Egg wash for presentation, but taste buds for reality, is it not?

Vrai! We eat first with our eyes… but we really eat with our mouths.

I have an affinity, really a longing, for foraged greens. Dandelion is up there, as are fiddlehead ferns, ramps, and wild onions. Number one is definitely morels, and the next time I go morel hunting I’ll definitely post whatever I cook.

I bought these, sadly. City living has its perks, but I wouldn’t trust the local dandelions either.

I think the cream, here, is an optical illusion. It’s two parts skyr and one part heavy cream, shaken with dill and a little salt, so thinner than actual sour cream, and it melted into the broth as I played it. It’s probably only 30-40ml of dairy.

I would plate it with a shameful amount of sour cream, though. Next time for sure.

Unfortunately, while I enjoy regional breakdowns using cabbage or meat, or how the beets are cut or grated, this is mostly just me, so generic Eastern Europe filtered through Alice Waters’ sensibilities.

Any visual allure is a testament to beets.

I cooked this based on vibes using what I had on hand, I only bought the beets and the dill, but here’s the gist.

3 parts beets, peeled and julienned 1 part carrot, peeled and fine julienned 1 part parsnip, peeled and julienned 1 part yellow onion, julienned 1 part Yukon gold potato, cut into thin wedges, skin on, not much thicker at their widest point than the matchstick cuts Butter

Vegetable stock

Red wine vinegar, to taste

——

In a thick bottomed pot on medium heat, sweat the beets, carrots, parsnips, onion, and potato in butter until the onions are translucent. A little color is okay, but they don’t need to brown.

Barely cover with stock, simmer, and cover. Simmer until the veg is soft and the broth has taken on the color of the beets, stirring occasionally, some ten to fifteen minutes.

Finish with a splash of vinegar. Portion and garnish as desired.

——

I used four small-ish beets, three quarters of a pretty big onion, one average carrot, two small parsnips, and five small roasting potatoes. Probably a liter of stock. Even if my average and your average don’t match, the ratios are after the knife work, so more or less by weight. I finished with about 20ml of vinegar for the whole pot. The acidity helps the sweetness of the beets pop. It yielded around two liters.

To me only the beets and potato are strictly necessary. Throw in other vegetable and, in a fight, the beets will win.

The carrot being cut thinner is not a typo, I like how they cook down when they’re a bit thinner.

I’m also worried about online recipes. Decent cookbooks routinely have recipes that benefit from adjustments or lack good explanations. Online recipes are already worse than that and AI is going to make them much worse. Sometimes you want a known good recipe.

In my experience the recipes in these seven books are particularly trustworthy. They deliver what they say on the tin, the listed quantities are good, and they’re well written.

• The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer
• Bravetart by Stella Parks
• Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan
• Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop
• Victuals by Ronni Lundy
• Mooncakes and Milkbread by Kristina Cho
• Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji

I wish I could add Mexican and maybe regional Indian cookbooks of this caliber, but I haven’t read any I liked this much. All the classic French books are also excellent and very reliable (Larousse, Bocuse, etc.), that’s kind of their thing. Joy of Cooking does cover similar ground.

I recommend two plant focused books, both deeper cuts.

• Vedge by Richard Landau and Kate Jacoby
• From the Earth by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

I cooked through Vedge with a few skips during COVID and it’s haymaker after haymaker, I can’t heap enough praise on it. From the Earth is pretty dated, and sometimes that shows in the ingredients, but also shockingly solid.

To to learn to cook from the ground up, I’d favor YouTube over books. They work, but being able to see and hear what’s going on helps so much. And as lists of recipes I don’t find those books particularly useful.

Ruhlman’s Ratios is an extremely versatile cookbook for soups, sauces, batters, and doughs that walks through a mindset that will let someone easily overhaul recipes to fit their vision or what’s on hand. You can find it very cheap and I think it can help most okay to even amazing cooks improve.

I recommend looking for many of these used, online or in person, or skimming them in a library. The Joy of Cooking in particular is practically falling out of trees they’ve printed so many of them.

I had it as a textbook in culinary school, as do many people, and it’s the one I still routinely use. The recipes are rock solid. I use it mostly for very basic things, but I routinely get requests for recipes out of it, sometimes even from other chefs.

I also have a copy of an old King Arthur’s cookbook from the 80s that I find similarly useful and robust. Very seldom do I need a staple baking recipe that I can’t find from those two.

Older Star Trek, as Roddenberry saw it, more closely followed your desired formula. I mirror your sentiment, I love that Trek at its best is about culture, society, people, etc. Unfortunately war is a comfortable crutch for shows like Star Trek, I’d be surprised if anyone could make a sci-fi TV show entirely without it. Personally I’ll take entire seasons of filler about things like fungus people or Law In Space.

Up to a certain point Trek managed to keep military conflict at bay, to a degree. There were episodes about the Neutral Zone, or a Klingon raid, or what have you, but the plot eventually would cycle back to other matters. It’s DS9 where the show runners intentionally dove into those elements, and to their credit the show found good conflict there. How do you feel about Voyager? I prefer it to DS9, despite thinking DS9 is a stronger show and preferring the cast, because it focuses more on the things I like in Trek while DS9 at its root is about war.

They have different strengths.

Cast iron is sturdy and cheap. If it’s well conditioned it will still stick more than a non stick pan, but it’s close, certainly good enough for say eggs. Because cast iron pans are so heavy (more mass can hold more heat) they’re good at applying a lot of heat over a long time, like for searing meat. The problems with iron are the weight and possible rust.

Carbon steel conditions like cast iron but is lighter. Tends to be expensive.

Copper is finicky. It heats evenly, but if you don’t know you need a copper pan, you almost certainly don’t want a copper pan. They’re delicate and expensive.

Stainless is difficult to damage. It doesn’t heat particularly evenly, so it struggles to cook evenly. Clad stainless steel pans have a disc of aluminum or copper jacketed in the bottom that heats more evenly than just steel, so kind of best of all worlds. Medium priced.

Non-stick generally needs specific utensils, is light enough it doesn’t sear well outside some fish, and doesn’t last forever. Many non-stick coatings are probably health risks.

You should expect to spend 10-20$/€ on a decent scale. Costlier scales often offer specific features, but in general use they’re comparable.

A scale accurate to a gram can be a bit loose for ingredients like agar, cream of tartar, gelatin, etc. That said, my nearly decade old home scale is only accurate to the gram and I don’t plan to replace it. Scales accurate to a tenth of a gram are pretty common at reasonable prices at this point.