Knowing the Western bias against short-grain rice, I made an interesting experiment once. I had invited the chef from Harry’s Bar in Venice to Japan, and I asked him to make a risotto. I told him we had many varieties and grades of short-grain rice in Japan and asked him to select the one best for his recipe from a large variety of samples from all over Japan. I had simply numbered each one, so he had no idea of how they were rated here. He boiled the different kinds and sampled each one, and finally said, without any hesitation at all, “This is it!” It was sasa-nishiki, the rice we rate the very highest quality of all! We may not be far wrong in considering Japan a rice paradise.

I vividly remember reading this part of Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art (10/10 cookbook) and being enamored with the idea of risotto from rice grown outside Italy. High end Japanese rice works wonderfully, as does Carolina Gold.

I haven’t written anything like this down, but this would be a close approximation.

Fruit Mousse

Yield approximately 20 fl oz

• 1 can evaporated milk
• 6 fl oz sweetened condensed milk
• Fruit, to taste
• Egg whites, as needed

Freeze the evaporated milk in a mixing bowl. Once frozen, whip to stiff peaks. Fold in condensed milk.

Blend the fruit to very smooth. Fold into milk mixture.

This mixture won’t set with time, so if you want more body whip egg whites to stiff peaks and fold in as needed.

Evaporated milk does whip beautifully if it’s cold enough. The condensed milk could be subbed out for 10x sugar, but it will add richness beyond the sugar.

Bird’s Milk cake with layers of shaved shingled pineapple. I’d want a really pretty top layer dressed with apricot glaze, which I don’t keep on hand but occasionally buy. It might be pretty difficult to cut even with a sharp knife, but I’d be willing to try.

Quick alternative: Pineapple mousse, salted peanuts, maybe a little shaved chocolate. Sincerely tempted to make that tomorrow.

Split poached shrimp/pepper coulis/barley crumble/basil/a good oil.

I think peppers and barley are rough. The lob is to puree the peppers or bake the barley into something… or both. Like me. To be honest I’m probably adding corn to that crumble.

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 plated 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 thin skinned 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 instructions. 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 learn to cook from the ground up, I’d favor YouTube over books. The books work, but video simply conveys more information. 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 those recipes, 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.

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Every frozen and defrosted non-dairy milk I’ve had (mostly almond I think) did end up grainy, but still usable. Freezing it for baking is still reasonable. The time to defrost it would bother me.

If your household drinks a lot of sweet coffee drinks, yes, make a big batch of oat milk syrup to extend the shelf life.

I would personally make a huge batch of congee with a ton of ginger, garlic, shallots, and if you eat meat chicken (chicken arroz caldo). I use coconut milk for rice porridge, but oat milk would be good. I’d portion it into pint containers and freeze them. It’s cheap, freezes well, and could easily use up as much milk as you’d like. To my palate it’s a huge upgrade on chicken noodle soup when I’m sick, so it’s good to have frozen in advance.

If you have occasion in the next few weeks, it would be good for flan or blancmange as a dessert. I’ve never made blancmange with oat milk but it’s usually nut flavored, so I’d expect that to work really well, probably better than dairy milk. It’s a good time in the northern hemisphere for fruit sauces, too, so fresh compotes are on the table, and maybe toasted almonds.

Yeah, to be honest my point is there are many good games out there. That said…

• Pathfinder: Fantasy in the classic D&D style, branched off after 3.5ed. Three action economy is gooooood once you’re used to it. Lots of dice.
• Blades in the Dark: Steampunk horror fantasy. The most beautifully designed system I’ve played. Dice pool game that’s easy to pick up and master, flavor for days, fantastic narrative control for the players and GM, easy to run. Even people who will never play Blades need to read the book, it has several concepts that can change how any GM or DM runs their games.
• Call of Cthulhu: d100 horror game about staring into the face of a cold, uncaring universe. The cashmere scarf of tabletop RPGs, just oozes luxury. The way the math on skills works is so perfectly suited to CoC’s style of horror it’s uncanny. Delta Green is a great variant if you want to an SCP or X-Files game.
• Savage Worlds: Action Movie! The Game. Universal system, can be used for most any genre. When it was written it was considered pretty fast to play, now it’s about average. Swingy combat. I use it when I run a system not covered by other games, for me mostly 1920-1950s era detective stories. The surface level rules are intuitive, but the GM needs better system knowledge.
• Fate: Very high concept storytelling game. Players and GMs both have the ability to influence the narrative of the scene. The game I had the hardest time learning, not because of the game itself is hard but because I had to change the way I think about TTRPGs.
• Vampire: Vampires in the modern world. Dice pool system. I like the newest edition a lot, I think it’s pretty elegant. Can get weird.
• GURPS: The ultimate multipurpose game. Build any character in any setting. ANY setting. Building characters is a horrible slog, but the rules are… surprisingly simple in practice, at the discretion of the GM. A lot of work in prep, but when it’s right, it’s very right. The Film Reroll podcast plays through movies using it, highly recommend listening to a movie run by Paulo (Home Alone, maybe) to get an idea of the system.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord: Grimdark or horror fantasy. d20 system, very easy for D&D players to learn.
• Dread: Extreme rules light horror game. Tasks are resolved with a Jenga tower. The GM creates a horror scenario. Anytime the GM wants to increase the tension or the players are in danger trying to do something, a player pulls a block (or two, or three). When the tower falls the player who knocked it over dies. Players can sacrifice their life to accomplish a heroic action by knocking over the tower intentionally. That’s all the rules.
• Worlds Without Number: Fantasy. Sort of another branch off AD&D. A nicely designed mix of Old School Renaissance and some modern conveniences. Very, very good worldbuilding tools. Free, to some extent.
• Mothership: d100 sci-fi horror system, more barebones than CoC. Very easy to pick up and build characters fast, which is good, 'cause they’re going to die.
• Numenera: Weird sort of futuristic/fantasy setting. One of the easiest systems I’ve ever run, super easy to adjust on the fly. Maybe a little too complicated to explain in a few sentences.
• Mork Borg: Old school, original D&D turned emo. Can be played straight or as satire.
• Everyone is John: A comedy game, very rules light, where the players take turns controlling the same character, John. They try to accomplish hilarious tasks. Gets weird. My John flew the USS Enterprise-D into a sun once. Free.

For people who want high fantasy but not D&D, I’d recommend Pathfinder 2e. For people who want something a little more dangerous and stripped down and are coming from D&D, Worlds Without Number. For anyone I recommend Call of Cthulhu and Dread. Everyone should read Blades in the Dark, even if they don’t want to play in the setting.

Also, from the other comments below: Traveller: Space Adventures! The Game. The rumor is Firefly was based on Joss Whedon’s Traveller game, and that’s how Traveller plays. Amazing character creation system that lets players control some of their background, but mirrors real life in that not everything goes as planned. The setting is very, very deep. I admit I would probably play Scum and Villainy (Blades in the Dark in Space) or Stars Without Number (the predecessor to WWN) instead, but it’s up there. The One Ring Roleplaying Game: Very much a system to play stories not just in Middle Earth but in the style of LotR. I have not played this and have no intent to do so, but it’s clever in its own little hobbit hole way. I have read it. Cool dice.

I haven’t read Shadowdark or Pugmire. Shadowdark looks, for my purposes, similar to Worlds Without Number or Shadow of the Demon Lord. As for Pugmire I use Mouseguard for my Redwall adjacent stuff, but I would sit in a few sessions for sure.

Everything people are scared Tencent might do to D&D has already been done by Hasbro: the MMORPG conversion (4th edition), canning all the staff (happens every few years, and to Magic too), adding DLC (just take a look at the current official app), walling off the garden (three tries on that one: once with 4th, once recently with the OGL stuff, and once with the limitations on animations in map applications), even the movie.

D&D the rules system has been a corpse for years, that the designers managed to make 5th into a passable game is a miracle. Play Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, Fate, Vampire, GURPS, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Dread, Worlds Without Number, Mothership, Numenera, Mork Borg, Everyone is John, any of the dozen variations on those games, or one of the hundreds of other options not yet listed. They pretty much all run as well if not better than D&D.