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Making round discs of baked dough while simultaneously avoiding the daunting task of actually making pizza.

With some red kimchi and a light smear of cream cheese to offset the intensity of the sweet sour and salty flavors.

Saw some red cabbage being sold and decided to give it a try with fermenting it. One of the results – A burger with a spicy kimchi mayo. Tasty, even though the difference between red and regular cabbage are mostly optics.

Just trying different combinations. This one’s whisky, dark chocolate and caramelized white chocolate. Can’t complain.

The benefits of having leftovers is you can start throwing them together and see what comes out. In this case a dessert that is, for lack of better term, crazily decadent. The Kouign-Amann are best though when they are freshly baked, so I suppose I have to invite the rest of the party next time so they make short work of them while they’re still hot.

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It must have been boredom, or the urge to tackle one last challenging thing before the year ends, or maybe I was feeling a bit festive, or all the above, but I decided to go for the granddaddy, the big kahuna, the BBEG of layered doughs – puff pastry, in the form of the sugar and butter bomb that is known as Kouign-Amann.

It starts out innocently enough, mix the dough, make sure the gluten develops well so it can stretch, shape the butter into a square block, be amazed and alarmed at the amount of butter. Let the dough rise, chill the butter. For now they go their separate ways. It’s only once you set up those two to meet that the intricate dance of dough rolling starts. You see, if the butter is too hard and too cold you can’t roll it and tear the dough, if it’s too soft it will melt and seep together. The temperature has to be just right. I gave it my best, threw it into the oven and watched it rise. Quite literally, as the view straight into the oven completely took my attention for 15 minutes straight as I gazed at the bubbling dough. Once done, pull quickly from the mold before the caramel hardens, let it cool for as long as your patience allows and dig in. As you can see, I got impatient with chilling the dough, so things got a bit melty, leading to less distinct layers, but the result is still quite phenomenal. The crunchy, caramel-y crust on the outside is an absolute treat. But don’t eat those thingies if you plan to be active afterwards.

And so ends the year, a bit sweet, a bit salty, a bit messy, twisting and turning like dough in a mold (hm, that analogy is kinda clunky). Let’s see what the new year brings, hopefully a bevy of new delights, culinary or otherwise.

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Meat sprinkles, technically. See the trick when you overcook some meat is to pretend it was on purpose and go all the way. In all seriousness, it’s lean meat (turkey this time) boiled in soy sauce, ginger, some cooking wine and star anise until cooked through, then cooled and shredded, then toasted in a pan on really low heat until it’s completely dry. Crush in a mortar and mix with chopped nori and toasted sesame, tada, you got a wonderful savory topping to throw on top of your freshly cooked rice.

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Quite an experiment, but I wanted to try this idea of taking celery root and treating it like a spit roast. Marinated the slices with miso, chili, cumin and lemon juice and then slowly roasted the thing on all sides with this hodgepodge contraption made out of a bunch of skewers. The result was, eh, tasty, but also not quite there. I vastly underestimated the cooking time, so my tummy was rumbling and the celery root could have been cooked even further, and I imagine in a much less complicated way because roasting it like this wasn’t as great as I would have hoped. I imagine something like baking it tightly wrapped in foil to cook everything through and then broiling it at the end to get the nice and crispy browning would be better. You live and you learn.

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It’s the end of the year, so let’s play the classics. Added a bit of turmeric, which doesn’t really do much flavor wise, but gives the buns a nice yellow color. Huh, looks like the middle didn’t get quite as much heat, but the buns turned out nice and soft.

Well, leftovers technically. It’s missing the boiled meat and I usually like the broader noodles, but it’s still delicious. I’ll have to do it proper again sometime, I heard Sou Far likes noodles. Remember when I said chicken dumpling soup is hard to beat in terms of being comforting? I take that back, Phở is where it’s at.

Update: Round two, now I’m out of soup