Cooking journal July 2025: summer vegetable pasta, entomatadas, tiramisu

pasta with farmers market vegetables and beurre monte:

Summer fruits and vegetables are one of life’s great joys. I’ve been buying sugar snap peas, yellow and green zucchini, and green beans from the farmer’s market. But any summer vegetable is fair game. The seasonality is CRITICAL. When they’re in season, they’re super sweet and crunchy and almost floral in taste. If the vegetables aren’t fresh and in season, this dish is bland and mushy.  

 I blanch the green beans and sugar snap peas. The flavor is best raw, so I only keep them in the water for a second just so to break down the fibers so they aren’t tough. I cut the zucchini into paper thin slices and sauté them for like a second. Again, as raw as possible. 

I combine it with pasta and I coat it all in my own version of a beurre monté. I make a lighter, waterier version than the standard cause otherwise it’s way too heavy for my taste. I also add some parmesan cheese and I use pasta water for the starch to help thicken the sauce without extra butter. I’m still experimenting with this part. It’s really hard to control the emulsion of the cheese and butter, and the sauce splits really easily if the temperature is too hot.  

I top it off with lemon zest, chili flakes, and fresh basil if I have it on hand. If made properly is SO good, you can’t imagine. If not made properly, it's kind of watery and weird tasting. My goal of the dish is to display the flavor and freshness of the vegetables as much as possible. The lemon and pepper flakes brightens it up a lot, and the light smoothness of the beurre monté is a great canvas for the sharp sweetness of the vegetables and acidity of the lemon zest.

entomatadas: 

Once in a while my mom made these for me as a kid. They make me really nostalgic and are a much needed comfort food lately. I don’t know why she stopped making them, I’ll have to ask. Maybe it’s because they’re probably more of a kid food since they don’t have dried chiles in them. I’m sure I’ll make these for my kids someday. Once I got past a certain age and could handle spice she’d usually add chiles, usually anchos or moritas. I usually do that too, but I ran out of all my dried anchos. Also rehydrating chiles gets annoying. 

I boil roma tomatoes, serrano, and garlic in salted water. Then, I add that to my food processor with raw white onion, salt, pepper, a dash of cumin, and sometimes some Mexican oregano. I lightly fry tortillas for a few seconds on each side in the pan. Then I just lay the tortillas on a layer of the salsa on the plate, add the filling, fold, and pour another layer of salsa on top. I know a lot of people make these with chicken but I prefer them vegetarian. I usually stuff them with queso fresco and either avocado, mushrooms, or zucchini. I top it with more queso fresco, avocado if I have it, and sometimes some thinly sliced white onion. 

tiramisu: 

At the start of July, I felt a violent impulse to bake something. I don’t get that often because I usually don’t enjoy baking as much as I enjoy cooking. I’m also not very good at it. Maybe that’s part of why I don’t enjoy it. When I get in these baking moods, it rarely ends in anything but disappointment because whatever I make is usually borderline (if not entirely) inedible. 

I decided to make a tiramisu because it doesn’t involve actual baking and because obviously I love tiramisu. Whenever I visit home, one of my first stops is usually getting a slice of tiramisu from this one Italian cafe in Palo Alto. I don’t have any tiramisu spots in LA. A friend told me about this old Italian man named Giovanni who makes tiramisu that you can order on Instagram in LA. His daughter set up his business for him and runs it herself. He is literally just some otherwise retired guy and makes the tiramisu out of his own kitchen. I really want to try Giovanni’s tiramisu, but you can only order full sheets and I never have an excuse to order an entire sheet of tiramisu. But it’s okay, I’ll be my own Giovanni for now. 

Tiramisu involves the one pastry skill I’m very good at, which is tempering egg yolks. 

Tempering egg involves cooking the yolks at low heat with constant motion so as to gently and gradually cook them so they don’t coagulate. Eggs scramble because the proteins shrink with sudden heat. Gentle heat encourages the proteins to stay relaxed during the entire cooking process. The result is a glossy, stable custard with proteins that won't seize up and scramble. 

This is usually done by whisking the yolks with sugar using a double boiler system to control the heat. Once in a while I’ll make lemon custard tarts or lemon curd using this method. It takes a lot of attention to precise heat levels and developing an intuition of how the changes in the feel of the whisk moving through the egg indicates its doneness. If you underdo it or overheat it, the egg will coagulate as soon it gets too warm or if you add any other liquid (like cream) to the mixture. If you overdo it, the mixture gets too stiff to work with. I’ve weirdly rarely failed this technique while messing up many easier ones. I’m probably better suited to it because it is basically a cooking techniuqe. Still, every time is a bit stressful because you know if you mess up you’ll have to start all over again and when that happens it’s infuriating. 

What I didn’t realize is that most use an electric whisk for this recipe. My arm and wrist hurt so bad whisking these yolks for like 15 minutes straight hunched over my stove sweating in the heat of the steam from the double boiler. If I made a tiramisu every day, I’d be so jacked. 

I successfully tempered the yolks with sugar, vanilla extract, and orange cuaraçao until it was glossy and thick. According to my research, Marsala, Madeira wine, or amaretto are the most popular liqueurs for tiramisu, but I was working with what I had. 

Then, I whisked mascarpone and heavy cream together till they formed stiff peaks. Which luckily didn’t take long because at this point my arm and shoulder really couldn’t take it anymore. I folded the egg into the mascarpone mixture as little as possible so as not to deflate all the air in it. 

As a substitute for actual espresso, I just made a batch of extremely strong brewed coffee in my French press. I dipped lady fingers in the coffee and laid them in the tray. Then, I layered the filling on top and repeated the process. I was dumb and didn’t buy enough ladyfingers to fit into the whole tray so ¾ of the tiramisu is double tiered, and then there is a step down to a sad single tier of tiramisu. But no one has to know. I added an extra thick layer of mascarpone on the top to hide my secrets, and levelled it out with a spoon. 

I dusted it with a generous layer of cocoa powder filtered through a mesh strainer and left it in the fridge to set overnight. 

It turned out pretty good! A solid standard tiramisu. Nothing to write home about, but good all the same. I got the sweetness level perfect. For some reason the orange flavor in the orange curaçao was completely obliterated when I cooked it down. I was kind of hoping it would stay to add some complexity to the flavor. I think it would benefit from something with more of a burn to cut through the heaviness of the cream. I think next time, I will change up the ratio of the mascarpone to have more cream and less mascarpone. Just a personal preference, I usually prefer lighter and airier versions of desserts. 

I’m also left with a problem I often have when making sweet things, which is that now I have a whole tray of tiramisu and no idea what to do with it. I can’t eat a whole tray of tiramisu myself. I could, but I don’t really want to. I don’t really like sweet things that much. So I had one slice of it and even though it’s good, I  really don’t want any more. But it’s going to go bad soon. And one of my two roommates is lactose intolerant. 

Maybe that’s the beauty of sweet treats, that it gives me an excuse to connect with my friends and community. I could give it to my across the hall neighbors, but if they don’t take it it will hurt my feelings. I could drive it over to a friend’s house, but I don’t want to do that because I’m sleepy. We’ll see. 

I think a great thing about baking is how sweets are the go-to thing to bring people together. Like bringing cookies to your neighbors, or baking a cake for someone’s birthday party. There was a guy named Rahul on one season of the Great British Bake Off who said he started baking because everyone at work ignored him and was mean to him, but then when he started brought in a in cake suddenly everyone was his best friend. So then he felt pressured to get even better at baking so that people would like him by proxy of liking his cakes. And he claimed it worked. He was soon both an accomplished baker and popular at work, even making unexpected lifelong friends. I thought that was really funny and poetic and think about it whenever I make pastries or bake. 

While I don’t think my tiramisu is good enough to bribe anyone for friendship or love, I had a fun time making it! 

I think I’m going to experiment with different variations of this traditional coffee tiramisu or other versions of tiramisu. I’m thinking a tea version would be fun, like matcha or earl grey.