We all need a lift & a distraction. This calls for a recipe.

Chicken with Preserved Lemon and Olives

Few ingredients, easy to throw together, this flavorful dish tastes as good as it looks.

👇

I’m clearly feeling slightly better as I’ve just spent a good ten minutes being furious about all the wrong trifles on the internet.

Excuse me, BBC Good Food?

This is an abomination.

There should be trials at The Hague for these.

*shakes head*

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.

Today I made garlic bread.

You add flour, water, salt, and most importantly, yeast. When baking bread, you have to let the dough rise.

No reasonable intervention will significantly increase the speed the dough rises for really good bread, possibly the best bread in the world.

No matter how much you yell at the bread, the dough will only rise to the sufficient amount after a given amount of time.

If you go to the store for the mass distributed stuff, the copy pasted churned brand, whatever it is, will never compare to homemade bread.

If you get the store bought stuff, it’s optimized for shelf life, which always detracts from the quality of the immediacy of the homemade stuff.

If you go to a bakery, it’s better, but never as good as the manual kneading you can do for yourself for what you want.

Bread making is simple, and world-class bread making is even simpler than what you may think. Mostly because humans converge on the flavors, texture, and content of their perfect bread.

But world-class bread does have shared constants of quality you can get only from the best.

Flavorless bread is bland. I’m a huge fan of personal choices I get with the categorization one has under the term “garlic bread.”

“Garlic bread” gives me flexibility to experiment with some wild ingredients, knowing it’s always going to be delicious, just in different ways.