beef ragu

ingredients

(For a standard 6 qt Instant Pot)

• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 6 beef short ribs, 10-14 oz each
• 3 carrots, finely diced
• 2 celery ribs, finely diced
• 1 large yellow onion, finely diced
• 8 cloves garlic, minced
• Half a tube of tomato paste (~2 oz)
• 1 tbsp beef bouillon paste
• 1 cup dry red wine (ex. Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chianti)
• 4 sprigs fresh thyme
• 2 dried bay leaves
• (optional) 1 parmesan rind
• 28 oz crushed tomatoes
• 2 cups beef stock
• 16 oz pappardelle pasta
• Grated parmesan cheese, for garnish
• Finely chopped fresh basil, for garnish
• Salt and pepper, to taste

i didn't have writer's block but i can't exactly call it writer's edge now can i

Excluding the introduction and imports from my last blog, I made a grand total of two posts in 2024. I'd had a bunch of ideas cooking in the drafts:

• Going on a wild goose chase to make my very first homemade dumplings for that Lunar New Year,
• The anxiety of holding down a reservation at a busy restaurant when everyone else is egregiously late,
• Being a whole bridesmaid at my very first nonfamilial wedding,
• My drunken tech exec neighbor's plot to sabotage the startup he was being ousted from,
• The ping pong–esque comedy I acted out on Black Friday in my attempts to balance time with two separate friend groups, and more.

None of those stories made it to the site, and I have no illusions of believing I'll ever get around to finishing those drafts. Even if I gave myself a little bit of leeway timing-wise, I'd say the moments have long passed. I mean, it would be silly to write about those dumplings when we've just passed Lunar New Year 2025.

Honestly? I'm okay with that. It was a lot of fun creating the skeleton of each narrative and imagining the flow and fun it could take on. It was simply too much work trying to polish it up for an audience. In October, I'd started a temporary assignment with another department at work, and it requires a hell of a lot more writing than my usual job. With all the reading and typing I do in the office now, I often don't have it in me to open up another blank document after business hours.

At the same time...

And I mean proper prose, not just a ramble of bullet points and sentence fragments! It seems paradoxical that I could be fine with leaving my stories as barebone descriptions yet not be fine with not "properly" writing. To be clear, I'm not mad about being unable to realize those story ideas. I'm mad that I haven't been able to physically mash away at a keyboard and watch a bunch of words go brrrrrrr on a screen without thinking of work.

The screen itself isn't what drains me. When I get home at the end of the work day, I usually jump straight to a video game or start marathon-watching a YouTuber's entire catalogue to unwind. There's just something about the crispy clean border of a word editor that instills automatic exhaustion in my brain. I've tried Obsidian, Scrivener, Word, the Ghost web editor, Notepad, even the notes function on the goddamn Steam Deck. None of them avoid the curse. I'd barely get 20-30 words out before needing to close out of the window.

As an alternative, I've attempted to physically write in a notebook, but my natural handwriting is dogshit – I've been told it bears an uncanny resemblance to Arabic, and by several Arabic speakers, no less. By the time I've expended half my brain cells getting a vice-grip on my hand's fine motor movements, my brain is already three stations ahead on a train of thought. People online have suggested speech-to-text software, but knowing how convoluted my mental tangents get, I fear it'd take a herculean effort to verbally backtrack and retrace my previous hierarchy of logic. The amount of time that'd go into extracting something productive from the byzantine transcript would make the software infinitely more maddening than convenient.

In lieu of practical alternatives, I've kept all of my ideas inside my head. I've said for a while that free writing is a hobby of mine, but now that I've had to step away from it – against my own will, I've now realized it's a habit that gives me a lot of comfort. Some people describe their id as a monkey that claps cymbals and screeches whenever they try to suppress their innate impulses; mine can also be described as a dog trapped in a metropolitan apartment in April 2020, absolutely chomping at the bit to get outside and touch some grass like you're supposed to in spring.

The solution? I think I've got to take back what's mine. If work keeps on tainting my enjoyment of writing, then I just need to start writing enjoyable things at work. It's past 5 PM in the office, when almost all my colleagues are out, and I'm going to let the dog out. I mean it. I'm doing it! I'm currently at my cubicle banging out this section on my personal laptop instead of writing up a research article! I'm serious!

Look at me! Go, Fido! Make a run for it! No one can stop you now! You're free!!

pressure cooking my nemesis

There's something called the Garcia effect, a psychological phenomenon where you develop an aversion to food that has made you sick. It's a survival instinct for our brain to preemptively treat that type of food as a red flag, and the fun part is that it'll do this even if that food wasn't the actual cause of your sickness. If you contracted a stomach bug from a piece of salmon at lunch but didn't feel yucky until you started eating seaweed at dinner, congrats! You'll now feel weird about eating innocent ol' seaweed.

I don't think the Garcia effect had nothing to do with my long-time disgust of mushrooms. I'm sure I've only eaten mushrooms in the most optimal of dining experiences and cooked in the most sanitary of kitchen spaces. It was hatred upon first taste. It didn't matter what mushrooms my dad tried to feed me: oyster, shiitake, portobello, shimeji, enoki, don't care, didn't ask, get that shit out of my sight ASAP.

As a kid, I would secretly pick mushrooms off my plate to trade with my sister for whatever vegetable she didn't like that day, or I'd eat them all first to front-load the burden and leave only the good stuff for the rest of my meal. As an adult with free will, I could simply avoid mushroom-inclusive recipes and meals, but with greater freedom over my diet came greater self-shame over my pickiness. In my first year living on my own, I'd done thorough recipe research to conquer many an old foe – kale pasta salad for cherry tomatoes, jambalaya or egg salad for celery, black bean shrimp or scallion ginger beef as companions for tofu – yet I'd avoid mushrooms like the plague. I'd never understood the mathematical truth behind my revulsion, so I'd never attempted to calculate a solution.

Then, one day, I simply lost my hate-boner for fungi. It was specifically one day in October while I was hanging out with my friend Helena. For lunch, she used her handy-dandy Instant Pot to cook the most sumptuous braised beef, served with a fun red wine sauce over creamy polenta. I took a stab at what looked like a slice of beef, and when I took a bite, I was surprised by the telltale smoothness of a thinly sliced mushroom.

For some reason, "surprise" was all I felt. I didn't have to fight an impulse to spit it out. I was pleasantly indifferent to it all. It felt like it came out of nowhere, but the more I chewed on it, the more I started to piece things together.

I think my problem with mushrooms is that they're the wrong combination of taste and texture. I don't find either characteristic appealing on their own, but they're at most non-offensive. Put them together in a single package, however, and I'll experience a whole that's way more disgusting than the sum of its mediocre parts. The mushrooms I ate in my childhood were cooked by my dad, who loves to draw out an ingredient's natural taste and preserve its natural texture. In contrast, the braised beef mushrooms had marinated in a rich sauce for the pressure cooker equivalent of a few hours. Hints of the original taste still lay underneath, but it was only a subtle foundation for a more opulent flavor.

Let's be clear, it's not like that braised beef made me fall in love with mushrooms. I still find them pretty meh, but they at least no longer make my stomach lurch. No longer do I scurry past the fungi section at the grocery store; no longer do I skim past menu items with mushrooms in their ingredient lists. You could think of it as a reverse Garcia effect where one super positive experience has now improved all my future interactions with mushrooms.

Another revelation Helena's braised beef sparked: I had an Instant Pot! It's embarrassing to admit, but ever since I got it three years ago, I'd only ever used it to cook rice. I knew my roommate sometimes used the Instant Pot but never stuck around to the end to see what she was making inside. Watching Helena cook was the first time I'd actually seen the ingredients go in and the meal come out, and I realized just how much potential I'd been wasting by consigning my Instant Pot to rice-cooking duty.

Of all recipes I chose to usher in the second life of my Instant Pot, it was a beef and mushroom stew. I'd found plenty of more exciting meals I could've used for an inaugural recipe, plenty of foods that were only feasible through pressure cooking and couldn't be replicated easily on stovetop like a stew, but I knew it had to be this one. A beef stew, one of my most beloved dishes from my childhood, combined with mushrooms, one of my most reviled nemeses from back then. It felt poetic.

I knew it would be a good stew from the online reviews, but I was surprised to discover that it was a good stew because – not in spite of – of the mushrooms. When I ate that first spoonful, I was expecting a mouthful of tender beef and carrot. I got what I expected, but surrounding it was a mysterious earthy aroma I'd never tasted before in a beef stew. It's the kind of aftertaste that elevates a dish from just good food to something that unites distinct flavors under a single banner that you want to decorate with vivid adjectives: rustic, heartwarming, sincere, and so on.

I guess this is how I'll eat mushrooms now, cooked with time and care to meld seamlessly with the rest of the dish. It might be too much of a stretch to say I'll welcome them with open arms, but the bottom line of making that beef stew wasn't to develop a love for mushrooms. The point was to prove to myself that there's nothing to fear about them. I wanted to break my confirmation bias and counter the irrational repugnance it spawned. The mild indifference I feel now is exactly what I was hoping to achieve.

It might be too soon to confidently declare I'm past old habits, but a small win is still a win. We take those.

home for the holidays

Sometime in the recent past, I was talking with my family about how I wasn't looking forward to all the grocery shopping and other errands I'd have to get through once I got back home, and my mom said something a little more rude than what did you just freaking say, and I almost instinctively took it back but soldiered on and said something a lot more oblique than I said "home" because it's where I feel like I'm safest and most loved, and if that hurts your feelings, you need to get over that.

Unfortunately, I'm a softhearted wimp who does care about hurting my mom's feelings, so despite feeling more and more dread with each visit I make, I always spend the winter holidays with my family in Boston. I fell into the habit during college when I'd go home for week-long breaks. Once I graduated, before I even got a job, I was still being pulled back north by inertia, and I really thought that this was how things out to be until my friend Harry asked if I was planning to move back to Boston to be closer to my family since I was visiting them so frequently.

I felt offended at his insinuation that I was a clingy child. I think I responded in a more snappish manner than his question deserved, but he was justified in the end because I later took a look at my calendar and realized I was going home about every six weeks on average. I would often procrastinate on booking Amtraks and flights, internally debating whether I ought to go back for this long weekend or that Chinese holiday or those relatives' birthdays, but the decision was always the same. All that that dithering accomplished was to exacerbate the toll on my bank account and my mental health.

This time around, I procrastinated for longer than usual. I'm sorry to all the friends whom I've agonized aloud to, often with only the most surface-level explanation of why I'd be less than enthused about visiting my family. Know that your sacrifices weren't for naught; it was only through your patience and validation that I finally gathered the courage to tell my parents I'd be spending the winter break with friends down in DC.

They took it better than I expected. Maybe it was because I'd already paid my dues by spending three straight weeks with them for Thanksgiving and our vacation in Italy. Maybe they were more mature than I'd given them credit for and had already come around to the idea that I was a grown adult with her own life and her own home. Either way, I'm hoping this will be the pattern breaker that gets me to be more honest with myself.

While I'm not a huge Christmas believer, I do buy into this country's cultural emphasis on enjoying a bountiful dinnertime feast with loved ones. The possibility of having no friends in town was my biggest reservation about spending the holidays in DC, and I did shamelessly spam-text a bunch of pals last-minute to check on their Christmas-time locations. In the end, only Lili was around, but the prospect of hosting my very first Christmas party (even if it was a two-seater!) quickly got me over the blues.

Lili was an old roommate and an international student from China. In the six years I've known her, she's only been able to go home twice. The pandemic screwed things up for some of those years, and for the others, I can only assume there are financial constraints with affording international flights. When she asked about the circumstances that had kept me in the District of Columbia this holiday season, I fell back to equivocation. It never feels great to lie to a friend, but it felt insensitive to essentially admit I'd freely made that choice to someone who'd never had a choice in spending six winters alone.

Reading through these last few paragraphs, it sounds like I had a real downer Christmas, but trust me when I say it was fun! My recent trip to Italy inspired me to take on the challenge of making beef ragu, and holy shit is it a fun mess of a time! Never have two college-educated women displayed as much kitchen idiocy as we did, from messing up the size of the chopped soffritto to underestimating what sixteen ounces of pappardelle looks like – a lot more than a twelve ounce bag, surprisingly. It was a good I'd remembered I had an Instant Pot earlier in the year, otherwise the simmering time would've taken twice as long as it had, and we were already waiting for 1.5 hours. To pass the time, I found an old mulled spice mix to spruce up the leftover red wine, but your girl doesn't have the budget for crystal glasses, so Lili and I had the luxury of sipping from reused condiment jars.

All that chaos and waiting made the end product all the more satisfying. When the Instant Pot emitted its finishing beep, Lili and I could hardly contain ourselves as we yanked out the short ribs and ripped them to shreds with forks, almost as if we were pantomiming devouring the meat. As I stirred the shredded beef back into the tomato mixture, it felt as if all the doubts and vacillations of the last year were disappearing into the aromatic steaming swirls of the ragu. Each ladle of sauce poured was a gentle blanket over my anxieties, each length of pasta twirled was a reminder to be kinder to myself. With each bite of beef ragu, I lost another part of myself in the here and now of wonderful smells, wonderful food, and wonderful company in my wonderful home.

instructions

1. Use paper towel to pat the surface of the beef as dry as possible, then generously season with salt and pepper.
2. Set the Instant Pot to “Sauté” mode. Add 2 tbsp olive oil to the pot. Once the oil is shimmering, add in the beef. (If necessary, work in batches to avoid overcrowding.) Cook for 3-4 minutes per side until nicely browned. Set them aside.
3. Add remaining 1 tbsp olive oil to the Instant Pot. Once shimmering, add the carrot, celery, and onion, along with 1 tsp salt and 1 tsp pepper. Stir to combine and cook for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until deeply browned.
4. Add garlic. Cook until fragrant, stirring constantly, for 1-2 minutes. Add tomato paste, stirring to coat the vegetables and aromatics, and cook 2-3 minutes until browned. Deglaze with red wine, scraping up browned bits, and cook for 4-5 minutes until the wine is completely absorbed.
5. Add the thyme, bay leaves, and parmesan rind (if using). Add the crushed tomatoes, broth/stock/water, beef bouillon, and browned beef. Stir to combine. Bring the mixture to a boil.
6. Cover and seal the pressure cooker and cook on manual high pressure for 50 minutes. Allow the pressure cooker to naturally release pressure for 10 minutes before carefully flicking the valve to its “Venting” position to vent out any residual pressure. (Check out this page if you don't know the difference between an Instant Pot's natural vs. quick release.) If the ragu seems a little too liquid-y, turn on the “Sauté” setting again and let the sauce simmer down. If it’s too thick, add some pasta water.
7. Remove the thyme, bay leaves, and parmesan rind. Remove beef, shred the meat, and return it to the pot. Stir to combine. Taste the sauce, then add more salt or pepper if necessary.
8. Cook pappardelle in salted water, making sure to reserve a cup of pasta water, until just shy of al dente. Toss directly into the Instant Pot. Simmer together for 5 minutes.
9. Serve topped with parmesan and fresh basil.