Dining with strangers
PLUS: feel-good gyoza dumplings, a rare Four Tet interview and Yaeji's Boiler Room revolution
Welcome to the second issue of Sizzlers, a monthly newsletter about food and music. Not yet subscribed? Let me help you with that:
Happy New Year! I hope you had a good start to 2021. Mine was exciting – Sizzlers the radio show premiered on Jan 4th (available to listen back here) and will be a monthly feature on Reform Radio from now on.
The next show goes out on Feb 16th and will feature an ‘Ask Me Anything with Chef Cecilio’. Cecilio is a good friend of mine and an excellent chef! He promises to answer all questions with brutal honesty, so this is your chance:
What did you always want to know from a professional chef?
Hit ‘reply’ to submit your burning questions, any and all welcome.
I LOVED seeing so many of you try out last month’s dynamite broth recipe, keep the delicious soup snaps coming! For this issue, I’ve picked out another comfort food recipe: feel-good gyoza dumplings. They’re delicious and super easy to make, I hope you give it a try.
What else is on the menu this week?
🔥 EAT: Feel-good gyoza dumplings
🔥 LISTEN: A rare Four Tet interview
🔥 DANCE: Yaeji’s Boiler Room revolution
🔥 READ: Dining with strangers
EAT: feel-good gyoza dumplings
“I had no idea it was this easy!” is what my friends say when I show them how to make gyoza at home – and it’s exactly why I want to share this recipe with you. Making your own dumplings is so easy and affordable, you’ll never want to order another portion of overpriced, soggy takeaway gyoza ever again.
It’s also a fun activity for yet another weekend in lockdown (urgh, I know). The feeling of achievement you get from producing a whole batch of cute little dumplings is almost as good as the sensation of polishing them off afterwards.
The best thing about making your own gyoza dumplings is that you. have. complete. control.
Not just in terms of filling – veggie, vegan, stuffed with spicy beef or bursting with juicy kimchi are just a few of countless options – but also in the cooking method. Will you steam them until they’re silky-soft warm pillows of goodness? Boil them in a big bowl of hot soup? Fry them in sesame oil until they’re golden brown and crackle with every bite?
I like my food as crunchy as possible, which places me in the crispy camp of the dumpling discussion. But you have my full support regardless of which road you go down, because every dumpling is a good dumpling.
Recipe
This recipe can easily be tailored to suit your dietary needs. I like to use vegetarian mince, but if your supermarket doesn’t sell any, you can also use finely chopped chestnut mushrooms (real meat works too, of course). Leave out the fish sauce and the recipe becomes vegan.
Let me know if you give this one a try, and don’t forget to tag @s.i.z.z.l.e.r.s if you share your dumpling creations on Instagram 🥟
GET THE RECIPE: Feel-good gyoza dumplings
LISTEN: A rare Four Tet interview
For someone who’s been at the forefront of the electronic music scene for over a decade, there are surprisingly few interviews with Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet. Which is a shame – because his appearance on the ‘Hanging out with audiophiles’ podcast proves that Hebden has more than a few fascinating anecdotes to share.
In conversation with podcast host and veteran UK producer Jamie Lidell, Four Tet gives a fascinatingly detailed insight into his creative process and recording techniques. Four Tet, whose music production is heavily based on sampling, reveals that he organises his samples in monthly folders on his computer: one folder for each month, dating back all the way to 1999 (!).
He also unveils that he often weaves sound recordings from his childhood and youth into his tracks. On ‘Teenage Birdsong’ – the first single from his 2020 album ‘Sixteen Oceans’ – Hebden included a feedback note which came from a video of him and his friends, aged 15, watching The Chart Show on TV. “If I find sound from the past, that’s even more powerful than a photograph to me”, he explains.
Throughout the episode, Four Tet comes across as a warm, down-to-earth person with no allures. He talks about music production with such a passion that it made me appreciate his records, collaborations and live performances even more than before.
My favourite part of the interview is when Four Tet describes his early days as a musician: “I couldn’t get a booking agent for a really long time. They all said to me, you’re not going to play festivals on a laptop, unless you’re in a band.”
Oh, how the times have changed.
IMPORTANT: Skip to minute 27 where the interview begins.
You can also listen to the podcast here.
DANCE: Yaeji’s Boiler Room revolution
If DJ live streams were designed to bring the club atmosphere to our living rooms, then nobody succeeded at this more than Yaeji with her ‘Yaeji in Place’ Boiler Room session. In a refreshingly new take on the lockdown live stream, Yaeji delivers an audio-visual extravaganza featuring countless bangers from her 2020 album ‘What We Drew’.
I love how Yaeji rejects the classic live stream set-up (decks, disco lights, a few quirky props) for an entirely new concept. Perched on a grey sofa in front of a green screen, she performs in her virtual living room while tiny dancers come to play, giant emoji heads circle around her, and collaborators like YonYon and G.L.A.M. ‘dial in’ via video call simulations.
Sounds strange? It is, in the best way possible. One of the songs even transports the viewer into a video game which is played by Yaeji on her smartphone. I don’t want to give too much away at this point since the visual surprises really elevate this set from ‘great’ to ‘absolutely incredible’ – all I can say is it’s certainly worth a watch.
Yaeji in Place is a unique look inside the NYC-based producer’s brilliant mind and serves as the perfect accompaniment for Friday night drinks. Fix yourself a g&t, crank up the volume on this baby and make sure you full-screen the video for maximum enjoyment!
READ: Dining with strangers
A solo trip-turned-adventure in Milan, January 2020.
Written by Ina Fischer
With complete disbelief I stare at the table in front of me. Five. There are five different buffalo milk cheeses presented on blue and white ceramic plates. Never before had I seen such a spread – I didn’t even know you could make so many different cheeses from buffalo milk. The tough question was, which one would I try first?
The plump ball of mozzarella, glistening in a coat of olive oil and salt crystals? Its sensual counterpart the burrata, unapologetically oozing over a bed of basil and sliced tomatoes? One of the bite-sized mini mozzarellas piled up into a little tower? A thick slice of smokey scamorza? Or the king of them all, an entire platter of creamy stracciatella di bufala, topped with chargrilled courgette slices?
The decision is made for me by Mamo, who catches me giving the stracciatella some serious side-eye. He scoops up a massive mouthful and shoves it into my face. “Only the best for you!” he shouts joyfully and wraps a big arm around me. Across the table, Luca and Mateo nod and swig red wine from ceramic mugs. I beam back a big smile.
Three hours ago, we had never even met each other.
A lot of things had gone wrong leading up to this point, but somehow they had all led me here, to a small fold-out table squeezed into a packed restaurant in Milan’s hip Isola district. Ten pm on a chilly Saturday night. Dining with strangers.
I had flown to Milan on a last-minute whim, to catch the final weekend of Wes Anderson’s exhibition, ‘Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures’, at the Fondazione Prada museum. These were pre-pandemic times, January 2020 to be exact. I had just bid good-bye to a truly catastrophic 2019 (of course, completely oblivious to the shit show of a year 2020 was about to deliver). I needed time alone, a small adventure to prove to myself that I was fine by myself.
Ironically, I barely spent any time alone the entire weekend I was in Italy. Checking into the legendary Ostello Bello late on Friday night, I was instantly whisked out on a sort of bar crawl together with other hostel guests. Several negroni sbagliato later, a few of us ditched the bar crawl with all its organised fun, filled up on take-away cocktails, and caught a tram to a warehouse rave on the outskirts of the city. We danced all night, laughing and hugging each other as if we’d been friends for years.
By pure luck I managed to escape a hangover the next morning. I got up early, giddy with excitement for the Wes Anderson exhibition. The sun was shining and on my walk to the metro stop, an Italian man stopped me in the street to tell me I was beautiful – and then he simply left me alone and went about his day. It was an unusually pleasant encounter.
I spent hours and hours roaming the museum, and when I stepped back outside into the fresh winter air, the sun was already starting to set. Aperitivo time, how convenient. I decided to check out Deus Café, an old mechanics workshop turned hipster cocktail bar.
The place was packed with big groups of friends enjoying their pre-dinner drinks. All dressed up in black, nonchalantly puffing on cigarettes as The Chromatics’ ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Some’ played in the background. That Saturday night buzz hung in the air. Circling the courtyard for a place to perch, I secretly wished I had a friend to enjoy the atmosphere with.
After three loops of the entire bar and no luck in finding a spot to sit or stand in, I was close to just downing my drink and heading back to the hostel to freshen up before dinner. I scanned the room one last time, and noticed an empty chair at a table of four. The other three seats were occupied by Italian men in their late forties, who caught me eyeing up the empty seat and motioned for me to join them. And that was how I met Mamo, Luca and Mateo.
They were surprised to see me out on my own on a Saturday night, and I explained that my solo adventure was a mission to mend a broken heart. “You’re not the only one then! He just got divorced!” Luca exclaimed a little too cheerfully, slapping Mateo on the back.
It turned out that they were childhood friends, having grown up in the same neighbourhood in Milan many years ago. As teenagers they roamed the streets together, getting into all kinds of trouble. Then, when they started settling down in serious relationships, getting married and having children, they lost touch. Mateo’s divorce was the catalyst for them to get back in touch with each other, and they decided to reunite for a Saturday night out on the town. And here I was, crashing their high school reunion.
On paper we had literally nothing in common, and between my non-existent Italian and their broken English, we could barely communicate. Yet the conversation kept flowing- about Milan, Italian food, anecdotes from their youth and stories of my life in Amsterdam. The drinks kept coming, we were cracking jokes and laughing, it was getting late.
“You probably have better things to do on a Saturday night, but… do you want to come to dinner with us?” Luca suddenly asked. The way they were grinning at me, I could tell they half expected me to turn down the offer. However, I had made zero plans for the evening and the thought of going for a meal with three Milanese locals sounded like the best way to experience authentic Italian cuisine.
And that is how I ended up at a table laden with various antipasti and the previously mentioned five plates of buffalo milk cheeses. They were followed by a trio of pasta dishes and a main course of freshly grilled hunks of meat, juicy sausages and garlicky sautéed greens.
We went through a ridiculous amount of red wine, served in ceramic carafes and drunk from painted mugs, which you often find in Puglian restaurants. By the time we had made it to dessert, it was 1am and the restaurant was empty apart from our table.
The waiters pulled up chairs and plunked a bottle of limoncello on the table. Someone started playing Italian love songs through the speakers. Before I knew it, we were all in each others’ arms, singing along passionately at the top of our lungs.
When it was finally time to head home, my new friends walked me all the way back to my hostel. We exchanged numbers as we said our good-byes. “Let me know if you ever come to Amsterdam! I’ll show you around”, I insisted, but deep down inside we all knew that we’d probably never see each other again. Drunk with limoncello and happiness, I passed out in my hostel bed, smiling from ear to ear.
I still think about that memorable meal in Milan exactly one year ago. Right before Covid-19 forced us to press pause on life plans, spontaneous weekend trips and adventures with strangers. Right now, I can’t even legally travel to Italy. And even if I could, nothing would be the way it was that weekend in January. Eating in a restaurant feels like a distant memory, I can barely remember the last time I got drunk in a bar with friends – let alone strangers.
But it’s not just the longing for “normality” that makes me feel nostalgic about my weekend in Milan. It’s the fact that I went there to get used to being on my own, and ended up spending barely any time alone at all. There’s something so invigorating about having an unexpectedly deep conversation with someone you just met. In a way, it allows you to be more vulnerable and speak more freely; there are no expectations and no strings attached.
I flew back to Amsterdam feeling calm and balanced, full of stories to tell my friends – and with a newly-found obsession for burrata.