Lake Tahoe 2023: Friendsgiving Feast

When planning the Lake Tahoe outing, we knew we would be eating good. I mean, 3 members of our group are known to be great cooks, those 3 being Erik, AJ and of course, myself. I have to say, we definitely lived up to the lofty expectations we set for ourselves. 

To start out, I got to try sinigang, an iconic Filipino soup dish known for its sour flavors. I’ll admit, as someone who is not too familiar with Filipino cuisine, I found this a breath of fresh air. Apparently the online website, TasteAtlas, ranked it the world’s best vegetable soup in 2021, so the dish certainly had a lot to live up to. I’m not entirely sure I’d go as far as to say it was the best in the world, but AJ’s sinigang was extremely hearty and provided a very satisfying lunch. I’ll have to remember to ask AJ regarding the recipe.

For our dinner, we had trouble deciding exactly how to approach. I ended up lugging my sous vide machine from my home in Los Angeles just to do steaks at Tahoe. We had the chance to buy the meat at Safeway but saw there was a local butcher’s shop. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’d prefer supporting a local butcher over a chain market. It seemed to have been the right choice as the steaks offered at the butchers shop were almost double the size of Safeway, granted the cost was also much more. We contemplated stopping at just steak, but in the end, I convinced myself to also get a filet of fresh salmon.

I don’t think we needed to go this hard at dinner but we did. The steak was seasoned with salt, pepper, time and homemade garlic butter, then sous vide for 2 hours. The salmon also got a healthy dose of thyme and garlic butter. The brussels sprouts and mushrooms as you might’ve guessed, also got a dose of garlic butter. Basically, I didn’t want to waste the butter we bought and just doused everything with it. I was aiming for medium rare on the steaks but unfortunately did not account for the shear thickness of the steak and ended up with rare. Grilling it on our patio’s grill did not seem to do enough to change that, but rare steak is still leagues better than well-done. If the salmon and steak wasn’t enough protein, we also got told by AJ that there were some extra ribs from his sinigang that were unused. We ended up grilling those as well. This dinner was at first supposed to be mainly an additional Bday dinner for me in an already stacked week full of Bday outings, but I like to see this as more of a friendsgiving meal. Everyone helped with the meal in some sort of way. I have to admit, cooking as a group may have been one of the most fun experiences I’ve had. It was like the game Overcooked, but less stressful and actually helped our friendship rather than burn it to the ground.