Seaweed is the way to go. As others have noted, miso soup with kombucha is good, seaweed salad, maybe tofu wrapped in seaweed, nori snacks (I like the wasabi ones).
Think of the tentacles shape, too. Maybe make a dense shallow cake and cut it into tentacles shape before frosting it? I don’t think it all has to taste of the sea to be thematic.
Generally I just wing it, have been cooking so long I can develop my own recipes for most things. But sometimes I do have to look for tips, and will read recipes for inspiration.
Food:
Bon Appetit
Recipe Tin Eats
Boy who Bakes
Perfect Loaf
Food and Wine
NYT Cooking
Cocktails:
Punch
Imbibe
It is newer, with a terrifying metal dough hook that looks like a sadist’s implement and a 1/2 speed setting. I do sourdough not dry yeast breads, and usually let it run on the slow speed for a couple minutes, rest, then on 2 for about 5 minutes or so, longer if all whole grain. (Then dump into a bowl, rest, stretch, evaluate if it needs another round or two of stretch and rest before bulk rise.) What I like is that or doesn’t struggle at all with that mass of dough. I have run it for over 10 minutes making brioche (it takes time to incorporate the butter) and it stays cool and comfortable.
I couldn’t stand the bread machine, it was like Schrodinger’s box. Put in measured ingredients. Will it be a brick? Will it be a bread? No idea until you open it.
I have to see the dough, feel the dough, be able to adjust the timing, give it an extra stretch if needed or an extra hour rest or go faster if it’s ready ahead of schedule.
With bread machine, 35% success, ugly bread
Hands and a bowl, and a pan? 95% success (never gets to 100%) and gorgeous bread.
Literal Gadget, the big KitchenAid mixer. I got one that can handle my 2 kilo of sourdough dough, it’s glorious.
MVP? The iron skillets, hands down. If I had to build a kitchen out of fewer than 10 items the medium and oldest one would be first on that list.
I agree with this.
If I am measuring “for real” I use a scale and grams. Mine can also do ounces & pounds.
If I am measuring in a measuring cup, my kids laugh at me but I crouch down so the liquid is at eye level so that I can see it better. And most things don’t need to be all that exact. The ones that do, convert them to weight measures.
Savory oatmeal is awesome. I like it with olives & Parmesan and a fried egg.
Eggs smell so bad cooking but taste so good.
Broccoli too.
Cumin here too, followed by Berebere mix which is the one I buy in bulk, keep the bag in the freezer. I don’t buy the cumin in bulk because it’s cheap in stores here.
Unless you are counting onion & garlic, but those almost always fresh and I’d call them veg more than spice.
I hate beets as vegetables but shredded beets in chocolate cake will fix it just like the carrot fixes the spice cake.
That’s the way I cook, just have made enough mistakes and so many different dishes I can put things together and make magic. On baking, my family doesn’t like fancy cakes, more like snacking cakes, those are pretty forgiving. I don’t measure rice & water, just know how it should look, and yes my husband sometimes gets annoyed that it’s not more standardized but I’m not a commercial chef I am a cook.
The exceptions - My sourdough bread, and the sourdough chocolate chip cookies - carefully measured by weight and if I am winging the bread (never the cookies) I try to still write down the measurements in case it’s the best bread I have ever made. The bread I could almost certainly make it without measuring at this point, I can tell by how it feels, what it will do, but have the scale and use it.
My mom cooked from recipes. Only from recipes . She asked her mom once how to make good biscuits, and her mom said “the water has to be very cold”. Which, honestly, would have helped me a lot. But my mom wanted a recipe!