cooking vintage

winter carrots

2008-01-15T12:07:00.001-06:00

I pulled these from the ground a couple of days before it started snowing again, on my mother's birthday--it would have been her ninty-seventh. It made me think again how she wasn't interested in gardening, which I believe she associated with loss and failure and sadness, and she put it behind her, with the other parts of her childhood that she didn't want to remember. She appreciated a good homegrown tomato though, if she didn't have to grow it herself.
I didn't do anything to these except clean, chop, and steam. They tasted like the ultimate essence of carrots, sweet and sharp and intense.

Menu for Hope

2007-12-09T12:53:00.000-06:00

I haven't been blogging for a while, but participating in the Menu for Hope gave me the incentive to start again. I'm donating a dozen vintage cookbooks, dating from the '20s to the '80s-- Prize #UC 19. They make good reading--there are some excellent forgotten recipes (and some very strange ones: Frozen Cheddar Cheese Dessert, anyone?). It's also a nice way to look at the history of food preparation, food fads, and even the place of women in the home, since a lot of small cookbooks were put out as new appliances came out. The manufacturers wanted the American homemaker to want an exciting new GE refrigerator or a Hotpoint stove, and they put together recipes to entice her with a vision of her ideal future (see photo above, lower right corner).

If you don't know about Menu for Hope, check out Chez Pim--Pim is the begetter and gracious overseer of this enterprise to do some good in the world, now in its 4th year. Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen is handling things for the central U.S.--take a look at her post, with a listing of other prizes that have been donated by midwesterners. A full list of all prizes is at Chez Pim, here.

OLS10: tardy!

2007-09-03T11:29:00.000-05:00

How could I be late for the last One Local Summer post? I had some very good reasons (the main one being the excitement of a visit from one grandson), but as I tell my students: I don't want to hear your excuses. (My reasoning being that I don't want to have to decide if someone's grandmother really died; and anyway, I always give extensions.)

But here, late, is my last OLS meal:

OLS 10 Menu

Pasta with Sauteed Vegetables

(local noodles, peppers and onions from the market, kale and herbs from the garden)

Mixed Tomatoes with Honey and Olive Oil (garden tomatoes, market honey, nonlocal olive oil)

Cucumber Salad (D's father's cucumbers with my herbs, a little local vinegar)

Chocolate Ice Cream (from Honey Hut, our favorite local ice cream maker since the '70s)

This was a meal notable for its simplicity and ease: vegetables chopped and sauteed to a sputter, then thrown together with the pasta, or mixed with their oil or vinegar baths. My favorite part of it is also my #1 favorite salad of the summer, which I've eaten several dozen times, at both lunch and dinner--the tomato salad. I never thought before this year to add honey to tomatoes, and I'm not sure why I did the first time, except that I was feeling experimental. But the fact is that honey and olive oil (sometimes with a squeeze of lemon or lime, sometimes not) is ambrosial. Here's a loose recipe.

Ambrosial Tomato Salad

Several mixed tomatoes--whatever you have in your garden or market basket

A good olive oil; I used about a teaspoon per cup of tomatoes

A squeeze or 2 of honey

A pinch or 2 of salt, to taste

Whatever herbs need pruning in the garden: I've used dill, basil, mint, cilantro, and sometimes a combination, depending on the day. My favorite combination was mint and opal basil.

Chop the tomatoes; if you're using cherry tomatoes in the mix, cut them in half so that they absorb the flavors. Sprinkle with salt and let sit while you gather your herbs (the salt draws out the tomato juices, which in this case, you don't want to discard, but savor). Add olive oil and honey and the chopped or torn herbs. Eat immediately, preferably outside on a day of the perfect temperature (for me that would be a nonhumid 82).

OLS 9: the last of the deer

2007-08-26T14:58:00.000-05:00

A quickie post this week, because I'm working on my syllabus at the last minute (as always). Don't I tell my students not to do this? Why don't I listen to myself??
We had the last of the deer D got the last time he went hunting--a little amazing, since there seemed to be so much of it at first. We had to reorganize the freezer so it would all fit, and even then, we gave away parcels to D's father and anyone else who expressed an interest in venison.
We thought we'd eaten the last of it in July, but there was one more package hidden in the bottom drawer which I found when I was checking to see if there was anymore ice cream (there wasn't, darn it).
End of August Menu
Deer burgers with crispy bacon (courtesy of the Sausage Shoppe)
A salad of zucchini and cherry tomatoes (farmers market and garden, respectively), with a nonlocal vinaigrette
Corn from the market that's next to the multiplex theater (a nice double feature: a movie and a dozen ears of corn)
No photo of the burgers because they came out looking fuzzy and sinister.

OLS 8: pizza!

2007-08-19T16:24:00.000-05:00

Last night we had pizza, in celebration of being able to comfortably turn on the oven. Not only was it comfortable, it was welcome--I think it got down in the high 40s last night.
The pizza crust was half of a batch I made a few weeks ago and froze--it's from a recipe I got from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's book on local eating, and it's very good--crispy, chewily toothsome. Plus, it's online!
The sauce was a local affair, mainly, as were the mushrooms and cheese (farmers' market, both); the pepperoni was not. The salad--totally local, and in fact, totally garden (mine), except for the olive oil and vinegar dressing.
One of the best things about this sauce was how it made the house smell--tomato-y and rich and spicy--as if someone Italian lived here, someone Italian who was a brilliant cook.
Heavenly Roasted Tomato Pizza Sauce
several tomatoes; as many as you want to get rid of, if you're trying to use them up. I used 6 medium to large tomatoes, Brandywine and Beefsteak
2 cloves garlic
a double handful of fresh basil
a small handful of fresh oregano
several sprigs of fresh thyme
salt
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
Because I was using very juicy tomatoes, I chopped them, put them in a colander over a bowl, salted them a bit, and let them sit there for a while so they'd lose some liquid. Then I spread them out on a cookie sheet which I lined with foil (to make clean up easier). I chopped the herbs and the garlic and distributed them more or less evenly, then drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (I'd guess 2-3 tablespoons each).
I roasted them in a 325 oven for about an hour--but the time would definitely depend on how juicy your tomatoes are, so you have to keep an eye on it. I was waiting for the point where the juices were on the verging of burning (another reason to use the foil). When that happened, I took them out and put the tomatoes and remaining juices in the food processor to mix them up a little. What I got was a nice, thickened, heavenly smelling (and tasting) sauce somewhere between tomato sauce and paste in thickness--perfect for spreading on pizza. I used about half on a 9x13 pizza and froze the rest for a future dinner.
A very pleasing dinner for a summer day that feels a little bit like fall.

Julia Child Birthday Event

2007-08-15T11:32:00.000-05:00

I'm late for this, but I had to do it anyway. Last year Lisa at Champaign Taste invited bloggers to post about Julia, and inspired by this, I made mayonnaise for the first time. (It was easy; did you know that Julia says it's OK to do it in the blender?)

This year I made Nicoise Salad. Here is Julia's recipe. I followed it as to ingredients, but altered quantities freely, on the grounds of availability and personal taste (less tuna, more tomato). It was one of the best I've had, probably because so many of the vegetables were fresh, just picked from the garden--the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the beans, the basil I put in the vinaigrette, the shallots.

When I was thinking about Julia and what to make, I tried to remember when and what I first knew about her. I couldn't pin it down, but an early Julia connection was her appearance in Desperately Seeking Susan, an '80s Madonna movie. Rosanna Arquette is a frustrated, ignored wife of a swimming pool salesman--can I be remembering that correctly? Her husband comes home and wants to know what his girls have been up to--he means Rosanna and Julia, who is cooking on the television in their kitchen, as Rosanna tries to keep up with her furious whisking. The idea of it was that Rosanna didn't have a life or any friends, so she had to look to Julia for companionship (I guess)--and of course, she goes out and meets Madonna and has adventures (does she become a stripper?) and finds love, etc.

But that scene also had this cozy friendly feeling--Julia cooking on the tv, and Rosanna in her own kitchen, that I liked. When I came across Julia again, I wanted to get in on that (without having to meet Madonna, etc.) and our culinary relationship was born.

This Nicoise Salad was also good in the way that something can be when you make one serving, just for yourself, on the spur of the moment. I read the word "Nicoise" (which is a lovely word), I let the ingredients drift through my mind--olives, tomatoes, beans. I found myself going to the refrigerator as if in a dream, and dreaming, brought it all together: lunch!

OLS 7: food as medicine

2007-08-12T12:05:00.000-05:00

The gardens (mine and D's father's) are producing beans, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, kale (pictured), radishes, tomatoes and pears--so there has been a lot of local eating going on this week.

But the best local meal was made for me by D when I was sick--a medicinal soup made from chicken broth (from our last farmers market chicken), various garden vegetables and herbs, and a lot of garlic and cayenne pepper. It was a soup that made your eyes water a little and your nose run (wait--it was already running!), and it made me feel as if I might be on the road to recovery.

No pictures. As D said, just eat it for once, why don't you? so I did.

OLS 6: the garden in a salad bowl

2007-08-05T16:28:00.000-05:00

This week's One Local Summer meal: another omelet and a salad. But to call it a salad is to reduce it, to flatten it out. There should be another word for a salad like this that doesn't put it into the same category as a bowl of iceberg lettuce with a few carrot shavings and a stiffly crimped slice of cucumber.

Salad Gathered from the Garden

a handful of cherry tomatoes (I used Sweet 100s and the volunteer yellow pear tomatoes from last year)

a handful of grean beans

the kernels off 1 ear of corn (leftover from last night's dinner)

a handful of basil (I used purple)

2-3 stalks of lemon thyme

a few fronds of dill, and another few of chives

sea salt

olive oil

cider vinegar

I steamed the green beans a little, until they were cooked a bit but still crisp. Then sliced the corn off the cob, cut the cherry tomatoes in half, and tore the herbs by hand--mixed altogether in the yellow bowl I inherited from my mother. A sprinkle of sea salt, a glug-glug of oil and a glug of vinegar, a few tosses, and it was ready. I didn't measure the oil or vinegar, but it was probably about 3 tbs of oil and 2 of vinegar. Everything local except for the last 3 ingredients, and from the garden except for the corn, which was from the local bins at Giant Eagle. Yes, Giant Eagle Supermarkets have gone local, in a small way, which I like to think I've contributed to by constantly annoying them with questions about local products. I buy some of it every time I go, so as to encourage their efforts.

The omelet was excellent, too (Amish eggs and potatoes and onions from the farmers market) but it failed to keep its integrity when folded over and so couldn't make it as a cover girl (cover omelet?).

The best thing about this meal was the 10 minutes I spent in the garden with my basket (oh yes, I have a basket!), gathering up what looked ripe and imagining the salad into being--a bit of this, a pinch of that. The essence of local.

eating local in NYC

2007-08-03T10:19:00.000-05:00

A report from the Alternate Parker:

I went to that restaurant, Borough Food and Drink, [12 E. 22 St.; near Broadway] and it was great. They say everything on the menu is "sourced" from the 5 boroughs, which means only that they use the best ethnic butchers, not that they make burgers from local cows. I had rigatoni with sausage and peas, and I can't remember the last time I had fresh peas that were not overcooked. MMMmmmm.

And lots of local beers from Long Island and upstate. The beer I drank at Borough was called War of 1812, and it was from Saratoga. I think it was an amber beer. I'd have it again. Tonight, if possible.

New York wines I would leave alone. And did.

I shared a memorable dinner with the AP in NYC, which was decidedly not local. I think I was there for the MLA conference (big English and mod. language professors thingie), and D was along for the fun of being in New York. The AP took us to a French restaurant--nothing fancy, but with amazing food of an old-fashioned sort. I only remember the salad, which was mixed greens with a simple vinaigrette, and goat cheese--a salad the like of which I'd never had before (this was in the '80s). One of those taste memories that reminds you what goodness there is in simple, well prepared ingredients.
The AP's capable hands, working on a probaby nonlocal wine last summer.

OLS5: a summer feast

2007-07-25T08:41:00.000-05:00

I was amazed to realize that it's the 5th week already. I feel as if I've had my head down in the garden, trying to get the last of those pesky weeds that are light green and viciously twining, and when I looked up, summer was half gone. At least One Local Summer is half gone, for I believe our term of officially local eating is ten weeks.
But let's say the summer is half full, shall we? The garden supports me on this: we have radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, some cayenne peppers, a plentitude of beans, a fair crop of basil and other herbs. And D's father's garden is spilling over with cucumbers, carrots, and the promise of peppers and pears.
Yesterday's dinner brought together our 2 gardens, and with the help of the farmers market, we feasted.
Summer Feast
Chicken stew (chicken, mushrooms, and onions from the market, chicken broth from our last market chicken to make a little gravy, and various garden herbs, plus a small Early Girl for color)
Noodles (bought at the Bergman Farm Market in Marblehead, abt 60 miles away, on a June trip to the beach)
Green beans (ours) and carrots (D's father), steamed with dill flower heads.
It was very good, although the picture is a little murky. Chicken stew is a very brown dish, isn't it? I should have put the beans in the foreground, I guess.

OLS4: the reinvention of bean salad

2007-07-22T16:23:00.000-05:00

What to have for dinner when you've been working on the house and yard all day long? when one of you has been scraping the east wall of the house and trying to get the gutter to work better? and the other has been weeding and watering and tying up the branches cut from the black walnut tree?

The Eat-Local Dinner for Exhausted Diners (neither of whom wants to be chef)
Local raw-milk cheddar and goats cheese from the farmers market
Sourdough bread from local bakery (the Stone Oven) slathered with butter from Hartzler's Dairy
A bean salad, all ingredients except dressing from the garden
I never liked bean salad when it showed up on the table, often at family reunions (since my mother didn't make it), or on cafeteria lines. The one I was used to was known as 3-Bean Salad, was made with canned beans, sometimes with a sort of sweet and sour dressing. I avoided it whenever possible.
This bean salad is very different, made with green beans (actually green and purple), and a dressing that's a simple vinaigrette.

One-Bean Salad
A double handful of beans--green or purple (the purple ones go green when cooked, sadly)
2 tomatoes--I used one Early Girl and one Lemon Boy
About a 1/2 cup of mixed fresh herbs: I used basil and dill
1/4 cup olive oil
3 tbs cider vinegar
1 tsp honey (from the farmers market)
2 pinches salt, or to taste
Simmer the beans until just done. Slice the tomatoes, mix with beans and chopped herbs. Mix the last 4 ingredients well and pour over vegetables. We ate this barely warm for dinner, and it was amazing. But the refrigerated leftovers weren't bad the next day, either.

seasonal lunch

2007-07-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

My 1st husband's parents lived next door to us. His stepfather planted tomatoes and cucumbers every year--the 1st person I knew who planted vegetables. He didn't have what I thought of as a garden--his plants were in a row along the back of the house, like the dahlias or rosebushes in other yards, a strip along the edge of the lawn. Every summer, he grew them, and every summer when they started to produce, he'd make himself a bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers, which he called Cuke Salad, for lunch, every day, as long as they lasted.
I never thought to ask him about this--I just thought of it as one of his peculiarities. We never had a conversation about this, or about much of anything--he was friendly, but not communicative. So I don't know why he was so intent on these plants. I wonder now if they were a part of his past that he was preserving--maybe, like a lot of people his age he had a farm in his background. Maybe he'd grown tomatoes or cucumbers when he was young, or his parents did. Maybe that salad was a remnant of some greater summer harvest that disappeared when he went to work in a factory.
I don't know any of those things, but I do know now why he took such pleasure in it--there is nothing so wonderful as going out in your yard and picking some lunch, which once you are in the kitchen flies together in a simple, satisfying dish that tastes of summer, or of the past.
Cuke Salad
1 or 2 cucumbers, seeded and peeled
1 large tomato chopped, or a handful of cherry tomatoes
3 tbs olive oil
2 tbs cider vinegar
a pinch of sugar
a pinch of salt
a few grinds of black pepper
Combine all ingredients and refrigerate until serving. It tastes better if it sits for an hour, even better the next day. I sometimes jazz it up with whatever herb I've picked in the garden--it's good with basil or dill or chives, probably some others, too.

seasonal breakfast

2007-07-17T10:42:00.001-05:00

This is one of the best breakfasts I've ever had: canteloupe, cut up and sprinkled with a pinch of salt; a dollop of Greek yogurt; a handful of mint from the garden, chopped; a couple of squeezes of honey.
I love summer.

OLS3

2007-07-15T19:31:00.000-05:00

A quickie post on our local meal this week: an omelet made from eggs bought from an Amish farmer at the market, market onions and raw milk cheddar, plus garden chives; and a potato salad, made from market and garden ingredients entirely (potato, cucumber, radishes, 1 cherry tomato, mustard flowers, tarragon, purple basil), except for the olive oil and cider vinegar dressing. Only the salad is pictured because the omelet fell apart and had to be removed from the pan in pieces--it was very good though.

And here's a picture of the tomato we ate for lunch, dividing it fairly between the 2 of us and eating it in solitary splendor, with only a sprinkling of kosher salt: the first of the Early Girls.

OLS: week 2

2007-07-07T20:50:00.000-05:00

I went to the farmers market today and brought home a whole chicken, onions, green beans, 2 hydroponic tomatoes, blueberries, corn, and 2 chocolate chip cookies. I did wonder about the corn--surely too early? But the farmers market has a policy that no one can sell anything they haven't grown or raised or made. Just where was it from? I should have asked, but I guess I decided to believe that it was from southern Ohio, because I knew how happy D would be to have corn for dinner.
Dinner was part of the chicken, braised with one of the onions and some oregano and thyme from the garden, plus one of the tomatoes and the corn. All in all, really good. I am still wondering about the corn. Could it have been local? can corn be grown in a greenhouse? It was a little undersized.
Check out the regional roundups at One Local Summer.

local eating

2007-06-30T20:39:00.000-05:00

This isn't the 1st time we've eaten a local or mostly local dinner, but it's the 1st of the One Local Summer dinners (cleverly instituted by Pocket Farm, for the 2nd year), and a good one, too.

Le Menu

Deer burgers (courtesy of D, from SE Ohio)

topped with raw milk cheddar and sauteed onions (both from the farmers mkt)

on locally made bread

Salad of several lettuces and greens (from my and D's father's gardens)

Strawberry ice cream (made by me from the u-pick strawberries and Hartzler's milk; so I guess it's really ice milk)

Everything excellent. The salad had, besides lettuce, tiny carrots thinned from the garden (not even as thick as a pencil), dill, mustard flowers, and mustard leaves. The ice cream was the star-- luridly pink--who needs food coloring when you have strawberries?--and intensely flavored. I sort of threw it together, so no recipe, but I plan to do some more experimenting.

The failure of the dinner: the hamburger buns, which raised half-heartedly, but then fell in the oven, so that they looked like large cookies. Actually, they didn't taste bad, and if I'd called them flatbread, they might have passed. But they were certainly not buns.

I've been reading Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, which is a history of the restaurant as well as of the woman--I like to think that Alice wouldn't have disdained our dinner, showing off our terroir as it did. (Maybe she'd have had some advice about those flattened buns.)

back from the novel: One Local Summer

2007-06-29T15:20:00.000-05:00

All this time, I've been revising, and then polishing, and then dithering, and so on. But I'm done with it for a while now, so I'm ready to turn to food. Or rather to writing about it, since I've certainly eaten plenty since May, and cooked some, too.

Liz at Pocket Farm has brought One Local Summer to us for a 2nd year, and I'm planning to localize our food as much as possible, between our garden and D's father's garden and the farmers market.

Above, some of the strawberries D's father and I picked last weekend. He's 87, but he picked more than I did. Also, he didn't complain about how his back was hurting afterward. The woman in the next row and I agreed that picking your food should be mandated as part of serious diets: work your food off before you eat it.

I thought I was going to make jam, but I froze some and we've just been eating the rest, on ice cream, on cereal, on cottage cheese and yogurt, and by themselves. Maybe next time, if my back will stand it (I did complain).

writing, not cooking

2007-05-27T12:57:00.001-05:00

D is top chef again--I'm in the throes of revision, the 3rd revision, cutting ruthlessly (it's easier to be ruthless the 3rd time around, I find--more distance).

But here is what happened yesterday--see picture above--a transformer, or something, blew up on the telephone pole by our driveway. Blew up with a loud crack, fell off, and burned merrily. And this is food-related, why? Because it happened when I was making lunch, in between Chapter 3, At Lily's House, and Chapter 4, Moonville. Happily, I had saved before we lost power. (I don't even want to think about the alternative.)

The fire department came in record time, the electric company, too. Amazingly, it was all fixed within an hour. If I was a poet, I'd write a panegyric to Cleveland Public Power--they not only fixed it with dispatch, they swept the burned and broken pieces up before they left.

Lunch: leftover rice, mustard leaves and basil from the garden, half an onion chopped, small cubes of smoked Mozzarella, olive oil, cider vinegar, sea salt--warmed slightly and tossed.

home-rolled crackers

2007-05-11T21:56:00.000-05:00

D and I have decided that we want to reform our snacking behavior--not by stopping, for heaven's sake, but by buying or making healthier choices. Popcorn popped in olive oil: we've been doing that for a while (tastes fine). Ice cream: only the best, and only once in a while (sometimes a while is shorter than other times). Nuts: good fats!
But we both love crackers, and the crackers we love are transfatty. It's true that Ritz has come out with healthier crackers, but they're not the same, and if the crackers we eat aren't going to be the same, we decided they should be extremely not-the-same.
"We should make our own crackers," we said to each other all winter long, but like many self-improvement projects, it didn't happen. But the last time one of us said it--D--I had just read Heidi's post on crackers, which sounded good, and very doable.
D made the 1st batch, using Heidi's recipe for Spicy Polenta Cheese Crackers (which she got from Patricia Wells's book, Vegetable Harvest), changing the fat, and substituting brown rice flour for polenta, because of a dearth of the latter and just having bought the former (and using less, because we hadn't used brown rice flour before).
Spicy Brown Rice Cheese Crackers
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
3/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cayenne
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 1/2 tbs olive oil (substituted for butter)
Preheat oven to 375. Combine 1st six ingredients (Heidi used a food processor, D used a wooden spoon and one of those piecrust making things that have wire loops). Add the oil and mix further, much like you do for piecrust. Knead for a few seconds on a floured surface and let it rest for 15 minutes (although D forget this last part).
Roll it out as thin as you can--Heidi says to 1/16th of an inch--ours weren't that thin. Cut into rounds or strips or squares, put on ungreased baking sheet, bake for 12-15 minutes (our oven is hot, so we baked them for just over 10 minutes).
They just spicy enough, faintly cheesy, good with wine and cheese. They weren't crisp, except at the edges where they were thinner, so we're thinking next time we'll have to roll them out as thin as Heidi recommends. But they were very good, and they kept well for 4 days (which is as long as they lasted). Most important they were easy enough to adopt as a regular snack habit.
I made a 2nd batch substituting a different kind of cheese and teff flour which were not as successful--tasted great but were more like thin biscuits. But we're looking forward to more experiments.

odd restaurant behavior

2007-05-03T11:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went to Sergio's, a Brazilian-ish restaurant in University Circle, with a friend. This isn't a restaurant review, but I will say that we both had the Carioca Burger, with 2 sauces (one a kind of salsa, the other intensely green and pesto-like), and crispy fries which came with an amazing spiced ketchup for dipping. And we shared pistachio gelato for dessert, fighting politely over the crunchy nuts. Everything was very good (I guess that was a review, a mini one anyway).

But the odd thing that happened at the next table is still on my mind. We were seated on a banquette with several small tables spaced out along its length, and 2 women were at the next 2-table. I can't describe them (and probably shouldn't) because I didn't want to inspect them--it's hard to observe someone minutely and covertly who is only an arm's length away from you. With good restaurant etiquette, you are supposed, usually, to pretend that they are invisible, and that you can't hear their conversation.

But in fact, although I observe this convention of invisibility, I always eavesdrop if I can (I consider it my duty as a writer), and in the interstices of my own interesting conversation with Plan B (writing, MFAs, our bookish childhoods, etc.) I heard snips and bits of the talk at the next table--nothing startling, just 2 friends out for lunch.

But at one point, I heard one say to the other "isn't this good?" and I glanced over to see what they were talking about, for in restaurants, don't we all want to know what they're eating at the other tables? don't we all feel that we might have missed the best thing on the menu?

So I slid my eyes sideways: they were eating biscotti, and I began to lose interest, since I don't like biscotti (too hard, often flavorless). But then I remembered that there was no biscotti on the dessert menu (we had just looked at it). And when I looked back, I noticed that they seemed to have taken it out of a bag.

Our pistachio gelato arrived just then, and under the cover of our waiter's setting it on the table (marvelously pale green, in a martini glasses, the 2 spoons with their handles pointing in opposite directions, ready to be grasped by our opposing right hands), I saw that yes, it was a bag, partially hidden under a napkin. I could see but not read the printing on the bag, a small transparent bakery sort of a bag. They were eating at one of the best restaurants in town and had brought in their own food!

I wanted so much to say to Plan B--look at what they're doing! But our tables were so close (I could have broken off a piece of the biscotti without even straightening my arm all the way), that I refrained. And then I forgot about it in the flurry of our departure, both away to our respective offices.

But how odd. And why? Sergio's has other magnificent desserts besides gelato--their coconut cake is amazing, for instance. And isn't this a variety of high incivility? I've been in places (Arabica coffee houses) that have signs prohibiting people from bringing in and eating their own food, but I guess Sergio's didn't think they'd have to go this far.

don't mess with my chocolate

2007-04-25T10:26:00.000-05:00

A rallying cry sent out by Cybele, of Candyblog. I heard her on NPR yesterday discussing the FDA's intention to allow chocolate to be adulterated with vegetable oils, etc., and still be called chocolate. There are such products around now, but they're called "chocolate-flavored" or some other such equivocation--they tend to be too sweet, often with some indefinably off taste.

According to Cybele yesterday, the FDA is of the opinion that consumers won't notice the difference: are they crazy?!? Maybe someone who, like D's father, loses his sense of taste (result of an antibiotic reaction, and happily, it's back). Or someone who has never tasted genuine, made-with-only-cocoa-butter chocolate.

Fran Gage, of Fran's Chocolates, also spoke on the program, which gave me a chocoholic's thrill, since I love her chocolates and caramels (see right).

For more info, read Cybele here. And if you want to complain to the FDA, today is the deadline (I wish I'd heard about it before). Here is the online comment form, and here is a tutorial, complete with a letter you can copy if you don't want to write your own (both courtesy of Cybele).

If there's a march through the streets with torches burning being planned, I'll let you know.

at last: the farmers' market

2007-04-22T13:29:00.000-05:00

The Crocker-Basset branch of the North Union Farmers Market opened yesterday in its spring version--smaller than the many canopies and vendors of summer, but as friendly. Plus, there were lambs. I missed the sheep shearing, although there was a pile of wool to show it had been done--my sister stopped breathing as we went by to hold off an allergic sneeze.

Shopping list:

bread from Zoss bakery (rye and sourdough)

2 banana-chocolate chip scones from Olaf's Daughter (dreamy)

a bag of Empire apples from Woolf Farms (literary apples!); the young woman in the yellow t-shirt explained that these had been in normal storage and not cold storage, and so might not be quite as crisp (but they were as crispy as I could want). I should have asked what normal storage was, exactly. I imagine a loose pile of apples in a root cellar, with a shaft of sun coming in through a high-up window (but probably not).

some unfiltered honey; apparently it's a good thing if there are stray bee wings in your honey. We'll see.

cheese: mozzarella and raw-milk cheddar

There were ramps, but I'm not convinced that they are any better than the young garlic growing in my yard, so I passed (even though they looked lovely. I didn't buy any jewelry either, although I admired the display.

At home, a farmers market lunch: raw milk cheddar on rye bread, sprinkled with chives from my garden. Heavenly.

pasta primavera: eat spring

2007-04-11T20:23:00.000-05:00

Primavera means spring in Italian, I believe, and is also the name of Botticelli's painting, which hangs in the Uffizi in Florence, where I saw it when I was very tired. There are no elevators in the Uffizi, or at least none that an able-bodied but exhausted tourist could take. But even so, even though my feet hurt all the way up to my knees after walking the cobblestones of Florence for days, it's still a hell of a painting.

In it, Venus watches the 3 Graces dancing, and she looks serenely content. Possibly, she had just had some pasta beforehand? Pasta Primavera is certainly good enough for a goddess.
Traditionally, PP is pasta served with sauteed vegetables and a cream sauce. I often make it with a sort of bechamel though, because I have the ingredients for that always at hand. This one is a hybrid--it has a flour-thickened sauce, but also a bit of cream.

Pasta Primavera

3 cups pasta

3 tbs olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

2 shallots, chopped

8-10 baby portabella mushrooms, sliced

1/2 tsp tarragon

pinch of fennel seeds
bunch of asparagus, sliced on the diagonal
1 broccoli crown, separated into florets
2 small zucchini, sliced (not too thin)
handful of fresh peas (although frozen would be fine)
2 tbs flour
2 cups chicken broth (could use vegetable broth to make it vegetarian)
splash of wine
2 tbs cream
1/2 cup sour cream (I used low-fat)
about 3/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

I sauteed the onions and shallots in 2 tbs of the oil, and when they had started to soften, added the mushrooms, fennel, and tarragon. While the pasta was cooking, I cut up the vegetables; when the pasta was done, I scooped it out of the pot with a slotted spoon, and then used the pasta water to cook the vegetables, one kind at a time (so each would be just tender).

When the mushroom mixture was done, I spooned it out, added a little more oil to the pan, and then the flour, mixing it up well. Then in with the wine and the broth--I stirred it around, smashing flour lumps with the back of the spoon, until it started to thicken. I added the 2 creams and stirred them in, then the grated cheese, then stirred in the mushroom mixture.

Finally, everything into a bowl--the pasta, the vegetables, and the sauce folded together so that everything was well combined.

I served it with additional grated cheese (although D and I agreed that it didn't need any) and orange sections that had been sprinkled with pomegranite vinegar and rose petal cardamom syrup. An excellent dinner to remind us that it's really spring, even though there's still a considerable amount of snow in the back yard.

(I owe this dinner in large part to Whole Foods, where I bought the vegetables on my 1st visit to the Cleveland area's new store, which is fabulous!)

it's so easy

2007-04-01T21:22:00.000-05:00

which is what my mother used to say about some fabulous dish she'd just served--and it wasn't always true. Sometimes there was a lot of folding, chopping, mincing, kneading, etc. in her it's-so-easy. I found myself saying it about the cheesecake I made for company on Friday, but in this case, it was true. Easy, uncomplicated, didn't take long, came out perfect.
This was the Inaugural Cheesecake: 1st cheesecake I've ever made, and 1st time using my lovely new springform pan (offered to me when I whined on this blog about not having one: thanks MB; fittingly, she was one of the guests for whom the cheesecake was made).
Cheesecake was one of those things I put off trying, like yeast doughs, or handmade pasta, or Beef Wellington, because I thought it would be hard. I'm not sure why; maybe just because it often requires a springform pan? Something that is baked in a pan with a mechanism--how can that be easy?

I used the most basic recipe I could find, the Joy of Cooking's Cheesecake Cockaigne. And I went against my tinkering inclination and didn't change anything because of my fear of cheesecake (well-maybe 2 things).

The Feared Cheesecake Which Yet Turned Out to be Not Only Beneficent but Luscious

Prepare a crumb crust (I used Joy's--graham crackers, sugar, melted butter, adding a pinch of ginger; but any crumb crust would be fine), and press into a springform pan.
Beat until creamy 24 oz cream cheese. Joy suggested that this would only take 30 seconds, but it took more like a minute. Beat in 1 cup sugar and 1 tsp vanilla or 1/4 tsp almond extract (I used vanilla). Beat in 3 eggs, one at a time, just until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl and beaters after each. I added the zest of one lemon, an ingredient borrowed from the New York style cheesecake that was on the same page of Joy. Put into pan, smooth the top lovingly, bake at 300 degrees 45 to 55 minutes. Joy said to put the pan on a cookie sheet, which I forgot to do, but luckily there weren't any leaks.
Combine 1 cup sour cream, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tbs vanilla, 1/4 tsp salt and spread on the cooled cheesecake. And that is it--you've got your cheesecake.
I used my mother's Kitchen-Aid, which is getting along in years (it's avocado-colored, if that tells you anything), but still works fine. I worried when the cream cheese all got stuck inside the whisk attachment, but it worked itself loose as more things were added.

The most difficult part of this was deciding when it was done. The directions suggested that it should still have a bit of a wiggle in the center when it was time to take it out. But how much of a wiggle? D and I consulted over the degree of wiggliness--I needed the support, for I have a tendency to want to put things back in the oven if there's the least bit of doubt.
And it was beautiful (top picture). The Joy said it should be cooled on a rack for an hour, and then after the topping was added, should be refrigerated for 3 hours or preferably 24 before serving, which part of the directions I hadn't bothered to read until I was starting to put it together at 4:00 pm (company coming at 6:30). I compromised by cooling it on the rack for 30 minutes; putting on the topping; and putting the whole thing in the refrigerator on a rack for about 45 minutes. It was fine--not totally chilled, but cool and creamy, and it didn't, as I feared it might, fail to come out of the springform neatly, and it also didn't lose its firmness once it was out.
I think it might have been the best cheesecake I've ever eaten--light, sweet with a small tartness from the sour cream and the lemon zest, the filling creamy over the crunch of the crust. I regret to say that everyone except for D had 2 pieces, with Margaritas, to celebrate spring. And the next day I had 2 more. Needless to say it's quite gone now. But I'm already planning the next one: chocolate? marbled? strawberry-topped? cashew-caramel?

summer in a jar

2007-03-19T19:58:00.000-05:00

A breakfast of peaches canned from D's father's trees, with raspberries picked at Rosby's Farm and frozen: this bowl is the reason we'll be canning again this year, even though it was hot and sweaty and sticky work.

supernaturally good granola

2007-03-18T15:26:00.000-05:00

I've gotten a nice haul of cookbooks in the last few weeks--some for my birthday, and some as presents from me to me--so I'm planning to try a few new things out here over the next weeks.

Last week I got Heidi Swanson's new cookbook, Super Natural Cooking. I've been following her blog, 101 Cookbooks, almost since I started reading blogs (how did I live in that pre-blog darkness?) and I bought this as soon as I could. It's a beautiful book, wonderful colors, great photographs (Heidi is her own photographer), and the recipes are the kind I like best, that is, they are recipes that quest and explore.

So far I've mostly been reading it, dipping in here and there, making note of things I want to try (Raspberry Curd Swirl Cake! hibiscus-flavored Agua de Jamaica! a healthy version of Thin Mints!). But yesterday I wanted to get my hands into one of those recipes, and I chose something simple to start: Heidi's Grain-ola. I changed her recipe a little, partly to downsize it by half, partly to suit my cupboards.

Grain-ola, mostly from Super Natural Foods

2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup hulled pumpkin seeds (a sub for sunflower seeds)
1/2 cup roughly chopped walnuts
grated zest of 1 orange
1/3 cup of maple syrup, plus 3 tbs of honey (Heidi used all honey, but I was almost out)
1/8 cup peanut oil (sub for coconut which I didn't have)
about a cup of assorted dried fruits (I used raisins, cranberries, and chopped apricots)
(I also left out coconut, again because I was without, and I have promised to try it with the coconut and the coconut oil.)

Heat sweeteners and oil until warm, and pour over the other ingredients, combined in a big bowl. Spread out on a cookie sheet (I lined mine with foil to save clean-up) and bake at 300 degrees for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Mine came out a little darker than Heidi's, because I couldn't decide if it was done and left it in about 10 minutes longer--not a terrible mistake, because it has a nice darkly caramelized flavor. Altogether, as fine a granola as I've had, right up to my former high watermark of granolas, the kind they make for Vermont College's cafeteria (which is catered by a culinary institute): crispy, chewy, with the nice toothy softness of the dried fruits--good as a dry snack, and ambrosial in a bowl of milk.

One of the appeals of Super Natural Foods, for me, is its focus on unprocessed or minimally processed food, and on unfamiliar grains. Under Heidi's tutelage, I'm hoping to get to know teff and wheat berries in the most intimate and delicious ways.
For Amy Sherman's (of Cooking with Amy) interview with Heidi, check here.

some links, and kitchen news

2007-03-05T09:52:00.000-06:00

Here's the best thing I read about the Oscars (1st saw it at Foodgoat); I was also thrilled that Helen Mirren won.
Some people are gardening already--I have seedling envy. My garden still looks pretty much like this, although some of the snow has melted.
Some other people (well, only one) have lost 1/2 their weight, which makes feel like a slacker for not being able to lose 10.
March 1 was National Pig Day, which I didn't know--but I'm planning on eating bacon this week anyway, in belated remembrance, perhaps in this tempting recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini, which is basically mac and cheese with hazelnuts and bacon: mmmm. (Clothilde's cookbook is coming out in May!)
I was looking for something quite different the other day (can't remember what it was), and found a site with Czech and Slovak recipes, which reminded me that I want to explore my native cuisine (one of them: I'm a mongrel). The only ones I recognized were klobasa (which we knew as kielbasi)--the beloved smoked sausage of many Eastern European countries; and palacinky, which the site described as "sweet stuffed crepes." I felt almost offended by the name--I could feel my dormant Slovakness rising up: a French name for one of the only Slovak dishes my mother made for us? Quel horreur!
But I guess they are crepes, we just didn't know it. To us they were a seldom, special treat, and everything about them was lit with magic: the way the batter gaily spread in the pan to make the thinnest of (pancakes) (crepes) palacinky, the red gleam of the jelly spread on the finished product, the powdered sugar dusted on the rolled palacinky, the squidginess of the roll under the fork, the separate tastes of egginess, jelly, sugar in the mouth.
Sometimes Mom would say, "my mother used to make these for us," for her and her 10 brothers and sisters, and that would make them taste even better, imagining my grandmother making them on the farm, and maybe even back in what we then called "the old country." Food from the past, from Europe, from where our grandfather worked as a forester, like something in a fairy tale.
Here's the best picture I could find of palacinky--it appears to be a mix for palacinky. Ours were never served with whipped cream or berries, although I wouldn't say no.

News: the kitchen is almost, almost finished. See D, left, putting a coat of primer on the ugly redness. There is a stage and a half left: the half is the refinishing of the cupboard doors, which we decided to do separately from the cupboards themselves, since it's going to involve paint remover which we'd rather do outside. The whole stage is the floor, which will be no doubt involved and awful in ways we can't even imagine, but which we won't think about before we have to.
So this weekend, my daughters and their families will come to visit and we'll be able to cook something for them in an attractive kitchen (if you don't look at the floor), free of its plastic veil--I am elated. And I can make palacinky--possibly on Saturday I'll be pouring batter, spreading jelly, dusting sugar. Can't wait.

February is a cold month

2007-03-01T10:41:00.001-06:00

We are still in the kitchen, meaning still working on it. Currently, it's the inside of the cupboards, which are painted a hideous shade of drying-blood red, robustly chipped (we always check for paint chips if we get out a little-used dish or bowl), which is not only unattractive but probably lead-based and therefore toxic.
Even so, we haven't mostly relied on frozen dinners, because we got so sick of them during the plastering part of the work. Some things are more easily prepared in a partially functional kitchen. Anthing that uses too many spices will cause grief, because the spices and dried herbs are dispersed far and wide, some in a blue basket, some in a giant dough-rising bowl, some in a box along with the deer's skull that used to hang between the windows (found, not shot).
Also it's not wise to embark on anything that uses too many pans, because there's sure to be cursing and banging of the available pots when you can't find the top of the double boiler, or the springform pan, or the top of the glass casserole dish. (Actually, I don't have a springform pan. I did have one, but I decided I wasn't using it and gave it away, and then became convinced that my life wasn't worth living unless I made cheesecake. So I'll probably buy another.)

Some things that have worked well:
Macaroni and cheese--of course--so simple: macaroni, milk, flour, oil or butter, cheese. The flour canister is easy to find because it's big enough to hold a five-pound bag.
Omelets: everything's in the fridge, which has not so far been renovated.
Chili: this was one of the 1st things we made after the kitchen became functional, and because we like it so much, I grouped the necessary spices/herbs on the window sill for easy access. If I want to use dried beans there's a minor problem, since there are several kinds and they're widely distributed: a giant bag of kidney beans in the cooler, along with the giant bag of rice; pinto beans in an attractive glass jar I got at a house sale; lentils in a plastic container on the dining room window seat next to our record collection; black beans in their original bag in a box on top of the fridge.
Soup: because it is so forgiving. As long as you have stock, bought or homemade and frozen, some vegetables, onions and garlic (almost always essential), meat (optional)--you're in business. One of our recent successful soups was a black bean soup with rice and corn, sensibly spicy--so simple as not to need a recipe: black beans, chicken broth, onion and garlic chopped, corn, extra veg (diced carrots this time), one potato cut up, a cup of leftover rice, a dash of hot sauce, a pinch of ancho pepper (one of the gathered chili spices), another of kosher salt. Serve with grated cheese on top (in this case, smoked cheddar).
Thank heaven for canned crushed tomatoes--a convenience food worth standing up for. And speaking of convenience foods, if you need a reason not to buy Hamburger Helper, check out Erin O'Brien's hilarious post on her HH experiment.

a winter meal

2007-02-18T13:09:00.000-06:00

Winter calls, of course, for comfort food. For a dish baked in the oven, the warmth and smell of it permating the house. For blankets of creamy cheese sauce. For turkey and broccoli, which is the family name for this heavenly dish, sometimes known elsewhere as Something or another Divan. Why divan? isn't this anothe name for sofa/couch? Why does divan equal cheese sauce? I don't know. I could Google it right now, but it's winter, and I'm conserving body heat and energy, so I'm going to rest in my ignorance.

We only had this when there was leftover turkey, which meant after Thanksgiving or after Christmas, which were the only times we had turkey. My mother would never have dreamed of making turkey just so there would be leftovers (as we have sometimes done), so it was a rare treat, remembered fondly and yearned for.

There were dozens of recipes for this or dishes like it floating around in the '50s, I think, but my mother got hers from a restaurant, now forgotten. She liked what she'd ordered so much (and probably it was called Turkey Divan), that she asked the waiter if the chef might give her the recipe. He told her that the chef was stingy with his recipes, but that it was really easy, and he described what went into it, my mother scribbling it down on the back of an envelope: sliced turkey, broccoli spears, a white sauce enriched with cheese.

My version is only a little different from hers--I don't use frozen broccoli, and I don't used Kraft's Olde English Cheese. But otherwise, it's the same, and it produces a dish where the whole is immeasurably more than the parts.

Jo's Turkey and Broccoli

2 tbs butter or olive oil

2 tbs flour

1.5 cups milk

1.5 cups grated cheese of your choice

pinch of salt

1/4 tsp nutmeg

2-3 broccoli crowns

a cup or cup and a half of leftover turkey

paprika

Melt butter in a saucepan, and add the flour to it (or to the oil), stirring over the heat until it's absorbed. Stir in the milk and continue stirring until it thickens into its white-sauceness. (This time, I was doing 2 other things at the same time, and I let it start to boil, which you are never supposed to do to white sauce, but you know--it turned out fine.) When it's thickened, add salt and nutmeg and grated cheese, stirring until it melts in. (I mostly use cheddar, but I add other cheese to it, depending on what's in the fridge.)

Cook broccoli until just starting to become tender, and slice or separate the florets--you don't want anything to be so big that it will stick up and mar the cheese-sauce blanket. Slice or chop the turkey. Put the broccoli in one layer in an 8-inch baking pan, and the turkey over it. Pour cheese sauce--it will probably be thick, so spread it to the edges and corners. Sprinkle lightly with paprika.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes, or until the sauce is bubbling around the edges and the top browns slightly. Eat with moans of pleasure.

I always think of my mother when we have this, of her wonderful cooking, her curiosity. I can see her talking to the waiter, her eager friendliness, maybe almost flirting a little (she was a very attractive woman), my father looking on benevolently--because for him, everything she did was right.

snowed-in valentines

2007-02-14T12:02:00.000-06:00

Big storm, as you probably know if you're a midwesterner. We're not really truly snowed in--we could get out if we had to. But there's enough snow that we're happy we don't have to--about a foot, I'm guessing, although there are drifts that are much bigger.

We're having a make-do Valentine's day, since both of us were planning last-minute heart-shaped shopping. D gave me a chocolate heart made from a Cadbury bar melted down and poured into an ancient high-sided, heart-shaped cookie cutter.

I'm making him a bread pudding in heart-shaped ramekins with what's around the house: I'm thinking chestnuts, apricots, caramel--I'll let you know how it turns out.

this + this, but not that + that

2007-02-11T17:16:00.000-06:00

I do have a kitchen again, although there are still 2 more stages to the renovating: the upper cupboards and the floor (see left, the paint job). And D and I have been cooking--how I missed those beloved ordinary meals that were so unattainable when the kitchen was full of ladders and plastic tarps: shrimp stir fry, meatloaf, baked potatoes with various toppings, etc. etc.
I'm not quite ready to post about the actual cooking yet though--I'm easing my way in by food contemplation: imagine me with chin leaning on one hand, a cartoon balloon over my head that has a picture of a cake in it, or maybe a steaming pot of stock, or some handmade pasta (one of my food resolutions).
Today I was thinking about things going with other things: sometimes they do and sometimes not. So I've started a small meme, a version of the fives: list 5 food pairings that you've discovered go very well together (maybe against expectations); and 5 that you really don't like at all.

Here are mine:
5 delicious partners
1. Ginger snaps and cheddar cheese--the snaps should be very gingery, the cheddar sharpish. This is an idea I got from a good friend, Susan of Bluffton, a late-night snack invention when she was getting her Ph.D. in creative writing. When I was visiting her several years ago, she brought out the gingersnaps and cheddar for one of our food and talk fests. "You'll love this," she said, and I was an immediate convert.
2. Potato chips and ice cream. Unflavored chips, of an unsurpassed crispiness and saltiness, and any kind of ice cream, although I like them best with chocolate. Salty and sweet--very classic; also crunchy and creamy. There's so much going on you won't be able to hold a sensible conversation. The first time I ate chips and ice cream together it was to gross out one of my squeamish cousins. I scooped the ice cream up like dip while she squealed in horror. Now I just eat them sedately from side-by-side bowls, which is just as good.
3. Cherry tomatoes and kalamata olives. They can be eaten together casually and promiscuously out of a bowl for lunch, or skewered jauntily on decorative toothpicks. Each makes the other taste more so--more sweetly tomatoish, more bitingly, piquantly olivish.
4. Saltine crackers with butter. This takes your snack life up a notch without noticeably increasing prep time. Open box of crackers, spread butter thinly. Make a stack so you don't have to go back to make more when you've gotten to a good place in the book you're reading and you don't want to stop and go back to the kitchen. I prefer unsalted butter, but if you're a saltlover go for the double dose.
5. Hardboiled eggs and French dressing. I usually make my own salad dressing now, but if it's going to be on a halved hardboiled egg, it has to be Kraft French Deluxe. The taste is important, but also the brilliant (some say lurid) color.

5 food hostilities
1. Prunes and chocolate. I like prunes, I like chocolate, but they just don't go together for me. Hopeful, I try them out again every once in a while, but--nope. Even as I'm typing this though, I had a vision of prune chocolate chunk muffins, so who knows? (Chocolate and apricots are fast friends though.)
2. Champagne and beer. Probably no one needs to be told this, but champagne and beer do not go well together. Especially not when they're mixed because you don't have a lot of champagne, and you think that beer (which you have a lot more of) will make it go farther when you're celebrating New Year's Eve at the home of one of your friends whose parents are spending the weekend in Las Vegas. I don't like to admit whose idea it was.
3. Coconut milk and pumpkin. One of the worst soups I ever made was a pumpkin soup made with coconut milk. It's true that I was not following the recipe, so it was my my own fault, but it was awful. The only time I've ever thrown something away (usually if things go bad, I put it in the fridge and pretend that I'm going to eat it later, until it grows a coat of mold and then I throw it away).
4. Sausage and gravy, as in sausage gravy. I've given sausage gravy many chances, because I ought to like it--I like them when they're decorously apart, but when they come together I draw back in horror. Maybe it's because I don't think gravy should be white? I know it's not because it's high in fat.

5. Celery stuffed with peanut butter. Who is responsible for this? I don't like the way it tastes, I don't like the way the peanut butter stickies up the crispness of the celery, and I don't like the way it looks--green and brown, not attractive. The only thing celery should be stuffed with is cream cheese mixed with a dollop of horseradish and a squeeze of lemon juice--a sanctified and beloved hors d'ouevre in our family.

I'm tagging Plan B, Madame X, Pen in Hand, Book of Marvels, No Feeling of Falling, and I'm hoping that Alternate Side Parking will take some time from the pressing business of moving her car from one side of the street to the other as well.

wishful cooking

2007-01-17T11:06:00.000-06:00

The kitchen is coming along. It has gone from its mutilated state (left) ; then the stove served up an assortment of strange chemical dishes, right; and now it's assuming a bridal-white coat of primer below right).

But cooking is once again suspended, and we've eaten more TV dinner type food than I like. The Boston Market chicken pot pie is not that great, in case you're interested; Marie Callendar's is far superior (although a little too salty).

In the meantime, I'm reading cookbooks and blogs and marking recipes I want to try when my stove has lost its plastic drapery, and the cupboards are full of food and dishes instead of paint thinner and sandpaper.

There have been a lot of winter vegetable posts lately, enough to make a menu. Here is my dream wintery menu:

Appetizers:
Puree of Celery Root Soup, from Orangette
Winter Salad with Fennel, Pear, Orange, and Pecan, from the passionate cook
Entree:
Simple Butternut Squash Tart, from Heidi at 101 Cookbooks

with side vegetable:
Roasted Parsnips, from Maureen at No Feeling of Falling
and for dessert,
Dark Chocolate and Beet Brownies, from La Tartine Gourmand

In the meantime, the contents of my kitchen cupboards are all over the place. Is the oatmeal on the dining table or in the corner of the living room? Where is the cinnamon? Did we eat all the walnuts, or are they in a box next to the couch?

Our tentative date of cook-ability is January 25: here's hoping.

culinary resolutions

2007-01-13T15:35:00.000-06:00

It's still January, still fair to be making resolutions. So here are mine:
1. Make pasta from scratch. I'll have 2 good step-by-step blog posts to guide me, here and here.
2. Finally finish renovating the kitchen. I want to have all my spices in one place again!
3. Try making dishes from a new-to-me ethnic cuisine. Thai? Moroccan? or maybe explore my own culinary roots--Slovak/Eastern European. (I also have Scottish roots, but I'm not sure I want to make a haggis.)
4. Make pierogies from scratch (my ethnic roots!).
5. Utilize my cookbook collection more. I have a tendency to covet and collect and then just hoard things--so maybe I ought to make a recipe a week from one or another of them.
6. Make an effort to shop, cook, and eat more adventurously. Find out what galangal is. Buy a quince or some kumquats. Make some pickled turnips!
7. Collect the family recipes, which is something I've been meaning to do for a long time and haven't.
8. Make a kitchen inventory: do I really want to do this? or is it just a fantasy, like the one where all my books are alphabetized and ordered by genre and subject?
9. Stop eating things I don't like, or don't like much, and eat only things I love. No more of those muffins from Starbucks. No more processed cheese or stale doughnuts at work functions. (Make my own doughnuts! if I make pompkushki, it will be more of the ethnic roots thing.)
For some other posts on food-related resolutions and plans, see Food and Thoughts and Hooked on Heat; and for a great retrospective list of her favorite 2006 recipes, see La Tartine Gourmande.

good luck food

2007-01-06T17:46:00.000-06:00

This probably should have gone in the end-of-2006 post--our New Year's Eve dinner, but I didn't get around to it, and then there was the mac & cheese thing, and so on. But I had to give it a post for 2 reasons--one is that my kielbasi photo looked so good, I didn't want to waste it. And two, I wondered about the good-luckness of pork and sauerkraut, which is the Slovak good-luck new-year's dinner of choice. I'm very fond of both, but why is it good luck to eat them at the end/beginning of the year? Living off the fat of the land? (pork) eating up the bitter/sour parts of life? (sauerkraut)
I'm passionately fond of sauerkraut, and would make it more often except that D is not as fond. I make it from my mother's recipe in a no-recipe way, but this year I made it with chicken broth because I forgot to buy beer and didn't want to go out again. And since I was changing the one thing I made another addition or two, which I hope my mother wouldn't hate (although she might find it faddish).
Sauerkraut for New Year's (or anytime)
1 bag sauerkraut, drained
a pork chop or a chunk of kielbasi
a good pinch of caraway seeds (about 1 tsp)
a smaller pinch of cumin seeds
a cup of beer or chicken broth
(if broth, also add a splash of vinegar)
1 small potato, grated
1 tsp diced lemon peel
Put sauerkraut in a saucepan with everything else but the lemon peel and bring to a boil. Simmer for about 30 minutes (while you're frying up the rest of the kielbasi in a skillet). In the last few minutes put in the lemon peel. Serve with kielbasi and plenty of horseradish, and follow (somewhat later) with champagne.
We added brownies with vanilla ice cream for dessert, and thought ourselves lucky to have found the brownies leftover in the freezer.

macaroni and cheese

2007-01-05T11:09:00.000-06:00

This post is dedicated to my daughter S, who loves macaroni and cheese with a passion--I always try to make it for her if she visits (and once made it for her at her house; a small disaster because of the difference in our ovens). I must say it's a pleasure to know of something that will always delight her; if only my older daughter V had a favorite dish so I could do the same for her--if she has, she's not telling.
Kevin at Seriously Good has come up with a Mac-and-Cheese Off, and I had to post on mine, even though it is extremely ungourmet, not in any way tarted up, perhaps boring. We like it that way (although we don't agree that it's boring). I haven't used a recipe for years, although long ago I had it written out on an index card, one of the few dishes of my mother's that I carried into my first marriage. It's her recipe, possibly originally from the Joy of Cooking (although it's not quite the same) and all I've changed is the type of cheese (Mom was a fan of Kraft American).
Here it is--basic, homey, and delicious.
Sue Bee's Macaroni and Cheese
2 tbs butter (you can use oil if you want, although the taste will change)
2 tbs flour
2 cups milk (I've used skim, 2%, and whole--all work fine)
about 2 cups grated cheese
2 cups macaroni
Paprika
Melt the butter in a sauce pan, add flour and stir into a roux, cooking it gently for a half minute or so. 1 Add milk and stir constantly over low heat until the lumps dissolve (smash at them with your spoon if necessary). Continue cooking over lowish heat, 2 until the sauce thickens enough to coat the spoon a little. 3 Add the grated cheese 4 and stir until melted (you shouldn't need the stove here--the heat of the sauce should melt it).
In the meantime, if you're efficient, you'll have had water boiling for the macaroni. Sling it in and simmer it until it just starts to soften (I take one or two out and eat them to see how they're coming along). When they get there, drain and put in your preferred dish (I use a 9x13 pan), then pour the sauce over, mixing everything around until the cheesiness is nicely distributed.
As a last touch, sprinkle with paprika (this is more for aesthetics than flavor, but we can't do without it). Bake at 350 degrees for a while. I don't really time it any more, but I think it's supposed to go for about 25 minutes, or until the sauce is bubbling a little around the edges.
Serve right from the pan, because no one is interested in waiting any longer. It's good with vegetables like broccoli or green beans (also a nice color contrast), but we never put the vegetables into the mac and cheese in the interests of innovation or saving time as I've seen some recipes suggest.
mac and cheese footnotes:
1 When I first made this I had no idea what a roux was, but now I take pleasure in using the right word.
2 You're supposed to cook it over low heat, but I confess that I often turn up the heat after the lumps are gone, which works OK if you stir madly.
3 Knowing when this is partly a matter of experience, but I find that the feel of the spoon (I always use a wooden one) against the pan changes when the sauce starts to thicken--it moves against the pan bottom in a more silky way.
4 This particular mac and cheese had a mixture of two kinds of cheddar (an Irish cheese, I think, and Helluva Good Cheese Extra Sharp Cheddar), plus the end of a piece of Swiss. If I'm making it for S, it has to have a high proportion of yellow cheddar, since she disdains the white version. Confession: I once used a judicious mixture of yellow and red food coloring when I had only white cheese: no one guessed.

end-of-2006

2006-12-29T16:11:00.000-06:00

A wrap-up of my first food-blogging year that is a day late. This has also been the year of my kitchen disruption, which is leaking into 2007 (but surely not farther?).
Here are some dishes and meals from 2006 that I didn't blog about:
Left--my birthday cake, a yogurt cake based on Clothilde's soaked with an orange-infused simple syrup, and topped with ganache and whipped cream. Excellent!

In July, I ate some of the amazing food in Lake Tahoe, most of it bought at the farmers market--perfect local blackberries, tapenade made from local ingredients (not pictured), my friend Kris's mother's famous eggplant dish (left). (Had I ever had a fresh-from-someone's farm eggplant before? I don't think I had.)

Dark, luscious, local cherries (during local-eating August) made part of a picnic on the road to my niece's wedding in upstate New York. And in early fall, there was an amazing dinner at Three Birds restaurant to celebrate finishing the first draft of my novel--see the crowning dessert below, left.

In November, I was amazed to find I still had herbs and greens still growing in my garden (and even more amazed that I'm planning to go out later this afternoon and pick some cilantro to go with the black bean soup I'm planning to make; I'm worried about global warming, but does that mean I can't enjoy a small silver lining?).

In early December, I made a very successful (but unrecorded) chicken curry, dodging the plastic sheets that hung in the half-renovated kitchen.

And finally, right before Christmas some friends and I had our annual holiday lunch at Parker's, a great Cleveland-area restaurant that closed at the end of 2006 (yesterday!), and let our festive martinis serve as a valedictory virtual toast to the end of the year. It was a pretty good one for me, but even so, I'm always happy to see the new one arrive--the promise of something new, new projects, new writing, whatever is coming up.

our kitchen is on hiatus, but--

2006-11-28T10:44:00.000-06:00

we are doing a bit of cooking here and there. Actually, the kitchen is stalled, while D figures out what is causing the minor leak in the corner by the cupboards. This was a relief, because takeout palls after a while.
But I was very glad that my sister had volunteered to do Thanksgiving. She did the turkey, gravy, stuffing

--all in our mother's time-tested ways--and the mashed potatoes, also the cranberry sauce (we have to have the canned, complete with molded lines, for tradition's sake). I did the salad and veg (green salad w homemade dressing, roasted carrots, and green beans). Our aunt made the pies: two pumpkin, one pumpkin chiffon, and as she always does, pronounced the dinner a triumph. Here she is, approving the table settings.
The green beans were steamed and unadorned; the salad with a simple vinaigrette: our family believes in some plain food on holidays to go along with the fancy. But the roasted carrots were gussied up a little, and got their modest share of compliments.
Roasted Carrots
16-20 medium to large carrots
2-3 tbs olive oil
a pinch of salt
juice of half a lime
2-3 tbs brown sugar
I cut the carrots in chunks, splitting some of the largest first, then tossed them with the oil and juice and sprinkled them with salt. I roasted them for about 40 minutes in a 375 degree oven (until fork tender), then took them out and tossed them with the brown sugar. I did them a day ahead and heated them up in my sister's microwave, and they were very good, fitting accompaniment to the glamorous turkey.
My surprise of the day was how much I (a fanatical lover of the regular version) liked the pumpkin chiffon pie--my aunt has promised the recipe, so maybe I'll post it later. As with so many great dishes, it was devoured before anyone (me) thought to take a picture.
Here's the youngest and pickiest Thanksgiving diner, left, turning his nose up at something.
And his cousin, right, planning an assault on the mashed potatoes. They haven't learned to like the stuffing yet, but maybe we won't tell them how good it is for a while.

2006-11-02T09:33:00.000-06:00

Here's the reason there haven't been so many cooking posts lately--the only things on our stove are a tub of plastering stuff and various implements of renovation, plus an attractive frosting of plaster dust. D is fixing the ancient water damage, that we ignored for as long as we could (some might say it was way too long), and because he's a perfectionist, he's decided that not only will he do his own plastering, but that he'd redo all the ceiling problems, cracks, flaws, dimples, etc. All the books say to leave large plastering jobs to the experts, but D was undeterred. My part is to be encouraging; to call out "What's wrong?" in a calming voice when he starts swearing; and not to complain about the dust.
So there's been some take-out, some McDonald's; I had a Big Mac for the first time since the '80s. We have done a little bit of cooking, but it's short-cut cooking, making extensive use of the microwave. I made scones the other day, but all the prep work had to be done in the dining room, since every kitchen surface is a plaster-staging area.
The idea is to have it done for Thanksgiving, when my daughters' families are coming. I have my fingers crossed.

art and food

2006-10-29T09:53:00.000-06:00

D was in a juried art show which had its opening last night, so we went and mingled with other other artists and art lovers. Some good stuff--above is the 1st prize winner, which was called "Emerging."
And here is my favorite painting of D's in the show:

And here is the food--it was solid fare of the cheese-cracker-grape-olive variety, but I particularly liked the signs, which suggested mysterious food and drink misbehavior at past openings that I'd like to hear more about.

one of the 50 best restaurants in America

2006-10-23T17:02:00.000-05:00

I went out to dinner with some friends last Friday--a kind of memorial dinner. We did an informal writing retreat in the summer, and want to keep the energy alive; also just to have fun.
We went to Parker's New American Bistro and it was wonderful--above is my entree, a moistly tender piece of pork loin with just the right amount of chewiness. And here's the lamb sausage on a polenta cake appetizer: also extremely good (I snagged the last bite).
One of the nice things about Parker's is that everything is very good, and also as local as it's possible to be when you're running a restaurant. Parker is a local-foods advocate, and is active in various ways around Cleveland and northeast Ohio in the farmers markets, etc. In fact, he's closing the restaurant to give more time to these activities, which is good and bad. Good: more attention to local food, better farmers markets. Bad: no more Parker's.
So this dinner might have been a swan dinner, if I don't make it back before the end of December. It made me think of all the times I'd been there before. It's in the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, which is where I went to high school, so the 19th-century building was familiar to me from before it was a restaurant (it's quite close to a boys' school, in the vicinity of which the girls from my girls' school did a certain amount of hanging out).
And then later, when I was working at Cleveland State, my boss would sometimes take me to dinner at Parkers. He liked it because they would bring his plate without any garnish or vegetable. He didn't like to see anything impinging on his meat and potatoes--it ruined his appetite, he said. At other restaurants they would say they'd leave off the carrots or the curly kale, but then they would forget. He also liked the dessert souflees, which had to be ordered at the beginning of the meal (they still do). I had my first souflee there--lemon, very good.
Parker's was featured by Gourmet as one of the 2006 50 best restaurants--one of not so many Cleveland restaurants to be so honored--so it's quite a loss. I'm thinking I ought to go once more at least before it's gone forever.

food news from here and there

2006-10-21T11:23:00.000-05:00

Dagoba Organic Chocolate has been purchased by Hershey. Click here for some words about this from Schilling of Dagoba via David Lebovitz's blog. Question: is Hershey planning to gobble up all the organic/artisan chocolatemakers? Is this an evil chocolate plot? Stay tuned.
Elise at Simply Recipes has posted a recipe for Caramel Apples, which look so wonderful I'm thinking of changing my mind about not liking them.
Bridal gown made by future husband, a baker, from cream puffs. See here.
Kitchenhand gives a personal history of the bean, and a recipe.
I had cheese (an unidentified cheddar scrap rescued from the back of the fridge) and crackers (Ritz) for lunch. No photos.

fair food

2006-10-17T17:27:00.000-05:00

I went to the Fairfield County Fair in Lancaster last weekend. It's the last county fair in Ohio every year, which gives it an air of nostalgia--last fair, end of summer--quick, eat some funnel cake. Which I did, along with a lot of other stuff.
I also went to look at the food exhibitions, which I love. I've never entered anything (although come to think of it, why not?). I love the gleaming jars of jam and the giant vegetables, and the slices of pie and cake going limp, on display for days after their eat-by dates. This year, I especially liked the weird carrot exhibit, but I'm also always a sucker for outsize tomatoes and giant pumpkins.
I guess some people think of county fairs as outdated, and possibly they are, but I love their connection back to the time when Ohio, and much of the U.S., was mainly agricultural, when farming was one of the major occupations. Making a good jar of jam or canning garden produce wasn't just something you did for fun, but a survival mechanism. Long ago, in the winter, you couldn't go to the store and buy some sundried tomatoes or a jar of capers or spiced peaches. If you didn't have it in the root cellar, you did without.
This was my 1st year canning, and I admit I'm glad I don't have to depend for my winter diet on my food-preserving labor, because it was hard and time-consuming and I was thoroughly tired of it when it was over. But I don't want to lose the connection, even if it's sentimental, even if I'm being food-nostalgic.
The fair is also a wonderful spectacle, full of color and noise and movement. This was the first time I went in the daytime and I felt pleasantly overwhelmed by the sun and the blue sky, the moving crowds, the bright colors of the booths and the rides. A holdover again, right? For those benighted generations w/o electronic diversions. But a day later in front of the tv, I remembered being at the fair, when instead of sitting in front of the flat screen, I had walked in the very midst and moil of the highly-colored, doughnut and gyro scented air, able to put my hands on the giant goose-necked squash or press my face against the chainlink fence to see the sulky race.
And yes, I did have a deep-fried Twinkie.

some things I have cooked

2006-10-12T20:19:00.000-05:00

One thing is the pumpkin stuffed with a sausage stuffing. I got the idea of a stuffed pumpkin in my head (which sounds uncomfortable), and then I bought a small pumpkin to symbolize fall, and then I felt we should eat it before it went squashy. I think I was influenced by the Sausage-Stuffed Acorn Squash at Chez Megane--that's how the pumpkin got in my head.
I precooked my pumpkin halves in the microwave a bit and also precooked the sausage a little because we were both hungry. The stuffing was very simple: mild Italian sausage, an egg, some torn up bread, a splash of milk, and some herbs from the garden (basil, parsley, and sage). I garnished it with some sauteed sage leaves, and it was very good.
Another thing is the Tomato-Apple Salad, which was the result of having tons of apples from D's father's tree. They were very insect-bitten this year, and most of the apples have to be cut and cut again to find the good parts. We wanted a tomato salad, but there weren't enough tomatoes left in the garden, so in desperation, I added chopped apples--this was an excellent idea. The salad was about equal parts chopped yellow tomato and chopped tart apple, in a vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon juice, with a sprinkling of kosher salt and a grind or 2 of pepper. Who knew that tomatoes and apples went together so well? I'm thinking now of a tomato soup with apples in some form: chopped? juiced? sauteed? We'll see.
Something I've cooked with: my new olive oil, brought back from the food nirvana of California by my friend Kris. It's from Lodestar Farms, a lemon olive oil with a very nice pedigree: extra virgin, cold pressed, late harvest. So far I've only used it twice. I drizzled it on the stuffed pumpkin when it came out of the oven, and I've dressed the pumpkin seeds with it after I roasted them. Both applications heavenly.
This weekend I'm going to Logan, Ohio, home of Pizza Crossing. I expect to try some pepperoni, and pepperoni/sausage/mushroom/hot pepper with my grandsons, who don't mind if I eat the hot peppers off theirslices.

all the things I haven't cooked, plus my favorite herb

2006-10-01T09:28:00.000-05:00

I haven't cooked anything at all this week. I'm working on a big project, and D has taken up the spatula (as he did for a lot of the summer). Yesterday, he made a crockpot venison stew that was the ultimate comfort food, with drop biscuits to sop it up, which was so heavenly and nourishing that it may even have increased my IQ a couple of points.
I wasn't cooking over the weekend, and I wasn't blogging either, so I missed contributing to Kalyn's my-favorite-herb event, and didn't get to vote for basil, which came in poor second to cilantro (cilantro 13, basil 7). Check out her round-up, here.
So this is a belated tribute to basil. I have 7 basil plants growing in my garden, 3 of them still looking pretty good although it's been chilly (we haven't had a frost yet). The photo above was taken yesterday, when I was on my way to the library.
I use basil a lot. In summer it goes into 8 out of 10 dinners. I use basil leaves instead of lettuce on my sandwiches. I put a leaf or 2 in my cup of herbal tea in the mornings. I dry part of what I grow and use it as long it lasts (it never lasts long enough). And I make pesto and freeze it.
Pesto is my favorite basil recipe. I got my original pesto recipe from a book on herbs that I've lost. I bought it at an herb shop run by a chirpy old woman, the kind of person from whom you want to buy something, because they're so nice and they answer all your stupid questions about growing this and making vinegar out of that, and in this case, because they're so cute (she was wearing a straw hat with real daisies stuck in the ribbon band around the crown). So I bought the book, and read it through and through, learned how to make herb vinegars, different ways to dry, and most important, how to make pesto.
I changed her recipe somewhat, reducing the oil, for instance--and I see no need to stick to pine nuts; I've used walnuts and almonds, both of which were fine (walnuts give a better texture though). I add a little vinegar because I was nervous then about botulism or something, and I still do because I like the way it tastes. I also like it to be spicy, so I often add part of a hot pepper.
Here's my recipe, which is always amendable--I don't really measure anything anymore, so these are estimated measurements.
Basil Pesto
2 cups of basil (I put it in a pyrex 2-cup measuring cup and really squash it down tight)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese (it's best if you use fresh-grated, but in a pinch, I've used the stuff in the green can and it's pretty good that way)
a handful of some kind of nuts: pine, walnut, almond; I used pecan once, and I'm thinking of trying pistachio this year, since I have half a bag in the freezer)
a splash of vinegar: probably this splash is in the nature of a scant tablespoon; I use whatever I have in the cupboard.
a whole or half hot pepper: I've used both dried and fresh; jalapenos or cayenne, usually.
a clove or 2 of garlic
I put everything in the food processor except the olive oil and let it go for a minute; then I add the olive oil a little at a time through the feed tube. Sometimes I use more than a quarter cup--I like it to be moving toward smooth, but still a little textured--more olive oil would make it more sauce-like. Mine mounds up in the spoon.
I sometimes add other things on a whim--some green or red pepper; half an onion; some parsley. And I mix basils, except for purple, which I segregate.
I freeze it in small containers, and we eat it in all the usual ways--pasta, mainly. But it's also good on a sandwich, either by itself or mixed into a little mayonnaise. Even frozen it has a strong aroma--when I open one of the little containers I can smell the basil and it's like opening my back door to summer.

why does food taste better outdoors?

2006-09-26T17:38:00.000-05:00

This is a perennial question, first asked by (I believe) Lucy in the Enid Blyton's XXX of Adventure series (Castle of Adventure, Island of Adventure, and so on), and more lately, by kitchenhand on his excellent blog, What I cooked last night. My answer is I don't know, but also, who cares, because it does, and we should just accept this and then go forth and eat as many meals out of doors as the weather will permit.
On my writing weekend, I ate most breakfasts and some lunches on the deck, and all snacks on the beach. Dinners were formally served in the dining room, but the appetizer course was eaten on the deck, with various forms of alcohol. As Virginia Woolf is my witness, it did taste better. See above, a 7-layer dip that was devoured not long after this picture was taken.
I took brownies (see here), and made a curried vegetable dish, for which there is neither picture nor recipe. It was the kind of dish which arises out of what vegetables are available and look good (onions, green and hot peppers, potatoes, corn, cherry tomatoes) and comes together with a pinch of this and a grating of that.
We were also well-supplied with chocolate, which as everyone knows is crucial to the writing process.

the joy of brownies

2006-09-13T18:50:00.000-05:00

I'm making brownies tonight to take to a writing thing I'm doing this weekend. Brownies are good because I've made them so often I don't really need the recipe anymore--they make me feel like a high-flying, don't-need-to-check cook. Also, they're good because they're good. No one ever pokes at them dubiously and asks, "Now what's this again?" They do say, "Oh, I shouldn't." But then they do.
I originally used the Joy of Cooking recipe, but over time I've tinkered with it a little, and I have several different variations. The big difference is that I use more chocolate and less sugar, because I like them fudgier and a little less sweet. I sometimes make them with nuts, but not too often, because one of my daughters hates nuts, especially nuts in cookies. I also use the trick (which I think I read about in one of Maida Heatter's cookbooks) of lining the pan with foil and then lifting the brownies out to cool--they're much easier to cut and you don't have to pry them out of the pan with a fork if you overbake them the slightest little bit.

Brownies
1/2 cup butter
5 0z unsweetened chocolate (if I have it I use Scharffen-Berger)
1 and 3/4 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
a tiny pinch of salt
1 cup flour
optional:
I often add
1 cup chopped toasted walnuts, and
1 cup chocolate chips
but this time I substituted 3/4 cup of slivered dried apricots and a handful of chopped crystallized ginger for the chocolate chips.

Melt the butter and chocolate together (I use the microwave, doing it in 30-second increments so it doesn't get too hot; is there such a thing as overmelted?). Beat the eggs with the tsp of vanilla and the pinch of salt. You could also add other spices, etc., if you're using them.
(The old Joy told you to add the sugar to the eggs, and then the chocolate/butter mixture to that. But the new one says to add the sugar to the chocolate mixture--the advantage of this is that you don't have to wait as long for the chocolate to cool, because it cools somewhat when it mixes with the sugar. And then you don't have to worry about it being curdling the eggs. And it works fine.)
After adding the sugar to the chocolate/butter, mix in the eggs lightly, mixing well but not beating. Then add the flour, mixing until just before it all comes together (so that there is still some flour visible. Add the nuts and/or chocolate chips or whatever you're adding, and mix the rest of the way.
I line a 9x13 pan with foil, and I grease the foil with butter, and then I throw in a mixture of sugar and cocoa to coat the pan (as you are directed to do with flour for some cake recipes), tapping out the excess. In goes the brownie batter, and the pan in the preheated oven, to bake at 350 degrees. Bake for 25 minutes--checking the brownies with a toothpick to see if they're done.
Sometimes I add a tsp of chili powder (chipotle or ancho); sometimes a half tsp each of cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger. I made it once with a syrup of mint made from the mint in my garden, but I forgot to write that version down, so I'll have to invent it again some time. I also made it once and drenched the still-warm brownies with a slathering of black raspberry jam, and then a chocolate-bar frosting, which was so decadent that I haven't yet done it again.
Some things that don't work: minimarshmallows and Heath Bar bits (they both melt into the brownies). But white chocolate chips are good; and M&Ms would probably be fine, too. I won't taste the brownies with slivered apricot, ginger, and walnuts until tomorrow, but they smell divine, and D says they're pretty good.

the 5 things to eat before you die meme

2006-09-07T10:56:00.000-05:00

Started by The Traveler's Lunchbox, this has been variously and wondrously interpreted by bloggers, including Faith at Mekuno Cooking (who tagged me); Karina at gluten-free goddess (she gives 5 foods to live for); Cookiecrumb (who includes a deathbed wish); and kitchen hand at What I cooked last night (he has 5 meals).
I had trouble coming up with my own list--too many wonderful things, of course, but also, how to interpret it--personal foods? universal foods? unique and amazing foods? My list turned out to be personal, but somewhat accessible.
1. Pizza in Italy. I didn't really know how good pizza could be until I went to Italy. The 1st one my sister and I had (a Pizza Margherita in an 8-table restaurant in a Roman alley) was a revelation that swept aside all the unsatisfactory experiences with Domino's and their like. (Actually, any food in Italy would be a good list item--almost everything we ate there was wonderful.)
2. My mother's torte, made always for Christmas dinner, and occasionally on other state occasions. We learned that my sister couldn't have it for her June birthday though, since the heat tended to uncrisp and even melt it. When we were young, the torte seemed like a miraculous and unique creation, but I know it now as a variety of dacquoise, meringue layers filled and frosted with whipped cream flavored with cherries and pineapple. It's one of those recipes that turns out to be more than the sum of its parts.
3. Warm bread you've made yourself. The taste is wonderful enough in itself, good even w/o butter (although butter is welcome), but it's even better because of the sense of accomplishment. I waited a long time to taste this because of my fear of yeast, one of several food-preparation fears I had: fear of yeast, fear of canning, fear of pressure cookers, and fear of deep-fat frying. I've conquered the 1st two, and I'm contemplating learning how to make doughnuts.
4. Pierogi, an eastern-European kind of filled dumpling for those of you whose grandma didn't make them by the dozen, filled most often with potato and/or cheese, but now available in other flavors. I'm part Slovak, and my grandma and aunts were great pierogi makers. I myself am a great pierogi buyer. Hmmm--maybe I have a fear of pierogi? Pierogi should ideally be served with fried onions, some sour cream, possibly sauerkraut, and some kielbasi sausage. It's a dish that will turn you Slovak (or Polish or Hungarian).
5. A BLT, with homegrown tomatoes and lettuce, which incidentally we had last night for dinner--tomato slices as large as dessert plates, Red Sails lettuce, bacon from The Sausage Shoppe (home-cured), and bread from one of my favorite bakeries, the Stone Oven. I was starting to feel sick last night, and the BLT made me feel cured, for a while at least.

Bloggers I'd like to tag (and who I'm pretty sure haven't posted on it yet): Barbara at Tigers and Strawberries; Liz at Pocket Farm; ladygoat at Foodgoat; Queen of the Kitchen; and Gina at Crazy Diamond.

preservation

2006-09-06T08:33:00.000-05:00

Back from Logan, Ohio, where I discussed canning with my son-in-law. He and my daughter have done green beans (in a pressure cooker) and tomatoes so far, their first time. D and I have done peaches, pears, chutney, and peach jam. The combination is starting to approach a balanced meal, along with the venison we have in the freezer. Back to the land! Oh, wait--too late for that. Not to mention that I don't want to chop my own wood and make lye soap or whatever they were doing on those communes in the '60s while I was living a more ordinary life.

I haven't quite got the hang of jam-making yet. I'm never sure how long to cook it and my sources are somewhat contradictory. Plus, I can't resist adding things to it (balsamic vinegar? why not!). The peach jam I made yesterday came out tasting very good, but a little too solid--too much pectin? or just overcooked? I'm not sure. I won't give a recipe, because I kept adding things in a manic way, but it tastes pretty good. I'm calling it Balsamic Peach Jam--a little balsamic vinegar, some cardamom seeds to spice it up a little.

Here's the jam on some vanilla ice cream: very bad picture; very good jam.

chocolate

2006-08-30T08:46:00.000-05:00

See, what I love about food blogs is that you can find there interviews of people who make chocolate--as for instance, here, where David Lebovitz interviews Frederick Schilling of Dagoba Organic Chocolate on his wonderful (often chocolate-focused) blog. Lots of interesting stuff about chocolate making, the chocolatemakers community, etc. Schilling quotes Dr. Seuss and mentions a fantasy of transporting chocolate from South America in sailing boats--could he be more charming? Plus, Dagoba makes one of my favorite chocolat bars, the Xocalatl, bittersweet chocolate with chilies and cacao nibs. It turns out it's their #1 best selling bar, which dashes my feelings of being unique and clever in my liking of it, but I'll get over it.

peachy

2006-08-25T17:01:00.000-05:00

I always thought I'd like to do some canning, in the way that people think they might like to write a novel, some time, in the future, when other interests have palled, perhaps when they've retired and don't have enough to do. But this summer I had canning thrust upon me. D's father Raymond, who has an intensively planted city garden, has always canned--tomatoes, peaches, pears. And this year, he decided he wasn't up to it any more, so D said we would do it. Sure, we'll do it, I said comfortably back in June when the peaches were still in the future, and I sat back to read another ancient mystery I'd found when cleaning the closet.
And then the peaches arrived! Several hundred of them.
So we're canning, and just in time for the 22nd Sugar High Friday, Can You Can, hosted at Delicious Days.
The main reference we used (besides D's father, who had plenty to say) was the older version of The Joy of Cooking, which has been there for me through many culinary triumphs and failures. We supplemented it with an intensely wordy online treatise from the USDA, and a perky but useful FAQ, here.
So far, we've done 35 pints of peaches and 10 quarts, canned in a medium sugar syrup by the cold-pack method. We've had 4 exploding jars (they didn't really explode, just broke in the hot water bath), which was exciting (what was that noise!?) but annoying. We don't need cologne because we carry with us a mild but pervasive odor of peachiness. We have only one peach-related injury--D cut his knuckle during some over-enthusiastic peeling.
We've learned several things: pack those peaches in tightly; when they say to fill the jars with a certain amount of headroom, they really mean it; boiling water is HOT!; and, although this may seem obvious, peeled peaches are slippery. Mainly we've learned that it isn't as hard as I feared it might be. It's the kind of thing that you get better at the more you do it. And I have to say that I feel an immense sense of accomplishment when I look at the jars on the dining room table.
I'm thinking: we can do this!; which is a good thing, because in a couple of weeks, the pears are going to start coming in.

one local summer #8: pot luck

2006-08-19T18:49:00.000-05:00

My featured local meal this week wasn't actually a meal. I made locally grown food the star of my potluck contributions (as it turned out, I wasn't the only one--there were some homegrown tomatoes in the salad and, I believe, local eggplant in the main dish).
I made 2 things--a kind of tapenade with garlic toasts and a fruit crumble. The tapenade was all local except for the olive oil and spices, and the bread was from a local bakery. The crumble (or was it a crisp?) had local plums and cherries and local butter from Hartzler's Dairy in the crumble topping. I made it with very little sugar because one of the potluckers is a diabetic.

Tapenade
1 small tomato, seeded
1/2 medium onion
8 oven-dried tomatoes (from last year)
1/2 mildly hot pepper
1 garlic clove
handful of local black walnuts, chopped
handful of mixed basil from the garden (green, purple, lime, and Thai)
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp of smoked paprika
1/2 tsp of chipotle powder
drizzle of olive oil
I put everything except the oil into the food processor and let it go for a minute. When it was chunky, I started adding the olive oil in dribs and drabs until it started to look spreadable (probably about 1/4 cup). It tasted fine, and was popular enough that it was half gone before I took a picture of it.

Plum-Cherry Crumble
about 15 prune plums, pitted and sliced
about twenty cherries, pitted
5 tbs white (divided use)
pinch of ginger
pinch of nutmeg
1/8 cup of red wine
1/4 cup oatmeal
1/2 cup flour
2tbs demerara sugar (although you could use brown)
3 tbs butter
pinch salt
I roasted the plums a little first after tossing them with 3 tbs of the sugar, the ginger and the nutmeg--about 10 minutes in a 350 degree oven to draw the juices out a little. I put the plums and their juice in my baking dish (a smallish 5-cup pyrex) along with the halved cherries. I added the wine and tossed them a little. (I had some rose petal syrup leftover from something else and added a couple of spoonsful, but this was optional.) I put the oatmeal, flour, butter, salt, and the rest of the sugars in a dish and mixed it with my hands (although you can use a pastry cutter if you want to). Then I spooned it onto the fruit and put it in the 350-degree oven for about 35 minutes (or until you can see the fruit juices bubbling up a little.
At the potluck we had this with Hartzler cream, and it was universally commended. It turned out very red/purple, despite the prune plums--some powerfully colored cherries, I guess.

in honor of Julia

2006-08-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

Lisa at Champaign Taste had the nifty idea to celebrate Julia Child's birthday today by making one of her recipes. I decided to make mayonnaise because I've never done it and always wanted to. To make it even easier, Julia gives Blender Mayonnaise as a variation in Mastering the Art of French Cooking--I couldn't put it off any longer.
I want to say I'm a little embarrassed that I haven't done it before--it was soooo easy.
Julia Child's Blender Mayonnaise
1 whole egg
1/4 tsp dry mustard (I used prepared because I couldn't find dry)
1/2 tsp salt (I used kosher)
1 tbs white wine vinegar (or Julia says you can use lemon juice)
1 cup olive oil (or a mixture of oils)
I put the 1st 3 ingredients in my food processor (figuring it would work as well as the blender--which it did) and whirred it for 30 seconds; added the vinegar and let it go 10 seconds more. Then I poured the oil very slowly into the feed tube--in fact, I put it in by dripped spoonsful, because Julia was emphatic about the need for slowness. I could see it turning into mayonnaise right then and there--it was like a chemistry experiment (and more successful than most of mine were in Sister Gabriella's class).
And voila--le mayonnaise (la mayonnaise?).
I tried it immediately on the classic cheese and tomato-from-the-garden sandwich.
Bon appetit!

Postscript: I just read on megnut that mayonnaise is (possibly) 250 years old this summer. Glad to have observed two anniversaries in one.

The Local Spice is Right

2006-08-07T09:55:00.000-05:00

Local spice, local ingredients. This is my entry for The Spice is Right 5: Fresh and Local. Barbara at Tigers and Strawberries this time asked us to come up with a locally grown spice if we could and pair it with as much local produce as possible, in honor of the lush and prolific growth of summer.
My local spice is coriander, the seeds of cilantro, and their terroir is my backyard. I've been growing cilantro for more than ten years, and sometimes now it reseeds itself, which I love. But I don't take any chances--I plant it every year, somtimes twice, because I love it so much.
The cilantro wars have been fought fiercely at my house, because D is one of those people who are genetically disposed to dislike the taste of cilantro. To some of these unfortunates, cilantro tastes like soap; D says it tastes like wet cardboard. I used to think he was just giving me a hard time, or that if I snuck it into enough dishes he'd get to like it. But I can't fight a genetic disposition.
In doing a little research on coriander/cilantro, I was glad to find out that its name derives from the Latin coriandrum, which in turn derives from the Greek corys, a bedbug, supposedly referring to the scent of the crushed leaves (I'm not going to tell D about this). It's both a spice (the seeds, whole or ground) and an herb (the leaves). The seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs (I've noticed this is claimed for a lot of plants--those Egyptians must have been fiends for seed burial). It was one of the 1st herbs grown by the American colonists, and the Roman legions carried it along on the march to flavor their bread. It is still used in cough medicine in India. There's a website for cilantro haters: I Hate Cilantro! And it's the name of the title character in I, Coriander.
I got my recipe from The Serendipitous Chef's Fiery Cool Cucumber Soup. Here's my version, only a little different:

about 3 medium cucumbers, seeded and cut in large pieces
(I peeled them, but left a little on for green flecks)
half an onion, cut in chunks
1 tbs dill
a small handful of basil
a small handful of mint
about 1 tbs of green coriander seeds, smashed a little with a knife
3 cloves garlic
1tsp chipotle chile powder
1 tsp paprika
pinch of sea salt
a pinch of cumin seeds
a splash of olive oil
and another of white wine
about 2 cups of yogurt
I put everything except the last 3 ingredients in the food processor and whirred it up until it was small-chunky. Then I put in the olive oil and white wine, and started adding yogurt about a quarter cup at a time. When it got to a nice soupy, not-too-thick consistency, I stopped (hence the imprecise measurement). I chilled it in the freezer for about 20 minutes (since it was very close to dinnertime), and brought it out and garnished it with mint sprigs (forgot them in the picture).
As for locality--the cucumbers was from D's father's garden, the onion from the farmers market. The herbs and the garlic were all from my garden, the white wine was a local wine, leaving only the salt, chile powders, olive oil, yogurt from out of town.
It was great--so good that I ate some for a bedtime snack later that night--chilled and icy, with a snap of spicy pepper and the pleasant tang of the yogurt--so good that I'm planning on adding the Chef to my blogroll--I don't want to miss anything else this good.

(Neither of the photos do it justice--I swear it didn't look that brown in real life!)

vegging out

2006-08-05T18:40:00.000-05:00

The heat has broken somewhat, but it's still not what you'd call cool. So we opted to keep the temperature of dinner minimal, both the cooking of it and the eating. It also turned out to be more or less vegetarian (I used some chicken broth making the beans, but mostly because it was in the fridge, a leftover; vegetable broth could be easily substituted).
Black Bean Salad
about 1 cup uncooked black beans
liquid to cover (I used a mixture of water, red wine, and chicken broth)
half an onion
several sprigs of Thai basil
2 cloves of garlic
a sprig of mint
2 ears of corn
assorted heirloom tomatoes, enough to make about a cup roughly chopped
salt
half a lime
olive oil
Herb Pesto (see below)
I sorted through the beans, put them in the dutch oven with the liquid and the next 4 ingredients, and simmered them until they were tender (this took a while, because these beans were pretty old). When they were done, I discarded the onion, garlic, and herb sprigs, and set the beans aside to cool down.
I microwaved the corn--my new discovery, and I wish I remembered whom to credit, but I don't. Corn cooks perfectly in the microwave wrapped loosely in a paper towel. For 2 ears, I put the timer on 2.5 minutes, but you probably would need to experiment to find the perfect timing for your own microwave.
I cut the corn off the cobs and combined it with the beans and the tomato, annointed it with the juice of the half lime and a dose of olive oil (probably a couple of tablespoons), and the pesto.
The pesto looks depressingly khaki in the picture, probably because I used a mixture of purple and green basils. I threw it together, but this is a good approximation:
Herb Pesto
handful of green basil leaves
handful of purple basil leaves
the leaves from a goodish sprig of purslane (optional)
handful of mint leaves (I used 2 kinds--apple mint and spearmint)
5 or 6 walnut halves
about 3 tbs parmesan cheese, in small chunks
a dash of cider vinegar
olive oil
Throw the 1st 5 ingredients in the food processor and whirl it up a little; add a splash of olive oil and watch it approach chunky paste-hood. I kept adding olive oil until the texture looked right to me, probably about 3-4 tablespoons--some people would like more. At the last, I added the cheese and the vinegar (in vain hopes that it would keep the color bright--it did--bright khaki) and let it go a few more seconds. It was marvelously good, destined to be eaten on toast for breakfast the next day.
This was a hot-day meal to remember: it was vegetable-rich; I believe the beans and corn give you a complete protein; it was easy; and it was very good.

a return to one local summer

2006-08-04T10:46:00.000-05:00

The above is an action shot of D putting together a 90%-local stirfry: his father's carrots, squash and onions broccoli and corn (not visible) from the farmer's market, some herbs from our garden, various condiments, and rice (which is the unlocal 10%, or so I declare). We had guests, and dinner was running late, so no photo of the finished product. It was whisked onto the table and we fell up on it. Very good.
Working quite hard on my novel, plus time out for a high school reunion--when will I get to cook anything interesting again? D is having all the food fun this summer, with his Wonders of Wok Cookery cookbook. And of course, it's been hot. I have a wistful desire to make some muffins, or a batch of chocolate chip-pecan cookies. But I'm not prepared to turn on the oven until the temperature dips substantially below 90.

farmers market envy

2006-07-25T19:44:00.000-05:00

Lake Tahoe was great in a number of ways, about which I'll say more over several posts. But one of the most amazing things was the Tahoe City Farmers Market (Thursdays, 8 am to 1 pm, in case you're in the neighborhood). First, it was on the lake--points right there for the blue and sparkling view.
But even without the clear Tahoe water (from snowmelt) sparkling between the stalls, there would have been so much else to look at, taste, sniff--and, of course, buy. A rainbow of plums, for instance. A dozen varieties of tomatoes, heirloom and conventional. Breads, Indian food, giant blackberries, velvety peaches. An avalanche of beans.

My sister kept asking me if I'd taken a picture of this or that (I had), and I kept saying, have you tasted this? the cilantro pesto? the organic strawberries?

We bought (a partial list) mint chutney, chicken tikka, strawberries, blackberries, red plums, black plums, maroon plums, lemon cucumbers, basil, a small honeydew melon, a handwoven market basket, goat cheese, manchego cheese, eggplants, several kinds of tomatoes, and much, much more. Then we staggered back to our house on the lake, ready to eat locally for as many days as it took to consume it all.
I love my usual farmers markets--North Union at Crocker Bassett and off Detroit Ave. in Lakewood--but I have never seen anything like this variety and lushness there. I guess this is the difference between living in Ohio and California. They had yellow carrots! And long beans! I'd forgotten about those--something I'd never even seen before (next to the eggplant in the bean picture).

If anything could make me want to move to California, the prospect of this kind of farmers market might do the trick.

going away

2006-07-18T11:21:00.000-05:00

I'm going away to Lake Tahoe for a week, so maybe I'll get to see what eating locally is like in another location. In the meantime, I wanted to recommend Molly O'Neill's book, Mostly True. Its subtitle is "a memoir of family, food, and baseball"; and when I heard a piece about it on the radio, it sounded like it was mostly about food. O'Neill is a food writer and has been a chef, so I was expecting it to be something like Ruth Reichl's books (which I loved). But although there is food aplenty in here, it's really centered on O'Neill's amazing family--her father, mother, and 5 brothers. Very funny and readable.
Here's a quote to tempt you:
Many families have an inspirational text, a book that both mirrors their hopes and ambitions and acts as a spiritual how-to guide--the Bible, for instance.... Ours was Go, Dog. Go!.... a story about dogs... dogs on bikes and scooters, dogs in the water, in trees, and in cars. ... mostly about boy dogs....
There is one girl in Go, Dog. Go! She is a French poodle and a redhead and she spends all her time trying to get one big goofy-looking hound to notice that she's alive. ... "Do you like my hat?" she asks... "I do not," replies the hound....
In fact, I looked more like a St. Bernard than a poodle, and I had little interest in building hats. But my appetite for recognition was greater than any dogs', and in the spring of my eleventh year, I courted it with a red pogo stick.
I hadn't heard of O'Neill before reading this, but I'm determined to search out whatever else she's written.

eating weeds

2006-07-15T09:15:00.000-05:00

What could be more ecologically sound? I was reading cookie crumb's blog this morning, and there was a photo of something that I've been pulling up and throwing on my ineffective compost heap--purslane. It's free, green, and good for you.
"Purslane may be a common plant, but it is uncommonly good for you. It tops the list of plants high in vitamin E and an essential omega-3 fatty acid called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). Purslane provides six times more vitamin E than spinach and seven times more beta carotene than carrots. It's also rich in vitamin C, magnesium, riboflavin, potassium and phosphorus." (from Seabreeze Organic Farm's website)
I went right out and pulled some up. I washed it and nibbled a bit--a little tart, possibly lemony (as some sources say it is). Not bad. We had some in our salad for dinner, but it was pretty overwhelmed by the lettuce, cucumber, carrot shavings, and vinaigrette with mustard and honey. I think I'll have to look out for some recipes that will give it more of a starring role.

one local summer, redux

2006-07-13T20:19:00.000-05:00

Our second meal was heavenly-delish, but maybe a mite unbalanced. I was brought up with dinners that always included meat (or occasionally fish), potatoes (very rarely replaced by rice or dumplings), two vegetables, and salad. So sometimes when we make guacamole for dinner accompanied only by chips, or a solitary baked potato, I feel as if I ought to be explaining something to my mother.
The slightly unbablanced meal was fresh pea soup, and potatoes fried with onions and chives--my first time with this soup (although I've made split pea a number of times).
I couldn't find a recipe that I felt happy with (or that I had all the ingredients for), so I used one in Joy of Cooking and one in a Martha Stewart book as my foundation and took flight from there.
It came out wonderfully--a beautiful color of green, with a very fresh taste. The fried potatoes were basically just potatoes fried with onion and chives (and a little home-grown garlic)--no need for a recipe.

Fresh Pea Soup Garnished with Croutons and Mustard Flowers
1/2 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 tbs olive oil
2 cups shelled peas
a handful of beet (or other) greens, cut in thin strips
a handful of fresh mint leaves, ditto ***forgot this in 1st draft, sorry)
2 cups chicken broth
1/4 cup white wine
1/2 cup cream
1/4 cup yogurt
pinch of ginger
1/2 tsp ancho chile powder
1/2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp nutmeg
a few shakes of pepper
salt to taste
croutons and mustard flowers
(or other garnish)
I sauteed the onion and garlic in the olive oil. When they were softened I added the peas, beet greens, broth, and wine, and brought it to a simmer. I'm not sure exactly how long I let it go, because I kept taking one pea out to see if it was done; I'd guess about 4 minutes.
I added the seasonings and the cream and let it go a little longer, 2 more minutes about. (The spices gave just a hint of heat to the soup--but some might like it more purely pea in flavor--if so, I'd use only the salt, pepper, and nutmeg.)
I tried my immersion blender on this mixture, but it didn't work so well, so I put it in the regular blender and gave it a whiz. When it was smoothly and deliciously green, I added the yogurt, and then garnished our bowls with the flowers and croutons. This was meant to be a cold soup, but in fact, I ate it at room temperature (very good), and D ate it warmed up (because he can't see the point of cold soups) and had no complaints.

The mustard flowers are from my garden--I have mustard growing wild, which I more or less like, and I often eat the flowers raw when I'm out in the yard--they're very hot and sharp. They're not too noticeable when you put them in something, so they were just the tiniest piquant note in the soup, and also very pretty. The croutons were homemade: sourdough bread cut up and heated over a low flame in a cast iron pan to dry them out; then I added a little oil and tossed them around in the pan until they were coated and crispy.
My mother would have liked each element of this meal (although she would have perhaps questioned the mustard flowers), but she would probably have recommended that we add a nice sauteed chicken breast or a stuffed pork chop.

one local summer

2006-07-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

Liz at Pocket Farm cleverly came up with One Local Summer, to keep us eating locally in a non-pressured way: commit to at least one purely local meal a week over the summer. I had to beg off last week (here's the round-up) because I was traveling, but it's week 2, and I'm on it.
My local meal last night was simple and delicious--no thanks to me, because it was a total D production. Lately, he's been obsessed with our wok, but this meal celebrates a return to the good old iron skillet.
He made some deer burgers: meat from last year's hunting season, in SE Ohio, lettuce from his father's garden, local Amish cheese, locally baked bread. The cherry tomatoes are local produce from the Mustard Seed Market, as were the vegetables in the coleslaw.
I actually have lettuce in my own garden, but mine is more in the micro-green stage. D's father claims this is because he waters his every day, and I don't. It's true, I believe in tough vegetable love.

coconut and cucumbers

2006-07-04T17:40:00.000-05:00

Here's a quote that expresses perfectly how I feel about food blogs:

"I think the thing I like most about food weblogs is that they lift recipes and food off the page and into real life, in living color! You take one look at a picture of something cooked by a living person, not some invisible cookbook aggregate, and you say, Hey! I can do that. In fact, I am going to do it right now!

I found it along with a great post on Coconut Bread on mekuno cooking; and just to make it more food-blog-interactive, Karin found the recipe at another of my favorite blogs, bakingsheet.

We had hot dogs for the Fourth, which were ungourmet but perfect. Just to show off I made some cucumber salad, not really a recipe: cucumbers (peeled and seeded) and the kernels from one ear of corn, tossed with a dressing (a few tablespoons of mayo, soy sauce, lime juice, a bit of olive oil, rice vinegar) and a handful of herbs snipped from the garden: dill, fennel, cilantro, and mustard flowers). It was our hot dog antidote, the healthy part of our meal.

futile apologies

2006-06-29T10:03:00.000-05:00

How many times have I read other bloggers who say thusly: I've been eating, cooking, taking photographs like mad--but, sorry, no time to post! I hate this as a reader. Just give me a hint, I think. Stew? Curry? lots of dessert?
But now I have to say it myself--lots of stuff I could have posted about, but the truth is I've been working hard on my novel, and blogging has suffered. And now I'm going away for the weekend. Is there no end to my perfidy?
In the meantime, here's something I posted on the Eat Local Challenge site, plus a photo of the flowers on my tomato plants, and one of the garlic scapes that I couldn't for some reason put up on the ELC.

June...

2006-06-10T15:43:00.000-05:00

Is that not one of the loveliest words in English? meaning summer, meaning sun, meaning long days, roses, the smell of mown grass.
I'm a fan of June, and not just because I have the summers off (although that's no small thing). May was the month of eating locally, which was interesting, sometimes difficult, educational, occasionally thrilling (ramps!). This year, June is the month of eating and not cooking--D has offered to do most of the cooking so I can work more intensely on finishing a big project. Toward that end, he's unearthed our wok and started cooking up various stir-frys.
Meanwhile, I make my own lunches (unless they're leftover stirfrys, of course), and they are pretty basic: cheese sandwich, cheese and crackers, yogurt with some fruit--the kinds of meals that are assembled rather than cooked, and that can, if necessary, be eaten in front of the computer.
Occasionally, however, the thrown-together lunch approaches greatness: leftover mashed potatoes, a drizzle of olive oil, a splash of milk, some sea salt, and--because it's June--some herbs picked at random in the garden and snipped into the bowl--basil, fennel, and dill.

cookbook windfall

2006-06-09T09:34:00.000-05:00

Sweetnick's has a round-up of inside-of-fridge photos, here--both informative and entertaining. All of these refrigerators are a lot cleaner than mine, and they look better organized, too. I'm not showing mine off, but here is part of the bounty from my son-in-law's recent day-long yardsaling: a vintage cookbook bonanza.

a savory bread pudding: asparagus & mushroom

2006-06-04T17:04:00.000-05:00

This is a recipe I made for a weekend away with some friends (at a condo on an island in Lake Erie: idyllic). It's a mainly local recipe, made in the first flush of eating-local-challenge madness; I remember I apologized because several things (garlic, spices, cheeses) weren't local, to the puzzlement of the friends, whom I hadn't yet tried to convert.
I got the idea for a nonsweet bread pudding from Stephencooks--his recipe (which looked divine) was a Roasted Tomato Bread Pudding. And then when I was looking for things to make for the weekend away, I came across another savory pudding in a Deborah Madison cookbook I love--Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets.
It was very well received by the friends, and so here is my version of Deborah Madison's bread pudding, adjusted somewhat to my taste and to what was available.

Asparagus and Wild Mushroom Bread Pudding
1 1-pound loaf of good white bread
2 to 3 cups milk
1 pound asparagus
2 tbs olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 to 1 pound mushrooms (I used crimini that I got at the market, not wild)
1/3 cup chopped greens or herbs (I used some dandelion greens out of my yard; DM recommended parsley; basil would probably be good, too)
4 large eggs
1 tbs dried tarragon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 cups grated cheese (DM says Fontina or Gruyere; I used a mix of French feta, mozzarella, a bit of Swiss and some Parmesan--what I had left in the fridge)

Pull or cut the bread into bite-size pieces. If it isn't stale, put it in a 250 degree oven for abt half an hour, until it's crispish, but not hard. Then pour the milk over it in a bowl and let it sit.
Saute the garlic and onion in the olive oil. Add mushrooms and greens and let it go a little longer. Break the tough ends of the asparagus and cut it into about 1-2 inch lenghths. Boil some water and throw the asparagus in for abt a minute--take out and run cold water over it.
Beat the eggs, and add the tarragon and nutmeg to them. Mix the bread/milk mixture with the eggs, onion-mushroom mixture, asparagus, and the grated cheese, put in a casserole dish and pop it into the oven. Bake at 350 for abt 45 minutes. It's done when there's no liquid slopping around when you tilt the dish.

It was really good--subtly cheesy and savory, with the earthy mushrooms and bright,vegetal asparagus tastes coming together. I plan to make it again, substituting various things around--broccoli for asparagus, different cheeses, adding maybe sundried tomatoes, etc. It was even better as leftovers--some of us had it for breakfast the next day.

bridal food

2006-06-02T18:37:00.000-05:00

Or more accurately, bridal shower food. The big food event for the end of May was my niece K's shower. It was the usual kind of many-dish extravaganza that our family does. Our one rule is that there must be too much food. And then the hostess must be appalled at how much food is left, and beg/persuade/threaten the guests to take some home with them.
We had, in no particular order--
Chicken salad
Fruit salad
Stuffed mushrooms
Sausage/cheese crostini
Chocolate-dipped strawberries
Kolachke
Chocolate chip blondies
Tiny crustless sandwiches
These wonderful cakes my aunt makes with the icing soaked in
Stuffed celery
Skewered pepperoni and mozzarella cubes
Mints
And a beautiful wedding-like cake

There were supposed to be rolls, but we forgot to put them until the last moment, and then decided not to because there was so much (!) food.

more on eating locally

2006-05-18T20:33:00.000-05:00

Fact from Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of 4 Meals: a single strawberry contains about five calories. To get that strawberry from a field in California requires 435 calories of energy.
The book is full of such interesting bits of information--also some disgusting ones (don't ask about fecal dust in cattle feedlots--or rather, do, if you are interested in what goes into your food). I'm reading it along with eating locally this month, and it's eye-opening.
He follows the food chain back to its sources--a corn field in Iowa, a feedlot in Kansas, farms that practice Big Organic (Earthbound Farms, for instance, from whom you have probably bought lettuce) and Small Organic (family-type, sustainable farms). In the last section, he forages and hunts his dinner--I haven't gotten that far. I'm just past the feedlots (fecal dust!), starting on his dinner from Whole Foods.
Here's an excerpt. If you're interested in this kind of thing, it's required reading. His earlier book, The Botany of Desire, which focuses on 4 particular plants (potatoes, apples, tulips, and marijuana) is also very good. (Check out that organic smile, right.)
For more diverse and interesting opinions on the local eating challenge, check out the ELC website.

very short shortbread

2006-05-15T19:24:00.000-05:00

This is a post that meanders from eating local, because I wanted to do The Spice is Right II, hosted by Barbara at Tigers and Strawberries, and I got fixated on the idea of a sweet shortbread cookie that used a savory spice. Pretty much nothing in this shortbread is local, although the spices are old friends, and have lived at my house for a fair amount of time.
My chosen spice is chile. In the food culture of my childhood, which I would characterize as '50s cooking (meatloaf, angelfood cake, jello with various things in it) along with a sprinkling of Slovak dishes like stuffed cabbage and kolachke, chili powder was something used exclusively for chili--my mother made a distinctly unhot but flavorful version with 2 colors of kidney beans. Chili powder came in only one variety, and was seen as somewhat exotic.
As an adult, I became enamored of all things hot and spicy, and I have come to love the varieties of chile--pasilla, ancho, chipotle--my refrigerator is cluttered with little tubs from the spice stand at the market. I chose my all-around favorite, chipotle, to highlight my chocolate shortbread.
It didn't turn out quite right--I have to admit that, although I feel like my mother when I say it. She was always turning compliments away with a recital of what had gone wrong with a dish--"I forgot the butter until the last minute," or "I didn't beat it long enough--it should have been higher"--that kind of thing, although no one else could tell that anything was wrong. But although the shortbread is really good, I think it's a little too short, meaning proportionally too much butter (and why is this short? does it have to do with shortening? why is shortening called shortening? things to ponder). They look a lot like brownies, but are unlike them in texture--they have the sandiness of shortbread, although they're a little too crumbly.
The recipe is a little muddy (I put it together from 2 other recipes, one from Joy of Cooking and one from Martha Stewart), and although I'm including it, it's with a disclaimer--I'd change it the next time I made them. But I will make them next time, because apart from their too-shortness and their tendency to crumble, they were heavenly in taste, very chocolatey and spicy and buttery.
Chocolate Chipotle Shortbread
2 sticks butter
about a cup of sugar (used half granulated and half confectioner's)
1/2 cup cocoa
2 squares unsweetened chocolate, melted
generous pinch of salt
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 and 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp chipotle powder (use less if you're not a big fan of heat)
a pinch ginger
1/4 tsp dried rosemary, crushed to a powder
Cream the butter, then add the sugar and cream that into the butter. Add cocoa and salt, stir to combine, then add the melted chocolate. At this point I tasted it to see if it seemed sweet enough--the cup of sugar measurement is an approximation, because I didn't want it to be too sweet, so I added it until it seemed OK.
Mix cornstarch, flour, and the spices and rosemary. Mix into butter/chocolate mixture.
Pat into an ungreased square pan (I used an 8 by 8, but 9 by 9 would probably have been better, since they came out a little thick). Bake at 325 for about 35 minutes. Use a toothpick to see if the shortbread is done--it should come out cleanish, but with perhaps a crumb on it--nothing sticky.
The shortbread is supposed to be cut while warm--and it looks quite floppy and soft when you do it. But it firmed up enough to be respectably cooky-like.
As I said, the flavor is intensely chocolatey, with a nice bite of pepper, backed up by the ginger. The rosemary could probably be left out, but I liked its piney-ness with the chocolate. When you bite in, it has a cookie feel in your mouth, and the shortbread sandy crumb, but it melts to a mouthful of spicy smooth chocolate--very nice.

dinner at chez local

2006-05-10T19:29:00.000-05:00

Today I went to the Mustard Seed Market, a great local chain (2 stores) with an emphasis on organic and healthy food. I love it there--I sometimes feel as if I get healthier just by walking in the door. I went today looking for local products, and although I came away with some good buys, I was surprised to find that local stuff was the exception, not the rule. (Check out my post on the Eat Local Challenge blog for more on the shopping trip.)
But I did buy some great Amish chicken and asparagus, both local, and these were the basis of dinner. Full disclosure: I didn't cook. D did, a nonrecipe type of cooking. He cut up the chicken breast (just one, because it was so big), sauteed it with some red onions (nonlocal!), added a couple of tablespoons of flour to coat the chicken pieces a little, then splashed in some red wine and put the lid on for a while to cook it through. Final additions, a bit of vinegar and a bit of honey--sour and sweet to balance the flavors.
We had it over rice (nonlocal, one of my exemptions) and the asparagus, steamed until it was bright green and tender. Not only very tasty, but it made the house smell great. Shouldn't there be food perfumes? Eau de beef stew? Tomato parfum?)

breakfast is the cruelest meal

2006-05-04T17:23:00.000-05:00

That is, if you're trying to eat local. Eating local takes thought, care, consideration, perhaps some prep time, unless you've found a local cereal, which I haven't. I'm not a morning person, and to have to think about breakfast has been deeply upsetting to the walking coma where I like to spend the morning hours.
Toast (local bakery) and egg (from Amish farm) are fine; orange juice is fine (one of my exceptions). But cereal, no. And yogurt with fruit, another no. I haven't found a local yogurt, and although I thought I'd like to try making my own, I haven't done it yet.
On the bright side, I went on a shopping trip to three local stores yesterday, and got a plethora of local items. At one, Nature's Bin, I expected to do well, because it's a store with a commitment to local and organic food--I got apples, salsa, hummus, bread, and a number of other things--almost everything in my cart except for the chocolate (Dagoba and Lindt) was the localest of local.
The 2nd place, the Sausage Shoppe, also has great local credentials--they smoke and prepare their own sausage, kielbasi, and other meat products--their smokehouse is out back, I believe, a grandfathered-in holdover in this urban neighborhood. Here I got leberwurst, kielbasi, and horseradish: local, local, local.
But the third place surprised me: Giant Eagle. True, I bought a number of nonlocal things, including the orange juice. But I found some local black walnuts, and an Ohio wine from Grand River (only about 40 minutes away).
D is not used to seeing me so excited when I come home from grocery shopping--but maybe he'll have to get used to it.

first local meal

2006-05-01T09:29:00.000-05:00

Pleased to report that I have one local meal under my belt. I know that I'm not going to be able to eat totally locally (and don't even want to: the chocolate factor), but I took pleasure in looking at my plate and saying, "You belong to my foodshed." Saying mentally, you understand.
I had rye bread (baker at the farmers market) toasted, with butter from the Hartzler Family Dairy (Wooster, Ohio), and a scoop of cottage cheese from the Amish guy in the straw hat at the farmers market.
I always have tea with breakfast, and I'd decided that I'd be drinking mint tea, dried from my garden mint, for the duration. But I couldn't find my tea ball. I ransacked the kitchen as quietly as I could (D still sleeping), but no tea ball. My intense desire to avoid drinking a cup of hot water led me to MacGyver-like inspiration--I made an impromptu tea bag with a coffee filter and a twisty-tie.
Thanks to Richard Dean Anderson, local eating is saved.
Check out the Eat Local Challenge group blog for more measured and informative prose on the subject.

temp

2006-04-30T14:32:00.000-05:00

at the farmers market

2006-04-29T18:05:00.000-05:00

Today was my 1st farmers market visit this year, the North Union Market at Crocker Bassett. I'm particularly interested in the market this year because I'm doing the Eat Local Challenge, a movement to increase awareness about the perils of eating unseasonally and having our food trek around the globe to arrive on our plates weary and travel-stained (so to speak). I'm also going to be posting on a blog with other eat-local-challengers: more on that later.
I'd never been to the market this early in the year, and I was curious about what I'd find. What is there to eat in Ohio in May? There are some onionish things coming up in my yard, and some micro lettuce, but nothing much to put on a plate. Happily, the North Union farmers are more on the ball.

I bought the following
ramps
2 kinds of lettuce
2 loaves of bread (rye and some kind of multigrain)
a dozen eggs
cottage cheese (eggs and cottage cheese from an Amish farmer in a straw hat)
raw milk cheddar
a plastic bag of nettles (I don't know what to do with these yet)
a giant bunch of kale
Fuji apples
some bison sausage
a paper bag full of mushrooms
2 basil plants, one green, one green
and a chocolate-almond croissant
every single thing either grown or produced or baked or preserved in northeast Ohio: amazing.
I was most excited about the ramps (see left)--I'd read about them, but never had any before. They're a wild food, very seasonal (only early spring), supposedly very smelly, in the onion family. I'd read that they'd totally stink up your car on the way home, but neither my sister nor I noticed this. I've double-bagged them in the veg drawer--we'll see how aromatic they are tomorrow.
As often, D looked doubtful when I spread out this bounty. He worries that we won't be able to use everything when I buy a lot of stuff. He's already imagining the vegetables as slime in the bottom drawer of the fridge (and it's not like this has never happened), so I must prove him wrong.
Here's Sally of Summit Croissants--hers was the chocolate-almond croissant I bought (and almost immediately ate: mmm). I forgot to ask her why she'd named them Summit. Because they're from Summit county? they're the peak of croissants? Not sure, but they were excellent.

For more information about eating local, check out here or here.

baby food 101

2006-04-23T16:56:00.000-05:00

I ate all my meals this last weekend with my grandson, C--he was visiting with his parents. He's just a few weeks over a year old, still eating some food specifically for babies, but venturing out into the world of grown-up food. He eats in bits and pieces--grapes bitten or cut in half by his mother, crumbs of hamburger, french fries cut in baby-size pieces (with all the sharp ends taken off). He eats with his fingers, although he's also very interested in eating by spoon. He hasn't mastered the art of putting food on the spoon, although if he's offered a spoonload of fruit or mashed potatoes, he knows how to take it in his hand and get it in his mouth.
I fed him breakfast on Saturday, and thinking back on it, it occurred to me that it was a lesson in mindful eating, something I'm trying to get better at. We had Cheerios in milk (both of us), apples and blueberries in a jar (C), toast spread with olive oil and parmesan cheese (mostly me, but a bit for C).
C's Cheerios have to be put in a bowl of milk about half a dozen at a time, since he spits them out if they get soggy. He likes the crunch, but he likes the milk accompaniment. He also likes his bites to alternate--some fruit, then some Cheerios. He likes to have some Cheerios on the table in front of him, dry, so he can pick them up if he gets bored with Cheerios in milk. He appreciated the toast, although when I gave him the first bite, he took it out of his mouth to check it out. Apparently, it passed inspection, since he ate half of my slice in bird-size bits.
When C is done eating, he's done. When he's not hungry any more, he will politely take the bite you offer him, but then he spits it out, extruding it down over his lower lip, dropping it on his bib or the high chair tray.
Or he'll start smearing the food on his tray with wide sweeps, some of which may cause food to drop onto the floor.
Then he likes to hang over in his chair and look at it on the floor. (I find all this far more amusing than his mother does.) And this happens whether it's babyfood squash or birthday cake (see C, below, with the remains of his 1st birthday cake).
A baby is a powerful teacher of mindful eating. He knows just what he wants; he won't eat something if he really doesn't like it; he stops when he's not hungry any more. I'm studying up on this for my own edification and eating/dieting pleasure. I'm usually a quick study, but I think it's going to take a lot more meals in baby company before I'm through.

Easter breakfast

2006-04-16T15:25:00.000-05:00

Our family celebrates Easter with a breakfast that is like the kinds of breakfasts people might have eaten when they were going to work in the fields all day carrying a 20 pound weight. (We celebrate all holidays this way, but not otherwise at breakfast). This half-sunny, half-cloudy Easter was no exception: me and my cousins and their spouses and children at my Aunt Honey's house.
It's supposed to start at 10 sharp, but there's often a little lag time for the slightly late (no one is really late, because no one wants to miss out on the food). It used to start at 9 sharp when my mother was alive, because she was diabetic and couldn't wait until 10 to eat something substantial. Now that she's gone, the extra hour gives us time to salivate, and decide what to wear. If you haven't thrown at least 3 outfits on your bed and started to swear, you're not really trying.
The menu is traditional, but not unvarying. Always kielbasi (we're part Slovak), always ham and sausage (we like pig products); but never bacon. Scrambled eggs, done with butter and added cream cheese, as well as hardboiled colored eggs. The latter are blessed (as is the butter) and the shells can't be thrown away--they must be burnt or buried (I favor burying).
Always celery sticks and raw green onions, sometimes tomato slices, if Aunt Honey can find some good ones. Always some kind of fruit, sometimes a fruit cup, sometimes, as this year, just very nice strawberries. Always potato pancakes, browned and crispy. Horseradish? definitely.
A platter of sweets, which may vary, but must always include my aunt's famous Danish pastries (prune or apricot). This year there were also bran muffins and an iced butter ring. To finish (if you're not finished already), some jelly beans and chocolate eggs from Malleys.
There's always some discussion of the weather--is it nicer this Easter than last? remember that time it snowed a foot? An exchange of news: who's going to be stationed at Fort Huachaca, someone's new job at KeyBank, how someone else's grandsons are doing. Now that we are older there may be some discussion of blood pressure medication and a good knee surgeon.
This year Aunt Honey had a story about the Danish, and how after she'd made them all she discovered that her rolling pin had a chip out of it. She couldn't decide whether the chip had been gone before she started or not. "I thought about it all night," she said, and then she decided that she couldn't serve something to her family at a party that might have a splintery chip in it, so she made the recipe all over again. Food is important in our family. We told her that they were the better for being made twice, and it was true.
We've been having Easter breakfast at my aunt's for 30 or more years. Before she did it, it was at my grandma's house on Daisy Avenue. I suppose that sometimes traditions are a pain. When I was younger and more annoying, I sometimes postured a bit in front of my friends about having to go to this or that family occasion. My mother is making me go, I would say, probably with a cigarette drooping from my mouth. Sometimes I might have left early because there were other more exciting things I wanted to do (which often involved the opposite sex). But I always went, and now I'm glad I did.
All those earlier occasions are layered over and over themselves, all the kielbasi, the Easter snow, my mother sipping delicately at some pink champagne (only on holidays), my children clutching their money-stuffed plastic eggs, all the Easter outfits that I put together, the spring coat my sister called my "scrambled egg coat" (yellow and white tweed), my father and my uncles gathering secretly (but not really) for a shot, the greening of the lawn, the brave forsythia drowned in rain, every bite of egg and sausage and potato and chocolate--they are in my cell structure and the marrow of my bones. I have been made by them.

ancient nutmeg: circa 1985

2006-04-14T19:54:00.000-05:00

I thought I knew nutmeg, but it turns out it's a racier and more elusive spice than I'd guessed. For instance, it was prized as an aphrodisiac by Chinese women. Scientists have found that it increases mating activity in mice. In large quantities, nutmeg can have a hallucinatory effect. The nut of a fruit, it grows on a tree fifteen feet high (Myristica fragrans). It originated in the Eastern Moluccas.
This arouses so many questions: which Chinese women, and when, and why not Chinese men? How did the scientists serve the nutmeg? Sprinkled on mice-sized custards? How large is the hallucinogenic dose? What does the nutmeg fruit look like? (see left)
Where are the Eastern Moluccas? (I've always been weak in geography.)
Not all of these questions are easily answerable, but I did find an interesting story (first published in a 1970 issue of British Medical Journal) about a young woman who ate "one ounce of nutmeg in water and orange juice." The nutmeg made her feel nauseous and see black creatures and red eyes, but even so, "her mood was one of elation." After being taken to the emergency room, "she was admitted and quickly fell into a sound sleep." Ah, the sixties.
(And I now know that the Eastern Moluccas are in Indonesia.)
I chose nutmeg as my spice of choice for my entry in Tigers and Strawberries new blogging event, The Spice is Right. My nutmeg qualifies as ancient on account of its long tenure in my household. D and I bought a jar of nutmegs sometime between 1983 and 1986, which is still with us, and still quite spicy. I got curious about the nutmegs' staying power when I started working on this and I bought several new nutmegs from the West Side Market. How would the 20 year old nutmegs stand up to fresh-bought? I grated a bit from both and taste-tested. The newer ones were maybe a mite more pungent, but not really so much. My nutmegs have stood the test of time.
I used one of the venerable '80s nutmegs (there are still 5 left) for the following dish, and it performed like a champ.

Spinach-Potato Soup
1 onion, chopped
1 tsp ginger-garlic paste (the kind you can find in Indian groceries)
or, 1 clove garlic, chopped, and 1 quarter-size slice of ginger, chopped
1 tbs olive oil
2 cups chicken broth
3 small potatoes, peeled and diced
1 cup raw spinach, roughly chopped
1 cup skim milk
1 tbs lime juice
large pinch of nutmeg (about a 1/2 tsp)
Salt and pepper to taste

I sauteed the onion in the oil, added the garlic ginger paste when the onions were translucent. Then in with the broth and the potatoes, and about 10 minutes of simmering (since the potatoes were cut quite small). I added the spinach, simmered about 5 minutes more, then the milk, lime juice and nutmeg. I left it on a little longer, just to warm it up after the milk chill, and then brought out my beloved immersion blender. I only blended it a bit, just to break things up a little, but not so much that it was uniform, and then salted and peppered it lightly.
A very straightforward and simple soup, which could easily be made vegetarian with vegetable broth instead of chicken. When I went at it with the immersion blender, it worked up quite a froth, which was a little unsettling, too milkshake-like. But this settled down after a while.
I got the original recipe from a British recipe site, recipes4us, but I changed it enough that I think I can claim it as mine. It was pretty good, a lovely greenish color, tasting both like spring and winter, a nice segue into a new season, good both immediately and as leftovers the next day.
Dutch explorers brought the first nutmegs to Europe around 1608 and they were so popular that the Dutch invaded and conquered the islands so they could be the kings of nutmeg--which makes me historically regretful, but no less appreciative of its charm.

after the dentist: soup

2006-04-01T18:08:00.000-06:00

I originally intended this to be my IMBB entry for the 30-minute meal, but although this soup only takes 30 minutes, it isn't a meal unless you've just been to the dentist (as I had) and the dentist has filed and drilled away at the tooth which is being prepared for a cap. I didn't really want to eat anything else, but fortunately this soup sufficed.
I first ate this soup in a soup-and-sandwich place, the Emporium, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, when I was there for the Antioch Writers Workshop the summer before last. It was one of the 4 soups of the day, Jamaican Tomato Soup, and alongside the name there was a card listing the ingredients. I liked it so much that I tried to get the actual recipe, but the cashier didn't know where it was and the manager wasn't there, so I wrote down the ingredients and went home and gave it a shot.
What I came up with is the recipe following, and although it isn't quite what I had in Yellow Springs, it's pretty good, and goes well with a grilled cheese and onion sandwich (if you haven't just been to the dentist, when even the slight crunch of the toasty sandwich edge is too chewy).

Spicy Tomato Soup
1-2 onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
a chunk of fresh ginger, chopped or grated
1 jalapeno pepper, chopped
1/2 tsp mustard seed
1/2 tsp cumin seed
1 can crushed tomatoes (the size that's abt 32 oz)
1 6 oz can tomato paste
About 4 cups chicken broth
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Juice of one orange
Zest of same orange, grated or chopped
A good pinch of salt (or to taste)
Sugar to taste

I saute the first 6 ingredients until the onions look done (somewhat translucent), then add the tomatoes. (You can just as well use an equivalent amount of whole canned tomatoes chopped in the food processor). Add the tomato paste and broth, and bring to a boil, stirring to incorporate the paste. Add the orange juice and zest (this time I used a blood orange since I happened to have it

--it made the soup a little redder, but otherwise didn't make much difference. It was a lovely color in the squeezer though.).
Let everything simmer for a few minutes, and then taste before adding salt. The sugar is optional and depends on your personal taste and the sweetness of the tomatoes. I usually add about a tablespoon. I used my new hand blender on it when it was done--you don't have to, but it gives it a nice part-smooth/part-chunky texture.
The resulting soup is tomato-ey, a little spicy (you can up the pepper hit, or if you're not a fan of hot, reduce it), has the tang of orange, and a sunny, happy feel in your mouth. Guaranteed to require no chewing.
In the interests of transparency, I have to add that we never eat our soup out of martini glasses. But my actual soup bowl, a much-loved plastic bowl in a muddy yellow print (I think it's Melmac, and about 50 hard-using years old), is not at all photogenic.

back from the south

2006-03-17T10:59:00.000-06:00

Of Ohio, that is. I spent my time taking 107 pictures of my grandsons, reading a book about multiplying hippos to my grandsons, making brownies for my grandsons (although they only had a tiny bite each), and going to the mall with my grandsons where they rode on the merry-go-round and the vibating helicopter.
I did have some time to eat though, notably at Pizza Crossing, and at the auction I went to (with my grandsons, among others). Pizza Crossing is the premier place to eat pizza in Logan, Ohio, and in my opinion, the world, except for Italy. They do a thin-crust pizza, quite crispy, a not-too-sweet sauce, light hand with the cheese (which not everyone likes, I know, although I do), and a plethora of toppings. Check out their on-line menu. "We deliver," it says, but unfortunately, not to Cleveland.
Auction food is a whole genre in itself. I don't know if this phenomenon is peculiar to southeast Ohio, but at auctions down there, there is always food, and an auction is judged partly by the quality of what's on offer. At the auction I went to last week in Circleville, the women who was making the food was as much a draw as the glass and pottery. One couple told me they'd come just for the food and the fun--their own interests ran more to furniture and antique tools.

I was torn--I wanted to try the green beans, but I settled on Chicken and Noodles, a regional specialty I'd had before and couldn't resist. These noodles are more like dumplings made in a fat noodle-shape--very toothsome, with an eggy resistance, served in a chickeny stew, with bits of chicken. It's all about the noodles, in my opinion; you don't want too much chicken to overshadow them.
Auction food is also pie- and cake-centered. I have to admit I've never had auction cake, because auction pie is so good. A cherry/rhubarb pie I had at an auction two summers ago is still bright in my memory. That particular auction food was made by a church group raising funds for (I think) a new communion table, and I was lucky enough to get one of them to give me the pie crust recipe.

This time I went for the coconut cream pie, which was not too sweet, dense with coconut, and topped by a high and light meringue. I wish my photo could do it justice. I also bought a cut-glass vase with a pineapple pattern and a 14-inch glass candlewick platter. I had my eye on some George and Martha Washington salt and pepper shakers and a small but charming green vase, but the grandsons were not as enthralled with the auction as I was, so we left early. Just as well, for I heard later that the small and unremarkable green vase was Warwick (whatever that is) and went for almost $200.

reading cookbooks

2006-03-09T18:12:00.000-06:00

I used to think that it was weird that I liked to read cookbooks, but thanks tro the world of food blogging, I now know that if it is, it's a weirdness shared by many. Here's what I've been browsing (and sometimes drooling over) lately.
Pure Chocolate, by Fran Bigelow. 234 pp. of chocolatey deliciousness. Even the index sounds good enough to eat. I got this to look for recipes for my niece's shower, but I think I'm going to make some things ahead of time, for instance--Gold Bar Brownies (caramel, almonds, dark chocolate) and the classic Chocolate Wafers.
Egyptian Cooking, A Practical Guide, by Samia Abdennour. This and the next one I got from the library sale shelf for 50 cents each. I admit that I'm never going to make Gizzards, Baked with Bechamel, but I enjoyed reading about it. On the other hand, Chicken Stewed with Yogurt and Roasted Chicken with Sumac sound quite possible.
Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons, by Jessica B. Harris. This is devoted to the foods of Africa as they've been interpreted there, and in the newer world. The names are great: Akkra Funfun (bean fritters) and Potato Fou Fou (a kind of stiffer mashed potato dish). I've already made the Funfun, and they were great.
The Bontempi Cookbook, by Fedora Bontempi. This was a birthday present from my cousin J, who knows I love vintage cookbook. The Bontempis, Fedora and her husband Pino, had a weekly cooking show on tv in the '50s and '60s. It's mainly Italian, classic dishes adapted somewhat to American tastes--good, solid recipes.
Mangoes and Curry Leaves, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. This is very heavy, intensely illustrated, a very beautiful cookbook, with a lot of stories and context to the recipes--very novelistic. But the recipes seem to be as good as the photos and the reading. I've only tried a potato curry so far, but I like it so much that I'm thinking about buying it (I got it out of the library). You can only renew books so many times; and they don't like it if they come back with mysterious food stains either.

dregs of the refrigerator

2006-03-01T21:14:00.000-06:00

I got the idea for this post from The Accidental Scientist, who made a wonderful parmesan, broccoli and pine nut risotto from the dregs of the pantry in the last days before payday (see here). Coincidentally, I had done the same thing the night before. One of those what-shall-we-have-for-dinner nights, no desire to shop, and a disinclination for junk food (Taco Bell was mentioned and vetoed).
We decided soup was the thing, a mainly vegetable soup, with a chicken broth base. Here's what went into it, mostly without measurements--it was the kind of cooking where you put in a spoonful of this and a handful of that.

Clean Out the Refrigerator Soup
About 6 cups of chicken broth

1 parsnip

1 carrot

1/2 an onion

1/2 stalk celery

3 skinny stalks of fennel

1 sweet potato, peeled and diced
Remains of a head of romaine lettuce (perhaps 6 small leaves)
1/2 glass white wine (remains of the Gewurtztraminer)
A bit of zucchini relish
Last 2 spoons of a jar of almond butter
Remains of a jar of smoky chipotle salsa (perhaps 1/2 cup)
Spoonful of garlic-ginger paste
Spoonful of horseradish
Couple of shakes of ancho chile powder
Large pinch of curry powder (hot)
Yogurt
Handful of cilantro leaves

Believe it or not, this made a wonderful soup--mildly spicy, a little smoky in flavor, slightly crispy carrot bites along with tender sweet potato cubes. I didn't do any sauteing or anything special, just poured in the broth and then added the rest of the ingredients, beginning with the carrots through fennel, then a pause to allow them to soften, then the sweet potatoes, another pause, and then everything else, ending with the yogurt after I'd turned it off. The cilantro was added after dishing out, since I'm a cilantro love and D isn't.
This is why I love soup.

IMBB French Regional Cooking

2006-02-26T09:26:00.000-06:00

I decided to make Quiche Lorraine. It's well known (and maybe even a cliche?), but I'd never made it, and I'd never made a quiche at all. Here's something I copied off Food Time Line:
"Quiche. A French [dish]...most prominent in Lorraine... The version now well known, which includes bacon (and sometimes cheese) in the filling, was originally a variant known as quich au lard. Whereas the original could be eaten on meatless days, this variant--now known around the world as quiche Lorraine--could not. Nonetheless, a quiche Lorraine is perceived as something with only a slight meat content. This may account for the reputation it acquired in some English-speaking countries, where it only became familiar in the latter part of the 20th century, as a dish not suitable for "he-men" or " real men." (from the Oxford Companion to Food)
I made a relatively organic quiche--Organic Valley milk and half and half and Organic Valley butter in the crust. I decided to add cheese, even though a very traditional rendition wouldn't. My swiss cheese was merely domestic, but my bacon was made by the owners of The Sausage Shoppe, a great place in my neighborhood where they make their own bacon and sausage, and without nitrates.
I used my mother's pie crust recipe, except using all butter instead of half butter/ half Crisco (I won't include it, since any good piecrust recipe would be fine); and the New Joy of Cooking's quiche recipe (I browsed around on the internet and several cookbooks and came to the conclusion that all the Quiche Lorraine recipes were practically identical, except when they started adding distinctly nontraditional ingredients).

Quiche Lorraine
1 recipe pie crust
5 strips bacon
3 large eggs
1 1/2 cups milk, creme fraiche, cream or combination
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
pinch of nutmeg
You have to blind-bake the pie shell, something else I'd never done before. I used dried beans to weight it down, baked it for 20 minutes at 400 degrees, shook the beans out (unexpectedly difficult since they stuck a little), and baked it for 5 minutes more.
Cook the bacon until crisp and crumble, then sprinkle on the crust. Here I also added grated swiss cheese (about 1/8 cup), and a couple of tablespoons of sauteed onion (on the grounds that onion and cheese improve everything).
Whisk the eggs and milk mixture together with the seasonings. (I used a combination of cream, half and half, sour cream, and 2% milk, with milk predominating, to use up the ends of some things.)
Then pour this into the pie shell, trying not to disarrange the bacon, etc. Bake until the filling is set, from 25 to 35 minutes, at 375 degrees.
It came out pretty well, although not quite beautiful. I didn't expect the bacon and grated cheese to rise up and swirl around so vigorously when I poured the egg/milk mixture (and I poured it very carefully!), so the top was speckled. I'd never made any kind of custard pie before, so I hovered over my oven, which tends to run a little hot. It took almost the full time, and came out with just the right amount of wiggle.
Beauty or not, it tasted wonderful, served with steamed brussel sprouts and a Wolfberger Gewurtztramminer. (I wasn't wild about the Gewurtztramminer, which seemed to have a metallic aftertaste; but I've never had any sort of Gewurtztramminer before, so I'm not sure how they're supposed to taste.)

Tagged with: IMBB23 + French

chocolate, caramel, and salt

2006-02-22T11:24:00.000-06:00

My sister and I went to the West Point Market in Akron, Ohio, on President's Day. We don't live in Akron--we live 28.57 miles away--which is far for grocery shopping. Instead, we treat it as a destination, a jaunt, a trip into the fantasy land of grocery shopping, and we only do it about once every two months.

It's worth the 28.57 mile drive (which we while away discussing our children, our writing, our students), because they have lovely produce, interesting canned or jarred items, fabulous prepared food, and the best selection of chocolate that I know about in the Cleveland area. (If there's a better, please let me know.)

They also have a small selection of Fran's Chocolates, made by the talented Fran Bigelow in Seattle, and in particular they have her salted caramels, the Smoked Salt Caramels above, as well as Grey Salt. Her amazing caramels have made me rethink my chocolate-is-the-only-possible-candy position. They're creamy in their caramelness, piquantly chocolate, with some salty crunchiness going on. My only problem with them is that there are only 6 of them in their package.

You'll notice in the picture that two of them are gone, and if the picture was better, you'd see that the end of the package is a little bent. This is because my sister and I mangled the package to get out some caramels to eat on the way home. Next time we'll take our Swiss Army knives.

the bliss of the cheese sandwich

2006-02-18T12:16:00.000-06:00

Here is my cheese sandwich post. The cheese sandwich avalanche is in response to an article by Pete Wells in Food and Wine, where he wrote about food blogs, saying some interesting and insightful things, but also committed the (writerly) crime of quoting out of context. I'm a little late with my sandwich (official Cheese Sandwich Day was 2/16) but I firmly believe there's always room for cheese.
This is a mundane cheese sandwich: Jarlsberg on whole wheat bread, adorned with yellow mustard, and fortified with onion slices and spinach leaves. Its ordinariness is redeemed (for me) by its historical associations: it was one of my favorite sandwiches as a child, and eaten on many historic occasions, often out of my lunch box, sometimes made for me by my mother (now dead: sentimental association), and sometimes by me (see chapter on Cooking, My Apprenticeship in).
The historic sandwich was always on white bread, because that's what we ate then, and didn't have spinach, which we knew only in the form of frozen blocks that could be cooked in an inch of water in a Revereware saucepan. Note: green onions were sometimes substituted for onion slices.
For a masterly wrap-up, see Kalyn's Kitchen.

post it recipes

2006-02-08T17:07:00.000-06:00

I have a great love of post-its, and use them for everything, including writing down recipes on the fly. Sometimes it's someone telling me what went into the amazing squash and cheese and pasta casserole at a party, and sometimes it's something on the internet that I don't want to take time to write down properly.
This is OK if I'm making whatever it is right away, so that my shorthand is fresh in my mind. But if the post-it sits around for a while the meaning of it starts to drain away, and when I unearth it weeks later it's become an un-recipe.
For instance, this nice orange post-it I just found under a stack of computer disks. It says, mysteriously:
Sesame oil
OJ
Gr onions
Ch broth? 1 cup
cornstarch
Sherry, if
Soy sauce
Peas?
No name for this dish, if it is one, and no indication of whence it came. No amounts except for the 1 cup. No instructions. This is the kind of thing that makes me think I should have a cooking notebook, wherein I place all my recipes and ideas, etc.
But I have sorry experience with my gardening notebook, which is religiously kept every spring, with lists of seeds ordered, and starts out noting what things are blooming when, and what I planted in the square of ground in the front yard that unthaws before anything else. This goes on until about May 25, when the planting gets intense and I forget all about the notebook until the next spring, when I resolve anew to keep it all summer long, and so forth.
It's tempting to assemble these ingredients and see if anything suggests itself. If it weren't for the peas, it might be a marinade?With more broth, a soup? Sherry if annoyed? If desperate? I'll never know.

blog swap

2006-02-05T16:00:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I made Orangette's Tamarind Soup with Chickpeas, Chard and Spices for dinner. Dinner was a compromise: I wanted to make something new and brilliantly interesting, and D wanted something comforting that he'd had a thousand times before. The final menu was hamburgers made with ground venison, topped with cheddar cheese and grilled onions on sourdough rolls, and the Tamarind Soup, each of us making our chosen recipe. I changed Orangette's recipe a little, not to be difficult, but because I didn't have quite everything and didn't want to go out (it was snowing): I substituted broccoli for zuccini and kale for chard, and I made a bit less of it because I only had 2 cans of chickpeas.
It turned out very well, although frankly not so glamorous looking as the original. You know how sometimes wonderful tasting food is just kind of brown and mushy looking? This was one of those times. Orangette's picture is much more beautiful, and I recommend you click on the recipe link above and take a look at it.
This soup was also the occasion for the first use of my new immersion blender. I got it for Christmas, but I felt shy about using it, or maybe afraid. I'm not the most technologically minded person in the world. But it worked like a charm, as advertised, without splattering and after only a minimal look at the directions. I'm thinking milkshake next.
PS: the hamburgers were very good, too.

what I had for lunch yesterday

2006-02-01T10:26:00.000-06:00

Which is, of course, the most boring thing in the world, even to me. But I feel the urge to confess the depths to which I sank.
Half a chocolate bar
A bag of Lay's from the vending machine
6 leftover peanuts from a former vending machine purchase
A bag of Cheese-Its, also vending machine
A blueberry muffin from the snack bar in the Peter B. Lewis building, where my afternoon class is. I put cream cheese on it, pretending that this insignificant smear of protein would make it healthier. The muffin was one of ones that are really more like cake, too.
I just discussed this with my daughter, and we agreed that if we don't pack a lunch, we don't eat well at work. Yes, there are restaurants and coffee places that offer a more varied and healthy menu, but somehow when I get hungry and I'm in the middle of something I convince myself that I can't take the time to walk two blocks and get a salad or some soup. So it's down to the vending machine which lurks in the back hallway of my office building, down the back stairs, smoothing my dollar bills so that their bent corners won't make the machine spit them out. "Just getting a snack," I say if I meet someone there, laughing falsely.
So, a small resolve: to pack my lunch; to possibly buy one of those nifty Tupperware thermos mugs; to eat some real food in my office.
The photo, by the way, is from Quantum Diaries, an on-line chronicle that follows physicists doing the World Year of Physics. I'm not sure what that is, but I do like having this visible proof that physicists are no more immune to junk food than English teachers.

Sugar Low Cupcakes

2006-01-26T20:00:00.000-06:00

This is an entry in Sugar High Friday, hosted by Sam at Becks and Posh--but this time it's Sugar Low. The idea was to use less fat and sugar, and possibly to experiment with other sweeteners.
My idea was to make some low-sugar cupcakes, using staples that I already had in my kitchen. Toward that end I browsed around the internet and my cookbooks, looking for a recipe that used honey, found a few, jotted down some notes, and started to get out the bowls and spoons. Many substitutions and mistakes later, I had the above not-quite cupcakes--really more like muffins. I'll give the recipe, but I don't recommend using it w/o changes.
First, I discovered the honey was almost gone, so I decided on maple syrup. Then I remembered that I had a big container of whole wheat flour that I'd been meaning to use up, so I got that out. Finally it turned out I only had one egg. (A less determined or smarter cook might have given up here.)
Even though these weren't an unqualified success, they weren't bad, especially if you said "muffin" to yourself, firmly eschewing the idea of "cupcake."
Whole Wheat Maple Muffin-Cupcakes
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup wheat germ
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ginger
zest of one orange, chopped
1/4 cup butter
1 egg
1/4 cup plus 2 tbs maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup orange juice
1/8 cup yogurt
about 1/2 cup chopped 70% chocolate
Mix first 6 ingredients in a bowl. In another, cream butter, add first the egg, then after whisking a bit, add maple syrup and vanilla, finally orange juice. The mix looked really unpromising at this point, grainy and not quite together. But I persevered, and added the dry ingredients.
The batter looked a little dry to me, so I added an eighth cup of yogurt, on the grounds of why not. At this point I tasted the batter, and it tasted very uncake like. So I decided to add the chocolate, on the grounds that chocolate improves everything.
With some misgivings, I filled the muffin cups (I used paper liners), and baked them at 375 for about 28 minutes.
How were they? As I said, not bad, in a muffin kind of way. There was really too much wheat germ, and it gave them a undesirable grainy feel in the mouth. The tastes were good though--the maple syrup, the hint of orange, and the chocolate--which might make me try them again. If I do, I think I'd substitute white flour for half the whole wheat. I'd use a second egg. I'd reduce the wheat germ or maybe get rid of it altogether. The orange juice didn't seem to make any difference--all the orange I tasted was from the zest, so I'd get rid of that.
I made an icing which tasted wonderful, but was a) too gloppy, and b) tasted better on its own than top of the cupcake-muffins. It was a yogurt and butter mix, flavored with maple syrup and a bit of ginger. I found that I had to put two tablespoons of powdered sugar into it to make it come together, which it then did miraculously--a little chemistry lesson, which if I'd read Harold McGee's book, I'd understand more deeply.
Tagged with: SHF # 15 + Low Sugar

soup and more soup

2006-01-22T21:40:00.000-06:00

I was out for dinner last night at the friend of some friends, a dinner where everything was very good, but most especially the potato soup. I'm planning on begging for the recipe. The soupmaker, K, apologized for it before hand, reminding me so strongly of my mother, who often stood by the table, wiping her hands on a dish towel and listing all the things that were wrong with a dish that a tableful of guests were slurping and drooling over. She was a perfectionist, and she didn't want us to like the apricot chiffon pie or the stuffed pork chop unless we knew how wonderful it could have been, if only she'd done this or that, or hadn't run out of the other.
One of my thoughts about this blog was that I'd cook some of the things that she cooked, recipes I've never attempted. For a long time, there was no need for me to make the black walnut cake or the torte, because my mother would be doing it, sooner or later. And then, poof, she was gone--she and my father both died in 1999, and all that was left of her lifetime of superlative cooking were taste memories, a dozen or so cookbooks, and a pile of recipes in a black folder held together by crossed rubber bands, one red and one blue.
My first venture in this direction was the torte, which I made for Christmas dinner. It's a meringe torte, a kind of dacquoise (sp?), I think, that she got out of some magazine in the '50s. Two layers of slow-baked meringue, filled and frosted with whipped cream mixed with chopped cherries and pineapple. It's the kind of food that seems like more than the sum of its parts.
I agonized over it somewhat, especially when I had trouble getting the layers out of the pans (and had to patch it all together with extra gobs of whipped cream). And just as my mother had, I warned of dire consequences to anyone who touched it as it sat in state in the refrigerator, or moved, or even breathed on it too heavily. It was pretty good, but like my mother, I feel constrained to tell you that it was a little squat, not quite as pretty as my mother's were, and that I wondered if I might have put in a little more pineapple than I did.
My plan now is to start going through her cookbooks and follow the bookmarks (old envelopes, shopping lists, ancient Christmas and get-well cards) and the food-stains marking favorite recipes. Swedish Meatballs, anyone? Veal Stew and Dumplings? Stuffed Cabbage?

chicken soup

2006-01-09T11:00:00.000-06:00

Like a lot of other foodbloggers, I feel a need to abjure cookies and all their ilk for a while. It's true that yesterday I went out to lunch with my sister and had dessert--a tiny chocolate cake with a molten chocolate center, topped off by vanilla gelato. But that's absolutely the last of that kind of thing for a while. (Unless I'm tempted beyond my strength.) Therefore, tonight I'm making chicken soup for dinner.

Chicken Soup

This is not my mother’s recipe, for she didn’t make chicken soup. She made vegetable soup and split pea soup. In a frisky mood, she sometimes made vichysoisse, but she served it hot, not sure why. Maybe cold soup seemed silly to her. It was fine. But I don’t remember her ever making chicken soup. When we had that, it was from a red and white can, often for lunch with a grilled cheese sandwich.

I did use recipes originally when I made chicken soup—I have a recipe card from when I first got married hubristically titled “Chicken Vegetable Soup Supreme.” My experimental contribution to the annals of chicken soup was adding a chopped apple. But now when I make chicken soup, I go with the flow. If I have time, or if I have some in the freezer, I make a separate chicken stock. But often I just poach the chicken and use that poaching liquid as the basis for the soup.

This time, I have on hand

1 whole chicken breast, skin on

3 onions

4-5 carrots, both the regular orange and also some maroon ones I got at the market

3 medium potatoes

1 stalk celery with some leaves on it

½ red pepper

a big pinch of tarragon

a corresponding pinch of dried mint

a pinch of basil

a few shakes of cayenne pepper

a slug of white wine (about a half cup, I’d guess)

salt and pepper to taste

Put the chicken in a pot with one of the onions and the celery. Cover with water and throw in a few shakes of salt. Bring to a boil and simmer gently for abt 20 minutes. Take chicken out and cool, then take the meat off the bones and cut bite-size; discard skin. Other recipes always say to discard the solids in a stock, but I often just cut them up and put them in with the rest of the soup. If this is a bad idea, someone please let me know. Put the chopped carrots, onions, and red pepper in the pan with the chicken-poaching water and the wine. Add a little water if it seems like not enough. Add the herbs and the pepper and a bit of salt, and cook until the carrots are approaching doneness. Add chopped potatoes and simmer for maybe 10 minutes more. Add the chicken.

At this point, I taste the broth and sometimes add a bit more of this or that—more of what’s already in there (basil, tarragon, mint), or something else that seems to have potential: a bit of smoked paprika, a tiny pinch of oregano, a little turmeric. Also a good time to add a cup of cooked rice or pasta, if you’ve got some leftovers you’d like to use profitably. And this is the time for the salt and pepper to-taste.

This is a crowded soup, with chunks of vegetable and meat, and flecks of herbs floating in it—not to everyone’s taste maybe, but very good.

from my rasoi

2005-12-30T21:42:00.000-06:00

First post, first food blog event. I've been exploring Indian food for the last year, after a momentous and transcendent dinner cooked by my friend T's aunt, who was visiting from India. I don't remember anymore the names of what we ate, but everything tasted new and fresh and spicy, and very unlike what I'd had in Indian restaurants.
So I was delighted to see that Meena at Hooked on Heat (http://hookedonheat.blogspot.com/) had announced a new event: From My Rasoi. Cook something Indian, she said, something that reminds you of winter, and I complied.
This recipe was originally from 1000 Indian Recipes, by Neelam Batra, my first, and so far, only Indian cookbook (and a pretty good one). But I changed it a bit, according to my whim and what was in the cupboard. It's warming, mildly spicy, real comfort food.

Spicy Fish Curry
1/2 cup coconut milk
2-3 dried chili peppers (small)
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp black pepper
2 medium onions, chopped
1 heaped tbs ginger and garlic paste
half a dozen cherry tomatoes, cut in half
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
About 1 pound fish fillets (I used mahi-mahi)
I splashed a couple of tbs of olive oil (not authentic, I know) in the pan, and when it was hot, threw in the mustard seeds. When they were sizzling, I put in the onion and sauteed it until it was translucent. Meanwhile, I ground the chile peppers in my coffee grinder (former coffee grinder, that is), and added them to the onions, then added the fish filets and seared them a bit on both sides. At this point, I added the garlic/ginger paste, the other spices, the coconut milk, and the cherry tomatoes, and simmered the fish briefly with the lid on, perhaps for about 5 minutes.
All this took really very little time, and it turned out very well. We had it with rice, and carrots roasted with cinnamon and olive oil. The original recipe called for chopped cilantro, and it probably would have been good, but I didn't have any.
No picture, you'll notice--which is mostly because I forgot to take one until the curry was reduced to some leftovers in tupperware; but it wasn't really very photogenic anyway. Next time, I vow to remember the camera.