Saturday, December 27, 2008

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Topsy-Turvy

I'm titling this post with that phrase because it has such interesting connotations. It makes me think of the Disney song from Hunchback of Notre Dame. It's such a good phrase, indicating not your average kind of chaos, but the kind of craziness that dumps you upside down and shakes all the change out of your pockets, but also thrills you with strange and exotic gifts.

Life's like that right now. It's my first weekend back in school, and I'm neatly tucked in to my back corner of the library. Portland is both losing and gaining some of its finest: Brenna, beloved housemate, leaves for Italy tomorrow afternoon (lucky girl!), but a dear friend from high school has just finished unpacking boxes in a townhouse not one mile from me.

I'm not cooking much these days, because my loans haven't gone through yet, and I'm living on the kindness of friends and a few very precious farmers market tokens. I'm also making some delicious slapdash meals from the sorts of foods that hide out in the back of my cupboard and the leftover boxes in my fridge, but those aren't really the kinds of meals you talk about. Well, ok, maybe they are, but not in the braggy way where I photograph it sixty times and then pretend I just threw it around on to the website. (I did make some half-mashed potatoes with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, feta, and mustard that were amazing; and a baked pasta casserole that included skinned broccoli stalks).

The meaning of all this is to be a check-in, and to declare a mini-break. I won't be gone long, but for now, a short hiatus. Be well, go eat some yogurt and brown sugar.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

You say it's your birthday,

it's my birthday too.

Well, it was yesterday. And I'm having people over in about 15 minutes, so I'll just stop in to make a suggestion. It's definitely nowhere near precise enough to be a recipe, but it's a bit more conceived than an idea, so, indeed, we'll call it a suggestion. It's what I'm drinking for my birthday, and it's probably what you should be drinking too, special day or no (I mean... every day is special, right?)


It's a lime-honey whiskey sour, and it's delicious. It's like this: combine two parts room-temperature lime juice and one part honey, stir or shake until the honey is somewhat dissolved (it won't want to, so it might take some effort). Shake with ice and whiskey to taste (might I suggest somewhere around the amount of lime?), pour into a glass, and top with a dash of soda water.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

August; or, imitation autumn

Oh, thank god, it's fall.
I don't think you'll be hearing that much. The blog world definitely seems to be noticing it, especially in Finland and in my own Pacific Northwest, but it's not being championed so much as accepted. In my small corner of the world, though, I've officially kissed the summer goodbye.
I don't know if I have that reverse-SAD condition ("Summer SAD", google tells me), but the season always seems harried, and overly bright. I have this picture in my mind of the perfect summer moments: twilight dinners on porches, late-night dog walks, watching meteor showers on golf courses. I'm also very partial to gardening when it's sunny. But there's this suspension of regular life during the summer, and everyone gets so frantic to make use of every single summer moment. I don't like the pressure of summer. I'm an autumn and winter girl, I am. I like my seasons imperfect, and honest. February might soak me to the bone and throw mushy masses of grey leaves onto my new suede boots, but at least it tells me that it's going to.
Now that I've said all of that, I will say that I'm rather partial to August. It's not July, after all. It's not bleached out. August is my birthday month, and there's that certain fall smokiness to August. You really have to savor August because there's so much crammed into it, and September is, of course, a month in which everyone gets back to business. August is a month for back-to-school clothes and new beginnings.
And there's so much late-summer produce in August. Tomatoes, peppers, blueberries, corn, melons, huckleberries (especially huckleberries). Pretty much everything everyone loves about summer comes out in August.
In honor of blueberries, I have here a recipe for blueberry pie. It's gluten-free blueberry pie, at that. It's kind of the perfect August food, because it can be eaten barefoot, picnic-style, in your backyard early on in the month; or it can be eaten out of the pan on the counter, in a sweater and thick socks on one of those first cold evenings. And we all now know how I feel about cold evenings.

Gluten-Free Blueberry Pie
The crust is an altered version of this glutenfreegirl classic recipe. The filling is everything that sounded good to me, with the half-cooked/half-raw trick that I read about somewhere on the internet last summer.

Crust
1 cup rice flour
1/2 cup teff flour
1/2 cup potato starch
3 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cinnamon
8 tablespoons cold butter
1 large egg
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
ice-cold water, enough to make the dough stick together (approx. 1/4 cup)

-Mix together all dry ingredients.
-Cut the butter into small pieces. Deposit into dry ingredients. Cut the butter in until the whole mess is comprised mainly of small crumbly balls.
-Make a well in the center. Deposit the egg and the vinegar, and mix it all together, starting from the inside.
-Add just enough water to make the dough stick together. It shouldn't be overly wet, just enough to stick together.
-Put in the freezer for at least two hours.
(-Shauna, of glutenfreegirl, suggests an elaborate rolling out of the dough pre-freezer. I actually just dumped the dough ball in the fridge for two hours, and then tore off small pieces and mushed them into the pan. Get the dough into the greased pie pan, somehow).
-Put in pie weights. Bake 350 degrees until somewhat browned, 15-20 minutes.

Filling-Cream cheese
4 oz cream cheese
sugar to taste, a few tablespoons would probably do it
1 teaspoon vanilla

Filling- blueberries
4 cups blueberries, picked over and washed
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 Tablespoons potato starch
1/4 cup water
pinch of salt
1 Tablespoon lemon or lime juice
1 Tablespoon butter

-Combine the cream cheese ingredients, mix until well combined.
-Combine half the blueberries, the sugar, the potato starch, the water, and the salt in a saucepan. Cook over medium heat until the berries are tender and the liquid has thickened. Remove from heat.
-Spread cream cheese filling over the bottom of the pie crust.
-Place uncooked blueberries in the pie crust. Pour the cooked blueberry mixture over it.
-Chill, or eat warm and gooey.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

On donuts, and surprises

So, say your dog got sick and couldn't stay inside for fear of damaging the floors. You might have just spent three hours at the vet, and feel a little cooped up. So you and your housemate Brenna might grab a friend and the dog and drive to the base of Mt. Hood, where you might sneak onto a golf course at 1 a.m. and curl up in twelve blankets and a pair of socks, and watch the Perseids meteor shower peak over the southeastern mountain range.

If you're really pure of heart, the noise of the sprinklers being turned on would rouse you before you had to deal with any unfortunate questions, and you would drive back towards your metropolis at 4:30 in the morning.

And if you did all that, well. As reward, a certain donut shop would most certainly catch your eye, and so you would find yourself at Joe's Donut Shop, in the tiny burg of Sandy, Oregon. Consider yourself lucky, you donut-eater, you, because Joe's opens at 4 a.m. and has the best damn donuts this side of your childhood county fair's octogenarian donut-frier's.

I would make a note of it and plan on it again next year. 

Friday, August 8, 2008

This is not about clafoutis

Once upon a time, I went to a French Immersion school. We were taught, besides the irregular verbs, such essential French skills as how to use a period in place of a comma and how to yell "OUBLEK!" at the top of our lungs when the phone rang (Why "oublek"? What does it even mean? I suspect I'll never know). We were also taught, come 8th grade, essential French cooking. Vegetarian that I am (was?), I turned up my nose at the snails in classroom-prepared butter sauce. In fact, I was a bit of a snob about the whole thing. I didn't really like cooking, and I was very, very picky about my food.
One of the dishes we made was clafoutis, a French dish which Epicurious described, in one of those perfectly apt, wish-I'd-thought-that-up descriptions, as "a cross between a pancake and a custard".
I was a rather substandard child, in terms of tastebuds. You know those tiny wee children, only two or three years old, who just can't get enough of things like kale and whole-grain mustard? I love hearing about them, and hope my imaginary future children will be of that type but, no, that was not me. Not anywhere close to being me. When I wanted cake, I wanted it right then, in large quantities, and in standard cake form. Do I even need to explain how much clafoutis disappointed me? No frosting, no artless sweetness, more of an internal custard than a crumb.
Well, I've grown up a bit. I smear my dijon mustard on everything from bread to sausage, and I'm growing kale in my garden. I still haven't gotten around to making a clafoutis, but while I'm waiting on that, I've made a kind of compromise. It's French and it's a cake. It's simple, too, and it includes cherries like the ones I pitted for that original clafoutis. At the same time, it's a cake-cake, the kind that rises. You're not wondering secretly, somewhere in a hidden corner of your mind, whether you've accidentally gone and stuck fruit into an omelette recipe. I think it might even please my younger self, but more importantly, it really, really pleases the current me.



Brown Sugar Yogurt Cake
I love yogurt and brown sugar. Given my choice, I could probably eat plain yogurt and muscovado sugar for dessert every night for the rest of my life. If I got to include fresh fruit, I would definitely, definitely be set. Other people might get bored though. I have a feeling that a food blog which said "Dump brown sugar over yogurt. Eat." every day would get old quickly, also. So, doing the next best thing, I made a cake.
I based this on a selection of French yogurt cake recipes. This kind of yogurt cake is traditionally a French country food, but. I made it with plain brown sugar, but I think that if one made this with muscovado, it would probably transcend any stereotypes about "plain and simple" peasant food.

1 c. whole yogurt
1 c. brown sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 c. almonds, ground
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 c. canola oil
enough cherries

-Grease and flour an 8-inch round pan. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
-Wash and pit cherries. Cover the bottom of your pan with them.
-Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Attempt to sift in the ground almonds, too, but don't actually succeed because they're really not that finely ground.
-Combine the yogurt, brown sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a bowl, whisk until combined.
-Whisk in dry ingredients. Fold oil in with a rubber spatula.
-Pour the batter over the cherries in your pan. Bake for 40-50 minutes, until the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan, or a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

In honor of my quarter-life crisis

I've been having a lot of hang-ups about my cooking, lately. For a 21-year-old, I have a lot of, as a friend put it, "middle-aged habits". Well, yes. I garden. I read fiction before I go to bed (sometimes I even fall asleep reading on the couch. Although, on second thought, my grandfather used to do that too, so perhaps that's more retirement-aged than middle-aged). I get into habits and, damn it, I like to stick to them. Occasionally, I will tell people that I can't go places because I have to cook something.

(Yes, I like to can my own jam and dehydrate food. Yes, I also call it "putting up food for the winter").

I also live with, and am friends with, many people who take their 20-something statuses very seriously. Which makes my sometimes-creaky hobbies stick out more than a bit.

And so, in an effort to deal with the issue without actually dealing with the issue, I made cookies. Chocolate chip cookies.

Biting into a warm cookie and following it with a swig of milk transported me back to what felt like every chocolate chip cookies I'd eaten as a child; or better yet, every one I'd wanted to eat, and wasn't allowed to (and I wanted to eat just about every cookie I saw when I was young). These cookies were pegged by the New York Times as being a sort of grown-up dessert, or at the very least, one for all ages, but I didn't notice that so much. I was too busy rolling the chocolate and salt around on my tongue, uniting my present wine-drinking self with that inner five-year-old me.

New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies
I'm a johnny-come-lately as far as these cookies. The rest of the blogging and online culinary world was exploding with descriptions of their flavor and texture and crispy brown edges weeks ago, and I'm only just getting around to them. I was also a bit of a skeptic as far as the "secret" of letting them sit for 24 hours. After testing the dough on my own, though, I stand corrected. I made the first batch immediately, the second batch a few hours over 12, and the third after around 30 hours. The last batch was obviously the best, and yes, their edges are both crispy and delicious. They kind of make the first batch look anemic. So, let the dough sit. It's worth it.

(Top to bottom, 30 hours, 15 hours, immediately after making dough. Please compare).

They do seem kind of fussy to me still, though. I think it's the two kinds of flours. If anyone makes them without this detail, report back. The recipe lists chocolate discs or fèves as ideal, instead of chips, which I did, but I wasn't completely blown away by it. What I found more important was using a nice dark chocolate, with a high cocoa content. This combines with the salt to make a much more complex cookie than the normal super-sweet kind.

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons cake flour
1 2/3 cups bread flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
1 1/4 cups (2 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar
1 cup + 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract
1 1/4 pounds good-quality bittersweet/dark chocolate chips (or disks or fèves)
Sea salt for sprinkling

-Combine flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Whisk well; then set aside.
-Cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.
- When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat.
-Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet. (Note: The original recipe here continues "...making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more attractive cookie". If you look at the picture above, you can see that I did not make great efforts to follow this suggestion. I'm rarely much of an aesthete, true, but the bulky, horizontal-chocolate cookies tasted twice as good as the others, seasoned with the knowledge that I did not spend excess time readjusting the chocolate logistics).
-Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes.
-Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Grasping good things

These past few days have been less than stellar. I've either caught some bug or I've got some sort of deficiency going on. I'm dizzy and generally woozy, occasionally off-balance. I've also lost my grasp on basic punctuation and steps of logic, which makes me slightly worried about anything I write for this or for work.
It doesn't really feel like sick, so I'm hoping for an iron deficiency. Easily diagnosed, easily treatable.

It would also explain the deadly-strong cravings I've been having for meat. The last of these was a half nightmare-half craving which involved me and the household fish, Michael Jackson:


My grandmother had a fantastic Norwegian friend who one day came over and remarked at the koi pond "Good! They'll be ready in time for Christmas!". Apparently, in Norway, it's tradition to raise koi and eat them during the holidays.

Michael Jackson is not that kind of fish.


The entire disturbing series of cravings was enough to convince me that my body had a real need going on, and so the next day, I broke 14 years of vegetarianism and split chicken wings with Brenna. To be fair, these were no normal chicken wings. They come from Pok Pok, one of Portland's best Thai restaurants, and they were the dish that originally made me ponder a return to omnivorism, six long months ago.
Returning to meat with chicken was fitting, really, since it was my pet chicken Goldie that made me give up the whole deal when I was seven. In a way, one bite bridged the infinite days between that time and now, in the shocking familiarity of that chicken wing. I've always said that I'd forgotten what it tasted like, to the point that veggie sausage tasted no different to me than how I remembered the real, but that's now been proven untrue. It seems that there's always a way to return home, to the instinctual eating circle that ancestors upon ancestors lived in.

So, here's to hoping it's about the iron (or something even easier to deal with). I went to the doctor today, so I might have things figured out by as soon as tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm finding things that I love despite being curled up on my couch most of the last week. I ate a really nice dinner on our porch tonight (quinoa, avocado, and nori again- yum!), and watched a little girl on a bike go in circles around the block.


She'd made it around fifteen or twenty times by the time I was done. We've got a pretty decent neighborhood, with pretty decent neighbors, and I've got a nifty little website, and solid people around me. Life is good, dizziness be damned.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

I love my job, parts I & II

I

I have the coolest job. Ok, technically it's not really a job, it's an internship. With that caveat, I'll repeat again: I have the coolest job.
I intern part-time for Culinate, which is what I've been calling an "online food magazine". It's not exactly a magazine, really, and it goes beyond what my mind classifies as "website". Think Grist, but for food. There are articles, recipes, a multi-person blog. Anyway, I think it's pretty damn cool, but that's probably clear enough from the fact that I work there.
What I love about work there, besides getting to read about food and farmers markets all day, is being surrounded by people who love food as much as I do. The gossip tends to be about restaurants we've eaten at lately, or techniques that have just been tried (apparently spatchcocking was a big one right before I started there). Recipes also get tossed back and forth, and since they're from fellow foodies, I tend to go right home and try them.
Payoff! I can't believe I waited this long on this one. Perhaps I was unconvinced by the hippie-ish ingredients? (I found myself listing off "avocado, quinoa, nori..." to a housemate and watching her eyes glaze over earlier this evening).


Whatever the case, I've now remedied the error of not going immediately home and trying this the very day that Kim suggested it to me.
Tea does an excellent job of describing it all (and the pictures are much prettier than mine!), so I'll just shepherd you on over to her site. Not to be heretical, but counter to her statements, I think I actually did find a way to improve upon it, by adding a bit of pickled ginger. Try it both ways. I'm guessing you'll probably be wanting to eat it multiple times a day, so you'll have a chance.
While you're there, check out the next post up for a poignantly biting essay on foodworker's rights (I always thought there must be something fishy going on with Two-Buck Chuck).

II

As you might expect, I perpetually have about ten billion recipes to try. I've got at least seven different lists floating around, on sticky notes and in my email inbox, on scraps of paper and the backs of receipts. And those are just the recipes from work. So the ones that make it into food form in my kitchen are the cream of the crop, or, say, the crema of the espresso.
This one fits into that category. It's one of those that doesn't sound like it should be good, but melds better than you could have expected. You know, the kind that you're glad worked out well because you can then go around talking about them for weeks, and sound surprised when people don't automatically know these flavors go well together. "Cheese and mint? Well, duh!"
Hell, this recipe can get you job interviews. An application the other day asked for "a favorite recent meal". I put this down, and got an interview. I didn't end up with the job, but I like to suppose that they were so intrigued that they at least had to interview me.


Pasta with Ricotta, Fava Beans, and Mint
From this Culinate recipe. Make sure to actually finely slice the garlic; I didn't read far enough ahead in the recipe the first time. Fine slicing lets them cook through and soften without needing to be on the heat for too long.

2 lbs fava beans, in their pods
2 cups dry pasta
2 cloves garlic
3-4 tablespoons olive oil
small bunch mint
1 1/4 cups ricotta cheese
2/3 cup grated pecorino cheese

-Pop the beans from their pods (you should end up with about 2 cups) and cook them in deep boiling salted water until tender. (Seven to 10 minutes should do it.) Drain the beans, rinse under cold running water, and remove the skin from any beans bigger than your thumbnail. Tiny beans will have a thin skin that is perfectly edible.
-Bring a large, deep pot of water to a boil and add the pasta. It should be ready after about 9 minutes, depending on the type.
-Peel and finely slice the garlic. Put it in a shallow pan with the olive oil and let it soften over moderate heat without coloring. Remove the mint leaves from their stems and chop them roughly, then stir them into the softening garlic. Tip in the beans and then the ricotta, in dollops. Add the drained pasta and fold the mixture together lightly with a fork.
-Divide between 2 warmed pasta bowls and drizzle generously with extra-virgin olive oil and grated pecorino.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Rhubarb, for my father

When my father comes to visit, I like to show off my cooking skills. After all, the man lived through what we might call "The Bad Decades", in which I didn't quite understand that baking powder needs to be thoroughly mixed into batters and I wasn't really clear on meat needing to be cooked all the way through. I once set the toaster oven on fire and then proceeded to dump water on it (neither of these are things you should try out for yourself). But one new toaster oven and several years later, I like to think I've got a skill or two in the kitchen.
To prove this, I usually foist food on him whenever he comes to visit me. One of the things I fed him last time was a certain intriguing raw rhubarb compôte. I found the concept a lot more interesting than the end result, but apparently Dad liked it enough, because he keeps asking me to post it here (hi Dad!). I think I would have liked it a whole lot more if I had chopped the rhubarb very finely, so go ahead and give that a try.

Rhubarb in the Raw
I found this recipe on culinate, a very nifty little site based in my lovely hometown.

1 lb. rhubarb, leaves trimmed
10 dried apricots, coarsely chopped
⅓ cup dried cranberries
⅓ cup honey
8 small rosemary sprigs (about 2 inches each)
2 tsp. orange liquor, such as Grand Marnier or Cointreau
Chopped mint for garnish

- Chop rhubarb fairly finely
- Combine everything but the mine in a medium-sized non-reactive bowl (glass or stainless steel). Mix well.
-Let sit for 24 hours, stirring at least twice in this time.
-Remove the rosemary sprigs. Garnish with mint.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Insalata Caprese, in a way

Something very good happened tonight. I've been running around these past few weeks, trying to get everything done at once (and usually getting nothing done as a result). So tonight I scheduled in a night to myself, so I could catch up on blogs and fiction, and cook myself dinner. It's not really cooking weather, though, so I marinated myself some mozzarella and put it on top of a tomato and basil salad. These normally belong in a salad of their very own, or on top of bread, I suppose; but it's been so hot outside, and when I come home from biking everywhere, I'd much rather eat something lighter than bread and more heavy on the vegetables than normal Caprese.

So I cracked open a beer and tore up some lettuce and picked some rosemary and basil from the bushes outside and made myself a huge salad. I ate it on the porch and watched the sunset.

Have you taken any time for yourself lately? I highly suggest it.

The whole thing isn't very pretty, so there aren't any pictures, but if there were a word for a
photogenic-on-your-tastebuds, it would definitely be that.

Variation on the Caprese
I got some beautiful heirloom tomatoes from the market. One was this particularly delicious yellow plum tomato type thing (I'm sure it has a name somewhere out there in the world). I just recently learned how to save tomato seeds, and I'm hooked. Should you bite into one that's worth saving this summer, I suggest you follow these instructions. Next summer, with luck, we can all have loads of (free!) seeds.

I used a variation on this vinaigrette for the marinade. I learned the basic concept in my eighth-grade French cooking class, and I haven't strayed since. The trio of vinegar, olive oil, and spicing works for just about anything you'd want to dress. This serves one, but can obviously be increased.

Finally, don't skimp on the basil, because it's one of the main flavors. I used a fairly mild lettuce so as to not to overpower the basil.

For marinated mozzarella
1/2 Tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/2 Tablespoon olive oil
1/2 - 1 clove garlic, chopped (to taste)
1/2 small sprig of rosemary (or to taste)
3 oz fresh mozzarella, small balls or roughly chopped

For salad
1 medium tomato
handful basil
2-3 large handfuls salad greens

For serving
Kosher salt

-Combine all vinaigrette ingredients (but not the mozzarella), whisk until smooth. Marinate the mozzarella in it for an hour or longer, stirring occasionally to make sure it all gets covered.
-Chop the tomatoes (and save the seeds! so cool!) Tear the basil and greens with your hands, toss together in a bowl.
-Deposit mozzarella on top of salad. Dress with remaining marinade. Sprinkle with kosher salt.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

In which farming gets me all hot and bothered

My life right now feels overly hectic, which is a little silly. This summer is not particularly stressful, as it's mainly composed of a part-time internship, biking, and putting up food for the winter, all of which I enjoy thoroughly. I think maybe living a stress-culture life eight months of the year probably has its effect on the other four.
Anyway, the place where I feel the most at home these days is my garden. It's a cute little plot, smack dab in the center of a community garden. I dug the entire thing up this spring* with some help from friends and family. When I got back from Montréal, it was absolutely covered in weeds, but in between the dandelions and unidentified greens that like to choke the life out of the other plants, there were some carrots. And lettuce. And beans. And I beamed like a proud parent of slightly vegetal children.
To bring those two paragraphs together, what I'm trying to say is that this year, my garden is my main space. I'd never really thought I'd be the type to enjoy digging up quack grass and pulling up weeds. After all, I was a bookish child with many, many pollen allergies. But things have changed, and I'm pretty much up in the plot any chance I get. It's calm in there. It's been said, I know, but I feel altogether a bit zen when I'm there. Which is a nice change. And weirdest of all is the recurring thought that if I enjoy it this much, who knows, maybe I'd enjoy doing it on a larger scale. I'm not exactly being groomed for farming over here at this liberal arts college of mine, but it's possible that I could end up being a farmer with some academia on the side. This train of thoughts is probably why I'm clutching thirstily at every word that Zoë Bradbury is writing over at Edible Portland. She's a former urbanite who sold it all and moved to start farming in Southern Oregon. She blogs about the ups and some of the very unexpected downs (who knew that the USDA was so ill-prepared to help small farmers?) right here. It all reminds me about how damn excited I get when I remember that food grows out of the ground. It sounds simple, but trust me, pulling up a carrot and remembering when it was a tiny seed in my hand is nothing short of miraculous.



*lies. I'm still digging up the north section. Bad, I know. Full of procrastination.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Università di Scienze Gastronomiche

I'll bet you didn't Slow Food has a university. Well, maybe you did. Maybe you're much more on top of these things than I am. I was pretty shocked, frankly. Who knew that you could live in Italy, work with Slow Food, and get all sorts of degrees in Food Technology, Communication, or Economics? It's so organized, too. They even have student housing. Score another 12 million for Slow Food.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Just a few from Montréal


It's been grey here in Portland lately. I've been doing slightly dweeby things like grinning like an idiot while flying down a hill on my bike, or composing small prayers of thanks to the universe, for warm grey spring days and muscles to take me places and the ability to feel contentment and joy. (I said they were slightly dweeby)
I might be doing all this normally, true, but my reason of late is that I just got back to the city. You see, I spent the past week and a half in Montréal.
Montréal, Montréal, Montréal. It's even got an accent over its "e". How much more delightful can one city be?
Someone told me that Montréal is this bizarre little outpost of Europe, tucked in neatly on the right side of North America, and it really is. It's kind of like being told a secret, or stumbling upon a rabbit hole that dumps you out across the world. We took a day trips out in a rental car, and I could not wrap my brain around the fact that there are highways in and out of the city; that it was connected to the rest of Canada and didn't just exist as an island floating in outer space.
Which is to say I liked it.
Of course I immediately took up with the food. Day Three was spent entirely on a self-devised "walking food tour". My father rolled his eyes a lot as I sacrificed cathedrals and museums for the sake of hitting up every single bakery on my list, but I think he understood after he had his first bite of a real bagel. And when I say "real bagel", I mean a bagel unlike any other bagel I've tasted, even in New York. It began with a craggy, lumpy, almost-too-thickly-crisp exterior, and then gave way to an interior that was soft yet feistily chewy, unlike the normal, easy, cotton-like interiors of your average inferior bagel.
It was from the Fairmont Bagel Bakery and it looked, well, a lot like this, actually, except his was sprinkled with muesli. Yes, raisins and oatmeal and nuts.

We, brave souls, took only the smallest of breaks before continuing on to our second bakery of the day: La Croissanterie Figaro, a bastion of French cooking and pastry art at the crossroads between Montréal's ritzier residential areas, and the more run-down sections surrounding Little Italy. They are adorable in the way that only Francophone establishments can be, with curly writing all over their menu and flowers all over their wrought-iron terraces. They also make what I've been calling the best almond croissant I've ever had. Ever. That's something big, by the way... "ever".
Their other croissants weren't quite as good, a bit too dry and a tad bland (although still very good, of course, just not, you know, the best I'd ever had), but, in case it hadn't gotten through, it's all worth it for their almond croissants. If you had to walk across the entire city of Montréal, in the middle of August, with snowshoes and a parka on, I would still advise it, just for the sake of their almond croissant. (If you go, make sure to order the almond paste. They have two types of almond, and the almond cream was a bit too reminiscent of a donut for my taste).

Their food is quite good, also, and their coffee is the cheapest I found in the entire city: under $2 (further proof for my theory of the inverse relationship between coffee quality and coffee price). We sat down for brunch a couple of times, and so I can highly recommend both the smoked salmon-cream cheese sandwich (you can even get it on one of their croissants!), and their rather impressive selection of quiche. Oh, what am I saying? I'll recommend the entire menu without even trying it all. This bakery, this bakery on its own, made me consider dumping it all and moving. Goodbye Portland, hello apartment directly next to authentic French bakery.
We then moved on to the Marché Jean-Talon and, err, well yes, another bakery. Before I continue with the details of our bakery crawl, though, a word about Montréal's marchés.
There are several throughout the city. They tend to be based around, if not completely contained within, buildings, so that they are permanent parts of the city. They're reminiscent of farmers' markets in the States, but with a few key differences: the biggest being that they're not entirely operated by farmers. Much of the produce is not from Québec, or even Canada, although they say that the local produce is much more of a fixture during the true summer. Then again, the summer only lasts about three months, max, so the rest of the year is heavily based on imported produce. That was rather disappointing, but, ah, well, it's another reason to love home. They also house several other kinds of food stores, from cheese shops to bakeries to nut-roasters. There are even some chains in a few; we spotted an Au Pain Doré or two. That said, everything we found was quite delicious and high-quality.
Our favorite marché was by far the Marché Jean-Talon, which featured our favorite nut-roaster and our favorite gelato shop, as well as several fantastic bread bakeries and produce stands. We went to some other marchés at first, but once we went to Jean-Talon, we didn't really go back.
The bakery I mentioned was nothing more than a stop for dinner baguette (but organic sesame-whole wheat!), luckily, but I should mention my favorite vendors there. The first was Havre de Glaces and their gelato. OH, what gelato. They had a wall fairly covered in newspaper articles raving about their quality and ice cream texture and "adult" flavor combinations (like strawberry with peppercorns, blood orange, fresh cheese, dark chocolate, burnt caramel, and "lulu", which is apparently some sort of tropical fruit that I'd never even heard of). I do believe one article was titled "Ice cream not just for children anymore". I find it comforting that my ice cream was mature since I hadn't even known that I was supposed to have outgrown it years ago.

The marché also contains a nut-roaster, whose name I can't recall for the life of me (it might not even have a name, now that I stop and think about it). It's not a large place, though, so one good tour of the place should lead you right to the display of almonds, pistachios, pecans, and the like. They have a mixed nut selection coated in savory spices that I spent days evaluating (I eventually came out with the dominant flavors of coconut milk and rosemary, but eventually gave up on the more subtle contributors). And we fought over the maple pecans.

We also discovered, way too late into the trip, a tiny little gourmet grocery market tucked away into the Village. I, forever making vows that I will never keep, declared that I wanted to move to the Village and live a completely self-sufficient life there: working and shopping at this store, and going to the huge assortment of clubs and bars when I got bored or had a night off. The prices are amazingly good for the chichi products they peddle, and the selection was pretty amazing considering that it was all crammed into a space not much bigger than our hotel room. There is a big problem here, unfortunately, in that we don't remember, at all, what the name is. I enlisted my father; we searched through receipts, we looked at price tags, we scoured the internet, and, nothing. If you'd like a nice adventure in Montréal, though, I recommend walking through the Village along rue Saint-Catherine. You'll stumble upon this shop, and since I can't give you a name, you can even say you discovered yourself.

And last but not least, the organic grocery and deli only blocks from our hostel, Marché Serafim. Despite a fairly limited selection of groceries, they still manage offer all your, well, gourmet basics like crackers, bread, cheese, drinks, and fruit & veg. The prices are definitely a bit more than we were used to paying, but coming from a tourist glut of white breads and fruit that tasted like chemicals, we managed to keep our enthusiasm up in the face of (gulp) $8 deli salads. Plus the man working the register informed me in exotically accented French that I was "particularly beautiful". You're not really going to get anything better than that handed over with your receipt, anywhere, I can assure you.


Tiny Directory
La Croissanterie
The website calls it "un petit coin perdu de Paris" (a little lost corner of Paris) and damned if it isn't.

Havre aux Glaces
...is inside the Marché Jean-Talon.

Marché Jean-Talon
7070 rue Henri-Julien, one and a half blocks south of rue Jean-Talon

Marché Serafim
393 rue St. Paul Est & Bonsecours

Fairmont Bagel Bakery
74 Fairmont Ouest

Photos by Savannah Naffziger

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Potato Envy

photo by Savannah Naffziger
If I'd been smart, when I started this blog, I wouldn't have made a blog about what I cook. I would have followed my friend Brian around and made a blog called "Delicious Things Brian Has Cooked".
New potatoes are in season, well, probably just about everywhere now. We had a beginning of summer dinner the other week, complete with picnicking on the front lawn which probably drove the neighbors a little crazy. Brian, of course, showed up with a new potato salad which he whipped onto a dish, and then sprinkled with sea salt in that impeccably-presented Brian way. We all oohed and ahhed and then ate and ate, and there were absolutely no leftovers. Definitely a pity, especially since I woke up with a horrible craving for that salad the next day. So I pulled my own new potatoes and mustard out, and improvised my own salad. Not quite as pretty, but just about as delicious.

New Potato Salad with Vinaigrette
I really didn't make many measurements when I made this, so feel free to toy around with the proportions (oh, I bet you've heard that from me before...). Use good quality, well, everything, since the salad is so simple. You'll probably have some leftover vinaigrette, use it on salads or to marinate a softish cheese.

1/2 lb fresh small new potatoes
1/3 c. white wine vinegar
1/3 c. olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 sprig (a bit less than one tablespoon, unpacked) fresh rosemary
wholegrain/dijon mustard to taste (I used around 2 tablespoons)
fresh pepper to taste
kosher salt for serving

-Boil water, deposit potatoes, turn heat down to medium. Cook potatoes until a fork goes in easily (10-15 minutes). Drain, put in bowl.
-Combine the rest of the ingredients, except the salt, as the potatoes cook. After draining the potatoes, pour the vinaigrette over potatoes. Gently toss the potatoes or push them around until they're covered. -Sprinkle with kosher salt, serve.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Goddess Dressing

Summer? Almost here. Classes are over, Renn Fayre (our end of year festival) is past, and I've only got two weeks of reading period and finals left. Today I had my first interview for a summer internship, and tomorrow I have another. Yeesh. It's MAY. So it's all really happening, then.
Summer is excellent for many things, like outside concerts and biking along esplanades and developing natural highlights in one's hair and eating green salads. I had some good, pungent arugula tonight, and celebrated being done with classes by making my own salad dressing. I fussed with it a lot, taking advantage of my spare time, but really it's quite simple. It all just goes into the blender whole and comes out smooth and delicious.

Goddess Dressing
I would be sparing with the water. The dressing seemed very thick to me, so I added a bit more water, but I think it made it a little grainy in the end. Add it last, and warily.

- 3 green onions (white and green parts)
- 2 large cloves garlic
- 1/3 c. tahini
- 2 Tablespoons olive oil
- 2 1/2 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
- 2 Tablespoons lemon juice
- 1 1/2 Tablespoons soy sauce
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
- 1/3 c. water

Deposit everything in blender. Blend until smoothish.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Vegan Coconut-Banana Bread

So, I want to say that our oven exploded. I really, really want to say that our oven exploded. Unfortunately, it didn't; I'm just a bit too fond of hyperbole. What it did do was start shooting large sparks from the temperature gauge.
So we didn't have an oven (or a stove!) for about a week. When we finally got the new one installed, I ran downstairs from bed, literally more excited than I get on Christmas morning. It's beautiful. It's new. It's even got, I kid you not, a Sabbath setting! (Set it before the sun goes down, and the next day at the set time it will bake your food, so that you don't have to work, a.k.a. turn on the oven, on the Sabbath. AMAZING).
Yesterday was busy, but today my one class was canceled, so I woke up at a scarily early time and made this bread, which I fully intent to feed to my housemates, with french press, when they wake up.

Vegan Coconut-Banana Bread
I cobbled this banana bread together from many sources, and a couple of vegan resource sites (thank you, Post Punk Kitchen). I used whole wheat flour to make it heartier, which I think is key, since the whole thing is rather rich. I found the whole thing almost too sweet, given the richness of it, so consider cutting back the sugar if that sort of thing appeals to you.
Mine also took a stunningly long time to bake (an HOUR and A HALF!), which I'm still trying to figure out. It pretty much perfect after that long, though, so don't be weirded out if yours needs that long, too. Although I would definitely recommend checking it at the half hour and hour marks.

3 large bananas
2 Tablespoons bourbon (or rum, or...)
2 Tablespoons soymilk
2 cups flour (1 c. whole wheat flour & 1 c. white)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 (ish) teaspoon salt
1/2 c. Earth Balance
1 c. dehydrated cane sugar
1 c. unsweetened dried shredded coconut
Optional: 1 Tablespoon demerara sugar, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 teaspoon cinnamon

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Grease a bread loaf pan (ohhhh, 5 x 9?)
- Mush bananas. Mix with bourbon and soymilk.
- Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
- Cream EB and sugar.
- Add flour and banana mixtures, alternating between the two until well-blended. Mix in coconut.
- I sprinkled some demerara sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon on top after it had been in for half an hour (I was going to put the spices in the batter, but completely spaced it)
- Bake for 1 1/2 hours (see note above), or until a toothpick/fork inserted in it comes out clean.

For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat...1/3 of one?

Here's an article I wrote for our student-run newspaper. If you know me outside the blog, you've probably already read it, but, ah well. Beyond being published in the paper, it's also been my writing sample for just about every internship I've applied for lately, so pretty soon every single person in the world will have seen it.

For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat...1/3 of one?
April 16, 2008
Confession: I’ve never been a very good vegetarian. When I saw the facebook group “For Every Animal You Don’t Eat, I’m Going To Eat Three”, I laughed and briefly considered switching back to eating meat just to have that on my profile. Pet peeves of mine include self-righteous vegetarians, anyone who has ever been on a raw diet, and anything involving the words “fruit fast” and “healthy”.
Now I’m considering switching back to the omnivorous side of things, and not just because I want to microwave myself whenever I meet people who think fruit juice fasts/vegetarianism/five daily infusions of soy and flaxseed oil will make them Crazy Androids of Health and Fitness. Not because I miss meat, either; because after 14 years, the entire thing really does sound a little... gross. But I’ve begun to feel that the best eating plan is probably the one that meets all of my nutritional needs on its own. Strike me down, ok maybe, but after more than a decade of popping iron and B12 supplements, I’m kind of thinking that maybe my body knew what it was doing back in the day when it craved meat.
Lately, meat’s been getting a bad rap. The New York Times, for instance, recently ran an article titled “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler”. I’ve heard so many people who love meat suggest that they’re going to become vegetarians for the “good of the environment” or for their own health that if I hear it one more time, I’ll probably let out a really good primal scream.
As far as it goes, though, the vegans aren’t crazy. Slaughterhouses are full to the brim of excessive atrocities and violence that often borders on sadism. Happily, though, while the horrific information in all of those vegan pamphlets is pretty accurate, the problem is NOT necessarily with meat. The problem is with the meat industry and the government. Laws are vague and poorly enforced, and the production of meat is on such a large scale that profit is basically the only bottom line. Billions of animals are turned into meat each year, and the great majority is produced in factory farms. However, some smaller producers actually give their animals pretty decent lives, with space to roam and real food to eat; the kinds of lives where they get to keep all their body parts and don’t need to be fed antibiotics every day to be kept alive. These are, for many reasons, probably the people from whom you want to be buying your meat. Local, traditionally-raised meat is better for the environment (less oil used—since it doesn’t have to be shipped or trucked across the country—means less pollution). It’s also looking like it’s better for you. Animals that have been shot up with hormones, antibiotics, and chemicals are going to make meat that is also full of hormones, antibiotics, and chemicals. Animals that live and eat in the ways they have for centuries are going to make for meat that is much more similar to meat in past centuries (centuries when, we hear, diet-related health problems were much less common, despite the inclusion of meat in people’s diets).
Not all producers who advertise as “free-range” and “organic” actually raise their animals in conditions that we would normally associate with these words; the law gives a lot of loopholes for labeling. A good rule of thumb is the more local the production of the animal, the better. Of course, this isn’t always true. But Safeway and Trader Joe’s = huge corporations who can profit from buying large amounts of cheap meat from the Midwest. Meat producers who sell at farmers markets and directly to co-ops = people who have to make the decisions and deal with the animals, and who as part of a niche market, have a much bigger investment in treating their animals in a respectful way.
If you specifically don’t eat meat because of how you feel about eating animals, then most of this article isn’t for you. Except, remember that while your approach is a valid one, it’s not the only one. It’s not necessarily the most healthful or the most environmentally or economically sound. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver points out that in many locations with rocky or otherwise unfertile soil, meat and animal products are some of the best sources of food, as animals can turn tough, inedible-by-humans grasses and plants into protein and other nutrients in a digestible-by-humans form. The oil used to ship food to people who live in climates where there cannot be lots of produce year-round is a huge contributor to our growing environmental crisis.
Realistically, not everyone is willing to give up meat. People enjoy eating it. People have been eating it for as long as people have been people. It seems to me that reducing animal cruelty is at least a good first step for vegetarians and vegans who do it for the animals. Encouraging responsible and respectful meat producers, and creating an economically visible market for that meat, is an active step that is just as important (possibly more) than passively taking oneself out of the system. That isn’t to say that all vegetarians should start eating meat, but it is to say that they should keep broad horizons about how to encourage responsible meat-related behavior in others.
And on a final point, yes, meat that is raised humanely is expensive. Super-expensive, in some cases, which is right about where it should be. We don’t need to eat meat every day, and we certainly don’t need to eat it every meal. Buying better quality, better-raised meat is a good way to naturally limit one’s meat consumption to a healthy and natural amount.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Oh, oh.

It's been a while. It's been so long, in fact, that my computer didn't recognize and fill in "blogger.com" when I started typing it. Da-amn. Oh yeah, and it's been two months since I posted anything real.
I have things to say, so much to say (well, at least a few days' worth of posting to show for two months), but it'll have to wait for another few days, until I've got my life a bit more together. Emily's lost her computer-camera cord, too, so I've been using that as an excuse to not make anything photograph-able, but no more. Pictures, or no pictures, I'll have, well, something to show for myself. Soon. Soon.

Monday, March 3, 2008

GO HERE

P.S. Ever wanted to see the most beautiful pictures in the world?
Yeah, you betcha.
Go here. Go here now. La Tartine Gourmande will blow your mind. It exceeds the category of "food photography"; it's sheerly some of the best photography my untrained eye has ever seen.

Roast yourself some garlic

It's basic. It's simple. And it's my favorite thing to do these days.
Roasting garlic is probably the best decision you can make. It's the perfect winter dish, for those who are living in a normal February zone. It's also perfectly reminiscent of summer, for those of us who are undergoing the early springs, like what's happening in Portland right now. It's making me imagine summer pasta dishes with luscious fresh tomatoes and huge salads full of salad greens (ohhhh, salad green season).
What I'm trying to say, I think, is that I'm ready for it to be growing season, but I'm taking my roasted garlic along with me.


Photo by the generous and ever-lovely Emily F. Samstag.

Roasted Garlic
It's rather easy. So easy, in fact, that it doesn't really take a recipe. But it's delicious in just about anything in which you would use normal garlic.
For starters, cut about a half inch off of the top of a head of garlic (always use a head. Using individual cloves will make the cloves undergo a strange and bitter melding with their papery outer layers). Drizzle it liberally with a quality olive oil, making sure to let it soak between the cloves and coat the papery outside. Stick it in something over-safe, and roast somewhere between 400 and 500 degrees Fahrenheit, for 20-25 minutes. Check it periodically throughout the roasting process and douse with more olive oil if it starts to look dry. Toss with pasta and some Pecorino Romano, or spread on a slice of artisan bread.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Single's Appreciation Day


Christmas was a bit of a let-down for me this year. I spent it with a few friends and ate a lovely meal, but it wasn't the completely enthralling, October-November-December-consuming holiday of my childhoods. Same for Halloween (I used to start planning my costumes in June). Which means that what I'm about to tell you about may be, in fact, my favorite holiday.
I went to college in Maine for a year, at Bowdoin College, to be precise. While there, my friend Doris imparted to me her own (very wise) riff on February 14: Single's Awareness Day. Together, we began the ritual of eating lots of chocolate, watching Boondock Saints, and appreciating being single and having such good friends.
Fast-forward another year: I'd transferred back West, and I'd begun introducing the holiday at my new school. I'd changed the name to "Single's Appreciation Day", but of course I'd kept the chocolate and the Boondock Saints. Emily and I had a small celebration with our friend Eira and her roommate.
And now we're in 2008. My beloved holiday is taking on a life of its own; one that involves pre-planning, and email invitations, and baking the night before. Brenna, Zoë, Emily and I are hosting a viewing of the movie at The Miracle (the house where Em and I live), and expecting many a Singles-loving person to show up.
The Rules, as I sent them out: "ASD is a day for glorying in the single life. There will be no bitching about being single. There will be no discussing of significant others. Should anyone have the gall to show up with an S.O. in anything but faking a "This is my distant cousin" sort of way, they will be immediately subjected to doubtful looks and criticism ("Are you sure about that choice?", "When ARE you going to be single again, anyways? You can't put it off forever, you know..."). Enjoy watching two attractive men with accents kill people and eat some chocolate and be with the people you love (your friends)."
I will be doing my part by baking one of my favorite means of chocolate consumption: Gâteau au chocolat fondant.



Gâteau au chocolat fondant
adapted from my recently acquired, and dearly beloved copy of Je veux du chocolat ! (ok, so, I'm full of lies. I actually have the English version. It was $20 cheaper. But really, the French title just sounds SO much better than I Want Chocolate! which, let's be honest, sounds like a bratty five-year-old more than anything else). I love this cake. I LOVE this cake. I made it for this year's Christmas dinner; and Orangette over here used something like it for her wedding cake, which is about the most delightful thing I can think of. Maybe I'm just a bit too fond of fantastic yet slightly homely products in high-falootin settings (we did go out to pizza for my Senior Prom dinner), but if I were going to get married in the next decade or so (well, I suppose we never know...) I'm pretty sure that that's one idea (of many) I would be stealing.

7 oz best-quality dark chocolate
14 Tablespoons butter
1.25 c. granulated sugar
5 eggs
1 Tablespoon flour

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Use 8 inch round pan (or cupcake pans, if you want to, say, hand out individual small cakes)

Melt chocolate and butter together (in microwave or in double-boiler). Let cool slightly (I grease and cocoa* the pan at this point). Add sugar, blend until the sugar is somewhat dissolved. Add eggs one at a time, incorporating each completely before going on to the next. Add the flour. Batter should be delightfully blob-ish (mine always sticks together in the coolest, most gelatinous, horror-movie kind of way).

Deposit batter in to pan, bake for around 22 minutes. The middle will still be somewhat jiggly, as this is a soft, fondant cake.



*cocoa-ing in place of flouring, since it's a dark cake, and flour would look a little out of place

Photo by the generous and ever-lovely Emily F. Samstag.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Awe in Mouth

In case you were wondering, this is the trendy week to have the flu. What can I say, all the cool kids are doing it, and when there's a good trend, I just can't help myself.
Ok, so, that last sentence is entirely untrue. But the part about the flu is pretty accurate.
Wanted to pass along a couple of super-important bits of information:
The first... I am now a daring baker. Oh, yes. (Do you even know how long I've been waiting to describe myself in such an awesome way?? Ten billion years or thereabouts, I would say). I've actually just last night signed up to be a Daring Baker. There will be more on that later, when challenges actually roll around, but for now, I'll be all glowy with the thought of actually joining myself to other bloggers in some way.
The second is Luna & Larry's. I tend to shy away from product reviews, mainly because I'm just plain not interested in them, but Coconut Bliss, as the word "Bliss" implies, really needs a shout-out. They, and their lovely dessert, are all from my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, which is pretty damn cool in and of itself. I remember a few years ago when they started up, and all of a sudden Sundance was posting signs for having sold out, and Sweet Life was judging them good enough to sell right next to their gelato. Despite all of this, I'd never actually tried Coconut Bliss until I wandered into my local co-op last week and wasn't able to get the phrase "Cinnamon Chocolate Flake" out of my brain. I bought it, pulled out a spoon and... was sadly disappointed. I'm going to blame this one on my penchant for ice cream (in all its dairy-having glory), but the Bliss seemed a little, well, anemic would be a good word for it. Thin, and without anything in it to pack a real oomph. I was disappointed, but, shamefully, not incredibly surprised. However, if there's anything my hippie roots will lead me to do, it's to give a vegan product a second try. And so, half an hour later, I was back at my freezer, spoon in hand, and awe in mouth.
Freshly filled pints of Maple Walnut Coconut Bliss, patiently waiting  for their lids.
(Picture ruthlessly abducted from www.coconutbliss.com,
but used with only the best of intentions)
I think the reason that the Bliss is so good (besides the obvious marketing tactic of its name) is because it's less sweet than normal ice creams. Most of the sweetness comes from the coconut itself, and the rest comes from agave syrup, which means that the flavor is much more complex than the normal pint of, say, Ben and Jerry's. It's one of those desserts that feels natural and good, in that it's still, you know, a completely decadent dessert, but it doesn't feel like someone picked up a bag of sugar and ten bags of candy and poured them together for your enjoyment (because, honestly, I of course enjoy those ice creams, too). It's also not a vegan replacement-for-something-better dessert (I hate those). It's lovely entirely in its own right. And I'll say it again a few more times: the flavor is complex. Complex, complex, complex. Complexity is the key word here.
My other worry with a coconut milk-based dessert was that it would taste too tropical, like a Piña Colada or other. Nope. Wrong. The first few bites are a bit strong on the coconut flavor, but them it's just creamy and just sweet enough and flavored with spicy cinnamon and... mmhm. Just go buy some. (I'm not even taunting you with some hippie Oregon product; if you live in Oregon, Washington, Northern California, Hawai'i, Alaska, Montana, or Idaho, there is Luna and Larry's being sold somewhere in your state. That should really motivate you to go on a grand treasure hunt, stat). I'll leave you with the parting inspirational statement that, if I'm encouraging you to buy a product that needs to have its main ingredient (coconut [milk]) shipped from halfway across the world (Thailand), then it's got to be damn good.

Monday, February 4, 2008

[decadent] re-gifting

It's been a strange week.
School started, of course, I've talked all about that. I felt like I dropped off the face of the planet there for a bit, really. I guess nothing was going to compare to the idyllic lifestyle I was leading in December and January (Eden, anyone?), near-constant blogging included. Emily, dearest photographer of my heart, is in LA for the week, becoming some sort of tanned, biking wonder, or so I am to understand. I spent the majority of the past week with my Linguistics reading, and a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal, or several, and not with cookbooks or whisks in hand. All the same, Saturday I couldn't resist baking some bread, and Sunday I went a little crazy and made a huge dinner, complete with pots de crême for dessert. (Butterscotch, no less!)
Unfortunately, I am not the mother, or even distantly related cousin of any of these, since they were all found on other blogs which are far too comprehensive and pretty to need any of my commentary. Thus, I'm using this past week as an excuse to tell you about two other blogs which far surpass my own small grassroots-of-the-grassroots spot, and which you should most definitely be looking at.
The first, Orangette, has probably spawned an entire generation of bloggers. Go anywhere, and you'll see her delightful and shockingly fresh writing style (and its slightest hint of campy naivety) all over the web. This weekend I made her panade, as well as her butterscotch pots de crème which have an addictiveness level which I assume is quite near to crack cocaine. The panade is made with chard, onion, and gruyère, and, while not quite to perfect taste the first day, is pleasingly stuffing-like on the second. I tried the pan-frying of the leftovers as suggested, but, um, really just succeeded in heating them up in a frying pan. I couldn't really handle the thought of involving any more oil in them, so perhaps that was why?
But my real weakness is dessert, and, if you haven't already immediately clicked on that link as you were reading the words "butterscotch" and "pots de crème", well, go now. Even if you are a complete scrooge and hate dessert and sugar and potentially even food itself, go for her pictures. The post is called "pots of gold", and damned if those aren't the most appealing metallic food photographs I have ever seen. They glimmer, people, like they're flecked with actual gold. Mine were delicious and all, to the point of needing to give them away to housemates, but hers. Wow. It appears to be some actual incarnation of the Midas myth. Go try your own, and if you can figure out how to make them look like that, well, get back to me.
But for all the words of excess and delight, the last think I have saved for you is, I think, the gastronomic equivalent of an insider trading tip.
Farmgirl Susan (oh, yes) lives on 240 acres of farmland in rural Missouri. Uh-huh. She used to live in California, and now she has sheep, and a farmdog, and god knows probably even a turkey or two hidden somewhere. I still can't decide whether I'm enchanted at the writing and novelty, or terrified because there's this slight possibility that it could be my future some day. I'm not terribly familiar with the site, having just stumbled upon it with the finding of this recipe, but if you don't mind a cutesy-named animal and the concept of farms, I recommend checking it out. Or, just make the following bread recipe with her in mind as you realize that you have stumbled upon the true definition of "alchemy". I've included the recipe because, well, if I'm ever stranded on a dessert island with just my blog and a six-pack, I'll need this recipe.

Whole Wheat Beer Bread
... IS SO EASY. When I said alchemy, I meant it. I first made this after agreeing to bake with a friend. We were even a little disappointed when we finally sat down and looked at the recipe, because it takes nothing. NOTHING. You mix and stick in oven. We forgot salt and it was still delicious. I made a loaf again the next day (remembering salt) to give to my father, and kept double-checking the recipe since I couldn't even believe my own memory of it being so simple. Read, bake, and be awed.

2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon granulated sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
14 oz beer

Mix ingredients in bowl, beer last. Dump into appropriately-sized oiled and floured bread pan. Squeal like it's your third-grade science project while it bakes for 45 minutes at 375 degrees. Let cool for twenty minutes.

Now go, go, GO!

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Have I told you about how I am the long-lost brother of Tupac Shakur?

So, school starts again on Monday. Oh, whine, whine, whine. Complain and then some more. I know. This has already happened for literally every other college student I’ve talked to. It’s part of being a student. You, you know, go to school. To boot, our breaks here are almost sickeningly long. All the same, I’m not ready for it. I finished last semester out by hyperventilating under a desk while eating pumpkin pie from a tin and guzzling coffee. Then I slept for about twenty-two hours. Break has been nice, I'll say: I’ve developed habits such as a dependence on regular sleep and biking. Plus, there’s so much I haven’t done yet. Especially, I haven’t gotten around to baking croissants. And this part, it’s significant, because my dedication to French pastry is serious business.
All the same, it’s kind of looking like it’s not going to happen. The next two days are rather packed, and I’m out of butter, and there are so many other things that the responsible part of me says I should probably do, such as... my laundry. And my readings for class on Monday.
Ah well. It’s a tough life I lead. I’m going to have to content myself with another French stand-by, the crêpe. It’s not quite as refined and nose-tappingly posh, but it’ll do in a pinch. Or in any situation in which you want delicious food, actually. I’ve been making crêpes all over the place lately.


We made them for a welcome-home brunch for James the other day, and I made them tonight for myself as dinner. They’re not exactly healthy dinner fare, but they’re just that deliciously quick. You make them in a blender, and they still look like something I bought from that crêpe-seller the last time I was in Paris (I say “that crêpe-seller” because he notoriously spent the better part of ten minutes explaining to me that he is, in fact, Tupac Shakur’s long-lost brother, separated at birth and turned into a white Frenchman. But that’s a story for another day). They’re kind of the opposite of croissants, actually.
The pictures portray them so well that around here we've been referring to them as "sex crêpes", and I've been teasing Emily about her first forays into food porn.


I myself am probably going to go make another batch, to freeze (crêpes freeze well, and when frozen on a cookie sheet, they're perfectly stackable). When I'm mid-March and exhausted with semiotics and linguistics, hopefully I'll pull out a crêpe and remember that there are breaks out there on the horizon.



Crêpes Fines (et peut-être Sucrées)
I stole this recipe ruthlessly from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One, via Epicurious. I didn’t change a single thing. It’s amazing. I mentioned the blender, but this recipe can seriously do no wrong. It says in the original to let the batter sit for at least two hours to let the flour molecules expand. However, I just made some straight from blending to hot pan in about three minutes, with only an extra bit of milk to thin the batter, and they were possibly even better than previous batches. Seriously, this recipe could get away with murder. It’s stellar with the old stand-by, melted chocolate and raspberry jam, but (magic!) it’s possibly even better with just the slightest glaze of butter and a smattering of sugar. It’s custard-y and browned and eggy in a way I never even knew I craved. It’s like something a professional crêpe-man would make, but even better because you made it in your blender. I rest my case with the below recipe.

3/4 cup cold milk
3/4 cup cold water
3 egg yolks
1 Tablespoon granulated sugar
3 Tablespoons orange liqueur, rum, or brandy
1 cup flour (scooped and leveled)
5 Tablespoon melted butter
butter for the pan

Place all ingredients in blender, blend for one minute, checking to make sure there are no lumps left. [According to the recipe,] refrigerate for at least two hours.

Heat a frying pan or crêpe pan over medium-high heat. Gloss the pan with a little butter. Pour in approximately 1/4 cup of batter (more or less depending on the size of the pan). Quickly tilt the pan in all directions so as to coat the entire bottom of the pan with a thin layer of batter. Pour out any excess. This should all take only a few seconds. Cook the crêpe for 60-80 seconds, until the edges begin to brown, and the underside is lightly browned. Turn it over with a spatula. Cook until this second side is also browned, although there will only be spots of browning. This quasi-browned side is traditionally seen as the less attractive side, and put on the inside of the finished, filled crêpe.

The first crêpe is generally a throw-away (or rather, for eating with one's hands as the rest of the crêpes cook) to test conditions.

Fill crêpes and roll/fold them any way your heart desires.

Photo by the generous and ever-lovely Emily F. Samstag.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Windy City

Did you read Little House on the Prairie when you were a kid? I did. I don’t have any particularly good reason for bringing it up, except that lately, life around here has been reminiscent of my memories of the book. I don't remember a whole lot, except for the fact that winters in the Little House always seemed so personified. Long winter nights had the worst of intentions, and snowbanks had a bad habit of abducting fathers and valued cattle. And the wind, oh, the wind. It gets its fair share of attention in other literature, but to a small girl living in the middle of the prairie in the flattest of the flat lands, the wind must have seemed like celebrity enough to engulf every single person inside that tiny log cabin.
We’re having a bit of a winter like that right now. Biking home this morning, I pedaled slower and slower, and began to realize that had I been going the opposite direction, I wouldn’t even have had to move my feet. It’s coming through cracks in windows, and it’s yelling outside like the worst of pioneer kidnappers. When you find the rare protected street, the weather is almost balmy, until you turn a corner and are reintroduced to the meaning of the words “wind chill”.
Part of the romance of those books for me was the exoticism of needing to store a winter’s worth of food, or starve. I was a strange child, and enjoyed games of desperation and apocalypse scenarios, so I suppose it makes sense that this would have fascinated me. The bizarre, extreme nature of this other lifestyle made my own, snowless Oregon winters seem puny and anemic in comparison. I wanted white Christmases, and I sure as hell wanted to stockpile all the food in the pantry. Maybe I just wanted a smash-bang snowstorm to keep me out of school for a few days. I suppose I’ll never know.
Either way, the romanticism lives on in this particular winter. There are few things that will send me out to brave a bike ride in the cold, but they exist: the need to rent the next season of Alias, a few more bottles of wine, or a trip to the backyard larder for supplies.



Squash Soup with Sage
This soup definitely merits trips to the larder or to the store for ingredients. I mean, really, there's not much better for windy winter days than homey soup ("homely" works well, too; the best soups are straight-up ugly) and a brown bread. The recipe is roughly based off of one from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: I tweaked several things, and didn't really go by the recipe so much as adding milk, vegetable stock, squash, and sage until it poured well and tasted soup-like. Do it to taste, people, extremely to taste. I changed the squash from pumpkin to butternut (although I'm sure the transition back would be just as rewarding). It's not cooked in its own shell (if you read the book, you'll understand why), and being the people we are, we added an entire head of roasted garlic instead of three measly cloves. I'm honestly of the opinion that once you have roasted garlic, there is no actual taste-based limit, only that of how much you can carry home to roast in the first place.

One medium butternut squash (I think we ended up using about a 4-pounder)
1 large head garlic
olive oil for garlic roasting
(about) 1 quart vegetable or chicken stock
(about) 1 quart milk
(about) 1 Tablespoon dried sage
salt&pepper

To begin, roast the butternut squash and the garlic. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Squash first: Split the squash lengthwise, and gut the seeds/stringy seed surrounds. Place into a glass pan, cut sides down, and pour in approx. 1 cup water, or until the squash is 1/4-1/3 covered in water. Cook for at least an hour, until the flesh is tender. Let cool, and remove the flesh from the rind.

For the garlic, cut about 1/2 inch off the top of the head. Place on a baking sheet or small dish, and pour olive oil liberally over the head. Make sure the olive oil gets in between the cloves. Roast until the cloves are tender (it really does depend, I find it usually takes our oven about 20 minutes, but it could be as little as 15 minutes, and as many as 45). Let cool, remove cloves from the papery surroundings.

Puree the roasted squash and garlic together. Deposit the puree into a large pot. Add stock, milk, sage, and s&p until the soup has reached desired taste and consistency.


Photo by the generous and ever-lovely Emily F. Samstag.