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.

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.

And you thought this was going to be a nice cooking blog about baked goods

(Warning: I'm still fairly blogspot-incompetent, and as such have no idea how to hide parts of posts. Thus, there are pictures of goat skinning down on that there bottom of the post. I find them fascinating, but if that's not really your thing, I suggest you page down with caution until someone explains to me the details of how I'm supposed to place the proper html into the damn post)

This morning, I received a phone call from my father.
“So, is he cute?”
I, oh-so-single, replied (confused), “Who?”
“You know, the guy who you blew us off for"
Oh. Apparently our conversation yesterday did not go so convincingly. When I called to inform him I wouldn’t be able to make it down to the beach to visit, I did so with an “I can’t come down because some kids on campus have got a USDA-approved goat and I’ve got a chance to help them skin and process it! They’re going to use every part of it!”
I guess that’s not what a parent generally expects to hear out of their kid’s mouth. But, unfortunately for my love life, that is indeed what happened, and here I am with a story about a goat and a bunch of college students.
To take a roundabout route: I started this blog with several plans in mind; one of the bigger ones being to explore where my food comes from. Or, considering the limitations of being a vegetarian: where food comes from, in general. My recent literature (namely Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which, by the way, are both informative page-turners, and such good fodder for your next over-educated dinner party. But, I digress...) has reinforced in my mind the idea that a large part of understanding a food chain is understanding where meat comes from. I’ve started to ponder backing away from vegetarianism itself, since the best way to support humanely-raised meat is to buy it, and for the sake of efficiency, consume it. The woman who is feeding Thanksgiving dinner to turkeys has some creative ideas, I’ll give you that, but it’s not really benefiting any turkeys except for the very few she’s managed to rescue and provide for.
But again, I digress. If you’re still reading this, I’m going to assume that you’re here for one reason, and that’s for goat-skinning stories.
We showed up at 11 a.m. on a gray Saturday morning. The skinning was already underway. It had taken some effort to convince the butcher that a group of college students did indeed want a goat with “the pelt on. And the limbs. And yeah, we want the head, too” (and do I blame the butcher for not understanding? Not one single bit). In the end, they had kindly disemboweled the goat for us, given us the guts in a bag, and left everything else intact. Our activity started with incising around the ankles (mid-leg), and the neck. I missed this part, but I assume the actually skinning began around the neck and gut incisions. I’m not sure how much detail is welcome here, but when skinning an animal, the majority of the fat goes with the pelt, and what remains is mostly what gets eaten. The skinning, aided by yours truly, took at least two and a half hours, but at the end of all of it, we were left with a skin and what now looked significantly more like what one might stick on a barbeque and eventually dish out for eating.
It was a motley crew of neo-hippies, my housemates and I, and two international students (leading to what was potentially my favorite moment of the entire experience... Neo-Hippie: “So, did you guys go hunting a lot with your dad when you were younger?” International Student, eyebrow raised: “... No. He’s from Ghana and I’m from India.”). That is to say, few of us really knew how to butcher a chicken, let alone a goat, so when the international students left us to go wash their hands, we made a proper mess of the meat. I’m not claiming to know much about the subject, but I do know that there probably isn’t any cut consisting entirely of the spine and an inch of flesh. But college students will eat just about anything, and the ribs looked pretty damn well-butchered.
We left soon after this, while people were beginning to debate how to best get at the brains, to tan the hide (to boil or not to boil? Hey, well, I figured if you made it this far, you’re not too squeamish for that particular detail).
So, no, this post does not include a recipe, and I didn’t even eat the rewards of everyone’s diligent knifework. But I got more than I expected out of the morning, such as the knowledge that “processing” an animal involves next to no blood, and is much, much less disgusting than most of my interactions with post-processed meat that I’ve had (for instance, slicing deli meats and removing chicken breasts from plastic at the bakery at which I used to work). The goat came from a pasture, I’m told, and the meat was something I had worked on. This was meat that I would have eaten if I had wanted to stick around until 5 p.m. Working with a group of people to prepare a meal of meat hit on something vital and connected to instinct (forgive me my inability to express that without sounding New Age-y to the point of no return). I enjoyed my Winter Break this year because I spent a lot of time preparing food with friends, and this was a logical, if pleasantly extreme, extension of that.
In conclusion, in the middle of all this, our favorite Community Safety Officer walking up and explaining that they’d had a complaint about “a group of students and what seemed to be a... dead animal?” And we shook our heads and said “Nooo, noooo, we’d seen nothing like that”. But my moral, I suppose, is something along the lines of how strange it is that a group of students preparing and using an entire goat is seen more along the lines of ritual slaughter than as communal, celebratory activity.




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

When Brian brings you coffee...

Winter in Portland isn’t exactly what I’d call harsh. It barely snows, if at all, and freezing temperatures are usually limited to night and the very early morning. I’ve lived in Maine, and wow, do they know their way around a snow plow there. It snows on the beach (that means at sea level, people) That said, living in an unheated house in December and January is not a exactly a summer’s day, and it’s hard to convince people to come over and watch their breath turn white and foggy in our living room.
So we lure them with food.
Well, not completely. We got Brian over for breakfast the other day, but he’s a good sport to start out with. He even biked to Stumptown on the 8 a.m. icy streets to bring us coffee for the french press. So it’s possible that we could have got him over here for an early breakfast even without such delectable baked goods, but I’m guessing that they helped.
This bread, well, I won’t call it magical, but it’s got something going for it. It managed to turn an early 8 a.m. morning in a cold house to cozy one with dear people and dear (dear!) coffee. We watched weak sun shine play with the ices outside, and laughed and took pictures and lounged on the couch. And perhaps it was the baking the night before, or perhaps it was the increased number of people in the house but, well, we couldn’t even see our breaths.


Cinnamon Raisin Brioche
This recipe is from Leslie Mackie’s Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook. The woman knows how to make a loaf of bread, and she sure as hell knows how to put together a dessert. Although, to be honest, I find the bakery a little disappointing, for its crowdedness and for its baked goods which feel like they should have had a bit more care put into them. Don’t get me wrong, what I’ve had has been delicious, but it often feels as if it should be slightly more so. I think that’s why I love the cookbook so much, since I am one woman cooking one recipe, instead of a bakery supplying for thousands of people. Mackie recommends making this bread in a stand mixer, but I find that it worked well enough by hand. I also added substituted dried, sweetened cranberries for some of the raisins, and found that it worked well. Please note the adorable brioche muffins I made with some spare dough...

For brioche:
1/4 c. warm filtered water
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons dried yeast
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
3/4 c. whole milk
3 1/2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 c. butter (at room temperature, cut into pieces about 1-inch thick)
3/4 c. raisins and/or cranberries

For topping:
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
4 tablespoons butter, melted

Place warm water and two teaspoons of the sugar into a bowl. Sprinkle yeast on top, whisk until dissolved, let stand for five minutes.

Add remaining sugar, vanilla, eggs, milk, flour, and salt. Mix with a wooden spoon until the dough is decently combined. Knead by hand for 15-20 minutes, dropping in pieces of butter and incorporating while kneading (Mackie recommends kneading for 10-12 minutes, but since I was doing this by hand instead of with a stand mixer, I thought a longer kneading time would be a good idea). Dough will be elastic, and still somewhat sticky and wet when done. Add in raisins/cranberries/whichever dried fruit you’ve decided is worthwhile.

Get dough into a ball, and deposit into an oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap. Let it proof for around 2 1/2 hours in a warm room (Mackie recommends 70-75 degrees, I just turn the space heater on in my room and let it proof there). It will almost double in size.

Line bottom and sides of a 9 x 5 x 4 inch loaf pan with parchment paper.

For topping, combine the 1/2 c. granulated sugar, 1/2 c. brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

Pull dough onto floured surface, flatten with your hands to release excess air bubbles. Divide dough into three equal pieces. Roll each piece into a 10-inch-long rope. Coat the ropes in melted butter, and roll in the cinnamon sugar mixture. Pinch the ropes together at one end, and braid them until out of dough. Pinch the finish end together. Lift the braid into the loaf pan. Brush with more melted butter, and sprinkle with the remaining cinnamon sugar.

Re-cover with the plastic wrap, and let proof in the warm room for another hour.

Preheat oven to 360 degrees. Remove plastic. Bake the loaf for about 45 minutes. Unsugared parts will be a golden brown, and on my own loaf, the sugars had begun to caramelize and turn a darker brown. Cool the loaf for 20 minutes on a wire rack, but remove the loaf from pan before the sugars cool and harden. If necessary, run a knife around the edge, invert pan, and whew, pour some coffee and enjoy.

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

A case of Americana

Once upon a time, somewhere in the middle of high school, I went through what I can now identify as a wee bit of an Americana phase. Oh, I managed to stay away from any knickknacks or Norman Rockwell paintings, but I baked dozens of traditional cookies at Christmas, wanted nothing more than to be a cowgirl (despite a desperate, paralyzing fear of horses and a bad childhood run-in with attempting to ride a sheep), and even asked my father for our family’s traditional recipe for “Cranberry Surprise”. I will not be giving the recipe for that last one here, but suffice it to say, it was a World War II-era dessert casserole composed entirely of raw cranberries, unsweetened whipped cream, and crushed saltine crackers.
I am, luckily, out of the woods as far as any serious vintage-clothing buys or saws painted with forest scenes or saltine desserts, but there are still some recipes banging around from this period. Last night, while sitting up and enjoying my Winter Break, I remembered a blonde brownie I made all through high school. No matter which 1950’s jellied vegetable associations blondies may have for me, these particular ones are keepers. They are buttery and caramelized throughout the brownie section, with a layer of fudge to fulfill, of course, the chocolate requirement. The batter itself is hard to keep away from (I’m even considering using the first four ingredients as a sauce of their own; weird, I know, but proves my point). I made these brownies monthly, if not weekly, for a few years back there, and they can, I swear, work miracles. I think they may have been what originally seduced my high school boyfriend into dating me, although he tactfully never came right out and said it.


Fudge Butterscotch Brownies
In the spirit of full disclosure, this is not actually the recipe that seduced boyfriends and appeared in my Christmas gift baskets. It is a very, very similar recipe that I have tinkered into existence. The original (from some unknown magazine collection) is either lost forever or buried for the ages in my father’s storage unit from when he moved house. I’m hoping to go on some sort of archeological expedition through that unit at some point or another, but for now, this recreation is what we’ve got to work with.


For fudge:
2 Tablespoons butter
1 1/2 c. chocolate chips
1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk

For brownie:
1/2 c. butter
2 c. packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 Tablespoons milk
2 eggs
2 c. all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 c. coconut


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a saucepan, combine 2 Tablespoons butter and chocolate chips in a saucepan, stirring regularly so it doesn’t burn. Melt completely. Mix in sweetened condensed milk. Set fudge mixture aside to cool.

In another, large saucepan, melt 1/2 c. butter, and remove from heat. Mix in brown sugar, vanilla, and milk. Mix in eggs. Stir in remaining ingredients.

Pour half of the blondie batter into a greased and floured 9x13 glass pan. Smooth the fudge in a layer, and cover with the remaining blondie batter.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.


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

"sneak-back-in-to-the-kitchen-at-2- a.m.-for-seconds"

Well, I suppose the momentous first post in a blog should have some sort of grand gesture first post, the "WHO I AM!" and "WHAT I COOK!" and, god forbid, perhaps even a "WHY THIS MATTERS IN MY LIFE (and yours)!"
Or at least some sort of mission statement.
Ah well. That's not to be, although I suppose it will all work itself out in the long run. If I waited forever for the perfect first post, I would be waiting until the internet itself is passé. For now, I have one momentous thing for any readers potentially stumbling across this little lonely, wind-swept site: the most delicious, moist, sneak-back-in-to-the-kitchen-at-2-a.m.-for-seconds banana bread I've ever consumed. (And that includes the ones that didn't come from my own kitchen).


Banana Bread (loaded full of things)
It's based off of an Emeril Lagasse recipe (eek, I know, but I swear I won't start saying "bam!", ever, in this post, or in outside physical life). I changed the "shortening" to butter, because I'm of the rather popular opinion that no truly good baked good can be created with vegetable shortening (with the possible exception of pie crusts), nixed the macadamia nuts, and added in loads of other things.
It's the result of a few years worth of experimentation, and I'm pretty sure it would be just as good with different add-in types. Change the nut, add more or less, do what you will. I thought to sprinkle the top with demerara sugar, but managed to forget by the time I stuck it in the oven.

1/2 c. butter
1 c. sugar
2 eggs
1 heaping c. banana
1 tspn. baking soda
1/2 tspn. salt
1 1/4 c. flour
1/2 tspn cinnamon
1/3 c. walnuts (or to taste)
1/3 c. finely chopped candied ginger (or to taste)
1/2 c. chocolate chips (or to taste)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, with electric mixer or very thoroughly by hand. Add the bananas and mix well. Add the baking soda, salt, flour, and cinnamon. Fold in walnuts, candied ginger, and chocolate chips. Dough will be sticky.

Pour into a 9x9 glass pan and bake for around 30 minutes, until it's browned and set.

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