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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.