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.

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.

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.

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.

Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers

Please go here

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.