The End of a Mad Month

May is called "Birthday Month" at my house, because — well, because I say so. My birthday is on the 2nd, and I usually manage to squeeze out every good wish and trinket and restaurant meal until the bitter end.
This month ended up being "Car Month," though, because Cranky needed a new car (read all about it on his blog) — and he drove me nuts for four solid weeks, test driving, comparing, gabbing with salesmen, surfing the auto sites on the Web.
We ended up with a good selection, one that satisfies both our needs. I'm happy with it, and he is too. We didn't actually acquire it until just a few days ago, though, so "Birthday Month" was a bit eclipsed.
Oh, then it was also "Eat Local Month." Remind me never to take on a strict regimen during "Birthday Month" again. Not that I minded bowls of cherries, artichokes with homemade mayonnaise, salmon with Japanese-style pressed pickles and rice... But it was a little difficult to go out for meals (I never did get a little dessert with a candle in it).
Well. Except for today. We decided to make the most of the last day of the (Birthday-Car-Eat Local) month by having lunch on the deck of a restaurant that does make an effort to use locally sourced foods.
Best I can report to you: Creamy soup made from Full Belly Farms carrots. Delicious.
Let's not talk about the rest of the meal.
(And still no candle.)
I'm not mad.
I'm just glad the month is over.

Playing Catch Up

Howdy from the Circle-
Dot-K Ranch, here in Ketchup, Idaho.
In response to two avid readers (oh, I've got a huge base, people), I'm going to talk about the ketchup I made yesterday.
I didn't use a recipe, though I'm sure you could find one on the Internet (a quick check turned up a few with — shudder — bell peppers added to the mix, along with gobs of sugar and spices... and then there was the one with added cornstarch!).
Here's what I did. Last summer I oven-roasted scads of tomatoes (quartered, tossed with good olive oil). When they had cooked down a bit (an hour and a half at about 400ºF, IIRC), I passed them through a food mill to remove the skins and seeds. I spooned the resulting sauce into freezer bags, and I've been picking them off ever since. Still got a few to go before real tomato season begins this summer.
So, my recipe would go like this:

1. Last summer, make some tomato sauce and freeze it.
2. Today, take out as much frozen tomato sauce as you think you'll want (I only made about four or five tablespoons of ketchup, so I guess I used a half cup or less).
3. Put the tomato sauce into a saucepan with some honey to taste, along with salt and just a few semi-hot red chile flakes. Don't forget to throw in a fresh laurel leaf (see, this is where it gets all wonky, because you don't have a Greek laurel tree on your patio like I do), and a tiny peeled, cracked clove of garlic. Oh, and a little splash of nice vinegar. (These quantities, though terribly vague, are for that small dab I ended up with.)
4. Cook it all down very gently, probably no longer than 30 minutes, tasting and adjusting flavors once in a while (you really can't resist, but try and save some for the burgers, now, willya?).
5. This recipe is the Eat Local Challenge 100-mile version. If you want to use dried, imported spices, by all means... go ahead. I find the fresh laurel leaf adds all the exotic, aromatic flavor I want.

See how simple it is? See why I'm not being specific about quantities?
And oh, boy. It is tasty. The tomato flavor really comes through, it's so fresh. I really wouldn't want to muck it up with cloves and brown sugar and long, long boiling.
But I couldn't resist putting it in one of those squirt bottles. Strictly for photographic purposes, you understand.

Obligatory Picnic Food

We wanted hamburgers, dammit, but we were not allowed hamburger buns on this local diet. I have whole-wheat flour; in fact I made lumpy, leaden whole-wheat hot dog buns last August (with yeast). This time — no yeast; not local.
I was being perhaps unnecessarily zealous, making sure everything on the plate came from within 100 miles of Santa Venetia. Well, zealous sounds un-fun; we were having wa-a-ay fun.
So: A little leftover cooked rice. Some yogurt. A blender. I mixed these naive, comforting ingredients with a pinch of salt and a small handful of that wheat flour, and let it sit on the counter until the batter was bubbly. For good measure, I then tossed in an egg, and more wheat flour to absorb the extra squishiness. It sat a little while longer.
When Cranky got the griddle greased and hot and the burgers were nearing beautiful, pinky, juicy perfection, I poured four rounds of this funny, tender batter in my own buttered skillet. Yup. Pancakes. What the hey. They made fine "bookends" for our burgers, even if they kind of fell apart. The flavor was delightful, and I saved enough batter to fry up two more tomorrow, to eat with honey and butter.
So: Just so you know. The ketchup was homemade with local tomato sauce, honey, salt, chile flakes, garlic and a laurel leaf. I'm not sure I'll ever go back to commercial ketchup, it was so good and easy. And it doesn't have that galling clove oil flavor.
Also on the burger: griddled local onions.
Also on the plate (not shown): local coleslaw with homemade mayonnaise, yogurt, honey, blue cheese, salt and chile flakes and a squirt of vinegar.
I am SO tired of talking about local food.
But I am not tired of eating it.

Coloring Inside the Lines

Cranky teases me for my "plating" technique.
I have no technique. I lack the "insouciant" gene for artful scattering, so I have to resort to kindergartenesque concentric circles, with maybe a blob of main dish in the middle of the plate and radiating garnishes surrounding it.
Cranky calls it "anal." I call it "rectal...linear."
Anyway, the joke's on Cranky (or maybe he was spoofing on himself).
He served last night's light supper on a fondue dish, the kind you use for beef fondue boiled in oil and dipped into one of several sauces. See those five slots? Five sauces (think something ketchupy, something mustardy, something pesto-y, something — oh, I don't know, something 70's-ish). See the larger space where the cheese is? That's where you'd pile your raw beef, awaiting a blistering bath in the bubbling Wesson.
You'd forget how hot that long metal fork would get in the sizzling oil, and sometimes you'd accidentally shove the meat straight into your mouth, without transfering it to your "polite" fork. Burning your lips in the process... or so I've heard.
My mom gave me her old set of six gorgeous fondue dishes, of which this is one. We like to use the divided plate for a variety of presentations.
And so, last night Cranky stayed inside the lines.
Hah. Plating technique, my eye!
See, Cranky? Sometimes neat is neat.

Thirteen Spoons

Is this unlucky? A dish drainer full of 13 just-washed wooden spoons.
I have a lot of wooden spoons, as you can see. But there was only one clean one left in the pitcher I store them in beside the stove. So I figured I'd better get me a soapy sponge and some elbow grease.
Eating locally has meant cooking locally, a lot.
Cranky and I have only eaten two restaurant meals this whole month. We've patronized places we know to support local, sustainable foods, but each time we were presented with menus on the skimpy side of local. I had a grilled local sardine sandwich at Fish (as of last Wednesday they seem to have lost their Web domain to someone who likes monkeys...?), but of course, the wheat in the bread was not local.
Last night I finally caught up with my much-delayed birthday dinner at Poggio , but the only local item I could spot on the menu was a local endives salad. It was OK. It had walnuts (which certainly could have been local) and dried figs (ditto).
Main courses were less successful. We went totally off the diet with desserts (sugar). I loved my panna cotta. Way too rich. Draped with sliced strawberries. Little flecks of vanilla seeds... Mm.
However. We'd rather eat at home. We like our own food better.
Hence, the thirteen spoons. I think that's lucky.
They're clean now, so I'd better get in the kitchen and start messing around.

Barbary Coast Kitchen VI

I made Joe’s Special yesterday, and I did not serve it on a blue plate.
It is not Blue Plate Special, it is Joe’s Special, the San Francisco Treat.
San Francisco has a lot of restaurants named Joe’s (and there are plenty more in the outlying counties, including Marin Joe’s, down the road from me). I don’t know how, or whether, they are related.
But you can bet they all have Joe’s Special on their menus.
Theories abound on the origin of Joe’s Special: it was invented to feed hungry miners during the gold rush; it was a late-night concoction favored by jazz musicians after the dance halls closed for the evening in the 1920s; it was a… who knows? Who cares?
What we do know is that Joe’s Special is eggs, hamburger, onions and spinach, cooked in a skillet with seasonings and served with a glass of house red. And no fancy stemware, mind you; it has to be a juice glass or a milk glass, filled to the brim with plonk. You won’t want a refill.
You probably won’t want seconds on Joe’s Special either, because it’s a manly, hefty, meaty dish served in large portions.
Unless you eat at Cookiecrumb’s house, where it is an ethereal, sweet, locally sourced, beautiful blend.
On Tuesday I praised the recipes of Passionate Eater, and after making her fried rice dish the other day, I learned something.
Well, I attribute this lesson also to something Cranky made not long ago: A skillet melange of asparagus, mushrooms, onions and eggs. He cooked it all in one dish, the way Joe’s Special is traditionally made, and the asparagus oozed out its green liquid, which the eggs absorbed, preventing them from setting properly — and turning them a sickly shade of khaki.
Passionate Eater’s fried rice recipe calls for cooking the beaten eggs first, omelet style, and then setting it aside while you finish building the dish. At the last minute you add back the egg, breaking it up and stirring it through. Beautiful.
So for yesterday’s Joe’s Special, I scrambled my eggs first and set them aside while I fried the hamburger until it was crumbly and still a little bit pink.
The meat came out of the skillet, a bit of fat was poured off, and in went the onions and mushrooms. (Oh. Mushrooms. Yes, they are an acceptable embellishment on ordinary Joe’s, which makes the dish Special Joe’s Special.)
When they were all but done, I put the meat back in and tossed in a few handfuls of roughly hacked raw spinach. Lid on, steam until tender. Lid off, throw in the pristine eggs. Heat for a minute, stirring to get every ingredient flung about equally, and ohmygod, the world’s most beautiful nouveau Joe’s Special.
I call it Not Your Average Joe’s.

Seasoning notes: I’m still playing Eat Locally this month, so aside from a pinch of possibly local salt, I used local chile flakes and a fresh laurel leaf from my tree. The leaf adds so much: greenness, piney-ness, allspicey-ness… It’s elusive and very good. (Cook the meat with the leaf but don’t chicken out and remove it just because the meat becomes so perfumed; let it go back into the skillet with the mushrooms, etc., and then taste for flavor.)

Barbary Coast Kitchen V

A century ago, San Francisco had a thriving Chinese community.
Quick, name two Chinese dishes from that era.
Right, 1) chop suey and 2) chow mein.
Of course, the cuisine at that time was certainly more varied, and more authentic — chop suey and chow mein were even then regarded as American inventions.
Still. Doesn't make them any less tasty, authentic or not, as long as they're made well.
What the hey. Maybe those Sino-American concoctions were a case of "make do with what you have on hand." I'm told "chop suey" translates as "odds and ends."
What I had on hand was some rice, eggs, vegetables, a little leftover pork and seasonings.
Well, that surely adds up to fried rice. Or as my blog pal Passionate Eater calls it, "the resting place for retired vegetables." (She's only joking a little; the post featuring her recipe was prompted by an upcoming trip and a need to clean out the fridge.)
I gather that eggs were fairly expensive in early San Francisco, so perhaps this isn't a perfect example of Barbary Coast cooking. But, see, it's what I had on hand. And since a previous recipe (scroll down) of Passionate Eater's had turned out so good, I was willing to give this great cook and blogger another go.
I embellished: added more vegetables (peas and mushrooms) and a bit of meat. But other than that, I followed her ingredients and technique and it came out superb. Sweet, light, ungreasy, unsalty — unlike restaurant fried rice, where they probably are cleaning out their refrigerators. (A commenter on PE alluded to restaurants possibly even using "leftovers"; yikes, you mean food diners didn't finish?)
I know I said I wasn't going to bother you with local boasts anymore, but other than the soy sauce, fish sauce and sesame oil, it was local.
And goooood.

Cross Salad Dressing

Did you grow up with a bottle of salad dressing on the dinner table? Maybe even more than one bottle?
Excuse me, I have lots of salad dressing rants in me. Let me try to organize my thoughts.
When I was a kid, my mom used Good Seasons dressings (“Italian,” I think) that came dehydrated in foil packets. When you bought your first packet, it was rubber-banded to a curvy, empty, glass bottle with a green plastic snap-on lid. The bottle had markings on the side telling you how much water, vinegar and “salad oil” to add to the powdered ingredients. Cap it, shake it, and velò, you had a nice, golden liquid with little onion bits, black pepper, and tiny flecks of something red (probably bell pepper).
It looked like something. And you could be reasonably sure the ingredients were mostly benign. It tasted OK. Salty, probably too salty. Not horribly fake, though.
(By the way, have you heard the rumor that Col. Sanders’ secret 11 herbs and spices are the same 11 herbs and spices found in Good Seasons? Yeah, and that his recipe was most likely made with packets of dehydrated dressing.)
My mom would then pour a little of the dressing over the salad in a nice bowl, toss it, and then either put portions on our plates or pass the bowl around to the family.
No bottle of dressing on the table.
The leftover dressing would go into the fridge, where it would separate into geologic layers of chunky bits on the bottom, vinegar-water next up, and oil on the top. Shake it up again, and presto.
We did buy a commercial bottle of “French” dressing from time to time, a throat-burning, ghastly orange blend of salt and sugar (and mayonnaise, ketchup and paprika, I presume), that we were allowed to pour over wedges of iceberg lettuce... once in a while. It never separated in the fridge.
Cranky’s mom tried Good Seasons packets too. She mixed up a batch or two, but then decided the cool bottle with the snap-on lid was all she needed to make her own dressing. Which consisted, Cranky recalls, of nothing more than oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Plus, in a dashing gourmet touch, one clove of garlic rolling around in the bottom of the bottle. Cranky suspects it was the same clove of garlic for a long, long time. She was a frugal lady.
But again, no bottle of dressing on the table.
At this point, I can’t decide where to go with my rant.
Well, let’s go with bottles on the table. See, I think the cook should be responsible for the salad, including dressing it to his or her taste.
But what’s really going on with the bottles on the table is that each diner wants a different flavor of dressing, so out come the Ranch, the Thousand Island, the the increasingly diverse varieties of Honey-Poppyseed, Chipotle-Cheddar (honest), Dijon this-and-that, Three-Cheese Balsamic Vinaigrette, and – blow me down – there’s actually a dressing out there called “Spinach Salad.”
Now you’ve got a cluttered table.
Worse, you’ve got a cluttered refrigerator. Bottle after bottle of sugary goop, mixed with surreal food starches so the ingredients stay emulsified and don’t separate into layers (and oh, such mouth-feel). Gummy bottle caps. Drippy shelves.
Not to mention the fact that by pouring on the dressing individually at the table, you’ve surely added too much glop to your greens.
But wait! You don’t have to pour on your dressing anymore. Wish-Bone has introduced Salad Spritzers, which is sort of like throat spray for your arugula, which sounds a little too much like "gargle" in this sentence. Press the button, and you’ve got particles of high-fructose corn syrup, xanthan gum and soybean oil flying around your plate (and table, and floor…). Oh well, at least you have portion control.
OK, I’m ready to shut up. Here’s where I’m going with this rant:
Make your own dressings! They will be fresh, flavored the way you want, in manageable sizes so you can use them up and move on to new concoctions without having a cluttered fridge. Start simply if you are timid. I use a little jar with a tight-fitting lid to shake my dressings. I don’t go much beyond simple vinaigrettes myself, but that’s what I like best.
I can’t believe how many recipes I come across that promise to produce mouthwatering results – only to list bottled vinaigrette as one of the ingredients. Cucumber dressing? I don’t even know what that is. But it’s OK, the recipe author says I can substitute poppyseed. Poppyseed what? Muffins?
It turns out I’m not the only one ranting about salad dressings this spring. I had been collecting my thoughts for a week or so when I came across Hen Waller’s Salad Dressing Ramble from May 15; NPR’s Kitchen Window tackled the subject last month, to name two others.
Must be the nice weather.

Will It Float?

As long the spring peas are abundant, I'm going to try eating them every which way. We've already had peas with chopped hard-cooked eggs and potatoes. We've had a pea omelet. On our list in the near future is a dish of fried rice with peas, carrots, mushrooms and onions.
Yesterday we had fresh pea soup. None of that Andersen's stuff, no sir.
But I seem to have made a few missteps along the way.
Not that the final product wasn't tasty. Oh. No, it was good.
It was made from a bunch of hulled peas, cooked in thawed vegetable stock along with a bit of spring onion that had been sauteed in butter and salt. (My vegetable stocks have been so deeply flavorful lately because I'm using lots of herbs.) Since I intended to serve the soup chilled, I waited until the end of cooking to add a good glug of buttermilk (didn't want it to separate due to the heat). This all went into the blender.
But the soup wasn't as thick as I would have liked, so I cooked a couple of small potatoes and pureed them with the pea soup mixture.
Well. Then I didn't think the soup had a pronounced enough pea flavor.
D'oh! I should have saved the pea pods and given them a good simmer in the vegetable stock first! Oh, well, next time.
So as a solution, I cooked up another handful of peas to use as garnish on the chilled pea soup.
They sank .

Any Idea What These Are?

They are slices of something that was grown more than 100 miles from my home, although they can also be grown closer. (In fact, just the other day I came across a very, very local version of it in a so-called Biblical Garden, a sort of exhibition garden of various species, about five minutes' walk from my home.)
They make irresistibly tart, crunchy snacks.
They are in slices because they are going into the freezer until June.

A Thought for These Times

Leave the Netz Alone

Internet Neutrality. It means you, and I, and that rich old scumbag CEO, have equal access to the Internet.
I'm just a little pooper. I shouldn't have to be forced to use slower access just because I'm not a fat cat. I shouldn't have to pay for what has proven, as a free medium, to be brilliantly successful for all classes of people. I will not be ripping anyone off if I continue to blog for free.
But I might be forced to pay for good access, or be consigned to the slow lane. I might even be dropped from Internet service providers.
Nuh-uh. Not for me.
Go take a look, get involved.
Thank you.

Local, Yadda Yadda, Shut Up

At the risk of sounding like another cheese sandwich blogger, I have to talk about the meal I had yesterday, composed entirely of ingredients that came from within 100 miles of my home.
OK, first, the rice. It's actually sushi rice, grown by Lundberg Family Farms. It was steamed (came out a little too soft; mental note for next time) and tossed with a mixture of sake, honey and my own homemade cider vinegar.
Atop the rice I placed a slab of pan-fried pristine local salmon that had been briefly marinated in a mixture of the same ingredients I tossed the rice with.
Surrounding the salmon, I strewed super-thin slices of local carrot and cucumber . The veggies had been tossed with salt (Diamond; I know it's Cargill, but it's local) and pressed in a Japanese pickle maker.
Final touch: The dish was sprinkled with chile flakes, and seaweed flakes that I made by whirling a couple of toasted, dried sprigs of nori in a spice grinder.
OK, I give you my word that as of now I will stop yammering about local food.

Pretty as a Picture

H A P P Y    M O T H E R ' S    D A Y
My mom, who painted this awesome crystal bowl of grapes (yeah, that's a watercolor, not a photo), has been having problems with her vision for nearly a year now. Worsening cataracts, botched lens surgery... I won't go into any details, but she recently had a high-tech remedial operation done.
And it seems to be working!
Yesterday she took the car out for a solo drive, her first since August.
Her eyesight is getting better by the day.
So, Mom... I'll be expecting more food paintings soon. This is the last one of yours I have.
For now.

Forget Recipes

If you're eating locally, as Cranky and I have been doing this month, it's not always easy to pick out a dish from a cookbook and try to make it from what's available within a 100-mile radius.
No sukiyaki for me, in other words — tofu, shirataki, soy sauce are off limits. No spaghetti carbonara, even if I seldom use a recipe for it — wheat pasta is off limits (sadly, because everything else in the recipe is available within my region).
No scones.
No chicken satay with peanut sauce.
No paella.
Ah, so what.
We're eating à la availabilité.
I'm constantly thrilled by how good food can be when you didn't really choose in advance what you'd want to be eating. When you just take inventory, let the brain do a little arithmetic, and come up with possibilities. Brilliant possibilities, recipes be damned.
What's in the larder that's local? Well today, it was a sack of mushrooms, some frozen roasted tomatoes, a little half & half, some spring onion, butter, red wine, chile flakes. Salt. (Hah! Local!) On the patio, bay leaves and thyme.
Therefore, tomato soup.
I've never had this soup before, but I might have it again.
Then again, I might not. It was a product of provisions.

Seasoning note: I accidentally let the butter go brown while I was slicing the mushrooms, but I pulled it off the heat in time to save it from burning. Oh, wow. What a flavor enhancer. I did add a little fresh butter to sauté the mushrooms in, but in the finished soup I could really taste the sweet, nutty flavor of the brown butter. Recommended.

Still a Bum

This picture is from last year. Bean Sprout in the Tomato Forest. I grew six tomato plants in containers last summer, set atop wheeled platforms so we could chase the sunshine as it roved across the patio.
I got my tomatoes sometime in March, I think, and I had a couple of ripe cherry tomatoes by mid-June. I was so impressed with myself, I signed up to enter tomatoes in the 2006 Marin County Fair. (We had visited the agricultural exhibit last July — nary a ripe 'mater in the house.)
But then this year it rained and rained and rained. I decided not to plant tomatoes at all.
One reason was, of course, that they'd be going into dirt so late that I wouldn't be able to get all braggy at the fair.
Another reason was that growing tomatoes in a hot climate in the summer requires a lot of watering. I know you're supposed to "dry farm" your tomatoes, give them a little discipline... But in my patio last August, if those six plants didn't get a drink every day, they were dust... And this year, Cranky and I decided we'd like to be free for a little traveling with the poochster, possibly even in August.
So it started to look like I might not be a tomato ranchin' bum after all.
Until a week ago at the farmers' market. We were cruising for new herb plants to replace some tired, depleted ones we've been urging along for years (and I'll bet I'm the only person you've ever heard of who can accidentally kill a mint plant — I blame the weather, actually).
There it was. A healthy little plant, buds ready to pop into bloom. It's called "Patio Tomato," said the lovely young woman selling tender nursery babies. It's compact.
I succumbed.
But only one plant this year.
And if we decide to travel, Cranky says he'll put the plant in the car and take it with us.

Salt Day!!

Today I used Fleur de Sel de Marin County for the first time on some food.
A tomato.
Yeah, a hothouse tomato, and it was a bit watery and faint of flavor.
The interesting discovery, though, was that the salt was a bit watery. Flavor was just fine, though: Sodium Chloride.
Apparently when I boiled down the sea water, stopping just short of absolute dehydration (everybody likes a slightly moist salt, right?), I left in enough moisture that the salt sort of sludged into a paste over time. The first day it was flaky and beautiful; now, after several weeks in a tightly capped jar, it's wet.
I'm not sure how to restore it to a sprinkleable state. I've left the open jar out on the counter, hoping some of the wetness will evaporate, but I'm a little afraid I'm going to end up with a solid salt lick. I'm still learning.
Anyway.
As for today's meal, I simply ended up spreading the salt on the tomato halves with a knife. Lightly, at first. Then I realized I really liked what I was eating, so I spread a little more on. (I'm guessing I used 1/8 teaspoon total, maybe a touch more.)
About five minutes after I ate the tomato I thought I detected some chemical flavors in my mouth. Could the sea water off the shore of Marin County have been so contaminated that I was tasting boiled-down esters and enols and ethanes and batteries and tires?
Yikes.
But I'm your diligent reporter. I took another taste of the salt, straight from the jar, just to find out.
Ow. It was really sharp, salty, you might even say acrid. For all of about a millisecond. (And I daresay that if you put a dab of any salt right on your tongue, you'd experience the same thing.)
Then, immediately, my mouth felt fresh! Clean. Salty, yeah, but not scary.
I'm sitting here writing, and it's been about ten minutes since I tasted the salt straight from the jar. Verdict: Clean.
So, I'm going to call this a success.
Until I find I have to go chisel salt chunks out of a jar tomorrow.

Barbary Coast Kitchen IV

It pays, when you're restricting your diet to local food, to have preserved items on hand.
I'm no great canner, but I do have a lot of local tomato sauce frozen in plastic bags (fill one-qt. bags with about two cups of sauce, freeze 'em flat, stack 'em — I go the added mile of laying four or five bags inside a large freezer zipper bag, for protection against freezer flavor).
A week ago at the farmers' market, we talked to a fishmonger who said the Dungeness crabs from Half Moon Bay are almost finished for the season, so last Sunday we made sure to get ourselves some.
See where this is going? Tomato sauce... Dungeness crab... Cioppino!
Oh, but I didn't want to be dipping my manicure into a bowl of hot soup, struggling with slippery, shell-y crustaceans.* So we bought crabmeat and simply skipped the other usual suspects in this venerable North Beach recipe (clams, shrimp). We didn't even add any fish. Just a bowl of tomato sauce and crab.
WITH: Spring onions, olive oil, diced carrots (we pretended they were the clams), salt, chile powder, white wine, a bay leaf, a lemon leaf, a short length of wild fennel stem, and the tips of some oil-roasted asparagus (we pretended they were the shrimp).
Notes on seasoning: Lemon leaves! Who knew? I just learned about it in this month's Saveur. Use fresh, young ones and monitor your food for flavor. Our soup got lemony really fast. The fennel stem may need to be yanked out soon, too, especially if you are making soup for Cranky.

*I'm lying, of course. Cookiecrumb does not have a manicure.

Happy Blogday to Me

Wow. A whole year.
I never imagined it would be so much fun.
For sure, I never imagined I'd ever get any readers, other than the ones I would have to beg (or pay) to drop by. My mom and dad. My brother once in a while.
Huge props to Sam at Becks & Posh, though, for hosting my coming out party at her blog, as she has with so many other Bay Area food bloggers. I got a few tentative sniffs from folks that day as a result of her generous announcement (I remember Dr. Biggles leaving a comment for me that there wasn't enough meat, but ever since then, he and I have been pals. Meat or no.)
And then it just kept growing.
OMG! I'm a food blogger! People actually read this crap now and then.
I'm not an A-list blogger, and I'm not trying to be one. I'm not hugely popular. I'm just me.
But when I signed up for the Eat Local Challenge last year, I met more and more food bloggers, and we've mostly kept in touch ever since, either in person or completely cybernetically. That was really neat. I suspect that my idiotic quest for local salt vaulted me into some renown. OK. I can live with that. (But I've seriously *got* to find another prank to attempt!)
I've visited bloggers all over the world, and I've left comments for them. And it occasionally results in them paying a visit to I'm Mad and I Eat, which is cool.
There are so many other food bloggers I don't regularly visit yet, and of course, there are new bloggers every day. I've got to get out there.
It's just an amazing world.
Are you having as much fun as I am?

Smoothies Can Wait

Look: President Bush's approval rating slid to 31% today, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll. He dropped three points in a single week.
Oh, sure, the margin of error is +/- 3 points... but that could mean he's down as low as 28%.
His disapproval rating, a stronger indicator of voters' opinions, is at a record 65%.
I like this number: Liberals gave him an approval rating of 7%! (And what are they smoking?)
Mmm! What's for supper?

Taking It Easy

When the raw ingredients are this good, it's hard to go messing with them any more than you have to.
Last night, our supper was mushrooms. A good, filling, heaping bowl of cut-up mushrooms, sauteed in butter. Deeply satisfying.
Lunch (brunch, actually, by the clock) was a strawberry smoothie. We used up some odds and ends of dairy from the fridge (yogurt, half & half, buttermilk) and spun a whole basket of berries in the blender with some ice and a little honey. [Insert Homer Simpson snorfing noises here.]
I shouldn't be surprised, but it's interesting to notice that as I consume a diet of strictly local food, my cooking has sort of reverted to plain, simple hippie food.
A smoothie? I don't drink smoothies!
But it was good!
(Wait. Maybe I do drink smoothies. Now!)

Barbary Coast Kitchen III

For the third installment of our "eating local, historically" month, Cranky whipped up a skilletful of Hangtown Fry.
Hangtown is the old Forty-Niners' name for what is now Placerville (less than 100 miles from here, which is amusing, but beside the point). The story goes that a miner got lucky during the Gold Rush and decided to splurge on dinner. He asked the waiter what were the most expensive items on the menu. Eggs and oysters, as it turned out. (And I suspect the oysters were canned and trucked in from back east.) "OK, make me something with those," said the miner.
Another version has the waiter adding bacon to the list of expensive comestibles, and you'll see recipes for Hangtown Fry topped with crumbled bacon.
We added a little chopped spinach to the eggs before they went into the pan, just because it sounded pretty (and nutritious).
It was good.
But it was not expensive.
Almost forgot to take a picture.

Sources: Oysters from Tomales Bay, CA, purchased at Whole Foods. Spinach and spring onion from Star Route Farms, Marin County, CA. Eggs from Triple T Ranch, Santa Rosa, CA. Bacon from Black Sheep Farm, Occidental, CA. Oysters were dusted with whole-wheat flour from Full Belly Farm, Guinda, CA, and fried in bacon fat.

Par-ta-a-ay!

I'm sorry. The Eat Local Challenge is proving so easy because of Northern California's bounty. I'm not going to brag anymore about my meals. (But since it's hard to tell from this picture, that's a stuffed bell pepper.)
If I do something interesting, like wild and crazy foraging or growing my own cacao plant, maybe I'll talk about that.
Well, I do just want to boast that we made sangria from 100% local ingredients.
Happy Cinco.
So, hey, how about CIA Director Porter Goss resigning today after only a year and a half on the job? Stinky, nasty rumors surround him; maybe he thinks he can dodge a bullet.
Olé!

Barbary Coast Kitchen II

We have the luxury of buying local oysters from Tomales Bay. We have local milk and cream. We have local spring onions.
Honestly, as this month evolves, I'm feeling embarrassed about the bounty. Oh. But I shouldn't. Because this is exactly why I live in Marin County.
Look: My house (a condominium) costs a zillion times more than the average American abode. I'm not proud of that. You'd think it proves I'm wealthy, but in fact, it proves I'm poor — I'm spending way too much to live here.
My house is a 30-year-old townhouse with gutter leaks and foundation issues... and a really wacky homeowners' association board. Oof.
Yet. Here we are in an environment that allows Cranky and me to re-create a turn-of-the-century meal, Oyster Stew. Good old San Francisco dining from the Gaslight era.
So. Episode Two of the Barbary Coast Kitchen.
We procured Tomales Bay oysters (from Whole Foods market; so sue me). We got milk and half & half from Clover. We grated a local spring onion (forgot the provenance). Local chile powder. Salt (not talking). And we had the idea to beef up the stew with some local potatoes (again, forgot the provenance). OK, and a splish of local white wine.
It was "best ever," says Cranky.
Those ugly brown squares are, in fact, tasty whole-wheat crackers made from local flour. The flavor is similar to Wheat Thins, but I'm such a lousy baker, mine came out more like Wheat Thicks.

Serendipity

We're getting to the point of needing to re-provision for the Eat Local Challenge. Yesterday, after a thrilling birthday visit to an unnamed store (which left us both so buzzed we had to have a glass of (local) wine afterward), we stopped by one of the few stores that I know of in Marin County that carries incomparable St. Benoît yogurt.
The purpose of the yogurt was to mix with the mayonnaise I had made the day before. This would be used as a dip for local artichokes we had bought at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market over a week ago, when I wasn't even thinking about the ELC yet (OK, I'm lying, I was thinking about it).
I had made the mayonnaise with a very aromatic olive oil (the only local oil we have on hand at the moment). Have you ever heard potent olive oil described as having an artichoke perfume?
Well!
The yogurt-mayonnaise dip (nothing else added, nothing at all) was perfect with our artichokes. We had planned to eat only the leaves, and save the bottoms for another dish.
But it was so good. Stunningly good. We each devoured two whole artichokes, bottoms and all, sitting at the patio table making nonhuman sounds.
Nrngghfffmmgah!
Llmmnggrrmuh!

Sources: Wine from Kunde Estate, Sonoma, CA. Artichokes from Swanton Berry Farm, Davenport, CA. Yogurt from St. Benoît, Sonoma County, CA. Mayonnaise: oil from McEvoy, Petaluma, CA; egg from Triple T Ranch, Santa Rosa, CA; vinegar from juice I extracted from apples grown in Sebastopol, CA; salt from “Sonoma Salt,” an inscrutable source found online with no telling details.

It's My Birthday Too, Yeah!

This is my second Eat Local Challenge, and I can’t believe the difference between last year and this.
I already have so many locally sourced ingredients in my house, I didn’t have to buy a single new item to make last night’s dinner.
And what we made was delightfully silly. Beanie-Weenies.
You know: sliced hot dogs in a pot of “pork ‘n’ beans.”
Kid food.
Our wieners were leftover beef franks that have been knocking around in the freezer for far too long. We discovered them during the Ice Harvest, and saved them for May.
The beans are local, a variety called Red Nightfall. Very tender. They give off a lot of red into the cooking liquid, which was seriously, deliciously, importantly flavored with two fresh bay leaves. Wow. What a kick.
I pulled out the beans as soon as they were tender and added into the cooking liquid a little bit of frozen tomato sauce that I had put up last summer. Sweetened it with honey, spiced it with chile powder and salt, and thickened it with a teensy pinch of local whole-wheat flour. Added back the beans and the sliced franks.
Oh, and then we accompanied our camp-out meal with a coleslaw of shredded cabbage dressed with an impromptu mayonnaise: local olive oil (but this oil turns out to be way too flavorful for decent mayo; must shop around for a milder local oil), homemade cider vinegar, local egg, salt and chile powder.
Sounds like I’m bragging. I’m sorry. It was just so easy. Everything was on the premises, and it all came together.
What a goofy meal.
However: It is my birthday today, and we’re having dinner tonight in a restaurant. So I’ll be “unpure” for one meal, although the restaurant we have chosen does have its own produce garden.
Verdict so far: Fun.

Sources: Franks from Marin Sun Farms, Point Reyes Station, CA. Beans from Rancho Gordo, Napa, CA (grown in Sacramento Valley, I believe). Bay leaves from my patio. Tomatoes from Winters, CA. Honey from Marshall’s, American Canyon, CA (Marin County hives). Chile from Happy Quail Farms, East Palo Alto, CA. Salt from “Sonoma Salt,” an inscrutable source found online with no telling details. Flour from Full Belly Farm, Guinda, CA. Cabbage from Santa Rosa, CA. Oil from McEvoy, Petaluma, CA. Egg from Triple-T Ranch, Santa Rosa. Vinegar from juice I extracted from apples grown in Sebastopol, CA.

Let the Cardoons Begin!

It’s Day One of the Eat Local Challenge, and here in Cookiecrumb’s Playhouse, we have appointed a theme for our month: The Barbary Coast Kitchen.
We won’t be strict adherents to antique eating, but wherever possible or whenever it just seems like the right thing to do, we’re going to re-create menus, using local ingredients, from the Gaslight Era in San Francisco. Turn of the Century. Earthquake time. Native ranchos. Old Chinatown. Like that.
I know for certain that those who could afford to do so in San Francisco a hundred years ago loved dining on imported extravagances, like pineapples, terrapin, coconut. We’re not going to be doing that. We’re not going to be dressing in Edwardian costumes, either, belting out “Open your Golden Gate!”
In fact, we’re going to have a little fun with the recipes of yore, all the while delving into a historical tradition that will be fun to – uh – delve into.
Today we’ve taken a venerable dish, Celery Victor, and reinterpreted it as Cardoons Victor.
When Cranky took his first taste, he called it Cardoons Loser.
He said, “Let the cardoons end!”
Oddly, he kept nibbling and totally came around to it.
Celery Victor is a dish of celery boiled in broth and served cold with vinaigrette and (optionally) hard-boiled eggs, created by Chef Victor Hirtzler of San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel (he published a cookbook in 1910).
Cardoons look something like celery. There the similarity ends, however, because it turns out cardoons are molto bitter. I think I should have trimmed the leaves off before I simmered the stalks.
After my first couple of bites, I said, “This is like smoking a cigarette. No, it’s like eating a cigarette.”
But cardoons are related to artichokes, and once you get past the – well, we ended up calling it “sophisticated” – bitterness, there’s a lot to like.
I actually hit the “Mm” stage. Every time I’d take a bite, another “Mm” would erupt. Then I achieved the elusive “golden taste” that eating artichokes leaves in my mouth: a sweet, mysterious I-don’t-know-what.
Not sure I’m going to try cardoons again, though. Jeez, you buy a bunch the size of a Body Snatcher pod, trim it, cook it, and you end up with an appetizer. And I’ve learned that cardoons are considered a noxious pest – a weed – in Northern California because they spurt seeds so readily. (Wait. Weed? Foraging? Did somebody say foraging?)
Anyway. How do you like that rummage-sale celery plate the food's on?

Sources: Cardoons from Mariquita Farm, Watsonville, CA. Vegetable broth from my freezer, made from local stuff in 2005. Herbs from my patio. Olive oil from McEvoy, Petaluma, CA. Habanero flakes from Happy Quail Farms, East Palo Alto, CA. Egg from Triple T Ranch, Santa Rosa, CA. Vinegar from Kitchen Line, Sonoma, CA. Mustard from Tulocay’s, Napa Valley, CA. Salt… Well, let’s talk about the salt another time, shall we?