More Metablogging Musing

First, the payoff. Then I'll get around to the setup.
(I can't help it. I like to run the photos on top.)
So: The payoff is this gorgeous soft taco, made with fresh market vegetables.
The setup: I was reading a review of a Seattle restaurant yesterday on The Ethicurean, about some killer tacos stuffed with mashed potatoes. I thought how much I've been enjoying my own non-meat tacos, filled with only the purest, most local, entirely logical but not greasy-spoon-traditional, vegetables. Potatoes in tacos? Awesome.
It inspired me to make these for lunch today: poofy corn tortillas smeared with smooshed cooked peas mixed with feta and yogurt, topped with sauteed squash and onions.
I took a picture of my creation, only to gasp: "It looks like guacamole!"
Which reminded me that I had read, just two or three days ago, a food blog post about guacamole somewhere... and it had elicited a comment from a reader about fake guacamole made from peas. And I left a comment to that commenter. And now I can't remember what blog I was reading.
Which is all by way of announcing my conundrum: How do you keep track of comments you've left on other blogs?

Culture Collision

Downtown Novato is going through some pretty spastic growing pains these days, for a city that's already well over 100 years old. El Rancho de Novato started out as a Mexican land grant in 1839, and wasn't even incorporated as a "real" city until 1960.
I always thought of Novato just as that place on 101 you drive by real fast on your way north to Sonoma, past the funny refrigerated storage facility with the huge Van Gogh-esque mural of American presidents on its side (recently painted over, alas).
Then I moved to Marin County and came to think of Novato as a funky old town with a couple of outdated bars, surrounded by sprawls of housing developments — and a huge shopping center with a Costco on the other side of the freeway.
I am really not the person to make judgments about Novato and its permutations. I think Novato is great, but I don't live there.
I'll let Jennifer of The Novato Experiment be your chronicler of the progress this town has been making. Check in with her every now and then for updates.
You'll have to decide for yourself, though, whether you even think Novato {can/ought to/shouldn't/must/won't be able to} adapt to the growing demands of people who moved to Novato because it's the last place they could afford in Marin County, and who now expect local merchants to cater to their sophisticated tastes.
After lunch the other day at a nifty, manly new pub called Finnegan's, owned by a group of men and probably cheffed by men — good, smart food at half the price of a comparable San Francisco joint, with only a little tweaking still needed in the service department — I walked past a shop displaying these paper napkins in the window.
Hello? Is this not the 21st Century?
Well, they'd probably make a hilarious High Camp statement at a gay cocktail party.
I'm just not sure that party's happening in Novato. (But give me a call if it is... I'll bring the napkins.)

Tony Blair is in the Bay Area?

Lance Bass is Gay?

Metallica is Now Available on iTunes?

Floyd Landis was Doping?

I blame it all on the recent heat wave.
Here's hoping things return to normal soon.

Nah.

Oh, Damn. Oh Damn.

A year ago I had six tomato plants, and I was already eating the first ripe ones in June.
This year it rained for, oh let's see: EVER. And I didn't start my annual tomato crop until May.
And then we had an 11-day heatwave, on top of some strange disease that afflicted my lone plant this summer.
Now I've got tomato jerky.
Damn, damn, damn.

Baby Steps Back to Hot Meals

We're calling this one "Salad Soup." The weather is cooperating, allowing us to use the stove again, but we're still not interested in a big, steaming bowl of anything. So I calmed this dish down with cool green vegetables.
I wouldn't even be posting about it, but it came out so pretty, Cranky insisted on a photo.
It's a quasi-vegetarian version of pozole (I used chicken stock that had been simmered with fresh, empty pea pods). No meat chunks in this soup, but the heft comes from a can of rinsed white hominy. The flavor comes from onion, garlic, tomatillo and jalapeño.
We decorated the soup with cilantro, lettuce, cubed avocado, white cheese (feta and dry Jack), and a nice squeeze of lime.
It was surprisingly filling.
I think it put Cranky to sleep; I haven't heard a peep from him for the last 15 minutes or so.

Hot Enough to Cook an Egg

This egg wasn't cooked on the pavement, obviously, but it has been hot enough outdoors for a whole sidewalk of omelets.
Still. It's cooling off a bit (only reached the high 90s today; the answering machine at the AC repair shop said "Don't even dream of getting an appointment for the next few weeks"). Safe for us to return to the kitchen, a little at a time.
And therein lay Cranky's Crisis.
He is a natural egg cooker. He gets perfect yolks every time. His omelets never stick, they always turn beautifully and fold to hold luscious fillings. He knows his way around a frittata, and if he had any interest in shirred eggs, I'm sure he could shir with the best of them.
But look at the little gray-green ring on this egg wedge, between the yolk and the white.
"Can I eat this?" Cranky gasped. "Do you think it's all right?"
Yup. The Eggman has never before cooked a hard-cooked egg to the point of getting the little gray-green ring.
He's off his rhythm.
I'm crying.
Goo goo g'joob.

Are You Cool?

It's hotter than a habanero out there, and I'm not cool.
Oh, I'm struggling along all right indoors, temperature-wise, with a fan on and the shades pulled. The dog is doing fine sprawled on the tiled kitchen floor. We're gulping oceans of iced liquids.
But I'm not cool. As in "kewl."
I'm not an A-list blogger. I don't get the big hits on my site meter (and it doesn't bother me at all, so why on earth do I even have a site meter?).
I'm not a joiner, although from time to time I will play along with the latest meme.
I do love to have readers leave comments on my blog. And I enjoy reading other blogs and leaving comments.
Here in blogland, however, even though it has been a warm and welcoming community, I'm running up against the inevitable chilled-out status games. High school, all over again.
Apparently I'm not cool enough to have my comments replied to on some cool blogs. I've tried winningly, wittily, and without success, on one's guy's blog in particular, but he has never acknowledged me. He's not a hermit; I know for certain he hangs in person with other local food bloggers when conditions are favorable. Maybe I could have elbowed my way into the inner circle and made sure to be present when conditions are favorable; maybe not... but I'm not a joiner, so I don't know.
Except... I am a joiner. Sort of.
I've befriended many bloggers in real life, meat & veg-space, actual coordinate vector time. I really, really like them. They've become a whole new social world for me. For instance: The flowers in the above photo come from (wow, feel the love) the garden of the mother of a food-blogger friend, both of whom are out of town. I'm watering the plants while they're away, and it's a good 25-minute drive each way for me to do the favor. Which I'm very happy to do — good karma plus all the monstrous zucchini I can eat.
Then there are the doggie pix in the photo up there, included today specifically because some food bloggers like to participate in a meme called Weekend Dog Blogging. I'm not enough of a joiner to officially include links and tags, but I'm crazy about my dog. So he shows up every now and then, usually on weekends... which makes me a half-assed joiner.
But would I ever, in a million years, want to go congregate with bloggers in a very warm (not cool) city? Never in a million years; I've been to academic conferences (back when I was in academics), and they are one big high-school status game condensed into a few days. Will you get to hobnob with the keynote speaker? Or did you get stuck in the back row of a mobbed-out seminar? No thanks.
This isn't warmed-over sour grapes, not by a long shot. I'm still hot for blogging and bloggers, and a couple of frosty receptions aren't going to shut me down; maybe my cool quotient will even benefit from rubbing cold shoulders.
If you've made it this far reading, thanks for joining me on my lukewarm ruminations — even if you're not a joiner.
I'd love to hear your thoughts. That would be cool.

I'm Mad from the Heat and I Eat

The heat wave continues, and the kitchen continues to be neglected.
Pity, because I have some really nice, fresh produce in the fridge. Maybe I'll get to it tonight...
Today for some mad reason, Cranky and I decided it was pleasant to sit in the shade on the patio, as the temperature inched ever higher. There was a slight breeze with the gate open, and the aroma of newly irrigated garden plants nearly convinced us it was tolerable.
We were the oblivious frogs in the pot of slowly boiling water. It got hotter and hotter, and we sat and sat, persuading ourselves the weather was fine.
Fortunately something caused me to lurch out of my pot of boiling water, er, chaise longue, into the dark, not-quite-so-hot house, where I suddenly realized I was uncomfortable, hungry and maybe even crazy.
The air conditioner is not working — service call goes in Monday — so we had no choice but to escape to the nearest place with food and a refrigerated atmosphere: the mall.
We're talking cultural blight. Middle America. Piercing pavilions and tacky taffeta bridal salons. Photo parlors and B-boy baggy pants shops.
Food court.
Did I mention we were hungry?
Stupider things have happened.

Midday Meal for a Summer Bum

Just on this side of that there nandina hedge, you can almost make out Cranky, Bean Sprout and me enjoying another el fishco meal al fresco.
Despite the hefty cash-only pricetag, I'm really enjoying meals there. A few bucks for a vegetarian meal of coleslaw and a plate of fries doesn't hurt much most days, and every now and then a little splurge for piscine protein happily happens.
Surroundings are just right: picnic tables, boats, birds, dogs. Clientele is yuppies, sailors, bums like me.
Today's lunch was fish and chips. The fish — perfectly unidentifiable white fillet, tender and moist — is encased in batter that forms lava-lamp shapes once it's dropped into the deep fryer. The chips are hand-cut wedges (skin on) that become — er, well, tender and moist, just like the fish, in that fryer. Altogether perfect with a sploosh of malt vinegar.
Except that now, a few hours later, I'm still enjoying the esophageal flavor of "remembered" fried grease.
I don't blame the restaurant. I really am that delicate a digester.
Hey! Did Bush do anything really stupid today? Probably, but I'm just not seeing it in the news.
What a great day.

Iced Coffee, Take 2

Holy smoke, I think I did dive in.
We only reached the mid-80s today. But I'm not turning on the heat-making appliances. No.
I think a supper of cold melons will be just fine.

I Am Not Cooking in This Heat

I am drinking a lot of cold beverages, however.
That is a perfect milk droplet on the rim of this iced coffee. Milk counts as food, right?
So I'm being fed.
No problem.

How Does My Garden Grow?

Not well. I'm not much of a tomato-ranchin' bum this year.
This is a close-up of "Patio" tomatoes in a pot on the (duh!) patio.
I have had to trim off some ugly, deathy leaves that were covered with a brown, mildewy powder. I'm no horticulturist, but I blame the tree that died over the past year just outside the patio gate, dropping its diseased (yet oddly gorgeous) leaves into all my suburban agricultural endeavors.
There are eight tomatoes in the early stages of ripening, and then there is a petite cluster of new, healthy green leaves at the base of the plant. I wish them well, but at this rate it will be January before they reach maturity. (Stranger things have happened.)
The way things are going, it will still be warm and balmy in January anyway.
Man, it's hot!
Is anybody else suffering in the heat?

Tomatoes: Thaw 'Em If You Got 'Em

Last year I went nuts making roasted tomato sauce, ladling it into freezer bags, stacking them in our tiny fridge-top freezer compartment, and waiting for the winter doldrums to set in.
You know. Those doldrums that can only be satisfied by a taste of summer. Whip out a bag of sweet-acidic red nostalgia, melt it into a kettle with some dreary root vegetables, and grasp at fleeting memories of late sunsets, skeeters over the grass, and the flavor of August in your mouth.
Well, it did happen a few times. I made a couple of pots of temporally incongruous minestrone soup, doling out miserly dollops of my precious tomato elixer. I thawed a sack or two for some long-braised meats, long-forgotten now. I even wallowed in a few self-indulgent bowls of tomato soup, made once with cream, next time without (stunningly deep and pure) and then one more time with cream (or yogurt or something).
But I'm not kidding when I tell you we've only used about two-thirds of the tomato sauce I preserved.
And I'm not kidding when I tell you I'm already buying fresh tomatoes at the market for only $2 a pound. I had a plate of sliced 'maters last night, drenched with stellar olive oil and showered with sea salt. Heaven.
Furthermore, I'm not kidding when I tell you I'm already planning on roasting up more batches of nature's bounty in a few months, when the price drifts downward to about a buck a pound for ridiculously ripe, need-to-be-used-NOW tomatoes of all varieties: sweet, dark, wet, tart, thick, cracked, big, small...
Between now and August, though, I've got a few more bags of last year's bounty awaiting a quick thaw, and I plan to make quick work of them.
Today's lunch was my template for many lunches to come: A sack of thawed tomatoes. A splash of cucumber juice. Some chopped peppers, onions, peasant bread... Oh, you know the drill. You've memorized your own favorite recipe for gazpacho; you don't need to hear mine.
Well, I must persuade you that the concentrated flavor of slightly roasted tomatoes makes the best damn gazpacho, and I recommend it.
Now, if I can just eke out those few remaining sacks of tomato sauce until I'm ready to roast again...
UPDATE: Not that this soup could ever compete with the "George Clooney of tomato soups."

I Can't Make This Stuff Up

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (CNN) — Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected a suggestion from U.S. President George W. Bush that his country should emulate democracy in Iraq.

Putin had the presence of mind to reply, amidst gales of laughter, that "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly."
Hell, I'm not even enjoying the kind we have here in the U.S. these days (and you didn't hear W recommending that, did you?).
Our president is a buffoon.
I'm mad.
I'm gonna go eat something.

A Brief History of Bastille Day

The people have no bread.










Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!











Brioche?




















Aux barricades!












Bien. Liberté, égalité, et baguettes pour tout.







(Fin.)

A Nice Shrimp Bisque

What to order when you find yourself in a steakhouse, and you're not in the mood for steak?
Soup. Especially if the chef of said steakhouse is so enamored of soup that he's published a cookbook on that very topic.
Too bad said cookbook has gone into the remainder bins.
And I don't think for a moment that said chef was actually at the stove in said steakhouse, stirring up said soup.
But it was pretty good anyway.
Besides, I had already eaten my appetizer of beef tartare in a cocktail glass: Meat Martini with a Twist of Quail Egg (not its real name).
Mm. Decent lunch.

Spuds and Studs

I’m a woman of lustful tastes. I admit it.
And I like my potatoes like I like my men: Hot, steaming and buttery, with little green flecks on them.
Which may explain my love life.
Liz at Pocketfarm has issued an invitation to eat locally: One meal a week during the 12 weeks of summer, made from local — as you define it — ingredients. It’s meant to be an easy introduction to eating locally, or an opportunity to wallow in the new-grown bounty that might not have been available during last May’s Eat Local Challenge, a chance to find out that this diet is doable and delicious.
I haven’t signed on officially, although Liz has a list of about three-dozen participants, including a few hardcore ELC-ers (you know who you are, even if you didn’t go out and make your own salt, ya sissies). I’m comfortable just knowing that most of my everyday food is local and that every now and then all of the food on my plate is local.
Yesterday, for example. Cranky prepared bowls of steamed new potatoes from Full Belly Farm, slathered in butter from Clover and showered with chopped parsley from the Asian guy at the farmers market (I think he’s from Stockton).
The parsley could just as well have been picked from the pot in my patio, but we had provisions in the crisper that needed a’usin’.
Likewise, the salt could have been my own Fleur de Sel de Marin, but… no, we resorted to Industrial Mega-Corp salt evaporated locally from the same Bay Area water that, in the case of my home-collected salt, scares me just enough that I’m a little nervous about using too much. But I (and countless others) purchase and eat this store-bought sodium daily without a care in the world. Can somebody explain this?
Anyway. Just a simple bowl of local food. Filling. Nourishing.
As satisfying as a roll in the hay with a hot, steaming buttery guy…
Wait, did somebody just say “roll in the hay”? Would that be a homemade wholewheat roll, hot, steaming and buttery, with little green…

Nice Baby... Come and Lie Down on this Ritz Cracker

• Excuse me, waiter? I ordered the chunky on my kid, and this is definitely the smooth.
• You are in so much trouble! That was supposed to be for everybody's dinner, and now we're all going to have to lick you.
• Don't laugh; she'll just think it's cute, and tomorrow it'll be the pâté.
::shriek:: This is the pâté!

Your turn.
(Credits and more pix)

Go Pick Your Dinner

I had a friend years ago who grew up on a farm in Iowa. Every once in a while when the weather was unbearably hot, her mother would call a strike on housework.
"You guys wanna eat," mom would say, "go pick your dinner."
That meant corn. (Well, duh. Farm in Iowa!)
However, in my friend's case, it meant pig corn, because her father was in the pork business, not the tender kernels of summer juiciness business. The corn was hog feed.
Still, it was fresh from the field, and my friend's mom was usually feeling motherly enough, even on strike days, to put on a pot of water to boil.
A little butter, a little salt, and a kid could make do with a happy meal she picked herself.
I was always a little jealous of my friend's foraged feast.
Here in the suburbs of California, the only dinner I'm going to be able to pick is something I've planted myself (and this season is shaping up to be a bummer backyard-food-wise; film at eleven), or an edible something nature has kindly laid in my path.
A few weeks ago Cranky and I bought a small handful of fresh purslane at the farmers market. We both know it's a weed, and we both know the farmers know that. However, it's a fashionable weed, and a rather tasty, succulent weed as well. Great for salads, dripping with Omega-3 fatty acids, and cute to boot.
We were sort of embarrassed to be paying actual money for the purslane, so we selected only 60 cents' worth (and left half of it to rot in the crisper drawer).
As we walked up the driveway with our purchased purslane, I suddenly spotted that familiar red-stemmed, spider-shaped weed growing out of the rocks, everywhere.
Huh! Never saw that before.
Then it dawned on me I hadn't seen it before because it's in season now!
So. Now when I want to go pick my dinner, I can go root around for some Portulaca oleracea, aka Little Hogweed.
Rhymes with little hog feed, and that's fine with me.

Nix on the Big Ol' Plate of Same

Meal planning. Feh.
I like food, and it's fun to pull something together with ingredients I happen to have in the house.
I also like to prowl the farmers market and impulsively grab seasonal items that catch my fancy. Which often results in having to pull something together with ingredients I happen to have in the house.
But every now and then there's an "occasion." A holiday, an anniversary, company coming over... For some dumb reason, those occasions always seem to make me concoct a meal that's just another big ol' plate of same: mouthful after mouthful of today's chef's special.
Slabs of meat, for example. Vats of stew. Piles of pasta.
It's a trap. I'll be trying to think up a nice meal, and for some reason one particular item takes over. Dominates. Hogs the plate. Mouthful after mouthful.
We weren't going to let that happen for our recent anniversary dinner. We not only didn't want another Plate of Same, we also didn't want the pressure of dreaming up whatever special Plate of Same would serve as a celebratory meal. Of cooking it perfectly. Getting it to the table on time. Unenjoying it.
Feh.
So we decided to have lots of plates of little things. We would let them come out of the kitchen in any order. We would eat them whenever we felt like it. We would have a small bite or two, and then move on to the next taste. When we felt like it.
One of our favorite little bites, pictured here, was some pan-fried scallops topped with a pesto of chives, cilantro and walnuts. We ate them just-warm. I would have liked a runnier dressing, maybe with a squeeze of lemon (mental note for next time), but there they were: Just a few. Casual but snazzy. Eat until happy, and then think about the next course.
Fun.

Oh, unhappy birthday

I've come to wish you an unhappy birthday
I've come to wish you an unhappy birthday
'Cause you're evil
And you lie
And if you should die
I may feel slightly sad
(But I won't cry)

Cool as, uh, All Get Out

You have to try this.
This is 100% cucumber juice, extracted a few minutes ago with a juicer and poured through a strainer into a glass.
(Apparently there are extractors with a strainer already built in; shop around and see what you can get for $60-100.)
The juice is pure green summer. It's delicious by itself, or it would take nicely to a little sweetener. We drank a couple of glasses of it mixed 50-50 with sparkling water, over ice, and it was astoundingly delicious and refreshing. Better than refreshing: You felt like you were consuming nature.
Who needs bottled juices and tired iced teas on hot days? The juicer is so easy to use, and even with all those parts, it's no problem to wash up and put away for next time.
There will be a next time. I'm just wondering if I should move on from cucumbers to, well... carrots? That sounds so hippy-dippy, but it's probably yummy. Maybe a blend of carrots and cukes.
Melon and cukes? (Audible groan.) Yeah.

Tips: I used unwaxed cucumbers with bumps on their skins, the kind you'd use to make dill pickles. Except these were monstrous — too large to fit inside a pickle jar, even. And no good for eating, either, since the centers are filled with tough, woody seeds. The vendor at the farmers market was selling them as "Japanese cucumbers," but oh, no, he was pulling somebody's leg. You ought to be able to buy these goliaths for quite cheap, even more so as the summer wears on. Wash them, cut them into chunks, and run them through the juicer unpeeled for that fantastic green hue.

The American Way

How did we end up living in a country that is now synonymous with torture?
How did we end up with a secretive and power-hungry president who thinks he is above the law?
When did "The Land of the Free" start meaning "freedom for the government to spy on you, and you can't do a thing about it"?
Liberty has become tenuous and precious, right here in what we are now supposedly calling "The Homeland."
Defend your rights.
Be mad.
Eat.

The Important Stuff

Hanging with your friends. Making new ones. Eating well, even if it's just (*just*??) a rawhide stick — and don't worry, it's vet-approved pighide.

Bean Sprout made some new friends this weekend too, so here's a howdy from both of us to Jen's mom and aunt Pam.