I'm Mad and I'm Scared to Eat

The tainted pet-food recall is six weeks old, and only now is the FDA stirring its lazy self to take a look into the problem.
It should be obvious to anybody who eats: If the food targeted for pets was tainted (deliberately, it seems, with melamine to increase the protein analysis — and therefore the presumed value — of the corn, wheat and rice products), then it's entirely likely that food intended for the human market could be similarly poisoned.
Oh, wait! It already is. Pigs are being fed "salvaged" pet food. Humans eat pork.
The FDA seems to have known about this since last year.
I am sickened.
It pays to know where your food is coming from.
Mcjoan at Daily Kos has a good post on the situation.
The photo is of a happy, presumably healthy pig raised at Full Belly Farm in Guinda, CA. Cranky and I love that farm so much we went up there for a field trip not long ago. I don't think miss piggy eats salvaged pet food.

Cheap-o Wrap-up

I don't usually budget my meals. It's not because I can afford to eat anything I want.
I have a horror of letting food go to waste. I'm not inclined to buy expensive stuff on a whim. I totally avoid prepared foods in the grocery store.
So I'm sensible, but I didn't really think I was frugal.
For a whole week, I kept tabs on my expenses while eating food produced within 100 miles of my home. I ate well, but I did try to economize because it seemed like the right thing to do for the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge.
What I didn't know was that I would come in so far under the Department of Labor's statistics, $144 for the average family of two wage-earning adults. (Cranky and I are both retired, but our nest egg makes money for us, so we like to consider that "wages.")
We spent just over $70. Not counting the final meal of the week, totally off the reservation (we sneaked over to the local Chili's for beer and nachos).
But I think we proved something, which was the point of the challenge: eating locally doesn't have to be expensive.
We don't usually eat breakfast, but for this event, I thought I'd try to eat breakfast most days, even if it was just a few spoonfuls of homemade yogurt. The photo is of some of that yogurt spooned over cooked local wheatberries, topped with local honey. Heaven.
All other meals were rich, filling and nutritious. We didn't starve. We feasted.
I could leave you with several exhortations about how to make it through a week on this challenge, such as using fats and proteins sparingly, using flavors vigorously, embracing humble foods, getting out of your frozen mind set ("But I always eat toast!"), and all.
No. I will leave you with this observation: You will have to cook. To get the most out of your food dollar, you will have to use your kitchen.
It doesn't mean the end of the world. Your rice can simmer while you watch American Idol. The beans can soak overnight, and then you can leave them bubbling in your slow cooker the next day while you're at work. The chicken stock can enrich itself while you're over there blogging.
Give it a try.

Local Frugal, Day 6

This was the big day. A newspaper reporter was coming over to see what we were up to, and to share a meal of food we had procured from within a 100-mile radius.
The plan was to feed two adults for a week on this diet for $144. And we dared ourselves to include a dedicated eater as our guest, within that budget.
Of course, we had to show off.
We cooked up a four-course lunch. I don't eat four-course lunches!
But it was easy, filling, nutritious and — gosh — yumzo.
As you may know, Cranky and I took the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge a couple of weeks early so our reporter pal could chart our progress. So I'm telling the story today of a meal that happened in the recent past.
Here's how it went.
First course: Chilled gazpacho soup, made from last summer's frozen roasted tomatoes. We didn't have any local onions on hand, so we blinged out the soup with diced radishes and chopped seabeans. Flavoring was homemade cider vinegar, salt and local habanero pepper. Just a small serving for each of us.
Second course: A beautiful salad I've already written about. Go see.
Third course: Chicken hash. We had roasted a chicken at the beginning of the week, and were doling out portions of the cooked meat for subsequent meals. This meal was made from diced, boiled potatoes; some chopped, cooked bacon (and the fat that was rendered); some diced scallion; some minced, foraged grape leaves; and a good drizzle of cream. If you follow the link to the newspaper story, the recipe for our hash is in the paper, but I guess the food staff there decided to go way skimpy on the bacon; the recipe says 1/4 ounce bacon, but I think I used an ounce and a quarter; maybe my notes were faulty... Ooh, but it was good.
Fourth course: Dessert of a simple laurel-infused yogurt, drizzled with local honey. For three (admittedly small, but we were stuffed) desserts, I figure we spent 49 cents.
Total cost for three: Just over $13.
The meal was consumed at a leisurely pace on the patio, but — and I can't stress this enough — for any of you who think cooking local food on a budget requires more time than you can spare, I want you to know that we cooked the entire four courses while the reporter was on the premises... And that includes the time she spent eating with us. Yes, the chicken was already cooked, but around here, that's known as "leftovers." The tomatoes had been preserved last summer, but that's called "smart." Everything else was prepared on the spot, in the amount of time a busy journalist has to spend interviewing and eating.
I'd say she got the lucky end of the deal... but so did we.

My 600th Post, Today

But never mind that. We're here to talk about how to get a lot of bang for your buck.
The bang, in the case of the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge, means great flavor, good nutrition, and compelling presentation. Wouldn't want to eat a tiresome plate of rice all week long just to prove something. You'd prove to be boring (and starving) yourself, and you'd fall off the wagon.
The chicken we roasted for the week's meals went pretty far. Cranky wanted to use some of the meat in a chicken salad, but I had plans for using it in a chicken hash later in the week and didn't want to spare any.
Then we came up with a superb idea. I would spare a small amount of meat (about a fifth of the overall available bird), and we would extend the salad with cooked rice. Rice lightened the mixture so that it wasn't mouthful after mouthful of chicken shreds, which, come to think of it, is probably why I don't like chicken salad.
I loved this chicken salad. We cooked the rice in chicken stock! Little lovely bits of chicken and chicken-flavored rice suspended throughout a silky blend of homemade bay yogurt and homemade mayonnaise, studded here and there with snipped pickleweed and chopped walnuts. It was served with baby Romaine leaves, so we could scoop up dabs of this poufy salad and transport them to our mouths.
I thought the wheatberry salad was fantastic.
This was better.
Total cost for two (and jeez, the entire blurp of yogurt I used only cost 11 cents): $4.80.
If there's a lesson here, it's along the lines of thinking beyond your paralyzed conceptions of recipes. You might say, "Chicken salad doesn't have rice in it."
I might say, "Aw, c'mon. Think outside the chicken."
One more lesson: Any reason why you shouldn't use chicken stock to cook the rice? Especially if the rice is going in a chicken dish? I learned something.

Foraged Food is Free, and Fun

Seriously, I would never expect to survive on found food alone, but I can't resist going out and beating the bushes now and then.
During my Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge week I saw a quail under a bush, but I wasn't sure how to catch it (and would it be legal?). I know there are deer, hares and wild turkeys in the woods behind my house, but the same questions apply.
Well, so much for free, local fauna (and lucky you, Bambi).
Flora, on the other hand, I can catch. Still not certain if I was violating any ordinances by going out and catching some, but I did it anyway. Weeds (dandelion, miner's lettuce) are probably fair game but swiping tender, young grape leaves off the vine at my local Basque eatery might be a no-no if I didn't ask first. (I asked. A-OK.)
I didn't know who to ask about the pickleweed in the picture, though. It grows in a salt marsh, and salt marshes in California tend to be all tree-huggy and protected. So I snuck it, on the sly. A few quick slashes, a couple furtive stashes, and I had my sack of salicornia, aka glasswort, samphire, or in a marketer's idea of charming sellability, "seabeans." Around my neighborhood, it's known colloquially as pickleweed, and I like that.
I like pickleweed, too. It's crunchy, tender, juicy, and kind of salty. You can eat it raw, although historically it was pickled. (I pickled some last year, but this year I felt much braver and just snacked on the fresh spikes.)
Cranky's idea for using them in a dish was a play on food words: Three Bean Salad. We cooked, separately, two kinds of dried local beans (one from a Napa boutique, and a much cheaper one from the Sacramento Valley), and stirred them into a handful cut-up seabeans. The dressing was local olive oil, homemade local cider vinegar, a pinch of local habanero powder. No salt needed.
Cost for two servings (and there were leftovers): $2.25.

Meet Your Nutritional Needs

Going without bread for a whole week?
Did somebody just say whole wheat?
While eating food from a 100-mile radius, and sticking to a budget for the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge, I know I will have to do without white flour.
There is a local farm, Full Belly Farm, that grows a sturdy winter red wheat. They mill it into whole-wheat flour, and I have baked with it, but the results were leaden (keeping in mind that I am not a baker). I came across a recipe for whole-wheat pasta not long ago, although I have yet to experiment with it.
So. How am I to get the carbs I need during my local challenge? Potatoes, sure. Rice, too — I am fortunate, living in the Bay Area, that there are rice growers roughly within my region.
Ah, but that wheaty taste. Sometimes you crave it.
Luckily, Full Belly Farm sells whole wheatberries. They are hella easy to cook. You can use them in "risotto" dishes, or you can stir them into soups. We ate some for breakfast, drizzled with yogurt and honey.
And then we made a salad of room-temperature wheatberries, mixed with local olives, Marin feta cheese, baby romaine lettuce leaves, local olive oil, homemade cider vinegar, a splash of olive juice, and a pinch of homegrown herbs.
It sounds naive and quaint, but eating it was an haute cuisine experience garbed in peasant clothing. The berries have a caviar-like explosive crunch, and the ingredients are all deeply satisfying as well as nutrient-rich. I can't say enough about it. Oh, except that for the two of us, it cost $4.86.
Meeting all your needs: It is tempting to forgo costly proteins to come in under budget during this challenge, but your body will not forgive you and you'll end up cheating. Make sure you get what you need. Beans, eggs, little dabs of meat, cheese. Don't eat too much of them, though, and make sure your food is fascinating by using bright flavors and tempting textures. Please don't try to do this experiment by living strictly on potatoes for a week.
One more idea. When you cook a strip or two of bacon to jazz up dinner, save the bacon grease. It is a thrilling cooking fat for your next day's menu — and it's free.

The *Pow* Factor, for a Buck and a Half

Here's another lesson for eating locally on a budget: Zing up a humble, inexpensive dish with a dab of pow.
The *pow* we are talking about in this case was a hunk of Point Reyes Farmstead blue cheese worth $1.50. A mere one and five-eighths ounce (an odd measure, yes, because I cook by feel, and then had to weigh the chunk in order to know how much it cost).
And what did it *pow* up? A humble potato soup.
I can't even remember how I came up with the idea for this meal; maybe Cranky thought it up. What I do remember is that a week or two earlier I had been having dinner with friends at a restaurant when the server described that evening's soup. She said it had cream added to it. "Not a cream soup," she clarified, "but as a liaison."
How elegant. Not a cream soup! A cream soup is too rich (and too expensive), but a frugal binder of cream? I could do that. One-quarter cup cost only 50 cents. And that's when the idea of some blue cheese materialized.
You may recall that the chicken stock was practically free, but I charged myself 17 cents for 2 cups of it. The Kennebec (russet-style) potatoes, which made up the bulk of the soup, were only $1.30 (for a wacko 10-3/8 oz., but really, I couldn't coax those cute little taters to come in at a rounder number... I used three small-to-medium ones and that's just what they happened to weigh). There was also a little salt.
This meal for two, which in my daily notes I called "ethereal" and "restaurant quality," cost a total of $3.47.
Other ideas for letting more-expensive, more-flavorful items do the zing work, while letting cheap starches bulk out the meal, include using tiny dabs of bacon (in a chicken hash; that story is still to come) or moderate amounts of some awesome braised beef in an otherwise vegetabley, potatoey cottage pie. I topped a salad of baby romaine with some toasted walnuts; yummy, nutritious, and maybe just a teensy bit well-priced. And the homemade mayonnaise for our lunch of artichokes was so intensely flavored that even though the oil and eggs were spendy, we didn't eat much of the mayo.
It's doable.
Cranky said it's like eating from the food pyramid. Good for your health. And when the tiny bits of expensive protein and oils are so flavorful, they really do a lot of the work for next to nothing.
Technique: Cook peeled, cut-up potatoes in boiling, salted water until just tender. Drain and allow to cool a bit. Place in blender with stock. Blend until smooth. Return mixture to pot and stir in cheese, over medium heat, until cheese is melted. Stir in cream and heat to desired temperature. Taste, and add salt if needed.

The 70-cent Solution

As if it weren't enough of a challenge to restrict your diet to foods produced within a limited-mile zone, a bunch of us bozos are going to do it on a budget this week.
Visit the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge for details.
As for moi, I already completed my challenge a couple of weeks early, but I saved details and photos to blog about this week.
I'm speaking from experience. Not only my recent experience of eating locally on a budget, but the experience of having participated in two previous monthlong local challenges where costs were not necessarily tracked.
And I can sum up my experience in two words: PLAN AHEAD.
Sure, you can swing by the farmers market and pick up some lovely local produce, eggs, fish and meat. But how are you going to cook your goodies? Is your olive oil local? What are you doing about seasonings and sweeteners? If wheat is not in your local region, what will you do to get enough carbohydrates?
In other words, this is not a project you can just wake up one morning and decide to opt into.
And I haven't even talked about costs yet.
Fortunately, at my house, a lot of the food is already local; that's just the way we shop. But for this project, I now had to cost out portions: a tablespoon of the local olive oil I use is 62 cents, for instance. I didn't know that before but to stick within my budget, I had to know now.
I kept receipts for everything we bought for the week; that was a new behavior for me. I even bought a kitchen scale so I'd know how much of a one-pound bag of beans I'd be using for soup, or how much three potatoes, at $2 a pound, weighed — before peeling, because you paid for the peels whether you're eating them or not.
Speaking of the peels: Save everything. Well, almost everything. I might have been able to dream up a use for the potato peels (oven-baked chips? Drat, shoulda thought of that), but I threw them out. All my other flavorings and trimmings, though, were saved for other uses.
Et voilà, may I present one of the highlights of my frugal week: The 70-cent pot of chicken stock, aka Garbage Soup. Everything in that pot was free except for one 70-cent bulb of green garlic (and I could have used just half of that, it was so potent). Recipe: chicken carcass, parsnip and carrot trimmings, a handful of carrot greens, herbs from the garden, and that expensive green garlic. (For the purposes of the challenge, I didn't put a price on water or salt, because they are essential for life and nobody should have to budget for them.)
Why am I showing you leftovers on day one of the Penny-Wise challenge? Because I planned ahead for them. We started our week with a grand supper of roast chicken and vegetables.
Our total expenses for the day for two adults: under eight dollars.

Marching on his Stomach

Cranky had a craving.
He's had a lot of them lately, come to think of it. Must be a reaction to the upheaval of dismantling our worldly goods and cramming them into boxes. He gets oral. Yesterday he had to — had to — have sushi for lunch, and later in the evening he stuffed chocolates into his mouth. (The chocolates were unearthed as I was unloading the china hutch; they were leftover goodies from my Christmas stocking that somehow got stashed in a candy jar and shoved behind closed doors.)
So the other day he became obsessed with bagels. Ordinarily, Cranky and I talk about our food lusts together, refining and honing until, YES, let's have THAT, that's EXACTLY what we want to eat! But I wasn't in on the bagel discussion. There was no discussion. He simply came home with the ingredients — the only ingredients — that would sate his appetite at that moment.
This meant he had to buy an out-of-season tomato... but it was a very good, hothouse-grown tomato of a dark and lovely variety (probably purple Cherokee), from the spunky ladies at the farmers market.
It also meant, of course, that he had to buy fresh bagels, (red onion and cream cheese were already in the house) and some sort of cured salmon. What he found at Whole Foods was not lox, not nova, but a genuinely smoky, tender treatment of wild Northern California salmon. Not too smoky. Perfect.
Cranky's craving was satisfied.
Me? I had a very nice lunch.

Local, on the Cheap

I'm a few days late making this announcement (I didn't even know there was a deadline). But I'm already in such a time-warp, this is less of an announcement and more of a post mortem. Except nobody died. Everybody had a good time.
And you will have a good time, too, if you choose to participate in the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge next week.
Click on the link to learn all about it, but let me briefly explain that this is a one-week exercise in eating a diet of strictly local foods, within a strictly defined budget. The point? To prove it can be done. To dispel, once and for all, the idea that there is something "elitist" in living on regionally grown food.
My personal time-warp stems from the fact that a reporter pal at the San Francisco Chronicle wanted to be able to write a story about the event that would appear in the paper early enough to give others the chance to join in. She asked me and Cranky to bump up our effort by a couple of weeks so she could follow our progress.
In other words, we already did it.
Go read about it yourself, if you're inclined. Here's the link; the photo of me and Cranky is pretty cute (and our kitchen looks so spotless and tidy for the real-estate people!). The other two stories about premature locavores that accompany ours are great reads, too. Good job, Chronicle!
I kept careful notes and took pictures of my food, so I will be doing a sort of ghost blog all next week. Which is convenient, because right now Cranky and I are up to our sternums in newsprint and cardboard, packing for a move to "we're not sure where yet but we hope it's in Marin." While you're reading about me dining inexpensively on delicacies from my foodshed, in actuality I'll probably be scarfing take-out burritos.

Why English Food Is Good

I'm playing along. I don't know what I'm doing, because it's all about Google docs and spreadsheets, and thankgod I'm old enough not to have to know what that all means.
But Sam at Becks & Posh invited us all to blog about why English food isn't a joke.
Well.
We all know English food was a joke for decades, if not more. It took the careful archaeological uncoverings of Elizabeth David to prove that we were prejudiced and wrong — and even then, she was all about French food.
I will leave aside discussion of the Two Fat Ladies, and even (oy) Jamie Oliver. Also that guy who loves candy too much (Nigel somebody?). Oh, and the whole-pig blokes.
Anyway. I'm not English. I have no excuse and no excuses.
I don't even have any English food traditions. I will make a roast beef for Christmas, but Tiny Tim might cringe. I've done a few Yorkshire puddings that pleased me, but the Queen might disagree. I'm competent with shortbread, and I've stewed up oatmeal... Oh, wait. I do love Lyle's Golden Syrup.
Ummm. What else. I drink tea?
So. Huh.
One thing I know I can get right. And it suits me: Beans on toast.
Comfort food of the simplest (and therefore highest) degree. Open a can (Heinz vegetarian, of course). Toast up a few slices of bread. Shave some cheese (today it was Montgomery Farm Cheddar from Neal's Yard Dairy). Run it all under the broiler.
It was necessary because our kitchen is being dismantled. We are packing stuff into boxes for an anticipated move. The magical dual-fuel convection oven/range is being donated to the new owners, and we are out there in "where shall we move to" land, moiled in that real estate uncertainty that makes earthquakey California so — unsettling.

Black Is the New Chili

A few months ago, when I first bought these gorgeous, shiny, dried black beans from Full Belly Farm, I thought it would be fun to dream up a completely black dish.
No, this doesn't come from depression. Just nutty creativity.
So: Black beans... What else?
Chinese black vinegar? Yeah, sure. Black pepper? No problem. Black ale? I've heard it can be procured.
Oh. And the final black protein to make it all worthwhile: Boudin noir, aka blood sausage.
I've never dared to eat blood sausage before, but now that I'm an old hand with cocks' combs, etc., I didn't think I should chicken (heh) out.
Anyway, the entire combination seemed to be adding up to a black chili. So I added some ground dried pasilla chiles, which were so old in my pantry, they were definitely black.
This was a feel-your-way-through recipe. I had no idea where I was going.
I thought some Scharffen Berger cacao nibs might go nicely, and they do have a dark taste (well, "almost" black). So I tossed in a spoonful. But chocolate needed cinnamon, so I shook in a sprinkle of that. Of course there was salt.
The boudins noirs, from Fabrique Délices, were nicely seasoned with baking spices, so I sort of backed off in that area. But it still needed something to offset the bitterness of the Big Bear Black Stout (from Healdsburg). Kong Yen Chinese black vinegar to the rescue.
I must add: Beans love cooking in fat. The blood sausages were terribly lean. But we had a bit of leftover Black Sheep bacon fat (Website? mm; sorry) in the fridge, and even if the fat wasn't black, the sheep was. Go figure.
There was also the expected minced red onion... I've learned there's such a thing as black garlic, but I'm not resourceful enough to procure some.
We finished this stew by stirring in some cooked Trader Joe's black japonica rice. Everything's still a little chewy right now, but here's a preview.
Looking forward to our black meal.

What Do You Think?

There's a meme going around in the blogosphere that asks bloggers to name five blogs that make them think.
Somehow, I've been tagged twice, once by Barbara at Winos and Foodies, and once by Katie at Thyme for Cooking. Thanks to you both, really, but what do I make you think? About mutant gummi bears?
Well, in order to spread the honor, I'm selecting five blogs I read regularly, as much for the food as for the thought behind the food. In no particular order:

The Ethicurean. This is a group blog devoted to sustainable, local, organic eating, but it never shies away from the sometimes awful truth about food. Politics, food safety, butchering, farming — all are covered, and often there are links to original source material. Check it out.

Ruhlman. As in Michael Ruhlman, the witty raconteur, writer, chef, and rasslin' pal of Anthony Bourdain. Ruhlman is the wordmeister behind the French Laundry Cookbook, just for instance, and he has also authored many good reads of his own, such as The Reach of A Chef. He is perhaps best known among food bloggers for his Charcuterie (co-authored with Brian Polcyn), which has so many of us curing our own pancetta and corning our own briskets. His blog is a vivid, funny thing: Ruhlman without an editor.

What Do I Know? KathyF is an American who recently moved to England. She is still very opinionated about American politics, but is studying Arthurian literature and has already incorporated English words, like "lorry," into her vocabulary. And she's a vegan. Every Wednesday she blogs about delicious vegan food, but that's not the only reason I read her.

Ideas in Food. I almost didn't choose this one, because every so often its authors, Aki and Alex, make me mad. It'll be about some dumb little thing or even about some huge politically incorrect gaffe... And then I realized: They make me think. But the main reason to visit their blog is to gawk at their inventions. Oh, they'd call them creations, and they are edible. But really, it's the work of mad scientists in the food lab.

Hungry in Hogtown. I'm a new reader of this Toronto-based blog, so I don't have a good take on Rob and Rachel's work yet. But come on. Posts about popcorn puree on crabcakes? Fried rabbit ears? I'll be back.

Do You Get Inspired?

In my perigrinations through all the other food blogs (well, not all), I often come across recipes, or even just mere mentions, of dishes I really want to try myself. Especially if there's an irresistible photo accompanying the description.
I've only ended up trying one or two dishes, in truth, although I get seriously inspired (and may still end up going back and doing it).
One of my tried and true re-creations is ChrisB's cottage pie, from Ms. Cellania. I think Chris would faint if she saw what actual ingredients I use, but it's still a fairly faithful version — and it's easy and yummy.
But even though I've vowed to make other bloggers' recipes, I fall short. Oh, wait. I did make Ilva's blood-orange jellies in the shape of hearts. Yeah. So there might have even been some other replications I'm just not remembering now. OK, remembering another one now! Sourdough Monkey Wrangler's rice torte, which I bastardized into my own version, and which spawned a slew of other versions, including one by the originator.
I know it happens out there in the blogosphere's kitchens.
The other day I noticed that Glenna at A Fridge Full of Food had whipped up a version of Krispy Kreme Doughnut Bread Pudding, inspired by her friend Sher's attempt, at What Did You Eat? There was photographic evidence that this recipe re-creation actually happened.
Eek! That is not something I'll try. But you might.
All the time, when reading comments on food blogs, I see people saying, "Great! I am going to try this!"
So here's my question: Do you try out the foods you read about on other peoples' blogs?

When Gummi Bears Go Terribly Wrong

Trust me, I've had enough gummi bears to know. Occasionally there is a mutant in the bag.
For a long time, I was saving a yellow lemon bear with a stunning red streak inside it. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn't get around to it, and eventually the bear turned opaque, crystallized when all its hideous sugars and high-fructose corn syrup were oxidized by the air.
Well, I went off gummi bears for seven whole days while I experienced a restricted diet last week, and it only took me — um — is today still Monday? OK, about eight hours until I opened up a sack o' teddies. (I don't do it often, but trust me, there was deep sugar hunger.)
And here's what came out. A clone train.
Ew. I've heard you don't really want to see how sausage is made because the gruesome reality will sicken you. That's not a problem for me because I know who my sausage makers are (and sometimes they're me) — voilà: unsickening, nay, delicious sausage.
But today. Gummi bratwurst? Hold the casing, but still...
Meaning I don't really want to know how gummi bears are made. I want to continue believing they are sprinkled out of happy clouds, raining down in all their rainbow colors right into the cellophane bags.
I don't want to think they are extruded, brat-style, or in whatever method they happened to end up in this obscene daisy chain.
If you are looking for a moral to this story, you are out of luck.

Happy Pagan Spring Holiday

Jellybeans and chocolate bunnies, no thanks.
I'll tell you what I'm eating today (and I must interject here that once, on Easter Sunday, I was served RABBIT in the dining room of a cruise ship, so I was traumatized and maintain an uneasy relationship with Easter feasts): For breakfast we are making matzoh brei. I love that stuff, even though I have no cultural heritage for the dish. I learned it from the mother of a college boyfriend (and this woman had converted to Quakerism, so what a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride there). I think I'm pretty good at making it the way I like (buttery, fluffy and salty), though I understand there's a method for crisping it on both sides like a soft, browned frittata. Sort of. I guess. I might try that. Sounds good. (I've been on a restricted diet for the past week that disallowed white flour, so no matzohs for Passover. No problem; I'll just fit it in later. I'm loose with holidays. I almost always make matzoh brei for Christmas breakfast; just one of my many illogical irreligious feasts.)
Then, later on, we're going to try Ilva's asparagus deviled eggs. Simply cannot resist. What a pure, heathen acknowledgement of the sensuality of spring. Yep, doing that.
No lamb for dinner. Ugh. Nor rabbit.
By the way, that concrete bunny is really sitting in my patio, but he's not on a grill over a fire. It's our etagére that we keep potted flowers on; those are marigolds, not flames. Nice, cool bunny.

Salad Days

I hate to think how many pictures on this blog look almost exactly like the one above.
Yet another salad made with fresh, local ingredients. Eaten in the dappled shadow at the table on the patio.
Yeah, I should go back and count some time.
See, that's what's going on chez Cookiecrumb. Always. I don't do complicated recipes. Beautiful produce is flooding the market. And of course, we had to sit outdoors in the gorgeous weather, hence the dapples.
Ah, but there was a twist. Today's lunch was a bigger, more special version of that deliciously simple meal I take so many pictures of.
Cranky and I had a friend over to eat with us. We wanted to show her how well we can feed ourselves on a strictly local diet, while not spending outlandish amounts of money. We served four courses, from a pert little amuse bouche to a calming, easy (and small) dessert.
I'll talk about it later in the month, but I figured I'd show you today's familiar-looking salad.
It's made with baby Romaine leaves, topped with sliced roasted baby beets in two colors. Then it's showered with crumbled blue cheese and toasted walnut bits. The dressing was a light amalgamation of mayonnaise, vinegar, salt and olive oil.
Every one of the flavors in the salad was so intense, most surprisingly the lettuce (tastes of iron and chlorophyll), that just a small, casual plate of the stuff was enough to knock us silly.
Besides, there was more to come.

Feasting on my Laurels

I don't have much of a sweet tooth, so I was largely unaware that the flavor of bay leaves has been appearing more and more in desserts, usually milky ones like ice cream, creme brulee, creme caramel and pot de creme, but also in a dreamy-sounding dish of warm bananas.
If you haven't become aware of this trend, then your first reaction is probably "Yuck."
Because, of course, everybody knows that bay leaves belong in stews (until the recipe tells you to take them out). Sadly, everybody also knows that bay leaves are stiff, crackly, dried-out flakes of former flora; too much shelf time in that sad little jar has turned them into tasteless shards.
I've seen bottles of fairly fresh-looking green bay leaves in the dried spice department now and then, but really, will you use them up fast enough to spare them that brittle, faded fate? No, probably not, unless you make a lot of stews.
Or — (ha, ha, not dessert; no sweet tooth here, remember?) — yogurt!
Plain, milky, whole-fat yogurt, with a blissed-out flavor. Slightly green, slightly pine tree, slightly anise, very much "tea," and surprisingly compatible with the fresh tang of good yogurt. Homemade yogurt, obviously, because you get the flavor of the bay leaves by infusing your milk with them.
For one batch (in my yogurt maker, that's 42 ounces of milk), I add three or four fresh bay leaves that have been lightly scored on their surface with the tip of a knife, in a crosshatch pattern. (If all you have is dried leaves, I would say you're out of luck, but who knows? Give it a try if you're tempted.) I bring the milk to a slight boil, and then let it cool to body temperature before stirring in the culture (and yes, you may take out the leaves now).
I've been using very good milk, by the way, and the difference is noticeable. Great body and flavor. The yogurt develops a natural elasticity in its texture (you know, the "mouthfeel" that food labs recreate in commercial yogurt by adding wheat gluten — and, not to frighten you, but it might not be just pets who are being fed contaminated products).
I first learned about using bay leaves to flavor milk from Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book, the "Joy of Cooking" for English ladies in the 19th century, a copy of which Cranky's grandmother owned in Manchester, and brought with her to America. In the book, half a bay leaf is boiled with milk to make a blancmange. I'm not particularly interested in blancmange, but the idea lodged in my head.
A couple of years ago I bought a Greek laurel tree so I'd have local herbs on my patio.
A couple of months ago I bought a yogurt maker.
A couple of weeks ago I finally figured out what to do.

Dumpster Diving

I had to salvage two artichokes we bought maybe two weeks ago. Cranky suspects they're even older.
But because they came from a farmers market, they were as fresh as could be the day we bought them, so after a languid stay in the crisper drawer, they emerged today not terribly worse for the delay.
It was so lucky not to have to throw them away. The greater porportion of the body of an artichoke is inedible, so quite a bit of their entity must be discarded in the enjoying. At least we managed to save the edible bits today.
I love artichokes. I love all the "A" vegetables: avocadoes (a fruit, I know), asparagus, arugula, armenian cucumber. But especially artichokes, which you have to know how to eat.
At a dinner party many years ago hosted by a young couple hell-bent on getting their "Sophisticate" merit badges, guests were served a single steamed artichoke with cocktails. Everybody sat on the floor around the coffee table, metrosexually plucking off the leaves of this lone offering, dipping them into some sauce, and scraping the luxuriant flesh against our teeth before dropping the spent leaves into a discard bowl.
Pretty soon, the edible leaves had been devoured, and the urbane host tried to trot the presumably exhausted globe back into the kitchen, headed for the trash bag.
"Stop!" I cried. "Do you not know the best part of the artichoke?"
He did not. (Honestly, I was not assaulting his suavité. I just didn't want that artichoke in the garbage.)
I found a fork and knife, and removed the useless, chokey leaves and stickers from the inside of the artichoke. Scraped away the fur. Chopped off the stem. Cut the glistening, emergent heart into portions... and dipped. No scraping, no throwing away. Just perfect chewing. (I shared!)
Today's salvaged artichokes were served with homemade mayonnaise. I used an exceptionally green-tasting, peppery, local olive oil, and it was just right with the 'chokes.
So glad we got to bite the leaves and cut up the hearts before these beauties wound up in the trash.

Not a Food Blog Post

I hate to be absent, but unless I have a killer topic, I'm reluctant to just post stories about today's cheese sandwich.
Except: Today I'd love nothing more than to post a story about today's "cheese sandwich," but it's kind of a secret. It was no cheese sandwich.
I'm involved with a food project that I prefer to keep quiet about. For now. You all will have your chance to participate in this project in a few weeks, if you choose, but I've been singled out by a friend to give it a go ahead of time, so she can write about it for the paper she works for.
I just don't want to take the wind out of anybody's sails by talking about it too early.
That said, maybe I will post about today's "cheese sandwich."
It was a roasted chicken, cooked in an uncovered Dutch oven, inside the American oven, atop sliced root vegetables. If I were any more well-versed in temperature-taking, I might have left it in the oven for about 10 minutes longer. Even so, it was edible, and it was very tasty.
But, you see, I can't tell you the back story.
How cool: Intrigue!