I Don't Know if I Cook Anymore!

Since I got this garden thing going, the food is coming in a little more reliably now. At first it was just arugula. Then a few leaves of lettuce. Some cucumbers. Tomatoes.
Each time I eat something from my garden, I have a mental checkmark saying, "OK, I tried that."
But I have to keep remembering that the food keeps growing and I will have to eat it again. And again.
Oh, wow, to quote a hippie I used to be. This is too cool.
So yesterday I prepared four glasses of deconstructed gazpacho from the garden. I had seen a version of it on a blog (cannot refind it, so sorry!), and since we were having friends for dinner, I thought it would be a swanky presentation.
Almost everything was grown in the yard, although we added store-bought vinegar, oil, onions and some mild peppers — all local — plus a little corporate, evil salt. (Salt is necessary for your body; I'm just spoofing my local-ass self.)
Finely diced vegetables were layered in colorful arrangements with occasional sprinklings of salt. When the final layer went on, I realized I had forgotten to put in any onions. Ew, that would make a terrible top layer. Cranky's solution was to puree onion bits with a garlic press, and we stirred the mush into some vinegar and drizzled it over the top. A little olive oil, and a garnish of toasted baguette slice, and done. Cute.
Today we were discussing our trendy verrine. Cranky said, "Wha?" Like he had not heard me already calling the deconstructed gazpacho a verrine.
He thought I was talking about Ben Vereen. Cranky can be so un-trendy.
Doesn't mean he didn't like the "gazpacho."
But now we're just calling it salad in a glass.
(P.S. I do still cook. We also had some spaghetti with cooked backyard arugula in it. And, hey — I did have to run the oven a little to toast those baguette slices.)

Look What Crawled Onto My Plate

Cute-cumbers.
No, actually, more like creepy-cumbers.
At first. Until you tame them.
A tiny cucumber plant was sold to us at the farmers market as a "Japanese Cucumber." Oh, yeah! The slender, crisp ones; I want that.
She got big pretty quick. (It's Gwen, as you may recall.)
Then the cukes started to grow in evil, twisted shapes. With prickly spines! I had to wear gloves today to harvest these.
I thought they were so ugly, we'd have to peel them (we didn't) and then just look the other way while we ate. (In this picture, I've already rubbed off the spines with my gloved hands.)
But, sliced? Cute.
Wicked cute.
Monstrous cute.

Lunch Today

Ohgod.
Sometimes I am so vegan.
The best part is that to eat this lunch, all I had to do was tote out a plate, two forks, a sharp knife, and some seasonings (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper).
The food was already out there. Just waiting to be plucked.
I don't think I've ever had the joy of such a fresh-plucked meal. Lettuce and a fat, ripe tomato.
For dessert, Bean Sprout located a ripe pear. After a few munches, he allowed us to finish the rest in slices.

It's Uneasy Being Green

This soup was just a little too green for Cranky.
He ate it, and said he liked the flavor. The color, he could live with, although he called it Soylent Bean. But he wished one thing had been done differently: He's not as fond of blended soups as I am.
When we first heard about Ilva's spinach and white bean soup, we both drooled. But only I actually read her blog, so I knew that it was a velvety purée. Cranky assumed it was a chunky, beany brew. That's just the way he thinks; he likes food you can use a fork on.
Once we talked it over, though, he agreed to give it a try.
Oh. And we agreed to substitute arugula (rucola, rocket) for the spinach. We had to. The garden is holding us hostage, and there are daily prison-yard riots in the arugula patch. Armed with machetes and a stainless-steel bowl, we hacked back much of the unruly foliage and softened it in a skillet with oil and garlic.
Meanwhile, beans from Rancho Gordo simmered in a pot. Homemade local vegetable stock from last summer got a good thawing in the microwave.
Then, bam! Drain the beans, put in blender with cooked greens and garlic, add broth and whiz until smooth.
Finish with salt, smoked paprika and drizzles of olive oil.
You will fall in love with the texture of the soup, even if you were expecting chunks.
Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about that green color. Sunglasses?

A Babe in the Wood

Or, a nincompoop in a pear tree.
I have no idea what I'm doing, but all of a sudden I'm the owner of a treeful of pears.
Bartlett pears. The kind that get ready to harvest in July, and — oh, hell! This is July.
I haven't harvested a single one yet. Those bastards are simply jumping off the tree. Every night.
The first week it was like two or three. Then eight. We averaged 10 jumps a night for almost a week, but now... Yesterday there were 34.
You never see them fall off the tree in the daytime, but each morning we go out and collect the jumpers. Somebody call the Golden Gate Bridge suicide watch. Or put a net up.
Fortunately, the pears that jump are just pre-ripe. If they ripen on the tree, I'm told, they'll rot. These have been green and firm, and when they land on the ground, they don't even bruise.
Then, a few days later, they turn yellow and fragrant and juicy. And I put them in a plastic bag, in the fridge.
We've eaten some. They're really, really good. But I'm not a baker, and I'm timid about canning. I will get around to it, I will. (There are quite enough left on the tree for me to work my courage up to this.) It's just that we're on the brink of do-or-don't time here. Either save the bounty, or throw the slime into the yard-waste can.
I want to save it. I do.
Also, I will give away many, many baskets of pears to wary (grateful?) friends.
Today I attempted pear cider. I got pear slush. It's yummy, but thick and foamy. Not something you'd want to ferment, or turn into vinegar. More like... brown slush.
What a delicious problem.

Goat Herd Mentality

In any intense foodie population, you'll be hearing about some favorite purveyors, restaurants, farmers... again and again. It's as if we had formed a club and we're all reading each others' comments and basing our opinions on what we learn and...
Wait. Yeah. We have. That's just exactly what we're doing here in the food blogs, and in the newspaper food sections too.
We're all recycling one another's group knowledge.

Pimientos de Padrón are fun because every now and then you get a really hot one and that's — fun.

Bi-Rite Creamery is oh, so, you know... What, you haven't been there yet?

Maldon salt. Yeah, baby. That's the shiz.

Well, I'm guilty of some of that groupthink myself.
But there are other purveyors that just get overlooked, or even dissed, and I don't understand why. Maybe they got a bad review. Maybe they've never been reviewed. Does that make me wrong for liking them?
If I fall in love with a "shunned" cheese, is it like having a crush on the pimply nerd in 7th grade? (Oh, you picked the ugly one! Ha.)
A bunch of years ago I was with a gathering of food literati in the Bay Area, and I mentioned liking Point Reyes Farmstead blue cheese. Everyone else at the table chanted in unison, "It's too acidic." As if they were reading from cue cards. Frankly, I believe they were mentally reciting a review they'd all read, and had never bothered to form their own personal opinions on the cheese, or to even trust their own opinions. I have a fairly fine-tuned sense of taste, and I happen to like the Point Reyes blue. Not too acidic for me.
Another cheese I've been enjoying for years comes from the Bodega Goat Cheese company in Sonoma County. I couldn't tell you the exact variety I usually buy, even though I'm looking right now at a list of their products, but I can always recognize it on sight. It's good, fresh, a little — well, the words I'm about to use sound negative, but they're positive in your mouth: bouncy, spongy, even rubbery. Let's say bouncy. Also very milky and pure white. Sweet. Salty.
But. I never see reviews of this cheese company. Has the proprietor soiled his reputation by getting a divorce? Are they too far away from the Ferry Plaza (120 miles)? Is it simply too goaty? (And for that matter, whatever happened to Laura Chenel? Oh. She sold her outfit to a French corporation. Still, she "invented" goat cheese for Americans, and I can't believe we never hear about her stuff anymore.)
So, anyway. Back to Bodega Goat Cheese. We found a little tub of their requeson at the market yesterday. It's a lot like ricotta (but don't let the phonetic similarities of "requeson" and "ricotta" fool you... one has the root word for "cheese" and the other has the root word of "cooked").
It's mild, slightly grainy, and very fresh and milky. Spreadable, though not creamy. It's girly but butch.
Cranky thinks it's goaty, and I don't. I can be very sensitive to goatiness, but this struck me as just — nice.
Here it is on a slice of wheat levain, topped with sliced radishes, a grind of pepper, and (sigh) Maldon salt.

It's Not Always Food

Sometimes it's a cocktail.
Oh my.
A bloody Mary, without the blood.
This was a vodka concoction made with home-grown, home-squeezed Sungold cherry tomatoes.
And. The decoration was home-grown celery stalks. It's all very immature right now, but then... so am I.

Summertime, and the Cookin' Is Lazy

I agree with my friend Catherine, who said that during the warm season, simple food is best.
That doesn't mean you can't get complex flavors. Just layer bite after bite, clockwise or counterclockwise, around your plate.
Here, for One Local Summer, episode four, we dined on local corn; potatoes mixed with peas; cucumbers; and tomatoes. We didn't grow any of this food ourselves (we are still camped out beside the tomato plants with baskets and binoculars, but only the Sungold cherries are ripening). It is beyond privilege to be able to buy this bounty at the local farmers market. Even the butter and olive oil are local.
Then there's the salt. Oh, darn, I bet you can tell from those crazy tetrahedron flakes — it's Maldon salt, and it's way, way not local. But such cute, snowy flakes.

The Blogosphere, Bless its Pointy Little Head

I have a new friend I've never met.
We have a lot in common: We're very close in age; our dads were both U.S. Navy pilots; we both lived in Alameda, just missing each other by about a year; we both also lived in Yokosuka, Japan, when our dads were stationed there.
And now we have another thing in common. She has started a blog. It's pretty heavy on the food-blog quotient, though I loved a recent post of hers about drying laundry outdoors on a clothesline.
My new friend is Zoomie, of Zoomie Station. She lives in the Bay Area, like me, and has already cultivated local dignitaries to visit her blog, such as Sam and Biggles. Dagny, too.
She's currently making plans to head up to Seattle for one of the most notorious (and I mean that in a good way) food blogger weddings of the summer. How cool is that? The bride is Zoomie's niece-in-law.
I can't wait to talk to Zoomie about the wedding — and other stuff, too — when she gets back.
When we meet.

Who Is Gwen?

Who is Gwen, and why is she leaving graffiti in my garden?
This is our Japanese cucumber plant. It has the most awesome tendrils; they seem to have an innate intelligence. There is a tomato cage surrounding the plant, and the tendrils almost unfailingly find the wire tiers and wrap themselves around, many, many times. Tightly.
It helps to hoist up the plant's weight as it grows. A vertical cucumber plant produces straight cucumbers; if it sprawls on the ground, they come out curled.
I've tried guiding some tendrils to what I thought would be a useful foothold, but they undo themselves when I'm not looking. "Butt out, garden amateur."
OK.
I'm puzzled why this particular tendril got all up in the grill of this innocent leaf. I guess it needed to grasp something, anything.
But what do you think it's trying to tell me?
"Surrender, Dorothy"?
"Some Pig!"?
Oh. No. I think I got it.
The cucumber plant's name is Gwen.
Welcome to my backyard, Gwen. Live long and prosper.
"Dup dor a'az Mubster," as they say in Vulcan. Which is probably about as legible as your next graffito will be.

Repetitive Blog Entry

Man. You stick with this blogging stuff long enough, you find yourself repeating things.
Can't be helped, I suppose. I mean, I know women who wear Something New every single day, but jeepers, my kitchen repertory isn't that imaginative (or stuck up). Let's not talk about my imaginative wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts.
I like some of the meals I make, and I tend to make them again and... so.
Well, Friday I repeated the Joe's Special and two readers caught me.
OK, here's an up-front confessed repeat: Posole.
Salad soup.
Far from authentic, but so nice, so refreshing, so personalizable! Like phở. Right? That Vietnamese soup that comes with a tray of optional garnishes; you toss in the basil or bean sprouts or whatever you like.
My faux posole (Cranky wants me to call it phởsole) was made with freshly decocted chicken broth, some nice chunks of the dark chicken meat, diced onions, diced tomatoes, diced nopales, sliced hot chiles... and the critical cooked hominy (not canned, yay!)
At the table, I brought out little dishes of cut-up lettuce, arugula, crumbled cotija cheese, avocado cubes, cilantro leaves, dried Mexican oregano, some hacked Sungold cherry tomatoes, sliced radishes, and lime wedges for squeezing.
Have a go at her, fellas.
Because, if you've invited a meat magician over for lunch, you're sure as heck not going to try cooking meat for him. No sir. Salad soup it will be.
(He cleaned his bowl. Good boy.)

Bless Joe's Heart (Whoever He Is)

Still chugging along with One Local Summer, a pledge to eat (at least) one meal a week of local food.
Last summer I didn't officially join (I'm not a joiner!), and I managed to blog about only one local meal, even though I'm sure there were many, many others. It's just so easy here in Northern California. I mean, I hate to brag. I almost hate to "join," because it's not always a given for my other blogging brethren and sistren to be able to blithely cook up local meals.
But if there's an upside to my participating (other than my own delicious fortune), surely it's the sharing of stories. The hope, the accomplishment, the compromise.
I'm an amateur here. I buy most of my local foods. Several of my favorite bloggie foodies are growing vast quantities of the stuff they eat, even the meat.
I'm just now exploring a long-repressed itch to grow food. At this moment, Cranky and I sit in our lawn chairs, staring at the garden... in abject terror! Any minute it will bloom with edibles, and then we will have to put our edibles where our mouth is. For now, all that's coming in is the arugula. Which explains why last week's OLS meal was also based on arugula. It's easy to use.
The zucchini... that will be harder. And the tomatoes, which I love, but SIX plants for two people?
OK, well. That's the (immediate) future, and the immediate now is: Joe's Special. It's a historic San Francisco mish-mash dish of ground beef, onions, mushrooms, spinach, eggs, and seasonings. If you follow the recipe on that link, be advised that you will get a wet, gray mess.
Here's how we did ours: Some local bacon fat in a skillet with sliced mushrooms; cook nicely. Remove the mushrooms and toss in some diced onion. Peel the casing off some local beef/pork sausage and crumble the meat into the onions; cook nicely. Add back the mushrooms and a huge wad of chopped arugula leaves. Season with salt and (local?) paprika. Cook until the arugula is as tender as you like. Beat a couple of eggs in a bowl, and {{danger alert!}} drain off the collected watery juices from the skillet. OK, now add the eggs and cook gently, stirring, until you get a yummy but highly unphotographable hodgepodge.
Verdict: Amazingly tasty. I'm full, burp.

Zucchini Telephone

Recipes, when you don't write them down or follow them to the letter out of a cookbook, can be a little bit like the game of Telephone. You know, when one person whispers a short sentence to somebody else, who then whispers it — or what he thinks he heard — to the next person, and so on. At the end of the line of people, the last person says out loud what he heard. Which is how "What part of 'subpoena' don't you understand, Ms. Miers?" eventually becomes "Wet farts and penis-doodies, stinky big liars."
And so it is with zucchini. Are you wallowing in zucchini from your garden yet? No, me neither. It seems a little absurd to have a couple of sickly plants in the ground, here in mid-July, and find yourself having to buy some zukes at the market.
(Not that the guy selling them at the market thought it was absurd, and more power to him.)
But I had seen a dish of baked zucchini in the food section of my newspaper (I know, yuck, baked zucchini?) and I really wanted to eat some.
The author of the recipe originally tasted this dish in a restaurant, and then crafted her own version of it. So already the newspaper recipe wasn't "authentic" (and who knows where the restaurant got its idea from in the first place?).
Key words stuck in my mind: gruyere, cream, toasted chopped walnuts, breadcrumbs. Yeah! I was going to make the baked zucchini. Without the recipe.
In fact, I'll tell you up front that I added an egg to my version, to make it a little quiche-like.
Here's what else I'll tell you: Grated zucchini tossed with salt and allowed to drain (give 'em a squeeze). Stir it with all the other stuff except the breadcrumbs. Season to your liking (remember, it's already salty). Top with breadcrumbs, dots of butter and a shower of grated parmesan. Bake until it's just the way you like it.
I liked mine a lot.
Which is to say, "Harriet Miers should be held in contempt."

Global Worming and Climate Change

Worms are cute.
But they poot.

Turns out trendy vermicomposting — setting up a bin on your balcony or in your yard, filling it with shredded paper, kitchen scraps and red worms, and then collecting the "castings" (worm poo) to use as fertilizer — may be creating greenhouse gasses.
Darn. Such a nifty idea. Wiggly red worms you buy at a bait shop or nature store. No need to run the garbage disposal. Less dumping onto the landfill.
But now we learn what the little buggers are emitting as a natural byproduct of digestion: nitrous oxide, way more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Odds are the average home worm bin is not contributing huge loads of the bad gas. So you probably shouldn't feel guilty about continuing your project for now.
But.
Darn.
It's not easy being green.

Well-Wrapped

I have scads of aprons. I've worn most of them at one time or another, although I confess some still have the pristine creases from the day they were packed and sent.
In other words, some I have bought, and some have been gifts.
Some were souvenirs I especially wanted, others just seem to have caught the fancy of the giver: "Hey, Cookiecrumb likes dogs; let's give her this dog apron." (I have worn the dog apron. A lot.)
All but one of them are factory jobs. Most have logos, although some are just screen-printed with nice images.
A few have (I think) cachet: one from The Fillmore in San Francisco; another from Spago in Hollywood — way back when.
Three of them are newspaper-related, although I have no idea where that New York Times apron came from. The black Examiner apron is actually one of those abbreviated items news vendors used to wear (and maybe still do).
I think you can sense a certain fondness in me for my collection.
But Ilva, at Lucullian Delights, wants me to single out just one.
It's that blue flowered thing. Quilted fabric with hideous yellow straps.
Cranky's sister made the apron for me a million years ago. I've always loved the way it ties on, snug like a hug. The pockets are just right, and it fits. (So many manufactured aprons seem to be made for Julia Child-size people.) Not the prettiest item, but very sentimental and useful.
When Cranky's sister saw me wearing it, ages after she had given it to me, she said, "Oh, that's what I made for you? I'm so sorry."
No, honey. Look. See how many times it's been laundered?

Summer in my Little Patio

Is it any wonder some days I don't even leave the house? Just wander around back there, watering and pinching and smelling. Eating, even.
A little excursion: The flower is a columbine. Yes, the now-icky name of the high school in Colorado where a massacre took place several years ago. It hasn't made the flower any less lovely, though, or strange. It's so Alien! Very Giger, and click here to see what I'm talking about.
Another excursion: In the enchanting movie King of Hearts, the beautiful love interest played by Geneviève Bujold is named Coquelicot. But in the English subtitles, her name is translated to Columbine. Yet, coquelicot is actually a poppy. Why wouldn't she want to be called Poppy?

Optimistic Awe

You might think I'm describing the harvest of my terribly, terribly modest, miniature garden in terms of grandiose braggadocio.
Nope.
I'm simply amazed that I can scrape up a few square inches of inferior sod, replace it with seedlings, and then eat the result.
Oh, and we've decided to save the sod scrapings to begin a compost pile. Freebie.
Yesterday we harvested some (admittedly overgrown) arugula leaves, along with a paltry handful of sorrel leaves.
Then the usual kitchen applications applied: oil, salt, chicken stock, garlic scapes, heat, cream, blender. Then cold buttermilk and a little time out in the fridge. All the ingredients except the salt were procured from within 100 miles.
We dined on a fragrant, peppery, funky soup that was not quite as Shreky as pure sorrel soup, less astringent than spinach soup and — glory — came from our own garden.
This is my paltry contribution to One Local Summer, a season of crafting at least one local meal a week. Because sometimes, I really do eat only a big, local bowl of soup for supper.

Menu Memories

Many, many years ago, while in exile in Florida, Cranky and I happened upon a swanky Italian restaurant in the town of Longwood, just outside Orlando. It was situated on a lake (there are scads of lakes, actually watered-up sinkholes, in Central Florida) rimmed by trees twinkling with tiny white lights.
The food was good, and the atmosphere was unintimidatingly upscale. In those days, the restaurant was called something like Enzo's Mamma something or other... Dear Enzo loved his mother. Enzo himself would handsomely greet us and make us feel special and smart.
It was almost a rarity in Florida then: a classy, local (read non-chain) restaurant with modern European touches and a whiff of Wise Guy presence. Seriously!
I became obsessed with a pasta dish served there, the bucatini with pancetta, peas, pepper flakes and grated parmesan. Today — I just looked up Enzo's website (the restaurant has changed its name to Enzo's on the Lake) — it's still on the menu! I seem to have forgotten that there were also bacon and mushrooms in the dish... or maybe they're a latter-day adjustment.
Anyway, that was always my dinner of choice at Enzo's. So debonair. So — unknown! Who'd ever heard of bucatini? I didn't really process the fact that restaurants love it when customers order the pasta, because it's so cheap to make. I'd simply pay a whopping entrée price for my beloved, exotic bucatini.
Well, let's just say that I'm still happy about that meal, even in retrospect.
But now I make it at home. Save loads of cash that way (have you seen the price for a ticket to Florida?). Because I can buy bucatini pasta at A.G. Ferrari, a local Italian food importer.
Ferrari's bucatini is almost peculiarly tender. If you're an al dente stalwart, you won't like it: it cooks up pretty soft. But it's so loving, so gentle, so virginal thrown in there with the beasts of red pepper flakes and manly bacon. A wicked contrast.
Just like dinner on a dewy, twinkling lake in Florida... with a Mafia guy at the next table.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY

Now, more than ever. (Read the rebus, kids.)

What Is It?

It's food. I ate some today for lunch.
I loved, loved this meal. So easy and deeply flavorful.
So, what is it?
It is not green octopus.
And "Moby Pickle" is likewise incorrect.

I Like 'Em Big and Stupid

Yesterday wasn't much of a food day for me. I was cruising the Marin farmers market with a gaggle of pals, when a gut cramp struck.
I wasn't really suffering badly, but I didn't think it wise to remain in a public place while I sorted out the intestinal distress. Would I double over? Throw up? Something else? Ew.
So I went home and languished. Fasted right through lunch, which was like hitting the reset button. A good thing.
I was finally hungry for supper, and a fat, ripe avocado was an easy choice.
I once learned a recipe for a sauce to drizzle on avocado halves eons ago from an East Coast guy. Excuse me, but I think the West Coast has dibs on avocado recipes. (Well, excluding that bizarre avocado dessert from Sunset magazine.) Still, I gave the sauce a try a couple of times. I think it was called "Volcano Sauce" or "Dynamite Sauce," something like that.
And last night it just seemed like a fun, stupid thing to try again.
I don't know if I still have the actual recipe anywhere; I recall that it was one of those unit=unit=unit recipes. In other words, equal proportions of everything. The problem was remembering what the ingredients were.
Ketchup, yes. Worcestershire sauce, yes. Then. Um... Something sweet. Something hot. (See why this is an East Coast recipe? It so disrespects the avocado!)
So I winged it. There was a jar of Dijon mustard in the fridge that only held wisps of mustard. That would be a good mixing vessel. I squirted in some agave nectar. A little Tabasco. Some vinegar. The ketchup and Worcestershire (although not in equal proportions).
It tasted pretty good, for a stupid, weird thing to do to an avocado.
Cranky asked how I liked it.
"It's stupid," I said. "I think I just reinvented Heinz 57 Sauce."