I'm Cool With That

Doesn't that look good? Toasted pasta, golden brown and yet still slippery in the mouth. Deeply infused rice, fragrant with chicken and herbs.
Naturally, it's a pilaf.
But it came from a box labeled Rice-A-Roni.
Seriously. Laugh me out of blogdom now.
The weather here has not been cooperating lately. During a particularly wet sludge through what I thought was supposed to be summer, I collapsed into my needy, sickbed ways. Almost.
When I'm really sick, I like a can of chicken and noodle soup.
This time, though, I felt hearty enough for not-soup. But it still needed to be noodley, chickeny, kinda MSG-y.
Oh, just kill me now. I haven't had Rice-A-Roni in decades. I knew, though, it was the remedy, the elixir. Just this once.
Cranky dashed down to the market and grabbed a couple of boxes. He also bought the makings of a chicken sandwich for himself.
I cooked the Roni while he assembled his own lunch. He kept offering me bits of chicken, but NO, it needs to be pure, in situ, as is.
He ate, and I ate. Finally, he accepted a nibble of my pilaf, and he (secretly) liked it. A lot.
I know this, because the very next day he heated up the leftover Roni and shared a plate of it with me.
And now he is out there, buying more boxes of the stuff.

You Call This Lunch? I Do, I Do.

This was our meal yesterday, celebrating with champagne.
It was perfect. We didn't have to do anything but pop, cut, plate and eat.
And surprisingly, that cheese resembling a Stilton went suavely with the bubbly. Didn't expect that, but we dared to try, and it worked.
The cheese, which doesn't even have a name yet as far as I can tell, is designed to resemble a Stilton, but the cheese lady told Cranky, "We're not allowed to call it Stilton."
Because it's made in Marin County, zillions of miles from Stiltonshire. Appellation contrôlée and all.
It comes from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company, from whom we have been buying a wonderful blue cheese for a good few years now. It's clear they know their mold inoculation.
This, um, let's call it "Stilter" (anyone reminded of a Monty Python skit?), is new for them. It is yellow, buttery, mildly tart. Yummy texture; a little soft but it definitely slices. Less in-your-face than an English Stilton. The wheels are smaller (and you can see in the picture that it has been cut in half horizontally).
Verdict: So damn yeah. I hope they continue making this cheese; I suspect they showed up at our farmers market (for the first time!) to get a general reaction from the public on their latest experiment.
I wish I could tell you how to find some; their website hasn't been updated since January, it looks like.
Oh, the rest of the plate. White peaches with some fanciful name like Pink Tutu. Bing cherries as big as beef hearts. Mouth toys, basically. Good with the cheese and champers (which, because it was made in California and not Champagneshire, we must call "sparkling wine," eek).
A good, good day.

Happy Us

This glass is 30 years old today.
It was a wedding gift. Form your own conclusions here; yes, I am old.
Today it's not filled with Perrier-Jouët, although that is the bubbly that accompanied the glasses (one has broken) in a nice, fine box back then. Today it's some sassy Taittinger stuff.
We drank it with the best lunch, which I will be dragging out until tomorrow.
Got to. Little giggly.

Not My Dog

Hardly a dog at all.
But so cute.
I shouldn't bore you with this stuff. I should just buy some pinking shears and glue and start a scrapbook, to bore only myself.
Still. Cutest little puppy in the world.

Sad Soup

It is my duty to be honest with you about food. I can't brag about my successes, day after day. I make mistakes.
I want you to know about this mistake, because the other day I bragged about oiled, roasted fava beans in the pod.
They came out tender, even without that pesky second skin-peeling. I guess it was the effect of the oil, and the roasting (without H2O). Really nice. I saved some for an impromptu minestrone a day or two later.
Well. (Jack Benny face, hand on chin.) The beans ended up tough. It was like chewing through miniature rubber swim caps. Not pleasant.
And I suspect it was due to the action of the hot water (vegetable broth, actually). Fava skins go all cooked-latex in hot liquid.
The soup itself was really nice, though. I have to tell you that we found a container of pea-pod/cilantro broth in the freezer, dated 2008! It was still simply wonderful.
And I really liked dicing a juicy, ripe heirloom tomato and tossing that in; more pleasant in the mouth than spurts of old tomato sauce. That's a keeper.
The beans? We're going to continue roasting them; got a new sack of favas in the fridge now. But I will not let them get into hot water.

Solstice Sistah

Really, you can't imagine how much you want this concoction.
Cucumber water.
I love cucumbers; always have. My dad warned me when I was about six and ordered a cucumber salad in a restaurant that they would make me burp. How cool! I couldn't wait to start burping. (It didn't happen.)
So, the other day we put together something that needed peeled cukes. There were all those beautiful, deep green curls left over.
I'm a nose-to-tail eater, so the peels did not go immediately onto the compost pile. They went into a pitcher of water, and in the fridge. After we drink the fragrant water, we will toss the peels onto the compost. Too damn brilliant.
Burp!

Roasted Fava Beans

You might have seen roasted fava beans here and there on the Web. I ran into two separate posts about them, within days of each other, and I think it's going viral.
I don't even like favas, but of course I had to try this. What I mainly don't like about favas is the double peeling of the damn beans (which someone likened to castrating an elf). In this preparation, though, you don't have to peel off the tiresome inner skins! They're edible, and I mean, really edible.
It was mentioned that roasted favas are like edamame. No, they are not. They are nothing like edamame. If pulling a cooked green bean out of a salty pod and popping it into your mouth = "edamame," well, that's your narrow-minded little fantasy, not mine.
Roasted favas taste brown. Deep. Meaty.
And since they are protein, they are filling and nutritious. Cranky and I ate half of this foot-wide plate of beans for lunch, and were very happy. (Leftovers are going into an impromptu minestrone.)
I can't say enough how good roasted favas are, and I wouldn't even have eaten favas this spring until I saw the other bloggers' photos.
Get a sack of beans while they're still in season. I might even tell you how to roast them.
OK. Oven at 425F. Wash and dry the pods. Strew them in a baking pan large enough to hold them in a single layer (crowding is fine). Splurt some olive oil and goosh the pods until they are all shiny all over. Pop 'em in the oven for 25 minutes, remembering to give a stir halfway through.
Sprinkle nice salt over the cooked pods. Let cool just a bit, so you can strip off the pods, one at a time. You are ready to eat.

The Fighting Garden

It's not really a garden, it's a weed patch. It's in the way-back, little-used side of the house, fenced and ignored.
A lot of fighting goes on in that patch, pulling up those adorable yellow flowers before they turn into the puffballs of dandelion doom. Nature vs. man. You can see there are a lot that need attending to.
Still, they are the only flowers in our garden. We haven't replaced the annuals that grace small pots on a steel etagére near the fence on the other side of the house. There were chive blossoms, but they're getting faded and tattered.
So we are a little flower-free, but the weather has improved and we're headed to the gardening store soon for seedlings. My limbic system is craving beauty.
Cranky was out there this morning, hacking wayward branches and pulling those nasty weeds. He developed such a hatred for the yellow flowers, we accidentally had a fight.
I went over to see how he was doing; to encourage him to quit for the day; to thank him for his hard work.
And then I said, "Pretty."
I wouldn't say he went feral on me. It was more like a neuro-disordered misunderstanding. Cranky was still in deep, reptilian-brain work mode, still with a hate on for those yellow flowers, totally confused why I would even use the word "pretty." I shouldn't have been insisting on a conversation at that moment. The man was covered with sweat and grime.
"I don't think they're pretty," he said. "I think they're the ugliest things on earth."
(The rest of the fight has been redacted so that the author will look good. -Ed.)

Dog on da Bed!

Bartlett thinks she built this house all by herself and staffed it with two compliant humans.
She has never slept anywhere but on our bed, from the day we brought her home. (Though she is about to take an overnighter out of town; we'll see how that works.)
She manipulates one or the other of us (usually Cranky) into taking her outside for a game of fetch, ANY TIME she wants.
We trot her food and water bowls from room to room (and outdoors, too), so she'll never be at a loss for a bite or a lick.
We are good servants.
But if you think that sounds bad, that's as bad as it gets.
She doesn't beg for human food because it doesn't work.
She is getting cuddlier by the day, as the root beer in her veins from puppyhood calms down.
She has done pretty well with behavior training. Pretty well; still working on "come," and she's almost two.
She is basically a nice dog with ultra soft fur and unbelievable muscle mass. Kinda ugly-pretty.
We are pwned.

Tra La La Laaa!

The sun came out. The wind died down. The temperature went up.
Cranky and I sat outdoors with our brains in the sunlight yesterday, and I came to believe this was IT. The sad dank might be over.
This morning I woke up cheery and frisky. Happy.
Lemme tell you something about feelings. You feel them. I had been morose, monosyllabic, mopey.
And in a day, I was joking and gesturing and gyrating. Happy.
Whew. I hope it holds.
So this food post is a little obsolete, one hopes. During the grim gloom we made a couple of plates of spaghetti, darkly flavored with mushrooms, onions and tomatoes. Anchovy paste. A squirt of balsamic vinegar (dem tomatoes from the freezer are really sweet). It tasted brown (the mushrooms, I believe). Perfect for a dismal day, and hoo boy, have we had them.
I would not like to think spaghetti is a seasonal dish, though. We'll be having more throughout the year.
But maybe not as dark.

Bored, But Back To Blogging

I know people who would not consider this lunch. Lunch is a sandwich, right?
Well, as my gastroenterologist said, bread is junk.
I'm not giving up bread, because I like a sandwich too. Now and then.
But this is lunch. And the USDA would definitely approve of this plate.
Behold, the first harvest of homegrown blueberries. Damn, they are sweet! So different from supermarket berries. The texture is snappy and juicy, not potato-y. The flavor is — I have to say this — *blue*.
A leisurely graze through this plate of wonder (the cottage cheese is Cowgirl Creamery, the roasted almonds are Massa, the peach is Kashiwase, and what have they been doing? It was fantastic), divided between two of us (we shared one spoon), felt so nurturing. Taste explosions. Protein bombs. Sweet, sweet fruit. And as we approached the end of the food on the plate, we were satisfied, full. Happy.
What a way to eat.

Spoiler Alert: Sad Story

I got the hankering for this dish after Molly moaned, almost audibly, over it. She has never steered me wrong.
It is a bowl of kimchi fried rice, made with bacon and egg. It sounded startling to me, but Molly moaned.
It was OK. No, I didn't like it. I ate half, and threw the rest away.
The bacon. That didn't work for me.
I will allow the slight possibility that one of the slices of guanciale had a microscopic dot of mold on it, and the bad flavor could have tainted the rice.
But I doubt it.
Besides, I'm not making it again, even if it is the most delicious food in the world to somebody else.
It didn't work for me.

Where Y'at on Hot Dogs?

I like hot dogs.
I admit, I went through a long period in my young adulthood when I thought they were poison. Tasteless, dangerous, and that white ball in there!
Turns out I had been eating inferior hot dogs. You don't just walk into Piggly Wiggly and grab the cheapest pack of tube steaks. That's death. Pork Lips Now.
I don't think you need to be all boutique about dogs, either. A few years ago Marin Sun Farms put out some hot dogs, and they're a trustworthy outfit. But the dogs stunk.
I'll let you pick the best you can find.
You've had a Chicago dog, right? Overloaded with relish and peppers and pickles and tomatoes and so, so good.
Well, I invented a California dog. Stuffed with avocado, cilantro, tomato, onions, and smeared with mayonnaise mixed with gochujang. Try that, me laddies! It's like a Blade Runner dog. Be good with a little fried kimchi, too. Next time.
Sadly, we used chicken hot dogs from a very nice, largely organic store, and they were on sale. Duds! No more. Boo.
My friend Chilebrown turned me on the these buns, called bolillos and available at Latino markets. They are really large. More than you need to hold all that junk. And the texture is a little wispy (which in a way is good; less chewing). I might try them again, might not. Yeah, I think I will. Cheap as hell, too.

Plant Misty for Me

This is real! I bought a native blueberry bush, called Southern Highbush "Misty."
It's in my yard, happily potted in acid soil and protected from wind. Looks like I will have to protect it from birds, soon, too. I got the netting already.
I had no idea there would be fruit the first season. I haven't tasted any yet, but I just may fall in love with blueberries.
There are now five kinds of fruit growing chez moi; six if you count the lemons.
It makes me happy, not an easy thing during this miserable gloomy weather.

This'll Fix You Up

June Gloom? Yeah, we got it bad. Showers, gray skies, fricky wind.
The mood suffers.
There is a cure for that, and it comes in many flavors. Soup.
This is sunny avgolemono soup. I saw no need to art up the photo with utensils, herbs, crockery. What you want is exactly what you're looking at: A bowl of glaringly yellow soup, tingling with lemon and substantial with rice. Eggs, chicken stock... that's food. After we finished our lunch, we couldn't get up from the table. The soup was so nourishing (and there was a little Greek salad, too).
In the old days (we're talking Pleistocene, okay?), I made up my very own recipe for avgolemono soup. How hard could it be? Whatever I came up with tasted good and was definitely satisfying.
I haven't cooked this soup in years. We have lemons to use, and it just seemed so right today. To make sure, I looked up recipes.
Turns out I was making it properly all along.