I'm Mad and I Eat

Take Five

2012-01-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

The stovetop fairy paid a visit this morning. Actually, two burly men with charming demeanors and a sackful of power tools. That's my dream of a good fairy.
I can't believe we waited nearly five years to run a gas line into the kitchen. I've been cooking on a wobbly, uneven electric range all this time. It had the decency to have infinite settings on the knobs; no clunky clicks from Medium to Medium Hot, you just swooped in on any temperature.
But that's gone, and good bye. I don't even know how to use the new cooktop yet. Not too complicated, I suspect. Just a flick of the pilot, then dial up the flame of your choice.
Oh, and there's a low-simmer burner, and a high BTU one for setting bacon on fire. Choices! And there's, uh, wait. Count the knobs.
OMG.

Theme Park Restaurant, Pastrami Is an E-Ticket

2012-01-23T15:03:00.000-08:00

This pastrami sandwich was really tasty, but I have to confess I removed about half the meat before eating. We'll think of something clever to do with it as soon as the appliance guys are out of the kitchen later this week.
The half sour pickle was a delight, coming across all innocent cucumber at first, and then killing you with garlic. And the cole slaw was so good, I wonder where to find the vial of happy drops they are surely adding.
An East Coast deli on the West Coast. Nice, but not all that hard to imagine. You just imitate, exactly, the best deli you've ever had in New York. But the decor? Also imitating New York, or your version of it. Tile and Formica. Goofy artwork on the walls. No pretensions (except to be a New York deli).
Look, guys. We all know we're in California. Couldn't there be a Wasabi Corner in the decor? A Shag You Conversation Pit somewhere? Tiki Tova's Pickle Hut?
No, because that would just be pretend. Made up. About as original as recreating a New-York style theme park for your restaurant.
I don't mind. My food was take-out, anyway.
And it was really good.

Miller's

I Got Scalloped

2012-01-22T11:11:00.000-08:00

Scallops! I don't even like scallops, but apparently I do. Now and then. Once in a while.
So, of course, when I mentioned scallops to Cranky the other day, he dashed off and bought a passle.
They are so easy to cook. Sauté until goldy-brown on both sides, that ought to do ya. Don't be afraid of a little heat! We splattered ours with lemon juice, melted butter and capers, though I'm sure a more genteel sauce would be nice.
Best thing I have to tell you about, though, is that winter salad you can hardly see on the plate. Mandolined radishes, tiny white turnips, celery and fennel bulb. You just shave your salad.
Sorry I can't tell you what I'll be snacking on while watching the 49ers play the Giants in soaking rain this afternoon. It's not on the premises yet. Oh, hell, I'll blurt. It's going to be a pastrami sandwich, from a local NY-style deli. New York, I eat your lunch!

What We Did All Day

2012-01-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

It was an amazingly successful live, online protest against a couple of poisonous Internet censorship acts up for votes in Congress.
In one day, several representatives slipped over into the "No" camp. Most of them Republican, and I am free of any rational explanation for that.
I hope you had a chance to read some of the screams and howls of schoolkids who depend on Wikipedia for "doing" their homework. Wikipedia was down for the day, so the kids' personal plagiarisms would be late.
Some Senator or Representative (sorry, tired) became very (officially) upset that Wikipedia had the audacity to shut itself down, complaining that it deprived citizens of a valuable resource (which is not funded by taxpayers, sheesh).
Ah, Mr. Congresscritter? Aren't YOU proposing censoring, by these laws, websites that you find icky? That don't funnel enough cash from the 99% in your general direction? Yes, then your creepy kids would not be able to copy their homework off the web, and you might be personally inconvenienced. Get your facts straight.
So what did we do all day? We drove the two-seater motor boat/double bed. Just drove it into happy land. Bartlett was a good passenger.

Gone Dark

2012-01-18T05:00:00.000-08:00

Stop It, That Hirst

2012-01-13T16:28:00.000-08:00

Don't go to the Gagosian gallery. Any of them, as a matter of fact. I have done you a favor and recreated a Damien Hirst Spot Painting, right here, for free.
Actually, I like my version better. Fresher, foolish.
How is it that major artists make a name for themselves, and then turn around and do paint by number? There is nothing original about Hirst's canvases (don't get me started on the sliced, pickled cows, for real). I believe he has an atelier of devoted, starving artists painting his polka dots for him.
Well, so. Here. I did this for you. For free.

Beautiful, Beastly Food

2012-01-11T16:26:00.000-08:00

It's pretty, isn't it? Some roasting pan filled with gently singed vegetables.
Weird that all the vegetables are white, though. (I could tell you about my White Food years; no complaints from me.)
It was based on a dish I saw briefly on the Web, during the time of holiday recipe ideas. This was so unusual, at least to me, that I wanted to eat some. Of course I no longer had the recipe; story of my life.
Why was it so appealing? Because it's a combination of sweet potatoes, onions and apples. Baked. Yes, we all want sweet potatoes this time of year, but apples and onions? Too cool.
First surprise: The sweet potatoes, once peeled, were white-fleshed. First time for me. They are a little drabber, both in color and flavor, than the usual orange spuds. But they worked fine.
Second surprise: Apples with onions? I know, I've had apples with onions before, but in much stewier presentations, where the immediacy of the original sweet and savory orbs was disguised. Here, it was in your face. What a treat!
Third surprise: Actually, I made this part up myself. I tossed a few glugs of whole cream over the softening foodstuffs toward the end of the cooking time, covered the pan, and waited for a little magic to happen in the oven.
Magic accomplished!

What Comforts You?

2012-01-07T09:29:00.000-08:00

In my corner of the world, it's winter now. Short days, cold nights. For a person of a particular temperament, it's enough to make you -- well, me -- scramble under the covers and stay there.
It works! If you can configure your life to ignore winter, give this a try. (You will need reading material, a dog, and a loving servant. You will also need exercise; get outta the damn bed already!)
It hasn't rained so far this winter in Northern California, so that's one pressure-point less. Open the blinds and get some of that daylight inside your cabin. Mood goes up a bit.
Rather than pretend winter's not happening, though, one might as well embrace it. All those stews and braises. Brandy in a snifter if you're so inclined. The wearing of the scarves (Cranky's favorite part of winter, and he has a lot of scarves). The awesome rain boots you can wear even if it's not raining.
The new year brings an urge for renewal, but getting renewal done is not comforting. Sigh. Bite the bullet. Order those appliances and have your favorite plumber install them Expertly Plus One. Now you have comfort!
Which is a little life lesson. Sometimes you have to earn your comfort by doing one or a couple hard things.

The Little Vegan Who Wouldn't

2012-01-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a funny confession.
I'm not going to do a weeklong vegan diet experiment after all.
I knew we could eat deliciously for every meal. Some of our "normal" meals already are vegan, in fact. Like that bowl of beans and rice with zucchini, gently sloshed with a little vegetable broth and brightened with a squeeze of lemon.
I read a whole book on going vegan. It was charming (and rather youth oriented), but by the end it seemed to be veering into a horrible rule-bound cult. All vegans eat the same recipes. And if a recipe includes vegan burger crumbles, you don't gag, you buy the crumbles. Whatever they are.
So, is my disagreement with the diet or its practitioners? No problem. I can ignore the practitioners and dream up lovely meals free of animal products on my own (and I will not buy oatmeal).
Just the other day, Mark Bittman of the NYT was urging his readers to try a scattering of nice dishes he had come up with. He suggested that a vegan diet might be a good weight management strategy. Oh! "Weight management" means you are too heavy. I am not too heavy, far from it.
I started thinking what I would have to do without. Sour cream. Butter. Milk. Eggs. (I know! I already knew that!) I need the fat and protein from those foods. Yes, there are vegan substitutes for them, but they are not local, and they are processed, a big no-no for me. And what are they made from?
This all sounds like an excuse, doesn't it? It is an excuse. Excuse me for not going overboard in my eating just to satisfy a curiosity.
If you ever see me with a bag of vegan burger crumbles, please call somebody.

Occupy Optics

2011-12-31T11:45:00.000-08:00

Some very good things happened this year, thanks to a strange, leaderless, constantly morphing group of protestors. Who have only had the last three and a half months to make their mark!
And they ain't done yet.
Thank you Occupy Wall Street and all your permutations. You have made the issue of income inequality huge in our minds. The income inequality was there all along, but it took OWS to get us to notice it, to get us heated up about it.
Occupy has also brought the simple right to assemble peaceably into the spotlight. If cops in riot gear think they can bust up nonviolent groups of demonstrators for no good reason, we, the 99%, now have more work to do.
But the cops persist in busting up law-abiding gatherings with batons and pepper spray, putting the fat, stupid bastards in the news, and shining a favorable light on the people. Thanks, cops. It makes our work easier, even if it hurts for a while, and you are prancing imbeciles until you get put on administrative leave.
When OWS burst onto the news back in mid-September, I felt immediately we had a new form, a new context, a new theater. Camping all night in pup tents? Crazy optics. Embracing the homeless, feeding everybody? Angelic. Making rules up as you go along? (Human Mic, those hand wiggles for approval or disapproval at general assemblies.) Radical.
I've seen remarks from ordinary people, even people I know, who don't dig OWS. They have decided that THEY know how OWS should be run: Get a leader, get an agenda, focus on jobs.
Enlighten me, what butt-headed Tweeter thinks he or she should tell OWS what to do? Are they running secret underground railroads through their apartment that I don't know about? No, they are in constant search of lattes, mani-pedis and coiffeur blow-outs, which seriously cuts into their revolutionary credentials.
When OWS needs leadership, it will emerge from the movement. Agendas are already there, if invisible to the un-punk eye. And jobs? Really, Occupy has to say "We need jobs"? We ALL need jobs. It's practically a moot point.
I hope you are looking forward to the New Year. It's going to be important.
I hope it's great.

Break the Rules; Sometimes It Works

2011-12-27T12:13:00.000-08:00

When is Christmas dinner? On Christmas Eve, or on Christmas Day?
I know, it depends on your family tradition. I didn't know when Christmas dinner was when I was growing up. Mom was always changing the family tradition. One year she had us all open every present on Christmas Eve! I was horrified. What would Christmas Day be? (Nothing, as it turned out. And no special dinner. What a waste.)
Cranky and I decided, long ago, that Christmas dinner would be on Christmas Day. It just makes sense. It's Christmas. And Christmas Eve is a little bit fraught with anxiety; no fun munching on a green bean casserole then. For Christmas Eve, we usually go a little swanky-appetizers style. Last Saturday we had fresh Dungeness crab with squeezes of lemon and dabs of mayo.
OK, not the point, really. Whichever day you choose for your feast, I have a little suggestion. If you are having roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, that is. The reliable old recipe for Yorkie from the Joy of Cooking can't be beat. But I beat it the other night, easy-peasy and worth a dare.
The cookbook advises that you cook the pud in a glass or ceramic dish. Fine; I've always done so, and got great poofy corners, but sad, sunken middles. The other night, we had seared our beef in a cast-iron skillet before oven time, and there was a great, well-flavored vessel just sitting there.
We didn't have enough beef fat, but we slid the skillet into the oven with pats of butter until everything got hot and brown. Yes, brown butter! I scraped the pudding batter right into the forbidden skillet, and got a souffle effect like I've never seen.
A work of explosive culinary art. Don't have to wait a whole year to try this again. (But what will we call the dinner?)

On, Dasher!

2011-12-23T08:35:00.000-08:00

I'm snuggled in bed with the most selfish and smug of feelings. Christmas is nearly here, and all I have to do is cuddle with Cranky and Bartlett.
I did most of my shopping online (and I'm pleased with the results, so pleased), but there was one undelivered snafu. I could remedy that by going to the mall today, although Cranky kindly suggested that we wait until later next week. He is such a good boy.
Decorating the house has gone slowly, meaning we might not get the "tree" up. There's a wreath on the door, though, so the neighbors and delivery people have to assume we enjoy a skosh of festivity at this house. We do, really, but I'm finding it unimportant to get all tinselly indoors. That's what fireplaces are for (if it's not another Spare the Air day; we've had a rash of them in this sunny December). And I have a fantastic Christmas music channel on Pandora.
Enough about me and mine. I wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season. I love that Hanukkah is overlapping Christmas this year; gonna fry up some latkes tonight. 2011 was a stinker of a year, but it went fast, ending (so far) with Boehner's bag o' toys of a cave-in.
Let's all hold cybernetic hands and feel the love. I love you! I'm so happy to know you. May the soft-focus colored soft-drink bottles spray you with good cheer. Oh, wait, that's a close-up of Christmas lights. Good cheer!

Food You Should Eat

2011-12-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

This would be good on Meatless Monday. But Cranky wanted a little meat. So the chopped-off ends of a few fatty rashers of bacon found their way in. (Yum.)
You are looking at the classic pot o' greens. This was a two-hour endeavor -- not counting washing and trimming the greens, which Cranky picked up fresh at the farmers market this morning.
You have to be careful what you talk about while you're still snuggling in bed with the Sunday paper. I mentioned greens, merely because I think our diet could use some healthin' up. Cranky was all, like, "Bang! Wow! Done." Still, largely, nothing wrong with that.
I'm traditionally the greens cook around here, but we collaborated today, and I know that Cranky picked up some really good lessons.
He also cooked a pot of rice and a pot of red beans; combine however you see fit.
That dude is my salvation.

A Wind in the Willows Lunch

2011-12-14T09:10:00.000-08:00

It's a peasanty kind of meal, even if you're out of bread and Marie Antoinette orders you to eat brioche.
It was a simple matter of food on hand. What to do, how to eat?
Well, naturally you cut and sautee the mushrooms (crimini and trumpet). With a shallot, yas? Then you drizzle in some cream and stir lovingly, until you can no longer wait: you add a glug of rum (because there is no sherry in the house, and the rum works surprisingly well).
Just toast and mushrooms, really, but so damn fancy. The flavors, the rustic presentation, a collision of sensations.
I was going to say something about maybe winter's not so bad... But it's still fall.

If You're Gonna Be a Lush, Be a Proper Lush

2011-12-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

You've noticed that cocktails are all the rage. Probably always been all the rage, except during the late 60s, when they were considered mommy drinks. My mommy.
I was one of those hippies who avoided liquor in favor of junky red wine, and didn't have my first martini until I was in my 30s.
At the time, there was a little "cool" revival. Sinatra. Dark bars. Attitude.
Oh, let me tell you about the attitude. Cranky and I went to a hipster waterfront restaurant and ordered martinis.
"Vodka martinis?" growled the bartender.
"No, a martini is made with gin unless I ask for something else," said Cranky, the cranky ex-bartender. "And we like a little vermouth."
Grrr! The bartender hated us now. He turned his back, did a little mixing, and served us the best martini I've ever had. By accident. He wanted to skunk us by following the old formula, which we would surely hate. He didn't understand the reasoning behind the old formula. (And he was flattered and embarrassed when we complimented, and tipped, him. Attitude collapse.)
Look, if you want a dry martini, fine. Leave out the vermouth altogether, if you like, but then you'll just be drinking chilled gin, straight. Gah. Gaseous. And, frankly, a one-booze drink isn't a cocktail.
I have a feeling a lot of the fine young cocktailians have never had a true, decent martini. All those silly tricks about whispering "vermouth" to the shaker, or dampening the glass with vermouth and pouring it off.
Try a real martini.

Blog Ennui Again, Ongoing

2011-12-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

No, I don't mean "you" are the source of my ennui. Just couldn't resist a little Sluggo.
I've just been ripped up by the Occupy events. The last encampment of any size to be taken down, Occupy Boston, survived its deadline last night and people remained in Dewey Square. Seems the Bruins lost, and the cops were needed elsewhere. Ha!
I'm eating, but never anything pretty or ambitious. We have a few ideas in the fridge, though.
The weather is not killing me. The short days are fine. It's not raining. It's not depression; just ennui.
Besides, one of my favorite blog pals seems to have abandoned her blog (and this is fair warning, Ms. you-know-who-you-are). It's a little disheartening, because our time zones are too out of sync to Tweet with much overlap of awakeness.
I could blame her, couldn't I?
Ms. Redacted, you are the You in the Nancy cartoon.

Eat Mostly Plants

2011-12-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

You know about adding some beets to your salad plate. This was a plate of beets with some salad added!
So damn good.
Are beets in season? I honestly don't know the lifecycle of this glorious orb. But I can tell you how to cook them. Bonk them, unpeeled, into a small covered casserole dish with a tiny puddle of water, and roast for an hour. Take them out and plunge into a bowl of cold water (in the sink), where you can easily massage the skins off.
Cranky decorated this salad with blue cheese, a little too much for me.
But let me tell you about cheese. The Crankycrumbs are considering an experimental vegan diet, for a week. Probably after the holidays. Laugh, monsters, but a lot of the food we eat is vegan already.
I'll tell you about it next month.

Occupy Christmas

2011-11-30T15:38:00.000-08:00

I have a rule: no Christmas decorations before December. Tomorrow I'll go a little nutty with red and gold and glittery things. All symbolic, for some reason, of the holiday.
Another symbol of the season is the tent. I think we can all agree that Occupy Wall Street pretty well established that icon to represent the movement.
I support OWS, and the other day I said to Cranky, "We should peg a tent in the front yard. The neighbors would hate it, though."
(Note: I don't care if they hate it. I am a neighborly neighbor, but I have a wild streak.)
Well! I figured out how to put a tent in the yard and not offend any of the 1% on my street. (I jest! They're not the 1%; just Republicans.) I would decorate the tent with Christmas ornaments, maybe a string of lights powered by a bicycle generator. Who could object?
I went searching for the perfect tent, and I found it. It's Christmas tree shaped, in shades of green. And it even comes with its own angel on top.
Power to the people, right Santa? All I want for Christmas.

Gratitude

2011-11-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

It wasn't stuffing, because there was no bird to stuff.
So we decided to call it bread pudding, and gussy it up with milk and an egg. Slices of Kabocha squash. Mushrooms and onions. And that milk? It was deeply perfumed with garlic and bay leaf.
The kind of thing you could eat all season long. Because there was no sage in it to whiplash you into a pilgrim state of mind.
That's my kind of religious freedom.

Beans, Beans, Go Away

2011-11-23T13:50:00.000-08:00

See this? Pretty, comforty, colorful. Perfect autumn noshing.
It's root vegetables with green beans, baked slowly and lovingly, dolloped with butter and a little chicken stock. What could be better?
Turnips, beets, carrots, potatoes, radishes, rutabagas, parsnips. Plus onion and leek. (They're kinda rooty.) Oh, and the green beans. An afterthought.
A mistake, if you can believe it.
Beans aren't rooty, but we didn't think that would be a problem. They're green and pretty and taste good. But they didn't taste good here.
Who knew? It seems like magical thinking, to believe that root vegetables only go with root vegetables. It's true, though. The beans seemed woody and strange and uncomforty.
Learning.

His Name Is Lt. John Pike

2011-11-19T14:52:00.000-08:00

Just so you know, every word I write here today is pulled, burning and screaming, from my relentless memory loop of the UC Davis kids getting pepper sprayed. The chief of UCD police claimed his men were surrounded! By peaceful kids sitting on the ground.
Anyway, this cheese sandwich post is filled with good feelings, and was a good, temporary antidote to the image of that bastard squirting students in the face as casually as if he were watering his roses.
The idea came from Ilva, who posted a dish of peas mixed with pancetta, topped with an egg, and baked. It looked awesome, but I just sort of gagged at the idea of baked peas. I would substitute white beans. I looove white beans. We are a white bean household.
First, you have to get your white beans cooked. It is good to be prepared. I was relieved, upon seeing still photos of the UC Davis atrocity, that most of the kids turned their faces away from the stream of capsaicin. Be prepared! OK, once your beans are ready (and a little soupiness is fine), stir in a judicious amount of minced ham. Then get out your canning funnel. This thing is a certain Mr. C.'s new favorite gadget.
How to proceed. Keep calm, and humiliate the police officers. Shout "Shame on you! Shame on you!" I saw one cop without a riot helmet; he looked so mortified. The rest of the squad was sort of nudging the miscreant with the hot sauce away from the kids. "We done wrong." Oh, OK, just settle the canning funnel into the little cocottes of beans, and spoon out some from within the funnel. Now, crack an egg in this indentation, remove the funnel, and spoon the spare beans back over your dish.
Fifteen minutes in a 350F oven, and I got a nice, semiliquid yolk! This was wonderful, and so nutritious. A happy ending.
No, I'll tell you the happy ending. It was when those arrogant thugs gained a shred of decency. They acted as if they actually believed they were in danger, but they began to move away from the students and cluster in an embarrassed huddle. They stepped away like a flock of penguins, or the Burghers of Calais. Clip-clop, clip-clop, those fat dicks shuffled off.

Saucy

2011-11-16T16:12:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I saw some chatter on Twitter about the best recipe for Bolognese sauce.
I know how to make Bolognese sauce. Do you really need a recipe?
Well, the author of the recipe (I'm just gonna conceal her identity slightly) is Marbella Kazan. Everybody loves her, and they were crazy about the sauce. So I had to give it a try.
It's really simple. Very few ingredients. It just takes a little time. The sauce simmers for three hours while you watch Ellen or something. I could imagine Marbella with a wooden spoon in one hand and a tumbler of Martini & Rossi in the other, giving it a good stir before going out on the balcony of her Florida condo for a cigarette or two.
Here's the deal. This very simple recipe needed tweaking. For one thing, the ground beef was too rough, too chunky, and needed to be punished with the immersion blender. For another, we thought the ratio of tomatoes to meat was seriously low, and we added more tomatoes (oh, and the tomatoes are canned, eek). We also subbed out about a third of the beef for some ground pork, yum. Finally, we thought the sauce tasted fine, okay, but nothing special. It went into the fridge overnight.
You know what I'm going to say next. The sauce improved. Everything tastes better the next day!
It's not the bestest thing I've ever eaten, but I'm glad we made it. At least half went into plastic bags, in the freezer. That will be a nice dinner solution down the road.
Here it is with some eggplant slices, fresh mozzarella and grated Parmesan. I liked it.

Hambiguous

2011-11-12T13:43:00.000-08:00

I have funny taste in hamburgers. I don't like to eat them at home.
When I was a kid, my dad would turn ground beef into nasty black wads on the barbecue. Around the very same time, I spent a lot of summer days at the Officer's Pool, where they also happened to have a geedunk. I don't know if I'm spelling that right, but it was a Navy term for, basically, a snack bar. I'm not sure what else they served, because I always, always got the hamburger.
A geedunk burger is thin and flimsy, good and greasy, and tastes just right. What is just right? Not too meaty.
Lacking any geedunks in my adulthood, I had to turn to fast-food joints. Really. I can't tell you how much I love a Whopper. But I can't eat them anymore. (Read Fast-Food Nation if you wonder why.)
Cranky naturally thinks that we should have wonderful hamburgers from reliable steakhouses. If we're not making our own at home.
A few days ago we were having a Bolognese adventure in the kitchen, and there was extra ground beef of good quality. He wanted a hamburger, and he knew he would have to treat me extra special to get one on my plate. He made it small, he layered it with my favorite condiments, he formed the meat patty to fit within the slider-size bun. Without thinking, though, he just used a regular-size lump of raw meat, small enough to fit the bun, but too thick.
I didn't like it. It was too meaty.
Actually, it was a perfect hamburger.
I am such a meat wuss.

In Which I Exclaim

2011-11-07T16:12:00.000-08:00

OK. All right.
Anyway.
Ya gotta eat. I came across a recipe in the NY Times for a moussaka made without béchamel. I think that deserves an exclamation point!
Yargh, béchamel. I mean, it has its purpose here and there, but it is not a happy afterthought to food. "Wouldn't this look nice with a clammy white gloop on top?"
We had just concocted a roasted onions dish from the NYT, which was smothered in béchamel. It did not pass the happy test. Perhaps that was why we were all over the modified moussaka. And it was good.
This version is just a bit like shepherd's pie, but with fewer vegetables. The genius is that it has an egg yolk and Parmesan cheese stirred into the mashed potato topping. I could eat that every day. Oh, plus a petite grating of nutmeg.
The meat mixture called for cinnamon and cloves, which scared the crap out of me. But we soldiered on. Hm. No ground cloves in the spice treasury. Fine, allspice will do, and it did very well indeed.
Verdict: Damn yum. This is going into heavy rotation.
And the ground meat? It was goat. I think that deserves an exclamation point!

Where I've Been

2011-11-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

No, not in Oakland. But I've been gripped by the Occupy demonstrations.
Last Tuesday, when Scott Olsen was brutalized by police for doing nothing, I got a bit emotional. Maybe even maternal. I care so much for this young man, who still can't talk and possibly faces brain surgery. It shut me down.
Today, Occupy Oakland called for a general strike, and I couldn't get reliable news on it until about noon. I was worried.
It was going well! There are some idiot Anarchists who want to smash and vandalize things, but the rest of the demonstrators have kept them at bay.
I'm just fascinated by the OWS point of view, and their viral success in getting international attention and... results. I wish them well. Please donate to them; it's going to be a cold winter.
As for Oakland, the city of my birth. Very badly done last week. Perhaps you can let these young people show you how it's done.
Best wishes for a full recovery to Scott.

What That Smoker is For

2011-10-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

And now for the final smoked item: pork spareribs. I think pork spareribs are the THING you fire up the smoker for. Well, that, and home-cured bacon.
We have never used the smoker without a slab or two or more of pork spareribs in there. (Not baby-back ribs, not short ribs.) Sometimes there may be something more interesting going on, like bacon or oysters, but you always want to fit in the ribs.
A little bath in a marinade of vinegar and beer, Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce. Soaky, soaky. Then a gentle cooking with a kiss of hickory smoke, and yer done, baby.
Look at that meat! It was like eating all-day meat lollipops. The meat came from Marin Sun Farms (they didn't grow it, though), and it resembled a Sunday roast.
We decided we didn't even want barbecue sauce, because the meat was so plump and glowing, infused with a not-bad marinade. The first time I've ever had spareribs without sauce, and it was a smart gamble.
I have nothing funny to say.

Smoker's Valuable Real Estate

2011-10-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

When you fire up the smoker, you want to take advantage of every waft of smoke. Our smoker holds a couple of shelves of comestibles, so we planned ahead with marinades and so forth.
We smoked three kinds of meat. Two were seafood, and the other was not chicken. I hate smoked chicken. (I will tell you soon, of course, what it was.)
Voila, the smoked teriyaki salmon. My dad used to make smoked salmon jerky when he was in Alaska, pretending he wasn't hauling nukes on his antisubmarine patrol plane. (He was.) I loved the dense, chewy texture, even though that's not really standard for smoked salmon. And I wanted to recreate it.
But Cranky cut the meat into largish chunks, so it wouldn't fall through the grill, and it came out sort of in between. In between jerky and tender fillet.
I'm not going to go on about textures and cooking times. We were very happy with the results, though we may pull the fish out of the smoker earlier next time and forget about salmon candy. Or, we might aim for salmon candy next time.
There will be a next time, before the rains of winter.

The Oyster and the Carpenters, Close to You

2011-10-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

Why did I never try this before?
Has anybody else tried this before? Because I will come over and damage your wind chimes for not telling me. (And the neighbors will like me!)
This is local oysters, smoked in the back yard. Ate 'em about an hour ago.
My parents had a lot of Navy cocktail parties when I was young, and the stuff they served was strictly off-limits to me. Hence my abiding attraction to smoked oysters. Nowadays canned smoked oysters creep me out, with the poisonous soy oil and Chinese melamine. So no smoked oysters.
But look! Pop the top shell off a dozen or so fresh bivalves. Slide them onto the top rack of the smoker. Wait a measly hour or so. You get smoked oysters!
The smoke was perfect, and the texture of the meat was very good, though a bit glued onto the shells for the smaller ones. Next time, I'd say shuck the oysters completely out of the shell, apply a little olive oil, put the meat back in the shells, and smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Cranky's perfect idea was to squeeze lemon juice on the oysters when we served them, followed by a drizzle of olive oil, and man. That was perfection.
I am so stunned. Why did I never try this before?

It Takes a Village

2011-10-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, Bartlett will have been with us two years.
She was such a difficult dog to train, we seriously thought about giving up and taking her back to the dog pound. And we're good trainers!
The only way it even worked out was because of positive reinforcement. Do something right, you get a little tasty treat. Do something wrong, and we will try to correct you. We wore a treat bag on our waist, filled with yummy crumbs of liver bombs to hand out as needed.
I have seen Bartlett in the deepest psychic pain (Cranky was out of the room in a strange hotel.) To keep her from whimpering, I just slipped her a crumb every time she was quiet for a few seconds. And before you know it, she fell asleep beside me on the bed.
It has been a long, long slog. Her youthfulness and genetic fizzy nature meant we were still in high training mode at 18 months. Then one day she seemed to get it. "They like me more when I do certain things the right way."
She never got yelled at, never got a slap on the rump. (Though we have had to say some things sternly.)
I'm writing this because we recently got new neighbors next door. Younger than us, probably never really be friends. The two adults take care of the man's little kids several times a week; some shared custody deal. They are really nice.
But the guy yells at their dog when he's unhappy with its behavior. And, yes, he yells at his kids.
I don't think he's even close to terrorizing them, but I wish I could share my story about positive reinforcement.
You don't just lean over the fence and offer that kind of help, though. Sigh.

Catalonian "Bread With Tomato"

2011-10-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know it's fall. But it's still tomato season.
I met a couple of friends at the farmers market this morning, where I shivered my gluteus maximus off, and my pal said, "I should have brought you some of my tomatoes." (I gave him a sack of autumn pears.) Doesn't matter. You can get boxes of tomatoes at discount prices now, to roast into sauce and then freeze or can for the winter.
And that's what we are planning to do this week.
But in the meantime, eat some tomatoes fresh, while you still can. While it's still tomato season.
I couldn't believe how fresh the tomatoes tasted in this humble preparation, pa amb tomaquet. Probably because there's a frisky scrape of fresh garlic rubbed into the toast. And a drizzle of your best olive oil. Then top it with raw tomato gloodge (it's easy; just rub tomato halves on the big holes of your box grater.) Not too much tomato. Surprisingly, skimpy is best. Finally a skimpy shower of lovely salt crystals.
The easiest thing in the world, and I order you to make some.
It's still tomato season.

I See Dead People Food

2011-10-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

Isn't this pretty? It's about as pretty as a kooky '50s apron, all colorful and well-loved.
I think the corn loaf pictured here probably dates back to the 50s or earlier. Pat Fusco wrote a, well, I wouldn't call it irreverent, but she wrote a kickass story for the Pacific Sun on funeral food! In certain regions of the country, funeral food (the covered dishes you bring to a grieving family) can be quite competitive. Prettiest, most nourishing, like that.
Makes me suspect scenarios like, "Sorry about your uncle, but wait till you try my Chocolate-Caramel Maple Doodles. When you're ready, hon. I know it's hard."
I couldn't resist this multicolored pan of comfort food from Pat's article. We had everything on hand except for the evaporated milk. We followed the recipe exactly. It seemed a bit odd to me, to be including a little dab of sour cream in there, when you're already flavoring it strongly with cheese. And why add water and evaporated milk? You could just use milk, unless the recipe is from the old ice box days and there was no more ice so the milk went bad, but wait. Where were you storing the sour cream? So it was a little nutty, but fun to try. The minute we pulled it out of the oven, we were all over it like starving zombies. Eat, eat. Snorf.
It was really tasty -- so many flavors -- but horrifyingly filling. (We ate a lot.) Toward the end of our snorfing, we realized this was a dense, nutrient-rich thing, and that, sadly, some of the cornmeal grains remained raw and gritty.
Cranky said, "Would you make this again?"
I said, "Over my dead body."
We wrapped up the leftovers for another day. And the darned thing came back to life!
Think about it. If you're taking this corn loaf to a bereaved family, they are certainly not eating it hot out of the oven, as we did. In fact, it might spend a night or two in the fridge, benefitting from moisturizing treatments.
The recipe works. If you treat it as funeral food.

I Hate Bra Shopping

2011-09-28T13:09:00.000-07:00

I hate bra shopping.
Let me make that perfectly clear. I hate bra shopping.
For me, it's never a trip to the frilly Woman Cave, caressing all that satin and elastic and hardware. It's torture. They don't fit, they're expensive, and I'd rather just go without one.
But I can't, having a fantastic figure as I do.
Cranky had a discount coupon for the local discount store. He wanted a new pair of sneakers. He goes out every morning for his coffee socializing, and he thought he'd just swing by the store.
"Anything I could get you?" he thoughtfully asked.
"Yes, get me a bra," I whispered. It was a joke, sorta, but I really did want him to come home with a perfect bra for me. Like that could ever happen. You ever go bra shopping? I hate bra shopping. It's never perfect.
Cranky didn't get any shoes, but he actually went into the lingerie department (there was nobody else there, so he didn't feel too furtive) and rummaged around for my size. Ohjeez, I forgot to tell him I prefer underwire. And none of that foam "shaping" stuff.
OMG, Cranky came home with TWO bras, one pink and one white. The saleswoman bantered with him, saying it would not be possible to fit a bra for an absent female. He said it was really just a joke, and we would return them if they were wrong.
Amazingly, they fit very well. Somehow, even the shoulder straps were adjusted perfectly for my frame. I just put one on, and... it worked.
I sent him back to get his shoes. They're very good!
Cranky is elated.

Christmas Stocking Goodie

2011-09-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

You know what this is? (I know, lots of quizzes about articles of clothing.)
No, it's not a sock! It WAS a sock, but now it's the cover for my Kindle. Good fit, cozy... I'm going to attach a button and loop closure on the other side.
Oh, yes, I did. I did say "my Kindle."
Cranky got one for Christmas, and he reads it so much, I can't get a minute of battery time. So when Amazon knocked $50 off the price, I got one of my own.
Naturally, I predicted that Amazon was selling off stock because they would be coming out with a new model. And naturally, I was right. Their new Kindle, due in time for holiday gifting, will have sound, color, and a touch screen. I mean, it's practically an iPad, at half the price.
I know. Amazon forces its employees to work in an overheated warehouse in Pennsylvania. Maybe they'll get that fixed.

And Sometimes Vanity Prevails

2011-09-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

Looks like chef pants, doesn't it? Well, before the chili pepper and goldfish and cupcake chef pants got so popular. I mean the old checkered kind.
There was a time back in the '90s when I was so self-absorbed about cooking, I found myself wanting a chef's jacket. Nothing outrageous, just a white double-breasted deal. I even checked them out in catalogs, but sanity prevailed. When would I ever wear the thing? Certainly not for company. And I do just fine in an apron, so it would be a shame to dirty it up in the humble duty of spaghetti sauce. Yeah, sanity prevailed.
This was all before blogging. I didn't know about other "normal" people's obsessions. I just thought I was the smartest foodist in town. I read all the right magazines, I shopped for the best equipment, I knew where to buy ingredients.
I would be the first to admit I'm not an ambitious cook. I would also admit that sometimes supper is Doritos and cottage cheese.
Then food blogs arose! I didn't get in on it as early as some of my favorite writers, but by early 2005 I was yapping my mouth about what I eat, on the Internet. I actually thought I had something to say. In some cases, maybe I did. What a great outlet for the self-absorbed.
But the good thing was reading the other blogs. Ones that could really teach you something, and could entertain. Fabulous photography, too.
There are middlebrow blogs, as well, some of them very popular. I don't think any of us are in competition with one another (except maybe for ad revenue).
I look at some of my early posts, and I see that I was a bit avant-garde on some topics. I was into Sandor Katz and fermentation before most of you, believe me. I was growing my own vegetable garden before that became the hot, hipster DIY fad. But that sounds competitive, and I don't mean it that way.
I'm just saying I actually did have something to say. And I've never made a penny off it.
But with the boom of intelligent food blogs (some of them now idle, sadly), I began to question my own showoffiness. Who wants to hear about an egg I scrambled, even if I am the best egg scrambler in the world? (I could tell you how. Maybe I will someday.)
Those checkered pants in the photo? They're pajamas.

Fake, Good, Southern Food

2011-09-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

I am open to suggestion. Talk about food, and I will find a way to incorporate our conversation into an upcoming meal.
Here's a fun example. Not long ago, a blog pal was mulling over the idea of cornmeal mush. She was certain she'd never eaten any, and decided it probably tasted nasty.I told her it was lovely, actually. American polenta. And if you make extra, you can spread some in a dish, about half an inch deep, chill overnight, and the next morning you'll cut delicate slabs out to fry gently in butter. Maple syrup!
This is true; it's a valid childhood memory of mine, and it's good. We really did call it cornmeal mush, by the way. We didn't have a fancier name for it.And now I wanted some.
Meanwhile, another blog pal has been spending the summer in the land of her heritage, the American South. She wanted shrimp and grits for her birthday supper, and that's what she got. I think. I know she got shrimp and grits sometime on her visit.
I didn't know shrimp and grits was a "dish." I like shrimp and I like grits, but this is a "together" item. Some cooks even have you stir the cooked shrimp into the grits (blech!).And now I wanted some of that.
Cranky and I did what Cranky and I do: we proceeded without a recipe. We're good at a tasty, almost Creole, preparation of shrimp in oil, garlic and herbs. That would go on top of the grits.But there were no grits. Cornmeal mush to the rescue. (You genuine Southerners may scold me here.)
To round things out, we fried up some okra. We've always had success with our cornmeal coating, but Cranky, for some reason, followed a recipe. Pow-la Deeeeeeen! Y'all let us dah-yown! The batter didn't stick. At all. Ah well.

I'm Game

2011-09-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

I'd been noticing a few people Tweeting about a book they liked. I downloaded a free sample, and I liked it! So I bought The Hunger Games.
Oops. Turns out the book those people were talking about was Ender's Game (you can see how I was confused), so I downloaded a free sample, and I liked it too!
But I read The Hunger Games first.
Ohmagah, I was consumed by it. I couldn't put it down, as they say. It's a page-turner, as they say.
I felt guilty for my single-minded behavior, like the Jane Fonda character in Barefoot in the Park who can't come out of the honeymoon suite. Cannot. There's good stuff in there, and the rest of the world can just bloody well wait.
Now, here's the thing. The Hunger Games is a young adult, science fiction story with a female protagonist. SO not my genre. And guaranteed to keep boys from reading any of it. (It's a trilogy; I devoured all three books.)
Well, as we speak, Cranky, a mature male reader whose favorite works are nonfiction war history stuff, is slurping up volume number two. Now will you believe me that it's addictive?
Some of you probably already know about it. It's become so huge, the book is translated into a million languages, a movie is due out in 2012, and someone wrote a cookbook based on the foods mentioned in the stories.
Let me lapse back into being a food blogger: The foods mentioned in the stories are either simple and acceptable (lamb stew with plums), kinda weird (chicken with orange cream sauce), or downright inedible (fish stew so slippery and horrific, it takes three swallows to get one mouthful down). So I probably wouldn't buy the cookbook, but I think it's clever of someone to have written it.
Also, there's wild game in The Hunger Games, but that's a coincidence. The "games" are something else, indeed.
Oh, right, I haven't told you what the trilogy is about. You can look it up yourself if you want. Just know that I accidentally downloaded it without a clue, and I was absorbed.
I'm finally out of that honeymoon suite, but I think I'm going to start Ender's Game next.

You Think I'm Talking About 9/11 Today?

2011-09-11T12:23:00.000-07:00

You'd be wrong.

It's Like Homework, Every Day

2011-09-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, I've grown weary of the soshul nitwurgs. I've made many, many friends here and on Twitter and Facebook, but the longer I follow some of those people, the more I feel I'm headed into divorce court. Irreconcilable differences.
The other day, a blogger I follow on Twitter asked her readers what meal we were planning for 9/11. There is no 9/11 feast! It is not a holiday! She disgusted me, and since she has turned me off with previous rantings, I guess it's no big deal to unfollow her. Sorry, sweetheart, things just didn't work out.
On my end, I have watched the increasing absence of replies to my tweets and Facebook comments. I guess people got exasperated with me and yanked me from their network. My feelings are hurt, but maybe we weren't a good fit, and... sorry, sweetheart.
It can get dire and nasty, too. One blogger reports that her enemy list is so vicious, they have created shadow blogs, parodying everything she writes. I think that's really mean. Fortunately, I'm not famous enough for that kind of mistreatment.
Most of my encounters with commenters and tweeps and FB friends have been very nice.But I'd like to talk about more than "what I ate." I'm sick of writing about food every day, even though I almost always have a topic, because I almost always eat.Again, though, I want to be cautious. I like to write, but I don't reveal too much of myself. Or bore you.
So I'll just put out some questions. Are you tired of this medium? Are you sorry about the name you gave your blog? (I still like mine.) Are you embarrassed by the nickname you gave yourself? (Yes.)Do you sense a dwindling in the power of blogging? (I know, it's dead as a doornail, but it'll never go away.)
Talk to me. If I feel a little less shy, maybe I'll tell you about my first day at school. Or the three years in a row I was required to take Home Ec. (Yeah, we might be talking about food.)

Food?

2011-09-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

I know! I threaten to quit food blogging, and then the greatest dish comes out of my kitchen.
It's totally faux, phony, fabricated. And it tasted just like it was supposed to! Odd, considering that I've never tasted it before.
You are looking at a bowl of dashi broth, heightened a bit with a spoonful of miso and a squirt of shoyu. In this brown deliciousness, cook some mung bean noodles, those stringy transparent things. Add chopped scallion and cubes of tofu. This looks like a little too much tofu (it was).
That's it. That's all. Simple as pie, especially if you use liquid dashi concentrate.
I couldn't believe how good it was, and how filling. And it's practically health food.
This is going into heavy rotation.

Fauvism Friday

2011-09-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

This painting was left on the front porch, in rather good condition. Which puts the kibosh on any speculation that the trove of squiggles that continues to emerge at my house (this is the third) might be old.
It's new, say I, and it looks decidedly different from the first two. But does that mean it's by a different artist?
The brush strokes are thinner and more colors are used. Still, there are those same dots, which also characterized the first two paintings.
I think it looks like a galloping swarm of sperm bunnies. (Yes, I studied art appreciation!) I think it's very, very good, if I do say so... Ah, well, never mind.
Cranky can't wait to get these framed and hung around the house. He's serious.
And... I should tell you that I saw Cranky dabbling with one of those cheap pixel "art" apps the other day. All I can say is I know he didn't produce this piece. This piece is a master, um, uh, piece.

I'm Mad and I Don't Eat

2011-08-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

I am so tired of food blogging. I don't know whether I want to officially resign, or just talk about a mix of things now and then, sometimes food.
I'm eating soup today, and it's canned soup. Not very interesting. But I'm not allowed to chew, doctor's orders, because half my face is still numb from having two lower molars ground down this morning. My mouth tastes like plastic and glue right now, and any good cooking would just be a waste.
I go back tomorrow for the coronation.

Wonderland

2011-08-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

You fall through a rabbit hole, and everything's magical, mysterious, but still as real as can be.
You come upon this glowing bowl of soup with a sign on it that says "Eat Me," and you eat it.
Your head starts to spin, in a nice gentle way. You are happier than you've ever felt. Have you been drugged?
No, you have tasted Tuscan Garlic and Bean Soup.
I have to laugh whenever a recipe, or a style of patio furniture, or your roofing tiles is called "Tuscan." What, am I suddenly wearing wrought iron and terra cotta? Should I purchase a palazzo to renovate and fall in love with a hunky Italian guy? That's somewhat dreamy, but I'm afraid the real Tuscany has become overrun with fever-dreaming American ex-pats. Speaking bad Italian, if at all.
Back to the rabbit hole (which is my dream, actually, especially if it has WiFi and I can swipe recipes like this one). There's no point in linking to the recipe, because the version I read was already a departure from a previous recipe... And who knows how original that was?
Cook some white beans. A cup of dried. I will not tell you it's OK to use canned. Drain, saving the liquid, and reserve the beans.
Cut up two cloves of garlic and one plump shallot (these quantities serve two generously). Cook the alliums in oil until tender, and then pour in two cups of well-seasoned chicken stock. Add most of the beans, and hit this mess with an immersion blender. Want more beans in there? It's nice to have some whole. You decide. Do you need more liquid? Splash in a little of the bean water. Oh, seasonings. Gah. I always cook beans with a bay leaf, and our chicken stock is already deeply herby. Check for salt. Here comes the Mad Hatter. You are going to glug in a decent amount of cream.
You have been drugged.

Chez Gallery

2011-08-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

I found another painting in my house! This one was in the garage, high up on a shelf.
Although there are similarities with the first one I found, the style is different in this piece, bolder and simpler. Still, I would guess they are both by the same artist.
This is kind of exciting. I wonder why the pictures never showed up until now. And what other places are there to look? Should I look, or just wait for my Friday good luck?
Let's see, crawl space, closets, maybe even some forbidden spaces outdoors.
I think I'll just wait and see if I get lucky.

Gringo Lasagna

2011-08-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

Tiresome, repetitive, cheerful food for lunch.
Tortilla pie again. This is so simple, and it packs such a wallop of satisfaction, no wonder it's in heavy rotation on the menu.
Just make sure you have tomato sauce in your freezer. Oh, it's the dead of summer where you live? Then cut up a couple of tomatoes (one big one might do) and give them a preliminary roast in a squirt of olive oil. What would be even easier is fetching a bag of cut-up, roasted tomatoes from last summer out of the freezer.
OK, that was the hard part. Do you have leftover roast chicken? No? But that's why we're making this dish! Never mind. You can skip the meat. What's essential is some chopped onion and chopped mild green chile (Anaheim or poblano), sautéed briefly in oil. (Oil makes this dish magic, by the way. The oil and tomato juices infiltrate the corn tortillas and you end up with candy. What I call candy, anyway.) And some cheese. Feta makes a dandy substitute for Mexican cheese. Just for once, because there were fresh specimens in the house, we added the cut-off kernels (uncooked) of one ear of corn. OMG.
Now, layer all this ambrosia. Some smarty pants topped today's version with slices of fresh tomato; so pretty. If all the tomato were raw it might be a little too juicy, but it is definitely good to have some juice.
Bake. Moderate oven. Half an hour.
Lather, rinse. Repeat.

Cheesetopia

2011-08-21T11:58:00.001-07:00

I'll spare you the history of cheesemaking in my area. There are century-old companies still in business. There are classy start-ups.
It seemed like a long, dry spell in the 80s and 90s, though. Cheese was not interesting. Not ambitious. (Somebody come and tell me I'm wrong; I don't mind being corrected.)
But lately we've had an unbelievable spate of newcomers. I mentioned the flurry of new cheesemaking from an established (but not old) company recently. I'm not a cheese historian, so I'm probably botching the story here anyway.
And then, all of a sudden, there's Weirauch Farm and Creamery, making wonderful cow's milk cheeses, and promising sheep's milk cheeses once their herd is sufficiently established and the season is right.
They showed up at the local farmers market last week, and Cranky grabbed this Tomme Fraiche.
I don't speak professional cheese. Let me just say it's semi-firm (a texture my mouth loves), riddled with little eyeholes, and tasting salty and tangy. It's mild (and not stinky) but it makes its presence known. A very adaptable cheese. We adapted it to a picnic. The rind is edible, and a little goes a long way.
It may be made in America, but this is not American cheese.
I'm so happy to be living in my little European pocket of America.

Definitely Not Counterfeit

2011-08-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Nobody blogs on Fridays, so I thought I'd just share this picture of a painting we found in the attic.
First of all, this house is pretty old, born in 1963. So the painting could be, oh, mid-century-ish. That's hot, right?
And the image is clearly nonrepresentational, unless you count that fish-like figure in the corner. In which case, it's abstract. (Your art lesson for today.)
We think we've got something valuable here.
We think it's a Maticasso.

Happy Birthdayish

2011-08-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

My little chocolate bonbon is "this many" (holds up two claws) this week.
We don't know the exact date of her birth, but she arrived at the Humane Society as a newborn on the 19th of August.
Doesn't matter. We celebrate Birthday Month around here. We just bought a cache of dog toys to dribble out to her, over time. She is already cuckoo-wahwah for the monkey with the braided body (good for chewing) and its big fluffy head with a squeaker inside (good for chewing). She loves it so much, she nearly "kissed" its face wide open.
I haven't written about Bartlett for a while, but that's mainly because there's no news. This is a good dog! She seems to adore Cranky and me equally, even though he's the one who always feeds her and picks up those special treasures she drops on the lawn. (They must be special, because he gathers them up with a napkin, slides them into a pretty blue plastic bag, and carries them off to the garage, where... Who knows? Special.)
Bartlett has learned lots of words. We don't try to teach them, necessarily, but she picks them up. Hoo, boy, don't say "outside" unless you are definitely opening that door.
She has calmed down considerably around dogs (she loves them, but just a little too much). The back yard is surrounded on all three sides by families with dogs, and Bartlett no longer does the shameful and embarrassing Wiggle Dance With Whimpering up against the fence.
She has learned the value of a good nap.
And, funny that this behavior came with her maturing a bit, but she is now a nuzzle puppy. Face kissing, ear skritching, neck rubbing... All good, now, all allowed.
We wish you many more happy birthdays, Ms. B.

The Colossus of Rhode Island

2011-08-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

It looks like bangers and mash, but it's breakfast sausages and mash.
I found it a bit startling to pile the sausages right on top of the taters, but that's the way Cranky's mum always did it, and she was born of English immigrants. She used those little dinky link breakfast sausages, and arranged them artistically over the spuds. So he says.
Our breakfast sausages came from Chris Cosentino's Boccalone, and Chris credits his Rhode Island mother for the recipe, fragrant with orange zest.
Cranky spent much of his youth in Rhode Island, maybe even eating his own mother's loving creation there a time or three.
So there's a Rhode Island mothers links link.
We could have dressed it up with a little gravy, or at least a side of peas. (Nobody wanted to shell the peas.)
But it was really fun to eat. Especially fun with those juicy, squirty sausages making little bursts in your mouth with each bite.
Mainly, though, I'm just wild about the picture. It's such a naive, earnest plate of food. And Cranky did the arranging.

Sausage Is Flavor

2011-08-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

We have a bunch of Spanish chorizo in the freezer. The plan was to cook a paella outdoors on the grill.
It will still happen, but Cranky was itching to taste the chorizo.
I suggested white beans with herbs and garlic. Slightly soupy. Diced bits of sausage for flavor and color, and then handfuls of spinach leaves stirred through, just because.
Couldn't be easier. We cook beans a lot in this house, so that's never daunting. And these tender white beans cook up quickly.
Results? It was really good, but.
I hate to complain, and I ate a big bowlful.
I checked this out with Cranky, and...
It tasted like somebody else's food!
The seasonings in the chorizo came from a parallel universe: competent but not what I would have gone for. I don't know what spices were used, and I can hardly guess what I would have done differently.
That's the risk when you cook with sausage as an ingredient. Somebody else is in charge of the flavor.
OK. That seems petty.
I'll get over it, because we have a bunch of chorizo in the freezer. Paella coming up.

Watermelons in the Mist

2011-08-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

Somebody I follow on Twitter recently confessed that she had never really liked watermelon.
She had lots of sympathizers. I despised the stuff as a kid, and simply avoided it as an adult.
Who wants a submarine-sized "fruit" full of seeds, hopelessly mushy, and watery to boot? Oh, and no flavor.
Well, that was the old days.
I wasn't necessarily jonesing for watermelon to eat, but the blogosphere was riddled with swanky watermelon cocktails. That's what I wanted.
Cranky found a small, round specimen, and it happened to be seedless. OH! And it happened to be very tasty and crisp. We cut little wedges off, and almost couldn't stop eating.
No, this watermelon is to be absorbed by straw, I proclaimed. I don't "eat" watermelon. Koko the signing gorilla famously called watermelon "drink fruit," and I was going to drink it. Because I take orders from signing gorillas.
OK, so Cranky carved chunks and whacked off the rinds, and (girly sigh) squeezed the watermelon with his bare hands! My ape man.
Then we decided to get jiggy wid it. We squeezed juice from both Meyer lemons and Summer Navel oranges, and added that to the watermelon juice.
Would the fantastic flavor be drowned out?
No, it was still very watermelon, with a hint of mild citrus. Really good. So nice! That newfangled watermelon sure tastes great.
I might eat some.

People Are Strange

2011-08-10T09:35:00.000-07:00

I had seen some nostalgia for Barbara Tropp's China Moon Cafe recently, so when Kudzu suggested I make her Strange-Flavor Eggplant, it seemed a natural. I had the book.
Strangely, though, I had never used a single recipe from it. It seems to be one of those snaky cookbooks that goes, "Three weeks ago, shoot an elk." I didn't shoot an elk three weeks ago! What will I do?
Nothing, yeah, that's easier.
Well, this time, Barbara allowed that I would be able to make and eat the food on the same day (even though she urged an overnight in the fridge before devouring).
The recipe looks complex, but it's because she's being careful to take you by the hand, stay with me, not scary.
And it came out great, great I tell you!
What is "strange" about it? I think "strange" is just a cute euphemism for "interesting." "Yummy." "Why didn't I think of this?" "Ha ha ha! 'Splosions in your mouth!"
The flavors are ginger, garlic, vinegar, chile peppers, brown sugar, scallion, soy sauce. The eggplant is roughly pureed with these seasonings, in an order that Tropp makes perfectly clear. It's easy.
Strange.
We served it with dark sesame crackers, which make for a terrible photo, but really good eating.
Not strange.

One Potato

2011-08-08T06:18:00.000-07:00

It seems so obvious, but it was something I had never tried.
Roasted potatoes and olives.
If you Google it, it exists. Abounds. Varieties galore, I would imagine, but I didn't explore deeply. Just wanted confirmation.
This made-up version used garlicky (pitted) green olives. There were little garlic cloves bobbing about in the olive brine, and we roasted them too. I would call this important.
What else? Good olive oil and a shower of thyme leaves.
So easy. So good.

Adult Picnic

2011-08-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Maybe I AM the tapas queen, as a kind friend commented here earlier.
Ever since I discovered "small dishes" (or was it small plates?) at Fog City Diner a thousand years ago, I was liberated. That's how I want to eat! I like to order from the top of the menu.
It's easy, so easy at home, but it might take a little planning. If you think it would be easier to boil up a couple of plates of spaghetti when you get home from work, fine by me. All you will have is a plate of spaghetti, but again, fine.
If you always keep a stash of nice cheeses, toasted almonds, wonderful olives, and that sort of adult picnic fare, you might be able to pull off a tapas platter.
I know it's not a small dish! But it is small-dish eating.
Behold, then, pimientos de padron, in season now and more popular than ever. You used to be able to buy them from one vendor only, but I'm seeing more and more from other farmers.
You know the allure of padrons? You eat one or two, nice, mild, and then you get a firecracker! Fun, but hot. Russian roulette with capsaicin.
OK, well, ALL the peppers from this new vendor were hot. This old esophagus had to mostly avoid them.
But there were all those other nice flavors on the plate.

When Food Is Either-Or

2011-08-04T09:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether this is old-fashioned ladies' lunch or some boundary-breaking new discovery that fills the void of El Bulli's closing.
Let's put it this way: it would satisfy either crowd.
It is embarrassingly summery. Sweet, savory. Filling, too. No mere ice pop here.
As soon as I tell you what it is (stalling for time,) you will not even need a recipe. That is, if you want to try this at home. Some of you more macho types will probably turn up your nose, although my live-in macho type liked it very much.
OK, I can't drag it out any longer.
It's cantaloupe chicken salad, with cucumbers, sweet onion, tiny smear of mayo with a dab of Dijon stirred in, salt, pepper and tarragon.
I know. That will either sound divine or squicky.
Take it or leave it. Fair warning, though: eat it and love it.

Kids, Do Try This at Home

2011-08-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

You can't quite call them French fries; they're a little slab-like and not quite fluffy.
There's an education to be had here. The potatoes were not a flaky, Russet kind of variety. Almost impossible to find those at the farmers market in these parts.
Also the potatoes were on their last little potato legs, going sort of flabby. Pretty hard to resurrect with a spa treatment of hot grease, but one had hopes.
Finally, if the cuts had been more slender, there's a chance they might have crisped up better in the frying.
Oh, I forgot to tell you about the frying. Cranky used decidedly non-copious amounts of leaf lard (smoke 'em if you got 'em!). This was not deep frying at all. This was skillet fries. And when all the variables line up just right, you will get perfect French fries. I know. I've had some.
But I'm not here to talk about the fries. Well, obviously I am. Um, see that petite pale brown drizzle on the plate at about 5:00?
That's homemade malt vinegar, and it's fantastic.
I've made lots and lots of vinegars, and I love them all, but the malt is the best I've ever come up with, and it's easy as flipping the cap off a bottle of Guinness.
I added a teaspoon or so of some very active vinegar with a huge mother (couldn't get the mother out the neck of the bottle), topped the beer bottle with a loose foil lid (oxygen, good; spores and dust, bad), and left it out, unbothered, for four months, maybe five.
That's a long time to wait (good thing I have a pantry full of homemade vinegars), but it's worth it. The fermentation develops to a very sophisticated state, and minute amounts of evaporation are occurring so the resulting vinegar is a little bit concentrated.
The flavor, though. I have to thank Mr. Guinness for that.
I'm going to start a batch of new batches soon. Christmas is four months away!

Bean and Fish Sandwich, Basically

2011-07-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

White bean bruschetta. Who doesn't love that? Over the years I've learned to make the bean mash lighter (save your bean cooking water for a loosening dollop if you need it), maybe a little oilier with superb oil. This time it was seasoned with minuscule dustings of herbs and chile powder. A squeeze of lemon juice!
How could it be any nicer?
Well, I had an idea. A completely original idea, mine alone. Nobody would have thought of this.
I was going to place a strip of anchovy over the beans. I felt like I was inventing Barcelona!
We had bought some fantastic anchovies a few months ago at Whole Foods. They were sold in a little plastic butcher's tray, like fresh meat. They were vivid, kinda red, and firm. Best thing ever.
Turns out we couldn't finish all the little fishes, so Cranky preserved them in a small jar with a covering of olive oil, in the fridge.
They turned mushy. The magic was gone. The flavor was good, though... Or was it even a little stronger?
Cautiously, I only used a tiny strip, halved lengthwise, on my first bruschetta (untoasted bread). It was good, everything was good, but it was just too strong.
Next, I skipped the seafood entirely and enjoyed a simple bean sandwich, open faced. It was good, too, but I missed that oceanic smack in the mouth.
Third bruschetta, I smeared the beans on, and drizzled drops of anchovy-flavored oil from the jar. That was the winner. Don't throw away your anchovy oil.
Oh, yeah, so I Googled "white bean bruschetta with anchovies," and I got several hits. It is already invented. You can't invent any new food.

Rule: Never Skip the Slather

2011-07-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

There was a little grilled teriyaki pork tenderloin left over.
I know. Left over? Those tenderloins are so small, I think Cranky and I devoured the first one we grilled, years ago, in a single sitting.
This one was a little more generous. And the teriyaki flavor was stupendous. (No bottled sauces, please; you can easily make your own.) We immediately thought of bánh mì sandwiches, and who'd have known, a decade or so ago, that a pair of old whities like us could make bánh mì at home?
We were liberated, in fact, because in my kitchen, it's my way. So, I did it my way. Well, Cranky's way, too. He doesn't care for daikon, so no daikon. We whipped up quick pickles of shaved cucumber and carrot. Pulled little tender lettuce leaves. Sliced the meat and plucked cilantro leaves.
We debated a light slather (is a slather ever light?) of mayonnaise mixed with a squirt of sriracha... and decided no, because of the tasty meat marinade.
In retrospect, I only wish I had gone for that slather.

The Food of Dreams

2011-07-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

This Is why I love chicken stock.
We made an intensely deep, strong stock from the skin and bones of half a chicken. Little tiny pot. Handfuls of European aromatics. Water to cover, and then a long, slow simmer with the lid on, a bit ajar. It ended up being one pint of the most heavenly stuff. Almost brown. Super thick with bone goo. Serious flavor.
And then what did we use it for?
Rice-A-Roni. Homemade.
Some onion, some oil and butter, some rice, some broken pasta. A little salt and pepper (your stock should be salted, but not salty). Cook until you get brown spots on the pasta. Cranky was too excited about the experiment, and rushed that part.
Then pour in your chicken stock and put the lid on, over low heat, until it's done.
You could call it pilaf if it makes you feel stupid to call it Rice-A-Roni.
We call it Rice-A-Roni.

My Summer of Eggplant, and a Mini-Prep

2011-07-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

I'm in love with eggplants.
At times, I have despised them because they made the inside of my mouth itchy. I think they just weren't cooked well enough.
There is no al dente eggplant!
We have two cooking techniques that work great. You can slice and lightly oil the stuff, and roast it the oven until it gets soft. That's nice if you already have the oven going. The other way is to hitch a ride on the grill when you are burning meat outdoors. Leave it whole, unpeeled, and stab a few fork holes in it. Let it go until you can easily slide a knife all the way through. If you take the meat off the grill, you can now put the lid on, and roasting will happen quickly.
We used the grill for this charming eggplant caviar. The recipe from the Silver Spoon is SO simple. It is like a gift to be informed by an authority that good food is simple. Sigh. A little salt and pepper, a gludge of olive oil and a squirt of lemon.
It was too hard to use a potato masher on, so I whirled it in my new mini-prep. That thing is magic! Easy to use, easy to clean, easy to lug around. My new favorite thing.
Oh, don't forget the buttered toast. The Silver Spoon said so.

Pretty, Though

2011-07-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

Damn, I forgot to eat these.
That's the problem with having a front-yard garden, when I spend most of my time in the back.
There were three.
They would have been yummy.
Weepy, weepy.

Angel Pillow Fruit Meat Food

2011-07-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows about prosciutto-wrapped melon. It's been an upscale appetizer forever.
I remember traveling in Italy in the '70s, my tragic supply of lire ever dwindling. I was afraid I could barely afford lunch, but I found a central, outdoor market. I bought a melon! I would cut it with my pocketknife. Next, I came across a guy selling prosciutto. I asked him in pretend Italian for a hundred grams, per favore, and he said "Which kind?" He rattled off at least four varieties, and it was all I could do to memorize the last one he said, and tell him, "Why, that one, of course." In pretend Italian.
So I had my lunch, for a bargain, and it was so fancy (to me, at least), I almost shouted something in pretend Italian.
"Questo pranzo!"
"Dove grazie?"
"Io sono happy!"
My little impromptu meal was good, but the truth is, one tends to wrap too long a ribbon of meat around the fruit. Prosciutto can be stringy, and gaggy. You have to chew it very well. And you've used up all your meat. Not so economical for a poor student, after all.
The present day to the rescue.
Cranky's solution was to cut small squares of prosciutto and place them atop slices of puffy, cloudlike, fresh mozzarella, which in turn sat atop little chunks of cantaloupe. Seriously, it elevates the dumb old cocktail party snack to heaven. I beg you to try this.
Molto sofisticato.

Little Pots of Nightshade

2011-07-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

The first eggplant of the summer. Sadly, not grown by me. I didn't harvest a single aubergine last year, from two feeble plants. So we decided not to put in vegetables at all this summer; the seedlings we got at the nursery are dying, stunted, still in their little plastic pots. Time for the compost heap.
Who cares? We are carefree!
We wanted eggplant because we love it this time of year, and because of all the fresh mozzarella we keep buying.
Cranky suggested eggplant parmiggiana, and he wouldn't let me cook. Wouldn't let me help. Wouldn't let me in the kitchen. Damn, I have created a monster. My sole contribution was to suggest he take a look at the A16 cookbook, where he got some very basic and good ideas.
Somehow, Cranky came up with the notion of piling his little stacks into individual ramekins for baking and serving. I love little dishes!
The bonus was that, because Cranky topped his stacks with a slice of fresh tomato, the juice that ran off was collected and mingled with cheese juice and eggplant juice.
A perfect last slurp.
Why would you want your eggplant any other way?

Panini, Paisan

2011-07-16T10:53:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, a blog friend of mine, Ilva, tweeted that she had plans to make mozzarella in carrozza. "Loads of them."
It was the "loads of them" that done me in. If Ilva liked it that much, it must be good.
But I didn't know what it was, so I Googled and got an eyeful. It's little sandwiches filled with mozzarella cheese, dunked in an egg bath, and fried in butter and oil.
I'm no fool. Mozzarella in Carrozza happened in my kitchen, presto. Oh, god, the aroma! The squidgy texture! And the flavor, a little pancakey because of the bath.
I'm also no Italian, so did I get it right? Let's just say damn, yes. We added some fresh herbs to the egg bath for a sumptuous savory kick. It was so good, I want loads of them.
If you try these, please use fresh mozzarella, the kind bobbing in the container of whey. It makes for a sinful softness that elevates the grilled cheese sandwich straight to the clouds.
As a bookend to my story, it turns out my pal Kudzu, who writes for the Pacific Sun under her real grown-up name, devoted a whole story this week to Italian sandwiches. With recipes. Sigh. It was the other slice of bread to my sandwich. Ilva on one side, Kudzu on the other, and me in the middle. And we all know each other!
Celeste, capito?
(Feel free to correct my Italian.)

Francophilia

2011-07-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

Three-and-a-half-hour soup!
It was so worth it.
All through the lengthy beef stock extraction and the tiresome onion caramelizing, I thought, "What are we doing? It would be so much easier to just order French Onion Soup in a restaurant."
Yeah, but it wouldn't be as good. Sweet, deep, sweet, oniony. Sweet. That little dab of bread on top (it was a bâtard, which I will translate to that bastard, King Louis XVI), covered with chewy gruyère.
Honestly, you wouldn't want dessert.
Dessert would probably be "cake." No thanks, Marie.

Chicken Salad? Chicken Salad?

2011-07-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

Who makes chicken salad anymore? Deliberately?
Well, blame it on the summery weather, but when Cranky suggested bringing home half a rotisseried chicken from the farmers market, I immediately wanted chicken salad.
Trust me, I'm not even sure if I've ever made chicken salad before.
But I got this idea. Chicken chunks with cucumber chunks. Couldn't get it out of my head.
Maybe a delicate application of mayonnaise? And some tarragon, for sure.
Please try this! If you ran a charming seaside cafe with nice food, your customers would not let you take this off the menu. It's that good.
Listen here, beady eyes: No vinegar, no mustard. There were little curls of mild onion, briefly soaked in water to make them more mild. Salt, yeah, sure.
I will tell you soon how much I want to buy a half chicken every week. Well, I will tell you why.

Summer on a Plate

2011-07-10T10:31:00.000-07:00

Yeah, another stuffed pepper. A staple around here. But there was a special, secret ingredient mixed in with the cheese and black beans. Left-over Rice-A-Roni. I know! How divine. Ever so good.
OK, what I really wanted to talk about is the food in the little monkey dish (I love the monkey dishes!). It's a perfect summer salad made from corn, slightly cooked and stripped from the cob. Diced cantaloupe. Minced jalapeño. A little salt. That's it. Perfect. Not outstandingly amazing, but perfect.
Who needs tomatoes? (I jest, I jest.)

Change in Gardening Plans

2011-07-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

I've been away for a few days, where I could eat nothing but industrially farmed food. It was OK for the most part, but the tomatoes on one salad tasted like a spoonful of fertilizer. I scraped them aside.
Not many other people seem to notice this, but when you've conditioned your taste buds by eating only local, organic, farmers market food, the "real" world tastes bad.
That shocked me, to realize I really am only eating local, organic, farmers market food. Almost exclusively, barring the occasional gummy bear or sack of Doritos. (Cheating with junk food once in a while is what life is all about.) The simple truth is, I only buy organic meat, cheese and produce at the farmers market. I haven't had a banana in over six years.
So here's the sad story. We decided not to plant vegetables this summer. We have a variety of reasons, some personal, some meteorological, and some fruitacious.
See the pears in the tree? We'll have a half ton of Bartletts and Comices by the end of next month.
We are still clearing the Summer Navels from the orange tree.
The plum tree is just squirting fruit.
The grapes. The grapes! If everything works out, we'll have bunches and bunches of wine grapes (not enough to make wine, though), probably all at the same time (I don't know when, exactly; this is new).
I'm going to enjoy my Summer of Fruit.
But I will still eat my vegetables. They will come from the farmers market. What a relief!

Independence From Pie

2011-07-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

I don't have a sweet tooth, but that doesn't mean I don't like sweet things. I mainly mean I don't want bear claws for breakfast or pie for dessert. No thanks to the refined sugar, the flour and the fat.
Fruit gives me all the satisfaction I want.
Here comes Mrs. McNaggity: Please develop an interest in fruit. It does not need to be baked in a clafoutis. It does not need to be whirled in a blender as a sweetened smoothie.
Fruit is so good, it IS dessert. Well, you have to make sure the fruit you get is good. A peach with the mushy texture of rice and the flavor of Elmer's glue is a disaster, and you will blame it on "fruitness." You will avoid fruit. It is not the peach's fault; it is the peach farmer's fault, or more likely, the supermarket's fault. Try again. Find great suppliers, like at the farmers market.
We grow five kinds of fruit at my house, and we long ago gave up on trying to put them in baked goods just to use them up. Just eat them!
So this is my stealth entry into the pie maelstrom that's buzzing in the blogosphere this week. I don't want a wedge of pie, but a wedge of cheese is fine. With fruit.
(It's a toma, from Point Reyes, one of the myriad of new cheeses they recently introduced. A little tangy, a little stinky, softish... it was great.)
Happy red, white and blue!

The Cheese Doesn't Stand Alone

2011-07-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

Summer. Ahhh.
Cranky calls it "mayonnaise season." I'm afraid it's also pesto season, or at least basil season, and I don't like basil.
For sure it's tomato season, even if these are a little early (hothouse-grown).
Lucky me, I just found out it's also cheese season.
I told you last week about the "Stilton" from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company. All along, I'd only known the company for its "original blue."
Well, I kept a couple secrets from you.
Point Reyes is also making fresh mozzarella, creamy soft balls about the size of rubbery, plastic-wrapped mozz in grocery stores, but this is floating in whey and it tastes like a cloud. A delicate, lactic cloud. So fresh, it moos.
We made Caprese salad, hold the basil.
Silly. I wouldn't even give this a name. It's sliced cheese, sliced tomatoes, wonderful olive oil and salt and pepper. That just sounds like food. Normal.
I always slurp the oil/tomato/cheese slurry that results in the plate when the food is gone. It's a tonic.
(And, I have one more secret. Gosh, I hope they come back to the market tomorrow.)

I'm Cool With That

2011-06-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-06-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-23T14:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-06-13T18:12:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-06-12T14:01:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-06-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-01T13:36:00.001-07:00

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.

And the Sky Is Gray

2011-05-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

Oh, it is just hell shitty out there. Rained this morning, and never really cleared up. The long-term forecast says we will have rain next Wednesday. A week off (and some in between). Rain in June, and May sucked.
OK, take it easy on me. It RIPS my mood. I am sensitive.
Today we made a pot of beans for lunch, because that works.
Tomorrow I'm making avgolemono soup, with my own Meyer lemons. Because that should help, too. Bright, snappy.
Whaah.
{*gently rocking*}

Remembering

2011-05-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

I think I can tie this post to Memorial Day.
Today we grilled chicken teriyaki skewers and peach halves. The flavor of the teriyaki sauce yanked me immediately back to Hawaii, where I used to buy teriyaki sticks for a quarter whenever the Navy guys were grilling on the beach for a party or something.
"Dad, can I have another one?"
"OK, here's a quarter."
Loved that stuff, even though it was always overcooked and rather skimpy.
Today we made some teriyaki sauce ourselves and marinated chicken breast strips in it. Then we threaded the meat on skewers and grilled them, to uproarious, insane, happy-dance success. Tender! Is that possible? And the grilled peaches. Peaches don't taste like this! Just slightly singed and warmed, juicy and insane. I gotta get another bag of mesquite. Tasted like pure Hawaii.
Here's the Memorial Day part. We lived on Ford Island, a tiny navy base/airstrip nestled inside Pearl Harbor. The base was so small there were no schools on the island, and I had to take a boat to Oahu to learn my three Rs. (There's a bridge now to the "mainland." A bridge!)
Every school day we would pass right by the sunken USS Arizona, which was felled right next to Ford Island. It was just there, and we all knew it. We even knew people who knew people who had survived. Or died.
But it was not a monument then. It was a sunken navy ship. I would think about the skeletons still down there. I was pretty young, so I wasn't having patriotic thoughts, but I sure knew it was there.
Now it's a Memorial, all architected up. Fine. Good.
But there was another sunken ship, right off my shore of the island, outside my front door. The USS Utah. Never heard of it, huh? It has a memorial, too, but it's not all splashy-fancy.
There was also the USS Oklahoma, on the other side of the island. Battleship Row. I didn't pay too much attention to it because it was on... hah... the other side of the island.
Whatever. I was pretty young.
But I sure knew those ships were there and that men had died on them.

The New Food Profile

2011-05-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know if it's the atmospheric climate or the economic climate, but I have noticed a shift in food.
Food presentation. Food combination.
Food is nowadays a bowl or a plate of foodlets, mingled together. Not tethered with sauces. Not roasted stand-alone meats.
You got your farro salad. Your chunky, random pasta. Your beans and veg.
All just strewn across a plate or huddled in a bowl.
Gone, it seems for now, are the sculpted confections, the engineered arrangements, the precious, tedious plating.
What a way to eat. Pressure's off. Cook your nice ingredients, and then eat them. Together.
This was a "potato salad," inspired by Heidi's new book (the picture showed there were peas; we didn't follow the recipe but peas sounded good).
There's a Japanese deli in the San Francisco Ferry Building. I've cruised the cases there a couple of times, but always ended up feeling urpy when I came upon the mashed potatoes with vegetables punctuating it. All the rest of the food looks good; random minglings of foodlets. The reason my potato salad doesn't look urpy is because it's not mashed.
Ideas: Just throw in chopped pickled eggs, cooked peas, chopped celery, sliced leeks (raw), olives... Whoa, I didn't even add all that. Vinaigrette, then toss and serve.
I really like easy, messy, aggregate food! Recipe completely optional.

Gray Skies Had Better Clear Up

2011-05-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

Today I heard that a local farmer who services CSAs and attends several farmers markets nearby (but not mine) was unhappy about our recent, dark weather. It's not tomato weather, he said in so many words.
Now, I've been moaning for weeks about the absence of tomato weather in my backyard, where my contribution to the economy is zero and my dependence on crops to make a living is also zero.
Suddenly I feel puny. Like a selfish suburban whiner who wants to garden, but Mother Nature has other plans. Whaah, whaah.
How do you think this farmer feels? Probably a little bit panicked. Disappointed like me, sure, but more kinda worried.
For the three past summers, the growing season has been late, and it's really getting to me. I'm losing my mojo and putting in fewer and fewer plants. It's discouraging. Sometimes I hardly want to go outdoors and pull weeds, because it's rainy and miserable.
(Please refrain from preaching about tornado victims here, thank you.)
Well, that farmer does not get to go all delicate on us, no matter what is coming down from the sky. Cats, dogs, locusts, rain, meatballs. He's got a financial commitment to the earth, and he must soldier on. Farmer on, whatever.
Weather or not, though, I am still a tomato ranchin' bum, and there are always a lot of 'maters out there, if I have to pick them green and roast them in November.
Even so (and allow me one last sniffle), it's hard to put on a happy face. Let me try.
I raise a toast to the whiners and the farmers. Spread sunshine all over the place!

Sláinte and Pucker Up

2011-05-23T17:35:00.000-07:00

I saw a picture of President Obama swigging a pint of Guinness in his ancenstral town of Moneygall, Ireland, and it reminded me I had to check on my alegar.

al·egar (al′ə gər, ā′lə-)
noun
a vinegar resulting from the fermentation of ale; sour ale
Origin: ME alegre < ale (see ale) + egre, sour < OFr aigre: see vinegar al·e·gar (ălˈĭ-gər, āˈlĭ-) noun Vinegar produced by the fermentation of ale. Origin: Middle English, blend of ale, ale; see ale, and vinegar, vinegar; see vinegar.
from YourDictionary.com

How simple! Ferment some beer until it turns sour, and you get alegar, which is sort of like "vinegar," but made from ale. And, I'll bet you've already figured out that the "vine-" in vinegar comes from vine, i.e., grapes, or more precisely, vin, as in wine.
You wanna know what else is simple, besides etymology? Making alegar. I just took a bottle of Guinness, flipped off the cap, and made a loose helmet from aluminum foil (it needs air, but not dust or spores). The bottle has been sitting on a dark windowsill (oxymoron?) for several weeks.
You can do it too. Just don't touch the opening of the bottle with your fingers or your lips. No contamination. When you want to taste to see how it's developing, lift off the foil and slide a clean knife into the bottle. Taste the alegar from the knife.
It will be exciting. Deep and malty, with what I felt were two jolts of sour: a sweet one at first taste, and a sharp one at the finish.
I've decided it's not as ready as it could get, but even so, I'd use it in a minute right now. That good.
Thanks for reminding me, O'Bama.

Time of Year for Green Soups

2011-05-21T14:32:00.000-07:00

I have too many cookbooks. I won't tell you how many I've never even cooked a single recipe from. I do get ideas, though, so that's good.
But I have one cookbook I could happily eat my way through. It's no longer "new" and it has never been hot or trendy. It's a book of delicious, homemade foods. Soup to nuts (and I've used recipes in the book for both nuts and soup).
It used to be called the Good Fat Cookbook by Fran McCullough, but then in subsequent printings, Dr. Barry Sears horned in and claimed co-authorship (he wrote the introduction). I think everything is back in balance now; the current edition has Fran as the rightful author.
Ms. McCullough used to edit Deborah Madison's books. She knows her way around a recipe, and likes to keep them simple and tasty. Here's my point: Everything always works. This is a book to USE.
So I have been loving her chilled, grated cucumber soup with buttermilk, onion, dijon mustard and sour cream. Made it a zillion times.
Today, though, I dared a little departure. There were fresh English peas in the fridge. Wouldn't they be so CUTE in this summery soup?
Bang, we shelled and lightly cooked a handful and stirred them in. Honestly, I was just going for cute. Didn't know how it would taste.
Tasted great. Sweet, springy, perfect.
Fran, I dicked with one of your recipes. Still friends?

Rapture Barbie

2011-05-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

Man, if I'm going to be Left Behind™, I want the shoes.
Not just any shoes. They must be small and pink and stoopid.
Where should I position myself on Saturday to await my shoefall? Outside Toys R Us? A whole lotta naked, flying Barbies, on their way to the hereafter. That'll be cool.
And I get the shoes.

The Camels Are Coming

2011-05-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

You ate Campbell's soup growing up, right? Admit it.
It was completely NORMAL in my house. Mom could make some nice soups from scratch, sure, but the larder always had several red and white cans.
I sampled lots and lots of flavors of Campbell's soup, but my two favorites were cream of mushroom, and then bean with bacon. (Later I adored the black bean soup, but that was a transitional time and I've transited out of it.)
Bean with bacon. That was the hands-down winner. For a little kid, it wasn't too sweet, too salty, too creepy. I liked it.
A little ashamed to say it's still a benchmark soup for me, even if I'm cooking from pure, robust ingredients at home. My mom liked to make Navy bean soup (probably because my dad was in the Navy and it beefed up his credentials). But the Campbell's bean soup was a little pinker, a little more complex.
Today's lunch was bean with ham soup. That looks like a mega-blob of meat in the spoon, but there was probably no more than an ounce or two of ham in four servings. They just all ganged up for the photo.
You don't need a lot of meat. Whiz it with your immersion blender to get a greater meat-to-liquid distribution. If it's really tasty ham, the whole pot of soup will be adequately perfumed. More than that and you've just got a mouthful of smoky protein, ya doof.
But the secret, the way to get that nostalgic Campbell's allure, is to squirt some tomato paste in there. A little. And while you're at it, grab the anchovy paste tube, too. Umami it up. Check carefully for salt. Homemade, good food is sweet. You might need a little salt. We actually used Thai fish sauce! Not too much, you're not going for cartoon food, just a mysterious salt/umami.
I was having a childish, needy day. This fixed it.

Meatless Monday, Magical Mouth

2011-05-17T11:39:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know it's Tuesday. But this was yesterday's supper. Yesterday, if you recall, really was Monday.
I have created a vegetarian cook, and his name is Chef Cranky! All I had to do was say, "Gee, we haven't eaten a tortilla pie in a while."
Somebody's juices got flowing, because within a few extracurricular (shopping) moments, we had corn tortillas, orange cheddar cheese, fresh chile peppers and a bunch of cilantro in the kitchen. Tomato and onion were already on hand.
The funny thing is, chicken did not appear. I usually make tortilla pie with leftover turkey or chicken. It didn't even OCCUR to Cranky to buy meat.
He used canned refried beans.
Fine! Fine with me!
You don't wanna know how to assemble this silly dish (layers in a little casserole, moistened with vegetable broth here and there, that's basically it, and baked for half an hour). But every time I've eaten it in recent years, it has tasted like candy. My taste buds are so extensively recalibrated that good food tastes like candy. Not in a sickly way, no. Good, sweet, natural.
I'm going to say something dippy here. I love having recalibrated taste buds. I can eat canned beans now and then (and even gummi bears), and my mouth is still full of magical flavors from a newly sensitive palate. A little cheating won't hurt.
If you're interested, I'd say stop using sugar in your food. That's a good beginning.

Again With the Recipes!

2011-05-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

Look. This is the dish from the cover of Heidi Swanson's new book, Super Natural Every Day. I'm slightly aware that a zillion copies of the book made their way into the hands of compatible bloggers, for the inevitable good reviews that would result. I am not on the A List, though, and bought the book myself, with real money.
Really happy about it!
It's so interesting to explore the culinary habits of another cook. Heidi goes for browned, crisp, deep flavors. Perhaps it's a make-up for no meat (she's a vegetarian). But browned beans? New to me.
It was simple, filling (oof) and tasty. Cabbage, potatoes, onions, beans. Some cheese. At this point you hardly need a recipe. Stir fry, that's about it. I think it needs the addition of some vegetable broth for moistness.
But I loved it, because I've never had beans with cabbage. I think. And potatoes in there? Wonderful. We jiggered with it by adding a tiny dash of sherry vinegar, but might skip that next time.
Next time, I'm making it without a recipe.

Homemade Junky Snack Food, But Not Junky

2011-05-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

You must have noticed all the fried, roasted, crisped garbanzos pinging around the food-o-sphere.
I knew I would eventually try them. Sooner than later.
But it took a double-whammy to get it to happen. Kalyn posted about a salad made from roasted chickpeas. That got my juices flowing. The chickpeas weren't crunchy, though (and I supposed crunchy chickpeas would make a creepy salad, unless they were the croutons). It turns out Kalyn had posted about exactly the crunchy beans I was looking for, a few years earlier, but I missed it.
So I googled roasted garbanzos, and was led to Steamy Kitchen. Oh, yeah! I remember that post. That's the recipe I followed.
It turns out that Cranky was jonesing for some, having seen the sensual picture of a plate of golden legumes in Heidi Swanson's new book, Super Natural Every Day. It's not the recipe I followed, but I'll take a look at it next time.
The point is simple. You oil and roast some dried-off (cooked) beans. You are going for total Corn Nuts crisp, although the end product is more tender than a Corn Nut. No mush in the middle allowed (but they can burn, so beware). You season them to your liking (I used garlic powder, salt, cumin and hot smoked paprika).
And you get this bowl of SNACK. Perfect tapa if you are snorting the cava, or even just a glass of sparkling water.
Jaden at Steamy Kitchen advises using two cans of beans, these are so addictive. They make your tummy growl.
But they are protein bombs. I mean it, really filling.
Cranky and I were wishing we had made more, and then we couldn't even finish the one batch.
We'll make another batch soon. Cranky just went and bought four cans of garbanzos.

Coming Soon to a Backyard Near You

2011-05-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

I've learned you can be a very lazy gardener and still get a good crop. Just start with some good animal poo stirred into your dirt. Plug in the plant. Cover the dirt with mulch, really pile it on. No weeding.
Keep it watered as needed, and hose the aphids off.
Voila.
Cannot wait.
Should I buy a blueberry bush? That will make five kinds of fruit out there... Yikes. Not too late.

So Damn Cute

2011-05-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

What can I say?
This was pretty, whimsical, and fun to eat. It made you hungry. It was like... like an appetizer! It appetized.
Roll some really fat asparagus around in a pan of butter until they soften (we cut them in half, crosswise). Brown spots are encouraged. No salt, though.
Because once the spears are custard-tender, you're going to cut a lengthwise slit and fill the pocket with skinny slivers of Gruyere, and cheese is plenty-o-salty.
Also, you're going to wrap your confection in pieces of Lady Gaga's meat dress. No, edit that. Pieces of fantastic prosciutto, with so much flavor already in it, you don't need anything else.
Toothpicks.
Return to pan, but try to keep the slit side up so your cheese doesn't melt all over the pan.
Yep, just heat'n'serve. Simple, really. We laughed when we weren't groaning with pleasure.

Red, Not Blue

2011-05-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

This spaghetti is sauced with uncooked tomatoes. They are fragrant with uncooked green garlic and sybaritic glugs of olive oil. Salt, pepper. An early version of this "recipe" included basil leaves, but I just can't fall in love with basil leaves. Out of season, anyway. There was a dab of arugula pesto from the freezer. (And the tomato was grown in a hothouse; shoot me.)
I told Cranky yesterday that it was the only sauce I ever wanted on spaghetti, forever.
Then today, I saw a sexy photo of spaghetti in cooked marinara sauce, all tangled through (pasta finished in the sugo, I suspect). And I wanted that.
I'm going through a sort of "me-time" state. Thank goodness the dog is such an adorable clown, and that Cranky is SO good with her.
I'd call it a spaghetti with red sauce period.

Mission Accomplished

2011-05-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

I am not a spice wimp. I'm not chary about chiles, grossed out by garlic, negatory on nigella seeds.
But I just haven't been using spices much.
I think it's the good, local food we've been getting at the farmers market that has calmed down my need for added flavors. The fresh vegetables, meat, seafood just taste so good already.
I do like to use salt. I don't think I overuse it at all, and I'm not saying I like salty food. I just think salt works magic in cooking.
It's rare that I ever ransack the baking spices. You know, the warm, holiday-tasting ones like cinnamon, cloves, allspice. I think they're lovely, but so noticeable in food as to trump the native flavor of your essential eats. (And I think I'm off vanilla forever, but that's another story.) Maybe I am a spice wimp!
Herbs, yes, I do like herbs (both fresh and — gasp — dried).
I adore cumin and pepper, and I think I could cook with those two alone (plus salt) and never need another flavor.
But why?
It's like I was getting all Taliban about the additives. Loosen up, use judgment, give it a try. Go easy, have a little fun. Raid that compound!
So. Spiced rice.
There's really nothing to say here, except that this dish of rice is flavored with cracked, roasted almonds and chopped homegrown prunes. A handful of peas. Salt and pepper, of course, and cumin (of course!).
At the end, I stirred in a microscopic flick of allspice, and it went to another dimension. It was a bad mutha... (shut yo' mouth!).
I threw off that burka and reveled in a little spice.

M'aidez, M'aidez!

2011-05-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

I am smacked on so many levels by this May Day salad.
It's the epitome of spring. It's pretty. It's surprisingly filling. And, pardon me, but it's rather original.
Ingredients (but no recipe): Fresh rose petals. Fresh parsley leaves. Fresh sorrel leaves, slightly chopped to match the size of the roses. Peas, cooked only al dente. Mandolined fennel bulb. Minced chives, and some of their pretty little blossoms.
The dressing was just backyard lemon juice with local olive oil, transformed slightly (and perhaps unnecessarily) by a few drops of pomegranate syrup. Salt and white pepper.
We have a stupid rose bush in the back yard, installed by the rube who "remodeled" his parents' old mid-century house and sold it to us. He had little taste, though the bathrooms look OK. The rose is a hybrid, meaning it has no fragrance. (I disagree with this official description of hybrid roses only a little; I think it smells like a rose, but not like rose perfume.)
I had a small bite of a rose petal yesterday, and bingo.
Cranky was only a TINY bit hard to sell on this. (Why? Too girly?) But I thought the petals tasted like food, and that's what I used them for.
It was a solid hit!
My birthday is tomorrow.