Eat This House

Chickens + Time = Eggs! (An Herb Baked Egg Recipe)

2010-10-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

You may remember from this post that we adopted day-old chicks back in March, and lo and behold, a miracle happens when they hit 5 or 6 months old: they start laying eggs! Being the good foodies that we are, we're diligently trying new recipes with our fresh little backyard prizes. (In retrospect, "fresh little backyard prizes" sound more like poop than eggs, but I'm sticking to it. Although we certainly get our fair share of those other prizes, too.)

Our Americauna, Violet, the brown one in the picture, lays lovely green eggs... when she's actually laying. Currently, though, she's going through her first molt, which means no eggs, a growing mass of feathers all over the yard and an extremely scrubby looking chicken. She also happens to be much feistier than her sister, Lily, our Black Australorp. Let me tell you, it is not fun trying to convince an angry, half-naked chicken that there are better things to peck at than your bare toes. Because, come on, toes look delicious, don't they? All pink and plump and wriggly. How could she resist?

Lily's eggs are large, brown and gorgeous, as you can see from the top picture. It's almost a shame to cook with them, though once I discovered this Herb Baked Egg recipe from Strawberry Creek Inn, I quickly got over it. Justin and I made a fair amount of modifications to this recipe, as I'm not a big fan of mustard and neither of us cares much for nutmeg in savory dishes, but the basics are the same: you line a ramekin with a delicious breakfast meat, add a layer of cheese and top it off with eggs and herbs. The result is so much better than I imagined - we seriously made this two days in a row. The addition of yogurt to the beaten eggs is just pure, creamy, yummy genius.

Herb Baked Eggs
adapted from Inn Cuisine
(makes 2 servings)

4 slices uncooked turkey bacon
3 large eggs
1/4 cup plain lowfat yogurt
1/2 cup shredded cheese of your choice (we used sharp cheddar and fresh parmesan)
2 teaspoons chopped fresh herbs (we grow basil, oregano and chives in our yard, so we used those)

1. Preheat oven to 375 F. Grease two oval gratin dishes with vegetable spray.
2. Arrange two slices of uncooked turkey bacon across the bottom of each dish. Separate 1/4 cup of the shredded cheese and divide evenly between the two dishes, sprinkling directly on top of the turkey bacon.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together eggs, yogurt, herbs and the remaining 1/4 cup cheese. Pour this mixture into both gratin dishes, dividing evenly.
4. Bake in oven for 10-20 minutes, depending on how done you like your eggs. I prefer the shorter end of the scale, when the eggs are set on the sides but a bit soft in the center.

As the wonderful blogger over at Inn Cuisine points out, this recipe is ripe for reinvention - you can sub in your choice of breakfast meats or veggies on the bottom layer, and suit the herbs and cheeses to your taste. Consider yourself warned, though: this is a highly addictive recipe, one that will have you craving baked eggs every weekend, imaging their cheesy herbed goodness even as your eyes open in the morning. And considering how completely easy this breakfast is, you'll probably be giving in to those cravings.

Banana Espresso Chocolate Chip Muffins

2010-10-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

At six months pregnant, I am finally back to baking with a gusto. In the throes of my first trimester, I couldn't eat anything - I subsisted mostly on apples and oatmeal, and even the smell of my prenatal vitamins made me want to run to the sink. The saddest thing wasn't that I couldn't cook, or be in the kitchen, or even glance at the jar of tartar sauce on the top shelf of the refrigerator, but that morning sickness robbed me of my love for food. It made me dread eating, something I didn't even think was possible. So at the end of this second trimester, to be out of bed, back on my feet and conjuring up goodies like these muffins from the wonderful Baked: New Frontiers in Baking cookbook? It's seriously the greatest feeling in the world. That, and getting kicked by the little alien living in my abdomen. That's pretty great, too.

What I loved best about this recipe was the intense banana flavor. Four super ripe bananas for a little over a dozen muffins turns out a rich, bright taste that's only improved by the tiny bit of instant espresso powder and cup of chocolate chips. If you're looking for an intensely espresso muffin, this isn't the recipe for you, but I think the teaspoon of grounds give the muffins a deepness that they wouldn't have had otherwise. And, of course, you can't go wrong with chocolate chips.

Banana Espresso Chocolate Chip Muffins
from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking
(makes 15)

4 mashed, very ripe medium-sized bananas
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup milk (recipe calls for whole milk, but I used skim without a problem)
1 large egg

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder (make sure you use instant, and not just regular espresso grounds!)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Line muffin pan with liners or spray with nonstick spray.
2. In a medium bowl, combine mashed bananas, sugar, brown sugar, melted butter, milk and egg.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, instant espresso powder, baking soda and salt. Make a large indent in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients into the well. Stir until just combined, and fold in chocolate chips.
4. Fill liners about 3/4's full. Bake in center of oven for 20-25 minutes, until cake tester comes out clean.
5. Cool muffin pan on cooling rack for 15 minutes, remove muffins from pan and let them finish cooling outside of the pan.

These muffins are beyond heavenly, and tasted even more banana-y the next morning. They can be kept for up to two days, but let's be honest - are they really going to last that long without getting eaten?

Apricots!

2010-07-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

It's weird to look up and realize that two months and more has gone since I wrote here, perhaps weirder still to think of why.

You guys, you probably know this already--if you know us even vaguely away from this blog, if you're even a friend of a Facebook friend of ours, I'm sure you've heard the news--Dana is pregnant!

If you're just joining us in this exciting and uproariously happy news, feel free to take this time to squee. I completely understand and I'll wait. Better?

Good. Welcome.

As you might imagine, we have been sort of busy, with all our planning and taking portraits and letting slip the news to everyone who calls the house. In addition to all that, we've begun haunting the baby care sections of every department store we enter, creeping through Target's aisles of onesies with tiny aloof doggies on the front and their racks of smiling octopus-covered blankets, surfing Etsy's many pages of unforgivably expensive cribs shaped like boats. This keeps us busy. Honestly, though I haven't been not posting here because of that. No, it's not planning that keeps me away from the blog, it's something more insidious. See, Dana's about three months along in the pregnancy now, poised just at the exit ramp of her third month. She's just slowing to make the corner into the reportedly shining, felicitous months of her second trimester with its inflated sense of well being, its reshuffling of organs, and as she makes this curve her wheels are just beginning to spin free of the constant nausea of her last months' morning sickness. It's this nausea, this aversion to food in all its forms, which has been our dread enemy the last couple months and the reason for our silence.

Until this week, I don't know if I could name more than five dishes that I have even made these last months. Quesadillas, occasionally, peanut butter sandwiches if the mood allows, even, once, a bit of pasta, but mainly I have been slicing apples, boiling potatoes, mixing oatmeal. Concocting, in short, the blandest food imaginable, and even then sometimes finding it nigh-impossible to coax Dana to eat it.

But oh, this week, the tides are turning. Just as we reach the last breathless moments of apricot season (our backyard has smelled like bad fruit wine for weeks; one of our chickens scavenged the hearts from so many mushy fallen apricots that her nostrils became clogged with congealed fruit), as tomatoes start to glow red as blisters under the skirts of their vines, as the gargantuan zucchini plants are producing a generous basket of green intimidating phalluses every day, Dana is eating again!

I'll deal with the squash next time--the zucchini bread is finishing its sentence in the oven as I labor over this very paragraph but I think I can safely say it will be both delicious and lovely when paroled--and I have yet to figure out what to do when one daily has more tomatoes than sense, but today I wanted to talk to you about apricots. A couple of long months ago (like two posts before this one), I mentioned that the weight of the unripe apricot crop was weighing down our tree. By now, the apricots have basically come and gone, the tree has sprung back up to full height and we are becoming blissfully reaccustomed to the lack of fruit flies in the house.

In the meantime, between my ravenous out of hand consumption and Dana's disinterest in even the smell of the things, I made a couple of recipes that were fairly successful.

My first foray into baked apricot goodness was a meh result. Apricot turnovers with store bought puff pastry turned out a bit dense for my tastes, the filling (fresh apricots sliced and cooked down with lemon and lots of sugar) was more jam than fruit and an inadvisable egg wash on the pastry--while pretty--kept the puff pastry on a leash instead of, well, letting it puff.

Second was an apricot pie that I turned out for our 3rd Annual Fourth of July barbecue and Elmo roast at which, as always, we spent half the day filling an Elmo doll with jury rigged fireworks, and about 2 minutes of the evening watching it turn into flaring festive charcoal and singed plastic hair.

The pie was a wonderful thing, juicy and sweet and so apricoty that it was something like picking and eating fruit fresh from the tree. Only in a pie, and awesome. I'll post the recipe down below this just in case you have any apricots hanging around. You could definitely do worse than tossing a few cups of them toward a nice pie.

The third thing I made from the apricots, and probably the best, was this apricot sorbet from Annie's Eats. This... I have no words. It was absolutely tremendous. This is just one more indication that I need to pick up David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop sooner rather than later. Although, come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't be surrounded by beautiful delicious ice cream constantly. Eh, who am I kidding. I should definitely be surrounded by it.

Fresh Apricot Pie
(slightly adapted from this about.com page)

1 cup sugar
4 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
pastry for double crust 9-inch pie
3 cups fresh apricot halves
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter, cut in small pieces

Line a 9 inch pie pan with half (or one sheet if you're using the refrigerated stuff) of the pie crust. Toss the apricot halves with sugar, flour, and nutmeg mixture then pile into the prepared crust. Sprinkle evenly with the lemon juice and then dot with the Tbsp of butter.

Cover with top crust, trim and flute edges and make several small slits in top to vent.

Bake at 425° for 25 to 35 minutes or until the pie is bubbling wonderful amazing syrup from its vents and the edges of the crust you weren't quite as careful sealing.

So, there you have it, a few apricot options if you haven't passed through the season entirely.

And, also, I'm going to try to write here a bit more than I have been. I've been neglecting all you hungry folks for too long.

Moosewood Macaroni & Cheese

2010-05-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

I've talked up Moosewood often enough here that you might suspect I'm a shill for the restaurant, nothing better than a marketeer for their prodigious line of stylish reasonably-priced cookbooks available now for the low low price of... etcetera, etcetera. The truth is, yeah, I loved the restaurant more than I hated it, and I have been nothing but happy with the food I've produced from the Moosewood cookbooks. Since we've been trying out vegetarianism (we've been saying veggie-curious half seriously) the last month or so, we've been paging through the cookbooks even more than usual. But after what happened last week, I'm starting to think maybe all my praise has been based on something transient, something distressingly more like good luck than good design, something like happenstance. You guys, last week we made something from New Classics so abysmal, so abhorrently distasteful I am about to be forced to paraphrase myself, to reuse a line I first used to describe the crime against nature that was Tater-Tot Nachos served in the wilds of the midwest. Are you ready for this?

It was so awful, I want to make it again just to take a picture of myself throwing it away.

It started out almost as innocently as a meal can start: we wanted macaroni and cheese for dinner. Here's a useful rule of thumb: when the majority of the ingredients are included in the dish's name, the difficulty of execution is somewhere between poking yourself in the face and sitting in a folding chair. Seriously, it's like cooking at a first grade level. You put pasta in water, you add cheese. Done. Next. Meal. In this way, we were bolstered.

The cookbook set us up well, too: to add some protein to your cheesy pasta, simply blend some tofu into this dish's cheese sauce, your kids will never suspect the extra nutrition! And you know what, they probably wouldn't, either, because there is no way they're getting far enough into this dish to detect the subtle flavor of tofu. Instead, the first and most egregious misstep was one rather obviously incongruous ingredient the addition of which they fail to even mention in the text: along with the cheese and tofu going into the sauce, you add raw diced onions and prepared mustard. 2 huge Tablespoons of prepared mustard. In our defense, we questioned it when we were putting everything together, but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we'd never been steered wrong by these books. Where others have failed so spectacularly, Moosewood has held strong, had won the sort of trust necessary to even make us add an ingredient we knew we shouldn't.

After combination but before baking, the dish was the color and consistency of deviled eggs and had a smell akin to mayonnaise late in the process of turning. Yet on and on we pressed, turning away our noses and hoping that all this would somehow magically transform into deliciousness in the oven. It took literally an hour and a half of baking (twice as long as indicated because the middle remained stubbornly cold) before we could dig into the finished product. Once we chipped our way through the dry, insanely breadcrumby crust--yet another misstep, if a forgivable one--the interior just looked and smelled wrong. The kind of thing you would send back if served it in a restaurant. Instead of lessening in baking, the smell had intensified, building up to a stink that became more and more hideous as it permeated the room. If we had turned back then and ordered a pizza, we might have been spared some measure of queasiness, but by then it was probably 9pm, we were completely famished and held still to our faith in the source. So in spite of the evidence before us, we spooned it into bowls.

Dana, to her credit, made it maybe three bites in before she gave up; I am ashamed to admit that in my hunger and desperation, I somehow managed to polish off most of my bowl before pushing it bodily across the table. Reader, let me put you there with us. Below the crisp, nearly wooden crust, the texture was somewhere in the neighborhood of leftover egg salad, lukewarm and paste-like toward the center, molten and fluid along the edges. The smell was some kind of heavy mustard and sulfur dried on the counter. It tasted like culinary death, like holding sulfrous clotted ash in our mouths on a dare, only the dare was simply a late dinner of what should have been comfort food. The taste was overwhelmingly the bitterness of uncooked onions, unctuous and nauseating. There was mustard on the tongue, too, of course. There was mustard besieging us on every side at that point, its presence inescapable within the four walls of the house, even after disposing of the leftovers, even after brushing--nay, scouring--our teeth, it remained. That night as I slept, I swear to God that I could dream of nothing but the pervasive presence of mustard and onions. This is how deeply we were failed.

I have to confess that I still find myself a little mystified by the level of fail here. I'm still not clear on how a simple dish went so hellishly wrong. I mean, even Trader Joe's makes their microwaveable macaroni and cheese a winner, how could something so much more work intensive be so far off the mark? While we didn't get a picture of me throwing the remains of this ill fated adventure away, we got this:

Why did you have to make Dana so sad, Moosewood? Why, oh why, have you betrayed us?

On the recipe

2010-05-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

I love recipes.

Yeah, I'm man enough to admit it, right up in front of all of you gathered here today. Okay, okay, I know I've talked before about how difficult it can be for me to follow a recipe to the letter, but whenever I cook I do pretty much invariably have something in front of me. See, I love everything about recipes. The precise seemingly logical measurements, the linear directions, the sense that, like a map, if you follow their lines precisely, you will always get where you intend to go. This is really satisfying, and it speaks to the age we live in, too. You probably know this but if you study any art long enough you'll hear reiterations of the idea that everything has been done, everything thought, everything said and heard. We humans have been here on Earth doing stuff long enough that we don't really have anything new to offer, just the same old things, hopefully combined in some new way that, immediately after you do it, becomes just one more thing that's also not new. So when it comes to cooking, it's not much of a stretch to say that everything you're thinking of throwing together in a pan, someone else has made it first. And if you look deep enough on google, they've probably blogged about it too.

Think too hard on the implications of this concept and it'll drive you absolutely mad, but once it wiggles its way inside you you kind of have to learn to live with it. Me, I like to imagine that this concept of reiteration is one of the cornerstones of modern civilization, that it's comforting to be living in the shadow of history, and recipes for me just reinforce this. When I cook from a recipe, I'm just consciously reiterating a previous meal, attaching myself to a newer form of someone else's experience with a dish, when I then blog about the recipe, I'm constructing the underlying associations that society depends on. I am not saying that this is my motivation all the time, but sometimes, sure, I'm doing it to do it so that it will be redone.

As you might imagine from this, I cook from recipes quite a bit. But more and more I find that my developing sense of how things work in the kitchen leads me away from whatever recipe my laptop screen is open to and toward the cupboard, or the fridge. I guess, despite all my tangled beliefs about the power of the recipe, all my reliance on the formula, I'm finally learning to cook. I'm sure that there are a million names for this realization, for this act of breaking through the recipe, but the one that keeps running through my head tonight is this: I'm cooking freehand.

Tonight, as Dana ailed on the couch tending a fever as sudden and furious as a sunspot, I had the idea that I'd make her a soup. It was only after I'd diced the aromatics and started digging veggies from the crisper that I realized I was going about this differently than usual. I hadn't hit up tastespotting, hadn't dug through the food-stained catalog of printed out recipes we keep in a binder near the stove, hadn't even really referenced the recipes I've followed so many times I have them by heart. I just wanted soup so I put together soup. I tasted broth, and I frowned at vegetables like normal but I was doing something much more interesting than usual.

Ultimately, the soup turned out all right, good for what it was but still a little unbalanced with flavors, and perhaps that is one of the things that turns me off of cooking freehand, the sense that if something doesn't turn out quite right, it's not the fault of the recipe, it's my fault. There's no scapegoat.

Anyway, the soup's not the important thing (though it was very pretty) it was just a dish that got me thinking. So now I'm curious: what's the breakdown on this issue like in the general population?

So this is a quick sort of poll, a post that needs responses from you.

When you cook, do you dig out recipes and follow their instructions or do you cook freehand, gripping like mad to experience and--if you're a science-minded cook-- the ratios of what goes with what? Okay, why?

Busted Belly Benefit

2010-05-01T01:01:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't hear, our dear dear friend Alex Solla has run into some pretty serious medical problems for the better part of a year. In fact, his last few months have been repeatedly punctuated by the sort of medical emergencies most people don't recover from. This has left him with a stack of medical bills and physically unable to pursue the pottery from which he earns his living. You can read the nitty-gritty of Alex's last few months here if you've got a strong stomach and you're so inclined but I just wanted to post to say this:

If you're anywhere in the Ithaca area this Sunday at around 6pm, you should stop by the Rongo in Trumansburg to support someone awesome who needs--and deserves--a hand. Plus there'll be "two awesome live bands playing and a fantastic auction of art, fine crafts, and lots of fun stuff from local wineries and bed and breakfasts," so you'll be able to grab some wicked stuff.

Meet our Chickens

2010-04-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, Dana and I, buoyed by countless facebook albums of other peoples' newly-purchased tiny chicks strutting in deep green grass, broke down and made arrangements to adopt some of our own.

We picked out two, a black one and a brown one, an Ostralorp and an Americauna respectively, and set them up in a big cardboard box in our garage with a heatlamp (repurposed from my photo lighting equipment, actually), a feeder, and water dish. We named the black one Lily and the brown Violet. They were just little peepers when we brought them home, small enough for both to make the move from the feed store in the sort of brown paper bag you send your kids' lunch in, and not yet heavy enough to even crinkle the bag's bottom.

But, as you're probably aware if you've ever raised any sort of animal, they grow so fast. Provided food, water, heat, and space, they've probably quadrupled in size in the last month. Since we've raised them and thereby handled them presumably every day of their short lives, they're essentially pets. Pets as likely to poop on you as perch, sure, but pets nonetheless. The cardboard box they'd been swimming in in late March is much too tight a fit now, Lily can look over the side and meet our eyes when she cranes her neck. Unsurprisingly, she manages this as often as she can.

The soft fuzz they were covered in their first week has slowly given way to glossy feathers, leaving only their heads patchy and balding where the fuzz has ebbed. Then last night, when I went to check on them, Violet's head had suddenly bloomed with a strong coat of ginger feathers, seemingly from nowhere. It's just so startling to see something grow before your eyes. I feel like I'm caught in a time lapse video somehow, the world spinning like a child's globe, flowers blooming from seed.

Since they'll have far outgrown their box by the end of this week, we've been working on setting up a coop for them to transfer to. It's down to only finishing touches at this point: the wire is on and stretched taut, but the door is still missing, they've got a box to roost in but no roosts.
This is to say that while I haven't been writing about food on the blog--a whole month has slipped away, somehow--we've still been busily approaching this idea of homestead which brought us out here in the first place. I feel with our transition into gardening and raising our own birds this year--expect egg recipes galore when the girls start laying around September--we've crossed some line in food that I hadn't really conceptualized. We're going from consumers, perpetual supermarket shoppers, and amateur gourmets (props) to cultivators of earth.

We've built the chicken coop in a sheltered cement island nestled under the apple tree in our backyard, bordered on one side by riotously growing tomato plants, tangles of berry vines, and a solitary jalapeno bush. Our apricot tree a little further away is dense with underripe green fruit, its branches drooping like a willow's nearly to the lawn.

Along one the side of the house, tulips are dancing a slow masquerade, and the waxen leaves of strawberry plants shelter small red fruits as vibrant as songs, on the other side grape vines bolstered by the suddenly torrential spring rains wind like a breeze through the slats of a fence. Nearby our little lemon sapling pushes up, up toward the sunlight pushing back.

It is April here, and the air is hot or cold day to day with little pattern. We let the chickens perch on our fingers while we lay in the grass, we sow wildflower seeds in the good earth, the sky builds--fraying white along the edges--toward the inexorable heat of the summer to come.

St. Patrick's Day Feast

2010-03-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

Since St. Patrick's Day this year falls somewhere in the worst part of the week, celebrations promise to be reserved where work-precluding "illnesses" don't abound. Since St. Patty's is always a big thing around our house, we decided to just celebrate at our convenience. So this weekend, during some of the best weather of the year so far, we had our best friends Jack and Nicole over for a pre-St. Patty's day celebration, garden planting blowout, and D&D extravaganza.

The fare is classic, the heavy late-winter/early-spring peasant food you don't find, let alone want, any other time of year. Corned beef, boiled potatoes, carrots and cabbage, soda bread. And, of course, the American addition: beer, and lots of it. Since we were celebrating early this year, we got our pick of the corned beef cuts. The slab we took home was thick and well-marbled, a cut that resembled a steak more than the castoff 35% solution meats we usually end up with and, as we all noted while eating, this cut actually had some texture to it. If you too procrastinate buying corned beef until you can only find one in the store, you know this is unfortunately atypical.

To this stellar slab of meat and its heavy spices in the pot of water on our stove, we added half a dozen potatoes, a head of cabbage, and a few carrots. Then, in an act central to our holiday tradition, we stood around drinking beer and roleplaying barbarians and sorceresses while Nicole mixed together and shaped a loaf of Irish Soda Bread. The recipe for this bread originally came from her years ago. The loaf it turns out is dense and satisfyingly chewy, its crust dusted with cinnamon sugar and dotted here and there with plump raisins and little stirrups of crunchy crust-bits. It's an excellent counterpoint to the salty meat and vegetables, one we're always coming back to the kitchen for extra slices of throughout the night.

Irish Soda Bread
makes one large loaf

3-1/2 cups AP flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup white sugar
1-1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup raisins (for a bit of a kick, you might soak these in a splash of boiling water and a couple Tbsps of Irish whiskey)
2 large eggs

Also, for dusting:

1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, beat together eggs and buttermilk. Add wet ingredients and raisins to dry mixture and mix until combined. Pour onto floured board and shape into a round loaf, mixing in more flour if it's too wet to shape.

Place in a lightly greased springform pan or baking sheet (depending on your shape preferences), sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, then slice an X into the top of the loaf with a sharp knife and bake for 1 hour until the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.

Let cool for 10 or 15 minutes before slicing

The next day, we took advantage of the newly extended day by planting pots of herbs, a long line of tomato seedlings, and a single, lonely jalapeno plant. We're expecting pounds and pounds of salsa by the end of May, and craving sun-drenched produce already. Already the hot summer is threatening. All weekend, the sun was out and the thermometers hovered around the mid-70s. We could hardly stand to go inside for two days. Owing to this, of course, Dana took home her first slight sunburn of the year and I'm already starting to pick up a tan. Yeah, Ireland this is not, but the Irish food (and a good day's worth of leftovers) still fit very beautifully into the places in our bodies that still crave the warm gooey root vegetables of winter, even as the seasons are changing.

So what are your St. Patty's Day plans, kiddos? Drinking any beer? Dyeing any rivers green? Enjoying any late-winter delicacies?

Bonus Pictures: Dana's headshot

2010-03-13T12:09:00.004-08:00

Okay, I'm guilty. This isn't a picture of food.

But Dana and I had an impromptu photo shoot at the park a couple days ago and I liked this shot too much not to post it.

So, here is my lovely wife looking lovely and springy. And, of course, to check out more of my portrait work, head over to my photography site: jsouzaphotography.com

J Souza Photography

2010-03-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

As promised last time, I'm here to write in more depth about some recent developments I'm pursuing.

First of all, I'd like to officially introduce you all to my new site: JSouzaPhotography.com

This is the official site for my photography work, portrait, food, and still life. Here you can read my bio (a work in progress), browse my constantly updated portfolio, and--if you're in the central California area--contact me to set up a job. In the coming weeks, look for direct links to buy a print of any of the photos in my portfolio at low low prices.

This leads me to my next subject: my new etsy shop!

At jsouzaphotography.etsy.com I'm selling high quality prints of the best of my photos, all available in various sizes upon request, see the shop info for baseline pricing information.

In the next few weeks, I'd also like to automate offering prints or digital negatives of photos taken for this blog for purchase through my etsy store. In the meantime, if one of the food photos we've posted on ETH has touched you and you'd like to own a copy of your very own, send me a conversation on etsy or email me at jsouzaphotography@gmail.com and I will set up the item in a flash!

Heh heh. Get it... flash.

Photography!

Bonus Pictures: Radishes and Sunlight

2010-03-10T07:35:00.001-08:00

I did a quick photoshoot with the radishes in the DIY lightbox I built for ebay sales.

Unrelated but equally lovely is this shot I took at sunset on the farm.

Also, I've set up a website for my photography and an etsy store from which to sell prints and images. I'm going to write a longer post about the two developments in the coming days but until then you can find the photography site here:

www.jsouzaphotography.com

And you can find my etsy shop here:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/jsouzaphotography

Spring sprung sprong!

2010-03-08T23:16:00.000-08:00

You guys! We've got a garden!

The heavy hand of winter is receding and the sun is filling in the shady spaces it has left. We've had a lot of rain lately but this weekend the skies were blue and the sun was radiant. Suddenly, things are flowering, blooming, leafing. Where there was dirt there is greenery, where there were branches there are buds, where there was crappy lawn there is less crappy lawn!

The garden we planted in the late fall at my parents' place has started to take off in earnest and we've started to enjoy the fruits (vegetables) of our labor. The first harvestable crop was lettuce: bunches of arugula and butter lettuce only just breaking out of their spicy late winter malaise, but now there's this:

Suddenly we have more radishes than we quite know what to do with. Rad ass radishes, yo!

I apologize, it's exciting.

Soon, we'll have beets and spinach, tall stalks of brussels sprouts, baskets of stockton red onions and fresh heads of garlic. Not to mention all the cat plants that have started to produce fruit. Note, you have to pick these early or they turn into lions and crap and then it's like illegal to eat them.

Congratulations,California, you made it through your two and a half months of temperate winter unscathed.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, snowicanes!

40 years, an Anniversary Party costarring Homemade Lasagna!

2010-02-21T22:18:00.001-08:00

Today is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Can you wrap your head around that number? Because I have trouble.

Think about this: forty years ago was February 21st, 1970, a week after Valentine's Day, about six months after the moon landing, two and a half years after the summer of love. They were 19, and only just.

That morning the two of them stole out of then-sleepy-little Modesto to even-tinier Carson City, Nevada to elope because neither's parents believed that they could possibly know at nineteen years old what they've spent the forty years since then proving: that the two of them just belong together. With only his sister and her then-husband as witnesses, and not even enough money for a whole bouquet for my mother to carry down the aisle, they entered into the relationship that has defined them and in which they've spent more than 2/3s of their lifetimes.

I've lived with this knowledge my whole life, that my parents met at 18 and were off on their life together before either of them was more than a teenager, but it wasn't until I found myself at that age (and then suddenly past it) myself that I realized what a tremendous and unlikely feat they managed to pull off marrying so young and making it last so well.
Last night, in honor of their union and in celebration of them, Dana and I hosted a little Anniversary party here at the house. I say little but we had somewhere around twenty-five adults and a passel of kids, a group that did not even comprise all of their close family. For the occasion, we whipped up a lasagna we'd made once before, the recipe for which we received from our friend Sol, and Dana toiled over this unbelievable cake that I'll let her relate to you. So unbelievable, though, that though it's six months early I've put in a request for a version of it for my birthday. You're going to die. (...it just occurs to me that while this flows off the tongue fairly easily, it looks rather macabre in print. I'm really not trying to prophesy your death. I promise. Please don't actually die.)

Anyway, the lasagna we made is really really good and, as I've learned both times I've made it, incredibly heavy. We're talking like ten pounds at least. This is a dish made to feed a crowd* and it will. Granted, not the 25+ people that we had sitting on every possible surface in our house last night--to accomplish that task, we also counted a pizza, a plate of chicken skewers, half a tri-tip, bacon-wrapped crab, hummus, caesar salad, and a loaf of garlic bread among our ranks--but it'll fill up a good dozen stomachs.

I'll toss the recipe below but I wanted to take this opportunity to raise my glass once more to my dear parents whose long happy years together have given me something to shoot for, and whose unflinching joy and relentless happiness continue to provide me hope for my future. Mom and Daddy, may your good times never end.

Family-size Lasagna
recipe adapted from Marisol Baca

for the sauce:

1lb lean ground beef
1/2lb ground pork
1 medium spanish onion, diced
4-5 whole cloves garlic, peeled
8 ounces Crimini mushrooms, scrubbed
2 cans whole peeled tomatoes, drained and cut up (I use the Cook's Illustrated trick of taking kitchen shears to them while they're in the can)
2 Tbsp tomato paste
1-2 Tbsp Italian seasonings (basil, thyme, oregano, parsley)
3 Tbsp olive oil

cheesey goodness mixture:

4 cups (1lb) cottage cheese or ricotta (didn't I tell you that this is a decadent recipe?)
8 cups (1.5-2lb) shredded mozarella, 1 cup reserved (didn't I?)
3-4 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
1 egg
salt and pepper

also,

1-2 cups of baby spinach, washed
1 package of oven-ready (no-boil) lasagna noodles, see note below

Preheat oven to 375F

In a large pot (I used a 3.5l pot and it was just barely big enough. I advise a step up from that.) over a medium flame, cook the onion in the olive oil until clear then throw the garlic in and brown it in the oil. Add your dried seasonings to the pot then add and brown the meat. Drain off any collected fat and then add the tomatoes and paste. Cook on medium-low for 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine the ricotta or cottage cheese, 7 cups mozzarella, parsley, and egg in a bowl. Mix together well and set aside.

Note on the no-boil noodles: If you take the package's word for it and put them in dry, you'll get hard bits of noodle in your final dish. Instead, fill a shallow baking dish with hot water and soak the noodles for 3-5 minutes. This gives them time to soften up pre-baking and turns out a nicely firm but not crunchy lasagna.

To assemble: put 1/4 of the sauce into a large baking dish then layer noodles, cheese mixture, and then spinach in that order. Repeat up to the edge of the pan being certain to end on a layer of sauce. Top with the reserved Mozzarella and some fresh parsley or basil.

Cover dish with foil and bake covered for 40 minutes then remove foil and bake an additional 10 minutes or until heated through and cheese is slightly browned.

Enjoy!

*: On the first occasion of working our way through this dish--a week's endeavor which was an unexpected result of friends' plans falling through--we each must have gained a good five pounds. This I write as a warning to you, lovely reader.

Gather about you your friends and your family and make sure they are hungry. Do Not endeavor to eat this alone.

Savory onion pie and a quick cookbook review

2010-02-06T15:59:00.001-08:00

One of the unexpected benefits of Dana getting a job at the library is that she's constantly surrounded by cool books that she can take home. In fact there's a whole system in place to facilitate that very thing. (From my understanding it works okay but I'm not sure this whole book lending thing is going to catch on.) Her first week there she was shelving fiction and ended up coming home with some awful Pride and Prejudice meets sexy vampires book. This had no discernible benefits for anyone, no matter what she says. Last week, though, the process totally came through. On her way out of the library, she had stopped off at the desk to check out two awesome cookbooks: Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess and Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques, the cookbook from which the hazelnut brown butter cake recipe originated.

Sunday Suppers at Lucques is a visual feast, heavy glossy pages literally (figuratively) drooping with the weight of the exquisite food photography and deliciously typeset recipes. It's really a gorgeous book, well put together and considerable, but I paged all the way through it twice before I realized that it didn't make me want to cook. Sure, the brown butter cake was good -when Dana made it but I feel that that recipe was a good indication of the book's direction. That cake was an all-day affair, both in its preparation and--I think more importantly--its consumption. It was good but it was not the sort of thing you eat two slices of in a sitting. I liken it to taking weary steps up an unscaled mountain. Every step and every forkful are something new--I hesitate to say a revelation because I don't mean the word's more ecstatic connotations, but maybe exploration?--but each is just so damn exhausting that you're not anxious to rush into the next one. The food here, like the cake, is complex, dense in flavor if not texture, and despite the impression I got from the book's name, not cuisine I would want to spend a Sunday putting together. I'm sure the book has its devotees, a quick peek at the Amazon reviews certainly indicate so, but for me there's a missing link here between the potential of the recipes--which is great, apparently--and the enthusiasm and motivation necessary to follow them to an end. Every successful cookbook--actually, at this point, even every fiction book that stays planted on our shelves--must inspire just as much as it instructs. With the proper inspiration, I'll gladly, ecstatically spend a whole weekend putting dinner on the table, but I'm just not getting that. We have the book a couple more weeks. I'll let you know if anything changes.

The great success for us was Nigella Lawson's book. As I was finding myself decreasingly rapt with Lucques, Dana was becoming noticeably enamored with the tone of this book which is often just as no-nonsense, biting, and hilarious as Dana herself. The first recipe we tried from it was this Supper Onion Pie which had four red onions caramelized atop a simple scone dough. Easy and simple, but so tasty and incredibly photogenic.

Supper Onion Pie
from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess

for the filling/topping

4 medium red onions
1Tbsp olive oil
1Tbsp butter
3-4 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1/2 tsp dried
5 ounces sharp cheddar cheese or Gruyere, grated

for the scone dough

1-2/3 cups AP flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
3Tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp dry English mustard (we left this out because we didn't want to go out to the store for it)
1 large egg, beaten

Butter a 9-inch pie plate or 8-10 inch cast iron skillet and preheat the oven to 400F.

Peel the onions, halve them, then cut each half into 4 segments each. Heat the oil and butter in the pan, then add the onions and cook over a medium heat, stirring regularly, for about 30 minutes. For me, they were meltingly soft and gorgeously colored. Season with salt and pepper and add the thyme. Turn into your prepared pie dish and scatter 2 ounces of the cheese over the waiting onions.

Meanwhile, put the flour, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl with the remaining cheese. Pour the milk into a measuring cup, add the melted butter, mustard (if using), and egg. Mix well and then pour onto the flour mixture in the bowl. Mix to a dough using a fork, a wooden spoon, or your hands; it should be quite sticky. Then tip it out onto a work surface and press into a circle about the size of the pie dish. Transfer it to the dish and press to seal the edges.

Put it in the oven for 15 minutes, then turn down to 350F and give it another 10. The dough should be golden and crisp on top. Let it stand for a couple of minutes then run a knife along the inside edge of the pie plate, place a plate over it and invert. Ours needed a little convincing but eventually plopped out beautifully onto a platter.

Nigella suggests serving with a brown sauce but we just dug straight in and it was heavenly. Your mileage may vary, though. Especially steer clear if you're not a huge onions fan like I am. If you are, though, it's hard to beat this for a low stress vegetarian dinner and some gorgeous photo ops.

Naan, oh naan

2010-01-21T14:58:00.002-08:00

When Dana and I were living in our first apartment together, we got hooked on this hole-in-the-wall Indian place that was down the street from us.

Looking back, I can't really imagine why we went there in the first place. From the outside, it looked more like a front for the mafia than a restaurant: peeling paint and faded neon, a sign announcing the specials from what looked like four hundred years back, and beyond the streaked, hazy windows the sight of two or three empty formica tables gathered haphazardly around a counter that took up most of the room. Not a soul in sight inside or out.

But once you got past the intimidating approach, there was something wonderful about it. Yeah, it looked like there was no one there, but as soon as you'd enter there would immediately be someone manning the counter, eager and always the slightest bit brusque, a wave of the scent of baking bread, of seared meat and spices, and the food they served was that near-impossible combination of fast, cheap, and good. The tandoori chicken was to die for, its skin always shattered and then melted in your mouth, the masala was invariably thick and decadent, but what has me nostalgic the last couple of days isn't the entrees there, it's the naan. At the time, I couldn't get enough of the hot chewy and crisp flatbread, not because it was a particularly amazing version, just because it was what it was. If you've looked through this site much at all, you know I'm a sucker for baked goods, for breads and pastries especially. Keep your desserts, a warm loaf of bread has more to offer than any dozen cookies ever could. And a loaf cooked hot and fast in a clay oven? Yes please.

Like I said, I've been jonesing for naan the last couple of days with no idea where to get it in town. This happens. Usually the solution is just to get past the craving. I don't know where to get naan so I don't get naan. Sometimes, though, I remember why (and that) I keep a food blog. If I want something, I'm happy--even ecstatic--to make it. If I remember to.

What's been stopping me here is that I've never actually made any sort of Indian food that didn't come from a box or a package. So what threw me over the edge this time was Bon Appetit. The latest issue of the magazine I'm always swearing I'm going to cancel and don't listed a family friendly Indian dinner in its index. A quick peruse of the directions made me realize that not only was it really easy, I had everything in stock. So I whipped up a batch of a yogurty garam masala marinade for some chicken breasts, chopped and tossed some carrots with cumin, salt, and oil and, my favorite part, whipped up about a dozen little rounds of naan.

And while I used this recipe from Evil Shenanigans (don't you just love that name? Is it just me?), I have since found this video on youtube that seems like it might be even more promising. Not that the little flatbreads I made last night weren't tasty--they were, and nicely chewy with little pockets of crunch where the dough was thin--but they were just a little bit tough. I like my naan crisp but exceedingly tender and the extra leavening from some baking powder might just be the key.

It was a hell of a meal. I'll try to post a link to the recipes from Bon Appetit when they get posted online but for now, I urge you to try making your own naan. It's really easy and so so worth it.

So tell me, kiddos, what foods have you been craving lately and what exactly are you going to do about it?

Bacon wrapped, almond stuffed dates

2009-12-31T00:31:00.000-08:00

Not much of a lead up to this one since I've been cooking for hours and I need to go to bed but I thought it might be useful to any of you who--like us--are planning appetizers for New Years parties.

This is our own recipe, an attempted deconstruction of a dish Collegetown Bagels used to bring to Cornell English Department functions that everyone would completely flip over. It was hard to get more than one on your plate given the push of the crowd behind you and almost impossible to make that one bacony little package last until you found a quiet corner in which to sit and shovel hors'dourves into your mouth with your greasy fingers. Life at a University is so illustrious!

Almond-stuffed bacon-wrapped dates

12 oz bacon (a whole package) strips separated and cut in half
30ish dates, pitted (the -ish suffix because this really depends on how many strips of bacon are in your package. We had 30, your mileage may vary.)
30ish raw almonds (I used almonds from the farm that I picked, cracked, and peeled with my own two hands. If you want to be lame, you could probably just buy some.)
30ish toothpicks, soaked in water for twenty minutes

Preheat your oven to 400˚F.

Unless you have blanched almonds, the first thing you'll want to do is remove their skins. They add a bit of bitterness to the final dish that doesn't lend well to its balance.

To blanch the nuts, heat a small saucepan of water to boiling and add a dash of baking soda. Toss in the almonds and let sit until the skins start to look loose and puckered as a fingertip when you've been too long in the bath. Remove from water and transfer to towel to cool a bit. When cool enough to handle, you should be able to remove the skins with a slight squeeze on one end of the nut.

Stuff one peeled nut into the hole at the end of each pitted date and wrap tightly in bacon, using the soaked toothpick to pin the end.

Bake on a wired rack set above a rimmed baking sheet (do not use a flat cookie sheet. You will get bacon grease in your oven and you will be sad and you'll come to me crying and I'll be like nah, girl which will be insulting to you no matter your gender. No one wants that.) for around 30 minutes or until the bacon looks crispy and delicious.

Carefully remove toothpicks and serve slightly cooled or room temperature. They should even keep fine in a sealed container overnight.

Alternative version: replace the almond with a bit of pungent blue cheese and wrap as above. I have no idea how this will be but it sounds really good.

Z-z-z-zeppole!

2009-12-23T11:22:00.008-08:00

One of the things I miss most about Ithaca is sauntering up to the counter at Smart Monkey Cafe, ordering an organic lunch, an obscenely large cup of Gimme! Coffee and freshly made zeppole. I miss it so much, in fact, that I decided last weekend that the only thing I wanted to do on Saturday morning was make those crunchy little Italian donuts at home. Having never attempted donuts before, I feared that this was a doomed prospect, but no! They were surprisingly easy, deliciously custardy when still warm, and they made for lovely little holiday gifts to all the friends and family we saw throughout the day.

According to my friend Steven, zeppole are an Italian holiday staple (at least at his house), and not always prepared sweetly. Apparently his grandfather stuffs them with anchovies every year, and from what I've read about zeppole, that's fairly traditional. I stuck with the cinnamon/sugar variety because I'm not a fan of anchovies in the morning, but you know, stuff these with whatever floats your boat. Jelly? Sure! Chocolate ganache? Why not! Steak tartare? Go for it. Just don't ask me to share.

Zeppole
adapted from Giada De Laurentiis

1/2 cup sugar, plus 3 tablespoons
2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 stick butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup water
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs
vegetable oil, for frying

1. In a small bowl, combine 1/2 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons cinnamon and stir. Set aside.

2. In a medium saucepan over a burner set to medium heat, bring butter, salt, 3 tablespoons of sugar and water to boil. When melted and combined, remove pan from heat and stir in flour. Return to heat and stir until the mixture forms a ball.

3. Pour enough oil into a frying pan to reach a depth of 2 inches. We didn't want to waste too much oil, so we went with a medium sized pan, and made the zeppole in batches. Heat oil over medium heat until a candy thermometer registers 375 degrees F. Make sure you keep an eye on the temperature throughout the process, and adjust the flame when needed.

4. Transfer dough to bowl of electric mixer. At low speed, mix in eggs one at a time, making sure each egg is completely incorporated before adding another. Beat until smooth.

5. Using a melon baller, mini ice cream scoop or a spoon, carefully drop dough into hot oil a tablespoon at a time. Play around to see how many you can fit into the pan - we were able to do batches of six zeppole at a time. Turn the donuts a few times so that they're evenly golden and puffy, about 5-6 minutes. Drain on paper towels, roll in cinnamon-sugar mixture and eat. Eat! You're too skinny, you need some meat on your bones.

I actually enjoyed the donuts more after they'd cooled down a bit since the initial, just-fried bite is extremely rich and custardy. Either way, make sure you eat them the day you make them - this is one of those treats that doesn't keep.

My First Risotto(tm)

2009-12-19T23:54:00.003-08:00

The longer I pursue cooking as a serious avocation, the more I find I know nothing about it. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess, since that's often the way learning goes. The whole process is inevitably fractal, each explored avenue opens into a dozen throughways with a thousand offshoots branching from each. I know that that's why formal education works the way it does: you start off mild and generalized with your crayons and block letters and as you invest the years, the process becomes increasingly specialized and intensive and you seem to get progressively worse at sussing it all out. By the time you're in grad school you're either grading stacks of papers four feet tall or so intently focused on ten words in an ancient manuscript that you can barely even make your eyes focus. Is this just me? Maybe.

Anyway, I was saying that just to get here: the more I cook, the more I realize I haven't eaten. At least not thoroughly enough. I've mentioned my first forays into certain foods on the blog before, I know, but it strikes me as peculiar every time. Yesterday, I'd cooked all the way through my first risotto--stirring until my forearms were screaming from clenching the spoon--and eaten half my serving of the resulting slurry before Dana asked "is this what you wanted?" and I realized that I had no idea of what I wanted, that I'd never actually had risotto before, and that any judgment I had on this was uninformed. That said, I guess it kind of was what I was expecting.

I cooked this from our newest cookbook: Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, an early Christmas present from Dana's lovely aunt and, from my limited experience a thoroughly engrossing primer on a cuisine thats familiarity has been so thoroughly Americanized I hardly know where to start my exploration. Should I go with pasta, a subject that takes up probably a third of the considerable volume, or maybe the appetizer section which boasts proto-favorites like tomatoes stuffed with shrimp or salmon foam (SALMON FOAM???). Even the basic pasta sauce seems like a wonderful adventure. I've made so many tomato sauces out of crap gathered from our cupboard that I fear I may have to unlearn everything I've ever done just to pick up a new skill or two. Totally totally worth it.

Back to the risotto, the texture was spot on--creamy and rich without being sticky--and the taste, while not terribly deep, was good. I did specifically violate the instructions by using a chicken stock I'd made "in the french fashion" which was said to make the risotto bitter but I wasn't going to cook up another pot of stock just for an experimental side dish. If you have italian meat stock around with its requisite veal bones or want to make some give it a go, but you'd probably be fine just doing what I did: making obscene gestures at the recipe and using whatever. I thought the final dish could have benefited from a bit more earthiness, something that a few well-chosen mushrooms or a dollop of truffle oil (or, as the recipe suggests for the millionaires among us, shaved white truffles) could have remedied but I thought it worked out well overall. Not mind-blowing but decent. A platform from which to work. Here's the recipe:

Risotto with Parmesan Cheese

from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan

5 cups meat broth

3 Tbsp butter

2 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 Tbsp onion chopped very fine

2 cups Arborio rice

1/2 heaping cup parmigiano-reggiano cheese

salt to taste

Bring the broth to a low simmer on a burner near where you'll be cooking the risotto. In a broad sturdy pot on medium high heat, put 1 Tbsp butter, the vegetable oil, and the chopped onion. Cook stirring until the onion becomes translucent then stir in the rice. Stir until the grains are coated well.

Add 1/2 cup of simmering broth and cook the rice stirring constantly until the liquid is gone. Make sure you wipe the bottom and sides of the pot free of any grains that are threatening to stick. Fifteen minutes in they will stick and they will burn and you will hate yourself. Proceed like this, adding 1/2 cup of broth whenever there is no more liquid in the pot continuously stirring the ever-expanding mass until you can imagine no other job but this in all of the world, until the spoon becomes part of your hand and your arm puffs up and looks like Popeye's. Come to think of it, maybe switch hands before that happens.

After about twenty minutes, when the rice is tender but still kind of toothsome, gradually reduce the amount of liquid so that when it is fully cooked it is slightly moist but not runny. This would probably be a good time to stir in all the cheese and the remaining butter so that it's all melty and thoroughly coats the rice grains. Also taste and adjust for salt.

Transfer to a platter and serve promptly. Later, wake yourself from a deep dreamless sleep with the motion of your arm stirring, still stirring.

Always stirring.

Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies of Magical Deliciousness

2009-12-16T21:31:00.007-08:00

I prefer chewy cookies over crisp ones, gingerbread over sugar, frugal over extravagant, Coke over Pepsi, Martha over Julia, Nabokov over Tolstoy, cake over death. Hold on, that got away from me somewhere. My point is: Martha Stewart's chewy chocolate gingerbread cookies have blown my mind. Did you know chocolate kills in gingerbread? Because it does. Kills. It. Dead. Or at least it mortally injures your sweet tooth, rendering you incapable of eating any other holiday desserts. I do, of course, mean that in the best way.

To be honest, J & I aren't particularly big on ginger. I suspect that if you love ginger, this recipe is even better, and if so, you should make the version posted on Martha Stewart's site, and not mine, which omits the fresh variety. I should also confess that the main reason I left it out is monetary - when you're just scraping by, it's hard enough to justify keeping cocoa powder or chocolate chips around, let along a strange root that you'll only use in a cookie recipe and probably never touch again. But enough about me - I know what you're really here for.

Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies of Magical Deliciousness
(makes 24)

1 heaping cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon all spice
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon Dutch process cocoa powder
1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup unsulfured molasses
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons boiling water
granulated sugar, for rolling cookies

Note: I've simplified these instructions a bit in an attempt to address some of the issues from the comments on Martha's site.

Cover two baking sheets with parchment paper (or silpat). In medium bowl, sift together flour, ginger, cinnamon, all spice, nutmeg, and cocoa. Place a small amount of water in a tea kettle, and heat on high.
Afix paddle attachment to electric mixer. In bowl of mixer, beat butter until whitened, about 3 minutes. Beat in brown sugar, mixing until combined. Pour in molasses and beat until combined.
In a separate bowl, dissolve baking soda in 1 1/2 teaspoons boiling water. Taking turns, alternately beat half of flour mixture into butter/sugar/molasses, then all of the dissolved baking soda, then the rest of the flour. Mix in chocolate chips, then turn dough out onto a piece of plastic wrap. Pat into a 1 inch thick rectangle, seal the plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm (at least two hours).
Heat oven to 325 degrees. Cut dough into 24 equal parts using a serrated knife.
Roll each square into a ball, roll each ball in granulated sugar, then place on baking sheet.
If dough gets too sticky, put it back in the fridge for twenty minutes or so - I had to do this about halfway through. Also, to avoid a too-round final product, smush the balls a tiny bit with the flat of your hand.
Bake cookies until the surfaces crack slightly, 10 to 12 minutes. Let cool on pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack. Devour.

The combination of gingerbread and chocolate in these cookies is unbeatable. This is a holiday cookie win, no question.

Seriously guys, why are you not eating these right now?

Holiday baking, an overview

2009-12-11T20:58:00.001-08:00

What with Thanksgiving and Christmas being all up in our grills and us being tremendously poor, we've been doing a lot of baking. I know, I know, on the surface those seem like they don't fit together but let me assure you, they do. See, while food itself is not priced out of our range, food prepared by other people is a distant memory. At times the past couple of months, the idea of going out has been completely unreachable. Going to a restaurant, even an order-at-the-counter place, is a good twenty bucks, enough to feed us for almost a week at home. No matter how much we might want a burrito, we know objectively that we can barely afford to leave the house so we swallow our laziness and we stay here and we cook. And when it gets close to the end of the month and our supplies are running low, well we just scrape together our flour reserves and we bake.

Have I mentioned that being unemployed and poor sucks? Given the state of the economy, it's entirely too likely that you already know this.

Anyway, here's an overview of what's been slithering out of our kitchen to keep us busy the last couple of weeks:

For Thanksgiving, Dana pulled together this ridiculous Hazelnut Brown Butter Cake from Smitten Kitchen that was good. Note that I'm not saying spectacular but good. This is a conscious decision. It was solidly good, the hints of toasted hazelnut blended well with the nuttiness of the browned butter and the lightness of the egg white based batter carried through the cake. The ganache, though, that's where the whole thing kind of fell through for me. Throwing a candy shell on top of something so intentionally airy is a contradiction of intention. Do you want it sugar-drenched and dense or do you want it to float two millimeters above the fork? You don't get it both ways. Hazelnut brown butter cake, you're on notice.

While Dana was wrestling that cake to the ground, I put together an apple pie and some pie crust cookies. You know those, right? They're exactly what they sound like, sure, but the name doesn't really do justice to how much these are a part of my childhood. Every time my Mom has made a pie in my memory, these were the treasured byproduct: the little extra bits of pie crust laid flat and baked with cinnamon sugar or pie spice, quick to brown and easy to eat, like a preview of the pie to come. For someone who is a long-time compulsive pie crust picker (I can't keep my hands off it! I don't care that I'm just stealing from the future pie slice, I have to break off those little browned bits! I have to!), these little confections are heaven sent. Not to mention easy.

In case you haven't put it together or, I don't know, haven't grown up with it for some reason (you poor thing), here's the process: take all the little pie crust bits you have left over after putting together your beautiful delicious pie and roll them out flat. Then just slice them up, egg or milk wash them and sprinkle with sugar and bake with the pie for eight to ten minutes or until browned. Then just try not to eat all of them. Try.

Other than that, Dana has baked up some mocha chocolate chip cookies, a decadent almost-disgusting five layer bar (candy, it's just candy, no matter what I call it), I turned out a couple loaves of Julia Child's classic white sandwich bread, quite a few pans of cornbread (to accompany this badass turkey chili we've been perfecting that I'll tell you about later), a few pizzas--we've been stuck on the Cheeseboard recipe so I haven't been posting them lately but I have to say, I'm kind of in love with the breakfast pizza thing. You know, chopped bacon bits, a whole egg, that sort of thing, it's so incredibly delicious I want to make and eat another whole pizza while I'm still eating the first slice.

Tomorrow morning, Dana's off to our sister-in-law's house to join a group of bakers in holiday preparations. We're talking all the classics: gingerbread, sugar cookies, peanut butter balls, butter on a stick, peppermint flamethrowers, chocolate range rovers. Everything.

Lastly, it's not a baked good exactly but I have to mention it anyway. First, allow me to properly emphasize. ahem.

SQUASH.

BLOSSOM.

QUESADILLA!

also starring black beans and fresh cilantro! Maybe one of the best dishes I have ever cooked. Agonizingly, tortuously good. I hate to torture you with it since it's way way too late for squash blossoms in this hemisphere, but there it is. Definitely look for more of this little champion starting in the spring which, since we're in California, should be any day now. Jealous?

...and we're back

2009-11-24T21:00:00.003-08:00

It's been a while. I know, baby, I missed you too. So much. I missed your golden-lit macaronis, the velvet creaminess of your coffee-based beverage products, your good time tumblr reposts. I want to laugh, baby, I want to take a bite so good I have to close my eyes for a whole minute, I want to get back into the things we love to do together, but it's hard.

See, we've been away. In town, but away from the kitchen, away from the keyboard, away from the camera. It's been a busy couple weeks, and not in a good way. My grandfather has died. We've been at the hospital, the funeral home, we've been holding hands, and yes, we've been weeping.

His name was Sidney William Huffman and he was my mother's father, a man of 89 years and until his last day still fit, still plugged like a wire into his boots, still caring for the family--and the lawn--that he loved. He was my last surviving grandparent and though I've had nearly thirty years to get to know him, I didn't know him well enough. I guess this is always the way it goes, that you don't truly appreciate how much you care for someone until they're gone, but knowing that's how it goes doesn't make it any easier to face.

I keep thinking about the things I didn't know. Looking through old pictures the night after he died gave me some specific gaps. I found out that he, like me, was a great fan of hats. I never knew we had this in common. I saw him in his youth in fedoras, in driving caps, decked out in double-breasted suits with his arms around brothers who have since grown old and preceded him into eternity. And maybe it's a waste of energy, but I can't help think I should have known. Not just this but all of it. Everything. His life's stories. He was always so readily available, his house only a mile or so from mine while I lived here, but I knew him as a child knows an adult. Incompletely, with the assumptions and unquestioned discrepancies of youth. I knew he went to war in 1942 but simultaneously also thought he was on Hawaii during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I know he worked for Gallo Glass, but I confess I haven't the slightest idea what he did there. This is just trivia, I know, just the stuff that makes up our days not what makes up our lives, but what we are as people must be written in what we leave behind us, the memories of our family and friends are the marks we make on the world. I fear that the memories I have of my grandfather are not a good enough legacy for the man he was.

Since he passed, my cousins have been collecting, scanning, and distributing old pictures of him. Though he was born in 1920, he lived his life in the time of the camera so we have pictures all the way back to him and his siblings as children. I thought it would be a fitting tribute to share a couple of the pictures from his vibrant youth including a photo booth series of he and my grandma, and then what might be the last picture of the two of us together, from our welcome home party in July. Here is what Sidney Huffman was, a soldier, a good father, grandfather, and great-grandfather and as you can see below, totally awesome. It's hard to imagine the world without him.

Goodbye Grandpa. I didn't know you well enough, but I love you.

Bonus Pictures: Halloween

2009-11-07T23:41:00.006-08:00

Here are a couple more pictures of our Evil League of Evil Halloween party. I don't usually commentate these posts kind of on purpose but I have to point out the ectoplasm in the second to last picture.

Superstitious poppycock you say?

Lens flare you say?

Maybe.

Tumbleweed

Skulls

Trying to look half serious as Velocirapture. And failing.

A soldier of the Foot Clan

A quick skirmish between Doctor Scalpel and MerMaid

Ectoplasm! You guys! I'm telling you.

We'll get you next time, Halloween! {evil laughter}

Persimmon Pancakes

2009-11-06T09:12:00.006-08:00

Moving back to California from upstate New York has obviously meant a lot of changes for us. The weather's different, the people are different, and the variety of food that's available is much larger. I mean, it's November, and we can still get tomatoes from the farmer's market. How awesome is that? And even though the sheer variety of fruits and vegetables can be a bit overwhelming at times, I've gotten to experiment with all sorts of things that I haven't used before, like persimmons.

I started by making this persimmon bread, which was tasty and pretty, but didn't taste at all like persimmons. If you're looking for a quickbread and have persimmons on hand, it's a good option, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

I don't know if it's the kind of persimmon that I'm using or if this is true of persimmons in general, but when Justin and I cut open our mushy little fruits and scooped the insides out with a spoon, the mush had a pretty subtle taste. It's nice - I've heard it compared to apricot - but it's not overpowering. And the problem I've been having with the recipes I've found is that they all call for a huge amount of spices, which means you don't taste the persimmons at all, and might as well be using pumpkin, or applesauce, or banana. Call me crazy, but I want it to actually taste like what it is.

So I've been tinkering with recipes that will showcase the persimmon taste a bit better, and came up with this one, based loosely on the pumpkin pancake post from earlier this week, that fits the bill.

Persimmon Pancakes
(serves 2-3 people)

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon each salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
1 cup milk
6 tablespoons Hachiya persimmon pulp (1-2 fruits)
1 egg
2 tablespoons melted butter

1. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and cardamom. Set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, combine milk, persimmon pulp, egg and melted butter.
3. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ones, stirring until mixture is mostly smooth, but still has a few clumps.
4. Using an ice cream scoop, pour even amounts of batter onto griddle and cook first side until pancake batter is bubbling on top, and brown on the bottom. Flip, cook until done, and serve with butter and maple syrup.

The pancakes had a more distinct persimmon flavor than the really spice-heavy quickbread I made, and were delicious with maple syrup. Mmm, persimmony... that's just exactly what I was going for.

Halloween housewarming, pumpkin pancakes

2009-11-02T13:18:00.008-08:00

This weekend, in honor of Halloween--one of our very favorite holidays--Dana and I threw our first party in our new place. As it doubled as a housewarming and Evil League of Evil shindig (see here if you can't place the name), we got a pretty wide ranging group of invitees: a parade of family and friends ranging from high school, college, grad school, and the working world. With the candy handed out to trick or treaters (we got a grand total of 5 kids traveling in two bunches) and our frightening pun-laden costumes woven from the fabric of free and cheaply obtained materials, we warmed this house like crazy.

Speaking of the costumes, way back in early October--in the very beginnings of our preparation for the party--Dana and I made a pact with our best friends, Jack and Nicole: if we could costume them, they could costume us. Anything that didn't involve nudity was fair game, no questions asked. The result of this was that Dana joined the party as Mer-Maid (a mermaid maid), and I became Velocirapture (basically a dinosaur pope). Jack was Doctor Scalpel, meanwhile, and Nicole went as Night Mare (an evil unicorn. We toyed with the rather droll Bad unicorn but just couldn't resist this name). Obviously, we are well matched in awful terrible puns.

Here are Jack and Nicole. Look for our costumes in a bonus pictures post in a couple of days!
It was good times, but that's not what I want to tell you about. This is:

Since we had friends coming from all over the state, our afterparty activity was setting up a bunch of makeshift beds for people to crash on and the next morning we got to do something that's still pretty new to us. We got to cook for a crowd.

For the occasion, we went with a topical choice, a double batch of Martha Stewart's simple pumpkin pancakes. This with some strong coffee, a hefty dose of water, and a huge slab of fatty hangover-clearing bacon really hit the spot.

Pumpkin Pancakes (double recipe, makes 16-20 3-inch pancakes which serves about 6)
from MarthaStewart.com

2-1/2 cups AP Flour
4 Tbsp sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch of ground cloves
2 cups milk
12 Tbsp pumpkin puree
4 Tbsp melted butter
2 eggs

Sift together the dry ingredients in a largish bowl. In a separate medium bowl combine wet ingredients well and then fold into dry. Let sit for a couple of minutes while you melt butter into a skillet over medium heat and then measure into pan in 1/4 cup increments. You know how to do the rest, they're pancakes for God's sake.

As we were making these entirely too early in the morning after a big party (I'm talking like 10am), I didn't stray too far from the recipe. But if I make them again--and I think I will, they were really tasty and even the double batch went entirely too fast--I'd add another 1/4 tsp of cinnamon and possibly go for cake flour instead of the AP for a bit of a lighter crumb. As it was though, I was definitely happy with the lightness of the cakes and the pumpkin was subtle enough to blend but still forward enough to stand out while smothered in warm syrup.

Now that I've extolled our embarrassing costumes and our next-morning dish, it's your turn. What did you dress up as this Halloween?

Oozalicious Cheese Scones

2009-10-26T17:54:00.009-07:00

As Justin mentioned in this pizza post, we are addicted to The Cheeseboard Collective, a co-operative cheese shop and pizza place in Berkeley, California. As we currently live in Modesto, California - which is an hour and a half drive away - we've made very few trips to the actual Cheeseboard shop as of late. Luckily, this has forced us to make increasingly frequent forays into their awesome cookbook. This week's adventure? Warm, buttery, oozing cheese scones.

One of my favorite parts about this book is the anecdotes about working for, well, a cheese collective/co-op bakery, which is just as strange and inspiring as you would imagine. There are quirky quotes from former members:

"I do a lot of baking by sound. The scones have a sound they make when they have mixed the right length of time and have the right amount of liquid. It's a smacking, kissing sort of sound. You have to make the scones many times to get to know what that sound is."
- Carrie, p49

As well as notes about each recipe and scans of the original cards used at the shop:

Awesome, right? My only note about this cheese scone recipe is 1) use the best quality, sharpest cheddar you can find - it seriously ups the quality of the dish, and 2) feel free to add some herbs into the mix. I was inspired by Peter Reinhardt's Herb & Cheese Popper recipe in this month's Bon Appetit magazine, and I threw some fresh chives into this batch of scones. De-lish! My only regret is that I didn't put in more, and try some thyme, basil, sage, etc.

But I know what you really came here for - the recipe.

Cheese Scones adapted from The Cheese Board Collective Works
(makes 8-12 scones, depending on size)

3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons fine yellow cornmeal
1 stick plus 1 tablespoon cold unsalted butter, cubed
1/2 pound sharp orange cheddar cheese, cubed
1/2 cup milk
1 cup buttermilk
chopped fresh chives
1 egg, beaten

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place silpat or parchment paper on flat baking sheet and sprinkle with some cornmeal.
2. Sift flour, baking soda, baking powder and cayenne pepper into a large bowl.
3. Stir in salt and cornmeal. Cut in butter with pastry blender until mixture is the size of small peas. Stir in chunks of cheddar and chives.
4. In center of flour mixture, make a well. Pour in milk and buttermilk, and stir until just combined, careful not to overmix. The cheese should still be in big chunks, and there should be a bit of flour left at the bottom of the bowl.
5. Transfer dough to a generously floured surface, and pat it into a 6 by 9 inch rectangle.
6. Using a serrated knife, cut the dough in half lengthwise and then cut the smaller rectangles into even triangles - six, if you want twelve scones, or four, if you want eight larger scones.
7. Place scones on pan several inches apart. Brush the tops of each with beaten egg.
8. Bake on middle rack for 30 minutes, or until scones are lightly browned and cheese has burst forth into glorious, crusty pools.
These have been a staple in our house lately, and are an excellent companion to a bowl of soup on a cold fall night. They're also excellent in the morning, at lunch, or in the no-one-is-watching-and-I-want-cheesey-goodness-now hour. Also known as every hour.

These bunnies are about to hunger your mind hole. Wait. That got away from me.

2009-10-16T22:44:00.010-07:00

Are you ready for this? Let me answer that one for you. You're not ready. Because what you are about to see is so Legen...

wait for it...

dary* that it is going to blow your mind right out of your skull, it is going to make your eyeballs leave on vacation and decide never to return, your jaw will drop so far it will penetrate and destabilize the center of the earth. I ask you again. Are. You. Ready?

You're still not. But here it comes anyway.

We told you about discovering the Rogue Creamery on our trip back from Spokane but we alluded to something in that post and never filled you in on the rest of the details. In fact, we've been anxiously holding on to those details ever since, just waiting for the right time. That time, you see, is Halloween, and the item we've been waiting to unveil is this:

They're called Voodoo Bunnies, and if I had a yearly list of favorite things, these little rascals would be at the top of it.

You see, Lillie Belle, the amazing and tiny chocolate shop (Blue cheese truffles? Yes!) next to the Rogue Creamery had windows from the main floor into their working space. On cursory first glance at these little guys, Dana just saw bunnies and so passed on to ogle the dastardly delicious confections lining the shelves. Macadamia Ginger Chew! Lemon coconut buttercream! The almost nefarious-sounding Dark Star! At the time, I was invested in staying still enough to take long exposures of a vat of chocolate running silkily through a mixing machine that I wished I could be.
When I made it to the window overlooking the bunny work area, I was so anesthetized by the swirling of chocolate it took me a minute to notice something odd was going on: these bunnies weren't all right. In fact, they were all kinds of wrong. The more I looked the more their grotesqueries became clear. One had a hole where an ear should have been and a tiny marzipan brain showing through its chocolate skull, a white chocolate bunny had a chunk of shoulder ripped out and miniscule musculature and bones showing clean below its unconcerned face, the worst though was the bunny with its head thrown back and its throat absent all the way to the tiny candy spine.

photos above courtesy of Lillie Belle Farms

These are the logical yet stony extension of thought for anyone who's had a sudden flash of empathy for the dismembered hollow chocolate easter bunny, who's ever suppressed a shiver after snapping off the head of an animal cracker lion. You wanted to have your anthropomorphised animals and you wanted to eat them too.

Well you just got your wish.

D and I are big fans of zombies. For years now we've hosted a Zombie Prom every halloween, have washed cakes of fake blood from our hair or scrubbed it from our skin more times than I can even remember. And if we're forsaking all that this year for a turn of the horriblest of screws, well it doesn't mean we like zombies any less. Although if one more person tells me about this book, I swear to God I will consume them.

So, okay, I know, you're totally like ho hum, I thought this revelation was going to blow my mind and yet it was so... pedestrian.

But check this out. The folks at Lillie Belle weren't just working on these bunnies idly. Oh no, they certainly were not.

In honor of the holiday, the voodoo bunnies are now for sale!

Just a simple click here and you too can revel in the majesty, the wonder, the sickening reality of your very own disfigured candy rabbit! And I assure you that you can't go wrong with anything else from the store, either. Even the chocolate covered bacon I had there was a hit!

Enjoy in chocolatey, disgusted good health!

*: It's really not my fault, How I Met Your Mother season 4 just came out and we've been mainlining it in a tube pulled straight from Netflix. By the way, if you haven't seen the series, let me ask you one thing: Haaave you met Barney?

Pumpkin Pie With Brown Sugar Pecan Topping & No Evaporated Milk

2009-10-08T23:18:00.016-07:00

When I saw a picture of this topping-ed pie in November's Bon Appetit, I got understandably excited. And it wasn't just because this is a twist on a classic, because in all honesty, I was a little dubious about the necessity of topping on a pumpkin pie. I mean, it's a classic for a reason - you pretty much throw some whipped cream on that baby and call it a night.

But I decided to try it, mostly because my mother-in-law requested a birthday pumpkin pie on the same day this issue of Bon Appetit arrived at my door, and I took that as a sign. The Universe is trying to tell me something, I thought. Something... about pie. And so I listened, because The Universe doesn't often speak to me about pies, and it turns out the thing it was saying was Daaaaaannnnaaa [echo echo echo].... This recipeeeee.... is deeeeelicious.

In case you were wondering, The Universe also tends to echo its vowel sounds.

I did make a few changes along the way, including subbing in pecans instead of walnuts and changing a few spices to taste, but I stayed pretty faithful. Oh, and I used the Moosewood Book of Desserts pie crust recipe, as it's my Old Faithful. And I topped it all off with some awesome cinnamon whipped cream. Okay, so actually I changed a lot more than I thought I did. It was delicious, anyway.

Pumpkin Pie with Brown Sugar Pecan Topping adapted from Bon Appetit (serves 8-10)

1 12-inch pre-baked pie crust

Filling

1 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup canned pumpkin
1 cup heavy whipping cream

Topping

1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
pinch of kosher salt

1. Pre-bake your pie crust of choice until it's golden brown, then set the oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a medium bowl, begin preparing the filling. Whisk together brown sugar, eggs, kosher salt, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and nutmeg. When well mixed, whisk in pumpkin and cream until the ingredients are smooth. Pour into (cooled) pie crust.
3. Bake until filling is firm, but not fully set, approximately 30 minutes.
4. While filling is baking, prepare topping. Combine pecan pieces, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt in a small bowl. The original recipe calls for this mixture to be processed into "fine crumbs," but I preferred mine more chunky.
5. After filling has firmed, pull pie out of oven and reduce temperature to 325. Sprinkle on the pecan/brown sugar topping. Return to oven and bake until filling is set and pie has puffed up, approximately 15 minutes.
6. Transfer pie to cooling rack and cool completely. And if you're feeling adventurous, top with cinnamon whipped cream.

I found the lack of evaporated milk in this recipe to be particularly refreshing, and I have to admit, dubious though I was, the topping added a lot to the pie's flavor. It was sweet, the tiniest bit salty, and a perfect compliment to the spicy pumpkin filling. In fact, it was so good that the recipe will likely be making an appearance at this year's Thanksgiving dinner.

Golden cheddar cheese soup with roasted tomato bread

2009-10-05T19:24:00.009-07:00

One of the great things about having a food blog is it keeps us working.

I mean, it's easy to fall into a rut, to discover that though you meant to keep a variety coming, you've been eating the same thing or variations on the same thing, for weeks. Tell me if this sounds familiar: as you get busy doing other things--I don't know, life things, whatever--cooking takes a back seat. Food goes through that less than magical transformation from fascination to fuel, you find a couple of dishes that are fast and tasty enough and you stick with them. As we've been working with the almond harvest and living--let's face it--kind of hand to mouth, we've been guilty of succumbing to this trap. It's been like this lately around the house: cereal for breakfast, a hot dog for lunch, a wrap for dinner. I'm not talking microwave burritos here but still, anything taken often and without pleasure is a chore. This sort of thing used to happen to us a lot, actually, we're prone to it, but since we started ETH we feel just enough responsibility to you, the people reading this blog--our bleaders, to steal a phrase from Julie & Julia--that it can break us out of this rut.

So here is this week's rut-breaker, a quickish dinner that is familiar but still outside of our everyday menu: Golden cheddar cheese soup and roasted tomato bread.

The soup comes from a recipe in Moosewood Cooks at Home (can you tell we have an affinity for these books yet?) and is creamy and wonderful and just tastes... well, Moosewood. At their best, they can manage to make a bowl of vegetables--which is really what this soup is--taste both like itself and like something you want more of. As someone who didn't grow up a huge fan of vegetables, this is a revelation to me. The soup is pretty simple:

Golden Cheddar Cheese Soup
Serves 4 good-sized bowls

1 cup chopped onions
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 medium potatoes, thinly sliced (I didn't even peel them, frankly)
1 medium carrot, thinly sliced
1 medium yellow summer squash, thinly sliced(though I used like 4 small)
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper (or to taste)
pinch of turmeric
2 cups vegetable stock or water
1 cup buttermilk or milk (we used nonfat and it still turned out super creamy)
1 cup grated sharp yellow cheddar cheese (the quality of the cheese makes a huge difference here so go for some big flavor, you won't regret it)
salt to taste
minced fresh scallions, chives, or parsley for garnish

In a 3-5 quart soup pot over medium heat, cook the onion in the oil until translucent. Then add the squash, potato, carrot, and broth along with the black pepper and turmeric. Simmer for 20 minutes until vegetables are soft then add milk and cheese and, using either a standard or immersion blender, blend until silky. Salt generously, throw on some chives, and serve.
As you can see from the ingredients, the soup is well named. The pinch of turmeric and the cheese combine to make a lovely golden hue specked in places by bits of darker potato peel and orange dots of carrot and the two cups of dairy make for a very filling, very rich bowl.

The bread, though, is what I really wanted to tell you about.

Last time we made focaccia, it was kind of a mini-disaster. Even after we got the fire alarms to stop screeching like jungle birds gone mad, we were left cleaning piles of charred oil out of the bottom of our oven for months. This time, armed with a thick rolled-edge sheet pan and the steely eyes of true determination, we managed to not only deliver a sheet bread sans catastrophe, it came out really beautifully to boot.
Though this bread shares the dense olive oil flavor of a traditional focaccia, I found the consistency and ease of it to be more akin to a biscuit, especially given the addition of milk as a major liquid ingredient.

Roasted-Tomato Bread
from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook
makes one 17-by-12-inch bread

4 pints cherry tomatoes, sliced into 1/4 inch rounds
3/4 cup plus 3 Tbsp olive oil
4 tsp coarse salt
3-1/2 cups milk
1-1/2 lbs AP flour
10 oz semolina flour (I used bread flour because I didn't have semolina on hand. I'll definitely have to pick some up, though, as its graininess would be welcome here)
1-1/2 oz fresh yeast (frankly, I don't even know where I can find fresh yeast so I subbed in a tsp active dry yeast and doubled the rise time)

What you do is lay out the tomatoes in a couple of pans, drizzle with 1/4 cup olive oil, and sprinkle with 2 tsp salt. Roast the tomatoes in a 300 degree oven until they're shriveled and the juice on the pan has reduced, about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring milk to a simmer over low heat. Combine 2 tsp salt, the flours, 3 Tbsp olive oil, and the yeast. If you're using active dry, it might be a good idea to proof the yeast beforehand in a bit of water but I didn't think of it until too late. Mix on low speed with the paddle attachment, gradually adding the hot milk bit by bit. When it's combined, increase speed to medium and mix for a minute.

Transfer to a heavy baking sheet brushed with a bit of olive oil. Spread the dough to fill the pan and cover tightly with plastic wrap.
Let rise for 30 minutes to an hour then, using your fingers, dimple the dough in an uneven pattern leaving a little space between. Arrange half of the roasted tomatoes on the dough, drizzle with 1/4 cup of olive oil, and sprinkle liberally with salt.

Bake at 425 degrees until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Remove from oven and drizzle with remaining oil and cover with reserved tomatoes.
So, there you have it, a way out of the ordinary meal that's totally scratch and totally ready for company in maybe an hour of active time. Not bad for a rut breaker, eh?

Almond Days

2009-09-28T04:00:00.002-07:00

I know posts have been a bit sporadic--read, nonexistent--lately, but I have a good reason. All this week I've been really really busy doing something exciting yet troublingly unique in the world of food: getting my hands dirty growing it.
My parents, as I think we've mentioned before, are farmers. On 40 acres of land outside Ceres, a small town that borders the grand suburban metropolis of Modesto, they have around 4000 almond trees in production. This is not the kind of super-farm that springs up throughout the Midwest but it approaches an ideal: enough to both support two families--my parents as well as my dad's brother's family of four--and just about the right amount of work throughout the year for two men to handle. Double this acreage and it would take 3 or 4 hands but most of the year it's just my dad and his brother, Bill, who keep the place going. Irrigating, spraying, pruning, all of those various gerunds that roll so easily off the tongue but translate to days, sometimes weeks, of work for the two of them. Occasionally, though, the work of the farm will crescendo, turn into something they cannot handle alone. In these times, their families step in to take up the slack. That's where I come in.

Intermittently, as I blundered my way through University and then grad school, I would find myself back in the area at one of these times and be able to lend a hand to help. It's good honest work, but it can be laborious. Once, I spent a few wet January days swinging a fifteen pound rubber mallet at tree trunks in order to knock mummy nuts--almonds that weren't collected in the harvesting process and, if they remained on the branches, could become infested with worms that would harm the next years' crop and eventually kill the tree--from the spare winter branches. By the time I finished two rows--maybe a hundred trees--my arms had gone numb to the elbow from the sharp impact of the mallet reverberating through the wooden handle. Once I'd finished for the day I couldn't uncurl my hands from the shape of the mallet for hours. I wrote this stanza in a poem titled Almond Days about the experience.

Some nights my hands stay negative tools
chainsaw grip, tractor claw, cramps like coins in the blood.

It can be backbreaking work, punishing to the body and truly wearying, but it's hard to communicate just how rewarding I find it. Just to be walking under the canopy of gnarled branches right after sunrise, the doves and crows flitting from tree to tree in front of you, jackrabbits leaving a trail of dust you can follow for half a mile. Just to be working at something you can put into words instead of toiling at the ethereal labor of the office makes everything feel right. Maybe I've just worked at too many dead end white-collar jobs and this is backlash but even at night, when my bones ache and my head feels swollen from weariness, I don't regret a minute of the day. The pleasure of feeling exactly what I've done with the hours between sunrise and sunset is too great.

Since we returned to the Modesto area, I've had the good fortune to be involved in a part of the almond production process that I'd never had the time to even see before. This week and the next few we're bringing in the harvest: truckload after truckload of nuts, many hundreds of tons of almonds dusty and sun beaten and ready to be processed and packaged and marked up and sold for ridiculous prices in stores. You'll find us there from just after sunrise straight on into the thin arid heat of the day, a fine dust like peach fuzz all over our bodies, hair and skin and clothes dyed the gray-brown of the field.

At the moment, I'm unskilled labor. But I've been trying to learn as much about the process as possible, partially to satisfy my newfound curiosity at this enormous aspect of my father's life, partially because I honestly enjoy the work.

So here's an overview of the trip almonds take from tree to factory this time of year, as I'm learning it.
When the nuts have grown ripe on the tree, they will split their protective hulls--the gray-green outer shell in the picture above--and start to dry out. When dry enough (we're talking less than a tenth of a percentage point of moisture each), they are vibrated from the trees by a shaker, a machine that is essentially a gigantic robotic claw that grasps each trunk and shakes the hell out of it until what was loosely attached above--leaves, sticks, birds, almonds--uncouples and ends up on the ground.

The shaker leaves a thin carpet of nuts through the field, so tightly packed you cannot find room for your feet between them so walking through the rows at this point means almonds crunching beneath you like a crust of grainy sublimated snow. For its surreality, it's not an altogether unpleasant experience, walking on food this way. I'm not saying I'm into messy fun or anything but it's nicely tactile. Real.

Next, these nuts are swept into neat piles between each row of trees by a machine called, you might have guessed it, a sweep. Following this is the job I spent the early bulk of the week at: walking the tremendous length of each of these piles and pulling out any larger branches or thick brush I find. This detritus can get stuck in the machines during pick up and cause an overflow, which is basically just a huge amount of almonds falling on the ground and means a ton of work shoveling the damn things up by hand.

Using the obviously-named pick up machine, we brush these rows of nuts up into belts that shake off the smaller dust and debris and shuttle the nuts into a trailer which empties into a conveyor belt to transfer them into a series of double-trailered semis and eventually into the factory which will hull, shell, and store the nut meats until they sell to any of the many buyers of almonds around the country and the world. Phew.
This week I've been involved in every step of the process in some form and, despite the heat (it's been in the high 90s), it's been a wonderful experience.

Maybe it's the blush of working with my hands for the first time in a long time, but I find I can hardly wait for next week to begin. I think about food quite a lot, and it's just so cool to be involved with this side of its production.

Look for more almond posts coming up in the next couple of weeks as I further dirty my shiny camera documenting the harvest!

It's a Girl! Strawberry Cupcakes

2009-09-26T11:52:00.002-07:00

It's been a week of extreme ups and downs, but rather than dwell on the downs, I'd like to celebrate the biggest up of all ups: my newest niece, Madison Grace, born 9/15/09. She's perfect, right?

I'll spare you the details of the birth, but suffice to say: I was there, I saw everything, and even afterwards I kept looking at this little one and thinking how did you just fit through there? It baffles the mind. Granted this is probably the least appetizing introduction to a cupcake recipe ever, but there you go.

So, to celebrate my sister-in-law's first daughter, I whipped up a batch of strawberry cupcakes with strawberry cream cheese frosting. These are sans food coloring, made with fresh strawberries and turn out a delightful, natural shade of pastel pink. Also, I swear to you, they taste like you're biting into a strawberry, which is obviously a big plus for me, given my strawberry obsession.

Strawberry Cupcakes adapted from Sprinkles Cupcakes, via Martha Stewart (makes 12)

1 cup fresh strawberries, pureed
3/4 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 cup milk, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 large egg, room temperature
2 large egg whites, whisked

Preheat oven to 350. Place cupcake liners in muffin tin.
Take one cup whole, fresh strawberries and puree in food processer. Scoop out 1/3 cup of this puree and set aside - you'll use this for the cream cheese frosting.
In medium bowl, whisk flours, baking powder, and salt.
In small bowl, whisk together milk, vanilla, and remaining strawberry puree.
Using the paddle attachment of your electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream butter until light and fluffy. Add sugar a little bit at a time until the whole mixture is fluffy. Reduce speed to medium, add egg, then egg whites until just blended.
Switch the mixer to low speed and add half the flour mixture, mixing until just blended. Add the milk/vanilla/strawberry puree until just blended. Slowly add the remaining flour, and do not overmix.
Spoon batter into prepared muffin liners. Bake until tops are just dry to the touch, 22 to 25 minutes. Cool completely on wire rack before frosting.

Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting (makes way too much for 12 cupcakes)

8 ounces of cream cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
Remaining 1/4 cup of fresh pureed strawberries
4 cups confectioner's sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

In an electric mixer, beat cream cheese and butter at medium speed until velvety.
Add the remaining 1/4 cup of pureed strawberries and mix until combined.
With the mixer on medium-low, slowly sift in 4 cups of confectioner's sugar. You may use less or more sugar, depending on your tastes.
Frost cupcakes!

So, congratulations to the proud parents, and welcome to the world, Madison. Someday, when you're actually old enough to eat these, I'll bake them again.

Meyer Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Curd Filling

2009-09-17T20:40:00.001-07:00

What do you get for the girl who wants "monkey robot ninja space pirates" for her birthday? And what do you bake for someone who likes cupcakes, but not frosting? I guess there are probably lots of answers to these questions, especially if you're good at genetic engineering or mystic animal kung fu, but I'm sadly deficient in these areas.

It was actually kind of hard to find a good frosting-free cupcake recipe for my best friend Nicole's birthday. I decided fairly early on that a filled cupcake would probably be the best bet, but most filled recipes also call for frosting to hide the huge gaping hole at the top of each cake. So when I settled on the idea of lemon cake and homemade lemon curd filling, I had to find a way to make the pairing look pretty without a thick white layer of cream cheese or meringue goodness on top. And that's where the monkey robot ninja space pirates came in.

I enlisted the birthday girl's significant other (yes, these were for a 27th birthday, not a 7th) to carve out some handmade stencils in the shape of skulls & crossbones, robots, monkey ninjas and old school rocketships. He did this by drawing a design onto some thick paper, "laminating" the paper with scotch tape, and then carving each design out with an exacto knife. After that, I just set one on top of a cupcake, dusted it with powdered sugar, and voila! Monkey robot ninja space pirate stencils, or whatever you please (and are capable of cutting out).

Meyer Lemon Cupcakes adapated from Martha Stewart
(makes 12)

1 stick unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 Meyer lemon, zested and juiced
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Arrange cupcake liners in muffin tin. Make lemon curd recipe (below), and place in refrigerator to cool.
In medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. In a separate, smaller bowl, whisk yogurt, vanilla, Meyer lemon zest and juice. If you don't have yogurt, buttermilk is a good substitute, though I find that the yogurt batter is somewhat thicker in the mixing stages, and easier to pour into the liners.
In an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter and sugar until light in color. Add eggs one at a time, mixing in between. On low speed, add one third of the flour mixture, one half of the yogurt mixture, one third of the flour, the other half of the yogurt, and the rest of the flour. Basically, alternate dry and wet - and don't overmix.
Divide batter evenly among cupcake liners. Bake 20-25 minutes, until cake tester comes out clean. Cool completely on wire rack.
With a melon baller, carefully scoop out the center of each cupcake. Spoon in lemon curd, and decorate as you please.

Meyer Lemon Curd adapted from Ina Garten

1 large Meyer lemon, zested
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 stick unsalted butter
2 large eggs
1/4 cup Meyer lemon juice
a pinch of kosher salt

Zest the lemon, avoiding the white pith. In a food processor, pulse zest and granulated sugar until combined.
In electric mixer, cream butter and sugar/lemon zest mixture. Add eggs, one at a time, and mix until combined. Keeping the mixer at medium low speed, add in lemon juice and pinch of salt.
Pour contents of mixing bowl into a small saucepan and cook over low heat until the mixture thickens considerably, about ten minutes. Stir it constantly during this stage, and check the temperature periodically. Ina's recipe says that the curd will thicken at about 170 degrees (just below simmer), and I found this to be true.
Remove from heat, refrigerate. Cook cupcakes (recipe above).
Spoon lemon curd into cupcakes, and decorate with powdered sugar, preferably in the shape of monkey ninjas (pictured below).

I should specify that I made these Meyer lemon rather than regular lemon not out of design, but out of cheapness - Justin's parents have a Meyer lemon tree in their yard, and free lemons are way better than store-bought lemons. I do appreciate that Meyers taste a little bit sweeter than the normal variety, but they aren't a necessity. Make these with whatever lemons are handy (or free - free always tastes the best).

So I wouldn't necessarily say that this recipe is healthier for you than normal cupcakes, but there's tanginess in the lemon curd, sweetness in the cupcake, and absolutely no need for the added sugar in the frosting. It's certainly a nice departure from the norm. Plus, if you frosted these babies, how could you decorate them with kickass jolly rogers?

Cheese Board pizza

2009-09-13T22:38:00.011-07:00

Time again, kiddos, for another installment of the great ETH pizza experiment! Take a seat and let me regale you with tales of yet another homemade pizza that blew my mind.

Where were we again in this saga? Oh right, last time we were planting ripe heirloom tomatoes and fresh cilantro on a dough from Martha Stewart's baking handbook. Well, let me tell you, things have changed around here. Thanks to a trip to Modesto's fantastic library (let me mitigate this praise a little bit with something that's kind of been nagging at us since we started using this library quite a lot: while Modesto shelves both sides of an entire aisle with floor to ceiling cookbooks, we have not found a single book of poetry in the whole damn place. I mean, come on! It's a whole form of writing unrepresented. For shame, Modesto, for shame.) we've been paging through The Cheese Board: Collective Works, indescriminately trying recipes so heavy with cheese each could bankrupt a dairy. This is a book devoted, as far as I've been able to determine, entirely on the analysis of every possible intersection of cheese and flour and I can't reccomend it highly enough. It's an orgy of cheesy breads and cheesy scones and cheesy rolls and, as anyone who knows anything about the Cheese Board would invariably assure you: recipes for some of the best hippy pizza available on this planet.

See, the Cheese Board's pizzeria offshoot holds a special place in the hearts of those who've spent time in the East Bay. Rain or shine you'll find the place packed for lunch and dinner, often with a line stretching down the block and a jazz group blazing away. At the counter, they'll be serving up one and only one type of pizza, invariably something greasy and crisp and topped with a slathering of seasonal ingredients and gourmet cheeses.
Which is not to say it's everyone's taste. Certainly when I was holed up in Berkeley's hills it wasn't to mine. I stopped in to the Cheese Board a grand total of twice: once for pizza and once at the original establishment to buy cheese. The cheese rocked but the pizza I thought was weird, topped with a dusting of these strange-tasting purplish olives and almost livid with olive oil and tangy cheeses. I never went back, confirmed in my belief that when it came to pizza in town Blondie's and Fat Slice were the furthest I need trek. But in the six years since then, my tastes have changed. I've long since identified the weird olives as kalamata and embarked on a grand love affair with the things; have developed a growing appreciation for goat cheese; have begun to read whole books on pizza just because I want--no, need--to know it better; in short, have come to a place in my life where the Cheese Board's mission makes sense to me, where I see how amazing a place I was near yet somehow stupidly, stubbornly blind to.

So just how good is this pizza?

So good that with occasional forays back into the world of the deep dish, I think I've found my crust. So good that when my best friend Jack who, like Mikey from those old Life Cereal commercials, will eat anything and probably has, described it to another friend of ours, he used the words "best pizza in the whole friggin' universe."
So here's what you need to know about this pizza: it's easy and it's quick and despite being vegetarian it's terrible for you. Just... just terrible. Let's start with the dough:

3-1/2 to 4 cups bread flour
1-1/2 cups of warm water
1 tsp active dry yeast
2 Tbsp olive oil
1.5 tsp kosher salt

Combine the yeast and water and let sit until foamy (about ten minutes), then add in the oil salt and a cup and a half of the flour. Stir with the paddle attachment on the mixer for 5 minutes then add in another cup of flour. Switch to the dough hook and let knead for another 5 minutes gradually adding in the remaining flour until the dough is no longer sticky. Transfer to an oiled bowl and let rise for an hour or overnight in the refrigerator.
After it's risen, separate and flatten into three 10" rounds. Meanwhile, combine a clove of minced garlic with a Tbsp of olive oil in a small bowl and let sit.

Next, take a pound of cheese of various types. We like a mix of sharp cheddar, mozzarella, and feta, though I would not call it an error to use a good crumble of goat cheese here. Divide out a third of the cheese and sprinkle it on the dough rounds. Nope, you didn't miss the tomato sauce, it's just cheese straight on the dough. Now add your hot toppings. We've tried a couple of different iterations but the best we've found to date is actually one of the standard recipes from the Cheese Board: roasted red peppers, a kalamata olive tapenade (firefox spelling suggestion: did you mean tapeworm?) made with a bit of black pepper, a cup of olives, a Tbsp of olive oil, and some red pepper flakes processed into a chunky spread, and chopped basil. For this recipe, the roasted peppers go on next and the remainder of the cheese goes on top.

Pop this onto a pizza stone in a 450 degree oven for about 12 minutes or until crispy and just starting to blacken in bits. The crispier the better, I say. Top the bubbling mess of cheese with the tapenade and basil, and brush the outside of the crust with the olive/garlic mixture. Slice and serve and watch your friends' eyes go fuzzy and their jaws go slack. Listen to the crunch of the crust where it has infused with the mountain of cheese, wait for your world to crumble around you.

Yes, this pizza is terrible for you as far as vegetarian pies go, but my God is it not wondrous as well? Is it not somehow exactly what I'd tasted as a youngling and yet also not at all that? Do you even know what I mean at all?

Rogue Creamery

2009-09-08T18:30:00.008-07:00

When J & I travel together, we like to keep our plans extremely loose. So yes, when we drove from Modesto to Spokane for our friend Anthony's wedding this weekend, we kind of knew where we were going. I'd made reservations at a bed and breakfast in Spokane, but beyond that, we didn't plan anything out - not where we were staying along the way, not what we would do until the 6:00 PM ceremony, not what restaurants or wineries or shops we would patronize. At times, this does put us in a bad position. For example: I would not recommend staying at the Comfort Inn in Bend, Oregon, unless you enjoy thin walls, air conditioners that won't turn off and synthetic-tasting waffles. Also, you should know that there's nowhere decent to eat along Highway 80 in Wyoming, no matter how much the billboards proclaim that Taco John's Super Potato Ole's are actually food. I'm sorry, no, tater tot nachos do not count as edible, thankyouandgoodnight.

Most of the time, though, this lack of planning leaves us open to exciting discoveries like the Rogue Creamery in Central Point, Oregon. In classic spontaneous travel mode, we happened upon the shop by spotting a sign from I-5 and saying to ourselves: well, cheese is awesome. Obviously we should stop there. What we didn't know was that this wasn't just a place to buy cheese, it was the place to buy cheese. Rogue Creamery was the first American cheesemaker to win the London World Cheese Award for best blue cheese. And you know what? It really was that good.

There was a tasting room with an assortment of chedders, blues and cheese curds that could seriously make you consider moving to Oregon. There was also an honest-to-God, gloriously packed cheese counter, where you were invited to try some of the more exciting flavors. My favorite was the Chocolate Stout Cheddar, a mild cheese infused with Rogue Brewery's Chocolate Stout beer. We ended up bringing home a quarter pound of it, along with some of that dry, spicy salami you see in the above righthand picture.

I particularly enjoyed the wall of plexiglass, behind which one could see cheesemakers in their natural habitat, stirring, salting and dipping their way to deliciousness. Central Point was, hands down, my favorite spontaneous stop along the way, thanks to Rogue Creamery and to Lillie Belle, the chocolatier next door. But that's a post for another day.

Brown Sugar Bacon... wait for it... Waffles.

2009-08-30T17:18:00.006-07:00

In one of my recent two hour browse-and-drool sessions with Tastespotting, I came upon a link to this post from Joy the Baker and its accompanying recipe for brown sugar bacon buttermilk waffles. Yes, you read that right: all of those things ultimately serve as adjectives to modify waffles. Now, I've never been a sucker for the whole bacon craze meme; I haven't sprinkled bacon salt on anything, haven't covered bacon in chocolate, haven't... I don't know, woven anything out of the stuff. Bacon's fine, it's cool. It's meaty and salty and I can't protest that sort of thing, but I am certainly not dedicating my life to its production. But something about this recipe really got me. I mean, I've often enough eaten bacon alongside a waffle, have occasionally mopped up a smudge of errant syrup with the flat side of a slice, why not combine the two officially? It certainly seems streamlined, like the way that the cartoons imagined eating in the future, a tiny pill that contains everything loved and familiar about modern sustenance but in a simpler form. There's something appealing about combining the whole meal into one dish. Something so theoretically cosmopolitan, so easy.

But here's the thing about that line of thinking: it's what gave us casseroles, what gave us one pot meals, what gave us Hamburger Helper for God's sake! Combined does not always mean better. And bacon, however much it is the most fad-alicious of all breakfast meats, is strong stuff. The waffles, after I'd sugar coated and baked and chopped and stirred and pressed and everything else the recipe required, were great!
They were fantastic, actually!

Except for the bacon floating like little fatty depth charges among the ridges and valleys. Every forkful that did not contain a clump of bacon (the bacon, recently candied with brown sugar, stuck together and made it into the finished waffle in crowds instead of shards--this might have been part of the problem) was light and airy and delicious with the slight tang of buttermilk. But every heavy dark baconed forkful I lifted to my mouth unfolded the same way. Here's my thought process every time: this isn't so bad, it's got a little bit of chewiness, a little sweet to go with the maple syrup, a little salt. Oh. A lot of salt. A lot of salt, now, and now every tastebud is overwhelmed and all my fond memories of crisp airy waffles are ruined, stomped into the ground beneath the iron boot of bacon flavor.
Oh, and even six hours later I swear I was still prying bacon-grease candy from my molars. In case you were confused, this is not a pleasant activity.

This is, I readily admit, probably more an issue with my bacon than the recipe itself. A less heavily cured, (ahem...) antique bacon than the one the local grocery store marks down for immediate sale is probably called for here. And I'm sure with a light thin artisanal bacon taken from pigs that had never even seen a fence and cured in the tears of pixies this could be amazing. But that's not what I had and that's not what the recipe called for so I didn't think through the necessity of going fancy on its ass. So here's what I'm going to do next time.

I'm going to take the print-out I have of this recipe and white out everything that says bacon on it. With the result, I'm going to make some of the best waffles I've ever made at home. Waffles that are rich and flavorful enough to stand up to syrup yet light enough to absorb it. And when I'm eating them I'm never going to dread a forkful for its lingering obliteration of my tastebuds, never going to crack a blackened spiderweb of baked brown sugar and bacon grease from a cookie sheet, never going to mistakenly believe that just because something is popular it must be good folded into one of my favorite foods. Well, okay, honestly, I will probably do that last one again and again and never learn but I am definitely going to make some normal waffles before I restart the cycle.
If you don't believe me--and I've always encouraged every new semester's worth of students not to--then you can find the recipe and instructions here:

Get the recipe!

If you find them more palatable, I would love to hear what I did wrong.

Chocolate Angel Food Cake Fail

2009-08-24T23:04:00.008-07:00

The overwhelming theme of my baking projects this week is failure. Justin and I stopped in at the Stanislaus County Library on Thursday and came home with a huge stack of cookbooks: Moosewood New Classics, Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates, Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads and Buttercup Bakes at Home. So far we've tackled a recipe from each of them, but the most tantalizing of the books, by far, was the last one. "More than 75 new recipes from Manhattan's premier bake shop," it sang to me from the front cover. "Tempting homemade sweets," it purred. Even as it dragged me down, I could not resist its siren song.

To be honest, that nectarine tart debacle kind of shook my confidence. I'm not a professional baker by any means, but I like to think I kind of know what I'm doing in the kitchen. I was tentative, but optimistic, when I picked out the Chocolate Angel Food Cake recipe from Buttercup Bakes at Home. Angel food cake is a little challenging, but as long as you sift the ingredients enough and get the egg whites sufficiently stiff, you're good, right? At least, this is what I thought going into it. Below is the recipe, which tasted amazing, but with which I have one very, very large disagreement. See if you can spot it based on the pictures.

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Chocolate Angel Food Cake from Buttercup Bakes at Home

3/4 cup cake flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I tend to go for Scharrfen Berger)
1 1/2 cups sugar, divided
13 or 14 large egg whites (~2 cups)
1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Set out an ungreased 10-inch tube pan.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour and cocoa powder with 3/4 cup of sugar. Sift these together three separate times. Set aside.

Place the egg whites in a standing mixer bowl and, using the whisk attachment, turn mixer to lowest speed. After 1 minute, add the cream of tartar, vanilla, and salt. After another minute of beating, turn the mixer to medium speed and gradually add the remaining 3/4 cup sugar. Stop and scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula when all the sugar has been added. Resume beating until the whites are stiff but moist, about 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl.

Sift the flour-sugar mixture a fourth time over the egg white mixture and gently fold until all the dry ingredients are mixed in.

Fill the pan immediately and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes. Test for doneness at 30 minutes; if tester comes out clean with no traces of batter, it is done. The cake should be lightly browned and spring back when pressed gently with finger. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the pan for 30 minutes. Remove the pan and cool completely on a wire rack (place the pan upside down on an empty bottle for easier removal).

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The aftermath?

Ungreased tube pan? Ungreased?! Maybe if you have some special I-can-get-sticky-things-out-of-ungreased-cake-pans skill, something that I am not, apparently, blessed with. And the book's advice didn't help that much: "place the pan upside down on an empty bottle for easier removal." Seriously? I didn't really see the point of this exercise, beyond that an upside down cake inside a pan on top of a coke bottle is kind of amusing. You know, in a terribly defeating sort of way.

So I guess I'll pose a question to you all: how do you guys get sticky things out of pans, if not by greasing and flouring them? Obviously I'm in need of help. This was a very promising recipe - the broken chunks were definitely tasty - but it's just not workable, for me, as is.

Moosewood; Quick Cinnamon Biscuits

2009-08-24T23:01:00.008-07:00

In Ithaca, it's easy to take Moosewood for granted.

I mean, it's just there in the DeWitt Mall rain or shine, this deceptively little restaurant with its short daily menu and inexpensive lunches. It's a restaurant like any number of vegetarian places around the country, just like them, in fact. Like, archetypally like them. But you don't think about it, really. It's fresh good food a lot of the time and you love it but occasionally you'll get a stinker, a test recipe, and you'll swear it off for a couple of weeks. You come back, yeah, but because it's cheap and convenient as much as anything. It's just a place. But occasionally, while sitting at one of the grooved wooden tables devouring the soup of the day, you hear someone gush to a waitress that he drove ten hours to eat here, or that she'd dreamt of coming here for half her life. And suddenly you get an inkling of just what kind of place you're taking for granted, just what a restaurant around the corner from your apartment might mean to the food community.

I like to think that in our time in Ithaca we took full advantage of Moosewood. Of the restaurant, I mean, because it's only now that we've moved away from it that we're truly starting to appreciate the oeuvre the name is truly synonymous with: the cookbooks. If you know cookbooks at all, you know the ones I mean. Whether it's Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant or Cooks at Home, if you like vegetarian food there's probably a good chance that you've held one in your hands. We've had the Book of Deserts for a while and I know we've posted a couple of recipes from it but a recent trip to the Modesto Public Library resulted in a whole armful more in our kitchen.

I made breakfast from New Classics this weekend--an interesting and easy if not (in my estimation) totally perfect recipe for cinnamon biscuits that took almost no time to put together--and today, our first calm day alone in quite a while, we put together a lime frozen yogurt that was really quite tasty. Since the biscuits were a slightly more problematic dish, I've been rolling it over in my mind since I made it, trying to figure out what could go better. Here's the recipe with my proposed changes.
Quick Cinnamon Biscuits (makes 9) derived from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics

Cinnamon Sugar Mix
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
2-1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 cup toasted pecans

Biscuit Dough
2-1/2 cups flour
2 Tbsp brown sugar, packed
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1-1/2 cups heavy cream (plus 1 Tbsp reserved)

Icing
3 Tbsp powdered sugar
2-3 tsp milk
1/4 tsp vanilla extract or 1 tsp maple syrup

Combine the cinnamon sugar mix ingredients and set aside. In a separate bowl, stir together dry ingredients, add cream and stir until the dough forms a ball and all loose bits are incorporated.

Turn dough out onto lightly floured surface and pat into a 1/2 inch thick rectangle (about 9 x 13) Brush the surface of the dough with the reserved cream then sprinkle evenly with the cinnamon sugar mix.

Starting from the long side, roll the dough into a cylinder and then slice into 9 equal rounds. Place the rounds in an oven-safe dish and bake until lightly browned. Drizzle with icing and serve warm.

The problem I had with the recipe in its original form is one that I've often had with Moosewood recipes. I found it a little... flat. And, as I think we've discussed before in this forum, I'm not a big fan of nutmeg. Here I've adjusted the balance of nutmeg with the other flavors, thrown in some nuts for textural contrast, and added a couple of suggestions to the icing to hopefully bring out a little more of the zip I was looking for. Keep in mind, though, that this recipe's ease--and it is fabulously, decadently easy--is due in part to its adherence to the biscuit formula rather than a familiarity to a yeasted bread. So while this cancels out the need for a rise time, it doesn't produce the exact texture I expected from a breakfast baked good. But once I got past that hurdle, I found these biscuits lovely and, partially due to their quick near-effortless construction (I managed to do this pre-coffee Saturday morning) I'm certain I'll make them again.
Look for more Moosewood in the next couple weeks as we plow through the cookbooks we've borrowed in order to return them in time. It's going to be a lot of veggies and tofu and cheese in our future and it should be tremendous fun.

Martha Stewart's Nectarine Tart, a.k.a. My Slow Descent into Madness

2009-08-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

I've spent a lot of time on this blog praising Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. Oh Martha, that biscotti was heavenly, Martha, your recipes are foolproof, you could never do me wrong.

Well, I take it all back. Every bit of it. What follows, today, is the story of a woman, a man, and the nectarine tart that threatened to destroy them.

For the past few weeks, the nectarine tree on my in-laws' farm has been producing obscene amounts of fruit. We've picked literally dozens of the things, eating some, giving most away to friends, grudgingly throwing the rotting ones in the compost bucket. I knew the best use would likely be some kind of baked good, but I was afraid. The convection oven at our new place gleamed at me from the kitchen, a heartless, unforgiving monster forged from tears and stainless steel. I was intimidated. And frankly, there just aren't that many nectarine recipes out there.

So I did what any rational baker would do: I gathered my courage, grabbed my go-to cookbooks and started looking for recipes. Nothing in Moosewood Desserts or Silver Palate, but just when hope was failing, the pages of Martha's Baking Handbook revealed a nectarine tart I could not resist. Those perfectly pink nectarine rosettes, that browned butter filling, the flaky crust... irresistible, right? I was so innocent then, unaware of the horrors to come.

For tart crust one, I followed the instructions in Martha's Baking Handbook, made the whole thing in the mixer, patted it into a pretty little disk, covered it in plastic wrap and popped it in the fridge. After the two hour chill time was up, I pulled out perhaps the driest dough known to man. My rolling pin and I could barely force the thing into submission. Though I did manage to get it into a passable shape, it crumbled as soon as I tried to put it into the tart pan. I have since realized that the refrigerator at this new place dries everything out... something I would have loved to know before I began this process, but alas. I kept going.

The next morning, I attempted crust number two, which came out similarly dry. I was sneaky this time, though, and enlisted Justin's help to flip the cutting board upside down - in my mind, this scenario would lead the dough to kind of gently fall into the tart pan, where I would use my nimble fingers to form it into something resembling the picture in Martha's book.

In practice, the whole thing landed in the stack of dirty dishes in our sink, and I created all sorts of new swears, such as "goddamn fucking tartfucker." I guess that counts for something.

For tart dough three, I gave up on Martha's crust and instead used a recipe from The Silver Palate. This one was hand-mixed with a pastry blender, rather than the Kitchenaid, but after two hours in the fridge, it also came out dry. Far past the point of caring, I jammed pieces into the tart pan and called it a day. It came out looking okay, actually:

But then, oh then, came the rosettes.

According to Martha, you simply slice the nectarines thin, create a pretty little circle out of the first slice and add more "petals" until the thing transforms itself into a rose. Easy, right? I wish.

If the slices are too thin, even by a few millimeters, they break in half, and absolutely will not form a pretty rosette shape, no matter how much wishing, or cursing, or flailing, or crying you do.
If you slice them too thin, they become translucent, slimy little things that are impossible to pick up. Justin cut ten nectarines into slices this way, just for my benefit. According to him, he's never chopped that much of anything in his life. As for me, I developed an excruciating neck cramp from hunching over the cutting board for an hour, creating dozens of these things, and then threatening each of them with bodily harm every time I transferred one to the pan.

And yes, the end product was beautiful. And yes, it tasted amazing. The sauce was browned butter and vanilla and what must have been ambrosia, or unicorn tears - even Justin's parents, who we served this evil, evil masterpiece to, agreed. But come on. Someone needs to sit down and ask themselves: can a mere mortal create this dish without self-destructing? If the answer is no, well, don't put it in the goddamn cookbook, okay?

Mexican Pizza... but not like Taco Bell's Mexican Pizza, y'know?

2009-08-15T22:08:00.013-07:00

This is what it's like to keep this blog: I had this big post planned for tonight. I'd been sitting on it all week while we were pulled hither and yon (yeah, I said that) by friends and family and... you know, life. But I was really going to do it up right when I got the time to sit down and do it. The pictures were all shot and I had all kinds of witty metaphors percolating inside my head. But then the day was slipping away again and before I sat down and put my fingers to home row, I had to make dinner.

And that's when it happened. That was when the whole train of thought got diverted. Because in our preparations for dinner I found something that I had to write about, which I could not even consider not writing about. I put together the following pizza:
A light pizza crust (recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook again, which is quickly becoming our go-to dough for its ease [it comes together in seriously five minutes tops] and its hands-off approach to flavor [it imparts just the tiniest hit of saltiness and a fresh floury oomph that really suits summer veggie pizzas] ) topped with fine local extra virgin olive oil; half an organic yellow onion sauteed with diced jalapeno, garlic, and cumin; a light scattering (maybe half a cup? 3/4 of a cup?) of a blend of pepper jack and medium cheddar; and slices of a variety of heady, ripe heirloom tomatoes layered on raw.

We popped it onto the pizza stone which had been heating in our oven and we waited, half-crouched to keep an eye through the oven door and maybe, if we were lucky, to catch a whiff of the flavors melding inside.

And just to build suspense, let me add a little sidebar about our oven. The house we moved into a few weeks ago had recently had the kitchen remodeled by my parents. One of the appliances they put in is a GE Profile stove and convection oven. Now, I've had a convection toaster oven that I use all the time but there's just something a little bit... well, intimidating about the real thing. So while we've been using the stove daily, the oven has done no more than keep a set of (weird weird weird) soy pancakes warm while I cooked bacon last weekend. This was, for all intents and purposes, the maiden voyage of this little beast. Our first foray into high heat and moving parts. I can honestly say, watching the crust puff and brown and the tomatoes steam in maybe half the time it would have taken in a conventional oven, that I did take a step toward conversion.
After it came out of the oven looking gorgous, we topped the steaming tomatoes and cheese with crumbled queso fresco (which we got from this great store in Fresno called Vallarta which my original post was going to be about), and roughly chopped cilantro. And then sliced it up and took bites.
Let me tell you. Without exaggeration. It was damn good.

Given the fortuitous combination of good ingredients on hand, a bad ass oven, and some "what would happen if we..."s, we haphazardly threw together one of our top five best dishes ever. Maybe top two. I don't know. I'm stoked, though. And I could have eaten the whole pizza by myself. I love California Pizza, and I didn't think I could make it on my own, but there it is. Proven. Now how long until I get to make another one?

California Changes

2009-08-12T23:27:00.005-07:00

Justin and I expected our food escapades to change when we moved across the country, but I don't think either of us really anticipated how much. When we last lived in California, we were poor, we couldn't cook, and we really weren't that discerning about what we put in our mouths. Pad thai from a box? Sure! That's a staple that we should make once a week, at least. Pita bread with store bought deli meat and medium cheddar cheese stuffed inside? Mmm, sounds like dinner. For three nights in a row. We really didn't notice or care what sort of stuff was available at the supermarket.

I'm not sure what it was about Ithaca that made us interested in cooking. As I mentioned in a previous post, part of it was our addiction to Mexican food, and Ithaca's complete lack of such cuisine. Part of it, I'm sure, was the long, cold winters. It became totally and utterly normal to spend an entire Sunday indoors baking bread. We're talking nine hours straight here. And the more we did this sort of thing, the better we got, and the more fun it became.

So, the first thing you'll need to know about Modesto, the town we just moved to, is that it's in the Central Valley of California, which puts it smack in the agricultural center of the state. Considering California is one of the big agricultural centers of the world, that's saying something. Modesto itself is fairly suburban, but if you drive in any direction out of town, you hit farmland. Justin's folks grow almonds on their farm, which is about fifteen minutes from us, and their neighbors grow peaches, plums, walnuts, all sorts of stuff. My in-laws also have an acre or two of land where they grow fruits and vegetables for personal use, everything from nectarines to grapes to eggplant to pumpkins. You name it, they're growing it, plan to grow it or have grown it already.
We've gotten our fair share of food from the farm, including a big bag of nectarines that we split with some friends. But even without this resource, just walking into the produce section of the grocery store is redonkulous: bags of limes for $2, huge ripe peaches for a dollar a pound, and the tomatoes? Justin ate a piece of one a few days after we moved here and swore he hadn't eaten a real tomato in four years. Yes, they're that good. We basically don't know what to do with ourselves.

So that's the backstory for this adventure. For the last couple weeks we've been gallivanting around, painting our house, hauling furniture back from IKEA, and eating fresh everything. The only thing I haven't been able to find in grocery stores here is arugula, which is a shame, but it's also not the end of the world. Plus, I'm convinced we'll find it somewhere. And if not, well, those tomatoes can make me forget just about anything.

Bonus Pictures:Opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew

2009-08-07T12:19:00.004-07:00

This past weekend, when our friends Sol and Curtis came by to see our new place, we pulled out a bottle of wine but realized we hadn't yet unpacked a corkscrew.
It was Curtis' brilliant idea that gave us this really basic solution.

Wine bottle + actual screw + pliers = homemade corkscrew! Wine for everyone!

Salt Lake City

2009-08-03T20:46:00.007-07:00

From Fort Collins, Colorado, the road took us back into and all the way through Wyoming along the 80. Let's assume, for the sake of comedy, that you haven't spent many hundreds of man hours staring at the scenery of the 80 through Wyoming. Allow me to set the scene: on your right, perhaps as much as five whole universes away, there are mountains, there are cliffs, there is difference. To you, these things are nothing more than purple smudges jutting through the haze and cloudcover. Impossibly distant both in miles and in conception. Near you, there is only desert. Not sand dunes and buzzards desert but desert just the same, 400 miles of identical, unmemorable scrub brush punctuated occasionally by rusting barb wire fences, oil derricks, the moon-eyed faces of cattle destined, inevitably, for slaughter.
Proceeding vertically from the top edges of those impossibly distant smudges of mountains, track your eyes across the sky. It's something like 300 degrees from one horizon to another, the sky blue and white and vast as anything you've ever experienced in your life, as if every sky that has ever been has coalesced here in order to force away the land. In front of you, far ahead but growing closer, you can see Utah. You can't actually see Utah, you understand, what you can see is the ending to a long long day in which you would cross both the halfway mark and the 2/3 way mark, but you can see something shimmering out there like water, and you swear to the steering wheel, the gearshift, anything you can get your hands on, that Joseph Smith had this promised land thing right all along.

This is how I spent my 29th birthday, how I welcomed another year of life: a long, fugue-like drive into Utah and a night at a hotel in Salt Lake City. And for all this it was an awesome time.

See, it wasn't just any hotel. What Dana had been keeping secret for a month or more before our trip was that the room we were staying in that night was titled Dodge City, a themed affair, one of many themed rooms in this complex called The Anniversary Inn which is apparently a big thing in Utah. (Note from Dana: it's where Mormons go to have crazy fantasy sex!) Our hotel room sported a bed shaped like a (very convincing) covered wagon, a mirror nestled into the worn center of a yolk, swinging saloon doors between the bedroom and bathroom, and a huge two-wall mural of a western scene. Also some creepy-ass pictures of frontiersman all over the walls but I'd just as soon forget about those, thanks.
And, okay, the enormous bathtub was equipped with what I can only describe as the coolest shower of all time. The water for the shower flowed from a set of antique bottles which I originally thought had been discarded precariously above the tub. So you're showering from a bunch of whiskey bottles. That's so friggin' old west! Tell me truthfully: does this not kick ass?
In addition to being a kick-ass surprise hotel to stay the night at, The Anniversary Inn was also apparently a bed & breakfast! So at 7am (remember we'd been gaining hours as we passed through time zones all along the way) the staff there knocked on our door and left us a huge plate of really decent food including these great yogurt parfaits (highlight!), a huge cinnamon roll (good, but I wanted it to be better), a ham & cheese croissant (eh), and coffee (blessed, blessed coffee). Really, a decent showing.
After checking out of the hotel, Dana and I wandered over a couple of blocks to a Whole Foods we'd spotted the night before. Okay, call me an uncultured slob or... I don't know, a bumpkin? Call me what you will, but I have to admit this: before last week, I'd never been into a Whole Foods. I've lived in towns with Whole Foods, I've watched dozens of Top Chef contestants shop at them (between food porny shots of piled up apples and blatant branding, obviously) I'd even been in their parking lots, but I'd never walked inside. So tell me, is every Whole Foods the most awesome place in the world or is it just this random one in Salt Lake City? I'm leaning toward every one but I just want to be sure.

We picked up a couple of righteous salads (to offset the beating our stomachs had been taking with all the road food), some snacks, and (accidentally) a couple of energy drinks, but I was nearly in tears at the idea that a place with this much healthy beautiful food exists in the world and I do not have regular access to it. I'm seriously considering driving back to Utah and setting up a tent in the parking lot, just to get more of their house-made tortilla chips. I mean, they are good chips. That's not so crazy, right?

Hey Nebraska, guess what, YOU SUCK!

2009-07-28T15:39:00.007-07:00

That the US is big is sort of an obvious point. It's not Australia big, certainly, but there are some serious miles between the coasts. Somehow it's easy for us to lose sight of this. We'll think "Yes, let's drive across the country. It'll take us a few days, sure, but it's not that far." Except it is that far.

Truthfully, it's probably further even than that.

From Omaha, our last stop as far as the blog is concerned, we spun like a needle through the heart of Nebraska and then north into the corner of Wyoming then, eventually, into Colorado to spend the night before my 29th birthday in Fort Collins with our friend Rachel. Did you see that? All of that happened in one sentence, that's the misleading bit. Words condense distances just as thoughts do, but there is nothing about tires meeting a highway that condense or mitigate anything. There are the miles and the heat and there is the truth of myself behind the wheel driving across them. What I'm saying, ultimately, with no offense intended to any of our readers in these states: Nebraska and Wyoming are boring as hell.

Arriving into Colorado, then, was a wonderful thing. Trading the interminable plains for hills and then mountains sped us along, gave us a motivation toward our goal that no shady Wyoming fireworks stand could provide.

What I didn't expect from Colorado was the food. After a few days on the road stealing what we could from the buzzards and coyotes and, failing that, eating at roadside cafes, we really needed the recharge of good food. Thanks to Rachel's suggestions, Fort Collins provided in spades. Our first night there we stopped by a New Mexican Semi-Fast food place (is there a name for this I don't know? It wasn't fast food, but it was ordered from a counter and brought out to us in baskets. Medium food? Normal speed food?) called La Luz. The guacamole was just as fantastic as it looked and the local beer even better.

The next day, the morning of my birthday as it happens, Dana took me to Lucile's, a cajun breakfast restaurant that was truly fabulous. We ordered two beignets to start and then followed up with plates of really amazing Eggs Benedict and Eggs Sardu served alongside a buttermilk biscuit as big as a trash can lid and easily twice as delicious.
Do you know beignets? If you don't, you should, they're essentially amazing airy donuts covered in powdered sugar gone nearly caramel from the residual heat of the oil. These were enormous and filled with gorgeous pockets of air. If we lived anywhere in Colorado, Lucile's would definitely be a staple in our diet. As it is, it was a wonderful way to start a birthday on the road.

Expect Delays and Gigantic Adirondack Chairs

2009-07-21T08:08:00.004-07:00

Okay, I have to say something here: four hours to get through one city? Four hours? Not cool, Chicago. I feel like this picture really sums up that particular part of our drive from Ohio to Wisonsin:

We arrived in Madison at 9:00 PM, hungry and tired and barely able to lift our eyelids, let alone the sub-par hamburgers we procured at a Red Robin. Actually, I had a turkey club sandwich on a croissant and Justin had the hamburger, but my sandwich tasted like bland mouthfuls of ash bobbing across the tongue. It made me wish I had ordered the sub-par hamburger, which glistened at me temptingly from across the table. Shortly after this, we passed out in an AmericInn, and I dreamed of better meals.

The next day we traveled through the upper reaches of Wisconsin and into the Twin Cities, where we spent an amazing couple of days with family, friends and The Mall of America, a figure that hulks on the horizon, dwarfing even the IKEA in the parking lot across from it. Oh, also, we found an even bigger Adirondack chair!

Thankfully, Minneapolis provided the best meal we've eaten so far on our road trip, a lunch at the French Meadow Bakery in Uptown. When our friend Jon walked us up to the front door, I immediately knew it was a good restaurant: the line to order was out the door, and the patrons were hipsters to the bone, little wisps of androgynous girl/boys who flitted about in plaid button-up shirts and ugly, too-large reading glasses. I knew, then, that all the cool people ate at this place, and I was not disappointed when our meals came. The coffee was hot and smooth, my eggs benedict oozed perfectly poached yolks onto the plate, and Jon's curried chicken sandwich on croissant claimed the prize for Best Lunch Order of the afternoon.

Currently, we're at a Starbucks in Omaha, NE eating free pastries (it's Free Pastry Day!) and drinking huge cups of flavored coffee. The drive behind us, through Iowa, was long and cornfieldy, and the drive ahead of us, from Nebraska to Colorado, promises to be much of the same. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, we'll find a decent place to lunch, and this gray day will brighten to something sunnier.

Come down to Cleveland-town everyone

2009-07-18T07:10:00.006-07:00

We've moved! As of Thursday, with the help of the Sollas, Eisha, and Advance Moving, we cleared out our apartment and cleaned it with caustic and toxic chemicals to a spotless gleam.

After stopping in for one last lunch at Moosewood, we packed up our car, filled the gas tank, and took to the road. The first leg of our road trip took us out of sunny Ithaca (*sniff*), past the enormous Adirondack Chair near Horseheads, through Pennsylvania's pines and premiere firework/karate supply distributors, and into the plains of Ohio.

Our first night away from home we spent in the guest room of Dana's aunt and uncle's house in Westlake, one of the wooded suburbs of that bastion of clean air and drifters, Cleveland! Well, mostly we spent it in bed. Despite our assertions that we'd been holding up under the various stressors of the move very well, once we closed our eyes we didn't open them again until we'd had a good eleven hours of recuperative rest.

As I'm typing this, we're safely ensconced in a hotel room in Madison but as we're doing this with sporadic unreliable internet I'm going to stop here with our first day. The road is stretched long ahead of us and while we don't have much to say about the food so far (as we've been stuck mainly to the tollway's various oasis fast food joints), the countryside has been truly gorgeous.You, dear reader, are under strict orders to think of us as we pave the ill-maintained roads of the nation. And if you're located somewhere along our route to keep an eye out for our car. If my experience is any indication, there are plenty of them out there.
More road tripping to come! But, finally, in honor of Cleveland's air which managed to give Dana an asthma attack while we were still twenty miles from the city, let me leave you with this:

Bonus Pictures: 4th of July

2009-07-08T10:45:00.005-07:00

Just a quick note and a couple of pictures today. We're in the middle of packing up everything we own in preparation for movers to cart it all away so posting might be sporadic the next couple of weeks but will return to a more reasonable schedule by the end of July.

Until then, we'll be doing smallish posts heavy on pictures and stories about our drive across the country.

Below, there are a few pictures of how we spent our 4th of July weekend. So, some fireworks, graveyard strawberries, a fantastic barbecue, and generally awesome times.

This may have been our last 4th of July living in Ithaca, but I think we gave it an admirable sendoff.

Deep Dish Pizza

2009-06-29T09:22:00.006-07:00

Zachary's Chicago Pizza is one of my favorite restaurants of all time but one I don't make it to very often, for a couple of reasons. First, it's all the way on the other side of the country (at least for the next few weeks. By this I mean that we're moving, not it) and second, with pizza this intense, a little goes a long way.

The thing that's amazing about Zachary's is that it's pizza unlike any other I've found. While it touts itself as Chicago style, it's really its own creature, visually similar to the deep dish pie that's been made so ubiquitous by the Pizzeria Unos popping up in strip malls all over the country but miles away from that in taste. Zachary's specializes in stuffed pizzas, essentially pies in which all the toppings are encased in a buttery crisp crust shell--thick on the bottom but thin on top--and then covered in beautifully red peeled tomatoes and basil. This is the ideological opposite of New York pizza, thick and hearty where New York pushes thin and light, bright with fresh tomato flavor and toppings like spinach and mushroom that explode in your mouth where New York slices are often cheese-forward, bubbling crisp and deliciously greasy enough to have you reaching for a fourth napkin before you're halfway through. They're both great ways to approach pizza but Zachary's is so unique, the taste so completely Zachary's, so complexly alive, that it's hard to think of it as a pizzeria at all. This is no simple hole in the wall with a hot oven burning little square scars into the arms of the staff, this is a real restaurant and the food you're being served is not just pizza, it's pizza heightened, it's pizza cuisine. So it's not something you eat everyday.
The trouble is, our cravings for a thick complex slice of Zachary's come more often than our flights to California. Much more often. So we find ourselves all the way on the other side of the country, far beyond the possibility of Zachary's pizza. Yet for some reason, we never really thought our way to the obvious solution: if we want Zachary's and we can't get it, we just have to make it.

So we tried.

This dough recipe comes from Peter Reinhardt's amazing American Pie which I can never appreciate enough. It's an absolutely phenomenal book on pizza that I get more from every time I look.

Chicago deep-dish pizza dough
from American Pie
(makes 2 18-ounce dough balls)

18 ounces unbleached bread flour (I used all purpose and it worked fine. I might actually suggest it because of the delicious tender lightness I encountered.)
2/3 cup fine-grind yellow cornmeal
2 Tbsp sugar
2-1/2 tsp kosher salt
2-1/4 tsps instant yeast
5 Tbsp corn oil
1-1/2 cups lukewarm water

Combine all ingredients in an electric mixer and, using the dough hook, mix on low for 4 minutes until a coarse ball forms. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes then mix again on low for 2-3 until the dough is tacky and passes the windowpane test. Form the dough into a ball and place in an oiled bowl covered with plastic wrap to rise until doubled. Divide into two equal pieces and round them into balls. Cover in olive oil and let rest, covered in plastic wrap, for 15-20 minutes.
When they've rested, roll out each dough into a disk about 14 inches in diameter. Lay each disk into a 10 inch round cake pan (or springform) and press into the corners and up the sides. The first time I did this, I thought the instructions were to make the dough stretch over the top of the pan so I did and the pizza turned out looking like it had a popped collar and very little substance. It looked like a douchebag is what I'm saying.

For a thinner crust, put immediately into a 400 degree oven, for a thicker crust cover dough-lined pans with a kitchen towel and let sit 30-60 minutes before baking. Either way, bake the crusts for 3-4 minutes to set them, remove from oven and let cool, then top. It should go cheese, toppings, (another layer of crust if you're going for the stuffed pizza which I didn't decide to do), sauce, and a richer cheese like parmesan. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes, rotate pan, then bake for another 20-25 until the edges are golden and the cheese is browned.

We topped it with slices of zucchini, turkey pepperoni, onions and mushrooms sauteed in wine, mozzarella, fresh basil, and crumbles of goat cheese which was... a lot of stuff and in the future I think I will thin down the toppings list so we can focus on the actual flavors.
So here's the rundown: the dough wasn't as buttery as I wanted (next time I might try this actual recipe from Zachary's which Dana found ages ago and which was then lost among my bookmarks until, of course, today), the sauce a little over processed and not the rich whole tomato sauce Zachary's uses, the toppings kind of... muddled, but it was a good first step. And it reiterated a good lesson we seem to get over and over and are just beginning to retain: it's much easier to approximate a dish at home than we ever expect. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's close enough to quell the cravings for a while. Long enough, certainly, for us to make it back to California and have the real thing.

Cardamom Almond Biscotti

2009-06-26T09:57:00.009-07:00

High up on my list of things I'll miss most about Ithaca are the Jane Austen tea parties Eisha and I have been hosting since last summer. It started with a screening of Pride and Prejudice with an incredible spread of tea, scones, marmalade, cheese, crackers and madelines, and from then on we were hooked. Accompanied by an always-changing assortment of people and ever-evolving spread of food, we plowed through the fabulous 2008 BBC Sense and Sensibility, hit a definite low with Mansfield Park (really, don't bother with that one), thoroughly enjoyed the 2007 Masterpiece Theatre version of Persuasion and, most recently, undertook a double screening of Emma and Clueless in a single afternoon.

In the past, I've contributed madelines, rice pudding, scones, and more scones to our tea parties, but this week I went for something different - biscotti - because I've been dying to try a new recipe since that awesome hazelnut chocolate batch. I needed something a bit more subdued, though, to pair with tea rather than coffee, and in the midst of packing I came upon a Martha Stewart Living from last July. Lo and behold, in the back there was a recipe for Cardamom Biscotti. Perfect.

What follows is my version of this recipe. I haven't changed much about the ingredients (I did go with toasted amonds rather than blanced), but the instructions were pretty hard to follow, so I've clarified them here. Personally, I think anyone should be able to bake, not just people with the experience to know that "mix flour into wet ingredients" means to replace the whisk with the paddle attachment, then add flour a little bit at a time. Come on, Martha. You're better than that.

Cardamom Almond Biscotti (adapted from Martha Stewart Living)

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
a pinch of salt
3 3/4 ounces toasted almonds, chopped fine
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg white, for wash
2 tablespoons sanding sugar

Directions

Put rack in center of oven and preheat to 325 degrees.
In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
Pulse toasted almonds in a food processor until chopped fine. Whisk the following into the flour mixture: almonds, cardamom, and 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar.
In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs and vanilla until foamy. Make a small indent in the middle of the flour mixture, then pour in eggs and vanilla. Mix with hands or wooden spoon until all the flour is incorporated, and a soft dough has formed.
Lightly flour work surface, and transfer dough to it.
Using as little flour as is necessary, roll dough into an oblong log. Transfer to a baking sheet lined with either parchment paper or a silpat. Flatten the log out by gently pressing on the top with the heel of your hand.
Bake 25-30 minutes, or until the log is just the slightest bit golden and lightly cracked, then remove from oven.
Lightly beat egg white and brush onto biscotti. Sprinkle log with sanding sugar, and place back in oven for 15 minutes.
When log is golden brown and slightly hard to the touch, remove from oven and let cool on wire rack for 10 minutes.
Transfer biscotti log to a cutting board, and cut into it at an angle using a sharp, serrated knife. The slices should be approximately an inch thick.
Put a wire rack onto the baking sheet and arrange slices, flat side down, on the rack. Bake until crisp and devoid of moisture, 15-20 minutes.
Remove from oven and let cool. Enjoy with tea.

Even though this recipe will always remind me of Ithaca, it's also very connected to our future plans. Justin and I are moving to his hometown of Modesto, California in a few weeks, where we'll be very near to his parents, who live and work on an almond farm. And Modesto is known for its huge Portuguese population, including Justin's family, all of whom use cardamom in copious amounts when cooking. I'm interested to see how our cooking and baking will change, once we get there.

What the hell are garlic scapes?

2009-06-22T08:01:00.008-07:00

Earlier this week, Alex strode into the studio carrying a huge cardboard box hoisted like a prize. "Garlic Scapes!" he declared, but honestly, he might as well have been speaking another language. I was convinced I'd heard him wrong, that actually the box he came in with would contain something from my known universe of food. Something that sounded like garlic scapes. Pickled scallops, maybe. Charles grapes. Dana and I were both throwing at the time, something close to a million sorbet bowls for me, a similar amount of spoon rests for Dana. We switched off our wheels and turned in unison to peer into the depths of the box from which tiny green tendrils were winding. This is when it became clear that these were not a known entity, not a gnarled plate or a licked date (I'm reaching). No, these were something else entirely.

Garlic scapes are the curly green stalks that grow from a head of subterranean garlic. They look like long green onions wound into loose ringlets; they seem like thin delicate little things but then resist like bedsprings when unwound. But most important for my purpose here is what they taste like. So lean back and imagine this: when you take a bite of raw garlic--come on, I know you've all done it at some point or another--you get this out of tune rock band of sharp flavors, pungent and overpowering, and lurking quietly beneath all that noise is the flavor that the garlic will cook down to, buttery and rich and very very... well, garlicy, but its hard to even detect it, let alone make sense of the flavor for all the raucous that the bitterness is raising on your tongue. Garlic scapes in their raw state are like that experience with the volume turned down and the talent turned up. You get some of that pungency, a virtuousic solo instead of a skull-splitting shred, and some of that buttery garlicness, but the disparate flavors are suddenly in harmony. There's still some bite, but it's not going to leave you with a headache, there's enough richness to bring you back for more. Cooked, they're somewhere between a green bean and asparagus, grassy and light with just the barest hint of garlic flavor. They're completely awesome and they're amazing in everything.

See, you probably know all this, you in your well stocked gourmet kitchen, you superstar with a whisk and a saute pan, but I didn't. I had no idea. I had never even heard the word garlic scapes before Alex sent some of that enormous box full home with us, let alone processed the flavor.
But since we did, they've been in everything that has come out of the kitchen. The photos here are just of the pizza we put them on (raw but chopped thinly on the bias) but this week we've braised them in turmeric with chicken breast, added to a fresh gardeny pasta sauce, tossed into quesedillas. Every meal lately has featured them in some form or another and while I can't get enough, I feel like the bag we brought home hasn't even changed in size. It's like a mass of wriggling squid in freeze frame everytime I look in the fridge but I swear to God I think they're multiplying.

Anyway, suddenly this thing I'd never heard of is an integral component (and one that, I know, won't last long). But maybe the weirdest thing about this discovery is this: learning about garlic scapes was like learning a new word and then finding that it's incredibly common. I hear them mentioned everywhere. I've suddenly tuned in only to realize that half the nouns in the language right now have been replaced with scape. Somebody goes to the farmer's market and brings home a bunch of scapes, somebody else has a long standing opinion on their proper use, a third person keeps a huge bag full in her fridge, half the world posts (far superior) blog entries about them. I mean, come on, world, how long has this been going on? And more importantly, WHAT ELSE DON'T I KNOW ABOUT!?

If there are suddenly garlic scapes all over the radar, what else might be just underneath the surface? Is there some sort of better heat? Is there a different water? Tell me! Wait, no, don't.

In essence, I guess this is the wonderful ecstatic thing about becoming a foodie. Food was always such a flat map for me, a known quantity, and suddenly in the last couple years I'm learning not only that I don't know everything about food but I'm constantly reminded that actually I might not know anything and, God willing, maybe I never will. I'm hard pressed to imagine anything better than continuing down this road and eternally finding nestled past every bend an entirely new way of thinking and feeling, a new experience that is always, inevitably, a game changer.

This week it was garlic scapes, but just imagine what could be peeking over the edge of the box next year, or ten years from now. What will I be discovering then? What will we be eating? I have absolutely no idea, not even the idea of an idea. Now tell me. Could there be anything more exciting than that?

Easy Peasy Rice Pudding

2009-06-20T12:45:00.006-07:00

With only 26 days to go, Justin and I are officially in the "use up excess food items" phase of our move. In the last week, this has meant: 2 huge batches of hummus (to use up a giant jar of tahini and a pound of dried chick peas), three bowls of salsa (to get rid of the jalapenos we've had in our freezer since last summer's farm share adventure), and a big batch of rice pudding (to use up, well, rice). Still to go: that bag of frozen tilapia that doesn't really taste right, canned tomatoes and lots of chicken. On second thought, maybe we should throw out that tilapia.

Anyway, my go-to rice pudding recipe is actually from All Recipes, which does, occasionally, get things right. You probably don't want to be pulling any non-Midwest-centric recipes off there (these ladies will find a way to put cream of chicken soup in an enchilada recipe), but for home cooked staples? They know what's up. I like to throw in a few spices at the end, but otherwise I don't make too many changes. It's quick, it's easy, it's creamy and it tastes like childhood. What more can you ask for?

Easy Peasy Rice Pudding (adapted from All Recipes)

3/4 cup uncooked white rice

2 cups whole milk, divided into 1 1/2 cups and 1/2 cup

1/3 cup white sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 egg, beaten

2/3 cup golden raisins

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cardamom
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1. Bring 1 1/2 cups of water to boil in a medium saucepan, add rice and stir. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, or until rice is cooked.
2. Add 1 1/2 cups of the milk you've set aside, sugar and salt to the saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat 15-20 minutes. The mixture should look thick and creamy.
3. Stir in leftover 1/2 cup of milk, beaten egg and golden raisins. Cook two more minutes, stirring constantly.
4. Remove from heat. Stir in butter, vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg. Or, if you don't like your rice pudding so heavily spiced, don't add those last three things. See what I care!

There's something wonderful and homey and not-at-all summer appropriate about warm rice pudding, but luckily (or unluckily) we've had dreary weather for all of June, so warm desserts are just fine. For the record, though, this recipe tastes great chilled, too. So go ahead, people. Make it. You probably have all of the ingredients in your pantry, and you know you want to.

note from justin!
Dana first made this rice pudding when I had taken swooningly ill with a little flu not long ago. While I was laid up on the couch half-heartedly watching Gladiator and The Matrix (you know, real visceral gettin' better movies) and occasionally retching into a purple bucket, she whipped into the kitchen and came out moments later with a bowl of warm rice pudding that made everything better forever. I cannot get enough of this stuff, it is a gift from God. I would eat it four times a day if I could but, thankfully, never remember it exists at the right time to actually bring home the ingredients. Luckily, Dana has no such mental blockage and trundled home the ingredients yesterday. It's a good life.

Oh, second note: this post is dedicated to Michele whose surprise birthday party we attended last night. Standing in her gorgeous yard, buried amid throngs of her adoring friends and family clamoring for attention, she actually found the time to single us out with a hearty "What, no posts this week?" So, Michele, from both of us, happy 50th, go make yourself some rice pudding!

Focaccia

2009-06-11T10:15:00.006-07:00

Since I bought Dana that baking handbook, she's slowly been transferring her obsession with it to me. It's like a parasite, slowly creeping in to lay its eggs in my ear. Pizza, the larvae whispered a week ago, brioche, it's been saying today, focaccia it said earlier this week. This wouldn't be such a problem except that I listen; I can't resist. I am a complete and total sucker for savory baked goods, I acknowledge this and I do not apologize.

The focaccia we made was good but I felt like it didn't rise to its full potential. Some of this is just a technique thing, I'm sure. I don't think I was doing the kneading precisely right, and I added the salt too early, and I might have mixed in a little too much flour in the process but here's the real problem: I made kind of a little fire in our oven when it was baking. Like, a little one. Kind of.

See, here's the thing, we didn't have the right size pan. Ours was short in both directions by a couple of inches. When I realized the problem, early in the recipe, I just shrugged. What could possibly go wrong? When it came time to soak the dough in olive oil (yes, you soak it in half a cup of oil before you bake it, I'll get to that), though, and the oil came pouring up over the sides of the pan onto the counter, what could go wrong became very very clear.

When the oil-soaked dough--on top of which I'd dutifully poured the remaining 1/4 cup of oil against my better judgment--went into the oven on its oily pan, and I went into the office to kill time playing mafia wars on facebook, a funny thing happened: smoke went everywhere. I came out of the office to check on the bread about ten minutes into its baking time to find half the house filling up with acrid whitish haze and not more than fifteen seconds later the smoke detectors in the hallway caught on to the problem as well. So I whipped the nascent bread off its rack (noting, as I did so, that all the lovely oil I'd poured on top a few minutes before had disappeared and a curiously similar puddle of goop was now boiling across the floor of the hot oven). I did the best job mitigating the mess that I could by sopping most of it up with a sponge which promptly and surprisingly melted, but by the time I actually got the smoke to clear, the smoke alarms to quit their irritated bleeping, and the oil to stop emitting that noxious smell like burning paper and pitch, the bread had already been out of the oven for fifteen minutes. This when it had only been in the oven for ten. Afterward, I threw the troublesome little thing back in and estimated as well as possible the remaining bake time.

After some trial and error, the bread that I pulled golden and fragrant from the oven was I think much drier than intended but still incredibly delicious. Here's the recipe, but I strongly suggest against taking my advice on this one.

Focaccia
from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook

7 cups bread flour
3.5 cups warm water
1 tsp active dry yeast
2 Tbsp coarse salt
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Sea Salt for sprinkling (which I found pretty unnecessary given that 2 tablespoons of salt in the dough)

Whisk together flour, yeast, and water, cover with plastic wrap and let rise until tripled (about 2 hours). Add the salt and, using the dough hook attachment of your mixer, mix for 3-5 minutes on low, stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl as needed. When the dough begins to climb the sides of the bowl, raise the speed to medium and beat for 15 seconds then transfer to well floured surface for kneading. Fold the dough over onto itself a couple of times and transfer to a floured bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let double again.
I'm going to skip some steps here because you need to just go out and buy this book but suffice to say that after a couple more kneading/resting cycles, you have a dough heavily bubbled and slack. Preheat the oven to 450 and pour 1/2 cup of the olive oil into a 17 by 12 inch rimmed baking pan. Dump the dough ball into the oil and turn to fully coat. Then press it down to fill the pan, letting it rest for a few minutes if it starts to resist. When it has fully filled the pan, press your fingers into it to leave impressions and then pour the remaining oil over the top and, if you're using it, sprinkle with salt.

Pop it in the oven for 25-30 minutes (barring some disaster) and when it comes out it will be thick and crusty and the bottom almost fried from the pools of oil that, if you're lucky, will not have been flung from the bread by oven spring as if bounding from a trampoline.

Even with all the mishaps, it's a bread worth keeping. And today at lunch, finishing the last slice with ripe tomato, a poached egg, and fresh basil, I never would have guessed that anything had gone amiss. So it was a little toothsome, a little more dense than it might have been, it was still another pretty awesome showing from a cookbook that has yet to disappoint.

Good going, Martha.

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti

2009-06-09T12:33:00.007-07:00

When I ordered my first scoop of Gianduia ice cream from the Cayuga Lake Creamery, some ancient, golden seal split open inside me and I knew, in that moment, that chocolate and hazelnut were the most perfect flavor combination in the world. I also saw a gigantic, orange-tinged explosion in my mind's eye, and the number 2012 appeared on my ankle, whatever that means. Anyway, the cravings for chocolate and hazelnut haven't stopped since.

So when I found a recipe for chocolate hazelnut biscotti in my new Martha Stewart Baking Handbook, I knew it had to be mine. And oh, how it was coveted, and much easier than I would have thought.

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti
(Adapted from Martha Stewart)

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup Scharffen Berger unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups hazelnuts
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups graunulated sugar
soymilk, for brushing
sugar in the raw, for sprinkling

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a food processor, blend together flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt, chocolate chunks and hazelnuts until combined.
2. Using whisk attachment, beat eggs and granulated sugar at medium speed until light and foamy. Replace whisk with paddle attachment, switch to low speed, and add the flour/cocoa mixture a little bit at a time. Do not overmix!
3. Flour your work surface and turn the whole dough onto it. It should be pretty sticky at this point. Separate dough and roll into three logs of equal size. Transfer to baking sheet (I lined mine with a Silpat, but you can use parchment paper, too) and flatten slightly. Brush tops with soymilk (or egg white), then sprinkle with sanding sugar.
4. Bake 20-24 minutes, until firm to the touch. Transfer logs to wire rack and cool for 20 minutes.
5. Transfer logs to cutting board. With a nice serrated bread knife, cut each log into 3/4-inch diagonal slices.
6. Place a wire rack on your baking sheet and arrange slices (cut side down) on the rack. Bake until biscotti are firm and dry, 10-15 minutes. Let biscotti cool completely, store in an airtight container and enjoy a sinfully delicious treat with your coffee in the morning.

I mean, I'm not saying these biscotti are going to help you survive the inevitable apocalypse, but I'm also not saying they won't help you survive it. They certainly can't hurt.

Healthy brunch

2009-06-08T07:22:00.008-07:00

Let me be the first to admit it: while Dana and I eat well we don't always eat healthily. It's a mind problem more than a body one. We can cook low fat, low calorie meals, we just don't want to. So much of the American conception of the diet is tied up in the idea that deprivation is holy. This gets perpetuated by The Biggest Loser, by Oprah, by... any number of media outlets obsessed with distancing humans from the seductive pleasure of fat. Food is bad, they tell us, you must disassociate emotion and eating. You must eat only to sustain the body. Food must be no more than fuel: utilitarian and flavorless. Maybe you could trace it back to our puritan roots if you tried hard enough. We're a nation that conflates asceticism with goodness, self denial with spiritual cleanliness. To deny ourselves cream feels good, like tearing off a scab but over a longer period. Maybe it's just a regression of the human relationship to food. Whatever it is, I find it wrong. Permanently (or, at the very least, long term enough for the scale's needle to drop) giving up things that improve your daily life--and I'm not ashamed to say food does this for me--for some ethereal final goal just doesn't make sense to me. So we cook with oil, we make ice cream, we enjoy the full capabilities of flavors. And we don't feel bad about it. Mostly.

But sometimes it's nice to realize that just as the dieting community demonizes full-fat cooking, we tend to demonize diet food. With all of the cardboard microwaveable meals and vegan pizzas out there, it can be easy to forget that a dish can be low in fat and calories and still be delicious. That was what Dana had in mind when she got out of bed Sunday morning with a brunch menu springing fully formed from her mind: An egg white omelette with tomato, fresh chives, cilantro, and jack cheese; lowfat yogurt with fresh raspberries, almonds, and coconut; and a few slices of turkey bacon. Healthy, but still incredibly delicious. The kind of meal in which you aren't forced to process the calorie content, that knowledge can wander off to frolic in the furthest reaches of the mind while your tongue relishes the flavor of fresh herbs or the yogurt's delicate bursts of tart and sweet.

Let this be a lesson to me and my heavy chorizo and eggs ways: there is more than one way to have a good breakfast, and more than one way to eat healthy and still love food.

No-Bake Vegan Chocolate Pie With Raspberries

2009-06-05T19:03:00.008-07:00

Life has been a little crazy. Justin and I have mentioned, I think, that we were both laid off recently, and that we're now in the packing stage of our subsequent move from Ithaca, New York to Modesto, California. What we haven't mentioned is that, in our free time, when we're not finishing our books of poetry or cooking or writing for this blog or packing/purging/hocking our wordly possessions, we're also apprenticing at a local pottery studio. So even though we're both without anything you'd call, say, a "job," or something that "makes money" - we're swamped. It's a good way to be, but hard to find time for involved baking schemes.

Which left me in a bind this afternoon, when I wanted to make a nice dessert for a friend's birthday BBQ, but found myself broke and out of the house most of the day. Enter Alex Solla, our pottery mentor and former chef extraordinaire, with his rescue recipe for no bake, dairy-free chocolate pie. We put the dessert together in his kitchen, shoved it in the freezer for a couple hours, and arranged some raspberries on top just prior to departure. It was so easy and delicious that the whole venture seeemed wrong, some sort of sin against kitchen and countrymen. But I guess that's what chocolate is supposed to taste like.

Alex's Vegan Chocolate Pie (With Raspberries)

2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips
1 block silken tofu
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 store-bought chocolate cookie crust
2 pints of fresh raspberries

1. Melt chocolate over double boiler.
2. When smooth, remove from heat and dump in tofu, vanilla, maple syrup and cinnamon. Liquify with an immersion blender right in the double boiler. Whiirrrrr, bloop, done.
3. Spoon chocolate pudding goodness into store bought cookie crust, then chill for two hours, or until the thing sets.
4. Pull out of freezer, arrange some raspberries on top, and look like a baking hero to your friends and neighbors while nursing a diabolical secret: the whole thing took five minutes to put together. You are the winner, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Maybe collect unemployment, though, because that helps keep you in tofu and chocolate.
I have to say, I'm a meat and dairy loving sort of girl, but this thing was enough to convert me. It was a hit with vegan and omnivore alike. If you need a quick and dirty dessert, this is it. And if you have time this weekend and are in the Trumansburg, New York area, stop by the seconds sale at Cold Springs Pottery Studio and say hello. We'll be there all weekend, and would love to see you.

Guess what! Pizza!

2009-06-04T18:44:00.008-07:00

As Dana mentioned offhand in the last post, while she bought me the wicked awesome Ben & Jerry's ice cream book for our anniversary (as well as this cool signed copy of Robert Pinsky's An Explanation of America which I'm totally in love with), I bought her a copy of a book she'd been wanting--no no, needing--forever: Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. First of all, it's hardly fair to call it a handbook. Yes, it serves as a guide to lead you by hand through step by step recipes for any baked good you have ever seen or imagined or eaten in a dream while riding a pegasus, but I feel like "handbook" implies that it can fit comfortably in the hand, that it is palm sized, that it is--in some way--heftable. It's not. It's really an absolute tome, dense with glossy photos of immaculate confections of every variety interspersed with recipes so tested and perfected I feel it a sin to veer away. This is not something I usually take well. I can't recall a time when I simply followed a recipe without making at least one change. I am a cook who won't take do this at face value. I will not be hemmed in by puny words, I will overcome them, I will beat the recipe and then I will add some freaking cinnamon. This is why I am not a baker.

But here, these baked goods have been so perfected, so polished to a luster that today, just this once, I made an exception and made no exceptions. Today, I followed a recipe.

The recipe in question was actually yet another pizza dough. Remember how I said my passion for pizza was reignited? Yeah. That.
So here is pizza dough via Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook:

1 cup warm water (110 degrees Fahrenheit)
1/4 teaspoon sugar (or honey, I'm just saying)
1 envelope active dry yeast
14 ounces AP flour (about 2 and 3/4 cups)
1 tsp table salt
1.5 Tbsp olive oil

Combine water, yeast, and sugar in a bowl and let sit until foamy (5 or 10 minutes). In a mixer or food processor, combine salt and flour then add yeast mixture and oil. Mix until tacky dough comes together. For me, the dough was pretty dry at this stage. It came together but shaggily. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until a smooth ball forms. Plop the tiny adorable dough ball into an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled (between 40 minutes and an hour for me). Punch it down and fold back on itself four or five times to reincorporate the air pockets then replace plastic wrap and let rise until doubled again.

The resulting dough ball is enough for two pizzas so turn it out onto a floured surface and split it in half. Stretch each half into a 12 inch circle allowing it to rest a few minutes whenever the dough resists or threatens to tear. Top with sauce and toppings (today, sauce was a can of whole peeled tomatoes, garlic, and some basil. Toppings were zucchini slices, hunks of mozzarella, basil leaves, and olive oil.)

Bake at 450 on a preheated pizza stone until golden brown (12-15 minutes). If you're like me and you can't wait longer than ten minutes and decide you've had it with hovering over the oven just smelling things which are delicious, pull the pizza out, cut it, and start eating, only realizing halfway through your second slice that it wasn't done yet, it's okay. Pop the other slices back onto the pizza stone--which will have retained much of its heat in the handful of seconds it took you to process more than your gollum-like greed for pizza--and toast them all the way up. The pie is best fully browned, the cheese on top blistered, the crust aching to snap and hot enough to sear your hands without leaving permanent scars.

As opposed to the last crust I wrote about, this had a thicker more luscious flavor granted in large part by the addition of the olive oil. Even the color was a bit darker, pushed more toward the bright yellow green of the oil. It has a tight crumb and it's fairly thin (not quite new york style but closer to that than the airy yeasty dough I culled from Eggs on Sunday) and it's really lovely. Don't ask me to pick a favorite because I could agonize for months and never come to a decision. They're both pretty phenomenal crusts to completely different types of pizza.

I'm just ecstatic to have come upon both recipes so close together. It's been a good week. For an unemployed poet, I'm an exceptionally lucky man.

Cornmeal Drop Biscuits & Sausage Gravy

2009-06-03T07:15:00.004-07:00

When I moved to Ithaca from California, everyone warned me that the winters would be hard. And yes, they were - I lacked energy, the desire to get out of bed, the ability to stay away from any and all bread products. Okay, that last one is true all the time, but winters were definitely a huge adjustment. The thing no one told me about, though, was the boundless energy I'd get come spring and summer, something that I've been taking full advantage of the last two months.

For example: this morning I got out of bed early, tried my best to not wake Justin, scooped some Gimme Coffee into the coffee maker, opened up the copy of Martha Stewart's Baking Book that J bought me for our anniversary, and picked out a breakfast recipe. It had to be something quick, something I had all of the ingredients for and something that I could pair with our one remaining link of hot Italian sausage from The Piggery. And so it was that my fortuitous gaze landed on a recipe for cornmeal biscuits, and lo! there was music from above, and all the children of the land rejoiced. The biscuits took about 25 minutes to make, from start to finish, and paired appallingly well with the sausage gravy I instructed Justin to make when he woke up. I felt a little bad handing him a wooden spoon and a frying pan while his eyes were still blurry, but it turned out, for Justin, this was an ideal way to start the day.

Cornmeal Drop Biscuits from Martha Stewart

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup fine yellow cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1 stickunsalted butter, cold, cut into pieces
1 cup nonfat milk

1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Whisk together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl.
3. Cut butter into flour with pastry cutter until the mixture forms coarse crumbs. Drizzle milk over top of dough and fold in with a rubber spatula. Try to get all of the little cornmeal bits off the bottom of the bowl, and be careful not to overmix. The dough will be sticky, but they're drop biscuits, so you're cool. It's supposed to look like that.
4. Using two large spoons, leverage globs of cornmeal dough onto a baking sheet (I line mine with a Silpat) and bake until golden, approximately 15 minutes.

While the biscuits are in the oven, whip up a batch of sausage gravy, or force your poor, sleepy significant other to do it. Justin's recipe below:

Sausage Gravy

2 1/2 tbsp all purpose flour
1 1/2 cups milk
1 link hot italian sausage
a pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

1. Remove sausage from casing and crumble into saute pan. Cook until thoroughly done, approximately 3 minutes.
2. Add flour a little at a time and cook, stirring, until just starting to brown. Add milk all at once. Cook until thickened, stirring constantly.
3. Season with a dash of salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper - or more, if you like.
4. Spoon over warm biscuits and devour.

Hazelnut Kitchen

2009-06-02T07:29:00.007-07:00

One of the worst things about moving is that I inevitably find the best restaurants right before I do. It's just one of life's rules: if you know for a fact that you're going to move, you will suddenly, right before you go, meet the coolest people you've met in all your time in that place, discover the best restaurants, learn the names of all the local flowers and feel intense stabs of longing at the thought of leaving. When Justin and I left Berkeley four years ago, we stumbled on a little Indian restaurant only a block from our house - one that we had failed to notice in all of our years there, and that we only got to eat at a handful of times before packing up our lives and fleeing to the east coast for grad school. And so it is, of course, that as we begin the process of packing up our lives here, we discover one of the best restaurants we've ever been to: Hazelnut Kitchen in Trumansburg, NY.

Don't let the location or the entree prices fool you. I grew up in a family that measures quality of food by price of entree, size of wine cellar and proximity to major culinary centers like Los Angeles and Paris. As I've become a cook in my own right (which is, to say, an amateur one that's really way better at baking, anyway), I've come to realize that this is a very poor way of judging a meal. The most important components, to me, are a combination of simplicity and elegance - and, well, ideally a price tag that's kind to my pocketbook. I mean, I'm an unemployed poet. These things matter.

And so it was that Justin and I found ourselves enjoying one of the best meals of our lives at Hazelnut Kitchen this Sunday, our first wedding anniversary. The best way I can think to describe the ambiance of this restaurant is to say that it's like eating a meal inside an Anthropologie store. The waitresses are all 20-something hipster girls in vintage polka dot dresses or high-waisted, vaguely nautical shorts. The place settings are mismatched, but perfect: antique silver tableware, delicate, bright cloth napkins that vary from table to table. Every plate or bowl is slightly different from its mate, but somehow cohesive.

The first thing we were served was a selection of artisan breads with a velvety chive butter. Heaven! Since this was our first wedding anniversary and perhaps the best excuse to splurge that we could think of, we also opted to share a deliciously floral bottle of Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc/Viognier, and both ordered appetizers. I know, we're crazy, right? Perhaps more crazy was my choice of sauteed green curry coconut cream escargot, a dish that seriously only set us back $10 and which proably ruined me on escargot for my whole life (in the good way). Snails, man. De-lish.

For our entrees, we went straight off of the May menu, J choosing the spanish style fish stew with mussels, tuna, baby octopus & shrimp (and also a few potatoes, some cilantro, scallions & grilled bread for mopping up juice). Just look at this monster:

I went with the duck confit, which was served between a bed of sweet beans and a small heaping of greens with mustard vinagerette. Maybe it's a given that duck should be served moist, cooked until the juices are oozing through the meat, but I find that this is not usually the case. So I'll just say this: Jonah McKeough, the chef at Hazelnut Kitchen, is a man who knows how to cook duck. I was a happy girl.

We ended on dessert, of course, so I'll end the post on this little gem: a perfectly-presented vanilla bean pot de creme with caramel sauce, whipped cream and a strawberrry on top. Thank you, everyone, for the anniversary wishes. I hope I always get to eat this well once a year.

Rediscovering Pizza

2009-06-01T08:06:00.008-07:00

We were addicted to home baked pizza for a while. I would make a triple batch of doughs about once a week and we would inevitably burn through them in quick succession, three nights of pizza in a row and then four days of recovery before we dared that endeavor again. This went like clockwork for months until, eventually, I made a set of doughs and only used two. Then one. Then I just didn't make a batch for a few weeks. The next time I did, we were unhappy with the result. The dough was somehow both rubbery and shatteringly sharp, dry and bland, thin and dense. Suddenly we were looking at this ubiquitous dish we'd tasted a hundred times as if for the first time and finding it wanting. We thought for a while that we'd erred somewhere along the line. In our quest to make the pizza "healthy" we'd subbed in too much wheat flour, reduced the oil to amounts only measurable in parts per millileter, done something that had suddenly turned this dish we loved into something unpalatable. I think now that this assumption of a new issue with the recipe was wrong. Nothing had changed in the dish irrevocably, we were turning out basically the same pies as we had before. I suspect instead we'd simply matured as cooks past our appreciation for the recipe but couldn't yet grasp the (admittedly kind of disturbing) idea that as our cooking improved the things that were once on the bleeding edge of our skills had now been left behind, that something once difficult was now too simple. Yes, it is an integral part of the human experience, that as we grow we leave things behind, but it's a particularly difficult one to come to terms with. As our skills developed, Dana and I were ready to leave years of these pizzas behind us with no indication that there was homemade pizza in our future at all.

A couple weeks ago, though, the fabulous local food blog (and Eat This House's official hero) Eggs on Sunday ran a pizza post in which Amy narrated her development of a new pizza dough recipe based on Michael Ruhlman's 5:3 (flour to water) ratio. I found myself intrigued by the idea of a fresh start on pizza and, in retrospect, I find that my poety-sense (think spidey-sense but instead of warning me about danger it warns me that I'm not thinking deeply enough about the issue at hand, also it's going off all the time) indicates that perhaps this experience is mappable to a sort of emotional baggage. I carried around the old pizza dough recipe for a long time, continually turning and turning it, tweaking tiny pieces--more oil one week, less honey the next--but never changing the essential components, never thinking my way past the things that made it what it was: a subtle failure. In short, I was in a terrible crippling rut, baking and eating pizzas I was only just this side of satisfied with, and because the flavors were familiar and on mildly satisfying, I just never realized it. After reading Amy's post, and then Ruhlman's, and then following a few other related pizza links, though, I really came to the epiphany I've been laying out this whole post. For the first time in a long time, I was hungry for pizza.I followed Amy's recipe pretty faithfully--only adding in a tiny bit of honey because I find the tinge of sweetness a welcome counterpoint to the tang of tomato sauces--and the dough it turned out was beautiful: spongy and light with a delicate flavor similar to a fresh baguette.

I topped it with a fresh sauce--made from tomato, garlic, a little oil, and some dried basil and oregano(I wish I'd had fresh but you work with what you have)--cheese, some sauteed vidalia onions and sausage. and fresh cilantro. I think it turned out quite well.I've made the recipe a couple more times since then, each time mixing something closer to the 5:3 ratio Ruhlman recommends, and even though this dough is extremely different from the new york style pies I was making before, even if I go somewhere else with pizza from here on out, I know for certain I won't be going back. This is progress. And really, can you ever ask for more than that?

B-b-b-b-ben and jerry's!

2009-05-27T18:25:00.005-07:00

So it's been nearly a year since Dana and I made official with the state of California and God and stuff this union we'd been living in for quite a while, dragging from tiny apartment to tiny apartment, blue state to blue state. By this I mean to say that we got married. And it trips me out. I mean, it's wicked awesome--even if Dana didn't read and write this blog I would gladly say that--but it's so... it's so adult. I'm still trying to get past being picked on in high school and I'm married! How did that happen?! And that it's been a year since we actually did the whole processional thing, since we processed, I guess, is even more absurd. Somehow, this year has passed faster than any year of my life so far. I fear somehow that this is growth in its own right, an indication of a pattern. That every year that follows this will pass faster than the one before it until finally everything is buzzing on as quick and distant as satellites and then it'll be done. This is my fear, that this condensing of perceptional time will steal my life from me. Is this a reasonable fear? No, it is a crazy fear and I accept and acknowledge this, but it's my fear and I've just put it on display. You came for the food but you got the insecurity. You're welcome.

So I started that paragraph to say this: it's almost our first anniversary and this week Dana, flush with a devilishly perfect gift she'd just received from Amazon, couldn't wait.

She ambushed me in the hallway and said it: I can't wait. I was going to wait but I can't. I'm going to give it to you.

Don't, I said, thinking suddenly she meant to do me in, It's not time yet. What is it? Don't tell me.

She pulled it from behind her back and pushed a book in front of me. Happy Anniversary!

The Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Book had been sulking on my Amazon wishlist for months, all hand drawn kitsch and layers of abdominal fat and suddenly here it was in the hands of my wife (my wife!), in my hallway, staring me down. I immediately knew it was an almost incalculably perfect gift and truly, just as I'd suspected earlier, my undoing.

What better way to spend a long sort-of-unemployed summer than with a cookbook (if that's even an appropriate name as I've yet to find any cooking between these covers) that pushes you irrevocably to generate more and more velvety cold sweets? That urges you not only to numb your tongue to a disturbing polish against almost undetectable ice crystals but first to toil in inactivity for hours sweating on the couch reading bad novels while a cream mixture chills or continually turning the television up and up to cover the grind of the ice cream maker churning? What better summer is there than to have a hundred pages of reciped relief to try and only the agonizing inefficiency of your freezer to get in your way? Do you see? Do you see now why this would be fantastic and awful?

Man, let me put it this way, from everything I've heard, this is the One Ring of ice cream cookbooks. It is the ice cream to rule them all. You get that, don't you? Nerd.
So our first product from the book was simple, one might even say humble in its restraint. Here's how it went: I made brownies. And then I froze them. The next day, armed with a cup of that Hillcrest Dairy heavy cream that Dana mentioned in her last post, 2 cups of whole milk (which I bought originally to make yogurt, another story yet to form), 3/4 cup of sugar, 2 eggs, and a teaspoon of mint extract, I made a variation of the Ben & Jerry's original sweet cream base which forms this thick intensely creamy uncooked ice cream that, at least on the first day, does seem to approximate the richness of a B & J pint. In the last two minutes or so of mixing, I dumped in the frozen brownie bits and then removed the nascent ice cream from the maker (eating like a quarter of it "just to clear the spoon" as per my custom) and let it set in the freezer for a bit before really digging in in earnest.
Here's the bad news. I think that the fairly cakey brownies I made produced bits that couldn't stand up to the mixing process so instead of the rich chunks I hoped for, we got shards, nay even flecks of brownies on the edges of our spoons. Unsatisfying. The ice cream itself kicked ass but still I struggle interminably with the true problem of home ice cream making: if you don't go through the trouble of making a custard, you're going to get crystallization. By the second day in the freezer, the quart was starting to solidify a little, by the third I could not dig a spoon in for the awful icy sound it shuddered up the shaft.
Now here's the good news: this is a start. We've got lots of time to divine the ice cream recipe that will transcend our homiest of home kitchens. Even if everything seems to be happening super quickly, we're only a year into this marriage, only days into this book, we've got all the time in the world.

Strawberries & Cream Scones

2009-05-25T19:15:00.006-07:00

Okay, so I obviously have a problem. I know this. But I can't stop it with the strawberries. Due to the near-visible pollen levels in our apartment, I found myself at the grocery store again on Sunday in search of allergy medicine, and somehow - we'll never know how, exactly - another pint of strawberries made it into my basket. Let's just chalk it up to a time/space/strawberry rift and never speak of it again.

When I made the Strawberry Shortcake Cookies last week, I enjoyed eating them, but couldn't help but think they would be better as a breakfast food, and not a cookie. So earlier tonight I hybridized a scone recipe from this Martha Stewart scone and this Alton Brown version. The result? Buttery, flaky, scones that almost satisfy my strawberry desires.

Almost.

Strawberry & Cream Scones
Makes 15

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup cake flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup sugar
1 stick cold unsalted butter, cubed
1 cup fresh strawberries, cubed
3/4 cup cream (ours was from Hillcrest Dairy, and it was impossibly rich and creamy)
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk flour, salt, baking powder and sugar until combined. It's best to handle the dough as little as possible during this process, so cut in the butter with a pastry cutter until it forms coarse crumbs. Stir in strawberries and mix with a fork until berries are lightly covered in flour.

2. In a small bowl, whisk cream, egg and vanilla. Pour into flour mixture, then mix with fork until just combined. There should still be a little bit of flour left in the bowl.

3. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and flatten into a rough rectangle, approximately 1 inch thick, then cut into 15 triangles. Transfer to baking sheet and bake until golden brown, approximately 20 minutes. Cool on wire rack. Enjoy with tea.

This was, admittedly, not the most patriotic cooking activity I could have undertaken on Memorial Day, but whatever. Maybe I served them on a blue plate, okay? Get off my back, man! Who are you, the pastry police?

I thought you were cool.