Category Archives: Food

Foodie Tuesday: Bechamel Mucho (Songs for a Saucy Character)

Posted on by
14

photocollage + textI love sauce. Saucing a great dish properly is a little bit like creating the right music to shape a fine piece of text: suddenly this new dimension brings out a whole range of new and beautiful textures and nuances that were lying there in wait all along but are awakened by the new partnership into something even deeper and lovelier. Words and music. Food and sauce.

Sing along with me, if you will. Bésame Mucho! Glorious things happen in the kitchen, love is brought to light, when the sauce is a-simmer. It’s enough to make a clodhopper like me sing and dance. (Sensitive readers, please avert your eyes, or you’ll end up wanting to evert them.)

One of the best things about saucing is that it doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult to have a great impact on a dish. The prime example of this, natürlich, is a simple deglaze–one additional ingredient that brings a lot of happiness to the dinner party. It’s nothing more than a way to rinse the pan with any fitting liquid that will loosen all of the good fond, or browned goodies and drippings, left in the pan in which the dish’s main ingredients were cooked. It can be kept nice and thin and loose or further reduced to thicken, either easy without adding a single other ingredient, or it can form the friendly base for yet more monkeying around. All good!

photo

Sometimes all it takes is a nice loose juice to deglaze the pan . . .

Which brings me to another great and lovable thing about sauces. There are such an enormous number of possible combinations of ingredients, proportions, and techniques that I’d bet any cook worth her salt (never mind all of the other ingredients) could cook her way through a long and delicious life without ever repeating a single sauce precisely. Almost frightening, that, but really quite exciting and encouraging in its way. A restaurant chef’s career depends on just the opposite, that she be able to reproduce to a virtually molecular level the same sauce over and over, meal by meal, dish by dish, once it’s on the menu. Patrons will rebel if given any surprises or disappointments. But the home cook, if his family is the least bit adventuresome or just plain ravenous, has the possibility of playing with his food and, if he’s lucky, discovering in the process the next world’s favorite. Or at least his wife’s.

Even the classic sauces offer incredible opportunity for invention, if you can master the basic form. Bechamel, salsa verde, Bolognese, hoisin, barbecue sauce, mole, tartar sauce. Me, I’m not such a master of basics. But I eventually figure my way around things, with enough expert guidance from my various kitchen muses in person or through recipes and other forms of fabulous foodie folklore. I try a whole bunch of different versions and variations and mess around, I read up, I lick the spoon, I experiment on all of my friends and loved ones (and I sincerely apologize for whatever culinary atrocities I may have perpetrated over the years against any undeserving parties), and I work my way around to sauces that I’m willing to try repeating, or that I even get asked for again. Sometimes it’s a long, puzzling path of kitchen adventure that leads to a complex and subtle sauce. Sometimes it’s just the joyful re-creation of a straightforward childhood favorite, and no less welcome on the plate or on the tongue.

So in closing today, I commend to you my very favorite variation on perhaps my very favorite sauce. I am mad for Hollandaise. In particular, my lifelong love is the Hollandaise version I learned from my mother, who learned it long ago from Queen Betty Crocker. It’s not an old-school French version with vinegar or white wine, it’s purely eggs, lemon juice and butter. I’m such a down-home bumpkin that I like it best made with [really top quality] butter that is <horrors!> salted. I’ve even learned that I like it quite well if I just hot up a cup of butter with two tablespoons of lemon juice until nice and sizzly, pour it into a blender, and spin it while I drop a couple of pretty whole farm fresh eggs right in, and watch it whiz while it quickly cooks the eggs just enough to thicken into a ridiculously delicious “instant” whole-egg Hollandaise that I will happily eat on fish, on pasta, on pork, on sautéed greens, on (sure!) Eggs Benedict, on sweet fresh fruit, on a shortbread, on a spoon. What can I say, I have a lemony Hollandaise <ahem!> problem. Thankfully, there’s not yet a twelve-step program to cure me, so I can keep on indulging my addiction as long as I like.

That, my friends, is sweet music to my ears.

photo

Sing along with me again . . . shall we have a little Monteverdi this time?

Foodie Tuesday: Everything in Due Season, If You Happen to Have That Sort of Thing

Posted on by
12
photo

Don't you just love autumn, with its colors toasted by the long summer sun, its air wafting with spice and earth . . .

I am very fond of autumn, at least what I think of as autumn. It signals the waning of the full ripening cycle of living and fruiting things on the earth, an anticipatory time when wind should be sweeping out old leaves and old habits and letting in the last cracked-open windows and doors an air of things to come. I’m having a little trouble getting my personal clock synchronized to believe it’s autumn right now, though. Sliding ever so gradually out of a blast-furnace summer so that temperatures in the middle of the night are still too warm for a coat and the roses and cosmos decide they can finally get into bloom–in October–contradicts my sense of logic when juxtaposed with being back in the school-and-concert season. And don’t get me started on the two-week “winter” thing!

I don’t dislike the virtually perpetual bathing in sunlight, no, you’re never going to hear a serious complaint from a SAD-sack like me about too much light, but I find the whole thing just a little confusing. I didn’t come from a land of perfectly defined, archetypal seasons, either, but there was a certain rhythm and temperature change that even in the temperate northwest tended to make me think seasonal thoughts with relative ease. So I could really get behind the whole logic of eating seasonally as well as locally. Up to a point. See, out there I had, admittedly, an overabundance of a whole range of foods available fresh and nearby for a bigger chunk of the calendar year than those living in more truly distinct seasonal climates could have. I might have to trade out one fish or vegetable for another, even one fruit for another, from month to month, but having a truckload of choices at all times spoils one for having to think very hard.

Here in Texas it seems there’s an even finer line between when you can and can’t get foods at their peak. So if I’m not getting clues from the outside temperature or the scent of the air, I’m having to rely more heavily on more artificial indicators of What It’s Time to Do, culinarily speaking. Frankly, it’s still picnic-and-popsicle weather around here when we’re practically hitting Midterms and the first big flurry of constant recitals and concerts of the year, and I feel, well, a little weird wearing sandals and short sleeves to attend those things. I’m almost grateful that most indoor events tend to be overenthusiastic with the air blowers so that the air conditioning requires my bundling up indoors, at least, even if I can’t do so outdoors yet.

Meanwhile, all of the food writers I love and all of the sitcoms and stores and advertisers are conspiring to tell me it’s long since time for pumpkins and braised lamb shanks and don’t forget, Talking Turkey, because as well all know, Thanksgiving has already happened in Canada and that means it’s headed our way! I just can’t quite reconcile the whole thing. It’s not that I don’t find pretty much everything not nailed down quite delicious regardless of time of day, month, or year if it’s available–sometimes it’s all about whether it seems right.

So I leaned ever so slightly off the summer chuckwagon when I made lunch the other day, because even if the weather refuses to cooperate with my sense of seasonal propriety, I’m darned well going to have a touch of autumn. I don’t suppose, when it comes right down to brass tacks, that there are limits to what tastes good at any given time, so if I can lay hands on it and it’s not so artificially shelf-stabilized as to have the half-life of radium, I guess I need to just make my own seasons here.

photo

Duck breast with wine sauce, carrot chips and bok choy

I kept the preparation simple both because it’s my M.O. and because anything more demanding would’ve taken enough time to kill off my urge for something a tad autumnal, as I’d break a very unladylike sweat in these temperatures if I got the least bit hyperactive in the kitchen. Duck breast sous vide is, I must say, a dandy and handy fix. I figured if the maximum time recommended for medium-rare duck breast s-v was about eight hours, the same temperature for a lot longer could bring it to the edge of confit, and so it was. All that remained by the time I’d put together a dish of quick steamed bok choy in light ginger-lime-soy-sesame dressing and reduced a handful of blackberries, a cup of Merlot and a knob of butter to a syrup and strained it and sweetened it up with a spoonful of Texas red plum jam was to sear the duck skin and plate it all up. As usual I took an exceedingly casual approach to the latter action (as you can see above), which was just as well because those pieces of duck hadn’t a hope of staying in neat perky little slices by the time they’d been virtually melted. In that condition, they would in fact make pretty fabulous tender shredded duck tacos, the direction I suspect I’ll take next time I lay hands on el pato fantástico. If it looks like a taco and quacks like a taco . . . .

So at last I’ve started edging my way toward eating something that at least sounds more autumnal to me than all of the stuff I’ve felt right eating up to now. Perhaps feeding my sense of the season by the forkful will have a better chance of getting me in an autumn frame of mind than what the relentlessly summery weather has managed to do so far. Otherwise, I’ll wait too long and it’ll be winter I’m having to invent, so I’d best get moving on this or I’ll hardly have myself ready for all of the necessary delights awaiting me.

photo

All seasons have their gifts . . .

Foodie Tuesday: The New Miracle Diet that will Give You X-ray Vision, Eidetic Memory and the Pheromones to Attract Every Sexy Human You can Possibly Want!!!

Posted on by
21
photo

If the Perfect Miracle Food were the food you despised most, would you eat a barrel of it anyway?

I’m beside myself [Ed: yes, right over here] with ecstasy that we live in an age where we’re constantly receiving updates apparently teleported, straight from God’s lips, on new life-saving Superfoods and diet strategies that will bring about world peace and end the shortage of sporty convertibles in our time. I realize that as long as there have been hucksters and hyperbolists that could spell Snake Oil there have been such claims filling the air and jamming our brainwaves with unrealistic wishful optimism. Purveyors of serious science and common sense have both long since given up on the possibility of coming to a definitive answer to the perpetual question of what’s good for us to eat, at least one on which all sentient beings can agree. That never stops anyone from trying either to discover it or to convince us (with our remarkably flexible wallet-hinges) that they have.

But the modern info-bombardment wherein we swim encourages us to see, hear and believe an ever-noisier, ever more enthusiastic and far-reaching set of claims to this Truth. Amazing! Astounding! and the ever-popular exclamation that I so love, Incredible! (As if I can’t tell just from the obnoxious typography of the advert and the hilariously awful before-and-after unretouched photos that there’s nothing remotely credible to be found in the accompanying claims.) Scientists are almost as guilty of outrageous claims as anyone, in this environment where every research program has to compete for every dime with not only every other genuine researcher but also the whole phalanx of false prophets and their wonderful platinum-plated products. It takes only a tiny effort for the completely uninformed amateur to sleuth out at least two diametrically opposed studies on any given dietary claim that have produced what looks and sounds like fairly convincing data, so I am loath to do anything more dramatic than take it all with a grain of salt.

photo

. . . and how do you prefer your sodium chloride: hickory smoked or deep fried?

Which, indeed, is what I will likely do. Hey, there are enough mutually exclusive authorities regarding how much sodium is permissible in whose diet and in what forms to keep a whole herd of elk dying in wait for the salt lick. I’m fond enough of being alive and not feeling like, say, I’m in imminent danger of keeling over with toxins squirting out of every pore of my body while I disintegrate to dirty swamp water like the alien in a 50s B-movie that I do try on the average to put things into my mouth with a modicum of moderation and thoughtfulness. I look for what seems to make me feel my best and work to include that in my meals rather than always succumbing to the lure of the luridly unhealthy.

It just seems to me that we have actually been living for a bit right in the middle of Woody Allen‘s Sleeper. Regardless of your view on Woody Allen movies, I’m nearly at the point where I think all school health classes should be required to see that film at some juncture in their studies just for the scenes where hero Miles Monroe is brought out of his cryogenic sleep and is coached by his attending doctors on how the understanding of health has changed in the two hundred years while he was snoozing on ice. There’s something almost eerily familiar nowadays when reputable researchers and doctors from every corner are admitting that perhaps not all of our longtime religiously held convictions about sugars, fats, proteins and all of those other pesky elements of edibles we fear and worship are exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. That perhaps there is a bit more difference in how one person or another is affected, and how good or evil that might be.

All I can say is, it’s kind of a relief to think that I don’t have total control over my destiny through what I ingest, so I’m going to continue to consider myself a so-far live experiment subject willing to undergo certain tests to see what can be most deliciously survived in my lifetime. Come on over and chow down with me, and don’t get too hung up on it, okay? There’s too much edible, drinkable goodness of every kind just hovering on the edge of my ken for me not to show it some respect and appreciation. Amen, let’s eat.

photo collage

So many tasty choices, so little time . . .

Foodie Tuesday: Beauty is in the Tastebuds of the Beholder

Posted on by
8
photo

Zest for life, zest for food, zest for art: all "customized" by our own tastes . . .

I give myself credit for being a tolerably decent cook. Once in a blue moon I even fuss with fancy-schmancy cookery or baking, but less often with every passing year. As it is, I’m mostly far too impatient to get to the actual eating to consider fooling around with any processes that delay that significantly. For a visual artist, I’m shockingly laissez-faire about plating and presentation, and depend on the goodwill and patience of those at table with me to get me past that part of the meal to the part where I get to play human forklift.

Now, I have great admiration for those who are serious and artful chefs, and I certainly prefer to feast upon delicious, rather than fit-only-for-subsistence, foods. And if those foods are a feast for the other senses as well, why that’s nigh unto nirvana. But mostly that happens at other people’s hands, others’ tables. I’m too busy concentrating on not eating the entire meal while preparing it to devote much attention to subtleties of composition. When I’m a guest in another’s dining room, it’s everything a piggy like me can do to feign manners enough to keep from leaning over my dessert with a maniacal tooth-baring slaver that belies the need for utensils while I wait for the host to take that first bite. A picture comes to my mind of our former neighbor Everett, so in love with both carpentry and helping out, that when he knew a project was afoot at our place across the street he would place his lawn chair at the front of his open garage and perch on the edge of it in runner’s-starting-block position, gripping his favorite Sawzall® at the ready, for the moment when he might be summoned to join in the party.

Likewise, I never have much in the way of photo documentation of any culinary successes I have, because those are usually dived into and massacred unceremoniously even as the last sprig of fresh herbs or the final flourish of confectioners’ sugar is drifting down to alight upon them. Yes, I have made heaps of glistening handmade pork jiao-zi, a mountainous mocha Intercontinental torte, delicate Norwegian-style fishcakes with dainty potetkaker (fat mini-lefse potato cakes) dripping with butter on the side, steamed zucchini blossoms stuffed with scented couscous, homemade rosemary pasta with wild mushroom cream sauce, and many more such dishes and meals over the years. I have fussed and fiddled with sauces and garnishes meant to make a sultan sigh with admiration. But dang it, when the perfume gets too heady and the urgency to get this stuff on the board gets too intense, well, how can anyone blame a poor ordinary cook and unbridled scarfer-of-foods if the comestibles get hustled to table and everybody just puts his head down, knife up, and plunges in?

There is the additional problem of what some foods look like in the first place. I’m not talking about the delightfully horror-movie appearance of a freshly caught monkfish or that sort of thing, but about the kinds of delicious dishes that resist being prettied up. Food stylists and top-flight chefs find ways around this all the time, but in truth, there’s not much point in gussying up a mousse. It is what it is.

photo

Two words. Peaches. Cream. That is all.

In the case of this mousse from last week, I didn’t even bother to fool much with the fineness of the puree, since I like the slightly chunky chew of the peaches that emerges in each spoonful of otherwise creamy texture. Okay, I went so far as to put the dessert in tall stemmed glasses and even powder the top of the servings with a bit of good ground cinnamon, so that the scent of them would be that much closer to the diners’ noses in case the odd brownish-orange color and irregular texture were a teeny bit suspect. But I wouldn’t necessarily trade in for a prettier appearance the simple richness of peaches caramelized deeply in vanilla and cinnamon and  butter and then pulverized to blend with lightly sweetened heavy cream. That’s just my set of priorities, you see.

photo

I'm told it's all about the quality of the ingredients, anyway . . .

I have eaten and heard described plenty of dishes that start out with individual ingredients that simply oughtn’t to have been invited to the same party, so there’s a certain incompleteness to the general rule of ingredient-quality = finished-dish-quality, but the converse is so definitively true that it’s best to rely on this side of the equation. The most elaborate and skillful preparation of kæstur hákarl (the classic rotten shark preparation) is still going to taste like rotten shark, so either get with the Icelandic program and learn to enjoy it on its own merits or don’t be serving it in puff pastry with sugarcrafted butterflies on it. (Sheesh, at least you could put sugarcrafted arctic foxes on it.) Even I with my limited-experience palate and low tolerance for foods not appreciated outside of their native cultural circles will know something’s just not right.

I’ll take a slightly sloppy looking plateful of hearty and unpretentious homemade goodness any day. Especially if the singular parts of it are fabulous ingredients and haven’t been ridiculously tortured in the process. Then the only danger is if you get in the way of my ninja-like attack on the dish with my gleaming cutlery. I can only keep up the guise of manners for so long, my dears.

Foodie Tuesday: Everything You See I Owe to Omnivorousness

Posted on by
7
photo

". . . zee spites of life . . ."

Sophia Loren is on record as having attributed her, erm, attributes thus: “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.” Following in her pulchritudinous footsteps, supermodel Laetitia Casta claimed “my breasts were made in Normandy from butter and creme fraiche.” I can tell you from experience that eating plenty of the aforementioned prescriptions doesn’t in any way guarantee one will become a siren–more likely, a zeppelin, if one applies the medicines too assiduously. I can even say that sometimes, as Pogo’s lady-skunk admirer Mam’selle Hepzibah referred to l’amour itself, food is “zee spites of life”–both the spice and the bane of existence. My love of food becomes at times something of an amour-propre, in which I am shaped by my love of food and in turn, my self-image is affected by my disaffection with my shape. But I can also tell you that I know this is not only an extremely common complaint but also one I am inclined to ignore and suppress, thanks to my adoration of food and the eating thereof.

I am an unregenerate omnivore of sorts; while there are a few (probably previously mentioned) foods I eschew to chew, they are generally in no way designated unwanted because of moral, ethical, logical, political, practical or physiological reasons. Yes, that’s changing a bit as my old carcase ages enough to begin objecting on its own to some things that weren’t previously non-grata on my plata. So as I said before, I am hunting up alternatives to wheat, for example, and finding that I lean toward some foods more as a way of leaning away from others I’d long eaten now that they don’t agree with my innards as well as they once did. The rest only gets avoided if I just plain don’t get its appeal, whether it’s a textural or flavor-based or conceptual thing. As for the objections others may have to a food for any of the above-named reasons or any others, for that matter, I am able to find plenty of things to like and overfill myself with in almost any setting, so if I need to lay off the red-in-tooth-and-nail eating while dining with my vegetarian companions, I can happily do so; if it’s time I got more kosher or halal because I’m at table with friends for whom that’s important, I can swing that way too.

photo

I can be semi-well-behaved when I really have to. I even learned to make wheat-free lemon shortbread to be kinder and gentler to the digestive attachments of my sweet tooth, but still . . .

But chances are pretty good that when left to my own devices, I’m going to eat a whole lot of whatever looks, smells and tastes good to me at the moment, and rare indeed are the moments when something or other doesn’t appeal. If the offerings in question should happen to be loaded with butter and eggs, taste rich and sweet and salty, have a juicy dash of ripe fruit and lavish lashings of cheese and avocado and chocolate and perhaps be sided with a rasher of excellent smoky bacon, look out! I’ve worked very steadily over the years to achieve my one form of womanly curvaceousness, that burgeoning bulge at my equator, and while it’s easy to maintain, I don’t recommend that you get between me and the buffet table at any inconvenient juncture or I can’t be held responsible for your safety. Just sayin’. Think I’ll go poach me an egg.

photo

At least edible perfection doesn't have to be complicated!

Foodie Tuesday: Currying Favor

Posted on by
8
graphite drawing

Everybody's curry is a unique and distinctive creature; the joy of curry is in its endless possibilities and the multi-layered adventure of its making and eating . . .

The request was in last evening: curry for dinner today. It’s perfectly understandable to me why so many people in so many cultures have embraced so many versions of this wildly versatile and varied ‘something-in-a-sauce’ meal, centered on a highly personalized and customized blend of spices. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a curry I didn’t like, from spicy vegetarian to earthy goat to sweet prawn or fruited chicken. I like curries as soups, with bread or noodles or rice, or as lashings of a more restrained saucing version over nearly any tasty food, sweet or savory or both.

I make the world’s easiest and most flexible version of a curry meal, because I’m notorious for never being able to do the same thing the same way twice, and because of my equally well-known laziness. Our household version is pretty bulletproof. Two ingredients: masala and coconut milk. Throw together in a pot and simmer and mellow the sauce until it’s ready, adding whatever I see fit to combine for the day’s version of goodness. It’s handy that a curry concoction can easily be assembled on the fly, using what’s available in pantry and fridge, if (as today) the rest of the day gets a bit cluttered with Doings. There’s not much food that doesn’t play nicely with curry if given half a chance.

The heart and soul of any curry is the masala, the spice blend, and there are countless good pre-made versions on the market. I’m fortunate to have a grand recipe I can whizz up myself, thanks to the good kitchen sense and generosity of my parents’ late friend Q (who really did go by his first initial). The curry powder recipe he shared with us is one of those that requires a fairly lengthy list of spices, some a little less easily found in the average grocery but all well worth the hunt. Once you’ve laid hands on all the ingredients, all you really have to do is grind them together (I use a dedicated little coffee grinder), and you get about a cup and a half of pure 24k turmeric-colored gold.

photo

Q's famous Kincurry--hide your stash when the foodie marauders head into the kitchen!

This is a sweet curry base–it takes a fair quantity to get it hot-spicy, though it can be about as spicy as you want to make it with that sort of adjustment. It goes mighty well with any meat or seafood or vegetable goodness, and is plenty tasty with sweeter things, from fruits to desserts, too. And it stains like boy-howdy, but hey, a good curry is certainly worth losing a good shirt over, if it comes to that.

The drill around my stove is: mix a copious amount of good coconut milk with however much of my precious curry masala I’m in the mood to use, and let it steep for as long as I wish with whatever I’m hungry to add. I am, by the way, fussy about the coconut milk, but not in the way you might think. While I have great admiration for those dedicated folk who make their own exquisitely crafted coconutty deliciousness by bisecting a fresh coconut and processing its innards carefully into perfect homemade coconut milk, I find there are plenty of things I’m quite content to let others fuss over to make my kitchen time easier, thank you very much. My prejudice is for a particular brand of canned coconut milk (nope, I’m not a paid promoter), Chaokoh. Ever since my Thai college roommate introduced me to this elixir I’ve found no other that compared. And yes, folks, I use it straight and undiluted from the tin. If you think your need for “good fats” doesn’t include this indulgence, I think you’re wrong. But go ahead and cheat yourself if you must. The only way I’ve been known to adulterate the stuff in the way of ‘thinning’ it is with homemade chicken broth. Which I do skim, but geez, if you take all of the schmalz out of it you take too away many of the good fats and nutrients, not to mention any genuine Jewish Penicillin in there.

Meanwhile, back at the cooker, there’s a saucy slurry just waiting for everybody to get in the hot tub. Today it was sliced celery, roughly chopped red capsicum, brown mushrooms, and cubed chicken breast and beefsteak, all having been browned first in the cast iron skillet with plenty of ghee, then deglazed with just enough water to grab all of that fabulous fond before diving together into the waiting curry. I didn’t have a lot of time to let it brew today because of the afternoon’s appointments and chores elsewhere, so I had let the coconut milk-curry masala hang about together over low heat beforehand and hoped the quick browning of the solids with a little grey salt and black pepper would bring enough caramelized nuance to the party that the quick coming together would suffice. All of that got scooped onto brown buttered Basmati rice at the table and finished with however much anybody wanted of sliced almonds and a batch of sweetened shredded coconut I’d toasted this afternoon with lots of sesame seeds and a little ground cardamom.

photo with wooden spoon

Sweet garniture . . .

I do like the simplicity of a one-dish meal, even if it’s got a few side components in the way of toppings and pickles and chutneys and garnishes and assorted whatnots. I don’t think anyone left the table starved. Just to be safe I did pass around a few homemade chocolate nut truffles for dessert. I make them in a very homely knife-cut style, but I think of them as the proverbial Smart Girl in the Class: maybe not as universally popular for her unconventional looks as the stereotypical hottie cheerleaders, but wins out on brains and talent and outstanding sense of humor every time. We geeky girls do have our ways. I’m going to assume that our houseguest’s cheerful accusation that I’m a temptress says that dinner went okay, anyway. It sure wasn’t the t-shirt, jeans and mules I potted around in for a weekday of work and errands that inspired the remark. Yup, must be the curry talking!

Foodie Tuesday: Bad News/Good News/Bad News

Posted on by
4
photo

Neither photogenic nor as much tastier than photogenic as it should have been . . .

The true food bloggers and kitchen mavens have it all over me when it comes to fully celebrating food in the manner it deserves. Take my lunch the other day (please!). It seemed like a good idea: cream of roasted cauliflower soup with a spoonful of buttery mushrooms on top. Nice and simple and earthy. Turns out, it was too simple, to the point of being about as bland as a children’s book written by well-intentioned Educators. I ate it, being a pietist of my own sort, but not with any particular enjoyment. I should have had the dedication to re-season the soup, but I wasn’t committed enough at the moment. The sautéed mushrooms, it turned out, only emphasized the soup’s lack of valor. A mild, but still a little irksome, moment of appetite suppression that didn’t match up to my original plan at all. The upside of it was that I was sufficiently fueled to fix up a much better dinner by the time my spouse headed home. If I cook up something disappointing, at least I’d rather it’s not when I’m sharing the food!

The week has been a little like that–mistakes and false starts punctuated and rescued by recoveries and rediscoveries.

There was the pantry light that was less and less frequently willing to be switched off until its pull-chain switch finally just broke entirely. It was good that the light was stuck “on” so that we could still find things in the pantry, but bad in that even with a low-e bulb it still heated up the little room, not very welcome in food storage at all but especially when the ambient temp here has been ridiculously high for so long. The other positive that came out of it was the motivation to replace the old ceramic shadeless utility fixture with an actual glassed light fixture, though I can’t say I enjoyed crouching atop my stepladder and angled over the pantry shelf at about 85 degrees Fahrenheit for even as long as it took to wire in a new little lamp. I’ll admit I do like the slightly more diffused light and appreciate the ability to once again turn it on and off, so I will concede that it was time to do the deed.

Then we started seeing ants, more ants, lots of ants around the kitchen. And we’d just had our quarterly household pest-control visitation in the last couple of weeks. At first I’d thought these were just refugees fleeing the spray-guy’s weaponry, but clearly the activity was beginning to build rather than subside. Great! A family of carpenter ants with resistance to our accustomed defense systems. But when I called the pest-control company this morning they sent “my” guy right on out, no waiting. Now, I like him not only because he’s a nice guy who comes when contacted and because he generally manages our bug problems quickly and thoroughly. This man, however, endeared himself to us immediately on his first visit by hooking us up with the best New York style pizza around this area (in a hole in the wall strip mall joint run by New York expats). You know you’ve found a good contractor when he can recommend first class food of any kind.

Today’s bug-fixing visit was a detailed reinspection and treatment with a new combination of baits and poisons and so forth, and certainly the ants visible during my rescuer’s efforts were not inured to this particular combo, so I am hopeful. The inspection and injection, however, required our moving most of the furniture in the affected rooms and most of the kitchen’s pantry and cupboard contents as well. And of course there were dead and dying ants all over the place. Sorry, I’m just not very zen about sharing my home, particularly my food storage areas, with indoor bugs. There was no doubt that at the end of it I would be facing a major household cleaning. The very good thing about the kitchen semi-demolition, however, was the usual one that when the contents of pantry and cupboards and counters get disturbed it’s amazing how much I discover that I’d put out of sight, out of mind or simply forgotten where it was stashed. Amazing that in less than a year since our move in I have managed to get that absent-minded and inattentive about things, but I suppose that’s not as uncommon as I think it is.

In any case, it was inspiring enough to overhaul the entire kitchen; I couldn’t even resist a foray into the freezer, though I’m reasonably certain that neither ants nor pest-control contractor visited in that particular corner of the room.

photo

And in this corner . . .

In any event, it was nice to rediscover a few food strays here and there that will undoubtedly whet my appetite for various forgotten dishes and treats in the near future. The freezer reminded me that I have a pair of modest lobster tails (thank you, there are some kinds of bugs I love) sealed up in there that will surely make a nice treat soon, perhaps with a little hollandaise, my all-time favorite seafood sauce; but I must tell you that I think no haute chef’s classic version or fussy variation of hollandaise matches the version I love best, the one my mother always made from the old Betty Crocker cookbook that’s purely egg yolks and lemon juice and a ton of butter. Meanwhile, I dug up and re-corralled a bunch of other favorite condiments in the pantry, from sauces to preserved lemons to pickled jalapenos and chipotles en adobo to Asian fried shallots. Sigh. Hidden treasures revealed.

Of course I couldn’t do so much tidying without simultaneously making a mess. When I was installing the light fixture, it was catching my sleeve on something that upset a bottle of vinegar from a shelf, sending the bottle headfirst onto the tile floor where it exploded in a shower of intensely fragrant miniscule glass shards and balsamic spray. Today it was turning around only to hear my favorite measuring pitcher (you know the one, you’ve got one too that’s got exactly the combination of measurements you most often use, in the size and shape of pitcher that’s most perfect to fit your favorite whisk, spatula, spoon or single-recipe-amount of any- and everything) overbalance and fall with a sharp crack on those same beautiful but deadly tiles. Goodbye, sweet kitchen tool.

photo

Not a tragedy in the classical sense, perhaps, but still . . .

I’m glad to say that despite my utter lack of grace and athletic skills I am not generally a complete and horrific klutz either. So I’ll be a tad more vigilant and hope that I’ve gotten my major kitchen hijinks out of my system for a little bit now and get on with fixing and eating. And I am certainly glad that there was the impetus, however unwelcome its various pesky sources may have been, to get ‘down and dirty’ in order to be cleaner and more efficient and well-organized in the kitchen again for a while. There is definitely a kind of contentment for me in just looking at a space that has been newly neatened and unveiled, and I know it will lead to more thoughtful cookery for a little while as well. Next soup will surely be much better!

photo

. . . and don't get me started on the joys of a stack of freshly washed kitchen linens or bar towels!

“It’s Complicated” with Orange

Posted on by
7
blurred taxi photo

Any color is fraught with meaning, and all relationships are fraught, yet . . .

Maybe it’s a little odd, my having an eccentrically complex relationship with that simple secondary color. Not that I dislike it; the fabulousness of a flaming sunset at the end of the day is hard to argue, and a spectacular orange koi is a worthy showstopper. Lots of things I really admire, even crave, are orange in fact. After all, the orange fruit and all of its showy tangerine and kumquat cousins are pretty, cheery, and refreshingly delish.

But orange still has some slightly off-putting associations for me that keep it as a color generally restrained from entering my go-to list of favorites. The aforementioned fruit might even share in the blame. I’m sure I’m not the first kid in history that thought oranges and mandarins exceedingly tasty except for those pesky un-chewable and indigestible segment membranes. But I may have been in the minority when my solution to that problem was to bypass them, not by spitting empty membranes out indecorously or rudely refusing to eat the food proffered by my kindly parents, but by squirreling them away in my cheek and not swallowing them. Clearly it can’t have been a particularly delicious solution, since the least desirable part of the treat was what remained the longest, but apparently I was too prim and simplistic to have thought the whole procedure through. Further, how I intended to cope with the skeletal remains in the long term if I wasn’t gutsy enough to just spit and throw them away I cannot quite imagine, but clearly the extended timeline was an abstraction beyond the scope of a person of my then so limited life-experience. All I can say is that the experiment was short-lived. When I arrived home after a whole morning’s outing and, on being parentally interrogated about my assumedly pleasant adventures, remained mum, a quick investigation revealed the impacted concretion of orange-leavings jammed up like snus by my gums. I was given a quick course on the proper technique for eating a whole orange section, which to my dismay involved actual swallowing and digestion of the part I didn’t much like. Ah, well, I managed to overcome my disappointment and learn to love the fruit in a slightly more grown-up fashion after that.

Though we are taught at a reasonably young age to watch out for those mercilessly careening yellow and orange cars that make up the majority of the (somewhat heedlessly) speedy American taxi fleet, I’ve certainly never been directly menaced by one–and there are times when there’s no more welcome sight that one hustling to my rescue when it’s wanted. Still, l have moments when the color, seen just peripherally on the move, gives me an instinctive urge to throw myself headlong into a safe ditch or behind a brick building. It might at least prove highly entertaining to those nearby, but it makes me just a bit more paranoid than it ought to when I’m on a city sidewalk.

Another youthful experience that may have colored my feelings about the color orange involved my initial foray into fashion. The first time my parents let me choose my very own garment, the object of my affection was an orange coat. Not just any orange coat, mind you, but a pint-sized, short-length, fake fur trenchcoat-styled warmer in brilliant Safety Orange. You know the color: they make road cones that color to keep you from driving your pickup truck into the sinkhole that just swallowed Highway 2. The warning tape quarantining an anthrax zone is that color. Deadly toadstools warn off marauding fauna with that color. And I chose a coat that was not only that color, but loudly and proudly so in plush fake fur. I must assume that it is the clearest possible confirmation of my parents’ unswerving and unconditional love of their offspring that they not only allowed me to have the coat but to wear it and be seen with them in public. Though children can reasonably be said to look cute in pretty much any old thing they do or do not wear, I think it’s also fair to say that no color has yet been invented that was less likely to flatter my skin tones, let alone give me the air of sophistication I imagine I was expecting from the thing.

That, however, is just what is so odd about my orangey-astic feelings. I felt myself a modern and cosmopolitan woman of distinction in that coat. My adult recoil at picturing the silliness of it in no way matches the love that I remember having for that ridiculously orange fur blob of a coat. No sight is more pleasing than that of a friendly orange taxicab pulling up to the curb at my command. My irritation at eating something with the flavor and consistency of strapping tape in no way diminishes my craving at certain times for a luscious juicy segment of a perfectly simple ripe Navel orange.

I’m complicated that way.

Foodie Tuesday: She’s Completely Nutbar, but isn’t She Sweet?

Posted on by
6
photo closeup

Won't You be My Baby, Oh, Honeycomb . . .

There’s little that can’t be improved by the addition of a sticky slick of raw local honey. I’ll concede that there might be something, but it doesn’t come to mind immediately. I could contentedly eat spoonfuls until comatose if it weren’t for the smidgen of good manners and even smaller atom of good sense preventing it.

Today’s supper was one of the times I restrained my sugar-rush inclinations, since I was making R’s favorite coleslaw and, with him persevering toward complete blood sugar control without the aid of medications, who am I to stand in the way of such valor? So I made the slaw with a natural non-sugar sweetener. But I still slipped just a hint of sugar into the mix, because the salad wouldn’t be entirely his favorite without his favorite add-in. It’s about the easiest ‘dish’ to throw together, if you can actually call something so ridiculously simple a dish. I’m no purist, so if you have strong Feelings about everything being homemade, organic, locally sourced, and so forth, you’ll probably want to squint a little during the next section to avoid unnecessary annoyance and then revise as needed to meet your needs.

Stupid-Easy Sweet Cole Slaw

Throw together everything ‘to taste’: Shredded cabbage (yeah, I’m often wonderfully lazy and use the pre-shredded slaw mix with red and green cabbage and carrots); lime juice, sweetener (honey is, of course, wonderful–or dark agave syrup, or sugar of any kind, whatever floats your cabbage-eating boat); a spoonful of mayonnaise (I’m still fond of good ol’ Hellman’s classic artery-hardener); add-ins.

So: cabbage, lime juice, sweetness, mayo and Fun Stuff.

The add-in of choice in this house is minced pickled sushi ginger.

Other goodies sometimes join the party: sesame seeds, toasted sliced almonds, chopped apple . . . whatever fun yummy junk is on hand, pretty much. It’s the ginger that I think of as the personality of the House Slaw, and anything that complements that is welcome along for the ride. But most of the time, it’s just the basic ingredients chez nous.

It was the other day that I got my honey fix. The day I went Nutbar. When the man of the house is away at any of his various work-related salt mines, I indulge in both foods that Mr Supertaster can’t or won’t eat and also in a bit of sugary madness. I made some chewy granola-style bars that work pretty nicely as a breakfast or brunch munch, especially with a nice spoonful of thick Greek yogurt drizzled with the aforementioned lovely honey and a toss of crispy carrot chips.

You’re going to sense a trend here: I’m all about the lazy approach. I love to eat what tastes delicious to me, but I have to really be in a certain rare mood to get into the groove of fixing super elaborate and labor intensive foods. More often I’m pleased to spend a day or two of heavy lifting in the kitchen in order to ‘put up’ a big, divisible, freeze-able batch of something that we can dig into at will over the next however-long. A slow cooker loaded with broth fixings is a common enough happening, mainly because I can use the resulting broth so many different ways, and also because it takes so little effort in total to throw a batch of prepared bones, roughly chopped mirepoix, herbs and spices and the like into the cooker and let it go for a long, slow simmer. I’ve got the straining thing down to a science, having learned to line a big pasta-strainer pot with a clean flour sack dish towel, spoon the skeletal remains out of the broth with a big sturdy spider, and dump the rest of the crock into the lined pot. Then all I have to do is hoist the pasta strainer high enough to lift out the dish towel by its corners, give that a quick squeeze to get the rest of the soupy goodness to flow through, empty the grisly remains in the trash, and pour up my broth for cooling. Lots of mileage off of a very humble process and the unfussiest of ingredients.

About those Nutbars. Again, easy-peasy. Simple contents, very simply prepared, not difficult to store, and quick-as-a-bunny to grab and nibble.

nutbars, yogurt & honey, carrot chips

. . . and you thought I was referring to my sanity when I said "Nutbar".

Going Nutbar

Ingredients: nuts, seeds, dried fruits, butter, spices, whey protein powder and gelatin, sweetening and salt.

I filled my trusty Tupperware 8-cup measuring pitcher with about 6 cups of mixed almonds (whole, raw), roasted/lightly salted macadamia nuts, dried dates and figs and apricots, and a handful of candied ginger, and filled in the gaps between all of them with about 3 good scoops of vanilla whey protein powder, a handful of raw sesame seeds, and a healthy dose of cinnamon with hints of cardamom, mace and cloves. I pulsed all of that mix in the blender in batches until it was all pretty well reduced to a chunky flour. Then I just mixed in as though for a very dense dough: 3 big tablespoons of gelatin melted in water (you can just leave this out or use agar agar if you’re vegetarian, but I like the chew and the added nutrients available in either of the add-ins), a little sweetener (I used a splash of sugar-free hazelnut syrup that I have around, just for the flavor), about 3 tablespoons of melted butter, and a bit of Maldon sea salt. All almost quicker to do than to record here.

The rest is finishing: line a cake pan (I used my ca. 10×14 Pyrex baking dish) with wax paper or plastic wrap, press the “dough” into it evenly, cover with more of the wrap, and (if you’re a little shaggy on the pat-in like I am) give a quick flattening treatment with a jar or can as your pan-sized rolling pin. Stick the pan in the refrigerator overnight and slice the bars up for storage next day. I cut them in granola bar configuration since that’s what they resemble a little. The bit of butter means they don’t stick together very badly, so I laid the bars on edge right next to each other with wax paper between layers. Some are lying in wait in the freezer, and the rest are being gradually eaten out of the fridge, with or without yogurt, honey, carrots . . . .

Did I mention honey? Guess I’m just a sucker for sweet things. Must be why I love you so.

Foodie Tuesday: You KNOW I’m Just a Big Marshmallow

Posted on by
4
s'mores brownies photo

With a heart full of darkness (chocolate, that is) . . .

. . . and if you think I am capable of eating strictly on the basis of survival and good health, you’re seriously deluded. Oh, wait–your impressionability is why I like you so much anyway, isn’t it!

However, I’m not utterly irredeemable. At least, not in the way of All Things Ingested (ooh, a good companion program to All Things Considered?). F’r’instance, while I found the above-pictured S’mores Brownies (simply a then-favored brownie recipe topped with marshmallow fluff and lightly oven-toasted, as I had no twig substantial enough to hold the entire 9×13 pan inverted over my campfire for full authenticity) perfectly edible and acceptable, I have since realized that I’m not as willing at my age to trade those moments of indulgent bliss for the mean-spirited monkey-wrenching that wheat seems, increasingly, to give my internal clockworks. So I have sauntered through a slew of my favorite cookery books and foodie websites and learned how to make a damn tasty brownie with almond flour rather than wheat (take that, grass meanies!). So far it’s such a fragile and airy brownie–unless smashed into fudginess with a fork, a style of eating to which I am not averse myself but others might find a bit less than perfect as tea-with-the-Queen manners go–that I will still have to tweak the recipe to discover a perfect lightly crisp outside, dense chocolaty inside brownie to meet my exacting standards. Or I’ll just pre-squash the entire pan of almond-flour brownies, if that’s what it takes.

Revise? Sure! Eschew the chew? Erm, unlikely. Never been much in the way of abstemious.

Meanwhile, back at the table, I can also lay claim to being broad-minded (and -beamed) enough to happily eat the great majority of things put in front of me. While I have tailored my cooking, and therefore my everyday eating, to better suit the tastes and needs of my partner in life and dining, I still enjoy eating stuff he’ll never touch, so there are divergences on our plates from time to time.

I gladly eat my vegetables. I like all kinds of “good-for-you” stuff. Though there may be few things that in middling-to-large quantities aren’t a bad dietary idea, there are even fewer that I won’t willingly overindulge in when my self-restraint gauge is on Low. So I’m trying over the years to get smarter and fill up that particular tank with the more permissible and sustaining pleasures of less processed and fresher and more carefully produced foods to at least divert attention from, if not lessen the lust for, those things I’d otherwise dive into in my full fressing gear. I am no ascetic and am not planning to become that one almost universally feared at table, the person whose foodly preferences go far beyond anaphylactic necessity into the territory of requiring that I be hand-fed a peeled butter lettuce leaf wrapped around a single organic and humanely free-range raised haunch of butterfly with a drop of steam-distilled chive water in a room spiritually cleansed of tomato effluvia by two shamans and a fruit bat.

Hey, I’ve even been known to eat and drink those relatively few things I really don’t like if I think it’s diplomatically appropriate or just good guest behavior. I’m not a complete jerk.

But no matter how eagerly I’ll scarf down the eggplant and brussels sprouts and gladly chomp my choppers on tasty roasted what-have-you, there will always be room for the perfect lard-crisped carnitas (available, by the way, at Tacos Guaymas on 38th and 72nd Streets in Tacoma, Washington: http://www.tacosguaymas.com/tacostacoma/menu-broadway.html) and rich fat salmon oven roasted in Jack Daniel’s, and homemade ice cream and cardamom butter cookies and yes, probably even brownies made with wheat flour. Definitely brownies made with almond flour, and I do plan to get those down to a science someday–though I’m doing just fine for now, eating the current version with a spoon.