To Eat or Not to Eat
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Category Archives: Food
Foodie Tuesday: Thrilled Cheese
My name is Kathryn and I’m a dairy fiend.
I sincerely hope there’s no umpteen-step program out there to cure me of my addiction, because I would be ever so sad to part company with butter (pastured butter, sage butter, beurre noisette…), cream (yogurt, ice cream, whipped cream, a drizzle of heavy cream, sour cream…) and all of their cow- and goat- and sheep-produced milky ilk. Among the most dire of those losses would certainly be cheeses. It’s even a remote possibility that in my childhood I mistook various people’s talk about the power and centrality of a certain deity in their lives as completely understandable allegiance to the prepared and aged dairy product, hearing them intone instead, ‘come into my heart, Lord Cheeses.’
All of that is merely to tell you in what high esteem I hold dairy products. I know I am not alone in this. The worldwide fame of the French cheese board, an Italian feast topped with fine curls of Parmigiano-Reggiano, a glorious firework of Saganaki, a rich fondue or heart- and hearth-warming rustic iron cooker oozing with Raclette (somehow fitting is that the compute offers as a ‘correction’ of this name the word Paraclete, for it is both a helper and rather holy in its way)–these are all embedded in the souls and arteries of generations around the globe, along with many others. The land of my birth has been, if anything, impregnated with this rich and robust love by every wave of immigrants who have ever set foot on its shores, bringing along all of the aforementioned and so much more, and gradually adding a multitude of delightfully cheesy (in every sense of the word) American twists to them. Along the way, besides gleefully adopting and adapting all of the aforementioned, we dairy devotees stateside have high on the short list of our national favorite foods such delicacies as cheeseburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, pizza and macaroni and cheese. [For the latter, by the way, I’d be hard pressed to find a recipe that rivals Amy Sedaris’s death-defying macaroni and cheese for my love; infinite variations of it have become my personal staple when I choose to make the dish.]
I confess that lowest on my personal list of cheese ratings, possibly even below the most notoriously stinky and bizarre of cheeses (yes, Gammelost, I’m looking at YOU) is the one ‘cheese’ named for our country, American Cheese, which I personally think of as purportedly edible vinyl and often has little or no actual dairy contents, though for good or ill there are otherwise reputable American cheese makers currently promoting a new, truly dairy version of this stuff. Yes, I get the whole melt-ability thing, whether for Tex-Mex ‘queso‘ (an ironic name, to my way of thinking) or for creamy sauces and the like—but I also know there are plenty of ways to achieve that smoothness with what I think of as real cheeses. But I digress. Yet again.
When hungry for grilled or toasted cheese sandwiches I am not averse to tinkering with the most sacred simple versions, as long as the cheese still gets to star in the meal, because after all, the entrée is named after it. Since there are whole restaurant menus devoted to the single item of this sandwich, I needn’t tell you what a wide and spectacular range of goodies goes ever-so-nicely with cheese and bread. Now that I think of it, the stereotype of the French eating nothing but bread, cheese and wine could be excellent reason to pour up a nice glass of red when one is consuming a grilled cheese sammy, but that’s merely a starting point for the whole world of possibilities of course. A cheese and chutney sandwich comprising a sharp white cheddar, Major Grey’s chutney and a lovely dense bread (how about a nice sweet pumpernickel? she asked) is a thing of beauty. A perfect deli Reuben is a great variant of the cheese sandwich. Tuna melt? Why, yes, please! And on we go.
A purist’s dream, amped up: the Bee Hive Restaurant in Montesano, Washington makes a buttery grilled Tillamook (Oregon) cheddar cheese sandwich on sourdough bread, adorned with a heap of sweet Dungeness crab meat. If you can’t find happiness in a bite of that, you’re really not trying.
Sometimes it can be both simple and surprising. I’d be hard pressed to love a sandwich better than the peasant bread grilled cheese from Beecher’s in Seattle with their Flagship in the starring role. But I’ve also discovered that a thick slice of Leipäjuusto (a slow-melt cheese like Saganaki), a few slices of crisped bacon and a generous schmier of ginger marmalade make for a dandy combination, and I would certainly not keep such a stellar combination from you, my friends. Kevin, a Canadian small-kitchen wizard, has published a veritable encyclopedia of grilled cheese sandwich variations on his blog Closet Cooking (a site everyone with cheese in his DNA ought to bookmark, stat), and there are all sorts of other blogs and sites, foodie and otherwise, loaded with such cheesy champions as can make your spirits sing and your capillaries tighten simultaneously. So go forth and chase the cheeses! I’ll be here waiting for you, with the ribbons of some good, fat, stretchy melted mozzarella hanging out of the corners of my loopy grin.
Foodie Tuesday: Let Me Call You Sweetheart
When you’re good enough, you don’t have to be trendy to have staying power. The classics never go away; a fabulous patisserie is forever in fashion, because well-crafted sweets have endless appeal. They may have waves of popularity over time, like the current euphoria over macarons that belies their long history or the delight of the general public on discovering in latter years that chocolate is not entirely a naughty indulgence. But what is truly tasty will never entirely fade from view, especially in the kitchens or patisseries where the expert practitioners of their making reside.
My sweet tooth knows few bounds. I love fat in most of its terribly delicious forms. When those two attributes of sweetness and fat combine so fortuitously as they can in desserts and baked goods, in little snacks or large displays of ostentatious celebratory food, I am unlikely to resist, unless I’m having an unusual fit of good manners when there’s not quite enough to go around or my calorie-conscience is working overtime to knit me a hair shirt that squeezes my increasingly well-rounded form.
As a visual artist and prettiness-addict, the moment when my resistance is most likely guaranteed to ebb and to fail is when I am standing, rapt, in front of a pastry case at the bakery. If I had any real moral strength in this regard, I would at least be inclined to pardon the beauties beckoning therein from my ravages for the sake of preserving their great visual appeal as long as possible. But I have none, so it’s more than likely I will excuse myself by reminding any fellow admirers that the visual attractions of food are limited by their shelf life, which is briefer indeed than my own. Even if I have eaten more darling pastries than is remotely good for me.
Farewell for now, sweet readers. If you should grow any sweeter, you might be in danger of being bit by me on a dessert rampage. For now, I’ll choose to take the precaution of stuffing my mouth full of marsipan bløtkake [a favorite, Norwegian marzipan-covered cream cake], if only for your safety.
Just My Cup of Tea
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Foodie Tuesday: What’s *Not* in My Kitchen
I don’t mind simple foods, simply prepared, and I’ve had plenty of pit-roasted and wood-stove cooking that was far better than merely edible. Sometimes there is nothing more delicious than the freshly caught fish grilled over an open fire or fried at lakeside in a worn and well-seasoned cast iron skillet. The smoky goodness of things cooked with live coals is sometimes so far superior to what I could conjure out of a high-tech kitchen with the pallid assistance of bottled liquid smoke (no matter how genuine and unprocessed that might be) that I would rather wait months for the proper weather and occasion to arise.
But I ain’t no chuckwagon Cookie, if you know what I mean. I was never fond of ‘roughing it’ in the sense of being outdoorsy and happy to labor over the building of my kitchen kit before I can even bother to lug buckets of water up from the stream to have on hand for stifling the coals at need. I haven’t the skills or the desire to do my own butchering, and I barely know a chanterelle from an Amanita, if left to forage anywhere wilder than my own pantry and the grocery aisles.
So my kitchen doesn’t sport the assortment of enameled camp cookware and the range of well-weathered cast iron pots and dutch ovens required for real down-to-earth preparation of meals. I don’t even have a clue what I’d do, short of going out in the backyard and having a go at such prairie wizardry, if I were faced with any of the old-school stoves and ovens that my ancestors and predecessors considered modern conveniences in their day. To cook with a wood stove, no matter how much I may have admired others’ mastery of it and the fantastic foods they’ve produced from such contraptions, is beyond my ken and requires subtleties of understanding how recipes and food science converge that I never learned. Even the electric ranges of earlier days have mystical mystery about them that would scare me right off to the local fast food joint for succor. And yes, I’d want fries with that.
In truth, I am a very limited and unskilled preparer of foods. I have a small palette of familiar ingredients upon which I rely, because I don’t have a clue what to do with many others that will make them safe for human consumption, let alone palatable. I have little patience for the suave or the grandiose in recipes, those techniques and tricks that require grace and keen senses and molecular understanding of the ingredients at play. I’m a reasonably willing eater of new foods and preparations, but not much for trying to make them myself, especially if I think anyone smarter and more experienced is available and willing to fix said dishes in my stead. The exception is mainly to be found in instances when real cooks let me play at being their sous chef without requiring better brains, knowledge of ingredients, or knife skills than I can offer.
What I do have in my kitchen, most of the time, is fun, and enough decent eating to keep me (and anyone else on hand) from going hungry for long. Thankfully, I do live in a place with good grocery stores close at hand, family and friends to share meals and their preparation, and a kitchen full of my idea of modern conveniences. And if the ovens I got with the purchase of the house have outlived their peak performance by a fair distance and the only mixer I’ve owned for the last couple of decades is a wire whisk or fork, it sure isn’t the same as having to shovel up hard Texas clay to make room for my hand-split mesquite hardwood or having to figure out if those fruits gleaming at me from over there are the euphoniously named Farkleberry or are the similar looking but highly toxic Chinese Privet, so I don’t have to dig a privy, too, in a hurry.
Foodie Tuesday: Pears, Greens & Coolness
When the heat of late summer is dogging my heels and dragging me into doldrums, what I want to eat is something that can relieve that spiritual weight. Even a vegetarian delight can seem overly demanding of my metabolism and moods at such times, but that doesn’t stop me from being hungry. So, what to do that will be more satisfying nutritionally than eating an entire package of Popsicles? Create some inner relief with a light and juicy salad.
My standard starting point for salad is generally some fresh green stuff. For a light and summery version, I love the sweet and fragile kinds of greens, perhaps some Bibb or butter or leaf lettuce, and even of those slightly meatier leaves that will give a bit of textural contrast and substance to the salad, I like the mild ones like mâche (lamb’s lettuce), chard (silverbeet), and beet greens. Some nice blend of several of those is refreshing and nutritious enough to make me feel virtuous but not overstuffed.
I like to give the meal a little zip with some other green goodness, say some fresh mint and thinly sliced fennel bulb, sweet basil and chopped sugar snap peas. But I wouldn’t want to limit myself to entirely green things. I’d use some diced or sliced ripe, juicy pear as the starring feature of the dish, because that’s a favorite treat almost any time, any way. What goes nicely with a pear-green-refreshing salad? So many possible things. This time, I think, a melange of toasted pistachios, a chiffonade of garden-fresh pink rose petals (or day lilies or a sprinkling of violets, borage, or lilac blossoms), and some finely shredded mildly nutty Jarlsberg cheese. Keeping in mind that the flowers must be chemical-free, of course. I’d dress this beauty up with a blend of avocado oil, sparkling Elderflower Pressé (I’m fond of Belvoir Fruit Farms‘ excellent elixir), lime juice, vanilla, a pinch of salt, and a dusting of cayenne pepper.
And then I’d stop sitting around, merely talking about it, and eat that salad. Appetite for light things or not, I get hungry.
A Full Menu of Absurdity
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Foodie Tuesday: By the Beautiful Sea
Certainly one of the particular pleasures of this summer’s travels was for a coastal native like me to get back to the water’s edges and indulge in quantities of fresh seafoods of the kinds I have always loved. Not a bad opportunity, either, to develop some new affections in the vast ocean of seafood options. So yes, of course I ate fish, shellfish, seaweed, and other delectable dainties from the depths as often as I could manage. Spending time in the familiar haunts of Stockholm and the Pacific Northwest, I was swimming in deliciousness.
There were, in both locales, a few much-needed refueling stops for Asian seafood treats, since both places are rich in the resources and have long since embraced the influences of those also-rich cultures to make fine use of the wealth, so sushi and Lee’s sweet walnut prawns were on the agenda from the beginning. I can’t think of any kind of sushi that makes me happier than delicate, pristinely fresh salmon—an ingredient introduced to sushi culture by Norwegians, I gather, so I guess I feel a certain genetic impulse to put this meeting-of-cultures on my plate—nigirizushi. So my partner and I devoured salmon nigiri in quantity on the trip, but I also happily tested a few different sorts of makizushi, like Ichiban’s Salmon Lemon Roll, a refreshingly simple kind of maki.
There were those variations on crab mac & cheese I mentioned before, and if anyone puts together two such huge addictions of mine as macaroni and cheese and Dungeness crab had just better get out of my way when I catch sight of the table. The versions I had this summer did nothing to slow me in my pursuit of such treasure, but as the aforementioned components both loom so large in my heart’s and stomach’s affections, neither did they hamper my continued mental tweaking of said dishes, and as I looked upon the photo for this post, I was moved further to contemplate joining my crab M&C lust with that for the classic and justifiably ubiquitous pairing of browned butter and sage, so you can expect to hear some groans of overindulgent happiness coming out of my kitchen sometime in the not too distant future when I get around to embracing that inspiration.
Fish and chips are, of necessity, a part of my seafood pilgrimages as well. As with these other treats, fish and chips have so many fantastic varieties possible, even before you get to the chef-specific fiddling of seasonings and sides, that it’s almost a pity there’s no way to eat every kind on offer. Will it be cod today, pollock or plaice, halibut? Salmon? Smoked cod? So many choices, so little time. I like a good light, crispy beer batter, but most end up being too doughy and heavy-handed in reality for my complete approval, so I’m more drawn to crunchier versions, whether they’re crumb- or cornmeal-based or spring from a dreamily delicate application of tempura. One of the standouts on this journey was when my parents took the two of us to a local shop in West Seattle, where we not only shared massive servings of fantastic, moist and tender and crunchy-coated wild cod but were given cabbage slaw (in a vinegar dressing) as a gift side dish by a beautiful and kind-hearted proprietress. Between that atmosphere of generous hospitality and the snappy-crusted fresh fish, the place won my vote as favorite in this summer’s fish-&-chips derby.
I managed to go in entirely new directions on occasion, as well. Probably the favorite such dish that comes to mind just now would have to be the scallop-mango ceviche my sister and I shared when we went with my husband to a venerable but still terrific restaurant on Alki, that long and lovely public beach in West Seattle where Elliott Bay provides the blue and sparkling underpinning to a grand view of downtown Seattle’s waterfront. Beloved company and glorious weather were guaranteed to make it a worthy event, but the ceviche did its part very well indeed, too. It was a relatively simple melange of diced bell peppers and red onion and scallops and mango in a very light lime-cilantro dressing. If I had any desire to change the dish in the slightest it might be to eliminate the green pepper from the mix since it was just a tiny bit strong compared to the sweet scallops and bright mango, yet not quite piquant enough (as the onion was) to serve as a complementary spark. But let’s be honest. Did that slow down my eating or diminish my enjoyment of that refreshing little appetizer? No, it most certainly did not. If I replicate the dish someday, there will probably be no green bell pepper, and for that matter, I’d be more likely to pop in a sprinkling of red pepper flakes for the spice than to add raw onion, but that combination of tender scallops and juicy mango was just the sunny splash the day required and also provided useful ideas for my future culinary machinations. Enough said.
Last among today’s reminiscence revels is shrimp pizza. Americans might not be quite so familiar with this sea creature as a great pizza topping as other nationals have been, but once tried, it’s kind of irresistible in its own way. My spousal person and I derive much of our fondness for the item in question from multiple happy visits in years past to a kind of down-at-heel looking pizzeria in the central train station in Stockholm, where a couple of swell Italian brothers fired up their (too-) well-kept secret wood oven and made the perfect Neapolitan crusts, lightly scorched and melting underneath a little light San Marzano tomato sauce, a nice gooey coating of fresh mozzarella, and heaps of candy-sweet pink shrimp with (unless my slightly lachanophobic husband remembered to forbid it) a dash of oregano over the top. Alas, the brothers have since packed up their oven and gone off to greener pastures, but in a bit of serendipitous sorrow on the afternoon of our discovery, we wandered down the hill from “our” apartment in the opposite direction to a restaurant we hadn’t revisited in quite some time and discovered that they, too, made a dandy version of this pie. Theirs is embellished with a little prosciutto and some mushrooms, which prove to be perfectly friendly companions to their little coral-colored shellfish pals on pizza.
What does all of this prove? Nothing you didn’t know already. I am an avid pursuer of food. Seafoods of many spanking fresh and tasty sorts rank high on the list of favorites among my food loves. And travel combines the increased access to those things that a coastal kid stranded inland in Texas craves at times with the splendors of the travel itself, that immersion in a different culture that suits me as much as it does my taste buds. Ahhh, so.
Pretty Thievery
You’ve heard of petty thieves; this summer I saw a pretty thief. My husband and I were visiting in Washington (state), seeing family, attending a fundraising event and spending a couple of days at the end of the trip where my partner was doing some work conducting a choir (comprising as its singers a batch of veteran choral conductors and teachers, a handful of whom are longtime friends of ours) in a workshop. It was all quite delightful, with the exception of the horrid respiratory gunk that my guy received as a gift along the way and that cut short the workshop fun. [He has fully recovered by now, thankfully.]
But another unexpected happy thing about the trip was that the fundraiser was held very near a condominium we own that, while it’s normally rented out as a residence—so we’ve not been inside it since we viewed it for purchase—our property manager informed us that we were getting a new renter and our visit sat right in the between-renters gap. So there was this handy opportunity for us to go in and renew our familiarity with the place where we might conceivably someday live ourselves as retirees, not to mention a chance to measure rooms, note the condition of things now that the home was actually clean and unfurnished, and so forth. All useful, along with the visit to that town itself, in reminding ourselves what had attracted us to the locale and the home in the first place.
Another attraction we were reminded of appeared serendipitously on this visit. As we were wandering through the neighborhood and trying to remember exactly how to find our only-once-visited place, we passed a house with beautiful dwarf fruit trees planted along its street side, and there stood a deer, placidly unruffled by either our passing car or the midday sun, casually balancing on two legs to reach up and nab some marvelous, rosy ripe apples and munch them one after another. We stopped, rolled down our windows to enjoy the sight, and listened to birds chorusing in the trees, and vowed never to turn in such a charming miscreant even if it one day dined on our own deck plants.
Foodie Tuesday: I’ll Eat Anything (Except That)
I’ve many times here admitted to being something of a pig, loving food and eating so much that I might as well be in the barn with the rest of my kind, snuffling around in glee at the trough. But lest you think me an utterly indiscriminate eater, let me say in my defense that (a) I do have a modicum of manners when I absolutely have to and know enough not to put my bare feet up on the table when having tea with the queen, and (b) there are a few actual items I would rather not eat or drink.
I’ve mentioned, indeed, such delicacies as blueberries that I find entirely resistible in any form, despite the practically universal admiration for them among others. And though I’m not opposed to eating things that have been living (vegetable and animal), I have no interest in eating things that are still alive, particularly those that have any capability of trying to escape from me as they enter my mouth. There are plenty of animals whose offal and organs I will also happily avoid, though they are considered magnificent delicacies by many people, and plenty of plants whose seeds, bark and roots have equally little appeal to me other than as decorative items or mulch.
I’ve even met the occasional cook, in my life’s wanderings, whose entire oeuvre of cookery I would be sincerely delighted never to taste, once I knew how skilled he was at removing all appealing and edible qualities and characteristics from any item brought to that singular hall of horrors known as his kitchen.
Still, there are relatively few things in the vast pantheon of foods that I would rather avoid than eat, and even many of those I will ingest if diplomacy requires it. This summer’s travels were, thankfully, 99% delicious. The cooks and their cookery were generally fine, and often outstanding, and I certainly didn’t come home any thinner than I was when I left. Better yet, there was little along the way that didn’t beckon to me as I gripped my fork in anticipation. Travel has such potential for culinary joy! Revisiting favored tastes from previous journeys is always complemented by the pleasures of trying new dishes.
Well, there was that aspic (pictured above), on this trip. It was so curious-looking that I couldn’t resist trying it, even though the oddments scattered through it were rather unrecognizable, for the most part. For something that looked playfully like jelly with tiny, mysterious pieces of toys in it, it turned out to be strangely dull in flavor, leading to a disappointment not entirely unlike that felt by a child on pulling open a party cracker and expecting a nice snapping noise, a fun trinket, and a shower of colorful confetti inside and instead finding a slightly used pair of socks. I ate most of that aspic, dutifully if not quite enthusiastically, but was mighty happy to move on to better things.
Another entertainment frequently offered in the Bad Food Department is, of course, the ever-popular menu-mishap. This is far from limited to foreign travel, given the American propensity (and, I suspect, that in other nations) for menu-writing to be handed off to people who haven’t the same level of linguistic skills as a restaurant’s chefs are supposed to have culinary ones. I found plenty of fodder for my amusement in this department along the summer’s ways, but saved one little sample for you as I’m still slightly uncertain how to decipher it fully. And very unwilling to try to eat it, if there’s any chance it was written out correctly.
Since this menu was meant to celebrate the World Cup semifinals then in progress, I suppose it’s possible that the so-called Lye bread was intended to simultaneously hold the sandwich together and wash out the mouth of anyone caught swearing at the referees. I’m still not clear, though, on whether the Pigling Ham was named to prove that the meat on the sandwich came from a very tender, youthful beast or it was, perhaps, *pickled*. If I ended up loosely interpreting this as a sort of Germanic (in one Viennese menu writer’s eyes, anyway) take on a Reuben sandwich, maybe it would all make some kind of sense. Maybe with a touch of Joppiesaus it’d be more palatable. But honestly, I’d prefer, in this instance, to merely enjoy the beer herein recommended, and skip the sandwich.
Art-Colored Glasses 