Foodie Tuesday: Autumnal Comforts

Posted on October 8, 2013 by kathryningrid

You know that I love the Fall season, even though it’s very late and short here in Texas. Perhaps it benefits from my love of seasonal change in general, but I think the romantic leanings that come in autumn, that sense of impending death softened by the comforts with which we pad ourselves and by the death-defying renewal of the beginning of school and art seasons, have their own peculiar attractions. And of course, there is the bounty of foods that are best appreciated as we slide from the fall equinox to the winter.The World in Autumn

Thin branches caging up the sun

In willow-wavy lacelike hands,

All skeletons and ampersands,

Hold clouds together in the one

Unreadable yet literate

Equation of the interstices

Whose elated season this is,

Crisp and quite deliberate

In tracing every moment in it,

Hour, year, and state of mind

Among the bones of humankind,

As though these things were infinite.

One of the delights I most admire in this season is earthy flavors. An abundance of root vegetables and mushrooms signals time for soups, stews and sauces whose savory riches warm body and soul and recall me to the embrace of home and childhood in many ways. A simple creamy soup loaded with mushrooms is hard to beat for succor on a grey and blustery day. A bouquet of cauliflower roasted with nothing more than a quantity of butter and salt and pepper until just-right is heavenly; adding sage leaves to the butter and a handful of shredded Reggiano to the top of the cauliflower just when they’ll have time to crisp and brown lightly moves the easy dish to a higher floor in the heavenly skyscraper.Roasted vegetables of any kind are especially welcome in the cooler seasons, and so easy to toss together with a little olive oil or butter in the oven while everything else is being prepared for the table that it’s almost a crime not to put them in the oven. Throw a chopped lemon in to roast with them and they are sauced in their own juices. Put the remains (if any) the next day into a bowl with a cup of hot homemade broth and a poached or soft-cooked egg or two, add cooked rice or noodles if you like, and, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, (or bi-bim-bap!), you have a bowl full of nutritious, delicious, and not at all ambitious goodness right in your own little corner of this magical autumn season.

Foodie Tuesday: May All Your Travels be Tasty

Posted on November 27, 2012 by kathryningrid

Polenta Lasagna at Alder Wood Bistro in Sequim

It’s very simple, really. Besides the minimal exercise involved in actually walking (or rolling) out one’s door and the social benefits of being elsewhere than holed up at home, one of the best reasons for leaving the house is to eat something less ordinary. No matter how fine a cook you are and how much you love preparing food, there are times when it’s a great pleasure, if not relief, to let somebody else do the cooking for a change, and perhaps doubly so when that somebody prepares things you wouldn’t or couldn’t at home. I am ever so fond of letting others make and clean up the mess from time to time, but much more than that, of having delicious food of the sorts that might be a little complicated to fix, more esoteric of ingredient than my nearby shopping can unearth, and especially those I either don’t know how to prepare so well–or haven’t even met yet.

Our trip last week to see family and get our feet [literally] wet in the old stomping grounds of the Pacific Northwest was a perfect excuse and motivation for such dining. We took care of the get-out-of-the-house and social aspects immediately enough by merely flying up to Washington and seeing our parents and some of our siblings’ crew. The food itself was kept simple that night, since everyone was dashing between work and school, traffic and travel and had places to go in the morning, so having pizzas delivered was the perfect way to share a pre-Thanksgiving gathering without enslaving anyone to the cookery. After that, however, we were less chaste in our taste, so to speak, being inclined to enjoy the opportunity for a little road food.

After a morning appointment, the three of us who were doing the road-tripping (one of my sisters joining my husband and me for the jaunt) headed yet farther northwest, aiming for the towns of Port Angeles and Sequim (pronounced skwim) that sit up on the Olympic Peninsula and overlook the Strait of Juan de Fuca, facing toward Victoria, BC. Seafood heaven, as we grew up knowing it. Since the PNW sits on the Ring of Fire that unites the US west coast and Japan, among other places, we also know that it’s a great place to get all sorts of Asian-influenced foods. But we’d learned, much to our chagrin, that two of our favorite Thai restaurants in the PA/Sequim area, and even our favorite old-school seafood restaurant (the venerable Three Crabs) had closed since we’d last been up that way.

Planked Salmon at Alder Wood Bistro

Thankfully, we got a dandy kickoff to the trip by eating at a serendipitously discovered pan-Asian eatery en route. Nothing fancy, just solid Asian-American eating, including some nice and tasty, very fresh sushi in the collation. It helped to take the edge off of our sorrow over the Thai places’ disappearance. As for seafood, I had been longing for some great fresh Dungeness crab, not least of all since we were going to be staying mere minutes from the eponymous Dungeness Spit, but with the Three Crabs (always reliable for a massive crab Louis salad in its heyday) gone and not being in town at a peak time, I satisfied my crab longings with some nice, if unspectacular, crab cakes that evening at a good local Italian restaurant. The true highlight of that meal was, fortunately, a local dainty too: chanterelle bruschetta. The mushrooms, sautéed and presented simply on the toasts with a smattering of goat cheese, a quick grind of black pepper, and a handful of fresh arugula, were the silkiest and butteriest mushrooms I’ve had in a long, long time.

That was Wednesday, and on Thanksgiving Thursday we three didn’t know exactly what to expect in an area where the towns are small enough (and the median age of the population high enough) that most restaurants were closed. Fast food fish sandwiches may not sound very holiday-like to some, but lunch is lunch (or brunch, as we’d not broken our fast) and since we weren’t even sure anything would be available for dinner, it seemed smarter to smile and enjoy it than otherwise. As it turned out, the oldest Fine Dining place around was open and had room for us. Now, I will be kind and not mention the name of the place lest I offend, but there was a reason there was room for us on Thanksgiving day. And by ‘oldest’, I don’t mean only that it’s been around the longest, though I think that part’s true too–more so than the ‘Fine Dining’ designation nowadays. When the highlight of the meal is the owner coming by for a boozy, rambling greeting, eventually taking orders and–on my requesting the Soufflé au Crabe (silly me)–blurting out, “Seriously?” and dashing to the kitchen to assure himself that the chef would, as he guessed, flat-out refuse to make something so “difficult” after a long day (of drinking, I can only assume, since we were practically alone the whole time in the dining room, and even I have not found a souffle all that hard to make)–I think you can correctly interpret that as Weird Entertainment rather than Fine Dining. We left having eaten, not exceedingly well, but laughing all the same.

The next day was more rewarding. We had read online, while bemoaning the loss of the several old favorite eateries, of the arrival of a promising new one, and it proved just right at lunchtime: Kiwi’s Fish & Chips. It’s just what it says, classic fish and chips prepared pub style by a true Kiwi (and easy-peasy to spot the owner when he popped by our table, given the music of his New Zealand accent), and the halibut was about as moist and sweet as any battered and fried filets could be. (I’m told the cod was as well.) Dinner was by reservation at a place my spouse and I had enjoyed in the past (Alder Wood Bistro), and thankfully that one was every bit as good as we remembered, from the featured wine to the savory dishes and right on through the final sweets. My sister and I did as we often do, sharing so we could try several different things, and I would be fairly hard pressed to state a favorite; my husband’s Steak Frite looked fully up to the bistro standard too. I enjoyed my ‘lasagna’ of stacked slices of fried polenta sandwiched with mushrooms, cheeses and roasted vegetables and topped with fried capers very much. Even better, perhaps, was my sister’s planked salmon, but that might possibly be my prejudice for gorgeous, fresh wild Pacific salmon talking. We had had tastes of salmon in a couple of meals before that, but none so perfectly prepared.

I suppose it’s almost superfluous to say that the food was so good, the atmosphere so warm and welcoming, and the memory of that dinner so fresh in mind that we decided to return for our going-away lunch the next day as we hit the road. After all, even when one is dining out, being well fed while feeling quite At Home is a very fine thing indeed.

Chanterelle Bruschetta at Bella Italia in Port Angeles

Foodie Tuesday: I Travel on My Stomach

Posted on June 12, 2012 by kathryningrid

Yes, I travel tummy-forward. But then, you knew that, didn’t you. Of course food is the center of my travel adventures. It’s pretty much the center of my daily life, as you have seen. So one of the central joys of going on any expedition is guaranteed to be eating related. I am somewhat inclined to plan any trip around the potential dining and snacking involved in the destination of choice. The choice of destination, if I have any, is certainly influenced as well by the quantity and quality of delicious items available in said locale.

As it happens, the point of this journey was determined in advance by the lovely necessity of the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Collegium‘s participation there. It was mere marvelous luck that sent us off to Berkeley, and San Francisco was of course a truly logical pit stop on the way to see our family up north, then, no? As it happens, there’s no end to the glorious eating and drinking you can do in the magnificent Golden Gate city. There are the icons of foodie worship all around that range from the Buena Vista, where Irish Coffee is purported to have been born (and is aging very gracefully indeed, I can tell you) and the venerable eateries of Fisherman’s Wharf (yes, we did pop in to Alioto’s last night and the Dungeness crab Louie was loaded with sweet crustacean dreaminess) to a nearly endless parade of newer delicacies and delicatessens.

One thing that could hardly steer you wrong on any expedition, from road trip to round-the-world, is keeping a sharp lookout for good food and drink at every turn. The most logical place to start is any farmer’s market, food hall, CSA, allotment or other magnificent foodie emporium. Say, perhaps, the Ferry Terminal, where just by crossing the cable car line at the Embarcadero you enter into a haven of artisanal glories that will transport you to another plane. There are charcuteries boasting all sorts of exquisite hand-crafted organic meat treats, a creamery or two filled with cheeses ranging from creamy goat cheese or a fromage triple-crème smoothness to the wildest of the contemporary cultured creations and back again to the most scintillating classics like the weirdly beautiful Mimolette (not, as it appears, an alien cantaloupe but a deep orange hearted beauty of a nutty salty cheese) and of course the most glamorous hunks of lovingly aged Parmigiano-Reggiano looking ever so much like a cheesy lunar landscape inviting exploration by hungry adventurers.There are the vegetable stands full of produce and forage unspeakably pristine and desirable in its purity and freshness. Sea beans, anyone? Mushrooms picked from their carefully hidden home turf this morning? Artichokes still small and tender and almost as delicate as to be able to self-destruct in a puff of fairy sparkles? Oh, my darlings, you can see that I’m bound to instantaneous loss of–well, okay, I would lose my composure and maturity if I had any to start. When I get around this stuff it just happens. And I think you do know what I mean. Be nice.Meanwhile, I shall be dashing hither and yon to hunt along those pretty, pretty piers of San Francisco, where the fishermen bring in their catch of the moment, just to see what tempts my hungry soul. I love fish. I love shrimp, prawns, scallops, calamari, all sorts of goodies. But what I’m most often and most likely to want any time I can possibly get hold of it is fresh, sweet, insanely delicious Dungeness crab. I will certainly eat it as many times as I get the chance on this visit to the coast. I had it at both lunch and dinner yesterday and it was barely enough to whet my appetite further. Don’t get me wrong: the crab Louis was excellent and the macaroni and cheese with D-crab in it was a dish of smooth, melting yumminess. But life is short and Dungeness far, far away from Texan turf, so I’ve a great need to fill up my innards with as much of this joy-inducing treat as I possibly can. So much work to do. I’ll get back to you later on this.What are you waiting for? You should be rushing out in search of, at the very least, a good grocery store or picnic ice chest. Get yourself moving. There’s very little time until the next meal, and who knows when it’ll be the last one, really? Hungry, I tell you, hungry and sure that time is seldom better spent in pursuit of grand food and drink than in nearly any other work known to humankind. Be reasonable. It would be quite a pity to let any such fine things go unappreciated, now wouldn’t it.