Tag Archives: Food

Foodie Tuesday: Apple Pie Order

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In most places, ‘apple pie order’ refers to perfect tidiness. Around me, not so. It has two meanings for me, each off on its own tangent. The first is very simple: it describes a standard action of my spouse’s–whenever the occasion should arise, he will order apple pie. The second meaning of the phrase in my world is quite the contrary to the idiom. When my husband’s menu request is at home, the pies I am apt to make are anything but orderly.photoAs with all of my kitchen adventures, the making of pie is always and only an approximation of reproducing a Platonic ideal of the pie concept. I am perhaps a touch the cantankerous and childish rebel in the kitchen, constitutionally unable to conform to others’ instructions to the letter. Can’t think of a lot of things as fun as playing with my food, after all. Remarkably, my supertaster spouse, with all of the palatal restrictions this condition inevitably entails, tolerates my machinations and monkeying remarkably well.

I use that phrase advisedly, since despite his uxorious generosity, he still doesn’t hesitate to remark on the results, good or bad. But he doesn’t actually turn up that fine-tuned nose of his very often, as it happens.

The mere physical assembly of a dish is unlikely to come very tidily from my hands, either, given my previously noted propensity for impatience. and slightly anarchic search for visual amusements. Needless to say, anything more pie- or tart-like than a mere crisp or crumble is more often than not going to turn out rustic as can be. Given that I’m a sort of rustic myself, I suppose it’s only fitting.

graphite and colored pencilThanksgiving‘s apple pie was somewhere in between true ‘apple pie order’ and my kind.

My mother is-was-and-ever-shall-be the indisputable nonpareil, the mistress and icon, of pie making. Her crust is legendary with very good reason. I’ve never met a filling she couldn’t make that wasn’t a paragon, the archetype of its genre. Her fresh raspberry pies, loaded with fruit of the canes she nurtured from cuttings off her father’s plants have been known to reduce adults of seemingly endless sophistication to slobbering infants in one bite, a whole slice to cause delirium, fainting spells, reenactments of the Dancing Plague of 1518, and umpteen return pilgrimages to the dessert table.

Needless to say, my pies grovel in obeisance to Mom‘s, though she’s much too modest and generous to require such a thing. So when she’s in our vicinity for any length of time, you can guess what she bakes for my elated husband. Last time, she went the extra mile and left a spare bottom crust and dough scraps in our freezer. So the Thanksgiving pie was even more reason for giving thanks: Mama’s magical piecrust, ready-made, waiting only to be filled for the big finish.

I blind-baked that bottom crust and a sheet of cinnamon-sugared leaves I’d cut out of the dough scraps, made apple pie filling, warmed all of the parts at the last and assembled the concoction just before serving time. The man with the spare tastebuds deemed the result a little too far inclined toward the nutmeg, and I agreed: I’m always a bit unclear on how much volatile oil is still present when I grate a nutmeg–guess this one was more potent than it smelled to me. But, miraculously, the pie still managed to disappear down various gullets with some alacrity. Not to mention with many spoonfuls of homemade vanilla-cinnamon ice cream.

photoThe filling was a little of this and a little of that, as usual. I always prefer a blend of tart and sweet apples, some firmer and some tenderer, so I chose a mix of Granny Smiths, Braeburns and Golden Delicious from among the grocer’s offerings. I cut them in somewhat varied thicknesses of slice and chunks both, because I like the textural variety it brings as well as the emphasis on the distinct tastes of the types. The rest is fairly standard stuff, mostly: sweetening, spices and flavorings, fat and thickener.

My favorite thickener for apple pie filling is a bit of quick-cooking (small grain) tapioca, which again contrasts in texture with the apples to liven things up a little, and keeps the pie from collapsing when sliced. Or almost does. For sweetening apple pies, I love to use brown sugar for part or all (as in this case), because it’s no secret caramel and apples are a divine pairing and that flavor comes through in a pie nicely. A dram of vanilla to smooth out the caramel flavor. A toss of salt. A little lime juice to spark the sweetness and keep the apples’ color. A good dose of browned butter to add a little nutty undertone. And a last boost of both sweetening and zing, a spoonful of ginger preserves.

That leaves the other pie spices, and I’m pretty sure I’m relatively tame and standard with my cinnamon, nutmeg and a dash of cloves and that little bit of sweet-spicy ginger, even if I did accidentally go a little overboard with the nutmeg this time around. After all, I’m not a monster. It is my husband who asked for apple pie. And he does like his in apple pie order.

Foodie Tuesday: Nothing Sexier than Proper Mise en Place

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Ready for mirepoix-making?

Let’s face it, I’m as predictable as romantic comedies when it comes to many things, not least of all, choosing the path of least resistance when fixing food. If there’s a shortcut to the shortbread, lemme at it. If there’s a snappier way to trim snap peas, I’m on board with that. But if there’s one thing I know is worth any amount of trouble, it’s prep. It’s not glamorous, I’ll grant you, and sometimes gets mighty tedious, especially when there’s a sizable party or elaborate meal on the horizon. But there is nothing that makes the rest of the time in the kitchen more tolerable, even enjoyable, than having the best of mise en place at my fingertips.

I did my time as a house painter, back in the misty distance, and I learned tout de suite that there was no substitute for careful first steps when it came to a fine finished product; I spent some time laboring backstage and behind the scenes in theatres and found that what’s seen when the curtain’s rung up is about a thousandth of what’s been and being done for the production. Of course, my conductor husband works in a discipline where the inexperienced concert-attendee would be wildly off base to think that all performers do is get up onstage and wave arms or pipe on musical contraptions or flap tongues. Even if they have an inkling that rehearsals are necessary, they haven’t imagined the tiniest increment of blood, sweat and tears that went into a performance. And I’m fairly certain I haven’t come across any other field in which that doesn’t generally hold true. What goes on before-hand is such an essential and formative part of what comes out of the proscenium or oven that sometimes I think we’re guilty of assuming everyone would just plain intuit that. We need to tell the inexperienced what a beautiful thing is that dull seeming preparatory work, what glorious jewels are the salt-cellar and oil bottle and dishes of neatly diced Tasso and shredded Reggiano and chiffonaded basil.

Even the finished dish may not look particularly artistic, unless it’s something generally far more designer-iffic than what I’m likely to produce at my board, but it is an infinitely greater pleasure to prepare and serve food that was made easier to prepare and serve by having arranged for good mise en place in good time. There’s both the initial set of ingredients and tools that ought to be at the ready, and then there’s the lineup of Parts that precedes the final plating for presentation, and both serve to wonderfully streamline the efforts.

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The cranberry-mandarin-maple relish that will add a note of piquancy to the Thanksgiving plate is nothing much to look at, but will add its own essential character to the plate . . .

Part of the effectiveness and pleasure of mise en place for a visual obsessive like me is that it allows me to ‘paint’ with the food, whether in creating the individual dishes or in building the presentation, modest though it might be, by considering not only all of the flavors and practical characteristics of the ingredients but also their colors, shapes, visual textures and other attributes that can contribute to the integrity and–God willing–deliciousness of the whole.

So this is why, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I’ve been brewing broth for gravy, concocting relishes and garnishes, butterflying the turkey and brining it (tomorrow it bathes sous vide, Thursday gets its high-roast crunch on!), roasting potatoes so that they will make heavenly light mash despite the added gallons of cream and pounds of butter, and all of that other ‘peripheral’ stuff. It’s not much to look at, to be sure, but I think I’ll manage to get a pretty fair showing out of it all eventually, because I’m laying the groundwork and setting the foundations first. Amen, let’s eat!

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That's it for today's sage advice.

Let Out the Waistband a Little, Wontcha

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photoBig as All Outdoors

Though she’s partial to the taste

Of homely things, she would not shun

A lobster tail or truffle, waste

Fine wine, or insult anyone

Who’s made the effort to provide

Her with the best the fecund earth

Produces, so she opens wide,

And so maintains her striking girth

garphite drawingMy paternal grandfather was a fabulous person, a super-grandpa. He was also a well-rounded man. He used to tell us kids he had a ‘watermelon’ stashed under his belt, and we had little reason to doubt it. Clearly a man so full of joie de vivre could have no worse burden than being shaped like the centerpiece of a summer picnic. Unfortunately in combination with an imperfectly functioning ticker this particular element of his physique probably led down a fairly direct path to his early death. But honestly, I can’t say it’s likely he’d’ve traded for more years of life if it meant giving up any serious amount of the good food he adored. He didn’t seem too distressed when laughingly relating his trip to a clothier where he’d been rather imperiously informed by the tailor that he was Portly and would require a bit of special attention to be well fitted.

Me, I can’t say I’d find it easy to choose differently than he did. Because food is a grand part of my joie de vivre as well. I’m more likely to reenact his slightly sheepish yet cheery confession when Grandma caught him almost literally with his hand in the cookie jar and he told her “I only ate fourteen.” Or I’ll quote his favorite refrain about virtually anything edible: “Wouldn’t this be great with some chocolate ice cream!”

photoWhether the menu du jour is old-school comfort food like lemony shellfish over butter-steamed beet greens, a cheeseburger-meatloaf or an egg salad sandwich, or is some fantastic concoction full of exotic ingredients (probably made by more skilled hands than mine, in that case), count on me jumping into the buffet line right away. Hey, I give myself aerobic credit for the jumping, for starters. The exercise’ll help improve my odds, right Grandpa? I’m always going to have a little Grandpa-angel on my shoulder, of course, reminding me to be moderate when I can stand to be, so I won’t follow too exactly in his genetic footsteps, but if I can keep up with the total-immersion happiness he seemed to find in sitting down to a great meal with his loved ones I’ll be glad to consistently have that aspect of my role model in mind too. Just thinking of our many fantastic times with Grandpa makes the food taste that much better, as it is. Hey, you over there, sneak another scoop of that Tillamook Mudslide ice cream into my dish while I go change into my elastic-waist stretch pants, all right?

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Foodie Tuesday: In a Froth over Broth

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How do I love broth? Let me count the ways.

photoSo versatile and so flexible an ingredient, it’s surprising that broth should be so UN-intimidating, so simple to concoct once you get the hang of it. After all, it’s water and flavorings simmered together for a nice long party in the hot tub, nothing more really. I’m extraordinarily simplistic when it comes to broth: if it ain’t easy to brew and full of tasty smooth liquid-gold goodness when it’s done, it ain’t gettin’ made in my kitchen. It ought to have a nice dose of nutrients beaming out of its depths as well, but I’m not getting any meters and test strips and laboratory lunacy involved to prove my point; if the ease is easy enough and the soup is slurpy enough, my litmus test is satisfied.

Every time I slide the old slow cooker off its shelf and out to start the party going, I clutch at my heart to still the palpitations of happy-tude. Because somewhere along the line, this kitchen commitment-phobe who dreaded attempting to prepare anything that looked complicated and fussy and mysterious discovered that while a good broth may require a certain amount of attention and a couple of brief periods of semi-assiduous activity over a couple of days (!), it doesn’t have to be scary and impossible, even for me. And hooray, it doesn’t have to follow a persnickety recipe full of esoteric ingredients either.

Good soup-secret factoids I’ve learned:

1 – Don’t think too hard. The more I muck about with a Plan in the kitchen for anything, the more I tend to want to give up.

2 – Use good ingredients. Don’t cook with anything you wouldn’t be willing to eat as nearly unadulterated on its own as is safe or any booze or juice you wouldn’t be caught drinking on purpose. That age-old wisdom is handed down from the earliest generations of cooks precisely because it’s True and it works.

3 – Choose tools that work the way you want them to and keep the techniques as uncomplicated as possible. Good broth can be made without much real skill, I’ve learned, so don’t go and make it more daunting than necessary.

4 – Let the ingredients, tools and time do the work for you as much as possible.

I use a Crock-Pot®, because it’s the slow cooker I happen to have and I like it. I’ve had it for about a decade and it puts up with all of my kitchen monkeyshines without breaking a sweat. Okay, that’s a complete fib: slow cookers tend to “sweat” profusely inside; it’s part of what they’re designed to do. Mine has a see-through (except for that condensation) glass lid and a removable stoneware lining that lets me soak all of the evidence away after whatever I’ve wrought in my cooking frenzies.

The rest of my broth-making arsenal is basic as can be. My 10×14″ Pyrex® casserole baking dish (not seen here–it was in use elsewhere during today’s modeling photo-shoot) to put bones and/or vegetables in for roasting before the big simmer starts. Tongs and a sturdy spoon for tending and fishing around in the broth contents once in a while if needed, and a sturdy cooking spider (this 6″ diameter baby works great for my purposes). Our old pasta strainer cook pot, lined with a flour sack dish towel, is the perfect way to finish the broth straining once the cookery is done.

photoThe ingredients of my broth parties are variable. A basic vegetable broth from my kitchen is likely to be nothing more complex than the classic aromatic combination of carrots, celery and onion, with seasonings dictated by my mood and the intended uses of the broth (mmmm, shall I go southeast Asian this time? Head for something more Spanish and gently tuck in some saffron at the end? Throw in some fruit?).

Seafood broth starts with the same aromatics and gets whatever shellfish parts–yay, I get to say exoskeletons, because it’s correct and such a cool word!–I can get my paws on thrown in along with the available vegetal treats. I’m not entirely open-minded when it comes to the veg that gets added to broth blends, because there are some (cruciferous culprits, I’m looking at YOU, for example) that will take over the pot the minute they get a chance and you won’t taste anything else. No matter how much I like broccoli, I’m saving it for Cream of Broccoli soup where it can show off all it wants without being a pest, but otherwise I’m a segregationist lest there be a liquid coup d’état.

Roasting almost anything before simmering it in liquids, thanks to the ethereal effects of caramelization or Maillard reaction, is a great way to enrich and intensify the flavors of the brew, so if there’s time to do a medium-heat roast beforehand, it’s always a dandy addition. And since that process is so ridiculously simple, it’s one there’s no reason to avoid.

How I roast this stuff: scatter coarse chunks of tasty ingredients in a big flat pan (the aforementioned Pyrex, in my house), season them with a light sprinkling of good salt and black pepper and a spritz of some delicious fat (coconut oil, olive oil, butter, lard, bacon drippings–whatever the mood requires that happens to be on hand), and stick it all in the oven at around 350 degrees Fahrenheit until it smells irresistible and looks as pretty as a roasted-goodies picture should look. What to roast: aromatic vegetables, root vegetables, sturdy mushrooms, and/or any protein supplements headed for the pot. That shellfish armor, some hunks of not-very-tender meat or just bones from the same birds or beasts that are destined to be the centerpiece–they can all benefit from a bout in the tanning bed. If some of it browns nicely before the rest, pull it out earlier and throw into the cauldron to get a head start simmering.

photoAll of this takes far longer to tell than it does to do.

So. Pre-roast whatever you want browned. Then you load up the slow cooker with the browned goods, vegetal parts, and seasonings, cover it all with water and/or white wine (red almost always overpowers the flavor too much for mere broth), throw in another knob of butter or other fat if so moved. Me, I’m almost always moved to add fats, okay? Then Let. It. Cook. No need to fiddle with it again for a very long time. I usually let my broth simmer for a whole twenty-four hours and get all of the flavor and life I can out of the meat, bones, vegetables and seasonings I’ve corralled in my concoction.

Dedicated vegetarians, I accept your choice, but please allow me to differ; while I relish good vegetarian dishes any time, I also respect and admire quality seafood, poultry and meats that are simmered down to their essences in broth. I cook mine so intently–but not, I insist, intensely, as that would kill their flavor and defeat the purpose of this slow ritual–that often the heaviest beef bone in the pot will break into several pieces when I begin the straining process by shoveling out the solids with my spider. Waste not; taste’s in the pot.

I cannot emphasize enough how little it matters to me to do the constant-skimming, water-changing, pot-cosseting stuff that I’m sure has perfectly meaningful and scientific reasons for being done by so many expert chefs. I can’t be bothered, because when I finally do strain out my broth and let it cool and chill it overnight and pull off the fat cap, I haven’t got any leftover grunge I won’t happily glug down plain or in a recipe. I have clear, rich, smiling, shimmering soup stuff that straight out of the fridge wiggles like a happy dashboard hula doll from all of the natural gelatin in it, soup that has rich, deep flavor from the roasting and the combination of delectable ingredients, and especially from the long sensual spa treatment melding it all together, and that I personally think has benefited greatly from not being pestered or treated with distrust. I’m not above poking the spoon in about once every two hours during daylight to slightly rearrange the parts and just make sure everyone gets an equal soak, not to mention to let a little of that intoxicating steam float around the house, but otherwise I’m all about letting the low heat and long time do their thing without interference from moi.

My general favorite broth combination these days is as follows:

Yellow onion, skin and all. Sweet onions are too soulless for soup. Sorry, sweet onions!

Carrots and celery, washed but not peeled or trimmed.

Beef: shanks, oxtail, short ribs, marrow bones, and all of the trimmings from steak dinners that got set aside in the freezer for Broth Day. Chicken: the picked carcass of last week’s roast chicken, plus a piece of fried chicken that didn’t get et at the picnic on Saturday, also all rescued from freezer purgatory. Beef and poultry are great as soloists, but together they rock the house. Just sayin’.

A small palm-full of black peppercorns, several good bay leaves, a big sprig of thyme, about a half-dozen whole cloves and a half-teaspoon or so of whole allspice. Sometimes a stick of whole cinnamon. I never add salt at this phase, since the roasted stuff was lightly salted, the meats were seasoned for their previous meals, I don’t (yes, I confess it right here in front of God and everybody) bother to use unsalted butter, and I concentrate this brew all too well to get anything but seawater if I’m adding further salt incautiously.

[Sometimes I add a knob of grassy pastured butter at this point. Because it’s insanely delicious. If I don’t put it in the pot I’m tempted to just eat it anyway, so better in the broth than in me. Maybe.]

Lop everything into approximately 2″ rough hunks. Neatness doesn’t count. Fill the cooker loosely up to the max-fill mark and then fill in the nooks and crannies with liquid. Set it a-simmer and wait for the angels to come and alight on the kitchen counter in anticipation of the unveiling lo these many hours later.

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We All Love Woobibe

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photoChildren pretty much love food and love to eat. Grownups are great at over-thinking them out of it: ‘Ooh, that’s too peppery, you won’t like it, Jimmy!’ ‘Oh, no, Suzie can’t have oysters; they’re too strange for a four-year-old’s taste!’ ‘I’m pretty sure Elmo is allergic to that stuff, ’cause he made a face when he tasted it the first time, so we’ll be sure to keep him safely away from it!’ Not to mention, ‘Are you kidding, let that six year old have truffles shaved onto her pasta???’ And then we wonder why “kids are such picky eaters”. Duhhh.SilverpointThe natural curiosity and openness of children should be encouraged (okay, up to a point, Lord Copper), and the people I’ve known with Good Eaters in the family simply tended to let nature take its course and give their kids whatever opportunity and exposure they could. Setting an example goes so much further than any amount of teaching and preaching. That goes not just for eating but for learning about all aspects of food, from its historic and cultural origins to how it’s raised and prepared, and how the young’uns themselves can participate in the process. The more the exposure is filled with fun and delight, the better the odds for success.

That’s how one of our nephews discovered when he was quite little that he loved the taste of that marvelous vegetable with the poisonous leaves whose super-acidic stalks have been used raw in traditional Chinese pharmacology as a laxative: rhubarb. Fortunately our nephew was, as were most of us, introduced to rhubarb, or “woobibe,” as he called it, not in its medicinal form but in its delectable sweetened-and-cooked form that tames its acid, and so fell immediately in love with the changeling vege-fruit. He admired it so much that he got his grandmother to get him started cultivating the stuff, which he still does, happily. [Yes, that’s some of his beautiful rhubarb below.]photoIt just so happens that I’m a big ol’ fan of rhubarb too. I adore it in sauce, pie, jam, tapioca pudding, chutney, and roasted and candied and simmered, and-and-and. But then, I grew up surrounded by not only good cooks but very much in the midst of people who respected and enjoyed and gave thought to and were grateful for their food. All of which made me the fan-girl I generally am in my medium-old age. Happy places to be, both the medium-old age and the fandom.SilverpointYou up-and-comers, middle-agers and glorious geezers all–and of course I consider myself to be each and every one of those as well, depending upon the moment–I bid you to take such comestible comeliness as the magnificent rhubarb, the sizzling hot pepper or the tantalizing truffle with all of the seriousness and happy enthusiasm they deserve. Especially when the kids are watching.

Rhubarb-Beetroot Chutney [Not bad at all as a relish for nice fat stuff like a scrumptious grilled cheese sandwich or a hunk of juicy grilled salmon or buttery seared lamb chops.]

Combine approximately equal amounts of peeled and cubed fresh beets,  1″-cut fresh rhubarb pieces, and sugar with just enough water to start the sugar melting a little, plus a couple of whole cloves and a cinnamon stick and a tiny pinch of salt. Bring it all up gradually to a simmer and then let it cook gently over low to moderate heat for a nice long time until it melts and thickens together. Pull out the cloves and cinnamon stick, and puree all the goodness into a nice mash. Keep cooking if it isn’t jammy enough. Adjust to your own exquisitely fine-tuned personal taste and enjoy.

Now, please don’t fuss with this “recipe” any more than absolutely necessary; only if it’s really rather easy and fun to make does it taste appropriately yummy. Extra bonus points if you bring a nice small person or two along for the preparation and savoring, because you will have a happy fellow diner for life. You’re welcome.

Foodie Tuesday: Drinking Flowers and Eating Dirt

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When you can't afford to drink stars, why not drink flowers?

Molecular gastronomists amaze me. Their mastery of elaborate concoctions and decoctions, deep-frozen and spherized and powdered and atomized into unprecedented works of art is impressive, often–I’m told–just as extravagantly delicious (though few can afford to find out), and almost always results in an astounding display of visual artistry of one sort or another. Many practitioners are also preparing and presenting highly refined acts of theatre. I stand in awe of and sometimes deeply moved by the concept of what the molecular gastronome does. And think that perhaps no kind of cook is as deserving of a “gnomic” title as the mad scientist of the kitchen.

Yet both because so few people can stretch our pockets to carry large enough quantities of that other essential dining ingredient, dough–in its vernacular definition as money–and because trendy palates are so easily jaded, the stage for molecular gastronomy’s expression is necessarily a very narrow niche apart from its conversational appeal. I hear that many of the most famed practitioners of this very art are indeed delving into a new branch of the kitchen sciences, or more accurately, going back to the attics and cellars of it, by reexamining antique cookery of all sorts. No matter how much we hybridize and transmogrify the ingredients or tweak, deconstruct and reassemble them, there is and always will be a relatively limited palette of possible foods we can use for the culinary practice. For every pallet of russet potatoes shipped to the kitchens of the world, there are only so many truly new things we’re likely to be able to do with them and still result in an edible item, let alone one we want to eat.

The beauty of revisiting and rethinking traditions and successes of the past is that there are so many forgotten treasures that deserve to be enjoyed yet again. But far more than that, it’s because it takes us back to where we came from as families, as cultures, as homo sapiens, and allows us to understand better how we fit in the world. Think, for example, of the people that first took up and swallowed a handful of their native clay, not knowing but evidently instinctively sensing that it offered essential minerals and nutrients that the plants and animals in their usual diet could not provide. Imagine being the very first person to taste a mint leaf, an oyster, a strawberry. To eat honey, of all things. These intrepid adventurers advanced human existence immeasurably. Imagine, even, your own first taste of any kind of food–what a revelation, a revolution, for good or ill that was!

And so much of the origin of any culture’s cuisine is full of wonders and delicious things that we should be loath to forget and lose. While I would never be one to turn down a good glass of champagne or sparkling wine, there have been many discoveries to equal the joys of Dom Pérignon‘s possibly apocryphal but nonetheless fitting sensation that in such a quaff he was tasting the stars. One of my own favorites is the drink that has been a standard from farm to fancy-dress for uncounted generations, an elderflower cordial. It’s like a light lemonade with great floral top-notes. A classic home brew in the British Isles and Scandinavia and probably elsewhere as well, it’s both delicate and distinctive in its light and heady sweetness. My sister, who lives in Norway and has nice elders growing near her house, makes fabulous elderflower cordial with the technique she learned there. I’m neither so skilled nor so patient, but am not ashamed to rely on well-made commercial cordial, whether in syrup form as in the kind I buy off the grocery shelf when in Stockholm or at IKEA when here, or as sparkling pressé like that produced by the charming Belvoir Fruit Farms (nope, not getting any sort of payment for sharing this personal endorsement with you! But you should go visit their humorous and quirky and refreshing website just for fun even if you think “flower soda” sounds appalling).

A mighty tasty lunch or supper treat that’s different from the usual for me but is extremely simple to prepare and satisfies both my sweet and savory hankerings is fried cheese with a dipping sauce. I love the crumb-crusted and deep fried cheese with a tzatziki-like sour cream dip that we get at Bistro Praha, a very favorite haunt in Edmonton for innumerable delectable and delightful reasons from the uniformly fabulous central-European cookery to the marvelous people running the place. But again, limited in resources to get to Edmonton whenever I wish or, barring that, to get quite the right ingredients and find time to bread and fry and sauce it all up properly, I can do a variant here that’s also wonderfully satisfying. I find a nice slab of Halloumi or Queso Ranchero or (as here) Juustoleipä or some similar “heatproof” cheese and fry it on medium heat in my cast iron skillet with just enough butter or olive oil to keep it from sticking (this time the skillet was conveniently still seasoned just fine with duck fat from last week’s lunch) and just warm it through until nicely browned on the outside, melty inside. I had this with a cup of last week’s beef bone broth on the side, so between the two savories, both a bit on the salty side as I prefer them, I wanted the dipping sauce for the cheese lusciousness to be sweet and a tiny bit spicy to offset that. I mixed plum jam and ginger preserves and warmed them with a little minced fresh mint, and that did the trick perfectly for my tastes. Jam, cheese, broth: all slow foods in their initial preparation, but once in the larder or fridge, they become almost instant throw-together happiness. And there is a decidedly old-fashioned appeal to such a meal that makes me glad so many of our illustrious ancestors were venturesome gastronauts in their own right.

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A simple repast is not a thing of the past, but it needn't be dull as dusty history either . . .

Foodie Tuesday: Beauty is in the Tastebuds of the Beholder

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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.

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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.

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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

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". . . 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.

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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.

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

Foodie Tuesday: Bad News/Good News/Bad News

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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.

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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.

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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!

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

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

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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.