OHC: Omnivore Herbivore Carnivore

I've moved....

2012-01-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

...to Tumblr, with everyone else. Check me out here.

2011-12-19T11:04:00.000-08:00

My book is available for pre-order at Amazon, right here.

more meat, please.

2011-12-14T08:35:00.000-08:00

An old friend of mine from grad school, Pete Attia, has just started a nutrition and health blog called War On Insulin. The critic in me has always been a bit cynical about neanderthal diets and such - I'm suspicious of romantic ideas of what a primitive or pre-modern body might have been. Peter, on the other hand, is about as obsessive and focused a scientific researcher as I've ever met. I'm going to follow along and think about his nutritional advice.Truth be told, I'd like to go back to a more meat-centered diet; his suggestions look pretty decent to me.

roast, mash, mix, roll, toast

2011-10-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

tortilla and salsa verde, pictures taken during a cooking class in Silverlake.

Against Gluttony

2011-09-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

In the conclusion to my first book I have a line where I say: I am sick to death of food. I wrote and erased that line about ten times before leaving it in; as the copy edits are just now under way, I suppose that I may still take it out.

The truth stands, though: I am so tired of food. Tired of food as event (the expensive restaurant), tired of food as performance (cf: wine people), tired of foodie-ism (class pretension disguised as self-expression and "taste" or "preference"), tired of pretensions to earthiness (the whole DIY movement as the most recent narcissistic expression of commodity citizenship).

That feeling washed over me the other day at Whole Foods. I thought: look at how greedy we are. And I felt so ashamed to be participating in that greed. I looked back at my early foodie self, you know, over twenty years ago when I began to write and think about food and, well, the connection between that girl's class aspirations and her food tastes seemed raw and painful to me.

Don't get me wrong: I still do food studies and my next project is arguably a food studies project. I still like restaurants; sometimes I like wine (though I prefer beer); I still love to feed people delicious (truthful?) food; I still have strong opinions on and preferences for certain foods, and I like to can. Some might say I'm about as pretentious as you can get; I certainly would. But I guess what I'm saying is that I wish people would stop talking about food and just eat it.*

Lately I've been thinking about how to recuperate simplicity in food, how to make meals for my family that have an element of what I would call, maybe, elementalism. One ingredient at a time, doing a perfectly adequate job at being edible. I don't mean this in the California sense of ingredient-centered romanticism, that is, in some fantasy of food pastoralism. I can't wax precious about late summer tomatoes - though I do like them. I myself am not in love with farming or gardening, or growing anything with my hands - though I appreciate the people who do, and do it well.

The other night, for instance, I made us a meal of brown rice and scrambled eggs. Some sliced raw cucumbers on the side. A little hot sauce on top.

Shut. Up. A perfectly fine dinner. More than that: my son eating it and me watching him. Perhaps I have become more interested in how people are eating, in the intimacy of the everyday, than in what they are eating. This may be the theme that extends from the first book to the second.

Perhaps what I'm saying is that just fine is good enough.

* - I get the nauseating irony.

Pasadena Taco Truck

2011-08-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

I'm toying with the idea of having a chapter on food blogs in my next book. I've been thinking about it ever since I read a quote in a magazine article about this being the generation that photographs everything it eats.

Why DO we do that, anyway? Are we afraid every meal is going to be our last?

Carne Asada, El Pastor and Pollo tacos, respectively, $1.25 each.

Pizzeria Mozza: dessert (Hollywood, August 2011)

2011-08-09T11:13:00.001-07:00

So on Mondays through Thursdays, Pizzeria Mozza offers a lunch special where $20 gets you a pizza, a glass of wine and a dessert. Here's my dessert from last week: caramel ice cream with marshmallow cream and salted peanuts.

Shut. Up.

I had to buy marshmallows at the store this week but of course it doesn't compare. Must make my own marshmallows one of these days: I think I'm scared of working with egg whites.

Europane (Pasadena, August 2011)

2011-08-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm a little in love with the idea of using a watermelon slice as a plate for an appetizer or salad course: this salad has tomatoes, feta and - I think? - mache?

coupon madness

2011-07-30T09:35:00.001-07:00

Every year I promise myself that I will start couponing and then I get lazy about it. I think I took couponing seriously for about two weeks and managed to save tons of money on it. But then I lost all of my links, and the printer wasn't working and then life got in the way and to the back burner went my good plans for penny-pinching.

A few weeks ago I made myself watch an episode of Extreme Couponing, which if you've seen it, you'll know is an appalling display of capitalism gone monstrous. In essence these families -- it's usually pinned on the mom, but everyone gets involved, at least while the cameras are running -- get ultra-organized about clipping coupons, and then racking up coupon savings (doubling! tripling!) on their Vons or Safeway cards or whatever and then they go out and buy all of this stuff they don't need. And then they turn the interiors of their homes into replicas of the store.

Is she in the store or at home?

There's a clear link for me between Extreme Couponing and, say, do-it-yourself movements. Both seem to me to responses to the extreme coerciveness of capitalism, which markets false choice and an ethos of individual responsibility to a public that increasingly equates success with public visibility. Can't afford it? You're not organized enough/you should make it yourself. You're not trying hard enough! And of course: feeling invisible? Get on tv! Blog! (Ahem.)

It's a tricky thing this living within capitalism: can you really exert any control over what you buy, or how much you spend? For my part, I find extreme couponing, just like the DIY movement, sort of apocalyptic. No, not sort of: definitely. Sure, the latter movement, especially the reuse/recycle part of it, are constructive responses to the environmental disaster we are all living within.

But how much difference is there between houses piled to the rafters with extreme couponing bargains and the nuclear fallout shelters of the 1950s? Except the disaster no longer seems to be nuclear but rather capitalism itself imploding, or eating itself alive on a planetary level.

Maybe the correct aesthetic reference should be to the many pop and modern art images of grocery store culture gone mad.

Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans (from the MOMA collection)

Andreas Gursky's 99 cent (also MOMA)

Lyza Danger's Grocery Store-zilla
(discussed on Mental Floss, Boing-Boing and featured in her flickr stream)

It's the new landscape, I suppose. I'm the first to admit that I find a lot of beauty in consumerism, and I'm an avid bargain hunter. But neither seems to be bolstering my despair at our planetary sunset any more, and I think, given the freneticism of the seemingly anti-capital new consumerist movements, it might not be for others either.

The manuscript is in!

2011-06-25T10:40:00.000-07:00

Phew! Now I just wait to see if the editors want more changes.

Also I need to get image permissions, scan my images properly, and write two book reviews and two articles, all by September 1. But my brain won't let me work: I've spent the last ten days lying on my couch reading the entire Sookie Stackhouse series -- all eleven books -- and, sadly, the very last Robert B. Parker mystery.

I've been telling people that handing the book manuscript in has felt like being relieved of chronic pain -- there's this radio silence in my head that's totally unnerving. I'm looking forward to filling the silence with a new project and most of all to getting out from under all of the publishing/performance pressure of a revised dissertation to find a writing voice I really want to inhabit. I'm pretty sure my next project will be about recipes, and I have a third book planned as well.

In food news, I've ordered a new, smaller, canning kit, after we stupidly sold our old one. I think I'm going to try doing some small-batch canning this summer. Since I had my initial canning phase during my first sabbatical 2007-2008 there's been this explosion in canning culture, part of the new bourgeois DIY domesticity. Makes me wish I had followed through on my plans to write a preserving cookbook.

I've got lots of theories on the new DIY culture, and a lot of them have to do with the unconscious ways our culture deals with massive environmental degradation, financial trauma and general cultural rootlessness. As Lauren Berlant said in an amazing talk given at the Hammer Museum a few weeks ago: we are in a period of massive cultural turmoil and we have no idea what is going to happen next. I think ~~people~~ the privileged classes are reaching out for something solid to hold on to, and as we so often do in this late-national period, we reach back to the past. Lauren also said this other amazing thing, Delphic Oracle that she is. She said: maybe we are all always thinking about futurity, but we don't have the genres to express those ideas yet.

I've been thinking a lot about genres since I heard that talk.

Writing in this blog, at one point in my life, was about reaching out for a writing voice that was easier and more joyful than my academic writing voice as a way of getting back to my academic writing when I was really blocked. I've spent a lot of time over the last few years rewriting my dissertation and manuscript - multiple times - trying to find an easier tone of voice, trying to make my intellectual prose more beautiful. I don't think that's a process that will stop now. Rather, I am hoping that reaching for the next project will open up new genres of writing for me, that somehow tie together what I do here and what I do in my scholarly life. If you look back at the last few posts, where I keep promising to start writing here, that's really what I've been struggling with.

So: what do canning, writing, political and cultural theory, genre and the nineteenth century have to do with each other? And with other worlds? I just don't know. If I keep up the writing here, maybe I will get a bit closer to an answer. I have a feeling that just writing this is helping me understand what my next book is about. I wish I could can this feeling.

what is left to say about food?

2011-01-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

What is there left to say about food? Though I haven't kept up with any food bloggers (maybe Molly and Jessica's) since I dropped the blog to concentrate on my manuscript quite a while ago, it seems to me that a lot of food blogging follows along the lines of:

a. domestic narrative, plus recipes
b. recipes, with a message (weight loss, health issues, allergies, vegetarian/veganism etc)
c. love of place including city food blogs (paris, new york, san francisco, los angeles, tokyo, etc) and country food blogs (farm life, living sustainably, etc)
d. gimmicky food blogs, in manner of Julie/Julia
e. what-I-ate-today blogs
f. photo-rich blogs, my personal favorite
g. restaurant blogs

I think what I might be looking for is a food essayist approach. The downside of that is that it means taking the writing part of this blog far more seriously, so that I'd have to forego some of the pleasure of writing a post quickly, which I've loved about blogging as opposed to my scholarly work. On the other hand, the upside of a longer food essay approach is that it means taking the writing part of this job seriously.

So, with that in mind, who are the great food essayists? MFK Fisher, Calvin Trillin, Jeffrey Steingarten, Laurie Colwin... De Montaigne. Bourdain, regretfully. Reichl, at least her first book. John Thorne, absolutely one of my favorites.

on writing about food, again

2010-12-31T13:32:00.001-08:00

On New Year's Eve, another pledge to start food blogging again. I'm hoping that the addition of various camera apps to my new IPhone will help; I put my SLR away almost a year ago and haven't had it out since.But no excuses: between baby, the business of teaching and my book, my blogging has been thin on the ground, to say the least. In part it's because of my real exhaustion with food-as-performance; after twenty or so years thinking and writing about food, I need to find a new way into being interested in the thing I'm most interested in.
Part of it is that I really don't want to join the food blogging hordes, publicly snapping away as they eat. I do believe in smart and sustained food criticism, and I don't have the time to do it anymore. Nor do I have the time or patience for the crazy canning fevers of yesteryear. Perhaps it's that I need to find a way to better integrate my two writing voices, the bloggy one that is much more interested in immediate pleasures, and the scholarly one that finds pleasure in my more sustained interests. I like the anonymity of the latter more but I miss the conversations that came with the former, many of which have moved to other social media. I like the texture of my scholarly work, if that makes sense. And I'd like to find a way to write in the first person that is less ego-bound. It is, one has to admit, very hard to find a way into writing about food that isn't hobbyist, or dull, or uncritical. Or pious. But I suppose one could say the same thing about scholarly writing. I'll try to do better in the New Year. I'll try, perhaps, to bring a sense of commensality back to the blog.

Kelg? Kela? Kely? All of the above?

2010-03-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

Kevin's post today reminded me that I hadn't posted the latest creative reinterpretation of my name at Starbucks. I think this is the best yet! Kelg! If my name was Kelg I would be a creature on the Starship Enterprise who worked on trans-warp somethingrather-whatchamacallit. Kelg is distinctly Gene Roddenberryian.

MS. 8A suggests that I should just give them "Trudy" or something. In fact, I do have a secret name, something I think every woman should have in case of irritating unwanted advances. If you internalize a fake name, as I once told my younger cousin the awesome CW, you always have it on the tip of your tongue for people who don't need to know, in bars and such. I don't think I'll do it when ordering my iced green tea though: I get a perverse pleasure from seeing my name misspelled on coffee cups.

Oddly enough, Meg suggests "Trotsky" and David suggests Stalin. Coincidence?

Classic

2010-03-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

Seriously?

2010-03-01T15:34:00.000-08:00

Best one yet.....

Misspelled coffee cups, part 1

2010-02-27T12:36:00.000-08:00

I've actually been meaning to do this for some time; put up a series on misspellings of my name. And not just at Starbucks; it just so happens that in the last few weeks I've been hitting Starbucks regularly and remembering to take the picture and post it on Facebook. To be fair, baristas often ask me to spell my name for them, but then I usually have to do it three or four times so I figured, why not just let them make it up?

I like how the guy in Pic #1, above, split the difference between the "e" and the "i". On the other hand, the guy below invented a whole new letter: the "l" with the umlaut. Or maybe it's a new kind of smiley.

Roasted Banana Ice Cream

2009-10-08T14:20:00.001-07:00

..is like ice cream crack.

To make: sprinkle bananas with butter and brown sugar, and roast at 400F until they are caramelized. Scrape with syrup into a food processor, puree with milk and vanilla until thick and custard-like, then process in your ice cream maker.

All of this via David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop, the best ice cream cookbook ever....

When the cat's away.....

2009-10-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

...the mouse has a burger! T. was away last weekend and so the A-man and I indulged in a burger. Which he didn't like and which promptly made me feel ill. Here they are half-formed and under-cooked in the frying pan. Besides roasted chicken, I'm not convinced I know how to cook meat well....

Plans and experiments continue on the cooking front. Above you will see the A-man chowing down on an orzo-peas-pesto-asiago combination that I made and froze up last week. We are still tweeking the weekly cook-a-thon but these days I'm thinking that Sunday should see two complete sets of frozen entrees for the week, one container of roasted veggies and something sweet. With that to count on, some fresh fruit and dairy, eggs, a few fresh-cooked meals and a couple of prepared foods like the shu mai that we've taken to buying every week, that takes us through a full week of three meals-a-day plus two snacks.

Last week's other major frozen dish was chana masala, but it's clear that the A-man likes dal better. Coming up: roasted banana ice cream, via David Lebovitz...

Now Under New Culinary Dictatorship: All Hail the Toddler!

2009-09-25T17:03:00.000-07:00

As you can see, like most kids the A-man loves his pasta. Which is great because even though I've bragged that he eats everything, we do have to do some concealing of vegetables to get as many down as we'd like. Pasta is a good way to do it.

In order to save time during the week I've taken to cooking two or three pots of food on Sunday and then freezing them into individual servings. This way T. gets food to take to school and I don't have to cook every day or think about planning meals more than just minimally. Honestly, I never thought I'd be the kind of person who planned out weekly menus but, yup, here I am with a menu sheet on the fridge and a master grocery list written out in OmniOutliner. Gone - at least temporarily - are the days when dinner was a glass of wine, a hunk of epoisses berthaut and some bread.

This week I did three dishes: orzo with cheddar, peas and carrots; berry compote for yogurt, and spaghetti with a red pepper-tomato sauce, spinach and feta.

I know there are some people out there that can do a whole fresh meal every night, but these days, if I want to get any of my own work done at night - and sometimes I'm way, way, way too knackered to - I have to plan ahead. At least this way I'm not defrosting Duncan Hines pizza every night.*

I think I'll do a chana masala this week, and maybe some sheperd's pies... Or maybe I'll pull out that Le Creuset tagine I've been ignoring for the last five years and do a chicken with preserved lemons and olives dish and some couscous.

* -- I'm not saying we don't do pre-packaged foods, either. We aren't afraid of a good frozen organic burrito, that's for sure.

Still a bad blogger....

2009-09-19T23:41:00.001-07:00

...take it up with me AFTER I finish the manuscript, okay? In the meantime, a few short notes.

1. The Collection

Two weeks ago I actually pruned my cookbook collection down to about, 80 or so, from around 300. I was overjoyed to get rid of anything Moosewood, which raised some eyebrows amongst my friends. I think it's hideous cooking.

I was sad to see some of the big tomes from the C.I.A. go. But I never open them and they'll do someone else a lot of good. Letting go of so many books turned me inwards and made me nostalgic for the period in my life when I was really passionate about cookbooks. I couldn't help wondering what I was searching for when I started hoarding them all. And what I've found such that I no longer need most of them. Actually I threw out a lot of old cooking stuff as well, including a full set of pots and pans and a fondue set, which, yes, I have actually used, and recently too.

I guess I just don't feel like carrying so much STUFF around anymore.

2. The Boy

The A-man continues to eat everything! This week saw the introduction of rice and lentil dal and pluots. Very exciting. The rice in the picture above is not basmati but rather some short-grained rice from a bag of Carolinian brown rice that my good friend and former roomie the Southern Slavicist bought me a few years ago. Rice, if you can believe it, is actually a new thing for me: except for risotto I NEVER make it. But I faithfully followed the package directions, left the pot lid on and stirred the cooked rice with a fork and not a spoon, thereby hopefully averting some hideous curse.

I love that my kid is into spicy food. This recipe came courtesy of my cousin's wife S., who told me to roast cumin and coriander seeds, grind them and add turmeric in order to make a mild introductory curry for the A-man's palate. I love the dal on the Bunnykins plate. Not sure what Beatrix Potter would say.

3. The Dish

New salad, born out of hunger and desperation one late night: diced peaches, pluots and avacodoes, topped with walnut oil. If it isn't too shameless to say this about your own recipes: dazzling.

Happy Canada Day!

2009-07-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

....and as that's the only Canadian thing happening to me right now, I'll move on.

Can I just say that as my cooking life is entirely taken up with what to feed baby these days I have nothing to say about food at all and seem to have even lost my appetite for the stuff, to the extent that I've lost at least ten lbs and two dress sizes... It's a strange thing, but I seem to have gone off eating altogether. Has that happened to any other new parents besides me?

My mother, who is visiting me right now, says the same thing and it makes sense: she's been running her own restaurant for twenty years and I've been reading, researching, writing and thinking about food for at least that long. So all of a sudden I don't really attack it with the same gusto I used to. I've lost my curiosity for new tastes! We even went for sushi last week and I just thought: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz............ Boring.

On the other hand, I haven't lost my taste for food-as-process and project, especially for canning, and I've been planning to put up some preserved lemons and harissa for weeks now. Maybe once I get this latest writing deadline met, for next Monday.

Above is a picture of me at my favorite writing spot, filling up with my ~~favorite~~ fuel, diet coke. Get this KF and DR, my fellow DC-junkies: I don't even really like diet coke anymore!

not much going on...

2009-06-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

So....not much happening except this:

We are now the parents of a one-year old boy, code named the A-dude, whom we brought home three weeks ago from Ethiopia.
I am on parental leave
I am trying to start blogging again
We are moving up to San Francisco on Saturday for ten weeks
I am still trying to finish my book (and write one chapter for an anthology and also two articles, but who's counting?)

On the issue of #3, above, I'm going to take a cue from The Dinner Files, which I hope you're reading, and start off with a discussion of what A-dude likes to eat, because that's pretty much what occupies my days these days. Here is what he likes:

everything

Seriously, the kid eats everything, with two exceptions: mushy cereals, which he is clearly outgrowing, and avocado, which he technically eats but only after spitting out once or twice. Sara G. assures me that food spitting is an important, though irritating, developmental milestone.

poulet

I've been trying to give the A-dude more spices recently, as we battle the giardia he brought home from the orphanage into submission. Above is chicken stuffed with garlic but as you can see from the picture below, I've been encouraging kitchen exploration.

Last week we pulled kecap manis, sour cherry syrup, tamari, corn syrup (shut up food psychos, you need it for shoofly and pecan pie!), fig balsamic, truffle olive oil and red wine vinegar out of the cupboard and got to sample them all. This week we're on a restricted diet because of the giardia meds (no dairy!) so we're doing a lot more tofu and veggie products.

I've also been trying to make some baby foods, though at one years old I obviously have to stop pureeing everything (but can be forgiven for babying him as I only got him two months ago). I made a mangu-like dish of yellow sweet potatoes, butter, milk and nutmeg last week that he also seemed to love.

I highly recommend this advice from Molly on raising an omnivorous child. And thanks to cousin C. in New York for our first foodie baby book.

Still a Crap Blogger....

2009-03-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

why i'm not food blogging these days

...but I am trying trying trying to do better! I've been considering a blogger re-org lately, moving the blog away from a food-centric focus and back to the more cultural commentary format I used to have. Problem is, I'm working on three writing projects, teaching, chairing the Gender Studies program at my college and - news! - expecting to bring home a one-year old baby boy in one month. So blogging is still going to be slow.

Anyway heads up that a blog shift is coming. Just don't know what it's going to be. I really don't want to do mommy blogging that's for sure. Just not my style.

The cat has nothing to say about this:

2009-02-25T06:26:00.000-08:00

toasty

Sorry to have been such a terrible blogger - I've been finishing a manuscript and starting a new article. But more soon.

I actually made the cornmeal pizza recipe from the Nigh-Times this weekend using fresh bocconcini. Malgre moi my flash wasn't working and I ended up with pictures that could have been captioned: Bocconcini Caught In Headlights.

Thus: no recipe for this week, just a picture of some toasty coriander and cumin seeds.

Garbage Soup

2009-01-25T14:18:00.000-08:00

before

Well I think we can all agree that I've been a terrible blogger for the last three months, while I finish another project. (FYI, look for a major article in the next Gastronomica.) However! I'm going to try to do at least minor posts for the next while, until my commuting schedule (SF-LA for three days a week) slows down.

welcome to northern california....

As you can see from the picture above, it's horrid out: freezing, rainy, ugh. Lizzy and Lucy have hunkered down to do nothing today - seriously, they are totally immobile - and I've got a pot of garbage soup on, to keep us fed for the next week.

lizzy and lucy in action

As you probably already know, garbage soup is a big pot full of whatever-you've-got plus some whatever-is-leftover all chopped up and cooked down together. Here's today's version of

Garbage Soup

One leek; one green pepper; one small green cabbage; two large heads of broccoli; lots of celery - all the above chopped, obviously - and four cans of diced tomatoes with jalapenos. For flavor backbone and just that so the soup doesn't taste like wet mulch add two cubes of vegetable bouillon, one poblano pepper split down the middle and a parmesan rind, the latter an old and excellent corrective to otherwise pallid and depressing vegetarian soup. Before serving add a bunch of chopped cilantro and maybe a dollop of sour cream.

after....

Vote For Change

2008-10-31T18:35:00.000-07:00

Shop Runway for Change at the Obama/Biden site. Get 25% off with the code 25OFF. Or don't take the discount at all....

Quick Trip to Pasadena

2008-10-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

A quick trip to LA this weekend for a wedding reception gave me the opportunity to utter four words I never thought would leave my mouth: I miss L.A. I really do! It was hot and muggy and smoggy but driving up the 110 I got a real wave of nostalgia for our year of living in Pasadena. Despite the traffic going through downtown.

Any of you who have driven in LA know that the above is not a good example of bad traffic.

On our way home we flew into SFO and took a quick side trip through Daly City to Koi Palace for what is purportedly the city's best dim sum. I've been to Koi Palace twice now and it really is the most complex and interesting Chinese food I've had since moving to the States. And I say that as a resident-in-exile of one of the foremost Chinatowns on the continent, where some of Hong Kong's top dim sum chefs decamped after Hong Kong went back to the China. A few examples:

One of Koi Palace's signature dishes are the coffee spare ribs, which while decidedly not authentic - not that I care about what is authentic - beats any ridiculous fusion invention that you'll ever find in SF's Financial District. See the cream on top? Get the joke? I'll eat anything that tastes like coffee, especially sugary, meaty, fatty spare ribs. From the other side of the tracks:

Tim got this agedashi-tofu-like tofu dish, which we both liked a lot, plus something called "Mexican Rice" (to be seen in the back of the lead picture) and an order of kai lan. T. and I always order the kai lan and in this case the waiter was thoughtful enough to offer to bring the oyster sauce on the side out of consideration for vegetarian T. I really wish I had better access to an Asian supermarket where we are; I'd love to get back into cooking more Chinese greens.

My not-very-adventurous but central reason for going for dim sum: har gow or some variation thereof:

These dumplings had shrimp and scallop in them so they're not strictly speaking har gow but I loved them nonetheless. These are the crab dumplings which I wasn't as crazy about:

Granted, none of these dumplings reach the heights achieved by Din Tai Fung in Arcadia, or even Monterey Park's Ocean Star - the rice noodle is a bit stickier and thicker than I'd like - but they're pretty good especially when you can order them with dishes like the coffee spare ribs, or the peking duck, which I had the last time we went. In fact, as I recall, I ended up eating a half duck alone, over the course of the week. Maybe I shared the skin with Lizzy.

We ended the meal with mango jelly which, to my total delight, they serve with a dish of evaporated milk the way I used to order off the dim sum dessert trollies as a child in Toronto (with canned fruit salad and almond tofu - fabulous).

Jellies are perfect slurped down with hot oolong. Now back to grading.

sparse notes from a busy week (or three)

2008-10-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

Artichoke season! Which doesn't apply to me because for the life of me I cannot ever cook these pain-in-the-butt vegetables properly.

More important and fun, it's melon time and T. and I have been dining out on the same cassaba melon for about two weeks. He's on a smoothie kick and we have been getting our 4 servings or whatever in liquid form. Throw in some white nectarines (see background) and you're in smoothie heaven.

We've also been going nuts on heirloom tomatoes and the last of the season's basil, as in these two pictures, taken from Friday's dinner party with visiting family:

This is a local Bulgarian feta that I bought at the new New Leaf in Half Moon Bay, and it's accompanying TWENTY DOLLARS worth of heirlooms, bought to feed a party of eight. We'd done a similar dish the weekend before when Cousin Baby Momma visited and we made our own pesto to go on top.

Besides that, nothing interestingly foodie to report, really. I'm going to have to try and put something up soon or there won't be anything to give away for the holidays....

Nothing Much to Report....

2008-09-22T19:53:00.000-07:00

Right so it's a little fuzzy but above you see pictures of my latest preserving project which is called I-have-no-time-to-cook-because-sabbatical-is-over-so-I'm-freezing-everything. Basically what I've been doing is buying a flat of berries every weekend, freezing and then bagging them for the winter so that we have good fruit for our smoothies at least for a few weeks after berries are gone. One day, hopefully, we'll have room for a really big freezer and I can put up enough to last us for a few months, but in the meantime, a couple of flats of frozen strawberries and raspberries will have to do.

We had friends over for dinner on Saturday and out of sheer exhaustion and some awful allergies I could only come up with a really simple meal: chakchouka with lamb sausages (but not merguez! my usual merguez guy wasn't at the market), cheesy orzo topped with truffle oil, arugula salad dressed with walnut oil and this amazing cheese that my local cheesemonger sells, called pecora pistachio. Which is exactly what it sounds like: a sheep's milk cheese with pistachios in it. Divine.

And finally, because I wanted to take them to work tomorrow, I took twenty minutes out of a dreary boatload of administrative writing and whipped up Martha Stewart's black bottom coconut bars. Because that's what I should be eating after twelve hours in front of my computer.

Next up: airport food. I'm seeing a lot of it these days....

Yesterday

2008-09-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday morning at the farmer's market, before getting some terrible news about a colleague. So, today, I just have nothing to say, really. It is strange to see pictures of the world taken before you heard something important had gone out of it. Just as watching the world go by after someone has gone seems profane.

Fittingly, it's fall, and the tomatoes and apples and zucchini blossoms are out. It smells cold these days, and soon we're going to have to light a fire every morning and leave heavy socks next to the bed. I want to eat things that are warm and heavy, and I want to share them with others.

un cafecito

2008-09-10T12:35:00.000-07:00

Yep, that's my breakfast you're looking at as I prepare for the two three-hour seminars I teach every Wednesday. Question: what do you keep in your office, or in the fridge at work to eat?

Lately I've been running to the dining halls to eat or grabbing a box of veg from Starbucks, plus I've got some yogurt and some healthy frozen meals stashed away in the fridge. Eating well is definitely going to be the major challenge of my commuting lifestyle; it's just too easy to go for the mac-and-cheese when you're pulling ~~eighteen-hour~~fourteen-hour* days in the office.

* -- it just feels like 18 hours

An Important Observation

2008-09-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

---from the guys at El Tonayense.

Please help Haiti....

2008-09-06T21:34:00.001-07:00

As some of you know, my family has lived in the Dominican Republic on and off for the last twenty years. It's hurricane season right now and, when I talked to my mom an hour ago, Hurricane Ike was exactly 120 miles north of her and the rain was coming down pretty hard.

We're lucky because Ike is passing the D.R. by. Unfortunately, just like Hurricane Gustav last week, Ike won't be passing Haiti. Already many people are without food and water, and many cities are flooded. When Ike hits Haiti tomorrow, the situation is going to get a lot worse.

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the joys of consumption and sometimes I forget that the other side of eating is hunger. But tonight it's all I can think of.

If you have a few moments today, and perhaps a few extra dollars, please give to these two organizations, which are raising money to go directly to Caribbean hurricane relief:

The British Red Cross is running a hurricane appeal here. Unicef is running a campaign here.

Fall Readings...

2008-09-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned I'm teaching a Food Studies class this fall?

It's a pretty big class, and one of my favorite classes to teach. I'll be posting my syllabus to the ASFS food studies syllabus set pretty soon, but I thought I'd post the readings here, too, in case people wanted a peek at what a food studies class looks like. Periodically I'll be posting some thoughts on our readings; stay tuned for my students' food studies blog, too.

Books
Fannie Hurst, Imitation of Life, ISBN: 978-0822333241
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life, ISBN: 978-0060852559
John Lancaster, The Debt to Pleasure, ISBN: 978-0312420369
Sara Roahen, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, ISBN: 978-0393061673
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle. ISBN: 978-0743487627
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals. ISBN: 978-0691070896
Debra Ginsberg, Waiting. ISBN: 978-0060932817
Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats: 014-0280464

September 3rd, 2008 - Week One: Method (the stuff that's good for you)
Roland Barthes, “Toward A Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption”
Klein, Roxanne and Charlie Trotter. “Raw Food,” Introduction to Raw: The Cookbook.
Jeffrey Steingarten, "Why Doesn't Everybody in China Have A Headache?" and "Cheese Crise."
Elspeth Probyn, Chapter One: "Bodies That Eat," from Carnal Appetites: Food Sex Identities
Betty Fussell, "On Murdering Eels and Laundering Swine."

September 10th, 2008 - Week Two: Identity and Food in the Americas
Jeffrey Pilcher, Que Vivan Los Tamales, Introduction, Chapters One Through Four."
Sylvester Graham, Bread and Bread Making, 1837
E. Melanie DuPuis, Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink, Introduction and chapters one through three

September 17th, 2008 - Week Three: No-one's in the Kitchen with Dinah
Psyche W. Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, Chapters 2 and 3
Fannie Hurst, Imitation of Life
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Chapter Four, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity, Chapter 1

September 24th, 2008 - Week Four: Food and (More) Immigrant Identity/ies
Film: Big Night
Hasia Diner, Hungering for America, Intro, Chapters 1-3
Harris-Shapiro, Carol (2006) 'Bloody Shankbones and Braided Bread: The Food Voice and the Fashioning of American Jewish Identities', Food and Foodways, 14:2, 67 — 90

October 1st, 2008 - Week Five: Food and Place
Trubek, Amy. A Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Berkeley: UC Press. 2008. Chapter 1.
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life

October 8th, 2008 - Week Six: Food and Bodies: The Grotesque
Film: The Nutty Professor (Eddie Murphy version)
William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, chapters 5 and 6
Rabelais's Gargantua, Chapters 6 and 7

October 15th, 2008 - Week Seven: Food Culture, Distinction and Eating Out
Parkhurst Ferguson, Priscilla. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. Chapter Two: Inventing French Cuisine.
John Lancaster, The Debt to Pleasure

October 22nd, 2008 - Week Eight: Travel and the Authentic
Sara Roahen, Gumbo Tales
Frow, John. "Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia."
Lisa Heldke, "Let's Cook Thai: Recipes for Colonialism." In Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge. 2008.

October 29th, 2008 – Guest Teacher, Molly Watson, Contributing Editor, Sunset Magazine, About.com [New York Times Co.], and The Dinner Files.

November 5th, 2008 - Week Ten: Animals and the Politics of Meat
Film: Ratatouille
J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, plus responses from Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger and Barbara Smuts.

November 12th, 2008 - Week Eleven: Food Labor
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: What the All American Meal Is Doing to the World. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Chapter 8: "The Most Dangerous Job."
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 1995 [1906].

November 19th, 2008 - Week Twelve: Food Labor, continued
Waiting, Debra Ginsberg
Barbara Ehrenreich, extract from Nickel and Dimed

November 26th, 2008 - Week Thirteen: Food and Silence
Salt, Monique Truong
Extract from Alice B. Toklas cookbook

December 3rd, 2008 -- Week Fifteen
Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats

random eating notes.....

2008-08-21T17:13:00.000-07:00

A few years ago some lucky New York Times reporter got to drive up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco in search of the perfect taco. As those two cities now form the two poles of my commuting life, I thought I'd pitch in my favorite places, one of which she mentioned in her own article.

Down the coast from us in Pescadero is Taqueria Los Amigos, where you can find one of the best fish tacos you'll ever have in your life. Los Amigos is totally innocuous: it's hidden in a gas station that doubles as a general store, and most people miss it (also because most people are going to Duarte's, also wonderful but a different kettle of fish, literally). Anyway, along with awesome tacos, they also have a full salsa bar, where I got the excellent salsa ranchero seen above.

You don't get the full salsa bar at most taco trucks but if you're ever in San Francisco, you should really check El Tonayense, which has four trucks along Harrison St. I love their lengua tacos.

Not exactly tacos but a totally hidden SF gem is the Goza Goza taco truck, which serves grilled Cuban pork sandwiches for $6 -- so awesome.

The Omnivore's 100

2008-08-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

#28 - oysters, at the santa cruz farmer's market every wednesday afternoon

($2 each or 3 for $5, thank you very much)

This Omnivore 100 meme via Sam at Becks & Posh, in turn via Andrew at Very Good Taste.

How It All Works:

1) Copy the list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) ~~Cross out~~ any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional: Post a comment at Very Good Taste, linking to your results

The 100

1. Venison

2. Nettle tea

3. Huevos rancheros

4. Steak tartare

5. Crocodile [only alligator, in New Orleans at Cochon.]

6. Black pudding

7. Cheese fondue

8. Carp [In gefilte fish - yuck.]

9. Borscht

10. Baba ghanoush

11. Calamari

12. Pho

13. PB&J sandwich

14. Aloo gobi

15. Hot dog from a street cart

16. Epoisses

17. Black truffle [the shame!]

18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes [blackberry]

19. Steamed pork buns

20. Pistachio ice cream

21. Heirloom tomatoes

22. Fresh wild berries

23. Foie gras

24. Rice and beans

25. Brawn or head cheese

26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper [I tried a nibble on a dare when in Jamaica but otherwise, are you crazy? Whoever says they've actually eaten one is lying.]

27. Dulce de leche

28. Oysters

29. Baklava

30. Bagna cauda

31. Wasabi peas

32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl [I prefer it in a regular bowl - the whole soup in bread thing is so tacky]

33. Salted lassi

34. Sauerkraut

35. Root beer float

36. ~~Cognac with a fat cigar~~ [Yuck.]

37. Clotted Cream Tea [Child of the Commonwealth, what do you expect?]

38. Vodka Jelly/Jell-O

39. Gumbo

40. Oxtail

41. Curried goat [Oh glory! Jamaican curried goat!]

42. Whole insects

43. Phaal [though in general I'm not crazy about Southern Indian food.]

44. Goat's milk

45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more

46. Fugu

47. Chicken tikka masala

48. Eel

49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut

50. Sea urchin

51. Prickly pear

52. Umeboshi

53. Abalone [Why haven't I tried this yet? I live up Highway 1 from an abalone farm.]

54. Paneer

55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal

56. Spaetzle

57. Dirty gin martini

58. Beer above 8% ABV [Ummm hello? Canadian!]

59. Poutine [Just last week!]

60. Carob chips [I have tried them; they are from Satan.]

61. S’mores

62. Sweetbreads

63. Kaolin [nope but I'd try it.]

64. Currywurst

65. Durian

66. Frogs’ legs

67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake

68. Haggis

69. Fried plantain

70. Chitterlings or andouillette

71. Gazpacho

72. Caviar and blini

73. Louche absinthe

74. Gjetost or brunost [Yech.]

75. Roadkill****

76. Baijiu [Grew up in Chinatown and bought it when I was underaged.]

77. Hostess Fruit Pie [I'm so ashamed! The crust is so gross and lardy and greasy!]

78. Snail

79. Lapsang Souchong

80. Bellini

81. Tom Yum

82. Eggs Benedict

83. Pocky

84. 3 Michelin Star Tasting Menu [Not until T. gets out of law school.]

85. Kobe beef

86. Hare

87. Goulash [possibly the first 'foreign' recipe I ever made back when I was a teen.]

88. Flowers

89. Horse

90. Criollo chocolate

91. Spam

92. Soft shell crab

93. Rose harissa [Never heard of it, must address this immediately.]

94. Catfish

95. Mole poblano

96. Bagel and lox

97. Lobster Thermidor [Always seemed so louche. Must try it now.]

98. Polenta

99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee

100. Snake [when I was a child, on a dare by a Chinese classmate.]

How many have you eaten?

**** - Yes, I have! I had a bush meat curry in Tobago once that had road kill in it.

2008-08-15T04:26:00.000-07:00

the shot machine

the lighted fountain

the individual hamburger press

Not much major cooking lately, except a big stack of frozen food for a cousin that's expecting a little guy mid-month. Instead, I've been getting ready for the school year by preparing my classes, including my food studies syllabus (my old one can be viewed here).

Some of the texts that appear in the totally rebuilt new food studies class are Jeff Pilcher's Que Vivan Los Tamales, John Lancaster's The Debt to Pleasure, J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and M.F. K. Fisher's The Art of Eating. In the meantime, during my last few days of freedom, I've been shopping for teaching clothes like mad. Speaking of which - and thank you very much, the award for worst segue ever can be passed out later - I've been meaning to put this post up for ages.

Two words, people: Sky Mall. I can't count the times that reading the Sky Mall magazine has taken the edge off of a long boring flight. The copy is the best prose ever ("Nothing goes down smoother than an ice-cold shot of your favorite liquor. Treat yourself with this hassle-free fill-and-pour system that virtually eliminates spills and features LED illumination for an eye-catching bottle display.")

Or how about the Lighted Party Fountain: "The Party Fountain adds a touch of pizazz to any event. Beverage is pumped from the bottom bowl to the top, then cascades down through holes in three separate tiers, creating a striking waterfall effect. Red and yellow lights in the base add a festive mood."

Or how about the hamburger patty press: "Simply put your ground meat inside the press, and press down! You've just fashioned a perfect 43/8"-dia. hamburger patty, ready for the broiler, grill or freezer. Heavy-duty aluminum press lets you adjust patty thickness up to 1-1/2" thick. Non-stick surface helps keep the patties whole, and makes clean-up a breeze."

Seriously, sometimes I don't know if I like kitchen appliances so much because I love to cook, or if I love to cook because I love the appliances.

(I'll post my completed syllabus here when it's done; I might use this site as part of my course.)

Off on adventures....

2008-08-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

I'm off on adventures for the next two weeks, and I've been a terrible blogger for the last three: sorry! I'll catch up soon with some canning, traveling and shopping posts. In the meantime I leave you with this picture from our own little slice of heaven in La Honda.

There was the most amazing rainbow tonight -- I think the whole town is talking about it.

Back soon!

Just Peachy

2008-07-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

I am completely devoid of creative energy. As in: totally empty and without inspiration or insight. Unable to write anything, cook anything or think anything. Why? I don't know. I just know that I've been trying to start things for the last two days but all I've been able to do is lie on the couch and watch the first season of the (now-canceled) Fox series Dirt.

I hate being blocked. So: I've sent a few chapters out to be read by friends and in the meantime, a quick blog post about a Saturday workshop I attended about a month ago with the Happy Girl people.

Happy Girl is a local company that specializes in making jams and pickles. They're at most of the Bay Area farmer's markets, and I've tried their products - especially their jars of lemonade - and really like them. A few weeks ago I took their cherries and apricots canning workshop. I learned a lot! More precisely, I un-learned a lot. Todd and Jordan (who own Happy Girl) cook their jams for about 20 minutes and process them in hot water baths for about 8 minutes. I'd been cooking my jams for about 30 minutes and processing them for about that. Their method is a lot easier and, best of all, uses a lot less sugar.

Another trick they shared was not adding citric acid to the fruit mixture but actually soaking fruit in a citric acid bath. This lets you can whole pieces of fruit, or pieces of halved fruit, without turning them brown. Then you puree them and add pectin, cook them and add sugar and lemon juice, and then process them in the jars.

We canned apricot and strawberry-cherry jams, as well as putting both fruits up in light honey syrup. Todd and Jordan's technique leaves the fruit a lot more fresh and toothsome, compared to most conventional recipes. I've already given away most of the jars I made there.

Last weekend I put the Happy Girl lessons to use with peach jam, but I think the peaches were too ripe to solidify. And I didn't have enough lemo juice. Never mind, now we've got peach sauce to go on ice cream or in yogurt. I sent some to my mother-in-law. I hope she likes it.

Necessity (aka Failure) Still Mother of Invention

2008-07-06T09:14:00.001-07:00

i found my thrill

I am the first person to admit that I am in no way a professional cook. I *wish* I was a professional cook, but I'm not. (Actually, I'm past the age at which I could work those kinds of hours on my feet.) (Especially not in the kinds of shoes I prefer.)

I bring this up because yesterday I was fooling around in the kitchen, procrastinating on the reshaping of a particularly stubborn chapter of my book, and I decided to make a blueberry pie without following a recipe. In other words, I decided to develop a recipe.

did you know that tapioca is used to thicken fruit pie fillings? i didn't.
however, did you know that tapioca is derived from cassava? i did.

I took a six-hour weekend class on recipe development this year, and if I came away with one thing it's that you don't come up with a recipe in one fell swoop. It takes research, then an initial making, then a re-making, and then a re-making again, and then testing. And then all of the above again.

Gah. That's a lot of ingredients for one household to pay for. Which is why, I submit to you, mon semblable, that most blogged recipes by lay people such as myself are really experiments in progress, acts of improvisation, and thus should be read as invitations to such. I mean, I have not inconsequential experience in things culinary, I'm not putting myself down. I just don't have the resources and time to test and re-test my recipes.

r.i.p.

At this point in this particular career, I like it that way. I like the idea of starting out with one idea and ending up somewhere you didn't expect. Or maybe I'm just trying to excuse the fact that the pie crust above, ultimately ended up looking like this:

cobbled together

The short answer is: failure. My recipe failed - the crust didn't hold its shape when I baked it, but rather puffed up indecorously into a vaguely cake-like structure. Thus betrayed, I wasn't going to toss it out so I turned it into a cobbler. And not a terrible cobbler either just....not a pie. Well, whatever, it's edible. I invite you to riff on this:

Failed Blueberry Pie

7 oz of Irish Steel Cut Oatmeal
1/2 cup of almond meal
1 stick of unsalted butter, softened or melted
3/4 cup of brown sugar

30 oz of blueberries, wild, cultivated, fresh or frozen, it doesn't matter
4 tablespoons of instant tapioca
1/2 cup of white sugar
1/8 cup of lemon or lime juice

1. Heat the oven to 425
2. Combine blueberries, tapioca, lime and sugar and set aside
3. Grind the oatmeal in your food processor until it resembles a chunky oat flour
4. Add almond meal and process to mix
5. Do the same with the sugar
6. Melt and add one stick of unsalted butter, process until the meal forms a dough
7. Layer a 11-3/4" x 7-1/2" x 1 3/4" baking pan with the blueberry mix
8. Top with oatmeal mix
9. Bake until the top is browned

July 4th Agua Fresca

2008-07-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

Awesome fourth of July with friends and family! The salads everyone brought - arugula with white bean, insalata caprese, spinach with berries, goat cheese and toasted pine nuts - were absolutely the tops, my hot fudge-brownie sundae went over well (once again, thank you David Lebovitz for the best cookbook of all time), there were burgers and dogs for the veggie and non-veggie alike and much fun was had by all, especially during our morning hike on Montara State Beach and in McNee State Ranch.

Here's Lizzy on the beach, plus some of her July 4th buddies:

hurray for lizzy! woo-hoo!

lizzy loves duke and isn't afraid to show it. enough said.

tia on the beach

I played around with this recipe, substituting evaporated organic cane juice for ~~sugar~~ agave nectar and upping the lime a bit. It took a bit of getting used to - T. said it tasted like homemade gatorade. But we liked it.

agua fresca, adapted from the l.a. times recipe

Recipe

one medium-sized seedless watermelon (or remove the seeds, but who has time?)
half a cup of lime juice
six tablespoons of evaporated cane juice
pinch of sea salt

1. Scoop out the innards of the watermelon, put them into a blender or food processor and liquify
2. Drain the pureed watermelon through a fine-mesh strainer to separate out the solids
3. Meanwhile, stir the sugar into the lime juice and allow to dissolve
4. Combine the ingredients, then add a pinch of salt
5. Adjust to taste
6. Chill and serve with ice

July 1, 2008

2008-07-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

belonging somewhere is a sensual thing

Right, so close your eyes and pretend you're paddling a canoe across a lake. You can hear the slap slap slap of the bow on the water, the wet crinkly rushing of the water against your paddles and you can feel the breeze move across your cafe and chill your arms even though the sun is out in full force.

Across the lake you hear a cottage door slam and from around a bend you can't see you either hear a motorboat or a lawnmower, but you're not sure. Tonight you know you're going to hear a loon as you crack open the two-four that's sitting on the floor of the boat. You know it will be cold so you're going to layer on the Eddie Bauer. But that won't stop you from keeping the beer as icy as you can.

Happy Birthday Canada from one homesick expat. I wish I was home today.

not food related but....

2008-06-29T17:15:00.001-07:00

We're seeing baby deer every day! Okay, maybe that's food related to some people.

Another New Orleans Meal

2008-06-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

fried green tomatoes

How lazy have I been on this blog? Here's what I have to post on:

a one-day canning workshop
a trip to the Half Moon Bay Farmer's Market
a lunch with my friend the Kosher Slavicist
lunch at Liuzza's in New Orleans

Here's what I have to work on, stat:

my manuscript
a book proposal
a funding proposal
syllabuses

and also...

5. a menu for july 4th, which we are hosting, including fermenting some ginger beer
(much easier than it sounds as it ferments on its own for a week after about 1/2 hour of work)

plate of strange pasta with plate of sweet potato fries in the background: they
bring the sweet potato fries with a shaker of cinnamon sugar,
which is delicious and completely decadent

Thus, I can only leave you with a pile of pics (again taken by Dr. 8A) that gesture to one of the most interesting and least even meals I've ever eaten, at Liuzza's Bar and Cafe in New Orleans. Remember in my post about Herbsaint when I mentioned that the pasta (with fried egg) was a lot like another pasta that I ate a few days later? I meant this one, above, at the well-known neighborhood cafe which is an interesting expression of New Orleans' Italian heritage. Who knew that there were New Orleanian pasta dishes, or an Italian strain in N.O. cooking. Not I.

My good friend the Italian food critic ordered the pasta and just said No! to it, for being too heavy, overcooked and well, gucky. But I now understand that Paula Deen episode I once watched in which she made fettucine alfredo with mayonnaise and pre-grated cheese. I've always joked about it, and I'll never make it, but now I get it. No-one liked it but perhaps it was a poor representative of N.O.-Italian cuisine? I'd like to try more before I totally decide.

soft shell crab sandwich

On the other hand, the soft shell crab sandwich, ordered on the suggestion of the waiter (who grew increasingly incredulous at how much we tried to eat) was just tops. I love love love white bread and we never have it at home but it was the perfect wrap for the lightly fried and chewily leggy crab. Did I grab a picture of the hot sauce on the table? I don't think so so I can't give you a name. It was just your standard, Caribbean-basin vinegar hot sauce, but piquant enough to pinch the crab's tail.

Liuzza's famous stuffed artichoke

OMG! Last but not least, the stuffed artichoke. My friend CB put it this way: the stuffing, not so much. It was just way too salty and gooey in a wet cooked bread kind of way. But the artichoke was one of the most flavorful, most savory I've ever had. Artichokes are an ever-living mystery to me; I have yet to really cook one to my own satisfaction. This dish left me wondering if stuffing - but a stuffing I really like - might not be the way to go.

Wait! I lied: here are the hot sauces.

pepperdoux, which is tastes like
Trinidadian pickapeppa sauce to me

Another crab picture, n.b. the beautifully-toasted completely-decadent pretty-sure-to-be Wonderbread toast, so awesomely delicious, I don't care what the swanky food snobs say.

crab, part II

And the winner: the greens, simmered with smoked pork (knuckle I think?). Best dish I'll never make in my kosher-style kitchen at home. God, I love pork. I wish I didn't but I do.

CB ordered the greens

Two Great New Orleans Meals

2008-06-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

First of all, if you're here because of the link about my blog at Becks & Posh - welcome!!

I've been traveling like crazy and after ten planes and three trips in three weeks I've finally succumbed to the cold that threatened to knock me out after the first two trips were over. Yuck. The good thing is my butt is finally nailed to the couch and I can get some work done. But not before I put up a post that I've been dying to get out of my system, subtitled In Which Our Heroine Eats Like A Mofo In New Orleans.

First stop: Herbsaint. Dr. 8A and I booked a table at the world-famous Herbsaint, which is owned by Cochon chef Donald Link with Bayona ’s chef Susan Spicer. These pictures were taken by Dr. 8A, who has now convinced me to go further into debt for a macro lens. Just what I needed.

As I said earlier, this was without doubt one of the best meals of my life: big flavors that managed to be subtle at the same time, combinations you'd never think of (frog's legs with chili butter?), the wedding of texture to different texture so that your mouth takes minutes to compute what your eyes are still appreciating on the plate. Oh, glory.

Our first appetizer was the Louisiana Shrimp and Grits with Tasso and Okra. I know that people often think of grits as down home food but, to me they always seems so sophisticated. My friend the Southern Slavicist brought me home a pound bag of really good quality grits a few months ago and I've developed an appreciation for the toothsomeness of the non-instant variety.

What put this dish over the top was the tasso, a dry-rubbed - with filé powder, aka gumbo filé, aka sassafras powder - and twice-smoked pork shoulder, that gave the sauce with a burnished, smoky polish. The grits were topped with shrimps that popped in the mouth the way only the most local, freshly-caught shrimp can.

We followed that with the Housemade Spaghetti with Pancetta and Fried-Poached Farm Egg, aka the Cardiac Arrest (wider shot above).

Has it ever occurred to you to poach an egg in hot oil? Do it immediately and let me know if you figure out how to get the breading on the outside of the egg before you fry it.

What I liked about this dish is that it managed to convey the sense of comfort food, the kind you cook for yourself when you're home alone. A runny egg cracked over what is basically a rich soft noodle in an Alfredo sauce, this appetizer paid homage to the influence that the many Italians living in new Orleans have had on the local cuisine. Later that weekend we had a downscale verion of this dish at Liuzza's. I'll blog about that soon.

Last but not least we went for the Fried Frog Legs with Fresh Fines Herbes, also deep fried but finished with a chile-butter sauce. The only word for the chile-butter sauce is ethereal. That finger you see swirling around in the sauce is mine, as I groped to understand the flavors. There was chile and something citric and something fruity in there and I'd give away ~~my Kitchenaid~~ ~~my favorite frying pan~~ well anyway something important to have that recipe. Maybe it was the fines herbes: I'm bad at identifying the classic french herbs. I can never detect tarragon or marjoram in a dish.

The frogs legs were like chicken, I suppose, but much more delicate, with fattier, richer meat. Divine.

For the main course we had Sauteed Louisiana Jumbo Shrimp with some kind of biscuit. But - wince - I can't remember the other main course we had, probably because we each had two Sazeracs (see below) and I am a very cheap drunk. But as you can see the jumbo shrimp were huge and juicy. What I like about Herbsaint's sauces is that they always seem to be roux-based - naturally, in the town that invented gumbo - so they have an earthiness to them that grounds what is generally an otherwise whimsical dish.

Dessert, on the other hand, I remember:

Banana Brown Butter Tart with Fleur de Sel Caramel. I hope they serve this after the Messiah comes: is there anything more to say about salted caramel and its proximity to God? This tart was crunchy on top, melty in the middle and punctuated with crisply caramelized banana slices. Best of all for someone whose palate doesn't incline to the sweet, the bite of salt cut what would have otherwise been an unbearable sugar overload on the palate.

There was also...

Green Tomato Pie with Vanilla Ice Cream, which I didn't like but which Dr. 8A loved. For me, the green tomato didn't really pop as a flavor, even though the ice cream was gorgeous and the pie crust perfectly flaky and crisp (and deep fried also). I mean I get the joke: it's fried green tomatoes. But it just didn't cohere. Well whatever: that's what happens sometimes in an adventurous kitchen. And anyway Dr. 8A loved it, so maybe I'm wrong.

One more NOLA post to go and then I'm done. Right now I've got to get some other writing done and then I'm preparing for the National Bake Sale for Obama on Saturday. If this sneezing and wheezing subsides.

(By the way, the second meal I was going to blog about today was our over-the-top lunch at Liuzza's Bar and Cafe, which is in the midcity district. But I don't have time. So instead I'm going to leave you with a picture from another meal, the final meal of the conference and the reason it is so worth it to work in food studies:

a shrimp and crawfish boil: beat that conference-goers

Far Be It From Me To Avoid Cliche

2008-06-11T08:16:00.000-07:00

10, 000 calories: no joke

Yes I know: every tourist and their mother who goes to New Orleans goes to Cafe Du Monde and sits there like a sheep chewing its beignet cud with all of the other tourists. I know, okay?

the standard C du M picture, I don't flatter myself

And while I usually like to congratulate myself that I am a traveler not a tourist (or some such fiction, tourism meaning traveling to see what you already recognize and traveling being willing to be lost in something new), I always come back to Cafe Du Monde when I'm in New Orleans because I just love the colonial feel of the place.

With its giant, slow-moving fans and open terrace of coffee drinkers looking out at Jackson Square, CduM reminds me of the Plaza Espana in the main square of the colonial district in Santo Domingo, D.R. And even when you are surrounded by tourists of every pastel stripe and khaki-shorted hue, sitting on the terrace offers a window into the completely hinckty, fly-your- freak-flagness that I love about New Orleans, that makes it a city I would move to in a heartbeat.

Quick story: last time I visited New Orleans was about two years before Katrina. While sitting at the Cafe one morning I looked up to see this tall guy cycling by on an old-fashioned bicycle with huge wheels. Long and tall like a glass of Pimm's Cup, he was wearing black leggings, a black and white horizontally-striped jersey with a round neck and three-quarter sleeves, black ballet slippers and a tiny little beanie on his head, with one of those whirligig things that goes round and round in the wind. (Sort of like Audrey H., you know, but a bit more flamboyant.) And that's when I knew I loved New Orleans.

Back to Cafe du Monde, I don't honestly think the coffee is very good, and the plate of beignets is worth a day of calories, but whatever: I always go back and imagine what it would be like to live in the best city in the United States, one that deserved a hell of a lot more love and respect than our current moronic and murderous government gave it.

A singer at the Cafe du Monde.

Much Ado About the Sazerac

2008-06-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

picture by dr. 8A just before the second round arrived

The Sazerac, as those of you following the Mixology craze, and those of you who have been to New Orleans, will know, is a drink made with absinthe, Peychaud bitters, (sometimes) angostura bitters, rye whiskey and simple syrup. It's garnished, as you can tell, with a twist of lemon.

The above picture, taken by Dr. 8A, was taken a few days ago in New Orleans, where I spent a few days at a conference. I am just now waiting for my delayed plane. That's me in the background. I only have a few minutes to post before my plane boards for home, but I had to post a teaser after four of the best food days of my life, and one of the three top meals of my life. The latter statement is not an exaggeration.

A weekend of serious cocktails later, I'm flying home dehydrated but happy. More soon.

can't beet it

2008-06-06T05:19:00.000-07:00

I never ever buy beets, and I don't know why because I really love them. When I was little, my grandmother's beet salad was my favorite thing, even though I now suspect that the beets might have been canned, and the dressing was as simple as white vinegar and oil. Never mind: come Friday night, pass me the bowl of beets.

Last Wednesday I went to the Civic Center Farmer's Market - the ghetto market as my friend Sara calls it - and there they were, these amazing, yellow, pink and red organic beets. I bought a few and made a simple salad when I got home.

Roasted Beet Salad

Preheat an oven to 400. Line a cookie sheet with a Silpat. Cut and slice enough beets - at about 1/4 inch thickness - to fill the pan and than drizzle olive oil over them. Roast for about 30-35 minutes or until the edges of the beets start to curl and crisp. Dress salad greens with a peppery olive oil and some very sweet balsamic, like a good fig balsamic. Serve the beets on top. (You can also roast and add some cauliflower, as above.)

New Celebrity Food Crush

2008-06-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

I have a major new celebrity food crush: Tamasin Day-Lewis. I'm currently reading her "Where shall We Go For Dinner?" which is a food narrative of her relationship with Murray's Cheese Store owner, Rob Kaufelt.

Well, the romance is all very well but the great thing about the book is her stunning prose and her impeccable taste. Day-Lewis is well-known in England and Ireland - here's a sample recipe at Leite's Culinaria. You can tell that she is a woman who really loves to eat, and despite her enjoyably Irish anti-Americanism, has an open mind and will try anything once. I loved this book. If you think you know what good food writing is and you haven't read this book: you ain't seen nothing yet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.....

2008-05-27T07:16:00.001-07:00

indian candy

Okay so I lied: one more post on Canadian food. Above you see Indian candy, which is essentially salmon cured in maple syrup. I usually stop by Caviar Direct when I'm at the market and buy myself one small piece of the stuff, which is smoky-sweet and salty all at the same time. He also sells caviar, smoked salmon and crazy-good gravlax.

gravlax

I recorded a video of Anthony Rommens, who is the owner, talking about Indian candy, because it seems like such a quintessentially Canadian dish and I wanted people to really appreciate the process and history that goes into it. But you have to excuse my voice in the foreground!!!! It's excessively irritating. You know how you have to try things out before you launch them?

Would've been a good idea; I might have canned it.

But anyway Anthony is awesome and totally interesting so that makes up for it.

anthony rommens of caviar direct

What are these?

2008-05-27T07:09:00.000-07:00

Fave New Appliance

2008-05-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

The onion chopper at At&T park.

Apriums

2008-05-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

These are apriums, which are a cross between apricots and plums... They're a bit beaten up because they're the leftovers of the day, meant to be jammers. I'd never heard of them before I saw them on Saturday.

I'm thinking of learning how to preserve with honey this year and I might start with apriums.... Does anyone out there know anything about preserving with honey?

anchovy heaven

2008-05-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

in the bag...

Having done a weekend class in recipe development this year, I'm fully ready to put out some fine, complicated, multi-step recipes. The problem (besides the fact that the first thing I should do here is standardize my recipe format - 1 tsp vs. 1 teaspoon, etc.) is that I'm someone who really likes the California approach to food: excellent ingredients + minimal intervention = great food. Which doesn't make for complex recipes.

Last night for instance, my friend the Southern Slavicist and another friend Ms. 8A came by for dinner and we barbecued the spoils of a day spent at three - count 'em - three San Francisco farmer's markets. And seriously, we put together one of the best meals I've had in ages.

marinating

Here's how it went, in no particular order, because it all came out onto the table at once and then we ate everything with our fingers.

Colombian arepas
Fresh anchovies with olive oil and lemon
Chinese greens garnished with fig balsamico
Roasted potatoes with rosemary and whole garlic cloves
T-bone steak with bagna cauda sauce
Grilled orange cauliflower
Bread

I spied the fresh anchovies at the Ferry Building Farmer's Market yesterday morning and carried them around all day in an iced insulating bag. When I took them out I cleaned them, doused them in some cooking olive oil - the kind that can take a high temperature without smoking - and added some kosher salt. They went on the grill just after the steak.

turf plus surf

After about nine or ten minutes they were done; I threw some grey salt on top and squeezed a lemon and then we ate them with the steak, which was topped with the bagna cauda sauce (made of canned anchovies, butter, olive oil and chopped garlic).

anchovies just off the grill

By the way, the orange cauliflower cost ten dollars. Isn't that crazy? It was one of those farmer's market deals in which you get to the cash register and hear the price but you're too shocked to protest. Even if you believe in paying more for your food - and I do - in order to protect the environment, the local farmers, whatever, TEN DOLLARS IS RIDICULOUS FOR A CAULIFLOWER!

ten dollar cauliflower

(Not) Canadian Bacon

2008-05-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

I'm home, I'm home! Someone pointed out to me today that my posts sound like I'm still out of town when in fact I've been home for a week. I know I'm home because I'm sitting outside the barn eating grilled vegetables and steak, drinking rosé and watching our new friend Geraldine eat her way through the pasture that sits on the hill above us.

Geraldine is a doe that has been coming by the house lately. She always seems to be alone, or we don't recognize her when she comes by with others. Because she's always alone I have a special fondness for her. She's a bit skinny - you can see her ribs - and I'm always worried she doesn't have enough to eat. But actually she has an entire pasture.

[Incidentally, as a longtime apartment dweller (and as the descendant of many generations of such) I'm new to this eating outdoors thing and I'm not sure I approve. First of all, your food gets cold. On the other hand, your rosé stays cool. I'm still undecided on the issue.]

Ever since I moved to the States, almost a decade ago, I've been confused by the term "Canadian bacon." People! This is not Canadian bacon:

Canadian bacon is not to be bought in stores or supermarkets, my friends. It is not a tragic flaccid industrialized product, per above picture. THIS is Canadian bacon:

Yes. That is true Canadian bacon, strong and free and covered with cornmeal. Essentially it is a pork back, sweet pickled and rolled in cornmeal:

Here's what it looks like being put together on a sandwich, in order of: 1. bacon on bun, 2. mustard on bacon on bun, 3. onions on mustard on bacon on bun.

So there you go. I'm going back to my bottle of rosé.

Links of Love

2008-05-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

how many times, as a teenager, did i eat at pizza pizza?

it is not even possible to count.

I am on so many foodie listservs that I've decided to start collating the interesting posts and links that come through my mailbox. Here's a couple of items I looked at this week:

Fishphone -- old news, I know, but worth posting. You text the word "fish" to 30644 with the name of the fish you are about to order and the Blue Ocean Institute will text you back that fish's sustainability information.

Raw Milk -- amazing article at Harper's about the raw milk debate.

Jenny Fremont, a graduate student on one of my academic listservs has a food blog going called Daily Prandium.

I love Ivonne's baking blog, Cream Puffs in Venice.

I am definitively not an Anglophile, except where it comes to food writing. Why did it take me so long to find the Beeb's (BBC's) food site?

Finally a video: Mixology 101 from Mixologista takes you through essential tools for bourbon cocktails:

Cheese at St. Lawrence Market

2008-05-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

The awesome folks from Best Baa dairy !

The words St. Lawrence Market and the word "cheese" are pretty much intertwined for me. Actually, the words "food" and "cheese" are pretty much the same thing for me, the way that "meat" and "pig" are the same word in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Years ago you could only buy cheese at the South Market, at the amazing store in the back of the main floor. There must be hundreds of cheeses stuffed into this tiny space, sitting in the refrigerator. I've literally spent *hours* shopping for cheese in the South Market, talking to the merchants and sampling the wares. Seriously.

Check out Le Rustique camembert, above: an awesome Normandy cheese.

King of Cheeses: Parmigiano Reggiano

Okay, I'm as chauvinist as the next expatriate Canadian, but even
I have to admit: if the Canadian brie isn't artisanal, don't buy it.
St. Andre, on the other hand: stock up.

What's changed since I've left Toronto is that you can now get really good cheese in the North - farmer's - market. I mean, you could always get cheese curds - for your poutine, naturally - but now you can get these amazing raw milk artisanal cheeses. These are all from this sheep's milk dairy called Best Baa that sells their cheeses under the Ewenity label. Best Baa is in Fergus, Ontario, a small farming town where my friend Martha and I spent many happy childhood hours....

brebette cheese

this cheese isn't listed on their site but it's a triple cream that's rolled in

herbs and then allowed to age and mold. stunning and herbal.
I thought of pairing this with champagne .

Finally, this cheese blew my mind. It's called Violet Hill and it's an ash-covered sheep's milk cheese made at Milky Way Dairy.

Amazing.

Pictures from St. Lawrence market

2008-05-15T19:12:00.000-07:00

St. Lawrence market, in Toronto, is right next to where I used to take ballet classes when I was little. I spent a lot of Saturdays going to class and then going shopping for groceries with my mother.

A million years later and thousands of miles away I still miss it, almost as much as I miss the city itself. I always go visit St. Lawrence market when I'm home. There are actually two markets - North and South - that make up the larger one. The North market has fresh produce and artisanal foods, while the South has meat, cheese, spices, and peameal bacon sandwiches (more on that later).

These pictures are from the North market, where we always go first, because you want to catch the produce before it all disappears. I got some great pictures of some foods that I really miss; I'm going to post some South market pictures soon.

It's fiddlehead season! I like the way the Japanese serve
fiddleheads - lightly steamed with a sesame sauce

Candy apples! I ask you: why is it impossible to buy candy apples in the States?
These used to cost 25 cents outside Huron Public School.

Homemade cinnamon buns, no nasty white icing.

a homemade apple-rhubarb pie

Pie! Pie everywhere! Now I know where I got my love of pies....

And also preserving....

Finally....

2008-05-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

I bought a quality digital camera! That's not it, above, that's me at Swatow restaurant in Toronto, using the excellent point and click that we've been using for the last two years. I'm about to retire it to family use only - I found a great deal on a Canon Digital Rebel XTi body. Now for the lenses: I'm looking for a good macro lens to do better food photography and I'm hearing the following advice: either buy the Canon 100mm with a 2.8 aperture (I think) or buy a common lens with a macro filter. What do you think? I'm taking any advice I can get.

What I'm definitely getting is a tabletop tripod. I am so over motion blur!

Deep Fried Duck with Special Sauce

These are some pics from the seven days we've spent eating our way through Toronto. Yesterday we ate at Swatow on Spadina, my cousin R.'s favorite Cantonese restaurant. I'm going to make a bold call here: I've been living in California for ten years now and except for Din Tai Fung in Los Angeles, I have yet to eat Chinese food in California that's as good as the Chinese food I've eaten in Toronto. Is it because I'm particularly used to Cantonese food or some specific ethnic Chinese flavor palate? Is it because I'm nostalgic? I don't know. I just know that Chinese food is better in Toronto than any other Chinese food I've ever had, anywhere else.

Lobster... oh, glory.

The price of lobster is now double what it was when I left. A gazillion years ago it was $16.99 for a double order of lobster. Now: $35! But worth it, totally.

mystery greens, possibly watercress?

Is this watercress? My mother ordered this dish and I can't remember what it was. It's here to affirm that at least once this weekend I abandoned fat and meat and ate a vegetable.

Spicy Shrimp and Eggplant

Best dish of the night: shrimp and spicy eggplant. Crazy good. More on St. Lawrence market, including about a thousand pictures of cheese, tomorrow.

Eating my way though Toronto

2008-05-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

I'm home visiting family in Toronto and, this being my family, we've been running around town eating. A sandwich here, appetizers at the bar there, goat roti at my aunt's, lamb at my other aunt's. Lunch at my grandmother's and the farmer's market tomorrow. Phew. I'm stuffed.

Here are a few shots from a few meals and other experiences.... Above is a shot of Holt Renfrew Cafe. (Holt's is the Canadian equivalent of Neiman Marcus.) We had a really great pineapple Tarte Tatin with vanilla ice cream and pots of Mariage Freres green tea. One thing about the Holt's Cafe is that three times a week they fly their bread in from Poilane bakery in Paris. Swank as that may be, I know that's one thing you'd never see in San Francisco. There would be major protests about carbon footprint. But the Tarte Tatin, not that they grow pineapples in Toronto, was excellent. My mother is stealing the idea for her restaurant.

We stopped in at the Illy Caffe earlier in the day while shopping for some new camera equipment. Toronto isn't in the throes of the Third Wave coffee revolution right but given that we have one of the biggest expatriate Italian populations on the continent, we've always been able to get great unfussy espresso drinks, long before Starbucks McMerded the espresso.

I know that this picture is over-exposed but I'm waiting for my new camera (Canon Digital Rebel!) and the lighting was not very good. This is a plate of cheeses from Splendido, one of my favorite restaurants in Toronto. I have a lot of good memories from Splendido - last night, sitting with my mother and aunt at the bar is now definitely one of them. Two Old Fashioneds, a plate of duck prosciutto and foie gras, something other appetizer I can't remember and a cheese plate with madeira and the rest is fuzzy. Above you will see the cheese board from which we chose our plates. In clockwise order from top left: Valdeon, a Spanish blue that only gets better topped with unpasteurized Ontario honey; Beemster X.O. from Holland - a double aged Gouda; Le Grand Manitou (third-down on the page), a washed-rind Quebecois cheese of mixed pasteurized goat, sheep and cow's milk; Riopelle (again, third from the top), an aged triple cream raw milk cheese; bottom right is Filou, a raw-milk cheese with a layer of ash running through the middle; cant remember this one, sounds like guignol or leguignol or something like that; and finally last on the left is an Okanagan blue.

More later.....

dal for the week

2008-04-27T20:25:00.001-07:00

Today was a completely lazy day in which T. and I drove down the peninsula to buy some outdoor furniture. Next planned purchase is a barbecue, now that the weather is warm enough to eat outside pretty consistently.

Not quite on a whim, I decided to make a pot of something that would last us at least halfway into the week, because since I've been running up to the city consistently I've been horrible about packing lunches instead of spending on the ten million yummy things one can spend money on in SF.

I decided on lentil dal, not only because it's one of the easiest things you could ever make but because on Saturday I went to hear this dynamic duo* give a talk about their new book at the Asian Art Museum, along with this totally inspiring food writer. At one point in the talk, Naomi described how if it's 6:30 at night and there's nothing to eat she or Jeff will often make a quick pot of dal for the family. And I thought: I haven't made dal in a million years.

That and a pleasant hour dawdling at Haig's (the weird postcolonial store on Clement St. where you can buy Lucozade and other yummies) with The Pegster later that afternoon sealed the deal. I came home with a jar of Patak's (cheating, I know!), some yellow split peas, fresh ginger and garlic. (Also: noodles and tofu for T. and half a duck plus some gi-normous har gow for me and Lizzy, which is already polished off.)

A quick recipe for a busy week:

6 cups of water (but keep a kettle boiling with a few more cups on the side, in case the water goes too quickly)
2 cups of yellow split peas
cumin seeds, roasted and ground
coriander seeds
1 knob of ginger, about four inches long and peeled
8 cloves of garlic
four small onions, sliced into bite-sized pieces - I like cutting them into half circles
6 tablespoon or so of Patak's curry - I like the madras blend
canola oil

Boil the water and add the two cups of split peas. Lower to a simmer and leave, stirring occasionally until lentils are soft. Add more water if the lentils get too dry. When the lentils are soft, drain them and put them aside. Roast one tablespoon of cumin seeds in a stovetop pan and, when you begin to smell them cumin aroma, put them in a spice grinder with another tablespoon of the coriander seeds and grind both until fine. Put the ginger and garlic into a separate small blender or food processor and pulse until somewhat coarsely chopped. Add the ground coriander and cumin and pulse again until the spices, ginger and garlic are combined and seem finely chopped. Heat about 6 tablespoons of canola oil until it is shimmering and add the onions. Cook onions until they have just become transparent (but really just barely transparent so that they retain some of their natural sweetness). Add the garlic-ginger-spice mixture to the onions. Fry for a few minutes, stirring constantly and then add the Patak's curry sauce. Lower the heat slightly and stir for a few more minutes. Add the lentils, stirring until the lentils and spices are completely mixed. Serve on rice.

(Cheat note: I added about 3/4 of a cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice to the mix because I like my curries sweet, but you don't have to.)

By the way, check out what we found in the farmer's market today: arugula rabe. Have you ever had that before? What would you do with it?

* - When did the Queen start doing voiceovers?

What Goes With Matzo

2008-04-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

chopped salad, after

Have I ever mentioned that I dislike, I mean, really dislike, hummus? The reason this comes up - and usually I wouldn't blog about what I dislike but rather only avoid it - is that it's Passover and I've been racking my brain to find things that go on matzoh. What goes on matzoh? Dips, that's what.

Maybe I should amend that first statement: I dislike most hummus(es?), especially the North American variations. I'll pass on a hint that my aunt M., who lived in Israel for a decade, passed on to me: in Israel they soak the chickpeas until the skins come off and then they grind them up with tons of tahini and lemon and garlic to make a much smoother paste. I like that hummus, especially when it foregrounds the astringent bite of sesame paste with the tang of lemon that most Middle-Eastern palates prefer. But the tragic gritty stuff we've inherited from the aesthetically depressed spirit of sixties hippy vegetarianism is not something I'll ever inflict on anybody I care about, i.e., me.

Good news though: I've found this Israeli brand that is pretty bearable: Sabra. Check it out. I'm going to start mixing in a little lemon juice and adding some harissa or hot sauce on top to make it even more authentic.

Other things Middle Eastern that I think go with matzoh are chopped salads.

chopped salad, before

I made a hybrid Greek-Moroccan version last night with leftover feta and preserved lemons that I bought at Rainbow Grocery. T. and I threw back two huge bowls each because we've been eating frozen and takeout foods for the last two weeks while I've been fighting this awful cold and I think we're craving fresh vegetables.

Chopped Salad, with variations

1.5 lbs tomatoes, diced
3 cucumbers, peeled, seeded and diced (actually, I'm okay with seeds but a chacun son gout)
4 preserved lemons
the heart and yellow tender stems of a bunch of celery, including the leaves
feta (if you want)
parsley (curly or flat, whatever)
2 or 3 belgian endives, outer leaves removed, inner leaves and core diced
calamata olives, pitted and coarsely chopped
olive oil, to taste
lemon(s)
touch of kosher salt, deending on the saltiness of the preserved lemons

Any and all of the above amounts can be altered according to taste. Wash, chop, combine, serve.

Happy Passover! I think the JibJab guys pretty much sum it up here:

yuck

2008-04-10T13:50:00.001-07:00

sick as a dog

I've been such a bad blogger! Sorry about this; between family trips, conferences, and just recently, a serious cold, I've hardly been doing any writing at all.

It might be a good aesthetic experiment to see what I could come up with, though, given the fogginess in my head. Maybe some sort of acetominophen-fueled stream of consciousness. In the meantime, I'm going to leave you with a recipe for my favorite cold remedy, via my grandmother.

Ginger-Lemon Tea

One three-inch knob of ginger
16 oz of water
one lemon
3 tbsp of honey
rum, to taste

-- Slice the ginger any which way but not too thick; put it in a pot with the water; bring to a boil; lower the heat and allow to simmer for about seven minutes; strain the mixture into a cup reserving the ginger for another use; squeeze a lemon into it; sweeten with gobs of honey; add a shot of rum if it's night time or if you don't have to drive. Get better.

Off on adventures....

2008-03-28T12:31:00.001-07:00

Back in a week or so!

Lotsa love for Jamie O.

2008-03-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

Last course at T's birthday dinner was a lemon-lime cream tart adapted from Jamie Oliver. Tarts are a new thing with me; I've usually made pies, especially because I like to make latticework crust.* But lately I've started to fall in love with the elegance of a good tart shell. Anyway, my pie shells are not that picturesque yet.

The tart turned out really well, not least because I mixed up the lemon-lime juice mixture to be about equal parts Meyer lemon and key lime. And I used a LOT of Meyer lemon zest. By the time I served dessert I was three sheets to the wind so I can't even remember if I ever brought out the topping, but there was also some lovely organic whipped cream to go with it all.

Jamie Oliver really knows how to teach and it comes out in his recipes. Here's a good example: he says to put the blind-baked tart shell on the oven rack and then pour in the lemon-lime mixture into it before baking to avoid spillage. So obvious, but who thinks to do that?

By the way, have you seen his new Jamie At Home series? With the most to die for English farmhouse and garden you've ever seen? Awesome. He even cooks on this old wood-burning stove. Be still my nineteenth-century heart!

Ingredients

1 12-inch tart shell, blind baked
1 1/2 cups of sugar
8 large eggs
1 1/2 cups of heavy cream
4 tablespoons or so of lemon zest, preferably Meyer, and preferably organic
1 1/2 cup of lime juice
1/2 cup of lemon juice [or, increase the lemon juice and decrease the lime if you have Meyer lemons)

Preheat oven to 350. Whisk sugar and eggs together; add cream, zest and juice. When the oven is ready, put the tart shell in the oven, on the middle rack. Pour custard mixture in. Bake for 40-45 or until the middle of the tart is still jiggly when you move the tin. It will finish cooking as it cools.

I had some leftover custard because I used a 9-inch tart shell instead of a 12-inch, so I poured the custard into 4 ramekins and baked them in a bain-marie at 350 for about 35 minutes. We shared them with our neighbours.

* -- Thanks Elise.com for the link!

happy happies

2008-03-17T19:41:00.001-07:00

T.'s bday was a roaring success and culminated in a house party that lasted almost twenty hours. Completely fun.

Dinner went well too, or so they tell me: all I can remember is that the asparagus and pea risotto (no pictures, unfortunately) took twice as long as Jamie Oliver told me it would so everyone had to wait for the second course. No worries: they were busy with the first, white bean puree.

As it turns out white bean puree is super easy to make: take whatever amount of canellini beans - I used about four tins - cover them with vegetable or chicken stock. Add peeled garlic cloves to taste and boil the mixture until the beans are soft and mash up easily when you press one between your fingers.

Drain the beans, rinsing them with cold water. Put the beans in a food processor and pulse until they are roughly pureed but not entirely smooth. Add some very green olive oil to the puree. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pulse again until the puree is entirely smooth.

At the last minute I got worried that the whole thing was a bit flavorless. I decided to make a confit of garlic cloves by covering peeled garlic with olive oil in a small cast iron pan and putting it under the broiler for about 30 minutes, or until the were golden brown and juicy to the bite. I topped the whole thing with oil from the garlic confit and garnished with the golden garlic cloves and some sea salt. A dash of ras el hanout and sprigs of rosemary from the bush outside our front door added a bit of perfume. Some toasted olive bread and we had a first course.

For me the best part of the evening was using our wedding china, finally. Doesn't it look pretty?

lychee sorbet with rosewater

2008-03-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

yes i know it's blatantly ripped off but i couldn't
think of a better way to illustrate cans

Right, so T.'s birthday dinner is this weekend and I'm starting to get the early stuff done. Here's the menu:

A white bean puree and flatbread
Risotto with roasted asparagus, fresh asparagus and smoked mozzarella
Salad
Lychee and rosewater sorbet with Meyer lemon tart
Quince ratafia

I started preparing the sorbet this afternoon, during a bout of impatience with my fourth chapter. There used to be this gourmet store in the Rosedale neighborhood in Toronto - I forget the name of it, it belonged to some really posh caterer, David something - and they served homemade sorbets. I had this flavour with my father one day, rosewater and lychee, and I never forgot it. Years later I found a recipe in Arabella Boxer's London Sunday Times Cookbook that made the same sorbet but with whipped egg whites.*

I'm not blessed with a great memory except when it comes to flavours and mouthfeel. I've never been able to get this sorbet out of my head. I made it today in about five minutes flat and I'm looking forward to seeing how it interacts with the lemon tart.

instant pleasure

Ingredients

2 tins of peeled lychees in heavy syrup
3 tbsp of rose water, or less according to taste

Puree everything in a food processor until the mixture is only minimally chunky or not chunky at all. Do it in two batches if necessary. Process the mixture in an ice cream maker according to instructions. Freeze until hard. Serve.

Voila! I love it when this stuff is easy. More to come on the rest of the menu....

* - Must ask David Lebovitz: is that normal or common to make sorbet with egg whites? Sounds kind of old school.

Happy International Women's Day!

2008-03-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

Martha Rosler sends up kitchen culture

Years and years ago when I got into food culture and writing, a big part of my interest came out of my commitment to feminism; I was interested in cooking and recipe writing as women's cultural production. These days I am much more sophisticated in my feminism - it's not just about the woman thing - and anyway it's obvious that cooking doesn't belong to women only.

But while, as a working feminist, I've outgrown the Gen-X wounded pessimism and defensiveness about identity politics that seems so common among my peers, my initial, admittedly sentimental, investment in cooking as women's art has returned to me. I like cooking because it is something that usually happens in female spaces, because it is a global art and a material sign of everyday human ingenuity. I admire the women who came before me, who turned a devalued skill into a fine way to make a living.

As today is International Women's Day, I'd like to note a few women who have shaped today's food culture, to whom I feel that I owe a great debt.

The inimitable, the only, Alice B. Toklas

Vertamae Grosvenor, of Geechee Girl Fame

Julia, natch

Catharine Beecher, arguably a mother of Home Economics

Elizabeth David, who birthed food writing as literature

MFK Fisher, also a literary doyenne

Claudia Roden, anthropologist of diasporic Jewish culture

Edna Lewis, historian of Southern Cuisine

Maria Parloa, sadly forgotten but a great 19th century food writer

And, yes, even Martha

Grumpy Pasta Al Forno (updated with forgotten peas)

2008-03-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

grumpy pasta al forno

It is a truth universally acknowledged that bad moods can be cured by pasta with lots of cheese. And man, yesterday I had a bad mood to put behind me.

I decided to treat us to big plates of pasta. We don't eat very much pasta now that we have to buy all of our cooking and drinking water. I really wanted a pasta al forno which would be nice and gooey and settle down into our guts like a rock. Plus we need to start using up the canned tomatoes before the spring batch comes in.

Ingredients

Just over 1 lb of Rigatoni or other dried pasta

UPDATED: 1/2 SMALL BAG OF FROZEN PEAS OR 3.5 CUPS OF FRESH PEAS
1/2 pint of tomato sauce
15 oz of ricotta (not low fat! what is this, the eighties?)
2/3 lb of parmesan, grated

Boil pasta in a large pot of salty water. In a large bowl combine 1/2 of the grated parmesan with the ricotta and tomato sauce. Preheat the oven to 400. [UPDATED: AT THE HALF WAY BOILING POINT ADD ONE HALF BAG OF FROZEN PEAS. ALTERNATELY, JUST BEFORE REMOVING THE PASTA ADD 3 AND A HALF CUPS OF FRESH PEAS.] When the pasta is still a few minutes from being al dente - this is really important: the pasta has to be undercooked because it will be baked for another half an hour - drain it and rinse it in cold water. Stir the pasta [AND PEAS] into the tomato-cheese sauce until it is fully mixed. Pour the mixture into a rectangular baking dish, either 9 by 12 inches or 8 by 13 inches. Top with the remaining parmesan and bake for twenty minutes.

Spring(ing)

2008-03-03T08:25:00.000-08:00

spring is springing, though it's not quite sprung

I've been hearing about Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories for a while now. Last week I picked it up at a book store to see what all of the hoopla was about. Short story short: absolutely a fabulous cookbook in the grand old tradition of British Francophilia. You can tell that Simon Hopkinson was brought up under Elizabeth David's umbrella: these are really simple and wonderful recipes developed by a cook because that's what he wants to eat. Brilliant.

Hopkinson's book really took off when the folks at Waitrose Illustrated, the great British food magazine, assembled a group of food writers and cooks to vote on the best cookbook of all time. Roast Chicken and Other Stories won and took off up the charts again. I think there's even a sequel. This week, inspired by Roast Chicken, I decided to make Hopkinson's leek tart.

Pickings were slim at the farmer's market on Saturday: spring vegetables aren't quite showing up yet and only the floral omnipresence of Meyer lemons hinted that a season change was around the corner (that, and the enormous table of Early Cheer narcissus for a $1 a bunch and anemones for $4 a bunch, which is why I have flower pictures this week and not produce pictures). Good luck and perseverance located one table where leeks tied together were on sale at $2 a bunch. Yes, you heard me right: $1 per leek. Sigh. I bought ten.

I also picked up one pound of Meyer lemons, which I used in David Lebovitz's recipe for lemon sorbet. Oh, glory!

Leek Tart, adapted from Roast Chicken and Other Stories

Pastry: 1 cup of flour, 4 tbsp butter, pinch of salt, egg yolk. Mix flour and butter together, add salt and egg yolk and enough cold water to form a dough. Chill for 30 minutes, then roll out the dough and fit it into an 8-inch tart tin. Prick the pastry with a fork and blind bake at 350 for about 15 or so minutes. Leave the oven on (unless you think you might fall asleep and you don't have adequate ventilation). (In which case, turn off the dang oven, wrap the tart and finish it the next day. Sheesh!)

Filling: 8-10 leeks, 1 stick of butter, 4 egg yolks, 1 cup of grated Gruyere (optional), 1 1/2 cups of whipping (or 35%) cream, salt and pepper. Trim, split horizontally, wash thoroughly, and slice 10 leeks. Saute in one stick of butter and then allow the leeks to simmer at a low heat for about an hour, or until they are softened and sweet. Combine and whip egg yolks, cream, gruyere, a pinch of salt and a couple of turns with a pepper mill. Stir in the leeks. Pour the mixture into the tart tin and bake until set and golden brown, appx 35-30 minutes.

(Meyer) Lemon Sorbet, adapted from

David Lebovitz's wonderful The Perfect Scoop

Syrup: 2 1/2 cups water; 1 cup sugar; 8 small Meyer lemons and 2 large regular lemons (or any combination thereof) to make 1 cup fresh lemon juice. Mix 1/2 cup of water with 1 cup of sugar. Grate the Meyer lemon zest into the sugar mixture and then heat in a pan until the sugar is dissolved. Juice the lemons; add juice to sugar mixture. Add the rest of the water to the mix and then chill until cool. Process in your ice cream machine according to instructions.

A Shot of Love with Lemon Tequila

2008-02-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

I collect these antique Canadian jars

Seriously, did you ever grab a peek at this show? So awful and so completely satisfying. It came to mind today when I was trying to come up with a snappy title for this post, in which I finally rescued my least favorite liquor from my abject memories of throwing it up through my nose sometime during high school.

This all started last week at the farmer's market, when I bought 3 1/2 pounds of Meyer lemons to make marmalade. I forgot to read the recipe before prepping the fruit. Thus I had already quartered and sliced all of the lemons before I realized that I was supposed to zest them and remove the fruit from the pith before cooking. So there I was with 3 1/2 pounds of chopped lemon. Meyer lemons. It's a holy sin to waste Meyer lemons.

As pretty as it tastes...

I decided to use the lemons to infuse this tequila that my buddy A. brought back from Tijuana a few years ago. I never even opened the bottle. After a few days of infusion the verdict is: delicious. It's like a floral lemon margarita, but without the ice or slushiness. I'm pretty sure you could end up tossing it if you drank too much but I've finally reached the stage in life where I know my limits.

Ingredients:

750 ml of regular, not sipping, white tequila
3 1/2 lbs of Meyer lemons, quartered and sliced finely
1 kg of white sugar.

Combine ingredients and transfer into freezable jars. Allow to infuse for as long as wanted (as long as the fruit doesn't get funky or discolored) and then drain. Serve straight up or in a mixed drink, up to you.

Abri la boca mami...

the last traces of la nouvelle cuisine

2008-02-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

Remember nouvelle cuisine? I was a child when that moment happened and it really shaped my idea of gastronomy. In particular I remember two famous Toronto restaurants: The Courtyard Cafe, where my mom used to take me to for special occasions, and Four Small Rooms, where I went once with a friend of my mom's. (Also Bemelman's but as a teenager I spent more time in the bar than the restaurant.) (But that's another story.)

Two things stick with me about nouvelle cuisine: tiny vegetables and brie appetizers. No, three things: raspberry coulis on everything. The Courtyard Cafe used to make an appetizer of baked, breaded brie topped with raspberry coulis in a basket shaped of fried parsley. This was before low fat, as you can tell.

Anyway, memories of miniscule vegetables came up for me the other day at the farmer's market when I was looking at the asparagus. The asparagus farmer had arranged the bunches in a pile about a foot high and about four feet across, and ranging from very thin, on the left, to very thick on the right.

I always buy thick asparagus. So when I grabbed my three bunches from the far right of the pile, the farmer noticed and we got into a conversation about growing to consumer tastes. According to the farmer most people only buy the thin bunches so that's what he has to grow. But he thinks, and I've heard this from other growers, that thick asparagus have more flavor. And it occurred to me that thin asparagus is the last remnant of nouvelle cuisine.

Why are people so stuck on thin? It is true that baby vegetables, carrots and new potatoes for instance, can be more tender and have a more delicate flavor than their more mature counterparts. But that is manifestly not true of asparagus. Thin asparagus always seems stringy and unsatisfying to me.

Anyway, I buy thick asparagus not just for the flavor but because I like to shave the raw stalks into long curls with a vegetable peeler and mix them with strips of parmigiano. Topped with lemon juice, salt, pepper and a fruity olive oil it makes a great winter salad. Or I roast the thick stalks in the oven.

Neither of those techniques work well with thin asparagus. Maybe, too, it's because we don't really eat much meat at home anymore that we prefer the thicker asparagus: it gives you more to bite into.

Sometimes I really hate food faddism. It ruins dining for the rest of us. I hope that nobody brings back raspberry coulis.

when handed lemons....

2008-02-21T09:19:00.001-08:00

...make marmalade! (more later.)

Nice work if you can get it (updated)

2008-02-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

Lizzy snoring behind my desk.

We take a break from our regularly scheduled food blogging to bring you these snapshots of our daily life up here in La Honda.*

Pretty much every day when I wake up I sit down with my cup of coffee and write or read, or work on the project in front of me, for a good six hours or so. It's a good life, and I'm deeply grateful for it.

But I'll tell ya, it's nothing like what these two creatures have going on, up here in La Honda. Of course, Lucy, pictured below, earns her keep by mousing in the barn where we live. Lucy belongs to our landlords, C. and D. But Lizzy: phew! What a life. Sleep all day, sleep all night.

Lucy stretching out on her favorite chair.

Our daily walks together are what I'll miss most when we leave here. At first it was just T., Lizzy and me. After a few weeks, Lucy joined us. As we walk Lucy goes hunting up and down the path. Sometimes, for no reason, she'll just scoot up one of the roadside trees or plant herself on an old redwood stump.

Other times she'll linger behind to go down a badger hole and then in a few minutes we'll hear the pattering drum beat of her paws running up the hill and - vroom - she'll go speeding past us, tail up in the air. Once in a while Lucy will speed past us and run under Lizzy, allowing her tail to knock Lizzy in the face. Lucy has a lot of personality.

our twice-daily inter-species walk

Lizzy, on the other hand, likes to stick close, occasionally nuzzling a hand or a leg and then stopping on the path behind and staring at us, pleading. Usually she's asking us to turn around and go straight home. Sometimes, though, she wants to play a complicated form of doggy tag, which involves pretending to hear or smell something, standing still and letting the anticipation build up, and then - POW - racing up the hill like we're being chased by the law. T. and I don't really understand doggy tag, but we play along.

I learn a lot from Lizzy and Lucy on our walks. I've learned that when beings you trust stop and smell the air, or listen hard, you should too. I've learned that the rustling in the forest can be the wind, or a rabbit, or, as it was a few months ago, a lone coyote. Today it was a bevy of quail**~~bouquet of pheasant~~ that took off, all at once, beating their wings and making us all jump.***

Mostly we stick together, a band of misfits: me in my ragged writing clothing, thinking about my second cup of coffee, Lizzy going faster up the hill than down because she's anticipating a treat, T. taking some deep breaths between reading cases for school and Lucy, glad to come along for the ride.

* -- Upcoming: the Wednesday Santa Cruz farmer's market.
** -- Oh, excellent website! You must check out this inestimable link.
*** - Thanks, D., for the correction!

cookie or candy.... (updated*)

2008-02-17T17:40:00.000-08:00

The sweets cupboard is bare this week and I thought I'd throw this old favorite of mine together. It's one of the few cookie recipes that I can actually remember off the top of my head and one of the few I really like. Peanut butter cookies are great because they're not too sweet - the salt in the peanut butter keeps the cookie from going over the top. And because there's ~~no egg~~tons of sugar in the batter the dry cake-y texture I tend not to like in most cookies doesn't happen.

I'm not really sure whether these are actually cookies; they're more like candy. Actually, I need a word like "skort" or something to describe them.

After spooning out the batter with a melon baller, I made an indent in the top of the dough and threw in some of the jam that M. and I made together last fall. 15 minutes in the oven and the cookie ends up chewy and caramelized. See? Look at the bottoms:

Ingredients

1 cup of brown sugar
1 cup of peanut butter
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla

Heat the oven to 325. Beat the ingredients together. Put scoops of batter onto parchment paper, and then make an indent on top. Fill with jam. When the oven is ready, bake the cookies for 15 minutes.

Update: Gah! Egregious error caught by excellent reader Allison! There is ONE egg in this batter. Thanks, Allison!

Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady....

2008-02-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

Also, I cooked for my other friend A.'s engagement party, and made the traditional Moroccan salad called a mitboucha (transliterated however you want I suppose), as well as a roasted eggplant salad, which some people call "egpplant caviar."*

The mitboucha is made by roasting peppers (usually green but for some reason the red peppers were less expensive at the farmer's market last week). Then, you fry up some tomato paste and garlic, add the roasted peppers, add some diced, canned tomatoes and let it all simmer down until its a big sticky gooey mess. Here is a very fuzzy picture of how it turned out:

Ingredients

--1/2 cup of olive oil (or more, this should be really oily and shiny)
--two tin of tomato paste
--eight or nine cloves of garlic
--four large tins of tomatoes, juice drained and put aside
--three pounds of peppers, preferably green but some red is fine
-- salt and pepper to taste
--something hot (I used my zhoug)
--parsley for garnish
--flatbread for scooping

Put the peppers in the oven to roast by cutting them in half, sprinkling them with olive oil and putting them under the broiler. When the skin starts to blister and turn black, remove the peppers from the oven, put them on a plate and cover the plate with a plastic bag. Let the peppers sweat for at least ten minutes before removing them. The skin should slip off. Do this for all of the peppers and then cut them into short strips or dice them.

Heat the olive oil in a big casserole pot or a very big frying pan and be generous about it: there are no fat fetishists in Morocco and we are trying to be authentic here! Add chopped garlic and fry until it starts to change color, but not longer. Add tomato paste and swoosh the paste around, mashing it to the bottom of the pan around so it starts to stick to the bottom. Be sure to scrape the sticky stuff off the bottom bfore it turns black but DO let it stick for a little while.

Add chopped, roasted peppers. Swoosh around some more and allow to cook down a bit. Add drained tins of tomatoes. Swoosh. Cook down for ages, adding juice from tins if it gets too dry.

Season with salt and pepper and add hot stuff, if you'd like a bit of a kick. Garnish with chopped parsley and serve with good flatbread or crusty bread not that flabby supermarket focaccia.

Happy engagement, A! (To E!) Hope your wedding looks like THIS!

So you see, I have been cooking. For others.

* -- which if you think about it is kind of gross: who wants eggplants to have eggs? I liked "roasted eggplant salad" better.

happy birthday, A!

2008-02-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, I suck. I've been a very bad blogger. My excuse is that I've been at one conference, I've got three more I'm preparing for this spring and I'm finally putting the tweaks on my manuscript.

But it's not like I haven't been cooking! To whit:

I made the cupcakes pictured above and left as a virtual birthday present for my friend A., who turns 35 this week! A. is a brilliant poet and a great friend and I haven't seen him in a few months. When I was trying to think of something I could do that would have any kind of parallel to the relentless task that is writing poetry, I came up with a red devil cake, especially because A. writes about Paradise Lost.

Happy Birthday, A ! One of these days we'll make it downtown to see this, much postponed.

hot soup, cold day

2008-01-29T23:33:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else I know, I've been fighting off a cold for the last three days. But an impending conference and the need to cook for a good friend's engagement party on Saturday is going to keep me off the couch for the next four days. I'm looking forward to the party but: ouch!

I cooked up this soup to try to sweat some of my cold out. T. likes it and it really hits the head-cold spot: dairy-free, light and full of vitamins. I think I was craving the color more than the soup. It's been gray, rainy and dull here for days and the sun only finally came out this morning. Our friend C. says that when the winter brings heavy rains, the hills around us are covered with wildflowers by spring. We can't wait for the flowers to start blooming.

Gingery Carrot Soup

8 oz ginger, chopped
4 cups of shredded carrots
1/2 large sweet potato, peeled and diced (just under 1 lb)
1 leek, cleaned carefully, the white and light green parts cut into rings
1 stalk of lemongrass, crushed and chopped and tied up in cheesecloth
6 cups of water, vegetable or chicken stock
1/2 tin of coconut milk, appx. 7 fluid oz.
1/4 cup of freshly squeezed orange or tangerine juice (like Odwalla)
1.5 cups of roughly chopped cilantro

Place ginger, carrots, sweet potato, leek and lemongrass bundle in water or stock. Bring to a boil then lower heat to a simmer. When the carrots and leek have softened, remove the lemongrass bundle and squeeze it against the side of the pot to extract juice. Discard lemongrass. Add coconut milk, juice and cilantro. Using a handheld blender, puree the soup. Add salt to taste and I suggest adding black pepper liberally. Serve hot or cold.

sugar, sugar (slightly updated)

2008-01-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

(Update: embarrassing spelling error removed.)

It's bitterly cold up in the Santa Cruz mountains and we've had over four inches of rain today alone. I've been craving sugar: burned sugar, cooked sugar and, most of all, caramel...

I made the caramel dots above because I was playing with the idea of scattering ground caramel sugar on flat bread. It didn't really work out. Then I tried the ground caramel on pancakes with a squeeze of lemon and that did work out. But left alone in the jar for a few minutes the ground caramel sugar just sticks back together in clumps and is a hassle to use. So I'm still working on that idea.

Left with these splats of sugar I stirred them into coffee and tea as a handy replacement for that other comfort food, Lyle's Golden Syrup. The lovely caramel flavor made me think of making fudge.

I came across this recipe for penuche ("pen-oo-chee") a few weeks ago: essentially, it's a brown sugar fudge, made in the traditional fashion: by melting sugar with fats and then beating them into a smooth and velvety consistency.

Above is a snapshot of the first batch I made, using, though I didn't know it, a defective candy thermometer. I made my usual mistake: I allowed the sugar to cook too quickly and form crystals which stopped the fudge from getting creamy and melty. You can kind of see the crystals in the pigture - they look like the crystals you're supposed to have in good Parmagiano Reggiano. You're not supposed to have them in fudge.

I started all over. This time I sat in front of the stove while the sugar slowly rolled in on itself for half an hour. Then, when it passed the ice water test, I beat in the icing sugar a touch at a time.

This last batch works: it's cushiony and silken and a rush of fat oozes out and onto your tongue with each bite. I cut it into 64 pieces because it's too rich to eat in large portions. Rich is good. It's going to rain again tomorrow.

***

Penuche, from this recipe:

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons evaporated milk
2 cups packed light brown sugar
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into tablespoons
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (I doubled it to 1 tsp)
1 3/4 cups confectioners' sugar

Mix the milk, sugar, butter and salt into a thick-bottomed saucepan and bring it to a boil over moderate heat, stirring consistently; bring the heat down to low and allow to cook slowly until the softball stage; pour mixture into a heatproof bowl and blend in the vanilla with a handheld blender or with the paddle of a stand mixer; SLOWLY, TABLESPOON BY TABLESPOON, mix in the confectioner's sugar (this is key: you should be mixing for about five or six minutes until the sugar is entirely gone). Pour into an unbuttered 8-inch square dish and allow to chill in the fridge for a few minutes. Take the dish out and score the top of the fudge to form 64 squares. Chill for another hour, cut along scored lines, serve it up.

* -- I'd just like to point out that the FAQ section on the Lyle's Golden Syrup homepage is called "We've Got the Answers (Hopefully)" - I just miss British self-deprecation so much.

getting zhoug-y with it

2008-01-18T17:41:00.001-08:00

Every time a relative or friend comes to visit from Israel, I get them to bring me a jar of green zhoug. Zhoug is a staple of Yemenite Jewish cooking, a hot paste that's often eaten with bread and tomato sauce. There are two kinds of zhoug, red and green. I prefer the green.

Since no-one's come to visit from Israel lately, I've had to make my own. I started yesterday afternoon. Two hours and ten burning fingers later, I managed to eke out a somewhat useful recipe for this aggressively hot pepper paste. But because it actually got way too hot for me, I added a variation on red zhoug, which is a lot easier to eat the traditional way, with some flatbread and oil.

Zhoug is hot, man! I checked out about ten different recipes before coming up with this one, and I still had to cut it with a few improvised ingredients to calm the heat down. So I guess you can't really call this recipe a traditional zhoug: it's zhough-y.

Ingredients (fills two ~~pint~~half-pint jars, almost)

-- seeds from 9 cardamom pods
-- 1 lb of serrano peppers
-- 4 cups of cilantro, washed and chopped: some stem is not a bad thing
-- 3 cups of parsley
-- two preserved lemons (completely inauthentic and thus can be omitted if you want to be like that. i added them to cut the heat on the green paste. no-one's going to give you an award for burning out your tastebuds, hotshot.)
-- 9 medium-sized cloves of garlic, chopped
-- 1/2 tbsp of ground black pepper
-- 1 tbsp ground cumin
-- 3 tbsp of canola oil

alternative red version: mix five tablespoons of tomato paste to one cup of zhoug

Our Daily Bread

2008-01-14T11:22:00.000-08:00

just out of the oven

It seems that everyone who loves to cook wishes they had more time to cook. Me, I wish I had more time to bake bread. How did women do it 200 years ago when they had to bake bread almost every day, in wood-heated stoves? I've decided to try baking bread once a week, and in order to do so, I've come up with this solution: prepare the dough the evening before and then leave it to rise in the fridge until the morning.

It's not impossible: if you're making flatbread, which is what I decided to do here, there's only one rising, and baked on pizza stone, it should only take about 8 minutes to have hot bread in the morning. Of course you have to be a fan of savory breakfasts, though I suppose you could sprinkle sugar on top of the bread just before bringing it out of the oven. Mmmmm - olive oil and sugar. I'll have to try that next time I make this recipe.

Savory Morning Flatbread (adapted from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Flatbreads and Flavors)

The Dough:

1 1/2 cups of warm water; 1/2 tsp of active yeast; 3 1/2 - 4 cups of flour; 1/4 tsp of salt; 2 tbsp of olive oil

On Top:

2 tbsp olive oil; 4 cloves of chopped garlic (optional); 4 tbsp of chopped rosemary or other herbs; 2 teaspoons of sea salt

The Night Before: dissolve yeast in warm water; slowly stir two cups of flour in the mixture, with a wooden spoon; cover bowl and allow to sit for about an hour to create a sponge; sprinkle 1/4 tsp of salt and 2 tbsp of olive oil over sponge and then stir in the rest of the flour. Once the dough is too stiff to stir, remove from the bowl and knead on a floured surface until the dough is smooth and elastic. Put the dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight. Also, put your pizza stone, or unglazed tiles, on the bottom rack of the oven. (You may also wish to divide the dough in half at this point and put it into two greased bowls if you are only baking one flatbread.)

In the morning: When you wake up, take the dough out before you do anything else, then turn the oven on to 500: the dough should return to room temperature before baking; when it is less cool, roll or stretch it out into a rectangle and allow it to rise for 15 minutes; brush the top generously with olive oil and sprinkle chopped garlic and/or rosemary on top; sprinkle half of the sea salt as well. Bake on your pizza stone for 7 minutes or until the bottom is golden brown. Serve it hot: you may want to sprinkle more salt and oil on top when it comes out.

a serious breakfast, served con formagio e espresso

Kamei Restaurant Supply

2008-01-13T15:04:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, your faithful correspondent spent a happy morning roaming the aisles of Kamei Restaurant Supply, on Clement St., in the "new" Chinatown, searching for new dishes.

For the last few months we've been dying to switch out our old and battered everyday plates for a new set of entirely white plates and serving dishes, but we're not willing to shell out for the pricey Williams-Sonoma or Crate and Barrel lines. (Except for the Classic Century line; everyone wants that.)

While the dishes at Kamei aren't porcelain or bone china, they'd do well enough for plebs like us. I fell for the long white dishes with five indentations - I can imagine serving various kinds of sashimi or ceviche in them. Kamei also has what must be every sushi dish ever created, many of them pretty fabulously stylish.

This enormous store also has - heads up, parents! - an entire row of plastic dishes. On my way to see my friend Sara, I grabbed a beige plastic sectional tray that I thought would do for C., her styling 14-month old Hayes Valley baby. We both loved that the dishes were a neutral, modernist beige with a pearly patina.

Minimalism aside, if I had to put together a picnic basket with plastic dishes I might have to go for the full Chinese kitsch, left.

Then of course you have the standards...

...blue fish dishes...

dragon dishes....

....and, my pick for culinary fad
of the year, clay pots, part of
the upcoming one-pot meal craze.

There's a lot of random stuff at Kamei (Pokemon dishes, anyone?) but there are also a lot of items that really should be inexpensive, and aren't, when you only visit high end stores.

Kamei Restaurant Supply, 547 Clement St, San Francisco, CA, (415) 666-3699.

blogging delinquency (super long post)

2008-01-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh....

Okay so remember how I said that I would track down recipes for sancocho and arroz con habichuelas (rice and beans)?

I lied.

Seriously: we were just so relaxed and chilled out that, except for T.'s smoothies, we never got up off of our beach chairs to get in the kitchen and cook. Imagine that! Instead, our greatest energy expenditure came from roaming the aisles of the local supermercados and taking pictures of things we've never seen before. Like aloe vera juice:

from left to right, guayaba (guava) jam, tahitian fruit juice, aloe vera juice

I guess you can find aloe vera juice here, but it's not like it's made around the corner like it is in the D.R.

Also, did you know that cashews are fruits before they are nuts? And that in the Caribbean they are often eaten as fruit, in jams? Dominican grocery stores are full of different kinds of fruit jams, which makes me think that, pace Rachel Laudan's work, you could draw quite a few links between the Moroccan/Moorish/ North African tradition of serving guests bowls of confit or candied cooked fruit - what we would call jam - and the Dominican fondness for all fruit in heavy syrup. To wit:

guayaba (guava) shells in syrup (above left); cajuiles (cashew fruit) in syrup
(below left and center top); orange slices in syrup (below center); cherries in syrup (right)

Then of course there are the ever present beans. If you've ever visited the Spanish Caribbean you know that rice and beans are staple foods for millions of people. Dominicans call the combination arroz con habichuelas:

habichuelas blancas

habichuelas negras y rojas

Sorry I was too lazy to get the recipe. (See top picture.) Next time.

You also find a lot of other carbohydrate-rich vegetables in the Dominican diet like yucca, yautia amatilla (yellow plantain), yautilla blanca (white plantain), chayote, batata (sweet potato), tayotas (squash), ahuyama (another kind of squash) and casabe (cassava).

tayote

Besides the different kinds of yautilla, or plantains, there are also quite a few banana varietals, including rulo, or red banana, and green plantains, which are boiled and mashed to make mangu, a local breakfast favorite. You can see three different kinds of bananas in this video, which I filmed at a roadside fruit stand, as well as fresh mandarines:

That's my mom talking to the fruit stand owner, asking him if the rulos/red bananas are ready.

Besides the native foods, you can pretty much get anything you want in the DR. That's how my mother can own a restaurant that has served Italian, Dominican, Moroccan, Japanese and Thai food, all in the last fifteen years.

The Dominican Republic is chock full of European, Canadian and American expatriates, like my family. In Santiago my mother took us to see a friend of hers who owns and operates an Italian import business. I couldn't resist taking pictures of some of his goods, and I stocked up on porcini mushroom brodo cubes and doppio concentrato tomato paste, which are hard to find here in the U.S. We stopped there for a plate of lasagna and T. and I each had a bottle of what I thought was a soda pop:

Ten minutes later, I realized I was tipsy: only in Italy do you bottle Campari and soda and make it look like fruit punch or some other kind of red soda!

Other strange and wonderful retail discoveries:

here's the double concentrate (doppio concentrato) tomato paste.
question: what's with all the tube food in Italy?

like this: salmon pate or black olive paste in a tube

or this: tuna with ketchup in a tube. weird.

mmmmm: bitter sodas. may or may not be alcoholic

orange soda: again, may or may not be booze-y

Okay, I owe visits to about a hundred different bloggers and I have to catch up on comments so I'm not going to post for a few days. Thanks for reading through a long post!

hola from the d.r., part two

2007-12-31T12:10:00.000-08:00

frutas mixtas

So many pictures! So little time. Today we stopped at a roadside stand to pick up some fresh fruits and I had finally remembered to bring along the camera. I've got enough photos for three posts, at least, but I thought I'd start with some pics of the local fruit and veg.

We've got into the habit of starting every day with a fruit smoothie, always made under T.'s jurisdiction. The last few days have seen soy milk with lechoza (papaya), melon (cantaloupe), and banana (banana).

lechoza (papaya)

Like I said, not too much cooking going on here these days: we've started hitting up the roadside restaurants for lunch and we've been going to my mom's restaurant for dinner. Which was recently reviewed by Fodor's, by the way.

mandarinas are in season

Eating fresh and local is always important to us, and it just seems easier here than anywhere else I've ever lived. We stopped for cocos de agua - coconuts with water in them - because T. had never had any before. Now we have a full bottle of coconut water in our fridge to mix with our morning smoothie. Does anyone know the health benefits of coconut water?

agua de coco

T. has been drinking Presidente beer since he got here but I've been macking on the amazing Dominican rum, served straight up with ice and lime. As many of you probably know, it's impossible to get lemons in the Caribbean, and everyone uses lime instead. Once you get used to that you wonder why you haven't been using limes more often at home. I'm dying to get home and make ceviche, following a red curry and lime ceviche recipe from my mother's restaurant.

limones

Anyway, it's crazy how good the fruit is here. One thing we haven't been eating are the grapefruits or toranjas if only because all the other fruits we can't get at home so easily are calling our names, but almost every restaurant serves fresh grapefruit juice. Maybe I'll have a greyhound tonight, just to mix things up.

toranjas/grapefuit/future gin mixer

Today my mom brought us to this crazy roadside barbecue place. This is a Dominican barbecue:

D.I.Y. BBQ

Kind of makes you ashamed of the huge shiny barbecue you've been eying at Home Depot, eh? We bought a half chicken and polished it off for lunch, but next time we're buying a whole one because I don't want to share.

bbq pollo

T. had the moro, or black beans with rice:

moro, or, black beans and rice

I had to physically hold myself back from buying the chivo, aka goat, stew and I forgot to take pictures. Tomorrow!

yuca, before (doesn't it look like kindling?)

This is yuca, before (above) and after cooking (below):

yuca, after

Next post is from the supermercado.... Happy New Year's everyone!

hola from the d.r.

2007-12-27T07:14:00.001-08:00

jealous?

Well, you know you love your mother when you carry a pound and a half of seriously pungent cheese 3000 miles across the United States in your suitcase, at her request. Then again, that's also how you know you are your mother's daughter.

We are staying in a deliriously beautiful apartment on the beach - the view across the infinity pool to the ocean in our front yard is pictured above. It's day three today, and besides a whole lot of nothing, with a healthy dose of the local beer, we celebrated the day after Christmas by polishing off a bunch of Colorado cheeses. Then we burned it all off with an hour in the ocean and a ninety-minute beach walk.

This is my last dispatch about North American food for a while, as I'm hoping to track down recipes for sancocho and arroz con habituelos but I felt I owed it to my Colorado family and my smelly bathing suits to spotlight these really fabulous cheeses.

According to the cheese dude at the Whole Foods at University and First in Denver, there are two really great Colorado cheesemakers: Mouco and Haystack.

smelly, baby, in the best possible way

Mouco is based in Fort Collins, and is a family business run under the supervision of a master cheesemaker from Bavaria. I only picked one cheese from them, the very forceful colorouge. Colorouge is a soft-ripened cheese that is rubbed by hand to develop a red and white edible rind. The makers thoughtfully add three eat-by dates to the packaging: soft with a white center, creamy and soft throughout, and "best vultured by." We got to colorouge at "creamy and soft" but I'm pretty sure that the voyage from Denver to Miami and into the tropics added some time to the cheese's flavour. By the time we had cut through half of it, it was pretty weepy.

The smell clinging to my new bathing suits was justified by colorouge's fulsome bouquet, but I mean fulsome in the best possible sense: big and generous and funky.

chevre on cassava crackers: dollars to donuts, it's never been done

I also picked up two cheeses from Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy, which is located outside Boulder in the small town of Niwot ("Nye, wot?"). The mountain boulder chevre is pretty much what you'd expect: fresh and light with a goaty kick. I thought it had a really superior creaminess. Haystack is cultured with vegetable enzymes for all the veggies and kosher types out there and is available in smoked, spiced and marinated varieties. In the background of the picture above you can see the cassava crackers upon which we spread the chevre.

the red cloud needed more time to mature

I also bought a small wheel of Red Cloud raw milk cheese, a harder cheese with a washed rind. While I did like this cheese very much - and it is an American Cheese Society award winner from 2007, by the way - I have a feeling that it hadn't matured quite enough when we bought it. The flavor is big, as you'd expect a raw milk cheese to be, but it's more restrained than the shameless colorouge . If we were at all in the mood for cooking I'd have melted a couple of wedges of Red Cloud on some whole grain bread and served it with some icy pilsner. It's that kind of mountain cheese. I expect it to keep getting better across the next few days of sweating on a Caribbean patio.

caribbean avocado varietal

Okay, that out of the way, here is my first Caribbean dispatch: the avocadoes here are completely different and need to be imported into North America. A tiny bit of internet research reveals that they are lower in fat - not that I care about fat, see above - than the Haas varietal that we are usually stuck with in the U.S. and Canada. This avocado really tastes like a fruit: it's sweet and light and you could eat it all day. We used the first half of this avocado on the cassava crackers with the chevre but I'm going to use the second half in a milk shake. Yum.

on the road

2007-12-22T09:51:00.000-08:00

flying across the countryside

T. and I and our collection of gingerbread persons have been on the road for a few days and just got in to Denver. The general result of the food-packing regime: a disaster. The slaw leaked purple oil over everything, we forgot the tea and soup so the thermoses of hot water were useless and the french press coffee - ugh.

But so what! When, on Wednesday evening, we arrived starving and pathetic in Green River, Utah, we found the most amazing restaurant, Ben's Cafe.

ye olde signage. love it.

First of all, dig the fabulous sign, my first hint that this was going to be an interesting spot. I wish I'd taken a picture of the inside, which was completely empty when we got in, the kind of empty that makes you sit at the counter because you don't want the one waitress to lack for company. Ben's Cafe has been owned by the same family for nine years and one man (Ben?) prepares everything on the menu from scratch. As we sat there, one other person came in and joined us at the bar. While we were eating three more people came in, obviously friends of Ben's, and they all peered at me suspiciously as I took pictures of our dinner.

Though you wouldn't know it by the signage, Ben's menu serves Mexican- American food, as well as "American." We passed on burgers and grilled cheese, my usual diner standbys. I ordered the green chili ("Utah's finest," per the menu) for me and a bean burrito for T. The owner's daughter, who was home from the high school she attends a few towns over, told us that the platter of tortilla chips and salsa that came with our drinks were freshly made. I've never actually had freshly made tortilla chips and they were awesome: light, perfectly greasy and rendered complete by the round flavors of salsa mexicana. When properly done, deep-fried tortilla is sweet and layered in upon itself, like the best French pastry. I never knew that.

utah's finest. believe it.

My green chili was so good I actually choked up with pleasure. I'm not kidding: tears came to my eyes. On the side of the dish I got three freshly-made, piping-hot flour tortillas, one more than I actually needed, and thus exactly the right sized serving. T.'s bean burrito was tops, delivered with a side of putatively vegetarian refried beans (T: "delicious!") and red rice, which I finished for him.

everything comes covered with cheese, a positive in my books

Ben's Cafe is a lone warrior of diner excellence in the desert that is the I-15/I-70 route through Nevada, Arizona and Utah, and I speak as a devotee of all things greasy spoon.

Such is the wonder of the internet that if you Google "Ben's Cafe Green River Utah" you will find it on google maps and on several sites for planning road trips. Sadly, you'll also find that Ben's, like everything else in Green River, is for sale, as are all the businesses on Main Street, Green River, Utah, zip code 84525.

I'll leave you to that metaphor.

***

Here are a few more pics from along the way, decidedly, maybe even charmingly, out of focus.

gingerbread cyclops driving past Vegas

mountains in utah

cyclops enters Arizona

road trip

2007-12-17T19:56:00.000-08:00

So how do you plan for a two-day car trip across Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado when there are almost no places to get healthy meals along the way? (And that includes sad-sack salads with French dressing, etc)

We've done this drive, or ones like it, for about five years now and we've finally developed a few techniques to stay a bit healthier, even if we give in to burgers and fries along the way. The first is: bring your own fruit and veg because it's a pain to stop along the way, particularly if you are married to someone who is a big bully about never stopping anywhere interesting no matter what (ahem). We usually pack apples, oranges, celery and carrots and a small jar of peanut butter. This time around I'm also mixing up a big vat of Asian Slaw (chop up some green cabbage into bit-sized pieces - you can use savoy or red cabbage or mix them, whatever - season with rice vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil). We'll keep it in a cooler to keep it fresh along the way.

We try to stop at Burger Kings along the way because they serve veggie burgers. Or at least they used to. If there's only a McDonald's, their salads are bearable these days. And of course their fries are awesome.

Another trick we've developed is to bring along two thermoses of hot water and several packets of dried soups (like miso) as well as tea. These keep you hydrated and stop you from consuming too many of the potato chips you will no doubt buy at gas stations along the way. Pretzels are good too because they have much less fat unless you buy the square ones that are great for scooping peanut butter.

T. likes Odwalla bars, but I don't, so we pack them for him.

Don't you love our vintage thermoses? (Thermi?)

We also pack sandwich fixings: we bring along turkey, sliced cheese, bread and mustard in the cooler.

Finally: new product alert! Looky looky loo at our new Bodum travel presses! Now I don't particularly love French press coffee, being much addicted to my Bialetti, but on the road I'll take anything before I'll drink the swill they serve at MacDonald's or whatever. I'm going to empty a can of condensed milk into a small tupperware container and that takes care of milk and sugar.

I'll try to post along the way but I'll probably be running a bit short on posts for the next week until we get to our final destination, the Dominican Republic.

Happy holidays, folks. Safe travels wherever you may be going.

yum

2007-12-17T17:08:00.000-08:00

Guess who I met yesterday? The girls from yumsugar; yumsugar and partysugar. Completely neat to meet these foodblogging dynamos. I'll be checking in on yumsugar regularly from now on....

gingerbreadmen you'd actually meet

2007-12-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

faceless beaureaucrat gingerbread person

I've been planning on doing gingerbread for a few weeks now. Then last week I was at Whole Foods, as usual - I never could resist a buffet - and while browsing around the bakery section I came across what I thought was gingerbread men. But lo! What did I see on the label? Gingerbread men have been renamed gingerbread people!

Listen. Your correspondent is in favor of gender equality, and in fact she makes her living promoting it. But she asks you: are gender neutral gingerbread figures really progress? The androgynous Whole Foods baker to whom I mistakenly addressed this question seemed to think so, but for me, the gingerbread person suggests the period in history - aka the culture wars, aka the eighties - when we really thought that all the future rested on changing pronouns and on parity of representation. But what was going on while we language-gazed? Nicaragua! The Evangelization of Central America! The Falklands Invasion! The Iran-Iraq War!

So I propose: if one must have gingerbread people, please return us to gingerbread men and women as well. And further, if one must focus on what are really the small-stakes issues of representation, let's really go for it with a sense of joy, fun and perversity.

I present to you my gallery of gingerbread men, women and, uh, people:

Gingerbread Cyclops! In a red vest!

Gingerbread Walk of Shame!

Inappropriate gingerbreadman with three nipples and green legwarmers!

Oedipus Prep!

Dropped ecstasy on the beach!

Angry in a Xmas sweater.

Gingerbread Gauguin.

The recipes that I followed are here, and here. I added a sense of humour.

And in the meantime, sign the petition and join the virtual March on Bali, here. That's what really matters.

Coming up: More xmas cookies! Also, road trip food! SF to Denver! Strategies for not gaining ten pounds while driving for two days!

Join the Virtual March in Bali

2007-12-13T16:21:00.001-08:00

I'm working on a post about gingerbread~~men~~people but in the meantime, please join me in the virtual march on Bali, urging the world's leaders to do something about climate change.

You can sign the petition and join the march here.

caramel love-in

2007-12-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

little packages of yum

Fantastic dinner at Lulu on Saturday night with ten of my best San Fran friends. I don't do reviews on this site so I won't go into detail but everything at Lulu was perfect.

they're not this big, in real life

The only downside was that with all of my Friday deadlines, I didn't get to make the party favors that I wanted to. So I spent a hungover Sunday making Sea Salt Caramels, almost entirely lifted from this Epicurious recipe from a Gourmet recipe October 2004. I'm packing them into small green boxes garnished with paper poinsettas.

thanks, martha!

The boxes are from Martha Stewart crafts and they are totally easy to make if you don't mind spending a lot of time doing cut-outs.

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients: 2 cup of whipping cream; 10 tablespoons unsalted butter; 2 teaspoons of vanilla-infused sea salt*; 3 cups sugar; 1/2 cup corn syrup; 1/2cup water

Preparation: Line bottom and sides of an 12x9 baking pan with parchment paper; combine cream, butter and salt in a saucepan; bring to a boil; turn heat off; put pan to the side; boil sugar, corn syrup, and water in a tall, heavy saucepan; stir until sugar is dissolved; boil, without stirring but swirling the pan, until the sugar mixture is a light golden caramel.

Carefully stir in cream mixture; the caramel will boil up so be careful; simmer, stirring frequently, until caramel registers 248°F or reaches the soft ball stage; about five minutes. Pour into baking pan and cool for 2 hours. Cut into small pieces; wrap each piece in a 4-inch square of wax paper, twisting 2 ends to close.

happy birthday to me

it's the most wonderful time....

2007-12-06T19:59:00.000-08:00

I'd like to say that I've been cooking up a storm, but actually I'm buried under three crazy deadlines and there's not a lot going on dans notre cuisine except some mediocre takeout falafel and an entire roasted chicken from Whole Foods.

I'll be up all night finishing some work that's due tomorrow but I offer you a hint of what's to come: caramel party favors for my friends who're coming out to celebrate my birthday on Saturday. The cuppa tea is there to make sure I get to tomorrow...