Isolated Foodie

Daring Cooks Marinate!

2010-01-16T22:07:00.004-08:00

Let me be clear: I am a terrible food blogger. I am here to confess my sins. Since moving to Rain City, I've barely posted and now I'm two days late with the Daring Cooks challenge for January! Life gets in the way sometimes, but for the late post I blame our new computer. It's a netbook and I love it's itty-bittiness, but I'm still getting used to not having all the programs I'm in the habit of using. The cooking was done on time; it's just the computer work that's late.

The January 2010 DC challenge was hosted by Cuppy of Cuppylicious and she chose a delicious Thai-inspired recipe for Pork Satay from the book 1000 Recipes by Martha Day.

The heart of this challenge was the marinade, a puree of onion, garlic, ginger, and other loveliness that could be combined with any meat or tofu. I chose tofu. I found that I needed two batches of the marinade in order to get good coverage. If I had been using a meat, I could have tossed everything into a ziplock bag and been good with one batch, but tofu doesn't love being squished around all that much.

While the tofu was bathing in the refrigerator, I made the second part of the challenge: a coconut milk and peanut butter sauce. I roughed this up a bit because I felt it was a little bland, but I don't exactly remember what I did to it other than simmer the heck out of the coconut milk with minced onion and garlic before making the rest of the sauce. As with a previous coconut-milk-based sauce, every time I tasted it, I kept wanting it to be a Thai red curry sauce and, of course, it wasn't. And for the same reason that the other one wasn't: No Thai red curry ingredients. Tricky, that.

Then it was time to broil! The options included grilling, but our rain made that a little impossible. As it happens, I'm glad I broiled because I've never actually tried broiling tofu before and I loved the result. I'll be playing with different marinades for a new future.

After it's visit with the fire (ok, fine, I don't really have fire because our Rain City house has a stooopid electric stove), the tofu was gorgeous and ready to eat!

We ate it with jasmine rice cooked with a little sauteed onion, steamed brocolli, and the peanut sauce. It was delicious. LittleGirl mostly focused on rice and peanut sauce with a few bites of tofu. Husband and I scarfed down the whole combo. He got the leftovers for lunch the next day. I'm very nice to him in that way because I know that it will mean that he'll get out of bed on cold mornings and light the pellet stove to warm up the house before I venture out of the covers. It's the little things.

Thanks to Cuppy for a delicious challenge!

Crab Cakes With A Side Of Guilt

2009-12-04T10:14:00.002-08:00

The commercial crabbing season started this week in Rain City. I bought my first (pre-cooked, 'cause that's what was first offered) crab the day after opening day. The docks have been completely transformed from pretty empty parking lots with full boat-slips to jam-packed parking lots. Boats come in and out all day. It's a hive of activity and you can buy live or cooked crabs right from the boats or from businesses on the docks. It's pretty crazy and can apparently last through January in a good crabbing year. Last year was not a good year and people have told us that there's a four or five year cycle of good and bad crab years.

My crab weighed just over two pounds and I managed to get 9.3 ounces of meat out of it. I need to ask around to see if my crab-picking skills are up to par. I was proud of the jumbo-lump quality of my picked meat. The shell and tiny claw-ends are now in the freezer to make stock at a later date, 'cause when the ocean offers up this succulent a treat, I feel like I should make the most of it.

We enjoyed our first Dungeness crab in the form of crab cakes with slaw on the side. The cakes were very, very basic. A little mayo as a binder and a quick dredge in seasoned flour. That's it. Since we had a lot of perfect crab, I didn't want to hide it at all.

Now, for the side of guilt. Those of you who are happy omnivores and don't want to change the "happy" part of that equation should feel free to skip my musings on omnivory.

I've recently been rethinking my eating habits. For the last many years (following a long period of strict vegetarianism), I have eaten fish and seafood occasionally. "Occasionally" has varied, from a few meals a week to a meal or two a month, depending largely on availability of high-quality locally fished choices. In Isolationville, we ate a fair bit of salmon and halibut because they were locally abundant and grocery stores weren't. In Desolationville and Desertville, we lived in a desert. Not a whole lot of local fisheries action. We didn't eat much seafood (Daring Cooks challenges aside!).

Now, here we are living once again near the ocean. We are a mile from the beach and only three miles from an active commercial fishery harbor. The fishery here focuses on tuna, salmon (both a river-based season and a fall ocean season), and crab. Husband loves crab. Husband could live on crab, I think. I love a good crab cake, but not quite in the same way as Husband.

So what do we do? There have been two opinion pieces in the NY Times in the past few months about the ethics of meat-eating. The most recent was written by an ethical vegan and spoke more to animals raised for food rather than wild-caught (or hunted) animals. In October, there was a powerful exploration of one person's journey to vegetarianism. It explored a lot of the same reasons I became vegetarian. Fiction, also, has conspired to make me think about my choice to eat fish. I recently finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, which hammers home a strong vegetarian message from a dystopian future.

My journey to vegetarianism started because I was horrified by the idea of raising animals to eat them (being a friend to all animals, as Husband calls me), and particularly horrified by the way animals are raised today (or in the mid-80s, when I stopped eating meat). Over the next several years, my vegetarianism was solidified not out of ethical concerns, but out of environmental ones. The higher we eat on the food chain, the more energy is required to produce a pound of food. Environmentally speaking, eating meat is very, very expensive. And in this century, the environment is a major ethical issue. Being vegetarian (or vegan) is one of the most powerful things an individual can do to slow down climate change.

But where do wild animal foods come into this equation? They are still higher on the food chain. There aren't the same ethical issues surrounding the way they lived, but there are still the ethical issues surrounding killing another animal to eat.

I've written before about my love of foraging, which is just another word for the "gathering" part of hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering produced the diet that our hominid ancestors ate for at least a couple million years (allowing for scavenging at the very beginning of the lineage). Humans are just one among many omnivores and, of course, pure carnivores. We evolved as predators and predators are a necessary part of any ecosystem. Is there any reason why we shouldn't play the predator role ever? Is there a moral obstacle to my participation in the "hunting" part of hunting and gathering?

I don't really know. I've been leaning away from eating fish recently, but it seems foolish when there's an abundant, sustainable fishery minutes from my house. Dungeness crabs are considered a best choice option by Monterey Bay Seafood Watch. Is it better to get protein from a local crustacean or a non-local soybean-processed-into-tofu?

For now, the long-term answer isn't clear to me, but I think this season's crabs will be part of my diet. Next year? I don't know.

Daring Cooks Shouldn't Move

2009-11-14T19:42:00.000-08:00

That is my lesson for this month: If you want to be a Daring Cook or a Daring Baker, you should not plan to move from your current home any time soon. Although I've been in Rain City (not really a city; population about 5000) for almost a month now, I still had to scurry like a trapped rat to get the challenge completed in time. The moving-in process is approaching completeness. Or so I like to tell myself until I reach for one of the two sushi mats I know I own and find that they must still be in a box in the garage.

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge.

I love sushi, so I really wanted to participate and I slowly found the most basic ingredients in various and sundry of the stores in Rain City. I've made sushi before (but not for a really long time; see below), so I thought this would be fun and relatively easy.

Half-way through the preparation of all the parts.

The reality? Not so much on the easy. I could not find any sushi-grade fish of any kind (except for a two-pound chunk of albacore this afternoon, way too late to thaw it). My solution was to coat a tuna steak from the supermarket in black sesame seeds and pan sear it. I couldn't lay hands on my rolling mats, so I was rolling on a kitchen wash cloth. I managed to seriously undercook my rice for perhaps the first time in my life and we had rice with very hard centers. The wasabi I bought was the worst tasting wasabi I have ever met, but it was my only choice. And, as always, I was rushing to finish it while Little Girl was slurping miso soup desperate to eat her real dinner, so I couldn't take a lot of time to make it look pretty and do helpful things like hold together well.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that I completed the challenge with a dragon roll stuffed with cucumber and baked tofu; the spiral roll with cucumber, asparagus, and tofu; and nigiri with baked tofu and a black-sesame-seed-crusted seared tuna. It was all quite tasty if you could ignore the occasional rock-like grain of rice, and after Little Girl had eaten what she was going to eat, I made another roll with tuna and avocado. Yum! I unfortunately did not have the camera quite as ready to hand as I usually do, so there aren't many pictures and virtually no pictures of the process. The tofu was designed to replace the unfindable eel we were supposed to use for the dragon roll. I dearly love it, but I made the tofu with as much similar flavor as possible and it worked well.

The finished platter of rolls and nigiri.

The other good news (I hope you agree) is that you get another story of the dating trials of Husband and me. The last time I made sushi was on our first date-like event*. We were both taking the worst course ever offered by our otherwise-wonderful graduate department. One week, there was a lecture (of real interest) that overlapped with this class and I joked that I was going to get the professor to cut class short so we could go. Husband said that if I got class cut in half, he'd take me out to a movie.

I called the professor and made the suggestion. She very happily said that this got her off the hook because she was going to have a hard time getting to class that day, so she'd just cancel it altogether and send out an email about the lecture.

I walked back to Husband's lab and asked what he'd do if I got class canceled. Dinner and a movie, was the answer. Well, huzzah! A few days later, we made sushi together because he wanted to learn and I'd made it a couple times before (this is why I have TWO rolling mats) and then went to see Chocolat. We got to our seats, the movie started, chocolate started appearing on the screen in large and delicious-looking quantities. And Husband pulled out a fancy box of chocolates, which had been hiding in his coat. I swooned, but he didn't notice because it was a dark theater.

That sushi definitely didn't include fancy inside-out, avocado-covered dragon rolls, something I am very excited to know how to make. So, many thanks to Audax and Rose for inspiring a new era of sushi-making in my kitchen! We all love it, there isn't a sushi restaurant in Rain City, and there is a tuna fishery here, so we'll be making it again, with fully cooked rice.

*Not an actual date; that wouldn't occur for almost another year. It just sounds like something people would do on a date.

Daring Cooks Do Pho

2009-10-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Morning, October 7th

This month, the Daring Cooks are visiting Vietnam via a bowl of steaming noodle soup. I love Vietnamese food and flavors. I dream of bahn mi chay with double tofu from Banh Mi So No. 1 in St. Louis on a frequent basis. This was a dangerous dream while I actually lived in St. Louis because it was literally just around the corner from my house and I ate there or got take away too often for the good of my pocketbook. It's cheap, but it's not cheap enough that getting banh mi chay three or four times a week after most of our kitchen tools were on their way to Alaska was a prudent financial move. But it was a very delicious move.

Toasted coriander seed, cloves, and star anise.

And now, my kitchen is full of wonderful Vietnamese restaurant smells as my stock for this month's challenge pho simmers gently on the stove. Shrimp, toasted spices, charred onion and ginger, dried shitakes and fresh cilantro stems are playing nicely with the sugar and fish sauce in the water. Or, at least they smell like they're playing nicely with each other.

The October 2009 Daring Cooks’ challenge was brought to us by Jaden of the blog Steamy Kitchen. The recipes are from her new cookbook, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook.

We had a choice of a quick or long version and I went for the long, substituting shrimp and dried shitake mushrooms for the whole chicken required for the long version of pho ga.

Charred onion and ginger. The ginger required more time under the broiler.

Before I go any further, it's confession time. While I have my small addiction to Vietnamese food, I've never actually eaten any version of pho. Why, you ask? Well, I've been either a vegetarian or an infrequent fish eater for almost 25 years. And 25 years ago, Vietnamese restaurants were not exactly a dime a dozen in my neck of the (fairly rural) woods. So by the time I was properly introduced to this lovely cuisine, pho was not on my personal menu. I've only seen a vegetarian or seafood pho once, at a wonderful vegan Vietnamese restaurant near LA. I can't remember what I ordered that time, but it wasn't soup. So I'm anxiously awaiting my first bowl later today when everything's ready to eat.

Prepped ingredients for the broth.

Evening, October 7th

Ah, the flavors! The flavors! I am full of pho.

Unfortunately, as I almost always do, I just could not get my noodles cooked all the way through. I don't entirely understand it, but I follow the directions and they're always just a little bit harder than I'd like them, even with extra soaking time.

But never mind that, the soup was quite delicious. Hard to eat, but delicious. We slurped, we sipped, we added herbs. We both added a little too much sriracha, but again, never mind that -- the soup was delicious.

Mint, cilantro, onion, and lime for the soup, and a little sliced cucumber for eating.

The test of a recipe, of course, is, "Would I make it again?" And the answer for me is, probably not. The soup was delicious, but all I could think about while I was eating it, while the cilantro and mint and fish sauce and sweetness and spice were dancing in my mouth, what I was thinking was, "Hey, this is really similar to the broth in three-and-a-half-dollar-dinner!!! I could recreate the three-and-a-half-dollar-dinner!"

The finished pho broth with shrimp, herbs, and red onion.

I've already raved about one Vietnamese restaurant in St. Louis, but let me talk about another one that I could walk to from my house. I tried to look it up, but maybe it's gone out of business. Too bad, because it was delicious! Three-and-a-half-dollar-dinner consisted of vermicelli-type noodles, lots of fresh herbs (mint, cilantro, and basil at the very least), a few different kinds of leafy green or thinly sliced green veggies, and tofu, all in a small amount of very light broth. We first started ordering it because it was one of the only vegetarian choices, but after trying a few other things, we ordered only three-and-a-half-dollar-dinner because it was so dang good. I'm guessing you know how much it cost.

The flavors in tonight's pho reminded me so much of that delicious meal and I am going to be on a quest until I manage to recreate it perfectly. When I do, you can be sure that I will share it with you.

Now, Husband and I have a small fiction that the reason it took so long for us to become a couple instead of virtually inseparable friends is that I played hard to get. The truth might be a little different. But there came a time, about a year and a half after we first met, that Husband asked me on an official date. Two weeks in advance. Yes, sweet Husband asked me if, when the semester was completely over (we met in grad school), I would go on a date with him to try a Mexican restaurant that had been getting great reviews. I said yes, assuming that this meant I wouldn't see much of him outside of school until then because he'd be crazy with work.

But the very next night, he called to ask if I wanted to go out for three-and-a-half-dollar-dinner. I said that I didn't have any cash (which was true and the restaurant didn't take anything else). He said that he could pay for my dinner. I said, "Ok, I'll meet you there in ten minutes." He said, "No, I'll pick you up." He lived north of restaurant, I lived south. So. He picked me up at my house, paid for dinner, drove me home.

But it wasn't a date.

Blog Changes

2009-10-06T20:31:00.001-07:00

I've made a big change with my blog: I've separated it completely from my other, less anonymous blog so that I can do more things with both of them without worrying about losing my (moderate) anonymity on this one. So my profile and such are works in progress while I establish this new Blogger account/identity for Isolated Foodie to live on.

Gourmet Says Good-Bye

2009-10-05T09:06:00.004-07:00

I haven't been very blog-y recently. Getting ready for a move will do that to me. But I just saw this news in the NYTimes and thought I'd give a quick comment.

Gourmet is closing up shop as a cost-cutting measure for Conde Nast. A lot of the comments are from people who are shocked and sad that such a long-standing magazine is getting the ax. I am a little surprised, but I'm glad it will be Gourmet and not Bon Appetit. Several years ago, a friend gave me subscriptions to both, so I was able to compare them side by side every month and Gourmet had an astonishing amount of filler (or what felt like filler to me). I do like a little content about food travel and restaurants, but I don't want it to dominate in a food magazine and that's what I saw in Gourmet. Still, I'll miss browsing through it at libraries and seeing the drool-inducing covers at the check out counter.

Strip Mall Thai Excellence!

2009-09-23T11:19:00.003-07:00

Several months ago, friends were in Las Vegas for a conference and being that LV is a lot closer to Desertville than Indiana is, we drove in to see them. We had some good dim sum, a nice visit, and got a recommendation from them for somewhere to eat. The night before, they had gone with a local colleague to a Thai restaurant that was delicious, most of all, but also had walls plastered with accolades from every possible source.

We tried going there a couple months ago, but we couldn't get through on the phone to make a reservation and when we got there without one, it was a 45 minute wait and Little Girl wasn't going to last that long. From that experience, however, we learned that the restaurant, Lotus of Siam, is in that strangest strip mall ever, along with a pool hall, a Korean church, several other restaurants, a few Asian groceries, and LV's LGBT center. Trust me on this one -- this is a weird, weird place.

Yesterday, we had to go to LV for some business-y sort of stuff. It's always a big deal to go because we get groceries, try to get some playground time for Little Girl, run errands, etc. One thing about living in the middle of nowhere is that every time you get somewhere, you have to take advantage of it. Because we're about to leave this part of the world, we decided to take advantage of being in LV and try Lotus of Siam. We made reservations the day before, so we were good.

The restaurant is nothing fancy. The decor could use some updating, the ceiling tiles are disgustingly dirty in many places, and there's a big, banged-up buffet station right in the middle of the whole thing (for lunch buffets during the week). But how could several years of Gourmet magazine, Zagat's, LA Times food section, the Rosengarten Report and everyone else who raves about this place be wrong? Lotus of Siam has been called the best Thai restaurant in the United States, it's made lists of the top fifty restaurants in the country -- this is big praise!

And all deserved. We had some some quibbles over service (no drink refills were ever offered for example), but the food was fantastic. We ordered pad Thai for Little Girl (and for ourselves as a standard test case). It was very good, although I like different noodles than they used. I know that this is an incredibly picky detail, but I just loved the way they cut their green onions, and the fact that they used small ones so the bites of green onion weren't bites of green onion.

I had a coconut milk based red curry with tofu. I meant to order the sticky rice (which costs $2 extra than the steamed rice it came with), but forgot. I love sticky rice. The curry had loads of fresh Thai basil and bamboo shoots and the fragrance was amazing. The flavor was excellent, too, and it was all gone before we left.

Husband, I think, ordered the winning dish last night -- thank goodness we had agreed to exchange part of our dishes before they actually came to the table. He ordered the pad sw-ew (how it appeared on the menu; I've usually seen it pad see ew) and it was to die for. Perfectly cooked Chinese broccoli and tofu squares among big broad noodles sauced to perfection. If we hadn't already been eating Little Girl's pad Thai, I'd would have seriously considered getting a second order of these noodles. They were just so good.

Unfortunately, their northern menu, which they are especially famous for, was pretty meat heavy. We considered ordering the spicy mushroom dip, but held off in part because Little Girl loves mushrooms and might not be thrilled about a mushroom dish that was too spicy for her to eat. We might try to get back there again before the move, but I don't think I'll hold my breath. We've already got a dinner date in LV coming up (and it includes a baby sitter!), and I can't imagine we're going to get there many more times before we leave.

Watch this space, though, for the next restaurant review, because Friday night, we're eating tapas!

The Daring Cooks Go To India (And Become Vegan!)

2009-09-13T19:10:00.008-07:00

And here it is ... the vegan, Indian food. Wait. No. Not vegan. Not Indian. Not made by me. That's the pizza back-up meal for Small Girl and Husband, who has been making faces all month every time I mention that the Daring Cooks challenge for September was an Indian recipe. Husband is not fond of Indian food. One big reason is the texture; he has a strong dislike for anything mushy. He also doesn't like cumin which can play a big role in the spice mixtures of some Indian dishes. So all the lovely Indian vegetarian things that I love (mattar paneer, saag paneer, aloo gobi, etc.) are just not Husband's cup of tea. So I bought a take-and-bake pizza for him. Small Girl was a mystery to me in terms of liking the dosa and as it happens, she ate as much dosa pancake and tofu as she did pizza. We'll get to Husband's reaction later.

But first: Thanks go to Debyi from The Healthy Vegan Kitchen for choosing the dosa recipe for this month's challenge. She challenged us all to make Indian Dosas from the refresh cookbook by Ruth Tal. Part of the challenge was to make all three elements of the dish (pancakes, sauce, filling) vegan. Here's what it really looks like (not pizza):

And here's how I got to that plated product: As mentioned above, there are three elements to the dish. We had some leeway on the filling and I knew that Husband was not even going to try a mashed chickpea filling, so I changed that. The first element is a coconut curry sauce and I also changed that a bit, hoping that a very mild sauce might be approved by Small Girl. It was an experimental sort of sauce and it taught me a few things.

This is what I learned: If you're using powdered coconut milk, you should probably NOT reconstitute it in a blender to make sure there are no lumps. No. You should probably stir it into warm water on the stove -- as the pictograph instructions on the otherwise-all-in-Thai packaging shows -- or you will end up with froth. Froth that after simmering for an hour with onion, garlic, and ginger is still froth. I also learned that no matter how many times I tasted the sauce, if you don't add Thai red chile paste to it (because you're not cooking Thai food), it will never taste like a Thai red curry sauce. Sigh. In the end, the sauce just didn't do it for me on its own. It did add something nice to the finished dish, though, so all my stirring and adding of this and that and the other did pay off in the end.

I agonized over my filling for pretty much the whole month (did I already mention that I'm writing this an hour after eating it and this post has to be revealed first thing tomorrow morning?). I knew it couldn't be mushy. I wanted it to be flavorful without needing a lot of spice-as-in-heat (or curry) so that the other members of my family might eat it. I finally decided on a potato and tofu filling very reminiscent of the potato-based filling often found in samosas. Lots of onion and garlic and a great big handful of cilantro added at the end made for a very tasty filling.

Next up, the dosa themselves. Dosa are pancakes made with a wide variety of different flours or mashed lentils. I used half wheat flour and half chickpea flour. The batter came together very, very easily. The cooking was not quite as struggle-free. You know how the first crepe is for the chef? Or the dog, depending on whether you have a dog and how bad your day is going? Well, the first dosa came out quite well. The next three were for someone or something other than tonight's diners. Just a mess, mess, mess! I finally added some extra water and got into the groove of things.

My sauce just was not pretty, so I decided to plate that on the bottom instead of the top and started rolling dosas around the filling as they came out of the pan. Between the three burners I had going and the oven blasting to cook the pizza, the stove top was plenty hot to keep everything warm as I worked.

When I had four rolled (it seemed like plenty, given that I was the only guaranteed consumer), I topped them off with some of the extra filling and some cilantro. After they posed for their pictures, it was time to eat! I loved them. The pancakes were tasty thanks to the curry powder and chickpea flour. The filling was delicious, because how could it not be with all that cilantro?? And the sauce ended up providing just the right amount of extra moisture, salt, and fat needed to make the completed dish a success. I never get to go to Indian restaurants, so it was a real treat to have an Indian meal -- thanks, Debyi!

And Husband? He took half a filled dosa. To try. And then ate the other half. And then asked if he could take the uneaten one to work for lunch tomorrow with some of the extra filling. Apparently, his new take on Indian food is that IF I make it AND he knows what's in it AND it's not mushy AND he knows how it was made? He just might like it.

I'd Lichen To Say Thank You! (Feel Free To Groan)

2009-09-01T11:21:00.010-07:00

It might not be the traditional thank-you image, but I was looking through my collection for a good wildflower photo and this caught my eye. Lichen! I have a small fascination with it and I think it's gorgeous, even in understated greys. The range of colors on the rocks around Desolationville and Desertville is stunning.

Without further commentary on the algae/fungus symbiotic beauty, I am sending a big THANK YOU to Kris from Bake in Paris and the She-Who-Chooses-Not-To-Be-Named at Kitchenlander for presenting me with two blogging awards! Kris added Isolated Foodie to his list of Lovely Blogs and Kitchenlander picked Isolated Foodie as a Kreativ Blogger. Thank you both again!

Both awards come with a task. I now have to list 13 blogs that I think are One Lovely Blog and seven Kreativ Bloggers. No small task, when there are so many of both! But I think I am up to it.

The Kreativ Blogger Award comes with a second task: I have to list seven interesting things about me (difficult because how do I know what you would find interesting?). I'm going to get that one out of the way, because I have some serious thinking to do for the lists.

1. I have lived in or traveled to five of the seven continents.
2. I lived on a kibbutz for about eight months (and loved it!).
3. My daughter is named for a character in one of my most-favorite books, Pride and Prejudice.
4. My feet like to be bare (Kitchenlander, you're not alone in your shoe non-fetish).
5. I haven't eaten red meat or poultry since 1985 and avoided fish for many years as well.
6. Addiction would be a good way to describe my relationship with chocolate, but I managed to give it up for Lent this year despite having no Catholic connections.
7. I love the gathering part of "hunting and gathering". I am a proud forager of wild foods.

Now, for the lists. My list of Kreativ Bloggers is a little easier than the Lovely Blogs, in part because I only have to list seven, but mostly because I have a theme. In my three or four months as a Daring Baker, I have been very impressed with the creativity of the vegan and gluten-free bakers in the group. I've done quite a few vegan-conversions for desserts (many years ago), but they were much simpler recipes most of the time. Making something that is packed full of wheat, butter, and eggs into a gluten or egg and dairy free treat is one thing; making it into something beautiful and incredibly delicious is quite another, and the bloggers behind the following blogs do it month after month in the Daring Bakery.

1. Celiac Teen
2. Hey, That Tastes Good!
3. Gluten Free Goodness
4. Dog Hill Kitchen
5. Vegan Food And Fitness
6. The Peaceable Kingdom
7. Gluten Free Sox Fan (this one is for Husband, the Sox fan, and for a great blog)

It turns out that even with a theme, it's hard to pick and choose and decide. I'm saving the next list for tomorrow so I can ponder this overnight. In the meantime, I highly recommend checking out these blogs. They are well-worth reading even if you are a devoted carnivore-and-wheat-bread kind of person.

(Ooops! I almost forgot that I need to post rules for the Kreativ Blogger awards, so I'm editing to say: These are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.
2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.
4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.
5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers.
6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.
7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.)

Daring Bakers: Dobos Torte Or, Why Toddlers Should Nap

2009-08-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

My feet hurt.

This was the wrong day for my Small Girl to decide she didn't need a nap. I had a lot to do. Pizza to make (using a new baking technique that finally gave me the crust I long for). A big fat torte to finish. A (soon-to-be) new house to ponder. Six weeks of pre-move activities to plan. It's been a rough week and today kicked me to the curb and back.

But it's over and despite everything, I managed to make the deadline for this month's Daring Bakers challenge.

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

I had good intentions this month. I was mentally prepared to make this lovely layered cake days and days ago, but I forgot my shopping list when we went to town last week and, in trying to recreate it, managed to forget all the things I needed for this month's challenge. I had less than half a cup of sugar in the house. Less than a cup of flour. It was pitiful that I didn't recognize that there were no back-up bags of either one. So the torte had to wait.

Using a template for cutting the layers.

Yesterday, I noticed that there were only two days left until the Daring Bakers reveal. That's some serious motivation. I had all (well, the store I shopped at on Monday didn't have hazelnuts, so technically, I didn't really have all the ingredients) the ingredients. I had a little bit of time. I had a relatively cool day. So I made the chocolate buttercream frosting. There are only three of us eating, so a half recipe seemed like plenty and that's what I did. The recipe yielded up a gorgeously light, smooth frosting and I checked that off the mental list.

This morning, I weighed out all the dry ingredients for the sponge cake layers and took out three eggs to come up to room temperature. I read through the instructions again. I prepared for battle. It was fine. Small Girl was fascinated by the changes the egg whites went through on their way to shiny, stiff peaks. Everything came together well. I had decided on a rectangular cake, so I was making two sheet pans of cake to cut into the layers.

The first sheet pan came out of the oven after it's allotted five minutes. It looked good. I inverted it, as directed, and then tried the next step: Sliding it back onto the parchment paper. It wasn't sliding. It wasn't moving. It was well and truly stuck and nothing was going to get it to budge. After three minutes of trying to gently scrape it, I realized that it was more important to make sure this didn't happen to the second -- and last -- cake, which would be emerging from the oven in two minutes. Scrape like mad. Wash. Pull another parchment sheet and dust it liberally with cocoa. Just in time! I inverted the second -- now only -- cake onto the prepared parchment and, with a little work, was able to slide it around. Whew!

The four-layer cake with it's crumb coat of frosting.

I wanted to get as many layers as I could without making a silly-looking cake in terms of proportions, so I measured, made a template, and cut four long rectangles. When they were completely cool, I brought out the buttercream and frosted. I've never owned an off-set spatula before. Don't know why, but I didn't. I bought one for this challenge because it was needed for smoothing the cake batter. But let me tell you how much easier it is to frost a cake with an off-set than a knife, my normal tool. I'm still not a great cake-decorator, but it's a big step up.

The Dobos torte traditionally has a toffee-coated cake layer arranged decoratively on top of the cake. It does look beautiful when done correctly, but the concept of a soft sponge layer coated with toffee leaves me a bit cold, so I thought I'd take the spirit of that element and do something I know and like: brittle. I made a big pan of toasted almond brittle and broke it up into small pieces for the top and sides of the cake. I had hoped to make the brittle early enough that I could crush some and put a layer inside the cake, too, but given Small Girl's anti-nap stance, it wasn't to be.

The joy of this torte is supposed to be the multiple, alternating layers of cake and frosting. Other Daring Bakers have been achieving heights of twelve layers! I have four. Four nicely-flavored layers, to be sure, but it's not quite the slice of sedimentary history that it's supposed to be. If I had a sleeping toddler, I probably would have made another half-batch of cake and gone to greater heights. But I didn't, so I couldn't, and it's all good.

Isolation, Watered Down

2009-08-22T15:40:00.003-07:00

Well, it's happened again. The very talented Husband has accepted a new and improved job many hundreds of miles north of here. Not quite Alaska (the home of Isolationville, for those keeping track), but on the coast with cool temperatures and trees and ... neighbors.

Yes, the Isolated Foodie will be not quite so isolated after we move in about two months. The town we'll be living in has a few thousand people, a couple grocery stores ( ! ), and even a small Asian market ( !! ). Hard to believe we'll have all the comforts of (semi-) urban living after the past four years of serious isolation. It will be a good thing, mostly, and the town is an active fishing port, so we will have access to great seafood again. Husband's boss told me last night that during crab season (Dungeness), he has people flag him down on his bicycle ride home to give him free crabs.

Now, picturing someone trying to hold on to a Dungeness crab (or two) while riding a bike is hilarious, but the concept of free crabs? Husband is moving to his version of heaven.

I plan to do the upcoming Daring Bakers and Daring Cooks challenges, but otherwise, I might be pretty absent as I try to purge some of the random stuff we have accumulated in the past two years. Even though Husband's employer will pay for the move, a move is good incentive to take stock of what is really needed.

So, enjoy the end of summer. Eat good tomatoes and corn and basil. In the meantime, I'll be sorting and packing and trying to decide on the next incognito place name.

Pesto!

2009-08-09T18:43:00.002-07:00

I went to a great farmers' market on Thursday and scored gorgeous basil, so I made some pesto. Here it is, all oil-slicked in an attempt to keep the green bright and fresh. Delicious.

Cookies: I Really Did Make Them

2009-08-04T07:43:00.002-07:00

Our camera turned up in my in-laws garage. It's a good thing. Here's a belated photo of my only-partially-successful Milanos.

Post Number One Hundred

2009-07-31T13:22:00.006-07:00

And here I am, one hundred posts later, still cooking away and writing about it occasionally. I thought a lot about what to write for this one-hundredth post. Originally, I had hoped it would be a Daring Kitchen post, but my cookies came out terribly and I'm having to sit out the current Daring Cooks contest, so that was out. Then I thought I'd make it short and sweet and just introduce y'all to Husband's and Little Girl's images. They are, after all, the main audience for my food itself. The rest of you just get pictures and descriptions. One of my current favorites of the two of them near Desertville therefore graces this post.

That's how I was leaning two days ago, but I didn't have time to post. This morning, I read Michael Pollan's latest article in the NYTimes, scheduled to appear in Sunday's Magazine. The article is about the phenomenon that is food television, perhaps particularly competitive food television like Iron Chef and Top Chef. (He neglects to mention the current Top Chef Masters, which I am loving this summer.) Pollan points out that Americans are cooking less, but watching other people cook more. His usual excellent arguments about how these habits affect both our own diets and our food system are present and insightful as always.

But as I was reading it, I had some misgivings. Like virtually all food-related things these days (apparently, anyway), one of Pollan's jumping-off points is the soon-to-be-released Julie and Julia. Pollan's mother was inspired by Julia Child to infuse experimentation and excitement into their weekly meals and he remembers it fondly. His argument is that most of the competitive food shows are more about "don't try this at home" than "hey, you can do this, too!", which was Julia's message. And maybe some of them are. Bravo's website does publish Top Chef recipes (and even published a book about them). One of those recipes, for pureed cauliflower and potatoes, has become part of my regular menu with a few changes because I'm not willing to cook the veggies in straight heavy cream. My point is that not all the food challenge shows ignore the cooking and recipes.

And, of course, Julie Powell was so inspired by Julia Child that she cooked every recipe over the course of a year. Pollan may consider her to be the exception that proves the rule, but I think he's ignoring, well, us. The food bloggers.

While the Daring Kitchen has been my most-recent love among food blog events, it is not lonely! Many weekly, monthly, and one-off food blogging events can be found listed on websites such as Is My Blog Burning? and others. I've participated in several others in the previous 99 posts. And if I wanted to and had the time, I could cook for a blogging event or challenge every day and probably not run out of choices.

Food blogs have created an entirely new way for cooks to swap recipes, share cooking experiences, make friends, show off their skills, and learn new things. While food bloggers may be a very small percentage of the American population, I like to think that we are not just crazy cooks on the fringe, but the leading edge of a new revolution in cooking. One of the people interviewed for the article asks who will teach the next generations how to cook. And I say, we will! With our hands and hearts in person, through our informative blogs, in cooking demonstrations on the web for everything from cutting an onion to flipping an omelette to making Chinese dumpling ... food bloggers are people who care about cooking. And we'll be around for a while to teach others to care, too.

There. Now I've thought deep thoughts for post number one hundred. I'll be ... hmmm ... I was about to say that I'll be out of town for the next couple weeks, but there's no town for me to be out of. So, more accurately, I'll be in town for the next two weeks. I hope to share photos of farmers markets and meals, but I probably won't be cooking much.

Enjoy the first half of August!

A Garden Update

2009-07-29T15:24:00.003-07:00

Don't you love walking into a mid-summer garden? Tall plants cascade into the walkways. You have to beat back vines, avoid tripping on baseball-sized zucchini, and generally wade through greenery and abundance. You get whiffs of basil and tomatoes and dill just by brushing up against a few leaves. It's great.

It's also not my garden. My garden, mentioned previously, is not exactly a riot of plant life. I suppose I should have expected that, being in the middle of a desert and all. But I had much higher hopes both for my own gardening motivation and skills, and for the ability of my coffee grounds and manure enhanced soil. Alas, various trips and the lack of neighbors who could babysit newly transplanted seedlings meant that I kept postponing lots of things. Like lettuce. Which I still hope to do for the fall. And when I did get tomato and cucumber plants in the ground, three of them got hit hard by some disease (all tomatoes), one of them got hit lightly by the disease and had half its leaves eaten by a still-unidentified beastie (but I'm thinking non-insect), and yet another just didn't thrive. For no particular reason that I can tell.

So I've been limping along with the remainders, trying to keep them alive. The harvest so far? Three cherry tomatoes, two of which are gracing this post.

I had a cucumber. Someone warned me, after I'd planted them, that I really should have sought out Persian cucumbers because they handle the heat well. I figured that having bought my plants in Las Vegas and them being labeled heat-tolerant and all, I'd be ok. And then I kept getting flower after flower after flower, with no fruit forming. And then I had one! I had a very, very small cucumber with its flower still attached. I showed Little Girl. I tried to show Husband, but he was weary of admiring the garden, having admired the almost-ripe cherry tomatoes the day before. I was very pleased.

And then down came the rains. Massive, flash-flood-producing rains came two days in a row. I wanted the rain, don't get me wrong, but my cucumber plants most clearly did not. And now, I have no cucumber.

Always optimistic, I hope for another one. I have more flowers. They're bright and sunny and cheerful. They seem optimistic. Why shouldn't I?

Daring Bakers: Orange Milano Cookies

2009-07-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

July 12th

10:21 am: Looking ahead to the rest of the month, I realized this morning that I have very little time to make this month's Daring Bakers challenge.

The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

Nicole very kindly allowed us to make either both types of cookies or just one. I'm not a big marshmallow cookie fan and in July, the idea of having to properly coat something in melted chocolate is just insane here; I'm sticking with just the Milan Cookies. So I am taking the plunge and my butter is in a bowl softening so that it will be ready when Little Girl starts her nap.

2:27 pm: I'm about to start separating eggs, a task I don't really love, but at least I'm not trying to whip the egg whites to some meringue-type stiffness, so if I break a yolk in the process, I won't ruin anything. I'm also realizing that I must be certifiably insane to be doing this today. It's definitely the hottest day we've had so far this summer. Even with the swamp cooler on high, I can't get the house below 82F. But hey! My butter was very well softened -- that's the upside!

Why am I doing this again?

3:09 pm: Oh. My. I thought I had such a nice plan to make a few round cookies from this, but my plan has gone a little awry. I just turned my sheet pans and I'm not sure this is what the cookies should look like. We'll see after another five minutes, but in the meantime, the rest of the batter/dough is in the fridge to make it firm up a little.

3:30pm: Right. I am now ready to accept that these cookies will not be going in my raging success category of new recipes. They had better taste delicious because, so far, at least, they are not very attractive. I've just popped the next batch in the oven and I'm mixing some cinnamon and cayenne into the remaining batter/dough to make a slightly more "grown-up" version.

4:33 pm: I just realized that I'm an idiot. It never feels good to come to that conclusion, but there's really no escaping it. The filling for these cookies has three ingredients: chocolate, cream, and orange zest. Really, how hard is it to get three ingredients into a bowl? Apparently, too hard for me. Because as I was spreading the chocolate onto my next-to-last cookie, I suddenly realized that I hadn't put in the orange zest. I hadn't zested the orange. I hadn't even taken the organic orange I bought especially for this challenge out of the refrigerator.

Well. Ain't that a kick in the teeth? To add insult to injury, as I was having this revelation, I stopped paying attention to what I was doing and put the topper cookie on backwards, so now I have a half-inside-out cookie.

Sigh.

July 27th

Apparently, I was so disappointed with my outcome in this challenge, that I didn't even properly finish the post before realizing this morning that it's time to post it. My culinary pride already has several cuts in it, but just to make this challenge more of a big fail, the camera I used to take pictures of the cookies (some of which, both cookies and pictures, were quite pretty in the end) has gone walkabout. So a poor showing on the challenge and the post itself. A photo-less Daring Bakers post ... grumble, grumble ... be sure to check out some other Daring Bakers so you can see how beautiful the cookies can be.

Wandering In Search Of Food, Part 2

2009-07-24T20:58:00.004-07:00

The outdoor patio at Root 246.

I woke up the day after my birthday with a small plan. It involved spending the day mostly away from the coast and eating at a restaurant I'd seen an ad for in a local magazine. Root 246 sounded lovely from what I'd read and I really wanted one sort-of-fancy meal. So in a round-about way, I headed out of Santa Maria to Solvang. Along the way I saw a lot of vineyards and mountainsides of grape vines. Very beautiful country.

I miraculously found street parking with a bit of shade in Solvang, just off the street the restaurant is on. I forgot to look at the street address before I got out of the car, but I didn't have to wander too far before I found it. As I walked up the stairs past the patio seating, I knew that if I looked at the menu and decided to eat at Root 246, I'd be eating outside. I looked, I saw they had perfectly fine veggie options (but not many -- be warned), the prices were within my mental budget, and I stayed.

I did love the sound of any of the vegetarian main courses, so I decided to have a cheese plate and a salad. They brought a separate cheese menu along with their lunch and wine menus, so they seemed fairly serious about their cheeses. All the cheeses sounded good to me; I had a lot of trouble choosing three. In the end, I asked my waiter (very friendly, not hovering, but always there if I needed something) for help. I wanted to try the St. Pat, a raw cow's milk cheese cured in stinging nettles. It was described as having a smoky artichoke flavor. I asked for someone else to choose two cheeses that would complement the St Pat and so ended up with a cow's milk tasting. The two other cheeses were Red Hawk, which was by far my favorite, and Beecher's Flagship, a one-year aged cheese.

The cheese plate, as you can see, was lovely. Nice portions of the three cheeses, with a little dish of local honeycomb, a fresh fig, champagne grapes, and almonds. It came with toasts of a raisin bread, which didn't do anything for me. I hate raisins, but I gave it a try and it just didn't work. I ate most of the cheese by itself or on the crusty bread that was on my bread plate. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely, bought a round of the Red Hawk at a store in Santa Ynez to take home, and served it with honey because the combination is so perfect.

I have a complaint about their cheese menu before I move on to my salad. When a restaurant goes to the trouble of having a separate cheese menu, with a short paragraph describing each cheese, and giving the cheese's origin, it should mention the cheese maker. When I found the Red Hawk in the store, I was very surprised to see that it was a Cowgirl Creamery cheese. It's such a well-known cheese maker and it is not in San Francisco, as stated on the menu, but in Point Reyes, one of my dream vacation spots. I would not have picked the Red Hawk from the description, but I would have picked it first if the menu had stated that it was from Cowgirl Creamery because I've wanted to taste more of their cheeses. (As it happens, I tasted two of their cheeses in this meal because the St. Pat is also one of theirs.)

But anyway, on to the salad.

My salad's name (nickname, really, because there was more to it) is Babe Farms Garden Party. And it was a party on the plate. So many different veggies! Roasted red and golden beets, carrot, summer squash, a radishes, broccoli rabe, and a variety of different greens. I ordered it in part because I loved the sound of the goat cheese croquets, but they were very dry and a little chewy and my least favorite part of the salad. My first bites lacked a little something and I almost considered requesting a salt shaker, but then I discovered two small puddles of creme fraiche hiding under the greens and tossing the salad with that solved my flavor problems. I loved this salad.

Overall, I loved this restaurant. It was a beautiful place to sit and eat. The food was interesting and beautifully presented. I'd love to go back with Husband and Little Girl. When I said that to my waiter, in response to his "I hope we'll see you again sometime", we ended up having a short conversation about child-friendly food. I said that I wasn't sure there was a Little Girl-friendly dish on the menu and he said that the kitchen is always happy to accomodate a child's taste, with a pasta or a sandwich or whatever it takes. That alone makes me hope that we can visit there sometime in the future.

My trip continued after lunch and I wound my way through more winding roads to Ojai. Ojai has a lot of artists and craftspeople and therefore, a lot of interesting stores. I had hoped to find a gift for Little Girl there and found a store with a t-shirt I wanted to buy her, but the sign said, "Closed for Grandpa duty". Can't argue with that.

I think there was an iced coffee somewhere in that day that I missed, but I did actually skip breakfast when I got to Los Olivos and found no little cafe hiding among the 17 (give or take) wine tasting rooms. I had hoped for something there. I made it back to my girl and Husband in time to have some good pizza with them and my in-laws, and then polished off my very last piece of birthday cake.

It was a good birthday.

Two Days Of Food Wanderings Or, My Husband Is Awesome, Part 1

2009-07-22T15:22:00.006-07:00

So I turned forty last week. To me, it marks another good year of life; I'm not worried about the whole 4-0 business. Husband felt somewhat differently. He started asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday months ago. And I wasn't sure and I wasn't sure and then I had a thought. I haven't spent a night away from Little Girl since she was born. I love her to pieces, but a little time away seemed like a good thing, so I asked for two days all to myself. And Husband agreed. He's a good husband.

The remants of my lovely birthday cake.

The evening before my birthday, I shared a truly delicious cake (and my favorite champagne!) with my extended in-law family. Husband did good procuring the cake: almond cake layers with a chocolate mousse filling and a praline layer for some crunch, topped quite dramatically with white and milk chocolate curls. People moaned as they ate it.

I woke up on the great day itself, opened a few presents with Little Girl's help, ate breakfast (leftover birthday cake, of course!), kissed Little Girl and Husband good-bye, and hopped in the car that Husband had gotten scrubbed inside and out the day before. Again -- I've got the best husband in the world. Y'all can just be jealous.

I had almost no plans except that I wanted to eat some great food and do whatever else seemed good at the time. The exceptions to the "no plans" were that I wanted to have lunch at a great sushi place we've been to a few times in Santa Barbara (my in-laws live outside of Los Angeles, so that was my starting point) and I wanted to hit the evening farmers' market in San Luis Obispo. One out of two is what I got. "Our" sushi place doesn't exist any more and I settled for a good-but-not-great Vietnamese lunch a couple blocks away. I had some very nice shrimp spring rolls, but an oily and not especially flavorful crispy tofu with lemongrass for my main. It was a wash.

After that, I drove up the coast to Pismo Beach where I tried to get a picture of the display case full of chocolate-covered grasshoppers, bacon-and-cheddar grasshoppers, white-chocolate-covered grasshoppers, etc., but there were inconsiderate crowds in the way of my photo.

Some of the gorgeous produce at the market.

I arrived in San Luis Obispo (SLO) a couple hours before the farmers' market started. I needed some extra change for my parking meter and came across Cowboy Cookies within a block of where I parked. What's a girl to do? I had a chocolate-chip/walnut cookie that was delicious, with almost enough walnuts to satisfy my walnut-tooth. Don't laugh. I have one. I wandered the main shopping district for a while, drank an iced coffee while I watched some of the vendors set up, and then was ready for the farmers' market to start!

Fire! Meat! Artichokes!

It was some market. It covers six or seven blocks of the main commercial street in SLO, with live music at every intersection, bicycle valet parking, and thousands of people. I couldn't, of course, buy anything really because I was staying in a hotel. I was hoping to see bread and cheese and fruit for a picnic or breakfast, but bread and cheese were largely absent from this market. BBQ, on the other hand, dominated the two ends of the market that showcased ready-to-eat food. Not being a meat-eater, this didn't interest me except in the sense that seeing a few hundred people in line to buy BBQ is a fascinating thing. Oh, and I like fire. A lot.

For dinner, my interest was caught by a booth at the market that served only to lead people half a block away to Bel Frites, a small storefront cafe that serves Belgian fries and Belgian beer. And that's all. They offer traditional plain fries and a variety of seasoned fries, and a selection of dipping sauces. I chose plain fries with a chipotle aioli and was not disappointed one bit until my fries ran out and there were no more. Then I was disappointed. Honestly, I would go back to SLO just so I could take Husband to eat these fries. I might owe him that much after this trip.

I wandered the market for a while after my fries were gone, drove out to the coast to see the fog roll in instead of a sunset, and then headed back inland to my hotel for the night. I might have had a few small pieces of chocolate before bed. One should always eat healthy, balanced meals on one's birthday, after all.

Stay tuned for Day 2, which featured a lovely lunch in Solvang, the Danish capital of California.

Daring Cooks Play With Powders

2009-07-14T06:06:00.000-07:00

I know that most mothers tell their children not to play with their food. Lucky for me, my mother wasn't much for the traditional childhood prohibitions, so I feel completely free to play with my food and talk to strangers. Good thing, too, because today's meal requires a well-developed sense of play. Without an appreciation for a little wackiness, the challenge could easily turn into many hours of tedious preparation.

What kind of meal inspires thoughts like that? A Daring Cooks challenge that skirts the non-chemical side of molecular gastronomy, that's what! Sketchy (from Sketchy's Kitchen) has a small obsession with the scientific side of cooking and dared the rest of us to enter that world. If you're unsure about just what molecular gastronomy is, think foams, gels, and caviar from foods not usually associated with such forms. It is play with food at an intricate level. If that doesn't help (which it probably doesn't), a browse through Sketchy's MG-related posts will show you what our host has been playing at. Wikipedia has a pretty nice discussion of molecular gastronomy, too. If you follow links to some of the chefs mentioned, the Great Wiki will give you even more information.

The challenge recipe comes from Grant Achatz's cookbook, Alinea: Skate, traditional flavors powdered. I'm not going to reproduce the entire recipe here, but at its heart, it's skate, poached in a beurre Monte sauce, green beans, bananas (I'm banana-phobic; I can't even discuss it's intended role), and several flavorful ingredients dehydrated and powdered. The potentially-tedious part of the whole thing is dehydrating, crushing, and sieving of multiple foods.

Lemon and lime zest before poaching and dehydrating.

We were given some license to play, so my dish was Pacific cod (more environmentally-friendly than skate) with green beans and powdered mango, cilantro, basil, red onion, lemon and lime zest, and chipotle pepper. The mango and chipotle were already dried. The rest was up to me.

The zest after microwave-dehydration was complete.

My reaction to this challenge was mixed. On one hand, I loved the whole concept of having a luxurious, butter-poached fish (beurre Monte is an emulsion of a tiny bit of water and a whole lot of butter) dipped into the powders. On the other, dehydrating multiple foods without a dehydrator was daunting and the whole thing was way outside my normal comfort zone. So I did my homework. I read through the recipe's directions for microwave-dehydrating. Read some more directions online. And read the whole recipe-experience via Alinea At Home.

And then I got Husband to buy the fish when he went to town, so I had no choice but make it the next day.

I started around nine in the morning, getting my powders in order. The onions seemed like the longest project, so I got them small-chopped (should have minced them properly) and into the microwave at low-medium power (4 out of 10) for ten minutes. Then I stirred them and gave them another ten. It wasn't working very well. Over the next couple hours, in between dehydrating other things, I'd pop the onions back in on very low (2 out of 10) for three minutes at a time. Eventually, they were dry little nuggets and ground up to a very flavorful powder. (Sorry for the blurry photo; things were a little chaotic.)

Onions, finally dry, in the coffee grinder.

Freeze-dried mango, ready to pulverize. Beware! It gums up the works!

Other than the onion, which probably had an extra half-hour in the microwave, the dehydrating went pretty well. The citrus zest required poaching in simple syrup before it was dried. The basil and cilantro, in order to keep their color, got a second-long bath in boiling water, followed by the traditional post-sauna ice-bath. It worked. Both zest and herb retained their color once powdered.

Herbs in their refreshing ice-bath.

So then, the powders were all done. Whew! It was surprisingly early in the day. As in, still before the small one's nap. Instead of saving this for a post-Little-Girl-bedtime-dinner, I decided we'd eat it for lunch during her nap. So I moved on to the later stages of the recipe, which required me to keep kicking Husband off the computer so I could look at just exactly what I was supposed to do next.

Powders, clockwise from far left: lemon/lime zest; mango; cilantro-basil; red onion; chipotle.

First, I cut my green beans into cute teeny rounds. Then, I tackled my last powder. The fish is supposed to have one edge dipped in toasted spray-dried cream powder. Uh-huh. Like I have access to that in Desertville. I don't even have access to cream in Desertville. But the always-clever (and very fast) Daring Cook, Audax, came to the rescue with his idea to use powdered coconut milk for this part. And that, I do have in Desertville. It's an artifact of my life in Isolationville. The concept of paying shipping for cans of coconut milk was too much, so I started to rely on the powder instead. I sifted a packet's worth onto a Silpat and baked it for just over four minutes, until it just started to turn brown. One more step closer.

Time to make the beurre Monte. I was making so little -- just over a quarter of the full recipe -- that my water was evaporating before it could really boil. Slightly problematic, but I worked around it and ended up with a lovely emulsion. A little went into a pot with an equal amount of water for the green beans, and the rest went into a pan, again with an equal amount of water, for the fish.

The cod in barely-simmering beurre Monte sauce.

My cod was thicker than skate would have been. A bit denser, too, from what I remember of the only time I've eaten skate. So I wanted to be sure it got cooked through and the beans didn't get soggy. So once the fish was in the pan, I plated my powders (not entirely successfully, from a purely aesthetic view) and got the beans into their butter.

The plate awaiting the cod.

The beans didn't take long to get to crisp-tender. And luscious. Definitely luscious. I got them on the plate, ready for the fish. My powders were supposed to be a little more dramatic in their presentation, but I don't have a lot of dish-choice and my fish was big for the plate. I thought I had a good compromise, but it was lackluster in the end.

The final product might not have had the presentation wow-factor, but the flavors made up for it. The fish and beans were rich and buttery, while the powders, quite obviously, weren't. But they interacted with each other very nicely, almost like putting a post-cooking rub on the fish. I loved the brightness of the citrus when the bite included a good wallop of the lemon-lime powder. I loved the toasted coconut flavor and wished I had both toasted it a bit longer and used a little more.

For a dinner, it would definitely need something more. Cooked potato slices under the fish, perhaps, or a mash of cauliflower and potato. If it were one course of many -- say appetizer, salad, this, a cheese course, and a dessert, it would stand fine alone.

I don't know that I'll make this particular dish again. It was a lot of work. But I'm already finding other uses for the powders. I added the leftover onion, citrus, and herb powders to my standard flour/nutritional yeast breading for tofu. Tonight, we'll have those fried slices stacked with grilled eggplant, onion, and zucchini, with a tomato sauce and parmesan cheese.

It was a good experience and definitely a challenge, which is what I was looking for when I joined the Daring Cooks! Thanks, Sketchy!

More Gnocchi

2009-07-12T09:44:00.004-07:00

We enjoyed our first meet-and-greets with the ricotta gnocchi from my first Daring Cooks challenge so much that I made them again last night. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the Fresh and Easy ricotta I used last time and although the substitute I found claimed it was also fresh ricotta, it didn't get dry enough after a lot of squeezing and weighted draining. So my gnocchi were very tender. As in, fell apart if I touched them the wrong way. They were tasty because I had strained in some leftover pesto, but the texture was nothing like the clouds I had produced the first two times.

Still, they made for a tasty light supper for a hot night when served with a garlic-laced veggie broth and leftover creamed spinach. I made just fifteen of them because they tried to disintegrate in the water. I have to figure out what to do with the leftovers today. It's just nice to know that some of the Daring Kitchen challenges will become part of our regular meal rotation.

The First Corn

2009-07-05T16:38:00.003-07:00

Our "neighbor" who lives a mere 20 miles away has a wonderful garden. He's lived in the same house for over a decade now, so he's had a chance to build up good organics in the soil and to experiment to find what works and what doesn't. His experience is only partly helpful to me because we're more than 2000 feet higher in elevation than he is, so our temperatures and frosts and such are completely different. However, we do benefit from his generosity. Last week, he sent bags of produce home with Husband. Loads of onions and green beans, smaller quantities of other lovelies, and a big bag of corn, picked that afternoon. You can imagine that my dinner plans suddenly involved corn.

I shucked the husks into my sink while boiling the water.

After a very brief bath in the pot, the corn was ready to eat. Some of the kernels were tiny, but still packed great flavor. Butter, salt, and pepper were all they wore. And because corn was the star and Husband loves fake bacon, we just had simple fake bacon sandwiches with the corn. Summer must really be upon us now.

A Daring Baker Bakes A Bakewell Tart...Well?

2009-06-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

Father's Day In Desertville

8:15 am: And the adventure begins! It's coming close to the end of the month and I haven't yet made this month's Daring Baker Challenge. This challenge comes from Jolly Olde England, with the following secret password:

The June Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart... er... pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800's in England.

The sugared berries

And, so, my kitchen is starting to bubble and whir with activity. A Bakewell Tart (and I'm sticking with that story, no pudding spoons will accompany dessert tonight) is a sweet pastry crust smeared with jam and topped with frangipane, which is somewhere between an almond custard and an almond cake. They are delicious and I've never made one before. This morning's preparations include grinding almonds (check!) and making pan jam sensu Jasmine's creation. The jam is just starting to bubble away now.

Thanks to this challenge and the ongoing, and therefore, top secret Daring Cooks challenge, I found myself justifying the purchase of a kitchen scale. I'm using the very last not-quite-500-grams of my Alaska berries. I've already mourned the last of the blueberries and cranberries, but now the last of my mixed blueberries/cranberries/bear berries are in a pan with 100 grams of sugar on their way to becoming the jam layer. It's more sugar to berries than Jasmine suggests, but bear berries and slightly under-ripe cranberries? Not so sweet.

8:47 am: But wait -- my worst nightmare has come true: I am Out Of Butter. There are two or three tablespoons in the butter dish, but a search of both freezers demonstrates a complete and utter lack of back-up. How did I let this happen?? It puts a serious crimp in making the crust. And the frangipane.

(Now, truthfully, being Out Of Butter is not my worst nightmare. I have a toddler, after all. She is very capable of inspiring much, much worse nightmares. But being Out Of Butter ranks right up there in my culinary nightmare situations. I love butter.)

And so what to do? If I was certain that the gas station carried butter, I'd drive the 16 miles each way to get some, but I'm not. They only carry single-serve milk and we've learned that they don't really stock bread, so staples are not their specialty.

This is where the isolated part of the blog title really comes into play. Bleah.

The cranky crust

2:43 pm: Back on track after a 70 mile round-trip drive to get butter. I justified that sojourn on the basis of needing gas for our car that does not go to town. It relies on a gas can that has been very much empty since before vacation. Husband fears the car won't get him home from work tomorrow if it doesn't get a gas infusion, so the gas was necessary. I thought that the second-closest gas station (where gas is close to a dollar cheaper than at the closest, price-gouging station) would have butter, but it didn't. Luckily, it is located in a "company town" with a very- well-hidden company store that welcomes non-company customers. They had butter.

So now Little Girl is napping, my crust is formed into a disk and resting in the refrigerator, the butter for the frangipane is softening in a mixing bowl, and I am going to have a belated lunch.

The not-so-cranky trimmed and crimped crust

5:21 pm: Once again, my trusty rolling jar was dragged out to do the honors. I think that might have been the ugliest rolled crust I've ever made, but once it was in the pie plate and trimmed, it looked pretty good. I know y'all are getting tired of this, but -- surprise! -- my tart pan is in storage. So the tart's in just a plain, old pie plate.

The deep purple jam layer -- thanks, Alaska!

I spread a goodly quantity of jam without measuring and then topped it up with the frangipane mixture. I set the timer for 25 minutes so I could toss the almond slivers on before it was done, but something made me check it at 20 minutes and it was already a deep brown. I got my slivers on and gave it another five minutes until I thought the center seemed more or less set. It looks good as it cools on the counter and I've got dinner almost made, too!

The finished tart, fresh from the oven

I'm making the tart as a Father's Day treat, so I sure hope the resident father likes it. Husband's a bit unpredictable on sweets, so I've hedged my bets by planning tamales and a black bean salsa/salad for dinner. That is a sure thing. I'm not convinced that the two courses will go together, but we'll live with it. Husband does not do flan (it's another texture thing), so he won't be expecting that particular Mexican classic.

A perfect slice

8:08 pm: A success! The tart was well-received by its intended audience. It sliced beautifully and tasted just as it should: fruity and almond-y and delicious.

My dough was probably a little thinner than it should have been and I had lots of trimmings, so if I hadn't been so ham-fisted with the rolling, it might have been perfect. I would have preferred a thicker jam layer, but when I voiced that thought, Husband was very quick to squash that idea, citing his dislike of "jammy textures". It is a well-established dislike.

So, many thanks to Jasmine and Annemarie for providing the inspiration for a successful Father's Day dessert!

Vegan Sorbet? Ice Cream?

2009-06-16T09:57:00.007-07:00

My BIL and SIL are coming to visit today and they're vegan, so I always try to pull out my vegan skills and brush them off before they arrive. Dinner tonight is going to be various breads and crackers with a big green salad, hummus, and sliced grilled and raw veggies. I forgot to buy tofu, but if they bring some as vaguely requested, we'll have some pan fried tofu (dredged first in a combination of flour and nutritional yeast).

But my big experiment today is the dessert. My SIL, last I knew, was trying to avoid most processed sugars. I like to provide dessert, though, so I started thinking last night about something I could make from ingredients in the house. I settled on a sorbet. Or ice cream. Or sherbert. Something in that family, anyway.

Last night, I combined 6 ounces of slivered raw almonds and a cup or so of water in my blender and let fly. The resulting slurry went in the fridge overnight. This morning, I added a little more water and blended it a little more before passing the slurry through a sieve to make a thick almond milk. Very delicious! I had about a cup and combined that with a pound of frozen berries and cherries with just two tablespoons of sugar.

At that point, I tasted it. A little flat. I added a pinch of salt and a generous sprinkle of coriander, having learned before that coriander goes beautifully with berries. Better, but I probably should have added a squeeze of lemon juice, too.

And now ... it's in the freezer and I'm whisking it every fifteen minutes or so to keep out the big ice crystals. With any luck, it will be just the right thing for after dinner!

It's late. We've eaten all the ice cream and I forgot to take a picture. It was well received by all except LittleGirl, who did not think the bright purple stuff was sufficiently ice cream like. BIL poured maple syrup over his to satisfy his sweet tooth. I had a little on mine to perk up the flavor.

Next time: more almond milk, less fruit.

The Promised Shrimp And Grits Picture

2009-06-15T18:27:00.003-07:00

There's really no message beyond the post title.

A Daring Cook: Potstickers!

2009-06-14T10:06:00.001-07:00

I went to graduate school in St. Louis, MO. My parents have lived in New York for a long time now. For several years, I drove between St. Louis and New York for the big-deal holidays. One year, I got in from a long day of driving and my mom had made potstickers, which she has done regularly, if infrequently, most of my life. I ate a big plate-full and then sat there chatting, dipping my spoon into the bowl of dipping sauce until my mother told me to stop drinking the salt.

I love potstickers. I love potsticker dipping sauce. I love making them (like here and here).

So imagine my thrill when Jen from UseRealButter announced that the June challenge was to make potstickers by hand. As in, even the wrappers by hand, something that had, quite honestly, never occurred to me as an actual possibility. But really? It was fun and not that much more work than using pre-made wrappers in the end. Thanks, Jen!

Freedom reigned in choice of filling and I chose two: a shrimp/scallop one that was hurt by mushy scallops and the Chinese-roast-pork-style tofu previously mentioned.

I tried to time most of the prep work to coincide with LittleGirl's nap. It almost worked. I got the fillings and the dough made, and my workspace set up before she slept, but very few wrappers were rolled and filled before the inevitable sounds of waking toddler filled the house. She was excited about watching the process for a short time, but then wandered off to play with her insects. Always fun.

Once again, I pulled out my amazing rolling-jar, but unlike my experience with the strudel dough, which did not respond well to the jar, the potsticker wrappers thought my jar was just the right size. And so did I. The rolling went smoothly and I worked out most of the kinks in the pleating process about half way into the job.

They all looked pretty once they were fried, though! Gorgeous golden bottoms make ugly pleats go away. The char siu style tofu potstickers were very tasty, although they suffered from the same over-sweetness as the tofu on its own. The seafood potstickers needed to have a bit more bite to them, both in terms of flavor and texture. I've made a similar filling before, with larger chunks of shrimp and scallop and they were much, much better.

The best result of this challenge was that I now know that, no matter how isolated this foodie gets, I can always have good potstickers by making my own wrappers! Again, thanks, Jen!

Boiled Shrimp, Shrimp And Grits, Shrimp Galore!

2009-06-09T12:34:00.004-07:00

I'm currently on vacation on North Carolina's Outer Banks with a bunch of family. It's a little more humid than my normal desert outpost, but beautiful and green with a beach, so that outweighs most of my issues with the weather.

Almost-local (from just down the coast) shrimp are everywhere and we bought three pounds yesterday and ate about two of them. First, we had cold shrimp boiled with a purchased shrimp boil. Apparently, I haven't eaten fresh (never frozen) shrimp in a really, really long time. It's not surprising as I haven't lived near a shrimp-bearing coast for a really, really long time, if ever. What was surprising was how amazingly different and better the fresh shrimp were. Texture, taste ... they had it all! (Why was this surprising? I don't know. I'd never be surprised that a fresh, local, ripe peach tasted better than a frozen peach, so why so surprised about the shrimp?)

The cold shrimp were just a peel-and-eat snack at the picnic table outside on the deck. A couple hours later, it was time for shrimp and grits, a Carolina coast specialty usually made with bacon, but adjusted for the mostly veg-and-seafood diets in the crowd. Very cheesy, buttery grits -- yum! Lovely sauteed shrimp with onions and garlic -- also yum! Pretty, too, with a layer of steamed chard between them. Unfortunately, the photos for this aren't on this computer right now, so I'll have to post a picture later. The plates at our rental weren't anything fancy, but they happened to be just the right colors for this dish.

I haven't thought about this in a long time, but as I was writing about the plate colors, I suddenly remembered the last time I can remember eating fresh shrimp. I was in Baton Rouge for a week apprenticing in a university lab and one of the professors invited me to her house for dinner. I can't remember exactly what we had, but the main course involved shrimp. (The salad course involved a dressing purchased from the back door of their favorite bar. It was an odd evening.)

This couple collects dishes from a particular pottery in the Czech Republic. They've visited the site and have at least fifty different patterns, all on display on floor-to-ceiling plate rails in the dining room. For most of the patterns, they just have two place settings, but also have a bunch of complete services. And the point of this story? They choose their pattern every night to match the colors of the meal, so we had carefully chosen plates to match the shrimp. Just like we had with our super-fancy Corelle plates!

The Long And Winding Road From Apple Strudel To "Pork" Fried Rice

2009-05-30T18:55:00.003-07:00

Is there such a thing as six degrees of separation for food? If so, then my tale of meandering food inspiration is a good example of it. It starts with the Daring Bakers' challenge described in my previous post. The recipe chosen was for apple strudel, but the real challenge was making the strudel dough, with the filling left up to each individual Baker.

Lisa Michele, of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives, made a truly mouthwatering-looking char siu (Chinese roast pork) strudel, with her very own roast pork. She provided her recipe for the roast pork and, as I've wanted to try making a vegetarian Chinese roast "pork" ever since a disastrous trial many years ago, I started yesterday by making her marinade (recipe in the linked post).

I had an unfortunate missing ingredient -- five spice powder -- but otherwise followed the recipe exactly, doubling it because tofu needs more added flavor than pork does. I sliced a high-protein, super-firm tofu and marinated it for almost 24 hours, turning it once to recoat. I baked it for about 45 minutes, turning once and basting with extra marinade.

It turned out quite beautifully, as you can see. I would tweak the next batch. This was a little sweeter than I'd like, so I'll cut back on the brown sugar next time. And make sure I secure some five-spice powder, too.

The cut tofu looks pretty darn good and we ate half of it tonight in a "pork" fried rice with lots of onion, garlic, and green onions. The side dish stole the show a little bit, though. I used Lisa's pork sauce as inspiration and combined about 1 TBSP of dry sherry, 1 TBSP of soy sauce, about a half TBSP of vinegar, and 1 TBSP of corn starch in a bowl. I sauteed some minced onion and lots of garlic and then poured in the starch flurry. I added about a third a cup of water, some salt, and a small amount sweet red chile sauce, and cooked until thickened before adding some par-steamed broccoli. Oh, it was GOOD.

Husband ate his. Looked longingly at mine. And stole Little Girl's about 10 seconds after she uttered the magic "May I please get down?" that ends her meal.

So, thank you, Daring Bakers for the original challenge! And thank you, Lisa, for your inspired char siu version!

A Daring Baker: Strudel!

2009-05-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

May 26th

10:07 am: So here it is. The last possible day I can make the strudel that is May's Daring Bakers challenge. It's been a crazy month between illnesses in the house and a family wedding. I could opt out, I starting thinking yesterday. But it's my first month as a Daring Baker and that just seems so wimpy. So if not making a strudel isn't an option, that means I have to make a strudel. Today. Not a problem, right? I just have to choose a filling. And figure out how to roll and stretch the dough without a rolling pin. And make the whole thing. It'll be, hmmmm....fun? Easy? A laugh a minute?

I even have the secret Daring Baker password for this month:

The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.

Thanks, Linda and Courtney for choosing a truly daring recipe for this month's challenge! Here goes nothing!

12:15 pm: It would be boring to do this with no mistakes, right? So mistake number one: miscount the number of 1/3 cupfuls of flour I put in the bowl. I stirred and turned the resulting very wet, very shaggy dough on an unfloured board, as directed. Tried to knead it. Not happening. I start thinking about adding just a little flour when my eyes glance down at my hastily scribbled notes and see the 1 1/3 cups flour. Oh, yeah. That fourth 1/3 cup of flour would be really handy just about now. So I dump it on the board/dough, knead it all into the dough, and then continue kneading on the now-flourless board for a couple more minutes.

The dough is now oiled and in the fridge. I need it to sit longer than the specified resting time, so I'll pull it out later to sit and get nice and warmed up before trying to stretch it out.

I've decided on a savory mushroom/potato filling. Little Girl has had cake three nights in a row thanks to the wedding rehearsal, wedding, and a birthday party last night. I think four nights of dessert would set a precedent I'm not interested in setting. So I'll use her nap to cook the mushrooms' liquid out of them, par-boil the potatoes, and mix up some carmelized onion/goat cheese/cream cheese just for kicks.

2:33 pm: No potatoes. Changed my mind about them because I want the flavors to be more intense. I don't really have a picture in my head about how much flavor the dough will take away from the filling. So the mushrooms are cooked, the cheeses/onions/garlic are all mixed. Now I just have to figure out the perfect time to pull the dough out to warm up. If I wait until Husband comes home, we'll eat pretty late. If I try to do it while Little Girl is still asleep, I'm guaranteeing us a room temperature dinner and I'm not sure if that's what I want. If I try to stretch the dough with Little Girl awake? Heh. Barrel of flour, add monkeys. That's what we'd have.

5:22 pm: Sesame Street to the rescue! Little Girl happily watched away as I rolled, stretched, and filled my dough. The problems came in my apparent inability to do simple math today. See flour, above for the first mistake. The second came as I was thinking, "Wow...this is pretty easy! I'm almost half-way rolled out and I haven't needed to use any creative language at all!" And that's when I realized that I hadn't cut my dough ball in half as planned. Of course it was all going along swimmingly -- I thought I was rolling out to a size suitable for a half recipe, but I had a whole recipe of dough. Very easy that way.

But, in the end, I managed to get a very thin dough almost as big as the recipe says it should be, and just cut off the sides to make a smaller rectangle for the amount of filling I had. And now, it's all filled and in the oven!

Husband, who kindly downloaded my pictures while I was taking care of other things, says that the unbaked strudel looks like a grub if you look at it quickly and don't know the scale. You'd never guess that I won his heart with a mushroom pie, would you? I think there was a qualifying, "Don't take this the wrong way, but..." I am not soothed.

After thirty minutes in the oven and thirty minutes of rest (I timed this phase; patience while waiting for food to cool is not my strongest virtue), I cut into the strudel. Flaky, mostly separate layers filled with a fairly rich mushroom and goat cheese filling.

That'll do, pig. That'll do.

A Daring Cook: Ricotta Gnocchi

2009-05-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

May 6th

11:03 am: For the very first Daring Cooks Challenge, we are making Ricotta Gnocchi from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, and I'm beginning to feel like I've cursed this recipe before I've really even started.

The first time I read through the recipe, I thought it was quite similar to the gnocchi I made for HHDD quite some time ago. The method of forming the gnocchi struck me as different, but it was not until my second reading today that I noticed that there is no flour in the Zuni Cafe recipe, other than flour to roll the gnocchi in. That puts me in a completely different mindset about what I'm about to deal with, but I think I can handle it.

The ricotta, straight from the container.

The first step in the recipe is to drain the ricotta for a long time. Two cups of it, or approximately a pound. Well. I bought my ricotta at Fresh and Easy yesterday. It's not truly fresh ricotta, recommended for this recipe, but it's a big step above "normal" store-bought ricotta. The ingredients list reads, "Pasteurized whey, milk, citric acid, salt." Not too bad. It comes already draining in its own little strainer. I took the recipe's warnings seriously, though, so it's currently draining. The problem is that I have not one pound, but 12 ounces. Twelve ounces that do not look like a cup and a half. More like a generous cup. I guess I'm making a half-recipe and hoping for the best.

The drained ricotta, waiting to be forced through the sieve.

1:45 pm: After almost four hours of sitting in a strainer with a couple pounds of weight on top, my ricotta has given up not one drop of liquid other than what the towel has absorbed. I'm calling it dry and thinking ahead to the next step.

4:41 pm: Creamy. Lemony. Delicate. Almost like an air-filled, savory, bite-sized lemon cheesecake. Truly. Delicious.

The luscious interior.

I just bit into my test gnocchi and I am in heaven. This is nothing like the previously mentioned ricotta gnocchi. Those took some chewing. These melt on the tongue, or maybe even before that, on the lips. I chose to flavor them with a little grated lemon peel (one of the recipe options) and very finely ground black pepper. I think Husband would probably like them as is, but he has texture issues (doesn't like mushy foods), so I'm thinking I might pan-fry my gnocchi with butter and a tiny bit of sage.

I have to completely rethink the dinner menu. I had planned to serve these with asparagus tips in an asparagus cream soup. But that is too much for the delicate flavors. So now, just the butter and sage, I think. Asparagus on the side, maybe, but perhaps these will just be an appetizer by themselves.

Forming the gnocchi.

6:37 pm: Husband has this belief that I sometimes take something perfect (like a recipe I've made over and over again) and tweak it in some way that makes me (and sometimes him) not love it as much. He says that tonight is a prime example.

Here I had these fluffy blobs of perfection and I, well, maybe "ruined" is too strong a word, but I made them into lesser beings. Instead of melting on the tongue, they had a tough outer surface. Think deep-fried milk skin. Not so good. And the airy middle had shrunk in on itself to form a denser, sponge-like center. Not good, either. Tasty as all get out. Pretty for the picture. But not the wisps of lemony perfection they had been.

Someday, I'll learn.

Finished product with steamed asparagus.

All in all? A good start for my Daring Kitchen experiences. I'll make these again and serve them straight out of the boiling water. Because right now, the only witnesses to my lemon-pepper clouds of joy are me and Little Girl. And nobody's gonna believe a two-and-half-year-old on this one.

May 12th
5:06 pm: With two days left before the reveal, I am reliving my gnocchi experience. The ricotta is drained, strained, and mixed with the other ingredients. I am sticking with the lemon zest and black pepper flavors, but these gnocchi will see only boiling water.

Yesterday, I made some veggie broth with veggies from a friend's garden. I will liven up the flavor with lemon juice and herbs and serve the gnocchi in the broth. The plan is that I will find enough energy to clean and cut to ribbons the spinach I also received. If I do, I'll put a mound of lightly sauteed spinach in the middle of the bowl of broth, with the gnocchi around it.

Simple, delicate flavors for a warm evening. That's the plan.

8:23 pm: The adventure is over. For now. I like making these, so I will probably pull out the recipe every once in a while. I think they'd make a perfect starter at a dinner party, but also a relatively painless supper for just the family. With all the different saucing possibilities, they are very versatile.

Things got a little crowded on the stove.

So, of course, the plan changed for dinner tonight. The broth wasn't a very pretty color, so I added some pureed tomatoes along with the lemon juice and zest. Light, but flavorful. I didn't find the energy for the spinach and the tomato took me in a different direction anyway, so I served them with a little feta cheese and basil in the middle of the bowl.

The gnocchi were as airy and luscious as my first, unfried test gnocchi. The flavors of the gnocchi and broth were balanced. I was happy.

As a coda to the experience, I required Husband to give me three adjectives to describe the gnocchi. He pulled out the thesaurus. He made a three-column list with 15 options. He crossed some out, circled others, second-guessed himself. He decided he required alliteration. But I am giving him the last word in thanks for his patience during my very first challenge with the Daring Kitchen:

Soft. Subtle. Satisfying.

A Cool Evening Meal

2009-05-03T09:08:00.003-07:00

Things are heating up in Desertville after a slightly extended winter. The oven is soon going to be put out to pasture for the summer. But we had an overcast day that kept temperatures low, so I took advantage of it to make a savory bread pudding with mushrooms and veggie sausage.

This dish owes it's place in my menu to my mother in law. Every Christmas, she makes huge pans of strata with thick bread, lots of ham (not for us, of course), cheese, and chiles. Hugely popular, especially with Husband who has a short list of iconic "my Mom makes it" dishes. Sometimes I do the true strata, but when that feels too fussy, I go for a bread pudding.

Husband was off for the day, so I had some free time to cook. The oven needed to do double duty to make the extra heat worth it. After getting the bread and veggies soaking in milk and eggs, I turned my hand to some lovely beets. I'll post that artful adventure soon.

The finished product was brown and crisp and well-received.

We ate the pudding with creamed spinach and the cranberry sauce my MIL always serves with her strata. It is a surprisingly perfect foil for the richness of a cheesy strata. I faked a whole berry sauce by simmering some dried crans in orange juice for a few minutes and then stirring them into the jelly that was my only option at the store.

Stay tuned for adventures in beet land.

A Top Chef Spotting

2009-04-28T17:15:00.003-07:00

I'm a fairly big fan of Top Chef, even with all the problems I have with the format. So imagine my small thrill to find the filming season's chefs at Whole Foods when I stopped there to pick up some picnic things for a toddler's birthday picnic this morning. They were, unfortunately, almost finished checking out, so I didn't get to see them running around for ingredients.

I won't spoil anything with more info -- in fact, I'm glad that it appeared to be early in filming with a lot of chefs, 'cause I wouldn't want to bump into them at the final six or seven and be spoiled myself!

A Pilfered Brussels Sprout

2009-04-27T20:33:00.003-07:00

LittleGirl, veggie-lover that she is, reached up and grabbed this Brussels sprout out of a basket at the Farmers' Market last week. The farmer waived off attempts to pay for the pilfered sprout and was a little tickled to watch her take nibbles out of it after I pulled out a few outer leaves. Then, as you can see, she took one Tremendous Mouthful (thanks, Blueberries for Sal) and that was that.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

2009-04-27T10:25:00.002-07:00

Or, a personalized obituary of my first experiences of culinary mecca.

The NYTimes today reports the closing of Manhattan's two branches of Balducci's market. In it's former home on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Balducci's was my introduction to the joys of food shopping and food porn. I didn't learn new ingredients as much as see them at their finest. And, of course, most expensive. My actual shopping at Balducci's was limited by the smallness of my budget, but I loved walking through those cramped spaces that passed for aisles with a basket waiting for one of two specialty items to perk up a menu. I longingly admired the tropical fruits I'd eaten while traveling through SE Asia, tempting, but beyond my means.

My aunt and uncle lived around the corner from Balducci's through all my teen years. And I do mean around the corner. They lived on West 10th Street, four or five buildings in from Sixth Avenue. Walking almost anywhere meant walking past the glorious windows of aging meat, bright-eyed whole fish, and delicate pastries that represented a closed world to me for the first years. It's not that the world of food was closed to me. On the contrary, my family, nuclear and extended, are lovers of food and explorers of cuisine. Our trips into Manhattan brought a car to my aunt's disposal and often led to a trip to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to stock up on Middle Eastern goodies at Sahadi's.

But for many years, I never entered Balducci's, although I'm not sure why. Later, when my aunt and uncle started spending weekends near my parents, I sometimes took over their apartment, with friends coming from as far as Montreal and Boston for weekends full of friendship and food. And then I did shop at Balducci's for then-hard-to-find specialty greens to elevate a salad made mostly of more ordinary leaves. Or for good bread to go with cheese from the East Village Cheese store that made fun cheeses affordable for me.

I occasionally forked over way too much money for a pastry for myself or bought a quarter pound of swoon-worthy coffee beans. Once, I stood behind Jodi Foster at the check-out. Mostly, though, I looked. And dreamed.

Even though I never visited Balducci's once it moved from the cramped, but wonderful space on the Avenue of the Americas, I'm a little sad to think that it no longer exists in Manhattan. The mingled food smells, the jeweled berries, the shelves crammed with oils, vinegars, and imported treats. They let me imagine meals I couldn't afford then (or now, really), but enjoyed planning. Always in my head, never on my stove. Luckily, my Memory Lane still pictures that market in that location, stocked with all the food goodness my culinary dreams require.

Mark Bittman: Food Matters

2009-04-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

Living, as I do, in the middle of nowhere, libraries are not thick on the ground. I'm a lifetime fan of libraries, so this is a sadness. The two bright spots in my library-poor existence are my once-every-two-weeks bookmobile visits (one of the stops is just a mile away -- it's miraculous!) and the fact that Las Vegas libraries are incredibly generous and allow non-Nevada residents (strictly limited) borrowing rights.

Two weeks ago, Mark Bittman's Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating* was sitting on the shelf in our bookmobile that is for special-order books, either on their way to patrons or recently returned. I very eagerly asked if it was coming in or going out, and my luck held: it had been returned at the previous stop and was all mine!

I had to return it yesterday without managing to actually try a recipe, although I read through them all. Ok, I skimmed the ones focused on meat, but those were a minority in this manifesto for limiting meat consumption.

Let me just say that I like Mark Bittman. I like his New York Times articles and blog. I like many, many of his recipes.

Apparently, I am not so fond of his prose in larger helpings. The first part of the book is a nutritional call-to-arms, arguing that eating less meat, more plants, and many fewer process foods altogether is a recipe not only for personal health, but planetary health as well. Eating a diet with few (or no) animal products is much easier on the environment and your body.

Among the recent books advocating this basic stance (Michael Pollan's works, among many others), I found this one a little lackluster. The recipes put the opinion into action very nicely, but the presentation of the opinion itself lacks soul. Don't get me wrong -- I don't argue with the premise. I haven't eaten red meat or poultry since 1985. I eat fish or other sea creatures a few times a month. This is a bandwagon I'm already on. I sing in this choir.

And maybe that's part of the problem: very little of the information was news to me. Another part was the format, which bordered on textbook-like. The excerpted quotes in the side margins just just served to distract me from the main text like so many buzzing mosquitoes at an outdoor concert picnic. The headings and sub-headings made the text choppy. I never felt that a rhythm built up at all.

I'll probably get the book again sometime to try a few recipes. Or I'll get Bittman's vegetarian cookbook, which I assume will have a similar, but larger selection. As a short, focused cookbook, Food Matters holds up. As a rousing call to action? Not so much.

An Easter Of Asparagus

2009-04-13T16:54:00.003-07:00

Easter dinner was supposed to be a nice, balanced meal, but egg coloring and LittleGirl's hunger meant that a few things went by the wayside. Luckily, I had bought way more asparagus that three people could possibly eat at one sitting, so there was still a spring bounty. The asparagus was simple: peeled stems, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a hot grill. Very yum! For lunch today, too.

It was a gorgeous day -- one of our first -- and we toyed with the idea of eating at the splintery outdoor table we inherited with this place, but ended up inside. Very, very good meal.

Cooking For Kids

2009-04-10T13:34:00.003-07:00

I think LittleGirl does pretty well in the nutrition and eating parts of life. She loves peas, broccoli, asparagus, spinach, onions, garlic, etc. She's not so big on fresh fruit, but will eat dried fruit and unsweetened apple sauce and a lot of cooked fruits (like a mixed berry/cherry crisp). But even so, I get a little bored with the short list of meals that she will eat and we (the grown-ups) can also enjoy.

At our last trip to the library, the book real food for healthy kids by Tracey Seaman and Tanya Wenman Steel was propped up in the new book section. I thought I'd see if I could get some new inspiration. I've tried one recipe so far (a toasted cheese snack with parmesan) that went well with a green veggie soup I'd made for dinner. It was tasty and easy and just different enough that we all enjoyed it.

The introduction to the book talks the good talk about whole grains and lower fat and lots of fruits and veggies. The authors urge the reader to ban white bread and white rice from his or her kitchen, and they provide nutritional information for all the recipes.

The problem is that their recipes don't live up to the hype. Although they suggest 20% of calories should come from fat, many -- if not most -- of their recipes are way above that. In just the first section of breakfast recipes, one recipe gets 69% of calories from fat! Of the first seven recipes in the book, fat represents more than half the calories in four dishes. The remaining three dishes get just over a third of calories from fat.

Now, the authors may assume that you'll be adding lots of fresh fruit or other low-fat, low-cal components to the breakfast table, but they'd have a hard time making up for the main dish.

I don't usually stress about how many calories of this, that, and the other are in the foods I make (probably explaining my current dress size), but when a cookbook is so explicitly selling itself as a source for healthy kids' food, I expect a little better. I may try a couple more recipes, but it's not the go-to book I'd like to find for easy, kid-and-adult-friendly foods.

The Wonders Of Bahn Mi

2009-04-08T10:42:00.003-07:00

Husband and I met when we were both graduate students living in St. Louis. For those not in the know, St. Louis has incredibly cheap housing, which made it a good place to be a student on a limited budget. I bought a house my second year in the city and never looked back.

My house was in a part of town with a lot of Vietnamese immigrants, including a sizable Hmong population, and I could easily walk to three excellent Vietnamese restaurants and a slightly longer walk would get me to two more plus a decent Thai place. It was heavenly. The closest place to me was a real hole-in-the-wall when I first moved there -- Bhan Mi So #1. I glanced at the posted menu once while taking a walk, didn't see much that was exciting, and stuck with the place that offered what Husband and I called our "three and a half dollar dinner" for the next several years.

The three and a half dollar dinner was a bowl of vermicelli noodles with tofu and a wide and ever-changing collection of green herbs and vegetables, all very lightly cooked with a light broth. Not enough broth to make it a soup, but enough to make it absolutely delicious.

But over the years, Bhan Mi So #1 spruced up a little. It added an outdoor seating area on the wide sidewalk. Plants joined the cafe tables and umbrellas. A friend convinced me that it was time to give this place a try. I was almost instantly addicted. On bhan mi chay -- tofu bhan mi sandwiches. Their spring rolls -- advertised as the best in the city -- lived up to their excellent reputation, but the bhan mi is what kept me coming back.

That, and the proprieter-husband reminded me strongly of my grandfather. I know that an elderly Vietnamese man and an elderly Russian Jew probably shouldn't look alike, but they really do. He treated me like a grandfather, too, suggesting tofu dishes I hadn't tried and joining his wife in haranguing me to try their Vietnamese desserts, heavy on mung beans.

The best suggestion he offered was his very first one: ordering my bhan mi chay with double tofu, an option offered for all their sandwiches. And this brings me to the inspiration for this post. Today's NYTimes has a very nice article on the innovative bhan mi chefs of New York City. I almost drooled while reading it, but kept getting stuck whenever they talked about the overstuffed, big sandwiches available. One descriptor that would not fit Bhan Mi So #1's creations is overstuffed. When I opened up my first sandwich to see what was inside, I had to search for the tofu -- and I had double tofu! There was, on a roughly 10 inch roll, perhaps an ounce and a half or maybe two ounces of tofu, along with a thin scattering of pickled daikon and carrot, three or four rings of jalapeno, a smear of mayo, a splash of fish sauce dressing, and a few sprigs of cilantro.

It was enough.

The flavors and quantities were perfect with the airy French bread roll. I was a convert. When we were later getting ready to move to Isolationville and I had packed up pretty much all of my kitchen, I frequently called to order a bhan mi chay, double tofu, and would walk around the corner to pick it up a few minutes later, wrapped in deli paper secured with a bright yellow rubber band.

When I returned to St. Louis for my only visit since leaving three years ago, I ate there twice, and was welcomed home by my Vietnamese grandfather.

Lemon Day Roundup

2009-04-05T10:49:00.002-07:00

Zorro has posted a truly delicious roundup for Lemon Day. Lots of lemon tarts and pies and cookies and ice cream, and some savories mixed in as well. I might need to put extra lemons on the next shopping list so I can do a lemon dessert. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I very foolishly gave up chocolate for Lent, so with a week left, a rich lemon dessert would really hit the spot.

Luckily, Husband loves lemon desserts. My dad hates them. When I was growing up, a huge treat when he wasn't home for dinner was a lemon dessert, often a lemon sponge custard. Occasionally, that was dinner, not just dessert. I'm glad I don't have to avoid them as an adult.

Lemon Day Tofu Piccata

2009-04-02T09:40:00.003-08:00

A glut of lemons inspired Zorra to create a Lemon Day food blog event. I would love to have a glut of lemons to make lemon curd and lemon tarts and lemon sponge pudding and lemon almost anything else. I, unfortunately, do not have a glut of lemons, so my lemony dish for this event had to be somewhat less lemon-focused.

By long journey from my sister, who used to make chicken-fried tofu, comes a tofu piccata dish similar to what my mother makes now. Because tofu doesn't have as much flavor as chicken breasts or thighs, a plain flour coating doesn't provide enough oomph, so I use a combination of flour, chickpea flour, and nutritional yeast, well-seasoned with salt and pepper. The sauce is made from the pan drippings and is bright with the flavor of capers and lemon.

To make this, I use an extra-firm tofu and press it briefly to get rid of a little extra moisture.

The coating (for about a pound and a half of tofu):

1/2 cup nutritional yeast
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup chickpea flour
Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the tofu into 1/2 inch thick slices. Dredge each slice in the flour/yeast mixture to coat well. Pan fry in olive oil in batches. Keep the tofu warm in a low oven while frying later batches.

When all the tofu is done, add a little oil and four or five thinly sliced garlic cloves. Cook until slightly soft. Add a tablespoon or two of the flour/yeast mixture and stir well, cooking to form a not-quite-roux. Add two to three tablespoons of small capers (or roughly chopped big capers), the juice of one large lemon (at least a third of a cup), and a quarter to a third cup of water or stock and cook until slightly thickened. At this point, this recipe is suitable for vegans. If you're not worried about that, add a couple tablespoons of butter to make the sauce richer.

I serve this with a puree of cauliflower and potato and something bright for color on the plate.

Hooray For Gardens!

2009-03-19T20:31:00.003-08:00

A quick note to say that my snap peas are planted and HOORAY -- the Obamas are breaking ground for a South Lawn veggie garden!!

The Well-Amended Garden

2009-03-06T19:47:00.002-08:00

A couple hundred pounds of coffee grounds, buckets and buckets of cow manure, and a couple garbage bags of grass clippings later and I have garden beds that almost look like decent soil for plants to live in! The one closest to the camera has had the most attention because it will soon get lettuce seedlings. The other three (one's not really in the picture) are better after today's addition of close to a hundred pounds of grounds and only one of them will be planted any time soon because our night temperatures are still pretty cold (29F tonight). One of them will get peas on St Patrick's Day and I'm looking forward to that because the seeds are big enough for Little Girl to really handle and plant.

Little Girl loves the garden. We had a nice warm day this week that brought some of the insects out of hiding. A beetle was nosing around the coffee grounds and LG decided it must like coffee. So wherever the poor beetle went for the next ten minutes, LG kept sprinkling it with coffee grounds if it wasn't already on top of some.

The Winter Of Soups Continues

2009-03-04T17:01:00.003-08:00

This winter has been all about soup and although spring is most definitely peeking around the corner, we still have cold nights, so soup's still on the menu. Little Girl is very fond of mushrooms, so the cream of mushroom soup from Moosewood's Daily Specials cookbook has been getting a lot of play for the past couple months. I've played with additions to the soup to round out the meal. We've had garlic-rubbed ciabatta slices crisped in the oven -- those were very tasty. This particular night, we had cheese tortellini. Also tasty.

Tonight's meal is pizza with oil-cured olives and mushrooms (with a little feta and lots of red pepper flakes on the part Little Girl isn't eating), a salad, and a mixed berry and cherry crisp for dessert. Trader Joe's used to have frozen cherries that were gorgeous, but last time I went to buy them, they weren't in the freezer anymore. In their place was a mix of raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and cherries. Very nice product. Little Girl loves her veggies, but isn't so big on fresh fruit. She'll eat these, though, and I just make sure the crisp topping has lots of rolled oats and not a lot of sugar.

In other news, my garden fencing is complete and two of the four beds are turned, sufficiently bulked up with manure, grass clippings, and coffee grounds (thank you, Starbucks!), and ready to plant.

Cooking and Garden-Making

2009-02-14T09:32:00.002-08:00

It's been a busy few weeks here in Desertville. In between snow falls (yes, I know...Desertville sounds like it shouldn't have snow, but it does), I've been trying to finish fencing my garden against the furballs and build up some organic matter in the soil. I have a big pile of cow poop and grass clippings that are slowly, but surely becoming something a plant would want to live in and, thanks to Starbucks, I have a growing pile of coffee grounds. Mostly, I just need to put in my gate and furball-proof the gate area and then I can start laying out the beds.

I've also been doing a lot of cooking. Yesterday, I dragged out three bananas I'd shoved in the freezer before leaving for a weekend a while back and turned them into banana bread. I also made shrimp tacos with a cilantro/tomatillo salsa. We each had half an avocado filled with diced red pepper in a lime-y dressing on the side.

Tonight, for Valentine's Day, I'm cheating a little. Husband is extremely fond of Quorn's gruyere cutlets and I happened to see them at the store a few days ago, so I'm cooking those with some type of potato (either roasted or mashed, I think) and veg. Maybe creamed spinach. Maybe sauteed broccoli with lots of garlic. Little Girl likes both. I'm not sure about a dessert. I believe there's chocolate in my future, so I don't know that I really need to make one.

I've been perusing upcoming blogging events, so I hope to start cooking and taking pictures and really food-blogging again soon. Certainly once my garden has small green things growing, I'll be sharing pictures of the plants and meals that come from it.

Another Recipe Followed ... Amazing!

2009-02-02T09:21:00.002-08:00

Yes, it's true. I followed yet another new recipe. I was reading my MIL's Real Simple and enjoyed their section on "healthier" comfort foods. (I'm planning to try their creamed spinach recipe next.) But two nights ago, I started with the Macaroni and Cheese with Cauliflower. I did a small amount of substituting (as in, we don't keep 1% milk or reduced-fat sour cream around the house) and it turned out very, very well. I did a full pound of pasta so there would be plenty of leftovers, so had to increase the amounts of everything else a bit. The "extra" cheese was a hard smoked goat's milk cheddar, which added a little oomph to the flavor profiles. I'd make it again, definitely, as SmallGirl liked it a lot and I added peas to her portion, thereby getting quite a bit of veggies into her supper.

Here's my quibble: They claim the hands-on time is 15 minutes. I'm not the fastest cook in the world; my knife skills have definitely slowed down after over a decade out of food service. I'm still no slouch, though, and I'm pretty organized in the kitchen. There's no way I could do the amount of hands-on required by the recipe in 15 minutes. It involves chopping a head of cauliflower and an onion, grating a cup and a half of cheese, sauteeing said onion for "five to seven minutes", cooking pasta, and measuring out and combining all the ingredients. Oh -- and making fresh breadcrumbs!

I was able to do most of the other prep while my water was coming to a boil and the pasta cooking (about 15 minutes right there), but I still had to mix the breadcrumb topping and measure out the milk, sour cream, and mustard while the pasta was sitting in the colander. Add another few minutes for mixing everything together, pouring into the baking dish, and adding the crumbs, and we're up to about 25 minutes before it got in the oven.

I think the only way it is 15 minutes of hands-on time is if you start timing it when the ingredients are in their list form, i.e., 1 onion, finely chopped; 1 1/2 cups grated extra-sharp cheddar; 1 head cauliflower, roughly chopping; and 4 slices multigrain bread, torn. If you've already done those parts before you hit start, it's 15 minutes. Otherwise? Not so much.

A Winter's Meal

2008-12-20T20:00:00.002-08:00

Winter has completely settled into Desertville. We've been mostly snowed in for a few days now. It is strange to see the desert plants under blankets of snow, but very beautiful.

Husband and I are somewhat addicted to Top Chef and watched it this week despite having to go out to scrape snow and ice off the satellite dish a few times when the picture started to degrade. I like cauliflower, so Ariane's winning cauliflower puree intrigued me. She seemed so proud that it didn't have any butter when guest judge Martha Stewart commented that it was swimming with butter. I was curious.

It turns out that she cooked the cauliflower and potato for the puree IN HEAVY CREAM. Yes, as in boiled the veggies in the cream. I can think of almost nothing that wouldn't taste good cooked in heavy cream. I, however, had neither the cream supply nor the inclination to cook the veggies in cream. I compromised and cooked them in a combination of milk and water. I used a half cup of heated heavy cream to puree it and added a small knob of butter for good measure. I was only missing the fresh thyme, and that would have been lovely.

We all liked the puree, and I'll make it again. It is a nice accompaniment to a strong-flavored dish. Tonight, I made pan fried tofu with a lemon-caper sauce. Little Girl adores capers. She loves tofu. She was lukewarm on the puree, but ate some of that along with some leftover peas and mushrooms.

Although I did get a nice brown on the tofu, this was still a pretty bland-looking meal, so no photos tonight. But I hope to gain points for following and linking to an actual recipe.

Orange Salad

2008-12-18T13:17:00.005-08:00

The economy being what it is, I figured some rice and beans type meals are in order this winter. Doesn't hurt that I like them anyway. One of my favorites is black beans (cooked with garlic and a halved orange in the cooking water) and rice with a hot salsa and a cool orange and cilantro salad. The oranges are dressed just with olive oil mixed with salt and pepper and make a really nice contrast to the rice and beans.

In other cooking, it is the season of recipes, as it is the season of baking. I haven't done too much yet because we got snowed out of Husband's office party before I'd gone too far with the cookie platter. Of course, I had already made the flourless chocolate cake we were giving away in the gift exchange. Snow prevented a shopping trip for the gift exchange and since everyone in his office knows the cake, I figured it would go over well. So now I'm low on butter, having used a pound in the cake. I need to make at least two kinds of cookies, though, so I have enough goodies to make up tins for Husband to take to work and for our postal workers.

I may be making bread, too, if we can't get to a store tomorrow, which is possible. I don't mind -- it makes the house smell SO good.

On The Joys Of Natural Pectin

2008-12-02T11:54:00.003-08:00

Husband had to work on Thanksgiving Day and Little Girl and I picked him up from work and instantly started the 3.5 hour trek to his parents' place for the rest of the weekend. Their feast was long over (and the leftovers weren't veggie-friendly), so no Thanksgiving meal that day.

On Saturday, we had a late celebration with Husband's father at my B-I-L's apartment. B-I-L had, of course, already had Thanksgiving meals with his family, his wife's family, AND with their step-siblings. Three meals, two days. Whew! Needless to say, they were not excited by the idea of cooking yet another turkey-and-trimmings feast on Saturday and my F-I-L wasn't interested either, having had a traditional Thanksgiving meal at his work. So B-I-L made meatloaf and some sides, and I made roasted potatoes, roasted veggies, and some baked salmon.

This has left Husband and I without a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Obviously, we don't eat the turkey part, but I am extraordinarily fond of bread-and-sage stuffing and Husband is equally fond of what he calls "leftover sandwiches". Therefore, yesterday, I made the trek into town to buy two Quorn roasts (not being fond of Tofurkeys at all). Today is all about the cooking, which brings me to the title of this post.

First thing I made was the cranberry sauce. I like to keep it simple, so it was a bag of cranberries (sniff! not enough of my hand-picked wild ones left for this!), half a cup of apple juice, half a cup of water, a cup of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a teeny dash each of cinnamon and cloves. I let it cool a little in the pan, then transferred it into a tupperware to cool completely before putting it in the fridge.

Even without refrigeration, it is now a solid block of whole-berry jelly. I could slice it and it would stay in formation! I am always amazed at the jelling power of high-pectin fruits. Life would hold so much less joy and mystery without them.

The Garden Inspiration

2008-11-30T14:34:00.002-08:00

So, other than the very kind, encouraging comments here (thank you!), the inspiration for my garden-preparation is stuff like this: lettuce I picked from Husband's coworker's garden just hours before we ate it all up. I mean, really, to go and pick gorgeous greens like these in November -- who wouldn't want that? I want it, and I'm willing to do the work to get it. Fresh greens make such a difference in a salad. In this case, it was a full-meal salad with red pepper, avocado, toasted walnuts, and my newly arrived Maytag blue cheese. Delicious!

In other news, we had our first winter rains! Two nights of heavy rain, followed by grey, damp, cool days. Good, soaking rains, too, without a lot of run-off. It was great!

And in still other news, I love Marcella Hazan's comments today in the NYTimes. I'm a cook. I was a cook when I cooked professionally for someone else and I was a cook when I ran my own kitchen for a living. I'm not a chef and I don't pretend to be one. I haven't run into the phenomenon of home cooks calling themselves (or being called) chefs, but I love that Marcella Hazan makes the distinction, even among professionals. I don't have anything particularly profound to say; I just enjoyed the article and the sentiment behind it.

Garden Of The Future

2008-11-18T12:23:00.002-08:00

This photo is a) probably not the kind of photo you're missing, Mimi, and b) not all that current, but it is the one I have of my garden space. I took this during the fencing-in process, which is still not completely done because I haven't decided what I'm doing about a gate yet. We have serious rodent issues, which is why the fence is buried. There's an additional layer of (also buried) hardware cloth. I worry sometimes that I'm just providing an elaborate ladder for the climbing variety of local fur ball. If that proves to be the case, I'm prepared to add a layer of roof flashing for a slippery first several inches. In the meantime, I'm concentrating on keeping out the crawling/hopping/digging fur balls.

It's not a huge space, but my plan for next year is herbs, greens, tomatoes, and a couple other things yet to be decided. I don't need tons of space for such moderate goals. If it goes well AND it looks like we'll be here for another year after next summer, I'll work on an expansion. The space this time around was determined by two things: the space the previous occupants had leveled for their above-ground swimming pool and the length of the fencing that was sitting here waiting to be around my garden.

Over the next few months, I'll be pounding sun-baked free-range cattle poop and trying to score used coffee grounds and spent grain from a brew-pub to get the soil ready for spring. And, with luck, I'll make one very small corner of Desertville bloom.

In Which Recipes Are Followed Left and Right

2008-11-17T14:42:00.003-08:00

I seem to be on a recipe-following streak these days. New recipes, mostly, too. I'm pretty proud.

The most recent recipes were for Baby Girl's Happy Birthday cake. She's now two, so maybe not quite a baby anymore. She had some very specific ideas about what should be present at a birthday: cake, candles, balloons, hats, song. Anything else was just gravy, but those were repeated frequently. After the actual event, where the presents were all opened by an older cousin (four-ish) because my Girl didn't quite get the point, presents will always be a part of the list for future birthdays.

I wanted to make sure the cake was sufficiently cake-like that it wouldn't be confused for the favorite muffin, but not completely unhealthy for a very low-sugar-consuming small one. I decided on an applesauce spice cake with lemon cream cheese frosting. The recipes came from the classic Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook that was on my M-I-L's shelf when I went looking. I followed them ALMOST to the letter. I increased the apple sauce quantity a little and the lemon was an addition to the frosting, which also went short by about a cup and a half of sugar to keep it a little less cloying. It was a hit with both kids and adults, which was the goal.

I've recently followed a couple other recipes, but I can't quite think of what they were. I swear that I did it, though. Husband and I have both put on a little weight since the shorter days set in, preventing late evening exercise time. So I'm thinking that I might try to make super-healthy soups twice a week to provide some vegetable-rich, filling, but lower-cal dinners and leftover lunches for the winter. I happen to have six or seven quarts of home made stock in the freezer right now, so that will provide some good inspiration. I have plenty of soup-rich cookbooks, so more recipes will probably follow.

Ladies and Gentlemen...

2008-11-07T13:47:00.004-08:00

...the next President of the United States.

Vote! Vote! Vote!

2008-11-03T12:31:00.002-08:00

Yes, this is my get-out-the-vote post. Please, no matter how long the lines are, no matter the weather, go vote tomorrow!

What does a Jack o' Lantern themed cake have to do with voting, you ask? I made it for Husband's work event last week and it was voted best dessert. Besides, you don't want to make that face the day after tomorrow if your candidate loses by only a few votes and YOU didn't make it to the polls. The cake, by the way, is a flourless mocha fudge cake from the Frog Commissary cookbook. Well worth a try; it is easy and delicious.

So get out there and vote! Eat good food while watching the returns come in! Be a good citizen!

(I recently followed another new recipe for a cauliflower bread pudding...I'll try to be a good blogger and share details soon! I really do try to keep up with my blog. I've got garden-to-be pictures somewhere, too.)

Slivered Salsa

2008-08-28T17:14:00.002-07:00

I've been having troubles with my internet connection. We have mobile broadband and the signal is much worse here in Desertville than in Desolationville. Who knew that there was something good about Desolationville?

Anyway. In an attempt to do a little catch-up, I offer this photo of some "salsa" I made a couple weeks ago. I wanted crunch and I wanted slivers rather than chunks. I added some cabbage after this photo was taken, and we ate it with black bean soft tacos. Very tasty.

Tonight, if I can find the energy to grill, we'll be having a garlic ciabatta with grilled portabellos, zucchini, and onions, with a cream cheese-pesto spread. It is technically junk food night, however, so I can get away with much, much less work, and I might. Husband was away part of this week, so I'm a tired person. Little Girl runs a person ragged these days.

Chapter 2: A Belated "Update" On The Finished Product

2008-08-19T11:01:00.004-07:00

So, I had thought to post as I proceeded yesterday, but having a toddler underfoot prevents such things from happening sometimes. I ended up not tweaking the recipe, except for the addition of a tablespoon of butter at the very end for extra creaminess. I had my doubts about the tomatoes, but I recognized my own biases; seafood and tomatoes are just not my thing. It might have to do with a lot of time spent on Cape Cod feeling around the sand for clams with my toes. Cape Cod clams do not spend time visiting with tomatoes.

And don't get me wrong...a good tomato is a treasure. I have sixteen of them sitting about five feet from me right now, thanks to the garden-raiding from yesterday. Homegrown tomatoes after two summers in frozen Isolationville -- it's a miracle. We ate five for breakfast.

Back to the risotto-making...I kept the tomatoes in the mix. I'm not sure my liquid adding-and-stirring technique was completely solid and I think I cooked it just a couple minutes longer than I should have, but it was declared a taste success by all who tasted it, especially the new parents. I forgot to take a picture of it, but quite frankly, it wasn't the most photogenic thing I've ever made anyway.

Perhaps the best part was the delivery: we had been there only a few minutes when another B- and S-I-L showed up with their two small ones, making it the first time that all four grandkids were in the same room together. We had a very happy and proud Grandmother and missed only Grandfather, who was still at work.

So there you have it: I followed a recipe for seafood risotto and ended up with...seafood risotto! A good day.

Chapter 1: In Which I Begin To Follow A Recipe

2008-08-18T12:10:00.004-07:00

That's right. After blogging last month about my apparent inability to choose a recipe and follow it, more or less as written, I have just finely chopped one cup (!!) of shallots for a seafood risotto recipe. My brother- and sister-in-law just had a baby last week. Yesterday my M-I-L and I made a big pan of enchiladas and she took it to them last night. Their request, however, was for seafood risotto. Not being a huge rice fan (I used to be more of one, but having a non-rice-loving Husband has put a damper on what rice love I had), I've only made risotto once before and that was a long time ago. So, I needed a recipe.

I found one on Epicurious. It was from an RSVP column and of the 76 people who reviewed the recipe, 93% said they'd make it again. Now, of course, almost all of them tweaked it in one way or another, and I MIGHT give one or two very, very small tweaks based on the reviews, but mostly, I'm going to actually follow it as written.

My next step is to peel and devein my shrimp. I want the seafood to all be a similar size, so I might also cut the bay scallops in half to match my "rough chop" of the shrimp.

Oh. And I think I've decided on Desertville as my new location-name. We are really, truly in the middle of the desert now, with few other distinguishing characteristics. I considered Noneighborville, but it looks awkward and I didn't want to keep typing it for the next couple years. It would also be accurate, though. We can't see our nearest neighbor; not by a long shot. And, as far as I know, we only have one part-time person who anyone would really consider a neighbor at all. Some of Husband's work colleagues are probably the closest full-time residents to us and they're five or six miles up the road.

I'd love to make it Dessertville, but Husband is more of a savory-food person. It might make him feel left out. Much like the name "Bitches' Ditches" was ruled out as the name of my family's short-term farm many years ago; my mom felt that it ignored my father's contribution.

Busy and More Isolated Again

2008-07-15T11:39:00.002-07:00

Well, since last writing, we have moved again. Desolationville was just too depressing to live there for much longer, so we picked up and moved 43 miles east and 3000 feet higher. Whew! The mornings and evenings are actually pleasant now and midday is at least not deadly.

We have no neighbors and our new 'ville consists of a single building that functions as part-time post office and store combined. There are no other buildings or businesses at the intersection that qualifies as the 'ville itself. But it is much, much better than living in Desolationville for even another day. I will be starting over with garden plans that will have to include some anti-bunny planning. BabyGirl is quite keen on the large rabbit population, but I suspect my tender greens would have different feelings on the subject.

In the meantime, I actually have a restaurant review to do when we get back to our new home! We were scheduled to go on vacation just a few days after moving and we're still on the road. This Isolated Foodie will be trying to write more regularly once we're settled into our new kitchen.

Some Food For Thought

2008-06-10T12:33:00.002-07:00

As I think I've mentioned before, I originally planned to write a blog about food and agricultural policy and then realized that a food blog was what I really wanted to write. But every once in a while, I come across something that I feel compelled to mention.

Today's case in point? George Monbiot's article from The Guardian about the productivity of small farms. Anthropological studies of small farmers have shown this to be true over and over again: per unit of land, small farms are more productive than large farms. It is true even when you look at the very same farmers; if a farmer has access to lots of land, that farmer will grow less food per unit of land than if the same farmer has limited access to land. In areas of highly restricted land availability, farmers plant multiple crops in the same space during the year, grow plants closer together, and find other ways to increase their harvests.

And -- this is key -- they virtually always do this without depleting the productivity and fertility of the land. Usually, this is because they integrate both animals and plants in one system, using the animal manures to keep up soil fertility. Anyone who has read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma is familiar with some of the ways this can be done. But his Virginia farmer is just one example of the immense creativity of people who are working to feed their families off the land.

What Monbiot does not really touch on is that there are cultural downfalls of large-scale farming as well as the agricultural and environmental woes. When newspapers talk about towns on the Great Plains dwindling down to 15 or 20 elderly residents, or disappearing altogether, a lot of it is the result of increased farm size. In a county where two or three hundred farms have been consolidated into two or three farms, run with very little human labor because of machinery, there aren't many families needed.

Most foodies don't need reminders to support local, small farms. Unfortunately, many others do need not only reminding, but convincing. Superior productivity -- and production of actual food products, not commodities -- is yet another reason to buy from local farmers whenever possible.

A Failed Goal

2008-06-09T10:45:00.001-07:00

Well, I had planned to make something with choux pastry by today, but we ended up going to visit Husband's family for the weekend, killing my prime days to have a big cooking project. Now I have to find another recipe-bound challenge for myself.

Recipe Thoughts and Roundups

2008-06-04T11:36:00.002-07:00

I'm sure this article is going to provide fodder for lots of food blogs this week: The NYTimes printed an article today about Recipe Deal Breakers. What ingredient, technique, or phrase will make you walk away from a recipe without trying it? Both the article and the accompanying reader comments are worth some perusing time; I agreed with some of the deal breakers, but thought that others were crazy. For example, a one-word comment said, "Cilantro." I love cilantro! Can't imagine giving up all the varied dishes that contain it.

But that's just a question of personal taste, so it's an agree to disagree sort of situation.

My bigger problem is that I seem to have walked away from almost all recipes in the past few years. I used to be reasonably good about looking for and trying new recipes, but I almost can't remember the last time I actually followed a new recipe (or even an old one, by actually looking at it) from start to finish. And I think this is good and bad. I even think I might know where it comes from.

Living here in Desolationville, I get to a grocery store once almost every week. Sometimes, we go ten days, but that's about the longest stretch we've had, I think. In Isolationville, we went MONTHS. After first arriving there, I spent six months without going more than sixteen miles from our house. And, believe me, there were no "real" grocery stores within a sixteen-mile radius of our house. So I had to make do with what I had stocked up on, what could be ordered on the internet (you'd think almost anything could be, but Amazon wouldn't ship food products to Isolationville and neither would a number of other mail-order purveyors), or what happened to show up on the shelves of our gas-station-convenience-store-sized "supermarket".

This automatically made following recipes, especially any that included fresh produce, extremely difficult, and I think I just stopped trying and haven't really started again. I cook a lot from scratch, even trying new things, but recipes aren't often involved. On the one hand, it means that I can almost always come up with something for dinner based on what's already in the kitchen, which is good in the day or two before a shopping trip takes us out of Desolationville.

On the other, though, I do think my cooking more generally is diminished by not trying new recipes created and honed by others. I have a good friend who almost always tries a new recipe when I visit. The last visit, she made a favorite, but she still had the cookbook (Moosewood Lowfat, a favorite of mine, too, for healthful foods without stupid concessions to commercial lowfat products) sitting open to the recipe on the counter. The same cookbook had inspired a foodie friend of mine (almost a decade ago) to try every recipe in the book. I think my cousin was pretty close to considering the same attempt.

I guess this is a way of saying that I need to find ways to try new recipes. I've been thinking of doing this month's Donna Day choux challenge, and that will help; I've always wanted to make choux, but never have, and I'll definitely need a recipe.

Speaking of food blogging events, a couple roundups have been posted recently for the Sandwich Festival and the Beautiful Bones event. There are a lot of great recipes -- maybe some I'll even follow!

A Good Deed and A Good Meal

2008-06-02T13:38:00.002-07:00

Meals are less planned in my life than I would like sometimes. It would make shopping trips easier if I was able to decide in advance what our week's menu will be. It just never happens. Some days I wake up with a firm plan about what we're eating that night (today, for example, I am pretty sure we're going to have pad Thai) and then BabyGirl has a really bad afternoon or Husband has to work a little late so that some prep work doesn't get done or I have a late-in-the-day hankering for something else.

The problem is that living so far from stores, we generally shop for fresh stuff just once every week to ten days. Anything that is quickly perishable has to be used in the first few days (which is why pad Thai is on the menu tonight; I bought bean sprouts over the weekend and they don't stay good for more than a day or two). Makes it difficult to have multiple dishes in a week that have delicate ingredients.

Anyway...this is all a way of saying that sometimes, menus are planned for me. Husband has a colleague here from a Middle Eastern country, and he's here for a month and a half, living just across the way from us. He has no transportation yet, so we offered to take him to The City when we went on Saturday. I looked up shopping possibilities that might offer him some comforts of home and found a good Mediterranean grocery, so off we went. I had in mind some good Bulgarian feta (which I got!) and a few other minor treats. He was thrilled, especially as they bake their own pita, something he was really missing.

He was going to buy canned baba ganouj, which just seems an abomination, so I told him I'd make him some instead. The only eggplants I could find were already old, so I made it yesterday, giving him half and keeping half for our dinner. I hope that it was up to par, but we certainly enjoyed it either way.

Being that we were starting out with one Middle Eastern dish, I stayed with the theme, so we enjoyed baba ganouj and falafel with chopped salad and tahina sauce. All very tasty, although it wasn't the best falafel mix I've ever used. Not a bad way to plan a meal -- do a good deed for a temporary neighbor and gain cooking inspiration at the same time.

Bowls o' Mussels

2008-05-28T11:33:00.003-07:00

Last week, when we went to The City for BabyGirl's Well Baby checkup and shopping, I asked Husband for dining preferences for the week and he asked for mussels. Obviously, we ate them that night as I wasn't about to let mussels sit around for a day. He didn't think about that aspect, though, so all I got was props for making his request so quickly.

The only mussels on offer were bigger than I really like, but they were still tasty. I sauteed onion, red pepper flakes, and a mass of garlic in olive oil, added a can of drained, diced tomatoes and some white wine and let that cook down for a while. When a lot of the liquid was gone, I tossed in the scrubbed mussels (a lot of them had beards -- strange for farmed mussels) and covered them up until they had cooked. Then I added some reduced cream, tossed in some fresh basil, and poured them over oiled, toasted bread slices, with more toasted bread for sopping up the juices. The "sop" is Husband's favorite part of the dish, so I always make sure there's good broth involved.

Beautiful Bones Dinner

2008-05-26T22:17:00.006-07:00

Susan from Food Blogga is hosting a calcium-rich event this month in honor of National Osteoporosis Awareness Month. She was looking for meals or recipes high in bone-building calcium. My dinner last night was a bit of a hodge-podge in its creation, but it definitely had a lot of calcium from multiple sources. For those out there wondering about calcium-packed foods, there's a good list in the event guidelines linked above.

I had a lot of veggies that I had meant to grill earlier in the week. Those plans were dealt a blow by our ridiculously high winds, so last night, I really HAD to grill a whole bunch of veggies or risk losing them. Quite honestly, I didn't know what I wanted to do with them once they were grilled, so I perused upcoming blogging events for some inspiration.

When I first read the Beautiful Bones description, I thought I'd do a main-course salad with lots of grilled veggies, goat cheese, and cooled boiled potatoes. But I was lacking motivation for washing greens and was losing focus more generally due to over-tiredness. Husband called from the other room to say that he didn't care what we ate; that we could have Boca Burgers for all he cared.

So we did.

The burgers went on the grill along with the rolls (Husband was in charge of this part as I had just spent a long while being seared in front of the grill). I had already cooked my potatoes and they are calcium-rich, so I wanted to include them. I pan fried them with some of the grilled onions and mushrooms, while marinating the roasted peppers in olive oil and fresh basil. Some of the excess oil and basil was drizzled over the spuds when they were done, and the burger was topped off with the peppers and a thick smear of goat cheese. We both snagged a few bits of grilled green veggies as a side.

By my count, we had four main sources of calcium: the burgers (being soy-based), the goat cheese, the potatoes, and the asparagus. We also had a variety of other nutrients, many of which no doubt either increase or decrease calcium absorption in the body. With any luck, it was mostly an increase and we were able to use most of what we ate.

Feed your bones, everyone!

Haiku Me, Baby!

2008-05-21T10:47:00.002-07:00

So, as the winner of last month's Haiku That Blog event, I am the subject of this month's contest. I thought I'd just mention it so that anyone reading this who did NOT follow a link from the contest would have a chance to write a lovely little haiku about my blog. Just seventeen syllables...anyone can do it! If y'all need more information about anything, feel free to ask questions. The only things I won't reveal are the true identities of Isolationville or Desolationville.

In other news, Husband did indeed love the reprise of the grilled veggie sandwiches last week. I love a good sandwich, but Husband might actually outdo me on the sammich-love. Last night, I gave him two good meal options, a main course salad or a sandwich. When I said the S-word, his eyes lit up. I don't have photographic evidence, but last night's dinner was fake-bacon, avocado, lettuce, and chipotle-cheddar sandwiches. Very tasty little beasts they were, too.

I've been working on my garden-to-be. The first time I tried to turn over the soil and incorporate some of my organic goodies, it was as hard as a rock. I'm reasonably strong and I could not get the shovel into the ground at all. So I swallowed my water-thrift-pride for a few days and watered my pile of grass to soften it up. It worked. Yesterday, I was able to get the shovel all the way into the ground and started the process of mixing the grass and coffee grounds into the sand. If only the Starbucks folks would recognize that I really do mean it when I tell them that I'll take absolutely every last speck of used grounds they have. I keep getting there to find that they've thrown out all that lovely stuff.

And finally, for inspiration, my own haiku sense of my blog's essence:

Weather, lack of stores
My food-gathering trials
Cook, isolated

The Sandwich Festival 2008

2008-05-13T12:27:00.004-07:00

Last night, I grilled a bunch of veggies to go with our fairly uninspired mac-n-broccoli-n-cheese that was designed as a meal we could all three eat together. BabyGirl ate one bite of each kind of grilled veg. I think. She did, of course, eat quite a bit of broccoli and the peas that I added to her mac-n-cheese.

I was planning to have leftovers of both for lunch, which is what Husband took to work with him this morning. But then I remembered that there was a sandwich blog event coming up, so I looked that up and decided to have a grilled veggie sandwich instead. So please enjoy the sequence of photos of my entry to the Sandwich Festival 2008, hosted by Food-n-More.

I considered going vegan with my entry, as it would be easy to do with a grilled veggie base, but I've really been loving mayo in hot sandwiches recently. Or I just realized I liked it, at least. So I took a ciabatta-style roll and lightly coated both top and bottom with mayo. Then I layered on grilled red onions, asparagus, and zucchini, added some sliced oil-cured olives and sun dried tomatoes, and topped that with a little sliced mozzarella and red pepper flakes.

In an attempt to make it easier to eat, I grilled it with a cast-iron pan on top to press it down and make it flat. It worked! Very easy to eat -- I surprised myself!

What also surprised me was just how much I loved this sandwich. I expected to like it. I expected it to be a Very Yummy Lunch. What I did not expect was to moan through most of the bites and to revise my dinner plans for tonight. I would be in serious trouble if Husband did not get to partake in this loveliness. He is awfully fond of a good sandwich. So another roll with come out of the freezer as soon as I finish writing this and the mushrooms we were going to have with pasta might become a soup to accompany our sammiches.

This could easily be made vegan by omitting the mayo and cheese or replacing them with vegan versions. It could be vegan and maybe better than the original with a drizzle of basil-blended- with-olive-oil or a white bean spread or both.

And now BabyGirl says, "Why are you making me wait to get up from my nap, you mean blogging mama?"

An Easy Supper

2008-05-11T12:24:00.003-07:00

The other night, we were tired and only somewhat hungry. So I made a salad of red pepper, tomatoes, avocado, cilantro, green onion, and lime juice and we ate that with Trader Joe's cheese and green chile tamales. Lovely, salty cotija got crumbled over the top of the salad before serving.

A Birthday Dinner And Soil-Building

2008-05-08T18:37:00.005-07:00

Well, Husband turned a year older a few days ago and I tried to be a good wife and give him a good dinner, especially as a present hasn't happened yet.

There's not much more Husband likes than a good potsticker, so I reprised a version I made a few months ago with a scallop and shrimp filling. I kept it very simple: scallops, shrimp, ginger, and a ton of green onion. I really wanted to cook them all at once, so I pulled out my monster electric griddle and panfried both sides instead of steaming one side. It worked; they were delicious.

I served them with a modified version of the cabbage-and-raw-ramen salad. I read a bunch of recipes online, but none of them really thrilled me. I took the best-looking of them and replaced some of the "salad oil" with toasted sesame oil, subbed sweet chile sauce for some of the sugar, added about a cup of chopped cilantro, and just generally gave it more Asian flavors and heat. It was good. For dessert, I made a lemon cake with lemon-cream cheese filling and frosting. Husband's a citrus lover, and the cake went over well. I'm not much of a decorator, so no picture of my not-ugly, but not-pretty cake.

Today, the morning featured bearable temperatures during BabyGirl's nap, so I went out to start doing some soil-building in my future garden. BabyGirl and I made a trip to Starbucks before the nap to pick up some used coffee grounds. There was a big pile of grass clippings I'd had my eye on for a while, so I raked those into roughly the size and shape of the raised bed that will eventually exist. Here's my lush, green garden area.

Ah, the desert in springtime!

Pasta Squared?

2008-05-06T12:01:00.004-07:00

Trader Joe's makes a lovely lemon pepper pasta that really tickles my tongue. It has a bit of a kick and really good lemon flavor. It stands alone with just a little garlic and olive oil, but the other night, I really wanted to make a one-pot sort of meal.

My problem is that I don't really like long pasta shapes. These aren't bad because they're so wide, but spaghetti and linguine just leave me cold. I don't like to work that hard to keep my food on the fork. That's the sad truth. But since I don't use them often, I don't really know how to make veggies work for the shape. I mean, it seems silly to have long, wide pasta hanging out with chunks of broccoli or even onion. So I browsed in the fridge, saw my friend the zucchini, and decided that I could mimic the shape of the pasta and avoid all the angst.

Using my beloved Messermeister veggie peeler, I shaved the zucchini into long strips about the width of the pasta. I added them to the pot when the pasta had just about a minute left to cook. In the meantime, I had sauteed some garlic and capers in olive oil, added heavy cream and some finely chopped oil-cured black olives, and reduced that down a bit. I tossed the pasta/zucchini in the sauce, added a bit more salt, and served it up with some grated parm. It was very tasty.

Now, this dish still doesn't win any big awards for veggie-rich meals, but we did plan to have bowls of berries for dessert, bringing in a good serving or two of fruit. It just never materialized, however. Such is life sometimes.

So Good To Cook Again

2008-04-30T10:50:00.004-07:00

Between the move and the travels and the lack of even an Isolationville-sized grocery store here in Desolationville, I feel as if I haven't really cooked more than a few meals here and there for months. This week has been better, though. I've been making an effort to get planned dinners on the table every night and it's mostly worked. Last night was grilled asparagus (in season in this state right now) and a passable attempt at shrimp fried rice. It needed higher heat, of course, and my plan to use the big side burner on our grill failed because of ridiculously high winds.

A few nights ago, I was feeling the need to use up some eggs. I made a layered omelet (I like them, ok?) with some soy-based Italian sausage, sundried tomatoes, capers, and cream cheese. It wasn't the prettiest one I've ever made because the sausage chunks were too big and I should really have had one more egg. We ate it with creamed spinach and toasted slices of some whole-grain rolls I had in the freezer. It was a nice comfort meal.

Now the big question is what (and how -- secret shopping doesn't work well in our current situation) do I plan for Husband's birthday, which is coming up next week. I'm thinking that I'll take a cake to his work, but the dinner is still completely unplanned.

Yet Another Reason To Garden

2008-04-26T14:08:00.003-07:00

Like anyone who cares about food and where it comes from needed any more reasons to feel that growing your own is a great idea, the NYTimes today provided another article about the distances that food travels. This article actually gave me new information. I didn't know that one of the reasons that imported food can be so cheap (imported to anywhere, not just the US) is that fuel for international shipping is not taxed! The EU is considering changing that, according to the NYTimes, but can you imagine what a shock it would be to the average consumer if food prices suddenly reflected a more realistic cost of bringing food from across the globe?

Anyway, it renewed my determination to get a garden bed ready for fall planting. I've been trying to get an agreement about where I can start working on soil improvement. I can't have an open compost pile, unfortunately, but I do have access to other organic materials. There's a big pile of grass clippings just thumbing its nose at me every time I see it. We can't buy much in the way of fresh produce without driving 60+ miles, so even greens and some herbs would be a great addition to our lives.

I'm thinking of doing lettuce in pots for the summer if I can get them to a decent size before they bolt in our heat. I also just gave someone else one of those hanging tomato growers and I'm thinking of trying to get a tomato plant to set fruit before the nights are too hot. A girl can dream, at any rate, and I'm working on keeping my dreams manageable. There are more possibilities here in Desolationville than there were in Isolationville, but the weather and wildlife will still keep some serious restrictions on what and how I can grow.

Haiku and A Healthy Eater

2008-04-24T20:05:00.002-07:00

I really, truly am trying to blog more regularly here. I just got back from a long trip and my cooking has not been particularly inspirational recently. My camera has been hard at work taking pictures of wildflowers instead of food. My most humble apologies!

But today, I perused the food blog event calendar a little, and found a few things of interest, so with luck, I'll get some new pictures up soon. In the meantime, I wrote a short haiku for the Haiku That Blog event. Entries are placed as comments to the announcement, but here is my haiku representing Lunch Bucket Bento:

A blog of boxes
Small containers, filled just so
Lunch, separated.

In other news, BabyGirl, who is now not so much a baby as a toddler-on-a-mission, has decided that green vegetables are the BEST THING EVER. This phase, which I'm sure will be short-lived, started about two weeks ago when she grabbed green beans off my plate while completely ignoring her cheese ravioli. Tonight, I made her pasta with peas and broccoli and cheese sauce (with mustard...I have to make up for the low-salt somehow). She painstakingly picked out every single pea, including those that had stuffed themselves into the shells, then ate about half the broccoli, and then deigned to eat some of the pasta, too.

Watching a toddler with cheesy fingers try to pry peas out of medium-sized shells is priceless, by the way. Very determined little beings, they are.

A Welcome Easter Surprise

2008-03-30T09:54:00.003-08:00

Never, ever allow a stomach virus to descend on your household when you have visitors. That is my lesson from the last two weeks. Over the course of three days, all five adults and two toddlers under our roof got violently ill. Food was just not on the radar for quite a while.

And then Easter showed up. I had resumed eating small, plain meals, but I hadn't had the energy to plan something tasty for Easter. Not that we're big on the religious celebrations anyway, but it's nice to have an excuse for a good meal. But there I was, without a plan, without much choice in ingredients, without a huge appetite. Then, Husband comes home from work bearing large bags of fresh produce from his co-worker's garden. Yes, we have one acquaintance who has lived in the desert long enough to coax miracles from the soil. And he sent just the right things at just the right time: asparagus and fresh herbs, the vegetable world's signs of spring.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I opened one of the bags to find about a dozen good-sized spears of asparagus; asparagus that had been picked an hour before it entered my kitchen. I combined the asparagus with the grill my parents gave us as a combined Christmas/housewarming gift (a grill the illness had left untested until this moment), used the herbs to make a slightly-thicker-than-I-meant-it-to-be sauce, and cooked up a package of Fresh and Easy's spinach-cheese ravioli. Easter Dinner was born.

A Short Post On Current Experiments: Pad Thai

2008-03-13T11:58:00.002-08:00

Visitors have descended on Desolationville, so I don't have a lot of computer time, but they just went out to see if any of the gas station convenience stores carry reading glasses and Baby Girl is asleep, so I thought I'd slip in a quick post. Without visuals, unfortunately.

I finally got tired of being Thai food deprived and decided to re-embark on a quest to make a decent Pad Thai.

Sometimes, a girl needs noodles.

I had most of the necessary ingredients, but I was missing tamarind paste and it really does add a lot. Then I noticed some Mexican tamarind chewy candies at one of the above-mentioned convenience stores and, for 89 cents for a bag of them, I thought, why not? They have sugar and chile, two ingredients I'd be adding to the Pad Thai anyway, so I auditioned them for the role. They work perfectly. They dissolve reasonably well when mixed with a little vinegar and microwaved, they add the tang, and you don't have to mess with the sticky mess that is a block of actual tamarind paste.

I'm a complete convert. I recently bought some real tamarind paste and using it was the usual sticky job and I decided that unless the flavor was significantly better, I'd stick with my candies. The truth is that I couldn't taste the difference in the final product. That's good enough for me.

So the sauce (enough for 7 - 8 ounces of rice noodles) for my Pad Thai looks more or less like this now:

3 Tamarindo candies dissolved in 1 TBS of white vinegar and 1 TBS water
2 TBS fish sauce
1 TBS soy sauce
2 TBS palm (or brown, in a pinch) sugar

I know it's not all that authentic, but it IS tasty.

A Slightly Less Isolated Foodie Returns

2008-03-05T10:30:00.002-08:00

After months of silence (including some silence from my actual kitchen), I'm hoping to get back to blogging here regularly. Since my last post, we moved a few thousand miles from the distant shores of nowhere to just about the dead center of nowhere. So, an improvement, right?!

Well, maybe. Instead of an hour and a half flight to the nearest real supermarket, etc., it's now just over an hour's drive to not only a supermarket, but a Trader Joe's, a Chinatown, a CITY. This is a deceiving blessing. Because I can get good produce in an easy day trip, I feel like I should, like I have to, like it's preordained that I should do so on a regular basis. Thus, our new car has almost ten thousand miles on it in four months. Husband's 70-mile-a-day commute has helped, too, of course, but the fact that many weekends see us doing 200 mile road trips to shop doesn't help.

Our new town is about the same size as our old town, just over 500 people. It's very, very different in all other ways. In Isolationville, the biggest employers were the federal and state governments. Here, in what I'm dubbing Desolationville, the biggest employer by far is the fast food industry because Desolationville is a pit-stop on an interstate highway. I've gone from having one year-round restaurant to having more than a dozen; they just aren't the kind of restaurants I'd typically choose. On the plus-side, our traditional Junk Food Night has a whole new sense of self here. Isolationville, as you all know, was on the tundra. Desolationville is in the heart of the desert. There will be no wild salmon or gallons of berries to pick here.

I had none of my own kitchen stuff for the first month we were here and still haven't quite settled in to the kitchen. It's a fine kitchen. I HATE the counter-top, but there is a lot of it, so I can't complain too much. I'm finally cooking with gas again, which makes me happy, and there's a decent view from the kitchen, which helps ease the pain of giving up my river views from my kitchen in Isolationville.

Anyway. I'm back. I hope to get some new posts about food up and running soon. My cooking needs a kick in the butt and joining food blog events is one of the best kicks out there.

Cranberries From The Tundra

2007-10-31T10:46:00.000-08:00

As mentioned earlier, I've been picking a lot of cranberries/lingonberries (both names are used for the same berry) recently, freezing my fingers and toes in the process. They've shown up in my oatmeal, in crisps, in breads, in sauces, and I just keep picking more to restock my supply. This all comes in handy for this month's Garden Cook Event hosted by Paulchen's Foodblog for which the theme is cranberries.

I decided to add cranberries to my lemon bar recipe because 1) I love lemon and cranberry together and 2) it uses four eggs and I was, once again, the happy recipient of 18 locally-laid eggs the other day. Three dozen eggs gifted in 10 days means finding a lot of ways to use eggs!

This was mostly successful, but I really needed to have been bolder about how many cranberries I added. They were a little thin on the ground, as you can see.

The bars were delicious, though, so here's the recipe. In the future, I think I'd use about a cup and a half of cranberries, or maybe even a cup and three-quarters.

Lemon-Cranberry Bars

Crust:

1 cup butter, softened and creamed
2 cups flour
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon each of dehydrated lemon and lime juice

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix the ingredients well and pat into a 9 x 11 inch brownie pan. Bake for 20 minutes, until just starting to brown. Remove from oven.

Filling:

4 eggs, beaten
5 TBS flour
2 cups sugar
juice and zest of one large lemon
pinch of salt
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries (or more)

Combine the first five ingredients and mix well. Pour over crust and sprinkle evenly with the cranberries. Bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven, dust with powdered sugar, and let cool completely before cutting into squares.

Sustainable Seafood Month: Wild Smoked Salmon Strata

2007-10-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

The Leather District Gourmet is hosting a sustainable seafood event this month, and I'm getting in just under the wire today. If there's one thing Isolationville does have, it's fish. Lots and lots of fish. We live in one of the largest salmon spawning grounds in the world, so our salmon is not just wild, it's local, and very, very little fossil fuel energy was spent to get it to our table.

This year was a great one for salmon in our particular drainage. The escapement (the number of fish that get past the commercial fisheries) was 3 million sockeye alone! We have kings and silvers, too, so there were one heck of a lot of salmon swimming upriver just a couple hundred yards from our house. We did have to drive about 14 miles to where we put in our net to get our subsistence catch in July, but that's it for transportation of these beauties.

My belief is that sustainability is in the use, not just the type of fish and how you get it. Our planet would be so much better off if we all treated animal foods, including fish, as a special occasion food or a condiment. With that in mind, my dish for this event features some of peppered smoked sockeye I made this year. It packs a flavorful punch, so you don't need much of it to get good salmon taste. I was also working on using up the wonderful fresh eggs a friend gave us. A friend of hers keeps chickens who are going nuts with laying, so I was the very happy recipient of 18 fresh eggs last week.

I made an eggy smoked salmon strata, or a stacked omelet. It was fun and pretty easy. Here's a rough recipe:

Wild Smoked Salmon Strata

5 eggs
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup water
salt to taste

Beat the eggs and liquid together very well. Set aside.

1/4-1/3 pound smoked, peppered salmon, shredded
1/4 cup capers, minced
1/4 onion, slivered
1/4 cup cream cheese or soft, mild cheese (or goat cheese would be great)
fresh pepper
butter for frying

The dish is a stacked series of very thin omelets, each with one of the fillings. For the smoked salmon strata, I did four layers with the salmon, two of which were heavily peppered as well, two caper layers, a cheese layer, and a thick onion layer. For most of them, I melted butter in a nonstick, small pan, poured in a scant 1/4 cup of the eggs, sprinkled on the filling, flipped, and cooked a minute on the flip side. Each finished layer was added to a straight-sided bowl to help shape the finished product. For the onion layer, I first carmelized the onion, spread it evenly in the pan, and poured the egg on top.

I served this with stuffed, twice-baked potatoes, so I let it sit a while to let the layers come together a bit, and then rewarmed it during the last ten minutes that the potatoes were in the oven. I inverted the strata onto a plate for cutting and serving. It's not much more difficult than making each person an omelet, but it can be quite elegant, and is a versatile dish.

For the price of a tail-end of one half of one fish, locally caught, we had a dish full of salmon flavor and goodness.

Gathering, Revisited

2007-10-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

This morning, I picked cranberries.

It sounds so ordinary, typed plainly like that. It was anything but ordinary or plain.

Our cranberries here are tundra-dwellers, not bog cranberries, and grow close to the ground and moss. All advice suggests picking them after the first frost, so they will be sweeter. Not sweet. Just sweeter than they would have been otherwise. The advisors did not mention how much deeper the red would be -- the color of blood that has congealed slightly -- but that was an easy observation.

I didn't get to pick cranberries last year. I was gone before the first frost, and when I returned, we had snow cover until spring. I had been told you could pick the berries until April, if there was no snow cover. That didn't happen last winter. So this was my first experience. Almost. I picked a couple small batches in the last week, just enough for my oatmeal in the morning.

This morning, though, I was determined to get out there while they were still frozen from the night's frigid temperatures. I thought I had gotten used to the tundra's beauty, not immune to it, but at least comfortable enough with it so I didn't have to actively appreciate every small vista my eyes wandered to. And maybe during the day, when it is thawed, I have reached that level of intimacy.

Not this morning.

Most of the berries I picked still had a frost on them, as if nature had sugared them for me in preparation for decorating a cake. They lay nestled in frost-crunchy leaves with moss lying alongside, crisp and ice-outlined. I was unprepared for the beauty of the truly frozen tundra. I may have joked about living on the frozen tundra over the past couple years, but until this morning, I'm not sure I'd ever really experienced the tundra except when thawed. It is a different landscape below 32 degrees.

Maybe the knowledge that I will soon leave this tangled miniature jungle imbued it with a special radiance this morning. The skies were gray, so it wasn't the angle of the light or the quality of the sunshine. Or maybe knowing that my gathering opportunities will be limited in my new life in the desert made this particular foraging expedition just that much more special.

I don't know. What I do know is that the cold disappeared. My vision took in the layers of vegetation more clearly than usual. I appreciated the unfrosted berries hiding beneath icy, fall-reddened leaves as much as the sugary berries sticking up above their foliage, begging to fall into my ungloved fingers.

I will gather again tomorrow morning, before the sun warms the berries and their tundra home. I don't know if it will be as magical as this morning. I don't know if it can be. Even if it is just a typical berrying outing, I will be grateful as always that I can gather to me wild foods tended only by nature; that I can return, however briefly, to a simpler, shorter food chain that ties me so directly to the earth and its bounty.

I Am A Bad Blogger

2007-10-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

It's amazing. I go away. I stay in houses with internet access, kitchens, and access to actual stores. With good food and produce. And I don't blog the whole time I'm away.

So, to start: the news. In about a month, I will become the Not-So-Isolated-Foodie. Oh, I'll still live in a tiny town (just under a thousand, as compared to 400 now), but it's a tiny town connected to ROADS. Roads that lead to Big Cities.

Many people, upon hearing the news, have immediately said, "You must be so excited to be getting out of Isolationville!!" But, I'm not. I like Isolationville. I love parts of life as an Isolated Foodie. The food situation is not really one of the parts I love, especially now, returning from the land of plenty to the land of empty shelves (no milk at the store for the first couple days we got back, for example). But I will miss the endless views and the long sunsets over the river and the river itself, always beautiful and always changing (we're close enough to the coast that the river has significant tides). I will miss our friends and the quiet pace of life. I will miss our house that we've just finished settling into. I will miss the amazing seasonality of life here, with the boisterous summers of salmon and bears and berries and the huge calm of winter.

Life goes on. While not excited about leaving this life, I am excited about our new life ahead. We will go from tundra to desert, quite the change. I am eagerly anticipating learning to cook in a solar oven because there will be four months of the year that I will do whatever I can to avoid cooking much of anything indoors. A grill and a trusty solar oven will be my closest cooking friends, I think. Those and the year-round farmers' market that is, admittedly, a little over an hour away. But that's an hour by CAR, not airplane. I can do that. At least every other week.

During my break from blogging due to travel, I did eat some wonderful food, visit farmers' markets, and make a gazillion truffles as my contribution to a homemade wedding. Double truffle boxes as the wedding favors, so two kinds. A very plain chocolate ganache truffle, coated in chocolate cookie crumbs, and an espresso-bean-and-lemon-infused ganache coated in crushed praline pecans. They went over very well.

And now, I have to start planning a month of meals designed to use up my stores of food. I should do a full inventory, especially of the frozen treat type foods, and really plan this, but I probably won't.

HHDD #14: The Roundup and Voting

2007-08-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

The gnocchi are in! The roundup for this month's Hay Hay It's Donna Day event is posted at Cafe Lynnylu. The guidelines for voting for a winner are here.

I enjoyed this blogging event a lot. Both my original meal and the leftovers were successful dishes in our house.

It's Berry Season!

2007-08-27T22:32:00.000-07:00

I am a somewhat obsessive berry picker. Today, for example, we stopped so I could take a picture of some taiga-like landscape, but I happened to notice that there were a lot of bear berries. Or bog cranberries. We were in disagreement about just what they were. I picked them anyway. They were gorgeous. They were tasty. They were berries. What more do I need? Most of my berry picking obsession has focused on the blueberries to this point, of course. In addition to all the berries we've eaten (certainly thousands...tens of thousands??), I've got a gallon and a half in the freezer for the winter. I'd love to have double that, but the blueberries came in early and I missed some of the best picking. I resorted to mixed-berry picking over the weekend, getting two quarts of mixed blueberries, crow berries, and cranberries.

One of my favorite ways to eat blueberries (other than in a big, fat bowl with cream, still warm from the sun) is in a crisp. I often make individual ones like this lovely beast that joined us for Scrabble last week. The topping is pretty much 1:1:2:2 flour:oatmeal:brown sugar:butter, with pinches of salt and baking powder, and a hefty bit of cinnamon and coriander (still thanking the HHDD sorbet round that I didn't enter for that one; one of the flavor combos I tried was blueberry and coriander and it's a huge winner).

Back to Normal Weather and Thoughts of Scurvy

2007-08-19T22:11:00.000-07:00

We had a week of summer. Glorious, sunny days in the low-70s. Sunshine blazing through my windows during what is usually the wettest month here in Isolationville. It was a treat. It was a trick. Overnight, our weather reverted to normal, with gray, wet skies and winds gusting above 40 mph. Ah, well, it was lovely while it lasted, and we took advantage with nice cool meals like cold sesame noodles with snow pea salad.

Tonight, however, soup was on the menu. Sopa de lima, to be exact, from the Sundays at Moosewood cookbook. I love this soup. I like the freshness of the tomatoes and lime, the soggy crunch of the tortilla chips (or strips of fried tortilla, which is what I usually do), the richness of the avocado. It all mingles in the bowl so amiably. We had some grated pepperjack and a few sprigs of windowsill cilantro to finish off the toppings.

When I first moved to Isolationville, deep in the throes of the coldest winter in a couple decades, I made the mistake of reading a collection of journals from ships trying to find the northwest passage (a previously mythical sea-route across the top of the North American continent; with global warming, it may soon be a reality almost year-round). The bravest (or foolhardiest, depending on your perspective) of the explorers ended up caught in ice at the end of the summer, doomed to spend the winter in a giant ice cube with diminishing supplies and no way out. Many of those crews succumbed to scurvy, and as I read these accounts, I started to crave oranges and tomatoes and limes.

It made perfect sense: I was in a land of darkness for much of the day, surrounded by piles of snow, with no escape route, and the produce section of our small store left much to be desired. They did carry citrus. I will have to admit that up front. Husband made fun of me, claiming that "nobody gets scurvy anymore."

Oh, really?

Just in time for me to score a major debating victory, the NYTimes Sunday Magazine printed one of their occasional "medical mystery" columns and the mystery illness was scurvy! A modern case of scurvy, not in some northern hinterland, but in the Bronx. I felt vindicated!

With this lovely soup, however, even I don't worry about getting scurvy:

Sopa de Lima (Sundays at Moosewood, page 455)

1 cup chopped onion
4 large cloves of garlic, minced
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 or 2 chiles, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
3 1/2 cups chopped fresh tomato (here in Isolationville, I use a can of crushed and a can of diced tomatoes instead of fresh)
3 cups vegetable stock
1/3 cup fresh-squeezed lime juice
salt to taste

In a medium pot, saute the onions and garlic in oil until the onions are translucent. Add the chiles, cumin, and oregano, and saute a few more minutes. Add the chopped tomatoes and sprinkle with a little salt. Cover the pot and cook gently until the tomatoes begin to release the juices. Stir occasionally. Add the stock and simmer, covered, for about 15 minutes. Add the lime juice and salt to taste.

Serve topped with grated cheese and crumbled tortilla chips. Garnish with finely chopped cilantro, if desired. (I usually serve it with cubes of avocado and lime wedges as well.)

Leftovers Are Beautiful, Too

2007-08-12T16:45:00.001-07:00

My leftover gnocchi went to good use, as planned. For lunch the day after I made them, I sauteed half a red onion and red pepper flakes in some olive oil until they were just barely starting to turn brown. Then I added capers and the gnocchi and tossed for a few minutes. I had planned to stop there, but the gnocchi started sticking to the pan a little before they were hot, so I drizzled in enough cream to prevent such silliness. And then I remembered that I hadn't used quite all the buttered crumbs from the night before, so we had those as a little crunchy topper. All very yummy.

Apple Tacos -- Who Knew?

2007-08-10T21:59:00.000-07:00

We've been having what qualifies as a heat wave here in Isolationville. It's been all the way in the 70s, with abundant sunshine and calm winds. Our wall o' windows ensures that our house gets very warm without diligent heat management through blind closures and window openings changing throughout the day.

And so, I've been inspired to cook summery foods. There isn't a lot of call for them around here, so I'll take what I can get. Lunch the past two days has consisted of edamame salad with a toasted sesame dressing and spicy sesame noodles. The leftovers made today a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. For dinner tonight, I'd planned tacos thinking to use up the last of the tomatillos from my birthday package. Things did not go quite as planned.

I set my tofu to drain, because I didn't feel like thawing out some Gimme Lean ground beef style even if we do, indeed, still have a package of it in the deep freeze. I'm not convinced that we do anyway. My brilliant plan was to coat small pieces of tofu in a combination of taco seasoning, flour, and nutritional yeast and fry it to a crispy goodness. That part worked. The part that didn't work was the salsa I'd planned to go with it. I was thinking tomatillos, cilantro (from my flower pot in the window), green chile, lime, and either green or red onion, depending on my mood when I got to that bit. But when I opened up the tupperware, I found that I'd left only three small tomatillos. Clearly, not enough for a salsa fresca.

I started poking around the kitchen and pantry. My first thought was to just use my fresh ingredients to liven up a can of Herdez salsa verde. It could have worked. But then I spied the green apples hanging out by the sink and thought, why the heck not. I could see nothing about a granny smith that didn't go with the rest of my planned ingredients.

So that's what we had. Lovely, crisp-fried taco tofu, shredded cabbage, and an apple-tomatillo salsa on hot corn tortillas. I went with the red onion, mostly for color, and the whole thing worked surprisingly well. I'd make it again. I think.

HHDD # 14: Smoked Salmon Gnocchi

2007-08-06T23:42:00.000-07:00

My first introduction to food blogging events was supposed to be the HHDD that featured sorbet, but I just didn't get my act together. I've managed a few others, but I'm very pleased to present my very first attempt at gnocchi for this month's event hosted by cafelynnylu.

When I read the announcement, I tried to think of some flavor combinations that would be appropriate for Isolationville. I've never made gnocchi before and didn't want to mess with the basic recipe too much, so I decided to stick with savory so I didn't have to worry about swapping out the parmesan. Given that we're still up to our hips in salmon, I decided to work with that. I had a very small piece of traditionally smoked/dried salmon left.

The texture and flavor of this particular smoked beauty (and yes, that's a little scale in the corner of the picture) lie somewhere in the realm where shoe leather, bacon, salmon, and smoke all come together. It's not for the faint of heart and a little goes a long way.

I shredded it finely for the gnocchi, knowing that the oils would seep through the dough nicely and spread the wealth of smoky goodness. I ended up with about a half a cup. I had some troubles with the dough. It was so wet as to be unworkable, no matter how much flour I put on the board. So I dumped it back into the bowl and added another 1/3 cup of flour. It was still wet, but barely workable, so I rolled out my worms of dough.

They weren't the prettiest of creatures, but they got the job done. I had made a cream sauce, very simple, by reducing to half the original volume 3/4 cup of wine with the zest of about half a lemon (it's what I had; Isolationville's store didn't have any for sale). I added a cup of heated heavy cream and reduced that a little before seasoning it with salt, black pepper, and crushed red pepper. Once half the gnocchi were boiled, I puddled a little sauce into each of two soup plates, spooned in the gnocchi straight from the pot, topped them with more sauce and buttered, toasted bread crumbs, and popped them into the oven for about fifteen minutes, to let everything get hot and bubbly.

It was delicious. Husband's comment after his first bite was, "I could eat a lot of these!"

This was my first bite. Creamy, dense, and crunchy; a true stick-to-your-ribs dinner. Although we ate quite early, and the portions weren't enormous, neither of us got hungry later. A bonus of this whole exercise is that half the gnocchi are still left! I had practice from the first half, and so managed to make the second set a little more presentable. I think they will be our lunch, reheated through a quick saute with red onion slivers and capers, a sort of deconstructed smoked salmon bagel.

Ok, so they're still not the fat, grooved cocoons that are store-bought gnocchi, but they're cute. They remind me of undercooked peanut butter cookies, only smaller. And with smoked salmon bits. I had a lot of fun with this event and got two good meals out of it, so I'm happy all around.

Birthdays Are Grand

2007-08-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

My birthday was a few weeks ago now, and one of my belated birthday presents was a box of produce from my ever-understanding sister. Two luscious tomatoes, full of the sun and heat that are so missing from Isolationville's "summer". Blue potatoes, tomatillos, chiles...oh, she's a good sister.

The fate of the tomatillos was a given: fish tacos. I know I recently posted a photo of our Fourth of July fish tacos, but they were deficient in a number of ways. Chief among the defects was the lack of tomatillos for the cilantro-sour cream salsa. Last night, we fixed that problem. Into a small pan went tomatillos, whole garlic cloves, a jalapeno, and two green onions. These got a short simmer and then a trip into the container for my stick blender. The second blending was the juice of a lime and a big bunch of cilantro. Both blended batches then joined some sour cream in a bowl.

Simple pleasures: hot corn tortillas filled with simply pan fried tilapia, shredded cabbage, and cilantro-sour cream salsa. Crunch, juiciness, and an explosion of flavor.

I'm A Gatherer

2007-08-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

I've never really thought of gardening or picking wild berries as an atavistic exercise in getting back to my Pleistocene or Neolithic roots before I read the following two paragraphs in The Omnivore's Dilemma, but the thought tickles me:

Playing at self-reliance takes different forms in different people, and you can probably tell a lot about a person by his choice of atavism: whether he's drawn to the patient and solitary attentiveness of fishing, the strict mathematical syntax of building, the emotional drama of the hunt, or the mostly comic dialogue with other species that unfolds in the garden. Most of us have a pretty good idea which of these jobs we'd try for if somehow a time machine were to plunk us down in the Pleistocene or Neolithic.

At least until my adventures in hunting and gathering, I'd always thought of myself as a Neolithic kind of guy. Growing food has been my atavism of choice since I was ten years old, when I planted a "farm" in my parents' suburban yard and set up a farm stand patronized, pretty much exclusively, by my mother. The mysteries of germination and flowering and fruiting engaged me from an early age, and the fact that by planting and working an ordinary patch of dirt you could in a few months' time harvest things of taste and value was, for me, nature's most enduring astonishment. It still is.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma, pages 364-365

The academic in me argues that being a "Neolithic kind of guy" does not restrict one to just gardening/farming. Plenty of "Neolithic guys", including many today, live not by hoe alone, but supplement with hunting and gathering of wild meat and plant foods.

That aside, I'm most definitely a gatherer at heart. It's a bit strange that I feel so content in that conviction, because I garden whenever I can (even in my Isolationville garage these days) and I was, for a couple years, a market gardener. I also study farming on many different levels, in many different times and places.

But still. I'm a gatherer.

The joy of feeling a hard lump in the sand, of knowing that a big, fat quahog lies there beneath my toes. The frantic sensation of standing in the middle of square miles of tundra, understanding that no matter how long I pick, I can never pick even a significant fraction of the billions of blueberries that surround me. The moment, as Pollan puts it, when I get my eye on, and morels jump out at me from the leaf litter and I can almost taste the mushroom tart they will become.

My heart also sings when I see seed leaves emerging from the soil, knowing that I put the seeds there, I gave them water and nutrients, and they grew. There is magic in agriculture.

For me, though, there is a greater magic in harvesting what no person produced. It makes me feel natural, in the same way as nursing my daughter makes me feel mammal. I was designed for this: for picking out the color and shape of the berries against the fall-purpled tundra, for kneeling amongst the hummocky wetness, using my opposable thumbs to pluck the berries from their branches, even for being able to make and carry containers to hold the berries as I pick.

It's much more than a feeling of getting something for nothing. There's an innate rightness about collecting food from nature. Gathering wild foods connects me more directly to the natural world than almost anything else I do, other than simply exist. The distance between the sun's energy and me is short, and the path it took between us direct.

For all the pitfalls of living in Isolationville, it does provide many opportunities for foraging from nature. Even the salmon are gathered here more than anything else. When there are millions of them, very literally, you don't exactly have to hunt for them. There may not be many green edible things around here, but there's plenty of protein, fat, and carbohydrates nonetheless.

Isolationville is a good place to be a gatherer (and a hunter, too, I should admit; just because I don't eat our furry friends doesn't mean they aren't here in abundance). Just lucky my avatar isn't an addicted gardener. Then, I'd be in trouble.

I'm Almost Back

2007-07-30T23:53:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to get back to my food blogging! Our camera was returned yesterday, so I can take pictures again. I have been hesitant about blogging specific meals without being able to take pictures. I'm not sure why. More than that, though, I was sick last week and so didn't cook much that was very interesting. That will all change now! I've been keeping my eye on upcoming food blog events and there are a few I'll probably join.

In the meantime, I've finally read The Omnivore's Dilemma (a birthday gift from clever Husband!) and I'll post a couple thoughts about that this week, too.

I (Mostly) Love Michael Pollan

2007-07-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

After way too long a wait, I'm now in the middle of reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I read and liked Botany of Desire and his many articles in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. In virtually all his writing, I find one tiny little nugget that I strongly disagree with. I've already found it in Omnivore's Dilemma.

Let me start by reminding anyone reading this that my blog actually started as a wonkish food policy blog before I realized that my heart lay in a true food blog. So this little nugget is very little. And very particular. And very petty. See, but I recognize AND acknowledge this! It's a step in the right direction, no?

In discussing the stages of grass's domination of human food supply and the planet, Pollan refers to what he says is "usually called" the invention of agriculture. He quite rightly sees that as a pretty darn smug way of looking at it. The problem I have is that people who actually study that phenomenon (myself included) virtually never call it an invention. At most, discovery might slip. But generally, it is referred to as "origins of food production" or "the transition to food production". Researchers recognize that there were always (at least) two species involved and changing, that it was a process, not an immediate change, etc.

I realize that almost nobody else cares about a three-word phrase out of a whole book. It's my field, though, and I get irked when people writing about it for the popular press so badly misrepresent how the phenomenon is viewed within the field.

And that's the end of my rant.

Well, the end of my rant about the invention of agriculture, anyway. There is so much more to rant about in Pollan's work. Again, this is my field, so he isn't saying much I haven't heard before. That said, he puts information together in a clear, connected style that makes his reader sit up and take notice. He makes me glad, all over again, that I haven't eaten poultry or red meat in over twenty years. He reinforces my conviction that I won't eat them for another twenty unless I'm raising the animals myself, and maybe not even then.

Last night, I had to think back to the meal I had made and try to figure out how much corn and corn by-products were in it. Not many, truthfully, since we had one processed component with a big salad followed by a rhubarb/blueberry crisp. The salad dressing I made definitely had at least a little corn in it somewhere. I'm sure the packaged bread crumbs that went into the crisp topping had corn in them. The butter was no doubt from corn-fed cows. The sugar was straight cane.

My lack of a camera is starting to get to me. I really like sharing pictures of what we're eating. I'll have to watch more carefully when Husband shows me (for the third time) how I can take still photos with our digital video camera.

Bagel Dreams

2007-07-19T15:41:00.000-07:00

I see that the best part of having people comment on my blog is following a link back to their blogs and seeing the wonderful things they've been cooking. In particular, I've seen a few of the Daring Bakers' bagel challenge over the past week. Today, I got to see the bagel party that is featured on My Kitchen in Half Cups. So much fun!

I admit to being a bit of a bagel snob. I have New York roots and a good bagel is a thing of glory. A bad bagel? At best, a decent roll. At worst, a conglomeration of bits from so many different baked goods without the glories of any of the constituent parts. When I first moved to the city I called home before moving to Isolationville, I was delighted to see lots of bagels displayed at the local chain of bakeries. Until I looked at the flavors. Blueberry, the clearly and rightly despised bane of bagels mentioned in the commentary that goes with the Daring Bakers' bagel recipe, was not even the worst.

Dutch Apple Crumb.

Three words that should never be associated with a bagel, and yet I kid you not. They made and sold Dutch Apple Crumb bagels. I still shudder. And yet what did they not have? A good, old-fashioned onion bagel. No garlic, either. What's the world coming to?

The various Daring Bakers make bagel making look so fun and easy that I need to try it myself. I've wanted to for quite a while, but this is the motivation I needed. We, of course, cannot get real bagels here in Isolationville. Thomas's and Lender's are the bagels on offer, and those hardly qualify. And they come in blueberry, too. So, with any luck at all, I'll soon be posting some bagel commentary of my own.

And, of course, enjoying the bagels with my own smoked salmon!

A Week of Guests and Salmon

2007-07-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

Ah, so woefully behind! Good friends came to visit for almost a week -- yes, all the way out here in Isolationville! (I told you they were good friends!) Their visit followed a weekend of salmon, salmon, salmon, and this all adds up to having no time to blog.

So here's a bit of a roundup of the last week:

Last Saturday, we did a little salmon netting with friends and came home with six big, beautiful salmon, caught about a mile from salt water. Some of one became dinner, some went in the freezer, and some bathed themselves in smoke for many hours before joining their friends in the deep-freeze. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of this yet. Our camera is once again gone walkabout.

Monday, our friends arrived, including a 3 1/2 year old. We dined on fresh salmon, roasted potatoes, and zucchini the first night. Breakfast the next day was English muffins with cream cheese and two kinds of smoked salmon, plain and peppered. Both were appreciated.

On Wednesday, our kitchen reverted to fish processing central after Visiting Friend caught two gorgeous king salmon (our netted fishies were sockeyes). Most of that went straight into vacuum packs and the freezer so they could transport it home to Pennsylvania at the end of their visit. A bit became dinner. Some filleting scraps did a very quick brine-and-smoke to become a quite-delicate smoked salmon that was part of two breakfasts later in the visit.

Thursday, we were out adventuring with nature and our picnic-style lunch consisted of, among other goodies, a loaf of The Bread, more smoked salmon, Maytag blue cheese, olives, sliced red peppers, avocado, and crackers. Visiting Friend caught a lovely sockeye, which was promptly filleted, brined, and smoked overnight, some plain, some peppered, so it would be at least partly frozen by yesterday afternoon when they hopped the first of their three flights home.

Friday required a late afternoon snack of reasonable proportions to keep the travelers hale and hearty until dinner in the next airport, so we had a reprise of the blueberry cornbread shortcake concoction.

And now it's Saturday and I have to decide if I'm still going to try to make a sorbet this weekend, just under the deadline, or if I'll move on to a different food blog event.

A Mexican Fourth of July

2007-07-05T09:35:00.001-07:00

DogNextDoor's person joined us for a Fourth of July meal last night. We had agreed to do this, but not discussed menus at all. On general principle, I made a loaf of The Bread, but we ended up deciding on a Mexican theme for the night. I couldn't not use The Bread, though, and my memories of glorious breakfasts of a fresh, crusty roll stuffed with avocado, lime, and salt led to our appetizer. It worked just fine. The avocado was courtesy of our grocery store's new and improved produce section, and was the second of a package of three that are good-looking and reasonably priced. It's all very exciting!

Our second/main course was fish tacos. Normally, they'd be even simpler than the picture shows because they would have just plain old shredded cabbage. But no cabbage was to be had, and a bad of cole slaw shred was the substitute, explaining the purple and orange bits. I make very simple fish tacos. When I have the option, I use tilapia because I like it's flavor and texture for tacos. I panfry fillets heavily salt-and-peppered until the tail bits get quite crispy. I flake that roughly once it's cooled a little. The sauce is a sour-cream/cilantro sauce made with jalapeno, green onion, garlic, loads of cilantro, lime juice, and sour cream. Isolationville has yet to reward me with tomatillos, but they are usually in the mix for the sauce, too.

I only got to take one picture of the tacos, because Husband was complaining to DND's person that he never gets to eat his food hot since I started blogging, so I abandoned the camera for marital harmony.

Dessert was lovely. DND's person brought a pint of Ben and Jerry's NY Super Fudge Chunk ice cream, and I heated a little goat's milk cajeta (carmelized, sweetened condensed milk) to drizzle over it. So yum!

All in all, a lovely Mexican-themed Fourth of July in one of the few parts of the country never colonized by the Spanish or owned by Mexico. Go figure.

The Dumpling Roundup and How to Shop for Isolationville

2007-07-05T08:10:00.002-07:00

The roundup of Waiter, There's Something in My...Dumpling is up at The Passionate Cook this morning. A lot of gyoza/wonton/potsticker varieties are there keeping mine company, alongside some delicious-looking sweet dumplings.

The Passionate Cook wonders, quite sensibly, how I get gyoza wrappers in Isolationville, and the answer is that I don't. Like virtually everyone else in and around Isolationville, I have a very large deep freeze in my garage and it is a depository for all things unavailable in our isolation. Mine tends to have a pretty good stock of things like edamame, gyoza wrappers, frozen herbs, and the frozen bounty of our local landscape: fish and berries. And Trader Joe's treats, of course. The non-local stuff comes via return trips from the World Out There, when we stuff coolers and ship boxes full of all kinds of things we can't get here.

We don't do quite as much stocking-up as some people do. In part, that's because Husband's job takes him out of Isolationville with regularity, though not frequency, and so we don't usually need to keep more than two months of exotics on hand. It's also because we don't have the ready cash it takes to do it properly. Between the actual food costs and the shipping, we typically spend $400-700 on a shopping trip in The City, not counting the car rental and hotel. Some folks spend thousands.

A typical day includes two trips each to CostCo, an Asian/International grocery, a health food store, and a regular supermarket/department store. The first trips are for non-perishables, which get packed and shipped parcel post or via the airline's special food freight services. You only get the special food rates if you're shipping over a hundred pounds, so if we're taking all the perishables as checked luggage, we sometimes don't have enough for that. The second trips are last-minute for frozen stuff. We can ship that via the airline, and sometimes do, but if we've only been away for a short time and don't have a lot of luggage, it's easier to take a cooler with us and then check it on the way home, full of goodies.

Right now, we're in the middle of a four-month stretch with no relief from Isolationville, and our food stores are showing it. We've actually just placed a desperation order with one of the services that shop and ship for you. Unfortunately, there were some things I wanted (like another bottle of sweet chili sauce) that weren't available, so now I'm going to have to hope that the store in The Other Town has it. They do a very good job of trying to stock a lot of different things in a small store with a tiny customer base, so they might have it.

Living in Isolationville is a lesson in how to make do with what you can get. My cooking and eating habits have changed radically since moving here, not necessarily for the better. But I'm learning to get around the limitations, and I'm actually using this blog and especially the food blogging events to push myself to be more aggressive in pushing the limits of our food-procuring possibilities.

Corn and Salmon: Two Meals

2007-07-04T18:34:00.001-07:00

For two nights in a row, we've been playing at eating summer. Monday was gorgeous...as close to a real summer as it gets around Isolationville. Seventy degrees, beautiful blue skies, a light breeze to scare away the bugs. We took a long walk with Baby Girl and DogNextDoor to the public docks and let DND play in the water. When I went to the store later, I couldn't resist the corn (probably should have...the cut end was starting to ferment) and they had affordable and ripe avocados, so a summer meal was born! Our produce selection has improved dramatically over the last month. Part of that is just increased summer traffic; our store goes from one produce delivery a week to several. But there's new management, too, over the winter, and they're doing really lovely things. There was ginger. Actual, fresh ginger. I hardly know what to do with myself.

Anyway. So dinner Monday night was salmon, avocado, grape tomato, and red pepper salad with cilantro, green onion, and lime juice, and corn on the cob. Very tasty. We had some of the salmon leftover, and I had just cooked it with salt and pepper, so it was completely flexible as an ingredient the next night. We also had two ears of corn left. So for dinner last night, I combined the corn kernels, the salmon, green onions, sauteed onion and red pepper, cilantro, and a light fritter batter, and made corn-salmon fritter-cakes. The pictures didn't turn out very well, as you can see.

We ate the cakes with a big heap of finely shredded romaine, lightly dressed again with sushi vinegar, sesame oil, and salt. A sweet chile sauce finished off the meal.

As I was shredding the lettuce, I was taken back to my meat-eating days. One of my favorite sandwiches, and the last meaty meal I ate, was a good hard salami with lettuce, tomato, and mayo. Now, I realize how heretical that might have been, but it was tasty! Really good delis would make their sandwiches with finely shredded lettuce rather than whole or torn leaves, and the texture added a certain something.

When people ask me if I miss eating meat, the answer is not really. I miss certain foods that happen to feature meat, but it's not necessarily the meat that I miss. This sandwich is like that. I love the spice of the salami with the crunch of the lettuce and the creaminess of the mayo, all on a good, crunchy roll. The meat was definitely part of a larger package. I haven't eaten red meat or poultry for over twenty years, and it's still very particular dishes that I think about, not the meat at their center or side or wherever it was.

All that from shredding my lettuce.

This Isn't My Grandmother's Shortcake!

2007-07-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

In my family, four or maybe five generations of it, strawberry shortcake is taken very, very seriously. There is A Way to make it, a time and place to eat it, and deviations are not encouraged. For the most part, I agree with that. Once you replace the strawberries with some other kind of fruit, however, anything goes!

And so, after having a lovely meal of roasted baby red potatoes, onion fritatta, and creamed spinach, I embarked on dessert. Let's call it Spiced Blueberry Corncake.

After my blueberry flavor pairing work last week, I had a combo in mind that I wanted a use for, having decided on a different one for my as-yet-to-be-made sorbet. I had tried a coriander blueberry mix and loved it, so that was my starting point. I poured about two cups of my frozen, hand-picked, wild blueberries into a small saucepan, added some sugar and the juice of a lemon, and turned on the heat. Once everything was well thawed and giving up juices, I pulled out the berries and reduced the liquid to a near-syrup, added about half a teaspoon of coriander, a pinch of salt, and the berries, and let it cool.

Meanwhile, my cake needed to be flavorful on its own. I worked all day today, and made dinner, so I cheated a bit on the cake. I used a Trader Joe's cornbread mix with an added tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of fresh lemon zest. It's great! I always seem to forget how lovely cornmeal and lemon are together.

Finally, plain-Jane whipped cream. I considered vanilla and/or orange extract and decided to just sugar it a little and be done with it.

The first piece for each of us went very quickly...Husband was stacking a second round before I'd even finished taking photos of my first helping. But I was pretty quickly back, too, once I'd started to dig into that first slice. Unfortunately, my best picture was of my second round, so it's on a dirty plate. I've decided to think of it as a wabi-sabi photograph and post it anyway.

It almost makes me want thirds, but Husband beat me to it and finished off the berries.

It Boggles My Mind: The Butter Edition

2007-07-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm not giving Daniel Patterson enough credit when I sit with a dropped jaw trying to figure out how he can not have known how to make butter. In the NYTimes Magazine, he describes his epiphany about homemade butter and provides a recipe/method.

I'll be the first to admit that I may have read Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder's food-porn biography-novel about her husband's childhood on a largely self-reliant farm, a few too many times. I've probably also visited more than my fair share of living-history museums, too. So maybe I have an advantage here and that's why my mind boggles at the thought of a chef not knowing how to make butter.

But still...I feel like I grew up knowing how to make butter. I first helped churn butter when I was not quite ten. I accidentally made butter a few years later in some of my early attempts at whipping cream without supervision. And every once in a long, long while, I've made my own. I'm not claiming that I make my own butter on a regular basis, or even that I'm a highly experienced butter maker. I'm not. It's a rare activity, mostly because of the cost.

In spite of the mind-boggling aspect of the article, I'm grateful for the reminder of just how good your own butter is. Baby Girl, as she has not yet reached the ripe old age of eight months yet, is not a candidate for butter making. She will be someday, however, and I look forward to making butter with her, if only so that she understands where butter comes from and how it gets to our table. And, of course, so she can have the sublime experience of slathering her very own butter onto a still-warm-from-the-oven slice of her very own bread.

Waiter, There's Something in My...Dumpling: Wild Salmon Gyoza

2007-06-29T22:07:00.000-07:00

Well, getting in just under the wire, I finally made my entry for June's Waiter, There's Something in My...Dumpling event. Isolationville may not have much to offer, but one thing we do have in abundance is salmon. Gorgeous, wild, deep red salmon. So I knew that my dumplings would be filled with salmon and I decided on an Asian flavor set. I had considered a European version, fried in butter and dill, but I stuck with a gyoza styling. When I play with a recipe for the first time, I tend to be pretty loose with measurements, so the following recipe has some approximations. I served it in an appetizer portion of five gyoza surrounding a small heap of mixed baby lettuce and spicy Asian greens, all grown in my garage. The greens were tossed with tiny drizzles of sesame oil, sushi vinegar, and a sprinkle of salt.

I also played a lot more with the photographs after realizing that this is why my digital camera has a macro setting. It was fun and I'm really happy with the triptych of the filling, the being filled stage, and the about to be eaten step. They were tasty and the process from beginning to end was very fun. Thanks to The Passionate Cook for hosting!

Wild Salmon Gyoza

1/2 - 2/3 pound wild salmon fillet, chopped or minced
1/2 cup chopped green onion/scallion
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
1 TBS minced jalapeno
2 tsp finely grated lime zest
1 tsp grated ginger
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
salt to taste
Gyoza wrappers

Combine all filling ingredients in a bowl. Set aside in the refrigerator for at least half an hour for flavors to blend.

Fill wrappers according to package directions.

Heat 2 TBS neutral-flavored oil over medium heat in a large frying pan. Add gyozas; do not overfill the pan. Fry until the bottoms are golden brown, add 1/3 cup of water, and cover tightly until the water has evaporated.

Serve with a sauce of your choice (soy and vinegar, sweet chile sauce, hot mustard, etc).

Enjoy!

Pizza by Force

2007-06-27T20:09:00.000-07:00

Living in Isolationville, we do a lot of bulk shopping-and-shipping whenever we go to City. CostCo is our friend, and so our cheese tends to come in two or three pound bricks. I always promise myself that I'll pull out the vacuum sealer and break them into manageable pieces, but I almost never do. (The main exception was the lovely Maytag blue, which I was not about to risk losing to spoilage.) So I was searching in the fridge for something else yesterday morning when I came upon a sad block of mozzarella, starting to show mold on its cut surface. Somehow we ended up with two blocks open at the same time and that's just asking for the mold fairies to come visit.

Clearly, I needed to make something with mozzarella, and pizza usually wins in those situations.

I used to make a lovely pizza with loads of fresh chopped tomatillos, cilantro, and green onion. Tomatillos rarely make an appearance in Isolationville, but I did have the other stuff, so a Mexican-y pizza was dinner last night and lunch today. I was all set to take a picture, but quite frankly, it wasn't the prettiest pizza I've ever made, so I didn't bother. Tasty, yes, but not gorgeous in the least.

Salad Before and After

2007-06-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

I've been growing greens under lights and finally had some mixed baby lettuces big enough to harvest for a salad last night. This is the before picture, prior to my scissor work. I'm really hoping that these greens do well and a cut and come again, as advertised. I've had good luck with that in the past, but I haven't tried this particular mix before.

There weren't really enough greens for full-meal salads for Husband and me, so I supplemented my tender babies with a bed of romaine underneath everything. Here's the after:

Along with the greens, we had cold cooked red potatoes, hard boiled eggs, red pepper, and parmesan shavings, all topped with a lemon-mustard dressing. It was lovely to eat some food I'd grown myself. Isolationville isn't all that friendly to gardening. Among other things, we can't compost because we have a dense bear population. Our growing season is extremely short and not at all what you would call warm, even if you (ok, me) desperately want to pretend it's summer. Indoor gardening is my main outlet now, so it was nice to reap some benefits.

My Isolated Apron

2007-06-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

I spied the announcement for Show Us Your Apron yesterday and decided that I had to enter this wonderfully insane apron I received for Christmas last year. Kudos for the photo and photo manipulation go to Husband. After braving the mosquitoes to take the pictures, we sat with our respective laptops playing in Photoshop -- geek out! My best attempt is now my profile picture, his is here.

We were with Husband's family shortly after Christmas this past winter and I was cooking something for a crowd and my mother-in-law suggested I put on an apron to protect something nice-ish I was wearing. I went to the cupboard and pulled this out, completely in love. She looked at me strangely, asked if I liked it, and when I said I loved it, she said, "Well, it's yours."

I thought she was trying to give it to me just because I admired it, but it turned out that she actually had bought it for me, along with aprons for her other daughters-in-law, but then decided that I would probably hate it, so put it with her other aprons!

Needless to say, it came back to Isolationville with me. I like that it has a defined waist; I always hated the shapeless food service standard apron and would fold over the top and wear it just from the waist down. Even though I don't usually like wearing patterned fabrics, I love the riotous mix of pattern and color in this. It makes me happy.

Cocoa and Nostalgia on a Rainy Day

2007-06-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here watching the rain hit my windows with a cup of contraband at my elbow. Cocoa. Luscious, chocolaty, slightly salty cocoa. I was eating a slice of peanut butter toast, on bread I baked from my family recipe, feeling a little chilly on this gray morning, and feeling that a big something was missing. All my life, peanut butter toast and cocoa have gone together, especially when the weather is bleak. And, quite frankly, a rainy, 46-degree day on the day after the Summer Solstice? Bleak.

BabyGirl, however, really doesn't appreciate my drinking milk. For the half-year it's been since we figured out that she doesn't like it, I have avoided all milk and ice cream, and large quantities of altered dairy products like cheese and yogurt.

But this morning, I just couldn't take it. My peanut butter toast cried out for cocoa. And so I carefully poured out half a mug's worth of milk, stirred the cocoa, sugar, and salt into some water to boil, added the milk, and now, I sit, with only a small amount of guilt, drinking my half mug of rainy day cocoa.

It's delicious.

What Was Lost is Now Found

2007-06-21T16:09:00.000-07:00

Wheeeeeeeee!! I have been camera-less for two weeks now. No new food photos, which is tricky, as I really want to get going on the food blog events I've decided to enter. Husband had it while he was away and came home without it. I was starting to despair and was convinced that whoever found it decided to keep it. But it turned up today and will be back in our home in a few days! Yay!

In the meantime, I thought I'd share some photos of food in Mexico a few years ago. Just because they're already digitized, so I can.

The first is from an outdoor wholesale market I attended several times in southern Puebla. There were trucks full of radishes, cilantro, onions, tomatoes, and various other veggies and fruits. These nopales are just so lovely! From another wholesale, but formal, market, a lovely pile of chiles.

This radiant treat is a raspberry tamal. Such a delicious treat, and almost translucent, the maize was ground so fine. I bought these at a barter-market before dawn in central Michoacan. They made great snacks for a very long bus ride that day. They traveled surprisingly well. I had seen these in another market a few days before I bought these, but thought they were steamed beet slices, which I thought was a little odd. It made a lot more sense when I learned that they are actually raspberry tamales.

And finally, not exactly food really. This is some detail from a huge seed-art mural at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I have a weak spot for good seed art and this was just beyond brilliant. I wish I had had my digital camera when I was there because it has a great composite feature that would have let me stitch the whole thing together into one image.

I was in Mexico for research and the markets were a combination of work and fun. I have loads more photos, but a lot of them are slides. It's too bad because there are some lovely food photos among them.