Cook 'em if you got 'em

Just Sayin'

2012-01-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

Scrambled eggs, gravlax with mustard dill sauce (thanks to my colleague Sue and her Danish-born loved ones), and a big pile of spring mix.

My New Toy

2012-01-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

The 7" straight carving fork from Wusthof is finally mine.

2001 A Space Odyssey - 02. Richard Strauss - Main Title - Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
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Just sayin'

2012-01-01T11:50:00.000-08:00

Chocolate cream pie on graham cracker crust with whipped cream.

And I am seriously done eating dessert for awhile.

Venison, Wild Rice, and Squash!

2011-12-18T20:36:00.000-08:00

A new job means new adventures, right? Well at least it means new colleagues—and, as it happens, a new window on the world of food.

My colleague Angi’s family are deer hunters, and they shot one this season. I’d been hearing about this dead deer for days: it was hanging in the garage. Angi had to bump past it every day to and from work. Her kids wanted to play with the legs. Her husband made sausage, which she did not want to help eat.

I must be doing something right, because guess what Angi brought me!

And I have a lot of little squashes piling up from my CSA, too. How fun would this be: squashes stuffed with a sausage and wild rice filling thing?

I chose three Sweet Dumpling squashes, each about the size of my two fists. I cut them in half, scooped out the seeds, and set them cut-side down on a rimmed baking sheet. I propped up each squash half on the rim of the sheet—like propping up a lid on the edge of a pot—so they weren’t flat on the metal.

While they were baking, I made a half recipe of fruited wild rice pilaf from a recipe card I found at Kowalski’s Market. I cut the recipe in half, fried up a cup of sausage, and mixed it in.

Then I stuffed my little squash friends full of fruity venison sausagey wild rice pilaf. Aren’t they cute? There was rice left over, so I could have made more or bigger squashes.

The dish was rich and sweet with a bit of tang from the fruit, chewiness from the wild rice, and crunch from the pecans in the recipe. Sage, stock, and aromatics permeate the rice. This would be good with a crisp salad of bitter greens. I pronounce it yummy. Thanks, Angi!

Just Sayin'

2011-11-27T16:31:00.000-08:00

Fried egg sandwich with eggs from Bar 5, peas & carrots microgreens from Bossy Acres, and bacon jam made out of Tollefson’s pork from the recipe at Kelli Abrahamian’s blog I Had a Delicious Time. Thank you, Minneapolis and Kingfield Farmers Markets.

Perfect Pecan Pie!

2011-11-19T20:50:00.000-08:00

Artist’s conception - real pic below!

In a rare instance of Amy Boland posting a holiday recipe in advance of a holiday, here’s the pecan pie I made last Thanksgiving and plan to make again!

There are two reasons to like this pie. One, it is full of deep, dark, sugary-buttery-caramely-toasty flavors. Two, it calls for bourbon and I don’t know anything about the stuff. I get to learn! Yay!

Last year I blindly got a pint of Wild Turkey. This elicited reactions ranging from indifference to dismay in the bourbon drinkers of my acquaintance.

This year I went to South Lyndale Liquors—where they will, upon request, pour you tiny tastes of booze from sample bottles lined up on the barrelheads of actual casks conditioned specially for them to sell. The guy who poured for me also explained what I was tasting and why the flavors were there. I chose Buffalo Trace.

So now I feel I have picked a winner, and I’m going to have plenty of bourbon left over afterwards. Um. Pie-making party at my house?

Oh, wait, yeah, the PIE! This IS supposed to be a post about pie.

Perfect Pecan Pie

Post-Thanksgiving pie pic update

I copied this recipe out of a column in the Star Tribune in 1997. Usually I don’t post recipes I didn’t create or significantly modify, because I think the person who wrote the recipe should get the credit (and should get stuck doing the typing). But since I don’t think we can go back in time and purchase a copy of the newspaper from an unknown day in late fall 1997, I’m prepared to make an exception.

Also I recall from my glamorous youth, when I worked on food books at a children’s publishing company, that the Copyright Guardians consider recipes to be formulae. So I’m not running afoul of the law, either. Potential haters, please make a note.

1 c dark brown sugar
⅔ c cane syrup OR ⅓ c light corn syrup and ⅓ c dark molasses
¼ c unsalted butter
3 T bourbon
½ t vanilla
½ t salt
4 eggs
2-3 T half & half
2 heaping c pecan pieces
1 unbaked single 9” pie crust
A big handful of pecan halves

Heat oven to 350°. Melt the sugar, syrup, butter, bourbon, vanilla, and salt together. Heat to boiling and boil one minute, stirring constantly. Let cool.

Beat the eggs with the half & half until frothy. Add this to the syrup, beating until well mixed. Stir in the pecan pieces.

Pour into the pie shell and top with a layer of pecan halves. (Make it look pretty.) Bake 45 to 50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Serve warm or at room temperature.

My Best Chocolate Cake

2011-11-14T20:14:00.000-08:00

“It’s your second-best cake,” Beth corrected.

“It is NOT! You don’t know,” I argued. “You’ve never even tried this one before.”

“I don’t need to try it to know. I know the other one is the best,” Beth snipped back.

It is NOT. She doesn’t KNOW. This one is the richest and fudgiest. I modified the old Walker Museum Gallery 8 cookbook recipe for Wellesley Fudge Cake.

Wellesley Fudge Cake

Cake part:
½ c butter, softened
2 c minus 2 T sugar
4 egg yolks
1 c flour
1 c cocoa
4 t baking powder
½ t salt
1 c milk
2 t vanilla
4 egg whites

Frosting part:
12 oz chocolate chips
¾ c sour cream
1 t vanilla
1 pinch salt

First, do your mise en place for the cake:

Preheat the oven to 325°.
It is easiest to use an electric mixer for this recipe. Haul yours out.
Grease, line with parchment paper, and flour three 9-inch layer pans.
Separate your eggs. Be careful not to get any yolk in the whites. Put the yolks in a small bowl and the whites in a medium to large bowl.
Sift the flour, cocoa powder, and salt together into a bowl.
Put the milk and vanilla together in a measuring cup or some other vessel. I dunno, maybe a bowl.

Now you’re ready to roll.

In yet another large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg yolks.

Mix in ⅓ of the dry ingredients. Then stir in ½ the milk mixture, followed by more dry stuff, more milk, and the last of the dry stuff.

Wash the beaters; any trace of fat will prevent the next step from coming true. With clean beaters, beat the egg whites to the soft peak stage. (Fat prevents egg whites from whipping up. I don’t know why. It’s probably just hatefulness.)

Fold ⅓ of the egg whites into the batter, then the next ⅓, then the final part. This helps the egg whites stay fluffy and gives your cake batter the best shot at high volume.

Spread the batter into the three pans and bake 20 to 25 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out mostly clean. Cool in the pans on racks for 10 minutes, then invert and peel off the parchment. Cool some more.

While the cake bakes, make the frosting:

Melt the chocolate chips in a heavy-bottomed pan over low heat. Stir in the sour cream. Stir in the salt and vanilla.

Frost your cake with the warm frosting. The frosting will firm up as it cools, producing a cake that resembles a fudge-walled fortress.

Cookin’ the Farmshare

2011-10-27T18:13:00.000-07:00

My neighbor Gwen and I share a CSA box from Harmony Valley. We are the perfect CSA companions. Everything she loves best is stuff I can take or leave. Everything I covet is something she thinks is a hassle to prepare. We think it’s a fair split if the single head of romaine goes to her house and the lone celeriac goes to mine. It’s true harmony!

Last week Gwen was out of town, which meant I got to keep the entire share. Whenever this happens, I feel a mixture of glee and guilt.
On the one hand, having an entire box of vegetables to myself is like playing with the Lincoln Logs while my brother is at T-ball practice. You mean I don’t have to split the roof slats with you? I can have all the flat logs? I can build an entire cabin the way I want without sharing?!

On the other hand, I hate to see my friendly neighbor lose out on tasty snacks. So when I opened the box last week, my heart fluttered. Much of the delivery was storage veggies: squash, sweet potatoes, leeks, kale, and beets. They would easily live until Gwen got home. But then she wouldn’t want to cook them.

“Surely, though,” I thought, “she’d like to eat them.” And since I was going to cook for myself anyway…

Leek and Potato Soup (potage Parmentier)
I used the recipe from Joy of Cooking. This soup is supposed to be white, but I used some very roasted, very vegetably chicken stock I froze earlier. I’m pretty sure the stock was made out of Harmony Valley vegetable scraps and a chicken raised by my neighbor Andrea’s mom. That chicken was really good.

Raw Kale Salad with Roasted Baby Beets
Harmony Valley sent red kale and marble-sized golden beets. I used the recipe from Kim Christensen’s “A Year to Eat Freely” 2011 calendar. I wonder if it’s still available on her Affairs of Living blog? This is a favorite recipe to which I keep returning again and again.

I scrubbed the beets, tossed them with oil, tented them with foil, and cooked them on a baking sheet in a 350° oven for an hour. When they were cool enough, I peeled them and popped them onto the salad. The next day, it occurred to me to toss some toasted walnuts on that too.

Sweet Potatoes Roasted with Apples
This one is based on another recipe from Joy of Cooking; but because I altered the cooking method, I will claim it as mine.

2 T butter
6 medium sweet potatoes, scrubbed well and sliced
3 apples, cored and cut into chunks
½ c brown sugar
A splash of water
Salt and pepper to taste

Put the butter in a large roasting pan and melt it in a 400° oven.

Add the sweet potatoes, apples, and sugar. Toss them all together in the pan to coat them. Add a splash of water to the pan.

Cook in the oven, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has boiled down and a sticky syrup remains. This will take perhaps 40 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Mmm, boy.

Have Fun Eating Your Sheep

2011-10-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

“Bye, honey. Have fun eating your sheep,” said my sweetheart.

I ended the phone call, turned to Judy, and shrugged. Beth would not be joining us. We were in Judy’s kitchen putting the final touches on dinner. The meal featured breast of lamb, which Judy had found in limited supply at her butcher shop. We’d seasoned it the night before, and it was cooking on her grill. I took a cutting board off the counter and turned toward the back door.

“Why does only half of a couple like lamb?” Judy called after me. Beth doesn’t like it. Judy’s partner, Stu, doesn’t like it. My mother had called while we were cooking and, upon hearing the menu, reported that my stepdad doesn’t like it either.

I put the laden cutting board back on the countertop. “Beth won’t eat it because lambs are cute and fluffy,” I remarked.

“Well that just makes them taste even better,” Judy replied.

Maybe and maybe not. What REALLY makes them taste even better are a dry marinade and a slow fire.

Grilly Lamb
Breast of lamb or some other lamb part
1 lemon
Olive oil
One of these dry rubs:
Let’s Pretend We’re Greek
Mix or grind together:

Minced leaves from 8 sprigs of rosemary
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 T fresh ground black pepper
Grated zest of 1 lemon
2 t sea salt

Let’s Pretend We’re Moroccan
Mix or grind together:

Minced leaves from 3 sprigs parsley
Minced leaves from 3 sprigs mint
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 t fresh ground black pepper
2 t sea salt
1 t ground coriander
½ t ground cumin
¼ t ground cinnamon
1 minced cayenne pepper

If you need lemon zest, then zest the lemon before you juice it.

Juice ½ the lemon, add an equal amount of olive oil, and whisk these together. Brush the lamb all over with the mixture.

Rub the dry rub all over the lamb.

Wrap the seasoned lamb tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Grill over indirect heat as low as you can manage. Judy cooked at 325° for about 45 minutes.

Take the lamb off the grill and let rest 20 minutes before carving.

Oh. Mah. Gaw.

Menus Stand Still

2011-09-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

I had occasion to take a meal to someone, and I decided to see what it was like to be inside Mollie Katzen’s head. I got out her Still Life With Menu Cookbook and opened it to somewhere in the middle.

Menu #21 is a tribute to southwestern cooking: eggplant relish with roasted peppers and ground pepitas; lentil chili; corn and red pepper muffins. (And, randomly, chocolate chip peanut butter cookies for dessert.) The food sounded simple, comforting, unfussy. It would be easy to reheat, would hold up well as leftovers, and would do OK in the freezer. I could double the batches and feed myself, too.

The food did everything it was supposed to do: taste good, fill the belly, comfort and nourish. The startling part was my recognition of the meal as a snapshot of food trends past. I don’t mean this as a slam, but I can’t think of a nice way to phrase it: this food is out of date.

I realized that the cookbook and the menu were put together at a time when the flavors of America’s southwest were new and unusual. Chiles, especially, were novel. Katzen’s recipes specify bell peppers and crushed red pepper, especially for cooks who are not “lucky enough to have access to fresh chiles.” Now it is not unusual, or even worthy of comment, to find dozens of kinds of fresh, dried, or canned chiles in grocery stores all over the nation. One recipe introduces pepitas as an exotic ingredient. Now I can buy them in my local big-box grocery store.

It’s just so... brown

Thinking a little more, I considered how this meal still has a foot in the vegetarian cooking of the 1970s and 1980s—which defined food in a context of meat. Meat’s conspicuous absence was everywhere. Menus still had a main dish and supporting sides. Dinner items had a protein-rich substitute for meat, often intending to echo its taste or texture. Chefs defined their food not by what it was, but by what it wasn’t: recipes titled “meatless” and “dairy-free” abounded. These things do still happen, but vegetarianism has evolved. Vegetables do not need to play supporting roles to a bowl of something brown.

The fact that I can, in 2011, call a menu unremarkable is a tribute to Mollie Katzen and the Moosewood Collective. Katzen’s adaptable and conversational approach to food, coupled with the reach and appeal of her bestselling cookbooks, made vegetarian cooking accessible for cooks across the nation. The fact that southwestern flavors are not news simply means that everyone has tried them and liked them well enough to cook and eat them all the time. And just because they are commonplace doesn’t make them any less delicious.

Kick Butt Biscuits

2011-09-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

This summer, Katrina gave me these Ninjabread Men cookie cutters because she likes the Fallen Caesar cookies I make for the Ides of March.

Well, OK! The first opportunity I’ve had to use them is this week. I’m making biscuits to go with a chicken dinner. Maybe it will be even more fun if they are Kick Butt Biscuits.

So, here we go: rolling out the dough and cutting it into ninja shapes.

There is a lot of leftover dough scrappins, too. I balled that back up and rolled it out into squares because, hey, biscuits.

Oh, looks like the square biscuits are itching to join the melee. But no, square biscuits, those other biscuits are highly trained martial artists, you’ll just get your…

…butts kicked. I TOLD you.

This Doesn't Suck

2011-09-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

“WHAT?!” I squawked.

“I don’t like it,” Beth repeated.

“But you like corn, and you like cream, and I replaced the lima beans with edamame, and you like that,” I insisted.

“Yes. I like those things, but I hate the succotash taste.” She patted my cheek. “More for you.”

More for me indeed.

Amy’s Take on Tash
The prime elements of succotash are corn and beans. They’re in season now, at the juxtaposition of summer and fall. You can tart it up with other things, too. This serves 4-6 people as a light main dish or a generous side.

4 ears fresh corn (will render 4 cups kernels)
1 pound edamame (will render 2 cups of shelled beans)
1 large red bell pepper, seeded and diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium zucchini, quartered lengthwise and sliced
1 T butter
1 c heavy cream
1 t dried thyme or 1 T fresh thyme leaves
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Throw the edamame, in its shell, in a pot with a half inch of boiling water. Cover and steam them about 5 minutes, then drain and pop them out of their shells.

Cut the kernels off the cobs of corn. Use a sharp knife, stand the ear on end, and cut close to the cob, taking care not to cut into it. Cut off 2 or 3 rows at a time. Then turn the knife over and scrape the dull edge along the cob to extract the “cream.”

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Sauté the onion, pepper, and zucchini until the onion are translucent. Remove from the pot and set aside.

Pour the cream in the pot and boil gently until reduced by half. Throw all the other ingredients in there and bring them back up to a bubble. Turn the heat down, cover the pot, and simmer for 5 or 10 minutes—until the corn is cooked and the edamame are tender. Correct the seasoning and serve to acclaim!

Just sayin'

2011-09-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

Caprese salad with three kinds of tomato, homegrown basil, and Valli dell’Etna “Etna Dario” olive oil; peppers, zucchini, and eggplant sautéed with garlic and onions.

Jam Is Good

2011-09-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

Left to right, vanilla pear (made with pectin) from Food in Jars; black plum; and Michigan peach.

Thus say I:

It is easy and fun to make jam;
It is fun to eat jam;
It is fun to say “jam.” Jam, jam, jam. Jam!

Therefore, I am going to make a boatload of jam this fall instead of/in addition to the too many pickles I usually make.
There are many schools of jam: hard-set jam, runny jam. Liquid pectin, powdered pectin, no pectin. Pounds of sugar; some sugar; no sugar. Sealed in a canner; sealed with paraffin. Cooked jam, freezer jam. I’ve been thinking a lot about all these jamways, their various pros and cons, and I have two working generalizations.

First, you can’t screw it up. If you make a good-faith effort and follow the steps, whatever you turn out will qualify as jam. It may be thin, it may be thick; but it will still fall in the jam gamut. The “jamut.” Snrrrrrk!

Second, all jam is good. Like all religions are good! There’s no right or wrong way to make jam, and there’s no right or wrong religion. They are all valid ways to worship fruit or deity, respectively. And there are many paths to thickness, too. Pectin will thicken jam, as will sugar and cooking down. Every one of them is good and right.

Except for my grandma’s recipe for zucchini jam made with cherry Jello. That’s where I draw the line. No, Grandma! That’s not jam. That’s an abomination of jam and Jello salad!

Basic Jam
Usually I am all for specifics, but jam is more a state of being for fruit. Seedy little fruits make jam that thickens nicely on its own. Fruits with little or no pectin will maybe need you to add some; or you may have to cook them down and they will acquire a hard-candy taste; or you can embrace softer jam. Ripe fruits have more flavor, but less pectin, than firm fruits.

Don't be scared! Let it boil hard.

I’ve gotten good results by measuring out ½ to ¾, even as much as 1, cup of sugar for every cup of chopped or crushed fruit; heat up the fruit to boiling; dump in the sugar and bring to a rolling boil; cook around 5 minutes, put in jars, and process in a hot water canner. You can also use wax, which you’ll find in the grocery store.

Directions very much like this are easy to find on many other Web sites and in books. For more reassurance on how jam becomes jam no matter what, see here.

Green Salsa for Lazy People

2011-08-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

I have a rule of thumb for salsa: a good recipe has five things in it. Why? Because then I can remember it by counting it off on my hand. I am too lazy to go through life looking up the recipe for something that I should know how to make off the top of my head.

Circular logic aside, I have a convergence of vegetables today: tomatillos, jalapeños, onion, cilantro, and garlic. See? Five things.

Tomatillos usually get cooked, so I will throw them in a pan with water. I will throw in the jalapeños, too. If I were feeling really lazy, I wouldn’t seed them first. I’m going to do it, though, because the people who will eat this with me don’t like too much heat. I may be lazy, but I’m not MEAN and lazy.

Meanwhile I chop up some onion and some cilantro and a clove or two of garlic. How much? Some. Who cares. I’d measure, but I’m too lazy. How fine to chop things? Meh. La-a-a-zy.

Here’s what makes it super lazy: all the things are just going in the blender. I will push a button and then it will be salsa. How much lazier can I get?!

Tomatillo Salsa
A handful of tomatillos, husks removed, rinsed
One or two jalapeño peppers, seeded or not
A clove or two of garlic, minced
A few tablespoons of onion or scallion, chopped
A handful of cilantro, chopped roughly

Put the tomatillos and jalapeños in a pan with water just to cover. Bring to a simmer and cook until the tomatillos turn a dull green and get heated through, about 5-10 minutes. Drain.

Meanwhile, wash and cut up the other three things.

Throw everything in a blender and pulse a few times until everything is roughly blended. You should have chunks and lumps and few worries.

If you need to add a little salt to taste, I won’t tell and I won’t count it as one of the five ingredients.

Justify My Fennel

2011-08-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

Mom called me a few weeks ago to chat. We got to complaining about our fennel. “Mine isn’t making any bulbs,” I said.

“Mine isn’t either,” she replied. Earlier this spring, we had split a six-pack of bronze fennel seedlings. We had checked the tag carefully to make sure it would make bulbs. We’d been assured it would. It hasn’t.

“Guess we got sold a bill of goods,” I grumped.

The fennel has been making really pretty leaves, though. It looks wispy and airy in the garden. I read in one of my garden magazines that fennel flowers are good for bees, butterflies, hoverflies, and other amusing pollinators. So when my ne’er-do-well vegetables started to bloom, I didn’t stand in their way.

I thought bronze fennel ought to earn its keep at least once this summer, so I snipped some leaves into a cucumber salad. Not only does the leaf look great against the pale green of the cucumber, but the flavor complements the sweet-sour of apple cider vinegar and a pinch of sugar in the dressing.

I, though, am not the one who has most been enjoying the fennel this summer. I went to the garden today to admire my fennel, and I found something that makes up for any disappointment I might have felt before. There was a big fat black swallowtail caterpillar munching down one of my plants.

Hooray! You keep at it, sweetie. When you finish that one, there are three more just like it.

Cucumber Salad
Better get some before Swallowtail finishes it all off...

4 cucumbers
1 small sweet onion
2 t salt
2 t sugar
¼ c apple cider vinegar
3 T olive oil
A few grinds of black pepper
2-3 T snipped fennel leaves

Slice the cucumbers and onions. Toss them with the salt and set aside for half an hour. Briefly rinse them, then drain well.

Meanwhile, whisk the rest of the ingredients together. Toss them with the cucumbers and onions. Done!

Black Diamond Watermelon

2011-08-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

Look at this thing.

My mom bought me a Black Diamond watermelon from Untiedt's at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. It's practically black on the outside and screaming red on the inside. Scarlet red. Hester Prynne red.

I can't quite believe how sweet it is. In fact, I'm concerned that I forgot how sweet it is, so I might have to go eat another piece right now to make sure I remember right. About how sweet the watermelon is.

It's really sweet.

Berry Tart

2011-07-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

When I tell people what I did yesterday, they say, “You did WHAT now?” Together with two other women, I hosted a baby shower.

This is seemingly a thing about as far removed from my regularly scheduled life as is possible: my house filled with a dozen straight women dressed for a summer party, toting colorfully wrapped packages and ready to talk about babies and children.

Except that the pregnant lady we’re showering is Katrina. She and all her friends, as it turns out, have many things in common. We love books, for one thing (that shower probably had the highest percentage of MFAs at any gathering outside the Loft). We loathe baby shower games; none were planned and no one missed them except to express relief at their absence. And nobody was shy about enjoying a good lunch made of fresh summer produce, or about having a slice of berry tart for dessert.

Berry Tart with Lemon Cream
This dessert is no less delicious for its ease of preparation; you can have the whole thing done in an hour from start to finish. It serves twelve—one slice for every lady at the party plus one more for Katrina to eat later. You know, so the baby can have a piece too.

Half a box of graham crackers (14 sheets)
⅓ c sugar
½ t cinnamon
1 stick butter, melted
10 oz (1 ¼ packages) cream cheese at room temperature
1/3 c sugar
2-3 T fresh lemon juice
1/3 c heavy cream
2 pints assorted berries, washed/hulled/pitted/rendered fit to eat
¼ c jelly or preserves

Heat the oven to 350°. Smush up the graham crackers. I sealed mine in a Ziploc bag and steamrolled them with a rolling pin until they were fine crumbs. Stir in the sugar and cinnamon, then drizzle on the melted butter. Stir up well. Dump into a 10 or 11" tart pan with a removable bottom. Press crumbs into the sides of the pan first, then all over the bottom. Pop this into the oven to toast for 10 or 15 minutes, then cool completely.

Meanwhile, put the cream cheese, sugar, and lemon juice in a bowl and beat them together. Dump in the heavy cream and blend this until smooth.
While you are waiting for the crust to cool, get the berries ready. Wash them, do any hulling necessary, and dry them off. Finally, prepare the jelly or preserves. If you’re using preserves, put them through a strainer–you only want the goo, not the solids. This is going to be your glaze. Warm it up just enough to melt it.

Now it’s showtime. Spread the lemon cream evenly in the bottom of the cooled crust. Arrange the fruit artfully on top. Ideally, no cream would be showing through; but if you don’t have enough fruit to pull that off, don’t worry about it. Last, brush the jelly glaze over the fruit so everything is shiny.

Chill the tart at least four hours; you should probably eat it by the next day.

Just sayin'

2011-07-24T19:29:00.000-07:00

Cherry pie with sour cherries from Maple Leaf Orchard.

Lemon Lavender Shortbread

2011-07-10T20:57:00.000-07:00

I don't know what's wrong with me lately. I just can't get enough of lavender. I love the way it smells. I love the sight of it in my garden: the silvery leaves and happy purple flowers thrive in a hot, sunny spot where other plants might wilt. I can pretend that we, the lavender and I, are in Provence or Sicily under a baking and bright Mediterranean sun. Cheers, lavender!

Lately I even want to eat lavender. Every time I turn around, I'm finding a use for just a subtle hint of its scent and flavor. This week, those pretty flowers are in full bloom. If we bake them into shortbread, the palest of cookies, then we can still enjoy their color. Lemon zest adds more fragrance to the cookie; so do vanilla ice cream and fresh strawberries on the side.

Lemon Lavender Shortbread
10 T butter, softened
¼ c powdered sugar
1 ½ T granulated sugar
¼ t salt
1 ½ c flour
2 t lavender flowers; you may include some tiny, tender leaves
2 t lemon zest

Preheat oven to 300° F. Cream the powdered sugar, granulated sugar, and salt into the butter until light and fluffy. Sprinkle the flour, lemon zest, and lavender over the mixture and stir until well incorporated.
Pat the mixture into an 8 x 8 pan. Prick all over with a fork if you like. Bake until the shortbread is just thinking about turning golden brown; but take it out of the oven before it does anything much about that idea. This should take 45 to 50 minutes.

Cut the shortbread in the pan while it’s hot, then cool in the pan on a rack. Pop them out with a metal spatula. Serve to acclaim.

Here's to Julie

2011-06-26T20:14:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, we reshuffled desks at work. Julie from account services moved into the cube behind me. "I don't want a new neighbor," I grumbled. "She'll talk to me. She'll try to have conversations."

Well, I found that I like sitting by Julie. She has an ear out for stray remarks that might fly over the cubicle wall; she'll volley right back. It's fun.

Like the day two weeks ago when it went from 50 degrees to 103 degrees overnight and the air conditioning wasn't on. We were sitting in the cube farm, panting slightly and trying to concentrate on work. I was thinking about how nice it would be to go home and have something icy cold... something refreshing... something like...

"Lavender-infused vodka tonic on crushed ice," I announced to the air around me.

"Yes!" Julie exclaimed without missing a beat. "And we could have those here? Now?"

No. Just thinking about booze doesn't make it appear. (Plus we'd like to keep our jobs.) But I did try making my daydream a reality when I got home.

I have two Munstead lavender plants in my yard. They're from Dehn's Garden by way of the Minneapolis Farmers Market. I learned they are winter-hardy one year when we had a long, warm fall and I didn't get around to cleaning out the herb garden. The following spring, to my surprise and delight, the lavender was not dead. It put out new shoots. Who knew?!

"Who knows if this'll work," I thought to myself. I popped some sprigs in a jar, sloshed in some vodka, and left it alone for a few days.

It did work! The lavender imparts a lovely pale green color to the vodka, which pulls perfumey and minerally notes out of the herbs. This may edge out gin and tonic for my favorite summer drink.
I'll bring Julie some lavender sprigs on Monday. I just know she's going to like this.

Lavender-Infused Vodka Tonic

4-6 sprigs lavender
1 pint vodka
Ice
Tonic water

Wash the lavender and stuff it in a pint jar. Fill the jar with vodka and screw on the lid. Leave in a cool, dark place for 3 or 4 days (you can taste and see if the vodka is flavorful enough). Remove the sprigs and pour the vodka in a bottle if you have one.

Make yourself a nice drink with vodka, ice, and tonic!

Just sayin'

2011-06-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

Grilled salmon; romaine salad with strawberries, lavender, rosemary, and balsamic vinaigrette; fresh bread with olive oil, sea salt, and cracked pepper.

Kitchen's Done. Let's Drink!

2011-06-12T05:52:00.001-07:00

My kitchen is done!

The last step was to put in the backsplash. I chose 2 x 6 subway tiles from Mission Tile West’s Revival series in blue wash. They make tiles to order, so I had to wait forEVER! for them to arrive. Almost none of them were broken and the guys from Handyman Connection were very careful and efficient. So now I have six or seven square feet of field tile left. What should I do with it? Someone hit me with ideas.

Detail: Look what a good job they did! Also: oooh, bullnose.

To celebrate, let’s make something easy and fun. The new countertops are acid-proof and the backsplash means I can use the blender with impunity. Let’s make fruity drinks!

I got a pineapple on sale and the mint in my garden is green and glorious. Plus there is a brand new bottle of rum in the cupboard just begging to be opened.

Yeah, baby.

Pineapple Agua Fresca Mojito
This is fun because a) it can be made out of any fruit you want, really; b) it probably doesn’t need any added sugar; c) you can skip the booze and it is still delicious.

A pineapple
Water
Sugar to taste (probably none!)
Mint leaves
Rum

Peel the pineapple. Don’t worry about doing too good of a job; and you don’t need to bother coring it, either. Cut it into chunks.

Fill the blender with pineapple chunks. Pour in some water; the waterline should be maybe a quarter to a third of the way up the blender jar. Liquefy. Set a fine strainer over a bowl and dump in the puree. Repeat this until there is no more pineapple. You may be forced to eat a chunk or two, you poor thing.

When the puree is well drained, sweeten the fruity water to taste (you might not need any sugar at all). Pour it into a pitcher and chill well. The pulp is done for, unless someone knows of a use for it besides compost?

Now then. Tear up a mint leaf or two or three into a tall glass. Use a chopstick or the handle of a wooden spoon to smash up the leaves a bit. Drop in some ice cubes and a finger or three of rum. Fill up with agua fresca, stir, and enjoy!

Mustard Jar Redemption

2011-05-31T20:43:00.000-07:00

I’m really sorry I didn’t take the picture earlier. This is all that was left by the time I got back to the kitchen from grilling the brats. The other diners were merciless; they took no prisoners.

At least they didn’t take the last spoonful of potato salad, too. Even if they had, I would be too busy being proud of my recipe to get upset. I like this one for two reasons:

It is fresh, simple, and immediate. There are only a handful of ingredients, but the vegetables can be locally grown and soon they’ll all be in season together.
The dressing is a great way to finish off a jar of mustard.

No, really. You know when there is only a little bit of mustard at the bottom of the jar or bottle? You can go in there with a knife and scrape all day. The jar will ring like a bell but you will not get enough mustard to season a sandwich. You can shake the bottle for twenty minutes but all you can get out of it are rude noises. But since there’s still a bunch of mustard stuck to the sides of the container, you stick it back in the fridge. “Stupid mustard,” you think to yourself. “I wish I had the cunning to use you up or the courage to throw you out.”

Well this salad dressing will take care of it for you! There’s probably just the right amount of mustard left in the jar. Take off the lid, put in the rest of the dressing ingredients, and shake. You will get a delicious salad dressing. You will clean up the container so it is fit to go in with the recycling. And you will have used up the last of that mustard. Aaah, closure!

Potato Salad with Dijon Dressing
Serves 6 to 8.

1 ½ lb potatoes (new red potatoes are great), scrubbed and cut in chunks
½ lb asparagus or green beans, snapped into 1” pieces
2 T Dijon mustard
2 T red wine vinegar
2 T lemon juice
1/3 c olive oil
3 T dill leaves, coarsely chopped
1 T capers

Boil the potatoes until just tender, about 20-25 minutes. In the last few minutes of cooking, throw the asparagus or green beans into the pot.
Drain the vegetables and plunge them into ice water to stop the cooking. Drain well. Chill.

Shake the mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, and oil until combined.

Close to serving time, toss the vegetables with the dill, the capers, and the dressing. If you leave the salad sitting in its dressing, the potatoes will absorb much of the liquid. Who knows; maybe you like that sort of thing.

Nettles called...

2011-05-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

Oh, hi! Hey, nettles called. They asked me to tell you to stop talking about that part of your yard where “nothing grows.”

No way, you say. Nettles are something, all right. Look how mean they are! They are covered with these little stickers full of formic acid, the same stuff in ant bites and bee stings. You think you can be friends with nettles, but if you get close, they burn you every time. Amirite?

OK, you have a point. But if you just handle them right, nettles are cool. They can hang out in all kinds of snacks, like pasta and soup and frittata and stuff. Sometimes when you meet a vegetable and you can’t seem to get along, you should just do what you like to do until you get to know each other better, K?

Like, if you have 15 minutes, some cheese, and a couple of tortillas, maybe you guys could make quesadillas together. Then you’ll be just chillin’ with a beer, you and your new friend Nettles.

Nettle Quesadillas
1 bunch nettles (mine came from Harmony Valley)
1 cup shredded cheese
8 corn tortillas
2 T oil
Salt to taste
A dollop of salsa if you want

Wear gloves to pick the nettle leaves off the stems. Wash them well and spin them dry. There should be about 2 tightly packed cups of leaves.
Heat a tablespoon of oil in a heavy frying pan. Toss the nettles in the hot oil until they reduce in volume and cook through; you may need to throw a splash of water in the pan to keep things from sticking. Remove the cooked nettles to a plate or bowl and season to taste.

Wipe out the frying pan, add just enough oil to coat the bottom, and reheat. Lay a pair of corn tortillas in the pan. When they begin to puff up, flip them over. They should have toasty brown spots on them. Put about a quarter cup of cheese and a quarter of the nettles on one of the tortillas. Stack the other tortilla, toasted side down, on top.

When the cheese gets melty, flip the quesadilla over and cook until the last tortilla surface is toasty. Turn it out onto a plate, quarter it, and top with salsa maybe. Hand it immediately to someone to eat. Cook the remaining quesadillas in the same way.

Peace out!

Brown Study

2011-05-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

For me, morels are from another world. Someone else knows them. Not me. Someone else from a morel family knows the secret: these seasonal markers, when the buds on this tree are just so, when these flowers bloom. Someone else takes a path, finds landmarks, turns here at this rock and arrives at this stump. In a town I don’t know, someone recognizes a man but will not greet him because, thirty years ago, his father came back alone to a place her father showed him.

I hope no one ever figures out how to cultivate them, either, because their mystery is part of their appeal. I hope they always stay scarce, ephemeral, and expensive. This forces a person to approach them with some gravity, mindfulness, and respect. For middle-class city dwellers, there are so few truly seasonal foods. Almost everything is attainable with a splurge or a search. It’s a comfort—to me, at least—to know that some things aren’t for sale because they truly can’t be bought at any price. Fresh morels, in any season but spring, are a thing like that.

Fresh morel pilaf, pan-grilled trout, and sorrel sauce

The pilaf
¼ lb fresh morels, rinsed well (they’re gritty!) and chopped roughly
1 bunch ramps or green onions, sliced (white part only)
2-3 T butter or oil
1 cup basmati rice
2 cups water or stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the stock in a small saucepan and keep it ready. Heat the butter or oil in a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Sauté the ramps and morels until the mushrooms release, then resorb, their juices. Toss the rice into the pan and sauté a few minutes more until the rice starts to turn golden brown. Add the hot stock and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to simmering, cover the pan, and cook until the liquid is absorbed, about 20 minutes. Season to taste.

Back to top

The sauce
Make the sauce while you’re making the pilaf. Be sure it’s ready before you cook the fish. This one is modified from a recipe in Joy of Cooking.

1 carrot, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
6 springs flat-leaf parsley
½ c water
½ c dry white wine
4 T butter, cut in little pieces
1 bunch sorrel, washed and torn or cut into 1” pieces
Salt and pepper to taste

Put the carrot, celery, garlic, parsley, water, and wine in a small saucepan with a tight-fitting lid and cook for 20 minutes. Strain the liquid and put back in the pot. There should be a half cup.
Heat the stock and whisk in the butter. Stir in the sorrel and let it wilt. Season to taste. Set the sauce aside while you make the fish.

Back to top

Pan-grilled trout

A trout
A pan

Heat up the pan for a few minutes. The trick is for it to be very hot. Lay the trout in the pan and wait 5-6 minutes; check inside and see if the inside of the bottom fillet is starting to cook. When it is, then flip the trout over and cook for another 5-6 minutes. The skin will be attractively brown and blistered. How fantastic is that?!

To serve: I think it is fun to make a little arrangement of the trout on a platter and show it to the diners. So dramatic! Why should the cook be the only one to enjoy the fun?

Next, slit the trout down the back and make a cut through the skin across the tail and across the body just behind the gills. Use a fork, the knife, a spatula, and a few muttered curse words to release the top fillet from the trout’s skeleton. Put this on a plate flesh side up and spoon on some of the sorrel sauce. Put a spoonful of mushroom pilaf on the plate and maybe some green frippery at the top.

Lift the head and tail. The skeleton should come off the second fillet, which you can then plate and sauce. So fancy. If you are not creeped out by the head, then don’t forget to pick out the tiny morsels of trout cheek under the gill plate just south of the eyes.

Bon appetit!

Heard it in a love song

2011-05-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

...about spinach and watercress tossed with honey mustard dressing.

Cain't be wrong.

Kale: Take That!

2011-05-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

You see what I did there?

I stripped the Russian kale off the stems; macerated it in olive oil, salt, and lemon juice for half an hour (props to AffairsofLiving.com); then tossed it with a sectioned navel orange and a pinch of toasted anise seeds.

Mmm-hmm. You're welcome.

First outdoor meal of the season

2011-05-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

My young neighbor Jack rolled up to me on his Razor scooter on Saturday and we chatted. "It's a nice summer day," he remarked. "It might not be summer tomorrow, but it is today."

I agree with him, and quick while it's summer, I made the season's first meal that I ate outside on a lounge chair. It's a steak cooked rare; mushrooms sauteed with ramps and finished with Madeira; new potatoes with butter and chopped herbs; a green salad with tomatoes, black radish, romaine, and sorrel; and a nice glass of Malbec. Thank goodness for Harmony Valley. Life was getting so bland!

I did it all by MYSELF!

2011-05-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

After using it twice, I came to regret the garbage disposal. My 100-year-old plumbing does not care to play nicely with it. (That’s OK, because for most of the year, my kitchen scraps go to compost anyway.) I was annoyed that I went to the trouble and expense of having it installed, and I didn’t want to spend another nickel to get rid of it. So I took it out! All by myself!

Except for help from an instruction manual, a how-to book, two online tutorials, and three people at two different hardware stores.

My lovely drain

Other than that, though, I did it completely unassisted! I took it out and replaced it with a regular drain and plumbing. It doesn’t even leak! Yaaaaay!

The kitchen is almost done, except for a tiny bit of painting and the backsplash. I put all my dishes and pans and cans and bottles in the new cupboards. We are ready to roll.

Which is good, because this week is the first Harmony Valley CSA share of the year. I can’t wait!

¿Quién sea La Anita?

2011-04-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

My kitchen has countertops now! And the stove is in its new home, I have plumbing, and I have a dishwasher. (Dishwashers are magical! Why didn’t anyone tell me?)

My stuff is still in boxes in the basement, but I rummaged around and found enough pots, pans, utensils, and spices to make an inaugural chicken dinner.

Which, um, I cooked on the grill.

Well, I painted all day, OK?! And besides, it is all clean and beautiful in there. It still feels like a museum or a shrine, too special to mess up with spatters and drips.

I wanted to do something interesting to the chicken; but I haven’t been grocery shopping in a while, so I don’t have the usual deep bench of ingredients in the fridge. I dug through my “Spice Cabinet” box until I found something interesting:

I am ashamed to tell you how long ago I bought this box of achiote powder. But I am not ashamed to tell you WHY I bought it. Look at her!

I like food packaging that has pictures of women. La Contadina from the tomato paste can; the wheat farmer on the De Cecco pasta box; the mother and daughter that used to be on Amy’s Kitchen packages. I like their expressions of abundance, generosity, and the friendly pride of a good cook issuing an invitation to a meal she knows her guest will enjoy.

But La Anita? She is a little off.

First of all, she floats alone on her orangey-pink background. The De Cecco lady strides through her wheat field, Amy feeds her daughter a taste right from the stove, but where is La Anita’s context? Why is she holding that enormous roast bird? Dios mio, it’s as big as she is. For what occasion did she cook it? Where is the hot kitchen in which she labored to prepare it? Where are the half-dozen other people who cooked with her? Where is the family who will help her eat it?

Second, what are we to make of that look on her face? The tightened lips, the narrowed eyes, the arched brows… is it a smile? A smirk? Is she about to sneer? Is she barely keeping it together under the strain of holding that ostrich en achiote?

Who is she?

¿Quién sea La Anita?

Well whoever she is, I wish I’d tried her achiote paste a lot sooner because it is easy and adds good flavor to barbecued chicken. Thanks, weird lady.

Pie Haven, Pizza Fail

2011-03-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

My kitchen’s still not ready for cooking, but it’s getting close!

This weekend, dear sweet Katrina welcomed me into her well-appointed kitchen so I could work out some of my pie issues. Katrina and my sweetheart, Beth, who have been friends since their freshman year of college, sat at the kitchen table and talked.

I listened with only half an ear, enjoying the piano song of women’s voices in easy confidence with each other. My hands remembered the stiffness of butter cut into wheat flour, the elastic resistance of pastry as I rolled it out on Katrina’s vintage enamel baking cart with her wooden pin. I felt my shoulders release the fretfulness of paint chips, the uncertainty of countertops and light fixtures, the angst of constant shopping.

The next day I felt inspired to attempt some dough at home. I set out to answer this question: Can a person make a creditable pizza in an electric fry pan?

I’m loathe to say I couldn’t. But the fact remains I didn’t.

Were I to try again, I’d…

Roll the dough out super-thin. The crust crisped up only to the thickness of a cracker. The rest of my quarter-inch-thick crust was rather steamed.
Make the pan as hot as possible. Even this will not be hot enough.
Flip the crust over like a pancake, then put sauce and fixings on top.
Don’t expect the cheese to be toasted.
Order delivery instead.

All I can fix in THIS kitchen

2011-03-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

I have walls! I have paint! But still no horizontal surfaces.

While I was painting this weekend, I snuck around behind my back and tore off the rest of the window trim. I sanded and primed the sashes, too, while I wasn’t looking. What a jerk.

Now, for your and my amusement both, a list of things that happen in my friend John Reimringer’s book Vestments that have happened in my kitchen since last week:
• Smashing out wallboard
• Fixing wallboard
• Sanding and repainting window sashes
• Painting walls
• An enormous glass of whiskey

It’s Jameson on the rocks. Recipe: One Jameson. One rocks. Put in a glass. The End.

Swiss Seitan

2011-03-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve just come home from vacation, and my kitchen looks like this:

See what I got? A problem! See what I don’t got: no stove, no sink, no countertops, no nothing. I’m tired; I’m crabby; I have to go to work instead of gad about all day in the sun with my girl. And now I have nothing to eat and nowhere to cook it.

But look! The workmen had to move some stuff out of the storage room to get at the electrical panel. Look what they unearthed!

It is my mom’s electric fry pan. She got it for a wedding present in the late 1960s. I drew the yellow lines around it to show off its majesty.

Well if this thing is here, then I am halfway to a good dinner. How about if I get out Mom’s Better Homes New Cookbook? It’s appropriate to the era.

Yeah, it was new back in the day, but not anymore. This might also have been a wedding present. What are these doing in my house?! Who can remember, and right now, who cares. These things are my ticket to some not-microwaved meals. Look at this goofy book:

“Men’s favorite?” With all due respect, men, who cares? I don’t need your approval to decide whether it’s good. And, in men’s defense, why does the Better Homes and Garden’s New Cookbook presume to know the salad preferences of half the human race? As my feminist scholar sweetheart would say, “It’s problematic.”

Oh get a load of this one:

This picture both co-opts, and eviscerates the potency of, the 1960s ethic of drugged-out spiritual exoticism. Nothing could be squarer than Susie Homemaker here, but she is all Lord Shiva on your ass with her Jiffy Cooking. Her dance both creates a meal from canned and frozen foods in 20 minutes and destroys any chance you might have had of enjoying home-cooked flavors from fresh ingredients. As an added ironic bonus, many people (possibly including the editors) may have missed the significance of this visual reference.

Enough ripping on Mom’s book. It is, along with its friend Electric Fry Pan, going to feed my ungrateful face. I deem Swiss steak to be a properly kitschy thing to cook. Also it has few ingredients and I have no prep space. Here are the directions.

As you see, it’s not a recipe. It’s truly just directions.

I don’t want to be as meat-tastic as things were in the 1960s. So I’m substituting seitan for beef. I’m not pounding in any flour or seasonings because seitan is already made of flour and seasonings. I’m also not going to simmer it until it’s tender because it’s already tender. I’m just going to whip it up and then steam a few potatoes in the microwave. No problem!

Look at it! It’s cooking like gangbusters, and it is starting to smell decidedly midcentury here in my basement.

And in twenty minutes, it’s food. I am just like Jiffy Cooking Lord Shiva Apron Lady.

Is it any good? Mmmehhhhhh… it’s problematic.

Straitened Circumstances

2011-03-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

For the next four weeks or so, this will be my kitchen:

My house is a foursquare built in 1908; the original kitchen was most likely a tiny, dark, and utilitarian 19th-century cubby. At some point, someone rearranged a few walls and added four feet to the back of the house to create a galley. If the style of cabinets is any indication, this might have been done sometime between 1967 and 1978. In 1999, a hasty do-it-yourselfer slapped on some quarter-round molding and vinyl flooring to prepare the house for sale to me.

I cook in an awkwardly designed kitchen with a four-foot-square work triangle. The unvented stove is in a corner. The fridge is directly opposite. They share the end of the narrow room with a defunct radiator. The sink is eighteen inches to the left of the stove. It’s impossible for more than one person to work comfortably.

Over the past few years I’ve been feeling increasingly grumbly about the kitchen. The final straw came one morning this past November when I made pancakes. My bedroom upstairs smelled like an IHOP for three days afterwards. OH! That was IT!

So I’ve been working for a couple of months on figuring out what I want and whom to hire. Demolition starts this coming week. I won’t get to cook anything meaningful in my own kitchen until April. But when it is finished, I will have new cabinets. I will have hardwood floors to match what’s in the rest of the house. I will have more light, a new sink, a dishwasher (for the first time!), a better workspace configuration, and more countertops. The materials, style and colors will be appropriate to the era in which my house was built.

Meanwhile, though, I will be eating like a college student out of the microwave that lives on a cart in the basement. I'll keep you posted.

Crocktodogs!

2011-02-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

This is ridiculous. It is my guilty pleasure: hot dogs violate every food ethic I hold dear. But I somehow still love them. I wish I knew how to quit you, hot dogs.

You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

Cranberry Crunch: Not Brown

2011-01-30T19:48:00.000-08:00

It’s the time of year again where everything is boring. The markets are boring: there’s nothing seasonal in them and everything is from somewhere else. The weather is boring. All the food I cook seems boring lately. For one thing, it is very brown. The last four things I cooked were brown. Browwwnnnnnnn. Booooo-rinnnnnng.

But hey, my neighbor gave me a bag of fresh Wisconsin cranberries leftover from Christmas. She didn’t quite get around to rounding up her kids, stringing the cranberries with popcorn, and garlanding the tree. The berries were about to go ‘round the bend, too. Quick! Make them into something!

Maybe I will make crunch. Crunch is easy. It has very few ingredients, and they are almost always on hand for most cooks. Plus it is all pioneery and Little House on the Prairie. Crunches, crumbles, and crisps are the birthright of every American who is middle class, has a northern European ethnic background, and has an ancestor who settled west of Ohio anytime before 1890. (Oops. Only two out of three for me. Does that make me a poseur?)

Hey, this isn’t boring. It is sweet yet zingy, warm and bubbly, and best of all—garnet red! Yay, this is so NOT brown. I feel alive!

Cranberry Crunch
OK, fine. The topping is brown. So sue me.

1 c oats
1 c brown sugar
½ c flour
Pinch salt
1 stick butter
1 bag cranberries
½ c sugar

Mix the oats, brown sugar, flour, and salt. Cut in the butter until crumbly. Pat half this mixture in the bottom of an 8 x 8 pan. Dump in the cranberries and sprinkle them with the sugar. Sprinkle the rest of the crunch stuff on top.

Bake an hour, then cool for 20 minutes (or don’t). Serve with ice cream maybe.

Easy and fun!

A Day to Celebrate Pie

2011-01-22T21:16:00.000-08:00

The American Pie Council® has declared January 23 National Pie Day! The APC’s web site proclaims a day “dedicated to the celebration of pie.”

According to the APC’s notes about pie history, “Pie has been around since the ancient Egyptians. The first pies were made by early Romans who may have learned about it through the Greeks.” So not only is pie A) delicious; but it B) has the power to transcend space/time and C) is not subject to the laws of cause and effect.

Hooray for Pie!

Zwiebelpastete

I brought this dish, based on a recipe from Marianna Olszewska Heberle’s German Cooking, to a Pie Day party. The original recipe called for bacon, but I (rightly) guessed there’d be vegetarians and left it out. Instead, I used repeated simmering to draw out and deepen the flavor. When people asked how to say this word, I explained it is pronounced “onion pie.”

½ cup butter

1 c flour

1 pinch sugar

1 pinch flour

2-3 T milk

1 T olive oil

3 large sweet onions, sliced
1 c vegetable broth
¼ c vodka
½ c sour cream
1 egg plus 1 egg white, lightly beaten
1 T chopped fresh chives
Salt and pepper to taste
1 egg yolk, beaten with ½ t water
¼ t caraway seeds
Paprika

Mix flour, sugar and salt; cut in butter until mixture is like coarse meal. Sprinkle on the milk, mix with a fork, and form the dough into a ball. Roll out and line a greased 10" or 11" pie pan with the dough. Crimp or flute the edge and trim off the extra. If you have time, wrap loosely and let the crust rest from an hour up to overnight. This will keep fancy edges from puffing out of shape in the oven.

Heat the oven to 350°. Prick the crust all over with a fork, weight it, and bake until browned, perhaps 20 minutes. Remove the weights and set the crust aside.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a big sauté pan. Cook the onions gently until they begin to soften. Splash in half the stock and continue stirring until the liquid evaporates. Splash in the rest of the stock and repeat. Splash in the vodka and cook the onions down one more time. Set them aside.

Turn the oven up to 375°. Separate one of the eggs and set the yolk aside. Beat the white and the other egg, then mix with the chives, sour cream, and salt/pepper to taste. Mix this into the onions. Spread the onion mixture evenly in the bottom of the pie crust.

Beat the leftover yolk with the half teaspoon of water and brush all over the top of the pie. Sprinkle on the caraway seeds and dust the top with paprika. Bake until the pie is set and the top begins to brown, about 20 minutes.

Let cool slightly and serve warm.

Happy Pie Day!

Bienvenue Bluie!

2011-01-17T20:43:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the family, petite chou!

This holiday season, through a combination of comparison shopping, lurking in cooking stores, and fortuitous receipt of gift cards, I made a longtime dream come true. I bought a 4.5 quart cobalt blue French oven from Le Creuset.

There was my new baby, all round and smooth and perfectly blue! What would I do to welcome her to the family?

I knew: I’d make cassoulet from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. No, I had never made it before. But it’s one of my favorite kinds of food: making it once is like making four other different things! Twice!! And I would get to put Bluie through her paces.

First there was shopping. I did not want to use lamb, as Mastering suggests. (My better half does not want to eat anything cute and fluffy.) Goose, duck, and partridge were uncomfortably expensive—especially right after the excesses of Sparklemas. I decided to use pork.

Polish sausage and ham hock

from Tollefson. Pork rind from

Finer Meats.

Even on a regular day, this dish calls for four different kinds of pork: roast, side or salt pork, sausage, and pork rind. I thought a nice, flavorful ham hock would be the perfect economical stand-in for rich duck or goose confit. I went to the Minneapolis Farmers Market to see Dan Tollefson, my favorite pork farmer in the world. He set me up with everything but rind. After calling all over the city, I found it at Finer Meat Company just a few blocks from my house. Who knew that this store was there? And why didn’t they tell me?! Finer Meat has a beautiful array of fresh, smoked, and salted meats. They have a shelf of meat-related groceries. (They have butcher hats on, for crying out loud!) They sold me a half-pound of lovely pork rind for a buck.

I’m not going to recite the recipe, since it is tiresome in its length and also it’s not mine. My Google fu turned up this, which will get you there. Instead of goose, I used a pork roast per Mastering’s original instruction. Instead of lamb, I used a ham hock per my imagination.

First, make a roast. Brown a pork loin and then some onions and carrots. Throw in a bouquet garni, then cover and pop in a 325 degree oven for an hour and a half.

(Just so you know, I used some bean cooking water to wash this tasty brown stuff back into the pot.)

Pork rind: weirdly elegant?

While all that jazz is going down in the oven, time to start the beans. Child specifies the quick-soak method. While the beans soak in their hot bath, freshen the pork rind in two changes of boiling water. Then cut it into quarter-inch dice and simmer it for a half hour. You’re essentially making gelatin here: the softened pork rind will melt to nothing but collagen. It will add velvety body to the finished dish.

All the stuff in the picture to the right, here, has got to get crammed into the same pot to simmer for an hour and a half. Julia wasn’t kidding about an 8-quart pot. I didn’t listen. I’m using the gray pot because Bluie was in the oven during this part.

C'est magnifique! Also I don't

speak French.

While the beans are cooking, or maybe the next day, you can make another meat dish. Mastering has many suggestions, including lamb braised with browned bones that add flavor. I had some meaty pork bones left over from Sparklemas dinner. I browned those in Bluie, then browned two chopped onions and two diced carrots. The bones went back in the pot along with a ham hock, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, a can of tomato paste, two bay leaves, four cloves of mashed garlic, and a half teaspoon of thyme. I braised that in the oven for an hour and a half.

Finally, everything is cooked and it smells like a French chophouse in here. Time to assemble...

...and top with crumbs and butter.

After baking it looks... um, it looks rather brown.

But it tastes like the heavenly congress of pork and beans. Which it is!

And though I scrubbed her with an enamel-safe pad and plenty of soap, Bluie has a few brown battle scars on the bottom of her. Ah, c’est la vie, little one. You work hard in this family of pots and pans. You get a mark here, a ding there. But you are no less beloved for it; no less beautiful to me.

Kabocha is Squashspeak for “I Love You”

2011-01-01T15:23:00.000-08:00

New Year’s Eve used to be my third most hated holiday.* But Beth has changed all that. New Year’s Eve is our anniversary!

I love Beth more than I can explain to you. I love the complement between her formidable intellect and her capacity for abject silliness. We laugh together every single day.

I love her giant heart: I have never met anyone who works as hard as Beth does to understand herself, to take responsibility for her actions, to extend a hand of compassion to others.

I love the fact that, though she’s a little tiny thing, she can eat an entire New York strip in a sitting. My baby can put the steak away, aww yeah.

So of course I made a steak for her on our special day. And there had to be something good to go with it. Bread? Pah! Baked potato? Fwuh! My girl loves squash. Imma make her some kabocha gratine.

Oh, kabocha. It is the most fine-grained, sweet, and creamy vegetable you could ever hope to meet. Its Crayola-colored rind peels away to reveal carrot-orange flesh streaked with green, yellow, and red. Can you resist sneaking a raw bite? It is crisp and sugary as a carrot, too.

Layer the slices in a baking dish and cover them with velvety cheese sauce, and you have decadence incarnate. The squash bakes to melting tenderness in a surprisingly short amount of time. The gratine is unctuous and rich, bathing the senses in deep flavors and smooth texture. Want to render your lover speechless with pleasure? Just slip a few spoonfuls of this onto her plate.

*After Christmas and Valentine’s Day. We fixed Christmas, but we still hate Valentine’s Day.

Kabocha Gratine with Four Cheeses

The remains of our Sparklemas cheese plate went into the sauce. More fun than the traditional Swiss!

A kabocha squash, peeled, seeded, and sliced
¼ cup (half a stick) butter
2 T flour
1 c milk or cream
1 c grated/shredded/mangled cheese, divided. I used scraps of chevre, Manchego, Parmesan; and mostly mozzarella. Swiss would have been better than mozzarella, but that’s what I had.
A dash of fresh-ground nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 350°. Butter a glass or ceramic baking dish. Arrange the squash slices in one layer, slightly overlapping them so the bottom of the pan is covered.

Melt the butter in a saucepan and sift in the flour. Whisk until smooth. Pour in the milk or cream and cook, whisking constantly, until thick—right before the liquid comes to the boil. Take the pan off the heat and stir in ¾ cup of cheese. The sauce should be thick and the cheese completely melted. Add the nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

Pour the sauce over the squash, taking care to cover it up well. Put the pan in the oven and bake until bubbly and browned, about 30 minutes. The squash should be tender. Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top and put back in the oven until melty and toasty, another 5 to 10 minutes.

Serve to acclaim.

A Sparklemas Pig

2010-12-27T16:04:00.000-08:00

It was love that made me ask. Not chauvinism, not disrespect or failure to acknowledge, understand, or embrace my vegetarian friends. But the pork shoulder was so transcendant and amazing; I simply could not bear the notion that another person might live in the same world with such flavors and miss tasting them.

Thinking it through, I decided the risk of offending them was pretty slight; and, anyway, less weighty than the opportunity to bring this potential experience to their attention.

I called their names. “Are you sure you don't want to expand your definition of ‘vegetable’ to include pigs just for tonight?”

They didn't. They were plenty blissed out on the oven-roasted tomatoes (from Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Italian Country Table) and the raw kale salad with walnuts, mandarin oranges, and dried cranberries (from the "A Year to Eat Freely" calendar from Kim Christensen's AffairsofLiving.com).

Eh, more for me.

Porchetta
There are, possibly, as many slight variations on this roast as there are families who cook it. My grandmother dictated the instructions to be over the phone many years ago, and I still have the notes I scrawled in red felt-tipped pen on the back of a research request form from the Geography Department at Lerner Publications, where I worked at the time.

Porchetta is pork stuffed with fennel, garlic, and black pepper. How much, you ask? “Some,” I answer. A bunch. Just the right amount. Whatever you think is good. This is a food I know in my heart, not in my head. I chopped up garlic until it looked like enough, ground pepper until I was satisfied. Earlier this year I chopped up and froze the fronds from Harmony Valley fennel. I could have used less, but I felt bad for it because it had been frozen. I wanted it to feel loved. So I broke up the entire quart container I’d preserved. I mixed in the garlic (say about a head of it? Maybe two?) and half the pepper (A handful. Perhaps a quarter cup) and some salt (I dunno. A few tablespoons?).

The dish is made with a pork shoulder or a Boston pork butt. This is the roast made from the thick end of the shoulder. This year, our fabulous 18” snowstorm prevented Tollefson, my favorite pork farmer, from procuring a fresh pork shoulder for me. Instead I chose a pair of roasts to piece together.

A Boston butt (hee hee hee! “Boston butt”) weights three to five pounds; the whole shoulder weighs eight to ten. One pound of this weight is the shoulder bone, which must come out. The flat part of the bone is a piece of cake; one straight slice across the width of the roast and it’s done. The other side, though, is much trickier. Viewed side-on, the bone is shaped like a triangle. From the end, though, it is a T-shaped affair that swoops and curves through the muscle, fat, and connective tissue that make the pork shoulder an incredibly flavorful and tender cut when cooked long and slow.

I finally cajoled the bones out of the roasts. Normally I’d cut two or three layers across the width of the meat, but boning had left me with four big pieces. I butterflied the thick pieces and flattened out the thinner ones. Then I spread my herb mixture over it all. I folded over and shoved together , cramming herbs into every crevice and cut surface. I used four yards of butcher string to tie up the meat any which way I could, ending up with a seven-pound roast.

I mixed the other handful of pepper with some more (another couple tablespoons?) salt and rubbed this mixture all over the porchetta. I wrapped it up tight in foil and put it in the fridge overnight.

The next day, I allowed two hours for the roast to come to room temperature; then started it, still foil-wrapped, in a 300° oven. I used a meat thermometer, since I was planning to cook it for five hours or more. But if I didn’t have one, I simply would have worried less and trusted more. Pork shoulder is so forgiving of overcooking. It is so well marbled and shot through with collagen. I’m not sure what it would take to dry one out. Maybe a volcano. Or someday when the earth consumes the sun. Not my partner’s little gas oven, that’s for sure.

For the last hour and a half, I peeled back the foil and cranked the temperature up to 350° so the meat would brown. I pulled it out of the oven at the five-hour mark, tented it, and let it rest a half hour. At this point, six or eight people suddenly needed to come in the kitchen. Where was the ice? Could they have some water? Did I need any help?

I had to insist, three times and increasingly loudly, that everyone get the hell out of my kitchen.

Finally, we carve. Another fun thing about pork shoulder is the grain: it is meaningless. You can start out cutting across it, but a) it doesn’t matter – the meat is falling-apart tender; and b) it is just going to change direction in about three slices. Do what you can. It doesn’t matter if you are a good carver or a poor one. Everyone is going to have one taste and forget everything except how delicious the meal is.

Buon Scintillina, e mangiamo!

(Happy Sparklemas, and let’s eat!)

My Kung Fu Is the Best

2010-12-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

Check out how small my cookie scrappins is.

Aww, that's right. The one in the center is all that was left. The rest of the dough got rolled out and made into Sparklemas cookies.

My recipe is here.

Gluten-Free Sparklemas Cookies

2010-12-05T19:12:00.000-08:00

I feel a little bit sick to my stomach from eating 15 square inches of mistakes, and I’m wondering what kind of gastrointestinal hell there will be to pay later. But overall, I’m going to declare a success of my first foray into gluten-free baking. Yay!

Last weekend I made the season’s first gingerbread cookies to share with friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family. A small but growing number of people in my life are eating gluten-free. Many are trying to avoid refined sugar, dairy, and other animal products. I want to include these people in my cookie plans, but who wants to get a cookie they can’t eat?

Thanks to Kim Christensen, who pointed me in the direction of The Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen blog, where I found a recipe for Spiced Teff Cookie Bars. I dialed down the vanilla to 1 teaspoon, the cinnamon to 2 teaspoons, and the ginger to the full 2 teaspoons. Well, I measured the ginger kind of sloppy because I like ginger.

This recipe tasted great—just like traditional gingerbread. The texture was a little bit gritty, as gluten-free baking is wont to be. Once the bars cooled, I could make fairly clean cuts using a sharp knife. The bars held their shape well, too.

I thought I’d use my deep metal cookie cutters to make Sparklemas shapes, which I would then decorate with nuts and dried fruits. Pushing the cutter into the pan was easy, but convincing the cookie—like a very soft brownie—to pop out of the cutter in one piece was more of a challenge. Cutting the bars warm definitely did not work. Cutting them cold was better, and cutting them slightly frozen was best of all. The larger and simpler the cutter, the easier a time I had. (No gingerbread people shapes, alas.) I used the side of a knife tip to push down on the corners a little at a time, and soon my cookie slid free.

I set out to make a dozen or more cookies, but I only got eight usable ones. I screwed several of them up while learning the principles outlined above. There was a high ratio of trimmings to cookies as well. I think I will make these again, but perhaps I will cut them into squares or diamonds and decorate each one with a dried cranberry, a slivered almond, a sprinkling of coconut flakes, or a dusting of cinnamon. They will not be as cute, but they will still taste great. And as my overfilled belly will attest, you don’t really have to eat very many of them to feel like you’ve had an abundant amount of gluten-free Sparklemas cookies.

Zucca Due Colori

2010-11-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of year again. Sparklemas is on its way, and I’m experimenting with what we should have for dinner. Last year I made a giant porchetta and pumpkin ravioli. This year, I want to mix it up a little. I like the flavors of squash and sage, but I don’t want to paint myself into the corner of making labor-intensive ravioli every year.

I tried a pan-fried squash dish and served it over gnocchi. Gnocchi are a favorite of mine: pillowy little dumplings of potato and flour, chewy and surprisingly filing. They’re comfort food and just the thing for me on a deep, dark winter night.

Problem, though: the softness and blandness of the gnocchi do not make much of a contrast for the squash. And, as it turns out, not everyone likes their texture. (Cough. Beth. Ahem.) I felt the sweetness of the dish needed a little something… perhaps a splash of balsamico.

Overall, I’d call the squash a win as a side dish. The squash is sumptuous and sweet; the savor of onions, garlic, and sage complement it well.

Zucca Due Colori
That is, two-color squash. Butternut and Festival are what I happened to have in the fridge. Who knew they were going to look so pretty together?

1 butternut squash (orange flesh), peeled, seeded, and cubed
1 Festival squash (yellow flesh), peeled, seeded, and cubed
1 onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
12 dried sage leaves
3 T butter
Salt and pepper
A pound of cooked pasta, if you want
A fistful of Italian parsley, chopped
A sprinkling of grated Parmesan

Heat the butter in a large sauté pan and fry the onion until it is translucent. Toss the garlic and sage in after it and fry a minute more until they start to give off scent.

Throw in the squash cubes. They should fit in one layer; if they are too crowded, you may need to do this part in two shifts. Stir and toss the squash constantly until they start showing sear marks. If your pan is getting too sticky, throw in a tablespoon or two of water to release the caramely bits and keep things moving.

When the squash shows evidence of browning, add a quarter cup of water to the pan, turn down the heat, and cover. Let the squash cook until soft, ten or fifteen minutes. You should start the pasta during this time if you are going to serve the squash on top of it.

Turn the squash into a serving bowl, deglaze the pan with a little more water, and pour all the browned delicious bits over the squash. Toss with pasta if you are going that route. Sprinkle the bowl, or each serving, with the parsley and cheese. A splash of balsamic vinegar might brighten things up, too.

Mangiamo!

Compearison

2010-11-21T20:01:00.000-08:00

Clockwise from bottom center: Concorde (large yellow), Bartlett
(large yellow), two Forelles, Bosc, two Seckels. Center: D'Anjou

Oh, jeez, sorry about that title. I really am. But… but… but it’s just that I’m comparing pears! And as I write this, it is STILL FUNNY!

OK, OK, OK. Down to business. So, this holiday coming in December: Beth and I have renamed it Sparklemas. Neither of us considers herself Christian, but we still want to celebrate the holiday of our childhoods. She likes the decorations. I like the food. And we know the reason for the season: it’s midwinter, the darkest time of the year, the time when we turn the corner. For thousands of years, people have celebrated because even though we might still starve or freeze to death this winter, at least we will do it during increasingly longer periods of daylight.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be getting ready. Beth will ornament her home with light and music. I will immerse myself in experiments of scent and flavor. On the big day, we’ll bring it all together: with sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, we’ll welcome light, hope, warmth, joy, and comfort into our own hearts and offer these gifts to those around us.

To do that, we’re going to need some pears.

But what kind? To find out, I bought a selection from the grocery store on Wednesday and let them ripen in a bowl until today, Sunday. They were beautiful: all sensuous curves, glowing colors, and perfume. It was almost a shame to eat them. But we tried each kind and we settled on our favorites.

Each of us agreed on our second favorite: good old Bartlett, the standard canning pear. Its classic shape and flavor, plus its cheerful yellow color, would make it a welcome guest on any fruit plate.

My favorite was Concorde. I think it’s the prettiest. It has a musky, almost melonlike flavor redolent of vanilla.

Beth’s favorite was Bosc. “Hands down,” she said. This pear is sweet with plenty of fragrance, but with a clean taste that appeals to her.

Here, in no particular order, are our tasting notes. Click on them to make them legible. Enjoy!

Tiramisu as Big as You!

2010-11-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

Last night was Big Goddamn Steak Night. It’s a time to celebrate, to gather with friends, to reflect, and to eat a really high-fat meal. Well, all except for the part about reflecting. Big Goddamn Steak Night would sum up everything that’s wrong with America if it weren’t all done ironically.

Except for dessert. The “Tiramisu as Big as You” course is in deadly earnest. And this year, when eggs are filled with salmonella and the world’s chocolate supplies dwindle, nothing could be a better reminder of how precious and fleeting our lives really are.

And because life is short, BGDSN tiramisu is special. For one thing, there’s a ton of it. For another thing, it does not have ladyfingers. Who wants to eat some stale-ass, nothing-flavored cookie the size, color, and texture of a tongue depressor? Not me. That’s why I make my tiramisu with chocolate cake.

If, before you leave this world, you want to eat a holiday dessert as spectacular—and as big—as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, then I have here just the thing for you.

Tiramisu as Big as You
There are four steps to tiramisu: cake, zabaglione, cream, and assembly. This dessert takes four or five hours to make and dirties up every bowl you own. When you’re done, though, you can serve twelve people.

Cake
Why take a perfectly good, made-from-scratch chocolate cake and tear it down? Trust me. Everything the cake lost shall be restored a hundredfold. It’s like the cake is Job.

I cut this recipe in half and changed the pan from a 9" × 13" because I always have too much cake left over.

½ c milk
2 t lemon juice or vinegar
1 c sugar *
¼ c butter
1 egg
¼ c cocoa powder
1 ¼ c flour
¼ t salt
1 ½ t soda
½ t vanilla
½ c boiling water

Stir the lemon juice into the milk and set aside. Combine the dry ingredients and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar; beat in the egg.

Beat in half the dry ingredients, then half the milk, then the rest of the dry stuff, then the last of the milk. Stir in the vanilla.

While the batter isn’t paying attention, dump in the boiling water all at once and blend it in! AIIEEEEE!

Pour into a greased, floured 8" × 8" pan and bake at 350° for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool the cake for 10 minutes, then turn it out of the pan and cool some more until you can handle the cake. Cut it in half and cut each half into 12 to 16 slices. Lay each slice on its side on a cookie sheet and pop those back in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Turn the slices over and toast them for another 10 minutes. Lay the cake-toast-slices on the cooling rack until perfectly cool. They will be crunchy. This is a good thing.

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Zabaglione
Next up: you are making a super-eggy-licious traditional Italian dessert (or breakfast, depending on whom you ask). Zabaglione is quite fine in its own right, rich with eggs and the raisiny-caramel flavor of Marsala. But stay strong and keep going. This is going to be fantastic!

10 eggs
⅔ c sugar
⅔ c Marsala wine
2 T water

Get yourself a heat-proof bowl, a candy thermometer, a whisk or hand mixer, a rubber scraper, and a pan of not-quite-simmering water.

Separate 10 eggs and put the yolks and the sugar together in a heat-proof bowl. Beat until lemony-yellow and thick, maybe three to five minutes. Beat in the Marsala and water.

Now the tricky part. Plunk your bowl in the pan of simmering water and start beating those eggs. As you beat them, they will cook and thicken and turn amazing. You are in a race against the hot water: you want the eggs to reach 160°, which is safe eating temperature. But you don’t want to work so slowly that the eggs stick to your bowl. So beat like crazy, scrape down quickly if you need to, and periodically check the temperature.

If you don’t have a candy thermometer, you might want to resign yourself to the fact that life is dangerous. You might want to use trustworthy eggs from a known-to-be-safe source, either way.

When you have achieved the proper temperature and your egg mixture is the consistency of softly whipped cream, you can stop. You did it, rock star! Take the bowl out of the water and set it aside to cool for at least 15 minutes.

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Cream
This part of the recipe seems pedestrian, but everything’s about to come together. You’ve done the hard parts! Now it’s time to torture an appalling amount of dairy fat into behaving like a solid instead of a liquid.

1 c heavy whipping cream
1-2 t vanilla
16-24 oz mascarpone cheese

Combine the vanilla and heavy whipping cream and beat at least to the soft peak stage. Maybe you could stop just short of stiff peaks.

In another, much larger bowl, beat the mascarpone until smooth. Blend in the whipped cream and the cooled zabaglione. You may need to pop this in the refrigerator while you get ready for…

Assembly!
1 c strong coffee, cooled
2 T sugar
3 T brandy
6 oz bittersweet chocolate, grated
2-3 T cocoa powder
In a shallow dish, mix the coffee, sugar, and brandy until sugar is dissolved.

Assemble your friends: cake-toast, booze-spresso, vat of creamy cream cream, and the two kinds of pulverized chocolate. Find yourself a glass bowl, too. There are at least two schools of thought on bowls. Some people like to use a wide, shallow bowl. They divide the cake and cream in halves and just do two layers. I have a tall V-shaped bowl that allows me to make many layers. Think about what kind of drama you want to create and how you will manage to serve the dessert, then make your choice.

Dip pieces of cake in the coffee mixture and arrange them in the bottom of the bowl. It’s OK to leave some space between and around the cake. Cover the cake with a layer of cream, burying it maybe a half inch thick. Sprinkle the cream with grated chocolate, covering up the surface.

Repeat layers of cake-cream-chocolate until you reach the top of the bowl or you are going to run out of something. The topmost layer should be grated chocolate.

Put the cocoa powder in a sieve and dust the top of the dessert artfully. Cover the bowl tightly and refrigerate overnight, or at least 6 hours, to give the cream a chance to set up.

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Mangiamo!
On 12.23.2010 the quantity of sugar was corrected to 1 cup from 2 cups. I am so very sorry, Amy Rea.

The Ballad of Mr. Turnip

2010-11-07T18:47:00.000-08:00

This here’s a story about a giant turnip, the woman who destroyed him (that would be me), and his ultimate redemption (I hope).

I was looking for someone else when I found Mr. Turnip at a Minneapolis Farmer’s Market stall. I’d never seen anything like him: a giant turnip almost as big as my head. He was grotesque… yet magnificent. He only cost a dollar! How could I pass him up?

And once I got him home, well, what the hell was I going to do with him? I put him on my kitchen scale, but I did not have enough weights to measure him. I stacked up a package of gnocchi; cans of coconut milk, tomato paste, and Amy’s brand lentil vegetable soup; two bars of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate; a bag of Bob’s Red Mill oat bran cereal; and a stray ounce of bittersweet chocolate. Mr. Turnip weighed slightly more than all of it put together. That put him at around five pounds.

Hmm… five pounds. If Mr. Turnip were a cabbage, I could make a gallon of sauerkraut out of him. I’d read that turnips, if given the same treatment, turn into sauerruben: reputedly even better than kraut. We’d just see about that.

As I peeled him, Mr. Turnip released a sulphurous odor that stung my nose and made my eyes water. Had I made a huge mistake? Maybe I should have left him whole and gone as Zaphod Beeblebrox for Halloween. But when I cut him in half, my fears were quelled: Mr. Turnip’s heart was clean and sweet.

With a few minutes’ work, he was a mound of snowy white shreds. I tossed him with three tablespoons of canning salt and packed him into a bag.

“There you go,” I told him. “Get to work.”

I left him alone for a few days. He made plenty of brine, but I didn’t see many of the bubbles that would tell me he was fermenting. This I didn’t like: he turned brown. What was he doing in there?

Ugh, who wanted to know. I left him alone until this afternoon, when I hauled him out into the light of day. I plunked him on a table, opened up his Ziploc, and had a taste.

Mr. Turnip—Herr Sauerruben, I should call him now—still has the faintest whiff of sulphur about him. But fermentation has turned him complex and flavorful. He is milder than sauerkraut, but he has a hint of the same bite as horseradish. There’s a meaty umami flavor to him. He reminds me of daikon pickled in soy sauce.

So here we stand. Mr. Turnip has emerged from his ordeal a transformed being. But I am asking the same question: What the hell am I going to do with him?

A Creative Waste of Food

2010-10-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

Usually I don't carve a jack o'lantern. I think it’s a waste of a perfectly good, delightfully edible pumpkin.

But this year one of my decorative-until-I-kill-and-eat-you pumpkins developed a soft spot. Eh. Why not. I’ve been threatening to do this for years. I just hope my house doesn’t get egged.

Of course, I can still eat the seeds:

* Separate the seeds from the goop as well as possible.
* Soak overnight, then rinse. This helps get rid of any remaining innards.
* Toss with salt and olive oil.
* Spread the seeds in a shallow pan. Make one layer.
* Toast in the oven at 350° for about 30 minutes. Stir and/or shake up the pan once or twice during toasting so everyone gets a chance to turn golden and delicious.

Happy Halloween, everyone. And you kids: get off my lawn!

Beer/Pie Pairings with Amy and Joe

2010-10-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

Did you know Curran’s Restaurant has Pie Happy Hour? I kid you not. From 2pm to 5pm and from 7pm to close, you can waltz in there and have a slice of pie for a dollar.

This is the kind of friendly customer-centric, get-‘em-in-the-door promotion I’d expect from Curran’s. They have been a neighborhood standard for more than sixty years. Think of a homegrown Perkin’s or Country Kitchen with career waitstaff. The clientele is a mix of families, elders, and high school couples on weeknight dates. So it is a little bit of a surprise to learn that Curran’s also has a long list of foreign, domestic, and craft beers in bottles.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

My friend Joe and I headed over for a flight of beer and pie. We ordered two beers and two slices of pie each. We split each beer and managed to eke out eight bites from each slice, eight sips from each half-beer. Our tasting notes are transcribed below. We were, in spite of ourselves, surprised by what we learned.

The worst beer overall, to my chagrin, was my own longtime favorite: Summit EPA. It performed poorly with every pie we tried, although it was tolerable with apple. Apple, we found, was the all-around good beer companion. While it did not excel with any beer we tasted, it made an acceptable sidekick to all of them. “The Will Smith of the pies,” remarked Joe.

The worst pie was blueberry. Curran’s blueberry pie is nothing to write home about in the first place; it’s an uninspired assembly of canned blueberry filling and pale crust. But had it been a better pie, it would only have been a bigger shame to eat it with beer. Time after time, flavors clashed like a pair of second-rate drag queens angling for the same spot on the dance floor. The Summit EPA and blueberry pairing was a complete loser.

The overall best match was Blue Moon and pumpkin. Curran’s tremblingly tender custard tastes strongly of fresh pumpkin and nutmeg. When that flavor combines with smooth, clean Blue Moon, it’s a magical moment.

So what’s next for beer/pie pairings? Curran’s has other beers to try, other pies to probe. Maybe a beer/pie potluck, where everyone brings either a six-pack or a pastry?

Beer and Pie Tasting Notes
Click to enlarge!

Cardoons: Once is Enough

2010-10-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

Note: There is an F-bomb in this post. You were warned.

Cardoons! Limited supply! Only take some if you can experiment with them and report back! So said the CSA announcement this week. Cardoons! I’d heard of them and been hoping for years to try them.

According to a British gardening book that I have somewhere in my house but can no longer find, cardoons are a tall and dramatic-looking member of the thistle family, a relative of artichokes, and a back-of-the-garden oddity. It used to be a common vegetable but fell out of favor sometime before the invention of the combustion engine. I’d filed the bit of information away in case I ever met this plant. And now, thanks to Harmony Valley, it was staring me in the face!

Cardoon looks like celery crossed with an iguana. It is flocked with grayish-green fuzz....

....and studded with quarter-inch spines. It’s as if aliens planted a Jurassic-era garden; or some mild-mannered vegetable got blasted with gamma rays and then got pissed off. Wow! This was going to be so cool!

A little checking around revealed that cardoon should be de-leafed, de-thorned, and cleaned of tough strings; then boiled for fifteen minutes to an hour. It can then be made into things like crudités or salads. Joy of Cooking suggested it might taste like artichoke. I decided on a gratine. This was going to be great! I’d serve it as a surprise treat to Saturday’s dinner guests.

As I prepared the cardoons, excitement soured into doubt. These stalks were awfully big and stringy. That gray bloom turned out to be a layer that sometimes peeled off like onionskin. I cut them into the two-inch lengths that Joy suggested and set them to boil in water spiked with salt and lemon juice.

Beth arrived to help with dinner preparations. “What can I do?” she asked. “Oh,” I tossed back breezily, “how about if you make the Mornay sauce?” I rattled off the directions over my shoulder as I poked the boiling cardoons with a spoon. “Like this?” she asked, some minutes later. I looked into the pan. Beth had made a textbook sauce. It was perfectly smooth, white, and uniform. The sides of the pan weren’t even dirty. Damn!

I drained the cardoons. They looked as if they had lost an election of some sort, or perhaps as if they owed money to the Mob.

I poured Beth’s beautiful sauce into a buttered dish and started laying cardoon pieces in, grumbling all the while. “You don’t sound too confident. You’re going to serve this to guests?” Beth demanded. So, drums rolling, I tasted a cardoon.

A high note of baking soda sang above a base taste of overcooked silage, followed by a convulsive sourness. “Oh, try this,” I gasped. “No way,” said Beth, backing away. I snatched the pieces out of the Mornay, horrified that they would taint it. And then I looked down at them, all sauce-smeared in the colander.

I never until this day met a vegetable I didn’t like. And I hate to waste anything. I screwed my courage to the sticking point and picked up one of the sauced pieces. This one was tenderer. The silky Mornay smoothed away most of the bitterness. The flavor and texture were like a mild, soft artichoke heart. I saw how this might have worked: tender inner stalks broiled up with sauce and cheese could have made a not too unattractive presentation, and they might even approach enjoyable.

But you know what? Fuck it. Cardoons are a lot of work for something only a little bit delicious. And a lot of people, my guests included, don’t even like artichoke. I dumped the whole mess straight in the trash. Sorry, cardoons.

I can see why people stopped eating these things. What I can’t see is why anyone ever decided to eat this in the first place. Maybe some feudal peasant saw her donkey munching a roadside thistle and shoved him out of the way to grab it for herself. Maybe when the choices were cardoons or nothing, cardoons were worth the fuss.

Even though I didn’t like them, I’m thankful to Harmony Valley for the opportunity to try cardoons. It had been a longtime dream, and now I can mark it up as a lifetime achievement.

Don’t try this at home
Here’s what I was going to do, had my initial bite not been so shatteringly unpleasant.

1 lb de-thorned, de-leafed, de-stringed cardoon stalks, cut in 2" pieces
2 T lemon juice
1 t salt
2 T butter
2 T flour
1½ c whole milk at room temperature
¾ c grated Swiss cheese, divided in half

Put the cardoon pieces in a pot with 8 cups of water, the lemon and salt. Boil for 15 to 20 minutes and drain.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a saucepan and whisk in the flour. Whisk until very smooth. Add the milk, whisking constantly to avoid lumps. Whisk and whisk over medium heat until the sauce thickens. Take it off the heat and whisk in half the cheese.

Butter a glass or ceramic baking dish and pour in half the sauce. Lay the cardoon pieces in the sauce, overlapping each other slightly, and cover them with the rest of the sauce. Sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Bake in a 375° oven until the sauce is bubbly and the cheese is toasty and just browned, about 20 minutes.

There’s a country song in here somewhere

2010-10-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

I had a notion I was going to get my heart broken when I walked up to him in the lunchroom.

“John,” I said, twirling the kitchen knife in my hand, “would you help me out with something?”

John looked up and smiled—not at the knife, but at the two large apples I held in my other hand. When John’s not at work, he’s an epicure with a well-trained palate. He was exactly the person I needed. I sat down, arranging the objects on the table between us. “We’re going to do a little experiment,” I said.

“As you know, this is the second year of SweeTango—the controversial new apple from the University of Minnesota. It’s touted as even better than my beloved favorite, Honeycrisp.”

“I have here two apples,” I continued. “One is a Honeycrisp. One is a SweeTango. We’re going to try them, talk about what we taste, and decide which one is better. Then I’ll tell you which is which. I’m too biased to be objective, so I’m interested to hear your opinion.”

John was in.

We started by looking at the apples. They were lovely, their rosy red skins striated with yellowish green. The only way to tell them apart was by size. “Not much difference,” John said.

I cut each in half. One of the apples had yellower flesh than the other. The second apple had a hurt spot in the center, but we dismissed that as unimportant. Texture appeared otherwise identical.

We tasted the first apple. Good crunch! We both found it very sweet, but it also had a contrasting acidic kick. “Nice tang,” John remarked. The flavors were high, sharp, and bright, with a cidery undertone. John gave his approval, and I agreed.

On to apple number two. Upon biting in, John exclaimed, “This has a grapey flavor to it.” He was right. Though sweet and equally crunchy as the first apple, the flavor was more muted and rounded. It was a softer, fruitier taste. Another very good apple, we concluded.

“So,” I asked, “which is better?”

John guessed that the first apple was Honeycrisp and declared that he liked it better.

I smiled sadly. I agreed with John’s judgment. The bright, tangy apple was indeed the tastier of the two. But he guessed wrong: it wasn’t the Honeycrisp.

Cue the music:

Dang you, SweeTango, I hate you
Like I hate the sun in the sky.
I hate you so bad, I hate your mom and your dad,
I hate you so much I could cry.

Dang you, SweeTango, I hate you
Like I hate the stars up above.
They don’t have to flaunt you, I hate you ‘cause I want you
Even more than the one that I love.

¡Vivan Chiles Rellenos!

2010-09-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

If you’re all wondering what to do with a poblano pepper, then you should go stuff it.

Har har har! No, really. And then you should batter it and fry it and serve it with a bunch of its friends.

Perhaps once a year I make chiles rellenos (say “ray-YAY-nohs.” Do not call them “reh-lennowz” unless you are still eating tor-til-ah chips.) from Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking. To me, they epitomize the complexity of Mexican food. Even the most seemingly simple Mexican dish can involve multiple cooking methods and several iterations of processing. Making rellenos is like making four different dishes: roasting, peeling, and seeding the chiles; making the stuffing; making the sauce; and, finally, battering and frying the chiles. Add some side dishes to the meal, and you could be cooking all day a la Like Water for Chocolate.

This time, though, I tried to keep things simple. I used a good brand of canned refried black beans, and I used cheese for the filling. I made a very quick and easy tomatillo salsa for an appetizer and an even quicker and easier red tomato sauce to nap on the chiles. I rounded out the meal with a pot of white rice and a simple stewed zucchini with yellow cherry tomatoes and oregano. I forgot to set out the corn tortillas I’d bought, but nobody missed them. Dessert was vanilla ice cream or muskmelon, a cup of coffee, and a sliver of chocolate spiced with cinnamon and cayenne.

Chiles Rellenos
There are four stages: the chiles, the sauce, the filling, and the frying. Finally, we eat!

The Chiles
You can stuff any pepper, but traditional cooks use the poblano. These dark green, glossy triangles are relatively mild and about the size of a fist. Start with more chiles than you’re planning to serve; I promise at least one of them will end up in shreds while you are preparing it. Roast them on a grill or under a broiler, then peel them (here’s how). Find the weakest part of the chile, slit it open lengthwise, and sweep out the seeds and veins, being careful not to tear the flesh. You may need to wipe off your fingers, or your chile, with a towel as you work. Put the cleaned chile on a plate or cookie rack. You can do this a day ahead.

The Sauce
According to Kennedy, rellenos are traditionally heated up in a sauce—essentially, a very simple tomato reduction thinned with chicken broth. I opted to skip the broth and ended up with a tangy and fresh-tasting tomato sauce. You can make this ahead of time.

2 or 3 tomatoes
2 T chopped onion
1 clove garlic, chopped
1-2 T oil
Salt to taste

Put the tomatoes, onion, and garlic in a blender and liquefy. Heat the oil in a well-seasoned skillet. Dump in the tomato mixture and fry until reduced, maybe 5 or 10 minutes. (At this point Kennedy has you add 2 ¼ cups of chicken broth and cook 5 minutes more.) Salt to taste.

The Filling
Recipes abound for the relleno, or stuffing, part of chiles rellenos. You can use seasoned meat, or maybe potatoes and chorizo. I found queso Chihuahua, the quintessential Mexican melting cheese, at the Wedge. Muenster would be the next best choice. I cut it in strips about the size of my index finger. A large poblano will take two or three of these pieces; for a tiny chile, I cut one in half.

Put cheese inside the chile, being careful not to tear it. The chile should be nice and full, but the sides of the hole should overlap a bit. If you opt to close the slit with a toothpick, be sure to warn your guests.

The Frying
Cover a plate with several layers of paper towels and put it in the oven at 200° F. Get out a big frying pan and pour in about an inch of oil. Canola is nice. Put the pan on a medium-high burner.

Now make the batter. For every four to six big chiles, get these things:

3 eggs
¼ t salt
⅓ c flour

Separate the eggs. Beat the whites until they are stiff and turning dry. Beat in the yolks, one by one, and the salt.

OK, here we go. It’s showtime. I always get very scared at this point. I’m convinced that the chiles will come apart, stick to the pan, catch on fire, splatter everywhere, or burn black. But not one of those things has ever happened. They always fry up like magic.

Plan to work with one or two chiles at a time. Dredge a chile in flour...

then hold it by its stem and dunk it in the batter.

Gently lay the chile in the hot oil and let it cook golden brown. Use two spatulas to turn it on its side (or flip it right over if it is very small). Fry each chile on all sides...

then remove to the plate to drain.

Hey, look at that! It worked!

Let’s eat!

If you did the broth thing, you can put the rellenos in the sauce and heat them up for five minutes or so. Otherwise, plate ‘em up! Serve each guest one big chile or two smaller ones. You can pool the sauce under them or nap it on top.

¡Buen provecho!

Beef Soup: True Enough

2010-09-13T20:24:00.000-07:00

My friend John Reimringer has just published his first novel, Vestments. John has called it his love letter to the city of St. Paul. Indeed, the city’s presence is strong throughout the book, shaping the characters’ daily lives, their choices, their reactions to each other—just as cities do in real life.

After listening to him read from Vestments, I decided John should have some soup and it must be of beef. For this man, a steer should be hewn down in its prime and laid low with long simmering. And so I’d make stock. As an homage, the ingredients would come from the St. Paul Farmers Market.

I got beef shanks from Farm on Wheels. I put them, together with cubed beef chuck, in the oven to roast while I prepared the aromatics. First, the strong leaves of an unblanched celery plant. Yellow onions and sage would bolster John and his wife, poet Katrina Vandenberg, with their pungency. But I added bay and rosemary, black pepper and sweet carrots, too, to soften and round out the flavors; I wanted my friends to be happy. Oh, and a bit of garlic, too. They would get no less than the best.

I put the bones to bed in a crock pot, their vegetable friends tucked in all around them. Then I let slow heat work its magic, easing subtle fingers into the hearts of marrow bones, smoothing out collagen and fat, drawing out essences; leaving the souls of vegetables and meat suspended in cooking liquid.

Finally, when I tasted a bit of meat, there was nothing beefy about it anymore. I strained the broth, defatted it, and cooked it down until it was strong, velvety, and satisfying. In went a half cup of pearled barley along with the beef cubes I roasted earlier. It would take about forty-five minutes for the grain to cook. In that time, I diced some more carrots and sliced shallots, then chopped some green beans for color and fun.

The weird thing about being friends with a novelist and a poet is this: I worry that I know a lot more about them than they can possibly have deduced about me. Their jobs are to make art, and art is emotional truth. A poem, the characters in a novel: they are shards of the author’s self caught and pinned onto the page like an entomological specimen. It’s published and out there, for better or for worse. Little bits of their truths are available on Amazon.com for anyone in the world to buy and read in black and white.

I brought two quarts of my emotional truth, still hot from the stove, to another of John’s readings on a rainy night last week. Soup can’t say everything. I hope it said enough.

Pepperpalooza!

2010-09-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

What am I supposed to do with all these little peppers that Harmony Valley keeps sending? The neighbors with whom I share the CSA don’t want to deal with them, so I have been inheriting entire paper sacks full of thin-fleshed red, orange, and yellow jewels not much bigger than a thumb.

I’ve been stacking them up like a miser with gold coins. But no more. You can’t hoard food; you have to spend it, however precious and rare it may be. I know just the thing to do with these dear ones. If you want to show a pepper to full advantage, you roast it.

This would be better done over a wood fire or on a charcoal grill, but my stove’s broiler works just fine. I have cookie sheets that are specially designated for roasting peppers. They are blackened with the unctuous pepper juices that ooze out and burn to the pan, never to be scrubbed free. These sheets will not bake cookies again.

Regiment your peppers, rank and file, leaving an inch or two between them so the hot, dry air of the broiler or grill can reach everywhere. Put them on the heat and go do something else until you hear them squeal and pop. Be brave; leave them until their skins are blackened and blistered. Then turn them. For large bell peppers, you may have to char four sides plus top and bottom. For these little dolls, one flip did the trick.

When the peppers are well charred, dump them into a paper bag and close them up. You can also use a bowl and cover them with a dish towel. The idea is to let them sweat their skins off. The hollow center of the pepper is filled with steam that will continue cooking the flesh and make the peppers easier to peel.

Finally, fish the peppers out of their sweat lodge. Pull off their skins, then pull out their caps. Tear them in half, dodging steam and hot liquid. Scoop out the seeds with your thumb, if the heat doesn’t bother you, or with a spoon or the back of a knife. It helps if you keep a small fingerbowl of water while you fillet your peppers. Rinse your fingers if you need to, but avoid rinsing the pepper flesh. You will wash off all the roasty deliciousness.

When you are finished, then perhaps more of the afternoon will have passed than you intended. Maybe your fingers will be pink and tender from the steam. But you will have a bowl of riches that no one can buy any other way.

What to do with your newmade treasure? You can make a mighty fine sandwich from roasted peppers, sprouts, your favorite cheese, and maybe a dab of olive oil and fines herbes. You can purée them into a cream soup that will make people drop their nets on the shore and follow you for the rest of their lives. You can pickle them in white wine vinegar with a little salt and sugar, then get them out some horrible February day to remind yourself that there is such thing as summer.

I put some of mine on top of a focaccia.

Whole Wheat Focaccia with Shallots and Roasted Red Peppers

1 package yeast
¾c lukewarm water
1 T sugar
½ c flour
Another 2 c white flour
And 2c whole wheat flour
1 t salt
1 c water
1 c olive oil
2 or 3 shallots, sliced thin
Another 2-3 T olive oil
1 cup roasted peppers, skinned and seeded
Sea salt to taste

Mix up the yeast, the lukewarm water, and the sugar. Let it stand for 5-10 minutes in a warm place. When you return, the solution should be foaming like gangbusters. This “proves” the yeast, i.e. demonstrates that it is alive and ready to do its job. Congratulate the yeast on its virility and add the ½ cup flour. Go away for about a half hour.

When you return, the yeast will have made a hell of a job with that flour. You will have a bowl of oatmeal-colored gloop shot through with bubbles from the action of the yeast. You may wish to signal your appreciation with a low whistle. This gloop is called the “sponge.”

Mix the flours and the salt in a big bowl. Make a well with your fist or a spoon. Pour in the remaining water, 1c oil, and the sponge. Use a rubber scraper to mix this mess up until all the flour is incorporated and the dough ball is starting to look a bit raggedy. Scrape the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it until it is smooth. Put it in an oiled bowl; the big bowl you were just using will probably work. Put a little oil on your palm and slather it across the dough surface to keep things from drying out. Cover the bowl with foil, plastic wrap, or a cloth and set it in a warm spot. (If your kitchen is drafty, preheat the oven to 200 and turn it off. When you open the door, you’ll lose 100 degrees anyway. Put the bowl in there.) In about an hour to 90 minutes, the dough will have doubled in size.

While that’s happening, put the sliced shallots in a small pan with the last bit of oil. Sweat them in there at low heat until they are golden or until you get sick of it. This should take around 20-30 minutes.

When you’ve finished washing the dishes and calling your friend Betty, then turn the dough out of the bowl and onto a greased cookie sheet. If you prefer, you can divide the dough into two loaves at this time. Spread it out with your hands until it is about an inch thick. Scatter the shallots and oil across the dough, then add the peppers in artful arrangements. Preheat the oven to 350°. Allow the dough to rise again, around 20-30 minutes. Bake the bread for 20-35 minutes, until the crust is browned and makes a hollow sound when you tap it. Sprinkle sea salt on top of the loaf. Make it look pretty.

Mangiamo!

These Beans Are Greek to Me

2010-08-25T17:59:00.000-07:00

How Greek is this dish? Heck if I know. I had it on vacation two weeks ago in a restaurant called Ethos. The hostess had a large swooping mane of platinum-colored hair and a flowy tiger-striped blouse. She kept the waiting list in her head and seemingly knew what every single person in the restaurant, whether staff or customer, was doing and what they needed next. She was born to be a maîtresse d’hôtel.

That staff of hers is great, too. Our server knew not only every dish, but every one of a dozen fish on the menu by their Greek and English names. Some of them were catch of the day. She knew all those fish well enough to have a favorite.

She brought a green bean dish with a sharpish-tasting tomato sauce. There was a subtly sweet, woodsy undertone to it, though, that I could not place. Finally I found and identified the culprit: whole allspice. Who would expect to find that at a Greek restaurant?

Well, when your mouth is full of something good, you don’t need to know what’s Greek. You just need to enjoy.

Ethos Green Beans
The allspice berries at Ethos were nearly tasteless, their deliciousness having escaped into the sauce via stewing. My guess is that the chef starts a batch of the sauce in the afternoon and then keeps it on the back burner all night. When the kitchen receives an order for this dish, maybe Chef scoops up a dollop of sauce, tosses in the beans and dill, and then simmers them tender while he or she makes the rest of the meal.

2 T olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
2 cups chopped tomatoes (I used a pint of cherry tomatoes plus one small beefsteak tomato)
½ cup white wine
3 allspice berries
A sprig of oregano
1 lb green beans
2-3 T chopped fresh dill
Salt and pepper

Heat the olive oil in a wide-bottomed, deep pan. Sauté the garlic and onion until translucent. Toss in the chopped tomatoes and fry them a bit until the pan starts to dry out. Add the wine, allspice, and oregano. Turn down the heat, cover the pan, and simmer for fifteen or twenty minutes. Check the pan often and throw in some water if things are getting too dry. It would be best if the dish could simmer on low heat for a long time, but if there isn’t time for that, cook it harder. The idea is for the tomatoes to break down into a thin sauce.

Throw in the green beans and the dill, stir, and cover the pan again. Let the pot stew, stirring occasionally, until the beans are quite tender, perhaps ten minutes or more. They will not be the bright green of steamed beans; they will start to turn olive-colored.
For the last minute or two, take the cover off the pan and check the thickness of the sauce. It should be thin but with some body, like gravy. You may need to let some extra water steam off.

Season to taste. Yum!

Open Letter to Target

2010-08-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

It’s my blog, so I get to go off-topic sometimes. Fellow food lovers, I have to get something off my chest.

Dear Target:

I’ve been your loyal customer for literally all my life. As a kid growing up in Minnesota, I formed some of my earliest shopping-related memories in the speckled white linoleum aisles of Duluth’s Target store. In college, that store was my go-to place for everything. Now that I’m climbing onto the bottom rung of middle age, I can’t think of a store I like better. That’s why it breaks my heart to tell you I’ll never shop at Target again.

There are so many reasons why I love your brand and your stores. There’s the merchandise, of course, and the prices. I’ve smugly identified with your cultivated image of the Target shopper: smart and fun; stylish, yet approachable. Yes. I am soooo much cooler than people who shop at discount stores.

I can’t tell you how many times I have defended you to opponents of big-box retail. “Target is different,” I’d say. “They treat their employees like people.” (I know this because as a cash-strapped young adult, I had a second job at the Knollwood Mall store in St. Louis Park.) I have advocated for you to people who think you are corporate drones. “Target cares about communities,” I’d argue. “They give a percentage of their profits to local charities. They send cadres of volunteers.”

And of course, your support for queer people and their causes is legendary. Target has long been a presence at the Minnesota AIDS Walk; AIDS is still popularly, though wrongly, thought of as a gay disease. Target takes up a big corner of Loring Park at Pride every summer. And no queer Target corporate employee needs to work in the closet, as you (inexplicably, still) have a 100% rating from HRC.

Over the years, you’ve made it clear your queer customers and employees are important to you. It’s just as clear that they are not as important as the possibility of an economic climate that might be a little more conducive to your financial growth. For me, your $150,000 campaign donation to a homophobe belied all the good you’ve ever done. I believed you when you said you’re sorry you gave the money. But I can’t help but notice that you did not ask for it back. And I cannot help but wonder if you’re planning to make another such donation in the future.

I have one political dream for my lifetime: to live in a country where I am not a second-class citizen. To live in an America that holds good to the promises in our Constitution: that full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. That Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. That no state shall make or enforce any law which shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

If I shop at Target, Target will make a profit. And I have no indication that Target will not give some of that profit to politicians who work to defeat my dream. That’s why I cannot spend another cent with you. I will be paying a lot more for prescriptions, for shampoo, for patio furniture and sunscreen and snow shovels and antifreeze and socks and dish soap and alarm clocks. But I won’t be helping you fund my demonization and continued marginalization. That’s what you bought with the money you made while we were doing business together. You’ve betrayed your own policies and you’ve betrayed me.

Honestly, I did expect more.

Summer Swoon

2010-08-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

Like a fool, I went on vacation. Why did I do it?! August is my favorite food time of year in Minnesota! Everything is ripe to bursting. All my favorite fruits and vegetables are peaking: corn, zucchini, tomatoes, basil, eggplants, cherries, berries, melons, peaches, and on and on and on.

I came home to an enormous CSA farm share full of impossibly lush corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, basil, melons, and raspberries. I’m equal parts frantic and ecstatic, so the only reasonable thing to do is faint.

When I pick myself up off the floor, I will go straight to the kitchen and cook this stuff. Summer cooking should, in my opinion, be fresh and immediate. You should be able to march out to the garden in the middle of a recipe and pick something to put in the dish. The prep should be simple and the cooking time short.

Today’s blog is a twofer because I’ve been neglecting you all. I have here a pair of dishes with summer vegetables and their good friend olive oil.

Corn and Radish Salad
This recipe came out of the Southwest Journal a couple of years ago, and I tweaked it a bit. It’s a great thing to do with leftover corn on the cob. Ha! As if there’s ever anything left over of THAT.

Dressing for 4 cups of corn
A jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped
Juice of ½ lime
1-2 t honey
¼ t ground cumin
¼ c olive oil
Salt and fresh ground pepper

Put these in the food processor or blender and liquefy them as you prepare the other ingredients.

The salad: Make it by the ear!
4 or 5 ears of cooked corn
6 radishes, halved and sliced (1 or 2 radishes per ear)
¼ c coarsely chopped Italian parsley (1 or 2 sprigs per ear)
1-2 T sliced or minced onion (a scant teaspoon per ear)

Slice the kernels off the cob. You do this by holding the cob on end and sawing a sharp knife down the side of the cob. Don’t dig too deep or you’ll cut into the cob; aim to cut off around three rows at a time.

Put all the salad ingredients in a bowl and toss them with the dressing. That’s all!

Zucchini Stewed with Tomato
Stewing a zucchini is not the same as stewing a chicken. It takes minutes, not hours. You can start this dish and throw it on the back burner while you toss a salad, and they will be done at the same time.

1-2 T olive oil
1 small onion, diced
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
A pound of zucchini and/or pattypan squash, sliced into thick rounds
One or two large fresh tomatoes, chopped, or 1 to 2 cups of canned tomatoes (I found one jar left from last summer)
A handful of fresh basil leaves, torn
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a large skillet and sauté the onion until translucent. Toss in the garlic and stir it around for a minute.

Add the squash and sauté until it begins to get tender, about four or five minutes. Add the tomatoes and, if needed, enough water so that the squash pieces are swimming just a little bit. Turn the heat down to medium-low and cover, stirring occasionally, for five minutes.

Have a look: the squash should be tender and the tomatoes should be thickened, not watery. If it is too soupy in there, uncover and cook off some of the water. Add the basil for the last minute of cooking, then season with salt and pepper.

Figs: Pure Romance

2010-07-25T18:54:00.000-07:00

I ducked into the Whole Foods to buy dip, and what should appear before my eyes but a display of fresh turkey figs? They were perfectly ripe and they were on sale. When the universe is speaking to you this clearly, ignore it at your own peril.

Soft, fragrant, and curvy figs are among our most sensuous fruits. Bite or cut into one: the dusky skin just barely offers resistance, then yields to reveal white flesh and glistening pink jelly. The taste is as delicate as a caress.

Match the sweet murmur of figs with a nibble of black pepper and a nip of goat cheese. Soften the cheese’s bite with a little dollop of honey. Serve these to your sweetheart as a light dessert, maybe with a moscato or a glass of lemonade, as the sun slips out of the summer sky. Breathe in the scents of figs and summer as evening fades into night. Draw your lover gently into your arms, place your lips close to her ear, and whisper:

“Are you going to eat that last one?”

Figs with Honeyed Goat Cheese
Sometimes you can find goat cheese with honey in the schmantzy cheese section of the grocery store. If you don’t see it, just get some chevre and put it in the blender with a couple of tablespoons of honey. Taste and add as you go until it is a nice balance of goat-tart and honey-sweet.

Fresh ripe figs
Honeyed goat cheese (see note above)at room temperature
Fresh ground black pepper

Trim any stems off the figs. Slice them in half the long way. Lay the fig halves cut side up.

Stir up the cheese so it is soft. Using two spoons, drop ½ to 1 teaspoon of cheese on the center hollow of each fig half. Arrange the figs smartly on a serving plate.

Grind a little black pepper over the figs. Bat your eyes a little as you serve them.

Go with what you know

2010-07-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

Today is a special day! It’s a milestone birthday for Beth, the most important person in the entire universe. There’s little to nothing I wouldn’t do for her, so when she asks me to make her favorite cake and decorate it with flowers, I do so with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

Beth loves the devil’s food cake recipe from Eleanor Ostman’s Always on Sunday frosted with the chocolate mousse frosting from Joy of Cooking. I usually decorate her cake with fresh pansies and mint leaves from the garden.

“But,” I wondered, “what if I candy the flowers?” I mulled over the advantages. “They will stay pretty for longer. I can preserve them in advance. I can capture them at the apex of their bloom, and they will look FABULOUS.”

And besides, it would be one more layer of elegance. One more confectionary demonstration of how much I love this brilliant woman. She makes my whole world feel like chocolate cake and a field of flowers. Why wouldn’t I want to pull out all the stops on her birthday?

So I studied up on how to candy the flowers. I picked the best ones, freshened them in cold water, and brushed them in egg wash with a clean, fine paintbrush. I dusted them as gently as I could with superfine sugar. I laid them carefully on parchment to dry.

I succeeded in turning the simple beauty of summer pansies…

into these sugar-mummified floral corpses.

I did not have the heart to put them on a cake this important. Good thing I have been super nice to my pansies all month. They were kind enough to have opened some new flowers. Thanks, pansies. I’ll go with what I know and not count on fancy sugar acrobatics to carry the day.

Happy birthday, dear Beth!

Pico de Mango

2010-07-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't get the bulletin, it's summer. The days are a grind of punishing sun. The night flows in, sultry, its dark heat draping us with a slick sheen of languor. The dense, humid air trails its heavy fingers across our skin, leaving trickles of sweat to slip down a back or a neck. In my garden, the scents of jasmine and lily hang in voluptuous clouds, nectar oozing to the tips of turgid pistils, pollen sifting off to stain fleshy white petals.

It’s salsa weather. Mangoes are a shudderingly fine balance between acid and sweet. Their lazy, musky nectar and silk-smooth flesh are a perfect complement to the vigorous crunch and zing of onions, chiles, and cilantro. Round it off with the clean finish of lime to cut the lingering sweetness.

Mango Salsa
I have won so many salsa contests with this recipe that people don’t know whether to get mad or hungry when they see me coming.
2 ripe mangoes
5 or 6 scallions or half a small onion
1 or 2 jalapeño chiles
A fistful of cilantro
Juice of one lime
A dash of salt

Chop everything and mix it up. That’s it!

Bonus: How to cut up a mango
There are still people in the world who do not know how to cut up a mango without waste or injury. Not another thumb lost to mangoes!

Anatomy of a mango: The large, flat seed is in the center of the mango. Its fibrous outside is entrenched in the flesh. The trick is to cut away the fruit as close to the seed as possible, then come back for what’s attached to the seed.

Addressing the mango: Find the stem to tell you where the center is. Hold the mango so the seed is perpendicular to the cutting surface.

Lop off the cheeks. With practice, you will learn to know how close to the center you can cut.

Score the flesh. Try to cut as deep as the skin, but not through the skin.

Now hold the mango slice like a votive offering and push it inside out. The skin will pop from concave to convex, presenting you with many cubes of mango that you can slice or pick off the skin.

Finally, pare the skin off the remaining disc and whittle the flesh off the seed. This is slippery and possibly dangerous. If you don’t want to risk your fingers, and especially if no one is looking, you might just want to gnaw the fruit off the seed.

Hey, cook’s privilege. You earned it.

Salmon for Introverts

2010-07-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

I’ll have a real picture as soon as I can figure out how this damn camera phone works.

Every time my friends John and Mike get an invitation to the same event as me, Mikey asks, “Is Beth going to be there?” The answer is often “no.” My partner, Beth, likes a quiet, intimate setting with a nice meal and a chance for a long conversation.

John and I belong to a circle of friends that, quite frequently, sings bawdy songs at the top of our voices in a space packed with as many of us as will fit.

So to give our introverted partners a chance to bond, I arranged dinner with Beth, John, and Mike at my house. John and I conducted an entire conversation to the tune of “America, F*** Yeah” (NSFW) while Beth and Mike embarked on an in-depth mutual fascination. In another room.

When it was time to serve, we turned to Beth and Mike. They were so deep in a conversation about yoga and modern art that they did not even hear us sing, “It’s dinnertime, F*** YEAH!”

Eh. How did we manage to attract these gentle people, who assert themselves so differently—and so much more quietly—than we do? I don’t know about John, but I used recipes like this to entice my introverted sweetheart into loving me back.

Salmon, Spinach Pasta, and Salad with Beet and Fennel
This meal would have served six. There were leftovers.

The Salmon
2 lb salmon fillets
5 springs rosemary
1 T olive oil
3 T lemon juice
Salt and pepper

Pick the leaves off the rosemary stalks and chop them. Mix all ingredients but the salmon. Rub the seasoning mix on the cut side of the fish. Refrigerate for 1 or 2 hours.

Broil or grill the fish for 8-10 minutes or until cooked to desired degree of firmness.

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The Pasta

1 lb whole wheat penne
2 T olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic
1 lb spinach leaves, washed and dried
1 splash of white wine
½ c Parmesan cheese
A grating of nutmeg
A grind of black pepper

Boil water and heat a pan. Pour the pasta in the boiling water. About 5 minutes before the pasta is cooked, pour the olive oil into the pan and swirl it around. Sauté the garlic for 30 seconds. Toss in the spinach and sauté for three or four minutes. Pour in a splash of wine, cover, and steam for a minute more. Take the pan off the heat.

The pasta should be about done. Drain it well. Throw it in the same pan with your spinach, the cheese, and the nutmeg and pepper. Toss to coat the pasta and serve immediately.

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The Salad
1 cup cooked diced beets
1 cup sliced fennel (stalks and leaves are great!)
1 head Boston lettuce (I used red from Dehn’s Garden)
Balsamic vinaigrette
Moisten the beets with a teaspoon or two of dressing. Toss the greens, beets, and fennel with a little more of the dressing. That’s it!

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The Crazy Cat Index

2010-06-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

We interrupt our regular food-related programming to bring you the Crazy Cat Index.

The Crazy Cat Index is a metric that gives insight on whether you (or anyone) are in danger of becoming a Crazy Cat Lady. It is just an indicator, and the outlying values are not necessarily useful. But that's no problem for me. The Crazy Cat Index is really just a tool for speculation, time-wasting, or making fun of my ex-girlfriends.

Here's how it works: the index is a ratio of person's age multiplied by number of cats in the household; over number of rooms in the household times number of human beings who share it. Age is measured in years. "Room" is defined as a weatherproof, full-time habitation space. Hallways don't count. Patios don't count. Bathrooms count, as do finished basement spaces. Laundry rooms? Sure, why not. Storage closets? No. If you're arguing to include closet space, then you already know you're a crazy cat lady. Stop trying to game the index.

Here are some examples for comparison.

Let's say a 35-year-old woman with one pet cat lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment with separate living and dining spaces. Count the rooms: 1) bedroom; 2) kitchen; 3) bathroom; 4) living room; 5) dining room.

Nothing about this woman sounds crazy outright. Her CCI is (35*1)/(5*1), or 7. If we increase her age to 50, her CCI is 10. So 7 to 10 a good benchmark for a person with a cat but no particular indicators of crazy. If the person shares the apartment with someone, the CCI is halved. This is still within normal range.

Compare with the CCI I calculated for someone of my acquaintance who is a known crazy cat lady. At 43 years of age, she lives in a small one-bedroom apartment (bed, bath, kitchen, living/dining area) with three cats. Her CCI, (43*3)/(4*1)=32.25, is frankly disturbing.

The CCI postulates that, all other factors being equal, crazy-cat-ladiness increases with age. Thus the CCI for each person in a cat-owning family is different, even though they share the same number of rooms, cats, and human companions. Living alone indicates more craziness than sharing a home with other people. Living in tiny one-room apartments is more crazymaking than living in spacious quarters.

Living alone in a studio apartment with multiple cats is, obviously, crazier and crazier every year.

One of these things is not like the others

2010-06-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have finally gotten around to making atonement for this.

I speared Kadejan chicken thighs, Tollefson Family Pork bacon, and a pineapple that I only bought because it was on sale at the local big box grocery store. I served them on a bed of grilled garlic scapes alongside some new potatoes with dill, both from the Minneapolis Farmers Market.

It’s all local! Except the pineapple! That’s OK; I’m an import, too.

Wagon Scapes

2010-06-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

I have never met my friend Kerry, and this recipe is for her.

Last summer I decided to try Twitter. One of the first people I found was one who blogs and tweets as Clue Wagon. We were both new to Twitter, and we quickly discovered that we really enjoy each other’s perspective on life. Go read her blog about genealogy. You’ll see; she’s a mensch.

Clue Wagon and I discovered garlic scapes at about the same time last year, I think. I remember sharing confusion and fascination with this absurdly curly vegetable. We swapped recipes. She sent me a nice pesto. I sent her a sauté of scapes and shrimp finished with white wine and served over cappellini. She told me she’s a vegetarian.

Damn it! I try so hard; I really do. I try to be open to the notion that not everyone will eat everything. I try not to assume. But it did not occur to me to wonder, much less ask, if Clue Wagon was into eating the not-kosher, not-halal, not-vegetable underwater bugs that shrimp essentially are. Crap!

I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Here’s the deal: cooked shrimp are a circle of savory yum. They meet the tooth with just the right amount of resistance. They are salty-sweet and meltingly delicious. I hate the thought of my friend missing out on an ingredient that creates this satisfying burst of flavor, but I’ll be damned if I can’t come up with something that isn’t a dead animal, too.

So, Kerry, please accept this recipe as my love song to vegetarians and food lovers everywhere. You’re at the top of the list.

Wagon Scapes
If you are a vegan, you could make these with gnocchi. It’s so gratifying to bite those. Rrrr!

Pan photo by Beth Berila

1 package cheese tortelloni (2-3 servings)
2-3 T olive oil
1 bunch (10 to 12) garlic scapes
1 bunch(6-8) green onions
½ lb crimini mushrooms
¼ to ½ c white wine, stock, or water
1 sprig each of sage, rosemary, parsley, and basil
Salt and pepper to taste

Set a pot of water to boil. Mince up the herbs. Cut the scapes into ½-inch pieces. Slice the white part of the onions and save the greens for some other use. Slice the mushrooms.

Pop dried tortelloni in the boiling water and give them a bit of a head start. If you’re using gnocchi and you are a multitasker, you can make them at the same time as the scapes. If you’re a one-track cook or you’re using fresh pasta, make them at the end.

Heat the oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Throw in the onions and garlic scapes and stir them around for a minute or two. Throw in the mushrooms. Stir until they release their juices.

Splash some of your liquid into the pan. Keep stirring until reduced and the vegetables are tender. Remove from the heat. Finish your pasta, drain it, and put it in serving bowls. Spoon the vegetables on top. Sprinkle on the herbs and finish with salt and a grind of black pepper.

Mangiamo!

Ladies Who Lunch

2010-05-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

OMG, you guys. This may be the most precious thing I have ever posted. “Precious” as in “twee.” For I have created a Cheese Log.

...wait for laughter to die down...

Here’s the deal. Two kinds of people will like this thing. First, people who genuinely like cheese logs. Second, people who like them ironically. Which one am I? I’m not going to confess, and I challenge you to guess.

Three events have converged to result in a cheese log. First, I am planning to attend a small gathering over the weekend, and snackies shall be required. Second, radishes the size of golf balls showed up in my Harmony Valley CSA box today. Third, I have been keeping the salad burnet from last week's box in a jar of water in the fridge. The plant is so pretty that nothing seemed special enough to use it in.

Well, cheese log is the thing! It is pink. It is springy and cool. It is covered with the minced leaves of a sparkly-flavored, wine-dark herb. I am so pleased with my own cleverness that I may just decide this appetizer is too special to serve.

Wait, no I won’t.

Ladies Who Lunch Cheese Log
1 package cream cheese (use full-fat or the log will not be very solid)
1 golf-ball-sized radish
2 T minced chives
A dash of salt
A handful of herb leaves, minced fine

Chop the radish and throw it in a food processor with the cream cheese. Process for several minutes until pink and smooth.

Gently stir in (do not process!) the minced chives. Salt to taste. Turn the cheese out onto a piece of waxed paper. Wrap the cheese up like a burrito and refrigerate until firm.

Unwrap the cheese. (You can cut the log in half at this point if you want it to be smaller.) Briefly smooth it out by rolling it on a counter or between your hands, and then roll it in the minced herbs until covered. Serve right away; or wrap in a clean piece of waxed paper or plastic wrap and chill until serving time.

I’ll drink to that.

Harmony Valley, Are You Trying to Kill Me?

2010-05-17T19:57:00.000-07:00

Harmony Valley Farm has never before given me any indication that they wanted me to be sick, hurt, or dead. So then why did they fill my CSA box with stinging nettle? We’re talking about a noxious weed that, when touched, retaliates with pain, itching, and blisters.

OK, OK. I know that Harmony Valley just thinks weird vegetables are fun. They like to grow new things. They like to try feeding these things to their customers—their newsletter even has handy tips on how to make pesto and pasta and soup with their new little friend. Hmmph. Next I suppose they’ll ask me if I want to play fetch with their pet alligator.

Well I want revenge. The only way I’ll be satisfied is to invent a more exciting recipe than what they came up with–and I have done it! I thought and thought until I realized this problem may have been solved before. My idea comes from an area of vague overlap between Mexican and East Asian cooking. The magic solution is, indeed, a solution: I will quick-pickle these little demons.

A Mexican cook would probably wait only an hour or so before serving this nettle recipe. A Japanese, Korean, or Chinese cook might wait one to three days. Any of those people would have put in hot peppers, garlic, ginger, or other seasonings, too; but I was interested in the pure nettle flavor. It’s a surprisingly complex taste: an initial pleasant pickle sourness broadens and mellows into a flavor that’s slightly nutty, slightly musky, slightly minerally. These would make a great taco with queso blanco, or a condiment for black bean soup, or for plain rice, or even for sushi.

Take that, Harmony Valley!

Pickled Stinging Nettles
They won’t sting anymore after you do this to them.

⅔ c vinegar – I used rice, but you could use white or apple cider too
1 T salt
2 T sugar
2 qt stinging nettle leaves – the bundle from a Harmony Valley CSA is just right

Pick the nettle leaves off their stems (wear gloves unless you like weeping sores), wash them, and spin them dry in a salad spinner.

Put the vinegar, salt, and sugar in a 2-quart saucepan, cover, and bring to a boil. Stuff the nettle leaves in the pan, clap the lid on, and return to a boil—this will only take a few seconds. Take the pan off the heat and stir the nettles so they all get dunked in the vinegar. Put the lid back on and allow them to stand for a few minutes until they have reduced in volume and are covered with the liquid.

Pack the nettles into a clean half-pint jar, pour on the vinegar, and screw on the lid. (I wrap the lid in plastic wrap to keep the metal from corroding.) Store in the refrigerator until ready to eat. I wouldn’t keep them more than a week or two; I don’t think long-term storage is going to be a big problem. Because, you know, yum.

Spring Thing Fling!

2010-05-09T19:35:00.001-07:00

Yesterday it tried to snow, and today it was sunny and 60 degrees. I bought my tomato plants but they will have to live inside for a few weeks. All the flowers in the garden are growing! I got to spend the whole afternoon outside playing with them! And tonight I will pay for it in allergies. Aaah! Spring is here!

Best of all: there’s finally something to cook. Vegetables have returned to the Minneapolis Farmers Market, and last week my neighbor Gwen and I pawed through the very first of a whole growing season’s worth of Harmony Valley CSA boxes we’re sharing this year.

Here’s my first hurrah of spring!

Spring Things Menu

Like a Minnesota spring, this meal is here in a heartbeat and gone before you know it. To make the dinner, get everything you see in the photograph; romaine lettuce; salt and pepper; a handful of sugar; salad dressing; a pat of butter; and a splash of mirin. Oh, and ice cream.

Sorrel and Romaine Salad
Sauté of Morels and Green Garlic
Fresh Asparagus
Pan-Seared Salmon in Mirin Reduction
Stewed Rhubarb with Vanilla Ice Cream

First, cut things up. Chop the rhubarb into ½” chunks. Chop the garlic and slice the morels. Roughly chop or tear the romaine and sorrel, wash it, dry it, and toss it together. Chop or snap the asparagus.

Next, throw the rhubarb in a saucepan with sugar and a splash of water. Heat to boiling. Simmer that, stirring occasionally, while you cook the rest.

Heat butter in a sauté pan. Cook the garlic and morels until tender and any water has been resorbed. Carefully scrape out the pan. Heat it back up.

Put the salmon, skin side up, in the hot sauté pan. Cook 3 or 4 minutes. Turn over and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Put the asparagus and a drop of water in a saucepan with a tight-fitting lid over high heat.

Pour a splash of mirin in the fish pan and shake. In the 3 minutes it takes the mirin to reduce, the asparagus will be done. The rhubarb sauce is probably done too.

Turn off all the burners, put your dinner on your plate, dress the greens, and serve. For dessert, spoon the still-warm rhubarb sauce over scoops of vanilla ice cream.

What to Make with What’s Left: Compost

2010-05-02T15:44:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, a pushy houseguest suggested I get a compost bin. I didn’t figure out until too late that she was pushy. The bin, I later understood, had not been a suggestion but a demand. Its installation encouraged her to new heights of imposition until finally I had to suggest she find other accommodations.

The overbearing guest is long gone, but the compost bin stuck around. We get along great! It stays out in the back yard near the alley and mostly keeps to itself. And on trash day, there’s not a whole lot for me to carry to the curb.

All spring, summer, and fall, every time I make fruit or vegetables, the compost bin gets to eat the scraps. Peels, trimmings, cores, and the occasional moldy crisper-drawer tragedy—everything goes in the bin. Good compost is a balance between these nitrogenous “green” materials and carbon-rich “browns,” things like grass clippings, fallen leaves, wood chips, last season’s mulch, and other yard waste. If it’s not rotting fast enough, it needs more green. If it’s too wet, it needs more browns. Eventually, any mix breaks down to a crumbly brown, earthy-smelling dirtlike substance.

Compost might not look like much of a treat to you, but try serving it to your garden. It makes clay soil drain better. It makes sandy soil retain water. Work it into the vegetable garden before planting, or spread it like mulch in your perennial garden, and you won’t need chemical fertilizer.

Here are some pictures of permanent houseguests who eat compost at Chez Boland.

Happy spring!

Wild ginger, Asarum canadensis

Pasque flower, Pulsatilla vulgaris

Blueberry, Vaccinium 'North Sky'

Lungwort, Pulmonaria and I forgot the cultivar.

Checkered lily, Fritillaria meleagris

Release the Krakenburgers!

2010-04-25T20:16:00.001-07:00

Caution: this post contains a spoiler! If you can't predict how the movie would end, watch out!

Oh my gawd, you guys. I just got back from watching Clash of the Titans with my friend Joe. I cannot remember the last time I laughed so hard, and it was only five bucks!

This movie did not have an original thought in its head. It was a hamhanded pastiche of classic and not-so-classic sci-fi, adventure, and fantasy movies. I only wish I had a broader crap-film background so I could name more quotes.

Let's see, first we see a coffin bob up in the Aegean Sea (Call me Ishmael!) bearing a baby... of mysterious parentage! Then the plot limps along on twin crutches: Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. ~~Obi-wan Kenobi~~ Liam Neeson as Zeus strides around pronouncing things, even turning up in a floppy brown hood. (Luke, um, Perseus! I'm your FATHER!) Perseus collects a ragtag band of soldierly followers in historically dubious armor. He even picks up a Jabberwocky/Wookie that communicates in sibilant grunts and a raven-haired immortal lady with great cheekbones. And a light saber! Of all things!

The film then lurches from the video-game monster violence of Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf past the Dark Crystal-meets-Pan's Labyrinth Gray Sisters and an Anaconda-esque Medusa, to a truly Godzillian ending with an impossibly giant kraken corpse making a tsunami-sized death splash—never quite managing to carry off Andromeda, though she is strung up like Naomi Watts on offer to Peter Jackson's King Kong. Along the way we even manage to quote The Mummy (blood falls on the sand and giant monsters pop out!) and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (a severed hand gets up and scurries off to do mischief!) I'm pretty sure they threw in some Pirates of the Caribbean, too (creaky skeleton ship ride!).

Meanwhile a black-cloaked Ralph Fiennes as Hades swoops and skulks through the movie, vaporizing and rematerializing around every corner like Sauron-cum-Dracula-cum-Voldemort-cum-Nightcrawler from X2. All the while he's simpering, sulking and glaring like the runner-up in an emo beauty pagent, coldly quipping on the movie's premised economies of human existence like Stalin to Zeus's Lenin: "No. YOU need their love. I learned to live on their FEAR." (Thanks to friend Joe for the apt comparison.)

In other words, it was a hokey, derivative-as-hell retread—but big and fun and made me laugh! And it only cost FIVE BUCKS!

Just like this week's recipe! These burgers do not teach anyone anything, but they are big, cheap, pretty tasty, and they make us happy.

Burgers of the Titans!
In a world where grilling seasons are all too short, one burger recipe hides a secret: savory ingredients lurking inside...

2 lb ground beef
1 piece of bread, rubbed between your palms until it is crumbs
2 eggs
2 T fines herbes
1/4 c grated Parmesan cheese
1 T freshly ground black pepper
1 T minced garlic or onion (optional)

Mix it all up! Pat it into 8 burgers. Grill over hot coals.

So Not in the Mood

2010-04-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

OMG you guys, it’s allergy season and spring. Two of the stupidest times of the year in terms of cooking: not only do my symptoms and/or pills render me functionally useless, but there’s nothing to cook! There’s nothing fresh, nothing in season, nothing local or abundant. Yeah, yeah, local food blah blah blah, traditional foodways blah. Back in the day, you know what people did this time of year? They starved!

Well, I guess I DO have some canned kraut around here. Quit bitchin’ and get in the kitchen.

A Thing I Just Made Up This Minute
Hardly groundbreaking, but hush up. I’m crabby and this is comfort food. It tastes good to this Slavic American, so make one for yourself too.

Olive oil
1 or 2 pork chops
1 onion
1 qt sauerkraut – mine has caraway in it
3 Yukon Gold potatoes, quartered
2 carrots, cut in chunks
1 apple, quartered, cored and peeled
¾ c water – white wine would’ve been good too
1 bay leaf, broken up

Heat the olive oil in a skillet with a tight-fitting lid. Throw the pork on one side and the onions on the other. Stir those onions around while the pork browns well, then flip pork over to brown the other side.

Throw everything else in the pan, stir it up a little, and heat to boiling. Turn down the heat to simmer. Clamp that lid on. Go do something else for an hour.

Come back and see if you can cut the pork with a wooden spoon. You can? Yay, it’s done. Oh, it smells good in here. Maybe I can carry on another day.

Risotto Is for People...

2010-04-11T18:29:00.000-07:00

Risotto is for people who like to stand around and fuss over things. You have to stir constantly for twenty minutes or more, and you might as well get comfortable at it. Risotto is for the standing meditation. The zone-out. The long phone call to someone who talks your ear off: “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Sure, Grandma. Yeah… No, you’re not using up all my long distance. I’m making risotto.”

Risotto is for people who haven’t been grocery shopping. Let’s see… I have half a carton of vegetable broth. I have a handful of dried mushrooms. I have two celery stalks, part of a jar of tomatoes, some leftover herb butter, and one shallot. What the hell am I going to do with one shallot?!

Risotto is for people who need to make something really, really good but who don’t have all the food, time, or money in the world. Maybe you have a lot of one thing, or maybe you have only a little of a bunch of things. Risotto is how you lengthen and broaden that one thing, or meld those many things, until it tastes like the whole world is made out of them. You pour on liquid and stir as the rice absorbs it and the heat reduces it. The dish builds up layers of flavor as your ingredients dissolve, transform, and reconstitute into something richer and greater than the sum of their parts.

Risotto is for people who want to impress someone. You can say, quite honestly, “Look, I worked over a hot stove for you. Now my whole house smells like the bliss I feel with you every day, and the savor of this dish is as deep and intense as my love for you, my cherished one.”

Eh, and if she still won’t come over after an overture like that? Risotto is for people who wouldn’t say no to a second helping.

Risotto alla Whatever
Make it up as you go, or make the same one I made. I don’t think you could screw up this recipe if you tried. The only real essentials are rice, liquid (even just plain water), and maybe butter and cheese. If you have these few things on hand, you’ll always be minutes away from something wonderful to eat.

2-3 T olive oil
Some aromatics (I used 2 celery stalks, a shallot, and a small onion, all diced up)
2 to 2½ c Arborio rice
Some minced garlic, or not (I used 2 cloves)
Some vegetables that can cook a long time (I used a handful of dried mushrooms reconstituted in 2 c water)
A quart of canned tomatoes, or not
Some quick-cooking vegetables (I chopped up fresh local spinach to make 2 cups)
Total of 8 c liquid (I counted the canned tomatoes as 3 cups, drained the mushrooms to make 2 cups, added 2 cups vegetable broth, and topped it off with a cup of water.)
Butter and grated cheese (I had ⅓ c leftover herb butter and ½ c grated Parmesan.)
Salt and pepper to taste

Put your liquid in a saucepan and bring it to a simmer. (I didn’t include the quart of tomatoes.)

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Sauté the aromatics until they begin to turn translucent. Toss in the dry rice and let the stirring begin: sauté it until it is translucent and beginning to turn gold, maybe 3-5 minutes. Add the garlic if you’re using it and stir a minute or two more.

Toss in the long-cooking vegetables and quart of tomatoes, if you’re using either of those. Otherwise start ladling in your simmering liquid about a cup at a time. Stir, stir, stir until the liquid is absorbed. This takes maybe five minutes or so. When the rice is the consistency of stiff oatmeal or thick tapioca pudding, add another cup of liquid.

Keep stirring, reducing, and adding more liquid until the rice is about al dente. You will probably only have a cup or less of liquid left in the simmering pot. Add the quick-cooking vegetables and a half cup or so of liquid. Stir and reduce until your vegetables are cooked, adding a bit more liquid if needed. Stir and stir like a brave soldier. Don’t give up now. A spoon should stand up in the risotto; it should remind you of stew but not of soup. Take the pan off the heat and stir in butter, cheese, salt, and pepper to taste.

Doesn’t it taste amazing? Mangiamo!

Fat Commuter in Mismatched Ensemble Hands Ass to Road Cyclist

2010-04-10T13:26:00.000-07:00

(MINNEAPOLIS, MN)-- Fat girl Amy Boland, wearing mismatched gear, handed back the ass of an apparently fitter, more stylishly dressed cyclist on a better bike today on the Kenilworth Trail.

Sporting a two-tone blue jersey, turquoise and gray jacket, brick-red bandanna, olive shoes, black shorts, and black helmet, Boland admired the red-clad fellow cyclist's toned calves as she approached from behind at approximately 13 miles per hour. Drawing abreast, she called "On your left," as dictated by cycling etiquette.

To Boland's surprise, the other rider responded by pedaling faster. As the thin-tired red road bike with newly taped drops began to gain ground, the rider turned to exchange a glance with the would-be overtaker. Boland grinned, dropped her 12-year-old commuter bike into the fifth ring, and left the other rider behind in a cloud of dust and clashing colors.

"Ha, ha," Boland commented about the incident. However, sources close to the triumphant fat chick predicted that by the time she rode up steep Dupont Avenue between Vineland and Mt. Curve, she would be laughing out of the other side of her face.

I made a tart!

2010-03-28T18:43:00.000-07:00

I made a tart out of spring vegetables! Wanna see how?

1 leek
10 asparagus
Butter
3 egg
1/2 c cream
Salt, pepper, nutmeg
1 pie crust

First I chopped up the vegetables and sauteed them in butter:

Then I patched together a tart crust from some dough bits left over from last week's pie. I baked it 20 minutes at 375. Then I painted it with the yolk of one of my eggs and returned it to the oven to set. This seals the crust in case of small holes or fissures and also keeps it from getting soggy.

Then I sprinkled in my veggies:

And I poured in a custard made from the rest of my eggs, the cream, and seasonings:

Then I baked at 400 for 20 minutes or so until the egg was just set. Easy and fun!

Cherry pie, babies. Cherry pie.

2010-03-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

If you were smart last summer, you froze some cherries. If you were smart all winter, you have eaten most of what’s in your freezer.

I apparently think that if I hoard frozen cherries, I am somehow wealthy beyond imagination. Now it’s spring and I am yelling at myself. “Wise up, kitten. It’s going to be July again before you know it. You will feel like a real dope with a freezer full of last summer’s fruit.”

Time to bake a bunch of pie before everyone finds out what a blockhead I’ve been.

Cherry Pie
To freeze fruit for use in pie, scatter it in one layer on a cookie sheet and freeze solid. Then pack the individual frozen fruit pieces in a freezer-proof bag or container for long-term storage.

The crust
2 ½ c flour
1 t sugar
1 t salt
1 c shortening
5 T ice water

The filling
5 c frozen sour cherries
1 ¼ c sugar
¼ c cornstarch
2 T butter, cut in 6 to 8 pieces

For the crust, mix the dry ingredients. Cut in the fat. Sprinkle with the water and stir with a fork. Make a ball, divide the dough in half, and refrigerate for at least ½ hour.

Set the oven rack at the lowest position and preheat the oven to 400°. Get three pieces of tin foil about 2” wide and join them, end to end, to make one long strip.
Roll out bottom crust and fit into pie pan. Roll out top crust.

Now move fast:

Knock any ice off the cherries. Toss them with the sugar and cornstarch. Put them in the pie pan and pour any remaining dry ingredients evenly over the fruit.

Space the butter pieces evenly over the fruit. Lay the top crust over the pie, trim the overhang to 1 or 2 inches, and crimp the pie shut.

Put on some decorative pie crust cutouts or other hoo-ha if you like. Cut steam vents in the top crust. Wrap the strip of foil around the pie like a collar, bending it in half over the crimped edge. This will keep the pie edge from charring to a crisp.

Bake for 50 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350° and bake until juices are bubbling out of the steam vents, another half hour or so. You can put a cookie sheet under the pie to keep pie juice from blarping all over your oven. You can also take off the little collar at this juncture.

Cool completely to give the pie a chance to congeal. Or cut it warm and suffer the runny, yummy consequences.

Beach House Seafood

2010-03-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

So, let’s say you go on vacation. Let’s say you go to a little island in the Gulf of Mexico where you get accommodations that include a kitchen with three pans, a dull knife, and a cookie sheet. Let’s say that on this island, all the good restaurants are expensive and all the cheap restaurants are crap. And let’s say that you have access to either a fish market or a fishing pole.

Wouldn’t you rather just be your own restaurant?

I would rather, yes, I would. With a few staple items at the overpriced grocery store, I can cook various sea creatures using different techniques to highlight their unique flavors and textures.

The groceries:
Get as many of these as are available, convenient, or attractive to you.

Butter
Olive oil
A lemon
Parsley
Other herbs, i.e. bay or thyme
Salt
Pepper
Garlic
Shallot
A big bottle of dry white wine
Cocktail sauce

The sea creatures:
Ideally, you will buy/catch different ones every day. Get something shelly or bony the first night so you can make a nice stock that will only get more delicious the rest of the week.

Crustaceans (shrimp, crabs, lobster)
Mollusks (mussels, scallops, clams)
Fish

The cooking techniques:
Boil/steam: Throw some parsley stems, dried herbs, and shallot peels in some water, wine, or a combination of the two. Bring it to a rolling boil. Throw in your sea creatures. When the water returns to a rolling boil, shrimp and scallops are cooked. Mussels and clams should be boiled until they open.

I like to make a shrimp cocktail and then throw the shells back in the cooking liquid. Simmer this for a half hour and you have a lovely stock that can be used for more shrimp cocktail. Or use it to finish off sautéed fish. Or use it as the base for a sauce.

Grill/broil: This is easy. You just, um, broil things. Scallops need just a few minutes. Shrimps too. Fish can go as long as 7-10 minutes per inch of thickness depending on how done you like it.

Sautée: Heat butter, oil, or both in a pan. Toss in garlic and shallots and cook until translucent. Put in fish skin side up, or throw in crustaceans/shelled mollusks. Cook only a couple of minutes for crustaceans/mollusks. Cook 3-5 minutes per inch of fish, flip over, season the top, pour in a splash of wine or stock from your fabulous shrimp cocktail, cover, and cook the remaining 3-5 minutes per inch of fish.

Pasta: If you boil up a nice linguine or capellini while you’re cooking your sea creatures, everything can be done at once. You can toss the sea creatures with the pasta, as I did with these sautéed scallops. You can put the sea creatures on a serving plate; splash your pan with more stock; then reduce it for a nice little sauce to go on your pasta. Or you can just butter the noodles. Or maybe serve them with garlic and olive oil.

The possibilities are not endless, but they will see you nicely through a week at the beach.

Mangiamo!

Beware the Ides of March: Fallen Caesar Cookies

2010-03-06T08:15:00.001-08:00

Cook ‘Em if You Got ‘Em is pleased and proud to present you, for the first time EVER, a holiday recipe well in advance of a holiday: Fallen Caesar Cookies for the Ides of March!

OK, so it’s not really a holiday, and I’m the only one who celebrates it, and the cookies usually freak people out. But still!

Here, I’ll let you in on the backstory. When I first moved to the Twin Cities, it was in the middle of a recession. I worked for a school library book publisher. A lot of the staff were, like me, Gen Xers right out of school. In college, we’d been writers, visual artists, English majors, theater minors. Now we were working for abysmal pay in a company with a World War II–era business model. We were energetic but cynical; creative but financially crippled.

Those times were an anxious mix of compliance and defiance. The myth of the American Dream was evaporating for college graduates across the country who would NOT be doing better than our parents. As well, I didn’t know anyone my age who was interested in the Baby Boomer live-to-work ethic. We didn’t want to be like the older adults around us, but we were scrambling to establish adult identities. For me and everyone I knew at Lerner, this included finding and using our creative voices as artists.

So we were constantly doing things like, say, composing haikus about our lunches. Or making Jello aquariums, complete with Swedish fish, for the company potluck. Or using decorative gourds to create dioramas of famous characters in literature.

Or commemorating the Ides of March by baking sugar cookies decorated with stab wounds and staging a recital, in a Boston accent, of Marc Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar. This was so much fun that I started doing it every year.

Now we’re in a much worse recession than the one in which I came of age. I look at the young adults around me and I can remember how it felt, but I can’t imagine what’s going to happen: what career paths will they have? How will the world change because of them, and how will it change them?

And THAT is why I’m putting out the call: everyone bake these cookies for March 15. Take them to work if you have a job. Or take them to school, or to church, or send a box to a distant friend. Just share them however you can. Read the funeral speech. Not for any logical reason. Just because it’s the Ides of March, and we should all beware, and tough times call for ridiculous measures.

Fallen Caesar Cookies
Use your favorite cookie dough recipe to make my traditional non sequitur response to The Man. My favorite is Rich Rolled Sugar Cookies from Joy of Cooking.

1 recipe sugar cookie dough
1 tube of red Cake Mate decorating gel
1 cookie cutter shaped like a person, i.e. gingerbread boy

Roll out the dough and cut out the shapes. Transfer shapes to a cookie sheet. Use the decorating gel to make seven marks—one for each conspirator in Caesar’s assassination—on each cookie. Use a little pressure to make a slight dent in the surface of the dough.

Bake the cookies, watching carefully. You want to bake them until they are just done, rendering as pale a cookie as possible without underbaking. This will make for more lurid contrast between the cookie and the stab wound. The decorating gel will bake into the cookie and will not brush or smear off after the cookie cools.

Beans and Sausage Belong in Soup

2010-02-28T16:33:00.000-08:00

Honestly, you guys, I don’t set out to cook cauldrons full of undifferentiated glop. This cauldronful is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the vat of stuff I made last post. This is bean soup, a magic soup full of protein and fiber and flavor. It will fill you up on a cold night. It will make your house smell so good.

Beth and I invented this soup because we wanted to make dinner for some friends. But we did NOT want to spend the last hour fussing in the kitchen while the friends stood about awkwardly, wondering if they should offer to help. The beauty of this soup is that it is easy to make. The secret of its deliciousness is in patience, not effort. Give it enough time on the stove for the vegetables to soften and melt a bit. The mellow bean flavor is punched up with sage and sausage*. Kale adds bright color as well as vitamins and minerals.

Add a salad and some good bread, and you’re done.

White Bean, Kale and Sausage Soup
Serves 6-8
Dry beans are more planning and monkey business than canned beans. Of course, they are correspondingly more delicious. You can soak and cook some extras, then pop them in the freezer to cut down your prep time for a future soup.

1 lb white beans: cannellini, great northern, or navy
2 bay leaves
4 peppercorns
3 carrots, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
8-12 oz sausage*: sweet Italian, hot Italian, andouille, chorizo; anything with garlic and/or chile
1 bunch kale, roughly chopped
4-6 leaves of sage
Salt to taste

*If you are a vegetarian, then instead of sausage, get some olive oil, a chopped bulb of fennel, some cayenne, and some chopped parsley.

Soak the beans overnight.

The next day, put the beans and their soaking water in a soup pot. DO NOT discard the cooking water. All the deliciousness is in it. I don’t care what your mom said about how throwing out the water will reduce bean gas. It won’t. It will only reduce my regard for you. Don’t you step to me.

Ahem. Make sure there is enough water to cover the beans. Add the bay leaves and the peppercorns. Bring them to a boil, then simmer them until they are tender.

Keep a kettle of water on the stove while you cook beans. If they need more water, bring the kettle to a boil. Adding cold water to beans makes their skins tough. Passive-aggressive little sulkers, aren’t they?

Toss the carrots, onion, and garlic cloves in the pot. Keep simmering until these soften. The garlic should break down. You can stir this into the broth, which by now should be getting thick and creamy as the beans break down, too.

About an hour before you plan to serve the soup, add the sage.

Meanwhile, brown the sausage. Or heat the olive oil and saute the fennel bulb, adding the cayenne for the last few minutes. Put the frying pan contents in the soup, reserving the cooking fat.

Sauté the kale, then pour a half cup of water in the pan and cover it tightly. Turn the heat down and steam until the kale is tender, maybe 20 to 30 minutes. (Keep an eye on it so the pan doesn’t get too dry.) Stir the kale into the pot. If you have parsley, sprinkle it on top of each bowl of soup.

Mangiamo!

Dear Thailand: Thanks for Curry

2010-02-14T18:04:00.000-08:00

Dear Entire Nation of Thailand,

I am only one person and you are all Thai people considered in context of your history, culture, language, geography, and cuisine. So the weight of my awe and gratitude will be as nothing to you, less than the weight of a fly upon the back of an elephant.

Even so, I would like to express my deep happiness to have been put on the same planet as you, Entire Nation of Thailand. On a winter evening, in the gathering darkness and the unrelenting cold, a person comes to crave something lush and tropical. The muted colors and sounds of the icebound landscape leave little to see and hear, and other senses can make known their demands. Smell, touch, and taste clamor for something sensual and wildly delicious—something that will make the body feel life and warmth again.

And that, Entire Nation of Thailand, is why I am so indebted to you. From your collective imagination springs curry: a dish that bursts with flavor and color. As I eat a bowlful, the fragrant steam curls around my frozen heart. The melting ice loosens, slips, and falls in a shattering splash.

Simmered Curry
This makes a big old pot of curry, 6-8 servings. If I were up to usual caliber for this blog, I would make my own curry paste. But I am too tired, sad, and sick of winter today. Look, just make this and eat it, and I don’t think you can stay mad at me.

2 cans regular or light coconut milk
A 4oz jar of curry paste. I like Thai Kitchen.
½ c or more of chicken stock
2-4 T fish sauce
A kaffir lime leaf (you can find these at an Asian grocery or at Lunds - ask the produce manager to order you some)
1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1 white potato, peeled and cubed
3-4 carrots, peeled and cubed
1 zucchini, sliced
1 red bell pepper, cubed
A handful of frozen green peas
A package of seitan
Jasmine rice (or white rice if you can’t find it)

Stir the coconut milk and curry paste together until they bubble, then simmer for a few minutes. Put in the stock, fish sauce, lime leaf, potatoes, and carrots. Simmer for 20 minutes. It’s OK if the potato starts to get crumbly.

Add the zucchini and pepper. Simmer a few minutes until the vegetables are tender. Drop in the peas and seitan; heat through. Serve over cooked rice.

Love, Betrayal, Spaghetti Sauce

2010-02-07T12:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday. She and my stepdad came to eat a Char’s Birthday Dinner. And afterwards, Mom retold some food stories about her immigrant grandparents, who arrived at an Italian-American community in Northern Minnesota around the 1910s–1920s.

Mom told how her nonno, her grandfather, was famous for being the best winemaker in town. How her nonna would grind pork, beef, and spinach together to fill ravioli. How Nonna didn’t teach her own daughter, my grandmother, to put wine in the tomato sauce. How Grandma found out one day because Nonno was watching her make a sauce in her own kitchen and asked, “Where’s the vino?”

To this I say: a) What the hell?! and b) Thank goodness.

Now, it’s family lore that Grandma and her own mother were not close. In fact, they were downright uncomfortable around each other. Grandma’s father had died when she was small, and Nonna had remarried. There was a large blended family of Grandma’s sibling, half-siblings, and stepsiblings to help the two keep their distance from each other. But even so, what the hell was Nonna thinking, keeping the wine a secret? Did she see her firstborn child as a painful reminder? A disappointment? A rival? What could have been more powerful than the responsibility to teach her daughter to cook? What could motivate a culinary betrayal of this caliber?

Whatever it was, thank goodness Nonno wasn’t clued in to the scheme. And thank goodness he was the sort to poke his nose into the cooking pots. Because if he hadn’t, would Grandma ever have learned the trick? Would Mom have found out? Would I?

Today I am cooking up a pot of the family sauce. My home is filled with the smell of wine and tomatoes, a familiar perfume that saturates my memories of growing up in my mother’s house. This sauce is, to me, the most important relic of a world that will disappear forever someday when Mom’s memory of it fades away. But since she never made any secrets about how to cook this recipe, our heritage will maybe linger on the stove for a few more generations.

Nonna’s Sugo
Nonna made this with round steak or chicken, according to Mom, who makes it with ground beef or meatballs. I am making it with mushrooms today.

The carrot fixes it so you don’t have to put sugar in the sauce. My brother and I used to fight over the carrot, so Mom got smart and started putting in two.

2 T butter
3-4 big fat cloves of garlic, minced
1 large onion, chopped
1 lb Something (beef, chicken, sliced mushrooms—whatever you want, I guess)
3 pints tomato purée
2 oz or more of tomato paste
2 c fruity red wine
2-3 t dried oregano
2-3 t dried basil or marjoram
1 big, thick carrot, peeled

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pot over high heat. Sauté the garlic and onions until translucent. Add the Something and sauté until browned, if meat, or tender, if mushrooms.

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well. Let the sauce come up to a bubble, then turn down to a low simmer. Cover loosely or leave uncovered. Cook for hours and hours and hours until the carrot starts to melt into the sauce. For best results, you should drag this out all day long until the carrot completely dissolves. But if you are in a big hurry, I guess you could simmer for just three hours. The sauce should be a deep, rich red and reduced in volume by a third to a half. Add salt to taste.

Use a spoon to find every last piece of carrot. Make sure they are evenly divisible by the number of people who will be mad if they don’t get some. If no one is looking, eat the odd carrot piece quickly before anyone finds out. Careful, it’s hot.

Serve over pasta. Mangiamo!

They Can't All Be Champions

2010-01-31T19:13:00.001-08:00

Two things converged today. First, my friend Judy found out last week that if you do a Google image search on "bacon cupcakes," you get 55,000 hits. Second, the temperature failed to reach her minimum threshhold for us to go to the Art Shanty Projects. That's how we ended up in my kitchen trying to make our own bacon cupcakes on a Sunday afternoon.

They say you learn not from your successes, but from your failures. Today has been an education. Did you know that you cannot make a credible peanut butter frosting from the Joy of Cooking recipe using natural peanut butter? Did you know that there is a razor-thin line between crisp-cooked bacon and burned-to-a-crisp bacon? Did you know that a quarter pound of bacon is nowhere near enough to make any kind of flavor impression on the old Walker Museum Gallery 8's Wellesley fudge cake?

That's OK. We learned all kinds of things for next time. For instance, next time we should cook a full pound of bacon to crumble into the batter. Next time we might try a spice cake with brown butter frosting instead of fudge cake with peanut butter frosting. Next time we might even try replacing a tablespoon or two of the butter with bacon grease.

Next time. Except there's probably not going to be a next time. Upon tasting our handiwork, Judy commented, "It's not the best use of bacon, but if you're going to make cupcakes, you might as well put some in."

Meh. We should have gone to the shanties.

Julia Child, and Beef, in Real Life

2010-01-24T15:24:00.000-08:00

Skip straight to the photos if you hate essays.

I was at the airport, in desperate need of something to read on the flight home, when I spotted Julia Child’s My Life in France. Now, I get that Julie & Julia has renewed people’s interest in the book, but still. The cover is plastered with images from a movie made from a book about Julie Powell’s one-sided relationship with her concept of a mentor that she knew only from books and television. By my count, that’s at least five layers of embroidery between the reader and Julia Child, and all of them are about some other book. Is anyone else bugged by this?

While reading, I recognized sections of the book that had been source material for the Meryl Streep scenes of the movie. It was tempting to visualize Streep’s Julia Child romping through antebellum Paris, good-naturedly exclaiming over everything, winning the hearts of everyone, and marching clear-eyed toward her preordained success as an author and television personality. But I put this temptation aside. I didn’t want Meryl Streep’s Julia Child, or Nora Ephron’s, or Julie Powell’s. I wanted Julia Child’s Julia Child. And even though it is filtered through the lens of her great-nephew and coauthor, Paul Prud’homme, My Life in France is the closest thing the world will ever get to Child’s authentic self-account of her life.

The film did show some things that jive with My Life in France. Julia Child was a scientist in that all outcomes were equally valuable sources of knowledge. She was an engineer who relentlessly applied knowledge and technique to a problem until she achieved her desired result. There’s no question that she was an artist. She understood the world and herself through experiences with food: cooking it, eating it, talking about it. Child connected to other people through shared culinary truths.

Anyone who has seen a scrap of The French Chef found Meryl Streep’s physical portrayal spot-on. But in the film, Streep/Child is unfailingly forward-thinking, gregarious, attractive, and lovable. Her perfect life is a product of Julie Powell’s (as rendered by Amy Adams and Nora Ephron) imagination: an ideal to strive for and a foil highlighting Powell’s self-perceived shortcomings as a cook and a human being. Child’s own recollections reveal a much different person.

Child was, by her own account, stubborn. She sometimes missed opportunities by failing to heed the nuances of personal politics. She was not a graceful handler of conflict, especially in intimate relationships. On occasion, she did the easy thing and kept silent when she should have spoken up. She sometimes made up her mind without consulting, or notifying, the affected parties. Quite often, she let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In short, despite doing her best, she sometimes screwed up. Like every other human being on our planet, she was flawed… and still lovable, and much beloved.

I am one of the other human beings on our planet, and so is my much beloved Beth, who is having a flawed winter semester. A thousand little things have turned out wrong, and they are all stressing her out. So I asked her to let me cook for her in the coming weeks. When she said yes, I turned to Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon.

Child’s stated goal for her recipes was that they be foolproof: a typical American cook, using American equipment and ingredients, should produce accurate and consistent results by following her clear, well-tested instructions.

Thank you, Mrs. Child. You made all the big mistakes for me so that in recipes, if not in life, we can do everything perfectly.

Bouef Bourguignon
Knopf Doubleday has posted the recipe here.

This is my mother’s old copy of Mastering. It is some goofy pirated version from Taiwan. It looks to me as though someone shot very poor stats of the pages, then reassembled them in a smaller format on fewer pages. The colophon is in Chinese, though. What a lot of nerve!

The pages are onionskin-thin, there is broken type everywhere, and the index was not adjusted for the new pagination. But the recipes, advice, and opinions of the Trois Gourmandes are all here.

My ingredients: onions and carrots, blanched Tollefson’s bacon, and beef chuck. I didn’t even have to dry off the beef chunks. The meat from The Wedge is that good.

You are supposed to have a casserole, e.g. Le Creuset, that can go from the stovetop to the oven. I make do with a cast-iron skillet and my big Emeril covered casserole. Emeril and Mrs. Child cooked together when she was alive, so I figured nobody would mind.

First you brown the bacon...

Then the beef...

Then the vegetables.

Into the charméd pot they go. They get tossed with flour and then toasted for a bit in the oven.

In real life, next you would pour wine into your casserole and start things simmering on the stovetop. Instead I put wine and stock in the skillet. This gets all the browned deliciousness out of the pan so it can go in my stew.

The pot full of meat, vegetables, and sauce gets to hang out in the oven for four hours. Meanwhile, it's time to sauté mushrooms in butter. When you do this, you can expect three stages. First, the mushrooms will soak up all your butter and you will think you didn't use enough. Don't be tricked. Keep stirring, even though the pan looks dry. Second, the mushrooms will lay down the treasures of their bodies, and the pan will fill with mushroom juice. Third, the juices will cook off, leaving tender and flavorful mushrooms.

By this point the kitchen smells like heaven and neighborhood dogs have lined up on my front sidewalk to beg. Now I get to make braised onions. Peel them, brown them, and braise them in stock. All this only takes another hour and a half.

It's possibly time to take that bourguignon out of the oven. I must pour off the sauce, reduce it, put the onions and mushrooms in the pot, and pour the sauce back on. I don't know about you, but I am starting to have some predatory feelings toward this dish. I am starting to leer at it and sing to it. Hey, pretty, don't you wanna take a ride with me?

The dish is getting uncomfortable with my attention.

I served it with wide noodles. Mrs. Child would have said, "Bon appétit!"

Six meals in Boston

2010-01-18T19:50:00.000-08:00

Wha... where'd my January go? I meant to take a week or two off for the holidays. Then I got really sick (no disease named after me, though). Then I got mailed to a suburb of Boston on a business trip. Holy crap! I feel like I haven't cooked anything in a million years and probably all my 23 readers have left for sexier food blogs.

Readers! Come back! I miss you, too. Here: as a gesture of my good intentions, I will give you a little food porn tour of Boston. I went with a colleague, Kurt; my lovely consort, Beth, flew in later for funsies. Kurt and I worked all day and then, by night, explored Boston as much as we could. The two characters in the pictures are Ruby Mae Owl and Fred, Beth's and my respective finger puppet alter egos.

Meal #1: Legal Sea Foods

A steamed lobster met its end in my belly at this regional fine dining chain. The whole lobster came with the requisite drawn butter; also with sides of garlic mashies and spicy seaweed salad. Mr. Lobster (pretty sure it was a mister; I found no coral) was preceded in death by a bowl of creamy potato-studded clam chowder. Wicked ahhhsome.

Meal #2: Ye Olde Union Oyster House

Established in 1826, this oldest restaurant in America has the dark, cramped dining space and insanely plumbed, drafty bathrooms to prove it. Not that I'm complaining; I live in a (much younger, yet still) old building myself, and I find the scale perfectly human and dottily charming. Our barman served us Harpoon beer and chatted us up in a fantastic Boston accent. There was a Ben Franklin impersonator drinking at the end of the bar. When we were seated, our waitress mothered us like a hen. The menu was large and impossible to winnow, as there didn't appear to be a bad or boring dish on the list.

I decided on a plate of fried clams that came with buttered boiled potatoes. My two companions had scallops with pasta Alfredo and lobster ravioli in cream sauce.

Odd as it seems to me now, it did not occur to any of us to order oysters.

Meal #3: Amarin of Thailand

The next day, Kurt flew home. Beth and I were staying for another two days. We did not feel like venturing downtown this night, and Beth had found a Thai restaurant on her way to the local Starbucks that morning.

Amarin was a lovely change of pace from the seafood. They had fresh, flavorful, spicy, and inexpensive dishes like this beef with holy basil. The restaurant was filled with Thai paintings, prints, carvings, and sculptures. I felt disloyal to Minneapolis, home of so many exemplary Thai places, for enjoying it so much.

Meal #4: Artú

My professional obligations concluded by Friday early afternoon, leaving some daylight hours for exploring Boston's neighborhoods. In Beacon Hill, we found this small Italian restaurant. I had the "Preferito" panini: huge leaves of prosciutto nestled into provolone-lined Italian rolls and filled with thin-sliced eggplant marinated in olive oil, white wine vinegar, red pepper, basil, parsley, and oregano. Mmmm, mangiamo!

On our way out of Beacon Hill, we stumbled across Cheers across from Boston Commons. It was a great TV show, but we are over it. We satisfied ourselves with a picture.

Meal #5: Cafe Jaffa

Cafe Jaffa is a Middle Eastern restaurant. And yet they had cabbage rolls, a favorite dish of my late Croatian grandfather. I guess Croatia clings to the Near East by its fingernails. Whatever. Jaffa made a fine version of this comfort food from my childhood.

Meal #6: La Summa

And that about sizes it up: La Summa (roughly, "Everything" or "All That" or "It" as in "that's it") was all that, that's it, everything I wanted for lunch. The space was elegant. The food was sublime. The prices were absurdly low, especially considering the neighborhood (North End, historic/expensive).

I had this dish of house-made fresh penne with generous hunks of ham, sun-dried tomato, and spinach in a rich cream sauce with a sprinkling of chopped basil. Che bella.

On our post-prandial stroll, we passed (but did not enter) the Parker House, birthplace of the Parker House roll and Boston cream pie.

And then it was time to fly back to Minneapolis! I'm happy to be home, grateful to be well, and looking forward to cooking my own food this week.

Welcome back to my blog, and thank you for reading!

Ravioli pa' Natale

2009-12-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

According to Mom, her nonna—my great-grandmother—spent hours and hours making ravioli for Christmas each year. They truly are a labor of love: between preparing the filling, making the pasta, rolling and assembling the ravioli, and making their sauce, it's like you've made the meal four or five times. When the food passes so many times through the hands of the cook, it cannot help but absorb what's in the heart of the cook.

And in my heart, there's joy to see the ravioli spring into the world out of nothing but flour, egg, pumpkin, and cheese. There's the warm companionship of cooking with my partner, Beth. There's a sense of connection with the women in my family, whose hands have also kneaded dough, rolled it thin, doled out filling, and set trim little pasta shapes on a floured towel to dry. And there's the anticipation of delight when, on Christmas Day, people we love will take pleasure and nourishment from the food we're making.

Ravioli di Zucca pa' Natale
That is to say, pumpkin ravioli for Christmas. This is my recipe, not Nonna's, but I hope she'd be proud. You can make the filling ahead of time and freeze it. You can also freeze the ravioli.

This recipe will make perhaps 80 or so ravioli. For a side dish, plan on 6 per person. For a main dish, plan on 9 to 12 per person.

The filling:
A pumpkin, 3-4 lb.
½ lb. grated Parmesan
Salt and black pepper to taste

The pasta:
5 c semolina flour (any other kind will work)
5 eggs
A tablespoon or two of olive oil

The sauce:
For every 6 ravioli you plan to serve,
1 T butter
2-3 sage leaves, fresh or dried
1-2 baby spinach leaves
1 T shaved Parmesan cheese
Ground black pepper

Cut the top off the pumpkin. Hollow it out, then replace its lid. Place in a pan and bake at 375° for one to one and a half hours or until tender. Let cool.

Peel the pumpkin, cut the flesh into small pieces, and mash it. Mix it with the Parmesan and seasonings to taste.

On a wooden cutting board or directly on your work surface, make a mountain of the flour. Make a volcano crater in it with your fist. Crack the eggs into the crater and add a splash of olive oil.

Use a fork to whisk the eggs in the volcano crater. Whisk all around the edges of the crater. Flour from the volcano mountain is incorporated into the eggs as you go, and soon you are whisking a pale yellow batter. Go slowly so that the eggs whisk evenly and you avoid lumps.

Soon, the batter has become a soft dough. It will grab your fork and you won't be able to whisk anymore.

Abandon the fork, toss a handful of flour on top of your dough, and start kneading in more flour. Gather, squeeze, and turn until the dough is like Play-Doh and does not feel tacky any more. There will still be flour left on your work surface; don't worry about that.

You must be tired by now. Your dough sure is, so wrap it up in foil, plastic wrap, or a barely damp cloth and let it rest 20 minutes. This will allow it to become stretchy.

Now it's time to roll. Get ready a barely damp cloth. Roll your dough out paper thin. You can do this by hand if you are very stubborn. I have an Atlas pasta machine, which is much easier.

Rolled-out pasta is susceptible to drying, so keep it fresh by covering it with the barely-damp cloth while you roll more sheets.

We rolled out to setting 6. We made rectangular sheets by cutting lengths, brushing the edges with water, and rolling the pieces together with the pin.

Work quickly to avoid drying but carefully to avoid tearing.

While I was fussing with the pasta sheets, Beth made tidy little balls of filling. We placed them on a sheet several inches apart, keeping in mind that we would need a seam allowance between each dumpling.

Use a damp pastry brush to moisten (barely!) the space in between each filling ball.

Cover with the other pasta sheet. Allow the pasta to drape over the filling. Seal the fillings in between the pasta sheets by pressing with your fingers. Avoid air pockets; you can get rid of trapped air by making a tiny slit with a paring knife, pressing out the air, then pressing the slit closed.

If you tear the pasta sheet, you can patch it with a dampened scrap of pasta. It doesn't look like America's Top Chef made it, but it tastes the same. And none of those people are invited over, anyway.

Dust a dish towel with flour. Cut between the ravioli with a knife or pizza cutter. Use a bench knife or spatula to pick them up and transfer them to the towel. Let them rest until they are dry enough to handle.

You can pack them up in the freezer at this point. But before you do, make sure to boil some water and test them out. You know, to make sure they're delicious enough to serve.

Set a pot of salted water on the stove to boil. Heat the butter in a skillet or saucepan. Gently sauté the sage leaves until they are crispy; break them up in the butter a little. Sliver the spinach leaves.

Cook the ravioli. If they are fresh, this will take less than five minutes. If they are frozen, just drop them right in the boiling water without thawing.

Drain them well and arrange them on a plate. Drizzle them with the sage butter, sprinkle with shaved parmesan, and toss on a smattering of the spinach slivers. Finish with a grind or three of fresh black pepper.

Buon Natale, mios amicos.

Bûche de Noël Challenge

2009-12-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

(artist's concept)

Updated: See actual!

When friend Katrina mentioned that she wanted to attempt a bûche de Noël, I can't remember who first suggested making the traditional French Christmas dessert together. But I do know it was me who proposed "Bûche de Noël Smackdown."

Katrina laughed nervously at that idea. She is the embodiment of kindness and gentility, and I don't think she has a competitive bone in her body. I, on the other hand, freely trade good-natured insults with friends and often cross the line in my efforts to top their putdowns. Katrina is the one person for whom I try my hardest to be kind. If I ever hurt her feelings, even in a friendly cake contest, I could never forgive myself.

"If I set my dial at Lovefest and you set yours at Smackdown, we'll meet in the middle," I said. And so we agreed to a Friday night baking party.

A classic bûche de Noël is made with a chocolate génoise sheet cake and buttercream frosting. After investigating simpler cake and frosting schemes and assessing their levels of difficulty, we opted to take on the challenge of the traditional recipes. We decided, while we were at it, to make two—one for each of us. "How long do you think this will take?" asked Katrina. "Hmmm... three hours," I replied.

Boy, was I wrong. Katrina, her friend and my partner Beth, and I worked together for five hours on the two bûches. Katrina's poor little hand mixer labored away on high speed for at least two solid hours. We were amazed at how many eggs and how much butter disappeared into the cake batter and frosting. And by the end, I was making only indirect requests; and Katrina was threatening, as a joke, to throw me out of her kitchen.

Bûche de Noël: the great leveler, the great reverser of roles.

The cake:
The génoise cake batter requires that eggs be whipped with sugar until they triple in volume. We doubled the recipe, so there were eight total. Here are four eggs at the start.

Beth whipped the eight eggs for nearly an hour to get them ready. We were afraid to imagine how strenuous it would be to whip them by hand. Clearly French cooking is based on a feudal business model, as it depends on a lot of strong young kitchen workers.

Beth adds equal parts cake flour and cocoa. We spread this into two sheet pans and baked them.

Meanwhile, the frosting:
To make buttercream, first cook two cups of sugar and a cup of water to the soft ball stage. Then pour it in a thin stream into beaten, pasteurized eggs. Since the mixer was in use, I opted to beat by hand. This was fun at first. By the time I finished, though, it was a matter of pride.

Then Katrina beat an appalling amount of butter into the frosting. I am ashamed to tell you how much. Oh, OK, six sticks.

This is what a pound of chocolate looks like when melted with a half cup of water.

And here it goes into the buttercream. You must talk like Julia Child when performing this operation.

By the time this buttercream was ready, the cakes were baked, cooled, and brushed with a quarter cup apiece of equal parts brandy and simple syrup.

Assembling the bûche:

Frost the cake generously.

This was the scary part. We were four and a half hours into this job. The last step was to roll up the cake. And if we screwed this up, all our work would come to naught. Those are Katrina's hands rolling the cake. My hands, at the right, are "helping" because I'm terrified.

My fear was groundless. Katrina rolled it up like a pro.

We wrapped up our cakes tightly, packed up buttercream to spread on the outside, and popped them into the freezer. In a couple of weeks, we'll take them out, frost them to resemble logs, and serve them at Christmastime.

By then, each cake will have taken about 8 or 9 person-hours of work. The moral of the story is this: if you see a bûche de Noël in a bakery for any amount of money, pay it. It's worth it.

Bon appétit!

Post-Christmas Update: Here it is in all its splendor.

Peace, Love, and Gingerbread

2009-12-07T13:17:00.000-08:00

True confession: I don’t like Christmas much. I don’t like the music. I don’t like the decorations, or Salvation Army bell ringing, or cards. I don’t like shopping. I don’t like how the presumption of Christianity blots out other perspectives at this time of year. I don’t like how it all happens against a deepening backdrop of cold weather and dark skies; or how in January, all the lights will fade and I will feel abandoned to a bleak winter without even the respite of Christmas’s unwelcome distractions.

One thing that keeps me peaceful at Christmastime is gingerbread. I love the alchemic ritual of boiling molasses, sugar, and fat. I love perfuming the flour with splashes of dark, sweet cinnamon and sharp, warm ginger. I love the surface of the rolled-out dough, smooth and cold like black marble. I love my cookie cutters—those old friends I see just once a year. Tin ones from Mom that we used when I was little. Plastic ones that I bought for myself as a young adult, an act of self-assertion for my first holiday on my own.

In those days, I was slowly realizing that I can define this season however I want. I don’t have to be in the office gift exchange. I don’t have to decorate a tree or send cards. I don’t have to let someone else tell me how and when to give. And I can leave all these things behind without losing what’s important: warmth. Light. Faith that, even in the looming darkness of winter, there are human connections to be made. There are cookies to be baked.

I love to decorate each cookie shape in a particular way. The stars and bells get red sugar sprinkles. The trees and holly leaves get green. The dreidls and stars of David get blue sprinkles. The blue cookies are for friends whose philosophies get crowded out this time of year. I want to say to them, “True, this cookie exists because of Christmas. But I know you don’t ride that train, and I see you.” And really, when I bake gingerbread, that’s what I’m saying to, and for, myself.

Gingerbread Molasses Cutouts
Makes 7 or 8 dozen cookies, each 2 or 3 inches across. The great thing about this recipe is how many times you can roll and re-roll it. You can keep cutting out cookies until the dough ball is too small to make a single ‘nother one.

1 c shortening
1 c molasses
1 c sugar
1 c vinegar
2 eggs
6 c flour
½ t baking powder
½ t salt
1 t baking soda
1 T ginger
1 t cinnamon

Combine shortening, molasses, sugar, and vinegar in a large saucepan. Heat, stirring constantly, and bring to a rolling boil. Cook 2 minutes. Remove from heat and cool. Add the two beaten eggs.

Sift, mix, or whisk all the dry ingredients together. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix well. Roll the dough into a ball and chill it well. Overnight will do it.

On a floured board, bench, or countertop, roll the dough ⅛ to ¼ inch thick. Cut out shapes. Decorate them with colored sugar, currants, and small candies as desired. Bake on greased or nonstick cookie sheets 6 to 9 minutes at 375°.

Use your cookies to celebrate—or not—however you want. But I do hope they'll make you happy this season.