Pie and Beer

Sanjeev Kapoor's Potato, Banana, and Pomegranate Chaat

2011-02-11T08:24:00.004-05:00

I just came across a picture of a chaat I made a couple months ago and thought I'd share the recipe now. It's from Sanjeev Kapoor's first U.S.-published book, How to Cook Indian [Food], which I worked on a bit for STC in late summer. The book is well worth checking out when it's released in April—it's absolutely loaded with fun, authentic, but do-able dishes from all over India. I especially liked the chaats, of course.

Aloo Kachalu Chaat
Serves 4 to 6.

This is only slightly simplified from Sanjeev's version.

1 1/2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt, or more to taste
1 teaspoon tamarind concentrate
1 teaspoon chaat masala (see Note)
1 large ripe banana
2 potatoes, boiled, cooled, peeled, and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 sweet potato, boiled, cooled, peeled, and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 hot green chiles, minced
1/4 cup fresh pomegranate arils
Handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
1-inch piece fresh ginger, cut into thin julienne

In a large bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, salt, tamarind, and chaat masala. Add the banana, potatoes, sweet potato, chile, pomegranate, and cilantro and toss to coat. Taste and add more salt if necessary. Pile on a platter and scatter the ginger over the top. Serve at room temperature.

Note: The spice mix chaat masala can be purchased at Indian grocery stores, or you can mix up some of your own, or just sprinkle in a little coriander, cumin, and ground cayenne. Sanjeev's chaat masala: 1/4 cup coriander seeds, 2 teaspoons cumin seeds, 1 teaspoon ajwain, 2 or 3 dried red chiles, 3 tablespoons black salt (which I think is rather a lot), 1/2 teaspoon citric acid, 1 teaspoon amchur, 1 tablespoon regular salt, and 1 teaspoon ground black pepper—whole spices toasted and ground and then everything mixed together. Makes 1/2 cup.

Bulk Valentines

2011-02-09T15:11:00.003-05:00

After last year's ill-advised adventure in elaborate preschool Valentines made weeks in advance (and the heartbreak that ensued when we found out that the class Valentines were not to be addressed to individual students, nor were they to contain any sweets), this year we made it easy on ourselves and did our anonymous cards assembly-line style.

I taped two sheets of 9-by-12-inch watercolor paper down on the table in front of the kid, and masked off six rectangles on each with tape, plus a border all around the edges. She just painted over the whole thing every which way (I painted some too), let it dry, then peeled off the tape and I cut them up into cards. Then I taped together some rubber letter stamps spelling out "THALI" and had her stamp each of them one night before bedtime; we untaped and added the final "A" at the end. Done.

She can write her name, of course, but I weighed the benefits to her of practicing her handwriting on twenty-eight cards against the possibility that it would make her mom go absolutely mad, and so she stamped.

A Pretty Good Way to Hem Jeans

2011-01-01T10:38:00.005-05:00

Not at all food related, but I thought I'd post this anyway, along the lines of my little invisible zipper tutorial from way back, on the assumption that perhaps not a lot of people know how to hem jeans. Hey, at least it's content.

Almost all of my jeans have needed to be hemmed—I'm just that kind of shape, I guess. That is, not willowy. This is how I do it so I don't lose the nicely frayed and washed-in factory hem.

1. Fold the hem to the outside so that if you were to fold just the hem back down toward the floor it would be the length you want. In this picture, the red line will be the final length of the pant leg. Press well.

2. Put a jeans needle in your machine if you have one, and an edge-stitching foot if you have one. I've recently started using the edge-stitching foot whenever I can—it just makes it easier to sew a straight line—but it's certainly not necessary here. I don't use any special kind of thread here, but you could use heavy-duty if you'd like. I used a dark blue in the needle and a dark gray in the bobbin. Using a slightly longer stitch than usual, sew right next to the turned-under edge of the original hem. Depending on the jeans and your machine, it may get tricky as you go over the side seam and inseam. Go slowly, and help it along by turning the wheel manually if necessary. If you can't get over the inseam, don't force it: cut the threads and continue by hand.

3. In this case, I did have to stop before I got to the inseam because it was too thick to fit under the presser foot, even when it was raised (these are men's jeans; I haven't had this issue with my own), so I sewed that part by hand with a doubled thread, a long needle, and a thimble.

4. Using a regular presser foot and switching the needle thread to light gray (if you want to be fussy about it), line up the left edge of the foot with the line of stitching you just made, and sew a line of zigzag stitching (scribbled in red here) all the way around the pant leg.

5. Cut off the folded edge as close to the zigzag stitching as you can, being careful not to cut the stitching and being extra careful as you cut through the thick side seam and inseam so your shears don't go where you don't want them to.

6. Sew another line of zigzag stitch that extends just over the cut edges to keep unraveling to a minimum; note that you're sewing through two layers of seam allowance here.

7. Turn the zigzagged edge up to the inside of the pant leg and the original hem to the bottom. Press the bejeezus out of it, using lots of steam.

7. By hand, tack the seam allowances up to the side seam and inseam to keep them from flopping out.

8. Press some more, and you should have a pretty good-looking hem that you'd have to look closely at to see wasn't the original. You may have to press them again after they go through the wash, you may not. You could also, I suppose, take them to a dry cleaner and ask them to hit the hems with the professional steam iron.

Just in Time for Christmas Eve

2010-12-23T12:59:00.003-05:00

A couple of oldies but goodies from the hot drinks book are featured today on STC Cooks: mulled wine, and broiled dates stuffed with curried cheddar, apple, and walnuts. I'd almost forgotten about those dates, but I may just have to indulge. Especially since I still have a few of the amazing selection of a dozen or so very different varieties of dates my dear friend Heidi sent us from Dubai, where she's lived for almost a year now. Win!

Contest at STC Cooks

2010-11-21T11:17:00.003-05:00

Y'all should head over to STC Cooks and enter their cookbook giveaway by November 30. Just tell them about a memorable Thanksgiving and you could win a stack of really nice food books—they're good; I've read most of them.

Kimchi Ferment-along-a-thon!

2010-11-03T09:27:00.004-04:00

Please join me and my publisher peeps over at the new STC Cooks blog for the first in a series of posts about making kimchi, Korean fermented cabbage and daikon (or other vegetables; here's a fun list of kimchi types—and some good-looking recipes—from Saveur to spark your imagination). Kimchi is one of the easiest preserves to make yourself: after giving the cabbage and other vegetables an overnight soak in a simple salt brine, you mix them up with a chile powder–orange paste, stuff them into a jar, and just kind of let the whole thing sit there until it tastes good, four or five days. Unlike, say, fermented dill pickles, there's no day-to-day maintenance required. You just leave it alone for a while, then screw a lid on and stick the jar in the fridge. It'll keep for weeks, very gradually becoming a little more sour.

Lots of readers (we hope) are going to make their own kimchi along with us, so if you've been wanting to be part of an enormous online community of enthusiastic cabbage and radish fermenters but didn't know where to start, here's your chance!

Thanks, Internet

2010-09-02T20:33:00.006-04:00

D. had to go to the ATL for a book event tonight, so it's just us girls tonight (and our guard dog, Cooper). We had a nice meal inspired by this post and recipe for aloo simla mirch (potato and sweet pepper curry) on one of my new favorite blogs, The Perfect Pastry. "Supper was better than I thought it would be," proclaimed the four-year-old, but I knew it would be good even with my (minor) changes: I just put one slit serrano in and kept it aside for my own plate, I grated in half a tomato I had sitting around, and instead of making fresh all-out curry powder I used a little of the stuff from Taj Mahal and then coarsely ground some cumin and coriander seeds. Served with some leftover spiced brown basmati with some peas. Oh, it was wonderful. Thank you, Margie.

After supper, I turned on a movie, thinking maybe T. would kind of fall asleep on her own, saving me the whole drawn-out bedtime routine—we were both so tired this afternoon—and I could get some work done. Not a chance. We sat on the couch, huddled together, gripping our girlie nightgowns, totally engrossed in the extremely manipulative and simplistic but highly effective Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which I'd seen on a list of a few recent non-snarky movies for youngsters blogged on Sweet Juniper!. (Thank you—really—Sweet Juniper! writer.)

For my part, once I managed to separate the Spirit Matt Damon voice-over from the ADM Informant! Matt Damon voice-over recently experienced, I was fine. T.'s reaction was a little more complex: She was sobbing through most of it—with sadness as well as happiness—but she would not let me turn it off no matter what happened. Or even turn down the volume so the sappy (but again, highly effective) Bryan Adams–Hans Zimmer score wouldn't get to her so much. This movie was intense for a kid, veering from euphoric relief to wrenching heartbreak every ten or fifteen seconds. Seeing T. parsing all that was almost too much for me. She enjoys the long form—Ponyo, which I find incredibly slow for an animated feature, has been a favorite of hers for a couple months—but I've never seen her so thrilled about a movie. She couldn't stop talking about it afterward. We watched all the DVD extras, and I learned how to sort of draw Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron, and she colored him red and green, and then she ran and got lots more paper and announced that she was going to make a movie about the horse. "But it's going to be different. It will be shorter. And no people will try to ride him, because wild horses aren't supposed to be rided. And the good guy will use a rope to get apples from a tree for all the horses." (And there was something about a strip'ed pebble.) She added, "I think you're going to like this movie. Half of it will be scary, and half of it will be good." Which sounds perfect to me.

Note the tissue handy. (And that's my wine, not hers.)

Some Lunchbox Inspiration

2010-08-25T09:19:00.002-04:00

I just noticed that Hugh Acheson's new place in the ATL, Empire State South, seems to have opened, and the menus are up online. It all looks intriguing, but I'm especially delighted by the tiffin box lunches: you pay a deposit for the tiffin, take your lunch to work or wherever, and then return the tiffin. The meals themselves sound great, and I'm definitely going to steal many of those down-home ideas for T.'s lunches. (I also love the little half-cup canning jar of what looks like a yogurt of some sort in the second picture.)

I'm glad this came along, because today's box lunch for T. would appear to be the work of an insane person: a couple pieces of leftover sushi from her supper last night (I was getting some sliced turkey in the deli at Kroger; she spied the premade sushi and insisted on that for her meal), a turkey sandwich, and about a pound of grapes.

As a side note, I'm wondering where the restaurant got its supply of tiffins. I'd love one (or two), but retail is pricey! Anybody know of a good source for those?

Questions and Errata

2010-08-21T17:04:00.003-04:00

There's something missing in the Cardamom Plum Jam on page 116.

Indeed, a line got dropped. The plums should be pitted and diced.

In the Tomato and Basil Jam with Sherry Vinegar on page 176, what do you do with the apple–lemon–tomato juice mixture?

Yikes, a whole paragraph is missing. After you cook the apples and lemon in the tomato juice for about 15 minutes, it should read: "Dump the tomato solids into the bowl and place a sieve over the bowl. Pour the apple and lemon mixture into the sieve and press as much of the juice and apple pulp through the sieve as you can. Discard the solids in the sieve."

Where do you add the lemon juice in the Nectarine Jam on page 107?

Add the lemon juice with the nectarines and sugar—you just put everything in at once and cook it till it looks like jam, which is kind of the beauty of this particular preserve.

Can you substitute one kind of vinegar for another in the pickle or salsa recipes?

No, please don't, unless you're using a vinegar of a higher percentage acidity than the one called for in the recipe. Otherwise you could compromise the safety of the pickle or salsa by lowering the acidity (that is, raising the pH), which could make it unsafe to can in a boiling-water bath.

Is that how you spell Seebee?

Well, that's embarrassing. It's Seabee. As in "sea," where the navy is.

Where else can you find citric acid?

I just noticed that the local health/gourmet food store here, Earth Fare, has citric acid in the bulk spices section for $9.99/pound, which is a little bit more expensive than yogurt-covered pretzels. So if you have a Whole Foods or some such near you, try the bulk section.

Imagined Asked Questions

2010-08-04T14:24:00.005-04:00

It's fig, glorious fig season here in Georgia, and while looking at the two fig preserve recipes in my book I realized I hadn't made something clear. Some figs, as many of you probably know, are—like some tomatoes—not quite acidic enough to can in a boiling-water bath unless acid is added; here I use lemon and lemon juice, in quantities that should be—and have been, in my experience—sufficient. (The USDA/NCHFP, e.g., suggests 2 tablespoons lemon juice per quart of preserved figs in a light syrup; my recipes each make 4 half-pint jars and call for 1 lemon and 3 tablespoons, respectively.) What I didn't make clear is that the lemon or lemon juice in those two recipes (slow-roasted fig preserves with lemon, and honeyed fig jam with sesame seeds) is necessary for preservation purposes and should not be viewed as optional. These preserves, like most in the book, are low in sugar, so you need the added acid to make sure the pH is in the safe range. If you don't have lemon juice or aren't comfortable making a not-sugar-saturated fig preserve, these recipes make such small quantities that you could certainly just skip the canning and keep them in the fridge, from which they'll quickly disappear.

Padron Peppers

2010-08-02T08:28:00.002-04:00

This was a really special treat for me: fresh Padron peppers from Mill Gap Farm, via Athens Locally Grown. Olive oil in a hot pan, plus plenty of coarse salt. (The National here in Athens sometimes serves them like this as a tapas.) You eat everything but the stem. The flesh and seeds are tender, pleasantly bitter. Some are hot, some mild, but they're never sweet. They just taste like little explosions of chile and salt. I don't often get all rhapsodic about foods, but these, last Thursday night, with a glass of cold white wine, were transporting. We need more of these in our lives, all of us. I get the impression they're not easy to grow, but can we please try?

Asked Questions

2010-07-28T19:31:00.005-04:00

I thought I'd post a few of the canning questions I've gotten from folks over the last several weeks, posed here or on Facebook or by email or in person. If you have more, leave them in the comments, and I'll post again with answers if I have them, and eventually I'll figure out how to put an FAQ page on this blog thing. So here goes . . .

Where can you find citric acid for canning tomatoes and tomato sauce?

Some health food stores carry it, as do some Indian groceries (where it may be labeled "lemon salt"). It's available online from Amazon, Kalustyans, and Leeners, among many other vendors. If all else fails, you can use lemon juice or Fruit Fresh, which is citric acid stepped on with ascorbic acid and anti-caking agents (see the quantities for lemon juice and Fruit Fresh in the recipes in the book).

Do you have to dry off the flat jar lids after they've been in the hot water and before you put them on the jars?

No. Just slap ’em on.

Can you forgo peeling the tomatoes for sauce and just blend them up, skins and seeds and all?

Sure. Just wash the tomatoes really well first (there are more bacteria on the surface of the tomatoes, obviously, though those will be killed during the long processing time in the canning pot).

Can you can pesto in a boiling water bath?

No. Pesto is not an acid food (it has a high pH), and so it's not safe to can it in a boiling water bath. Freeze it instead!

What are your favorite things to preserve?

Sour cherries, all-purpose tomato sauce, salsa verde, and grapefruit marmalade are some of my favorites. They're extra-fun to make and delicious and useful.

Are your recipes approved by the USDA?

No. As far as I know, the only recipes officially approved by the USDA are the ones published in its handbook and online at the National Center for Home Food Preservation. The USDA is not in the business of evaluating or testing recipes to be published by private companies; the agency has developed its own recipes, and those are the ones they officially stand behind. That said, all of the canning methods described in my book conform exactly to current USDA standards for processing: I don't advocate the so-called open kettle or inversion method, I ask you to sterilize jars in boiling water rather than in a dishwasher or oven, processing times are totally in line with the USDA's recommendations, and so on. Fruit preserves in my book are significantly lower in sugar than those made by standard recipes, but when fruit (which is high acid) is canned using reliable methods sugar is not necessary for preservation purposes. The canned pickles in my book were tested for pH levels at several stages in the process—before processing and several days or weeks later—and packing and processing times conform to those recommended by the feds (in addition, temperatures were checked during processing using the method required of commercial canners by the FDA). If you still have concerns about a recipe—mine or any other—you can always send it to your local extension agent to ask if it looks okay to him or her. And, as always, use your judgment when opening and using a canned food, whether it has sealed properly or not. If anything doesn't seem right to you, toss it!

Kid Lunches

2010-07-23T19:55:00.005-04:00

We don't usually eat this much pasta! I guess I just had a craving for it, or rather for the ease of it, as I was a bit under the weather last week. As usual, you can see details in the Flickr set here. If T. were rounding up the highlights, she'd mention the peas and carrots (which she requested), the Asian pear, the edamame, the potstickers of course, the tomato (as I was filling her box, she said, "That tomato smells so good!"), and the chocolate chip cookies. Lowlights would include the lentils, lychees (which she loved until this year), fresh cheese with "not-real" (translation: cooked) cherries, and that horrid raw carrot.

Pictures of the Gosford Wine Event

2010-07-17T07:23:00.005-04:00

My friend Clare Adams took these lovely pictures of some of the food at the tasting and book signing the other night, and I thought I'd share them here with her permission. Rinne brought the summery flowers and let T. arrange them in those cute apothecary bottles.

I had tons of help filling tacos, pouring little cups of hot-pink cold beet soup, slicing bread and spreading it with fresh cheese and butter, scooping out single-cherry tastes of clafouti, and even dumping good crunchy tortilla chips into my big old butter-washing bowl for dipping into last year's super-spicy salsa verde. I didn't do a thing all evening, now that I think about it, except enjoy myself.

Rinne's sister, Lucy, who has the soul of a high-end caterer and the work ethic of an early American settler, arranged everything invitingly on two big wooden farm tables, with pretty paper napkins (Ikea, I think), rough linens, ironstone plates and platters, and in some cases simply dry waxed paper sheets (my beloved Kabnet brand, which I'd gotten to hold the tacos). And Lucy kept those tables looking spiffy and abundant all night long. D.'s coworker Anne and her daughter showed up during preparations and instantly set to work making tacos, refilling platters, and basically doing everything I'd expected to be doing.

T. helped me trim the little threads from the cards—she cut the corners off most of them too. (Here's a bad preparty shot I took of that cake, showing my genius cutting job in all its forty-eight-tiny-slice glory:)

It was a great time, and I felt very lucky to have been able to meet so many people who are enthusiastic about cooking and eating—and canning.

Tonight at Gosford Wine

2010-07-15T10:46:00.002-04:00

Just a quick reminder that tonight at 6:30 is the wine and preserve tasting at Gosford Wine on Baxter Street here in Athens. (With any luck there will be books to be had as well.) Hope to see you there!

Cultured Butter

2010-07-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

A while back, I became smitten with Vermont Butter & Cheese Company's cultured butter. It tasted like no other butter I'd ever had: funky, earthy, but delicate and just a little tangy. It's hard to describe, but the butter was different enough from regular butter that T., who is four, claimed not to like it at first (it's grown on her since then). I tried culturing some cream with buttermilk, but the result was bland—not right. I'd read about piima butter, made from a Scandinavian-style culture derived from the butterwort plant that is apparently similar to the culture used in buttermilk, acidophilus. Descriptions of it sounded like what I was going for, so eventually I broke down and ordered a little jar of piima culture from an outfit called Moonwise Herbs, which unfortunately ships the ready-to-use (not dried) culture only in cooler months; however, there are lots of other places online that sell piima.

The flavor of butter made with cream cultured with piima is amazing. And it's so, so easy to make this at home—that is, once you have a bit of culture. The culture will keep for a couple weeks in the fridge, or you can freeze it for months before refreshing it by mixing it with new cream and letting it ferment for a day. Just remember to save some of the cream for next time before whipping the rest into butter. Instructions that came with mine say it's best to use pasteurized cream so that the character of the culture remains consistent over time. For those of us in Georgia this shouldn't be a problem.

Cultured Butter
Makes about 7 ounces, depending on the fat content of the cream

2 to 3 tablespoons piima culture
1 pint pasteurized heavy cream

In a nonreactive bowl, stir together the culture and cream. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside to culture at room temperature (or warmer) for 12 to 24 hours. The mixture should thicken, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, depending on the temperature and probably other factors that are mysterious to me. This time it thickened a lot:

Scoop a few tablespoons of the cultured cream into a lidded jar and save it for the next batch. I just put this straight into the freezer, where I'm told it'll keep for months:

Whip the cream with a mixer or an immersion blender. I think you could do this in a food processor, but I don't have a regular-size one and the cleanup would surely be more intensive than with a mixer or immersion blender. Keep whipping past the thick-whipped-cream stage to the point where the solids separate from the liquid, slowing the mixer speed down as this happens:

Holding back the solids (the butter) with your hand or a sieve, pour off as much of the liquid as you can. This is cultured buttermilk. I usually get about a cup from a pint of cream. Here I've transferred the butter back to the first bowl, but you could do this all in the same bowl start to finish:

Put a few handfuls of ice and some cold water in the bowl with the butter:

Use a spatula or wooden spoon to stir and knead the butter with the ice water. The water will become milky as the remaining buttermilk is kneaded out of the butter. Holding the butter (and any ice cubes) back, drain off the cloudy water. Add more ice and clean water and keep kneading to wash out the buttermilk, draining and replacing the water and ice until you can knead the butter and the water stays relatively clear:

Drain again and pick out the ice cubes, if there are any that haven't melted. Knead the butter some more, pouring off the water that comes out. Keep kneading and draining to remove as much water as possible. I imagine there are more effective ways of getting all the water out, and they probably involve butter muslin, but I just knead, drain, and then sort of pat the butter with a paper towel until it looks pretty dry:

Stir in salt to taste, if you'd like, then pack the soft butter into a container and cover with waxed paper (or wrap it into a log in plastic):

Refrigerate. This butter will last at least a week, and can be used . . . however you'd use butter. This butter turned out fairly light in color, while other batches have been brighter yellow. My mom tells me it has to do with what the cows were eating, along with the fat content of the cream. Of course, you could always color it with juice squeezed from a carrot that's been grated, milk-simmered, and squeezed in cheesecloth, as T. and I just read about in Little House in the Big Woods, but that seems like a lot of trouble to me.

Oatmeal Two Ways

2010-07-12T08:00:00.004-04:00

Steel-cut oats for the kid, with blueberries, agave nectar, sliced almonds, and milk. For me, sambal oelek (fresh chile paste), scallions, cilantro, a splash of soy sauce, and garlic, fried in olive oil until crisp, then drained on a paper towel—one of the best breakfasts ever, I think: spicy and hearty but also fresh-tasting enough to have in midsummer. McCann's makes quick-cooking steel-cut oats now, and I can't discover how they're made and whether they're as good for you as the long-cooking ones, but they taste exactly the same and are done in about 10 minutes. I suspect they're pre-steamed. Does anybody know?

Kid Lunches

2010-07-09T08:37:00.002-04:00

Four sandwiches, yawn, and some potstickers T. asked for and helped make (we cooked some for supper the night before, and froze a bunch uncooked for lunches). Today's box includes homemade yogurt—first time since we moved to town that I've made any, but I'm back on it . . . two quarts at a time. It's good with a little agave nectar and pecans.

Friday Supper: The Good and the Expensive

2010-07-08T10:30:00.000-04:00

The good: Roasted beet salad from Sunday Suppers at Lucques. I used baby red and Chiogga beets and parsley from the market, oil-cured olives, a not-great ricotta salata (feta would've been better), and canned chickpeas. Looking at the recipe now, and not while I was actually making the salad, I realize that I changed it a bit, so that's how I'll type it out below. The instructions in the recipe were kind of fussy; I just tossed everything together with the cumin vinaigrette, then dropped chickpeas over the salad, which was quite pretty enough:

Roasted Beet Salad with Fried Chickpeas, Nyons Olives, and Ricotta Salata
Adapted and simplified from Sunday Suppers at Lucques, by Suzanne Goin with Teri Gelber

3 bunches beets, mixed colors, tops cut off, scrubbed
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil (this is less than the 3/4 cup called for; I prefer a more vinegary, less oily vinaigrette)
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1/4 cup red wine vinegar (I used sherry vinegar, and more than the 2-plus tablespoons called for)
Juice of 1 small lemon
1 cup crisp roasted chickpeas (see Note)
1/4 cup thinly sliced shallots
1/2 cup Nyons olives or other strong-tasting oil-cured black olives
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves
4 ounces ricotta salata cheese, sliced 1/4 inch thick
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Rub the beets all over with some of the oil, season with salt and pepper, and put in a roasting pan with a little water. Cover with foil and roast until tender, about 40 minutes. Let cool completely, then peel and quarter the beets. Set aside.

Toast the cumin seeds in a heavy skillet over medium heat until fragrant and a shade darker. Coarsely grind them with a mortar and pestle. Put them in a large bowl with the vinegar, lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste and whisk. Whisk in the remaining oil in a thin stream. Add the beets, shallots, olives, parsley, and cheese and toss gently to coat with the dressing. Taste and season with more salt and pepper if necessary. Scatter the chickpeas over the top and serve.

Note: Goin wants you to fry the chickpeas, but I roasted them for more crispness, using a great technique I learned from Kalyn's Kitchen: Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. Drain a can of chickpeas in a colander and rinse well under cold running water. Drain well, then dump the chickpeas onto a clean kitchen towel. Gather up the corners of the towel to enclose the chickpeas in a little "bag" and swing it around a bit (outside, perhaps, or maybe in the shower stall) to drain and dry the chickpeas really well. Toss them in a bowl with 1 tablespoon olive oil and a couple tablespoons of soy sauce, and here I also added some of the toasted ground cumin. Spread in a single layer on the foil-lined pan and roast until well browned and crisp-crunchy, about 45 minutes.

And now the expensive: Expensive in this case meaning "not good."

After having read here and there about the wonder that is the hundred-day-old pastured Poulet Rouge chicken, I went ahead and ordered one from Nature's Harmony Farm in Elberton, via Athens Locally Grown, a kind of brilliant Internet farmers' market in which members place orders on Monday and Tuesday, and pay for and pick up their stuff on Thursday evening at a central location.

Anyway, this chicken. I wanted to roast it simply, to fully appreciate its specialness, and the best way to roast chicken, I've found, is to just spatchcock it, pat it dry and season with salt and pepper and dried thyme, set it in a roasting pan on top of some sliced citrus, and roast at high heat until just about 160°F at the thigh. Then let it rest on a cutting board for a few minutes, carve, and eat. Simple.

Except this chicken was inedible. It was so tough and chewy and stringy we couldn't even get our teeth through pieces of it. People describe the texture as "firm," but that is unhelpful. No, it was like rubber bands, really, lots of rubber bands in your mouth. And it didn't really have any special chickeny flavor that I, a "normal" taster, or D., who I suspect is a better than normal taster, could discern. At all. D. wondered if it was digestible. I wondered if I could throw the whole thing in a pot and at least get some good broth for my sixteen smackers. D. wondered if this was how people in the past ate.

What should I have done differently? I suppose I could've braised. But I didn't want chicken bog, dammit, I wanted roasted chicken. If anyone can give me some seriously promising advice on this matter I might be willing to give it one more shot.

Tortillas Supermercados

2010-07-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

I went a little slap happy this past weekend. The family and I went to Buford Highway for Indonesian food at the charming Tempo Doeloe (5090 Buford Hwy NW, Doraville), and then we stopped in at Supermercado Chicago (5263) to see if they had fresh masa for sale (I didn't find any). I came out with two kinds of preservative-free corn tortillas, and later picked up a few more varieties for a long-overdue taste test.

Homemade is always better, of course, but I'm supposed to be serving tacos to a crowd (I hope it's one anyway) in a couple weeks and I am kind of losing sleep about how to get everything done, and do it without cooking or warming anything on site. Purchasing the tortillas will just make my life a bit easier.

Here's the lineup, left to right: Olé (with preservatives; made in Norcross, GA, by La Banderita), El Milagro (no preservatives; Doraville, GA), La Banderita (no preservatives; made in Norcross).

Again left to right: La Banderita mini taco size (with preservatives; Norcross), Guerrero (with preservatives; Irving, TX).

I warmed all of them one by one in a hot cast-iron skillet just until they started to brown. (Later I tried out various steaming methods and confirmed what I already knew: I don't care for steam-warmed tortillas.) For this comparison I ignored factors like price (they were comparable, as I remember) and availability.

The two that did not have preservatives, El Milagro (the brand I observed more Latinas picking up than any of the others, in two different supermercados) and La Banderita, were coarse-textured, heavy, thick, and had a pretty unpleasant metallic aftertaste. They didn't seem "fresher" to me. With the exception of the Guerrero, the texture of the ones with preservatives was finer and more tender, and perhaps those would not stand up as well to damp fillings—or to time.

The best tasting of all of them, and the one with the nicest texture, was Guerrero: it had lots of masa flavor, it puffed beautifully on the griddle, and was light without being flimsy. Oddly, it was the most rubbery straight out of the package, and I didn't have high hopes for it, but the griddle fixed everything.

La Banderita's mini taco–sized tortilla was probably my second favorite. It also puffed and browned nicely; its flavor was a bit bland compared to the Guerrero and the two no-preservatives brands but not as . . . challenging as the latter.

Conclusion: For personal use, if I'm not making them myself I'll try to make an effort to get Guerrero tortillas (the store on Prince in Athens has them). For the event in a couple weeks I'm going to use the mini tortillas—the size is right for a two- or three-bite sample-type serving, eaten standing up and maybe with a glass in one hand, and the texture and flavor are not bad.

And yes, I had my hamburger off the grill yesterday in a tortilla, with pico de gallo. And I toasted our nation of immigrants.

Green Apples

2010-07-03T18:06:00.003-04:00

A teacher at T.'s school was selling green apples from her yard a few weeks ago, trying to get them all off the trees before the deer ate them, so I bought four or five pounds and made green apple pectin stock—basically concentrated cooked apple juice that's high in pectin so it can be used as a base for all kinds of jellies. You can keep it in the fridge for a couple weeks or freeze it or can it and it'll last for months. This stuff is what I use to make wine and tea jellies in the winter.

You chop up the apples—cores, seeds, peel, and all, add water to just cover them, and simmer until they fall apart into mush:

Then you dump everything into a very fine sieve—I use a bouillon strainer (here's an example, since the picture of mine got lost when my computer died last week)—or a huge jelly bag and let it drain and drain and drain:

Then return that golden juice to the pan and boil it to reduce it by about half. That's it. Green apple pectin stock.

To Pit a Cherry, or Two Hundred

2010-07-02T12:09:00.005-04:00

Last summer when T. and I went out to my parents' place in Washington State for the cherries (and to, you know, visit) I had some slick little Oxo cherry pitters shipped there a week in advance. Hey, I was excited. We don't get many cherries—much less sour cherries—down here in the GA.

I shouldn't have bothered, though, because we determined, through the highly scientific experiment known as a "race," that the paperclip does a much, much faster job. Also a better one, because it makes only one hole in the cherry rather than two, so the cherry stays nice and intact and plump—this is what you want if you're making brandied cherries or sour-cherry preserves, or freezing a quart bag of sweet cherries for a winter clafouti.

First get yourself a large paperclip and unfold it once, like the one in the picture above.

Pull off the cherry stem:

Hold the cherry firmly in one hand and jam the small fold of the paperclip into the cherry where the stem was, angling it a bit so it slides right along one side of the pit:

You'll be able to feel when the bend in the clip has reached the end of the pit. Now lever the pit and sort of pull it out the hole you just made. You might need to apply a little pressure with the fingers holding the cherry. (It's easier than it sounds.)

Cherry, one hole, no pit:

This was about four pounds of Bing cherries, and it took maybe ten minutes. So raid the supply closet at the office and pit some cherries this weekend!

More Kid Lunches

2010-07-02T10:45:00.003-04:00

This week's unintentional theme: Where would we be without yogurt? Mixed with parsley, garlic, salt, and pepper as a dip, and with various fresh fruit and preserves as a dessert. I did not make those "yogurt"-covered pretzels, but heck, maybe I should try that too! You can see the individual pictures here, but basically, working left to right, we've got a beet-green quesadilla, a turkey sandwich and grilled corn, rice and black-eyed peas with salsa, generic sandwich of some sort, and two kinds of leftover rice with leftover Chinese broccoli.

Book Event at Gosford Wine

2010-07-01T10:21:00.003-04:00

Hello! Just a quick note to let you know that Gosford Wine here in Athens is going to be hosting a little wine and preserve tasting and book signing for the canning book, with Rinne Allen (the photographer) and me. Here are the details:

Thursday, July 15
6:30 p.m.
Gosford Wine
1059 Baxter Street (between the library and Rocksprings)

STC is expediting shipment of some (slightly) advance copies of the book, so you can get yours probably even before Rinne and I have gotten ours. Please come out and have some wine and taste samples of dishes from the book, including "Asia tacos" (pork with do chua, cilantro sauce, and pear), Lithuanian-style chilled pickled-beet soup made with homemade yogurt, and a selection of fruit preserves with homemade breads and fresh cheese. I think how the wine part works is that you give the man $10, he gives you a glass, and they pour you five or six wines throughout the evening. It should be a fun time.

I'd love to meet you, kind readers, in person, and give you tacos.

Lunchboxes

2010-06-21T10:21:00.006-04:00

T. wakes us up at 5:30 or so each morning, and I take her to camp at her school at 9. Which leaves me approximately three and a half hours to have a cup of coffee, cook her an egg for breakfast, and pack her lunch and morning snack. Not for us the rushing-around-the-kitchen-guzzling-a-smoothie-and-dashing-out-the-door-with-a-cereal-bar we're told is the typical American-family morning. (Although most days I'd prefer the extra sleep, thank you.) I've been taking pictures of some of the lunches I've packed for her, if only to keep myself thinking of fun things to include. Up top are a few of them so far. You can check out the Flickr set here for details about what's in these lunches. Nothing fancy, for the most part, and she's liked pretty much everything I've sent with her (carrots tend to come back home).

The main box is an air-tight .9-quart clip-lid box from the Container Store, which has a convenient moveable divider. It's much better than the other, cheapo bento boxes I've used: the lid is easy to open and close, but it stays sealed and secure. The two little 4-ounce rectangular boxes are also from the Container Store. The lunch bag, seen in the bottom-right corner, is a bento carrier from Laptop Lunchbox; I found out after I ordered this that the cheaper but perfectly fine insulated lunch bags at the grocery store are kept in the cocktail mixers section. I think all of these elements work very well together, and just looking at them empty each morning is often enough inspiration to start coming up with ideas for filling them.

Stay tuned for a post about making piima cultured butter, which is, along with chat, my latest mini-obsession.

Chat

2010-05-19T07:58:00.004-04:00

With apologies for the horrible picture above—I've found it very difficult to take a good picture of a chat. Anyway, continuing with the room-temperature theme . . .

This is a chat/chaat, an Indian snack, in this case probably what would be called something like sev puri/poori, although I have to admit I have a mind block when it comes to the names of different chats and what goes into and on top of each. I was trying to make a dish like the sev puri chat I had at Bombay Chaat House, the street cart in Portland, a couple months ago. It wasn't quite the same—that one was soupier—but I think what I came up with was pretty good. Here's what I did, and if anyone has any other good chat recipes lay 'em on me!

For the crunchy stuff on top I used "bikaneri sev" (so it was labeled), made with lentil and chickpea flours and spices. You can find this in Indian grocery stores (at Taj Mahal here in Athens it's in a green bag in the snack aisle), or you could use any similar crunchy puffy snack. I've even used lightly crushed corn Chex—the flavor is different, of course, but the crisp crunch is just right.

I can now report that this makes a fine breakfast, especially if you put a little more super-spicy mint chutney on it, though obviously the sev doesn't stay quite as fresh after a night in the fridge (or—oops—on the counter).

Random Chat
Serves 2 heartily.

These amounts are pretty approximate. I was tasting and adding stuff as I went along, and I encourage you to do the same! The whole thing should be tart, a tiny bit sweet (just from the dates and onion), spicy, a little creamy, and of course crunchy.

About 4 medium red potatoes, peeled and diced
Salt
1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas
About 14 pitted dates
2 tablespoons tamarind concentrate
2 teaspoons sweet Hungarian paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
About 1 1/2 cups plain yogurt
Mint chutney (I used store-bought, but you could chop and puree a bunch of cilantro, mint, green chiles, ginger, maybe some lime juice and a bit of water)
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/2 sweet onion, diced
About 1 cup bikaneri sev or similar crunchy stuff

Cook the potatoes in well-salted water to cover until just tender; drain in a colander, dump in the chickpeas, and rinse under cold running water until cool; set aside to drain.

While the potatoes are cooking, roughly chop the dates and put them in a small saucepan with the tamarind concentrate and enough water to cover them. Simmer until the dates are very soft (about as long as it takes the potatoes to cook), then puree the date mixture in a mini food processor or blender until very smooth, adding water if necessary to make a thick but pourable sauce. Season with a couple pinches of salt.

Put the potatoes and chickpeas in a medium bowl and drizzle in half of the tamarind sauce. Add most of the paprika and cumin, along with 1/2 cup of the yogurt. Toss to combine. Fold in a little water to loosen the mixture if it seems too thick. Put in a serving dish or spread on a shallow platter. Put big spoonfuls of yogurt on top, then drizzle the whole thing with the remaining tamarind sauce. Spoon some of the mint chutney over the top. Layer the onion and cilantro over the top, then sprinkle with the remaining paprika and cumin. Cover the whole thing with the sev and serve.

Thai Beef Salad and Raw Yu Choy

2010-05-13T17:36:00.008-04:00

It's not even that hot here in Georgia yet, and I keep making salads. This week I made two variations on the theme of grape tomato + cucumber + protein (of sorts). One was a kind of larb, which is one of my favorite foods ever:

Thai Beef Salad
Serves 2 to 4.

We had this with a plate of raw Chinese greens (yu choy, I think it was called) covered with crushed ice, like D. and I had at Pok Pok, where they served them with the boar collar meat salad. Before that I'd never thought to eat this stuff raw, but it's delicious! Crisp, cold, and very refreshing alongside the spicy, super-tangy salad. T. liked putting a few pinches of ice in a leaf and eating it like an ice-and-greens taco.

This is the best way I can think of to use up leftover grilled steak, but it's well worth cooking the steak just for this purpose.

Juice of 3 limes
1/4 cup Thai fish sauce (nam pla)
1 teaspoon sambal oelek (chile paste), or lots more to taste
1 teaspoon brown sugar or palm sugar
About 3/4 pound flank steak, grilled or boiled, then thinly sliced across the grain (or any leftover steak)
2 small shallots, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon raw rice
1/2 cucumber, peeled, halved lengthwise, seeded, and sliced 1/4 inch thick
Handfuls of fresh cilantro, Thai basil, and mint, torn
1 1/2 cups grape tomatoes, halved

In a large bowl, whisk together the lime juice, fish sauce, sambal oelek, and brown sugar. Add the steak and shallots and toss to coat. Set aside.

In a small skillet over medium heat, toast the rice until golden brown. Grind finely with a mortar and pestle and add the rice to the steak, along with all the remaining ingredients. Toss to combine, taste, and add more sambal if necessary. Serve or let sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes to marinate before serving.

I also made a nice cold quinoa salad very loosely based on a recipe in Tal Ronnen's The Conscious Cook, a collection of pretty upscale vegan dishes. So loosely, in fact, that a description of it will have to do here: cooked and chilled quinoa, tossed with a quick red wine vinaigrette, a segmented orange (and its juice), tomatoes and cucumber, and thinly sliced shallot:

Turkey Picadillo Tacos and Black Beans

2010-05-06T06:46:00.004-04:00

This is a pretty simplified version of a Rick Bayless recipe for smoky, slightly sweet picadillo I've made and loved many times. Among other adaptations, I use ground turkey instead of braised and shredded pork, canned tomatoes instead of fresh, and I don't precook the sauce. Also below is a stripped-down pot of basic black beans—no soaking, no pork, no epazote, so don't let the lack of time or extra ingredients stop you from making them!

Turkey Picadillo Tacos
Serves 4.

1 (14.5-ounce) can whole plum tomatoes
1 to 2 chipotle chiles in adobo (2 will make it pretty spicy)
1/4 cup raisins
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 1/2 pounds ground turkey
1/2 large onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Salt
1/4 cup pine nuts or slivered almonds, toasted
Corn tortillas
Lots of fresh cilantro, some crumbly cheese (this time I used feta), and lime wedges

In a mini food processor or similar, puree the tomatoes (with their juices) and chipotle(s). Transfer to a bowl and add the raisins and cinnamon. Set the sauce aside.

In a medium skillet or sauté pan, heat the oil over high heat. Add the turkey and cook, breaking it up with a spatula, until no longer pink. Add the onion and garlic and cook, stirring, until tender and the turkey is just starting to brown and become dry in the pan. Add the sauce, stirring to loosen any browned bits, and lower the heat to maintain a simmer. Simmer until thick, about 10 minutes. Season with salt to taste, then stir in the pine nuts.

Meanwhile, heat the tortillas one or two at a time in a heavy skillet and wrap them in a clean cloth to keep them soft and warm. Serve the picadillo with the tortillas, cilantro, cheese, and lime wedges.

Basic Black Beans
Serves 8.

1 pound dried black beans (the more recently bought the better; old beans will take much longer to cook)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 large onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
Salt

Rinse the beans well and set aside to drain in a sieve or colander.

In a medium pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook, stirring, until translucent. Add the beans and cold water to cover them by at least 1 inch. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, partially covered, until the beans are soft but still hold their shape (try not to let the pot boil, which I think can toughen the skins, and don't add salt yet), about 1 1/2 hours, adding more water if necessary to keep the beans covered. Season with plenty of salt, then, if you'd like, use an immersion blender to puree some of the beans in the pot. Serve.

Also, T. and I made some hula hoops. Yep, we're Athenians.

Dark and Rainy Day Salad

2010-04-24T12:41:00.005-04:00

Despite D.'s ribbing about how long it was taking us to make this, T. and I enjoyed a lovely simple spring salad for lunch today. These are eggs from Clare's chickens (we left our hens with the old house's new owner in Carlton), and tender, sweet lettuce from her garden, all of it so generously delivered straight to our doorstep. So basically this is a salad from Clare. Thank you!

While the eggs were taking an eternity to medium-soft-cook, we made your basic vinaigrette: rubbed the bowl with cut garlic, then whisked minced shallot, Dijon mustard, sherry vinegar, and salt and pepper; drizzled in olive oil, whisking. Added some slivers of chewy sun-dried tomatoes (no lardons here, sorry to say, but these added a similar texture) to soak up a bit of dressing. Then at the last minute—at last!—we tossed in the lettuces, peeled and quartered the eggs, and flaked some canned tuna over the top (this was albacore in water, but you know what would've been much better is light in olive oil—salty and delicious, and not at all resembling cardboard). More black pepper, and an extra drizzle of tangy dressing.

Quick Huevos Rancheros

2010-04-21T17:40:00.004-04:00

This is hardly worthy of the first post on this blog in months, but a friend and I were talking recently about how sometimes one just forgets how to make easy, quick meals that don't require any thought or effort. So in case I forget again, self: huevos rancheros is a perfectly delicious supper, even if you have to use canned beans and store-bought tortillas, and if you have no other plans for tonight you should make it. It'll take about ten minutes.

Huevos Rancheros

Put two skillets over high heat, and a small saucepan over medium heat. Open a can of black beans and dump them in the saucepan to heat up. Put a few tortillas in one skillet, and heat a little olive oil in the other. Flip the tortillas. Crack a few eggs into the oil and season them with salt and pepper; lower the heat to low and cook until they're as done as you want them (flip if desired—my daughter won't allow any flipping, as she insists they be runny sunny side up).

Chop up a tomato and a couple scallions and a handful of cilantro, put them in a bowl, and squeeze in some lime juice. Season with salt.

Stir the beans and put a tortilla on each serving plate. Season the beans, if necessary, then spoon them over the tortillas. Top each with an egg, then some of the salsa. Flick some of the onions and adobo sauce from a jar of chipotle chiles over the top of everything and serve with lime wedges.

In other news, we moved! A few weeks ago, we packed up and left our beautiful old nineteenth-century farmhouse half an hour outside town and brought ourselves to Athens proper. We couldn't be happier in the super-efficient, smartly designed 1958-built little ranch house we're renting in a shady old subdivision right smack in town. T. and I walk to and from her school most days, or, often, ride our bike (she has a little half-bike that hooks onto the back of mine). We bike to the grocery store. D.'s drive to work takes about five minutes. And our yard, though lacking in quirky double-seater outhouses, shotgun shells, and old broken bottles and such, has a mulberry tree as well as the perfect spot for a hammock, the hanging of which was of course the first thing I did when we arrived here. Town life is being very good to us.

Roasted Cauliflower Macaroni and Cheese with Caraway Havarti

2010-02-16T06:11:00.001-05:00

The day after I confessed to a friend that I'd never myself made a good macaroni and cheese I got a request to develop a recipe for same for the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board's new blog devoted to what has to be their biggest moneymaking dish. I tried to ignore it, but the challenge was too appealing. I love macaroni and cheese.

My M&C roots do not run deep. I can't remember my mom ever making it, though she says she did, and that she used to put green bell peppers in it—which might very well explain why I've blocked it out. My own efforts have all occurred in the last two or three years as I've tried to make it for my daughter, who had it somewhere outside the home and now asks for it every week (not that I make it for her that often).

I've never used a recipe, simply because I feel it should be such an easy dish to throw together, and as a result every pan of it I've made—I say "pan" because macaroni and cheese to my mind means baked—has suffered from (at least) two problems, both of which should have been a cinch to fix: not enough cheese, and not enough salt. Somehow I just never got it right. For this post I could, of course, have just gone with a classic no-white-sauce, extra-cheesy version similar to Julia Moskin's Creamy Macaroni and Cheese (1 pound cheese to 1/2 pound macaroni, plus pureed cottage cheese!), which actually looks similar to the surprisingly good stuff I very occasionally break down and get premade from the Ingles in Elberton (I know!). But that would satisfy only two of the people in my family.

You see, my husband despises macaroni and cheese (especially when it's referred to as "mac 'n [sic] cheese") Traditional macaroni and cheese is not comforting to him, it's bland. Its texture is not bouncy, it's soggy and unpleasant. So I set out to come up with a way to make a macaroni and cheese that would appeal to him as well as to my three-year-old and me. This is what I came up with. He loved it, and deemed it "award-winning." (No awards were involved; I did, however, receive a small "cheese stipend" for developing this recipe for the WMMB event—cheese stipend!) I hope you like it too.

Roasted Cauliflower Macaroni and Cheese with Caraway Havarti

Havarti with caraway seeds is one of my favorite basic snacking cheeses, but I'd never thought to actually cook with it before. Turns out it's a stellar melter, and its slight sharpness, along with the nutty caraway, are just wonderful in this context. The slabs of roasted cauliflower at the bottom of the casserole give the dish a welcome meaty texture: put this macaroni and cheese at the center of the plate, next to some sweet baby peas or a simple bitter greens and parsley salad, and pour plenty of red wine.

Serves 8

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 head cauliflower

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 pound elbow macaroni

6 tablespoons butter

1 small onion, finely diced

4 tablespoons flour

3 cups milk

Pinch of cayenne

1 pound Wisconsin Havarti Cheese with Caraway, or plain havarti plus 2 teaspoons caraway

1/2 cup bread crumbs

2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Drizzle half of the oil all over the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking pan.

Trim the head of caulflower and use a big knife to slice it into 1/2-inch-thick slabs. Arrange the pieces in the baking pan to cover the bottom in a single layer. Drizzle with the remaining oil, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast for 25 to 30 minutes, until tender and lightly browned. Remove from the oven and reduce the oven temperature to 400 degrees F.

Meanwhile, cook the macaroni in a large pot of boiling salted water until just barely tender; drain and set aside in a large bowl.

In a large saucepan over medium heat, melt 4 tablespoons of the butter. Add the onion and sauté until translucent, about 5 minutes.

Sprinkle in the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until pale golden, about 3 minutes.

Whisk in the milk and cayenne. Whisking and stirring frequently, bring to a simmer; simmer for 2 to 3 minutes, until the sauce has thickened slightly.

Remove from the heat and gently stir in the cheese, stirring until melted. Season generously with salt—you'll need at least 2 teaspoons. Pour the sauce over the macaroni and stir to coat well, then dump the whole mixture over the roasted cauliflower in the baking dish.

Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter and toss it with the bread crumbs. Sprinkle the crumbs over the macaroni and cheese, along with the Parmesan, if using.

Bake until very bubbly and browned on top, about 30 minutes. Let sit for 10 minutes to firm up before scooping out servings.

Fresh Cranberry Relish

2009-11-26T06:42:00.004-05:00

Never thought I would ever have any connection to so vaunted a site as Design*Sponge, but here it is, a recipe for fresh cranberry relish, posted as part of the lovely Beauty Everyday's guest appearance. I didn't know it was up until this morning (I thought it was going to be on BE)—sorry to be late getting you all a recipe appropriate to the day; it's a quick one, though, so if you have a few minutes to spare and an extra bag of cranberries . . .

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today's Most Photographed House in Madison County

2009-10-28T15:52:00.007-04:00

It was a tough thing to do, but yes, we've put our beloved house on the market. If you know anyone who wants to live the good life here in Carlton, please direct them to our Realtor extraordinaire, Michael Littleton, at Full Circle Real Estate Group.

I'll miss the windowseats most of all.

In other news, the photography for my book is well under way, and I'm just thrilled with how everything is looking. Luckily for me and STC, one of the most talented photographers in the world, Rinne Allen, happens to live right in Athens, and, even better, despite her recent fame she was available and willing to take on the job of shooting my crazy pickles and preserves. Early indications are that this is going to be an amazingly gorgeous book. So I'm happy about that.

Figs

2009-08-10T07:53:00.012-04:00

Carrie has this crazy, giant fig tree growing into the side of her house, and it's loaded with fruit, so T. and I went over yesterday to say hi and pick as many as we could before the heat, yellow jackets, and crankiness had their way with us. The first thing I did when we got home, while D. cleaned up the kid and kept her happy by talking about parties with her, was set aside three pounds for preserves and sear the rest in a skillet:

Seared Figs with Mustard Seeds and Curry Leaves

This is via my friend Regan, although I'm not sure if this is exactly how she did it that one time, and she says it came from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. Now that I look at that page over on Amazon, though, I see that the dish has a squeeze of lemon juice and some cayenne—both of which would be nice, it's true. Also that recipe has quantities and everything. Fancy!

Vegetable oil or ghee (or a little oil and a little butter)
Ripe fresh figs, halved
Handful of fresh curry leaves
Yellow mustard seeds
Kosher salt

In a heavy skillet over medium-high heat, heat a bit of oil—just enough to coat the bottom of the pan. Add the figs and arrange them cut side down in the pan, then sprinkle in the curry leaves, mustard seeds, and a pinch or two of salt. Cook, without disturbing, until the figs are nicely browned on the bottom, 4 to 5 minutes. Use a thin metal spatula to turn the figs over and cook just until they're soft and glazed-looking, about 1 more minute. Serve warm.

Then I made some fig preserves, the first of this season, kind of winging it based on Regan's description of another fig dish she loved once, roasted figs with ricotta. It worked very well, and even though a version of this recipe will be in my book about canning and preserving (almost finished now, and due to come out next year!) I thought I'd post it here anyway for loyal friends and family who still have old Pie and Beer in their readers, blogrolls, or whatever.

Thank you, Regan, for passing along your extensive fig knowledge, and thank you, Carrie, for passing along the figs!

Texas Barbecue

2009-04-22T08:32:00.002-04:00

Over on Flickr, I've posted some pictures of a weekend the elder Chalmerses spent in and around Austin. Lots of brisket, tacos, and donuts.

Ten Kitchen Things I Like

2009-03-19T14:05:00.002-04:00

A set of pictures over on Flickr, which I've been using lately as a sort of comfortable medium between blog (too hard) and Twitter (too easy).

So Lazy

2009-01-24T11:16:00.002-05:00

I'm exhausted today after a hectic week of work, but I wanted to point you over to Flickr, where I wrote up a really basic tutorial for sewing an easy tiered toddler skirt.

Bagels

2008-12-20T09:38:00.005-05:00

Clockwise from top left: Salt, everything, sesame, plain.

I've been itching to make bagels with my new KitchenAid Pro 600 mixer, and the imminent delivery today of something like twenty pounds of buttery, velvety Eastern nova and lox from Barney Greengrass—a gift to Mr. Chalmers from my parents—was more than enough to get me and the bug started last night. (Although, as it turns out, there were tons of bagels in the FedEx box too!) It's possible to make these without a good stand mixer, but it won't be all fun and games. The dough has to be super-stiff but also thoroughly combined (the barley malt syrup doesn't integrate itself easily), and you have to knead it for a good ten minutes. When I did this by hand last year I nearly broke my arms. The KA struggled a bit but powered through admirably.

This recipe is a keeper. Stick to it, and you'll have bagels that seriously taste just like the real thing—not just a decent New York bagel but a very, very good one. Crusty on the outside, chewy, and light on the inside. I don't remember where I got the recipe I based this on, someplace on the Internet, but my thanks go to whoever posted it years ago.

Bagels

Makes 16 bagels.

For the sponge:

2 1/2 cups water
1 teaspoon instant yeast
4 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten (see Notes)

For the dough:

1 tablespoon barley malt syrup (see Notes)
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
3 1/2 to 4 cups bread flour
2 teaspoons vital wheat gluten
2 3/4 teaspoons kosher salt

To boil and bake:

1 tablespoon baking soda
1 tablespoon barley malt syrup
Toppings: sesame seeds, poppyseeds, coarse sea salt, dehydrated chopped onion and garlic;

The night before you plan to boil and bake the bagels:

Make the sponge: Put the water in a large bowl and sprinkle in the yeast. Stir in the flour and vital wheat gluten, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let rise for 2 hours.
Make the dough: Add the malt syrup, yeast, 3 cups flour, the vital wheat gluten, and salt. Stir, adding enough of the remaining flour to make a very, very stiff dough. Knead for 10 minutes. Cut the dough into 16 pieces and roll each into a ball. Cover with plastic and let rest for 20 minutes. Shape the balls by sticking your finger through the center and stretching them into circles (make the hole bigger than you think it should be, as it'll close up as it rises). Put the circles on two parchment-lined sheet pans, spaced at least 1 inch apart, cover completely with plastic, and let rise for 20 minutes. Transfer to the refrigerator overnight.
The next day, boil and bake: Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and stir in the baking soda and malt syrup.

Drop in a few bagels at a time and let them boil for about 1 minute, then turn them over (chopsticks work well for this) and cook on the other side for about 1 minute. As they boil, sprinkle some of the toppings, if desired, on the parchment. Return the boiled bagels to the parchment and immediately top them with . . . toppings. Repeat until all the bagels are boiled and topped.

Bake for 5 minutes. Rotate the pans, lower the oven temperature to 450 degrees, and bake for 10 minutes. Turn off the oven and leave the bagels inside for 5 minutes. Crack the oven door and leave them in there for 5 minutes more. Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Note: Vital wheat gluten can be found at health food stores (check the bulk bins) and in good supermarkets (among the specialty flours). You can use barley malt powder instead of syrup, if you like. Both powder and syrup are available at most health food stores.

Serving suggestion.

Lox, overcast daylight, and the hand of a happy Mr. Chalmers.

Eastern nova, and lots of it. Thank you, Mom and Dad!

Baker's Hours

2008-11-20T05:02:00.002-05:00

The bug is not going back to sleep. She's been up since about 2:30. It's okay, though; I wasn't sleeping well either. And I had four loaves of bread in the pantry that I'd shaped yesterday evening and was too tired to stay up and bake. So this is what just came out of the oven.

Media Notes

2008-11-18T15:10:00.007-05:00

1. I wish this reporter had called me back to confirm slash copyedit the quote he attributes to me, and also to confirm that I live in Athens, which I don't. I like Simply Meats, and I said some nice things about it, but I don't think I said them quite that stupidly.

2. You can find my mug on the beta version of the new recipe resource Cookstr, alongside some very smart authors indeed (and probably some thick ones like me).

3. I learned yesterday that my proposal for a kind of unusual cookbook has been accepted, and if all goes well and contracts get signed it'll be published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang. This will be the first book that's really my own (that is, it was my idea) and that I actually have a stake in (it's not a work-for-hire job). Apparently I'm going to have months upon months to write it, which means it's going to be awesome and I'm not going to go completely insane. Whew.

Election Day in Fictional Baltimore

2008-11-04T15:23:00.003-05:00

Does anyone else have this montage running through their heads right now? I wish this clip contained the "Naw, man, I can't vote" line that just breaks my heart.

Our Polling Place 2

2008-11-04T14:28:00.004-05:00

The Chalmerses voted a bit later in the morning than last year, all of us having had a difficult sleep last night for various reasons. The bug skipped ahead of us (until we got to the highway and the railroad tracks), and the Mr. and I walked with our arms around each other. Our best neighbors and friends June and Cecilia were there, having just voted themselves; we chatted awhile, and the atmosphere was cheerful and expectant. It was a beautiful morning, bright and clear and breezy.

Later, at the Southern States in Lexington, the mood among the middle-aged white men I overheard talking politics was not so cheerful. Though I hate to admit finding pleasure in the bitterness I hear in a feed store in rural Georgia, I think this is a sign of good things to come tonight.

As I did last year, I submitted my picture to the Polling Place Photo Project, even though the building itself is just a tiny dot here, at the vanishing point. As they ask in the questionnaire, if there's anything that would have made my voting experience better it would be knowing that all my neighbors, even those much less fortunate than I am, were able to register and to vote as easily as I was.

Outside Brown

2008-11-02T10:18:00.005-05:00

The pork shoulder was excellent. We smoked it until about 2 p.m., so maybe nine hours for an eight-pound Boston butt? I think it registered almost 180 degrees when we took it off.

Here are some things I want to remember about what I did this time for the next time:

Marinate overnight: apple juice, a little brown sugar, cumin, onion powder, salt, Goya adobo.
Start out with hot charcoal fire in the firebox, let it burn down till the briquettes are mostly coals, then add soaked hickory chips.
Do not trim off any of the fat. Put shoulder fat side down on the grate to start, then flip it after a couple hours.
Keep the temperature at 200 to 225 degrees: When the coals are white all over, add a few more fresh coals and a handful of soaked wood chips. If it's cold outside, be sure to do this before the smoker temperature drops at all, and before the old coals are totally white; otherwise it'll be hard to maintain the heat evenly and the new coals won't light very easily and things will suck for a while.
When the meat registers 170 degrees, keep going for another 1 or 2 hours. Those last 10 degrees, as Mr. Chalmers warned me, are the toughest, but they're worth it.
Boil a few cups of the marinade for 10 or 15 minutes with some chile flakes, then strain. Add about three times as much cider vinegar, and some more chile flakes. This should be about right and all the sauce you'll need.

Mr. Chalmers chopped the meat into chunks, and I made a sauce (for the side). This morning I roughly chopped some in the food processor—I know, sue me, but it was the best tool for the job, and just look at the results!—and mixed in a bit of the sauce and made a sandwich with a toasted storebought bun for breakfast.

The coleslaw was good too, though I'm no connoisseur of the stuff. It was just green cabbage (no carrot or other useless crap) with a dressing of sour cream, mayonnaise, yogurt, Dijon mustard, cider vinegar, salt, and a little sugar. I like it with tons of cracked black pepper, so I put some in my own servings. Also made some cornbread muffins.

Our friend Regan came out to watch the Florida-Georgia game and hang out and drink beer and Argentinian wine and throw the football around out in the yard. Along with the wine, she brought pretty little turnips from Athens Locally Grown, for which she volunteers each Thursday, and made a delicious turnip salad: blanched cubed turnips tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, cumin, paprika, and parsley. It was amazing, and went so well with everything else you'd've thought we'd called each other beforehand.

Dessert was creamy cold jasmine rice pudding with caramelized bananas, a Martha Stewart recipe that I would say is too fussy except that the results are always so worth the trouble that I can never bring myself to skip any of the steps. It's here, and you should try it sometime. The bananas take on this strange texture, and somehow taste alcoholic, as if they really do have rum in them. Weirdly addictive.

It was a happy, fun day, and I'm glad it lasted as long as it did.

Must Be Feeling Better?

2008-11-01T04:43:00.003-04:00

Got up this morning around 3 and made coleslaw. It's 4:40 now, and I have a fire going in the smoker, almost ready to put the whole Boston butt pork shoulder on. I just took a pain pill and I'm drinking coffee and wearing my deer-hunter-orange puffy coat over my pajamas. Everyone else, including the dogs, is asleep. The pork's been marinating overnight in my husband's favorite pork marinade/brine thing: apple juice, onion salt, a little brown sugar, a little cumin, and some other stuff. More later.

Quick Update

2008-10-23T11:46:00.005-04:00

I got home from the hospital yesterday after surgery early Tuesday morning. Everything went well according to the stoic, matter-of-fact, blunt neurosurgeon (is blunt a word you should use to describe a surgeon?). It took about three hours, and he had to take out a piece of bone to get to the disc where my spinal cord was "splattered"—his word (did I mention he has no bedside manner to speak of?)—against the vertebra. The incision site hurts like hell, but 100 percent of the nerve pain in my back and legs is gone, completely. I can stand up straight for the first time in a couple months, and I slept very well last night (Percoset and Valium helped a bit with that), and didn't once wake up screaming and squeezing poor Mr. Chalmers's upper arm in a death grip.

What I'm dealing with now is the kind of pain that I can tell is going to go away—my dad, who's had four operations on his back, put it this way too. In other words, this pain makes sense: cut muscles, bruising, staples, and whatnot = hurt. The pain I had before made no sense. I know I'm going to be completely better very soon.

My mom and Mr. Chalmers are still pretty much doing everything around here that I would normally do—and then some. The nurse told me to eat lots of red meat to help heal the muscles, so they pulled some big "cowboy steaks" (bone-in rib-eyes) out of the freezer for supper last night. I'd gotten them as part of a "freezer pack" at Simply Meats on Baxter Street the day after our chest freezer came. They were amazingly tender and delicious, even though I'm not normally a fan of the rib-eye. Athenians, let's keep this place in business! Why didn't it turn up in the ABH piece this week about local butcher shops? Sure, it's not all local meat, and the more unusual cuts and meats are frozen or special-order items (as they are most places), but certainly it would've been worth a mention.

Mr. Chalmers also brined and hot-smoked a side of salmon over the weekend. I think it was his best yet. The bug ate—no exaggeration—about a quarter of it.

Continuing with the random food notes, after all my pre-op stuff at St. Mary's on Monday, the bug and I took Grandma to Just Pho . . . and More for lunch. We'd been there once. The night before, my mom asked the bug, "What is pho?" (She knows, but was just making conversation.) Without missing a beat, the bug answered, "Deeee-LISH-us!" My little girl makes a valiant effort with the chopsticks, but of course mostly uses her hands.

She also really enjoys the boba "smoothies":

My mom, who traveled through Thailand for a month or so with my Thai aunt, was happy to see that they had a durian boba drink. I had no idea she liked durian, even the fresh-cut ones. I've never had the guts to try it, but the smoothie version wasn't too bad. Weird, but not as terrible as the fresh fruits smell.

The pho itself was better this time than on our first visit. The herbs and add-ins were nice and fresh, and the basil was real Thai basil. I always ask for the raw meat on the side; last time they gave me raw round, but dry and crumbly cooked brisket, so this time I just went with the round, and it was nice.

I guess that's it for now. Time to lie down.

Stocking Up

2008-10-17T14:26:00.007-04:00

Wow, it's been a while. I intend to write a real post one of these days, but in the meantime you can check out Flickr to see pictures of, among other random things, the Chalmerses and my mom and our friend Regan making butter in our old glass Dazey churn. I do have a big piece of news to relate: we've gone and gotten ourselves a chest freezer! It's a relatively small model, 8.8 cubic feet to be exact, but it fit through the narrow old pantry door (with about two millimeters to spare), which means it can be essentially right in the kitchen—such a luxury. I remember my parents' chest freezers—two of them: one in the laundry room on the other side of the house from the kitchen and one out in the storage barn. Holy pain.

The Great Whatsit.

It's a rainy, at times windy day here. My mom and I sat on the porch waiting for the freezer to arrive while it rained and the bug napped under a quilt in her teepee, on a bear-hide* rug my mom tanned out in Washington. I was reading Stocking Up and getting very antsy. I want to can a lot more stuff, sprout stuff, curdle and cure stuff, dry stuff, freeze stuff.

Earlier, we'd had a "tea" party. Table was a stack of boxes of canning jars. It was a good day to be on the porch. Grandma even swept the "piderwebs" away so the bug could—would—ride her trike up and down the long empty side of the porch.

We've become a bit lackadaisical about the chickens, one of which is seen here. These days we kind of just let them out in the morning and put them in at night and hope for the best. So far I think only one is laying, so unless that's the one that gets carried off by a dog it wouldn't be a huge loss. I must admit, though, that I've become accustomed to having them around.

My mom's been here for almost three weeks, and will stay a couple more weeks to continue helping out. I'm having back surgery this Tuesday to fix a badly herniated disc—it's been a mess for two months now. As much as I'm not looking forward to the process itself, I'm very much looking forward to putting the whole back-pain thing behind me so I can at least stand up long enough to cook a full meal, or take the bug for her bedtime walk. It seems that surgery is the best (some would say only) way to do it.

Mom and the bug planted a cover crop of annual ryegrass on my spring garden plot—right on top of the straw and newspapers I put down in early summer to kill the grass—and it's growing like crazy. She just put two loaves of bread in the oven and made some tea. She's almost done sewing slipcovers for the old orange sectional—she's been dragging her feet on the last part, with the curved swoosh-shaped back. Need to light a fire under her. Then she needs to start getting supper ready, and there's vacuuming to be done . . .

*Edit: Correction: sheepskin. But she did tan it herself.

Chickens

2008-09-13T17:57:00.003-04:00

The bug and I went to see a man about some chickens yesterday. I was hemming and hawing about which of the Ameraucana hens to get, and felt I was taking too long, so I quickly said I'd take that one and that one . . . and one of those black ones over there. He snatched up a black one and stuck it in our box. I learned upon opening the box when we got home that the black one was a rooster. So we have two Ameraucana hens (or more likely a mixed Easter Egger breed) and a Black Australorp rooster. They've settled into the chicken tractor nicely, and the dogs have been exceptionally well behaved, barking at them only intermittently from behind their own fence.

This afternoon we found the first egg in the nesting box. It was very light blue, a bit oddly shaped and large but lightweight for its size, with a bright orange yolk and a sort of thin albumin. Tasted like . . . egg. (All that back-breaking labor is starting to pay off, ha ha.)

Whenever I reminded the bug to hold the egg carefully, she'd gently and slowly uncurl her fingers so that it was just balancing on her palm.

The bug likes tossing the chickens scratch, and we've given them pear and apple trimmings and cores, and some grapes (the latter of which went uneaten except by fire ants) in addition to crushed pellet laying feed. She also likes counting the chickens. She counts everything now, including, the other day, all the apples in a three-pound bag: twelve!

Our chickens do not have names (yet). My first thought, before I knew that one was a rooster, was that they could be Nancy, Bess, and George, but now that may be too cute by a third.

Cold Smoking

2008-09-04T13:07:00.005-04:00

In August—no, wait: September. In Georgia. That's the kind of thing the Chalmerses do. Here's the rig we rigged up, and I have to say it's kind of genius, and much easier on the back than my original plan to build a freestanding smokehouse with bricks and wood, and clay pipelines buried in the yard. (Not to say that that might not happen someday, but just that it'll be after the adobe pizza oven has been completed. Priorities!)

Styrofoam cooler, into which an old wire cooling rack fit perfectly on the little built-in ledge. Hole cut out of the side. Flexible duct pipe inserted. Ice (not visible) and rock salt in bottom of cooler.

Salmon on the rack. Mr. Chalmers used a cure of, I think, sugar, brown sugar, salt, and orange zest and put it under weight in the fridge for maybe 24 hours? Indoor-outdoor thermometer wire running into cooler so we can read the interior temperature. The idea is to keep the environment as cool as possible (ideally around 54 degrees) while pumping smoke into it. Outside temperature was around 85 degrees; Mr. Chalmers managed to keep the cooler at 65 to 70 for, I think, about 4 or 5 hours. (Can you tell I was a little out of it this weekend?) Note beer can in the background.

The other end of the duct fit snugly over the smokestack of our Char-Griller smoker (after the swivel cover was removed). The Mr. built a charcoal fire in the side firebox on the right, and topped it with hickory chips wrapped in a foil packet that he punctured a bunch of times to let the smoke out.

Back view, with smoke.

We didn't think we'd be able to keep the temperature low enough, but what we got was remarkably close to real cold-smoked salmon, and we now believe it will be possible, with a few adjustments (including to the calendar, and to the cure and to the wood used for smoking [needs to be subtler, like a fruit wood]), to make actual lox. I'm going to revisit the bagel technique I started working on last winter.

I have no pictures of the finished salmon. It looked, you know, kinda like the salmon you see in the picture above, except sliced.

Lists Are Fun

2008-08-29T08:04:00.003-04:00

My last list has become a bit obsolete, so here's one I picked up from one of my favorite morning-reading blogs, Antidisingenuousmentarianism or something like that. Take it and do it yourself, if you'd like.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. [I don't know how to do a strikethrough on Blogger, but I'll gray-out things I wouldn't eat.]
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

1. Venison [We almost never had beef at home when I was a kid]
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile [Just alligator, caught by my wacky uncle in the Everglades]
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes [Dad made strawberry wine and Mom made elderflower]
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl [Would not eat a bread bowl]
33. Salted lassi [Salted lemonade doesn't count, I suppose]
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea [Just to be a jerk here: "clotted cream" is a part of "cream tea"; you don't ever say "clotted cream tea," because it sounds gross]
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal [Only because I hate the idea of an extra slice of bread in the middle of a hamburger]
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini ["Gin martini"? there's no other kind, folks]
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips [My mom went through a period of trying to pass carob off as chocolate to me and my brother, but it failed miserably]
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin [What the hell is this?]
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis [My folks make it every Robert Burns Day, but funnily enough I'm never around]
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake [Thanks again to that crazy uncle]

Lots of stuff here I'd like to try, though they wouldn't be at the top of my list. Maybe Kobe beef and snails would be up there. What can you all tell me about the things I haven't eaten? Is hare like wild rabbit? Tougher maybe? Can you really taste the rose in rose harissa? Seems like the rest of the spices would overpower it completely and make it not worth the expense.

Comfort Food

2008-08-21T15:42:00.009-04:00

So the old back has not been doing very well for the last few days, and meals around here have been low-impact affairs centered around foods you can put between slices of store-bought sandwich bread. But tonight, aches be damned, I wanted something more interesting, so I made this Isan (northeastern) Thai dish from an old Saveur (June/July 2003), and it's making me very happy! It's a room-temperature larb—spicy and salty, with cooling mint. And very lime-y, thanks to the big bag of extra-juicy limes Clare brought over when she and her kids came to play on Saturday. (More about that fun day—Okrapalooza—later, I hope.) The original recipe called for minced grilled catfish, but I just thawed some lean ground pork and cooked it in a skillet until there were lots of crisp bits. I made the same dish earlier this summer with chopped leftover roast chicken, which was fine, but not as good as the pork, texture-wise.

This may actually be the best thing I've ever made, and it's one of the easiest very good Thai dishes I know of. The recipe as published was called Laab Pla Duk (Minced Grilled Catfish Salad), but with ground pork it seems more like what's commonly called larb gai* on menus.

Larb (?)

Adapted from Saveur
Serves 2 to 4

1 pound lean ground pork
1 tablespoon rice (jasmine would be best, but I used brown rice)
6 to 10 dried red chiles (I used 6 chiles de arbol, but the original specifies 10 Thai chiles)
Juice of 3 limes
1/4 cup Thai fish sauce (nam pla)
4 kaffir lime leaves, very thinly sliced
About 1/4 cup chopped fresh mint
About 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro (or use culantro or saw-tooth cilantro—mine died when we went out of town and it wasn't watered)
5 shallots, thinly sliced

In a heavy skillet, cook the pork over medium-high heat until no pink remains; drain if it gives off a lot of fat. Cook for about 5 minutes longer, until crisp and well-browned in places, breaking up the meat with a spoon. Transfer to a colander and set aside to cool to room temperature.

Meanwhile, in a dry pan over medium heat, toast the rice until golden brown, then transfer to a spice grinder and let cool a bit. Grind to a coarse powder and put in a large bowl. Return the pan to medium heat and add the chiles; toast until blackened in spots, then transfer to the spice grinder, coarsely chop, and add to the rice.

Add all the remaining ingredients and the pork and toss to combine. Taste and add more lime juice or fish sauce if necessary—it should be very tangy and salty. Serve at room temperature.

This, incidentally, is our newly red table, which we've decided we like in the kitchen, even though it's in a weird position right next to the desk. The bug and I have our breakfast here now, and have a pretty bouquet of matching red spider lilies on it. In the evenings, I sit at the table and flip through magazines or something while Mr. Chalmers sits kind of opposite me at the desk (which he calls the computer lab) and we engage in veep speculation. The bug wanders in and out, as do the dogs.

*Edit: Larb gai, of course, being made with chicken, not pork.

Supper Last Night

2008-08-13T09:29:00.004-04:00

This was really good, y'all. I rubbed a chicken all over with salt, Chinese five-spice, and cumin (I saw that combination, plus bacon, on squabs on Iron Chef the other night), then roasted it at 425 degrees until nice and crisp, basting once. And the salad is from a recipe on Epicurious: Green-Tomato and Honeydew Melon Salad. I couldn't find the pepitas in my cupboard (spice cabinet is next on my list of wood things to build), so I used sesame seeds, and then I found the pepitas. Of course, too, I used four times as much vinegar—Champagne and white wine vinegar this time. The tomato was a bit pink, but still tart and crunchy, a beautiful contrast to the soft, sweet honeydew. Mr. Chalmers and the bug liked this as much as I did; try it!

Neighbors

2008-08-12T09:43:00.006-04:00

Our friend Clare, a true Renaissance woman in Crawford with an absurd amount of energy (she's building two or three houses with her bare hands, and doing it with a six-month-old strapped to her front and a two-and-a-half-year-old on her back), gave us a bagful of produce from her garden when the bug and I met her and her kids at the Chick-Fil-A (the new one on the East Side has a great—i.e., air-conditioned—playground). Among other things the bounty included these neat beans. Note the gorgeous dark purple ones; in real life they were almost iridescent. I have no idea what any of them are, but they were great just steamed in the same pot with some Yukon Gold and red new potatoes then tossed with Champagne vinegar and pesto.

On Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers went out to the Hold Steady show at the 40 Watt, and our neighbor from across the road stayed with the little Chalmers (until 2 a.m.!). I made a spinach lasagne for her dinner—anticipating that we'd also appreciate leftovers the next, long day while we recovered. And the first pie I've made in months and months: blueberry, with a cornmeal crust, from this very good recipe on Epicurious. It was lovely morning-after food.

Pie and crayon.

Our other neighbor, June from up the road, came by early one morning last week and picked up the bug. She and her two granddaughters, who've been playing with the bug all summer, often just taking her up to June's house for supper and bringing her back at bedtime, took the bug to swim at Lake Russell for the whole day! They got home at 5. I almost didn't know what to do with myself all day, but I managed to strip several coats of paint and contact paper off the bug's former diaper-changing table (an Ikea number from way back), sand it down, and "Americanize" half of a UK cookbook. And now I'd better get to the other half . . .

Le française

2008-07-24T06:48:00.004-04:00

So we Googled "mes vacances"—I think it was to see if you use the plural possessive mes—and came across these funny little videos from Gorseville. The bug was already in bed, but we watched them all without her, charmed by the theme music and the sweet voices. This morning I played one for the bug and her reaction was the same as ours: "Again! Again! Again!" Who needs Muzzy?

Lemon Ice Cream

2008-07-23T18:55:00.008-04:00

The Chalmerses are heading out of town tomorrow for a week in Asheville, North Carolina, with Mr. Chalmers's mom and sisters. I don't know if I'll be able to post anything while we're gone, but I thought I'd leave you all with a very good recipe just in case. I made it today to use up some lemons and milk and such in the fridge—well, to transfer them, in ice cream form, to the freezer. This is based on a recipe for lemon-buttermilk ice cream from the Times (the article's from 1998, but it was in a recent recap of ice cream articles). I had no buttermilk, and I think it'd be even better with its tang on top of the lemon's, but it's still pretty great as it is. I added the vodka on the recommendation of David Liebowitz, and I think it does help make it nice and soft right out of the freezer. Another thing I've learned in the last couple days is that it's possible to overchurn your ice cream; this is what gives it that weird, buttery mouthfeel as the butterfat separates out of the cream and milk. So check the ice cream well before you think it might be ready—that is, when it's the consistency of runny, melty frozen custard—and know that it has to finish freezing in the freezer.

That's all I've got for now. Happy ice cream!

Lemon Ice Cream

¼ cup strained fresh lemon juice
¾ cup sugar
2 cups half-and-half
1 cup whole milk
3 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons vodka
Zest of 1 lemon, candied (optional; see Note)

In a small heavy saucepan, combine the lemon juice and ¼ cup of the sugar and cook over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved. Remove to a bowl and set aside to cool.

Clean the saucepan; in it, combine the half-and-half, milk, and ¼ cup of the sugar. Heat until steam rises from the surface.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks together with the remaining ¼ cup sugar. Gradually whisk ½ cup of the hot milk mixture into the yolks, then return the mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium-low heat until the custard is thick and coats the back of a teaspoon. Transfer to a wide bowl and set in another bowl of ice water. Cool to room temperature, stirring occasionally. Stir in the lemon syrup and the vodka. Cover with plastic wrap, pressing the plastic directly onto the surface of the custard, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours.

Freeze in an ice cream maker until it’s the consistency of runny soft-serve ice cream, then stir in the candied lemon zest, if using.

Note: To make candied lemon zest: Remove the zest of the lemon using a vegetable peeler. Put it in a small saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then immediately drain the zest in a strainer. Return it to the pan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil again, drain, cover with cold water, and bring to a boil a third time. Drain and return the zest to the pan and add ¼ cup water and ¼ cup sugar. Boil over medium-high heat until the zest is translucent, 6 to 8 minutes. Let cool to room temperature in the syrup, then remove with a fork to a piece of waxed paper. Sprinkle with sugar and put in the refrigerator until firm and dry.

Blackberries up the Road

2008-07-22T09:28:00.006-04:00

They were much better than last year, and I credit the rain. They're still well protected by two-foot-high fire ant hills and lots of poison ivy, but one morning recently after the bug left for daycare I decided to go all out and get as many as I could. I put on long pants, high boots, gloves (which ended up being too unwieldy for handling the delicate, very ripe berries), and a long-sleeved shirt. I went early enough that it wasn't too hot. I brought a long pole with a hook on the end, thinking that I'd use it to pull vines toward me, but it was more useful for shoving them out of my way and for tamping down the brambles so I could step over or onto them—the hook just made that more difficult. I took a lot of risks—jumping over ant hills and into the thick of the brambles—and at one point, surrounded by ant hills and stuck to the thorns on all sides, it occurred to me that if I lost my balance and fell the cicadas and doves would be the last sounds I heard. I worked fast, and checked my picking hand for ants every few seconds. Usually I come home with three or four painful bites and a handful of berries, but this time I had no bites and about six cups of berries! I probably dropped enough for a pie, and left enough for four. I found a back way in, though, so if we're still here next year it'll be a piece of cake. I also found the muscadines, which are behind the ant hills, through the poison ivy, and on the wrong side of the blackberry bramble—but they're there, and when they're ripe I intend to pick them.

I picked the bug up early from daycare, and we made blackberry frozen yogurt from my mom's old recipe. She used to make it every July in Georgia and Virginia. Next time I'll strain out the seeds. (I like the seeds, but others don't.)

Blackberry Frozen Yogurt

4 cups blackberries
2¼ cups sugar
3 large eggs, separated
4 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
4 teaspoons vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
2 quarts plain yogurt

Put the blackberries and 2 cups of the sugar in a small saucepan; bring to a boil and cook, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved and the berries are broken down a bit.

In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks. Stir in ½ cup of the blackberry mixture, then stir in the remaining blackberry mixture, the lemon juice, and vanilla. Set the bowl in another bowl of ice water and let cool to room temperature, stirring frequently. Chill in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours.

Beat the egg whites, salt, and cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Add the remaining ¼ cup sugar and beat until stiff peaks form.

In a large bowl, whisk the yogurt, then fold in the blackberry mixture, then fold the yogurt mixture into the egg whites.

Freeze in an ice cream maker until it's the consistency of runny soft-serve ice cream, then transfer to the freezer until completely frozen.

Starting Over

2008-07-18T07:58:00.005-04:00

I've taken a bunch of pictures of stuff lately and have all sorts of fun blog posts to write, but since I found out on Saturday that not only did my computer need a new hard drive but the repair shop couldn't save anything from my old drive I've been kind of avoiding dealing with pictures. Pretty much everything I've done in the last eight years was on that drive; while I don't really care about the work stuff and the two books I'd started (and abandoned), I'm sad that all the pictures and little movies we've taken of the bug were lost. I was terrible about backing up, although I did find a CD of a dozen or so pictures I burned for some reason last fall. We emailed small files of some pictures, and there are jpegs on this blog, of course, so not all is lost, but most of it is. I'm looking into serious data recovery efforts (like the people who do computer forensics)—and trying to figure out a better organizational system for myself.

Do any of you out there have any advice? How do you manage your pictures, edit them, post them to blogs, and archive them? I'm stumbling my way through Flickr and haven't hit upon a workable strategy. In the meantime, while I get this sorted out, here are a few midsummer pictures, the last of which, happily, taken with a camera smudged by little fingers with wild blackberry frozen yogurt.

Long Weekend

2008-07-05T10:27:00.005-04:00

The other evening, the bug's new friend up the road called and asked if she could come over and play for a couple hours and have hamburgers (she's a babysitter in training, literally, with the Red Cross). As I watched the two of them walk up the road I was overcome by a desire to make a supper that included both meat and side dish. The meat was a big thin slice of beef I got at Los Compadres, the Latino supermarket on Prince Avenue—the stuff you use for fajitas. It'd been marinating for a while in lime juice, olive oil, a bit of Goya adobo seasoning (purchased for the NFL recipe-testing job), and cilantro. Grilled it hot and fast, then thinly sliced it.

I made a fresh salsa (tomatoes, scallions, lime juice, cilantro, serranos, salt). And a Greek spinach, scallion, and rice dish, which I topped with yogurt. (The spinach recipe came from Regan, who's been searching her files for good simple but somewhat unusual dishes for me to make. I added tangy sorrel to it.) It was so nice to have a meal like this—simple as it may seem—and watch the News Hour on TV without the little one yelling "Caillou! Caillou! Max and Ruby!" in the background.

Next day, we piled in the car and went to Greenville, South Carolina! For no other reason than to get out of the house. Well, that's not true. We went because going to Bonefish Grill was the closest we could get to going to Florida this long weekend without the death drive through south Georgia. We went to the Greenville Zoo, the crazy modern playground nearby, and then downtown for gelato—watermelon (Mr. Chalmers's preference) and grapefruit (mine); the bug liked both of them, but did seem to speed up when she hit the watermelon layer on the bottom.

I froze some of St. Herman's sourdough starter just to put my mind at ease—in case I forget to refresh it as I had for the last month or so. Luckily it's still alive and well as ever. I refreshed a couple times, then let it go past its prime and spread half of it out on parchment paper and froze it, then the bug crumbled it up and put the pieces in a freezer bag. I made two small loaves of sourdough today. The flavor was excellent, but I botched the technique a bit so no pictures this time. Used mostly white whole wheat flour, along with bread flour.

The first Cherokee Purple ripened yesterday. It's delicious, I have to admit, despite its sweetness. I had it just now in a tomato sandwich (with the sourdough) sans onion. The bug was excited that she got to pick some more big ones today.

We went to Whole Foods in Greenville, and I got a couple handfuls of sea beans—always wanted to try them.

Mr. Chalmers smoked a side of salmon, and I fiddled with the beans. Here's what we came up with for a late breakfast or early lunch today:

Hot-Smoked Salmon

3/4 cup kosher salt
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon honey
2 1/2 pounds salmon fillet

In a large bowl, combine the salt, brown sugar, honey, and about 1 gallon cold water and stir to dissolve the salt and sugar. Add the salmon, cover, and refrigerate overnight.

Smoke at about 200 degrees F. with liberal use of smoke (hickory) for about 3 1/2 hours, until firm but still moist.

Sea Bean and Cucumber Salad

Serves 4

1 1/2 cups thin sea beans
1 small cucumber
1 tablespoon Champagne vinegar
1 tablespoon mirin
1/2 teaspoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon sesame seeds, toasted

Blanch the sea beans for 1 minute in boiling water. Drain, then plunge into ice water to stop the cooking. Set aside in the water to soak while you prepare the cucumber and dressing.

Peel and seed the cucumber and cut it into thin strips.

In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, mirin, soy sauce, sesame oil, and ginger. Drain the sea beans and add them, along with the cucumber, to the dressing and toss to coat. Divide among serving plates and sprinkle with the sesame seeds.

I also made cold borscht, New York deli style.

The bug liked it a little. Not a lot, but enough.

Vacancy

2008-07-03T08:18:00.008-04:00

Okay, so here's what I've been working on, the chicken tractor! I bought plans on eBay! "Easy instructions for the non-woodworker!" That's me! Indeed the very detailed instructions, clear pictures and diagrams, and helpful hints were well worth the fifteen bucks. My previous experience building things with wood includes, in total, a couple shelves and maybe a birdhouse when I was an adolescent. So if I could follow these plans and come up with something useable it's got to be easy. I did learn a lot in the process. For example: (1) Don't start building something on an enclosed porch if it won't fit through the door when it's done. (2) Everything goes faster if you use two drills, one for predrilling the holes and one for screwing in the screws. (3) Wood is flexible.

Here's how the chicken tractor works. As you probably already know, a chicken tractor is basically a moveable coop that allows chickens access to sunlight, grass (and weeds), dirt, and the insects they like to eat and also provides space for nesting and shelter from the elements. Because it's totally covered, it will also, it is hoped, keep predators—hawks, racoons, neighbor dogs—from getting to the chickens. Being able to move the coop every few days or every week or so means that the chickens will always have relatively fresh ground to peck at, and it spreads out the fertilizer all over the lawn a patch at a time. For more about chicken tractors, see The City Chicken.

This tractor is about 3 feet wide and 8 feet long, enough space for two or three smallish hens. There's a door in the front for putting a feeder and water bucket inside. (I'll probably try to rig up hanging ones so they travel with the coop as it gets moved around the yard.) A little ramp leads up to the nesting box area. I want to trim the nesting box door in white, because it just isn't cutsy enough as it is; I haven't found anything around the house to use as molding yet. Also I'll put a branch or dowel across between the center studs as a roost.

These are the wheels in the down position, in which the tractor sits flush to the ground when it's not in motion.

When you want to move it, you lift the back of the coop with the handles (they could stand to be about six inches longer, but these were the longest pieces of 1x1 I could find at the Home Depot or Lowe's; did I mention I had to rent a pickup truck to bring all the lumber home?) and kick the wheel assembly, which is on hinges, up underneath the back of the coop. Then you go to the front of the coop and use the longer handles to push or pull it like a wheelbarrow. Even though it's incredibly heavy, it rolls easily and smoothly (you could do it one-handed, to give you some idea), and it can turn on a dime. When you find a good spot, you just hook your foot under the wheel assembly and flip the wheels back out.

The back door leads to the nesting box, where the chickens will lay their eggs. I made the nesting box for three hens (though I'm thinking we'll probably only have two; the full-height center divider just looked cozier to me). Note the very bad paint job. I've learned that there are a few things I'm constitutionally incapable of doing, and one of them is using masking tape; another is putting two coats of paint on anything.

The whole nesting box slides out for (presumptive) cleaning.

The plans called for special thin, lightweight cedar shingles, which were then painted. I could only find these rough, thick underlayer shingles, which I think work fine. I didn't paint them because I like how they look all raw, and I think the cedar will weather nicely (cedar resists rot). Unfortunately I realized, just after I'd spent a couple hours screwing them all on in the blazing sun, that the shingles should've been staggered. If the roof leaks too much (there's a painted plywood base underneath) I'll take them off and redo them.

And that's it. Now back to copyediting.

Mom's Pickles

2008-07-02T13:20:00.005-04:00

The chicken tractor is done, as of 2:30 today. Pictures to come as soon as the Mr. comes home and helps me get it down off the sawhorse.

I stopped in at the produce farm today, and they had—along with the expected zucchini and yellow squash, onions, potatoes, melons, corn (well, it was being picked), and tomatoes—several kinds of pretty cucumbers. This is just what I needed, although I'd gone there looking for okra. (I did—gulp—put in an order for three pounds of okra, not knowing that the heavy bag of squash and potatoes I was preparing to buy was only three pounds. I'm not very good with weights. Good thing I have one or two ideas for how to use okra.)

Anyway, I came home and looked up my mom's recipe for Persian pickles, which I think are the most delicious pickles this side of the Lower East Side. The comparison is inapt, because they're not dill pickles but tarragon-flavored mostly; also they're refrigerator pickles, which means you have to keep them in the fridge, but that's okay because like most pickles they're best cold anyway. My mom and her friend, who's from Iran, wrote a little book of Persian sweets and sours, as yet unpublished; this recipe comes from there. I halved it: 1 pound cucumbers, 3 garlic cloves, a few tarragon sprigs, 3 or 4 clusters of fresh coriander seeds (or 1/2 tablespoon dried seeds), and 2 dried red peppers in a leftover pickle-barrel-type jar (sorry, I forgot to check the volume; I'm not very good with volumes); 3 1/2 cups water, 1/4 cup kosher salt, 1/4 cup cider vinegar.

Persian Pickles

2 to 3 pounds small crisp pickling cucumbers
5 cloves garlic, unpeeled
5 sprigs fresh tarragon leaves
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
2 fresh or dried chiles
1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup cider vinegar

Pack the cucumbers, garlic, tarragon, coriander, and chiles into a 1-gallon jar.

Bring 7 cups water and the salt to a boil. Remove from the heat and let cool completely. Add the vinegar and pour the mixture over the cucumbers. Put the lid on the jar. Refrigerate for 6 weeks.

Slice the pickles lengthwise to serve. Use within 2 months.

Makes 1 gallon.

Fresh coriander seeds—before they've dried into what we normally think of as coriander. They're tender, and the flavor is dead between coriander and cilantro. They're good sprinkled on top of a bowl of dal. I'm not sure how they'll work in these pickles, but I'll bet they'll be fine.

Produce and Panzanella

2008-07-02T07:36:00.008-04:00

This was our first tomato from our plants, an oversized grape:

The bug picks them as soon as there's a hint of orange on them, and eats them one after another straight off the vine. Sometimes I can wrestle them out of her grip and put them on the counter out of reach to finish ripening.

All of our tomatoes this year will be on the sweet side—these grapes, the Golden Egg, and the Cherokee Purple. (Not sure about the Manalucie.) I'm actually not a fan of sweet tomatoes, much preferring ones that have an acidic bite, which to me tastes more like tomato than the fruity varieties popular among tomato fanciers. I've realized, though, that while the sweet tomato has no place in a traditional tomato sauce for pasta, or on a pizza, or in a salsa, and is just barely acceptable in a tomato sandwich as long as there's a thin slice of onion to balance it, there is one excellent use for them (besides eating out of hand, for which they're just fine), and that's panzanella, the beauty of which I was recently reminded of by a friend. Somehow the sweetness is less cloying here?

I was able to save from the bug enough tomatoes for a lunch of warm panzanella yesterday. I used a dark, seedy multigrain bread (storebought) instead of the usual Italian bread, and it was perfect.

Warm Panzanella

Serves 1 or 2

2 thick slices bread, cut into cubes
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large clove garlic, sliced
4 plum tomatoes or 5 large grape tomatoes (or whatever), chopped
4 sprigs fresh basil, torn
2 sprigs fresh flat-leaf parsley, stemmed
Large handful of fresh spinach, stemmed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 slices fresh mozzarella, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Put the bread cubes on a baking sheet and toast under the broiler, turning the cubes to toast both sides until well browned. Set aside.

In a sauté pan, cook the oil and garlic over medium heat until the garlic is soft but not browned, about 2 minutes. Raise the heat to high and add the bread cubes, tossing to coat with the oil. Cook, tossing frequently, until the garlic is golden brown, about 1 minute. Add the tomatoes, basil, parsley, and spinach and cook, tossing frequently, until the spinach is wilted and the tomatoes are just heated through, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and add the mozzarella. Cook, tossing constantly, until the mozzarella is just starting to melt, about 1 minute. Serve immediately.

The other night I had a supper of corn from the Comer farmers' market. It was only $2.50 a dozen, but the ears were very small and exceedingly wormy, and the corn was not very good. Still, with Plugra and salt I'd ground very fine in a mortar (for better sticking) it was a nice meal. The bug and I ate ten ears, just because it was corn. I'm hoping for better as soon as it's available from the farm on Sorrow Patterson Road. That is, I hope the corn I get there this year is as good as it was the first time I got it there last year—subsequent batches were underwhelming.

In other news, but still in the production category, the bug has been helping me with the chicken tractor. Here she is painting one of the door studs or whatever they're called:

I neglected to take any in-progress pictures, but you can see it in the upper right corner here. Damn thing is all lopsided and out of alignment (to put it mildly; I realized too late that I was building it on a slight incline), and in its almost-finished form it is extremely heavy, but I think it'll work okay. I still have to put wheels on (no way can it be moved without wheels) and do a little bit more futzing, then I'll finally be ready to think about actual chickens. (Honestly, I've been more excited about building the coop than having chickens to put in it. I mostly think of them as fertilizers so I can have a decent garden next year. For good corn.)

End Game (or Overtime)

2008-06-17T08:37:00.004-04:00

For the last three weeks, I've been embroiled in a recipe-testing and writing job that has taught me much about how people in this country cook and eat—and by people I mean selected NFL players and NBC on-air talent. I learned that with very few exceptions they don't do acidic foods or anything with top notes, and also that my can opener was not top-of-the-line enough for meals prepared entirely with products from the center aisles of the grocery store. I learned, too, that some of that food can be really delicious and satisfying—although I guess I always knew that. Shrimp Creole made with frozen cooked shrimp? Surprisingly good! Kahlúa cake made with boxed mix and instant pudding? I ate the whole damn thing! Sheet cake (from a mix) with peanut butter and chocolate chips? A new family favorite!

Because some of the players were less, um, detailed in their approach to recipe-writing, I got to create a few dishes basically from scratch, which was fun—especially the turkey necks dish, which I developed based on a conversation I had with a very old black woman as I was standing stupidly in front of the turkey section at the Kroger and wondering how in the hell I was going to cook them. I understood only about every fifth word, and this being Georgia I had to assume she was saying "boiled" and not "broiled," but I'm pretty sure that what I came up with was in the right spirit and that the fullback or tailback or whatever in question would be proud. (Turns out, though, that the Chalmerses don't really like turkey necks apart from the amazing gravy you get from them.)

Another fun thing about this project was that I got to write a bunch of short "regional food" sidebars. I didn't know about the Indiana specialty sugar cream pie before last week (Dad? Have you been holding out on me?), nor did I know that 49ers were also once called sourdoughs. And my brilliant husband helped me out of an excruciating mind block by writing a bit about the Black Panthers' Free Breakfast for Children Program (it works in the context of the Oakland sidebar, if maybe not in the context of a book largely funded by NBC; we'll see if it makes it in).

In the middle of all that middle-America stuff, I was asked to test a Top Chef season-four recipe (I was a tester for the Top Chef cookbook that came out a couple months ago). Not surprisingly, it featured rack of lamb and mushrooms (last October I made about sixteen racks of lamb, and the fridge was overflowing with every kind of mushroom imaginable), and required about $98 worth of ingredients. My plating was haphazard at best—I was tired, and I didn't know exactly what to do with the two different blackberry sauces—but it was a wonderful respite not only from the casseroles and cake mixes of recent days but from my usual easy one-dish, one-pot suppers. It was almost inspiring.

It's been great work, but I'm very happy to be (almost) done with it for the time being, if only so I can cook whatever I want to cook. (Stay tuned for sugar cream pie.) On Friday, we went out with a couple friends to the Five and Ten, and I took it as an opportunity to eat kind of the opposite of football-player food. We had lots of oysters. I'd been wanting to try Kumamoto oysters for about a decade, ever since reading somewhere about them being topped somewhere with a cucumber gelée, and the nice cucumber mignonette they came with here meant I could basically fill that gaping culinary void. With a dry rosé. Continuing with the top notes, I insisted we order the appetizer of marinated white anchovies with grapefruit and little peppery herb shoots, one of my favorite things to eat anywhere. I had a perfectly pan-roasted Scottish salmon—it was pale, almost white, with extra-crisp skin—with sautéed cucumbers, Red Mule grits, and a caper and lemon cream sauce. We had dessert, too, a not-too-sweet Earl Grey panna cotta with another lemon sauce and lemon cookies (which were good themselves but totally unnecessary). Oh, and continuing with the smoke notes, I splurged on a Lagavullin, neat.

Anyway, that's what's going on here. Mr. Chalmers brought flowers home yesterday for my birthday, and he played the guitar for us, and the bug has been an unbelievable pleasure to work and play with lately (she's good at stirring, among other things . . . like taking naps). She had a special visit from her grandma from New York last week. And she was excited to go with her dad to daycare this morning so she could play with "Abby, Abby, Abby!" I miss her already.

Water Bug

2008-05-27T14:23:00.004-04:00

I watered the asparagus for the first time since, well, since the bug learned how to walk and it became more of a chore to go out there while she got into trouble in falling-down outbuildings. By now, though, she's realized it's way more fun to stay close to Mummy and, more important, the hose.

In Case Elberton Attacks

2008-05-27T12:39:00.005-04:00

I've been using serranos from the garden, and the sorrel and herbs are producing quite well despite my ridiculously haphazard planting method (throwing seeds out on the ground and hoping something grows somewhere). The eggplant is starting to bloom, and the epazote that finally came up from seeds looks nice—I've already used a bunch in tacos:

The tomatoes Jane gave me are incredibly healthy. I don't know what variety this one is, but it looks good so far:

Even the grape tomatoes I started from seed myself are growing crazily. They're almost two feet higher than the top of the metal trellis frame thing:

With some stray cilantro that sprouted from last year's dropped seeds, and a bunch of African basil and sweet basil.

Emboldened by my timid foray into vegetable gardening in Georgia, I'm now considering putting in a real garden next spring, part of my plan to make us completely self-sufficient by 2012. (I don't have such a plan, of course. But gas prices, plus living half an hour from my beloved Publix, plus produce prices, plus blah blah blah . . . and I'm thinking we should get a chest freezer and some chickens and plant a garden and drill for oil.)

Have any of you readers tried "no-till" or "weedless" gardening? I was given a book about it years ago (to review for Amazon, back in the good old days of the Internet boom), and have been rereading it this weekend. It kind of makes a lot of sense, although I'll need to start working on our plot now if the soil is going to be good enough by next spring. Here's where I'm thinking about putting the garden, in front of the mulberry trees, but not close enough to the road that everything will be covered with dust all the time:

The right end is shady until about 11:30. Mom: thoughts? Will I have to fence it in?

This morning during a lull in my freelance work I made some old fencing into two compost bins—I think that will work better and be more efficient than my random spreading pile system that seems to attract egg-shell-eating neighbor dogs.

Oh, and I do think we should have a couple chickens—that is, if we can figure out how to keep them out of sight of Cooper and Wagner, who have a barking problem that chickens would only exacerbate. To that end I've actually purchased detailed plans for a chicken tractor that will accommodate two or three hens.

Mr. Chalmers thought it was funny that I planted fifty asparagus crowns, and once explained to some guests that it was for when Elberton attacks. Heh.

Movie Night Becomes Garden Party

2008-05-27T12:07:00.006-04:00

The Chalmerses had a party in our front yard the other night at which we'd intended to screen The Super Cops on an old 16 mm projector I'd been repairing piece by piece for the last year or so—finding and buying and replacing random parts, super-gluing broken pieces, replacing lamps, getting the sound to work with the Mr.'s amplifier, et cetera, ad nauseum. We hung up the screen (slipcover material) early in the evening . . .

And tested out the setup: all systems go: it looked and sounded fantastic. When it got dark, however, the projector suddenly would not work. At all. Not one frame of The Super Cops made it to the big screen that night, but that just meant we got to have a normal party, with conversation and drinking and food and music, and we were spared having to watch a probably not-so-great film in less-than-perfect (cinematically) conditions. I wasn't too disappointed, but I do want to know what the hell is wrong with that goddamned machine.

Moving on . . .

I hung battery-powered paper lanterns from the magnolia tree, and put citronella candles all around. We had smoked chicken wings that Mr. Chalmers made, potato salad with lovage, deviled eggs (our neighbor had just given us about four dozen eggs from her hens), a big apple crisp and banana bread, vodka sours and Pimm's cups, popcorn, and so on. I was especially happy with the mulberry drink the bug and I made. Just a cup of mulberry juice tinted it a beautiful deep pink, and the mulberry flavor was surprisingly pronounced—these mulberries are extremely sweet, but the acidic lemon and lime helped brighten things up:

Mulberry-lemon-limeade: Puree 2 cups mulberries in a food processor with a little water, then push the juice through a sieve and discard the seeds.

You should have about 1 cup juice. Pour it into a pitcher and stir in about 1 cup each of fresh lemon and lime juice, and water and simple syrup to taste. Chill.

The bug and I had lunch in the front yard the day of the party:

I didn't take any actual party-in-progress pictures, but I think this was taken the morning after, in the middle of the clean-up:

The bug stayed up with us until midnight, taking short little breaks in the teepee throughout the evening. She burned her fingers holding a sparkler—just as our friend was saying that he'd had to show his ID to buy them. She didn't seem too bothered by it, though, and would probably say the sheer thrill of being allowed to hold her own sparkler was worth it.

Calm before the Storm

2008-05-18T19:01:00.009-04:00

I've been trying to pack everything fun I want to do into the few days before my next big freelance job starts. My mom stayed on several days after we got home from our vacation, and helped out a lot. Us girls went to Pinebush Nursery in Ila—by far the best place to get perennials and trees around here (they also have some herbs and vegetables, but their focus is great prices on the larger stuff)—and my mom helped me pick out some bushes and trees to plant as a screen in the shade between our house and the neighbors'. I got three large (seven-gallon, I think) Cryptomeria japonica "Yoshino" and two beautiful anise bushes, and a tall camellia (for $7.50 because it was a little spindly). My mom convinced me we could fit them all in my car, a big old gas-guzzling Oldsmobile. We came home and dug holes the rest of the day; Mr. Chalmers smoked meat for lunch and spelled me on the shovel.

My mom also told me about how to make my dogwood seedlings grow the way I want them to, with the branches spreading out a little instead of straight up. Apparently all you do is tie the branches down with string, and tighten them every couple weeks until they're growing that way on their own. I'm now thinking about doing something similar with the cut-down pecan tree that's sprouting crazily in the front yard. The bug likes to stand or sit on the stump and hide inside the branches, and I think I could accentuate the bowl effect and prune the leaders off at the top to keep it small and round, then make it into a little chair with woven honeysuckle or something.

My mom also pointed out that the two trees in the side yard are not basswood as I'd thought, but mulberries! There was no fruit on them the last two years as far as I remember, but right now they're loaded. We took the ladder out and picked some. The bug calls them "sweets," which is what she's saying in this picture:

I started a moss garden under the magnolia tree. It mostly gets covered up with leaves.

We collect bits of sparkly mica from the gravel under the tree and put it in the holes in a log (which I'd made as a birdfeeder last year).

Am I the only person who comes home from a trip and sets about making a souvenir? In New Mexico and Arizona you can't turn around without getting tangled in a tacky, mass-produced dreamcatcher, but instead of spending a fortune on one for the bug I bought some pretty beads in Bisbee (the bead and paper store was open late for some reason) so I could make a more personalized one for her myself.

Most evenings lately before bed she and I go on a little walk around the yard, always stopping to taste the nectar in the honeysuckle blossoms and pick some seed pods from the weeds at the edge of the woods. Yesterday we went out and clipped some of the older vines, then boiled them for about fifteen minutes so the bark could be rubbed off easily. Twisted them into a circle (or "O"), then followed these easy directions for the web in the center, using heavy-duty button thread in place of the traditional sinew. I added the beads (some of which are made from date pits, dates being one of the bug's favorite sweets), a feather my mom had sent to the bug a while back (I think she said it was from a loon), and some twisty dried seed pods. I think it looks nice next to the Japanese-style paper lantern hanging from the blue bandana-print canopy over her bed. It certainly won't do anything to alleviate the night terrors our little boo has been having, but making it with her out in the teepee was a wonderful way to spend a windy Sunday afternoon (even though much of that time was spent searching for the beads she had spread around the yard).

This morning, early, the bug and I went out and picked some greens from the yard: two kinds of sorrel, three kinds of basil, and a bunch of tarragon.

Quick frittata with greens: Preheat the broiler to high. Roughly chop a few handfuls of greens and herbs. Whisk 4 or 5 eggs together with a bit of water. Melt a bit of butter in a skillet over medium-high heat and pour in the eggs. Spread the greens and herbs over the eggs, sprinkle with salt and pepper and some crumbled feta. When the eggs are set around the edges, put the skillet under the broiler to set the top. Cut into wedges and serve.

With an English muffin and fig jam my mom made, the frittata is a fine start to a breakfast for a growing little girl. She ate about twice this much, plus some dried lychees, some popcorn, some Monterey Jack cheese, and two chocolate chips—we have to spell out "chocolate" in this house now.

Next project is a slipcover for the orange couch. Yes, I still like the orange, but something about the texture of the upholstery makes it extremely difficult to get dog hair out of, and I thought that a slipcover could at least be taken off and washed. I got the cheapest fabric I could find, a 100 percent cotton bull denim (11 ounces per square yard, which is heavy), and it's white at the moment—Mr. Chalmers thinks I'm crazy to try to solve a black-dog-hair problem with white fabric, and he may well be right. I ordered the fabric online (from Fabric Masters—it was $1.75 a yard, plus about $17 to ship FedEx overnight: an incredible bargain), and here's what 22 yards of it looks like:

With a flip flop for scale.

I expected it to be more "natural" than white, and the project for today is to see if I can make it more off-white by dying it with tea. I hope it really is 100 percent cotton. In any case, though, I think the white will be fine as long as it's washable. Grandma went back to Washington State yesterday, unfortunately, before she got a chance to make the slipcover for me. So it's me and the bug and the sewing machine—and 22 yards of heavy denim . . .

Boulder to Tucson

2008-05-16T19:17:00.020-04:00

Mr. Chalmers and I went on an honest-to-god vacation while my mom stayed here in Georgia with the bug for almost a whole week! We went to Boulder to attend a party celebrating the impending wedding of two good friends of ours, then drove south to Tucson and flew back from there. Here are some pictorial highlights, with notes and soundtrack suggestions.

The Saturday farmer's market in Boulder was shockingly good. I guess in the mountain states, where it's freezing even in May, farmer's markets might tend to be heavy on the meat—I kept having to stop Mr. Chalmers from buying large cuts of beef (we were staying in a motel). I had a wonderful breakfast of a crusty, yeasty, sticky pecan roll and a mole tamale, the latter pictured below.

Boulder is swank, y'all. We had pretty good sushi for dinner at what might have been a chain restaurant (Mr. Chalmers was told by someone at the party that new chains are tested out in Colorado because the population is representative of the U.S. as a whole). The night before, we had a surprisingly good dinner at (our hosts' choice) a Tibetan restaurant—luckily it also featured Indian dishes, which in fact made up the bulk of the menu.

Before the party, we were taken to a bar on the outskirts of the city called the Rocky Flats Lounge, where certain of us put David Allan Coe, Tom Petty (deep album track), and the Shins on the jukebox and all of us were regaled with tales from the Internet trenches by famous music critic Frank Kogan (whose book is as fun as it sounds, by the way).

It was a relief to see that not all of Boulder is brand-sparkling-new and Green.

We had two breakfasts the morning after the party. One of them was in Louisville (pronounced Lewis), at the Huckleberry. It's not the kind of place I'd expect to like, and it was crowded with Mother's Day people even very early in the morning, but we took seats at the bar and had a really good meal with our New York Times. I had a crabcake eggs Benedict with perfect fried potatoes.

With a certified Kogan mix CD in the car stereo—new favorite song: "Ta, Da, Tako Je" (which can be heard here) by Grupa Zeris—we made our way to Albuquerque on Sunday, via Taos (late Mother's Day lunch at a touristy terrace on the square) and Espanola, where we were thrilled to see two actual low riders (one of them in time and close enough for me to snap a picture). We'd been to Espanola a few years ago and seen none.

Somewhere on this drive we heard an announcement on WNMX AM 540 that said something to the effect that they are making some changes at the station to better serve their listeners. One of these changes is that they are no longer playing requests. Hee. A couple songs later, we heard the most bizarre cumbio ever, and I so wish I knew what it was; basically this guy is just singing as if he's in terrible, terrible pain. It's something WNMX thinks we should hear.

First meal in Albuquerque, as it probably always will be, was at an old favorite of Mr. Chalmers (and as of three years ago myself), the Frontier. I had a green chile cheeseburger, Mr. Chalmers having beat me to the chicken enchilada with green. It was exactly right. Sadly I was too full to even contemplate—no, that's not true, I agonized over the decision—a hot buttered sweet roll.

Second meal in Albuquerque was at Mary & Tito's: carne adovado, fried eggs with red chile and hash browns (back); cheese enchiladas with green chile and refried beans (front). I think we both preferred the adovado we'd had last time we were in ABQ at Barela's Coffee Shop, and I didn't care so much for the green chile enchiladas—the cheese was not quite melted, and the chile was a bit watery and mild. Still, you can hardly go wrong with enchiladas for breakfast.

Between Albuquerque and the turnoff for Hatch—new favorite song: "Cappuccino" by the Knux (which can be experienced here); Mr. Chalmers's new favorite: "I'm in Love with You" by Cassie (uh, here)—the landscape looked mostly like this, parched and brown and very, very bright, for miles upon miles:

I looked at the map and saw that this stretch along the Rio Grande is called the Jornada del Muerte. True, that.

Fun road signs, part 1: between Rodeo and Douglas on route 80: "Watch for animals, next 112 miles." Thanks.

Bisbee! Why don't more people like us go to Bisbee, Arizona? Has Jonathan Franzen written about it yet? It's apparently a birding mecca (we saw—and heard—some of the craziest birds there), but it's also a beautiful old mining town carved out of the Mule Mountains. We stayed at a truly perfect little motel, the Copper City Inn. Wine was waiting for us when we arrived (one of the best things about this place is that you're given a code for the main door lock and the door to one of the three rooms in the motel in advance, so you never have to check in or out, or be greeted in any way). We had our wine out on the balcony while we listened to the birds and the sun set. (This picture, I should note, was taken the next morning—hence the coffee mugs where you might be expecting wineglasses.)

Having freshened up after our day's jornada, we strolled around town, stopping for a drink at perhaps the most photogenic bar in the Southwest, the Bisbee Grand Saloon. View to my right:

And to my left:

It was a slow night in Bisbee, the kind of disturbingly desperate bartender told us. We had dinner at the only place within walking distance that was open, the old Copper Queen hotel, out on the pretty, heated terrace at dusk. (Come to think of it, there are a few reasons people like us don't go to Bisbee more often; maybe it was the off season, or just too late in the day for much commerce to be going on.)

Next morning, coffee then breakfast, then a quick stop for gawking at the mine. A sucker for open-pit mines since my early childhood in Butte, I took about three dozen pictures of the Lavender pit mine (copper) just east of town; here's one:

If you look at a road atlas, you'll notice that the route from Bisbee to Nogales, right along the border, is signified by either a dotted line or a thin-black-outlined white line. I floated the possibility to Mr. Chalmers that this could be a dirt road, and he was dubious that a dirt road would make it into Rand McNally. Of course it was dirt, all forty or fifty miles of it, and not only dirt but almost continuous mountain switchbacks. With a couple exceptions, the only vehicles we saw on that four-plus-hour stretch of road were Border Patrol SUVs.

Fun road signs, part 2: About two hours into the unimproved winding mountain road: "Unimproved winding mountain road, next 14 miles." Soon afterward, around Lochiel, the road became paved, and we cheered; then about fifty feet later: "Pavement ends." About three hours in, Mr. Chalmers spotted a scary and official-looking sign up ahead and said, "Now what kind of shitty sign is this gonna be?" and it said something like "Cars must not leave the road," but in Spanish with no translation.

Nogales! By the time we reached Nogales we'd had our fill of Border Patrol, so we decided to stay on the AZ side for lunch. Jardines de Mexico was chosen at random, but it was absolutely lovely. I had a sweet, refreshing horchata and a chicken mole torta that I was head over heels for; Mr. Chalmers had a carne asada torta that he said was okay but too heavy on the mayonnaise.

Meanwhile, Grandma was having her way with the bug's wardrobe, and sending us pictures on the email. Here's the bug at lunch at Big City Bread back in Athens. Have you ever seen so much gingham?

We missed her all the time, except on the airplane and at certain other points during our trip—for example, at the Rocky Flats Lounge, and when we pulled off to take in the view on the road between Palominas and Lochiel, Arizona, where there were sheer dropoffs with very little in the way of barriers and much in the way of warnings about dangerous UDAs in the area.

We'd saved all our fancy meals for shiny Tucson, and instead of taking pictures of our gorgeously plated food I concentrated on preserving the memory of random parking lots and grocery stores. Here's the road down from the foothills, where we had dinner at sunset on the (heated) patio at J Bar, in the Westin La Paloma spa and resort:

I'd scoured Chowhound for weeks and uneasily come to accept that fancy restaurants in Arizona are often associated with spas and resorts, and this place was independently recommended by a Tucsonian colleague of Mr. Chalmers, so we went ahead. We had an appetizer of a cold roasted poblano stuffed with hamachi seviche (with croutons, which were unexpected in a ceviche but delightful) and sitting in a pool of chilled cucumber-mint broth. It was good, and tangy with lime. I had a seared salmon with corn quinoa, "Peruvian" potatoes in some sort of creamy sauce, roasted beets, and fried yucca chips spiced with canela. It was a good, if complicated, plate of stuff. Mr. Chalmers had the carne asada. I think it was less good. Boy, I should be a reviewer. Oh, and the margarita (rocks, with salt) was top notch.

We stopped at a couple grocery stores after dinner. I like walking slowly through supermarkets in new cities and seeing ways they're different from the ones I'm used to. For example, probably not surprisingly, the big Tucson Safeway in the rich part of town featured an enormous section devoted to kosher foods. Here's but a small part of it:

Mr. Chalmers got us a slice of carrot cake to eat in the car for dessert, and it was sweet and thus awesome. We stopped at a Trader Joe's that night—my first Trader Joe's, if you can believe that. Nothing too special, but it seemed well priced, a place to pick up staples like dried pasta, dried fruit, coffee, yogurt, maybe cheese. I got some funny pasta and some dried lychees for the bug, some dark chocolate for me (not knowing that there was a big box of fun spicy Cowgirl Chocolates, a gift from my uncle and his wife, waiting for us at home).

Up early one morning (we were still on toddler-parent EST, even though the funky and ambitious Hotel Congress, where we stayed, was on hipster-cat's-eye-glasses-wearing roots-rock-listening twenty-something time), we took a short and somewhat confused hike in the Saguaro National Park:

. . . then hit the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. We wished more than ever that the bug was with us, and vowed to return with her in three years.

We both had chilaquiles for the first time, at Teresa's Mosaic Café in Tucson. They're on the left in this picture:

Mr. Chalmers said it was the best thing he ate on our trip. Fried corn tortillas layered with a rich, long-cooked tomato sauce and melted cheese, it sounds so simple, but I'm sure it's one of those foods that's easier to screw up than to get just right. The tortillas were somehow crisp and tender and soft at the same time. I was equally impressed by the black beans, which made good use of epazote (possibly fresh), and were the ideal consistency: creamy beans that nonetheless hold their shape, with a not-too-thick, not-too-thin liquid around them.

After a walk through the Barrio Historico, we couldn't not stop at a warehouse-sized building advertising "vegetable donuts." From the display cases shoved into one corner of the vast and otherwise empty space, I picked out a plain cinnamon-sugar cake donut and a mango empanada, both excellent. The empanada crust was sweet and extremely tender and crumbly, the filling just tart enough to offset it. The donut was crisp on the outside and light on the inside.

Our second fancy meal was our last dinner in Tucson. We walked to Cafe Poca Cosa from the hotel, and ate on the (unlovely) patio, which completely filled up soon after we arrived (make reservations, is the lesson). The menu apparently changes twice a day, and was presented on a chalkboard accompanied by a waitress explaining all sorts of rules about what you get and how you get it. We each ordered the chef's plate: three small portions of main dishes of the chef's choosing (with the promise that each of our selections would be different), with a pile of salad on top and a bowl of pink beans and one of rice with corn on the side. It was all pretty good. The small portions were large. I was celebrating having snagged a big recipe-testing job via email and cell phone that evening, and had two glasses of red sangria that I liked a lot. The chef herself stopped by all the tables to ask sweetly how things were going—and incidentally the chef at J Bar was also omnipresent on the patio: Is this a western thing?

I'm leaving out quite a bit, I'm sure, but right now I'm all blogged the heck out. We were happy to come home to our little sweetheart, who we're told was a perfect angel the entire time. I reintroduced the old T-shirts into her lineup.

Pigtails.

Early May

2008-05-05T12:58:00.002-04:00

Completely unfocused and uninformative post follows—with pictures!

Over the weekend, we went to Nature's Harmony Farm, near Elberton, Georgia, for a lengthy guided tour of their operations, which are apparently modeled on the Polyface Farms in Virginia. Mostly we just walked around pointing, tuning in to and out of the more detailed explanations of crop rotation, natural fertilization, and breeding. I suppose this kind of thing should be much more fascinating to me than it is, and I have to admit that I might have rolled my eyes when I heard the phrase "coated in diesel fuel." (To be fair, it was used in reference to the farmers' certainly wise decision to forego strictly organic baby turkey feed in favor of a locally produced feed.)

The bug immediately took to the chickens, and had to be coaxed out of the henhouse after about twenty minutes. I'm again considering building a chicken tractor and getting some for ourselves.

We did a lot of laundry in preparation for a visit from Grandma. I had to string up a line in the backyard to accommodate some of the larger items.

The herb garden over the weekend was invaded by vegetable plants, god help me. An heirloom-tomato-growing friend, a colleague of Mr. Chalmers, sent five plants home with him for me, along with various baggies of stuff like bone meal, blood meal, green sand, and more for fertlizing. I just hope I don't kill them off right away.

Here's part of the herb garden in the front yard, though I guess you can't see much right now. At the bottom (under crossed sticks, to keep trampling dogs and the bug away) is sorrel. In the middle are a couple of pepper plants (serrano and Anaheim) and a Japanese eggplant—why not? A bunch of random herbs, and the tomatoes are in the back. The bug has helped with this project every step of the way, although there are few things she enjoys more than digging up the seedlings we've just put in the ground.

Yesterday I dug some seedlings of English dogwood (or mock orange) from the brush at the side of the yard and put them in the front yard. And I took, from the woods in back, some shrubs I don't know the name of—I've seen them everywhere, and I love how they look, especially when the leaves turn bright red in fall. Will take a picture soon so I can ask you all for an ID. They really are in just about every yard around here, but I don't know how to look up the name.

This morning I fixed up the teepee and made it more sturdy by actually sewing the cloth to the poles, and cutting off the extra cloth at the bottom. The bug went right in and took a two-hour nap; I brought my computer out to the porch and got some work done.

She's inside, napping on her sleeping bag. Her birthday-present slide, still much used, thank you very much, has as far as I know not negatively affected home prices in the area. I think the decline of the American lawn is much exaggerated, and that Tom Vanderbilt is a snob. (The mystery plant is in the top right corner, but I'll take a clearer picture.)

The Eyes Have It

2008-04-26T13:02:00.006-04:00

This is the last zakka owl I'll bore y'all with, made as a gift for a little girlfriend of the bug's. I just really liked these old shell buttons, which were clearly made for no other reason than to be made into owl eyes. And that's another of the same series of prints, also purchased for Xmas stockings.

Número Dos

2008-04-26T07:59:00.007-04:00

This is the second Barcelona skirt I made, again the layered version.

I made some modifications: I didn't line it (the dark print was opaque enough, and I wanted a cooler summer skirt), and instead added a narrow waistband in a silk I got for some other purpose a long time ago (blouse?) interfaced with medium-weight woven interfacing on the outside half.

I wore it around a bit and then made another modification. One thing I absolutely hate is when the inside of the zipper jams into the small of my back; the zipper on this skirt was particularly offensive in that regard, so I cut a strip of fabric along the selvedge, folded it once, and stitched it down to the seam allowance and zipper tape on one side of the back seam so that it overlaps the opposite seam allowance by about 1/8 inch. I also stitched up the opposite side at the bottom about an inch, then sewed the unfolded edges of the strip down to the actual skirt back using a blind hem stitch, just to help it lay as flat as possible. Not pretty on the inside, but it does the job and is undetectable on the outside. (I tried taking some pictures of the closed zipper from the outside, but lost patience with the whole camera-behind-the-back thing.)

The main fabric is Cho-Cho no Sanpomichi by Kumiko Sudo for In the Beginning—my new favorite fabric series (not that I've ever had a favorite series before). Incidentally, the print I used for the owl in this post is also from that group of fabrics, not Moda as I miswrote the other day.

Spring Skirt

2008-04-24T08:34:00.003-04:00

I made a skirt yesterday, the Amy Butler Barcelona skirt, layered version. The main fabric is a very fine gray-brown seersucker I got many years ago when I thought it would be fun to single-handedly revive seersucker in womenswear (then I couldn't think of anything cool to do with it). The skirt is lined with bleached muslin, which works surprisingly well as a lining, although a thinner voile or lawn might be better.

New shoes! It's been a while since I've worn such impractical footwear.

Don't know if you can see the stripes or texture in this picture—it was the best I could do this morning. I think it'll look better after a few more turns in the washing machine to unravel the edges a bit more.

The pattern is good—thanks to Heidi for recommending it. That doesn't mean I didn't, as usual, rip more stitches than I sewed on this project. I learned that invisible zippers are less invisible when they're inserted into striped fabric, even barely perceptible stripes like these. Had to redo it a couple times to get it looking okay. Also, I don't know why the directions tell you to fold over the top of the zipper tape—it was very bulky and weird that way, and it made it hard to cover up the raw corner of the tape. And I was kind of between sizes, so more ripping. Blah blah, who cares. In any case, I do plan to make another one soon, and have even ordered some fabric online, from Fabric.com, to that end.

"Owl. Hoo-Hoo. Owl. Hoo-Hoo . . ."

2008-04-12T06:38:00.003-04:00

The above is what the bug calls those nocturnal birds. Rarely just "owl." A couple weeks ago, a friend's mom happened to find a string of pretty, sturdy old buttons in our crawlspace, tucked into the insulation. I cleaned them up and made owls.

The print and the woven striped fabrics are both Moda quilting cottons I had leftover from our Christmas stockings, which I made back in December (the woman at the fabric store was scandalized when I told her what I was planning to use them for). For the owls, I followed these instructions at Moonstitches as closely as I could, sort of eyeballing the shapes. They each took about half an hour, and considering that they'll bring good luck to all of us I think it was time well spent.

For Seriously Bored Editors:

2008-04-08T14:59:00.006-04:00

Fun style sheet excerpts! Here are some from a few of the books I'm working on at the moment:

hoe (for whore)
homie
hot dog (n.)
Kmart
LL Cool J
mic
MTV Video Music Awards; VMAs
Munchausen syndrome by proxy
Naughty by Nature
okay
Royce da 5'9"
Saint Andrews Hall
shit hole
shit storm
slept-on (adj.)
smart-ass

___

final load
finger palm (v., n.); finger-palm (adj. preceding n.)
finger-flinger
Great Tomsoni, the
half dollar
hankie (for handkerchief)
Hindu shuffle [control]
hokey
inertia move
jog shuffle [control]
Keith-Orpheum
key card
King of Koins, the
letter C
Lulu Hurst-ian
magician-speak
Marlo’s switch control
pseudo-Hindu shuffle [control]

___

his-and-hers
modernist
Native American
North Wales
overdoor
plein-air (adj. preceding n.)
Provençal
quinta
Realtor
Romanesque
Saltillo
Santa Ynez Mountains
slipcover
southern California; northern California
Spanish Revival
swath
terra cotta (n.); terra-cotta (adj.)
tipi
veranda
website
wood (not wooden)

Obviously these are arranged according to how much I'm enjoying each project.

Green Gold

2008-04-08T14:22:00.004-04:00

The bug and I picked a few—and by that I mean four—spears of asparagus from our yard the other day. (This is only the plants' second season after I planted the crowns, so I'm letting most of the spears grow into fronds or whatever to strengthen the roots. I'm not sure they'll ever yield a whole lot, though.) We took them straight inside, cut them into pieces, steamed them for about 60 seconds, and tossed them with a little butter and salt, and we shared them. It was the best asparagus I've ever eaten, and I'd say that even if I hadn't spent scores of hours digging, planting, weeding, and fertilizing them for the last thirteen or fourteen months. As I told Mr. Chalmers, when he came home from an errand and found me nearly in tears, this asparagus was like a different vegetable altogether from the asparagus we've been buying. I couldn't even say that freshness was the main factor: they just tasted so much more like asparagus! I guess I hadn't remembered the asparagus my parents grew in Virginia as accurately as I'd thought, maybe because when I was living at home we'd go through several weeks each spring eating the stuff three meals a day, and I took it for granted. I want the little bug to take it for granted too, but it'll take a lot more asparagus before that happens. She asked for more, and I told her next year.

These are the asparagus trenches; I weeded them recently, I swear!

Near the asparagus is another little project, a shed I want to kind of fix up so it's usable in some way (recording studio or goat shed, depending on how far we get). The main thing we have to do is pour a concrete floor. And run electricity out to it. And do something about the empty window . . . It's a long-term idea.

Here are some before pictures, which I must say truly do not capture the griminess of the inside when I started on it:

I do like how it looks in this picture; maybe when it's all finished we can let the brush grow back up around it. Nature's soundproofing.

And here are some during pictures:

Rag Doll

2008-03-25T13:01:00.006-04:00

Last Friday was the bug's second birthday; the day before, when I realized I didn't have a real present for her, I pulled a bunch of bags of stuff out of the closet in the sewing room—I'm sorry, home office—and started to make her a doll. Her surprisingly elaborate pretend play for the last few months has involved various stuffed animals, an old hard plastic doll, Phyllis, who used to be mine, and a little baby doll, Giacamo, who's now, for some reason, in the trunk of the car getting tossed around in the dry cement mix that spilled back there. I thought she'd like to play with someone her own age. I worked on the doll that afternoon and part of the morning of the bug's birthday, and even though I've never made a doll or anything like one before I think Stacey (Dad's the namer) turned out okay.

I tried, many times, to embroider a face, but they all ended up looking like those Andean animals with big blank, vacant expressions—that is, just like the weird jackrabbit in profile I made on a wall hanging thing two years ago. So I picked three buttons almost at random, and used them for the eyes and mouth (the mouth button has a little band of Chinese-looking engraving across the center, making it mouthlike).

I've been assured that all rag dolls look a little freaky, and the bug doesn't appear to be at all scared of hers (except when she tried to pull the lace medallion off Stacey's sweater and it was sewed on and wouldn't come off and the bug seemed to think Stacey was being mean by not letting her have it and she refused to even look at her for a full hour; after that disturbing episode I sewed a big snap to the lace and the sweater, and now all is well between the bug and her doll).

I had no idea how to make hair. Here I used a full skein of Paton Glace "Taupe," I think, and it was a real pain. Next time I'll make the hair more stylized and make less of an attempt at verisimilitude.

I cheated, I suppose, by making the doll big enough to wear the bug's old clothes. Someday I'll get around to sewing up the dress I cut out over a year ago, and it'll fit the doll. The bug does like stuffing Stacey's huge but well-formed feet into her old shoes, and putting hats and scarves on her head. Sometimes my reading glasses end up on her too.

I don't think I should worry about the bug's priorities: here she's putting the (unfinished) doll in steerage; the dog gets pride of place.

On February 27, the bug climbed out of her crib on her own, setting in motion the events that led to her first nap in her new bed, pictured below. (Note that this historic nap happened a number of days after I set up her new bed and disassembled the crib.)

Some days she doesn't nap at all, but if she's in a good mood it's not a big deal. She still falls out of bed once or twice or three times a night, but (at least when she's not sick) it's been pretty easy to just go in and help her back up to her pillow and sit or lie down nearby for a few minutes while she goes back to sleep. And she's been pretty good about settling down and falling asleep at bedtime these days—usually after a little bit of cute stalling: a cup of "dulk," more water . . . which of course I'm happy to bring her, and not just because she always says thank you.

Valentine's Day and After

2008-02-25T07:07:00.014-05:00

Valentine's Day: I made a pretty, pink-sauced dish for the two and a half of us, a much-simplified and -cheapened version of a recipe I tested last fall. I used the inexpensive fish Publix is cleverly calling "basa," which is just a Vietnamese variety of catfish; as much as I'd like to support Southern catfish farmers, this stuff just looked better in the store than the supposedly local catfish (and indeed it was significantly better tasting and had a more pleasant texture than much of the catfish I've bought around here), and I've read that despite claims of the catfish industry to the contrary it's raised in very good conditions (clean, fast-running water, etc.). Fancier firm-fleshed fish like halibut or bass would be slightly better here.

Catfish with Riesling and Grapes

Serves 2 (and a half)

About 3 ounces bacon, diced
2 leeks, bottom 2 inches only, roots trimmed off
Vegetable oil
1/2 cup late-harvest (sweet) Riesling
1/2 cup white wine such as Chardonnay
2 cups red grapes
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 Russet potato
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup warmed milk
1 tablespoon grapeseed oil
Handful of baby arugula
2 (and a half) 6-ounce pieces catfish or other fish fillet

In a heavy skillet, fry the bacon until crisp. Remove to paper towels to drain.

Cut the leeks in half lengthwise and cut into thin julienne strips. Wash well under cold water, then drain and pat dry with paper towels. Roughly chop 1/2 cup of the leeks and set aside. Heat about 1 inch oil in a heavy-bottomed 1 1/2-quart saucepan until it's shimmering but not smoking. Add a small handful of the remaining julienned leeks and fry until well browned, 45 seconds to 1 minute. Remove to paper towels to drain. Repeat with the remaining julienned leeks.

Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the oil (strain and reserve it for another use, if you like) and add the reserved chopped leeks. Sauté over medium-high heat until browned, about 3 minutes. Add the wines and 1 1/2 cups of the grapes and raise the heat to high. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 8 to 10 minutes, until the grapes are very soft and have burst open.

Transfer the mixture to a blender and puree. Pour through a fine-mesh sieve set over the saucepan and discard the solids in the sieve. Simmer the sauce over medium-low heat for 15 to 20 minutes, until reduced to 2/3 cup, skimming the foam from the surface occasionally. Set aside.

Peel, chop, and boil the potato until very tender. Pass through a potato ricer twice, then put in a medium bowl and beat in 1 tablespoon of the butter and the milk; whip until very smooth. Cover to keep warm.

Cut the remaining 1/2 cup grapes in half. Toss the grapes with the arugula, fried leeks, bacon, and a drizzle of the sauce and season the salad with salt and pepper to taste.

Rewarm the sauce and whisk in the remaining 1 tablespoon butter until smooth. Spoon some of the sauce onto each of 2 (and a half) plates and dollop some of the whipped potatoes on the side.

In a heavy skillet, heat the grapeseed oil over high heat until shimmering but not smoking. Season the fish with salt and pepper and carefully place it in the pan (skin side down, if it has skin). Cook, without turning, until well browned and crisp on the bottom, about 4 minutes, then use a thin metal spatula to turn the fish over gently. Cook until just opaque in the center. Place the fish over the sauce on the plates and top with the salad. Serve immediately.

For dessert I had a couple squares of a very good Dagoba dark milk chocolate.

And after: Well, I've decided to make some changes in the way I eat. I want to try to avoid high-refined-carbohydrate foods like white flour and sugars (except on special occasions, of course, like when there are good peaches available and we haven't had pie for a while), and I want to eat more nonstarchy vegetables and whole grains. As you might have noticed from the last few posts, I've been making more than my share of bread and cakey things lately, so it's time to shift gears. Also, it's how Mr. Chalmers prefers to eat anyway, and I think my new approach has had the added benefit of making meals and cooking in general more fun for both of us. I'm not going overboard with this, obviously, and I'm not following any specific "plan" (although I admit I actually purchased the embarassingly named South Beach Diet good carbs, good fats guide as a reference); I still drink coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, and wine with supper, and I don't feel terrible if we go out for breakfast on Sunday morning and I have, for example, fresh orange juice and multigrain pancakes (yay!).

Mr. Chalmers roasted a leg of lamb in the smoker! He rubbed it with an interesting spice blend that included lots of cinnamon and nutmeg, and he stuck cloves of garlic into cuts in the meat. Not exactly low-fat, but it fit in with what I'm trying to do right now, and was absolutely delicious in small portions, with dollops of hummus and a simple cucumber-yogurt sauce on the side.

The bug is playing with the heart-shaped pancake/egg mold her grandma and grandpa sent to her for Valentine's Day. And she has a dangerously large piece of apple in her mouth . . .

And speaking of her, here she is in the cute-as-a-button smocked dress my mom made for her. She wears it with jeans and sneakers. It buttons all the way down the back.

I've been trying to make most of our suppers as special and as varied as possible so I don't miss the carbs so much these first couple weeks. Following the advice of someone posting on Chowhound, I tried cooking egg-dipped and parmesan-sprinkled eggplant in the waffle maker, for example, which was not disastrous but not worth doing again; for supper I ended up cooking the eggplant in a cast-iron skillet and topping it with a long-simmered marinara—it was good! I've also made two varieties of almost-no-carb "crackers" that Mr. Chalmers seems to like a lot. Will post recipes for those at some point. I tried making flax seed meal "pancakes" the other morning and was pretty depressed for the next several hours, so I don't think I'll be doing any more such fake foods—these suckers looked just like pancakes and smelled just like pancakes, but last time I checked pancakes weren't supposed to be slimy.

Saturday I was under the weather and needed something comforting and soothing, so for late lunch/early dinner I made a variation of Linda Dannenberg's salmon with dill gribiche from her wonderful Fresh Herb Cooking. (Her name is misspelled on Amazon.) I'd highly recommend this book, by the way. I don't even own it, but I keep calling my mom to ask her to dictate recipes I remember from when I tested them years ago; some all-time classics I've made many times: eggplant tian, the salmon dish, and there's an amazing thyme-scented chocolate cake I've been wanting to make again . . .

The salmon I made the other day had no potatoes and no spinach. I added asparagus with all the other vegetables, and I used Vidalia spring onions instead of leeks (which were a shocking $3.99 for a bunch of three at the Kroger!). I used only about 2 tablespoons butter in the broth (most of which is left behind in the skillet). For the gribiche, I omitted the parsley and cut the quantity of oil by more than half (this makes a less-thick sauce, but it doesn't need to be that thick here), and I used only half of a hard-boiled egg. The sauce recipe makes much more than you need, but it's great on sandwiches (if you're eating sandwiches) and just spooned over plain steamed or pan-seared fish. It keeps for about a week in the fridge. I'm giving the original recipe here, because it's so good, but know that it takes to adaptations very well.

Salmon with Dill Gribiche Sauce

From chef Charlene Rollins, in Talent, Oregon.
Serves 4

8 small purple potatoes, cut in half lengthwise
1 sweet red pepper, roasted and peeled, seeds removed
2 medium leeks, white and light green parts only
1 red onion
8 shiitake mushrooms, stems removed
2 tablespoons chopped dill
5 tablespoons butter
Salt
Four 6-ounce salmon fillets
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 bunches spinach, stems removed, washed
½ cup Dill Gribiche Sauce
Dill sprigs

Cook the potatoes in boiling water until just tender, 8 to 10 minutes. Drain and set aside. Cut the roasted pepper into 1-inch squares. Cut the leeks crosswise into 1/4-inch rounds and wash thoroughly. Dice the onion. Wipe the mushrooms with a paper towel to remove any dirt, and cut the caps into quarters.

In a large sauté pan or saucepan, put the potatoes, roasted pepper, leeks onion, mushrooms, chopped dill, butter, and 1 teaspoon salt. Pour in enough water to just cover the vegetables and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to maintain a simmer; cook for 5 to 8 minutes, until the leeks and onion are soft.

Meanwhile, lightly season the salmon with salt and pepper on both sides. When the vegetables are almost done, heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat, and place the salmon in the skillet. Cook for 2 minutes, turn, and cook for 1 or 2 minutes longer, or to desired degree of doneness.
Add the spinach to the pan with the broth, and gently stir it in; cook for about 2 minutes, until the spinach is wilted and bright green.

Using a slotted spoon, transfer the vegetables from the broth to 4 individual serving plates; return the broth to the heat. Place the salmon over the vegetables. Pout a little of the broth over each portion. Spoon a line of gribiche sauce across the salmon and onto some of the vegetables. Season with salt and pepper, garnish with the dill sprigs, and serve immediately.

Dill Gribiche Sauce

Makes 2 cups

1 unshelled egg
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon pickle juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 packed cup parsley leaves
1 cup dill, with stems, coarsely chopped
1/3 cup capers
2 cups canola oil
4 shallots
3 medium-sized crunchy dill pickles
2 hard-boiled eggs, cooled and peeled

Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Gently place the egg in the boiling water, cover, and remove from the heat. Let stand for 6 minutes, then remove the egg and crack it into the bowl of a food processor. Add the vinegar, pickle juice, and salt; process until smooth. Add the parsley and dill and proces. Add the capers; then, with the processor running, gradually add the oil in a thin stream, until the mixture is thick but still pourable. If it’s too thick, stir in a dash of pickle juice. Transfer the sauce to a sealable plastic container.
Finely mince the shallots, and dice the pickles and hard-boiled eggs; stir them into the sauce and season to taste with pickle juice or vinegar. The gribiche will keep for a week or two in the refrigerator.

One of my favorite simple meals so far has been that old standby of low-carb early adopters (that is, pre-Dreamfields): zucchini "linguine." I know, I know, it's not like pasta at all, but it is a tasty and satisfying vehicle for one of my favorite pasta sauces, Patricia Wells's meat and celery sauce. I made a big batch of the sauce, and when lunchtime rolls around all I have to do is slice a zucchini on the mandoline (I have an Oxo one that works quite well for this purpose), throw it in a sauté pan, spoon on some of the sauce straight from the fridge, sprinkle with a little water and salt and pepper, and cook until everything is heated through and the zucchini is just tender. It all takes about seven minutes. The bug loves it (and sometimes I cook some regular macaroni for her too).

It looks a little grim in this picture, but in real life it's nice and bright.

I don't know why the fonts and line spacing in my posts are so screwy, and nothing seems to work to fix them. Sorry about the lack of readability above.

Fun Mail

2008-02-15T14:25:00.003-05:00

This afternoon an exciting package arrived from a new friend and correspondant—so exciting that I forgot to take a picture of it right away, in all its bubbly, spongy, extruding-from-the-Ziploc glory. Above is a sourdough starter, which smells absolutely wonderful by the way, just after I mixed in flour and water to refresh it. According to my extremely generous benefactor, it probably dates back to Sonoma County around the end of the eighteenth century. Needless to say, I'm very much looking forward to trying it.

Too Much Baking

2008-02-13T16:06:00.003-05:00

This may be the last of my baking for a few days. I've done far too much of it lately, I think because around this time of year I get completely sick of winter foods and it's too early for spring and summer foods. What I wouldn't give right now for a good tomato sandwich with mayonnaise, salt and pepper, a basil leaf, and a couple slices of this bread:

Sourdough in the foreground, somewhat overbaked multigrain with walnuts in the back.

I've been learning so much about flour and yeast, though, that I do want to keep going while I feel like I'm getting the hang of it.

We Have a Winner

2008-02-13T10:49:00.006-05:00

After a minor setback last night, in which my too-wet dough stuck so disastrously to my very well floured cloths that the cloths had to be discarded, this morning I baked a really good loaf of sourdough. This one had no leaven other than the starter, which when I mixed up the dough yesterday morning was at the point where it was doubling in volume in a couple hours.

I used this LA Times recipe, sort of. My starter is only part whole wheat (I ran out of whole wheat flour a while ago and started using all-purpose and bread flour—no big deal), and I used a bit less whole wheat flour in the dough itself: 9 ounces starter (which was quite a bit more than 1 cup), 5 ounces whole wheat flour, about 10 ounces bread flour (to which I later added maybe another ounce due to the aforementioned sticking problem), 12 ounces water, 2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt.

I followed all the folding and shaping steps, but because my dough was so wet to begin with I had to gently fold and knead it again last night instead of baking it. I stuck it in the fridge overnight, let it rise at room temperature for a few hours this morning, then shaped it into boules and put them in flour-cloth-lined bowls covered with plastic (above) to rise for another hour or so.

Turned a boule out onto parchment on a peel, then onto a stone in a 450-degree oven with lots of steam (ice in the bottom of the oven, plus misting the oven walls in the first few minutes of baking). I did not turn down the oven temperature as it says to do in the recipe.

Here's what I got: a very holey, moist, chewy crumb; a nice chewy crust (not very crisp, though); and, most important, a wonderfully complex flavor. It's good and salty, quite sour but not in as assertive a way as my last sourdough attempt. Basically it's just fantastic bread, and I'm very happy with it. Next time I make sourdough the process will be less problematic, I think, but I will do the overnight rise in the fridge again, as I think that helped the flavor develop and mature considerably.

On the muffin front, I made some of the Everyday Food quinoa muffins Heidi mentioned, but I baked them in mini-muffin pans and used only 2 tablespoons sugar instead of the 3/4 cup called for, and chopped frozen cherries instead of raisins. They are, well, not sweet, and the low sugar content meant they didn't brown very well. (I don't know about the picture on the Martha Stewart recipe page, by the way. Where's the quinoa in those muffins?)

The bug taste-tested them, and when I saw that she'd picked the cherries out and left the crumbled half-chewed remains of the quinoa part on the counter I decided to try another recipe. Daycare workers don't need that kind of mess at a Valentine's Day party, I figured; they'd probably appreciate just a little more sugar high and a little less mess.

So I adapted a blueberry muffin recipe my mom sent me from her stash. She says that in the old days muffins weren't supposed to be sweet at all because they were served with supper, and sure enough her old recipes called for only 2 tablespoons sugar (and in once case none at all!) per 2 cups or 1 1/2 cups flour. I split the difference, and the results were so popular I had to hide them from little hands.

Semi-Old-Fashioned Raspberry Muffins

Makes about 20 mini muffins

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, melted
3/4 cup milk
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup frozen raspberries

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Butter and flour mini muffin tins.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.

In a small bowl, whisk together the butter, milk, egg, and vanilla. Gently stir the wet mixture into the dry ingredients with a rubber spatula until the dry ingredients are almost all moistened; do not overmix or the muffins will be tough. Gently fold in the raspberries. (You can toss the raspberries with a little flour before folding them in if you don't want the color to bleed too much. I wanted the pink to spread, as these are Valentine's Day muffins.)

Fill the muffin cups to the top and bake in the center of the oven for about 15 minutes, until lightly browned. Remove the muffins to wire racks to cool.

Multigrain Extravaganza

2008-02-10T18:41:00.000-05:00

The Chalmerses have been hunkered down this weekend as the bug has been down with a nasty cold. We helped her make valentines for her "classmates" at daycare (they sent home a list of names for us, and convinced me to sign up to bring low-sugar muffins on Thursday), and then for some reason Mr. Chalmers started using the construction paper to make a small and fantastical city. It looked like fun, so I made a couple buildings too.

I baked a couple loaves of bread based on Beranbaum's Tyrolean ten-grain torpedo, with, I think, great success. I'm not usually a fan of multigrain-type breads, but this one was much better than others I've had or made because the flour is just 100% regular bread flour, with the whole (-ish) grains added. No whole wheat flour, in other words, to weigh it down. It was springy and chewy and light, even with all the chunky additions.

I used rinsed quinoa and speckle grits, rolled and steel-cut oats, wheat germ, flax seeds, nuts (sunflower seeds in one loaf and chopped toasted walnuts in the other), toasted pepitos, and I think some white cornmeal—all soaked overnight in hot water to just cover. Meanwhile, the sponge went in the fridge overnight. Everything was mixed together with the salt (in the second loaf I increased the salt from 1 1/4 teaspoons to 2 teaspoons) in the morning to make a sticky dough; two rises, shaped into a batard (this was the first time I've done a batard following good illustrations, and the picture below doesn't do it justice!), proofed for an hour, then sprinkled with rye flour, slashed, and baked on a stone with lots of steam at the beginning.

Something about the perspective makes this photo look odd. The slashes were a little off, but the shape itself was more uniform and pretty than it appears here.

The crumb wasn't exceptionally holey, but it was surprisingly light, and the crust was nice and crisp-chewy.

My whole wheat (mostly; I ran out of whole wheat and switched to all-purpose) sourdough starter, in other news, is almost ready to use. It isn't quadrupling in volume yet, but it's much more active in the last day or so than any starter I've made before.

When Life Hands You Pineapple Juice

2008-02-07T09:32:00.000-05:00

I decided to go ahead and try Peter Reinhart et al.'s "pineapple solution," outlined in the L.A. Times recently. I'm now in the late feeding and refreshing stage, and it's a good thing, because I've gotten to the point where I feel like I'm using an awful lot of flour for the amount of bread coming out of the oven (that is, zero bread as yet). So far I don't think there's been much difference between the starter begun with juice and the one begun with water; we'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, what to do with the extra pineapple juice (it only came in six-can packs!). Make a ridiculous tropical drink, of course.

This one had white rum, Grand Marnier (also left over from something else; I can't remember what), lime juice, and pineapple juice. It would've been better without the pineapple juice, actually.

Here's what my countertop looked like this morning:

Clearly I need to step away from the Stretch-Tite. Whole wheat starter in front; soaking grains (quinoa, oats, flax, cornmeal) in the middle; not sure about the metal bowl in back; regular rye-white starter at right. That's Julia Child underneath the cutting board (so that's where it went), and BBA in the foreground. The banana is unrelated.

Our Polling Place

2008-02-05T07:39:00.000-05:00

It was the bug's first national election. We all walked across the railroad tracks to the volunteer fire department building at 7 a.m., where there was already one woman waiting to vote.

Redneck Wine Pairing

2008-01-31T17:18:00.000-05:00

Dellatorri Chianti, 2005 ($8.88 at Kroger this week, with a Plus card). Everyone knows ants on a log just cries out for Sauv Blanc, but I'm a rebel like that. And besides, the tannins really cut through the cream cheese in the ham roll-ups.

Sometimes I make weird suppers like this (chicken salad and sliced apples not pictured). I don't know why, but they make me happy.

Cheating at Sourdough

2008-01-28T05:57:00.001-05:00

I've yet to get a sourdough culture going that is strong enough to rise a regular bread dough, so in the loaves I've made in the last week or so I've added 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast to the dough (per 4 1/2 and in one case about 7 cups flour) in the middle of the process—at about day two of three.

These loaves are mostly white flour, with 1/4 cup of whole wheat flour for flavor. The bug was impatient, so I cut into the funny-looking one before it had cooled, and it got a little gummy.

In the Reinhart book, many of the recipes have you mixing the flour and salt together and adding them to the wetter ingredients (a starter or barm plus water, for example). I've found that technique problematic, because often it results in a stiffer dough than I think is right—and adding more water at the end is extremely annoying and difficult. In future, I'll go back to the usual way of adding the salt with the first cup or so of flour, and adding more flour gradually until it just feels right to me.

The ugly loaves in front, variations on Reinhart's version of Poilâne bread, are 100% whole wheat (and they sure tasted like it). Good and sour, but very heavy and dense. I forgot about the baguettes in the oven, and they burnt a bit.

The whole wheat loaf crumb.

The baguette's crumb. This loaf was baked on a sheet pan because I have only one French bread pan (I was making four loaves at a time)—hence the flat bottom. Very chewy and sour, but I prefer the lighter texture of my normal, nonsourdough French loaf.

The baguettes made excellent bread crumbs, incidentally, which I put on top of the most ridiculously complicated tuna noodle casserole ever. Look at this recipe! It's a tuna noodle casserole, for crying out loud! Yes, it was good, and maybe slightly more healthful than the canned-soup variety, but really not worth the kitchen mess and effort.

This is the cinnamon crumb nut apple surprise quickbread from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible. Not a bread bread, but I was craving a slice of it to go with my afternoon Earl Grey. I took the remaining slices to Mr. Chalmers's office kitchen.

The apples are the surprise part, I guess.

I think my breads were better before I started reading the Beranbaum and Reinhart books and trying to learn how to make better bread, but I think I'll get to a point where the extra knowledge starts to pay off. A few factors might delay this: I'm no good at following directions, I'm forgetful, and I'm no good at keeping track of what I've done for future reference.

Good Food in Georgia

2008-01-21T07:13:00.001-05:00

The Chalmerses and a friend made the about-three-hour drive to Marietta yesterday to have lunch at Tasty China (585 Franklin Rd. SE, Marietta, 770-419-9849—though they've never answered the phone when I've called), the Sichuan restaurant that's been much discussed on the South board on Chowhound for the last year and a half or so. The bug slept all the way there, and was brilliantly behaved throughout our extended meal, thoroughly charming the servers and trying lots of different foods.

We ordered more food than could fit on our table, and they had to take plates away and pack up to-go containers as we were eating. A singularly unhelpful and vague report on our meal is here, on Chowhound; scroll up for much more detailed descriptions of dishes by people who know what they're talking about. Locals with any interest in Chinese food should try to get over there. It's worth the drive, says Mr. Chalmers, who actually did the drive and who isn't normally a fan of Chinese. (He was won over by, among other things, the interesting use of cumin in several of the dishes.)

Afterwards we checked out the international grocery in the same strip shopping center (no purchases, but they do carry Bulgarian feta, I was happy to see: look for the green-and-white-striped tins in the refrigerated case). If you're at Tasty China for dinner on a weekend, you might go to one of the two Latino dance clubs next door afterwards—just a suggestion. Since we were there on a Sunday afternoon and were packing a toddler, we instead went into downtown Marietta and had coffee at a surprisingly attractive and well-patronized coffee house just off the square (the name of it escapes me, but it's opposite a blue-and-white-facaded Greek restaurant). It was a very cold but very good Sunday afternoon.

Progress Reports

2008-01-19T04:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon I noticed five bubbles in my first "real" sourdough starter made with only flour and water, which means I've captured some wild yeast from either the flour or the sweet Madison County air. You might be able to pick them out:

There may be sourdough bread in our near future, who knows? I'm not entirely sure what comes next. If only for my own future reference, here's what I did. This starts out close to BBA, but then veers off on day 4 as I worry it's not working (and as I reach my "viewing limit").

Possible sourdough starter

Day 1: Combine 1 cup whole organic rye flour and 3/4 cup lukewarm water; press the mixture (it was like a paste) into the bottom of a tall plastic container. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 24 hours.

Day 2: Scrape the mixture into a bowl and mix in 1 cup King Arthur unbleached bread flour and 1/2 cup lukewarm water; press the dough (now a stiff ball) back into the container. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 24 hours.

Day 3: Discard half of the dough ball. To the remaining, add 1 cup bread flour and 1/2 cup lukewarm water; press into the container. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 24 hours.

Day 4: Add 1/2 cup bread flour and 1/2 cup lukewarm water directly to the container and mix it in with a rubber spatula. (It's runnier now, and easier to mix.) Put a piece of tape on the outside of the container to mark the level of the mixture. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 24 hours.

It's about 5 a.m. right now on day 5, the stuff has risen about 3/4 inch above the tape, and that's all I know about this sourdough thing for now.

Last night I made my first attempt at kung pao chicken. I should say that I don't cook a lot of Chinese food, at least not Americanized Chinese (although once at about 3 a.m. after a big night out with my now husband I made us my mom's moo goo gai pan, and I do have a few Chinese Chinese dishes in my regular rotation—ugh, "rotation": this is why I want to try more new foods). I don't know much about stir-frying, and I don't own a wok. So I was pretty much at the mercy of actual recipes this time. I couldn't find any that seemed just like West Side Cottage II's: the "authentic"-looking ones didn't have the vegetables (I like it with crisp carrots, celery, and water chestnuts), and the ones that had the vegetables seemed lame on the sauce front. In the end, I kind of winged it, and the results were wonderful. I won't post a recipe yet, because what I came up with was close to what I wanted but not quite right (the marinade and sauce were based on Fuchsia Dunlop's gong bao ji ding). I know that the elements of most takeout versions are fried in tons of oil, and of course I didn't do that—the only real problem was that the sauce was too sweet and had too much soy flavor. I think I can fix the latter by using Chinese light soy sauce next time.

I'm all out of black vinegar or I'd make a second attempt right now and post a recipe. Soon, folks.

Sorry for the crappy lighting. It looked better than this.

Leftovers

2008-01-17T06:20:00.000-05:00

This week I've found myself trying to use up ten pounds of jagerwurst we stuffed and smoked over the weekend. We gave away as much as we could without being obnoxious sausage-pushers, and I managed to fit a half dozen links or so in the (now) completely full freezer. It can be eaten out of hand, perhaps on a plate with crackers and cheese and pickles, but I can handle only a few slices at a time. Here's what I made last night; it was really good with French bread and cheap red wine on a wintry-mix sort of evening.

White beans with kale and jagerwurst
Serves 4.

2 cups dried white beans, rinsed
1 bay leaf
1 sprig rosemary
Chicken stock
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 large white onion, diced
About 1 pound kale, trimmed and chopped (I used blanched kale that I'd frozen a few months ago)
About 3/4 pound jagerwurst or other smoked pork sausage, sliced 1/2 inch thick
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a pot, cover the beans with water by 2 inches and bring to a boil over high heat. Remove from the heat and let soak for 1 hour. Drain and rinse the beans and return them to the pot. Add the bay leaf, rosemary sprig, and stock to cover the beans by 1 inch. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer and cook until the beans are just tender, 1 to 1 1/2 hours, adding more stock or water to keep the beans just covered. Remove and discard the bay leaf and rosemary.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat and add the onion. Sauté until the onion is soft and just starting to brown. Remove from the heat. When the beans are almost done, add the onion to the pot and stir in the kale.

Return the pan to medium heat and add the sausage. Cook until well browned on one side, then add the sausage to the pot and simmer until the kale is tender and the beans are soft. Season with salt and pepper to taste and spoon into shallow soup bowls.

List in Progress

2008-01-15T09:11:00.000-05:00

It's been a hell of a year so far, but I'm still here, still thinking crazy thoughts about food.

I'm not one for lists—or, rather, for following lists; I love making them!—but here are a few things I'd like to learn how to do well this year (or whenever):

Sourdough bread. I've ordered The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which should arrive next week. But I was too excited, and went ahead and began a starter this morning, following the BBA page I could read in Google Books. Apparently, though, I've reached my "viewing limit," which means I only know what to do through day three. Can anybody tell me what is on pages 230ff?
Kung pao chicken like they have at West Side Cottage II, which was our local delivery/takeout Chinese in New York. All the elements are perfectly cooked, and the sauce is dark and spicy. Have I mentioned here that in Gainesville, Florida, where we lived for a year between New York and Georgia, the kung pao chicken had zucchini in it? I've still never forgiven Gainesville for that.
Summer sausage. I love even mediocre summer sausage, and I think it'd be fun to make my own.
Bagels, and again I mean New York bagels, good ones, the kind you just cannot get anywhere near Athens. I have a good start: my first attempt, a couple weeks ago, worked really well. I added vital wheat gluten to high-gluten flour, and used barley malt syrup in the (very stiff) dough and the poaching water. Next time there will be pictures, because next time they'll look more like bagels and less like softballs.
Lox. Which means building that smokehouse, and also: learning how to cut a straight line with my Skilsaw. Can one make cream cheese at home?
Kouign amann. I can't pronounce it and I've never eaten it, but it sure sounds like something I'd like. My mom's made it a few times and has given me some tips to augment this recipe.
Gnocchi, light and fluffy, now that I have a potato ricer.
Iranian cheese, the stuff that's like Bulgarian feta, which I haven't come across outside New York. It has the consistency and saltiness of feta, but is very, very sour—not to everyone's taste, but I think it's wonderful. The bug was found yesterday sitting in a corner of the kitchen, on top of a heating register, with a fistful of Bulgarian feta we'd brought back from the city. She likes it too.
Beef with long hot peppers. This will be easy. I've given up on my pork with sour long beans dish from Grand Sichuan International: the Ninth Avenue restaurant is no longer extant, I learned, which I think is a sign that I should just let it go.
Lovage. This year I will try harder to grow it, and if the seeds don't sprout, as happened last year, I'll look harder for potted lovage. My mom planted some for me in my yard this fall, but the drought might have killed it off.

Also, I want to try to use more unfamiliar ingredients—unfamiliar to me, anyway—in everyday cooking. Once recently I bought a turnip, and I don't think I'd ever eaten one before, but it was a revelation. I love turnips! (I sautéed thin slices in duck fat. I love duck fat!) I'm looking for more of that this year.

And now for some random pictures that might represent how the holidays went for the Chalmerses.

There was a cookie-baking day with Athens friends.

There was a long drive to New York, and reading to Cooper.

There was a trip to drizzly Mount Vernon, New York, for pizza at Johnny's (30 W. Lincoln Ave., near Gramatan Ave.)—mentioned on Jeff Varasano 's pizza page.

It was probably the bug's best restaurant outing ever. She was fascinated, as were we, by the place and the people there (all of them men: she probably appreciated the low, deep hum of the conversations?), and she seemed to like the pizza, too. It was very good: thin, charred, bubbly, flavorful crust, simple sauce, not too much cheese, that's it.

There was the bug's first time on a beach, near Rye Playland: subfreezing temperatures and below-zero windchill.

There were two nights in Atlantic City, oddly.

There was coming home and cozying up in the big chair.

Pralines

2007-12-10T10:41:00.000-05:00

I never thought there would come a time when I could write a blog post with the title "Pralines," but here it is. A couple-few years ago, I promised Mr. Chalmers I'd never again attempt to make pralines due to the terrible black cloud that descended and hovered over the household during my third, fourth, fifth, and sixth complete failures in the space of about a week and a half. I fully intended to keep my promise, but something about my circumstances this year emboldened me.

At the end of a day of high-volume cookie baking this weekend with friends, one of them stuck her ex-boyfriend's praline recipe on the wall above the stove and proceeded to show me how it's done. The recipe was from Southern Living, 1959. First of all, I love the ingredients: sugar, baking soda, light cream, butter, and pecans—there's no corn syrup crutch (so many praline recipes call for a whole cup of the stuff, which makes the praline mixture—note I did not say pralines, because what I've made in the past would not be recognized as such anywhere south of I-60—it makes it taste not so much like sugar as like corn syrup). Second, the recipe contained one vital piece of information other recipes I've tried did not: if the damn candy mixture starts to harden before you've hurriedly gotten it all scooped out of the pot, just add a tablespoon of hot water and keep going. Genius! Third, and most important, the pralines taste wonderful and have a creamy, smooth, melt-in-your-mouth texture.

After seeing it done on Saturday I decided to try it all by myself on Sunday. Success:

Pralines
From Southern Living, via my friend Regan

2 cups sugar
¾ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup light cream or evaporated milk
1½ tablespoons butter
2 cups pecan halves
Get everything ready in advance: Put a cup of cold water in the freezer for the cold water tests, lay out a big sheet of waxed paper or parchment right next to the stovetop, measure the butter and pecans and have them next to the stove.
Combine the sugar and soda in a deep 3-quart saucepan [4-quart worked fine]. Mix well with a wooden spoon, then add the cream. Stir carefully to keep the sugar crystals in the bottom part of the pan [Not sure what this means]. All the crystals should be dissolved before the mixture boils—this helps make it smooth and creamy.
Bring to a boil over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally [I'd say frequently] to prevent scorching [I stirred up little browned bits from the bottom and sides, and was worried, but it all evened out toward the end]. When the mixture starts to boil, it bubbles high in the pan, so reduce the heat and continue stirring to keep it from boiling over. Cook to about 234 degrees F., until candy forms a soft ball when tested in cold water [I pulled my pot off the heat at 230 or even a bit lower, trusting the color and the soft ball test more than the thermometer]. Test several times; read the thermometer while candy boils, but remove the pan from the heat during the water test so it won’t overcook.
Remove the pan from the heat and immediately stir in the butter. Measure accurately—too much butter may keep the pralines from firming up. Add the pecans and beat until thick enough to drop from a spoon, 2 to 3 minutes [I beat for less time; don't let it thicken too much; it'll thicken as it drops from the spoon]. Candy thickens rapidly with beating.
Drop candies onto waxed paper. Add 1 tablespoon hot water if necessary to keep the candy at the right stage for dropping from the spoon.

Pandoro + Danish = Babka

2007-11-28T10:57:00.000-05:00

Here's my version (only a little simplified) of my mom's version of Mario Batali's pandoro and Craig Claiborne's danish. (For all the Craig Claiborne fans out there, have you seen his newly reissued book of Southern recipes? Did you know he was from Mississippi? I did not.)

Cheese Babka

For the yeast mixture:
1/4 cup warm water
1 tablespoon active dry yeast (I used instant)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 large egg yolk
1/2 cup all-purpose flour

For phase 1:
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 large egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup room temperature water

For phase 2:
2 cups all-purpose flour
4 large egg yolks
1 large egg
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup room-temperature water
Zest of 1 lemon
1/4 cup golden raisins (I used black)

For the cheese filling:
1 cup cottage cheese
1 large egg
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon butter
Zest of 1/2 lemon

For the topping (optional):
1 large egg, beaten together with 1 teaspoon water
Sugar

Make the yeast mixture: In a small bowl, combine the water, yeast, sugar, egg yolk, and flour. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for 2 hours, or until doubled in bulk.

Phase 1: In a medium bowl, beat together all the ingredients. Add the yeast mixture and mix well. Gradually stir in the flour to form a sticky dough. Knead for 5 to 10 minutes, or use the dough hook attachment on an electric mixer (which I don't have; use those arms!). The dough should remain somewhat tacky, unlike bread dough.

Butter a large bowl and add the dough. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for 2 hours.

Phase 2: In a medium bowl, beat together the flour, egg yolks, egg, sugar, salt, water, and lemon zest.

Punch down the dough from phase 1 above and pour in the egg mixture, stirring and cutting slowly to break up the dough. The texture of this mixture will appear strange, but will smooth out after the addition of the flour. Gradually add the flour and mix until thoroughly incorporated. Knead for an additional 10 minutes. Place in a buttered bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise for 2 hours. Punch down the dough and knead in the raisins.

Make the cheese filling: In a food processor, process the cottage cheese until very smooth, then add the egg, sugar, butter, and lemon zest and process to combine.

Shape and bake the babkas: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter and flour 2 large coffee cans (I used cans that were 6 3/4 inches tall and 6 inches in diameter, but you can get creative here and use 3 smaller cans, or tall cake pans, or whatever; just adjust the baking time and watch them closely).

Divide the dough in half. On a lightly floured surface, pat out half of the dough into a rough rectangle about 6 by 12 inches. Spoon half of the filling over the rectangle and do your best to roll it up and get it into a coffee can. It may look as messy as this:

But don't worry. Do the other half of the dough and filling. Cover and let rise for 30 minutes. Bake for 35 minutes, until nicely browned on top, then brush with the egg wash and sprinkle with sugar. Return to the oven for 5 minutes. Let cool on wire racks for 10 minutes, then loosen the edges with a thin knife and remove from the cans. Let cool completely, then slice one and give one away.

Sleepy Cozy

2007-11-26T08:03:00.001-05:00

One of my new favorite things to do with the bug is to take her over to Watson Mill Bridge State Park, which is about three miles from our house, to go for long morning walks in the woods. The last time we went, it was before naptime and I thought the one-and-a-half-mile loop would make her nice and sleepy. I didn't expect it to put her to sleep half a mile in—I carried her the rest of the way. Before I lost the use of my arms I took some pictures along the trail.

In the evenings now that it's cold, I've been warming up the bug's bedtime milk with a pinch of cinnamon, a tiny bit of nutmeg, and one small drop of honey. She breaks out into a huge smile after every gulp, but it's always too dark to take a clear picture unless she's absorbed in her cup.

It's drizzly and chilly this morning (okay, not that chilly—45.2 degrees), but I might go ahead and bundle us up and go out. It's either that or hibernate.