Boulder to Tucson

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

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

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

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

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 . . ."

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.