Paprika

Gizzard Paprikash

2011-02-26T21:45:00.000-08:00

While I was home over the holidays, we got together with some friends and butchered a number of chickens -- hens who'd stopped laying, roosters with asthma, roosters in general. Nobody else was particularly interested in the organs and feet, so I took those. Gracious. Those old roosters grew dragon's hide on their feet! I dunked the feet in boiling water for five minutes, clipped off the toenails, and then my mother and I painstakingly peeled off the outer layer of scaly skin before making stock of them. That dragon stock was gorgeous. You could have walked on it and not fallen in.

But this is about the gizzards and hearts. Gizzards and hearts are delicious dark, dark meat -- almost blue, they're so dark -- but they take a little stewing to become tender. The gizzard is a powerful disc-shaped muscle in the chicken's neck, which grinds seeds and grass. To get the partially digested food out of the gizzard, you have to split it open and peel the lining out, which is why gizzards have that clam-shell shape when you buy them.

When considering what to do with my bucket of gizzards and hearts (besides make an enormous pot of gravy), I recalled a delicious dish of zúza paprikás, a.k.a. gizzard paprikash, I had one evening in Budapest. And I recalled a page or two I'd spent an entire day translating from a Hungarian cookbook, and from these two recollections I made a very delicious, convincing gizzard/heart paprikash for supper. It was boldly orange, piquant and creamy.

Back in San Francisco, I wanted to compare my recipe to that in a book of mine called Cooking with Love and Paprika, a 1966 cookbook by Joseph Pasternak. To my alarm, he makes a distinction between Hungarian paprikash and Transylvanian paprikash; according to him, my recipe is Transylvanian because it includes sour cream. How perplexing. Well, the zúza paprikás I had in Hungary most definitely had sour cream in it, just like practically everything I ate there (oh sigh!). Also, a good bit of Transylvania used to belong to Hungary, so maybe it's a moot point.

Many Hungarian dishes start with rendering some minced smoked pork fat in a skillet. Unfortunately, I cannot walk two blocks to the nearest market hall and ask for a kilo of smoked Mangalica fat from the butcher. (Nor can I ask for a kilo of goose gizzards, or a quart of pickled peppers ladled from the brine vat, or get my jug filled up with raw milk for a handful of forints -- sigh, sigh, and sigh.) So I would recommend frying a few slices of bacon at a fairly low temperature for a long time, so the fat renders out without burning at all. Pour the clean fat into a jar, eat the bacon, and clean the sticky stuff off the skillet before putting the fat back in. This will give you good fat with a nice smoky flavor.

You may chop the gizzards or hearts before cooking them; when cooked, a whole gizzard tends to be a bit more than one mouthful. You can also remove the "hinge" in the middle of the gizzard -- this is the most sinewy part -- and then the gizzards will become tender much sooner. I lazily left my gizzards whole.

Mince a large onion fairly fine, and let it cook in the fat in Dutch oven till soft and clear. Push the onions to one side of the Dutch oven and briefly brown about a pound of gizzards and/or hearts on the other side.

Add salt and a large peeled, crushed tomato (or a tablespoon of paste), and a ton of fresh sweet paprika, 2-3 tablespoons.* Pour in enough chicken stock** to cover the gizzards, cover the pan, and let it simmer for about three hours, until the meat is tender. Undercooked gizzards are unpleasantly squeaky on the tooth. If you trimmed the gizzards, they may only take an hour or so to cook.

If the dish seems too liquid (soupy, not stewy), remove the lid and let it boil down for a bit. When it's done cooking, add a couple of cloves of finely minced garlic and turn off the heat. Swirl in sour cream or creme fraiche to taste -- at least half a cup. Taste and adjust the seasonings. Paprikash is traditionally served over little egg noodles (tojásos tészta). As you can see in the picture above, I sometimes enjoy it on potatoes.

You can also use this recipe to make straight-up chicken paprikash. Break a small young chicken down into drumsticks, thighs, wings and breasts. It will only need 45 minutes or so of cooking time, and you can let the chicken pieces make their own stock as they cook. Add the breasts towards the end of the cooking time so they don't get overdone. Old stewing birds will take about three hours, just like the gizzards.

*About the paprika: it really needs to be good if you're not just sprinkling it on deviled eggs for pretty. Fresh means less than a year old. Sweet means it's made from sweet peppers, not spicy ones. It's hard to find non-sweet paprika in the United States, so you probably don't need to worry about it.

**You probably expect me to say "or water" here. But I won't do it. If you were making a custard that called for milk, would you use water instead? Only a very slight exaggeration. Vegetable stock also doesn't work. Neither does most of the "chicken broth" you can buy in stores. Unless the stock is made from bones and tendons, there will not be gelatin in it, and gelatin is necessary for that silky feeling on your lips. And that silky feeling on your lips is necessary for happiness. Okay, fine, you can use water if you're really in a pinch, but don't make a habit of it. Also, if you've gone to the trouble of tracking down chicken gizzards, you're probably in close proximity to some chicken backs or feet, too. Just simmer them for a few hours before you make supper.

How to Make a Wedding Dress, Part One

2011-02-16T10:14:00.001-08:00

When I was about four, I saw that dainty ladies pinched their skirts up and walked with pointed toes (probably in a book, because all the women I knew wore plaid and denim). I knew I should be just as dainty as these storybook ladies. Daintier, even! I lifted my skirts as high as I could and pranced around like the queen of daintiness, until my mother told me I wasn't allowed to wear skirts to church if I flashed everyone.

When I was about seven, I vowed that I would never, ever, ever wear jeans. Denim was entirely too uncomfortable, stiff, and modern. I preferred calico dresses, with buttons down the front. "I will not even wear jeans when I am a TEENAGER," I said. I pretty much held to it, wearing long flowing skirts all through high school and the first year of college, up until that day I cut off all my hair.

This is my wedding dress design problem, see. I have too long a history with fantastic dress-ups. I know how to sew a wizard's cloak, how to turn thrift-store negligees into fairy gowns and spiderwitch tatters, how to cut a cardboard sword from the Arabian Nights. I'm getting married; I can't screw it up now. All my younger selves are standing in a dainty row, waiting to see their dreams fully realized in my wedding dress. So I lay awake at night, thinking about sashes and gores and trims and petticoats, and wondering what Mlirriiken the Wizardess would wear to her wedding. And what would you wear to a pirate wedding on the Purple Island? Or hell, to the polyandrous weddings in Midderwynn? These are ponderous, ponderous questions! I tossed and turned.

I thought about buying a wedding dress. There are all kinds of professional magical seamsters, on Etsy and elsewhere, who spin gossamer gowns out of seashells and hickory nuts. They could certainly do a better job than I. I thought about embarking on the most epic thrift-store-scouring mission in the history of used clothing. Wouldn't scavenged laces and ruffles be fun, and cheaper than sewing?

But that line of dainty young selves shook their heads. When would I ever again have the chance to make a dress entirely out of my dreams?

On a flight home, I filled a sketchbook with drawings. The businessmen on either side of me must have thought I was some kind of overgrown eight-year old, hurriedly filling pages with sketches of nearly identical dresses. With my imagination finally loosed, the possibilities and abstractions drove me crazy. I have designed skirts before, and designed fitted bodices before, and made dresses from patterns before. But designing a whole dress required entirely too many choices -- and I knew my vision needed to crystallize before I could set to with my scissors and pins.

Also, you know how hard it is to make a flat map of a round earth? HA. Spheres are EASY. They are so predictable. Mapping a body is the real challenge.

In part two: how to actually make a pattern, instead of just talking about it.

Ring-Making Recipe

2011-01-11T14:04:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been thinking of white wool and green silk almost as much as I've been thinking of eggnog and avocados. There's a lot to be done when you get engaged! And of course I want to make marrying-time as fun and arduous as possible, so here I am, revving up the sewing machine and finding my anvil.

Actually, I was prepared for these rings to be a lot more difficult than they were. My father helped expedite the process, sending me home with a full ring-making kit. I find that assembling my materials and tools is the hardest and least rewarding part of any project, so this was a great boon. The kit included: sandpaper in an array of fine grits, a cylindrical file, a small hammer, and two 1930's silver quarters that he mounted on bolts. Quarters newer than 1964 have copper cores.

The bolt gives you something to hang on to when you're hammering. The washers also give the quarter stability, so an errant hammer-stroke doesn't fatally warp the quarter.

For my anvil, I used one of the stones from my grain mill. Holding the bolt so the quarter was vertical, I tapped the edge of the quarter, turning it between taps to avoid making flat spots. I did that for half a day. The rim of the quarter widened as it flattened, and the diameter of the quarter shrunk. When it reached the predetermined size of W. Crawford's finger, I took it off the bolt.

I started using the narrow file in the bolt-hole. Silver dust was flying! Then I wrapped a slightly wider metal cylinder in medium-grit sandpaper and removed the rest of the middle. At that point, you could no longer tell it had once been a quarter.

The rest was just sanding. The ring fit W. Crawford perfectly, and he promptly went to work making one for me, of daintier dimensions.

Also, it's only illegal to destroy coins if you plan on reusing them as currency.

Buttermilk-Soaked Buckwheat Pancakes

2010-09-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

I never, ever vary my breakfast routine. I get up at dawn and putter about for a few minutes until my hunger wakes up. Then I move with a swiftness. I heat the skillet, toast a slice of homemade bread, and circle back to the skillet to crack in two eggs. The eggs barely make contact with the pan. (Over-easy is the term, but we called them "gook-out" when we were young.) Then the toast pops, and the butter drips down through its chewy holes, and I tuck in. Once my hunger wakes up it's a growling beast.

After dipping my toast in the warm yolks and sliding the whites through the dripped-down melted butter, I can more leisurely turn my attention to things like sauerkraut and tea. It's a splendid breakfast, so splendid that when I make fancy breakfasts for other folks, I still make myself eggs and toast.

Indeed, I never, ever vary my breakfast routine. Except for yesterday. And today. The folks at the farmer's market didn't bring eggs on Wednesday, being too busy with tomatoes. I am such a snob that I just can't tolerate the sight of ordinary commercial eggs anymore, not even the expensive organic omega-3 faux-family-farm eggs. They look flaccid and mucilaginous, not at all muscular and perky and bright like real eggs.

So I went back to an old recipe I was saving for the dark of the year when real hens cease to lay. It's a recipe that was outdated before it was published a century ago. Helen Marsden, the endearingly nostalgic author, bemoans modern methods and the modern fear of inconvenience. But back then, "modern methods" meant baking powder instead of soda. And "inconvenience" was taking the time to soak your batter overnight. These days, breakfast itself is the great inconvenience.

Take heart, though! She assures us that "the setting overnight ... is in fact a very simple and convenient process, consuming only a few minutes and doing its leavening work in accordance with nature's chemistry during the long hours of the night."

It turns out that nature's chemistry is delicious, and truly easy. There's nothing in our modern repertoire quite like these buckwheat cakes. You know the spongey sour Ethiopian flatbread, injera? The cakes are spongey like that, but more delicate on account of the milk, and not sour. Like a cross between crepes and injera. They're tiny little chewy toothsome morsels. She calls it "light nothingness." Yes, that's true, but they're also satisfying -- they fill you up without the midmorning pancake crash. I ate a dozen and they kept me humming till lunch.

Real Buckwheat Cakes

This recipe makes enough pancakes for two hungry people, with maybe a few left over for a third person who generally prefers coffee to breakfast.

The night before, put two cups of buckwheat flour in a large bowl with a cup of sour milk (buttermilk, kefir, whey, or clabber), and a cup of water. Whisk until all the lumps are gone. Add a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of molasses, and whisk in. I think Marsden assumes you're using toasted buckwheat flour (the grey-colored kind, readily available), but I usually prefer freshly ground untoasted buckwheat groats.

Put a tea towel over the bowl, a plate on top to hold it on, and a thick dish towel over the whole thing. Set it somewhere warm. I put it directly on my stovetop over the hot spot from the pilot light. A radiator would also work. It shouldn't be so hot that it hurts to touch -- that would kill the fermenting bacteria.

In the morning, heat a cast iron skillet over a medium-high flame. Don't let it smoke. Add a teaspoon of baking soda to the batter, and whisk it in until it's all bubbly and evenly distributed.

Grease the skillet well (use ghee, lard, or bacon fat -- or butter, if you're careful not to burn it). Marsden says to use a "cooking-spoonful" of batter for each cake. It's not a lot. These are little guys. Put four or five in the skillet.

Flip them when they have bubbles in the middle. Remove when they're brown on the bottom and re-grease the skillet before you put the next round in.

Serve hot with gravy or butter. Or syrup, if you must, but I warned you about the pancake crash.

Hint

Helen Marsden recommends an innovative pan-greasing device: a piece of fat pork stuck on the end of a fork. I suppose I could keep it handy in a little jar on the back of my stove; no more running around for the butter knife between pancakes. In fact, I could even use the fat-pork fork for my ova over-easy.

Hollandaise

2010-09-02T12:53:00.001-07:00

Hollandaise! It's mayonnaise, but with butter. Do you know why that makes it hollandaise? Because in Holland they fry their bacon in butter. Yes, and it's delicious. The only confusing part is why I never made hollandaise until today. And that confusing part is also an embarrassing part -- hollandaise is one of the Mother Sauces!

But at lunch today, hollandaise became a simply ineluctable condiment. I was making a salad, and realized that I wanted some butter. Sadly, there was nothing to spread it on, since I had just run out of bread and wouldn't be baking till tomorrow. And then I knew what I had to do: dress the salad with butter, of course. The time had come for hollandaise.

I went straight to the stove and made it. I didn't stop to look in a cookbook or ask the Internet. My conviction was complete, and left no room for doubts or hesitations. I cracked the egg, I melted the butter, I beat it. A pinch of salt, a splash of vinegar. In less than five minutes, I returned to my salad, and poured over it a glossy golden ribbon of sauce, and became a whole woman again. I can still feel it, shining inside me.

Hollandaise

Gently melt 3-4 tablespoons of butter in a small pan. Turn it off as soon as it is melted. For the hollandaise to be really sunny, use butter from grassfed cows.

Separate an egg (and fry the white; why not?). Put the yolk in a small jar or bowl and beat it well. For the hollandaise to be even more sunny and golden, use an egg from a pastured hen.

Pour in one drop of the melted butter. Beat it thoroughly, so that the butter is completely incorporated into a creamy, shiny emulsion. Repeat until you've added all the butter. (Towards the end you can add the butter in larger quantities, but don't stop beating until it's all smooth.)

Add some salt and a little apple cider vinegar or lemon juice. I think lemon juice is the preferred thing, but I didn't have any lemons today.

Note: this dressed one large serving of arugula-apple salad.

Also, now I'm beginning to doubt myself. Surely I've made hollandaise before today? In a little way, for a last minute supper? For crepes at breakfast? I'll ask W. Crawford. I make him eat so many things, and they just float away without recipes to weight them down. Or maybe I dreamt about making hollandaise. That's just as likely.

OH MY GOODNESS! I just had an idea. Hollandaise in Waldorf salad. No, better: browned butter hollandaise in Waldorf salad.

Purple Sauerkraut

2010-08-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

At the farmer's market yesterday, there weren't any green cabbages, just purples, so I loaded three large ones onto my bike and pedaled away. I pedaled remarkably slowly, though, because I'd also strapped two dozen eggs to the rear rack, and every time I went over a bump all twenty-four eggs made a threatening rattle. By the time I got home, I'd imagined about twenty-four terrible ways my eggs could break, leaving me lump-throated in the middle of the street with eggwhites dripping down my cold, bare knees.

Ordinarily, I'd put everything into my pannier, where it would be somewhat cushioned from the bumps, and I could ride away swiftly. But I'd thought the market would be closed by the time I got off work, so I'd left my pannier at home. I'd also thought the sun would still be shining, and the air temperature would be within ten degrees of the temperature when I left the house. But San Francisco reverted, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of Fog moved upon the face of the waters. And the hem of my gown was above my knees.

Happily, the fog drove everyone away from the farmer's market, which meant that there were still eggs by the time I arrived! Along with many, many purple cabbages.

Most purple sauerkraut is treated specially, fermented with vinegar and spices (there is exactly such a recipe in The Lost Art of Real Cooking, in fact). But today I am just making plain sauerkraut and happening to use purple cabbage instead of green.

Purple Sauerkraut

Take three large heads of purple cabbage, rinse them, and peel off the outer leaves until you get to the shiny part. Quarter one of the heads and cut out the core. Slice each quarter into fine slivers and put them in a large bowl.

Add a tablespoon of sea salt and knead-squeeze-punch the cabbage vigorously until it breaks down and forms juice. Dump the kneaded cabbage and its juice into a one-gallon crock. Repeat with the remaining cabbages, using a total of 3-4 tablespoons of salt.

When all the cabbage is chopped and kneaded and put in the crock, press down on the chopped cabbage to submerge it beneath the juice. Clean the sides of the crock of any stray pieces of cabbage (cabbage exposed to the air will mold), and find a plate that just barely fits down inside the crock. A large jar might also work.

Put the plate upside-down directly on the surface of the cabbage, and press down on it to bring the juice up. Set a weight on top of the plate -- a jar full of water will work. Cover with a cloth and secure it with a rubber band. Set it somewhere warmish and out of the way, and check on it from time to time. Depending on the temperature, the kraut may be ready in just a few days, or it may take a couple of weeks. When it smells delicious and tangy, repack it into jars and put it in the fridge. Once it's fermented and refrigerated, you don't need to worry about it molding on top. You can eat it right away, or age it for a month or more in the fridge.

The color of the kraut will fade as it ferments, becoming more pink than purple. The purple will also eventually fade from your fingernails.

Beer Braised Lamb

2010-07-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

Do you find that you only talk about recipes you hardly ever make? This is the third time this month that we're having beer braised lamb, and yet, all I've talked about are things like doughnuts that I eat about twice in three years.

The weather certainly has something to do with how frequently I put bony chunks of meat in a pot and simmer them all afternoon. I'm wearing sweaters and cats, see. The rest of you who are eating salad and peach ice cream can just save this recipe till your winter comes along.

You can use any properly bony cut of lamb for this dish, which is why it's economical. Things I have tried that work well: lamb neck pieces, lamb ribs, miscellaneous "bone-in stewing lamb," and lamb shanks. Shanks tend to be a bit spendier and frankly I don't know why, when lamb ribs are so much more unctuous.

Beer Braised Lamb

This recipe feeds two people with the possibility of some leftovers.

Take a pound of bony lamb, rinse it, and put it in a large heavy pot. Add a couple of sprigs of rosemary, a roughly chopped onion, plenty of salt and pepper, and the better part of a bottle of strong, sweet beer.

Cover and bring to a gentle simmer. Simmer at least four hours. During the last hour or so, check the level of liquid in the pot. If it's still deep and thin, let it simmer uncovered for a while. As the beer reduces, it will thicken and caramelize into an unctuous sauce. Yeah, I like that unct.

Note: if you double this recipe, don't double the beer! More meat in the pot will make the liquid level higher anyway, and if you add more beer it won't reduce and caramelize in time.

Doughnut Bread Pudding

2010-07-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

You're right. Nobody ever has too many homemade doughnuts just sitting around waiting to be made into doughnut bread pudding. Nor would I ever dream of recommending that anyone make doughnuts just for turning into bread pudding. But should the unthinkable occur, consider that doughnut bread pudding is nothing other than a good rich dough, fried in lard, glazed, and baked in a custard; i.e., sublime.

For my cookbook release party on Thursday, Mama and I made eighty-odd doughnuts according to the directions for overnight-risen potato doughnuts in the book.

Half we glazed with the standard glaze, and half with the maple glaze (this time I browned the butter in the maple glaze recipe, a charming variation).

We only brought a dozen back home, and those quickly dwindled to half a dozen. But after a day or two, the unthinkable happened: the doughnuts ceased to be perfect. And a doughnut that is anything less than perfect really has no reason to exist. So I made bread pudding.

Doughnut Bread Pudding

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Slice six or seven stale homemade doughnuts in half like bagels and place them on a rack. Put them in the oven until they're lightly toasted, flipping them if need be.

Meanwhile, beat 5-6 eggs in a large bowl. Add a teaspoon of vanilla, half a teaspoon of salt, a grating of nutmeg, a few tablespoons of maple syrup (inversely proportional to the amount of glaze on the doughnuts), and a quart of rich milk. Beat well.

Pull the toasted doughnuts from the oven and let them cool. Butter a 9 x 13" baking dish. Find a slightly larger roasting pan to use as a water bath, and bring a kettleful of water to a boil.

Arrange the doughnut halves in the buttered baking dish and pour the egg mixture overtop. Let the doughnuts soak in the custard for 15 minutes or so, turning them to sop it up on all sides. When they are nicely soggy, cover the dish with tinfoil and place it in the larger roasting pan in the oven. Pour hot water in the roasting pan about an inch deep. Bake 45-50 minutes, until the custard is mostly set, but still a bit runny in the middle. Let cool for half an hour and serve warm or refrigerate.

Upcoming San Francisco Events

2010-07-16T10:30:00.001-07:00

The Lost Art of Real Cooking, good food, wine, and company: next week at two events!

On Thursday evening, I'll be at 18 Reasons with my co-author, Ken Albala, and our illustrator (my mother) Marjorie Nafziger. Wine and lots of good food -- Ken is bringing homemade salami, pickles, cheese, and bread. I'm bringing homemade doughnuts, butter, and koji pickles! My mother will have prints and cards of her illustrations available. July 22, 7:00-9:00 p.m. 593 Guerrero Street (just off of 18th Street). $5 for 18 Reasons members; $10 for non-members. 18 Reasons is a non-profit event space for the celebration of art and food. More about 18 Reasons.

On Saturday afternoon, I'll be at Omnivore Books on Food, again with Ken and Marjorie. We'll read and talk about the book in one of my favorite bookstores ever. It's entirely dedicated to cookbooks -- new, used, and antiquarian. July 24, 3-4 p.m. 3885a Cesar Chavez Street. Free. More about Omnivore. A write-up on SF Weekly.

Books will be available for sale at both events. I would love to see you at either one!

The Lost Art of Real Cooking (& Lacto-Fermented Jicama Pickles)

2010-07-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

The Lost Art of Real Cooking is a real book! You can get it here.

Yesterday, I got off the train from Oregon and just like that, all of a sudden, I was a published author. I was also tired, smelly, grumbling at the fog, and oddly nervous.

Is it odd to be nervous about book releases? Particularly, cookbook releases? It's not like I've just published The Collected Love Letters of Thirteen-Year-Old Rosanna (which, incidentally, would be a longer book than I'd like to admit). But still, reading over this cookbook, I find myself thinking, "I said that? But it's so opinionated! How bold!" and I shiver. Not that I don't hold those opinions, of course. But I've had a bit too much practice actively suppressing my opinions in the short-sighted belief that they would only stir up contention if I uttered them. I was nervous. I sidestepped controversy, nodded and said "hmm." I was afraid of being engaged. And now, there's a permanent record of my cooking opinions, in a book! So I'm nervous.

If only I had so actively suppressed my romantic opinions at the age of thirteen.

Certainly it's not very odd to be nervous about live radio interviews. Can you conceive of something more nightmare-and-fever-inducing to an introvert than a live radio interview? It's like talking on the telephone. Times a billion. Of course it's always worth it afterwards, when I'm glowing in the knowledge that the gracious interviewer was actually interested in my book and what I had to say, and that there were many stupid things I could have done and said but didn't. Then I play the interviews back, and notice how my voice sounds so girly and breathless, and wish all over again that I were one of those people who can be effortlessly warm and funny at once.

Like Ken, my co-author. You should listen to an interview he did for Good Food on KCRW today. You can find it here, sometime in the future when it airs.

Now I'm wondering if I'm supposed to confess this timidity, or not! I should be bold and forthright, shouldn't I?

Here's something decidedly bold: jicama pickles! I've only ever had vinegar-pickled jicama before, but it was good enough to convince me that lacto-fermented jicama pickles would be sublime. (It is one of my opinions that lacto-fermented pickles are superior to their vinegar equivalents.)

It took them almost a month to ferment at cold room temperature, but as soon as I got back from [sigh] Oregon, I stuck my nose in the crock and was rewarded with the beautiful aroma of mature lacto-fermentation. They had a little mold growth, which I skimmed off before ladling them into a jar for refrigerator storage. They're delicious right now -- snappy crisp, briny -- but I know they'll only improve as they age in the fridge.

There is one problem. Jicama is a starchy vegetable. The starch from the cut jicama has dissolved into the brine, turning it milky and unpleasantly viscous. Perhaps I should have rinsed the jicama very well after I cut it, to wash off its external starches. Without trying that method, I'm suspicious that more starches would have simply seeped out during fermentation. Or perhaps I should rinse the pickles now, before serving. But that makes me sad, because usually I treasure the brine nearly as much as the pickles (there's nothing like brine in a salad dressing!). Perhaps after I eat the pickles the starches will settle, and I can decant or siphon some clear brine off the top.

Jicama Pickles

Take two or three large jicamas. Clean and peel them and cut out any bad spots. Cut them into sticks about 1/4" wide. (Here you might try rinsing them.) Peel several cloves of garlic and pick the stems from a couple of dried chilies. Pack everything into a medium-sized crock. Mix a tablespoon of salt with a cup or two of water. Pour the water over the cut jicama just until it covers it. Place a clean, flat-bottomed weight inside the crock on top of the jicama. A half-gallon jar filled with water works well, depending on the size of your crock. The closer your weight comes to the edge of the crock, the better (air exposure = a place for mold to grow). Cover everything with a tea towel or layered cheesecloth to keep out bugs, and secure with a rubber band.

Put the crock in a dark, warmish place. Here in San Francisco, that means the cupboard over my refrigerator. If you're anywhere else that actually has a summer, you should probably seek out a relatively cool place. For the next few weeks, check on your pickles every so often. Skim off any visible mold and let them ferment until they start to smell like pickles. Transfer them to a quart jar, pour the brine overtop, and refrigerate. You can eat them now, or let them keep curing. They will only get better.

Slow Bread

2010-06-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been making Slow Bread. It's the bread I make when I've neglected my sourdough starter, but I want the deep flavor and chewy texture of a long, slow fermentation. The idea is simple: long, cold rising encourages flavorful lacto-fermentation, instead of astringent yeasty-flavored alcoholic fermentation. I positively detest the flavor of over-yeasted bread.

Slow Bread is also very convenient for the work week. I can mix it up before bed, knead it down just before I leave for work the next morning, and shape it into loaves when I get home. You can even let it go for a third rising in the bowl before shaping it -- so long as the weather's not too hot.

About that weather. I've been wearing wool for a week and my hands are growing bony with the cold. The cats have cabin fever and quarrel over my lap. It's deathly still for a moment and we are so stuck, so trapped, so entombed in this wretched fog. It's only June, but my heart quails at the thought of another horrid mummified summer on this godforsaken peninsula.

I suppose it's clear that my distaste for this weather is not unmixed with a certain macabre fascination. I like to take long walks among the shrouded eucalyptus trees, and I'm grateful when I don't have to see all the sunny-day people. But a macabre fascination in no way makes up for missing out on summer. And the summers I miss are not even golden breezy affairs, but sickly hot things spent working in the orchard with gnats up my nose and peach fuzz adhering to my sweat.

Well, if you have that sort of summer, you should let this bread rise in the springhouse or down in your basement.

Slow Bread

The night before baking, put 1/8 to 1/4 tsp. yeast (depending on how cold it is) in a quarter-cup of lukewarm water. Stir 2 T. salt into another half-cup of water.

Put twelve cups flour in a bowl. For all my bread these days, I use coarse, freshly ground spelt flour.

When the yeast is dissolved, add it and the salt to the flour. Add a couple of cups of water, and stir well. Keep adding water -- a bit at a time -- until all the flour is moistened. I would give you better measurements, but the amount of water you need will vary widely depending on your weather and the flour you've got. It should be soft but still bouncy. Knead the dough well, form it into a smooth ball, and place it in a large oiled bowl to rise in a cool place. Cover it with tea towels.

In the morning, it should be risen and bubbly. Knead it gently back into a taut ball, and leave it to rise again, still in a cool place. When it has risen high and its top has started to look not taut, but puckered, you can either knead it down and let it rise once more in the bowl, or shape it into loaves.

To shape the loaves, cut the dough in two. Shape each half into a taut ball, and let it rest in the bowl or a floured tabletop for ten minutes or so, to the give the gluten a chance to relax again. Oil a large baking sheet or two loaf pans. Take each ball of dough and tuck two opposite sides down and under, keeping the top of the loaf smooth and taut while letting it elongate. Place the shaped loaves in your pans or on the baking sheet and let them rise again.

When they are not quite doubled in volume (not height), still taut and springy, preheat the oven to 450. Place the loaves in the oven and turn it down to 350. Bake until they are well browned and hollow-sounding when tapped on the bottom, about one hour.

Henna, Paprika, and Hair: An Aside

2010-06-24T12:59:00.000-07:00

This is not particularly relevant to food, but it concerns the color of my hair, which used to be the direct inspiration for the title of this blog. I'm sorry to go on a long ramble about a topic as trivial as my hair. Skip it unless you're genuinely curious about the vanities of a paprikahead.

For many years, I kept my hair a crimson color with the aid of henna (and paprika, for fun). Henna, it seemed, was made for my hair -- it turned my light brown locks a shimmery, glossy scarlet. Almost the color of blood, as you can see by direct comparison in this photo. Pure fun.

But then I grew uneasy at the thought that I was daily deceiving the world into thinking me a redhead. And I grew uneasy with the fiery brilliance, which was too bold for either my pale eyebrows or my usual mood. I also wanted to regrow my hair the way it used to be, having gotten tired of trying to be hip, ironic, coy, or anything other than the sober Pre-Raphaelite I am.

Ah, the way things used to be. I never seriously cut my hair before I was nineteen, when it flounced about my hips in fluffy waves of almost-brown. College, however, was not good for my hair. I blame the cafeteria diet and a double major in mathematics and English for the way my hair thinned after my freshman year.

One day I put it in a ponytail, braided the ponytail, and chopped it off. (I kept the braid in a drawer until some perfect purpose occurred to me, like making creepy braided jewelry of my own hair. But the house caught on fire before I ever did something with it). I felt a little dizzy at first, without my hair. But it made a nice bouncy bob, and a few months later I started coloring it red. Its length varied a little, according to my moods and boyfriends, but it never went much past shoulder-length.

Then, the December before last, I grew really impatient with my roots. The half-red thing was lame, but I didn't want to just chop off my hair. So, for the first (and, I expect, last) time in my life, I set foot in a hairdresser's shop. He was hesitant to mess with henna, which can interact with salon chemicals in funny ways. But, bless his heart, he was willing to try, and so he bleached out the red part and put in some brownish color more like my own.

It was some relief for a while, but after six months or so, the brownish dye faded, revealing the persistent orange-red of bleached henna underneath. In addition to failing to remove the henna, the bleach had destroyed my hair, leaving the ends a brittle, tangled mess. Grrr. If I had more patience and less pride, my hair would be healthier and longer right now, and I'd have kept my salon virginity.

These days, I occasionally put golden-brown henna in the ends of my hair to mitigate their bleach-orange color. But mostly, I just wait. Soon there will be no traces of my paprika color anymore, and I will have to content myself with being only a figurative paprikahead.

That's fine, because at twenty-five, my hair is now just a few vertebrae shy of my waist, and as thick as it was at sixteen. The thickness I blame on a real food diet that includes two pastured eggs for breakfast, cod liver oil, and at least a pint of raw milk every day. Or maybe it's just because I sleep at night instead of doing problem sets and editing the lit mag? Whatever it is, I'll keep doing it, Hair, if you promise to hurry up and grow. I have to catch up with Laura Ingalls and the Pre-Raphaelite contingent!

A House That Stands on Chicken Feet

2010-06-22T17:22:00.000-07:00

I had a pop-up book when I was young, with terrible witches and misers and mysterious cats popping out all over. The text was a translation of the start of a Pushkin poem, and I can still recite most of it by heart. My favorite page featured the pop-up house of Baba Yaga, with dark pop-up pines leaning in close.

On chicken feet there stands a cottage,
No doors, no windows, bare and lone.
Upon the sands of hidden pathways
Lie tracks of creatures unbeknown.

Unbeknown? Whatever it takes to make it scan in English.

Oh, it was magical. The book didn't go into any more detail about the hut; I had no idea it was a central part of the Baba Yaga lore. It was just a chilling gratuitous puzzle, and I studied those pop-up feet intently.

This is all to say that chicken feet are witchy. They are also extremely practical, adding lots of velvety density to your chicken stock. But oh! The Quetzalcoatl reptilian skin! The toenails! Such things call for cauldrons, and upon such things my house should stand.

Well, my house does stand on chicken feet. Because my house stands on cookery (as well as books and love), and chicken stock is a firm foundation for my cookery (with a few other things, like good butter), and the stock made from chicken feet is a strong stock, indeed.

Chicken Stock from Feet

Put at least a pound of chicken feet in a large pot. Fill with water to cover. Add an onion, peeled and cut in half, a carrot, trimmed, and a stalk of celery, trimmed. Bring to a simmer and turn the heat to the lowest possible flame, so the feet just steep. Let them steep for at least four or five hours, or as long as twelve (they can cook that long if the heat is very gentle).

Strain through a colander. You can freeze the stock or keep it for a week in the fridge. Use it for everything -- even plain brown rice cooked in stock suddenly becomes attention-worthy.

A Handful of Culinary Delights, in Pictures

2010-06-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

A few recent photos of contented cooking and eating. Chortles in the middle of a productive purr, not noteworthy enough for their own posts.

Above is a good representation of the "firm, springy wads of gluten" you'll encounter in my sponge bread recipe. Does this picture warm your heart? It makes me so happy.

I gave into my dream-induced scallop craving. My most recent cooking dream: roasting strawberries and blackberries to put on ice cream.

This is what it looks like to be six and have a spring picnic.

Q & A with Paprikahead: Large Beans

2010-06-07T16:45:00.000-07:00

PAPRIKAHEAD HELP MEEEEE

I have these big white beans - what are they? Why have they split into two big halves that are toooo scary? What should I do to these tooo scary beans that have split into two? I want to eat them today! I bet they will cook fast because these tooooo big beans have been sitting on the stove for two days! HELP!!!

Yours Truly,

Big Fluffy Hamster in San Francisco

Dear Big Fluffy Hamster,

While I can't with any certainty identify your large beans, I can tell you something about the general properties of large beans. Beans often split as they soak; no problem there. The bad news is that even after a two-day soak they may still take a long time to cook, simply because they are so very large. Be patient, and you will be rewarded with a large creamy mouthful of beans.

Possibilities: you could have white runner beans (the white variety of scarlet runner beans). You could have gigantes, large white Greek beans. You could have some sort of big lima bean. Send me a picture?

All the best,

Paprikahead

Homemade Wine Vinegar

2010-05-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

I thought all my homemade blackberry wine was gone until I started ransacking my pantry when I was getting ready to move. (Oh, has it been that long? Yes, I moved up the hill a ways to a place with a vast backyard and a chillier ocean breeze.) One of the first things I did in the new kitchen was to turn the blackberry wine into a vinegar project. I have seen vinegar mothers for sale at high prices, but I figured that alcohol exposed to the air would become vinegar just fine by itself. So I just put it in a wide-mouth pint jar, covered it with cheesecloth, and left it in the cupboard. I really wouldn't feel at ease in a new kitchen if there weren't a magical transformation occurring in at least one of my cupboards.

After things were mostly unpacked, I took the next train to Oregon for a long-awaited visit with my brother's family. We had afternoon tea parties and evening rounds of zombie ball, and Legos and stories in all the between times. Then I got on the train again and sobbed my way back to San Francisco. Did you know that in Oregon there are thunderstorms and bare feet?

W. Crawford was away at work, so I went right to my cupboard for comfort when I got back to our apartment (no, not to the snack cupboard, because I don't even have one, but to the Cupboard of Magical Things). I took down my vinegar experiment, and one whiff convinced me it was a success. But then I undid the cheesecloth, and there was the most gratifying skin growing over the top of the liquid! Vinegar I had expected, but a glorious filmy mother-of-vinegar? I had assumed that if vinegar mothers cost twenty dollars, they must not form easily. I should have known. Homemade things are almost always easier and more delicious than businesses want you to think.

Now here's the question. When a delicious, vigorous homemade blackberry wine becomes homemade blackberry vinegar, how delicious will it be? I have been pondering this question quite patiently, fueling my imagination with whiffs from the vinegar-jar, hypothesizing about the effect of blackberry vinaigrette over x, and blackberry vinegar reductions on y, and I just don't know. I want to wait until the vinegar is as strong as can be. I think the mother should be at least an eighth of an inch thick before I even dip my finger in the jar.

And yes, that's another Paprikahead recipe: put something in a jar and leave it in your cupboard for a while.

On an entirely unrelated note, I had a delicious dream last night about roasting a chicken and some scallops. Wouldn't roast scallops be good? I imagine I'd have to roast them at a very high heat--nearly broil them, but just for a minute. I wonder if I could persuade my friend with a wood-fired pizza oven to try it.

Chocolate Ganache Pudding

2010-03-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

You might also call this "Instant Gratification Pudding." When you need this recipe, you'll know it.

It's for defusing sugar cravings. It only makes one serving, and you can have it ready in minutes. The pudding's got a bit of sweetness (from the dark chocolate), but its real merit lies in its completely satiating richness. It's so simple, it might not even be pudding. It might be just ganache with an egg yolk. And yes, that's the entire recipe.

Chocolate Ganache Pudding

Put half an inch of water in a little skillet over medium-high heat. Chop an ounce of dark chocolate into fine pieces. Put the chocolate in a tiny saucepan along with two tablespoons of butter. Set the saucepan in the skillet of hot water. Stir it occasionally as the pieces melt.

Meanwhile, put the yolk of an egg in a cup. Beat it with a fork.

When the chocolate and butter are both mostly melted, turn off the heat and stir them. Let the chocolate and butter finish melting in the residual warmth. When the chocolate and butter are all smooth, pour a bit of the chocolate into the egg yolk. Whisk it well with the fork, then scrape it all back into the saucepan. Stir it together, then turn the flame back on and cook it for just a tiny bit -- less than a minute, for sure -- until the mixture has gotten a bit thicker and glossier.

Scrape it into a small dish and pop it in the freezer. It should set up nicely in ten minutes.

Breast of Lamb Ste. Menehould

2010-02-26T14:00:00.001-08:00

Lamb breasts, also known as lamb ribs, come from the low-hanging part of the lamb's ribcage where the ribs are small and the meat is tough. Not rack-of-lamb material, not ribs-like-pork-ribs, not at all. Just marvelously cheap. Born to be braised.

I bought two pounds of lamb ribs planning to braise them like any bargain cut. When I got home, I decided to check with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, figuring he might have something particular to say about lamb ribs. Did he ever. There is a wonderful thing called Breast of Lamb Ste. Menehould, and the e on Ste. means that it is, indeed, French. And yes, you braise the ribs. But then you slide the bones out, cut the meat into strips, egg-and-breadcrumb them, and broil them crispy. You serve the crispy strips of tender lamb with savory sauces, and everyone makes cooing noises.

Slightly adapted from The River Cottage Meat Book.

Breast of Lamb Ste. Menehould

Serves 4.

Rinse two pounds of lamb ribs. Place them in a large baking dish, interleaved with two sliced onions and several sprigs of rosemary. Season with salt and pepper. Pour in a glass of white wine and a glass of water. Cover the dish with a lid or tinfoil. Bake for three hours at 275.

Pull them out when very tender and let the ribs cool to a comfortable temperature. Gently tug each bone out of the meat. Stack the meat in a tray and place a weight on top -- like a heavy wooden cutting board with a jug of milk on top. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight.

Shortly before you plan to eat, take the cold pressed meat from the fridge and cut it into inch-wide slices. Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall says they should be two fingers wide, but the picture shows slices about as wide as one of his fingers. Which, yes, is about two of mine.

Make sure your dipping sauces are ready. I made a harissa aioli (garlicky homemade mayonnaise with some jarred harissa mixed in). Mr. Fearnly-Whittingstall recommends either a homemade tartar sauce or mustard vinaigrette.

Beat an egg and have ready a cup or so of dried breadcrumbs and a quarter cup of melted butter. Spread the pieces of lamb with a little dijon mustard, dip them in the egg, and press them into the breadcrumbs. Brush them with the melted butter. Put the coated strips on a rack over a baking sheet and bake them at 350 for fifteen minutes. Turn on the broiler, and crisp the pieces for the final few minutes.

Serve immediately. Leftovers are nice the next day sliced thinly on a sandwich.

Molasses Muffins

2010-02-06T13:32:00.000-08:00

W. Crawford is off on a "little" 200k brevet today. A brevet is a long, long bike ride. The big ones take several days; you pedal on the uphill and sleep on the downhill. The main thing is that it's a self-sufficient ride. You have to haul your own snacks, your rain gear, your spare tubes, just like in real life. Once when I was very impressionable I saw a picture of a big colorful bike race. There was a guy in a car leaning out to peel back a cyclist's spandex shorts and squirt some lube down there for him. Nothing like that happens in a brevet.

My job was to pack enough snacks to sustain my randonneur for the ten hour ride (he can stop for a meal, if he feels like it). In lieu of squeezable goo-drinks and other high-tech, entirely artificial food for performance athletes, I sent him off with a stash of well-buttered rye molasses muffins, a quarter pound of cheese, and dates filled with coconut and sea salt.

I'm not just being flippantly anachronistic. These molasses muffins make excellent fodder for heavy exercise. By my calculations, W. Crawford needs nearly 9000 calories today. Exercise particularly drains magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron. If he eats all the (well-buttered) muffins I sent, he'll have 2000 calories right up front, plus 150% of the RDA for magnesium, and 75% of his copper, zinc, and iron. (Along with 500% of his daily manganese requirements, wtf?) If you include the chopped liver he had for breakfast and the righteous supper he'll no doubt have, this is one well-fueled randonneur. Don't worry; I only run the numbers when they're interesting ones, like "9000 calories."

That said, these muffins are dark, chewy, and moist, even if all the exercise you get is grinding grain. That grainy rye flavor is a marvelous (and appropriately subtle) foundation for something as deep and mineral as molasses. Rye flour has less gluten than wheat -- and less of a tendency to toughen -- but still keeps stuff stuck together. The oat flour keeps the muffins from spreading. Substitute quick oats or white flour if you have none.

I particularly like these with a glass of kefir.

Rye Molasses Muffins

Whisk together in a large bowl:

2 cups freshly ground rye flour
1/2 cup oat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground cloves

In another bowl, whisk together
1 egg
2/3 cup molasses
1 cup buttermilk, sour milk, yogurt, kefir, or (water plus a tablespoon of vinegar)

Put 1/4 cup butter in a small saucepan and melt it over medium heat. Let it brown lightly; remove from heat. Stir the liquids into the dries, pour in the butter, and combine. Cover with a plate and let it sit for the afternoon.

Spoon batter into greased muffin cups and bake at 375 for half an hour or until a knife comes out clean.

The Lost Art of Real Cooking

2010-02-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

It's a real book. Or rather, it will be on July 6. Look at that whisk! I just want to grab the wooden handle -- smooth with use -- and start whipping some cream. Ah, wooden handles and hard work.

It kind of makes me swoon. I think this calls for a second cup of tea before noon.

English Muffins

2010-01-21T09:35:00.000-08:00

A friend came over to make English muffins with me. It was such a rainy day.

We started with a simple goal: whole-grain holes. So we ground spelt berries until we were warm and had 6 cups of flour. Then we mixed in 2.5 teaspoons of salt. We put 2 teaspoons of yeast in half a cup of warm water, and let it dissolve. Then we put the yeast in the flour along with 1.5 cups cold water. We beat the mixture vigorously with a large wooden spoon for five, ten minutes, until it looked less like batter and more like dough. The coarse, freshly ground spelt flour is slow to absorb moisture, and that means it acts wetter than it will later on.

Then we squeezed the dough with our hands -- the dough still being too wet for the usual fold 'n' push kind of kneading. And when it began to form long lanky strands of gluten, we cleaned our hands, wet them, and added yet more water. The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book suggests a texture near to "runny," and we didn't stint with the water, not at all. I think we added another cup, gradually working it in until the dough was slippery, quivery, tender, and tendoned with gluten.

We let it rise, then, and ate a pleasant lunch and read our books. The rising process for a very wet dough is not quite like the usual one where your ball gets larger and larger. Rather, the rising process is one of intense bubbling. The mass rose, yes -- after maybe two hours or so it doubled. Then we stirred it back down -- usually an unremarkable process. The dough, however, did not fall back quickly, but took several minutes of stirring before reluctantly settling back down to its original size. Its bubbles were strong and well distributed.

It rose again, this time more quickly, and again we stirred it down. Then we generously floured two large rimless baking sheets. We cut egg-sized lumps from the dough, shaped them into floppy rounds, and placed them on the baking sheets. They were too wet to cover -- a cloth, unless well-floured, would have stuck. We had fifteen rounds when we were done.

We left them to rise and found a long enough gap in the rain for a nice walk up the dark drippy stairs on Potrero Hill.

By the time we got back, the rounds had spread out and puffed a bit. We warmed two large cast-iron skillets over a medium-low flame. Breath held, we lifted the first little muffin from the tray. It was a two-person job, sliding under the muffin from two sides and gingerly dropping it in the pan. You could do it by yourself if you had to.

We let it cook for five minutes on one side. We flipped it -- fingers work well for that. Bubbles formed. It puffed. Five minutes later, we flipped it again, and a few minutes after that, its sides were springy and we pulled it from the pan.

We split it immediately and discovered a beautiful array of holes, which we filled with butter and devoured. We were perhaps a little giddy with our success.

Our next goal is shapeliness. Rings might help the muffins be tall and circular. And then maybe we could altogether forego the shaping, let the dough have a third rising in the bowl, and just pinch off muffin-sized pieces as we fry them. This dough, after all, does not deflate very readily. And the shape of the rising rounds didn't seem to have much effect on the muffins' final shape.

Real, Raw Eggnog

2009-12-21T05:56:00.000-08:00

I can picture myself stricken with consumption, washed up on the pillows, pale but radiant with fever--can picture myself handed a cool, tall glass of eggnog. My pale thin fingers slip on the glass, but yet I raise it to my lips, and sip, eyes lidded with weakness. And as that silken custard touches my tongue, the luster returns to my hair and the pink blooms again in my fingertips. "Lissie," I say, "lace up my stays. I'm going to the Christmas ball tonight."

This is homemade eggnog, an unpasteurized festival of nutmeg-scented rum-rich cream. I wish I could drink nothing but eggnog from snowy dawn to early dusk, and all the long night through. But if I did, my skin would be so creamy, my eyes so bright and dewey, my hair so lush and wavy, that I'd have to dance with every man at the Christmas ball, and wear out my shoes with dancing. And I like my shoes.

Also the hens and gentle cows can barely keep up with me as it is.

This will make you a quart of eggnog. Since the eggs and milk are raw, I would not recommend making it with anything but eggs from the healthiest chickens. The golden yolks of those eggs will give it a creamy yellow hue and a richer, deeper flavor. If you only have access to storebought milk and eggs, make a cooked eggnog, or use lots of liquor to kill off bad bacteria. And the good bacteria in raw milk from healthy cows will actually kill off bad bacteria, should anything clinging to the shell of the egg find a way into the nog.

If you decide to drink eggnog daily, I would recommend using just six egg yolks instead of four whole eggs. Raw egg whites have a substance that causes biotin deficiency in the long term.

Raw Eggnog

Beat four eggs thoroughly. Add three tablespoons of maple syrup and a tiny pinch of salt and beat well.

Add some liquor--rum, brandy, bourbon--according to your taste. A few tablespoons will give you some flavor; a cup or more will give you a heady nog. Beat well.

Add three cups very rich raw milk, beat well. Grate nutmeg over it to taste. Chill for a few hours to meld the flavors.

Proper Weather

2009-12-19T10:14:00.000-08:00

This is as it should be.

The hens are fluffy enough.

Transcontinental Cornbread (Crumbfree)

2009-12-12T10:17:00.000-08:00

I always seat myself on the south side of airplanes. I like the sunshine on my lap. The clouds, too. Seen from above, their textures are so alien, surreal. They look like the puckering foam on top of bubbling jam pots. I know the bellies of the fatter clouds are indeed flatter from their close contact with the ground, but I'm never quite sure if these thin upper clouds actually have rougher tops than bottoms, or just look like it. From above, the low-angled sunlight highlights their texture so much that they jump into vivid dimensionality--and all we see from the earth is a muted greyness. I suppose clouds will always be smoother where the wind is faster and straighter. I guess that means the middles of thunderheads are all lined up straight, shooting straight up the middle like mushroom stalks or umbrella handles.

I'm heading home again, this time for my first Christmas home in four years. I've been home a lot lately, visiting Grandma, who dropped out of the nursing home to pursue the next life at her leisure. She's beautifully ensconced in a nook in my aunt and uncle's gracious old Lancaster farmhouse. There are cornfields and horses to see, and dry beef gravy, sauerkraut and pork, and molasses-tinted desserts on the tray by her bed.

That's what I think about as I nibble on my airplane food. Airplane food for me consists of last night's cornbread, several ounces of cheese, and chocolate. The cornbread was luxurious, moist, sweet, and toothsomely crusty, and I even baked it with air travel in mind. It's halfway to being baked polenta. No crumbs. And W. Crawford, who was under the weather and came reluctantly to the table, ate four slices last night, and three this morning.

It is imperative that the cornmeal be very fresh--very. Fresh cornmeal tastes of corn and sweetness, and will more than triple the goodness of any bread you bake with it.

Halfway-to-Polenta Cornbread

Mix three cups freshly ground, fine cornmeal with a teaspoon of salt. Bring three cups of water to a boil and pour it over the cornmeal. Stir it well and cover.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and thoroughly butter a well-seasoned #8 or 9 cast iron skillet.

In a small bowl, whisk together 1 cup flour and half a teaspoon of baking soda.

In another small bowl, whisk together a cup of buttermilk, sour milk, or sour half-and-half and two tablespoons of honey.

Check the cornmeal. I can't remember exactly how much water I used, so splash in some more if it looks more chunky than porridge-like. Add four tablespoons of butter and stir it until it's melted. Mix in the flour mixture and the buttermilk mixture and pour into the skillet. Bake until the top starts to brown.

An Assortment of Adventures, in Photography

2009-11-19T10:28:00.001-08:00

It's a rainy day in Virginia. The bread's rising. I've downed my third hot beverage of the day, written a letter, and sat in the rocking chair. The cat thinks he wants to go out. Seems like time to dig through my photos and remember some of my California adventures (which are not over, sigh).

A good crumb of flaky flaky pie crust.

Note the "no charge" for my soup bone. Another reason to love Bi-Rite.

That soup bone made the stew so velvety, so deep.

A pantry mishap. The same blackberry wine now stays in its bottle to age, having learned the value of restraint after sowing its wild oats in its effervescent youth.

Sponge Bread

2009-11-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

Breads made from a sponge that ferments overnight are halfway between quick yeast breads and sourdoughs, in all the right ways. They're savory, moist, and shockingly convenient.

Even wholegrain sponge breads rise lightly and spring wildly. Their chewiness is breathtaking. Their crumb is coarse. Every slice is composed of smooth, shiny holes, separated by panes of translucent bread. In fact, I just recently discovered a trick for making sponge bread even holier. Now it's so holy and chewy it's almost like a sliceable, sandwich-friendly English muffin.

If you're used to making standard yeast bread, you may be shocked at the tiny proportion of yeast to flour in sponge bread (here, a quarter teaspoon to 18 cups of flour). It's fine; as the sponge ferments overnight, the yeast multiplies exponentially. If you put in too much yeast, it becomes too densely populated during the overnight rise, and starts to produce a nostril-stinging alcoholic aroma. This aroma -- in a subtler form -- becomes the flavor of the finished bread.

The night before baking, dissolve 1/4 teaspoon yeast in 1/4 cup warm water. Dissolve 1 tablespoon sea salt in 2.5 cups cold water. Put 6 cups whole flour (I like spelt) in a medium bowl and add the yeast and salt water. Stir/knead it vigorously for several minutes, then cover it with a cloth and let it ferment for about twelve hours in a moderately warm room -- or longer in a cold room.

The next morning, the sponge will have risen up and collapsed on itself, looking spongey. Dissolve 2 tablespoons salt in 3.5 cups warm water. Add two tablespoons honey and 1/4 cup olive oil. Pour this over the sponge and mix it together with your fingers. Here's the holiness trick: knead the sponge while it's submerged in the warm water. As the starches in the sponge dissolve into the water, you'll be left with firm, springy wads of gluten in your hands. Don't let it go too far, or the gluten will be too firm to mix into the dough later on. It doesn't matter if it doesn't mix in smoothly.

I'm not sure why this works -- it's not like I've added extra gluten. Perhaps the underwater kneading makes it easier for the gluten to align itself into long fibers. It definitely becomes very ropy.

Put twelve cups wholegrain spelt flour in a very large bowl or pot, and add the sponge/water mixture. Stir it until it's combined, and see whether its moisture level is right. This will vary tremendously depending on the flour you use. For holiness and chew, I like this dough to be almost too wet to handle. Don't be shy about adding water if you need to -- or extra flour if the dough becomes an intractable batter. Knead it, or stir it vigorously for five or ten minutes, until it feels quite springy in spite of its softness.

Cover it and let it rise in a warm spot for about two hours, until it's doubled and full of spongey bubbles. Push it down, knead it a few turns, and let it rise again -- this time for about an hour.

When it's risen for the second time, collapse the dough again and divide it in thirds (four if your bread pans are on the smaller side). Form each piece into an elongated round, tucking the sides to form a taut, smooth surface -- which may not hold if the dough's quite wet. Place the shaped loaves in the buttered bread pans and let rise again.

When the loaves have risen well, but not too much -- nearly doubled in volume -- place them in a 425-degree oven for twenty minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 and bake until done (35-40 minutes more for medium loaves, an hour for huge ones).

Q & A with Paprikahead: Peas and Grapes

2009-10-21T08:45:00.000-07:00

Hey Paprikahead,

It's me, the fluffy hamster, wondering about some weird stuff. Really, really weird stuff.

Like Number 1: How come peas seem to be frozen or in cans? What would peas look like in a market? Where are they? They would fit so well in my pouches, making my cheeks soft to the squeeze yet textured to the rub.

OK, Number 2: Can I really use fresh grapes in my bread? I sure hope so. I have so few raisins and rumor is that raisins are really just dried out grapes. Maybe this is true? Oh Jeez. Better get rid of those seeds.

All right Paprikahead. These are just some small queries. I'm going to get back to nest building here in Portland and chasing the cat around.

I'm making a nice stock, by the way, and a soup shall follow. Directions courtesy of paprikahead.com, of course.

Your faithful small woodland creature of the night,

Fluffy Hamster

Dear Fluffy Hamster,

I'm afraid I have sad news for you today.

1. Peas, it turns out, are one of the sweetest signs of springtime. In farmers' markets, you can find them inside their crisp green pods. You shell them with a little push to pop their seams and a zipper-like action with your thumb. The little peas roll out, so cute, so sweet. For the shelling, I recommend child labor. Tell them it's a contest to see who can find the pod with the most peas in it. That's how I learned. They don't keep very well once shelled, so that's why you really only see them frozen. See if you can wait till next spring, Hamster.

2. I would not recommend making bread with grapes in it. First, the seeds would be a bit of a pain. Second, grapes are very moist -- much moister than bread dough -- and they would turn your dough to mush. It is true, though, that grapes turn into raisins. You could, if you were patient, pick the seeds out of your grapes and spread them out on a rack set in a black cookie sheet and dry them for several days in the sun, bringing them in before dusk each night so they wouldn't catch a drop of dew. Or, if you're in rainy Portland, you could put them in a very cool oven -- no more than 150, or they'll get crisp instead of chewy, and dry them that way for several days.

Something altogether different, having to do with grapes and bread, is the delightful fact that the dusty bloom on grape skins is actually wild yeast. You can jumpstart a wild yeast sourdough starter by putting a handful of grape skins in it. My coauthor, Ken Albala, has some good examples on his site, but sadly, the wild yeast sourdough recipe is part of our cookbook(!) so it's not on the web anymore.

Happy nest buildling, Hamster!

Paprikahead

Frugality in the Kitchen (No Corners Cut)

2009-10-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

These are Mama's scarlet runner beans. They bounce out of their leathery pods when you shell them, hot pink and flaming purple. They're a fun genetic study, too, as they mingle in the garden (purple is dominant -- all the beans on the left grew from seeds of their own color, but the beans on the right were grown from brown and tan seeds, and picked up the purple from their neighbors. I think white might be a different species).

To follow up on my frugality post, I'm putting together ten of my own favorite tactics for spending less on wholesome, satisfying food. I grew up in a household that ate a lot of scarlet runner beans and venison, and we lived very comfortably on a tiny food budget. That said, money is not the only resource worth saving. Your health is much more important. Also, I currently share a communal kitchen with four fellows who spend their days biking to and fro, so I'm not talking about saving money by eating less.

Things to eat:

(1) Dry beans. Canned beans are a convenient waste of money. Plus, soaking and partially sprouting beans increases the availability of their nutrients as the seeds tap their nutrient stores in preparation for germination. Partially sprouted beans take much less time to cook, saving time and energy. I keep a big bowl or two of beans soaking at all times in the pantry. To soak beans, cover them with three times their volume in water. Change the water twice a day for two days. Then drain the beans and either cook them at this point or rinse them twice daily until they've formed 1/4" sprouts.

(2) Eggs. Eggs are one of the least expensive, most thorough sources of high-quality protein you can buy. Even the best pastured eggs cost less than most meat, pound for pound (and they've got essential fatty acids and vitamin D, which you won't find in regular, cage-free, or free-range eggs). In short: the tryptophan! the selenium! the B vitamins! the choline, oh heavens, the choline!

(3) Homemade yogurt. Yogurt is so easy to make. You can buy the highest-quality raw milk for much less than the equivalent volume of mediocre yogurt, and make it into yogurt yourself.

(4) Fresh produce. Fresh produce tastes better, looks better, and has more nutritional value than produce that spends a long time getting shipped all over and stored in warehouses before you eat it. At farmer's markets, you don't have to give money to a middleman. Growing your own veggies is the best option if you have the space, of course.

(5) Lard. Even lard from the healthiest, happiest pigs is quite inexpensive, very satisfying, and rich in vitamins. Put tons of it in all those beans you cook to make them filling and easy to digest. You can get pork fat very cheaply from a butcher and render it yourself if you like.

(6) Organ meats. Not only are organ meats just teeming with nutrients, but they're less expensive than fancy cuts of steak. Personally, I'd take a braised heart or tongue any day over a steak, but even if you don't share my enthusiasm, try making some chopped liver for supper. It always wins over the liver-phobes.

(7) Porridge. Boxed cereal and ready-made granola are some of the most expensive foods you can buy -- especially given that they're half made of sugar and leave you hungry by ten o'clock. Make your own convenient oatmeal by soaking rolled oats overnight.

Things to avoid:

(8) Storebought alcohol. Ever since college, I have had many friends who complain that they have no money for good food, but spend five or ten dollars a day on alcohol. That's a couple hundred a month. Yes, yes, I understand. If you want it every day, brew your own or go get high on endorphins instead.

(9) Prepared food. Packaged food costs a ridiculous amount of money, and usually contains ingredients you'd never add for yourself -- strange preservatives and whatnot. This includes not just the obvious candy bars, but all sorts of organic faux-wholesome foods. Take packaged instant oatmeal. It's heavily sugared, wrapped in wasteful packaging, and costs ten times as much as plain rolled oats. And tastes like mealy spit-up.

(10) Reduced-fat anything. You'd pay to have someone strip your food of flavor and nutritional value?

Q & A with Paprikahead: Basil

2009-10-10T16:27:00.000-07:00

From a big fluffy hamster:
EEK!

The harvest has come to the north east and my parents wee garden is popping and retracting! It's here! And what to do!!!

Namely, my guru Paprikahead, I must know what to do with all of this basil! I got so big last year (almost like that cat Babette - the 18-pound monolith that frequents the Mission) that I just don't want to make the over-sized pesto. Is there a fine recipe you know to can basil? Perhaps some kind of sauce that I can later use?

Oh jeez. All of this Basil! What to do! I'd really like to use Mason Jars, too, rather than plastic bags. Plastic is so postmodern and shiny.

Salutations from the very end of Long Island,

A Big Fluffy Hamster.

Dear Big Fluffy Hamster,

First, the bad news. As a light fresh herb, basil does not can well. Think about canning lettuce.

It isn't perfectly satisfactory when frozen, either. Should you decide to freeze basil, you can lay it out on cookie sheets and place them in the freezer. When the basil is quite frozen, swiftly transfer it to a bag and keep it frozen until you want to use it. It will thaw within seconds of being removed from the freezer, and will go limp. It will be fine in cooked dishes but I wouldn't try it in anything else.

Now, some good news. Pesto will make you skinnier, not fatter. Look at it this way. Pesto is made of leaves, olive oil, cheese, garlic, nuts, and lemon juice. And a sprinkle of salt. Do you know what that is, Hamster? It's a salad. An extremely dense, mashed, raw, thriving salad. It contains not one empty calorie. You can -- and should -- eat pesto by the spoonful. Your coat will get all shiny and your eyes will be bright. In fact, if that Babette ate more pesto, she would be a svelte little mink, indeed. Furthermore, pesto does, in fact, freeze very well. (No canning -- that's cooking the salad).

One other option would be to make a basil-infused liquor: pack the cleaned leaves in a large jar, pour vodka over it, and let it sit for a week. I'm sure it will be delicious. Sadly, vodka is, of course, nothing but empty calories, and that's the problem you were worried about in the first place.

Other suggestion for our Hamster friend? Feel free to advise him.

Sincerely,

Paprikahead

Frugality

2009-10-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

"Dedicated to Those Who are Not Ashamed of Economy" reads the subtitle of The American Frugal Housewife, which was Mama's birthday present to me this year.

It made me wonder. Am I ashamed of frugality? Frugality's the hottest thing these days among the cruise-canceling set, but for those of us who have always been underfunded, frugality looks like dull work. And even in these straitened days, the prophets of frugality sound like bitter killjoys. Take the advice of the frugal housewife herself:

"Young ladies should be taught that usefulness is happiness, and all other things are but incidental."

She's right, of course -- just a few things are less happy than the feeling of uselessness -- but she sounds so harsh with all her "should be taught"s and "young ladies", and while frankly I think people waste a lot of money out of fear and ignorance and incompetence, I'm not about to tell them so. Am I ashamed?

Let's see. I just voluntarily quit my very nice job as a produce clerk to wing it as a freelancer. In this economy? How embarrassing. I just voluntarily subjected myself to the drudgery of scrimping, the grit of budget spreadsheets, the shameful penury of the unsteadily employed. I also lost my health insurance. (Obama, please hurry up with the health insurance. I'd like some before my beauty marks metastatize). In the meantime, I get to pull a number, grab a seat, and wait half a day in the very-unglamorous public clinic for my health care. (I consider nutrition my best health insurance, but there's always the risk of some drunk SUV-driving teenager running me over when I'm biking home with my eggs and milk). I'm a little ashamed.

As a small girl, I relished my self-proclaimed "weirdness" and delighted in my thrifty heritage. I did! I didn't mind the holes in my shoes, but I did mind that the socks poking out were unfashionably teal. And I didn't like the fact that our laundry hung to dry on a clothesline directly southeast of the outdoor woodstove. When the coldest winds came hurtling from the northwest and we stoked the stove to a fever pitch, we smelled like stale woodsmoke for days. I was a little ashamed. On most days, though, I'm a touch smug about my pennypinching.

For one thing, I can tap into a rich heritage of proud thrift. Every penny saved is a tic on my Mennonite scorecard. Nonetheless, I've had to shift some of my traditional definitions of frugal. Money is not the only resource -- what about health (and our children's health) and time and beauty? It isn't, for example, frugal to save large quantities of white bread even if it's free. Refined flours drain nutrients from your body when you digest them -- they spend health. Nor is it frugal to buy cheap chicken that comes from an industrial poultry farm that spews chicken shit and antibiotics into the drinking water and gives the workers brown lung. Nor is it frugal to spend hours of your time figuring out ways to save a few pennies.

It is, however, quite frugal to "waste" lots of time cooking for yourself and doing chores, even if you could go buy the same food for much less than your hourly wage. Why? Because building varied daily physical activity into your schedule makes you healthy and content. Grinding grain, hanging laundry, kneading bread, sweeping the floor -- these sorts of "boring" chores free the mind and relax the body. They can also be incredibly satisfying aesthetically (sigh for a line of well-hung laundry drying in the sun). And the aesthetics are crucial. It's much more fun to clean a light and lovely home, much more fun to cook in a well-appointed kitchen, much more fun to have people over for supper when the lighting's warm and mellow. This sort of beauty makes you happier and healthier, I do believe -- it's genuinely frugal and nothing to cause shame.

The Joy of Grinding Grain & a Pretend-Prenatal Diet

2009-09-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

There aren't many objects I lust over. My bicycle is my wings. My skillets are my magic fireproof hands. My dresses and books are quite well worn. The rug I made is lots of flirty dreams knotted together with hand-me-down tradition, etc. In fact, I don't own or long for anything fancier than what I can buy with a couple hundred dollars on craigslist.

Still. For the last decade, there has been a big something missing from my life. (No, W. Crawford, I am not talking about babies! Sigh -- more on that later). It's a grain grinder I've been yearning for. With a grain grinder I might finally be sufficient in the kitchen. I could make the most delicious and nutritious bread from the freshest, sweetest grains. I could make all sorts of exotic flours! I could make cornbread the REAL way, from freshly ground corn, which is orders of magnitude more sweet and satisfying than pre-ground cornmeal. I could feed my babies through the apocalypse!

So I had a birthday (a long time ago -- back in July) and reached my first QUARTER CENTURY. (Two weeks later, I discovered my first grey hair. A week later, I found my second). Anyway, William gave me a package all wrapped up in paper bags and stitched together with string and nails, and inside it I found the Wondermill Junior. He had called up all the best the-end-is-coming dealers and asked which grain mill they'd want their children to use during the apocalypse. The Wondermill Junior.

Of course I've been getting toned grinding nutty-fresh wheat and rye for my bread. But my biggest discovery so far has been buckwheat. Not only is it shockingly easy to grind (it's very tender), but you'd never guess how mild freshly ground buckwheat can be.

Most buckwheat flour is ground from toasted buckwheat groats, which is why it's dark in color, bold in flavor, and doesn't stick together very well. Even raw buckwheat flour has no gluten, and you can't make a very good dough from it. But I like it much better than toasted buckwheat flour for crepes, cookies, noodles, pancakes, and muffins.

Buckwheat itself is not a true grain, and much easier to digest than wheat. Plus, it's brimming with nutrients. I think about these things a lot, because frankly, I am so impatient to have babies, I like to pretend I'm on a pre-pre-natal diet. "Mmm," I tell myself, "this cod liver oil's for the baby's brain!" "Better have a bedtime swig of rich raw milk for the baby's bones," I say.

Yes, I'm crazy. I'm not planning on having a baby for a while. I'm not even married. But for whatever reason, I've wanted babies -- badly -- ever since I first got thighs. (I just found out in Real Food for Mother and Baby that thighs & hips are where mothers store essential fatty acids for their babies. The body only burns that fat when making babies -- and that's why a high hip-to-waist ratio is so attractive). From my growing library of prenatal-advice books I've also found out that in most traditional societies, men and women eat special nutrient-rich diets before they conceive. It makes sense.

And so I figured it wouldn't do any harm to channel my insane baby-wanting into something productive, like eating some good nourishing food. So I quit the refined sugar, and stopped drinking alcohol (which messes up my sleep, anyway), and found myself ten pounds lighter, clear-skinned, and chipper. By the way, nourishing to me means: two golden eggs for breakfast, topped with homemade kimchi. Sprouts and raw yogurt and walnuts and avocados and cheese for lunch. Chopped liver and beet salad for supper. Green tea to help me write and dark chocolate, walnuts, and raw milk for snacks -- mmhmm. And cod liver oil daily.

So this was a very rambling way to tell you what I've been up to for the past two months. In other news, I'm now a full-time freelance writer and editor. Sometimes I find myself clad entirely in heather-grey knitwear, and I am frightened. I love spending my days sitting with my cats, picking apart words, walking W.Crawford to the Apple bus, biking around, making yogurt.

How to Brew Your Own Kombucha From a Store-Bought Bottle of the Same

2009-07-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

Yes, you can use nothing more than a bottle of store-bought kombucha as a starter for your own never-ending supply of kombucha -- if you are patient and a little careful.

I'm not going to bother with the controversy over the health benefits of kombucha. It's a mysterious, ancient elixer fermented with a thick rubbery "mushroom" (the mother), which is actually a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (also called a SCOBY). Nobody has ever found a kombucha SCOBY in the wild, but it entered recorded history around 250 B.C. in China. The main thing is, it's a delicious, non-soda, (mostly) non-alcoholic, tart, fizzy, refreshing beverage.

The common wisdom is that to make your own kombucha, you have to buy a kombucha mother for a lot of money online, or acquire one from your housemate's boyfriend, who got it from a girl on Craigslist in exchange for a ride to Portland. Sadly, the girl on Craigslist may have a subpar kombucha mother. It's hard to tell, but not all kombucha mothers are the same. A neglected kombucha mother, or any of its descendents, will fail to produce delicious, fizzy, happy kombucha -- and it may even breed fruit flies.

Commercial kombucha brewers work with very high-quality kombucha mothers. You can propagate a high-quality kombucha mother of your own with just a bottle of raw kombucha from your favorite kombucha-brand, a little care, some sugar, and good black tea.

Here's why. Every bottle of raw kombucha has very small strands of kombucha mother in it. Your job is to feed those strands until they form a strong kombucha mother. Too much food, and the kombucha won't be strong enough to culture the substrate and it will mold. Too little food, and it won't grow.

Growing the Mother

First, select an excellent bottle of plain or gingered kombucha. It should have as many yeasty filaments floating in it as possible, and it must be raw. Heat kills kombucha. You can drink some of the kombucha if you like -- just leave all the sediment & stringy bits in the bottle, and at least half a cup of liquid. Next, ready the kombucha food.

In a small saucepan, heat 1 cup water to boiling. Add two tablespoons white sugar, and return the liquid to a boil until the sugar is dissolved. Turn off the heat and add one bag of organic black tea (or a tablespoon of looseleaf) and let the mixture cool at room temperature until it no longer feels the slightest bit warm to the touch. Remove the tea bag or strain the tea. Pour all the contents of the kombucha bottle into the sugar-tea -- the the sediment, the half-cup of kombucha liquid, and the stringy things (these will turn into the kombucha mother!), and put it all in a glass quart or pint jar. Cover the jar with a cloth and a tight rubberband to keep bugs out, and place it in a warm, dark, safe spot. Note that the kombucha liquid is necessary to keep the mixture sufficiently acidic. If the liquid is not acidic, mold will grow.

Keep an eye on the kombucha. In a few days or a week, it should star to grow a thin film over the surface. The film will thicken and become the kombucha mother. If any mold appears, discard everything and start over -- but that shouldn't even be a possibility if you have enough acid in the liquid.

When the film is about an eighth of an inch thick, you'll need to give it another little boost of food. It's not yet strong enough to culture a lot of kombucha for you to drink -- right now it's just growing.

This time, make a quart of tea. Heat four cups water to the boil, add 1/3 cup sugar, and steep with 2 tea bags or 2 tablespoons black tea. When the liquid cools completely, remove the tea leaves, put the baby kombucha and all the liquid and sediment in a large glass jar or bowl with the tea. Cover it tightly and watch it carefully. The kombucha mother should thicken significantly over the space of two weeks. When the mother is between 1/4 and 1/2" thick, you can use it to make yourself a batch of kombucha.

Making Kombucha

Heat three quarts water to the boil. Add 1 cup sugar, return to the boil until dissolved, turn off the heat, and add 4 tea bags (or 4 tablespoons looseleaf) black tea. Let cool completely to room temperature. Remove the tea bags or leaves, and put it in a one-gallon glass jar. Pour in a cup or two of finished kombucha liquid from the last batch (to keep everything acidic) and place the kombucha mother on top. It's okay if it sinks. Cover it securely with cloth and a rubberband, and place it in a warm, dark cupboard for a week or ten days. A new kombucha baby will grow on the surface of the liquid. When the kombucha baby is about 1/8" to 1/4" thick, taste the kombucha. If it doesn't taste too sweet, you can harvest the liquid (saving some for the next batch) and repeat the process.

And you can give the baby kombucha to a friend or someone who gives you a ride to Portland.

Blueberries, Apologies, Wistfulness, and Some Satisfaction

2009-07-01T13:28:00.000-07:00

Three years ago this fall Papa and I went to a junkyard in Virginia for a different engine to put in his tiny little late-eighties hatchback, which he was giving me for my journey West. Oregon, where I was born, has always been Papa's Promised Land, and he was happy to help me get back there. It took some tinkering, but the little car got me all the way out here, mountains, snow, and attractive midwestern boys notwithstanding. I've been home twice since -- the first time for four days, and the second time just now, for a pinched and stretched little week spent scampering from kin to friends.

It was a magical, dense visit. Everyone back home has settled into gracious old houses, and I happily settled myself in their porches and spare rooms, just parched with longing. I changed clothes several times daily -- tutus in the morning, garden scrubs in the afternoon, floaty porch-sitting dresses for the firefly-and-thunderstorm evenings.

Just before we got in the car to drive to the Greyhound station to fly back to San Francisco, I picked a handful of blueberries and promptly burst into tears. I ate them slowly, saltily, all the way across the Blue Ridge mountains.

But for all my homesickness, I've done pretty well by the West. Just two days ago Ken Albala and I submitted our manuscript to our publisher. Our publisher who is Penguin. Do you hear that? I'm not yet 25 and just finished writing (half) a book and managed to get a real-life agent and editor and publisher. I really have trouble connecting my daily laundry-hanging, yogurt-making, fruit-sorting, babysitting, hill-pedaling life with such things as happen to people in books.

It's a grand book we wrote, but it did leave me pretty quiet on the blogging front. No, much more than grand! The duck confit! The beer made from nothing but raw barley and hops! The miso from koji I cultured myself! And Ken -- such bread! and he cured his own salami and olives!

And the West also found me the very best boy ever, and we do get to be car-free and ride our bikes along craggy coasts, and we live in a soaring Victorian flat, and yes, I've met many dear friends and seen many marvels. But oh, meadows and thunderstorms and deep windowsills in old brick farmhouses.

Well, I'll try to blog a little more regularly now. There is, for instance, this bubbling vat of black-purple blackberry wine in my pantry.

Mennonite Doughnuts

2009-04-01T17:27:00.000-07:00

Edna Ruth Byler's Potato Dough Doughnuts have both fortified and funded many a Mennonite missionary. I tweaked the recipe just the slightest -- exchanging shortening for lard, margarine for butter -- and wound up with spectacular doughnuts (actually, their rectangularity means that they're fastnachts). Never mind that we're in the middle of Lent, when good folks eat neither sugar nor fat, and never mind that I'm in San Francisco's Mission District, which is rather the opposite of being a missionary. I'm trying.

It's a new kitchen. It needed some cinnamon-sugared deep-fried aroma. I've upended myself and moved once again (that's move number three in the last twelve months; lagging behind last year's four-move record). Hence the hiatus. Um, and actually, I'm going to go take another nap-hiatus ahorita, so I'll post the recipe later. Perhaps I'll wait till after Easter so as not to lead you into temptation.

Making Butter

2009-02-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

I take home leftover whipped cream from the creamery. I culture it with some yogurt for a while, and it becomes a lovely mousse-like cheesecake-flavored fluff.

I beat the fluff until the fat breaks. It turns grainy, and golden specks of butter appear in the translucent buttermilk. Like stars appearing at twilight.

The stars start clumping -- just like those nights H. Rose and I spread our cloaks over the dew in the cow pasture and watched the Milky Way congeal. Oh yes, and then the butter rises and it's last night's moon all over again.

I knead the butter under running water, cleaning out any trapped pockets of buttermilk. I save the majority of the buttermilk for baking. It contains the sugar and vanilla that were used to flavor the whipped cream.

Sweet as a newborn babe, that nugget! I kneaded in a pinch of sel gris and gave it a kiss.

Does anyone know of a local dairy goddess? Is she still accepting acolytes?

Q & A with Paprikahead: Pot o' Beans and an Accidental Reduction

2009-02-05T11:24:00.000-08:00

This, from a Hamster Reader:

Subject: recipe for big pot o beans?

you got one for me lady? i got bags of dried beans and want these suckers good good good. mmmm good.

-A Hamster Reader

p.s. and then i looked to the stove. it's on!, i thunk, and not like friday night hipsters going to the demolition derby. no, no. like the stove, it's on, like still turned on from the night before! and this is what i found.

turned to the lowest heat available the [pumpkin] soup had reduced all through the night (lid on with tiny hole for air passage) to this kind of thick, creamy looking goodnees. the top of it had this thick, thick skin that reminded me of, well, burned, charred pizza sauce. it was unlike anything i have ever seen, really, but i knew it was awesome from the first. and it was. the taste of this here sucker is sweet as candy, the texture thicker than chile, like a kind of paste for toast or something. i feel like the guy that *happened* upon blighted rye and tripped balls and gave the world the wee secret of acid, two hundred years before it was synthesized. or something like that. anyway, i thought you would like this story and that maybe it would make a smile.

Dear Hamster,

For the beans: first, soak them overnight in three times their volume of water. Drain them in the morning, fill the pot with fresh water, and bring them to a simmer. Simmer simmer simmer. Throw in some onions, ham bone or bacon, carrots, tomatoes, celery. Make them a little sweet -- molasses is good (with care!). Some apple cider vinegar for tanginess. And a lot of salt, but only after the beans are soft, because the salt will make their skins tough if you add it too soon. They should simmer all day, in proportion to their size.

I'm so happy your pumpkin soup reduction was magnificent and not disastrous! It sounds like a good task for a crock-pot, akin to making tomato paste or apple butter. I think I'll try to replicate it with the pumpkin on my counter.

My Sourdough Turned White!

2009-02-03T15:00:00.001-08:00

I've been happily tending to my new starter for some weeks now. I notice with pride its every milestone, watching misty-eyed as it develops character, strength, and smooth digestion.

This morning, like many mornings, I rose early and got a batch of bread going. The starter was chafing at the bit and the dough rose steadily. When I put it in the oven, it gave a yare spring and wafted up a fragrance savory enough I could hear the upstairs neighbors' stomachs growling. And then I noticed the crust was blanching. Like this:

Does anyone know why? The crust is thin but crisp, the crumb moist, a little bubbled, and tender. Perhaps I should start it in a hot, steamy oven to ensure perfect browning. Perhaps I should clean my room, which has evidence of a hundred ongoing projects:

Can you find (1) the bread, (2) the bicycle chain ready to be covered with waxed canvas & leather for a homespun anti-thievery saddle-leash, (3) W. Crawford's briefcase, tin cloth pants, and pinstripes, (4) Dogfish Head's chicory stout, (5) the flaky-ass router, (6) the milk crate holding my mending queue, (7) two of three bicycles, and (8) the recently-pruned Mystery Mint, plus the recently-repotted jade, dieffenbachia, and rapidly-rapunzelling ivy. All of which need constant, unwavering attention. And that's just one corner of my room.* No wonder my bread turned white -- my hairs aren't far behind.

I will not give you my bread recipe until it stops turning white. Instead, I will go cut another thick, warm slice and slather it with butter, which will melt, pool, and slowly saturate its velvety, spongy crumb.

*Actually the picture shows four of the twelve corners in my room.

Wholegrain Banana Bread, the Good Kind

2009-01-26T20:41:00.000-08:00

Here's the thing all the bran & germ hippies need to know: that bitter, gritty flavor of wholegrain bread, that flavor you pretend to relish? There's a reason you don't actually like it, deep in the crystalline magnetic reaches of your rainbow souls. It's not that you're an accountant in disguise. It's that underfermented wholegrain breads are, in fact, bitter and gritty and pretty much taste like yeast excrement.

Well, I guess that leaves us with... sourdough. All well and good, the sourdough. Such long, slow fermentations, so much intensity, texture, character, whatnot. Marvelous stuff.

But what about that banana bread? It only gets a little baking powder rise in the oven -- no fermentation there, to break down the bitter grit and make us a nice sweet strong loaf. And yet, we want some.

Oh look, here comes the dairymaid to the rescue. You can ferment quick breads (banana bread, cornbread, muffins) with yogurt to get a silky rich tender nubbly bread, with all the germ and bran melted into a creamy batter. My recipe is adapted from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions.

I make this stuff in batches when I have bunches of overripe bananas from Bi-Rite, and then freeze loaves of it to surprise W. Crawford in later, poorer days. Speaking of whom, note the funny little grin at the top of this picture. I was so engrossed in my banana bread photo shoot that I didn't notice my visitor for another two pictures. I hope you're similarly oblivious to the street-grime on my window.

Banana Bread

24 hours before baking, stir together in a large bowl:
6 cups whole grain kamut flour, wheat flour, or spelt flour
4 cups acidic liquid, being: yogurt, kefir, or water + a splash of raw vinegar
Cover with a plate and let sit till tomorrow.

The next day, butter 3 large loaf pans, preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and mash:
6 large overripe bananas

Whisk in:
6 eggs
1 T. vanilla extract
2 tsp. salt
1 T. baking soda
3/4 cup honey or maple syrup or other sugar
1/2 c. butter, melted (and browned slightly, if you like)
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans or dark chocolate chips (optional)

When well combined, add to the soaked flour mixture and stir until thoroughly mixed. I use my hands. Pour into the buttered pans and bake until well browned and a knife comes out clean, somewhat more than an hour. Let cool for a bit in the pans, then run a knife around the edges and ease the loaves out.

Wrapped in plastic when cool, this bread keeps well for days at room temperature. Or wrap tightly and freeze.

Q & A with Paprikahead: Thin Hummus

2009-01-26T08:52:00.000-08:00

From the first real, live person I ever met from Brooklyn, or all of New York City, for that matter:

I recently made a large batch of hummus that came out thin and a little bit underspiced. Do you have any suggestions for ways to use it where this won't matter? Pretty much all I ever do with hummus is eat it with bread, and I want some novel use for it. Or, do you have any suggestions for ways to transform it into something completely different from hummus?

Toby

Dear Toby,
You have several options. Under-spicing is fairly easy to correct. The consistency, less so. Of course you could make an extra-thick and over-spiced batch of hummus, combine the two, and continue eating hummus on bread as is your wont.

But if it's metamorphosis you're after, you could add extra tahini and squeeze in some more lemon juice and call it salad dressing. You could use it as a sauce for meat, inspired by the mixing of flavors that often occurs on large dinner plates at Mediterranean restaurants. Lamb, for instance, or keftethes. For that matter, you could really go out on a limb and make soup. I mean, is there anything in hummus you wouldn't put in soup? Maybe not so much lemon juice or spice, but the spice won't be an issue for you. The olive oil -- well, it probably won't break its emulsion if you don't make too thin a soup. But if you added just the right amount of stock, and some tomatoes, you could call it whatever you liked. Garbanzo bisque.

Speaking of keftethes, and the fact that you are now in Seattle, you should check out Vios Cafe, where I used to be a pantry chef. Oh my goodness! They opened a new one in Ravenna! With a pub and science on tap. Yes, Seattle, I have been gone too long. (Not that I was ever there longer than the time it took to break a couple of hearts, slice some feta, and drown it all with olive oil.)

Sincerely,
Paprikahead

San Francisco Apple Pie

2009-01-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

One of just three apple varieties indigenous to California, the Sierra Beauty is tart, crisp, and juicy. It gets rather soft when cooked, but I still think it makes an excellent pie -- especially if your pie is small, and subjects the apples to less oven time. Come to think of it, why is there so much emphasis on cooking with apples that hold their shape under heat? So long as the apples don't get mealy-stringy mushy, I like a soft creamy filling to contrast with my flaky crisp crust. In fact, two tall, stylish European customers the other day particularly requested "pie apples that get soft like applesauce apples." I led them straight to the basket of Sierra Beauties, of course.

Aside from the Sierra Beauties, the other thing that makes this pie distinctively San Franciscan is that I served it up with Bi-Rite Creamery's salted caramel ice cream. The ice cream is quite intense, so garnish sparingly.

A note on apple peels: when I'm in a big hippie hurry, I don't peel my pie apples. That's just fine for your traditional dry, firm pie apples and your favorite hungry farmer, but it simply won't do for creamy pie apples and San Francisco epicures. The leathery bits of skin will be obnoxiously obvious in the otherwise velvet-soft pie. To balance out the lack of wholesome peels, I've decided that apple pies are much better with MINIMAL sugar. This one has 3 puny tablespoons. I eat it for breakfast at 5 a.m. before cycling off to work at Bi-Rite.

San Francisco Apple Pie

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Have ready:
one unbaked pie shell
another pastry round for the top

In a large bowl, toss together:
5 medium sierra beauty apples
(peeled, sliced, and cored)
3 T. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
several gratings of nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt

Let the apples and sugar macerate while you get the pastry ready: leave an overhanging rim on the bottom crust, and cut pretty patterns out of the center of the top crust.

Arrange the apples in the pastry shell, dab with bits of butter, cover with the top pastry round, and trim it flush with the rim. Then fold the bottom crust's overhang back over the edge of the top crust and flute.

Bake until the crust starts to gild, then reduce the oven temperature to 350 and bake some more until thick juices bubble out of the center holes.

Q & A with Paprikahead: Ravioli

2009-01-16T10:07:00.000-08:00

A hamster couple posed a question about ravioli:

Dear Paprikahead,

Hamster and I are hoping to make ravioli tomorrow for some people in Montauk. We perused your blog for some ravioli inspiration, but are still feeling lost. Hamster makes a mean pasta dough, but what would you suggest we put inside the ravioli? What to coat it with? We made a bunch of pesto yesterday, consequently we're hoping to avoid it tomorrow.

Sincerely,
Hamster Couple

Dear Hamsters,

Oddly, just yesterday somebody asked me the same question. I recommend roasting some butternut or other winter squash and mixing the insides with ricotta, salt, butter, and minced-up rosemary. Or ricotta, egg, salt, and pepper. A long time ago, W. Crawford wooed me with a ravioli filled with mashed (cooked) beets and ricotta.

Fancily-filled ravioli are great in a simple browned-butter garlic sauce. Slowly melt a stick of butter. When it gets frothy and golden-brown, add a couple cloves or so of crushed & finely minced garlic. Remove from the heat and let it sit for a few minutes to diffuse the garlic flavor. Spoon over ravioli.

Sincerely,
Paprikahead

Last-minute supper questions? Fantastic adaptions of my recipes? Unscrubbably burnt disasters?

rosanna at paprikahead dot com

Winter Chicory Salad: Escarole, Radicchio, and Sweet Potatoes

2008-12-30T19:48:00.000-08:00

This is how I eat salad in December. By the crunchy, juicy-bitter, burgundy plateful. With a slice of dense bread under fork-marked pâté, I call it lunch.

Winter Chicory Salad

Rinse as many radicchio and escarole leaves as you want to eat. Shake the water off them and tear them up a bit. Dump a very well-roasted sweet potato on top; drizzle with olive oil, maple syrup, and apple cider vinegar; and season with salt and pepper.

Orange sycamore leaves: San Francisco's rare bit of evidence that it is, indeed, December. The sweetgum trees are just starting to turn.

Persimmons, Roasted or Stuffed in Delicata Squash

2008-11-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

It surprised me to discover that persimmons perform spectacularly in the oven, turning all maple-custardy inside. Last week I roasted some fuyu persimmons, red onions, and brussels sprouts, and took them to the Obama potluck garnished with toasted walnuts and drizzled with maple syrup. I was so happy when Virginia and Indiana were colored blue on the map -- both states in which I have registered to vote, but never thought it would matter. Obama hangs out with Alice Waters, said the farmer Waters shops from.

San Francisco erupted into spontaneous street parties. I biked between joyfully honking cars on Market Street, and threaded my way through the crowds on Castro, where a bit of anxiety tempered everyone's glee. California's Proposition 8 passed. What a piece of hate-legislation it is: using the state constitution to tell some people they can't marry.

Tonight I spooned super-ripe peeled fuyu persimmons into delicata halves with minced shallots, raisins, and butter, and baked them up till quite tender at 425. And then I had cornbread crumbled in my lentil soup. I made Sally Fallon's yogurt-fermented cornbread from Nourishing Traditions, which was light, gold-crusted, nubbly, and deeply corn-y.

To roast persimmons: select ripe-orange, almost-tender fuyu persimmons. Rinse them and pluck out their gorgeously symmetric leaf-tops with your thumb. Slice them in eighths and pick out any pits. Arrange them on a buttered baking sheet, sprinkle with salt, and roast at 400 till golden on the underside -- twenty minutes or so -- and flip them. Continue baking till uniformly golden, crisp on the outside and very tender on the inside. Toss with other roasted or cooked vegetables, or eat plain with butter.

How to Roll a Crepe

2008-11-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

Pick a sunny morning -- the last sunny morning of Indian summer will do -- and make some crepe batter. I whisk together a cup of flour, 4 eggs, and enough milk or water to make a very thin runny batter. I like to add several tablespoons of ground flax meal because it makes a pied-beauty speckling on the undersides of the crepes (and, magically, only the undersides). Then I heat at least two skillets to medium-hot, with a little butter, and go into skillet-slamming wrist-gyrating batter-dribbling pancake mode. The idea is to make a small puddle of batter in the middle of the skillet, then lift the pan and swirl it around to spread out the batter. When I saw my Aunt L. first make these, I was completely awestruck. She used a cast iron griddle that left characteristic concentric rings on the bottom of the cakes.

And then she taught me this, which I thought the height of elegance, a trick so deft and dainty as to be just about as much fun as donning her dress-ups:

But of course, you can always roll your crepes like a denim-ripping miscreant:

The denim-ripping miscreant was also responsible for the roast apple-banana-carrot-currant filling. Delicious.

Kitchen Mold Farming

2008-10-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

I keep having this terribly haunting dream that I'm treading barefoot through the dark furrows of a field, my steps labored not just by the quicksand-moist soil but the girth of my tummy. I think I'm going a little wonk for lack of healthy dirt.

So I've been planting crops in my little apartment kitchen. Mold crops. This one is koji mold: aspergillus oryzae, for the cultivation of miso, sake, and unusual pickles. Look! I even got to make furrows in the rice-substrate. Perhaps you can't tell from where you are, but the rice is covered with a white chalky mold, which I liken to the luminous green mist hovering over a distant field of freshly-germinated sprouts.

This is another one for the cookery-book.

Pastry: A Butter-and-Cereal Serial, Part the Second

2008-10-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

So there I was, bread flour and almost-too-warm butter, ready to make some pastry to wrap around those blackberries. In Part the First I chronicled my pastry odyssey, from my juvenile reliance on a no-fail egg-and-vinegar recipe to my whole-hearted adoption of the simplest ingredients: flour, salt, water, and butter-and-nothing-but. Now for the juice:

"What did you do differently?" W. Crawford asked.
"Four things," I said, spearing a forkful of tender, yielding, evanescent flakes. "First, I pinched in the butter."
"That's not so unusual," he said.
"But this time I pinched carelessly -- leaving rather large chunks! And second, I did use an egg as part of the liquid."
"That's not cheating?"
"No, I decided it wasn't. It was to compensate for the bread flour, you know? Anyway, eggs are nutritious. Third, I rolled the dough, then folded it in quarters, and rolled it again, just like Aunt L. -- only this time it made real sense because I didn't pinch the butter so small."
"And the fourth thing?"

I picked up a piece of the bottom crust. Glassy-golden, but tender, it had completely resisted the sogginess of the blackberries. "Back in the olden days," I said, "butter was cultured. You'd make butter once you saved up enough cream, and that cream might be pretty cheesy by the time you got to it. That was fine -- it made for awfully savory pastries."

"Did you culture some butter?"
"Not this time. I calculated that old-fashioned butter was likely somewhat acidic, and helped break down the gluten in flour. And more likely than not, the gluten was already somewhat frayed from standing in the field and germinating partially. Instead, I added a splash of that really nice golden balsamic vinegar in the cupboard."

"Cheater!"
"No, no, no! I'm only compensating for our faulty modern ingredients! Hundreds of years ago when I was an Alpine dairymaid all pie crusts were flaky, tender, and pure as my intentions!"

To be entirely honest, W. Crawford never said most of those things. Mostly, he said, "Mmph." But just to prove that I'm not actually cheating -- that I am, in fact, being more "authentic", I think next time I'll use a little whey instead of vinegar. And then nobody can call me a juvenile training-wheels baker. Pbbbbbbt.

Pie Crust

Makes 4 large crusts. In a large bowl, whisk together:

5 cups flour (pastry, all-purpose, yea, even unto the bread flour)
1 T. salt

In a small bowl, whisk together:
1 egg
1 T. acidic liquid, like vinegar or strong whey
2 T. ice water

Have ready:
more ice water

Using your fingers, briskly pinch 1 lb. butter into the flour. The goal is to have a variety of butter chunks, ranging from little crumbles to marbles, all malleable but not warm. Merely slicing the butter will give you square chunks that won't properly flatten into a billion flaky layers when you go to roll out the dough. Every so often, plunk both hands in the flour and feel out the largest pieces. Quickly rub these between your fingers to make smear-crumbles. The whole process should take just a few minutes, and it's okay if you feel a little slatternly -- soon everything will be in order.

Drizzle the egg mixture into the flour, fluffing frequently with a fork, until mostly distributed. Continue drizzling with ice water and fluffing until most of the mixture is in lumps but a fair bit of it is still loose and crumbly. Divide the dough into quarters, pat each quarter into a crumbly ball, cover, and refrigerate for an hour or so.

Lightly flour your rolling surface and remove one dough-portion from the fridge. With the rolling pin, pat it down, packing it until it holds together, and roll the dough, from the center outwards, into a 10" disc. Gently fold the dough in half, and then in half again. Re-flour your rolling surface, and roll the dough a second time into a large circle, checking frequently to be sure the dough isn't sticking. Fold the dough in half and transfer it in your pie dish. Unfold it, push it into the corners, and trim any excess hanging more than 1" over the edge. Use the trimmings to patch any thin or torn areas.

If making a single-crust pie, fold the overhanging rim to lie flush with the dish, press it together, and flute it. If making a double crust, just leave it as-is. Cover the crust loosely and return to the refrigerator. Repeat with the remaining crusts. When rolling out the dough for a lattice top, you may find it simpler to fold the dough in thirds, like a letter, before rolling it the second time, since it doesn't need to be circular.

Pastry freezes well, so you can line a pie dish, wrap it up well, and stash it in the freezer for another day.

Pastry: A Butter-and-Cereal Serial, Part the First

2008-10-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday while W. Crawford had my bike up in the gurneys, I pranced into the kitchen with a bucket of blackberries and had a pastry epiphany. Later, the grease washed from his hands, W. Crawford lay down his fork and looked at me. "What," he said, "did you do?" My standard pastry, though flavorful and layer-flaky, was sometimes won't-return-your-calls flaky. I chalked it up to my ornery devotion to butter-&-nothing-but, and didn't try to fix the matter. But this pastry, laced over bubbling blackberries, was -- I almost can't believe it still -- perfect.

When I was thirteen, I made pies with Crisco. We didn't know about trans fat back then, and Crisco was cheap and tenderized the flour into shattering flakes. With the aid of a "no-fail" egg-and-vinegar pastry recipe, I made lovely pie crusts and considered myself a perfectly competent, eminently marriageable Nice Mennonite Girl (NMG). I even used the dough scraps for cinnamonjigs.

One day I ate a slice of rhubarb pie made by my Dread Pirate Robert's mother. She's one of those bone-china-elegant lawyer-sharp perfectly-appointed Mennonite women whose everyday speech is heavily bespattered with other languages and references to the grand old books that line her wisteria-shrouded study. I once saw her in denim. I was certain she could tell that my vinegar-egg pie crusts were really just training-wheels, the culinary version of rubberpants. I started leaving out the vinegar and egg, and after a few false starts, managed just fine and even retained my partially-hydrogenated NMG status, for the moment.

Mama has always had a remarkable nose for faulty imitation, either in boys or oleomargarines, and it wasn't long before we cleansed our kitchen of all such mistakes and went on in buttery good health. The flavor of my crusts improved dramatically, but I found them less predictable. The pastry -- while perfectly layered with butter strata -- produced tough unbreakable flakes. For a period of time, I even made whole-wheat all-butter pie crusts, but I decided the health benefits weren't worth the texture/flavor sacrifice, and read that unfermented whole grains are difficult to digest. Back to the white flour, and onward in my quest for pastry perfection.

After college and a glorious lard-crusted stint in Hungary, I met an unfortunate hobo on the rebound and went in for his grated frozen butter technique. Before too long, I packed up all my worldly possessions and rolled out West. On the way I adopted two cats from my cousin and visited my long-lost cook-turned-pastor Aunt L., who pinches the butter into flakes with her fingers, rolls the dough out partially, folds it in quarters, and rolls it out again for something approaching the flakiness of a laminated puff-pastry dough. The pinching was time-consuming whenever I tried it, but she managed to get up on Thanksgiving morning and make a dozen such pies before the the turkey went in the oven.

I made some mighty fine pastry in the tenacious little shack in the Wallawa Mountains, what with the (yes, literally) icy room temperature and the woodfired cookstove. Down in the moderate climes of the coastal region, I grated if I had frozen butter, and pinched if I didn't. I made vegan pies for my roommates, and lactard-friendly pies for my lactard friends. Everybody was happy. Except for me -- where was my perfect pastry, my elusive rolling-pin-up starlet ? Had anyone out here ever met an NMG?

Sunday, then, a bucketful of blackberries on the counter and my dear little bicycle up in the gurneys, I leisurely went about the pie-making. I had bread flour and non-frozen butter on hand -- not my ideal set-up, to be sure.

To be continued.

Potluck Peach Pies

2008-09-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

Speaking of bikeable containers for brownies, I think I've found my solution to the biking-to-the-potluck problem. In its purest formulation, the problem goes like this: a good Mennonite woman must rise at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning to milk the cow, pick fresh blackberries, grind fresh flour, make fresh butter, and bake the flakiest pie ever tasted for the church potluck. Once everyone circles around the heavy-laden potluck tables and patiently sings all seven verses of Praise to God, Immortal Praise, she -- the modest, hardworking alto -- works just as carefully to deflect any praise for her pie.

"Well, thanks, but I overbaked it and it bubbled over. Guess I get to clean out the oven tomorrow -- that'll teach me!"
"I think one of the children sat in it on the way to church this morning. Gracious, yours are growing so fast."
"With all the rain last week, I'm afraid the berries just weren't so good. I'm so grateful, though -- sure helps the corn!"
"Oh, no, it wasn't a thing. I just needed to use up those peaches, and you know, they're having a sale on butter at the dent-can store. How do you always get your chow-chow so crisp? "

With a rather thick streak of this potluck-perfectionism running through my veins, I find myself utterly flummoxed by the bicycle. How am I to bike with the perfect pie -- a syrupy peach pie, say -- and have it remain sufficiently intact so I can denigrate it in one piece? I found an awfully appealing solution over at Smitten Kitchen. A solution so appealing, in fact, that M. Sergei threatened to pop my tires so I couldn't leave the house with my two dozen peach hand pies, which I called pielets (like eyelets in a white summer nightgown, like violets under the dogwood, like what girls can be too if you give them wings, like what your mother tells you to do with every armload of firewood).

The pastry here has an unbelievable capacity to stretch and flake and puff.

Peach Pielets

adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Combine 2.5 c. cold flour and 1/2 tsp. salt. Grate in 1/2 lb. frozen butter. Cut a bit with a pastry blender to the consistency of coarse meal. In another bowl, mix together 1/2 c. sour cream (or Greek yogurt, which I had on hand), 4 tsp. lemon juice, and 1/2 c. ice water. Make a well in the flour-butter mixture and pour in half the liquids. Stir it about until lumps form; set the lumps aside and add the remaining liquid to the powdery unlumped flour. Pack everything back together again (gently!), cover the bowl with a plate, and refrigerate for an hour.

Place half the dough on a lightly floured surface and roll 1/8" thick. Cut into 4 or 5" circles. Put the circles on a parchment-lined baking sheet and chill while you roll out and cut the remaining dough (including the scraps -- just stack them and re-roll). Let the circles chill half an hour while you make the filling.

For the filling, combine:
2 lbs peaches, peeled and cut into half-inch dice
1/4 c. flour
1/4 c. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 T. bourbon

Take one tray of pastry circles from the fridge. Put a tablespoon of filling in the center of a circle, brush the edge of the circle with water, and fold the circle in half. Press the edges together a bit, and then seal them decoratively with the tines of fork. Make up all the pielets and chill at least half an hour.

Preaheat the oven to 375 degrees. Make an egg wash with 1 egg yolk and 2 T. water. Brush the tops of the chilled pastries with the egg wash and prick a steam-vent in the middle with a sharp knife. Bake until puffy and gilded, about 20 minutes.

Triply Chocolate Brownies

2008-09-23T10:08:00.001-07:00

I was dicing samples of peaches yesterday at work when the catering manager placed this still-shrink-wrapped Le Creuset enamaled cast iron baking pan on the table and asked me if I wanted it.

"It's just been collecting dust upstairs," she said. Naturally, it weighed a ton and half when I was biking up Polk Street.

Of course I had to take it for a spin around the kitchen once I got it home. At first, I was making regular brownies. Then I decided to replace some of the flour with cocoa powder, and they were doubly-chocolate brownies. And then I found myself sprinkling whole chocolate chips on top of the batter, and I was up to my knees in triply chocolate brownies. When I pulled them from the oven, Chocolate No. 3 had become shiny pools glinting on the chocolate landscape. Quick as a wink I studded the melted pools of chocolate with fat crystals of sea salt and packed the fragile young brownies into bikeable containers. With all that chocolate, they weighed a ton and a half as I swooped down Polk Street. They were still molten by the time I arrived.

Triply-Chocolate Brownies

Set out 4 eggs to warm up.

In a double boiler, or very carefully over direct heat, melt together:

1/4 lb. butter
1/4 lb. dark chocolate, chopped

Place the chocolate-butter mixture in the freezer to cool, stirring occasionally. Butter a 9 x 13 baking dish.

When the eggs are warmer and sweaty, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Beat the eggs with 1/2 tsp. salt till foamy and light-colored. Whisk in:

1.5 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla

Then dump in the chocolate, exchange the whisk for a spatula, and briefly mix it together. Add:

3/4 c. flour
1/4 c. cocoa powder

Combine everything swiftly and pour into the buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with 1/4 c. dark chocolate chips. Bake till not super-gooey, 25 minutes or so. Place large crystals of sea salt in the melted chocolate chips before they cool. These brownies will totally keep you up at night.

Apple in His Lunchbox

2008-09-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

Clockwise from apple: fiscalini cheddar, medjool date, molinari salami, gouda pettig, my sprouted wheat bread, a shot of espresso, and Cocoa Programming. It's a far cry from the alfalfa sprout sandwiches of my youth -- and a further cry from the Lunchables I sometimes thought I wanted. It's to keep W. Crawford from buying lunch with his bicycle-money.

Bicycle-money definitely covers the cost of the golden balsamic vinegar and maple syrup with which we dressed our salad for a picnic on the beach by the craigslist house where W. Crawford bought his latest bike frame. Unfortunately, we also dressed everything else in the lunch-sack, including the beer and peach cobbler and gold-beet ravioli. A summer ago, he wooed me with beet ravioli. I plied him with apple pie....

And bicycle-money certainly must cover the breakfast of buffalo momos in the garden, and fig & prosciutto crepes I made for supper last night. Were it not for the biking and the chain-cleaning and the oh-dear-me bottom bracket, we wouldn't have been so hungry. So long as Apple keeps the apple in his lunchbox, I'll bring home the prosciutto, and the bicycle money will get us pretty far. Home?

Cornmeal Peach Muffins: Portable Peach Cobbler

2008-09-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

Potlucking by bike is tricky work, almost as tricky as picnicking. For some reason, sweets lend themselves to portability in a way roast goose just doesn't. And so the potluck diabetic begins his insulin spiral through the shoofly pies and gingersnaps and (in some anonymous midwestern towns dear to everyone's heart) triple-cookie marshmallow jello krispy mush.

Just think of these muffins as portable peach cobbler. Pack them full of fiber, butter, and less-guilty sugars, bike really fast, and maybe you'll turn out all right in the end. I flipped open the old Boston Cooking School Cookbook for the structure here, but a little of this morning's oatmeal porridge sneaked in, the butter got itself browned, a streusel fell on top, and the peaches just got all sunny-soft inside.

Cornmeal Peach Muffins

Preheat the oven to 400 and butter a muffin pan.
Peel two big peaches and dice them in medium chunks. Chop the peels a little finer and (not kidding!) add them back to the peaches.

Combine:
2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
4 t. baking powder
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup oat bran
1/2 tsp. grated nutmeg
and whisk it all together.

In another bowl, mix:
1/4 lb. melted and browned butter
one serving leftover porridge
4 eggs
2/3 cup yogurt
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup maple syrup

For the streusel topping, combine:
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar
pinch nutmeg
pinch salt
and rub in:
4 T. butter

Add the liquids to the dries, fold in the peaches, ladle into the buttered muffin holes, and sprinkle generously with streusel. Bake until golden and a knife comes out clean, some 25 minutes. Makes 1.5 dozen.

Paprikahead is Expecting

2008-08-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

Since March when I plunked down my bags on the well-worn oak floorboards of my TenderNob flat, I've been busy making the kitchen look less like it faces on a garbage chute, and more like some chickens could wander through at any moment. My favorite thing is the pantry with its dutch door, which faces on crocks and jars and tomes.

And now -- if the old desk lamp over the stove didn't do the trick -- I can officially call it my office. My laboratory. My nursery. There's a little something in the oven, and it's due before I turn 25. The learned culinary historian Ken Albala and I are putting our crocks together and making an antiquated cookery-book, which Penguin/Perigee is being so kind as to publish, probably in early 2010.

I can scarce believe it. Does the year 2010 even exist? Let alone contain a book authored by ME? As I told the agent/author I intern for, I seriously couldn't have chosen a better lot for myself if I were eight, and that's saying a hell of a lot. I mean, at six, I knew that when I grew up I would sustain myself on lima beans, venison hearts, and rice pudding, and keep my two dozen babies dressed like 18th century nobility in an underground catacomb-house. But at seven I composed a felicentric novella and by eight I was on to poems about the rainbows on fairy wings. I haven't looked back since:

Flicker flicker
Quickly trick her
Snidely snicker
Let them bicker

Flutter flutter
Bite the butter
Spill and clutter
Tongue's a-stutter

(Glitter glitter?
Now I'll get her
Gnash and spit her
Wings are bitter!

Haven't lost the knack.

Anyway, now I can be an author writing about venison hearts and rice pudding!

White Nectarine Jam

2008-08-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

Cool mountain nights retard ripening and encourage sugar production, making for drop-dead late-bloomer peaches and nectarines. There's a farm up in the mountains in Placerville where they grow drupes like what I sweated under in Virginia.

The nectar in those nectarines! Makes me a honey bee in those honey beans! I hopped on my buzzbuzz little nymph-green one-speed and raced home after a sixty-hour work week with a sackful of bruisy peeling white nectarines, of the sort that attract fruit flies like me and won't sell but couldn't possibly taste better 'less my quivering hand plucked them from the tree itself. I peeled them, sliced them, mashed them up, tossed them with honey, pectin and a scattering of raspberries for color, and made myself a little nectar for the winter.

Jam! The POP of a sealing jar thrums some fat, long chord in me, and gives me sudden chicken-keeping laundry-hanging urges. While my Back Forty may be far off in the misty (not foggy) future, jam, at least is well-suited to cramped urban confines. A few pounds of fruit will give you enough sweetness to fill half-a-dozen jars, which don't take up freezer space and look as pretty as can be on your pantry shelf.

When it comes to nutrition, I do not look among my canned goods for healthy staples. Rather, jam is a marvelous summer-reminiscent garnish for buttered toast, thumbprint cookies, and cheese. And that winey fig jam I made with the moldy calmyrnas and missions, all speckled with crunchy seeds and rather too thick? Ready-made filling for pastry-scrap turnovers.

White Nectarine Jam

Bring 5 half-pint jam jars to a boil in enough water to cover them. In another pot, bring their lids and rings to a boil, too. Turn off the heat and let everything sit in its sterile water.

Halve, pit, peel, slice, and half-heartedly mash 5 cups white nectarines. Toss with a quarter cup of lemon juice and the recommended amount of calcium water that comes with the low-sugar pectin, like Pomona's. Bring to a boil and stir in 1/2 cup honey mixed with the pectin powder. Return to a boil and turn off heat.

Pull jars from their hot water and fill them to 1/4 inch of the rim. Dip a clean cloth in the hot water and wipe the rim of the jar to remove any spattered jam or other schmutz, place a lid on the jar rim, and screw on the ring. Cap all the jars and place them in their hot water. Bring them to a boil, turn down the heat to maintain a gentle bubble, and boil 5 minutes. Remove the jars from the hot water and let cool overnight. You should hear the "pop!" of the jars sealing as they cool. When properly sealed, the lids will be sucked-in and not pop in and out when you push on the center. The acidity and sweetness of jam make it fairly risk-free as far as canning projects are concerned.

I Always Make Truffles

2008-08-12T16:41:00.000-07:00

Lactase. More like LACKtase. More like lacLAZE. More like I'm just a lactard and that's all there is to it. It seems, lately, when I go to do something nice for myself, like go to Polk Street and drink two cups of complementary chai -- which is the real-deal, tea-&-spices-brewed-in-milk-not-water -- my innards curdle. My stomach grinds to a halt. Like as if I just drank molten wax, which has now set up in my tummy, forming a perfect hermetic seal. Gradually, I begin to feel like that can of soda your brother methodically shakes back and forth, back and forth, snickering, "Want some? Want some? Here, let me open it for you."

As a youngster, I invented an odd little recipe for chocolate-covered coconut candies. I wanted a Mounds bar. But I didn't know what to put in the center -- what, exactly, is the medium for white candy centers? I asked myself. Could it be marshmallows? Maybe Crisco? Cookie dough? I had never heard of fondant, let alone partially hydrogenated high-fructose sludge. So I tried cream cheese ("It worked in the icing"), and stuck with it. The candies never tasted Quite Right -- nowadays I would scratch my chin and say, "Harrumph! The synergy between chocolate and coconut is antithetical to the synergy between coconut and cheese." Quite Right or not, I was terribly afraid my brother would eat all the chocolates without acknowledging my culinary genius, so I added mounds of salt to the fillings of a few, memorized their locations in the wax-paper-lined tupperware container, and warned my brother that if he didn't consult with me before eating one, he would have himself a nasty surprise. I took to hanging around outside the kitchen door, eager to watch him writhe in agony when he sank his gluttonous teeth into the briny cheesy coconutty chocolate at D7.

Now, when I am feeling lactarded and nervous about a potluck where I know all of two people, I return to my chocolate-coated roots. These days, I spike my chocolates with bourbon. Where did my creativity go? Hard so say, but the bourbon sure helps with the nerves.

Dryad Soup: Lentil-Barley Mushroom Brew

2008-08-06T21:16:00.000-07:00

I served this dryadic sylvan soup in walnut shells and garnished it with lichen. It was tricky rounding up conch shells in which to serve the mermaid salad (dulse, wakame, and kale in sesame oil), but I had no difficulty collecting baby-seal eyelashes for the dressing, what with all the offshore drilling. Sigh. The dryads are tapping their wooden fingers together, and furrowing their shagbark brows.

Actually, it was just a sackful of grungy mushroom culls that inspired this soup -- those, and a ratty little sprig of marjoram. Add that toothsome chewy thing I love so much about barley, a splash of maple syrup and a handful of French lentils, and you have what the housemates lauded as "the best housemeal yet." M. Sergeivich ate with a handcarved wooden spoon I purchased with a loaf of my homemade bread in West Virginia. Does that count as a walnut shell? What if I had a loaf of my spelt baguette warming in the oven, and some creamy grassfed yogurt to plop on top of the soup? Some coconut bourbon truffles for dessert?

If you don't serve the soup with yogurt (which would be very unfortunate), the entire menu is, incidentally, vegan.

Dryad Soup

Brown a chopped onion in the bottom of your soup pot. Add two quarts of water, a chopped carrot, a couple stalks of chopped celery, and a few chopped tomatoes; bring to a simmer. Stir in 1 cup French green lentils and 1 cup pearl barley. Simmer till barley and lentils are soft, about an hour. Make several tablespoons of whole-wheat roux* with coconut oil and add to the soup along with a couple tablespoons of sea salt, a few grinds of black pepper, a splash of maple syrup and honey or molasses if you are so inclined. Meatless soups require a lot of tasting and adjusting: they never have that rich mouthfeel or perfect caramelly quality, so mimic it with acids and sugars and rich roux. A couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, generous swizzles of honey, and you're good to go. So long as you serve it with yogurt.

Twenty minutes before serving, add 5 cloves crushed and minced garlic, 3 cups chopped assorted mushrooms (I used shiitake, cremini, and a lone fraying portobella), and half a dozen sprigs of spritely fresh herbs: thyme and marjoram, for example.

Serve with rich yogurt.

*You know, heat several tablespoons fat in the skillet, add an equal quantity of flour, stir about while it bubbles and gilds a bit, and then drop it in the broth.

Black-Eyed Pea Soup with Smoked Pig

2008-07-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

A friend asked why I was making soup on a summer's day. This city is freezing me slowly with sweet salt breezes, is why. In any case, porky bean soup makes a nice meal for the winter, or late fall when the collard greens aren't snowed over yet, or a foggy day in July. The fellow behind the deli case didn't know what a ham hock was. I wiped a little honeysuckle tear from my firefly eyes and found a smoked shank for myself.

Also on the menu (for a successful Week Three of house meals at the TenderNob Flat): Padrón peppers, cornbread, and collard greens. I like my cornbread with cooked grits, and I liked my grits gritty -- not those little globules of cornstarch you find in the diner, but the whole-corn variety, more like polenta. I simmer the grits while the beans simmer.

Black-Eyed Pea Soup

Soak 2 cups black-eyed peas in a large bowlful of water overnight. Early in the afternoon, drain the peas and put them in a large pot with more than twice their volume of water. Bring to a simmer. While they simmer, chop and add an onion or two, a carrot, a stalk of celery and some leaves, a pint of canned tomatoes*, and a quarter-cup of honey.

When the beans have softened a bit, add a smoked bony chunk of pork, whatever part of the pig it might be, and a small palmful of salt. I often divide my chunk into two pieces and freeze the other half for later use. It really doesn't take much for a savory hamminess to creep into the beans.

Then keep simmering. By 7:00 the beans ought to be nice and velvety-soft, the meat fallen from the bone, and the tomatoes a reddish mush. Add water as necessary. Pull out the meat, chop, and throw back in the soup. Serve it up, nice and hot.

*I believe in canned tomatoes. Even boughten ones, if you don't have your own. They're usually picked and packed in season wherever they're from -- making them higher quality than expensive out-of-season tomatoes. They're condensed and sturdy, so they require less space when shipped, and needn't be refrigerated during the process, reducing oil use and emissions all around. But better yet, can your own when they're in season.

Chocolate Beet Cake

2008-07-16T16:24:00.001-07:00

I prefer numbers that, like vegetable-laden cakes, have many factors. I dislike the significant, holy numbers like 3 and 7, and particularly loathe large prime numbers, which remind me of tax-evading misanthropes. So thank heavens that as of yesterday my age is no longer a middling-large prime number. I'm annoyed that 3 is still a factor, but there's nothing for it but to wait out the whole 8 years before I haven't any odd factors at all -- and make myself a birthday cake.

It's to be a fudgy beet chocolate cake, with a mixing method that's more brownie-inspired than not, and therefore quite simple. Confession: I'm winging it. Like dirty Mrs. Pigeon on the ledge across the alley.

Beet Chocolate Cake

Prepare 2 cups beet puree: boil three medium beets halfway covered in salted water till quite tender. Drain and let cool. Slide off their skins, chop them roughly, and toss them in your favorite pureeing device. I like the Foley food mill because it means I don't have to add water as I would in a wimpy blender.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9" round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment. Flour the sides.

Melt over medium heat:
1/2 lb butter
8 oz. unsweetened chocolate

Pour the chocolate mixture into a large bowl and beat well with:
4 eggs
2 cups sugar

In another bowl, whisk together:
1.5 cups ordinary flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt

Gradually fold the flour into the chocolate, alternating with the beet puree.

Pour into the baking pans, smooth the tops, and bake until risen in the center and a toothpick comes out clean, somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes depending on the material of your pans and whether or not you have a kitchen timepiece. Cool briefly before removing the cakes from the pan and letting them cool completely on a rack.

Frost with a (mint?) buttercream or cream cheese frosting. It occurred to me afterwards that some lovely dramatic results could be achieved by putting beet puree in the frosting, too. Gold beet puree! I can't wait to make it again. And you know what? Because of all the eggs, the top has a lovely sheen, which the beets turn maroon. You might even serve the cake plain with whipped cream, or do a minimal see-through drizzled glaze job on it. I didn't allow myself enough time to be inventive more than twice. I curdled the first batch of buttercream by trying to simultaneously add Greek yogurt and answer the door -- at which point I started brandishing my whisk with a mad glint in my eye and everybody scampered till the cake got itself under control.

Grilled Peach Salad

2008-07-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

My sitcomly diverse housemates and I have instituted a house meal plan. Monday it's meat and potatoes, noodles dressed in soft eggs and bacon -- from the Croatian. Tuesday the Jewish pre-med hands us a platter of pasta and ketchup and tells us it was a delicacy back in Russia. Actually, he's fond of some fish and greens and things, too. Thursdays the Indian dishes up dal and curry and rice. Wednesdays the Mennonite girl spends all morning at work handling peaches, and winds up with a let's-put-yummy-things-together-and-call-it salad. Last week it was let's-put-yummy-things-together-and-call-it avgolemono.

(Oh, yes, I'm regularly employed now at a health-insurance-providing charming little market down in the Mission. I make cornucopiac cascading displays of peaches. And I get discounts at the creamery across the street).

In designing a menu for my housemates, I have to consider their capacities. The Russian says, "Back in Russia starvation was a delicacy," and chows down on plateful of food like he just did an Ironman in Siberia. Not so far from the truth. His favorite hobbies are going to the gym, running, and wishing he went more places icicle-free women also went. The Indian bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge to and from work every day. Add an extra 1200 calories to both of their portions. The Croatian is slender, rather like a daisy growing on a cloud. It's encouragement to limit my plate accordingly. My meal-planning tactic so far has been to make a regular supper and supplement it with vast quantities of good bread.

Rosemary-Thyme Aioli

Place two egg yolks in a bowl. With a fork, beat in one drop of olive oil. Beat in another. And another. Now a teaspoon. Beat. Now a splash. Beat. When it is stiff and glossy, add a sprinkle of salt, a tablespoon of minced rosemary, a tablespoon minced thyme, and the juice of half a lemon. It should be almost swizzle-able -- if not, thin with lemon juice or thicken with oil.

Grilled Peaches

Dip whole peaches in boiling water for a minute so you can easily slip off their skins. Or peel them. Cut them in half, remove the pit, and place them on a fairly hot grill or one of those skillets with raised lines. When nicely seared, rotate them 60 degrees to make pretty cross-hatching marks. When those marks are well-formed, flip them and repeat. Cover for a bit, then lift them carefully and leave somewhere they can cool.

Grilled Peach Salad

Arrange chunks of cooled grilled chicken legs, sliced grilled peaches, and soaked sunflower seeds or tomatoes or avocado or cheese, all on a pile of rinsed and dried lettuce. Serve with rosemary-thyme aioli.

Cherry Cream Tart

2008-06-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

Once I was picking sour cherries with an erstwhile boyfriend. The arrangement -- 2 quarts for the farmer, 1 quart for me -- meant that I had to pick pretty quickly, and I was greedily picking away (plink-plink-plonk), juice running to my elbows (plonk-plank-plink), gnats sticking in the juice (plunk plunk plink), when the boy announced (plink) that he didn't, in fact, like picking cherries (plonk). Unfortunately, I said something that may have included unfavorable references to his D&D character's Constitution, and things fizzled out shortly thereafter.

Another summer, another boy and I noticed my Aunt S. Jean's magnificent cherry tree just as we were about to leave. We wound up extending our visit to pick and pit every cherry within reach, and then capped the day with some Dylan in the ballpark. Dylan was a mess, but we got to study his wizened blue eyes for twitches of sardonic grace. Another boy and I discovered that in Hungary, tart and sweet cherries are two different fruits (meggy and cseresnye). I turned brandied meggyek into pie for Pi Day. He was fiercely loyal to his Rainier cherries, and later we ate them by the fistful in sight of their towering namesake. But I am not really a sweet cherry girl....

This summer, Mama calls me up to tell me how many sour cherry quarts -- nay, bushels -- she's put up, while I hunt and peck to find them in San Francisco at $5 a pound. Sure, I can tolerate the widely-available sweet Bing and Rainier cherries, nibbled juicily fresh off the stem, but they turn to a mealy bland mush when baked. Pie cherries, though, positively ripen under heat, getting glossy, translucent, and breathtakingly intense. Withstanding the oven's crucible -- now that's a winning trait. And cherry pie is my favorite flavor of heaven.

But what's to be done when a pie's worth of sour cherries cost more than $10? Stretch them out over pastry cream and a rich shortbread crust.

Cherry Cream Tart

Prepare and bake a 9" sweet shortbread tart crust
Prepare a 2-cup batch of pastry cream

When the crust and pastry cream are cool, spoon the pastry cream in the tart shell. Rinse and pit 2 cups sour cherries. Pitting is most easily done with a paperclip. In a small saucepan, whisk together 4 T. sugar and 1 T. cornstarch. Drizzle in 4 T. red wine, blend well, and add the cherries. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly until everything thickens, turns clear, and boils. Remove from heat and stir in a splash of bourbon. Immediately spoon on top of pastry cream. Chill till set. Avoid transporting on public transit during rush hour.

Serve with soft dollops of lightly-sweetened whipped cream.

Pastry Cream

2008-06-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

Put 2 cups milk over medium heat and bring to a frothy (not boiling) scald. Meanwhile, heat a skillet full of water. Beat 2 egg yolks in a small bowl. In an enamel or steel bowl, whisk together 1/4 cup sugar and 2 T. cornstarch (or 3 T. flour). Pour the scalded milk into the flour mixture in a thin stream, whisking constantly. Place the bowl in the simmering water and stir till thickened, 5 minutes or so. Pour a cupful of the hot milk mixture into the egg yolks, whisking well, and pour back into the hot milk. Keep it in the simmering water, stirring constantly, until even more thickened, 5 minutes or so. Remove from heat and stir in 2 T. butter and 2 tsp. vanilla. Chill with tinfoil or a plastic bag pressed directly against its surface.

Peach Apricot Cobbler

2008-06-15T19:49:00.000-07:00

Or, The-Late-Bird-Gets-the-Bargain Cobbler. Or, It's-a-Party-in-the-Biscuit-Tent-and-Drupes-Are-Invited.

As I was taking the de-escalator to the train today, a stranger just leaving the farmer's market asked me for the time, and then launched into a peach paean. He was a photographer, he explained. "You can slice them, and watch the droplets of juice bead on the cut." I was already feeling a bit sorry for myself, being in such a remarkable hurry to walk somebody's dog that I couldn't stop to browse the overflowing market stalls for myself. I should've, though. The train tunnel was clogged for the better part of an hour, a polished intercom lady-voice repeating over and over that the N was arriving in 2 minutes.

The poor dog was crossing its legs and doing the dance by the time I arrived. On the way back, I was terribly afraid the market would be packed away entirely. All those peaches and their beads of juice. Maybe there were pie cherries, too? Fruit on the brain, I skidded to a halt right at the toes of a 7-foot cop asking for the ticket I hadn't purchased. I didn't hide my infinitely-flusterable calico-two-shoes propitiating nature, and after a gentle reprimand, the guard let me on my way, with assurances that I really needn't worry this time.

I ran up the escalator with my adrenaline rush to find that the market was closing up. Vendors hawked their last-minute bargains, and I swooped in to snag large dollar-bags of peaches, apricots, and cherries. After eating half a dozen of my juicy drupes over the kitchen sink, I cast about for a good fruit-dump recipe for all the ripe stuff I couldn't reasonably consume in one sitting. I struck on Fannie Merritt Farmer's peach cobbler recipe in the Boston Cooking School Cook Book, notable for its use of an egg for thickening.

Peach Cobbler

1 egg, well beaten
2/3 cup sugar
3 cups sliced peaches (or apricots)
1/4 cup butter
Baking Powder Biscuit (one standard biscuit recipe)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Combine egg, sugar, and peaches. Pour into buttered 9" baking dish. Dot with butter. Cover with biscuits (I like making rhombi and arranging them radially). FMF and her BCSCB don't give a timing, but bake till the biscuits are golden and the peaches are bubbly. She recommends serving it with Butterscotch Sauce, Hard Sauce, cream, Hot Orange Sauce, Lemon Sauce, Soft Custard, or whipped cream flavored with cinnamon and sugar. I shall have to have mine plain like the holes-in-my-stockings ticketless pauper I am.

Update: Reduce the sugar to 1/2 cup or less if you have cusp-o'-ripeness ambrosial fruit (which is, of course, the ONLY kind you should have). I baked my cobbler a little past golden, as the biscuits just weren't getting done. I do like a nice boggy-bottomed biscuit on my cobbler, but it ought to be soggily saturated with fruit juices, not underdoneness. Especially because I used some rather sketchy whey and sour milk for the biscuits, which is only acceptable if they bake through entirely.

Drunk Raisin Muffins

2008-06-10T17:38:00.000-07:00

When I put raisins in my favorite oatmeal muffins last time, I found them rather dry. Dry like a town with no cheer. The solution? Get your raisins drunk and send them stumbling into the batter. Rather like making mulled wine -- with the spotlight on the raisins, not the half-drunk cabernet that spent several days on the counter -- I put 1.5 cups of red wine in a little saucepan with 1 cup raisins, 2 sticks of cinnamon, and 3 cloves. I brought it to a simmer and let it sit while I made the batter.

For the batter, combine 2 cups flour, 3 cups rolled oats, 2 tsp. baking soda, and 1.5 tsp. salt. In another bowl, mix 3/4 cup brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 tsp. vanilla, and 2.5 cups whey (or other sour dairy product, like yogurt or buttermilk). Pour the wets into the dries, mix well, and let sit until the oats soak up the moisture. Just before baking, drain the raisins from the wine (pick out the cloves and cinnamon), and fold them into the batter. If your wine is like mine, its raisin-bathing labors will have only improved it. Spoon the batter into greased muffin cups and bake in a 350 degree oven for 25 minutes or till golden on top. Makes 12.

Make Cheese When the Fridge Freezes

2008-06-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

When things go wrong, Babette-the-Cat tells me, make cheese from the curdled mess. This time, the refrigerator froze a top-shelf bottle of kefir, causing the butterfat to separate from the curds, which in turn separated from the whey. Thank heavens for mason jars and cheese cloth -- I would that there were such a convenient solution for my other woes. Or even a nice analogy. Let's see -- I suppose cheesemaking is rather like panning for gold, which is rather like solving pecuniary problems. In any event, I had the curds draining by my desk as I worked, and it smelled sweeter and sweeter the warmer the afternoon became. Perhaps I should market dairy-based room fresheners.

We have yet to see how butter chunks will affect the cheese. Probably they will separate entirely into a wee teaspoon of butter, and my strange little cheese shall be the less rich for it.

Update: The butter re-emulsified quite nicely with the curds this morning. Have a care when salting the curds, as it takes an hour or more for the saltiness to diffuse and permeate the cheese. Babette knew it for the cheese it was as soon as I took it from the fridge. No wonder she's such a plumpkin -- her brother's favorite food is wheatgrass, and I don't see him toting a bowling-ball belly around.

Beer Bread

2008-05-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Fressen Artisan Bakery,
I wanted to check out the rhubarb scene at the farmer's market down by People's Food Co-op, and I thought it a good excuse to take my new broomstick of a bike for a spin. I found forests of rhubarb, and bought a couple pounds of the crimson stalks. Then I saw your bread, and it looked like Europe, and so I asked about it. You told me all about the long-fermented sourdoughs, the dense volkornbrot and some rolls I'd be tempted to call zsemle, and you even gave me a sample of that enormous beer bread loaf behind the glass. I said I'd like to buy it, only to discover I had squandered almost all my funds on rhubarb. Even combing out all my change, I still came up $2.50 short. But you gave me the loaf anyway, and it filled up first my backpack and then my tummy. It was exactly perfect: sour and light, with a crackly thin crust and a moist, tender interior. Thanks ever so much.

Love,
Paprikahead

Molasses Cookies with L33T Sauce

2008-05-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

While the Reed math department hunkered down around a case of PBR and blew up each others' dirigibles, I hid out in the kitchen with some bourbon and a hankering for moist, sweet-salty molasses cookies. Like most good clean fun, the LAN party required more set-up than play time -- but it seems to have the same appeal as cookie dough and dominoes and novels about long, tedious courtships. I'm still not entirely sure what L33t Sauce is, but I think it has something to do with PBR. Or maybe it's a cool, tart glass of kefir, which pairs marvelously with soft cookies -- coating them without penetrating to their already-tender interiors. Crunchy or firm cookies are still better in milk.

In any case, these cookies were so good that I made another batch this morning before breakfast.

Savory Molasses Cookies
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Thinly slice and lay out to soften:
12 tablespoons butter

Whisk together:
2.25 cups flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
3/4 tsp. salt

Cream the butter with:
1 cup brown sugar.

You can beat it on medium with a mixer. While I have nothing against mixers in theory, in a quick little recipe like molasses cookies I find them a bit clunky. All that plugging-in, and hunting for the beaters, and washing the beaters, and then the server crashes again and everybody dies. Instead, I go all primal and knead the butter and sugar together with my (clean) fingers. The benefits are manifold, but the best is that there really is no commercial moisturizing product quite like creamed butter and sugar. The sugar crystals gently exfoliate and energize your tired skin, while the butter cools, conditions, and seals in moisture. Knead lavishly.

Then whisk in:
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 cup dark molasses

Whisk until lightish and fluffy. Add the dry ingredients, mix until just combined, and shape into 1.5" balls. Roll the balls in a little bit of white sugar to make them sparkly and arrange on a parchment-lined cookie sheet about two inches from each other. Ooh, you could even add a sprinkle of coarse sea salt to the rolling-sugar, and reduce the salt in the dough. Bake till the cookies are lightly fissured on top, pull them from the oven, and let them cool just a bit on the cookie sheet before removing them to a cooling surface (rack, flattened paper bag, your mouth) and popping the next trayful in the oven. Even leaving them on the cookie sheet too long can darken them: the key to gooey molasses delight is minimal baking.

I remembered to call Mama this morning but n00blike totally forgot that I'd just put the last batch in the oven. pWnage.

From Ramp Feeds to Renn Fayre

2008-05-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

Just as the snows are receding from the cold mountain slopes of my perpetually-seceding homeland, the very same folk who only last fall bragged about their deer-hunting exploits now brag about their ability to track a tiny wild leek poking its way up through decomposing snowdrifts. Extraordinarily difficult to cultivate, ramps are a shy little member of the onion family, claiming a distinctly delicious spot between onions and garlic and rendering the entire state of West Virginia a little nutso for the two weeks they're in season.

Papa went to the Ramp Feeds pretty regularly. The biting onion scent clung to every fiber of his woolen shirt, every curl in his beard. It lingered in the boots he shed at the front door and clung to the bedding for days. Once he persuaded us all to come along. Young and cautious, I steered clear of the ramp stews and the bacony-potato-ramp fries, and headed straight for the pie table, where I met my first slice of lemon meringue pie and forgave every past, present, and future ramp-infused kiss. In any case, the town where we got groceries (45 minutes from our mountaintop farmhouse) just had its annual international ramp festival, and numerous other towns host rampy events all throughout April (do note the banner that reads "Richwood WVa God County Ramps Ramps Ramps").

So it was a remarkable error when someone out here in Oregon announced with great authority that ramps are monocotyledons that only grow west of the Mississippi. It was a slushy-headed morning for me in the midst of Reed College's annual 3-day post-thesis shindig, so I didn't respond to the challenge with the proper alacrity, or anything remotely resembling alacrity at all. As a last-minute replacement judge for the Iron Chef competition (secret ingredient: ramps), I should have deducted fierce points right then. But there weren't scorecards -- just a lot of skillet shit-talk and hungover hubris -- so I poured some more 2buckchuck and proceeded to placidly rate the almond pate with caramelized ramp leaves over the asian turnip wrapped in pork belly.

Now I've sufficiently collected myself, and I've got just one thing to say: montani semper liberi, hipsters. Oh, and my secret ramp patch is totally west of the Mississippi. Keep looking. You're almost there. Just a little wester, now....

The Settlement Cook Book and Apple Roly-Poly

2008-04-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

I stood in the deserted Book Exchange yesterday afternoon, sniffing through the old books, when I noticed a battered volume covered in old yellow shelf paper. Shelf paper is always a good sign. Nobody these days has plain wood shelving they want to cover, and a book must be well-loved to merit a homemade jacket. In thin pencil on the spine were the words, "Settlement Cook Book."

Inside, Mrs. Simon Kander smiles placidly at me, "Very Truly Yours," and I recall that she often sits on well-papered shelves with the likes of Irma Rombauer and Fannie Merritt Farmer. But I don't yet discover her real design -- I slip a dollar in the box and run with my treasure. It's only hours later, back in the city, that I slide the shelf-paper jacket from the book and gasp.

Two-by-two, noses in their cookbooks, are a couple dozen cute little cooks, marching towards a large heart on the horizon and the words, "The way to a man's heart." Come, my apron-clad, man-seeking companions, let us take the road laid out before us as it winds its way through our iceboxes and ranges, through our pies and pickles, through the capillaries and arteries of a manly chest to the heart that lies beating within it. It's a hilarious grotesque, a creepy relic of coy humor, and a fabulous treasure for my shelf.

Mrs. Simon Kander, née Lizzie Black, compiled the first edition of her cookbook in 1903, a charity project to benefit a community of Russian Jews in Milwaukee. That edition also bears the subtitle, "The way to a man's heart," but instead of antlike marching cooks, it depicts a lady playing the flute. Mine is the 30th edition, from 1951. The book is falling apart, and I might need to work some curatorial magic to get it in good enough shape for my own shelf. Since Mrs. Kander herself was German, the cookbook includes kuchen and matzos and spritz krapfen -- and, of course, clear signposts pointing its readers to manly hearts. Is it the Apple Roly-Poly? The Wine Syllabub? Rinktum-Dity?

Apple Roly-Poly
p. 345

Make Plain Pie Crust or Biscuit Dough. Roll out 1/2 inch thick. Spread with chopped apples or jam, raisins, sugar and cinnamon; roll like Jelly Roll. Place in a small baking pan, spread butter over all and add 2 cups of cold water, and bake in a hot oven, basting often, with the sauce in the pan, until done. Serve hot.

(Kander, Mrs. Simon. The Settlement Cook Book. Milwaukee: The Settlement Cook Book Co., 30th ed., 1951).

Kefir Cheese and Dates

2008-04-13T16:52:00.001-07:00

I had to leave for a few days to V.'s French kitchen, and so I cleverly stashed my latest batch of kefir in the fridge, hoping the chill would retard the fermenting action of the kefir grains. Unfortunately, there is no stopping the kefir once it gets going, and when I returned home and went to strain out my precious kefir grains, I was left with curds and whey -- the kefir grains, of course, firmly embedded in the curd.

Unfazed, I removed a good bit of curd/grain mixture, wrapped it in cheesecloth, and rinsed it well. I refrigerated the grains in a little glass jar filled with water, and turned to my remaining kefir cheese. I had about a cup of it -- an average cheese yield for a quart of raw milk. I sprinkled it with sea salt, stirred it well, and let it sit. The salt absorbs slowly, so it's good to be cautious. (Ordinarily, kefir is of a creamy, slightly frothy consistency, not much thicker than light cream).

At the Civic Center farmer's market today I bought a pound of honey dates ($2/lb), as well as some on-the-twig fresh dates ($2.50/lb). Fresh dates are crisper than the gooey self-preserved things we find in grocery stores, and taste something like a fuyu persimmon. Sometimes they even have an orange luster to them. For a lovely midafternoon snack, split and pit a large date, dab it with kefir cheese, and pop it in your mouth. The contrasting fibrous sweet goo and creamy salty cheese are rather too addictive.

Cheesemongrel

2008-04-11T17:54:00.001-07:00

Yesterday my employer asked his wife why the cheese was in the refrigerator. It might seem an odd question, except V. is French, and habitually breaks food safety recommendations to keep her cheese out on the counter. "Here," she said, "it is too warm. In France we have a cool room next to the kitchen for keeping cheese. Anyway," she added, "in France we eat cheese at every meal, and use it up much more quickly." Her kitchen teems with bacteria -- kombucha and kefir and yogurt fermenting everywhere, raw milk and soft runny cheeses puddling at all sorts of scandalous torrid temperatures.

I made a little promise to myself that I would buy some good cheese when I got back to the city. After stilton and raclette and cave-aged gruyere, one finds oneself snubbing dowdy little annatto-yellow cheddars. Late in the afternoon, my companions paused in a small town to meet somebody. We were patiently sipping pinot noir when one of us said, "If you had to give up either wine or cheese, which would you stick to?" We weren't even eating cheese. It just so happened to be on everyone's mind.

"Wine," said the filmmaker to my left.

"Cheese," said the rapper to my right.

"Where is the boundary," I asked, "between milk and cheese? Leave me something fermented and dairy and I'll give up the cheese." I pictured myself straining a nice yogurt to a tangy custardy thickness and insisting to an arbiter of cultured dairy disputes that it really wasn't "cheese".

Some more pinot and a splash of bourbon later, I found myself on the way to the Tenderknob with a new girl who announced at no provocation, "I promise you, I love cheese more than you do."

Frankly, I'm just a casual cheese philanderer. A dairy dilettente. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Before I even started this job, I knew cheese way more than anybody. But my boss knew orders of magnitude more than I did, and that was a year ago I started learning from her. I just spent the last week with an ex in Hawaii eating shitty food, and I can't wait to go eat some cheese."

What was the phrase my employer used? Show some neck. "What is it that you do?" I'm a cheese cur showing neck.

"I'm a cheesemonger." I'm a cowering mongrel. Maybe she'll give me a rind of parmesan if I visit her -- which, in fact, I think I just might do.

I do still wonder whether she likes cheese as much as a certain Babette. Babette hefts all her swaying furry bellies to come running when she smells chevre, or triple-cream brie, or a bit of feta still dripping with brine. Her complete abandon to epicurean enthusiasm leaves me a little breathless. How can a cat have such discriminating tastes -- eschewing milk and yogurt and creme fraiche in favor of "cheese" -- if cheese isn't, in fact, a distinct biological entity? It's not like she knows a damned thing about the coagulation of proteins, or the action of bacteria on milk sugars, but her little, little brain can put leathery romano and pickled sheep's milk feta and runny brie in the same category, and discriminate them from creme fraiche. Can she really taste the agedness that (usually) distinguishes cheese from other cultured dairy products?

I know; it's very tedious when people ascribe wonderful intelligence to their pets. But I'm doing just the opposite. Bless her, Babette isn't such a clever one -- leaving me to think it's the cheese that's so very smart. After all, the strangest thing about cheese is that it tastes like cat piss and soiled garments -- eminently nasty things -- but somehow dupes us into enjoying those same fungal flavors. And not without some advantage to itself. Think of the nice treatment we give our favorite cheese cultures (VIP petri dishes, nubile young cheesemongers). Rather a useful leg up in the cutthroat world of bacterial survival, no?

It's a clever cheese, I tell you.

Oatmeal Raisin* Browned-Butter Muffins

2008-03-31T21:10:00.001-07:00

The Grand Dame of Southern Cooking was a Communist. Her name is Edna Lewis, and I was thrilled to stumble across her cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor, at Goodwill today. She writes, "In those days, we lived by the seasons, and I quickly discovered that food tastes best when it is naturally ripe and ready to eat." And unlike Alice Waters, she started cooking professionally all the way back in 1949. She makes her own baking powder, and braises meat in a clay pot, and advocated seasonal food long before the West Coast jumped on the slow food bandwagon. She fed William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And, yes, worked for The Daily Worker.

Here's the thing, though. I'm not really pitting one culinary genius against another. Unlike other caustic celebrities, the heroes of cookery play a good game of wholesome charm. Think of a kitchen full of the likes of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, James Beard, Julia Child...? My heart just melts like butter on an oatmeal muffin. Which reminds me to tell you that oatmeal muffins are improved twelvefold by the addition of half a cup of browned butter -- but that does NOT mean you should refrain from topping them with extra butter when you split them open all steamy from the oven.

Browned-Butter Muffins

Melt 1/2 c. butter over low heat. While it slowly gilds to a honey-wheat color, whisk together 2 cups white flour, 1.5 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking soda, 1 T. cinnamon, 3 c. rolled oats, and 1 cup of raisins*.

In another bowl, whisk 3 eggs, 1/2 c. honey, and 2.5 c. kefir or yogurt (some part of which may be old sour milk, water, or other bilge).

Pour the browned butter into the oat mixture and toss it about till evenly coated. Stir in the liquids and let the batter sit and thicken up for an afternoon or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter and flour 18 muffin holes. Bake till golden brown on top, some 25 minutes or so.

*In retrospect, the raisins effectively sucked up the moisture like sponges. I much prefer a muffin riddled with caverns of tart berry juice. Add frozen or seasonal berries instead -- just before filling the muffin pan if you don't want grey batter.

Of Dearth and Home

2008-03-24T19:04:00.000-07:00

Ring in that recession! Nothing fuels the home cooking fires like the bellows of inflation. No, seriously -- every generation defines its comfort food as whatever grandma cooked up when things were tough. The corn pone crumbled in bean soup. The ham bone that lent the beans their meaty savor. Mashed potatoes all winter long. Oatmeal for breakfast. Coffee brewed with burnt toast -- though that's venturing into the territory of full-on Depression. When things really get wild, when threadbare and barefoot take the runways by storm, when the Dust Bowl supersedes the Super Bowl, and dole means government handouts, not bananas. Thing of it is, I think it's fair to say that most of us picky-palated impecunious youngsters would take a handout over Dole bananas 'most any day of the year....

In the meantime, let's celebrate the fruits of economic hardship by reminding ourselves that a backyard garden is like backing up our dollars with gold: potatoes are immune to inflation. And what is more, the distinctive creativity of every ethnic cuisine derives not just from the cleverness of the people who've cooked it every day for a thousand years, but also from a dearth of culinary options. In other words, this next generation of poor kids is on the verge of inventing the new American cuisine. Haute dumpster. And perhaps this new cuisine will be defined by a dearth of bananas, or electric ovens, or beer.

In fact, I love the word "dearth". Dear-th, dear-ness. It's not the absence of everything wonderful, but the preciousness of the little we've got. It's the perfect antidote to the mesmerizing superfluity of food on grocery store shelves (and, in fact, the perfect antidote to the perplexing plethora of lifestyles, roles, and visions I could choose). When 26 enticing varieties of olive oil gang up and fix me to the floor with indecision and panic, it occurs to me that freedom isn't a linear function of the number of choices we've got. Maybe those dear deep-rooted folks, the ones who don't pretend to be self-made, but build themselves up on the foundation of a community and its traditions, who take hand-me-downs and make quilts or whatever tired metaphors they can mine from deep in their dearth -- maybe the deep-rooted ones are happier for it.

In other words, I went to church on Sunday. Sometimes a wayward Mennonite girl could use a dose of community -- some sermonizing, a hymn or two, maybe even a wee nibble of communion loaf and a long, thirsty swig of wine. In San Francisco, Mennonites are allowed to be gay and drink wine and the communion loaf might even be challah. Go back East and the church has its panty-hose in a wad trying to figure out just how much of the loaf it's allowed to dole out to so-called sinners. But there it is: I was born into a tightly-knit Mennonite world, and it's my particular "dearth", whether or not I view it as stricture or scripture, or just one useful structure among many.

And soon, we'll all have dearth a-plenty: recession! Bring it on, I say. Let's drink to our dearth, toast our burnt toast, and hunker down with what we've got. To that end, a recipe for coffee from Grandma's taped-together copy of The Mennonite Community Cookbook:

Coffee

This coffee recipe accompanies a "birthday cake" made from alternating strata of bread and cottage cheese, topped with a whipped oatmeal-thickened skimmed-milk frosting. TMCC notes, "This is an original recipe from our Russian Mennonite refugees of World War II."

Toast slices of rye bread until they are quite black.
Pulverize these slices of bread to form fine crumbs.
Use the crumbs to make coffee.

Paprikahead's Henna Hair Dye Recipe

2008-03-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

In honor of all the charming redheaded Irish boys named Patrick, and old boyfriends who always wanted me to quit the henna habit and revert to dirty blond, here's my latest recipe for red hair. It's easy, slimy-fun, and very effective. So effective, in fact, that just yesterday I had to listen to somebody extol at great length the beauty and rarity of my natural red hair. He even explained how redheadedness was a recessive gene, which meant that both my mother and father must have redheads in their family. How embarrassing! My red hair is a white lie, and inspires patronizing lectures! I panicked this morning when I found myself in the middle of the St. Patrick's Day parade.

Assessment: Look at your hair. Is it lightish-colored and porous? Very strong, smooth hair will not absorb the henna as well as weak wavy hair. And of course, dark hair won't show the effects much at all, while blond hair will turn orange. Unlike gnarly ammonia-based hair dye, henna does not bleach your hair, and can only add color -- which it does by bonding with the weak spots in your hair. Regardless of color and texture, henna will strengthen and condition your hair.

Selection: Procure the finest, freshest henna you can find. I do not recommend the expensive brands in health food stores. Instead, pick up a box for $2.50 at the local "India Bazar" or one of those markets where you can also stock up on Turkish delight, fresh dates, and halvah. Choose 100% pure henna -- sometimes chemicals, indigo, or ayurvedic herbs are added. It should be very finely powdered and smell faintly grassy.

Preparation: Empty two cups henna powder into a ceramic bowl. Add a tablespoon each of paprika, cinnamon, and other interesting spices. Bring 3 or more cups water to a boil and add two bags of black tea and two tablespoons of hibiscus flowers. Allow it to steep for a good twenty minutes. Return to a boil, strain, and stir into the henna a bit at a time. Add enough to achieve a smooth, almost soupy texture. It will thicken as it cools. Cover the henna pot and let it macerate for several hours. Take care to keep it off your skin.

Application: Wear a minimal amount of clothing, or lots of clothing you don't care about. Take a large kitchen bag, rip a small hole in the end, and stretch it over your head and down around your neck. Rub good oil or lotion onto your neck, shoulders, hairline, and ears, to repel any stray drips of henna. Henna will make you orange. Put a small plastic bag or rubber glove over your left hand, and put a plastic comb in your right hand. With your left hand, pull up your hair. Comb a part in your hair and shovel up a glob of henna on the comb. Smeer it around with your gloved hand. Get it right down in the roots, and along hairlines, especially. Continue parting and glopping your hair down the sides and around the back. Having a friend do it for you is very pleasant, but you can definitely do a perfect job yourself with a little care and dexterity. Don't let the henna dry on your hair. It can only work its magic when wet. When all the roots are slimed, smoosh more henna down to the ends of your hair section by section and pile your hair on top of your head,

Curing: remove your glove, and carefully pull the plastic bag up on your head. It should fit perfectly around your hairline. Gather the top of it together around your hair, tuck, and tie an old towel or scarf around it to keep everything in place. Heat and moisture are key for the next two hours. Clean up all henna spatters, do laundry, read, or watch a movie. You'll probably look funny, especially if the henna was too liquid and seeps out from under your turban like gangrenous algal ooze. Let it cure for two hours or more.

Removal: You don't want all that grime going down the drain. I've stood in a dank basement with moldy old henna dripping all round me, sawing into old lead pipes and scraping out the slime with my fingernails. Instead, hose your hair outside, or rinse it into a bucket or garbage bag and empty it down the toilet. It's a matter of debate whether shampooing your hair immediately after a henna job will lighten the colors. I like the grassy smell, frankly. It's like the hay mow.

Taste Buds

2008-03-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

Now I know why I crave gravelly salt and blackstrap molasses and gnarly zinfandel and the most csípős of paprika. And why Mama doesn't.

My taste buds are underpopulated. They're scattered about in farflung outposts, pioneers who must be subjected to the most cataclysmic of flavor disasters before they can look up from their stony furrows to take note. Mama's taste buds, on the other hand, live in dense, tightly-knit communities among alabaster aqueducts and operas. They soliloquize on the flavors of 4 p.m. westerlies and the delights of bare, sunwarmed silverware. She is -- I'm sure of it -- what wine expert Tim Hanni calls a "supertaster": someone with more than her fair share of the tastebuds. His theory: the more taste buds you have, the more sensitive your palate, and the subtler the flavors you will like (be they tannins in wine or cacao in a chocolate bar).

Let me feign outrage. Doesn't this smack of that well-debunked tongue-phrenology that assigns various regions of the tongue to corresponding flavor-receptors? (In fact, we can taste all flavors anywhere on the tongue). And isn't it a simplistic model -- a neat linear correlation between taste-bud count and preferences? Perception is such a tangle of sensory devices and memories and expectation! Perhaps Hanni's theory would work if we also counted dollars spent on packaging, to accomodate for wine experts who get all befuddled when faced with white wine dyed red and cheap wine in fancy bottles. But first, let's wheel in the budometer, a contraption that analyzed my food preferences and correlated them with taste-bud count, which it correlated with my food preferences. It called me a "tolerant" taster. A possessor of sparse & plebian tastebuds.

Actually, I love multiple-choice contraptions that tell me who I am. Really. And Hanni's theories were mostly confirmed at a recent wine-tasting, and I'm all in favor of anything that finishes by saying, "Drink the wine you like, because even the experts don't have equal numbers of tastebuds."

Which means, of course, that Mama and I can both be taste experts -- though I think smell is the critical difference between my mother's taste and mine. Her nose can detect vices up to 24 hours after their execution -- 96 hours in the case of my suitors' sins. Little wonder she likes her stews less salty.

Black Cherry Oat Muffins

2008-03-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

Aw, muffins. "Aw," like your mother saying, "But she's such a good-hearted girl, so what if she wears jeans with elastic at the waist AND at the cuffs?" Note: your mother was not referring to me. I refused to wear denim altogether in favor of bright monotone sweat pants with preemptive patches sewn in the knees.

Black cherry oat muffins are bumbling and nubbly, attempting to hide their dark hearty wholegraininess under the guise of black cherries and molasses. Like when elastic-jean wearers grow up to be adolescent Mennonite girls hiding their pimples and purity under white powders and black lipstick.

Whisk together 2 cups whole-wheat flour, 1.5 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking soda, 2 cups rolled oats, and 1 cup quick oats. Or whatever combination you prefer.

In another bowl, whisk 2 eggs, 1/2 c. brown sugar, 1/4 c. molasses, 2.5 c. buttermilk, whey, or yogurt, 1 tsp. vanilla, and 1/4 tsp. almond extract. Let the batter sit and thicken up -- all afternoon, or overnight, or till next Sunday -- while you preheat the oven to 350 and butter and flour 18 muffin holes.

Just before you put them in the oven, add 2 cups halved frozen cherries. The cherries melt and form warm dark caves. Bake till they have risen and a knife inserted in the middle doesn't come out gluey -- 20-25 minutes or so. Actually, the cherries are entirely arbitrary. I just happened to have them on hand from Valentine's Day, and frankly think blackberries would work much better.

This recipe (my bran-less adaptation of a bran muffin recipe) turns out to be very similar to an old one my mother just sent me; which, when my kitchen is back up to muffin-production standards, I'll try for comparison. Wish I had such a muffin now. The tea at the tea house where I have come to fetch the Internet is very fine indeed, but the scone tastes like baking powder. Hmph.

Of Green Eggplant and Mustard Carp

2008-03-06T17:22:00.001-08:00

The first morning I woke in this house, I found a large bowl of chicken marinating in yogurt. Oh, yummy, tandoori chicken! But what have we here? A huge platter of carp, marinating in a thick mustard rub. And yet more? Okra and young eggplant curries, cauliflower, prawns, cabbage in a creamy anise dressing, chapati everywhere and tamarind sauce on top and I'm hamfisted and butterfingered when it comes to eating without utensils but everything's forgiven by the time we pass the creamy caramelly candies -- demure little allusions to sweetness that they are. Unfortunately, A. M. prepares all this food in a great hurry and runs off without explaining a bit, as he is fantastically busy cheffing it for the first-class passengers of your favorite major airline in an enormous hangar of a kitchen. He said as a small boy in his village he never wanted the adventure or excitement of leaving home, but only to eat well. His wife has been in India for the nine years he's been off landing cutthroat-competitive contracts with his gracious shrug, fourth-grade education, and food that speaks for itself, thank you.

In other words, this little household hanger-on is left gasping in wonder with a plateful of curry three times a day. And butterfingered and hamfisted as I am, all I can do is take a knifeless, forkless stab at naming the turmeric and anise and cumin and ghee, yes, I've met you... but I'm struggling to transcribe this symphony on my tongue.

Shortly, my stay in South Indian ananda will close. Shortly I shall chortle apron-clad in my own new kitchen, flicking on&off the blue flames in my gas stove and flinging wide the funny little half-doors to the pantry (I have a pantry!) -- which shall all be bare and dry with one doleful moth fluttering out. For now, I'm told the whole refrigerator is my demesne, and damned but if I'm not going to make the rounds. The dal looks like it wants some reconnoitering.

U-Eat

2008-03-03T10:05:00.000-08:00

While I have my camera and shoes, my USB cord seems to be in the same buried box as my clean socks. No pictures, then of my U-Haul manna. My traveling companion brought the finest food in the cab: a perfect persimmon and a brined beef tongue. I brought the random things I hoped my housemates wouldn't miss (yes, I'm the scape- goat cheese, my dears). Altogether, then, I made the journey from Portland to San Francisco with half a persimmon, all 7 ounces of cheese, a square of Theo's Ghana chocolate, 3 bosc pears (one brown and mealy), two slices beef tongue, half an orange, and one baby banana. I consumed approximately 300% of my recommended daily saturated fat, while my fifth of the shared U-Haul guzzled a billion percent of its recommended daily non-renewable oil. The cats refused all apologies, palliatives, and palatables.

Sweet Roasted Tomatoes

2008-02-11T19:02:00.001-08:00

I like condiments the way I liked jewelry as a tightly-braided calico-printed bookish Mennonite girl: big, gaudy, and swinging from lobes of lettuce, studded or satiny, maybe splayed on velvety cuts of duck or strung in little droplets over beets, swizzled in amber strands over tender rolls and when in hell was the last time I had DUCK, or amber strands of anything? It's high time I got out the dress-ups again.

For starters, we can always hide our dry toast and sprouting potatoes under some clever sauce or pickly thing. Darkly caramelized roasted tomatoes do the trick nicely.

Preheat the oven to 450, oil a baking sheet, and quarter a dozen roma tomatoes* lengthwise, crowding them cut-side up on the baking sheet. Mix two parts sugar to one part salt and sprinkle it lightly over the tomatoes, taking care to keep it off the baking sheet. Slide them in the oven and roast till quite shrunk and dark (put those sugars to work making complicated caramel flavor), but not entirely burnt. Straight-up carbon doesn't taste very complicated. Pull the tomatoes from the oven and let them cool till you can peel them up off the tray without burning yourself. You can store them in a jar in the fridge for a while -- they're lovely in sandwiches, tossed with roasted potatoes and basil, or rolled around a chunk of feta.

Note that eating too many will give you canker sores in your mouth. It's the trait of a good condiment to bite back when we treat it like a staple -- much like our companions when we don nothing but jewelry.

*What? Tomatoes in February? Here I run into a moral snag. If they are quite a thrifty deal, practically free -- and I fix the long-distance insipidity by roasting as I describe -- is it wrong for me to support the multinational-petroleum-gross food industry? Is it downright heinous if Michael Pollan happens to be in Portland tomorrow, touring with his new book, In Defense of Food?

The Laptop Supper

2008-02-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

It was almost sunny this morning, and I brazenly went out without my burly Carhartt jacket. I'm so over this business of defending myself against the rain. I want to acquiesce, to submit my tenderness to the gentle inspection of the sunshine. But it's a cruel, wet world, a rebuffing buffeting place where the 5 o'clock traffic rushes over crosswalks like the drops on your southwest windowpanes, splashing up viscous puddles of an entire winter's worth of Powell Boulevard strip-club dregs and congealed pho noodles. I stand my ground and shiver and shake and by the power (di)vested in me as a coatless pedestrian in the rain, I demand the WALK signal appear.

Megalomania never works the way you wish it would. Thank heavens there is a balm for sin-sick souls like mine. Called supper. Something even lighter and more soothing than "dinner," something at-hand and intimate, something to nibble in nubbly sweaters after we have doffed our weighty nobility.

Back on the farm, noontime dinner was the largest meal of the day, with supper following the evening chores. Then folks started working outside the home. "In cities the members of the family usually eat the noon meal 'in town.' This meal is light and often hurried," notes Everyday Foods, my favorite 1950's home economics text. "Dinner," on the other hand, "is a more leisurely and dignified meal than luncheon, and likely to be heavier."

I think we all know which members of the family were and were not encouraged to be out eating luncheon "in town" with their attache-toting associates. In any case, nowadays we're getting back to the farm scene in our dining habits. We not only lunch but live in the city, too; family is over on the other coast and our colleagues are our housemates (our "urban tribe," in Ethan Watters' words). Now we can work late from home, after which we'll share potluck suppers at 9 or 10. Supper because it's informal and food isn't the greatest part of the whole affair -- which, of course, is good company and guitars by the fire after the laptops get shut for the evening.

Tonight's supper: creamy little nuggets of yukon gold, parboiled till tender, then roasted at 500 with just oil, salt and pepper (an idea I got from Roast Chicken & Other Stories). While they turned brown, I tossed together a mixed green salad, sprinkled it with soaked sunflower seeds (put raw ones to soak last night), and a few shreds of slow-smoked salmon (with apologies to my budget). For the dressing, I whisked equal parts olive oil and maple syrup, dashes of salt & pepper, and a splash of red wine vinegar. Even the salad-eschewers like greens under a good wholesome sweet-rich-tangy dressing -- and, quite frankly, the time it takes to make a delectable salad dressing is significantly less than the time it takes to pick out your favorite flavor from the hundred different Lite, Lo-Sodium and Charitable varieties on the supermarket shelf.

Enough ranting for today. Tomorrow I will go throw bottles of Newman's Own at splashing cars. For now it's suppertime.

Generic Asian Stir-Fry

2008-02-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

If you're careful about this one you can pass it off to your friends as one of those pre-medleyed frozen vegetable packages that come with a squeeze tube of General Tamari's Sweet 'n' Sour Sauce Concentrate.

It behooved me to run two blocks to the A. Dong market for chopsticks.

Chop howevermuch tempeh you want to eat into bite-size chunks. Note: I'm not so much a fan of soy-based meat substitutes. They are difficult to digest and full of phytates, which strip your body of minerals. Furthermore, a creative vegan/vegetarian ought not subsist on a reactionary, defensive diet of styrofoamy meat-shaped substitutions. Highly fermented soy products are altogether different critters, however, which is why I like tempeh and miso and soy sauce (the salt helps, too). They have a little more identity to them, not to mention a long & glorious history -- quite unlike modern-day soy inventions, which exist only to make the meat-free path a wide and easy one for the casually abstemious.

Actually, there's a soft spot in my heart for tofu still warm from the factory, like I used to get it in Seattle. Warm and fleshly-tender, I'd tuck it under my jacket for the walk back up to the shiny towers of First Hill.

Like I was saying, marinate the tempeh in soy sauce and maybe some extra-strong long-fermented kombucha (or apple cider vinegar), several dabs of miso, three cloves minced crushed garlic, and two tablespoons minced crushed ginger. If you have baby bok choy that looks a little too adolescent for frying whole, peel it apart and rinse. Similarly divide a head or two of broccoli. Maybe you have snow peas, or bean sprouts, or bamboo shoots -- even mushrooms or miniature ears of corn. I don't. Mince a shallot or two and let it sit in some soy sauce.

Heat some oil in two large skillets and fry the tempeh in one till golden (on a medium-low flame). Save the marinade. In the other skillet (or wok), throw in your vegetables in the inverse order of cooking time. Splash with the marinade while they cook, (or wine or water or kombucha), so the veggies steam-fry till a bit wilted but still bright. Splash with the shallot & soy sauce. Splash with toasted sesame oil. Remove the cooked vegetables to the same bowl as the tempeh, put all the marinade in the hot skillet and add several tablespoons brown sugar. Reduce a bit, and add cornstarch paste if you'd like a thicker sauce. Taste for acid/sweet salt/herb balance. Pour over the veggies & tempeh. Eat with rice or by itself, in a pleasingly round little bowl with chopsticks.

Follow-up: My tummy hates tempeh, too. Next: miso.

Lactose-Free Pumpkin Pie

2008-01-23T19:45:00.000-08:00

The "lactards" returned last night from an epic desert adventure, so I butchered the fatted October pumpkin and set about figuring out how to make a lactose-free pumpkin pie.

The crust is simple -- merely substitute melted coconut oil or melted cocoa butter for the butter in a sweet shortbread crust. Both coconut and cocoa fats lend a distinctive, marvelous flavor without making asses of themselves in front of the sugar and spice. It's getting a rich, tender, creamy filling (dairy adjectives, all!) that poses the challenge for our lactose-free custard-maker.

Combine 2 c. flour, 2/3 c. sugar and 1.5 tsp. fine sea salt. Drizzle in melted cocoa butter (pictured) or melted coconut oil and fluff it about with a fork. Something like 6-8 ounces should be about right to achieve a crumbly dough that holds it shape well when you squeeze it. Err on the side of more fat. You can supplement the saturated tropical fats with other vegetable oils, but be careful: straight-up oil makes for a straight-up oily crust. Dump the crumbly pile into your #9 skillet or large pie dish and press it down firmly, building it up the sides and forming an even, dense layer of crust. Refrigerate till the filling is ready.

My "pumpkin" was actually a cheese squash. I halved it, scooped out the seeds, plucked out the fibers, and roasted it cut-side-down on an oiled baking sheet at 400 degrees till so tender it lost all structural integrity and collapsed on itself in a gory heap. I put 2.5 cups of it in a blender with 1 c. unsweetened full-fat soy milk (not without a reservation or two*), 1/3 c. brown sugar, 1/2 other sugar (maple syrup, white sugar), 2 eggs, 1 egg yolk (for added richness), 1 tsp. cinnamon, 3/4 tsp. ginger, 1/2 tsp. nutmeg, 1/4 tsp. cloves and 1/4 tsp. allspice. Using roasted rather than boiled squash reduces its water content, making a denser custard that is less likely to curdle. Blend well and pour into the pie shell. Bake at 325-350 till the edges have risen just a tad and the interior still wiggles (but doesn't slosh) when you move it -- somewhere in the vicinity of 45 minutes.

*Soy bloats tummies, shrinks testes and kills cute rainforest animals. Furthermore, commercial nut, bean, and grain milks are almost always diluted, which is extra-undesirable when we consider that we're trying to replace the cream in our pumpkin pie, not just ordinary milk. Readily-digested and much less controversial rice milk is too watery, and I feared would make for curdled eggs. The other commercial non-dairy milks had loads of sugar and unpronounceables, so I left them on the shelf (where their life is frighteningly long). Undiluted homemade soymilk would be much better for custardy purposes, but if we're going to that trouble, we really ought to make our own almond milk, and avoid the whole fart-testicle-rainforest business anyway.

Manburgers

2008-01-21T17:21:00.000-08:00

"What, for the love of God, is a manburger? I Googled it, but I'm still not sure. It's either a geeky guy or a double cheeseburger with no condiments or extras. Simply meat and cheese. What's your definition?"

Well, T. Douglas, thanks for asking. Manburgers are an important topic, being the staple food of a number of my close companions. According to T. Ellsworth, a Manburger is "a burger designed by men, for men. Except also by women for etc...." Concretely, the key element of the Manburger is the grassfed beef from which it is shaped. Contrary to popular belief, the essence of Manburger is not the stereotypically masculine consumption of animal flesh, but rather variety and creativity. Manburgers often incorporate "maternal" additions like green onions, chives, parsley, and shallots, or genderbending curry aoli and maple syrup. In the words of W. Crawford, "What's more manly than the empirical process of trial and not-error?"

Let's consider one particularly stellar specimen of the manburger, the Belgian Waffle variant, pictured above in the hands of man W. Crawford. A good stove-top waffle maker produces a deeply-pocketed, crispy waffle -- a waffle with a shiny, almost glazed, buttery surface guarding a moist, tender interior. Just the thing to warm up later in the day as buns for your manburger. Note the slab of melting cheddar, added shortly after the manburger was flipped. A good dose of coarse sel gris added to the raw hamburger lent it a charming sparkle. And finally, a healthy trickle of bloody juices escaped the crispy seared surface of the burger, moistening the waffle and facilitating the marriage of burger and bun.

In conclusion, T. Douglas, I would have to say that your first definition of Manburger is not so far removed from mine.

Persimmon Pudding

2008-01-17T17:40:00.000-08:00

It's unrepentantly old-fashioned, free-standing, and decadent as only the last loyal citizen of a crumbling empire can be. Think "pudding" as in "bread pudding": what seems mere cake at first slice turns all syrupy-spicy-custardy under a generous lather of cream and then disappears to leave you dazed and dreamy-eyed, not unlike T. Ellsworth when The Girl went back to her fiance in Mexico.

I adapted this recipe somewhat arbitrarily based on the large units in which I had frozen my persimmon pulp. Having nearly a quart of persimmon on hand, I reduced the milk and splashed in all my silky red-orange pulp with wantonly intemperate glee. A certain prodigality was due if we were to forget the threat of barbarian invasion (winter strawberries) for one gloriously debauched night of persimmon indulgence. Incidentally, the sun never sets on the persimmon empire, since persimmons are native to all four hemispheres.

In the end, my recipe looked like this:

Preheat the oven to 325. Melt 6 tablespoons butter in the warming oven. Mix together 3.5 cups hachiya persimmon pulp, 1/4 c. cream, 1/2 c. whole milk, 2 tablespoons honey, 3 tablespoons maple syrup, a splash of vanilla, and 3 eggs. Pull the butter from the oven when it's melted to let it cool a bit, but no harm done if it gets a chance to brown a little.

In another bowl, whisk together 1.5 c. flour, 3/4 tsp. baking powder, 3/4 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 c. brown sugar, 1.5 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg and 1 tsp. salt. Add the wets to the dries and combine well. Let stand while you finish up.

Butter your large springform pan and lightly toast 2/3 c. walnuts. Break up the walnuts and add them to the batter, along with 1/3 c. raisins and the slightly-cooled butter. Pour the batter into the pan and slide it into the oven with a baking sheet underneath to catch any drips. Bake 45 minutes. If you have to run out suddenly at this point to move your cats to fresher pastures, just turn off the oven and leave it till your return. The pudding should rise in the center and form deep glassy rifts while still quivering in invitation.

Serve with pillows of whipped cream: whisk 1.5 c. heavy whipping cream, 1/4 c. maple syrup, and 1 tsp. vanilla till almost stiff shortly before serving.

Bacon Apple Pie

2008-01-14T15:49:00.000-08:00

Save your bacon drippings for a pie like your rainy-day childhood fantasies of the sweet-savory territory between ham and mulled cider.

Prepare the crust as usual: grate 1 cup frozen butter into 3 cups well-salted flour, sprinkle on enough water to make a good collection of dough-lumps, and roll out 2/3 of it to the thickness of five thirty-seconds of an inch. Place it in a large pie dish, trim a half-inch overhang, liberally smear it with bacon drippings saved from breakfast, and put it in the fridge while you butcher up the apples. Refrigerate the unused portion and the scraps.

Take half a dozen or eight large Braeburn apples (roll your 'r's, and linger on that archaically transposed 'ae') and slice, core, and chop them. Peel them if your feel like the trouble. Mix 3 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves (like cloves in the ham, right?) and 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg. Toss with the apples. Then mix 1/2 c. honey and several tablespoons strong red wine (the wine takes the place of lemon juice). Toss with the apples and let macerate while you roll out the remaining dough for the lattice top. Preheat the oven to 425.

You should have plenty of dough to work with, which I much prefer to patch-and-stretch, just-enough dough. Use a sharp knife or pizza wheel to cut it in half-or-three-quarter-inch strips. Retrieve the chilling crust and moisten its overhanging rim with a few dabs of water. Turn the apples out in the crust and put little bits of bacon fat all over them. Arrange strips in parallel over the top of the apples (the warp); then, starting from the center, arrange the perpendicular strips (the woof), weaving each strip into the warp as you go. Trim off the ends even with the bottom crust, and press them into it. Fold the overhang back on top, press to seal, and flute.

Slip the pie into the oven, reducing the heat to 350 when the crust is just starting to gild, some 15-20 minutes into the baking. Stack the crust trimmings, press together, and add to your secret stash of pie dough -- which you ought to use up in the next few days, for breakfast turnovers or another pie or cinnamon pinwheels. The pie is done about half an hour after it starts smelling unearthly -- when it bubbles thick towards the center.

Serve warm with ice cream.

The Wild Beasties: Roast Bear and Parsnips

2008-01-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

Ask six-year-old me what my favorite meat was, and I'd likely have told you, "Pork fat." Seven-year-old me would have inhaled deeply before gasping, "BEAR!" At least I was consistent; bear is much like pork, only deeper and smokier and spicier (yes, "gamier"). Like bacon would be if pigs ate blueberries.

H. Rose found a fresh bear, minus the choicest morsels, and hauled it home on HAC's horse. She roasted us the ribs. In the meantime, I butchered and roasted up one dangerous specimen of a parsnip Mama pulled from the frozen garden, and sloshed maple syrup all over it with a heavy hand before I turned the oven off and let it wait till suppertime.

Ordinarily I preach the superiority of small vegetables, but a good frost sweetens and tames even a behemoth of a parsnip, especially if it already has the advantages of a good garden upbringing. Small produce is always preferable when "large" is achieved through genetic modification and hyperfertility, yielding mealy bland bitter waterlogged monstrosities. (Remember: always pick the littlest apple or chalice or princess). But certain beasts do achieve magnificently large-scale flavor, like that feral parsnip and its cousin, the wild bear.

Mama's Oatmeal Meatloaf

2008-01-03T10:27:00.001-08:00

I can't say much more than that this the real thing, straightforward and eternally satisfying.

Mince 2-3 cloves garlic, 1 onion, and 2 T. fresh parsley. Add 1 lb. of the very best grass-fed, local ground beef (meatloaf is as good as the meat you use. Mama gets hers from Polyface Farms, of Omnivore’s Dilemma fame), 1/2 - 2/3 c. rolled oats, 1 tsp. salt, pepper and 2 eggs to moisten and bind. Mix well and add milk or yogurt as needed to make it moist. Shape into a nice loaf, place in a greased bread pan, and spread homemade catsup over the top (at all costs avoid high-fructose catsup). Bake uncovered for 45 minutes to an hour at 350 degrees. Serve with more catsup and some of the summer’s succotash, or mashed potatoes, or sweet potatoes.

New Year's Feast

2008-01-02T14:37:00.000-08:00

I rang in the New Year supping on a dish of oyster stew soup and sharing an apple cider toast with my mother in the kitchen of a Lancaster County farmhouse. When Mama and I sneaked in from the airport, the house was dark and breathing a little heavy what with the guest rooms all thrown open, the hide-a-bed in the living room pulled out, the children’s cots set up around their parents’ bed. We raided the fridge for festive leftovers, and a stellar rendition of the Weaver family oyster stew was the very best thing I could imagine after airline cookies and bottled water (fertile territory for the gustatory imagination).

This morning, then, we all bundled into the car and set our for Aunt Pearl’s. Every year for fifty years, Aunt Pearl has hosted the New Year’s Day Feast. The menu is as stable and fundamental as the best of traditions, from the shrimp and mulled cider appetizers to the ham, baked corn, peas with pearl onions, pineapple casserole, baked potatoes with sour cream, and feathery buttery crescent rolls. (This menu has long since become a litany; the sort of thing we’d chant to each other on the drive over, always finishing with the chocolate-covered pretzels. Oh, and butterscotch pudding and cheesecake and candied pecans). It’s a long dinner, with a break in the middle for walks and speed scrabble, and ham sandwiches before everyone departs. Precisely the sort of thing to make everyone agree that New Year’s resolutions don’t take effect till the second day of January.

Saffron Rice

2007-12-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

When a stringy orange spice only comes in tiny baggies stored behind the register counter (except for customers who order an ounce at a time for sixty dollars), I naturally want to put it in everything I cook, or perhaps, like Cleopatra, bathe in it. Saffron is, after all, approximately as expensive as a certain other celebrated herb and probably claims the highest value density of anything I own. But why shouldn't it? It’s got to be magic: as the stamen of a certain crocus flower, it’s nothing but concentrated virility, the pigment for both prostitutes and monks.

So here is a recipe from W. Crawford’s cookbook, adapted by the fallibility of my memory:

Heat 1/2 c. milk gently. When hot, remove from the heat and add a pinch of saffron (rub it between your fingers to help it dissolve). You should pinch your saffron as tightly as you have to pinch your pennies, but keep in mind that largesse is sweet and stinge is singe; there’s no sense in ruining a fine thing by diluting it. Swish the saffron threads around so they get all coated and diffuse their pigments and sweet tang.

Heat a skillet with 1/4 c. ghee (or butter or other fat) and add 4 cinnamon sticks, a pinch of whole cloves, some cardamom, and a few peppercorns. Remove from the heat when the spices are fragrant. The recipe tells you to throw 2 c. rice, 2.5 c. water, 1 tsp. salt, and the saffron milk in a rice cooker and turn it on. You can also cook it the normal way (bring the water to a boil, add everything else, reduce heat, and simmer till done). Extra liquid is no problem, as saffron rice is pleasant when a little on the creamy side.

Sweet Potato Cakes

2007-12-20T18:10:00.000-08:00

Last night I roasted three sweet potatoes in the toaster oven, the actual oven being nonfunctional. We didn’t get around to eating them (being happily distracted by things that took less time to get to the table; namely, thyme-y fried eggplant, spaghetti with eggs beaten in to make it creamy, and sausage ‘n’ onions). So this morning I peeled a large sweet potato, mashed it, beat in 4 eggs, 1/4 c. brown sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp salt, and 1/2 c. flour. I dolloped the batter into a medium-hot well-oiled skillet and fried the little cakes till dark-golden on each side. Tender, light, nutritious, lactose-free, and infinitely simple. Next time: raisins in the batter.

Less related to this morning’s pleasant activities, I’m frankly fed up to here with this whole sweet potato/yam nomenclature controversy. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re not the only one: I had been operating under the assumption that the terms were synonymous in common North American usage, referring to a delectable orange tuber, though the “true yam” was a starchy staple food of western Africa. Then I had to make signs at work to discriminate between the white sweet potatoes and the orange ones -- and what do you know but the LESS sweet of the two should be granted the name “sweet potato”, while the vitamin-packed, dense, moist, and truly sweet sister should be called a “yam”?

The solution to this entire controversy, of course, is to eliminate cultivation of the white starchy thing, whatever it is, and eat the much more delicious orange sweet potato, which is tasty enough to take on many names.

Meyer Lemon Cheesecake

2007-12-13T16:08:00.000-08:00

I was reaching deep into a pot of coarse, moist sea salt when I met my first Meyer lemon. It was my job on a slow night to scrape out Meyer lemon interiors and finely mince the brined zest for a Meyer lemon sea-salt that got sprinkled on grilled asparagus. The squeaky squealy slimy rinds were a pain to work with, and my knife skills were not so well-developed as they might have been -- rind-mincing, like mopping the floor, wasn't my favorite task (that, perhaps, was roasting eggplants. Or making horseradish creme fraiche. Or wrapping the cheeses each night).

Yesterday I found myself with several pounds of lovely Meyer lemons on my hands. An old hybrid of mandarins and regular lemons, Meyers are incomparably sweet, creamy-shiny things redolent with meringue and custard possibilities. What with the December chill, I've been hankering for some more fat on my bones -- and so it had to be cheesecake. Yesterday I dumped two quarts of rich yogurt into a cheesecloth-lined colander set over a large bowl to start making fresh cheese for the cake, and whey for sipping.

To make the crust, brown 1/2 c. butter (slowly), while in another bowl you whisk together 1 c. almond meal, 3/4 c. white flour, 1 tsp. salt, and 1/3 c. sugar. Drizzle in the browned butter, fluff well, and pat the crumbs into the bottom and partway up the sides of a springform pan. Bake at 350 degrees fahreinheit for 15 minutes, or until lightly browned.

Beat the well-drained cream cheese* til yet creamier, then gradually beat in 1 1/3 c. sugar, 4 eggs, one at a time, 1/3 c. cream, 1/2 c. sour cream, the lemon juice and zest, a small splash of vanilla, and 1 tsp salt.

Bake at 350 till the edges have risen and just barely cracked but the center still jiggles. Turn off the oven and leave there a bit longer, then chill for quite a few hours before you serve it. It is one of the many merits of cheesecake that it improves with age.

*2 lbs of room-temperature commercial cream cheese will work as well. Reduce the amount of sour cream and cream to something like 1/4 c. of each and the salt to 1/2 tsp.

Dutch Babies Blog

2007-12-12T11:14:00.000-08:00

Paprika has rules. Like, "Contain yourself, lass," and "Take that butter right back where you got it from," and "If I see one more layer of eggy-crispiness it's the time-out corner for you, young lady!"

I'm a good girl; I'm taking my Dutch Babies outside.

To The Dutch Babies Blog! (Because "god their delicious").

Papa's "Stewp"

2007-12-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

My father has spent upwards of three decades working as a carpenter, and naturally abhors things like sixteenths of an inch and tablespoons (for which, he tells me, we can all blame Reagan). Here is his philosophy for ‘STEWP', where he sidesteps the politics of measurement by resorting to genuinely universal units.

Other stellar highlights of his culinary repertoire include grilled blue cheese sandwiches and I don't know how many hundreds of gallons of maple syrup, cooked off in a converted water trough out in the cow pasture.

He sent this my way back in October, but there's plenty of soup season ahead of us.

(Thanks, Papa!)

Persimmons

2007-12-09T20:50:00.001-08:00

Tell me. How come folks pay more for a quart of atrophied white-shouldered, moldy-assed, ungainly Californicating strawberries than a voluptuous hachiya persimmon? Honestly! Strawberries in December give you that same queasy feeling as peaking at your presents under the tree (to employ an in-season metaphor). They're like porn when the girl next door is home alone doing the Sunday crossword in her lingerie.

Because a ripe persimmon is a skinful of quivering pumpkin-apricot jelly. It's translucent like amber, and'll give you googly eyes, and persists in dangling from denuded branches long into the winter, long after the leaves have fallen, and the snow, too. The persimmon was meant to make the autumn not just bearable, but exquisite: a study in the beauty of orange on grey, of sweetness in the rain, and something that could be called patience but is far too delicious to be so didactic. For some reason, we can't wait till May for our strawberries, and insist on eating the botox-flavored, injection-molded pretend strawberries they assemble in sunnier regions and ship north on tractor-trailers in December.

Of course I love strawberries! In May I frolic, I cavort, I gambol for my ruby-hearted strawberries. I dance all night and fall in love and make shortcake. Come December, though, I get wise and wrinkly and nibble (gobble, suck, slurp?) those sunny plump persimmons. And puzzle over 9 across.

Really. Tell me how they choke those strawberries down.

Chili con Carnage

2007-11-29T16:37:00.000-08:00

Last night at the Lloyd J. Reynolds Memorial Shoestring Theater, we were dishing up chili and lactose-free cornbread when suddenly the film became unexpectedly sinister -- who knew writer's block could be so macabre? In any case, Barton Fink is worth watching, and this chili worth eating.

The evening before it's supposed to rain, run up to Otto's (or the German sausage joint nearest you) and nurse a franciscan hefe as you peruse the glass cases. Select two pounds of ground beef and the last ham hock, which is the last, the butcher tells you, "Because we've been doing so much elk lately." Allow yourself a little sigh for last year this time when you, too, were "doing so much elk." At home, rinse & soak a pound of kidney beans.

About noon on the rainy day you've selected for chili, pour off the bean-soaking water, put the beans in a great big stock pot, and cover with fresh cold water. Simmer them till soft, and then add the ham hock and some canned tomatoes (don't even try buying fresh tomatoes in chili season). The salt from the hock will toughen the bean skins if you add it too early. Coarsely chop a head of garlic and throw that in, too, along with a fistful of chopped dried chilis or chili powder. I like using a lot of mild chilis to lay down the foundational savor, adjusting the heat with the spicier ones later on. Word of Caution #1: Spiciness increases with time. Word of Caution #2: Do not change your diva cup for several hours after chopping chilis. No matter how hard you scrub your hands, that capsaicin will linger on your fingers.

A couple of hours before suppertime, caramelize three onions till pleasantly golden in olive oil. Add some chopped jalapenos, if you like. Splash in some Egri bikaver or other robust red wine, let it cook off, then splash in some more, etc.... Add the onions to the bean pot and check to see if the ham hock is fall-apart tender. If it is, pull it out and let it cool a bit before removing the bone, chopping the meat, and returning it to the soup.

In the now-empty onion skillet, brown the ground beef well, and add that to the chili. Swizzle in some molasses, and do some taste-testing. How's the salty-sweet balance? Probably more molasses will be wanted. The acids and mellows? Tomato paste will help thicken and add acid; so will wine vinegar, and the pork should have contributed plenty of mellow fat. Add some more garlic, this time thinly slivered. Turn off the heat and let it steep some more while you make the cornbread.

Serve with cornbread, sour cream, cheese, and chopped raw onions.

Thanksgiving 3.0

2007-11-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

It rated a perfect 3.0 on the butter scale. Pound and a quarter for three pie crusts. Pound for the stuffing. Quarter pound for basting. Quarter pound between the gravy and the beet sauce that got drizzled all over the kale. The balance for the mashed sweet potatoes, which, unfortunately, were so delicious* we didn't eat ANY pie till today. Ludicrous, I know, but with that much butter in a crust, it can survive even overnight refrigeration quite gracefully. And the day rated an even 3.0 for trips to the rosemary bush down the street, a 3.0 for liters of mulled wine, and a 3.0 for Members-of-the-Household-Working-on-Their-Theses-on-Thanksgiving-of-all-Days.

*Steam the sweet potatoes till quite tender. Whisk in the whipped cream left over from the morning's waffles, lots of salt and pepper, one trip's worth finely minced rosemary, a moderate amount of curry powder, slightly more molasses than you intended, and a stick of butter (and maybe just a bit of that ghee that got a little bit accidentally-deliciously caramelized).

Chicken Noodle Soup from Scratch

2007-11-14T22:09:00.000-08:00

This is a Little-Red-Hen, chicken-scratch kind of recipe.

In the morning, put a couple of pounds of chicken feet along with any miscellaneous saved bones in a large stock pot, cover with water, and bring to a simmer. Add some peppercorns, cover, and simmer all day long while you gad about in toy stores and gourmet grocers, and other places you have no business being (except to buy glow-in-the-dark stars and that grey sea salt you've been jonesing for).

When you tire of the blustery wind and people who say, "Oh, does he like yummy yummy cheeses? Does he? Oh yes, daddy's little soldier loves yummy yummy cheeses. He'll have a good palate when he's a big boy," come back home and drain the stock through a colander. Reserve half of it for later use (I freeze it) and put the rest back to simmer with several tablespoons of that fancy-ass sea salt. Then make the noodles.

Build a little cinder cone from 1.5 c. white whole-wheat flour on a clean countertop. Put 3 eggs in the crater and a pinch of salt and beat the eggs gently, incorporating some of the flour until it's too thick to stir. Knead till glossy-smooth, shape into ball, and hide under a bowl.

Chop two onions and whatever veggies are on hand (carrots, parsnips, cauliflower, celery, etc...). Add them to the simmering stock according to their respective cooking times and throw in something green, like thyme, and maybe a couple dashes of curry.

Uncover the dough. Cut it in half and shape into two balls. On a lightly floured surface, press one ball into a circle and roll from the center out till it's less than an eighth of an inch thick. Cut into half-inch strips. Gently stretch each noodle lengthwise before hanging it to dry (I find this easier than rolling the whole dough super-thin, and makes noodles of more even thickness). The noodles certainly don't need to dry all the way -- throw them into the soup pot as soon as you've shaped them all and the veggies are done. Go ahead and make noodles out of the other dough-ball, to use tomorrow or next week (those should dry all the way, hanging over a chair or a wooden spoon handle), but don't forget about the noodles in the pot. They should swell significantly but stay chewy.

This made enough for three people. If more people want some, garnish each dish with chicken feet and feathers. That'll teach 'em to freeload from the Little Red Hen.

Gizzards 'n' Sprouts

2007-11-14T14:25:00.000-08:00

Once each autumn a great scouring wind swoops down and rips off the last of the leaves. On that day I find it particularly difficult to control the urge to cackle and steal small children. I distracted myself today by fixing a wickedly delicious witch's luncheon: maple-glazed chicken gizzards and brussels sprouts. Supper, of course, will be soup in a cauldron, with chicken feet bubbling out.

Wash ¼ lb. chicken gizzards and cut into bite-size chunks. Sprinkle with salt. Peal the outer leaves from 8 brussels sprouts and cut in half. Core and dice one crisp, tart apple (like the dusty-red cameos everybody's been overlooking at the store).

Heat a large skillet and fry 2 slices bacon till crisp. Remove the bacon from the pan and let it drain while you cook up the other things. Brown the gizzards in the bacon fat, peppering well. Add the brussels sprouts and a quarter cup of water, cover, and let steam a bit. Remove the cover and let the liquid cook down. The sprouts will soak up that savory bacon fat on their cut sides. When the sprouts are just a bit too firm to eat, add the apple, another splash of water, and several tablespoons of maple syrup. Cover again, just to soften the apples a tad, and then uncover and let the liquid cook down to a syrup again. Spoon the sprouts 'n' gizzards into a dish, crumble the bacon overtop, and pour the pan juices over it all (said pan juices will accumulate in the bottom of your dish. You will want a slice of crusty bread for sopping).

This dish has marvelously assertive textures: the gizzards spring, the apples split, the sprouts crunch, and the bacon crackles. Whee-hee-hee, my pretty.

How to Eat

2007-11-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

With your fingers. Because it's silly to sit down with fine folk and share only the conversation -- when there are germs and elbow-space and enormous platters of wat to be scooped up with that spongy fermented injera.

Quite frankly, when LJ makes Ethiopian food, it's magic. And when there's a fire in the grate and cats and guitars, it's hard not to question our dependence on things like forks and job interviews.

In other news, the new house is great, and I'm taking advantage of its relative security to brew kombucha, make granola, and cultivate houseplants.

Confessions of a Roast Garlic & Sweet Onion Jam Thief

2007-11-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Baby, there's no delectation like peculation. An inveterate fridge-snitch, I've encountered many a tasty leftover that doesn't belong to me. Some favorites:
LJ's coconut milk curry with the big juicy shrimp (I know, dear. I'm really sorry. You even hid it in the upstairs fridge at Canada House).
ALL's cashew butter (what it is it, 10 bucks for a wee bitty jar? Wicked, wicked me).
V. Cafe's marinated olives (five gallon pailfuls of juicy briny delight! By the end of the shift my apron pockets bulged with pits)(no, of course I didn't violate the health code).
A. Rose's garlic-onion jam (and you're so good at savoring your treats. I hang my head).

I can change; I swear from now on I'm a new person. I'll keep my kleptomaniacal lips off my housemates' possessions and make my own roast garlic and sweet onion jam.

For the exorcism of vampires, colds, and leftover biscuits:
Dice two and a half enormous sweet onions and throw them in a large stockpot with a long splash of olive oil. Confit them: simmer them gently forever, adding more fat and stirring if they brown & stick, while you roast the garlic and prepare the pectin. Alternatively, lay them out on an oiled baking sheet and roast them with the garlic.

Take three heads of garlic, maybe five if you have a cold, peel off the really loose papery stuff, and slice across the top so each clove has a little peep-hole. Place them in a skillet with a little bit of water and roast them at 400 till quite creamy inside. You may want to add more water or partially cover the dish.

I used Pomona's Universal Pectin because it doesn't require a mountain of sugar. It comes with directions. But you can probably get by without it if you just cook everything way down at the end.

When the garlic is nicely browned, squeeze the cloves into the onion pot and mash everything with the potato masher. Add 1/4 c. cider vinegar, the juice of one lemon, 3 tablespoons of salt, a lot of pepper, 1/4 c. brown sugar, some molasses for good measure, and 2 tsp. calcium water if you're working with Pomona. Bring it all to a boil.

Mix the pectin (2 tsp) with 1/2 c. honey and add to the onion mixture. Stir vigorously and return to a boil. Boil for a minute and pull of the heat. Pack into sterile jars & do the whole canning thing, or just put it in a quart jar or two and keep it in the fridge.

As a concentrated source of the sweet-savory-sour culinary triumvirate, this jam makes a great gift for the flavor-shy. Tell them to use it as a glaze, marinade, sandwich spread, and soup.

Chicken Potpie

2007-11-06T19:58:00.000-08:00

Chicken potpie occupies a spectrum of pastried poultry ranging from a thick stew with rich dumplings to an honest-to-goodness two-crust chicken pie. Mine, directly descended from my mother's, lands somewhere in the middle: a creamed chicken casserole with biscuits baked on top.

To somewhat maintain their individuality, I like to prepare the ingredients separately. I roasted two well-salted, skins-on chicken quarters at 400 till they'd rendered some fat, then added two chopped onions and a generous splash of chicken stock. I let the chicken brown while I chopped cauliflower, green beans, parsnips, carrots, and potatoes (something like two quarts of each). The potatoes I seasoned and roasted alongside the chicken, but only for 20-30 minutes to keep them from getting bitter. I steamed the other vegetables till just tender -- this meant the carrots had to be chopped much finer than everything else.

When the chicken was fall-apart tender, I pulled it out and let it cool till I could comfortably pick the meat from the bones. I made a roux by adding half a cup of flour to 4 tablespoons sizzling butter, and stirring it about till the flour was all saturated. I added a quart of chicken stock and whisked it all till thick and bubbly -- but not too thick (it ought to be pourable, not gloppable). With the potatoes roasted, the veggies steamed, the chicken pulled, and the gravy thick, I was read to "make biscuit".

I'm particularly fond of crusty flaky layered cornmeal biscuits as the nicest counterpoint to the creamy filling. So I whisked together 2 cups white whole-wheat flour, 1.5 c. white flour, 1/2 c. cornmeal, 5 tsp. baking powder, and a tablespoon of salt. I grated 10 tablespoons of frozen butter, fluffed it about, made a well, and poured in a little more than 1.5 c. milk. With a few quick movements, I emptied the dough onto the counter, kneaded it with a half-dozen fold-turns, patted it into a round on a light sprinkling of cornmeal, and rolled it (from the center out) till half an inch thick. Mama cuts round biscuits. I like making rhombi (diamonds, slanty-squares, what-have-you), which tile nicely as in the picture and produce less scrap for re-rolling.

To finish it off: preheat the oven to 450 degrees, equally distribute the veggies and chicken between two #8 or 9 cast-iron skillets, pour over the creamy-gravy (which I did have to thin a bit with some milk) and top with biscuits. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or till crusty and golden. Serve one skilletful for supper and keep one back for leftovers. Counts as three good doses of religion.

Maple Parsnip Pie

2007-11-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

How is it that the parsnip, so carrot-like -- though sweeter, spicier, and creamier -- has been left to languish like a wallflower while its orange-complected sister gads about in cakes with cream cheese frosting?

I decided last night, when the store was slow because everyone was out trick-or-treating, that I must find a partner for the poor neglected parsnip, and throw a debutante ball in a realm where the crisp carrot really can't compete: pie!

I halved six parsnips this morning and roasted them in a buttered dish with a little water till they were quite tender. I nibbled off their tails, which were pleasantly crispy, and threw about half the tops in the blender with some good rich milk. I tried to add as little liquid as possible, to see how concentrated I could get the parsnippy flavor without the blender protesting, and wound up with 2.5 cups of parsnip puree, 1 cup of which was milk. I put a spoonful of puree in two cups and added a tablespoon of honey to one, and a tablespoon of maple syrup to the other. I had already ruled out molasses because I wanted to preserve the ivory-cream color. It was good with honey, but maple syrup really understood the parsnip's clean earthy-woodsy bite. Honey, on the other hand, just couldn't parse parsnips' nip.

So to the blenderful of puree I added 3/4 c. maple syrup, two eggs, 1/4 c. sour cream, 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg, and 1/8 tsp. ground cloves. I blended it well, then let it sit while I made a 9" sweet shortbread crust to put it in. I baked the pie at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes, then reduced it to 350 until the custard had risen significantly around the edges but not so much in the middle.

Oh, damn it, I forgot to add vanilla! Perhaps I should top the pie with vanilla whipped cream. In any case, it's cooling now and I shall let you know how parsnips behave when they're all dolled up.