Jan 23

As We Come Marching, Marching

Along with many other cities around the country, Seattle was the site of a large Women’s March. In keeping with the Seattle Way, ours was called the Womxn’s March. This was to include anyone with sympathies with the goals of the march.
I arrived at the Park and Ride around 8:20. There was already a large group of folks waiting for the bus downtown. When the bus arrived, it was nearly full already. I grabbed one of the last open seats. More riders got on, and the bus was full before we hit the Seattle city limits. Despite the sardine-can conditions, everyone was in good spirits.
Many of us got off the bus in the International District and walked to the starting point, Judkins Park. It was an uphill slog, but less steep than some of the other routes. The open field was awash with pink pussy hats and interesting signs. It took me a while to find my church group; in the meantime, I ran into other acquaintances and chatted up a young woman who was wearing a St. Lawrence University shirt. I finally found my group and got ready to march.

Mobilizing a large mass of humanity is difficult enough. Mobilizing a large mass of humanity onto narrow residential streets is damn near impossible. It took my group nearly an hour to get out of the park, and an hour to get one block. Our group entertained ourselves by singing “We Are a Gentle Angry People” and “This Little Light of Mine”. One of the neighborhood residents set up his audio system to play an anti-Trump rap for the marchers.

The mass of humanity on Jackson Street in Little Saigon. Note that not everyone marched (right).

Once we got to Jackson Street, the main drag of Little Saigon and the International District, the mass of humanity was able to spread out and move quickly. People on the sidewalks cheered us on. The Viet Wah supermarket set up an outdoor refreshment stand. My favorite sign is shown below. The sign and the man holding it were posted near the interstate 5 overpass. Also on Jackson Street, a woman updated us on the participation: 100,000. The Seattle police officers along the route seemed to enjoy the passing scene. As well they should have: We were a peaceful crowd. No arrests, no vandalism.

No comment needed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make it all the way to the end of the march. After i took the photo above, my knees decided that I should go home. I met some marchers who made the same decision on the train to the University District, including a woman who’d had two knee replacements inside of a year. Another rider heard that the participation was over 120,000: “That’s more than the Seahawks’ Super Bowl parade!”

My “inner iPod” was playing several tunes while I was marching. One was a little chant by Fiona Apple that Julian had emailed to me. The second was “Bread and Roses”, an old women’s labor song based on a poem by James Oppenheim. This post’s title is a line from the song. This is the last verse:

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

Over a century later, we’re still marching for the same stuff.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/23/as-we-come-marching-marching/

Jan 19

Better than Chicken Soup

Julian’s had a nasty cold this week. Last night he decided he needed soup to decongest his respiratory tract. He stopped at a Vietnamese joint north of us and brought home two servings of bun bo Hue, one of my favorite soups.

Bun bo Hue is a Vietnamese noodle soup, but it’s more complex than pho. First, it contains both pork and beef. Some restaurants will also add Vietnamese pork roll (what Julian calls nose meat); others will add blood cake. However, most of the recipes I’ve seen in cookbooks use beef shank and fresh ham for the soup. Other differences between bun bo Hue and pho are the use of chiles and shrimp sauce in bun bo Hue for spice and funk. Bun bo Hue noodles are also thicker than standard pho rice vermicelli. Both soups are served with an herb platter, which can also contain lime wedges and bean sprouts.

I had my first taste of bun bo Hue at a Vietnamese restaurant in Rochester, NY many years ago. It was love at first slurp. The soup isn’t easy to find in restaurants. Your all-purpose House of Pho wants to serve variations on one or two broths to simplify the menu and keep costs low. Making the broth for bun bo Hue is more involved, and requires multiple steps to build up the layers of flavor. The noodles take much longer to cook than rice vermicelli, about 15 minutes. Finally, the owners of many pho joints believe that their non-Asian customers wouldn’t like bun bo Hue.

Making bun bo Hue at home isn’t difficult, providing you have a good Asian grocery store nearby. You want to get pork and beef cuts with bones to make the broth. The only challenging ingredients to find are the bun bo Hue noodles and an herb called rau ram (sometimes called Vietnamese coriander) for the herb platter. My go-to recipe is in Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. I bought the book solely on the basis of the bun bo Hue recipe; luckily, the other recipes are keepers as well. I’ve also used the recipe from Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. Either recipe will yield a soup that will clear your sinuses and convince you that your ancestors took the long way to Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/19/better-than-chicken-soup/

Jan 17

Ignoring is Bliss

I do not plan to watch or listen to the Inauguration festivities live on Friday. This is an easy choice to make. I’ll be at work in a cube farm on Friday, and I don’t particularly like to use earphones. I may listen to the oldies station on the drive home. If I do pay attention, I’ll probably read about it on “loser” websites such as washingtonpost.com or cnn.com.

Addendum: I’m apparently not the only one hereabouts who will ignore Friday’s brouhaha. So will Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/17/ignoring-is-bliss/

Jan 17

The Travails of a Two-Person Kitchen

Back in the day, the kitchen was the headquarters (or prison) for the woman of the house. She’d shop for groceries, make all of the family meals, and clean up thereafter. Children – usually the daughters – would assist in the kitchen chores as soon as they could stand on a stool to reach the sink. Luckily, things have (mostly) changed. Many men not only set foot in the kitchen, but out-cook their female partners. When two people claim the kitchen as their own, chaos can erupt.

Julian and I consolidated kitchens many years ago. For most of our moves, I organized the kitchen and cookbooks first and he configured the electronics. (We’d both say that we had our priorities straight.) This division of labor would result in exchanges similar to this:

J: CJ, I can’t find anything in this kitchen! Where’s the [insert essential ingredient or utensil here]?

C (going straight to the shelf where said item is located, usually hiding in plain sight): If this were a rattlesnake, you’d be dead meat by now.

J: I’ll never understand your organization system.

When we purchased new cookware for the induction range (see The Homeowner Begets post), I decided to let him reorganize the kitchen. I admit that he did a good job overall. He got pull-out shelves for the colanders and cat food, and wire shelves to expand the amount of usable space in the cupboards. However, we now have variations on the following exchange:

J: CJ, where’s the wok?

C: You organized the kitchen. It’s right where you put it.

Beyond organization, we’ve adopted several strategies to maintain domestic tranquility:

  • Never argue with or sneak up on the person wielding the knife. This does not mean we get into saber fights on a regular basis. This is more self-preservation for the knife-wielder. If s/he gets distracted or startled, a nasty cut could ensue.
  • Respect the other’s turf. Both of us are in the kitchen at the same time when we’re having our friends over to dinner. We have our own section of counter with a cutting board and knife for our separate mises en place. This avoids misappropriation of ingredients: “You stole my chopped onion!”
  • Make sure items stored in the refrigerator (even temporarily) are covered and well-sealed. This reduces the risk of spills or odor permeation. Think sauerkraut-scented orange juice: Not very palatable.
  • S/He who does not cook does the dishes. This dates back to his days running the kitchen of his co-op and my days rooming and cooking with friends.

Reducing the number of arguments about the kitchen leaves us plenty of bandwidth to bicker about other things; which movie to watch after dinner, for example.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/17/the-travails-of-a-two-person-kitchen/

Jan 15

French Dinner, Part Deux

Some of our friends couldn’t make it to November’s French dinner, so we hosted a make-up session. This time, we made duck à l’orange and vegetarian cassoulet. The duck à l’orange recipe is one Julian’s used for many years, dating back to when he was the menu planner for his co-op in grad school. It’s a streamlined version of the French classic. Canned beef consommé and orange marmalade take the place of homemade duck stock and orange glaze. It’s our traditional Christmas or Easter dinner main dish.

The vegetarian cassoulet would seem to be a contradiction in terms. In traditional cassoulet, the beans are simply a vehicle for meat/poultry and animal fat. The vegetarian version has butter as the animal fat. The recipe is from the Seattle restaurant Tilth, and appeared last fall in the Seattle Times. Mushrooms and truffles add the umami factor. I had to make some adjustments to the recipe. First, the sun-dried tomatoes had to be left out, as one of the vegetarians had an intolerance to nightshades. Finding a black truffle for shavings was out of our price range. We wound up getting some white truffle paste at a place in Pike Place Market called the Truffle Café. I also skipped smoking the beans in favor of a whiff of liquid smoke.

The main dishes were served with brown/wild rice blend and a green salad. Appetizers were cheese toasts, and the dessert was a vegan chocolate cake. The masses left well fed.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/15/french-dinner-part-deux/

Jan 14

Moss Never Sleeps

Here on the wet side of the Cascades, moss is a fact of life. Local columnist Knute Berger refers to himself as Mossback. Moss grows on any stationary object, including roofs, siding, lawns, and (occasionally) rusted-out cars. Our postage-stamp-sized front lawn in Seattle was being overtaken by moss. Was I concerned? Absolutely not: Moss doesn’t need to be mowed.

Here are a couple of shots I took today of the moss growing in front of Casa Sammamish.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/14/moss-never-sleeps/

Jan 14

The Bill Arrives

It only took four months, but the bill for my emergency room visit in Avignon for the dislocated pinky arrived. The envelope was stamped “prioritaire” (priority), but was postmarked 11/18/16. I guess the French postal system has a different conception of priority. The real surprise was the bottom line: 127.52 Euros (about $150). The probable cost of a similar ER visit in the US would be about ten times that much. Such a bargain.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/14/the-bill-arrives/

Jan 09

Raiding the Pantry

I was in the mood for pasta with clam sauce, but didn’t have the time or inclination to pick up live clams on the way home. Fortunately, I had a can of clams in the cupboard. I riffed off our standard recipe. Tonight’s side dish was an artichoke heart salad with roasted red pepper, green olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and green onions. The clams were cooked with a French Viognier white wine, which we also drank. Definitely an easy weeknight dinner.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/09/raiding-the-pantry/

Jan 08

Reliable Sources

Even with the sheer number of cookbooks in my library, there are times when I gravitate to certain sources for recipes. The common characteristics are that the recipes are well edited and work in our hands. For weeknight cooking, it helps that I don’t need to make special trips to get obscure ingredients that I may use once. Here are a few that are my go-to sources for recipes.

General cooking. Joy of Cooking is still the standard. Most of the time I reach for the 1997 edition, edited by Maria Guarnaschelli (aka the “cast of thousands Joy”, because of the number of contributors). The last edition worked on by Marion Rombauer Becker (1975) still holds a prominent place in my bookshelf. I also use Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and the Gourmet Today Cookbook for general purpose recipes.

Asian cooking. I joke that my ancestors took the long way to Plymouth Rock on the Mayflower–through southeast Asia. I go to Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table for Vietnamese food, including bun bo Hue. The Elephant Walk Cookbook by Longteine DeMonteiro and Katherine Neustadt was one of the first Cambodian cookbooks published in the US. I’ve never been to the eponymous restaurant in the Boston area, mostly because I haven’t been to Boston in nearly 30 years. (Let’s just say that I had a traumatic experience driving around the city on my grad school-hunting tour of the East Coast.) There’s not a bum recipe in the book, and I’ve served her hot and sour fish soup many times over the years.

Weeknight dinners. Now that Julian’s retired, he has time to play in the kitchen all afternoon. On the other hand, my goal for weeknight dinners is quick and tasty chow. Mark Bittman’s Minimalist cookbooks are a good place to start. I also bought a used copy of Pierre Franey’s More 60-Minute Gourmet, and have adapted some of his recipes to 21st century tastes. Julian also collected clippings of Marian Burros’s columns for the New York Times, which give complete menus for weeknight dinners.

Breads. Although the book is more overview than deep dive, Bernard Clayton Jr’s Complete Book of Breads has served me well over the years. George Greenstein’s Secrets of a Jewish Baker is also a frequent source of inspiration. It contains the all-important recipe for Miami-style onion rolls, which were prominently featured at the Rascal House and Wolfie’s delis (both of blessed memory). I’ll make the onion rolls for Julian on special occasions.

Although these volumes are regularly used, there are times when I’ll go on a spree with a particular book or genre. Because of our friends at the Spanish Table (now the Paris-Madrid Grocery), we’ve gotten comfortable with Spanish cuisine. Greek and Middle Eastern food also get ample representation. And thanks to our travels and acquaintance with our former French professor, Provençal cuisine has been incorporated into our menus. This list is subject to change as I get new books or get drawn in different directions.

 

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/08/reliable-sources/

Jan 02

For Future Reference

I have over 500 cookbooks, folders full of recipe clippings and internet downloads, and index cards I’ve compiled over the years. Keeping track of what I’ve tried has been challenging. However, I’ve developed a three-pronged system that works for me. (I’ll discuss later how it works for Julian.)

  • The recipe cards were relatively easy to track. I scrawled comments on the upper right-hand corner of the ones I tried and initiated a 1-to-4-star rating system. As the number of cards grew, I put the tested recipes into a separate box so I could find them easily.
  • For the cookbooks, I started out with a loose-leaf notebook and kept notes on recipes I tested. Each cookbook is identified by a short code. For example, Joy of Cooking is joy, and the (original) New York Times Cookbook is NYT. Updated editions of these cookbooks have their own codes. There is a section of the notebook that identifies the cookbook and its code, and I pencil the code into the front of the cookbook.
  • The clippings file started later. I also identified magazines by code (Bon Appétit is BA, for example) and kept track of them in a separate notebook and a multi-section file envelope. As the clippings expanded, I bought a rolling set of Pendaflex file boxes (see right of photo).

I digitized my files when I got my first Macintosh. I’ve used FileMaker Pro to create separate cookbook and clippings files. Typing in the code autofills the source of the recipe. I then add my comments. Recipes we’ve downloaded from the internet get classified as IN, and the cards are identified as card in the clippings file. At Julian’s request, I added a field for key ingredients that the recipe contains. That way I can find where my go-to recipe for fennel salad is by searching for fennel, pomegranate, and olives. Each cookbook record also contains the bookcase and shelf where it’s located. This comes in handy when I forget where I shelved a book I don’t use often. When I cull a cookbook (yes, it happens), I can easily delete the recipes I’ve tried from that book by searching on the code. I keep the loose-leaf notebooks as a backup for the digital files. (Yes, I back up my hard drive. Not as often as Julian would like…)

My most recent tweak to the system is to house the clippings I’ve tried in the notebooks where the ratings are. The recipes and ratings are by category (Appetizers, breads ,etc.), and the clippings are in plastic sleeves behind the ratings. This allows me easier access to clippings we use often, such as the aforementioned fennel salad.

This system, as I said earlier, works well for me. So how does it work for Julian? Most of the time, he asks me: “CJ, where’s that recipe for the crackling wings?” I hope that the above recent tweak helps him to find that recipe independent of me in advance of our next Super Bowl party. He does know in which cookbook some of our “best of” recipes reside, and sometimes he can find them without my help. I housed the barbecue and a few of his other favorite cookbooks at eye level right next to the coffee grinder and espresso machine (see left of photo) so he wouldn’t miss them. At some point we may replace those aging Ikea-esque bookcases with built-in bookshelves, but that may take a few years. Plus I’d have to revise the databases thereafter…

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/02/for-future-reference/

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