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/

Jan 01

Getting my Goat

I’ve developed a liking for goat meat over the years. It started with our friend Beverly’s Jamaican curried goat dish. We’ve had it several times when we’ve visited her and her family north of Miami. Since then, I’ve ordered goat in several other restaurants of varying ethnicities.

Goat is not easy to find. Most standard supermarkets don’t carry it. Your best bet is to go to a Caribbean, Indian, or halal (Muslim) grocery store. Although goat is built similarly to sheep (although rangier), butchers usually cut it in smaller pieces with bones. Don’t shy away from it because of the boniness. The bones add body to the dish, along with tasty marrow. The meat has a gaminess similar to lamb, but not overwhelming.

The other night we went to our friendly neighborhood Korean restaurant. This is the place with the umami-bomb broths. I decided to order the goat dish. The broth and meat were great. Also in the stew were seeds that I didn’t recognize. I though they were leftover seeds from somebody’s Christmas Chia Pet Donald Trump. When I asked the waiter what the seeds were, he said they were wild sesame seeds.The seeds looked nothing like what usually graces my bagels. They were spherical and decidedly crunchy. I might try to reproduce this dish at home, if I can figure out the secret to their broth and find wild sesame seeds.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/01/getting-my-goat/

Dec 31

Good Riddance!

Words to live by.

Judging from the cards and letters I’ve received this holiday season, 2016 was a uniformly bad year. My friend Carolyn said it best: “Goodbye 2016 – You sucked!” Her father died and her husband was diagnosed with leukemia. Another friend lost her husband. One of my longest-term friends was in a bad auto accident and is now walking with a brace on one foot. I think it’s part of aging. The cloak of invincibility becomes frayed and is easy to breach.

My wishes for 2017 are summarized on these two little stones I keep next to my computer. These are legacies of my days doing triathlons with a group of women from my church, the mighty Team UUC. The perseverance stone (someone else did the spelling) was from my first year as a “triathlete”, when I was on a relay team with two other women. I wrote resilience on the left stone after a kidney cancer scare the following year. Many of the women in my group got through even worse events. The support we gave each other through group training sessions, monthly potlucks, and coffee hours after services were essential to endure the rough spots and finish the race. May we all develop the perseverance and resilience needed to face the challenges ahead of us. Happy new year.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2016/12/31/good-riddance/

Dec 26

Christmas at Casa Sammamish

Our Christmases over the years here have evolved into a pattern:

  • Christmas Eve with our friends for food and the white elephant exchange;
  • A quiet Christmas à deux (actually à quatre, including the cats); followed by
  • “Jewish Christmas” dinner with friends.

I had the morning and early afternoon to myself, given Julian’s propensity to sleep late. I sent out email holiday letters, reorganized my filing system for clipped recipes, called my family in New York, and read the Sunday paper. The river was quiet, except for the ducks and geese. One of our neighborhood eagles was hunting for Christmas dinner. I saw a lone duffer on the golf course across the river from us.

Julian got up, and we had grilled brie and apple sandwiches for lunch. This is a specialty of one of our old Greensboro haunts, the Liberty Oak. We then emptied the cats’ stockings (with predictable ensuing chaos) and exchanged our gifts. I got two cookbooks (no surprise here; see below). Unlike many of the bad-boy chefs who’ve written cookbooks of late, Bourdain can write two sentences in a row without including an expletive. The Short Stack Cookbook focuses on recipes for specific ingredients in each chapter, such as winter squash, chicken, and mayonnaise (EEEUW!!!). I got Julian two Northwest-themed books: Short Nights of the Shadow-Catcher, about the early 20th-century photographer Edward Curtis; and Eruption, about Mount St. Helens.

The cats also made out well. Luka (right) was hogging the toys before this photo was taken.

In past years, we’ve done Jewish Christmas in Chinese restaurants, most notably Facing East in Bellevue. This year we switched to Indian food, as one of the Known Twentysomethings in our group is now a gluten-free vegan. We wound up at Chutneys Bistro, in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. Dinner was buffet-style, and the offerings I had were very good. I talked food with my former next-door neighbor, and talked shop with the nurse practitioner in our group. We essentially closed the restaurant down.

It was still early when we got home, so we watched a movie, Age of Adeline. Julian categorized it as a science fiction romance. I categorized it as a gemisch of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Robin Cook medical sci-fi, only with a happy ending.

I hope you all had a Christmas (second night of Hanukkah, or December 25) of peace, joy, good food, and love.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2016/12/26/christmas-at-casa-sammamish/

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2016/12/26/rebuilding-bothell/

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