Three Tarts

Waffle Smackdown

2009-01-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

Will and I would like to announce the formation of the Weekend Waffle Federation. Waffles are our weekend ritual (pecan today!) so we've decided to formalize things. Our waffles will whoop your waffles. Don't think I'm kidding. Our waffles have caused injuries. In 2006, during the Waffle Whallop, Will reached for a waffle and ended up pulling a back muscle.

If you think your waffles stand a chance against ours, we're ready for a smackdown! The WWF championship belt could be yours!

Squirrel, it's what's for dinner

2009-01-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

Since moving to Ottawa, I have spent a lot of time watching squirrels scamper about. They are everywhere and they provide a certain amount of entertainment while I am sitting at my computer grading papers or standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. They have also scared the shit out of me a few times by jumping up on the windowsill unexpectedly. The squirrels are everywhere. And they are sort of adorable.

Now, though, I get to contemplate making them my dinner. According to the NY Times, squirrel meat is all the rage in England. Look, economic times are hard. And they're right there. They practically come inside if the window is open. They are also quite fond of our compost bin, so there's a trap right there. (Will did say he would get me a BB gun if I wanted one).

The article did mention that squirrels are very hard to skin, but I don't think that will be a problem for me with this handy guide from the Joy of Cooking.

a candy-coated cruciferous Christmas

2008-12-09T20:24:00.000-08:00

Found while searching for a recipe for chocolate-covered pretzels for my in-laws' annual candy-making extravaganza....

It's like they've been waiting for me. . .

2008-09-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

Look! A bakery called 3 Tarts. In my neighborhood. It's fate, I tell you.

We went there yesterday and had little pecan tarts. They were delicious. Buttery creamy filling with a touch of lemon. None of that syrupy cloying filling of the bad pecan tart. They also have pretty cakes and cookies that look pretty good. They don't have a place to sit down which is lame, especially since they have plenty of room for a few chairs and some cafe tables. Instead they have a sad and too large display of quick breads. I love quick bread, don't get me wrong, but I need a place to sit and devour my tasty tarts. We solved the problem by going across the street to another bakery, buying some bread, and sitting on their patio.

dinner at Citronelle

2008-07-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

Forget elaborate gifts or weekend getaways - Mark and I usually celebrate anniversaries and/or birthdays by eating somewhere we wouldn't be able to justify any other time of the year. My personal shortlist of D.C. restaurants special enough for that once-a-year trip include Komi, Restaurant Eve, CityZen, Citronelle, Minibar, and the Inn at Little Washington. We've done Komi and Eve, so this year for our second wedding anniversary, we made a reservation at Citronelle, Michel Richard's flagship restaurant.

Citronelle definitely has a different atmosphere than Komi or Eve; the latter both feel comfy, while Citronelle is more of an officious-French-waiter, D.C. dealmaking sort of place. That's not to say the service isn't excellent. It is, and if you can get over feeling intimidated by it, it's fun to sit back and admire the complicated dance. Anyway, we went with the promenade gourmande, the more reasonably sized of the two tasting menus. If it hadn't been a weeknight, we'd have done the wine pairings, but when I've gotta work the next day, that's just too much for me. So I started with a glass of Sancerre for the first few courses, than asked the waiter to recommend a red that would go well with my heavier courses (it was a Bordeaux and it was fabulous, but that's all I remember. I was a little put off that he didn't even ask me about my preferences, though - I asked and he just nodded and whooshed off and reappeared with a bottle). First came the amuse bouche, or rather a trio of them: egg surprise, escargot crumble, and vitello-tonnato. The "egg surprise" was a mousse-like cauliflower puree topped with smoked salmon, served in a perfect eggshell half. The top half had a little handle that you lifted up to reveal the puree. The escargot was in a tiny, thimble-sized ramekin, and the vitello tonnato looked like a tiny, pretty wedge of layer cake, one of Richard's many whimsical presentation touches. Next was a silky vichyssoise with house-made potato chips (fried in clarified butter - yum). That was followed by a fried soft-shell crab on a bed of chilled ratatouille. I felt like the crab itself wasn't all that special, but the ratatouille was nice.

Next, a melt-in-your-mouth broiled sablefish with a swoon-worthy caramelized sake-miso glaze. However, this was one course where Mark's vegetarian counterpart got short shrift: my fish came with a little mound of veggies (baby bok choy, etc., with Asian flavors). His dish? Simply three mounds of those same side-dish veggies. It felt like such a dated attitude toward vegetarians. A place that respected them as diners with equally sophisticated palates would have aimed a little higher. In fact, now that I'm on the topic: When we sat down, our waiter acted befuddled when Mark wanted to order a vegetarian version of the tasting menu. (This was after Mark told them he was vegetarian twice: once when he made the reservation on OpenTable, and again following up on the phone. We're aware this is the sort of thing a place needs to know in advance.) The waiter said something like, "Are you sure you want that?" I think there was some confusion because I was getting the regular tasting menu, and the waiter said Mark would have gaps where I had courses and he didn't, because the vegetarian tasting menu was shorter. Mark said that was fine with him, but then the waiter said no, no, it's no problem, the kitchen can do it. I have to say, Komi and Eve were never confused by the request or anything less than gracious about it. (In fact, I think when we first arrived at Komi, the waiter came over right away to ask Mark whether he ate cheese and eggs before he could even remind them he was a vegetarian.) In retrospect, Mark would've been better off with the shorter vegetarian tasting menu, because they don't seem to have enough ideas to sustain a longer one. (Hence the three piles of the side veggies from the sablefish dish.)

Anyway. Next came the lobster burger, my favorite dish of the night. It was a perfect little slider on a brioche roll with what I think was a tomato-ginger jam. (I think it's available in a full-sized entree version at Citronelle's casual-dining counterpart, Central. That would certainly lure me in there.) Perfectly moist, and just the right ratio of lobster to bread. It was served with more of those buttery potato chips. They were delicious, and certainly made sense with this fine-dining take on the burger, but then again, I'd just had them a few courses back. Hmmm. (Similarly, Mark was served asparagus two or three times, and not really in an "asparagus three ways" sort of way. Maybe if we'd gone with the wine pairings, we'd be tipsy enough to not remember?) Next, black angus steak with veal sweetbreads, morels and asparagus. It was good, but it had a tough act to follow after that superstar lobster burger.

Next, the cheese course. Then a strawberry cocktail - a little dish with a sort of strawberry compote in the bottom, then a nice little mousse layer, topped with a mint granita that was so fresh and clean and herbal-tasting. One of the best "palate cleanser" courses I've had. Dessert, Richard's take on a Kit Kat bar, was fabulous. A dense chocolate/hazelnut crispy layered thing with pistachio ice cream and rhubarb tuiles .... sigh. Oh, and then somehow we found room for the petit fours. And managed to waddle home. :)

Overall, though? I sort of felt like we'd been sized up and mentally seated at the kids' table. They have a certain number of star dishes to trot out, and they're incredible, but a lot of Mark's dishes felt like afterthoughts. Maybe they figured we didn't know any better, but we do. In the future, I'll get my lobster burger fix at Citronelle's casual sibling, Central, and we'll do our special-occasion dining at places that treat us like we know what's going on.

oat-apricot bars (and a great springtime cocktail)

2008-05-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

So what do you make when you're craving something sweet that's also portable for lunches and such, and you're also impatient for summer stone fruit to make its debut? CHOW's Crumbly Oat & Apricot Bars, made with dried apricots and apricot jam, do the trick. Aren't those gorgeous? They turn out just like the picture. The crust reminds me of the salty oat cookies at Teaism, one of my favorite neighborhood snacks. As noted in the comments on the CHOW website, it's important to use kosher salt for this, not only because table salt is saltier and more densely packed for its volume (they'd be salty indeed if you used a tablespoon of table salt), but also because kosher salt won't totally dissolve in the crust mixture, resulting in appealing little bursts of salt playing off the sweet.

I was almost dissuaded from trying this recipe because of the user comments. But having made this and having had them turn out fabulously, I have to say I have no idea what these people are talking about. Raw flour taste? Not sweet enough? What did they do? Seriously, these are great.

And as for the drink, I think I have perfected my version of a pomegranate martini. Two shots of vodka, one shot of Grand Marnier, a splash of rosewater, a generous squeeze of lemon, topped off with pomegranate juice. The rosewater is nice with pomegranate and it makes the drink something more than just spiked fruit juice (got the idea from a similarly embellished sangria I had recently), and it's not cloyingly sweet. Some boys might even drink it (just don't tell them about the girly rosewater).

I'm watching Dirty Dancing on cable as I type this - What was Jennifer Grey thinking in the '90s when she got that thoroughly generic nose job? Why did she do that? What was wrong with her real one? That is all.

Gotta go - it's time for the big finale. Ooh, here they all come marching down toward the stage for the big lift! Nobody puts Baby in a corner!

just in case you're sick of winter

2008-03-26T07:00:00.001-07:00

reverse-engineering a lebanese dish

2008-03-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

Mark and I got back from a trip to South Africa yesterday (proper post on that to come). Despite the 17-hour flight, I'm feeling remarkably not very jet lagged, so I was looking forward to cooking tonight. While in Cape Town, we ate at a Lebanese restaurant and had a dish that even Mark had never had: the menu called it potato harra, and it consisted of cauliflower and potatoes--fried or roasted, I wasn't sure--with a spicy, brothy sauce full of lemon and garlic. If Lebanese cooking has a "holy trinity" of flavors, lemon and garlic have got to be two of them. (I'm not sure about the third. Parsley, maybe? Mint? Tomatoes? Chickpeas?)

Anyway, we loved it, and I vowed to re-create it at home. I cut cauliflower and potatoes into bite-sized pieces, tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and set them in a pan to roast at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, I chopped up a lot of garlic--just keep peeling those cloves until you start to get a bit scared--and mixed it up with some olive oil, smoked paprika and a little cayenne, and let that all sit while the veggies roast. Then I poured that over the partially roasted veggies (I think the garlic would burn if it was in there for the full half hour), tossed it to coat, sprinkled some panko bread crumbs over the top, and roasted for about 15 minutes more.

I also took a few liberties with the original. I wanted there to be some protein so this could be a one-dish dinner type of thing, so at the end, I mixed in some chickpeas along with the lemon juice (and a little veggie broth to adjust the consistency). And I thought it needed a little extra zing, so I added some chopped preserved lemon. Oh, and some snipped chives (because, well, I had them on hand, although parsley or cilantro would probably make more sense). And I served it with quinoa (also very protein-rich).

Because of my last-minute additions, the panko didn't stay crunchy, of course, after getting all mixed in, but that was OK because it ended up thickening the sauce just a bit.

The verdict? The flavors were right, I think, but the veggies didn't get as browned and crispy. I think maybe they were fried in the original. I think I could still get away with roasting, just with a bigger pan. I think things don't get as browned when the pan is crowded. So it was a different dish, but a keeper in its own right. We loved the added dimension of the preserved lemon - sort of a Moroccan twist. Arab fusion, if you will. :)

I've managed to parlay my presidential politics obsession into a blog post...

2008-02-18T08:21:00.000-08:00

...because I'm just that lazy.

Courtesy of CHOW, now you have a handy-dandy reference guide to the presidential candidates and their food likes and dislikes. Just in case your state hasn't voted yet and you feel you need to take this into consideration. As you can see, by and large, they are fans of the grill, and vegetables generally don't fare well (though there's no mention here of Hillary's stated love for hot peppers and mango ice cream -- I have to admit, she might be the best candidate to go chow-hunting with. She sounds the least picky). Even Barack Obama gets in on the vegetable hate, avoiding beets. Et tu, Barry? That hurts me.

off-topic post: the hokey pokey baby

2008-01-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

After 18 hours of labor, Griffin danced his way into the world on Saturday, January 26, 2008, at 3:47 pm. The doctor said he was doing the hokey pokey in the birth canal--"you put your head out, you put your head in, you put your head out and you shake it all about." Fortunately, he eventually tired of dancing and decided to finish being born. (P.S.--this explains a lot of the kicking the last nine months--practice!)

As we had noticed in his 20 week ultrasound, Griffin does indeed have the pointy little Duex family chin. He weighed in at 7 lbs 12.5 oz and 20 inches long with light brown hair and plenty of it; we can't decide if his eyes are dark blue or grey.

As for personality, well, he's like most babies. Cries, sleeps, eats, looks cute. He likes flying--going through the air in his daddy's arms--and bouncing. He also has perfected the art of roaring while simultaneously making the baby bird sucking face. He wants his food and he wants it five minutes ago.

That's what told us his name. While "Griffin" had been on our short list, any kid that can be part lion and part bird at the same time clearly deserves the name of a such a magical creature (gryphon). Add in his 'claws' (sharp fingernails) and his powerful neck (can already move his head around on his own, even if he can't hold it up long), and he's definitely got us enchanted.

He's home with us now--he and "Maman" are doing well. We love him. And that's what it's all about.

surviving the winter

2008-01-22T09:01:00.000-08:00

Winter is not my favorite time of year. I believe that people should hibernate; who are we kidding that we can function normally when the days are short and the temperatures icy? Now that we are planning to move to Ottawa, I think I really have to learn how to survive winter.

It seems that Canadians have really learned how to embrace the winter. The five dollar bill, after all, includes images of ice hockey, sledding, and ice skating. These images say some good things about Canada's national priorities, but if winter is a dominant part of the money-scape I fear that winter in our new home will be endless.

And how can a winter-hater survive in a land of seemingly endless winter?

Since meeting Will, I have learned to accept winter just a little bit more by ramping up my winter sports activities. Before Will, I would occasionally go snowshoeing. I liked it well enough, but it was a poor replacement for summer hiking. I would only go out on bluebird days when there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Now I have two pairs of skis and I go out almost every weekend. It makes a difference; this winter, even with loads of snow, I feel pretty content.

The other trick for winter survival, of course, is comfort food. Hot creamy tea, melty chocolate chip cookies, mashed potatoes. And perhaps the ultimate savory comfort food: shepherd's pie.

My winter has been a quest for ways to prepare the stacks of lamb in my freezer. I'm not sure why it took me so long to do the obvious. What else should you make in the middle of the winter if you have a supply of lamb and the hope to forget that it is 20 degrees outside and that you are moving to Canada where you fear it will be 20 degrees below zero?

I made the Gourmet version of shepherd's pie, which was a little fussy with its pearl onions and leeks but totally worth the time. The mashed potatoes on the top were divine and it's a miracle I didn't eat them all while waiting for the stew to braise. I made a mess in the oven because my cast-iron pan wasn't quite big enough, but again--completely worth it. Shepherd's pie and a Guinness? More winter, I say.

happy new year, southern style

2008-01-07T14:57:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, my mom had this cookbook full of heritage-style recipes: sally lunn, muffuletta, hoppin' john. It must have been a gift because my mom wasn't much of a cook and she never made anything from the cookbook--much to my childhood frustration. I loved browsing through that cookbook, reading the stories behind the recipes and imagining what the food would taste like.

Lately, I've found myself slowly remembering all of those foods and finding recipes so I can try them out. Muffuletta last summer for a picnic. And this New Year's, hoppin' john.

Hoppin' John is basically rice and black-eyed peas, cooked with ham and onion. Completely simple but so, so good. It's a traditional New Year's dish in the south--so logical: leftover christmas ham=hoppin' john. I took the ham hock home from my family's Christmas dinner and luckily Gourmet's January issue had all sorts of southern recipes, including hoppin' john. Another good version of the rice and black-eyed peas combo is to get rid of the ham and add coconut milk and a little thyme--no cool name here, just rice and peas. I learned how to make that one from my friend Carmen.

The think I like most about the hoppin' john is that it represents an approach to food, cultural knowledge, that we've lost--the ability to transform one food in multiple ways, to create bridges from one meal to another.

candy for Christmas

2007-12-30T11:31:00.000-08:00

My mother-in-law and sister-in-law and I had our annual candy-making extravaganza last weekend. This time we ended up with eleven different kinds, five of which were new to us:

almond brittle
toffee
caramels
peanut butter bark
haystacks
peanuts covered in white bark
raspberry jellies
Earl Grey truffles (the cream infused with tea)
Carribean truffles rolled in coconut (the cream infused with coconut-passionfruit tea I brought back from St. Martin)
peppermint bark:

and pretzel wreaths:

I have never been much of a candy maker--anything that involves a thermometer and boiling sugar makes me nervous--but I'm getting good at melting white bark and pouring it over things like chow mein noodles and pretzels! And really, all truffles are is melted chocolate that gets gussied up.

So are you a holiday cookie baker, a holiday candy maker, or neither? What are your sweet holiday traditions?

time to thai one on!

2007-12-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

We had a particularly delicious Supper Club dinner earlier this year. This time the theme was coconut milk--I mean, "dishes from Thailand"--and they were rich and flavorful! Appetizers included Thai-spiced pickled veggies and deep-fried fish balls. Here's one of the main courses, chicken with veggies and coconut milk,

and perhaps everyone's favorite dish of the evening, shrimp curry with coconut milk (both prepared by Cynde and Todd).

Or perhaps Katie and Aaron's velvety coconut milk chicken soup was the favorite?

Mr. Tart and I provided dessert. Our lemongrass sorbet never quite froze, so I called it a "lemongrass icee" and served it in glasses,

but the sticky rice with, yes, sweet coconut milk sauce and mango was a success!

satisfying our curd cravings

2007-12-10T20:35:00.001-08:00

Now, y'all know that I'm not a football fan and that Mr. Tart is not a sports bar kind of guy. But when in Green Bay...

and when you really want good fried cheese curds, and when your parents want your unborn child to be inculcated into Packer fandom, well then you have lunch at Curly's Pub at Lambeau Field. (That's us posing with his statue at the entrance to the legendary stadium.)

While we all had entrees (burgers and brats, mostly), the main event for Mr. Tart and me was the curds:

Yes, that's $8 for a big bowl of curds. Curly's urges its diners to "tackle Packer-sized portions."

As you can see, one picture is worth a thousand curds. (Or something like that.)

By the way, speaking of portions that could fell a linebacker, here's what we didn't order for dessert:

on a sugar high

2007-12-09T20:23:00.000-08:00

So we're having this holiday cookie swap at work tomorrow, and for some reason we're each supposed to bring six to eight dozen cookies. That's right, six to eight DOZEN. I think maybe the idea is that this way, everyone goes home with several assorted cookie plates they can then give to people. I dunno. I also don't know quite how I'm going to get all this stuff to and from work tomorrow, because I walk to work. All I know is that it means I've gone through a truly astounding amount of butter in this weekend's baking.

My contributions: maple-date bars, lavender-vanilla bean shortbread, lemon curd thumbprints, and chocolate cupcakes with chocolate-mint ganache and mint buttercream frosting (from the fabulous Cupcake Bakeshop blog). The cupcakes, which you see above (sorry for the less-than-optimal photo) were my first cupcake effort, inspired by my purchase of a nifty decorating set - instead of a pastry bag, it's a small plastic accordion-pleated squeeze bottle that's a lot easier to control for a beginner. I'm a decorating klutz, but it worked out well.

Happy holidays, everyone!

the perfect baby shower game for a foodie?

2007-12-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

My former colleagues from CSU--many of whom are also close friends and/or mentors--threw me a baby shower yesterday. It was great fun and felt so warm and affectionate and supportive. (Can you read the cake? It proclaims "Welcome Croissant"!) And they even heeded my wishes for "no stupid baby shower games."

Well, there was one almost-game, which the hostesses (one of whom was Katie from my supper club) were careful to call a "challenge activity." It involved giving everyone a dollop of pureed, unadorned baby food from nine different jars to see if we could identify the flavors. I ended up with eight correct (missed "peach"). The general consensus was "No wonder babies spit up so much--this stuff tastes awful!"

Salt is definitely a good thing.

bread heaven

2007-12-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the summer, I woke up thinking about this wheat grinder that my parents had when I was younger. In my morning haze, I was wrapped up in memories of the sound of wheat berries popping down into the grinding blades, warm flour piling up in the metal bread pan resting below. I told my mom about my musings and she informed me that they still had the grinder and I was welcome to use it.

I drove down to my parents' house and rescued the grinder from the basement (and a hand-crank wheat grinder that we used for cracked wheat--my favorite breakfast food). Because I had new wheat grinding tools, I had to get wheat so I purchased a 50-lb bag. I immediately cracked some wheat for breakfast and ground some beautiful fluffy, nutty flour. Then, I set about baking bread.

I rarely bake bread. Growing up, our whole wheat was mainly used for waffles and pancakes (which my be why I had such good memories of the wheat grinder). I am not a break baking expert. I made a couple of transitional loaves and they worked fine, but with 50 lbs of wheat in the house, I really want to work with whole wheat. I made a stab at an entirely whole wheat loaf. It tasted fine, but it was so dense. A brick of chewy, dark bread. Not really what I was looking for. I found recipe for pumpkin whole wheat bread and that worked beautifully--the pumpkin made the bread creamier, lighter. But, I don't want to be throwing pumpkin into every loaf of bread I make.

My search for whole wheat bread recipes online were unsatisfactory, so I went to the bookstore hoping to find something that would change my baking life. The first think I saw on the shelves was Peter Reinhart's new Whole Grain Breads. The book was beautiful, the directions were detialed, and the quotes on the back seemed enthusiastic (unlike those negative book blurbs!). It was a little pricey, but it was birthday month. I bought it and looked at it for a couple of weeks before actually giving it a try.

So far, I have made a basic sandwhich loaf and cinnamon rolls. OMG. This is bread perfection. Reinhart uses a delayed fermentation method which includes making a biga and a soaker the day before shaping and baking. You have to plan ahead with this bread, but it is perfect. Light, soft, flavorful. The steps are many and a first look at the book suggests a complicated process, but it's quite easy. Reinhart gives measurements, weights, and baker's proportions so you can approach the bread with simplicity or a little more finesse (I went for the easy measurements and things worked fine). I think my next attemps will be challah and bagels.

If you have any bread baking ambitions, I highly recommend checking out this book. If you don't want to use whole grains, you may want to get his Bread Baker's Apprentice. I actually haven't looked at it, but I can only imagine it's fabulous.

I may just get through that 50 pounds of wheat.

no pie day this year

2007-11-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Usually, this is the time of year I provide a list of all of the pies I made for the family Thanksgiving, but alas, there was no pie day this year. Will and I decided to head down to Southern Utah for a camping trip instead of having a traditional Thanksgiving--the first time in my life I haven't had the usual meal. We spent Thanksgiving night in a motel, watching deliciously bad reality tv and eating a semblance of a Thanksgiving dinner: turkey sandwiches, pumpkin empanadas, and beaujolais. It wasn't bad and the pumpkin empanadas gave us breakfast for the next two mornings. I was a little glum about missing the pie, because when else can you justify baking seven pies at one time? But the camping was lovely--great scenery, sometimes warm weather, and perfect hiking (although there were way more people around than I expected).

Luckily, friends decided to gather before Thanksgiving for a pie party, so I feel that my pie lust was satisfied--you can read about the party over at Hightouchmegastore.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I'd love to hear about your meals.

OED word of the year

2007-11-25T21:04:00.000-08:00

Beating out other timely contestants ("bacn," "tase," and more), at a youthful two years old, the 2007 Oxford New American Dictionary Word of the Year is locavore, the word for someone who prefers to eat food cultivated locally.

(How do I know this? I subscribe to the OED word-a-day listserv!)

squeaking with pleasure

2007-11-18T22:12:00.000-08:00

Mr. Tart and I are heading up to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for Thanksgiving with my extended family. The festivities will include a tremendous dinner for the nearly 30 of us expected at my parents' house, the Packers game on Thanksgiving day, of course (no Macy's parade viewing for this crowd), my cousins' annual "Miles Standish Day" steak meal on Thanksgiving Eve, and oh joy! that squeaky orange delicacy done best in the dairy state, cheese curds.

If I wasn't certain that my husband really, genuinely likes my parents, I would suspect that he agrees to accompany me on our pilgrimages to the midwest solely for the cheese curds.

They're best still warm from the, well, wherever it is that they make cheese curds--but they're just about as good from the refrigerator the next day. They're springy when you bite them and they squeak between your teeth when they're fresh; they taste of the essence of a rich, mild cheddar. As much as I love my stinky unpasteurized French cheese, I delight in cheese curds too.

Bonus: Unlike those forbidden stinky unpasteurized French fromages, Wisconsin cheese curds are not off limits to pregnant women!

And guess what? It turns out that some restaurants in the Green Bay area fry them! Exquisitely soft and creamy inside, protected by a golden brown crunch that leaves a slick memory on your fingers, the deep-fried cheese curd is addictive and comforting. No previously frozen, mass-produced mozzarella stick could ever compare. The deep-fried cheese curd only lacks its fresh counterpart's beguiling squeak (once described by the New York Times as "balloons trying to neck").

Mom and Dad will have cheese curds waiting for us when we get off the airplane tomorrow--but will we have a chance to eat fried curds during our short holiday visit?

local food article

2007-11-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

I've been a bad blogger lately, but you can check out some of my thoughts about eating locally over at Culinate.

Mushroom risotto? What a shocker.

2007-11-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

When my husband and I go out for a nice meal, I can never shake my vague sense of guilt. I enjoy checking out the D.C. restaurant scene, partially because I learn a lot about it at my job and partially because, well, duh. But, although Mark loves a good plate of food (almost) as much as I do, he'd often be happier eating at the empty place with no wait list next door to the new place everyone's talking about.

And I think I've figured out why: The vegetarian entrees are uninspired, even from kitchens that otherwise turn out creative, well executed food. While I'm having an epiphany over unctuous duck confit, poor Mark is faced with yet another grim Melange of Seasonal Vegetables, one just like what he could get at the empty place next door. I feel terrible about subjecting him to places where I'll have all these amazing choices and he'll scan the menu, find the one veggie option (if there is one at all), and say, "Well, mushroom risotto it is, I guess." We skipped Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal because I just couldn't subject him to that scenario, even though he always swears up and down that he wouldn't mind (bless him).

In fact, it seems that the better the restaurant, the slimmer the meatless choices. (With exceptions, like certain types of ethnic restaurants and booked-in-advance tasting menus.) In casual-dining places where the philosophy is "give the people what they want," Mark generally gets to at least choose between the mushroom risotto and the Melange of Seasonal Vegetables. (Oh, goody!) But in places where the menu reflects the chef's culinary point of view -- places we'd both be excited to eat at -- that point of view comes across as "vegetarians, go home." Okay, maybe that's a little harsh. But the point is, they're showing you what they make best, what inspires them, what they like, and mostly that doesn't happen to include vegetarian entrees.

Here's the thing, though. Right now, the sustainable seafood movement is translating into a restaurant trend in D.C. -- look at Hook in Georgetown. And most respectable chefs these days make at least some effort to source ingredients as locally and sustainably as possible. So, given that going veggie at least part of the time reduces your carbon footprint, I don't understand why this isn't also manifesting itself in the form of more innovative vegetarian food in restaurants. (And I say this as a most-of-the-time carnivore, lest I sound preachy.)

I understand, I guess, that chefs view meat as the centerpiece of what they do -- that they can demonstrate their technical mastery by cooking it perfectly, and then demonstrate their creativity by having it be a vehicle for innovative flavor profiles. It's what lets them show off their chops (no pun intended). But come on, can someone please, please show me a vegetarian entree I wouldn't think to make at home? Do it for the vegetarian foodies, and for the omnivores who love them.

Is it better in other cities, maybe? Because it's bleak in D.C.

Happy Halloween!

2007-10-31T20:44:00.000-07:00

This year, I was uber-crafty and made mummy cupcakes for Halloween (the idea for these is thanks to the Martha Stewart Halloween magazine, which I only bought because my sister-in-law designed--I swear I'm not a Martha groupie!) The decorations are a little sloppy (mummies are sloppy, right?), but I think I finally figured out how to adjust the cupcake recipe for altitude--no floppy tops.

Chefs and their last meals

2007-10-24T20:05:00.000-07:00

Check out My Last Supper, a photoessay on famous chefs and the foods they'd choose for their last hurrah before leaving this world. Who wants a foie gras terrine? Who wants chips and guac? Who's photographed wearing a totally awesome hat made out of pasta? Find out here. Oh, and Ferran Adria, father of molecular gastronomy? His last-meal picks involve no foams, no spheres of whatever suspended in something, nothing you'd need an immersion circulator to make. Which isn't surprising, I suppose. Even Ferran Adria has comfort foods. Food is still love, even when your life's work involves playing chem lab in the kitchen.

I'll have to think more about what my own last meal would involve. What about yours?

the most decadent brunch ever

2007-10-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

Mr. Tart whisked me away for a babymoon last weekend to the historic Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. He had scheduled me for a prenatal massage--lovely, lovely--and then took me to the theatre to see Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood perform a two-man version of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", where we laughed so hard we actually cried. Sunday morning brought with it the most decadent brunch ever, which the hotel is rightly famous for.

The following list is merely a sampling of each long table's offerings!

Buffet one: Breakfast stuff (waffles, bacon, sausage, hash browns, fresh fruit, omelet/egg station, pastries, cheese plate)

Buffet two: Carving station with various meats, green beans cooked to order, mashed potatoes, rolls, and scallops seared while you watched

Buffet three: Prepared salads, green salad bar, several types of smoked fish, oysters, jumbo peeled shrimp, crab claws, lobster meat, mussels, sushi

Buffet four: Desserts! Hot chocolate made with cream, chocolate fondue, several varieties of cheesecake, several types of petit fours, five kinds of truffles, chocolate souffle, creme de menthe layered chocolate cake, coconut tuile "spoons" with vanilla cream, and so much more....

This is the only buffet I've ever experienced where the quantity was so extensive and yet the quality surpassed the quantity! While some options were familiar and pedestrian, others were gourmet (for example, I didn't recognize all the cheeses) or even Iron Chef-worthy (like the butternut squash mousse--by far the best vegetable I've ever had for dessert--and the white chocolate lavender truffles, which tasted like a bubble bath, in the best possible way). The huge pillowy scallops in a mead sauce made me gasp.

The presentation shone along with the food--the deconstructed caprese salad with jewel-tone roasted red peppers and gorgeous tomatoes and round balls of mozzarella, the creme brulee in espresso cups, the smoked salt on the truffles, the starfruit slices decorating the passionfruit cheesecake. (Ed reminds me that the ice sculpture was a nice touch--but apparently I never even saw the swan towering over the seafood!)

In honor of autumn, the brunch also had a theme going: apples. There was apple coleslaw, apple chicken salad, julienned and sauteed apple under the seared scallops, and a caramel-sauced Granny Smith-Jack Daniels flambe station on the dessert table. (Surprisingly, none of the fresh fruit options included apple slices.)

We especially liked when the three-piece jazz band played "Fly Me to the Moon," the song from the first dance at our wedding. We ended up sitting in the dining room for two hours, willing our stomachs to digest the food and open up some room for another danish, another scallop or two, another shot glass of hot chocolate cream.

I can't wait to get pregnant with baby #2 so we have an excuse to go back to the Brown Palace!

success!

2007-10-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, I almost NEVER make pies from scratch because, frankly, I am scared of making pie crust. On this blog, Melissa has often stated her caramel phobia; well, that's how I am with flaky pastry. It just never, ever ends well. I always seem to end up with too much filling or too little, and burnt, bricklike crust with nary a flake in sight. But I had a fridge full of apples, a lazy Saturday ahead of me and a husband requesting pie, so I figured I'd face my fears. Imagine my surprise when I took this beauty out of the oven:

I used the recipe from Cook Something by Mitchell Davis. It was the very first cookbook I ever bought myself and almost every recipe I've tried has been great (and I've tried almost all of them -- just not the apple pie, until today). It's 10 years old now and the pages are falling out. I'm nostalgic about this book because this is pretty much what I taught myself to cook from.

Once again, I used the freeze-the-butter-and-grate-it trick. You end up hardly having to work the dough at all, and I think that's the key.

pomegranate molasses, smoked Maldon salt

2007-10-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

These were my impulse buys today at the grocery store. Anyone have any (preferably vegetarian) ideas what I can do with these two things?

I'm thinking I could make a pretty awesome salad dressing with the pomegranate molasses. I know it's a Lebanese ingredient, but I'm not sure what it's used for. Marinades, I'd guess? The consistency is more like a syrup than molasses, and the flavor is really concentrated (i.e., you wouldn't want to just pour it straight onto anything, I don't think). Has anyone ever used it?

And the smoked sea salt: Since I'm cooking vegetarian most of the time, I'm always looking for creative ways to introduce a little smokiness, a little umami, to things. Maldon - both the smoked and the regular variety - is very delicate and flaky, and I first had it at a restaurant in Montreal, and I swear it made everything it touched amazing. It seemed to sharpen all the other flavors. There was even a little sprinkled on top of my chocolate pot de creme. Beautiful. (That was the regular, not the smoked -- although, am I crazy for thinking the smoked salt just might work with chocolate or caramel? Maybe?)

So many questions ...

2007-09-29T06:57:00.001-07:00

Spotted at a deli near my office:

I have nothing else to say about this.

"pickling is the new knitting"

2007-09-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

... says Brooklyn hipster. The NY Daily News has this story about a "canning consultant" who does workshops in New York. (Melissa, you may fancy yourself "assertively unhip," but I'm afraid your hobby has been deemed decidedly trendy!)

à la recherche des recettes!

2007-09-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

The Cercle Français (French Club) at the school where I used to teach (Colorado State University) is looking for recipes from France and other French-speaking countries to publish in a cookbook to raise money for the club. If you have any tried-and-true recipes that you love and would be willing to have included, they'd be very appreciative! (They're currently short of their goal of 150.) No monetary compensation, of course, but I bet they'd be willing to cite your website under your name if you're a food blogger--so that means free publicity!

To share your recipes, please either post them here via the "comments" section or email them to me at babybilingual (at) gmail (dot) com.

Merci beaucoup!

Here's one of my favorites to get you started: Pasta Niçoise (inspired by the foods of Nice, on the French Riviera, and its delicious Salade Niçoise).

Pasta Niçoise

Adapted from a recipe in the Denver Post

2 Tbsp olive oil
3 large shallots, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb haricots verts, trimmed, cut into 1/2-inch slices (if haricots verts, the skinny French green beans, are not available, substitute regular green beans)
1/2 c. chicken or vegetable broth
1/4 c. red wine
1 Tbsp herbes de Provence (substitute dried Italian herb blend), or more to taste
1 tsp salt
Freshly ground pepper
1 c. pitted niçoise olives (very small briny black olives with pits; substitute larger black olives if necessary--but don't use canned black olives!)
1 lb rotini pasta, cooked according to package directions
1 c. soft chèvre (goat cheese)
Toasted pine nuts (optional)

Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat; sauté shallot and garlic until golden and fragrant, about 3 minutes. Add green beans, broth, wine, herbs, salt, and pepper to taste; cook until beans are cooked through, stirring occasionally, about 6 minutes (longer if using larger green beans).

Stir in olives; cook until heated through, about 1 minute. Put pasta in large serving bowl; add bean-olive mixture. Stir in chèvre. Sprinkle with pine nuts if desired and serve.

Other alternatives: Add (or substitute for the olives) chopped sun-dried tomatoes. Sprinkle finely diced hard-boiled egg on top to boost protein for a vegetarian main dish.

Serves 8.

grilled pizza

2007-09-20T21:24:00.001-07:00

Has anyone had success with this approach? We tried a recipe tonight from Lynne "Splendid Table" Rossetto Kasper and it was a splendid failure. My lovely dough (Lis' favorite recipe from Gourmet) neither puffed up nor acquired grill marks as it was supposed to, at which point we're instructed to flip it over on the grill and add the desired toppings. We suspect the problem stems from not having a hot enough grill (after all, a pizza oven is over 500 degrees). But then doesn't everyone have this problem when they go to grill a pizza? Or is it just that no one else is foolish enough to try?

street food in D.C. just got a little better

2007-09-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether we have many regular D.C. readers (note to self: must get SiteMeter), but I know that some of you have some knowledge of the D.C. food scene (looking at you, Ed), and that you will sympathize when I say that D.C.'s downtown food carts suffer from a serious lack of imagination. Basically, it's all hot dogs (er, pardon me, half smokes), all the time. In fact, several months ago, when the city was preparing to issue its first licenses for new food carts after a long moratorium, it actually sponsored a workshop for prospective cart owners entitled "You Don't Have To Sell Hot Dogs." Sad, but true.

The first of these new carts have opened, and the buzz is positive. There's a Korean BBQ cart three blocks from my office, and I plan to go try its bulgogi tomorrow. There's a new halal cart that's supposed to have good chicken shawarma, and there's another cart opening soon that will sell chicken & waffles -- sadly, those two are a bit farther away for a lunchtime trek for me. Still, this is encouraging. It just makes me happy to know that somewhere in this city, you can (soon) buy soul food from a street vendor.

cheddar-caraway biscuits, homemade applesauce

2007-09-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

Every week, we get tons of apples from our farm share, and we're having trouble keeping up. They were starting to take over the fridge, so today I made some applesauce. I'd never made my own before, which now makes me feel a bit silly because it is ridiculously easy. You set it on heat and it practically makes itself.

Applesauce

3 lbs. apples, peeled, cored and cut into wedges
1 c. water
1/3 c. packed brown sugar
juice of 1 lemon
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. cardamom

Bring apples, sugar & water to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered, about 25 minutes. Apples should be soft and breaking down at this point; cook uncovered for a few more minutes if there's still excess liquid. Remove from heat; stir in lemon juice and spices. Mash any huge chunks that still exist (I left mine slightly chunky). Makes about 3 cups.

And, because apples love cheddar cheese, I also made cheddar & caraway biscuits -- the first biscuits I've made that didn't resemble hockey pucks! I know very cold butter is the key, so I tried a trick I read about somewhere and froze the butter, then grated it with a box grater. That seemed to do the trick (well, that and very minimal handling of the dough), because they turned out very light and flaky, which you maybe wouldn't expect from a cheese biscuit. And the flavor? Well, I'm a sucker for sharp cheddar. The original recipe called for dill, but I tried caraway and black pepper. Yum.

Cheddar-Caraway Biscuits

2 c. flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. caraway seeds
black pepper (not sure how much I used)
5 Tbsp. cold, unsalted butter (see my note above about the freezing and grating)
3/4 c. extra-sharp Cheddar, grated
3/4 c. plain yogurt
1/3 c. milk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix dry ingredients; grate frozen butter with box grater, add to the flour mixture, and work in with a pastry cutter (or a couple of forks, or your food processor, or however you like to do it). Add cheese; mix until just combined. In a separate bowl, whisk milk and yogurt together; add to flour mixture and mix until just combined. Drop by big spoonfuls (about 1/4 cup) onto an ungreased baking sheet and bake 12 to 15 minutes. Makes 12 biscuits.

prison food

2007-09-16T13:15:00.001-07:00

The SL County Jail started a master gardener program this year in collaboration with Utah State University. Inmates plant, tend, and harvest a variety of produce and either donate the food or sell it at the farmer's market. We've tried to buy from the program every time they are at the market. Their produce is great and incredibly cheap (since they are not looking for profits). A few inmates are always there, selling their vegetables and you can tell they are pretty proud of their work.

Compare that to this video about a convention for correctional system food. Maybe instead of worrying about sticks in corn dogs a few more correctional facilities could get inmates to grow some of their own food.

win a prize!

2007-09-04T18:30:00.000-07:00

Mark and I recently went out for Indian food with our friends Reid and Kate. As we looked at the menu, Reid was telling us about a mysterious dish called Chicken 65. When he attempted to order it -- off-menu, of course -- our waiter looked at him for a second, eyes narrowed, and deadpanned, "I have not heard of this dish." His look, however, said he totally knew about it. Since then, Mark -- a vegetarian, mind you -- has been obsessed with the idea of Chicken 65. Read more about it on his blog.

So, I have a challenge for you, dear readers: Successfully order Chicken 65 in an Indian restaurant (and document it to share here), and I will send you a prize. A real, tangible prize through the mail. (Except you, Reid, since you apparently already know where to get Chicken 65.)

clean-out-the-freezer bread pudding

2007-09-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

Two people just can't eat a lot of fresh bread before it goes bad. I end up turning baguettes into bread crumbs and throwing rolls into the freezer. Ditto for pancakes and waffles--Mr. Tart and I can't even finish a half-batch of homemade breakfast goodies on our own. As a result, our freezer was bursting with leftover sweet and starchy goodies, and they had to go. It was time for bread pudding!

I used my favorite very easy recipe from Epicurious, but this time substituted leftover waffles and croissants (turning an already-French dish into a very-French dish). I cut them into big chunks and let them sit out on the counter until they weren't soft anymore, and then preceded with the recipe. (I also had more than the four cups' worth the recipe calls for, so I increased the amount of milk in the custard--enough to cover the pastry pieces--and also the baking time.) And I doubled the bourbon sauce--it's intense and delicious and takes the dessert from France back to New Orleans.

raise your sippy cup and say "cheers" with Carl, the future foodie!

2007-08-30T20:34:00.000-07:00

My nephew Carl, age 19 months, talks about food constantly--in French, no less! Swing by Bringing up Baby Bilingual and see how he can sweet-talk me into giving him grapes or clinking crackers.

goat-cheese cheesecake with gingersnap-hazelnut crust and blood-orange caramel

2007-08-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

I hardly ever follow recipes to the letter anymore. Which, when I'm making dinner, generally works out fine because I know enough techniques and flavor combos to throw something decent together. But I don't really have the pastry skills to make that work with dessert. So I'll improvise in a sort of modular way, using made-up elements and components of various recipes. The goat-cheese cheesecake recipe I used was crustless and baked in six ramekins, but I like cookie crusts with my cheesecakes and I wanted to use my springform pan. So I made up a gingersnap-and-hazelnut crust (delish!), made extra filling (good call) and sort of guessed on the baking time. I think I overdid it by about 10 minutes -- it was a bit too much on the cakey side, rather than the creamy/silky side. Live and learn. But even when cheesecake isn't technically flawless, it's still cheesecake. You can't truly screw it up.

I also used the blood-orange caramel called for in the original recipe. But I tweaked that too: I added a good fat pinch of sea salt, and instead of taking it off the heat after adding the orange juice, I let it reduce for a few minutes (mine was inexplicably runny), and I finished it with a bit of butter - maybe a tablespoon or so - which deepened the flavor. Perfect. It plays off the tanginess of the cheesecake. I will be using this caramel recipe to accompany many desserts in the future. In fact, I made a double batch and we had some this morning, accompanying peaches as a crepe filling. (Hooray, dessert-as-breakfast!) And that hazelnut brittle in the original recipe? I will trying that in the future too.

desperately seeking sushi

2007-08-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

So I've been craving sushi lately. I don't think it's a pregnancy thing--more of a "98-degree summer in Colorado where cool, light meals are perfect" thing. We've got good sushi restaurants in the Boulder-Denver area--even one right here in little Lafayette--but of course they present a dilemma: I'm not allowed to eat raw fish. So far, I've been satisfying my craving with the occasional California roll or unagi (the eel that tastes barbecued). Do any of you with more sushi expertise than me have suggestions of other cooked fish sushi rolls I can indulge in? (I had a vegetarian one the other day, which disappointed me because there were too many crunchy bits.)

Lafayette garden report: squash gone wild

2007-08-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

Why do they sell packets of dozens of squash seeds when any normal family would be satisfied with just two or three squash plants per summer? I couldn't bear not to plant at least a handful after purchasing the packets. Even though wise people warned me that a whole row of squash could be dangerous, I planted two anyway: one of yellow zucchini, one of butternut. I thought that since the butternut (or as Mr. Tart trepidaciously called them, "those big, funky, strange-shaped squash things"), a winter squash, wouldn't mature until much later, it would stay out of the way. (It didn't.) As for the yellow zucchini--one of which turns out to be green, a pleasant surprise--even after I mercilessly yanked out several of the half-grown plants in July, it's still trying to take over the yard. Not just the garden, but the whole yard. I have to trim it back to keep it from spilling onto the flagstone walkway. And now these long green tentacles with leaves bigger than my head stretch out over the rock almost to the fence--but that's fine since they're not in the way. One vine attacked a basil plant minding its own business a foot away and a foot above on a different level of our terraced garden.

Yes! Our terraced vegetable garden! After several summers of trying to garden on a slope, and watching every afternoon rainstorm and every winter snowmelt send valuable topsoil whooshing down into the rock, providing a fertile home for all sorts of noxious weeds, while our tomatoes struggled to survive mere inches away, Mr. Tart decided to save our garden! He hauled in bricks and new bags of topsoil and built up the bottom part of the sloping hill to level it with the rest of the garden.

Maybe that's why the squash has spent the whole summer partying.

But as you can see, the vegetable garden is an overcrowded, verdant explosion producing more herbs that we will ever use (thyme, sage, chives, tarragon, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, several mints, and lemon balm, with the latter two in "time-out" planters after their previous attempts to overtake the vegetables),

the aforementioned zucchini and butternuts (bringing with them, fortunately, their stuffable blossoms),

adorable baby cantaloupe which aren't sure if they're ever going to finish growing and ripen into edibility,

our favorite green beans ever, the thin, sexy, French haricots verts,

new-to-the-garden-this-summer edamame beans (still too little to pick, but oh-so-fuzzy),

plenty of feathery carrot tops,

and a few tomato plants that are still deciding whether or not they want to produce anything. Oh, and a volunteer tomatillo plant--growing in the rocks--which is bigger and healthier than any of the tomato plants eeking by in fertilized soil, go figure.

Summer 2007 promises our most bountiful harvest yet--but we're rapidly tiring of chocolate zucchini cake.

hamburger, ketchup

2007-08-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

I hate big menus. They make me a little nervous, a little sweaty. How can I possibly make a choice among so many options. Not to mention that usually the bigger the menu, the worse the food. When I get a big menu, I usually try to get someone else at the table to make a decision for me. In college, my roommates and I had plans for a restaurant called "Just Spaghetti" that served well, just spaghetti. No garlic bread, no salad, no nothin. Of course, we weren't very good at keeping to our vision. Every time we ate something we really liked, we'd amend: "well, just spaghetti and cheesecake. . ."

On our recent visit to Coeur D'Alene, Will told me about Hudson's, a local joint that only sells hamburgers. No french fries. Just burgers (ok, they also have pie and you can get a ham and cheese sandwich--although in two visits I never saw anyone order this). You get a choice between regular or cheese and you can have the burger topped with pickles or onions. For dressing, there are bottles of ketchup, spicy ketchup, or spicy mustard on the counter.

This is the kind of place I like. No choices, no fretting, no disappointment. There is one cook, standing at the grill with a pan of ground beef on the left, buns layed out in front, a whole onion and pickle on the right. Shape the patties, throw them on the grill. Slice onion and pickle. Throw it all together. Things move pretty fast. The place is rather like that old SNL skit, "Hamburger, ketchup. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, ketchup."

This is a good burger. No frills. No options. Total Satisfaction.

baking a tartlette

2007-08-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

I'm baking a new type of dish right now.

You loyal readers will say, "But Sarah! We all know that you're not a baker! You never post about pies or bread or cakes! What gives? What's up with the tartlette?"

Well, here's what's up: I'm pregnant! This Tart is going to have a Tartlette sometime around January 23. In the meantime, we're having all sorts of fun with the food analogies. Ed calls me la boulangerie now, and I've been telling people that since I'm a French teacher, I have a croissant (instead of a bun) in the oven. "Croissant" is perfect, even better than "tartlette" (except perhaps in our little blog community), because it's the present participle of the verb croitre, which means "to grow" in French. Yep, croissant means "growing." See? I told you it was perfect!

But now I can tell the truth about our gorgeous St. Martin trip in June: it wasn't perfect for this pregnant foodie! Can you imagine being on a tropical island and limited to no more than 12 ounces of seafood per week? There's Ed, eating his five-course lobster meal, and me with my vegetarian pasta. No tuna, no king mackerel, no swordfish, no shark allowed at all. (Well, I could have had canned tuna, but there was no way I was going to a French island and eating canned tuna imported from the US.) No wine, no champagne, no fruity alchoholic drinks in coconuts topped with little paper umbrellas. (I was, however, delighted to discover that a virgin passionfruit daiquiri is just as refreshing and drinkable as the kind with the rum.) Nothing raw, so no sushi and no lovely runny French cheeses made with raw milk. (Fortunately, the hard Dutch cheeses were plenty tasty.)

My HMO insisted that I consult with their travel clinic before the trip, and their recommendations included no street food, no tap water, and no fruits or vegetables that I didn't boil or at least wash myself in bottled water (which leaves out eating any salad on the island). In other words, no fun. But for goodness' sake, St. Martin is a highly civilized place, not a third-world country rife with disease and sewage in the streets! After checking with the American who ran our hotel, she assured me that she had eaten restaurant salads and drunk the tap water there when she was pregnant, that I had nothing to worry about.

Still, I limited myself to one salad and not many meals from the lolos. On the other hand, I did have bites of all of Ed's seafood dishes, finally having one all to myself our last day there. I even once ordered an escargot appetizer, telling myself that since they're land dwellers, snails don't count as shellfish.

And you know what? I'm so happy that we're going to have a croissant that I don't mind not being able to eat all the fish I want! But nonetheless, I'll be glad for a nice ripe brie, a glass of red wine, and some tuna sashimi come February.

Saint Martin: the simple food

2007-07-21T06:20:00.000-07:00

Let's face it: when you and your hubby are spending a week in the half-French, half-Dutch island of Saint Martin your hotel room has a kitchen and this is the view from your balcony,

you'll take a lot of meals out on your private terrace:

We'd buy eggs and juice and cereal and nutty Dutch cheeses (an amazing gouda and a moist mimolette) and bread and croissants and exotic jams from the market or the grocery store (though, oddly enough, we found very few boulangeries on the French part of the island, very unlike in mainland France) and have every breakfast overlooking the Caribbean. I also cooked a few dinners at the hotel (and heated up several days' worth of leftovers one night)--we didn't dine in Saint Martin's gourmet restaurants every night! Every trip deserves picnics.

And then when this
and this
are typical daytime sights, you have little desire to leave the beach and go to a fancy restaurant for lunch!

(Although you'll probably be tempted to order a passionfruit daiquiri or two to sip on the sand after your, say, fourth swim of the day.)

We took advantage of several beach bars and lolos for simple meals. A lolo is basically a shack with picnic table-style seating and a grill--no kitchen, no dining room. Huge tubs hold whatever the day's side dishes happen to be (coleslaw, beans and rice, etc.), while raw meat is on ice--chicken, fish, shrimp, pork, lobster. You order it, they grill it. Done. Good.

These photos are from a lolo in Grand Case on Restaurant Row. We also ate at a lolo-type place in Marigot, the capital city, which boasted goat curry as the local favorite. (I opted for the chicken curry, which consisted of rice covered with a thick and not-too-spicy stew, not a Thai or Indian-style curry.)

Another simple lunch that stands out as one of the best meals we had on the island was one that we really earned: we had spent an hour and a half on a zipline/ropes course tour of the rainforest canopy.

The tour was exhilarating and nerve-wracking and panic-inspiring and sweaty and wonderful. I loved the zipline bits, flying over mango trees and chickens at Loterie Farms, a nearly 300-year-old plantation in the center of the island!

And I loved the meal we had afterwards at the the site's open-air Treetop Cafe. The lentil balls in this picture may not look appetizing, but trust me, with their date-tamarind sauce, they were plenty satisfying (especially after feeling like I had just risked my life swinging from one tree to another). And isn't the plating whimsical? Those side dishes encircling the lentil concoction are sweet and sour cabbage, mashed sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, and plantain beignets. Trust me, it was rare to find such an inspired vegetarian dish on that island! After all, a foodie can't order fish every time she goes out to eat.

Not that Mr. Tart had any compunctions about overdosing on the seafood; his crabcakes in a spicy pepper jelly with roe were both humongous (twice as thick as a hamburger patty and nearly as big around) and delicious.

We washed all this hearty food down with Ting, a Jamaican grapefruit soda (very sprightly!). Other fun nonalcoholic drinks we sipped on the island included a strong and spicy ginger beer and some imports from mainland France, like sweetened black-currant flavored water, Oasis fruit punches, and of course the mainstay Orangina. (But our favorites were still the daiquiris!)

All in all, our tropical vacation was a tasty and relaxing combination of all sorts of beaches and all sorts of eating, punctuated by good books, some hair-raising drives in the rental car, dips in the hotel pool, and many opportunities to hear people speaking French as they discussed lobster, wine, politics, and dogs--perfect for this foodie French teacher!

enough with the raspberry sauce!

2007-07-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes something good--something sweet and beautiful--can go terribly, terribly wrong.

Raspberry sauce is a good idea. Who can complain really about sweet berries pureed, removed of seeds, drizzled decoratively on a plate? And if it's topped by rich chocolate cake and whipped cream? Nobody's going to complain about that.

But then the chocolate cake, cream, raspberry sauce becomes part of every restaurant menu on the planet. It starts getting a little tired. Blackberry sauce maybe? Cake with flour? A little variety would be nice.

You try not to complain until the raspberry sauce until it starts showing up in places it shouldn't: drizzled on top of creme brulee, turning the crisp sugar topping into mush; underneath a beautiful bread pudding full of cardamom and golden raisins.

Hey, just because you have a bunch of raspberry sauce in the kitchen doesn't mean you should put it on every dessert!

You start complaining, just a little. It's like you can't escape the raspberry sauce.

And then. . . the raspberry sauce appears underneath a mcmuffin sort of creation with eggs, ham, and cheese. What?! I'm sorry but raspberry sauce does not belong on this plate. (a meal at the B&B we're currently staying at)

This is the last straw for me and the raspberry sauce. I'm starting a boycott. I'm going to carry signs. I may even ride my bike naked through city streets just to get someone to pay attention. Stop it with the raspberry sauce!

Who knew that you could do all that to a lobster?

2007-07-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

The food that really stands out from our recent visit to Saint Martin was the very high end and the very low end (like visiting the open-air market). Both types were memorable and made our mouths water!

Apparently many young chefs just out of French cooking school head to the Antilles to work in the gourmet restaurants that populate the French -speaking islands, then with that experience under their toques, return to France to open up their own restaurants. (In fact, on the plane to St. Martin, I was reading the charming From Here, You Can't See Paris, about American author Michael Sanders who moves to a tiny French village anchored by a tiny museum and a renowned (but not Michelin-starred) restaurant; turns out the chef extraordinaire trained right there on St. Martin!)

As a result, you can eat very well on the French side of the island (probably on the Dutch side, too, but we never made it over there, though the entire island is just 37 square miles). We happened to be staying a five-minute walk from Restaurant Row in Grand Case (a village about 15 minutes from the capital of Marigot). Imagine walking in sweltering heat up and down a long street of hundred-year-old Creole-style houses that have all been turned into airy restaurants, each with a bilingual menu posted by the steps, offering gourmet dishes with local seafood and other ingredients flown in from France or the US. We were there in June, the off-season, which meant that while a handful of the restaurants were closed, the others were uncrowded. We could leisurely check out the menus and then choose a place to eat and walk right in, usually getting seated on the porch or on the balcony above the water! (In the high season, you need reservations just to get a table.)

Unfortunately, I didn't carry a camera around much of the time--sandy beaches and fancy restaurants not being conducive to them--so I don't have many pictures to share. But to give you an idea, above is a painter's rendition of Restaurant Row. Below is Il Nettuno, an Italian restaurant facing the Caribbean (photo from their website--and if you think it looks inviting now, try it after sunset!).

We had lobster ravioli and red snapper here, followed by gelato and complimentary glasses of grappa with coffee beans floating in them, all very good. Here's the fish:

Another rich and seafoody meal along Restaurant Row--with yet another order of lobster ravioli, these even more luscious than those at Il Nettuno--came from L'Escapade, where we feasted on sea bass with mushroom and asparagus ravioli (Mr. Tart) and a Thai-influenced soup of sorts with huge shrimp, huge scallops, and lobster tail in a lemongrass-coconut milk base (me). I wanted to lick the bowl! And then dessert: chocolate mousse, dense and puddingy, for him and a combination of two of my favorite French desserts for me: chocolate profiterole crepes. The crepes became the wrappers for the cream puffs (profiteroles), with ice cream inside and several sauces (one fruity, one chocolate) drenching the ginormous puffs. (This is the one dish we tasted in St. Martin that I think I could attempt at home without a recipe!)

(This photo, courtesy L'Escapade's website, doesn't do justice to those decadent puffs. But it still makes me want to lick the plate.)

Mr. Tart's favorite restaurant on St. Martin, though, was Le Cottage. He still raves about the food, the atmosphere, the sommelier, and wishes that we had had time to go back before we left the island! But who wouldn't, after experiencing their Five Course Lobster Tasting Menu?! Picture this:

Lobster bisque...

Lobster and pineapple carpaccio (the lobster not raw, but sliced mandolinely thinly along with the pineapple) in a passionfruit and lime marinade, accompanied by arugula salad in a savory tuile and--get this--a foamy shot of the Caribbean classic Ti-Punch, a coconut planter's punch with spiced rum...

Lobster ravioli in coconut milk (can you tell we like this sort of dish?) flavored with galangal and tiny minced vegetables, served with a Granny Smith apple and coconut salad...

Roasted lobster meat in homemade squid ink fettucine, served with the carapace of the lobster standing up proudly like a Caribbean erection...

And then dessert, which thankfully didn't imply an Iron Chef-esque attempt to turn the theme ingredient into a strange sweet or ice cream: four small scoops of delicate sorbets (peach, strawberry, lemon verbena, and rose) whose bottom halves were dipped in a chocolate sauce that solidified and cupped them so that they could be placed on a long rectangular platter painted with more chocolate sauce in the shape of musical staff, forming the base of chocolate muscial notes, with a tuile cookie guitar and a puff pastry treble clef thrown in for good measure (pun intended). Wow.

Again, the website photo looks flat (okay, that pun also intended) compared to the real thing!

Oh, and the house cocktail is Champagne with lychee liqueur and red fruit liqueur. Very sprightly! I nibbled on my generous hubby's lobster dishes when not eating my appetizer (marinated escargots alongside a baby zucchini whose flower, still attached, boasted a mushroom mixture) and main course (a vegetarian concoction of caramelized onions and spinach and tomato concasse, stacked layer upon layer, each section separated with a parmesan crisp).

What struck us most about the gourmet restaurants in Grand Case was that they were entirely non-stuffy, non-pretentious, non-intimidating. As it was the off-season, the proprietors stood on the steps and called out to the tourists as we walked past, offering free cocktails, inviting us in, or simply greeting us. No one dressed up--not the patrons, not the servers, not the sommeliers. (We even showed up at the Sunset Cafe restaurant for lunch in bathing suits and then ate 20-euro mussels!) True, the bottled waters were served in a white wine ice bucket--but that reflects the weather rather than the snootiness of the establishment. And while the meals were pricey, at least the portion sizes were American rather than French.

Stay tuned for my final St. Martin post about the opposite end of the food spectrum: passionfruit daiquiris on the beach, stewed goat, grilled lobster at a shack, and lentils in the treetops....

a new addition to the food movie canon

2007-07-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

Just in case you haven't seen it already, I just want to say: go see Ratatouille! I think it's now my favorite animated feature (dare I say it slightly edges out Triplets of Belleville?), and it's up there on my list of favorite food movies, right alongside Big Night, Babette's Feast, etc. The script is intelligent, the animation is gorgeous -- actually, it just might be my favorite movie this year, animation or no. It felt like a work of art rather than a kids' cartoon cash cow. The audience applauded at the end. How often does that happen in a movie theater?

The Pixar animators took cooking lessons so they would understand how chefs move in the kitchen, how they handle their knives, that sort of thing. Another thing they say they struggled with in the early stages was making the animated food look really good. The solution? Bring Thomas Keller of the French Laundry on board as a consultant. There's a pivotal scene where a notoriously cranky food critic has a Proust's madeleines sort of moment with the title dish - Thomas Keller determined what that very important ratatouille would look like (read more about that here). Apparently he also voiced one of the minor characters, which I didn't realize when I saw it. (Ferran Adria of El Bulli voices one in the Spanish version.)

Also, there's a scene along the Seine in Paris that made me want to go back there, right now. The animators got the City of Light exactly right. What a great movie.

Which leads me to a question -- what are your favorite food movies? I could use some new ideas for rentals ...

2007-07-09T19:25:00.000-07:00

In winter, the NY Times brought us the infamous No-Knead Bread, the bread that became the darling of the food blogging world. And now, in another moment of the sublime made easy, they bring us: butter!

I don't know why this hasn't already shown up on every food blog in creation. Patterson's instructions are easy-peasy. Read the article for details, but the basic process is 1) Beat cream 2) Drain buttermilk 3) Knead butter. It took 15 minutes and it's truly amazing butter. I want to eat it by the spoonful. I just might.

This approach is not really about saving money. The cream cost me about $6 (although I probably could have got it cheaper). For my money I got 2 cups of butter and 2 cups of buttermilk. Patterson gives a few recipes for the buttermilk--they all look great. I haven't tried anything with the buttermilk yet, but I'll let you know.

Now that you are done reading, don't waste time for comments. Just make some butter!

an easy, luscious summer dessert

2007-07-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

The farmers' markets here in D.C. are starting to explode: The first honest-to-goodness dirt-grown tomatoes, the sweet corn, and the peaches all made their debut at my local market today. The peaches I bought were ripe but still firm, and I found some locally made mascarpone, so I made this based on something I remember reading about in the Washington Post food section. We had it with a very tasty dessert wine (Bonny Doon Vineyards' Muscat Vin de Glaciere) that I'd been saving for the right accompaniment:

Grilled Peaches with Mascarpone, Basil & Tupelo Honey

Slice peaches in half and remove pits (for grilling, it's important that the peaches not be overripe); rub a little olive oil on both sides. Preheat the grill; meanwhile, chop some basil and mix it into some mascarpone cheese (enough to put a dollop in each peach half). Put the peach halves cut side down on the grill; grill two or three minutes on each side. The peaches should be fragrant, lightly charred and heated through, but they shouldn't start to collapse. Put a dollop of the basil mascarpone in each peach half, drizzle with honey and top with a little more basil.

It was just Mark and me tonight, but this would be a fabulous dinner-party dessert for when it's too hot to turn on the stove and you want to impress guests with something that tastes much more sophisticated than it should.

Dinner at Komi

2007-07-05T18:17:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, Mark and I celebrated our anniversary with dinner at Komi. I don't know if I mentioned this in my account of our January meal at Komi, but the waitstaff and other front-of-house people there really are fantastic. Johnny Monis' food may be amazing, but that's not the only special thing going on at Komi. You know how at a lot of restaurants of this type, the unspoken message is "you don't deserve to eat here and you can't understand what artistes we are; be grateful we're serving you at all"? Well, at Komi we were actually greeted warmly at the door. The attitude of the servers here is more like, "We love food, and we know you probably do too, or you wouldn't be here." They are true professionals. We asked our server lots of questions, and he always had well-informed answers. We even chatted briefly about The Omnivore's Dilemma (when I asked where they get their quail eggs from).

Anyway, the tasting menu begins with the mezzethakia, a flight of eight or so amuse-bouche-sized treats. You don't order them off a menu -- it's a series of surprises, which makes it my favorite part of the meal. We started with a couple of house-cured olives, and they were so much cleaner-tasting than most. The brine wasn't especially salty or vinegary, so the taste was like a really good, fruity olive oil --an apt flavor with which to begin a Mediterranean-influenced meal. Next came wedges of radish topped with a bit of butter and salmon roe, the salty component in a riff on the French radishes-with-butter-and-salt thing. (Mark's came with thin shavings of garlic scape instead.) Oh, and with these first couple of mezze, we were served a Greek sparkling wine. Next came the mascarpone-stuffed date I've been craving since January. Still heavenly.

At about this point we were poured a really good Spanish albarino (sorry, I don't know how to add the tilde character in Blogger), along with two small grilled Padron peppers and a shot-glass-sized serving of gazpacho. I *think* our server told us there was roasted beet in there. Whatever it was, I heartily approve. After that was some octopus, a thin slice of avocado, and a quail egg atop black lentils. Next came a corn fritter with anchovy aioli (Mark's had saffron aioli, and I think his was better, but then I do love saffron). Then a little pita sandwich with oxtail and tzatziki (I remember this one from last time, only this time it also had beet in it). And finally, a bit of watermelon topped with whipped feta, the only mezze I wasn't crazy about. I just don't know about watermelon and cheese. There were a couple other wines during the mezze course; Mark took surreptitious notes, but now that I've waited so long to do this post, these notes are cryptic. I know we had wines from Santorini (who knew there was any part of Santorini used for anything but tourism?) and the Piedmont region of Italy because the notes tell me so. Oops.

Next, the pasta course. Mark had something with gorgonzola (and with it, a merlot/grenache blend); I had fava bean agnolotti with chorizo and garlic scapes and a curry emulsion (served with a gewurztraminer). It was good, but I thought the chorizo overwhelmed the delicate favas just a little.

My entree was roasted squab with asparagus, morel mushrooms, morcilla sausage and trotters, served with a Spanish rioja. When ordering, I inquired as to what trotters were. The short answer? Pig's knuckles. The magic of Komi is that I didn't care. They were delicious (they were part of a fritter). And now I'm cursing these notes, because all Mark wrote down about his entree was this: "Vegetables." And he's gone to bed now, so I can't inquire. (Perhaps tomorrow he'll weigh in in the comments section and share more details.)

Next we were given a little taste of olive oil gelato: so simple, so unexpected. If you've ever had really good olive oil, you understand what a great flavor that is. (And now we've come full circle from the olives we started the meal with!) This was a prelude to dessert: coconut panna cotta for Mark, a cornmeal crepe with mascarpone for me.

And they still bring out lollipops with the check: this time, lime and juniper flavored -- "like a gin & tonic," our server said. And indeed, it did taste like a G&T: a whimsical end to another amazing meal from Monis & Co.

at the market: cherries

2007-07-02T19:01:00.000-07:00

My life is all about cherries these days: brandied cherries, cherry pie filling (stowed away in my new freezer), dried cherries, cherry sorbet, sour cherry syrup (a recipe from July's Gourmet). With such a short season, they should be enjoyed--shoved into my mouth as quickly as possible--while they last. My fingers have turned a brownish-red from all of the cherries I've been handling.

My favorite concoction, though, from all of the cherry mania is a cherry green olive tapenade. The tapenade came about because I was wondering whether my new cherry pitter would also make a good olive pitter. Then I started thinking about how olives and cherries have basically the same texture. How would they taste together?

I searched for a tapenade recipe with cherries and olives, but I didn't find anything. A bad idea, perhaps? Oh well, I figured I had nothing to lose but a few cherries. And a few pricey olives.

I always feel a little proud when my kitchen experiments turn out. This one still needs a little tweaking and I have to admit that I didn't keep track of the amounts I used, but here's the basic idea.

Green Olive and Cherry Tapenade

Green Olives (I used lucques)
Bing Cherries
Parsley
Toasted Pine Nuts
Lemon Juice
Olive Oil

Chop everything up (using amounts you find satisfactory). Toss in lemon juice and olive oil to taste. Serve with bread or make a make a sandwich with a little cheese.

speaking of saffron and spices....

2007-06-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

Mr. Tart and I just returned from an idyllic week on the half-French, half-Dutch Caribbean island of Saint Martin. The sea water was calm and clear and turquoise, just like all the photos you see of tropic islands, and the French restaurants remarkable, but the most food-bloggable place we went was the open-air market. The above photo shows the statue at its entrance in honor of all the women who work and shop there.

Now, I love open-air markets in France--the colors, the smells, the funky cheeses, the possibility of stumbling across a little old lady selling dandelion greens who cautions you to pour your vinaigrette over them well before you serve them because they're so bitter. But I think the St. Martin market, though smaller than most of those I've meandered through in France, is a must-see. You can't find buckets of pliable and sticky and relatively inexpensive vanilla beans in Paris, for example!

Or big curls of cinnamon tossed unpretentiously into old tubs of laundry detergent....

Or unidentified tubers sharing display space with home-brewed hot sauce....

Or wrinkly passion fruit looking like rotted apples but smelling like a drink you want to pour into a coconut shell and decorate with a paper umbrella....

You can tell how much I loved this market by the fact that I even took pictures of the stubby bananas--yes, me, who can't stand bananas!

The fresh fish goes fast--only the sign was left when we got there around 10:00 am. (But don't worry, I'll post about our other island lobster opportunities later!)

The market ladies also sell whole nutmegs, curry powders, peppercorns, mixtures for grilling fish, and much more. Including bags of sunshine yellow powder labeled "safran" (saffron) for suspiciously low prices. They were too good to be true, I thought, so I bypassed them. Later on, at a different stall, I touched a knobby root and asked the lady what it was. "Safran," she explained, thus confirming that the yellow powder couldn't possibly be saffron, the world's most expensive spice harvested by hand from tempramental flowers. I felt cheated, even though I hadn't bought any of it. Were they deliberately misleading the tourists? Or is "safran" on the islands different from "safran" on the mainland? I double checked my best bilingual dictionary when I got home, hoping that, say, "turmeric" would be an acceptable less-common translation. But no, "safran" is supposed to be saffron.

But even with the saffron betrayal, the market remained a riotous celebration of intense colors and smells and music.

And finally, another plus the St. Martin market has on the ones in Paris: the view.

at the market: saffron?

2007-06-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

In my continuing effort to eat locally and seasonally, I thought I'd write each week about what's available at my local farmer's market and what I'm cooking with it. The farmer's market has been going for three weeks, but I've been too busy (fishing and backpacking--poor me) to write anything about it. Anyway, here is the first installment.

This weekend, the market was filling out a bit--the veggies moving beyond salad greens and garlic scapes. There were piles of cherries, peas, the first melons of the season. But the real surprise of this week's market was saffron.

Beautiful, delicate, expensive saffron grown right here, in a Salt Lake suburb. A couple started planting saffron crocuses about seventeen years ago. And now it's at the market--tiny jars of the bright orange stigma. And it's only $5 for 6/10 an ounce. Not a bad deal.

Tonight I made a lovely saffron risotto, accompanied by sauteed chard (from the market, of course). I tried to take a picture, but risotto is a fussy subject.

It's easy to perceive eating locally as dull and difficult--especially when you live in a landlocked state with a short growing season. But eating locally can also provide some impressive surprises.

(for anyone in SL, you can find the saffron on the east sidewalk of the market)

quick pickles

2007-06-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

A new Penzey's store just opened in our area -- well, in Rockville, Md., to be exact. So getting out there took some doing, but Penzey's is worth the trip. So yesterday, we stocked up on new-to-me stuff like pink peppercorns, roasted Szechuan-pepper salt -- more on these later -- and pickling spice. Then today at the farmers' market, inspired by my shiny new purchases, I picked up some small pickling cucumbers and some green beans. At home I combined them with sliced red onion and lots of sliced garlic to make these quick pickles:

I used this recipe for my basic proportions for the brine, but added a couple teaspoons of my Penzey's pickling spice (plus some fennel seed) instead of the spices called for here. (If you want the whole breakdown of what's in Penzey's pickling spice, here it is--these are all whole seeds/berries, not ground: yellow and brown mustard seeds, allspice, cracked cassia, bay leaves, dill seed, cloves, ginger, Tellicherry peppercorns, star anise, coriander, juniper berries, mace, cardamom and Sanaam red peppers. Whew!)

They need to sit for a couple hours yet until they'll be ready to sample, so I'll report back later. But this was so easy -- a bare minimum of chopping, and the stove only needed to be on for about five minutes, an important summertime consideration.

As for my other Penzey's buys: the Szechuan peppercorn salt has a nice lemony, coriander/gingery flavor to it. This is going to sound weird, but I think it would be awesome on popcorn. And I'm going to use the pink peppercorns for this ice cream.

the return of Top Chef, and what not to do with plastic wrap

2007-06-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

First off, a public service announcement: the new season of Top Chef starts tomorrow! If you have BRAVO and you missed out last time, tune in. Seriously, people, come on. I need somebody to obsess with.

Remember in January when I posted about the amazing dinner we had at Komi on my birthday? I'm pretty sure that was the best meal I've ever had in my life. Well, Komi chef Johnny Monis has been named to Food and Wine magazine's annual Best New Chefs list, an honor whose now-superstar alums include Thomas Keller (French Laundry, Per Se), Nobu Matsuhisa (Nobu), Tom Colicchio (Craft; also, these days the head judge on Top Chef), Wylie Dufresne (wd-50) and Grant Achatz (Alinea), to name a few. The announcement itself isn't really news, as the list came out weeks ago. D.C. area food blogs were all atwitter with the news (one headline read: You're Never Getting Into Komi Again). But I'm posting about this now because I finally got the Best New Chefs issue in the mail today, AND because Mark thought ahead and made us reservations at Komi for our anniversary. We ARE getting into Komi again!

I'm so excited. I don't even care what's on the menu: I will eat anything Chef Monis puts on the table. If he were to open up a box of Kraft Mac n' Cheese, I would have utter faith that it would be better than anything I could ever make.

I remember I said back in January that the attention to detail at Komi was amazing. Well, this slightly obsessive-compulsive quote from Monis in his Food & Wine Q&A made me laugh. After having seen him back there in the kitchen, crouched over dishes he was plating as if he were defusing a bomb, it just seems so apt. When asked about his pet peeve, he says: "I very much dislike when people rip into the plastic wrap covering something-when they make a hole and dig in. It takes seconds to just unwrap something properly. I can’t tell you why, but it has always bothered me. Improper use of plastic wrap, that’s what I call it."

looking forward to airport food

2007-06-09T15:22:00.001-07:00

I've spent the past week in Louisville, KY, scoring essays for this year's AP French exam. We meet in a convention center and have our meals in a huge room where we are herded like sheep to buffet troughs full of either very dry or very soggy food doused in salt and surrounded by white rolls, potatoes, and rice. (Even the leaders refer to the dining hall as the "House of Starch.") It is uniformly dreadful. It is the worst institutional food I have ever had. And it's not even a cafeteria--they're caterers!

Now, I understand that feeding 2000 people quickly presents lots of challenges. But surely they don't have to boil every ounce of flavor and texture out of the vegetables. And can't they bring themselves to put more than one tablespoon of marinara on each manicotti? Doesn't "chicken piccata" imply a sauce with lemons and capers? Or at least a sauce? Why not yogurt and granola for breakfast instead of gummy reconstituted powdered eggs and flavorless donuts?

To be fair, the vegetarian meat loaf today was actually tasty, and desserts like lemon cake with cream cheese frosting and brownies crusted with chocolate chips help me get through the meals. But when the cereal guy confesses that all the milk in the carafes marked "1%," "2%," and "whole" is actually skim, you start to wonder what else they're misrepresenting and what other corners they're cutting.

The lowest point was yesterday's vegetarian lunch selection: bean curd stir-fry with vegetables. I still had enough optimism left to be excited about that. Turns out it was the previous night's overboiled green beans mixed with the previous lunch's overboiled carrots with some tofu thrown in. No soy sauce, no ginger, no garlic, definitely no stir frying involved.

And these are French teachers they're feeding--the most culinarily discriminating of all the possible graders!

Let's just say that I'm actually looking forward to eating breakfast in the airport on the way home tomorrow. And then I'll spend the rest of the morning drooling in anticipation of lunch at my chef extraordinaire mother-in-law's!

get 'em now: three ultra-seasonal vegetables

2007-06-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

It's raining today, but we doggedly walked to the farmers' market anyway, and I'm glad we did: I finally got to try garlic scapes! June is the season for these tender young garlic shoots, which are full of flavor but lack the harsh bite of raw garlic. I thought of Melissa's garlic scape frittata recipe but, as Mark's not a huge fan of egg dishes, I opted for garlic scape pesto instead. Delicious! Mild enough to eat as a dip on bread or crackers because of the lack of that raw bite, but packs enough flavor to stand up to whatever pizza or pasta creation you dream up. A little of this made into a vinaigrette would be nice drizzled over fish, I bet. Next week I'm going to buy more scapes so I can make more of this and freeze it.

Garlic Scape Pesto

12 or so garlic scapes, coarsely chopped
3/4 c. olive oil
3/4 c. parmesan cheese
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Salt & pepper to taste

Blend the scapes, oil and parmesan in a couple batches in a food processor/blender, then stir in lemon juice, salt & pepper to taste. If you're in the market for any new kitchen toys, I should mention that I love my immersion blender -- the main attachment is great for blending soups and sauces right in the saucepan, but it also comes with several other attachments, including a mini food processor that's perfect for this sort of thing.

Our CSA deliveries start this week, and I think we get more garlic scapes there too. I think I'll try this recipe next (scroll down to the Garlic Scape Pesto/Hummus Dip recipe in the comments). I would've tried that today if I'd had any tahini on hand, but I wasn't about to venture back out into the rain for it...

But anyway, that's not the only ultra-seasonal vegetable we've tried for the first time in the last couple of weeks. I was shocked to find fiddlehead ferns at my local Trader Joe's, so of course I had to try them. These are another short-season spring treat, and they grow best in the Northeastern U.S. They're the young, tightly coiled ends of the ostrich fern, and they're almost too pretty to eat. I sauteed them with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper and swirled in a little butter at the end. I'm glad I didn't try to do anything more elaborate with them, because they have an intriguing flavor on their own: a lot like asparagus, but with a sort of nutty flavor too that we found irresistible.

And finally, one whose season is probably just about done for the year: ramps. These wild leeks are sort of an Appalachian specialty (Any of you who don't live in the Mid-Atlantic region: have you ever seen these in your farmers' markets? I'd never heard of them until I moved out here). They grow wild in the Blue Ridge mountains just west of here, and their season is just a few short weeks in the spring. Lately they've been showing up on several local chefs' menus. These too I gave the simple treatment: sauteed and tossed with pasta. They were good, but frankly, they were no garlic scapes. I hear pickled ramps are good, but I think I missed the season to try them. Alas, there's always next year.

the Lafayette garden report; or, last year's leeks

2007-05-23T18:46:00.000-07:00

Mr. Tart and I were slow to put in our vegetable garden this year. I feel sheepish admitting this, but we didn't get around to cleaning up the detritus from last year's garden until recently. You see, we figured that we'd have some mild winter weekends that would allow us to go in and yank up the old stuff, check on the radishes and spinach planted at the last minute, and keep harvesting the herbs that survive. But no, this was a snowy, snowy winter here in Lafayette, Colorado, and for months the dessicated tomato plant carcasses swayed in the wind, mesclun greens poked feebly through the snow, and the radishes refused to sprout.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, we took stock of our sad little garden on a slope. We pulled out the dead plants (and all the new weeks, flourishing after all the snowmelt) and decided that it's silly to plant on a slope; every time it rains a layer of topsoil washes away into the rock beside the garden. Our plants gasp and struggle to grow in the remaining clay, while the weeds have a field day in the rock with its rich earth. So Mr. Tart bought retaining wall bricks and many bags of manure and top soil and turned our slanty plot into a series of upstanding raised beds!

But that's another story--I'll post about that (with pictures) and what we planted a bit later.

What I do want to say is that we found dozens of leeks under all the dead plants. None of them actually grew very big (which is probably why I never dug them up last fall), but they were still alive in April, so I pulled them all up, gave them several baths, and then stared at a huge bowl of smallish leeks: And then put them in a gallon zip-lock bag at the bottom of the fridge.

Several weeks later, investigating a funky fridge smell, I re-discovered them and decided that it was time. I had put too much effort into reclaiming those leeks to let them rot away! So I stripped off the slimy bits, washed them again, sliced the larger ones in half, and threw them all into a baking dish with some half and half, a little butter, and salt and pepper. I roasted them until they were tender and glistening, and Mr. Tart and I ate them all in one sitting (they had shrunk considerably in the oven). And they were good--but not that good.

sausage!

2007-05-15T21:28:00.000-07:00

As someone who doesn't eat pork, I miss sausage sometimes. In fact, when I was a complete vegetarian during my years in France, the only times I fell off the wagon were one trip to Munich, when I ate potato soup with sausage (and would have licked the bowl if I hadn't been in a restaurant), and one trip months later to Berlin, when I craved a cheese bratwurst, bought one on a streetcorner, and devoured it with relish (figuratively, not literally). Good stuff. Nowadays some really stellar turkey brats are available around here--some flavored with apple and basil, some with mango and habanero, some just simple and suprisingly porky and crying out for a grill--but I've had less success in finding turkey breakfast sausage patties that make me want to shout for joy.

So I made my own, trying to find a medium-greasy, medium-spicy replacement. After looking at a few recipes, here's what I came up with:

1 lb 99% fat free ground turkey

1 lb 85% ground turkey

6 big cloves of garlic, minced

1 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (or to taste)

3/4 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp freshly ground pepper

1 1/2 tsp fennel seed

1 tsp salt

1/3 c. fresh parsley, minced (could probably substitute dried, but less)

5 fresh sage leaves, minced (could probably substitute dried rubbed sage, but less)

Mash the garlic and spices in a mortar and pestle, then work the paste into the ground turkey with your hands. Shape into patties and fry on each side till brown, or crumble into pieces and fry to use in casseroles, soups, etc. (I used it in a quiche with aged cheddar, sauteed granny smith apples, and sage.) Makes ~16 patties.

The first time I made it I went clove-happy, so I've dialed it down for this version. But other than over-cloving it (and making it too spicy for my baby nephew), I liked it and I'm proud. Everyone at the Mother's Day brunch we hosted seemed to enjoy it--and my MIL, who's a whiz in the kitchen, said that she's never made her own sausage! Dear readers, making sausage is actually a lot easier than you think (especially if you're not grinding your own meat and stuffing the casings).

sweet tea, sweet seafood, sweet home Carolina

2007-05-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

I flew from Denver last week to Wilmington, North Carolina--where I grew up--for Anne's wedding on the beach. Anne and I grew up together--poison ivy, hair metal bands, Halloween parties, books, beaches, boys. Lots of boys. And she just married the one she met in 11th grade!

I hadn't been back to the south for four years and feel like I'm a Coloradoan now. You'd have to drag me kicking and screaming from these mountains, this climate, my friends and family here. But as soon as my plane touched down in Atlanta, I felt like I was coming home. People I didn't even know called me "Precious." (No one calls anyone "Precious" in Colorado!) I ate fried chicken, yams, and corn bread at the food court. (Only Boston Market and restaurants specializing in Southern food--it's an exotic cuisine out here--serve yams in Colorado, and they call them "sweet potatoes" instead.) I ordered "iced tea" and felt a sugar rush as I remembered that the default in the south is sweet tea--you have to ask specifically for unsweetened (and then deal with the suspicious stare from the server--"What's wrong with that girl? Must be a Yankee"). My sense of nostalgia and joy was so strong that even when I happened to look down and see a big fat smushed cockroach, my first thought was "Oh! A cockroach! I haven't seen a cockroach in four years. Awww."

Okay, so I got over that warm, fuzzy feeling for nasty bugs quickly.

Over the course of the weekend, the food just got better and better, with the ubiquitous sweet tea at every meal. Saturday night we had a feast on the porch: pounds and pounds of shrimp that Anne's great-uncle caught locally in the Sound and that Anne's dad boiled up with beer and Old Bay. We--Anne and Mark, Anne's parents, and our friend Amy and her husband--sat on the porch as the sun set and the heat receded, smelling pine and magnolia, listening to the whipporwill, gnawing on corn on the cob (boiled with sugar), eating cole slaw, and peeling and popping the tender shrimp.

The day of the wedding saw sort of an open house for friends and family dropping by to drop off gifts, show off dresses, and share food. We ate cold cuts and banana nut muffins (well, I didn't--I detest bananas--but other people did!) and some really good cold salads, like Three Bean Wacky Mac:

1 package Wacky Mac (or other tri-colored pasta)
1 can (14.5 oz) green beans drained or 1 1/2 cup freshgreen bean, cut into pieces
1 can (14.5 oz) wax beans, drained, or 1 1/2 cup freshbeans cut into pieces
1 can (14.5 oz) kidney beans, drained
1 cup chopped sweet onion
3/4 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup salad oil (Anne uses canola light oil)
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups halved cherry tomatoes
Salt and pepper to taste

Prepare Wacky Mac according to package directions and rinse with cool water. Meanwhile, combine drained beans and chopped onion in large bowl. In small bowl combine cider vinegar and oil; slowly add in sugar to dissolve. Add drained Wacky Mac and vinegar mixture to beans. Add tomatoes, salt and pepper; gently toss to combine. Makes 6 servings (probably more).

At the wedding itself, we inadvertently ate sand--the wind was gusting up to 40 mph--and tasted the salt air. But Anne looked beautiful, and even though her grandmother had to wear a parka, it felt right to be outside. Anne couldn't have been married inside four walls and a ceiling. Here's the happy couple, with his daughter Jadzia:

The reception at the Bluewater, a sprawling restaurant just spitting distance from the intracoastal waterway, brought more good seafood: fresh mahi mahi. (And yes, sweet tea. I sat next to the groom's brother, who had steak, a glass of pinot noir, and a glass of sweet tea.) The following day, I also managed to fit in a crab melt made from local crab and accompanied by homemade potato chips (for $7--and you can barely get a turkey sandwich and bag of Lay's for $7 in Colorado) as well as a trip with Anne's mom to Boombalatti's homemade ice cream shop (no web page, just sweet creamy chocolate bliss).

I had more sweet tea and more fresh ocean seafood in three days than I've had in the past four years, I think! Hyper from the caffeine and sugar, sated by the good food and even better conversations with my oldest friends, I boarded the plane back to Colorado, where it's easy to find fancy restaurants with watermelon pico de gallo, grilled Caesar salads, and French cuisine, but impossible to walk on the beach and then eat shrimp caught just offshore, much less with dear friends who let me crimp their hair while singing "Rock Me, Amadeus" at junior high sleepovers.

Tea Party 2007

2007-05-06T19:35:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago Sunday was the annual tea party for all the girls in my family. We did have two boys in attendance: Will and the new nephew. We tried to ignore them (we didn't succeed so well with the baby).

The party meant two days of shopping, baking, and cleaning for me--which is probably not the best idea at the end of the semester, but oh well. It was worth it.

While I was baking tarts, Will hovered in the kitchen. Every time something came out of the oven, he got in my face like a little puppy: Can I have some, can I, can I? Even though I was letting him taste one of everything and I let him finish off the bowl of chocolate mousse, he got cranky with me for only letting him have one piece of shortbread. He says there is a lot on the line with the tarts. Despite all his whining, he probably got more tarts than a man needs in a day.
This year's menu: lavender lemonade, hot chocolate (no real tea, but the party isn't about tea--it's about the tarts), lavender shortbread, lemon madeleines, chocolate mousse tarts, blood orange tarts, asparagus tarts, cucumber sandwiches, and goat cheese watercress sandwiches.

Lavender Lemonade

Mix 2 cups sugar with 2 cups water. Bring to a boil for five minutes. Add 1 1/2 Tablespoons lavender. Remove from heat, cover, and steep for 20 minutes. Strain syrup through fine-meshed sieve (may need to line with cheesecloth to remove all lavender). Chill syrup. Add 5 cups cold water and 2 cups fresh lemon juice. Makes about 1/2 gallon.

our day at the farm, part 2

2007-04-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

Picking sorrel at the Hauters' farm:

We missed the asparagus -- it went fast -- but came home with some eggs, rhubarb and herbs in addition to the aforementioned sorrel. We picked a decent-sized bagful, enough for a pot of soup, I think.

Anyway, we had a great time. You can tell Leigh really enjoys having customers come visit. He's a talker! We were thanking him and preparing to leave when he said, "Wait, can I show you around the greenhouse?" :) And we shareholders are all invited out again in a couple weeks to pick up any extra seedlings he doesn't put in the ground. I also heard him say something about potlucks for shareholders later in the season, which I am totally up for. I'm so glad we signed up for this!

The peacock that roams the farm:

meet our farmer

2007-04-29T06:54:00.000-07:00

The guy who runs the CSA farm where we're shareholders this year, Leigh Hauter at Bull Run Mountain Farm, keeps a blog. He writes about what it's like when your livelihood depends on the whims of nature, he keeps us updated on the progress of this year's crop, he tells stories about the history of his land and the neighbors, and he's a pretty decent storyteller to boot.

It's no small thing to say these are the people who'll largely be feeding us this summer and fall, and I love it that we're getting such a unique link to where our food is grown. Today we're going out to the farm to pick some asparagus and sorrel, as it's sort of a designated "come out and see the farm" day. So we get to meet our farmers! I'm excited.

best beer-bottle label ever

2007-04-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

I adore cool, vintagey labels and frequently keep random found knickknacks around the house for no practical reason. When I recently visited the Brickskeller, a 50-year-old D.C. bar that boasts a dizzyingly encyclopedic beer list of over 1,000 brews from around the world, I ordered a Piraat ale because I asked our server to suggest a good Belgian tripple. I had no idea I was getting such an awesome label -- had I known, I would have ordered it for this alone:

I wish I had a poster of this. Anyway, look in the lower right-hand corner. Can you read that, where it says "Alc. 10.5%"? Yes, this beer packs a punch, which I noticed the next day. Ahem.

Anyway, the Brickskeller is great. It's practically in our backyard, it's very cool and laid-back and not meat-markety, and if you'd like to try a beer from, say, Estonia, Bolivia or Vietnam, you're in luck. (Fort Collins, however, is snubbed: no New Belgium beers, no Odells. I would have ordered an Easy Street Wheat for old times' sake.)

more on canning

2007-04-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

Check out the following link for an article I wrote about my canning woes and joys:

http://www.gildedfork.com/gastronomicmeditations/preserving-the-local-407.html

Happy Easter, uh, I mean Candy Day

2007-04-08T19:22:00.000-07:00

I went to visit my family for Easter weekend. And today while my family went to church, I stayed home to read Steve Almond's Candyfreak while eating Easter candy. Everyone has to worship in her own way, I say.

Why, why haven't I read this book before? It might be the same sort of logic that has kept my brother from trying the deep fried Snickers at Brooklyn's Chip Shop --it would just be too good. Steve Almond is my soulmate. Truly.

I love candy--more than I usually feel comfortable admitting. But with Candyfreak I feel like someone understands. It is my manifesto. A few examples from my life that illustrate my own personal candy freakness:

1. As a child, I once found a half-eaten sucker in the road. I took it home, rinsed it off, and ate it. I am sure this happened more than once.

2. My parents weren't very good sugar suppliers, so my lack of candy often forced me to eat jello powder. One day, seeing a small pile of green powder on the kitchen counter, I scraped it into my mouth thinking it was green jello. It was comet.

3. I have a very distinct memory of stopping at a gas station with a boyfriend and buying Idaho Spud bars. I can remember the candy, but I can't remember who I was with.

The only point of disagreement I have with Almond is that he hates Peeps. Probably it's only because he hasn't eaten them the right way, aged and slightly stale. Peeps are glorious and anyone who thinks otherwise is missing out on some serious candy joy. Oh well, more Peeps for me. On subject of Peeps, Tara informed me that they are now making sugar free Peeps. WHAT??! Please, don't they understand that the reason that Peeps are so good is because they taste like sugar? Really, that's the only flavor. But I did decide to buy a pack just to make my disgust official.

First, let's talk economics. For 99 cents, I can either get three sugar free Peeps or 15 regular Peeps. And then there's the taste. I know some of you think Peeps are gross, but you are wrong. They are soft and crunchy and sugary. What's not to love? Sugar free Peeps, however, are gross. The main reason they don't work is because there is no crunchy sugary coating. It's just a sad approximation. I even tried letting them dry out a bit, but even that didn't improve matters.

Even though, this year brought the nadir of Peeps production, I also encountered the zenith: Dark Chocolate covered Peeps. And not just any chocolate. I found the treasures while visiting the Jacques Torres shop. Oh, the joy. The only problem with the chocolate covered Peeps is that they lost a bit of their sugary crunch. If you could keep the coating in tact and still have the chocolate, life would be perfect. But really, I'm not complaining. I only wish I would have bought more.

Note: The fabulous Peeps basket pictured above was a gift from Sarah's mother-in-law.

I'm never buying grocery story tortillas again!

2007-04-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

One of the best parts of working in the Foreign Language Department of a university is the potlucks. Teachers from all over the world usually bring food from their countries, and oh, we eat so well--tamales, sushi, fabulous cheese, spaghetti with mussels....

One of my friends and colleagues, Maura, offered to show me how to make tortillas from scratch last year. (She's from Paraguay, where they don't eat tortillas, but she learned from her daughter's Mexican nanny.) It took two separate sessions, but I finally got to the point where I could make my own corn tortillas, and confidently enough to invite my in-laws over to partake of them this past weekend! And oh, they're so good. Rich, bursting with corn flavor, hot, pliable--I won't ever go back to grocery store tortillas again. I am so spoiled now!

The beauty of the fresh homemade tortilla is that you can do anything with it. Maura even eats them with Asian stir-fried veggies! All it takes is some shredded cheese, a little salsa, maybe sauteed shrimp or grilled fish. So simple, so good.

Interesting, though, that for a foodie gringo like me, this dish is exotic, requiring a special tortilla press, lessons, lots of "oh that one didn't work let's try it again," yet for millions of Mexicans it's breakfast, lunch, and dinner, made by women who are so practiced that they don't even need the tortilla press--they just pat the dough with their hands and end up with a uniformly flat and perfectly round piece.

Here's what Maura does, with my best guesses at proportions:

With your hands, mix 3 cups masa harina, 1 tsp salt, and 2 1/2 or 3 cups hot water. The batter will be very wet. Form it into balls a bit larger than golf balls and place them in a plastic bag. (The photo is of Maura and her daughter at one of my "lessons.")

Wrap the plates of a tortilla press with a cut-open plastic bag or plastic wrap. Place a dough ball inside and press down gently. Open the press, turn the plastic 90 degrees, then close the press more firmly. Open, then place your hand over the dough and press down firmly enough to leave indentations in the dough.

Put the tortilla in a hot cast iron skillet. After 3o seconds, turn it over. After 60 seconds, turn it over again. After about 30 more seconds, take a damp cloth and start pressing quickly all over the tortilla. Ideally what happens here is the top layer of the tortilla adheres to the cloth, pulling the it apart from the bottom layer apart as the cloth lifts. This puffing is highly desirable--it makes the tortilla less heavy and dense, and also permits you to fold the tortilla without it's cracking or breaking in half. After it puffs adequately, wrap it in a kitchen towel. Keep adding hot tortillas to the stack inside the towel, and they'll stay warm until you get them all eaten. Serves about 5 people.

At our tortilla party, we served them with the following choices for toppings: sauteed shrimp, pan-fried haddock (both seasoned with garlic, ancho chili powder, cumin, and salt), three salsas (mango-pineapple, tomato, and tomatillo), quesadilla cheese, chopped cilantro, sauteed mushrooms, guacamole, and sour cream. The side dishes and drink were pineapple-cilantro rice, vegetarian cast iron skillet beans, and a citrus spritzer with pineapple juice. (Unfortunately I can't find links for any of these--let me know if you want the recipes.)

Our dinner party was an unequivical success! My father-in-law made this analogy: grocery store tortillas are to fresh homemade tortillas as sliced sandwich bread is to artisan loaves. We all agreed! And even our nephew ate two tortillas all by himself.

Provence in dessert form

2007-03-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

Ever since I recently discovered food-grade dried lavender at my local World Market, I've been in love with the stuff. So far, I've tried two desserts using lavender: honey lavender ice cream from the blog Very Good Things, and tonight, this lavender lemon pound cake from the pastry-chef-authored blog The Pastry Department (can I just say I love her banner graphic? Yay, salt caramel!)

My favorite thing about the ice cream was that it came out a very sunny Provencal yellow, especially nice with the flecks of lavender in there. The recipe doesn't have you strain the flowers out, and I'm torn on how I feel about that. I liked it presentation-wise, but the buds themselves had a slightly bitter flavor. I think lavender infuses itself into things well enough that you don't need to keep the buds in. Still, though, I'd make it again -- I'd just strain out the flowers before freezing the base. Also, the honey flavor was nice. I used a raw, unfiltered honey for the ice cream so that you'd really be able to taste it. And Mark brought me back some Tupelo honey from his trip to Florida that I can't wait to use in this recipe.

And, the pound cake. Okay, lavender steeped in melted butter=OHMYGOD. I have GOT to find ways to use lavender butter in other dishes. Imagine the possibilities...sigh. And I can't give a final verdict on the cake, as it's still cooling. But I did lick the batter bowl, so things are looking good.

kitchen alchemy: mujadarrah

2007-03-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

There are lots of dishes that are more than the sum of their parts, but I can think of few that transform kitchen staples into something sublime quite like mujadarrah, a Lebanese comfort food made entirely of things I bet all of you have in your kitchen right now. It's rice, lentils, and caramelized onions, and that's about it. But it tastes like so much more.

I'm almost ashamed to admit that the recipe I use also calls for some garlic and cumin, and that's practically heresy. They really are strictly optional -- the key is the onions. Don't be shy about the caramelization -- I practically burn them for this dish. When blended with the other flavors, they'll work their magic.

And as with so many Middle Eastern dishes, there are as many variations as there are ways to spell its name. Mark even recently got an invitation to attend a mujadarrah cookoff! He tells me there's an Egyptian version that uses some sort of pasta instead of rice. I've had versions of mujadarrah where the rice and lentils keep their texture; Mark's aunt makes a version that's almost more like a thick spread (nice with pita and all the standard accoutrements: hummus, baba ghanoush, etc.). I like to let the lentils break down enough that it thickens the dish and sort of ties everything together.

Mujadarrah
4 T. olive oil
1 onion, chopped; 2 onions sliced thinly
3 garlic cloves
2 t. cumin
3/4 t. allspice
2 cans vegetable stock (or one carton)
3/4 c. lentils
3/4 c. brown rice (you can also do white rice*)
salt/pepper to taste

Heat half the oil in saucepan. Saute chopped onion, garlic, and spices until the onion is soft and translucent. Add broth, rice, and lentils; bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer 40 minutes. Meanwhile, caramelize sliced onions in skillet in the remaining olive oil. Add caramelized onions to lentil/rice mixture; taste for salt & pepper.

Serve topped with plain yogurt.

*If using white rice: After sauteeing onions and garlic, add only the lentils with the stock; bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer 10 minutes. Then add rice, return to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes.

can it be true?

2007-03-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

I grew up in an uninspired town. It has no town center, just one long row of chain stores and fast food joints. It does have some amazing mountains surrounding it, but the town itself is about as boring as a city can get. It is essentially a suburb without the urb. The town council was so worried about non-existent crime that they recently installed bright street lights on every corner making the entire town glow like a football stadium. My town is nicknamed "Family City, USA" in a mountain valley that everyone calls "Happy Valley." It used to be a town of fruit orchards, but most of those were gone by the time my family moved there. The last hold out just got shut down in order to widen an already very wide (and not terribly busy) road. There used to be a good mexican restaurant there, but that closed. It's certainly not a town known for its food.

And then I learn that there is someone making artisinal chocolate in my home town. What?! We're not just talking about a choclatier here, we're talking about someone making chocolate from bean to bar. In Orem, Utah? Amano chocolate has only been in production for about a year and only widely available (you can order on their website) for a couple of months. They currently make two single orginin bars: Madagascar and Ocumare. Even though they've only been around a short time, they are getting some good press.

And how does the chocolate taste? Both bars have a clean and crisp break. The two bars have very distinct flavors: citrus for the Madagascar and mint for the Ocumare. The Ocumare is pretty amazing; it's surprising that the beans themselves can have such a minty undertone. At $6 for a 2 oz. bar, the chocolate probably wouldn't be my choice for baking projects (I'll stick with my standby Scharffenberger for that), but for general eating and chocolate bliss Amano may be a new favorite. The chocolate is a little spendy, but how can I resist near-perfect artisinal chocolate from my home town?

have you ever grilled a salad?

2007-03-04T20:59:00.000-08:00

When dining with Mr. Tart and his parents at Panzano last week, taking advantage of the Denver Restaurant Week promotion (two prix fixe meals for $52.80), we were a little doubtful of the appellation "grilled Caesar salad." I mean, come on, you don't grill lettuce. Maybe you grill other vegetables like carrots and mushrooms and put dressing on them, but then it's not really a "caesar salad," now is it? I figured that for this restaurant's version, the croutons were grilled instead of baked or fried.

But I was wrong!

The lettuce was grilled!

And it--and the whole salad--was amazing. The chef had taken the heart of a head of romaine lettuce, leaving the leaves attached to the stem, and cooked it over a wood fire so that some leaves were singed, some were smoky, but most stayed crunchy. The dressing was a little tart, a lot creamy, and just salty enough--it definitely didn't come out of a bottle--and then the single anchovy sunbathing on top tasted like rich, soft salt more than it tasted of fish. Shaved parmesan decorated the plate and the romaine balanced on a grilled sliced of garlicky peasant bread. It was without question the best caesar salad I've ever experienced! As soon as the snow melts off our deck, we're going to try to repicate it at home with our gas grill.

the budding gourmand

2007-02-25T15:38:00.000-08:00

My nephew Carl recently turned one year old. His birthday cake was actually gingerbread cupcakes which Elizabeth adapted from a Cook's Illustrated recipe; he wolfed two of them down and chased them with ice cream and laughed.

Why gingerbread? Well, a neighbor had given their family a plate of various cookies just before Christmas, so Carl's parents fed him a soft gingerbread cookie. When it was gone, he sobbed and cried real tears. They held up the plate to show that the gingerbread was all gone, and he continued to wail. So they handed him the plate to make it clear that no more cookies were left. And what did Carl do? He started licking the plate!

Here he is with the cupcakes:

Can't you tell that he love gingerbread? His other favorites include bananas (he can even say "nana" when he sees one!) and ice cream and carrots and apple juice.

wine touring in Virginia

2007-02-25T12:33:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, Mark and I went on a Virginia winery bus tour sponsored by the Washington Wine Academy. It was, well, a lot of time on a bus (thanks to a bus driver who, relying solely on his GPS device, managed to drive right past 4 out of 4 stops, at one point even taking us on an unnecessary half-hour loop through the countryside). But it got us out of the city for a while, and we learned about some grapes we'd never heard of.

At Chrysalis Vineyards in Middleburg, Va., we sampled wine made from Norton grapes. Thought to be the best (maybe the only?) truly native North American grape for winemaking, Norton grows best in Virginia and Missouri. I liked what we tasted -- it was dry, a little spicy, and fruity (but without any weird "grape jelly" quality, which they say a lot of other wines made from native North American grape varieties can have).

Later, at Unicorn Winery, we sampled Chambourcin, a French/American hybrid grape. It was really, really deeply colored -- purple, really, like petite sirah. Yet Unicorn's website describes it as having "light tannins." And that seems true -- it didn't have that mouth-drying effect that petite sirah sometimes does, and it had a nice, jammy fig flavor going on. But now I'm confused about tannins. I thought tannins were imparted by the grapeskins, and like I said, this wine is downright purple, suggesting lots of contact with the skins, so ... wine expert I'm not. But I know it was tasty!

So it was a long day, but we learned a lot. Tour participants were also allowed to drink on the bus, which means there were some pretty sloshed people on board by the time we rolled back into D.C. I hadn't witnessed a bus singalong since high school, but I'm here to say that you haven't lived until you've heard grown adults segue straight from "Baby Got Back" into "Hey Jude."

the teen movie nerd-turned-hottie of vegetables

2007-02-17T21:32:00.000-08:00

When you fall into the rut of weeknight cooking -- coming home hungry, realizing it's 7 pm and your fridge has tofu, a sweet potato and leftover rice pudding -- you look forward to a lazy weekend where you have time to kick back and make a meal worth eating. Or at least I do. And I don't know if it's the winter blahs or what, but I feel like lately I make the same stuff all the time, so I dug out some new recipes and tried some new stuff. On the menu tonight: swiss chard with beets, goat cheese and raisins; corn cakes with pepper jelly; and Mexican chocolate mousse with burnt rum and spicy candied pumpkin seeds. We had a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand with it that we really liked (Spy Valley '05, found at World Market, if anybody cares).

It struck me that I've never really cooked with beets before. I have bad childhood memories of slimy canned beets. Mark says the same. But in recent years, they've gotten an image boost. I've had them in restaurants, all dressed up in fresh, interesting preparations. Beets are the '80s teen movie nerd-turned-hot-chick of vegetables. They are Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. Wait, no. That's not quite right. I always thought she looked weird at the end after Molly Ringwald gives her a makeover. I liked her better when she was scowling and eating her potato-chip sandwich. Anyway, I digress.

Anyway, I will now be roasting beets at home all the time. Such dramatic color, so much flavor! And such easy prep: you can just wrap them in foil, roast for a hour at 400 degrees, let them cool a bit, and their skins peel right off. So anyway, the dish -- it's chard, beets, goat cheese, raisins, pumpkin seeds, and tomatoes -- I thought tomatoes and beets in the same dish wouldn't work, but I'm glad I gave it a try. I think the acid in the tomatoes balanced the sweetness from the beets. Anyway, delicious, healthy and beautiful on the plate. And, oddly, it was better at room temperature than it was when it was hot. When the flavors had had a chance to blend, it really came together.

The corn cakes were the one dish that wasn't new in my repertoire. We like them with goat cheese and pepper jelly:

On to dessert. The mousse uses Ibarra, a cinnamon-spiked, sort of gritty-textured Mexican chocolate used mostly for hot chocolate. The really fun part: after melting your chocolate, you get to flambe the rum! You can't see the flames in this photo, really, but you can sort of see my trepidation:

I used a recipe for the mousse (and what a luscious mousse!), but the pumpkin seeds were my addition. See, I love spicy chocolate things, and I was tempted to put cayenne in the mousse (see my post on Jacques Torres Wicked Hot Chocolate), but thought better of it, deciding that chili-infused chocolate is the sort of thing that loses its whimsy when you do it all the time. So I practiced restraint -- that is, until I realized that what the mousse needed was something crunchy to go with it. (The recipe had called for topping the mousse with whipped cream, which sounded redundant to me.) And I liked the idea of said crunchy thing also being sweet, spicy and just a little salty (taking a cue from the genius of salt caramel). So I toasted pumpkin seeds in a dry skillet, glazed them with a mixture of sugar, water and cayenne (just poured it over the toasted seeds in the skillet and let it turn syrupy, then spread the mixture out on foil to dry), and sprinkled a little kosher salt over them. Perfect -- the mousse got its spicy counterpoint after all! This would be the perfect dinner-party dessert, as you can do it all ahead of time.

egg on our face

2007-02-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is embarassing to admit: this post refers to a Supper Club dinner party from ten months ago. And I'm not going to try to cover it up, because it was an egg-themed potluck at Easter time and here's the bunny we saw outside the hosts' house and took a picture of because it seemed like a good omen for the meal! So here we go.
Cynde and Atley (Katie and Aaron's daughter, who was docile and not walking then, but is now a drama queen toddler) think happy thoughts about the cholesterol-filled repast awaiting them:

We all went overboard on the appetizers this time. Katie made garlic-stuffed olives wrapped in pastry dough (they're egg-shaped, see?) while my contribution was a plethora of international eggy hors-d'oeuvres. For example, we had several types of deviled eggs: Indian (pierced with pieces of pappadam and served with tamarind sauce), Mexican (flavored with jalapenos and cumin and decorated with tortilla chips), and plain old American.

Then I made mini-quiches with broccoli (French) and Scotch eggs (hard-boiled eggs wrapped in a sausage-bread crumb mixture and deep fried).

Unfortunately, none of us can remember the main dish in any detail, other than it was a kind of egg casserole. Oh well! Dessert also exploited eggs to their fullest, in Katie's sweet, custardy "Bob and Andy pie" from an Amish cookbook.

Full tummies, happy friends--yet another successful themed potluck dinner party!

cooking with kids

2007-02-06T07:53:00.000-08:00

I've been tutoring a four-year-old, a five-year-old, and their mom in French for a semester now. One night a week we have a "cooking class" in French, where I teach them the necessary vocabulary and they follow my directions to prepare something simple and sweet that they can eat right away. (We meet after dinner, so it's supposed to be a dessert.) And I'm running out of ideas! Here's a list of what we've done so far (that I can remember); can anyone else suggestion other hands-on, kid-friendly desserts? (They don't actually have to be French.)

"bananes royales" (banana splits)
palmiers (rolled-up puff pastry sliced into cookies)
croissants (refrigerated crescent rolls that they rolled up themselves)
crepes (I made those and the girls added the toppings)
French toast
spider crackers
parfaits (with yogurt, granola, and fruit)
strawberry shortcake
cookies (from a refrigerator tube, which we decorated with icing after slicing and baking them--baking cookies from scratch with two preschoolers would take up all the time we had for lessons!)
cinnamon toast
ants on a log
fruit dipped in chocolate

so much more than Swedish meatballs!

2007-02-04T17:45:00.000-08:00

Meet Tucker, Cynde and Todd's baby, born last summer. This was his first dinner party with us and Katie and Aaron (our three-couple Supper Club)! He's making a face because he doesn't approve of the hors-d'oeuvres at our Scandinavian-themed potluck.

But who can blame him when confronted with caviar in a tube?

Fortunately, the other appetizers were more appetizing: Danish blue cheese and home-smoked salmon (Todd's first attempt with his in-laws' smoker turned out quite well!).

And while Katie's canned goodies included quite a few jalapenos (she's a Spanish teacher, after all), she correctly pointed out that Scandinavians are all about pickling. (I liked her pickled green beans the best.)

Side dishes included rye bread (from Schmidt's Bakery and Deli in Loveland--geniuses with flour) and lingonberry jam,

plus potatoes swimming in cream and more pickled veggies (beets this time).

The main dish--whose name I can't recall--was like a big ol' Swedish meatball in a pastry crust. After all that good food, we were ready for a long winter's nap, but wait! There's still dessert!

We concluded the meal with the creaminess of rice pudding and the crunchiness of Swedish rosettes, which I fried in hot oil on our deck just like my mother used to do every Christmas. (Now I understand why she stopped--they're really time-consuming and don't last till the following morning! That's a lot of work for something so delicate and ephemeral.)

Other than the grody caviar, it was another delicious and inventive dinner! We try to get together like this every two months or so, sometimes with their kids, sometimes just us grown-ups. We always pledge to experiment with new recipes (and we always go overboard and end up with way more food than we can actually eat). We used to do Iron Chef-style meals, where we all had to prepare dishes using the theme ingredient (eg squash, tomatoes, fondue, aphrodisiacs), but now we're moving into regional cuisine instead. Stay tuned for an egg dinner post followed by Indian food! I'll try to get caught up before our next dinner: raclette in March.

wee foodies

2007-01-28T20:51:00.000-08:00

Washingtonian magazine reports on a gathering of young -- very young -- D.C. foodies.

And to think I thought fish sticks were pretty tasty when I was 12.

eating D.C.: Komi

2007-01-28T17:15:00.000-08:00

Have I mentioned that I have the best husband ever? For my birthday, he signed me up for a CSA share from Bull Run Farm. We got a combination vegetable/fruit subscription; some weeks there might also be flowers or some honey from the farm's bees in our share. I can't wait to finally have some garlic scapes!

That was the delayed-gratification part of my birthday, since it won't start until May or so. The instant gratification came from our dinner at Komi, the D.C. restaurant I've been most looking forward to trying (D.C. food bloggers rave about it). Chef/owner Johnny Monis is a mere 27 years old. I had a good view of the kitchen from where we sat, and I could see him in there, painstakingly plating everything. I know that a lot of chef/owners can be a bit removed from the day-to-day workings of the kitchen, but this guy's very involved in the details. And oh, the attention to detail is what makes Komi great.

Komi does "slow food" in the best possible sense: the restaurant is tiny, warm and inviting; your meal takes three hours, and for those three hours you are well taken care of. In a world where we all go out to eat too often, Komi is still a special-occasion experience. And yet they make you feel comfortable enough to put your elbows on the table. The servers know their stuff, but they don't talk down to you. The food is incredible, but never overly precious. It's fine dining, but the overall vibe is comfy.

We ordered the tasting menu, plus the optional wine pairings. I'm glad we did: instead of fumbling through the wine list and blindly choosing a bottle ourselves, we got a sommelier-guided tour through the highlights of the wine list, tailored to what we were eating. (We even got to try some very tasty Greek and Hungarian wines. Who knew?)

The first course actually consisted of eight or so mini-courses: a few house-brined olives, a fried ricotta ball, a little sunchoke panna cotta with a quail egg inside. A little oxtail sandwich with tzatziki, some sauteed octopus, cured beef with persimmon and avocado. (And corresponding veggie counterparts for Mark.) Every time we thought the parade of small plates was done, something new came out. Oh, and the best was a mascarpone-stuffed date, which may be the single tastiest bite of food I've ever had. The date was caramelized, and it was drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkling of salt. The overall effect was that of a creamy salt caramel. So many layers of flavor in one little bite. I'm still thinking about that bite days later.

After the series of small plates was done, there was the pasta course: truffled potato ravioli for Mark, tagliatelle with wild boar (!), cocoa and mint for me. (In between courses, our server brought us three kinds of house-made crackers. See what I mean about detail?) For the entree, I chose the roasted turbot with blood oranges and some kind of creamy celery root polenta. Mark had a vegetable platter: Brussels sprouts, mushrooms, the same celery root polenta, and haricots verts with little slices of pickled red onion.

Next came the cheese course: Gouda, Camembert and candied quince in a vanilla-bean-specked syrup, with homemade oat crackers. Mine was served with a glass of vin santo; Mark had another kind of dessert wine, the name of which is escaping me. For dessert, Mark had blood-orange granita and I had the Greek doughnuts with chocolate mascarpone pudding. I thought the donuts were just OK -- they may have been overhyped in the reviews I read -- but the pudding was fantastic. Even when the check arrived, the parade of treats wasn't over, as it came with two house-made lollipops (pina colada flavor).

bread pudding? bread soup?

2007-01-28T08:48:00.001-08:00

Mr. Tart and I recently dined at Boulder's Mateo, where we had a lovely meal--including a ginormous lobster raviolo--yep, just one!--which ended perfectly with what they called a dried-cherry and caramel bread pudding. Served in a ramekin, the custard was nearly liquid and the bread chunks still chunky and almost crisp. I suspect that this bread pudding hadn't actually been baked, because the bread had not absorbed much custard, hadn't gone soft, hadn't expanded and enlarged, and no dried crusty bits clung to the side of the ramekin. It was like a thick sweet soup studded with dried cherries and topped with caramel syrup. And this dessert tasted so rich and lucious I didn't even mind being misled by the "bread pudding" misnomer.

So here's what I'm wondering: does it really have to be baked in the oven to be considered "bread pudding"? And does anyone have a non-baked bread pudding recipe to share before I try to invent my own?

a tasty salad idea (and Top Chef disappointment)

2007-01-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

Just something I made today for lunch: I started with salad greens tossed with a bit of walnut oil and sherry vinegar. Then I toasted a bit of crusty bread, rubbed it with a garlic clove, topped it with some goat cheese, and put that on the greens. Meanwhile, I poached an egg and placed it on top of the goat cheese toast, thus melting the cheese. Then I topped it with a little pepper and a drizzle of white truffle oil. Dee-lish.

The first bite is pleasant enough. Then you break the soft egg yolk and it becomes swoon-worthy. And, of course, I love any excuse to bust out the truffle oil.

I think I've been on a poached-egg kick as a result of watching too much Top Chef. (Is it just me, or are eggs ubiquitous on that show?)

Speaking of which: Are any of you watching this season? I'm not sure whom to root for anymore. That last episode was just so disturbing, so Lord of the Flies. I mean, what is the matter with these people? Sam, Ilan and Elia were just as much to blame as Cliff was for that ugly incident, so part of me thinks they should have just declared Marcel the winner by default. But he's clearly not the best chef, endearing as I may find him. There's no possible outcome that can be satisfying now. If we were only mid-season, I'd just quit watching. But I can't skip the finale now, right?

In any event, if you're a TC fan, listen to this exit interview with Mike at CHOW.com. His story about the dentist is hilarious.

D.C. Restaurant Week: Cafe Atlantico

2007-01-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

As we’ve gotten to know our new city over the past few months, I must admit I’ve been disappointed with the state of D.C. dining. There’s a perception that D.C. is a second-tier food city, and sadly, I think my experience has supported that. I’ve had a few good meals here, but all too often they’re just sort of OK. On Thursday night, though, I had my first really great meal here. It’s Restaurant Week here in D.C., which means it’s time for dozens of the city’s best restaurants to offer a special prix-fixe three-course menu for $30. We chose to check out Cafe Atlantico, a Nuevo Latino place with a few creative twists. It’s owned by Jose Andres, the chef behind Jaleo (a tapas place we really like) and Minibar (haven’t been there yet, but they do “molecular gastronomy” type stuff like, oh, caramelized olive oil bonbons). Cafe Atlantico is sort of the middle ground between traditional fare and that more experimental stuff.

I started out with a mojito, and it was fantastic. I’d heard they were great here, and mine lived up to its reputation. Mojitos are easy to screw up, I think. They’re often too sweet, too tart, too boozy, too weak, too something. This one, though, was perfectly balanced. And they don’t skimp on the mint! (I would have happily ordered a second one later in the meal, but our server was nowhere to be seen until dessert. That was the one service blunder.)

My first course was conch fritters with jicama-avocado ravioli and mango oil. I loved this dish because everything on the plate had a counterpoint, texturally and in terms of flavor. There were these hot, savory fried morsels complemented by these cold, clean-tasting ravioli. There was a palate-cleanser quality about them. I do wish there’d been a little more of the mango oil; it brightened the whole thing up. But about those ravioli: they were wrapped up, dim sum steamed-dumpling style, in something that at first looked very much like a spring roll wrapper. I could taste jicama in there with the avocado, but there was something about it I couldn’t figure out. The crunch wasn’t there. I didn’t realize until the second dumpling that the jicama was the wrapper – sliced paper-thin! So that was kind of cool. Mark had a salad he really enjoyed; he said the vinaigrette was a lot subtler than most. Vinegar needn’t club you over the head.

My main course was duck confit and, once again, everything on the plate had something balancing it out. The duck was bruleed on top, which was brilliant. I don’t know if a crisp sugar crust on top of a layer of caramelized duck fat sounds good to you, but trust me, it was fabulous. I don’t generally like fatty meat, but duck confit just melts me into a little puddle of happy. I forget now what the sauce was, but it was something saltier to balance the sweetness, and there was a little frisee salad to offset the fat from the duck. There were some really thinly sliced plantain chips, too. Meanwhile, while I was in duck fat heaven, Mark was enjoying a portobello mushroom with corn, goat cheese, and beets. (His contribution to this review? "It was good.")

(I just said “duck fat,” or some variation, four times in one paragraph.)

Finally, dessert was a little chocolate cake with a molten center, bananas, caramel, and –this will sound weird but it totally worked – a little lime juice. It kept everything from being cloyingly sweet. See, again, it’s all about the counterpoints. Mark had a passionfruit sorbet: not too sweet, not too tart.

Here’s my one complaint, though: We ordered coffee with dessert, and the coffee was awful. It tasted like the dregs of a carafe that had been sitting on the hot plate for two hours. I’ve had better coffee at IHOP. Why do so many really good restaurants treat coffee like an afterthought? After so much attention to detail throughout the meal, it’s really jarring at the end to be served bad coffee. A great little cup of French-press coffee would have been a perfect conclusion, and it would have been so good with that dessert. So much energy is spent on food and wine pairings – why not coffee? It just seems dumb to ignore a diner’s last impression of the meal.

Coffee-colored water aside, it was a memorable meal, and a lovely way to celebrate my new job. (Yes, new job! Like how I snuck that in there at the end?)

a yurt christmas

2007-01-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

Usually I spend Christmas pretty much the same way: hanging out at my parents' house, eating food, opening presents. Now that adventure boy is in my life, it seems things are going to be a bit different. Will's parents planned to visit us during Christmas so the two of us (well, mostly him) came up with the idea to spend Christmas in a yurt at 9400 feet. The trip required a 5 1/2 mile cross-country ski with full packs (never mind that my entire cross-country skiing experience consisted of an afternoon out at the nordic park three days before departure). We intended to spend two nights at the yurt with Will's entire family, but travel problems prevented both of his siblings from arriving and delayed our journey one day. But one night was probably just right for me.

The Uintas are a high mountain range with shallow valleys. The first part of our journey was a fairly gentle glide on partially groomed trails through pines and aspens, leading to a final steep slog up to our yurt which is appropriately called the Ridge. The yurt was nestled into a slight depression in the ridge.

As far as winter camping goes, a yurt is pretty luxorious. There is a wood stove, so you can keep yourself pretty warm (if you don't choke on the smoke from the faulty drafting). You get to sleep off the floor on wooden bunks. There is an outhouse. There is a propane stove and lantern and a large stack of chopped wood. Still, seeing as I detest winter and being cold, I was a bit apprehensive about the whole thing. But thanks to a new down, zero degree sleeping bag and some good food, I survived (and am even looking forward to making another yurt trip in two weeks).

But the food. Trying to plan Christmas dinner that can be cooked entirely on a propane stove is a tricky thing (especially when you have to consider the weight of your food). With a little brainstorming and Will's willingness to be a workhorse and tow in a sled full of food, we ended up with a very satisfactory Christmas feast.

For lunch on our arrival, we nibbled on bread, spanish olives, manchego, salami, and Will's mom's fruitcake and nutmeg cookies. And tea of course--lots of tea while waiting for the stove's warmth to kick in. We also got to work melting snow on top of the wood stove (a continual process during our stay).

The obvious plan for Christmas eve dinner was pan-fried ham. We added mashed potatoes (mashed entirely--and quite handily, I might add--with a dinner fork) and asparagus (totally out of season, but. . . ) to round things out. And for dessert, rice pudding--which not only happens to be one of few stove-top desserts but also happens to be a Christmas tradition for Will's family. Will's dad is apparently the family's rice pudding master, but he was kind enough to step out of my way and let me craft the pudding (even though it was my first effort); it felt like a bit of an honor that I was trusted with the family tradition. Part of the tradition includes hiding an almond in the pudding which provides its discoverer with some luck. Rice pudding is a good choice for deesert when all you have is a stove-top, but at 9400 feet liquids boil very quickly making it tricky to properly cook rice leaving the pudding a little, well, chewy. We topped off the evening's meal with hot chocolate (chopped Scharffenberger with milk, to be exact) and peppermint schnapps.

For Christmas morning (after clearing our lungs from soot-filled sleep), we ate french toast from some chocolate chunk challah bread I'd baked at home, bacon, and reheated (and surprisingly tasty) mashed potatoes.

This is the kind of winter camping I can support: slighty warm conditions, good food (and lots of it)

holiday baking extravaganza

2006-12-28T11:42:00.000-08:00

I have admitted before on this blog that, unlike Lis and Tara, I usually avoid baking--I've only ever made yeast bread with a machine, my pie crusts are disastrous, my cakes come from mixes and my cookies from refrigerated tubes. But, buoyed by my success with this year's buche de Noel, and wanting to spend time with family and friends while preparing for the holiday onslaught, I managed to prepare (or at least be present at) the following:

--Six loaves of cranberry-orange-walnut bread (and this time I toasted the walnuts first, which made the flavor even richer)

--During the annual candy-making festivities with my mother- and sister-in-law, we came up with all sorts of goodies. Here's my candied orange peel (to flavor mulled wine, to put in fruitcakes, and to serve with espresso). Don't they look like glossy French fries? I also made haystacks with white chocolate bark and chow mein noodles.
--My mother-in-law's almond brittle (she also made toffee and caramels)
--Elizabeth's peanut butter chocolate bark

--Several kinds of cookies with my friend Dana and her children, nine-year-old Damien and seven-year-old Amelia, including pecan tartlettes and spritz cookies (the first time I've worked with a cookie press)
--Gingerbread cookies (with white pepper in the batter to make them spicier)
--And finally, while in Wisconsin, my mom and I decorated the cut-out sugar cookies that she had already baked.
--And this list doesn't even include what we baked for dessert on Christmas day and the four batches of apple pie cookies and s'mores bar cookies that Mr. Tart baked for a cookie exhange with friends while I was making candy!!! And you know what? I loved it everything about it. Maybe I'm not so averse to baking after all!

say "Mewwy Chwistmas" with a wog

2006-12-17T06:47:00.000-08:00

The children, upon seeing their first buche de Noel at the Christmas party last night:

Elizabeth, age 3: It's a wock!

Ben, age 4: No, siwwy. It's a wog.

And indeed it is.

Until this weekend, I had always felt a little fraudulent: I was a French teacher who had never made a yule log cake, the traditional French buche de Noel. Ironically, the year I spent the holidays in France, we ate an ice cream cake shaped like a log, not the real buche. But this year all that changed. We attended a Christmas party with a group of some of Mr. Tart's oldest friends, and the theme was "holidays around the world." We started out with smoked salmon appetizers and New Mexican posole served with Norwegian lefse (mashed potato pancakes). Homemade ravioli with smoked turkey and cranberries served with gravy followed (Italy, of course), plus roasted turkey and all the trimmings. There was a lovely pinot noir for the wine drinkers, lamb's wool for the beer drinkers (an English precurser to mulled wine made with pureed apples, spices, and two kinds of ale), and hot cider. Then dessert was my buche de Noel and glogg, Scandinavian spiced wine with homemade candied orange peel and almonds and raisins.

We all agreed that the buche de Noel looked and tasted gorgeous, maybe even worth the effort it took to make Cook's Illustrated's persnickety version of it (including rules like "beat eggs for exactly 40 seconds"). It starts out with a sponge cake so rich that it only includes 1/4 cup of flour for lots of bittersweet chocolate and 6 eggs. You bake this in a jelly roll pan and then spread whipped mascapone cheese (flavored with coffee and made fluffier and, well, creamier with the addition of heavy cream) over it:

Then you roll it up, cut off the ends and affix them to the top with frosting to make it look more log-like, and then cover it all copiously with a ganache made of more bittersweet chocolate and cream and cognac. If you're feeling particularly ambitous and artistic (I wasn't), make meringue or marzipan mushrooms. Here's what it looks like inside:

Gee, that description makes it sound pretty manageable, doesn't it? Well, it took all afternoon, and I won't be making another buche de Noel any time soon, but it is by far the dish I am most proud of making this year.

You've seen the "before" picture; here's 1.5-year-old Charlie with the "after."

Mewwy Chwistmas!

celebratory pancakes

2006-12-13T10:20:00.000-08:00

This is just to say that the semester is over. OVER, I tell you. Ok, I still have to finish some grading, but I don't have to see my students anymore (which is sometimes a very good thing) and soon, very soon I will have three luscious work-free weeks. But for now, even though I'm still technically working, I can do so in my pjs and my slippers while sipping coffee and eating a tasty breakfast. And since it is the end of the semester, I deserve a breakfast that is both tasty and fattening like the puffy pancake. You may call this pancake by some other name, but in my childhood it was always called the puffy pancake and so it will remain. Here's the recipe in case you want to join my in a celebratory breakfast.

Puffy Pancake

1/2 cup flour
2 eggs
1/c cup milk
pinch nutmeg
1/4 cup butter

Heat oven to 425. Melt butter in a 9-inch pie pan (you may be tempted to cut down on the butter, but don't. Remember, this is a celebratory pancake). While the butter is melting, whisk together remaining ingredients. Pour the batter into the butter and bake for 20 minutes. Once it comes out of the oven, sprinkle the pancake with powdered sugar. Just to fool yourself that this breakfast is healthy, serve with fruit.

the gift of the madeleines

2006-12-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

You know that O. Henry story "The Gift of the Magi" where the young couple has nothing but he has a gold pocket watch and she has beautifully long hair and he sells his watch to buy her a hair comb and she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain? Well, this story is sort of like that, but it's a story of abundance more than sacrifice.

I've told you before how much Will and I love Les Madeleines, the perfect bakery in the bad neighborhood, the source of the decadent chocolate birthday cake. One day, while savoring our tasty breakfast pastries, Will commented on how much he liked madeleines. I agreed and mentioned that I should buy a pan. His birthday came along, so I decided to bake him madeleines.

I trekked to the kitchen store, found a pan, brought it home and set it on the kitchen table where it was quickly covered up by my usual clutter.

Will came home, we chatted about our day, and he stared at my pile of clutter. I couldn't figure out what he was interested in (it's not like he'd never seen my clutter before!); then he pulled the pan out from the pile with a crestfallen look on his face.

"This is what I got you for your birthday; it's coming in the mail."

"But I was going to make you madeleines for your birthday."

Well, I didn't bake any madeleines for Will's birthday. I waited for the new (and clearly better) pan to arrive and returned mine to the store (just in time to buy a replacement glass for my french press--cluttery and clumsy!). Finally, I got to bake my madeleines.

no longer a turkey virgin

2006-11-27T21:11:00.000-08:00

Everyone told me not to worry when I announced that I was apprehensive about preparing my first Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family and my in-laws. "The turkey's easy," they reassured me. "It won't be a big deal. Just throw it in the oven and don't let it dry out." Well, they were half right. Roasting the turkey isn't a big deal. But menu planning for the big day, coordinating the sides and desserts which needed to be cooked in the same oven as the turkey, discovering on Wednesday that the turkey is too small for ten people but it's too late to buy and thaw a new one, dealing with gross stuff inside the turkey, setting the table, and thoroughly cleaning the house, all when I've been visiting Grandma out of state--well, that's the big deal.

I do like the way the table turned out, with our wedding china and Nana's silver and a big bowl of oranges and cranberries. Each place setting had its own individual bouquet of sage leaves from our vegetable garden! (And you can't tell from this photo that the tablecloth was too short once we put all the table leaves in.)

The turkey saga: After consulting with my mother and mother-in-law, I bought a boneless turkey breast and roasted it the day before to make sure that we had enough meat. That wasn't difficult. Choosing a recipe to use for the big bird, though, was more challenging. I immediately eliminated anything involving brining, grilling, deep frying, or bags--I wanted a turkey like the ones my mom makes. Simple. Crispy skin. Moist white meat. After narrowing it down to three recipes, I opted for parts of each: Lis' recommended turkey with herbs, jettisoning its shiitake mushroom gravy in favor of a giblet-stock gravy from the Gourmet cookbook, then jettisoning the moderately fussy roasting directions in favor of those accompanying this ridiculously easy recipe. So basically, I took a little turkey, rubbed it with oil and fresh herbs from the garden, then placed more herbs, leeks from the garden, an orange, and a lemon in the cavity, and roasted it at 450 for a couple of hours. The house filled with smoke, but the meat was moist and everything smelled good! Then my cousin Julie's husband Jerimy (Mr. Tart's friend from high school who served as his best man) helped me make the gravy:

The gravy saga: So the day before Thanksgiving I decided to prepare the stock for the gravy. This is a step my mother never takes, but it sounded like a good idea. I wasn't looking forward to fondling the giblets, but I knew enough to expect to find them. (Others have told me stories about pulling little baggies of innards out of their turkeys at the table, surprised.) What I wasn't prepared for was the neck. The turkey neck. I reached into the cavity to pull out the bag of giblets but instead found this long, fleshy, pallid, phallic thing that stretched the entire length of the bird. I pulled and pulled, and it kept coming and coming. Nowhere on the package does it say "One frozen turkey, giblets and repulsive neck included." Nope, the neck is never mentioned anywhere, just the giblets. But I tell you what: once I added that grossest part of the turkey anatomy to the hot oil, it started to smell like Thanksgiving.

The next step was to add the giblets. Following Gourmet's recipe carefully, I read that I shouldn't include the liver because it will make the gravy bitter. Fair enough--but the little baggie of innards isn't labeled! Nowhere on the turkey package or in the cookbook is a diagram explaining which organ is which! I thought about Googling "turkey liver" to find some pictures, but decided to wing it. "Hmmm. These two identically-shaped organs connected by a little tendon have to be the kidneys, because there's two of them, and this small triangular one must be the heart." So far so good--but that left two large amorphous organs that, frankly, frightened me. One liver, one gizzard--and I didn't even know what a gizzard was. So I chucked the darkest one and continued on. (Julie, a nurse, later told me that I did end up throwing out the liver after all!) Giblets went into the hot oil along with veggies and herbs, and a couple of hours later I had a rich stock--so much nicer than anything I've ever poured out of a can.

The rest of the meal came together pretty smoothly, despite the smoke in the house from the high-heat roasting and the fact that with 60-degree weather here in Colorado, mulled wine and mulled cider didn't feel right. (We served sparkling cider and Cranberry Mimosas instead. For the latter, take a big glass, pour in 1/3 cup cranberry juice, 1/3 cup orange juice, 1/2 cup champagne, and garnish with cranberries and an orange slice.) I think the only reason I survived prepping this meal, though, was that all our guests brought sides to share.

What I found really neat about the sharing was seeing what each side of the family wanted to have at Thanksgiving dinner--what overlapped, what stood out, what was new. We started with purposefully light appetizers at noon: crudites, clementines, and popcorn (you know, because it was served at the first Thanksgiving!). This was new: I put them out because I was skeptical that the turkey would actually be ready when it was supposed to be, and because sometimes I think that appetizers are my favorite meal. Julie brought green bean casserole, which she and I both grew up with, while my sister-in-law Elizabeth contributed peas with chives and pine nuts, also a new recipe. I modified my mom's cranberry sauce to make it chunkier. My mother-in-law brought her famous yeast rolls, which my husband and brother-in-law drool over, while Jerimy brought his mother's cardamom braided bread. We didn't really need mashed potatoes, because we already had two breads, two stuffings, and sweet potatoes, but you know, it just doesn't seem Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes and gravy. I gave in to Mr. Tart's request not to include celery in the stuffing--though that still seems heretical--and at the last minute divided the stuffing into two baking dishes, so that I could add toasted pecans and dried fruit (cherries, cranberries, apples) to one of them, paying tribute to the fact that I grew up in the south (so in fact, we should really call that one "dressing," the southern term, instead of "stuffing"). Speaking of the sweet potatoes, aren't they gorgeous? My mother-in-law mixed them with eggs and pineapple and spooned them into hollowed-out oranges--another new dish.

Our most atypical dish, though, was the elk loin that Julie's son Luke, 16, recently hunted. She grew up in Wisconsin eating game that her father brought home, so her family fits right in to Wyoming. Jerimy also grew up hunting, so the elk combined traditions from their two families. Here's Luke grilling it on our deck (no more room in the oven!):

Dessert was another recommendation from Lis, Chocolate Cranberry Tart, which I added to my repetoire last year, and Nana's cranberry pudding, a light cake with cranberries with a warm silky sauce made from butter, cream, and sugar, yet another part of our extended family's holiday traditions. (Julie's mom and my mom were sisters; Nana was their mother. And as long as I'm reminiscing, I remember the summer thirteen years ago when Julie told Nana that she was going to be a great-grandmother again; Julie was pregnant with her daughter Kelley. That was the last time I saw Nana--but I can't help but think of her often, as my husband proposed to me with her engagement ring, which I still wear today.)

Notice too the wine; we brought it back to Colorado from our trip to California for Tara's wedding. It's a white cabernet that we tasted at one of the vineyards (Filsinger) and really fell for. We'd been saving it for a special occasion--and our first time hosting Thanksgiving for our families certainly was.

Oh, and the other new thing that we had at Thanksgiving? That would be our nephew Carl. We've got lots to be thankful for. (He's in the half-hidden high chair at the right.)

pie day

2006-11-24T18:22:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, Will and I were talking about Thanksgiving plans and he suggested we go out of town--hiking or something. I paused for a moment, trying to decide whether I should tell him what I was actually thinking (could I reveal what a food dork I truly am?) and said a bit sheepishly, "But Thanksgiving is when I bake pies." He laughed and I tried to argue that I didn't really care that much about baking pie, but he didn't buy it. (I later told a friend about the conversation and as soon as I mentioned Will's trip suggestion, she interrupted with: "Does he even know you?). Well, he's learning.

I do love baking pie. And Thanksgiving makes me a bit giddy because I get to bake a lot of pie. My mom initially suggested that she could make the pumpkin pies, but I eventually convinced her to let me bake everything. This year's pie tally:

Ginger streusel pumpkin (2)
your every day pumpkin (2)
apple
chocolate pecan
linzer torte

Yeah, seven pies might have been a little excessive (and makes for a very messy kitchen, as Will felt compelled to document), but everyone got to take home leftovers. But really, I wait all year for an excuse to bake more pies than necessary.

For me, it's all about the crust. I love working out all the details--keeping the house cold, icing the water, chilling the final product so that all the tiny clumps of fat melt at just the right time to create savory, flaky layers. It's like magic or something. Ok, I also like the reaction I get when people eat my pies--a teacher near the end of a semester needs a little positive affirmation, right?

my baby's all grown up

2006-11-22T11:31:00.001-08:00

The hardest thing about Jim Lahey's no-knead bread -- the recipe that's taken the food blog world by storm in the past few weeks -- is that it's not about instant gratification. You're looking at about a 24-hour turnaround period between mixing your dough and taking your finished bread out of the oven. But oh, oh, the payoff. I can't believe this came out of my kitchen. Seriously.

Here's my dough at the beginning, in its initial sticky, shaggy stage:

And after 18 hours of fermentation, it's alive and kickin':

I wish I'd gotten a picture of how stretchy and stringy the dough was when I inverted that bowl to drop it onto my work surface. That was some serious gluten! Here it is after turning it over on itself a couple times and left to rest briefly before the final rise:

And, here we are, ready for the final 2-hour rise. I had read on Chowhound that some people were having problems with this very slack dough sticking to their floured towels, so I went nuts with the flour and cornmeal. I had no problems with sticking, luckily.

And after two hours, it's ready to go into the oven:

Success! Here's Mark listening to the crust crackle as the bread cools. It sounds a bit like a bowl of Rice Krispies, or perhaps like a crackling fire:

Let's have a closer look, shall we? This is the most beautiful bread that's ever come from my kitchen. I didn't think it was possible to do this kind of bread at home. Jim Lahey, you are a genius!

And the final test, of course: Let's take a look at the crumb structure. Gorgeous, no?

If I'm not careful, we'll eat this whole loaf tonight. Who needs dinner?

fulfilling Grandma's expectations

2006-11-22T01:39:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm married, my 92-year-old grandmother treats me differently. Now I am a Wife. When we talk on the phone, she asks me when my husband will get home from work, if he's going up in the space shuttle any time soon (hey, she's 92, and to her, an "aerospace systems engineer" is the same thing as "astronaut"), what I'm fixing him for dinner, how I'm going to set the table, when we're going to start making babies. Once, very pleased with my dutiful responses, she exclaimed, "You're such a good little housewife!" But, see, she used to ask me about my job, my hobbies, if I've heard from my brother lately, if I'm planning any more trips to France. It's as if now that I'm married my role as Wife supersedes everything else and my husband should be the focus of our conversations--even though I still have a job, volunteer work, hobbies, news of my brother, and travel plans. So I take deep breaths, remind myself that she's of a very different generation than my own, answer her questions, and then tell her about my job and everything else going on in my life, even if she didn't ask.

When I decided to visit her for four days before Thanksgiving, I didn't realize that rather than remind her that I'm a multi-faceted young woman with many skills and interests who just happens to be married (to the most wonderful Rocket Man ever), my visit would instead reinforce the fact that I'm married and domestic now.

Grandma lives independently but doesn't do much cooking any more--because of shoulder problems she can't lift pots and pans, and a couple of times she's fallen asleep while food was cooking on the stove. This is so sad to me--I remember her glorious meals of fried chicken, cream gravy, mashed potoates, beans cooked in bacon grease, homemade apple pies. Even as recently as ten years ago she would mail me care packages of chocolate chip cookies. But now all she can handle on her own is heating up canned soup or frozen meals, making grilled cheese sandwiches, and that sort of thing. She received Meals on Wheels for a while but pooh-poohed the food and wouldn't eat it, so her kids cancelled that service. They're worried now that she doesn't eat enough now, specifically not enough protein and vegetables.

So I promised to cook a few meals for us during my visit. This took significant planning, as she would never dream of eating, say, portabello mushrooms, couscous, most seafood, Mexican dishes--anything mildly exotic or simply different from the meat-and-potatoes that she grew up and grew old with. In other words, most of my recipes were out. I also wanted to find dishes which didn't require equipment any more specialized than a can opener, whose leftovers would freeze and reheat well later, and which were easy to prepare, so that I wouldn't be spending half of my visit in the kitchen.

Here's what I ended up with:
Chicken with apples and onions
Broccoli in cheese sauce
Hash brown casserole
Turkey bacon and onion quiche
Cherry crumble
Scrambled eggs and turkey bacon

See? Heavy on the protein, just like my aunt requested.

Well, everything I prepared was a success. She was wary of the some of the ingredients, like apples with chicken--even though I pointed out that this combination wasn't that different from turkey with cranberries--and of the foreign character of the quiche, but she politely tried everything I put on her plate. And then took seconds. And then called up her friends and her children--and my husband--to tell them what a good cook I was and how delicious chicken and apples are together!

We had a genuinely good time. She kept me company while I chopped and sauteed and roasted, laughed uproariously when I tried to put a baking dish into the preheated oven only to discover that that's where she stores her cookie sheets and cast iron skillets, and asked for the recipes. So even though I basically cemented her image of me as a paragon of domesticity, she's satisfied that I can run a kitchen and feed my husband--and she even ate some vegetables.

Chicken Roasted on a Bed of Apples and Onions

2 apples, cored and thinly sliced
2 onions, thinly sliced
salt and pepper
2 Tbsp olive oil
4 chicken breast halves
2 Tbsp chopped fresh thyme
1 Tbsp chopped fresh rosemary

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss the apples and onions in large bowl with salt, pepper, and one Tbsp oil. Transfer to baking dish. Roast 25 minutes, stirring once. Beat chicken with meat mallet or heavy pan to flatten them to an even thickness. Add chicken to pan. Sprinkle with one Tbsp oil, salt, pepper, and herbs. Roast about 30 minutes until tender. Place some of apple-onion mixture on each plate and top with chicken. Serves 4. (Recipe adapted from Rocky Mountain News.)

Ridiculously Easy Cherry Crumble

16 oz package frozen unsweetened pitted cherries
1 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp water
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 cups crushed shortbread cookies (leave some as chunks)

Place cherries, sugar, and water in a pie plate and bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove from oven, top with cookie crumbs, and bake 10 more minutes. Serves four if you stretch it with ice cream on top (I like it with dulce de leche or cherry with chocolate chunks). Otherwise make a double recipe! (Recipe adapted from one of the Moosewood cookbooks--I think.)

salt caramel ice cream

2006-11-21T17:11:00.000-08:00

This morning, a friend directed my attention to this recipe over at Orangette for salt caramel ice cream. (Thanks, Shirin!) I had all the ingredients on hand, so I gave it a shot. I've had bad luck with caramel in the past, but wow, this was good. The ice cream didn't get quite as solid as I would have liked, but that's probably my fault. You're generally supposed to chill an ice cream mixture for several hours before putting it in the ice cream machine, but I always get impatient and give up after about an hour. I want ice cream NOW!

And my other exciting food news today is that my dutch oven arrived. This is the handle on the lid -- isn't it pretty?

Anyway, now that this is here, I can start my bread! Right now the dough is about five hours into its 18-hour rise. Will post pictures tomorrow.

a Thanksgiving eve tradition

2006-11-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

When Mr. Tart and I were in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving with my family last year, we learned of--and participated in--my cousins' annual pre-Thanksgiving celebration: Miles Standish Day. Apparently on the day before Thanksgiving, Miles Standish met with some Native American leaders for a meal and some important discussionsl; the menu was steak. As a result, my cousins and their families always go out for a big steak dinner on Thanksgiving Eve. They drink beer, dig into huge filets, and toast Miles Standish.

I suspect that this tradition originated as an excuse to eat steak before a week of turkey and its infinite leftovers. Although Google returns nearly 3000 results for a search for Miles Standish and steak, none of them appear to document this so-called historic red meat event. Does that matter to my family? No. Does it make their tradition even funnier because of the lack of authenticity? Of course!

So, therefore, in the spirit of my wacky cousins, I charge all readers of Three Tarts to help perpetuate this tradition. Have yourself a steak for dinner on Wednesday--or at least a burger--and toast Miles Standish. Bon appetit.

pigs in a blanket--all grown up

2006-11-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

The other night Will and I somehow got talking about pigs in the blanket and he came up with the genius idea of giving the piggies an update, a little more sophistication (just another reason to love the guy): black pepper biscuits and tasty Colisimo's chicken and fennel sausage (a local company). Believe me this was an improvement from the vienna sausages and Pillsbury biscuits of my childhood.

(um, just ignore the messy kitchen table in the background)

The dinner was sort of for Will's b-day, but we've been celebrating since Friday. I am already a firm believer in Birthday Week (best to make the fun last a while) and since my birthday is a week after Will's, I can now justify a full two weeks of birthday celebrations. Soon I might be able to figure out a way to get a month! The birthday fortnight started off with a deliciously dense chocolate cake from our new favorite bakery, Les Madeleines. Les Madeleines makes the best vanilla cupcakes I have ever tasted and with every cup of coffee they give you a tiny orange madeleine. The bakery is also located in a place you'd never expect to find delicate pastries: a street dominated by bars and pawn shops. Will's parents order him a cake every year, so this year he suggested Les Madeleines (who knew it would cost $60?!). The cake was heavy and dense, covered in a thick ganache and decorated with chocolate covered crisped rice. The trick to this cake is eating it in very small pieces. But we're doing pretty well--nearly half way finished.

I'm considering buying a cast-iron pot just for this

2006-11-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

Dare I believe the hype? The good folks at Metafilter are frothing at the mouth over a shockingly easy, supposedly foolproof breadmaking method recently covered in this New York Times story. Cliff's Notes version: Very, very wet dough; a long proofing stage; no kneading at all; and baking in a heavy enamel or cast-iron pot with a lid.

Why the covered pot? As you probably know, the type of oven most of us have in our homes just can't produce that elusive crackling crust of a great loaf. I've tried spraying the oven walls with water during baking, but to no avail. The covered pot apparently supplies the moisture that the pros' fancy ovens do. So as soon as I can find the appropriate cookware, I'm giving this a shot.

rice pudding

2006-11-11T09:28:00.000-08:00

I was in the mood for some comfort food that would be friendly to a discombobulated stomach, so I tried Deborah Madison's recipes for rice pudding and dried fruits poached in wine. Both are slow-cooked with a vanilla bean, a cinnamon stick, and some lemon zest. So, needless to say, the house smelled wonderful. Delicious while still warm, and even better straight from the fridge for breakfast this morning.

Also: This crazy fractal vegetable is too pretty to eat (courtesy of DCist).

a visit to the farm

2006-11-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I spent the day planting garlic up at Sun River Farm, the farm where all of my lovely CSA vegetables are grown. I've been meaning to volunteer up there all summer, so when my friend Gavin suggested that we join a volunteer outing coordinated by Denise, owner of One World Cafe (a local restaurant with no set menu that runs on donations), I quickly agreed.

Sun River is in Cache Valley about an hour and a half north of Salt Lake, near some very lovely mountains. The Haggertys have a small garden at their home and a larger farm closer to the mountains. We did our planting at the garden: 6400 cloves, about 1/8 of the total planting for the year. The cloves look lovely in their tidy rows, don't you think?

It was a good way to spend a day--in the dirt, separating bulbs of garlic from their papery skins, dropping the plump cloves evenly down the line. I learned a little about how to make garlic grow (should I ever have my own plot of land). I learned why James decided to become a farmer. It's a long story, but part of it includes a love of food (when he quits farming, he wants to go to culinary school); I wasn't surprised--anyone who grows garlic and tomatoes like he does must love food. I told him that he grows the best garlic in the state, but he wouldn't accept the compliment. (There are other growers with very nice garlic, he says). But I still think his is the best. And now, of course, I think it's all the better because of my fabulous planting skills.

On the way home, Denise observed that there was a full moon, telling us how her grandmother only planted garlic on a full moon because it would grow best. We'll see if our eighteen rows grow better than the others.

the ethics of eating

2006-10-31T15:50:00.000-08:00

Mark and I are going to hear this lecture at Georgetown on Thursday night. I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma now (as the other two Tarts already have), so this should tie in nicely. And I'm not Catholic, but I'm intrigued that there's going to be a Catholic angle to this. We'll see what that's about. I'll post a report later.

boo appetit!

2006-10-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here's what we're taking to a Halloween party tonight: Graveyard cake (a chocolate sheet cake with walnut icing decorated with Milano cookies),

and spider crackers, made with Ritz crackers, peanut butter, pretzels, and raisins.