OLS 6: the garden in a salad bowl

This week's One Local Summer meal: another omelet and a salad. But to call it a salad is to reduce it, to flatten it out. There should be another word for a salad like this that doesn't put it into the same category as a bowl of iceberg lettuce with a few carrot shavings and a stiffly crimped slice of cucumber.

Salad Gathered from the Garden

a handful of cherry tomatoes (I used Sweet 100s and the volunteer yellow pear tomatoes from last year)

a handful of grean beans

the kernels off 1 ear of corn (leftover from last night's dinner)

a handful of basil (I used purple)

2-3 stalks of lemon thyme

a few fronds of dill, and another few of chives

sea salt

olive oil

cider vinegar

I steamed the green beans a little, until they were cooked a bit but still crisp. Then sliced the corn off the cob, cut the cherry tomatoes in half, and tore the herbs by hand--mixed altogether in the yellow bowl I inherited from my mother. A sprinkle of sea salt, a glug-glug of oil and a glug of vinegar, a few tosses, and it was ready. I didn't measure the oil or vinegar, but it was probably about 3 tbs of oil and 2 of vinegar. Everything local except for the last 3 ingredients, and from the garden except for the corn, which was from the local bins at Giant Eagle. Yes, Giant Eagle Supermarkets have gone local, in a small way, which I like to think I've contributed to by constantly annoying them with questions about local products. I buy some of it every time I go, so as to encourage their efforts.

The omelet was excellent, too (Amish eggs and potatoes and onions from the farmers market) but it failed to keep its integrity when folded over and so couldn't make it as a cover girl (cover omelet?).

The best thing about this meal was the 10 minutes I spent in the garden with my basket (oh yes, I have a basket!), gathering up what looked ripe and imagining the salad into being--a bit of this, a pinch of that. The essence of local.

eating local in NYC

A report from the Alternate Parker:

I went to that restaurant, Borough Food and Drink, [12 E. 22 St.; near Broadway] and it was great. They say everything on the menu is "sourced" from the 5 boroughs, which means only that they use the best ethnic butchers, not that they make burgers from local cows. I had rigatoni with sausage and peas, and I can't remember the last time I had fresh peas that were not overcooked. MMMmmmm.

And lots of local beers from Long Island and upstate. The beer I drank at Borough was called War of 1812, and it was from Saratoga. I think it was an amber beer. I'd have it again. Tonight, if possible.

New York wines I would leave alone. And did.

I shared a memorable dinner with the AP in NYC, which was decidedly not local. I think I was there for the MLA conference (big English and mod. language professors thingie), and D was along for the fun of being in New York. The AP took us to a French restaurant--nothing fancy, but with amazing food of an old-fashioned sort. I only remember the salad, which was mixed greens with a simple vinaigrette, and goat cheese--a salad the like of which I'd never had before (this was in the '80s). One of those taste memories that reminds you what goodness there is in simple, well prepared ingredients.
The AP's capable hands, working on a probaby nonlocal wine last summer.

OLS5: a summer feast

I was amazed to realize that it's the 5th week already. I feel as if I've had my head down in the garden, trying to get the last of those pesky weeds that are light green and viciously twining, and when I looked up, summer was half gone. At least One Local Summer is half gone, for I believe our term of officially local eating is ten weeks.
But let's say the summer is half full, shall we? The garden supports me on this: we have radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, some cayenne peppers, a plentitude of beans, a fair crop of basil and other herbs. And D's father's garden is spilling over with cucumbers, carrots, and the promise of peppers and pears.
Yesterday's dinner brought together our 2 gardens, and with the help of the farmers market, we feasted.
Summer Feast
Chicken stew (chicken, mushrooms, and onions from the market, chicken broth from our last market chicken to make a little gravy, and various garden herbs, plus a small Early Girl for color)
Noodles (bought at the Bergman Farm Market in Marblehead, abt 60 miles away, on a June trip to the beach)
Green beans (ours) and carrots (D's father), steamed with dill flower heads.
It was very good, although the picture is a little murky. Chicken stew is a very brown dish, isn't it? I should have put the beans in the foreground, I guess.

OLS4: the reinvention of bean salad

What to have for dinner when you've been working on the house and yard all day long? when one of you has been scraping the east wall of the house and trying to get the gutter to work better? and the other has been weeding and watering and tying up the branches cut from the black walnut tree?

The Eat-Local Dinner for Exhausted Diners (neither of whom wants to be chef)
Local raw-milk cheddar and goats cheese from the farmers market
Sourdough bread from local bakery (the Stone Oven) slathered with butter from Hartzler's Dairy
A bean salad, all ingredients except dressing from the garden
I never liked bean salad when it showed up on the table, often at family reunions (since my mother didn't make it), or on cafeteria lines. The one I was used to was known as 3-Bean Salad, was made with canned beans, sometimes with a sort of sweet and sour dressing. I avoided it whenever possible.
This bean salad is very different, made with green beans (actually green and purple), and a dressing that's a simple vinaigrette.

One-Bean Salad
A double handful of beans--green or purple (the purple ones go green when cooked, sadly)
2 tomatoes--I used one Early Girl and one Lemon Boy
About a 1/2 cup of mixed fresh herbs: I used basil and dill
1/4 cup olive oil
3 tbs cider vinegar
1 tsp honey (from the farmers market)
2 pinches salt, or to taste
Simmer the beans until just done. Slice the tomatoes, mix with beans and chopped herbs. Mix the last 4 ingredients well and pour over vegetables. We ate this barely warm for dinner, and it was amazing. But the refrigerated leftovers weren't bad the next day, either.

seasonal lunch

My 1st husband's parents lived next door to us. His stepfather planted tomatoes and cucumbers every year--the 1st person I knew who planted vegetables. He didn't have what I thought of as a garden--his plants were in a row along the back of the house, like the dahlias or rosebushes in other yards, a strip along the edge of the lawn. Every summer, he grew them, and every summer when they started to produce, he'd make himself a bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers, which he called Cuke Salad, for lunch, every day, as long as they lasted.
I never thought to ask him about this--I just thought of it as one of his peculiarities. We never had a conversation about this, or about much of anything--he was friendly, but not communicative. So I don't know why he was so intent on these plants. I wonder now if they were a part of his past that he was preserving--maybe, like a lot of people his age he had a farm in his background. Maybe he'd grown tomatoes or cucumbers when he was young, or his parents did. Maybe that salad was a remnant of some greater summer harvest that disappeared when he went to work in a factory.
I don't know any of those things, but I do know now why he took such pleasure in it--there is nothing so wonderful as going out in your yard and picking some lunch, which once you are in the kitchen flies together in a simple, satisfying dish that tastes of summer, or of the past.
Cuke Salad
1 or 2 cucumbers, seeded and peeled
1 large tomato chopped, or a handful of cherry tomatoes
3 tbs olive oil
2 tbs cider vinegar
a pinch of sugar
a pinch of salt
a few grinds of black pepper
Combine all ingredients and refrigerate until serving. It tastes better if it sits for an hour, even better the next day. I sometimes jazz it up with whatever herb I've picked in the garden--it's good with basil or dill or chives, probably some others, too.

seasonal breakfast

This is one of the best breakfasts I've ever had: canteloupe, cut up and sprinkled with a pinch of salt; a dollop of Greek yogurt; a handful of mint from the garden, chopped; a couple of squeezes of honey.
I love summer.

OLS3

A quickie post on our local meal this week: an omelet made from eggs bought from an Amish farmer at the market, market onions and raw milk cheddar, plus garden chives; and a potato salad, made from market and garden ingredients entirely (potato, cucumber, radishes, 1 cherry tomato, mustard flowers, tarragon, purple basil), except for the olive oil and cider vinegar dressing. Only the salad is pictured because the omelet fell apart and had to be removed from the pan in pieces--it was very good though.

And here's a picture of the tomato we ate for lunch, dividing it fairly between the 2 of us and eating it in solitary splendor, with only a sprinkling of kosher salt: the first of the Early Girls.

OLS: week 2

I went to the farmers market today and brought home a whole chicken, onions, green beans, 2 hydroponic tomatoes, blueberries, corn, and 2 chocolate chip cookies. I did wonder about the corn--surely too early? But the farmers market has a policy that no one can sell anything they haven't grown or raised or made. Just where was it from? I should have asked, but I guess I decided to believe that it was from southern Ohio, because I knew how happy D would be to have corn for dinner.
Dinner was part of the chicken, braised with one of the onions and some oregano and thyme from the garden, plus one of the tomatoes and the corn. All in all, really good. I am still wondering about the corn. Could it have been local? can corn be grown in a greenhouse? It was a little undersized.
Check out the regional roundups at One Local Summer.

local eating

This isn't the 1st time we've eaten a local or mostly local dinner, but it's the 1st of the One Local Summer dinners (cleverly instituted by Pocket Farm, for the 2nd year), and a good one, too.

Le Menu

Deer burgers (courtesy of D, from SE Ohio)

topped with raw milk cheddar and sauteed onions (both from the farmers mkt)

on locally made bread

Salad of several lettuces and greens (from my and D's father's gardens)

Strawberry ice cream (made by me from the u-pick strawberries and Hartzler's milk; so I guess it's really ice milk)

Everything excellent. The salad had, besides lettuce, tiny carrots thinned from the garden (not even as thick as a pencil), dill, mustard flowers, and mustard leaves. The ice cream was the star-- luridly pink--who needs food coloring when you have strawberries?--and intensely flavored. I sort of threw it together, so no recipe, but I plan to do some more experimenting.

The failure of the dinner: the hamburger buns, which raised half-heartedly, but then fell in the oven, so that they looked like large cookies. Actually, they didn't taste bad, and if I'd called them flatbread, they might have passed. But they were certainly not buns.

I've been reading Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, which is a history of the restaurant as well as of the woman--I like to think that Alice wouldn't have disdained our dinner, showing off our terroir as it did. (Maybe she'd have had some advice about those flattened buns.)

back from the novel: One Local Summer

All this time, I've been revising, and then polishing, and then dithering, and so on. But I'm done with it for a while now, so I'm ready to turn to food. Or rather to writing about it, since I've certainly eaten plenty since May, and cooked some, too.

Liz at Pocket Farm has brought One Local Summer to us for a 2nd year, and I'm planning to localize our food as much as possible, between our garden and D's father's garden and the farmers market.

Above, some of the strawberries D's father and I picked last weekend. He's 87, but he picked more than I did. Also, he didn't complain about how his back was hurting afterward. The woman in the next row and I agreed that picking your food should be mandated as part of serious diets: work your food off before you eat it.

I thought I was going to make jam, but I froze some and we've just been eating the rest, on ice cream, on cereal, on cottage cheese and yogurt, and by themselves. Maybe next time, if my back will stand it (I did complain).

writing, not cooking

D is top chef again--I'm in the throes of revision, the 3rd revision, cutting ruthlessly (it's easier to be ruthless the 3rd time around, I find--more distance).

But here is what happened yesterday--see picture above--a transformer, or something, blew up on the telephone pole by our driveway. Blew up with a loud crack, fell off, and burned merrily. And this is food-related, why? Because it happened when I was making lunch, in between Chapter 3, At Lily's House, and Chapter 4, Moonville. Happily, I had saved before we lost power. (I don't even want to think about the alternative.)

The fire department came in record time, the electric company, too. Amazingly, it was all fixed within an hour. If I was a poet, I'd write a panegyric to Cleveland Public Power--they not only fixed it with dispatch, they swept the burned and broken pieces up before they left.

Lunch: leftover rice, mustard leaves and basil from the garden, half an onion chopped, small cubes of smoked Mozzarella, olive oil, cider vinegar, sea salt--warmed slightly and tossed.

home-rolled crackers

D and I have decided that we want to reform our snacking behavior--not by stopping, for heaven's sake, but by buying or making healthier choices. Popcorn popped in olive oil: we've been doing that for a while (tastes fine). Ice cream: only the best, and only once in a while (sometimes a while is shorter than other times). Nuts: good fats!
But we both love crackers, and the crackers we love are transfatty. It's true that Ritz has come out with healthier crackers, but they're not the same, and if the crackers we eat aren't going to be the same, we decided they should be extremely not-the-same.
"We should make our own crackers," we said to each other all winter long, but like many self-improvement projects, it didn't happen. But the last time one of us said it--D--I had just read Heidi's post on crackers, which sounded good, and very doable.
D made the 1st batch, using Heidi's recipe for Spicy Polenta Cheese Crackers (which she got from Patricia Wells's book, Vegetable Harvest), changing the fat, and substituting brown rice flour for polenta, because of a dearth of the latter and just having bought the former (and using less, because we hadn't used brown rice flour before).
Spicy Brown Rice Cheese Crackers
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
3/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cayenne
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 1/2 tbs olive oil (substituted for butter)
Preheat oven to 375. Combine 1st six ingredients (Heidi used a food processor, D used a wooden spoon and one of those piecrust making things that have wire loops). Add the oil and mix further, much like you do for piecrust. Knead for a few seconds on a floured surface and let it rest for 15 minutes (although D forget this last part).
Roll it out as thin as you can--Heidi says to 1/16th of an inch--ours weren't that thin. Cut into rounds or strips or squares, put on ungreased baking sheet, bake for 12-15 minutes (our oven is hot, so we baked them for just over 10 minutes).
They just spicy enough, faintly cheesy, good with wine and cheese. They weren't crisp, except at the edges where they were thinner, so we're thinking next time we'll have to roll them out as thin as Heidi recommends. But they were very good, and they kept well for 4 days (which is as long as they lasted). Most important they were easy enough to adopt as a regular snack habit.
I made a 2nd batch substituting a different kind of cheese and teff flour which were not as successful--tasted great but were more like thin biscuits. But we're looking forward to more experiments.

odd restaurant behavior

Yesterday I went to Sergio's, a Brazilian-ish restaurant in University Circle, with a friend. This isn't a restaurant review, but I will say that we both had the Carioca Burger, with 2 sauces (one a kind of salsa, the other intensely green and pesto-like), and crispy fries which came with an amazing spiced ketchup for dipping. And we shared pistachio gelato for dessert, fighting politely over the crunchy nuts. Everything was very good (I guess that was a review, a mini one anyway).

But the odd thing that happened at the next table is still on my mind. We were seated on a banquette with several small tables spaced out along its length, and 2 women were at the next 2-table. I can't describe them (and probably shouldn't) because I didn't want to inspect them--it's hard to observe someone minutely and covertly who is only an arm's length away from you. With good restaurant etiquette, you are supposed, usually, to pretend that they are invisible, and that you can't hear their conversation.

But in fact, although I observe this convention of invisibility, I always eavesdrop if I can (I consider it my duty as a writer), and in the interstices of my own interesting conversation with Plan B (writing, MFAs, our bookish childhoods, etc.) I heard snips and bits of the talk at the next table--nothing startling, just 2 friends out for lunch.

But at one point, I heard one say to the other "isn't this good?" and I glanced over to see what they were talking about, for in restaurants, don't we all want to know what they're eating at the other tables? don't we all feel that we might have missed the best thing on the menu?

So I slid my eyes sideways: they were eating biscotti, and I began to lose interest, since I don't like biscotti (too hard, often flavorless). But then I remembered that there was no biscotti on the dessert menu (we had just looked at it). And when I looked back, I noticed that they seemed to have taken it out of a bag.

Our pistachio gelato arrived just then, and under the cover of our waiter's setting it on the table (marvelously pale green, in a martini glasses, the 2 spoons with their handles pointing in opposite directions, ready to be grasped by our opposing right hands), I saw that yes, it was a bag, partially hidden under a napkin. I could see but not read the printing on the bag, a small transparent bakery sort of a bag. They were eating at one of the best restaurants in town and had brought in their own food!

I wanted so much to say to Plan B--look at what they're doing! But our tables were so close (I could have broken off a piece of the biscotti without even straightening my arm all the way), that I refrained. And then I forgot about it in the flurry of our departure, both away to our respective offices.

But how odd. And why? Sergio's has other magnificent desserts besides gelato--their coconut cake is amazing, for instance. And isn't this a variety of high incivility? I've been in places (Arabica coffee houses) that have signs prohibiting people from bringing in and eating their own food, but I guess Sergio's didn't think they'd have to go this far.

don't mess with my chocolate

A rallying cry sent out by Cybele, of Candyblog. I heard her on NPR yesterday discussing the FDA's intention to allow chocolate to be adulterated with vegetable oils, etc., and still be called chocolate. There are such products around now, but they're called "chocolate-flavored" or some other such equivocation--they tend to be too sweet, often with some indefinably off taste.

According to Cybele yesterday, the FDA is of the opinion that consumers won't notice the difference: are they crazy?!? Maybe someone who, like D's father, loses his sense of taste (result of an antibiotic reaction, and happily, it's back). Or someone who has never tasted genuine, made-with-only-cocoa-butter chocolate.

Fran Gage, of Fran's Chocolates, also spoke on the program, which gave me a chocoholic's thrill, since I love her chocolates and caramels (see right).

For more info, read Cybele here. And if you want to complain to the FDA, today is the deadline (I wish I'd heard about it before). Here is the online comment form, and here is a tutorial, complete with a letter you can copy if you don't want to write your own (both courtesy of Cybele).

If there's a march through the streets with torches burning being planned, I'll let you know.

at last: the farmers' market

The Crocker-Basset branch of the North Union Farmers Market opened yesterday in its spring version--smaller than the many canopies and vendors of summer, but as friendly. Plus, there were lambs. I missed the sheep shearing, although there was a pile of wool to show it had been done--my sister stopped breathing as we went by to hold off an allergic sneeze.

Shopping list:

bread from Zoss bakery (rye and sourdough)

2 banana-chocolate chip scones from Olaf's Daughter (dreamy)

a bag of Empire apples from Woolf Farms (literary apples!); the young woman in the yellow t-shirt explained that these had been in normal storage and not cold storage, and so might not be quite as crisp (but they were as crispy as I could want). I should have asked what normal storage was, exactly. I imagine a loose pile of apples in a root cellar, with a shaft of sun coming in through a high-up window (but probably not).

some unfiltered honey; apparently it's a good thing if there are stray bee wings in your honey. We'll see.

cheese: mozzarella and raw-milk cheddar

There were ramps, but I'm not convinced that they are any better than the young garlic growing in my yard, so I passed (even though they looked lovely. I didn't buy any jewelry either, although I admired the display.

At home, a farmers market lunch: raw milk cheddar on rye bread, sprinkled with chives from my garden. Heavenly.

pasta primavera: eat spring

Primavera means spring in Italian, I believe, and is also the name of Botticelli's painting, which hangs in the Uffizi in Florence, where I saw it when I was very tired. There are no elevators in the Uffizi, or at least none that an able-bodied but exhausted tourist could take. But even so, even though my feet hurt all the way up to my knees after walking the cobblestones of Florence for days, it's still a hell of a painting.

In it, Venus watches the 3 Graces dancing, and she looks serenely content. Possibly, she had just had some pasta beforehand? Pasta Primavera is certainly good enough for a goddess.
Traditionally, PP is pasta served with sauteed vegetables and a cream sauce. I often make it with a sort of bechamel though, because I have the ingredients for that always at hand. This one is a hybrid--it has a flour-thickened sauce, but also a bit of cream.

Pasta Primavera

3 cups pasta

3 tbs olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

2 shallots, chopped

8-10 baby portabella mushrooms, sliced

1/2 tsp tarragon

pinch of fennel seeds
bunch of asparagus, sliced on the diagonal
1 broccoli crown, separated into florets
2 small zucchini, sliced (not too thin)
handful of fresh peas (although frozen would be fine)
2 tbs flour
2 cups chicken broth (could use vegetable broth to make it vegetarian)
splash of wine
2 tbs cream
1/2 cup sour cream (I used low-fat)
about 3/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

I sauteed the onions and shallots in 2 tbs of the oil, and when they had started to soften, added the mushrooms, fennel, and tarragon. While the pasta was cooking, I cut up the vegetables; when the pasta was done, I scooped it out of the pot with a slotted spoon, and then used the pasta water to cook the vegetables, one kind at a time (so each would be just tender).

When the mushroom mixture was done, I spooned it out, added a little more oil to the pan, and then the flour, mixing it up well. Then in with the wine and the broth--I stirred it around, smashing flour lumps with the back of the spoon, until it started to thicken. I added the 2 creams and stirred them in, then the grated cheese, then stirred in the mushroom mixture.

Finally, everything into a bowl--the pasta, the vegetables, and the sauce folded together so that everything was well combined.

I served it with additional grated cheese (although D and I agreed that it didn't need any) and orange sections that had been sprinkled with pomegranite vinegar and rose petal cardamom syrup. An excellent dinner to remind us that it's really spring, even though there's still a considerable amount of snow in the back yard.

(I owe this dinner in large part to Whole Foods, where I bought the vegetables on my 1st visit to the Cleveland area's new store, which is fabulous!)

it's so easy

which is what my mother used to say about some fabulous dish she'd just served--and it wasn't always true. Sometimes there was a lot of folding, chopping, mincing, kneading, etc. in her it's-so-easy. I found myself saying it about the cheesecake I made for company on Friday, but in this case, it was true. Easy, uncomplicated, didn't take long, came out perfect.
This was the Inaugural Cheesecake: 1st cheesecake I've ever made, and 1st time using my lovely new springform pan (offered to me when I whined on this blog about not having one: thanks MB; fittingly, she was one of the guests for whom the cheesecake was made).
Cheesecake was one of those things I put off trying, like yeast doughs, or handmade pasta, or Beef Wellington, because I thought it would be hard. I'm not sure why; maybe just because it often requires a springform pan? Something that is baked in a pan with a mechanism--how can that be easy?

I used the most basic recipe I could find, the Joy of Cooking's Cheesecake Cockaigne. And I went against my tinkering inclination and didn't change anything because of my fear of cheesecake (well-maybe 2 things).

The Feared Cheesecake Which Yet Turned Out to be Not Only Beneficent but Luscious

Prepare a crumb crust (I used Joy's--graham crackers, sugar, melted butter, adding a pinch of ginger; but any crumb crust would be fine), and press into a springform pan.
Beat until creamy 24 oz cream cheese. Joy suggested that this would only take 30 seconds, but it took more like a minute. Beat in 1 cup sugar and 1 tsp vanilla or 1/4 tsp almond extract (I used vanilla). Beat in 3 eggs, one at a time, just until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl and beaters after each. I added the zest of one lemon, an ingredient borrowed from the New York style cheesecake that was on the same page of Joy. Put into pan, smooth the top lovingly, bake at 300 degrees 45 to 55 minutes. Joy said to put the pan on a cookie sheet, which I forgot to do, but luckily there weren't any leaks.
Combine 1 cup sour cream, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tbs vanilla, 1/4 tsp salt and spread on the cooled cheesecake. And that is it--you've got your cheesecake.
I used my mother's Kitchen-Aid, which is getting along in years (it's avocado-colored, if that tells you anything), but still works fine. I worried when the cream cheese all got stuck inside the whisk attachment, but it worked itself loose as more things were added.

The most difficult part of this was deciding when it was done. The directions suggested that it should still have a bit of a wiggle in the center when it was time to take it out. But how much of a wiggle? D and I consulted over the degree of wiggliness--I needed the support, for I have a tendency to want to put things back in the oven if there's the least bit of doubt.
And it was beautiful (top picture). The Joy said it should be cooled on a rack for an hour, and then after the topping was added, should be refrigerated for 3 hours or preferably 24 before serving, which part of the directions I hadn't bothered to read until I was starting to put it together at 4:00 pm (company coming at 6:30). I compromised by cooling it on the rack for 30 minutes; putting on the topping; and putting the whole thing in the refrigerator on a rack for about 45 minutes. It was fine--not totally chilled, but cool and creamy, and it didn't, as I feared it might, fail to come out of the springform neatly, and it also didn't lose its firmness once it was out.
I think it might have been the best cheesecake I've ever eaten--light, sweet with a small tartness from the sour cream and the lemon zest, the filling creamy over the crunch of the crust. I regret to say that everyone except for D had 2 pieces, with Margaritas, to celebrate spring. And the next day I had 2 more. Needless to say it's quite gone now. But I'm already planning the next one: chocolate? marbled? strawberry-topped? cashew-caramel?

summer in a jar

A breakfast of peaches canned from D's father's trees, with raspberries picked at Rosby's Farm and frozen: this bowl is the reason we'll be canning again this year, even though it was hot and sweaty and sticky work.

supernaturally good granola

I've gotten a nice haul of cookbooks in the last few weeks--some for my birthday, and some as presents from me to me--so I'm planning to try a few new things out here over the next weeks.

Last week I got Heidi Swanson's new cookbook, Super Natural Cooking. I've been following her blog, 101 Cookbooks, almost since I started reading blogs (how did I live in that pre-blog darkness?) and I bought this as soon as I could. It's a beautiful book, wonderful colors, great photographs (Heidi is her own photographer), and the recipes are the kind I like best, that is, they are recipes that quest and explore.

So far I've mostly been reading it, dipping in here and there, making note of things I want to try (Raspberry Curd Swirl Cake! hibiscus-flavored Agua de Jamaica! a healthy version of Thin Mints!). But yesterday I wanted to get my hands into one of those recipes, and I chose something simple to start: Heidi's Grain-ola. I changed her recipe a little, partly to downsize it by half, partly to suit my cupboards.

Grain-ola, mostly from Super Natural Foods

2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup hulled pumpkin seeds (a sub for sunflower seeds)
1/2 cup roughly chopped walnuts
grated zest of 1 orange
1/3 cup of maple syrup, plus 3 tbs of honey (Heidi used all honey, but I was almost out)
1/8 cup peanut oil (sub for coconut which I didn't have)
about a cup of assorted dried fruits (I used raisins, cranberries, and chopped apricots)
(I also left out coconut, again because I was without, and I have promised to try it with the coconut and the coconut oil.)

Heat sweeteners and oil until warm, and pour over the other ingredients, combined in a big bowl. Spread out on a cookie sheet (I lined mine with foil to save clean-up) and bake at 300 degrees for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Mine came out a little darker than Heidi's, because I couldn't decide if it was done and left it in about 10 minutes longer--not a terrible mistake, because it has a nice darkly caramelized flavor. Altogether, as fine a granola as I've had, right up to my former high watermark of granolas, the kind they make for Vermont College's cafeteria (which is catered by a culinary institute): crispy, chewy, with the nice toothy softness of the dried fruits--good as a dry snack, and ambrosial in a bowl of milk.


One of the appeals of Super Natural Foods, for me, is its focus on unprocessed or minimally processed food, and on unfamiliar grains. Under Heidi's tutelage, I'm hoping to get to know teff and wheat berries in the most intimate and delicious ways.
For Amy Sherman's (of Cooking with Amy) interview with Heidi, check here.

some links, and kitchen news

Here's the best thing I read about the Oscars (1st saw it at Foodgoat); I was also thrilled that Helen Mirren won.
Some people are gardening already--I have seedling envy. My garden still looks pretty much like this, although some of the snow has melted.
Some other people (well, only one) have lost 1/2 their weight, which makes feel like a slacker for not being able to lose 10.
March 1 was National Pig Day, which I didn't know--but I'm planning on eating bacon this week anyway, in belated remembrance, perhaps in this tempting recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini, which is basically mac and cheese with hazelnuts and bacon: mmmm. (Clothilde's cookbook is coming out in May!)
I was looking for something quite different the other day (can't remember what it was), and found a site with Czech and Slovak recipes, which reminded me that I want to explore my native cuisine (one of them: I'm a mongrel). The only ones I recognized were klobasa (which we knew as kielbasi)--the beloved smoked sausage of many Eastern European countries; and palacinky, which the site described as "sweet stuffed crepes." I felt almost offended by the name--I could feel my dormant Slovakness rising up: a French name for one of the only Slovak dishes my mother made for us? Quel horreur!
But I guess they are crepes, we just didn't know it. To us they were a seldom, special treat, and everything about them was lit with magic: the way the batter gaily spread in the pan to make the thinnest of (pancakes) (crepes) palacinky, the red gleam of the jelly spread on the finished product, the powdered sugar dusted on the rolled palacinky, the squidginess of the roll under the fork, the separate tastes of egginess, jelly, sugar in the mouth.
Sometimes Mom would say, "my mother used to make these for us," for her and her 10 brothers and sisters, and that would make them taste even better, imagining my grandmother making them on the farm, and maybe even back in what we then called "the old country." Food from the past, from Europe, from where our grandfather worked as a forester, like something in a fairy tale.
Here's the best picture I could find of palacinky--it appears to be a mix for palacinky. Ours were never served with whipped cream or berries, although I wouldn't say no.

News: the kitchen is almost, almost finished. See D, left, putting a coat of primer on the ugly redness. There is a stage and a half left: the half is the refinishing of the cupboard doors, which we decided to do separately from the cupboards themselves, since it's going to involve paint remover which we'd rather do outside. The whole stage is the floor, which will be no doubt involved and awful in ways we can't even imagine, but which we won't think about before we have to.
So this weekend, my daughters and their families will come to visit and we'll be able to cook something for them in an attractive kitchen (if you don't look at the floor), free of its plastic veil--I am elated. And I can make palacinky--possibly on Saturday I'll be pouring batter, spreading jelly, dusting sugar. Can't wait.