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Month: June 2007

Happy Dad …

Happy Dad …

mac and cheese dad
Yes — that’s my dad, happy — hard to believe from the grumpy look on his face — and he’s happy because I sent him a big box of mac-and-cheese for his birthday. Dad lives in the Czech Republic and he too has a blog, PragueWriter.com

From Dad: Post lady stopped by yesterday morning with your birthday gift. Wow, all that comfort food. Your chef friends would crack up if they knew what you sent your dad for his birthday. The really amazing thing is that the box hasn’t changed a bit in 60 years–still all that great Dow Chemical fake cheddar powder and the same great taste–when I want to go gourmet, I boil a couple of hot-dogs with the mac. Misha snapped a pic of Kraft Dinner for lunch yesterday–I look like a (slightly) less grouchy Dick Cheney. 

I don’t know Dad — you and Dick could maybe go head-to-head there on the grouchiness face! Happy Birthday  — glad to contribute to your preservative-levels for another year!

Bad Dog!

Bad Dog!

Ray
I went out last night, and when I came home — Raymond was missing! He wasn’t in the basement, or in his crate, or in the yard. He was gone! Owen was home, wagging his butt and licking my leg as though to say “I don’t know where he went! He’s gone!”

I’m not sure how he got out of the yard — sometimes the front gate doesn’t close properly, but it was closed when I got home. And the back gate was also latched. My hunch is it was the front gate, and then Owen somehow closed it by jumping on it looking at Ray who was on the wrong side of the gate. It was a mystery, as was Raymond’s conspicuous absence in my yard. He wasn’t there. I kept looking, but he was really not there.

So I put in a few phone calls and started walking around the neighborhood. I thought I heard him barking, but I wasn’t sure where he was or whether it was just wishful thinking on my part. It was my friend Bill, and his new dog Seamus who found Ray — he was a block away in a woman’s yard, barking. She said she found him in the middle of the street in front of the Baptist church (which is at the end of my alley) — just standing there, refusing to move, as though he knew he needed help.

Our Raymond is not the smartest dog in the world. He’s been known, for example, to try to jump in the closed back window of various vehicles in wild anticipation of a promised walk, only to splat against the window glass like one of those stuffed Garfield dolls with the suction cups and then fall into the street with a look of utter befuddlement. But my Ray did hear me calling from a block away and he kept barking until we found him. The nice neighbor said she fed him half a can of Alpo and he humped her leg all evening (bad dog!) but that he’d been a good boy and she was glad we’d found him.

I am too — I wrote an entire novel about a beloved child who suddenly disappeared. And especially after Patrick, it’s a sensation I’m all too familiar with — someone you love is here and then they’re gone. That sinking feeling in the bottom of your stomach.

So it was a great relief to wake up this morning with my goofy Raymond sprawled across the foot of the bed, hogging all the space and snoring …. as though it had all been a bad dream.

Bolted Spinach Soup

Bolted Spinach Soup

Bayless Spinach soup
This photo doesn’t do the soup justice — it is a much more vibrant green — a lovely live-plant sort of green. So, this morning I was confronted with half a dozen spinach plants that really did need to be picked — they’d bolted and well, it was beyond time to do something with them.

I wanted soup, but spinach can get tricky — it gets that funny soapy taste on the back of your teeth — wanted to avoid that. I surfed around in the cookbooks for a while, and finally found a soup that sounded good in Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen. It’s called “Roasted Poblano Crema with Mexican Greens.” Now, sorry Rick, but i didn’t have any fresh poblanos, and I’m working today, so I cheated and used a can of 10-for-a-dollar diced green chiles. It’s an easy soup — saute one onion and three cloves of garlic until the onion gets soft, then add the chiles. When everything is sizzling, add the spinach. The recipe calls for 6 cups spinach or swiss chard. I had a colander’s worth of spinach — so I added the spinach until it wilted, with a cup of chicken broth. Bayless says to cook it until the spinach is cooked through but still bright green — it was about six or seven minutes. I used the handheld immersion blender to puree it, added the rest of the chicken broth (half a quart box) and put it back on the fire to heat up. Now here’s the interesting part — Bayless has you make a slurry from half a cup of masa harina and broth (I was out, so I used water) and add that to the soup. It looked like too much, but once I started adding it, it seemed like it was going to work well. The recipe also calls for half a cup of cream — I think I didn’t use quite that much — i just added cream until it looked the color I wanted. At the very end I realized I needed to add salt (the recipe surely calls for it but I was sort of just using the recipe as a guide), and it seemed like some cayenne, coriander and cumin would be good as well.

I put some frozen corn in the bottom of the soup bowl and heated it in the microwave. Then I chopped up some leftover grilled chicken from the other night and added that as well. Some soup ladled on top, a sprinkling of goat cheese, and a splash of jalapeno Tabasco and this was a *great* lunch. Substantial enough that I didn’t get hungry again in ten minutes, and the spinach and masa together make this terrific green and corny taste. I love this soup. This is probably going in the repetoire as a new pureed soup master recipe.

For tomorrow I’m thinking corn, a couple of shrimp, a green onion from the garden and maybe a little goat cheese again … yum.

Mint Harvest

Mint Harvest

basket o'mint
I have an abundance of mint in my garden — which is partially my fault because I deliberately transplanted some mint from the front garden to the back — I knew I might regret this, since mint is really weedy, but so far, I kind of like it as a ground cover. It’s invasive, and I’ve pulled a lot of it out, but I also really love this mint in particular — it’s somewhere between a spearmint and a peppermint — not too strong and not too sweet. I crush up a big handful in my pot of tea every morning, and I’ve become slightly addicted this spring to the combination of mint, garlic and hot peppers in any number of recipes. So, the mint was a little out of hand, and it was also really lovely — later in the summer it gets sort of scraggly — so I picked a whole basketful to dry for my tea all winter (I can’t really drink coffee — it makes me shake and gives me a stomach ache).

hanging mint So, I sorted out the stalks — pulled the bindweed off where it had crept in, and made these big bundles (they were a little too big, actually, and didn’t dry out as quickly as I would have liked) and then I hung them in this interior window. The whole kitchen smelled very green for a few days … WHen they were crunchy, I took them down and stripped the dried leaves into mason jars. I have three big mason jars of mint — definitely enough for winter.

mint in jars

Gender and Restaurants

Gender and Restaurants

Reading this article in the SF Chronicle this morning has me wondering, is it gender that separates the show-off chefs from the nurturing chefs? Gender seems like both a simplistic and sexist way to separate out these very different approaches to food — (especially when published in the edition of the Sunday paper dedicated to Gay Pride weekend).

Myself — I’m what this author calls a “mama cook” — I don’t cook what I think of as “restaurant food” at home. My cooking tends toward braises, marinated things on the grill in the summer, tarts, cakes … home food. I want food without a lot of fuss. I don’t like restaurant recipes with too many ingredients — but I know plenty of home cooks of both genders for whom that’s the fun of it — following a complicated recipe, seeing if it’ll come out right.

More morels …

More morels …

jungle fire
Forest fires are a huge drag when they’re happening, although I have to say last summer as we watched this column of smoke rise behind Livingston peak, we were thinking of morels. The Jungle Fire was scary — it roared down seven miles of drainage in an afternoon — my friend Scott who was over there covering it for the paper said it sounded like the loudest jet engine you’ve ever heard. And yet, a few months later, here’s what’s happening in the burn — morels. Lots of morels.

I went up early yesterday morning and it’s fascinating up in the site. New grasses and plants are everywhere on the forest floor. The trees are burned, and it went through so hot that there are many many big granite boulders that have had the first layer or two just popped right off — shards of granite in piles around a newly-white boulder. And then there are the morels. I didn’t take my camera into the burn with me, which is probably good considering that the wet ash got on everything. It was so exciting — for a long while at the beginning I thought I was going to get skunked, but then I started following a little seep uphill, and there they were. Clumps of morels tucked into the root systems of big burned out trees. It was like hunting Easter eggs — look! Over there! Another clump! The dogs had a great time running big circles around me, and we all shared a ham sandwich for lunch, and I came home looking like Pigpen, with a daypack full of morels and smudges of ash on my face. The MH estimated I probably had 18 or 20 pounds.

morels in colanders These are the nicest ones, washed and draining. Last night we had veal chops on the grill with a morel cream sauce — morels, lots of butter, a little bourbon (since I don’t have any brandy), a little garlic and some cream. Yum. And then this morning it was morels and spinach with scrambled eggs. Tonight I’m thinking some variation on the Barefoot Contessa’s chicken with morels — I might have to see if there’s any asparagus left in the stores too — not local, but morels and asparagus are so nice together.

morels drying And then there are these, drying for winter: . Three baking racks full and my whole kitchen smells like woodsy morels. That fire was crazy last summer –it went up so fast and so hot that they found leaves and pine needles as far away as Wisconisn, but despite the destruction, the forest is doing it’s thing — it’s full of new growth and new flora. And the gift for all of us after fires like that is the mysterious bumper crops of morels.

Puffballs!

Puffballs!

puffballs whole
Look what I found at the dog park this afternoon! I’ve always wanted to find a Giant Western Puffball, and I found two! They were a pound or so each, and the size of a grapefruit — growing right there in the long grass in the woods — so I snatched them up and brought them home.

puffballs sliced Where I cleaned off the edges where the dirt and the bugs were (a few maggot holes, but nothing like the boletes later in the summer). then I sliced them up, brushed them with olive oil infused with the parsley/basil I put up last summer, sprinkled them with salt and cooked them on the grill.

puffballs grilled They were delicious. Very mushroomy. Imagine an enormous white button mushroom — that taste. Not the earthy morel-kind of mushroom taste, but that clean, slightly spongy, white mushroom flavor. They grilled up nicely. I have a lot of them … not sure what I’ll do next … mushroom parmigiana perhaps?

Morels

Morels

pile o'morels
We had several big forest fires here last summer — and while all that smoke and destruction was awful, in the wake of a fire, come the morels. Morels. Yummy, yummy morels.

I went up last weekend and only found a few. Eight, to be exact. Here they are: eight morels

And then on Monday, the MH went up and found the big pile in the first picture. We’ve had three warm days since then, and I plan to go back out on Saturday, when I don’t have to work. It’s a big burn, and if things don’t dry out too much, we should have more mushrooms.

I love mushroom hunting. I got really sick in graduate school — ran a low-grade fever on and off for three years — and it was mushroom hunting that cured me. Mushroom hunting gives one a chance to hike really slowly; to get outside and look with care at exactly what is in front of you. It’s like meditation, but not so hard. And the dogs like it — they run big doggy circles around me — smelling birds and rabbits and other woodsy creatures. A good day all the way around.

A Rose is a Rose is a …

A Rose is a Rose is a …

first roses ...

Here are the first roses of the spring … Therese Bugnet, I think — I’m terrible about putting the markers in the ground. The cranesbill geraniums in the background are starting to bloom and the Iris that my friend Andrea gave me a couple of years ago have finally really come in. They’re huge and gorgeous this year.

So, the weather warmed up, and the flowers are starting to bloom, and just about everything survived our little snowstorm. I think I lost one or two cucumbers, but I have plenty and can afford to lose a couple. The peas and favas and arugula and spinach are all coming in —

We’re on our way. Summer might finally have arrived.