It's that time of the year again

I was going to attempt to write something trenchant about  That Anniversary but I got too angry and burst into tears instead, which is a problem when one is wearing glasses as this one does these days.  Also that post was a hair more serious and self revelatory than I am willing to be in this medium. And the audience in my head -- sundry relatives and close friends has probably heard me say all I really have to say on the topic, and yelling online won't help anything, especially when others manage to say what I want to say and keep some shreds of civility. So instead I will talk about the week which was totally a red letter week as these things go -- except for intermittent episodes of yelling at Leon Panetta and Congress which is pretty much par for the course.  (To the best of my knowledge Leon Panetta  does not read this blog and does not know that every so often he says something that causes me to yell at him in the privacy of my car*)

In the course of this magnificent week, I got to spend time with three of the four people who know way too much about me**: Skadi, the Tall Guy, and JVW (who I really need to come up with a better nickname for).  Spending time with any of them is exciting, but getting to see three of the four in a week is almost too much to hope for (especially as it's the three of the four that I am usually at least a thousand miles away from at all times, and even when I'm home in Anchorage, one of them is persistently in the Midwest***).  I made up a new recipe.  And I went for a hike.  And I finished a quilt. I am exercising great restraint.  If I were to truly demonstrate my happiness any one of these things would be occasion for all caps, bold, and hot pink, flashing type.  As it is, I merely point out my excitement, so that people who know me well can say, "indeed, Sarah is very happy about all this." Also any one of these things is enough and more than enough for a blog post, and may yet prove to spark one. I kept writing the one about how I don't sew in my head while I was, in fact, sewing.

And because it wouldn't be my life without heaping helpings of absurdity, I also explained my beauty regimen to a Japanese student, who didn't believe that I was as old as I said I was. (Dear readers who have never met me, I look more or less  my age, which is almost thirty-one.)  Upon producing my driver's license, he (yes, dear readers who have not already heard the story, the student in question was and is male) asked what I did to have such wonderful skin.  I stared at him as if he had gone completely mad, and explained that I took a multivitamin, and walked a lot. I believe that the main thing in my beauty regimen is beyond his reach.  Namely, at this point in his life, he is unlikely to be able to be related to both my grandmothers (and possibly my grandfathers as well).  Certainly my complexion is one of those things for which I can take no credit. 

But I mentioned a recipe, and I have one, albeit with almost no measurements, because if I'm not baking I rarely measure.  JVW has opined that my recipes are funny.  I have no idea why she thinks this way.

Smoked Salmon Pizza

First off you need a recipe of pizza dough.  Use your favorite, or use this one. If you use my recipe, I strongly suggest leaving the herbs out of the crust.

I actually suggest making the "sauce" the night before so that the flavors have time to meld.  I, of course, did not do this.
1 box cream cheese (full fat, or neufchatel if your definitions of virtue run that way. Although the results will not be quite as over the top.)
A handful of fresh dill or to taste, snipped up with kitchen shears
A handful of fresh parsley, like wise
A clove of garlic or so, minced, mashed or smashed, or a teaspoon or so out of a jar
A couple of green onions minced
A sizeable pinch of sweet paprika
The zest and juice of a quarter lemon
A tablespoon or so of milk
Salt and pepper

Use a hand mixer to mix everything.  You might consider nuking the cream cheese to render it easier to work.  Chill overnight if you have time to do that.

Toppings for the pizza

Smoked salmon, not lox (lox is a fine thing in its way, but it lacks the force of smoked salmon)
roasted red peppers
grape tomatoes
feta
pine nuts (I forgot that I had meant to put pine nuts on the pizza, until I was eating the leftovers.  It didn't suffer from the lack, but I suggest them, if you like that sort of thing.)

After the first baking of the pizza crust (see the linked recipe), spread the pizza thickly with the cream cheese mixture.  I have a hard time thinking of it as a sauce, because in the main, sauces pour; however it fulfills the role of sauce.

Sprinkle on the toppings in quantities that seem right to you.  The feta should probably be added with a light hand.

Bake the pizza for 5 minutes or so, or until the cheeses are a bit browned.  Serve with a large green salad, bacon wrapped dates, red wine, and most importantly good friends. I fed this to JVW, the Tall Guy, and his girl friend (who seems like still another delightful person, whose perversity of location I shall regret).  No one complained, and everyone had seconds and in some cases thirds. 

*Some people watch football and yell at the tv.  My family treats politics the same way.
**I really dislike the term "best friend," with its exclusivity, and in any case my relationships with all of these people are so different.  But they do all know more about me than I find entirely comfortable, though sometimes it is comforting.
*** Repetitive to the point of annoyance announcements that the friend in question ought to move to Seattle or Anchorage have so far not been productive, but hopefully my brainwashing attempts will eventually bear fruit.  Also, my friends are incredibly tolerant.

Baleful Chickens and Other Things

The Buff Orpington is not amused, neither am I.

Since this post devolves fairly quickly into me ranting about people doing health food badly, I thought I'd mention up front that I passed a very pleasant Sunday with my Viking cousins and their chickens.  The chickens are charming and dopey until you look them in the face and realize that not only are they dinosaur relatives, but also they probably remember being tyrannosaurs in previous lives.  The chickens are biding their time.  (Mostly by making daft noises and begriming their living space, but still.)

The Viking fed me squash and kale soup that was so good I think I have added another brassica to the list of cabbage family members that I adore.  He also sent me home with a tub of homemade coconut butter cream that he made for the Little Viking's birthday cake.  I'm supposed to come up with something fantastic to do with it.  I did.

However, it's spreading the butter cream on peanut butter cookies (which are surpassingly moist and chewy several days after baking.  I may have to revise my initial assessment of the recipe as nothing more than inoffensive).   I think the Viking had more spectacular things in mind.  Against that, I am toying with ideas involving crab apple sauce.  (It's a little known fact that crab apples and coconuts are friends.  I'm not even making this up.  JVW's crab apple and coconut tart is objective verification of my assertion.)

Secondly,  ginger ale mk. 2 was so good that it is almost gone now.  Heating the ginger and adding lemon seem to be the things that ginger ale mk. 1 was missing.  I'll probably have a definitive recipe ready to go soon.

Now that the preludes are out of the way, I come to the reason that there is an angry dinosaur descendant headlining the blog tonight.

Today I ate an unpleasant thing.  It was a portobello mushroom cap "pizza" picked up in the produce section of my local Safeway. Now this is not an automatically bad idea.  I wouldn't have bought it if had seemed like an automatically bad idea.  I like mushrooms.  I like pizza.  I like food that attempts to be healthful.

I mention this because the experience of eating my dinner was entirely unpleasant.  Everything people, who don't like mushrooms, say about mushrooms was on display.  Grey, faintly rubbery, and ever so slightly funky like toe cheese.  I like mushrooms (I say this a second time, both for emphasis and also to reassure myself that I do still, in fact, like mushrooms) and this was not a happy vegetable and cheese stuffed mushroom.  What went wrong here?  

Firstly, a mismatch in expectations.  There was NO garlic.  I have made and served pizzas without garlic to people with garlic allergies.  It happens.  But if you label a food as somehow being of the pizza nature, unless it explicitly says so in large friendly, neon-yellow letters larger than fourteen point, it had darned well better have garlic.  Even pizza margherita which dispenses with pizza sauce, and can be pretty casual about the cheese has GARLIC.   (These yahoos had dispensed with pizza sauce too.  This was probably a mistake.)

Secondly, as I have ranted before, in an attempt to be healthy, the makers of health food often strip the fat from their foods (I had to buy yogurt today too -- do I even need to mention my disgust at there being no fat bearing yogurt on sale?).  In this case they skimped on the skim milk mozzarella and skipped the olive oil entirely.  Fat in excess is not all that great for you. You know what is excellent for you, and will kill you in excess?  Water.  Fat is necessary.  The human brain is mostly fat.  Human fertility is fat dependent.  Yes, folks, the survival of the human race depends on there being enough fat.  (Not that a badly executed portobello pizza will bring the human race to a screeching halt because of amenorrhea.  Probably.)  And the kind of fat that should have gone into this pitiable excuse for a dinner was good fat, namely olive oil.  Olive oil would have helped the mushroom caps to brown, carmelizing and sealing in juices that would have immeasurably improved the texture and the flavor.  

So this is what I would have done, and what I probably will do later this week or maybe next, because while the execution was poor, the idea was sound, and filling.  I'd probably skip the sausage in favor of more vegetables.  Maybe a roasted bell pepper.  More cheese. Definitely more cheese.  Maybe some sauteed onions. 

Against Yogurt

I like yogurt.  I grew up eating yogurt. I wanted to buy some today.

Today found me in QFC staring with rising dismay into the dairy case as I attempted to buy a reasonable and affordable amount of vanilla yogurt, preferrably with some fat* in it and not too many extraneous weird things.

That ought to be simple, yes?  There were squillions of choices, surely one would make me happy. 

Americans seem to view yogurt as a "health" food.   Or should I say "health" "food"?  Apparently if I just bought the right brand of yogurt, I would lose weight and have well regulated bowels.  My skin would clear up.   My sex appeal would abound.  My dishes would do themselves.  Claims are made about the active lives of the yogurt's cultures which would enable this miracle.

Unfortunately, I wanted yogurt because I think it tastes good, and I wanted to experiment with packing yogurt and granola as part of my lunch.   I wanted yogurt because it will help fill me up and give me energy to do things.  In short, I wanted yogurt as food, not as a tonic or patent medicine.

Most of the yogurt in my market segment* is fat free or lite (which is like fat free only without the sugar as well).  Not infrequently it comes in unholy flavors meant to mimic dessert: one can get apple pie yogurt, strawberry cheesecake yogurt, chocolate mousse yogurt, creme caramel yogurt, or even key lime pie yogurt.    Most all of the flavors, whether or not they are intended to mimic desserts, are packed with sugar, high fructose corn syrup, or artificial sweeteners to make up for the decrement in flavor that occurs when fat is removed.  Trading fat for sugar does not please me. Trading real sugar for something that breaks down to formaldehyde in my brain? The depths of my displeasure are as a canyon which no explorer may plumb nor any traveler cross. 

Low fat is alright, not my favorite**, but it has some flavor, less sugar, and less algae byproduct*** to create the creaminess that the fat skimmed out would otherwise impart.  Yogurt made from not-skim milk, and flavored with a moderate amount of sugar is increasingly hard to find, squeezed out of the market by the health claims of yogurt-like substances tarted up as desserts and packed with chemicals.  If Americans regarded yogurt as food rather than medication, I suspect that this would not be the case.

I had to read every single label in the case.  The Dannon All Natural line of yogurt appears promising... except that they did not have vanilla yogurt in the large container, or the small.  They had coffee yogurt, which was flavored with real coffee though.  I eventually settled for a quart of the Mountain High Vanilla, which is a known quantity****, even if it was slightly more than I wanted to pay.

I am not noticeably sexier. 

*There is fantastic yogurt on the market.  Yogurt that fills my heart with loving gluttony.  Unfortunately I cannot afford it as a regular thing.  If you want to know, my favorite brand is Greek Gods, with especial affection for the fig yogurt.

** There have probably been times in my life when my response to the world of food has not been "needs more fat"-- I'm not sure when they were.

***Carrageenan is seaweed extract, e.g. algae.  It's a common thickener, and commonly used to smooth textures that would otherwise be damaged by fat removal.  There's nothing exactly wrong with it, except when it goes bad.  Oh dear, I'm about to tell you why I don't buy fat free half-and-half.  Those of you who have already heard this story may want to roll your eyes and go back to the main essay right now.  Those of you with delicate sensibilities may wish to do likewise.

My excellent friend JVW was attempting to limit her fat intake.  To that end she had started buying fat free half-and-half.  It tasted fine.  The mouthfeel wasn't weird.  However, it was ultra-pasteurized (which I think involves gigantic lasers or something) so it had an unusually long shelf life.  JVW does not go through half-and-half particularly quickly.  One day six weeks or so later, she was pouring half-and-half into her tea, while I was nattering inconsequentially (probably, the ensuing event totally drove my thoughts from my mind).  The flow stopped, but the container still felt like it was about a third full.  This being the sort of condition that would raise questions in anyone's mind, we investigated.

Inside was a viscous, pink jelly.  Horror ensued.  Neither of us drank any more tea that night.
The carrageenan had fallen out of suspension, and begun acting like a bacterial culture.  A bright pink bacteria culture. 

****I'm ambivalent about crystalline fructose as a sweetener, but I know from experience that they don't use much.