Mystery of the Day

Why can I walk into almost any kitchen, be presented with a bunch of random ingredients, and throw together something delicious, and quick -- except my own?  In my own kitchen I stare into the refrigerator piteously and wonder why the idiot in charge of purchasing hasn't been sacked.

This is exacerbated by the end of the quarter.  I have been putting in long days at school, and I come home at night wanting a lamb roast, new potatoes, a slice of pie, and half a bottle or so of something dry and red.  Needless to say none of those things are waiting for me. It's already eight o'clock, so no time to cook a lamb roast (if I had one).  So it's frozen ravioli, pasta sauce from a bottle, and a handful of frozen spinach in the sauce to keep me from biting the neighbors.  It's not bad...

 I think I'm going to interest a friend or two in the idea of roast lamb sometime soon.

Alternative Uses for Pancake Mix

Today I could not face my usual scrambled egg breakfast. I require a hot breakfast in the mornings, cereal is an excellent snack at any other time of day, but it is not breakfast food -- too cold and lumpy. I was going to be off doing things for most of the day (OPERA! With an Aunt! What Larks!), and I was uncertain about lunch, so it needed to be a substantial meal that might carry me through to dinner.

So I stared into my refrigerator pondering my choices. I contemplated pancakes but did not feel sufficiently something or other. I contemplated a quesadilla, but that did not sing to me either. I thought about a Dutch baby*, but a true Dutch baby required more eggs than I wanted to commit. I returned to contemplating the buckwheat pancake mix. It still did not appeal as pancakes, but what if used it in place of some of the flour in a Dutch baby, in the hopes that its leavening agents would compensate for the lack of an egg. 


Cap Hill Baby

1/2 c Archer Mills Organic Buckwheat pancake mix
1/2 c all purpose flour
1 c milk
2 eggs
1 Tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
2 Tbsp veg. oil
2 Tbsp butter

Combine everything but the oil and butter in a blender. Beat until smooth. Stick in the fridge.
Preheat oven to 350.

In a ten inch cast iron skillet combine the butter and oil. Place the skillet in the oven for 10 -15 minutes.

Remove the skillet from the oven, and carefully (it might spatter) pour in the batter.

Bake for 15 -20 minutes, until puffed and solid. (To my surprise it was done at the fifteen minute mark not the 20. Although if I had let it go longer it might have gotten browner, but I was in a time crunch.)

Serve with your favorite pancake toppings. Today I ate it with canned peaches, in honor of my great grandmother, and yogurt.

This procedure resulted in a dense, chewy cake with good buckwheat and butter flavor. It was not quite what I was expecting, but it was a good hearty brunch on a morning when I walked to the Seattle Center. I could have taken the bus, but I would have had to leave the house at the same time. It was a very nice walk even on a day inclined to serious bluster.

*It's a baked puffy thing that exists in the borderlands between pancakes and soufflés. These are two things that at first glance do not have obvious borders.  Yorkshire puddings occupy similar culinary geography

For Science!

My excellent friend JVW recently sent me a care package.  Among other things it contained a jar of Double Apricot brand Preserved Cabbage.  Apparently it's Thai cabbage that is preserved.  The contents of the jar appeared oddly dry for something that I imagined belonged in the sauerkraut family. 

The jar might have sat in some out of the way place in the kitchen except that this week also saw me bringing home a bag of Safeway's house brand frozen pot stickers. (I speak the international language of dumplings.)  This evening I thought I'd have some for dinner.  The soup I'd been planning to eat had not thawed, so I cast about for another side dish.  At once, I thought of the Preserved Cabbage.  So after I whisked the pot stickers out of the skillet, I dumped what I thought was an appropriate Sarah size portion into the remaining water from the pot stickers.  I can be enthusiastic about cabbage and its relatives.  Very enthusiastic, so it was rather a lot of preserved cabbage.

Only then did I taste the cabbage.  It was salty.  No... it was SALTY.

This was not pickled cabbage in the kimchi tradition, this was salted cabbage in the salt pork tradition.  Only more so.  

Clearly it had been intended to be rinsed, blanched, and used as a condiment.  I had dumped almost half the tightly packed jar into my skillet.  I added more water.  I added vinegar.  In desperation, I added a pinch of sugar.  Anything to cut through the salt flavor. 

Dear readers, I did not succeed in appreciably diminishing the saltiness of the preserved cabbage, but because I was very hungry, I dumped it over my pot stickers and attempted to eat it anyway. I mostly succeeded, because I was very stubborn and very hungry (having spent the afternoon walking around Seattle in cold, wind, and snow hunting a particular book). 

If there is a lesson here, it's probably try the bizarre Asian canned goods sent to you by your friends, before you commit to eating half a jar.  I will be trying to figure out what to do with the remaining preserved cabbage in the weeks to come.  If you have ideas, drop me a line.  My ideas at the moment involve mashed turnips and potatoes.   

So Tired

An online thesaurus offers these synonyms for tired: all in, beat, bone-tired, bored, burned out, bushed, dead tired, dead, dog-tired, done in, drained, drooping, drowsy, enervated, exhausted, fagged, fatigued, flagging, out of gas, overworked, pooped, punchy, ready to drop, sleepy, spent, taxed, wearied, wearing, wiped out, worn out, zonked.  Most of these are applicable.  I am once again facing the reality that if I were getting paid for the time I spend at school, I would be pulling some serious overtime, and that's not counting the night when I was up until one am doing research.

But that's me whining.  Have some random bits and pieces instead. 

1. To your left you see the doodle that happened when I was supposed to be paying attention to a lecture about paper.  Those of you who have "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" burned into your brains may notice that there are two problems with this quotation.  One I figured out on my own, and one a friend* pointed out to me.  Only the latter was fixable.  

I should try to remember to update the image tomorrow with the fix.  I should also try to remember that I now want to do a gigantic Prufrock poster when I have time and energy.** 

2.  The second item is vaguely related two the first.  My shoddy memory dropped "sirens" into Eliot's deathless verse in place of "mermaids".  I drew a mermaid anyway.  (I like drawing mermaids, and have been drawing more or less rubenesque mermaids since sometime in high school. This may be because I don't particularly love drawing feet.)  A quick google image search, which I don't actually recommend, will show you that most sirens in the popular imagination are fish tailed temptresses (or else scantily clad women lounging on motorcycles).  However, the ancient greeks, imagined the Sirens as bird women.  Often just a woman's head on a bird's body.  Sometimes a winged woman with duck feet.  The webbed feet are fairly constant though (or possibly, they are the most memorable).  Temptresses with duck feet.  Get your head around that.  

Now consider this, the Ancient Greeks adorned their funerary monuments with images of the Sirens. Yes, at least some Greeks apparently hoped to be conducted into the afterlife by duck footed women.  This fact is not mentioned enough during the acquisition of a liberal arts education.   

3. Today is the 110st anniversary of my great grandmother's birth.  Today I learned that she, like me, loved canned peaches.  I also learned that, unlike me, her first name was Alvira (I've probably been told this fact before).  For reasons that are probably obvious, she went by Belle instead.  

4.  The strangest search term to find me in the last 24 hours was "Happy Giant poems."  Apparently this search points you at the Giant Cephalopod Awareness Day post, which does contain links to poetry.  And yet somehow I don't believe it was what they were looking for, although what they were looking for puzzles me.   

5. Breyer's ice cream at my local safeway is $2 a carton this week.  They have found my Achilles heel.


*To the best of my knowledge, this friend does not have Prufrock burned into his brain.  The fact that there are people in the world with perfect pitch for scansion would be the a cause of much teeth gnashing if I were not all of the things the thesaurus claims I am.  

**I do have Prufrock burned, however imperfectly, into my brain thanks to a college habit of dramatic reading duets with my roommate.

Oh, this is nice!

Still Life with Shrimp, Vincent Van Gogh

In a fit of something or other early last week it seemed the thing to invite Jackie up to spend the night and invite a new friend of seemingly compatible temperament over for dinner with us after I dragged Jackie to the church that I am tentatively beginning to think of as mine. 

It was a good incentive to clean.  So I cleaned.* And then Sunday afternoon, I realized that I had no idea about what I was feeding my two unsuspecting dinner guests.  Except that I definitely did not want to cook another pot of soup or unending casserole, and quiche would take too long after we arrived hungry after church.
I decided that the least I could do was make pizza dough.  Either I'd make pizza or bake it as bread with dinner.  I threw the first stage of pizza dough together and set it aside to rise. 

Then I stared into the depths of the freezer, hoping that I would discover inspiration.  Instead I discovered  most of a bag of frozen spinach.  Somewhere back in the primordial ooze of my mind, a memory stirred.

"Hey M, how do you make that spinach and scallop thing?" 

M is not so big on recipes, but she is a damn good cook.  She thought for a minute  and said, "well, first I take some bacon..."

I groaned a little bit, for one of my guests does not eat dead mammal generally speaking, and turkey bacon does not cut it in the delicious fat department.

"... and if I want a bit of crunch I sprinkle some pine nuts on top.  But the bacon is what really makes it."

I thought longingly of the spinach and scallop thing, and decided that I could sub some olive oil and butter for the bacon grease, and walnuts for the pine nuts.** So I hustled off to the nearest grocery store.  The closest QFC appears to be a grocery store,  but manages to thwart me every time I go in.  This time they did not have the tiny sweet sea scallops of my dreams***.  Sea scallops are relatively cheap and insanely delicous.  Instead, they had great hulking bay scallops for much more than I wanted to spend.  Not having time to run to the either of the larger grocery stores nearby I resorted to some midsized shrimp.  And a lemon.

I got back, and did the stage two things to the pizza dough and shoved it into the fridge to wait.

That evening we feasted.  The pizza dough became a focaccia-like substrate to the not-really-actually-M's-spinach-and-scallop-thing-at-all.  We crumbled feta on top and washed it all down with mugs of tea and glasses of water, and it was wonderful and homey and filling.  For some reason we spent quite a lot of time discussing the literary uses of the Seven Deadly Sins.   

Here are the particulars such as they are.  I confess that I was not measuring anything too strictly for this endeavor.  I could make pizza crust in my sleep, and almost the only ingredient I measure is the water at the beginning.


Pizza Crust or Fake Focaccia

This recipe takes time.  At least a couple of hours.  If you're hungry, but have your heart set on homemade pizza, make yourself a snack before proceeding further.  

Combine in 1 c. tepid water
1 tsp sugar
1Tbsp yeast (or roughly one packet if one does not buy yeast by the jar)
if it foams up in ten minutes or so, then it's usable. If it
doesn't you're probably better off putting yeast on the shopping list
and ordering pizza.

Stir in 1 1/2 c unbleached flour (try to keep the flour to a minimum,
you can always add more if necessary -- this does reflect my prejudice
towards a thinner crust)
optional 1/2 tsp crushed dried rosemary (parmesan cheese, oregano,
and or basil are also good, but I tend towards rosemary because the
other things end up in the toppings)
Stir until flour (and any other additions) is combined.

Go do something else for 45 - 60 minutes. I tend to lean towards the longer rise time

Stir in 1/2 c more of flour (more if the dough is especially wet, as it sometimes is)
1/4 c olive oil
1 tsp salt.

Knead for three minutes or so until the dough is thoroughly mixed and
springy.

Here we come to a choice. At this point, one can cover the bowl and stick it in the fridge, and leave it there for a few hours or a day or so. Or one can go on to the next bit straight away. The texture is better for the long rest in the fridge, but it's not necessary.

Pour a bit of oil in the bottom of the mixing bowl. Turn
the dough over to coat it with oil.

Oil an appropriate pan and sprinkle it with
corn meal to discourage sticking. Brush off excess cornmeal.

If one is making pizza, attempt to follow these instructions. Form the dough into a round blob. Attempt to stretch it into a disc
about six inches in diameter. Place this in the center of the pan,
working from the center out stretch the pizza dough until it fills the
pan. Try to maintain an even thickness, pinch tears together. The
terminal morrain of crust forms naturally as you work towards the
edge.

Go back to ignoring the dough. This is a good time to turn on the
oven. Turn it on to it's highest setting (probably 500 or 550). By
the time it's done preheating, the 20-30 minute second rise should be
done. This is also a good time to make the sauce if you are going to make one.

Place the pizza somewhere in the upper half of the oven. Leave it
there for 5 minutes.

Top the thing.

Bake it for 10-12 minutes (long enough for the cheese to melt and get
bubbly). Serve it to a grateful public.

OR you can skip making pizza, and instead pat out the crust into a round or rectangle about half an inch thick and cook at 450 for 15-20 minutes or until golden on top.

Sauteed Shrimp and Spinach

(Not M's amazing Spinach and Scallop thing really, but pretty wonderful all the same)

This comes together fast enough that one can pretty much do the entire thing while the fake focaccia is in the oven.

1 Tbsp Olive oil
1 Tbsp Butter
1 half large onion
1 shallot
1 1/2 tsp minced garlic
1/2 pound shell on shrimp
frozen spinach, I think it was at least a cup and a half, maybe two
1/2 cup walnuts chopped
Juice of half a lemon (about a 1/4 cup -- it was a large lemon)
1/2 tsp salt
loads of black pepper

Heat the olive oil and butter together in a large skillet over medium heat.

Chop the onion and shallot, and talk a friend into peeling the shrimp.

Add the onions, shallot, and garlic to the skillet. 

Defrost the spinach in the microwave after discovering that it had not thawed as much as you had hoped while you were at church. 

Stir the alliums occasionally, while you try to make conversation with your guests.

When the alliums are translucent, add the shrimp.  Flip the shrimp occasionally, so that they cook evenly, but keep an eye on things, for over cooked shrimp are sad. 

When the shrimp are nearly cooked, but still have translucent bits, add the spinach and the lemon juice.  Stir frequently for a couple of minutes while the extra spinach juice cooks off.  Salt and pepper.

Oh it was good. 

*Cleaning at one point involved staring in dismay at the slurry of water and crumbs that resulted after I knocked both my toaster and electric kettle off the cart where they ordinarily reside.  It wouldn't have been so bad, except that I had been moving the cart in order to mop under it.  I looked at the mess, and thought about crying, while I muttered, "This is why I suck at housekeeping. I only make things worse."  And then I went and got the towel that impersonates a bath mat, and sopped up the water and crumbs and remopped the floor. 

**Something of a dice roll, since I am periodically sensitive to walnuts and pecans, but I had been avoiding both for a couple of months, and decided to risk it since I did have a freezer well stocked with nuts from before the last time my body decided that tree nuts were evil. 

***If shrimp are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy; scallops are doubly so.

Poor Kerouac!

I was doing dishes.  Jackie, who was pretending to be a guest, was wandering around the kitchen and had come to rest before the refrigerator.  She was reading the things stuck there on.

"I don't know how I feel about exploding spiders."

I looked up from scrubbing the cookie sheet on which I had baked the evening's bread.  Jackie was reading the Jack Kerouac magnet, the one that reads:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...

"They're metaphorical spiders."

"I know, but I'm still not sure I like the image."

I thought about it for a moment and concluded that I was at peace with the image.  "Exploding spiders will never be in my hair."

Jackie is a more compassionate and enlightened person than I am (AND she reminds me, she used to work at a zoo), "there are lots of things that spiders can do that are not exploding or in your hair."

I once found a spider in my hair.  It was horrifying.  "but exploding spiders will NEVER be in my hair."

I'd like to think that my position re: exploding spiders, metaphorical or otherwise, is unassailable, but I have a feeling that Jackie may have the moral high ground here.

I Will Take the Ring

Walking to school I spied a silvery circle on the sidewalk. Curious, I bent down and picked it up. It was a ring. Battered silver plate eroded enough that the copper beneath had worn through at the edges.  In the best traditions of one of my favorite genres I stuck it in my pocket.  Regrettably the rest of my walk to school was uneventful. No riddle games at all.*  Upon further inspection, I discovered a Mysterious Inscription: in deeply
etched letters, it read "DATUMAMORE. AD DEFENDUM."  It more or less fit on my right thumb, or the first finger of either hand, though it attempted to slip off unexpectedly.

Sensing Latin, I googled the phrase when I got to school.  I was right.  It was not the Black Speech. (Sigh.) Instead it was one of those instances, where people use Latin to say something sappy that they might otherwise be too embarrassed to say.  In this case, apparently,  "Given with love, for your protection."  Which is nice, although one wonders how it ended up lying on the sidewalk, clearly having been run over a couple of times. Some protection.


*The answer to "what has it got in its pocketses?" is lengthy: knife, keys, head lamp, plastic dinosaur, phone, change, hands, pen, hand kerchief, and sometimes a hat.

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. 

Happy Giant Cephalopod Awareness Day

Today is the day when we turn aside from worldly affairs and contemplate our relationship with the strange things that live in the sea.* A friend of mine reminded me that since we live in Seattle, bordered by sea, the squid are watching.  We think it should be the basis for a tourism campaign, and that Capital Hill should be renamed Calamari Hill.  I think it has a nice ring to it.

In my early youth I spent a lot of time watching PBS nature shows.  My attention at some point was captured by the tragic plight of the octopus and cuttle fish.  The males spawned and died, and then the females starved to death while guarding their eggs.  This worried me deeply.  The poor baby cuttlefish and octopuses who never knew their parents!  The poor parents who gave their lives for children they never met!  This had all the cathartic grandeur of a Greek tragedy for my eight year old imagination.

As I got older, I never got over being fascinated by members of clan cephalopoda.  They're intelligent.  They change color to communicate (well, some of them do).  Some of them demonstrate tool use, others social behavior.  Many of them taste wonderful deep fried with garlic aioli (but not the giant squid which uses ammonia to maintain its buoyancy). Sometimes I dream about them. 

And I am not the only one fascinated by these amazing, if squishy, creatures.

Artistic intimations of squidity


Oliver Wendell Holms uses the nautilus as a poetic figure for the growth of the soul. 

Tennyson meanwhile has strange ideas about the apocalyptic significance of the giant squid.

And here are some things to read and watch if overwrought nineteenth century poetry is not your thing. 

A rather long article from the Smithsonian about the giant squid which culminates in adorable baby squid pictures.  The adorable baby squid, regrettably, are not Architeuthis dux. 

The Flamboyant Cuttlefish is not truly giant, except in AWESOME which it has in abundance.  

This Giant Octopus, on the otherhand, is huge, and curious.

Have a safe Giant Cephalopod Awareness Day.  Remember, the squid are watching.

(If you really want to celebrate that other holiday with a poem about love for today, here are two favorites.)
 
*I've heard about another holiday that falls on February 14 that involves covering mediocre candy in red and pink foil and giving them to people you care about.  Obviously it's a holiday that celebrates the importance of forgiveness in human affairs.  Cephalopods are more interesting.

They're Alive

It was a nasty rainy cold miserable day outside today.  I think I've mentioned that already.  Since I could not face the amount of soaked to the bone a long walk with a camera would involve, I puttered.  I made another batch of ginger ale, invented (mediocre) cookies, cleaned out the fridge, did laundry went grocery shopping, and then I made soup.  I had planned on a bean soup. (Having had enough of pureed soups made from orange vegetables for a while.) I had bacon that needed using.  I had quick cooking dried beans.  I had onions.  I had shallots.  I had carrots (I'm in the bad habit of buying baby carrots sticks when they're on sale and then forgetting them).  It was going to be great.

I fried the bacon.  I chopped the onions and shallots. I opened the recently discovered pack of baby carrots intending on using a handful.  They had roots.  They had bulbous orange excrescences that were the beginning of roots.  They had foliage.  Clearly they all needed to be cooked now.

So I made carrot soup instead.  A quick online search turned up all sorts of exotic carrot soups, all calling for ingredients I didn't have.  I surveyed the ingredients I did have.  So it's carrot soup with bacon, cumin, coriander, and new mexican green chili.  It's really good.  But it's also pureed.

The orange vegetables win again.