Sunday, December 31, 2006

Karma

Writing this year's Christmas letter was a challenge, considering the multiple losses we endured. None was terribly earth-shattering, but when I added them up, it made me understand why I'd been having a rough time. Just before Christmas last year, my father passed away; shortly after the dust settled from that, two friends announced they were returning with their families to England and Switzerland respectively; other dear friends announced almost simultaneously that they were going to spend the next nine months living overseas. It seemed as if everyone was jumping ship!

We had also endured a year of grumpy renters and year of noisy, inept remodeling in the house next door. It's easy to underestimate the impact this kind of negativity has on your peace of mind. In the summer though, it looked like our patience would be rewarded when a delightful family from Oregon moved in. They were like-minded folks, and their kids and our kids immediately hit it off, spending hours peddling around the neighborhood, climbing trees and even going to summer camp together. (Aside: Their mom was finishing up a new edition of her cookbook, The Warehouse Gourmet. I find it amusing that her book is aimed at warehouse shoppers, but she did all the recipes with organic ingredients ordered in bulk from the co-op!). Things seemed to be going so well, and then...

...her husband got transferred back to Oregon in August. The week before school started, they were gone again, and the house was back up for sale/rent. And then another house down the street went up for sale too. My neighbor and I looked at each other, as if to ask, "are you going to jump ship too?"

And did I mention the cat died, too?

And so we began a new school year, hoping desperately to connect with new families, the kind you want to while away the hours with. There are a few folks that we have connected with briefly, but between their own busy-ness and distance (North Bend!?), we haven't got into any regular social habits.

Then one glorious September morning as I was taking out the mail, a car pulled up next door, and a smiling couple got out. We chatted, and I learned they had just moved here from London to work where DH works, had two children and were seriously considering renting next door. And they did! In just a few days, we had nice neighbors, who we quickly discover are always good for an after-the-kids-are-in-bed glass of wine and a nibble of something. (They were instrumental in taste trials to perfect my chocolate soup and nudder budder recipe, but that's another story altogether!) How handy to have folks to borrow a cup of flour from, or watch the kids for ten minutes while one of us runs to the store. The men folk even walk to work together.
And then, miracle of miracle, the day of the big storm, we noted that house at the other side had sold as well, this time to a delightful couple who just moved here from Dublin with their two small boys, to work for the same mega-employer.

It seems that the tide of loss has turned to one of gain, and we shall celebrate the New Year tomorrow with a cul-de-sac brunch. The menu at this point is undecided: one of the most important aspects of food is that it feeds our souls as much (or more) than our bodies. Clearly, Champagne is in order.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Does size matter?

I had a cooking date with my stand partner today. One of my dear friends suffers from a myriad of afflictions, including multiple chemical sensitivity, which can make it difficult for her to function in society. Her daughter, the same age and in the same class as my eldest, is an energetic 12-year old with several dietary restrictions. She loves to cook, but accommodating her diet and creating new things in the kitchen overwhelms her mother (did I mention that Stand Partner is energetic?), so she comes here.

Inspired by my beloved vintage Cuisinart, she acquired a cute little Cuisinart mini-prep. We popped it out of its packaging, flipped though the book, and put it through its paces. I recalled that I used a bunch of celery to become acquainted with mine some twenty-odd years ago, so we grabbed a couple of stalks, chopped them to length and plopped them in. (An aside: The first thing I noticed was you can't slice with this thing, since there's no feed tube! It's strictly a chop and grind appliance.) A quick pulse, then another, then another. Voilà! finely chopped celery, with the exception of one or two nearly untouched bits. We tried it again, with more stalks to see if it preferred being full (mine does). Same result. Ditto for carrots. We cut the rest of the carrots into sticks--with a knife--and moved on to making hummus.

I have avoided making hummus for years, simply because all the recipes I find start with soaking garbanzo beans overnight, etc., inferring that it's somehow inferior to use canned beans, and certainly not giving me any indication of how to substitute. But a friend of mine had enough of that, and developed a recipe that is based not only on canned beans, but on a standard-sized can! Here's his recipe:

In a blender, purée the contents of one 15 oz. can of garbanzo beans (drained, but save some liquid in case the mixture is too dry), three tablespoons of lemon juice (about one lemon's worth), a teaspoon of ground cumin, 3-10 cloves of garlic, and 1/3 cup tahini. That's it!

The mini-prep handled the whole thing remarkably well, though we had to hold on to it so it wouldn't jump around and throw it's lid off ("chop" keeps things moving in a direction that tightens the lid; "grind" goes the other way, which tends to loosen the lid during operation). The hand-cut carrots helped us with quality control here.

We tried guacamole, and even managed to coax it to do cashew butter, with a little oil and some cooling down time between one-minute spurts. DH had to do a Trader Joe's run to get chips for guacamole QC.

Then we pulled out the real food processor and got creative. Stand Partner had a wrapper from a Bobo's Coconut bar that she had in Colorado and it was so incredibly yummy and she really liked it and could I make something like it, please, oh please? Well, without the actual bar, I had only her gushing description and the ingredients list to go on. That went something like this: Organic rolled oats, organic Earth Balance soy and vegetable oils, (100% expeller-pressed) organic brown rice syrup, organic Sucanat (cane juice). It also had shredded coconut and coconut milk in it. Well, I didn't have sucanat or rice syrup handy, so grabbed a cup of clover honey out of the ten-pound bucket. Vegetable oil, no problem, I used about 3/4 cup of safflower oil, and I had oats, though they were of the quick-cook variety, so we used two cups. But I was plum out of coconut, so we grabbed some dried cranberries and macadamia nuts, probably about 1/2 cup altogether. And we added a splash of coconut milk for good measure. Ground it all together, pressed it into an 8x8 pan and baked it in a 350°F oven for about 35 minutes, until it was golden on top. We let it cool a bit, then cut it into squares. They're yummy, but still not perfect: we should have whizzed up the honey and oil before adding the oats and crunchy stuff and the pan should be bigger, like 9x11 to allow for a thinner bar and shorter cooking time.

Poor little mini-prep wouldn't quite have managed the bars, but is perfect for her homemade hummus and nut butters. I'll stick with my old thing for now and rest up for our next cooking date.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Playing favorites

One of the problems with being a good cook is that it's difficult to find a restaurant that does better than I do (or can do). Sure, there are five star experiences, but I'm talking about someplace we can head to as a family when Mom (that would be me) doesn't feel like cooking.
Like this evening. I've been tiling the downstairs shower, and between little mosaic pieces that aren't the same thickness as the field tiles, combined with the fact that the nothing about that room is plumb or square, my head hurts along with my back by the end of the day. Enter one of our favorite places, Teapot, tucked away in a nondescript strip mall in Bellevue. This place inspires me. The first time we went there, on a recommendation from a friend, we tried their Jewel Box, an exquisite presentation of nuts and vegetables in a nori "box." But what made us regulars was their vegetable curry. It's a Singaporean curry, sweet from thick coconut milk, yellow from curry, and chock full of broccoli, tofu, potatoes and cabbage. We actually brought out the spoon to devour the sauce straight from the serving dish.

I liked it so much that I've learned to make it: brown yellow onions in oil, add curry and a bit of garam masala, add a can of coconut milk, some chunks of extra firm tofu (fried chunks are best), a few roughly cut cabbage leaves, some thinly sliced carrots and one coarsely chopped cooked potato. Simmer until tofu is warmed through, them put plenty of broccoli on top, and pop the lid on the pot to steam the broccoli for another ten minutes or so. Serve with rice steamed with a generous pinch of saffron.

Tonight the curry wasn't great--someone in the kitchen gave it a squirt of hot sauce, which none of us care for, but, since we try to taste a new dish each visit, all was not lost. The basil nuggets were out of this world, a deep savory sauce with sautéed onions, tomatoes and tofu chunks. The vermicelli vegetables were also light and delicious. Both are on their way to favorite status.
The problem now is that we have so many favorites, it's hard to decide which one we won't order to be able to try something new. We should all have such problems!

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

A happy love habit

Growing up in California, the chocolate store for special occasions was See's. It was just too expensive for "everyday" chocolate. Ah, but one of the things I learned when I was losing weight was to focus on portion size: I was eating the right things, just too much of them. Since I was limiting the amount of chocolate I ate, I convinced my dear husband that we (he) could afford to shop at See's to keep me in chocolates.

With the dietary restrictions put in place more recently, though, he was a bit at loose ends: his love currency was off-limits because of the milk content. The See's web site, while delightful and enticing, is completely devoid of nutritional information, and the attractive black-and-white boxes only contain composite ingredient lists. But, if I didn't already know how much my husband loves me, I do now. The light of my life went down to the store and had the lady in the nice white uniform produce an ingredients list for every dark chocolate soft center they had (I don't waste my time with nuts). The result of his research was a quarter-pound box under the tree with See's Dark Molasses Chips and Dark Patties (chocolate vanilla caramel).

Unfortunately, the box now weighs considerably less than a quarter pound. But that weight seems to have gone to my heart.

Monday, December 25, 2006

Figgy pudding

"Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat..."

Ah, the traditional Christmas dinner: the Victorian picture-perfect roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, a token spoonful of overcooked peas, followed by the flaming steamed Christmas pudding served up with hard sauce, all dished up midday (or later, depending on the organizational skills of the perpetrator/host.)

Not for us. We snacked our way through the morning, mostly on chocolate, since that what Santa put in our stockings (isn't he smart?). Then this evening, I threw together a pot of coq au vin (lovely, melted onions and leeks, thyme and marjoram, bacon and chicken thighs, and the remainders of two bottles of red wine), some potatoes and Brussels sprouts. This wintery menu, with its roots and kale family seems imminently appropriate to the season, and has special meaning for us. When we decided to wed, we were living in Germany as graduate students. The discussion between equals went something like this: "Let's get married." (Already adept at reading his mind, I could tell he really meant, 'Let's go down to the town hall and be done with it in fifteen minutes') "I would only feel married if we wed in a church." "The only church I would consider would be the cathedral in Bourges." "Okay." That short exchange defined the wedding: it was ours, not our families'--they all lived at least 12 hours away (by car for his; by plane for mine), so we made the decisions. When my husband-to-be said, "I'd like to have a wedding dinner at a cozy inn in the French countryside," I said, "Let's go find one!" When we finally found the right one (after truly exhaustive and inebriating research), the rustic supper that she suggested sounded right for a sure-to-be chilly March evening. A salad of pâté de campagne and avocado, potato pastries, trou berrichon, coq en barbouille (coq au vin thickened with the blood of the chicken in question), all washed down with local wine, Menetou-Salon. The wedding cake also departed from tradition, as I eschewed the showy pièce montée for a homely but rich chocolate decadence cake. A wedding menu of our own, for a wedding on our own terms.
So, this Christmas, we celebrated the season, the bounty of the local harvest (did I mention the food was all local?) and life on our own terms, as we stayed home rather than cave to the requests of family to be present for them.

We did not celebrate traditionally. We'll save that for another time.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Santa's snack

For Santa: a cup of Celestial Seasonings Sunrise C tea (he's out in the cold a lot), a fat slice of cheesecake ("shall we give him cake or cake and cookies?" "Oh, cake and cookies, Mommy!"), three Mexican wedding cakes and one lone Dominostein.

For the reindeer: a bowl of water, and a pitcher to refill it, a bag of oats--the carrots in the fridge were not suitable for even livestock, I'm afraid. Maybe we should have made it hot water, since they're quick-cooking oats.

Norad says Santa is fast approaching, so I'll need to finish up and get to bed, to let visions of sugarplums dance in my head.

Christmas eve

We started off, quite festively, with champagne at the neighbors, enjoying conversation, playing music together, and then playing murders until at the bottom of bottle four, we reached a lull where kids were hungry enough to bring home for supper. After that much champagne, I was quite pleased that I had had the presence of mind to skin the salmon filet before we went over.
I put the water on under the potatoes, then we popped over to the other neighbors for the annual exchange of cookies: I offer up Vanillekipferl, Zimtsterne and Lebkuchen, she reciprocates with her Swedish cookies: Pepperkakkor, Krumkake and Spritz. We have two Christmas-y trays that the cookies go on, and they move back and forth between our houses yearly.
Once the cookie exchange was accomplished, along with the usual catch-up on offspring/girlfriends/niece, we headed home and put on the salmon. I was thinking a nut crust and some pretty fresh cranberries would make for a nice counterpoint to the buttery flesh, but apparently the acid of the cranberries reacted with the carbon steel of my pan, and the juices turned out a grubby grey. Luckily, there was no metallic taste, and it looked worse in the kitchen than by candlelight on the table. The potatoes did the buttery melting thing, with herb salt, and lemon juice gave the steamed broccoli the perfect tang. A lamb's lettuce salad with a lemon-herb dressing made for an elegant but festive supper on a busy evening.
We only managed one of the cheesecakes this evening, but there are enough leftovers that we can resume more scientific testing tomorrow.

The great cheesecake experiment

Christmas dinner this year will be absolutely non-traditional. Our exchange student has invitations for brunch and dinner on the 25th, so we'll celebrate today (I've promised my husband's favorite, coq au vin for our dinner on the 25th.). After a party at the neighbors ("bring your cello, violin and something to drink"), we'll grill up some salmon, potatoes and broccoli and polish it off with cheesecake. Ah, cheesecake, but how shall I make it? Conventional is out, with its milk, eggs and wheat, so it'll have to be an alternative. Since I couldn't decide between a soy-based cream cheese recipe and a tofu-based recipe ("Wait, aren't they both tofu, Mom?"), I made both, adding some Irish cream syrup (more intense flavor than the real item, which Santa is hoping to find with his snack tonight) and a handful or two of chocolate chips. The crust is the same for both, made from Newman's wheat-free chocolate sandwich cookies, sugar and melted butter whizzed together in the food processor.

Which means we'll all have to have at least two slices of cheesecake for dinner tonight. At least.

Party food

Our strategy for potlucks is to always bring what we know we can eat, since we never know if we'll be able to eat what others bring. Yesterday, a rice day, was white elephant gift exchange party with a potluck, so I rolled some sushi. I had some cucumber and avocado sliced into strips and some shrimp that I mixed with mayonnaise for the filling. A little bit of gomasio garnished the cucumber rolls.

Two generous cups of rice make seven rolls (and a couple rice balls), and about five rolls fit on my white square platter. That should mean we have two rolls to nosh on before we leave. My misguided hope is that my kids will be satisfied with that and not make pigs of themselves at the party. The extras, including the shaggy end cutoffs, disappeared as I wrapped the platter in plastic wrap. I got one piece!

Unfortunately, there were slim pickings at this potluck--2 veggie trays, a bowl of grapes, a fruit platter and some cold chicken. The sushi was gone within 15 minutes, and it wasn't just my kids!

Friday, December 22, 2006

Salad is for grownups

They say a child has to try a food several times before they can really decide if they like it or not. The exception to this rule has to be salad. Granted, my experience is based on a very small, scientifically invalid sample (my two boys), but anecdotal evidence (parking lot conversations with other parents), backs it up.

Every night, there is a cooked vegetable and a salad on our table. Every night. Every night, we offer each child the same thing, and they're expected to take a bite or two of at least one of the veggies (granted, sometimes the vegetable is in the main dish). Every night until he was around six years old, number one son opted for the cooked veggie. Sometime around then it changed, and he decided he liked salad after all. Now he chooses the salad most every evening, often in addition to the hot vegetable.

Darling husband went to Costco this week to pick up a mega-pack of jelly bellies for our exchange student for Christmas (two pounds of pure refined sugar really ought to blow his mind). While he was there, he made a couple of impulse buys: a dozen bagels and two dozen croissants. Which means I'm getting creative in making them interesting. Yesterday, the boys got BLA (Avocado, since I was out of Tomato) croissant sandwiches, garnished with a huge leaf of local green lettuce. And that little kiddo couldn't stop raving about the lettuce!

And whaddyaknow, at dinner last night, he opted for the salad, and proceeded to eat a real-sized portion. Guess he's big now!

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Heat, no brownies

That's right, five days after the storm, and I've got a girlfriend still without power. Her genius husband (really, he is excruciatingly intelligent) finally figured that it would be more energy-efficient to hook up the generator to the blower motor on their gas furnace than to run electric space heaters. So they're warm.

But she's craving comfort food, and I can hardly blame her. You can only do so much soup and tea. She wants brownies, but no power means no oven--her gas one has electronic controls. So here's what I told her to do. Fire up the charcoal grill--in the backyard--and grab the Dutch oven out of the camping gear (mine lives in the regular cupboard since I use it even when not camping). Take some brownie mix, or mix up your favorite recipe if you're feeling ambitious, and dump the whole mess into the pot. You might want to butter your pan, but mine is so cured nothing would dare stick to it, especially not a buttery batch of brownies. Now, take the whole covered mess out to the grill, use nice long handled tongs to put 16 coals on top, leaving 8 coals below. Set the timer for 20 minutes, then come and pull the pot off the coals. Another five minutes and you can scrape the coals off the top and use them to roast weenies or whatever. You could cool the brownies and cut them into pieces, but I'm not inclined to do that. Grab a spoon instead. They should be nice and gooey and make you forget all about wind and trees and downed power lines.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Heimweh

When I took German 101 at the community college to prepare for life with my new-found love, the teacher showed a film that we all found hilarious. One scene in particular prompted riotous laughter: a woman filling an immense tin--really the size of a carry-on suitcase--with Christmas cookies. I mean nobody bakes that much, right?

Fast forward twenty years: I bake German Christmas cookies this time of year, since I now understand the wistful feeling that true Germans get this time of year, and how well their favorite cookie helps allay this angst. And, so help me, I even have a huge tin, courtesy of my Nuremberg-dwelling sister-in-law, who in true Swabian (read skinflint) fashion, buys them factory direct, and sends huge packages via DHL. It appears that cookies in quantity make homesick Germans feel better.

My husband's favorite are Vanillekipferl, little melt-in-your-mouth vanilla crescents, made with butter, egg yolks, ground almonds and a token amount of flour, then dredged in vanilla bean-scented powdered sugar. Their companion cookie is Zimtsterne, cinnamon stars, since they use the egg whites. They're essentially nut meringues, cut into six-pointed star shapes and dried in a slow oven. These, it turns out, are the favorite of our exchange student.

This year presents the wheat/egg/dairy free challenge. Rather than start by adapting recipes, I hit the Internet, looking for German gluten free (GF) sites. Bingo! My hunch was right: even Germans with health issues were not going to do without their Christmas cookies! The Vanillekipferl turned out lovely without eggs and flour (I don't consider butter dairy, since it's pure fat). There were other surprises: I didn't expect much of Elisenlebkuchen, those delicately chewy gingerbread made with honey, orange peel and ground almonds, but they turned out to be the best of the bunch, chewy and tart with their lemon icing. But I thought Marzipanhoernchen would behave, since they're mostly marzipan with a few eggs to bind. Clearly egg replacer doesn't make the grade on these: they absolutely lost their shape. I saved them by slicing the thin, bubbling mess into squares before it cooled, then drizzled the squares with chocolate (no sense wasting all that marzipan!). I can always pretend I intended them to come out that way.

It does help to think out of the box, even--or especially--when dealing with tradition. One hot August day back in our student days in Freiburg, I went into the community kitchen in our dorm to bake up some chocolate chip cookies. I was writing my thesis, and really needed some of those gooey bundles of home (together with a tall glass of cold milk) to feed my muse. In waltzed a fellow student (pre-law), asking what I was doing. When I told him I was baking cookies, he looked puzzled, then alarmed, and stated with Teutonic authority, "but it's not December!"
Nope, they're not the way Oma made them, but they're just right for right now.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Aftermath

There are still many in the dark at this point; we are realizing how very lucky we are. But even this misfortune has its upside: for this is the point where the Feast of the Thawed begins. One dear friend had 100 pounds of salmon in her freezer; the top layer thawed too much to refreeze, but not too much to eat! We came home with eight huge King salmon filets, which we promptly reduced to three by giving some away to the neighbors, re-freezing some and making a pot of soup.

Half of one filet, sliced thinly on the diagonal, went into a pot of onions simmering in olive oil. It was joined shortly thereafter by dill, salt, milk and a splash of California Gewürztraminer. A light green salad with avocados and tomatoes was all this meal needed for a tasty Sunday supper. (A loaf of warm crusty sourdough would have been perfect, but between not eating wheat for a while and the absence of bakeries with power, we had to make do with oyster crackers...)

Celebration of Lights

With the power back on, we're back to the task of celebrating. The hard-working linemen got us back on the grid just as the sun was going down. There was great jubilation all around--as you can imagine. But we decided that we still wanted to share our suppers, so the neighbors, whose freezer had barely anything in it, cooked up the thawed spaghetti sauce (being British, they call it ragú sauce, which is of course a brand name here).

I threw together a pot of my vegetable curry. Brown onions in oil and butter, add curry paste and garam masala, throw in chunks of firm tofu, garbanzo beans and simmer. Ten minutes before serving, I place broccoli on top to steam. Basmati rice is in the rice cooker with a generous pinch of saffron to give it a beautiful color and flavor.

For dessert, I needed to use up milk, so I made chocolate soup: 1 cup of milk to 3 oz. good quality semi-sweet chocolate and 1 T of Dutch process cocoa powder. Heat milk, add chocolate & cocoa, stir it to melt, then pour into serving dishes. I've got a set of little espresso cups from IKEA that I use. We had German Christmas cookies, satsumas and comice pears to dunk in the chocolate. We didn't sing, but we did enjoy!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

No juice, no roast

The plan was potluck at a colleague's lovely home, followed by a community reading of Dylan's A Child's Christmas in Wales. I had bought some waxy red potatoes and local Brussels sprouts to roast in olive oil and rosemary to bring. However, we hadn't reckoned with just how hard the wind would blow Thursday night.

The power went out; a bit of a surprise, since we're on the same power grid as Microsoft. We've had no real outages in the ten years we've lived here. But this storm was a biggie. School was canceled. The neighbor had a tree fall across the street onto another neighbor's car, and it took most of the neighborhood to help clear the road. After a few hours of cutting branches and schlepping firewood for next year, I raided the larder and made a steaming pot of lentil soup (with leeks and cauliflower from the fridge, which is rapidly starting to smell). The hostess wisely canceled: even though she has a natural gas-powered generator, the roads were just too much of a mess to go anywhere if we don't have to.

We clearly needed a new plan. No oven, no way to roast those potatoes; ah, but I have my griddle! And, since it's the first night of Hanukkah, potato pancakes were the obvious choice. I grated them up with onion and wrapped them in a dishtowel. There was sour cream and applesauce (from our Gravenstein tree) in the fridge, which needed to be emptied anyway. The Brussels sprouts got the steaming treatment, then slathered in butter. We did a quick inventory of firewood, and decided to meet at the neighbor's for supper. They mashed potatoes and made a stew with leftover steak au poivre. We brought the Menorah; they provided champagne and music stands, and with full bellies and rosy cheeks, we played and sang together until the kid's bedtime.

We lit the stove one more time to boil water for hot water bottles, and tucked ourselves in for a long winter's nap. And we have a plan: if there's no power again tonight, we'll be lighting a fire, and the neighbors will bring their supper (and cello) to our house.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Salad pro tempore

'Tis the season for potlucks, though any season is a good one, if you ask me. Even though some people groan at the mention of one, potlucks build communities, a sorely needed panacea in this fractured society.

As a child, I was amazed at the seeming randomness of potluck offerings, but I'm beginning to see patterns emerge as I grow older. Potlucks happen when a group of people who have a commonality gather to break bread together. A group's first potluck is often risky (unless organized by Methodists or the like, in which case A-L bring main course, M-Z dessert), but successive potlucks stabilize. Some people have standby dishes that they always bring, which are often so good that others come to expect and anticipate them. Others can always be counted on to bring whatever is easy to grab from the supermarket deli. We tolerate their offerings because we enjoy their company. Late arrivals are heralded, not only for the joy of seeing old friends again, but because their offerings placed on the table are a good excuse to revisit the buffet. By the time you've emptied your plate, you can go back an fill it up with a combination of more of the really good stuff plus some of the new.

I serve on a board of directors for the local translators and interpreters association, and we gather for our meetings over a potluck. There is an unspoken code: we can rely on the Belgian project manager for cheese and bread, the Russian conference interpreter always brings something hearty and carb-loaded, the Swedish literary translator lives around the corner from a terrific bakery, the Japanese-English patent translator (who always seems to be on deadline) brings potato chips, and so on. (Our former newsletter editor always brought homemade cookies. We miss her terribly.) The problem is our secretary, or rather her absence. She makes terrific salads, but when she can't make it, we not only have no one to take the minutes, everyone else jumps in with a salad. Last night was a perfect example: the balance being upset by her absence, we had three green salads, a green pepper salad, a frittata, pelmeni (a sort of Russian tortellini) and a bag of honey Dijon potato chips. Since I'm not eating wheat or eggs (my own fault, I know), my dinner consisted a lot of salad and potato chips. One salad in particular was heavenly: red leaf lettuce, avocado, cherry tomatoes and cranberry with a silky vinaigrette. The German technical translator who brought it went home with an empty bowl (labeled with her name, of course). We also asked her to take the minutes.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Crawfish Etouffé

This year's ATA conference took us to New Orleans at the beginning of November. We went a few days early, and took the whole family, since who knows when we'll get back there. We figured it would be an education, and I was certainly looking forward to the regional specialities. Katrina aside, I knew there would be food, and I figured they would prioritize, making what was important to them. I was right.

I was as adventuresome as I could be, trying all sorts of new things (It was funny to note that no one was serving spinach salad, even though the scare was long over). I aimed for combo plates that let me try more than one thing at once. Shrimp gumbo, crawfish étouffé, alligator gumbo (disappointing: the liver-like texture was a real turn-off), pecan pie (with and without chocolate), pralines, smooth court-bouillon, popcorn shrimp, red beans, and fall-apart tender fried catfish. And of course, hot beignets smothered in powdered sugar from the Café du Monde.
Our Halloween day lunch in New Orleans was on a pleasantly sunny day, in a restaurant with its tall windows wide open to the street. I tried a combo plate with a spicy shrimp creole, but the crawfish étouffé won my heart. I was determined to try to make it at home, so I picked up a cookbook in the airport. Once ensconced in my claustophobically cozy airplane seat, I plunged in. No surprise that the recipe called for crawfish (my spell-checker prefers the term crayfish). I figured I should be able to get that locally, as they fish jumbo crayfish right here in Lake Washington, selling it down at the Pike Place Market. The cookbook author assures me it's wonderful with shrimp, so maybe we'll try that first.

But there was a huge surprise: bell pepper. I admit that it's been years since I've eaten bell peppers, since they seem to disagree with me--at least I thought they did. I remember vividly watching my mother cutting the top off of a big green bell pepper, scraping out the seeds, and stuffing it with rice and ground beef & onions, so I know I ate them as a child. But one encounter with them in a Mexican restaurant led me to believe I couldn't manage them anymore. But no matter, that étouffé sat just fine in my belly. So today I bought my first green pepper in two decades, and it simmered away with the shrimp and celery and tabasco sauce (even though the recipe didn't call for that). It was as tasty as I recall, and will definitely enter my repertoire, though I can see it better suited for warm, sultry days. Since we don't get any of that here, rainy ones will have to do.

Oh, and I served it with spinach salad.

Uninspired

The cold rain returned yesterday, that cold rain that would be snow if it were only a bit colder. When I thought of potatoes (since it was Monday), I could only think of mashed potatoes. Luckily, there were russet potatoes in the larder, so I peeled them, plopped them in a pan of water and set them to simmer on the stove. Lacking other inspiration, and preoccupied with the evening's upcoming concert, I grabbed some sausage out of the freezer--where would I be without the microwave to thaw? Mashed potatoes also call for peas, these were Petit Peas from Trader Joe's, also out of the freezer. Uninspired, but apparently comforting: I note that all the mashed potatoes were gone by the time I got to the dishes.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Fish on Friday & the Rhythm Method

Our exchange student must think we're pretty weird. There's a little chart on the fridge (with a cute cartoon of Sandra Boynton's hungry monsters rubbing their tummies) that says what we eat each day. He's getting a trial by fire into the rotation diet.

There are a couple of reasons we rotate our diet, the first being that the doctor told us to. My dear husband would be perfectly content with a brie sandwich washed down with a glass of milk for every meal, every day. Indeed, he did this during the several months that visa expirations separated us, and Costco made it possible to continue this habit on a grand scale. Lo and behold, when his cholesterol reached dangerous proportions, doctors were alarmed. The MD offered him the option of prescription medications for life; the naturopath tested him for allergies and proposed the radical option of rotating his diet. I won't lie and say it was easy; it was anything but. But his cholesterol plummeted from dangerous levels to absolutely picture-perfect. (We also noted other minor health benefits.)

However, after two years of trying to fit a four-day rotation into a seven-day week, I backed off. It was no fun always having to consult the chart on the fridge to determine dinner. Figuring out what next Tuesday's dinner was meant counting on my fingers (Thanksgiving only falls on a wheat day once every four years!). And planning evenings out or trips was a nightmare.
When our eldest started going to school, there were parent evenings where this incredibly impractical woman would give us parenting tips--an interesting notion, since she had none of her own. However, this wisp of a young woman said something that stuck: small children don't have the wherewithal to make choices. Tell, don't ask, she said. Bombarding them from the minute they get up with questions about what they're going to eat, wear, do first, etc., is too much for everyone. Better to establish Monday as oatmeal day, Tuesday scrambled eggs, etc. Indeed, their weekly rhythm at school was well-established, and we soon picked up the lingo: "today is soup day, remember to take a vegetable for the pot!" "Oh, goody, Wednesday is watercolor day!"

When our slacker dietary habits caught up to us in the form of higher cholesterol and blood pressure, our new doctor suggested we restart the rotation. But that kindergarten teacher had given me the key: make it a seven-day rotation. And so there we have it: Monday is potato/almond milk; Tuesday, rice/soy; Wednesday, spelt/goat (or sheep); Thursday, rice/soy; Friday, potato/almond; Saturday rice/soy and Sunday is indulgently normal: wheat and dairy (think bread and cheese, cake and whipped cream).

In the end, it does make things easier. If the omnivore's dilemma is having too many choices, then setting up some sort of rhythm already makes some of the decisions for you. In this day of information overload, the knowledge that I'm making spaghetti (spelt, with sheep's milk Romano cheese) on Wednesday is a comfort. Our family finds comfort, stability and joy in getting one of our favorite meals on a regular basis. And yes, blood pressure, cholesterol and weight are in wonderfully normal ranges.

I recall a theatre teacher telling us that art without discipline was chaos. I find that this 'discipline' creates a framework that actually increases my creativity. I once saw a BBC cooking show where they give a chef a bag of seemingly disparate ingredients, and the chef had to create a dish that used all of them. The rigid rules made the chefs dig deeply into their creativity--which we all know can mean some real doozies, both good and bad.

I also must note that establishing a routine or rhythm for meals is not an entirely new-age-y practice. Think of the Saturday night prime rib dinner at the local diner (and how it always seems to turn up as leftovers in the next morning's special), or the priest urging parishioners to eat fish on Fridays. A friend has a mom who was a Home Ec teacher: they had the same meals weekly (predictably, roast beef on Sunday and fish on Friday). We all readily accept the notion of three meals a day--our language even accommodates this convention.

It turns out oatmeal is not our exchange student's thing. He gave it the old college try, but he's discovered the joys of granola, even on Monday.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Industrial organic

There are a few books that will change the way you view the food you put in your mouth. One of these is Diet for A New America by John Robbins, but the one that came to mind today was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Our family tries in so many ways to reduce our footprint on this Earth. We have a "used" house, remodeled with recycled items wherever possible, we use energy-efficient appliances (and even a few of those annoyingly dim compact fluorescent light bulbs). Our cars are two ancient Volvos (the 'new' one is a 1992). Our clothes come from both thrift shops and retail outlets. And we buy organic food for the right reasons, as well as the selfish ones.

So I feel slightly guilty about today's meals. I didn't really cook today, but I was politically correct enough to buy organic "fast" food. (The only meal I made today was a quick lunch: French onion soup from a mini-brick and a BLT on rye crisp.)

Blame it on the holidays: We got to sleep in this morning, as the kids overnighted at the neighbors while we went dancing. I awoke at 8 and baked up some lemon poppy seed organic muffins from a box of Dr. Oetker, and we breakfasted with the neighbors. It's funny, Dr. Oetker is about as mainstream as you can get in Germany, but you don't find his (their?) boxed mixes anywhere but import shops here; instead the organic line is in every natural food store.

Dinner was a different story: eaten in the car between a holiday party at the swimming school and Number One son's cello recital (his Tarantella was actually quite nice, in spite of a couple glitches). It came in little boxes from Whole Foods, and cost me well over $30 for four people.
I hark back to 1988, and a French friend is ranting about the opening of a bakery in her provincial French town--Pat à Pain was open until 9 pm, and open on Sundays, and she was absolutely livid. Young and American as I was, I thought it was terrific--very convenient and all that. She grumbled something about the younger generation not being able to plan ahead. Dear me, but she turned out to be right! If I had planned ahead, I could have done better than the Whole Paycheck buffet.

I promise to try to do better tomorrow. But as long as I was feeling frivolous, I bought premium gas for the 30-year old Volvo.

Saturday, December 9, 2006

Cocoa

One of the hardest things to give up has been that lovely bacon-and-eggs breakfast that I indulged in when nursing our youngest. Between losing weight and dietary restrictions, I might indulge in the occasional hash browns, but the Full Irish must, alas, be but a distant memory, at least for a while.

To compensate, I've been indulging myself with a mid-morning cocoa.

Now, as a child, breakfast was not my thing. My mother used to jokingly remind me that as a baby, I liked two big meals: one mid-morning, one mid-afternoon. I'm still not a morning person, as our exchange student has learned (I may look awake, but I'm not), and I still don't like most breakfast foods. If I can't have a greasy mess, forget it.

So, after putting in an hour or two at work, I shuffle upstairs and make myself cocoa. Last year at this time, I was using eggnog, thinned with milk (too thick otherwise), but this year, doctor's orders means being creative. I've been experimenting with Silk Soy Nog. It's quite good with Green and Black's Hot Chocolate. Other good combinations are made with almond milk (Blue Diamond's vanilla Almond Breeze is an excellent base). My standby is vanilla almond milk with Ghirardelli Double Chocolate, but I have a whole collection of chocolate to add to hot (almond) milk: the aforementioned Green & Black's, which also comes in an incredibly tasty version called Maya Gold, with cinnamon and chili; Ghirardelli's collection, including the double chocolate, hazelnut (once that's back on the menu) and mocha (for mornings where I need a kick start); and the old standby of Cadbury drinking chocolate. I'm fortunate to have my husband's work colleagues who visit regularly from Ireland, and they keep us in good supply (I trade them peanut brittle and jelly bellies for it).

My mid-morning cocoa break is now over, and I shall get back to work.

Friday, December 8, 2006

Winter Light

Driving over the hill yesterday, the light struck me: that pale, thin winter sunshine. There were dark clouds behind the mountain, which stood out brightly in its new white coat. And the bare trees reminded me of Paris this time of year. There is an elegant beauty to the leafless trees lining the boulevards, and great pleasure in tucking into a good bistro meal on a cold night.

Tonight we were all home, miracle of miracles in this season (it does seem to be busier than ever this year). Dinner was "home bistro"--steak au poivre: I sautéed round steak (local, grass-fed beef), deglazed with a little Cabernet Sauvingnon (electric reindeer?!) and finished off with some sour cream (Tofutti, since it's not a dairy day). A sprinkling of cracked pepper to garnish. French fries from the oven, perfect for pushing through the sauce on your plate. Steamed fresh organic green beans rounded things off. Salad was mâche, radiccio and frisé with avocado and tomato in a raspberry balsamic vinaigrette.

The boys devoured their chocolate St. Nicholauses, while we noshed on cookies from the giant tin, and we had an interesting discussion about why they're hollow, and what it would take to make them solid. My dear husband insisted that the traditional ones were hollow, and had me running around town to find them. I finally found inexpensive ones at the drug store--Russell Stover makes them. They had all kinds of fillings: marshmallow, caramel, but he wanted 30 for his team, and insisted they be hollow.

Anyhow, we talked about how it was much harder to make solid chocolate shapes, since molten chocolate shrinks and leaves dimples as it cools, just like wax when you create candles by pouring. It reminded me how I had been reading Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate by Alice Medrich, and she talked about how she had naïvely made her first truffles with untempered chocolate. She was doing it all wrong, but there were distinct advantages: they had to be eaten fresh, which meant they tasted better, and they melted at a lower temperature, which, if you ask me, makes for a more sensual experience. Not that little boys don't smear chocolate all over their faces anyway.