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….a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town

Thursday, June 11, 2009

I never seem to do things in the right season. I was talking about preserving apples in April, and now, in June, I would like to present my exhaustively-tested sweet potato fries recipe.


photograph by Carlos Scheidegger

And by “exhaustively-tested,” I mean that I eat this pretty much every week. Sweet potatoes are not only easy to prepare this way, they’re useful for not dying of malnutrition; full of vitamins C and A, they’ve also got a ridiculously high fiber content, and a high manganese profile (manganese shows up in the weirdest places: oatmeal, blackstrap molasses, and oysters, for example; I seriously can’t figure what those three have in common).

One sweet potato per person is generally a good rule of thumb, I find, if you’re serving them as a side dish; two and a salad and a beer is a really nice vegetarian meal for a quiet night at home.

Heat the oven to 400-450º (this is not the most precise recipe in the world). Wash and peel sweet potato(es). Depending on the size, you may want to halve it horizontally. Either way, trim the ends. Slice the potato into strips about half to three-quarters of an inch thick.

Toss the fries with olive oil, salt, pepper, cinnamon and cornstarch until well-coated. The cornstarch is the best, most foolproof way I have found to keep the fries crisp. They should be gleaming with oil, but not drowning in it, and the salt, cinnamon, and pepper should be well-distributed throughout the population.

Spread in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake, undisturbed, for ten to fifteen minutes. Then flip the fries so they don’t burn and bake for another five to ten minutes, depending on your oven. (I did say this was imprecise.) If you like them really sweet, in the last three-four minutes, sprinkle brown sugar on the top and turn the broiler on.

I like eating them with soft goat cheese or Greek yogurt (sometimes mixing the yogurt with a bit of Dijon mustard for some kick), but they’re just fine plain. As to whether they reheat well, I have no idea; they generally get eaten within ten minutes of coming out of the oven. They are that good.

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and everytime I eat vegetables it makes me think of you

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Somebody is going to have to explain this to me, because I still don’t get it, no matter how much economic theory I read. I went to the farmer’s market today with forty dollars and an empty stomach. I left with no money and a tote bag full of the following:

  • dozen large free-range eggs
  • two peach yogurts
  • twelve ounces chocolate milk
  • twelve ounces 2% milk
  • one bunch spring onions
  • one sweet potato
  • ½ pound sugar snap peas
  • two pizzas (Yukon gold potatoes, artichokes, and rosemary; tomato, spinach, and pesto)
  • one head of lettuce bigger than my head
  • one pint of tiny, jewellike strawberries


    • photograph by edseloh

    I just fail to understand how this is fair. I keep looking at this list and thinking, “That’s more than forty dollars worth of food. It has to be.”

    (That being said: I am looking forward to Sunday’s market, because I can pick up turkey sausage and mushrooms for crustless quiches and get chèvre and maybe pick up some more rhubarb and make rhubarb-strawberry rice pudding.)

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

cover of The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Occasionally repetitive, occasionally meandering, Omnivore’s Dilemma handles a complex topic well, through a smart and yet not overly-clever lens. Pollan tracks four meals from origin to table — please note, this is not in the tradition of muckraking journalism, Pollan did not set out to, nor did he, write an exposé — with heavy reliance on evolutionary biology and some vivid evocations of Pollan’s experiences. I’m a little troubled by how few women there are in the book; the three major food-mentors Pollan has are men, and all in all, it was just strange, for Liz and Judith and the other women who make fleeting appearance to be so peripheral. At Polyface, only Joel and Daniel and Galen and Peter seem to work in the fields; Salatin’s wife is relegated to a few throwaway comments and making change when they sell chickens. Let me be clear: I don’t think this is intentional, and I doubt it was even conscious. I don’t think Pollan is trying to erase women in agriculture, much less gastronomy. I think he just didn’t notice when they weren’t as powerfully present as men.

There are many points in the book which are troubling because they’re meant to be, like the creepy idea that the industrial-organic niche is even more precarious in terms of bacteria and viruses than conventional produce, because it’s grown on the same scale as conventional agriculture, but without the safety net of antibiotics and the like; the labor practices used by those organic farms, which are as vile and dishonest as the ones at the mammoth industrial farms; the spectre of cannibal cows ankle-deep in manure; and Joel Salatin’s casual dismissal of New York City. (”Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” Because we no longer live in a Jeffersonian world, Mr. Salatin, if we ever did. I’m almost tempted to start talking about how I suspect Polyface is not as replicable as Salatin and Pollan imply, and how I am curious about the depth of Salatin’s engagement in the community and the amount of community and government support he enjoys; a single farm generally isn’t entirely-self-sustaining — no, seriously, Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were has some fascinating statistics on how farmers have depended on government subsidies since before the Constitution — but that is not, actually, the topic at hand.)

One of the most troubling things in the book, in 2009, is the thread that runs through the first section: Pollan isn’t allowed in to see corn being transformed into high fructose corn syrup, nor is he permitted to watch the slaughtering process in a conventional meat factory. It’s hard to avoid hearing the echo of the recent controversy over the release of photographs of military and quasi-military proceedings over the last few years; if the people who are affected by an action — eating hamburgers and drinking soda, going to malls and crossing state borders without going through metal detectors and checkpoints — can’t watch it being done on their behalf, what does that say about the process? (There are two things you never want to let people see how you make ‘em: laws and sausages.)

I’m glad I read this; it is, I think, a genuinely important book, and I like the approach Pollan takes, I like that he examines the practical application of ethics in an industrial and post-industrial society (because his discussion of how few people choose to go into agriculture skirts the issue of how unmechanized a culture we have become), and I really like that he can laugh at himself when he starts writing “hunter porn.”

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Easter bread

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Families are odd. In other news, the sky is up.

I spent part of my weekend taking part in a family tradition that is not my own, and it was disconcerting; a friend came over to use my counterspace and oven, because hers sucks, and she was homesick for her family recipe of Easter bread. S informs me that “Easter bread” is “an old family recipe from my great-grandmother that’s been around for ages. It’s Lebanese in origin, but I’m pretty sure it’s unique to my family. I’ve searched for the recipe in old Lebanese and Middle Eastern cookbooks and haven’t been able to find it anywhere.” The Internet informs us that her family got a mixing of two traditions: Ka’ak was traditionally made by Palestinean Christians in honor of Easter, and Muslims of the Levant made Ka’ak al-Asfar to honor the dead, which recipe is more like the one we used, although we lacked a bread stamp.

I wish I could say that this will become my tradition as well, but I doubt it — while I had a great deal of fun, most of the enjoyment came from the company and the simple process of baking, not the end product, which does not have the Proustian power for me that it does for S. (Of course, my next post will likely be on one of my family traditions, which no one else will find as interesting as I do. But that is why I have a blog.) For five hours of rising time, this stuff should be spectacular, and I just didn’t find it so. I am, however, grateful for the introduction to mahlab, one of the spices involved; ground cherry seed is not a seasoning I had ever heard of before.


photograph by cesarastudillo

Easter bread

Oven: 375° Fahrenheit

Cream ½ cup of granulated sugar with 1 stick butter. Dissolve 2½ teaspoons yeast in 2 cups of milk. Combine milk with creamed sugar and butter. Add 2 heaping teaspoons of anise and 1 heaping teaspoon of mahlab. Mix in five cups of all-purpose flour; turn out of bowl and onto a floured surface. Knead until smooth, adding up to 1 more cup of flour while kneading.

Let rise, covered, five hours in a warm space. Form fist-sized balls of dough and let rise 30 minutes, covered.

Flatten each ball of dough and place on a parchment-covered baking sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until golden brown on the bottom and pale golden brown on top. Optional: Brush with milk and sprinkle with granulated sugar when warm.

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apple chips

Sunday, April 5, 2009

There is a nonzero amount of my time spent in transit, where eating is clumsy at best and horribly messy and embarrassing at worst, and at computers, where eating is verboten (”do you want to break the internet?”). So snacks are important, especially tidy, self-contained ones.

This is the wrong season for this, as more delicate fruit begins to come into season, but I recently figured out how to make apple chips on my own, and it’s so simple that I’ve been eating them a lot.


photograph by garynoon1961

Apples are fibery, vitamin C-full deliciousness; if you get a good variety, they are incredibly sweet (I swear honeycrisps are sweeter than candy) — thou shalt not eat Red Delicious, which may be red but are not delicious, they are tasteless — and do many, many good things for your body.

All you have to do to make homemade apple chips is heat the oven to 200 F, slice an apple (I love Granny Smiths and Galas for this) as evenly as you can (if you have a mandoline, this is when you should use it) to fairly thin:


photograph by Dano
It will almost certainly be easier to halve the apple vertically and slice half-moons than to cut it horizontally, but if you have better fine-motor skills than I do, by all means!

Lay a sheet of parchment paper on a baking sheet and lay the apple slices on the paper; do not overlap them. If you want them extra sweet or flavored, sprinkle granulated sugar/cinnamon/nutmeg/cloves lightly on top. Put in oven, bake for an hour before checking. When dry (lightly browned and curling at the edges), you can either put the slices on a rack, to ensure complete dryness, or move the slices into containers immediately. Grab on your way out the door in the morning.

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potatoes and chevre? why didn’t I think of this before?

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

I’m still on something of a goat cheese kick — and as winter finally seems to be going away, I present a last curl-up-in-blankets-and-nom recipe.  (Oh, let’s face it, last…for today.  I like curling up in blankets and nomming.)

You can use several varieties of potatoes for this, but I’d suggest Yukon golds or tiny red potatoes, which give different but equally pleasing effects.  Theorginal recipe from the New York Times included fingerlings in that list, but I thought they held together too much; I like my potato salad to be warm and amalgamated.


photograph by Kok Robin

Make a vinaigrette of white wine/sherry/champagne vinegar, lemon juice, Dijon vinegar, and olive oil (you can use buttermilk or Greek yogurt for half the olive oil, if you want; it really adds to the creamy quality of the salad) to your taste.  Set aside.

Cube small potatoes into dice a little less than an inch across; steam or boil until tender but not falling apart.  (If you can get your hands on them, chop some fresh herbs while they’re cooking; parsley or sage or basil are my favorites. Some people like thin-sliced red onion in this, as you can see in the photo; I don’t.) Drain. Toss with vinaigrette and as much chévre as you want, at least two ounces.

Curl up in a blanket and eat, wiggling your toes with pleasure at being warm.

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fooding!

Sunday, February 8, 2009

There’s something very new and exciting at the 114th Street farmer’s market: soft cheese. There’s been a few different dairy stands there over the months, and I’ve been lucky enough to pick up not only milk and cream but cheddar and a few other aged cheeses from them. But now, there’s a stand that has feta and chèvre and if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to go get another slice of bread with herbed chèvre, because it’s delicious. (The goat milk soap looks fantastic, too, but I ran out of cash today; once I get around to buying some, I’ll probably wax eloquent, or at least long-winded, about it too.)

I’m back to buying my staples at the market, I think — it wasn’t fun there for a while, a combination of how much I hate winter and inadvertant scheduling conflicts making it hard to get there. But today I got apples and milk, as usual (and boy am I glad of it; I’ve missed good milk, and never mind that it was my own fault for spending my money at actual brick and mortar stores), as well as mesclun and carrots and butternut squash….and chèvre. I know, I mentioned it, but it bears repeating.

Tentative plans for the week include chicken with chèvre and figs, warm potato and goat cheese salad, and some kind of butternut squash soup.

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meme

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Rachel Barenblat, the Velveteen Rabbi, tagged me for a seven things you don’t know about me meme. I’m a big fan of numbered and lettered lists, so: onward!

  1. A few weeks ago, I dyed my hair with henna. I naturally have dark blonde, wavy hair; the henna has turned it into a gorgeous red-gold that glows in sunlight, and loosened the waves quite a lot. I’m not sure if I’ll keep up with it — not least because it completely alters my makeup — but I really do think it’s pretty.
  2. I’m utterly convinced that the 42nd Street library has every book I could possibly want to read in their catalog; they have never failed me in a search.
  3. I taught myself HTML and CSS to the point where I get paid for it. And think it’s fun. (I make birthday presents of website layouts.)
  4. I’m incapable of sitting through a movie without talking back to it.
  5. I genuinely like country music; most of it non-ironically. I’m aware this is incredibly uncool, and I can’t bring myself to care. It’s fascinating.
  6. I have a really good visual imagination, but a crap visual memory; I have a hard time describing even family members in physical terms.
  7. I go through about two quarts of milk a week, even when I live entirely alone. Most of that milk goes into tea.

I’m tagging common periwinkles, eat make read, Not Eating Out in New York City, and The Bitten Word, if they want to do it.

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somewhere over the rainbow

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

I am never doing that again.

The last time I was around these parts, I was making all kinds of sadfaces about culinary amnesia, myopia, whatever you want to call it. Then I visited family and ate comfort food and shoveled a millionty inches of snow, which left me feeling up to tackling smitten kitchen’s rainbow cookies.

Never again.

Don’t get me wrong: they were delicious (don’t click away! just because you know the ending doesn’t mean the rest of the story can’t be enjoyable! this blog is not a murder mystery, or if it is, think Dorothy L. Sayers!). They were just an unbelievable amount of work. And I cheated. Not only did I have a faithful minion, J., but we decided that 3 and 8 look enough alike that it would be okay to take the cookies out of the refrigerator where they were resting after three hours. Instead of eight. Yeah.


photograph from afagen

And yet: utterly delicious. Other than that (and running out of almond extract and probably not whipping the egg whites all the way to “stiff, glossy peaks”), though, I used deb’s recipe exactly. So I’m not going to bother reposting it; I will say only that this is easily the single most time-consuming recipe I have ever made (J. is going to show up and refute this, I bet you anything), one of the prettiest, and one of the most impressive. People have been shocked that rainbow cookies can be made at home, and then they’re shocked by how much work they are, and then, finally, they’re shocked at how good they taste.

On second thought, I may make these again, on three conditions: one, that the reason is a very good one (a wedding or a birth would be an example); two, that I am in someone else’s kitchen, with sufficient room and counters and a dishwasher; three, that I get to play with the colors and not use the traditional pink, white, green pattern. I think a purple stripe would be nice, don’t you?

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insert sadface here

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

If you can eat it and it doesn’t give you food poisoning, it’s not a failure.

That said, pretty much everything I have made over the last two weeks or so has been….not really something I want to admit to cooking. Beef stew that didn’t thicken (I blame the crockpot, which I am really unenamored of), coffee cake that was wet in the middle, salmon with yogurt sauce that was utterly tasteless, potstickers that tore and tasted unspeakably foul, grainy butternut squash risotto…It’s been a bad run. I did make one kickass vegetable stirfry, one night when I desperately needed some comfort food, and the stars aligned or something, because I got my comfort dinner. Other than that, though, it’s been Annie’s mac and cheese and carrot sticks and hummus and sandwiches from the panino place in the next building. And ginger tea, because my body was cranky about not being fed well (and therefore rejected all food pre-emptively. Good call there.) while under stress anyway.

Whether the inability to judge a recipe and ingredients came first, a sort of culinary myopia, leading to my brain’s current thinking strike, or whether I couldn’t think straight about dinner after long days spent putting out fires and acquiring new assignments at work and feeling out of control there, doesn’t really matter. It’s been a bad run in pretty much every way imaginable.

And I’m not sure how to break it; some superstitious part of me wants to salt the edges of the kitchen, maybe the apartment, paint runes on the doorjambs, something symbolic. I could go on as I’ve been doing, and wait for some invisible seismic shift in the world, cooking only the things I can make with my eyes closed (I’ve never yet messed up oatmeal, for example, although I did manage to burn rice last week), and hope I manage to re-learn whatever the hell it is that I’ve forgotten. I could give myself a sabbatical from cooking, declare that I am off the hook for making anything edible for the next….week maybe? However long I need to stop feeling dread when I go into the kitchen.

One of the many reasons I love cooking (usually) is its mysterious combination of magic and chemistry; if you melt butter and whisk flour into it, it will get thick! Every time! And yet — souffles fall, vanilla floats invisibly in the back of chocolate-chip cookies, madeleines make Proust tremble in a trance, and we can’t put our finger on why. But it doesn’t feel like magic right now. It feels like work.

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