something new

This site isn't totally operational yet, but I suggest you check it out, and bookmark it for the future: mennogourmet.wordpress.com

observations from the last month, not all of them culinary

1. I had yak meat for the first time, in the form of yak kebabs at my cousin Jess's wedding. It was really good meat, tender and fully flavored. This might have been because of the marinade, or the grilling job. Either way, I would definitely eat yak again. Here's hoping this restaurant gets it on the menu. It would make sense, wouldn't it?

2. When making pizza for 15 people (6 pies), the cornmeal used to slide the pizza off the peel and onto the stone will build up in the oven. It will cause black smoke to roll out of your oven every time you open it. You should take down and disable your smoke alarm as a preventative measure, and open all the doors and windows that you can. Still, the pizza will keep on tasting delicious. (I used some King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour in the crust this time around, and I liked it.)

3. "Summer" in Alaska can mean 45 degrees, with constant rain. There was new snow on the mountains around Anchorage in July. In the last two weeks I have wished several times for another sweater, warmer boots, and gloves. I spent eight hours on a glacier cruise out of Seward, eight hours on a bus trip in Denali National Park, and several hours at an outdoor wedding being cold and wet. Oh, Alaska. Sometimes you're not very easy to love.

4. Making chocolate pudding late at night with my sister is fun. I wish she lived closer, so we could cook together more often.

5. I ate steamer clams for the first time at Ray's Waterfront Restaurant in Seward, and they were really good. I think it was more the broth than the clams. The clams themselves were small and a little chewy. The broth was amazing. It had white wine, butter, herbs, garlic and onions in it. I sopped it up with bread and wiped the bowl clean. I think I could eat cardboard cooked in a broth like that.

6. I was asked to provide communion bread for church, and I took my duties quite seriously. What kind of bread would Jesus eat? I hazarded a guess that Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread would be right up there. So I made it for the first time, and was pleased with the results. Next time I might make it into two loaves--in my oven, one loaf rose up so big that the top burned a little. I didn't cook the bread in a Dutch oven. I just slid it directly onto my pizza stone, and poured hot water onto a roasting pan under the stone to make steam. It worked fairly well. Still, I can't help but wonder if it would have turned out better in a Le Creuset Dutch oven. Would Jesus condone a $200 purchase just to make better bread? What if it was multi-purpose, and made really great stews and casseroles?

Our 4th Anniversary

..is this Thursday, July 3rd. Last week my Uncle Clint emailed me a few video clips of our wedding that he found while sorting through his archives. These clips are quite short, around 8 seconds each, but I thought I'd share them anyway. It's been a good four years. We're off on a backcountry hike in the Wrangells for the next few days to celebrate. Have a great weekend, everyone!



Rachel washes Krestia's feet



Krestia washes Rachel's feet




Cousin Alec plays bagpipes for the recessional

Easy Apricot Almond Tart

I have been more and more into recipes that involve the word "easy." Recently my cooking has not been ambitious or creative. It has been fueled by convenience and speed. Like, how quickly can I get decent food into my mouth?
Two weeks ago I made a rhubarb tart with fresh rhubarb from my cousin's yard. I made a double batch of tart crust and saved the extra crust, figuring I would use it somehow. Two weeks went by, and I finally bought some fresh apricots at Fred Meyer, and decided to make them into a tart. I found this recipe on epicurious and went with it. (A note: part of what makes this recipe "easy" is a store-bought pie crust. My standards may be slipping, but I just can't go there yet.) I recommend making it, but with a few changes. You may have guessed this already, but a two-week old crust is very dry, and I ended up putting it into the tart pan in pieces and smushing them together. So probably use a fresh crust. Still, it tasted good. The first slice I had, while it was cooling, was way too sweet. I think the store bought apricot jam I used was really sweet. However, the next day the sweetness was reduced. Still, I would maybe reduce the sugar to 1/4 cup, or add some lemon juice to the jam to balance out the sugar. Also, I think the apricots I used weren't totally ripe, so it took longer in the oven to get them soft, thus the top is a bit browner than I'd like. I was pleased with how quickly this tart came together, since I had the crust made already. Easy gourmet, that's what it's about.

monthly review?

Perhaps I was a little ambitious with that weekly review thing.

Recent cooking highlights include the arrival of a fresh crop of California asparagus, inspiring me to cook scallops with asparagus and lemon-asparagus pasta. The scallops were good, but not great. I keep trying new seafood and hoping I'll like it. I can eat scallops but from what I've tasted so far I won't go out of my way to cook them at home. I was excited to try a real beurre-blanc sauce. It just tasted like melted butter, which is essentially what it is. I do love butter, but I was hoping for a bit more of an interesting taste. The lemon asparagus pasta was mostly my own creation. Basically, saute half a pound of asparagus (chopped into 1/2 inch pieces) and a few cloves of garlic (sliced) in olive oil until tender. Add the asparagus and garlic to 1/2 lb of cooked angel hair pasta and mix in the zest and juice of one lemon (I had an extra half lemon in the fridge, so I guess I did the juice of one and a half lemons). Mix in some pasta water to keep it loose, and top with grated Parmesan and salt and pepper. Tastes like spring.

We also hosted a going-away party last week for a few of my husband's co-workers. We prepared for 10-15 people and ended up with six people, so we've been enjoying leftover pizza, ice cream (I made homemade chocolate--yum) and fancy alcohol since. I have discovered a few mixed drinks that I like. One is called the Greyhound, and it's so simple: vodka and grapefruit juice. We bought this kind of gin and made some great gin and tonics for some friends last week. While hiking yesterday, my husband stopped me and pointed out some berries on a low bush by the trail. He crushed one and had me smell it--mmm, the smell of gin, which is made from juniper berries (well, the gin we bought is made from spruce berries, but close enough). My husband loves the forest and the outdoors so much, he drinks the taste of it.

We got a shipment today of one of the food items we miss the most from the lower 48: maple syrup. My husband's parents sent it to us. We were just about out of the jug we got from my husband's brother last year. Up here in Alaska they make birch syrup, which just isn't the same. Now I'll be looking forward to September, when my parents send me a box of freshly picked New York apples for my birthday. Otherwise I'm happy with the food here, especially the fresh salmon that will be coming in the next few months. Yum. Oh, and we're down to one handful of wild blueberries in the freezer. Unfortunately we have to make those berries last until August. Hopefully we will be picking a lot more this year!

Travel edition--Alaskan fishing towns

So...there hasn't been a lot of innovative cooking being done at home for the last few weeks. I traveled to Kodiak for work April 28th through May 1st. Then Krestia and I took a weekend trip to Cordova May 9th through May 11th, just because. In between all of that, there has been a lot of quick meals, leftovers, and eating out.

However. I always like to have culinary adventures when I travel. Sadly, I never remember to take food pictures when traveling. Sorry about that. In Kodiak, I had a great fish and chips lunch at The Channel Side Chowder House, a nice little restaurant on the edge of town by the water. While we ate, we watched fishing boats go in and out, followed by seagulls and bald eagles looking for scraps. The meal came in a basket--two large pieces of halibut with a wonderfully crispy coating on top of a pile of good fries. The accompanying tartar sauce wasn't the typical kind--there was some spices mixed in, maybe paprika and thyme. Usually I don't like tartar sauce much, but I liked this. I ate a whole basket by myself. The two ladies I was with split a basket, so I think they were a little shocked to see a small person devouring a large amount of food. Oh well, I was hungry. :)

In Cordova, our best meal was probably Sunday afternoon lunch at Baja Taco. This is a great little taco stand headquartered in an old red bus that has been converted into a kitchen. The bus is parked right next to a cozy little building. You order through one of the bus windows, then take your food next door, where there is free wireless. Krestia got fish tacos (made with salmon) with rice and beans and I had tortilla soup with a quesadilla on the side. It was a perfect meal for a rainy, cold afternoon.

Now that we're back in Anchorage, I'm looking forward to going to the Farmer's Market this weekend. It opened last weekend. I'm excited, but I have to keep telling myself there won't be much produce available. I'm longing for all kinds of spring produce, but here in Alaska, there really isn't anything until late June. Maybe a few greens and herbs that they started in a greenhouse, which sell out quickly because we all are desperate for something fresh. Mostly there will be flowers, and potatoes left from last winter. What are you all cooking with your spring produce?

My new favorite pizza

The pizza experiments continue in our kitchen. We're eating pizza twice a week or so and debating all the nuances of crust texture, crispness, chewiness, how airy or dense it should be, etc. It's a fun process. Krestia prefers the basic pizza dough recipe in the Joy of Cooking but it needs some altering. We've found that it rises too much in the oven, producing more of what I would call a foccacia instead of a pizza crust. It needs to be more flat and crispy instead of bread-like. So he decreased the yeast which helped a little. Shaping the dough is an important part of the process, too. It takes time to really work it into a nice flat circle. Krestia likes to be really Italian and toss the dough in the air.

While Krestia focuses on the technicalities of the crust, I've been playing around with toppings. He tends to be a basic red sauce and mozzarella guy, but I convinced him recently to try the Backpacker Pizza at Moose's Tooth--fresh spinach topped with sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, feta, mozzarella and provolone. Yum. We combined that in our heads with the Goat pizza at Great Northern Pizza and came up with what I call, for lack of a better term, the Mediterranean pizza. Or maybe I should call it the Goat Backpacker? :) Anyway, I spread a thin layer of olive oil over the crust, then put down a layer of fresh spinach leaves, trimmed of rough stems and cut in half if they're big leaves. Then I add artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives and roasted garlic. Over all of that I crumble some soft goat cheese, then slide it into a 500 degree oven (that has been preheating with a pizza stone in it for 15-30 minutes) for around 5 minutes. It doesn't look nearly as pretty when it comes out (the spinach wilts and gets a little brown) but it tastes really, really good.