MennoGourmet

something new

2008-09-19T11:13:00.002-08:00

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

2008-08-04T17:15:00.004-08:00

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

2008-07-01T18:11:00.005-08:00

..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

2008-06-26T17:14:00.005-08:00

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?

2008-06-02T18:20:00.003-08:00

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

2008-05-14T17:28:00.004-08:00

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

2008-04-16T19:20:00.004-08:00

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.

Taste Test

2008-04-11T21:07:00.002-08:00

An essential part of the cooking process.

Weekly Review, 3-31 through 4-6

2008-04-07T18:19:00.003-08:00

I'm already behind on my weekly reviews. Sigh.

On Monday, March 31st, I made Chorizo and Mushroom Fideua. Sounds fancy, yes, but it's really baked spaghetti in tomato sauce with a few fun ingredients. The spaghetti (well, angel hair) is cooked in the sauce, not in water, and then the whole thing goes in the oven to make it nice and crusty on top. My husband loved it. I liked it, but it kinda reminded me of the spaghetti casseroles from the church potlucks of my youth. It was a little mushy below the crusty top but it's not supposed to be the "al dente" Italian way of pasta. This is something altogether different. Anyway, try it out if you're interested. We had it with a white wine (Viognier, I think).

On Tuesday, April 1st, we had Kashi frozen pizza. This is not an April Fool's joke. I sometimes sink to the depths of frozen pizza, for the sheer ease of it. Be warned, however: I have not yet found what I consider to be a good frozen pizza. Most of them have crusts that manage to be too crisp on the bottom and too doughy in the middle, with bland toppings. This was a chicken and roasted garlic pizza, and was passable for a quick dinner. My husband had to eat fast in between work and an evening meeting, so it worked. When I make a frozen pizza I like to console myself with a nice side dish, so I made steamed broccoli in the microwave, then combined it with sauteed garlic, olive oil and lemon. Yum.

On Wednesday we had one of my other quick meal favorites, Chicken Curry. This is from a cookbook compiled by some of our college friends. I can make it in half an hour (including thawing out frozen chicken) and it tastes good. If anyone's interested in the recipe, I'll be glad to email it to you, but I won't write it out here. We top it with diced apples, sunflower seeds, dried coconut, peanuts and raisins.

On Thursday we splurged and went out to eat at Orso. We had never been there before and had always heard good things about it. It was a fun experience. Somehow I was in the mood for a steak, so we went against the gender lines and I got a 12 oz ribeye (which I could only finish half of!) while my husband ordered the seafood paella. We had fried ravioli for an appetizer and split a piece of tiramisu for dessert. Decadent, and calorie-heavy.

Friday was leftovers, so I'm going to skip over that and continue on to the weekend. Saturday night we cooked a Japanese feast for ourselves. Behold:

Scallops with shiitake mushrooms, snow peas, carrots and ginger, on udon noodles, with miso soup. I made the soup. My husband made the main dish. The recipe is in Extending the Table, and it's actually supposed to be Chicken with Snow Peas. We substituted scallops, with pleasing results. This is an intensely flavored dish, with soy sauce, sesame oil, and lots of ginger. My husband thought the scallops were overwhelmed by all that flavoring but I really liked how they soaked up the sauce. I'm not huge on the flavor of seafood to begin with, so I was happy. He wants to try a recipe for scallops in a light sauce to let their flavor really come through. Anyway. The miso soup was a first for me. I didn't realize how much dried seaweed expands when you add it to soup--it ended up being more of a seaweed soup than a miso soup! But now I have all the ingredients and the soup is so quick to make, so I can keep experimenting.

Finally, we made homemade pizza on Sunday! We got this pizza stone from Habitat Housewares and enjoyed a crispy, chewy homemade crust (basic recipe in the Joy of Cooking) topped with store-bought sauce and mozzarella. We have some tweaking to do to make the crust thinner, but with my fastidious Italian husband as the pizza chef, I have no doubt that we will soon be making mighty good pizza. When we get it all worked out, we'll throw a pizza party. Be prepared for a very hot apartment. 500 degrees in our small place really heats things up!

MennoGourmet Weekly Review

2008-03-27T20:59:00.004-08:00

I'd like to introduce what I hope will be a regular feature on my blog: "MennoGourmet Weekly Review." And yes, I stole the title partially from this newspaper. I also was thinking of an old Mennonite joke--thrifty Mennonites have "Mennonite Weekly Review" for dinner on Sundays, as a way to clean up all the leftovers from the previous week. All of that to say that I hope this idea will help me to be more consistent in blogging once a week. I will present to you what I (and usually my husband) ate for dinner for the past week. I love food and I love to cook, but it is a challenge to get a good meal on the table every night after work. I hope to share some of what works for us and to hear what works for you.

So we'll start with this week, even though it's only Thursday.

Monday night we ate at this restaurant. We usually go out to eat once a week, but didn't go out last week, so we splurged and went out on a Monday. The first time we ate at Thai Kitchen, we ordered things spicy and almost couldn't eat them. This time around we had milder dishes. So far everything we've had there has been delicious. Can you tell already that I'm not much of a thrifty Mennonite? We go out to eat too much. But heck, we both work full-time, so I say we should enjoy some of the perks. :)

Tuesday night I made Chicken with White Wine and Mushrooms. I made a few changes--I used boneless skinless chicken breast and I added some dried basil, oregano and a little crushed red pepper to the sauce. I used a semi-dry Reisling for the wine in the sauce and we drank the rest of the bottle with dinner. It was yummy. I cooked angel-hair pasta to go along with it.

Wednesday night I made a stew with Italian sausage, French green lentils, chopped onion, carrot and green pepper, and a can of diced tomatoes. It turned out well given that I mostly made up the recipe after reading a lot of similar ones online. I especially liked the finishing touch--a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar stirred into the stew just before eating.

Tonight I made one of our favorite "I want to eat soon but I don't feel like cooking much" meals, sweet potato quesadillas. The recipe is from Simply in Season, but basically it goes like this: saute onion, garlic, and grated sweet potatoes with a bunch of spices (chili powder, cumin, cayenne, oregano, basil) until soft. Make a quesadilla with some cheese (I use a mixture of Colby Jack and White Cheddar) on the bottom, a layer of the sweet potato mixture in the middle, and more cheese on top to hold it all together. Eat with salsa, sour cream and guacamole if you have it (we just had salsa tonight).

So far, a pretty typical week. I tend to cook one fancy meal at home per week that we have with wine. I usually do one quick and easy meal, and then something in between fancy and quick. That covers three nights, then we go out to eat once. The other night we might have leftovers, or another quick meal. I find that I really only have enough culinary energy to cook fancy one or maybe two nights a week.

I'll finish with a picture I took earlier this week. Daylight Savings and the lengthening daylight here have led to long, sunny evenings, with the sun setting around 8:30 pm, and glorious sunsets out our living room window. We saw this on Tuesday night:

The Shrine of St. Therese

2008-03-05T20:15:00.008-09:00

If you're ever in Juneau, I highly, highly recommend visiting this place. It's about 20 miles north of downtown on the Glacier Highway going out of town. There's a little sign pointing to the left at mile marker 23 or so. After parking in the lot, I walked down a trail towards the coast. This is what I saw:

It doesn't look like much, just a teeny island off the coast with rocks around it. But...walk across the causeway and under the trees....

This little chapel is in the center of the island. A trail borders the island with all the stations of the cross along the way. It's a beautiful, meditative place. I walked. The trees dripped. I tried to take pictures, but with only a point-and-shoot under a canopy of trees on a rainy day, I didn't get really good ones. I wished for my photographer-husband, who would have taken pictures that captured the beauty of this place. Here's my feeble efforts:

One of the stations of the cross--I think resurrection? but I'm not sure

Christ among the Sitka Spruce.

View from the island overlooking Lynn Canal.

Sadly enough, after wandering around the island for half an hour or so, my cell phone rang. Of all places for my cell phone to ring, this really felt like an intrusion. But I was in Juneau for work, and this call was work-related, so I took it, and soon left. I hope to be back, and next time I'll turn my phone off.

Juneau trip

2008-02-29T17:00:00.006-09:00

I went to Juneau February 25th through the 29th, also for my job. I spent two of those days at the state capitol, talking with legislators and lobbying for increased funding for services for people with disabilities. If you're interested in learning more, check out the website for the Key Campaign. I had the luxury of having a rental car for the week, so I was able to get out a little and enjoy the scenery Juneau has to offer--the Tongass National Forest, Mendenhall Glacier, and the Shrine of St. Therese (separate blog post coming on that last one--I took a lot of pictures!). Here's a brief sampling for you:

Mendenhall Glacier, about 12 miles outside of downtown Juneau.

Hills by the glacier. The Tongass is a rain forest, thus all the fog and gray skies. There was some form of precipitation every day I was there--rain, snow, a mix, some of each in the same day. Next time I go I'll need some knee-high rain boots.

Downtown Juneau, taken from the sidewalk by the harbor. The city is squeezed between the ocean and the mountains, and there is a real risk of avalanches (see here). It is a great little city with lots of fun shops and hilly, winding streets.

North Slope winter trip

2008-02-29T16:38:00.007-09:00

I went to Barrow again for my job February 11th through February 15th. During that time I flew out to two small villages, Nuiqsut and Point Lay. I was sufficiently afraid of the cold, so I stocked up on a lot of warm gear. Thankfully the weather wasn't that bad...only 20 below zero instead of 40 or 60 below! (Apologies to those with facebook accounts...you have seen these pictures already!)

Rachel the Eskimo

"Palm trees" outside of Barrow, Alaska. The fronds are made of baleen!

Wind-swept snow in Barrow.

A blurry shot of reindeer by the airstrip in Point Lay, AK.

one year in Alaska

2008-01-30T16:38:00.000-09:00

We celebrated with an old standby, the usual salmon recipe, along with buttered and herbed pasta, green salad and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. The food was delicious, but I was more excited about the dishes we ate it on. For my birthday this past September, my husband arranged to have some pottery made for me to match a set we got from my Aunt Debbie for a wedding present. The pottery arrived last week, and we now have place settings for 5--dinner plate, salad bowl and soup bowl. I love the cool green color, and the variation in each piece that comes with being handmade. All the green pottery you see in the pictures was made by Dick Lang, a ceramic artist in Alfred Station, New York. Thanks so much to him for adding more beauty to our everyday lives! Thanks for the amazing packing job, too...all the pieces made the long trip to Alaska intact.

In other news, I made this coffee ice cream last week. It could almost be called espresso ice cream. The coffee flavor was strong but delicious. As it melted in my bowl, I imagined I was eating the thick, foamy cream off the top of a cappuccino. Mmmm. Next, I think I'll try a basic chocolate ice cream.

the first batch

2008-01-19T14:51:00.000-09:00

I am proud to report that I have accomplished two of my resolutions already, and it's not even February yet. I had our pastor over for dinner, and made my first batch of ice cream for dessert that night. The next night I had my cousin Joe and the Judges, a family of 6 from church, over for dessert (we ate the rest of the ice cream). Good thing I had some easy resolutions. :)

I made cinnamon ice cream by tweaking the French vanilla ice cream recipe that was in the booklet that came with my ice cream maker. Here's the recipe. This is a half batch since I don't have a container large enough to store a whole batch in my freezer! Start this the day before, or in the morning if you're planning on making ice cream that evening. Oh, and if you have a KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment, make sure it's in the freezer 15 hours before you want to use it.

Heat 1 1/4 cups whole milk (or half and half, if you want the richest experience--I used whole milk) until warm but do not boil. Add one cinnamon stick, broken into a few chunks, and a sprinkle of ground cinnamon (to add some nice specks of color to the ice cream). Cover and keep warm.

In a mixer, beat 4 egg yolks with 1/2 cup sugar until fully mixed. Remove cinnamon stick from milk and pour in a slow stream into mixer. Once fully mixed, return the mixture to the saucepan and heat slowly (I put the cinnamon stick back in at this point). Heat until little bubbles form around the edge, stirring constantly. Do not boil. Transfer mixture to a large bowl (leave the cinnamon stick in). Add 1 1/4 cups of whipping cream, a teaspoon of vanilla and 1/8 teaspoon (or a small pinch) of salt. Mix gently and refrigerate until completely cool (8 hours).

When you're ready to make the ice cream, attach the freeze bowl, dasher and drive assembly to the mixer. Turn to STIR (Speed 1). The machine has to be running before you pour the batter in. Remove the cinnamon stick. Pour the ice cream mixture into the freeze bowl. Continue on STIR for 15-20 minutes or until desired consistency. Immediately transfer ice cream into serving dishes or freeze in an airtight container.

It's hard for me to be patient while the ice cream is churning. I had to check on it every few minutes. Time goes by so slowly when you're waiting for homemade ice cream! It is well worth the wait, though. It melts quickly since it doesn't have any stabilizers, so be prepared for a soupy mess in your bowl if you don't eat it fast enough.

Since we had seven people over for dessert and I had made a small batch of ice cream, there was only enough for each of us to have a little scoop with a brownie. On the way out the door, the seven year old, Noah, said, "Next time, can you make more ice cream?" Yes, I told him, I certainly will. Large freezer containers are on my shopping list.

SADness?

2008-01-12T10:05:00.000-09:00

One of the most common questions I get about living in Alaska is, "Isn't it dark there all the time during the winter? How can you stand that?" After answering that question over and over again while we were home for Christmas, I began to think a little bit more about it. I don't consider myself to be a "back to the earth" kind of person, though I would like to be a little bit more. There is very little about my life that changes with the seasons. I get up and go to work five days a week, whether it's light or dark or cold or warm. True, in the winter it's a bit more of a process, but my life doesn't change drastically because of it. Often the people that ask this question are like me. We don't forage for our food. We stay indoors the majority of the time. We drive most places. We use artificial light whenever it's dark out. So why does it matter so much to people that it's darker in Alaska in the wintertime?

I've been learning more about Seasonal Affective Disorder since I've been here. It's more prevalent here and I've have some acquaintances at work who are being treated for it. I realize that it's a serious condition causing depression, but I like thinking about the connection between our bodies and light from the sun. I like that our bodies still respond to the world around us even when we've become so industrialized. I think most of us feel a touch of SADness during the winter. Here's a list of symptoms, taken from the Seasonal Affective Disorder Association's website:

Sleep problems:	Usually desire to oversleep and difficulty staying awake but, in some cases, disturbed sleep and early morning wakening
Lethargy:	Feeling of fatigue and inability to carry out normal routine
Overeating:	Craving for carbohydrates and sweet foods, usually resulting in weight gain
Depression:	Feelings of misery, guilt and loss of self-esteem, sometimes hopelessness and despair, sometimes apathy and loss of feelings
Social problems:	Irritability and desire to avoid social contact
Anxiety:	Tension and inability to tolerate stress
Loss of libido	Decreased interest in sex and physical contact
Mood changes	In some sufferers, extremes of mood and short periods of hypomania (overactivity) in spring and autumn.

Most sufferers show signs of a weakened immune system during the Winter, and are more vulnerable to infections and other illnesses.

I don't know about other Alaskans, but I've noticed a few of these in particular this winter. I have been sleeping a lot. I get tired as early as 9 pm. I have been wanting to eat a lot of starchy and sweet food. I don't like to go out after I get home from work. I don't know if this has to do with wanting to avoid social contact or just that I want to stay warm and not deal with starting the car, brushing it off, and driving somewhere on slippery roads. Maybe I have a mild case, or what most of us call "the winter blues." I'm not worried. I hear on the radio every day how many more minutes of sunlight we're getting. Today the sun rises at 10:02 am and sets at 4:14 pm, giving us 6 hours and 11 minutes of daylight, a gain of 3 minutes and 43 seconds over yesterday! Getting outdoors during the brief daylight on the weekends helps too. Last weekend we went skiing on Saturday and Sunday. Winter is beautiful with all the snow and mountains up here.

Here's a recipe to indulge in when you're craving carbohydrates. Be warned, there's no protein and it's probably high in calories. I improvised and came up with this a few days ago when I made pasta, then looked in my cupboards for a jar of pasta sauce that I thought I had. There was no sauce. What to do, then, with half a pound of linguine? I had already made this chicken recipe and was envisioning having it with pasta and red sauce. Instead, I started thinking about something my husband used to order at an Italian restaurant in Rochester. It was pasta with garlic and oil, or "aglio e olio." Here it is, in all its greasy, carby goodness:

Cook 1/2 lb of pasta (something long and skinny--linguine, angel hair, etc) in plenty of boiling water until al dente. Drain.

In a large saute pan, pour 1/4 cup olive oil and heat until warm. Add 4-6 cloves of garlic, depending on how much you like garlic. I put the garlic through my garlic press, but you can just as easily chop it. Saute the garlic until golden. Add the pasta and mix well, tossing over medium heat. Add red pepper flakes to your liking (about two teaspoons? I didn't measure) and continue to mix. Serve with salt and pepper, and parmesan cheese if you want. We didn't, since the chicken we were eating was basically coated in parmesan. Serves 2-3, depending on how much you are craving carbohydrates.

Foodie Resolutions

2008-01-02T19:27:00.000-09:00

1. My cupboards need organizing. Badly. I think a set of canisters will help with this, or a large amount of clear glass jars. Right now I have items from the bulk section in plastic bags, all intertwined and piled on each other. It's hard to find anything in the heap.

2. I want to become a bread baker. Okay, I want either me or my husband to become a bread baker. I think he'll be better at it, actually. He's more of a stickler for detail when it comes to cooking, where I like to substitute and improvise, which doesn't go well when you are baking. Anyway, I love good crusty artisan-style bread, and I've been meaning to learn how to make it at home for awhile now. I think this is the year. We have the book Crust and Crumb, which will be our guide.

3. I want to can, freeze and otherwise preserve more food this summer. I did can grape juice last year, but had to give it away when we moved. It's hard to know when we'll move again, but I still want to fill my freezer and shelves with summer bounty to hold us through the winter. It's in my genes. Mennonites are champions at this. It's about time I did it. This summer, all we managed to do was freeze half a bag of wild blueberries. It's a start.

4. Speaking of being Mennonite, I need to pay more attention to the cost of groceries. This is one area where I've been much more gourmet than Mennonite. I just buy what I want, regardless of the price. There's a certain purity to that but I need to be a little more practical. Someday our income might not be what it is now, and I should be a little more aware of what I'm spending on food in preparation for that. I'm still going to splurge on some items (good cheese, local produce, chocolate, fresh seafood, the occasional bottle of wine) but there are some areas where I could spend less. I could at least pay attention to sales.

5. Make homemade ice cream! Okay, that's an easy one, but I had to give myself something attainable. I got the ice cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid Mixer as a Christmas present from my parents. It requires some planning ahead (the bowl has to be in the freezer for 15 hours before making the ice cream, and the batter must be mixed and chilled for a few hours) but I think it'll be great fun to make blueberry ice cream, pumpkin ice cream, cinnamon ice cream...yum.

6. Try more seafood. I live in Alaska. I grew up in land-locked western New York, though, where the only seafood available is bland and white-fleshed fish, rolled in batter and deep-fried. Since moving here I have learned to love salmon (that was easy!) and found some fun ways to cook halibut. I can occasionally be persuaded to eat shrimp, but so far I'm not that excited about it. I need to branch out and eat more varieties of fish. I'm not so sure if I'll ever like shellfish but I'd be willing to try some.

7. Have more people over for dinner. I love to cook and to have people over. So far I've been shy about asking people to dinner, worrying mostly about scheduling conflicts. We tend to eat dinner late. I'll try for weekends, maybe.

Whew. That's enough of a list for now. I'd love to hear thoughts, recipes, helpful tips, anything! Happy New Year, by the way!

I really don't blog enough

2007-12-20T16:38:00.000-09:00

I'm sorry it has been so long. I have a bit of an excuse--Thanksgiving, my grandfather's funeral, crazy Christmas preparations. I did find a little bit of time to make some Christmas goodies. I made Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Gingerbread again, this time in a bundt pan, and it was beautiful and delicious. I tried toffee for the first time (using this recipe). It was easy and really yummy.

We leave for the East Coast in two days, for a rushed week of family/friends/Christmas and all that. I'm excited. It's started me thinking about this move to Alaska. I miss my old friends and my family. I love the wilderness here, and the new people we've met, but I still feel such a connection to my network of friends and family back east. It's hard. We are adventuring up here and enjoying that. I'm probably just having the mid-winter blues.

Speaking of which, there's a cup of my favorite chai made with 1/2 cup of eggnog waiting for me. There is also a couch with a blanket, a Christmas tree, and snow falling outside. I think I'll go curl up.

(our living room, decorated for Christmas)

Botched Alaska with Exxon Valdez fudge sauce

2007-11-02T16:57:00.000-08:00

Please read this article. I find it wonderful when food and current events (well, maybe not so current) mingle in such an interesting way. If only Baked Alaska didn't seem so complicated and unnecessarily fussy, I might consider making it just to serve it with the "whiskey-laden Exxon Valdez fudge sauce." How funny.

In unrelated news, I found out yesterday that Dagoba, one of my favorite chocolate brands (mostly because I thought it was named after the Dagobah System from Star Wars and I love Yoda), was bought out by Hershey a few years ago. Today I discovered that Burt's Bees was recently bought by Clorox and Tom's of Maine is owned by Colgate. Does anyone else find this to be a sad trend?

Dinner

2007-10-30T18:03:00.000-08:00

Now that my husband has a fancy camera, I keep begging him to take more food pictures. He finally indulged me last night, mostly because he just got a new lens. He left this morning for a four-day trip to the North Slope to work on a story. I decided to cook a nice dinner before he left. We had the usual salmon recipe (we're not tired of it yet!) along with roasted Yellow Finn and Peruvian Blue potatoes with rosemary and sauteed Toscano kale with garlic and lemon. I was surprised to see fresh king salmon at the market yesterday. The fishmonger told me it was from Southeast Alaska. I bought the potatoes and kale at the Arctic Organics stand at the farmer's market last week. Eating locally is somewhat possible here!

I'm missing something

2007-10-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'll tell you. It's my appendix. I went into the hospital on September 12th with abdominal pain and emerged later the same day without my appendix! Being a nurse myself, it was interesting to be the patient and experience everything from the other side. I am happy to say I was treated very well. The most painful part actually was after I came home when the medical bills started arriving. I have insurance, thankfully. If this had happened a few months earlier I wouldn't have had it yet (I had to be at my new job for 3 months before I was eligible for insurance). Basically, once I meet a $2000 deductible for the year, my insurance pays 80% of costs, I pay 20%.

Here's a rundown of the bills I've received so far. The first number is the total bill. The second number is after insurance paid their portion, so it's my responsibility to pay.

ER physician exam: $576.00, $104.20
IV fluids (2 bags Normal Saline): $197.00, $39.40
IV antibiotics: $59.00, $11.80
CAT scan of the pelvis with contrast: $213.00, $42.60
CAT scan of the abdomen with contrast: $235.00, $47.00
Pathologist's fee (for examining the appendix once it was removed): $145.00, $27.00
Anesthesiologist's fee: $1078.00, $338.90
Surgeon's fee (it was a laparascopic procedure): $3300.00, $790.00

Total without insurance: $5803.00
Total I will have to pay: $1400.90

Wow. Thank goodness for insurance. Thank goodness I have a job that pays well so I can afford to pay the bills that I still owe even with insurance. What a crazy health care system.

the promised pictures

2007-08-28T20:36:00.000-08:00

My trip to the North Slope region of Alaska was an eye-opening experience. I flew almost every day, mostly in small planes. I saw the tundra during the summer, which is beautiful in a strange, barren way. Part of me looks forward to seeing it in the winter, but another part of me thinks that I must be crazy to look forward to being in Barrow in the winter. I learned one word in Inupiat: "aarigaa," which is an expression of satisfaction. I unfortunately didn't get to eat any whale meat or Eskimo ice cream, but I will be going every three months from now on so I'm sure the experience will come along sometime. So no food pictures to share with you, but hopefully you'll enjoy these anyway...

Okay, I guess this one is kinda food-related. This is a dumpster in Barrow. All the dumpsters in town are spray-painted with positive, inspirational sayings (maybe to prevent someone from spraying them with not-so-positive sayings?). This saying refers to events in the mid-1900s when all whaling was banned because of over-hunting by commercial whalers. The Inupiat people protested because they were not the ones to blame for the whales being hunted to the brink of extinction. They have been hunting and eating whale meat for centuries. They eventually won back the right to continue whaling the way they have always done: sustainably and respectfully.

Another semi-related food picture! This is caribou fur (I think) drying in Point Lay, one of the villages I visited. Caribou season opened mid-August and continues through the next month or so, then may re-open depending on how many caribou are killed. I spoke with someone in the village who got a caribou a few weeks ago and had already eaten most of it. He was hoping to get another one soon.

No food at all in this picture, just the beautiful beach in Point Lay. Can you see the town just over the hills there? I loved this village. It helped that the weather was perfect the day I was there, about 60, sunny and clear.

Just to prove I was really there, here's a picture of me next to some whale jaws in Barrow. This was taken in front of the Inupiat Heritage Center.

The Arctic Ocean. We stayed a few blocks from here while in Barrow. I'll be sure to take another picture in a few months with all the snow and ice. Then it will really look like the Arctic Ocean.

the tempura experiment

2007-08-28T20:15:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the long lapse in blogging. August was busy with a friend's wedding, a family vacation and my first trip to Barrow with my job (pictures to follow, I promise). I did find some time in all of that to try something new in the kitchen, though.

A few weeks ago I found myself with a fridge full of fresh vegetables and some fresh halibut from the market. Hmmm, I thought, I've always been curious about tempura. Maybe now is the time to try. After some internet research, I plunged in. I found the process to be very simple, very messy and a lot of fun. Here's what I did:

First, I prepped all the veggies. I decided to do green beans, zucchini and sugar snap peas. I washed everything, strung the peas, snapped the ends off the beans and sliced the zucchini into medium thick slices. Then I set up my tempura-making station: one plate of flour, one bowl with two eggs beaten with a tablespoon or two of water (egg wash), and a plate of panko. I heated a few inches of canola oil in a deep frying pan. When a pinch of flour spattered nicely in the oil, I began putting the veggies through the assembly line. Flour bath, egg bath, panko bath, then onto a plate by the hot oil. Then into the fryer until golden brown, turned occasionally to ensure even cooking. Everything came out wonderfully, although the green beans and zucchini were better than the sugar snaps. I would have done sweet potato slices if I had them around. I cut the halibut into medium-sized chunks and fried that last. Somewhere in there I made a dipping sauce in my food processor. I made the sauce up completely, but it turned out well--how could it not, though, when composed of tamari sauce, sesame oil, fresh cilantro, grated ginger root and fresh garlic? I added a little water to thin everything out nicely. I think next time I might add some peanut butter.

I think this would make a great meal for a party. It should be eaten fresh (although mine did stay amazingly crispy in a 350 degree oven until my husband got back from work). The prep is so simple that everyone can pick out the veggies they want and go through the assembly line themselves. I did, of course, feel that greasy heaviness after consuming just this for dinner. That's why it would be great as an appetizer, or along with a bunch of fresh fruit or a big green salad.

kitchen gymnastics

2007-07-18T21:47:00.000-08:00

Someday, Krestia and I will buy some land out in the country somewhere. We'll build a little house. Among other things, that little house will have a kitchen designed just for me, where I will never have to do this to put away the dishes:

Ah well, I guess climbing on counters keeps me young. But still, it would be nice to be able to reach all the cupboards without having to climb.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...

2007-07-12T20:56:00.000-08:00

I went to the farmer's market over my lunch break this past Wednesday (yes, one of the signs that I am a serious foodie) and saw, to my delight, local, fresh, organic strawberries for sale! I moved closer and saw the sign next to them: "organic strawberries, $7 per pint." Wow. Not even $7 per quart, $7 per pint. Domestic strawberries don't grow well in Alaska. They take lots of time and loving care to yield good berries, and even then the production isn't great. Thus the price. Longing for the taste of good strawberries, I bought one box, and they were delicious. But at about 50 cents per strawberry, I can't afford to do that very much. I'm savoring them like expensive chocolate--one little bit at a time.
Being a native western New Yorker, late June and early July are strawberry season to me. My parents always took us to a u-pick place nearby early in the morning, and for days afterwards we ate our fill in shortcake, sliced into our morning cereal and made into fresh strawberry pie. We made batches and batches of strawberry jam to give us a taste of the glorious fruit all through the winter. Such bounty! (Click here for my blog post last year during strawberry season.)
So yes, I'm going through produce withdrawal. I haven't acclimated yet to what's available here, it seems so scarce and so late. I'm sure I'll get used to it. But it's early still, I've only been here 5 months. I am making some good food discoveries. I bought some locally made goat cheese at the same stand as the strawberries at the market on Wednesday and its tangy, crumbly goodness makes me want to find out more about what else the goat dairy produces. The goat farm is just getting started in the business, check out an article about them here. I know that in August blueberry season starts, and many of the mountains outside of town offer the fruit on bushes all around as a sweet reward at the summit. But allow me a moment of sadness for my lost strawberry season. If you're in a place where local strawberries are widely available--please, pick and eat with abandon.

dinner for 10

2007-07-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

Krestia and I hosted 8 people for dinner this past Thursday night. Four of my aunts were here for a week and a half on a vacation to Alaska. We had them over for dinner their last night here along with my cousin, his wife and their two kids. I've never served dinner to that many people. It was a lot of work but great fun. The menu:

Spinach salad with strawberries, spring onions, goat cheese and almonds with balsamic viniagrette
Roasted potatoes with rosemary
Salmon with breadcrumb, olive and sun-dried tomato crust (from epicurious). We made this with fresh Cook Inlet red salmon that I bought earlier the same day from New Sagaya Market.
2 bottles of pinot noir
Rustic pear tart (made by my husband, similar to one he made last year)

Here we are busily cooking together just after the aunts arrived. Note the matching aprons, a gift from my mother. :) (photo courtesy of my Aunt Joyce):

A few things I learned:
1. One more chair would have been nice so Krestia wouldn't have had to eat standing up. :)
2. I need a bigger oven and more baking pans if I'm going to try to bake salmon, potatoes and a pastry dessert at the same time. :) I should have had dessert made the day before but time constraints prevented that.
3. I should have looked harder for roasting potatoes. I used baking potatoes which fell apart with the high temperatures and frequent stirring while roasting. Still, they tasted good.

Now we are prepared for more dinner parties! Come on over, I'll cook up a good meal.

My new favorite breakfast

2007-06-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

I've been eating a lot of eggs for breakfast recently. Cereal just hasn't seemed appealing. I love how versatile eggs are, how good they taste in many different forms. I like looking in the fridge and figuring out what kind of omelet to make based on the ingredients I have. That's how this delicious discovery happened:

It's a spinach, spring onion and gruyere omelet. The first time I made this omelet I used goat cheese, and I think I prefer that but really, it would be good with almost any cheese. Fresh spinach and spring onions from the Farmer's Market help a lot. Here's a rough recipe:

Beat two eggs in a bowl. Set aside.
Chop a handful of spinach (however much you want)
Slice a spring onion.
Get the cheese out of the fridge.

Melt some butter in a frying pan over medium heat. Pour in the eggs and cook briefly. On one half of the eggs sprinkle the spring onion, then the pile of chopped fresh spinach. Crumble the cheese on top. Fold over the top half of the omelet and cook for a little. Flip the omelet and turn the heat to low. Cook until it's done (I like my eggs a little browned). Serve with salt and pepper. Yum.

Wolverine Peak

2007-06-17T14:41:00.000-08:00

Probably all these hiking photos start to look the same after awhile. Oh, another gorgeous panorama of Anchorage and the oceans and the mountains. Haven't we already seen that? :) But I must keep posting them in the hopes that somehow I can convince more people to come visit us here in this strange and beautiful land.
Yesterday I hiked Wolverine Peak with John David and Cindy (another church friend). Krestia was gone in Portland, Oregon for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Conference. It was a long hike, 11 miles total, but we only did about 10 miles. We made it to the ridge below the peak, but by then the intense sunshine had sapped us of the energy to reach the summit. It was almost 80 here yesterday, a little too hot to be comfortable while hiking. Still, it was gorgeous and I'll go back again for the whole thing someday.

Near Point, about a mile from the summit of Wolverine.

This is Cindy. She's from Ohio. She teaches in the Yup'ik School District in Akiachak, Alaska (outside of Bethel) during the school year. During the summers she lives in Anchorage. She's taking classes towards her speech pathology degree.

This is John David with Cindy's dog Jake. Jake was so energetic the first half of the hike. Then his paws got sore and started to peel from all the rocks (he's used to the ground in Akiachak, which isn't rocky). Cindy carried him a little and we took it slow on the way down.

The summit of Wolverine, taken from the place where we stopped hiking.

My attempt at a close-up. Not sure what these flowers are, but the mountains are covered with lovely summer blooming.

Hiking Flattop

2007-06-11T19:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we hiked Flattop Mountain after church. It's the most popular day hike around here because it's so close to Anchorage but offers world-class mountain views. The climb itself is short (it took us about an hour) but a good workout with some scrambling over rocky sections at the end. At the top there's a great view of all of Anchorage with mountains and ocean surrounding it. On a good day (like yesterday) you can see Denali. Once on top, the mountains keep going and going in all directions. It's tempting to keep climbing the next ridge and I think Krestia would have gone all day unless we stopped him. I can't blame him, the mountains are so incredible here. We hiked with the pastor of our church up here (Prince of Peace Mennonite Church), John David, and Benjamin, a church friend who is a volunteer with AmeriCorps. It was a gorgeous summery day, 70 degrees which is cause for celebration in Anchorage!

Here's some pictures from the hike:

A view of Anchorage from the top of the mountain

Krestia goes exploring

John David (with the hat) and Benjamin take in the view

These are the mountains behind Flattop...we could have kept going and going....

I'm a cheechako

2007-05-29T10:43:00.000-08:00

For a definition of that word, plus some other interesting Alaska vocabulary words, click here.

Lost Lake, take 1

2007-05-27T14:57:00.000-08:00

The prospect of a three day weekend in Alaska excited us with all the possibilities. On the recommendation of a co-worker of mine, we chose to hike in to Lost Lake outside of Seward. It's about an 8 mile hike to the lake, with the prospect of exploring old mines and day hikes in the mountains once we set up camp by the lake. She showed us pictures of the lake and surrounding tundra in the fall, red and golden and beautiful. We made a trip to REI for supplies, buying all the camping supplies we've been talking about for awhile. At last we had the immediacy of a trip to spur us into action. We spent most of yesterday packing and talking over all the details that a backpacking trip entails. I was excited to be carrying on my back all the supplies we would need in the wilderness. This kind of self-sufficiency is refreshing, it makes me think of the world in simpler terms.
Due to all of our preparation, we finally hit the road at 3 pm on Saturday, arriving at the trailhead at 5. Thanks to the long evenings in Alaska during the summer, we still had 6-7 hours of daylight to hike and if we wanted to do the 8 miles to the lake, it would probably take that long. No other cars were parked at the trailhead, something that made us wonder if everyone else knew something we didn't. We ignored the comments on sign-in paper that said, "Snow after mile 4, snowshoes recommended, " and "Turn back now!" :) The hike began well, the trail winding through dry forest. We took a side trail to an overlook across from a gorgeous waterfall, swelled with the water from the spring melt. Soon after that we hit mud, then patchy snow, then solid snow. We eventually hiked for about 2 miles on a snowmachine trail, with the sound of gushing water beneath us under at least a foot of snow. The snow was mushy in spots and occasionally one foot would break through and get soaked by the stream below. After about six miles and 3 1/2 hours of hiking, we still hadn't made it above treeline, and there was no guarantee of dry ground to pitch a tent on. We decided to call it a day hike instead and turned around. We got back to our car around 11 and made it home by 1 am, so thankful for dry clothes and a cozy bed. On our way out we signed the trail registration paper, "Should be nice in September." We're still not used to how long the snow sticks around up here...

Porcupine Falls

Close-up of the falls

On the trail

Muddy boots

it's spring...in washington

2007-05-09T22:47:00.000-08:00

Remember all the convictions I once had about eating food in season and grown locally? Well, then I moved to Alaska. And it's May and I want to be eating spring vegetables. And the snow just melted a few weeks ago, so the farmer's market last Saturday had overwintered carrots, turnips, and potatoes, and flats of seedlings to start in the ground. So I found my lust for spring vegetables had to be satisfied at Fred Meyer with this asparagus flown in from Washington (that's kinda local, right? I mean, it's the West Coast...). Still, I was impressed with its tenderness and how thin the stalks were--often asparagus is picked too late, when it's big and fat and bitter tasting. This picture was taken just before roasting the asparagus in the oven. The finished product eventually became a part of Asparagus Lemon Pasta, mostly a hit but with a glitch--how to make a sauce that has milk (which I substituted for the cream) and lemon juice in it without said sauce curdling? We pretended I had made the dish with ricotta cheese and it tasted fine.

domesticity

2007-05-08T17:35:00.000-08:00

Living in Alaska, I could probably take pictures all day every day for the rest of my life of all the gorgeous scenery up here. But sometimes I have this strange desire to take pictures of random everyday things around our apartment and share them with you all. Maybe because for most of you, I can't just tell you to drop by and visit us anytime. (Of course the invitation always stands, if you can make the trip...) We are slowly making our apartment more home-like, though we are still searching for some major items (a couch being the most dire need right now). It's been fun and painful at the same time to start from scratch. Fun in that we can buy exactly what we want, and painful because it involves a long decision-making process and it's usually expensive. It makes us feel old to have real furniture that we picked out and bought as opposed to something worn and not-exactly-beautiful that was given to us! Through this furnishing process we are discovering we have definite likes and dislikes when it comes to interior decorating. A few things so far have been a definite success, so here they are:

What is this strange photo, you ask? Well, it's my version of a spice rack (with apologies to Ken and Carrie, who gave us this idea). Those little silver jars are magnets stuck to the side of our fridge, each one filled with something delicious. I love how easy it is to grab a spice, twist off the lid, grab a pinch of something, and put it back on the fridge. Now, the presentation would be nicer if we had a magnetic board hung on the wall, and the spices displayed there for all to see (the way the fridge is in our kitchen, you only see these if you are standing at the sink). Sadly our kitchen doesn't have the wall space for that, so we make do with this. The little jars are from Bed Bath and Beyond and the spices I buy in bulk in the organic section at Fred Meyer.

This lovely thing is sold as an assemble-it-yourself shoe bench at Fred Meyer (if you could see it up close you would see spots of wood glue), but my magazine-loving husband saw it and thought, "coffee table!" And it's perfect. We store our piles of magazines below and someday, when we have a couch, we will put snacks on top while we're watching a movie. The only problem: it would be nice to reserve one spot for each magazine, but we get more than 8 magazines, so we'll have to have some share with each other. I'm thinking of putting The Mennonite in the same spot as Gourmet (see title of this blog...groan). :)

This is my lovely coleus plant, given to me by my Aunt Betts. I just repotted it and I think I should have bought a larger pot....it takes up the whole thing! It's our only houseplant so far and it's doing so well. It just started popping out little purple flowers, which I think you can see in the next picture, even though it's bleached out by the flash:

It's so nice to have a green thing to share space with. We'll be buying more plants soon. Our apartment gets a lot of natural light, which I'm grateful for.

Ah, domesticity. Having a peaceful, beautiful, practical space to live in makes life happier, I think.

Barrow bound

2007-05-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

I released this news in an email last week, but it bears repeating here. My boss told me last week that starting in August I will start traveling to Barrow, Alaska! I will travel there every 3 months or so to do home visits with children up there who receive services through Hope (the company I work for). The trips will be short, probably 2-3 days each, and I will travel along with a few other people from Hope.

As I have begun sharing my news with people, it's interesting to see the varying reactions to Barrow. Only a few people are excited for me, and for the opportunity I have to travel there. Many more are surprised and ask me, "have you ever been to Barrow?" in a tone that implies no one would ever want to go. And yes, it's cold there most of the year. And very dark. And flat. And no, I've never been. But still, I'm excited to see part of the world that I've never seen, the northernmost city in North America. The whaling season has started up there. So far it's been a good year, they have harvested 4 whales. Over half the population is Alaska native. Employment mostly comes from the oil fields on the North Slope. My first visit will be when it's still a little warm, right at the end of the summer when the sun finally sets for a few hours at night. I might be introduced to one of the local delicacies, muktuk, which I hope I will like. Wish me luck, friends, as I travel, and hopefully in a few months I will share news from Barrow with you!

We enjoyed a hike last weekend with some of my family up here at Hatcher's Pass in the mountains outside of Wasilla (about an hour's drive from Anchorage). The snow was deep in the pass, so we found ourselves "post-holing" often, walking along on the crust and suddenly one leg sinks into snow up to the hip. There's lots of snow still left in the mountains, but we were warmed by the exercise and good company. Here's some pictures for you to enjoy:

That small figure is my Aunt Betts, hiking along what will be a road when the snow finally melts.

Cousin Jess contemplates the incredible view from a ridge above the pass.

funny pictures

2007-04-03T21:28:00.000-08:00

In case you're interested, a Houghton friend of ours (the wonderfully talented Dave Huth) is doing a series of really imaginative photoshopped pictures of his friends on his flickr site. Here's one of Krestia and one of Rachel.

small plane travel

2007-04-03T20:07:00.000-08:00

I received a copy of my job description a few days ago at work. I've just started a job as a Community Health Nurse at Hope Community Resources, a non-profit company based in Anchorage. I will be working as a case manager with children who have complex medical conditions and their families, ensuring that all the services they need in the home are provided and trying to keep them healthy and out of the hospital. The job involves home visits in the Anchorage area plus some travel around the state. So when I got my job description, this particular thing caught my eye:

"Be able to travel in small planes and by alternative transportation methods to reach remote villages."

I think I can do that! :) And when they say "alternative transportation methods" I can see myself on a dog sled, heading out into the bush. Probably I won't get to travel by dog sled, but anyway, I'm excited.

And speaking of traveling by plane, Krestia got an afternoon off of work this past week to go on a plane ride with my cousin Jess who has his own plane (well, had, anyway...he just sold it a few days ago) and flies for an air taxi company in Bethel, AK. Since the day of the flight was the day I started my new job, I unfortunately couldn't go along. However, Krestia took some great pictures while in the air, and I'll share some here. Enjoy, and come visit us!

not just cooking anymore

2007-03-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the absence of new posts here. What with moving, buying furniture, new jobs, and particularly not having internet access at home, I've been bad about keeping this going. At last we have DSL hooked up after almost two months of not having any internet access at home. It's good to be back online. I'm surprised and slightly ashamed by how much I missed it. It's a little sad to realize now that internet access has become a basic utility that I expect to have in a home, like hot water and heat. I mean, I obviously lived without it, but because I keep up with so many people through email, blogs and websites, it was hard to be restricted from using it.
The title of this post refers to something I've been contemplating for awhile, and with the encouragement of a few friends, I've decided to do it. This blog will not just be about me cooking anymore. Now that we are in Alaska, far from many of our friends and family, I think I'll be posting more about daily life up here, including cooking, outdoor recreation, our jobs, etc. How does that sound? Also, my cooking has deteriorated somewhat due to working later hours and wanting to eat quickly before we rush out to run errands and buy things for the apartment. I have to admit we've been eating ramen noodles and Annie's mac and cheese more than I would like. Once life settles into more of a routine and we don't have to furniture shop constantly, I hope to return to my previous standards of excellence. :) I just heard recently that the Anchorage Farmer's Market starts on May 5th, so I'm excited to start going to that and getting inspired by what I can find there.
To begin this new chapter in the life of this blog, here's a picture Krestia took while we were cross-country skiing two weeks ago in Eagle River, a town about 15 minutes outside of Anchorage. We continue to be amazed by all the opportunities in the great outdoors here, and by how few people there are whenever we go to a park or trail. Anchorage is the same size as Rochester, but unlike Rochester, there's no suburbs (the city of Rochester plus the suburbs adds up to almost a million people), and the population in Anchorage is half of the total population of Alaska. Much fewer people in a much bigger state with much better mountains and parks and trails equals great outdoor fun! Here's the picture, hopefully not a letdown after all that explanation:
The walkway at the bottom of the picture is for viewing the stream during the summer time. We skied for about an hour and a half in this gorgeous valley between mountain ridges, then returned home for a delicious simple supper. We had grilled cheddar cheese and apple sandwiches on sourdough bread, a sandwich that Krestia invented which I think was a stroke of genius. Try it sometime. First, saute some nice crisp thin apple slices in butter until soft. Then, use sourdough bread, some extra-sharp white cheddar (up here, we've discovered Tillamook vintage white is delicious--Tillamook is a Oregon dairy company) and good butter to make grilled cheese sandwiches, but add a layer of the apple slices in between the cheese. Yum. We should mention this sandwich was inspired by our friends Ken and Carrie who lived in Vermont for awhile and told us of the tradition of eating apple pie with cheddar cheese. Good idea. Anyway, along with the sandwiches we had a cold avocado soup from a new soup cookbook my sister Janna bought me for Christmas this year. The cookbook is called "A Beautiful Bowl of Soup," by Paulette Mitchell, and it's all vegetarian soup recipes. This soup was so easy and delicious with an unexpected combination of flavors. Here's the recipe(for 2 servings):

Blend in a food processor or blender:
1 ripe avocado, peeled, pitted and coarsely chopped
1/2 cup vegetable stock (I used water)
1/2 cup fresh orange juice
1/4 cup plain yogurt
2 T fresh cilantro leaves (sadly, I left these out, but will be sure to include them when spring arrives up here and I can hopefully find some fresh local cilantro)
2 T finely chopped red onion (I used white)
2 teaspoons thin strips orange zest (I left this out--I figured the orange juice was enough orange flavor, but also we were out of oranges. I'm sure it would be yummy)
2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
pinch of red pepper flakes, or to taste
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Pour into bowls and serve! The author says to chill this for three hours before serving, but of course I don't plan ahead enough to do that. We ate it right away and it was delicious. She also says to serve it with an orange marmalade chutney on top, which sounds yummy but who keeps orange marmalade in the fridge? She also says, "serve in small portions as a first course rather than as a main course," which is good advice, because the flavor combination is unusual and good but not necessarily one you want to eat a big bowl of.

starting from scratch

2007-02-12T16:44:00.000-09:00

Hello from Anchorage! This is the kitchen in our apartment--we just moved in last week so the kitchen is not quite functional yet. As you can see, I am now cooking on an electric stove which is not my favorite but will have to do (all the apartments here have electric stoves). But...this kitchen has a great breakfast bar with a view of downtown Anchorage and the mountains and tons of counter/cupboard space, so on the whole I'm happy with it.
(Here's a picture from the kitchen looking over the breakfast bar to the view of downtown and the mountains out our window.)
So far the food discoveries here have been good. I've taken up partial residence at the downtown Kaladi Brothers coffeeshop, mostly to use their free wireless but also to enjoy their short classic cappuccinos. We have done most of our grocery shopping at Fred Meyer but also have made a few trips to the New Sagaya city market. Groceries are more expensive here, but so far I've been able to find everything and it's been good quality. Fred Meyer sells my favorite Frontier chai blend, so I'm happy! Our apartment is within walking distance from the downtown farmers' market which starts operating in May or June.
I'm finding it to be a bit overwhelming to start building a kitchen pantry from scratch. We go to the grocery store at least once a day (yesterday we went three times). So far I've bought four spices to start my new spice collection: basil, oregano, cumin and chili powder. Little by little I'll get my supply back to where it used to be!

baked alaska

2007-01-09T13:45:00.000-09:00

Baked Alaska is a dessert I have never made, but have always been intrigued by. For those of you who are unaware of this culinary oddity, it consists of ice cream in a cake shell, covered by meringue and baked in the oven (here's a sample recipe that sounds yummy from epicurious). The thick egg white meringue on top keeps the ice cream from melting while in a hot oven. Magic.
So why do I bring this up? Well, it's the only food-related item I can think of to post along with some big news: my husband and I are moving to Anchorage, Alaska. He got a job there. We are excited for all the opportunities this move brings our way. We will be moving within a month, most likely. This brings up another food challenge: we have resolved to use up as much as we can of the food we already have before we go. That means trying not to buy more groceries until the pantry has been emptied! This is probably an impossible feat, but I enjoy the challenge nonetheless. And once we get there, I'm hoping to enjoy some local Alaskan food: fresh salmon, maybe even some caribou, who knows. It may be awhile until I post again due to all the commotion around here. The next post will be from Alaska!
So the next time you make Baked Alaska (if you ever make it) think of us. And maybe I'll try it just once before we go.

I'm dreaming of a chocolate Christmas

2006-12-24T16:15:00.000-09:00

I haven't done much Christmas baking this year, but what I have done has featured chocolate, an ingredient I'm falling more and more in love with. I made the aforementioned Chocolate Hazelnut Crinkles for a cookie exchange at work. They were a big hit, nicely balancing the chocolate with not too much sugar and just enough hazelnut flavor.
I carried the theme further a few days ago by cooking my first Nigella Lawson recipe: Chocolate Gingerbread. I've been curious about this British cooking sensation for awhile, and I thought this recipe might be a good introduction to her culinary skills. My husband makes Upside-Down Pear Gingerbread often (recipe from the Simply in Season cookbook). I've always thought that chocolate would mix well with the spices. I compulsively reduce sugar in recipes, and I managed to follow this one exactly, keeping all the sweetness intact. I also skipped the frosting, as I feel like too often frosting doesn't add any flavor--only an extra layer of sugar that isn't necessary. We ate the gingerbread while celebrating Christmas with my in-laws yesterday. It was a success with some plain vanilla ice cream on the side. It also stayed moist for two days (it was made on Thursday and consumed on Saturday without too much dryness...the ice cream helped).
Merry Christmas! (and may all your Christmases be chocolatey...)

dinner tonight

2006-12-11T17:13:00.000-09:00

I recently received a late birthday present from my dear sister Janna. She gave me a terra cotta pizza stone, made from red clay from Alfred, New York (my hometown). When I was a kid I thought terra cotta was invented in Alfred, but since I've grown up I've learned that the ancient Greeks invented it. Alfred at one point had a fairly large and well-known terra cotta factory, though. All of that aside, we used our new pizza stone tonight! My husband, being part Italian, insists on perfect pizza, so he was the chef. This was our first real try, and we realized achieving pizza perfection will be a life-long quest. Being the first time around, it wasn't bad, though the crust was almost cracker-like, dry and chewy. For my husband, though, that is much better than having an overly soft, doughy crust.

nibbles from the last month

2006-12-02T07:23:00.000-09:00

An apology to the 3 or 4 people who read this...I know it has been over a month since I last posted! Life is hectic, we've been traveling, Thanksgiving, etc. I have a few small items that have been accumulating in my culinary thoughts but alas, no pictures.
1. Our souls and stomachs were fortified from a recent trip to Lancaster, PA, where we stocked up on Weges, my family's favorite sourdough hard pretzels. These are very hard to find in New York, probably due to not having enough German Mennonites around up here. Some Wegmans in the Rochester area used to stock them, but I think I was the only one buying them, so they were taken off the shelf. I am forced to let my longing build up over several months, then satisfy it all at once in a Weges binge. I limited myself to two bags this time, which is probably wise. I enjoy them with apple cider, with cheese, after a bowl of ice cream, really anytime or anyplace.
2. My husband and I collaborated on baking a delicious Bittersweet Chocolate Tart a few weeks ago. Okay, so he did all the work and I supervised, but the tart was my idea to make in the first place. The recipe is from the Joy of Cooking and is beautiful in its simplicity: a buttery tart crust filled with melted bittersweet chocolate (something like two and a half bars) mixed with one cup of cream and one egg. Not even any sugar. We took it over to our friends down the street and enjoyed its heart-stopping goodness together. Definitely a dessert to impress any chocoholic or to take along to a dinner party. Eat a slice of it with a glass of milk.
3. My thoughts are turning now to Christmas and all the delicious gluttony it entails. I miss the treats my mom cooks up at home (fudge, caramels, all manner of cookies, chex mix) but I don't really feel like doing all of that work just for my husband and I. Besides, we get to eat all of that when we go home for Christmas. I do have a few things on my baking list though. I'm determined to try the Chocolate Hazelnut Crinkles from the December issue of Gourmet, and maybe, if I get ambitious enough, the Salted Chocolate Caramels from the same issue. The combination of sweet and salty gets me every time.

savor our flavor

2006-10-23T17:38:00.000-08:00

It's time for a little bragging about my neighborhood. My husband and I live in the South Wedge, an up-and-coming section of Rochester. This past Saturday we had the pleasure of visiting two new businesses just down the street from us (literally a 5 minute walk from our house). One is the South Wedge Green Grocer, which had its grand opening on Saturday. Yes, that's right, a grocery store within walking distance! And not just any old grocery store--one that sells organic, local items! Many of the shelves were still empty on Saturday but oh, the possibilities. Already I know that having milk, yogurt, locally made ice cream, produce and baking goods close by will be so handy for those times when I have the urge to cook but I'm out of something. Women's Coffee Connection, a coffee shop that has been in operation for awhile here, just relocated to the space right next to the Green Grocer. They had a "Grand Opening" on Saturday also, complete with a mariachi band providing entertainment. A sign recently appeared in their window announcing that they will have food provided by Skippy (a vegetarian chef in Rochester who recently closed her restaurant to the sadness of many here). Good news.
A walk down South Avenue led us past Open Face (a wonderful sandwich shop that I've already mentioned here) and the property next door to it which has recently been turned into a wine bar called Solera. We hadn't heard that it had opened but a little sign on the door said "Opening October 20th" (which was the night before). We immediately decided to return later that night to try it out. And what a wonderful experience! The inside is simply, tastefully decorated, with small wooden tables, tealights, dark red walls and curtains, and a nice bar in the corner. I had a glass of New York Riesling. My husband had a Pinot Noir from California. Word is that soon food will be added to the menu (cheese, olives, some desserts).
I am so proud of my little neighborhood. It's growing up so fast and adding so many good things. Come visit us and I'll show you what I mean!

All Things Apple

2006-10-15T17:37:00.000-08:00

I had this past Friday off and spent most of the day doing my favorite thing: cooking. My theme was apples. The variations on the theme were apple butter (this recipe from epicurious) and apple cake (from Simply in Season).

The apple butter turned out well, I think. The recipe says it only needs 45 minutes of stovetop cooking (after pureeing the apples) but I found that I had to keep the heat very low or else the mixture bubbled strangely. Thus, it took me about 3 hours to get it to the consistency I wanted with it on very low heat. That's okay, though, because I was home all day anyway. My husband loves apple butter--I think I'll have to make more to keep up with demand, as this was a small batch. Next time I think I'll just make some from the applesauce I already have in the freezer.

This apple cake was a big hit. I made it to take along to my in-laws' (we spent this past weekend visiting them). My mother-in-law recently gave me a bundt pan, so I decided to make something in it to take to their house. I also used my new mixer to make it. The mixer was fun to use but I found it hard to stand there and watch a machine mix the batter for me. I like being able to control the speed, direction, etc, of mixing. I think as I get more comfortable using the mixer this feeling will go away. The cake calls for 5 cups of unpeeled, chopped apples, which seemed a little excessive but made for a moist, apple-y cake. The batter seemed at first like it was barely coating the apples but during baking it puffed up and formed into a real cake. It was devoured by the crew at my in-laws' house who were working on putting on a new deck. My mother-in-law didn't even get a piece (she was working all day). Definitely worth a repeat.

You Couldn't Get a Better Squeeze

2006-10-10T18:32:00.000-08:00

Tonight I used this wonderful device (called a Squeezo) to make 6 big yogurt containers full of applesauce for the freezer. Heartfelt thanks to my mother for finding this nifty appliance at a yard sale for $5. I know it's authentic because it came with a little pamphlet dated 1973. On the pamphlet, besides the directions, I found the phrase "You Couldn't get a Better Squeeze," next to a logo that I've learned is the tomato lady. Click here for a picture.

eyeball stew

2006-10-05T13:23:00.000-08:00

Okay, so it's really the filling for a Concord grape pie that I made a few days ago. The insides of the grapes do have the firm but slimy look of eyeballs. Green alien eyeballs, maybe. This was my first attempt at grape pie, and I learned a few things:
1. It takes a long time to make. You have to squeeze out the insides of 3 cups of grapes (reserving the skins), then boil the insides to break down the pulp, then put the pulp/juice through a strainer to get rid of the seeds. I started to make the pie at 9 pm and was up until midnight (one of my rare late night baking impulses).
2. The filling, as my wise mother told me, is a lot like grape jelly. Her adjective to describe grape pie: "hideous." I enjoyed it for the freshness of the taste, and just that I got to eat something so deeply purple. It got me thinking that maybe I should attempt to make a peanut butter and jelly pie...peanut butter filling on the bottom, topped with this delicious grape filling. Or maybe just serve a peanut butter pie alongside this grape pie, so you can have a slice of each and eat them together.
3. Next time I will cut back on the sugar. The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar per pie. I put in 3/4 cup. Next time I will do 1/2 cup.
4. My oven is a wreck. It looks like a grape jelly factory exploded in there. I tried my best to put a cookie sheet under the drippy pies, but they found a way to drip outside of the sheet. Thank goodness I have a self-cleaning oven.

Here's the final products (one for us, one to share at work), followed by the recipe (taken directly from Simply in Season). My recipe notes are in parentheses.

Grape Pie
3 cups Concord-type grapes (skins removed and saved)
In saucepan simmer pulp for 5 minutes. Press through a sieve to remove the seeds. Combine the pulp and the reserved skins. (Simmer until the pulp is mostly broken down, which may take a total of 7-8 minutes. I was doing a double batch, so maybe that makes a difference. If the pulp is still clinging to the seed it's much harder to press through the sieve.)

1 cup sugar (see above on reducing the sugar)
3 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon lemon juice
9-inch pastry shell
Add sugar, flour and lemon juice to grapes. Pour into pastry shell.

1 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons oil (I used all butter...I love butter.)
Combine and sprinkle over the grape mixture. Bake in preheated oven at 425 for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 and bake for 30 minutes. (I had to bake it for 10 minutes longer for the crust to brown how I like it.)

happy birthday to me

2006-09-25T17:05:00.000-08:00

Today I am 26 years old. My husband surprised me one day early--I came downstairs yesterday morning and found this lovely thing sitting on my kitchen counter. Oh, the possibilities it holds! As I get acquainted with this new member of my kitchen family, I'll be posting on how it works and what delicious things I can make with it. I've heard rave reviews from everyone on how easy it is to use and how quickly it produces yummy things to eat. My husband found this particular mixer refurbished online, which made it a lot more reasonably priced.

harvest time

2006-09-25T16:42:00.000-08:00

I love fall. I love the food it brings to the table: squash, pumpkins, apples, pears, grapes. I especially love my family's tradition of going grape and apple picking late in September. We went yesterday and enjoyed again the bounty the earth gives: we got almost 50 pounds of apples (Cortlands and Empires) and over 30 pounds of grapes (mostly purple Concords, with a few whites and reds thrown in for good measure). I'm hoping to make grape juice, apple butter and applesauce, and of course eat my fill of the fruit just plain.

the great pastry awakening

2006-09-13T15:52:00.000-08:00

It was a pleasure for me to witness, in the past week, my husband get bitten by the pastry bug. He has made three free-form tarts in one week (peach, plum, and pear). A week ago he had never made any kind of pastry. Now, behold the glory above! There are still a few glitches to work out--particularly figuring out how to keep all the juice from leaking out all over the baking pan and hardening into an impenetrable black glaze. The only other drawback is that his cooking urges strike later in the evening so the final product emerges from the oven after my bedtime. Which means I wake up to a messy kitchen. But it's worth it to enjoy such a treat!

two recent epicurious meals

2006-09-04T17:09:00.000-08:00

We had this delicious soup for supper tonight. I finally found something good to use up the swiss chard that has been accumulating in our fridge for the past two weeks from our CSA. The recipe is Barley and Lentil Soup with Swiss Chard. The carrot, onion, garlic, basil and chard are all from our CSA (I substituted purple basil for dill in the recipe). I'm glad the weather is getting cooler and I can start making good hearty soups again.

This is a meal in progress--my husband found the ingredients on the cutting board to be so beautiful, he had to stop and take a picture before continuing. The recipe was Linguine with Pears and Gorgonzola Cheese, and he made it for his parents who were visiting us this past weekend. It was a big hit. With a sauce that includes butter, heavy cream, Gorgonzola and Parmesan, how can you go wrong? The pears we bought at the Rochester Public Market that morning, and the Gorgonzola from the wonderful cheese shop also at the market.

the best way to eat pie...

2006-08-24T05:44:00.000-08:00

...is out of your hands. Although any way of eating pie is delicious--on a plate with ice cream is one of my other favorites. Eating pie out of my hands is a skill I learned early in my years. It's perfect for that on-the-run breakfast or after work snack. I never thought other people might find it strange or hard to do. Here is a picture of our friend Andris attempting to eat pie out of his hands (it was the last piece of a blueberry pie I made and he generously offered to clean it up). There was pie filling on the floor when he was done. :)

how to roast a chicken (vegetarians beware)

2006-08-24T05:22:00.000-08:00

I confess that for too long I have been a member of the "I only cook with boneless skinless chicken breast" club. It's just so easy to cook with and not very messy. For a Mennonite, this is a sad confession indeed, as I should be able to use every possible part of a chicken (I believe my dear grandmother is especially fond of chicken hearts). I finally faced my chicken cooking deficiency when my good friend Hilarie came to visit recently. She and her husband have become champion chicken roasters--it's much cheaper to buy a whole chicken and roast it, then eat the leftovers, than to keep buying the boneless skinless stuff. We bought a whole chicken without the giblets (sorry, grandma), and together roasted it for dinner. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to prepare. She cut out the backbone with kitchen shears, then flattened the bird on a roasting pan. We stuffed pieces of garlic and rosemary under the skin, then drizzled the whole thing with lemon juice, olive oil and balsalmic vinegar. Surrounded by potatoes, zucchini, carrots and onions, the whole thing roasted for 50 minutes or so at 400 degrees. It was delicious. Yesterday I used the leftovers to make a yummy chicken vegetable soup, adding fresh sage, parsley and thyme from my garden.

ice cream discovery

2006-08-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight my husband and I stumbled upon something I have been dreaming about for awhile: an ice cream shop within walking distance. It's one of the few things missing from our neighborhood--we have a few coffeeshops, a few restaurants, a pizza place, a great sandwich shop (Open Face) and even a grocery store opening in September. This ice cream place isn't in our South Wedge neighborhood, so it is a bit of a walk (probably 20 minutes) but when you consider the calories you consume eating the ice cream, and the calories you burn walking to and returning from the shop, it all balances out in the end. The shop is called Corn Hill Creamery and it just opened a month ago at the new Corn Hill Landing apartments across the river from us. All the ice cream is homemade. I had chocolate hazelnut ice cream in a waffle cone. My husband had mint chocolate chunk, also in a waffle cone. Both flavors were thoroughly enjoyed. The walk back helped me feel better about the huge size of the cone--even a small is almost beyond my ability to finish.

my little herb garden

2006-08-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

I am so proud of my little herb children. Some of these herbs are from my mother (oregano, thyme, chives, parsley) and others (both basils, dill, sage) I bought as seedlings at the public market this past spring. Due to our warm, wet summer, and the fact that the garden in the front of our house faces south, all of them are growing well. I don't know a lot about gardening and we live in the middle of the city, so I'm amazed it worked. It's a pleasure to walk out my front door and pick herbs for dinner. I even have just enough basil to make a small batch of pesto if I pluck all the leaves off a bush of it all at once, then let it grow back for another batch. The only disappointment is my cilantro--I planted cilantro seeds too late in the season so now I have just a little bit of it (you can barely see it beside the sage). So when our CSA doesn't have it, I've resorted to buying bunches of it at Wegmans to make my favorite fresh salsa (which I have to make a batch of whenever we have fresh tomatoes). I'll know better next spring.
See if you can identify the following in the picture: basil, thai basil, sage, thyme, dill, cilantro, oregano, chives, parsley.

hot weather cooking

2006-08-02T14:40:00.000-08:00

Here in Rochester it has been HOT. As in around 94 for the last two days, with the heat index above 100. My husband and I are trying to survive without an air conditioner. Our resolve is weakening, particularly because it's hard to sleep when it's so hot. It's also very hard to convince myself to cook in this weather. Anything that adds heat to the already too hot environment is not appealing.

However, we have managed to have two good meals so far despite the weather. The first one was sort of cheating. We ate at Thali of India last night. We gave up on cooking and went to a lovely air-conditioned environment where we were served delicious Indian food. I had the Vegetarian Thali of India, a combination platter with palak paneer, dal, navrattan korma, basmati rice, naan, raita, salad and rice pudding (all for 11.95). My husband had the non-vegetarian platter (with tandoori chicken and lamb curry). We ordered samosas for an appetizer and a mango lassi to split between us. Our waiters had turbans and were so kind as to refill our water after every other sip or so. All in all, a good meal, but I still think my favorite Rochester Indian restaurant is Raj Mahal.

Tonight I actually made dinner at home and managed to do so without fainting from heat exhaustion. I made angelhair pasta with fresh tomato sauce, a deliciously simple recipe that only requires cooking pasta for 8 minutes or so. While the pasta cooked, I chopped three tomatoes and tossed them in a large bowl with 2 cloves of garlic (minced), a pinch of salt, freshly ground black pepper, a handful of chopped basil and a few tablespoons of olive oil. When the pasta was done, I drained it and added it to the bowl and tossed well. I topped it with freshly grated Parmesan. Yum. (You can find this recipe in the Simply in Season cookbook or on epicurious). We also had green salad (lettuce, cherry tomatoes, green pepper, carrot and goat cheese) and my mom's applesauce, pulled out of the freezer yesterday. Not bad for very little effort. I love the fresh produce of summer!

Other recent cooking adventures: pie season has begun! Well, I guess it began with the strawberry pie I made a month ago, but now it's in full swing. My husband and I made a blueberry and a cherry pie this past Sunday. The cherry is not great--we really should try making it with sour cherries--I hear this makes the best pie. We had sweet cherries, not that flavorful, which gave us an okay pie. The blueberry, though...it is transcendent. It has convinced me that my two favorite pies in the world are apple and blueberry. When combined with the right amount of flour, sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon, the blueberries' natural tart/sweet combination shines. I had a piece for an after-work snack today and will definitely have another before going to bed. My next goal: a peach pie. And maybe raspberry, if I go raspberry picking somewhere.

Last but probably most importantly: I have been hydrating myself with homemade mint tea (called meadow tea in some circles) for the last few days. It's probably the reason I'm still alive. While we were visiting my parents this past weekend, I picked a bagful of mint from their ample supply (most of it grows wild down by the creek). On Sunday I steeped it all in a big kettle of water and made a lot of mint tea concentrate. We have been going through a pitcher of it per day or so. I was excited to make so much concentrate at once and found myself dreaming of cool fall or winter days where I would pull the concentrate out of the freezer and enjoy the fresh taste of summer. Alas, I think we are going to drink it all this week! Which just means we'll have to get more on our next trip. Plus plant some mint here in our backyard, although I'm not sure how well it will survive.

camping cuisine

2006-07-23T14:08:00.000-08:00

My husband and I just returned from a few days of canoe camping in the Adirondacks along with a college friend and his girlfriend. We enjoyed great food while out in the woods and already have ideas for our next camping menu. Breakfasts were a highlight for me: the best were bacon, eggs and fried potatoes (leftover from dinner the night before) and wild berry pancakes (raspberries and blueberries were growing right next to one of our campsites). One advantage of canoe camping is that you don't have to carry all the gear--the boat does all the work. So we brought a lot of food, including a cooler stuffed with fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs, bacon and plenty of cheese. All of this great cooking was also made possible by our friend's camping stove, a well designed and efficient little white gas burner. Anyway, here's some pictures:

Dinner preparations the first night in the wilderness: on the left, Kevin stirs the pasta (which will be mixed with sauce, fried onions, peppers and garlic, and meatballs) while on the right, Krestia shaves thin slices of Parmesan to go on top.

Breakfast a day later: on the left, McNeill cooks bacon over the cooking stove while, on the right, Kevin fries potatoes and attends to the water for hot drinks over the campfire.

the borscht experiment

2006-07-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

After having beets in my fridge for at least 2 weeks, I teamed up with a fellow CSA member and cook to figure out how to use them up. We combined ingredients and recipes and shared a meal of cold beet borscht for dinner a few days ago. I have never really been a fan of beets but this was surprisingly good--beets and potatoes pureed with vinegar and salt, chilled, and topped with sour cream, chopped hard boiled eggs, green onions, dill, and cilantro.

how to use up a CSA share

2006-06-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

What we got this week (on Sunday) and what we have made so far:
amaranth greens--added to a vegetable stirfry on Monday along with carrots, broccoli, and green onions (all three from Wegmans produce section, which I try to avoid during CSA but can't always). The stirfry was seasoned with ginger, red wine vinegar, peanut butter, and sesame oil. My husband made this stirfry which I thought was good but he wasn't impressed with it. Either way, it really helped to use up several vegetables all at once.
garlic scapes--added to same stirfry
spinach--half used in vegetable bean soup on Tuesday (ingredients: carrots, green pepper, onion, orzo, cannellini beans, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, water, oregano, thyme). Other half used in pasta dish on Wednesday (fettucine with chicken, sundried tomatoes, onions, garlic, fresh basil and oregano, topped with parmesan cheese).
mizuna--half used in green salad on Wednesday along with some spinach and red lettuce (topped with strawberries, almonds and goat cheese)
lettuce--used in salad (I'm still using the lettuce from last week)
baby beets--not used yet! I'm not a huge beet fan, so I'm trying to get myself excited about these. Anyone have any ideas for me? I'd like to use the greens, too.
cilantro--half used in Monday's stirfry. Remaining half to be used in fresh homemade salsa or maybe a curry...I haven't decided yet.
shelling peas--all used on Monday in Fresh Pea Soup (from Simply in Season). I made this as a side dish while my husband made the stir-fry. Easy, delicious recipe--peel and chop two potatoes, put in large saucepan with 2 1/2 cups water. Bring to a boil, cook until potato is tender. Add shelled peas (I only had one cup but recipe called for three cups--adjust recipe as needed). Boil until peas are bright green and tender (a few minutes). Puree soup in food processor or blender. Salt and pepper to taste. Top with chopped fresh dill (which I had leftover from last week).
All in all, it's been a delicious week. The race continues...can we use up this week's ingredients before this coming Sunday when we get more produce? Tune in next posting and see....

More strawberries

2006-06-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

Today my husband and I went to pick strawberries at Hurd Orchards, a place about half an hour from here. The picking was good but the field was pretty messy--no defined paths to pick in, no idea of what has been picked or hasn't. It made me long for the good old days when my parents took us to Shultz's Strawberry Farm (formerly in Hornell). Still, in about half an hour we picked 10 quarts. We paid $21 total which I think is a really good deal. They charge by the pound, not the quart. The price is $1.75 per pound unless you pick more than 10 pounds, in which case you get a discount to $1.50 per pound (we picked 13 pounds). I don't think we'll have any problem using up the berries. We used up one quart already tonight for strawberry shortcake (my Grandma Grastorf's recipe--buttery and yummy). Also, on the way home from picking we stopped at a farmstand and bought a pound of fresh, local edible pod peas. And today was our CSA pickup day, so we have a fridge full of greens to use (this week: kale, spinach, dill, cilantro, red lettuce, green onions, and mizspoona--I know, I had never heard of it either--it's a cross between tat soi and mizuna). Hooray for early summer produce!

the perfect Sunday brunch

2006-06-18T07:55:00.000-08:00

What I ate this morning (after reading the Sunday New York Times, still in my pajamas):

a 2-egg omelet with mushrooms, spinach, onions, rosemary and goat cheese
a glass of Wegman's premium orange juice
a piece of whole wheat toast with butter
half a mug of aforementioned homemade chai

What a delicious start to the day.

Strawberry fever

2006-06-14T19:29:00.000-08:00

Strawberry fever is the condition that causes a usual "early to bed" person to stay up until almost midnight making a strawberry-rhubarb pie from scratch. It also describes the panicked feeling you feel knowing that strawberry season is only 3-4 weeks long, and you have to pack in all the essential strawberry dishes in that time period. Fresh, local strawberries are one of life's greatest pleasures, and they are gone too quickly every year. I got my first two quarts of the season today from a farm close to where I work. I'm hoping to pick more later this week. The rhubarb is from our CSA. The filling recipe is courtesy of the Joy of Cooking. The crust recipe is from my dear mom, who taught me that pie making is an art, a rapidly dying one, at that.

true chai

2006-05-30T04:41:00.000-08:00

Chai is my favorite hot drink. When made right, chai is a deeply flavored, sweet and spicy tea with milk and sugar. This leads me to a dilemma: if coffeeshops can make all kinds of delicious coffee drinks, why can't they make good chai? I've never had a cup of chai at a coffeeshop as good as what I make at home (I just tried chai at my husband's favorite coffeeshop in town and was again let down). It always tastes like it started as a flavor powder that they mixed with warm milk, then topped with steamed milk. It's not really brewed tea, just some powder stirred into milk. Disappointing. I have, however, had some good chai at a few local Indian and Pakistan restaurants. I guess I'll have to settle for getting my chai there or at home.
Here's my recipe for good, full-flavored, real chai (serves 1):
Mix one cup water and one cup milk. Pour into a small saucepan.
Heat the mixture, stirring often, until it gets foamy and little bubbles appear around the edge.
Add 1 Tablespoon Frontier chai black tea (I discovered this at our local organic/natural foods market). Stir for a few minutes over heat, then cover tightly and turn off heat.
Allow tea to steep for 10 minutes or to desired strength (I like it to turn a deep brown color).
Strain chai into a mug. Sprinkle with ground cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom. Add sugar as desired. Enjoy.

colorful goodness

2006-05-24T16:46:00.001-08:00

It's so pretty, I just want to cook with it. And then take pictures of it. And, of course, eventually eat it. I made Sweet Peppers with Pasta for dinner tonight. I think the colors of the peppers were the best part of the dish--it really ended up tasting like a nice warm pasta salad, but not much else. I added garlic scallions from our CSA share plus fresh basil and oregano from my little herb garden. And, of course, good freshly grated Parmesan, which covers over a multitude of sins.
The old cooking magic is back! Last night I cooked a Thai beef and asparagus curry for dinner and then made dessert starting at 9:30 pm. Usually the only thing I'm starting then is the process of getting ready for bed. I made stovetop chocolate pudding--such an American standby--from the Joy of Cooking (a recent gift from my mother). It was amazingly easy and fudgy and delicious and helped to use up the extra milk we have currently (my husband and I bought milk on the same day). Since we were impatient for dessert, I put the pudding in the freezer for a fast cool-down and we ate it 15 minutes later, still warm in the middle. But oh so good.

chef's block

2006-05-21T16:33:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in 2 1/2 weeks, and I think it's because of something new for me: I'm tired of cooking. Well, not tired, really, just not cooking anything new or exciting. The last few weeks my main goals in cooking have been to use the ingredients we already have and get dinner on the table as quickly as possible. Thus, a lot of pasta and rice dishes, and nothing with any really exciting ingredients. My husband has been doing all the inventive stuff recently--including some great experimentation with Gorgonzola cheese.
Anyway, the end of my chef's block may be in sight due to a new development: tonight was the first vegetable pickup for our CSA share. And what happiness--leeks, carrots, watercress, lettuce, garlic scallions and asparagus, all ours to eat! I came home and right away made leek soup with watercress to celebrate. Such a fresh taste in the mouth.
Speaking of CSA, I wanted to mention a new term I heard recently in the New York Times Style Magazine: locavores, defined as "a coinage combining "local" and "omnivores"; a subset of activists who eat not just politically, sustainably and seasonally, but extremely locally--all the foods they consume should be sourced within a 100-mile radius of where they live." Of course this movement was started by people in Berkeley, California, where it's much easier to eat locally than, say, in western New York. But check out the website anyway for inspiration: www.locavores.com.

ramps (wild leeks)

2006-05-02T16:34:00.000-08:00

The first taste of spring! We collected these beauties from the woods behind my in-laws' house, while visiting them this past weekend. Our harvest lasted for two meals. Last night my husband cooked Provencal Chicken Breasts with Rosemary Orzo. Tonight I made Potato Leek Soup with Cheese. Oh, the joy of cooking with produce fresh from the earth!

homemade bread

2006-05-01T15:24:00.000-08:00

Mmm...a loaf of homemade bread. I made this last week for a friend who recently had a baby. I took a meal to her and her husband. I made a hearty vegetable soup and oatmeal bread (both from my Simply in Season cookbook), and took along fruit salad and brownies for dessert. It was good to make bread but I could tell I was rusty at it--I let it rise too much and it turned out airy and too light for my taste. I like bread to be nice and chewy and thick. Still, it looks tasty, right?

Dinner Review #2

2006-04-24T16:53:00.000-08:00

As the weather gets warmer I find myself craving summer foods--salads, cool dips, lemon, mint, fresh herbs. When I crave all of that I go for Mediterranean. I love the cool salads, the plates of hummus and tabouleh with pita bread, the feta crumbled over everything. All of this led me and my husband to Oasis Mediterranean Bistro for our first meal there. We have enjoyed Aladdin's and Sinbad's for awhile now and, while driving around town, happened upon Oasis and decided to give it a chance.
We were seated immediately upon arriving, which was nice on a Friday night (we weren't sure what to expect). I ordered the combination platter for an appetizer, so I could sample all of those classic Mediterranean dips and salads at once. Somehow our order got messed up and our main dishes arrived with no sign of the appetizer--I had to ask for it again and it seemed our waitress had totally missed it the first time. No harm done, though, because we were so hungry by that time that we still demolished our main dishes and the platter all at once. I thought the platter (composed of hummus, baba ganouj, dolmades, felafel and tabouleh) was decent but not as flavorful as some I've had. My Chicken Plate (marinated chicken thigh meat, grilled and served over a Greek salad) was delicious--the meat was crispy on the outside, moist and tender on the inside. Unfortunately it was listed under the "Atkins Friendly Main Dishes" section of the menu--I tend to resent food being grouped into fad diet categories but I was hungry for a good Greek salad. I know that I said on the last dinner review that I don't tend to get salad for a main dish but it seems I am eating my words. :) My husband enjoyed his Beef Kabob with Couscous--it came artfully presented with the couscous molded in a mound and a sauce drizzled on the plate.
The bill: a surprising $32.48 before tip. We realized the price was lower because we didn't order wine. My husband wanted to try the baclava but I was too full for any dessert! All in all, a cozy, more quiet, and decent Mediterranean place to eat if you're looking to avoid the crowds at the more well known places.

On My Husband's Cooking

2006-04-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

Oh thing of great beauty and delight--a meal conceived and created by my husband. Every Monday I work late, and he does the selecting of recipes, the shopping and most of the cooking (depending on when I get home). And what a treat Monday nights have become! He serves meals with such care to presentation and detail--the soup always has a garnish (tonight it was a small sprig of fresh rosemary), the meal is served on our Dick Lang light green pottery set (a wedding gift), and there is always a perfect wine pairing (tonight was a French white wine called Pouilly Fume). He's also becoming quite good with portion sizes. Each meal he cooks usually includes a serving of soup, a perfectly sized main dish and a salad or side dish, all artfully presented. Tonight we enjoyed Chicken with Sauteed Pears and Rosemary Sauce along with Tomato Soup with Lemon-Rosemary Cream and a side salad of arugula, lettuce, pears, almonds, goat cheese, and raisins. You will note that both epicurious recipes include a small amount of whipping cream. This is because I bought some to use in making cheesecake for Easter and we had some leftover, so he found delicious, creative ways to use it up. I am so proud of his cooking skills. I'm almost worried because I think he's getting better than me, especially in the gourmet area of cooking. (Naturally, I beat him hands down in the Mennonite area.) But this is a small worry. Mostly I'm wildly glad for the delectable meals he prepares for me, and so grateful that I have a husband who loves food and cooks well.

Choices, choices

2006-04-15T18:08:00.000-08:00

Dinner tonight: choice of Chocolate Swirl Cheesecake or celery and carrot sticks with dill dip. Actually, cancel that--the cheesecake is off limits until Easter dinner tomorrow. We decided to pick up a pizza. :)

Red Lentils

2006-04-13T04:47:00.000-08:00

Last night my sister was here, and we always cook an international feast together. This time we cooked from the Mennonite cookbooks--I made Ethiopian Red Lentil Bowl from Simply in Season and she made Curried Peas and Potatoes from Extending the Table. A nice mix, combined with rice and raita. The red lentils were wonderful, cooked slowly with half a head of garlic, an onion and a few spices (ginger, paprika, black pepper). The recipe made it sound like a soup but it was more like a wat that you would eat at an Ethiopian restaurant. Definitely a recipe I will repeat!

Eggplant Scallopini Marsala, in the making

2006-04-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

I can't wait for our CSA produce to start arriving...then my meals always start with cutting boards full of fresh, local, yummy produce. All of this produce is from Wegmans. The finished product (with fettucine) will be consumed at a church potluck in a few hours. Hopefully all the Mennonites won't mind a little cooking wine in the sauce.

Dinner Review #1

2006-04-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

For our weekly dining out meal, my husband and I chose something a little more low-key and less adventurous than usual. We were tired. We just finished a busy week and the weekend isn't going to be any less busy. We didn't exactly feel like going out but didn't want to cook, either, so we finally decided on Hogan's Hideaway, a casual restaurant on Park Ave. It was a pleasant experience, a good mix of decent food and just the right kind of atmosphere. Unfortunately I had to notice a splatter of tomato sauce on our table as we were being seated, so of course I had to stare at it occasionally throughout the meal. The silverware was also dingy with dried rinse water patterns on it. That's the obsessive side of me speaking, though. My more gracious side says they were busy, and once the food comes, who cares? My wine (Mountain Road 2004 Pinot Noir, from New York, incidentally the most expensive glass on the menu) and my husband's beer (Hogan's Park Ave Ale) were excellent and our meals pretty good. I had a steak salad with blue cheese, red peppers and a roasted garlic dressing. I'm not usually a "salad for a main dish" kind of eater--that's a little too girly for me, but this salad had enough substance and my appetite was not as robust as usual so in the end I was satisfied. He had the Friday Fish Fry (cod-which I tasted and pronounced a little doughy as opposed to crispy, but I'm not a fish fry person anyway). The complimentary bread was a mixed bag--a soft white country-style loaf instead of the nice crispy crust we prefer, but laced with some kind of seed (either caraway or fennel, we couldn't decide) that made the flavor more exciting. The bill totaled $40.77 before tip, a little more expensive than what it was worth, maybe, but not bad.

Food Poetry #1

2006-04-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

Mmm...two of my favorite art forms combined into one. Delicious. I hope to make this a fairly regular feature on my blog--there's a lot of good food poetry out there. It's my mission to share it with the masses. Here's a poem by Julia Kasdorf (who grew up in a Mennonite family/community) about Mennonite women and how we feel about food. This poem helps me explain to my husband why I tend to cook too much and why I must save everything in Tupperware containers. It's in my genes.

When Our Women Go Crazy

When our women go crazy, they're scared there won't be
enough meat in the house. They keep asking
but how will we eat? Who will cook? Will there be enough?
Mother to daughter, it's always the same
questions. The sisters and aunts recognize symptoms:
she thinks there's no food, same as Mommy
before they sent her away to that place,
and she thinks if she goes, the men will eat
whatever they find right out of the saucepans.
When our women are sane, they can tomatoes
and simmer big pots of soup for the freezer.
They are satisfied arranging spice tins
on cupboard shelves lined with clean paper.
They save all the leftovers under tight lids
and only throw them away when they're rotten.
Their refrigerators are always immaculate and full,
which is also the case when our women are crazy.

This reminds me--I need to clean the refrigerator. It's full, but definitely not immaculate. And one of my goals for this summer is to learn how to can my own tomatoes. And I have to cook a big pot of something for potluck at church Sunday, and a dessert to take to my family tomorrow. Am I crazy yet?

Little Chocolate Cakes in Ramekins

2006-04-06T06:58:00.000-08:00

Yum. I made this dessert awhile ago in an attempt to learn how to cook well with chocolate. I found the recipe at my favorite on-line cooking website, epicurious.com. The recipe is called Molten Chocolate Cakes. Watch out for the mistake I made--overcooking them just enough so the insides were no longer molten. Still delicious, though--how could it not be with chocolate , butter, eggs and sugar?

Rice is Nice

2006-04-06T06:55:00.000-08:00

First Draft

2006-04-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

Here I am, at last with a blog. Not sure how to do this or what I'll do with it yet, but I'm thinking the main purpose will be meditations on food--eating well, eating in season, eating thoughtfully. I'm looking forward to hearing from others out there on these topics. Of course, in the tradition of blogs, this will be mostly self-centered--what I've been cooking recently, where I've eaten recently, new recipes, musings, etc. The title reflects a merging of my background--Mennonite roots (the standard cookbooks More with Less, Extending the Table, and now Simply in Season) mixed with more gourmet influences (epicurious, Gourmet magazine). Mollie Katzen fits somewhere in there too--I think she's an honorary Mennonite but also a little bit gourmet.