No Musing

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour III

2011-08-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

Every lunch and dinner in Saint-Flour lasted about an hour and a half. Every single one included a first course, main course, vegetable dish, cheese course, dessert, and wine. The cheeses were always the same four. Nobody was ever completely sure what they were, but the most knowledgeable people told me they were Cantal, Saint-Nectaire, Fourme d'Ambert, and tomme de montagne. All of them were excellent. The soft cheeses had an amazing, gooey texture that I've never seen in American cheese. I attribute it to raw milk aged fewer than 60 days, or to non-refrigeration. We always had the same pretty good red table wine, even when we had white fish.

I tried to keep track of all of our meals and will record them for posterity here. I probably made a mistake or two, especially at the end.

Monday:: Lunchham and egg in aspic; braised beef, mashed potatoes; crème caramel
Dinnermelon; stewed Romano beans and other vegetables; breaded chicken cutlets; packaged coffee ice cream sundae
Tuesday: Lunchquiche with Cantal cheese; stewed chicken with mushrooms, onions, and cauliflower; cooked peaches
Dinnerbeets and tomatoes in vinaigrette; salad, cod cakes (from yesterday's mashed potatoes); chocolate mousse
Wednesday: Lunchprosciutto with bread and butter; pork chops with buttered pasta, roasted tomatoes; plum, apricot, and raspberry tart
Dinnersalad; chicken kebabs, string beans; fruit
Thursday: Lunchtuna with mayonnaise; veal stew, scalloped potatoes; ice cream
Dinnergrapefruit; baked crepes with ham and béchamel sauce, endives, hash browns; baked apple with caramel
Friday: Lunchsalad; a white fish called colin, which might be hake, in a very buttery sauce, rice with vegetables; meringue in vanilla sauce with caramel
Dinnercelery root remoulade; tomatoes stuffed with sausage; chopped vegetables; fruit
Saturday: Lunchham/corned beef in aspic; steak, aligot (cheesy mashed potatoes); pastry with pears
Dinnersurimi (i.e., fake crab--seriously!); salad, lasagna; flan
Sunday: Lunchassorted seafood (fish, mussels) baked in scallop shells with cheese on top; brussels sprouts with fried potato balls, chicken legs; tiramisu cake
Dinnermelon; croque monsieurs, salad; cooked peaches, lady fingers
Monday: Lunchcarrots with vinaigrette; roast pork with prunes, french fries; packaged sundae with weird pear flavor
Dinnercured sausage with bread and butter; buckwheat crepes with cheese and mushrooms, stewed zucchini; banana, nuts, and chocolate with vanilla sauce
Tuesday: Lunchmushrooms in sweet tomato sauce; rabbit stew with a cream sauce, egg noodles; tarte tatin
Dinnertomatoes with corn, crumbled boiled egg, and vinaigrette; spinach, potato croquettes, omelets with herbs; fruit
Wednesday: Lunchbaloney-like meat; sausages, lentils; creme caramel
Dinnerbeans and vegetables in mayonnaise; quiche, salad; cake
Thursday: Lunchbeets and cucumbers in vinaigrette; paella; strawberry cake
Dinnermelon; cold chicken, herbed potatoes; apricot Chantilly
Friday: Lunchmixed vegetables; cheese and ham in pastry
Dinnerpaté de campagne; peas and carrots, breaded balls of ham and veal; chocolate pots de creme with ladyfingers

Me in front of the Viaduc de Garabit, bilt by Gustave Eiffel

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour II

2011-07-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

The next day in Saint-Flour, the summer school started. The routine for the next two weeks was to get up, eat breakfast, go to a one and a half hour lecture, take a break, go to another lecture, and then eat lunch. After lunch, there were usually two shorter talks by students about their research. Nothing was scheduled until dinner, after which was another student talk. This was usually the worst-attended talk.

After the lectures were over on my first day, I took a walk to look around and buy some postcards.

The upper town, from outside the train station.

Saint-Flour has an upper and a lower town. The upper town is the older part, and it's where I was walking. It has narrow streets that cars drive through at ridiculous speeds.

A street in the upper town.

Walking around that first day, I managed to get lost. The upper town is so small that this is a real feat. I blame it on the jetlag--I woke up at 5am that morning and was really confused about what time it was. I ended up wandering through the main square:

The main square.

Eventually, I found my way back to the abbey, establishing that a random walk in Saint-Flour is recurrent (parents and grandparents: this is an extremely bad math joke).

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour I

2011-07-21T23:53:00.000-07:00

I spent the last two weeks in Saint-Flour, France. We're not talking about Paris: I was in the Massif Central of France, the massive middle.

Sunflowers from a train window.

I left my apartment at 6am for a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. From there I flew to Paris. I arrived at 9am and took the commuter rail to the Gare de Lyon, where I got on a train to Clermont-Ferrand. Four hours later, I discovered that my next train was actually a bus, and after a lot of miming and attempts at communication (my one year of high school French was not that helpful), I got on one of the six buses that was waiting. When the bus sat around and didn't leave when it was scheduled, I started to worry. When about twenty young children got on the bus, I really didn't know what was going on. We left, and we did seem to be going towards Saint-Flour, according to the highway signs. The person sitting behind me spoke some English to me, and then two people sitting nearby told me that I must be a probabilist, and that I was going in the right direction. This was not to last: our bus kept going down the highway right past the exit for Saint-Flour, and we all watched the town at the top of a hill, receding into the distance. This was because the bus route involved going 40 kilometers south of Saint-Flour, stopping for fifteen minutes, and then turning around and going back to Saint-Flour. And so I arrived around 7pm, after 26 hours of constant travel. The director of the summer school, Jean Picard, picked up the three of us who were on the bus and drove us to the hotel where the summer school is held. It's an old abbey. The doors are all shorter than I am.

Then was dinner: potato salad with olives, pickles, ham, and lots of mayonnaise, cucumber and tomato salad, couscous, cold meat with pickles and mustard, baguettes and four kinds of cheese with which I would soon become very familiar, and pastries with layers of cake and cream. This was all washed down with carafes of very drinkable red wine. I ate, climbed up to my room, and fell asleep.

My room.

Haircuts

2011-06-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

This is how we used to look:

And this is how we look as of a few weeks ago:

Garden

2011-06-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

Lindsay and I have been trying to grow things. Let's start with the tomatoes:

From left to right, the varieties are Green Grape, Silvery Fir Tree, and Peacevine. The first and third are cherry tomatoes; the first and the second are heirloom. Here are some burgeoning tomatoes:

Tomatoes on our Peacevine plant.

Green grape tomatoes: how do we know when they're ripe?

We have really pampered these tomatoes. The first month we had them, we took them inside every night. When Seattle was more reliably warm, we put them in bigger containers, along with some compost from our friend Stephen. For a while, we covered them at night to keep them warm. Now we're forcing them to fend for themselves, but on nice days I do move them to a new spot in the late afternoon to catch some evening sun.

Here are the rest of our plants:

We bought a mystery bulb last fall, and it grew into this gigantic lily.

Arugula and thyme, with a few nasturtiums amongst them.

Our tarragon has been less prolific than our thyme, but it's doing okay.

Nasturtiums.

We also have some more nasturtiums and some sorrel growing in the same pots as the tomatoes, but they've only just started to sprout. There are some older pictures from our garden on Lindsay's blog, so you can see how much everything has grown.

I saw this when I was walking the other day. It was one block away from my apartment, sitting in somebody's front yard:

A rabbit.

2011-06-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

Dick's Brewing Company, Bavarian Style Hefeweizen
Centralia, WA
4% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

This beer is notable for being American and tasting like a German wheat beer. It's not as good as the best of those, but it's not bad.

Sourdough II: The loaf lives

2011-05-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

So, you've cultivated some yeast and now you want to make some sourdough? Well, be careful. Lots of people seem to hate bread called sourdough, so call it naturally leavened bread or something like that. Your bread will be very sour if you let it rise very slowly at a low temperature, but barely sour otherwise, and your deceit will surely go unnoticed. (For example, I have no idea which of my local bakery's breads are sourdough and which aren't. You have to look on the ingredient list and check if yeast is listed to know.)

I've cobbled this bread recipe together from a few sources, including Sandor Ellix Katz, Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking, and a bread seminar I took one weekend in college. (Yes, I took a bread seminar. It was during passover, too.) I use about 75% white bread flour, 20% whole wheat bread flour, and 5% rye. In the recipe, I've just written flour.

This recipe is for two large loaves. After step 2, I take half the dough and put it in the refrigerator. Then I take it out a few days later, let it come to room temperature for a few hours, and bake it.

There are three basic steps. Here's quick summary:

Mix up a preferment of starter, flour, and water, and let it sit overnight. This is supposed to give the yeast a chance to multiply and to give a deeper, fermented taste.
The next day, combine the preferment with more flour and water and some salt. Knead and let rise.
Form a loaf and bake.

Step 1

1 cup starter
240g (1 1/2 cups) flour
40g (scant 3 tbs) water

Mix up the starter, flour, and water. Cover and leave overnight, or however long is convenient. This is your preferment.

Step 2

840g (5 1/4 cups) flour
445g (scant 2 cups) water
1 tbs salt

Mix up the flour and water in a separate bowl. It might be a bit too dry to quite come together. Let this sit for thirty minutes. This supposedly helps break down some of the gluten, which makes it easier for it to reform itself in a grid.

Mix in the preferment and the salt. With your hands, combine everything and start kneading. It will be really sticky at first, but don't give up and don't add any flour. After a few minutes of kneading it should start to feel a lot less wet. Knead it for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, after which the dough should be pretty and smooth. (I might even try to make the dough a little bit wetter next time.) Form a ball, put it down, and cover.

Now you want to let the dough rise. Instead of punching down the dough at any point, which the experts seem to frown upon, do something called turning: pick up the dough, gently stretch it out a little bit, then make a ball by folding the four sides up towards the center. Then flip the dough over and put it back down. After you've done this, the dough will magically seem smoother and more dough-like, more capable of stretching without tearing. I think it's ideal to do this a three or four times as the dough rises, but I'm always away when this is happening, so instead I usually just do it once at the beginning, 15-30 minutes after I stopped kneading and started to let the dough rise. You could also try doing it at the end, thirty minutes before you want to shape the dough.

Dough that has risen.

Step 3

How long you let the dough rise probably depends on the temperature. My best loaf happened when I kneaded in the morning, let the dough rise during the day, and baked it in the evening. So, try something like eight hours of rising, maybe more if your apartment is colder than 68 degrees and less if it's warmer. But you should probably just do whatever is convenient for you, since that's what I did, and it seems to work okay.

When you're done with the rise, cut the ball of dough in half. Put half in the fridge, unless you want to bake a huge amount of bread, and form the other half into a ball. Let this sit for an hour, and while your dough is resting, turn your oven to 450 degrees and put a dutch oven in to heat up for 20 or 30 minutes. When you're ready to bake the bread, take the dutch oven out and sprinkle it with coarse corn meal. Form the loaf into a ball and put it in. Sprinkle flour on top, and slash very shallowly with a knife in whatever pattern you'd like. Bake with the lid on for 35 minutes, and then off for 15-20 minutes. Remove the bread and let cool.

Sourdough I: Starting your starter

2011-05-24T21:51:00.000-07:00

If making your own bread isn't enough anymore and you want to make your own yeast, continue reading. I used to make no-knead bread. It's great, but I needed to put something extra in it---rosemary, caraway seeds, walnuts---to give it some flavor. My sourdough doesn't need this.

Sourdough starter with bubbles from yeast.

The first step is to catch some yeast. I followed Sandor Ellix Katz's instructions.

2 cups flour (I used a mix of white, whole wheat, and rye)
2 cups water

In a jar, mix the flour and water. Stir vigorously, cover with cheesecloth or a cloth napkin or other porous material. Stir at least once a day. After two or three days there should be bubbles produced by the yeast (there will always be bubbles when you stir up the starter, but these are irrelevant). Add 1-2 tbsp. of flour to the starter every day for 3 or 4 days and keep stirring. The starter should get thick, but if it becomes so thick that it's not really liquid any more, add a bit more water.

After these days of feeding, you'll need a bread recipe (coming soon!). When you use the starter, leave a little bit behind and replenish with equal parts water and flour. If you're using the starter a lot (say, every week), you can leave it out and feed it a spoonful of flour every day or so. If you're using it less, put it in the fridge. Let it warm up and feed it a day before you want to use it. In the fridge, you should still feed it once a week or so.

Egg Salad Sandwich

2011-05-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

My mayonnaise batting average is all the way up from .333 to .500. I followed these instructions. I whirred my immersion blender inside a jar as Lindsay dripped oil in. Nothing happened until the oil was mostly gone, and then all at once the egg yolk and oil turned solid, or at least, very thick. I added some extra olive oil to thin it out a bit, and then we ate some with asparagus. Today we made egg salad. If only we had some brioche or challah; think how much egg we could have consumed in a sitting!

The egg salad had hard-boiled eggs, red onions, carrots, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and our mayonnaise. The bread is my third (and best so far!) attempt at sourdough.

Almond Rhubarb Cake

2011-05-15T22:03:00.000-07:00

I took a plum cake from David Tanis's A Platter of Figs, which I have out from the library, and replaced the plums with rhubarb. I also added some extra sugar to compensate for the rhubarb, which was a good thing, because it still came out pretty sour. The cake was nutty and wholesome, more like a breakfast pastry than a dessert (but good for dessert too!). I'll give a very abbreviated version to encourage you to check out the original cookbook.

1 cup unblanched almonds
1/2 cup sugar, plus 1/3 cup for topping
1/3 cup flour
dash of salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
4 tbs. melted butter
2 pounds rhubarb

Grind the almonds and 1/2 cup sugar in a food processor, and combine with the flour and salt. Beat the eggs, milk, and butter together. Combine with the dry ingredients and put in a buttered, 10-inch cake pan. Top with thickly sliced rhubarb (more than one layer is okay if they won't fit) and the extra sugar and bake at 350 degrees. The recipe says to cook for 40-45 minutes, but the rhubarb adds a lot of liquid, and I had to mine took longer.

A halved recipe, cooked in a cast iron pan.

Chana Masala

2011-05-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my friend Sweta picked up some authentic Indian spices for me, and today I cooked some authentic Indian food, mostly following the recipe on the back of the box. It was a good recipe--not the Indian equivalent of Ritz Cracker Apple Pie--and I'll tell you what I did.

1 and 1/4 cups dried chickpeas
1 large onion
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tsp. Punjabi chhole masala (Sweta got Badshah brand for me)
dried chile to taste
1/2 tsp. turmeric
half of a 28 oz. can of tomatoes, crushed
chopped cilantro
salt, vegetable or peanut oil

Cook the chickpeas until soft with the garlic, and optionally with half the onion, chopped. The box says, "Pressure cook for three whistles," but I don't know how to convert a whistle to different units, so you're on your own. The box also says to cook the chickpeas with a small cloth containing tea leaves, which I didn't do but am interested to try.

Chop the onions as finely as you can, or turn them to mush in a food processor. In a large pot, sautée the onion puree in oil over low heat, stirring occasionally, until it starts to color. Add the spices and sautee for a few more minutes. Add the chickpeas with some of their cooking water, and scrape everything off the bottom of the pan. Add the tomatoes, and some salt. Cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. Serve with rice, garnished with cilantro.

Odin Freya's Gold

2011-05-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

Odin Brewing Company, Freya's Gold
Kolsch Style Ale
Seattle, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

An excellent summer beer. Every light beer aspires to this. It's sweet and a little bit wheaty.

Burnt Greens

2011-04-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, I went to Revel with my cousin Amelia and ate what amounted to a broiled salad. It was a mixture of lettuces and other greens, blackened on top and raw on the bottom, and it was very good. I don't think I can reproduce it, but yesterday I made something similar. I used kale raab (kale that had started to flower). I think any tough green like kale, chard, or collards would work fine.

1/2 pound bunch of kale raab
1 tbs. peanut oil
1 tbs. fish sauce
1 tbs. garlic-chili paste
1 tbs. fermented plum paste, or fermented soy paste, or soy sauce
1 tbs. rice vinegar
2 tsp. sugar
1 tbs. water

Mix together all the ingredients besides the greens and the peanut oil. Blanche the greens for about five minutes (less if they're young and tender) in boiling water. Drain and run cold water over them to stop the cooking. Lightly squeeze the greens to remove water and lay them out in an inch-thick layer on a baking sheet. Dry the top of this with a cloth or paper towel as best you can, and drizzle the peanut oil on it. Put the greens right under a preheated broiler. Take them out after about five minutes, when they've just started to burn at the tips. Put in a bowl and toss with the sauce.

Burnt greens.

A bulb growing in our planter.

Hummus Variant

2011-04-09T23:55:00.000-07:00

Tonight for dinner I made hummus, and it only took me about an hour. I took my favorite hummus recipe, replaced the slowest cooking beans (chickpeas) with the quickest (black-eyed peas), and also threw in some leeks, because I've always wanted to put leeks in hummus. The results were pretty good. Nobody who ate it would bat an eye, but once you know it's not made with chickpeas, you'll notice the slight vegetal flavor of the peas. Or maybe that was just the leeks. Either way, I liked it.

1 cup black-eyed peas
1 large leek, cleaned and chopped
1/2 cup tahini
juice of 1 1/2 lemons, or more
3 cloves garlic
olive oil, salt

Cook the black-eyed peas in water to cover with about 1/2 tsp. of salt. You want to get them completely tender. Mine took about 45 minutes, but beans vary. While they cook, sauté the leeks in oil slowly with a bit of salt, stirring occasionally, until they've browned a bit. When the back-eyed peas are almost done, add the leeks to the pot with them.

Leeks and black-eyed peas cooking. Despite the picture, cover the pot of black-eyed peas.

In a food processor (or with an immersion blender, which is what I used), puree the garlic with the lemon juice, tahini, and 1/4 cup of water (use extra water from the beans if there's any). Add the black-eyed peas and the leeks and puree some more. Add olive oil to taste (I like about 1 tbs.), and puree some more. Add salt and more lemon juice if necessary.

More Home Improvement

2011-04-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

When I was in New York a few weeks ago, I packed up 45 pounds of CDs and books of mine that were cluttering up my parents' house and mailed them to Seattle. Soon, they were cluttering up my apartment, and Lindsay and I set out to do something about it.

We went to the hardware store, bought some standard shelves and supports, found studs in our wall, and put everything up. The shelves look nice, and they feel sturdy. Success!

Me and Lindsay looking unusually glamorous in New York.

A Fine Wallingford Day

2011-03-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

New York next week! Here are some Wallingford photos in case I miss it while I'm there. These discs remind me of grape-flavored children's tylenol.

Weird stone discs

Somersaulter in Gasworks Park

Racking

2011-03-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

Last week I racked my honey wine from one carboy to another, thereby achieving my goal of combining common words like rack, car, and boy into an incoherent jumble. A carboy is a jug, and racking is the process of siphoning a fermented liquid from one jug to another, leaving the yeasty sediments behind.

The original carboy.

The happy racker.

I made the honey wine as instructed by Sandor Ellix Katz in Wild Fermentation, which means it's as simple as possible: mix honey and water, let it sit around for a few days until yeast colonize it, and put it in a carboy capped with an airlock, which lets gas escape but not enter. I started it in September, and I flavored it with a little bit of mint from the patch on our sidewalk.

Racking is fun; a few pumps on the Auto Siphon (or L'auto-Siphon--the instructions were in English and French) and you're enjoying the alchemy of liquid flowing through tubes.

A glass of honey wine, with the new carboy behind it.

The honey wine is still a little sweet, though in a pleasant way. It's developed a slightly rubbery flavor; it's not terrible, but I'm still hoping it goes away. Maybe in another six months?

Long Weekend

2011-02-21T22:04:00.000-08:00

This weekend Lindsay and I had our advisors and their spouses over for dinner.

A striking squash.

Spinach pasta.

The main course.

We made squash lasagna, roasted cauliflower with hazelnuts, sauerkraut, and brownies. Our guests brought wonderful wine. A good time was had by all. Also, it was my brother's birthday! Happy birthday, Seth.

On Sunday Lindsay and I biked to Capitol Hill, making use of these new buffered bike lanes, and I got a haircut. I went to the Elliott Bay Bookstore and bought Canning for a New Generation. It's a beautiful, encouraging book. Here it is on typical canning books:

[I] found that the common thread running through them all, from the classic Ball Blue Book to the newer, prettier books on jam and jellies, is the notion that Canning Is Hard: tedious work, complicated, deadly. I somehow got the impression that I would die if I tried this without three thermometers calibrated monthly, a hundred-foot roll of litmus paper, and a topographical map that pinpointed my location and its exact elevation.

I once read a book on canning that advised its readers to boil their canned food for ten minutes immediately before eating it, in case it had developed botulism. This sounded impractical if I just wanted some jam in the morning.

Then we got completely lost trying to get to the arboretum and went home, where I discovered that pages 148-161 were torn out of my new book. But still, it was a very nice day.

Those pages must have had some good recipes.

On Monday, I ate dutch babies, did math, and ate fresh pasta with tomato sauce. (When you borrow a pasta maker, you should use it! Thanks to Chris and Nathalie for lending it to us.) I also ate some apple-walnut cake, the subject of a future post. If every weekend was like this I would be very happy.

Dutch Babies

2011-02-21T21:05:00.000-08:00

Dutch babies are massive pancakes that puff up in the oven and deflate when you take them out. They're eggy like clafoutis or kaiserschmarrn. I halved this recipe (another fine product of Paprika), and the batter fit in an 8-inch cast iron pan. Here's the dutch baby about to enter the oven:

And here it is when we took it out 25 minutes later:

I wasn't quick enough to take a picture of it still puffed up, so just try to imagine me pulling it out of the oven with the center even higher than the edges. This lasts a few seconds; then the center trembles and falls in. The edges end up crunchy, and the middle is soft and custardy. We ate it with lemon juice and powdered sugar.

Beautiful Brussels Sprouts

2011-02-05T17:58:00.000-08:00

This dish combines brussels sprouts and red onions to beautiful effect. You'll have to trust me since I didn't take a picture. Its clean, bright flavors make a nice change from beer braised brussels sprouts.

1/2 pound brussels sprouts, halved if they're big
a small red onion, or half a large one
1 tsp. whole coriander seeds, crushed (instructions below!)
zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
olive oil, salt, pepper

Crush the coriander seeds by putting them in a line on a cutting board, pressing the side of a knife against them, and slamming it down with your fist (it's fun!). Slice the onion very thin, making long pieces. Put a large pan over medium high heat with some oil. When it's hot, cook the onion for two minutes, stirring the whole time. Put the onions aside in a bowl and salt them. Put the pan back on the heat, turn it down to medium, and cook the brussels sprouts, coriander, and lemon zest in it, stirring occasionally and adding some salt and pepper. When the sprouts have a nice brown color, add a few tablespoons of water, turn the heat down, and cook for a few minutes until the brussels sprouts are cooked but on the crunchy side. Add the lemon juice and some extra olive oil and serve.

Dick's Danger Ale

2011-02-01T20:03:00.000-08:00

Dick's Brewing Company, Danger Ale
Centralia, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

This is an extraordinarily unobjectionable beer. It's on the sweet side for a beer; in fact, it's one of the least bitter beers I can remember drinking. Its flavor doesn't stay in your mouth very long, but while it's there it's pleasant.

Lately the sky has been pretty as the sun sets. I've been enjoying it.

In front of Padelford Hall.

Dick's Cream Stout

2011-01-23T22:47:00.000-08:00

Dick's Brewing Company, Cream Stout
Centralia, WA
5.5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

It's an excellent stout with a rich flavor that could even be described, dare I say it, as creamy.

Beet Cobbler

2011-01-15T20:39:00.000-08:00

Beets in a pan

Here's the idea: take some of the most standard accompaniments to beets--hazelnuts, goat cheese--and put biscuits on top. The biscuits are taken from a peach cobbler recipe of my mother's, minus some sugar. I put in a leek, but an onion would work fine too. This is at least four or five portions.

4 beets, peeled and sliced
1 tbs. malt vinegar
1/2 cup hazelnuts
a few ounces soft goat cheese
1 large leek, chopped
olive oil, salt, pepper
butter for greasing

For the topping:

1 cup flour
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
2-3 tbs. melted butter
1/2 cup buttermilk, or 1/2 cup yogurt plus a bit of water

Grease an 8-inch square pan (or something of a similar size) and put in the sliced beets mixed up with the malt vinegar and some salt. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and cook for 25 minutes at 400 degrees.

Meanwhile, cook the leeks in a skillet over medium-low heat in olive oil with some salt and pepper until they're soft. Make the biscuit dough by mixing up the dry ingredients and then adding the liquid ingredients and stirring with a spoon or spatula. The dough should be like a very sticky bread dough, not a batter.

When the beets have cooked for 25 minutes, uncover the pan. Give the beets a stir, and put the leeks and hazelnuts on top. Drop handfuls of the dough on top of this, and scatter some blobs of goat cheese around. (When I did this I buried the cheese under biscuits because I was worried it would burn, but I don't think it was necessary.) Put back into the oven until the biscuits are done, 25-30 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes and serve.

Iron Horse Cozy Sweater

2011-01-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

Iron Horse Brewery, Cozy Sweater
Vanilla Milk Stout
Ellensburg, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

This is the kind of beer that I wouldn't buy if I didn't trust Iron Horse. I really didn't like it at first: the vanilla flavor was jarring, and it all seemed too sweet. By the end I appreciated the rich malty flavor and found it more tolerable, if not my favorite.

More Apartment Improvement

2011-01-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

Since we got back from Minnesota, Lindsay and I have made two big improvements to the apartment. Here are our new bedroom curtains:

These took a few months to make. We bought fabric and curtain rods back in August or September, but then we had to wait for December so that Lindsay could use her mother's sewing machine. Off to the side, you can see Lindsay sewing a different set of curtains, which we'll put up when we get bored of these bright pink ones. I should also mention that even though I keep saying that "we" did various things, Lindsay did all the work, from hemming the curtains to putting up the rod. Really the only thing I did was choose the pattern.

The other new thing is this wire rack:

We moved our bag of rice and jug of peanut oil off the floor and onto the first rack. We emptied out a cabinet onto the second rack. The third rack got our bucket of granola and a few other containers of food, most of which had been crowded on top of our refrigerator.

Three Skulls Pilsner

2011-01-04T19:45:00.000-08:00

Three Skulls Ales, Yellow Beard Pilsner
Seattle, WA
~5% Alcohol (just a guess)
Rating: 2/5

It tastes like grape soda. It is possibly the first domestic beer I've had that tastes like this. Is beer supposed to taste this way? I don't like it.

Some internet investigating has taught me that Three Skulls Ales is basically just Baron Brewery.

Minnesota Before and After

2011-01-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

South Seattle Sunrise

Our trip began a few weeks ago with an early morning ride on the light rail to the airport. And look what a nice job our new camera did in the dim light! Thanks, parents.

I took this next picture on the way back from the airport 11 days later. Look for the walruses.

The Arctic Building

You can find some more recent photos on this post and this post of Lindsay's. Also, check out my new slippers, a Christmas present from Lindsay's mother:

My new slippers and Lindsay's old slippers.

Cookies

2011-01-02T20:47:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the cookies of Christmas.

In order, they're chocolate espresso cookies, mint meringues, krumkake, sugar cookies, sugary chocolate cookies, and benne wafers. Lindsay and I made the sugar cookies, the sugary chocolate cookies, and the benne wafers, and along with her brother Zach we made the meringues. Lindsay's mother Kim made the espresso cookies, and her grandmother Viv made the krumkake. All were delicious. We made some more benne wafers for New Year's, but they're getting soggy, either because of the Seattle dampness or because we used dark brown sugar instead of light brown sugar. They're still pretty good, even if they melt instead of crunch in your mouth.

Eggs

2010-12-19T13:02:00.000-08:00

I'm in Minnesota with Lindsay's family eating eggs.

Black beans and rice with an egg on top.

They have beautiful shells:

Here is their source:

Chickens in the path.

Chickens in the window

Zach holding up a chicken.

Future plans include custard. Any other egg dishes we should make?

Iron Horse Hop Hub Pale Ale

2010-12-14T18:54:00.000-08:00

Iron Horse Brewery, Hop Hub Pale Ale
Ellensburg, WA
6.0% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

It's a nice beer with a tiny bit of sour, citrusy flavor.

Lentil Salad with Squash

2010-12-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

I had a really good lentil salad at Thanksgiving (thanks Joel and Marie!) and I've started making my own recently. The concept is really good: lentils taste good but are too monotonous and earthy to eat in large amounts, so mix them up with something else and dress them heavily. The one I had at Thanksgiving was lentils with arugula and goat cheese. I used parsley--lots of it--to play the role of non-earthy thing, and I steamed a delicata squash and put it in too. This should be good as a salad for at least four people.

2/3 cup lentils, preferably the little green French kind
1 large delicata squash, seeds removed, and chopped into 1-inch pieces
parsley
1 tbs. red wine vinegar
4 tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. good mustard
salt, pepper

Cook the lentils in salted water (2 cups of water is probably about right) until they're soft, which usually takes 45 minutes for me. Steam the squash until it's ready, about 15 minutes. Mix up the mustard, vinegar, and oil in a jar or bowl, and combine everything with a bit of salt and pepper. Add the chopped parsley. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Harmon Porter

2010-12-04T23:20:00.000-08:00

Harmon Brewing Co., Puget Sound Porter
Tacoma, WA
5.4% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

A malty, slightly sweet beer; clean tasting and pleasant.

Stuffing

2010-12-04T19:03:00.000-08:00

This post probably won't be useful for another eleven months, but I think it's worth getting the recipe down now. Besides, stuffing is good. For the last few years my stuffing has had cornbread and mushrooms as a base. Usually I put in pine nuts, but they're expensive right now, plus I dread the pine nut syndrome. Everything in this recipe is flexible. I think the most important thing is to start with the stuffing inside the bird and then take it out and bake it for a while to make the top crisp up, but I made a vegetarian one by cooking it outside the turkey and moistening it with some mushroomy water, and it was good too.

some stale cornbread
two large onions, or one onion and a leek, chopped
two or three stalks of celery, chopped
1/2 pound wild mushrooms, chopped (chanterelles and hedgehogs are good)
a handful of dried porcini
lots of chopped parsley
1/2 stick of butter
salt, pepper

Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl and pour over just enough boiling water to cover them. After they've rehydrated a bit, reserve the water and chop the mushrooms. If the fresh mushrooms are chanterelles or another mushroom that holds a lot of water, put them in a dry pan over medium heat with a little bit of salt for a few minutes, until they give off most of their liquid. Remove from heat and set aside the mushroom liquid in the pan.

Put the butter in a very large skillet over medium-low heat and cook the onion and celery for about 15 minutes, adding some salt and pepper. Add the fresh and the dried mushrooms and cook for a while longer. Add the mushroom liquid, and cook a few minutes more. Add cornbread by roughly crumbling it up over the pan until you're happy with the amount. Remove from the heat, and add the parsley. Let this cool and put it in the refrigerator until you're ready to cook your turkey (or any other bird you feel like stuffing).

Put the stuffing into the bird, not packing it in tightly or filling up the cavity completely. It's fine if only half the stuffing fits. Roast the turkey. When it's close to done, take the stuffing out of the turkey (a big metal spoon works well for this) and put it in a casserole dish with the rest of the stuffing, stirring to mix up the turkefied and unturkefied parts. Put this back in the oven until the top is starting to turn brown and get crispy, maybe 30-45 minutes. It's fine to do this after the turkey is finished.

Beets with Honey Mustard

2010-11-24T22:11:00.000-08:00

This is the only way I make beets lately. It's very good, and I just got stuck.

about 3 large beets
2-4 tbs. mustard
1 tsp rice or other mild vinegar
1 tbs. honey
olive oil, salt, pepper

Peel the beets and chop them into small (1/2 to 1 inch) cubes. Put them in a large roasting pan with salt and pepper and a bit of olive oil. Cover the pan (aluminum foil works) and roast at 400 degrees for 25 minutes. Uncover and roast for another 20-25 minutes until they look a little bit caramelized on the edges, stirring once or twice near the end of the cooking time.

While the beets are roasting, mix up the honey and mustard and vinegar in a bowl. When the beets are done cooking, take them out of the oven and turn it off. Add the honey-mustard mixture to the pan of beets, stir it up, and put it back in the oven for five minutes. Serve warm, though leftovers taste good at room temperature too.

Weighty Matters

2010-11-24T20:41:00.000-08:00

This is my new kitchen scale, in action:

It was the floor model at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Now it has found a pleasant home in my kitchen, where I rarely measure anything by volume anymore. A cup and a half of flour? Put the mixing bowl on the scale, tare it, and pour in flour until the scale says 240 grams. A half cup of sugar? That's 100 grams. The precision is nice, but the convenience is what's really great.

Snow!

2010-11-23T17:33:00.000-08:00

Today is a snow day! Sure, we only got two inches of snow, but that was enough to cancel my students' calculus midterm. I had a fun walk through the snow to the liquor store to buy some cognac for my grandma's cranberry sauce. Lindsay took a picture that shows how nice autumn snow is:

In other news, Lindsay got a haircut, and I'm going to Berkeley for a conference at MSRI in two weeks. Here's a picture of the haircut:

Haircuts make you happier.

CAN

2010-10-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

Behold this marvel of modern science!

These jars are filled with perishable food yet they do not rot. Or at least not yet. Canning is not scary and will not kill you, unless you can non-acidic food like (non-pickled) vegetables and they develop botulism. So refrain from doing that and don't be afraid.

On the bottom of the pyramid are pickled beets. In the next row are bread and butter pickles, which are sweet pickles with onions. At the top is a container of freezer jam, which I made from a twenty pound box of peaches. I cooked the fruit for a minute or two with a little bit of sugar, added some lemon juice, thickened it with freezer jam pectin, and then froze it. I also made six quarts of pear sauce with cinnamon. I have so far resisted the temptation to eat my winter rations, so I can't tell you how anything came out yet. But I'll report soon. Here's a closer look at the beets:

Julia Child's Leek and Potato Soup

2010-10-12T23:38:00.000-07:00

How could I have missed it for so long! It's a recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking that isn't outdated (Aspics and Molds, 544-6), uses no extravagant ingredients (Foie Gras Stuffing with Prunes for Goose, 284), and does not involve cooking lettuce (Lettuce, Braised, 489). Also, it's the very first recipe in the book. It makes enough for 6-8 people, or for two people with some for the next day's lunch and some for the freezer. It's better on the second day. Julia Child calls for a bit of cream or butter, but I had some good milk in the fridge and used that instead with fine results. Julia Child also calls for peeling the potatoes, but that's just silly. Here's the basic recipe:

1 pound potatoes, chopped
1 pound thinly sliced leeks
2 quarts water
1 tbs. salt
1/3 cup whole milk or cream

Simmer the vegetables, water, and salt together, partially covered, for 40 to 50 minutes. Mash the vegetables with a potato masher (or fork, or food mill); don't puree it. Immediately before serving, add the milk (or just add a tablespoon or so to each bowl).

The recipe also calls for parsley or chives added at the very end, which I would have done if I had either. My mother likes to put cilantro in her leek and potato soup, which I also endorse. Julia Child mentions that you can add carrots, turnips, tomatoes, half-cooked dried beans, peas, or lentils with their cooking liquid at the beginning. You can also add cauliflower, cucumbers, broccoli, Lima beans, peas, string beans, okra, zucchini, shredded lettuce (oops!), spinach, sorrel, or cabbage after the soup is mashed, to be cooked for 10 minutes or so. I made my batch with some carrots and parsnips, even though parsnips aren't on this list. Deviation from a Julia Child recipe usually leads to ruination, but I got away with this one.

Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale

2010-10-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale
Fresh Hop Ale
Chico, CA
6.7% Alcohol
Rating: 5/5

This beer reminded me of Pliny the Elder. It's powerful and direct, but there are a lot of flavors to it, and none of them are off in any way. I expected something more delicate, but I'm really happy with what I got.

More Apartment Pictures

2010-09-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

My apartment's intruders and houseguests face this when they open the door:

Here's another shot of my bike hanging against the wall:

We hung a basket from the ceiling:

Here is a picture of Lindsay studying for prelims a few weeks ago:

And her work was not for nothing: today she learned that she (more than!) passed her exams.

Vancouver, Day 5, 9/19/2010

2010-09-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

We set out early on the SkyTrain to Coquitlam, a suburb outside of Vancouver where Tom and Megan live. We arrived and walked to the parking lot north of the train station where we were supposed to meet Tom. After fifteen minutes, we realized the train station had two exits, and that north of the other one was a different parking lot. We went over there. Tom was patiently waiting for us there.

After a quick ride back to Tom and Megan's apartment we began eating the delicious pancakes they had made, with lots of cinnamon and clove and maple syrup. After this breakfast, we walked around in the immense park near their apartment, which is filled with a variety of mushrooms, some of which Tom and Megan have deemed probably edible.

Back in Vancouver, we went over to the Granville Island public market to pick up some bread, smoked fish, and tomatoes for the ride home. The best looking fish store had smoked sablefish, which I was excited about, but they told me it was only lightly smoked and needed to be cooked further. So, we bought some salmon instead, which turned out to be a little bit boring but still good. Before we ate this dinner on the train, we walked around Chinatown, which isn't exciting (the good Chinatown is in a suburb called Richmond, apparently). I did have a bizarre pastry, though: a century egg covered in sesame paste, wrapped up in a bun. Century eggs are preserved eggs that turn into a weird gel. I liked the combination of sweet sesame paste and egg, but the egg yolk was too sulfurous for me.

Our train ride home was nice. We ate the grapes we had brought as quickly as we could on the line for customs. On the train we ate our dinner of bread and salmon and read our books.

One of the two cats in the house where we stayed; neither one was willing to stand still.

Vancouver, Day 4, 9/18/2010

2010-09-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

Our day began with delicious croissants at Coco et Olive, with crunchy outsides and perfectly flaky insides. Eventually we made it to the University of British Columbia campus to go to the Museum of Anthropology, but by this time we were hungry and needed lunch. We weren't in a very good area for this, but we eventually found the Boulevard Coffee Roasting Co., which had some decent-looking sandwiches in the display case. I got one with scrambled egg, sun-dried tomatoes, some sort of cheese, and some sort of red pepper spread. Lindsay got one with brie and pear and walnuts. They heated the sandwiches up a bit so the cheese got a bit melty.

At the UBC Museum of Anthropology we met Sasha, who just got his PhD and a job at UBC, and his girlfriend Sheila. We apologized for how late we were and a had a good time chatting. Then we toured the museum, which had a huge collection of native art and artifacts.

After this we went to Yaletown, the trendiest part of downtown Vancouver, sort of Soho-esque in feel. Most of the streets are laid out with one side of the sidewalk about five steps up from the street. This elevated strip is filled with outdoor restaurant seating. We wandered around looking for a sushi place called Honjin our hosts had recommended. After we methodically walked back and forth down trying to cover every block in turn (which is actually fun!), we found a large map with a list of restaurants and went straight there. We had tiny dishes of spinach with with a sesame sauce, squid with a sweet soy sauce, and pickles. The spinach was good though I found the sauce a bit too peanut buttery. I liked the squid a lot: it turned out to be raw, and after a bit of chewing it would give in and feel rich and tender. The pickles were great. We also had sockeye salmon sashimi, two pieces of mackerel sushi, and a roll with some pickles vegetable inside. We had a hard time ordering because we barely know anything about Japanese food and most of the sushi was listed only with Japanese names. So, we didn't get much food at all. Also, none of the beer looked exciting, and we wanted to go somewhere else and get some, maybe with french fries. And that's what we did, at the Yaletown Brewing Co., which according to an article I read in one of those free city papers was a craft-brewing pioneer in Vancouver. The brewpub had a corporate, touristy feel, but the fries and beer were excellent. I had an IPA, and Lindsay had the seasonal Belgian Wit, and I couldn't say which was better. (Lindsay says hers!) We had a beautiful walk back over the Cambie St. bridge to get back.

Vancouver, Day 3, 9/17/2010

2010-09-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

After a leisurely morning in which we caught up on a summer's worth of sleep, we borrowed our hosts' bikes and went to Kitsilano, another district south of downtown. We parked our bikes, checked out a beach, and got some Indian food at Rangoli, the cheaper version of a fancy restaurant called Vij's. We had black chickpea fritters with tomatoes and a rice pilaf and a slaw-like cabbage salad, and blackened eggplant with curried chickpeas. The fritters were amazing, with a texture like a meatball and a perfectly spiced sauce. No spices I cook with ever taste that good and clear. The eggplant's skin was really burnt to a crisp--I never would have had the nerve to cook it like that--and it was wonderfully smokey. The chickpeas were in a sweet tomato sauce, again spiced in a way that I can't approximate. It also came with an intensely cucumbery rajta and a thin flatbread that was slightly tough but slightly buttery.

We left and wanted to read--relaxing was a big priority for us on this trip--so we stopped in a café. At first I thought they only had espresso-based drinks, but it turned out their drip coffee was just listed as "java" on the menu. Every once in a while Canada does seem like a foreign country!

We biked over a bridge and then followed signs to the seawall, a path that goes all the way around Vancouver's downtown through Stanley Park. We rode on this pretty path and eventually turned to head back to a bridge to take us home, riding through a residential neighborhood made up of high-rise apartment buildings. What should have been overwhelming somehow wasn't. For whatever reason--architects and urban planners, please explain--instead of towering above me, the buildings just felt like they happened to go up for a while.

View from the Burrard St. bridge.

Despite Vancouver's excellent bike infrastructure, the ride to the Cambie St. bridge was a little bit scary. Biking unfamiliar routes in traffic is just never pleasant. One thing that made me feel better was a biker who merged in front of me and then biked all the way to the bridge with no hands, while I nervously gripped my bike's brakes. At one point he started waving his hands around like he was doing very relaxed calisthenics. It was weird.

Once we were back, we looked up some bus schedules and headed back to Granville Island to see a Fringe Festival play and meet our friends Tom and Megan who just moved around here. The buses were great: they had a dedicated lane, the seats are placed so that people can get on and off quickly, an LED display gives the next stop, and they seem to run often. We are beginning to annoy ourselves with all our talk about how great Vancouver is compared to Seattle.

We went walking around with Tom and Megan after the show looking for a place to get a snack. Nothing looked appropriate, and eventually we walked into a fancy supermarket called Capers that also sold prepared food and had a place to sit. After we went in we discovered it was a disguised Whole Foods! (Actual comment from the Yelp page of Capers: "Yup, I was a bit sad when the Canadian version of Whole Foods actually got taken over by Whole Foods...") Nevertheless we bought a loaf of bread, a piece of hard goat cheese, and some Concord grapes (which were seedless--I didn't know such a thing existed). We had a nice dinner of this, discussed the saga of Tom and Megan's pet snake that was refused entrance to Canada (it will be able to join them in a few weeks), and took the bus back to the house. Tom and Megan stayed on the bus and caught the SkyTrain back to where they live outside of Vancouver.

Vancouver, Day 2, 9/16/2010

2010-09-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

We're staying in a house south of downtown. The owners are a couple who sometimes rent out their extra bedroom on airbnb.com. They're wonderful people, and they picked us up from the train station when we arrived yesterday. Their house is full of art and books and two cats who we tried and failed to photograph. One of them hides, and the other never stops moving.

The house we stayed at.

In the morning we walked over a bridge to get downtown. Along the way we saw a lot of bike infrastructure.

Bikes going the wrong way, legally.

We walked around the center of downtown, which like most downtowns is full of skyscrapers and expensive shopping. Unlike downtown Seattle, it's also full of people.

By lunchtime we had made it to the outskirts of Gastown and Chinatown. We had lunch at a place called Medina, where we ate delicious open face sandwiches. Mine were two variations of smoked salmon with herbed cream cheese: the first was topped with lightly dressed arugula and sweet cherry tomatoes, and the second with slices of avocado and a fried egg, sunny side up. Lindsay's dish was four (four!) different little open faced sandwiches: Moroccan carrots with raisins, grilled haloumi cheese (some sort of soft cheese that can be cooked without melting completely), tabouleh, and beets.

In the afternoon we took a terrible route over a long and ugly bridge to Granville Island to go the farmers market and the public market, a Pike Place Market-esque collection of food vendors. I made a mental note to return for smoked fish. We sat around reading and watching seagulls make funny noises before taking an exhausting walk back to the house.

After some rest, we went to a nearby restaurant called the Cascade Room. From the extraordinarily dim lighting we could tell it was a hip spot. I had a Main St. Pilsner that was great; very clean and toasty. I also had duck breast with shiitake mushrooms and gai lan, which is the same as Chinese broccoli. I mostly had pieces of stem, which were like massive asparagus stalks with leaves. Duck breast as usual was great. Lindsay had wonderful mushroom and paneer strudel on a pile of curried lentils. For dessert we shared cinnamon and chile crème brûlée. Then we went back to the house and ate a tiny melon we had bought at the farmers market earlier that day.

Vancouver, Day 1, 9/15/2010

2010-09-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

Lindsay and I hurried to King Street Station soon after her last prelim to catch the train to Vancouver. I called my father to wish him a happy birthday. We were in a celebratory mood, and once we got going we indulged ourselves with some $5.50 bottles of beer to go with our dinner of bread, baba ghanouj (leftover from our housewarming party), and Romano beans with tomato sauce, whose recipe follows:

1 pound Romano beans, stem ends trimmed, cut in half so they're not so long
2 pounds tomatoes
5 cloves garlic, minced
lots of basil leaves, chopped
little splash of white wine
copious olive oil
salt, pepper

Heat the garlic in the olive oil in a large skillet or pot over medium-low heat while you prepare the beans. When you've finished cutting off their ends and chopping them up, toss them in the skillet with a bit of salt and pepper. Core the tomatoes and chop them roughly, putting them in a colander inside a mixing bowl and salting them lightly as you put them in, to help draw our their liquid. As you're preparing the tomatoes, periodically hold the colander over the pot of beans and push on the tomatoes to try to squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Turn the heat up on the beans to keep this liquid simmering. Keep pressing out as much liquid as can, and let this liquid reduce until it's a thick syrup (this will take a long time, especially if you use a narrow pot). At this point the Romano beans will be quite tender, but go ahead and add the wine and the diced tomatoes, and cook for another five minutes. Let this cool (or put the pot in a bowl of ice water if you need to go catch a train), adjust the seasoning, and add tons of chopped basil. Serve at room temperature.

Potato Roasting in Great Detail

2010-09-07T23:28:00.000-07:00

After a pleasant visit from my parents with lots of exciting food, I made a very simple dinner of roast potatoes with pesto. The combination (born of a need to use up some basil) is good, but what I want to share is my current potato roasting technique. Everybody cooks this, so chime in if you've got a nice method. The basic summary of what I do: low heat until they're cooked through, high heat for ten minutes or so. It's not really worthy of being called a recipe, but if it makes my potatoes crunchier it's good for something.

potatoes in 1-inch chunks (or anything sized consistently)
olive oil
salt, pepper, rosemary

Put the potatoes in a large pan, or in multiple large pans, so that they're in a single layer and not completely packed up against each other. Mix them up with the oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary. Put in a 350 degree oven until the potatoes are soft. It's okay if they're not done to the point that you could eat them happily, but you should be able to eat them. This takes me 40-60 minutes, depending on the potatoes and the oven and mysterious forces (potatoes seem to cook faster in Lindsay's presence, for example). Ideally, try to scrape up all the potatoes from the pan every 15 minutes or so; a metal spatula works best. Turn the heat up to 450 and cook the potatoes until they're golden, which should take 10-15 minutes. Stir them once or twice and check on them when you do.

You can vary the seasoning and the fat. In the winter something like garam masala is nice instead of rosemary. Other pleasant fats include peanut oil, lard, and duck fat, and even a totally neutral oil like canola makes delicious potatoes. I would have thought that more oil meant crispier potatoes, but in my experience it hasn't been true. If the potatoes end up dried out, or if you're just in a hurry, try roasting at 375 and 475 instead of 350 and 450. You really can't go wrong whatever you do.

Iron Horse 509

2010-09-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Iron Horse Brewery, 509 Style
Session Ale
Ellensburg, WA
5.0% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

A beer with a really simple taste: the best description I could come up with was "citrusy", but that's an exaggeration. It has barely any aftertaste. All this makes it sound bad, but I really liked it. Being refreshing and having no flaws is enough.

Tomatillo Dressing

2010-09-04T23:28:00.000-07:00

I have been cooking for myself for (almost exactly!) five years. Tomatillos only entered my kitchen about a month ago. The first thing I made was the green chile at my housewarming party. The second was a sauce that left my pasta looking totally bare, but which tasted fine, since tomatillos are amazingly concentrated. The most recent was a salad dressing to use up the three little leftover tomatillos. It's been a real Columbian explosion. For enough dressing for a salad for two to six people:

3 (or fewer) little tomatillos
olive oil
honey
salt, pepper

Take the husks off the tomatillos and wash off their slimy skins (I have no idea if this is necessary). Put them in a 450 degree oven in a roasting pan and cook until they start getting charred on the top, about 10-15 minutes. When they're cool enough to handle, blend them up in some way. Or you could just mush them up; you'll get some chunks, but that's fine. Add a decent amount of olive oil and a dollop of honey (maybe a teaspoon, but any amount would be fine), and you will an excellent salad dressing. It's nice if the salad has cucumbers in it, like this one does:

A salad with cucumbers and tomatillo dressing.

If you were making a salad with, say, a vinaigrette, you probably wouldn't want to drench it in dressing. With this dressing feel free. Nothing bad will befall your lettuce.

Housewarming

2010-08-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

Our housewarming party lived up to its name: 20 people, lots of baking, and the rare 90 degree Seattle day meant it was hot. Here's the menu:

Green chile (pork and tomatillos)
Red curry with tofu and string beans
Baba ghanouj
Tomato and bread salad
Kale with peanut butter
Various breads, plus some naan from dough which was to be bread but came out much too wet
Blueberry buckle
Homemade honey wine

A housewarming present.

Lindsay shapes a pretty loaf.

The honey wine was fizzy and sweet, and it had a faint mint flavor. My guess is that it was something like 3 or 4% alcohol. Next time I'll let it ferment in my closet until it's dry.

Honey wine with a slice of lime.

I finished up my calculus class and Lindsay finished up hers; our students did pretty well. Things are calm now, as illustrated by this still life:

After Lindsay's prelims in September, we will rush off on the train to Vancouver. Any restaurant (or other) recommendations?

Apartment in Order and Apricot Sorbet

2010-08-04T22:54:00.000-07:00

It's hard to make an apartment look neat in pictures! (Or in person, for that matter.)

I thought our place was looking tidy, but what I notice first in this picture is the precarious pillow. What I notice second is the cables. Last I see all the things I like about our apartment, like the vast windows and the staircase behind our kitchen table.

Our bedroom comes off a little bit better:

My favorite part of the apartment is the kitchen, which Lindsay and I have kept busy improving. If you look out the door in the bedroom picture, you can see a spice rack that we put up. This picture is what you see if you walk out that door and turn right:

This is what we've been eating for dessert lately:

Lindsay made the cake. It's a perfectly executed Reine de Saba cake from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The stuff on the side is an apricot sorbet that I adapted from a Martha Stewart recipe for cherry ice. I traded apricots for cherries, roasted them, and put the whole thing in an ice cream maker. Here's the recipe.

2 pounds apricots
juice from 1/4 lime
1/4 cup and 2 tbs. honey
1/2 cup white wine

Tear each apricot in half (along the seam, of course!) and lay them in a single layer in a roasting pan, torn side up. Put them in a 450 degree oven for 15-20 minutes, until they start to brown in spots. Remove them, let them cool a bit, and turn them into mush by whatever method suits your fancy. I used an immersion blender, but even a potato masher should do a decent job. Add the remaining ingredients and taste. You might need to add more honey. Remember that it will be less sweet when you freeze it, and so it should really taste sweeter than you think is right. Let it cool off for a few hours in the fridge, or for thirty minutes in the freezer if you're really impatient like I was, and freeze in a quart-sized ice cream maker. It's soft but still great after this, and after an hour in the freezer it will really be terrific. It stays reasonably soft in the freezer, probably due to all the wine in it.

Apartment in Disarray

2010-08-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

I spent last month moving into a new apartment with Lindsay. Here's our bedroom the day of the move:

The living room was also a mess:

It's been fun watching it turn into a lovely place. I'll take some more flattering pictures tomorrow afternoon when the sunlight drifts through our living room windows (they face south). For now, here's a good look at me and our shower curtain.

Pike Dry Wit

2010-07-03T22:15:00.000-07:00

Pike Brewing Co., Dry Wit
White ale brewed with spices
Seattle, WA
5.0% Alcohol
Rating: 5/5

A fizzy, tart beer. It's not very bitter or hoppy. If Seattle manages a hot day anytime soon, it would be lovely to sit outside and drink it.

Quinoa and Tofu

2010-07-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

Quinoa and tofu sounds like a parody of bad vegetarian food. Let us rescue it from the scourge of blandness by loading it up with all the new summer vegetables and seasoning heavily. Lindsay and I did this together, and out of it we got a terrific dinner, a few lunch portions, and the pleasure of using up some of our CSA vegetables (I'm talking about you, aging chard).

I used some dry, marinated tofu from our friendly local tofu factory. I marinated it some more anyway, so it seems reasonable to start with a typical block of tofu, press out as much liquid as possible, and then marinate that. It would be nice to serve this dish cold, but I didn't plan ahead, so I put it in a bowl in a bigger bowl of ice water to cool it down to room temperature quickly.

Pretty red and yellow tomatoes, no?

1 cup (dry) quinoa
3 blocks of dry tofu from Northwest Tofu, or most or all of a normal packet of tofu, in rough cubes
2 large tomatoes, cut roughly into cubes
1/2 cucumber, cut into cubes
1 large spring onion (or normal onion), with green part (or with some scallions), chopped
5 chard leaves, stems separated, coursely chopped
1/2 lemon
1 tbs. peanut oil
salt, pepper
marinade for tofu (see below)

For the marinade, you don't need to be at all precise, and I wasn't. Here's a very rough estimate, but substitute freely and use your own judgment:

1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tbs. peanut oil
2 tbs. rice vinegar
1 tbs. mirin
1 tsp. sesame oil
lots of grated ginger
a bit of onion, minced finely
1 clove green garlic (or normal garlic), minced finely
star anise, coriander, cardamom, or other spices of your choosing

Put the marinade over the tofu and let it sit out for an hour or so, giving it an occasional stir so that all of the tofu gets to spend some time immersed in liquid. Cook the quinoa with 2 cups water and some salt. Heat up the peanut oil over medium heat in a pan and cook the onion for a minute or two with a bit of salt so that it loses its edge but maintains its crunch. (I hope that as I age, I lose my edge but maintain my crunch.) Remove from heat into a large bowl. In the same pan, cook the chard stems, adding a bit of water, and after two minutes add the leaves and some salt, turn of the heat and give it a stir or two until the leaves wilt. Add to the bowl with the onions. Let these things cool or take action to make them do so. Then add the quinoa, the tofu with its marinade, the cucumber, the tomatoes, and the juice of a half lemon. Add some pepper, add more soy sauce or vinegar or whatever if necessary, and serve.

Epic Ales Simply Summer Ale

2010-07-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

Epic Ales, Simply Summer Ale
Seattle, WA
4.9% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

It's a plain beer with a sort of soapy aftertaste (it just tastes weird, not contaminated).

Sugar Snap Peas with Morels and Mint

2010-06-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Lindsay and I cooked dinner for her mother: halibut with Chimichurri sauce, a lettuce and tomato salad with croutons flavored with oregano from Lindsay's yard, and the snap pea dish that gives this post its title. We didn't take a picture of the snap peas, so here's another fish picture to keep everyone satisfied:

Why didn't we take a picture? It's because the peas were the very last thing on the table, after the camera was put away. This was because I completely forgot about them until the fish was almost done. But there was no disaster, since this dish only takes about 10 minutes. All I did was take something that my mother cooks and make the Northwestern addition of morels. For a side dish for four people:

1 pound sugar snap peas, tops and strings snapped off
1/4 pound morels, chopped very coarsely
5 mint leaves, minced or chiffonaded
2 tsp. soy sauce
2 tbs. peanut oil
1 tsp. rice vinegar
salt, pepper

Heat a very large skillet over very high heat with 1 tbs. of the peanut oil. When it's really hot, add the peas and a sprinkle of salt and pepper and leave them alone for about a minute, until they've blistered and browned. Flip them over and cook them for another 30 seconds, giving them an occasional shake. Add 1 tsp. soy sauce, stir, and remove the peas to a serving dish. Put the pan back on the heat and cook the morels the exact same way (another tbs. of oil, another tsp. of soy sauce). Add the mushrooms to the serving dish. Add the rice vinegar, the mint, and a shake of coarse, crunchy salt if you have some.

Dogfish Head Festina Pêche

2010-06-15T22:26:00.000-07:00

Dogfish Head, Festina Pêche
Neo-Berliner Weisse brewed with peaches
Milton, DE
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

This has a good, dry, peachy flavor (and I usually hate fruit beers). It's got a sharp, acidic tang to it.

Alaskan Raspberry Wheat

2010-06-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Alaskan Brewing Co., Raspberry Wheat
Juneau, AK
6.5% Alcohol
Rating: 2/5

Yick. The raspberry flavor is powerful and not good.

Epic Ales Terrasaurus

2010-06-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

Epic Ales, Terrasaurus
Ale brewed with shiitake mushrooms
Seattle, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 5/5

This is such a weird, delicious beer. The mushrooms give it a rich flavor, sort of like coffee. For its depth it's incredibly light and it never tires you out.

Thursday Night Halibut

2010-06-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

Time for another installment of Thursday night fish pictures by Lindsay!

Today's dinner was Alaskan halibut roasted atop potatoes sliced so thin that some of them became chips. The baked potato chips that you buy in a store don't taste as good, though, since they usually aren't drenched in olive oil.

For two people:

2/3 pound fillet of halibut
1 pound potatoes, sliced as thinly as possible (something like 1/8 inch or smaller)
3 heads green garlic, or a few scallions, chopped
lots of olive oil
salt, pepper

Pat the halibut dry and sprinkle both sides with salt and pepper. Put the potatoes in one layer (or as close as possible) in a roasting pan with some salt and a lot of oil. Roast at 450 degrees for 10-15 minutes, keeping a close eye on the potatoes. Flip them and cook for about another 10-15 minutes, getting them good and browned, and adding more oil if you want. You'll turn the heat down when you start cooking the fish, so don't worry too much about burning them. When they look basically ready to eat, plop the halibut down in the middle of the pan, toss the green garlic on top, and sprinkle some more olive oil over the fish. Turn the heat down to 400 and put the pan back in the oven until the halibut is just cooked through, which took me a bit over 10 minutes. I'm not sure whether fish needs to rest like meat does, but I suspect a few minutes patience will only improve things.

Iron Horse Ginger Hefeweizen

2010-06-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

Iron Horse Brewery, High Five Hefe
Hefeweizen brewed with ginger
Ellensburg, WA
6% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

I went to the Iron Horse Brewery tasting a few couple weeks ago at Bottleworks. It was Saturday and the store was packed. A guy was there from Iron Horse to pour the samples, and he really liked talking about the beer. This meant that the only way to avoid a painfully long wait was to go immediately back to the end of the line after you get your beer. So, I spent my afternoon drinking beer while walking in a large circle.

The hefeweizen was their lightest beer. It has a real ginger flavor without being sweet, and it's a fun, simple beer.

Deschutes Red Chair Pale Ale

2010-06-03T21:31:00.000-07:00

Deschutes Brewery Red Chair Northwest Pale Ale
Bend, OR
6.4% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

Recently it has come to my attention that I rate every beer four. This is a natural thing: the beers I buy are all pretty good, but they're rarely perfect. It definitely makes for a stupid system, though. I thought about rating the beers on a scale of 3.0-4.0--this would satisfy my desire to give everything a decent rating and would match up with the grades for graduate math classes at the University of Washington--but here's what I've settled on: five for perfect, four for excitingly good, three for boringly good, two for PBR, and one if it gives me food poisoning.

This pale ale was good, but I probably wouldn't get it again. It's not at all bland, especially for a pale ale, but I found it a little bit too piney. In any event I think they finished brewing it in April, when I bought six that I still haven't finished.

Russian River Damnation

2010-05-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

Russian River Damnation
Belgian Golden Ale
Santa Rosa, CA
7.0% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

It was good, but it was no Pliny the Elder! It smelled amazing, with all the complexity that you'd want in a golden ale, but the taste fell a little bit short. Still, a delicious beer. Maybe I was supposed to age it or something?

Use for Stale Bagels

2010-05-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

This is a weird little dessert that I put together when I had some giant, stale poppy bagels. It's a bread pudding, spiffed up with some nuts and spices and the poppy seeds from the bagels. If your bagels aren't giant ones from New York, you might need to use two. Even though the quantities in here sound small, it should be plenty for four people.

1 1/2 stale poppy bagels (or 1 bagel plus some bread, or something similar)
1 1/2 cups milk or half-and-half
2 tbs. butter and some for greasing the pan
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. garam masala or similar spice mixture
1/4 cup sugar, plus an extra spoonful
pinch salt
2 tbs. rum
1/4 cup walnuts, toasted and then ground roughly (use a food processor)
1/4 cup shelled salted pistachios
1/4 cup halvah, chopped into walnut-sized bits (not really essential)

Heat your oven to 325 degrees and grease a small casserole dish or cake pan with butter. Tear the bagels up into pieces; these should be about the size of grapes, but it's nice to have some variation to get a range of textures. Put these in the casserole dish with the halvah and pistachios. Heat up the milk, rum, butter, cinnamon, garam masala, salt, and the 1/4 cup sugar just until the butter is melted. Pour this over the bagels into the casserole dish. Sprinkle the ground walnuts on top, and then sprinkle a spoonful of sugar on top of this. Bake until a knife put in at the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes to an hour.

Delicious Fish Pictures

2010-05-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

Photographer extraordinaire Lindsay took some excellent pictures of our dinner yesterday.

It was Pacific cod with Chimichurri sauce. I got the recipe for the sauce from Simply Recipes and it's very good; use a food processor when you make it. For the fish, I just sauteed a half pound fillet of cod in olive oil over medium-high heat for about three or four minutes per side. It stuck to the pan about as much as it could (it's a very finicky pan!), so I deglazed it with some white wine to salvage the delicious little bits. Here's another view:

Hale's Ales Kölsch

2010-05-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

Hale's Ales, Kölsch German Style Ale
Seattle, WA
4.5% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

Yesterday Lindsay and I went to a tasting at Bottleworks, where we tasted five beers from Hale's Ales for one dollar! The first one was their Kölsch, which they said was like a Pilsner but more flavorful. This description was dead-on, but I found these extra flavors slightly funky, even though it was still a nice beer. On the other hand, Lindsay thought it was great, so it's definitely worth a look, especially if you're tired of IPAs and the like.

Snoqualmie Falls Belgian Grand Cru

2010-05-15T23:05:00.000-07:00

Snoqualmie Falls Brewing Company, Spring Fever Belgian Style Grand Cru Ale
Snoqualmie, WA
7.0% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

It's brewed with coriander. Their label says it has overtones of pineapple, and it's actually true! It reminds me of the Austrian wheat beers I used to drink when I was in Hungary. Very pleasant and refreshing.

A Beet Primer, part 2: the nuts and beets of things

2010-05-08T23:15:00.000-07:00

These recipes combine beets with nuts. I was planning to write some filler about how nuts and beets complement each other, but I don't really think they do. They're both earthy and almost dirty tasting. Sometimes there are more important things than balance!

Since the nuts will provide so much flavor, these are good recipes to use the easier but inferior method of beet cookery mentioned in my previous article, which I'll summarize:

If the beets are really dirty, rinse them a bit, but don't worry too much about it. Put them in a pan, tops cut off but otherwise whole and unpeeled, with a splash of water and a bit of salt. Cover and put in the oven at 400 degrees for about an hour, depending on the size of the beets. Pierce them with knife to check if they're done. You can put them in the fridge for later or use them right away. When you're ready, peel the beets by holding them under running water and sloughing off the skin. Then chop to desired size.

Here are the recipes. I'm leaving them imprecise because measuring when you make these would be like weighing your lettuce when you make a salad.

Beets with Pecans

cooked beets in 1-inch cubes
pecans
olive oil
rice vinegar
salt, pepper

Toast the pecans in a dry cast iron pan over medium heat, giving them an occasional shake. When they've browned a bit, combine them with the beets, pour on some oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and toss. This is also good with a little bit of honey, especially if the beets aren't very sweet.

Beets with pistachios

beets
tahini sauce
pistachios

If you don't have any tahini sauce, make some. (I just mixed up some tahini paste with a clove of crushed garlic, some cumin, salt, tons of lemon juice, and some water to thin it.) Toast some (shelled!) pistachios, and combine with the beets and tahini dressing.

Arugula and Beet Salad with Pine Nuts

beets
arugula
pine nuts
lemon juice
olive oil
Parmesan cheese

Toast the pine nuts. Shake up lemon juice and olive oil in a jar, pour it over the beets, pine nuts, and arugula, and toss along with Parmesan. This one is nice with warm beets, so that the arugula wilts a bit.

Lazy Boy IPA

2010-05-08T22:01:00.000-07:00

Lazy Boy Brewing, India Pale Ale
Everett, WA
6.2% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

A clean, fresh-tasting IPA. An excellent beer for your everyday drinking.

Chicken with Spices and Sweet Potatoes

2010-04-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

I thought of this right before I fell asleep one night last week. I'd say it was of divine origin, but actually I got the idea from Bill Buford's book Heat, which talks about a pre-Columbian Italian recipe of meat cooked with sweet red wine, orange zest, and spices. Here I've taken this and adulterated it with some post-1492 tomatoes and sweet potatoes. The recipe is slow, but it's really simple. Brown the chicken, braise the chicken, and then when you're close to done, add some sweet potatoes and carrots.

2 chicken legs, split into drumsticks and thighs
1 large onion, chopped
half a 28oz can of tomatoes (or a smaller can), crushed
zest of an orange
1 carrot, roughly chopped
2 sweet potatoes, preferably the white kind, in 1-inch chunks
1/2 cup red wine
1 star anise
3 cloves
1 tsp. coriander
1 heaping tsp. honey
3 tbs. olive oil
salt, pepper

Sprinkle the chicken pieces with salt and pepper. In a large pot or dutch oven, heat up 2 tbs. oil over medium-high heat, and brown the chicken on both sides. When you're done with this, remove the chicken, turn the heat down and cook the onions for about ten minutes with another tablespoon of olive oil, stirring occasionally. Add the chicken back to the pot along with the orange zest, spices, tomato, wine, and some salt. Bring the heat back up to get this simmering, and then put a lid slightly ajar on top of the pot and turn the heat to low. (If you're using a dutch oven, you might try cooking this in the oven at maybe 300 or 325 degrees.) Cook for an hour, adding more wine if it needs it (though it probably won't). Add the honey, carrots, and sweet potatoes, and cook until these are tender, another 20-30 minutes. If the dish is still liquidy, remove the lid and turn the heat up to dry it up a bit. Serve with bread.

Spaghetti with Sardines, Almonds, and Orange

2010-04-11T21:08:00.000-07:00

Lately sardines have been much in the news. The last American sardine cannery is closing. Mark Bittman is cooking with sardines, and he encourages you to try too. A kind person has published this ranking of sardines that I found here. Now it's time for my contribution to the sardine genre. My recommendation is to buy sardines packed in olive oil. I've never actually eaten the ones packed in water, but if I were a fish doomed to spend a year in a dark can surrounded by liquid, I would want it to be olive oil. The distinguishing thing about this recipe is the almonds and orange zest. I got the idea from a restaurant review that claimed this was some famous chef's signature move, but I can't remember whose or find the review. This recipe only takes 40 minutes or so, and it serves two or three people depending on what else you're having.

1/2 pound pasta
1 can sardines without bones, packed in olive oil (mine was 85 grams, not counting the can)
1 medium onion, chopped
3 or 4 dried mild chilies, crushed up (or some red pepper flakes)
1/4 cup sliced almonds
zest of an orange
juice of 1/2 lemon
chopped parsley
2 tbs. oil, plus the oil from the sardine can
salt, pepper

Put on a pot of salty water, and start cooking the spaghetti as soon as it comes to a boil. Heat a small pan (preferably cast iron) over medium heat and put the almond slices in it to toast. Shake them up from time to time and keep a close eye on them. Take them out when they start turning brown, and add the orange zest to them.

Meanwhile, start cooking the onion in a large skillet over medium heat with the olive oil and some salt and pepper, stirring occasionally. Add the chilies. Cook the onion until it softens up and browns a bit, 10-15 minutes. Add the sardines and their oil, mush them up a bit, and cook them till they're heated through. Add the lemon juice and some more pepper. Mix all of this with the cooked spaghetti, add the almonds with the zest, and serve with Parmesan (or without).

Hale's Ales Kölsch

2010-04-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

Hale's Ales, Irish Style Nut Brown Ale
Seattle, WA
5.3% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

This is my favorite beer from Hale's Ales yet. It has a nice malty flavor for an ale.

A Beet Primer, part 1

2010-02-10T20:33:00.000-08:00

In part 1 of this series of survey articles on beets, we will discuss various methods of basic beet preparation and their advantages. In part 2, we will demonstrate how these methods can be applied to create dishes featuring beets. In part 3, we will discuss the concentration of measure phenomenon, which in its ubiquity surely relates to beets.

The different methods of beet preparation can be broken into three classes: boiling, steaming, and roasting. Another technique worthy of consideration is to leave the beets raw (which can be thought of as the empty preparation). This will be discussed in part 2, but for now we limit ourselves to the three aforementioned classes.

Let us focus our attention on each of these in turn. The most traditional method of boiling beets is to bring a pot of water to a boil, typically by use of a stove, and then to place the beets in the water until they are cooked through. Thus cooked, the beets can be used immediately or stored in the refrigerator for a week or so. A variant of this technique is to cook the beets in a flavorful broth, along with other ingredients, thereby making a soup. We will neglect the former of these techniques in our article, and we will delay our discussion of the latter until part 2.

Steaming can be done in several ways. The next two methods are often classified as roasting, but as neither of them caramelize the beets, it is more accurate to call them steaming. The simplest and most reliable is to put the beets whole and unpeeled in a roasting pan with a small amount (perhaps 1/4 cup) salted water, cover the pan, and cook at 400 degrees. If the beets are quite dirty, it is advisable to give them a quick wash. As they will later be peeled, it is not necessary to be thorough, but leaving them completely unwashed may impart a dirty flavor. Depending on their size, they will need to be cooked from 45 to 75 minutes, with 60 being typical.

Another method of steaming often found in the literature is to wrap each beet individually in aluminum foil and then to place these in a 400 degree oven. It is commonly asserted that this method minimizes work, as the beets can be stored still wrapped in their foil in the refrigerator. In practice, though, this method is more trouble than it is worth. Even though they will later be peeled, the beets must be scrubbed well or they taste dirty all the way through. Despite all the foil, they still need to be placed in a pan, since invariably they drip sticky beet juice (especially when you cut into them to see if they are done). If put in the refrigerator in the foil, they will drip and stain your lovely, clean refrigerator purple, and then you will leave it dirty for the next three months as you wait for a good time to clean it up, all the while infuriating your roommates. Clearly, this is a method best avoided.

Last, we discuss roasting. This differs from the other methods in that the beets must first be peeled and chopped. Then, they are placed in a roasting pan with some salt, pepper, and fat, typically olive oil. Herbs and spices may also be placed in the pan. The pan is then covered and placed in the oven for thirty minutes, after which the cover is removed and the beets are cooked for about twenty minutes longer. In this stage they must be stirred occasionally to prevent them from sticking to the pan and to ensure they brown evenly, and care must be taken that they do not burn.

Out of these methods, there are really only two worth considering: steaming in a covered pan and roasting. The first of these offers unparalleled ease, leaving you with enough time to prepare another dish or write a treatise on, say, the chopping of carrots. In particular, after the beets are cooked with this method, it is child's play to peel off their skin under cold running water. In terms of taste, this method falls short of roasting but still performs adequately. You would probably not want to eat the resulting beets plain (unless you are a real beet aficionado), but when combined with other ingredients and some sort of dressing, they suffice.

The roasting technique, on the other hand, is by far the most laborious. The beets must be peeled, chopped, and carefully washed. But it makes by far the most delicious beets. They brown, and their natural sugars turn into something complex and beguiling. Beets cooked in this way can always be used in place of steamed beets with better results, and they are also delicious eaten plain, perhaps with some rice. They are perhaps worse for storing in the fridge, as they are already chopped and hence don't keep as well. In addition, much of their toasty flavor is diminished when cold.

Thus ends part 1 of our article on beet cookery. To summarize, the steaming method is the least work and it gives good results. Much time can be saved by cooking a large batch of beets in this manner and storing them in the refrigerator for later use. The roasting method is the most work, but it offers powerful deliciousness. In part 2, we will give ideas for what to do with beets cooked in these ways, as well as offer up some recipes that avoid such methods of beet cookery entirely. Stay tuned for more excitement.

Hale's Ales Wee Heavy Winter Ale

2009-12-19T21:06:00.000-08:00

Hale's Ales, Wee Heavy Winter Ale
Seattle, WA
6.8% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

Hale's Ales is a brewery that makes beer that doesn't stand out in any way, but is solid and tasty and pleasant to drink. At least, it seems that way based on this and the one other beer of theirs I've had. This one is strong, but it's lighter than the name would make you think.

Ninkasi Oatmeal Stout

2009-12-19T21:00:00.000-08:00

Ninkasi Brewing Company, Oatis Oatmeal Stout
Eugene, OR
7.5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

A beer with a powerful malty flavor. Pretty good if you're looking for something strong.

Worst Commutative Diagram Ever

2009-12-17T12:57:00.000-08:00

Okay, mathematical hotshots! This commutative diagram appears in a legitimate math book, despite its appearance. What fact is it proving? Leave your answers in the comments. Second-year UW math students may not respond.

Revision: nobody who was in spring quarter of last year's algebra class can answer. Other second year math students, feel free.

Deschutes Porter

2009-12-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

Deschutes Brewery Black Butte Porter
Bend, OR
5% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

A smooth porter with a caramel flavor that's not too sweet. It achieves the trick of lingering in your mouth for the shortest amount of time without being unsatisfying, which makes it a relaxing, light beer. Comment on this to your friends and they'll look at you funny as you drink a jet black beer. I had it with sweet potatoes--good combination.

Soba Noodles and Squash

2009-11-29T22:30:00.000-08:00

Soba noodles are great. Compared to normal pasta, they cook faster, have more taste, and cost about the same. You should be alert when you cook them. They're done more quickly than you'd think, and they're nicest when they're still chewy. This recipe takes 30 or 40 minutes, but it's incredibly simple. It serves 3 or 4 people.

1/2 pound soba noodles
1 large or 2 small delicata squash, chopped into 1-inch pieces and seeds removed (don't peel it, though)
5 large collard leaves, chopped
3 chilies of a level of spiciness that you like, finely minced
1 clove garlic, crushed
3 tbs. soy sauce
2 tbs. mirin
1/2 tsp. sesame oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp. rice vinegar
2 tbs. peanut oil
1 tbs. grated ginger
pepper

Put a pot of salted water on. While it comes to a boil, mix together in a large bowl all the ingredients but the noodles, squash, and collards. When the water boils, cook the soba noodles till they're done, about four or five minutes. Drain them and put them in the bowl, and stir them up.

Meanwhile, start steaming the squash. About 10 minutes later, start steaming the collards as well. When they're both tender, add them to the bowl. Mix and adjust the seasoning.

Duchesse de Bourgogne

2009-11-29T22:15:00.000-08:00

Brouwerij Verhaeghe, Duchesse de Bourgogne
Belgian reddish-brown ale
Vichte, Belgium
6% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

Bizarre! It's first sour, then sweet, and it has more in common with soda than with most beers. Don't take this as criticism; it's great, even if it doesn't taste like beer.

Alaskan Smoked Porter

2009-11-29T22:11:00.000-08:00

Alaskan Brewing Co., 2009 Smoked Porter
Juneau, AK
6.5% Alcohol
Rating: 3/5

It's not bad, but I would never really choose it. The smoke flavor is just overwhelming.

Hale's Ales Mongoose IPA

2009-11-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

Hale's Ales, Mongoose IPA
Seattle, WA
7% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

If you had to reduce beer in the Northwest to one style, it would be the IPA, and if you had to reduce Northwest IPAs to one beer, it might as well be this one. Don't expect anything unusual from this beer, but drink it if you want a well-made IPA. It's incredibly hoppy, but it's not over the top and it makes fine drinking.

Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA

2009-11-29T21:52:00.000-08:00

Dogfish Head, 90 Minute Imperial IPA
Milton, Delaware
9% Alcohol
Rating: 5/5

It's simultaneously more flavorful and mellower than the usual IPA. Whatever "balanced" means, this beer is balanced.

By the way, I've added in the percent alcohol not out of love for statistics but because it seems like something I might want to know if I were choosing a beer.

Kale or Collards with Peanuts and Garlic

2009-11-27T00:06:00.000-08:00

As promised, here's another recipe for greens. Lindsay and I adapted the recipe from Simply in Season, a Mennonite cookbook, and we spiffed it up by adding chili-garlic sauce, soy sauce, and vinegar. Two people could eat this as meal, along with some rice. It could serve twice as many people as a side dish. It takes about thirty minutes to cook.

1 bunch kale or collards (about 10 giant leaves)
1 large onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, diced or crushed
1 tbs. peanut oil
2 tsps. whole cumin seeds (or a smaller amount of ground cumin)
1 tsp. ground coriander
1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
1 tbs. chili-garlic sauce, such as Huy Fong's (or just use fresh or dried chilies)
a bit less than 1/4 cup peanut butter, possibly more
2 tbs. soy sauce
1 tbs. rice vinegar
1 tsp. sugar
salt, pepper

Cut the stems out of the greens and chop them roughly. Heat the peanut oil over medium heat in a big skillet than can be covered, and add the stems, the chopped onion, and some salt. Let this cook while you prepare the rest of the ingredients, stirring occasionally to keep things from burning. Chop the rest of the greens roughly. Mix up the peanut butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sugar, along with about two tablespoons of water to thin it out (but don't worry if it's still thick--when it gets hot, it will unclump).

When the onions have browned a little, turn down the heat to medium-low and add the garlic, cumin, cardamom, and coriander. Cook this for about a minute, stirring, and add the greens, the chili-garlic sauce, and a bit more salt. Add about 1/4 cup of water, turn up the heat and stir this up. Once the water boils, turn the heat to low and cover, maintaining a simmer. Cook until the greens are tender, about 5-10 minutes for kale and 10-15 minutes for collards. Uncover and add the peanut sauce. Stir it until it heats up and coats the leaves. Add a little bit more water if it's stubborn. Taste it; add some more peanut butter, depending on what you think. Grind some pepper over the whole thing, and add some salt if it needs it.

Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel

2009-11-19T22:21:00.000-08:00

Weihenstephan Brewery, Hefeweissbier Dunkel
Dark Wheat Beer
Freising, Germany
Rating: 5/5

This beer was a present from Lindsay for my birthday! But my love for it goes beyond sentiment. It's deliciously smooth and toasty.

Barely Cooked Chard with Lemon and Parmesan

2009-11-19T18:22:00.000-08:00

This year my CSA has loaded up my box with greens. Few can match me in my love for spinach, chard, kale, and collards, so it means something that I had so much of them that eating them was a burden. I've picked up some new tricks for greens, now. This was one of my favorites. Its basic outline--greens with olive oil and lemon juice--is unremarkable, but as always, adding a ton of Parmesan cheese makes it great. This also straddles the line nicely between cooked and raw. It's more substantial than a salad, but it's still as refreshing as one. It serves two and is really quick.

5 large chard leaves
1 or 2 large cloves garlic, julienned
2 tbs. pine nuts (optional)
juice of 1/2 lemon
Parmesan cheese
olive oil, salt, pepper

Cut out the stems from the chard and cut them into inch-long pieces. Start this cooking in a bit of olive oil (use as little as possible--you'll be adding more) in a big pan over medium heat. Add the garlic, pine nuts, and a bit of salt, and give this a stir from time to time as you prepare the rest of the dish.

In a jar (or a bowl), combine the lemon juice with equally much olive oil. Grind in some pepper and add in lots of Parmesan cheese. Shake this up.

Cut up the chard and add it to the pan, along with some salt (greens need a lot of salt!). Stir for about thirty seconds. The goal is to stop cooking the chard at the first sign of wilting; remember that it will keep on cooking after you remove it, so err on the side of taking it out too soon. Remove everything into a large bowl, pour the dressing over, and toss.

Deschutes Jubelale

2009-10-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

Deschutes Brewery, Jubelale
Spiced Ale
Bend, OR
Rating: 3/5

This was a strong, dark beer. It was flavorful, nutty, and not really that enjoyable to me. Maybe it would have been good if I were eating some meaty stew or something like that.

Deschutes Hop Trip

2009-10-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Deschutes Brewery, Hop Trip
Fresh Hop Pale Ale
Bend, OR
Rating: 4/5

Maybe it's just because it's autumn, and this is a beer only available in autumn, but I think this beer tasted autumnal. The spiel on the bottle suggested that it tasted citrusy and piney. I disagree with citrusy, but piney is dead on. The aftertaste isn't powerful like an IPA, but it lasts in a pleasant, refreshing way.

Port Townsend Golden Ale

2009-10-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

The northwest has a lot of beer. So, please don't interpret my notes on beer as a snobby, critical thing (though I do don a monocle before drinking). It's just that I don't have a very good memory, and I can't remember what I liked. Take my numerical rating in the same spirit. It demeans beer to reduce it to a number. But without the number, I'll look back at my by beer description and have no idea if I enjoyed it.

Port Townsend Brewing Company, Golden Ale
Port Townsend, WA
Rating: 3/5

This beer is a little bit tart and cidery, though it doesn't really have a very strong taste. Unlike other golden ales I have enjoyed, it has no citrus taste. It reminds me of what I thought beer tasted like as a child.

Black Beans in the Style of a Mojito

2009-06-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

I have a fridge full of limes and a garden full of mint. Actually, I don't really know if I can really say that the mint is in the garden. Most of it is growing in the cracks in the walk up to our house.

Go easy on the mint. I used about ten leaves and it really took over. Cook the black beans however you want, and feel free to do it ahead of time. Soak them before you cook them if you like doing that. I'm a reluctant believer that salting beans from the start of their cooking makes them tougher, so I guess salt them after they've begun to soften, but definitely do add a fair amount of salt to them. Also, try to end up with only a little bit of bean-cooking water at the end. If the beans are still floating around freely, boil it away or dump some out.

1 cup of dried black beans
1 cup rice
2 large onions
1 and 1/2 limes, zested (you can zest the whole second lime)
5 mint leaves, chopped finely
2 tbs. olive oil
1/4 cup white wine (you could leave this out)
salt, pepper

Cook the black beans. Fry the onions in the olive oil in a large pot over medium-low heat for anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes (turn the heat down for the longer time, turn it up for the shorter time). Salt them a bit while they cook, and add the lime zest. When the onions are nice and brown, start cooking the rice. Add cooked beans with their liquid to the onions. Add the wine, turn up the heat, and let this bubble away while the rice cooks. When the rice is ready, turn the heat off under the beans, and add the juice from the limes and the chopped mint. Add pepper, taste, and add more salt or lime juice if it seems wise. Serves four.

Asparagus with Rice

2009-06-17T00:39:00.000-07:00

I was embarrassed to post this recipe because there's so little too it. But what's wrong with that if it tastes good? I used lime juice when you'd expect lemon because I had a large bag of limes in the fridge, and I thought it worked well.

1 pound of asparagus, trimmed of woody stalks and cut into one inch pieces
2 large onions, chopped roughly
1/2 of a lime
1 tbs. olive oil
salt, pepper

Cook the onions in a large skillet with the oil over medium heat, stirring often. Add salt. Cook for about twenty minutes, until the onions are nicely browned (but feel free to cut this short if you're in a hurry). Add about 2 tablespoons of water to the pan. Stir this around quickly, scraping the pan to free any nice, brown oniony bits. Shake a bit of salt in, add the asparagus, cover, and turn the heat to medium-low. Cook for a few minutes, until the asparagus is nearly cooked to the point you like. Uncover, turn the heat up a bit, and try to get some brown on the asparagus. Add lots of pepper, salt if necessary. Squeeze the lime over this, mix, and remove from the heat. Serve with rice; about 1/2 cup dry rice makes a good amount to go with this. Serves 2-4, depending on what else you're eating.

Mathless Days

2009-06-12T23:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a full two days since my last final. Two entire days without any mathematical obligations! In another week I'll start studying for my three preliminary exams in real analysis, algebra, and topology/differential geometry, and I'll start doing some reading about Coxeter groups (I can't tell you what those are until I've read about them).

This week, I'll explore Seattle and its surroundings and eat the best food I can find. I started by crossing N. 145th St., leaving the friendly confines of Seattle for the strikingly similar confines of Shoreline. Shoreline isn't known for much yet, but everyone should go there to enjoy the delicious Korean food at Haenam Kalbi & Calamari. Their logo is a smiling pig and squid. Based on this, we ordered a dish of pork and calamari in a chili sauce, which came with a gas burner and was cooked on our table. I spooned some onto my plate as soon as we got it, and as I took my first bite the waitress scurried over. She grabbed my plate, slid the food back onto the burner, and said, "Not ready yet." My bite of squid tasted fine--it wasn't quite raw--but the dish was better when it was nicely charred and the waitress gave us permission to eat it. We also got a bowl of buckwheat noodles with a sauce made from peanuts and chilis and other mysterious things and a boiled egg on top; the waitress came back with a pair of scissors to cut the noodles to a more manageable length. Our third dish was strips of beef atop a layer of onions on a sizzling cast iron plate. The onions were raw when they arrived and sweet and crunchy by the time we finished. Before any of this had even arrived, we were given about ten bowls of pickles, ranging from kimchi to miniature dried fish. It took the entire meal to even try everything. Most of the dishes cost eight to twelve dollars, and as you can tell you get plenty of food. I can't wait to go back.

Addresses:
Haenam Kalbi & Calamari
15001 Aurora Ave N
Shoreline, WA 98133

Pumpkin Lasagna

2009-01-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

Ever since I started cooking I've eaten a lot of squash, which confuses my parents since they never cooked them when I was growing up. (Squash is my form of rebellion.) In Seattle I've met lots of new squashes, like the delicata, which is my favorite for its creamy, dense, sweet flesh. But this post is about the pumpkin, and the lasagna that Lindsay and I made from one. I used Mark Bittman recipes for the pasta and the Béchamel sauce.

The pasta:

1/2 pound spinach
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
3 eggs

Put the spinach in boiling water and cook it till it wilts (about a minute and half). Run cold water over it to cool it down. Pick it up and try to squeeze all the water out of it. Then chop very finely, or put it in a food-processor and puree it.

Mix up the flour and salt in a large bowl. Crack an egg and mix it in. Add some spinach. Repeat with the other eggs, incorporating the spinach as you go. Once you've added all the eggs and spinach, try to form a ball of dough, adding a little bit of water if necessary (it almost certainly will be, but you'll probably only need a tablespoon or two). Once you've gotten the dough together, roll it out as thinly as possible, and cut into appropriate strips for lasagna.

The Béchamel sauce:

1 1/2 tbs. butter
1 1/2 tbs. flour
1 1/2 cup whole milk

Heat the butter in a small pot. When it's done foaming up, add the flour and cook over low heat, whisking. When the flour is light-brown, start adding the milk gradually. Whenever the sauce looks thick, add some more milk, stirring with a wooden spoon the whole time and making sure to scrape the bottom of the pan. You can turn the heat up a little bit while you do this. After 15-30 minutes, you should have a thick sauce, and you're done.

Everything else:

1 medium-sized pumpkin
1 pound of mushrooms (we used hedgehogs and black trumpets)
1 1/2 cups grated Parmesan cheese
1 tbs. butter, plus a bit more for greasing the pan
1 tbs. olive oil
salt, pepper, nutmeg

Cut the pumpkin in half, take out the seeds, and roast at 375 degrees till it's very soft, about 1 1/2 hours. Scoop out the flesh and season it with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Cook the mushrooms in the butter and olive oil over medium heat with some salt and pepper. Cook until all of the exuded mushroom water has evaporated, and then let the mushrooms brown a little bit.

Boil water and cook your pasta for a minute or two.

At this point, everything is prepared and you just need to assemble the lasagna. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Grease a pan with butter and put strips of pasta on the bottom of the pan. It's okay if they overlap a bit (or if they don't). Put down a layer of pumpkin, a layer of mushrooms, a layer of Béchamel, and a layer of cheese. Put down another layer of noodles and repeat the whole thing two or three times. End with a layer of pasta, Béchamel, and Parmesan. Bake this for thirty minutes (or until it starts to bubble). Let it rest for at least 10 minutes, and serve.

Here's the first layer of the lasagna:

And this is what it looked like after it was cooked:

Thanks to Lindsay for the pictures.

Bûche

2008-12-27T20:00:00.000-08:00

The true meaning of Christmas is not presents, nor is it the birth of Jesus. It is bûche de noël.

A bûche de noël from Marquet Patisserie

Photo courtesy of my father.

Italy Addendum: Ordering Food in Italian Restaurants

2008-12-21T15:29:00.002-08:00

I used to be confused about the structure of Italian meals. I had read some authoritative sentence that sounded like this: "In Italy, pasta is eaten not as a main course but rather as a small appetizer prior to it." Back when I read that my appetite was large enough that eating a meal of some appetizers, pasta, meat, and dessert didn't strike me as crazy. But a meal like that with restaurant-sized portions would be crazy. (And don't blame it on American portions: Italian dishes were about the same size as American ones.)

So, here's my bid at a new authoritative sentence on how to order at Italian restaurants: "In Italy, pasta is eaten in a separate course from meat and fish. You can have one course or the other or both, and you can share dishes in either course." I always like sharing, and apparently so do Italians. We had a representative meal in Ancona. Three of us had two antipasti, two pastas, and one thing from the fish menu, which was a good amount of food.

Italy, Day 15, 6/29/2008

2008-12-21T15:26:00.001-08:00

breakfast: typical
lunch at Trattoria Tre Torri: eggplant "bruschetta"; casoncelli (pasta stuffed with a meaty paste); polenta cake
dinner: airport sandwiches

Eggplant "bruschetta" was tomato, Parmesan cheese, and dried oregano on slices of grilled eggplant. (Incidentally, all the oregano I encountered on the trip was dried. All the other herbs were always fresh.) The casoncelli were small pasta stuffed with a pink paste that seemed to include prosciutto. They were served with a sauce of bacon and fried sage. The dish was terrific, especially the sage.

After lunch we bought one of the many small cakes sitting in a bakery window. It was made of polenta and had a thick layer of chocolate frosting, and as you'd expect from something made of coarse cornmeal and chocolate, it was delicious.

We ate some sandwiches at the airport. Even airport food is good in Italy!

Addresses:
Trattoria Tre Torri
Piazza Mercato Del Fieno, 7/A
24129 Bergamo (BG), Italy

Italy, Day 14, 6/28/2008

2008-12-20T13:26:00.002-08:00

breakfast: typical
lunch: mozzarella, tomato, lettuce sandwich; torta di verdure
dinner: polenta with cheese and mushrooms (antipasto); grilled pork tenderloin with rosemary and deep-fried squash flowers; vegetables with sesame seeds

Torta di verdure--vegetable cake--was a spinach pie with a thin, flaky crust. We ate it on our train journey to Bergamo, which suffered all sorts of delays (typical of all the trains we rode in Italy).

We finally got to Bergamo and walked around a bit. It's a nice town, especially for one that no Americans have heard of. It has an old town on a hill and a new town (still pretty old) below. I failed at finding a restaurant for dinner, and we ended up back at our bed and breakfast, which was also a restaurant.

The polenta with mushrooms was a traditional dish from Bergamo. The polenta had a much stronger corn flavor than it does when I make it. The pork was good but a little dry. The squash flowers mostly tasted like deep-fried batter, but it was very good batter. The vegetables were shockingly bad.

Italy, Day 13, 6/27/2008

2008-12-19T20:18:00.004-08:00

breakfast: the usual, plus a lemon granita from La Scogliera
lunch from Focacceria Antonio: focaccia, walnut cake
dinner from La Cantina de Mananan: mixed seafood antipasto; pasta with pesto; mozzarella with tomato, capers, olives, and oregano; fruit with gelato

I got a lemon granita at La Scogliera, and it was the best granita I had ever had. It was a refreshing, icy lemonade, like the Italian ice at Court Pastry but with a thinner consistency and a much stronger flavor.

We had made a reservation for dinner at La Cantina de Mananan. Giovanna was excited that when she gave her name, she didn't have to spell it. The restaurant had placemats advising us in English and German that Parmesan cheese doesn't go with seafood, that pesto doesn't go with pepper (who knew!), and that it is not appropriate to drink cappuccino after dinner. One frenzied man was the waiter for the entire restaurant. The antipasto had two delicious bits of smoked fish, two anchovies, some fish marinated in oil, capers, and lemon juice, and two shrimp with sweet, moist meat served in dark tomato sauce.

The pesto was exactly what pesto should be. The pasta was the weirdest shape I've ever seen (I forget its name, unfortunately). They were flat squares, about two-by-two inches, and one side was covered in little bubbles. They looked almost exactly like boiled pieces of pork skin (don't ask how I know that).

The gelato in our dessert wasn't vanilla but fior di latte--milk-flavored. It tasted like milk with no other flavor, and I think I liked it more than vanilla.

A roof with rocks and a satellite dish

Addresses:
La Scogliera
Via Fegina, 222
19016 Monterosso Al Mare (SP)

Focacceria Antonio
Via Fegina, 124
19016 Monterosso Al Mare (SP)

La Cantina de Mananan
Via Fieschi, 117
19010 Corniglia (SP)

Italy, Day 12, 6/26/2008

2008-12-19T19:54:00.004-08:00

breakfast: pastry with raisins
lunch: roll with spinach; stromboli-like thing with tomato, mozzarella, and ham
dinner: prosciutto and melon; trofie (worm-shaped pasta) with pesto and zucchini; ravioli with lobster

We bought breakfast at a trendy pastry shop in Bologna. Giovanna had a croissant stuffed with hazelnut cream, which was as good as it sounds.

We had an hour layover in Parma on our way to the Cinque Terre, five towns within walking distance of each other on the Mediterranean coast. We found a shop selling focaccia and other things resembling pizza. We got a roll that looked like a Chinese pork bun. It actually was kind of similar, but stuffed with spinach flavored with a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar.

We arrived in Corniglia, the middle town of the Cinque Terre, and we walked down the coast to two other towns. Things got more and more touristy, but it seemed appropriate for such a beautiful coast to be a little bit touristy. The restaurant we ate at was half good, in unexpected ways. In our prosciutto and melon, the melon was perfect, and a perfect melon is a surprise even in Italy. But the prosciutto was bad, which for Italy is an even bigger surprise. The ravioli with lobster were outstanding, though they were actually ricotta-spinach ravioli in tomato sauce with half of a little lobster on the side. On the other hand, the pesto dish was terrible. It had mushy strips of zucchini with the same texture as an overcooked potato and about as much flavor too.

The coast around the Cinque Terre

Italy, Day 11, 6/25/2008

2008-12-19T10:14:00.002-08:00

breakfast: bread, honey
lunch: sandwich with prosciutto, sheep's cheese, and roasted eggplant and zucchini; peach granita
dinner: pasta filled with potato with guanciale and chives; lasagna with little vegetables

Our afternoon in Bologna was taken up by a search for somewhere to stay. We had booked a room, but when we got to the listed address, there was no sign of any hotel. We went to a tourist office for help and someone there was friendly enough to walk down with us and ring some buzzers. She managed to find our (entirely unmarked) hotel, but the man on the other end of the buzzer said that he wasn't the owner and couldn't let us in. We had to call Giancarlo, the owner. We already had called him several times--his cell phone was turned off--and so we gave up and looked for something new (we hadn't paid a deposit or anything). We ended up with a cheap room in a hotel that looked exactly like a college dorm. It was incredibly hot, but it housed us for a night. Some time while we were wondering around with our bags taking care of this, I managed to get myself a peach granita. It seemed to be just pureed peach and ice, and was very refreshing, though not particularly intense.

At dinner we had small triangular pasta (bigger than tortellini, smaller than ravioli) stuffed with potato, kind of like pierogis. The sauce was chives, very crispy guanciale (cured pork cheek--similar to bacon), and lots of butter. The lasagna had little pieces of zucchini, carrots, and I tihnk some other vegetables, and lots of Béchamel sauce.

Italy, Day 10, 6/24/2008

2008-12-18T19:31:00.005-08:00

breakfast: bread, honey, jam, peanut butter
lunch: prosciutto sandwich and gelato
dinner at La Cantineta: cold fish antipasto; mussels and clams in tomato sauce antipasto; orecchiette with shrimp and cuttlefish; tagliole (long, thin pasta) with seafood; roasted seafood; lemon sorbet

We packed sandwiches and left in the morning for a beach in Sirolo, a small town on the Adriatic. After a day there, we got some gelato and came back to Ancona. Despite Italian food's superiority over Hungarian food, I preferred Hungarian ice cream. Gelato and fagylalt (i.e., Hungarian ice cream) are similar to each other; both are lighter and less creamy than American ice cream. I thought most gelato felt unnaturally (and unpleasantly) slick in my mouth. Giovanna did not agree.

The beach in Sirolo

Back in Ancona, Chiara took us to a seafood restaurant called La Cantineta. She took forever to translate the menu for us because she gave us a detailed description of every pasta shape. According to her (and perhaps to all Italians?) the shape of the pasta was as important as what was on it.

The cold fish antipasto had a lot of different things: a single shrimp with an intense flavor; a piece of smoked salmon; anchovies marinated in lemon juice; and arugula with what I think was cuttlefish. Our other antipasto, mussels and tiny clams in tomato sauce, was delicious.

Both pastas were great and achieved a miraculous chewiness. When I cook either dried or fresh pasta, it goes from uncooked to cooked without passing through such a chewy stage. (Apparently the intermediate value theorem does not apply to pasta.)

The seafood in the one secondo that we got consisted of a few mild white fish and some crayfish. All were covered in coarse breadcrumbs, including the crayfish, which needed to be shelled, rendering most of its breadcrumbs irrelevant. The different fishes were all good, and I have no idea what any of them were. After this I had lemon sorbet, which was essentially thick, icy lemonade, served with a straw. It was one of the best meals I had in Italy, and it made up for my year in landlocked Hungary with no seafood.

Addresses:
La Cantineta
Via A. Gramsci, 1/C
60121 Ancona (AN)

Italy, Day 9, 6/23/2008

2008-09-02T13:41:00.007-07:00

breakfast: bread and jam
lunch at Ristorante Clemente: fried dough; farro salad; roasted eggplant; sun-dried tomatoes; cured meats; warm ricotta; mashed potatoes that were crunchy on top; gnocchi with zucchini, saffron, and salt cod; ravioli with ricotta, tomato sauce, and basil; sfalgione mousse; puff pastry with cream; warm apple cake
dinner: pasta salad with pickled vegetables, asiago, and ham

We went with Fabrizio and Maria to Ristorante Clemente. We started with an enormous antipasto course and an excellent bottle of Montepulciano red wine from Abruzzo. The farro salad was made of cooked farro--like barley but not as chewy--with cherry tomatoes and basil. The mashed potatoes were put in a casserole dish, covered with breadcrumbs and baked to make a crunchy top. After this came the pasta dishes, one after another. They were flawless. Salt cod goes nicely with zucchini, livening it up. Dessert was great too, and it came with a glass of delicious, sweet white wine. I set the automatic Google translator on the restaurant's menu, with hilarious results.

Ovid's Square in Sulmona

In the afternoon we moved on to Ancona, a port town with lots of immigrants. We stayed with Chiara, who had been an exchange student living with Giovanna's family 18 years ago. She showed us how to make "cold pasta": cook the pasta less than usual; drain it and run cold water over it; add vegetables, ham, cheese, and olives if you want them; put the entire dish in the freezer for five minutes.

Addresses:
Ristorante Clemente
Vicolo Quercia, 5
67039 Sulmona (AQ)