My beautiful friends!

One a Day... Number five

A photo and a story. I decided to make use of my brand new ice cream maker and whip up some fresh watermelon sorbet. So, I took about 3/4 of a small watermelon, cubed and seeded it and popped it into my (also brand new) food processor. Then I squeezed half a lime in and threw in a glug or two of the lime scented simple syrup I made the night before. Then I added a splash of vodka and popped it into the ice cream maker. Result: delicious intense watermelon-y flavor with just enough tart lime flavor and sugary sweetness. The texture was a little odd, but still tasty.

In other news, I've been shooting black and white medium format and rediscovering the joys of that. Will hopefully have scans soon. (Oh, scanner, how do I want you... Canoscan 8800f, maybe?)

One a day...Number three and four.

Well, I missed yesterday. Maybe because I was busy drinking these.Today: Three very happy packages arrived - food processor, ice cream maker, and film processing supplies, oh my!

One a day...Number two.

The only photos I've taken today have been analog - I finally got a new battery for my trusty old Mamiya and, oh, I've got big plans for her. So, in the spirit of at least uploading one photo every day in an effort to make myself be creative at least part-time, I give you last night's dinner. Nothing fancy, just some light buttery pasta with veg and a good, big, fat salad.

In other exciting photo news, not only did I find TWO places that have rentable darkroom space, but I also dug out my old tank and ordered up some chemistry so that I can develop my own film again! It's been a long, long time since I did it and just reading a tutorial to remind myself how it goes made me go all misty/nostalgic. I remember so poignantly the feeling of my fingers going all puckery while washing freshly developed film combined with wafting chemical smells and everything being nice and cool and clean and dust-free. And come Wednesday (when my happy little shipment arrives) I'll be doing it again, theoretically. I am a little nervous to discover that I've lost my touch or that it's not as much fun as I remember it (as with so many foolish things we did in college), but I'm sure it'll come back in a snap and be even more satisfying now since I haven't done it in ages.

All this photo-Schwärmerei was brought about, in case you're wondering, by some fun shooting in Ireland and the decision that if I'm going to have the kind of well rounded life I really want, now is as good a time as any to get started. So here we go - I'm plunging back in.

One a day...

It may be time for another attempt at 365 photos. Keep your expectations in check.

Faux toes

This is a taste of my photos from our trip to Ireland. Many, many more can be seen here.

Hot weather equals ...

An urge, a craving, and, ultimately, sweet satisfaction

Yesterday I found myself with the urge to do something in the kitchen. These moods tend to strike at the least opportune times - as far as possible from mealtimes, when I have a ton of work to do, when the kitchen is dangerously low on supplies (which, admittedly, forces creativity, but usually ends with less than ideal results), and so forth. This was combined with a craving for bread, which - tragedy! - we did not have in the house.

And so I pulled out the book that is quickly becoming a Bible for me - The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook and started to read recipes. I quickly decided against rolls, sandwich bread, and a variety of sweet options. I landed on their quick, easy recipe for Rosemary Focaccia (my rosemary needed a little pruning, after all).

The result, with a little fiddling and a lot of shameful ignoring (How long is it supposed to rise again?), was a crispy, yet soft, chewy focaccia with the tang of good olive oil and the bite of good, crunchy sea salt. In short, it hit the spot.
Rosemary Focaccia - The Book also provides suggestions for substituting parmesan, sage, or olive and thyme. They all sound delicious.

Note: don't use dried rosemary for fear of burning.

1 russet potato (I used Yukon Gold) - be sure you'll have enough for about 1 1/3 cups grated potato (for me, this meant two small ones)
3 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 t. instant yeast
1 1/4 t. salt
1 c. warm water
1/4 c. extra-virgin olive oil, plus some for the baking sheet and rising bowl (I didn't measure very carefully, which resulted in a rather too-oily bread. But it's good oil, so it tastes fine anyway.)
2 T. fresh rosemary (Again, I did not measure, but instead just liberally plopped the rosemary down on the top of the dough)
3/4 t. coarse sea salt (I used too much.)

1. Cook the potato until it's easily pierced with a knife (~10 minutes). Allow to cool until it's comfortable to handle. Grate it on the large holes of a box grater. The recipe initially asks you to cut the potato into 1-inch chunks, but in the future (for the sake of grating it more easily) I would leave it in halves or quarters. The small chunks were rather unwieldy and quite messy to grate. Reserve 1 1/3 c. grated potato.
2. Mix 3 1/4 c. of the flour with the other dry ingredients (yeast, table salt). On low, add potato, water and 2 T. olive oil until the dough comes together.
3. Ratchet up the speed (medium-low) and knead until dough is smooth and elastic (~10 minutes). If the dough is too wet (sticking to sides of the bowl), add flour. I needed all of the extra flour, perhaps because of the massive humidity in Boston yesterday?
4. Turn the dough out onto the counter and knead it to form a smooth ball (~1 minute).
5. Put the dough-ball into an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. I would also suggest oiling the plastic wrap, lest the plastic wrap stick to the dough, which mine did (tragedy!). Let rise for about an hour, or until it's doubled in size.
6. Finagle the dough into a 12x18 rimmed baking sheet - just try to get it to stay in the corners - with WET HANDS. This part is very important. It calms down the dough a little and keeps your hands from sticking without drastically changing the flour/oil/water balance in the dough.
7. Cover and let it rise for another 45-60 minutes. It should just about double in size and will slowly return to its original shape when prodded.
8. Preheat oven to 425. Dimple the dough with your fingers in a more or less regular pattern. Drizzle the rest of the olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and toss on the rosemary.
9. Bake 20-25 minutes (25 for me) until the bocaccia bottom is golden and crisp. (I found a normal spatula very very helpful in lifting up the focaccia to check the bottom.)
10. Try to wait until it's cooled a little before slicing. You won't be able to.

**Another prop for this book - they have EXCELLENT descriptions and photos of how to know when the dough is too wet. Very useful for those who are uncertain about these sorts of things. It's a SERIOUSLY good cookbook for cooks at any level. Also, they provide rationales for a lot of their recipe and ingredient choices, which is reassuring.

Lessons I learned in Ireland

Figure One. Scones are better in Ireland. So is the butter.
Figure Two. Guinness is good for you.
Figure Three. When asked the question "Would you like a bit of cream with your raspberry crumble," say yes.
Figure Four. When making a sandwich, good bread is obviously a necessity (good Irish brown bread, in this case). Also highly recommended, however, is shredded cheese instead of sliced.
Figure Five. Even if it doesn't look like much, fish and chips is truly a memorable meal when you're near the sea and have lots of salt and vinegar at your disposal.
Figure Six. If you ever find yourself in Kenmare, County Kerry, go to Mulcahy's. Order the pork.

Radio Silent

I'm off to the land of Guinness, shamrocks, and Leprechauns. Don't expect to hear much from me for a couple of weeks.

Lasagna and clafoutis and cocktails - oh my!

In other weekend eating news, I tried Sweet Amandine's clafoutis recipe with a few too many berries (again with the moisture issue), but it came out gorgeously. (See the pre-batter photo, as the post-baking result wasn't as pretty as it was delicious.) The clafoutis was dessert for a rather decadent dinner involving lasagna and a newly invented cocktail.

But first, the lasagna. I followed the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook recipe (if you don't have this book, buy it immediately). They handily start with a vegetarian version (Simple Cheese Lasagna) and offers options for other versions (Meat, Mushroom & Spinach, etc.) and clear instructions.

First, the sauce recipe (it is delicious for lasagna or other pasta).

1 T olive oil
1 minced onion
6 cloves minced garlic
1 can crushed tomatoes (28 oz.)
1 can diced tomatoes (28 oz.)
1/4 t. dried oregano (I used fresh)
1/8 t. red pepper flakes (I used cayenne)

You basically do what you would expect to: cook the onion until it softens, add the garlic until it's fragrant. If you're making it MEATY, add the meat (I used 1 lb. ground turkey and 1/2 c. diced prociutto) now. Then tomatoes (don't drain!) and season with oregano, cayenne pepper (or pepper flakes), and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until it's a little thicker.

And then the process of the lasagna itself. The book (quite rightly) recommends no-boil noodles, but I only had yes-boil noodles on hand. There are four basic layers that you repeat as long as your pan holds out.

1. Sauce. You can make the sauce from the recipe above or use jar sauce.
2. Noodles. Three standard lasagna noodles will cover the bottom of a 9"x13" pan.
3. Happy, rich ricotta mixture. This is comprised of 15 oz. ricotta mixed with 1 c. Parmesan, 1/2 c. minced fresh basil, an egg, and salt and pepper.
4. Mozzarella, grated.

Layer these one over the other until the pan is full. If you've ever seen me packing a suitcase, you understand the method I find useful to employ: pour in more goodies and apply pressure until it all fits. Just be prepared to get a little dirty. Finish this layering process with a layer of noodles, then sauce, then a cup of mozzarella and the final 1/4 c. Parmesan. Then cover the lasagna with oiled aluminum foil and bake for 15 minutes at 375. Remove the foil and continue baking for 25 more minutes until bubbling and brown on top.

But, as I mentioned before, there have been a couple of cocktails created in the last week: First, the heady one. I have a little herb garden growing on my balcony, which includes a curious plant called Pineapple Sage. It is primarily decorative and aromatic, but is perfectly safe for culinary use and I had read it recommended for cocktails. So, I got adventurous.

For four generous pours:
Muddle:
8-10 small Pineapple Sage leaves, roughly chopped
2 T. brown sugar

Mix in about 4 oz. gin

Pour about an oz. of this mixture into each glass and top with ginger ale. Garnish with an additional sage leaf.

The other cocktail was a little less aggressively flavored (probably a good thing, as it followed lasagna and clafoutis and we were all practically collapsed with heavy food). It was smooth, citrusy, and herby and went down quite easily.

Muddle:
ca. 5 large basil leaves, roughly chopped
2 T. powdered sugar
1 lime, cut into eighths

Mix in about 4 oz. vodka. Pour about an oz. of this mixture into each glass. Top with club soda. Drink up! Oh, and I haven't named these cocktails yet. Any ideas?

More Cooking Adventures

It's not often that I find myself arrested by a recipe with an urge to try it immediately, but it happened yesterday. A few weeks ago the New York Times did a profile of Twitter-users who tweet recipes. The most impressive of them is, in my opinion, Cookbook. She tweets entire recipes in the allotted 140 characters, with the help of a battery of abbreviations and sometimes curious punctuations. This epicurean Morse code is sometimes difficult to parse, but the effort of condensing them and eliminating all those pretty words seems herculean. Anyway, over the weekend the following popped up in my feed:

"Olive Oil Cookies: beat egg/7T oil/5T wine. Fold+c flour/6T sug/.5t mince fresh rosemary/.25t bkgpdr&s+p. Form~20t's; 12m@375F/190C to brwn."

"Hark!" I said to myself," Hath someone shown me the way to eat olive oil and sugar at the same time!?" And I sprinted to my kitchen. A scant 25 minutes later, the lovely, chewy little morsels you see to the right came out of the oven with a puff of olive oil scented steam. A note, however. (And this was a theme of the weekend.) The dough for these cookies came out more like a batter, so I added a little more flour to thicken them up. This may have been unnecessary, but I couldn't see a way to "form" anything out of the slurry that resulted from the above proportions.

In any case, the cookies came out (with a little extra baking time, which confirms my suspicion that my oven runs cold) delicious, chewy in the center, crispy on the edges, and with a complex, sweet, mildly salty, peppery flavor that surprises and challenges the taster. These cookies go equally well with wine and coffee and on their own. Oh, and being lighter than butter cookies (blessed, blessed olive oil), it's easier to eat a whole batch in one sitting. Try these immediately!

The promise of things to come

I've decided that maybe the key to making beautiful photos (as Jess does over at Sweet Amandine) is to consistently surround myself with beautiful things.

For a brief period a few years ago, I spent more of my time making and printing photos than doing almost anything else. Anyone who knows me has heard me say that the best part of the process was being in the darkroom and experiencing what my (batty) photo teacher called the "alchemical process" of developing photos. I liked to watch the photo paper swimming around in the developer and the faint ghost of an image creeping onto the paper and then the full, vivid image appearin all in a rush.

I feel sort of the same way about my plants. I like counting the buds of new leaves and blossoms and watching them unfurl by the day. And now I have vegetable plants that are similarly exciting to watch! And so, here are a few mundane flower and veg shots to get myself back in the swing of things.Figure 1. My sweet little "Bell Boy" pepper plant! Near the top you see two teeny little peppers and at the bottom, one bigger one! The biggun is about two inches long and about an inch in diameter.
Figure 2. One of the meaty little Peonies I bought yesterday.Figure 3. The meatier of the two Peonies I bought yesterday.Figure 4. And look what they did today!Figure 5. You can imagine how I'm ogling these sweet little green buds. And the actual snappy blooms aren't bad either.

Clip Show: June is almost over?

This is what I've been doing lately.
Fig. 1. Photobooth pictures were taken.
Fig. 2. Rooty trees were ogled.
Fig. 3. Just maybe the happiest place on Earth was visited.

Feast for a visiting friend

Recently, the puppy and the hubby and I played host to a dog called Snoot - Lucy's best friend from puppy-hood who tragically moved to California with his human, whom we shall call Ishmael. Ishmael came over to visit Snoot one day and I cooked a little feasty goodness for lunch. So very lovely to see this good friend and his gorgeous dog. Ishmael calls himself a Vegetarian of Convenience, so we decided to be a little inconvenient and eat fish (which he adores and which you all know is a recent project of mine).

I did a rerun of the lemon-tomato-baked chicken I posted about earlier, this time with Scrod purchased from the Court House Fish Market (about which I will be separately posting very soon). But! Before we get to the main course! The appetizer - swoon.What you see there is the end - it was so good I forgot to take a picture of the whole dish before diving into it - of a small green salad topped with some olive oil, some SERIOUSLY good Balsamico, and one plump, moist, delicious, melt-in-your-mouth, gorgeous scallop* with a little ribbon of prociutto. The salad was simple. A few mesclun and butter lettuce leaves, oil and vinegar, and that's it. The scallop was almost that simple. I wrapped the prociutto around the scallop and tossed it in a pan with a little olive oil (loose ends of the prociutto on the bottom for starters) and cooked it til it was golden brown on that side (about a minute?) and about 30 seconds on the other side (just til it started to brown). This resulted in a little crispy edge on each bite, but a creamy just-done middle. Delicious.

So, Ishmael, we enjoyed having you and Snoot visit. I hope you enjoyed the food enough to induce a repeat visit!


*Note: If you know me, you know that next to chocolate, nothing makes me go weak in the knees quite like a perfectly-cooked scallop.

Cute Puppy Photo of the Day

Sesame Crusted Mahi-Mahi with Orange-Soy sauce

A success story from last week's creative cooking! I took two frozen mahi-mahi fillets, defrosted them and crusted them with sesame seeds (dredged in egg, rolled in sesame seeds). Then I pan fried them (canola oil) and made a little glaze-y orange-soy sauce. (garlic, juice of one valencia orange, drizzle of soy sauce, salt, pepper) Served with steamed Asparagus. Delicious!

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

My need, in this case, is twofold: One: to get healthy; Two: to lose a little weight. My problem with these projects is also twofold: One: I hate working out; Two: I hate diets. And 'healthy' food.

So, in this series I'm going to try to cook healthily (i.e. less pasta, more healthy protein, less cholesterol) within the guidelines of the South Beach Diet, with which I had a lot of success in the past.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is the only mention of the Diet that I will include (save the occasional Phase notation). My plan is not to write a Diet Blog (Those irritate me and you all don't need the blow-by-blow of my fight with my thighs.), but rather to share some recipes - some plundered, some invented - that are indistinguishable from Real Food. Wish me luck.

Today:

Lunch: Turkey burgers

-ground turkey
-drizzle of olive oil
-salt, pepper, garlic powder to taste
-smidge of pesto

Smoosh all the ingredients together, form into burger sized balls, squish onto hot griddle and cook until done (juices run clear, golden brown surfaces, internal temp of ca. 165° F).

Dinner: Crock Pot Lentils

-16 oz. bag of dried lentils
-1 carton chicken broth
-1/2 can crushed tomatoes
-1 small yellow onion, diced and browned
-2 cloves garlic, sliced
-salt, pepper to taste
-generous heap of Ras el hanout (thank you, Jamie!)
-smidge of ground cumin
-a few mushrooms, quartered
-also a dash of cinnamon

I searched briefly for a good crock-pot lentil (not soup) recipe, but quickly became bored with samey recipes that included many many ingredients I don't have on hand. This recipe is very much a "what do I have on hand" invention. I know it really needs some freshening up - celery would do wonders. Carrots would also be nice, but this is a Phase I recipe. I'll be adjusting liquid and seasoning as it goes, but my goal is to cook it on high for about 5 hours and hope they don't turn out too soupy. At this moment, they smell disarmingly like the chili my mom made when I was a kid.

I'm going to serve this as a side with some as-yet-undetermined chicken or fish dish. Yes, I need to go to the grocery. Stay tuned for updates.

Two Meals

One: Fish.

As you might recall. I hadn't until recently cooked fish before. I did try, though, and it worked out great! This is what I did.
I drizzled a casserole dish with olive oil, then placed a half-pound cod filet (cut into two servings) into the pan. I drizzled the fish again with olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper, some thyme and rosemary. Then, I chopped garlic and two roma tomatoes and sprinkled them over the top. I squeezed half a lemon over the fish and sliced the other half. I placed the slices on top of the fish and sprinkled capers over. Then I baked the fish until it was flaky. I served with steamed broccoli and buttery cous cous. Delish.

Two: Picnic.

Last weekend, my girlfriends and I descended on Northampton for our fifth college reunion. In a (feeble) effort to save money, we thought we would lunch on the grass on picnic food rather than forking out for a reunion-sponsored meal or schmancy restaurant option. Though I would be surprised if any of us actually saved money with this plan, we did indulge in one of the most delicious, nostalgic, idyllic early-summer picnics you could imagine.
On this plate:

• Satay noodles - the stuff of my dreams - from the State Street Fruit Store Deli. Oh, how I have missed these noodles.
• CRAZY delicious strawberries.
• Sunflower seed bread with cheddar and sopressata.
• Rosemary bread with brie. French Batard with smoked gouda. Bread from the Hungry Ghost Bakery.
• We also had prosecco with strawberry juice.

We all lounged on a blanket under the Big Elm Tree on Chapin Lawn and swapped stories and muppet imitations and news from our every-days. The funny thing was that even though we're five years and miles and miles away from then, it seemed like nothing more than the old every-day we had in college. Much love to all my Smithies.

This Week's The Grand Essential To-Do

• Do laundry (ASAP)
• Final Edits/Bibliography tweaking on Prospectus (By Tuesday 5 PM)
• Post lecture notes (today)
• Finish PITF application (today)
• Submit Final Exam question proposals (today)
  
• GWF final report (today)
• Find and book a moving company (by Friday?)
• Finish grading for Extension school (by Thursday)
• Write Extension School Final (by next Thursday)
• Car for 5/21-24 (ASAP)
  
• Hotel for 7/18 in Marion, MA (ASAP)
  
• Hotel for 8/20-23 in Tiverton, RI (ASAP)
  
• Change addresses on everything (5/15)