Lemon Nutmeg Cookies

Cream together:
1 stick butter (softened)
1/2 cup sugar

Beat in:
3 egg yolks
Zest of one lemon
A little salt
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste

Add slowly:
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 t baking powder

Roll between two sheets of wax paper, chill, cut out. Bake at 300F for 10 minutes.

I iced them, too. And here's a nice indication of the kind of operation I run in my kitchen: (My internal monologue) Damn, I don't have any food coloring. I don't want white icing! Well, that's okay, I'll just grind up a little saffron using the smaller mortar. Yeah, that's how I roll.

Hasty Quiche

one crust for a 9" pie

1 Trader Joe's package of baby spinach
1/2 of one large sweet onion
6 eggs
1/2 c half and half
lots of grated sharp English cheddar
black pepper
fresh rosemary

Chop the spinach small. Slice the onion. Chop the rosemary as finely as you can. Blend filling, pour into shell. Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

Noooooooooooooooo

On a whim I bought a tiny bit of some goat milk cheddar at New Seasons.

It was incredible, remarkable, delicious, hyperbolic.

It is TWENTY GODDAMN DOLLARS PER POUND!

I will never have this treat again :-(

A very tasty dinner

A very tasty dinner
Originally uploaded by laurelfactorial

Here we go, the first in what will no doubt become a popular feature: easy and delicious meals using ingredients from Trader Joe's.

You will need:
-Tomatoes (I went with the high lycopene on the vine little ones)
-Sour cream
-Beef (I went with a small amount of sirloin)
-Jasmine rice (1 cup uncooked)
-Chicken broth (1.5 - 2 cups)
-Olive oil
-Saffron (to taste)
-Garlic (proportional to the amount of meat you have)
-Onions (proportional to the amount of meat you have)
-Cumin (to taste)
-Pepper (to taste)
-Salt (to taste -- you don't need much at all!)
-Sumac (very little, it has quite a punch) (okay okay so you can't get this one at Trader Joe's)
-Some kind of bread -- you can make pita, or I bought this lavosh stuff.

Chop the tomatoes roughly and set aside. Chop your onions and garlic very finely. I used a little food processor. Slice the beef into fairly thin strips, and mix together the raw beef, onions and garlic, pepper, salt, cumin, and sumac. While this is getting acquainted, make your rice. In a very small saucepan, bring the rice and broth to a boil. (The more broth you use the softer the rice will be. This is a matter of personal taste, but be warned that it is very easy to end up with mushy and gross rice.) Turn down the heat to low, cover, and cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand. Cook the beef in the olive oil on moderately high heat. This will work out better in a large pan where you can get the beef fully spread out (you want to sear it, not stew it). To serve, put a little pile of rice on your bread, and spread the beef and tomatoes over this. Top with sour cream. Roll up like a super trendy oh my Gods I can't believe I'm writing these words wrap, and stuff your face.

For maximum effect, serve with mint tea in a room decorated with Orientalism prints whilst wearing a Ghawazee coat and playing a bellydancing CD.

(If you live in Portland, you might recognize this for what it is: an attempt to recreate or at least echo my favorite dish at a certain very good Lebanese restaurant. You should also know that it's not as good as their version.)

Not to sound all Food Network, but this makes a really great weeknight dinner (definitely less than an hour start to finish), and the leftovers are easy to take to work for lunch. It's also pretty enough that I think you could serve it to company (certain company) -- try making a nice cucumber salad to go with, and maybe some hummus; buy some baklava for dessert.

Health has a flavor

I made myself a smoothie just now with frozen wild blueberries, low fat yogurt, pomegranate/blueberry juice, honey matcha powder, and golden flax meal.

It's a little weird, kind of a scary not-all-the-way purple color, with a very plant-y taste (from the matcha) and a little bit of texture from the flax meal.

I kept trying to think where I had seen this color and tasted this flavor before, and suddenly it hit me: this stuff looks and tastes exactly like sweetened acai pulp. Well, okay, not exactly: it's less oily. But when you consider that the health benefits are very similar (loads of antioxidants plus some omega fatty acids), it becomes even more eerie. Perhaps I've just blown the lid off of this conspiracy: there is no such thing as acai, there is is only a factory in Brazil where they mix blueberries and matcha and flax and flax oil and pomegranate juice. They gave it an exotic name to con the unsuspecting American public into buying products they already knew about, but hadn't thought of combining!

The other and perhaps weirder possibility is that this particular combination of nutrition has a distinct taste.

Or maybe it's just that I've heard a fair number of people compare the taste of acai to blueberries, and the first time I tasted I remarked how much it tasted like "eating tea". But who likes boring answers like that?

I really like acai, actually. It's fairly nasty in unsweetened pulp form, but once you add just a little sugar it's really good. If you ever manage to find this product, I HIGHLY recommend it. It's crazy delicious. I like it because it's non-dairy, and full of health, but still super fatty (NOM NOM NOM) and sweet and tasty. It's like... like sorbet you would eat for breakfast. It's extremely filling, and in a good way, not in an "I just ate lots of ice cream and am now sick" way.

The Great and Powerful RR

I will admit it, here, on the internet, for all the world to see: I hate Rachael Ray. That's right, I'm just like every other asshole with a Kitchen Aid mixer and a Le Creuset. I can't stand that woman. Her alarming smile. All those horrible things she says (you know what I mean). Her recipes aren't really that impressive or creative. She comes across as pretty dumb. She'll promote a recipe as healthy, when it's obviously not (my favorite example of this is when she made a pasta dish and said it was "low carb" because she didn't use as much pasta as usual -- seriously what the hell). She's just... annoying. If I had known her in high school I would have hated her.

HOWEVER I can also admit something else, something the other assholes can't: mostly I hate her because I'm jealous. I wish I could have her job. I want a show on the Food Network! I want to sell eighty bazillion cookbooks!

And you know, I'll even take this one step further: I admire what she's done. She's been able to make people less afraid of cooking. Cooking doesn't have to be hard or scary or even glamorous. Her dumbness (like when she "eyeballs" an amount and gets it fantastically wrong) makes her accessable. Just because I don't like perky people doesn't mean I don't know that everybody else does. Her recipes don't appeal to me, and that's okay -- because they are the kind of food that a lot of people want to eat. Hell, if she can get people back in the kitchen, I'm all in favor. I'm not opposed to easy and tasty food. I cook a lot of food like she cooks, in fact.

But back to the hating!

Recently I was in a grocery store, and I wanted to buy some crackers. Little did I realize that this activity is now fraught with peril. Choose carefully, mortal, else Rachael Ray's goddamn smiling face end up in your goddamn cupboard! Cripes. That's what I hate about her, she's so... oversaturated. Good on her for building an empire and a fortune, but Jesus H Christ, do I really need knives with her name on them? I'm opposed to the whole celebrity chef promotion thing generally. Sure, I understand, it's like basketball players and shoes. You gotta make a living. But it's symptomatic of everything that I dislike about that whole Food Network culture in general -- it's all about celebrity, not about talent, or the quality of what you produce.

Okay, I'm stopping myself right there. Now I'm just flinging poo at the unstoppable machine. What are celebrity chefs for if not being celebrities?

I miss the Two Fat Ladies. They were my idea of what a cooking show should be.

Why I failed at veganism

As I mentioned previously, I've been quite taken up with the book Gastronaut by Stefan Gates. There is a description in this book of ortolans. Ortolans are songbirds that are kept in the dark, which causes them to overeat. When they are ready for consumption, they are drowned in brandy. The are, apparently, illegal in France. If you have not already done so, you can read about them on Wikipedia.

Now, here is the thing: when I hear about any food that I am not allowed to have because of some goddamn government regulation (even if it's not my own government doing the regulating), I get worked up. I once got so worked up at my job about unpasteurized cider that my coworkers started to back away slowly. So I'm already suckered in on this one. Add to that the fact that this is a food that is outlandish, fanciful, evocative, and suggests not only a foreign place but time as well, and, well, I have to admit that I got a little pang inside of me. I have this weird competitive, show-offisish nature when it comes to food. I know in my little heart that someday I'm going to enter a cooking contest with a cockentrice -- "Oh, this?" I'll say, "Just a little something I whipped up!" Even though I'm scared of scary foods, I want to eat them.

I started to wonder: could I buy those on the internet? I... I'm almost afraid to look. I suspect anyway that the answer is "no" and "they wouldn't taste that good, fool". So then I started to wonder, is there some kind of similar songbird species that lives here that I could do the same thing with in the convenience of my own apartment?

At that point I realized that there's something deeply wrong with me. Not only is the idea of eating a bird whole pretty goddamn gross (although I suspect I know at least one person who as attempted it, but I cannot confirm this and so I won't elaborate), but, as I'm sure anyone with any kind of sentimentality at all has already noted, that's a pretty creepy thing to do to an animal.

I will never attempt those medieval recipes that call for roasting a goose alive. They make me cry to think about them. However, I don't have the same reaction to force-feeding. I had veal the other day, and it was great. I've never had foie gras (I'm kind of opposed to liver just biologically), but I don't find myself getting all worked up over it. I've eaten face bacon (MMMMMMM FACE BACON).

I was a vegan for like 9 months once. I totally failed at it. Not only because I thought about cheese every. single. day. but also because I never had that sharp, visceral reaction that some people have about animal cruelty. I don't like factory farming, and I try (but usually fail) to buy the most non-offensive animal products that I can. But the thing is, at the end of the day, I've never reacted to it the same way other people have. There are some animals that I won't eat (cephalopods because they are magnificent, rabbit because of a childhood incident, duck because I had pet duck, etc.) so I understand that sentimental/emotional reaction, I just don't have it in the way that I feel like I'm "supposed" to.

So... who wants to come over to my place for some force-fed starlings? Eh? Eh? (God, that would be disgusting.)

I wonder if they'd pay me

I should probably just change this to a blog featuring delicious things that you can prepare using only ingredients from Trader Joe's, since that seems to be all I make these days.

From the "Why Didn't I Do That?" File

The rest of you, perhaps, are familiar with the work of Stefan Gates. I was not familiar with him until my mother, being wise in all things, gave me a copy of Gastronaut.

This book is completely awesome, honestly one of the best books I've read.

As all two of you (if that many!) who read this blog are probably well aware, I read cookbooks for fun. There's nothing like a description of the proper way to skin frog legs to while away a rainy afternoon. Although I have prepared frog legs (the frogs came from a biology lab I was in, I am not ashamed to admit this), I will probably never do so again as I doubt my friends would actually consent to eat them. I say this so that you will understand that I do not read cookbooks for any kind of knowledge or skill acquisition, I read them for the little shiver of pleasure that slithers down my spine when I consider the glories of food.

So it will come as no surprise, perhaps, that I read Gastronaut in three sittings over two days. This is a cookbook, sort of, but more than that it is a treatise on the pleasures of the table and, most delightful for me personally, it is an invitation to experiment, sometimes dangerously and disastrously, with food and cooking.

I learned to cook through failure. I remember when my dad thought that a good early cooking lesson was to have me make these pancake things that he used to make from left over mashed potatoes. They were a real bitch of a food, made more so by his insistence that his miracle pans required no oil. The smell of the briquettes that I managed to produce haunts me still: there was crying, there was a thought that I would never learn to cook, there was probably some kind of bribery to make me feel better on my father's part. This is right up there with when my dad told me to put my marshmallow in a particular little tunnel within the embers of a fire. This tunnel, it turns out, had the approximate heat of a point about 6 inches above the surface of the sun. The marshmallow went from cold to incinerated in about four tenths of a second. Again, much crying.

But did that stop me from trying to toast the perfect marshmallow? No! Did that stop me from making potato pancakes? Well I never liked them much to begin with. The point is, you can't make an omlette without spending at least thirty dollars on eggs and ruining at least one good pan. I have a scientific mind: I approach cooking, like I approach nearly anything, with an open heart and the knowledge that, as those Mythbusters put it so well, "Failure is always an option." Every time I've made a batch of biscuits that turned out like hockey pucks, every time I've gone to carve a chicken only to find its thighs are still what I would call rare, every time I've put in "just one more tablespoon" of ginger, every time I've opened the oven only to set off a fire alarm, I've learned how to cook. You don't forget those lessons -- biscuits, I am now confident in saying, turn out much better when you remember to add leavening.

And this is why I'm so in love with Stefan Gates. His approach to food mirrors mine, so well that I'm a little jealous that he seems to have made a career out of loving food and cooking with reckless abandon. This is cooking without fear. This is not your mother's cookbook, unless your mother is like mine. The central tenet of the work, and indeed, it seems, of Gates' life, is

THE GASTRONAUT'S CREED

"Food will consume 16 percent of my life. That life is too precious to waste; therefore:

-I resolve, whenever possible, to transform food from fuel into love, power, adventure, poetry, sex, or drama.
-I will never turn down the opportunity to taste or cook something new.
-I will never forget: canapés are evil.
-I will remember that culinary disaster does not necessarily equal failure.
-I will always keep a jar of pesto on hand in case of the latter."

I cannot honestly say that I'm keeping with the second tenet -- I'm kind of scared of organ meats and a lot of seafood. But I do think that I'm doing quite well with the general spirit of not being afraid of experimentation. Indeed, as you probably know from my other blog / my website, a huge part of my life is devoted to medieval cooking. You can't learn to cook medievally if you're afraid of screwing up or of eating something weird.

This is not so much a book review as a love note: I love you, Gastronaut! Some of the things you do gross me out (I had the skip the section on eating things your body makes, as reading far enough into it to figure out where you were going was enough to make me throw up), but mostly you inspire me. I would like everyone I know to read this book, whether or not you fancy yourself a chef. Even if you never cook adventurously, you can still eat adventurously.

So... who wants to come to my house for a proper orgiastic Roman feast? (By far my favorite chapter!)

Daaaang

Nancy's organic lowfat peach kefir + honey + peaches and strawberries I picked and froze last summer = DAAAAAAANG

So tasty!

Molded Cookies

(cross posted from my SCA blog)

Tonight I am attempting to make molded cookes. Molded cookies seem to have a long and dignified although somewhat debateable history, so I decided to try my hand at a period approximation. I read through a lot of Elizabethan cookie recipes, and they seem to me to be variants on the theme of:
-Flour
-Sugar
-Butter
-Egg
-Rose water
-Possibly spices

So I made this recipe:

Cream together:
1 stick butter
4 tablespoons of sugar
Add, beating:
Spices to taste
1 egg
2 T rose water
Add slowly, beating:
1 3/4 c flour

Allow me a digression. Being of German extraction, Springerle were always a part of Christmas in my childhood. However, I myself have often remarked that Springerle is a German word meaning "How can we make cookies less fun?" They just don't taste that good, so unless you have really spectacular molds, there's not much point. Except, of course, tradition. The problem, though, is that this is simply the nature of molded cookies. The dough for molded cookies should be very, very stiff, with lots of flour, so that you can mold it. Well a stiff dough doesn't make a very enjoyable cookie. The cookies need to sit overnight before you bake them, so that the image doesn't "melt" during baking. This rules out modern leavening agents even if you aren't already omitting them for authenticity concerns. While springerle can be made with hartshorn as a leavener, I'm pretty sure (but don't quote me on this) that they turn out better when they are completely unleavened. So you end up with something a little... well, hard-tack-ish. If you read the last line of a lot of Elizabethan "cookie" recipes, the author makes a note about how long they will keep, often a truly appalling duration, like "A year or more." A year or more! This isn't a cookie, this is a Powerbar that you can stash in the dash of your car and discover six months later.

But don't let my rousing discouragement keep you from making them! There is after all something very satisfying about being able to say to someone "Would you like a cookie? They taste like rocks and they were ridiculously hard to make."

Let's say you make the above dough. Roll it out about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick between two sheets of wax paper and stash it in the 'fridge until it is quite cold (now don't ask me how they did this in period because I haven't come up with a good answer yet). When chilled, you take your sheet of dough (take off the wax paper), and brush it all over with flour. I know that sounds ridiculous, shouldn't you brush the mold? No. Brush the dough. Get out your pastry brush, all you need is the lightest dusting. Now grasp your mold and press it, firmly and evenly, into the dough. With the side with the design on it down, of course.

Allow me another digression. During the process of molding, I realized why this is a German tradition: you must be very fat to do it correctly. Only a large, sturdy woman with broad shoulders and a round face prone to both laughter and scolding can ever hope to exert enough force on a tiny block of wood (or in my case, resin) to compell it to leave an imprint on dough that is cold enough to hold said imprint. Holy cow, I might have even worked up a sweat while molded. I definitely grunted. If you are light, I have no advice for you. Maybe jump up and down on the mold a few times. For the heavy among us, I found I had better success with using a rolling pin or even my mortar to press down on the mold rather than just my hands.

Lay out your cookies on a baking rack and let them dry overnight. I well let you know what happens when I bake them.

Yes

Why are grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup so dang good? Pacific Foods tomato soup is awesome, and I hate tomatoes. Also pickles!

Look out world!

I got a book on cooking with FIRE for Christmas!!!! The world is no longer safe!

Hunter with Prey, 2

Hunter with Prey, 2
Originally uploaded by laurelfactorial.

I FOUND A BOLETE!

Cucumber Salad

I shop at Trader Joe's perhaps too much -- ingredients that I got there are indicated by (TJ).

3 small "Persian style" cucumbers (TJ), sliced thinly
Dressing:
1.5-2 T Fage Greek yogurt, nonfat (TJ)
Juice and zest of one key lime
Tiniest drizzle (maybe .5 tsp?) olive oil (TJ)
Fresh mint, chopped as finely as you can (TJ)
Fresh dill, ditto
Sea salt and black pepper (freshly ground, of course!) to taste (TJ)
Optional: dash of red sumac, which can be found at Middle Eastern grocers

Mix all dressing ingredients. Add cucumbers. Refrigerate. Eat.

Substitutions and additions: lemon juice/zest instead of lime would work, keeping in mind that you only need a little bit (probably half a small lemon); parsley would be a nice addition; obviously you could use fatty yogurt, but 1. the Fage 0% is very thick and delicious and you won't notice the difference except for the fact that 2. light is good for a salad like this, it tastes better.

Delicious latke-ish things

(Not being Jewish, I don't feel entitled to call any food I produce "latkes" so these are latke-ish things.)

4 very small (baby) potatoes
1 oz cheddar cheese
1 egg
Just the green part of less than one green onion, snipped with scissors
freshly ground black pepper (to taste)

Lots of oil

Shred the potatoes and cheese together, add the egg and beat well. Add the green onion and pepper, beat. In a decent pan, heat about 3/4" of oil. Drop in SMALL amounts of the "batter" and fry, flipping once, until golden brown. Remove, drain on paper towels.

Top with: home made mustard (no I will not give you the recipe! this one is my secret, but it's easy to develop your own recipe, basically you just need mustard seed and vinegar, then everything else -- other spices, salt, honey, etc. -- is up to you), or sour cream, or plain yogurt, or just salt.

Root Beer

I loves me some root beer. I might go so far as to say I have an unhealthy obsession with root beer. I am pretty sure I have allowed my love of root beer to limit my life ("I'm not going there, they only have shitty root beer") and it has probably interfered with my relationships ("we are not friends if you drink that kind of root beer"). With some small measure of shame, I will admit that I even like one of the commercially available brands of root beer, and I actually became distressed in the aftermath of last summer's hurricane season that said brand might become less available due to the damage done to the city which it claims to be made in (I later realized that they must have manufacturing plants all over the country, right?), to the point that I had to be talked down from buying some cases of it at the store. I rank most root beers based on days of the week. Yes, I am a little bit crazy. I am not for root beer like some people are for beer, I am for root beer like some people are for sherry cask aged single malt scotch.

To that end, I present my list of...

GOOD ROOT BEERS (and not so good root beers)

Friday root beer (the best easily available brand): Journey Root Beer. Actually I love all Journey bottled beverages.

Saturday root beer (really quite good, if mellow): Virgil's. I had a keg of this for my last birthday. At one point I just opened the spout of the keg over my mouth. AUGAHGAUGAHGAUGAHGAUGAHGAUG

Thursday root beer (acceptable if somewhat uninteresting): Thomas Kemper. A little too mild for my tastes, I like my root beer to be a little bit aggressive and mysterious.

Sunday root beer (it will do in a pinch, but it's much too boring for me): Henry Weinhard's.

Tuesday root beer (I hate Tuesdays. If you serve me this, I will no longer be your friend.): IBC. I'm serious. This stuff is CRAP.

The single acceptable corporate brand: Barq's. I drink it when there is no other root beer, or if I am getting lunch at a fast food restaurant.

And finally, THE ROOT BEER THAT IS SO GOOD IT TRANSCENDS MY RANKING SYSTEM: the root beer I had at the McMenamin's Cornelius Pass Roadhouse, which as I understand it they brew themselves. Now, normally I hate McMenamin's, with their crappy service and their overpriced food and their soggy french fries, but THIS IS THE ROOT BEER THAT THE GODS DRINK WHEN THEY ARE NOT TOO BUSY DRINKING AMBROSIA. If they serve root beer in heaven, this is what it is like.

If they do not serve root beer in heaven, then I'm not going.

Macaroni and cheese, all grown up

Today for lunch, I made macaroni and cheese, using fusilli and cabot white cheddar. I added frozen petite peas, sliced smoked (precooked) bratwurst, and, on a whim, a large dollop of dijon mustard.

Quite good!

Burritos!

-Shredded beef. Basically I made a pot roast in the crock pot yesterday with chili powder, salt, garlic, onion, and lime juice, and reheated it.
-Black beans cooked with onions, cilantro, and chili powder
-Canned sweet corn (from Trader Joe's) cooked with caramelized onions and, drum roll please, chili powder
-Guacamole (avacado, lime juice, garlic, onion, cilantro, salt)
-Cilantro, green onions, cheese, sour cream

I set everything out buffet style, and I even steamed the tortillas first for that added touch of awesome.

Tasty Pasta Salad

1 kilo (uncooked) pasta -- any shape will do, I like fusilli

1 can artichoke hearts, drained and roughly chopped
1 can black olives, drained (actually I usually use Kalamata)
~4oz sundried tomatoes in olive oil, chopped
~8oz feta, crumbled
1/4 cup fesh basil, chopped (optional)
1/4 to 1/2 cup RAW pine nuts
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
Generous amount of capers ("to taste")
Salt, pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
Freshly grated parmesian, romano, or other hard, salty cheese, to taste

Cook the pasta in salted water. Drain and rinse if desired. While the pasta is cooking, prep all the other ingredients. In a large bowl, combine everything, tossing well. Add the salt last -- you will need much less than you might expect (in fact, you might not even want to add salt at all).

I hate to sound like Rachel Ray here, but "the secret ingredient is nutmeg." I've been eating variants of this for years, and it wasn't until today that I added nutmeg. It made a huge difference! I like this salad because I can make it in the winter (most of the ingredients are canned) without sacrificing quality, and because I can make a big vat of it and eat it over the course of a couple of weeks.