Two cheeses

Taleggio cheese= big hit.

I also bought a Reblechon, which in spite of its interesting history and my penchant for rich cheeses, didn't appeal to me as much as the Teleggio. The Rechlechon was a little too assertive in its acidic or ashy flavor, not the subtle buttery notes I expected from its appearance.

2007 La Posta, ‘Estala Armando Vineyard’ Bonarda, Mendoza, Argentina

This had a little more character than your Malbecs to my palate, and it was a spectacular sipper with Humboldt Fog ripened goat cheese.

California Dreamin

It's that time of year when I wonder how on Earth I've managed to live in the Midwest all these years. To not see the sun for, like, 39 days straight would certainly crank up anyone's seasonal affective disorder. But the infernal succession of ice, sleet, snow, slush, melt, snow, ice, sleet is a certain counterindication for the little Vitamin D capsules I add to my battery of supplements this time of year. The groundhog used to provide some solace, but the last few years spring is delayed well past his groggy worst-case scenario.

Our attempts to eat within a tristate "local" radius yields little more than squash and beets this time of year, of which we have eaten plenty. Oh to be in the land of year round citrus and greens growing in your own backyard! So while the organic broccoli at Trader Joe's is Californian and looking wan, it's among the many other not-squash-or-beets that must round out my diet. Perhaps someday I'll do some canning and try to really live it old-school, but until then my only truly local and seasonal food options are venison and racoon scampering out of the woods and into the nearest 4 lane highway. That reminds me, let's hear it for dried beans!

An additional food challenge is the 21 month old who lives with us. This baby who up until recently so gloriously counted among her favorite foods tabouli, goat cheese, and salmon will, to take today for example, only eat crackers, bread, toast (apparently its own category of food), O cereal, and waffles (plain, don't even try to sneak a fruit in it or on top of it). She does get on kicks for a certain food and these foods are seldom local or in season, but like heck if I don't go to the ends of the earth to find organic seedless grapes this time of year if it's The Thing she's decided to permit past her lips. The most recent kick had been for raspberries but without warning the kick ended and I was left with two containers which I have been enjoying in the mornings with yogurt, my summertime breakfast cutting a little swath of comfort through this bleak season.

Other food friends that have helped to beat the blahs lately are--

-Humboldt Fog goat cheese paired with an earthy red, a chance to enjoy some new-to-me varietals out of South America, much more booming than my usual Loire preferences, but with this cheese they're perfect

-Homemade waffles smeared with melted chocolate

-J's tomato-tarragon soup

-This Amish cottage cheese from Iowa-- the best cottage cheese I've ever tasted! It was twice as good the week we had some very ripe, sweet pears.

-An-Mok stone ground wheat crackers. Since crackers are V's go-to food I've been exploring all kinds and this brand is really tasty.

-Lima bean-fennel soup

While we're in exile a few months longer from any foodie destination whatsoever, it remains homecooking every day, all the time. This, coupled with the gluten-minimal, dairy-now-somewhat-permissible, almost entirely vegetarian stipulations have brought my game up a notch, I must say. A few memorable meals include fried plantains with mojo and garlicy black beans with avocado tacos; polenta (the first time I've ever made it) with a ragout of zucchini, spinach, garlic and shallots, tomato-basil sauce and pecorino romano cheese; slow roasted salmon fillets on a bed of fresh tarragon.

It'll be June before our CSA share kicks in, and hopefully it will be slightly sooner than that that we will be returning to the city and to the land of restaurants I actually want to eat in and well-supplied, non-corporate grocery stores.

Until then, I'm taking my Vit D with a hearty helping of flax and keeping my picky eater enthusiastic about helping in the kitchen by letting her "chop vegetables" with her own cutting board and knife... a butter knife.

Date Syrup

What I rhapsodized over in a recent post I have found online. The gods be praised.

Check out this bit o' history:

"The date palm has flourished in Israel since the Neolithic period near the site of Jericho. It was grown for its leaves (lulav for Sukkot) and general thatching, wood, it was a symbol of immortality or fertility; it had sweet fruit fresh or could be dried, made into date honey or syrup, date liqueur, even the palm leaves could be woven for many items, fibers for ropes and such, woven baskets and brooms, sandals and fans. Apiculture or bee-hive raising was never a major industry of the Jews, and thus it had to be date honey.

Agam Hagalil’s Silan Date Honey is not actually a honey, rather a date syrup that can substituted in its place, this sweet elixir from Israel could put a lot of bees out of business! Use it as a flavorful sweetener in tea or in baking."

Irv and Shelly's Fresh Picks

Last Wednesday I received my first box of produce from Irv and Shelly's Fresh Picks. They deliver fresh, locally-grown organic produce right to your door. And what a bounty- even without the green onions and sweet potatoes they erroneously left out of my order. A gigantic, beautiful head of cauliflower, 2 fuji apples, a bunch of beets, a big head of tat soi greens, garlic chives, a pie pumpkin, a red cabbage and a gigantic portabello mushroom.

I love the cooking challenges presented by the randomness of the week's picks. Here's what's happened to the bounty so far:
I roasted the beets straightaway and had a yummy beet and goat cheese salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
I sauteed the beet greens in a little olive oil and water, but we haven't eaten them yet.
I made a few awesome salads out of the tat soi greens- which I'd never had before. Kind of hearty, peppery in flavor. Went nicely with avocado, beets, cherry tomatoes and goat cheese in a vinagrette. Still have a lot of these green guys to eat though.. Perhaps I'll try cooking with them..
Made the Moroccan Pumpkin and Lentils recipe with the pie pumpkin.
Snipped some of the garlic chives over poached cod, but still have a lot of them left...
Ate the apples.

That leaves the cauliflower (perhaps an Indian curry with it and some peas later in the week); the cabbage (a slaw? another soup? I don't know); and the giant mushroom (risotto!) left to deal with. Also a friend gave me 4 giant stalks of brussels sprouts from his garden, so I've got to roast those up today! He suggested braising and freezing the extras.
How I love the fall harvest!

*Update: Cauliflower became creamy curried cauliflower soup; Giant mushroom was sauteed with garlic, olive oil, basil, sliced zucchini and some cherry tomatoes for a pasta topping (but I ate half of it right out of the pan for lunch, sans pasta!); garlic chives went a little limp in the veggie drawer before they got all used up; red cabbage may become a Japanese sesame type of slaw...

Chateau Ste. Michelle

The 2005 vintage of Riesling from this winemaker was a bargain and drunk mostly on its own (and with Boca hot dogs!), but another bottle is definitely in order as I gear up to try some new Indian curry recipes this weekend. Dry, not too sweet, and well-balanced.

Also, a new wine shop is slated to open a block away from our place! That, I'm expecting, will further my education greatly.

Cupcakes!

Not made by me, but what i call research.
The source: Cupcakes

pictured, and subsequently eaten, are:

Triple Chocolate
Rich Dark Chocolate cake filled with Chocolate Ganache and frosted with Dark Chocolate buttercream

Violet
White cake with Violet White Chocolate buttercream topped with a handmade Sugar Flower

Champagne
White cake with Champagne buttercream sprinkled with Sugar Bubbles

Vin, two, three, four

Wines that are hitting the spot lately...
A to Z Pinot Gris 2005
Domaine des Gatilles Chiroubles 2004
Masciarelli Montepulciano d'Abruzzo 2003
Clean Slate 2005 Riesling

2 of 2 new favorite markets in a weekend

Hadn't made a trip to the Middle East grocery on Foster in quite some time, and this is the first time I went with a list that included gum aspic, rosewater, pomegranate molasses and sumac-- which enabled me to value this place all the more (had everything I was looking for, and inexpensively at that). The owner told me about how he used to get gum aspic straight from the seam of an old tree when he was a boy in Jerusalem, and before I left I was packed up with some additional supplies of fresh-baked 7 grain pita (excellent toasted), some sheep's milk cheese and homemade, mega-garlicky fool madamas.

New Food Source

At the recommendation of L, I checked out Sunflower Market today. More affordable than Whole Foods and an inspiring all-organic produce section. I also found organic kefir, fresh radishes that have broken my life-long dislike of radishes and a tasty red wine from Abruzzo. So I'm stocked up for a long, cold weekend of cooking from my new books: Arabesque & The Sweet Life.

Currently enjoying

Me: Doctor Kracker Klassic 3 Seed flatbread and Domain de Couron 2005 Cotes-du-Rhone.

As for Bean, I think he just ate a fennel seed. Is that a usual cat palate?

J's making something Indian with a chickpea.

Gobo fix

Finally made it back to Tensuke market this weekend for some Japan rations. I’m tired of paying an arm and a leg at Whole F***s for umeboshi, though I still will have to since Tensuke didn’t carry any that wasn’t full of red dye. But I did get a three and a half foot long Burdock root, a.k.a. gobo. Having tried a package of the pickled variety on my last visit, and then S telling me it’s what all the Okinawan centenarians swear by, I was on the lookout to pick up some more of it. Again, avoiding dyes and msg was tricky, and I ended up with the homely, unadulterated article from their produce section. So I’m to figure out how to pickle it myself. In the meantime I’ve been eating the bugger raw and adding it to my okayus after a little soaking. It looks from my internet survey that it is also frequently cut or grated with carrots to make a sort of stir-fried slaw. It seems like the subtle, nutty flavor, the nutritional profile, the culinary versatility and exotic/common weed factor would have gobo well-poised to be a future foodie affectation.

OK, I just spent too long pouring over a website that sells nothing but lunchboxes. For starters, I skipped past all the nylon sacks and mod bentos and went straight for the metal category. Warning sign number one. Scrolling through cartoon characters and logos old and new, I stopped for a moment of purely aesthetic appreciation for the red and brown “I’m a Pepper” and the beige, green and orange Orange Crush boxes, thinking of J’s story of the damage these pre-OSHA time bombs could wreck: see whirling dervish with slippery grip meets sister’s brow. As if all of this wasn’t already woefully retro, or “vintage” as J noticed his record collection handily classed in a recent browse through a used record store, the nostalgia alarms became impossible to ignore when I found myself nearly purchasing a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox exactly like the one I carried to Trinity Lutheran School on Old German Church Road in 1984. Understand, Strawberry was the talisman of my youth. Everything I wore and surrounded myself with, for a time, had to be red, the color of her berry charisma. My devotion to her hung on for years but ended before her move to Saturday morning cartoons. For me, she was a character only, a visual cue for that thing the elders refer to as Imagination. I spent hours everyday speculating on the doings of Raspberry Tart and Plum Pudding and Strawberry’s cat Custard in their parallel universe that carried on simultaneous to my daily experience. At school I would wonder, what are they doing right now? Other times my existential queries probed deeper: What do their bathrooms look like? What do they eat for breakfast? Two things are apparent to me now, with the distance of 24 years: I was never a plot-driven kind of gal (the conflict and other trappings of typical story patterning always bothered me, whether it was in books, movies or Saturday morning cartoons, it always seemed superficial), the first sign of the writer who would later find herself via Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf; and, most obviously, the foodcentrism of all these imaginings.

Much is made of early food memories— that anyone of discriminating taste as an adult surely had a sensually epic childhood of meals one might still prepare for oneself and the transport those meals offer to a place of comfort and simplicity. And this creates an interesting question I may return to, but for now I’m struck by the power of non-edible food memories like my Shortcake years. The fruity-scented mops of hair, the iconic berry as both architecture and décor. In the days before merchandising filled in every imaginative aspect of a childhood character’s universe, a berry was not only a berry but a girl, a house, an ethic of gentle kindness, a sound that possessed semantic-bending powers, i.e. “Have a berry good day.” Paralleling the years in which literacy is being formed, is it not possible that a slippery sequitur like this is a very healthy thing? That –and her antioxidant profile— has renewed my appreciation for this curly redhead in a way simple nostalgia could never explain. Hell, maybe I’ll get the lunchbox after all.

Sweet Teeth

I buzzed through the Christkindlmarket downtown tonight after work since the arctic wind had, for a time, abated and given us a toasty 20 degree evening. This was just a sussing out trip since a future date with J to go and drink mulled wine out of a ceramic boot is in the works for later in the week. I went past the food stalls preparing to be tempted, and perhaps on another day some sauerkraut and potato pancakes will grab me (but by the looks of it I'll still prefer my own). One vendor remarking on my huge bag declared it perfect for carrying lots of bratwurst. I felt silly telling him he had the wrong frau, because how silly is it for a vegetarian to be loitering around a bunch of schnitzel anyway? Well, besides the heated structure that was erected to house a German candy store full of cookies and chocolate pleasures, and a compelling waffle/crepe tent and more stollen than you could shake a stick at, nothing edible was catching my fancy on this evening. Well one thing did. I ended up talking to a fellow peddling organic pumpkin seeds and soy nuts. Eh, what's so special about some nuts, I thought. They're organic, OK. They're organic and from Austria, that's better. I waxed a little EU-envy his way for a moment over their common-sense ban of GMOs. Yes, of course-- he looked horrified at my very mention of it. I asked him how the standards for organic were defined in Austria, but instead a number of sample cups of nuts were being cordially extended to me. And once I got nibbling on the chocolate-covered section of the nut repetoire, I was hooked. Having just consumed a 55 gram bag of chocolate covered roasted soybean snack mix I can roundly pronounce them sehr lekker! I hope these little babes get some distribution in the US soon so my sugar yen can at least keep me flush in isoflavones. The market's up until Dec. 24. I'll be going back for more.

Something else that's preventing me from eating all of the holiday cookies people are bringing in to work-- and soon to follow, vendor gift baskets-- are Larabars. There's an umlaut in there somewhere too. So far Pecan Pie and Cashew Cookie were perfect 10s, Ginger Snap however was a bit grody.