Week 3

This is the third week of school for Ian and I still feel like I'm in the middle of a whirlwind. For anyone else who needs a little Monday morning levity, I send you to this informative explication of The History and Geopolitical Importance of Pie.

Many thanks to Brian Pinkelman for bringing this overlooked piece of scholarship to my attention.

Pear pieces

I'm having some success and some failure when processing the current bounty of pears. I made pear sorbet,
though I would call it more of a granita than a sorbet. It has some Poire William brandy in it (maybe a little too much brandy if you wanted to serve it to small people, though Fiona lapped up the stuff) and whether it is the alcohol or the relatively low sugar content (only 1/3 C) or maybe just my not-so-schwoopy ice cream maker, it never really hardened up. But the slushy stuff was delicious.

Then I made some pear muffins that weren't so great.
They looked kind of pretty and used two whole cups of pear pieces, but the batter was too cakey for my liking (I like a sturdier muffin) and had a weird after taste--like the bitterness of the baking powder was the final flavor on your tongue. Ewwwww. The pear pieces were the best part of the muffins and I found myself picking them out and leaving the cakey bits.

I love the suggestions folks have been sending in but unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to do any of the whole (or even halved) poached pears which require long stretches of intact fruit. Compared to commercial pears, these lovely little honey bombs are 1) small and 2) likely to have at least one wee worm residing inside.

See the difference?

I like the idea of turning the rest of my lumpy supply into chutney, as one person suggested in the comments section of my previous pear post. I love a grilled sharp cheddar and chutney sandwich, preferably on Zingerman's Farm Bread.

A timely post

This week I made the Calabacitas that Halla brought to our most recent Gluttony Fest and I must report that it is a fabulous way to use up a whole LOT of summer squash in a very pleasant, easy dish.

It drives me batty when (this time of year) magazines or newspapers publish articles on how to diminish the overload of zucchini and summer squash and then include recipes that call for, say, 1/2 of a grated zucchini. People, we got squash coming out our ears this time of year! We need recipes that deal with quantity (quality too, of course). This one fits the bill deliciously.Patience is the secret to this squash tasting so good. Don't cook the onions or the squash over high heat--keep the heat on the low to medium side and let the vegetables become meltingly tender. There is no butter in this dish (ok, there is a sizeable quantity of cheese) but the squash tastes buttery when cooked slowly. I'm sure zucchini would taste just as good, but I'd miss the sunny glow of the summer squash since zucchini can get a bit muddy colored when cooked.

I took Halla's advice and made the effort to roast a couple of poblano chiles which were really great, just a mild background heat. The rest of the dish is so absurdly easy that roasting the chiles didn't even seem like much of an effort, despite the little bits of singed skin that are all over the stove now.

We ate this as a side dish tonight (with Pork and Hominy Stew) but it could make a nice light, vegetarian supper when accompanied by a salad and bread or quesadillas.

Calabacitas (Skillet Squash)

5 cubed small summer squash
1 diced large onion
2 roasted peeled diced poblano chiles or about 1 small can diced green chile
1 tablespoon neutral oil
3/4 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Saute onion in oil over medium heat until soft--do not brown. Add squash and keep the heat medium low, stirring once in a while until the squash is tender (not tender crisp). Add chiles; simmer briefly. Sprinkle on cheese and stir until melted.

Pear Greed

My greed overcame me on Sunday when I went out to Ami and John's house. I brought over a raspberry buckle and came home with a cubic foot of pears. Lest you think I am exaggerating I show the proof:
These were all windfalls from Ami and John's trees--and there are plenty more pears up there that have not let gravity get the best of them (yet). For a free-fruit-freak like me, this is a wonderful way to start a week.

So now I am accumulating pear recipes to manage the bounty--so far I have a pear sorbet recipe and three different pear tarts to attempt (I'll post recipes or links if any of them turns out decent). I'm also planning on a pear/walnut/blue cheese salad. Suggestions for other favorite pear recipes I should try would be gratefully accepted at this time.

Excellent news for the caffeinated among us

If you are a coffee-loving Ann Arborite, there's good news to be had! Amazing Beans, the local coffee roaster who delivered your coffee to your doorstep the next day, has re-opened for business under the new name Mighty Good Coffee Roasting Company.

The former owner/roaster Johann Lee sold the business to two of his customers and today I received the following letter that I thought I'd share:

Dear Amazing Beans Customer,

I am writing to you for two reasons. First, I'd like to thank you for supporting Amazing Beans when it was in operation. I started Amazing Beans because I thought that Ann Arbor deserved and could support a local business that provided freshly roasted coffee using the best beans money could buy. I was, and remain, passionate about coffee, and I am grateful to you for your past support. I closed Amazing Beans because I could not make it work while working full time in another demanding professional job. I was simply unwilling to compromise on the quality of my product, and so I closed up the roaster. I am now headed to a new job out of state.

The second reason I write is to give you some good news. Fortunately for all of us, two of my former customers have bought the operation and will shortly resume roasting. Ann Arbor will again have access to the highest quality freshly roasted coffee delivered to your door. I have been working closely with the new owners. We have been roasting a lot of coffee together and I am convinced that they share my passion for delivering the best possible coffee. They will be buying their beans from the same sources I used. They will be using the same roaster and equipment I used. They will even be using the same roast profiles I used so you can again buy just what I was selling. While I'’m sure that there will be some changes, one thing won't change, a commitment to providing the best coffee you can buy anywhere.

I decided I was too fond of the name Amazing Beans to sell that too. The new business will be run under a name the new owners chose: Mighty Good Coffee. Their web site is simply MightyGoodCoffee.com. I hope you'’ll support Mighty Good Coffee. I plan to be drinking it myself, and I'’ll be working with the new owners over the next several months as Mighty Good Coffee starts showing up at your doorstep.

Best wishes,
Johann Lee

As soon as I'm finished with the current bag of Peet's I'll be placing my order!

Where I been

Two weeks ago, my husband announced "Honey, I pulled a cottage out of my ass!" After recoiling in horror that such a structure was to be found up his colon, I realized that he was telling me that we were going on a last-minute vacation.

I spent the last week at a cottage called Snug Haven up at Georgian Bay, just north of Parry Sound.

It was just gorgeous; see, here is my kid looking poetic instead of frenetic:
We canoed or kayaked almost every day:
The last time I was there was when my now-six-year-old son was one. Brian and I took him on his first canoe camping trip out to Franklin Island and we visited the place again, this time for a picnic and a little skinny dipping.
It is a most excellent thing to be the one with the camera when skinny dipping.

The landscape is so beautiful it is hard to take in--there is a lot of mica in the pinkish granite rocks and this means that everything sparkles. You stick your hand into the shallow water and stir up a little sand and it looks like someone just dumped in a container of glitter. And thanks to the glaciers, there are the coolest chains of islands to explore--I found this image on Flickr that gives you a sense of all the little bays and inlets there are to poke around in a canoe. And much of the area is Crown Land so you can pull your boat out of the water and explore the islands and let your kids run around like little mountain goats without fear of trespassing.

The cottage itself was pretty nice--incredibly clean and spacious enough for me to enjoy a week with husband, kids and my mother-in-law (yes, we brought Brian's ma with us and didn't abuse the built-in-babysitter feature too much). However--you knew there had to be a "however" in there somewhere, right?--the kitchen supplies were woefully inadequate. I adjusted to the electric stove quickly enough and it wasn't an evil one like our old "inferno". But I can't understand how anyone is expected to make a sandwich, much less a meal, with one crappy 3 inch serrated knife.

Note to self: things to bring to supplement otherwise-perfectly-satisfactory-rental-cottage:

• your own chef, paring and bread knife
• a decent sized cutting board
• your cast iron skillet
• a pot wide and deep enough to cook 5 ears of corn on the cob (for one meal I had three tiny pots of water boiling each of which fit 3 halves of a cob of corn)
  
• a salad spinner

I did remember to bring my little red Melita coffee cone and filters so I didn't have a replay of my disastrous encounter with an unknown coffee maker from last October.

So I spent last week cooking a lot of food on the grill (to get around the absence of reasonable sized pots), canoeing, kayaking, reading three terrific books--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Mary and O'Neil, and Small Island (reviews to come shortly)
and mostly managing to stop obsessing about the start of a new school year and whether Ian's new teacher will "get" him or not.

Room to think

Open the door (and please note the pretty glass door knob you are turning), come on in. Welcome to my thinking room.
Yes, folks, after 5 years of weekend projects my office is finally habitable! I no longer have to tap away at my keyboard in a dark unheated corner of the house (though the duct work isn't actually finished in this room either...sigh). Now I have this lovely airy space to call my own:
To the right of my desk is a whole wall of book shelves with the gems from my old collection now accessible and not packed away in my parents' basement, and with the rest (lots of good books, mind you, just ones I don't plan to read again or need to reference with urgency) donated to the Friends of the AADL bookshop.

Is it just a fluke that when unloading and sorting all the stored books I found three copies of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own? Not at all. (Yes, two are now available for sale at the library!)

I was once castigated by one of my grad student officemates for liking such a white, bourgeois treatise, but guess what? I'm white and kinda bourgeois (with a little rebellious bent, I like to think). This officemate mocked Virginia for complaining about the difference between the meals that women at university were served compared to the relative splendor of the men's accommodations and, while I take her point that there are graver injustices in the world than bad food and drafty rooms, I think the essay makes its point and can be extended to people whose live in much more dire conditions. Later she lays it down: "Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?"

I'm not claiming that I'm going to create great works of art in this room, but I do have a new sense of mental freedom to now have a space of my own (and I have plenty of wine!) In a completely unintentional move, this room has also become the most feminine in the house--to start off with there is my pretty doorknob (which Brian picked out), and then there is this curvaceous light fixture on the ceiling:
You can't tell when it is off (or really see it in this picture), but the shades have a gentle pink color which I was surprised by when I first turned it on, but have grown to like.

And then there is the unintentional femininity of the curtains. I had a dickens of a time finding any sort of fabric that would look ok with the (I now realize slightly eccentric) blue paint I chose and serve as half curtains for my five (count em' 5!) windows that look out on the street. I think the blue is the color of the perfect summer sky, but clearly most textiles were not designed to coordinate with the summer sky...I tried hanging rice paper, I bought some raw silk that ended up looking like a Chanel summer suit draped over a curtain rod, and finally I found amidst the chaos of the Joann fabric sales shelf this grass green linen fabric, with what I thought was rather subtle embroidery on it:
Only when I got home and unfurled the stuff I found out that the whole time (including when they measured and cut the fabric for me) I had been looking at the wrong side. When flipped over, it turned out that the embroidery was done in silver and there were a whole lot of sequins too!
Surprise! A little more femininity than I had intended (Brian is not sold on it--though he admits it isn't his office--and complains that the place looks like a disco in the early morning when the sun coming in the East windows glances off all the sequins and makes the room all sparkly.) I would have been way too chicken intentionally to buy sequined fabric, but it is a happy mistake and gives the room a touch of whimsy and reminds me to lighten up and not take myself too seriously.

I have left-over fabric which, for a very brief moment, I thought about turning into a fairy dress for Fiona, but then it dawned on me that sewing the super basic straight seams for the curtains had pretty much maxed out my sewing skills. If anyone with more sewing skill than I have would like 1.5 yards of sparkly green linen, just let me know. Otherwise the cat will claim it as nap spot #58.

Old School

I have to thank Ami for recomending the Tobias Wolff novel Old School.

The book passes through so many moods. In the first chapters, the narrator lays out the atmosphere of his boarding school in the early 1960's and shows us how the boys with literary aspiration mimic their favorite writers. There is a fantastic conscious parody of Hemingway: "Today is the day of meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore." It made me laugh so hard I risked inhaling my coffee.

Then the book shifts into a different section, much more about self-discovery than about the institution, and how a competition reveals what kind of men the boys will likely grow up to be. There is a culminating event (which I'm not going to give away) which in any other author's novel would be The Climax, the do-all and end-all, the tragic moment. But while writing clean, clear prose, Wolff inserts a much more complex view of the world and doesn't stop the story here. Bad stuff happens, characters make stupid decisions, but life doesn't stop there, nor is a life necessarily ruined by a major mistake.

The last section of the book is more reflective, the adult narrator contemplating the institution of the boarding school from afar, how he eventually became a writer, and what he learns about and from his old Masters. It would be very easy to lapse into sentimentality in this section but Wolff touches on innocence, self-awareness and memory so lightly that it never gets bogged down.

I'm trying to think of another writer who manages to convey the balance between masculine desire for power or dominance with the craving for tenderness. I'm not sure what it is about these passages that touches me so much, but the last line of the book (which doesn't give any of the plot away, if you are worried about spoilers) is an example that makes me all choked up when I read and re-read it:

"...he felt no more than a boy again--but a very well-versed boy who couldn't help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him."

(Even such a heathen as I am, I managed to recognize the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32)--Thanks undergrad "Bible as Literature" class!)

Gluttony fest # 3000 or so....

Book group met on Tuesday evening and this time I remembered to wear shorts with a very loose waist band. An excellent piece of foresight since the evening quickly turned into our usual Gluttony Fest.

We read Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife which, I think we all agreed, was not one of her best; definitely not in the class of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. The story was very fragmented and while Erdrich often shows what tangled family lines are all about, this one felt both more tangled and less subtle than the others. I felt like I was being beaten over the head with family disfunction and intermarriage. It didn't help that I had a first edition copy which did not have a family tree included--clearly the editors received some feedback about this omission and its use-value for readers because the family tree appears in all the subsequent editions of the book.

But back to the food....

We were a bit loose with the food connections to the book with the great exception of Ami and Sarah's contribution (noted below).

I brought an aperitif and canapes consisting of Bellini's made with a puree of local red haven peaches and prosecco sparkling wine. The canapes were a terrific (and really easy) assemblage of baguette topped with smoked trout and then blopped with a sauce made of creme fraiche, mayo, lemon, chives and dill (recipe at the end of this post).
While sipping and nibbling, we watched Ami make frybread (which was mentioned numerous times in the book). Here you see Ami demonstrating the many uses of the spirit hole that is punched in the center of each piece of dough:
Some of the frybread (cooked in pure Lard! Yum!) were popped into a bag with cinnamon and sugar and shaken until coated. The others were sprinkled with salt. Both were damn good. In this photo you can see Halla's nicely manicured fingers making a grab for one.
For the main course, Marilyn shared the bounty of her glorious garden with us in a potato, corn, roasted chile chowder (gotta get that recipe). The corn was so sweet and still a little crisp and the chile gave it a nice kick.
And then there was the overladen plate to go with the chowder. From top and then proceeding clockwise around the plate you see: Halla's cheesy and meltingly tender summer squash dish, Meg's garlicy tequila shrimp, a varied summer fruit salad provided by Diane, some of Marilyn's roasted beets (if she didn't provide them, I probably would have snuck away from the table and been found in the garden eating them raw with dirt smears all over my face, so thanks Marilyn, for accomodating my beet fixation!), and a pasta salad she made with the beet greens, dried cherries and Parmesan, and a salad that Lea brought with toasted pine nuts and sliced pears. Whew!
It was incredibly tempting to go back and get seconds on some of these fantastic dishes, but already I was feeling rotund in the belly region and I knew we still had dessert to contend with, so I stayed put and had another glass of wine instead!

Sarah made a blitzkuchen--a cake which is prominent in the book--and I brought along a quart of raspberries that we picked at Makielski's the other day. Thankfully the cake wasn't over the top rich--Sarah's inspired addition of lemon zest brightened the cake and helped it to not sink beneath the medly of complex flavors that preceded it.
No, we didn't serve it with a candle on the plate; by desert time it was pretty dark and we were eating outside so votive lighting by Marilyn-the-pyromaniac was the way to go.

The next book around which the glutton-group will assemble is:
Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Smoked Trout Canapes with Lemon Chive Sauce
adapted from the NY Times dining section, August 9, 2006

2 medium smoked trout filets
1/4 C mayo
1/2 C creme fraiche (1/2 C heavy cream with 1/2 T buttermilk stirred in and allowed to sour overnight in a warmish place)
zest of two lemons
2 t lemon juice
1 T chopped chives, plus some extra for sprinkling over the top
2 T minced dill
1 baguette, sliced thin into rounds

• Peel skin off of trout and discard. Break up trout filets into pieces that will fit on top of the baguette slices.
• In a small bowl, combine mayo, creme fraiche, lemon zest, lemon juice, chives and dill. Mix well.
• Place a piece of trout on a slice of baguette and top with a blob of the sauce. Sprinkle with reserved chives.

Buckle for Breakfast

It is berry season in our area now with blueberries, blackberries and raspberries all available. Yesterday we went out to Makielski Berry Farm and picked two quarts of blackberries and two quarts of raspberries. The thorns on the blackberries were ferocious--my legs look like I've been playing with a whole litter of needle clawed kittens (the raspberries were much more kid-friendly picking). But I can handle a little pain for berries!

The whole time I was picking I kept chanting the rhymes from the picture book Jamberry which I have read to my kids so many times that I have it memorized. So my kids could keep track of where I was in the row by listening for "Clickberry clackberry pick me a blackberry; trainberry trackberry clickety clackberry..."

By the time we got home, I was a little tired and not quite up to dealing with the fragility of pie crust, so I turned to the recipe sheet that I picked up at the farm and settled upon Blackberry Buckle. The great thing about a Buckle is that it can pass as either dessert or as a fruit-loaded coffee cake the next morning! In the interest of testing both options, I consumed it both ways.

Buckle is fast to throw together--a basic cake batter, topped with berries (lots of berries),
then sprinkled with streusel and baked until it looks like this:

Mmmmm. Buckley goodness!

Blackberry Buckle
from Makielski Berry Farm

2.5 C fresh or frozen blackberries
1 C all purpose flour
1.5 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
1/2 C butter
1/2 C sugar
1 egg
1/3 C milk
1 t vanilla

topping:
1/4 C sugar
1/4 C flour
1/2 t cinnamon
2 T butter

• Preheat oven to 375.
• Stir together 1 C flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
• In a mixing bowl, beat together 1/2 C butter and 1/2 C sugar until fluffy. Add egg and beat until smooth.
• Combine milk and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and milk alternately to the beaten mixture, beating at low speed after each addition.
• Pour (or spread) batter into a greased 1 and 1/2 quart pan.
• Arrange berries evenly over the batter.
• Combine 1/4 C sugar, 1/4 C flour and cinnamon. Cut in 3 T butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over the berries.
• Bake for 35 minutes.