Eat the damn salad

This is my favorite salad. You should eat it.

I kind of feel like stopping there because it has been an exhausting day full of the void of no one knowing what they should do (other than stay home) and so wandering from space to space, starting one thing, putting it down, picking something else up and then feeling restless after 15 minutes, turning the tv on, turning it off. You get the idea.

The dog has been on four long walks today. The dog is tired.

It's not that I didn't have the time to make something interesting and elaborate for dinner tonight. I didn't have the brain.

Back to the salad: it's crunchy, salty, sweet, has a little protein from the walnuts and feta and is made with stuff that is available year-round in Michigan so no reliance on perfect produce. It makes me happy every time I eat it.

Guess what I'm having for dinner tonight?

Kate's favorite salad
in per person quantities

about 1/2 a small apple, Pink Lady is my favorite
1 scallion, sliced
1 stalk of celery, sliced
about 1/4 C of walnuts
about 2 T crumbled feta
some lettuce (you can use whatever you've got. I've made it with everything under the sun including arugula and iceberg lettuce. Because of the sweetness of the apples, punchy greens are pretty nice here.)
optional--some shredded cabbage, green or red, doesn't matter
optional--a few sliced radishes
optional--some chopped parsley

Pile it all on a plate and drizzle on your favorite vinaigrette, or really whatever you like on your salads.

Interlude, with carbohydrates

I interrupt my freezer-and-pantry-and-bookshelf clearing routine for a little interlude featuring everyone's favorite food group, carbohydrates.

Last night I made the oven-fried chicken I mentioned yesterday and greens, cheese grits for me and for the gluten eaters, I made these biscuits:

They are Kenji Lopez-Alt's Buttermilk Biscuits from Serious Eats and are super easy and hard to screw up. The only changes I made to his recipe was to use soured milk (1/2 C milk and 2 t vinegar mixed together and left to sit for 10 minutes) for the buttermilk and I cut them in squares rather than using a biscuit cutter to make circles because then there's no waste and no need to re-roll scraps of dough. The recipe made nine sizable square biscuits and since there are only three left, I think that means that the three humans I made them for approved of the recipe.

This morning I decided to continue the carb celebration and made my new favorite thing, buckwheat pancakes.

These babies (recipe below) are gluten-free using half buckwheat flour and half Namaste gluten free flour blend. I chucked in a few shriveled blueberries I found in the fridge that no one is likely to eat fresh then topped them with a little Irish butter and a drizzle of maple syrup.

Which leads me to a little discussion about GF flours; while most grocery stores are out of wheat flour, there are likely still GF flours on the shelf. Yesterday I went to Arbor Farms to get groceries for me and for my parents. I hadn't been to a store in a week and I was curious and nervous about what I'd find out there. The place was not ravaged and didn't look like a scene from the apocalypse.* They were, however, out of wheat flour. But there were plenty of gluten-free flours on the shelf and since I have time on my hands to experiment and bake right now, I stocked up on some. If you want to bake and don't have any wheat flour and can't buy any until the supply chain balances out again, give some of these a try. (Avoid King Arthur's gluten free flour mix, though. That stuff is gritty!)

Buckwheat Pancakes

1 and 1/4 C milk
1 T vinegar
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
1/2 C buckwheat flour
1/2 C other flour: if you aren't GF, then use all purpose. I used Namaste GF perfect flour blend.
2 t sugar
1/4 t salt
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
canola oil for the pan

Start by souring your milk: stir the vinegar into the milk and set aside for 10 minutes to get it to sour (if you have buttermilk in the house, use that instead of the milk and vinegar).
In a medium bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients.
Combine the soured milk, egg and vanilla and use a whisk or fork to get the egg distributed well. Dump the wet stuff into the dry stuff and mix until there aren't any more dry bits. Then walk away for 10 minutes (that'll give the acid from the sour milk and the leavening ingredients time to react and thicken your batter. If you make the pancakes right after combining the wet and dry ingredients they'll be much thinner. Ask me how I know...)
Heat up your pan, add a little canola oil and then drop 1/4 C sized blobs in and cook as usual (look for bubbles to form on the surface, then flip.)
Serve with butter and whatever you like on your pancakes: maple syrup that has been warmed up with some frozen blueberries is lovely, but I also like these with just a slice of sharp cheddar cheese on top.

I got 8 hearty pancakes out of this recipe. If you don't have an audience to eat them all at once, then refrigerate the leftovers and they can be reheated in a toaster oven or microwave in the coming days. Waking up to pre-made pancakes is a really nice way to start the day.


*A big plug for shopping at Arbor Farms (probably also holds true for other small markets, but I haven't visited any): the cashier changed gloves between each order, the place was pretty empty so no standing in line with tons of other people and they had a pretty decent supply of foods that I hear are running low elsewhere. I saw sliced bread from Avalon bakery, plenty of olive oil on the shelves and it looked like the De Cecco brand dried pasta had just been restocked because the shelves were full. There were a few things that you could tell had been impacted: the canned soup section was decimated and there wasn't the normal selection in the chicken section (I usually make the oven-fried chicken with all thighs but they were out of those so we did it with a cut up whole chicken and it still worked great.) There was plenty of good stuff in stock if you are able to be flexible. Best of all I didn't feel like a massive ball of stress from the experience of shopping there.

Stashbusting

In this time of forced confinement, I'm trying to use what I have and that leads to multi-obsession/genre STASHBUSTING. I'm covering yarn, food and books in this post so if one of my obsessions doesn't interest you, scroll on down to the one that does.

Yarn
I started Ankestrick's Simple Something sweater because it looked like a great stashbuster. Then I realized I don't actually have a huge stash of yarn because I work in a yarn store so have pretty amazing access to whatever yarn I want whenever I want it (living the dream, people!) In my defense, I am using two skeins of legit stashed yarn and one of them was the inspiration for the project: a cream and pink and beige skein of sock yarn that my lovely employer, Spun, commissioned from a dyer based on our pets.

 Here's a photo of the inspiration: Molly, the pink-nosed pitbull, 65 lb lap-dog and major snuggle bug

My Molly skein has been sitting around, waiting for me to do something with it. In my many years of knitting, I've made about five pairs of socks and while I get the appeal--portable, finite, warm feet--I never caught the bug. I really like knitting sweaters (and yes, I now give away sweaters. I don't need any more sweaters. But I still want to knit them.)  The construction of this sweater is very simple: doubled sock yarn makes for a heavy worsted weight sweater with top down/raglan construction. The fun is in deciding which colors to use and when to change one or both of the strands; someone on Ravelry called it "painting with yarn" and that seems an apt description. There are some bold, wild examples of this sweater on Ravelry that I admire, but I decided to stick with a quiet color palette, mostly just riffing off the colors of the original Molly skein and another gray stashed sock yarn (label long gone; I think I bought it in Germany where sock yarn is sold in grocery stores) while bringing in a little purple and light green. There are also lots of little scraps of left-over fingering weight yarn from past projects that I'm using as accents and it's very satisfying to see a stripe of green and remember a shawl I made last year.

I ended up purchasing four skeins of yarn to add to the Molly and the mystery gray stash skein: I bought them at Spun (which is offering free local delivery and free shipping while the store is closed). Two of them are from local dyer Fiberstory and they are her Fave sock yarn in the colors Crocus (cream with purple speckles) and Cake (a very subtle cream/pink/yellow). And there are two grayish based yarns, one is Fig & Posy Fiber Co.'s Simple Sock in Abalone and the other is Neighborhood Fiber Co.'s Studio Sock in Earnest Shaw.


Food
The freezer clean-out continues and is a little terrifying. I found a packet of totally freezer burned sausages and now the dog has a couple of days of really good Kong fillings. She's pretty happy about this process.

I also found some pre-formed turkey burgers that Brian bought during one semester of particularly hectic family schedules during which none of our dinner times lined up and individuals were regularly scrounging for something that resembled real-food. He thought these fit the bill. The fact that they were ignored by everyone and shoved to the back corner of the freezer means that he was wrong.

Last night I took out four of the individual patties (lightly freezer burned at the edges), defrosted them, crumbled them up and made Curried Ground Turkey with Potatoes. I make real Indian food pretty often and I warn you, this dish is not that. But it is kinda nice and comforting on a cold rainy day. I made brown rice and raita to go with it. Brian and I ate it happily and the other two human residents at this fine establishment tolerated it: one picked out the peas and the tomatoes, the other picked out the potatoes. They are weird and a pain-in-the-ass but I love them.

I also found a frozen pack of Trader Joe's puff pastry that was bought for some appetizer idea that never got made (I think it was supposed to be rolled up with brie and cranberries and then the event I was going to bring it to was rescheduled and I never made it.) So I tried making palmiers with it to give the gluten-eaters an afternoon treat and it was a total disaster. I've never used TJ's puff pastry before but wow, that stuff sucks. I've made my own puff pastry (a labor intensive project, but not a bad one if you have time and want to try your hand at laminated dough) and this stuff does not even closely approximate it: puff pastry that doesn't puff is just tough, greasy dough. The younger child ate two of the resulting palmiers (because grease and sugar count as major food groups for this age bracket) and then I threw the rest away. Disappointing, but at least I'm not wasting freezer space on an inferior product.

I started rummaging around in the pantry and I found a whole container of grits hiding behind the sugar containers which were probably purchased after some trip down south and then promptly forgotten. So I made myself cheese grits topped with a good splash of hot sauce:

Ugly, but tasty! And gluten free!

I'll make these again as a side-dish to go along with oven-fried chicken (here's a great recipe) and greens.

Books
I'm really trying to read The Mirror and the Light slowly but oh god it's so good and hard not to gobble it down and I'm going to be really sad when it ends. So I'm queuing up Ocean Voung's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Christmas gift!) for when I finish spending time with the Tudors (they are such a weaselly lot but oh how I love them). I tend to feel panicky if I don't have at least one book lined up to look forward to and no-one needs a panicky Kate right now, or really, let's be honest, ever. 

Since I have time, I also decided to make a little room on my bookshelves for new stuff so in the coming days I will post pictures of books I own that I don't plan to re-read and which will be looking for a new home. I will attempt to get my kids to engage in a similar project which would liberate space on their shelves and provide a broader range of genres/topics/ages. If you are local and want one of them, I can drop one (or more!) off at your house. I love our local bookstores Literati, Bookbound and Nicola's and will try to support them to the best of my budget's ability during this period but I know that isn't an option for everyone so if one of my books would make you happy, please ask for it (while the library is closed another resource is the free ebooks and audiobooks that can be checked out from Overdrive with your library card.) And now I'm actually looking forward to what I would normally describe as a chore: it'll be like visiting with old friends who I haven't seen in a long time. Since I can't sit down with real friends at the moment, my book friends will serve as a nice substitute. 

Waking up! Welcome back!

I'm waking up this long-dormant blog because in this time of COVID-19 intentional social isolating I find (despite my intense introversion) that I still crave conversation. So let's wake up together and keep each other sane! For today, I'd love to hear about:

1. what you are reading
2. what you are cooking

I'll start:
1. It could not have arrived at a better time: Hilary Mantel's final book in the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. (The link will take you to one of my local bookstores; support your local folks if you can particularly when their storefronts are closed.) It is 757 pages of intricate Tudor historical fiction requiring me to regularly refresh my memory of who exactly had claims to the throne and looking up family trees from the War of the Roses onward to see how they are leveraging their claims. I am happy as a pig in shit reading this. 

For levity (because I can't spend every moment of my day with murderous Tudors without starting to consider keeping a knife in my doublet/jacket pocket), I'm listening to another Terry Pratchett Discworld audiobook read by the amazing Stephen Briggs. Thud! is the one I'm currently listening to with The Truth waiting in the wings for when I finish. (The link takes you to the digital library download where you can request it. I assume it is probably also available if you have an audible subscription. Unfortunately, with the library closed getting it on CD isn't an option right now, but normally they do have a decent supply of Pratchett books). It is truly a sanity saver to still have more Discworld books to read--there are 47!--even after years of enjoying them.

2. On the cooking front, I'm doing some freezer and pantry clearing-out which, let's face it, really needed to be done. Yesterday I pulled a pound of freezer-burned ground pork out and made some great rice noodles w/pork, tofu, peanuts and cilantro (no one could tell in that format that the meat was less than ideal), served with celery and cucumber salad (chop them up and toss them together with a spoonful of chili crisp, a little tamari, rice vinegar and a pinch of sugar). Tonight, we're having roasted pork loin (because apparently I stash pork in my freezer? I don't even really like pork...) and roasted cauliflower with this coconut tumeric relish and a salad. I haven't tried the relish before but it sounds promising and the picky eaters in my house can skip it and just eat beige food.

And I've been baking. I gave up gluten about 6 weeks ago (and I feel so much better) so I'm experimenting with gluten-free recipes and have come across some really good ones (there is a NYTimes almond-flour chocolate chip cookie recipe that is amazing but sadly is also behind a paywall...) And I'm trying to teach my helpless-in-the-kitchen children to bake their favorites with all the regular wheat flour we still have on hand. So far, my strategy for dealing with grumpy teenagers has been to a) throw a brownie or cookie at them and then b) make them go for a walk with me. It probably won't work for the length of our shelter-in-place behavior, but it's working for now so I'm not going to knock it.

I'd love to hear what you are up to!

Ugly Lumps of Tasty Happiness

Just a warning before you go any further,
I am feeling VERY SHOUTY TODAY.

Almost every afternoon between 2 and 4 pm I need some strong tea to keep me going and push the anxiety and despair that have become such a vibrant part of living in 2018 back into the little lock box in my brain where they live (the little buggers then jimmy the lock and we have a grand old time at approximately 2:30 EVERY FUCKING MORNING.)

Here's the tea I currently drink which I buy on Amazon because they don't sell it in the US and most US tea is as weak as dirty dishwater:

I know it is possible to just have a cup or two of tea and not eat anything. But I'm usually also feeling a bit of blood sugar dip about then and quite frankly just want some goddamn baked thing to have with it. But, as mentioned in my last post, all those things I used to make like heavenly lemon scones and supernatural brownies now hit my aging metabolism like a brick and I spike then I crash and OH BOY IS LIFE WITH KATE EVER FUN THEN.

So I started trying to put together a scone recipe that I can eat without metabolic whiplash. I came up with something that works for me and I think it is pretty tasty: it is totally whole grain with whole wheat pastry flour and buckwheat flour. It uses coconut sugar which has a lower glycemic index than regular sugar. And it has walnuts in it to give it some protein and metabolism stabilization. To keep these from tasting like baked cardboard I add the zest of a whole orange, about a 1/4 of a freshly grated nutmeg and some vanilla extract; those three ingredients are basically food perfume. The dry stuff has a decent amount of butter cut into it and then buttermilk is added to make it doughy.

The first time I made these, I tried to pat them into a circle and then cut triangular scone-shaped wedges.

They looked scone-like, but were still too crumbly to cut in half and it was a royal pain in the ass. The dough is wet. It stuck to my hands and spatula and the parchment paper and I probably lost at least a half a scone's worth of dough which made me grumpy.

Then it occurred to me that the recipe is a lot more like a drop biscuit (flour, butter, buttermilk) than a scone (flour, butter, heavy cream or mix of milk and egg) so the next time I saved myself some grief and just used a spoon to blop it on the baking sheet. BONUS: I got 8 reasonably sized scones out of it rather than 6 in the wedge formation AND my hands weren't covered in gunk. 

After baking they looked like this:

THIS ISN'T A SCONE BEAUTY CONTEST, PEOPLE.
THESE ARE UGLY LUMPS OF TASTY HAPPINESS.
THIS IS A WAY TO HAVE SOMETHING COMFORTING WITH YOUR TEA WITHOUT DOING A NUMBER ON YOUR INCREASINGLY PISSY METABOLISM.
(goddamnit)

It was a rough day when I baked the last batch so I made a pot of tea and ate two of them:

First one, with a thick layer of lemon curd spread on top. (I am aware that lemon curd has a shit-ton of refined sugar and I am undoing the stabilizing benefits of said scone. Bite me.)

Second one, a layer of Irish butter and crumbles of excellent sharp English cheddar pressed into the butter.  (The book in the background is The Taste of Empire by Lizzie Collingham which is the perfect book to read while drinking tea.)

They also freeze pretty well. If you take one (or two) out a few hours before you intend to eat it, the texture should be ok. If you have a toaster oven and can pop it in for about 5 minutes at 300 degrees then it'll be almost as good as when they first came out of the oven. 

Ugly Lumps of Tasty Happiness AKA Buckwheat Walnut Drop Scones

1 1/3 C whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 C buckwheat flour

1/3 C coconut sugar

1/2 t baking soda

2 t baking powder

1/2 t salt

1/4 of a freshly ground nutmeg (probably about 1/2 t if you are using the pre-ground stuff)

fine zest of one orange

6 T cold butter cut into cubes

1/3 C walnuts 

3/4 C buttermilk

1 t vanilla

Heat your oven to 400 degrees F. Put parchment paper or a silpat liner on a baking sheet.

In a food processor combine flours, sugar, baking soda and powder, salt, nutmeg and orange zest. Pulse a few times to mix it up. Scatter butter cubes over dry stuff and pulse a few times to pea-sized pieces. If you are using whole walnuts chuck them in and pulse a few times to chop them (do not grind them into dust). If your walnuts are already chopped or you prefer to do it by hand, then just mix them in with the dry stuff in the next step.

Dump everything from the food processor in a mixing bowl. In a measuring cup, mix together buttermilk and vanilla. Pour it over the dry stuff and use a silicon spatula to mix it in gently. You just want the dough to come together and eliminate dry spots. Get out a spoon and blop 8 scone-sized blops on the baking sheet. Bake for 18 minutes until lightly browned. 

Let cool slightly then serve with butter, jam, cheese or whatever floats your boat.

Aging and Whinging

Hey look it's been over a year since I wrote anything here.
In that time I:
got mad
got mad again
got mad again
(you get the trend)

2017 was a year of rage and action and more rage and action and 2018 looks like it's going to be more of it; meanwhile the two charming poppets who used to live here have been replaced by teenagers with massive doses of snark (Internal monologue: "Who on earth did they learn that from?" Look in mirror. "Oh yeah...")

I also got old. My freaking body no longer responds to what I put in it with the same ease as when I was a bright young thing of 40 so as I look at the recipes posed on the side bar of this blog I think nope, really tasty but nope, nope, that one's OK, nope, nope. I'm turning 49 in June. It is humbling.

In particular, I've found that me+refined carbs is really not a great combo. Refined carbs are now a treat, not a regular thing so no more weekly homemade pizza nights or regular batches of those fucking amazing lemon scones because at the end of the night I feel like shit and continue feeling like shit for a few days: lethargy, joint pain, fatigue, sluggish thoughts. You know, fun stuff!

Luckily moderation, whole grains and a lot more protein tempers the effect. But you know all this stuff, you've read all the damn studies about what refined carbs do to your entire system and how we all should be eating massive quantities of vegetables (I'm happy to, always have, but I also like to eat other stuff). I have not been transformed into a paragon of virtue. I still eat mac and cheese made with regular pasta and chocolate chip cookies, especially the really good ones made with browned butter. The thing is, I can't do it all the time and I have to be prepared for the blowback.

The more important question which I know you are dying to hear is:

What do you cook now that tastes good and doesn't make you feel like shit afterwards?

So let's start with the smoothie. Most smoothies are evil in a glass because they are composed of fruit and fruit juice which makes my blood sugar spike and then crash and leave me very, very cranky. But smoothies are convenient, especially when you are so wiped out that chewing seems like too much effort and maybe you will just go lie down and rage in a horizontal position until someone notices and feeds you. (Tried that. They just walked by my prone form.) So it was time to come up with a smoothie that wasn't evil.

I get hangry more often now than I used to. No, strike that. I've always been someone who gets hangry. After all, I own this shirt:

Maybe now I'm getting better at preventing the hunger/anger outbursts? (I ask my kids. They give me the gimlet eye. Guess not.)

But hey, no one notices when you prevent bad behavior, especially when you aren't a toddler. My kids have no idea how often they would be exposed to my outbursts if I wasn't drinking this regularly:

It tastes better when served in a Guinness pint glass.

I call it: 

Hangry Prevention in a Glass

It has a shit ton of protein, fiber and hydration (as someone with low blood pressure and a tendency towards dehydration, anything that ups my liquid intake is also a plus)

Here is what goes into the blender:

• about 1/3 C of frozen organic blueberries
• about 1/3 C of toasted, unsalted cashew nuts
• a spoonful of salted almond butter
• a lot of glugs of unsweetened vanilla almond milk
• and sometimes a little piece of frozen banana (about 2" long) if I have any on hand

WHIRRR that baby up, drink it down, feel the stability descending upon you. Be warned, it will make your teeth, tongue and lips turn blue so maybe don't drink it on the run unless you want to creep out anyone who looks at you. One of the liberating things about being older is that I now really don't give a shit what people think about how I look. Coke bottle glasses for my myopia? CHECK! A desire to wear floppy comfy clothes all the time? CHECK! Super short hair because caring for anything over an inch requires too much effort? CHECK! So adding blue lips to my daily presentation to the world is just fine by me. I did have someone ask about my circulation once though which means that despite my efforts, I have not become totally invisible. (Which leads me to reconsider that old super-power question: which would you prefer as a super power, to be able to fly or to be invisible? I always went for the former because I assumed that people who chose invisibility were probably creeps who wanted to sneak around and spy on people in their private moments. Now I think they are probably just wise super introverts who want the world to leave them the fuck alone. If that is your rationale for choosing invisibility over flying then I think you are awesome.)

Catching up and looking ahead

Here's a long and long-delayed update on my 4 Obsessions. Yes, I am still obsessed, and yes, there still are (primarily) four.

Cooking

First off, here is the recipe for curried pumpkin red lentil soup that I promised a bunch of people a while ago and never managed to post. It is easy, fast and damn good.

Curried Pumpkin Red Lentil Soup

1 large or 2 medium onions

2 T olive oil

1 T prepared, refrigerated ginger garlic paste like this stuff which I can get at my local grocery store for about $4 (or 2 minced garlic cloves and about 2 teaspoons of grated fresh ginger)

1 Tbsp curry powder

salt

freshly ground black pepper

15-oz can pumpkin

1 can vegetable or chicken broth or equivalent homemade

¾ cup red lentils

1 lime

plain yogurt

cilantro

1. Grate the onion in the food processor (if you don't have a food processor I probably wouldn't make this recipe because grating an onion on a box grater would make me weep for ages.)
2. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium high. Add ginger garlic paste, grated onion, 1 teaspoon salt and some black pepper. Cook, stirring, until aromatic and starting to stick to the bottom of the pan, about 3 minutes.
3. Add curry powder and cook, stirring for 30 seconds. Whisk in pumpkin until evenly incorporated, then whisk in the broth and 3 cups water. Season with 1 teaspoon salt and bring to a simmer.
4. Add lentils and continue to simmer until lentils are tender, about 15-20 minutes. Squeeze half the lime into the soup (cut the other half into wedges so people can squeeze in more if they want).
5. If necessary, thin the soup with a little water before serving.
6. Serve soup with a dollop of yogurt, top with some chopped cilantro and offer lime wedges for those of us who appreciate a dose of acidity.

In other food news, like many of my friends I was gifted an Instant Pot for Christmas. So far I like it and think it is a useful addition to my kitchen, particularly for making brown rice and cooking dried beans, two things I love but have had trouble planning far enough ahead to make them as often as I should.  I've made a few "real" recipes in the instant pot (chili, a chicken orzo pasta dish) that are decent but not earth shaking. I'm actively reading pressure cooking cookbooks and reading blogs about pressure cooking to expand my repertoire. Send me your recommendations if you have them!

Reading

One of my responses to the impending Trump presidency was to buy books, as though my purchases could neutralize the waves of ignorance and hatred rolling through our country. I realize this is illogical but hell, at least I'm helping to keep the local bookstores in business and I'm sending some of my money to authors I admire.

This is the haul from one week (other weeks I've been a little more in control and just purchased books one at a time). Some were intended as gifts, many were for me. Now that I can no longer stand to listen to the radio because Trump's voice makes me want to throw things (all my NPR is consumed via podcasts now) I have more time for reading. I've also started consuming more audio books (which I mostly get from the library) because they mean I can knit more easily while consuming prose.

From top to bottom: The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky, An Untamed State by Roxane Gay, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (screenplay) by J.K.Rowling, The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies, The Bitch is Back edited by Cathi Hanauer, Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts by Aglaia Kremenzi

I read a lot of good stuff last year, though I didn't quite make my 52 books in a year goal. Again, I blame the election because I started and did not finish many books in November and December. My mind was just too unsettled to focus so some were worthy books that I will pick back up later and some just felt wrong and trivial and got tossed aside. If you are looking for something good to read you might be interested in perusing last year's list and if you want to see what I think of the above books and everything else I plan to read this year then check in with this year's reading list (both lists contain brief comments).

• 2016's reading with brief comments
• 2017's reading with brief comments

Writing

I also haven't been able to write fiction since the election. The world has become so surreal that I find it hard to escape into an alternate universe--I feel like I won't find my way back to this one since it is increasingly unrecognizable. I know this sounds dramatic, but writing is hard and, with my particular brain chemistry, reality is also increasingly hard so it's enough to stop me from doing it. I've decided to set all my current work-in-progress fiction aside and not feel bad about it.

I won't stop writing, but I'm giving myself a different challenge: read (at least) a poem a day and write a poem a day.

Reading a poem a day is easy and I recommend poets.org's email service where they send one well-curated poem each day to your email inbox. New poems appear M-F and there are classic poems on the weekends. It's a great way to discover new poets, visit with poets you've read before but haven't been following lately and generally just pay attention to a whole genre that doesn't get much attention. I check a lot of poetry books out of the library and keep them next to my bed so I can dive in when the insomnia hits, most nights at about 3:30 am.

I'm finding writing a poem a day surprisingly enjoyable. This is about process, not product. Some of these are really lousy poems. That's ok. A few have at least a stanza or a line that I really like and maybe I'll find a way to use them elsewhere or I'll go back and work on the poem to bring the rest of it up to that quality. The process is waking up a part of my brain that I haven't accessed recently and I feel like I'm building new muscles as a writer.


Knitting

Two days a week I work at the local (wonderful) yarn shop Spun so my knitting has taken a big upturn in quantity and quality. All my knitting projects are on Ravelry so if you are curious about what my needles have been doing you can check it out here. Since the shop started carrying Brooklyn Tweed yarn, I now understand why people get addicted to the stuff. I've completed one project (Oxbow) and am currently working on two others (Koto and Stasis) and all three are in different yarn weights (Quarry, Shelter and Loft respectively). The yarn is wonderful to knit with, the colors are complex and the patterns are incredibly well-written and clear. My knitting queue is increasingly filling up with more Brooklyn Tweed projects (Bronwyn and Reverb are the two I'm trying to decide between for next-on-the-needles).

Lately, of course, when I haven't been working on samples for the shop, I've been making a whole lot of Pussyhats for the Women's March in DC:

That's the update on the obsessions for now; if you feel like chiming in and commenting and letting me know what you are up to, please do. Now that social media has changed the landscape I find myself commenting less on blogs and more on facebook and Instagram posts. I'm sure that's true for many of you too.

Weeks 18, 19 and 20

Closing out the CSA season with three weeks packed into one post. I got sick during week 18 so went minimal; then I got busy and didn't feel inspired to do much beyond basic "use it before it rots cooking."  I end the post with a few reflections on this Homer CSA season.

Week 18

Clockwise from Left: Celery, roma tomatoes, watermelon, green zebra tomatoes, tatsoi, green beans, beets and greens, and sweet potatoes

Week 19

From left: scallions,  butternut squash, parsley, cayenne peppers, green peppers, corn, red pepper, eggplant, napa cabbage

Week 20

From left: popcorn, kale, pie pumpkin, massive sweet potato, Anaheim chiles, green pepper, garlic, massive butternut squash, napa cabbage

What I did/plan to do with it all:

• I don't think I did anything very creative with Week 18 stuff: baked the sweet potatoes and had them topped with feta and scallions, made a quick tomato sauce for pasta with the roma tomatoes, steamed the green beans, boiled the beets and put them in a salad. Tasty but not exactly creative.
• From Week 19, I cut the corn off the cob and added it to pozole; the red pepper, eggplant and scallions got stir fried together; the green peppers and parsley were chopped into salads; a little of the napa cabbage got stir fried with tofu, ginger and garlic; the cayenne peppers are being dried and the butternut squash will store well.
• From Week 20: I still have a pie pumpkin from a previous week so I'm going to bake this one and that one together and see if I have enough for Thanksgiving pie (probably do it when I have the oven on for something else and then freeze the pulp for the end of November); the kale is going into kale, white bean and sausage soup; since I still have a lot of last week's napa and am faced with another massive head of it, I'll make some kimchi; the freakishly large sweet potato will get roasted and served with yogurt and cilantro chile sauce; the Anaheim chiles will get roasted and combined with some tomatillos and probably frozen to be combined later with pork or chicken for a chili verde; the butternut squash will (again) be stored until I'm in the mood to deal with its massiveness.

And now a reflection on the season:
I haven't decided whether I'm going to do the Homer CSA again next year. The produce was generally good and unsurprising; what I missed in the creative offerings from my years with Tantre (sweet potato leaves, shishito peppers, Japanese turnips, lots of herbs) I appreciated in the fact that I didn't have to work too hard to figure out what to do with the weekly share.  Most of the vegetables were good and fresh and tasted great with simple preparation if I was too busy to do anything fussy. There were a few disappointments: the corn was pretty tasteless (quickly learned that corn on the cob was not the way to go with it and cut it off and mixed it in with other stuff), the celery was bitter beyond use (chucked it in the compost), one cantaloupe was rotten and there was not much basil and there were almost no potatoes (only one week in the spring). I hadn't realized how much I was looking forward to fingerlings and the like until they never showed up. The communication from the farm was sporadic and not terribly helpful when compared to Tantre emails (for example, if a pest got the potato crop and that's why there weren't any, it would have been nice to know that.) The few recipes they suggested were not my kind of cooking (think hearty Amish) but that didn't really matter to me since I have pretty strong opinions and ideas about recipes to go on. The pick up at Arbor Farms on Saturday mornings was really convenient so thats a big plus. I am pretty tempted by the White Lotus Farm CSA for next year; I've been looking at their Instagram photos where they occasionally post photos their weekly CSA share and their farm is not that much further from my house than Arbor Farms, though the pick up time is later in the day and thus more of an imposition on my schedule. As an early riser, the 7:30-8:30 pick up for Homer CSA was ideal because I could get it and then get on with my day. But with White Lotus, I might be able to lure the girl child out to the farm with me (goats to visit! goat cheese, croissants and other treats to buy!) so it might help develop positive associations with produce for one of my kids. I'm going to keep contemplating my options for next year. If you have another CSA to recommend with easy west-side of Ann Arbor pick up options, please let me know!

Week 17

CSA Share

From Left: eggplant, green and red peppers, assorted tomatoes, concord grapes, carrots, hot peppers, squash, corn

Menu plans:

• eggplant, peppers and the green zebra tomatoes will go into this eggplant salad, to be served with quiche.
• a couple of the big red tomatoes will be grated to make a quick cooked fresh tomato sauce to serve with tortellini.
• the squash will join last week's delicata and get roasted with some rosemary and garlic and served with the corn and pork tenderloin.
• carrots are already gone since Fiona found them...
• I'm not a big fan of concord grapes so I'm looking for recipes that go beyond grape-jelly flavors; can't decide whether making something like this grape focaccia is worth the effort or not. If you have a great savory concord grape recipe, send it my way!
• I've accumulated quite a few jalapeños (and have a few more growing in my garden) so I think I'll combine them all to make a jar of pickled pepper rings.

Week 16

From Left: 4 ears of corn, 3 beets and greens, broccoli florets, 3 green zebra tomatoes, 2 big red tomatoes, eggplant, green beans, watermelon, delicata squash, red and green peppers, red onion, scallions

Menu plans:

• the corn I plan to cook and then refrigerate and add it to the following:
• kale, corn and white bean Caesar salad (I made this three times last week--it holds up great as a next-day lunch salad.)
• added to a plain old batch of chili that the kids will eat 
• added to this quinoa salad that also uses the green beans and some of the red onion
• one of the big tomatoes will be used for my new favorite (very messy sandwich): toasted Ed's bread multigrain bread slathered with mayo, then layered with big slices of super ripe tomato, sliced hard boiled egg, and pickled hot peppers.
• the broccoli florets, green and red peppers and scallions will go into a stir fry to be served with miso-butter tofu and some brown rice.
• I'll roast cubes of the eggplant in olive oil and toss them with the green zebra tomatoes, some garlic, and balsamic and use it to top pasta with some pine nuts and parmesan.
• The beets, the last big red tomato and the rest of the red onion will probably get turned into a big greek salad, maybe with some grilled chicken, or maybe plain.
• I'm going to set aside the delicata squash until I get some more roast-able vegetables (more squash, potatoes, cauliflower, onions, etc.) and then make a big pile of roasted vegetables topped with feta, parsley and lemon.
• If you happen to have some huge leaves of chard (one of Brian's coworkers dropped off a big bag of the stuff) then I recommend making these chard-wrapped, Greek yogurt pies. I made them last week and they are delicious, delicate and pretty darn easy.