Sculpin

You know that anxiety dream where you’ve forgotten that you’ve signed up for a class and the final is tomorrow? Just about all of us have that dream, right? (Mine’s always a math class — there’s no bullshitting my way through that.) Last night I had a variation on that: I dreamed that I’d been in a long-distance relationship and had forgotten to break up. Whoops. Awkward.

Hey, Canyonwren, remember this sketch?

That was fifteen years ago. Yikes.

Today I roasted an onion in the woodstove, and it was delicious! I followed the instructions in The Magic of Fire. It’s easy: get a good bed of embers going from a mature fire with moderate flames, place the onion on the embers a few inches from the fire, and rotate every once in a while until it’s soft. (Or, hey, rotate much more often because it’s fun.) When it’s done, peel off the bits that are thoroughly burned (I left a little char) and dress it with olive oil and sage.

It’s interesting — it’s not quite like an oven-roasted onion. There’s something tangy about that char. It grows on you.

I also cooked much of a traditional-type Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, but y’know, I find that pretty boring. And I don’t even like turkey all that much. (I’d start a Thanksgiving Tamales tradition if I thought folks would go along with it without complaining.) That said, the plum-orange sauce I made for the ice cream did the trick pretty well. I’d write down the recipe, but it’s basically, “Take one jar of plum-orange conserve that you made from the Ball Blue Book recipe with the wild misprint of how much plummage you’d be using by weight, which you wound up storing in the freezer because who knows if that’s safe. Add apple cider to thin.”

Still coughing, still irritated in more ways than one. I ate a handful of peanuts today and realized too late that a peanut is basically a quasi-explosive Sharp Little Crumbs Delivery Device. So much for that. It’s still soup season for me.

I’ve been growing kohlrabi, which has been fun. They look very alien. But what on earth do you do with them? First, I think, you wait for them to go through a couple of good frosts; the kohlrabi I harvested today were much tastier than those I harvested a few weeks ago. And second, you turn them into soup. I made a sort of minestrone with kohlrabi today.

First I sauteed one medium-small yellow onion in butter and olive oil, then added four garlic cloves. Then I pureed a 28-ounce can of tomatoes and dumped that in with about a cup of good chicken stock and a little water. While that heated up, I diced half of a peeled softball-sized kohlrabi into 3/8″ cubes. That simmered gently for a while as I futzed around with seasonings: lots of fresh thyme, a little fresh rosemary, a finely minced dried morel, a small pinch of celery seed that I smashed up with mortar and pestle, and a good solid pinch from the “Italian seasonings” bottle. (Why do we even have an “Italian seasonings” bottle when we have all its ingredients in other bottles?) A splash of vodka brought out the tomato flavors, and a little balsamic vinegar balanced the sweetness of the kohlrabi. When the kohlrabi seemed to me to be done, I rummaged through the freezer and pantry, adding a handful of green beans, a couple handfuls of green peas, and a can of navy beans, rinsed. When everything was heated through, I served it up with some fresh hominy bread from the market.

Normally I would have started with a mirepoix. But note that there’s no carrot  in this — that would have been way too sweet for me.

The kohlrabi never really became soft, exactly, but it stopped being tough and crunchy — the phrase that came to mind was “tender-crisp”. It’s cabbagey, but it’s also sweet in a way that reminds me (weirdly enough) of fresh green peas. I like it a lot. Not bad for an evening when I’d been feeling too run-down and uninspired to cook. Not bad at all.

Last Saturday, Josh and I were running a little late. We needed to buy eggs, and those always sell out at the farmers market in a snap, so we were in too much of a hurry to stop for breakfast first. Which seemed like a fine excuse for stopping afterward by the Rolling Fire stand for some wonderful wood-fired pizza.

If you’ve been to the U District Farmers Market, you might still have missed it. It’s tucked away in a courtyard close to the old schoolhouse. Mike Dash, the owner, has a big wood-fired oven on a trailer that he pulls with a biodiesel-powered truck. The pizza he and his assistant make there is the kind I remember having in Italy: a thin, delicate crust with a hint of crackle, topped delicately with highly flavored ingredients. Plus there’s a hint of charred fruity sweetness to it — I can only guess that’s flavor from the apple wood he uses and from the bits of char on the pizza itself. It’s delicious and highly satisfying.

It’s also fascinating to watch him use that oven. Things cook amazingly quickly. A pizza might take three minutes. And, I have to admit, Mike interests me too — he seems so gentle and grounded. It makes me wonder how somebody comes to be that way. He reminds me of Vince from Pies and Pints a little bit. I’m coming to think that making good things with your own hands is good for the soul. His manner is so sweet that it coaxes my shyness-to-inquisitiveness ratio all the way over into full-force inquisitiveness, and by Saturday I was asking him all kinds of questions about the oven and the pizza-making process.

As it happened, he was teaching a woodfired oven class at the Experimental College the very next day. “Extreme Cuisine”, the class was called. So Josh and I signed up for the last two spaces and went down to his houseboat to make pizza of our own. (Josh took a few photos.) Consider: houseboat; woodfired oven. You know, those weigh about a ton. Getting it onto the boat must have been quite a trick; and once on, he said, the whole platform tipped about fourteen inches, and he had to get divers to put extra flotation on that side. It’s a beautiful little oven with a fold-down metal shelf in front and a cheerful salamander tile over the entrance. (I say “little” because it’s much smaller than that cob monster we helped build at the UW.) He says it takes about an hour for it to come up to full heat.

There were six of us students, and after a little prep work and some tasty pre-pizza snacks, we each made two pizzas. The dough he uses is very loose, and it takes a little coaxing to get it out of the box it’s been rising in. We tapped the bubbles out with the flats of our fingers and pulled it out to an eleven-inch mostly-round. (Josh still has his mad Pagliacci skills, but I definitely do not yet have the touch when it comes to pulling it out into a crust. Then again, Mike says that it took him forever to learn to make a round crust. He’d have his friends over and announce, “This is a map of Madagascar!” as he pulled the pizzas out of the oven.) Then we’d put it on a thin floured board, top it with a few things — slices of roasted potato and slivers of roasted pepper with garlic in olive oil was a good combination — and slide it into the oven.

In under a minute it’d start to speckle on the side closest to the fire, which was our cue to check the bottom and turn it. Turning it’s a bit of a trick. The first time I wound up just pulling the whole thing out, turning it, and putting it back in. Inelegant, but it works. The second time, I managed to turn it in a more classic style. You slide the small, long-handled metal peel just under the pizza, twist it so that the pizza catches on its edge, pull back slightly, and repeat. Sometimes the middle of the pizza doesn’t cook quite as fast as you’d like, especially if you’ve put a fair bit of stuff on; in that case, you get the peel well under the pizza and lift it up near the roof of the oven for a few seconds for a little extra top heat.

It was delicious. Nobody made a pizza that was anything less than very good, and some of them were great. I was surprised to find that I liked the dessert pizza a lot: halved red grapes, cut side down, sprinkled with sugar. It reminded me a little bit of a sopapilla minus the deep-frying. Mike says that one traditional dessert pizza involves a layer of plum jam, which sounds interesting. (And imagine roasting plums in some gentle residual heat after a day of cooking pizza… hm!)

I hear they’re firing up that monster cob oven on Thursdays, and now I feel prepared to come over and help. And Mike’s class has showed me that yes, I really do want one of my own. Those things are fun, and they’re so heavily insulated that they take less wood than you might think. Until then, though, I think I might try cooking a few things in our soapstone fireplace insert. Mike turned me onto a beautiful book, The Magic of Fire, which is all about cooking on the hearth and in the firebox. I don’t really have a hearth, but I think I’ll be able to adapt a lot of the book’s ideas.

This is what I’ve been having every day for lunch lately. Goes down easily on a sore throat and contains various things that are supposed to be good for a person. The key has been getting really tasty chicken stock — even if I ate CAFO meat products, that mass-market commercial crud isn’t worth mentioning. (In a pinch, I’d rather use Imagine’s “No-Chicken” broth and season the living daylights out of it.) Making my own can be tedious and it tends to take up a lot of freezer space, but I’ve found that I can get something almost as good in quarts from Vashon’s Sea Breeze Farm at the U District Farmers’ Market.

Really Too Easy To Mention Soup Noodles For One

Sweat several sliced garlic cloves in a generous splash of sesame oil. While the garlic cloves are softening, cut up a half-dozen shiitake mushrooms into slices between 1/8″ and 1/4″. Add chicken stock — as much as you’ll absolutely need to cook as many noodles as you’re planning on, but not much more. Add salt to taste and simmer for about fifteen minutes or until the shiitakes are rehydrated, perhaps adding a little thyme; meanwhile, chop up some Chinese cabbage or other moderately firm greens into 1/2″ strips. Bring the stock up to the boil and add a handful of somen noodles and your greens. Cook a couple of minutes, just until the somen noodles are done. Then dish it up and dress it with a little toasted sesame oil, hot oil, and cilantro.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I think it’d be good with a little star anise.

I’m not doing NaNoWriMo, but maybe for me this is LoMoCoMo: local more cooking month. I’ve been mostly living on industrial-food crap for weeks now. But yesterday I started getting it together again. For one thing, I made a batch of pan de muerto for the first time. It’s basically an orange brioche. Yummy stuff. Next time, I think I’ll try making it into rolls, and I’ll par-bake and freeze half the batch — or maybe invite a bunch of people over. This makes about twice as much as Josh and I can eat. Recipe follows.
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