Sculpin

I had a bit of an unnerving morning today. I’d stayed up very late doing the Emerald City Search treasure hunt, so at about 10:15 a.m. I was still dozing when my coworker Bob pounded at my door. He’d injured his back and couldn’t play his case today, the big demanding End of Life role. Could I do it? Please please? When does it start, you ask? Oh, in forty-five minutes.

Time seemed to slow while I decided. I hadn’t played the case since February, but I knew I could do it, and Bob looked like he was in a lot of pain. Knowing isn’t enough to keep the adrenaline at bay, though. ZAP! Run run run go go go! I slammed through the house at speed, talking myself through the case as I showered quickly, the old case notes flooding back to me, and then it was into the clothes and out the door and into Bob’s car and away we go. Poor extroverted Bob was already having a long day, and I hope I didn’t offend him: I forgot about social skills, I was that task-focused. The civilized veneer, such as it is, dropped; I was 100% doing the thing.

Half a mile from work, Bob gets a call: oh, hey, they canceled that session. *pant pant pant whew* It all worked out elegantly, but damn, that was a rush. I’d compressed half a day’s worth of preparation and performance anxiety into about half an hour, and it felt like my brain was on fire.

Nothing calms the nerves like making something. What I made was ratatouille. Almost all of this came out of our own garden — it’s been a great year for peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes. There are a hundred thousand ways to cook ratatouille; this just happens to be what I did today. A little rosemary and savory wouldn’t go amiss in here, maybe some cayenne, maybe even a tiny touch of lavender. Normally I’d add the tomatoes at the end, but these were so startlingly sweet that I wanted them to fall apart entirely so they could coat everything else. No need to peel the vegetables, by the way — nobody’s getting that fancy ’round here.

Ratatouille
(enough for two generous bowls)

olive oil
generous amount of garlic — I used about 2 T in roughly a 3mm mince
1/2 large onion, chopped
5 smallish, very ripe tomatoes, chopped (about 2-3 medium)
2 Japanese-type eggplant, chopped in roughly 1-cm dice
2 large zucchini, diced
1 green pepper, diced (I used a fabulous yellow Gypsy pepper)
1/2 cup of vegetable stock or less
a dash of vodka or other mildly flavored alcohol
a small handful each of basil and parsley, chopped or chiffonaded
three stems’ worth of thyme

Gently sweat your garlic and onions in a little olive oil until they’re translucent. Add tomatoes and cook with a dash of vodka, stirring often, until they’ve fallen apart and reduced into a paste. Add a little vegetable stock to deglaze, then your chopped vegetables. Stir it all up, adding vegetable stock as needed to lubricate the vegetables for easier stirring. Simmer until tender. (About fifteen minutes with this particular batch of vegetables, iirc.) Add the herbs and let them wilt and perfume the dish. Salt and pepper to taste.

This would be good served with crusty bread, or even as an omelet filling, but I just ate it as-is and was perfectly well satisfied.

For a good while now I’ve been hearing what sounds like a call from both my conscience and my common sense to adopt a vegan diet, or at least a very much more vegan-influenced one. Some of that is for health reasons, some for treehugger reasons, and some is pure sentimentalism about animal welfare.

Now, I think there are many ways to solve that particular set of moral equations besides flat-out veganism. What I’m finding, though, is that the solutions I’ve been trying haven’t been working particularly well for me. I’d hoped that I’d rejigger my diet to be much more vegetable-centric. Mostly I haven’t. Given, this has been a particularly trying several months, and I did not completely fail. Still, I could have done more. And maybe with a firmer guideline I would have.

Unfortunately, I hear an opposite call from the summer sausage in the fridge. Oh, delicious summer sausage, you have made my blood a cholesterol dump, but you are so tasty. How tragic and outrageous it seems when Josh is eating summer sausage and I am not. How can summer sausage be here, but not be here for me?

I’m not ready to give up meat and dairy 100%, and I’m definitely not giving up eggs. (I keep three chickens who are in their egg-laying prime. Come on now.) But I’m taken with the idea of becoming fractionally vegan. One way to fractionate would be to play vegan on, say, every Tuesday and Thursday. Another way — the way I’m going to try — is to take a strict vegetarian half-day. For the next two weeks, I’m going to experiment: before noon, I’m eating like a vegan. (I might move that up to one o’clock for more vegan lunch action. We’ll see.) If I’m still craving the cheese sandwich in the afternoon, so be it.

My outs: if I have breakfast with friends and there’s really nothing at all vegan on the menu, I can swap the half-day from morning to evening. And I’m not bothering about honey, sugar made with bone char, finings, etc.

Fortunately, I like rice milk in my coffee, especially in summer. Seriously, it’s good — very light. It turns out I also really like that Red Star nutritional yeast. And agave nectar makes an ideal lemonade. Not that I’m worrying about sugar and honey, but still, there’s another example of a Weird Vegan Food that’s actually pretty great.

Today was my first day. Breakfast was easy: two cups of coffee with rice milk, and then pigging out on blueberries and apple chips. Hey, I didn’t say I was going to be eating only meals I didn’t have any regrets about…

Any day in which I get to use the term “mangle-wurzel” in conversation is a pretty good day in my book. Even better, it made sense.

Why was I talking about mangle-wurzels? It’s unholy hot out there for early June, which means it’s about time for solar beet salad. It’s a sign of summer around here. I roast the beets for several hours in the solar oven at about 300F, then slip their skins off, chop or slice them, and chill them. Sometimes I dress them with a little vinegar the way Delores taught me, or I pair them with greens, but sometimes it’s just me, a fork, and a jar of cold beets, and that’s fine too. It’s all kind of amazing considering how many times I was threatened into eating my beets as a kid, but those were canned beets that’d generally been left in an open can for a few days. Slow-roasted beets are a whole ‘nother story.

A lot of people like baby beets, but I actually prefer that edge of bitterness that the more mature beets can have. Knowing this, Josh brought home the biggest beets he could find. They’re almost alarming in their oversizedness. If you want a five-pound beet, this is your time to hit up Whole Foods.

I hate to rag on one of my favorite institutions, but this was not one of the more successful Tilth Harvest Fairs I’ve gone to. We went up there hoping to get a case of the world’s best pickles from China Bend and some cranberry honey from PSBA. Mostly, though, we were going there to clean out the China Bend stall — they make these great salsas, good enchilada sauce, some killer dips… it’s all good. We brought the trailer so we could really stock up.

But China Bend wasn’t there (boo!) and the PSBA booth appeared much reduced. No cranberry honey for me. Shoot. Poor Josh looked a little shocked; he’d been looking forward to those pickles for weeks, and (so he tells me) he had plans for that salsa.

Maybe it’s been a rough year for China Bend, what with the fuel costs and the bad weather. Therefore we should mail-order extra pickles.

It wasn’t a total loss. We came home with a bag of keeper onions and some decent-looking plant starts. I picked up some kind of loom in a free pile on the way back. Most satisfyingly, we made it up the hill to Wallingford without feeling like we were seriously overdoing it, which was a big change from the last time we dragged ourselves up there.

The tandem gets a lot of attention with a trailer on the back. We’re practically a parade. One woman even went sprawling on the pavement because she was looking at our bike instead of at where she was going.

You know what works well together? Strawberries and rosewater. I’m having some homegrown strawberries with Port Madison Farm yogurt, lightly scented with rosewater and sweetened with a dash of turbinado sugar. It’s killer. I’ll have to try this with blackberries or raspberries.

Strawberry season is almost here! Last year’s strawberry-rhubarb jam was fantastic; I thought I’d can some plain strawberry jam this year.

If any of you would like to come over and learn to can, you’re more than welcome; let me know and I’ll drop you a line when it’s getting to be canning time.

Chicken content lives over at our new household blog, House of Cranks. This evening, Josh videotaped the chicks playing “capture the flag” with a piece of paper towel. They’ve been a delight.

I think I’ve finally got a fix for the minor problem I’ve been having with my homemade cinnamon rolls. There’s so much cinnamon in the filling that sometimes its consistency seems to me to be slightly on the powdery side. Well, between batches 1 and 2 yesterday, I ran out of ground cinnamon and had to grind my own. The second batch was noticeably better than the first, and I think it’s mostly because the home-ground cinnamon particles were a bit larger. I should try to replicate these results very soon.

And so, a question about freezing rolls. Do you find that it’s best to freeze them after baking them fully, after baking them partly, or before baking them at all?

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.