Sculpin

I made that raspberry butter today. The trick was to balance getting a good strong raspberry flavor against the risk of over-softening the butter.

I didn’t take any measurements, but I started with perhaps a 3:2 ratio of raspberries to butter by volume. The raspberries went into a small saucepan and were crushed and cooked gently with a little cranberry honey until they’d broken down and released their juices. Then I pushed the mixture through a fine sieve.

This is the point at which recipes tell you to mix the raspberry juice with the butter. I tried mixing a sample of butter and juice together, and I was underwhelmed. It wasn’t the raspberry knock-out I’d been hoping for. So I returned the rest of the juice to the pan, added a little more honey for body, and reduced it to a syrup, which I let cool somewhat. Then I slowly added it to the butter, whipping the mixture with a fork. I decided to push the edge of how much raspberry the butter could absorb while still maintaining a recognizably buttery texture; every once in a while I’d chill the butter to make sure that I hadn’t made butter-raspberry soup. In the end, I used all the syrup.

The result: a mixture that’s the deep color and taste of raspberry sorbet with a buttery undertone, and a texture like that of the lightest possible whipped butter. Should be really good on crepes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go lick the bowl.

ETA: With nearly-backyard raspberries and PSBA honey, I thought I’d created something spectacularly local. Not so much. I’m chagrined to learn that Smith Brothers moved its dairy operations from Kent to the other side of the mountains; now the cows are near Royal City, SE of Wenatchee. Apparently, dealing with environmental regulations here in salmon country was too onerous for them. Furthermore, it’s described as a “giant dairy operation” that has had trouble with the locals for all the usual CAFO reasons. (More.) It’s good to know that they’ve agreed to do better, but I do not know if they’re actually doing it. I may be able to do better myself, one way or another.

Last week’s One Local Summer dinner from me was a bit underwhelming, seeing as how it consisted of a pound of apricots greedily scarfed down. So I was determined to do it up this week. Thus, homemade pasta.

Funny thing — I’d been meaning to make butter for over a year now, and a day after I get around to getting the cream, there in my RSS reader is a post in The Wednesday Chef referencing a article in the New York Times Magazine about making butter. I briefly tried shaking the cream the way we used to in Girl Scouts, for extra bonus hippie points, but that didn’t last long. Forget that; there’s a reason churns were invented. The stand mixer is great for making butter. I did try washing some of the butter; unfortunately, I was out of ice, and washing the butter in cool water was definitely not working out as well as washing it in icewater would have been. Besides, I made so little of it that I’m sure we’ll use it up quickly. I’ll make raspberry butter with some of the stuff we didn’t use tonight. If I’m lucky, Josh will make buttermilk pancakes to put that butter on.

The butter’s excellent. I minced some basil from Rents Due Ranch, then crushed it in a mortar with a little salt before mixing it 1:1 by volume with butter, adding a very small amount of local spring garlic, and letting it sit for several hours.

Then Josh and I made whole-egg fettucine. Two eggs from Skagit River Ranch, five ounces of locally-milled white flour (I think the grain’s from Montana), and five ounces of home-milled emmer flour with grain from Bluebird Grain Farms, plus enough water to make it all hang together. That emmer dough is stiff, yowza. Rolled, cut, cooked, and dressed with a little basil butter, and I am a happy woman. Turns out that making pasta with two people is an order of magnitude easier than making it by yourself, not to mention more fun.

For dessert, homegrown raspberries from our P-Patch.

Photos, alas, did not turn out so well. We had a late dinner, having blown off cooking to go throw a frisbee down at the park for a while instead. If I want good photos, I ought to make dinner earlier, so it can be lovingly photographed in the golden summer sun. On the other hand, I can’t see passing up some good frisbee-throwing just to take a stupid photograph.

Note for Grouchy Chris: yes, we used not one but two semi-obscure crank-powered kitchen appliances tonight. Apparently Chris thinks that we have a houseful of cranks here. I can’t imagine why.

So, it’s the last day of the first week of One Local Summer, and I went down to the market to see what I might want to use in the way of an all-local meal. The first apricots of the season are in. I thought I’d make pasta and pesto tonight and eat those apricots tomorrow. Well, no. “I’ll just have this one,” I said to myself. And ate about a pound. And that was that. We’ll have pasta tomorrow. The week really starts on Monday, right?

Josh and I stopped at “Rolling Fire”, the wood-fired pizza stand. While we were waiting for our pizza, we wound up chatting with Mitchell(?), who’s involved with Haulin’ Colin somehow. He’d seen the big cob oven we helped finish at the UW. “It’s got all kinds of sculpture on it,” he enthused. I confessed that I’d made the feet. His eyes lit up. “I remember the feet! You did the feet?!” He brought his hands up and hooked his fingers like the oven’s front claws. I was so proud! And so relieved — I’m glad the feet hadn’t cracked and fallen off. And then proud some more!

It’s an odd thing — I’ll go for months contentedly drinking my one cup of morning coffee. Then suddenly it’s as if a switch gets flipped in my brain, and I want more, mooooore. I start having two cups of coffee in the morning on occasion, and then every day, and I’m still wanting more and enjoying it less. I shamble blindly to the kitchen every morning like some kind of coffee-seeking zombie. Four cups of coffee starts to sound about right. That’s my cue to knock off the caffeine for a few weeks.

Today’s my first day without caffeine. I was going to start next week, but I’ve got a cold this week, and I figured I might as well get all the headaches over with at once. Doing it this way has some benefits: for instance, I do not think, “If only I had a cup of coffee, I’d feel fine,” because no, I’d feel lousy anyway.

Some kind anonymous soul left a big box of kale on our doorstep yesterday. Thank you, mysterious kale-giver!

Update: the Mystery Gardener was Paul Beard. Thanks, Paul!

This is especially for Cissa, who bakes a fair bit of bread if I recall correctly, but maybe some others of you have some ideas as well.

I’ve been going through an awful lot of the hominy bread from Tall Grass Bakery, and I’d like to learn to make something like it at home. It’s basically a not-too-chewy round of white bread with a large admixture of coarsely ground yellow corn. (Which is not quite what I think of as hominy, but there it is.)

Before I just launch ahead and try dumping coarse cornmeal into a standard artisanal white bread recipe, has anyone out there tried something like this? Any tips? I’m particularly wondering if the sharp edges of the cornmeal are going to slice through the gluten strands, and if extra gluten would help.

Josh and I biked down to the University District farmers market on Saturday, thinking we’d buy half a dozen bunches of greens and make a big batch of Gumbo Zeb. There had been lots of gorgeous bunches of greens the week before; I had happy thoughts of coming back with a trailer full of local collard greens. I wasn’t thinking straight.

The farmers market was missing maybe a third of its farmers because of the floods, and many more had been affected. There were no dahlia farmers at all. Willie Green’s is said to be entirely under water. So is Growing Things. Full Circle has root crops but its lettuce is a total loss. “They’re free. Just come back,” said the Full Circle guy when we asked for the bunch of rootless beet greens that he’d just offered to the previous customer. I couldn’t let him just give us beet greens and then walk away, so we bought carrots, too. He sounded worried and exhausted.

I came home thinking that this was the year for me to learn to enjoy borscht, if only so I can support local farmers through a hard winter. (Well, that, and it sounds tasty.)

I wound up buying some greens I’d never heard of before. “Perpetual spinach” is a sort of spinach-like chard. It tastes to me like a mature spinach crossed with a little sorrel. The market was fairly picked over when we got there, but there were still lots of beautiful bunches of this mysterious stuff that nobody was buying, presumably because they’d never heard of it either. I also got some kale from Whistling Train which is notable mostly in being so delicious that I’d eat it raw. Seriously fantastic. And it’s kale, as in “I am just about desperate enough in mid-winter to eat kale.”

The gumbo is killer. It’s worth buying this book just for the gumbo recipe. I make it over three days: day 1, make the roux; day 2, prep the vegetables; day 3, assemble the soup base and make the first batch of soup.

The car is gone at last. I’m a little sad to see it go. It was a good car for a while there. (And then, not so much, and eventually not at all.) Even if it were easy to make it run again, it wouldn’t make sense to pay to keep a car that’s driven less than ten miles a week most weeks. And reading The Weather Makers is doing wonders for any lingering regret I might have.

Today was the first time I’d ridden a bike in the rain. We really need to get some fenders on that thing. And I’ve got to get myself some rain pants. On the bright side, everybody seems to enjoy watching a couple of soggy, grinning people on a tandem. A bunch of folks waved to us as we rode by. Riding the tandem’s always fun, even in the rain.

Being married to an amiable driver made me go soft, I have to say. I used to go out for walks in the pouring rain and not think much of it. But after being ferried around in a car for a few years, I got so reluctant to go out in the rain, you’d think I’d melt. I’ve wondered if I’d regret going car-free once the fall rains set in. So far, the answer is no. I’m rediscovering that it’s not that bad, even with imperfect rain gear. Sometimes it’s even kind of nice. (Though we’ll see how nice I think it is when the rain is less Pineapple Express than Hyperborean Drench.)

At the market today, we picked up enough sausage to hold us for a couple of weeks, some fabulous Microbakery cheese-and-onion rolls, and about twenty bucks’ worth of potatoes. And yes, that’s a lot of potatoes.

There’s a new potato you can get from Olsen Farms, called “Purple Majesty”, that’s stunningly purple. (If you go to the U District market or some of the others in Seattle, you’ll probably remember the Olsen Farms guy; he’s really nice and has a big bushy beard.) It’s a lot more vivid than the old All-Blue, which was no slouch itself. It’s likely the anthocyanidins are good for us, but it’s the sheer gorgeousness that really draws us in. And it makes great mashed potatoes. Josh is the mashed potato czar at his family-of-origin’s Thanksgiving (weighty responsibility!) and this year he’s going for the dramatic flourish.

Next week I’ll try to remember to bring a really large plastic bag and a couple of straps so we can buy a ton of greens. It’s just about time for us to have another round of making and freezing gumbo base. We’ve been using a recipe out of Crescent Dragonwagon’s Soup and Bread cookbook. It takes a couple of days to do it at a relaxed pace, and we wind up filling every big pot we own with chopped vegetables. But in the end, we get around a gallon and a half of pure gumbo-base bliss, which makes about three gallons of gumbo not counting the rice. This is the recipe that taught me that collard greens are food. I’d happily live on this stuff all winter.

I made rice pudding last week with some leftover rice, and it was good. It’s basically an excuse to eat half-and-half and sugar:

Rice pudding for two

1 cup cooked white rice
dash of salt
1 cup half-and-half
3/4 cup milk
scant 1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla

Bring rice, salt, sugar, and dairy products to a boil in a heavy-bottomed pot, then reduce to low and cook, stirring frequently, for about half an hour or until the mixture is very thick. Add vanilla and cook a few minutes more, then serve.

I’ve read that rice pudding is generally eaten cold or at room temperature. But I learned to eat rice pudding in Thai restaurants, so I like it nice and hot.

Holy… Okay, see, when I wrote that Eggplant Oop recipe? I guess I’d been eating a lot of hot peppers right around then. I just made a batch for dinner, and let me tell you, five cayenne peppers is a lot. A lot. Yeeeoowwww.

I tried making it in the solar oven this time, and it worked pretty well, though not brilliantly; I still had to start and finish it on the stove. This batch seems eggplantier than I’m used to. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m used to eggplant being more of a garlic delivery device than much of a presence of its own.

To cut the heat: Microbakery bread (locally made from locally-milled flour by Larry, my favorite farmers market guy), killer Rama Farms organic nectarines, Appel Farms quark. I had no plans to buy nectarines today, with my plum tree as loaded as it is, but when I overheard one of the market volunteers calling her friends to tell them that Rama was there with nectarines, I knew they were something special.