Rainy Day Windows

 

I woke in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm, and I enjoyed celebrating this rainy birthday with lunch with a good friend and an afternoon nap.

On the Changes the New Year will Bring.

It's a new year and time for change.

As the dwindling number of posts here recently indicates, I've been bored by this blog.  It isn't that I don't still love food, cooking, writing, and photography.  I do.  It's that this blog no longer feels big enough.  I want to write and share about things beyond food.  I want balance in my life, and that means writing and thinking and photographing things that aren't edible.  It means using this space as a place to try out the ideas I'm working on in my literary writing.

2011 was a good year, but when I look back on what made it good or memorable, only a few of those things are food related:

2011 was the year:
Amanda and I started an online cooking show Spatula
I became a regular contributor to Connotation Press.
I grew 50 lbs of sunchokes in my garden
I butchered  my elderly backyard chickens

But, it was also the year:
I turned 30
got tattoo #4
took up yoga again
nurtured my spiritual practice as a Quaker
learned how to make make a button hole and machine applique

I'm not sure where I'm going exactly, but I do know that I want Prose and Potatoes to be a bit more visual, and a bit more about the other main interests in my life including cooking, but moving beyond just food.   So, this year expect posts about yoga, Quakerism/spirituality, photography (with lots more photos), food, recipes, and sewing projects.  Oh, and maybe cats.

This week I adopted Gabby:

Pomegrantes, Chickpeas, and Fairy Dust

The first time I ate a pomegranate seed I was on a school bus, on the rural back roads of North-Central Nebraska, and Lindsay Wagner was showing off. She was a harmless elementary school social climber because as a fifth grader, she was a year younger than me, she was in the remedial reading class, and she was ridiculous. Her best friend, Sundae, also rode our bus, and they were always bringing toys on the bus and playing elaborate games. One week they brought Barbies even though they were much too old for them, and even more confusingly, the next week, they showed up with a box of Troll dolls, which they used to act out scenarios in different voices. As a sixth grader, I was obviously too mature for that. They annoyed me, and who wouldn’t be annoyed by such desperate arm-flailing, look-at-me stunts? I liked the peace and quiet of the bus ride, but my daydreaming was routinely shattered by shrieking, giggling, and the occasional air-borne Troll doll, with its neon polyester shock of hair.

But one day, Lindsay’s shenanigans did get my attention. She was eating something I had never seen before. On the outside, it looked like a dark red grapefruit, but inside, there were the small tear-drop shaped seeds. The seeds glowed garnet, the juice from them interiors translucent and ready to burst.

“This is a pomegranate,” Lindsay announced. Other bus riders had gathered around her seat. Some turned around to see better.

“You eat it like this.” She plucked a seed from the rind and sucked the juicy pulp, then she spit out the woody, white center of the seed in a paper towel.

“You can try it if you want," Lindsay said as she slowly picked out one pomegranate seed at a time with the edges of her nails, which were polished in baby blue sparkles. As if she were bestowing communion wafers, we waited with palms outstretched.

“You don’t want to eat the seed,” she said. In unison we sucked off the jeweled flesh, and spit out the woody centers, and placed them in Lindsay’s paper towel.

It wasn't until years later I realized Lindsay had it all wrong. Eating the whole pomegranate seed is a delightful study in contrasts. Sure there's the burst of tart juice, but I like it better when it's tempered by the delightful crunch of the white hull. I also think that pomegrante seeds work best with savory dishes, as a garnish on top of a wheel of brie served with ligonberry jam, for instance, or my new favorite lunch dish.

Fairy Dust aka Homemade Chili Pepper Flakes

Pomegranate and Chickpea Salad with Fairy Dust
serves 2 - 3

Fairy dust is simply homemade chili powder. A gracious, gardening friend gave me an entire grocery bag heaping with jalapenos. I put them in food dehydrator, and then when they were dry ground them to a chunky powder. The green, herbaceous notes of the jalapeno carried through the drying, and I'm using this "Fairy Dust" on anything and everything that needs a little heat. You can substitute ground cayenne pepper for the Fairy Dust in this recipe.

1 - 15 oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 seeds of one large pomegranate
1 small clove of garlic
salt
2 teaspoons olive oil
juice of half a lemon
1/8 teaspoon fairy dust, or to taste (a little goes a long way)
1/4 cup finely grated Asiago cheese

Combine chickpeas and pomegranate seeds in a small mixing bowl. Mash clove of garlic with a pinch of salt, using either a mortar and pestle or the flat side of chef knife. Whisk garlic paste with olive oil and lemon juice. Pour over chickpeas and pomegranate seeds. Add remaining ingredients and toss gentle to combine.

Spatula!

It's hard to believe that summer is over.  Pumpkins and butternut squash are ripening in the garden, and will soon be roasting in my oven.  Still, I think fondly, with a wisp of nostalgia at how I spent this summer.
Here's the data.  This summer I:

read 29 books.
taught 90 summer reading classes.
canned 14 quarts of tomatoes.
drank 7 mojitos.
swam at the Quarry 1 time.
butchered 3 chickens.
ate 9 ears of corn on the cob.
co-starred in 3 episodes of Spatula, a new online cooking show.

On the set of "Spatula"

Please click over to Connotation Press to see the Spatula Cooking Show Teaser. Here you will find also find essays by myself and co-star Amanda explaining how we came to be friends, and how we were inspired to do a cooking show.  I am so grateful for the wonderful, creative foodie friends in my life, which is what Spatula is all about.  I hope you enjoy!

A New Way of Looking at Zucchini

I hate August.  Summer is dying, and the garden is exploding with so much produce that I can't see straight over the steamy fog spewing from the pressure canner in hissing spurts.  August is one giant pressure canner in my head (as I prepare for the new teaching term), and even in the atmosphere  (as we've had daily thunderstorms all this week and when I step out my front door its like the steamy inside of a pressure canner.)

The only thing that's  made me feel better in the kitchen is eating raw zucchini ribbons.  It is cliche to discuss the abundance of zucchini right now.  Case in point, last weekend I was a speaker on a local food panel at the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting of Quakers, and EVERY single one of us panelists made a joke about zucchini overload.  Even so, I'm going to discuss zucchini anyway.  This tired, old, boring problem of what to do with summer squash has a simple solution.

Sometimes you only need to change the shape of something to utterly transform it.  My f(F)riends, J (author of this awesome spiritual blog) and his fiance, K  invited me over for dinner last Sunday night.  They served me a raw zucchini salad that was quite like the "salad of raw zucchini, lemon, and toasted Parmesan" that Nigel Slater discusses in Tender I had been reading about one a few days before.  Slater writes, the raw zucchini "had the quality of freshly picked wet walnuts." 

 Rather than cubing it or chunking the zucchini, J and K finely sliced the zucchini.  Wispy threads of noodle-like zucchini flesh are surprisingly juicy, succulent and slightly nutty.  They drizzled the zucchini with olive oil and lemon juice and a heavy grating of Parmesan cheese.  A simple and delightfully refreshing salad that I can't seem to get enough of (though, in my version, I added a sprinkling of  pine nuts and used a vegetable peeler--rather than a mandoline--to get the thinnest slices possible.)

When two similar ideas show up in my life from seperate sources, well, rather than coincidence, I believe that some greater good, some divine force, is working, asking me to stop and pay attention.  Even to something as simple and mundane as zucchini.

 Suddenly, I am MINDFUL of the zucchini now that it has taken on this new shape, taste, and texture.  The dish is light and delicate, and I find that I have to quiet myself to really taken in the understated glory of the subtle, shifting flavors.  I like everything about this dish.  The monochromatic, pale colors are beautiful, the textures, the ease of preparing it.  And then there's the fact that I can eat an entire zucchini like this all by myself.  Then I don't feel so desperate when there are 10 very large zucchinis, sitting in wait on the bottom shelf of my fridge.

A New Way of Looking at Cucumbers

She remembers a phrase from the movie Julie and Julia, that movie about that woman that cooked through Julia Child's entire Mastering the Art of French Cooking: "Baked cucumbers are a revelation."  She holds this thought in her mind, and like Mark Doty suggests in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, the mind becomes a Magic 8 Ball.  That plastic toy with the floating marble inside of it that gives answers "yes" or "no" or "ask again later."  Doty says,

"Now I think there is a space in me that is like the dark inside that hollow sphere, and things float up into view, images that are vessels of meaning, the flotsam and detail of any particular moment.  Vanished things.” 

In the heat of July, with a pile of cucumbers, things float into her brain.  "How can I ever possibly eat this many cucumbers?"  The dark solution in her brain sloshes.  "Baked cucumbers are a revelation."  She decides--even though it is 95 degrees outside--to stoke the oven.  The oven, dependable and stubborn, turns the kitchen into an inferno, a wall of heat that can be walked into.  She doesn't mind.  She crams the oven with a roasting chicken, long-skinny Japanese egg-plant, chunks of beets, and after drying them off with wads of paper towels, the cucumbers.

This dinner, it can't exist on any other day, or any other time.  When six pounds of cucumbers arrived in the weekly vegetable box, when the eggplants in the garden reached the heavy purple enamel sheen of ripeness, when the beets heaved their round shoulders out of the soil.  While the chicken and vegetables roast, she makes mayonaise.  Whisking egg yolk and oil, to a thick creamy dollop, studded with shallots and flecks of dark yellow lemon zest.


She thinks, in her lifetime, she's eaten dozens of cucumbers.  But never baked. Never warm.  Dispatching the pile of cucumbers, makes her feel effiecent.  As if she has somehow arrested decay and age, stopped time for these cucumbers in the oven.

Now they are something else.  When they emerge from the oven they are firm, but yielding.  Sweet, but slightly bitter.  Richly coated with butter.  They are not a revelation, exactly.  They are more than the sum of their parts, and startling in how the ordinary has been rendered unfamiliar and strange.

She drags a forkful of chicken across a slick of mayonnaise, chews.  She takes a bite of cucumber, and she wonders about all these things as the roasted beets bleed across the plate, and the eggplants wait patiently in the kitchen to be turned into baba ganoush.  She wonders about the ordinary turning unfamiliar.








** Julia Child's recipe for Baked Cucumbers has been reprinted here.

It Really Gets to the Marrow of Things

When I go to Bellville Brothers Butcher Shop and ask for marrow bones, the butcher looks at me strangely.  
 “You mean dog bones?” he asks.  “I’ve got those.”
“No,” I say, “not for the dog.  I’m going to eat them.”  
 He shrugs.  “Here, I’ll show you what I got.”  He walks me away from the glass class of expensive T-bones and filet mignon, so bright red that they look plastic, to the freezer case at the back of the store.  “These?”  He holds up a 10 inch long bone wrapped in plastic.  Then he says, “My dog loves these bones.  He’ll work on one for hours.” 
I wish that he would get off the dog kick, so I try to get him back on my needs as a customer.  “Those bones are too big.  Can you cut them?”  Then, we have a discussion about how to cut them. I want them cut lengthwise to better scoop out the marrow from the center.  He says that he can’t do that.  The bones are more fragile than they look.  They will splinter too much. So he cuts them crosswise in three-inch long increments.  The bones look like a human femur.  The marrow is pink and thick.  It is at the core, at the very center, of this desire I have.  For something rich, nourishing, and out of the ordinary.  I take the bones over to my friend Amanda’s house.  Whenever I get a craving for foods that push the bounds of cultural conventions, Amanda is my accomplice.  I’ve fed her bull testicles and chicken feet, tongue and liver.  When I get to Amanda’s, we stand the bones up on end in a cast iron pan, and slide them into the oven.  They roast until the marrow has turned a translucent whitish color, with the palest hint of yellow and gray. 

 Then, we scrape the marrow out of the interior of each bone with silver steak knives and slather the marrow on slices of toasted baguette.  The marrow is unctuous. Rich.  We sprinkle chopped capers and shallots and parsley over the thick smear of bone marrow. 

 Amanda’s black lab, Bleu, is jealous.  He sits on the floor next to the table, looking expectantly at the stack of bones on the table.  Maybe the butcher was right.  Still, I am surprised that more people don’t realize that something this tasty, this succulent, this filling could be had for just a couple of dollars.  I am satiated in way that most people only associate with those bright red, bloody steaks.  Later, after Amanda has used the leftover marrow to roast potatoes, I still can’t stop thinking about marrow.  But, now it’s more of an idea hanging in the air.  Perhaps it is because the smell lingers.  Even after scrubbing my hands with lavender soap my fingers still smell of beef tallow.  Like the smell of grease clinging skin, my brain clings to the symbol of marrow.  I mull over marrow.  It is mysterious in ways that I can’t quite grasp.  I look up the word marrow in the OED.  Aside from the literal biological definition of marrow, the word can also mean the innermost part of a person’s being.  Another less common usage for marrow is as a companion or even an accomplice.  If used as an adjective it can denote a resemblance to something of the same kind, and I think of how Amanda and I are the knit from the same foodie cloth.  When marrow is a verb, it means to join, and I think of the way the marrow fuses itself to the interior of the bone the same way that a meal brings people together.   In the mid 1600s there was also a trend to use the word marrow in titles of books.  That way the author could claim that his tome got at the very heart of the subject—that it dug into the deepest part of the issue.   Most of these were religious titles like The Marrow of the Oracles of God or The Marrow of Sacred Divinity.  In the end, I want to devour meaning just like the marrow.  I want to consume it, so somehow, it gets to my essence.  When eating marrow, there’s no forgetting that this animal I’m eating is like me with muscles and tendons and bones.  Perhaps I eat things that make me think about death because, then maybe, I can understand being alive.

*Note:  The recipe photographed and written about here is "Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad" from Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating.
This recipe has also been reprinted all over the web and you can find it here, here, here, and here.  There is also a great Mark Bittman video clip with Henderson here.