Garnish

Beans! Corn! Strawberries!

2009-06-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

A sense of impending summer bounty!

Mmmm.... Pie.

2009-06-01T15:56:00.000-07:00

May 31, 2009
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My friend Michaela can whip up a pie like no one else I know. She is the Pie Maker. Her pie crusts are light and flaky and perfect every time. The filling is always just the right amount of sweet, complimenting the cookies n’ cream ice cream that we both agree must accompany pie. Today, we decide to make a birthday pie, because today I turn 23 years old. Happy Birthday to me! I’ve dubbed it a day of decadence, and my friends and I will celebrate the occasion by doing what we do best and enjoy most: eating delicious food. We have an amazing menu planned, a dinner of seared tuna steaks and fresh garden salad. And pie. Raspberry rhubarb pie, to take full advantage of the massive rhubarb plants growing outside my apartment. The raspberries were also grown in the garden just outside my door, frozen after last year’s harvest.

Like all good chefs, we drink while we cook. We’re approaching the end of another hot and summer-like day in May, which makes the cold beers we drink supremely satisfying (I think about my friend Elena J. Scribbles–who lives out of state and cannot join the party this year–and wonder if she too is enjoying a beer in the late afternoon sun. She promised to drink a beer in my honor today, and I have no doubt she’ll follow through).

Marah arrives, and joins us in our beer drinking and pie making. She enters in a gauzy purple slip, her summer wear of choice, and the room is instantly filled by her presence. I have known these girls forever, they are the only two friends who are still in my life from my childhood. After thinking a lot about the fluidity of relationships lately, how people come and go from your life at random, and how true friends are hard to come by, I am comforted by these constant and steady friendships. In their company, there is clarity: I am reminded of where I came from, and they help me to remember not only who I really am but who I wanted to be. Upon being bombarded by other people’s bullshit and their perceptions of me, sometimes those truths begin to slip away. I question who I really am, and I start to think that maybe the way I’m living my life is all wrong. Maybe they’re right and I don’t really know myself at all. But in this laughter filled kitchen, amid the aroma of pie baking in the oven, I am reminded that these people know who I really am because they knew me when. When the drama and game-playing of high school got heated, when the bottom dropped out at home, when the demands of college overwhelmed us and distance separated us. After seeing friends I make as an adult claim to know and love me, and then bail in tough times, I am amazed and stupefied to realize that there are people in this world who loved me as an awkward, knobby-kneed 10 year old who still love me today. In fact, the unconditional love I feel from them is palpable, and I figure if they loved me then and they still love me know, they must be the toughest, truest, and most loyal of the bunch.

The pie comes out of the oven and is so imperfect that it’s absolutely perfect. The crust is slightly burnt on top from an oven that runs too hot, and the filling is more soupy than it should be, seeping from any available opening. I can’t help but hope that my 24th year of life will be like this pie: pieced together from quality elements, shared with those I love most, and not entirely flawless but nonetheless filled with delicious surprises.

The rest of our meal turns out to be delicious as well. The sesame coated tuna steaks are perfectly cooked, and Michaela has brought a salad assembled from her own garden. The tuna is wonderfully complimented by an avocado and mango relish, and the entire dish screams "summertime!" We eat and drink until we become fat and happy. Satiated, we lounge on my deck in the twilight and look out over the garden: rows of corn protected by bird netting until it sprouts, a bamboo tripod with bean seedlings at its base, cloches filled with baby peppers and basil. It’s the calm before the storm, before the overwhelming bounty of summer, and in my minds eye I can picture the garden in full flourish. I compare it to the bounties I hope to encounter during the next year, and I think to myself: if the overwhelming love and sense of possibility I feel today is any indication of how this next year will turn out, it will be a fucking amazing year.

After the dishes are washed and put away and everyone has gone home, I am alone again. I decide to end this birthday and begin this next year by making a list of everything I am grateful for. Lungs that breathe air, a heart that pumps blood, arms and legs that work, a healthy body. The things I write down range from serious to silly. Two parents who love me. Feeling really happy today. A garden that is beautiful and that will provide me with food. The cool night breeze. Birthday beer and raspberry rhubarb pie. Having plenty of time. While mulling over all of my blessings, yet another blessing occurs to me: leftover pie. First I think, no, no Maria, show some restraint, you’ve had enough pie for one day. Then a louder and obviously more rational thought takes over and I think, what the heck? It’s my birthday!

Comfort

2009-05-26T21:06:00.000-07:00

"The first thing we taste is milk from our mother's breast, accompanied by love and affection, stroking, a sense of security, warmth, and well-being, our first intense feelings of pleasure. Later on she will feed us solid food from her hands, or even chew food first and press it into our mouths, partially digested. Such powerful associations do not fade easily, if at all. We say "food" as if it were a simple thing, an absolute like rock or rain to take for granted. But it is a big source of pleasure in most lives, a complex realm of satisfaction both physiological and emotional, much of which involves memories of childhood." from A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, page 129.

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I close my eyes and try to imagine the most comforting thing possible. I’m standing in my kitchen, adjusting to the cool tile under my bare feet as the thick heat of an early summer afternoon sizzles outside. It’s that perfect time of day when the sun hits my kitchen window and shines through the red and orange curtain I have hanging there, creating a rosy glow around me. Comfort, comfort, comfort, I think, rubbing the tension from my neck and shoulders and willing all of the world’s craziness to melt away.

A warm bubble bath, I think, irritated immediately since my apartment only has a stall shower to offer.

The caress of a lover. No lover tonight.

A hot cup of tea, a long massage, a satisfying meal. Then the answer comes to me so clearly that I’m surprised I didn’t think of it right away. I double check to make sure that I have all the necessary ingredients to make this delicacy I have thought of, very high on my list of "Most Comforting Things Ever"and one that will definitely do the trick of comforting me tonight: Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Of the many cookbooks I own, I choose for this endeavor a cookbook gifted to me by a friend many years ago, entitled Bitchin’ in the Kitchen: The PMS Survival Cookbook by Jennifer Evans and Fritzi Horstman. I find the title fitting for my current mood. I am not–at this time of the month–"surviving PMS," but I am bitchin’ in my kitchen, completely thrown and jarred after a day of realizing life’s small cruelties. Comfort, comfort, comfort, I think again, flipping to the recipe for "Double Trouble Chocolate Chip Cookies: When no amount of chocolate is too much." I appreciate the humor at the end of the recipe, the instructions telling me to combine all ingredients, scoop the dough into golf ball-sized balls and eat as is. "Alternative: You can also bake the cookies." Although I do anticipate many tastes of the raw cookie dough, I crave the smell of cookies baking in the oven: as much of a pleasure as actually eating them.

I start by combining 1 and 3/4 cups flour with 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. In a separate bowl, I combine 1 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, ½ cup brown sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla. As I cream these ingredients together, I let my mind wander and think about what has led to this quest for comfort. I think about you telling me that your new girlfriend is not only gorgeous, but a belly dancer to boot. On the list of things I TOTALLY could have gone without knowing... I think, shaking my head and cracking a large egg into the batter, with perhaps a little too much force. I combine 1/3 cup unsweetened powdered cocoa with 2 tablespoons milk, and add this to my butter and sugar mixture. As I slowly begin to add my flour to the bowl, I push this last thought out of my mind and turn my thoughts toward other things that life has thrown at me recently.

Like the realization of the volatility of relationships, for example, and how people come and go, in and out of your life as time passes. I consider how many times I’ve let myself think that I have found a forever friend, until something happens to remind me that this is a delusion and that nothing is permanent. As I finish my cookie recipe by adding what can only be described as a SHIT TON of chocolate chips, I consider the conditional nature of compassion and forgiveness. And with every dollop of cookie dough that I place on my baking sheet, I wonder if it’s really true that everyone will disappoint you eventually, if you know them long enough.

(I suddenly start to wonder if these Double Trouble Chocolate Chip Cookies will be affected by my mood. Will their structure change as a result of absorbing my sadness and anger, like the water crystals studied by Masaru Emoto? If I continue to brood over them, will they burn? Or, like the food cooked by Tita in Like Water for Chocolate, will the people I share my cookies with experience what I felt while baking them?)

The aroma of the chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven begins to permeate the air around me, and the smell is enough to lull me into thinking---at least for a moment---that the troubles outside my door no longer exist. Suddenly, I’m no longer rehashing arguments in my head or worrying about the future. Instead, I am transported to the past, to a time when things were simpler, when the most difficult task at hand was to stand eye-level with the kitchen counter and heed an adult’s warning to wait for those cookies to cool on their wire racks. This time, I’m the adult and I don’t wait. And in fact my cookies are not burnt, they are chewy and gooey and chocolaty and delicious. I crawl into bed with a book, my still hot chocolate chip cookies and a glass of cold milk, and I feel instantly at ease and also amazed by the power of comfort foods. If only for a short while, I’m a kid again: I feel safe and happy and warm and comforted.

Mission accomplished.

Sausage Wench

2009-05-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

Standing in front of my stove, wooden spoon in hand, skillet of browning sausage spitting before me, I feel like a real pro. I look down at my mismatched, dull kitchen knives and my stained apron. Although it’s made to be worn around ones waist, I‘ve hitched my apron up into my armpits in an effort to shield my shirt from spatter. I don’t usually wear an apron while cooking, but the farm I work for has asked me to prepare samples of their meat products for Saturday Farmer’s Market. As I consider my position preparing a product given to me by a higher authority to serve to the masses, a thought occurs to me: "I am Maria: Grass-fed Meat Wench." No, no, that doesn’t sound right...I’m not grass-fed, after all, the meat is. "Maria: "Wench of Grass-fed Meats."

I’m determined to include the word "wench" in describing exactly what it is I’m doing right now. The word "wench," as noted by my friend Elena J. Scribbles, is the all-time most perfect word for describing someone who, like a barmaid or a drug-pusher, facilitates other peoples vices. Elena J. Scribbles would use this word to describe our position in the clinic where we both used to work, as we peddled prescriptions and handed out pills like they were Pez candy. I feel somewhat like I’m in the same position now, catering to a certain fetish (except aren’t we all, really?). This particular addiction, however, is to clean food; I’m fortunate enough to live in a community where a good portion of people are conscious about where their food comes from and what they put into their bodies. Hence, there’s a demand for the grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic-free meat that currently sizzles on my stove-top.

Tonight I’m cooking sausages. Grass-fed lamb and goat sausages, to be exact. I’ll admit, I’ve never cooked link sausages before, and so I did a Google search before starting. "Poaching your sausages first will make them easier to grill, and ensure that they are fully cooked." Score.

The whole event takes me about 2 and a half hours to finish–9 pounds of lamb and goat sausage in all, first poached, then browned, then carefully diced into bite size samples and tucked away in the fridge. Despite the fact that every part of me–and every surface surrounding my stove-top–feels greasy, and despite the fact that even the most tucked-away corner of my small apartment smells like meat, I still feel strangely satisfied and pretty lucky. I’ve been at this job for a good while now and I still can’t quite believe that I get paid to hang out in my own kitchen and cook. Someone actually gives me money to engage in what I like to refer to as "Kitchen Zen Time."

Granted, cooking 9 pounds of sausage may not seem particularly zen to some people. But the ritual of moving link after link from a boiling pot of water, to a hot skillet, to a cool cutting board, allows me to zone out a bit and rehash my day in my mind. As Zen as it may be, I find that tonight’s ritual of seemingly endless sausage cooking--the smell of the browning meat, the crackling sound it makes as it grills, and the many tastes I take while cooking--lulls me into a sort of meat coma.

After I wipe away the remaining grease spatter from my stove-top and remove my apron, I think to myself, "Maybe I’ll make a salad for dinner."

2009-05-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

2009-05-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

Summer Salad

2008-09-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

garden lettuce

radishes

cantalope

red peppers

avacado

hard boiled eggs

dried cranberries

salt and pepper

A Simple Yeast Bread

2008-08-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

Yeast breads have always intimidated me, with their fickle tendency to rise too much or not enough, or to die straight away and sabotage my meager efforts at making bread. Tricky little yeast, flaunting its living power to create or destroy, bullying novice bakers, making irrefutable demands about its living conditions. Just a simple wheat bread, that's all I want!

Well, that might be a bit dramatic, a slight exaggeration of my reluctance to learn just how to get along with that wondrous fungus, baker's yeast. Reluctance is the wrong word. Fear would be more appropriate. And that fear has kept me from working with any kind of dough other than quick until now. Today, I broke out the yeast, mixed it with warm water to awaken it, fed it some sugar, then mixed it with a healthy amount of flour and a little salt and oil for the eating's sake. I let the yeast do the work for me today, for the first time, though undoubtedly not the last.

I haven't tasted the bread yet. It's cooling on wire racks as I write this small memory. I don't know if it will be delicious and tender and chewy in all the right ways. I don't know if this experiment will lead to an adequate wheat bread, but it certainly looks promising: classic loaf shape, attractive little slits along the top, a smattering of poppy seeds for visual and gustatory interest. My first bread certainly has all the right components to be that simple little yeast bread I'm after. Now it's just a matter of waiting that painful hour while it cools on the rack.

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All is right in the world. That fresh bakery smell came out of my oven today: yeasty, delicious, homey. And the bread today lived up to its smell. I got my simple wheat bread, and I am pleased. I may have also acquired a new habit. This dough business is pretty gratifying, and, while I am still wary of yeast, I feel less bullied now, more able to meet its demands, ready for our next encounter.

I think Ed Brown, author of The Tassajara Bread Book, said it best: “If you have never made bread, your first batch is going to be better than nothing. After that, no comparison! Each batch is unique and full of your sincere effort. Offer it forth.”

And so, to the moon, with fresh bread in tow!

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A note: "Today" was actually a bit over a week ago. It just takes me a minute to write and post, slacker that I am. Since then, I've made a second batch of bread, rye-oat bread, that turned out just as well. Making bread really is a habit-forming occupation. I recommend it.

Slow Cooker Skepticism

2008-08-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

I am engaging in a standoff with my crock-pot.

Actually, it’s not my crock-pot (I’ve never owned, or even used one), but here I am at 11:30pm on a Friday night and I still haven’t started to prepare the pork shoulder that I’m supposed to serve at Farmer’s market tomorrow morning. My employer has a booth there and has asked me to prepare samples of their product: hormone-free, grass-fed meat. And of course (for reasons we shall delve into later), I’ve chosen the recipe that takes 4 hours to make, first simmering on the stove-top in a bath of chicken broth, onions, salsa verde and spices, then baking in the oven to brown and intensify flavor. I look at the clock, then back at this creature hovering on my counter top. 11:31pm. Shit. As much as I love to cook, I love to sleep even more, and so I’ve decided to let this borrowed appliance do all the work for me, overnight.

However, I am deeply suspicious.

Some part of me can’t seem to wrap my mind around how this dish could turn out as amazing in a slow cooker as it would if I gave each step of the recipe my full attention, showing tender love and care for each detail. And I didn’t come from a crock-pot family; I’m not even sure if I’ve ever been in the same room with one before. More so than how it works, I’m skeptical of the fact that such a thing could be plugged in for 9 hours, braising meat, without somehow managing to burn my house down. My slight fear of electrical fires and penchant for doing things the hard way must have been inherited from my mother, who once made her own phyllo dough from scratch, rolling out paper thin sheets for hours and hours. She’s also the same woman who, when I was a kid, constantly asked both me and herself, "Did I remember to unplug the coffee pot?" There was always a slight panic in her voice, which resulted in me forever thinking that, if left plugged in, coffee pots–and other household appliances–could burn your house down to mere ashes while away at work.

But it’s too late to go back now, I either go with the slow-cooker or show up at Farmer’s market tomorrow with nothing. It’s time to pop my crock-pot cherry.

To start, I decide to reverse the order of the recipe and bake the pork shoulder first. While it bakes, I combine chicken stock, salsa verde, onions, oregano, and cumin and coriander seeds on the stove, bringing it to a boil. When the pork shoulder comes out of the oven, I transfer it to the crock-pot, pouring my salsa verde mixture over the top. I turn the dial to High, plug it in and step away.

That’s it? I stand there a while, staring at it. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for, but I stare a little longer, arms crossed, belly out. Finally, I step away and sit down at my computer, leering into the kitchen, nervously. Even though many people have assured me that crock-pots were designed to be left alone for hours and hours, I have not been able to fully let go of my skepticism. Part of the problem, I’m sure, stems from my obsessive compulsive need to follow recipes step-by-step. My friend Elena J. Scribbles and I sometimes butt heads over this; her cooking style is very much "use whatever is in the cupboard and make it up as you go" while I tend to be weary of not using exact measurements or adding something to a dish when it’s not in the directions. I of course don’t want to be this way and I am getting better. Coaxed by Elena J. Scribbles’ assurances that "if you use quality ingredients, how could it be bad?" I am learning to eyeball measurements of spices in the palm of my hand and fashion recipes based on what I have in my fridge. So, this is a very big step for me: opting for the easier means of cooking this pork shoulder over the 4 hours worth of steps that Sunset magazine has painstakingly laid out for me.

Quietly assuring myself that I’ve "done good," I finally give in and slink off to bed.

I sleep fitfully. The aroma of braising pork infiltrates my sleep and I dream of inferior food and fire, all night long. When I wake, the crock-pot looks like it did when I left it, and I lift the lid to find the pork shoulder beautifully golden and tender, shredding effortlessly under my fork.

At market, I hand out bite-sized samples of this shredded 4-pound roast, and the whole thing is gone in an hour, delightfully well received by customers. We sell out of pork shoulders, which never happens. Strangers ask for both my name and my recipe, and I am giddy about my success. Still, at the end of the day after I’ve washed my borrowed crock-pot and returned it to its rightful owner, I am not envious that this device belongs to her and not me. As appealing as it sounds to load a slow cooker with ingredients before work and return home in the evening to a dinner that’s ready to eat, I find that I still don’t want one. Not until I conquer my neuroses, which may take a few years. For now I’m still the girl who leaves my house in the morning, drives halfway to work and then has to turn around because I start to question...

Did I remember to unplug the coffee pot?