Kitchen snapshot

I love taking the macro lens, close-in shots. Not only because you can see every drop of sauce and bit of garlic.

But also because, when you zoom out a bit, you can see that I cook in the middle of this kind of chaos.

Toddler special-treat lunch of ravioli, garlic, butter, and zucchini. Homemade playdough smashed in the pestle with fennel seeds. Leftover banana in a little bowl. Crumbs. Life.

It ain't pretty, but it is beautiful.

Preserving tomatoes

11 hours and 12 quarts later...

Plus some sauce, but not as much as you'd think.

I guess there's a reason plum tomatoes are recommended--we had about 10 times as much juice and seeds as finished product. My compost pile is soaked through with tomato gore.

I know we could have canned the juice too, but it was just. too. much.

We ended up with large jars packed full of tomatoes and not too much juice. It took careful peeling and seeding, a thorough squeezing, and a hot pack. We absolutely did not need to add additional water or juice. After a little pressing, our tomatoes were completely covered in their own juice.

I've made some decisions about how to best deal with the summer surplus of tomatoes.

This is it:




If you have a chest freezer, freezing, hands down. You can put your tomatoes whole on a cookie sheet in the freezer. When they're hard, transfer to plastic bags.

In the winter, when you pull them out to defrost, their skins slip right off and cores are easily cut off. You have to deal with a bit of hassle later down the line, but you skip the days and days of canning in the summer. The texture isn't as wonderful as canned whole tomatoes, but whatevs. Throw those suckers in a soup or chili, and no one will know the difference.

Unfortunately, I don't have a chest freezer.

But those glass jars of tomatoes look lovely on my cupboard shelves. And a day and late night of progressively more delirious tomato-spattered hilarity with a couple good girlfriends is never a bad thing.

I am still freezing the sauces: lazy tomato sauce, enchilada sauce, tomato puree.

If they are packed as above, they stack neatly and keep well.

Don't be tempted, as I always am, to fill the freezer bags too full. If they are thin, you can break off a sliver of sauce and close up the bag again. (Then use up in the next couple weeks—freezer burn sets in fast once you open a bag.) If you overfill, you have to defrost an entire bag to get a bit of enchilada sauce for a wet burrito.

I'm also planning on sundried tomatoes and my mom's sundried tomato paste, which goes a long way in a winter stew.

Canning

Somehow, I thought 75 pounds of peaches would be manageable. There were five of us after all, crammed into a gallery kitchen while the rest of the families watched the Tour de France and ate pizza.

I didn't factor in the endless runs to the store for more ice, sugar, lemons, jars, whatever. I didn't factor in the time it would take for 50 pounds of chopped peaches to simmer themselves into jam without pectin.

That classic advice not to double canning recipes? I laughed in the face of expertise and timed the recipes by 10. No mere doubling here.

Holy 9 hours in the kitchen, Batman!

I did discover that I suck at the whole check-your-jam's-jelling-point-with-a-plate-in-the-freezer thing. You know how this jam has reached it's jelling point? It spits.

The simmering bubbles get slower and bigger, and when you stir the jam, scraping the spoon along the bottom of the pan, you see pan for a split second. The liquid doesn't rush back around the spoon like water--it slides back, thicker.

And then it hisses spits little bits of hot jam, angrily. I have a collection of little round burns on my hands to prove it.

The jam was ready. And awesome.

Also on the the agenda were pickles and canned peaches in ginger syrup (above). Next round? Tomatoes and tomato sauce and salsa.

When left to my own devices

It's rare that I get a meal alone. A real meal at home, not leftovers packed into a Mason jar and eaten on the bench outside my office.

When I do eat alone, it's simple and utterly personal. For dinner, spaghetti with butter and garlic.

For lunch, like today, a fried in butter grilled Swiss cheese sandwich. Dipped in "rooster sauce." With a heaping mass of homemade sauerkraut on the side.

I scarfed it down so fast I didn't take a picture.

I agree, you don't need a picture. It's obscene enough already that I shared. But dude, look at this. I'm not alone.

For dessert? Coffee and back to work from home via laptop.

Local love

We eat seasonally and locally. We are not one of those trendy restaurants* with the "we buy local and organic produce whenever possible" tagline on their menus. I've worked at some of those, and found that cost or inconvenience too often override the declared intent.

But at home, we are authentic**, and pretty quiet about it. We try to honor our bodies, our community, our soil, our beliefs, and our neighbors--and we try to shut up about that with our friends.

Instead of the evangelism, we dish out food.

We try to hook the devoted grocery store shoppers on green garlic, local lamb, fresh tomatoes. We try to make them part of the loop--to make explicit that connection: soil, water, seeds, spirit, farmer, food, table...

And if they want a little of the joy in their own lives, well, we've done something right.

I imagine, those of you out there with more traditional faiths than mine, that this is a familiar feeling.

This recipe--another version of the classic asparagus/egg combo--is spring. Easy and epic. Try it now, before summer is in full swing and asparagus is a memory.

Don't you dare use grocery store asparagus in November or jumbo-pack eggs for this one. It is largely unadorned and depends on freshness.


*Ah, restaurants. Oven-branded forearms, coke and testosterone, bands of misfits united against the unsuspecting customer. I get nostalgic every once in a while.

**Authentic, not perfect. We all snack on bananas from Trader Joe's. We buy potatoes and onions and garlic and citrus all year. Other than that, each season brings a new, eagerly awaited treat: Asparagus and favas and onion scapes. Peaches and tomatoes. Hot chilies and tomatillos. Winter squash and escarole.

Operation Homemade Yogurt: Failure

I like making things from scratch. Fussy, involved things that most people buy from the store: sauerkraut, salt-cured olives, sun-dried tomatoes, jam...

Things that require weeks of fermentation or hours of simmering make me very, very happy. Long rising, curing, drying— the words give me a thrill.

(I'm actually shocked--SHOCKED--that everyone doesn't get off on this kind of thing. This may explain why, when I get out in the world, I feel so freakish. That or my inability to make small talk.)

But as much as I love large-scale culinary projects, I hate fiddly baking that requires any amount of precision. Candy thermometers, sifting, and weighing are deal breakers, as are pastry bags and parchment-lined pans. And it turns out that yogurt belongs in that category. Finer brush required.

This is how I made clumps of sour milk floating in a clear liquid:

Bring milk to near boil, cool to the required 110-115 degrees by guessing. Why buy a candy thermometer when you have your fingers, right?

Bring milk/yogurt mixture over to W., tell him to stick his finger in it, ask "Do you think this is about 5 degrees hotter than that time your parents overheated their Jacuzzi?"

Scoff at the doubters. Put mixture in oven to keep warm by pilot light overnight.

Sleep in. Uncover mess of nastiness at 8 am. Make husband use it instead of buttermilk to make awesome pancakes.

Scoff at the doubters. "See, I told you this would be great!"

Budget for yogurt maker.

***

The complex math of household finance:

The organic yogurt we buy is about twice the price of milk by ounce. We eat about a quart of yogurt a week. So our savings would be about $12/month, minus occasional starter.

Yes, this is significant.

Yogurt maker bought off Amazon would pay for itself in 2.5 months if I slip in a sewing pattern book to get free shipping. The book would pay itself off in money saved by making awesome homemade Christmas presents for family and friends.

Bonus savings from buying Organic Valley milk in bulk at Costco. Membership paid for by savings on gin, contact solution, and contact lenses alone.

And this is how we subsidize a life with one student, one part-timer in a creative profession, and one child. We co-parent, we eat largely locally, we have cocktails, we carve out leisure time, we pay our mortgage. It can be done.

More fat, please: homemade sausage

I can't stop trying to jam more healthy goodness into everything we eat. It's becoming pathological--some primal desire to maintain the health of my offspring. Or a response to the "holy crap, an infant is no longer draining a zillion calories a day from my boobs so mainlining butter just not OK" belly.

Whichever the case, I'm becoming uncomfortably like my mother in this way, who is a fantastic cook but also regularly made these rock-like clusters she called "nutty nuggets." Pretty much muesli moistened with nonfat milk, formed into lumps, and baked until solid.

(My sister and I also got kefir as our "junk food" treat and swallowed fish oil nightly. My parents were decades ahead of the times on the the functional foods thing.*

Anyway, I made oatmeal carrot cookies with walnuts and dried blueberries the other day. And then tried to sell them to the toddler as COOKIES! FOR BREAKFAST! She didn't buy it. Then she asked for some plain yogurt with cinnamon, which I have managed to convince her is more awesome than sugar.

I am a mean, mean mother who destroys dreams and puts kale in the macaroni and cheese.

So I thought some breakfast sausage would cheer everyone up—and to be honest, decrease the glycemic index of our starchy breakfast.


They tasted great, but lacked that certain something that I've since discovered comes with the generous addition of pork fatback. They didn't have that greasy, crispy goodness, but a denser, herbal goodness. They were OK, not pork-ishly delicious. Our pork is especially lean because it's from healthy pigs who forage and eat mushrooms and tofu. Really.

What is pork-ishly delicious is this same mixture crumbled and fried in olive oil and sprinkled on top of pizza.

Homemade Sausage (adapted from Alice Waters)

1 pound ground pork
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 garlic clove, pressed
a sprig of fresh sage, chopped (enough to make a couple teaspoons)
a pinch of nutmeg
a pinch of cayenne
a generous grind fresh black pepper

Gently mix all the ingredients. Form into patties (don't press) for breakfast and fry in skillet with a bit of olive oil, turning once. I think it took us about four minutes a side in a medium-high skillet.

Alternatively, form into meatballs or fry loose in skillet for a pizza topping or to start a pasta sauce.

*Hi Mom! I still love kefir, really. And I wouldn't trade the taste of a sun-warmed tomato for all the Cocoa Puffs in the world, no matter what I said when I was 16.

Overwintering

February was stark, in the best way. Simple meals—stir fry, burritos, pizza, salad, in rotation. Not much writing, not much doing, but lots of waiting, thinking, becoming...

Persimmon bread

I read a lot of food blogs, and in nearly every one, every winter, there is the rainy/snowy day, curl up on the couch under hand-knitted/quilted blankets with ridiculously cute dog/cat while drinking a mug of hot coffee/tea/hand-harvested stone-ground chocolate and eating assorted sweet breads/muffins/cookies/feats of sculptural bakery. And they claim to stay there all afternoon.

I'll admit it, I'm jealous. An entire afternoon! Time to layer mini cakes with home-canned jam. To knit scarfs that will be ready to sling around cold necks this winter, not next. To watch my children frolic in an adorably artistic pile on the vintage hardwood.

My afternoons are much more of the rush home from work and prevent the child from licking electrical cords variety. And if they weren't, I'd probably still skip the baking and head for the couch and the latest Michael Connelly mystery. (Which is where I've been the last week, for those who wondered.)

As for winter baking, I make endless versions of the following persimmon bread, break out the cream cheese, and call it good. Because this is one of those rare sweet baked things that can be totally over-stirred, it's easy to make with an enthusiastic toddler.

I pick persimmons from my parents' house at Christmastime, let them ripen into mush, whiz in the food processor, and freeze flat in Ziploc freezer bags. For this bread, pumpkin puree works great too, even better if that slightly astringent, squeaky persimmon flavor turns you off.

Persimmon Bread with Walnuts and Cranberries

1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 t. baking soda
3/4 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. ground cloves
1/4 t. ground nutmeg
1/4 t. ground ginger
1/4 t. salt

2 eggs
1/3 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 cup persimmon (or pumpkin) puree
1/2 canola oil
1 t. vanilla

1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup frozen cranberries (not defrosted)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan.

Whisk together dry ingredients in one bowl. Whisk wet ingredients together in another, add to dry, and whisk until blended. Stir in walnuts and cranberries. Pour dough into prepared pan.

Bake in the middle of oven about 1 hour and 15 minutes, until it feels firm when you poke at the top with your finger and a toothpick or wooden skewer jabbed through the middle comes out clean. Cool completely.

Instead of walnuts and cranberries, try chocolate chips, pumpkin seeds, coconut, whatever you've got on hand. It's all tasty. The recipe also doubles easily, so you can snack on one loaf all week and freeze the other for later.

Not-so-solitary spaghetti

Now that the baby has morphed into a toddler, my secret single spaghetti has become pasta with a side of potty talk. There's not really much you can do to put a positive hipster spin on that one, but I have taught the child to spin and slurp spaghetti, which delights me and horrifies my husband. (EDITED TO ADD: At lunch today, he taught her to drape spaghetti over her forearm and then nibble it off, so I've got nothing.)


When W. is at class late, the baby and I put together a quick pasta, as a team. She cuts the butter with a butter knife, then picks it up and gnaws on the stick when she thinks I'm not looking. I heat the water and chop garlic, herbs, and whatever veggie we have on hand. She tosses ingredients into the pan, we stir together.

And in the rush to prep quickly with a not-so-helpful helper, I've hit on a formula for awfully good pasta that uses what you've got:

Fast anything-goes pasta

Put a pot of water on to boil for pasta. Don't forget to salt it, liberally. Prep your ingredients while you wait for it to boil. When the water is ready, dump in a half pound of pasta and begin to make your sauce.

Put the following in a large saucepan and heat on medium low:

a couple cloves garlic, minced
a couple tablespoons parsley (or other herbs)
a small shake red chili flakes
a couple glugs olive oil (or a mixture of olive oil and butter to equal a couple tablespoons)

When the garlic is sizzling, add about a 1/4 cup of chicken broth. (I freeze my homemade stock in ice cube trays, and just throw in three cubes.) Turn up heat to medium, bring to a simmer, and add some sort of protein.

I like to do one of the following:
garbanzo beans
white beans
slivered almonds
slivered salami
pine nuts

A couple minutes before the pasta is done, toss a vegetable in the boiling water (broccoli florets; chicory, spinach, kale, or chard ribbons; small potato cubes; whatever). Or you can roast a vegetable in the oven by tossing with olive oil and salt and blasting it at 450 degrees for about 20 minutes. Obviously, if you do this, you need to start the roasting process at the beginning of your prep.

Drain pasta when it's very very al dente, toss with sauce (and roasted veggies if you are going that route). Continue to simmer a minute or so, until pasta is done and sauce is largely absorbed. I like mine a little juicy.

Top with cheese. Finely grated parm or pecorino romano are good, as are aged cheddar, blue cheese, feta...

The photos show a broccoli/almond spaghetti and a roasted cauliflower/garbanzo fusilli, but this is one of those recipes that are born of that delicate balance between what sounds good and what is in the fridge. It is often delicious, but I've had my failures--frozen stir fry mix plus blue cheese anyone?

Cojones

Nope, we don't eat them.

A friend emailed me the following: "...I have to admit that I am very impressed at your courage to cook entire animals such as lambs and goats. Do you try to use everything, or do you draw the line at, for example: brains? Does it come with its pelt? Do you try to tan it? Does the dog get to chew the feet and ears? These are pressing issues about whole-animal preparation!"

And I realized, I have been misrepresenting the size of my balls. In a parallel universe in which I am totally hard core, when faced with brains, fur, and feet, I'm all "bring it ON!" In reality, our "whole" lamb goes from the farm straight to a local butcher, who packages it up neatly and without offal. Our freezer is less random bits and more $7/pound rack of lamb.

Poor dog.

How to make sugar syrup, redux

You know how you do something over and over and over again and then one day, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, you realize there's a much easier way to do it? And then you're all "Why the hell didn't I think of this before?"

Case in point? Sugar syrup. After all these years of lighting the stove, stirring and simmering, it hit me: the microwave.

Equal parts sugar and water in a Mason jar. Microwave until hot. Stir to dissolve sugar. Cool on counter. Slap a lid on the jar. Refrigerate. Make cocktails for weeks. Decide the cocktail hour is making you fat and vow to contain the cocktailing to weekends. Decide nothing goes with Jane Eyre, or with learning to knit, or with 8 PM like a little gin. Repeat.

An arctic blast and the soup that nobody ate

Remember the fresh herbs of last week? They've been hidden under a blanket of snow for the past five days. No more bahn mi until summer most likely.

We get just enough snow for it to be amazing each time, for us to gawk like tourists at snowflakes—snowflakes! Actually falling! From the sky!

But after slip sliding out of my driveway, blatantly disregarding the "chains required" signs, desperate to make it to my final on Monday, I can see how it could get old. Honestly, what's the point of snow if you don't get a snow day? Frozen pipes, a yard coated in ice, snowplowed slush run through with mud—I'm glad we only get this a couple times a year.

As it is, snowy days are the perfect excuse to make cookies, break our cocktails-on-weekends-only rule, and indulge in soup and sandwiches after work. If only my family liked the soup as much as I did...

My husband hates smooth soup. (He also hates parsley, spaghetti, anything with celery in it. I say that's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. He says that because I hate shrimp and lobster, my opinion is completely invalid.)

I can see the soup thing, sort of. I don't like to eat pureed foods as a main dish. No smoothies for breakfast, puddings for snacks. But as the side to a crunchy grilled ham and cheese sandwich, I think a bit of roasted butternut squash soup and cilantro pesto is perfect.

Too bad I'm outnumbered. Tonight's tally was bowls of soup served, 3; empty bowls at the end of dinner, 1. Sigh.

W. says that if it was chunky, it would be great; I say that all that chopping would make the endeavor just not worth it. The whole point of the soup is that it's easy. He says that anything that produces smooth soup is pointless anyway. And I say something unprintable.

I'll let you judge for yourself.

Butternut squash soup

1 butternut, cut into large chunks (like into quarters)
1 apple, cored and quartered
1 onion, peeled and quartered
2 garlic cloves, peeled

Toss the veggies (EDITED TO ADD: and apple) with olive oil, salt, and pepper and roast in a 375-degree oven until dark, dark, brown on the tips. Remove peel from squash. Coarsely process veggies in the food processor. (This can be done ahead and kept in the refrigerator. This is what I did so I had an easy, quick weeknight meal on tap.)

Put puree in saucepan with equal parts chicken broth and water, enough to thin the puree to your desired consistency. Bring to a boil and simmer gently about 10 minutes to blend flavors.

I like this soup with a dab of cilantro pesto made with cilantro (stems and all), walnuts, cotija cheese, a small splash of apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper, and olive oil—all blended in the food processor until smooth. It's also good with bacon, croutons, and fried sage or a bit of curry powder.

I can't decide

...whether our makeshift Christmas tree is clever or just a bit pitiful. But the baby is so delighted by her handprint ornaments and the fairy lights, it makes us feel like Christmas superstars.


I have a lot to say about being a parent, not all of it idyllic. But honestly, I think it's worth it just for the reminder of how amazing the world can be.

A string of lights, a potted plant, paper hands sprinkled with glitter. Beautiful.

A cheap advent calendar stuffed with so-so chocolate, a misshapen snowball cookie, a handmade fleece blanket. Magical.

Coq au vin

So, I did it. I cut up a whole chicken--or at least deciphered the instructions from How to Cook Everything while W. wielded the knife. Then I fussed in the kitchen for hours making Julia's coq au vin, which I've heard is the gold standard. I cut little Xs in the bottom of countless baby onions. I sauteed the mushrooms separately. I deglazed and flambed and braised. I even boiled the bacon, which just sounds wrong, and looks even wronger.


Gross, huh? But I had faith--in me, in Julia, in the power of a cold fall afternoon and hours to while away in the kitchen, pretending to be productive.

And?

Eh.

It was ugly purple chicken, which was fine, but it also tasted, well, eh. Flabby bacon still doesn't get me going, neither does flabby chicken skin. Honestly, I'd rather have a crispy roast over crispy potatoes and served with a crispy salad and crisp-crusted bread.

What went wrong? Why did I fail at making the gold standard of homey French chicken dishes? Are we just not coq au vin people?

Is it because I went around mispronouncing the name of the dish for the last 10 years? Vahn. Oops.

Is it because I used this 10-cent garage sale book instead of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, like any good Juliaophile would have?


Did I fail to sufficiently brown my onions? My mushrooms?

Was it the Charles Shaw? Are we too poor to make a proper wine-braised chicken? (It worked just fine with the lamb.)

On the upside, this was pretty cool:


And now we can do this:

Pad Thai, with or without ketchup

This was our lunch, leftovers. Looks good, doesn't it? It's Pim's pad Thai, old, old news but so, so good. This one with tofu and no bean sprouts (just poor excuses for noodles as far as I'm concerned). We have garlic chives in the herb garden and eggs from the farmers market. And it was just awesome.

That said, I think it's strange that bloggers all over are apologizing for approximating a pad Thai with ketchup before trying this recipe. Sure, that's just not the same. Sure, it's not authentic. But for fuck's sake, sometimes you just want some rice noodles and sauce--salty and sweet and grocery-store easy. I don't see why we all feel compelled to wallow in our previous inadequacy for--gasp!--making something that isn't perfect.

It's fun and satisfying (for some of us) and more often than not very, very tasty to do things the "right" way. I cure my own olives, make my own pasta from scratch, boil chicken carcasses for a full day to produce a rich broth that makes soups jump off the spoon...sometimes. I just as often open a can, shop at only one store, buy things in packets and jars. Because sometimes I just don't want to spend time pressing tamarind concentrate through a sieve, or driving all over town for the tiny Asian market that occasionally stocks the ready-to-use paste. (And we're one of the few rural-ish towns lucky enough to have an Asian market.)

Sometimes I want to throw four servings of noodles in the wok at once and call it good enough.

I love my Nina Simonds recipe for rice noodles with ketchup-and-fish-sauce-based sauce. I've made it a zillion times, and I'll do it again. And I'll even call it pad Thai. Without apology.

Moroccan lamb koftas

Another easy meal, this one served with store-bought flatbread, simply dressed arugula, and a sauce made with yogurt, salt, pepper, and a little crushed garlic. My mom made a Turkish version occasionally when I was growing up--kofte.

I made the meat mixture the night before, so all that was left to do when we came home on a busy weekday was to throw the kofta under the broiler, heating the flatbread in the oven in foil with a little garlic olive oil and making the sauce while the meatballs browned.

Ground lamb releases a lot of fat when cooked and spatters like nobody's business, so don't put these on a rimless sheet tray super close to the broiler element. Because that might start a fire in your oven. Fun for toddlers, but not so much so for adults in a hurry to get dinner on the table. Not that we would know anything about that. Ahem.

I based this recipe on one from The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook. I'd recommend this to anyone new to cooking grassfed--the cooking times and temperatures can be different enough to make traditional recipes a total failure, especially beef. But everything we've made from this book has been really good.

Moroccan Lamb Koftas (for 4—or 2 and a baby, with leftovers for lunch)

1 T. water
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 T. cilantro, finely chopped
1 T. paprika
1 t. ground cumin
3/4 t. ground coriander
1/2 t. ground cinnamon
3/4 t. salt
1/4 t. freshly ground black pepper
1 pound lamb, or about that

Preheat broiler. Mix all the ingredients and shape into 8 oval patties. Put on a rimmed sheet pan and broil about six inches from the element until browned and cooked through, about 3–4 minutes a side.

Tired, grouchy, and hungry

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but as soon as I told a certain company (cough, AT&T, cough) that my cheap-o Internet plan was plenty fast for streaming music and checking my email, thank you, the connectivity problems began. Now, not only is my cheap-o Internet plan not always fast enough to listen to NPR in the mornings, it also just up and quits on us periodically.

So call me occasionally online or occasionally annoyed or something…

When we get home at 6 and the spouse is at school and the baby is starving and I’m tired and we need to get the bath-time routine rolling, like, now, I freak out a little: Why didn’t I make batches of soup and line individual servings up in Mason jars on my freezer shelf for just these occasions? Why didn’t I steam vegetables on Sunday for snacking and sides all week? Why don’t I have fruit cut into baby-friendly bite-size pieces and neatly tucked into the fridge?

Last night, the Turkey Tail CSA and the veggie peeler made me feel totally together, even when dinner was a warmed-up can of lentil soup and bread dipped into a packaged red pepper-white bean dip. Arugula with curls of Parmigiano-Reggiano,* splashed quickly with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, kosher salt and pepper—it feels fancy and grown-up and healthy, even if your dinner companion is trying out the soup-on-head thing.

The salty cheese balances the sharpness of the greens, and it’s totally not the same grated finely. You must drag a carrot peeler slowly against the edge of your block of cheese, letting the curls drop onto your salad with a bit of drama. Then hurry, hurry, eat—fuzzy pajamas and a lullaby await.

Easiest Arugula Salad

a handful of arugula, bigger stems discarded
Parmigiano-Reggiano
extra-virgin olive oil
balsamic vinegar
kosher or sea salt
freshly ground pepper

Put your arugula in a bowl. Drizzle on a little olive oil and vinegar. (If you need to cut costs, do it with the vinegar. I buy a mid-range balsamic at Trader Joe's, and it works just fine. Although I really don't know what I'm missing: I've never been able to spend $30 on a couple ounces of vinegar. Maybe the heavens would open up, and my world would turn upside down. Better not to know, I say.) Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss a bit. Shave curls of cheese onto your greens with a vegetable peeler. Ahhh, see? You really do have it all together.

*I’ve had friends call me out on spending $15 on a block of real parm at Costco, but I consider it a budget item. We use it sparingly, going so far as to throw the rind in minestrone. And without it, we’d never eat our arugula. Shaking green can grains onto my salad would completely obliterate the joy. (Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate the wonders of fake cheese in context. I salivate just remembering the childhood joy licking Cheeto residue off my fingers. But with this simple salad? Just don’t go there.)

Pizza dough

We came out to our small town last week--put a yard sign up on our fence, proclaiming our choice for president for everyone to see. We had some trepidation; we're in the minority in our neck of the (not quite rural) woods. We anticipated some crude gestures from passing cars, a new chill from next door. But our neighbors have taken it in stride and continue bringing us vegetables from their prolific gardens, waving from their cars as they pass our house.

So I have a new bravery and am ready to come clean: I am a name-brand whore. It's hard when you're poor, when you are a public advocate of limiting consumption, living with less, and you dream of Calvin Klein suits and Tanqueray 10. I get my designer jeans and department store face wash on eBay. I go out of my way to make sure my cream cheese is Philadelphia and my pickles are Clausen. And I drool regularly over the latest models of Cuisinart. It's disgusting, I know.

So it pains me to pull out our food processor--that free, reliable, totally functional thorn in my side. We only have one blade, the brutal cutting one. The lid is cracked in so many places that you have to hold it on manually. But the darn thing works, and makes us pizza weekly and focaccia regularly. And when I can get something as pretty as the bread above out of it, it's much easier to count my blessings.

Pizza Dough (based on a recipe from Mark Bittman)

3 cups flour, a combo of 2 cups white and 1 cup white-whole wheat
2 T. olive oil
1 t. yeast
2 t. salt
1 cup water, approximately

Blend first four ingredients in food processor. Slowly add water until it forms a slightly sticky ball. Knead on a countertop for about 30 seconds and drop into an oiled mixing bowl, turning over to coat dough with oil. Let rise in warm place.

This dough is very forgiving and takes about 5 minutes once you memorize the proportions. W. makes it in the afternoon and lets it rise anywhere from 2 to 5 hours. You can also make it in the morning or the day before and let rise in the fridge. We have pizza night once a week, rolling out two pizzas, topping with whatever we have on hand and baking both at once in the oven, set at 500 degrees, switching places after 5 minutes or so. Dinner and leftovers for lunch the next day.

Or we make focaccia, using an entire recipe to make a thicker bread. The one pictured above is topped with olive oil, coarse salt, black pepper, rosemary, and thinly sliced lemons.

(EDITED TO ADD: Don't stress if you don't have a food processor. Just stir everything in a bowl until you can't anymore and then knead it until it forms a smooth-ish ball. Easy.)

The Goleta Peach that wasn't

I got a recipe in the e-mail. Doesn't this sound good?

The Goleta Peach

4.5 oz peach juice (we mashed up some really ripe peaches and strained out the juice)

3 oz vodka

a bit less than 3oz sugar syrup

9-12 mint leaves

Rebecca adds, "It was pretty sweet and juicy, so you guys might want to use more vodka and less sugar." Does she know us, or what?

I came home ready for a Goleta Peach, reminiscing about the good ol' days at UCSB all the while. (Although we rarely drank anything that required more than a bottle opener.)

And our mint plant? Nothing but several leaves dried to a crisp by temperatures over 100 and smoked into inedibleity by the wildfires. Our vodka, always in stock? Nothing but a drop rattling around in the bottom of the Costco-size bottle. Sugar syrup, so easy to have on hand? Yep, nope.

I gave up. The universe had spoken. It was a night for old faithfuls.


Scotch, ice, Haribo...