a bowl of soba

The other night J was supposed to get pizza at work, so I put together a quick dinner for myself - a bowl of buckwheat soba with egg, scallions and broth. It’s very easy to throw together for one person or ten, and can be flavored however you want.

When I got home from work, I got a container of chicken broth out of the freezer and put it in a pan to melt. I put on another pan full of water for the noodles, and another to boil the egg (you can add the raw egg directly to the hot broth, but I prefer the texture of a soft boiled egg). My method is to put the egg in with the cold water and heat it all up together, then after the water has been at a boil for two minutes I fish the egg out and rinse it under cold water, then shell it and chop it. The noodles (which come in a charming individual serving portion) take around 9 minutes to cook - I just go by feel.

 I put the noodles, egg and scallions in the bowl, top it all up with boiling hot broth, and add tamari and Sriracha sauce to taste. The cooked yolk all falls out of the egg bits and gets mashed up in the broth - that’s the best part, slurping up all the little bits that fell to the bottom. Yum. Try not to fling drops of hot sauce and chicken broth all over your library book.

Oh - and of course, the pizza J was supposed to have for dinner got misdelivered, so I had to take him out for dinner and drink beer to keep him company. Oh, the hardship.

Matzoh ball soup with celery root

We got our first celery root (also called celeriac) of the season at Dunbar Gardens last week! Possibly the ugliest and least edible looking vegetable around, but it has a beautiful, delicate celery flavor. I love what it does for chicken soup, especially matzoh ball soup.

I didn’t have matzoh growing up - I don’t think I even saw it until I went to a seder in California when I was 21 (yes, I was the youngest person there - I got to read the questions!) So I don’t have many preconceived notions of what matzoh ball soup should be like - I know it’s traditionally just carrots, chicken stock and matzoh balls, but I like my soup to have a little more oomph. So I generally put chicken meat in, and usually celery root for flavor and peas or spinach for color. For the balls, I just follow the recipe on the box - matzoh meal, eggs, oil, seltzer and salt, mix with a fork, leave in the fridge for an hour while you get the soup going. No big secret family recipe. Unless my family wants to give me one, of course…

Note about cutting up celery root: it’s so knobbly and hairy that it doesn’t pay to be overly careful. I just whack the edges off so it becomes a sort of cube, then dice from there.

lunch at the Kemper

Options for the day after Thanksgiving tend to be limited, assuming you’re not interested in hurling yourself into the shopping fray. When we spend the holiday in Kansas City we almost always do the same thing on Friday - go to an art museum. The Nelson-Atkins is awesome, of course, but it’s a lot of museum to get hit with at once. I prefer the Kemper Modern Art Museum, which is small, manageable - and free!

We spent the morning looking through the museum, the main exhibit being some rather odd works from East Germany, and I got to visit my favorite painting in the collection. We had lunch in the museum’s restaurant, which is called Cafe Sebastienne. It’s really pretty good, and a nice setting, too - most of the tables are in an open, glass-ceilinged courtyard so it’s very bright and airy.

J ordered the Arctic char with cauliflower puree, chard and a maple-bourbon sauce. He doesn’t usually go for fish in restaurants, but we were able to buy char at our local fish counter a few months ago and were very taken by it. This seemed nice, the fish was a little overcooked by my standards but the flavors were interesting.

Kansas City barbecue

The west coast has barbecue. Really, it does exist! I can’t claim to be a qualified BBQ connoisseur, but there are at least two good places to get real barbecued ribs and brisket within fifty miles of our house: one is the Skagit River Brewery, which does its own barbecue out back of the restaurant - I walk through the wonderful woodsmoke scent of it every morning. They do a very untraditional peach-jalapeño sauce that somehow works fantastically, and I’ve probably ordered their brisket sandwich at least two dozen times. Then there’s the Depot Smokehouse in Everett, which has got to be the best kept secret in Western Washington - it’s always mostly empty when we go and the food is just fantastic. Try the chili. And the pulled pork. Heck, try everything, you’ll like it.

Otherwise, I admit, the pickings are pretty slim. We were going to try a place in Burlington called Double Barrel BBQ, but it burned down the week we were going to go there. Most of the Seattle joints don’t get real good reviews - I liked that the OK Corral had collards on the menu but I didn’t care for the big jug of Kool-Aid that was the only beverage available. So you can see why we like visiting Kansas City!

The joy of cranberry sauce

One of the things I like about spending Thanksgiving with our Kansas City relatives is the wide assortment of cranberry sauces. I grew up with basic boiled cranberries and sugar, and I still consider that the most elemental form of cranberry sauce. I know plenty of people swear by the canned stuff, but it makes me think of canned beets and (sorry to all you canned-cranberry-or-beet eaters) I just can’t do it.

But the other kind - the sauce in the pretty glass dish in the picture - is my personal favorite. I still make the boiled kind for everyday, but for Thanksgiving I have to have this. I don’t know Aunt Sheryl’s personal recipe, but when I make it myself I use the Joy of Cooking’s Uncooked Cranberry Relish recipe. It’s very simple, just put into a food processor and grind up:

• 4 cups cranberries
• 1 whole orange
• 2 cups sugar

That’s it! It’s fresh, bright, tart and fantastic with turkey and stuffing. Joy says to let the whole thing “ripen” for a couple days before eating - doesn’t seem strictly necessary, but maybe it makes it even better, who knows?

In the garden: still a little color out there

The garden is looking pretty bleak this week, but here’s a shot of holiday color - rosa glauca hips in front of a small euphorbia. The rose is just covered with hips this year - it’s one of my cherished plants from Heronswood and it’s done splendidly.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We’re off to Kansas City for turkey and barbecue! Happy Thanksgiving and I’ll be back next week!

Photo by Curt Gibbs/ExperienceLA

Chicken pot pie

Last week we suddenly had a hankering for pot pie. Once something like that gets in your head, you just have to go with it, so I made one for Sunday night dinner. We used to eat this embarrassingly often, and I am likewise embarrassed to admit that I always used to make it with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. I have since decided that I don’t need to put that much salt and MSG into my system, so I did this one from scratch. It could have used a touch more salt, but I think it was the best pot pie I’ve ever produced. Comfort food extraordinaire!

I like my pot pie topped with drop biscuits, and my favorite biscuit recipe of the moment is the Buttermilk Biscuits from Kitchen Sense by Mitchell Davis. As long as I had the book out I ended up loosely following his recipe for pot pie, as well. I ignored some of his seasoning suggestions and did not put in any sherry. Here’s the version I made, more or less:

Breakfast clafoutis

This recipe has an interesting (to me) backstory. Years back, I had come into possession of some random issues of Home & Garden magazine, which I mostly looked at for the photos of unattainably beautiful and enormous gardens. One of them, though - I believe the November 1992 issue - had a story about going out to pick fresh cranberries in Maine and bringing them home to make clafoutis for breakfast. The recipe seemed simple (minus the fresh-picked cranberries - not so common out here), so I tried it, and it became a solid staple in our breakfast repertoire. I barely noticed the author of the article.

Much later, my father was reading Jim Harrison’s remarkable book The Raw and the Cooked, and noticed that he was constantly singing the praises of someone named John Thorne, calling him the finest food writer in America. That’s interesting, we thought, we’ve never heard of him. So when I happened across one of his books (Pot on the Fire) I snapped it up, and I found his website and went through it. He is indeed an amazing food writer - I have since subscribed to his newsletter and bought my father every single one of his books. And I discovered that in one of his earlier books, there’s a recipe for a cranberry clafoutis. The very same one that we’ve been making all these years! So I am very happy to attribute this recipe, correctly, to John Thorne and his wife, Matt Lewis Thorne. I don’t remember if the Grand Marnier is my own idea or not. Probably not.

Lamb-apricot tagine with Lebanese couscous

Saturday was another nasty, cold, wet, blustery day - perfect for a stew. We had some lamb in the freezer, already cleaned and cut up for braising, and I felt moved to make a tagine. A few years ago I bought J a copy of Claudia Roden’s book on Middle Eastern food, but we’ve actually made very little progress through it with the exception of two tagine recipes, one with preserved lemon and one with apricots. They’re both excellent, so maybe someday we’ll try something else from the book.

 Anyway, this time I felt like making the apricot one. I got started shortly after 4:30 pm when we got home from errands, and dinner was ready around 7 - not really a workday dinner for us, but fun for the weekend. The tagine is really straightforward: I began by sauteeing a chopped onion in a glug of olive oil for awhile, until soft but not browned. I added cinnamon, cumin and a bit of cayenne pepper, then added sliced ginger, garlic and the defrosted lamb chunks and salted and peppered them liberally. Once they were browned I added water just to cover, brought it to a simmer and covered the pan. It burbled away on the lowest heat setting for about an hour while I did other things. Then I tossed in about a half pound of whole dried apricots, stirred it up and covered it again. About 20 minutes later I added a can of chickpeas, left the lid off so the liquid could boil down slightly, and started on the couscous.