an old recipe new again

A million years ago (give or take a bit) I spent a few months in Italy as part of a geology course I was taking. We stayed in a tiny village in the Marche region, with occasional field trips elsewhere. We did most of our own cooking, under the supervision of our professors (one Italian and one American), and our diet was pretty repetitive: fresh rolls from the bakery down the road for breakfast, spread with chestnut jam; also cornflakes stirred into blueberry yogurt. Sandwiches for lunch, made from very hard rolls and very ripe pecorino (we referred to it as the Stinky Feet Cheese). Dinner was always, always pasta, but fortunately there was some variation in the toppings, many of which were really delicious. Some of my classmates put together a small recipe book, and I continued to make many of my pasta sauces from this collection for many years afterwards.

One of these sauces that was in my regular rotation was made up of sauteed eggplant mixed with sun dried tomatoes, chopped nuts and mascarpone cheese. It had a great nutty, savory taste and was a nice change from the endless red sauce/pesto rotation. As J and I started to phase out high glycemic foods from our diet I stopped making pasta for dinner as a regular thing, and the eggplant sauce disappeared from the repertoire.

Last week, though, as we were staring vacantly at grocery store produce with very little inspiration, we saw some eggplants that looked halfway decent, and J said, “What about that eggplant walnut sauce you used to make? What if we did it with meatballs?” And so we did.

spring break!

We are off to the Big Island of Hawaii today, to experience the delights of hot lava, sulfur gas and plate lunch! The garden and this blog will have to get by without me for the next week. As you can see, the garden’s doing pretty well on its own anyway (ignore the weeds), and I’ll have at least one post lined up so the place won’t be completely deserted. I won’t be around to respond to comments, though, unless I stumble across a computer along the way.

But with any luck, I’ll have some great material when I get back!

first time to Tivoli

There’s a new place in Bellingham, but it’s been hard to find out much about it. We heard some gossip about it at Gretchens, then walked by it once just before it opened, when we went up to Bistro Zazou (now defunct, sadly). All we knew was that it was called Tivoli, and the menu was an interesting-sound melange of dishes from Scandinavia, France and Italy, based on the owners’ travels.

Finally, we heard that it was not only open, but fabulous. We took ourselves out to dinner there last week, and I would like to say to any of you in the Bellingham area - go there. It was not only some of the best food we’ve had between Seattle and Vancouver - it was definitely some of the best service. They are doing a beautiful job, and the place was half empty on a Friday night. Go eat there!

asparagus tart

One of my various jobs at work is managing the library’s collection of periodicals. This keeps me splendidly up to date on all kinds of important stuff, like Britney’s latest debacle or who’s crushing on who this week. It also lets me peek at all the food magazines I don’t bother to subscribe to, like Gourmet and Bon Appetit (full disclosure: I do get Gastronomica, Saveur, Cook’s Illustrated, Simple Cooking and Food & Wine (hey, F&W was cheap)). When the latest issue of B.A. crossed my desk I picked it up and flipped through it to get rid of the subscription cards, and was immediately caught by an article on things to do with all the vegetables in your CSA box, by Molly Stevens of All About Braising fame. Not that we get a CSA box (nearly all the farms around here only produce May through October). Sigh. But anyway - the very first recipe was a tart made with asparagus, whole-milk ricotta and comte cheese, and I instantly knew I had to try it.

After some careful searching at the co-op, we were able to come up with whole-milk ricotta, a small chunk of comte cheese, nitrate-free soppressata salami and a bunch of fresh, fat asparagus from California. I had a leftover sheet of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry in the freezer, so that was taken care of. We also picked up a small pack of pork chops to give us some protein with our puff pastry.

cooking class: tapas & paella

Another cooking class at Gretchens, this time focusing on one dish: paella! Knut Christiansen of Paellaworks catering brought his big pan and lots of good stuff to put in it, and Randy Finley of Mount Baker Vineyards brought wine to go along with it all. Paella is something Knut does especially well, even when he’s making it up as he goes along, so it was great fun to watch it all come together. And even more fun to eat it at the end.

Paella takes a while to cook, of course, so to keep people occupied and happy Knut put together some tapas to pass out. One was a leaf of Swiss chard wrapped around a tasty filling of cheese and sausage, paired with a salad of shredded asparagus, olives, chard stems and a tangy tangerine and cinnamon dressing. Everyone ate those immediately, so after that he toasted some crostini in the paella pan, I rubbed it with raw garlic and he swiped a bit of tomato sauce across it. Simple but good. We ate the tapas with two white wines, a blend called Rosetta Blanc and a Viognier (Mount Baker makes a really nice vio).

in the garden: muscari

The grape hyacinths are blooming! They really are invasive, but they carpet large swathes of the garden in bright blue, and they’re pretty easy to pull out if necessary.

Happy Easter to everyone! It feels like spring may actually be here (despite the snow yesterday morning)!

roasted vegetables with an egg on top

We were dying for vegetables after our odd weekend in the Tri-Cities, so we loaded up a shopping cart with mushrooms, onion, fennel, beets, carrot and a parsnip and took it all home to roast with olive oil and salt. I separated out the shrooms and fennel to roast together, parboiled the beets and put them in a pan with the carrot, and put the onion and parsnip in a third pan (J is not a big fan of the parsnip). When everything was caramelized and soft I tossed it all together on our plates, and topped the piles with a lovely halibut steak that I had roasted as well. It was all very fresh tasting and delicious, and made us feel that it was nice to be home (sleeping in our own bed helped, too).

So dinner was nice, but I felt the high point was lunch the next day. I was feeling inspired after seeing this post and video on poaching eggs, as well as months of reading the wonderful blog posts on Last Night’s Dinner featuring beautiful poached eggs on top of duck hash or other yummy things. I had been known to poach an egg occasionally, but usually wimped out and ended up frying them (I’m good at frying eggs, at least) and eating them for breakfast on top of leftover greens or couscous.

But I did it! It’s not as pretty as it could be, but it was perfectly done and it tasted wonderful with the roasted parsnip and beets and such, with the yolk dribbling down and mixing with the sweet vegetables juices. With a good sprinkle of fleur de sel, it was a cheery and restorative lunch.

to Kennewick and back

As some of you may know, I play in an Irish band with J and my parents. Because of that, Saint Patrick’s Day tends to be a bit fraught for us, trying to cram in several performances during the prime “season.” This year we played two concerts, one in Wenatchee and one in Kennewick. Lots of driving, but the weather was clear and, as we usually do when we head out to the Tri-Cities area, we made the most of the chance to visit some of the many, many wineries along the way.

Food-wise, we started out well. The morning after our gig in Wenatchee we drove over Blewett Pass to Ellensburg, home of one of our favorite casual restaurants of all time, the Valley Cafe. The Valley’s been around for ages - my parents took me there when I was a kid - and J and I had the good fortune to live four blocks away from it for two years. Sigh…

Anyway, the Valley continues to be a great place. They specialize in sort of elegant but gooey Italian bistro food, particularly pastas, and they usually have some interesting meat or seafood specials going, and their wine list features loads of the local wineries. I find it a deeply comforting place to eat, but that’s partly because I remember what good care the waitstaff took of me when I would wander over there for lunch on my work break.

cooking class: polenta three ways

Last week we helped out at a great cooking class: Casey Schanen from Nell Thorn restaurant did the cooking and Renee Stark of Noble Wines brought the wine. The theme was polenta in different preparations, which sounds like it would be repetitive, but in fact it was fabulous. Not a surprise, of course - Casey’s cooking is always fabulous.

We didn’t start out with polenta immediately. Casey likes to bring an assortment of nibbles with him, so we assembled a bunch of plates for the guests with marinated olives, cheesy wafers, Nell Thorn sourdough bread and butter. I think putting out the nibbles is a great idea, it keeps the guests from getting antsy while the first course is being demonstrated (the classes start at 6:30 and sometimes no food gets served until 7:30).

in the garden: the first daffodils

The crocuses are kaput, but the daffodils are opening just in time to give the garden some new color. I have some plain King Alfred-style yellow daffodils that are bright and cheery, but I especially love these Jack Snipe dwarf narcissus. They’re short and sturdy (and don’t fall over in the rain, of which we’re having plenty), they’re bright and they smell great. I keep adding clumps of them, but I don’t have nearly enough yet.