grill me an oyster

Finally, a beautiful day! We celebrated by going on food safari, as Jen from Last Night’s Dinner puts it (I’m adopting that phrase, it’s perfect). We had visited the farmer’s market the day before and gotten a bunch of goodies, but on Sunday we drove out Chuckanut for further supplies. We got mussels and Kumamoto oysters at Taylor Shellfish, a loaf of farmer bread from the Breadfarm (plus what may have been the world’s best macaroon), and a completely gratuitous chorizo sausage from Slough Food (hey, as long as we were in there…) We took our haul home, fired up the grill, opened up some wine and settled in to eat shellfish.

strawberries

At last, we have local strawberries! J went out to Sakuma Brothers last week and bought our first Skagit Valley strawberries of the season. They were huge, juicy and sweet - a totally different animal from the California berries for sale in the grocery store. I know that there are great strawberries in California - we used to buy them at the Santa Barbara farmer’s market every week - but they never make it up here.

What did we do with our fresh berries? Apart from eating one every time I walked by the box, that is? Strawberry shortcake, naturally.

in the garden: Junuary

This month has been so depressing here in the Northwest, people have started called it Junuary. The sun has appeared a few times, but it’s mostly been in the low 50s and raining. Ugh. The only way to know that it’s really June is that the foxgloves are blooming, in spite of it all.

chicken with lemongrass and lime leaf

It may not look like it from the picture, but this was really good (taking appetizing pictures of stewed chicken can be mighty tricky).

The library recently acquired a copy of the book 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer. I checked it out, we made two recipes out of it and promptly bought our own copy. It’s a great book, written in a humorous, comfortable tone and full of a huge selection of curries from all over India. I knew I had to have it when I had counted something like 15 different recipes for okra.

Last weekend at the farmer’s market we were thrilled to find fresh lemongrass at the Hedlin farmstand. This was exciting enough that we searched our cookbooks looking for something that would really show off the flavor, and we landed on this lemongrass-lime leaf chicken curry from the new book. J made it while I was at work, and let me tell you - the house smelled really good when I got home. He also took all these pictures, since I wasn’t around - so yeah, I’m really just the reporter on this one.

First he marinated whole boneless chicken thighs in ginger, garlic and salt.

cooking class: cream sauce, anyone?

A lovely, but very rich, set of recipes from Normandy, presented by chef Peter Belknap. For some reason we didn’t need to wash nearly as many dishes as usual - very relaxing!

The kickoff was a very tasty salad of mixed greens topped with sweet spiced walnuts, apple and pear slices, a garlicky/mustardy vinaigrette, and a slice of baguette that had been spread with goat cheese and broiled. I could eat this sort of thing every day. A viognier was poured to go with this, which was a nice match.

Matt’s in the Market

Before last weekend, we had been to Matt’s in the Market twice: once before the remodel, for gumbo and the best catfish sandwich of my life, then once after the expansion with guests, for a nice enough lunch with a lot of attitude from the waiter. So we had gotten this idea of the new Matt’s as a sort of hip, interesting place to bring out-of-towners but not really anything special. Our last visit proved us wrong.

We had just wandered up out of the market after sharing a plate of really delicious mussels at Place Pigalle. We had landed a nice table there, by an open window looking out at the raincloud settling over Elliott Bay, and the food and wine were lovely, but it just didn’t suit our mood somehow - too quiet, maybe. So we went looking for somewhere a little more lively. Shea’s Lounge (just down the hall from Matt’s) was a possibility, but after looking at both menus we were caught by the salt cod-stuffed piquillo pepper rellenos on Matt’s appetizer list. We scored seats at the chef’s bar, where we could see salads being mixed and octopus being grilled, and settled in to agonize over the menu.

in the garden: red flowers in the rain

A major drawback of this part of the world is that June is rainy. Every year. And everyone gets grumpy, because they made through the long gray winter and they’re READY FOR SUMMER! But despite the nice weather we have for parts of May, June is persistently cold and wet, and often stays that way until the fourth of July. It makes me grateful for brightly colored flowers in the garden, and the geums on the deck are particularly bright - the orange ones have been blooming for a couple of weeks, and the red ones have just opened: little scarlet blooms dance on long flexible stems, weaving through the foliage of other plants and seeding themselves into all the other pots.

Eventually it will get warmer and drier and the lilies will bloom. In the meantime, we have geums.

 

tofu is delicious food

We don’t have tofu at home real often - I usually get my fix ordering it deep-fried in Thai restaurants - but when we do, one of my favorite ways to eat it is with broccoli and peanut sauce. I remember we made a sort-of version of this back in college, when I lived in a vegan interest house on the edge of campus. One day we discovered we had left our shipment of tofu out on the porch…in Minnesota. In January. In case you haven’t done this yourself, let me tell you that frozen tofu takes on a really interesting texture, kind of like a hardened sponge. It’s not entirely unpleasant, and actually it was such a nice change from the usual that we all got very enthusiastic about it for a while. Anyway, we would cut it into cubes and toss it up with broccoli and peanut butter and rice, and it was good and more filling than a lot of the things we cooked in that house (I often had to eat a peanut butter sandwich after dinner just to get through the night).

My current version is, I hope, a little more carefully put together. We only recently discovered how good buckwheat soba is in this dish, but I like it a lot - the creamy sauce and tofu against the earthy bite of the noodles is great. Brown rice works well, too.

a cheering supper

Coming home a bit late one evening, I was tired and slightly grumpy at having spent much of a lovely afternoon indoors. We were hungry and wanting to make the most of the remaining evening, but there was no food at home. We thought quickly and did a fast swing through the grocery store before heading home and bought ground lamb, whole wheat pita breads (from a local company!) and a fresh cucumber - I had recently been reading through my copy of My Bombay Kitchen and had some idea of making parsiburgers with lots of fresh mint. J, however, wanted to try a recipe from his Street Food book, packing spiced lamb onto skewers and grilling it.

The kebabs were a mixed success - they were very very delicious, but the soft lamb mixture didn’t want to cling to our narrow metal skewers and threatened to fall off every time they were moved.

farmer’s market season!

The farmer’s market is here again, hurrah! Opening day was bright and sunny, which seemed auspicious. It’s too early for much in the way of vegetables, but we did our best. Our first stop, before we got too weighed down by purchases, was the pancake booth.

Dora’s, a locally based family-run affair, does Swedish pancakes (just like white-flour crepes) with lingonberry butter, sausages, and sometimes homemade pies. Always fantastic.