food as big as your head

We drive over Stevens Pass with some frequency, a trip that usually takes us 2 ½ or 3 hours and often requires a stop for sustenance along the way. Often that means the School Bus for barbecue, cornbread and hot pinto beans, or on the way home we may push on for Fred’s Rivertown Alehouse in Snohomish, but other times it means the Sultan Bakery. It’s not fancy, the service is slow, there’s not much to drink except coffee and water, and they have a definite tendency to run out of the very thing I was craving, but they make the best old-fashioned sour cream doughnuts I’ve had anywhere, and their sandwiches are as big as your head. Maybe bigger.

The menu here is flexible, with separate items written on a variety of white boards and set out or taken down as necessary. You can pretty much always count on there being tuna or plain deli meat sandwiches, with tomato soup or chili or maybe split pea to go on the side. They usually have French Dip or open-face turkey sandwiches, although not always, and depending on time of day there may be both breakfast sandwiches and a prime rib plate with mashed potatoes. We have tried some of their hot food, but every time we stop here I secretly hope they’ll have either the egg salad or the BLT.

Here’s what we got last weekend. I normally prefer my BLTs on thin toasted sourdough bread, but the Sultan Bakery’s country white bread is an exception. It’s like ultra-Wonder bread, cut so thick you think you’ll never fit it in your mouth, but squishing down to almost nothing. It’s exceptional for egg salad, as it molds around the filling without coming apart, but it’s also excellent with tuna or bacon. And as you can see, a single sandwich can easily feed two people. I saw a turkey sandwich across the room that looked nearly twice as big as this one – I believe a to-go carton was required for that.

The tomato-basil soup is deceptively heavy, being so laden with cheese you can almost stand a spoon up in it, and as I recall the chili is equally solid. The sandwiches here used to come with a really good goopy macaroni salad, but unfortunately that’s been discontinued. However, getting sufficient calories is not going to be a problem. And if you are still hungry after lunch, there are always doughnuts. Or cookies, or brownies, or turnovers, or bearclaws, or…

eggplant mush

Hardly a glamorous name for a dish – actually it’s so unglamorous we sometimes forget how much we like this. A concoction we made up ourselves, it consists only of roasted eggplant, butter, and onions. There are all sorts of other things you could add, but somehow it never seems necessary. Its toasty sweetness goes perfectly alongside spicy Indian food or something simple like a pork chop, or with middle-eastern flavors like lamb kebabs and yogurt.

Baked eggplant is a real revelation if you’ve never tried it. Once the insides are soft, they can be scooped out and added to all sorts of things. Baba ganoush is made this way, or you can stirfry the cooked eggplant with curry spices. It completely gets rid of the eggplant’s bitterness and spongy texture, leaving you with a dish that is both silky and sweet. It’s especially a good thing to do with the big purple grocery store eggplants when you can’t get fresh local ones – we find that the two of us can eat two eggplants very quickly this way.

Eggplant Mush

• 2 large eggplants
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1 onion, diced
• kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 400°. Prick the eggplants all over with a fork, set them on a baking sheet (line it with foil to make cleanup easier) and bake until wrinkled and soft, 30-50 minutes depending on their size. Cut them open lengthwise and let cool slightly.

Melt the butter in a heavy skillet and add the onion. Cook slowly until soft and golden. Scrape the eggplant flesh out of its skin and add it to the onions. Turn the heat to low and cook, stirring frequently, until the eggplant has broken down and incorporated with the onion – perhaps 20 minutes or so. Salt to taste and serve.

food photography

For the last two months I’ve been taking a course at PCNW in studio lighting. Except for the portrait assignment, we’ve been able to choose our own subjects, so I’ve mostly been going into the studio with a bag of produce. Vegetables sit still and don’t twitch while you’re moving lights around.

It’s been a lot of fun, and great to see how studio light can mimic daylight or look very different depending how you use it. I’ve come up with a few images that I really like while doing homework for this class.

Some of them, like the squash and citrus shots above, are framed and hanging up at Chuckanut Brewery in Bellingham. They’ll be there through March 19th if you want to stop by and take a look, or you can meet me on Wednesday the 9th when I go in for “Art Night”. Let’s drink beer and talk about photography!

The 30 Day Beer Challenge

I live in Mount Vernon. It’s a small town in a rural county in northwestern Washington State, built at the site of an old log jam on the Skagit River back in the 1800s. People in Seattle have heard of it, either because they’ve come up here for the annual Tulip Festival or because they’ve driven by on I-5, but most of them never stop in town. Which means that it’s still rather a well-kept secret that our small downtown is one of the best places to drink beer of, well, pretty much anywhere.

We have two breweries, Skagit River and North Sound. Then there are the pubs: the Empire Alehouse, the Trumpeter Public House, and the Porterhouse. All have multiple rotating taps, as many as twenty-one at a time, almost entirely West Coast microbrews. From our house we can walk to four of these pubs and drink some of the best beers available. It’s pretty sweet.

Last year, wanting to raise awareness of the local beer possibilities, encourage responsible drinking and promote downtown businesses, our friends Lyra and Ryan Morrison attempted something they dubbed the 30 Day Beer Challenge. The idea was to drink a different beer every day in March, staying within the downtown area of Mount Vernon. Given the options, it was extremely easy. So this year they’re doing it again, with a twist – they can’t repeat any of the beers tasted last year. And they’re bringing in some help, including us.

Every day this month, at a predetermined pub, representatives of the Beer Challenge will show up and drink their chosen beer. A brief review will be submitted to the team leader for online publication and discussions will be held on the beer’s merits (or just beer in general), with public participation encouraged. You can follow along on Facebook, Twitter or by text. Or you can just come out and have a beer with us. Jon and I will be at the Empire tomorrow night, March 3rd, and at Skagit Brewery on the 24th (not to mention our band playing at the Empire on St. Patrick’s Day – and there’s a special local beer release that night, too). What beers will we be tasting? You’ll have to wait and see.

a few minor difficulties

After a really odd week of record snowfall, record cold, cancelled school and lots of snow shovelling, we decided to treat ourselves by making a weekend supper of fried chicken, biscuits and collard greens. The fried chicken was inspired by my latest library find, Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller – a gorgeous, heavy, hunger-inspiring book. The chicken, which called for brining followed by double-coating, seemed a bit more involved than the buttermilk fried rabbit I made a few months ago, but very doable. Well, it was indeed, but unfortunately my brain wasn’t fully in gear and we hit a few bumps along the way.

First came the brine for the chicken. I hadn’t read the recipe in its entirety, or I would have realized the brine needed to be assembled, boiled and chilled ahead of time. On Saturday morning I went to put the chicken to brine and panicked at the listing of five lemons and a whole head of garlic, then calmed down and realized we only needed a quarter recipe for the amount of chicken we had. I made a few adjustments, combining kosher salt with water, one and a half lemons, four bay leaves (carefully plucked from the cold-shocked, snow-buried tree in the backyard), two cloves of garlic, some peppercorns, and the top half of the picked-over bunch of parsley we had left in the fridge. I brought all this to a boil, then stuck the pot into the snow on the deck to chill it as quickly as possible. At least all that stupid snow was good for something.

snow days

What do you do when life dumps 18″ of snow on top of you and everything comes screeching to a halt? You shovel until you can’t move, turn up the house heat, and make cocktails. At least that’s what we did. It worked very well.

oh, fishcakes

Last week I got an inexplicable craving for salmon cakes. This has been one of our standard pantry dinners for years – cheap, easy and healthy – but we hadn’t had it for a while. I made an executive decision and picked up a can of Alaskan salmon at the co-op.

Oddly enough, this may have been the first time I ever made fish cakes myself. My husband and I have divisions of labor in the kitchen, not always logical, and he’s generally in charge of curries, Thai beef stirfry, burgers, kebabs, and salmon cakes. He must have been busy with something else on this occasion, since I ended up making them myself. Fortunately for me, these are really, really simple. We use a recipe from the Joy of Cooking as our base, then add flavorings as we please. This batch was very basic, as I was also cooking Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes and wasn’t really focusing.

The version I made was just canned salmon (with a little skin and bone mashed in – I rather like the texture, and it’s full of calcium), matzo meal, egg, salt, pepper and parsley. Other times we’ve added red pepper flakes, herbs, or breadcrumbs instead of matzo, but I wouldn’t say we’d gotten really inventive with them. We usually make garlic mayonnaise to liven things up. What do you think would be good in fish cakes?

Salmon Cakes

Adapted from Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer. Easily scaled up or down depending on the size of your can of salmon.

• 2 cups canned salmon meat, with or without skin and bones
• 1/2 cup cracker crumbs or matzo meal
• 2 eggs
• salt
• pepper
• chopped parsley

Mash all the ingredients together in a bowl. Shape into patties and fry in butter or oil until browned. Serve hot with garlic mayonnaise.

good use of leftovers

As I suspected, the leftover porcini-tomato sauce from the hunter’s chicken (which we ate all the chicken out of immediately) was really swell with the addition of freshly made oven-baked pork meatballs. And there was yet another reiteration for breakfast the next day, with – you guessed it – an egg on top. The effect was rather like the classic English breakfast, served in a jumble: mushrooms, tomatoes, sausage, and eggs. This is obviously a versatile sauce, and I can definitely see making it again just to go with pork.

hunter's chicken

Last night I tried a recipe for hunter’s chicken from my friend Jen over at Last Night’s Dinner – a dish that earned her major kudos from the Food52 community. We served it with sauteed chard and soft polenta, and it was warm and comforting for a stormy evening. Leftovers were even better for lunch today.

It has a savory base of dried porcini and fresh crimini mushrooms, onions, grated carrot, sweet vermouth and red wine, and it really is the perfect dish to serve over polenta. We’ve eaten all of the chicken out of it, and I’m rather excited to use the remaining sauce as a vehicle for pork meatballs. I’ll let you know how that goes.

As it happened, it was an apropos evening to be making one of Jen’s recipes, as she had a rather major announcement yesterday over on her blog. Congratulations and the very best of luck to Jen and Michael!

happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your Valentine, whoever they may be. We celebrated last night instead of today, so I’d have time to cook up one of our favorite meals: seared lamb chops, garlicky white beans and a big pile of lacinato kale cooked in the bean liquid, risotto-style. For tonight we have a pot of soup that can be heated up when we get home – nothing fancy.

What’s everyone else doing for dinner tonight?