The 2011 Food on the Brain Calendar!

For the past few years, I’ve put together a calendar of my photos  – sometimes food, sometimes flowers, or whatever struck my fancy at the time – and given them as gifts. This year, I’ve decided to make it more widely available for anyone who’s interested. I now have a store page on Qoop, and you can order any of the various items directly from them and they’ll print them to order. I’ve used calendars from Qoop myself and they’re very nice quality, wire-bound with heavy paper. One is all food photos, all from this blog in the last year. One is scenery from around Skagit Valley (no tulips, sorry, but there is a shot of daffodil fields) and the last is a self-indulgent selection of kitty cats. Check them out and let me know what you think, or if you’d like to see a different collection – I can put together other designs if there’s interest.

Also, in case you’re in an art shopping mood this Christmas, remember you can buy prints of many of my photos over at my main website, or order them framed directly from me. They make great kitchen art!

horseradish cream

Posting that chicken chiffon pie really took a lot out of me, but I think I’m in recovery. Now we can move on to better, and yummier, things. Like horseradish cream.

I just discovered this easy sauce on Friday – I had gotten a tenderloin out of the freezer for dinner, and was trying to figure out what to cook alongside. I pulled out Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques, which is helpfully arranged both by season and by menu, and found a suggestion of roasted beets with horseradish creme fraiche. We bought some enormous beets recently at the farmer’s market, so that was an easy call, and the sauce sounded fantastic. I walked down to the co-op and picked up a container of creme fraiche. I’ve made this myself in the past, but it takes time to culture so this time I took the easy route. And all I had to do was stir in a heaping spoonful of prepared horseradish and some salt and pepper (Goin adds a few other seasonings, but it didn’t seem necessary). It was SO GOOD with the beets, which we cubed and roasted in olive oil and herbed salt, as well as the steak and the steamed broccolini. And it was good the next morning with latkes, and eaten cold that night stirred into leftover beets. And the tiny bit that’s left is fated to be drizzled over tonight’s beef stew with barley and mushrooms. I’m looking forward to it.

The Chiffon Chicken Pie Adventure

I said I would do it, and here it is: the winner of the Regrettable Food survey, Chiffon Chicken Pie, straight from the pages of The Sunday News Family Cook Book published in 1962. Please tell me I never have to make this again.

The ingredients were not necessarily promising, but didn’t include much “fake food”, and thankfully no MSG. I bought Ritz crackers for the first time in years, and had to hunt a bit to find pimientos. We already had gelatin on hand, as I sometimes use it in mousse cake. I bought a value pack of chicken thighs (no way was I going to use quality organic chicken for this) and roasted them, picked the meat off and made stock from the bones, but I could certainly have bought precooked chicken meat and canned stock, which would probably have been more authentic.

giant apple popover

Here’s a nice breakfast dish that I had forgotten about. Usually when we have apples on hand, if I haven’t already turned them into applesauce, we saute them in butter and serve them as part of a German apple pancake. Last weekend, though, some fresh Jonagolds were crying out to be used and Jon remembered the apple popover recipe from the San Francisco Chronicle cookbook.

We used to make this a lot, and my parents still do (they often throw in blueberries, which is nice). It’s basically a clafoutis, with a lightly sweetened egg batter baked over apples that have been precooked with butter and cinnamon. As with many dishes of this sort, you could use any sort of fruit or seasoning – I haven’t tried pears, but I bet it would be fantastic. Maybe with a little nutmeg?

You never know how this is going to turn out – we never know if it’s to do with humidity, or temperature, or the fruit, or what. Sometimes the whole thing poofs up into a perfect dome, sometimes you get a craggy mountain range. This one refused to rise at all, but produced fantastic caramelized edges. Certainly nothing to complain about. We ate half on Sunday and saved the rest to reheat for Monday breakfast, which worked very well. It would also do nicely as a dessert, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

overabundance

We went to the farmer’s market last Saturday without much of a shopping list. We started out with a plate of Swedish pancakes and sausage, then began picking up a few vegetables – some leeks here, a bunch of carrots there. Then we were undone by Frog’s Song Farm and their offer of a large box stuffed full for $20. We went a tad overboard. On the plus side, we now have winter squash, potatoes and onions to last us quite some time, assuming we remember to use them.

Whenever this sort of thing happens, I have to make a list of all the perishable items we have on hand so I won’t forget about them. And we put together a meal plan for the week that will use as much as possible. So far we’ve eaten the bok choi, the cauliflower, some of the braising greens, one onion, and part of the cilantro. Tonight I’ll melt the leeks for a quiche, and make a Caesar salad. Tomorrow will be a soup to use up the braising greens and some carrots and celery. The squash and beets will keep, so we’ll get to them later.

There’s only one market weekend left, so hopefully we won’t have this problem again for a while. If you’d like to share our difficulties, Frog’s Song should be doing the box deal again next Saturday. Knock yourself out!

the week so far

Autumn is really here. Time to rip up the tomato plants, dig out the garlic bed, and kick off the fall cooking repertoire. I haven’t been posting much of what we’ve been eating lately, not because I don’t have time but because we’re just making the same old stuff that I’ve already posted about in years past. Sometimes I do think, though, that it’s worth seeing what our regular repertoire morphs into with each new season. Some things we make once and never come back to, other dishes get made over and over again, with or without variations, depending on what needs using up. So here’s what’s gone into our eating this week:

Last weekend we were invited to a fabulous party featuring nine fat freshly killed chickens, brined, rubbed with za’atar and slow-cooked over a wood fire. We brought home half of a bird, and the next day turned it into one of the better chicken pot pies I’ve ever made. I mixed the smoky meat with a hot pepper from my garden and lots of peas and carrots, and made a gravy with stock left over from a Moroccan seven-spice chicken, giving it a sweet-spicy edge. With buttermilk biscuits on top, it was amazingly good.

and the winner is…

Yes, the Chiffon Chicken Pie won out, after a neck-and-neck race with both the Norway Strudel and the Mock Chicken Legs. I honestly don’t know whether to feel relieved or horrified. So any way, now I need to go buy some Ritz crackers and pimientos (I seem to have an unopened box of gelatin already), and we’ll make this either later this week or next (we’ve been eating a lot of chicken, I might need a slight vacation before undertaking the pie).

Say, if anyone is still morbidly curious about the other regrettable dishes, I’d be happy to supply you with the recipes for you to try them yourself. No problem!

Caturday with attitude

I’ve hardly been out of the house this week, trying to get work framed for my next show, which means not a lot of non-food-related photos have been taken. The other day I decided to take some new pictures of the cats just for variety, and Mickey obliged by getting up on a stool in the kitchen and looking regal. He’s good at that. We don’t spoil him at all, can you tell?

investigating amaro

On a recent expedition to Seattle, we checked out a liquor store that we hadn’t been to before, down in the Sodo district. Fortunately for us, as our local liquor stores don’t carry much of a selection, the state liquor board website is kept more or less up to date, and we were able to determine that the Sodo store was one of the only places in the state that carried a particular gin we were looking for. As it turned out, they had a happy selection of amaro as well. We picked up a bottle of Amaro Nonino and took it home to experiment.

cooking classes are back

We helped out at Gretchens Cooking School last night for the first time this season. This one was a food and wine pairing, with Jim Kowalski of Farm to Market Bakery doing the food and Renee Stark of Noble Wines providing the drink. Jim has a really nice feel for flavors – if you haven’t checked out his place in Edison I sincerely urge you to do so.

The menu for the class included green salads with tomato-goat cheese crostini, handmade fettucine alfredo with fresh Dungeness crab, and pear-ginger tarts. The salads were drizzled with a maple syrup and balsamic vinegar dressing which was surprisingly delicious, and Renee’s choice of a light French rose was a good match with the goat cheese toasts. I’m not generally a huge fan of green salad, especially when the dressing isn’t tossed with the greens, but this was very good.