crab feed

I have an article in the current issue of Grow Northwest with some recipes for fresh Dungeness crab, which is in season right now – I know, what a terrible job, right? While I was working on it, some friends pitched in by throwing a crab party so I could try out some new recipes. Also, I had never cooked or cleaned a live crab before (my family always bought them pre-cleaned) so I got to watch the process, as well as eat warm, just-cooked crabmeat. These are good friends.

Before the party, I made up some different dipping sauces to try with both plain crabmeat and with the crabcakes I was going to cook – it seems like everyone serves crab with sweet Thai chile sauce these days and I’m really tired of it. I made a cucumber mignonette, nuoc cham, and a creamy buttermilk dressing that was somewhere between Green Goddess and ranch. I loved all of them with the crab but especially the cucumber, which made a fresh vinegary punch with the rich crabcakes.

Peruvian supper club

I’m a little late getting these photos up, due to no particularly good reason, but all my other food photos are piling up behind so I’d better get these posted! The most recent meeting of our supper club was centered around Peruvian food, with a few other South American influences creeping in. It was a much smaller group for this one, but we still ate very well.

We started, of course, with Pisco Sours, made by Jon, mixed and shaken by hand. Thank goodness we remembered the existence of packaged pasteurized egg whites. We were lucky enough to find a really nice Pisco for this at an unexpectedly swell liquor store in Lynnwood, and they were perfect.

fenugreek leaves

I’ve written about fun things we’ve cooked with fenugreek leaves before, but always using dried, which is all we’d been able to find at our usual haunts. On a recent foray to the Lynnwood H-Mart for kimchi supplies, while hunting through the vast produce area for scallions and ginger, Jon spied pre-packaged bunches of fresh fenugreek. We bought a pack (only 99 cents!), immediately searched through our cookbooks to find an appropriate recipe, and the following evening we made a curry of cubed lamb simmered with warm spices and the fresh fenugreek, served with rice and fried red onion slices. It was SO GOOD.

The lamb, simmering in its gravy, was one of the best-smelling things we’ve ever had in our kitchen, and that’s saying something. Fenugreek is one of those things that makes curry taste like curry, and the overall effect was of wonderful savoriness.

the local pork sandwich

A few weeks ago I went to visit some pigs out at Well Fed Farms. They were happy, handsome pigs, rooting up grasses on the fertile Skagit flats and being fed with apple pressings.

A couple of weeks later we got the call from Silvana Meats, and we picked up half a pig’s worth of fresh pork, neatly packed for the freezer. The smoked meats will be ready later (we’re very excited about bacon).

happy thanksgiving

May your Thanksgiving be warm and cozy! We did our turkey dinner last weekend, so tonight is a little different to keep things interesting: pork roast, spinach gratin, mashed potatoes, and pear-pecorino ice cream. What’s on your table tonight?

rockfish curry

It was a dark and stormy night last night. Here’s what we had for dinner: a rather ugly yellow plateful, true, but very delicious. Following a recipe from 660 curries, I coated rockfish fillets with turmeric, fried them in panch phoran spices (fenugreek, fennel, nigella, cumin, mustard seed), then simmered them with plain yogurt and red onion. This all went over steamed basmati rice and some simple sauteed cabbage with a few spices. The fish had a wonderful fragrance, and all the whole spices exploded in our mouths as we ate. We drank some Chinook Semillon that we had left over from the previous night, then sat by the fire and listened to the rain hammer against the windows.

boozy meringue cookies

If you’re anything like us, you often find yourself in the position of having too many egg whites on hand. This is due entirely to Jon’s tendency to make fabulous homemade ice cream, full of cream and egg yolks, plus our extreme dislike of scrambled egg whites (I’ve tried adding a bit of extra white to regular scrambled eggs, and I’m not crazy about that either). What to do with all those egg whites? It finally occurred to me to start making meringue.

The main way I’ve seen baked meringue is as a pavlova, or the big messy pillows that French bakeries all seem to have piled up in their windows. I wanted a small, bite-sized cookie, so I hunted around and found some recipes to try. The first batch I made, I just spooned out the batter in lumps like drop biscuits, and didn’t bake them quite long enough. They were delicious but very sticky. This last time, I used a piping tube to make evenly sized dollops, then baked them very slowly for two hours and gave them an extra hour in the oven to dry out. They were perfect – crispy to bite into, then melting away. Not to mention adorable. The few remaining cookies that sat out overnight began to get a bit soft, so they were like slightly stale marshmallows – which was kind of wonderful.

pickled lotus root

Recently being in the odd position of having two leftover nodules of lotus root lurking in my fridge (H-Mart sells them in large packs, as it turns out), I looked through all my books for something to do with them besides just tossing them into a stirfry.  A recipe in China Moon
for pickled lotus root jumped out at me, as China Moon recipes tend to do.

Lotus root is a wonderful vegetable – like water chestnut, it stays crunchy no matter how much you cook it, and it has a very mild flavor that works with all sorts of things. Plus it’s really cool looking. I don’t get to cook with it very often, so I definitely didn’t want to let any of this batch go to waste. Pickling seemed like the perfect solution.

pumpkins on the brain

Here it is Halloween again! This year I’m not taking on any extensive cooking projects – I think I’m going to do a risotto with some pumpkin and the chanterelles a friend gave me yesterday, and (by spousal request) a pecan pie. That should be festive enough.

What’s everyone else eating tonight? Besides tiny Twix bars, of course.

street food party

Supper club is back, and we really had a great theme this time – street food! We could easily repeat this theme every year and have a completely different dinner.

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I made a variant of Turkish borek. This was the second version of borek that I’ve tried, from the cookbook Turquoise by Greg Malouf (a beautiful and inspiring cookbook, btw, but somewhat undependable in the ingredient lists and index). Both used the same yogurt and butter rough puff pastry (yum), but the first batch had a filling of steamed squash, herbs and feta. It was good but very subtle, so for the actual supper club I made a lamb and pine nut filling (the same one I use for my lamb pizza) and it worked very well. These guys are dense and rich and kind of a lot of work but well worth playing around with.