Food words

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Chelsea

The words we use when we talk about food, and the attitudes they invoke, positive or negative, intrigue me. For example, “buttery” is a good word. It connotes flaky pastries, dense nut-filled cakes, rich bready desserts or breakfasts. However, “oily” is a bad word, and “greasy” is even worse. Why is that?

(This will seem like something of a non-sequitur, but I promise you’ll see where I’m going here in a paragraph or two.)

I recently saw the Meryl Streep/Amy Adams movie Julie&Julia. While I will leave the review to my friend S., who is good at that sort of thing, I will comment that the food cinematography in the movie is marvelous. I don’t know whether it is always real food they are using or not, but the colors were deep, the textures were luscious, and the sounds (mixing, slicing, carving) were pretty realistic. At one particular point in the movie, as Julie Powell and her husband are sitting down to a dinner of bright red and yellow rustic-looking bruschetta, all six of the women I saw the movie with (including me) said something between “ohhhhh,” “mmmmmmm,” and “yum.” Or maybe all three. So a few nights later, inspired by the bursts of orange from the sungold cherry tomato plant in my backyard, I decided to try out Julie and Eric Powell’s dinner.

Starting with my favorite basic bruschetta recipe, I chopped up one red early girl tomato, a few dozen cherry tomatoes, a peeled and seeded cucumber from the back garden, and a handful of red onion. Then I added julienned basil (backyard again!), salt, pepper, olive oil, and a tiny splash of red wine vinegar. Then I let it sit in the fridge for a few hours while we went about our business.

After watching a dear colleague successfully defend her dissertation and then celebrate accordingly, we picked up a loaf of sourdough bread on the way home and the magic really began. Generally when I make bruschetta, I toast the bread slices in the broiler. However, in her rendition in the movie, Julie Powell (or Amy Adams; I don’t know whether Julie Powell ever actually made this) fried her bread in olive oil. Wanting to stay as true to the beautiful food in the movie as I could, I opted to do the same.

Though some of my bread got a little dark, most of it turned out just fine.

We stacked up the vegetables on the bread, covering every square millimeter possible before biting in and, of course, losing half the tomatoes to the plates below. They squirted down our chins and slicked up our hands, but it was worth it, and here we return to my initial question. The tomatoes were good and juicy, the cucumber was crisp, the basil added the right zing, but the bread was really what made the dish excellent. It absorbed enough olive oil to be a beautiful golden brown color, and the crumbs of each slice became crisp; the perfect surface to stand up to the weight of the tomatoes, but still soak up a little of the juice the vegetables had created. Biting into a slice was a textural experience, because the inside of the bread was still soft, but the crust was crunchy and the outer surfaces were crispy, and the whole thing was deliciously… oily? Oiled? In our low/no-fat culture, obsessed with cleanliness and thinness and sleekness, the idea of oil seems objectively negative. But this was wonderful and delicious and silky and superb. What can I call it? Can we bring back, can we reclaim “oily” to mean what it should mean? That crispness with buttery rich moisture I experienced with our weeknight dinner? I think we should.

Zucchini Days of Summer, Part I

Posted on August 14, 2009 by Chelsea

It’s that time. The days are warm (mostly), the skies are blue (except when they’re cloudy, this is Oregon, after all), and the zucchini are swelling and ripening and filling up the garden with all the grace and timeliness of an animated stubbed toe.

Alright, I confess, that’s not quite fair. I do like zucchini. I’m just discovering, as a first time gardener, how right everyone is about how creative you have to be, and how strong the potential is to get sick of it. So in case you find yourself in similar straits, I’ll share some of my zucchini ambitions with you in what will most certainly be a multi-part series.

Part I is pretty simple: zucchini and mushroom pizza. I like a simple “sauce” on my Boboli crust; just olive oil, garlic (or garlic powder, depending on how tired I’m feeling), dried Italian seasoning, and salt and pepper. I topped this with a layer of Monterey jack cheese, and then stacked up thin slices of yellow zucchini and thick slices of crimini mushroom until you could barely see the cheese underneath anymore. Then I added another thin layer of cheese, some leftover crumbles of feta, and a collection of cherry tomatoes, carefully inserted between vegetables to hold them securely in place. Then, just for an added flourish, I sprinkled the whole thing with chopped chives. Eleven or twelve minutes in the oven, and the veggies are cooked, the cheese is melted and bubbly, the cherry tomatoes are just starting to burst their skins, and dinner is served.

Homegrown Feast

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Chelsea

Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food” (the latter of which is on my wish list, if anyone is so inclined…) has written a New York Times article about the upcoming movie “Julie & Julia,” the show “The Next Food Network Star” and the network from which it springs, and about food and the American mentality for it in general. He considers why food, and cooking, have become spectator sports instead of daily endeavors, and concludes that a combination of increasing work hours, ever advancing kitchen technologies, and endlessly multiplying availability of quick and easy processed foods, are leading us out of the kitchen. However, speculating that the instinctive, reptilian parts of our minds that are always subconsciously searching for sustenance are attracted by the appearance of food being made, we like the Food Network with its fancy presentations, competitive cooking shows, and analyses of restaurants. Though this does not surprise me about American society in general, I am trying to set myself apart from this norm. Hence the blog, the backyard garden, the subscriptions to cooking magazines… I try to pick up techniques and inspirations from Food Network shows, though I do admit to sometimes just enjoying watching someone else do the cooking. However, today was something of a proud moment, considering Pollan’s article, which I read shortly after lunchtime. Today each one of my meals included something homemade or homegrown.

For breakfast I feasted on toast topped by pluot-raspberry jam, lovingly preserved by a friend and colleague. It was glossy and thick and sweet-tart with lumps of fruit inside, my favorite way. I like my jams and preserves to still resemble the fruits they once came from, so they feel a little more real.

Lunch was one of my favorite summertime meals. In celebration of our first full size ripe tomato (we’ve had great luck with the sungold cherries so far, but the big tomatoes are blushing only grudgingly), I picked it, carved it into thick slices, and had myself a juicy, creamy, yummy tomato sandwich. I like my bread toasted, with mayonnaise on both sides to hold in the seeds and tender flesh of the tomato. That’s all. Ungarnished. Unfancy. Fresh and delectable.

Dinner was a big triumph. At my best estimate, about 70% of our dinner came from either my garden, or our neighbor’s. Armed with cherry tomatoes, a few yellow pole beans, green onions, basil, and oregano from my yard, and a cucumber accompanied by a zucchini practically the size of a T-ball bat from our neighbor’s garden, I went to work. I blanched the beans since a few of them were quite long and I was afraid they would be tough, before combining them with the halved sungolds, sliced cucumber, and a cup or two of defrosted frozen corn.

I tossed these with a really simple vinaigrette of just red wine vinegar, some sugar, and a touch of olive oil. Salt, pepper, and a small handful of julienned basil, and the salad was done. I set it aside to marinate while I fixed the main event.

The zucchini was so big that I knew the seeds would be fully developed, so I sliced the monster in half lengthwise and scooped out the seeds, leaving the flesh behind. I added salt, black pepper, and a little olive oil to the flesh before placing the halves in a roasting pan. Per a distantly related recipe I found in a vegetarian cookbook, I added a little water to the roasting pan and slapped some aluminum foil over the top before letting them cook for about fifteen minutes, just to start softening up the flesh. Meanwhile I mixed up the filling. After finely chopping the green onions and oregano from the garden, I mixed them into some goat cheese along with garlic powder and Penzey’s Black and Red pepper mix that I particularly like. When the zucchini halves finished their steam, I took them out, filled them with the cheese mixture, and topped them with considerable mounds of fresh white bread crumbs. Then it was back into the oven for another 25 minutes, when the bread crumbs were suitably golden for my taste.

When they came out, we cut off thick slices and ate them with the salad as a side. The zucchini flesh was tender but still had some texture to it, and I was surprised to find that the skin was not a bit bitter. The goat cheese lent a tangy flavor that was, surprisingly, not so strong that it overpowered the vegetable. The bread crumbs were a nice touch, adding a crunchy texture and toasty flavor to the dish. I think when I make this again (our own zucchini promise that I will), I may add some lemon juice or another acidic flavor to the cheese mixture. I generally like my vegetables with lemon, and the goat cheese has a unique tartness that leads me to believe it would pair well with a squeeze of citrus.

Feeling like a ecologically, environmentally, locally responsible citizen of the world, I can’t help but feel a twinge of longing for ice cream… packaged, processed, hermetically sealed… but maybe I’ll settle for a homebaked blueberry struesel bar instead.

First Bounty

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Chelsea

Though we have been harvesting sugar snap peas by the bowlful for the past few weeks, and though we probably still have enough preparing for maturity on the vine for me to freeze a bagful, it didn’t feel like we really had a harvest on our hands until a few days ago, when I picked these:

I know it seems crazy, and I know I’ll be sick of it before August is over, but despite the heat and despite the impending pounds of zucchini and despite my encouragement to myself to eat better at breakfast time, I couldn’t resist. Despite all that, I made zucchini bread.

As you can see, whether it was the monster zucchini I grated up that exceeded the recipe’s requirement a little bit, or whether it was because my thrift store loaf pan was on the small side, I had extra batter. Fortunately, my sweet little too-seldom-used ramekins called to me from the cupboard, and I heeded their siren song. In addition to the loaf, we also had four big muffin-sized servings. The advantage of this was that they were ready for consumption much sooner, and consume we did. Here’s my serving suggestion:

The recipe I use for zucchini bread right now is from Bon Appetit’s latest cookbook. This isn’t the magazine, it’s the full book, and this particular version is called Zucchini Spice Bread. It has a hefty teaspoon of cinnamon added to the standard mix, and with 2 cups of zucchini as well as a cup of toasted nuts (I used pecans because I was out of walnuts, and may have liked it better with the substitution), it seems like one of the healthier quickbreads out there, as well as using up a decent amount of zucchini. And the flavor. The flavor is stupendous. Since the nuts are toasted, they donate more of a crunch and a warm richness to the bread. Because there is so much zucchini, they don’t dry out the bread too much, which is sometimes a complaint I have about nuts. The zucchini itself is mild but still present, and the bread is not too sweet. It has a nice moist crumb to it but the top gets crusty, so the whole thing is just a medley of textures that I really enjoy. Here’s to the joy of baked goods, the joy of home grown vegetables, and the very special joy of being able to eat them both at the same time!

Hasty Bites 2

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Chelsea

I have tried, in recent months, to create not only a list before going to that temptation-laden den that is the grocery store, but also a meal plan for the week, so that I can see as I shop how the seemingly random ingredients I toss haphazardly into my cart (inevitably squeaky, sticky, or with a bum wheel) fit together.

Of course, this doesn’t always work. Usually I veer off from my established course (from the meal plan, that is. The shopping cart leads me physically astray throughout the voyage) when I hit the produce section. In very late fall and very early spring, my weakness is asparagus. Pencil-thin spears, that woody green color of new growth – at this time of year these bunches of promise not only attract me from a flavor perspective, but they mean something about the weather. Since it is only February, this is sometimes a lie, but they give me something to look forward to – they permit me brief rememberances of what Spring means (in the sense that the weather warms and the sky blues, not that the allergens arrive).

My new favorite way to cook asparagus is not on the stovetop, as Mom taught me, but in the oven.

I snap the stems of the asparagus and combine them, a scattering of cherry tomatoes, two or three minced cloves of garlic, the juice from half a lemon and the juiced lemon half, sliced, on a baking sheet. I toss my veg liberally with olive oil, then add black pepper and sea salt. At 400, a bunch of skinny spears usually takes about 15 minutes to cook. If you’re feeling less technical about the whole thing, once most of the tomatoes have begun to burst it’s a good time to check for doneness.

We had our roasted asparagus with big, beautiful pan-fried salmon filets. Just salt, pepper, olive oil, and a sprinkle of dill on each.