Breadbasket

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It has been a yeastless week.

I must confess a culinary secret: I am afraid of yeast.This is silly, and it is something I want to amend.One of my many New Year’s resolutions this past winter was to conquer one food fear.2008 has seen me conquer the pie crust.I think yeast will be next.

However, fear of yeast does not prevent me from making a number of really delicious baked goods.With an exam approaching, my oven is calling to me on a more and more frequent basis, and in preparation for a small dinner party we went to last night, I made Brownie Chunk Cookies.

This is a recipe from Bon Appetit magazine, a wedding gift that has kept on giving, and boy are we grateful!The really delightful thing about this recipe is that it involves two baking projects.First I made Old Fashioned Brownies (also from Bon Appetit), which turned out really fudgy and dense.They had excellent flavor, but eating them by themselves required large glasses of milk.However, the cookies call for ½ a recipe of the brownies, so after eating some and pawning off the rest at a study session, I cut up the remaining brownies into small chunks and mixed them and a cup of chopped walnuts into the cookie batter.The result is delectable.Topped with vanilla ice cream is even better.

Tonight I made our favorite biscuits: cheese and black pepper biscuits with herbs.This is really a method recipe rather than a strict set of ingredients.I use Bisquick’s heart healthy biscuit recipe, but add a good amount of ground black pepper, half a cup of grated cheese, and a few tablespoons of some herb.Tonight’s additions were an aged sharp cheddar we had left from some cheesy project, and finely chopped green onions.I sprinkle the tops with sea salt and bake them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.They are best eaten soon after removal from the oven.If they still steam when broken in half, you’re doing something right.

Derridean BBQ

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Call me a post-structuralist, but since arriving in graduate school and submerging myself in contented and sometimes even enthusiastic nerdiness, I’ve become intrigued with the idea of slippage. How can words with clear definitions become other words? On a lesser but related note, I’ve always been fascinated with what must be the gradual process of how nouns become verbs and vice versa. The focus of this discussion, of course, is Barbecue. It being Labor Day weekend, the natural assumption to this Oregonian is that barbecues will take place. However, barbecue is, rightfully and literally, neither the name of an event, nor is the accurate word for the type of cooking that I assume will take place at the gathering I have just been to. Before we get to the food, let’s have a brief history lesson, shall we?

Thanks to the ever faithful Food Network, and of course the estimable wisdom of Wikipedia (yes, I’m a bad graduate student!), I know that there are primarily two methods of outdoor cooking in the US. Barbecue generally refers to a slow, often all day process of indirect heat and smoke, often achieved within a large, enclosed apparatus that looks nothing like the “BBQ” you can buy at Home Depot or Target. Grilling, on the other hand, is the process that involves placing meat on a rack over charcoal or propane heat and cooking it quickly, directly over the flames. Why, then, do we not say that we’re going to a grill? Perhaps because the tradition of barbecue as a slow process is uniquely American. Perhaps this is a square versus rectangle argument. Perhaps I should start telling people that I’m going to a grill, and add this new noun to the dubious regional dialect I find myself immersed in.

So, for the Grill that I attended last night, I decided to go simple and, knowing there would be ample meat for the tasting (and glorious glutting), I made a panzanella salad. Stepping this traditional bread and tomatoes salad up a few notches with the addition of local mesclun greens, basil, cannellini beans, and parmesan cheese makes it almost fit to be a meal in itself. But I still ate one of the hand made lamb and goat cheese burgers.

Panzanella salad

Toss together in a large salad bowl:

4-6 cups bagged mixed greens (I used a mesclun mix from the local Farmers’ Market)

1 pint cherry tomatoes or 3-4 tomatoes cut in bite-size pieces (I used Sungolds from the Farmers’ Market)

¼ cup julienned basil (from my backyard basil plant)

1 can white beans, drained and rinsed

½ cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

1/3 cup balsamic vinaigrette (my recipe follows)

2 cups freshly baked sourdough croutons (my recipe follows)

Vinaigrette:

Squeeze of spicy brown mustard

A few tablespoons balsamic vinegar (To make it extra special, I use a locally made Raspberry Balsamic)

Whisk in enough extra virgin olive oil to equal 1/3 cup of dressing

Croutons:

Cut about ½ of a sourdough baguette into bite size chunks, scatter onto a cookie sheet and spray liberally with an olive oil cooking spray. Bake in a 400° oven for 10-15 minutes or until all pieces are golden brown and crisp to the touch.

In addition to the lamb burgers, which were cooked only to medium and therefore excruciatingly delicious (N. likes his meat very well done, and pink interiors make him nervous, which means the pink and juicy center is reserved for special occasions for me), we ate a delicious spicy cream cheese dip on tortilla chips, a pesto and cherry tomato pasta salad, locally made (I think) vegan peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies, and a cocktail I invented with the help of my backyard bounty; essentially a blackberry mojito without the mint. I was encouraged to name my creation, and told in no uncertain terms to remember it so I could make it again, and so my rough estimates follow below.

Blackberry Crush

6-8 very ripe blackberries

1 TB sugar

1 TB lime juice

1-2 oz. white rum (or to taste)

Ice

Club soda or other sparkling mixer

Muddle together the blackberries, sugar, and lime juice at the bottom of a pint glass. Add rum, ice, and top up with club soda. Garnish with a lime slice and a few whole blackberries, skewered and balanced on the edge of the glass.

Happy Labor Day weekend!

Summer comfort food

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The woman at right is my Aunt Nancy.

Just below her is one of the many, many reasons I love her.

My slow-cooker and I have a Machiavellian relationship. I want desperately to love it, but I fear it. My reasoning for this is, like many of my food fears, mostly irrational. Shortly after acquiring said slow-cooker, I created a disappointingly leathery pot roast. From that day forth until two or three nights ago, I’ve been wary of the beast, and it has sat in a cabinet. However, a few days ago I embarked on Nancy’s slow-cooker baked beans recipe that I’ve adored and coveted for a number of years now, and I can say with surety that I’m no longer afraid (I think), as it came out perfectly.

The mixture of beans is great, and despite the 6 hours of cooking time, they keep their texture very well. Imagine the little bowl of frijoles de la olla that you get as a side at some TexMex places. Though our baked beans do not remotely resemble those frijoles in taste, the final texture is fairly similar. The beans hold their shape, but the liquid ingredients create a kind of mix between a sauce and a glaze, and somehow hold the beans in a kind of suspended animation of glory.

Nancy’s Crockpot Baked Beans:

1 can baked beans (all cans between 14-16oz).

1 can lima beans

1 can butter beans

1 can kidney beans, rinsed

½ lb. bacon, cut up and fried

1 large onion, sautéed in bacon grease

1 c ketchup

1½ – 2 c brown sugar

2 tsp vinegar

Drain and rinse lima, butter, and kidney beans only (baked bean liquid is necessary for the sauce). Mix all ingredients together. Either cook in a slow cooker for about 6 hours (add a ladle of water if they seem dry), or bake in the oven in a 2 qt casserole at 350o for 1 hour.

I’ve thought about ways you might amend this recipe to be vegetarian, and I think it just wouldn’t be as good. The bacon adds necessary elements of flavor. The sauce becomes quite sweet from the ketchup and brown sugar, and though bacon can also be somewhat sweet, the meaty flavor does contribute something to the finished product, cutting through the starchy beans and the syrupy sauce. Maybe it’s a smokiness that the beans can’t quite develop sans pork product. In any case, the closest I’ve come so far to developing a theoretical veggie version is maybe experimenting with flavored vinegars, rather than the standard white.

In any case, the final result according to the recipe is a bubbling mass of sweet, protein-packed goodness. It’s like edible magma that warms you up from inside. In a way, the flavor reminds me a little bit of that sweet red bean paste that sometimes comes in steamed buns. I served this with sautéed cabbage and peppercorn crusted pork loin. Drool.

Of new blogs and backyard berries

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Prince Harry and Falstaff banter about blackberry picking and blackberry eating in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part I. Alchemically, blackberries have properties of promoting wealth and protecting the eater from evil. Galway Kinnell’s poem Blackberry Eating, from which this blog’s title is taken, remembers the propensity of swollen, shining black blackberries, overripe and almost frozen on a cold morning, to fall unbidden to the speaker’s tongue. Then he curiously likens this involuntary offering for digestion to words, especially “certain peculiar words” that sometimes emerge. Now that September approaches, now that several substantial harvests have kept me in blackberries through the summer, I know that those small clusters of berries only beginning to flush red today will come full and ripe at the end of next month, and perhaps I can experience Kinnell’s comparison.

For today, however, the likeness between late September berries and unexpectedly summoned words will have to suffice as an analogy for this, a blog focused on sharing my culinary and gardening adventures. Welcome. Enjoy.