{14 August 2010}

last night, hungry and stymied by choices inside the trader joe’s booze aisle, i bought two bottles of wine: the first, because it claimed to have flavors of: “cigars, leather, chocolate, and earth.” i couldn’t imagine why i’d want my food to taste like cigars, but curiosity overcame me. as Ben put it, looking at the label, “one of these things is not like the other.”

this got me to thinking about the adjectives used to describe wine. which led me to this graphic, which I like very much, though it contains a long list of other things i’m not sure i want my wine to taste of, including: yeast, camphor, tar, smoked meat, asparagus, and grass.

the second bottle I purchased because it was called “Abrazo del Toro”. come on, who wouldn’t want a hug from a bull?

it’s a step up from buying wine because i like the label art, but only just.

Procrastination Bread

{07 August 2010}

even without our own garden we find ourselves with a embarrassment of zucchini this time of year; we recently joined a CSA, and one week’s vegetable box yielded enough squash for a a tomato-zucchini-dill side-dish, two pasta dishes, and this weekend i retreated to the obligatory zucchini bread. this is not a chore, however — i’m always looking for an excuse to bake. two over-ripe bananas? banana bread coming up. even better if i can procrastinate something, anything, in order to bake. saturday afternoon was set aside for finishing up the blog transition; consequently, i decided i should bake and here it is 6pm and i’m finally sitting down at my desk, with a warm loaf of Procrastination Bread cooling on the kitchen counter.

so i trolled a half dozen recipes (paula deen suggest serving hers with a side of whipped cream, naturally) before deciding that i’d made up my own version. admittedly, doing something my own way without having done it correctly the first time IS how i have gone astray in the kitchen many many times. but i know my way around quickbreads pretty well.

i loosely based this on 101 cookbook’s Special Zucchini Bread Recipe, borrowing the structure more than the flavors. 101 cookbooks is great about using wheat flours. simply substituting wheat for white flour in a recipe usually yields baked goods that are crumbly and dry. the recipe needs to be built for wheat flour, and that’s beyond my baking skills as of yet. anyway, i had chocolate on the brain, but i couldn’t really justify making a cocoa-powder-laden loaf (tho, yum) and still consider it something that’s on the diet-approved list. but maybe sneaking a few chocolate chips wouldn’t count, right? its like putting chocolate into mixed nuts and calling it trail mix. in another arrangement, the same ingredients would be a snickers bar. but packaging is everything.

so, i packaged chocolate chips into a bread loaded with zucchini. or, hid zucchini in a chocolate chip muffin, thereby tricking Ben into eating one more zucchini dish this week. one of the loaf pans seems to have gone missing, so it was necessary at the last minute to bail into one loaf pan and one muffin pan, but no harm done there.


here’s the recipe, with a few tweaks added in for next time based on how these came out:

Procrastination Bread, or Chocolate Chip Orange Zucchini Bread/Muffins

1.5 cup chopped walnuts. i like pretty big chunks, so i tend to buy halves and then chop them slightly
1 cup chocolate chips or chunks (i recommend guittard for chips, or better yet, buy a scharffenberger bar and chop it into chunks)
zest of 2 oranges

3 cup whole wheat pastry flour (hard to find, totally worth it. you can order it here, or, happily, Berkeley Bowl carries it in the bulk foods section)
1.5 tsp baking soda (make sure your box isn’t more than a year old — it DOES matter)
.5 tsp baking powder (ditto that for age of baking soda)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg (could try allspice in place of the nutmeg with interesting results)

.5 cup butter, softened
.75 cup granulated sugar
.5 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract

3 cup grated zucchini (the food processor is your best friend here!)

1) toss together walnuts, orange zest and chocolate. set aside and try not to snack on too much. (think of it as a snickers bar, not trail mix).

2) mix together flour, baking soda and powder, salt and spices and set aside.

3) grate zucchini

4) cream butter with an electric mixer (or your big strong arm) till it’s fluffy. add sugar. then add eggs one at a time, and finally the vanilla. with a spatula, fold in the zucchini shreds.

5) mix in the flour mixture in several batches. don’t over mix. stir till the flour is almost but not quite incorporated. then add the chocolate/nut/orange mix and fold over a couple of times.

6) line 2 loaf pans with parchment paper (for real – once you discover parchment paper you’ll never butter/flour or pam a pan again). pour batter in and smooth the top.

7) baking 45 + minutes at 350 degrees, checking every 5 until the center is set. per 101 cookbook’s recommendation, don’t overbake, since the loaf will keep cooking for a few minutes once you pull it out. i made one loaf and a dozen cupcakes out of this recipe, since i could only find one of my loaf pans. the cupcakes took about 18 minutes. start checking them every 3 min after about 12 minutes.

8) let stand in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack or a dishtowel to fully cool.

9) now go back to doing whatever you were supposed to be doing before you started baking instead.

tassajara

{01 August 2010}

last weekend was an experiment in being off the grid; for my birthday my brother and sister-in-law treated me to a weekend at Tassajara, the san francisco zen center’s monastery in the ventana wilderness. most of the year Tassajara is a closed and working monastery, but they open up to guest season for a few months each summer. as a mountain retreat, they got it right. getting there isn’t easy: the road in to the center of the remote valley is the bumpiest, steepest, toughest 14 miles of dirt road i’ve ever encountered (even having grown up driving around the backwoods of idaho), so it’s not a trip to undertake lightly, and there’s no quick trips back to town once you’re there. the sense of isolation is complete. they have the required amenities (running water, delicious vegetarian food), but not the unnecessary ones (electricity, internet/phone service). this works because: kerosene lanterns are charming, but outhouse stink is not.

staying at Tassajara is the opposite of being on a cruise ship. rather than providing a day full of activities, Tassajara provides a beautiful, open space, in which guests can just slow down for a little while. there isn’t much to do besides hike, read, nap, and bathe in the beautiful bathhouses (fed by natural hotsprings). zen practice is available for those who want to participate, and though i am fascinated by it (my dojo in chicago also served as a zen temple and many of the aikidoka i trained with were also zen students), it also terrifies me. seriously, the thought of sitting sesshin for five days makes me feel panicky. i can’t even get up the nerve to attend a half-hour zazen. it’s an understatement to say that i have trouble with being still. i’m quite aware that this is something i need to come to terms with. just…i’ll get there when i’m ready. until then i creep around the edges, with things like aikido and yoga and hanging around monasteries as a guest.

in spite of the fact that i’m normally an action-packed-adventure vacationer, there really is something profound about a vacation in which there’s nothing to do. i noticed that i walk differently when i’m not in a hurry. (and i’m pretty much always in a hurry). my posture changes, i relax muscles that are normally tensed, my whole gait & posture change. and this transformation was almost immediate. within minutes of arriving, i found my whole body felt different. while hiking i’d catch myself trying to push further, faster – get some cardio exercise, or see what was around the next bend. and then i’d remind myself to try being deliberate in my actions, just to see what it’s like. there’s nothing i have to accomplish with this hike, no time i’m due back. to notice where i walk, what i see, what the path feels like under my feet. i’d grasp that focus for a few moments, then it would slip away again. like all unfamiliar habits, it only comes through practice. a practice i’m not quite ready to undertake, but i know it’s out there. but for the short duration of the vacation, i found that going off the grid was easier than it seemed. its like quitting a job you’ve worked very hard at. quitting seems like it’ll be agonizing, but once you actually pack up your things and leave, it’s easier to detach than you thought it was going to be (is there an echo of a zen lesson in here? yeah yeah, shut up little bird on my shoulder.)

also, i knocked off a 101 in 1001 list item, by the way — skinny dipping in the creek.

foundling

{24 July 2010}


three trips to Omega Salvage in as many weeks led to a desire for this chair that was just short of obsessive. actually, there are three of these chairs. i brought home one today, to be my office chair, but i confess to having spent several hours last weekend trying to figure out how to rearrange my already-cramped living room to accommodate the other pair of chairs. i haven’t figured it out yet, but i will! there’s this wagon-wheel coffee table i must come to terms with first…

the other thing that poking around Omega has done is caused me to pledge never to buy another piece of laminate furniture from IKEA again. i didn’t anticipate this sudden rejection of IKEA-style, though i should have seen it coming. a few years ago, when my (non-arts-employed) friends started eschewing IKEA in favor of “real” furniture, i was still in the financial/maturity bracket to look at IKEA and think “this stuff is cheap and awesome! and you can bring it home in the back of your honda!” for a long time, IKEA has represented a step up from where MOST of my furniture comes from: theatre hand-me-downs*, and casts-offs from ex-boyfriends’ parents. believe you me, being in a financial position where i can buy NEW hardwood furniture is far far off, and probably not in this lifetime, or at least this career. but i love old furniture like i love old houses: i know the plumbing’s iffy and that the floors slope, but there is an integrity of construction, and a feeling of history, life, depth, that makes me overlook everything but the crown moulding in the bedroom, the little metal plate bolted on to the back of the chair.

replacing my office chair has a practical function as well: our household is feline battleground right now as our cats try to figure out why the fuck is that other cat still here?, and one of Eddie’s favorite tricks is to hang out underneath skirted furniture (especially my now-former office chair, which is next to Zeke’s food dish) and growl at Zeke, taunting him into snarling confrontation.**

* if you walk around my darkened apartment at night, you may still encounter bits of glow tape here and there.
** yes, our furniture growls.

farmer’s market gazpacho

{20 July 2010}


It is a truth that every summer I am inspired by farmer’s market tomatoes to spend an entire afternoon chopping, straining, pureeing and chilling a whole pile o’ veggies into a round of gazpacho. It is also a truth that every year I remember, 2/3rds of the way through, that it’s really too much work. Also, that the bay area summers never get hot enough to justify a bowl of cold soup for dinner. And yet I persist once a year, and it feels like a grown up, gourmet, foodie sort of meal, despite the fact that really, I just spent the past hour and a half making a bowl of organic V8. Still, we strive with presentation.


Gazpacho

(with my edits)

6 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped (see Joy of Cooking for tomato blanching. Surprisingly effective!)
1 purple onion, finely chopped
2 cucumbers, peeled, seeded, chopped
1 sweet red bell pepper (or green) seeded and chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1-2 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
2 Tbsp chopped fresh chives
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/8 cup red wine vinegar, plus more to taste
1/8 cup olive oil, plus more to taste
2 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste
2 cups tomato juice (use tomato juice, not a vegetable juice like V8), and add it slowly. If your tomatoes are really juicy and ripe, it may not be necessary at all.
1 ripe avocado, sliced thinly, for garnish
1 green bell pepper, sliced into rings, for garnish

Reserve 1/3 c of finely-minced vegetables (cucumber, bell pepper, celery) for garnish. Combine all ingredients in food processor, working in batches if necessary, or chop finely before putting into a blender. Blend to a smooth consistency. Then run through a strainer, reserving the liquid and mashing the solids to get a much liquid as out possible. Depending on desired consistency, add some portion of the vegetable pulp back, discarding the rest. Blend again to get the smoothest texture possible. Taste and adjust for olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Place in non-metal, non-reactive storage container, cover tightly and refrigerate overnight, allowing flavors to blend.

To serve, garnish with slice of avocado, a ring of green bell pepper, and the minced vegetables. Serve with crusty bread and a bottle of spanish wine. On a very hot day.