Early Summer Salad

Oh my, would you look at that?

I know salads aren’t the most exciting thing to post about, but I have to because I was driving back from the Takoma Park farmer’s market (I try to alternate between Dupont and Takoma, and I hope to add Penn Quarter into the rotation as well), where a young woman exclaimed over my insulated farmer’s market bag, and the vegetable stand on the corner of Jones Mill and East West Highway is back, and whatddaya know they have in-the-pod English peas.

I love peas, and always have, but after spending a semester in London I became a huge fan of mushy peas, the ubiquitous fish and chips side, which can only be properly made with english peas. That’s not how I used them last night, but I have enough leftover for tonight’s feast!

But I did have a delicious salad last night– a local, all pesticide free, almost all of it from the farmer’s market, except the bit that came from the garden I’ve been planting at a friend’s house! (I live in an apartment building — no land to garden on myself.) Delicious large and curly spinach leaves, some crispy and mild (and HUGE!) radishes, sliced thick, our home-grown cherry tomatoes, just slightly underripe as I like ‘em, quartered, coarse chopped roasted spring asparagus, and those english peas, shelled, boiled for about 4 minutes, cooled and tossed top. I dressed it with a lemon vinagrette: 1 part lemon juice, 1 part apple cider vinegar, 3 parts olive oil, salt and pepper.

It was like eating a sparkling plate of jewels, so crips and so clean and so acidic. Paired with the young spring chicken I bought from Smithfield’s Meats (again, farmer’s market and ALL pasture-raised and grassfed!) and roasted, it was just perfection.

Ahhh, summertime is here.

Up next: Strawberry Jam. Because I went strawberry picking and made it into jam.

How To Fail At Food Blogging?

Folow my lead and don’t update for a month and a half.

I’M SO SORRY. Ironically, a large part of why I haven’t been blogging is that I’ve been cooking and drinking and eating and drinking and drinking and drinking more often than usual (which… I mean, you have to do it every day to live, but still..) and as a result I’ve been 1. not taking pictures and 2. horribly hungover at work the next day, which makes it hard to post. And why does work have to start at 9 a.m. anyway??? Who invented this cruel, cruel system.

As an apology — a bad, half-assed apology, but an apology nonetheless — I offer you the recipe to my new favorite drink, which is some kind of mutant hybrid of a Gin Julep, a Gin & Tonic, and a Gin Mojito. Yes, it’s that delicious.

And also a promise to get back to blogging regularly and stop being such a foodie douche. APOLOGIES!!!

Ingrediants:
A nice handful of fresh mint
Up to one teaspoon of sugar (how sweet you want it is up to you)
One lime, sliced up. (You only need a wedge or two).
Ice (preferably crushed, but whatevs)
Gin
Tonic water

Method:
Combine your mint (you can rip the leaves up first if they’re huge) and your sugar in the bottom of a glass. Using a muddler, if you’re fancy, or a spoon/fork if you’re po’ like me, muddle/mush/crush the mint and the sugar together. Halfway through, add a thin slice of lime and continue to mush away. Add crushed ice. Add gin and tonice to your preference, stir, and garnish with lime wedge.

Lather, rinse, repeat until you can’t feel your face and the lightening bugs in your front lawn are particularly interesting.

Follies, Foibles and Failures

Do you ever have a week, or a weekend, where you just cannot cook? It’s not so much that you don’t have the drive — we all get tired sometimes, and takeout is so very tempting — as much as, no matter what you do you get it wrong?

I had one of those weekends.

The thng is, I only cooked two things all weekend. Don’t ask about the details — they involve a birthday party and a lot of friends from college in town, so I was barely home at all — but over the course of the 60 hours between when I left work on Friday and when I got back to work this morning, I managed to botch two embarassingly easy recipes.

One of which came in a box.

I know.

Let me preface by saying that one of the reasons I might have been so helpless in the kitchen this weekend has to do with a bar here in DC called The Gibson. The Gibson is a speakeasy, and a haven of delicious, delicious cocktails, and if you haven’t been you should go, except don’t because you might take my barstool. You cannot have my barstool. But, no, really, you should go. Try to go on a weekday. Or very early in the evening. There’s no standing in the bar (by which I mean the entire place, which is all bar and no food and I LOVE YOU SPEAKEASY), so if you get there on a weekend and it’s full, you’re going to be waiting a long time. By text message. You read that right.

I’m getting totally off-topic here. Suffice to say, I got to The Gibson early on Friday, I downed 5 uneblievably delicious drinks, and then I ate Salvadorian food and got home completely wasted at about 10:30 and passed out by 11:30 and that was the beginning of a series of compounded hangovers that probably made things worse for me.

I felt pretty good when I woke up Saturday, though, and despite the rather icky weather me and friend road-tripped it up to Frederick, MD, for some pretty awesome thrift store shopping and a stop at the world’s largest and most confusing used book store (which, incidentally, is having a BOGO sale on BOOKS, so you should go, but bring a list!), which of course led to us being late back to DC, which pressed me for time to make the birthday cake for my friend whose birthday party was that night. The theme of the party was Sparks, and so the cake was going to be themed to match: Yellow cake, with sprinkles (confetti) on the inside, with some orange zest for a slight orange flavor (does Sparks taste like orange? Not really, but whatever), and cream cheese vanilla frosting with orange writing on it. With time not on my side, I grabbed cake mix and orange icing and sprinkles from the Safeway. I made boxed cake.

Michael Ruhlman is not pleased.

So how did that go wrong? Let’s see. I forgot to put the oil in, so the cake was slightly dry. I forgot to put the orange zest in. I forgot to put the sprinkles in. It was ok — I soaked the cake in Triple Sec (orange liquer) to get it moister, and added the zest and the sprinkles to the icing; in the end it worked out. But, seriously: I messed up a boxed-mix cake. It was humiliating.

In the end it worked out; the party was amazing, I was out ’till 4 a.m., I was jittery and insane and had a great time. The next day I went back to my friend’s house to hang in the glorious sunshine with college folks; before I left, I put a pork shoulder in cold water to defrost. In the early evening, before we cooked dinner (veggies and half-smokes from Eastern Market, and us breaking out the grill for the first time in ’09), I went home to shower and lay on my couch and make pulled pork. I mixed up a homemade BBQ sauce recipe that sounded delicious (and which I got from the intarwebs), sliced up my pork shoulder (my crockpot is tiny, so I had to cut it into pieces to make it fit), mixed it all together, set the timer for 4 and a half hours, flipped the crockpot to on, and left.

When I got home four hours later, I realized I forgot to plug the crockpot in.

D’OH!

Which left me with this conundrum: the shoulder had still be frozen at its verymost center when I left (hence the longer cooktime — my crockpot only cooks on high, and the recipe said 8 hours on low). Because of that, over the four hours that it sat there on my counter, not cooking, it just finished defrosting and the temperature of the meat was lower than it would have been otherwise. Also, the windows of my apartment had been open all day and when I had gotten home at about 5 (I left at 6:15), my apartment had been cool; when I got hom at 10, it was positivly chilly. So the ambient temperature was lower than normal, also. Not knowing what to do — do I cook? I did drop almost $20 on the pork shoulder. Nothing smells bad. It’s going to cook for a long time. What do I do?

So… I called my sister. My sister is an excellent cook, and a very smart young lady, and after she stopped laughing at me we talked about it and eventually we decided I should cook it and cross my fingers that it doesn’t make me puke.

I haven’t tried it yet.

It smells fine. It looks fine. It is not pink, or red, or discolored, and the crockpot was happiily bubbling away when I turned it off at 3 in the morning after almost 5 1/2 hours of cooking. But I’ve been afraid to try it, so right now it’s just sitting in my fridge.

The plan, I think, is to pick up some burrito fixin’s Thursday afternoon (Wednesday is LOST night, and I’m going over to K’s house for it, so no grocery shopping for me!) and basically make my own version of a Chipotle carnitas burrito with my pulled pork. I suspect it will be delicious. I really hope it’s bacterially ok.

But after all of this, my burgeoning-chef’s* confidence is shaken. Guys, I screwed up boxed cake mix. Was I just tired? Is there only so much work and play and planning for grad school and aborted blogging that one mind can do? Did I over-tax myself, over-drink myself, and therefore just act like an idiot? Or did this expose a hidden layer of total incompetance? For all the years I’ve been cooking for myself — 7 totally on my own, more than that if you count my cooking nights with my family — have I learned nothing? I feel less familiar with food than when I left for college, despite the fact that I’ve made a flaky pie crust from scratch, I’ve roasted whole fish in salt crusts, and I’ve perfected the art of spaghetti sauce to the point where I really, really, really don’t want to give out the recipe because I think I could make some money off that one. But I can’t make crockpot pulled pork? Or boxed yellow cake?

Perhaps as a result, I’ve not cooked since Sunday. Some of this was because of social obligation, but I think it’s mostly because I don’t trust myself right now.

All of which is ironic considering that last week I cooked some of the best, most delicious meals of my life. I’ll have to tell you about those another time.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day — Give Me A Fry-Up!

There once was a girl from DC
Whose hunger just wouldn’t recede
As her stomach growled
She finally howled,
“A fry-up is just what I need!”

So dreaming of sasuage and bacon
She looked for a pub that would make ‘em
And just down the road
Was her own pot of gold
Ri Ra, where they wouldn’t just fake ‘em!

Seriously, though, I’m starving and the only thing that wil truly satisfy is a greasy, horrible-for-me-but-oh-so-delicious fry-up, courtesy of the lovely people in the UK/Ireland. Lucky for me, there are a few pubs in walking distance of my house, and while they will surely be packed with revellers, I will be joining them, with K, for some beers and hopefully some black pudding after work.

I spent three months living in London, studying, in 2005 when I was still in college. Not that it took those three months to learn to love it — I was pretty much smitten since my parents took my sister and I back in 1998, on a family vacation — but during that time I became an absolute black pudding fanatic.

Black pudding is a kinder name for “blood sausage,” which is what the dark delicious stuff really is. It’s a fairly normal sausage — pork or beef-based, though in my experience it’s usually pork — that is cooked and cooked and cooked with the blood of the animal until it is thick enough to congeal when it’s cooled. The resulting mixture, when cooked, turns nearly black… henche “black pudding.” It’s gross in concept, I suppose, except that it’s extremely tasty — savory, salty, rich and delicious, like sausage but better. If I could find it in a supermarket here in the states, I would never stop eating it. Being rich and decadent, of course, it’s not particularly good for you, but I don’t really care.

Black pudding is one of several things in a proper fry-up. You get two pieces (patties) of black pudding, two to three links of breakfast sausage, two to four rashers of bacon (different than American bacon, British bacon is usually taken from the back and termed “rashers”; there’s a little bit of fat and mostly lean meat, though bacon cut from the belly can be obtained and is termed “streaky bacon”), one or two eggs (most commonly fried, and even more commonly sunny-side-up), one or two fried tomato halves, a small handful of sauteed whole mushrooms, two slices of toast, and a generous spoonful of Heinz Baked Beans(accept no substitutes!). You wash it down with tea (usually English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast), with cream and sugar. It looks like that amazing picture above.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find one before my stomach gets so hungry it starts to eat itself.

Eat, drink, and be merry! Happy St. Patty’s day!

An Explaination and a Promise

It’s kind of a big promise, too. But let’s start with the explaination:

On Friday, I had designs to write an interesting, and potentially long, blog post about what I cooked last week and what I ended up making to satisfy my food dilemma and what I did with my spinach (the answer: lots and lots and lots of spinach and mushroom salad), and I was all settled in and pleasently hungover (old friend in town) and whaddaya know, I got an email. And it said: Dear S, we are exicted to welcome you to our master’s program. And I stared like a dumb goat for a moment and then realized I had been accepted to grad school.

I only applied to one grad school.

The rest of the day, to be honest, is kind of a blur. As it turns out, when you mix a major adrenaline rush with a pretty bad hangover, you get roughly the effects of snorting a couple monster lines of cocaine at about 4:30 in the morning; I ran around like a maniac, yelled a bunch of things, got a lot of hugs, and then, 12 hours later, fell asleep wherever I was. Lucky me, I had a little bit of foresight and made it home and into my bed by the time my body just up and quit on me.

That mania has colored my entire weekend, all the way through yesterday. And so, dear readers (all 35 of you, I love all of you), this fall I will be in grad school and a lot more poor and still shopping at farmer’s markets and things should get a lot more interesting.

Here is the promise:

I make the best spaghetti sauce. I’m not bragging; it’s the only food I have truly mastered. And I’m getting pretty good at meatballs. Tomorrow, I am going to give you the recipe.

Tonight, though, I’m going to get cocktails at Bar Pilar.

It’s Snowing, I’m Working, and Hungry

I guess it’s a little inaccurate to say it’s still snowing, but that’s what it looked like earlier this morning and there’s about half a foot of soft, powdery snow on the ground. K is not at work — he’s been out of town at a family reunion and his flight got pushed back until tomorrow because of the snow — which is a shame because I’m one of only 3 people here and this is perfect snowball snow.

Maybe it’ll stick around for a snowball fight.

I was at Wegman’s in Fairfax this weekend with a friend on a normal grocery trip — neither of us pay attention to the weather — when she got yelled at by a crazy woman who had to (*gasp!* *swoon*!) walk around her to get to something in the meat cases. Her rudeness was shocking, as was how busy it was; a nice older lady informed us, in line, that it was because it was going to snow and people were SCAAAAARED like they always are down here in DC because they are pansies who apparently cannot deal with snow even though we used to get blizzards in march on, like, a regular basis. I lived through 4 of them. Grow up, peeps.

I found myself stocking up on vegetables because I haven’t had fresh vegetables in weeks and I need vitamins, people, vitamins! I scoffed at the idea of snow — it never snows down here, not like it used at least, and people go so crazy over half an inch that I stopped heading the weatherman’s warnings a long time ago. I made myself delicious lamb chops (purchased months ago at the Dupont Farmer’s Market and kept safely in my freezer) with asparagus (not in season, but delicious: SUE ME) last night, all broiled and roasted and fatty delicious. I went to bed to freezing rain.

Woke up to 6 inches of snow. Ooops.

Actually, all of this reminds me a lot of college. I did my four undergraduate years up in Boston, at a fantastic institution outside the city which I will not name because at the moment I am, weirdly, still trying to keep some anonymity while blogging about the ins and outs of what I eat and think about food. I should probably get over that. Either way, it snows up there. A lot. Like, three or four feet at a time. On a regular basis. And you know what’s funny? They don’t cancel school up there for anything. And if they do, they do it mid-day so that you’re already on campus and walking up the deadly-in-perfectly-dry-weather-and-so-steep-you-may-as-well-climb-Everest Rabb steps for the 12th time that day in 2 1/2 feet of slippery, icy snow when someone tells you that classes are cancelled, school is closed, the BranVan isn’t running and HAVE FUN WALKING HOME.

THANKS, MASSACHUSETTS.

But days like today are easy, and they always make me think about what I was doing up in Boston on those snow days. (One time, during a Nor’Easter, I had to move my car from the street to keep it from getting plowed it, and there was already 3 feet of snow on the ground, I got stuck, and my roommates wouldn’t help me — AND I HAD PNEUMONIA. FOR REAL PNEUMONIA. GOT BACK TO SCHOOL A WEEK AND A HALF LATE BECAUSE OF IT PNEUMONIA. That doesn’t have anything to do with food, but I’m still kind of pissed about that. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, FORMER ROOMMATES??? I HAD PNEUMONIA!!!)

I mean, I know what I was doing. I was watching TV, most likely Lost or ER, and smoking a fatty, and thinking about food. But I can’t for the life of me (perhaps this has something to do with the fatty..) remember what it was that we cooked. The best I can come up with is pasta, of some sort, or maybe Campbell’s Chunky Clam Chowder (AKA the best clam chowder you can buy in a can), or tuna melts? The hell?

And all of this begs the question: what do I make for dinner tonight? It’d be a good night for something warm and creamy and soothing. I think I have some skirt steak in the freezer and spinach in the fridge; maybe broiled skirt steak marinated in oil and garlic, with creamed spinach? I have some heavy cream, and if that’s not enough I have half and half as well. Maybe with a handful of roasted potatoes?

Ideas, ideas — I welcome them!

Turnip Dillema Solved: Turnip Gratin

Before anybody asks, I did not cook that beautiful looking dish above. This woman did, and provided both the inspiration and the recipe for what I ended up making with those four lonely turnips in my fridge.

Gratin. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it? A French word derived from grater, which means “to scratch,” (not very surprising, is it; it’s all part of the Great French Infusion* of the English language, which also gave us words like “beef”), something cooked au gratin means, literally, with grated things over it. Luckily for all of us, those “grated things” are usually cheese. And what on earth cannot be improved by cheese?**

The Pionneer Woman’s recipe will be duplicated below, but I want to talk about it a little bit first. One, the recipe calls for the gratin to be cooked in an oven-proof skillet. The method tells you to melt the butter on medium-low heat, then begin your layering of thinly sliced turnips, butter, garlic, cheese, chicken broth and cream while it is still on that heat. I think the reasoning behind that is that, while you’re doing this, some of the liquid can already start cooking off. I don’t have an oven-proof skillet (I know. I’m working on it, but pans are expensive! Look, I once made a pie on the floor of my apartment.), so I let my (not stove-approved) glass baking dish heat up in the oven while the oven was preheating; it was more than hot enough to melt the butter when I took it out to start the layering. And since I rested it on my stove burners where the heat of the oven was filtering up and out, I was hoping it would stay hot enough to do some of that reduction work without my having to turn on burners.

The recipe itself is incredibly simple, and the result I got is partially from my own mistakes. Using my food processor rules — it worked like a charm to thinly slice the turnips. Using it to grate the Gruyere? A mistake; I got little nubs and balls, not a thin grate like I needed to get a really, really good melt between the layers. That was my fault — see, kids? Never be lazy when you’re cooking; it’s not worth it.

The biggest problem with this recipe, though (at least as I see it), is that some of the instructions involve “a healthy splash” of chicken broth and/or cream. What is “a healthy splash”? As a result, when my gratin was done baking, and nice and cheesey golden brown on top, it was like soup on the inside. No amount of letting it cool allowed it to set up, and cooled, melted cheese is just weird. It was frustrating, that part, because other than that it was pretty darn good. I admit, I wished I was eating potato gratin while I was eating this, but that’s not the recipe’s fault. In the end, I almost always wish I’m eating a potato anyway.

Turnip Gratin (adapted from The Pioneer Woman Cooks)

Ingrediants:
4 medium sized turnips, peeled and thinly sliced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2-3 cups of grated Gruyere cheese (do not get lazy and stick it in the food processor, trust me, and use more if you want. Cheese for all!)
A carton (about 1 cup) of heavy cream
A small can of chicken broth (I only had chicken stock; I used slightly less than 1/4 cup stock with 3/4 cup water to mellow it out)
Butter
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Thinly slice turnips, either via mandolin or food processor (you can do it by hand, too). Finely mince your garlic. Grate your Gruyere. When you’ve got all your things together, place an ovenproof skillet on your stove over medium-low heat (or if you, like me, do not have an oven-proof skillet, let your baking dish heat up fully in the oven while you prep, then pull it out when it’s good and hot for these steps) and melt 2-3 tablespoons of butter to coat the bottom. When the buter is melted, cover the bottom with one layer of sliced turnips. On top of that, add a couple knobs of butter (totally optional, and will contribute to the amount of liquid in your pan), then a light sprinkling of mixed garlic. Sprinkle a tablespoon or two of chicken broth over the turnips; do the same with the heavy cream. You probably want to use more heavy cream than chicken broth, as it’ll bake up to a great consistency. Add a pinch of salt for taste. Then add a generous layer of Gruyere.

Repeat those layering steps twice, so that you have a total of three layers of turnips, garlic, liquid, and cheese. Make sure you save cheese for the top layer (or grate more), because this is the layer that will get all brown and bubbly. Grate a few turns of pepper over the top layer. Bake at 375 for about 20 minutes or until the cheese on top is golden brown and bubbling.

A warning: the molten cheese inside the gratin is delicious and extremely hot. You may want to let your portion cool for a moment before taking a bite.

* – No one, as far as I know, has ever called the period in which the English language got one hell of an infusion of French words (for we are a Germanic, not Romantic, language) the “Great French Infusion” aside from me, as I just made it up right now.

** – This is the cornerstone of why I don’t understand vegans. I did the vegetarian thing; I understand, at least intellectually, giving up meat. But cheese? Wonderful, delicious, been-around-since-the-beginning-of-history cheese? Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Crazy hippies.

A Turnip Tale

To be more accurate, perhaps, should I say “A Turnip Tale.. in the making”? Because, you see, I haven’t cooked these turnips yet. No, they’re still sitting in my fridge, in their little green-tinted Whole Foods bag.

I had a lovely “date” for Valentine’s Day this year, a good friend of mine who had recently broken up with her long-term boyfriend. She called last month, asking if I would be her Valentine, and of course I said yes. To avoid having to watch couples be disgusting with each other in restaurants, we opted to eat dinner at my house. Looking for the easiest, and best, of all possible solutions for dinner, I roasted a chicken.

It turned out great. But I’m a huge fan of roasted vegetables (there are few treats in this world more tasty than a properly roasted carrot, and get away, those are MINE!), and I went a little overboard. Carrots, farmer’s market yukon gold potatoes, onions, a tomato, a couple bulbs of kholrabi, two sweet potatoes from the farmer’s market (this was a good opportunity for me to roast off the rest of my farmer’s market potatoes and make space for this week’s market trip), garlic, basically I stuffed my roasting pan so full of vegetables that I had to let them cook for way longer than the chicken. The ones on the bottom simply got reserved to be re-cooked yesterday, and gobbled for dinner. Which I did.

And, thinking the would be delicious (considering that “roasted” is the only way I’ve ever eaten them), I picked up four turnips that, ultimately, never even made it onto my cutting board for lack of space in the pan.

And now I have turnips.

So.. what do I do with them?

Do any of you remember the American Girl book series? Specifically, Molly, the child of the 1940′s, who knitted socks for the troops and talked about rationing and grew her own vicotry garden? (An aside: I cannot tell you how badly I want to start a victory garden this spring. SO BADLY. I’ve never been so frustrated with renting an apartment before in my life.) In the very first book, “Meet Molly,” the author describes an epic dinner table faceoff betwee Molly and her mother, who had prepared mashed turnips for dinner, and which Molly brattily described as “old, cold, moldy brains.” And as unappealing as that sounds… well, I’ve been fascinated ever since.

So I’m thinking, to go with the leftover chicken meat still clinging to that carcass, perhaps I’ll make mashed turnips tonight? Any recommendations? Anyone? Recipes? Tips? Please? Help?

Random Thought During Tony Bourdain Food Porn Special

I propose a new American diet: looking at super close ups of really small, delicious dishes, followed by eating those dishes in their real size.

Bourdain Is Coming…

Bourdain is coming! Bourdain is coming!

Actually, to be specific, Bourdain already came, saw, and was molested by Jose Andres. Or, at least, that’s what the commercials currently being shown on the Travel Channel imply. (A key moment? Andres pushing Bourdain’s head, pimp-style, into a carton of peaches at the Penn Quarter farmer’s market and shouting, “You must be close to the skin! Smell! Smell!” Oh my god, Andres, what are you doing to us?!) The Washington DC episode of No Reservations will air, appropriately, next Monday night at 10 p.m., on the eve of the Inauguration.

I think it’s fair to say that I’m approaching the episode with more than a little trepidation.

I grew up right outside of Washington DC. I have lived in this city and its surrounding area for 20 of the 24 years of my life. My mother was also raised here, and my father has been living here since my parents graudated from college in 1978. We are natives, and we are proud.

I know a lot of things about where to find food in this city. Sure, there are the high-falutin’ dining restaurants — Gerard’s Place, Citronelle, CityZen, The Inn at Little Washington, 1789, Vidalia, Komi, etc. — and there are the tourist staples — Jaleo, Clyde’s, Old Ebbitt, Ben’s Chili Bowl — and the late-night scene — The Diner, Amsterdam Falafel, the beloved Jumbo Slice (yes, beloved). Most people know about Little Ethiopia around 9th street, and most people have been disappointed by the mostly-sub-par Chinatown (Full Kee, you are an exception, and a beloved one). DC tends to get a fairly bad rap for dining, or at least it doesn’t get the kind of respect lavished on Chicago and New York, who both claim certain universally recognizable foods as their “own” (hello, HALF SMOKES anyone?!) But the real reason DC gets kind fo a bad rap is because people don’t know where to look. Or, rather, people don’t understand where the food is.