Server Burp Last Night

This is just letting folks know that I had a post, a long one, with lots of links, all ready to go last night, and the server we host Tigers & Strawberries on decided to go down just as I was posting. Which means that the site was down for an unspecified length of time last night, which is a pain, but it also means that the post went to Lost and Unfound in Internet Land.

So, no post until I post about the handmade tortellini I am making today.

And thank you to the folks who emailed in concern last night–no, all is well, I am still here. Reports of my demise are premature, to say the least!

Books, Blogs and Recipes in the News

Never Apologize

A book that I have awaited with baited breath is finally coming out this Tuesday: My Life In France, by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme. Telling the story of Julia’s formative years in France when she attended Ecole du Cordon Bleu in Paris and then the publication of her seminal work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and the pioneering television show, “The French Chef,” the book promises to be filled with wisdom, laughter, tears and revelations about what made our grand dame of the kitchen tick. Illustrated with photographs by Julia’s talented husband, Paul Child, the narrative is so well transcribed from Alex’ coversations with his aunt, that apparently one can hear the words in her characteristic tweedling voice.

Providing a glimpse of Julia that few of us have ever seen before, she appears at the beginning of the memoir as a wide-eyed, ignorant young woman who knows nothing of things gastronomic, to the point that she didn’t even know what a shallot was. Nurtured by the tastes of Paul and his gourmet friends, Julia becomes enchanted by the cuisine of France, and decides that she simpy must learn how it is done. And so, with the nose of a reporter hot on the scent of a story, she enrolls in culinary school, and begins applying her intelligence towards decoding the techniques, methods, history and mystery of French food.

And then, she translated it all so that other Americans could do the same.

And she changed the course of the way a nation cooked.

You can guess what I will be doing on Tuesday, I suppose…reading!

Julie Powell Wins Blooker Award

Print on demand publisher Lulu.com has created a new literary award for books that came from blogs.

Called the “Blooker Prize,” the first award recognizes Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, the book that started as a blog chronicling her self-appointed mission to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of a year.

Bloggers of all sorts, including the vastly popular political bloggers, are coming up with book deals, but I cannot help that I am pleased that the first “Blooker Prize” went to someone who wrote about food.

Even if she has been known to say nasty things about food bloggers -after- she her book was published, of course.

Anyway, congratulations, Julie, for yourself and for the fact that you have helped raise the profile of all of us “really boring” food bloggers.

Reader’s Digest Acquires Allrecipes.com

Reader’s Digest, which in 2002 bought out Reiman Publicaitons, the publishers of the highest circulating food magazine, “Taste of Home,” and which launched “Everyday with Rachel Ray” last year, has purchased Allrecipes.com for 66 million dollars.

The publisher sees the move as a means to create as strong a web presence among foodies as their magazines make in print.

Allrecipes, a website where readers can exchange recipes, will become part of the websites of “Taste of Home,” and the other Reiman publications such as “Light & Tasty.” At present, Reader’s Digest has announced plans to keep Allrecipes.com’s 45 employees on staff, and in Seattle where the website is based.

I just hope that Reader’s Digest doesn’t change the somewhat busy, but still useable design of Allrecipes.com to resemble the cluttered look of the Taste of Home website, which has all the hallmarks of a print layout designer creating a bit of digital media: ugly, messy and not user-friendly.

It’s Coming: The 2006 Eat Local Challenge

May 2006 is the time and wherever you are is the place for the Locavore’s 2006 Eat Local Challenge. Last year, it was in August, a time of year when harvests are abundant and varied; this year, the Bay-Area Locavores, decided to give participants a chance to eat local in another season–spring.

Depending on where in the world one is living, May can bring strawberries, asparagus, garlic, ramps, fiddleheads, morels, new potatoes, baby peas, radishes or tiny lettuces. It is a very different set of produce than the tomatoes, corn, beans, eggplant, peppers, squash, and greens pour from the fields in a plethora of color, scent and flavor, and this difference affords the cook and eater a new set of challenges and rewards when they step into the adventure of eating local.

Once again, the rules of the challenge are simple. Each participant decides on their own limitations, exceptions and parameters, as they strive to “eat where they live.” Throughout the month, participants will blog about their experiences, the triumphs and failures, in whatever way they see fit. Last year, some folks sought out hard to find local products, some harvested their own sea salt, while others foraged wild foods. Everyone had creative recipes to share, and good stories to tell.

Jen of Life Begins at Thirty was central to the Eat Local Challenge last year, reporting not only on all of her personal eating local adventures, but also showcasing the exploits and efforts of other bloggers in her own blog. This year will be no exception–Jen has been asked to join the Locavores’ organizing committee–way to go, Jen! This year, she intends to continue to chronicle the doings of the bloggers who eat locally, but this time around, she intends to do things a little differently; instead of using Life Begins at Thirty to report on all of the doings of the Challenge, she is opening a new, group-written blog for the purpose of keeping up with all of the blogging locavores around the world. This blog will serve as a clearinghouse for announcements on eating local, and will not just be a useful phenominon in May, but the entire year around as people like Jen and myself, who strive to eat locally more than once a year, will be posting about the trials and successes of striving to eat as locally as possible.

So, what do I intend to do this May, for the Eat Local Challenge? Well, in addition to using fresh strawberries and asparagus to great effect in the kitchen, I am hoping to do a little bit of food preservation for the winter. This winter season, I have been awful at eating locally, when it comes to produce, because, when you live in a state like Ohio, you have to plan ahead for the winter unless you want to eat organically grown produce or canned products shipped from California. Not a lot grows in Ohio in the winter, though we do have farmers with greenhouses and cloches who have fresh root crops, leafy greens and squash all winter long. Tomatos, fruit and the like, however, are not available locally preserved, unless one does it one’s self.

So, maybe you will get to watch me begin my new adventures in jams, jellies, preserves and canning starting in May and progressing through the summer months. We’ll see, though. That is a lot of work; I grew up helping my grandmother can, freeze and preserve and I know how much stamina is necessary to pull such an enterprise off.

In addition, like last time, I will have book reviews on topics relevant to the Eat Local Challenge for my readers to peruse. Some of the titles are ones I didn’t get to in August, while others are new since then, and new to me. I will try to do some old favorites as well, so that budding locavores have an idea of where to go for appropriate reading material from the present and the past.

And, as always, there will be features on my local food finds during the month. Last year it was locally made tofu from locally grown organic soybeans–maybe this time around it will be locally produced milk. Or maybe I will finally track down that organic farmer in Licking County and buy some freshly milled, organically grown whole wheat flour from him.

Of course, there will be recipes, and lots of pretty photographs of the produce from the farmer’s market and maybe even the action at the market itself. And, you can watch over my shoulder as I plant my herbs and maybe even some container-grown cherry tomatoes.

Stay tuned for all of the action, and if there is anything in particular you would like to see in May, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email and ask. Your wish, as always, is my command.

No Note-For-Note Cooking Here

One of my stated culinary New Year’s resolutions was to make more use of my many hundreds of cookbooks and actually bother to try more recipes from them, more or less as they are written.

And I have actually mostly kept to that. Okay, the Spaghetti with Creamed Eggplant and Walnuts recipe counts more as “inspired” by Diane Seed’s recipe from The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, than it was followed word for word, but, I actually opened the book, read the recipe more than once, absorbed what she meant by it and then riffed off on it my ownself. But yeah, I changed it considerably, to the point that I don’t really count it as the same recipe anymore.

I don’t see much of anything wrong with such an approach. I mean, I can’t stand guitarists that slavishly copy guitar solos from the original artists. I mean, okay, so sure, you can play the solo to “Stairway to Heaven” note-for-note, but it still doesn’t make you into Jimmy Page, okay? Only Jimmy Page is Jimmy Page, okay? You are still pudgy, with spots on your face and chicks are just not impressed, so dammit, play your own guitar solo, already. (In fact, I would go so far as to say, if you want to impress chicks, don’t even play “Stairway to Heaven” in the first damned place, play something else, but I am digressing here.) (Can we tell I have been married to two guitarists in my life, and have listened to way, way too many amateur guitarists wanking in guitar stores? Can we tell it has made me jaded in my middle age?)

Anyway, I am not a “note-for-note” cook. I never have been and never will be. I have given up on it, and that is okay with me.

And it seems to be okay with everyone else, because folks eat my food with great glee and keep coming back for more.

So, last night, Zak said, “I want something with beef in it. Something stir fried.”

And, not having much in the way of inspiration in my head at that moment, I thrust my hand into the cookbook shelf and pulled out one of my favorite cookbooks which I have never cooked from, The Breath of a Wok by Grace Young. It is one of my favorite cookbooks, because it is an astounding piece of culinary anthropology, and is a great read. I learned as much from reading Grace’s book as I have in experimenting on my own for ten years. She has a gift for conveying useful information that she gleans from interviewing chefs, home cooks and cooking instructors by weaving into tightly written and beautifully composed prose, and I know her recipes are great, because while I haven’t personally cooked from them–I have eaten what I helped her cook in a class in Columbus.

Besides, after years of study, one can usually look at a recipe and tell if it is going to be a good one or not. And the ones in The Breath of a Wok, are definately good ones. And I keep meaning to cook from it, and keep forgetting.

Until last night.

I went right to the recipe I knew Zak would like.

Martin Yan’s Genghis Khan Beef, on page 91.

It involves garlic, Thai chiles, hoisin sauce, chile sambal and sesame oil–five of his favorite things.

So, that is what I made.

To go with it, I made some plain steamed broccoli; the crisp broccoli went fantastically with the chewy, tender beef in its rich sauce, which was sweet from the hoisin and redolent of garlic and chile.

Though I have to admit–I was out of sambal, so I used chile garlic paste instead, and at the end, along with the sliced scallion tops, I added cilantro leaves for a garnish. I found that the green, fresh flavor of the cilantro cut through the richness of the sauce, and married it to the green flavor of the broccoli. Oh, and I put a splash of shao hsing wine in to help deglaze the wok after I put in the hoisin. (I am just terrible at following recipes, I know–I even deviated from his method of stir-frying, even though it was very close to the way in which I tend to stir fry.)

It was definately a recipe worth trying and in the future, repeating.

Next time, though, instead of playing quite so close to Martin Yan’s melody line, I think I will improvise by removing the garlic and replacing it with ginger, as I love the way that ginger lightens the deep flavor of the beef and gives it a shining top note that somehow seems to lighten a dish immeasureably. And I might try lighening up on the hoisin sauce, too–it is one of Zak’s favorite flavors, but not so much one of mine. Maybe I will use ground bean paste instead, and see what happens.

Of course, if I do that, I suspect I will have to give the recipe a new name….

Martin Yan’s Genghis Khan Beef

Ingredients (as I cooked it, not as it was written–for that, I suggest you go out and get a copy of the book. You won’t regret it.):

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon thin soy sauce
2 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
12 ounces lean flank steak, cut across the grain into thin slices about 1″ wide, 2″ long and 1/4″ thick
2 tablespoons peanut oil
6 scallions
4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
6 fresh Thai chiles, stemmed, but left whole
2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
3 teaspoons chile garlic paste
2 tablespoons shao hsing wine
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/4 cup fresh cilantro leaves

Method:

In a bowl, toss together the soy sauces, cornstarch and meat, and marinate for about twenty minutes.

Slice white and light green parts of the scallions on the diagonal, very thinly. Cut the dark green parts into 1″ diagonal slices. Keep them separate.

Heat wok until it smokes, add oil and heat until the oil is quite hot.

Add the white part of the scallions, the garlic and the whole chiles. Stir fry for about thirty seconds.

Add the meat, reserving any liquid marinade that is left in the bowl. Lay the meat into a single layer and allow to brown on one side–depending on how hot your stove gets, this could take from about thirty seconds (like mine does) to about a minute and a half. Once it browns, start stir frying. When there is still some good red in the meat, add the hoisin sauce and chile garlic paste, along with any marinade still in the bowl. Keep stir frying.

If the hoisin sauce sticks to the wok (it will), pour in the shao hsing wine and deglaze.

When the meat is mostly done, add the dark green tops of the scallions and the cilantro, stir in the sesame oil, and stir well, then pull off of the heat. Scrape into a heated platter and garnish with steamed broccoli if you like.

Serve immediately.

Serves four for a multi-course meal, or three, with steamed rice, for a full meal.

Note: While someone else carries the platter to the table, do yourself a favor and carry your wok right to the sink, turn the hot water on high and scrub it while it is still warm. If you leave your wok while you go eat, the hoisin sauce will harden up like concrete and be an evil mess to chip away later. While, if you scrub it with the bamboo brush and really hot water right away, it takes about a minute to clean it properly right then and there.

New Pretties For the Kitchen

I have to admit that one of the most fun things about visiting the Smithsonian, is that the museum shops rock. Especially the shop at the Sackler.

While I am in a confessional mood, I will also cop to the fact that I like dishes. Tableware. Serving pieces. Plates, bowls, cups, glasses, silverware, you name it–if it goes on a table, I like it.

Now, I have definite tastes when it comes to these sorts of things. I am not much into fussy-fussy china, with silver rims or lacy white-on-white patterns. I don’t care for silverware that is festooned with so much ornate gobbledy-gook that you get bruises on your hands from using it. I like clean, simple lines, bright colors, interesting shapes, and pieces with a lot of heft to them.

So, when people come to eat at our house, they should not be surprised to never sit down to a formal table, with white lacy fussy bone china plates, because, well, we don’t have any of those.

What we do have is a collection of Japanese and Chinese stoneware and pottery, and lots of Fiesta Ware, old and new, as well as a bunch of other eclectic stuff in neat shapes and bright colors which go with the colors in our house, which I like to refer to as “The Crayola Fortress.”

So, while Morganna and Donny were staring blissfully at the gemstones, minerals and dinosaurs in The Museum of Natural History, Zak and I, who have been through that museum probably close to a dozen times, opted for shopping.

And we found some of the coolest bowls ever.

They are called Udon Noodle Bowls, and they are handmade in the US by a company called flavourdesign. (Having found their website, I must admit to also being tempted by their Buddha Bowls.)

As you can see, they are shaped like stylized ginko leaves, and they are meant to be cupped in the palm. They are extremely comfortable; the ergonomic design allows the diner to hold the bowl up close to the mouth so that one can slurp warm, soupy noodles easily from chopsticks. Then, when the noodles are gone, the mug-like bowl is easily tipped so the eater can sip the broth down without making a mess.

A really great idea.

And, as you can see, they came in juicy colors that I absolutely adore, and which coordinate nicely with our existing multi-hued collection of Fiesta Ware. (That purple critter that the tulips are arranged in is the plum carafe.)

We brought home two of them, because that was as many as I could easily carry on the Metro, but I plan on ordering a couple more later. Right now, these two are displayed on the open shelves framing the windows in the kitchen. They look quite spifftastic there amidst our collection of stoneware teacups, our Ganesha sculpture, the tea set Morganna gave me at Yule, and our raku rice bowls.

As for the tulips–those are a gift from Zak. Tulips are not blooming here yet–just some anenomes, forsythia and daffodils.