Mae's Food Blog

A New Take on the Still Life

2012-01-27T07:33:00.001-05:00

The fruits move around -- see this LA Times Article!

Pie for Breakfast

2012-01-16T09:23:00.001-05:00

Hardest recipe ever! Why? The key limes were tiny and very stubbornly held onto their juice. 21 limes were barely half as much juice as Evelyn needed, so it was a key-lime-tangerine pie. Delicious!!Note that Alice has converted her 3-D glasses to hipster glasses. And Miriam is gleeful about our decadent breakfast.

Scenes from a Mall

2012-01-15T09:39:00.001-05:00

Lunch at Villa Mozart

2012-01-13T08:53:00.001-05:00

The first photo shows my delicious calamari with small discs of polenta, peas, and cherry tomatoes (mainly hidden under the thin slices of toast). Our pasta courses were all very delicious too. The second photo shows Evelyn and Tom about to have their soup and salad, and suggests the very pleasant atmosphere of this Fairfax restaurant.

Fifteen minutes would have been enough

2012-01-04T14:26:00.002-05:00

The New Yorker this week has a brief but wonderful summary -- "Julia Child's Taqueria" -- of the author's special trip to the Super-Rica Taqueria in Santa Barbara, which became a legend because Julia Child liked it something like 30 years ago.

In my mind this little Mexican diner may defy any other cultural institution as the most overrated hole-in-the-wall in America, or maybe on the planet. But note I defined this to avoid including the Iowa caucuses, which deserve an overrated category all their own.

I'm glad someone has validated my impression, which is shared by many native Santa Barbarans that I know. The everlasting line out the Super-Rica's door -- that's been there, I think, since I first tried it in 1983, or was that 2003? -- is an eternal mystery, but people keep driving up there from everywhere. Last summer I found a taqueria at random that was better and had less waiting, though I admit that the tortillas weren't made fresh by hand as they were when I was at the Super-Rica. See this post for more about the taqueria I enjoyed.

The New Yorker's image (above/right) doesn't really show the line the way it usually looks -- it often goes out the door to the right and past the back door of the tiny kitchen. Last summer we stood in line for a while, still curious to see how the place was lasting, but the pretentious conversations all around us drove us out.

Why we didn't have Chinese food for Christmas

2011-12-25T20:40:00.001-05:00

Christmas dinner for Jews is Chinese food -- old New York custom. Right? We thought we would finally join in this tradition, which we've never observed in our past.

Well, not tonight. The one Chinese restaurant that we thought was open seemed to have left the phone off the hook, so we figured they were over-taxed with Christmas customers. They have a few service issues anyway, so we definitely didn't want to drive over to see what was wrong with them. We stayed home, lit the Hanukkah candles, and had tuna melts and champagne. Good combination! Elaine and Lenny, in the photo above, are ready to eat.

Earlier, we took a walk in the park and watched "Midnight in Paris" on streaming video. Great way to enjoy the holiday. Great movie, too. From the walk, Lenny's photos:

Latke Dinner

2011-12-24T21:35:00.000-05:00

Our latke dinner included latkes, leg of lamb, and lemon layer cake. I made the cake from scratch instead of from a mix this time. In the photo: Elaine and Larry, here to enjoy the holiday.

Also to celebrate, we saw the movie "Hugo" with Ben Kingsley and Sasha Baron-Cohen this afternoon. It was great. How could I not love a movie about wind-up toys?

The cake:

Bread

2011-12-20T13:23:00.000-05:00

I just read Bread: A Global History by William Rubel and "Barms and Leavens -- Medieval to Modern," an article about bakers' yeast, brewers' yeast, and sourdough starters, by Laura Mason, in the collection titled Over a Red-Hot Stove: Essays in Early Cooking Technology edited by Ivan Day. Here's a photo of these two books sandwiching a few other books about bread:

Rubel's first chapter presents the prehistoric origins of bread. He writes: "Long before the Neolithic Revolution, when the hunters and gatherers in the Fertile Crescent made the cultural shift to farming and raising large animals..., the peoples in the region were harvesting and eating grains from vast fields of wild barley and wheat." He sets the earliest date for some type of bread-making in this region at 22,500 years ago, explaining that both wheat and barley, when winnowed, ground, and perhaps roughly sifted, could be used for a dough that would form "an aerated crumb, not a dense mass of starch." Archaeology identifies grindstones and traces of hearth fires that confirm this early bread-making. One major theme of his work is that early examples of bread were not necessarily primitive or crude: early people had and used tools and ingenuity to make bread that was tasty by modern standards, and moreover, was often visually creative in its decorative uses.

Both Rubel and Mason explore at length the chemistry of bread-making. Mason's concentration is on the historic use of various substances to raise dough, mainly in England, and on the flavors and varieties of bread that resulted from the choices of housewives, noble kitchens, or professional bakers. The early bakers depended on either yeast -- which came from brewing beer or ale -- or on sourdough starter -- which resulted from exposing dough to ambient yeasts and bacteria. Both types of leavening resulted in a variety of flavors; only in the last 200 years or so has yeast exclusively intended for baking bread been prepared, preserved, and sold. Chemical baking powder is very recent, and is barely mentioned in either source.

Rubel discusses the same choices in a number of historical and modern contexts, exploring not only the taste and chemistry, but also the social and cultural associations of various types of bread. He makes a case that the past 40 years or so have been a time of very rapid change in bread consumption and in worldwide changes in taste in bread, and especially in the globalization of some types of bread with the possible decline of some local products.

Some tastes come and go, for example in some eras bread made from yeast has been highly prized, while in other eras, including the present, a higher value has been placed on sourdough. Also, some bakers cultivate practices that make sourdough bread more sour or less sour -- the famous Poilane bread (described in one of my books depicted) is much less sour than the well-known San Francisco sourdough breads. Mason interestingly pointed out that sourdough, relying more on bacteria, facilitates baking with non-wheat flour such as rye, while yeast creates less of a rise in rye or other grains.

My previous favorite bread history was H.E.Jacob's Six Thousand Years of Bread. The two more recent works are much more scientific, and more based in analytic archaeology than in Jacob's more mystical views of bread, though his descriptions are very fascinating. All these books have a large and interesting amount of information and historic detail -- the subject seems almost inexhaustible.

Latkes

2011-12-17T23:30:00.001-05:00

We used 10 pounds of potatoes, and two electric griddles, and made latkes for 10 people.

The Belly of Paris

2011-12-17T09:03:00.000-05:00

I just read Zola's The Belly of Paris in a new translation by Mark Kurlansky. It's the topic for the next meeting of the culinary history book club I belong to.

What a masterpiece! The perceived conflict between thin people (who crave social justice) and fat people (mainly the small shopkeepers of the area) is presented vividly. The descriptions of the sights and smells of the market combine perfectly with the pettiness of the characters and their escalating quarrels. The market itself is the central image, along with the streets all around. The map above (from here) shows all the little streets that he mentions.

Does this look good to eat?

2011-12-10T10:11:00.002-05:00

The plastic food in restaurant windows really didn't look all that good to me. But it was useful since I can't read Japanese. I did not eat at this restaurant, which I think was a chain.

Food is not Magical

2011-12-09T11:09:00.006-05:00

Haruki Murakami's new book 1Q84 conforms to his normal genre: magical realism. It's also very long: 925 pages, described as a doorstop in one review. In an earlier version of our real world, a book this huge would have been completely impractical as airplane reading -- but I bought the Kindle version. In fact, I couldn't finish it in a 13 hour flight from Japan, but now I have finished.

1Q84 is enjoyable, but I think it could really have been shorter. Before I left for Japan, I reread Murakami's much earlier novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, as preparation. I think I like it better, though it's less suspenseful. The magic in it is more spontaneous, the sense of unreality develops more effectively and maybe more naturally if that makes sense.

One thing I've noticed: magical realism has to be anchored in some sort of realistic world, and in Murakami, one area that stays real is food. While sampling or observing the many and remarkable types of restaurant food in Tokyo last week (Japanese-French banquet food, authentic sushi and other fish, tempura, noodles, rice bowls, kaiseki lunch, Edo hotpot, Wagyu beef, street vendors' offerings, small cakes and pastries in tea shops, and more) I wondered what Japanese people cook and eat at home. Murakami's descriptions of food are probably a reliable indication, even in the midst of the unreality of the plots of these novels.

Here's a sample of how Tengo, one of the two main characters, makes a meal for himself, after having shopped for the ingredients. He opens a beer, preps some "leathery edamame pods," and puts them on to boil. Then he daydreams about Aomame, the other main character, whom the magical side of things has destined as his own.

"Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he chopped up finely. He peeled the shrimp and washed them at the sink. Spreading a paper towel, he laid the shrimp out in neat rows, like troops in formation. When the edamame were finished boiling, he drained them in a colander and left them to cool. Next he warmed a large frying pan and dribbled some sesame oil and spread it over the bottom. He slowly fried the chopped ginger over a low flame." (p. 255)

It's almost like a recipe. As the ginger is cooking, he continues to think about Aomame whom, at this point, he hasn't seen in 20 years, since they were both 10 years old.

"He put the sliced celery and mushrooms into the frying pan. Turning the gas flame up to high and lightly jogging the pan, he carefully stirred the contants with a bamboo spatula, adding a sprinkle of salt and pepper. ...."

The cooking and daydreaming continue. "When the stir-fried shrimp and vegetables were ready, Tengo transferred the food from the frying pan to a large platter along with the edamame. He took a fresh beer from the refrigerator, sat at the kitchen table, and, still lost in thought, proceeded to eat the steaming food." After eating half, he puts the rest away in the refrigerator.

In contrast, in an earlier scene, Aomame was served an elegant meal prepared by a professional chef at the home of a rich woman: "boiled white asparagus, salade Nicoise, a crabmeat omelet, and rolls and butter" -- showing, I guess, the evident value of French food to the Japanese that I also observed. (p. 233) In her own home cooking, she prefers fruits and vegetables, as she's a fitness instructor with highly-developed standards for her own health and healthy eating.

Other characters mention eating packaged food, ready-to-microwave dishes, or packaged puddings, while Tengo cooks other elaborate dinners for himself as well as for a guest. He makes rice in a rice-cooker to go with sun-dried mackerel, tofu, daikon radish, pickled turnip slices, and pickled plums. Sometimes the foods mentioned are even less recognizable to the non-Japanese reader.

"Cooking was not a chore for Tengo. He always used it as a time to think -- about everyday problems, about math problems, about his writing, or about metaphysical propositions."

In an inn where he stays, Tengo is served the same breakfast every day "dried horse mackerel and fried eggs, a quartered tomato, seasoned dried seaweed, miso soup with shijimi clams, and rice."

During the course of the story, Tengo checks what is the number-one best selling book. It was a diet book entitled Eat as Much as You want of the Food You Love and Still Lose Weight. Tengo thinks: "What a great title. The whole book could be blank inside and it would still sell."

My suspicion has been that the Japanese choice of home-cooked foods differs substantially from the American diet, and these various scenes from the real side of magical realism seem to support that thought. I think Tengo was made special by the fact that he is a man who lives alone but cooks elaborately, but that his choice of food was suggested to be roughly normal. In any case, the level of realistic detail about food is an interesting inclusion among the magical events of 1Q84.

Wagyu Beef !

2011-12-05T06:29:00.002-05:00

For dinner we found a Wagyu beef restaurant not far from the guest house where we are staying. The extremely marbled and tender beef is sliced thin so that you can quickly grill each piece on an in-table wood fire. The kitchen (shown above) also prepares a number of dishes from other parts of the cow, as well as salads and other things we couldn't figure out. No one spoke English, but we did work out how to get a very nice meal.

Sushi Chef

2011-12-05T00:33:00.002-05:00

We sat at the sushi bar in a tiny restaurant while this chef made us sushi -- he bought this amazing piece of tuna at the Tsukuji market this morning.

Street Food

2011-12-04T16:42:00.005-05:00

In the temple grounds at Asakusa we passed a number of food stalls, with many varied types of food that people could eat as they walked. Later, on our way from the Ueno subway station to our guest house, we passed another row of such stalls near the temple in Ueno Park. The food ranged from completely recognizable -- like bananas dipped in brightly colored candy or skewered meat -- to slightly mysterious -- like pancakes or egg mixtures filled with vegetables or funnel cakes on a stick -- to exotic -- like octopus.

Lunch at Asakusa

2011-12-04T03:18:00.006-05:00

After a water-taxi ride on the Sumida River we arrived at Asakusa, a huge shopping district surrounding a temple and pagoda. It was time for lunch, so we selected a very traditional looking restaurant named Tatsumiya specializing in Edo Hot Pot. Unlike our experience at yesterday's traditional restaurant, we were given a table in the area where one sits on chairs rather than on tatami mats. We ordered one hot pot and one eel over rice. Every bite was very delicious!

Traditional Japanese

2011-12-03T08:13:00.004-05:00

In Ueno Park we found a traditional Japanese restaurant named Insho-tei (or Innsyoutei). we ate there this afternoon, after viewing the special exhibit of Kamakura Buddhist art and other exhibits at the National Tokyo Museum nearby. We enjoyed a variety of mysterious small bites of food, miso soup, rice with beans, and small cups of non-sweet custards, served in a woven basket in a tatami-mat room (meaning we sat on the floor to eat). Although we had no idea what most of them were, we liked them very much.

Also in the park: a shrine to the early Edo shogun.

From the museum's Asian collections: a 12th-13th century Ganesha statue from Cambodia.

We had dinner in a small Yakitori restaurant near the guest house on the University of Tokyo campus where we are staying. It was delicious!

Japanese Food!

2011-12-02T08:22:00.002-05:00

For lunch today, I had a bowl of ramen noodles, as described on the sign above (click on it to enlarge). At the counter in the noodle shop I happened to sit next to a Buddhist monk named Malcolm, whose father is the hereditary head of a nearby Buddhist temple. His American mother went to the University of Michigan, which is why he spoke perfect English and thus was fortuitously available to help me figure out the system (involving purchase of a ticket from a vending machine to pay the cook behind the counter).

We had dinner at a wonderful place, which our hosts identified as a "drinking" place, so we made toasts in beer and saki along with an amazing and fabulous selection of sashimi, sushi, edamame, and other interesting dishes such as sea grapes (a kind of seaweed with tiny spherical air sacs that crunch when you bite them); tofu salad with an almost-sweet, very smooth tofu; and an egg dish that is also slightly sweet.

Conference Banquet

2011-12-01T18:19:00.002-05:00

This is Japan, where the luxury food for a really high quality banquet is French. In fact, we have been her 2 days without having any Japanese food! The first night was a smaller dinner, at an Italian restaurant. Many of the details of this banquet showed how the Japanese have adapted French food to their style and taste; some of the hot buffet items were even more influenced than the appetizer buffet above.

Len was invited to give a short speech and a toast to the physicist in whose honor the conference is held.

Tea Bowls

2011-12-01T01:40:00.005-05:00

Several collections of tea ceremony items appear in the Tokyo National Museum which I visited this morning. Tea ceremony items are also depicted on other works such as on one sword hilt in the room of swords and sword accessories. The first bowl above is so famous that it has a name: "Hashihime" -- it is Mino ware, and dates from the 16th or 17th century. The second tea bowl is Takatori ware from the 17th century.

Above: a 17th century Oribe square tea plate glazed in two different ways.

Finally, Pie

2011-11-24T20:20:00.003-05:00

First, add whipped cream:

Everyone together

Waiting for Pi(e)

2011-11-24T18:17:00.002-05:00

Dinner

2011-11-24T18:10:00.002-05:00

Four kinds of chutney (cranberry, plum and mango-cranberry) and regular cranberry sauce, along with other traditional food --

The set table --

Ready to eat --

Chocolate Pie

2011-11-24T14:35:00.000-05:00

Note: apple pies were made yesterday. Banana cream pie was made later.

Peeling Potatoes

2011-11-24T14:27:00.001-05:00

Turkey Prep

2011-11-24T11:10:00.005-05:00

Bread, apple, onion, fresh sage .... chopped by Alice and Elaine.

Adding eggs and stock, then stuffing the bird --

More prep, and meanwhile:

Thanksgiving Aprons

2011-11-24T09:10:00.001-05:00

Here we are: Elaine and I, starting on Thanksgiving Dinner at Aparna's house in our new aprons. Thank you, Kappu!

" My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner"

2011-11-20T21:04:00.005-05:00

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir by Meir Shalev is a delicious depiction of Moshav Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel. A moshav is a type of collective farm that's far less communal than a kibbutz. The early Israeli pioneers who preferred to live in separate homes for individual families frequently chose life on a moshav instead of the demanding shared kibbutz life. Nahalal was one of the first, perhaps the very first, moshav, founded by Russian Jews in the 1920s. In the course of his memoir, Shalev depicts life on the moshav throughout its history, and even provides background about the Russian villages where the founders came from.

I especially enjoyed Shalev's memoir because I've visited the Moshav and met some of the present-day inhabitants. I was even given a tour of the cemetery where his parents are buried: a location that figures in several scenes in his memoir. At right is a photo that I took on that visit.

For our visit, we drove on the most recently built tollway from our temporary apartment in Rehovot up to Nahalal. In contrast, Shalev's earliest childhood trips to Nahalal in the 1950s were via the milk tanker that delivered milk from the moshav's cows to the dairy in Jerusalem. Though his grandparents were founders of the moshav, his mother had moved to Jerusalem where his father was a teacher and a poet, so the milk-truck driver would take him back to visit his grandmother and other relatives. Later, he traveled by train, a long and complicated route. His descriptions of train travel are vivid and amusing, right down to the sandwiches with tomato but with the salt packed separately so that the tomatoes wouldn't get mushy and to the last few miles when he and his mother and sisters would travel by horse-drawn cart.

Here's my favorite passage about a story his grandfather told about life before going to Israel:

"In the shop that his family had 'back there' in Makarov, in Ukraine, 'we sold products for the body, products for the soul, and products for between the two.' When I asked him what he meant by that, he explained. 'Products for the body were axes and hoes and boots for the Ukrainian farmers. Products for the soul were tallises, tefillin, and prayer books for the Jews.'

"Then he fell silent and stared at me in order to get me to ask what the products in betwen the two were.

'"Grandpa,' I said, 'and what were the products in between the two?'
"In between the two," he chuckled, 'is selyodka, herring. It's for both the body and the soul.'"

Happy Birthday Adam

2011-11-12T09:32:00.000-05:00

On 11-11-11, Adam turns 25. Happy Birthday!

A Strange Burst of Efficiency

2011-11-09T20:23:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I buy frozen packages of meatballs from Trader Joe's, but today I decided to make a whole lot of meatballs and freeze some. This is very unusual for me! My freezer is usually full of convenience food, bread, and ice packs of various sorts. (We threw out the 8 year old rolls of photo film when we installed our new refrigerator last month.)

For my meatballs, I used 2 lb. of grass-fed ground beef (the leanest) and a pound of whatever ecologically green ground pork Whole Foods had to offer. As a result, I did not spend less per meatball than at TJ's. But that's not what was driving me, anyway. I wanted to have some home-made meatballs in the freezer.

Above you can see one of the 2 trays of meat balls before I put them in the oven. And below, the still steaming meatballs just as they came out. This was the tray that went into 2 freezer boxes:

For dinner, I simmered the other tray of baked meatballs in some tomato sauce (this was from Trader Joe's but I added a dash of sugar and balsamic vinegar to it). We ate around half of it for dinner; I thought it was good:

To make meatballs I use 1 egg and one-half to one small, finely chopped onion per pound of meat. Today I put in panko crumbs (I sometimes use other starchy stuff such as matzoh meal or oatmeal), parsley flakes, herbs de Provence, and a squeeze of tomato paste from my handy tomato paste tube. Sometimes I flavor them differently. Always salt and pepper, though. I don't measure all the seasonings, just eyeball it and feel it to see if it needs more crumbs. I mix it up thoroughly, gently form meat balls tucking the onion pieces inside the meat so they don't separate while cooking. I bake them at 475° for 12 minutes (less if they are to be simmered in sauce). Some of the frozen ones might end up in cardamom flavored white sauce or in some other arrangement.

Freaks

2011-11-03T15:35:00.010-04:00

I just read Candy Freak by Steve Almond. The book, as suggested by its title, is about Steve Almond's obsessions with candy bars. He spends a lot of time describing his childhood experiences with candy bars, but the main topic of each chapter is the exploration of candy bar factories, especially the small regional ones that make little-known candy bars with imaginative names. I've never heard of many of the brands he features, much less tasted them, but I googled around for photos to help myself imagine what he was talking about.

Almond is obsessed by the fate of these obscure candy bars, a sad declining fate which is pretty much sealed. Mars, Hershey, and Nestle pay tens of thousands of dollars to super markets and other mainstream candy sellers for the shelf space for their products (which Almond seems to have nothing against, just that they won't let him tour their factories). No matter how good or how locally popular obscure candy bars may be, the small and often eccentric manufacturers can't afford these fees. So they are sold in gas stations or dollar stores or mom-and-pop places where only candy freaks like the author or neighborhood kids or whatever will buy them.

Almond is therefore very sad. He's a sad man, and he slowly introduces the reader to any number of sources of sadness and freaking out in his life. I don't want to go into this area of the book -- too depressing. Candy bars for him are an escape from what could be seen as neurotic self-absorption and messed-up memories. He calls his existential state "the loneliness, the creeping sense of failure," and he harbors the hope that "the pleasures of candy would help me beat a path from my despair." (p. 155) Jeez. For this he embarked on a nation-wide tour of candy factories.

Mostly, it's a very freaky book, but unlike a lot of books, it isn't guilty of misrepresenting itself: Candy Freak. Yes.

The greatest writerly skill Almond displays is describing tastes of candy bars.

He bites into one and writes: "The dark chocolate shell gave way to an intense burst of sweet, chewy fruit. The texture was soft enough to yield to the teeth, yet firm enough to absorb the musky undertones of the chocolate." This candy bar turns out to be "a dried cherry, infused with raspberry and covered in a Select Origin 75 percent dark chocolate." (p. 104) Yes, a premium post-modern chocolate bar, photo at right.

But Almond is just as rapturous about dozens of other candy bars that have been manufactured pretty much the same way and on the same antique equipment for nearly a century, and are still made by the descendants of the founding candy-makers. And he describes each factory and each owner in great and remarkably varied detail.

For me, this is the worst week of the year to hear about all these candy bars, because Monday was Halloween, and I spent at least the last 2 weeks in October on a kind of Snickers and Butterfinger bender. Honest -- I only ate one Snickers bar between last Halloween and this October, and that was on the road when we stopped at a gas station that didn't really have any real food. But I digress from Almond's talents, and his great success in documenting the last of the small-scale candy makers. For this, he is in fact widely recognized and often quoted. Freaky!

Way Out West

2011-11-02T09:30:00.005-04:00

The La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe New Mexico, the splendid accommodations at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the Union Station in St. Louis, and the coffee shop in the Petrified Forest National Monument (now a museum -- see photo above) all have impressed me greatly at the various times in my life when I've experienced them. I just read a book that puts them all together: they were originally designed and developed by Fred Harvey. Author Stephen Fried's Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West -- One Meal at a Time is a good read. It successfully combines the biography of the man Fred Harvey (1835-1901), the historic development of the American west, and the history of the once-famous hospitality company, also named Fred Harvey, that he founded and that continued for decades under the management of his family after his death.

I knew two basic things about Fred Harvey before I read the book. First, I was aware that there were many restaurants and hotels by that name at some time in the past, which turns out to have been the era of development of tourism along the route of the Santa Fe railroad. Second, I understood that Fred Harvey Indian stores had traded for some of the highest quality rugs, pottery, and other artifacts, and had encouraged the Indians to develop their craft traditions.

Here are several additional interesting things I learned about the man and his company:

Harvey began by creating a chain of restaurants along the rail lines, where travelers could buy reliable meals without being cheated. He continued by improving the food and service in a number of ways, and by working with Pullman to develop dining cars when train technology made it possible to walk from car to car, and made the interiors of the trains more pleasant. His endeavor included many measures to ensure consistent quality, making Fred Harvey the first restaurant chain and a model for some that followed.

At the end of his life, Harvey and his sons began to expand into tourist hotels, and particularly to create the still-amazing hotels and tourist facilities at the Grand Canyon, the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, and a few other spectacular places. They also took over all concessions at central rail terminals such as the Union Station in St.Louis that I remember. After the Depression, the only profitable part of the company was at the Grand Canyon, and the rest slowly shut down.

The Harvey company was ahead of its time in hiring women. The wait staff of the restaurants from quite early-on was entirely female, in jobs that had previously been mainly for men. These waitresses received intense training and promised to remain in service for a certain time (after which they often married the men on the frontier where they worked). Known as "Harvey Girls," they wore super-clean white aprons, and upheld the high standards set by Fred Harvey.

Women were hired not only as waitresses, but also in other roles unusual for that era. Mary Colter (1869-1958) was the chief architect and designer of the truly innovative buildings and interiors for the restaurants, gift shops, and tourist hotels for the chain. Beginning in 1902 she was the main visionary in developing what now seems to be a classic southwest style of architecture. Ironically, though, the women in the family were shut out of management by one inflexible member of the Harvey male line.

Finally, in 1946, the Fred Harvey heirs cooperated with the making of "The Harvey Girls," a Judy Garland movie about the early days of the chain. The movie was extremely popular (the book notes that it made more money in its initial year than the Santa Fe railroad, which was sliding into oblivion by then). The best-known song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," won an Academy Award. Like many films, this one cemented the collective memory of an era that was just about finished. I admit that I had not heard of the movie, though I do know the song.

I loved the book. Its appendix includes recipes from published Fred Harvey cookbooks and from surviving manuscripts used by the cooks in the restaurants, many of whom were brought over from Europe to innovate combinations of classic recipes with southwest cuisine -- especially at the La Fonda in Santa Fe. (In other words, the Coyote Cafe wasn't the first to put Santa Fe on the culinary map.) I may try some of them!

Dumas Celebrates Pork Month

2011-10-26T00:06:00.004-04:00

Alexandre Dumas is best known for the Three Musketeers (at least 29 different film versions listed on IMDB, as one measure of its popularity) and The Count of Monte Cristo (at least 18 versions) but he also wrote a gigantic work called the "Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine." I just bought the little tiny abridged version, recently republished. It's not exactly a cookbook but he does give recipes, so in honor of Louise's Cookbook Game at Months of Edible Celebrations, I'm going to share a recipe in honor of Pork Month. That's what we do in this game: we pick a current MONTH, like Apple Month or in this case Pork Month, which is celebrated in October, and we find a recipe in a cookbook we like.

The recipe in the tiny version of the "Grand Dictionnaire" which is titled From Absinthe to Zest: An Alphabet for Food Lovers, doesn't just have any old entry for pork: it has "Young Wild Boar," which in French is "marcassin." The recipe is for "Quarter of wild boar with cherry sauce." You would surely want to make it, if you happened to have a "fresh tender quarter of a young wild boar." Dumas suggests that you start by dealing with the bone -- his description is detailed, on how to do this so that the bone protrudes properly from the meat. Then you put the meat in a litre of marinade, and let it macerate for two or three days, you cook it and baste it, drain it and "mask it with a thick layer of breadcrumbs (from black bread) which have been dried, pounded, sieved, mixed with a little sugar and cinnamon, and then dampened with some good red wine, but only enough to make them stick together." There are a few more instructions on cooking it, and finally putting "a paper frill around the protruding bone."

The Cherry Sauce for the meat is made separately, from dried, unpitted cherries, softened in water and then pounded in a mortar. Additional ingredients include red wine, cinnamon, cloves, salt, and lemon zest, all thickened with starch.

Sounds delicious, doesn't it?

"Pomegranate Soup" by Marsha Mehran

2011-10-22T15:46:00.002-04:00

I just read the novel Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran. The book features descriptions of food and cooking, including one Persian recipe in each chapter. However, these descriptions are really the only feature of the novel that I find truly strong and enjoyable. The recipes for chicken with walnuts and pomegranates; various soups, yogurt drinks, and deep-fried pastries sound wonderful.

The premise of Pomegranate Soup is like a well-known recipe. Take an insular village somewhere in northern Europe (here, Ireland). Invent some quirky inhabitants (quite a few here). Bring in an immigrant or two to found a restaurant or cafe (here, three sisters from Iran and an elderly Italian widow who had already been the outsider in a village for 40 years or more). Introduce the villagers to exotic cooking. They like it (a bit too fast here). Create some jealousy, greed, adolescent pranks, rivalry, and love interest (maybe a little contrived). Yup, yup, yup, a kind of a melodrama.

The portrayal of the sisters and how they fled the revolution in Iran is interesting and plausible. The portrayal of the Irish villagers and the Italian widow is pretty plausible too, at least at first. The events of the story start out not too bad. But as things progress, the story goes out of control -- spoiler coming.

The ending, where all the evildoers and mischief makers see the light, repent, and swear to be good, doesn't do much for me at all. Also, throughout the book the descriptions are often a bit over-written, sometimes with rather odd word choices that overreach to try to make it more vivid. In sum, it's a rather weak novel with really good food writing.

It's School Lunch and Chili Month

2011-10-13T18:47:00.004-04:00

October is School Lunch Month and also Chili Month. For me this is quite appropriate, because my first taste of chili was in the school cafeteria at Delmar Harvard Elementary School in University City, Missouri. This was exceptional: I normally brought a bag lunch consisting of a sandwich, an apple, and sometimes a treat like a cookie or a piece of candy. My mother made our lunches almost every day, so I can't remember how I was able to try the chili in the cafeteria instead of my sandwich. I'm sure it wasn't in the least hot, as no children in Missouri at that time would have been expected to eat spicy food. It was served in a heavy white china bowl with a little cellophane packet of crackers. I was always curious to try things that were different from what my mother made, and this was really different.

I did have chili once at home -- that was later, when I was in high school. My Aunt Florence brought us some of her home made chili. I remember her describing what she put in: ground beef, canned beans and tomatoes, bell peppers, chili powder, and probably a couple of other things. Compared to my mother's cooking it was exotic.

Later when I had a kitchen of my own, I found the very bland taste of Campbell's Chili Beef Soup to replicate my school-cafeteria memories. (I put the Andy Warhol soup can image in this blog post to reinforce that memory.) By that time, I was living in California and trying out the inexpensive and maybe even somewhat authentic California Mexican restaurants in Berkeley (which was not yet the gourmet paradise that it later became). The familiar school cafeteria flavor didn't seem exotic at all.

Then I got adventurous and began to make chili from recipes that I found one place or another, most likely starting with the recipe "Chilly-Night Chili" on page 16 of the I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken. Instead of going right to the Campbell's Chili Beef can, it uses a can of tomato soup along with onion, beans, hamburger, and optional olives. Aunt Florence did it better, but pretty soon, so did I.

Here's a chili recipe that I posted a few years ago. This time I know where it came from, but it's not from a cookbook, it's from real people who at the time they gave me the recipe were really living in Texas. Alec, in fact is a native.

Ellen and Alec's "Texas Red" Chili
2 to 3 lb. lean beef cubes: trim off fat if necessary
2 chopped onions
3 cloves chopped garlic
Several fresh chopped chilies (such as jalapenos) or 1 can Old El Paso chopped chili peppers
1 to 4 tablespoons of chili spice (recipe follows — blend of spice is essential)
8 oz tomato sauce and 8 oz water
1 lb can of tomatoes, cut in pieces

Brown onion and garlic. Add fresh peppers (if using fresh). Remove from pan. Add beef and brown. Drain excess fat. Return meat to pan. (Add canned peppers.) Add spice, then tomato sauce, water, and tomatoes. Simmer several hours on top of stove or in 275 degree oven, until meat is soft.

One heresy is to add a can of corn, a can of black beans, and/or a can of red beans towards the end of cooking. I'm not enough of a heretic to make the beans or corn dominate the chili. That would be a different recipe.

Chili Spice Blend
In a mortar or spice grinder blend 1 crumbled bay leaf with 1 tablespoon of each of the following spices: Whole Cumin, Dried Oregano, Chili Powder. Optionally add 1 tablespoon each of onion flakes, parsley flakes, and dried basil. Add at least 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper, dried hot pepper, or hot pepper flakes.

Thanks again to Louise at Months of Edible Celebrations for inspiring me and so many others in new areas of food blogging this month. I celebrate all the huge number of chili recipes and variations that I've ever tried, and the rather pathetic memory of the school cafeteria.

Really Retro

2011-10-10T17:31:00.002-04:00

I just read about a tasting menu at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that included American food representing several decades. It's arranged in chronological order from starters to desert. I'm unusually impressed by the right-on choices:

1940s -- chicken liver and bacon paté with brandied cherries, watercress and pecan raisin bread
1950s -- poached lobster and asparagus casserole with crispy potato, shaved truffle and American caviar
1960s -- steak Diane with fingerling potatoes, caramelized onion, wild mushrooms and Bloomsdale spinach
1970s -- "Brie fondue" (puff pastry baked Brie) with brioche, orange marmalade and balsamic
1980s -- "mud pie," a coffee sabayon with chocolate crust and dark chocolate ganache.

A random photo of a mud pie:

Louise's Cookbook Party Game

2011-10-04T14:30:00.008-04:00

At Months of Edible Celebrations Louise is having a fun month, challenging her readers to post a recipe in honor of one of the special foods of the month. Among the commemorations she lists for October is Cranberry Month. Great idea -- I hope cranberries start to show up in the markets soon.

I love cranberries. I substitute either dried or fresh for walnuts in chocolate chip cookies or even in brownies (shown above). I have made cranberry cornmeal cake, cranberry bread, and above all, cranberry chutney. I make it early so it will be aged enough for Thanksgiving dinner, so my celebration has to be deferred -- later, I make ordinary cranberry sauce for those who like it more traditional.

Louise requested that we specify what event we made our recipe for. She also asked where I got the recipe: good question. I don't remember, I've been making it for years. I hope these details don't disqualify me from her game!

Here's the recipe -- which I've posted before.

Cranberry Chutney
Use a total of 2 packages of cranberries -- 6 cups
Combine the following in a large pan and boil until sugar dissolves:

1/2 cup cider vinegar        2 and 1/4 cups brown sugar
3/4 tsp. curry powder        1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground cloves       1/4 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. cinnamon            1 and 1/2 cups water

Add and simmer 10 minutes:

1 apple, peeled, cored, chopped
2 lemons and 2 oranges, prepared as follows

Use the orange and lemon rind and the fruit -- pare rind with a vegetable peeler and chop or grate it. Discard the pith. Section and chop the fruit.

Add and boil 40 minutes:

1/2 cup golden raisins       1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
3 cups cranberries

Add 3 cups more, that is the rest of the cranberries. I fool around with this recipe a lot. Sometimes I just put everything together and cook until it looks thick and done. Sometimes I use candied ginger.

Store in jars in refrigerator. Age this chutney about a week before using. It keeps for several months in the refrigerator. It's good as a side dish for chicken, turkey, or duck, or as a filling for halves of acorn squash, or as a relish on a cheddar cheese sandwich -- among other uses.

"Being inauthentic is a fact of America"

2011-10-01T10:02:00.003-04:00

In an article by an immigrant from Thailand with evolving views of Thai restaurants in America, I read this thought-provoking paragraph about the emotions created by differences between the food in those restaurants and the food from childhood in Thailand:

"It’s a hard reality to swallow, but I’ve learned to live with it, because being inauthentic is a fact of America. To become American means to have been, at some point, uprooted from an ancestral world and reinvented free-style. I sometimes find myself counting in Thai, but most of my thoughts now bubble out in English. I go back and forth between the Thai way of eating in tandem with fork and spoon and the American way of picking at foods with a lone fork. What love I have for fish sauce equally goes to butter. If I can feel neither wholly Thai nor wholly American, how can I ask the same of a bowl of duck green curry? Now, when I look at a Thai restaurant menu, I don’t fume and think in expletives as much. I just breathe in and out, and let the food be what it can be." -- Learning to Love Thai-American Food by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

No pumpkin problem

2011-09-28T12:02:00.002-04:00

I've read that the floods in the Northeast are causing a pumpkin shortage. But there's good news! The shortage is local -- pumpkins grow in every state, and they travel well. Says the wonderful Consumer Reports blog The Consumerist --

"That means if New York is having a tough pumpkin season, that's okay, Michigan will come to the rescue! Or California, or Texas! Worst case scenario, you might have to pay a little bit more or not get that mega huge one you usually go for, but isn't a magnificently carved jack-o-lantern worth a dollar more and a size downgrade? Charlie Brown would say yes."

Challah

2011-09-22T09:34:00.003-04:00

If you want to make good challah, I learned last night, you need to use good flour, good yeast, and water just the right temperature (not hot!). Recipes vary in proportions, method, and additions such as toppings and fillings. The finished loaf is brushed with egg which can be mixed with honey to make the crust sweet. Some people add chocolate chips, chopped apple, cinnamon-sugar, chopped onion, olives, and more either to the top or within the strands that are then braided.

Here are a few photos of some of the women who were also learning:

Forming strands of dough after first rise:

Shaped dough topped with apples:

My finished loaf, baked after I got home:

It's Just about the Food

2011-09-20T14:15:00.003-04:00

The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery is a venerable event: I suspect it's the Gold Standard for food articles. Lazy me -- I haven't systematically read through the collected proceedings of these annual meetings where the best articles from each year since 1981 have been published. On a recent visit to the library, however, I checked out the 1998 volume, Food in the Arts. I was especially interested to read "Food in the Detective Novel" by Joan P. Alcock, and to learn how a professional food historian approaches the subject that I often return to.

"Food in the Detective Novel" begins with a quote from W.H.Auden's famous article on detective fiction, though in fact he says little about food. Alcock acknowledges that the most basic role of food in crime is "in relation to killing the victim," and the second place goes to "the contents of the stomach" for clues to the time of death. She continues:

"In recent years attention has been paid to the food eaten by the investigator, either as part of the story or to add background verisimilitude. This is evident in the historical whodunits, but it may also be a facet of the investigator. The number of cook/chef investigators is increasing." (p. 13)

After this introduction, the article continues with a survey in chronological order by the setting of the detective stories. Inspector Marcus Didius Falco in ancient Rome is her first example: readers hear of the value of peppercorns, the economics of the oil trade, and the lost herb silphium. She continues by tabulating the food references in detective stories set in the middle ages, such as Brother Cadfael "who is more concerned with growing herbs ... than with his stomach, for his herbs have healing powers." (p. 14) She continues with Renaissance-era detective fiction, such as the protocol and place settings for a feast in the work of Kate Sedley. Alcock points out:

"The feast is described in some detail but phrases such as 'I cannot remember at this distance of time more than a tithe of what was consumed that evening,' seem an attempt to avoid accurate description." (p. 15)

The article proceeds with a study of several series of detective novels set in the Mediterranean, including those of Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Questura:

"Chilled wine is sipped slowly while savouring views over Venice.... Prosecco or Fragolino are aperitifs; Soave is served with chicken and artichokes; Dolcetto with pasta fagioli and cotoletta; brandy or grappa with coffee." (p. 17)

A summary of French detectives' food follows -- "If Madame Maigret has a vice, it is drinking her cup of Balthazar coffee, which she takes every morning." Then the classic English detective novel, "mainly by women writers... Food was of little account in their stories." She finds a few meals of interest in the stories of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and the less-famous Gladys Mitchell.

Alcock invents another category for the novels of Conan Doyle, Michael Innes, and Rex Stout: "The Abstemious and the Aesthete." I was surprised that she made no mention of Stout's Nero Wolfe novel Too Many Cooks, published 1938, where the subject is a meeting of 15 international master cooks. In it, Nero Wolfe gives a paper on American food; he consents to attend the meeting only because he wants to obtain a secret recipe.

And Alcock goes on to discuss women detectives, such as the work of Amanda Cross and others (somehow, Miss Marple isn't in this category, but in the Classic English category). She lists the foods eaten by each detective, without being distracted by other features of the tales. Only in her conclusion does she apply what I would think of as literary analysis:

"Other books than detective stories incorporate food, but it is obvious that the frisson between murder and food, between intellectual puzzle-solving and creating of dishes is eminently satisfying. ... The dinner party provides opportunities for endless twists in a murder plot, the murderer awaiting an opportunity, the victim calmly eating, unsuspecting of the final fate." (p. 29)

I wish she had been more explicit about how each author made use of the food details that she catalogued.

Today at the Detroit Institute of Arts

2011-09-16T19:59:00.003-04:00

Daniel Spoerri's "Variations d'un Petit Dejuner, 1966" shows a conceptual breakfast; that is, a breakfast that someone has finished eating, and the cigarette they smoked during, or maybe after, the meal. Leftover foil jam pot; check. Coffee and milk pots; check. Used knife and butter wrapper; check. Open and presumably empty sugar packets; check. Cup stained with coffee; check. I suspect these are real crumbs and remnants, an artistic selection from a real hotel tray somewhere.

I've mentioned Spoerri before -- see this post about his work "Use Rembrandt as an Ironing Board," in which I explained why the image was Mona Lisa, not a Rembrandt, on the ironing board. I like him for his humor in both works.

"Cookbooks as Literature"

2011-09-14T14:00:00.006-04:00

I just read a really good article about cookbook authors: "Soul Food: Cookbooks As Literature" by Maria Bustillos. Included for a detailed review: Alexandre Dumas for his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, Elizabeth David; Irma S. Rombauer, the original author of The Joy of Cooking; and Black Panther activist Bobby Seale for Barbeque'N with Bobby. She mentions others as she describes these favorites. She also singles out a few cookbook authors who provide a less interesting and appealing persona, notably Martha Stewart. Bustillos selects apt quotations and recipes to illustrate her descriptions of these authors, which makes this a very readable and enjoyable piece of writing.

In summing up her ideas on cookboos as literature, Bustillos writes: "Dumas, and Elizabeth David and Julia Child, Marcel Boulestin and Alice B. Toklas and Bobby Seale and so many others, have the eating of soup figured out and a good deal besides; as literary artists and beyond this, as artists of savoir faire, of life itself. Given that one must eat, how then to do it? Historians and philosophers as well as poets tend to come up short where advice on questions urgent and as homely as these is required."

Good Eats

2011-09-13T19:54:00.007-04:00

Last night my book club met at my house to discuss Just Kids by Patti Smith. We found the book very appealing and fascinating, and discussed it non-stop, except for eating the refreshments that I made. One funny memory that she relates in her memoir was of meeting Allen Ginsberg. He appeared just as she realized that she didn't have enough money for her sandwich at the automat -- he bought her the sandwich and a cup of coffee and sat down with her. After a while he asked "Wait, are you a girl?" She's a girl.

"I thought you were a pretty boy," he explained.

"Do I have to pay you for the sandwich?" she asked.

"No, my mistake."

However, food wasn't really a theme of the book. Much of the time in her early life as a New York art scene wannabe, Patti Smith didn't have much to eat. She does often mention eating at the automat -- things like mac and cheese, or a sandwich on a poppy-seed roll. Not much inspiration for refreshments.

Smith mentions that when she and her lover Robert Mapplethorpe had a bit of money they would buy a bag of Mallomars. I decided that would be my one literary menu choice. When I went to the market, though, I found out that Mallomars are seasonal! The chocolate is too melty in summer. So I bought Canadian Whippets, which are similar.

In order to make this a scholarly post, I read the Wikipedia entry on Chocolate-coated marshmallow treats. And learned more than any sane person should know about Mallomars, Whippets, and similar confections from Israel, Denmark, England, and even the Phillipines as well as other places. Turns out Mallomars are really a New York thing: 70% are sold there. If you want to know more, you can read the article and the many places that it diligently links to.

A couple of people suggested that the might like recipes for the non-themed but seasonal food I made for the meeting. First, the healthy parts:

Not-quite caprese salad. Do you get tired of the classic combo: fresh mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, and vinaigrette? I've had it quite often this tomato season. I love it, but wanted some variety for my tomatoes, so I used a goat-cheese log and chopped dill and parsley, and a few black olives too.

Carrot salad, but not cloyingly sweet, rather savory. It's similar to a Moroccan-Jewish (and also Israeli) recipe. Simple: grated carrots and vinaigrette made from oil, lemon juice, rice vinegar, cumin, Spanish smoked paprika, ground coriander, a crushed garlic clove, and a parsley garnish. Around half a teaspoon of each ground spice for around 1/2 cup oil and around 1/4 cup combined lemon juice and vinegar.

Again I made peach-plum cake from the Polish cookbook. For the recipe see this post from last June. Nearby you can see a watermelon and pineapple fruit bowl and the Whippets.

And one more picture of current cooking ...

Tonight: steak on the grill with great grill marks. Thanks, Lenny.

Hunger

2011-09-11T09:23:00.006-04:00

"Hunger is an unforgivable disease because it is the easiest one to cure. It is devastating to wake up in the morning and look east, west, south and north and see that there is nothing green that you can chew. During a drought everything goes yellow and dry. ...

"Hunger is dehumanizing. It gets to a level where you do not know how you will survive and you will do anything for a simple kernel of corn."

So writes Peter Kimeu in "Remembering a Hungry Childhood" an op-ed in today's New York Times. It's a powerful essay: almost unbearable to read. Such suffering is outside of my own experience and that of almost everyone I know well. Kimeu doesn't ask the reader to take responsibility for his past, but his last words are: "It is incumbent on all of us to band together and fight this very curable disease. No child on earth should ever have to sleep like that."

But what can we do? I feel totally helpless to make a response, as I don't see any reasonable charitable, governmental, or global political measures being offered that would effectively address hunger on a global scale.

Labor Day Picnic

2011-09-05T22:14:00.002-04:00

South Lake, Michigan, Labor Day 2011 at Nat's house. Too cool to go out on the lake, but we saw two sandhill cranes walking on the beach -- actually the way they lifted their long legs simultaneously looked more like marching than like walking. We had a big picnic which everyone collaborated on. Appetizers from Greek Town; grilled vegetables, peaches, and chicken-sausage skewers; watermelon salad; caprese salad; fresh corn kernels; and dessert of blondies, plum cake, and rosemary shortbread. Did I forget anything? Wine, beer, coffee...

Sausage and chicken skewers with fresh herbs & peaches, ready to grill

Adam, Kaywin, and Lenny grilling.

Indoor cooks Adam and Nat ... missed a photo of Carol making the watermelon salad

Dinner is ready.

Blondies and plum cake.

Plum Chutney

2011-09-04T18:24:00.002-04:00

Looking just like the plum chutney I have made in the past --

What did Inspector French eat?

2011-09-03T12:58:00.003-04:00

Freeman Wills Crofts is the creator of Scotland Yard Inspector French, who appears in a number of novels. I heard of his novels in an article by W.H.Auden, published in Harpers in 1948: "The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict" It's a wonderful study of detective fiction, which presents Auden's ideas on the appeal of murder mysteries as well as analysis of their principal "five elements–-the milieu, the victim, the murderer, the suspects, the detectives."

Auden says "Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. Indeed, I only know of three: Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Freeman Wills Crofts), and Father Brown (Chesterton)." I have read all of Sherlock Holmes, and sampled Father Brown. However, Crofts' Inspector French novels, published between 1920 and 1957, were entirely new to me. I was delighted at the possibility of discovering a new detective author, and quickly purchased Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy for my Kindle.

French is an extremely intense detective, and there are virtually no passages in the novel that don't directly advance the plot and help him solve the diabolical crime, which is initially so clever that it appears to be an accident. I completely agree with Auden that this is an author worth reading, though there are aspects of the work that are somewhat dated.

Of course as I read I was looking for the theme I always check in detective fiction: how does the author use food in his narrative? Unlike some of my favorites, Crofts offers no description of what Inspector French eats of of who cooks it for him. This is consistent with the intensity of the narrative. Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy has nothing more detailed than "after breakfast he stood in the hotel coffee room" (p. 72), or "starting out with a stick in his hand and a packet of sandwiches in his pocket" (p. 99), or "at the hotel he dined, and ... asked for a packet of sandwiches" (p. 157) True to the detective writers' commitment that no detail can be left without follow-up, when French takes sandwiches with him you usually hear about when he ate them: "In the small hours he ate his sandwiches, and then he had to fight an overwhelming desire for sleep." (p. 158)

I find it interesting that despite the seeming lack of interest in the details of what French ate, the author uses these meals and snacks just the way that other authors do: to punctuate the days of detecting and contribute to the reader's sense of time passing. Perhaps there is more expansive food description in later books, but that would represent a change in this intensity.

I found Auden's description of Inspector French especially interesting. Auden says:

"His class and culture are the natural ones for a Scotland Yard inspector. (The old Oxonian Inspector is insufferable.) His motive is love of duty. Holmes detects for his own sake and shows the maximum indifference to all feelings except a negative fear of his own. French detects for the sake of the innocent members of society, and is indifferent only to his own feelings and those of the murderer. ... He is exceptional only in his exceptional love of duty which makes him take exceptional pains; he does only what all could do as well if they had the same patient industry (his checking of alibis for tiny flaws which careless hurry had missed). He outwits the murderer, partly because the latter is not quite so painstaking as he, and partly because the murderer must act alone, while he has the help of all the innocent people in the world who are doing their duty (e.g., the post- men, railway clerks, milkmen, etc., who become, accidentally, witnesses to the truth)."

Note: to see all my posts on the topic, click on the label "Food in Detective Fiction" at the bottom of this post.

This Year's Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

2011-09-02T11:25:00.002-04:00

I've made slow-roasted tomatoes for the last few years. After a trip to the Ann Arbor farmers' market, I did it again on Wednesday. Above, the ready-to-roast tomatoes.

I cut a huge number of tomatoes in half, garnished them with fresh herbs (this year: tarragon and sage), salted them lightly, drizzled them with olive oil, and roasted them in the oven at 200º for 12 hours. In the past I have also added garlic, but experience has taught me that it's better to add fresh garlic to the recipes where the tomatoes are used -- I'm not happy with the result of freezing it.

Here are the finished tomatoes. Due to poor planning, I had to take them out of the oven at around 4:30 AM. I was going to leave them in the oven until I got up in the morning but the electronic brain in my stove turns out to think you have messed up if you leave it on for more than 12 hours. "Beep... beep... your tomatoes are ready. Get up now!"

Two boxes of tomatoes went into the freezer by 5 AM. That evening, several tomatoes went into lasagna along with some left-over pesto and ricotta, more fresh herbs, and some other stuff. I forgot to take a photo before we ate the well-browned dish, but the photo above shows it ready to go in the oven. I also ate a couple of them on a sandwich this morning. MMMM.

Original recipe from The Perfect Pantry blog here.

Eggplant Curry with Garum Masala

2011-08-30T20:02:00.007-04:00

Garum masala is such an interesting spice blend that I keep experimenting with it.

To the right, you can see the before and after photos. And this time, I even have a recipe, which I loosely adapted from here.

Eggplant with Garum Masala

1 medium eggplant sliced, salted, and brushed with oil
2 tablespoons whole cumin
½ large red onion, chopped
2 Tb finely chopped fresh ginger
4 tomatoes, chopped & salted
2 garlic cloves, minced
½ teaspoon red chili powder
1 teaspoon garam masala
¼ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon ground coriander (or fresh chopped coriander as a garnish)
2 tablespoons Canola oil
Salt to taste

Bake the eggplant slices on a cookie sheet at 350º for around 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, saute the cumin seeds in a small amount of oil until brown – around 30 seconds to a minute. Add ginger and onion, and cook until onion begins to soften. Add tomatoes, and garlic; simmer for around 10 minutes. When eggplant slices are soft, add to tomato mixture and cook for 5 minutes. Add the other spices. Add salt, hot pepper, or fresh peppers to boost heat & saltiness to your taste (I wanted it mild, so no peppers). Simmer for a few minutes.

I served it at room temperature with lettuce leaves and Trader Joe's mango chutney.

Fruit Crisp with Garum Masala

2011-08-25T20:28:00.003-04:00

Fruit season is here, and we've been eating peaches and plums at almost every meal. Tonight I made peach-plum crisp. I did not use very much topping, but I spiced it in an unusual and appealing way: with garum masala from my friend/relative Kappu in Toronto. She uses 20 spices in her blend. I don't know what most of them are, but it's delicious with fruit.

The left photo is before baking, the right one when it was ready to eat. You can probably see that the topping is made from uncooked rolled oats, brown sugar, butter, pecans, and the spice mixture. This was very juicy fruit, so we ate with spoons. No problem!

Birthday Cake

2011-08-18T21:02:00.003-04:00

Alice, beginning to make frosting for her cake...

... and adding the moulded chocolate letters and decorations.

Miriam adding decorations to the cake she baked.

The cake table with 4 of the 5 cakes, including one of Tom's two roulade cakes, our friend Elaine's lemon-poppyseed cake, and Miriam and Alice's decorated cakes.

After the party: cakes almost entirely gone!

Art as Food

2011-08-09T17:11:00.003-04:00

From the L.A.Times: Affordable art is the new reality.

According to the article, people in these impoverished times love to buy inexpensive -- but original -- prints and paintings. Their cravings are being addressed by warehouse-style galleries in L.A. (or online). If you like to treat your purchases as commodities like groceries, they will even let you pile them into a shopping cart.

Eggs, $8 a dozen

2011-08-09T11:28:00.004-04:00

Are organically grown foods too expensive to be a normal alternate to industrially produced foods? I think most people accept that there's some premium, often high, to be paid for organic food. And a little research tells us that a portion of that increase in price is due to government subsidies to the large-scale, environmentally unfriendly agriculture -- and no subsidies at all to the small-scale farmers who can behave more responsibly.

A farmer in New York -- written up in the Atlantic -- charges $8 per dozen for eggs: "each morning, the chickens are fed organic grain, then moved to fresh pasture in a specially made chicken mobile ... the process is so labor-intensive that bringing down the price would be near impossible." Further, bringing food into New York is itself a costly process.

The big question: will organic food ever be affordable to a reasonable percent of the population? The author of the article lists some possible reforms that could at least make the choice more plausible, but I wonder if any of those ideas are viable. The government is really out to lunch, and their lunch is not environmentally friendly or free of toxins and antibiotic resistant organisms. The industrial farmers and food processors don't bear the burden for the costs that result from their irresponsibility. And they have the money to influence the legislators. Alas!

Food Paintings at the Norton Simon Museum

2011-08-03T16:45:00.003-04:00

The curator of the Norton Simon museum offers tours of food-themed paintings, as documented by the L.A.Times. This is a fascinating collection of images. I remarked on the large number of food paintings when I was at the museum earlier this summer: Food in Art: the Norton Simon Museum. However, I chose mainly different pictures, like this one:

Time for a New Mona Lisa

2011-08-03T11:27:00.000-04:00

Love that M&M character!

Two-fisted Taste Test

2011-08-02T21:31:00.003-04:00

Trader Joe now sells "Bistro Biscuits" very similar to the Biscoff cookies served on some Delta Airlines flights, and available randomly at some stores. These are justifiably popular cookies, maybe even a cult item, and I'm really glad that TJ has come through.

We did the two-fisted cookie challenge, taking bites from a TJ cookie and one of the two Delta Lotus Biscoff cookies that a friend thoughtfully saved for me from a flight she was on. The TJ version might be just a tiny bit sweeter, but the taste is almost identical. The TJ cookies are slightly smaller, measuring approximately 3 inches. I ate the Delta cookie before I thought of measuring it.

Above are the Lotus Biscoff cookies that I bought from amazon.com a few months ago (eaten up long ago of course -- see Delta Cookies -- Hard to find on Delta flights). As it happens, amazon.com now sells two kinds of Biscoff cookies, one from Lotus and another from "Gourmet Center" and the cost of the Lotus original has nearly doubled since I bought them. Lucky thing I can now get Trader Joe's Bistro Biscuits!

Chinese Woodblock Prints

2011-07-31T18:03:00.002-04:00

This afternoon we saw a remarkable exhibit of Chinese woodblock prints all dating to the past decade. I was especially impressed by this image of a family eating dinner, reflected in a spoon. I loved the detailed imagery of dishes and foods, and the suggestion of family life. My photo isn't good at all: the print is around 6 feet tall, so I took it from across the room.

We also heard a fascinating lecture about the meaning of the prints, especially about a conceptual artist, Xu Bing, who used to work in New York but is now in China.

The Ego Trip

2011-07-31T09:27:00.003-04:00

Last night I saw the BBC film "The Trip." The title should really be "The Ego Trip" because it's all about two boring men who think they are celebrities. The actors are supposed to be famous -- they wish. Well, maybe they are famous somewhere, not here.

A lot of "The Trip" is improvised, with them congratulating themselves all over the north of England as they supposedly are dining in famous restaurants in order to write about the food. In fact, as Len pointed out, it's too chaotic to be fiction. Mocumentary is the best description I've seen for the genre.

The claim that the two egomaniacs are exploring something about fine restaurants is a sham. There's no way they could ever write about what they were eating because all the time they are tasting the food, they are competing to do impressions of truly famous film stars and also competing to quote famous poetry about the places they are traveling. They sit in front of painstakingly plated little morsels of fish, duck, pigeon, chocolate cake, or whatever that's just come out of the kitchen of whichever restaurant they are in.

There are lots of shots of the kitchen staff painstakingly sauteing and arranging the food which the two characters shovel into their mouths without seeming to notice it. Although they are supposedly in 5 different restaurants I suspect that all the shots were taken in only one kitchen. Repetitiveness is another annoying feature of "The Trip."

A few images of their posturing:

Fortunately the evening started better. We ate at Seva, which has been Ann Arbor's principal vegetarian restaurant for nearly 30 years. I think it's improved since I was last there -- a marvel for a local restaurant. Our 4 dinners were nicely plated but not to the extremes of the awful film:

What's the carbon footprint of your dinner?

2011-07-24T15:07:00.008-04:00

First, here's a graphic that's getting a lot of attention, just published by The Environmental Working Group, a Washington lobbying organization:

Full Lifecycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Common Proteins and Vegetables

Here's a graphic (thanks, Len!) showing some of the same foods with their carbon footprint for 1000 calories instead of for one kilo:

Greenhouse Gas Emissions for 1000 calories of Common Proteins and Vegetables

The first graph comes from the EWG's "Meat Eater's Guide," discussing the impact of meat eating on the environment. It illustrates the carbon footprint of common foods, measured in kilograms of carbon expended to produce a kilogram of edible food. I find the idea of comparing various foods by their carbon footprint be effective, but comparing the foods by weight seems misleading. Comparing a kilogram of tomatoes to a kilogram of edible beef seems rather naive: after all, the kilo of tomatoes supplies you with around 180 calories, while a kilo of steak is 2010 calories. Comparing these to cheese is even less helpful: a kilogram of cheddar has just over 4000 calories. To me, calorie content is a better measure of nutritional value than weight, and if you look at some of the foods from this point of view, the profile is very different, as you can see in the second graphic.

Comparing beef to lentils still gets the same result: the carbon footprint of beef is over 30 times as high as the carbon used to deliver a plate of lentils to a diner. However, in between, the differences don't come out so consistent -- cheese turns out to be a much more responsible carbon-conserving choice if you look at its calorie value.

Note: calorie values are based on the information in the USDA online calorie counter.

Appreciation of Food in Fiction

2011-07-16T08:09:00.002-04:00

In the Guardian food blog:

Food writing, glorious food writing

The author, Sarah Crown, describes the use of food by a number of authors, many new to me. I loved this passage:

All books, in my opinion, benefit from a bit of food – and I've been a connoisseur since childhood. During my Blyton phase, it was the luxurious descriptions of midnight feasts, and the Famous Five's acquisition of "new rolls, anchovy paste, a big round jam tart in a cardboard box, oranges, lime-juice, a fat lettuce and some ham sandwiches" (Five Get Into Trouble, in case you're interested) that hooked me. In Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods I was enthralled by the descriptions of meat smoking, butter-churning and the putting away of provisions against the long, cold winter. My mouth still waters at the thought of the homemade ice cream with burnt toffee which Roald Dahl remembers eating at his grandmother's house in his childhood memoir, Boy.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto...

2011-07-15T16:19:00.004-04:00

Sherman Alexie's story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven is a collection of brief glimpses of Indians (his term) living on and off the Spokane reservation. Their lives are tragic, but their view is often to see the humor in what they experience. "Laughter through tears" was a classic description of the works of Sholem Aleichem -- who wrote about Jews on the reservation. I mean in the shtetl. The similarity is odd.

Sometimes the humor is open, sometimes indirect. In one story, a character named James Many Horses is abandoned by his wife because he makes too many jokes about death; another story says "even the other Indians got tired of his joking." (p. 203)

Food and hunger are both repeating themes in Alexie's stories, among the many themes that make the work vivid and poignant. Also beer, vodka, whiskey, and (unexpectedly) Diet Pepsi. One character thinks that "one more beer could save the world. One more beer and every chair would be comfortable. One more beer and the light bulb in the bathroom would never burn out. ... " (p. 88)

A few examples of the foods Alexie mentions: macaroni with commodity cheese, fry bread (of which the best recipe was lost when the older generation died), cheap hamburgers, Green Giant mushrooms (in absence of magic mushrooms), and a creamsicle (one of many items from the 7-11). In the delivery room a new mother has just one question about her baby son: "Will he love to eat potatoes?" (p. 81) Another character says:

... eating potatoes every day of my life, I imagined the potatoes grew larger, filled my stomach, reversed the emptiness. My sisters saved up a few quarters and bought food coloring. For weeks we ate red potatoes, green potatoes, blue potatoes. ...[We told] stories about the food we wanted most. We imagined oranges, Pepsi-Cola, chocolate, deer jerky." (p. 151)

Some of the characters have diabetes, and must politely refuse candy that a policemen offers them. One junior high kid says to a bulimic girl in his school "Give me your lunch if you're just going to throw it up." But the girls "Grow skinny from self-pity." (p. 177) An empty refrigerator begins one story. The narrator of one story is locked in the 7-11 refrigerator by a robber, who "pulled the basketball shoes off my feet, and left me waiting for rescue between the expired milk and broken eggs." (p. 150)

Poverty, hunger, exclusion from education, and being able to see the mainstream without joining it might be common points between Sholem Aleichem's village and Sherman Alexie's reservation, but the real nexus is laugher through tears. And they all ate potatoes.

Jason's Birthday Cake

2011-07-14T11:42:00.000-04:00

Lemon with notes of ginger and strawberry candle holders...

Pop Food

2011-07-12T14:49:00.003-04:00

In the 1960s, commercial images of food inspired the Pop Art movement to depict food in a completely different way from the artists that preceded them. Claes Oldenbourg was among the early pop artists, and he often made gigantic sculptures of food (like the spoon bridge with a cherry in Minneapolis). He also made soft sculpture or moulded sculpture of meat, pastry, sandwiches, and other foods, like the case of Danish Pastry above. When I first saw Pop Art I felt as if it had showed me a whole new way to see the things around me. I still find these representations of ordinary foods to open my eyes in a special way. The context of Oldenbourg's representations is defined not by painting or sculpting the surroundings (as earlier artists usually did) but by using the same type of case in which real food in a diner or restaurant would be displayed to someone about to eat. Playful! Artful!

Andy Warhol started as a commercial artist, and combined the Pop Art vision with the commercial vision, as in the hamburgers below, which are re-drawn from ads. Of course his soup cans are much more famous, and even one remove from the food: you only see the label, not the soup itself.

Pop Art really differs from what came before, in my opinion. Artists like Jan Steen, Velazquez, Manet, Bonnard, and many others painted food in a social context: people were cooking, about to eat, or otherwise to engage in cooking or taking a meal. Van Gogh's potato eaters and Picasso's frugal diners put dining in the context of poverty, perhaps making a political point about the subjects. Still-life painters (whether classic, cubist, or romantic) made studies of the shapes and colors of foods, fruits, serving dishes, and related objects, at times also referring to symbolism associated with the objects in their pictures. Pop Art referred to another visual dimension of modern life.

Two Sad Meals by Picasso

2011-07-09T16:32:00.002-04:00

It's well known that in his early days in Paris Picasso was often hungry, maybe even offering paintings in exchange for something to eat. The first of these two works, "The Frugal Meal" is often reproduced; the second, "The Blindman's Meal," is less famous, I think. The people depicted during Picasso's blue period are often depressed looking, but these works seem even sadder. Both suggest the desperation of hunger and poverty.

I need to look more thoroughly for later Picasso paintings of people eating, perhaps even enjoying food. I would not expect to find a painting of food preparation, at least my current knowledge of Picasso's biography wouldn't lead me to expect such subjects. He did later paint still-life subjects, but that's more for the shape and color of fruit and other objects on a table, not really about eating them.

Velazquez paints food

2011-07-08T16:04:00.002-04:00

We're home again from our long trip out west. And I'm again looking at the topic of how artists (maybe not many of them) have pursued the topic of food and cooking. It seems that one such painter was Velazquez (1599-1660). I am especially interested in the picture above, "Old woman cooking eggs," painted when Velazquez was very young. I have little information about what he was thinking or any meaning beyond a realistic depiction of a simple subject. The contemporary Dutch painters' still life works had a great deal of symbolism in them. Here? I don't know.

There are quite a few more, including this one:

George Lang 1924-2011

2011-07-06T22:15:00.002-04:00

The New York Times today published the obituary of George Lang, a cookbook author and an impressario of restaurants, most famously the Cafe des Artistes in New York, and the post-communist reincarnation of the historic restaurant Gundel in Budapest. Lang was born on July 13, 1924, in Szekesfehervar, Hungary. He originally studied music, and intended to be a musician. His first deviation from his plan was to be in the resistance in World War II after escaping from a Nazi prison camp. As a Jew, he had little choice but resistance, but by joining the fascist Arrow Cross militia was able to assist other Jews in hiding. His parents died in Auschwitz.

Lang escaped to New York and resumed his intended career as a musician, but eventually discovered his talent for designing and running restaurants and also for writing cookbooks. The Cuisine of Hungary is one of my favorite ethnic cookbooks, which the obituary says was the first Hungarian cookbook in English.

According to the Times:

"Mr. Lang often enjoyed constructing fantasy meals, including his last. The ideal final meal, he told The Village Voice in 2007, would include some of the great dishes from his restaurant career but above all his Hungarian favorites: fisherman’s soup, stuffed goose neck, sour cherry soup, layered cabbage, stuffed peppers, plum dumplings, pancakes with apple meringue, and whipped-cream strudel.

"'And then I will have what it takes to get to another world,' he said."

Picnic Game Day

2011-07-01T09:50:00.002-04:00

Happy picnic day: don't forget to check Louise's blog for a complete list of 26 picnic foods in alphabetical order! My post,

A-Apricot Cobbler

has been up for around a week. There are 16 recipes for desserts and sweet baked goods, and a very interesting Portuguese dish that starts with "X" among the delicious foods for this virtual picnic.

Aspen Water Tastes Better

2011-06-30T17:22:00.002-04:00

The insistent marketing of Fiji Water in Aspen has infuriated me. Aspen tap water comes from local mountain springs, and trucks aren't necessary to bring it up the mountain, nor boats to bring it from distant exotic islands. Fiji Water sponsors many of the Aspen events, thus buying the right to have its logo all over town. I think it's shameful! Aspen tap water is delicious.

Today I was happy to read (here) that the city of Aspen is rolling out an effort to create appreciation for their own local water. According to a city official: "When people talk about bottled water, they have this image that comes from mountain streams and pristine environments, and they don't realize that's exactly where Aspen's tap water comes from."

Like several national parks that I visited lately, Aspen is installing "filling stations" where tourists and locals are encouraged to fill their re-usable water bottles instead of buying plastic ones and throwing them away. The city is selling stainless steel bottles with the logo "Aspen Tap" and the words “Better Than Bottled.” The national parks have also instituted a policy that park-located shops sell only re-usable bottles, not bottled water, a policy that wouldn't work in a city with private enterprise. I hope that they can counter the pernicious advertising efforts.

Wrap up: Simple Cooking

2011-06-30T16:36:00.005-04:00

During our 3 weeks in Aspen (we leave Sunday), I've been paying a lot of attention to the contrast between elaborate restaurant meals and simple, more healthful home cooking -- as I've mentioned. When we arrived, I set myself a challenge: to cook without many condiments, spices, and extra ingredients; that is, I've been trying to buy only plain, unprocessed foods that are intended to be eaten at one or two meals. I'm avoiding a lot of food that normally remains on the shelf or in the refrigerator and would go to waste when I leave. Even peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches or hot dogs with crisp rolls and mustard qualify for my simple fare.

Here are a few things I've done. One night, I flavored pan-fried lamb sirloin with strips of red pepper, and served it with mustard, a few tomato wedges and sprigs of cilantro, and a side of steamed broccoli.

For dessert we ate fruit: cut-up cantaloupe, and strawberries. The cantaloupe was unadorned, but I glazed the berries with a mixture of 1/3 cup apricot jam (initially destined for PB&J) and 2 tablespoons of my wonderful wine vinegar made from Italian Pinot Grigio. I heated the glaze in a pyrex cup in the microwave so that it would melt together and be able to coat the strawberries. Sugar would be easier -- but bulk items like sugar or flour weren't on my very short list of pantry staples.

Another day, I made meatballs with sweet-sour sauce from some moderately low-fat ground beef.

To make the meatball mixture, I had no flour or prepared bread crumbs, but I crushed a few AkMak sesame crackers to serve that purpose. Besides fixing the texture, this gave the meat balls a bit of sesame flavor. Other ingredients: an egg, some chopped onion, and of course my Spanish smoked paprika and Trader Joe's salt, the two trusty spices I brought with me. The meatball mixture also had a tablespoon or two of the sweet-sour sauce I made. In this: a can of prepared organic tomato sauce, a drizzle of my wonderful vinegar, a shake of salt and paprika, and 2 purloined packets of brown sugar from a cafe (yes, that's cheating, I know, but I did buy a cup of coffee). I sauteed the meatballs in a bit of olive oil and added the sauce, which I'd heated in the microwave. Garnish again: tomato and fresh cilantro. On the side: fresh pineapple chunks also from the supermarket.

Not all restaurant cooking is that much different, though it frequently has considerably more added fat and salt. Here is an admittedly delicious restaurant salad at Mezzaluna restaurant that wasn't that much more complex than my concoctions:

The restaurant salad did contain quite a few more ingredients than most of my productions. The price was also a lot higher than cooking at home -- the overwhelming cost of restaurant meals is another motivating factor here in Aspen more than most places.

Aspen Restaurants Again

2011-06-28T16:59:00.002-04:00

Last night we celebrated Elaine's birthday at a restaurant called "Elevation." It was excellent. Seating was in a courtyard above the actual restaurant, which seems to be in a basement. The food was excellent, and so was the service. The first course, charcutrie, was house-made and wonderful:

One of our main courses:

Elaine's dessert with a birthday sparkler:

Click on any of these to see the flickr set with more photos.

Eating Out in Aspen

2011-06-23T16:54:00.007-04:00

The restaurants in Aspen are all very good. Some are famous, and some are known for their famous clients. I've already described how we also like quietly eating simpler things in our condo -- tuna and vegetable salad, chicken strips, seared lamb chops with broccoli, and always cereal for breakfast.

The first time we ate out, we tried a very nice but unremarkable Mexican restaurant called Palapa, which didn't seem very photogenic. I'd be surprised if it's frequented by the Aspen elite either, but one never knows around here.

Last weekend, we bicycled to the very quirky Woody Creek Tavern, around 6 miles down the extraordinary Rio Grand Trail. Woody Creek Tavern is known for home-style food in an eccentric atmosphere. The walls are entirely covered with trinkets, photos, notes from customers, and posters -- such as one of their most famous customer, the late Hunter Thompson, who ran for sheriff in 1970.

We also ate dinner one night at the famous Ajax Tavern at the foot of the Gondola which carries skiers in winter and hikers in summer. I suspect that celebrities do come here but I'm not much good at spotting them. Ajax Tavern's green gazpacho was delicious.

Here's the Ajax Tavern kitchen/staging area:

The Ajax Tavern has a lot of trendy dishes, such as truffle-oil-flavored french fries and reimagined ice cream bars:

For lunch one day, right near our condo, I tried Mezzaluna, a small cafe with a very nice patio and very appealing menu. I love the way the trees cast shadows on the big cafe awnings. My salad was very good, and I hope to go back and try their pizza.

For access to the entire Flickr photo set -- lots more photos of each place -- click on any photo here.

The Picnic Game from Louise

2011-06-18T10:42:00.005-04:00

Louise at the blog Months of Edible Celebrations is hosting a picnic!! She just announced this game today, inviting bloggers to celebrate by bringing a full alphabet of picnic treats. Louise assigned me the letter A: I'm "baking" for the picnic even though my reality right now is a condo in Aspen, Colorado, where I have no pantry supplies whatsoever. I'm looking forward to getting home in a few weeks, and baking in my own kitchen where I keep flour, baking powder, and where I have many baking dishes!

Well, I'm going on this virtual fantasy picnic, and I'm bringing:

A -- APRICOT COBBLER

Other bloggers will be bringing foods from B to Z.

Here is a photo and recipe:

Apricot (or Peach) Cobbler
Preheat oven to 400°F.

Make the filling first:
1 1/2 lb ripe apricots or 9 to 10 ripe peaches
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour (2 for peaches)
1 1/2 teaspoons fresh lemon or lime juice
3/4 teaspoon almond extract

Cut apricots in quarters. (Or peel the peaches and cut in 6-8 slices each). Toss all the ingredients together in a 9-inch round or square glass or ceramic baking dish. Let stand until juicy, about 30 minutes or as long as it takes to make the topping.

For topping:
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar mixed in
2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into bits
1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk OR 1/2 c. milk plus a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar
2 or more teaspoons of cinnamon-sugar for sprinkling.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and 1 teaspoon sugar in a bowl. Blend in the butter with your fingertips or a knife until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in the buttermilk with a fork just until combined. Do not overmix.

Drop rounded tablespoons of dough on top of the filling; leave spaces in between the blobs to allow topping to expand. Sprinkle with remaining 2 teaspoons cinnamon-sugar.

Bake cobbler in 400 degree oven until fruit is tender and topping is golden, about 30 minutes. Cool slightly, about 15 minutes, and serve warm with ice cream.

APRICOT CAKE

While I'm thinking about apricots and what I could do with them -- another good picnic dish with apricots would be a traditional Polish fruit cake. Similar recipes appear in many traditional Eastern European cuisines -- I always knew it as a Jewish tradition before friends gave me a Polish cookbook a couple of years ago.

I include a scan of the cake recipe, with my notes on how to make the depicted cake:

Click on this copy of the cake recipe with my notes to see a full-sized version.

Even Simpler

2011-06-18T08:59:00.003-04:00

Continuing to report on how I cook in condo with good cooking equipent, but starting with a completely empty pantry and frige -- last night, I made the least-demanding dish there could be: scrambled eggs with red peppers, mushrooms, and chopped cilantro, seasoned only with salt. On the side: a salad and some French bread. As I've mentioned, the oil and vinegar for the salad are the basics that I always get for a temporary kitchen. Instead of mustard I used some Colorado goat cheese -- a very nice cheese that I've not seen outside the state.

Water

2011-06-16T19:51:00.001-04:00

As I walked around the streets near our condo, I noticed this Fiji water being delivered to the Aspen Food and Wine Classic. Several drums of it stood under a huge semi-truck -- one of many delivering supplies to the big tents in several locations. All over Aspen, I see preparations for this event, which is happening this weekend. I'm not a food professional: no one would pay the $1200 admission fee for me to attend. So I'm outside the big tents.

Fiji water in Aspen: this is apppaallling!!!! Think of the energy this big truck expended bringing the water up to the Rocky Mountains, and the energy expended bringing the water by boat from Fiji. I know the owners of Fiji Water are really good at promotion, and sometimes questioned about its ethics; but really, how did they sell this...

Aspen has the most delicious pure water I've ever tasted running out of the taps. It wells up in fountains in the streets:

All around us are high mountains, and the snow is melting and pouring down in little rushing trickles, rivulets and bigger streams. I'm sure it's purified a bit before going into the city water system, but probably needs very little.

Thursday morning we took a long hike to the Maroon Bells, where water was running through the meadows and coursing through the little mountain lakes. Water everywhere -- and somehow they are bringing it from Fiji. Maybe it's emblematic of the type of thing that's going on at the Food and Wine Classic, but I'll never know.

Cooking with basic ingredients

2011-06-16T19:40:00.004-04:00

Last night I cooked two dishes: baked chicken with Spanish smoked paprika (I brought it with me from Santa Barbara) and Gratin Dauphinoise, my favorite potato dish. I learned this Alpine dish when I was in Grenoble, France, so it's appropriate to make it here in the Rocky Mountains, I think. Also, it requires no special condiments or spices. It's made of sliced potatoes, a chopped shallot (could be onion or garlic), milk (I discovered long ago that it's good with skim milk though the authentic version uses cream), real gruere cheese, and butter. I heat the milk with a bit of salt and pour it over the vegetables, cheese, and butter, which are layered in the baking dish. After baking it for an hour at 300, I turned it up to 425 and put the chicken in the oven. That's it: very basic.

So far, here are the only condiments I have:

Mayonnaise, olive oil, white wine viengar, Dijon mustard. And you can see my temporary kitchen.

Food and Art in Spain

2011-06-14T22:34:00.006-04:00

In today's New York Times I read an article about Spanish restaurants: After El Bulli, Spain Looks Forward. The description of Spanish restaurants that may become famous or popular after El Bulli closes included a description of a dish called the Mondrian. It intrigued me with its intersection of food and art.

The Mondrian comes from a restaurant called Sant Pau where: "dishes like a gorgeous, lightly jelled Mondrian made from green almonds, red peppers and olives, and a juicy chunk of roasted foal (horsemeat is not unusual on local menus) are jammed with flavor."

Obviously I'm not among the few hundred people per year who have eaten at El Bulli during its long season of fame (or notoriety), and I'm not really that interested in its closing. However, it was an example of the most extreme gap between restaurant food and what I am tempted to call real food. I'll get back to blogging about my basic, limited-ingredient, not-at-all-like restaurant cooking tomorrow. Today was the group picnic for the workshop Len is attending -- to which we brought some quite good sausages and crisp rolls. The organizers supplied us with relish and catsup -- not even those are currently in my small larder.

Back to Basics

2011-06-13T22:40:00.002-04:00

Well, here we are in a condo in Aspen for 3 weeks. As is normal for such rentals, the kitchen is pretty well-equipped but NO food at all is left between occupants. I've done this in temporary condos before -- stocking a pantry and frige without spending a fortune on stuff that will be thrown away when I leave.

This is a real challenge. How can one make simple meals with only a few ingredients. Home cooked food can use better materials, as I discussed in the previous post. But how to give them full-scale flavor? I thought I would keep track of what I did to try to make food that we'll like better than restaurant food.

The nearest market (half a block from here) is called City Market, but it's really a Krogers. Last night when we first arrived, I bought some flavored rolls, sliced beef (of my preferred brand, Applegate), gruere cheese, a tub of whipped butter, and prepared potato salad. For dessert: strawberries and cookies. I also bought a box of cereal, coffee, milk, and orange juice. Somehow I brought my Trader Joe's Himalayan salt grinder with me.

Tonight I needed to start cooking. Happily, City Market had a special on wild-caught Alaska salmon that they said came in today. I bought a pound of the salmon, various vegetables, a sour-dough bread, and three basics: olive oil, vinegar, and mustard. In the apartment's handy no-stick pan, I seared the salmon in a bit of olive oil, salted it a little, and covered it til done. Then I swirled in a spoonful of my butter and a splash of wine from my glass. (We had one bottle of Santa Barbara white wine that we babied in the hot car for the whole week on the way here!) Salad: avocado, lettuce, fresh cilantro leaves, tomato, and classic vinaigrette I made from the oil, vinegar, and mustard. The bread was good with a sop of the butter sauce -- after all, we're at home.

Yes! The flavor of the simply-prepared never-frozen Alaska salmon beats every piece of fish I've recently tasted in any restaurant. The salad is fresher. And the total dinner is lighter and more enjoyable -- at least I think so. I'll be using the oil, vinegar, mustard, and cilantro in lots of ways.

An Excellent Point!

2011-06-12T09:38:00.002-04:00

I've been traveling and eating all my meals in restaurants (or just crackers and peanut butter or something like that). So I appreciated this point from the Atlantic food section:

"I'm perturbed that people have gotten so turned around that they think restaurant food is the best food, and that today's modern, self -aware 'foodie' thinks that the highest level of cooking is to cook restaurant-style food in the home. Even in the finest restaurants, restaurant food, while delicious and deserving of its place as entertainment and theater, is really not the best food at all. It's over-sauced and over-salted and over-rich, because the only thing restaurant chefs have to worry about is that the food tastes exquisite on the table. They don't have to worry about whether you should eat less salt and fat or eat more vegetables or if you are consuming trans fats or saturated fat or petroleum. Even very good restaurants buy industrial commodity chicken and veal bones for their stock, and bulk up the plate with cheap commodity vegetables. What you pay for in most restaurants is for the transformation from ordinary into good or exquisite. And one of the ways that food is transformed is through copious amounts of butter, salt, and stocks." -- from Why Home-Style Cooking Will Always Beat Restaurant-Style

Zion Lodge Restaurant

2011-06-10T22:51:00.002-04:00

The terrace of the restaurant at Zion Lodge has a magnificent view of the cliffs that overshadow the valley. Besides the view, the restaurant offers a very nice menu of Southwest-style food: I enjoyed the quesadilla.

As we ate, the sun still vividly lit the eastern wall, though the cliffs to the west had been in the shadows since shortly past noon. Look carefully at the wine glass: you can see the reflection of the cliff!

Morning Snack

2011-06-10T22:37:00.002-04:00

This squirrel was amusing the hikers this morning as he pulled seed-filled grass stalks towards him and munched away. We saw him on the trail along the Virgin River at the rock formation called the Temple of Sinagawa in Zion National Park. The scenery is spectacular!

Evening Meal

2011-06-09T23:27:00.002-04:00

The scenery here at Zion National Park is spectacular. The last rays of the sun were still shining on the highest parts of the steep walls when we saw this young deer browsing on tree shoots.

Shavout

2011-06-06T19:02:00.002-04:00

The holiday of Shavout begins this evening. The LA Times ran a very interesting article about foods for the holiday: "Shavout: A Feast for Body and Soul." One of my interests is the history of foods for Jewish holidays and celebrations -- and also cooking and eating them. Shavout, a grain-and-fruit-harvest festival, has an especially rich tradition of foods and complex history of what and why people chose them.

In Biblical times, bread was the main food for Shavout. After the Temple fell, Rabbinic scholars shifted the significance of the holiday to a celebration of the giving of the Torah: "Searching through the Bible like employees at a 'CSI' crime lab, they found clues that proved to them that the ancient harvest festival had actually coincided with a crucial 'spiritual harvest' as well: What the Israelites 'reaped' at Shavuot was the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai."

Still later, the Shavout food tradition morphed again, and dairy foods appeared as the centerpiece of the holiday table. As a secular Jew, I enjoy the complicated explanations for why this is the tradition (as well as liking to eat them). For example, it's said that the Jews waiting for Moses didn't know about dietary laws until the Torah was delivered. To celebrate, they had to make a kosher meal -- but had no time for kosher slaughter that had just been explained to them. What to do? Eat blintzes.

I also like the more historic explanations, such as those in the L.A. Times article and those I wrote about last year here: Blintzes for Shavout. This post is also on my other blog for today.

Super Cucas and Its Opposite

2011-06-04T17:38:00.005-04:00

We really enjoyed the burritos, quesadillas, enchiladas, and green and red salsas at Super Cuca's Taqueria, quite near our temporary home in Santa Barbara. It's a completely informal place -- order at the counter, eat in a kind of garden area or take it home, which we've done a couple times. Cucas' kitchen makes a much more interesting photo subject than the food.

Cucas' also has a grocery section with an outstanding selection of fresh and dried chiles:

Earlier this week, we had a very different meal at the elegant French-California restaurant called Bouchon. Local food is their focus. The chef shops at the same farmer's market where I've spent almost every Tuesday afternoon. Probably he was one of the guys I saw with a wheelbarrow or other huge conveyance, buying in large quantities.

I've eyed the artistically arranged red and yellow beets at various farmers' stalls each week: at Bouchon, I ordered the beet salad with local greens and a sort of croquette made of wonderfully flavored cheese:

I love the contrast between delicious but informal tortilla-based food to eat with coke or beer, and special boutique-y food with local wine pairings. Other dishes in our Bouchon meal included rillettes of duck (Len's appetizer), local sea bass for Len and a duck main dish for me, and a meyer-lemon bread pudding and a blood-orange-and-strawberry tarte for dessert.

Government Nutrition Advice

2011-06-02T16:01:00.002-04:00

Does anyone but me find it funny that the new government graphic of advice on what to eat looks like the one they used during World War II? Note in case you need it: the new one has a website listed on it. The Ancient one lists butter as a food group.

My lunch -- and wasn't it delicious!

2011-05-31T17:23:00.001-04:00

Two Views of Food

2011-05-29T22:32:00.004-04:00

In this simple scene, painted around 1660, painter Pieter de Hooch depicts "A Woman Preparing Bread and Butter for a Boy." Many Dutch painters of the era illustrated the interior of homes of middle class people, showing their daily lives in an idealized way. I love the details of the loaf of bread, the butter, and the glimpses of the scene outside the home.

In contrast: this detail from Aert de Gelder's large portrayal of "The Banquet of Ahasuerus" uses a dining scene to illustrate a decadent and possibly corrupt man -- though of course the viewer knows how the scene is redeemed in the remainder of the book of Esther from which the image is derived. This painting dates from around 20 years after the first.

Nikolaus Knupfer's "Solon before Croesus" (detail above) shows an even more decadent-seeming scene. I'm not sure I understand what the woman's role is in this Greek myth about King Solon, who told Croesus that poor people may be happier than kings. The painting dates from a few years prior to the first one.

Based on these three paintings, which I saw today at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and on many other still-lives, Biblical and mythological paintings, and commonplace interiors from the Dutch Golden Age, I have an idea that the simple lives of ordinary virtuous Dutch people in this era were favorably contrasted with the more luxurious lives of the rich rulers of the past. I believe that this was the era of the Dutch Republic, where egalitarianism was almost achieved for a while.

The Getty museum is situated on a beautiful hilltop with vast views out to sea and towards the mountains. Its many harmonious buildings, outdoor fountains and sculpture, and well-kept gardens are very impressive.

The Holy Grail?

2011-05-28T23:44:00.002-04:00

After years of procrastination, we finally ate dinner tonight at In-N-Out Burger. We never got around to it during our stay in San Diego in 2009. We are leaving here in just over a week: lucky that we made it this time.

Our expectations were very modest: we had heard that though it's very highly hyped, most level-headed hamburger eaters find the food here just a bit better than MacDonald's. Our expectations were met. AHHHHH.... an ordinary hamburger!

Most of our fellow customers were probably not influenced by Julia Child's admiration for In-N-Out Burger, unlike the foodies lining up at the Super Rica Taqueria. My guess is that most of our fellow customers haven't actually heard of Julia Child at all, since they seem to be mainly high school students, some maybe too young to have even seen "Julie and Julia" (which didn't mention either In-N-Out Burger or Super Rica anyway). I overheard a conversation about falling off a skateboard. Nothing about Julia Child.

So this is it. The Holy Grail, not. Another peak California experience, perhaps.

"The Ethical Assassin"

2011-05-27T12:19:00.003-04:00

The Ethical Assassin by David Liss is a suspense novel in which a naive character, 17-year-old Lemul Altick suddenly finds himself threatened by bizarre criminals and corrupt policemen in the heat and misery of 1980s Florida. Lem -- whose name is coincidentally the same as Swift's Lemuel Gulliver -- grows up and learns a great deal in his strange voyage of saving himself from a variety of dangers. He learns to deal with strange circumstances, with dishonest employers in his job selling encyclopedias door-to-door, with bullying from his age peers and others, and with ambiguity about which people he can believe or trust. It's not quite as excellent as some novels in this style (like by Graham Greene) but it's good.

The "ethical assassin" of the title is a stealthy, weird-looking, and mysterious character named Melford who offers long discourses on veganism and saving animals from human cruelty. Melford insists on the ethical imperative of his views; his persuasiveness pulls in Lem and at least one other character. Despite all the discussion of the wrongs of eating meat, food in the sense that I usually write about it hardly plays a role in this book.

Lem, attempting to skip meat thanks to Melford's discourses, dislikes the dairy-free bowl of oatmeal that's his only choice at an IHOP; he eats fruit when his hunger tempts him otherwise, and he also resists temptation from a girl who tries to lure him to eat a hamburger -- but this book is truly not about food in the style of many works of detective fiction. Melford's obsession with the ethics of eating meat plays a large role in the unfolding suspense -- making the discussions relevant without (in my opinion) turning this into a philosophic novel. It would in fact be perverse to read this as a tract about "meat is murder" though some of the amazon.com reviewers did read it this way. It's about a bizarre character whose quirk is animal rights.

Lem Altick, like the central characters in Liss's other novels, is a Jew. For Lem, being Jewish has no stated religious or ethical content, it's just one of many taunts from the bullies of his school days and his experiences in the narrative. The extent to which Jewishness has no meaning for Lem is a bit extreme. In Liss's other books, which are set in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the key Jewish characters (the ones who have to get themselves out of dangerous and strange situations) are not practicing their religion; they nevertheless are very conscious of its meaning and customs and how it affects the lives of their Jewish relatives. For Lem, it's nothing but another reason to pick on him, like being overweight (which he had been a few years before).

Since the publication of The Ethical Assassin, Liss has returned to publishing historical fiction, and also seems to be collaborating on some graphic novels. I've read the rest of his novels to date, and liked them. I would judge this the weakest though it's a good read. The historical content of the others gives them a greater depth than this one; the variety of really oddball characters in this one doesn't make up for this lack of depth. I'm looking forward to Liss's new historical novel, scheduled to appear in August.

Food in Art: the Norton Simon Museum

2011-05-22T00:59:00.005-04:00

First, here is Ganesha the elephant god eating sweets from a basket with his trunk. The documentation on this 6th century sculpture explains that he once ate so much that his stomach burst, and the moon laughed at him. So he threw one of his tusks at the moon -- many Ganesha statues thus show him with only one tusk.

This 13th century fertility goddess is holding a bunch of mangoes, which represent abundance and auspiciousness. The mango is a native Indian fruit. We spent several hours at the Norton Simon museum today looking at sculpture from the Indian subcontinent, including both Buddhist and Hindu art.

Besides its excellent collection of Asian art, the Norton Simon has many beautiful European paintings and a large collection of Degas sculpture. I found two still-life paintings unusual. Above is one by 19th century Dutch artist Jacob Meyer de Haan. I like the large piece of ham. And below Manet's "Still Life with Fish and Shrimp."

Finally a huge painting of a vast number of fruits and vegetables by Frans Snyders. It goes without saying that we also enjoyed a number of works of art with non-food themes. Len took all the photos with his great new camera.

Google the Ingredients?

2011-05-18T12:11:00.002-04:00

I liked this article in today's NYT Food Section:

Can Recipe Search Engines Make You a Better Cook? by Julia Moskin.

Like most internet addicts who cook, I often find recipes by web searching. I have been worried because Google's techno-preference for big high-tech food sites became an issue when they released a specialized recipe search a few months ago. So I can't rely on googling as I used to.

Moskin's article suggests somewhat indirectly that cookbooks of known quality are probably a better bet than web searches. Probably true, though what's the fun in that? When Epicurious was new (was that 10 years ago?) it always seemed to be easier and more entertaining to see what those cooking mags had been publishing than to start pulling books off the shelf.

The article points out "Google and Bing searches give preference to big sites because the algorithms are designed by programmers who are not cooks" -- though I seriously wonder if artificial intelligence could be developed that would identify good recipes. The comments in blogged recipes or on Epicurious seem a more likely source of useful info to me. And of course I'm unhappy that the competition for eyeballs is so corrupting -- but I knew that anyway.

So here I am in California and I'm not making anything from a recipe!

Renaud's Patisserie

2011-05-14T15:18:00.002-04:00

Renaud's of Santa Barbara seems to be known for croissants and macarons (that's one-o macarons, the kind that are crunchy, not the Passover kind). There was a line out the door!

The owner seems to be a real French baker, and the look is amazingly French. We ate a pain-au-chocolate for second breakfast, and have some macarons and pâtes de fruits to take to dinner. Here's what I hope to try the next time I go there:

Santa Barbara Farmers' Market

2011-05-11T11:04:00.004-04:00

The market is full of wonderful local and often exotic produce -- artichokes, chirimoyas, dates, citrus, greens of all sorts, avocados, strawberries grown just up the road, and early cherries from the Central Valley. There are Japanese, English and conventional cucumbers and many other interesting varieties of vegetables that usually aren't differentiated.

The prices at this market seem very fair: less expensive than comparable quality in a grocery store -- in the rare cases that you could find comparable quality. Example: two large very fresh heads of lettuce for $1.50, a lower price than not-quite-as-fresh local lettuce at Lazy Acres, not even more than mass-produced lettuce at Albertsons. Fruit was somewhat less expensive per pound than the grocery store items.

Today I read an encouraging article about a comparison of prices at farmers' markets and grocery stores (admittedly in Vermont). The study suggests that the common view that farmers' markets are expensive and elitist is false. It "found that prices at farmers’ markets were lower for many conventionally produced grocery items than they were at supermarkets. For organic items, farmers’ markets beat grocery stores every time hands down."

Is expensive sea salt worth its salt?

2011-05-10T16:35:00.003-04:00

I've often wondered about the eye-popping prices for things like Himalayan sea salt (for one thing, there's no sea in those mountains) and hand-gathered fleur de sel from France. I've never been energetic enough to buy some and taste-test it -- besides, I'm too cheap. Finally, an article by Harold McGee a couple of weeks ago reported on this topic offering to sort out the "whirlwind of obfuscatory hype" that surrounds the labeling and use of fancy salts.

Here is the bottom line: "different salts do indeed have different tastes, even when the solutions had the same concentration of sodium." That said, "the differences themselves were generally small. ... Tasters significantly preferred chicken broth and bratwurst made with an inexpensive white sea salt over the ones made with kosher salt. Batches of those two foods made with gray sea salt, or sel gris, and fleur de sel fell in between."

Although altogether the reported studies showed that the result of using various types of salt isn't highly significant, McGee still suggests that adventurous or curious cooks might enjoy experimenting. I appreciate his point of view, though I might still be too cheap to pay the eye-popping prices for the most hyped salts.

Wineries

2011-05-07T21:24:00.002-04:00

Sweet Prawns of Santa Barbara

2011-05-07T21:12:00.002-04:00

Fresh local prawns here are very sweet and delicious. We remember buying them from the fish market on the docks years ago. Last night at Opal Restaurant, where I ate this salad with Santa Barbara prawns, the host said that he did not think they had found any for the menu in the ten years he had been working there. So apparently, they are now quite rare, like many desirable foods from the sea, alas. The rest of our meal was also extremely well prepared -- basil-flavored pasta, grilled opah from Hawaii, and chocolate creme brulee.

On a previous visit to Santa Barbara, we also ate at Opal.

Temporary Kitchen in Santa Barbara

2011-05-06T17:03:00.002-04:00

Our temporary house has a functional though not luxurious kitchen. The owner is opposed to using microwaves because she says microwaves destroy nutrients and Kirilian photos show that vegetables cooked in a microwave oven are "dead." About this I checked Wikipedia which a few minutes ago stated:

"An experiment in evidence of energy fields generated by living entities involves taking Kirlian contact photographs of a picked leaf at set periods, its gradual withering corresponding with a decline in the strength of the aura. In some experiments, if a section of a leaf was torn away after the first photograph, a faint image of the missing section would remain when a second photograph was taken. ... James Randi has suggested that this effect was due to contamination of the glass plates, which were reused for both the 'before' and 'after' photographs."

I may retrieve the microwave oven from the studio that is part of this house, but at the moment I'm experimenting with no-microwave cooking. I actually have read that the shorter microwave cooking times for steamed vegetables preserve the vitamins better than conventional steaming. So far we've been eating salads anyway.

Meyer Lemons

2011-05-06T16:59:00.002-04:00

Our temporary house in Santa Barbara includes a beautiful Meyer lemon tree with the biggest, juciest Meyer lemons I have ever seen. On the tree hang many ripe and unripe fruits as well as a few fragrant blossoms. Beautiful!

I love the taste of Meyer lemons: like an unusually sour Clementine. I have already squeezed some juice into a couple of salads and a sauteed pork dish, and will surely continue to cook with them -- and eat them -- throughout our stay.

As it's meant to be...

2011-04-28T22:05:00.003-04:00

Toasted Ravioli

St.Louis Food: toasted ravioli at Pasta House in University City, Mo. Until this dish was copied by Olive Garden, it was a specialty of St.Louis only. I remember eating it at a restaurant called Rinaldi's that went out of business ages ago. We ate there Tuesday night with a number of relatives.

Chips and Salsa

Southwestern Food: real chips and salsa in Albuquerque Old Town. I haven't had such perfectly flavored chips and salsa that was exactly the right heat for a long time! We ate inside the building, one of the oldest in the city, made from adobe of a type from the early 19th century. The tamales, chili rellenos, and other things we ate were all good too. For more about our day: Oklahoma from a moving car.

Chinese food for Easter

2011-04-24T20:29:00.003-04:00

... Szechuan Garden, West Lafayette, Indiana.