More from Fairfax

Miriam and Alice both took photos of their dinner for my blog -- garden pesto and lettuce, homemade croutons, and farmers market zucchini. Meanwhile, we didn't really have dinner because we went to Shakespeare in the Arb, as I documented in my travel blog.

Alice's plate is first (or on the left):

Miriam Photographs Food

Miriam has been taking lots of photos -- under my influence, this includes food photography. Go Miriam!

The lettuce is grown in their garden at home, the cheese is from the Fairfax farmers market, and the chicken nuggets are home made. Go Evelyn!

Squash Blossoms

According to today's L.A.Times food section, one seasonal item is the same at southern California farmers' markets and at the one here in Ann Arbor: squash blossoms. Evelyn also bought some from a farmer at the market in Virginia.

I'd never tried them. Said the Times: "Though female zucchini flowers with the little squash still attached are cute, the best ones for cooking are the boys, which have nothing but stem. The problem with the girls is that by the time the squash has cooked through, the delicate flower has turned to rags ... the very best way to cook them is frying."

Their recipe was a little more complicated than what I did, which was to stuff a little piece of goat cheese (also from the market) into each one, dip it in egg, and fry in butter. I must admit that the taste of goat cheese and egg was delicious, but the squash blossom taste was almost indiscernible. The photo in the Times showed somewhat longer blossoms. Maybe that's significant.

Evelyn's response: "I didn't dip mine in egg, and I used a much less flavored cheese called "plain cheese curds" which I also bought at the market, so I tasted the blossoms."

Miriam's Lunch: as she chose to depict it

Miriam took pictures of everything in her life, including lunch!

Leeks Vinaigrette -- and Emu Eggs

Today at the Farmers Market: leeks, a few flowers, more lettuce, onions, rhubarb, and strawberries. We had brioche and coffee for brekfast at Sweetwaters Cafe in the Kerrytown market adjacent to the Farmers Market. Will I ever have the nerve to try Ernst Farms emu eggs? I don't know, but Mrs. Ernst says the emu lays a couple eggs per week, so maybe I have another chance.

Update -- in answer to Evelyn's question on emu eggs: I think you can do anything with emu eggs that you can do with other eggs. So I think an omelet (emulet?) would be logical. It would just be very big. I think most bird eggs taste pretty much alike, too, just sometimes stronger egg flavor. I read about them in Gourmet's Easter edition.

The emu is the national bird of Australia, but farms across the United States have made emu meat and eggs available to the American market. The eye-catching dark-teal eggs are extremely popular among artists known as "eggers," who carve intricate designs in the shells or use them in jewelry making. Slightly smaller than an ostrich egg, an emu egg provides the equivalent of 10 chicken eggs; an emu egg yolk can be very pale compared to the usual rich yellow of many yolks. The eggs can be found in some specialty markets and can keep, refrigerated, for up to two months.

Here are my leeks before and after preparation. The big job is getting all the dirt out from between the leek leaves. Unfortunately, one of the leeks was rather tough, despite having been steamed for 15 minutes. But they tasted excellent.

Harry Eats

Everything about Harry Potter seems unforgettable -- except there's so much of it that it's hard to keep track. In the first book, the contrast between what he ate at the Dursleys' -- where he was fed on rejects -- and the more-than-life-size introductory feast at Hogwarts doesn't recede into the huge cauldron of Harry Potter details that only a kid could recall. I love the way that every possible favorite food magically appears. Sometimes I wonder why all the pumpkin juice -- but of course they ARE witches, so something has to be different, and Halloween means a lot to them.

In the second and third books, the magical Hogwarts feasts continue, but the descriptions become more cursory -- sometimes we just hear that the food appeared, and was delicious. In the fourth volume, there are some new food themes: Dudley's grapefruit diet, and Mrs.Weasley's amazing magic cooking techniques. Not to mention the role of house elves.

The Weasley's loving family life centers around Mrs. Weasley, and Harry sees her as the most extreme of contrasts to his awful Aunt Petunia. When she disapproves of something they do, you can always tell she's trying to protect and correct them out of affection, not spite like the Dursleys.

In the first scene at the Weasley's house, Harry watches Mrs. Weasley's magic cooking techniques, while we readers learn quickly of the superiority of wizard housekeeping. Mrs. Weasley points her wand "a little more vigorously than she had intended at a pile of potatoes in the sink, which shot out of their skins so fast that they ricocheted off the walls and ceilings."

She then points the wand at a dustpan, "which hopped off the side and started skating across the floor, scooping up the potatoes. ... She slammed a large copper saucepan down on the kitchen table and began to wave her wand around inside it. A creamy sauce poured from the wand tip as she stirred." She lights the fire under the pan with the wand, and then "jabbed her wand at the cutlery drawer, which shot open... several knives soared out of it, flew across the kitchen and began chopping the potatoes, which had just been tipped back into the sink by the dustpan." We've seen her clean pots and pans in the sink with a flick of the wand as well. Magic!

What a difference from life with the Dursleys. Just before he went to the Weasley's Harry ate breakfast with his aunt, his uncle, and Dudley, who is both fat and terribly spoiled by his parents. Becoming a horrible bully and school failure, Dudley also had "reached roughly the size and weight of a young killer whale."

After hearing from the school, Dudley's mother had finally acknowledged his fatness, and had taped the diet recommendations of his school nurse to the refrigerator, "which had been emptied of all Dudley's favourite things -- fizzy drinks and cakes, chocolate bars and burgers -- and filled instead with fruit and vegetables and the sorts of thin gs that Uncle Vernon called 'rabbit food'. To make Dudley feel better about it all, Aunt Petunia had insisted that the whole family follow the diet too." For breakfast, he gets a quarter of a grapefruit -- just a little bigger than Harry's portion. By now, though, Harry has his own food supplies under the floorboards of his bedroom; he's no longer the persecuted child of the first book.

This sounds exactly like what this week's Time magazine says you should do to keep kids from succumbing to the obesity epidemic. Change the whole family's habits. Keep the bad stuff out of the house. Oh, wait. Here's what else Time says: "Does dieting even work for kids? Many clinicians say no. 'We actually find that children who diet gain more weight than their peers.'"

Authorities cited in Time seem to agree: "It's not just that kids who diet tend to gain back the weight later; it's that dieting brings up all sorts of unbidden psychological responses that sabotage the process." And the Dursleys are the ultimate indulgent parents who wreck their kids' personality, aren't they? A textbook case.

I'm enjoying rereading the Harry Potter books. Too bad I'll never get all the details straight!

Can I eat these?

Once in a Chinese food shop, I bought dried lilies that I think were the same as day lilies. A Chinese soup recipe called for them. So I wonder: can I eat the day lilies from our garden? I don't spray them.

Happy Graduation, Alice

Michigan Salad

I have locavore tendencies. I love the Farmers Market and local food from Produce Station. I especially love making salad with local ingredients -- augmented by whatever else goes well with it. Let's face it: we have NO local olive oil!

Saturday: spinach, walnuts, dried cranberries, and French goat cheese.

Today: lettuce, peppery greens, tarragon goat, tomato, and almonds.

My method for making what I call Michigan Salad involves picking options from a list and creating a combination that appeals to you. Some results are classic -- like tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella is called capresi. Or spinach, pears, walnuts and dried cherries, which was a restaurant fad in the 80s. Each item is optional, as long as you like the resulting combo:

• Wash some greens. Saturday we had locally grown spinach. Today: lettuce and peppery greens like arugula and others from the Farmers Market. The greens go in the bottom of the bowl.
• Add some fruit: dried Traverse Bay cranberries or cherries or Calif. raisins are nice. So are pears, apples, mango, avocado, or tomato (yes it is a fruit). Today's tomatoes were local, but grown in a greenhouse, so they are safe but not wonderful.
  
• Add flavor to the fruit with whichever is appropriate: lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, other flavored vinegar, salt, pepper.
• Garnish with fresh herbs like chives, parsley, cilantro, basil, or tarragon.
  
• Toast some nuts like walnuts or almonds and sprinkle over fruit.
• Add some soft cheese such as goat, fresh mozzarella, blue. Today I had Zingerman's Creamery goat with tarragon from the Farmers Market.
• Drizzle olive oil over the whole salad.

Photos from the market where I bought today's ingredients:

A little humor from "Great Housewives in Art"

For more Jocondes du Jour, see my other blog. I love art parodies, not just Mona Lisa.

More on the Tomato Recall

It looks as if we should avoid raw tomatoes, especially those sold without the vine attached. Our local Trader Joe's was still selling Romas this morning, though. The implication is that in restaurants or fast-food places, don't eat anything made with fresh tomatoes, like salsa. Some chains have already withdrawn all such foods.

From the L.A.Times today: "The Food and Drug Administration said consumers should avoid raw red plum, red Roma or round red tomatoes, which have been tied to 145 infections reported since mid-April."

From the Washington Post: "Salmonella food poisoning from raw tomatoes has spread to 16 states, causing U.S. health officials to speculate that the outbreak might be nationwide, the Associated Press reports....Consumers are warned not to buy any raw tomatoes except cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, tomatoes sold with the vine still attached and homegrown tomatoes, the wire service reported."

So here's my vegetable drawer:

Tuna-Noodle Casserole, Literary Version

Robert Parker has always written in an incredibly mannered style, and as time goes by, the mannerisms become more and more the essential thing in his writing. He must really be able to do it fast -- I think he publishes two police novels per year. Spare Change, his latest paperback (at least it's dated June, 2008), is no exception to this trend. Spenser, Parker's original detective hero, always revealed various things about himself via food choices and reactions to food. The novels are set in the eternal present (from the 1960s or 70s to now) and the food always reflects the times, as well as the character of the diners.

In Spare Change, Sunny Randall, improbable wonder woman, psychoanalytic subject, and heroine of several recent novels does the same. In one scene, a tuna noodle casserole creates an opportunity for some of Parker's characteristic archness. Sunny is having lunch with her mother, her sister, and her sister's fiance Charles. "My mother had made tuna-noodle casserole and served it with a side dish of tomato aspic on a lettuce leaf. There was a basket of brown-and-serve rolls, and butter in a cut-glass dish," Sunny, the narrator, says.

The conversation turns to the wine that Charles had brought them. "It's really very drinkable," Charles says, pretending not to notice that the mother has poured herself a stiff bourbon. "From Alsace. Ideal for a convivial lunch, I think. Especially with fish." Sunny's mother mentions that tuna-noodle casserole had been her daughters' favorite. Sunny continues to report this conversation:

"It looks delicious," Charles said. "Do you make your own noodles?"
My mother nodded enthusiastically.
"I boil them first," my mother said. "But about a minute less than they need, so that they can cook in the casserole without getting overcooked."
Charles nodded vigorously.
"And are they homemade?"
"Sure, I made the whole casserole this morning."
"And the noodles?"
I couldn't tell if Charles was merely making conversation of if he was busting her chops for his own amusement.
"The noodles?" my mother said.
As far as my mother knew, noodles came in a box. She'd never imagined someone making them.
"Mom uses Prince noodles," I said.
"Absolutely," my mother said. "I swear by Prince."
"They'll be fun to try," Charles said. "Anyone been to Tuscany?"

And so on. I won't bore you by further comment on how Parker writes dialog. It's worth a read, even if his plots are now beyond improbable and his characters are less than 2-D.

Uh-Oh, now it's salmonella in Roma tomatoes

This afternoon as I was checking out of the Produce Station, my local produce store, the checker warned me about the Roma tomatoes I had selected. I switched for stem tomatoes -- more than twice the price -- now I know why. Good job, checker!!

I googled "Roma tomato recall 2008" when I got home. Evidently, in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Utah and Arizona, Roma tomatoes are being held responsible for an outbreak of the St. Paul strain of salmonella. The outbreak started in Texas in April, and is now more and more widespread. By web browsing I've discovered that at least 70 people have been diagnosed and at least 17 hospitalized.

I guess I ought to wait for local tomatoes to be in season. Stem tomatoes are evidently safe -- I suspect that's because they are hydroponic, and often come from Canada. The source of the contaminated tomatoes seems to remain unclear, as far as I can tell. And there have been no cases in Michigan -- yet. I'll watch the news now that I know about it. I've seen nothing in the sources I generally read.

See: Tomato Recall - State warns of salmonella outbreak involving uncooked tomatoes; recall likely and google for up to date news for yourself.

Update in answer to comment: there is no recall in Michigan, no outbreak in Michigan, and no clear idea of where the contamination has originated, which is why Produce Station is still selling the tomatoes. The checker evidently was just acknowledging what people had been asking, I guess. Avoiding the product seems prudent to me. I found this article from the Ann Arbor News: Ann Arbor Markets Respond ....

Baghdad, Yesterday

'Amba is a spicy yellow condiment made from pickled mango. Brought to Israel "by the Jews of Iraq, bowls of it are prominently displayed at shawarma and falafel stands." Amba is a link between the Jews of Iraq and their new life in Israel, writes Israeli-Iraqui author Sasson Somekh. Among his many recollections in his memoir Baghdad, Yesterday, this food memory was very vivid.

"The 'amba's pungent odor, one of the distinctive smells of Baghdad, also symbolizes the prominent culinary link between Iraq and the Indian subcontinent," said Somekh. "Even after their arrival in Israel, Iraqi Jews set up small factories and began to produce 'amba -- the main ingredients being slices of mango pickled in a sauce flavored with curry and other sharp spices." (In the photo is a man selling 'amba and other condiments at the Manahe Yehuda market in Jerusalem.)

As a child in Baghdad, the author was especially tempted by 'amba sold near the local movie theater and purchased by mainly Muslim boys to eat on sammoon, a diamond-shaped bread. "I wasn't allowed to join them; my mother warned me over and over not to touch the 'amba sold by street vendors. She insisted that it was teeming with disease-carrying germs -- in any case, why would I want to eat that 'fake contaminated' stuff when we had at home a barrel of the genuine article...? Yet watching the boys... never failed to whet my appetite. And I did disobey my mother on occasion, tasting that forbidden fruit. The heavenly flavor of 'amba on fresh-baked sammoon lingers on my tongue to this day."

I don't remember ever eating 'amba: now I hope I'll have some eventually. However, I suspect that I've tried a bit of this condiment at one or another Israeli falafel stands. I already knew that falafel represent the fusion of various Israeli immigrant groups. Originally, falafel -- deep-fried chick-pea patties -- was a dish of the Egyptian and eastern-Mediterranean Arab groups, but became known as Yemenite falafel when Yemeni street vendors flavored their offering with hawaij -- another spice blend that reflected contact with India. Fascinating!

The 'amba memories appear in Somekh's Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew. Somekh is an Israeli poet and writer, born in Baghdad in 1934. His stories describe his childhood and adolescence in Baghdad, life and education for a member of the then-large Jewish community of Iraq, his contact with Arab poets and translators, and of the process of immigration to Israel.

Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew is published by Ibis Editions in Jerusalem. The author came from Baghdad to Israel in the early 1950s with the great exodus that reduced the number of Jews in Baghdad to a tiny fraction of its original 120,000 people. Some families had roots going back to the very first Israeli diaspora, the destruction of Solomon's Temple, so the transition for them was not at all easy. Somekh originally published these memoirs of the Baghdad Jewish community in the Israeli paper Haaretz. It's worth reading if you want to know more about another side of Iraqi history.

Notes: I found the photo of an Israeli 'amba seller on an EGullet forum. Quotes are from pages 100-101 of Samekh's book.

Garden Salad

"The Next to Last Supper"

New from Middle Earth, my favorite store for art -- Chinese takeout at the Last Supper (on a match box). OK, so it's really the Next to Last Supper. Shades of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: this is the ultimate nexus of Jews and Chinese food! In fact, Jesus has a fortune cookie in his hand, held high (click on the picture to get a really clear view). You can also buy Next-to-last matches and see images here.

I must read this!

In today's New York Times Food Section I read a review of several books by Lara Vapnyar, a Russian immigrant to New York whose fiction is centered around food. [UPDATE: I ordered the book right away, read and enjoyed it. The photo shows it with some broccoli I cooked in its honor!]

I love books that work this way: using food to illuminate the characteristics of life here and there, like Stealing Buddha's Dinner and others. This one reminds me of what I learned from my friend Natasha, originally from Russia -- now Israeli, from interviewing some Russian immigrants to Ann Arbor, and from my sister's friend Luda.

Here is the reviewer's summary of a couple of the stories and their food themes: "A young woman, trapped in Brighton Beach by her immigrant parents’ expectations, finds her place at the family table by sitting down with a knife to make Salad Olivier. It is the Russian party dish par excellence: a mound of hard-boiled eggs, canned peas, pickles, potatoes and meat, diced and bound with a tangy mayonnaise. For particularly swanky occasions, the salad is covered with aspic." Yes, Natasha made us a salad like this.

I had already read another Times excerpt from Vapnyar's work: Pot Luck - Food - Eat, Memory. It included sentences like these: "Asparagus was another mystery. I didn’t know it as a child, but once I started reading adult novels set in 19th-century Russia or 20th-century Europe and America, asparagus seemed to be the primary food a literary character would eat. I would read the asparagus pages over and over, trying to conjure a picture of it. The descriptions were maddeningly incomplete. The author would go on and on with his boring psychological insights, mentioning asparagus only in passing. Nobody I knew had ever seen asparagus. I couldn’t even find it in the huge Household Encyclopedia that had pictures of various fruits and vegetables I had never tasted, like mango or kohlrabi. I constructed an image of asparagus from bits of novelistic description. To me, it was green, expensive and exquisite, and it had a stem and a head, with the head being the juiciest part."

Also, the Times book section offers readers the first chapter of her book Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. Now I'm even more eager to read the stories of this author.

I'm not much of a gardener, but...

A few weeks ago, Tracy and Arny gave me a beautiful box with herbs, lettuce, and a few flowers. I did next to nothing and all the plants have grown up. Today I put a few leaves from the basil and oregano plants into a tuna-whitebean-tomato salad. Soon we'll need to eat the lettuce too.

Peanut Butter?

In a cooking blog, I happened to read a reference to cooking with beer today. I had a sudden memory from the past. Here it is:

Years ago, we were planning a camping trip to Yosemite with a friend from France. This was long before the high level of communications that occur about cooking between the 2 countries now. Our friend had read that peanut butter soup was a favorite with American campers — I’ve never heard this before or since but anyway, he’d believe anything about American oddness. For him peanut butter was exotic and abominable. His face made one of those Gallic moues and he said in his deep and stereotypic accent: “Maybe it would be ok if you used beer to thin the peanut butter.”

Some time I'll have to do a more complete set of memories on our French friends, who came to Berkeley and changed their lives. It's apt: after being changed personally and politically (and maybe chemically too) by his Berkeley stay, our friend went back and had a peak experience in Paris in May, 1968, whose anniversary just was celebrated with varying memories, and which still polarizes the French a bit.

Update to this memory: Our friend was also marshmallow-phobic. On the same camping trip, our fellow Americans brought along marshmallows; when he tried a toasted marshmallow he said "it's like eating a jelly fish."

Another update about eating in France, inspired by yet another blogger: Our friend Michelle in Paris (the best cook in the world) serves radishes in a bowl with unsalted butter on the side and NO bread! With an aperitif like Kir or even whiskey, before the first course in one of her fabulous French meals.

Dinner from the Farmers Market

AND here's what I made for dinner from the foods I bought this morning:

• Roast farmers' market chicken stuffed with apple-sage dressing, including some spring onions. The dark color of the bird came from basting with hoi-sin sauce. Mmmmm.
  
• Steamed asparagus (3 min. in microwave does it).
• A little cranberry sauce that I made a few days ago from the last frozen berries left from last fall.
  

Note: for lunch we had lettuce from the market in our salad.