On the Beach in Cape May, NJ

We arrived in Cape May this afternoon, and took a walk on the beach. Few others were on the beach: a man and his dog, a little girl whose parents weren't to far away, and very few birds. It was not very cold but very windy. Conditions for the weekend aren't very promising, but we hope the forecast will change. Evelyn, Tom, Miriam, and Alice arrived around an hour after we did.

Loons in the water.

Alice and Miriam on the beach near our hotel.

Dinner at Lobster House. Right: local oysters and Maine lobster.

"Taste" at Culinary Book Club

Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Food by Kate Colquhoun was this month's Culinary Reading Group selection. The group meet each month at Motte and Bailey Bookstore, our sponsor. Gene, the owner, and his wife Jackie are the moderators. This evening's meeting included seven people who attend almost every time, and two others.

Taste is a difficult book, full of excruciating detail. Some of the phrases and sentences people used to describe their reading experiences:

• "Endlessness of ingredients that gets boring." 
• "Arduous." 
• "So detailed that I found it freeing myself to skim." 
• "She rushes the twentieth century." 
• “Didn't talk about other countries, while some of the chefs she mentioned were actually French." 
• “She didn’t have to tell us EVERY single thing she knew.” 
• “I really was interested in beginning, but found it hard going."

As our discussion proceeded, I began to have the following thought: the less an individual had read of the book, the better he or she thought it was. However, there were many interesting avenues of discussion, quite a few of them about the things we thought the author had missed or skimped on. Examples: we wondered about communal ovens in English towns, about charitable efforts to feed people during hard times, about the vast improvements in English food in the late twentieth century, about the inclusion of cuisines from the Empire and when an imported food (like chicken tikka masala) becomes actually English, about why the author didn't discuss the food served on railroads and steamships in the era of that type of transportation, and other topics.

As always, it was a lively discussion and I enjoyed it enormously.

Playing with Food

"The toast will be ready in a minute," said Len, suspecting that I was impatient before breakfast this morning.

"I'm just having fun arranging butter and jam on my plate. No rush." I answered.

Playing with food! As I continued buttering my toast and then peeling a tangerine, I thought about how much fun it is to play with food. When you peel the tangerine, you have to pull off all those little white stringy things one by one. It's compelling sometimes. Do you ever smear peanut butter on a graham cracker and then squish it with the other half of the graham cracker? Did you ever microwave cocoa with marshmallows on top and watch them swell up? I hope you didn't set your microwave on fire. Do you think it's fun to whack the catsup bottle? As in the poem The Catsup Bottle by Ogden Nash "First a little/ Then a lottle."

Cooking can be like playing with food, sometimes. Do you like fooling around with the toppings for a pizza? Last night, I spread the sauce with a silicone basting brush and I arranged the toppings in patterns, especially the artichoke hearts. Watching the dough as the flour mixer forms a ball in the food processor is fun. Kneading the dough is kind of amusing too -- some people like it more than I do. (Yesterday was Pi Day, and I didn't think I would have pie but I made a pizza after all.)

During my actual childhood, my mother didn't tolerate a lot of fooling around at the dinner table, but I guess I tried a few things. I used to enjoy mushing up the three separate dishes that composed one of the meals she often made: salmon croquettes, mashed potatoes, and peas (that would have been canned peas; soft, for mushing). I'm sure there were a few other foods or combinations I would have liked to fool around with. My sister probably remembers more.

But I'm a grownup now. I shouldn't play with food. Unless I'm cooking. Like mashing potatoes. The other night, I made twice-baked potatoes. This means I got to scrape the potato out after the first baking, then mash it with butter and browned onions and kefir, then smash the mixture into balls and stuff them into the potato shells, and finally, bake them again, covered with melty cheese. Meanwhile I grated carrots and chopped red cabbage for a side salad, not exactly playing, but almost.

I can think of other things that allow a cook to play with food -- legitimately! Like making tuna salad, egg salad, deviled eggs, or almost anything smushed with mayonnaise, which is a very playful substance as any child knows. Like making ice cream. Like forming a messy meat mixture into meatballs, which you can roll between the palms of your hands. Like the tense moment when you have added flour to white sauce and it forms a smooth paste, not a lumpy mess. It's all play.

Happy Pi Day

I'm probably not going to bake a pi-themed pie today. Or any pie. So above is a screen capture from Google images.
On an earlier Pi-Day post, I calculated some useful pie-making numbers using π -- you probably remember them from basic math class: first the basic calculations. The area of a circle is π (approximately 3.14) times the radius squared. Therefore:

• 8 inch round pans have diameter 8, radius 4 so they have 3.14 x 4 x 4 = 50 square inches of area
• 9 inch round = 63.5 sq. in.
• 10 inch round = 87.5 sq. in.

Square pans have the following areas:

• 8 inch square = 64 sq. in.
• 9 inch square = 81 sq. in.
• 9 by 13 inch = 117 sq. in.

If you pour in filling to the same depth, the amount of pie filling or cake batter you need is the same when you fill pans of the same area, assuming that the round pans have straight, not sloping sides. Sloping sides add a bit of unpredictability. These are useful results:

• An 8 inch square and a 9 inch round are virtually identical in their need for filling or batter.
• A 9 inch square and a 10 inch round are less than 10% apart.
• Two 8 inch squares are very close to a 9 x 13 inch rectangle.
• NOT equivalent: a 10 inch pie with sloping sides probably holds close to twice as much filling as an 8 inch pie.

UPDATE: the most extreme pie movie I've ever seen:

Simple Meals

Ingredients for quesadillas, salad, and stir-fried beef with green onions.

Cooking this week has been simple. We had quite a few leftovers and went out once, so I didn't do a lot in the kitchen.

Quesadillas are close to the simplest dish I know how to make -- I can't believe that I like them so much I even order them in restaurants sometimes. I keep my version basic: just some green chiles and melty cheese in a flour tortilla, fried to brown. Some restaurant versions get very fussy with the filling, like chicken in layers of sauce etc -- really, they should call them tacos or enchiladas or something. I like the original plain quesadillas. I served them with a bowl of lettuce, arugula, avocado, and cucumber; tomato salsa; corn salsa; and some stir-fried beef flavored with cumin, hot sauce, and green onions.

My quesadillas, ready to eat.

Green onions and beef.

Chicken with tarragon, capers, and lemon, served with green salad with artichoke hearts.

Another meal, shown above, was chicken breast cooked with white wine, tarragon, capers and lemon. Finally, the simplest and lightest of our dinners was a mug of mushroom soup alongside a vegetable salad dressed with kefir and goat cheese. For the soup I used the classic French onion soup recipe and added fresh and dried mushrooms before the long simmer. Serving the leftover soup at lunch the next day, I added a toasted English muffin with melted cheese and hot sauce.

Mushroom soup and an English muffin with cheese.
Note that I am incapable of making fancy squiggles from the Sriracha bottle.
Minnie Mouse is on the plate under the soup plate. Yes, I have Micky too.
No, they are not for children, they are for us.

I am not sure how my mushroom soup fits into the history of soup. In fact, I only just became aware that soup even had a history. However, I know more now because soup, also called pottage, frumenty, broth, and other names appears throughout the book I've been reading, Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking by Kate Colquhoun. Serving a piece of bread or toast in the soup was common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance era. Over time, this "sop" of bread went out of style and was replaced by vermicelli, rice, or other starches. I'll write more on this book and its overwhelming detail about eating through 20 centuries in a later post, maybe after my culinary reading group discusses it.

Michael Pollan's "Cooked" on Netflix

Australian tribes people at their fire in the Outback, from part one "Fire" of Michael Pollan's Netflix special, COOKED.

In Michael Pollan's video series COOKED, there are examples of cooking by tribal Australians, by barbecue pitmasters from the American South, by urban women in India, by bread-bakers in Moroccan villagers, and by Michael Pollan's own friends and neighbors in Berkeley, California. The series is full of fabulous images of kitchen activities, of mould spores forming on cheese, of bread dough in every stage from kneading to rising to baking, of the exotic locations where some of the cooks live and work, and much more.

The series, in my opinion, converts a fairly intellectual book (also titled Cooked) into a  delightful sensory experience -- except that unfortunately you can't smell or taste the products! Though Pollan covers a good deal of research by food scientists, anthropologists, and historians, the series is impressive mainly for the range of visuals. Here are some examples from the four parts of the series:

Pitmaster working on Barbecue from "Fire."

Kitchen in India, from "Water."

A pot boiling, from "Water."

Bakers' shop where families bring their own bread to be baked, from
"Air." This episode also has memorable imagery of a traditional miller,
where water-driven grindstones grind the grain for bread.

From "Air."

A nun who is a biochemist and cheesemaker, from "Earth."

A little-known processing fact: cacao beans must be fermented to produce the taste of chocolate -- from "Earth."

Pollan narrates the entire series, as well as demonstrating the cooking and
baking skills he learned while researching the book.

In the Atlantic this week is an article that goes perfectly with "Cooked" -- More Than Half of What Americans Eat Is 'Ultra-Processed'. The article begins by quoting Pollan's most famous line: “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” which they ideintify as "oft-quoted, less oft-followed." They conclude: "ultra-processed sugar bombs are replacing 'more nutrient-dense foods,' and leaving people “simultaneously overfed and undernourished." Best of all, they have a clear and useful definition of ultra-processed:

"Formulations of several ingredients which, besides salt, sugar, oils, and fats, include food substances not used in culinary preparations, in particular, flavors, colors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and other additives used to imitate sensorial qualities of unprocessed or minimally processed foods and their culinary preparations or to disguise undesirable qualities of the final product."

Pollan's quest for traditionally processed foods -- bread, cheese, fire-cooked meats, braised meat and vegetables and much more -- offers an alternative to industrial, ultra-processed foods.

Bloggers take note: food photography makes food taste better

"The meal is getting cold, and your fellow diners are waiting — not to mention silently willing you to sit down and stop embarrassing them with your millennial sensibilities. And, maybe most important, you also want to eat the delicious-looking food laid out in front of you. But none of this matters because the method is always the same: Photograph and delay gratification, which, in turn, makes the food seem more delicious."

An article titled "The Psychological Case for Instagramming Your Food" by Claudia McNeilly appeared in "Science of Us" in New York Magazine yesterday. The author reviewed several research projects that found that Instagrammers (or presumably bloggers) who photographed their food enjoyed eating it more than those who tucked in right away.

Miriam and Evelyn photographing our 2015 Thanksgiving turkey.

Rituals that postpone eating, including photography, all seem to increase enjoyment, according to this article. I wondered if one traditional ritual that wasn't mentioned would also do so: saying Grace! That would be an interesting research project. Meanwhile, this gives me some excuses about making people wait while I take food photos -- also does it for my fellow bloggers or Instagrammers.

The conclusion of the article puts it this way: "In short: Perhaps the only thing more irritating than the act of public food photography is knowing that those walking their $16 plates of eggs Benedict over to a window could be getting more out of their dining experience than you."

What do elves and fairies eat?

The fairy's campfire?

This morning we spent some time at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, which seem to have been invaded by elves and fairies. Tiny houses, patios with patio furniture in Bonsai dishes, playgrounds including tire swings and rope ladders, miniature stone benches, and many more elfin-size dwellings and play spaces now nestle among the labeled trees and flowers. Some are in the mossy banks under the jungle plants and others among the cactus in the desert spaces. Not many of the elves and fairies seemed to be eating anything; just sort of hanging out in their little homes. They are so small... they probably don't need much. I wondered what they were cooking over the campfire.

They have quite a few playgrounds, including
the tire swing above (penny for size).

Maybe these birds' eggs on scallop shells are this musical fairy's lunch.

Many of the fairies and elves seem to live in the tropical part of the greenhouse, but a few live in the desert among the cactus.

A bit of food served on another shell?

We also enjoyed the plants and flowers that grow in the greenhouses, but I've taken photos of them many times before.

Even in the very dry desert display, the greenhouse
windows are fogged up.

The goldfish pond reflects the greenhouse roof.

One of my favorites: the kaleidoscope
that's trained on a flower display.

I saw no written acknowledgements of the elves and fairies' houses, and found no mention on the webpage or Facebook page for Matthaei Botanical Gardens. But maybe the fairies and elves don't want to be noticed, and confused my eyes when I was checking for a mention of them.

Van Gogh Sketches a Soup Kitchen

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam makes a treasure trove of material available online, and they post fascinating bits of Van Gogh information on Facebook. Recently, they posted this sketch and quote from a letter Van Gogh wrote:

"Yesterday I did a drawing ... women and children at a hatch at the public kitchen
where soup is sold." -- Letter to Anthon van Rappard. The Hague,
on or about Monday, 5 March 1883

Artists like Van Gogh who were interested in common people and their ordinary food are fascinating. And of course Van Gogh's images of peasants eating potatoes are very famous, though the details of his social activism before he chose a career as an artist are little known.

The contents of this letter mostly concern technical details of Van Gogh's art: scrapers, painting stones, chalk (with which he mentions drawing this sketch), paper, and other art supplies. He also describes an art journal and works by a number of other artists, and mentions that he's rereading works by Dickens. All very fascinating details about the life of Van Gogh.

A New Hillerman

Anne Hillerman, daughter of the late detective fiction writer Tony Hillerman, has written a sequel to his wonderful series of Navajo mysteries. I'm delighted to find that her effort, titled Spider Woman's Daughter,  is highly successful, unlike many sequels to popular detective series. She continues to depict the two main detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, but her focus is more on police woman Bernie Manuelito, now married to Jim Chee. This change in focus allows Anne Hillerman to recreate the series in a new but not radically different way. I think her plot and most of her cultural details live up to the standard set by her father.

Food and travel writing, not fiction, was Anne Hillerman's previous profession. In her new turn as a fiction writer I especially enjoyed the way she used her food-writing skills to depict what the detectives ate. Tony Hillerman mainly had his detectives eat hamburgers at a couple of Southwest fast food chains. Anne Hillerman introduces lots more options. Here are a few examples, which speak for themselves.

"Bernie drove through the twilight into Cuba, a speck of a town known for its restaurant, El Bruno’s, which served some of the best New Mexican food in Sandoval County. They both ordered enchiladas, Bernie’s cheese with green chile and Chee’s with roast beef and Christmas chile — red and green. They had stopped here a few times with the lieutenant after a long day of meetings in Albuquerque. Leaphorn always had a burger, Bernie remembered, with no cheese or onion, and followed up with a piece of pie topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream." -- Spider Woman's Daughter p. 261.

"It [an interview] also involved eating a Spam sandwich, a treat he’d cut back on since he married Bernie. Mrs. Tsosie added delicious slices of raw onion and tomatoes from her garden, and gave him a box with a big piece of homemade chocolate cake, making him promise to share it with Bernie." -- p. 183. 

"'We should go somewhere that has both steak and sopaipillas. Somewhere nice.'
"'Sopaipillas? I love sopaipillas.'
"'I know you do. Miniature fry breads. Puffy. Served with honey or stuffed with ground meat, onions, chile.'" ...
"She ordered the stuffed sopaipilla with ground beef and green chile. He had the steak and chile relleno combination because the menu described the chilies as 'Big Jim.'" -- p. 220-224

If you have been a fan of Tony Hillerman, I think you too will be delighted with this sequel. I've already bought her second sequel, Rock with Wings.

Update: I read it and it's very very good!

Retro Pasta Night

Tonight's dinner: a rather retro recipe for pasta, salmon, and mushrooms. I think this is the kind of thing we ate in the 1980s.
I assembled all the ingredients, and according to the recipe, cooked the dill-seasoned salmon first, then the garlic.
Then I added chopped green onions, capers, sliced mushrooms, and white wine to the pan. When they were done, I tossed in the cooked pasta.

My friend Alice made salad to go with it. 

For an appetizer I served something even more retro:
sherry and celery stuffed with cheese.
Also, Trader Joe's delicious and sinful pastry hors d'oeuvres.

Pasta, ready to serve, garnished with halved cherry tomatoes in oil & dill,
chopped parsley, and lemon wedges.

Pasta on the table. My other guest made a fudge pie for dessert.

I found the recipe at Epicurious -- HERE, originally from Bon Appetit magazine.