Category Archives: Food & Recipes

Pumpkin Gratitude

Things we’re thankful for:

Taste buds.

Pumpkin. Eggs. Condensed sweetened milk. Cinnamon. Ginger. Nutmeg. Salt. Spelt flour, Tenderflake lard, and water.

Flame resistant oven gloves that protect delicate wee knuckles from contact with HOT! HOT! HOT! oven interiors.

Good health.

Yes, Virginia… Texas really does have their own muffin tin standard, which enables the hapless Thanksgiving Indulgent to indulge in a slightly smaller hunk o’ dessert than the classic piece o’ pie. (And they thought they were selling us slightly larger muffins.)

Gorgeous glossy Emile Henry Couleur pie dishes that make everything on them look gorgeous and glossy.

I want to take a big breath and swan dive right off the pastry cliff into that lake of fragrant autumnal satisfaction. This may be my favorite color: Pumpkin Pie.

Orange dessert foods, full of wonderful health-giving carotenoids, that aren’t raw carrots.

Olfactory glands.

Eyes that work.

Work that supplies money to buy the pumpkin we didn’t grow this summer, although we did pull in six fabulous strawberries from our nascent Zone 3 garden.

Peace in the Middle East.

Celebrating holidays with your wonderful best friend and a darned decent dog.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

oxox k and r

P.S. Whipping cream. Did I mention whipping cream? Whipping cream.

iMake Miso Soup and Maybe Happiness

If there’s any doubt that Rick and I have moved into a new food space of home-made everything, this ought to cinch the deal.

Dehydrated bonito shavings are an integral ingredient when making miso soup from scratch, and for our tastes, about a quarter cup of the feather-light wafters are enough to make enough for a serving for two.

Therefore, bringing a one-pound bag of dried bonito in a household of two adults and one bonito-abstaining poodle represents a serious commitment to miso soup and/or a great bulk-buying deal with free shipping from Amazon.

It wasn’t until I plunked the bag on to the counter and witnessed the size of it compared to the pot of soup I was about to make that the impressiveness of what we had signed up for dawned on me. I thought, “Wow… That’s enough bonito to take a family of ten through Armageddon. Wish there was someone we could share these with…” and thought of my sister, Sandi, also a fan of all things Japanese and edible.

I spontaneously grabbed my iPhone sitting on the counter, clicked the photo, and sent it to her, just for fun the halibut from one bonito fan to another. It’s not the kind of thing I would haul out the Nikon to do, but the camera-in-phone-connected-to-my-internet-world makes it quick and easy to send those “I was just thinking about you!” missives that can positively change the trajectory of someone’s day.

Here’s an idea… Let’s make November 10th “Remember Day.” Grab your phone, take a shot of whatever it was that reminded you of a dear one, and send it to them with the subject line, “This reminded me of you. Happy Remember Day!”

For the sender, it’s a satisfying quick execution on a whim. For the receiver, it can bring some comfort into a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, or if it’s funny and is received by someone who shouldn’t be checking their email or text messages during a meeting or dinner date anyway, it could make whatever they’re drinking shoot out of their nose.

See? Everybody wins!

On the Question of Rice Cakes

I’ve been MIA around here lately, and I’m blaming pickles, fried bread pizza, alfalfa sprouts, and rice cakes, etc.

I’m not sure what happened, exactly, but at some point in the past three months or so, we started spending WAY more time in our kitchen, making an increasing portion of our food from scratch.

In part, it was bringing the fermentation crock into the house at Christmas (thanks, Rick!), an increasing abundance of fresh vegetables, and a desire to have a greater hand–and say–in what we eat and how it’s prepared.

Plus, it’s fun and results in beautiful, hand-crafted objets de art and photo ops around every corner. It also has the added benefit of fewer polluting car trips to the dump because there is less food packaging coming into our house these days.

It’s more time consuming and labor intensive, though. That’s for sure.

But aside from the economic, environmental, and health benefits…

… there is the delight of being able to try all sorts of wonderful foods that we might not otherwise.

This, for instance, is kimchi. I had only ever heard about kimchi from Stephanie Morris’ blog she wrote while she was living and teaching English in South Korea. That is, until Rick found himself knee-deep into a new book on fermenting sauerkraut and announced his intention to give ‘er a whirl.

In parallel, we decided to dedicate a little counter space to Experiments in Sprouting (okay… not much time here, other than rinsing them twice a day)…

… I started grinding my own wheat by hand (more time)…

… and camping. That’s camp sourdough bread, made in a cast-iron Dutch oven.
The minutes add up…

… not to mention the three-week, 3400+ mile round trip we took in August in our wee trailer where I saw my first “girl cave,” invented fried bread pizza over an open flame, tried to teach the dog to swim, witnessed some jaw-dropping scenery, and hung out with the fam.
More on all that in blog posts to come, unless I extend my whole food processing skills to the next level and get side-tracked again.

In addition to all manner of sourdough breads, pizzas, and pancakes, I am now also making my own pasta, tortilla wraps, and as of this weekend, miso soup, hummus, tzatziki, and pita pockets.

Both the taste and the delight of having my hands in dough and soup pots are addictive, so who would blame me for eying part of our lunch today, and wondering…

Me: I wonder if I could make my own rice cakes?
Rick: You’d have to figure out how to make the rice puff up like that.
Me: Yeah, and I wonder what binds them together…
Rick: A shared history of oppression?

It’s funny what compels one to write.

How To Bake No-Knead Sourdough Rye Bread

I’ve baked bread for a while but always was intimidated to try sourdough, until now.

In fact, once I got the starter chugging along, it was ridiculously easy, so I thought I’d share the joy.

To get the best flavor, and to accommodate the “no knead” part of the equation, the dough needs to rise about 12 or so hours. This means you need to think about this as a day-long gig (or better still, overnight) but as you’ll see in the videos, the actual hands-on part amounts to only about 15 minutes. Truly, and that includes clean up. Think of it as a really terrific babysitting job, where the baby slept the whole time and you only needed to let the dog in and out a couple of times, and they paid really well.

Here’s the list of ingredients I used this time:

1 cup (5 oz.) organic rye flour
2 1/2 cups (11 oz.) organic unbleached white flour
1 1/2 tsp. sea salt
1 tbsp. caraway seeds
1 1/2 cups lukewarm water (use spring, well, bottled or Brita-filtered water: yeastie beasties don’t care for chlorine)
1/4 cup well-fed and active sourdough starter

I realize that the whole “sourdough starter” piece of this will probably be foreign to some, so if enough of you are interested, let me know in the Comments section here, and this week I’ll tape and post a video on where to find some starter starter (hint: I’ll figure out how to mail you some) how to start it, and how to keep one alive and healthy for when the urge strikes.

If you try it, share! We’d love to hear how it went for you.

Dinner at Chez Sordahl

If you ever get an email from us that says, “Hey, are you up for dinner tomorrow night? We’ve got some great pork tenderloin…” check your calendar and come on over. We’ll look forward to your company and try not to burn anything.

If, on the other hand, you get this same message from Chef Rick Sordahl and his talented and charming wife Dana, CLEAR YOUR CALENDAR AND SAY “YES!!!” BEFORE THEY CHANGE THEIR MINDS!

ç They create a lovely sweet energy together, are interesting and informed conversationalists, and share their toys well. (After dinner we played their PS3 snowboard game: awesome graphics, and much easier on the knees than the real thing on a full belly.)

When you also know that Rick is the executive chef at Amangani (an enchanting Aman resort in Jackson Hole) and has an upcoming invitation to cook at the James Beard House in NYC, and really knows a good pork tenderloin when he sees one…

… well… you understand our enthusiasm. When Chef Rick cooks, people become lost for speech and must resort to banging the table in appreciation.

He once cooked and served duck breasts that our neighbor Scott had shot and cleaned that morning that was so good it gave me the sniffles.

Sometimes it’s the food that makes one cry, and sometimes it’s the laughter.

And sometimes it’s just watching Dana and Rick move as a team in their home that brings a wee lump in your throat.

Their space is full of thoughtful, beautiful, yet accessible and friendly details.

Tableware, lighting, pottery, textiles…

… and a thousand other aesthetic choices that both evoke and invite creativity and spontaneous fun.

The pencil crayons on the counter beside the black truffle cheese plate should be your first clue.

There be magic there. This particular jus magic featured red wine, local huckleberries and secret chef stuff. (I’m not completely crisp on the secret chef stuff — I was kinda focused on the black truffle cheese at the time.)

The bulk of the magic, though, is in the unconscious emphasis Rick and Dana place on hospitality versus entertaining.

It’s the difference between entertaining to impress and hosting to embrace.

They are all about the embrace of hospitality.

Of course, what shows up on your dinner plate is always a once in a lifetime experience.

And when you step out into the cold winter air after a night like that and see a full moon like this coming up over the ridge of Darby Canyon, table banging gives way to a full-blown howl.

Thanks again, Rick and Dana… and Happy Birthday, Chef!

Pomegranates

Pomegranates are tiny gems of summer audacity, still ripe in vitamin-rich bright berry cheekiness. They exhibit a delightfully bratty tendency towards explosions of ruby-red splatter down the front of your best white shirt.

Pomegranates keep one humble.

(A scrubbing paste of Oxy-Clean and ice cold water seem to work best, BTW.)

So if you find yourself lacking in Holiday Giddy-Up and/or a spiritual insight into what Christmas is about, just have an incredibly delightful man peel a perfect mandarin orange and mix in a handful of July jewels for you.

Instant fix.

Abbondanza!

Note to our collective self: for a great kick-off to the holiday season, get graciously swooped into a robust Thanksgiving clan-a-thon with 45 or so Italian Americans.

The “abbondanza” of the table is just the beginning.

There are pockets of generations everywhere you look, swapping recipes…

… exchanging vital personal information…

… and imprinting on upcoming generations the very real possibility of life-long love affairs.

It was so wonderful to remember that dishes are prepared with warm anticipation in one kitchen, then wrapped in a towel, schlepped on a lap, and unswaddled without fuss in another kitchen as a conga line of squealing anklebiters fly by in a blur just under your elbow.

COUSINS!!! IS THERE ANYTHING MORE FUN THAN COUSINS?!!

Nope, unless it’s having a great camera to chase them around with.

Not every offering at the table was personally squeezed in the produce section, washed, peeled, sauteed, spiced, spruced up, set to rest, and plated perfectly. Some bought and brought exquisite cheese, God bless them.

Others showed up with the fruit of their labor that had been several months, even years, in the preparation.

That wine, dear readers, was a gift. It was as though Nevi had thought last year, “I know! I’ll make an outstandingly full, warm yet clean, and European-style cabernet sauvignon with just the softest end note of cranberry. It will be great with Thanksgiving dinner next year.”

He would have been (was?) right.