Weekend Appetite: Coffee, Cake, and Words

I must have a case of spring fever because all week I’ve wanted to skip work so I could go outside and play.  Since I’m a mature grown-up, I did not skip work; instead I just compared notes with everyone around me and I do believe that there’s a spring fever sweeping through town right now.  Rumor has it we may see 70-degree weather this weekend.  I can’t wait!  This is why I moved to Texas.  That, and the job that keeps me inside windowless rooms every day.

Right now thick sheets of grey clouds blanket the sky, and there’s a chorus of birds singing outside my apartment.  The temperature is mild, but the sun is nowhere to be seen.  It’s the kind of day that is filled with suspense.  Will it rain?  Will the sun break through those clouds?  Will the temperature drop precipitously into the scarf-and-mitten range?  The drama of it all makes me feel tense and clueless about what to wear today.

All I know is that this weekend needs to involve copious amounts of relaxing.  I’m not good at deliberate relaxation when I’m alone.  But the only social plan on my calendar is a phone date with a friend, so I need to cobble together a plan to make the most of this nice Saturday/Sunday pair.  If the sun comes out, I’m planning to sunbathe by the pool while I read papers.  I’m really missing the sun this morning!  Even with no sun, I’m going to make a much-needed trip to the other side of town to do some shopping at Target and HEB.  As an extra treat, I’m going to take myself to lunch at a restaurant called Soup’er Salad, a place I’ve wanted to check out for months now.  The name alone makes me think I’ll like it.  I miss my Panera.

Despite the spring fever, this past week was not a bad one at all.  New issues of Vegetarian Times and EatingWell arrived in my mailbox, along with City:Country, a book co-authored by one of my favorite bloggers.  I’m a voracious reader who needs constant infusions of new material.  The new Vegetarian Times looks especially promising, with its “Coffee Klatch” article filled with recipes to serve at a coffee tasting.  I would love a slice of their Blueberry Yogurt Cake with Lemon Glaze and a mug of coffee later today.  I could make it happen.

Speaking of coffee and cake, I wish I could invite Anne Lamott over to drink coffee and eat cake with me.  She is such an amazing writer that she blows me away with the beauty and hilarity of her words.  I want to tell her how much I have enjoyed her work.  This week I was hooting with laughter at these old Anne Lamott pieces from Salon: Reading, writing, resistance and Dear Mr. President: What are you thinking?  I may have had tears rolling down my cheeks from laughing so hard at a paragraph in that last one—it was a sneak attack of Lamott-style humor.  Today I’m excited to read this piece called How to get your man. 

There are moments when I think that if Anne Lamott had been my mother, she could have taught me everything I need to know to live a good life.  Love everyone.  Breathe.  Show up.  Sit outside.  Dance.  Stop sucking your stomach in.  Try not to kill anyone today.  Maybe she is teaching me those things anyway.  It’s not a bad blueprint of a plan for a weekend or any other day of the week.

I hope your weekend lives up to its promises, dear reader.  I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Don’t Fear the Butter

In the wake of Valentine’s Day, it seems only right to tell you that I’m having a love affair with butter.

It’s not my fault that butter is so delicious, clean and rich-tasting, capable of making savory and sweet dishes something to linger over.  It smells good too, whether it’s melting into a puddle of olive oil before being tossed with some thinly sliced red onions, or baking in little tea cookies or dense chocolate brownies.  Butter really does make things better, and I for one think that butter has earned its place in the kitchen, healthy or not.

But wait.  Am I the only one who thinks that butter has been given a second chance with the rising popularity of dairy from grass-fed cows?  Talk about good news for us hedonistic health nuts!  Rumor (or science) has it that grass-fed cows’ butter contains higher levels of antioxidants and those so-called “healthy” fats like conjugated linoleic acid and omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.  Now, I’m not really convinced that butter’s saturated fat is bad—that whole trans-fat issue really scrambled the data set and if coconut is supposed to be good for us now, then I think the jury is still out on saturated fat.  Regardless, I eat my butter, and I love every last morsel of it.

I have, however, made a conscious decision to buy butter from grass-fed cows as much as I can.  I’m really elated to find that my natural foods store (my “Brambles,” as I might say to Laurie) carries a regular supply of Organic Valley’s Organic Pasture Butter.  It is more expensive than regular organic butter, but I believe it’s worth it.  If you’re going to love butter, you might as well love the good stuff.

I love butter so much that I decided to put it somewhere that it rarely shows up: in a nut butter.  It was a magical moment for me when I realized I could make my own nut butters at home.  It also shows that I’m kinda slow sometimes, since I watched my friend Daine make his own peanut butter in his Chicago kitchen.  And never mind the huge “grind-your-own” vats at stores like Whole Foods.  I could make MY OWN NUT BUTTER!  Suddenly spending ten dollars on a jar of walnut butter was totally unnecessary—I could make it myself at home!  And best of all, I could make a custom blend of my favorite ingredients.  When was the last time you had a pecan butter?  Seriously!  But you can have it at home—all you need is a decent food processor and a touch of patience.  And a bit of butter.  I add a tablespoon of butter to about a cup of nuts because I thought the butter would give it a nice, creamy texture—it would help meld the flavors together.  What I got was a nubbly, sweet yet complex-tasting spread that I found positively addictive.  It’s delightful.  And so without further ado, I give you the recipe.

Honey Walnut-Pecan Butter

Makes ~1 cup

This nut butter is lightly sweetened with honey.  The bitterness of the walnuts adds an unusual layer of flavor, and the pecans and butter round everything out with their pleasant richness.  I like this nut butter a lot with apple slices, but I love it with a banana.  It reminds me of a banana split, which is always a good thing.

One last thing, about the title of this post: “I gotta have more cowbell!”

1/2 cup pecans (whole or coarsely chopped)

1/2 cup walnuts (whole or coarsely chopped)

1 tbsp. butter

1 tbsp. honey

1)  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Place the nuts on a large rimmed cookie sheet.  Toast them in the oven for 5-6 minutes, then remove and let them cool for a few minutes.

2)  Place the toasted walnuts and pecans in a food processor.  Grind for a few minutes to create a chunky paste.  Add the butter and honey.  Grind for another minute or two, scraping down the sides as needed, until the paste has reached a uniform consistency.  It will still be nubbly using a regular food processor like mine, but with a high-powered blender like a Vita-Mix, you might be able to get a smoother, creamier texture.  Myself, I like the nubbly texture.

3)  Store any leftovers in a tightly-lidded container in the fridge.

About Love, Old and New

Good morning, dear readers! It’s already been a good morning for me, between a good night’s sleep, a big bowl of banana oatmeal, and that Saturday feeling. It’s a working weekend for me because I’ve got a presentation to prepare for lab meeting on Monday and flies to water in the lab later today, but I don’t mind. It’s still Saturday!

I’m rediscovering all sorts of old things that I once loved and then forgot. I think it’s nice, a little like meeting up with an old friend after a long absence. Last night, after a reluctant 20-minute run in the cold and the dark, I put on a Norah Jones CD and made myself an almond crust pizza and a spinach salad. Everything hit the spot, especially the music. This CD was her feels like home album. Two of my favorite songs are “Creepin’ In” and “Toes.” I’m also partial to “Sunrise” because I consider sleeping late to be a weekend requirement.

I’ve discovered a new dessert tea that I want to share with you: Stash Decaf Chocolate Hazelnut Tea. Really: chocolate hazelnut! If you doctor it up with a splash of milk and a teaspoon of sugar, it’s like hot chocolate but lighter on the palate and with an almost fruity finish. I’m a huge fan of drinking herbal teas with dessert, but I think this Stash tea is going to work its way into my rotation.

This weekend I think I’m going to trot out some old favorite recipes for the big Saturday dinner. I haven’t made Matt’s Chickpea and Artichoke Heart Stew in a long time, and since it is Valentine’s Day weekend, it somehow seems appropriate to make recipes that remind me of Matt. I miss him in a sweet, happy way—with fondness and love. I’m glad our friendship blossomed into so much more.

With Matt’s stew I’m going to have his Spinach and Orange Salad and maybe a hunk of chewy bakery bread. The broth in the stew is so good and perfect for bread-dunking. Dessert will probably be a lazy affair of pantry-pawing to find something sweet to eat alongside a mug of my new Stash tea.

I know I tend toward the sappy and sentimental in my posts, but I can’t help but remember how scared and sad I felt a year ago at Valentine’s Day. I was crushed by the darkness of winter and the looming unknown questions about finishing my PhD and what would happen after that. I had no idea that I would be living in Texas by the end of the year or enjoying a research position in a new lab, one that would allow me to put all my hard-earned knowledge to work on new projects. Research is still hard—it’s never easy—but I’m so much happier with it than I imagined possible. I don’t feel crushed under the weight of my worry any more, and for that I will never stop feeling grateful. That’s why my PhD matters so much to me: it set me free.

A Dispatch in Which I Declare This Week a Success

I’m having such a good week!  I just had to stop by tonight to tell you about it.

I’ve been reading like a maniac for work this week, but today I finished my quota—three papers between Sunday and today!—and I’m feeling very accomplished.  Also, this afternoon I got an exciting preliminary result which is stoking my science fire.  On top of those things, today I knocked out a set of niggling little things that have been crowding my to-do list for a week, and there is nothing nicer than checking things off the list when they’ve been hanging over your head for way too long.

On the home front, I’m so excited to start making my new apartment feel like a home.  I’ve been living in my new place for about four months now, but it still doesn’t feel quite like home.  One of the big projects on my list is to finish unpacking and organizing the second bedroom, which I’ve dubbed my writing studio.  Does that sound pretentious?  Maybe a little.  But it’s true that I do the majority of my writing in there, and I just like the idea of having a writing studio.  Anyway, there are two big things I want to do with this room: get rid of my old college textbooks and buy bookcases for the books that I’m keeping.  This week I placed an ad on craigslist to see if I could just give someone my textbooks, and I received more than a dozen e-mails.  Now I’m just waiting to hear back from someone about making arrangements to give the textbooks to her.  I have trouble waiting—I want them gone!—but I think I’ll give her a week.  After that, the books go to the next guy!

I also started working on the bookcase question.  I’m having a hard time deciding exactly what kind of furniture I want to buy for this apartment.  There are too many options!  So I’ve decided to start small: I want to buy a pair of nightstands for my bedroom, and I want them to have some shelving.  I found a cute maple-colored nightstand at Target.com.  Before I purchase them, I’m going to check out the options in a brick-and-mortar Target, but I’m feeling happy having found something I like.  Baby steps, friends.

Finally, there was refrigerator soup for dinner tonight and a big oven-crisped flour tortilla topped with white bean hummus, melted sharp cheddar, and two roasted tomato halves.  I cooked with the classic rock station cranked up so I could sing along with it.  There may have been some dancing too.  Admittedly, the soup was bland and desperately needed a hefty dose of salt, but its frugality pleased me, leaving behind it an emptier vegetable drawer and just one bowl of leftover soup.  I’ve still got room for dessert, which will be a piece of shortbread, retrieved from the freezer, and a square each of dark and white chocolate.  (I’m craving chocolate tonight.)  There are good books waiting for me and maybe a spot of journaling as well.  Tomorrow morning there will be a bowl of pumpkin cottage cheese oatmeal similar to this one and perhaps a mug of lightly sweetened chai to match the warm spiciness of the oats.  I’m going to soak the oats overnight like I usually do.  There’s just something nice about doing that little bit of prep work the night before to make the morning more welcoming.

I hope your week is going well, sweet reader, with lots of getting-stuff-done and good meals in between.  The weekend is just two days away!

In Desperate Times

I have a secret weapon against the gloom and doom of endlessly rainy days, the everyday grind, the early mornings, the exhausted evenings—in short, the business of being a grown-up.  It’s not easy, this grown-up schtick.  More often than I’d like to admit, I’m completely overwhelmed by it all—job, bills, cleaning, feeding myself, and trying not to go crazy.  I could really use a housewife to take care of me, someone to put a hot dinner on the table for me and rub my back while making soothing shhh, it’s okay sounds.  Housewives were really a fabulous invention.  If only we could all run over to Target to buy one!

Without a housewife around, the temptation to buy a one-way ticket to Italy, where I could eat my weight in pasta and gelato a la Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love is almost more than I can bear.  But in desperate times, my secret weapon is stashed in the pantry or, rather, a brown paper bag in the corner since my kitchen’s pantry is laughably small.  It’s a stack of lumpy red-skinned potatoes.  It’s no housewife, but it’s awfully nice in its own ugly way.

Potatoes are, for me, one of the ultimate comfort foods.  I love that they are dug straight out of the earth, like a hidden treasure, a gift nurtured by the dirt, the rain, and, on nicer days, the sunshine.  I like their musty smell and the way they feel in my hand, solid and heavy.  When I was a child, I even liked the crunch of raw potato, snatched from my mother’s countertop as she cut potatoes into chunks for boiling or mashing.  Potatoes were a constant of my childhood, and though I rarely eat them now as my mother prepared them, potatoes are deeply, viscerally comforting to me.

I also like that potatoes are not an instant food.  Despite my childhood potato-snatching, I no longer eat them raw.  I like them in soups and stews, and there’s a really wonderful recipe for Golden Cheddar Cheese Soup in Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home that uses potatoes to make a creamy base for a bright but soothing pureed soup.  But my favorite way to eat potatoes these days is roasted.  The dry oven heat creates the perfect combination of textures: crispy-crunchy brown on the outside, creamy and soft on the inside.  Flavor-wise, I find potatoes to be a blank slate.  I like that about them.  They’re so forgiving about seasonings that you can ask yourself what flavors sound good to you right now, and the potato will take happily to just about whatever you throw at it.  If only all things in life were so carefree and accommodating!

On these endlessly rainy winter nights, I’ve returned to a recipe that started me on my potato-roasting path.  The original recipe is from my favorite all-purpose cookbook, Passionate Vegetarian, a book that I think every serious vegetarian cook should own.  The recipe first caught my eye with its clever name: Ned’s Fiery Oven French-Bakes.  What is a French-Bake?, I wondered.  “Spicy, Cajun-style French fries that aren’t fried but baked,” the recipe answered.  It warned me that these fries are addictive, but I paid it no mind and made them anyway.  And you know, I’m really glad I let my belly make decisions in these matters because the belly knows best.  Five years and a few recipe tweaks later, these oven fries still slay me with their incredible depth of flavor and crispy-creamy texture.  The secret is the use of rice vinegar with garlic oil on the fries before they go into the oven.  The finished fries deliver an immediate tang of flavor, followed by something savory and rich, a sort of deep umami that tastes unlike anything I’ve ever eaten before.  They are seriously good—better than a raw potato even.  Now, head into the kitchen because I’m about to give you the recipe.

Oil-and-Vinegar Oven Fries

Adapted from Passionate Vegetarian

Serves 2 (or 1, maybe with leftovers depending on greediness)

2 medium-large red-skinned potatoes (mine are about baseball-sized these days)

1/2 tbsp. garlic-infused olive oil

1 tbsp. rice vinegar

1/8-1/4 tsp. Tabasco sauce (I’d lean toward 1/8 tsp. here, but if you like a lot of heat, go for the 1/4 tsp.)

Salt to taste

Black pepper to taste

1)  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  Line a large baking sheet with a Silpat.

2)  Rinse the potatoes thoroughly and pat dry with a paper towel.  Use a vegetable peeler to remove any eyes or other really funky spots.  With a knife, slice the potatoes into French fry-shaped pieces about 1/2-inch thick.  In a bowl, toss the potatoes with the garlic oil, then add the vinegar and toss again.  Dribble the Tabasco over them, add some salt and pepper, and toss again.

3)  Spread the potatoes in a single layer on the Silpat-covered baking sheet.  Pop them in the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes, turning them every 10 minutes or so.  These fries don’t turn spectacularly brown and crisp, but if you are so inclined, you could try baking them longer to get a browner, crispier oven fry.  I like them a little crispy with a nice, creamy interior.  And that flavor!  Amazing.

Thank You Times Two, Plus a Winner

After the cookware.com giveaway this week, I’ve got a new wish list for my kitchen.  There are so many useful, pretty items in that store!  I’m saving my pennies for some shopping because a well-loved and smartly equipped kitchen is a happy place to be.

Before I announce the winner, I want to say thank you to the generous folks at CSN Stores for sponsoring this contest.  I also want to thank those of you who entered the contest!  I loved reading about your weekend plans—it was a little like tagging along with you on your adventures.  Thank you for sharing and for spending time with me here at Life, Love, and Food.

According to The Random Integer Generator, the winner is…

DAINE!

*** The official data:

Here are your random numbers:

1

Timestamp: 2010-02-06 16:47:28 UTC)

Daine’s comment made me smile because I miss Chicago, its food and its people.  Daine wrote,

“I'm going to India town with Amanda and Erin (she got good news from UIC, if you haven't heard). When you come back to Chicago, you have to go to Uru Swati. The ambiance leaves much to be desired, but the food there is heavenly. They also have the best Bhindi masala (okra) that I've ever eaten.

I'm actually glad that you put up that advertisement. I'm not in the market for any bar stools right now, but they do have a sugar bowl that I will probably order. I have distinct conceptions of products I'd like to own, but then spend years searching in vain for what I'd like (a square glass pitcher, for example). They almost have what I was imagining for a sugar bowl. It's probably worth buying, since the exact thing I'm envisioning probably doesn't exist.”

Happy shopping, Daine!  The rest of us will have to keep saving our pennies for a kitchen treat.  Where’s my piggy bank?

A Declaration of Weekend

I believe in weekends.

Recently, all of the students working in my lab have been obsessed with the question of working weekends.  Every single one of them has asked me if I work weekends.  My answer is ambiguous: no and yes.  During my graduate student days, I struggled with this issue.  Sometimes I enjoyed working weekends.  The lab was quiet and peaceful, I could sit and ponder my data, I could think about which experiments I wanted to do next, and I could leave whenever I felt ready to go home.  There was a certain freedom to it that I liked.  But I also found that the more I worked weekends, the less I pushed myself to get my work done Monday to Friday.  Tasks stretched themselves to fill the time I allowed them to occupy.  I was less efficient, even though I was spending more time in the lab.  And over time, I wanted to spend fewer weekends in the lab and more time having fun.  I wanted to be more efficient so I could have a life—and be a successful scientist.  For my happiness, I needed to believe that I could do both.

My answer now to the working weekend is this: if I work on the weekends, I work from home.  I try NOT to be in the lab on the weekends unless it’s essential (and sometimes it is).  As a postdoc, I feel it is more important than ever to make time to read scientific papers, so that is my weekend work.  I love to read on my blue couch.  I’ve even made myself a little star chart to track the number of papers I’m reading each week.  My goal is to read three papers; most weeks I read two.  That’s a big improvement over zero!  I didn’t read enough as a graduate student, and it’s a habit that I want to remedy.

The most important thing that I do to keep up my momentum in the lab is that one day a week, I don’t do any work at all.  Perhaps it sounds lazy, but for me it’s the perfect balance.  It encourages me to push myself hard because I know that I will give myself time to rest.  I need the fire under my bottom to keep me moving, but without a day to relax, I’ll just burn to a crisp.  I really want this postdoc to be my steppingstone to a faculty position, which means I’m in it for the long haul—probably a minimum of four years.  I’ve got to make it work for me.

So like I said, I believe in weekends.  Especially weekends that come on the heels of a difficult week in the lab.  I deserve a good weekend.  This one feels wide open to me, big enough for me to stretch my legs and wiggle my toes.  Big enough for a good yawn and a catnap on the couch, before or after reading Matt’s book or Nigel Slater’s the kitchen diaries or even the section about making grits in Passionate Vegetarian.  All of these things sound good to me!

Here’s a happy list of other items from my weekend plans:

* I have a phone date with my lovely friend Nicole, whom I miss very much and with whom I didn’t get to visit much last time we saw each other.  She’s a gem and I’m excited to catch up with her.

* Pancakes!  I’ve been thinking about making pancakes for weeks now.  I love the sound of this recipe from 3191 Miles Apart.  Spelt flour and whole oat flour!  Yum!  Plus I’ve got almost a cup of homemade citrus syrup left over from making Daine’s Yogurt Cake a few weeks ago, and I have a feeling the syrup will make a stellar pancake sauce.

* I yielded to temptation and slipped a copy of February’s Bon Appetit into my grocery cart last weekend.  There are easily ten recipes I want to trot into my kitchen from this issue, but I’m intrigued by one in particular, Easy Chicken Masala.  In this recipe, the chicken is marinated in a whole-milk yogurt sauce spiked with cilantro and garam masala, then it’s roasted over a bed of onion slices.  I’m so curious to see if the same technique will work with chickpeas that I’m ready to draw up my grocery list for tomorrow night’s dinner.

Happy weekend to you, dear readers!  I hope it’s a good one.