Cookies and Rocks

I’m marveling at the pleasures of home this morning: the whirring and gurgling of the dishwasher, the fuzzy carpet under my bare feet, the scents of coffee and soap lingering in the air, the whisper of breeze from the ceiling fan.  I’m unshowered and feeling deliciously lazy this morning, my hair is dirty and the weight of my glasses is making an indent on the bridge of my nose.  I rarely wear my glasses outside of the house, so the feeling of them on my face is a sort of early morning/late night pleasure.

It’s been a hard week, for reasons that I can’t discuss publicly because it’s not my story to tell.  Whenever I witness a personal tragedy, I am reminded of just how fragile and bittersweet this life is, how much beauty and pain, wonder and loss we can experience if we are open to it.  I don’t want you to worry, dear readers, but if it’s not too much to ask, if you wouldn’t mind asking for a miracle on my behalf, I would appreciate it.  There’s nothing wrong with me or my family, but I am finding little comfort in my own well-being.  No one ever said that life is fair, but sometimes there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the bad things that come out of nowhere.  In my own bizarre agnostic way, I’m calling on the universe to correct this horrible mistake it has made.  It’s not too crazy to hope for a miracle, right?

Even in the face of tragedy, life goes on.  We eat, we sleep, we read blogs and check Facebook and spy on the new neighbors moving into the building.  We live our lives as best we can.  It’s always struck me as weird that the mundane exists side by side with unspeakable sadness.  But I think the mundane has the power to pull us through our tragedies.  Hunger reminds us to eat so that we may live.  Exhaustion reminds us to sleep so that we may wake up and be strong to face the next day.  And laughter reminds us that there is a life worth living, through the nightmare and beyond.

On that note, I want to play a game of carrot-and-stick, only instead of carrots and sticks, I thought I’d give out something more personal, like cookies for the good stuff, the fun stuff, and rocks for the bad stuff.  I love a nice list, don’t you?  It’s so orderly, which in itself is a comfort.  Let’s begin!

***Cookies to:  

* My newest favorite blog, What Would a Nerd Wear.  I love Tania’s site!  She’s a style blogger and Brit lit graduate student, and her fashion sense is a lot like mine, but she’s more stylish than me.  Her writing is fun and friendly, thoughtful, even hilarious sometimes.  I want her to be my blog friend.

* An instant pudding dessert made of almost all whole foods: a few spoonfuls of vanilla yogurt and a spoonful or two each of peanut butter and coconut butter.  A bit sweet, a bit rich, it’s a great summer dessert to follow a light meal, like a soup-and-sandwich combination or a big salad.  For the coconut butter, I am devoted to my jar of Artisana Organic Raw Coconut Butter.  That stuff is unbelievably good.  It’s a little expensive—I got my jar on sale for ten bucks and change—but it lasts a long time because I don’t eat much in one sitting.  I think of it as an investment!

* A new cookbook: Ani’s Raw Foods Essentials by Ani Phyo.  I haven’t bought a new cookbook in a very, very long time.  You could say I’ve been on a cookbook diet.  But I’ve been thinking about buying a raw food cookbook for a long time, and this one seemed like a good choice for a newbie like me.  Now, I don’t have any plans to become a raw foodist, but I want to learn some new tricks from a raw foods expert.  As a sign of my commitment, I bought some fresh Medjool dates at the store today, and I don’t even like dates very much!  But I’m ready to learn—let the lessons begin!

* The weather this week, which permitted me to run outside three times!  I was shocked and amazed and also very sweaty.  But still, it felt great to get off the treadmill for a few days.

And now, onto the second part of our game.

***Rocks to:  

* My new upstairs neighbors, whose late-night noise is keeping me from my beauty rest.  I want to yell at them, “Go to bed!  Or buy me some earplugs!”

* Me, for not paying attention.  All week I’ve had weird headaches and I’ve been straining to see things.  I am very near-sighted and must have vision correction at all times.  On Monday I put in a new pair of contact lenses, but it took me until Friday to figure out that I put the wrong lenses in each eye.  You see, my two eyes have different prescriptions because my left eye is worse than my right.  Last night, I switched the lenses and behold, headache gone!  Perfect vision!

* Neal D. Barnard, MD and Vegetarian Times for the worst answer ever to this question: Why go organic?  (Organic meaning organic foods, not organic chemistry.  Glad I’m long done with that second one!)

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, my personal belief is that organic produce is the healthier choice because I believe that pesticides and such are likely to be cancer-causing agents.  I cannot, however, cite the scientific studies that provide more solid evidence for my belief.  Because there are so many variables among human subjects, my hypothesis may be difficult to disprove conclusively.  I’m okay with that.  I still buy organic produce as much as I can.

I would have hoped that Dr. Barnard’s answer would shed some light on the demonstrable health dangers of ingesting pesticides and other chemicals.  Instead, the argument goes like this: chemicals are bad for you.  If you eat organic foods, you eat fewer chemicals.  Therefore, not eating organic foods is bad for you.  The problem with his answer, even if I believe his conclusion, is that it fails to tell me why these chemicals are bad for me.  Just because something seems like a bad idea does not make it so: eating bacteria, to me, sounds like a bad idea.  Bacteria can kill us.  But the bacteria found in things like yogurt are really good for our digestion and gut health.  Dr. Barnard’s answer strikes me as weirdly intuitive—he’s a doctor, for crying out loud!  Intuition is not the same thing as science.  Intuition is just a starting point for a hypothesis that must be tested and retested in such a way that it can be disproved.

If anyone cares to shed some light on this topic, please be my guest.  Hopefully your argument will be more convincing that Dr. Barnard’s!

That’s the end of my rant, and the end of cookies-and-rocks.  I hate to end on such a down note, so how about some green to spruce up this otherwise wordy post?  I took this picture over at my fountain, where lovely green plants are basking in the heat and the moisture.  I try to stop by the fountain a few times a week, just to check on the plants.

Have a happy green weekend, friends!  See you tomorrow, maybe with more green!

Sharp Knives and Kitchen Dreams

If you like vegetables and you like to cook, I’d say there are three things you absolutely need: a great knife, a nice cutting board, and a decent soup pot.

Now, what does it say about me that I failed to buy two out of those three things for myself?  I’d say it means I am too cheap for my own good.  Also, that I am very lucky to have someone in my life who gives me knives and wooden chopping blocks for my birthday.

I am so in love with everything in that picture up there, especially the hands.  I know they’re a little blurry because this is an action shot, but please, just look at that thumb!  Isn’t it great, holding the onion in place, keeping things moving along smoothly?  I have found the absolute best hand model, and, as if that weren’t enough, my hand model will cook for me upon request.  I feel all warm and flirty just thinking about it.

In what must have been an infatuation-induced spending spree, just a few months after we started seeing each other, Matt bought me three great knives from J.A. Henckels: a paring knife, a mid-sized all-purpose knife, and a huge chef’s knife.  He also bought me a snazzy and very sharp-toothed bread knife, as well as a parade of other kitchen goodies.  To be honest, I was overwhelmed by his generosity, even a little embarrassed.  Before him, I’d never dated anyone who was a really fantastic gift-giver, so I was blown away by his thoughtfulness.  I also, in the back of my mind, wondered if this was a little like giving himself a present—in the best way possible, of course.  We cooked so many things together during that New Year’s visit of his—soup and stew and roasted potatoes and tofu scramble.  We ate well, even though we spent most of our time on the couch while Matt nursed a cold and I kept him company.  The food made our time together brighter and cozier, as snow swirled in the frozen Chicago air outside my windows.  Given all the cooking we had done, I wondered if Matt was thinking he might cook in my kitchen again and therefore have the chance to put those sharp knives to good use.

If he had that thought, he was totally right.

Now that we’ve been together through several rounds of birthdays, I can’t imagine my kitchen without his influence.  It’s not really about the knives, per se, although they are very nice.  It’s about how Matt has taught me to value my own quality of life.  It was hard for me to think about this idea when I was still a PhD student.  I was just trying to get out of graduate school alive.  I considered it a victory that most nights I cooked a “real” dinner and not frozen pizza.  It was important to me to have what felt like a home life, something that existed independently of my academic life.  Cooking was, and still is, a huge part of that home life.  To imagine something beyond that was nearly impossible.  But with Matt, nothing is impossible.  It’s one of the reasons I adore him.

Matt and I have very different attitudes toward money.  The truth is that I want to be more like him.  He invests in his happiness.  I inherited my parents’ “just-getting-by” attitude.  At some point, though, just getting by starts to feel bleak.  To look into the future and realize that you can do things NOW to make things better for your future self—that’s dreaming, in the best way possible. 

I want to be a dreamer.  I already know that I’m a get-it-done kind of person, but a dreamer?  Who imagines big, beautiful, sparkling, happy dreams?  Even in a recession?  Yes, that’s who I want to be.  And yes, kitchen knives are an important part of dreaming, especially if your dreams take place inside a kitchen.  I know mine do—or at least some of them do.

To be continued… 

Mezzetta Extra Virgin Italian Olive Oil

If you cook a lot and you like to cook with olive oil, I think it’s important to have a good workhorse of an oil in your pantry.  One that tastes good and makes food taste good.  An everyday kind of oil.  This oil shouldn’t be very expensive because everyday cooking should not be the kind that makes you wince and sigh and scowl as you imagine your bank account being drained by dinner.

Mezzetta Extra Virgin Italian Olive Oil could be your kitchen workhorse.  It’s very reasonably priced—I get mine for about eleven bucks a pint at Albertson’s, my neighborhood grocery store—but more importantly, Mezzetta’s oil is an excellent choice for cooking and baking.  On its own, this oil has a really fruity smell and the taste is pure grass.  In the mouth, it has a rich texture, but it’s not a flavor powerhouse.  What it does is a little more alchemical: it helps other foods taste more like themselves.  Salads taste greener and grassier, tomatoes taste fresher and sweeter, blueberry yogurt cakes taste like perfect baked treats.  It’s nice to have an olive oil that works well in both savory and sweet recipes.

Diligent olive oil tester that I am, I made Mezzetta’s oil jump through my various hoops for Project Olive Oil, but I did them all backwards, starting with dessert.  I loved this oil in a blueberry yogurt cake; it added a subtle note of green grassiness that complemented the sweeter flavors.  Mezzetta’s was delicious with tomatoes, whether in simple caprese form or a more elaborate Tomato Bread Salad.

The final taste test was today: a small plate of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, a few slices of great bread for dipping.  I always think of this test as the simplest of all: three ingredients and maybe, maybe a touch of salt if needed.  If I may be completely honest with you, dear reader, I will confess that I expected Mezzetta to fail this test.  It is not a powerhouse olive oil; I wouldn’t even think of giving someone a bottle of this as a gift.  (And yes, I am now in the habit of gifting olive oil.)  I believed that the vinegar-and-oil test would separate the truly outstanding oils from the workhorses.

Then I tried Mezzetta, and I cleaned my plate.  I was so wrong.  It was awesome.

What I have come to believe now is that when it comes to food and flavor, nothing is simple.  There are dozens of variables that can alter what we experience when we taste something: soil, climate, the rainfall during that growing season, the storage/processing/shipping conditions—and that’s the short list.  The food we see when we sit down at the table is the product of interconnected processes.  Even the simplest, humblest foods seem miraculous when viewed this way.

Mezzetta’s Extra Virgin Italian Olive Oil, a grocery store staple and resident in my pantry, is exactly what I wanted to discover when I started Project Olive Oil.  Combine good-quality ingredients with this oil and you will feed yourself, your family, and anyone at your table delicious food.  At the end of the day, that’s what matters most to me.

Saturday, with Water Lilies and Kitchen Agenda

Whew, that was a close one, but I made it to Saturday.  What a long week!  It was a very productive week in the lab, though I think it was the kind of productivity that looks more like two steps forward, one step back.  Ah, experiments!  If it weren’t for weekends, I’d have to throw in the towel on this way of life.

But thankfully, there are weekends, and this one is going to be good.  I can just feel it.  I’m of two minds about my weekending.  One very tempting idea is to be as lazy as possible, leaving the couch only for snacks and drinks.  I’ve got my old copy of Walden to keep me entertained; my Book Club is reading Thoreau and I haven’t even started my assignment yet!  But one cannot read Walden in a hurry any more than one can read poetry without time to linger over the words.  These things must not be rushed.

Just the idea of being lazy this weekend makes me feel better.  But then I think about all the delicious things I could make this weekend and my belly gets really excited about all the cooking and baking we could do.  I’ve got my eye on Shauna’s new granola recipe, and I’m planning to make a big pot of vegetable soup tonight.  There’s a loaf of sourdough bread on the counter, melon in the fridge, and bars of chocolate in the cupboard.  Oh, and a new block of my favorite cheese.  I like to keep a well-stocked kitchen.

I’ve been riding my bike a lot lately.  I should clarify that “my bike” isn’t really my bike; it’s a bike that a kind friend loaned to me.  This kind friend also made me the most amazing Indian food on Thursday night.  The food was so good that instead of having dessert, I had seconds.  I dream about being able to make food like that.  Anyway, with my borrowed bike I’ve been riding all over town for errands and for fun.  I love seeing the dusky Texas sky overhead as I pedal forward.  In the evenings, with a gentle breeze on my skin, this Texas summer is pleasant.  It’s still awfully hot every day as long as the sun is shining, but the evenings here are kind of magical.  I want to remember them when the sun disappears at 5 PM and the land feels dark and grey to me, even if it isn’t cold.

I’m off to fix some lunch and bake some Walnut Wafers.  Have a groovy weekend, friends!

Letter to a Friend, with Lemon Butter Cookies

Dear Ammie,

By now, you must be in Germany, trotting around the music festival, viola strapped to your back.  It’s funny to imagine you so far away.  You are an ocean away from me, but it feels more like a world away.

My excitement for this trip of yours is unmatched.  What an adventure!  I’ve never been to Europe.  I am afraid to be so far away from home.  Someday, perhaps, I’ll be ready to visit that foreign continent with its centuries of history and food and architecture and language.  Germany is high on my list of countries to visit, as it is part of my ancestry and I studied its language for four years in high school.  I feel connected with Germany.  Also, I hear they are very friendly to tourists and they want their guests to have a wonderful time in Deutschland.  This reputation is in contrast to what I hear about France, where they hate their tourists and would really prefer if you just stayed in your own country—and sent them your money anyway.  Now, these nasty rumors may not be true at all—maybe the French will love me!—but I’d have to confirm them in person to be sure.  Based on this logic, I think that I’ll have to visit Germany and France during my first trip to the Old World.  

Leaving your everyday life for a few weeks opened up an expanse of time for you that was unparalleled in recent months.  I hope that you are finding yourself charmed by this experience of living without your daily grind.  I know it can be unnerving to not have your routine to keep you feeling solid and safe, but it can also be so liberating and powerful.  Sometimes I dream about those days without routine, days when I don’t have the commute and the work and the packed lunch and the daily annoyances that irritate me, despite my best efforts to not let them bother me.  I dream about floating through my day, moving from one beautiful place to the next, stopping to refuel with food and drink as necessary.  Of course, in my fantasy, all the food is wonderful and the people friendly and the floating feels magical.  In reality, sometimes when I have too little to do, I feel lost, like I’m drifting and no one is around to hear my cries of loneliness.  It’s the double-edged sword of being an independent woman, a freedom that seems limitless but is capable of slicing away at you as you struggle to find your sense of security.

All of this is to say that sometimes it’s good to travel and other times it’s good to put down some roots.  You’ve been putting down your roots in Chicago for a long time now!  That our Chicago experiences happened to overlap is a coincidence that makes me so grateful for mutual friends and what I can only call luck.  So many times have I been astonished to find us navigating through the same murky emotional landscapes; being able to talk to you about scary, ugly truths has been like having a hand to hold in the dark.  I always say that I like a little hand-holding; I think this world is sharp and cruel enough as it is.  I don’t think I believe in tough love.  Maybe I’m not as jaded as everyone thinks I am!

Things are going well for me these days.  My grueling presentation at work went well, I think, though I was totally exhausted afterward.  I expected that, so I figured that I would not get much done for the rest of the day.  I’ve noticed that lately, when I give talks, my voice always seems to give out after about five minutes, which concerns me.  How am I going to teach hour-long lectures if I can’t get past my opening slides?  Maybe I need hot tea or lemon water with honey to keep my throat silky smooth?

I’ve been a total bookworm lately, devouring books with a ravenous appetite.  I finished The Devil in the White City!  I’m so glad I gave that book a second try; it was absolutely worth it once I was absorbed into 1893 Chicago and all the glamour of the Gilded Age.  Matt has recommended another Gilded Age book to me, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, filled with New Yorkers who are climbing the social ladder.  I’ve got to ride my bike over to the library to find a copy.  I love a good library.  In the meantime, I’m rereading The Awakening by Kate Chopin (more nineteenth century, please!) about a married woman in New Orleans who “awakens” to her desires for freedom.  I want to visit the Crescent City again, and now that I’m living in Texas, it’s not far away.

When I’m reading, I love a mug of tea and a plate of cookies.  Snacks make everything better, don’t you think?  I made some lemon butter cookies recently that reminded me a lot of you, though I’m not quite sure why.  I think they remind me of the cookies with apricots and fresh thyme.  Both recipes make refrigerator cookies, the kind where you shape the dough into logs, wrap it in plastic wrap, and then refrigerate for a while.  Then, using a sharp knife, you slice the dough into rounds and bake them until they turn golden and fragrant in the hot cave of the oven.  Do you remember the night we made the apricot cookies?  What other cookie did we make that night?  That was a very fun, very cookie-filled night, though I seem to remember little else other than the cookies and my cozy kitchen with you standing at the counter.

I must confess that I was not very brave when I made the lemon butter cookies.  You see, the recipe called for adding chopped fresh rosemary to the dough.  Rosemary!  In cookies!  It’s so wild!  I really hemmed and hawed about the rosemary.  I used to think that I didn’t like that pungent, piney herb.  It’s so strong, almost overbearing, that I thought it best if I just stayed away from it.  Slowly, with effort on both our parts, I’ve learned to appreciate rosemary.  A little goes a long way, so I use a light hand with it.  I do love your white bean soup with fresh rosemary—that soup’s going on my list of fall things to cook.  Ooh la la.

But back to the cookies.  Even without the rosemary, they are quite lovely.  They’re rather delicate, with a soft, almost sandy crumb that melts on the tongue.  They’ve got a bit of sparkle on top from the hippie sugar in which you press the unbaked cookie rounds.  That sparkle is very important, and not just because it looks pretty: these cookies are barely sweet, and the sparkly topcoat is what makes the difference between what could be a lemon butter cracker and a lemon butter cookie.  I even made a few without the extra sugar, and they weren’t as good, so don’t skip the hippie sugar!

If you were in my neighborhood, I’d tell you to hop on your bike and I’ll brew us a pot of tea.  I’d set out a plate of these cookies, and we’d have a little tea party while sharing the latest news with each other.  Doesn’t that sound nice?  But my goodness, our neighborhoods are very far apart, and though your legs are strong, I just don’t think you’ll be able to bike down here before the tea gets cold.  So instead, I shall wish you a safe, happy, and wonderful time in Europe, and I’ll look forward to the next time we meet over a plate of fresh cookies.

Much love,

Rose-Anne

Lemon Butter Cookies

Adapted from Vegetarian Times

Makes about 30 cookies

These cookies may seem understated upon first bite, but they are very sly and soon you’ll be telling yourself that you’ll just have one more cookie—after all, they’re so small!  One more cookie is just another bite or two.  And it’s true: these are bite-sized little tea cookies, subtle but deliciously so.  I love them for an after-dinner dessert, preferably with a mug of tea.  I think they’re even better the second day, when the lemon flavor becomes more pronounced.  The dough also keeps well in the fridge for at least a week if it’s tightly wrapped.

One more thing: when slicing the dough into cookie rounds, be sure to use a very sharp knife, such as a paring knife.  The dough sort of flops over if you try to use a butter knife, but a paring knife will slice clean through and give you perfect little rounds.

1/2 cup (1 stick or 4 ounces) butter, softened

1/4 cup sugar

1 tsp. freshly chopped rosemary, optional (if you try it, let me know what you think!)

1/2 tsp. finely grated lemon zest

2 egg yolks

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 cup flour

1/3 cup corn flour (Bob’s Red Mill sells this in 24-oz. bags; I found mine at my neighborhood Albertson’s—nothing too fancy)

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 cup turbinado or hippie sugar, for decorating (you may not use a full 1/2 cup—I didn’t)

Cookie spray

1)  Beat the butter, sugar, rosemary if using, and lemon zest with a mixer for 3 minutes or until creamy.  Beat in the egg yolks and vanilla.

2)  In a bowl, stir together the flours, baking powder, and salt.  Add them to the butter mixture and mix until just combined.

3)  Divide the dough in half.  Shape each half into a log about 1 inch wide.  Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours.

4)  Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray.  Using a very sharp knife, such as a paring knife, slice the dough into 1/3-inch rounds.  Dip each round in the turbinado or hippie sugar to give each cookie a sparkly coat.  Place the rounds, sugared side up, on the baking sheet, and bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown on the bottoms.

5)  Allow cookies to cool for a minute or two on the sheet, then remove them to wire racks to cool completely.  The cookies are quite delicate when they first come out of the oven, so handle them gently.  Serve to good friends with hot tea and plenty of stories to tell.

Science Sunday

Oh, goodness, friends.  I am knee-deep in other people’s data today, trying to muck my way through putting together a presentation for work tomorrow.  The topic of the presentation is interesting: obesity and fat regulation in fruit flies, which, before last week, I knew nothing about.  Now I know a teeny-tiny bit, but still, I am overwhelmed with just two papers to read and understand.

Actually, that’s not true.  Understanding them is not the problem.  My real concern is that there is no way I can present these papers without using cheat sheets to remind me what’s what.  My memory alone will not be sufficient, hence the mucking through things.  The powerpoint presentation is filled with notes to help me remember things more easily, but holy moly there’s a lot to know.  I am way outside of my comfort zone here.

I had planned to tell you about a lemon butter cookie today.  It’s a good one too, topped with sparkly sugar, and when you eat it, it melts softly in your mouth with a rush of lemon and sweetness.  I’m excited to share it with you, and I’ve got something fun to accompany the recipe.  But I need time, and today I’m overwhelmed with work.  Our lemon butter cookies will have to wait, but I hope to share them with you later this week.

Despite the work, it hasn’t been a bad weekend.  Last night I fell in love with a very cute sweater at Kohl’s—short sleeves with a sort of fisherman’s net thing going on.  It also has big buttons.  I bought one for a friend’s birthday present, but now I think I must return to buy one for myself.  Also, I found some great stuff on sale at Brazos Natural Foods: a pint of heavy cream for 99 cents, a big bottle of Organic Valley’s pourable yogurt, also for 99 cents—both steals!  One of these days I’m going to make homemade caramel sauce with my heavy cream stash.  Everything is better with caramel sauce.

I also bought some beautiful peaches, which, coincidentally, match my shirt.

 

Despite the pile of work on my plate today, I’m feeling happy and mellow.  Maybe it’s the jazz playing over the speakers at It’s a Grind, where I sit, typing away.  Maybe it’s the pretty fountain, sending up its cascades of bubbly water outside the coffeeshop.  Or maybe it’s just Sunday, a day to relax and regroup for the week ahead.  Sundays are made for daydreams and long walks, staring at fountains and catching up with friends.  I hope to get a little bit of all those things into my Sunday, in between the papers and the powerpoint.

I hope your weekend is wonderful!  See you later this week.

At the Grocery Store, in the Mailbox

Howdy, friends!  Now that we’ve gotten my love life straightened out, we can get back to more important things, like food and shopping. 

When it comes to grocery shopping, I run hot and cold.  Sometimes I love it; sometimes it feels like such a chore.  Like most things in my life, if I feel like I’m doing it for fun, then I love it.  If it feels necessary and unavoidable, I am much less enthusiastic about it.  Maybe that’s how I feel about all shopping?  I remember shopping for a pair of black high-heeled shoes for job interviews last summer.  I did it totally on a whim.  I was at work, presumably doing something that needed to get done, when I just decided to leave and go to the mall.  I’d been feeling anxious about putting together my interview outfits, and I knew I needed new shoes—classy, dressy ones with no open toes and preferably ones that wouldn’t kill my feet after an hour.  I ended up at Nine West, taking footware advice from a friendly older woman, and even though the shopping was necessary, it was pretty fun.  I think the part where I skipped work was the best.  Remember when I confessed that I’m not a fun girl?  I think that may be changing.  I’ll have to tell you more later, in a future post.

On a fun whim the other day at the grocery store, I decided to take a chance.  I plunked a half-gallon of original flavor Silk PureAlmond almond milk in my cart, and since then, it’s become one of my weekly pick-ups at the store.  It seems like the universe has been trying to nudge me toward almond milk for a while, but I haven’t been listening.  My sister-in-law makes her own, using dates as a sweetener, and when I was staying at Daphna and Ian’s in May, Daphna’s mom used it in her coffee, and so I did too.  Almond milk, I don’t know what took me so long, but I’m glad we found each other!

Silk’s PureAlmond is really great stuff.  It has a sweet, vaguely nutty flavor, with just a hint of almonds.  The texture is a little creamy but not palate-coating.  I use it all the time in overnight oatmeal.  One of the odd things about this almond milk is that it tastes sweeter than cow’s milk to me, even though cup for cup, it has half as much sugar (7 g versus 12 g in 2% cow’s milk).  I even did a side-by-side tasting to test my impression, and the almond milk was noticeably sweeter.  By comparison, dairy milk had a cleaner taste, like you’d want in a good palate-cleanser.  Except for taste tests, I don’t drink milk straight any more, but if I were a milk-and-cookies kinda girl, I’d prefer dairy milk with sweets.

Almond milk has even made its way into my morning cup of coffee.  My new formula is 1 tablespoon each of almond milk and heavy cream and 1 tsp. sugar, either hippie sugar or vanilla-infused granulated sugar.  The combination is subtly sweet and creamy enough to make the morning coffee feel like a treat.  I deserve a reward for getting out of bed, especially on the mornings when I have to go to work.

Speaking of mornings, peanut butter is a steady morning companion of mine.  I take my peanut butter very, very seriously, so it was with some anxiety that, when offered the chance to try a new-to-me brand, I accepted the offer.  The company, via its generous correspondent, Nanette, went a little overboard and sent me four big jars of peanut butter—that’s four pounds of peanut butter, all for me!  Yikes.  The peanut butter had the unfortunate experience of sitting in a very hot Texas mailbox for nine days while I was off roaming the streets of Chicago, but upon opening the first jar, it tasted perfectly fresh to me.  I immediately tucked them all into the fridge, just to be on the safe side.

The company who made this donation to my belly is Krema Products and Crazy Richard’s of Dublin, Ohio.  They sell peanut butter under both brand names, but as I understand it, the product is the same.  It’s good stuff, this Krema/Crazy Richard’s peanut butter.  Made of only peanuts, this nut butter has a wonderfully pure flavor, just the essence of peanut butter.  So far, I’ve eaten most of two jars, the Krema chunky peanut butter and the Crazy Richard’s smooth peanut butter.  I love the Krema as a dip with raw carrot sticks.  I wasn’t quite as wild about Crazy Richard’s, until I did a little bit of detective work and uncovered a piece of utterly obvious wisdom about peanut butter: you can add things to it.  Uh, yeah!  It was forehead-smackingly obvious, yet I needed someone else to point it out to me (thanks, Nick!).  I decided that what Crazy Richard’s needed was some added complexity in the form of salt and sugar.  Working off of Nick’s recommendations, I started adding a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of sugar to an open jar.  I tasted the peanut butter after adding most of the salt and sugar, only to find out that the salt was too much.  I added a bit more sugar, hoped for the best, and tasted.  Nope.  Still too salty.  Until I tried it on my morning oatmeal the next day, where suddenly the saltiness was delicious!  That extra bit of salt made the whole bowl taste better, sweeter and more vibrant.  This incident is, to me, yet another illustration of how one must overseason condiments in order to make them perfectly seasoned with other foods.  For example, I wouldn’t slurp soy sauce by itself, but I love it on rice and vegetables, or sprinkled on salads, or stirred into soups.  Peanut butter can definitely be a condiment, in which case extra salt can be a flavor booster.

This last one’s for locals only.  Long-distance readers, you’ll have to find your own tortillas.  Just down the street from me is Rosa’s, a restaurant that sells cheap, tasty Tex-Mex food and freshly made tortillas.  It even calls itself a tortilla factory, which I find rather charming.  It’s a place where Matt and I usually have lunch when he’s visiting me, and my only regret about his visit last weekend is that we didn’t make time for Rosa’s—so sad!  To make up for it, I sauntered over there this evening to pick up a few tortillas for dinner.  It was very tempting to just stay at Rosa’s, especially when I remembered how much I love their guacamole, but I wanted to cook tonight.  Maybe next week I’ll go to Rosa’s for dinner.

Rosa’s flour tortillas are the best.  They are doughy and a little thick, and with an application of butter and/or olive oil, they crisp up nicely in a hot skillet.  I first had them as part of a quesadilla meal that Matt made back in January.  I still dream about those quesadillas, filled with sautéed onions and bell peppers and so much cheese!  We ate them with salsa, of course, and this salad that blew my mind with its garlicky, salty, almost pickle-like radishes and bitter greens and fresh pears.  One day I will figure out how to make those radishes, and it will be a very good day.

Tonight I was inspired to make quesadillas, using the bits and bobs waiting patiently in my refrigerator: onions and peppers, leftover tofu scramble, shredded cheese.  I put on my Hootie & the Blowfish album* and listened to long-forgotten but much-loved songs while I pushed vegetables around a skillet and buzzed fresh melon and white wine in the blender to make something cold and fruity to sip.  Then I sat down to eat my homemade meal.  The quesadillas were hot and crispy, the boozy cocktail cold and refreshing.  It was a very good dinner, from start to finish.  I was pleased.

But next week I’m eating at Rosa’s.

*Don’t judge.  I like Hootie.  I’m not ashamed.  Plus their Musical Chairs album is lovely, so sweet and sad.