To Catch a Cloud

Last night we had more mountains in the sky.  This time, I saw them when I was leaving work and they hung around long enough for me to catch them with my camera.  I don’t think any of my photos really do the clouds justice; I can’t capture the way the sky seems so limitless here or the way the clouds rise up from the horizon with such majesty.  It’s really something special.

The clouds this week are a gift from Hurricane Alex, the first one of the season.  I have mixed feelings about hurricanes.  On the one hand, the storm has brought cooler temperatures to College Station, which is such sweet relief from the heat.  So far, it’s also bringing wind and clouds and grey days, none of which I mind.  I’d even go so far as to say it reminds me of Chicago, land of endless gray days and cool weather.  How funny that bad weather reminds me of home!

The downside of the hurricane?  IT’S A HURRICANE!  I’m just a little freaked out by the idea of it.  We don’t have hurricanes in the North.  I wasn’t raised to deal with hurricanes, so I’m concerned about them.  I am told that we’re so far inland here that it’s unlikely to do much damage—supposedly we’ll just get wind and rain.  Okay, fine.  That I can handle.  But I wouldn’t mind having a basement right now, just in case. 

Hurricane or no, I am having a good week.  I learned that frozen peas work just fine in this recipe instead of spinach.  This is good news—I’m kinda tired of spinach.  Last night I made my peas into a pasta dish by tossing the finished peas with cooked curly pasta and topping it with toasted almonds and a good handful of grated cheese.  My dinner and I curled up on the couch to watch the beginning of Season 2 of True Blood—now on DVD!—and it was like having a Friday night on a Tuesday.  I think I needed that.

Today was a particularly good work day.  I’d been waiting almost a week for an enzyme to arrive, and this morning it did!  With all of my supplies on hand, I was able to set up the next-to-last step in a really important experiment.  Now I’m basking in the sense of accomplishment.  It’s good to get things done, don’t you think?

In a moment, I’ll start making dinner.  Tonight I’m having eggs in a basket—eggs baked in ramekins lined with foccacia bread and topped with cheese.  Eggs, bread, cheese: it’s a trinity I often invite onto my dinner plate.  I love simple kitchen suppers.  I am tempted to bake cookies tonight, but I might instead finish up the leftover banana bread pudding that surprised me with its almond-laced yumminess.  I can’t wait to tell you more about the recipe because it’s a total keeper.

See you on the other side of the hurricane, friends.

Summer Decided to Stay

I haven’t yet lived through a Texas summer, but I know better than to complain that it’s hot down here.  Like, duh, of course it’s hot!  Instead, I’ll say that it feels like summer arrived in April and we have plans to complete the comparative series of hot, hotter, hottest before summer is over.  Oh well.  At least I’ve got tomatoes to eat.

When it comes to the seasons, Texas has completely inverted my feelings.  May I admit to you that I’m about a heartbeat away from drawing up a wintertime cooking list?  Having rediscovered my copy of How to Eat—don’t worry, I didn’t lose it; it was just hanging out on the cookbook shelf—I’m lusting after big bowls of Nigella’s minestrone and her chickpea soup with pasta.  But I just don’t know about making these sorts of things right now, not because I’m opposed to soup in the summer, but because they call for hours of cooking.  Thirty minutes of simmer time I can handle, but two, three, four hours?  That crosses a line between being passionate about soup to being just flat-out crazy.  And my mother would kill me if she found out.  She’s the one who, if I even looked longingly at the oven on a hot summer’s day, would let me know, on no uncertain terms, how I was not to even THINK about heating up her already hot kitchen.  Don’t even think about it!

But now, with my own kitchen (and my own electric bill—oh boy, I can’t wait to see that thing for the month of June!), these decisions fall into my hands.  And sometimes the oven gets turned on, along with the air-conditioner.  In the past few weeks, I’ve made banana bread and roasted potatoes.  Homemade tortilla chips have graced my table more than once, and on Wednesday I made my best frittata yet, with onions, kale, and a generous scattering of crumbled feta cheese.  But on the nights when the oven remains off, I’ve got a delicious little pasta dish to remind me that sometimes, the stovetop is all you need.

This pasta dish is a jumble of fresh tomatoes, well-seasoned caramelized onions, curly pasta, and fresh mozzarella, drizzled with excellent balsamic vinegar and sprinkled with salt and pepper.  It is, to me, what pasta salad wishes it could be, fresh and bright and flavorful.  I took a slightly unconventional route with the seasonings, using smoked paprika and Aleppo pepper to add smoke and spice.  These darker flavors add an intriguing layer to balance the bright sweetness of tomatoes and onions.

I should tell you that I’ve been a tiny bit obsessed with fresh mozzarella lately, and it goes beautifully with Aleppo pepper.  I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say this, but I think I like it better than fresh basil.  I mean, I still like fresh basil and I especially like it when Matt’s making his caprese salad, but Aleppo pepper is really nice too.  I like its very subtle heat and rich taste.  The Spice House describes it as having some “fruitiness and mild, cumin-like undertones.”  Sprinkled on fresh mozzarella that’s been dribbled with olive oil and some salt, it is so delicious.  There’s something about cream and spice together that just works, like when a handful of cheddar gets sprinkled on top of a spicy chili.

It is possible, however, to overdo the fresh mozzarella.  This pasta dish benefits from a tiny bit of restraint.  I learned this the hard way.  It may look fine, but I used way too much mozzarella in the photo you see above.  I think I ate half of what I put on my pasta.  Too much cheese and you can’t taste the other flavors as well.  The mozzarella just takes over.  If you are feeling indulgent and must have several generous mouthfuls of fresh mozzarella, slice up a few rounds and dress them as you see fit—with Aleppo pepper or fresh basil or maybe even just some salt and garlic-infused olive oil.  Then serve your pasta accompanied by something green, like a spinach salad or some lightly cooked kale.  For dessert, a glass of wine or perhaps a square or two of dark chocolate.  That’s my kind of summer cooking, especially that last part.

Pasta with Fresh Tomatoes, Spicy Caramelized Onions, and Fresh Mozzarella

Inspired by this recipe

Serves 3-4 as a main course

2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

2 medium white onions, thinly sliced

1 tsp. smoked paprika

1 tsp. Aleppo pepper

2 cups uncooked dried rotini pasta, such as Barilla PLUS Rotini

3-4 medium tomatoes, chopped (I’d go with 4 tomatoes here if I had them on hand)

Salt and pepper to taste

4 oz. fresh mozzarella

Balsamic vinegar, for drizzling

1)  In a big skillet (preferably one that is not non-stick), heat the olive oil over medium-high heat.  I use my ten-inch cast-iron skillet here.  Add the sliced onions, season with a good sprinkle of salt, stir everything around, and cook them for several minutes until they are starting to soften and turn translucent.  Then turn the heat down to medium-low and let the onions cook until the pasta is done, stirring them every once in a while.

2)  Cook the pasta according to the package’s directions.

3)  While the pasta and the onions are going, chop the tomatoes (if they aren’t already chopped) and place them in a medium-sized mixing bowl.

4)  When the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the tomatoes.  Toss together.

5)  By now, the onions should be growing brown and sweet.  Add the Aleppo pepper and smoked paprika to them and stir everything around.  Allow the spices to cook with the onions for a minute, then turn off the heat and add them to the tomato-pasta mixture.  Toss everything together, have a taste, and season with salt and pepper.

6)  Plate the pasta and add about 1 ounce of diced fresh mozzarella to each serving.  Drizzle with balsamic vinegar and serve.  I’d put the vinegar on the table, along with salt and pepper, to let people drizzle more on top of the pasta if they’d like.

For a Night, Simplicity and Certainty

Yesterday we had the most beautiful clouds here.  There’s something about the sky in Texas that makes the clouds look like mountains.  It’s really spectacular, especially when, like yesterday, we get fluffy clouds.  They were sitting on a bed of dark grey clouds, making the mountain effect particularly believeable.  I had planned on taking some photos of those wonderful clouds.  But dinner was calling my name, so I made soup.  When I went outside later, the fluffy clouds were gone.  To make myself feel better about missing the clouds, today I’m sharing a photo from April, from another glorious cloud-gathering.

I should tell you more about last night because it was a really nice night.  I spent it alone, but I didn’t feel the least bit lonely.  For one thing, I had this soup to keep me company.  I must have mentioned Jess’s Simplest Tomato Soup before because as soon as I made it the first time, it became one of my favorites.  (And her post about that soup is marvelous and so spot-on.  Oh, graduate school!)  I’d been craving a big bowl of it, but hot soup was not the way to go.  This is the season of cold soups, refreshing and full of flavor.  So before I started making the soup, I tucked an empty soup bowl in the freezer, and after the soup was done, I retrieved it, filled it with hot soup, and tucked it back in the freezer for about five minutes.  I learned this hot-to-cold trick from a Bon Appetit recipe, and it’s so handy that I’ve filed it away for summertime soup cookery.  It really works!  Just five minutes in the freezer made my bowl of tomato soup easily spoonable, the temperature mildly warm rather than steaming hot.  Eaten alongside homemade tortilla chips, baby spinach, and two nubs of cheese, it was a deeply calming dinner.  Later in the evening, after a glass of wine and a few episodes of Arrested Development, I went aqua-jogging in the pool underneath the stars.  A warm breeze swirled around me, the palm trees swayed, and I went round and round the pool.  Then I came home, showered, and tucked myself into bed with Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat.  I do love that book.

I think the reason that last night felt so right to me was its simplicity, its certainty: food, wine, fun.  It was easy and comforting.  Recently, a friend e-mailed me and asked about my life and research.  As an aside, she wrote, “Hopefully they are separable!”  The truth is, it’s been really hard for me to dial back my anxiety about work.  My main project is not going well, and my summer plans for work are on hold until I get a positive result.  I’m beyond freaked out.  I am now at the point where I’m learning to accept this turn of events because, whether I like it or not, it’s my reality.

Graduate school was really hard on me, and I thought that by finishing my PhD, I was now immune to the up-and-down uncertainties of research life.  I was wrong.  I totally panicked when I saw what was coming.  I know that research is my work, not my life, but it is a huge part of what I do now.  It is more than a job, and it’s almost impossible for me not to be emotionally invested in the outcome.  But I am so very, very lucky to have so many people in my life who love me, who accept me as I am, who want to help me when I’m struggling.  I saw that love in action over the past few weeks, at a time when I’m not sure I thought I deserved that sort of kindness.  I think these people get it—that my job is more than a job.  Their support means so much to me.  With all my heart, I say to them thank you.  You have no idea.

And so onward we go, into summer, accompanied by both hope and uncertainty.  With enough tomato soup, we’ll get through this one.  Happy summer, friends.  I hope it’s treating you well. 

One Whole Tomato

Tomatoes and I have come a long way.  When I was a child, I did not like raw tomatoes at all.  I loved tomato in its cooked forms—spaghetti sauce or in the rich beefy stews that my mother made—but raw tomatoes were always disappointing.  For one thing, they had way too many seeds, and I was deeply suspicious of anything seedlike.  There were textural issues too—raw tomatoes had so much peel and they were wet and mushy inside, like a fruit gone terribly wrong.  The flavor tasted nothing like the rich tomato essence found in cooked tomatoes.  For a long time, I stayed away from raw tomatoes.  We just didn’t get along.

It was a shame, really, because an ability to grow tomatoes runs in my family.  My dad had his tomato patch behind the garage, and I can remember him canning the fruits of his harvest in big glass jars that showed off his edible treasure.  I can remember stories about my grandfather, my dad’s dad, growing tomatoes alongside his garage.  And now, my brother grows tomatoes in his garden, a place where his daughter will happily snack on tomatoes fresh off the vine, declaring, “I like the juicy parts.”  I always knew that she was a smart kid.  Unlike me at her age.

But now, now I get it.  I get what all the tomato fuss is about.  And I’m spending all my play money on locally grown tomatoes from S & L Farms, a Texas farm that sells its produce to Brazos Natural Foods.  Raw tomatoes are all about freshness and fragrance, juice and pulp spilling out and onto everything around them.  A raw tomato is the essence of summer, something to be devoured with abandon until one’s belly swells and protests.  Good raw tomatoes can make a meal into something memorable, something to look forward to all day until the moment when it’s just you, a knife, a cutting board, and your bowl of tomatoes.  In that moment, magic happens.

Perhaps tomato season is still in the future for you, depending on where you live, but down here, the tomatoes have been tumbling into the markets for several weeks.  It is hot hot HOT down here, but the tomatoes don’t seem to mind.  They are perky and fragrant, juicy and fresh, and they make a mighty fine tomato bread salad.

I think of this salad as a deconstructed sandwich.  Chunks of fresh tomato are tossed with baby spinach and homemade Daphna-style croutons, and the whole thing is topped with shavings of Parmesan cheese.  It’s savory and chewy, delicious and filling, leaving you with just enough room for dessert.  I’ve eaten it at least half a dozen times in the last week or two, and I would not be surprised if it ends up in regular rotation until the end of tomato season.  It’s a dish that I look forward to at the end of the day, when it’s just me and my kitchen, and I can sit down to eat it five minutes after I’ve made it.  That, to me, is summer cooking at its best.  Though I will not miss the intense heat of June in December, I will miss the fresh tomatoes and the delight they brought to my kitchen.

Tomato Bread Salad

Serves 1 as a main course, 2 as a side dish

If you are a regular reader, you know that I spend most of my cooking time feeding just one person: me.  I eat this salad as a summer main course, but I think it would make a lovely component in a multi-course meal, perhaps alongside grilled vegetables or meats (a nod to my more carnivorous friends) or even vegetarian burgers, like my favorite chickpea patties.  Also, a nice variation here is to swap out the Parmesan for some cubes of fresh mozzarella.  If you were so inclined, you could even add shreds of fresh basil to complete the caprese theme.  Maybe I’ll do that the next time I make this.

For the croutons:

1 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 tsp. dried basil

1/4 tsp. smoked paprika

1/4 tsp. garlic powder

A pinch of McCormick Grill Mates Spicy Montreal Steak seasoning

3 slices of chewy bakery bread, such as Pugliese or Ciabatta, sliced into big cubes

For the rest of the salad:

1 medium tomato or 2 smallish tomatoes, chopped

2 handfuls of baby spinach

Parmesan cheese, to taste (from a block)

1)  To make the croutons, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add the spices and stir them around to distribute them in the oil.

2)  Add the bread cubes and stir them around to coat them in the spicy oil.  Let them cook in the pan for a minute or two, then push them around a bit and let them cook for another minute or two.  The goal is to season them with the oil and spices and give them a chance to get toasty.  A little bit of charring can be good here too because it provides another layer of flavor.

3)  While the croutons are going, chop the tomatoes if they aren’t already prepped and put them in a medium-sized bowl.  Add the spinach.  When the croutons are done, add them to the salad and toss everything together with a spoon or two.

4)  Pour the salad onto a plate and top with fresh shavings of Parmesan cheese (or cubes of fresh mozzarella if you are taking that route).  Serve immediately.

Messy, Imperfect Life

Sometimes I think it’s good to grab inspiration by the ankles and drag it inside.  I should be washing dishes right now, or buying groceries, or ironing clothes, but instead I’m writing another blog post.  I can’t help it—I like it here!  It’s fun talking to all y’all. 

Things have been so serious around here that when I saw this post on lifelovepaper, I knew it was inspiration, knocking on the door.  I invited it into my kitchen and saw all sorts of fun tidbits to share with you about my quirky cooking life.  So just for today, a short and sweet post about cooking and eating in a messy, imperfect life.

* My sink almost always has dirty dishes or containers waiting to be cleaned out and recycled.

* I have two sets of measuring spoons.  My favorite new kitchen toy is a spoon from Crate and Barrel that contains four spoons in one neat little utensil.  The tablespoon flips to become a half-tablespoon, and the teaspoon flips to become a half-teaspoon.  I love this thing.

* When I read a new cookbook, the first thing I look at is the desserts chapter.

* Even though it’s 90+ degrees F here most days, I roasted potatoes in the oven this week.  And they were delicious.

* I don’t think of chocolate as junk food.

* I love living in a place where okra grows easily and abundantly.

* I wish I lived in a place where rhubarb grows.

* I really miss having people over to eat and can’t wait to have more cooking-and-eating friends.

* All of my tablecloths came from my mom’s linen closet.  My cloth napkins were a gift from my sister-in-law and her family.

* Sometimes I feel like a grandmother trapped in a twenty-something-year-old’s body.

* I miss having a gas stove, but I think I’ve finally gotten used to having an electric stove in my new apartment.

* The other day I craved a piece of steak.  The craving passed, but it was noteworthy.

* Sometimes I wonder if my love for cooking and eating will make me fat.  So far, so good…

What’s your funny kitchen quirk?  Got a bad habit you aren’t too shy to share?  You’re in good company around here! 

Off to clean up the kitchen…at least a little bit.

I’ve Finally Arrived

Oh my, what a week.  I think one word describes it best: intense.

I don’t want to pretend that there’s no elephant in the room because we both know it’s there, swishing its skinny little tail and knocking drinks out of people’s hands.  About the elephant, for today I’m going to remain uncharacteristically quiet.  Important discoveries are being made, and I don’t want to scare them off by trying to explain their meanings before I understand them.  For now, I’ll say this: people are complex.  I am complex.  I am, perhaps, even more chameleon-like than I thought.  This realization is hard for me to swallow because I consider myself to be a very honest, straightforward person.  But life is strange and wonderful and sometimes hard to explain.  I’m just feeling my way and hoping I don’t hurt too many people as I fumble around in the darkness.

If that explanation is too vague to be satisfying, I offer my apologies.  I’m sorry.  I can’t offer anything more than that, and it’s not because someone has put a gag order on me.  But I will come back to the elephant after the fog clears.  For now, we all have to sit tight and wait.

* * *

I know that true happiness doesn’t come from possessions, but after waiting seven years to buy living room furniture, it’s hard for me to believe it.

I like to keep my word, so when I promised my friend Nicole that I would buy some sort of furniture before the end of June, I knew that I would keep that promise.  Purchasing furniture has been a surprisingly difficult task for me.  Part of the problem is that I feel like I have no interior decorating skills.  I don’t have a “vision,” and I’m not a very visual person.  By that, I mean that I tend to experience the world more through my emotions and other senses.  That’s part of the reason I was able to write this blog for over two years with almost no photos.  The words were enough for me.  I also have a bad habit of not living in the present.  My mind is always off recreating some past adventure or dreaming of what we’ll do next year.  The result is that it’s easy for me to look past appearances right now because I’m not really living in the now.  I’m somewhere else, doing something else.

When I bought furniture for my old apartment, my Evanston home, I learned the power of making a home by investing in it.  My new kitchen table and chairs made my kitchen feel like a place that I wanted to linger, a place to invite friends for tea and cookies.  In the years after that set of purchases, I had many friends over for cookies, for dinners, for anything at all.  I hosted overnight guests, and we would gather round the table in the morning for tea or pancakes or scrambled eggs.  (My heart still sings when I think about this lovely visit with my sister, and the way we keep finding each other again in kitchens—mine, our sister-in-law’s, or, soon enough, her kitchen in her very first apartment.)  Furniture matters because furniture turns a living space into a home.  In this way, it transcends the label of “possession” to become something that builds families and friendships, one meal at a time.

In the end, I decided to trust my own taste and buy something that appealed to me.  One of the things that really intimidates me about setting up a new home is this sense that you must have an idea of what you want things to look like at the end of the process.  Because of my lack of vision, I just don’t have that.  My vision is more of a vague sense of what I like and don’t like.  I wanted my home to feel cozy and comfortable, where guests can relax and enjoy themselves.  I want my home to welcome me back at the end of a workday.

These are the things that I like: natural materials, like wood, glass, and stone.  Bright colors, like blues, reds, and yellows.  A balance between cozy and spacious.  Geometric lines—rectangles rather than ovals.  Things that have been lovingly given to me by my family, like Big Blue, my couch, which used to belong to my brother’s boyfriend or the rug that my sister bought for me when I moved into my first apartment.  I am a sentimental person, living far away from my loved ones, and I like how my home is filled with things that connect me to my family.

 

That’s Big Blue up there, right behind my new coffee table.  On the far end of Big Blue, you can see one of the matching end tables.  I found these three pieces as a set here; they were even on sale!  I was also considering this set, so I got a second opinion on the two options.  My sister Theresa voted on the first option, and I just knew that she was right.  So I ordered living room furniture, and on Wednesday, it arrived.

This is what my living room looks like a few steps beyond the main entrance.  (In the other photo above, you get a view from the patio side of things.)  I love how inviting it feels to me with all that sitting space and surface space for drinks or snacks or a few books.  Also, the coffee table is conveniently hiding the part of my rug that is in tatters and keeps threatening to trip people when they walk over it.  I still like that rug and haven’t decided if it’s something I want to replace.  For now, I’ll keep it.

The best way that I can describe my home improvements is that now it feels like a grown-up lives here.  I have spent so many years as a student that it was hard to believe that I’d ever get to a point in my life when I didn’t feel like I was waiting to be done with school.  Now, I am done.  I’m even a little annoyed when people ask me, “So how is school going?”  Because they don’t know how much it means to me to be DONE with school.  I loved being a college student, but by the time I’d been in grad school for three years, I wanted to finish school and shed my student status.  Having a grown-up’s home makes me feel like I’ve finally arrived at a point where I can stop saying, “When I’m done with school, I’ll…”  I am here.  I am home.

Happy Saturday, friends.  I’ll see you back here tomorrow with tomatoes in hand.

A Summer Hiatus

Hi, friends.  I have some bad news for you.  a and I are feeling a bit overwhelmed by life right now, so I think we’re going to take some time off from our tandem posting project.  She may chime in here, informing me that she’s ready and waiting to post our next set of essays, but I think she will breathe a tiny sigh of relief.  As for me, I’m preoccupied with other things right now—I hope you’ll understand.  (I am also hoping Matt will forgive me for writing that post before talking to him.  A person with a smaller heart might hold a grudge, but I know his heart is generous.  Also, an apology is probably in order here.)

I’m not sure when the tandem posting project will resume.  a has a big summer of music and travel ahead of her, so I’m going to leave it in her hands.  I think I’ll be back in good writing form by this weekend.  In light of my recent struggles, I’ve been working hard to get at the root of my pain.  I have been writing long-winded e-mails and consulting my wisest, most trusted friends.  Answers are being revealed, and I am finding myself in a peaceful place.  It’s nice.  I never knew I was such a mystery to myself—it’s sort of alarming at my advanced age—but I think that with enough time, long walks, and good talks, I’ll get to where I want to be.

I don’t want to leave you completely empty-handed, or empty-eyed, as it were, so I’ll share a few favorites before I go.  First, one of my favorite random photos from my trip to Chicago last month.  I was waiting for the Clark Street bus when I took this picture.

And second, two quotes that inspire me.

“Some things…arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.”  Gail Godwin

“The delights of self-discovery are always available.”  Gail Sheehy

Until next time, gentle readers.