Book Report

I’m feeling very organized today, having just renewed all my library book loans.  We have a terrific library on campus here, and I like to visit it often.  The library sits right in the middle of the main campus, where the humanities types hang out.  In my experience, the science buildings, especially the older ones, tend to have an ugly industrial feel to them, and there’s always a lot of traffic from a steady stream of delivery trucks.  Humanities buildings, while not always gorgeous, have at least a few nice aesthetic touches, making them feel less like factories and more like places of higher learning.  In a science building, it’s easy to forget that you are in an academic setting, especially when you encounter the stereotypical scientist who refuses to mutter hello and can’t make eye contact with anyone in the hallway.  Science is a social freakshow, which is why I am grateful to escape to the library side of campus whenever possible.

I’ve been picking out my library books using my reading list.  I finished The Age of Innocence and Trespass, both of which were excellent.  Edith Wharton and Amy Irvine are wonderful writers who know how to spin words into an engaging, lyrical, and sometimes heartbreaking story.

I tried to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but my heart just isn’t in it right now.  Recently, my life has been overwhelmed by work, and reading about science is not appealing.  I need my leisure reading to be a little escape from my work life, so I have veered off the reading list path and into a book I found serendipitously.  I was in the library looking for Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God and could not find it anywhere, even though the library catalog said it was available.  But!  While I was wandering the shelves of India and Indian literature, I found Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich, which is the story of the author’s adventures in learning Hindi.  I just started reading it a few days ago, and the book has sucked me into its pages.  Russell Rich is a talented writer: funny, observant, curious, and introspective.  Because I am spending so much time in one place right now—no trips for me until September!—it’s nice to read a book about something as exotic and faraway as India, with the story told from an American’s viewpoint.

If this Indian theme keeps up, next I’ll be combing the cookbook shelves for a good Indian cookbook.  Too bad my friend Amutha hasn’t written a cookbook because she’s my favorite Indian cook!  Why do all the best cooks in my life store their cookbooks in their brains?  

Quesadillas Between Friends

Perhaps it was a foreshadowing of my crazy idea to move to Texas in pursuit of science, but I have always been a fan of Tex-Mex cuisine.  I’m not sure what defines Tex-Mex precisely; I think of it as an amalgamation of tortillas, spicy salsas, inventively seasoned meat and beans, corn in ground and whole form, and cheese.  Lots of cheese.  Oh, and deep-fried avocadoes—holy moly, those are good.  I know the deep-fried avocado can make you stop, take a deep breath, and check to see that yes, your heart really did just skip a beat.  It’s kind of an insane idea: Let’s take the fattiest fruit we can find, dip it in batter, and bathe it in more fat!  But before that, we’re going to stuff it with fat in the form of cheese!  A deep-fried avocado isn’t everyday food (at least I hope it’s not), but it’s worth having once in your life.  I’ve had it a few times now, a crispy, cheesy specimen shared with three others at a tiny table in a crowded Mexican restaurant, and let me assure you: it’s worth it.  Do it so you can tell all your friends you’ve eaten a deep-fried avocado, which is sure to inspire shock, awe, and maybe even a little admiration.  And if you and I ever cross paths and you brag to me about deep-fried avocado adventures, I’ll give you a high five.

Avocadoes aside, I love Tex-Mex food in many of its incarnations, but my very favorite way to do Tex-Mex is at home, with my own well-worn pots and pans.  Good food is as much about taste as it is about texture, and Tex-Mex is delightful in both ways.  (For evidence, please consider the above-mentioned deep-fried avocado: crispy, creamy, gooey, all in one messy little breaded package.)  I draw the line at deep-frying avocadoes at home, but I’m very happy to whip up a quesadilla or two for something that’s crispy, creamy, and gooey without the vat of used oil to clean up afterward.

I used to be devoted to one and only one way of making quesadillas: fried in oil inside a skillet.  But one evening, a chilly winter night not too long ago, I was shown that once again, butter is better.  Matt was visiting, and, as is his habit, he took over my kitchen to cook us dinner.  On one side of the stove, he cooked onions and peppers until they were silky and sweet; on the other, he melted lumps of butter in a skillet.  Into the butter he laid fresh flour tortillas, purchased from the tortilla factory down the road from me.  He warmed up the tortillas, letting them luxuriate in their buttery puddle, and then he layered those onions and peppers followed by big handfuls of cheese.  Matt is not one what might call a “restrained” or “health-conscious” cook.  He’s in the kitchen for one reason and one reason only: flavor.  And oh my goodness, those were some of the best quesadillas I’ve ever had.  I know I’m spoiled, as is everyone who gets to eat his food, but you and I can both steal his quesadilla trick: cook them in butter, or a little butter plus oil if you like. 

The other thing you need to know about cooking quesadillas on the stovetop is that you shouldn’t be too afraid to crank up the heat to let those tortillas get crispy and a little black.  We’re not aiming for completely burnt here; just a little burnt to add another layer of flavor and good crunchiness.

After learning about Matt’s secret butter trick, I happily adopted it for my quesadilla nights until a few weeks ago, when my friend Ammie told me how delicious the quesadilla recipe in Melissa Clark’s book is.  When we catch up on the phone, Ammie and I usually compare notes about what we’ve cooked lately, and she’s been on a roll with In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite.  She is showing that book who’s boss.  I’m so proud of her!  The quesadilla recipe, she explained, uses a broiler method to cook the quesadillas.  I should add here that Ammie has a long-standing fear of the broiler, and she’s very brave to consider cooking anything under the broiler after a traumatic experience with asparagus. 

Quesadillas under a broiler?  I was intrigued.  I could see how it might work—the broiler would crisp the tortillas and even burn them a little bit, providing that much-loved hint of charred flavor.  And compared to the stovetop method, the broiler would make things easy easy easy: just throw the quesadilla on a baking sheet, slide it under the broiler, set the timer, flip when you hear the beep beep beep, and slide it back under the broiler for another minute or so. 

Out comes a crispy, creamy, gooey quesadilla, which you can then slide onto a pretty bamboo cutting board and slice into quarters with a sharp knife.  Take it to the table and sit down to a dinner of hot quesadillas, green salad, and maybe a cold glass of white wine.

It’s what summer should look and taste like.

Apple Crumble, Hold the Oatmeal

I know I’m a Type A personality.  I’m a planner, detail-oriented, and punctual.  I hate it when other people are late.  I like to do the same things at the same time each day.  I eat the same breakfast every day, a steady theme made colorful with variations, swapping winter’s oranges for spring’s strawberries for summer’s blueberries.  But I swear, despite all this Type A business, I have a pretty strong hippie undercurrent.  I have a freezer stuffed with various whole-grain flours, a pair of hippie sandals on my feet, and the occasional desire to tell the man he can bite me as I ride off into the distance in my VW hippie bus.  I believe in civil rights for all, marriage for those who want it, and that morality and justice are not the same thing.

But most of all, I believe in apple crumble.

Okay, maybe I don’t believe in apple crumble more than civil rights.  That would be silly.  But I do believe that those of us with hippie tendencies like to pile our fruit crumbles high with oatmeal, and that is the point where I am about to diverge from classic hippie cookery.  In my past, I have enjoyed oatmeal-gilded crumbles, such as this simple blueberry one, which I think would benefit from even more of that delicious, streusel-like oatmeal topping.  Blueberries get along well with oatmeal.  Apples probably do too, but hear me out on this one: an oatmeal-less crumble, especially one that’s packed with two kinds of nuts, rum-soaked raisins, and big tender bites of apple, is a revelation.

It’s not just the rum talking either, though giving raisins a boozy bath does infuse this dessert a little bit of a rum raisin ice cream feel, especially if you eat it with good ice cream.  Which you should.  (Ammie, my dear, I hope your ears just perked up when I wrote “rum raisin.”  I blame you for introducing me to the addictive combination of raisins, booze, sugar, and cream.  Help!)  This apple crumble is really one of those magical recipes where each part, each delicious component, is present and accounted for, flavor-wise, but the overall effect is so much better than a simple sum of parts.  We’ve got apples for the base (duh), walnuts for crunch, almond flour for a softer nutty crunch, butter for richness, sugar for sweetness, and salt for that wonderful savory undercurrent that supports any good dessert these days.  The original recipe started in Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, but I’ve taken enough liberties with it that it feels like my own.  Not that I’m particularly possessive about recipes and adaptations, but I’m just saying that I really like my version of her recipe.

I find that making this crumble is a wonderful way to spend a weeknight evening—calmly peeling and chopping the apples, soaking the raisins, squishing my fingers into a bowl of flours and butter to make the crumble topping.  It’s enough of a project that I can let myself sink into the preparations, but it’s not so overwhelming that it feels like too much after a day at work.  But the best part is definitely the part where I make myself a little bowl of crumble with a scoop of vanilla ice cream to gild the lily.  The combination is ambrosial, delightful, and so very delicious that it justifies buying apples instead of blueberries in June.  No, scratch that.  You should buy apples AND blueberries.  Yes.  June is a month to indulge yourself in fruit and fresh food.  And like every other month of the year, it’s a month in which you can bake this apple crumble.

Apple Crumble, Hold the Oatmeal

Adapted from How to Eat by Nigella Lawson

Serves 4

Vegans, feel free to substitute Earth Butter or another vegan margarine for the butter here.  I can’t imagine that it would be anything but completely delicious as a vegan dessert.

3 tbsp. rum

2 tbsp. raisins

1/2 cup flour

1/4 cup almond flour

1/4 tsp. salt

4 tbsp. (half a stick) cold butter

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

4 tbsp. granulated sugar, divided

4 large apples

Nonstick spray

For serving: vanilla ice cream, optional

1)  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

2)  In a small saucepan, heat the rum gently over medium heat.  Take the rum off the heat, add the raisins, stir them around a bit, and let them soak while you prep the rest of the recipe.

3)  In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, almond flour, and salt.  Dice the butter into small dice, add it to the flour mixture, and use your fingers to rub the butter into the dry ingredients until you get a rubbly, shaggy pile.  Stir the walnuts and 3 tbsp. of sugar into the flour/butter mixture.  Stash this bowl in a cold place—I usually tuck it in the freezer because my fridge is always way too full to find room for a mixing bowl.

4)  Peel and core the apples, then cut them into chunks about 1/2-1 inch in size.  Put them in a medium- or large-sized saucepan with the rum, raisins, and remaining 1 tbsp. sugar.  Stir everything around a bit, then cook over medium heat for about five minutes, stirring or shaking the pan once or twice.

5)  Spray a 9-inch pie pan with nonstick spray.  Pile the apple mixture into the bottom, then top with the flour mixture.  Place the pie pan in the oven and bake for about 25 minutes.  The crumble topping should be golden brown and your kitchen should smell amazing.  Remove from the oven and serve warm or at room temperature with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream on the side.

A Thursday List

My blog friend Chrissy used to write these great lists on Fridays.  She would list the ups and downs of her week (+/-), and I always thought it was a fun bird’s-eye view of the week.  These days, I feel terribly behind on my ambitious blogging plans; I have approximately 685 posts that I’d like to write, several of which I’ve already started.  But I really enjoy spontaneous blogging too, the kind that happens because you are inspired, so you sit down, pull your thoughts together, press “Publish,” and voila!  A fresh new post, happy and shiny and filled with whatever was rolling around in your head at that moment.

Ta da!  Let’s do this.

The good stuff:

* Rain!  Cooler weather!  And during the week of the summer solstice no less!  It’s a Texas miracle!

* Green dresses from Five Bamboo.  I could live in this dress for the next five months.  It even has pockets! 

* Glee on Netflix.  So fun, so cheesy, so ridiculous, so awesome.  I am hooked.

* Crazy squirrels.  Hey, we all get hungry sometimes.

* Rediscovering my Heather Nova CD.  Between this and Glee, it’s like I’m back in high school again, minus all that angsty crushing on the guy who never did return my teenage love.  I hear he’s a doctor now…but so am I!  Ha.

* Things calming down at work after a few weeks of chaos.  I am busy busy busy, but it’s not quite so overwhelming.

The not-so-good stuff:

* A boring lunch on Wednesday.  I am such a ridiculous foodie that a boring lunch will get me down.

* Mystery produce that turned out NOT to be tender green beans.  Instead, I bought tough, stringy green bean imposters.  Does anyone know what these are?

Happy almost-weekend, groovy readers!  May your lunches be exciting and your crushes love you back.

A Little Too Easy: Thoughts on Love

Matt has a funny relationship with this blog.  Or at least I think he does.  On second thought, maybe “funny” isn’t the right word.  Maybe it’s wonderful.  As you may have guessed by now, or as you may remember, his presence on this site is almost completely limited to the text.  That’s not because he’s hideously ugly, or because he’s extremely shy.  He’s rather attractive (says one rather smitten and therefore biased woman) and he is definitely not shy.  But he does like to keep his private life private, which could create a conflict of interest between the two of us.  I write about him, and us, quite frequently.  And Matt, gracious and generous man that he is, lets me.  Not once has he howled in protest that I shared too much or offered too much of his private life for public consumption.    

As I’m sure is quite obvious by now, I like writing about him and us.  I learn a lot from him, and I like to share what I’m learning with you.  By writing about our romance, I get to savor those moments again, and it keeps the memories fresh for me.  I realize that time changes our memories, and a written account is flawed in its own way too, but now, more than three years after we started seeing each other, it’s such a pleasure for me to be able to read what I wrote about us in the earlier days of our relationship.  Time changes our memories, but more importantly, it changes us.  Having some sense of what we were in the past is a marvelous thing.  Some couples take lots of photos of their adventures together; I try to write them down so that I can remember us, so that I can love who we were and who we are becoming.   

Things are a bit different for us now that we live within driving distance.  When I was in graduate school, it was always plane tickets and flight itineraries, with time breathing down our necks as our visit gently became past tense.  Those were exciting days: those new romance days; those giddy, I-can’t-wait-to-see-him days.  I loved those days.  Those were the falling-in-love days.  We had a different rhythm then.  Usually, Matt would visit me, flying in on a Friday and leaving on Sunday.  We cooked more of our meals at home; our visits were humbler affairs, once he/I/we had arrived at our destination.  We would often pop out for lunch or tea, we liked to walk along Lake Michigan into downtown Evanston, and we’d usually go shopping at Whole Foods for wine and dinner provisions.  Matt would offer to carry the groceries, which was a sweetly chivalrous act, and he never complained about my lack of a car (or lack of money either).  Sometimes we’d ride the train together back to my apartment after our little downtown excursion.  I remember there was one time, early in our dating relationship, when he was visiting me during the bitter cold days after Christmas.  I had no internet at home—such a Luddite I was back then!—and he needed to check his e-mail.  We boarded a train to go to a cafe downtown, and I sat in the window seat.  He sat down next to me, very close to me, on the attached two-person seats, and blamed it on his bulky bag, heavy with a laptop computer.  It was a silly, sweet moment, sitting so snugly between him and the window.  It was the sort of moment that feels just right in a new romance, a sign of affection and intimacy and playfulness.

Part of me misses those old days.  Things felt less certain between us, but maybe that uncertainty made our time together that much more exciting.  I knew I liked him, I knew I liked him A LOT, but I didn’t know what that meant.  So many relationships are built on the premise of commitment, and he’d already said to me, earnestly, “I am committed to you.”  I believed him.  I even knew, deep down, that I was falling for him before we started dating.  So when we actually did start dating, I didn’t know what to do with myself because all the pieces had fallen into place, and that was, oddly enough, confusing.  I think it was confusing because we think of dating as a time when we figure out how we feel about that person—what our sense of commitment and compatibility feels like.  If those things don’t need to be deciphered, then where’s the dating puzzle?  Maybe that’s just it: Matt came into my life as a self-explaining puzzle: “Here I am!  Now let me tell you how I operate.”  So many men are mysterious creatures that require frequent conversations over wine with girlfriends to figure them out.  Matt was blissfully easy to love and to understand.

Perhaps he was a little too easy, which is why it felt uncertain in the first place.  Love can’t really be this easy, can it?

Actually, yes, it can, with the right person and if you are ready for it.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this rambling essay!

Saturday Lunch, Simply Done

I have this basic belief that whether or not you cook, you have to eat.  You simply must.  Or at least you should, because food is good for you!  All those generations of grandmothers can’t be wrong, right?  All those women who have given life to so many children—I think they were onto something.  Eating is good.  Food is life.

A lot of my cooking is of the non-recipe variety, and I’ve been enjoying the chance to share with you my lunches and dinners that are assembled using the cookbook in my head.  I have blatantly stolen that idea from Matt, who also has a cookbook in his head, which is handy when you find yourself in a kitchen in College Station, Texas, with the urge to make Spanish food.  You flip through your mental cookbook, pull out recipes for gazpacho and a little melon appetizer, and you get to work.  I love watching that man cook, even as I sigh and grumble to myself that I will never again be able to share with you a recipe of his because they are all in his head.  Such is the price one pays for cooking and eating with a man who is so adaptable to his circumstances that he tells me I can move to Nova Scotia and he’ll still visit me there.  And with the way that I am fantasizing about cold weather and cozy cooking these days, let me tell you that the urge to fly north is hard to ignore.  This polar bear, the one talking to you right now, is melting in the triple-digit heat we’ve been blessed with as of late.

But I’m making do with what Texas has to offer right now.  June is tomato season in Texas, and last weekend, Matt and I bought an estimated three pounds of tomatoes, just because I couldn’t get enough.  I’ve been working on that bumper crop, and for lunch today I topped toasted whole-grainy bread with a mayonnaise-mustard spread and coarsely chopped tomatoes which had been sprinkled with salt and pepper.  No olive oil today because of the mayonnaise.  It was nice—the crunch, the creaminess, the drippy juiciness of it all.  One could almost live on tomatoes and bread, with the right arsenal of condiments and seasonings to mix things up properly.

Alongside my toast, I ate some very crunchy celery sticks and a scoop of chickpea salad.  That salad was assembled last night, a mélange of chickpeas, a homemade honey-mustard dressing, finely diced red onion, and shredded pepper jack cheese.  It’s a riff on Molly’s famous chickpea salad, which for some strange reason I don’t like—I think the Parmesan doesn’t work for my palate.  It’s odd, I know, but one must respect her own palate.

Finally, when coming in from the heat, I require something cold in a glass to sip while I contemplate lunch.  Today I made a simple vanilla-banana malt.  I love a good malt, and this one was very good indeed: a large frozen banana, a cup of milk, a tablespoon of malt powder, and a few drops of vanilla extract.  Buzz to smoothness in the blender, and you’ve got a sweet, creamy, healthy milkshake.  It’s amazing to me what a tablespoon of malt powder can do to make a blender drink seem really indulgent.  I’m not a big ice cream person, but I love shakes and malts made with frozen bananas because they offer a thick creaminess and luscious sweetness just like ice cream does.  My malt was enough like dessert that I passed on a brownie, even though I’ve eaten one after lunch for the past two days.  A little chocolate is like putting a period at the end of your meal: this lunch is done.

And for today, so am I.  Happy weekend, everyone!

Hi

Hi.

I feel like I dropped the ball last week, and for that, I’m sorry.  I almost didn’t write this post tonight, too, but then I was re-reading my own words about that delicious black bean soup, the one with the roasted vegetables that my friend Ammie says I should try with sour cream spiked with toasted ground cumin, and I missed my blog.  I missed you, all of you, my sweet readers.  My life has been hectic and overwhelming lately, which is why I dropped the ball.  Things are…in flux for me these days.  It’s hard for me to write about it, because I honestly do not know where the line is between “okay to share” and “shooting self in foot.”  It’s about my job, which means it’s about how I spend my days, and what my future holds, and where I’ll be living in six months.  It’s complicated.  It’s difficult for me that I can’t write about it here.  Then again, it can be nice to have a place where I don’t have to talk about work or think about work.

Anyway, I wanted to stop by to tell you that one, I’m alive, and two, I’m cooking.  Tonight I thought about telling you about a frittata recipe that I really like, a slight adaptation of Mollie Katzen’s recipe in Sunlight Cafe, but then I decided that for tonight, saying hello would be sufficient.  But I did bring you pictures!  Two from my weekend, a lovely weekend with the sweetest man I know, and one from tonight.  I want to tell you more about my weekend, and that frittata, and these cornbread crepe thingies that go really well with last week’s black bean soup.  I also want to tell you my vegetarian story, which was supposed to be the capstone to my Veg Bootcamp series, the one that seemed to end so abruptly.  It’s not over, people, and I’m not done here.  I’m just taking a little breath, to refocus and recalibrate.  Thanks for bearing with me here, for being with me here.  Truly, writing this blog—and doing all the cooking and photographing that happens before the writing—is such fun, such joy.  I hope to carve out some time this weekend to write, but if that doesn’t happen, please don’t worry.  I’m probably just trying to stay calm in the middle of a hard time.

See you in a few days…maybe!  And happy cooking, always.