Kitchen flowers

Tulips and sourdough bread dough

AS I’VE BEEN ADJUSTING to this Coronavirus period, I’ve been thinking that in such a harsh time (however long it lasts) that you should be extra kind to yourself (and to others, of course).

I’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen these days, which is usually a big improvement over spending too much time on the computer screen (which I also do). Often it’s satisfying to be making good food for Steve and me (and sometimes our neighbor, Billie) or to see the wonder of flour, water and salt transform into a crusty tender loaf of sourdough.

But I confess, I don’t always love it. Sometimes it seems like I am here in the kitchen all the time, in an endless rotation of making yogurt and granola, baking bread, peeling and parboiling broccoli and stirring polenta. It can be a slog. (Steve is not much for cooking, though he does a lot of the clean up.)

That’s where flowers come in (and curbside pickup take-out from your local eateries, which I also recommend.)

“Baby bouquets” and spinach-feta-red pepper frittata

FLOWERS ARE ESSENTIAL for me lately, and they have staked their claim to the kitchen. I have a small galley kitchen with very limited counter space, so everything has to justify its place (seasonal fruit is always welcome, however). I wasn’t in the habit of flowers on the kitchen counter before. But now I am. I sometimes pick wild ones on the trail and I often buy them from Dona Flora Herbs at my farmers’ market, which makes me feel good twice — I can support a local business and have a beautiful little bunch of flowers to see me through both good times and slog-times in the kitchen!

Sweet peas and a polenta bake (polenta layered with cheese, sauce and sauteed zucchini)

 

 

To nourish and sustain us…

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED PROFOUNDLY since I wrote the last post in January with advice from an Italian grandmother about cooking vegetables.  Here in Washington state–where restaurants and coffee shops and even some bakeries have been closed for several weeks–the pandemic has also affected our kitchens, our cupboards and many of our habits surrounding food.

Before I say anything about that, though, I must say that my thoughts and worries are with all the people suffering and dying from the virus and with all those who care for them, at their own risks.  I’ve been obsessively reading stories from the four online news sources that we subscribe to, as well as the stories that my friends send me, and frankly, it’s been hard to concentrate on writing a post or much of anything else recently.

Plus I’ve been wondering — in such disturbing times, is it too shallow and irrelevant to write about food?

And yet, food is essential, as we know, and our practices and habits around food can contribute to our physical and emotional health — or just the opposite. But you’ve probably read enough elsewhere of food advice and pantry recipes, so I decided to simply write a personal account of my experiences and thoughts about food in these recent weeks of the coronavirus.

Steve and I are both old enough (70+) to be in the extra-cautious category, and suddenly, as the Covid-19 reality set in, we realized that we could not continue to go to the grocery store whenever we wanted or even be able to find everything we wanted when we did go. We had been in Southern California when the virus first hit the U.S., and our home state of Washington. We returned home to Washington on March 8 — before the governor closed all schools in the state and banned large gatherings.

But as we drove home, listening to the frightening news on NPR, we decided we had to change our ingrained habits. No more going out to restaurants or coffee shops. No casual trips to the grocery store. There’s a perfectly fine grocery store just half a mile from my house, and I often walk there (or I used to do so) several times a week to pick up this or that.  No more of that. Every shopping trip now had to be considered a possible exposure to Covid-19.

Before we sequestered ourselves, and switched to mainly grocery delivery,  we allowed ourselves one time — the day after we returned home — to stock up on what we thought we’d need for two or three weeks to come. I worried that by now some of the grocery shelves would be empty. In the days before our “Big Shop” sometimes I was unable to sleep until I’d written down one more item on a Post-it or yellow legal pad or back of an envelope. This was crazy.

At our neighborhood grocery and Trader Joe’s we  loaded our cart with basics like olive oil and bags of flour, walnuts, rice and beans, lentils, pasta, milk and cheese and butter. We tossed in canned tomatoes, mini-ravioli, frozen corn, raspberries and blueberries. Fresh fruit that could keep awhile, mainly oranges and mandarins, but also a pineapple. Onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes and sweet potatoes. Fresh green vegetables (broccoli, green beans) that I could parboil right after I got home, as I wrote about in the last post.  And condiments: olives, roasted red peppers, salsa and artichoke hearts. Treats of course: a few bags of organic corn chips, some chocolate bars, a bottle of wine…

The pasta supply was nearly emptied (forget about toilet paper and hand sanitizer!) Now even dried beans and flour are almost impossible to find.

We filled the shelves and some of the floor space in our closet-sized pantry, packed the refrigerator and freezer (oh, for a stand-alone freezer!). I had stocked, but not stockpiled or overstocked. This wasn’t a survivalist’s year-long supply, but rather enough food for about two weeks, and all of it food that we regularly ate.

Polenta with white beans and roasted red peppers, Parmigiano and broccoli

LATER, especially as the fresh vegetables dwindled, I was especially glad that I’d remembered to get some of the all-important condiments. A jar of roasted red peppers could stay in the cupboard until needed; then, chopped or sliced, those red peppers could brighten up a dish or add interest to a grilled cheese sandwich (I’d almost forgotten how good a grilled cheese sandwich could be!). Olives, marinated or canned artichoke hearts, pickles and pickled vegetables, a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, capers — these condiments, along with herbs and spices and perhaps a few jars of sauces, added so much to the staples, especially when fresh vegetables were running low.

Still — the staples are vital, and for me the top of the list is bread.  I felt especially ready for this aspect of food preparation since I’ve been baking bread for most of my life.

BAKING BREAD, it turned out, was one of the few activities I could concentrate on in this anxious and disturbing time. My son (an incredibly dedicated home baker) had given me some lively sourdough starter he’d made years before, and I was literally keeping it alive by feeding and replenishing it. From the time I’d feed the starter for the batch of dough–which I stretched and folded, shaped into a loaf and proofed overnight–to when I pulled the fragrant loaf out of the oven some 36 to 48 hours later, the whole process gave me a deep satisfaction, a connection to the good fundamentals of life.

But then I discovered something which stopped me cold: Flour— any kind of regular wheat flour (all-purpose, bread flour, whole wheat flour) — was disappearing from the shelves! My daughter, also an avid and wonderful home baker, told me she could not find it in several stores in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I checked sites online — King Arthur, Amazon, Fred Meyer, Safeway: NO wheat flour.

I texted my son in Berkeley. He’d recently recovered from a frightening experience with Covid-19 symptoms. We transmitted flour-deprivation anxiety and suggestions through email and text. My son suggested that I could try to buy some from a bakery or a restaurant supply store (he regularly buys 50-pound bags of flour from such a store). My daughter, who has her own grain mill, decided to order a 25-pound bag of white winter wheat berries from Palouse Brand.

If I was really up against it, my son said, he could send me five pounds of flour through the mail.

I was not at that point — and to be honest, I still had enough to last me a couple weeks, especially with Passover (no flour use) around the corner. But I suddenly understood (and resented) panic buying. I realized a lot of people were using the time at home to experiment with baking or for “baking-therapy” …. but come on:  Could they be really be using that much flour to leave the shelves bare??  I had a sneaking suspicion that there was a lot of stockpiling going on. And for the first time, I too felt suddenly panicked, about food.

THEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL and unexpected happened. A friend and neighbor who had heard about my flour-worries left a nearly full bag of King Arthur bread flour at my doorstep. This act of kindness made me so happy and immediately calmed my anxiety.

As I made my next loaf of bread, I thought of the ways that our friends and family and neighbors were watching out for each other. My son was willing to mail flour to me; my neighbor contributed her supply to calm my nerves. I was bringing minestrone soup and cinnamon rolls to my terrific 90-year old neighbor, and she had bought a rice cooker for me so that we could all share in freshly cooked nutritious brown rice. My family and friends kept up a conversation about what we were eating and sent photos of our latest creations to each other on e-mail. And with an increasing awareness that so many people now are in need of food, we were inspired to donate to food banks and hunger relief organizations like Northwest Harvest.

Of course food is essential to nourish and sustain our physical and emotional health, but it can also bridge the isolation of social distancing, helping us to nourish and sustain our relationships.  And that, too, is essential.

 

 

 

 

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness….

So begins, “To Autumn” which John Keats wrote in 1819. It was published in 1820, the year before he died at age 25 of tuberculosis. Here is the first stanza (you can read the entire poem here).

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cell

Autumn: the season to harvest apples, Italian plums, Bosc pears, juicy Concord grapes. Fruits filled “with ripeness to the core.” The season to make an apple pie or a torte with Italian plums, or to simply take the time to enjoy a cluster of grapes or a perfectly ripened pear.  Just because it’s the season.

For this style of plum torte or cake, make a simple yeast dough with unbleached flour, yeast and water, enriched with egg and a little oil and a bit of sugar or honey if you like. After the first rising, roll out to fit your pan; butter the pan and fit in the dough. Let it rise again for about half an hour.

Cut the plums in quarters, mix them with a tablespoon of sugar, a couple teaspoons of flour and some cinnamon to taste; then, arrange the plum pieces in a sunflower pattern. Sprinkle the top with streusel. Bake at 350 or 375 degrees till the dough is golden, and the plums are juicy and turning a wonderful rose-gold color.

In German it’s called Zwetchgenkuchen. Hard to say, easy to eat. Very nice with a cup of coffee or tea on an afternoon in autumn.

For another post on Zwetchgenkuchen, click here.

Fruit salad, any day

Every year on Mother’s Day, my daughter used to make fruit salad for me. What a treat — the colors and flavors combining in a joyous medley.

This year, she’s far away, but I’ll still be eating fruit salad tomorrow morning. Why not? Who says you have to wait for a holiday or for someone else to make it for you? Fruit salad is great any time — healthful and delicious.

And there are countless variations to suit your taste. I like it with the simplest of dressings — a little lemon juice, some zest and a bit of sugar — or none at all. You can add other flavorings, spices, or vanilla; you can serve with yogurt or sour cream or crème fraiche; you can put nuts or dried fruit in your fruit salad, or whatever you like. 

As spring turns to summer, the choices for fresh ripe fruit increase, of course, but at this time of year I still rely on one of my all-time beloved fruits, the pineapple.  As one of my friends pointed out, if you consider the cost per pound of a pineapple, it is one of the best fruit bargains. (I have written two pineapple posts on this blog — here‘s one of them.)

Happy Fruit Salad Day to you!

Eating green

It’s time for a St. Patrick’s Day post — so I’m recycling this one from 7 years ago. I just made my favorite green soup (parsley-potato) and I’m keeping things simple this year, with a toast to my Dad and the idea of America welcoming immigrants!

toby's kitchen notes

My family always celebrates St. Patrick’s Day.

It’s not that our Jewish family has any Irish ancestry. But my father always talked about the “Irish luck” that allowed him to escape Nazi Germany and arrive in the United States on March 17, 1939.

After he’d made the decision to leave–in 1936, when he lost his job after his boss was ordered to dismiss all Jewish employees–it took years and many obstacles before he could obtain a visa to America. By that time, February, 1939, there were no more boats leaving Germany. He packed a few belongings in a brown steamer trunk, said goodbye to his parents and brother, and took a train to Holland.

In early March, he boarded a small ship bound for America.  Because of rough seas, the voyage lasted fourteen days and the ship arrived in New York on March 17, 1939 – St. Patrick’s Day.

A…

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What’s for supper?

“WHAT ARE YOU COOKING for supper, Toby?”

Many years ago, when my dad was in his late 80s and early 90s, at least once a week, he would call me about 5 p.m. and ask me that question.  It was a great way to start a conversation — even on days when I really had no idea what we would have for supper and could laugh with my father about my lack of a plan.

At 5 p.m. Pacific Time, it was already 7 p.m. in Chicago so my parents had eaten and the dishes were cleared, and I could find out what they’d had for supper.

Although I will always miss hearing my dad asking me that question, I’ve taken his cue and often ask my adult children that same question. There is a difference: while my father was not planning to replicate my recipes, both my children are great cooks, and often finding out what they’re making for supper gives me a good idea what to make.

Such was the case a couple nights ago, when Aviva told me she was making a pot pie with a biscuit topping. “Oh, that sounds delicious!” I said. “I’ve made that last winter — but I forgot all about it.”

After we hung up the phone, I went into the kitchen and scrounged around. Sure enough, I had all the ingredients for such a pie. Previously, Aviva had showed me about cooking the vegetables (in this case, a little onion, some celery, carrots, chopped potatoes and  sweet potatoes, peas, etc. etc.) and chicken if desired, in a cast iron skillet, then making a sauce with a flour-butter roux and putting the biscuit batter on top.

The beauty of this method was the one-skillet method — which I’ve written about in a former post (which also includes a puff-pastry topped pie and a delicious lentil-carrot soup which I intend to make again soon).

The next day, Aviva and I compared notes on our pot pies. She’d warned me that the sauce (gravy?) might get too thick, by the time the biscuits were baked — and mine was. Aviva said she’d overcompensated and made the sauce too thin. I think that next time, I will put the filling in a regular pie pan (which has less surface area) so the filling won’t get quite as much direct heat. Like life, cooking is a work in progress.

What are you making for supper?

p.s. (By the way, though you can use any type of biscuits atop your pot pie, I do like Mark Bittman’s recipe for a cobbler-style biscuit topping).

Old friends and new

Blackberry-blueberry jam, an attempt to get the blackberry flavor with fewer seeds.

I MARKED THE 8TH ANNIVERSARY OF THIS BLOG, by picking a tub of wild blackberries and making a blackberry cobbler. The first post that I wrote here, in 2009, was about the culmination of eight blackberry cobblers (!) that I made that summer. Well, I only made one this summer, but I can report that the recipe still holds up well and is suitable for any kind of berry. Cobbler and Blueberry Boy Bait are old friends during berry season, recipes I can count on–so familiar I can almost make them by instinct.

Speaking of instinct, my dear friend Martha and I read a post touching on this subject in one of our favorite food blogs, Juls’ Kitchen, written by Giulia, a cook and writer in Tuscany (We read it in the Italian version first, as we’re studying the language and she writes so well.) She wrote about making a cake by instinct — and it made me think about the dishes that I make instinctively, or almost so.

Since it’s summer, and I’m enjoying my small crop of cherry tomatoes and basil, grown in pots, one of the simplest and best pasta dishes came to mind — an easy one to make by instinct. I cut the tomatoes in half, add some garlic and a dash of salt, and cook them down a bit to release their juices. Then I add a little of the cooking water from the pasta, toss in a good dose of chopped basil, stir the cooked, drained pasta into the skillet, and sprinkle with grated Parmeggiano or Pecorino Romano. Done. The best old friend of the late summer menu: I can never have too much of it.

Leftover wild salmon, leftover rice, chopped cucumber and cherry tomatoes, corn kernels, chopped green onion, cilantro and a dressing of lime juice with a little oil and salt.

Summer, with its bounty of vegetables, is also such a great time to compose salads. I don’t know if there is an art to this, but I think there is something of an instinct, developed over time, of putting foods together so they marry well. Contrasts of color, flavor and texture work well in a composed salad. Leftovers and seasonal specials are equally welcome. It’s not that my instinct is always so great–some salads I’ve made did not marry well — in fact, probably needed to divorce! But usually, my instincts are not too bad and the ingredients get along pretty well — even complementing each other.

Especially in the lazy days of summer, I tend to forget what I can put together for a simple meal, and I need inspiration from something I’ve seen or read, which I can then adapt to what I have.  The salad above that was like that — I was just reading about a lime-juice salad dressing, and then put this together from leftovers and farmers’ market produce.

Then, as I was sorting through photos for this post, I looked at the photo of this salad and realized I could make it again for today’s lunch, even though I was missing the rice and had more cucumber. Avocado would be nice in this salad too, or black beans, or red pepper.  You could make it vegan without the salmon. You could use parsley instead of cilantro if you are one of the 4-to-14 percent of the population that thinks cilantro tastes like soap. You could add some sesame seeds or nuts on top .  . .

There are as many salad variations as there are mathematical combinations of vegetables with grains, beans, protein, what have you. Here’s a post with some of my late-summer favorites from seasons past: https://tobykitchen.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/salads-salads-salads/.

Have fun, eat well and stay cool,
Toby

Hmmmm, shall I make a blackberry focaccia as I did this time last year? https://tobykitchen.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/blackberry-supper/

Rolling with the seasons

YES, IT’S OFFICIALLY AUTUMN, and the change of the seasons and cooler days call me back to baking once again (not that I’ve ever left it entirely).

In the late summer/ early fall, I made some Zwetchgenkuchen with the beautiful Italian plums, but now that the plums are all gone from the trees, and I’ve said farewell to summer, my fruit dreams turn to apples and pears.

Next week, when I visit my daughter in Arkansas, we plan to make an apple pie together, so I was recalling a post I wrote here back in 2007 that spoke of my “one-per-season pie calendar” and featured the marvelous Pie Queen Reeb Willms with her recipe for apple pie. You can read it here.

Another must-bake for me in the autumn is the round challah with raisins. Along with apples and honey, it signifies the sweet and spirit-nourishing tradition of Rosh Hashonah, the Jewish New Year.

My round challahs are never quite symmetrical, but then, it really doesn’t matter!

It seems timely to put a link to yet another blog post from years ago, titled “A circle, a braid, a meditation on challah”

In fact, circles seem to be a theme here — appropriately, as in the autumn, we are so aware of the circle of seasons.

So, even if you don’t do any baking this season, do enjoy a wonderful crisp, juicy, sweet (or sweet-tart) apple — and roll with the season!

p.s. Need a good challah recipe? A reader writes in: “I know everyone has her/his favorite challah recipe, but my late wife Ruth׳s was truly spectacular.  See her web site ruths-kitchen.com”

August fixin’s

AUGUST REMINDS ME of my childhood: the sticky hot humid days in Chicago, barely relieved by the big swamp cooler in the basement. We had no air conditioning and my two sisters and I slept in an upstairs attic-type room, catching what little breeze we could from the open window and a fan. A thunderstorm was an evening’s entertainment:  From our screened-in back porch, we’d listen to the thunder, watch the streaks of lightning and smell the oncoming rain.

But best of all, August meant we would pack up the car (I always had a case full of books) and leave the city for a rented cabin in Ephraim, Wisconsin, or South Haven, Michigan, where we’d swim in Lake Michigan (Yes, we did that at home too, but here it was even better) and eat fresh peaches and blueberries, corn and tomatoes, trout and smoked whitefish, and bakery white rolls. And cherry pie.

Wherever you are, fresh produce is abundant this month, and dinner doesn’t have to be salad. On these lazy days, I love to center an August meal around corn on the cob. Or potato and green beans in a vinaigrette. Or cherry tomatoes, as in the photo above, roasted (or sauteed) with some garlic and oil and sprinkled with basil, to dress a pasta. With a side of green beans with lemon zest, and a simple salad with beets (dressed in another vinaigrette) and hazelnuts, it was a light but satisfying meal that didn’t take long at the stove.

This kitchen blog began in 2009 with Blackberry Cobbler No. 8, a recipe for the eighth version I had made of blackberry cobbler.

This week my daughter and I picked  blackberries (it’s been unusually hot here so it’s almost end-of-the-season) for a cobbler and decided that the No. 8  version is still hard to beat, with very tender biscuits with a touch of cornmeal. There’s not too much sugar in it, and a dollop of ice cream on the warm cobbler will suit it just fine.

A plum welcome to summer

I HAVE WRITTEN BEFORE about the marvelous Santa Rosa plums of early summer, and my gratitude to Luther Burbank for developing them. But again I feel the need to praise these plums. If I were to have just one fruit tree, it might have to be a Santa Rosa plum, not only for their deliciousness at the start of summer, but also because they are so hard to find in the market.

I had enough, briefly, to eat plenty of plums au naturel and to make British cookbook writer Nigel Slater’s brilliant plum tabbouleh. (I did substitute a pinch of crushed red pepper for the small red chile he calls for). I even made some plum crumble with a topping of butter, brown sugar, flour and hazelnuts.

The plum tabbouleh drew me back to one of my favorite books, Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard, and to Nigel Slater’s lovely homage to plums.

“When I find the perfect plum, jelly-fleshed and incandescently ripe, its golden skin flashed with crimson freckles, I make a great fuss of it,” he writes. “I have even been known to get out a small plate and a napkin. I eat slowly, imagining time stopped. More usually, I come across such a fruit without warning, having little alternative but to eat it from the hand, spitting the pit into the long grass below.”

And why are these plums so hard to find? Although Slater is speaking of Britain and not of Santa Rosa plums, I think his sentiments could apply to the U.S. as well.

“It breaks my heart to think of the plum orchards we have lost in the last two decades,” he writes, “but what else can a farmer do when the crop is no longer profitable, consumers have more interest in peaches and nectarines, and the stores continue to sell imports even during our own brief season? I salute the British plum grower.”

Well, I salute all plum growers, and in particular my friends John and Cathy who gave me the pleasure of a few days full of plums from their Santa Rosa plum tree. What a happy welcome to summer!