Pretty summer pickles and how falafel made my life a little better

I don’t do too many cooking posts because I long ago decided that this was a sewing blog, but I couldn’t resist throwing up a picture of these beauties that Noah and I made this morning.

The Lee Brothers turned me onto refrigerator pickles in Simple Fresh Southern (a book that my Mom “borrowed” and I need back…like yesterday).  Their  method is so absurdly simple.  Put veg in jars, add some aromatics, make a simple brine, boil it, pour it over the veg.  Done.  There’s no fiddling about with canning which makes me really happy not only because it gets pickles on my plate faster, but I think non-processed veg taste so much fresher which is not a shocker.

So today we made the Lee Brothers’ gingered beet pickles which I thankfully found on Food52 (I’m coming for my cookbook Mom!) as well as their zucchini onion pickles which I’ve made a number of times.  I love them on top of red lentils which sounds weird but is really the perfect condiment.

We also made some pink turnip pickles from David Tanis’ A Platter of Figs.  I fell in love with turnip pickles at a tiny Lebanese restaurant in Houston when I was a kid.  I had heard of falafel and mustered up the courage to try it one day.  The restaurant was owned by a family and was overseen by a wizened matriarch who sat quietly at her own little table watching all of the goings on.  But when someone ordered falafel, this ancient woman sprung into action, disappearing for several minutes to create what can only be described as perfection on a piece of thin soft flatbread.  Falafel may have been her only official responsibility at the restaurant for all I know, but if it was, it could not have been a task left in more able hands.  Her falafel was light, loaded with fresh green herbs, and it shattered beneath your teeth with crispiness when you were lucky enough to get a bite of one in the sandwich.  Most falafel I feel gets thrown between some random marginal pita, and maybe there’s some token lettuce and mealy tomatoes and a sprinkle of tahini sauce.  Grandma’s falafel:  it was lovingly set on a bed of impeccably clean deep green lettuce, beautifully juicy tomatoes, showered generously with lemony garlicky tahini sauce and hot sauce, but tucked up in there were these beautiful turnip pickles and they were what has since made falafel mythical and legendary in my mind since.  For one, they were pink which added a Matisse like shock of color in an already outrageously diverse palette, but also, the crunch and the acid they provided was the perfect foil against the delicate crisp and fat of the falafel.  I would happily eat one of her sandwiches every day for the rest of my life, and there’s little that I would say that about.

So when I capped up my little pickles this morning, I couldn’t help but remember that first bite of awesome I had when I was like 11.  Oh that my energy would come back quickly that I can recreate it.  I’m getting there.  Another week and I should be in the second trimester which always seems a little better.

Do you pickle or preserve or can?  Do you have any life changing food encounters?

Restyling the past and young promise

In thinking about my MMM ensemble yesterday, I thought I’d revisit the past in the way of my garments.  So I pulled out BWOF 2-2008-119.

I made it back in October of 2009, too taken by the modeled photo to consider the fact that it was a shapeless sack of a garment.  I remember it being awful to fit.  Granted, I knew very little about fitting and what size I really am etc., but I really struggled with this one.  I did an FBA hoping it would be useful but it just created a host of other problems.  It was awful.  Still, I often worn it because I love the print.

Today I pulled it out in some sort of experiment to see if I could get it to work.  If it was hard to get it to work before, it’s extra hard now.  I’m at least 25 lbs lighter than when I made it (I would say it was relatively fitted at that point).  So if was sacky and shapeless before, it’s even more so now.  The modeled photo has it belted, which is hard for me to do because of my height.  I could belt it with a maxi skirt, but I do not have one, and it’s not a style that appeals to me.  So in thinking of other ways I could introduce structure to make this top work, I tried out some of my jackets and added my Burdastyle 3-2011-131 linen shorts.

I settled on a Forever 21 jean jacket I bought while at a conference in San Antonio in college.  It’s definitely a more fitted jacket and it does help to bring structure to this combo.  I sadly can’t button it up without tucking the shirt as the batiste turns into a rather poofy weird peplum underneath.

I still don’t think this top does me any favors, but it’s a good exercise I think to think about some of the items that we love but no longer are in the mix for whatever reason.

Today, I pulled out my Burda 7508 that I had made in the aqua striped shirting (I’m also wearing my shibori dyed zipper jeans which you can still vote for here [insert shameless plug]).  When I made it it was relatively fitted, but I still think I biffed the neck sizing and traced something too wide.  At this point, it’s hanging on me, but one of the variations of this pattern has you add some elastic to cinch in the back waist and then you cover that with a scrap of fabric.  This turned out to be a good solution today to get a little more fitted look to save this top for me to wear currently.  It’s still a little big in the wrong places, but it’s wearable, and I also can’t expect a woven top to fit like a t-shirt.

Do you find yourself restyling items that you’ve forgotten about but still love?

Totally unrelated, but I’m feeling the need to brag on my 3 year old.  He was helping me cook lunch (Melissa Clark’s wonderful Red Lentil Soup with Lemon, though I used parsley and farro instead of cilantro and bulgur), and I had him cutting up some rye bread for croutons.  Though he loves his little Kinderkitchen Dog Knife he got for his birthday, he decided that cutting up the bread took too long, so he went all rustic and just started tearing the bread and throwing it into the bowl.  I swear, every time I leave him alone with a task, I’m surprised by his intense focus and genuinely good instincts he has in the kitchen.  

He tossed them in the garlic olive oil I made in my mortar and pestle and we toasted them up in the oven.  He’s going to be a better cook than me…that is if he decides that PBJ isn’t really all that interesting.

Geeking out foodie style

What with waiting for baby (13 days left, theoretically) and our house (right now our closing date is set for my due date–tee hee), I can’t say I have a lot of extra motivation to start any projects.  Mostly, I’m just trying to keep busy with housework, cooking, and chasing after Noah.  It occurred to me that I should read more though as I’ve mostly been driving myself crazy looking for furniture on Craigslist.

I’ve been plowing through more than my usual quota of cookbooks, but this one I’ve been savoring:

 

I dearly dearly love good examples of food writing.  Don’t just give me a pile of recipes named after your Grandma without some introduction to the beloved woman!  Food is an expression of our lives, and I want to read about other people’s lives in food.  Molly O’Neill took on the task of collecting recipes from home cooks around the country for the past decade!  She does more than simply catalog recipes–she tells us who these people are.  This book is huge (nearly 1000 pages), and I’m grateful that she had an editor who allowed it to be so.  It’s good food too, just the usual home cook cookbooks full of mother-in-law recipes that are missing that one special thing, the absence of which will render the dish so-so or perhaps inedible.  That I get to read about so many people like me who derive so much joy out of cooking for others is bonus!  Am I taking this heavier-than-a-cast-iron-skillet book with me to the hospital?  You bet your biscuits!

My husband, continued this theme by coming up with the neatest birthday present ever.  Several years ago, I viciously, recklessly and savagely went through all of my issues of Gourmet up to 2004 and cut out the recipes that I thought looked the most promising and tossed the rest.  Nathan, knowing that I needed some quality reading material as well as some fresh inspiration took it upon himself to right the wrong I inflicted upon myself in the form of 60 pounds worth of back issues of Gourmet ranging from 1980 to 1996. 

I’m ITCHING to get cooking in our new house, and I dare say I will be more than occupied with new things.  If a girl has to turn 30 within days of giving birth, I dare say that a little dose of such husbandly romanticism will take away the sting every time.

I cook good food now.

I’ve been kicking this idea around for a while now.  I love food writing and I love to write about food and darn it cooking is about my favorite thing to do in the whole world.  My dilemma is that ~E Made This really has turned into more of a sewing blog than anything else.  I have too much to talk about in the way of food to justify keeping my food posts here where if you’re here, perhaps you’d rather be seeing sewing.  Perhaps the fact that I also have pretended for years what I would say to Martha were I a guest on her show trying to teach her how to make flatbreads has convinced me that I need to write about food too.

So as a matter of housekeeping, all my food love will be poured into ~E Made This Dairy Free from now on.  I’ll put up a link in my sidebar.

I will not apologize

The title needs an explanation.  But first, here is my kitchen print in its new home.  The owl clock, which I received for my birthday is from Decoy Lab.  I love how the fabric makes the owl pop…makes those owly eyes even more buggy.

The title refers to this quote from the late, the wonderful, the rather witty Julia Child:  “You should never apologize at the table. People will think, ‘Yes, it’s really not so good.’”

Today’s luncheon adventures made me think about this quote.  I have not been able to cook regularly since I’ve been pregnant.  Food has been often repellent to me, a lot more things make me feel sick, and I’m completely wiped out physically and mentally after teaching.  This has been a great point of sadness for me because I get so much joy out of cooking.  I also often have apologized to my more than understanding husband about what feels like a failure on my part.  Silly perhaps, but I don’t think I’m along among women who feel inadequate from time to time.  Feelings aside and feeling physically good today, I decided I’m going to make lunch…really make lunch.  What follows requires a bit of background…

A couple of years ago, I stopped using teflon pans after an incident that involved toasting chiles in what turned out to be a superheated teflon pan…the combo of the teflon fumes and the chile gas that resulted was a noxious, painful situation that certainly would have killed any canaries in the vicinity had there been any.  Since then, I’ve not really missed my non-stick pans with one exception…for making Tortilla Espagnola–Spanish Omelet.  It involves cooking potatoes in oil until they are soft and a little brown and then mixing them into eggs.  You pour the whole contents back into your pan and cook until the bottom of the tortilla is set.  Then you flip it and slide it back into the pan and cook the bottom side.  This is not an easy operation without some non-stick help. 

But Spainards have been making this dish since the dawn of time–or at least a long time before teflon, so what to use?  Thankfully, Nathan bought me a paella pan on a business trip a couple of years ago.  This pan is lightweight and very capable of holding seasoning much like a cast iron skillet (which is unfortunately too heavy for the flipping process).  So this morning, I went about seasoning it.  It looked pretty good and black by the time that I finished, so I proceeded.

Tortilla Espagnola–adapted from My Kitchen in Spain by Janet Mendel–serves 4 for a light meal or 2 if you’re like me and don’t particularly feel like sharing at the moment

2 lbs potatoes, peeled and sliced about 1/8″ thick

1/2 cup olive oil (okay, it’s a lot of oil, but trust me, you want all of it)

1 tsp salt

1 tsp smoked Spanish paprika–sweet or hot

1/4 onion, chopped in small dice

6 eggs

Warm the oil in a non-stick pan over medium-low heat.  Add the potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally for 15 minutes. 

  Things are going well so far.

Add 1/2 tsp of the salt, the onion and paprika.  Continue to cook the potatoes until they are tender throughout and if you like as I do, have some brown crispy edges to them.  Scrape the bottom of the pan really well with a wooden spatula to release any potato particles. 

Beat the eggs with the remaining 1/2 tsp salt in a large mixing bowl.  Using a slotted spoon, remove the potatoes and mix with the eggs.  The remaining oil in the pan should coat the bottom of your pan.  If it doesn’t, add a little more.  Pour the egg mixture back into the pan and cook until the edges are set–about 5 minutes.  Shake the pan as you do this to avoid sticking.  If you’re a little hesitant, run a long spatula under the omelet before you do the next bit.

Take an inverted pizza pan or cookie sheet and flip the tortilla out onto it so that the cooked side is up.  Slide the tortilla back into the pan and cook until the bottom is also set.  If you’re lucky, you will have quite a pretty omelet.  But it’s okay if, like me today, your omelet looks like this:

  The truth is is that all the love you put into letting those potatoes cook all that long time will still shine through in the final flavor of what now looks like a pile of hash.  If your tortilla also looks like a pile of hash, remember Julia and don’t apologize.  Plunk it down on a plate under some parsley and your family will still enjoy it.  You can work on your flipping technique later (or season your pan better).

As for me, I ate like 1/2 of the thing for lunch.  It was delicious.

Zakkattack

In my women’s prayer group, we draw a name every year for each of us to be responsible for the festivites of one person’s birthday.  I drew my friend Vanessa, who has the first birthday of the year on Jan. 9th.  We celebrated last night with a savory galette des rois that I made with a filling of bacon, cheddar, eggs, asparagus, and parmesan–all of which Vanessa loves.  We played the find the treasure that you traditionally do with a galette des rois. 

There was talk that the contest may have been rigged so that the birthday girl would get to wear the sparkly glittered crown that was the prize for finding the bean in your slice of the pastry.  I admit nothing.

I checked out Zakka Sewing at the library and saw this adorable pattern for little potholders that have a wee pocket to hold your spoon for coffee.  Being a lover of lattes (or leche con cafe as I like to say given the amount of milk Vanessa likes in her coffee) and having just moved into a new house, I figured she would like these very much.  Being a library book, I approximated the pattern from the book on grid paper. 

 

I also made her a little coin purse to house a gift card to a home store.  I’ve decided that it is so incredibly fun to make these little personal things for people.  I’m so grateful to be able to give something from my heart to someone else and I’m even more grateful that I’m able to do this because my sweet husband let me buy a sewing machine in the first place.

I also made the little houses because I made a cape a while ago for myself from S.E.W. Sew Everything Workshop that didn’t end up fitting me very well (too wide in the shoulders even after I took the pattern in and it made my hips look bigger–who wants that?).  Vanessa saw it and LOVED it, so I decided it would be a good birthday surprise for her.  I think she liked it.

All in all, we had a very fun night celebrating our friend.

Texas Sausage Kolaches

My maternal great-grandma was a wonderful cook.  She was bitter, stubborn, and half-blind most of my life.  She never lost her Czech accent even though she’s been in this country since age 17, but wow could she make a pork roast and some sad little root vegetables taste amazing.  Apparently, though I never ate them, she made lots and lots of kolaches.  My Mom and one of my uncles were very fond of her cheese ones.  There was a bakery in my home town where you could get quite good poppyseed kolaches.  There was a famous incident with one of my younger cousins smearing the contents of a poppyseed kolache around the side of the refrigerator as we babysat him one day when I was a kid.

When we moved to Texas, they had different kinds of kolaches.  They had a soft yeasted dough outside and were filled with little sausages and cheese.  I always loved these, but to my knowledge, you can’t get them outside of central to eastern TX.  I could never find a recipe either.  Until the other day, that is.  I was randomly thinking about how much I loved the little airpockets that occur between the dough and the sausage as they bake, and I decided to search for a recipe.

I found a very good one here, but I modified it below due to my inability to consume milk right now.

Texas Sausage Kolaches

Sponge:

Dissolve 3 tsp. yeast and 1 T sugar in 1/4 cup of warm water.  Allow to foam while you combine 3 T of sugar with 1 cup of coconut milk.  Heat the sugar and milk mixture until it is warm to the touch.  Add the yeast mixture to the milk mixture in a large bowl and add 1 3/4 cups of flour.  Stir 100 times in one direction with a wooden spoon.  Cover the sponge and allow to rest in a warm spot for 1 hour.

After 1 hour, add 1/4 cup of melted shortening, 1/4 cup of canola oil, 1/4 cup of coconut milk, 2 egg yolks, 1 1/2 tsp. salt, and 2 1/4 cups of flour.  Stir until combined.  Lightly flour a working surface and slap knead (this is such a cool technique–it’s worth watching the video for just so you can stare in awe), adding no extra flour until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Allow the dough to double in bulk which will take a couple of hours.  You can let it rise in the fridge overnight and just warm it up to room temperature on the counter or in the oven with just the pilot light on before you continue.

Divide the dough into quarters and roll each quarter into a rectangle about 1/8″ thick.  Divide the rolled dough into 9 smaller rectangles and place a small sausage (about 2″ long) or piece of sausage into the center.  Fold the dough over the sausage, pinching to seal.  Place the sealed side down on a lightly greased baking sheet and paint with an egg wash made with 1 egg and 1 T coconut milk or water beaten well together.  Preheat the oven to 400.  Allow the kolaches to rise for about 20 minutes before you bake them.  Bake them for 15 minutes or until golden brown. 

Make some!  They’re tasty!

I hope everyone had a very merry Christmas.

12 Days of Christmas Cookies, Day 12

Congratulations intrepid blog readers…you have made it to the end of the cookie-a-thon. 

#12 Alfajores

I’m always on the lookout for unusual cookies.  When I was researching my list last year, this was one I came across that was more different than any other cookie I had seen before.  And it should be–it’s Argentinian.  The recipe is from Nick Malgieri’s A Baker’s Tour, which I picked up at Ross one day for $4 (that was a good day).  The cookie itself is odd in that it contains a high proportion of cornstarch which yields a rather tender cookie.  It is flavored with a good bit of lemon zest and cognac of all things.  This in and of itself would be a good cookie, but it gets more interesting.  The cookies, which are rolled and cut are then sandwiched and coated on the outside with dulce de leche.  The sides are then dipped in coconut.  The combination of flavors was so different I thought that they had to be tried.  These were the dark horse of last year’s cookie fest.  First, I must express my love for dulce de leche.

In college, I had a friend whose Dad did a lot of business in Brazil, and he would bring back treats for her from time to time.  The one I always managed to convince her to let me have was arequipe, which is the Brazilian form of dulce de leche.  Many graham crackers were eaten in Brittany’s dorm room with this amazing stuff slathered on.  Thankfully, I found out you didn’t have to go to Brazil to get some of it.  It seems every Latin culture has some version of this delightful milk caramel.  It comes by different names–arequipe, cajeta, dulce de leche–but the idea is the same no matter what you call it.  You simmer sweetened milk to which a tiny bit of baking soda has been added and maybe some flavoring like a cinnamon stick down until it is brown and thick…you can use sweetened condensed milk to save some time, but I find it tastes like the can often.  Last year, I made it from the can per Nick’s instructions (which very much unlike him were rather fussy–involving baking the stuff in a water bath and stirring it at regular intervals and replenishing the water) with the sweetened condensed milk and while the end result was passable, I wanted to try the homemade stuff this year.

So about a week before we assembled the cookies, I made the cajeta.  Cajeta is made with goat’s milk which brings a little bit of tang that tempers the sweetness.  Yes, you have to simmer it for about an hour and a half, but really you don’t have to pay attention to it at all.  I think I overcooked it this time in my effort to get a deep caramel color…it spread kind of weird on the cookies.  No difference, though because they are still wonderfully delicious.

One last invitation from me: add your pictures of your Christmas cookies here.  It’s fun seeing what people make.

Nathan and I are in San Francisco for a couple of days.  He has a science conference here, and I tagged along to eat and shop (which sounds worse on both counts than it actually is).  I imagine I shall write about where we eat and any jiffy fabric places I may come across in the next day or so.  I’m so excited to eat dim sum on Saturday!

12 Days of Christmas Cookies, Day 11

#11 Bizcochitos

I have two links to New Mexican food…my sweet sister-in-law has some extended family from there originally and my friend Lisa and I took a culinary and artistic road trip through Santa Fe and Albuquerque a few years ago. 

That trip was so much fun, despite the fact that we learned a painful, yet important fact about culinary travel, which is that really spicy food plus a lot of fat that is partially used to tame the fire does not lead to happy times for one’s stomach.  It was Labor Day weekend, which means green chile time.  As we stopped to get our bushel of peppers roasted  with our friend we were visiting in Albuquerque, her husband ironically slipped off to get us some Alka-Seltzer.  If it wasn’t so painful, it would have been very funny.  It was a good trip despite that.  The Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe is about the coolest museum I’ve ever been to, perhaps barring the museums we went to in Florence.  We shopped at The Spanish Table where I bought a couple jars of awesome piquillo peppers and moscatel vinegar, as well as some olivewood utensils.  That’s just a fascinating store anyhow–they sell Paella pans that are literally 5′ across…I can’t imagine how many people could eat off of that much rice.  The other thing we discovered about Santa Fe besides an awesome farmer’s market where we ate these rock hard fresh pippin apples was how easy it is to make U-turns there.  I love u-turning!

But fond musings of New Mexico aside, apparently bizcochitos are a very famous New Mexican sugar cookie made with lard (they sure seem to use a lot of lard in their food), sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and flavored with anise seeds.  I found out about them soon after Lisa’s and my trip, but I’d been avoiding them because I’m not a huge licorice fan.  This year I figured I’d give them a chance this year because I can’t eat butter right now and I really love rendering my own lard (an odd fascination I picked up in learning to make tamales a few years ago).  If I had known what crispy, pastry-like flaky cookies they would have turned out to be, I would have started making them a long time ago.  These are one of those pastries that has multiple layers of flavor–you taste the crisp first, then the cinnamon sugar, then a faint bit of anise, and then the lard right at the end of the taste.  Bizcochitos were hands down the dark horse of this year’s cookie selection.  And the recipe (I modified it–this is not my favorite cookie book…good ideas, but the recipes don’t all work out right) makes about a million, so there are plenty of opportunities to take a couple without depleting the stash for all of the bags of cookies that I’ve made for people.

12 Days of Christmas Cookies, Day 10

#10 Las Lunas de Sevilla

My sweet friend Tamara and I created this cookie while she was taking a Spanish class a few years ago.  Her instructor was from Spain and she was given the task of bringing treats one night.  Wanting to make something that actually was Spanish, the two of us set about researching.  Tamara makes wickedly delicious flan, but she really wanted to make some kind of cookie.  What we discovered were very few cookie recipes in our research, so we decided to create something with Spanish ingredients.  We had 2 ideas: Seville orange marmalade–made from bitter oranges in the city of Seville and dark Spanish chocolate (we used Blanxart).  We then concluded that the best way to combine them was with a shortbread cookie.

The prototype was a circular cookie painted down the middle with chocolate and the marmalade on the other side.  They were delicious, but the marmalade was tacky to the touch and the flavors were seperate, not combined like we were looking for.  The solution was two very thin half-moon shaped cookies, sandwiched with the marmalade and striped with the chocolate.  A stunning cookie with delicious results.  It might seem weird to have two bitter flavors–the jam and the chocolate in the same cookie, but these actually balance each other quite well.  I’ve since added sweet orange rind in the shortbread dough to add a bigger and different orange flavor in the final cookie.