The Mono

"Hmm, I feel like some rhubarb cobbler for dessert."

Go downstairs, get shoes and flashlight, head out to the garden. Pull a good double handful of rhubarb stalks. Bring them inside, wash and trim them. Cut them into 1/2" pieces, as the plant variety is such that peeling is unnecessary.

Pull out a small casserole and dump the pieces in. Look up a rhubarb pie recipe for the flour:sugar ratio, eyeball the amount of fruit, and estimate amounts. Pour the flour and sugar mix on. Toss some oatmeal in a bowl, add a half-handful of brown sugar, a dollop of flour, and a few tablespoons of butter; mash it together. Cover the top of the fruit with it.

Look at a few more recipes, set the oven to 425F, toss in the casserole dish, and set the timer to 35 minutes as a first guess. Head back upstairs. Watch old TV shows while the aroma of cobbler wafts up the stairs. Go down and pull it out. Watch some more TV until it's cool enough to touch. Eat dessert. Elapsed time since the rhubarb was pulled off the plant: 90 minutes.

I can cook well enough I don't need recipes for everything. I have a garden which provides us with something we all love, year-round, 24 hours a day. I have an hour in my evening which I can devote to combining the two.

This is the life I'm slowly working toward, and I love it.

Thanks (in a tangential fashion) to pecunium's recent musing about fish, I seem to have found a decent substitute for canned tuna, in taste and texture if not convenience. I'm happy about that.

( cut for the uninterested... )

When I was in Whole Foods the other day, I discovered purely by accident that Weetabix has spun off a whole-oats version. (Yes, it is called "Oatibix".) I gleefully snatched up the box before I thought about what I was doing. I'm now nearly halfway through a surprisingly heavy box of edible brillo pads, and looking forward to the rest. God only knows why. I missed Weetabix more than I realized, despite the fact that the substance it most closely resembles is particle-board, and it has a little less flavor than Cheerios. With a pinch of brown sugar it's pretty decent, though, and I've been toying with ideas for how to toast the pads without a toaster oven. They'd shed horribly in the toaster.

I've been looking for a gluten-free version of shredded wheat for years, and I've never found one. That's another cereal that many people have to be forced to eat, but which I actually miss. I have no idea what process is involved in making it, but I'm a little surprised that in the sea of gluten-free wafer cookies and gluten-free pretzels, there's nothing at all like Triscuits or shredded wheat. I'm sure it's technically feasible.

I'd adore a wheat-free version of Grape-Nuts, too. I know that malt is an essential part of the flavor, so getting rid of the barley (and thus gluten) is out of the question, but I could eat it so long as the wheat vanished. I miss it perhaps most of all -- crunchy, soggy, it never really mattered, I ate it anyway. I've always preferred things like Kix and Chex to Lucky Charms, even as a kid... I also miss the dark flavor of a good raisin bran, as apparently oats and rice don't have that depth of flavor (or light crisp flake, even). Sigh.

Maybe when I'm done researching bread I'll go into the cereal business. :)

Edit: The Internet to the rescue. Complete with barley malt, which most recipes lack.

Why oh why do I let people dump 60 pounds of fruit on me every autumn?* First pears, now feijoas. Still working my way through the backlog (I'm glad they're keeping so long). Boy.

In other news, I harvested sweet potatoes larger than my two fists; the total usable crop fills a six-gallon bucket, with only one split one. It was a good year. Fortunately, sweet potatoes actually like neglect...



*Hint: it's because they're tasty.

I'm not a big coffee drinker. I suppose it was inevitable that when I went to the Pacific Northwest for college in the mid-90's, I'd pick up latte drinking, though. I've kept with the occasional cup since then, mostly to warm up or relax after a stressful class... I got a home espresso maker for Christmas one year, the kind that steams milk and yadda yadda, and used it occasionally. The last time I pulled it out (I was having a bad day), the pump quit. $100 for repairs? sigh. I don't drink them often enough to know who the good barristas are around here, which means that just going out (hard at 2am anyway) results in expensive undrinkable coffee half the time. I managed to fix the last latte from Panama Bay, but it took some doing.

I looked around, and didn't like the idea of paying $60-80 for a newer machine I'd only use once in a while, but all the stores had were basic coffeemakers and professional-style espresso machines. mactavish made the offhand comment that her espresso maker works on the stove, and that made me curious. So I went looking.

It turns out that, while such macchinettas are quite inexpensive ($10-20), and effective enough that the design has stayed the same for most of a century, no brick and mortar store carries them west of Manhattan. So I took a chance and ordered one, and waited 10 days for delivery. It came yesterday, and I played with it today.

After brewing and throwing out two rounds of coffee (to break in the aluminum finish), I made a mocha with the third. I have to say: it brews fast (2 minutes), it's easy to clean, it's quiet, it fits neatly on our smallest stove burner, and it's quite cute. It also makes very good coffee. I like my lattes and mochas to taste like premium coffee ice cream, the sort that has coffee grounds in it, without bitter or sour notes... this has a very slight bitter edge, but I suspect I can solve that by lightening the coffee blend a little. Otherwise it's at least as good as anything I've paid $3 for at a shop. I can brew good decaf rather than what the shop has on hand, sweeten it exactly as I like it, add chocolate or molasses (or not)... with no more hassle than the other machine gave me. Less, actually, as I don't have to worry about whether I've tamped it so firmly it'll burn.

So, all in all a good purchase. Thanks for turning me onto it, mactavish. :)

Today:

I whipped up two 2L bottles of root beer, because I really need something fizzy to drink that doesn't have high-fructose corn syrup in it. I would have made birch beer too, but I discovered I was out. Darn.

I actually ate food. Yesterday I accidentally fasted for 23 hours. Whoops.

I helped eastbaygreg and his dad put together a fence for the side of his house; this has been in the making for a while, and today was finally the day to drill post holes (with a tractor, no fools we) and pour the concrete around the anchor poles. Lots of hauling and mixing of 80lb bags of concrete. We made a great team, and the line of poles is neat, plumb, and firmly set. Sunday will see the fence completed. Woo!

I relaxed a bit with some TV while eating dinner, and caught up on LJ and FB.

I ordered more Gnome birch beer extract -- and discovered that The Home Brewery has outdone my usual mail-order place, Northern Brewer. Home Brewery has started carrying a line of extracts from Rainbow Flavors; they have the usual root beer, sarsaparilla, cream soda, birch beer, orange soda... cherry, strawberry, and lemon-lime, that's different... wait, eggnog? spruce beer? passionfruit?

Needless to say, I spent a little more than I expected; I drew the line at $30 with shipping, but I got spruce beer, their birch beer, and passionfruit in addition to my Gnome red birch beer (which is actually pink and kicks like a spearmint horse). I'm exceptionally curious about these three, and I'm glad foogod coaxed me into using 2L bottles, as it'll be much easier to do a small experimental batch of these without the undertaking of two dozen longnecks. I still like glass bottles, but two-liters are fast and small-scale.

I then finished the introduction for my review article. I desperately need to spend some serious time on this, as I'm getting closer to the deadline than I'm comfortable with. But I finished a major section, yay!

Yesterday I spent working on the RV, repairing the door, adding a water tank drain, and getting new keys made. I just need to load it up with the stuff we have here before it heads back over the hill.

Tomorrow will be two parties, one of which will have me working with yeast and honey and hopefully not requiring that I stand all the time; my feet hurt. Then I'll help assemble the facing boards for Greg's fence on Sunday, and possibly finish up with a tiki party in Berkeley.

Whew.

I decided that I've had sufficient luck with root beer that I should take a stab at ginger beer. I hate the stuff on store shelves, as it always has some nasty cloying taste associated with it. I tried a commercial extract, and discovered that the only flavoring in it was ester of pine resin -- it tasted, as you might expect, exactly like a pine board. eww.

So, since I wanted something that tastes like ginger, I took a hand of fresh ginger, some sugar, a little yeast, and water. I worried a little bit that the yeast might take exception to very fresh ginger (it's a pretty good antimicrobial) but apparently I needn't have worried. At all.

What follows is a tentative recipe for my trial batches of ginger beer. It is not alcoholic at all, but it has some heat to it. Do this only if you like ginger (a lot). :)

( Recipe! )

This makes a very clean, crisp ginger beer with enough heat to warm your belly afterward; it's a great way to settle an uneasy stomach. I may try foogod's advice of adding a touch of cardamom to the brew, but I like it plain just fine. Yum. :)

There are alcoholic versions out there, brewed like beer... CHOW makes a very traditional non-alcoholic ginger beer using a "bug", or starter. I like dry yeast because it's reliable, quick, and needs no maintenance, but I imagine a bug gives it more character.

After having gotten a balanced meal (perhaps a little more "balanced" in favor of protein than the other items), I decided that today's difficulties merited some compensation.

So I broke out the caramel syrup that I made with great effort a few weeks ago (a story in itself), whole milk, cream, and I softened a new stick of butter. A few minutes of microwave time later I had a pint of my favorite comforting drink, sort of like a shorthand version of the Spanish one made by heating milk until it caramelizes. Think of the richest hot chocolate you've ever had, and transmute it into vanilla and caramel flavors instead. It's hot, gently caramel half'n'half, I suppose, with a little dab of melted butter for good measure. It has real presence in the mouth, like I'm drinking premier ice cream. And it's wonderful.

I tell people that I'm not nuts about chocolate, and hot chocolate, even the rich stuff, always left me sort of "enh". One day I wondered what would happen if I made the same thing using caramel and vanilla, which is what I prefer... I decided later that I was a genius. :)

I save it for special occasions when I want to relax -- even with my general disregard for fat content, it's a bit rich -- but it's always worth that little extra effort. I'm feeling much more mellow about the day now.

Anybody know of a feijoa in the northeast bay whose fruit is going to waste?

My neighbor's tree didn't bear much this year, and I'm craving them.

More info for those unfamiliar with the plant. They're used in all sorts of places, but not everyone knows that these bushes bear edible yummy fruit and flowers.

I've been noticing more distinct periods of exhaustion and high energy. I was fine this morning; now, after lunch, I'm lightheaded, exhausted, and muzzy. That sort of thing has been happening more often.

That's good and bad. Good is that I can figure it out, given some work; bad that it means I'll have to make some changes again. It's probably something environmental causing fatigue and brainfog -- my money is on diet right now. My dietary restrictions are already complex enough that I dread having to expand them, but it would give me enough energy and brainpower to cope with that.

( musing on logistics )

I was in downtown San Jose this last weekend, down by the Convention Center. So, as I always do when I'm down there, I bemoaned the loss of my favorite taqueria, Iguanas. That place had very good food, very fast, very cheap -- $10 once bought me more than I could eat, and my capacity is not inconsiderable. Wonderful guacamole, good carne asada, no trouble with special orders; they'd make the food right in front of you, just behind the narrow counter. Oh, and did I mention? Being right next to SJSU, they opened for lunch and stayed open until at least 2am. Midnight munchies at the con? No contest. Sadly, they closed down in 2005, and the word at the place around the corner was that it was because they hadn't controlled the late-night rowdies enough. So poof, they were out.

I needed to grab some dinner that night, though, and on the way to the hotel, Greg drove down third street. So I pointed out where Iguanas had been -- right there, midblock, right where that giant sign is all... lit... up...

It said Iguanas: Home of the Burritozilla.

Hallelujah.



I walked over to it around 10pm, went up the little stairs and to the left, and it's like they were never gone. The same murals of silly iguanas on the walls and laminated into the tables, same menu at the front. I happily ordered two super tacos and a super burrito ($11.50 total), and asked the guy behind the counter what had happened.

Apparently (I'm piecing this together from what he told me and the little I can find online) there was a dispute with the landlord over the lease, which forced them to close down in July of 2005. The owners of Iguanas took the landlord to court, chased him all over the legal system, and finally won the right to stay open. So they handed the business to their two sons, who cleaned and freshened up the place, did a few repairs, and reopened in late 2006. They're doing a roaring trade, and they didn't even hike the prices much.

They're open until 3 now on Fridays and Saturdays, and they host live music and poetry readings. Man, I should have pulled out my student ID card -- the article says they might have given me a 10% discount. Next time...

The tacos were as good as I remember, even after sitting for an hour or so because I got distracted... sogginess didn't diminish them. The place puts garlic in their guacamole. That alone would have me coming back. :)

Since I have become increasingly frustrated with people who dump a couple of spoonfuls of salsa and an avocado into a bowl, mash it up, and call it guacamole (no, I'm looking mostly at restaurants here), I have decided to strike back by telling people exactly how easy it is to make The Good Stuff. Once you know, you have no excuse for making bland, gluey guacamole.

( recipe and commentary follow. )

Even though the whole corn-based ethanol craze has people coming up with pie-in-the-sky predictions and groundless optimism, before it all comes crashing down (and it will), it has at least done a couple of good things:

It's brought the selling price of corn up from its stagnant level of four decades, where it didn't even budge for inflation -- that's good for farmers, and

The spike in price -- it's doubled in the last five years -- has made corn syrup immensely less attractive to food manufacturers. Add that to the organic movement, where cane is not only easier to grow organically but not potentially tainted with GMOs, and we're starting to shake loose the ubiquitous presence of high fructose corn syrup.

On a personal note, I've found that corn syrup has increasingly had a "thickening" effect in my throat, to the point that I end up feeling thirstier after I've drunk a soda with HFCS, and I cough more. As a result, I've started avoiding soda (not easy when you can't drink the water most places). I brew my own, but only when I have time and energy. So I've begun looking for cane-sugar soda... and found that, in addition to good old Hansen's, Whole Foods' own brand uses cane sugar, and (what do you know) so does Jones, which I had never looked twice at before. Safeway hasn't started making standard soda with cane sugar yet, but their organic line of sparkling lemonade/fruit juices is cane-sugar sweetened, and their cranberry juice cocktail is too. I hope that other companies will start joining in as the price of corn continues to rise -- most of my friends prefer cane sugar in their soda anyway, if they don't do diet, so it may sell fairly well.

If nothing else, other processed foods may start quietly getting more beet and cane sugar. One downside is the rising cost of wheat as more farmers grow corn, but that will stabilize soon enough.

I make awesome soup. Even fish stew. It's not even a teensy bit fishy... just very tasty.

After ten years, I finally used the last of my red miso paste. It tasted vaguely like carob powder after all that time. Odd.

Note to self: no matter how good the soup is, next time don't use catfish. Skimming oil off the top of each jar with paper towels is not fun.

Cross your fingers that the jars seal despite all the oil.

Edit: 14 out of 16 sealed... not bad at all.

When I became sensitive to wheat, I lost a great many foods. Many of those have come back, either through easy substitutions or the growing number of wheat-free convenience foods in supermarkets these days. But a few remained elusive.

One of those was macaroni and cheese. Kraft dinner, I found, could be approximated with wheat-free macaroni and bulk cheese powder; over the years I've perfected that to the point where the difference is only subtle. (Most of you probably remember my hunt for cheese powder not too long ago, which was happily resolved by Barry Farms.) Our family mac&cheese recipe, however, was more difficult.

The origin of the recipe was a Sunset magazine issue, which offered an ingenious means of disposing of a leftover party cheese ball. The recipe basically recreated the cheese ball again and mixed macaroni in, making a strongly-flavored and very distinctive casserole. We took out a few things (such as the sherry and blue cheese), but the modified recipe still makes one of the most unique versions of macaroni and cheese I've ever found.

The trouble was, the base of the cheese ball (and thus the casserole) was condensed cream of celery soup. As any gluten-shy person knows, all cream soups (especially Campbells, who seems to delight in throwing just a little of it into everything) contain wheat flour. We could substitute corn pasta for macaroni, but no matter what we tried -- sour cream, cream cheese, a roux, a rice-flour white sauce -- it wouldn't come out right. We have been without it for most of a decade now, when we used to eat it pretty regularly, it being an easy make-ahead sort of thing.

I had a brainwave at the end of last year, with the result that tonight, we had a cheeseball macaroni that was almost exactly like the old one. The trick: Classico alfredo sauce. It has no wheat in it, which is nothing short of a miracle. (I should write to them and thank them.) It also has a consistency very much like the can of cream of celery plus 2/3 of a can of milk, which we traditionally used as the base. The texture was right, if a tiny bit starchy; more cheese will take care of that. The flavor was only subtly different. foogod said that if no one had told him, he wouldn't have known that it wasn't the original recipe. He's the most discriminating of us; all of us thought it was a success.

Nothing is quite as satisfying as recovering an old comfort food again. Yay!

I decided I was going to run through the offerings at the local fish market. Here's what I've discovered so far:

( tasty fishies )

More fish as I try them.

but I'm getting damn close.

I have a loaf of French bread here. It is crusty, chewy, moist, tastes just right, and is made with only flour, water, yeast, and salt, as all French bread should be. The catch: the flour type I used is rice, and only rice.

When you say "rice bread" to celiacs and wheat-intolerant folk, what comes to mind is something which might be dry, squeaky-dense, gritty, fragile, spongy, or a combination of the above. "Chewy" doesn't make the list. Rice bread is bought at specialty stores or made at home as a batter-bread, poured into a loaf pan and baked like a cake, with all sorts of gums and strengtheners to hold it together. It isn't kneaded, shaped and risen like wheat bread.

This loaf was kneaded twice, risen twice, and shaped into a long flat loaf on a baking sheet. It handled like regular bread dough, rose beautifully, and had to be dusted with flour when it was punched down, just like the standard bread I used to make. Its crust may not shatter like the store-bought loaves, but my home-baked bread never had a crust like that anyway. It tastes like I remember French bread tasting all those years ago, and is crying out for some marinara sauce and parmesan cheese. Yum.

I knew it could be done, and (after a little minor tweaking on oven temps and times, and checking to make sure it's mixer-friendly) I'll have a recipe that will do it perfectly. It's all just little corrections, now.

I promise to use my powers only for good. Pass the garlic and butter...

Let's get this straight.

Onions are a seasoning, not a vegetable.
Leeks are a vegetable, not a seasoning.
Garlic is a seasoning and a vegetable.
Shallots are onions.
Green onions are, as they say, also onions.
Chives are a seasoning as well (I can't imagine eating them in such quantity as to make them a vegetable).

I think that covers all of the edible region of Allium. I'll think about any that I may have missed.

I grow a lot of garlic. Like, over a hundred heads a year. This last year they were mostly split and cracked, but I'm trying to get some good intact heads this year... I already have a lot of garlic powder from the split heads, so what can I do with intact ones?

That's right: roast them.

Unfortunately, I have had a great deal of trouble making real, crusty, chewy french bread; my main bread recipe turns out Wonder Bread, which is fine for sandwiches and toast, not so good for roasted garlic. Ditto the commercial sour rye, which is whole-grain to the extreme. And let's not even mention the styrofoam rice bread. So what would I put the garlic on?

Focaccia, of course. Flat breads don't need as much gluten for rising power, and focaccia is good with garlic and oil.

I pulled the first one out of the oven a few minutes ago. I used a little too much rosemary, but otherwise it's thoroughly fantastic. Chewy, crispy, tastes slightly sweet and like olive oil and salt and rosemary and rosemary. And rosemary. (I need to remember how intense the winter rosemary gets.) It's almost impossible to get chewy bread without wheat flour, so I guess I figured out the secret -- maybe I can make french bread with this technique too. Hmmmmmmmm.....

This should be fabulous with garlic. I need to tweak the procedure a little -- kneading the wet, proofed yeast into a lump of dough was not my preferred method -- but I think I can make it quite a bit less painful. Maybe I can make more than one at a time, since the dough ball is small, and the top of the light rack (the source of bottom heat for rising) is long enough for two pans.

Mmmmmmmmm focaccia.

Edit: I forgot the link to the focaccia recipe I used. If anyone wants the wheat-free chewy version (I used barley, but it could probably be adapted further for celiacs) let me know.

I pulled my espresso maker out today. A few random thoughts...

I really need to get some decaf coffee. The headache hits harder after you haven't had much caffeine for many weeks.

I also need to get some semisweet chocolate. It seems a little odd, given that I normally dislike dark chocolate... but the milk adds sugar, and I'm thinking that I'd rather err on the side of needing to add a pinch of sweetening. I might even try what my dad did for a while, which was melting dark chocolate bars in the microwave, as well as heating my milk that way. (The steamer hurts my ears.)

Never let it be said that I don't take care of my equipment. :) I sometimes think that half the reason I make coffee is for the ritual of hooking up the machine, brewing, and then cleaning it all thoroughly before stashing it. Satisfying.

Milk shouldn't keep for twenty days past its expiration date when it's already been opened. But I suspect the fact that it did is related to the necessity of keeping the mayo in the other fridge because it kept freezing.

I might start making mochas more often. Especially if I get some good decaf coffee. It keeps forever in the freezer (well, next to forever) and I have access to a good brand, Thanksgiving. Grind your own, of course. Time to experiment a little -- knowing me, I'll end up with Chantico, though hopefully with less sugar. *vibrate*

I'm really more of a tea person, but my time in Washington marked me. *grin*