food

food : muffins

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I’ve been promising friends the muffin recipe(s) that we use, from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, and I realized that I did post the recipe a couple of years ago. It should be said that we never make the banana version, since bananas don’t grow in our region; we pretty much cycle through the muffins based on the seasonal availability of the fruit and vegetable ingredients.

Last year, we added a sour cherry variety to our repertoire, and it was fabulous. Much more like dessert than the other varieties, even with the same whole wheat flour and egg substitutions; cherries just make food fancier. For those muffins, substitute 1/2 tsp almond extract for the vanilla extract and use 1 1/2 cups sour cherries (we used frozen, but fresh would no doubt work). Delicious!

food : muffins

vacation : North Carolina

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We took two days to drive home from Hilton Head, stopping in Raleigh and spending the night at the Oakwood Inn. The Inn was (apparently) the first bed and breakfast in the city, and is located in the historic Oakwood neighborhood. The neighborhood has its own very nicely published walking tour guide to the homes, and we enjoyed reading about the places we passed when we hoofed it to and from dinner. Raleigh is not that big; we were planning to take the new circulator bus back to the Inn later in the evening, but just ended up walking everywhere. Years in Ann Arbor and DC without a car, where we regularly walked several miles a night when we went out, trained us well.

Our choice for dinner was The Raleigh Times, a local bar that’s located in the former offices of one of Raleigh’s now-defunct newspapers. It was spacious, well-designed, and played good music. Also, the guacamole and sangria was just as good as I’d been told it would be, which is always nice. We hung out there for a while, and then headed over to check out the live jazz place (the name of which I forget). Sadly, the band wasn’t going on for another hour—it was Saturday night, after all—and we weren’t up for making a night of it, even with the Irish bar right next door. Honestly, the live act at the Irish bar was a little off-putting: I’m sure they were a fine band, but their attempts to turn ‘Whiskey In a Jar’ into a sing-a-long about tequila were not what we were looking for. Instead, we walked back, past the statehouse and the Governor’s mansion, and stood under the streetlights to read the descriptions of houses we found interesting. We happened to be there on the weekend of the annual garden tour, so everyone’s yards and porches were looking particularly spiffy.

Before leaving Raleigh we were hoping to visit the Seagrove Pottery shop, however the hours didn’t work out. We did peer in the window and admire the lovely large pitchers and bowls; in terms of our vacation budget, it’s probably best they weren’t open. (Ditto with the totally funky bag shop in downtown Raleigh.) From there, we headed north on local roads so that my partner could get a sense of my experience riding my bike from Raleigh to DC six years ago. The plan was to stop for lunch in Warrenton, the town that threw the AIDS riders a welcome party at the end of our first day. Although I wasn’t able to recreate the route exactly, we had fun, and we did get lunch as planned. Warrenton was as I remembered it; everyone was perfectly friendly, although we felt a bit out of place in our casual traveling outfits as everyone was kitted out in their church outfits. In the end, we ate at the more casual Italian restaurant, taking half of our meals home to have for dinner. In Warrenton, we experienced one of the more surreal elements of town squares in the South, the Confederate War memorials. Nearly every town of any size has one (Raleigh did), but not necessarily a memorial for any other wars. (And, yes, it’s true that many towns in northern states have Civil War memorials, and it’s also true that in the end all of those dead soldiers were of the same nation. Maybe I’ll feel better about it when we have a national African-American history museum and/or a monument to the slave dead. Recognition of the existing African-American Civil War Memorial, right around the corner from where we used to live in DC, would be a great start.) All that being said, the fact that North Carolina voters chose both Kay Hagan and the prez went a long way toward our greater ease there than in rural South Carolina (where mostly we saw signs protesting incorporation of county land into towns and bumper stickers encouraging tax resistance evasion).

From Warrenton, we bid the Carolinas goodbye, hopped on the highway, and cruised home. Well, we didn’t exactly cruise; we got back off the highway and toodled half of the way through Virginia on Route 1 because it was moving more quickly. (Wow, Virginia! Your traffic is nuts! So glad I don’t live there!) They say the sign of a good vacation is when you’re happy to go and happy to return, and we were certainly both.

vacation : North Carolina

food : strawberry-rhubarb pie

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About five years ago, I realized that I could have homemade pie whenever I wanted if I baked it myself. Like most profound insights in life, this was completely obvious after the fact and I wondered at how I had spent so many pie-free years living in ignorance. No more! Since then, I’ve moved from the classics (apple pie in the fall, pumpkin or sweet potato pie at the holidays) through fancy tarts (lemon curd and Italian almond are the crowd favorites) to the boundless territory of fruit pies. Fruit pies are great because (1) they’re delicious and (2) there are gazillions of different ways to make them. So far, I’ve been working my way through the standards with seasonal fruit: blueberry, peach, apricot, and cherry have all had their turn in the past few years. Some, like blueberry and apple, we revisit every year; now that I have a source for sour cherries, cherry will become part of that rotation.

This week I managed, for the first time in years, to have both strawberries (from the farmers’ market) and rhubarb (from the local organic market) on hand in sufficient abundance to make a pie. Which is to say, usually I eat the strawberries fresh and end up with only rhubarb, which is how we come to have rhubarb muffins all through the year: the excess gets diced and frozen. This year, though, I was determined to try my hand at strawberry-rhubarb pie. I remember this pie from my summers in Ontario, where rhubarb grows like a weed and visits to a pick-your-own strawberry farm were a regular occurrence each June. The pie itself usually came from the store; while I was amply exposed to both plants, the rhubarb side of the family was not the strawberry side of the family and the fruits were rarely prepared in combination. It was my cousins on my father’s side who taught me never to eat rhubarb stalks without dipping them in sugar—never to eat anything unfamiliar that they handed me, as a more general rule—and my mother’s mother who loved the strawberries, dicing them and freezing them or serving them fresh with vanilla ice cream (for breakfast, if we were really lucky).

Now that I use the food processor to make the pie crust dough, making a pie is not as daunting as it was in the beginning. I was able to make the pie this morning (from my go-to pie cookbook) and have it cooling on the counter when our friends arrived to go to the May Fair at the elementary school. After a hot rain-free afternoon at the fair, we enjoyed the pie with ice cream, and my five year old friend gave it a thumbs up. It was great, if I do say so myself; it’s homemade pie, how bad could it be? Later in the weekend, I’ll pass along a couple of pieces to our neighbors who are our go-to friends when I have extra pie hanging around; by taking the pie off our hands, they perform the important function of allowing me to have fun making a pie without us each then having to eat half of it. It works out well for everyone, and we all look forward to the next one.

food : strawberry-rhubarb pie

food : asparagus pasta

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This time of year, I get three things at the farmers’ market: asparagus, rhubarb, and strawberries. These are, no doubt, the same three things everyone gets at the farmers’ market in spring, as they’re the first seasonal foods available. The Master Peace Community Garden Farm has a wide selection of delicious-looking greens; having just completed a six-month tour of nothing but greens and turnips, I’m disinclined to sample them. Instead, I buy asparagus. Lots of asparagus.

One of the most salient dynamics of seasonal eating is the propensity to eat so much of a fruit or vegetable when it’s in season—usually because you’ve been anticipating its arrival for weeks if not months, sometimes because you’ve grown it yourself and it’s just so darn prolific—that you can hardly bear the thought of touching it during the rest of the year. If you’re actively attempting not to buy vegetables shipped from the other coast during the off season, eating as much as you possibly can when it’s locally available is a good way to go to avoid being tempted during the rest of the year. This is my approach to asparagus. I confess to being a bit susceptible to a mob mentality when it comes to fresh produce; I’m not even sure I really like asparagus that much, but there’s such a culture of appreciation and veneration around the plant that I would never pass up the opportunity to cook and eat it. On the other hand, my partner is pretty sure he doesn’t like asparagus that much, so we’ve worked to find ways to prepare it other than steam, dab with butter, drizzle with lemon juice, and sprinkle with black pepper.

The way we’ve found is with pasta. In a cookbook I’ve had for many years, Pasta e Verdura, we found a recipe that we both love which combines the two seasonal favorites of asparagus and crimini mushrooms with shallots and tops it off with parmesan and black pepper (of course). Each spring we have this dish a few times, and then steamed asparagus until I get sick of it, by which point the season is over and we wait until the next year to do it all over again. This week, I ended up with two bunches of asparagus and only one round of mushrooms and shallots, so I improvised a second pasta sauce that was quick and easy. Steamed asparagus, ground walnuts, butter, lemon juice, and the ever-so-important ground black pepper. I think I added grated parmesan because why not, but it would have been just as good without it. If you’re going to keep it vegan by using olive oil, use less lemon juice; it can be overpowering without the butter. The recipe was quite good, enough so that I think I’ll use next week’s asparagus bunch this way rather than taking the time to cook up the mushrooms and shallots (it has the advantage of getting fewer pans dirty).

I’m sure that by the time my asparagus fixation runs its course, it will be just about time for pea season. To which I’m already looking forward.

food : asparagus pasta

J-Wen Farm milk redux

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After missing the market for a couple of weeks while traveling, I caught up with both the J-Wen farmer and the Riverdale market coordinator on Thursday. Both were eager to address my concerns about the spoiled milk, and I agreed to take another quart to test out. This time around, the milk was fine; the spoilage was likely a result of being out in the heat too long, both on display and while I transported it home. The J-Wen folks have moved their display over to the shadier side of the market, and I have been duly instructed to get the milk home into the fridge as quickly as possible after purchasing it. If we go that route in the future, I’ll remember to go to the market in the car.

All’s well that ends well, and there doesn’t appear to be any processing problem at work, just hot days slightly too much time out in the sun.

J-Wen Farm milk redux