A few sentences

Hi.

Just wanted to stop by quickly, and tell you that even though it doesn’t seem like it, I have been stringing together a few sentenes, here and there. I really have. Just lately, they haven’t been about food. That makes me sad, of course, not only because there are so many recipes to try and tell you about, but also because it means that I’m not actually eating much of anything interesting. And if you know me, you know that makes for a pretty sad few weeks.

If you’re curious, I’ve been blogging a bit for the Long River Review, and you can see the latest here and here.

I hope that tides you over. If not, then make galettes, if you haven’t already. Then we’ll talk.

Birthday traditions, plus galettes

I am invariably predictable when it comes to birthdays. Of two things you can be absolutely certain. First, for those not my own, I tend to get extraordinarily excited. We’re talking stay-up-all-night baking projects, planning months in advance, and the like. It’s sick, really.

Which brings me to the next certainty. Somewhere around my birthday, in the name of tradition, I usually get sick. In old family movies, especially the ages 4 through 7 trilogy, there is always a similar scene: a herd of little pig-tailed girls in dresses playing duck duck goose or the equivalent, Little Mermaid decor, and Kenzi, sitting outside of the circle, huddled in what looks like a mass of other people’s jackets, shivering. I’m usually wearing some kind of tiara, too, but I suppose that is beside the point.


My birthday was this past Monday, and as traditions go, I got sick again. I don’t have any home movies to prove it, but I do have some antibiotics and a fairly large pile of work to catch up on, if you’d like to see those. But even though I have sickness following me around every April, it turns out I wouldn’t really have it any other way. I have such wonderful friends that even though I ended the day shivering like mad wearing socks, slippers, and two whole comforters, I still managed to go to sleep happy. With a stomach full of galette. And future Marea reservations. Aren’t I lucky? These two things, plus the promise of a really nice bottle of wine sitting on your table, seem to do the trick entirely.

I also made out with a David Lebovitz cookbook, a generous Williams Sonoma gift card (ice cream maker perhaps?), and too many other things – a result of my parents’ lovely and utterly idiosyncratic habit of buying gifts, forgetting they bought gifts, and so then buying more gifts, having been thrown into a frenzy at the thought of not having any gifts at all.


But back to that galette. My friend Katherin made it for me and brought it to school on the day of my birthday, all wrapped in tin-foil and with plastic forks on the side. We ate it outside, in the sun, with a water-bottle full of red sangria. Which is how I highly suggest you eat it too, once you make it. It was perfect, all rustic and lemony and exactly what I imagine eating in the springtime. More perfect, though, is that when I saw her plate, I got excited for cookies, and then I opened it, and it was a galette. A strawberry one. With thyme. Do my friends know me or what?


Thyme and Strawberry Galette
Adapted from Crumpets and Cakes

Note: Katherin thinks that combining the curd with the strawberries makes it a little heavy on the liquid, but I say do it, because I tasted the final product and it. Was. Delicious.

Pastry:
1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
1 stick unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
3 tablespoons ice water

Filling:
3 tablespoons lemon curd
Strawberries, sliced ¼ inch thick
1 tablespoon honey
1-2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1 egg beaten with a bit of water for egg wash

Mix the flour, salt, and thyme in a food processor. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse meal. With the motor running, add the ice water; process only enough to moisten the dough and have it just come together. (You can also do this with your fingers if you’re an all-star pastry chef, or if you just don’t have a processor.)

Knead the dough just so it comes together and shape it into a disc. Wrap the dough in plastic and chill for at least 30 minutes. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and preheat oven to 400 degrees.

To make the filling, combine all ingredients (except the egg wash, silly) in a medium bowl and set aside.

Sprinkle a lightly floured work surface with 1/2Tbsp turbinado sugar (this step is easily skipped if you don’t have any). Roll out the crust to about ¼ inch thick and about 8 inches in diameter. At the last minute, fold the lemon curd into the filling mixture, and then arrange it all onto the pastry, leaving a border to fold the edges of dough over the strawberries. Brush the dough with the egg wash and bake for 20-25 minutes until the crust is browned and the center is bubbling.

Fifth-stair inspired muffins

The inspiration for this one is pretty strange.

If you don’t know by now, before the restaurant where I work was a restaurant, it was a big, big, old, old barn. The owners even kept an old, old, grey, grey horse in what now is the basement for a few years. Doesn’t that fit right in? Sometimes when I’m bringing boxes down to the still gravel-floored basement, or turning on the outdoor lights, I imagine how the stalls would look, all perfectly vintage-looking, nestled against the stone foundation.

When the barn was renovated, everything original that could stay, did: all of the beams are original, the bar is made out of the old cow stalls. The hay loft remains, though it’s now storage for mixers and deli cups and paper towels, and there is still an old rope swing right hanging above the newer duct work. Every time I go down those stairs, if I look up around the fifth, maybe sixth, stair, I look directly at old crates chock-full of muffin tins. And not the child’s-play muffin tins you make cupcakes in, either – they’re big, huge even, the super-sized version of muffin tins.


Last time I was at work, I hit the fifth stair, and thought that it would be awesome to make giant muffins. That’s it, that’s where I got the idea. And so I did, a few days later.

It turns out that I’m not that big of a muffin person, really (I thought I would rather enjoy being able to eat what is essentially a cupcake in the morning and be able to pass if off as breakfast). They were tasty, what with their heavy-handed dose of chocolate and walnuts, don’t get me wrong, they just weren’t really for me. It’s not a total lost cause, though. At least now I’ll never wonder what it would be like to make giant muffins? I can cross giant, chocolate-banana-walnut muffins off of my list? Maybe it was a total lost cause?


They got eaten, quickly, so maybe that’s a good sign. Though, if you leave pretty much anything out on the table in my apartment, it will get gobbled up at a pretty alarming rate. Like, record setting. It’s quite a nice ego-boost, come to think of it.

The moral: these were certainly decent, it wasn’t quite as awesome to make giant muffins as I had thought (though maybe some of you feel differently about that), and you should make these if you live in an apartment full of skinny, hungry boys. Or if you really like muffins, of course.

That was a terrible sell, I realize. I should never be a salesperson.


Chocolate Banana Walnut (giant) Muffins

1 ½ cups all purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup mashed ripe bananas
1 large egg
½ cup unsalted butter, melted
¼ cup milk
A few handfuls each of :
-semisweet chocolate chips
-roughly chopped walnuts
(Because I’m a rogue baker)


Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and flour your giant muffin tin, if you have one, or line a smaller tin with baking cups. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in large bowl. Mix mashed bananas, egg, melted butter and milk in different, medium bowl. Stir banana mixture into dry ingredients just until mixed.

Stir in chocolate chips and walnuts.

Divide batter among muffin cups, filling each about ¾ full. Bake muffins until tops are pale golden and tester inserted into center comes out relatively clean. Mine took about 30-35 minutes. Transfer muffins to rack; cool.

Feed to hungry roommates.

Staples, hummus, and playing catch-up

Hi there.

I promise I haven’t been off, enjoying all sorts of foodish things and not telling you about any of them. I wouldn’t do that. Last week (or the week before now? Yikes, time flies) was my spring break, my senior year spring break. I know that should have been exciting, but here, in Willimantic, it mainly consisted of glasses of wine before five o’clock and many too many episodes of fabulously melodramatic Lost. No sandy beaches, or Cancuns, or drinks with the little umbrellas in them for me. (Although, in my defense, my line of thinking strictly dictates that bikinis are not for March. Or April. Or maybe even May.)

So needless to say, I’ve been playing catch up with term papers and literary journal research, eating on-the-fly risotto, and spending the better part of Saturday mornings trying to make cut-offs out of old jeans. (Which, by the way, came out perfect if I wanted to have something vaguely similar to what Never Nudes wear.)


In an effort to not totally neglect you, though, I have a quick recipe and some exciting news. First, exciting news: remember this picture I took of pasta a while back? Well that, in a snazzy black and white version, is being printed in the Long River Review this year! Isn’t that exciting? I saw it in the draft that came back from the printer two nights ago, and while it's no huge, sweeping landscape, or an artsy portrayal of an antique car, I’m proud of its little persistence in being the only food photo that’s been published, well, for a few years now. Thank you, Dough, for being oh so photogenic.

Second, quick recipe: I wanted to give you my standby recipe for hummus both because it's my standby, and because it's something I have been known to live on for days at a time. In a word, this hummus is a staple. My roommate Annie introduced me to the recipe, and since, I’ve adapted it ever so slightly. I’ve started to eyeball everything now, instead of adhering closely to the exact measurements, and I’ve found that it comes out just a little different every time. Which I like, sort of. It almost turns the making of hummus, which is literally turn-on-the-food-processor-boring, into something less tedious, a game even.

Staple Hummus

I feel a bit like that name leads you to believe the hummus is actually made of staples, which means I should name it something else. In a moment of me exercising poetic license, however, it stays. Because I say so.

2 cups cooked chick peas
3 tablespoons tahini
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 generous pinch salt
1 head roasted garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
3-4 tablespoons water (to achieve desired consistency)
2 tablespoons vinegar

To roast the garlic, cut off about a half inch of the top of one head, and peel all but the layer closest to the cloves. Drizzle a bit of olive oil over the top, then wrap it in tin foil and roast for about 30 minutes in a 400 F oven. Let it cool, and peel it, before you add it to the hummus.

This is it: pulse everything but the water in a food processor until fairly smooth. Then, a tablespoon at a time, add in the water until it reaches your desired consistency.

Meetings and greetings

I generally don’t mind being left out. I hesitate to say that, mostly because it points glaringly at the hermit crab shell I like to sink into every now and then, and because socially, that’s weird, right? I don’t know, sometimes I really don’t mind being the third wheel, or whatever it is that they call it. Tricycles are cooler anyway. If I can drift off into some dream world of my own, I’m usually ok. Better than ok, actually.

But since I’m the weird one, and you, readers, are presumably the ones without hermit crab shells, and by that I mean not socially awkward, you’re probably feeling pretty left out by now. I don’t know if it’s because I've been too busy to notice or I’m missing some kind of cordial gene or what, but I’ve been carrying on about my restaurant, all this time, and I’ve never once formally introduced you to it and all of it’s lovely people. I’ve been a bad host.

So, then, in the spirit of not being left out, I’d like to introduce you to where I work, or more accurately, the place that has had dibs on me every Saturday date-night since high school. Let’s call it a meet and greet, long overdue.

Readers, kindly meet the Still River Café:


If you want to see more pictures of the interior, which you should because the barn is really quite something, take a look here. I took these at the end of service yesterday, and was experiencing the routine back-and-feet-ache ailments of serving, and well, didn’t quite have the patience for my camera.

I suppose this meet and greet will be slightly incomplete, because I didn’t corner each of the servers and snap photos of them, mug-shot style. I tried to be as discreet as possible, which meant that for today, you only get to meet the kitchen. But that’s ok, because this is where most of the magic happens anyway.

Readers, meet the kitchen:


That's Brandon, all the way to the right. He can usually be found at his station, singing a mean rendition of an 80s rock song, in case you wanted to know. Laurent is to the left, manning the stove, and is the frenchman that taught me to dice with the best of them. Also, that the the unused tops and leftover sides of red peppers shouldn't be thrown away because, in his words, zey are moneey.

And here's Joe-of-all-trades, who is apparently a muscle man, who usually serves with us but can also work in the kitchen, if needed.


Our dishwasher James may require a post of his own. In short, he's the man to go to if you're wondering how long it will take to translate, backwards, a Greek novel to English in your spare time. Or if you're short red wine glasses. Meet James:


I know you still haven't met the servers, or the owners who mostly function as second parents for me, but at least now you'll feel a little less left out. Stay tuned for hummus, independent study writing, and perhaps some pork buns (!!!).

The art of seeduction

Is that a horrible pun? Probably yes. But technically, though I wish I could, I can’t take credit for it. This is a bread that Whole Foods is apparently famous for, or at the very least, they’re the ones who came up with the wonderfully awful pun.


Two friends and I made this bread for the first time last week, and there is another batch of dough rising on my counter as I type this, only one week later. What can I say, I’ve been seeduced. (Too much? Sorry.)

I’ve always regarded bread as one of the more wholesome things you can make, itself a testament to domesticity, perhaps second only to perfectly trimmed pie crusts and embroidered aprons. It’s almost a culinary right of passage; to have bread-baking under your belt is the driving-test equivalent of adolescence.


I’ve also always regarded bread, like most things that spend the majority of their cooking time in the oven, as being finicky. The first time I can remember making bread was at my restaurant, during my stint in the kitchen. After cutting and shaping the dough, I would have to spray water into the convection oven every half minute, on the half minute, to imitate the steam injection of more schmancy bread ovens. It was all a science: each batch would bake for eleven minutes, no more, no less.



This time around, I had at least two people at any given time, hunched over the open oven with me, trying desperately to figure out if the crust was golden or if it sounded hollow when tapped. There were even frantic text messages thrown into the mix. When you can’t stick a tester in the center, or you aren’t told that it needs exactly eleven minutes, baking can actually be quite terrifying.

After all that, though, the bread came out perfectly sans spray bottles and to-the-minute-timing. I don’t know if it was all the seeds that kept it from drying out or if, like my driving test, my first go alone just needed to be borderline horrifying like some kind of initiation, but I did it. And now, I’m doing it again.


Seeduction Bread
(Adapted from Caviar and Codfish)

½ cup lukewarm water
2 ½ teaspoons active dry yeast
¼ cup honey
2 ¾ cups bread flour (A/P will suffice if it’s all you have)
1 cup whole wheat flour
½ cup bulgur or cracked wheat
1 ½ teaspoons salt
¼ cup olive oil
1 cup cool water
1 cup raw sunflower seeds
3 tablespoons poppy seeds
½ cup plus 3 tablespoons raw pumpkin seeds

In a medium bowl, sprinkle yeast over the lukewarm water. Mix in honey and let sit for about 10 minutes, making sure that it foams; this is how you know your yeast is alive.

Put flours, bulgur and salt in the bowl of your mixer (you can use a food processor or your hands as well) and mix to combine. Pour the oil and cool water into the yeast mixture and then, with the mixer running, pour it slowly into the flour mixture. Let it run until the dough stops sticking to the outside walls of mixer bowl and it forms around the dough hook. Add a teaspoon or two of water if it’s not sticky enough to form the ball, or flour if it looks too wet. Let the processor run for another minute to knead the dough.

Remove the dough to a greased bowl, making sure all sides of the dough get a little oil on them. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise in a warm spot for 2 hours.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface, and knead it a few times to form a large oval. Sprinkle with the seeds (reserving 3 tablespoons pumpkin seeds) and fold in half. Knead the dough so that you distribute the seeds evenly. This will take a little while and be slightly awkward (for fair warning). Just keep going, though, eventually the seeds will stick into the dough and distribute.

Divide the dough into two and form tight round balls. Roll the tops of the dough balls in the reserved pumpkin seeds. Place on the baking sheet, cover loosely with plastic wrap, and let rise for 45 minutes to an hour.

Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Bake the breads on the center rack for 35 minutes, or until they are “golden and sound hollow when tapped.” I would recommend checking every few minutes after they’ve been in for 25 minutes; my crusts ended up being a deep brown, too, if that helps. Cool before slicing.

This week: kindle musings, and how I'm an old person in a young person's body

This week I'm blogging over at the Long River Review; its a blog run by all of us working on the magazine this year, and we talk about whatever we feel like talking about that can be linked, in one way or another, to literary things.

I blogged about e-books this week, how the men upstairs at Kindle are giving away free downloads, all with a healthy undercurrent of disdain. (Long live print media!) Last year, my Long River blogs were about the craziness of online jargon, urban dictionaries, and the like. Next thing you know, I'll be wondering why we can't all just go back to land lines and what ever happened to the good old fashioned bag boys that helped you to your car. I am, it seems, an old person masquerading as a young one.

Anyway, go check it out if you have a minute - our website just got a shmancy new face lift. I have some bread-making in the works, too, so make sure you come back to check.