Foam on the Range

Photo: Gary Alan Fine

A word about foam. Spuma. Froth. Emulsion. Whatever. This is an increasingly popular menu technique, so widespread that it should (whew) soon be a thing of the trendy food past.

What it is supposed to be, when successfully executed, is an exciting textural and flavor experience, with a subtle essence or surprising taste element dancing on one's tongue then shoopt! disappearing on angel's wings in the pop of a bubble.

What it is most of the time is a spewy-looking, bubbly blob-- a clumsy nod to the idol-worship of food pioneer Ferran Adria, and evidence of the widening concentric circles of his influence in the surprisingly small puddle that is high-end restaurant food. (If you don't believe it's trendy, try searching "horseradish"--or beet, or wasabi, or any other secondary ingredient--+"foam" on google.)

I understand it, but I don't like it. There are many unpleasant things that I could tell you it reminds me of, but the next time you see it on your plate, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. It is unpleasant to look at, something I have to make myself overcome before I dig in.

A friend told me once that she didn't like overly precious or composed plates, because she always wondered how many people in the kitchen had to play with her food before she got to eat it. I feel a similar way about foam. Does it have to be "playful" or bear the mark of in-the-know pseudo-innovation to be good? There are people (see Thomas Keller, another example) who can pull off cheeky haute-gustatory feats--people who have refined palates and a stunning sense of balance and restraint. And then there are people who should not try this at home. They do anyway. I'll be so glad when this whole frothy mess blows over.

Good, Fast, Cheap II: Return of the Hummus

Slightly less garlicky, more flavorful hummus recipe than last time, a little tangier and less pasty.

Ingredients
1 green onion, trimmed and cut into 3 or 4 pieces
1/4 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into chunks
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 can garbanzo beans, rinsed
1/4- 1/2 tsp salt
1 T mayo (optional)
2-3 T rice vinegar
2 T ground flax seed (optional, but why not?)
1/2 tsp ground cumin
water (optional)

Materials
Food processor
Spatula

Method
Put first three ingredients in food processor, process until everything is stuck to the sides.
Scrape down with spatula, add remaining ingredients, process until texture of your choice, (I like grains to be like coarse corn meal rather than creamy) scraping down sides and bottom of processor bowl at least once. Add water if the mixture is too thick-- the flax will suck the water out of the mixture and thicken it, so better too soupy than too thick if you want to store it. You can always stir in a little water later if this does happen.

I had mine on this turkey, radicchio and apple sandwich. The radicchio was a little much for it-- tasted better when I had a bite of just the turkey, hummus and pita.

Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

Say, is that a humongously large zucchini you have there? (Kitchen timer included for scale.)


Abundance in the garden! In the veggie box! (This isn't even half of what came today. The oranges were from somewhere else, a few weeks ago.) In the bean barrels! Suddenly, it is summer.

Jeez, how did this turn into a blog about vegetables? Because at the moment, vegetables (and fruits) are my life. They are what is happening here in the Napa Valley. In my neck of the woods, anyway.

Yes, I am also surrounded by grapes. Right now, they are all the size of large peas, smaller than small marbles, and are very green and hard. It won't be long, though. The weather has been just what we like, except for the lack of about half of our rain. But otherwise, just right. Grapes are ready between 100 and 110 days after they bloom, which will get us started in the late part of August to mid-September, and last, depending on the weather, until mid-October. Harvest is a great time to be in the valley. It is all very exciting, even if you just like to drink wine. I'm really lucky.

Sometimes I forget that I am here in the middle of what so many people dream of seeing. I am going to work up a map of my favorite things and places and post it here. This summer, I promise.

The beans I planted a few days ago were not even bumps in the soil this morning when I left for St. Helena, and (no picture because it's dark outside) tonight there are little vines that have apparently been hard at work all day, because they have leaves and are poking right out of their little bean jackets already. Tomorrow I'll have to go find some sticks for bean teepees.

Lightening the Library

In order to trim down my book collection and make it a little more potentially mobile, I’ve just signed up with a site called paperbackswap.com.

The site is free (for now, at least). You list the books you have to give away, and mail them (at your own cost) when someone requests a book. For every book you send, you get a credit to receive another book in return. When you sign up, you receive three credits as a welcome gift, so you’re already ahead.

I’ve tried listing books with Amazon’s used book system. I had only one taker—someone in Kentucky needed a book on sushi, if you can believe it. The postage cost as much as the book sold for. In fact, I didn’t have any bubble mailers (I now hoard them) so I had to pay for the packaging AND postage and came out .60 behind after I got my credit from Amazon. There are just so many volume used booksellers out there selling the same books for a buck.

Here are some other book-buying and selling resources:
Swaps:
paperbackswap.com
bookmooch.com
frugalreader.com

Cheap Paperbacks:
thriftbooks.com
rereadables.com

Update: I posted 49 books this morning, and as of 12:30, I've already received over a dozen requests for books! So now I'm going to send these books to other people, collect the credits, and see if I can spend my credits on books I've always wanted to collect or own. Maybe I'll just look for very, very small books that don't weigh very much...

Sunday

I have to tell you, Robert Chunn has some new paintings available on Etsy (go to his site via the link and then click on the Etsy link)-- I love these so much that it's tempting to go buy another one... like this one:

Does it not rock? I love the two I have already.

Anyway, while I contemplate that, you can contemplate this week in the garden. Also this week, two band names seem to have dropped out of the ether into my brain: The Warhol Marilyns and Drag Ratio. I like those.





This morning, I made corn pancakes with green onions and ham for breakfast. Mike and I have found that pancakes made with coarse-ground cornmeal have a little more sticking power to last until lunch time (because lord knows by then we are just about faint with starvation, since we are both so scrawny and undernourished).

Corn Pancakes (this is enough for two)

Ingredients
1 egg
1/2 c milk or soy milk
1 T sugar
1/4 c medium to coarse ground cornmeal (I like Bob's Red Mill. They also make the coconut I use in the granola)
1/4 c flour
1 tsp BP*
*I have used this, and I have forgotten it, and I can't remember if it makes a difference. Nice recipe, huh?
Butter
(Optional: snipped green onions, chili flake, ham bits, or go sweet with blueberries or bananas.)

Tools
Non-stick or well-greased frying pan
Spatula (the yellow one)
Bowl
Whisk
1/4 c measuring cup

Method
Turn the pan on low, wipe with a little oil
Beat egg, add milk, add dry ingredients.
Make some coffee while you wait for the corn meal to soften and the pan to heat.
(Mix in optional ingredients if desired.)
Dip measuring cup in mix to make 4-5" pancakes. Cook them on the first side until bubbles on top look dry and bottom is golden brown, then flip and cook until golden on the other side.
Butter each pancake as you place it on a plate, preferably in a slightly warm oven, to wait for the others.
If sweet, serve with maple syrup, if savory, creme fraiche (my apologies for the lack of proper accents) is a nice accompaniment. Feel free to invent variations.

You can make these with green onions and chili flake in advance of a party and whip out a quick and impressive appetizer: make pancakes "silver dollar" size, with half a scoop of batter or less per pancake, cook, freeze or refrigerate, and reheat later on a baking sheet before topping with smoked salmon, creme fraiche, and a sprig of dill. Voila! You are the star!

You Gotta Keep 'Em Generated

Ok, one more post. I have hit the motherlode of silly thing generators: The Surrealist U.K. Generate yer cotton pickin' boots off. Marketing-speak, ad slogans, your own church signs, silliness galore. If that's not enough, you'll need a double-shot of the Captain Underpants silly name generator. (Beware of imitations and emails that claim to generate Captain Underpants names, this is the real thing, from the book Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants.) If that's not enough, generate some subdivisions. (This list is better, but it doesn't have a generator.) And just in case you missed it, here's the Random Band Name Generator.
Love, Tamara

PS- I can't stop! One more: The Haiku Generator. Tip: if the generator page does not seem to have a "generate" button, hit "refresh" in your top menu.

Welcome to My Parlor

Ok, I've had a lovely couple of weeks gardening and chatting with you, but it's time to get back to work tomorrow, so I thought I would share some pictures of my office with those of you who are very far away (or very near but who have never been in my office) so you can imagine me sitting here, looking out the window as the sky turns the color of a Royal Blenheim apricot (which you now have seen) and maybe imagine yourself sitting here, too, having an iced coffee with me on a hot, hot day. There are two cushy cubes behind me, so don't worry, you don't have to sit on that hard black dumpster diver stool.

The cords and things are kind of messy--you should have seen it before I got the little basket from my friend Lisa. Those are my peeps on top of my computer and behind them on the magnet board that Mike made for me, the faces I look at every day and smile. Over there on the left in the bookcase is my grandfather's painting of a bullfighter, which I love, my two new little paintings by Robert Chunn, my map of Manhattan from September 11th, and my paper umbrella collection. On top of the bookcase is my latest train-case acquisition, with my Stupid Creatures, Astor and Nestor, on top of it. Oh, and my African megaphone made from a Lolita talcum powder can. (I collect vintage train-cases, the small, square suitcases women used to use to carry their personal toiletry items in. If you have one, or see a really choice one at a yard sale, I'll pay to ship it. Think beach colors, and square rather than rounded plastic.)


I have my monitor set up so that it changes pictures from my flower and fruit photo folder every hour. Right now there are fava beans underneath the window I am typing in. On the left is my current things to do list, which goes on the pig-sticker when it is done, or when I lose it and then find it months later. Also old lottery tickets go here. Under that is the list of birthdays for the next month. What the hell were everyone's parents doing in November, for Christ's sake? Nevermind, I know.

And that concludes our tour for today. Please come see us again soon.

You're Going To Need This

Here is the cobbler dough recipe given to me by my old friend, chef Lou Lane, about twenty years ago. It has never failed me. It works for absolutely any kind of fruit, and you can also cut it into little biscuits and make shortbreads out of it, but it's best on top of the fruit so that it can soak up the yummy juice.

Lou "Butch" Lane's Cobbler Dough

Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 Tbl baking powder
1 tsp salt (1/2 tsp if using salted butter)
2 Tbl sugar
1/2 c unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
+/- 1 cup cream (Half & half will do, or even milk, if that's all you have. Cream is best.)

Tools
Food processor
(This recipe can of course be made without one-- use a fork to toss the dry ingredients, use your fingers or a pastry blender to incorporate the butter, as you would for biscuits, and go back to the fork for the cream.)
Spatula (the white one)
optional: parchment paper and rolling pin

Method
Measure dry ingredients into bowl of food processor, mix
Drop butter bits around the flour, pulse a couple of times, then spin until fully incorporated.
Open the processor and sprinkle about half the cream on top of the flour*, close the processor and turn on. Drizzle cream into the bowl until the mixture just forms a ball and starts to chase itself around the bowl. Stop immediately.
Place a square of parchment paper on the counter and scoop your dough ball out of the processor, pressing all of the loose bits in.
Chill for about half an hour. (Or not.)


(For cobbler, you can use this time to cut up enough summer fruit to fill your square glass pan, loaf pan, or pie pan, mixed in a bowl with about a tablespoon of sugar and a pinch of salt. Don't be afraid to fill it up-- the fruit will shrink and the dough will soak up the juice. This is peaches, apricots, cherries and blackberries.)

Open up the parchment and flatten the dough out to about the size and shape of your pan, flip it over on top of the fruit. Cut a few slits in the dough, and throw it in the oven at about 350 degrees. I set the timer for 30 minutes and check it. This one took 45 minutes. About. But I lost track because I was blogging and it turned out fine.

I'm tellin' ya', this one is so super easy that it's going to get you invited back to all of the barbecues this summer. Try it hot out of the oven with ice cream. (Don't worry, I won't be having any ice cream tonight.) I'll bet you could even make some of this dough up in advance, roll it into the right shape for your pan while it's still soft, and put it in the freezer in a plastic bag. Think how cool you'd be. *Note: the sprinkling bit was not called for in the original recipe. The reason I do this is that if you turn the food processor on, the flour spins to the outside of the bowl, leaving a space. When you start to pour the cream directly in, it goes directly into the bottom of the bowl and then spins outward, making a paste at the very bottom, and distributing unevenly. If you put some of the cream in first, then turn the processor on, it mixes more evenly. IF you just poured it in and got the paste thing, either stop, scrape up the bottom and give it a couple of pulses, or just gently knead it in with your hands when you ball it up at the end.

Moving On

Ok, it's been a day since I wrote the last post. I had another great day, though the weather was hot, hot, hot.

I ate egg salad in lettuce for lunch (which is actually awesome, try it) along with some cannelloni beans that I made on Tuesday. I picked up some chicken at Trader Joe's and made some flavorful, lowfat protein for myself, i.e., Green Chicken. Turned out pretty good. We had it for dinner with a salad of raw, shaved zucchini from the garden.


Tonight when I walked to the big garden with my basket to cut some herbs (with my scissors) I was again struck by the beauty. The way the light danced around the fireworks of the onion blossoms, glinting off the visiting bees. The colors of the rainbow chard. The smell of ripe blackberries in the hot sun. I picked rosemary, flat-leaf parsley, basil, and oregano. The dwarf peach trees are starting to drop their fruit on the ground, so I picked a few of those, too. And some of those pretty blackberries. Now that they are sweet, black, and fragrant, I realize that we were just eager for summer when we thought they were ripe a couple of weeks ago. I just walked along, picking a little of this, and a little of that, looking for zucchini that will be overgrown by the next time I come to the garden, admiring the way the peppers, eggplant and tomatoes have shot up in the last week.

And you know what? I simply cannot be at war with food. Not this food. All of this beautiful produce brings me so much joy.

I came home and put all of the herbs in the food processor with some salt, garlic and olive oil and made the green chicken. I cut up the beautiful fruit and made a cobbler. And I ate a modest dinner so that when that timer rings, I can go back out to the living room and enjoy a piece.

The Big O

Yesterday was a fine day. I made some granola, did some blogging (as you can probably tell), spent some time with my friends Tyla and Mollie, in turn, as Tyla had to have her hair done and Mollie took a nap upon her return, and I worked out at the gym. In the evening, I dug out all of the bulbs from the half-barrel planters in the back yard, filled the barrels with soil, and shoved some beans into the ground, hoping for some fast summer plants. And fall beans, of course. I added a couple of plants to my pot on the front porch, since the dragon crossvine seems to have lost its desire to put out those pretty red-orange trumpety flowers since I planted it. I pinched back the growing shoots in the hopes of encouraging it to refocus its efforts.

It was in between my swim at the gym and the evening gardening activities that I blithely hopped on the scale and discovered that I am half a pound away from the most that I have ever previously weighed. Talk about a day-wrecker.

I find myself walking a precarious balance between trying to be positive and give myself the benefit of the doubt, focus on action and move forward, and feeling really, really bad about myself. Action is the only thing that is going to change the situation, and no matter what, it can't change today, not entirely. Or tomorrow. Losing weight is something that takes daily attention and effort. It is a pain in the cellulite-lumpy ass. It is.

No matter how much weight I lose, I am never going to get any taller, or any prettier. (See how the negativity creeps in?) I hate jumping onto the hamster wheel that is kept spinning by the media, and women themselves, encouraging women to feel like they must keep improving themselves physically, LOSE WEIGHT! LOOK YOUNGER! DRESS THINNER! BUY! BUY! BUY! And yet I know that when I am this heavy, I don't feel good in the clothes I have. Things stick out. It is uncomfortable to sit wearing anything fitted, not because the clothes are uncomfortable, but because I can feel the lumps on my stomach sticking out. I become the muffin-top poster-child.

The last time I weighed this much was about, oh, ten years ago, I think. I quit my job at Tra Vigne restaurant. At one point while I was working there, I weighed almost 40 lbs less than I do now. By the time I left the restaurant a few years later, I had put a few back on, but still felt ok. The summer after I quit the restaurant, and the next year after, I wore loose linen shifts the whole summer, took a trip to Europe, and enjoyed my time off, deciding what to do with my life. I had a great time, for the most part. I also put on 20 lbs.

The most mortifying moment, which I will share with you now because I believe that sharing embarrassing moments as much as possible helps dissipate them, was when I ran into the former restaurant gardeners at the grocery store. Now, they had only ever seen me at the restaurant, in my suits and blouses, and they knew I had gotten married, and left the restaurant, and that they hadn't seen me for a few months. Suddenly, I was much heavier, and was wearing a loose linen dress. That is the set-up, and you know what comes next. We had gotten a puppy (so it was exactly ten years ago) and I was showing them the puppy. They asked if I had any "other news". It took me a moment to realize what they meant. Holding back tears, I said, "No, just the puppy." and went inside to find Mike. I barely made it out of the store and into the car before I burst into sobs.

Ok, so that's what's on my mind today, as I'm trying to go about my day. When I look in the mirror, from the front, when I'm getting ready each day, I just don't notice it that much. When I take a walk, my silhouette on the pavement doesn't look fat. Most of the time, I forget how I look. Here is a passage from a book I read (coincidentally) a couple of weeks ago, called Fat Girl:

"It may come as a surprise to you-- or maybe it won't-- but I often do not realize that I am fat, or how fat I am. When I am by myself, I don't tend to think about how I appear. I think about what I am doing. So when I see photographs...I am shocked by the difference between how I believed I looked and how I did look. This has happened before; I have believed I looked acceptably attractive, or even pretty, and then saw photographs that showed my wide butt and bulging stomach and those arms as big as big bolognas that hang from deli ceilings."

I realize that my situation is not this dire. The book, if you want to read it, is by Judith Moore. It is hard and short and painfully truthful. I also realize that in this post, I have crossed a new line. This is pretty personal stuff here. But I'm going to put it up anyway.

Indispensable

Here are some things that I wind up using over and over again in the kitchen. Even if you don't feel like you "cook" you'll cook for yourself sometime, and these will come in handy. (I've included where you can buy them as well.)

Silicone Spatulas
The little red one, in particular, is good for getting the last bit of anything out of a bowl, narrow jar or can (think tomato paste and horseradish). It also works for mayo, mustard, and molasses and honey at the bottom of a measuring cup. I keep a well-nicked white spatula specifically for cleaning the food processor so the other ones don't get shredded. Silicone spatulas are obviously also good for every type of flipping or stirring whether or not heat is involved. Dishwasher safe.

The little thin yellow one is the king of tiny flipping. Eggs, blinis, corn pancakes, crepes, whatever. It's always either in use, or in the dishwasher, because we use it so much. What I love about it is that when I'm making corn pancakes, or any batter, for that matter, I can use it to scrape out the bowl before the last pancake. Only one utensil to wash. Thrifty and Compulsive at it again-- it drives me nuts when cooks on television don't scrape their bowls out when making recipes. "You put three tablespoons of (ingredient) in there!" I shout. "What if there's a tablespoon left!" or "There's another whole pancake in that bowl!" Ok, I don't really shout, but I think about doing the math and wonder how many hundreds of pancakes could have been saved if each and every one of them would just scrape out the bowl. I have not been able to find this specific spatula online yet. The initials on the handle are WMB. My mom got it in a store in Modesto. I will find out more if I can.

Sturdy Kitchen Shears
I use these for everything from opening zip-top packages (such as those nasty sugar-laden dried apples) to snipping chives, parsley and cilantro, cutting flowers, string, parchment paper. Absolutely everything. Even cutting up those nasty sugar-laden dried apples. My grandmother asked me once what I wanted for a present, and I said kitchen shears, and this is what I got. She thought it was a little weird at the time, but I use them a lot, and every time I look at them and use them, which I have for years, I think of my grandmother.

I don't remember exactly when I started making a point of making sure that my birthday and Christmas money went towards specific things that were practical and I knew I'd use, but I'm glad now that I did. My big dictionary, my stockpot, these shears, my good chef's knife, all came from my grandparents' gifts. My pepper grinder was a wedding gift from a good friend. She asked for one from me for her wedding, and I asked for one from her. It's always been symbolic of our friendship to me. Not that our friendship is peppery. It's simple, sturdy, and important, and it's always at hand, whether I need it or not.

Dog
Great to have on hand, or under foot as the case may be, if you don't have a dustbuster. (We are thinking of calling our next dog Underfoot.) For cleaning up small spills and flung granola bits. Easy to use.

Fruit of the Day- Royal Blenheim Apricots

How Do You Like Them Apples? I Don't.

Dear Stoneridge Orchards,
Stoneridge Orchards sounds very farmy and wholesome. Imagine my surprise when I opened the package of "Dried Granny Smith Apple Wedges" and found that they were coated with sugar, dextrose, citric acid, malic acid, ascorbic acid and sunflower oil. Yes, they are technically speaking "all natural" but they are certainly not au naturel.

I should have been wary when I read the medallion on the front which highlighted the fact that they were made from "freshly hand-picked apples" (what else would they be made of?)...which are then dried and apparently covered in sugar. I was making granola, and I had already put in as much brown sugar as I wanted, so I had to rinse the sugar off of the cut-up apples and bake it more so that they'd dry out.

My gripe is not that you choose to put sugar on the apples. Some people might like that. I would just like to have been warned. How about putting "Sweetened Dried Granny Smith Apple Wedges" on your packaging in the future?

Thank you,
Tamara Landre

Isn't She Lovely?

Voila! My new composter. Is it just me, or does it look like the maid on the Jetson's? Did she have a name, or was it just Maid? Somebody look that up for me. Wait, I looked that up myself. Her name was Rosie. I have reservations about naming my composter Rosie, since Rose is my grandmother's name. I'm not sure she'd appreciate that. I love having the little bowl on the counter for the stems and scraps that collect in the day, knowing that eventually it will all end up as some nice, nutritious stuff for my garden. There is something very satisfying about completing that circle. (That's my thrifty side and my compulsive side, wringing their little hands and contemplating the takeover of the universe.) Now that I have been overwhelmed by late season kale and turnips, the composter is going to come in handy.

In completely unrelated news, my book club, or rather, the book club that I attend, is reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Click on the link to visit its very unique and interesting site.

For those who want to know, here is what the garden that I planted a few Sundays ago looks like now. I added sunflowers, which were supposed to be lined up along the back (whoops, a little crazy raking must have happened) and some wildflower mix in the bare spots caused by the gophers. Whatever's been munching on my basil seems to have abated temporarily.

Oh yes, and here's today's art class piece. It is a hat, with a scarf on it, sitting on top of a wooden hat form on top of a chair which is out of perspective with another scarf draped over it. Free to good home. They can't all be trout.

San Francisku

Oh, San Francisco
Chilly city-- hilly city
San Francisco