food – Page 3 – Words' End

December 18, 2007

chicken a la cultural transmission

“Scarborough Fair” is an old one! The Fair itself, a huge month-and-a-half-long trade show, originates in the 13th century, and the ballad appears to have its origins in another one from the late 17th. I, of course, am partial to Simon and Garfunkel’s version (link to YouTube video), because it takes me all the way back to 1993, when I moved from New York to sunny southern California (and hated it). S&G’s “The Concert in Central Park” was one of the first CDs I mail-ordered from BMG, an unspeakable luxury back then. That CD came with the bonus of “A Heart in New York,” which I sang to myself whenever I missed Queens. Which was often.

Come to think of it, I also hummed it to myself whenever I flew into New York to visit my brother (or whatnot). Have you flown into New York City in the dark? It’s unbelievably cool.

But this is a recipe post, of course:

-Take a chicken breast. Preferably a locally-grown, awesomely outrageous chicken breast, like the stuff I get from these folks. Defrost if necessary. (Never ever defrost meat in the microwave: potential health problems aside, it just gets an icky texture.) Preheat oven to 400F (200C).

-Put some salt, pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in a leettle bowl. How much? I dunno. It’s hard to over-herb a chicken breast. Mix.

-Put in a couple spoons of mayonnaise. Again, I don’t know how much: enough to coat the chicken. Mix well with the herbs.

-Slather the mixture all over the chicken. Use your hands. Get some under the skin too, if you like.

-Put chicken in a foil-lined or greased baking dish. Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until the juices run clear when you poke it with a fork. Eat, and tell me you don’t love me. I dare you.

By the way: I’m generally not a white-meat person. The meat CSA share has changed that! The Chestnut Farms chicken – as all their other meats – is amazing, and given that I’m not going to give up meat for environmental reasons anytime soon, it’s just about the most eco-conscious stuff to get. We get to eat meat of animals raised humanely, meat that hasn’t been plied with mysterious ingredients and transported the usual long distances. Support local agriculture, and all that.

If you have a chance to support your local agriculture, meat-raising or not, I encourage you to do so. Chestnut Farms’ minimum monthly share (ten pounds) is way too much for us, so we share it among three households. That way, even though the per-pound cost is high ($7 or a bit less, depending on whether they have thrown in freebies), it doesn’t break the bank to get a 3-4 lbs a month. Paradoxically, this arrangement has encouraged me to eat less meat than I normally would: store-bought stuff just doesn’t compare unless it’s really great and thus even more expensive.

Being able to participate in this meat-share thing has made me very, very happy to be back in Massachusetts: there was nothing like it around Providence, although the fruit-and-veggie farmers’ markets there are pretty good. It’s just one more thing that makes Boston feel like home all over again.

September 19, 2007

Bread.

What’s your favorite recipe for bread, made using hands and an oven but no bread machine, and easy for a bread beginner, and not so time-consuming that it’ll discourage me from baking bread in the future? Not sourdough: I don’t have starter, and don’t like sourdough enough to seek it out.

LiveJournal readers, please to comment using the URL up top and not directly on LJ; I won’t see the latter.

September 16, 2007

Cheesemas, and directional

Today was cheesemas. Cheeses were bought and brought – drunken goat, mozzarella, robiola, explorateur (?! – hokey name, but most excellent cheese), some other alcohol- (port-)laced semisoft cheese, Valdeon (a Spanish blue), raclette and half a dozen others. Someone even brought raclette ice cream which, really, was much milder than it had any right to be. Add to that fruit, bread, fig-and-vidalia jam, wine, beer, sprakly non-alc cider, fifteen folk or more and two mostly happy and social toddlers, and it’s cheesemas in the neighborhood. My undying gratitude and love to my cheesemas-elf conspirator.

Unrelatedly, I thought some this evening, and wrote down the following:

north is triangular, steady, monument-al

east is rounded, exotic, otherworldly

south is light, scintillating, hot

west is radio, diagonal, big

the center is small, sensitive, reactive

January 25, 2007

RolandHT, and ask the internets.

I’ve put up the latest version of RolandHT. It can only be viewed with (freely available) Mozilla/Firefox, or another XSLT-aware browser. I don’t know of any besides Firefox, so if you do, please let me know the browser and the operating system(s) on which you’ve used it.

The site definitely needs a help section, and some more intuitive navigation. For now, a few usage notes:

– The links up top don’t do anything yet.

– Pick an excerpt from the list on the left. Mouseover themes/characters/imagery that show up over the sword, and see what happens. Then click on a theme or character or image, and see what happens now.

– Click on the red “reset” at top right to return to initial state.

– For three other nifty features, find the excerpt named “Missionary Work.” Click on the “i” beside the name of the work; click on the quill in the second stanza; mouseover any underlined word.

– Check out also the excerpt, near the very bottom, titled “Battle Near Saragossa.” Click on the image.

– If something seems aesthetically or functionally wrong, it would be lovely if you emailed me to let me know.

– This is a work in progress. If you see the word “check” where you expect information, I’m working on it.

In other news, a couple of questions for the internet. The first, in two parts, is Roland-related – I’d like to know more about two geographical locations. One is Terra Major:

“Could one achieve that Rollant’s life was lost,

Charle’s right arm were from his body torn;

Though there remained his marvellous great host,

He’ld not again assemble in such force;

Terra Major would languish in repose.”

Is TM a region? Is it in Europe? If not, what is it (another name for Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire?)?

The other place is a bit more mysterious, partly because it’s in Middle English:

Roulond rod furthe—he wold not rest, I wene—

he sawe wher a Sairsin seche hym wold,

kinge was of Criklond, croun[y]d with gold.

What, pray tell, is Criklond?

And finally, a non-Roland-related query: what’s your favorite slow-cooker recipe? Things I’m trying to stay away from: large chunks of boiled onions (I’ve disliked them since forever), and really heavy dishes like mac and cheese. Meat is great, veggies are great, seafood that’s sturdy enough to survive a slow cooker is great, wacky but tasty ingredients totally get bonus points. Non-desserts is what I’m after.

December 24, 2006

Solstice and everything after.

We spent Friday-to-Saturday night awake, Ethan and I and Jennafer the Awesome Housemate and friend Dave, celebrating Solstice. There was cribbage and Futurama and coffee with Bailey’s and whiskey and talking and cheese! Omigod the cheese. I’d bought clochette for the first time (not at that site, locally – but isn’t that a nice photo?), and it was all that with bells on. Other cheeses too, St Marcellin and a Portuguese semi-hard goat cheese marinated in olive oil and herbs.

There was so much cheese that, when we had crepes the next morning, I did not want any cheese with my crepes. I’ll wait for the gasps of horrified wonder to subside.

And then we had a really slow and sleepy day, at the end of which some friends from Virginia showed up and we had pumpkin risotto made by yours truly. I love making risotto. If your ingredients are good (and mine included homemade broth, thank you Mr. Chest Freezer), it’s dead easy and deeply satisfying.

Now, I’m taking a headache break while five people finish up dinner – dolmas (oh yes, hand-rolled) and chicken biryani.

To summarize: I LOVE FOODIES.

Happy Light’s return, everybody.

February 17, 2006

You know what’s really good?

Toasted fennel seeds, left over from yesterday because what you actually meant to toast was cumin. By themselves, nothing else.

Big blog updates, what? So many things I keep meaning to write about, and they just never get written down. Have to start again somewhere.

Oh, all right. Here’s some content: Y: The Last Man is a great graphic-novel (you know, comic book) series. Well written, intriguing in its treatment of gender, beautifully drawn.

March 31, 2005

Food for thought

Was just talking to Cam Fraser, cool guy I met in Alberta at a graduate students’ humanities computing conference a few years ago. This is sort of a memo to self, but is also a great example of how THE INTERNET has changed the academic life. Multitask by chatting while writing a conference paper, get idea for a totally different thing, record it, go on. I *heart* these moments.

Cam: have you thought about bringing your cooking into your academic work?

me: Nnno. But it sounds like fun. How would you suggest I go about this?

Cam: boy, I have no idea.

me: drat.

Cam: Maybe something to do with bodies…

Cam: I’m thinking of the scene in “Woman on Top” where she’s smelling a chile and ends up cutting herself

me: hmmmm

me: Seriously, though: hm. Maybe I should take a look at how people (the *general populace*) procured and consumed food over the ages. It’s gone from a communal thing to a family thing and back so many times, I wonder if it’s correlated with the amount of cultural transmission that goes on.

Hmmm, indeed. Raw, but interesting.

March 9, 2005

Nuked organic spinach with olive oil and salt.

Now that’s happiness.

Wonderful spinach, too: soft, moist and flavorful. Hard to believe it had been [flash-?]frozen. Another reason to *heart* Trader Joe’s, where we’ve started going for obscene amounts of food each time, since it’s all the way in Boston. The chest freezer was so, so worth it.

Reconnected with an old friend after a decade’s worth of silence, more or less imposed by me. It’s strange to be in that phase of the email exchange when you’ve already established that you had the right email address, but no substantive conversation has yet happened. I felt strongly about him, back when we were on the same continent and for a long while after. There are some things that I couldn’t take, and so I stopped writing letters; but the memory of him has stayed with me, vivid and inextricable and compelling and good.

And now we’re suspended: how have we both changed in each other’s eyes?

And how will I deal if the answer to either is “no change at all”?

January 24, 2005

White, green and bike

I like to ride my bicycle, I like to ride my bike…

Today I didn’t ride, but I’ve an excuse. Yesterday I did ride, seven miles instead of the five I’d been doing, and although the total is on the low side, it still feels good. Then, later last night, I went out to take a walk and ended up shoveling out a path from our porch to the road as well as the entire space around and on the car. It felt good! Aside from the fact that the people in whose driveway we parked (long story) were complete asses. But the actual physical work felt really good, and let me tell you, it doesn’t get much better than Peter Mulvey and Morphine on the iPod while shoveling metric %#@!tons of light fluffy snow.

Today, we shoveled again! The snow was much heavier by the time we got to it, and it was a different driveway, the one where we’ll be parking from now on (see above). But we also got to be genial with the neighbors, and although there was no iPod, there were two of us and thus bits of winded conversation were possible.

My back hurts like nobody’s business, and I don’t feel guilty at all for not biking. Will do it tomorrow. Oooh, I’m liking the physical activity gig. Really, really hope it lasts.

Here’s a gift from the green god on a white and sky-blue winter’s day:

Take come crushed coriander seeds, some garam masala and some black mustard seeds. No precise measurements, I went with about a tablespoon of each of the first two and 1.5 tbsp of the mustard seeds at first. Oh, and a dash of good chili powder. Heat up some fat-of-choice (olive oil and a bit of butter, here) and fry the spices until they smell amazing, and the mustard seeds are popping.

Add a large plastic package of frozen spinach, not the square-package kind but the kind that’s already broken up into clumps; dump in a bit of water; stir well; cover. Steam-fry, stirring occasionally, until the spinach looks unfrozen. Take off the cover and adjust seasonings (at this point I put in salt, garlic powder and more garam masala): you want the spinach to taste just a little bit overspiced. Fry some more at higher heat until it’s no longer watery. Let cool.

Open up a package of silken tofu and drain it as much as you can. Dump the cooled spinach and the tofu into the food processor and whirr until it’s all uniformly colored. Taste, adjust seasonings, refrigerate until tomorrow when you can dip carrots and anything else your heart desires into it.

Good night!

August 23, 2004

Comfort food.

I’m afraid my entry into the distributed cookbook will be somewhat disappointing for George, since it’s…

well, it’s miso soup.

And I’ve never made it. But going to some Japanese place and ordering a bowl of that stuff when I’m feeling cold and miserable, mmmm. It cheers me right up.

The next thing I think of, when contemplating comfort food, is actually chicken soup. To wit:

a few large pieces of chicken
(I don’t much like white meat, so tend to get leg quarters)
1 onion
a couple of carrots
a couple of celery sticks
a couple of potatoes
fresh dill and parsley, the more the better
a tablespoon of Vegeta, more to taste
large pot

Throw the chicken in large pot, fill with water. Don’t ask me how much of either, because I don’t know. You know the largest pots in the cheapo sets they sell at Walmart? I’d probly put two leg quarters in that, and fill it almost-full of water, with just enough space to spare to put all the other stuff in.

Put that in, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer, wait until the foam floats up. Skim off the foam.

Put in everything else except for the herbs. I usually put in the onion whole, and at the end throw it out, but that’s because I don’t like boiled onions. If you’re using Vegeta, watch out: it contains salt already, so don’t add any more salt. Add other seasonings if you like, but I usually leave it at that. Cook until the vegetables are done, probably 15-20 minutes.

Throw in the herbs, taste and adjust the seasoning. I generally throw in a liiittle bit more Vegeta, or leave it be.

Let the herbs cook a couple of minutes. Turn off the heat, cover, let stand for as long as you can bear it. Ladle into bowls and grind some black pepper into that. Mmm.