this vichyssoise of verbiage

I have been composing this entry in my mind for a long, long time. The words aren't pairing up right, and the mental wastebasket is full of mentally crumpled up pieces of paper containing only silly opening lines.

I'll stop beating around the bush. Someone dear to me left me for grad school (sadly, this is a very common theme for me this year). In a somewhat recent email conversation, she mentioned that we are more like sisters than friends because a) she can make me angry over nothing at the drop of a hat and b) we have almost nothing in common but continue to love each other fiercely. As I think more on this, I wonder what ties us together, and it comes to me: food. Of course.

I don't think I really knew how to love food before Donna. The girl loves food. Living together opened my eyes to all sorts of new ways to orient my life around what soon became our favorite shared activity. We would text each other during class, discussing what to eat for lunch (burritos? pad see ew?).We loved beef: Donna was the steak grilling queen, and my signature dishes were shepherd's pie and mapo dofu. Oh wait, there was also the pasta carbonara I explicitly warned her not to eat because I got immediately sick afterwards. (She ignored me (and was fine).) We would drive way out of our way for the fastest pho service in the world. And once, 10 minutes before it closed for lunch, I saw on the Cheeseboard website that their pizza of the day was my absolute favorite, and we booked it over there, not quite in time, but managing to finagle our way in with our winsome smiles anyway. She would make me coffee and leave me post-it notes telling me to drink it. We drank Coke in bottles at a rock on campus and shared insanely deep conversations, documented here and here and here. I would beg her to do well on her tests so we could get free garlic fries from Smart A's. She would beg me to just try Indian food--I finally broke down senior year.

We've grown since then, naturally. She's upgraded to classier Indian spots, and I am way less picky, hallelujah. But vestiges of the old still remain: I still think the sun rises and sets on a fantastic bowl of freshly fried tortilla chips, and I'd like to think that if Carvel suddenly opened again near us, we'd be first in line on Wednesday for our buy one get one free sundaes, giddy as kids and refusing to share. We are the same, and yet we are not. I cherish the food person you've helped me become, and all the shared food memories I carry around with me could fill a book. I know I'm a little bit late, but happy first week of the rest of your life.

Eggy in a Basket



One morning Donna announced that she wanted to make me "eggy in a basket, like on V for Vendetta". I swiftly integrated it into my own breakfast routine...may have changed a few minor things, but the spirit of it is most definitely still there.

First, butter a slice of bread. Liberally. In the movie Evey is so excited that she is eating butter--she hadn't eaten it since she was a kid. Thus, thumb your nose at your local totalitarian state and butter that bread, one side only. You'll also need to cut a circle out of it. You can do it before you butter or after; it doesn't really matter, but I like doing it after.

Heat a frying pan on medium or so. When it's hot, melt some more butter on it. Yeah, this is necessary. The other side of the bread needs butter love too! When the butter melts, fry the bread just briefly, non-buttered side down, and then crack in an egg. If the bread circle doesn't also fit in the pan, just do it afterwards.

You'll have to flip it at some point, so do that. Cook it for as done as you like your egg. Then, remove to plate, sprinkle with salt and pepper...

and dig in. Use that cute bread circle to mop up the unctuous yolk. Your breakfasts will never be the same. (And yes, D, I know that you don't actually like runny yolks)

What's your favorite breakfast? Mine varies based on the season and my particular mood, but coffee is a given. Eggy in a basket probably shows up about once a week. (And for some breakfast inspiration, check out simply breakfast!)

peace, love, and granola

If I were me as a child writing this blog, it would not be called "i ate everything", by any means. A more accurate title would be "i ate just a teensy bit"...yes, I was that kid, the kid who hated most foods, save spaghetti, ice cream (no fruity flavors), chicken and corn. As I think about the foods I love now but would never have made the cut back then--spicy everything, macaroni and cheese, cilantro (along with most all green things)...I can know that I've grown, in many senses of the word. (Ha.) (It's especially difficult to play the role of little miss pickypants after a year of this...)

But why did I dislike so many things? As a perfectionistic little girl, anything "wrong" was banished to the island of No, I Will Not Eat That. Things of the wrong color, wrong smell, wrong appearance...it was an extremely arbitrary system, and I'm glad today it is no longer in place. Get this: granola was rejected by my system because of its wrong connotation. I associated granola with hippies, those legendary figures with their tie-dyed everything, their patchouli and incense, their general willingness to smoke many things, and their general unwillingness to shave at all. (Gross generalization.) (Hemp granola did not help the cause.) (Readers will be interested to note that I entered Cal as an uptight right-winged nutjob and emerged 4 years later...decidedly different in thought, opinion, and heart. But that can be fodder for another post.)

Over time, my view of hippies (and more importantly for this post, granola) changed. My senior year, I constantly berated Alisa, one of my roommates, for (sometimes) not recycling her plastic water bottles, and her response would always be "Fine, you hippie! I'll recycle just for you, you hippie of a roommate. Fine!! PS, have you seen the South Park episode 'Die Hippie Die'? It's so you." Interesting progression there...

I also remember shopping with Jena at Berkeley Bowl one day; she picked up a box of granola there and cracked it open in the car. I timidly grabbed a handful for myself...and so it began. (Jena is a wonderful teacher with exquisite taste, and some of the other life-changing things that she's introduced me to include (but are not limited to): Feist, the power of scarves, cheeseburger pie, and Jackson 5 dance parties.)

Then in Chicago last October, Lisa threw this awesome pad thai dinner party, but at the end we realized we had completely forgotten about dessert. Enter Lisa's friend, who quickly whipped up a storm of granola, which we used to top scoops (a mountain for me) of vanilla ice cream. Love at first spoonful, I vowed that it would be mine.

There was one last thing that was tripping me up. Most granola that I had seen in the past contained at least one weird ingredient like wheat germ or flax seed or quinoa--none of these are everyday things in my pantry/stomach. This was a turn-off. But one day the clouds parted and I found Molly's take on it all.

No weird stuff.

All normal stuff.

Plus chocolate!!!!!

Now close this window, preheat your oven, and accept that the game is over because this granola is so so so so good and the hippies have won (for this scenario, let's pretend that we're all hippies)!

(If you'll pretend (for me) that cell phone pictures are adequate for now and better than no pictures at all, I will too.)

Molly's French Chocolate Granola
(adapted from Orangette) (my #1 food blogger girl crush)

3 1/4 c rolled oats (old-fashioned)
3/4 c sliced almonds
2 tbp sugar
pinch of salt
6 tbp honey
2 tbp vegetable oil
at least 1/2 c chocolate (dark of course), chopped into little pieces

Preheat oven to 300. Line rimmed baking sheet with foil.

Heat honey and oil in a small saucepan on low, stirring frequently until honey is loosened up. In a large bowl, combine oats, almonds, sugar, and salt. Add the honey/oil to the oat mixture and mix well.

Spread evenly on baking sheet and bake 20 minutes, stirring once in the middle and once after you take it out to prevent French chocolate granola bars from forming (unless you want that).

When granola is cool, pour into plastic ziploc bag and add the chocolate. Shake to combine! Just try to keep your hands out of the bag until breakfast. You will lose.

(I am partial to eating this with Costco 1% organic milk.) (Thinking cinnamon and vanilla (and cranberries??) for the next iteration.) (Also, I'm so sorry that this post was flippin long. Something about lots of words in me or etc.)

And now a question for you! What's something you used to hate but now love?

no snow scones

I wanted to write a poem for you yesterday entitled "A Snow Dream Deferred", but Mr. Hughes did it better anyway. (Hey, that rhymes...right? Poem quota for blog: check.)

This part of the world never gets snow. Ever. So Sunday night when the weather man started talking crazy and mentioning snow...I got excited, naturally. But when the promised "snow" amounted to only a mere ground dusting that melted by the time I woke up...what's THAT all about?! (In case you were wondering, plenty of people around here woke up crazy early to catch a glimpse of snow, which tells you that this promised snow was a Really Big Deal. Oh California.)

So I thought I'd show you a quick way to be happy again. For me, there is baking, and then there's baking for others, and I've slowly learned over the years that making someone else happy is almost guaranteed to make me happy. (Unless we're playing a game, and then I'll make you work for your own happiness...) So I pulled out an old favorite.

Behold...the apricot scone. This is my take on Cheeseboard's take on that perennial morning pastry glory. But no triangles here! The Cheeseboard book compares this to a "rich, buttermilk biscuit", and I wouldn't dare to disagree. The top is crispy crunchy and the inside soft, with a cakelike crumb. If it's even possible, I would like to dare to say that the addition of following took this unusual scone to Mt. Everest heights:

White Lily (cue heavenly music). Many southern devotees are anxious that a recent relocation of the White Lily flour mill to the Midwest (oh, horror!) has wrecked the flour for good, but this Yankee wouldn't know the difference, given that this was my first experience with it. (Thanks to JH for gifting me with 2 bags after Thanksgiving dinner...you'd better believe I held them to me tightly all the way home as visions of biscuits and cakes danced in my head.)

Of course, no scone would be complete without its fruity mix-in; Mom's favorite is apricot. (Notice how all the pieces are pretty irregularly-sized, meaning that my knife skills won't be winning awards anytime soon.)

Snow comes and snow goes, but a good scone is a portable piece of buttery joy. Spread the love!

Apricot Scones

(adapted from The Cheeseboard Collective Works)

3 1/2 c all purpose flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tbp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 c granulated sugar

1 c (2 sticks) butter, cut into little cubes and then stuck in the freezer for maximum coldness

1 c dried apricots, fairly finely chopped (alternately, use anything else you love)

3/4 c buttermilk

3/4 c heavy cream

Preheat oven to 375. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, briefly stir together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar to combine. Drop in the cubed butter and stir on low for about 4 minutes until the butter is the size of little peas. Add in the apricot, and then stir in the buttermilk/cream with just a few rotations of the paddle (it's good if there's still flour at the bottom of the bowl).

Shape dough into 2 inch or smaller balls (warning: super sticky) and place on baking sheets. Bake 18ish minutes or until golden brown/you feel that you just can't wait any longer before actually sticking your hand into the oven to retrieve your afternoon snack.

Makes just shy of 2 dozen scones.