hello, lover

Behold...the Monte Cristo sandwich. Turkey, ham, and melty (gorgeous!) cheese, sandwiched by egg-battered-then-deep-fried bread (tastes like a French Toast/donut hybrid). To summarize: heart attack sandwiched by two slices of triple bypass surgery.

Can I get an "Amen" or a "hell yeah", depending on your mood? Holler if you love fried sandwiches.

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?

how the madeleine crumbles

Anyone else feeling the sad (seasonal affective disorder) coming on recently? I am hardly one to talk, given that I have friends living in Minnesota and Illinois, but this California girl is tired of the rain. Tired tired tired. Today marks day #3 of the week of unending rain, and I know I'm supposed to be supportive and everything because previous to this week we have been very behind on our rainfall total, farmers need rain for growing things, etc. Maybe I'm just a little on edge because I gave away my polka dot rainboots (and therefore my puddle jumping opportunities) last month, my thought process being a) I'm too old for polka dot rainboots and b) I don't need these anymore. Clearly both are very untrue. I'm going to have to get over this at some point.

So I turned to baking. It is now becoming as familiar to myself as breathing; the quiet, rhythmic movements required are perfect for calming down my overactive brain and antsy hands. I just received this as a late Christmas from the ever-amazing JH (of White Lily flour gifting fame), and it is massive. Full of techniques, cakes, etc, but mostly just massive. A certain family member was flipping through it last night and exclaimed, "Look! Two madeleine recipes!" Said family member used to complain about the way I made madeleines in the past, citing their overly cakey texture. Said family member would say, "Why can't you just make them they way they come at Starbucks?" Said family member is a little insane. To appease, I tried to make today's version dense and chewy, so I wouldn't end up being the only person eating them (though I'll never understand what Proust was referencing in his novel; read this for an overly involved investigation into the Proustian "madeleine", which falls neither in the "cakey" category nor the "dense and chewy" category but most likely the "dry and crumbly" category, which honestly just sounds nasty).

Back to today's madeleine. Thanks to another certain family member, my camera currently lacks a battery and battery charger (both are floating around somewhere in New York, thank you family member) and so no pictures. But can I just tell you something? Brushing softened butter into each mold creates an amazing madeleine crust. And working the flour in far more than my basic instincts would like creates the gluten necessary for chewy. Oh yeah. Kicking madeleine ass and taking names is certainly enough to dispel the gloom for me today.

(Non cakey) Madeleines
adapted from Baking by James Peterson

3/4 c sugar
3/4 c flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
4 egg whites
1/2 c butter, melted

Preheat oven to 400. Brush each madeleine mold with softened butter (1 tbp should be more than enough for this). Flour molds, unless you have a silicone mold (in that case, it's not necessary).

Sift together the sugar, flour, and baking powder in a medium bowl. Stir in the egg whites until smooth. Stir in the melted butter until smooth. Give it a couple more beats for chewiness. Using a spoon, fill molds 2/3-3/4 full.

Bake for 9-10 minutes, or until the edges of the madeleines are slightly browned. Transfer to a cooling rack and try not to eat 5 in the span of an hour (...I didn't do this).

Makes 18 madeleines.

all buttered up

I know this is a little early for this, but happy new year! (Shortly leaving for family trip, so I won't be around for a while.) As I've reflected on the past 4 months, this statistic kept jumping to mind:

20 pounds of butter in 4 months.

I baked away 20 pounds of butter from September to December. This is a slightly insane and delicious number. And who knows what the next year will bring?! 

Wishing you a peaceful, love-filled, and buttery 2010,
Stephanie 

coming full dumpling

First off, happy Christmas "to you and yours" (this little phrase is so strange and apart from this entry, I will never use it)! This was an interesting holiday as I remembered how wholly different it was from last year (we topped off our celebration with Christmas day all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ. Oh yeah!). It came and went very quietly this year but not without ponderings on the subject of our celebrations: a poor unwed teenage girl giving birth in a stanky barn to a baby who would one day grow up to love and save and change the world for good. God's love, revealed to us.

The parallels between this life and my East Asia life continue to be striking. I had a poignant Christmas Eve day as mom and I prepped potstickers for dinner, a tradition now several years running. (Just a year ago, we were eating dumplings at our neighbor's place for winter solstice, a tradition in the north.) Mom commented that while I still made a messy job of it, my potsticker stuffing speed has gotten a lot faster, which I had to attribute to the mothers and grandmothers of East Asia.

Making dumplings (potstickers being a subset) is like a national pastime for the women of East Asia. It is super labor intensive, but somehow, all know how to make them impeccably. You would think that constructing them would be fairly simple, but spoon, pleat, pleat, twist is surprisingly difficult. I will not claim that I ever got the hang of it, but I did manage to eat a whole lot of them while I was there. What were you expecting? This blog is aptly named. (sidenote: It is my dearest hope that every foreigner in Asia has at least one opportunity to try to make dumplings at some grandmother's house, subsequently get laughed out of the kitchen due to awful foreigner dumpling folding skills, and then proceed to get stuffed with said dumplings for dinner. I can eat 50 in one sitting!)

Some throwback photos from the spring at my friend's grand-uncle & aunt's place...yes, dumplings.

You can tell some of these were made by me..the ones with green filling sticking out the top.

                                     

Grand-aunt's hands, rolling out dumpling dough and going a million miles a minute! 

As I connect all the dots in my head, I realize that I can't ever fully escape East Asia because it lives on in photos, in this blog, in my memories, and very importantly, through food. With our Christmas Eve potsticker tradition, it seems like I have come full circle (or dumpling, if you're feeling punny), and I look forward to the next one, where I will undoubtedly pick up new questions and answers, insights, lessons, and (hopefully!) more hope.

i found you some pesto to love

(in response to Queen)

Pesto is kind of a wonderful thing to make. Pestopestopestopestopesto. Saying it 5 times fast makes me wish I hadn't eaten all of it already. I know that you're boggled because basil does NOT grow in December, and therefore fresh pesto should be an impossibility, but you are discounting the beauty of winter pesto.
Winter pesto, I love you and want to make you in the spring and summer and fall too.

Mmmmmf.

Arugula grows well in winter, so that's a good one to throw in there. I've been using a lot of walnuts lately, so yay for those. Suddenly, I found myself saying, basil? Pine nuts? What are those?!

Even when you sub out all of a traditional pesto's ingredients for slightly less conventional things, it will always remain herb + nut + cheese + olive oil, take or leave the garlic (and nut for allergies) (and the herb thing can just be a green thing like spinach or peas or roasted tomato (I know, not green)). In the same vein, my life today looks vastly differently than it did a year, even two years ago, but I love remembering (when I can) that the most important things are still (and forever will be) the most important things: loving people, listening to the Author, and letting myself be guided.


Winter Pesto

Stuff handfuls of arugula in food processor. Sprinkle with a healthy dose of walnuts. Grate a bunch of Parmesan over the top, then run the processor as you drizzle in olive oil. When it comes together, toss with tagliatelle, smear atop homemade croutons, or sneak spoonfuls of it from the fridge (for personal thrills). Repeat with parsley + almonds, spinach + pistachios, cilantro + brazil nuts with romano or asiago or manchego cheese...now you know the content of half of my daydreams! Scintillating, I know.

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.