Measurement-free Baking

I decided I was too busy and lazy to fuss with the metric baking experiment and, moreover, that I have no business eating a whole Dutch apple pie by myself over the weekend.  In fact, while I was at the store, I decided I wasn't going to do any baking at all--that I was going to be good and dutiful and spend that time reading or writing, and that I'd just eat the lovely local apples as-is.  That would have been a good choice too, but I got a hankering for hot apple goodness, and thought to replicate some of the apple crumbles I made the summer I spent in Donegal, where fresh food was limited and the house I was staying in didn't have any officially-marked measuring utensils. 

So, without further ado, here's the apple/blueberry crisp I just made:

The stove light doesn't show it off to best advantage (nor does the iPhone camera), but it sure does taste good!  The blueberries are some I'd frozen this summer when the fresh local ones were in, and as I said, the apples are also local--I can't remember which variety, but it's the one that tastes like lemon when they're first picked.  Excellent eating apples, and not shabby at all in a cooked dish, either.

Now, let's see--what did I do?  I tossed 3 thinly sliced apples and maybe 1.5 cups of blueberries with about a tablespoon of brown sugar.  I made the crumble out of maybe 1/3 cup flour and the same amount of rolled oats, with maybe 3 tablespoons of brown sugar (which was a bit much, but oh, well), and about 2 inches of a stick of butter (standard American stick of butter), and fecked in maybe half a teaspoon of cinnamon.  I'd have put in a bit more, except that I'm running out of cinnamon.  Baked it at 375F for about 35-40 minutes (who's counting?), and it's lovely.  I'm going to have a plate of it with some cream if the cream hasn't gone off.

(If you want to make this and feel better measuring, it's in Bittman's How to Cook Everything.  I looked because I was curious about how close my own sense of things was to his, and it's fairly close, though he had his baking at 400, which seems a bit excessive to me.)

Coming Soon....

I think I'm going to attempt my first exercise in baking in metric soon, perhaps even tomorrow.  Working from the "first in-first out" paradigm (see, I was awake at least one day of Intro to Computer Science in 1993 or whatever it was!), I am going to make Sophie's Dutch apple pie.

Right now, I have chicken (marinated in balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and a bit of mustard--my go-to salad dressing, repurposed) and acorn squash in the oven, and cabbage on the stove.  Nice seasonal meal.

So, stay tuned for ADVENTURES IN METRIC BAKING, coming to a theatre near you soon.

P.S.  I really miss Veselka.

Drinking My Tea in Style

...with my new Foucault mug from Philosophy is Dangerous. Nobody has positively ID-ed the man himself yet, but I'm just waiting for the comments around the office to begin....

It was a tough decision--I could happily have bought the Swift mug ("I like babies"), or the Arendt ("Perfection is Not"), or even the Cixous ("Got Milk?"), even though she drives me batty.

And yes, delighted as I am by my new mug, this post is also a shameless plug for my friend Alexis's attempt to fund her graduate school applications by selling philosopher goodies.  So in the immortal words of Mrs. Doyle, g'wan, g'wan, g'wan, g'wan, G'WAN!

Thursday Night Flotsam

...or jetsam?

Monday I made a lovely stew I shall know henceforth as Okra Thing, even though it bears little relation to Beet Thing (see a previous post from, hmmm, August or September 2008). Okra Thing was simple, homespun--garlic, an onion, a small can of tomatoes, and about a cup and a half of okra. I did with it just as you'd expect: sauteed the garlic and onion, and then fecked the rest in and let it go until I thought it looked done enough. Delicious. Last night, I cut up some chicken, sauteed it, and put the leftover OT in the pan at the end. It reminded me of something I'm sometimes served on the Delta flight between JFK and Shannon, except much, much better, and with okra instead of random vegetables. Delta, take note.

(And for those of you who hate the sliminess of okra, trust me and my Aunt Mary Margaret on this one: tomato takes care of the slime.)

What else have I made this week?

1. Sentences, paragraphs, and a research proposal.
2. A trip to the Whole Foods in Hadley.
3. A hole in my silly dog pajamas.
4. Sore muscles from my first ever aerobics classes.
5. Some new friends? Too early to tell.
6. 2 trips to Woodstar for their divine Nantucket sandwich.
7. Many, many cups of tea.

And so, to bed.

Sunday Morning

...with coffee, but without oranges or the cockatoo, and considerably more companionable and less angst-ridden than Wallace Stevens would have it.

And--complete with Anna's brilliant "Dutch pancake":



Now, let's see if I remember the recipe at all. I think it's resplendent with threes, which its cook, with her demurely comprehensive knowledge of the Bible, surely appreciates--

3 eggs
3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup milk

--whisked together, poured into a cake pan (or, in this case, a large souffle dish) and baked at--hmm, did I see 450 on the oven display? And how long did it cook? Maybe 15 minutes? 20? Anna didn't have enough milk, so rounded out the ration with heavy cream and a bit of water. And there were three of us to share it. I et mine with a dusting of powdered sugar and a squeeze of lime, which gave a very different flavor than the usual lemon, but was still very nice.

I Measure Deliciousness in Metric

Tonight I do, anyway.

For the last few days, I've been thinking about soup. It's starting to get chilly here at night, and not all that warm (by my Virginia standards) during the day, and that means soup. But I got burned out on all my standby soups--carrot coriander, vegetable, potato leek--and besides, it's best to keep those in reserve for wintertime comfort food. Of course, this soup will be brilliant later in the season, as well.



This recipe comes from Sophie, and her version was even better--I believe she made it with both monkfish and salmon from the fish shop in the market in Ennis. I had frozen cod on hand, so used that--but it was by far outdone by the sheer wondrousness of the soup itself.

So, without further ado, "Sweet Potato Soup with Fish." This is verbatim from what Sophie wrote down for me a couple of years ago:

Ingredients:
1 medium-sized onion
250 g sweet potato
200 g carrots
1 liter of fish stock (vegetable stock can be substituted)
salt
freshly ground pepper
2 teaspoons of curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 deciliter coconut milk
juice of 1 lime
fresh coriander
salmon and/or cod and/or monkfish, etc.
(and just for info: prawns)

* Peel the onion and chop it. Peel and chop the carrots and sweet potatoes. Put into soup pan and pour fish stock onto them. Add salt, pepper, curry powder, and cinnamon.

* Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes till vegetables are cooked.

* Blitz with whooshie. Add coconut milk and lime juice.

* Add fish and cook for about 7 minutes (if using prawns they only take 1 minute)

* Garnish with fresh coriander

...I did a few things differently, as per usual. I sauteed the onion and then added the spices at the end of the sauteeing. I used vegetable stock, and since it was plenty salty, didn't add any extra salt. And rather than measuring grams, I just fecked in 2 sweet potatoes and about a cup of carrots--it was soup, after all, not baking. I used a little more than a deciliter of coconut milk, since it comes in 150ml cans, and what, I ask you, am I going to do with 50ml of coconut milk? And I only used half a lime, because it was a juicy one, and I thought it tasted divine with just half. No prawns, since anaphylactic shock was not part of my plan for the evening.

Aside from some tough bits on the cod, it was gorgeous!

The Book I'm Not Reading: however shall I choose? The book I'd most like to be reading but don't have time for at the moment is Sara Ahmed's new one, The Promise of Happiness. Trust me, if you don't already know Ahmed's work, it's not what it sounds like.

Once again to the lake--or, in this case, the stove.

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It has been more than a year since my last post. But I'm back, in an attempt to simultaneously regain some cooking mojo and use my Internet addiction to better ends than frequent Facebook status updates and checking the weather far too often. Now that I have no television channels and a nicely renovated kitchen, it seems like a good time to bring back the blog. Needless to say, I still have an overwhelming workload, but we won't talk about that here. After all, the blog is called "The Book I'm Not Reading" for a very good reason--although at this point, I suppose I could change its title to "The Book I'm Not Writing"....

Anyway, lengthy preamble aside, here's what I made myself for lunch:



It tasted better than it looks, you'll be happy to hear. The kale was not black (as the photo suggests), and indeed, could have used a few more minutes on the stove. But I was hungry and impatient, and do have several tasks to complete before I head to the session tonight.

What it is: Bittman's kale and garlic recipe from How to Cook Everything--the caper option. I changed the quantities a bit because I didn't want to generate leftovers, and used rice wine vinegar instead of red or white wine vinegar, since I am only slowly setting myself up with household staples, and this was not a planned dish. Eggs on top are for protein, of course, but they were a nice addition, and the flavors of the capers and hint of vinegar elevated them to a much nicer creature than your typical boring boiled egg.

Living with Miss Diss

You know, when you're writing a dissertation, blogging suddenly becomes a really distasteful thing to do--or at least, to me it does, because if I'm writing all day, writing more is about the last thing I want to do.

But here I am. Guilt, perhaps? Whatever.

But to maintain the illusion that this is (among other things) a cooking blog, right now I'm thinking about a spectacularly delicious thing I made New Year's Day. I don't have pictures--it was too good not to gobble up--but you can picture it: a stacked brunch dish that consisted of leftover latkes (which, I was told by someone who knows the difference, were very authentic-tasting), a layer of arugula sauteed with a shallot and given a splash of lemon juice, and an over-easy egg on top. It was divine. I'm not the first person to have thought of such a thing, but maybe you haven't yet thought of it....

New Link

I've been the worst blogger ever recently--even Kerr has posted since I have--but that doesn't mean that cooking, eating, and dissertation writing haven't continued on apace. But really, where does the time go?

Anyway, a friend just sent me a link for an entertaining food blog, Thursday Night Smackdown, which I'm plugging here because the author's play-by-plays of "Top Chef" episodes have made me laugh out loud.

Ok, bye for now.

Fingers Crossed

So just what kind of a paragraph is THIS?!?

“And there must be something about San Francisco and he,” she continued, drawing laughter and cheers from the crowd. “Because it’s like I heard on Fox News today, it’s like a truth serum, where when he’s there he seems to be more candid. Remember it was there that he talking about, there you go, the bitter clingers. The cling-ons, all of us, I guess, hanging on to religion and guns.”

That's Sarah Palin, quoted on www.nytimes.com.

I would just like to say that in addition to any number of other things I'm voting for or against, I am most certainly voting against terrible grammar, usage, and composition in statements like this. In part because it is insidious, and affects my own writing, as this post demonstrates!

Great Composers All Around Us

...and we didn't even know it! I just ran across this in the Grove Dictionary of Music:

It takes a great composer to create a fine set of variations, because this does not demand pure invention so much as the ability to see the underlying possibilities of a single idea. Lesser composers can construct their music by the use of more material, which provides the opportunity for contrast. Nevertheless, a continuous succession of new ideas will not prove satisfying, so repetition of some sort is necessary.

By that definition, that means that any number of us who play Irish trad are great composers. Go us!

Saturday Afternoon Procrastination Roundup

So, does anyone else out there wonder why Hillary Clinton is "Hillary," but Sarah Palin is "Palin"? It's starting to sound like Goldilocks' dilemma: one is too "intimidating" (read: competent, per Judith Warner's "The Mirrored Ceiling" in the NYT the other day) and the other one needs not to sound quite as hockey mom-ish....

But back to food....

I just ate a simple but wonderful concoction that I'm a little embarrassed to post about, because it's such a no-brainer. But it was good. Quinoa, a handful of arugula chopped, some basil leaves chopped, half a tomato, and a glug of Newman's Italian dressing (yeah, I'm lazy. But it's humid and I'm technically hard at work under a couple of looming deadlines).

And last night, I made a frittata. It was good, but what made it noteworthy was that except for the eggs, the main ingredients all came from leftovers I brought home from the department party the other night. Spot the grad student!

Food on its Way to Becoming Food

The Livestock Marketing Association now has sound files of the winners of its annual World Livestock Auctioneer Championship online here. Hot damn!

(Thanks to Ben for sending me the link!)

Waste Not, Want Not

It's the end of the summer, and the grad school stipend checks don't start again until September 15th, so I'm playing that game well known to grad students the world over: creative food combinations. It worked brilliantly the other night in the Dracula Pasta, and again tonight in the Cup of Leftover Rice Stakes.

I didn't want flied lice tonight, even though I've got ingredients for a killer one, so was thinking about beans and rice. Easy and cheap, but then I started digging around in the flotsam and jetsam of the fridge, and discovered some capers, a few olives, and a few thoroughly wilted basil leaves. And a Peroni beer! Score!

So I sauteed half an onion and a lot of garlic, added a zucchini, seasoned with oregano. Then fecked in some capers, a can of chickpeas, and after that had heated through, I added the leftover rice and the basil. Delicious. The capers make it. A few olives would have been nice, but I was too hungry to think of dealing with pits en route to the rest of the dish. The Peroni is a nice accompaniment, and I think the leftovers of Rice Capers, Mediterranean Style, will be just as good cold for some meal tomorrow.

And now back to work. I am saying that I'm not busy--I just have a lot of stuff to do.

Eventually is Now, or, Making Friends with Beetroot

So J left tonight for a month away, so as is becoming customary, I spent part of my first evening batching it cooking something improbable, something I wasn't sure would be even remotely edible by me (I based it on a recipe I found, so clearly someone likes it!).

I was curious about all the buzz about beet greens, so I bought a bunch of beets today in order to get the greens, which are related to chard, which is my good buddy. So what to do with the beets themselves? Initially, I planned to make a variation on my "deconstructed pesto with greens" pasta dish, but then I started wondering--can I actually use the beets in a pasta dish too?

Mind ye, I am a very hard sell on the tastiness of beetroot. After being force-fed pickled beets as a kid, I was decidedly NOT a fan. But in Paris last summer, I was served a very palatable beet salad, and have been tentatively trying to reconsider my hatred ever since. So I can deal with beets in a juice blend now, but this was the first time I have actually enjoyed eating the things.

Here's what I did for one serving of what I'm going to call "Dracula Was There" Pasta (S, you'll appreciate that!). The original recipe is here:

1. I sauteed 1 small beet with 2 shallots, and added 3 cloves of garlic a few minutes after I'd started sauteeing.

2. I fecked in about a cup of vegetable stock and about a teaspoon of rice wine vinegar (the original recipe has lemon juice, but the sad little lemon I found in the basket had no business being in anything but the bin),

3. While all that (and my pasta) was going, I chopped about 2 handfuls of beet greens and some parsley and basil. I added that in after the stock had reduced to almost nothing, and let the greens wilt.

4. I stirred in the pasta--penne was not ideal (something non-tubular would have been much better)--and served it with parmesan cheese on top.

It was gorgeous, and didn't even really taste like the beets I knew and hated. Strangely, it was saltier than I'd expected (I didn't add any salt at all), and I'm wondering if my iron skillet is so saturated with soy sauce that I got a little residual flavor from that. Whatever it was, it worked.

Fun New Blog

Eventually I'll get around to writing some kind of update, or reporting on some cooking adventure, but for the moment, the school year is about to begin, and in the lip-bitingly overquoted words of Emeril, I'm having to kick my life up a notch (luckily, without needing the help of a mundane collection of spices that relies heavily on garlic salt, if memory serves).

Anyway--for now, I give y'all friend and fellow ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Keenan's new blog, Flotsam on the Stream of Pop Consciousness. And to make it even better, Elizabeth actually is from New Orleans, unlike His Essenceness.

If it's Tuesday....

The last couple of weeks have been many and variegated.

Ok, that doesn't make much sense, but then again, it does: I left London on July 5, stayed in Ennis one night, went out to Doolin, commuted to Miltown for the Willie Clancy from Doolin, came back to Ennis for a few days, and then came to Dublin yesterday. In all likelihood, I will only add to this kind of disjointed narrative in the coming weeks, but at the moment, I have access to wireless internet, so I'm taking advantage of it, if only to say that internet is a rare occurrence for me here at the moment!

Which means that cooking successes don't get blogged about until much later, like the stew Lauren & I made at the hostel in Doolin. It was a little random--partly designed to use up ingredients--but it was fabulous:

4 or 5 smallish regular potatoes
2 medium sweet potatoes
2 leeks (?) and some garlic, sauteed in butter
3 small red peppers, roasted
vegetable stock
a little ground coriander
salt & pepper

Definitely more than the sum of its parts. It needed some oregano, but did fine without, and we crumbled feta cheese on top.

I'm proud to say that I did not have to resort to chips at all during the week.

Eating in Dublin has been fabulous as well, but I'll leave those descriptions for another time. Suffice to say that Lauren & Dan have been feeding me well!

Thinking About Food

I have not been eating well here in London, and it's caught up with me. There, I've said it. Because this place comes with a functioning kitchen (albeit no pots, pans, or dishes), I feel like a bit of a moron having come to this, my second-to-last evening, having eaten only one meal cooked by me, and not some restaurant (in the best case) or, in the worst, by Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer, or Waitrose.

Call it an experiment in modern life, or call it just plain foolish: whatever its name, these two weeks have got me thinking even more about what I'm eating, and how.

By comparison with most other Americans & Brits, my diet has been fairly virtuous: yoghurt and oat crackers for breakfast, some sort of vegetarian (but not vegan) packaged sandwich for lunch, and for dinner, the prepared food du jour, which on various nights has been pizza, roast chicken & mashed potatoes, various curries (see previous post), or, occasionally, a meal out (a "regular" Indian vegetarian thali, a South Indian vegetarian thali, and pasta with smoked salmon). These meals I have supplemented lightly with apples and more oat cakes, the occasional stroopwafel, and lattes. So I'm not eating at the chipper every day, or drowning in spaghetti bolognaise, or getting all my calories from beer. Nor am I stuffing myself with cakes and sweets.

But all the packaged, not-cooked-by-me food is taking its toll. I'm not sure whether the damage is more psychic or physical: surely having most of my meals come from plastic is not a good plan, and I notice some hormonal weirdnesses I attribute to environmental factors, of which the plastic is certainly one. And of course, I've had the first migraines I've had since I left Cambridge in March. But for someone who cooks at home (or eats home-cooked food) most of the time, there's something very odd and disconcerting about not doing so, about feeling unusually alienated from the kitchen.

Anyway, all this is by way of introducing tonight's meal, which was a little random, but delicious and, I think, a much better plan than anything from a plastic tray.

Tonight, as I left the British Library, I was extremely nauseated and felt weak. Hmmm, what to eat? I suspected I needed some protein, and have also realized that my diet over here has included virtually no soy and no sweet potatoes, and I was craving the latter. So I got a couple of sweet potatoes, some cashews (couldn't find raw, so had to get roasted and salted), and some firm goats' cheese. I baked the potatoes, and inserted slices of the cheese into one of the potatoes (the other I put in the fridge for breakfast tomorrow), and ate some of the cashews while the potatoes were baking. I think it's the best meal I've had since I got to England!

I can't say my dinner will have cured everything, but it certainly didn't hurt.

In other news, I've missed a couple of days in the library, but I'm otherwise well satisfied with the work I've gotten done here.

And I'm still Not Reading the Kee book--but I am reading an entertaining novel about Rome by Stephen Saylor, whose historical novels I highly recommend for anyone with that sort of bent (thanks to Sophie for turning me on to his work).

Paddy Canny, RIP

I just got the news in this morning's email--no details yet, but he had been ill recently, and in hospital around the time Kitty Hayes died a couple of months ago.

(For those of you reading who aren't in the Irish trad scene, Paddy was a fiddler, and Kitty a concertina player. Both were of, as they say, an advanced age, and both were great musicians.)

I would not be at all surprised if Claire Keville does a tribute to Paddy on her radio show either on Clare FM this Tuesday or next. The show begins at 7pm Irish time, and I think it's archived online for a week afterward.

Friday Night Roundup

...although I suppose I need a fairly large corral if I'm truly going to do a roundup: far too many days have passed since I waxed rhapsodical about Alison Krauss and Robert Plant! So this will be the short-attention-span-roundup.

I'm now in London, after spending last weekend in Clare, getting over jetlag and partying a bit (I had a nice session Saturday night back at the old scene at the Crosses of Annagh, after watching Holland get beaten by Russia in the Euro Cup). I arrived in London Monday afternoon and started settling into my fairly grotty dorm room near King's Cross. So far, it's fine (fine in the American sense: just about on the positive side of acceptable), and it suits my purposes--and the location's perfect for me, since I'm dividing my time between the St. Pancras and Colindale branches of the British Library.

I won't go into the various (non-dealbreaker) problems with the accommodation, except to say that it costs about $12 more per night to be furnished with cooking equipment for the fairly decent kitchen down the hall. So my cooking, if it can be called that, has been fairly minimal. I have been meaning to buy some cooking vessel (saucepan? wok?) since I got here, but have been too fried in the evenings to even think of cooking, so I've slipped back down the ready meals slope (though I'm microwaving them in a bowl I bought). So far, this is a dismal idea altogether, with one remarkable exception: Sainsbury's pizza with ricotta, spinach pesto, and sundried tomatoes. Foodie friends, I *promise* I am going to get out of this rut! I have decided that I Do Not Need to Know which supermarket curries are the best--though I hesitate to use the word "best," because it implies some suggestion of "good," and these most definitely have not been. (I have had better food on airplanes.)

On a more pleasant topic, tonight I went to hear Emma Kirkby and company, with Cambridge's Trinity College choir, at St. John's Church in Smith Square. It was a lovely concert, and the setting was absolutely perfect--the church is fairly closely contemporary with the repertoire they performed (Handel's Chandos Anthems 7, 9, and 11). Handel's not my favorite ever--although I think his orchestration was cool, and I like some amount of the instrumental stuff (including the 'backing' for these pieces), I tend to prefer vocal music from earlier, and I found the sometimes banal lyrics a little distracting at times. Those are all small criticisms, though, and based on my own taste--for me, it wasn't a transcendental experience, just an evening delightfully spent. I wouldn't have minded hearing more of Emma Kirkby herself, although I did thoroughly enjoy the other soloists, particularly countertenor Iestyn Davies. And it didn't hurt that I got my ticket for 9 pounds through a deal they have to fill some seats on the side of the hall that don't have a great line of sight to the stage. I could actually see all the performers--the only drawback was that, in a hall without amplification, my position created something of an imbalance of sound, and I'm sure parts of it rung out better for those seated in more ideal locations. I was worried about that in the beginning, but it didn't wind up bothering me too much.

But London hasn't been all good concerts and bad curry. I've been working me arse off in the British Library, which is exhausting but exciting work that brings up as many--or more--questions than it answers.

So that's the news!

The Book I'm Not Reading: Robert Kee's The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism