There are things I daydream about. Sometimes, they are kitchen things.
In these kitchen daydreams, the sauce pan I need is never at the back of the cabinet. All my spice bottles are the same shape, same size, same color, and they’re all labeled in the same font. Sunshine floods across my countertops and splashes to the floor, filling the room with light. My knives are always sharp, but I never cut my fingers. Avocados grow locally. Also cashews and cocoa beans and grapefruits.
Le sigh.
Some dreams stay that way. But other dreams? Pasta-and-mushrooms-tossed-in-sun-dried-tomato-cream-sauce dreams? Oh yeah. They’re COMING TRUE.
I’ve been making a lot of soup lately. I crave it when it gets cold, when it gets cloudy, or when I just want to eat the embodiment of warmth and comfort.
Do you know the story of Stone Soup? An old folk tale that varies from culture to culture, the story centers around a traveler who arrives in a small village seeking food. At every door he is turned away as the villagers attempt to protect their meager pantries. The traveler then asks, quite simply for a stone and a kettle so that he might prepare a delicious soup.
Curious, the villagers slowly emerge from their homes and begin to offer small ingredients that will improve the soup: a bunch of carrots, an ear of corn, some grains of pepper. In no time at all, a hearty, filling soup feeds not only the traveler but the entire village, and the modest contribution of each villager yields an excellent meal for everyone.
Last summer, while in the midst of packing up my Ohio life for our pending move to Colorado, I was also menu planning a dinner for almost 20 people at a remote, 9700′ mountain lodge with gas refrigerators, gas ovens, and limited electricity. For dessert, I wanted something that was easy but impressive, required neither baking nor freezing, was cheap to make but wasn’t boring, could feed a crowd, and overall, was heartbreakingly delicious.
A unicorn, I thought.
BUT THEN. Icebox cake. To the freakin’ rescue.
Why, in the name of all that is good and delicious in this world, did I only start making this last summer? I mean, who knew such a perfect summer dessert could exist?
Did you guys know?
WELL. If you, like me, were in the shadows, let me show you the light. (more…)
For most people in the US of A, myself included, french fries are the primary way that we consume potatoes. Sure, we eat mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving and heaped atop shepherd’s pies, and certainly a fair number of potatoes turn into potato chips. But mostly, we eat fries. I even figured out how to make my own a few months ago, and boy oh boy are they delicious.
But I’d like to propose that we overthrow King French Fry from its mighty throne over potatoes everywhere. I don’t want to kick ’em out, just bring them back down on an equal plane with other potatoes.
And in the vacuum, let’s make THESEinstead.
Despite the fact that I grew up enjoying new potatoes from my grandparents’ garden every summer, I had never once before this spring considered buying a batch of teeny little potatoes to make at home. My dad was in town to visit so I decided to try out a recipe I’d been eying in the beautiful Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. The author herself (eeeee! I met her!) said that her Flat Roasted Chicken with Tiny Potatoes seems to be one of the more popular among her readers, so with an excellent excuse like company in the house, I gave it a shot. The chicken was delicious, but it was the potatoes that stole my heart.
I think I was in sixth or seventh grade when I first heard about hummus. One of my classmates probably brought it in their packed lunch, with a pack of carrot sticks or some pita bread. My hometown was (and still is) definitely the kind of place where sixth graders are excited about eating hummus and carrots for lunch.
Unfortunately, I was horrified by the idea of eating hummus. For the better part of my childhood, I thought that hummus (ground chickpeas with tahini paste) and HUMUS (fully decomposed soil) were the same thing. I was all for eating the fruits of the earth, but the earth itself? NO WAY.
The connections one makes as a child are truly fascinating, aren’t they?
Now, however, I know the truth. I know that in fact, that extra “m” makes a HUGE and delicious difference. What’s more, hummus is an incredibly easy and inexpensive snack to make.
Colorado doesn’t have to deal with hurricanes. Earthquakes there are rare. Only the occasional tornado finds its way to the ground in the eastern half of the state.
But we do have wildfire.
Well over half of the Centennial State is composed of thick forests, but they are very unlike the humid, deciduous forests that blanket the majority of the Eastern United States. Nearly every summer, odds are good that in some part of the state, plumes of smoke will rise on the horizon at one point or another. My childhood summer memories are speckled with forest fires, some that looked merely like a faint haze in the distance, and others whose flames were visible from my bedroom window.
Each summer brings fire, but some years are worse — far worse — and this is certainly one of them. Following a winter of little snow and a very dry spring, even the tiniest sparks have ignited blazes across the state, many of them near (and advancing into) major population centers. It’s only June, and already the skies are thick with smoke, thousands of acres have burned, and hundreds of families have lost their homes.
Yet while much is lost, the communities affected by these fires band together to protect what they can and to reach out to evacuees, firefighters, and relief workers. Though I am not currently a resident of Colorado, it will always be my home and I still want to help as best I can from 2,000 miles away.
One particularly incredible means of assistance has been created by a coalition of Colorado design businesses: Wildfire Tees. These designers and artists have put together some stellar t-shirts to remember this summer’s devastating fires, and all the proceeds from their sales will go both toward immediate fire relief and toward the arduous rebuilding that lies ahead. I’m hugely inspired by these individuals, who are using the artistic skills and resources they know best to make an impact in this urgent cause while at the same time are providing an easy avenue for others to make an impact, too.
We live in a big world and are faced with many crises, but with each act of generosity toward a neighbor in need, we create a better world for everyone. If you’re able, I encourage you to buy a tee or to support the efforts to fight the Colorado wildfires in whatever manner you can. You can find many ways to help at HelpColoradoNow.org, as well as at the Denver Post. At the very least, send your rain and rainy (though not lightning-y) thoughts toward Colorado. It could sure use them.
After several months of, design and re-design, recipe hunting, cake baking, flavor testing, and technique practicing, I’ve arrived in Colorado to do the real thing. Though the next few days will be long, busy, and full of butter, I’m really quite thrilled to be here. I haven’t seen October in Colorado since my senior year of high school, and it sure is something to see. We don’t have the red sugar maples of the east coast, but golden aspens against evergreens and snow-capped peaks are truly breathtaking. I hope I have at least one evening to take a drive through the mountains and enjoy some Colorado autumn.
But the priority this week is cake. Monday night found me bustling around my apartment packing what may be the strangest looking luggage I’ve ever compiled. In addition to my standard jeans, t-shirts, and socks, I’ve packed 10 cake pans, a quart of pecans, a case of decorating tips, piping bags, a bridesmaids dress, three options for shoes to wear with said dress (I may end up using all three, who knows), two antique glass insulators, four cake knives, one cake layer slicer, a box of parchment paper, two tubes of raspberry filling, a Lazy Susan, a cake turner, a jar of ginger, a roll of blue cellophane, a tripod, a pack of paintbrushes, gum paste, almond paste, vanilla bean paste, and a few other odds and ends that I’ll need to make this cake happen.
The impact that holidays have on my mood is real. I don’t even have Memorial Day off, but a feeling I can only describe as three-day-weekend anticipation built on Friday afternoon anyway, as I watched the clock tick toward 5pm. The lack of social commitments and spectacular weather of these two days feel like a luxurious break on their own.
There aren’t many things that can break me out of my water-all-time-time beverage habit, but the arrival of summer weather is one of them. And lemonade is usually first in line for my liquid-y cravings. Amazingly, though, I’d never made it from scratch until earlier this spring during the citrus extravaganza following my trip to California.
I can’t believe I waited so long.
Woe to the time I’ve wasted buying lemonade from the grocery. Woe to the powdery mix that’s walking around emulating this precious elixir. Using only a few lemons, you can make the most perfect, delightful lemonade with hardly any effort at all. Please do so as soon as possible.
I don’t make a lot of pie. I grew up in a cake house, you see. My mom always preferred baking cakes and cookies to pies, and my sister and I expanded on this behavior as 4-H cake decorating students for several years each. Pie, which has taken on a role of symbolic role of domestic culinary prowess in our culture, was simply not something I learned to make as a kid.
The pies my mom did make were never, ever, double-crusted fruit pies. If we did have a pie for dessert, it was typically composed of a pre-made graham cracker crust, a box of pudding mix, and a mound of Cool Whip.
And you know what? I freakin’ loved it.
To this day, while I will certainly eat a slice of apple, cherry, or other fruity pie if it’s presented to me with a sizable scoop of vanilla ice cream, the pies that I dream of are the cold, creamy, pudding-ish pies that I grew up on.
This pie follows in that tradition, though with some notable modifications. First, I love making my own graham cracker crusts. I like a heavier crumb with more crunch, and I like that I can control the level of sweetness and stickiness by adding as much or as little sugar and butter as I like when whirling it together myself.
As the clever among you have likely already deduced, I haven’t been posting much lately. Haven’t cooked much, haven’t edited photos, haven’t written many words about food or the silly stories relating to it. I would love to say that this is due to a lengthy and lazy vacation in the far reaches of the Caribbean or the Pacific. It’s not. No remote islands lacking internet access for this lady.
I knew it had been a while, but I was stunned, frankly, to discover that my last post was a month ago. A whole month. What happened to the thirty-one days of May?
I’ve spent a couple of days reflecting on the veritable evaporation of the last month. Some of you are already familiar with the highlights: Brad graduated law school, bringing his 10-year journey in higher education to a close. Spring semester, the busiest three-months I’ve EVER worked, finally ended, and the relative calm of the summer has arrived. Brad and I took an 11-day, 3,000-mile trip to the Midwest on which we completed two major missions: find a new place to live in a city that I will be calling home by this time next year, and, bake a grooms cake and wedding cake for a pair of dear friends in Wisconsin and also be a bridesmaid in their wedding. The long, late, cool spring has transitioned into a hot, humid summer. Yesterday, after nearly forgetting it was time for this to happen, I turned 27.
The truth is that the May was full of things that pulled my time and attention away from my little corner of the internet. In the hustle and bustle of it all, there was little time to cook, and the creative energy normally required to support this blogging endeavor was diverted elsewhere out of necessity. There were actually a few moments when I sat down to try to write a post, but simply felt I had nothing to say. What tale could I possibly weave about glazed carrots, or homemade popcorn, or new potatoes when some urgent deadline was looming over my head?
I’m looking forward to getting back to it. Even after I finish writing this post, I have an afternoon full of cooking projects I can’t wait to start. My desire to write has returned. It’s a beautiful sunny day, which should make for good photos of the rhubarb, berries, garlic scapes, and other tasty treats waiting in the fridge.
