Let me eat cake

"It takes a pretty good cake to equal pie." 

So says David Letterman, and while I love pie I'm tired of making blueberry pies. Yet as I gaze into the freezer I feel strongly that no blueberries should go to waste.

It's nearly blueberry season in the Willamette Valley, and all frozen berries must be vanquished pronto. We've eaten them on cereal in the morning, poured blueberry syrup on ice cream, and enjoyed fruit salads galore. There must be a good blueberry cake recipe out there. Not a crumble, not a coffee cake, but a cake cake. Anybody have a blueberry cake recipe to share?

No? Maybe you're all pie-eaters.

Kale

Sometimes you get a talkative check-out person at the local grocery store; it's one of the things I like about it. But this guy had just said something surprising:

Him: You feedin' turtles?
Me: What?
Him: The only people who buy kale are feeding turtles, far as I know.
Me: Oh...the kale...no I thought I'd--you know--eat it? In some soup, with white beans. I heard it has a lot of vitamins.
Him: Yeah. It's loaded with lutein, great for turtles.
Me: Uh huh. Well, what's good for turtles is good for me, maybe?
Him: You should get a turtle.

The above conversation took place 10 years ago. Since then kale has become a Food Super Star. It's been touted as a cancer-fighting, Alzheimers-avoiding, anti-oxidant, vitamin-loaded rock star. I have a friend who is a world class distance runner, and every morning she makes herself a kale smoothie. On Saturday I attended a grad student potluck and fully 20% of the food there was some form of kale salad. I happen to enjoy kale salad, but in large quantities? Gee whiz it makes me crave spaghetti and meatballs.

JUST when kale reached its peak, though, it got its come-uppance. It can be too much of a good thing, and my friend needs to stop overdosing on this veggie pronto. No longer the perfect food, it's kind of the Lance Armstrong of veggies: the too-good-to-be-true-hero. I feel like I've been through this before: the cranberry scare, the spinach scare, the grape scare. Eventually we eat these things again in moderation.

The grad students who brought all of that kale to dinner? They also produced cupcakes decorated with fondant fir needles, sugar acorns, and an edible squirrel. Eating these things undoubtedly cancels out any of the effects of the kale; I'm sure of it. Have a squirrel, go ahead.

Have one

The unassailable topic of today's post is...

 ...the penguin.

 I bet you didn't know that penguins are edible.

 Go ahead, have one.

They're irresistible.

Food cart yumminess

Yesterday I was in Portland with daughter J, back from Nairobi and needing to pick up some cargo at the airport.

  We dawdled in northeast Portland before coming home. Happily it was lunch time, which meant a foray into the ubiquitous food cart culture.

 Many neighborhoods have alleys and formerly-empty lots converted into small spaces for food trucks. Portland-unlike a lot of cities-has encouraged the proliferation of these entrepreneurial little places and the area has attracted young chefs wanting to make a name for themselves while on  shoestring budgets.

 You could spend weeks in Portland and not run out of fun places to have lunch.

 An assortment of dumplings and a big, steamed, curry-filled bao from Stumptown Dumplings...can you say yummmmmmy?

 Japanese katsu on a bed of cabbage, with rice on the side: $5.00.

 Our son and his family have just moved back to Portland from Chicago, and although I loved visiting the Windy City I'm really glad for the excuse to get to the City of Roses more often.  Pretty sure there will be more food carts in my future.

A gift

Last year we had the pleasure of hosting one of my favorite people on the planet, my 95-year-old father-in-law, for two weeks in December. Before flying out to be with us he asked what I wanted for Christmas. Aside from his presence I had trouble thinking of a single thing. Who needs more stuff?

Finally I asked for any recipes that might remain from my mother-in-law, who died in 1999. He wasn't sure what was left in that kitchen drawer where they resided all those years, but he dutifully brought me what scribbling he could find.

It turned out to be a treasure trove, not only of recipes but also of glimpses into Eliza's life. I can just see her enjoying a salad at a bridge club meeting, quickly jotting down the dressing ingredients on a score sheet.

Much of the fun in this old collection is her choice of paper. If you were born after 1985 you may not recognize where this little card is from, but on the other side you will find the scrawled directions for making orange sherbet.

This recipe has no title and so few directions that I haven't figured out what it's for, but it must've made sense to Eliza. Check out the ingredients...how much would 15 cents buy these days? However I'm pretty sure what she means by  "1 good teas."

This little brochure from the 40's still contains a coupon, and a strange recipe for "English Rocks."

As the decades ticked past, new ideas began to show up...granola? Looks like the grandkids were paying a visit at the time.

The paper is so fragile that most of Eliza's recipes can bear little handling. Still, I took this one out yesterday afternoon and baked orange macaroons.

Made with no shortening, just eggs, flour, sugar, orange zest, and almonds, these light little delights are like something you might pick up in a Parisian bakery. I don't remember her making these sophisticated treats but I'm glad she left me the recipe all these years later.

Five close family members celebrate birthdays in the next month so this sour cream cake is on my short list to make real soon.  My father-in-law's gift just keeps on giving.

My photographer friend Rebecca in Pennsylvania points out that I finally have a post for Friday Shoot-outs because the topic this week is "handwriting." If you'd like to see more, check it out at Friday My Town Shoot-Out.

A night with scallops

 John is gone this week, on the other side of the state with his class of American and Japanese students. They're completing the US component of a study focused on rural communities; next month they'll head to Japan for three weeks of the same. It's an unusual and very cool opportunity. I'm a little jealous because last year I had a really good time in Japan. 

An unsurprising urge to eat Japanese food drove me to the seaweed salad recipe contained in a recent article about scallops, which also happen to be John's favorite seafood.  It seems a bit vengeful, doesn't it, to whip up a fancy Japanese dinner involving scallops while he's gone this week.

But I had my doubts about the choice of seaweed salad.

That's because: 

Raw + Seaweed = Possibly Disgusting?

However:

Possibly Disgusting = A Good Thing To Make When Alone

Turns out I already had all of the ingredients except for the dry-packed scallops, of which I bought 4 at $1.25 apiece. They were labeled a "product of USA" and also "from Japan" which might mean that I'd just bought something caught here, shipped to Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, purchased by a US buyer, and sent to Oregon. This happens with sashimi-grade fish and I hate to think I might have participated. Arhggg. Perhaps it was a labeling error?

The seaweed was a bit slimy. Anticipating this, I'd bought a couple of spring rolls that could be counted on in case the salad was too weird. And I added waaay more cucumber, because who could argue with that? Despite these attempts at off-setting a bizarre dinner, it was still a tad strange with its sticky kelp and raw scallop.

It was wise to have sacrificed only one of those spendy scallops on the salad.

I  sauteed the remaining three in butter and parsley, serving them to myself with garlic bread. Ah, that's more familiar.

The whole dinner was like a culinary analogy to John's class: half Japanese, half American,  me easily identifying with the familiar part. Happily, it was all fun.

Substitutions

Lots of times you have to substitute stuff. Otherwise nothing would get done.

Recipe:

2 game hens (substituted 1 chicken)
1 onion (substituted 2 garlic cloves)
Lime (substituted lemon)
Smoked paprika (substituted one crushed candy cigarette & a dash of Tabasco)
1/2 cup honey (substituted 1/4 cup honey plus a small drawing of a bee)

A new pet

I've been on a bread-baking binge for months and months; it's been nearly a year since I've sprung/sprang/paid 5 bucks for a decent loaf of bread. It's easy to make your own. It smells so good, plus it's hardly any work at all.

If you say you bake bread, somebody will eventually ask if you make sourdough bread. This happened about 6 weeks ago & I had to admit that no, I didn't, which was bothersome. I  forgot what I once knew, that sourdough is a curse.

 Thus started the "sourdough pot" which resides next to the stove. It's like having a low-key pet: quiet, pretty clean, but needs to be fed and watered every day. It grows. You have to exercise it; it wants to be used. Demanding attention, it's a food version of Eddy, our Portuguese waterdog. In the past couple of weeks I've made 4 loaves of bread, two batches of pancakes, and John whipped up a batch of sourdough blueberry muffins, but there is still just as much starter as ever.

If you live near me, don't hesitate to contact me. I'll be happy to give you some starter. It's either that or list this stuff on PetFinder.

Cooking with peeps

Cooking is like alchemy, always searching for gold, coming up with other cool stuff as you go along, and punctuated with epic fails in between. Some young friends of ours have asked us to join in "Culinary Night" a tradition they observed with friends in Vancouver, BC: choose a country, create a menu, get the ingredients, then in a night of wine-fueled collaboration, cook it all up at somebody's house. I think this will be a load of fun.

These young friends do not yet know about my massive past failures, which include, but are not limited to:

1. The time I came back from a camping trip and absentmindedly dumped the the baggie of salt into the sugar bin & proceeded to prepare an inedible strawberry shortcake, serving up the first bowlful to a neighbor who immediately puked.

2. The time my then-7-year-old son asked if I could make "that snowman cake on the front of Woman's Day magazine at Krogers." Suffice it to say it was more like a blizzard of busted snowdrifts then anything resembling a snow man. (Who knew that a white cake mix was serious when they said to only use egg whites, not the whole egg? And that it wouldn't work if one didn't buy special cake pans.) Using yankee ingenuity, 7 boxes of *&$# cake mix,  and every damn over-sized pan in the kitchen, I DID, finally make that snowman's head: a HUGE white sphere, that would easily feed 120 people. But when that little boy turned 8 the next day, it was all worth it. I was exhausted.

3. The time I had a get-to-know-you session with a new food processor, resulting in hot cream of broccoli soup on all 4 walls of the kitchen. Yeah.

On Friday I decided to surprise John with a cake. The cup of sugar that you see next to the finished product is what I forgot to add while my mind was on auto-pilot during the preparation. The recipe had (oddly) called for 1 1/3 cups of sugar. Adding the 1/3 cup, I  imagine my sub-conscious hissing at me: that's ENOUGH toxicity, you moron! According to my favorite food writer, and many others, sugar is horrible.

Okay, "Subconscious-Know-It-All," whatever. Screw you. I've got my own back. I will add 16 ounces of chocolate frosting, chocolate chips,  and 18 Peeps to make this right. You see, it is a sunflower. How can that possibly be a bad thing?

It didn't look like a sunflower to John at first, but if I held it up just right and said the word "sunflower" he quickly caught on.  Neither of us felt like actually eating this creation. So it just sat there.

It sat there until last night when we had an impromptu dinner party with the neighbors on either side of us, who had never met one another: wild sockeye salmon with aioli sauce, fresh asparagus, home-made sourdough bread, green salad, and...a revolting Peep sunflower cake. 

Which.They. Devoured.

So, all in all, I have confidence that Culinary Night will work out with our sophisticated young peeps, err, friends. The theme will be vegetarian food from India. Ideas anyone?

Market's end

It was a wet and dismal Saturday, the last day for the outdoor farmer's market, and the crowd was sparse. In the summer months this place on the river front is teeming with people of all ages, plus dogs, bikes, skateboards, musicians, and sometimes actors.

Despite the rain, my photography class went ahead with a photo shoot. Sniffing out good subjects for photography wasn't hard at all, and the overcast skies only helped things look better.

One of the apple sellers must know that his red Studebaker pick-up truck makes the apples next to it look impossibly red on a gray day. The colors were so vivid there was no need to boost them afterwards. How can anything even get redder than this?

A honey seller propped up her table with hive boxes. So blue!

And then there were the veggies. You just can't go wrong taking pictures of them. (I bought 3 leeks for $3 and made potato leek soup in the afternoon.)

The lettuce appears to be celebrating: woohoo, it's the last day of the farmer's market!

Not to be outdone, the radishes were screaming to be bought. I don't even care for radishes all that much, but it's impossible to resist them when they look like this!

Peppers!

More radishes!

Artichokes!

Celeriac root: I bought one of these and plan to mash it with potatoes.

Poblanos. I had to buy a few of these too... what shall I do with them?

Even the mushrooms were aflame with color. I'd never seen oyster mushrooms like this before, but apparently they grow wild around here.

I always miss it when the market closes for the winter. The indoor market that replaces it in January pales in comparison. Sigh.

Turkish delight

Because of the greedy little kid in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I've long held a negative opinion of Turkish Delight, plus I always thought it was made out of rose water and tasted like soap.

It turns out that's not true. I now know this because of the largesse of our new Turkish friends, Kayham and Sezgin, visiting professors from central Turkey whom John sponsored for a 2 month stay at OSU.  They brought us a box of coconut Turkish Delight that is to-die-for: a very nice, unlooked-for gift.

Their wives and families came with them for a few weeks, and we had the whole gang over for dinner. Damn, why didn't I know it was still Ramadan!!  That's when Muslims fast until sundown, which occurred a bit late that night. At least I knew not to serve pork or alcohol. They were very relaxed about my breach of knowledge, and only K adhered to the exact moment of sundown, watching for it on the internet, eating his dinner an hour after everybody else.

 In the back yard the kids played for hours with Ed and Reub, who enthusiastically endorsed them. I was flabbergasted because:

1.  Eddy always overwhelms children with his desire to play, and Reuben is always terrified of kids because he sees them as unpredictable.
2.  These particular kids have never had a dog, and come from a culture where canines are generally lowly street creatures, not house pets. Shouldn't they have been freaked out by these big dogs? They were not. Instead they were charmed by Eddy's tennis ball obsession, entranced by Reub's truly weird play routine (some day I'll describe it, or he will). Reub wasn't even slightly uncomfortable with them, and Ed was ecstatic.

 Turks must have a gift-giving tradition. That evening I was presented with a large bouquet of fresh daisies, a white silk shawl, and a cunning little 11-piece Turkish coffee set, plus a bag of the right kind of coffee.

This is Turkish coffee, creating just the right amount of foam as it heats up.

AND a lesson in how to make Turkish coffee. Are you kiddin' me? They had me with the Turkish Delight.

But that's not all. Before coming to the US they asked what to bring: "anything...anything at all" Sezgin said. Music-lover John jokingly said not to worry, that some day he would go to Turkey and get himself an oud.

Tezgin gives John a lesson in Turkish music

Imagine John's shock when he was presented with an oud (on the left), complimenting the saz (right) that he already owns. An embarrassment of gifts, he had seriously only joked about that oud, and look what happened. He swears that he only aided his guests a little, just a small amount here and there, nothing that might deserve such a gift from strangers.

As Sezgin gave John the music lesson this past Sunday, his overturned coffee cup sat on its dish. I had asked for a fortune-telling demonstration, but my cup had been washed already, so he agreed to tell his own fortune.

"There is a hand," he said, "reaching up to accept a lot of money. Maybe I'll become rich!" 

I see the hand. Do you?

"I see a beautiful young girl, with long dark hair..." and you know what, this I could not see at all, at least not then. What I saw was a howler monkey in a tree, which I now have trouble deciphering but I can kind of see the girl. There are lots of things you could read into the designs on this little cup! Sezgin was a good sport to play this game, but now I would love to go have my fortune read in Ankara, for real, after drinking my cup of Turkish coffee.

For now, I'll just have another bite of Turkish Delight with coconut; hold the rose water please.