Almond Rosemary Cake with Lemon Creme Fraiche Glaze

By popular demand, my most recent foray into the world of flour and sugar:

Cake
1 stick unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 C raw almonds
1 1/3 C AP flour
1/2 C instant polenta
1 T baking powder
1 t minced fresh rosemary
zest of 1 lemon
1/2 t salt
4 eggs, room temp
1/2 C white sugar
3/4 C creme fraiche

Syrup
1/2 C water
1/2 C white sugar
1 T fresh lemon juice

Glaze
1/2 C confectioners' sugar
1/4 C creme fraiche
1 T fresh lemon juice

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 11" springform pan. Toast almonds in oven until fragrant, about 5 minutes. Chop and then process until finely ground. Mix together almonds, flour, polenta, baking powder, salt, lemon zest, rosemary.
Separately, beat eggs with sugar until tripled in volume. Add creme 3/4 C fraiche and the melted butter and mix. Fold egg mixture into dry ingredients in three batches. Scrape batter into pan and bake for 25 minutes.
For syrup, combine water, sugar, lemon juice and bring to boil. Pour over baked cake while still warm and still in pan. Let cool.
For glaze, whisk together confectioners' sugar, creme fraiche, lemon juice until smooth. Spread over cake.

Garden Pizza

After six months of just about bi-weekly late night stomach aches and next morning groans of "Ugh....damn you Pizza Night", I think I have made - and eaten - enough pizza dough to start the Italian grandmotherly process of muscle memory training. There are pizza muscles just as there are pasta ones, potato gnocchi muscles and pie crust ones, as many muscles as there are culinary traditions to carry on. And so after many failures (edible nonetheless), I am beginning to recognize a pizza dough when I feel one. But just beginning.

I was weeding the garden yesterday, sporadically and randomly and just trying to make a dent in the jungle that the garden has become, when I pulled up one after the other oblong beige tuber. I had forgotten that I had dropped off some sprouted spuds several months back, in a back corner of the un-scientific experiment of our vegetable garden, and, sure enough, they had taken hold and flourished. On my way back inside I snipped some broccoli that was getting pretty leggy, and thought that our house-marinated olives would round out the pizza toppings nicely. Still in possession of around 20 pounds of yellow onions left from last week's event, I caramelized a bowlful for good measure. Add to that some ricotta I had made earlier in the day for some cookies, and we were sitting on quite the pizza larder.

While the cooking was not ideal this first attempt on the Big Green Egg - I'd like more radiant heat to blister the top crust before the bottom crust gets too dark - it was plenty successful as a first attempt, tasted absolutely delicious, and didn't heat up the entire house as the kitchen oven used to. We dined al fresco, mere steps from the land that had given us the toppings. And, learning my lesson from abundances past, I only made three pizzas.

Local Love

I've been preparing for this Saturday's 120 person luncheon for the last month, brining meats and pickling veggies and contemplating with steadily growing anxiety. Now that the cooking is underway I'm less worried about the food and more concerned with the sheer logistics; 120 people, whoever they are, translates to a lot of food (turns out even with my recently acquired second refrigerator I am woefully short on space). But Saturday will happen (third refrigerator be damned!) and the food will be tasty.

What I really want to write about is the joy, deep down in every member of the human race, of cooking for loved ones. I got the chance to take a break from event-worrying for a few days when my family was in town, the first time we were all together for quite awhile. As it was their first time in Portland, I decided to give them a good thorough taste of the Pacific Northwest.

Celebrating the Do-it-yourself mentality out here we snacked on freshly un-crocked garlic-dill pickles and sauerkraut and sipped homemade root beer and ginger beer. We roasted local Chinook salmon, covered in dill and lemon wedges, on cedar planks, and tossed just-from-the-garden snap peas with local hazelnuts and sharp sheep's milk cheese. Willapa Bay clams steamed with morels and baby turnips and finished with a generous shaving of Oregon black truffle kept it close to home. And a sourdough pumpernickel bread to go with the array of NW cheeses and Netarts Bay salt really sealed the deal. Those famous Oregon berries found their way into a crostata made with leaf lard from local pigs and joined by homemade vanilla ice cream, and to wash it all down, of course, a Willamette Pinot (Chehalem) and some black currant liqueur from Clear Creek.

A celebration of the place and of the people sharing it. What else is cooking about?

How We Flew to Bavaria on Wings of Rye

I had been less than pleased with my attempts to bake bread using only my sourdough starter, rather than any commercial yeast. I have a jar full of Fleischmann's in the fridge, but what would I do if I suddenly found myself in a post-Apocalyptic farm house, no grocery stores left, only my trusty mason jar of bubbling sour-smelling goo to raise my breads? (The yeast is the first thing the zombies go for.) Clearly, another attempt was in order.

Rye bread has always been a favorite of mine, as well as the dense brown breads of Northern European tradition. If lightness was not a desirable attribute of these breads, then maybe leaving out the yeast would work just fine. I started my sponge the day before baking, mixing my starter with dark rye flour, warm water, and a little sugar, and mixing in browned onions and crushed caraway seeds. I put that on the counter and walked away.

After only a couple hours it was quite active, putting up the occasional bubble (polenta-style) and acquiring a rather ripe smell. By the next day (about 16 hours of fermentation time) it had developed a thoroughly adolescent personality - impatient, volatile, smelly, and just plain uncomfortable in its body. It was time to graduate it to the mixing bowl.

I folded in the remaining flour (100% rye, as opposed to most rye bread recipes which lighten the loaf with varying amounts of white wheat flour), and let the sticky dough rise and ferment some more.

Eight or so hours later, I gathered the sticky mass and clumped it into a loaf pan, for a final rise of about 90 minutes. Rye flour, unlike wheat flour, does not depend on gluten for its structural integrity and carbon dioxide trapping ability, and so does not require any kneading (read more here), which is fortunate, because rye dough is sticky. It's like kneading bubble gum mixed with Elmer's.

Finally, it went into the oven (350 degrees F) for right around two hours. It's hard to over-bake a bread like this, and you certainly don't want to under-bake it, so shoot for at least two hours, and give it a knock on the bottom to see if it sounds hollow.

A few squares of cold sweet butter and a pinch of crunchy salt would do just about perfectly, but we had the recently canned sauerkraut to debut. Some hot kraut and onions, melted cheese, a few slices of rye, last summer's bread and butter pickles, and a home brew. Prost!

Recipe

In response to several requests, here's the recipe for the shortcakes. Nothing fancy, just a prodigal amount of good cream and butter, and the ripest strawberries you can find.

Biscuits:

1.5 c AP flour
4 t sugar
2 t baking powder
6 T butter
.75 c cream
fat pinch of salt

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in cold butter, stir in about 10 T of the cream until dough forms. Chill. Roll out to 0.5" thick. Cut out biscuits, brush with remaining cream, and bake at 400 F for about 16 minutes.

Strawberries:

4 c fresh strawberries, hulled and washed
0.25 c sugar (give or take)

Slice the strawberries, sprinkle with sugar, puree half of the mixture and fold back in.

Cream:

1 c cream
0.5 c fresh lemon verbena leaves (mint works nicely, too)
1.5 T

Steep herb in cream for at least 24 hours. Strain out herb and whip cream with sugar.

Assemble the shortcakes any way you want. They won't stay assembled long.

The Main Event

This weekend, Home Skillet was launched, on wings of strawberry shortcake, past the reaches of word of mouth among friends and into the wide world beyond.

Along with several other local food businesses, we offered a menu item to be served at a wine tasting fundraiser for The International School here in Portland. I had spent the days leading up to the event making sure that this simple dish would really shine: finding the best possible local strawberries, infusing rich organic cream with fresh lemon verbena, baking over one hundred sweet cream biscuits. Everything came out beautifully, leaving us with an easy job once we got to the event.

We plated up our desserts, schmoozed (as I love to do) and mingled with the crowd, dispatched a handful of business cards, and called it a night. A great event for all involved. Look out Portland, there's tasty food coming your way, and it's called Home Skillet.

From Crock to Can: A Sauerkraut's Life Journey.

On February 9 I packed a one gallon crock full of salted cabbage. Over the next couple days I pressed it down, until finally it was submerged in its own salty liquid. I covered it and put it in a dark corner of the garage.

For the next couple of weeks I compulsively checked it, my first home fermentation project, impatient for a transformation. I knew that it would take several weeks, if not months, to become that tangy, funky, and thoroughly nourishing German staple we all know and love, but I couldn't stop looking. And doubting.

As I started more and more projects, my attention wandered from the cabbage, until, would you look at that, it's been a solid three months; I'd better check. I lifted the top, fully expecting to find moldy, fly-ridden rotten veg, but what wafted up to greet me was pleasantly sour, and somehow even smelled alive. It crunched like cabbage, but tasted like another being altogether. Pricklingly acidic, earthy, vegetal, robust, brimming with life.

Knowing I didn't want to lose the vivacity of our new friend in the garage, but also realizing that we would most likely not get around to eating it all before the temperature rose to summer heights and carried our sauerkraut over the fermentation Sour Cliff and into the Abyss of Off Flavors, I canned it.

I know, I know, I just killed a living being. I took all that natural health-giving bacteria and cooked it, rendering it just another can in the cupboard. But then again, I'd rather have four quarts of delicious preserve than a crock of what might have been.

Filone

Someday I will have a wood-burning oven, most likely made of brick, and probably in my backyard. I first need a house, a backyard, and either the skills to build or the money to pay someone to build, but it will happen. Someday.

For now I make do with a 500 degree electric oven, a baking stone, and a smoke-filled kitchen (and adjoining living room). One look at the crust and I know it's not "real" bread, but for the tools I'm working with, it'll do for now.

Springtime

Olive oil poached halibut, fried leeks, asparagus and fava beans in briny beurre blanc.

The Time Has Come

To my fans out there (both of you): I have finally been persuaded onto the facebook bandwagon. Check us out! HomeSkilletDining

The Big Sock

Pizza night is becoming a regular event. We decided to toss a calzone into the mix this time. Not bad looking? Pretty delicious, too.

Nice Little Tuesday

I felt like rolling pasta, Sarah wanted peas, so we put them together: fresh spaghetti with English peas, mint, and bread crumbs.

Paired it with a 1994 Kalin Chardonnay, nutty and herbal and tropical all at once.

Bitter

In the quest toward a more homegrown bar, we started our bitter herb infusions in mid-February: a fat pinch of said herb covered with a few ounces of high proof alcohol. The goal was to end up with a highly potent extract of various bittering elements which we could then either mix to form cocktail bitters or add to a batch of house vermouth.

Checking the infusions every few days for the first month was not reassuring: they were picking up color from the herbs, but still smelled only of alcohol. So we left them alone for awhile. Coming back a few weeks later they had a faint whiff of herb, but still mostly alcohol. It wasn't until I dipped my finger in one and licked it that I realized it had worked: I was overwhelmed by the flavor of the herb, a miniscule drop packing a whollop of flavor. It was the same for all the others: wormwood, mugwort, gentian, orange peel, angelica, quassia, and warm spice. A panoply of flavors and colors, ready for the straining.

An Extemporaneous Grill

It hit 80 degrees on Sunday. I walked out of work with a handful of kale raabs, knowing that I wanted to grill, but clueless as to what else to eat.

As I roamed the New Seasons aisles, having already grabbed a filet of sablefish, I spotted the avocado pile. Weaving my way through carts loaded with charcoal and watermelons, I snagged a dimpled green orb, tender enough to be eaten tonight (surprisingly, as usually I have to buy avocado rocks and wait a week to eat them).

I didn't want guacamole - I'll be making plenty of that when true summer arrives - but it had to be refreshing and satisfying, summery enough but not obnoxiously so (it was still April, after all). I made a couple of circuits through the produce, uninspired, until I landed on something I usually walk right past - portobello mushrooms. This dish was shaping up to be an odd one, but I trusted my (hungry) gut and picked up a bunch of parsley and a lime.

I cut the mushroom into fat wedges and grilled them until golden brown and tender, but still decidedly toothsome. I tossed in the avocado wedges, piled on the torn parsley leaves, and gave the whole a big dose of good olive oil, fresh lime juice, and plenty of Maldon salt. Odd, perhaps, but so delicious: meaty, creamy, vibrant, and fresh.

Home Skillet 2.0

Finally got ahold of some time to start setting up the Home Skillet website. It's an ongoing effort, but go ahead and check it out!

Pizza! Pizza!

Of all the categories of cooking that I someday hope to master, the one that has long lingered in the back of my mind, never quite taking center stage, is pizza. I've eaten it in Naples, all over Italy in fact. In New York I worked at a place that served what was arguably the best pizza in town, and I helped my good friend get his brick oven pizza business off the ground. But I've never really made it at home; without a brick oven, I thought, what's the point of even trying?

With my sourdough starter flourishing over the last month, though, I thought it was time to really give it a go. I used some yeast to augment my sourdough, and over the course of about 16 hours made a respectable dough: sponge in the fridge overnight, soft dough in the morning, slow rise, punch down, second rise, portion, final rise. Of course I failed to take any notes - a necessity for the serious pizzaiolo I'm told - but those days in the pizzeria trenches ended up serving me well. I could, with a fairly high degree of confidence, recognize when the dough looked and felt right, and could stretch it out efficiently.

Besides a good dough, the one missing piece of the puzzle - short of a backyard oven (someday!) - was a stone. So I bit the bullet and bought one, figuring now was the time to try to do it right. After a 45 minute pre-heat in a 475 degree oven (smoke alarm be damned), I used an inverted floured sheet tray as a makeshift peel and slid the lightly dressed dough onto the floured peel. Eight minutes later - not quite the 45 seconds of Da Michele, but respectable - out came a bubbly, crisped but chewy circle of happiness.

There is definite room for improvement (maybe play with the broiler to try to get some blistering), but for a first serious attempt, it was pretty darn delicious.

A Lunch fit for a (Thai) King

Finding myself with a whole trout (de-boned) in the fridge and a jar of white rice in the pantry, it was only a few steps and a couple dollars before we had the fixings for a quick jaunt to Southeast Asia.

I seasoned the fish, coated it in corn starch, and dropped it (gently) into a pan of hot oil. The salad was just what I love about Thai cuisine: fresh vegetables and herbs coaxed into a finely tuned balance of sweet (palm sugar), salty (fish sauce), hot (Bird's Eye chilies), and sour (lots of lime juice). Crispy skin, warm rice, cold salad, it was a flavor punch directly to the palate.

And in that odd way that only certain cuisines (S.E. Asian and Japanese, in particular) are capable of, we felt totally satisfied and not a bit full. Ready, in fact, for dinner.

Sunny Day Fish Fry

Since moving out to Portland, one thing I have learned to do is to take advantage of nice weather, because you never know when it will be back. So as I left work on Sunday and stepped into the warm glow of the late afternoon sunshine, I thought: Tonight, we eat outdoors.

The sudden and unpredicted 36-hour spell of summer weather got us thinking about Southern food, but to keep it simple, we limited the menu to a few reliably delicious dishes. Sarah took charge of the mac 'n' cheese and, despite our ongoing battle of methods (she layers and uses egg, whereas I take the Bechamel route), knocked it out of the park.

I spearheaded the fried cod batter, using a bottle of our very own home brew and thickening it with flour, corn starch, and baking powder, with some cayenne thrown in. And we teamed up on the hush puppies, folding in a minced jalapeno and a lot of onion and then frying them until deep brown.

As for drinks, we went with the 2009 Naucratis Lost Slough Vineyard by Scholium Project. This winery was started by a Philosophy professor turned winemaker, a guy who makes wines that are definitely not for everyone, but definitely appreciated by most wine geeks I know. It weighed in at a whopping 15.3 degrees alcohol (did I mention it's white?), but we took our time with it.

The best ingredient, of course, was the backyard. The sun on its way down, long rays slanting through the blossoming trees, the cool of the evening wrapping up our first glimpse of the summer to come.

Hello, Mother!

After a beautifully warm and sunny yesterday, when I managed to log a couple hours in the garden, transplanting most of my overgrown, tired seedlings (I had been waiting for the first glimmer of sun for weeks), I rose today to the return of the cold, gray rain. "Fine", I thought, "no backyard grilling; soup it is".

Reaching into the dry goods cupboard, I smelled the distinct aroma of acetic acid creeping around from the dark corner where my vinegar experiment had been (I thought) hibernating for the last five or six weeks. I pulled out the jar in which I had previously found only stale red wine remains, to find a glossy, slimy veneer floating atop the red juice. The Mother! That internal organ-looking thing, that miracle of cellulose and mycoderma aceti bacteria that works the magic of transforming fermented alcoholic substances into vinegar, had arrived! I had forgotten about my vinegar jar, relegating it to the shameful but all too populous corner of failed fermentation or other DIY experiments, when that is just what it needed: a little dark, a little cool, and a little time to get comfortable.

Mother Nature, in the guise of Mother Vinegar, had seen fit to give me a little consolation in this season of Spring rains and sluggish ferments.

Oh, and I used my mezzaluna for the first time today:

making these:

to follow that aforementioned soup.

Growing Season?

Looking out the window I see, for the first time all year, a winter wonderland. The yard is white, the car is frosted over, and there is no blue sky in sight. And it's the third day of Spring.

I started my seeds several weeks ago, and they have taken off, reaching what seems to me - the first-time gardener - about their limit in their confined little plastic incubators. What to do? The kids are big enough to play outside, but our current lovely Oregon Spring would kill them.

Fingers crossed for sunny weather.

The Wisdom of the Japanese Loaf

This was only my second attempt to make a cinnamon raisin bread, so it seems a bit unfair that I have been given the perfect recipe, a method that avoids all the pitfalls so common to the swirled loaf: wide airy gaps in the finished product, spilling filling, dry boring bread. But given to me it was (thanks, Mom!), and here it is:

I should include a photo of the inside as well, as that was where the real magic lay: a slightly sweet dough with a fine tender crumb, no gaps in sight, filling intact and flavorful. But you'll have to take my word for it.

The bread itself is a version of the traditional Japanese white bread called shokupan. It calls for a high-gluten flour, milk powder, and an egg, but most importantly a lot of kneading and even more rising (four 45-minute intervals). It's not a process that can or should be rushed, but the result is worth it. Toasted with a smear of butter, it puts those other cinnamon swirl breads to shame.

Beer O'Clock

I don't know why, as my interest in wine has grown over the past several years, a curiosity about beer never developed. It took my recent adventures in home fermentations to even open the door to home brewing, a door that, gladly, I don't think will close for quite some time.


As a first effort we decided to go with something straightforward, with a nice malt-hop balance, a drink that would - if successful - be easily recognizable as beer. I realized fairly early into the process why I had never been interested in it before. Unlike wine which, under the right serendipitous conditions, would be made in nature with no human intervention (e.g. a bunch of grapes falls to the ground and gets wedged between some rocks. It is unreachable by bugs or birds, shaded from weather extremes, and the ambient yeasts that are all around us go to town on the sweet berries); unlike that, beer is not a wild fermentation; that is, it requires a process - malting - by which certain starches in a grain are converted into certain sugars which are then available for fermentation. So from the beginning there is an extra human step with beer.

In theory, that could be the only added step. One could ferment using natural, wild yeasts (as they do for "sour" beers). But in the home brewing reality, there are many other possible points of intervention. You can buy hop pellets and malt syrup, and, if you are using store-bought yeast, you have to aggressively sanitize anything that comes near your beer.

It is all of these points of intervention, each a movement away from raw materials available in nature, that I find off-putting. That being said, I know a lot more about wine than I do about beer, so I may be oversimplifying the situation. Also, the craziness of sterilizing to kill everything and then inoculating with something in particular and then struggling to keep that store-bought thing as the only active critter in the mix while trying to kill all the other natural critters, is a process that happens all the time in the commercial wine world. So there's that.

Anyway, however you look at it, the magic is the fermentation, and it's fascinating to watch take place right in your kitchen. I'm thinking the fermentation period is over now, so I'll taste tomorrow, and then probably go ahead and bottle it. And then we'll brew again.

Meatless in the Mideast

I have, for a long time now, questioned my right to eat meat. If I do not, or could not, kill an animal, what gives me the right to eat one? For that matter, what gives me the right to kill one? This question being at varying depths below the surface of my daily diet, for years I have quietly ignored the dissonance as I dive into a pile of bacon or a dry-aged bone-in ribeye. I have also often rationalized it as a professional necessity: what kind of cook would I be if I didn't know as much as I could about meat?

Well, I finally did something about it. This year, for ten weeks now, we have been trying not so much to be Vegetarians (daunting as it sounds), but to start the process of changing our eating habits: less meat, more grains, more vegetables. We still eat fish, and I won't say that as springtime rolls around I won't be grilling burgers, but a shift is underway. We'll see where it takes us.

For now, though, a Middle Eastern extravaganza that satisfies both the palate and the conscience: first, my take on something I never thought I would even be in the same room with: the veggie burger. I coooked some chick peas and mashed them up with onions, garlic, spices and fresh herbs, a little bit of egg and some ground oats: grilled falafel for the burger lover. 

Next a salad of grilled vegetables, charred and sweet, with oregano and chives. A cooling yogurt (yes, homemade) condiment studded with cucumber and redolent of fresh mint.

And a good ol' fashioned tabbouleh: steamed bulghur with loads of chopped parsley, lots of lemon juice, and plenty of olive oil.

Where's the beef? Tonight, who cares?

Ginger Beer

I currently have a handful of bubbly ferments going around the house: sauerkraut in the garage, vinegar in the kitchen, yogurt in the fridge, and, as of about ten minutes ago, ginger beer in a swing top bottle on the bar.

The liquid in the bottle was a murky gray, with a few inches of sludgy yellow minced ginger on the bottom. There were occasional bubbles meandering their way to the surface, but all in all, it didn't exactly inspire confidence in the success of this particular experiment.

Nevertheless, I had read that it should take about 48 hours to get enough of a ferment going to produce sufficient carbon dioxide to carbonate the drink, while still leaving a bit of sugar for sweetness. As it appeared to be moving along sluggishly, if at all, I kept it out in the relatively warm living room air an extra day. But after 72 hours I figured if it's going to happen at all, it already has. So, with nary a preamble to the excited crowd (Sarah and Zorro) before me, and fully expecting a dud of an opening, I popped the swing top.

It was difficult for me to gauge the apex of the geyser of yellow froth from my proximity to it, but it must have come to within inches of the ceiling. I looked down and saw a hardwood floor, shining wet and (maybe I shouldn't have left it unfiltered?) covered in ginger and foam. A messy clean-up? Absolutely. But who cares: it worked!

When it finally came time to taste it, still in my sticky socks and wet corduroys, it was a delight: dry as a bone, full of ginger punch, and - no surprise here - prickly with carbonation.

This Week in Pasta

Although the Pacific Northwest is justifiably famous for its natural abundance, an easily foraged cornucopia of wild fruits, herbs, roots, and fungi, I took the easy way out and bought a half-pound of Black Trumpet mushrooms at the farmers' market.

After a fairly tedious process of washing them, splitting them open, and removing the pine needles from their center stalks, I took the tough bases and simmered them in water for a stock, and set the Trumpets aside while I made the pasta.

For the filling I grabbed some cheap button and crimini mushrooms from the store, chopped them up fine and roasted them with garlic and plenty of salt, and then mixed in some sauteed spinach, ricotta cheese, and lemon juice.

The tangy and salty pop of the filling was tamed by the rich, earthy, almost black broth redolent of a funky forest floor after the rain, reduced and enriched with a pat of butter. With the Trumpets sauteed and scattered on top, and a $1 farmers' market white truffle shaved over that, it was mushroom on mushroom coated in mushroom and filled with, you guessed it, mushroom.

An Accidental Harvest

I've been holding myself back lately. I've caught a glimpse of sunshine for at least a few minutes most days these past several weeks, and for those few minutes I have thought, "what's the worst that could happen?" My first true garden season is approaching, and I'm having a hard time waiting until the "proper time", whenever that may be. If the ground is warm enough for seeds to germinate, should I plant them? We still have a possible four months of regular rain, even if we luck out and the temperatures don't plummet again.

Well today is a brilliant sunny day, a true basking outside with a book and a dog kind of day, and I'm not waiting anymore. My seeds that I planted indoors a couple weeks ago are sprouting nicely (first hurdle cleared!), and it's time to head outside. My excitement at a spring, summer, and fall full of home-grown produce aside, I am trying to keep from getting ahead of the timeline, so today is just for planting bulbs for summer flowers and getting the soil in the veg garden turned over.

The bulbs in, the soil looking healthy and wormy, my last swipe with the pitch fork and I come up with a small bunch of what look, smell, and taste like spring onions. I'm thinking of roasting these sweet bulby surprise gifts and folding them into a simple risotto with mascarpone and black pepper. I'll raise my glass of, hmm, a crisply clean Alpine white wine and toast an auspicious start to garden season.