now picnic

Labels: "elephant larry", "the wow", elephants, larry, swears

// posted by kc @  11:51 AM   0 comments

I recently finished writing up my February trip to Morocco. You can see all the photos and my comments on them at flickr:

djemaa el fna at dusk

// posted by kc @  3:51 PM   1 comments

These are some food thoughts from a few weeks ago... will catch up to this week soon, I hope:

Sunday: Anchovy pasta for lunch (something like this), dinner of barley cooked with savory veggie broth, topped with green onions, sides of butternut squash and broccoli rabe

Monday: A bunch of people came over for BSG watching, and we made Texas beef chili with cornbread and vinegar-y cole slaw, AKA "Brassica Mixta." I think we cooked the chili for about 5 hours on Sunday and shredded it on Monday. It was a hit!

Tuesday: Salted and pressed, thin-sliced, floured, skillet-cooked, oven-finished eggplant, chickpeas with a bunch of random stuff (red pepper, tomato, ginger, unsweetened coconut...) and rice. As I was cooking this and thinking about how I would describe it, I realized how little I use recipes sometimes these days. I used to use them *all the time,* so it's a pretty big change for me. I did glance briefly at a recipe using unsweetened coconut, to see if I should add it early or late (answer: late. toasted.) The eggplant dish is one we make with really fresh eggplants, and the salting + draining thing really does seem to matter. They turn out with the best outside-crispy, inside-soft texture.

Wednesday: Dinner at "O! Canada!" House, followed by Karaoke. On a Wednesday! I know. The Baum made some kick-ass food, including steaks with a lot of Roquefort sauce.

Thursday: Spoons and I went out to dinner in our own hood. We went to a vietnamese place I hadn't been to before. The vinegar-y salad was deeee-licious and the other dishes were good, too. All those hot, sour, salty, sweet flavors.

Friday: Pasta with some kind of a red sauce that we made quickly. I remember there was a little bacon involved. And salad. I made a few things to take to a housewarming party, including a big batch of Sidecars -- a great thing to make when you have just TOO MUCH Cognac around. Spoons and I tested a few different proportions -- 1 cognac : 1 cointreau : 1 lemon juice tasted best to us. 2 cognac : 1 : 1 was a bit too alcoholic (just drink the cognac, then) and 1 : 2 cointreau : 1 tasted too syrupy. We also added a little sparkling water to the finished bottle of drinks and shook it with lots of ice. It was enjoyed by many.

Saturday: Everything Italian looked amazing at the farmers' market, and I relized it's probably because it is a lot warmer there! I got a bunch of lovely greens labelled "minestra," which I thought was the name of the kind of greens, but it turns out that "minestra" means soup. Oh. Ok. For dinner we had fishes: dorade/sea bream baked whole with rice and the undetermined "minestra" green.

Here is a picture of our fish, "Veritable dorade rose Bretonne" which means "Genuine pink dorade from Britanny." This fish was OK, but it had a texture a lot like chicken breast meat.



I'd been looking for a while for a guide to choosing fish here, something like the awesome Seafood Watch in the US, but hadn't found a good one until I googled "dorade rose." I found this one, for the WWF Switzerland, which says to avoid Dorade Rose AT ALL COSTS. Oh. Well, now we know where to look. Sorry, Dorade Rose. We didn't like your chicken-texture that much anyway.

// posted by kc @  9:11 AM   0 comments

I'm still working on the Morocco 2009 wrap-up, but in the meantime, here are some food thoughts from the past two weeks.

Sunday (Feb 8): Arrived home from Morocco! After a week of tagines and cous cous and meat, meat, meat, all I really want for lunch is plain pasta with butter. For dinner, we made some indian food: tofu, red lentils, and spicy broccoli rabe. Vegetables taste good.

Monday: Duck breast with red wine sauce, served with rice and more broccoli rabe. We made it a lot like this, but not quite as fast:

Pleurotus ostreatus / Pleurote en forme d'huître
Originally uploaded by Jules***

The porcini mushrooms
Originally uploaded by jmvnoos in Paris

010
Originally uploaded by e.sarah.c

Saturday: Fish & chips, using up the last of the french fries in our freezer. We got a good haul of free food before Christmas from people moving or leaving for extended holidays, and a big bag of french fries was leftover from that. Big salad of many vegetables.

Sunday: For lunch, I made salsa and we had polenta with fried eggs and spicy tomato salsa. One of my favorites -- this reminds me of brunch in Chicago at Flo.

Also made rice pudding, based on this rice pudding recipe from epicurious. 

New Master Rice Pudding Recipe:

- mix 1 rice : 1 sugar : 8 milk : little butter, little salt, little vanilla
- cook on low, with no lid, for an hour or two - watch that it doesn't boil!
- mix in one beaten egg after you take it off the heat (optional)

I usually make: 1/2 cup rice, 1/2 cup sugar, 4 cups milk, 1 Tbsp butter, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp vanilla for four servings

Dinner on Sunday: Stir fry with tofu, sesame seeds, black bean paste, broccoli, red peppers, cilantro.

Monday: Indian food -- yellow lentils Naveen-style, tiny green eggplants sauteed with ginger, spicy okra & rice. Made lots of leftovers for lunches.

Tuesday: Pasta with egg and cheese (something like this) and salad. 

Wednesday: Indian leftovers, now with sauteed spinach instead of okra.

Thursday: Duck confit, bulghur wheat side dish*, and salad. (Lots of salad this week...) We brought some duck confit home with us for Christmas because we like it so much. It's just duck, in a can, ready to eat. The pieces of duck are still whole, so it's not exactly like spam, but it's just about as easy. We usually pull the pieces out of the can and broil them for a few minutes before serving. Gourmet magazine had a Paris issue that I saw last year in an airport, and it had a lot of recipes to use the already-made duck confit that I keep meaning to try. They include one for a white bean soup with Armagnac and the pieces of duck in it, one for asian-style noodles with duck, and another for a salad with oranges.

Friday: Over at D+KW's we had pizza from a place in our little village. They had cooked some other food, but then their power went out! That's another story. One of the pizzas had a very creamy goat cheese on it. It was super-French tasting -- pizza with goat cheese!? -- and totally delicious.

Saturday: Fish from the market: "bar de ligne," broccoli, and the rice dish made by our power-less friends from the night before. "Bar de ligne" -- I think -- is a fish called "bar" (AKA "European Seabass" or "branzino") that is line-caught ("de ligne"). We usually pick the fish that looks the best at the market and then figure out what the heck it is when we get home. 

We cooked the fish wrapped in parchment paper so that it steams well. It looked kind of like the branzino in this post, but instead of Thai spices and shallots, we put fennel, onions, parsley, lemon, olive oil, and white wine with our whole fish. One thing that definitely worked was that spoons mixed all this good stuff in a bowl together and tasted it before the fish was even out of the fridge. In the past, I've salted the fish, then put lemon on and olive oil, then tried to add other spices, but by putting all the ingredients in the bowl besides the fish, we could really make sure the flavor was good before it was applied to the fish. After it was cooked, we fileted it and served it with some of the vegetable mixture. Our friend Liz laughed: "It looks like grown-up food!" and said she never cooks fish. We assured her that you can just buy a filet and cook it in a pan... no need to get parchment paper involved unless you feel like it. :)

Labels: "rice pudding", cake, chocolate, papillote

// posted by kc @  2:50 PM   0 comments

I just got back from a week in Morocco! I was there for work, and I wrote a bit more about it on the US LHC blog, so you can read about it there. I'll post some pictures soon.

Before I talk about all the tasty things I had in Morocco (cous cous, tagines, cous cous, and tagines) I wanted to wrap up the week before I left.

Sunday: Picked spoons up at the airport very early, so we had a breakfast of toast and jam and things, then a brunch later in the day. I'd picked up some smoked salmon at our little local store, so we ate it with eggs and creme fraiche and capers, good toast and potatoes. Salmon breakfast always makes me think of Chloe's in San Francisco, where they had an awesome scrambled eggs with chunks of salmon in the eggs, chunks of potatoes, and chunks of cream cheese! The cheese melted as you were eating it, and it was tasty. I can't remember what we had for dinner that night... leftovers?

Monday: We went to watch Battlestar Galactica at a friend's place, so we had a quick dinner after work of leftover potatoes, rotisserie chicken from the market, and sauteed cabbage with whole cumin and mustard seeds and other good spices.

Tuesday: Dinner was orange-colored indian food: ginger carrots, spicy red lentils, tasty basmati rice.

Wednesday: Our friend HH arrives! We had a bunch of good red wine and a traditional French dinner of barely cooked red meat with french fries (AKA "frites") and sauteed broccoli. Because spoons and HH and I were all talking while we were cooking, and spoons was cooking half the things and I was cooking the other half and not paying attention, I burned the broccoli. It was the first time in a long time that I've burned anything. We cut off the burnt parts and ate it anyway. :)

Thursday: Crazy soup with eggs. This is a favorite dish of spoons' because it has so many great flavors, and because you finish it with a medium-cooked egg. It's a soup from a Paula Wolfert cookbook, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. You can search inside the book on amazon, so I took these screen shots from there. (Click on the pictures to read the recipe.) You can also use amazon's "Look inside" yourself to search for "chickpea" and find the same pages and the ones around them.

The soup is a slow-cooked one, where chickpeas are simmered for hours to create a delicious broth. For a vegetarian version, just leave out the bones and it will still be tasty. Then, garnish the chickpeas+broth with lemon juice, salty olives and capers, spicy red pepper sauce, black pepper and cumin. Serve over crusty pieces of bread and break a medium-cooked egg over the top to add richness to the soup. If you're like me, you can cook the egg even more, but if you're like spoons, that runny yolk will be the best part!




I also made banana bread that night, with spoons' mom's banana bread recipe. When I am too enthusiastic with my banana purchases, I like to make this. Sometimes I even peel the bananas and throw the mush into the freezer for a while. It will keep in the freezer until you feel like baking.

Mix together the ingredients in a big bowl:
1 c sugar
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
1.5 - 2 cups of mashed bananas (as many as you have, really...)
2.5 cups flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Pour into a greased pan of whatever size you like. If you make a big bread loaf, you'll need to bake it for an hour or more at 350 degrees F. When you stick a fork/toothpick in to test for doneness, it's OK if it is a little moist still, but you don't want giant wet clumps of batter to come out.

Friday: We spent Friday night getting ready for a housewarming party - our friend T made delicious spicy pasta (with chunks of potatoes in with the penne!) and pizza at her place. We also made a few housewarming items for the new guys, including a pinata. Long story.

Saturday: We had a bon-voyage breakfast with HH of delicious eggs and bacon from the market - I used brioche bread and tried to make the eggs cook inside a circle cut into the toast: is that called a birds' nest? This was mildly successful. :) For dinner we went over to Chez W to visit with M&C and their kids who arrived back from a long trip to the US.

Sunday was my first day in Morocco... will write that week up next.

Labels: "banana bread", "P-Wo", breakfasts, eggs

// posted by kc @  9:51 PM   0 comments

Looks like I'm not the only one on the internet who is blogging about their food choices for other people to ... skim over quickly. Mark Bittman, awesome NY Times food guy posted about all the food he ate while traveling last week. He ends up eating a lot of raw fruits and vegetables during the days -- I often feel like I don't get enough vegetables when I travel, and his approach could solve that. It looks a little rabbit-like at some points, but I do like all those foods.

To see what I think is the best of Bittman, check out this funny, interesting look at his take on eating. Well worth 20 minutes! He goes through a little bit of the history, pitfalls, and ways to deal with the US diet. Similar to Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" but funnier.

So, to catch up on my own list of recent dinners:

Monday: Meatballs, take two. The week before's meatballs turned out good, but strange. This time, we tried to reproduce a Moroccan dish we really liked when we were visiting there last summer.


The dish has a tomato sauce with lots of spices, pan-browned meatballs cooked in the sauce, and, best of all, eggs (one egg per person) poached in the sauce just before serving. You can kind of see them in the photo above.

It came out OK, but there was an unfortunate meatball incident. The meatballs fell apart while I was browning them, so they made the sauce more like a thick meat sauce, rather than a thinner sauce with meatballs in it. I think it was because I added oil that was supposed to be used in the pan into the meatball mixture instead by mistake, and that stopped the meat from sticking together. It still tasted good, though.

We served it with bread and a Moroccan shredded carrot salad. The recipes we used were from the excellent and inspiring Couscous and other Good Food by Paula Wolfert. 

Tuesday: Easy dinner of sausages, brussel sprouts, and mashed potatoes

Wednesday: Risotto, which I'll call "harlequin risotto" instead of "ugly risotto." We put red wine in, which always makes the risotto come out a funny purple color. Adding bright orange chunks of butternut squash, and mushrooms to the already purple rice wasn't the best choice for a good-looking dish, but it came out with a good flavor. I can only guess what the Top Chef judges would have said about its looks...

Thursday: Chicken tacos, with corn tortillas brought back from the US -- a luxury! They do have tortillas in the grocery store here but they often taste weird/sweet/bad enough that they make you look forward to the real thing. Also had sauteéd red & green peppers, black beans, spicy rice, onions and cilantro and limes.

Friday: on the way to Strasbourg! We arrived and met up with friends and had drinks and snacks. I'll put all the Strasbourg food into a separate post.

Sunday night: back home, quick dinner of soup-from-a-box (something like quinoa vegetables soup?) and salad

Monday: spoons took off to Savannah, Georgia, for a week for a conference. I made a bunch of baked pasta that I could take for lunch. I used something like this vodka penne recipe, with wine instead of vodka, tossed it with already cooked pasta and put mozzarella cheese on top before putting it in the oven. I also mixed in some leftover peppers from the Mexican food.

Tuesday: Inauguration night! I brought another batch of those good brownies from last week to a potluck dinner at D & K's. K made a tasty bean chili dish with rice in it -- I'll try to get the recipe and post it.

Wednesday: Use up rest of Mexican leftovers from last week: black beans, rice, enchiladas, and add butternut squash. Black beans + butternut squash is always a good combination in my book.

Thursday: Out for dinner with friends at a local Irish pub: Paddy's. Had "Irish stew" which is big chunks of potato, carrot, and lamb in a tasty broth, and Guinness, of course.

Friday: not feeling so hot, I don't know if I even ate anything for dinner... crackers? soup?

Saturday: ditto, rice with chicken broth...

Sunday: feeling better. spoons returns. on to the next week!

Labels: bittman, meatballs, morocco

// posted by kc @  11:37 PM   0 comments