my bread and butter (and jam)

We finished the team-taught experimental University of Oregon Clark Honors College “Bread 101” class on Monday, with students bringing in their final projects: loaves of bread baked with sourdough starter they cultivated during the term.  You can see all the pictures chronicling the 10-week experience here.

Just so we’d have all the bases covered, I made some butter and brought along a few jams for the tasting.  A student requested a recipe, so I present them to you here, yeastily, in case you want to eat eight loaves of bread in a sitting, too.  It was a wonderful class, and I’m so grateful I had a chance to be a part of it.  Working with the scientists was so much fun, and we all improved our pedagogy and learned a great deal from each other.  And the class itself was a delight. Several of the students, mostly graduating seniors, were ones I had had as freshmen during my four years teaching in the Honors College, and it was a pleasure to see how they had developed as thinkers and writers.  That’s really the reward in teaching, and as I ponder the next phase in my life, I’m thankful that I can have this experience to cherish, a truly innovative course that I can say with no guile or guilt is part of the revolution that needs to happen in higher education.  A Pisgah sight of Paradise, I suppose, but I’m happy to have had it.

Congratulations to the graduates; may you earn good bread in both literal and metaphorical ways, and may your slices always fall with the butter side up!

Homemade Butter

Butter can easily be made cultured by souring the milk overnight on the counter with a little cultured buttermilk mixed in.  I suggest using about 1/2 teaspoon of salt.  Makes about 1 cup butter and 1 cup of fresh buttermilk.

Take one pint of the best whipping cream you can find, preferably not ultra-pasteurized.  (Strauss makes a good product.)  It’s best if it’s somewhere between ice cold and room temperature.  Place it in your mixer’s bowl and whip with the whisk attachment on high for about 8 minutes, scraping down the bowl occasionally, until the whipped cream “breaks” into solid bits and liquid.  Stop when it looks like grains of rice in swampy liquid.  You can also try this by hand with a whisk or by shaking it in a jar if you are a masochist.

Drain the liquid from the solids in a fine-mesh sieve for about 20 minutes, then add salt if you wish, mixing thoroughly.  Press as much liquid out as you can using a wooden spoon or similar.   Pack into a jar and refrigerate.

Boysenberry-Kaffir Lime Jam (low sugar)

This recipe is an adaptation of one for “sour blackberries” on the Pomona pectin recipe insert. It makes 4-5 half-pints for canning.  If you want to make it and give it away to friends, there’s no need to can the jam as long as you keep the jars in the refrigerator.  I’m providing basic canning instructions if you’d like to give it a try, though.  The pectin is necessary to make the jam low sugar, and I’ve chosen what I consider the best commercial pectin for low sugar spreads, Pomona.  It uses its own process with calcium water, so it can’t be substituted.  If you’d like to make a full sugar jam with no pectin, try a recipe like my roasted blackberry jam instead, substituting boysenberries and lime juice/lime leaves for the lemon.

• 1 box Pomona Pectin (do not substitute other kinds of pectin)
• 2 cups sugar
• half-flat of boysenberries (or enough to make 4 cups of mashed fruit, about 6-7 cups)
• 2 t. lime juice
• 2 t. finely minced fresh kaffir lime leaf
• 2 t. calcium water (see below)
• 2 t. pectin powder

For canning: Prepare calcium water: combine 1/2 cup water and 1/2 teaspoon calcium powder (in the small packet in your box of Pomona’s Pectin) in a little jar with a lid, since there will be some left over for future batches. Shake well and store in the refrigerator.

Mix 2 cups of sugar with 2 teaspoons of pectin powder (in the large packet in the box).

Bring to a boil enough water in a large stockpot or waterbath canner to cover 5 half-pint jars.  Wash your jars, rings, and lids, and heat the lids according to the package instructions as you’re heating up the waterbath canner.

Examine fruit for leaves and dirt; quickly rinse, if especially dusty.  Mash enough of the berries to make 4 cups of pulp and place in a large pot, leaving space for the mixture to bubble up.  Add 2 teaspoons of calcium water, lime juice, and minced kaffir lime leaves, mix well, and bring to a boil.

Add sugar mix and stir vigorously to melt pectin.  Bring back up to a boil and let boil for a minute.

Remove from heat and let sit for a couple minutes.  Skim foam from top. Spoon hot jam into jars carefully to reduce bubbles, leaving 1/4-inch head space.  Wipe rims of jars and adjust lids and rings.

Process in a waterbath canner for 10 minutes.  Let sit in canner for a few minutes, then remove jars carefully and let cool, undisturbed, overnight.  Remove the rings and check the seals, refrigerating any that didn’t seal.  The jam will keep over a year on the shelf if the seals are intact; a couple of months in the refrigerator.

 

 

 

 

 

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duck egg leche flan for pi day

Of the fowl I coddled recently on a two-week farm stay, I became a duck supporter.  Go Ducks!  I had heard that ducks have a presence that chickens lack, and it’s true. Their soft, smooth heads and facial expressions just charmed the pants off me. And they don’t have roosters who insist on pecking me and they’re not geese, period.  Seriously, a plus.

I was helping out some family farmers who needed livestock coverage in nearby Cottage Grove, a bucolic little rural town of covered bridges, plant nurseries, bookshops, and great breakfasts.  Part of my daily job was to process dozens of eggs from 24 chickens, a single egg a day from the horrible four-goose thug team, and whatever eggs the six ducks saw fit to lay.  I also had to milk two goats, an endeavor I enjoyed quite a bit, and one I’ll write about later.

So I suddenly found myself in the middle of the road of my life, surrounded by eggs.  I’ve been experimenting quite a bit.  I was reminded how delicious a classic béarnaise sauce is with a ribeye steak.  I learned that, despite a promising concept and the heart willing, leftover béarnaise sauce does not a good scrambled egg make.  I’ve made a glorious caramel duck egg bread pudding, a single goose egg chilaquiles (above), frittata, aioli, and Alice B. Toklas’ tricolor omelette with spinach and saffron layers, draped with tomato sauce.

And, my friends, I made this.

Duck egg leche flan with blood orange.  Doesn’t look like much, does it?  But o o o o that simple appearance belies a rich, deep, exquisite flavor of almost savory sweet egg custard, and the whole thing is bathed in caramel.  It’s a Filipino specialty, and traditionally relies on creamy water buffalo milk and a sour lime called a dayap (similar to a calamansi), but now uses pantry ingredients.  I opted for the “traditional” version with evaporated milk and condensed milk, managing to source some organic varieties of both.  For some thoughts on the rich variety of recipes using different kinds of dairy and eggs or whole eggs, click here.  I may still try it with cream and honey, but I present you with my first go, which was absolutely delicious.

The recipe uses 12 duck egg yolks.  If you ever find yourself in duck egg heaven, you won’t regret making it, since duck eggs are noticeably richer than their chicken cousins, but farm-fresh chicken egg yolks would work too.  It just wouldn’t be as rich.  And I hate to be a snob, but I wouldn’t bother making this with grocery store eggs and their pale yellow, tasteless yolks.

The traditional mold, a llanera, can be replaced by a cake or pie dish or ramekin.  A ramekin will give you less caramel on top, so screw that.  I found it much more reliable to bake the flan in a water bath versus steaming it (also more traditional).

What to do with the duck egg whites?  Well, they’re thicker and richer than chicken eggs, so they don’t work the same way in cakes and pastries.  I suggest beating them to soft peaks and making chiles rellenos out of them, which is what we had for dinner the night of the flan.  Yes, it’s decadent, but hey, I’ve got farm work to do.

Duck Egg Leche Flan with Blood Orange

Serves 12, very rich.

• 3/4 cup sugar
• 12 duck eggs, yolks and whites separated
• 1 blood orange
• 1 can condensed milk (best quality), 14 oz.
• 1 can evaporated milk (best quality), 12 oz.

Prepare a waterbath for a 10-inch cake pan or deep pie dish using a roasting pan or similar that will allow you to fit the dish in the pan and add hot water.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Place your cake pan next to the stove.  In a light-colored skillet, melt and caramelize the sugar on low heat.  As it melts, gently push the unmelted sugar into the melted sugar to help keep the heating constant.

Watch the skillet constantly, especially near the end, as burning is quick and fatal.  You want a medium-dark brown color, but dark brown will impart a bitter flavor, so take it off the heat immediately when done, and pour it into your reserved cake pan, tilting the pan for a thin layer and ensuring that the caramel goes on the sides as well as the bottom.

Place the pan in the roasting pan, and add very hot water to about midway up the side of the cake pan.

Zest the orange and squeeze about a tablespoon of juice.  Add to egg yolks in a medium bowl, and whisk.  Reserve whites for another use.  Whisk in condensed and evaporated milk, then pour batter into caramelized cake pan.  Place pan into water bath prepared earlier, and cook until just set, about 1 hour.  A knife inserted in the middle should come out almost completely clean (the caramel will make the tip wet).  Don’t overcook.

Let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate for several hours.  Carefully slide a thin spatula around the sides of the pan, then invert onto a dish quickly.  Be sure the dish is large enough for the liquid caramel on the bottom.

Serve with whipped unsweetened cream, berries, or supremed blood oranges, grapefruit, and limes tossed with a little Grand Marnier.

mfp fall preservation classes!

Hear ye, hear ye!  We’ve set the schedule for an exciting slate of fall OSU Extension-Lane County Master Food Preserver classes.  There are two series: one a continuation of our popular Friday night short, cheap, lecture/demo-style classes; the other a smaller, more exclusive, hands-on class.

I’m particularly excited by the very special Pacific Northwest cheese tasting class led by Mary Lou Shuler of Newman’s Fish Market on Friday, Sept. 30.  Don’t wait to make your reservation for this one!

For registrations, call 541-344-4885 or download a Saturday class form or a Friday class schedule to mail in with your check. (These forms are both in .pdf format and can be printed out from your computer.)

Saturday Hands-On Classes

All classes will be held at the Community Church of Christ located at 1485 Gilham Road, Eugene. You will receive intensive training at these two “hands-on” classes, then take home the items that you learned to make! Classes Start at 9:30 a.m. and end at 2:30 p.m. Classes are limited to 8 participants, so register early to save your place. Registration Fee is $50.00 for each class.

• October 22nd—Cheese Making.  Learn to make 4 to 5 different cheeses; take them home to enjoy! You will learn the techniques and receive the recipes. Lunch is included (with cheese, of course). If you have always wanted to learn how to make cheese, here is your chance. Register early as this class will fill up fast!
• November 5th—Fermented Foods. We’ll start with sauerkraut and move to kimchi, bake some sourdough bread, make a little sour cream and crème fraîche, kefir too! You will also learn how to make vinegars! This class will send you home with wonderful products you made yourself to enjoy with family and friends. Lunch with fermented goodies, including chocolate (we bet you didn’t know)! Lunch is included.

Friday Short Classes

All classes will be held at the Community Church of Christ located at 1485 Gilham Road, Eugene. Classes Start at 6:00 p.m. and end at 8:30 p.m.  These fun classes are in a lecture/demo format, and accommodate more people than the Saturday classes.

• SPECIAL!!  September 30th—Cheese Tasting. The Master Food Preservers present an evening of cheese tasting, featuring cheeses made in the Pacific Northwest. Hosted by local cheese specialist, Mary Lou Shuler of Newman’s Fish Market. Lots to learn and lots to taste. Join us for an evening of cheese delight. Registration Fee is $20.00 per person.
• October 14th—Apples and Pears. Learn to cook and preserve a variety of these delicious seasonal favorites. You will receive information on varieties; how to store the fruit throughout the season; and when the fruits are available. Come and join us. Taste lots of samples! Registration Fee is $15.00 per person.
• November 11th—The Turkey Show. Varieties and how to choose them; frozen vs. fresh; safe storage and handling; smoking; brining; stuffing; roasting; gravy; what to do with leftovers. Just in time for Thanksgiving. Take away knowledge that will enhance your dinner and promote food safety. Lots of samples! Registration Fee is $15.00 per person.
• December 9th—Sweet Breads & Fancy Shaped Breads. Simple bread dough recipes plus How-to-Help with Making Holiday Gift Baskets. Purchase items at our Holiday Gift Bazar on December 3rd, then learn how to arrange your freshly made goodies in a Holiday gift basket. Registration Fee is $15.00 plus $5.00 for materials.

And last but not least, Oregon State University Extension Service is celebrating its 100th Birthday on September 22. You are invited to join in the festivities and check out our temporary home.

• OSU Extension Centennial Celebration Open House, September 22, 2011, 2:30 – 6:00 p.m., Extension Office – 783 Grant Street, Eugene. Light refreshments will be provided.

it doesn’t get more cheesy than this

My charcuterer friend Del has started making farmstead cheese for Paul and his crew at Laughing Stock Farm in the rolling hills south of Eugene.  It’s only for their consumption, alas, because of regulations about raw milk and related issues relative to cheese making.  But the dairy production by the farm and neighbors, plus the commercial grade equipment and facilities that Paul already has in place from many years of goat cheese making provides awesome materials to play with for culinary mad geniuses like Del.

We started the day with over a hundred pounds of fresh cow milk from a neighboring farm and freshly distilled rennet.  Sheep gamboled among apple blossoms.  Curious barn cats eyed our wares.  Pigs squealed in the barns, eager for whey.  A herd of goats came passing by our trailer, fresh from milking.  Chickens laid eggs ’til it hurt.  A neighbor came by to discuss gathering herbs for herbal tonic, the dregs of a pilsner batch, and canning tuna.  A venerable basset hound kept court over the entire proceedings.  In short, it was just another day at the farm.

Making cheese is fascinating, and I hope to have many opportunities to hone my own skills this summer, if Del will have me back.  I’ve taken a few cheesemaking classes with the Extension Master Food Preservers, and even taught cheese demos (reminding one of the old professor joke: read it? I haven’t even taught it!) but my knowledge is very limited and largely text-based.  So why not test it out with a giant stockpot filled to the rim with milk in an ingenious hot water bath that uses a pump and immersible heating element to keep the milk at temperature?  Gouda enough for me.

Once the curds and whey were separated and the curds condensed into those squeaky little nuggets that are so fun to eat, Del set to pressing the curds into molds with an industrial strength metal press.  It’s an amazing device made out of stainless steel bars and a clamp.  I had seen smaller versions, much smaller versions, but this was for the big boys.

Before, the stuff of Miss Muffet’s dreams.

After the first press.  The cheese is flipped over and returned to the mold, where it is pressed again, then salted and cured in Del’s lovely cheese and sausage cave.

Can’t wait to taste the results!

pickled cheese? czech.

I finally found a preparation for those anemic supermarket Camemberts, thanks to Czech bar food, which takes no prisoners. Nakládaný Hermelin is a garlicky Czech specialty I wish I had found in Prague last summer, but saw it on the internet instead.  Hermelin is a bloomy rind cheese similar to brie, and it is pickled in big ol’ jars of spiced oil made heady by garlic, peppers, and onion.

Of course, if you wanted to use an imported Camembert, my assistant and I wouldn’t say no.  Nakládaný Hermelin hails from the same class of bar snacks as utopenci (“Drowned Men”): fine-grained miniature sausages, pickled in vinegar.  See?  Take no prisoners.

Preparing Nakládaný Hermelin is quite easy: just take a wheel of Camembert, slice it in half horizontally through the middle, press slivers of garlic and dust each half liberally with top quality paprika and pepper, then put the two halves back together.  Slice in wedges so it will fit in your sterilized jar, then layer with onions, bay leaf, and pickled peppers, and cover in oil.

I’ve adapted the recipe adapted from a blog called Northern Table and variations on this Czech food message board.  I’d warn against any of the versions that suggest leaving the cheese on the counter to ripen at room temperature for several days or longer, however, or reusing the oil.  You can get pretty sick by eating soft cheese left on the counter under any circumstances, and Camembert doesn’t quite have the acid one needs to stave off botulism in anaerobic (i.e., under oil) environments.

What you’re losing is the ripening and oozifying of the cheese.  By using pickled peppers you’d be lowering the pH even more, so, um, maybe…but I really don’t trust those garlic slivers in the center of the cheese.  It’s just not worth the risk.  And it’s still pretty darn good, all garlicky and spicy, after being refrigerated for a week.

I wouldn’t waste your best, raw milk Camembert on this preparation either.  Use pasteurized cheese, both for safety and budget.  The garlic and oil will kill any subtle nuances of a good cheese, believe me.

Rawr!!

Before serving, I’d suggest taking out the wedges you’d like to eat and letting them sit at room temperature for a while (and I’ll let you decide how many hours is “a while,” with the food safety proviso that 2 hours max is the limit for prepared foods).

As for the size of the jar, well, that’s up to you.  A quart canning jar for two small rounds of cheese seems ideal to me.  I managed to squeeze a small wheel into a pint jar, just barely, for my first try, and had a hard time getting the oil to fill all the air pockets (also important for food safety reasons).

Be sure you sterilize the jar by washing it well, then letting it go through the heat cycle of your dishwasher or boiling the jar for 10 minutes.

Dobrou chut!

Nakládaný Camembert

This recipe is easy to scale up or down, and Czechs experiment with the spices to their own taste, so you can’t go wrong.  The proportions here are estimated, since I made mine in a pint jar.  I’d advise using more paprika than less, and less garlic than more.  I’m not sure that I’m happy with using vegetable oil, since it didn’t add anything to the flavor of the cheese, but that’s what they use.  You might experiment with olive oils.  Other suggested spices are mustard seed, whole coriander, fresh rosemary (make sure it is completely dry), or dried hot peppers.  You could also just add 2 tablespoons of pickling spices for a slightly different taste.

• 1 jar, quart-sized
• 2 small rounds of pasteurized Camembert (about 8-10 oz. each), not too ripe
• 2-4 cloves garlic, slivered as thinly as you can
• 1 medium onion, sliced thinly in rounds
• 2 cups pickled peppers (try a mix of pickled jalapeño rings and pickled roasted red pepper strips if you don’t have your own canned)
• 2 tablespoons good quality sweet paprika (smoked would also be good)
• 2 teaspoons juniper berries
• 2 teaspoons whole allspice
• black pepper
• 3-4 fresh bay leaves (if you wash them, be sure to dry them completely, since moisture in anaerobic preparations encourages clostridium botulinum growth)
• 1-2 cups vegetable or a light olive oil (you’ll need enough to cover the cheese completely)

Prepare a clean, sterilized quart jar (see notes above) and a lid/ring combo or a plastic cap.  Refrigerate the cheese so it is as stiff as possible.

Slice the onion thinly into rings, and slice the garlic thinly, then cut it into slivers.  Thoroughly dry your bay leaves.  If you have a mortar and pestle, crack the whole spices to release the oils.

Prepare the chilled Camembert by slicing each wheel in half lengthwise, so you expose the inside of the wheel. Work fast and with a confident hand, because it is sticky and may fall apart if you mess around with the cut too much.  Press the garlic into one of the exposed halves for each cheese.  Sprinkle both halves of the interior with the paprika and lots of fresh black pepper.

Rejoin the two halves of the cheeses, then slice into wedges that will fit neatly into the jar in layers.

Layer the ingredients in the jar.  Place several onion rings and some spices at the bottom of the jar.  Use onions, pickled peppers, and bay leaves (and dried chiles if using) to separate the wedges, filling the gaps with more pickled peppers. Press the cheese down so it is firmly packed, but don’t pack too tightly.

When you are about half full, add some oil and more spices.  Press lightly with a spoon to release air bubbles.

Keep adding cheese and other items until the jar is about 3/4 full, then top off with oil, again pressing down and checking for air bubbles.  Add the rest of the spices.  Make sure the cheese is fully submerged in the oil.  Close with a canning lid/ring or plastic cap.

Refrigerate for 1-2 weeks, checking after the first few days that the cheese is still submerged.  When you’re ready, enjoy thin slices with traditional rye bread or a baguette, and some Czech lager.  The cheese should taste very garlicky and cheesy — if any off flavors or odd colors or mold are present, don’t eat.

in which i dream of tess of the d’urbervilles

I’m preparing for an advanced cheesemaking class tomorrow in Douglas County by drooling over pictures of our recent tour of Three Rings Farm, a goat dairy and the makers of River’s Edge chèvre.

In my fantasies, I see myself slinging curds and whey like a pro on a little goat farm, a latter-day Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  I will live in the rolling hills west of Portland, a stone’s throw from the coast, and I will sleep al fresco in a flowery meadow, and I will be nudged awake in the morning by my goats.

Heidi, my milking machine and all around Girl Friday, will wake at the break of dawn to take care of their udderly needs.

My cheese will come out as beautifully as these ash-coated, bloomy rind cheeses:

Above: Humbug Mountain and Sunset Bay.  Below:  I’m not sure, but they sure look good.

And there will be no Angel Clare or Alec or any Victorian labor practices or degeneration or class discrimination or murder, and we will live happily ever after, eating cheese.

Stay tuned.

dark days #15: tangled in pasta

I’ve been on a fresh pasta kick lately.  Not making it, no, but buying it from a local company. :)  But local it was, and thus a fitting candidate for this week’s Dark Days winter eating local challenge.  (In my defense, I did make crackers last weekend with a pasta machine in my flatbread class.)  Fresh pasta is toothsome and has a pleasant bite if it has been made with premium ingredients.  I can really taste the difference, especially in lasagna.

I’ve had a bumper crop of arugula this winter, so much that I treated it like spinach and made a wonderfully cheesy arugula lasagna last week. It didn’t qualify as local meal because I used non-local cheese and tomato sauce, being out of my own, but it was delicious.  We’ve been eating heavy-on-the-arugula salads, too.  I even mixed some in to my salad served to the bread baking class participants this weekend.  We’re all so desperate for green at this point in the winter, the salad was more of a hit than I expected.

For the Dark Days challenge, I did manage to rustle up a delicious creamy spaghettini with arugula, onions sauteed only ’til pale gold, and local frozen peas from Stahlbush Island Farms, our Willamette Valley processing facility.  My idea was based on the French spring vegetable dish of creamed new petits pois with shreds of lettuce.  The sauce contained some frozen homemade chicken stock and local butter and cream, and was quite mild.  Loads of salt and pepper and the first chives of my garden finished it off.

Consider the pea.  I’m kind of smitten.

eggscellent lunch: tamago donburi

One of my favorite comfort foods isn’t remotely from childhood.  It’s an adult dish, and one that evokes long days, lonely nights, and a cold, tiny studio apartment far away in Tokyo, long ago in the days before internet.

Living in Ayase, a small outpost at the end of the Chiyoda line, northeast of everything fashionable in Tokyo, was gloomy.  My short walk to the station in the morning was an obstacle course of ramen vomit, pachinko parlor neon, and depressing little shops trying to hold their own.  Across the tracks, I could see advertising posters of Korean and Thai girls and boy-girls pasted on the exterior walls of places that would advertise such things.  It was like Lost in Translation without the luxury hotel or falling in love.

My station was not too far from my work downtown, but I was working very long hours, and without a Japanese wife at home to cook me dinner, I could never make it to the market to buy food before it closed.  My miniature refrigerator-cum-freezer tended to thaw frozen things and freeze fresh ones, so I couldn’t shop for more than a couple of days.  The restaurants were too expensive, lackluster, and depressing for regular single dining. And because I was working at an American firm, I wasn’t regularly coerced into the ramen-vomit-inducing social requirement of after-work drinking with my colleagues and clients.

So I often found myself in the only shopping venue that was open when I’d get home around 9 p.m., the only place that could mete out a little alimentary comfort via a plastic dish and a microwave.  The corner convenience store.

More often than not, comfort came to me in the form of a loose, saucy omelette over rice, offered for sale in the refrigerated case alongside other slim pickin’s available that late.  I liked the idea of donburi, because it would give me both main dish and rice in a casserole-ish form, but I didn’t find the more popular version of this dish, oyako donburi, appetizing because I didn’t trust the chicken in it.  So I often ate plain tamago donburi, egg-and-rice bowl, relishing the little kick the artificially dyed red strands of pickled ginger on the side provided to the sweet, salty omelette.

When I came back to the States, I found that I actually missed tamago donburi, and quickly settled into a routine of making it whenever I felt exhausted or blue.  I still make it for lunch on grey, rainy days in Oregon when I need a little kick.  Perhaps it can help you as it has helped me.

Tamago donburi is not a pretty dish.  It’s rather monochromatic, actually, since the onions soak up the brown stock, and the eggs darken from the sauce.  Therefore, it’s essential to sprinkle some jaunty green onions, or fresh spring garden chives (as you see above) on top.  I like a soupy sauce for my donburi, so you might want to reduce the volume of dashi stock.  I never make my own dashi, using no more than a quarter teaspoon of powdered dashi bouillon for just under 2 cups of water, but you should make your own with katsuo flakes and kelp.  It would be tastier.  The only necessity is to make the stock relatively weak, so as not to overpower the egg.  One can also add mushrooms, cabbage, or myriad vegetable fillers to the omelette, as restaurants do, to make it prettier.  I don’t bother.

Tamago Donburi

Serves 1

2 cups cooked Japanese short-grain rice
1.5 cups dashi (made with a healthy sprinkle of dashi-no-moto powder and water; substitute chicken or vegetable stock)
2 teaspoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons sake
2 teaspoons sugar
a small piece of very thinly sliced white or yellow onion (maybe 1/4 cup?)
1 tablespoon chopped pickled ginger or 1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger
3 eggs
1 green onion or an equivalent amount of chives, thinly sliced, for garnish

Cook your rice ahead of time.  When rice is finished, proceed with the donburi.  Slice onion and chop ginger.  In a small saucepan, combine dashi, soy sauce, sake, and sugar, and bring to a boil over medium heat.  Add onion slices and ginger and reduce heat to a simmer.  Let simmer for 5 minutes.  As the sauce is simmering, break and lightly beat three eggs in a small bowl.  Finely slice the green onion or chive garnish and set aside.  Scoop out rice in a nice mound in a medium-sized bowl (a Japanese donburi bowl is perfect, of course, but one can use a deep vegetable serving bowl or pasta bowl).

Add eggs to saucepan.  Do not mix.  They will set in about 1 minute. When they look cooked through, and they have formed an omelette-like mass in the center of the pot, carefully pour the contents of the pot atop the bowl of rice you have prepared.  Sprinkle with reserved green onions and serve immediately.

Repeat for multiple servings.

dark days challenge #2: post-Thanksgiving corn chowder

For the second week of the Dark Days Winter Eat Local Challenge, I was indeed challenged.  The days leading up to Thanksgiving, and after Thanksgiving, I was really focused on the big meal we ate on the day.  With all the leftovers, it was hard to justify going to the store to buy more food just to “eat local.”

We certainly had local items within the T-day meal, including the cranberries in the cranberry sauce; the pumpkins in the pie; the bacon, shallots, celery, butter and hazelnuts in the stuffing (and the bread was local, but probably made from flour from out of state)…but the whole meal wasn’t local.  The turkey was a Shelton, from Southern California.  I’m not sure why our local fancy grocery and the local meat market both opt for Shelton’s fresh turkeys, but they do.  We don’t likely have a big local supplier.

As I was doing what I could with the leftovers, an endeavor that inspired me to transform my turkey breast leftovers via Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan strange-flavored chicken salad, it occured to me that I could make a simple, nourishing, light soup from the corn instead of eating it and pretending it was Chinese.

The corn dish I created this year was based on the proverbial “three sisters,” corn, beans and squash that were so-named because they serve as perfect companion plants in the fields.  The corn provides a pole for the beans, and the large leaves of the squash plant shade and protect the roots of the corn and beans until late in the season.  Everyone knows the old culinary saw, “if it grows together, it goes together.”  Why not use my dried beans, frozen summer corn, and fresh storage squash together?

The Thanksgiving corn side dish featured cream, thyme, roasted squash, and yellow-eye beans sautéed in butter the night before.  I had planned to use Anthony Boutard’s tarbais beans (Gaston, Oregon), since they hold up well, but I had just enough yellow-eye beans left (non-local, but I bought them in San Francisco, where they were local) from last season to add a sprinkle of beans to the dish.  The local corn itself was not the sweet, locally celebrated Bodacious, but rather a more corn-y, chewier variety that makes for a disappointing ear mid-summer, but a deeper, toastier taste when used frozen in winter recipes. The delicata squash was what it was: fresh, delicious, and easy to roast and cut into small pieces with the skin on for more fiber and pretty stripes.

With leftover buttery, creamy corn already seasoned with thyme and studded with squash and beans, I thought I might capitalize on a good thing and turn a local side dish into a local chowder that was hearty enough for dinner, yet light enough for dinner after Thanksgiving.

I added enough Noris Dairy milk to cover the corn and fill a small pot, then cut up a good knob of local leek and a local red-skinned potato.  A quick trip out the garden yielded even more thyme.  A healthy grind of black pepper and a good dose of salt finished it off.  I simply simmered the soup until the potatoes and leeks were soft.  Served with leftover baguette from a local bakery, it was perfect for a postprandial repast.

You could make this chowder with fresh ingredients.  Sweet, milky corn freshly shaven off the cob and poached in butter and milk with new potatoes and summer squash would be absolutely divine.  But it wasn’t bad for a fall dish, not bad at all!

Bring it on, challengers.  Bring.  It.  On.

food for thought: capricious caprese

I don’t really remember much of August.  It’s all a blur of words and revisions and paper and a computer screen and the sound of typing.

I do remember eating more than my fair share of the simple, elegant caprese salad, a salad that one simply can’t have at any other time of the year than late summer.  It is a sensible salad: no lettuce filler; sweet, vitamin C-filled garden tomatoes, sliced so that the juice leaches out with salt; little mozzarella balls that add a milkiness to the dressing and some heft to the mouth; olive oil; a bit of vinegar; black pepper; and herbs.  One generally chooses basil, but I capriciously added fresh fennel dust and seeds, wild marjoram, oregano, parsley…anything that seemed good at the time. Don’t be afraid to smush a tomato slice or two to make a creamier, tomato-ier dressing.

Whatever I did, it worked, and I am now the proud holder of a Ph.D.!  I start teaching at the University of Oregon in a few weeks, and it all begins again, but for now, I’m happy to relax, enjoy my tomatoes, and build up my depleted brain power.  Off to the store for more mozz…