Snow in Seattle

For a magical day or two, Seattle was a wintry paradise.

Our little tarragon plant idiotically chose this moment to send up shoots. The little plants were very cute in the snow, though.

Ice-encrusted flowers and leaves in the neighborhood:

Magical sideways icicles:

…and how they came to be sideways (poor top-heavy plant!):

Then it rained for a couple days, and all the snow was washed away. You wouldn’t even know it was ever here, if you suddenly teleported into Seattle.

 

Pictures from 2012, so far

I haven’t posted in so long that I have a giant backlog of pictures. Here goes!

A couple weeks ago, Toby attended some sort of workshop where everybody canned tuna and got to bring a few jars home. We’ve already eaten two of these and the tuna is delicious! We still have ten jars to go. I was also supposed to attend the workshop, but I had suddenly become very ill the night before and had to cancel. I remained sick for about a week with some mysterious flu-like ailment, but I have since recovered.

We finally have a rack to hang our little pots from! Toby put it up. I love the way it looks, and it freed up some cupboard space for the tuna jars and several other jars we’d been keeping in the closet.

Two of our friends bought a giant pile of Sichuan peppercorns and sent us back with a big bag of them. We haven’t cooked with them yet, but I’m super excited to try. Sichuan peppercorns make your tongue go numb. I tried one to see and it’s true!

We’ve been drinking port lately! Toby got me two tiny bottles for Christmas and we cracked open the first one about a week ago. We got four servings each out of it (tiny servings!), and I’m excited to try the other one too. I adore port. This one tasted like dried fruit. It was shockingly flavorful, and sweet without being too sugary. Amazing!

I made a really awesome pizza last week. It was topped with mozzarella, hedgehog mushrooms, and arugula. I love to make pizza.

We have been consuming an astonishing number of Clementine oranges. Every time we go to the store, we pick up another five-pound box (or two). Meyer lemons have also just come into season, so I should make some more Meyer lemon poppyseed muffins while the getting is good!

I made an orange-almond cake (Julia Child’s recipe) for a dinner party with friends. It was amazing. Why are almonds so incredibly delicious in cakes?

For the same dinner party, I made a batch of tender muffins. They’re actually just oatmeal muffins, but my family has called them “tender muffins” for my entire life. I didn’t have buttermilk so I mixed milk with some of Toby’s sourdough starter for a bit of fermented flavor!

Finally, the paperwhite bulb is shooting up. This picture is from a few days ago; it’s actually a couple inches taller already by now. I love it! The hyacinth hasn’t done much since I planted it in a jar, but its little shoot did turn bright green. Maybe that’s a good sign?

Next on Pickled Beets: Seattle gets buried under three inches of snow for about a day and a half!

 

Black cod simmered in caramel sauce

I posted about our Vietnamese cookbook’s caramel sauce a while back, and last night I cooked the best thing ever in it. We bought some black cod (a truly delicious fish) and simmered it in the caramel sauce and some other flavorings (fish sauce, sugar, lots and lots of black pepper).

Partway through the cooking:

After cooking. I worried I had let it go too long, since it was incredibly dark and caramelized, but this was NOT a problem.

Served with rice and roasted brussels sprouts, to soak up the incredibly strong and thick sauce. I made a full recipe of sauce, but only used about 1/3 the fish it called for. We also opened up a bottle of Oatis, Ninkasi’s delicious oatmeal stout.

I can’t stop thinking about the black cod and the thick caramel sauce. It was the most exciting thing I’d cooked in a long time.

 

Cardamom olive oil brownies

Yesterday I decided to make something delicious, and I narrowed my options to Swedish cardamom bread and cinnamon rolls. But neither seemed quite right. Then I had a flash of inspiration! Chocolate and cardamom!

So I made yet another variation on the amazing olive oil brownies.

I merely ground up some cardamom seeds and layered the spice in between two thick pours of batter. Big salt crystals went on top. They’re awesome.

Salty, cardamom-y things are very Seattley to me, too.

Also, happy 2012! Here’s to another year of great food.

 

Plants new and old

Before I begin, here is an inspiring picture of our menorah on December 27.

We suddenly have a bunch of new plants growing in the apartment! This is thanks to my mom, who sent us back with several proto-plants. First up, a pair of bulbs! These are super exciting because apparently they will look and smell wonderful.

One is a paperwhite, which my mom says is foolproof:

And a hyacinth, which may or may not work (according to my mom) but which I am really rooting for:

Also, we took back a couple clippings of my mom’s drapey shelf plants. I hope they’ll grow into new plants when submerged in water, but there have been no encouraging signs yet. I will continue to hope.

As far as our old plants go, the kalanchoe just started to flower again, and seems to be doing well.

The orchid limps along, as always. It has not been doing well for about a year now. I’m keeping it around until it’s totally dead, though.

 

Dungeness crab

I ate my first Dungeness crab a couple weeks ago! Dungeness crabs are very popular over here in the Northwest and they have an excellently maintained fishery along the coast from California to Alaska. We bought our crab at the farmers market (already cooked; that’s just how this vendor sells them) and excitedly made a recipe from our Vietnamese cookbook.

Here is the crab:

I roasted some Brussels sprouts while Toby cut up the crab and made a sauce. The sauce used the tomalley and fat inside the crab, along with other delicious ingredients. We didn’t have oyster sauce, so we substituted fermented black beans. I was surprised to learn that the tomalley (which is the liver of the crab) had very little flavor. It just had a pleasant richness, rather like an egg.

We also steamed some mustard greens to go on the side. Yum!

It was a delicious feast. The crab was incredibly messy to eat, since the sauce was all over the shells, but it was a neat dish. I definitely want to eat more Dungeness crab while I have the chance!

 

Crêpes and coconut macaroons

Before leaving for a holiday trip to New York and Minnesota (more on that later), we had friends over for a giant feast. Toby made carrot and red lentil soup, and I made a large pile of crêpes.

The crêpes turned into a layered “gâteau de crêpes” out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I layered them with golden beets, goat cheese, sliced and browned mushrooms, spinach, and béchamel sauce. I couldn’t serve it neatly, so it wasn’t worth memorializing in a picture, but it was delicious and didn’t last long.

For dessert we had coconut macaroons, which I made to use up the egg white left over from an earlier batch of mayonnaise.

I love coconut macaroons. And here is the mayonnaise that left me with an egg white:

We ate it the night before the dinner party, as a dip for roasted potatoes.

 

Caramel sauce

Toby and I have a fantastic new Vietnamese cookbook (this one), and the very first thing we made from it was caramel sauce. This is a very easy and simple sauce that goes into many, many of the book’s recipes.

You start with lots of sugar and a little water on the stove.

Let it sit and it starts to caramelize:

At the end it becomes very dark very fast! This part is exciting.

At this point you have to add back some water, so the sauce is thinner and easy to use. The author has advice for how to do it safely, since there is a lot of unpredictable bubbling when you mix water with the much hotter caramel liquid. At the end, you have a deliciously toasty sauce to use in anything! It’s like molasses, but much thinner and also lighter-tasting.

We instantly used it to cook some sole fillets. The result was subtle and delicious. The fish totally fell apart, which was not intended, but it tasted great.

 

Rice noodle success

(Unrelated but pretty picture: a pot of green tea, tied together to look like a little flower.)

I have always adored rice noodle dishes in restaurants, but I never had much success making them on my own. At Thai and Cambodian restaurants the rice noodles are flexible and elastic, soft yet chewy, and individually coated in sauce. They do not stick together, and they stretch pleasantly when you lift them.

The stir-fried rice noodles that I made, on the other hand, were always gummy and starchy. Even when I added lots of sauce, they would seem dry. They would stick together, and they did not become wonderfully coated in sauce. The dishes usually tasted good, but the texture was severely lacking.

But never again! I know the secret now.

Toby and I got a great Vietnamese cookbook from my parents for our birthdays (thanks!), and the author explains how to cook rice noodles. Bring water to a hard boil, she says, and drop in the noodles. Leave them in until they have the texture you desire. Drain them in a colander. Then, and this is the interesting step, you flush them with lots of cold water to stop the cooking and rinse off the extra starch. Amazingly, this basically solved my problems. The dish I made tonight was excellent, and had almost the taste and texture of a restaurant dish.

I made a simple noodle stir-fry in the style of the pad thai from this blog, but not exactly the same. I’d made seitan earlier today, so I chopped it up and fried it with some scallions in a wok to start. (I made one portion of the dish at a time in the wok, since the cooking took mere minutes and there was more room in the pan this way.) Then I added a handful of drained, rinsed rice noodles. Finally, I poured in a generous amount of sauce, which I had warmed up on the stove. The sauce for two portions consisted of 6 tablespoons of tamarind concentrate, a quarter cup of fish sauce, a bit less than a quarter cup of palm sugar, and a small blob of chili-garlic sauce. I meant to add ginger but I forgot.

I tossed everything together in the 350° [electric] wok for a minute or two and served it with a garnish of scallion tops and cilantro. I meant to add wedges of lime but, again, forgot.

It was perfect. I am thrilled. I would have taken a picture but we devoured it way too fast!

 

Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park

At the end of our recent trip to St. Louis, we tagged along with Toby’s parents to visit a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the area. It was built for the Kraus family and it is now a museum.

The dominant shape of the house was a parallelogram with 60° and 120° angles. There also were several hexagons. Right angles were rare indeed. Even the beds followed this rule: the master bedroom’s bed was a parallelogram and the guest bed was a hexagon. (I rather liked the hexagon bed!)

The house had very few closed-off spaces. I think only the bathrooms closed completely. Several other rooms were accessible by narrow passageways, but they did not seem to have doors (though I could be wrong about that). The interior was warm and gorgeous, though the furniture didn’t look extremely comfortable. Our tour guide confirmed that the chairs were definitely there for their looks, not their feel!

We couldn’t take pictures inside, so these will have to do.

Here’s the front door:

Frank Lloyd Wright apparently really hated garages (they invite clutter), so he built a parallelogram-shaped “carport” for the house. It was basically a sheltered parking area. You can see it just past the dramatic pointed brick wall below:

Here are some pictures of the outside walls.

I’d never seen a real-life Frank Lloyd Wright house, and I thought this building was pretty neat!