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!

 

Chili’s Deli and Mart

On Friday Toby and I and three friends wanted a reasonably quick, very delicious meal before an evening party. So we headed up the Ave (a.k.a. University Way) to the Secret Indian Restaurant just past 50 St.

Today, the Guide to Seattle presents:

Chili’s Deli and Mart
5002 University Way NE (map)
University District
open daily; no website

Click here for a picture of the exterior, so you know what to look for!

Chili’s is right next door to Pam’s Kitchen, which I wrote about a while back. In front it’s just a little store, but in back there are some plastic tables and chairs. Don’t be fooled by the dilapidated look of the place; the people are friendly and the food is awesome.

The best thing to get at Chili’s, in my opinion, is a dosa. A dosa is a sort of crêpe with a lot of savory fillings. I like the masala dosa, which is filled with spices, onions, and potatoes. It comes with a little cup of delicious soup and two intriguingly spiced chutnies.

If you’re feeling more adventurous and you want something with a nice fermented kick to it, you should choose from the items at the very bottom of the list of vegetarian dishes. Last time we went, we ordered some Rava Dosas and a plate of Adai. We had no idea what we were going to get, but they both turned out to be large circular rounds of soft, spiced, spongy bread, with chutnies on the side. The bread reminded me of injera, the spongy and delicious Ethiopian bread. The texture and fermented taste of the Indian breads were similar to injera’s, though the ingredients were almost certainly very different. (I’m not sure what our Indian bread was made of.)

Finally, you must get an order (or more than one order) of Vada. Vada are doughnut-like things made of lentils. They are soft and incredible.

Now go check this place out. It’s great.

 

Autumn in Seattle

Last weekend Toby and I went to St. Louis, MO, for a wedding in Toby’s family. The weather was incredible there: clear, sunny, and fairly warm. We drove past the Arch, whose iconic ridiculousness reminds me of the Space Needle. I think the arch is much classier, though, don’t you agree?

We also saw a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the area. A post about that is coming up soon.

So then we returned to Seattle and entered a giant cloud.

But yesterday was clear and gorgeous. We walked around a lot and saw a bunch of brilliantly colored leaves.

We also made our way over to the Wallingford wine store, City Cellars, for six new bottles. We’ve been doing this thing every few months where we go and ask for recommendations on six bottles: three red and three white. We take notes on what we liked and didn’t like, and bring them back for the next round. It’s great fun. I’m especially excited to try a couple Spanish wines we purchased this time!

This store is neat. It’s right next to Bottleworks, the fancy beer store/bar I just wrote about. City Cellars will probably get its own Guide to Seattle post in the future.

 

Hardy kiwis and a pumpkin

Fall produce is exciting. The only thing about it that’s sad is that it means we’re a season closer to spring produce, which is not so good in Seattle.

One of the best things about fall produce is a quart of hardy kiwis, which are delicious little fruits. We bought these this week at the market:

And I mean little! I took a picture with a dime for scale:

We also got a nice pumpkin in our CSA box this week. I wonder what to do with it? The best thing would be if we could serve it with clams, since we just got 2 pounds of little clams too! I’m considering trying to make a “Star Pumpkin Clam” dish in the style of the Star Pumpkin dish I mentioned a few posts back in my review of the restaurant Jhanjay. I’m sure I can think of something.

 

The last tomatoes

By now Seattle is solidly in its autumn season. A couple weeks ago I decided to finally pluck all the tomatoes that would never get ripe off our plants, so we could pickle them. This is the tiny haul I got, with a few spicy nasturtium flowers:

Now our garden is down to thyme (which is doing great!), tarragon (which is scrawny), and this weird thing growing on our biggest nasturtium plant. It is not a bud. It is a seed pod!

Anyway, back to the pickles. They fit easily into a pint Mason jar along with some dill seed and some brine. They’ve been fermenting for several days now. I look forward to eating them!

Here’s the whole ingenious set-up, where you can see that a jar of blackberry jam is keeping the tomatoes submerged: