Gilding the Lily since 2006
The Great Northwest is famous for many foods, and while hazelnuts and salmon usually come to mind as the obvious meibutsu, we also grow spectacular berries. Among them, Vacciniums – huckleberries, cranberries and blueberries – are Queen. These Ericaceous lovelies, to which my namesake heather …
This is not your mother’s tuna-noodle casserole. Not mine, anyway. This is, though, a basic, easy thing: spaghetti with tuna and lemon. Perfect for a lazy weeknight dinner, easily accomplished between bouts of checking my Twitter feed, playing Words with Friends and other impatient, hungry …
Summer: that time of year when we industrious ant-types toil and moil while our carefree grasshopper-type counterparts chirp and sing. As our blasé friends go rafting and camping, we busily tend our crops, gather from the excesses of others and put it all up for leaner times. And like all of Aesop’s cautionary tales in which a martyred animal wins at the end with an “I told you so,” The Ant and the Grasshopper is a dour warning to not squander time and resources, even as we languish in our apparently endless surfeit of plenty. The world does not owe us a living, it turns out.
So even though I enjoy a fresh zucchini or beet with dinner, I pickle and preserve. And although a fresh, seared tuna loin is a fine thing, I process and pressurize.
To wit:
Before:
After:
Be like the ant, grasshopper.
Yes, I’ve taken another two-week break. It’s summer – the busiest time of year for us do-it-ourselves, radical homemakin’, types! I’ll show you later what’s been keeping me so busy (hint: jars and jars), but for now I really need to get this off my …
Summer’s been a long time coming in Portland this year. We didn’t even break 80 degrees until after the 4th of July, I think. I really haven’t been complaining, I actually like it lukewarm and cloudy. But now, friends, now we have something to really …
S’been awhile, no? Last weekend was the pig roast. I didn’t take pictures this year, had my hands full with Zephyr and other things, but I turned out a rather gorgeous som tam-inspired chayote slaw that, served with spicy shredded pork belly, lime and cilantro (laap on the fly), was perfect Lao street food without the street. It’s worth a repeat, and so I shall, soon.
Now that Zephyr is a spry young man of 7 months, he is prone to ambling off the sanctuary of his outdoor blanket and into the wilds of the surrounding grass and weeds. I don’t mind his exploration, but I am wary of him cramming handfuls of freshly-cut bluegrass and clover into his gob. Sure, they’re edible enough, but I don’t want him getting some nasty parasite, so I handed him a nice, fat leaf of arugula for him to gnaw on. I half expected some funny faces, but sure as shit, he likes it!
Just as Zephyr is suddenly requiring a watchful eye, we suddenly have a garden full of bolted arugula. We had such a cold, wet spring that our first warm weather last week sent my lettuces and other tender greens all aflower. Lettuces are in the dandelion family and go bitter when they flower, but my peppery little Brassicaceous beauty, Eruca sativa, stays just as bright and nutty as the day she sprouted.
Pluck yourself a little posy of the flowers to brighten up your kitchen, and toss the rest of them – stems, shoots, leaves, buds, blooms and all – into your favorite food processing device, be it the mortar and pestle or the Magimix. Add a handful of the other flower shoots that are springing up all over the garden these days: garlic. Unless you plan on saving seed, letting your garlic bloom is a huge waste of the plant’s resources. Chop those shoots off and let the plant send all its energy into the bulb, where you want it. Toss the shoots (unceremoniously, or with aplomb – your call) into their pestofication device and douse the lot with olive oil, a few good pinches of salt and some toasted pumpkin seeds (or pine nuts, if you’re feeling rich).
Smear this verdure velvet onto some pizza dough and top with some grated pecorino, or add a blob to some angel hair and sweet tomatoes for a quick and easy Margherita. I bet it’d be just wonderful on a skewer of spot prawns. And this stuff? Freezes like a dream. As if you’d have any leftover.
The other day I was having a fierce hanker for soft pretzels with spicy mustard. The ones you get in the freezer section of even nicer stores like New Seasons are just fucking abysmal – dry, salty cardboard carbohydrate, salvageable only with copious cheese sauce. …
…or, New Kind of Neighborhood.
I finally moved to WordPress and cooked myself up a new blog. What do you think? I’m still fiddling with design details here and there (I just don’t have the same artistic eye since I quit dropping acid), but overall I think it’s coming along alright. It’ll probably never be perfect, and I might just get used to it before I really feel like it’s done to my exacting standards, but it’s better than a milquetoast built-in template. Or Blogger. A huge shout-out to my genius husband who coded this shit like a motherfucking wizard. Anyways, I’d love some feedback. And please, be brutal.
Another huge shout-out goes to my genius husband for coming up with this dinner idea. Full disclosure: I did actually start brainstorming what dish to make for my inaugural post, and wanted to make something comfort-y that would get a lot of traffic. People love comfort food – a glance at the top gawked/favorited/viewed posts on Tastespotting or Foodgawker reveals an orgy of gooey chocolate chip cookies, macaroni and cheese and other homey, familiar foods. And for some reason, 20-30% of my traffic still comes from people Googling some derivation of “swedish meatballs” (particularly, the gravy). So, yeah, I’m pandering a little. Hate on, haters – you know you wish you’d thought of this.
Meatballs and meatloaf are the same thing, just in different formats. The meatloaf/meatball part is a no-brainer: equal parts pork and beef, then minced onion, bread crumbs, an egg, seasonings (in this case nutmeg and sage), and something tart/sweet (in this case, a spoonful of lingonberry preserves), but I do have a gift for gravy, if I do say so myself. So as my gift to you, friends, I am giving up the goods and posting an actual recipe. That’s right. A recipe.
Nutmeg Gravy
To serve with Swedish meatballs or, as it were, meatloaf. Also great on biscuits.
2 tbsp butter
1/3 c flour
1 c cream (or milk)
1/2 c chicken stock
1/4 tsp fresh-grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
salt to taste
pinch paprika
Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and whisk until the roux is golden and begins to smell wonderful. Turn off the heat, and whisking your ass off, add the cream bit by bit, then the stock bit by bit. I prefer to whisk it to choux paste in between splashes of cream until it’s eventually velvety and smooth, then whisk in the stock. If you can’t be bothered, go ahead and use my trick of dumping the whole lot into a tall glass measuring beaker and run an immersion blender through it to smooth out all the lumps completely in 10 seconds.
Return the heat to medium low and add the nutmeg, pepper, salt and paprika and simmer for about 10 minutes or until the floury taste is gone. What does this mean? Hint: it should taste like gravy instead of library paste. Thin as needed with milk.
Serve with pan-roasted, herbed baby potatoes (or egg noodles) and lingonberry preserves.
So, here I am. Rock you like a hurricane.
I made this during a warm spell we had a week ago. It was the kind of weather we ought to be having right now, but Mother Nature is being a bit of a premenstrual dysphoric bitch right now, dumping buckets of rain and unseasonally …
