Gilding the Lily since 2006
Okay, to be honest, Friday was pretty fucking glorious. A seriously perfect autumn day: sunny, a balmy 65 degrees, just gorgeous. But when I got to the store after work I still ended up leaning toward comfort food, and picked up a half pound of …
This is all I have to show for my blogless week. I’ve been trying to, once again, wittle down the produce drawer in the fridge, and have been cooking a bunch of uninteresting pasta and stir-fry with the various vegetables. Do you know how “meh” …
The other day New Seasons had some divine Alaskan sockeye – supple, cadmium flesh – man, their seafood is so good lately. They have it all open to the air now, too, and you honestly can’t detect a single molecule of fishy amine. I totally forgive them for all those bunk clams they sold me way back when.
After tasting that sexy alder-smoked salt that Stacy gifted me, I think I was really craving salmon and maple – flavors so symbiotic and undeniably American. Salmon takes to a glaze like a dream, and it came together so effortlessly, like intuition. Hot brown mustard and a small glug of maple syrup made sweet music, and the crushed, smoky salt and black pepper consummated the relationship.
I had some puce baby potatoes, all iridescent skin and lilac pulp. I always pick out the tiniest pearls from the bin, so each one can be steamed intact and eaten in one bite. After steaming to a billowy interior, I tossed them into a hot pan with butter and broken petals of maitake; minced fire-roasted jalapeño, yellow pear tomatoes and a chiff of rainbow chard from the garden; and sliced onion and garlic. I tippled in a heaping tablespoon of hot curry powder and a splash of cream, and it sizzled into sauce with the melted tomatoes.
I brushed the salmon with the glaze a few times while it roasted, then dished up with some soft naan and curry okra and green tomato pickle.
Today was the first weekend day that Scott and I didn’t go out to eat in I don’t know how long. Yesterday we failed at our mushroom foray – that’s what I get for trying a new spot. Next weekend we’ll go to Old Faithful, …
A couple months ago, before the tomatoes were really getting good, I accidentally knocked a few off the vine trying to get to my beans or something. These were my first tomatoes, so I valued each one like my firstborn and I brought them in, …
I was totally going to do this with more of the last of the pâtisson, but then I saw matsutake mushrooms at New Seasons, alongside gorgeous vermilion lobster mushrooms. The matsutake were $25/lb, but one mushroom was only 75 cents (sliced wafer-thin, it was enough). The lobster mushrooms were much less, as were the maitake and shitake mushrooms I picked up to round it out.
I am going out soon to pick chanterelles, hedgehogs and cauliflower mushrooms, but have to wait until the last of my arduous fieldwork is over. By ‘arduous’, I mean I have to live on a $110/day per diem, which means I stay in the first Motel 6 I can find that has internet and no bloodstains on the mattress. But until I have bushels of the forest’s bounty that I hunted myself, I have to use store-gotten gains. I think I’m okay with that.
I lined a sheet pan with some store-bought puff pastry (don’t look at me like that, making puff pastry from scratch on a work night is for losers) and set the oven to 400. I whisked together 4 eggs and some chopped thyme, marjoram and rosemary, and a little pepper. I heated up a half cup of cream and whisked it in (tempering the eggs as I went), and stirred in a few good knobs of goat cheese, a handful of grated dill havarti and a little manchego for bite (I had these all in the fridge and I tend to forget my cheese drawer for weeks, so cutting off the science-y parts was necessary).
I carefully poured the cheese custard into the pastry shell, and layered on thinly-sliced onion, the sliced mushrooms, and sliced some bits off an old hunk of slab bacon from the freezer. The custard and filling came all the way to the edges, but it was still good. Bake for 20-30 minutes.
My gorgeous friend Stacy gifted me some fancy salts on Saturday, one of which is an intoxicating Salish alder-smoked (the Salish are an ethnographic group of Indigenous/Aboriginal people of the Pacific Northwest coast, although I doubt they actually passed their time by smoking chunks of sea salt over alder fires and then putting it into chic little tins). The salt took a quick crush in the old mortar and pestle, was the perfect final touch.
All that richness was a perfect dinner with a little sliced tomato and quick-sauteed zuke from the garden. These are the very last of the good days weather-wise, and I’m finding that eating the vegetables in less-adulterated ways helps me truly focus on why I’ll miss summer.
…but I sure am glad it’s mushroom season.
I really love my new camera, by the way. It’s almost that time of year where all of my vegetables start cracking and splitting under the spank of too much hard rain, and I’ve been frantically harvesting all of the last of my pattypans and …
…or, Wherein I Learn to Use My New Camera So my camera bit the dust. My trusty Nikon Coolpix, which has served me well for the past two years, finally bid adieu to this cruel world. Our waitress at Jules Casual French Bistro accidentally bumped …
Vancouver is to Japanese restaurants as Portland/Seattle is to coffee shops. Which is to say, there is a fuckton of Japanese food here. We sort of knew this; I mean, we knew we couldn’t afford to spend as much time in Japan this fall that we feel the flight warrants, and we heard that Vancouver has the largest Japanese population outside Japan. So we did the math, and it turns out to be true. Lucky us! And only an hour flight from home.
Let me tell you about Japadog. You might remember Japadog from such No Reservations episodes as Tony in the Pacific Northwest. We weren’t actually intending to come here. In fact, it wasn’t until we were in line that we remembered that Bourdain had been here. So, apparently, had Ice Cube. Ten times. No, starfucking wasn’t our impetus, it was the smell of kurobuta pork served up as the Misomayo (hot dog slathered in a mix of miso and kupie mayo, with radish sprouts on top) and Oroshi (hot dog with daikon relish and scallions). I wasn’t feeling brave enough to try the Okonomi (pickled cabbage, sweet sauce and mayo with nori shreds), but there’s always tomorrow.
Kurobuta is called the “kobe beef of pork”, and the dog tasted like a really good weisswurst. The toppings were fresh and not really out of left field – pickled crucifers, onions and sweet/salty condiments are all familiar tastes with a hot dog, but this was somehow still quite Japanese. We were lucky to stumble upon this cart (there is a shocking dearth of street food here), and are a steal at only a couple bucks each.
Japadog
899 Burrard St
Vancouver, BC
Guu Izakaya (the O – distinguished from its three other locations) was one of those places that look so great from the outside that you make an audible cooing noise and can’t wait to come back when it’s open. We did come back later, and after being greeted with enthusiastic screams of “Irrashaimase!” we were seated at the bar.
An all-Japanese staff, mostly Japanese clientele (the English-speakers next to us returned to Mandarin when the waitress left) and the din of knives, grill and wok really reinforced that we were in the right place. Typical of an izakaya, the menu consisted of small plates: a verdant pea shoot salad with slivers of red and yellow bell pepper, pine nuts and soy vinaigrette; grilled squid legs (the tips of the tentacles were charred-crispy) with sriracha mayo; ethereal tako yaki, perfect tender nuggets of octopus within steamy soft dumplings with golden brown exterior and the house udon (suggested when I asked for their mebutsu) – earthy/smoky from the grill, with chunks of beef and scallion. Many glasses of the house sake were consumed, and we stumbled back to our hotel three hours later with wide smiles. I literally have not had such a bliss-inducing dining experience since Honjin in Tokyo.
I, tragically, forgot my camera and didn’t remember until we were done eating that I could just use my phone. Scott pulled his out and snapped a few shots of the smiling chefs. But we’ll go back again before we leave – it’s worth a repeat. Maybe we’ll even be brave enough to try the beef liver sashimi.
Guu Izakaya (with Garlic)
838 Thurlow Street
Vancouver, BC
(604) 685-8817
So, sorry I haven’t been around much. I was in the field all last week with no internet (except on my phone, like I’m gonna blog on that thing), and yesterday Scott and I got a wild hair up our asses and came to Vancouver, …
