We're Safe

To the many who have kindly asked, we are all safe at my house. Our neighborhood was hit very hard, and there is true devastation all around us, but we were safe in the basement when the tornado hit, and our house sustained remarkably little damage all things considered. We are without power or cell phone or internet, so it will be a bit before I can respond to friends and family individually.

Crab Cakes

with brown rice and sauteed mei quing.

Blue Tee

This has been on the needles for a while; glad to have it done for the arrival of The Heat.

Happy Easter!

The Bunny did right by us this year.

Scrambled Eggs with Tarragon

with fried potatoes, broccoli, and asparagus.

Whole Wheat Spinach Noodles

with mustard greens and shiitake mushrooms, and salad.

Scrambled Goose Egg with Tarragon

with sauteed greens (mustard and collard) and baked sweet potatoes.

KillKat

I think that's the name of the fish; at any rate, I'd never heard of it before. We had it with brown rice and salad. The fish was mushy and tasteless.

Apologies for the Hiatus

I was busy eating high on the hog in Philadelphia. Last night it was back home, with crab cakes, greens, and corn on the cob for dinner.

Sauteed Grouper

with quinoa and broccoli.

Whole Wheat Spinach Noodles

with broccoli rapini and leftover chicken.

Chicken Drumsticks

braised in lemon and rosemary, with quinoa. The recipe is Alice Waters', from The Art of Simple Food. It should have been delicious, but I added too much lemon juice and chicken stock, and it wasn't. I'll try again.

Scrambled Eggs

with fried potatoes and roasted cauliflower/carrots/shiitakes.

Grilled Rock Fish

with quinoa and creamed spinach.

Back to the Sewing Machine

Man—I haven't sewed in years. Last weekend, however, we were at a local arts festival and a woman there was selling bolts of fabric she had bought at an estate sale. My daughter fell passionately in love with the purple plaid you see and begged me to make her a dress. Something deep in me responded to her call, as if to say "put down the knitting needles for a while; it's time for a new challenge." And here is the result! My daughter design-directed the whole thing, and I did the grunt work. The pattern is McCall's M6154. I loved making it; the rhythm of sewing is so different from that of knitting, and it's always exciting to stand at the threshold of a new craft vista.

Scrambled Goose Egg

with broccoli and buckwheat bread.

Buckwheat Rye

This is an example of a bread that looked really unpromising at every stage and has turned out to be one of the most delicious I've ever made. In shape it is much more like a pancake than a loaf, but it is chewy and crusty and has a deep, complex, slightly smoky flavor. The flour is 350g white (including the starter), 200g buckwheat (all of which fermented overnight) and 50g rye. I added commercial yeast in the morning when I mixed the final dough because I wanted to bake early. I also added way too much water, which probably accounts for the massive spread, but in my opinion if you don't care too much about shape too much water is not a problem. Too little and you get a tight dough that is (to me) repellent to work with; too much and you end up with a nice chewy interior.

Breakfast of Champions

Nothing beats a Hello Kitty waffle. The flour mix in these is whole wheat and teff, with a dash of coconut. The jam is raspberry cardamom, and it takes the full weight of my conditioning to keep me from eating it from the jar with a spoon.

Chai Spice Mini Cupcakes

with chocolate cinnamon ganache icing. You know how sometimes an idea will take root in your mind and flourish there without reference to observable reason? That's what happened to me in November. I was in a bakery in Victoria, BC, and had a little chai-spice cupcake. Ever since then I have wanted to make them, though I generally have no special interest in cupcakes or fancy baking per se. Today I found myself with the ingredients and the time, so I went for it, using these recipes. I overbeat my icing (despite the recipe's warning) and experienced a total failure of my decorating equipment, but they are nonetheless delicious. I went whole hog, with cake flour and full sugar. If I do it again I'll cut the sugar by a quarter, and add some vanilla. My teaspoon-size cookie scoop filled the mini-papers perfectly.

Scrambled Eggs

with heaps of fried potatoes. Yum.