Post #1000!

Friends, I've had a ball. One thousand posts and four years after I first thought, "what are these blogs I hear so much about?" I look back with total enthusiasm on my time here with you. I am putting The Enthusiast on an indefinite hiatus now, to find out how all the cooking, sewing, movie watching et. al. feels when I do it without reporting on it. I'll leave you with this one last image of what has to be a quintessential baking adventure for me: whole wheat sesame seed banana muffins. Thank you for looking, commenting, and letting me enthuse.

Costello Tagliapietra

I haven't kept up with the fashion shows in some time now, but a brief dip back in reminds me of this: for sheer I-want-itness and I'd-wear-that-everydayness, almost nobody beats Costello Tagliapietra for me. The designers are a pair of burly dudes who dress in identical full beards and lumberjack rigs, and who work almost exclusively in draped jersey, and I love them and all their works. Behold from the Spring collection:

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

There are times, increasingly numerous just lately, when I wonder why I am driven to do what I do. Why is it that the thought of a pound of carrots in the refrigerator won't leave me alone? Why must they absolutely be turned into cupcakes? Why do I always have to make things into other things?

I'm sure the answer is neurochemical in origin, and I'll probably never know it. In the meantime, these are remarkably good. I used Maida Heatter's recipes for cake and frosting, deviating from them only to decrease the sugar in the cake by half a cup, and whip the frosting in my mixer to make it airy. I also dug up my giant icing tip and it does make for a pretty and easy cupcake top.

Why are cupcakes suddenly the thing? I'll bet money there is a single PR agency somewhere responsible for the craze.

Signe Chanel

Do you have any interest in sewing at all? Well then YouTube yourself up this documentary about the making of a Chanel collection. Forget models and magazines and money (well, not the last, not really); what you want to watch is the Chanel atelier in action translating a sketch into a garment. The movie is made with a lot of wit and style, and with a sense of where the real action is: Laurence's fingers straightening panne velvet ("like a little mouse!"), Martine waiting for Karl ("Who cares if he's left home?"), Jacqueline rejecting a shoulder pad ("This is trash! You can't get anything good anymore.") I could watch these ladies drape all day. It's interesting how in watching the movie I have the simultaneous sense of how well-managed the complex process of making of a Chanel garment actually is, and how frighteningly fragile the whole system is: if a head seamstress dies, an irreplaceable body of knowledge dies with her. It's easy to forget that while a $100,000 dress may seem like an extravagance the world can do without, it's based on a body of skill that takes generations to build, and can easily disappear if any link in the generational chain gets broken. Let's start a fundraiser for couture! Or maybe not. Whatever. You'll love the film.

Spirituous Liquors

I don't imbibe much, but when mojitos are in the offing I'm always on board. We have a beautiful pot of mint in the backyard, and this is the best use I know of for it.
Today was a mighty day of cooking: potato salad (red potatoes, eggs, red onion, tarragon, olive oil, lemon juice), tabouli (bulgur, tomato, parsley, red onion), chicken set to marinate (olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, tarragon, garlic) and dinner: okra, tomato salad, corn on the cob, and tabouli.
I learned the most important thing I know about tabouli a year ago. Hitherto I'd been making it by letting the bulgur soak in boiling water until fluffy and hydrated, then adding the other stuff. Terrible idea! As a result of reading somewhere that the traditional method is to let the bulgur soak up tomato juice, I converted: I put a few tomatoes in the blender, then let the bulgur sit in the resultant sludge for a few hours. Perfection. Flavorful and perfectly textured. I also learned that a food processor is the right tool for the job when it comes to dicing parsley and onion fine enough to complement the bulgur.

New Blog Sib

Have you ever wondered how beautiful amateur astronomical photography can be? Surf on over to www.solarsystemimages.blogspot.com and find out.

Happy Easter!

The Bunny did right by us this year.

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.

Chia Seed Banana Bread

I read somewhere that if you include chia seed in your baking you can cut down on the fat. I'm normally pro-fat and not interested in cutting down on it, but I decided to try it in this case; I made my usual whole wheat banana bread but used about 3/4 the normal amount of butter, and included half a cup of gelled chia seed. And it's delicious! Even better than usual! I know because I ate about a third of the loaf just to be sure.

Banana Bread

As always I used Nigella Lawson's recipe as a template, and also as always I tinkered: I used half spelt, half whole wheat flour, cut the sugar in half, and added a quarter cup of chia seeds. Do you know about chia seeds? You can Google and read about their being the next wonder food, but for cooking purposes they are fun because they absorb water like nobody's business, turning into a strong gel within minutes of adding water. I can't detect their presence in the banana bread, which is delicious (whether because of the chia or despite it I don't know).

Happy New Year!

We celebrated with a party for our newly-minted three year olds. Can't tell them apart in the picture? Neither can I.

Holiday Cheeseballs and Cheer

We had a little holiday party last night; very much fun with food and drink. True, the roaming, unsupervised pack of children left a fine coating of Goldfish crumbs over everything, but what's a little cleanup during the holidays. If you have people over I recommend the following appetizer, straight from the suburban sixties: olive cheeseballs. Grate one block of sharp cheddar, add one cup of flour, and pour in enough melted butter to make a crumbly dough (about a stick will do it, but proportions aren't that crucial). Squish said dough into complete casings for small green olives, one at a time, and bake at 350 for about half an hour. Your kitchen will smell wonderful, your guests' mouths will water, and all will be eaten.

Nitrous Oxide

Not a whole lot of dinner happening around here lately. There would have been one yesterday had I not gone in for a root canal. Nasty procedure, I assume, though I was too high on nitrous at the time to be able to say for sure. I had many drug-induced insights, but here's the one that stays with me: the four-chord sequence that underlies "Billie Jean" is the same one that structures "Moondance!" How did I never hear that before?

V2K!

The Enthusiast has just passed its 2000th unique visitor mark (since I installed the counter a few months ago). Thank you to all who visit!

The Pirates of the Caribbean I, II, & III

Yo ho, yo ho, Johnny Depp as a pirate for me. I still remember the joyful shock of the first movie. I heard that they were making a movie about a ride at Disneyland and laughed for two days. Then it turned brutally hot so I went to see it in the theater, where it turned out the air conditioning was broken—and I didn't even notice, because the movie was so much fun. To say that these movies are better than they have any right to be is not saying much, since they have exactly no right to be any good at all. But there's Johnny, giving the performance of a lifetime, surrounded by an excellent supporting cast (hi Mackenzie Crook!), working from a witty script, wearing eyeliner that should have been nominated for an Oscar all by itself. I hear they are making part IV; I may not see it in the theater, but I'll gleefully add it to my DVD hoard.

Weekend Round-Up

A lot of cooking has happened here lately. When I thought back I realized that in one twenty-four hour period I produced, in addition to regular lunches and dinners, two loaves of sourdough (pictured), a double batch of waffles, several dozen chocolate chip cookies, and a big bowl of potato salad. I don't know what came over me, but it all seemed pretty natural at the time. The bread is mighty good; both loaves used the same starter, but the loaf on the right has about twenty percent kamut flour, while the one on the left has rye and whole wheat. Let's call them identical (conjoined!) twins raised in different environments. The pictured okra family represents our first harvest.

Okra Flowers

Until I moved to the south I knew nothing of okra (except that I found it slimy), and until this summer (when my husband planted some) I couldn't imagine what kind of plant it grew on (okra trees?), and until yesterday I had no idea it produces flowers of incredible delicacy and beauty. Needless to say, along the way I learned that it can be *delicious*.

Double My Fun!

What we are looking at here is a starter that has doubled in bulk a few hours after feeding and that, my friends, spells success. I'm baking with it tomorrow and we'll see what's next. The container comes from the paint section of Home Depot, which is appropriate because the starter smells exactly like fresh paint.