Yogurt

I have a pile of cookbooks, journals, food magazines and recipe-related newspaper articles piled high on the coffee table right now.  With a day off I had a chance to go through them.  I didn't make it far.  For my birthday last month I got Pushpesh Pant's, India: The Cookbook.  I ended up reading this one cookbook my entire day off.  This is one incredible, 816 page encyclopedia of 1000 Indian recipes from all over the 1,269,219 square mile country.

I spent hours of pouring over everything from Kamala Phoolkopi (Cauliflower with Oranges) to Tulasi Sherbet (Sweet Basil Seed Sherbet) to Karipatta Chutney (Curry Leaf Chutney).  Inspired, I took a break and went down to my storage shed.  I rifled around for a while until I found a personal journal from the winter of 2001/02 that I spent in India.  I worked for a fabulous organization, Shikshantar, in Rajasthan.  Every day at lunch we would gather for a home cooked meal.  I took notes on the cooking procedures when I could: hand scratched notes of approximations as fragrant Indian spices, lentils, vegetables and herbs came together to form each delicious concoction.  Spicy stuffed baby eggplants, tamarind sauce, cilantro chutney, flattened rice snack, palak paneer (spinach and cheese), homemade yogurt, spiced tea.

A Shout Out for Hallah!

It's been raining for a week straight.  Every once in a while the sun comes out for 5 minutes.  The ground in the garden is totally saturated, with parts flooded.  The creek next to my office has become a river, with whole trees rolling by.  Land slides, mud slides, wind and fallen trees punctuate the news, with Big Sur (one of our favorite ocean-side destinations) blocked indefinitely because of collapsed highway.  I really needed a kitchen project to lighten the mood and the week.  Bread came to mind.

When I was in college I started a bread baking business, Eron's Incredible Breadables.  It was a bread CSA -- if you wanted bread, you paid for 4 loaves of bread (one each week for a month) in advance.  Then I'd make the bread and deliver it, often hot from the oven, around campus.

Sun and Rain bread is a recipe I learned at that time that remains dear to my heart.  It started as a recipe from Beth Hensperger's The Bread Bible:  one golden-colored dough made with corn meal specked with orange zest braided together with a dough of buckwheat flour and baked.  The beautiful contrast of the sunny and gray doughs, as well as the different flavors make this an exceptional bread.  I've made Rain and Sun to celebrate the Jewish New Year, for birthdays... and just for kicks on rainy days when I need something metaphorical to remember that the rain and sun are all part of the yin and yang.  Today was one of those days.  And it was also Friday -- the day that Hallah is traditionally shared for the Sabbath. 

Celebrating the Irish

I'm not a big St. Patrick's Day reveler, but I am half Irish and would be happy to celebrate that fact with some dark beer anytime.  With the holiday falling on Thursday during a very busy work week, I had every intention of letting the day pass with a hasty after-work beer toast and a night on the couch.  But that morning as I cleared my in-box I saw a recipe that caused me to pause.  Somewhere, somehow I ended up on Martha Stewart's daily Every Day Food listserve, which diligently sends me a dinner recipe every morning.  I often delete without opening, but am also occasionally interested and inspired by the recipes that come through, which is why I have not unsubsribed.  This particular morning's recipe was for Irish Beef Hand Pies.  Although this did not initially sound appealing to me at all, I returned to the deleted recipe as I remembered the Hand Pie's relative -- the Cornish Pasty.  Traditionally a buttery (or lard-y), flaky crust enveloping steamy roast meat, potatoes and other veggies, the perfect size to hold in your hand. 

Bean & Barley Soup (in honor of Mickey)

Mickey Schoenberg

This week's blog is dedicated to my great family.  Especially to my Grandpa Mickey, who passed away peacefully on February 26th, 2011.

In the last few hours of his life, surrounded by his entire family -- wife, children, grandchildren, sister -- he talked about how grateful he was for his family, for his wife of 62 years, and for all the great meals my grandmother has made for our family.  He smiled as he rattled off a list of his favorites: Grandma's chicken fricassee, her Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing, matzoh ball soup.  Everyone reminded him that he also makes a darn good bean & barley soup.

Guest Post: A Dark and Stormier Dinner Party

I'm Racheal, guest posting for my older sister, Eron. I live in Pittsburgh, teach public speaking while working on my doctoral degree in rhetoric, and only cook on occasion.

Eron has an amazing talent for integrating cooking into her everyday life. She cooks with a sense of ease and grace, as though it's no big thing.

But nothing could be further from the truth for her. Preparing meals is, in some ways, the biggest thing. Food is the sustenance of our physical bodies, but it is also sustains the community created in the act of breaking bread together, traditions and cultures, and our planet. Eron’s kitchen is a hopeful one, at least in part, because she has faith in the practice of preparing food: I can make a meal that means something for myself, and for others. Cooking is significant, an act of love and responsibility.

As inspiring as I find this, I can’t say I manage to integrate this sense into my own daily life. I’m pleased when I cook anything from scratch. I made myself a BLT the other day and told people about it. I was that proud. So when Eron asked me to be a guest blogger, I happily agreed, and then spent the next week obsessing over what I was going to cook. And of course, if I’m going to cook, we may as well have people over to share it. My boyfriend invited two of his friends over, and I started making a menu.

Ode to Eggs

lovely, mustached Ameraucana, a blue egg layer

This post should probably be called 'Ode to Chickens'.  I never liked eggs as much as I do now that I know some lovely hens that produce eggs daily.  The eggs are beautiful: brown, speckled and blue, the yokes are huge and deep orange.  Delicious.  And the chickens make me happy.  I could watch them for hours: little fluffy clowns.  They also come running up to me whenever I approach the coop.  This is a result of feeding them snacks such as persimmon ends, kale and cherry tomatoes...but I'd like to think it's because they love me (which I'm sure they do).  Backyard chickens are so 'in' right now -- urban chickening is all the rage.  Rightly so!  They are so easy to care for, quickly make their way into our hearts, and are a productive member of the family -- laying eggs, consuming yard and food scraps, turning and fertilizing our garden beds.  Don't have chickens of your own to watch? Watch the interesting array of chickens they have at the LifeLab garden in Santa Cruz via their live chicken cam.

Anyway -- on to eggs! 

Mystery squash

Keeping up with what was going on in the new greenhouse at work was difficult last spring with 9 staff, an incomplete irrigation system and hundreds of small children, community members and volunteers cycling through.  After rearranging greenhouse tables several times and lots of lost plant markers, nearly all the squash and pumpkins were mysteries.  I was frustrated that I'd lost track of some heirloom seedlings:  Lakota squash and giant pink banana squash specifically.  The mystery squash plants sat in the greenhouse longer than they should have, until a motivated staff member cleared a weedy section of the garden near the road and planted all of them (thanks, Justin!).  During the summer many of them thrived and we harvested great Cinderella, sugar and Howden pumpkins, lots of spaghetti squash and delicata.  After the big harvest day, all the squash were piled up in our outdoor kitchen for distribution and admiring.  Three unfamiliar squash were left abandoned back by the road, where I drove by them numerous times before stopping and lugging them to my car.   While I never found the giant banana squash,  I finally got what I believed to be Lakotas -- two of them.  Strange-looking to harvesters that day, these were two of the abandoned, lonely squash.  The last was an unidentifiable, smooth-skinned, oblong, orange 16-pound pumpkin-like squash.  What are you?  I wondered.