Grilled Cheese Improvisation: 10pm Miracle
I’ve been a bit over scheduled these past few months. And it isn’t like I haven’t been thinking about food and eating food and making food. I just haven’t been writing about it. I would like to discuss ramps and the local mushrooms I’ve been cooking with–I’d like to talk about the thin quiche I made in a tart pan and also the variety of banana breads I’ve baked. I would like to write about my love for kale and the fact that my peas are planted and sprouting.
That is the future. The present is grilled cheese.
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Grilled Cheese Improvisation: Sharp Cheddar with Fresh Chives and Sage
Some people see a bobbing Robin hop across their lawn and think Spring. For me, it’s the first spiky head of chives poking up on the edge of the herb garden. The level of green emanating from this plant makes me stop and take deep hopeful breaths. Spring. Is. Here.
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Chocolate-Beet Cake with Cayenne, Fresh Pear, and Black Pepper
Beets bobbed like roiling hearts in the pan of boiling water. I measured the flour and baking soda into a big green bowl. Turned up the radio as a Felice Brothers song came on. Added salt. When I grabbed the pepper grinder and then the cayenne, I knew I’d tugged my recipe into uncharted waters.
I’ve warmed lately to the idea of improvisation with my baking—adding savory ingredients to sweet. Trying to predetermine and create a kind of taste that’s new to me–fresh to my palate. I think I’m trying to surprise myself.
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The Bake Sale: Considered
Lately, I’ve been considering food events with two of my food friends Christina Worsing and Leslie Fleisher. The kind of occasions we’ve been discussing involve both creatively swapping food and forming different kinds of community. The three of us have cooked many, many meals together.
As we tapped away at our email discussion (Leslie and me in Pittsburgh, Christina recently moved to San Francisco), an MFA student from Chatham University where I teach emailed to ask if I could contribute to a bake sale.
The words “bake sale” immediately escorted nostalgia into the room. I remembered church bake sales from my youth. I remembered high school sports team bake sales, and I remembered—of course—my various stops at bake sales set up on sidewalks and in halls over the years. The picking up of a bundle of snickerdoodle cookies or those wonderful omnipresent sheet pan brownies with the thick chocolate frosting on top? Yum.
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Spicy, Spinachy, Healthy, Hot Cold Food
Sneezing. Coughing. Slumping. Napping. Groggy-headed thinking. That has been my winter. Because of this day-to-day reality, my blog writing has suffered. I apologize.
I’m back now–cautiously healthy and cooking/baking up a storm. I thought I’d share with you some of the foods I ate while sick that made me feel so much better.
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Grilled Cheese Improvisation: Sauerkraut with Sharp Cheddar on Rye
I pulled a container of homemade sauerkraut from the sack, then I pulled out a hunk of local cheese. I had already made fresh rye bread, and thus the sauerkraut-cheddar-rye grilled cheese was born.
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Conquering Winter Vegetables: Parsnip, Turnip, Cabbage
The fire roars in the wood-burning stove as the first real snowstorm of 2012 begins. I’m settled into my chair, thinking about parsnips. I’m thinking (in all honesty) about how I don’t like them.
I eat most things non-meat, it’s true. But each year I manage to carefully avoid a few root vegetables. As I unpacked this past week’s CSA box and nestled its contents into the fridge, I knew I had some cooking thinking to do.
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Grilled Cheese Improvisation: Roasted Beets with Cambozola Bleu
My recent exceptional improvisational lunch was due, in part, to our new Winter CSA from Kretschmann Organic Farms, located in Rochester, Pa.
The thing about a CSA is that it encourages you to eat vegetables in different quantities than you might choose otherwise. This is how I came to have an extraordinary amount of roasted beets in my refrigerator. Beets are great. They’re pretty and nutritious and tasty. And so this afternoon I thought: Hmmm… Grilled cheese?
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Cookie Exchange: Cashew Shortbread
Once a month I get together with friends to eat and play music. We call it Hoot Night. Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Gillian Welch–I’m learning to play the ukelele. This month we decided to make our get-together a hoot-potluck-cookie exchange.
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Delicious Giftious: Sesame-Oat Cinnamon Swirl Bread
In the colder months I bake bread once a week. Since I work from home most of the time, it’s pretty easy to incorporate the mixing, kneading, rising, and baking into my schedule. (The whole process takes about 3 hours.) Plus, when it’s really cold I get to turn on the oven for bonus heat in the kitchen! For those of you with a 9-5:00 schedule, winter weekend mornings are a great time to let the bread dough lead the way.
Each December I bake something delicious to give to friends and family for holiday presents. Some years it’s cookies (See last week’s Chocolate Ginger Snap post); some years it’s traditional Christmas stollen, while others I get into the whole rhythmic process of making a bunch of yeasted breads.
When this urge hits me, I turn to the recipe for “Sesame-Oat Cinnamon Swirl Bread” from Beatrice Ojakangas Great Whole Grain Breads Cookbook (p. 127). The bread itself has a fantastic texture—the oats combined with the toasted sesame seeds and wheat flour. Sprinkling the cinnamon and rolling it up adds a festive, fun touch to the process.
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