Lazy Day Risotto

Saturday our trip to Sauvie's Island for pumpkins was rained out so Ben and I went to look at lighting fixtures. We took the money we'd stashed from the U-Price-It garage sale we had back in August and headed out. New lighting in the dining room has been on my wish list for a long time. Before the early nights of autumn turn the room into a cave I swore we'd have more light to eat by. I do love candles and the white Christmas lights around the window and a blazing fire in the wood stove, but our dining room is so dark you really can't see the food on your plate well enough to know what you're eating. There's no central light in the middle of the room over the table. We used to have one of those halogen floor lamps but I was afraid to plug it in when it started smoking recently.
After traveling to three different lighting stores we decided the light we both liked best was at Schoolhouse Electric and that we'd need at least three more garage sales with better stuff to sell in order to afford it. We stopped by Uncle Paul's Produce on the way home. I bought 3 pumpkins and a Brussel sprout tree--that was the best deal of the day. The tree was $2.49 and loaded with about 2 pounds of Brussels. That night for dinner we had roasted Brussel sprouts and mushroom risotto. At the Asian market you can buy those big bags of dried shitake mushrooms. When I hydrate them I save the broth to use as a base with onions, shallots, garlic and a bay leaf from our bay tree. The taste of fresh bay is soooooo much more wonderous than those tired dried up leaves you get at the store. After all the broth veggies are cooking away I throw in half a bottle of white wine, the mushroom broth and I keep it on the simmer while I start the risotto. On the right kind of day--as was Saturday--nothing is more comforting than standing in your socks in front of the stove listening to Luciana Souza while stirring a wide and shallow (sounds like some boy's I've known) pan of arborio rice (1 cup) in a slab of butter, adding the mushrooms (I'm poor so I used about a pound total of chopped Crimini and the hydrated shitake chopped roughly). The trick is to just relax and stir all on the lazy side. After the rice is coated with the butter and the rice is becoming slightly colored I dump in a goodly glass of the same white wine I used for the broth. This time it was Sauvignon Blanc. Let the wine evaporate and then start adding the mushroom broth that's simmering on the next burner. Everytime the broth evaporates add a bit more. Don't add too much at the same time and keep stirring. All told it takes about forty minutes start to finish. When the rice is tender stir in a good dollop of butter, some parm (half a cuppish) and taste for salt. It's so full of creamy goodness all you need is a glass of wine, some of those Brussels and later on a good, hot bath. Have your kitchen helper do the dishes--the other good thing about risotto is only two pans to clean!

Recent Discoveries/Things to Do With Green Tomatoes

Okay, so I've been Missing in Action for three months. Here's a short list of my new best discoveries:

Zout removes most grease stains. These grease stains are on almost all my clothes because I am a messy cook and an even messier eater. Even the ones that have baked in by repeated washing and drying.

The Rack has angora/wool socks for 4.98 a pair.

The Smart Wool ski socks make excellent kneehighs and stay up even on girls with thick calves--they are at The Rack for 9.98--but they're wool you can wash them and they're warm and they rock!

Check out Carla Bruni--hot French-chick singer. Good cooking music and you don't have to feel bad for not knowing the lyrics because THEY'RE IN FRENCH!

Best book I've read in a bit--"The Gathering" by Anne Enright--won the 2007 Man Booker prize. It's dark but funny in spots and you got to love the whole Irish thing. It's the story of a woman going home to attend her brother's funeral. The Hegarty's have a ridiculouly large Irish Catholic family and plenty of skeletons in every blessed closet starting with their Grandmother Ada. Our narrator is trying to piece together what the truth of her family might be. An excerpt: "The British, I decide, only bury people when they are so dead, you need another word for it. The British wait so long for a funeral that people gather not so much to mourn, as to complain that the corpse is till hanging around. There is a queue, they say on the phone (the British love a queue)."

"Heat" by Bill Buford. The book on CD from our local library is great to listen to while I make dinner. The actor reading the book is a little annoying at first, but the story itself about an aspiring cook who spends a year working for Mario Batteli (?) first as a kitchen slave all the way up to sous chef is funny. I also heartily recommend Sydney Portier's "Measure of a Man" read by him--now there's a voice I can listen to no matter what he's saying.

The other thing that's on my list are GREEN TOMATOES! Last weekend I pulled two of my tomato plants--the ones with plenty of green fruit left on the vine. I know the tomatoes would ripen if I left them alone (you can pull the whole plant and hang it upside down in a cool dark place and the tomatoes will ripen slowly giving you ripe fruit all the way into December) but what I want are GREEN tomatoes. Last year I experimented with green tomato chutney and it was so delicious I decided that this year I would plan for it so I grew two of my plants in a spot that didn't get as much sun and I had a ton of greenies. I used the basic chutney recipe from the Joy but it wasn't spicy enough for my jaded buds. Here's what I did:

Chop up 5 cups of green tomatoes, 1 onion, 3-5 cloves of garlic, 2 jalapeno peppers, 1/2 cup candied ginger, 2 red peppers. Put them in a big old pot with 2 cups brown sugar, 2 cups apple cider vinegar and a cup of golden raisins. Bring to a low boil and cook for about 2 hours until the juice is syrupy. You're going to want to open the windows--it's a pungent bastard. After it's done you can cool it and freeze in baggies or all those empty yogurt containers you should put in the recycling and don't, or while it's still hot you can put it in clean hot mason jars with lids that have been submerged in boiling water. That should make the jar seal and then it will keep until the Second Coming of Christ. The recipe is easy to double. Excellent on turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving or on a grilled sharp cheddar cheese sandwich. I've made tuna salad out of it too. Excellent with a bowl of rice or a curry. Excellent by the spoonful. I've made a bit more than a gallon and will make another batch this weekend. Giddy up!

The Bolter

I never liked gardening. As a kid, I loved the gardens we had, but I didn't much care for the enforced labor part of it--the digging and pulling, the bugs and the sweating, all done under the hot summer sun before I could go play. That changed when Ben and I started living together and began planting tomatoes in the boxes he built that adorn the strip of what used to be lawn. It's the only spot that really gets full sun. Ben tore out the grass, laid in discarded bricks he got for free at a landfill place in East county, and built four wooden raised beds in the strip. Every summer we talked about the garden we would have but I rarely got it going in time for a good crop of anything except the tomatoes. The tomatoes seemed to actually thrive on my neglect. I put them in much later than real gardeners--like mid-June. I sprinkled in some bone meal and watered, but other than that, those plants were on their own. Come late August you'd never know how sloppy a gardener I was, there were so many tomatoes. I made gallons of sauce and froze it in a stand up freezer Ben salvaged from a friend's garage. There's nothing like the taste of sauce from your own tomatoes in December when it's been raining for a solid week and the cold and dark feel like permanent and badly behaved house guest. Last year, with the help of Tammy who lives upstairs, we turned the whole front strip of ground into a vegetable garden. That's when I got the idea for a Joy Journal. It feels like too much of life is spent not loving what's right there to love--like the barren waste that used to be our front yard. With lots of compost, seeds, water and time, the yard has been transformed. It's not a fancy garden where well-tended roses and ornamental grasses have been landscaped to create a beautiful setting for a house. My garden looks like a description of chaos theory. Nasturtiums spill over the rock wall mingling with Scarlet runner beans that climb up a handmade trellis from discarded wood scraps. Sunflowers pop through densely packed tomato plants in one of the front boxes, and the second box only appears empty because after finishing off shell peas in a fresh pea risotto a month ago, I've replanted the box with rows of lacinato kale, nantes carrots, cylander beets. There's a smaller box with salad greens that grow bunched together, the butter lettuce leaning against romaine, arugula and some fancy greens mix are jumbled in patches not in evenly spaced rows at all. With the high heat of July, the arugula is bolting and in another day I'll pull it all and make my favorite summer pasta dish. Put some water on to boil for pasta--use angel hair or fresh pasta if it's hot outside and try to think like an old Italian woman who would probably not whine about a little hot weather. I stem the bolted arugula and roughly chop it--even the little white flowers because they're so pretty. Saute the arugula with lots of olive oil, a few cloves of garlic slivered up, and a good big pinch of red pepper flakes. Drain the pasta when it's done and toss it with the greens. Sprinkle with some parmesan and there you have it. I love summer!

Chock-Full-o-Nuts Liqueor

So, I guess it was last Thursday when Molly called and asked me to check my nuts. They aren't actually my nuts. The neighbor's giant Black walnut tree hangs over the roof and drops its load every fall along with a ton of leaves. Molly said to cut one open and check to see if the meat inside was spongy still without the any brittle bits of newly formed shell. The flesh of the unripe walnut is white, crisp as an apple and full of deceptively clear walnut smelling liquid. I say deceptively clear because after cutting open a few nuts my hands started to stain brown. The nuts had yet to form a shell so they were ready to turn into Nucino. Sunday morning we picked the nuts. I guess there was a fancy article in the MIX magazine about doing this very thing but without Molly, Pat and Joan I don't think I would have felt compelled to make this stuff and it's so easy. You chop in quarters--though Joan says she did some in a Cuisinart--30 green walnuts and put them in a quart jar. You dump in about a cup of sugar, a long twirly of lemon zest, 1/2 a cinnamon stick and a couple of cloves--again other people put in other things. Then you top the jar off with about half a liter of 100 proof vodka, put the lid on tight and shake it like a Polaroid picture, baby. You set the jars in a sunny window and every day for forty days you turn the jars upside down and evidently after forty days and forty nights you strain the nuts off and can use those bad boys to put on ice cream and around Thanksgiving you can use the walnut liqueur to sip or drizzle about on desserty things. I'm imagining pound cake and homemade ice cream. Ooooh, or my mom's Burnt Sugar cake. Ack Yah!

Little Miss Mayonnaise Caesar Salad

So last Friday, that day of torrential rains, I made a triple batch of Caesar salad for Steak and Martini night at Rancho Lando. It's my signature dish--the fallback crowd-pleasing vat of salad I kind of invented over the course of a summer a few years back. I had to learn to make mayonnaise first, and because I'm a bit backward when it comes to appliances I learned to make mayo with a whisk. I tell myself it tastes better. Plus you get a great upper arm workout. Plus it's the closest thing to magic I've ever experienced--turning olive oil and a raw (yes, raw and get over it) egg into the unctious base of a good salad dressing or a delicious dip for roasted or raw vegetables or slathered on bread in a sandwich. Fucking A! That whole summer I made batch after batch of mayo--sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I'm not a chef and I've never really worked in a restaurant except for that unfortunate experience at the Buttercup Corral in Hillsboro, circa 1976--I never could make the Softserv machine bend to my will. I do love to cook and I do love to make things from nothing and I am always on a tight leash money-wise. Here's the directions for the Caesar Salad but stop with just the mayo if you want:
Lolo's Little Miss Mayo Caesar Salad
The trick is the temperature—everything should be warm as a summer’s day so put that egg in a cup of hot tap water and warm it up or better yet--we're in Portland after all--ask a neighbor for a fresh, warm egg.
First make you some aioli (garlicky mayo) with a couple of crushed garlic cloves that you chopped fine with a big pinch of kosher salt. You scrape that stinking mess into a shallow bowl where you can get some good whippage going. You crack an egg—dumping the white down the sink like a jogger’s snot and the yolk goes in the bowl with the garlic. Start to whisk. It will get sticky and kind of tacky and then you dribble in a little olive oil and when that’s starting to look mayonaissey you add some more in a golden stream—like an old dude with prostrate troubles––not too much at a time. Eventually you should have about a cup of mayo in your shallow bowl looking all smug and wiggly. Now squeeze the juice of a whole lemon or two in there and think of Led Zepplin—maybe you have that album or cd and you should go find it and play it while you whisk a bit more. The mayo turns a lovely whitey lemony color. You can stop there, if you want and make a tomato sandwich with the mayo, or toss it with roasted veggies and hot pasta or you can carry on for the promised land.
Chop up as much anchovy as you can stand—I like a lot––and I drain the oil from them in, too. Thin it out with a bit of hot water and taste it—I like to rinse a few capers and toss them in, but you don’t have to. Let this sit and tear up some romaine in your favorite salad bowl. And don’t forget the croutons—I like mine sourdough and fried in more olive oil and cooled and then right when you’re ready to sit down toss the dressing, lettuce, croutons and freshly grated parm all together (I get the bag of mixed grated cheese from Pastaworks--it's expensive but I don't use much). Put the salad on a plate and have Pepper Boy--or Girl standing by. Pour you a big ass glass of white wine—take a long, cool drink of that mischief and have at it!