three bowls - Three Bowls Entries

Thursday

02Jul

Short & Grown-Up Sweet: Pineapple Rum Cilantro Sherbet or Granita

Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 03:59PM

Continuing with my series of burning off somewhat boring but potentially useful posts, here's this one in time for your holiday partay.

I had a bunch of cilantro left over the other day, and the answer to "What do I do with this now?" was, as it so often is: frozen dessert.

I looked around and found this recipe for a Tequila-Cilantro Sorbet. I didn't have enough lime and no tequila, but I did have some leftover cans of pineapple juice and some rum, so I made up this recipe for Pineapple Rum Cilantro Sherbet (cuz t o my American mind, sorbets don't have dairy).

It worked really well. While the rum does make this more a grown-up treat, I wouldn't skip it as it helps keep the texture smoother.

If you don't have an ice cream maker, there's also a granita method below.

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups whole milk
1 1/4 cups water
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro
3/4 cup pineapple juice
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
3/4 cup rum
Pinch of salt

Process

In a saucepan, bring milk, water, and sugar to a boil, and stir to dissolve the sugar.
Remove from heat and add cilantro.
Chill overnight in fridge.
Strain mixture through a fine sieve set over a bowl.
Stir in pineapple and lime juices, rum and salt.
SHERBET: Freeze the sorbet in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.
GRANITA: Pour mixture into a chilled 9x13 baking dish. Freeze for about 2 hours or until the mixture has frozen around the edges. Use a fork to break up the ice crystals around the edge and draw them into the middle. Repeat this process 3 or 4 times, about every 1/2 hour or so, or until the mixture is completed converted to ice crystals. (The goal of the breaking up is to keep those crystals small to make the mixture smoother.)
Serve!

LQ Seaton |

Refrigerator Pickles: Well, Why Not?

Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 12:09AM

There is an episode of the Simpsons with a relatively brief joke that has become my go-to metaphor for getting blocked by too many things.

Montgomery Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic for his first check-up in ages, where they have some rather alarming news for him.

Here, why don’t I let Wikipedia do the work for me? Crowd-sourcing, it’s what all the writers are doing these days. If it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for me.

"Burns discovers that he not only has all existing diseases (including pneumonia, juvenile diabetes and a little bit of hysterical pregnancy), but thousands of diseases the doctors apparently have just discovered in him. However, the sheer amount of diseases prevents any one disease from actually doing harm to him (a condition the doctors call 'Three Stooges Syndrome)."

My tendency towards excess often runs directly into my separate tendency towards getting confused into immobility by excess. So I get a lot of mileage out of this imagery.

I am at that point with posts for this site. I have a few posts that just need some editing to be ready, a bunch of dishes I’ve photographed that I could write about, and some new recipes to post that can then be organized into Menu Ideas. I also keep trying to develop a narrative or some kind of structure (salads! eating meals!) and then that doesn’t happen in an orderly fashion and I become even more confused.

So when trapped on the phone today for work I edited some photos and decided to maybe just start sticking some stuff up here regardless of the narrative tidiness.

In this case: Refrigerator Pickles. Mainly: why not?

I mean, pickles are actually kind of expensive for what they are (mainly water). You have to imagine that what you are really paying for is the cost of transporting heavy glass jars of liquid.

And, it turns out, refrigerator pickles are pretty easy and quite tasty. Summertime is cucumber season, so if you, like me, have never tried making fridge pickles, I say go for it.

The recipe I tried was this one for Dill Chips from Martha Stewart. I didn’t have the dill seed so I skipped that, but think I’ll use them in the future for even more flavor.

The process is simple, salt the cukes for a bit to get rid of some of the excess water and rinse them.

Put them with the dill weed in a jar, boil the other ingredients, and pour it all over the vegetables. Stick it in the fridge and in a week you have made pickles, my friend.

By using the fridge, you don’t have to deal with the frightening elements of botulism. (Recently went to a canning class where I was terrified out of my Laura Ingalls Wilder dreams of a dark and cool root cellar with walls lined with shelves full of preserves. Any activity that requires your attention to never wander, like neurosurgery, or stunt driving or, apparently, canning, is off the list of options for this space cadet.)

You have to wait a little while for them to be ready, and yes, fishing them out of the dill-filled brine is a bit like navigating a particularly sea-weedy beach.

But delicious, and with a least a mild frisson of Handy Homesteading.

I especially enjoyed these pickles on a sandwich with sharp light Irish cheddar, some avocado, mustard and tomato. They were also great diced in an egg salad as a more flavorful alternative to the usual celery.

LQ Seaton |

The Best Dessert I've Ever Made: Chipotle Gingerbread, Caramel Ice Cream & Coffee Sauce

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 10:24PM

(Hey check out the Summer Ice Cream Social Poll over to the left there. I'm trying to whittle down some ice cream choices. Help me out and you will be rewarded with the warm glow of self-satisfaction!)

Elizabeth Falkner was on Top Chef Masters tonight. She lost on the episode, but she is still a winner in my book, because one of her recipes is the base for the dish that won me the most praise of anything I've ever made.

I was involved this guy for a while who had a habit of making a lot of backhanded critical comments that I was too naive to understand were backhanded critical comments. (The naivete, incidentally, also explains the "for a while" part of why I continued hanging around someone who liked to make backhanded critical comments to me about me.)

One time, we were talking about a meal we were eating (it was, in fact, one of the first times I had Pad Kee Mao, the Thai dish I'm still obsessed with), and he said, pointedly, "I'm not one of these people who's always saying 'This is the best thing I've ever had' but this is seriously one of the best things I've ever had."

It was about three months later, when I was no longer hanging out with him, that it hit me in one of those apropos-of-nothing waves of epiphany that you have after climbing your way out of a confusing whirlpool of a situation: he was talking about me. Because I AM one of those people who is always saying something is the "best thing I've ever had."

And whatever, man. I'm trying to come to grips and accept the fact that I am hyper and overenthusiastic. I'm constantly simmering over with too much too-muchness no matter how much I try to rein myself in. I'm not cool or reserved.

But imagine for a minute that I am. I am a cool customer, rarely moved to effusive exuberance, to hyperbolic excess. And imagine it is that person, that phlegmatic, calm, impassive person who is exclaiming to you: "This is the best dessert I've ever made."

Remember this dessert? Of course you do, because who doesn't have an encyclopedic recall of this blog?

This is the Chipotle Gingerbread with Cinnamon-Vanilla Ice Cream and Dulce deLeche that I made for Thanksgiving last year. And at the time, I thought, it was pretty awesome. But I made another version of it for my Memorial Day party and you know what it was? Awesomer.

What I did this time was the Chipotle Gingerbread + Caramel Ice Cream + Coffee Sauce (So just imagine the above picture, but with a dark brown sauce.)

I didn't make up the recipes, I just made them and put them together. But I did think of the combination all by myself, so look what I can do!

It was a huge hit. I mean HUGE. People are usually very forgiving of desserts, and sweets usually please most folks. I am used to bringing an ice cream or cake to a party and people being excited.

But I feel like there was some real genuine amazement at just how well these three flavors worked together. My friend Jan also said it was one of the best desserts she's ever had. Even a real live food professional, Becky of the great blog, Chef Reinvented, liked enough to tweet about it. (Yeah, I linked to her tweet. That just happened. I did that. I can't unbecome becoming a person who linked to a complimentary tweet about herself. The slippery slope has slipped. Hemingway-esque unassuming stoic machismo is off the table as an option.)

Anyway, the great thing is, although this is a multiple recipe dish, it really isn't that hard, and totally worthwhile to consider making if you are entertaining and want a crowd-pleasing dessert.

Here are the recipes and a few other tips.

Chipotle Gingerbread. I do NOT use the crystallized ginger called for in the recipe. This recipe fit into 2 12-mini muffin tins. It is very very quick and easy, and could be made in advance. The actual cupcakes I used were, in fact, leftover from last Thanksgiving (!) that Will and Carolyn had in their deep freezer.
The Caramel Ice Cream could be swapped out with storebrought if you don't have a maker.
The Coffee Sauce is probably the only "challenging" part, just because it involved the scary caramelizing of sugar, but other than that, it's very fast to prepare.

LQ Seaton |

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Baking,

My new weird anthropomorphizing of caramel,

Something I'm Not Bad At

Sunday

14Jun

It's 10 PM on Sunday, Do You Know Where Your Next Meal Will Be?

Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 10:06PM

I don't mean in the sense of "It's a recession and we're all stretched thin." I mean in terms of actual location.

Well, I'm hoping I do. I'm hoping it's at this cleaned-off table.

I'm about to do a post about another recent happy marker of progress in the Learning How to Cook process that has been this blog thus far.

But with all the progress I've made in the cooking arena, there's really one area where I remain shamefully troglodytic: eating.

I'll spend all this time cooking and then revert back to old, haphazard, disorganized, thoughtless, careless eating.

As mentioned in some of my original posts about why I started this blog, I don't have a personal history of organized, structured, actual sit-down-at-a-table meal-eating. And while I've learned some great meal preparation techniques through the learning process of the past few years, I still do not have an organized, structured, actual sit-down-at-a-table meal-eating life.

And one can't help but wonder: what good is learning how to cook great meals if I don't actually sit down and eat them like a civilized human being instead of grabbing a piece of something and trying to keep the crumbs off my keyboard because I didn't even put it on a plate?

I overeat for many reasons, but I've been realizing lately that one of those reasons is that my brain is not registering the experience of eating because I'm not truly conscious of doing it. So I'll eat a meal with 90% of my brain elsewhere, and then later, have a feeling I need to eat and so I will, even though I'm not technically hungry.

You are supposed to listen to your body for cues of hunger in order to know when to eat. But that, in my experience, isn't the whole story. And telling yourself that story is one surefire way to feel like a failure if you ever try to reduce your food intake for weight control reasons.

I am starting to think lately that having a certain kind of conscious emotional experience of eating is probably just as if not more important than the actual physical experience of it. So many diets and weight loss schemes seem to approach the problem as though those emotional needs are to be somehow ignored, tamped down, burned through with sheer willpower and machismo. But then those same plans fail, so maybe it's not really effective to think that emotional needs are somehow inferior to physical ones.

I don't know enough about the Harry Harlow wire monkey/cloth monkey experiment beyond the broad brushstrokes, and I'm really too sleepy right now to try to tease out the connection to this burgeoning personal hypothesis I'm forming, but it's in there somewhere: my dinner table! terrycloth monkey! comfort and food! These ideas are on simmer, they're not quite ready for consumption yet.

But in order to help narrow things down, this week I'm tweaking this whole experiment a bit. What I'm focused on this week isn't really the cooking, it isn't using up all the produce in some perfect matrix, it isn't learning some new culture and cuisine. It's just eating actual meals sitting at an actual table.

In order to make that a little easier, I did a bunch of pre-work this weekend.

Made a bunch of stuff so that the actual meal prep can take less time, leaving more time for the meal-eating. So now, it's just a question, really, of keeping that table cleaned off this week so that I can sit at it and eat some of the above like a civilized person. Wish me luck, I think this is actually going to be a lot harder to do than any cook-a-thon.

LQ Seaton |

The Summer of George and Salads

Saturday, June 6, 2009 at 10:00AM

It hit 90 degrees here in Seattle on Thursday and people were FREAKING OUT. Being from Arizona, I was not impressed, but I guess I can understand in a part of the country where AC is not the norm, that can seem very hot.

We dipped back down to the 70's on Friday, and it looks to be cool for a few days still. Nevertheless, summer is coming along and I am truly determined to make the most of it.

It's my first summer in 3 years that I will not have more than one job (although I have kind of turned FreshPickedSeattle into another, tragically unpaid job, hence the lack of posting here).

I also recently took a trip back to AZ for the first time since moving here 4 yrs ago, and the whole thing felt like a closing of a rather grueling chapter, the hard slog it's been since I've moved here and sort of set about changing my life.

I was working while I was at home, staying with my folks at their house up in north Phoenix. But I took one afternoon off, borrowed my mom's car, and took a drive to look at my old hood, the Coronado District down in central Phoenix, and especially the little bungalow I lived in when I moved back to Phoenix, my first solo post-college adult pad.

I hadn't seen it since I left town in June of 2005, packing up my VW Golf (the car I got after the pragmatic but stylistically incongrous red Nissan pickup pictured above) with some of my possessions, a cat, and a 6'4" friend and driving to Seattle in a kind of weird foggy haze of a late quarterlife crisis.

The challenge with understanding your own life is the near-impossibility of getting a vantage point on it. You're in it, you can't suddenly shoot up to birds-eye view and see it all. You can't whip your head around fast enough to see behind you and in front of you at nearly the same time.

But sometimes little things give you a glimpse. For me, it was seeing that little bungalow with my current eyes, and processing it with my current brains. I suddenly felt like some significant portion of the cells in my body must have turned over since the last time I looked at it because I just didn't feel like the same person. In some good ways, and in some not-so-good ways, but what is adult life but continually getting comfortable with the idea that it's not always awesome?

I left Phoenix this time feeling no foggy haze. And feeling, for the first time in my adult life, like I had actually finished something significant. What that thing is isn't something I can trot out in a tidy bio or put on a resume. It's some kind of internal shift, some kind of movement towards being on the right path for myself that is hard to describe in the form of a blog post, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.

But it's something I realize now that I subconsciously set out to do, motivated by some instinctive and inarticulate internal compass. Since it was subconscious, what it turned out to be is not exactly what I thought I was doing this whole time.

And that's another lesson for me of adult life: your Big Life is just stubbornly, inexorably, going to do what it's going to do and the whole idea of making decisions about it sometimes can be a bit tilting-at-windmills.

But whatever it is, this untidy and nameless thing that I set out to do without really being aware of it, I did it. And now, by gum, I feel like I deserve a little break!

I'm not going to stop this life-changing process; I somehow have yet more websites I want to start, I'm training for a 5k, I have several other projects I'd like to undertake. However, I feel like I also just want to enjoy my summer.

So, I've been saying I'm going to have my Summer of George. This could all go up in smoke if I don't continue to cling like a barnacle to the hull of employment, but so long as I don't fall prey to the economic downturn and get canned, I want this summer to be about fun.

Rather than planning and scheming and hustling and working towards something in particular, I just want to work my one job and then spend my free time being creative, following my curiosity, exploring new ideas, learning stuff, looking at stuff, taking more pictures, writing, and (finally getting to the point), cooking.

Or not cooking, as the case might be, but cool meal assembly, more accurately. I mentioned recently on FreshPicked that I usually forget to plan meals for the weather, but I am getting my head in the game for summer. And that game is: Salads.

So I am on the lookout for more salad recipes. If you have one you like, I'd love to see it, feel free to email me or leave it in the comments and I will try to make it (and will of course link back to you if you have a blog or site). I am steering clear of red meat and poultry most of these days, so if it could be vegetarian or seafood-only, that would be awesome.

And here's my favorite salad of all time. I call it SuperPower because, as I've told my friend a million times, I think all the garlic in the dressing opens up my sinuses and finally being to breathe always makes me feel like I could run a marathon after I eat it.

This is actually an Olde Timey recipe as I've been making it since I lived in that bungalow, and made my first fumbling attempts at cooking in this teeny galley kitchen.

Even though I've been making it for that long, I still always forget how fantastic I feel after I eat it, so it's always a happy little post-dinner surprise to feel energized and full of vigor.

So here it is...

SuperPower Salad

Building Blocks of the Salad (adjust according to your own serving-size needs)

Leafy green or spinach
Raw diced tomatoes (optional if you are one of those weirdos who doesn't like raw tomatoes)
Raw red onion sliced, soaked in cold water for ten minutes and drained (to remove some bite) (also optional)
Candied Nuts
SuperPower Salad Dressing

Process: Toss. Since salad-making is the one thing I am good at, you can see my Ideal Salad Dressing Method recommendations from this post.