ZINGERMAN'S!!!

Firstly, if you do not know about Zingerman's, you are truly missing out on something wonderful. Imagine J. Peterman for foodies. A wonderfully illustrated catalog with a quirky sense of humor through which you can order a variety of intensely interesting foodstuffs.

thick-cut applewood-smoked bacon
raw milk stilton cheese
chocolate chunk sourdough bread
a ruben sandwich kit
sardine-stuffed cherry peppers
olive oils from Italy, Spain, and France

They even have a Culinary Adventure Society you can "join" to have the opportunity to taste things you might not otherwise get to sample unless you were to wind up in the small village in Europe where the stuff is produced.

Anyway - It turns out that this mythical perveyor of all things yummy actually exists in the real world! Specifically, in Ann Arbor, Michigan! And they have events and stuff!

While perusing the latest edition of their newsletter, I noticed that there is a Tomato & Mozzarella Party scheduled for the weekend of August 27th.

Also, there is something called the "Tour de Bacon."

Who wouldn't be excited by the sound of that?

The Tour is a special "contest" held this July and August, wherein if you visit all five of their retail locations within twenty-four hours (Deli, Dairy, Coffee Roastery, Roadhouse restaurant, and Bakery), you get a free t-shirt.

Reservations for the party have been made.
It's on a Saturday, so we should have ample time to complete the tour.

Photo below is my latest order. It arrived quite recently, so I'm still riding on a wave of euphoria. Included are an olive oil coffee cake (moms who've tried the lime coconut and/or almond ones, this is our favorite so far), all natural non-sweetened peanut butter made from jumbo Virginia peanuts, semi-dried Italian cherry tomatoes in olive oil seasoned with basil and garlic, and wild artichokes in olive oil, also from Italy.

Those artichokes are tiny.
Smaller-than-a-nickel tiny.

www.zingermans.com

Lunch.

Fried Tomatoes.
(They were green when I bought them, I swear.)

1 good sized tomato per person
1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup cornstarch, assuming this is feeding two people
Salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper in generous amounts
1 egg per tomato, beaten
Panko bread crumbs

Slice tomatoes into desired thickness.
Place on paper towels to drain.

Dredge in flour/corn starch/salt/pepper/cayenne mixture, then egg, then press into bread crumbs.

With tongs, put tomatoes into appropriately heated oil (350 degrees) and cook until both sides are golden brown.

Like all other fried things, drain them on a paper bag or paper towels.

Plate, and sprinkle with feta cheese and hot sauce.

Eat.

Problem Child.

So I was browsing my favorite food blogs the other day, and I came across Pim Techamuanvivit's recipe for what she calls "the easiest fig tart ever." (Check out Chez Pim for yourself!) And I thought, Easy fig tart?? That sounds delicious!

OK, actually I thought, Easy fig tart?? That sounds promising and the pictures are drop dead gorgeous. I need a better camera. I wonder if it's worth looking into SLRs or if just a better point and shoot would do it. I need something that can handle close ups, but I'd also like to be able to play with the focus and all that. Of course, I guess I could just do "all that" in PhotoShop, but it's just not the same somehow. Probably a point and shoot is fine. I can't really see dropping a grand to take pictures of my dinner...

But I digress.

Here are the ingredients:

10-15 fresh figs, halved or quartered depending on size
To spread under the figs, 75 grams each of granulated sugar, almonds, and butter
Pie crust dough, make your own or use a store bought "all butter" one

Simple enough, right? So I made a quick list of ingredients, got a little scared at the abstract idea of 75 grams worth of butter, and headed to the market.

Where I found no fresh figs whatsoever.
And no pre-made pie dough, either.

What the hell????

Figs! It's... they're figs!
You can stock starfruit, but not figs?
In the middle of fig season?

Whatever.

I grabbed a package of dried ones and a package of frozen puff pastry as substitutes. (I'm aware I had the option of making my own pie dough. I didn't feel like it. This is was supposed to be easy - it's in the description!) I also grabbed some almonds and a few sticks of butter.

Back at home, I remembered that I had a kitchen scale (yay!), and discovered that 75 grams of butter is only about three quarters of a stick.

I also discovered that I could not find the blades to my food processor.

Okay, so at this point we're working with dried figs, puff pastry, and a blender.
Fine.
Let's get to it.

I toasted the almonds in the oven at 350 for about 10 minutes. Then I dumped them in the blender with the sugar and blended - stopping often to rearrange things - until the two were homogenized into a fine powder.

Then I added the butter.
The blender did not like that part.

I dumped everything into a bowl and sort of kneaded the ingredients together till they were pretty much evenly mixed and my hands were nice and shiny.

To prep the puff pastry I scored an inch and a half border around the perimeter and docked (aka "poked holes in") the center heavily with a fork. Then I painted the border with egg white and sprinkled with sugar.

Time for assembly: Spread 1/4 of the almond/sugar/butter mixture - otherwise called frangipane, ooh la la - over the center of the tart and arrange the quartered/halved figs prettily on top.

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes until puff pastry is golden and puffed around the edges, flat under the figs. (This part actually worked! I did learn something from all those cooking shows!)

When it came out of the oven I drizzled the whole thing with agave nectar. It looked DELICIOUS! Until I realized I'd forgotten to prep the surface it was sitting on and I might possibly be serving a fig and tin foil tart.

That sucker was stuck on good.

In the end, I managed to remove most of the stuff and arrange a photo op. The setting's nice, the lighting's good, and you can't even tell the thing's busted into a million pieces.

See?

Happy 4th!

It's the Fourth of July! The day for us Americans to show how awesome we are by declaring our greatness and blowing things up! Actually, depending on what part of the world you're in, I guess that can be any day....

But this is about food.

And what better way to demonstrate at least one of those things than by preparing seared sesame-crusted tuna with a ponzusake-ginger reduction?

Brilliant!
(and delicious...)

To be honest, I'm not sure how much the cooking method mattered for the main course here, but just to PROVE what patriotic citizens we are, we contributed to our carbon footprint by preparing it on the grill. The charcoal grill. Not one of those commie gas ones.

I served this with grilled corn-on-the-cob spread with mayonnaise. And lime juice and cayenne pepper, but the important part is that we burned the hell out of it and slathered it with fat. So it's barely like eating an actual vegetable at all! Bonus: It's really, really good. Just like eating grilled corn-on-the-cob with butter, but more caloric.

Also some edamame (boiled soy beans), which are really too healthy to mention.

Extra snaps:

Hello. I would like some of that, if it's tuna. I think it's tuna.


Yum. Tuna!


Can I have some more tuna?

Then I made desert:

OKAY, it's a brown sugar Pop Tart topped with whipped cream and berries from our garden. Pop Tarts are Americans. Tarty Americans. Still counts.

Then, for good measure, we blew stuff up.
Because we're America.
And that's what we do.