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.

Seven-layer Bean Dip for the Gods.

Hiya, kids!

Today's recipe is brought to you by Nathan Fillion. Turns out TV's Rick Castle, Capt. Mal, and Joey Buchanan (the Joey Buchanan); and the interweb's Capt. Hammer also makes a killer bean dip, and he shared the recipe with little ol' Me!!!!

...And the rest of the Twitterverse, but let's just pretend I have some inside information and move on.

Seven-layer Bean Dip for the Gods

Ingredients (in order) :

A can of vegetarian "refried" beans
(I used the whole can before realizing that this recipe probably serves 20 people... Also, did you know that canned refried beans don't resemble beans at all? It's like a paste sort of dealie.)

A package of taco seasoning mixed with some low fat sour cream (Half a pack mixed with half a container - from here on the ingredients are more judiciously thought out.)

Diced fresh tomatoes. I used two, cleaned and seeded.

Guacamole. In this case, pre-packaged.

Diced green chiles, evenly distributed.

Sliced black olives. also equally distributed.

Shredded Mexican Cheese mix. As much as you want.
... Seriously, As Much as you want.

Pretty sure this is supposed to feed more than five people, but results are results:



Sampled conversation from those enjoying this "appetizer":

"Oh, good - you're here. Just in time, 'cause we've already eaten half of this stuff."
"This is really good."
"Really good."
"We should go outside - it's gorgeous out."
"Mm."
"Who's recipe did you say this was?"
"It's really good."
"OK, so why don't we go outside..."
"Yeah, maybe. What's the creamy stuff?"
"Low fat sour cream with taco seasoning."
"This is really good."
"...We could take the dip outside...?"

Cauliflower Soup

A while back, Matt and I decided we needed to eat more cauliflower. Or any cauliflower. At all. It's way under-used and it's really good for you, we really like it, but we never eat it.

So last time I was at the market, I picked up a head of the stuff.


And began wondering what to do with it.

I didn't want to just steam it or boil it, because let's face it - that's pretty boring. I eventually decided on a gratin, but with the advent of a new batch of crab mac'n'cheese, my gratin dish was suddenly unavailable. So for days, I'd eye the thing wearily every time I opened the refrigerator, hoping it didn't go bad before I could come up with a solution. Then, suddenly it dawned on me:

I should like to try some cauliflower soup.

I searched the web for a few minutes until I found a recipe I thought I could work with and took off. Here's what I ended up with (measurements of the spices are approximate, as I was eyeballing most of them):

1 large head of cauliflower, stemmed, cored, and broken up into medium-small florets
4 whole garlic cloves, peeled
1 TBS dried thyme
1 TBS ground ginger (maybe a little more)
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
salt and pepper to taste

Put all of the above in a pot with a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of oil. Stir to coat the veggies with all of the yummy spicy goodness. When things start sizzling, lower the heat a bit, cover, and let things sweat for about 10 minutes.

Then add: 1 quart of chicken stock.

Allow to come to a boil, uncovered, over medium heat.

When boiling, add: 2 cups whole milk

Allow to come to a boil, uncovered, over medium heat.

Transfer everything to a food processor (or blender, or use a stick blender thingy), then FREAK OUT MUCHLY as you watch all of your carefully crafted broth leak swiftly out of the bottom of the machine.

Salvage the situation by quickly placing the entire machine over the pot that held the broth in the first place. Recover from heart attack, clean up the leaked liquid (which turned out to be not that much, all things considered), then try again.

Puree soup until smooth.

(Unless you have some sort of monster industrial machine, you'll likely have to puree in multiple batches.)

Return soup to pot.

Add: 1/2 cup plain yogurt, stirring to fully incorporate.

Bring soup back up temperature and adjust seasonings, which may include but is not limited to a small amount of malt vinegar, for brightness.

Serve, garnished with some shredded white cheddar cheese (popping under a broiler, optional) and a drizzle of good olive oil. In my case, some really good olive oil. More on that later.

It's really hard to take an appetizing pic of white food.
I think I did a pretty good job.

Can't Cook; Knitting.

^
Cassette Tape Cases

...What?

My hobbies tend to run in cycles, and apparently I'm in a knitting phase. I've knit booties for every pregnant woman I know, then moved on to a limited run of 20 cassette cases for a future release of Matt's to be titled Stranded.

Now I'm done with that, and yet STILL in a knitting mood. Considering hitting ETSY up...

But, because this is a food blog, I'll mention this:

(Have I mentioned I need a better camera?)

In a medium hot skillet, toast some panko bread crumbs with some olive oil until medium brown, then toast some pumpkin seeds 'til they're plump and golden.

For the sauce:

1-2 tbs. Chili/Garlic/Lime Oil
1/2 jar Marinated Artichoke Hearts, with liquid
Capers
(CAPERS!!!!!!!) ... to taste, I suppose
a knob of butter

Add cooked pasta of choice, toss, and turn off the heat

Add grated Parmesan
Add toasted panko bread crumbs and toasted pumpkin seeds
Toss
Serve

HELL to the YEAH.

I won't brag or anything, but I did hear the words "best pasta I've ever had in my entire life" escape my hubby's lips. I don't agree, necessarily, but I'll take it. ;-)