Travel and Food

We just came back from a quick trip to visit colleges in California and Oregon. Since none of us had been to Oregon yet, we organized our trip so we could spend the weekend in Portland. It was a good weekend to be there because the famous Rose Garden was in bloom and there was a lot going on as part of the Rose Festival. We even went to see a Milk Carton Boat Race. There was a dairy ambassador and everything!

On Saturday morning we went to the Farmers' Market at the PSU campus. It was easily reached by the light rail which had a stop right next to our hotel. Aside from perhaps the largest artichokes I have ever seen, there was all sorts of local produce, prepared foods, and so on. One stand had a tremendous amount of morel mushrooms and also this:

Since I can never find ramps locally while I'm walking in the woods, I thought that bringing ramp salt home would be a good investment. The first thing I'm preparing with it are pasta and meatballs, with the ramp salt mixed into the meat. I'll bet it's great just sprinkled on grilled steak.

Happy New Year - Highlights and Lowlights From the Last Few Weeks

The holiday season is always busy, and this one was no different. We had our share of joy and chaos and food. Where to begin?

My brother-in-law out in Ohio has taken up hunting and, for Christmas, sent me a box with 2 venison roasts, 2 pounds of ground venison, 2 pheasants, 2 partridges, venison snack sticks, a venison summer sausage, and 4 goose breasts. Since two of the goose breasts were starting to thaw (even though the food was packed on dry ice, it was supposed to be an overnight delivery but it took 3 days and, yes, they got their money back for the shipping costs) we had them the night they arrived. My husband grilled them and I made an elderberry-cranberry-port reduction. Most of us thought they were lovely. The youngerchild apparently doesn't like meat that's a little "gamey." I have plans for some of the rest, like maybe venison meatballs or venison lasagna or something.

There was a quick run up to Christmas eve, in which the youngerchild was sick with a bad cold and I worked all the way through the 23rd. We had our first Christmas with my parents a week early. We had our second Christmas, with just the four of us, on the 22nd. On the morning of the 24th we flew to Denver to spend Christmas with my family out there and then go skiing. This is where the chaos set in.

We've done this ski trip thing for many years, right? We have it down to a science. We know how much food to get (as long as my husband doesn't go off script at the grocery store) and what meals we can easily cook in a small and not perfectly stocked kitchen. We have not, in the past, had to deal with illness. What happened was this - the youngerchild suddenly developed a fever and didn't want to get out of bed. We spent Christmas afternoon at an urgent care, with a negative flu test but a tentative diagnosis of pneumonia. Antibiotics were started. I asked the doctor if we could go to the altitude where our rental condo was; he assured me all would be fine.

Nope.

Up at altitude the fevers did not go away. After a day where the youngerchild did not ski and one of our friends did not ski but the rest of us did, in the night things seemed to be worse: breathing fast and really hot. The next morning we went to the urgent care on the mountain where it was quickly demonstrated that my youngerchild needed oxygen. A chest X ray showed a pneumonia but on the opposite side of where the original doctor thought. A different antibiotic was started and the options were to stay at altitude with oxygen or go down to a lower altitude and it was likely oxygen wasn't going to be needed. In my opinion there was no choice so the youngerchild and I left, leaving my husband, the elderchild, and our friends to stay and ski. I got a home oxygen saturation monitor and checked frequently, the first day was a little dicey but then things got better quickly. So we hung out with my sister and waited for the rest of the crew to finish the trip.

The original plan was this: we had the rental condo until 1/1, everyone was supposed to ski 4 out of 5 days, finishing up on 12/31. However, it was really warm up there (apparently the only part of the country that was) and after 3 days everyone decided to return their skis, book a snowboarding lesson for 12/31, and then come down a day early so we could be together for New Year's Eve. But then another event happened which threw that into disarray as well: they decided to go ice skating. Yeah. Suddenly I get a call on 12/30 that my husband had fallen, hit his head and, "there's a lot of blood." My friends sounded nervous, so I made them put him on the phone. He sounded fine. I had them take him to the same urgent care where he apparently started repeating himself. As I'm trying not to panic too much, thinking about concussions, head bleeds, CT scans and how to delay our flights and the fact that the kids have to be back at school on 1/2 and how am I going to get him down to where I was and whether he'd be safe to fly I eventually get another call that he's looking and sounding better and his head is getting stitched up. They get the intern on the phone with me so we can chat and we decide that he can be watched by our friends and then come down tomorrow. Snowboarding lessons were cancelled, everything else that had been planned was cancelled, and early on 12/31 they packed up and came down to Denver. Thankfully by then he just had a headache and we were able to go to the movies.

With regards to the cooking, I managed to get chickens roasted on the first day, the leftovers were turned into soup the next day. After that, the rest of the gang were on their own, and they seem to have fed themselves just fine.

Now we're all home, and we all feel as though we need a vacation from our vacation!

Culinary Review of Japan

We just returned from a trip to Japan. The land of beautiful food. Food that is as much for the sense of sight as it is for the senses of smell, taste and touch. (And sometimes hearing! Let's not forget that.) Done poorly, it's sensory overload. Done correctly, it's pure heaven.

Here are some of the best examples of food in the past few weeks:

Ramen. The broth is thick and filling and the noodles are chewy. The perfect way to deal with jet lag. Incredibly economical. The place at which we ate, Rokurinsha, located in the basement level of the Tokyo Train Station, had a line with a 45 minute wait and is considered one of the best in the area. You buy a ticket from the machine at the entrance for what you want and hand the ticket to the waitress when you sit down. The food comes within five minutes and as soon as you eat, you leave. Making room for the next people in line. The noodles were separate and dipped into the broth (a form of ramen called tsukumen). We had ramen a few other times but this was definitely the best.

Cute pies. We found a place in the Shibuya district of Tokyo called "Pie Face Happy Pie Home." The pies were sweet or savory and yes, every single one of them had a face stamped on the top. Except the apple pies, which had a lattice crust. They were delicious. Another night in Kyoto I found fish shaped pies stuffed with either sweet potato or red bean filling. Terrific.

Sweets of various kinds. Mochi, particularly with red bean filling, is a favorite in our house, but we also came across an incredible assortment of mochi-like things. This one is a Kyoto specialty: chestnut paste, surrounded by red bean paste, entirely encased in rice and then wrapped in a leaf. Also in Kyoto were little sugary sweets that tasted a lot like bubble gum but formed into swirls, spirals and fruit shapes. We discovered them while attending a tea ceremony and learning about matcha (green tea powder) and how to prepare it. It is traditional to serve a small sweet before the tea.

Not to mention, the sheer variety of KitKats is astounding. These are sake flavored, which were quite good. We also tried matcha, wasabi, strawberry, melon, and strawberry cheesecake KitKats. Plus grape and melon Pocky.

Sushi, of course. We went to the famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo and waited in line for 3 hours to have breakfast at Sushi Dai. It was worth it. I have never had mackerel or sea urchin that didn't taste fishy before. The sushi chef never made us feel rushed even though we knew there were over 50 people waiting hours to get in to this little 14-seat stall at the market. He even got the 11-year-old to eat egg, the first time that's happened in 10 years. After this we generally stopped eating sushi because we were worried that it all would pale in comparison.

Fatty Tuna that melts in your mouth

Sea urchins

Sea urchin nigiri

Horse Mackerel

"Fast" food. It was easy to get food at the train stations and it tended to be reliably better than a lot of the on street restaurants. Particularly before a long train ride, it made sense to grab a bento box. This was the most beautiful one I had, on the way to Kyoto. Added kudos for the aloe and white grape juice drink.

Okonomiyaki. This is more from the Hiroshima/Osaka/Kyoto region of Japan. It's a crepe, and noodles, and meat, and an egg, and cabbage, and pretty much anything else you can think of thrown onto it. Oh, and sauce. Cooked on a flat grill. You leave it on the grill and cut off a bit at a time. We used a side plate, another customer was eating it straight off the grill.

Shabu-shabu. This was dinner on our last night. High grade beef brought to your table by waitresses in kimono with tea, rice, appetizers, and a plate of vegetables, glass noodles and tofu. You cook the meat, tofu, noodles and vegetables in a hot pot of broth. There were two sauces for dipping: ponzu and miso. The 11-year-old declared this the best meal of the trip. Despite the tofu.

Crazy themed places. Osaka and Tokyo apparently compete in this arena. In Osaka we found an Alice in Wonderland themed restaurant. The staff all wore Alice dresses except the host was the Red Queen and there was a Mad Hatter somewhere. We wore bunny ears throughout dinner and everything had a face made out of food on it. Case in point, the Cheshire Cat pasta. It was probably the most entertaining of dinners.

Other categories: we also ate Yakitori one night. This tends to be bar food and, in Japan, one can still smoke in a bar. It's amazing how much we've gotten away from that and how much it affects the experience. The kids were rather unhappy with the smoke but loved the yakitori, including skewers of rice dumplings with various sauces. We did eat at a conveyor-belt sushi place (before Sushi Dai) which sent special orders to your table via a little Shinkansen (bullet train) on a track above the conveyor belt. It was pretty good for what it was.

Ice Cream. In crazy flavors. Matcha. Red bean. Chocolate-banana-charcoal. Black Sesame. Milk Salt. Grape. Peach. It was over 90 degrees and incredibly humid every day we were there so cold treats were most welcome. Shave ice was also abundant, sometimes just with flavored syrup and sometimes with actual fruit purée.

Finally, a word about drinks. Approximately every 30 feet there is a drink machine on a corner. Or in a temple. Or a parking lot. Or the train platforms. Everywhere, really. For about $1.25 you can get water, flavored water, energy drinks, juices, iced coffee. Almost every drink machine had a trash can next to it or built into it for recycling the bottle. People generally don't walk and eat or drink at the same time. They buy the drink, consume it, and ditch the bottle and then move on. Considering there were four of us, and we were constantly hot and thirsty, we were always buying drinks. The peach flavored water was the most popular in this family.

Now we're back, dealing with jet lag, and wishing we had some of that ramen.

Comfort Food

There's been a whole lot of cooking going on but not a lot of writing. We were skiing over New Year's as we won't be able to go over February break this year. Nine of us met up in Colorado and we had our usual array of meals, plus one night out.  Roast chicken and biscuits, burrito and guacamole night, pasta with lamb sauce, and fettuccine carbonara. Breakfasts included scrambled egg burritos, croissants from a local bakery, and lots and lots of Pop Tarts. Lunches were less inspired and consisted of sandwiches when we were skiing and homemade chicken soup when we were in. Thanks to my husband doing most of the shopping at a Save-A-Lot, it was the most economical year ever as far as food costs.  And many hands meant that every night someone different cooked which was nice, too. The skiing was very cold, but at least there was snow. There's nothing in our area and, up until the last week, it's been too warm to make any snow that will last.

Anyway, since we've been back I've been getting ready for pastry school. Orientation was 3 days ago and classes start on Monday. I'll be taking lots of photos as I have to make a portfolio of my creations as part of the required assignments.

Tonight's dinner was comfort food - stuffed peppers and mac and cheese. The peppers were stuffed with a mixture of ground lamb, onion, feta cheese, tomato sauce (yellow tomato sauce from our mason's wife), and rosemary. The macaroni was mixed with a sauce that started as a bechamel sauce (roux plus milk) to which I added Monterey Jack, cheddar, and cream cheese. I've decided that cream cheese or mascarpone is an essential ingredient to making a smooth and creamy mac and cheese. It's really rather tasty!

It's Late February, So I Must Have Been....

Looking toward Breckenridge from Copper

...skiing!  This, plus the final push at work, and taking a class in Boulder, CO, explains why I have done almost nothing of note in the kitchen in the last month.

Well, that's not entirely true.  We brought 1 jar of salsa and 2 jars of jam with us on the trip, and brought home 3 empty jars.  We had our usual go to meals, with a few variations.  Since there were a few more people this time, I started with roasting 2 chickens.  One chicken was dinner the first night with mashed potatoes and green beans, and the meat from the second chicken was the protein for the burritos another night.  The bones all went into making soup, which was lunch for several days.  We had BLT night, and pasta-with-Rick's-famous-lamb-sauce night, and went out for dinner one night.  At that point, I left the crew and headed to Boulder for my class, and they were on their own with instructions to eat up whatever was left.  They did pretty well, actually, only bringing back a little bit of food to my sister's place.  My sister had been kind enough to buy all the groceries before we got there, which saved us a HUGE amount of time and effort.  I think it was, quite possibly, more groceries than she'd ever bought at one time ever in her life!

While in Boulder, I recertified as a Wilderness First Responder.  It was an adventure!  I was one of the three people who got to be doused in cold water and shoved out into the snow so the rest of the class could rescue someone with hypothermia.  To be fair, I did kinda volunteer.  It was fun, in a shivery sort of way.

I got home last night, and today involved a lot of quality time with the laundry machine and some time spent chipping away at the ice that covered half our driveway.  I did make 2 loaves of bread, and I have a pork roast in the oven.  I think we might use the last of the spiced crabapples on the roast.  And preserved garlic.  I can't wait for dinner!

Easy and Efficient Travel Meals

The market in the rain

You've probably noticed that we like to travel.  We've been away, which explains the posting hiatus.  For half the time, we had apartments with small kitchens that were reasonably stocked with utensils and the like.  So we ate in, a lot, which meant shopping.

The extra stuffing just baked around the chicken

In the center of Zurich there is a farmer's market twice a week.  There are others, in other parts of the city, on different days.  I didn't want to spend every day at the market and I knew about this one so I made sure we got there when it was open.  We walked around, bought some cheese and bread for lunch, and then I found a wonderful stall full of terrific looking veggies.  I bought some green beans, and the proprietor threw in some tarragon.  That's just what they do when you buy green beans, I guess.  I had decided that the easiest thing for me to do was to roast a chicken for dinner that night, so I picked one up at the grocery on the way home.  I made stuffing out of leftover stale bread, some carrots, apples and onion, and the tarragon.  I hoped I was using a baking dish and not an ornamental serving dish to bake it.  All worked out in the end and it turned out beautifully.

Yum!

After dinner, I took the leftovers, some extra pasta from the previous night's dinner, and more carrot and onion and made soup, which was dinner on another day with more bread.  It was easy enough; I did have to buy salt and pepper.  At least there was that tarragon!

Limited Ingredients, Small Kitchen

We just got back from skiing for several days.  It's become an annual tradition for school vacation week.  Five of us (sometimes more) share a condo with a small kitchen.  It's always a little iffy about how well stocked the kitchen is in terms of pots and pans, sugar, spices, and utensils, but we make do.  Making our own meals saves us so much time and money and then we know what we're getting and that we're going to like it.  Generally, we go grocery shopping for the whole week before we get anywhere near the resort, figuring (correctly) that the groceries get more expensive as we get closer.  I don't usually plan meals that far in advance but, for this, it's necessary.  Generally there isn't an outdoor grill, so everything has to be made in the oven or on the stovetop.  Here are some of the go-to meals:

spaghetti or some sort of pasta with sauce made from lamb, garlic and cilantro with a salad;

burrito night, which involves ground meat, enchilada sauce, shredded cheese, guacamole (basically avocado, cilantro, and garlic - see how efficient that is?), sour cream, rice, salsa and a can of black beans.  We ran out of tortillas so some of us just had burrito bowls;

BLT night, so more lettuce, toast, bacon (the rest gets used for breakfast or, in this case, a little went into the black beans);

and this year I tried something new:  chicken cordon bleu.  I had chicken thighs, but they weren't boneless, and sliced cheese and ham that we had for lunches.  After I boned the thighs, I wrapped each around a little cheese and ham and then just baked them.  Sure, they would have been better with bread crumbs and a little white sauce, but they were pretty good as is.  As an added bonus, because I couldn't bear to throw out those bones with all that meat on them, I made a batch of chicken soup.

Leftover Chicken Soup

water

chicken thigh bones with some meat attached

salt and pepper

chopped up baby carrots

leftover rice (from burrito night)

leftover green beans (from CCB night)

Make the stock from the bones with salt and pepper, remove the bones and keep the meat.  Add the leftovers and heat through.  Reheat when ready to eat.

We decided that in the entire history of that kitchen it was probably the first time someone made soup from scratch in it.

Before baking

Dessert was another thing that required some ingenuity.  Some members of our party impulse-bought a bag of frozen berries.  We didn't need them for our oatmeal because we ran out of oatmeal long before we ran out of fresh fruit.  Since I didn't want them to go to waste, I attempted a crisp.  But again, no oatmeal.  Barely any sugar, for that matter.  No flour.  I did have Cheerios and butter.  We crushed the Cheerios and cut in softened butter with knives and put that over the berries that were in a buttered dish and sprinkled with 3 packets of sugar.  This was baked at 375 for 30 minutes and served with a little ice cream.  Unusual, but tasty in a breakfasty kind of way...

After baking

Canning in Brasil

A fraction of Iguacu Falls

We just got back from vacation.  Today.  After 24 hours of travel.  We spent the past 2 weeks in Brasil, partly on our own and partly visiting my friends who go home every summer to be with their family.  It was:  lovely, foreign, chaotic, hot sometimes, cold sometimes, wet sometimes, friendly, loud and wonderful.  We spent 4 nights in Rio de Janeiro, 3 nights at Iguacu Falls, and 7 nights with our friends in small places that aren't even in the travel guides.  In that week we rented a car and drove on some roads that really shouldn't have little tiny VWs on them.  They require trucks with 4 wheel drive.  But, somehow, I managed to stay on those roads, over the rickety bridges of death, to see some beautiful farmland, fauna in the form of livestock, rheas, macaws, vultures, toucans, an owl, and other birds, and meet even more of our friends' extended family.

Cooking with Wilma

While hanging out with our friends, I gave the matriarch some homemade jams and jellies I'd lugged across Brasil which, miraculously, didn't break.  I made sure to bring things they don't have there:  violet jelly, wild blueberry jam, and the apricot-ginger-mulberry jam.  I brought 2 others for my friend's sister, who hosted us for 4 of the 7 nights - black locust flower jelly and strawberry margarita jam.  In return, I acquired a jar of very spicy peppers preserved in oil and a lesson in making doces (sweets) - including papaya-pineapple jam (Mamao-abacaxi, if you speak Portuguese.  I made some improvements in my language skills, but it still comes out more like Spanish).  Overall, the food was very tasty and the coffee was fabulous.

Wilma, one of many cousins I met, taught me to make 2 doces:  the mamao-abacaxi jam and a pineapple-coconut sweet.  The latter involves cooking fresh pineapple cubes with sugar, water, clove, cinnamon and shredded coconut in a pressure cooker for 15 minutes then letting it cool and boiling it some more just on the stove.  The former required 1 pineapple and 1 slightly firm papaya, they were shredded into a pot and 400 g of sugar were added.  This was cooked and cooked and cooked until it cooked down and became jam-like in consistency; clove and cinnamon were added at the last minute.  Then we put them in jars.  In general, they don't really do the whole boiling-water canner thing.  They put their sweets in recycled jars, and just flip them over and let them seal (or hope that they do).  The reason I didn't come home with a jar of the pineapple and coconut sweet was that the jar didn't seal.  Which is a bummer.  That was good.  There's another doce I like, it's pumpkin and coconut and you wouldn't think it would work, would you.  It totally does.  I did not learn how to make it, but I might try to figure it out.

I double-ziplocked the jars I did bring home, which was a good thing, because the peppers did leak a little, but I think they will be ok.  You can smell how hot they are when the closed jar is well over an inch from your nose!  The jars made it without breaking, well padded by clothes and paper towels.



Today we got off the plane, my father picked us up and brought us home, where my mother had very kindly gotten the house in order and made us a lasagna.  What a great re-introduction to reality!  It had been a long, long, series of flights and we were tired.  (Boston to Miami to Rio, then Rio to Foz do Iguacu, then Foz do Iguacu to Sao Paulo to Sao Jose do Rio Preto, then Sao Jose do Rio Preto to Sao Paulo to New York to Boston, with a 5 hour layover in NY.)  Then I dropped everything and went to the farm to pick up the share.  Between that and a few things in my own pots, I had the makings of a very fresh salad:  lettuce, arugula, cucumber, peas (they were from my pots, and a little old, but they were all we were going to get from those plants), bell pepper, strawberries and nasturtium flowers.  There's more to the farm share, but I'm hoping to have some posts on that in the next few days.

Brasil was wonderful, but it's good to be home, too.