These salads I’ve been making are delicious, usually casual and easy, and they fill my heart and stomach with joy.  Inspired after the food styling workshop, I started taking pictures of these joy-giving salads, so I started a new sister blog, called 100 days of salad , to share ideas.  I hope you’ll share your own ideas there as well!  100 days of anything is pretty long, even if it is your favorite thing.

Bring to Boil is still continuing on. It’s like when Buffy the Vampire Slayer spun off to the concurrent but separate show, Angel.  The two blogs will likely refer to each other, since the same person is cooking for both.  One blog’s going to be about daily salads, and this blog will continue to be about Everything Else (possibly even more salads?).

As the food stylist Delores Custer says, “When you like a food photograph, who do you usually give credit to? The photographer.”  And where are the credits for the food stylist?  “In the gutter.”  I thought she was making some kind of bitter joke, but actually, the gutter is the place in the magazine that’s so close to the binding that we hardly see it.  I just went and checked the gutter of a few magazines and saw no credit for the stylists.  From here on out, though, I’m keeping a lookout and giving due props for pictures I like.

A food stylist is responsible for making food both visually appealing and mouth-watering.  These two qualities don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.  Have you ever seen a food photograph that is gorgeous and artful but not necessarily something you would want to eat?   Maybe that shot was intended to “sell” something else besides the food (such as a lifestyle shot).  Or maybe the person is a great photographer but has little experience with styling and shooting food.  I could go on about this for a long time. It’s a fascinating and subjective part of food photography–making it mouth-watering.  Delores would show us two beautiful food shots that were presented differently and asked us which we would rather eat.  The response was, literally, 50-50. 

Even though “mouth-watering” is subjective, food stylists do have some great tools that they bring with them on shoots to help optimize a food’s beauty and delectability.  Some common tools include a small atomizer to create subtle moisture on produce, a paintbrush and vegetable oil to create sheen, and tweezers to carefully move tiny items around, such as a wilted piece of lettuce.

Delores pointed out that a food blogger has to be the art director, food stylist, prop stylist, and photographer for food shots.   Good point!   I have a hard time imagining these jobs being separated out for four people. I wonder what that is like. Those people would have to be real team players.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons Delores split us up into pairs to style food for our photographs.  This was challenging and completely hilarious.  Viv and I paired up.  Viv is a gracious, gregarious, generous soul who didn’t mind that I was completely spazzing out with the vegetables.  At one point someone stopped by our table to see what we were up to, and it looked like a salad spinner sneezed on our table.  Whatever we were working on seemed to be buried under three kinds of lettuce.  We laughed more than we styled.  After much flailing with the salad concept (the “art director’s” job), our various chopped and sliced veggies evolved into something kind of elegant-looking. This final arrangement took about 3 minutes after half an hour of the aforementioned spazzing and flailing. 

As another part of the assignment we also took some pictures of biscotti (as seen above and below), but in comparision to the salad assignment, this seemed more natural and effortless. 

I learned a lot working with Viv.  Much of this seemed to occur to me after the fact.  Her natural elegant flair was really great to be near, and I will be able to take that with me to future sessions behind the camera.  I’ll bet that lots of people learned much from their partners in that class.  It was a really good idea.  And–I’m not surprised to learn–Delores used to teach 5th and 6th grade!  Go, teachers!

reclining pink ladies

I’ve been experimenting this week to maximize the deliciousness in a menu I’m cooking for somone’s 40th birthday party on Friday.  I love this menu so much!  It’s meant to be munchies, but for people who like interesting flavors.  Fun, fun, fun!

Apple slices with salted caramel dip will be one of the sweets.  I chose this item because I’ve been fixated on caramelizing sugar lately, ever since that flan.  More on flan some other time–that’s a whole separate post.  Meanwhile, about these apples & caramel.

You might have heard that caramel pairs nicely with sour apples, to offset the sweetness of the caramel.  Well, does this really apply to salted caramel, the kind that is made from scratch with grey sea salt?  The kind that is full of depth, mystery, and even the remotest hint of bitterness?  After trying it with the lovely Pink Lady, I’m feeling doubt about the combo.  I tried this with a Jazz apple, which is one of my favorite apples, but it didn’t quite do it for me.  I actually paired the Jazz apples with flan, and it tasted lovely, but I think it’s because the caramel in the flan is mellowed by the custard. 

Right about now I’m wishing I worked for America’s Test Kitchen.  I am a collaborator by nature and thinking into a vacuum like this feels a bit…slow.  I’ll bet the people who work for Cook’s Illustrated drive to work thinking, “Well, I sure love my job.”  They get to do all of this experimenting and they have a bunch of co-workers to talk with about it! How cool would that be? 

My mom just arrived five minutes ago–she’s visiting fora couple of days–and she asked if I have tried Fuji with this yet.  Well, no.  So I’ll give that a whirl next.  What do you think?  What would you pair with a dark and rich salted caramel?

Last Friday I was excited to teach a cooking class — “Cocina Con Amor” — a Spanish-themed meal for February.  Yes, I wanted to take Valentine’s Day into consideration, but really that kind of love was not the sole inspiration for the class.

The central ideas–and a huge driving force in my cooking–had to do with increasing joy in the kitchen and having that translate to even more delicious food for your beloved family, friends, & guests.  The techniques and tips focused around decreasing annoyances & avoiding feeling overwhelmed (as with a dinner party).  I talked about the mostly make-ahead dinner and gave a sample plan for the week before a dinner party, and I gave some concrete cooking and anti-annoyance prep tips.   The evening was so much fun, thanks to the lively and wonderful class participants!  I’ll list the menu at the end of the post.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to keep my mood joyful when preparing food.  I mean, moods happen.  What do you do when you’re feeling tired, grumpy, sad, or distracted?   Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:

• Play favorite guilty-pleasure music.  This one is huge for me!  I have one CD that will make my tired and grumpy body start dancing, in spite of me.  I feel a little like a marionette, tugged upward against my will by guitar strings, but it spreads to my brain eventually. It shocks me how well this one works.
• Think about some things I’m grateful for, especially the people who will be eating the food
• Pay close attention to the thing I’m doing right then.  This most often occurs to me when I’m cutting things.  Thank goodness, right?  It’s nice having my fingers.  It’s also fun to listen closely to the rumbling bubbles of pots boiling.
• Drink water.  This helps the tiredness, anyway.
• Don’t cook, after all (frozen pizza is our lazy last-minute standby)

What are your tricks?

Cocina Con Amor Menu

• Tapas/Pintxos – idiazábal cheese skewers with caramelized pearl onions; marcona almonds; olives 
• Salad – mixed greens with dried apricot, hazelnuts, and sherry vinaigrette
• Main -cerdo al chilindrόn (saucy braised pork with serrano ham, tomatoes, and fresh & dried peppers)
• Side -  fideo con azafrán y limones preservados (short capellini scented with saffron & preserved lemons)
• Dessert – traditional spanish flan

But now I reign victorious and have broken the mental roadblock of intimidation.  It’s that dang thermometer again.    

Over the holidays, my father-in-law, who had recently given us a yogurt maker (essentially a plug in low-heat incubator), showed me in no uncertain terms how easy the task is.  You heat a quart of milk with 1/3 cup nonfat dry milk for added richness.  You cool the milk down to a certain temperature range.  You add 1/4 cup plain yogurt (I used Greek style yogurt).  Stir, incubate overnight. Refrigerate.  It’s done.

I’m not giving specifics on heating and cooling because the details I saw online are different than the ones my father-in-law told me, so I need to experiment more before I go and toot that horn. 

The point is, you can make yogurt with a few ingredients and no official equipment (besides a thermometer).  I used the yogurt maker for a few jars of yogurt, but I also experimented with keeping a bowl of the mixture covered and on a heating pad and got equally good results.  It sounds like you can use other heat sources, such as a previously heated oven or even a crock pot.  

I like that I can control the thickness and acidity.  I also love that making yogurt costs about half as much to make it than to purchase it.  Next up: Cheese.  Yes.  This will happen.  It will happen before a dozen months from now.  I’ve used the thermometer, and I’ve made something from a culture…there’s no turning back!

I read recently that your dinner plate is “supposed” to contain only 1/4 meat, 1/4 starchy stuff and then all the rest is vegetables.  Or something like that.  Maybe it was exactly one bite of meat followed by three pounds of vegetables.

At any rate, the ratio was interesting to consider, since many of the meals I make for my family are usually super meat-happy.  Michael has passionate carnivorous tendencies, and Rosalie is no stranger to the meats, either.  I am somehow less so.  Not to say that I’m a bunny–although I was a semi-vegetarian for a few years.  I’m definitely an omnivore with all the delights that go with it, but after awhile, I feel like I need a break from the meaty side of life.     Also, with all the food experimenting I like to do (especially lately with chocolate), it’s easy to start feeling gross from all the richness. 

Salad is one of my favorite dishes.  It’s a pretty broad category, so there’s no shortage of possibilities there.  Especially when you do the weird thing that I’ve been doing lately with my salads.  Basically I make a dinner for Michael and Rosalie that would make them happy, then I mix a small serving of whatever is for dinner into a huge, crunchy, colorful salad. 

Here’s the deal.   A vast expanse of plants on my plate can be fun for awhile, but it can become tedious, especially when the rich part of the meal (the enchilada, the baked potato, the pasta, the pizza) can just ruin the fun of salad by hanging out there being intense and delicious. I don’t want salad to ever become a chore. 

So. If I’m going to eat the healthy salad and the alluring rich food all in the same meal anyway, why not make a salad with vegetables that are harmonious with the main dish, then dump that dish right on my salad?

For example: Pizza?  Cut it into cubes and you have pizza croutons.  How about chili? Just think “taco salad” and include veggies that work in that context, such as bell pepper, avocado, onion, crisp lettuce, and tomatoes.  All manner of meats thrive in a salad when cut up small enough, and the sauces just add some complexity to the vinaigrette. 

Tonight I transformed a bowl of soup into a salad by cutting up only chunky veggies rather than leafy ones, then pouring the soup over them (without most of the broth).  What broth there was broadened the flavor of the simple olive oil and vinegar.

At first I started doing this just because it was fun and it tasted good.  Now I’m considering it a challenge.  How many dinners or lunches can become salads?  When does it go too far?  Indian curries or Thai food?  I think not, especially if it’s a heavily spinachy salad.  Seriously. Is there a single homestyle meal you can think of that absolutely would not work on top of a big old salad? I can’t think of one yet.

Butternut Squash Arancini Stuffed with Pecorino Toscano

Unbelievable! I wrote this post on the evening of November 24.  I was looking for this recipe on my site and couldn’t find it…sure enough, there it was in “drafts” rather than “published.”  Was it that late at night when I wrote this?  Anyway, here is the post:

Arancini (risotto fritters),  translates from Italian as “little oranges,” since these little fried risotto balls do resemble oranges.  Arancini originated in Sicily and are usually filled with meat or tomato sauce, peas, or mozzarella. 

The Romans have a similar version of these croquettes, called Suppli al Telefono (which I believe translates to “telephone wires” or “on the phone”), which adorably refers to the strings of melted cheese that connect the two halves of the fritter when it is cut or bitten in half.   As the name indicates, Roman Suppli al Telefono are usually filled with cheese. 

These arancini are a non-traditional recipe, made with butternut squash risotto and stuffed with Pecorino Toscano, which is a creamy cheese.  I think a mild mozzarella would be fine as well.

Butternut Squash Arancini

Ingredients:

• One recipe of risotto (butternut squash or other kinds work as well), cooled
• 3 eggs
• 2 T milk
• 4 oz Pecorino Toscano (NOT Pecorino Romano. Choose a creamy cheese.  Mozzarella is fine)
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 cups dry bread crumbs
• 3 cups vegetable oil for frying

Directions:

1. Cube the cheese into 3/4 inch chunks.  In a small bowl, beat two eggs in with the milk.
2. Stir the third egg into the cooled risotto.  Roll 2 tablespoons’ worth of the risotto mixture in your hands, then with a finger, push a piece of cheese into the center of the ball.  Re-roll the ball around the cheese cube. 
3. Roll the ball into the flour, coating it lightly.  Drop the ball into the  egg mixture, then roll it in the bread crumbs.  Lay the ball on a cookie sheet or a piece of parchment or wax paper.  Make the rest of the balls, which will give a chance for the first balls to dry out slightly before frying. 
4. Slowly heat the oil in a medium, deep saucepan to 350˚.  The best temperature to do this is medium-low.  In small batches, fry the balls until they are evenly browned, turning them if necessary.  This will take several minutes.  Test the first ball to make sure you are happy with the interior–the cheese should be well-melted. 
5. When a fritter is finished, lay it on paper towels to absorb the extra oil. 
6. These arancini freeze well.  After frying them, lay them on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer.  After they are well-frozen, seal them in a freezer bag.  To re-heat, place fritters on a cookie sheet in a 350˚ oven.  Bake for about 20 minutes.  Alternatively, you can freeze them before frying them as well.

Today marks the last day of NaBloWriMo, National Blog Writing Month.  I feel proud to say that I wrote 30 entries in a row (having learned about this only on November 2, I wrote two entries on the 2nd).  Somehow this doesn’t sound like a big number as I write it, but it was definitely a bit of a brain marathon.

Though the challenge was merely to get out there and post each day, I did make an effort not to just dump out whatever was on my mind, like a fat purse, willy-nilly. I was thinking about you and other people who might stumble upon this site and wanted to offer some kind of entertainment, information, or food for thought.   

If you have been reading in the last month, I hope you have felt entertained, informed, or fed, at least once!  It’s been a great challenge and learning experience, and if you keep a blog yourself, I hope you might consider doing it next year, too.  I’m going to do it again next November. 

I’d like to share another completely adorable tidbit from the book I mentioned last night, Food for the Hungry. 

This book has a chapter on “The Dinner Pail” (i.e., the lunchbox), and how to make lunches wonderful and exciting for your loved ones. Really, she’s targeting “the stomach of a tired man whose appetite has been dulled by mechanical, in-door toil.”  I wish I could share all of the fun and fanciful ideas she has for that lunchbox (is this woman a turn-of-the-century Martha Stewart, or did this stuff really happen???). 

However, I don’t want to wear out my welcome in your brain, so here’s just example of something fun from the chapter that  I actually plan to try, just to see how it turns out.  As you will see, it is right up any person’s  alley whose subliminal desire it is to make truffles out of everything.

Deviled Eggs (Turn of the Century Style!)

Partially quoted and borrowed from Food for the Hungry

1. Boil six eggs (hard).  Slice the eggs lengthwise and scoop out the yolks into a small bowl.  “Rub to a paste with a generous teaspoonful of butter.  Season with pepper, salt, and a suspicion of mustard.”
2. Mold the balls into spheres of their original size and fit the yolk back into a hollow half.  Line up the other half of the egg so that you have put the puzzle back together.  
3. “Roll each egg up in tissue paper, as you would a (get this–) bon-bon, twisting the paper at the ends.  If you wish to make the entree ornamental (of course you do! Who wouldn’t?), fringe the squares of paper before enveloping the eggs. 
4. You can  also make the yolks “yet more savory” if you add giblets & gravy to the yolks to moisten the paste. 

Serves 6 dinner pails?

Sitting at the Thanksgiving table last Thursday, I exclaimed (as usual), “This is SO good, Mom!”  Who knows which dish I was talking about?  It was all delicious.  It might have been the yeast rolls at that moment.  She started talking about the trick to the dish, and I commented, “You should totally start a food blog, too!”

“No,” she reminded.

“Oh yeah.  No,” I agreed.  Too much measuring and exactitude for her. She doesn’t like to be bothered with recipes except as launching pads for her own creations.   Only a very few of her trademark dishes have been documented in recipe form onto paper.  The rest of it all is measured by “until it’s right.”  Surely I learned the art of intuitive cooking from her.  Who knows where I also got this love of recipes?  Last summer I about drove her nuts trying to get the measurements for her fried fish batter.  This will likely be the last time I chase her around with a teaspoon and a notepad. 

Anyway, we started talking around the table about the “olden days” of cooking, a time before any one of us at the table was born, when measuring utensils were incidental if even present, and any written communication included such abstractions as “some,” “a few,” “enough,”  and “more.”  This is how cooking began, not with carefully calculated ratios and measurements.

I told my family that this reminded me of Serve it Forth, the first book by MFK Fisher, who is a hugely influential, idiosyncratic, and brilliant culinary writer.  In this witty journey of culinary history, written  in 1939, she presents cooking practices and recipes dating back to ancient times, along with her droll and wonderful commentary. 

She quotes a recipe from The Harleian, a medieval cookbook, in which you are to “Take clean fresh brawn…and seethe it, but not enough.”  On this, MFK Fisher comments, “No step-by-step procedure for young brides here!  It is rather the terse understatement of one expert to another.”   Later in this old cookbook, the reader is to “…take salt and vinegar, and cast thereto, and look that it be poignant enough, and serve forth.”  I’m guessing this is where the title of her book came from (If you are interested in culinary history, I hope you will read this book! I have not done it justice here).

So, back to the Thanksgiving dining room table.  I mentioned this book as the mashed potato coma started to hit.   I probably said something detailed like, “MFK Fisher’s book talks about how they didn’t measure food in recipes a long time ago!”  I also tried to briefly describe Fisher’s 1942 book, How to Cook a Wolf, as a cookbook for eating with dignity while keeping the “wolf at the door” during those lean times of war shortages.

Mom got the picture.  Later that day she presented me with an old book, the one pictured above, called Food for the Hungry - A Complete Manual of Household Duties –compiled by Julia MacNair Wright, et al, and published in 1896.  Mom had this book left over from her antique dealing days. 

I was elated!  Greedily, I opened the book near the middle.  The first word I saw was “Oranges.”    This was to be the first course served on a breakfast menu.  Here’s what Julia et al had to say:

“As a preparatory course to the heavier business of breakfast, ripe, fresh oranges are held in high esteem.  They are served whole, and eaten as individual taste dictates, either pared, then divided into lobes, which are eaten with or without sugar, or cut in half, without paring, and scooped from the shells with a spoon.  Finger bowls and doilies are set on with them, and every vestige of this course is removed before the next is brought in.”

At this point I called Mom over to check this out.  “Doilies and finger bowls???” We started to laugh.   “This is probably intended for people who could afford servants at that time,” Mom observed.  After all, who has “brought in” the next course?  So, the title Food for the Hungry doesn’t exactly parallel How to Cook a Wolf, does it?  This was a clearly a different kind of hungry. 

I’ll bet you want to know what the whole menu of that breakfast was.  I know I did.  Here it is:

No. 32.  Breakfast.

Oranges. 

Pork Chops, with Tomato Sauce.

Crumb Griddle Cakes.  Maple Syrup.

Toast.   Brown Bread. 

Meringued Cafe au lait.  Tea.

I’m just curious: are you getting the same nostalgic longing that I have when I read this?  Who would have eaten this meal?  What was it like to have servants, when it apparently was a more common, no-big-deal thing?  What was it like for the servants?  Who actually did the cooking?  How precious were oranges then?  How about maple syrup?  What is the deal with serving both toast and brown bread?  May I have a meringued cafe au lait, please? 

I am seriously tempted to serve pork chops with tomato sauce for breakfast one morning and see what that’s like.    To follow the recipe in this book, all I’m lacking is a “potato beetle” to pound the chops flat. 

Michael and I love chickens.  We own The History of the Chicken on DVD, we took a class on chickens, and we dressed Rosalie up like a baby chick for Halloween 2008.  They are so adorable, so alert, so interesting!  

Anyway, I probably am genetically predisposed to love chickens; my mom is passionate about keeping chickens and has done so for more years than I can accurately count. This picture of the rooster above is one of “The Three Stooges,” some banties that Mom and Stan raised from eggs this year.  They do not produce the bulk of the eggs in the household, but they sure are friendly and cute.  They roam around the property and stick together like a little club, the three of them.

We plan on having chickens here in the city, too.  Anytime now.  The class Michael and I took was about keeping chickens in the city, and we know what we need to know.  Our neighbors up the street also have a few, so we have neighborly and parental support.  But we keep not having chickens.  Why?  You know, because blah, blah, blah, blah.  It will happen.  We have joked before that we were waiting for Rosalie to help care for them, but that excuse is out the window.  She was just feeding the chickens this morning before we left the farm to come back home. 

So.  Why have chickens, besides their companionship and occasional entertainment?  You know the word: eggs.  Oh, there is a difference.  Check it out:

Hmm.  Guess which egg came from a happy, free, well-loved chicken?  Which one came from a “cage free” egg carton at the store?  If you guessed that the egg on the left, with the robust, vibrant, perky yolk came from Mom and Stan’s place, then you’re adept at picking up my subtle hints. 

Below is another compare/contrast that I took last spring with the same thought in mind.   I imagine you can tell which is which.

Our neighbors insist that caring for chickens is virtually effortless once things are set up.  My mom would agree, too, although she keeps more chickens, so it may require a bit more effort at her place.  

If you are interested in keeping chickens in your backyard and you happen to live in Seattle, then I recommend taking a class for taking care of chickens at Seattle Tilth.  The guy that taught our class was so great–he had a degree in chicken husbandry, I believe, and he talked about the natural history of the chicken before launching into the nuts and bolts of their care.  By the way, did you know that chickens’ ancestors lived in the jungle? 

If having chickens in your backyard or jungle is not an option, or if your parents don’t have a few chickens handy of their own, there is still hope to eat fresh and beautiful eggs.  Go to the farmer’s market in your area and look for the stalls where they sell eggs.  Identify the stall that always has the longest line as your first clue; then come back extra early another day and get eggs from that stall.   Hope you have a great brunch!