Something smells delicious enough to drink!

Since Andy hasn't been blogging about all of the delicious food he has been making, I thought I'd tell you about my latest cocktail endeavor....Sarah

When my sister and brother-in-law were coming to Portland, Andy and I decided to spruce up our bar. We bottled the nocino (Andy's amazing walnut liqueur), stocked plenty of brown spirits and made sure our bitters were still aplenty. As the self-proclaimed bartender of the household, I researched wintery beverages to shake up. I came across Allspice Dram repeatedly and began to research what it is. Allspice liqueur is made from the allspice berry, which is a Jamaican spice, used a lot in Caribbean cooking. Of course instead of buying it, I decided to make it myself. Although the process proved to be extremely simple, it does take longer than most simple infusions. Sadly, Leah and Matt never got to taste it (although with everything else, it was not missed!)

Today I got to finally bottle it up and I am anxious to whip up a drink. The process begins by crushing 1/4 cup of allspice berries in a mortar and pestle and then adding about a cup of rum (light or dark..we used Goslings dark rum). I let that sit for a week, shaking it up whenever you think about it. You then add a cinnamon stick and let it steep for another week or so (I sort of forgot about it). After two weeks of steeping, you strain the mixture and make a syrup out of 2/3 cup of brown sugar dissolved in 1 1/2 cups of water. Finally, mix the syrup with the allspice and...homemade allspice dram!

I've consulted various websites to come up with some cocktail ideas to feature my new addition to the bar, The view from the Great Island and Gramercy Tavern both have great ideas. Two at the top of my list are:

Jalisco Pear: tequila, pear liqueur and allspice dram

Winter Waltz: rye, apple brandy (luckily we have Oregon Clear Creek Apple Brandy!), Averna and allspice dram.

YUM!

(Another shout out to Serious Eats for providing me with the recipe)

Sarah 

Black-Eyed Pea Croquettes

Pretty much falafel with black-eyed peas instead of chickpeas. Pick any bean you'd like.

2 C black-eyed peas, soaked overnight in water

2 T chopped parsley or cilantro

1/2 t salt

1 T shoyu (soy sauce)

1 t cumin, ground

2 C oil, to fry

Sauce

1/2 C honey, agave, or rice syrup

1 T Dijon mustard

Drain soaked beans and process with herbs, salt, shoyu, and cumin. Blend to fine shreds, but to so far that it turns pulpy. Form into small croquettes with a spoon and your hands and fry in oil until golden and crisp. Season with salt as soon as you remove them from oil.

Heat sugar and Dijon over low heat until it bubbles.

Almond Rosemary Cake with Lemon Creme Fraiche Glaze

By popular demand, my most recent foray into the world of flour and sugar:

Cake
1 stick unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 C raw almonds
1 1/3 C AP flour
1/2 C instant polenta
1 T baking powder
1 t minced fresh rosemary
zest of 1 lemon
1/2 t salt
4 eggs, room temp
1/2 C white sugar
3/4 C creme fraiche

Syrup
1/2 C water
1/2 C white sugar
1 T fresh lemon juice

Glaze
1/2 C confectioners' sugar
1/4 C creme fraiche
1 T fresh lemon juice

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 11" springform pan. Toast almonds in oven until fragrant, about 5 minutes. Chop and then process until finely ground. Mix together almonds, flour, polenta, baking powder, salt, lemon zest, rosemary.
Separately, beat eggs with sugar until tripled in volume. Add creme 3/4 C fraiche and the melted butter and mix. Fold egg mixture into dry ingredients in three batches. Scrape batter into pan and bake for 25 minutes.
For syrup, combine water, sugar, lemon juice and bring to boil. Pour over baked cake while still warm and still in pan. Let cool.
For glaze, whisk together confectioners' sugar, creme fraiche, lemon juice until smooth. Spread over cake.

Garden Pizza

After six months of just about bi-weekly late night stomach aches and next morning groans of "Ugh....damn you Pizza Night", I think I have made - and eaten - enough pizza dough to start the Italian grandmotherly process of muscle memory training. There are pizza muscles just as there are pasta ones, potato gnocchi muscles and pie crust ones, as many muscles as there are culinary traditions to carry on. And so after many failures (edible nonetheless), I am beginning to recognize a pizza dough when I feel one. But just beginning.

I was weeding the garden yesterday, sporadically and randomly and just trying to make a dent in the jungle that the garden has become, when I pulled up one after the other oblong beige tuber. I had forgotten that I had dropped off some sprouted spuds several months back, in a back corner of the un-scientific experiment of our vegetable garden, and, sure enough, they had taken hold and flourished. On my way back inside I snipped some broccoli that was getting pretty leggy, and thought that our house-marinated olives would round out the pizza toppings nicely. Still in possession of around 20 pounds of yellow onions left from last week's event, I caramelized a bowlful for good measure. Add to that some ricotta I had made earlier in the day for some cookies, and we were sitting on quite the pizza larder.

While the cooking was not ideal this first attempt on the Big Green Egg - I'd like more radiant heat to blister the top crust before the bottom crust gets too dark - it was plenty successful as a first attempt, tasted absolutely delicious, and didn't heat up the entire house as the kitchen oven used to. We dined al fresco, mere steps from the land that had given us the toppings. And, learning my lesson from abundances past, I only made three pizzas.

Local Love

I've been preparing for this Saturday's 120 person luncheon for the last month, brining meats and pickling veggies and contemplating with steadily growing anxiety. Now that the cooking is underway I'm less worried about the food and more concerned with the sheer logistics; 120 people, whoever they are, translates to a lot of food (turns out even with my recently acquired second refrigerator I am woefully short on space). But Saturday will happen (third refrigerator be damned!) and the food will be tasty.

What I really want to write about is the joy, deep down in every member of the human race, of cooking for loved ones. I got the chance to take a break from event-worrying for a few days when my family was in town, the first time we were all together for quite awhile. As it was their first time in Portland, I decided to give them a good thorough taste of the Pacific Northwest.

Celebrating the Do-it-yourself mentality out here we snacked on freshly un-crocked garlic-dill pickles and sauerkraut and sipped homemade root beer and ginger beer. We roasted local Chinook salmon, covered in dill and lemon wedges, on cedar planks, and tossed just-from-the-garden snap peas with local hazelnuts and sharp sheep's milk cheese. Willapa Bay clams steamed with morels and baby turnips and finished with a generous shaving of Oregon black truffle kept it close to home. And a sourdough pumpernickel bread to go with the array of NW cheeses and Netarts Bay salt really sealed the deal. Those famous Oregon berries found their way into a crostata made with leaf lard from local pigs and joined by homemade vanilla ice cream, and to wash it all down, of course, a Willamette Pinot (Chehalem) and some black currant liqueur from Clear Creek.

A celebration of the place and of the people sharing it. What else is cooking about?

How We Flew to Bavaria on Wings of Rye

I had been less than pleased with my attempts to bake bread using only my sourdough starter, rather than any commercial yeast. I have a jar full of Fleischmann's in the fridge, but what would I do if I suddenly found myself in a post-Apocalyptic farm house, no grocery stores left, only my trusty mason jar of bubbling sour-smelling goo to raise my breads? (The yeast is the first thing the zombies go for.) Clearly, another attempt was in order.

Rye bread has always been a favorite of mine, as well as the dense brown breads of Northern European tradition. If lightness was not a desirable attribute of these breads, then maybe leaving out the yeast would work just fine. I started my sponge the day before baking, mixing my starter with dark rye flour, warm water, and a little sugar, and mixing in browned onions and crushed caraway seeds. I put that on the counter and walked away.

After only a couple hours it was quite active, putting up the occasional bubble (polenta-style) and acquiring a rather ripe smell. By the next day (about 16 hours of fermentation time) it had developed a thoroughly adolescent personality - impatient, volatile, smelly, and just plain uncomfortable in its body. It was time to graduate it to the mixing bowl.

I folded in the remaining flour (100% rye, as opposed to most rye bread recipes which lighten the loaf with varying amounts of white wheat flour), and let the sticky dough rise and ferment some more.

Eight or so hours later, I gathered the sticky mass and clumped it into a loaf pan, for a final rise of about 90 minutes. Rye flour, unlike wheat flour, does not depend on gluten for its structural integrity and carbon dioxide trapping ability, and so does not require any kneading (read more here), which is fortunate, because rye dough is sticky. It's like kneading bubble gum mixed with Elmer's.

Finally, it went into the oven (350 degrees F) for right around two hours. It's hard to over-bake a bread like this, and you certainly don't want to under-bake it, so shoot for at least two hours, and give it a knock on the bottom to see if it sounds hollow.

A few squares of cold sweet butter and a pinch of crunchy salt would do just about perfectly, but we had the recently canned sauerkraut to debut. Some hot kraut and onions, melted cheese, a few slices of rye, last summer's bread and butter pickles, and a home brew. Prost!

Recipe

In response to several requests, here's the recipe for the shortcakes. Nothing fancy, just a prodigal amount of good cream and butter, and the ripest strawberries you can find.

Biscuits:

1.5 c AP flour
4 t sugar
2 t baking powder
6 T butter
.75 c cream
fat pinch of salt

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in cold butter, stir in about 10 T of the cream until dough forms. Chill. Roll out to 0.5" thick. Cut out biscuits, brush with remaining cream, and bake at 400 F for about 16 minutes.

Strawberries:

4 c fresh strawberries, hulled and washed
0.25 c sugar (give or take)

Slice the strawberries, sprinkle with sugar, puree half of the mixture and fold back in.

Cream:

1 c cream
0.5 c fresh lemon verbena leaves (mint works nicely, too)
1.5 T

Steep herb in cream for at least 24 hours. Strain out herb and whip cream with sugar.

Assemble the shortcakes any way you want. They won't stay assembled long.