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.

The Main Event

This weekend, Home Skillet was launched, on wings of strawberry shortcake, past the reaches of word of mouth among friends and into the wide world beyond.

Along with several other local food businesses, we offered a menu item to be served at a wine tasting fundraiser for The International School here in Portland. I had spent the days leading up to the event making sure that this simple dish would really shine: finding the best possible local strawberries, infusing rich organic cream with fresh lemon verbena, baking over one hundred sweet cream biscuits. Everything came out beautifully, leaving us with an easy job once we got to the event.

We plated up our desserts, schmoozed (as I love to do) and mingled with the crowd, dispatched a handful of business cards, and called it a night. A great event for all involved. Look out Portland, there's tasty food coming your way, and it's called Home Skillet.

From Crock to Can: A Sauerkraut's Life Journey.

On February 9 I packed a one gallon crock full of salted cabbage. Over the next couple days I pressed it down, until finally it was submerged in its own salty liquid. I covered it and put it in a dark corner of the garage.

For the next couple of weeks I compulsively checked it, my first home fermentation project, impatient for a transformation. I knew that it would take several weeks, if not months, to become that tangy, funky, and thoroughly nourishing German staple we all know and love, but I couldn't stop looking. And doubting.

As I started more and more projects, my attention wandered from the cabbage, until, would you look at that, it's been a solid three months; I'd better check. I lifted the top, fully expecting to find moldy, fly-ridden rotten veg, but what wafted up to greet me was pleasantly sour, and somehow even smelled alive. It crunched like cabbage, but tasted like another being altogether. Pricklingly acidic, earthy, vegetal, robust, brimming with life.

Knowing I didn't want to lose the vivacity of our new friend in the garage, but also realizing that we would most likely not get around to eating it all before the temperature rose to summer heights and carried our sauerkraut over the fermentation Sour Cliff and into the Abyss of Off Flavors, I canned it.

I know, I know, I just killed a living being. I took all that natural health-giving bacteria and cooked it, rendering it just another can in the cupboard. But then again, I'd rather have four quarts of delicious preserve than a crock of what might have been.

Filone

Someday I will have a wood-burning oven, most likely made of brick, and probably in my backyard. I first need a house, a backyard, and either the skills to build or the money to pay someone to build, but it will happen. Someday.

For now I make do with a 500 degree electric oven, a baking stone, and a smoke-filled kitchen (and adjoining living room). One look at the crust and I know it's not "real" bread, but for the tools I'm working with, it'll do for now.

Springtime

Olive oil poached halibut, fried leeks, asparagus and fava beans in briny beurre blanc.

The Time Has Come

To my fans out there (both of you): I have finally been persuaded onto the facebook bandwagon. Check us out! HomeSkilletDining

The Big Sock

Pizza night is becoming a regular event. We decided to toss a calzone into the mix this time. Not bad looking? Pretty delicious, too.

Nice Little Tuesday

I felt like rolling pasta, Sarah wanted peas, so we put them together: fresh spaghetti with English peas, mint, and bread crumbs.

Paired it with a 1994 Kalin Chardonnay, nutty and herbal and tropical all at once.

Bitter

In the quest toward a more homegrown bar, we started our bitter herb infusions in mid-February: a fat pinch of said herb covered with a few ounces of high proof alcohol. The goal was to end up with a highly potent extract of various bittering elements which we could then either mix to form cocktail bitters or add to a batch of house vermouth.

Checking the infusions every few days for the first month was not reassuring: they were picking up color from the herbs, but still smelled only of alcohol. So we left them alone for awhile. Coming back a few weeks later they had a faint whiff of herb, but still mostly alcohol. It wasn't until I dipped my finger in one and licked it that I realized it had worked: I was overwhelmed by the flavor of the herb, a miniscule drop packing a whollop of flavor. It was the same for all the others: wormwood, mugwort, gentian, orange peel, angelica, quassia, and warm spice. A panoply of flavors and colors, ready for the straining.

An Extemporaneous Grill

It hit 80 degrees on Sunday. I walked out of work with a handful of kale raabs, knowing that I wanted to grill, but clueless as to what else to eat.

As I roamed the New Seasons aisles, having already grabbed a filet of sablefish, I spotted the avocado pile. Weaving my way through carts loaded with charcoal and watermelons, I snagged a dimpled green orb, tender enough to be eaten tonight (surprisingly, as usually I have to buy avocado rocks and wait a week to eat them).

I didn't want guacamole - I'll be making plenty of that when true summer arrives - but it had to be refreshing and satisfying, summery enough but not obnoxiously so (it was still April, after all). I made a couple of circuits through the produce, uninspired, until I landed on something I usually walk right past - portobello mushrooms. This dish was shaping up to be an odd one, but I trusted my (hungry) gut and picked up a bunch of parsley and a lime.

I cut the mushroom into fat wedges and grilled them until golden brown and tender, but still decidedly toothsome. I tossed in the avocado wedges, piled on the torn parsley leaves, and gave the whole a big dose of good olive oil, fresh lime juice, and plenty of Maldon salt. Odd, perhaps, but so delicious: meaty, creamy, vibrant, and fresh.

Home Skillet 2.0

Finally got ahold of some time to start setting up the Home Skillet website. It's an ongoing effort, but go ahead and check it out!

Pizza! Pizza!

Of all the categories of cooking that I someday hope to master, the one that has long lingered in the back of my mind, never quite taking center stage, is pizza. I've eaten it in Naples, all over Italy in fact. In New York I worked at a place that served what was arguably the best pizza in town, and I helped my good friend get his brick oven pizza business off the ground. But I've never really made it at home; without a brick oven, I thought, what's the point of even trying?

With my sourdough starter flourishing over the last month, though, I thought it was time to really give it a go. I used some yeast to augment my sourdough, and over the course of about 16 hours made a respectable dough: sponge in the fridge overnight, soft dough in the morning, slow rise, punch down, second rise, portion, final rise. Of course I failed to take any notes - a necessity for the serious pizzaiolo I'm told - but those days in the pizzeria trenches ended up serving me well. I could, with a fairly high degree of confidence, recognize when the dough looked and felt right, and could stretch it out efficiently.

Besides a good dough, the one missing piece of the puzzle - short of a backyard oven (someday!) - was a stone. So I bit the bullet and bought one, figuring now was the time to try to do it right. After a 45 minute pre-heat in a 475 degree oven (smoke alarm be damned), I used an inverted floured sheet tray as a makeshift peel and slid the lightly dressed dough onto the floured peel. Eight minutes later - not quite the 45 seconds of Da Michele, but respectable - out came a bubbly, crisped but chewy circle of happiness.

There is definite room for improvement (maybe play with the broiler to try to get some blistering), but for a first serious attempt, it was pretty darn delicious.

A Lunch fit for a (Thai) King

Finding myself with a whole trout (de-boned) in the fridge and a jar of white rice in the pantry, it was only a few steps and a couple dollars before we had the fixings for a quick jaunt to Southeast Asia.

I seasoned the fish, coated it in corn starch, and dropped it (gently) into a pan of hot oil. The salad was just what I love about Thai cuisine: fresh vegetables and herbs coaxed into a finely tuned balance of sweet (palm sugar), salty (fish sauce), hot (Bird's Eye chilies), and sour (lots of lime juice). Crispy skin, warm rice, cold salad, it was a flavor punch directly to the palate.

And in that odd way that only certain cuisines (S.E. Asian and Japanese, in particular) are capable of, we felt totally satisfied and not a bit full. Ready, in fact, for dinner.

Sunny Day Fish Fry

Since moving out to Portland, one thing I have learned to do is to take advantage of nice weather, because you never know when it will be back. So as I left work on Sunday and stepped into the warm glow of the late afternoon sunshine, I thought: Tonight, we eat outdoors.

The sudden and unpredicted 36-hour spell of summer weather got us thinking about Southern food, but to keep it simple, we limited the menu to a few reliably delicious dishes. Sarah took charge of the mac 'n' cheese and, despite our ongoing battle of methods (she layers and uses egg, whereas I take the Bechamel route), knocked it out of the park.

I spearheaded the fried cod batter, using a bottle of our very own home brew and thickening it with flour, corn starch, and baking powder, with some cayenne thrown in. And we teamed up on the hush puppies, folding in a minced jalapeno and a lot of onion and then frying them until deep brown.

As for drinks, we went with the 2009 Naucratis Lost Slough Vineyard by Scholium Project. This winery was started by a Philosophy professor turned winemaker, a guy who makes wines that are definitely not for everyone, but definitely appreciated by most wine geeks I know. It weighed in at a whopping 15.3 degrees alcohol (did I mention it's white?), but we took our time with it.

The best ingredient, of course, was the backyard. The sun on its way down, long rays slanting through the blossoming trees, the cool of the evening wrapping up our first glimpse of the summer to come.