A couple of wine labels.
Okay, maybe they’re not crayons, just random streaks of color. Either way, nothing about it makes me think mmmm, good wine! Then again, it was eyecatching enough to photograph.
Tag Archives: food
As vegetarians we don’t celebrate “turkey day” but we do enjoy a feast
As I wrote last week, we had Thanksgiving, as always at Cafe Parizade in Durham. It’s a major vegan event and while we’re not vegan (lacto-ovo) the food is great. This year, for example, they introduced these filo triangles —
— tasty as hell. Ditto the desserts.
Well worth the money. My only regret is I only had room for one chocolate truffle. Ate a lot of those filo triangles though.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
Pesto!
See this blender?
That’s what’s left after three cups of basil leaves, plus other ingredients, go into my pesto (my in the sense I make it — it’s not my recipe). Here’s what it looks like before blending.
TYG has had poor luck in the garden this year: either the deer or the squirrels get the food crops or they just don’t grow. The basil though, is going great. Lots of pesto will go in the freezer over the next couple of months.
The smell of these early leaves is particularly strong and lovely.
Filed under Personal
You say tomayto, I say tomahto
TYG does container gardening on our deck. The first few years after we moved in, she had some success with tomatoes. The past two or three, not so much. Either the squirrels ate the tomatoes — more precisely, bite them off and then drop them as unsatisfying — or they didn’t grow, or life was too hectic to plant them. If we did get any, it wasn’t enough to cook with.
This year she staved off the squirrels and the crop was magnificent. Here’s the first haul.
That was enough to make a layered tomato/veggie meat/potato dish we both love.
Yesterday I made bruschetta for lunch. We should have enough to make something else this weekend.
Coolness.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
Food, butterflies and fear: this week’s reading
PRECIOUS CARGO: How Foods From the Americas Changed The World by Dave DeWitt looks at how tomatoes became essential to Italian cooking, paprika remade Hungarian cooking, maize and peanuts became African staples and potatoes became a valuable food source everywhere.
Most of this was interesting but the Asian section bogs down; it’s not a history of how the foods spread as much as an overall survey of Peppers In East Asian Cuisine which is not the same thing. That dragged down some of the fun of the book.
AN OBSESSION WITH BUTTERFLIES: Our Long Love Affair With a Singular Insect by Sharman Apt Russell is one of those nature books looking at thetile topic from every angle: how butterflies sense, feed, reproduce, grow, survive their attackers and human connections such as the network of breeders that supports butterfly houses. Not the best such book I’ve read, but good and informative.
NIGHT RIDERS IN BLACK FOLK HISTORY by Gladys-Marie Fry looks at oral history accounts by former slaves and their descendants of how the South used not only brute force and the threat of force to control them but also urban legends—abolitionists would take you from the plantation so they could sell you to Cuba, Canadians would eat you, the “night doctors” in Northern cities would bodysnatch you for dissection, etc. Interesting but it feels vaguely lacking; part of that, I think, is that I’d like these beliefs put in the context of white superstitions in the same era.
#SFWApro. Tomato image by JLPC, butterfly by Erin Silversmith, both via Wikimedia Commons.
Filed under Reading
Who the hell eats in these test kitchens?
Recently I made a barley and vegetable dish. Disappointing — so much barley it blanded out the vegetables — and way bigger than the recipe said.
That’s supposed to be a meal for three people. Barley is a heavy meal — I can’t imagine the average person would chow down a third of that even if it tasted better.
I should have known better. I almost never eat a recipe that doesn’t wildly understate volume. At half the amount, it would have been acceptable, as I’d have eaten it at much fewer meals.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
Baguettes and sourdough
Last year, I tried making a French baguette. I botched the recipe but the results were still good. Not really baguette shaped, though.
Late in December, I tried again and followed the recipe. The results were good but again, did not have the slim elegance of the classic baguette.
If anything it looked more misshapen. No big — I care more about taste than looks and it’s not like I’m baking for public consumption — but still slightly annoying.
I had more problems with sourdough. Once again I checked out Bread Head from the library last month, to make the cornbread recipe for the writers’ group Christmas party. And since I had it on hand, why not try a couple more recipes?
The process: mix flour and water, then wait a couple of days for wild yeast to colonize and start fermenting it. Then take some of that “seed starter,” mix with fresh flour and water to create a new batch of starter, and use that in the bread. I planned to use the fermented initial starter for a buckwheat banana bread, then the second generation starter for a regular loaf.
The banana bread turned out extremely tasty but very doughy in the middle. My guess is that I used the seed starter before the fermentation was far enough along and the yeast ran out of steam. The second-generation starter, which I made after the ferment got going, was worse — completely lifeless. I don’t know if it was too cold in the kitchen or what but by this point the seed starter was thriving so I used that. And guess what, it turned out great.
It’s a very tasty, firm bread, though not hugely superior to some of my favorite non-sourdough recipes. Still, the sour tang does make it different so I’m going to try a couple more sourdoughs from some of my other bread books.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
Hellboy, suffragettes, a Regency ghost and Johnny Quest: books read
I’ve fallen behind on the Hellboy series but I’ve begun catching up, starting with YOUNG HELLBOY: Assault on Castle Death by Mike Mignola, Tom Sniegoski and Craig Rousseau is a lightweight story set right after the BPRD moved from its base in New Mexico to Connecticut. Hellboy’s been laid low by a fever and suffering dreams in which the Lobster summons him to battle against an evil force. Little does Hellboy know that he’s in the crosshairs of a fanatic out to destroy him.
This is fluff that hardly adds anything to the mythos, but it’s fun fluff that I greatly enjoyed. And yes, it’s already added to the Hellboy Chronology.
I like food history and I like women’s history so ALL STIRRED UP: Suffrage Cookbooks, Food and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote by Laura Kumin should have hit my sweet spot perfectly. And it has a great hook, that alongside the marches and protests, many less confrontational suffragettes pushed their message through discussions at tea parties, over food at suffragette-run restaurants, or by selling cookbooks as fund-raisers, which also proved they weren’t abandoning the domestic sphere.
Unfortunately Kumin devotes too much time to just reprinting recipes (though she does a good job explaining how different food was in the pre-WW I era) and way too much time as a straight history of the suffragette movement, culmining in a final chapter about What The Suffrage Movement Means To Us Today. If I knew nothing of the topic, it might have worked better for me.
During my recent Florida trip, my friend Cindy Holbrook mentioned that years after it came out, she got a 
recent fan letter for her Regency romance LORD SAYER’S GHOST so naturally I reread it (I have all her books). Female lead Prudence and her aunt, who talks to dead people, have moved into their distant, deceased relative Lord Sayer’s mansion: his ghost has driven every other relative out but if they can last the year, they get the house. Except it turns out Sayer’s alive and well, hoping that posing as a ghost will enable him to smoke out his would-be murderer. Trouble is, he’s driven them all away instead. Prudence, however, helps him hatch a plan to try again, even if she does find him tempting her to be very unprudent. This was a fun, charming romp with one or two outstanding lines (“Even her dress knew better than to rustle in her presence.”).
FUTURE QUEST by Jeff Parker and multiple artists (primarily Evan Shaner) is also a fun romp, tailor-
made for someone my age. The crime cartel F.E.A.R. are plotting to control an alien monstrosity reaching towards Earth, with Dr. Zinn as their in-house scientist; against them we have Dr. Quest and the rest of the Quest team alongside Birdman and Devi, his new handler. At least that’s how it starts: before long we’ve also got the Impossibles, Space Ghost, Mighty Mytor, Jezebel Jade and Frankenstein Junior in the mix (and that’s not even the complete list). This twelve issue series (two TPBs) was tremendous fun.
#SFWApro. Hellboy cover by Matt Smith, Regency cover uncredited, Future Quest cover by Shaner
Wisp and a Pie
After I moved up here, TYG started taking me to a local meetup vegan group’s potlucks. We’re lacto-ovo vegetarian but the food was good and so was the company. However the potlucks ended during the pandemic and the hosts only managed one since things got back to normal. This week, TYG and I hosted one — like Gandhi said, be the meetup event you wish to see in the world (wait, that wasn’t quite right …).
I made vegetarian chili, plus a pie recipe from Rawsome Vegan Baking: Pecan crust, raisin/date/chia filling, chocolate sauce. It was good (how could it not be?).
Wisp was a little thrown by all the furniture rearranging we did. With the coffee table clear, she checked out the lamp.
But then she decided it was all too much.
We managed to dose her with gabapentin again which kept her snoozing up in the spare bedroom until everything was over. Dudley and Trixie had a fabulous time being petted and stroked, though Plushie eventually became bummed he didn’t even get one bite of the food!
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal, The Dog Ate My Homework
I haven’t photographed any bread for a while
So here’s a photograph of no-knead white bread.
The title is literal: you mix the ingredients, let it rise for eight hours, shape into a ball and rise some more, then bake in a Dutch oven. It’s taste is typical homemade white bread but the texture is distinctive, in a good way. And it looks cool.
I made it mostly because I was curious how it would turn out, but having bread recipes that take very little work is a handy thing. I have one, a whole-wheat recipe, but it’s good to have more options.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
