When I was a kid split pea was my favorite—maybe because it was one of the rare times we ate bacon, which my mom cooked and cooled tantalizingly on the counter, and then crumbled onto each bowl. If you’ve ever lived in the Pacific Northwest you know that there is a certain kind of squelching rain that comes every so often in the winter and lasts for days on end, different from the usual misty stuff and much colder. The exact right thing on those days is to come home and smell the house full of peas and ham and bacon. Sometimes we’d have grilled cheese (rough country bread and good cheese) to dip in it, sometimes toast with butter. I always sang “Pease porridge hot” in my head and thought of “Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old” and how we never, ever let it go that long. Leftovers were always gobbled up quickly. I think Laura says the same thing about bean soup in one of the Little House books, as a matter of fact.

And take it from me, split pea soup actually is still pretty delicious cold.

This is the recipe my mom used when I was a kid, and which I still prefer. She has moved on to a Jacques Pepin recipe with herbes de provence and a bit rougher texture, but this will always be split pea soup to me:

Split Pea Soup
from James Beard

2 cups dried split peas
2 quarts water
1 meaty ham hock
2 cloves garlic, peeled & crushed
1 medium yellow onion, peeled, left whole
2 cloves (stick in onion)
2 stalks celery, cut in half, cross-wise
2 carrots, peeled & cut length-wise
1 bay leaf

Spread out one cup of the split peas at a time on a cookie sheet and pick over for tiny stones or sticks. Rinse with cold water & drain.

* Put all ingredients in a pot, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer.
* Cook a couple of hours until peas are soft.
* Remove ham hock and cut off meat; set aside.
* Throw away onion with cloves, garlic, celery & bay leaf.
* Puree peas & carrots (or not if you don’t want carrots)
* Return soup to pot, add ham bits, salt & pepper to taste.
* Serve hot with cornbread.

I was low on onions, didn’t have celery and couldn’t find a bay leaf on the day I made this batch. Sure, it would be even better with the right stuff, but it was still delicious. Prepping this soup takes all of five minutes.

I was also using half yellow and half green split peas. (It was gross out and I was not making a trip to the store.) Rereading the recipe just now, I realized I never rinse the peas! Oops.

Despite its healthy appearance, this was a sadly disappointing ham hock. In fact, I have had enough trouble getting ham hocks (Whole Foods has to special order them. Honestly!) that when I found them at the normally-wonderful Savenor’s I bought four, two for the double batch I was making at the ski house, two to freeze for later. I’ve now used three of them and they have been horrible, with virtually no meat. Normally I get about a half cup of ham off the hock at the end, to chop up and put back in; these have given me just a few splinters. So weird!

(Note the tiny halved onions because all I had were little sprouting ones. Leave the onion whole, normally, which makes fishing it out far easier.)

Cooked, with ham hock and most of the carrots removed. Pre-blending. I use my immersion blender right in the pot and it gives me lovely silky soup.

Like so:

By the way, this requires quite a bit of salt and pepper at the end, especially if you don’t have a ton of ham to add back in. Keep tasting and stirring and adjusting. Hmm, it’s been a couple weeks since I made this… Time for another batch soon.

P.S. I joined Formspring, so head on over and ask me a question! http://www.formspring.me/kateflaim

As a matter of fact, we found out on the DAY OF our holiday party (which explains our dazed/delirious looks in the photos, despite my consumption of sparkling cider only), and that was my last real cooking effort for quite a while. Over Christmas in Oregon I indulged in such lavish delicacies as half a cup of yogurt with a bit of granola while everyone else ate beef bourguignon. And then laid still for a while. Party on! (Note to pregnant ladies: Eat, even if you aren’t hungry. Saltines did nothing for me; I needed protein. Once I added raw almonds, greek yogurt, etc. to my mid-afternoon routine life became muuuuch easier.)

Now that my appetite has come back (with a vengeance, sigh) and we’re back from a few trips, hopefully I’ll be cooking regularly again. Poor Ben had a meager diet for a while there. Meanwhile, I thought these photos were fun, juxtaposed against their summer counterparts. We were out at Crane Beach and around a pond further inland a couple weekends ago, and later I realized I had similar photos from a trip to those exact spots when everything was significantly warmer.

Crane Beach, January 31:

Crane Beach, July 5:

Salt marches near Crane Beach, January 31:

Looking down at the marshes, July 5:

Pond with the best swimming hole, January 31 (Someone kept biking around, but we couldn’t get a clear shot):

Swimming hole, July 5:

Yes, it’s been more than two weeks since I checked in. There’s no real reason for it, just a lack of motivation and a general feeling of “blah.” I have about 10 different things I should get posted, which is of course a little overwhelming (I’m trying to get to the photos for this post and I’m already on page 8 of my Flickr without getting close. Agh).

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Ben and I were on our own this year, so we took a drive up to York Beach, ME and ate at Lydia Shire’s Blue Sky, which was fantastic. Between the dinner I ate and my mom’s continued proselytizing, I am convinced of the wisdom of cooking the turkey legs and breast separately: I had lovely slices of the white meat, accompanied by a ridiculously delicious “ragout” of shredded dark meat warmed up in gravy. Yup, that is the way to go.

I never actually posted any of the cooking experiments from my visit home in late October, and I think one of them might come in handy if you’re looking for a satisfying but light dinner for these post-Turkey days. We ate at The Butcher Shop in the South End with new friends before my trip, and I shamelessly hogged a shared salad appetizer, a frisee salad with bacon dressing, shaved egg and fingerling potatoes. A few days later in Oregon, I decided to recreate it for the family, and we got it mostly right, though not quite perfect. It’s a nice riff on the traditional french bistro salad (frisee and lardons with a poached egg). This is easier to share, since there aren’t whole eggs, and would also be great without the potatoes, or as a simple lunch.

First things first, we baked a few strips of good, thick bacon, then cut it up into small little bits and saved a bit of the fat to make the dressing (like a warm spinach salad).

(I cut the bacon fat with a bit of grapeseed oil, which is nice and neutral. I never did get the dressing quite right; I forgot to add mustard and it never came together the way I wanted.)

Next up: Potatoes. Mom got gorgeous fingerlings, which I halved, boiled until nearly cooked, then tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted until they colored but didn’t crisp up.

Finally, the egg. In retrospect, I’m an ass. I could have passed it through a food mill or pushed it through a sieve. But I was jetlagged, sick and stupid, and didn’t get there. Mom thought her egg slicer could produce a very fine dice, so we gave it a try:

Um, fail. Even if I rotated it 90 degrees for a second slice….no. My solution? The box grater!

(Tom was entertained by taking action shots while I struggled)

It was hard to get through more than half of the egg before it fell apart in my hand, but the results were perfect:

Nice and fluffy.

Assembly time. I dressed the frisee, tossed it with the bacon, and then topped it with the egg.

Tossed the potatoes with the rest of the dressing, and layered those on top:

We also had steak, beets, beans, and peppers:

And wine and candles.

Still to come: A four-hour pasta recipe from the lovely Suzanne Goin, lots of non-food pictures, thrifting adventures with Tom, fun with purple vegetables, etc.

Dinner as bonding time
This isn’t rocket science. There have been tons of studies that link eating dinner as a family to better test scores, behavior, success in life, etc. I’m sure all of that is true, but the root is bonding time, I think.

When I was a kid, we ate dinner at the table every night. Sure, there were exceptions (my parents had a work event, one of us had a play or something at school), but 95% of weeknights we sat down at the table. As my mom finished dinner, Dad would turn off NPR and turn on Dave Brubeck or Miles Davis, light the candles, turn off the overhead lights, and we would set the table with cloth napkins. Everyone was expected to participate in the conversation (which was a major drag when I was 13 or 14), and we stayed at the table until everyone was finished eating. After the main course we’d have salad and wipe our plates with a bit of bread.

When I got married, my mom gave me napkin rings with our initials, along with cloth napkins, as a wedding gift. I don’t know why lighting the candles and using real napkins makes a difference to me, but it does. Maybe it’s that there is a distinct moment when it is truly Dinner Time. Sometimes we are eating a really simple salad and some bread with cheese toasted on it, but we sit across from each other at the table and we talk about our days and it is a really important part of our lives. We both feel off-kilter when we go a week or two without regular meals together at home.

Eating together means you are checking in every night, without the distraction of TV to let you get off the hook and avoid talking. It means eye contact and a glass of wine (or water!) and a respite from the blackberry. It’s not really about the food, but:

Food as social fodder
At some point I started thinking about food more seriously, and I chalk that up to my family, too. When I was in elementary school my mom started teaching cooking classes, as well as getting more and more serious about food herself. By the time I was in high school we were regulars at the farmers market and she had an in with a wholesale gourmet purveyor in Portland. Food had become the common language in my family, and we talked about it all the time.

Ben first visited us in Oregon the summer after we started dating, and at a certain point that week he turned to me and said “Um, do you guys ever stop talking about food?” No. If we’re not discussing what’s for dinner (say, because we’re currently eating dinner), we may be talking about things we plan to eat tomorrow, or things we ate recently that we want to replicate, or what’s due soon at the farmer’s market. Months before a trip to Eugene, my mom starts making a list of things we need to cook while I’m home. We’re a little obsessed.

The result is that I think about food all the time, sort of the way a sports fan thinks about his team of choice. I’m not into the whole “foodie” (gah) restaurant scorecard/chef-tracking thing, but I get really giddy about asparagus season.

What I don’t like is snobbishness and the idea that food needs to be fancy to be good. Food needs to be good to be good. Sure, I focus on trying to keep what I cook local and seasonal, but I won’t lie, we were at a small country fair this weekend and I found it crucially important to sample both the “giant donut” and the fried dough. And some cotton candy. (The giant donut won, and it was indeed the size of my face.) Which brings me to my last point (and about time, too):

Food should be fun and delicious, not scary
I was pleased that the movie version of Julie and Julia highlighted my favorite Julia Child advice, “be fearless.” (My other favorites, paraphrased: never apologize (this trips me up), always mix with your hands, and cover mistakes with whipped cream.) Cooking and eating should be fun, enriching experiences, not stressful ones. When we got married I had never cooked dinner regularly. Living in NYC with roommates and crappy kitchens meant that if I made anything at home, it was probably a fried egg or some Trader Joe’s dumplings. And yet I plunged into cooking that first year in Hanover, choosing Sunday Suppers at Lucques as my cookbook of choice and throwing one, maybe two dinner parties each week. Of course I overshot sometimes, and got stressed out trying to time the meals right, and I freaked out that time the plastic wrap melted into the short ribs, but it never occurred to me that I should start with simpler things, because for me the challenge made it fun.

Maybe it’s because I grew up sitting on the desk in the kitchen while my mom cooked dinner–I certainly didn’t cook much at home, aside from helping her with tedious tasks and going on occasional baking kicks. I did know how to do a lot of basic things, but let me tell you, my knife skills were pretty shoddy. The first time I made those triple pork burgers they took forever, and I swore it wasn’t worth the trouble. Funny; the most recent time I made them the prep took about 1/4 the time. Practice does, indeed, make something closer to perfect. (Though Ben and my mom swear that if I keep practicing one day I’ll be good at slicing bread, and so far that is a blatant lie. Stupid wonky slices.)

What I want to get across is that cooking doesn’t need to be intimidating. The worst that can happen is that you burn the hell out of something, or, um, explode the pyrex, or flood the kitchen with pizza dough. Kitchens are made to be cleaned up. You can always eat a scrambled egg or order takeout if things go truly awry.

I write about food because food makes me happy, and I want it to make other people happy, too.

In the interest of service journalism, How to enjoy food, my humble guide:
Geek out about the colors and shapes of vegetables and food. Use white plates, or vintage ones that make you happy. Try a complicated recipe when it won’t freak you out if it doesn’t work. When in doubt, make a braised stew. Buy dessert unless you really feel up to it. Eat fried dough at every fair you encounter. Eat more noodles. Use salt and butter and olive oil and sugar: In my experience, you’ll be ok if you’re also avoiding processed foods and eating lots of delicious vegetables and not eating pounds of any one thing. Visit farms. Visit farmer’s markets. Save up for one really astonishing meal every so often. Light the candles and sit down at the table for dinner. Brussels sprouts. Cabbage. Carrot salad. Beets. Garlic. Also wine. And, in the summer, gin.

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And now I’m going to go make a dutch baby for dinner, because who doesn’t love an oven pancake?

Brew coffee in a stovetop espresso maker.

Sweeten while hot with BROWN sugar, to taste (the coffee is strong and bitter, so I needed a goodly amount of sugar). Does anyone else out there besides me and Tom drink hot coffee with just milk, but iced coffee with milk and sugar? I’m sure this has something to do with bitter flavor compounds showing up when the drink is cold.

Chill, then serve over ice with milk. About a one-to-one ratio is good, or even more milk; again, the coffee is quite concentrated.

I make the espresso the night before and then I just have to add ice and milk in the morning when I can’t be trusted to do anything complicated, anyway.

While my parents were here (“Back East,” as we always said when I was growing up) we spent two nights with my aunt and uncle at a lodge they were renting on Great Pond in Maine. The weather cleared for us and we got to splash around in the lake and eat on the porch, and my dad and uncle did quite a bit of fly-fishing from the old canoe. The lodge is affiliated with a venerable and very cool boy’s camp, Pine Island Camp, which my uncle and cousin both attended. We got to have lunch there and tour the island, and it made me hope that I have at least one son one day, so I can pack him off to a mosquito-free island in a Maine Lake to canoe and row and sail and play crazy games and do carpentry and otherwise step back in time. I liked that there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on artistic achievement–music, painting, carving–as well as sports. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera that day, but Dad took a few shots. (The photo up top is of a group of boys rowing past our dock one morning.)

The campers still sleep in tents on platforms, just feet away from the lake.

(Photo by Dad)

Dad was smart enough to take a photo of an archival picture to show how little has changed in 100 years:

(Photo by Dad)

Other than that little trip, we mostly just cooked and ate and relaxed by the lake. We were visited by a distinctly un-shy loon:

Despite appearances, the green canoe was seaworthy:

Bug spray aside, this photo could have been taken 50 years ago:

And if this is basically my dad’s favorite kind of view (ok, he’d prefer a burbling trout stream, but framing anything with a fly rod helps):

I definitely captured his favorite way to shave!

Oh, and Mom and I cooked dinner one night!

——

After leaving the lake, we drove on back roads over to a resort in NH where my mom worked in High School. On our way there, we passed Douin’s Market, which looked like a convenience store, but sported a sign saying something like, “Home of the Brownie Whoopie Pie, STOP or you’ll regret it.” I yelled “STOP!” and everyone thought I was kidding. Once I made it clear that I take threats of brownie whoopie pie regret seriously, Dad and I ran in. He had the presence of mind to take an iPhone picture of a sign advertising the 10-lb Brownie Whoopie Pies Douin’s makes for parties:

We purchased the normal sized one (perched on the giant one in the previous photo), and devoured it with our picnic lunches. OMG, you guys. I like a whoopie pie as much as the next girl, but most of the time the cake seems to be sadly bland or dry. This subbed in the best brownie I’ve ever tasted–incredibly chewy and chocolatey and delicious. The market also makes a variety of normal whoopie pies, as well as some with peanut butter filling or pumpkin cake.

To die for. (Photo by Dad)

In case anyone will be in Maine soon, DO NOT MISS:
Douin’s Market, New Sharon, Maine
Home of the Brownie Whoopie Pie

Finally, on our way home Sunday we went to the very famous Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, NH. We called ahead to get on the list, so we didn’t have to wait long. Polly’s is well-known for serving some of the best pancakes anywhere. Your server cooks them to order, and brings three at a time, then your next three, fresh and hot, when you’ve finished those. I chose a sampler so I could try a few of the many, many options–the best by a long shot were the cornmeal blueberry (the middle pancake in my stack, below).

The smoky, crisp bacon and the maple spread were my two favorite things, though! Also the placemats, maple leaf shapes cut out of red vinyl, and the mismatched chairs all painted bright red.

Great, now I kind of want bacon for dinner.

And you’ll like it.

When I was home in Oregon a couple weeks ago (catching this cold) my mom and I visited a good friend who lives on a little farm a few miles outside of town. Linda is a fanatic gardener, especially of roses, and she took me on a garden tour that ended with the culling of more peonies than I’ve ever seen in my life. I filled all of her vases and still took home enough to fill my parents’ entire house. Witness:

The water lilies are blooming, and they should be grateful for the chance, since Linda wants to take out their high-maintenance pond home:

The gooseberries are ripening, in their magically glowy way:

It’s a bower:

Our harvest (incomplete):

We saw this man on our way home. That is a…dirt unicycle?

One of the many tagalongs I found in the flowers (one earwig managed to evade us until falling into a coffee cup the next day!!):

All arranged:

Linda also had 4-foot calla lilies, so I arranged some of those in the Orla Kiely pitcher I’d brought my mom:

Such ruffles:

If that isn’t luxury, I don’t know what is.

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As long as I’m posting greenery-themed photos, I took these in Rome for the darling Germinatrix, who loves overgrown buildings.

So! Week 1, 2009:

-1 head of lettuce
-1 head tatsoi
-Mesclun
-Small bunch of arugula
-Very small amount of large spinach leaves
-1 bunch radishes
-1 pint strawberries (!)
-1 parsnip (Did he overwinter in the root cellar? Does he know I hate parsnips? Poor thing.)

Ben took beauty shots of many of the items, so let’s admire the strawberries:

And an extremely exciting** development at Stone Soup Farm this year was the acquisition of lots of chickens! So we got an egg share in addition to our veggies:

Later in the week I used the tatsoi in a simple stir fry with chicken. It would have been even simpler if the greens weren’t quite so organic, because it took me ages to get them completely free of the aphids and little hard-shelled bugs clinging to each leaf. But I would rather clean off pests than eat pesticides.

Tatsoi is an Asian field mustard variety that looks, to me, like a wedding bouquet:

While I cleaned the greens I marinated a couple chicken breasts in soy sauce, grated ginger and minced garlic. I’d sliced the chicken against the grain, which gave it a nice texture. (I’ll spare you raw chicken photos today.)

Then I sauteed the chicken in two batches in my wok. The strips were thin and cooked really fast; at the end I added in the greens and cooked them very briefly, until they wilted, and served the whole thing over sticky rice.

The chicken looks dry in that photo, but it wasn’t, actually. Considering that rice and chicken are the two things I’m not comfortable cooking, this came out remarkably well.

*While rewashing the many, many aphids off the tatsoi I explained to him that dashing the greens under water for a second doesn’t do the trick. Also that it’s better to just wash everything right before you use it. But I appreciated the effort!

**Eggstremely eggciting!

(Help.)

—

In other news, I don’t normally talk about books here but… whyever not? Last night I finally read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and it was grand. Lots of fun. I adore epistolary novels (must be the sensation of eavesdropping? And maybe the slight mystery of jumping into something already in progress and getting to know the characters in dribs and drabs), and now I want to reread 84, Charing Cross Road (which is actually not a novel; they are real letters) and Ella Minnow Pea. I was crushed when I first visited London and found that 84 Charing Cross Road is now a Pizza Hut or something similarly hideous. Anyway, if you enjoyed The Guernsey Longest Title Ever, you might check out those two: 84, CCR is the post-WWII correspondence between a writer in NYC and a bookseller in London (similar content and tone!). Ella Minnow Pea is an extremely funny/odd little book of letters by residents of an imaginary island off the coast of South Carolina, where the alphabet is being gradually outlawed by the government as letters drop off a statue of the island’s founder, the man who came up with the “quick brown fox…” sentence. Hee.

Oh, and I also painted a little canvas based on one of my photos from Rome. I’m trying to paint the way I sketch in my travel journals; looser and less worried about perfection. It’s in my Etsy shop!

Ahem. Anyway. Back in March I was in DC reporting a story and I had the pleasure of visiting with my friends Rachel and Jen. We ate dinner at Matchbox, and I basically bogarted the “Matchbox Chopped Salad,” a genius easy-to-eat BLT with pasta subbing in for bread. When I spotted a sale on grape tomatoes at Whole Foods in my post-flight stupor, I grabbed them and happily spent the next few days eating bowls of this salad. (See note at the end for instructions on making it last!)

Here’s the thing. I used a head of organic iceberg for this, and I really do think that crunch and ease-of-slicing is best. Tonight I have regular leaf lettuce or mesclun (from the 1st CSA box of the season!), but in general if you can find iceberg that is more green than white, it’s great here.

BLT Salad
4 servings

1 small head of good iceberg lettuce
1/4 red onion
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
1/2 lb. pasta, preferably a loose spiral or something (I used what I had on hand)
1/2-3/4 of a pound of good, thick-cut bacon (I used hickory-smoked, I think), cooked
Creamy dressing of your choice, to taste

I quartered the grape tomatoes and diced the red onion:

I cooked pasta and then rinsed it in cold water to cool it down, and added that in:

When you’re ready to serve, chop up the cooked bacon (I bake mine in a 400 degree oven until crispy, so it stays flat) and your lettuce, add them to the tomato mixture, and dress to taste. Hold back a few pieces of bacon to scatter on top. It doesn’t look like much but it is soooo good.

Note: To make this keep for a few lunches, as I did, only dress the portion you’re using the first night, using only that proportion of the lettuce and bacon. Store the pasta/tomato mixture in a tupperware and wrap the bacon and lettuce up separately; it takes 2 seconds to chop up some more lettuce and stir everything together with the dressing at lunch time.

(It really is cold out, though. Maybe I should do a absorption pasta with tomatoes and bacon and a salad on the side? Hmm. Oh! I think we got arugula from the CSA. I could stir that in at the end. But I’m craving the salad. Oh dear.)

“Pepper’s Famous Chili
As seen on Oh Happy Day!

1lb. ground beef
1 (15 oz.) can tomato sauce
1 (15 oz.) can kidney beans with liquid
1 (15 oz.) can pinto beans with liquid
1/2 c. diced onion
1/4 c. diced celery
2 med. tomatoes, chopped
1 tsp. cumin
1 T. chili powder (2 T. if you like it hot)
1 tsp. black pepper
2 tsp. salt
1 c. water

Brown beef and drain liquid. Crumble beef and put into a large pot mix in all other ingredients. Cook over low heat stirring every 15 to 20 mins. for 2 to 3 hours. (You could also use a slow cooker.)”

I bought everything at Trader Joe’s, so the sizes of the cans of beans were a bit varied, but I don’t think it matters. And one time I made it with stew beef instead of ground beef, with moderate success–you need more meat, it turns out, and Tom was visiting and we ran into a bit of a problem while browning the meat (too much liquid, too small a pan), so it wasn’t as flavorful as it could be. Both times, I made cornbread muffins to accompany the chili, first using an Epicurious recipe, then ceding control to Tom for his favorite recipe.

Ingredients:

The fresh stuff livens up all those cans of beans and sauce:

Honestly the cooking process doesn’t present many opportunities for photos. You brown the beef, then throw everything in together for a couple hours. (Incidentally, I didn’t have chili powder and cumin but I thought I did. I ended up using a taco seasoning mix from the awesome spice shop in Inman Sq., which worked just fine.)

Here’s the result with ground beef:

Good stuff, easy to make. Not bad! I must say, we were eating leftovers for what felt like a year. I think next time (and it took me two batches to think of it; I am so braindead lately!) I’ll freeze half.

–

Oh man, while Tom was visiting we hit the slightly pathetic array of thrift stores in the neighborhood, as per tradition, and the one good find was a  sweet white-enamel 8-inch Copco cast iron frying pan for a couple bucks. It was *filthy* but we soaked it in soapy water and scrubbed it with barkeeper’s friend and fine steel wool, and now it’s in really great shape. Love.

Before:

After:

Fantastic shape—I love the little pour spout.

–

Note: Why yes, I’m posting things I cooked in March, why do you ask? The good news is that I’m hoping to pull together a couple posts to publish while I’m away next week. In Italy. HURRAY! (Also? Panic. I get so freaked out before trips because I loathe packing, never feel like I have the right clothes, and actually never do have the right shoes. I’ve got a fresh sketchbook and some maps, we should be fine!)

And: 1 more month until CSA time! Thank god.