I’m in a library in a wee little town by the bridge to the Isle of Skye… Just wanted to check in, say hello, and thank everyone who voted in the Rockywold contest. We got 2nd place, so we’ll get to have a quick weekend at the lake over the summer!
I’m seriously working on how we could arrange to move here and run a small inn or something. We’re staying here, and I never want to leave. Don’t you think it would be wholesome to raise the baby by the sea?
Ok, kids. I’m headed off on this epic last-trip-before-baby. We’re driving around Ireland and Scotland for a week (I bought a new umbrella for the occasion), then flying down and renting a place just north of the Spanish-French border for another week. I cannot wait! (But I should really go finish packing.)
I’ve lined up a few things to post while I’m gone, and don’t forget to vote in the Rockywold contest (link in the box on the left sidebar). The voting is pretty out of control since there’s no IP address limiter in place, so I doubt I have much of a chance of winning, but never give up, right?
Finally, this is random but too cute not to share. Ben brought home this tiny container of my favorite local milk for me, since I wouldn’t use up the big container before we left:
Heeeee!
Have a great couple weeks! I’ll check in if I can, and will be back online in mid-May.
The voting is open in the contest I blogged about yesterday. Please vote here!!
Squam Lake in NH is perhaps my favorite place in the world, and there is a very amazing and wonderful camp there, Rockywold-Deephaven, that we fell in love with last summer. It’s an old school (founded in 1897), rustic place, and I just love it. They are having an Earth Day essay contest to win a stay there this summer, and I’m one of the five finalists!
To win I need to get the most votes between noon on April 28 and noon on May 4. And I need your help, big time: I’m going to be out of the country for more than half of the voting, so it will be harder for me to spread the word towards the end.
Here’s my essay, which had to be fewer than 140 words and answer the the question, “What is one of your best moments or memories in nature?”:
I grew up in Oregon during the bitter battle to save the spotted owls from logging, and when I was 10 I was lucky enough to see the owls in the wild. We hiked deep into the forest, an emerald-green cathedral with a carpet of moss and ferns. When we stopped, the leader handed me a live mouse and I clambered to the end of an enormous fallen tree. I stood, holding the mouse out by its tail, and the owl swooped out of nowhere, so silent I barely registered it until the mouse had vanished. I never forgot that golden-green moment, the speckled owl whooshing past, the trees looming up overhead. I’m grateful that the logging trucks of my childhood–each holding one huge tree–have vanished, but that forest and those owls have held on.
—-
Voting is now!! Please share with as many people as you can. Email it around! I am not ashamed to ask for help, here!
Vote here:
PLEASE vote for me, and please ask your friends to vote? We didn’t think we’d make it to the lake this summer because of preparations for the baby, and it would mean so much to either make one last trip before he’s born, or to go up and relax with him at the tail end of the season. Thank you, thank you, and please excuse the re-posts I will be putting up until the contest ends…
And so you understand why I’m so excited, here are some postcards from our weekend at Deephaven Camp last summer:
I am so obsessed with noodles, you guys. I always have been; my known weak spots are generally fried dough (donuts, elephant ears, churros, etc.), assorted other fried foods (clam strips, sausage-stuffed olives, duck fat fries, etc.), flat breads, and noodles. Mmmm, carbs and fat. Also garlicky kale, thank god.
A couple weeks ago I met my cousin Sara for lunch at Blue Ginger, out in Wellesley, where chef Ming Tsai has recently added a Noodle Bar to the lunch menu. I ordered the yakisoba (“Ramen Noodles and Garlic-Ginger-Tamari Sauce, served with carrots, bell peppers, onions, cabbage and scallions”), subbing in pork for chicken, and received a heavenly (spicy) bowl of chewy noodles and ridiculously flavorful minced or ground pork. I ate all the noodles and as much pork as I could shovel up with my chopsticks, but I had plenty leftover to mix with a package of ramen at home for dinner that night. (I left out the “flavor”/MSG packet and let the sauce on the pork do the work.) When Ben returned home from the trip that was allowing me to eat noodles multiple times a day without anyone knowing (until now), I decided I’d try to recreate the dish at home.
And by recreate, I mean I made noodles with pork. Flavors and vegetable content ended up being totally different. Perhaps because it was only now that I looked up the menu online and saw tamari listed as a key ingredient in the sauce. This will be an ongoing quest, unless Chef Ming decides he wants to share his recipe. I did meet him briefly at the restaurant, where he was styling food for a photo shoot, but I failed to beg for the recipe. He was super nice, though.
I patched together a sauce with pretty much everything in the fridge, plus a crazily hot black bean/chili sauce I grabbed at Whole Foods. I kept adding splashes of this and that, so I have no proportions or measurements, but I used hoisin (fatal mistake), soy, rice wine vinegar, the black bean/chili stuff, sesame oil, and maybe some of the chili-garlic sauce I keep around. Eh.
I chopped up spring onions and napa cabbage, minced garlic and grated ginger.
Then I cooked about a pound of ground pork in the wok, with half of the garlic and ginger. At the end I poured in some of the sauce and cooked it off to coat the pork.
Set that aside, then stir-fried the onions with the rest of the garlic/ginger.
And then the cabbage.
Once the cabbage was wilting, I added in the rest of the sauce and got it simmering.
And then the unruly mass of the cooked noodles entered the scene.
OMG. I really need to get a source for the delicious square chinese noodles my mom always used. The ramen were SO hard to deal with, all curly and tangled together. I adjusted the flavoring with more soy at that point, because the hoisin had made everything too sweet.
The final result was tasty, but it didn’t hold a candle to the Blue Ginger dish. I will track down the right noodles and some tamari and give it another go when we’re back from Europe.
Does anyone have a noodle dish they swear by? I have a good-looking recipe from my mom to try out, but I welcome all suggestions.
A month or so ago I was honored when I got an invite to write an “In the Kitchen With” column for Grace’s wonderful Design*Sponge. Since spring was finally peering around the corner, I made absorption pasta, that old favorite of mine, with asparagus, pancetta, lemon zest and feta. The post is up today, so check it out!
And for those of you who came over from Design*Sponge today, welcome! Sorry about the site crash earlier; the volume was a bit much for the server, apparently. If you have any questions for me, please feel free to ask over at formspring!
This is a special one, guys. Two years ago Ben and I went to visit my wonderful great-aunt Kay, my maternal grandmother’s sister. She was 91 or so, and I was there to talk genealogy and take on the role of family historian. We spent a few hours going through photos and family trees, and when we first arrived she dashed into the kitchen and emerged bearing an enormous tray with a complete tea service and a platter of fresh cookies. I’ve never seen Ben move so fast in his life; he was over there and carrying the tray in about a second and a half. But I’ll never forget the image of her, so tiny, coming out of the kitchen with that huge heavy tray as if she weren’t rapidly approaching the century mark.
She had baked the cookies that morning, and with one whiff I knew they were the same sugar & spice cookies I grew up eating. I had recently asked my mom for the recipe but she couldn’t find it, so I asked Aunt Kay to let me copy it down.
Me with Aunt Kay (one of the many Katherines to precede me in the family tree) at that last visit:
Though she’d been in wonderful health, Aunt Kay died unexpectedly last year at 92, and her husband of 65+ years, George, died this winter. A month or so ago I got two big boxes in the mail from one of my mom’s sisters, with my name written on the side in pencil, in Aunt Kay’s writing. She had put aside all the miscellaneous family history stuff for me—piles of photos and a crazy assortment of documents, including the bill of sale from my great-grandfather’s purchase of his shoe store. Sorting everything out is one of my urgent to-do items before the baby arrives.
After all this time, I still hadn’t made the cookies. And for some reason I’d mentioned them to Ben, who, as we’ve established, is the baker in these parts, and while I was making dinner the other night he whipped up the batter.
Recipe first:
Sugar & Spice Cookies
My Mom says this was a recipe her mother made all the time. She emailed me: “One time a neighbor who raised eggs asked Mom for a recipe for customers and they used that one, so it’s kind of famous.” My aunt says it’s a Deerfield (Old Deerfield, MA, where they grew up) recipe, in general. Either way, it’s easy and delicious; you will not believe how good these smell.
3/4 cup shortening (we used butter)
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2 cups flour, sifted
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon ground cloves
3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
Preheat oven to 350.
Combine wet ingredients (cream the butter and sugar together, then add egg and molasses).
Combine the dry ingredients and then mix into the wet batter.
This is a very sticky, stiff dough.
According to Aunt Kay: “Drop by teaspoons on a cookie sheet. Flatten with a fork.” I took over from Ben at this point, and followed what I thought I remembered of my mom’s method, rolling the cookies into balls and dipping them in sugar before pressing down with the fork, or not.
Basically, I knew my mom’s didn’t have fork ridges. Once I asked her about it, I learned that she pressed them down with a buttered, sugared glass. Ah-ha! Ridges are for peanut butter cookies in my family. I tried a few ways, and used both granulated and sparkling sugar to see which was better.
Bake 10-12 minutes. DO NOT OVERCOOK, says Aunt Kay. The cookies are very soft when they first come out, but they firm up, and you want crisp edges and chewy insides.
Granulated sugar, pressed down with fork:
Sparkling sugar, no pressing down:
Side by side:
I preferred the pressed-down ones; the thicker ones got a little overcooked on the edges before the middles set. Ben likes those better, though! So compatible.
One more photo, for the road. This is my grandparents’ wartime wedding. My mom’s parents, Tom (who I never met) and Meg, are on the left. Aunt Kay is second from the right, with my grandfather’s brother.
In the boxes I got in the mail were two letters written by my grandmother to Aunt Kay right before she got married. My grandfather wrote snotty comments in the margin in pencil. They’re a hoot; I need to transcribe (and scan) them some day.
Late dinner tonight. Time for a cookie or two…
Every spring the maple trees on our block pop out neon green pompoms, then a few days later push forward tiny new leaves. Within another couple days the little accordion folds have turned into full-on leaves a few inches wide, but I love the in-between stage when the buds are so bright and delicate. To my delight, the neighbors responsible for one of the trees did some pruning during that exact stage this year, and I was able to swipe branches from the yard waste bags on the curb.
Is there an unexpectedly beautiful sign of spring in your neighborhood? I love all the flowering trees, of course, but it’s a shame to overlook things like these maple buds.
Sometimes all I really want is a giant bowl of greens. Garlicky kale is my favorite, or maybe chard, but spinach will do, too. (Not the baby stuff, that goes mushy too fast. Save it for salads.) But this dinner was really inspired by the divine confluence of the arrival of a care package from my mom, containing a pair of “Poach Pods,” and the simultaneous arrival of an early egg share from the farm. Fresh gorgeous eggs! I silicone helmet that is supposed to make poaching eggs foolproof! Clearly I needed to find something to top with poached eggs.
Spinach. Wilted spinach salad with bacon dressing. Maybe some cherry tomatoes. Toast. This was an easy plan! Of course, I ended up making more of a sauté than a wilted spinach salad, but who cares? We were happy.
Once I had cooked the bacon and softened the red onion, I added in red wine vinegar, a pinch of brown sugar, and a forkful of dijon mustard, and stirred it together with the rendered bacon fat to make a dressing/sauce.
I threw in the tomatoes, which I’d quartered, and cooked them a little bit. (This was a mistake; should have added them at the same time as the spinach.) Then in went half of the very vigorous and enthusiastic spinach. Once there was room, I added the other half.
I cooked that on low heat until it was wilted.
Meanwhile, the Poach Pods!! Wonderful for adorning grapefruits and salt cellars; also great for poaching eggs!
And let’s discuss those eggs. Oh my GOD. I have missed the farm eggs so much over the winter. No matter what fancy organic natural free range heaven-sent eggs I bought from Whole Foods, the yolks were pale and the whites were runny after six months of eggs from the farm. But back to the pods. You oil them (to prevent the eggs “sticking like glue,” according to my mom), break an egg in each, and then set them afloat in an inch and a half of simmering water. Cover the pan, wait four to six minutes, and voila! Poached eggs!
I had a surprise when I cracked open the two huge eggs I’d chosen from the carton: they BOTH had double yolks!
Off to sea:
Finished, if slightly overcooked (my fault, I panicked because of the double yolks):
You scoop the eggs out with a spoon, and they plop onto whatever you’re serving them with in perfect little domes.
The eggs were delicious, despite not being quite runny. Light and creamy and fluffy. Ben claims he hates eggs, but the farm ones don’t seem to count. They “don’t taste eggy,” he says. He’s right, they taste like heaven. I have used 8 of the dozen since Thursday, pacing myself AND going out of town for the weekend. Just look at the color of those yolks and tell me you aren’t dying to get your hands on some!
I know, it’s going to be 70 degrees this weekend, and all you want to eat are salads. I’m just going to put this out there: Consider making a meatloaf for the leftovers alone. Meatloaf is America’s pâté! Cold meatloaf makes one of the world’s best sandwiches for your celebratory Spring picnic.
I use my mother-in-law’s recipe, which she cooks in a pyrex instead of a loaf pan. It makes all the difference in the world. Recipe is here.
We ate it for dinner on one of this week’s final disgusting sopping wet days, when warm food felt just right. Roasted broccoli and mashed rutabaga (yum!!) on the side:
I smugly ate sandwiches for the remainder of the week. The last piece awaits today, but since Ben has the day off of work I might have to fight him for it.
Enjoy the gorgeous weekend if you’re out here on the East Coast! I think we earned it, after all this awful rain. And last time there was that crazy 70-degree Saturday, Ben and I drove up to Dixville Notch, in Northern NH, and went snowshoeing. Oops.
There were some rough bits towards the bottom:
But for the most part, plenty of only-slightly-squishy snow:
I was obsessed with this gorgeous shelf fungi; look at those soft shades of mink brown! (Grace, avert your eyes for two pictures.)
We were told to take a route that would take us past this crazy ice “sculpture,” formed by water spraying out of a pipe punched full of holes, all winter long.
I hope those are the last pictures I post of snow until next January. From my mouth to God’s ears.