strawberry crisp

Growing up, my mom made one dessert more than any other: her apple crisp. It's a dessert that's hard to get tired of...tart granny smith apples covered in a few simple ingredients produces a dessert that's easy and delicious. We served it over ice cream at night and ate it for breakfast the next morning. The original recipe is from the Vegetarian Epicure, a 1970's cookbook that must've appealed to my mom's latent hippie tendencies. The best part about this recipe is that it's a crisp in it's purest form: no oats, no nuts, just apples and a buttery, sugary, crispy crust. It's fantastic. But you might've noticed that the picture above is of strawberries, not apples. That's because I found a great deal on strawberries at the Farmer's Market this week and decided to see if the recipe could translate into a strawberry crisp.

And did it? Well, it was certainly delicious. The only issue I encountered was that the strawberries turned very "jammy," and it was more of a strawberry mess than a strawberry crisp. I think, were I to make it again, I might double the "crisp" coating and do two layers of strawberries and crisp coating. Or I might be more vigilant about checking on the crisp in the oven, instead of just assuming that the baking time would be the same! Oh well...onto the recipe!

Strawberries and dry ingredients, ready to go in the pan. Guest appearance by our new Thai chili pepper plant!

Filling:
Approximately two "pints" of strawberries (give or take a few for eating...), halved
Juice of 1/2 a lemon (for squeezing over the strawberries after halved)
2 tbs. cold water

Topping:
1/2 c. flour
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. cold butter, cut into smaller pieces
dash of cinnamon
dash of nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350.
Once you've halved the strawberries, toss them in the lemon juice and let sit in a baking pan (I used a 9x9, but I actually think this recipe is pretty flexible about pan size...just nothing too deep, and make sure you have enough topping to cover the strawberries). When the berries are in the ban, pour the 2 tbs. of water over them.

With an electric mixer or a food processor, combine flour, sugars, butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Mix or process until you've got something that resembles a coarse meal. If you go ahead and feel the topping, you should be able to re-form the topping into a very loose "dough" by compressing it with your fingers. There's no need to do that, it's just helpful to know that you have the right consistency. Sprinkle this mixture over the strawberries. Don't mix the strawberries and the topping. Just sprinkle it over and lightly pat the topping down.

Cover the pan with foil and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 30. This will produce something very "jammy," with not very much "crisp." If you want it crispier, I recommend keeping an eye on the baking time (maybe only an additional 15, not 30 minutes without the foil?) or doing two layers of topping.

Want to make this with apples? Just replace the strawberries with 4-5 granny smith apples. Recipe adapted from the 1972 edition of The Vegetarian Epicure, by Anna Thomas.

beer + cheese homebrew tasting

I haven't been brewing my own beer for very long--in fact, it's been only about 4 months. But it's one of those addicting hobbies, in part because taking the first sip of your homebrewed beer is such an exciting moment that you really want it to happen again.

And, until now, I've been brewing beer in a relatively solitary fashion--just me and my boyfriend Matt, in his kitchen, drinking it ourselves and sharing it with our friends. But no longer! Last night, we went to Beer + Cheese's Homebrew tasting at 18 Reasons. Thanks to Jesse (of Beer & Nosh), I found out about this awesome get together, where home brewers and beer lovers get together to try home brewed beers. Since I wasn't 100% clear on how much beer to bring (and since I had to bring it with me to work), I brought a pathetic 2 bottles of our Belgain Golden Ale. If anything, it motivated us to brew more beer--both because our Golden Ale was well-received & to have more to share.

There's more pictures of the party below--if you recognize yourself or anyone else in a photo, let me know and I'll update the captions.

on the road: eating at palate in glendale, ca

As much as I love food, I've always held a grudge against Los Angeles restaurants. Actually, that's incorrect. I've always held a grudge against fancy L.A. restaurants. The food might be good, but often it's in competition with the hard-to-get to location, chi-chi atmosphere, and ridiculous prices. I'm making a really gross generalization here, but I don't often get that sense of craft and sincerity that comes with dining in Portland or San Francisco (maybe my two favorite dining towns). (Full disclosure: part of the reason I don't love L.A. restaurants is that in L.A. I get to eat at my parents' house, which pretty much beats the pants off most restaurants anyway). But, luckily, this past weekend, while spending a really wonderful weekend with my parents, I visited Palate Food + Wine in Glendale, CA.

Palate is a really exciting restaurant that celebrates great wine and delicious, seasonal foods. The menu when I visited this past weekend really reflected the cusp-of-spring: citrus, peas, quail, spring onions, parsnips, and spinach were well-represented on the menu.

We started off, however, with the Porkfolio, a selection of wonderful pig cuts with thin toasts and mustard on the side. I've had La Quercia proscuitto many times, and each time it's really wonderful. But at Palate, I fell in love all over again with Mortadella, a moist and fatty Italian sausage that, at Palate, has a very subtle rosemary and coriander taste to it (I like to call Mortadella "upscale balogna," much to everyone's dismay).

And though I'm normally a little freaked out by pickles (I know, I know), I really adored the picked spring onions, which were perfectly tart and salty all at once.


For dinner, I had the quail with bacon, wheat berries, pine nuts, golden raisins, and artichokes. This dish just called my name--every single thing on the plate makes my list of "top 20 foods of all time." Yeah, I like wheat berries that much. And it definitely delivered--the quail was so so perfect (and large--sometimes you get quail that's more bone than meat, but this one was perfectly-sized) that I definitely picked the meat off the tiny drumstick with my teeth. In a fancy restaurant. Sigh. ** When you eat at Palate, you have all sorts of seating choices. The front of the restaurant is a sort of classic L.A. restaurant space (pink lights, sexy booths). The back of the restaurant is a little more exciting--there's a room for large parties, a room that doubles as a wine store/tasting bar, and the "in between room" (where we were) where guests sit at high tables sandwiched between the cheese room and a beautiful refrigerated cellar.

I thought this seating would be strange, but it was actually a lot of fun to be in the middle of the action--we had a fantastic view of the cheese room, and, although we couldn't hear them, we were totally charmed by how much fun the two chefs inside the room were having. When we were ready for dessert, we decided to just walk in (they saw us peeking and encouraged us) to pick our cheeses. They were extremely helpful with suggestions, and we wound up with three wonderful cheeses--a blue cheese, a sheep's milk cheese, and a goat cheese.

Part of our emboldened excursion to the cheese room was thanks to two wonderful bottles of wine: a 2007 Testarossa Pinot Noir Palazzio and a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Brix Vineyards. They were recommended by our server and proved absolutely lovely.

what happened this weekend?

friday: barlata in oakland

papas bravas

mussels

blood sausage (!!)

sunday: dutch baby at home for breakfast

it was much poofier before i ran to get my camera.

(not pictured: too much wine at rhone rangers on sunday afternoon)

cooking ubuntu: carrot macaroni and cheese

Have I eaten at Ubuntu? Unfortunately not. Do I want to? Hell yes. I used to work the early Wednesday morning shift at Reed College's Paradox Café, the only major of perk of which was reading the NY Times food section. At the time, Frank Bruni was doing his coast-to-coast tour of new "Restaurants that Matter," and I was following along mostly because he liked one of my personal Portalnd favorites, Le Pigeon.


So I was kind of blown away to read this, Frank Bruni's review of Napa Valley's Ubuntu, a vegetarian restaurant and yoga studio. It's not like I don't love vegetables and yoga. It's just that the restaurant seemed to embody all sorts of clichés, something that Bruni acknowledges. And yet it's good. Because, of course, you can make great vegetarian food (and yoga is pretty great too).

This was before I sort of had a vegetable "revelation." In college, I was way too busy to hit up the Farmer's Market every weekend, and Trader Joe's was way too convenient to my house. But, living in San Francisco now, I actually have time to take advantage of the amazing produce we have year around. So I've gone a little crazy with tons and tons of fresh vegetables--which is just fine, right? I mean, no one's going to tell me to eat fewer vegetables, so I think I'm doing okay.

This all brings me back to Ubuntu. It's on my list of places to go, but I probably won't get out there for awhile. So when this month's Food and Wine showed up and there were a couple of Ubuntu recipes? Yeah, I'm making those.

Up first is the Carrot Macaroni and Cheese recipe. This recipe called to me because a) carrots are cheap and delicious b) I love macaroni and cheese. I actually love macaroni and cheese out of the box (Annie's) and my favorite homemade macaroni and cheese is possibly the richest, most fattening macaroni and cheese ever (heya, cream!). So I was open to changing it up and making my macaroni and cheese a little more well-rounded.

First things first: at the Farmer's Market I went on a hunt for carrots with the tops on. Carrots last forever with the leaves off--if you think about it, the leaves are the first thing to show signs of age (wilting, etc), so who knows how old those carrots without their tops are? Surprisingly, the only stall at the Civic Center Farmer's market that had carrots with their leaves still attached was also the same stall that I usually avoid because it's a little pricey. But this time, the prices were fair and the guy behind the stall threw in a free head of garlic. Which is always welcome in my kitchen.

gratuitous shot of my kiwi knife in action

check out the tops!

So, with my carrots, I acquired a navel orange (to be zested and juiced) and basil. The recipe calls for tarragon, but of course I completely forgot and just used basil because that's what I always pick up on the weekends. Tasted delicious, of course. On the non-produce front, I used a pretty generic brand of penne and a very nice cheddar cheese from Say Cheese in Cole Valley.

the recipe called for the zest to be peeled in strips--makes sense, since it's used to infuse the carrots with orangey-ness

mmm..cheesy cheese.

I'd say the most striking and original part of this dish is definitely the orange-infused carrot purée, which lends a really fantastic and fresh flavor to the sharpness of the cheddar (seriously, use very sharp cheddar) and the penne. In retrospect, I would've liked to really purée the carrot into a smoother texture (more time in the food processor or more time on the stove), but the thicker carrot mixture wasn't really a problem for casual weekday eating. All in all, I'm happy with the recipe: it turns macaroni and cheese into a lighter, more refreshing and complex dish.



Of course, since it's macaroni and cheese, we both slathered it in hot sauce (I'm a fan of Melinda's, since I used an entire Costco-sized bottle of Cholulua up recently. He's on a rotating schedule of hot sauces, but right now it's a Belizean Heat). Is it sacreligious to cover your healthy Ubuntu macaroni and cheese with hot sauce? I'm going to say no.

the finished product! delicious!