Pizzas Have Ridges!

     While Cyrus and I may be on summer break, true summer decided not to show it's face today.  Despite the occasionally wet and consistently cloudy weather, which Cy described as being like Hanoi, I went ahead with a plan for grilled pizza.

     We've grilled pizza with this recipe before, though when I stretched out the dough from this batch, all three pies were wetter and more elastic than normal, leading to fears that the pie would slip straight through the grate of the grill (talk about déjà vu).  While fretting about losing the pies to the hellish depths of a brazier filled with charcoal, I prepared the toppings.  There would be two pepperoni pizzas, and beet, feta and honey pizza.
     Once the grill was hot, Dad and I stood under the gray sky.  I held a cookie sheet with the dough spread out on it by the side of the grill, Dad reached out and flipped it on and for a few tense moments we watched and waited for it to slide through.  It didn't slide all the way through, only enough to create a delicious ridged side for the toppings.

Beets, feta cheese, and honey pizza

     The beet, feta, honey pizza was especially good, succulent, savory and, where the honey pooled in the ridges left by the grate, incredibly sweet.  Now, after dinner, we are packing for our trip to Italy.  We leave later this week, and will return on the 7th, another Sunday.  I predict we'll be to jet-lagged for anything special, though we might make an attempt as the week after that we will find ourselves on the Klamath River, rafting with cousins.  The week after that, the rest of the family will be here, but I'll be missing, off at a high altitude, cross country running camp in the Steens Mountains.  In August, I hope, we will finally return to a normal schedule for Sunday Dinners.

Back to Normal

     Returning to the routine of Sunday Dinner's has been hard, and so while I would have liked to return with an especially spectacular meal, we all agreed some simple, classic burgers were the best choice for this sunny and beautiful not-technically-summer day.
     In addition to the burgers, I put together a batch of basil-lemonade, and rootbeer floats are in the post-dinner works.  All told, an incredibly simple meal to put together after a day spent hiking in the Gorge, and a wonderful one to eat on our front porch in the shade.  It was good to get back to normal.

It's Just Life

My grandmother is dying.  By the time you read this, she will probably be dead.  Cancer in her lungs and liver are killing her, the mid-century parties of her youth catching up fast.

She lives four blocks from my family, a short, shady walk.  Today, I went to see her.  She is bed-ridden, barely conscious.  Each breathe rattles in and out.  I sat with my parents, and held her hand for an hour, before stepping out.  I don’t know yet, but it might be the last time I see my grandmother alive.

It was a beautiful day out, so I took a walk.  One of my friends described the weather to me as being “like a hand dryer in a public restroom: slightly warm and a slightly windy.”  Despite the imagery he evokes, it was an absolutely beautiful day.  Warm, sunny, literally not a cloud in the sky.  I wandered a little bit, and ended up sitting at the top of a bluff, overlooking the Willamette River.  I sat down in a field of tall grass, and while I didn’t really want to, it was an amazing spring day, I thought about my grandmothers cancer.

On the Tuesday of spring break, I had gone hiking to the top of Multnomah Falls with my friend Rachael.  While we were ostensibly on spring break, that third week of March is as wintry as any other in Oregon, and that day was cold enough that we wore winter coats for the strenuous hike.

When we got home early in the afternoon, I walked in to find my mom eating tachos and drinking a Coke.  For the uninitiated, tachos are tater tot-nachos, a rare treat for my fit, middle-aged mother.  The Coke too, is something she indulges in only rarely, and it was immediately clear something was not as it ought to be.

Two weeks after my grandmother’s cancer diagnosis, she decided she was too sick to drive, leaving her baby-blue 2002 Toyota Prius (with requisite old lady bumper stickers for public libraries and all-classical radio stations) in front of our house.  Three days later, I turned sixteen, and the week after that I got my drivers license.  Now, as my grandmother slipped from the adult world, I was taking another step into it.  I had a car, and even if my parents are very adamant, “It’s not your car!” my mom said, reading over my shoulder as I type, I am the one carrying the key on my keychain.

I turned sixteen, and got a car and a drivers license all in early April, as winter segued to that rainy in-between season segued to spring.  As time went on, my grandmother’s condition continued to deteriorate.  By the last week of April my friends and I were eating lunch outside every day, and my grandmother spent all day in an La-Z-Boy in her living room.  She was on full-time hospice care by then, allowing the cancer to take her with the knowledge that her time had come.

Now, I suspect she has only days, if not hours, remaining.  As I write on a Sunday evening, I think she is not likely to survive to see Wednesday.  While I sat in the field on the bluff, after seeing my grandmother, two flies buzzed around my head.  While I am no expert on the behavior of Musca domestica, it seemed to me that these flies were mating.  These two flies were just completing the circle of life, of birth and death and new life and more death and more life.  A third fly, dead, lay in the grass at my feet.

As the Earth circled the sun, winter became spring.  My grandmother’s winter is rapidly ending, and my spring is beginning.  While I will be saddened by my grandmothers death, I won’t be.  Flies come, flies go, seasons come, seasons go.  People too, come and go.  I will go someday, it’s inevitable.  C’est la vie, as the French say.  It’s just life.

Postscript:

Mimi passed away May 6, less than a day after I finished this.  Sunday Dinner's should return next week in full force.

The Four C's (of Curry): Chicken, Curry, Coconut Milk and Cake

     Yesterday was my sixteenth birthday, and today I was busy with an all-day lifeguard re-certification class.  While I was at my class, Dad picked out a chicken curry from Mark Bittman's Mini Minimalist collection.

     It was relatively quick, easy and simple.  We chopped two onions and cooked them with curry powder, adding coconut milk, chicken and tomatoes in that order.  We served the curry on a bed of rice, with asparagus on the side.
     The curry was good, but it lacked the punch of an excellent curry, and it was because of this that it didn't compare to our family favorite curry recipe, which truly brings the full force of the potent Indian spice mix to forefront.  For dessert, we've got leftover birthday cake.

Back in a Bit

     Due to some events that are taking up most of the family's time, we'll be taking a short break from Sunday Dinners.  We should be back in a few months at most, so keep checking back each Sunday for our return!  Cyrus and I hope to return more energized and full of ideas for exciting new meals.  Until then, keep eating! We'll be back soon.

Papa Haydn's

     Memaw and Bamp are in town this weekend, so we went to Papa Haydn's for dinner tonight. Cyrus has suggested he'll make pirogi next weekend, however.

Sunday On the Road

     Sunday this week and last have been busy for us.  Last week our cousins were in town, and this week Mom, Cy and I were driving back from Vancouver, B.C. most of the day.  We'll be back next week, however, to celebrate my 16th birthday.

Salad. Meat Salad.

     A little over a month ago, at the swim team potluck before our the State Championships, my friend Zach brought a dish which could only have emerged from the thickets that are the brain of a teenage boy: meat salad.
     It was a version of what some of my other friends would call a "barnyard massacre," beef, chicken, and pork in one dish.  Zach's version was steak, grilled and sliced into strips, bacon, cut into pieces, and chicken, pan-fried in the bacon grease.  Mine was the same concoction, with spaghetti sauce on the side for dipping.

     Meat salad is, to say the least, a little bit revolting.  It's something about mixing the flesh of different animals.  At the same time, what's better than bacon, or steak, or fried chicken?  What's better than all three together?

     Mom called the meat salad "disgusting," and I agree it is not a great mix of flavors.  But as a novelty, meat salad is something well worth eating, not unlike a stick of deep-fried butter.  Just don't expect the flavor to blow your mind.

Twenty Three

     Today we had to pay for that wonderful day in November where we got a twenty-fifth hour in our day.  Somehow, even though it is only a single hour and we actually sleep through the change, daylight savings always has an outsize effect on an otherwise normal Sunday.   Today we rose "late," ate a late brunch, and struggled through the day -- late.
     Sometime, late in the afternoon, Cy picked out a simple spaghetti and meatballs recipe.  Cyrus assures me there was no Czech horse meat in the meatballs (but Ikea told me the same thing).  The sauce on the meatballs (and spaghetti) was strangely simple and simply strange.  Onions and a can of tomato paste where not so strange, but two cups of milk are not often found in a recipe for spaghetti sauce.

     The sauce, rich, creamy and flavored with the tomatoes, was excellent.   It was an exceedingly simple meal, and an excellent one at that.

Birthday Boy Calls the Shots

     Today was Dad's birthday, so when he came to me with a meal plan for dinner, I was happy to oblige.  The recipe was a sort of banh mi sandwich, with the meat being grilled on shish kebabs.
     The grill heated up quickly, leaving me scrambling to skewer the meat and get it out on the hot coals.  As with any meat on the grill, especially sirloin steak cut into bite-size pieces, we were back inside, slicing open baguettes and filling them to make surprisingly large sandwiches.
     Chewing through the thick bread and steak combination left us little room for conversation, but we still managed to sing happy birthday before digging into the chocolate-peanut butter cake Mimi made.

Three Years of Dinners

Tonight: Burgers

     Three years ago this weekend was the first weekend of the blog.  In the past three years I've written one-hundred and fifty-four blog posts, and Cyrus and I have each cooked somewhere in the range of eighty meals.  We've made hamburgers, and pizza, crickets and pirogi, sushi and steak and squid.  Our dinners have coincided with the death of Osama bin Laden and a solar eclipse.  We have made countless memories.
     There is no better way to describe the last three years of my life than through the lens of Sunday Dinners.  Every experience, every memory of mine from the past three years happened alongside these once-weekly dinners.  When I was finishing middle school, I was making tilapia and a mango salad.  When I first got glasses we were making stuffed burgers.  After our trip to Spain we made catalonian food.
     The weekly meals have provided a regular event to connect our memories to.  Many of those memories, both directly and indirectly related to the food, I am sure I will remember for the rest of my life, and over the next few years I am sure there will be more well worth remembering.

Spring Greenery

     Friday and Saturday this week were the State Swimming Championships.  They were held at Mount Hood Community College, in the same pool were we have the City Championships in the summer.  At this time of year though, the pool is kept under a giant canvas bubble, sixty feet high and held up by air pressure.  On Friday, while walking into the bubble's airlock, a teammate suggested to me that it was such a nice day that we didn't need the bubble.
     Saturday had it's fair share of nice weather too, but with intermittent downpours and rainbows.  I figured it was a nice enough day to break out the grill, despite consistent clouds.  We made lamb chops,  with a cucumber salad, and grilled some asparagus on the side.

     While Dad spiced the lamb chops, I peeled, sliced, and squeezed water from a half dozen cucumbers, and tossed them with salt, fresh mint and lemon juice.  With the grill ready, we went outside, crouched around the fire and watched the meat sizzle, the fire flare up.  Our fronts, facing the fire, were warm, our backs cold against the weather.
     The lamb chops and asparagus were both done after only a few minutes, at which point it was time to run inside and dish up the food.

     The lamb chops were excellent, even if it was a little tough to get the meat off the bone.  Served on a bed of the cucumber salad, the lamb chops felt like spring.  The bed, cucumber salad, was fresh, and salty.  It tasted like it belonged later in the year, in the early summer.  It was a spring meal, green and fresh and promising, yet it is early enough in the year that that promise was of the days to come, warm and sunny and fresh and green.

Rice, Fried

     We stumbled upon a small storefront today, the Pacific Pie Company.  Housed in an old warehouse, we decided to take a gamble and walked into the restaurant.  As the name suggests, the entire menu is pies, pot pies, australian meat pies and pasties make up most of the menu, while classics like key lime and chocolate peanut butter are the dessert menu.
     The beef and stout meat pie I had was stunning, as were the others.  I would have liked to make some sort of meat pie tonight, but that will have to wait.  This weekend was Organicology, an organic produce conference, so Dad is having a business dinner, and Mom asked that I make something that wouldn't require another set of hands.
     I opted for fried rice, which Mom makes occasionally, choosing it for it's simplicity, and use of two-week old leftover ham.  It took only a few minutes prepare garlic, ginger, carrots, red bell peppers, onions and the leftover ham.  As the vegetables and rice fried together, I scrambled an egg.  When that was ready, I added it, the ham and some soy sauce.  Dinner was ready.

     As far as I'm concerned, dinner turned out quite well.  The flavors were calm together, nothing clashing, and the ham bites were explosions of flavor.  The greatest part, we've got leftovers for breakfast tomorrow.

This Game Has Wings

     Sometimes, things we can't predict make a Sunday particularly memorable, things like slicing off a chunk of my finger (January 2, 2011) and the operation to kill bin Laden (May 1, 2011).  Sometimes, things we can predict make a Sunday particularly memorable, like a solar eclipse (May 20, 2012) and and the Super Bowl.
     Cyrus, obviously, knew the Super Bowl was coming, and decided to make wings.  Spicy, with celery sticks and cooling blue cheese dip, they were more or less what Cyrus was looking for, if not the most traditional wings.

     The cooking started just before kickoff, and when I went back to the kitchen in search of a first quarter snack, I could smell the grill.  The wings came in during the second quarter, and lasted only a few moments.  In addition to the all important celery sticks there were baked beans on the side.

They Moved a Bridge, We Ate Hash

The bridge on moving day.

     We've had beautiful, cold weather this weekend.  On Saturday, engineers moved the Sellwood Bridge a few dozen feet north to make way for it's replacement.  Despite the cold, hundreds turned out by the waterfront to watch the bridge move, though it's progress -- reported to be six feet an hour -- was so infinitesimal it could not be seen. Today was equally sunny, and even colder.  North-facing roofs are still frosted.
     Originally, our cousins Drew and Anna were going to spend this long weekend with us, but were forced to cancel.  Dad and I had already planned out a meal for them however, so we decided to go ahead with it.  It, is a sausage hash recipe from Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's "Gift off Southern Cooking" Cookbook, a family favorite.

     The hash consists of onions, celery, and sausage in addition to the potatoes.  Now, in the latter stages of cooking, everything simply rests in a pan, bathing in the cream and chicken stock.

     The hash was excellent - simple ingredients prepared well. Warm, rich and wintry, the ketchup on top made it feel like it belongs in the winter of an era before we could get fruits and veggies from the southern hemisphere in winter.  If you have a potato and a few vegetables, hash is definitely the meal to make.

An Elusive Cheese

     Friday, after my swim meet was finished and we had picked Mom up from work, the family went to Uno Mas, a new taqueria on NE Glisan.  Cyrus ordered one taco which he spoke glowingly of, and since my hunger had not yet been sated, I ordered one more taco, the one Cyrus recommended.
     The fried cheese taco was very good, but the moment I bit into the semi-soft, white cheese, I went back in time.  I had tasted that cheese before, in a small village in Costa Rica.  It was in a sort of breakfast quesadilla, which I suddenly remembered that I had loved.
     It was nearing closing time for the taqueria, and went to the counter to ask what kind of cheese they used.  Let's say that since the waiter wasn't there, I asked the chef what kind of cheese they used.  He didn't speak English, so I asked him in Spanish, "Qué tipo de queso use?"  His answer, was a kind of cheese I had never heard of before, asadero.
     Asadero is semi-soft, in between cheddar and brie.  It's also squeaky, and is, according to Wikipedia, similar to un-aged monterey jack.  I instantly knew what I wanted to make tonight.

     The breakfast quesadilla my host-mother made for me in Costa Rica was two thick, fresh, homemade tortillas, dipped in egg, like one was going to make french toast of them, and turned into a grilled cheese sandwich with what I now know to be asadero in the middle.  It was amazing, in the early tropical morning, and was accompanied by sides of sliced papaya and mango which I had picked from the trees just outside the front door the night before.

     So today, we went in search what turned out to be an elusive cheese.  We first checked a tienda on Powell, to no avail.  We drove a little ways down the road to Food 4 Less, figuring if an ethnic food item existed, we could find it there.  Much to our dismay, we discovered that Food 4 Less had closed, apparently for good.  Checking decreasingly likely stores, we made stops at Fred Meyer, and New Seasons, not surprisingly, neither store had what we were looking for.
     Returning home to cook, we were forced to settle for other kinds of cheese, a mix of queso oaxaca and monterey jack.  I mixed the masa harina according to the recipe on the back of the package, and set to pushing them into tortilla shape and cooking them.  Most of the tortillas Dad made more traditional quesadillas with, and I took a few to make Costa Rican style.  I beat an egg, and dipped the tortillas before throwing them in a pan.  I would have liked to put a slice of semi-soft asadero cheese in the quesadilla, but I had to settle for a mix of grated queso oaxaca and monterey jack.
     After several minutes, I flipped the quesadilla out of the pan and onto the plate.  The two Costa Rican quesadillas I ate were both nearly spot on.  The one thing I know it was missing was the right kind of cheese.  The tortillas, dipped in the egg, were just the way I had them in Costa Rica.
     Mom has said she will continue to search for the illusive asadero cheese.  If we find it, I know I'll try to create these again.  They were too good two and a half years ago to pass up finding now.

Taking Us Half A World Away

     For the last Sunday Dinner of 2012, Cyrus broke out a meal from one of his favorite genres: Vietnamese food.  Not only that, but he used two of the four mini-Mark Bittman cookbooks that Uncle Clark and Aunt Diane got me for Christmas.  The main course, Vietnamese lemon grass pork.  The small, pork medallions they made took barely half an hour for them to make.  The other dish Cy picked out, a pan fried noodle cake, was also very quick.

     When we all sat down to eat, Dad and Cyrus had also prepared a wonderful salad, with a handful of frilly greens, and some of satsuma sections to liven the basic lettuce.  The noodle cakes were hard to eat with a fork, but once you got them to your mouth they were quite good.  The curly, relatively sweet noodles set off the soy sauce topping, which was flung about by the now-crunchy noodles.  The pork was good, garlicky, with just a hint of the lemon grass underneath.
     It would have been better, Dad speculated, if it had been prepared by a woman squatting over a small grill on the cracked, buckled sidewalk half a world away on the streets of Hanoi.  Or we could have just grilled it ourselves.  Though, at this time of year, our own grill also feels like it's half a world away.

Simple, Does Not Mean Boring

     With Christmas just around the corner, it felt like a simple, not too big meal was more appropriate.  This morning, with no meals that wouldn't stuff us full to bursting coming readily to mind, Mom stuck a ripped out magazine page in front of me.  She said, "Does this look good?"
     "Sure," I said, only a handful of words from the recipe had registered, but two of them were "grits" and "andouille."  And the recipe said it only took half an hour.
     Dad and I started cooking around five, washing kale and stripping out the stems.  We boiled the kale, which was a little odd, but worked very well.  We made cheesy grits, and cooked the andouille sausage in a frying pan, throwing shallots and red bell peppers in the drippings.  Once the vegetable were soft, we threw back in the sausage, as well as the kale to warm up.  After a few moments, and the grits were ready, we tossed it all together on plates.
     The collection of kale, red bell peppers, grits and sausage made a festive sight, and a festive meal.  The warm, thick, creamy grits, were right at home with the sausage, and all the veggies toned down the fat of the grits and sausage.  Mom and Dad's favorite part, (and any other parent's I'm sure) was that any kid will eat kale (or broccoli, or brussel sprouts, for that matter) when it's covered in the delicious, concoction that is cheesy grits.  For a quick, easy, small meal, this one took us all by surprise.

One-man Pirogi

     Dad's in Sinaloa, with the wildly fun, interesting and slightly dangerous job of looking at zuchinni in hoop-houses.  Mom and I figured Cy would take the week a little easier, Cy doesn't roll that way though.  Instead, he's single-handedly put together one of our favorite, most complex dinners.
     There are three plates of pirogi, ready to be cooked, and a pan full of onions sits on the stove, alongside one of sauerkraut, warming up, and kielbasa for the three of us.  It's cold and rainy outside, though not cold enough for snow.  There's a fire in the fireplace, next to the tree, with it's warm lights and shiny ornaments.  It's not yet five, and dark as night outside.  Inside, in here, the bright colored lights cut the gloom of a December day.  Holiday lights do something to the season that normal, yellow, lights cannot.

    After the flurry of activity right before the end of any meal, Cy dished up the pirogi, sauerkraut and kielbasa for us, as we set up the Elf.  We ate dinner in front of the TV, with one of our favorite holiday movies.

Cal Pep, Their Recipes

     Earlier this week, I got an e-mail from Cal Pep, a restaurant in Barcelona with which we became enthralled when we visited about a year and a half ago.  While there, we signed up for their e-mail newsletter, and at irregular intervals since then, we've received recipes, translated into three different languages, from them.  Despite the fact that I, we, consider Cal Pep one of our favorite restaurants, we've never before attempted any of their recipes.
     The recipes are written for professional chefs, truly intended for the guys working behind Cal Pep's counter, and Catalan and Spanish have cooking euphemisms that Google translate quite simply doesn't understand.  Ultimately, we decided that a "coffee cup of sherry vinegar" meant an espesso size cup, or just a little bit.
     After guessing on all sorts of details, the two dishes we were making, "Chanterelles with Vinaigrette" and "Tuna Steak with Tomato and Pepper" (Cal Pep's names) came together.  Both were good, capturing the essence of the food at Cal Pep.  Rich in olive oil, with a spice burning long after you'd swallowed, they tasted like the real thing.  But it wasn't the real thing, not without the cooks behind the counter, and the several dozen people from countries near and far breathing down your neck for a seat.  Without the cacophony, the cramped space, the laughter in half a dozen languages, the flames shooting up from the stove, it wasn't quite like the restaurant.  Despite this, it was still good food.