An Orchestrated Affair

     Last night Cy and I went to a friends house for a sleepover because Mom and Dad were at the auction for Cy's school.  Our friends' parents weren't supposed to get back until midnight and we were playing Halo Reach.  Liam, the older of our friends came upstairs and told us he had thrown the pizza from Papa Murphy's into the oven, it would be ready in a minute.  The sounds of a battlefield on another planet quieted for just a second, and we heard a door click closed barely audible.
     "Did you hear that?" I whispered.  They nodded in return.  "I think someone's in the house."
      We went into their parent's bedroom, where we closed and locked the door.  Cyrus, Liam and Logan hid on the far side of the bed, and I took refuge behind a dresser.
     Liam's first words to the 911 operator were rather memorable.
     "Excuse me, I think someone's in my house."  Downstairs we could hear footsteps, drawers were opening and closing.  It sounded as if they were wearing thick soled boots.  At some point, I thought, they would come upstairs to see if they could find something other than silverware.  Or microwaveable meals.  We heard the microwave beeping.  Looking around in the dark I saw the solid, hard plastic body of a Nerf Gun, left from a Nerf battle earlier.  "Hey," I thought, "when I hear them coming up the stairs, I'll pick this up and go stand by the door so I can whack them over the head with it when they come in.
     After about ten minutes, we heard a knock at the door.  We heard the door open, and a police officer ask a question.  I couldn't hear what the other person said, but I recognized the voice.
     " Hey guys," I said, " it's your Dad!"
     After the cops left, we ate the pizza and the carrots (which had come out of the microwave) and recounted the story a number of times over.  It made me think of two things, the other time (almost a year ago) that 911 was called.  Remember the turkey frier incident? And I realized I needed to think of a vegetable for tonight, so, in addition to fish cakes and loaded baked potatoes, I decided to create a prepared carrot dish of my own.

    The potatoes are out of the oven and are cooling off before I scoop them out.  Mimi has graciously taken charge of shredding and de-boning the fish, and the carrots are on the stove in a pot of butter, maple syrup, and cinnamon.  In the potatoes I plan to add butter, cream and cheese.

     The potatoes have been scooped, mashed, mixed with butter, cheese and cream and are back in the oven.  The fish are ready to be made into cakes, though Mimi refuses to work on that while I blog.  The carrots are nearing readiness and the sun has just peeked out from behind the clouds for the first time today.  Now if only we weren't hung up on the problems of not operating with Dad as a sous chef.

     The carrots are nearly done.  All the butter and maple syrup has caramelized and the carrots are coated in a dark sticky layer of wonderfulness.  The fishcakes and potatoes will be ready in a few minutes and I should start the tartar sauce.

     The carrots were amazing.  They were sweet, with a vague sticky syrupy-ness,  and just a hint of cinnamon on your tongue.  The potatoes were quite similar.  You could taste the butter and cream, but only because you expected them to be there, as is standard issue in baked potatoes.  In between bites though, you could just catch a whiff of the orange cheddar as it slid off your tongue and back down your throat.  The fishcakes too were excellent.  One of the biggest problems we've had with fishcakes to date is the problem of keeping them crunchy, but not dry.  These fishcakes seemed to overcome that because they had gotten cooked for a much shorter period of time and after being formed we covered both sides in panko crumbs.  This whole meal was an accidentally well orchestrated affair (much unlike last night) where nothing overpowered, but only gave a hint of itself.  If only everything could work that well!

     Next week we'll be making our first blog post from a foreign country.  Spring break for Cy and I starts Friday but instead of sleeping in, we'll be getting up to catch our flight to Chicago.  After Chicago, we fly to Brussels, after which we catch our last flight to Barcelona, Spain.  That's where we'll be on Sunday.  The other day some of my friends and I were talking about what we were doing for spring break.
     "I'm spending a couple days at the coast," says one of my friends.
     "I'm going to the coast too," I tell them, "the Mediterranean Coast."

Diamonds Glistening And Glinting

     This morning we went to the gorge.  Up by Bonneville Dam is a little hole in the wall trail.  In the middle of the miles of basalt cliff is a narrow crag made by a raging white water river.  It's a mile to and a mile back to Wachlellah Falls, and the scenery is stunning.  Bridges sweep past some of the smaller waterfalls and even on parts of the trail when you are hundreds of feet above the river the fir and cedar covered canyon walls extend more hundreds of feet above your head.  The waterfall itself plummets fifty or sixty feet into a great bowl.  Fifty meters down the canyon the trail dips under an overhang which, after all this rain, is almost another waterfall.  Cy took off the backpack he'd brought with us and pulled out three flashlights.  He gave the backpack to Mom and Dad and I both took a flashlight.  The cave descended beyond our range of vision.  We walked into the cave, and turned on the flashlights, duck-walking, the rough craggy ceiling glistened above our heads.  The water droplets on the ceiling appeared to be diamonds glistening and glinting in the wavering beams of our lights.  Duckwalking ten meters we saw what appeared to be the end of the cave.  Instead, as we walked along we saw a bend.  We went around the bend, and the light of the outside world disappeared behind us.  Going another two or three meters deeper we stopped and flung rocks to see if we could find the back of the cave.  With no end in site we turned around, decided it was a lava tunnel, and greeted our dog, Sally.  She was quite distressed that her pack had split up.  We plan to go again after spring break and go deeper into the cave.

     Tonight Cy is making taco's.  Mimi has book club and Cy wanted to make something easy.  He browned the meat, over-browned the taco shells and sliced the lettuce.  Friend Ben is also here and brought a Tunnel of Fudge cake for dessert.

     The tacos were good as was the cake.  Sometimes a chocolate cake can taste more like just a brown cake, but this was super chocolate-y with a center that was like fudge.  The dinner was good but the hike this morning was spectacular!!

Nachos

     For as long as I can remember, we would have nachos for dinner on the day of the Oscars.  We would gather around the plate of glass resting on a pair of iron rams heads in our living room, trying to find a comfortable position from which we could both see the TV and eat the tray of nachos Dad had just placed on top of a pair of pot holders in the middle of the glass.  Dad's nacho recipe has always been fairly simple, grated cheddar layered with triangular tortilla chips.  Tonight Mom and Dad will be at a friends Oscar party,  though Cy, Mimi and I will still squeeze around the plate-glass table with a plate of nachos.  I'm going to try and spice up the recipe a bit though.  I think I'll add mozzarella, olives, taco meat, maybe we'll see something else at the grocery store to add to the nachos.

A Perfect One

     For lunch today we went to a new sandwich shop that hides beneath the towering skyscrapers downtown, (Portland isn't New York, but still).  The People's Sandwich of Portland is a Communism themed sandwich restaurant with sandwiches named The Hammer and Pickle (a cubano) or argentino arabiata. All sandwiches come with a side of DicTaterChips.  Sadly Cy isn't making any sort of sandwich tonight.  Instead he's making fettucini alfredo, for a while we had fettucini alfredo every other night, but it's been more than a year since we had it last and Cy is bringing back one of our families favorite dishes.
     The fettucini itself only takes a few minutes to cook so Dad's been slicing the membrane-y bits off a honey-gold grapefruit for a salad.  Ever since my little accident with the mandoline Cy and I have been very much knife averse.  A few moments ago I was watching Mildred (our cat) stalking a squirrel in the back yard.  Then the hunt was interrupted by Dad pouring off the boiling pasta water, then the rising coils of steam shot up, covering the window and obscuring my view.  I've barely started blogging and in a matter of seconds dinner will be served.  In the salad bowl sitting on the marble counter Cy is adding some local olive oil to the salad.  You wouldn't think that you could grow olives in Oregon, or make a profit, but apparently some folks are giving it a try it in nearby Yamhill county.


     The fettucini tasted just like I remember it. Funny thing is now, when I try to recall the old taste, I can only remember the most recent taste.  The salad was good though our excellent local olive oil was a bit lost in its strong flavors. It was a bit of a waste seeing as our local olive oil supply is extremely limited.  The honeygold grapefruit was excellent, the honeygold is a rare variety of white grapefruit, and tastes and looks like the predecessor of all grapefruits, the pomelo.  After we'd all finished eating Cy decided he wanted to make crêpes.  After digging around in our recipe box, he found an old recipe labeled crêpes á la Ben and is cooking a crêpe right now.

     The crêpes were excellent.  Soft and moist, delicate and buttery, they held a multitude of toppings too.  When I first bit in to my carefully prepped crêpe, I tasted the sweetness of the whip cream, and then the nutella's cocoa came in still sweet, but a little sharp, mmmm good.  Two bites later I was at the far end of the rolled crêpes, the nutella was still there, but the whip cream had been replaced by lemon curd and butter.  That was one heck of a crêpe.  That was the first time I've had nutella, and it was quite good (I'm pretty sure were not getting any money from Ferrero).  Cy says my next crêpe is the perfect one.

Meticulously

     Tonight, we'll be having dinner at a friends house.  At first, I was planning to make dessert.  Some sort of  heart shaped cake for Valentines day.  But then I was asked to make a salad.  Just my luck, that as my thumb is healing, we're using the mandoline again.  The first time this happened I sliced a chunk off my thumb, the second time I gave the kitchen a wide berth and the third time is today.  The salad is fairly heavy on roots with a fennel bulb and a celery root, but what is probably the strangest is the five bunches of parsley.  Three flat-leaf, two curly.  This should be interesting.

     After meticulously ripping the fronds from fennel bulbs stalks, there just happens to be exactly enough for the cup-and-a-half called for, I had to quarter the fennel bulb.  Which seems like a bad idea when one is preparing to take a mandoline to it.  Dad is slicing the quartered fennel  bulb on the mandoline, so far, one bulb down, we are incident free.  There must be a better way to slice stuff paper thin.  Quartering the fennel bulb seems less insane now. The fact that the bulb is quartered means that you can use the guard successfully almost immediately.  Sometimes, when you try to use the guard, it actually makes you more likely to get hurt.  But when one quarters the fennel bulb it makes it much safer.  The salad is finished, not yet tossed and we are en route to the Stalnecker's house where we'll be having dinner.

     The salad was excellent.  The dressing added a bit of tang and acidity and the meticulously shredded bits of frond, celery root and the fennel bulb mixed well with the ringlets of shallot and the parsley.  The parsley itself was just vaguely salty, and these separate parts came together quite well to create a fluffy salad that tickled the roof of your mouth and then bit back.  The main course of the night was a beef stew made by Chris, and for dessert Maryanne made us a pair of pies, apple and blackberry which were quite good.

Super Bowl XLV

     The last and only time we've cooked on Super Bowl Sunday I made pirogi.  Now it's Cy's turn to cook, and he's going to make what should be a fairly easy pasta because, while we love to cook and write about it, I missed the ads (the important part) and the game (the one time a year I actually bother to turn on a football game).
     The main course tonight is sort of pasta' n' cheese.  From Cy's description it should be cheesy fettucini.  For a side we are going to have a salad that Dad found in America's Test Kitchen.  It's a pear and cranberry chopped salad.
     Cy's been cooking the pasta, and I've been watching the game.  Right after the Steelers dropped what should have been an easy catch, Mimi said to me, "I don't like the orange and black combination on the Packer's uniforms."  Then she said our kitchen is orange colored.  Unless I'm color-blind, Mimi, the Packer's colors are green and gold.

     I was watching the clock tick down to half-time on the Packer's 21 to 3 lead, when Dad called me into the kitchen to get some pictures.  To my surprise, dinner was ready!  Then after I'd gotten a few pictures of the finished plates of food, Mom called from the living room to tell us the Black Eyed Peas were on.  Were did that time go?  Maybe it was just a short meal.

     The pasta was fine, a little spicy, as was the salad, though the little pear bites in the salad were excellent.  But the Super Bowl is on, the Ozzy Osborne and Justin Bieber ad was funny, ("looks kinda like a girl") and we have ice cream for dessert. Not a memorable dinner, but always a memorable day.

A Gilded Meal

     On Saturday morning as I went over my recipe choices. I wanted to find some squid ink to make fresh squid ink pasta. We called around but couldn't find any.  Dad pointed out to me that Mark Bittman, A.K.A. The Minimalist, was picking his twenty-five favorite recipes out of the thousands he has printed before he retired.  So I got onto the computer, went to NYT.com and decided I should make this Sunday Dinner from that list of twenty-five recipes.  In the end I picked four recipes to make.  Yesterday, Dad and I started the no-knead bread and set it out to rise.  At the grocery store this morning we bought, in addition to the chicken (chicken under a brick) and pomelo (fennel and celery salad), tofu and a bar of chocolate.  Not even Sherlock Holmes would be able to tell you those would be going into the same meal.
      When I pulled the chicken out of it's bag, I realized we had a bit of a problem.  Like the chicken's spine, and collar bones.  After a little butchering I was able to season the chicken, which after it's operation was left split in half down the middle.
       It just came to my attention that, in a dinner in which the meat cleaver and poultry shears have come out of their drawers the mandolin will be coming out for the salad (insert suspenseful music here).  My thumb cowers.  The bread just came out of the oven, it is beautiful.  The loaf is perfectly round, light brown and rises into a small little mountain peak on top with a dusting of snowy flour.  The bottom is flat and is covered in wheat bran.  If I didn't know better I'd tell you it was a bakery loaf.      The chicken has gone onto the stove top for a quick searing before it goes into the oven, just like the potatoes anna.  Speaking of the potatoes anna, the fennel salad is, unlike it's other mandolin counterpart, vegetarian.  No fingertips to speak of!  I'm breathing a sigh of relief for Dad. (Dad has forbidden kids from using the mandolin.) Dad's been using the apple peeler to peel thin, curly slices from the multitude of partially used parmesan blocks in our fridge. This really pulls the celery, fennel and citrus together.
The whole kitchen smells amazing, with the intermingling notes of fresh bread, pomelo, chicken and the garlic rosemary rub.  The chocolate-tofu dessert in the fridge is almost done setting. (Dad is attempting to forbid anyone from mentioning that tofu is an ingredient of the chocolate pudding.)

      The chicken will be done soon, it just came out of the oven.  We then removed the tinfoil wrapped brick used to weigh down the skillet on top of the chicken, flipped the chicken and put it back into the oven.  Dad is slicing the bread and giving us all some to dip in this new olive oil we got from the Oregon Olive Mill, the bread and olive oil were astonishingly good.  Dinner is served.

      That was amazing.  In the salad, the pomelo was wondrous, and you could taste the parmesan, which had wrapped itself around the celery and fennel.  The chicken was wonderful, flat and crispy.  The rub was interestingly hidden beneath the chicken flavors but it poked through and you could sure smell it.  And the bread.  Oh wow.  It was phenomenal. It was very crusty, and the inside was fluffy and warm - absolutely incredible.

      I haven't even told about the mousse yet.  For dessert we had a chocolate mousse with tofu in it.  I have two things to say: 1) Dad must have skipped the tofu step while I was out of the room and 2) The only difference between it and the chocolate mousse you can get at a restaurant was the fact that it was served in a small plastic bowl vs. a tall glass.  In other words it was jaw-dropping.  That is until your mouth closed and it melted on your tongue.  That brick we used on the chicken is still sitting on the counter, wrapped in gilded foil.  Like the brick, this was a gilded meal.

      The recipes we used tonight, and others from the minimalist are  linked here. They are really simple and really good. You have to try them out!