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.