hot sauce

Hey. Hi. Let’s kiss and make up, okay? Great. I just got back from visiting Denver and let me tell you if I was feeling depressed before, I most certainly still do. Woe is me, I know. I don’t want to complain, but goddammit it’s true. Let me wallow and let me think only of the cons and let me dwell on the negatives and allow me to think only of short term goals. I’m real good at that stuff sometimes. Like listening to Disintegration on repeat until any semblance of a positive life force has completely oozed out of my body, leaving me the saddest sack imaginable. That’s my jam, baby.

sesame summer squash salad

Tired of summer squash? Too bad, time to eat more. Can’t say I’m tired of it, because I don’t have any  in my garden (yet). But if I did, this salad would be a perfect way to plow through those ceaselessly proliferating plants. Or you could not pick them, let them get gigantic, then leave them on your patio table, hoping that they’ll turn into dried out ornamental gourds. I’ve def done that a few times.

tomato and onion salad with curried okra chips

Things are starting to fall into place here, I suppose. After I found out our landlord doesn’t want me planting anything in the front of the house, which is the south side, I looked at a few community gardens nearby. I picked one that seems decent, though there’s always worry that neighborhood brats will steal or ruin veggies from the garden. It’s the best option I have, since the landlord seems to prefer to keep the front yard devoid of anything other than weedy ground crawl and unartfully curved metal edging that edges out the weedy ground crawl in favor of debris strewn dirt. So I’m going to start planting for the fall this week, which is exciting! I’ve already got fall (yes fall) tomatoes planted in pots in a patch of sunlight in the back yard. I guess other than that I don’t have much else in my life in place, actually. I signed up for a month at Joe’s Gym. JoesGym.info. I just don’t know what to do about a stupid Crossfit gym. So in the meantime I’m just going to meathead body building gym, getting major weird stares while I try do my old gym’s workouts. Even my cats are in a funk. They kind of just sleep all day, which is what I want to do. I have to snap out! Have to be productive! My funk is sucking at my productivity and my will to be productive. What a terrible cycle.

walnut pork butter

I’m in a new-location-malaise. I know, poor pitiful me, what a hard life I have, but it’s true. I feel like a lump, a real sad sack. I think a need a routine and some friends. Thinking about my friends reminded me of this draft I had saved and not yet published, which was inspired by a fun dinner out I had back in Denver. One friend got a vegetarian 3-course meal, and two of the courses had butters of sorts accompanying. A delicious, slightly sweet pecan butter, an onion butter that I didn’t get enough of a taste of to figure out what they did, and…some other butter. Give me a break, I had gone out with other friends before, so I don’t remember too well all the butter details. But what I do know is, is that I had a bunch of walnuts in the freezer and a lot of confit pork bits leftover from making lard. Those little bits are great added to pan-fried potatoes and great, it turns out, puréed with walnuts, onion, and salt.

root vegetable chicken soup

Someone’s got to eat the end of the root vegetables. Or heck, maybe you’ve just gotten some out of the ground that have been growing over the winter. You’re my hero. Here’s your answer, nonetheless, a silky, salty, garlicky chicken soup full of big hunks of soft, starchy root vegetables.
Now that it’s getting warmer out I’m starting to regret my decision to get bangs. The other day was like 62 and they felt like a a sheet of plastic on my face. Sweaty plastic. I’m not sure headbands will work so well for the mid day workouts I like to do during my work days, lest I look like I have a drawbridge on my forehead. And please, I’m not washing my hair in the middle of the day. Who do you think I am?

celery root salad

I’m completely smitten with old cookbooks and reenactment cookbooks…well, historical cookbooks, because they’re often not reenactments so much as modern interpretations on historical recipes. I only wish they were reenactment ones; maybe just explained a little more thoroughly than old ones. I have this one interpreted historical cookbook from the City Tavern, which almost makes me cry because I want all of the recipes so badly to be exactly what olde timey Philadelphians would have eaten at that restaurant so that I can taste something exactly the same. But there are some recipes in the book that aren’t too modernized. It’s refreshing at least to see lard used as the fat of choice in some recipes. This celery root salad is one simple little dish that I’ve been eyeing for a while from that book. There are a fair amount of vegetable recipes in it that are prepared nice and heavily. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good, crisp summer salad, but I’m not going to say I don’t really love fat-laden vegetables. I should have been born in Minnesota, I guess.
Celeriac is one of my absolute favorite roots. To eat. Some how or other, though, I’ve avoided it raw. Mashed, boiled, roasted, but not raw. Come to think of it, I’ve also never had raw beets I don’t think. I asked for a mandoline for Christmas and this was the first time I used it to julienne something. Pretty sweet. I’m sorry if you don’t have one and you have to julienne the root by hand. No, I’m not, because I’ve had to julienne everything by hand before this. You can do it. You’ll be a better person for it. You could also use a box grater, though the result won’t be as elegant, but whatever. I’m not really elegant, either.

cilantro-lime fish cakes

I feel like salt cod is haunting me. I think it started with my blogger friend Mark’s post on salt cod that I mentioned back when I last posted about cod. Then in New York, I ate salt cod croquettes at Casa Mono. Even the Whole Foods we went to had salt cod in a bulk bin. Well, I’m sorry to announce that no, this recipe doesn’t utilize salt cod. It’s like my own recipe is jeering at and taunting me. I’ll just go hang out at allrecipes.com. Start posting there instead. Watch, they probably even wax on about bacalao there, too. User grandma_knitter64 is all about making her own salt cod and making the best salt cod croquettes, ’cause that’s just so here and now, ya know. Well screw you guys, I’m making plain old fish cakes with fresh cod and some mashed taters (and some lime zest and cilantro because, heck, I’m not in New England anymore).
There are about as many types of fish cake recipes out there as there are stupid blogs like mine with posts on them. I’m not sure I’m comfortable saying mine’s definitive in any way – either for me or in the world of fish cakes, but it’s pretty great. It’s crispy on the outside and super soft and fluffy on the inside with flecks of just crunchy enough red onion. Lime zest and cilantro make them kind of addicting and squeezing fresh lime juice on top before you eat them is just what I needed to get through yes, another snow storm. Accompanied by kale and cabbage slaw, it’s all a pretty great antidote.

pork neck bones with sauerkraut

My trip to New York City nearly killed me with a flake of puff pastry. I hadn’t even had puff pastry in so stinking long and then I like breathed in a litte flake and it flapped over my trachea. Like a vacuum seal. It was the worst. I’d like to say my life flashed before my eyes, but instead I just kept thinking how much I just wanted to be able to freaking breathe. My memory is terrible anyway. Well, I probably have that little pastry flake still in my lungs, because I breathed again. Wait, in a month or something I’ll get some sort of lung rot from the putrified puff pastry residing in there. At least I got to have a wonderful time and was able to eat some pretty great food. And Samantha found a glorious wedding dress.
Slow-cooked collagen is glorious in its melting rubber texture. That’s the best description I could come up with. I wish toothsome was the right word. If I could redefine toothsome, it’d be to mean the texture of slow-cooked collagen. It’s kinda like melty halloumi. But without the squeakiness. Kind of. I don’t know. It’s good though. And a spine, just like oxtail, has amble amounts of it.

braised cod

I have no idea how people bike commute throughout the winter. I’ve started biking to work again, after a long respite from it. I no longer go to mega-gym, I’m going to a much closer, much more down-to-earth, much more personal gym that a friend of mine opened and because of how convenient it is to work and my house, I feel alright about biking home in the dark and cold. I bought some real dorky winter biking gloves to try to keep my hands from freezing like they were at the end of my biking run last fall. Well, they don’t cut it. And neither do my snowboarding-in-0-degrees mittens. If it’s in the low to mid 20s in the morning, at about 1 mile into the trip, my fingers start to get really cold and numb and by the time I get to work I can barely feel the brake levers. As soon as I get into the office, the blood all comes rushing into my fingers and it hurts so incredibly bad I can’t help but yell and scream and grasp my hands in pain and pace back and forth around the office. My coworkers think I’m insane. I just think I’ll probably have some sort of evolutionary benefit from this. Either that or it’ll create some sort of permanent malfunction. Or one morning my fingers will just fall off with a big fuck you.
The first weekend of March I’m going to New York City to meet up with the newly engaged and frazzled Samantha. See, no one could possibly replace me in Samantha’s life when I left Boston, and she doesn’t want to shop for wedding dresses herself or with any of her second-rate friends, so we and her mom are making a weekend of it. We’re not only compiling possible dress shops to go to, but restaurants of course. It’s hard to know where to start. Plus, it’ll be a week after my 30th birthday, so I think we can make the case for a birthday dinner. Oh, and we’re going to the Tenement Museum. Samantha and I both have independently wanted to go there for a long time and what a perfect excuse to go (or was it the other way around?). I really love period houses and maybe especially period houses in cities, where those people’s ways of lives are so incomprehensible today. I sure hope I don’t get lectured on the evil capitalist builders who forced those poor people to live their squalid lives in those apartments. But of course I will.

shrimp scrambled eggs

I’m a total homebody who hates traffic…it’s really hard to get me to go snowboarding on the weekends. Even though I’m doing something fun, if I spend a day up there, I feel like my weekend is thus reduced to only one day. It’s like I need two days of mulling around the house and doing my mundane activities to feel relaxed. Pretty dumb, I know. In any case, I was swayed into going to Beaver Creek yesterday knowing full well that because of all the snow the mountains got over the past few days, the traffic and crowds were going to be awful. We left at 6:15 and 15 minutes into our drive the cars started getting backed up. I almost made Joe turn around to bring me back home. But I made it, the day was gorgeous and sunny and warm, and there was tons of really deep, untouched snow. Great, I was glad I bucked up and went. Then I realized my phone was missing and wasn’t in the car when we got back to it and Found My iPhone revealed an unfortunate result…

My friend Chris was still up at the resort, about to leave, when I discovered this and he quickly strapped back in, caught the chair with less than one minute left to last call, got 1/3 of the way up the mountain and came to a halt. No more running lifts. He asked around and very nice, no-nonsense ski patrolman Adam offered to snowmobile Chris up to the bottom of the lift where my phone was. But after searching around, they didn’t find anything. I KNEW I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME.

honey almond cake

Whoa look, something sweet on here! I told you I failed my Whole30. I’m going out with bang. A somewhat Paleo-friendly bang, with a whole food, deliciously ethnic cake to celebrate my impending trip to Spain. That’s right, I’m turning 30 and I’ve decided I can’t stand not having seen the world anymore. I even signed up for a Spanish class, which I would have done regardless of my decision to go to Spain. I always regret not having continued my years of middle and high school Spanish. I was so happy to drop the class when I did, but only because I was so overworked. But I’m determined to get back into speaking Spanish and how convenient it will be in Spain when I can ask “¿Dónde puedo conseguir una Torta de Santiago?” and not have to consult Google Translate.
This morning when I opened up the front curtains, I saw that the neighbor’s and our lawns were flooded. At first I thought that perhaps he was just smarter than I and thought to water his lawn in the midst of this winter drought, while our lawn withers away. But I went out to investigate and after tromping barefoot through our pond-yard, saw that all the water was coming from an irrigation pipe under his yard. Sweet! Have fun sucker! How wonderful it was to find our sump pump in the basement spewing water, our downstairs bathroom flooded, and the little closet in the basement where we keep all our outdoorsy gear equally flooded. Awesome. The backyard looked pretty great with sleeping bags and backpacks hanging on branches out to dry.
I first made this cake back in Boston for a ridiculous tapas party where I cooked for hours. There was so much food you would think I would’ve learned my lesson never to make approximately ten times what any one person could ever eat. Nope, I’ve replicated that kind of spread many times since – Thanksgivings, Christmases, Super Bowl parties… on and on, and the more I’m thinking about it right now, the more I want to have a tapas party. It’s been so long! Chorizo! Mackerel! Shrimp! Potatoes! This cake! Because it’s lovely and impressive and it’s grain-free and that’s so hip.
I hate blanching almonds. I’m just not fussy enough about that kind of thing. And when I really should be using Marcona almonds anyway for this cake, I feel okay about leaving the skins on. Besides, the almonds are ground fine enough that you don’t run the risk of getting sheaths of skin suctioned on your teeth. If you’d rather buy pre-blanched almonds in almond flour form, that’s cool. Are all almonds you buy pasteurized? That’s so irritating.

honey almond cake
adapted from lots of recipes for torta de Santiago

6 eggs at room temperature, separated
1/2 cup honey
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
zest of 1/2 lemon
9 oz almonds, finely ground

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl, beat egg yolks, honey, cinnamon, vanilla extract, and lemon zest until combined. Mix in the ground almonds.

2. In a separate mixing bowl, and with clean beaters, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Fold the egg whites into the almond mixture.

3. Line a springform cake pan, or just a regular cake pan, with parchment paper. Grease the sides. Pour in the batter and bake for 30 – 35 minutes, until a knife comes out clean.

Now, you can top this cake how you’d like – you can get fancy and make an egg white frosting or dust with powdered sugar (if you make your own of course – or not, if you love that GMO cornstarch) or you can go nice and simple and drizzle extra honey on top. That’s my favorite.

country style pork ribs confit

I thought I had the flu. I self-righteously didn’t get the flu shot. I would have gotten so scolded. Turns out that it wasn’t the flu, but perhaps a case of food poisoning? Or just some weird bug? I had eaten at Jonesy’s EatBar – shrimp, on a Monday. What an idiot. I didn’t have to read Kitchen Confidential to know better than that, but I just forgot. But really, they shouldn’t be serving me fish old enough to make me feel like death. I often knowingly choose to eat questionable food, but thoroughly questionable I’m kinda pissed about. Besides, just because I’m lazy and eat questionable food myself doesn’t mean that I want to go to a restaurant and pay out the nose for questionable food. I will forgo that place from here on out. It was nice knowing you Jonesy’s.
January Whole30: totally failed. The other two times I’ve done it, I didn’t even come close to failing. It was easy, I felt great, I didn’t even want to stop. But this month, I wasn’t in the right mindset and all my excuses seemed really viable in that state. Bleh. At least I’m not worse off for the time I did spend doing it. But still, I feel like the worst New Years resolutioner. At least it’s 60 degrees right now. I feel good about that. But I don’t feel good about the boatload of chocolate chips I just ate. Dammit.

one-pot mustard and lemon chicken

One-rimmed-baking-sheet chicken. Whatever. This is easy chicken. Perfect weekday night dinner. Joe’s sister Louise requested a recipe of her own on here – one that would be nice and simple. This is a good example of what I might do on a weekday night (you know, because I don’t always make ridiculous dinners on a Tuesday). It’s to the point, but not lacking in flavor, and super good. And look, it’s carrots again. That’s another thing I do; obsess over ingredients.
It’s tough for me to settle on a recipe that’s simple like this. Should I have included onions? Other root vegetables? I guess I feel like it has to be like the definitive one-pot chicken and carrot dish. The BEST way to make them together. Or, at least the best way to make them together with a mustard lemon sauce. But sometimes it’s just nice to have a different way of making your normal weeknight meat and vegetables. You don’t want to marinate the chicken overnight, even if will make a wonderful difference; you don’t want to roast the vegetables at one temperature and the chicken at another; and on the other end, you don’t want another dinner of steamed broccoli and boring chicken. It’s shocking how many dinners I eat that are seasoned only with salt. I sure do love salt. Salt and fat. But I’ve got a reputation to upkeep here. I’m fancier than salt. I use lemon and mustard. Watch out.

roasted carrot and caramelized onion soup with caraway

Sometimes it’s the little details that make me happy in a recipe. Like nicely roasted carrots and caramelized onions in an otherwise very simple soup. And homemade chicken broth. And then, anything with caraway seeds in it is superlative in my book. The best seed.

roasted winter squash with tahini and za’atar

I lost the homemade candy contest. 3rd place out of 3. That’s okay, I guess the judges just preferred marzipan squeezed from a tube with shitty chocolate melted on top. Actually…I probably deserved it. I gave my friend some of my toffee and there was a hair in it. Maybe the judges got a hair piece, too. How embarrassing. How am I supposed to make cookies for people for Christmas? I should be in exile.
I’m really not feeling like writing much here. I had all sorts of wonderful things written down, then I accidentally deleted everything and whenever I do something stupid like that, I freak out and make everything worse. So instead of ⌘-Z-ing, I clicked somewhere else on the page to really confirm that I had deleted everything, thus really truly confirming the delete. Idiot. I don’t even remember what I had written. Other than griping about losing the candy contest. And probably Christmas, something, something, cookies. Trying to rewrite what you’d deleted is such an awful feeling. Even when it’s something as silly as a blog post. It makes me want to pull my hair out.

za’atar

Spice mixes are fun. Making spice mixes is fun. You learn so much! Oh that’s how they get that flavor! Plus, if you make them in advance, as opposed to just adding spices to a dish as you’re making it, you’ll have a little jar with which you can now have a real nice way to impress people. No one is impressed with individual spices. Everyone is impressed with a jar of homemade za’atar. Well, you won’t be, because you’re going to make it and it’ll be old hat then.
Advent has begun. Every single day a Christmas activity must occur. I’m currently making cinnamon and clove scented pinecones. They’re sitting on the stovetop making the kitchen smell so wonderful. I also made cinnamon ornaments. Lots of cinnamon here. Also on the agenda is getting our Christmas tree from the wilderness, paper snowflakes, watching He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special, talking a walk to peer at fancy Christmas light displays in a fancy neighborhood, etc. I’m not in the mood to make Christmas cookies this year. Not like last year. I’m sure it’ll hit at some point, but nothing much this year. I might have gone overboard last year. I am going to make some sort of toffee concoction for my department’s Christmas party at work on Wednesday. Toffee almond salted something. It’s a homemade candy competition and I better freaking win. I should have made it this weekend because I tried making it last night and all was going well in the pot until it just separated and then it crystallized and now I have like one more chance to try it and I’ll probably ruin it again and cry.

savory spiced nuts

My aunt Suzanne made some wonderful spiced nuts one Thanksgiving she came to our house for when I was little. I remember thinking they were the absolute most wonderful things – and this coming from the string-cheese-for-dinner-girl – and how the herbs just smelled so, so wonderful. I forgot about them for a long time, but then when I started getting into cooking for myself in college, I remember each time I would use thyme I would think of those nuts. I don’t have too many nostalgic food memories, if anything most of them would be traumatizing memories anyway, reminding me of all the ridicule I’d get for only eating bread and butter at Thanksgiving, but man those spiced nuts still stick in my mind. Probably good I don’t have too many childhood food attachments. Otherwise I’d still be eating frozen Eggo waffles, just the edges of frosting-less strawberry Pop Tarts, Tupperware bowls full of Better Cheddars, and ohhh man sour cream and cheddar Ruffles. My poor mom. Totally just gave up with me. Worst kid ever.
Tomorrow I’m going to make pumpkin pudding, I believe. My friend Samantha had been listening to me with my nose stuck up in the air about the necessity of making a pumpkin pie with fresh roasted pumpkin purée for the past like 4 years so she finally did it in a Thanksgiving practice run. They turned out terribly, apparently. I’d like to blame it on her and say her palate just isn’t sophisticated enough…but that’s not true at all. I feel like I let her down. And what a let down. All this time, leading up to this one stupid pie, and the two pumpkins she’d gotten were crap. I must convince her to try again! It’s okay, you’ll get a nice pumpkin!! Nature is good! So, I thought I’d make one from scratch and send her pics along the way, just to show that indeed she somehow picked the two worst sugar pumpkins in the whole store. If this pudding is any good, perhaps you’ll see it later. I’m thinking it’s going to be with coconut milk and cardamom.

celery root and onion rösti

I’m having a real crabby week. And it might have started Saturday. A high school kind of moody, little things are getting me down kind of week. I had a meltdown at the gym. That was real cool. I am sick of my bum wrist… both bum wrists and I don’t want to have to think about them anymore and I’m tired of getting setback in trying to get betterstrongerfaster. I’m going to be the worst old person, when all sorts of things start to ache and give me problems. Saturday I got mad when I tried to make this recipe. I burnt it. And I got mad at our stupid stove whose biggest burner isn’t big enough for my cast iron pan so the rimmed edge hangs off and doesn’t allow the pan to heat evenly. The edges of the rösti were only lightly browned, and the center was black, but I still ate most all of it. It’s pretty great, so I remade it on Sunday for some friends I had over. I don’t think they thought I was too weird for taking pictures, and they gave it their thumbs up.

lamb tagine

After what I feel was a pretty damn decent representation of Ethiopian food, here we have what I think is maybe a bit of a misnomer. Not that this isn’t good, of course. It’s just…that there is no tagine involved. Like tandoori chicken with no tandoori. What other foods are named after their cooking vessel? Casserole. I don’t know. Aside from that, and maybe aside from the sweet potato, this is still a nice, long-cooked dish with lovely spices and tender meat. I didn’t take a lot of liberties. Though, I had also told myself that the next time I was to make Moroccan food I was going to have made preserved lemon. I didn’t. And I made this anyway. I’m such a let down. Lamb tagine…Moroccan lamb? Sure, whatever. Just make it.
I just realized that I thought I had only posted two African recipes in my blog’s existence. How incredibly embarrassing to admit that it was because I sometimes forget to think of Morocco when I think of Africa. I’m a bad person. Egypt, too. I don’t even know much how to differentiate Egyptian food from other Middle Eastern cuisines. I would like to be more cultured! Maybe that area should get their shit together so I can go visit and eat their food. Idiots. Oh and visit the Egyptian pyramids. Ohhhhh man do I want to do that. I used to be obsessed with Ancient Egypt. I had a Learn to Write in Hieroglyphics! set when I was in elementary school. Pretty, pretty, prettyyyyy cool.

doro wot

I hurt my wrist again. The other one. Double gimp. I am so mad about it I don’t even want to talk about it. I relive the moment and my head tightens up and I want so bad to redo it. Not be such a total spaz. I slipped off a pull up bar. At a competition. That I should have kicked butt at. I’m giving up on fitness. Resorting to the safe, comfy couch. Injuries SUCK. They’re so frustrating and my right wrist still isn’t fine from last year’s stupid fall. I don’t want to deal with this stufffff. GAH. Hey look, the last time I hurt my wrist I posted about African food. My only two African posts. I should stop planning on making anything from that continent. Is that racist? Prob.
So Denver doesn’t have quite the amount of ethnic diversity pockets as other cities might have, but the amount of Ethiopian restaurants here surpasses Boston by about a ton, so that’s good enough for me. I first had Ethiopian food my first year in Boston at this funny little hole in the wall near my apartment called Fasika. I’d just tell them to give me a sampling of all of their veggie dishes. Those are still all my favorite. I like the meat dishes, but oh man the vegetables. And the lentils. But for some reason I chose to make this for my first foray into Ethiopian food. I really should have made gomen, using the never ending amount of swiss chard I have in the garden. But I couldn’t muster the thought of prepping all of those leaves with one hand. Plus I was still so crabby about it. I’m still crabby about it. And the stupid splint I’m wearing.