11 posts tagged “food”
If Ireland was the drinking component of the trip (and, yes, it was!), then Scotland was the eating part! I'm working on my pictures and am remembering some of the foods I got to try:
The hog roast roll at Oink - every day the roast a locally-raised pig, put the recognizable body in the window, and serve hog roast rolls until they run out.
Oatcakes at the Taste of Scotland event (handily across from our hotel in Glasgow.. we had free lunch that day!). Oatcakes are a mild near-biscuit that are served with cheese & pickle, or with jam. I actually made some when I got home (I find I really want to cook SOMETHING when I've been away for a while) but the results from this recipe
are too sweet. I'll try again, though, as I brought home some Branston pickle as this trip's food tourism. (I had it in a couple of cheese & pickle ploughman's sandwiches.)
Cranachan - this is a Scottish dessert that's basically whipped cream and raspberry, with some ground oats (I think) mixed in. It was only okay. It was fun getting the waitress to pronounce Cranachan for me. It's more like Crrrrran-a-hhgghan. I can't figure out how to spell the throaty swallowed gghh sound.
Mince & tatties = minced meat and potatoes. Yummy and basic (and salty!).
Salmon, and some other fish at a fancy restaurant, but I can't remember what type it was. It was red-something.
I'm still in my lunch group, and am deciding what to bring for tomorrow. I thought I'd write up my process, for my enthralled readers' (or is that reader's?) consumption.
I started by thinking about what else we've eaten this week. Monday we had minestrone, Tuesday we had roasted veggie turnovers, today we have baked ziti (oh my yes, we eat well).
This morning I inventoried my cabinets & fridge. Here's what I have that I'd like to use:
can of pumpkin
one frozen chipotle pepper in adobo sauce (the very last one, from a can purchased ... a while ago)
half a block of cheddar cheese (so maybe 4 ounces)
some frozen corn
two frozen tortillas
I made soup the last two weeks: Roasted Beet Soup, followed by Sweet Potato, Corn, Jalapeno bisque. So, this week I think I should get away from soup.
Then I thought about the weather: yeah, we live in California, but it's a shocking mid-50s lately (12.7 Celsius, if I've got any Canadians in the house). So, while the weather doesn't require soup, something warm would not be misplaced.
So, I'm thinking of some sort of casserole/Mexican lasagna thing. In my mind, black beans and pumpkin go quite well together. I searched online and came up with some possible contenders:
Black Bean Lasagna - has guacamole baked right in! nice touch! doesn't include pumpkin though
Pumpkin Lasagna - well.. has goat cheese (yum!) but uses noodles; doesn't have any beans in it
Pumpkin and Black Bean Casserole - now we're getting closer, though it doesn't use any tortillas
So, I think I have enough to get me going. I'll cook the beans with onion, green or red bell pepper, and the chipotle pepper. I can layer the tortillas, beans, pumpkin, corn, and cheese a few times. Perhaps I'll pick up some salsa to mix in; alternatively I can add some canned tomatoes to the black beans. I'll bake the whole shebang for, I dunno, a half hour or so (we'll reheat tomorrow at lunch time). If I can find a ripe avocado, I might bring that to slice on the side. And I may bring oranges to have afterward.
Too bad I can't think of a way to incorporate the mass of Meyer lemons I still have at home! (actually, I'm down to maybe 8)
I grew up in a family of people with a good, slightly quirky, sense of humor. When I was about ten or eleven I heard my mom ask my dad, "Did you feed Herman?" I was confused, as we didn't have anyone named Herman in the household. My imagination's always been pretty good so I thought that maybe there was a SECRET PET in the house! They were going to surprise us with a dog!
[As an aside, I should've known this idea was pure folly: my mother always rightly maintained that if we got a dog, she'd be stuck taking care of it, and she wasn't at all interested in doing so. Still, that notion persisted for years. In fact when she and my father gathered me, my older brother, and my younger sister together around in early 1983, and said something was going to happen that we'd always wanted, my first thought was that they were having a baby, but I figured that was a definite no-go, so I went with my second guess and said, "we're getting a dog!" ... but no. In fact, they were having a baby.]
Anyway, it turned out that Herman was not a SECRET PET but was instead some kind of bread starter. It had to be fed periodically, and then you could split it up to keep it going, and use the rest to make a coffee-cake-like bread. Herman was yummy, but long-forgotten until last week, when a coworker brought in something she called "Friendship Bread" along with some bags of starter for our Very Own. I recounted the tale of Herman, and took a starter, and called it good.
But a different coworker brought her version of the Friendship Bread into her band practice, and in the course of conversation recounted my wacky tale of my parents feeding Herman. And, lo, it turns out that in the 1980s, there was a version of what is now called Amish Friendship Bread that was in Germany in the 1980s... and it was called Hermann! You can even read about it - in German!
I love it, a full twenty-five years later, I find out my mom was NOT being quirky in referring to the bread starter thingy as Herman.
If you were making a fancy dinner and at this stage in your planning, the main course was going to be an upscale version of beef stew, what on earth would you also serve? Or would you scrap the plan and start over with a different main course?
We had a potluck today, hosted by our work group, to thank another work group for some major assistance they gave us a while back. I think we have ten new best friends! Among some of the hits were the macaroni and cheese (made with sour cream AND cream cheese AND cheddar, colby, and monterey jack cheeses), empanadas, my gorgeous salad, barbeque chicken wings, pasta salad, strawberry-rhubarb pie, AND chocolate Pavlova. Serious YUM. I'm still full, four hours later. Fortunately it's bike to work week and I took a weak stab at earning my nom de blog, and biked in. I'm also working tomorrow so I can go for two in a row.
Lunch introduced us to a new turn of phrase, too. Coworker A was complimenting Coworker B on her pie, and said "You put your foot up in that pie!" ... long, blank stares all around. Apparently that's high praise in the South. *shrug* We decided it was like saying, "you kicked ass with that pie!" which would be easily understandable, if more than a little strange if taken literally.
This reminds me of the movie Brick which I have not seen, but came out in 2006 to high praise. It's a noir-ish film, and a friend said he knows a woman who is French who speaks English flawlessly, but who could not follow the movie at all, because it relies so heavily on turns of phrase, in the best noir traidtion. With lines like this, I can see the problem:
Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I've got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you.
Oooff. hot. Not used to this business. Wasn't I recently moping about the fact that it would never be really properly HOT here? I take it back!
But it did lead to a really lovely summer lunch:
I also came up with some good ideas for the evening in SF. It'll be me and beany and one of our friends from grad school, who's down for a conference. I was really surprised when he said he'd only been to SF once, briefly, many years ago. I think it was my Most-Visited Place before I moved here (because College Roommate moved here in 1993, and E moved here in 2003 (-ish), and I visited both of them multiple times before my move in 2006).
It's been a very quiet Sunday, which has been great, although it's been interrupted most of the day by various peopple laughing - first my next-door neighbor, who seemed to be having a brunch, and now it's my next-building neighbor who is laughing raucously and with abandon.
I'm reminding myself that, much as I'd prefer total quiet, laughter is FAR preferable than listening to, say, a couple fighting, a baby crying, a dog yapping, a car alarm going off...
Okay. A bit more meltage, then off to the city.
p.s. how melty is it? it's in the 80s!
Whoo. busy weekend! Yesterday after finally organizing my cds, I wandered out for a walk. I realized I hadn't eaten anything yet and was starving so I got a small ice cream cone from the local place. It's famous, and I've only been there once since I moved here, because it's also stupidly crowded at all times. But I held my impatience in check and was rewarded with a lovely breakfast/lunch. Then I somehow spent the next THREE HOURS hiking and taking pictures in the local cemetery (which is huge, and set into a steep hill). I decided my theme of the day was yellow and proceeded to explore it pretty thoroughly:
After that, I met up with Ethel and Deirdre and we went to a YUMMY vegetarian restaurant called the Golden Lotus. Their menu offers things like garlic-sauteed beef, carmelized chicken, and pork on rice, but it's ALL fake meat. We got those three dishes and they were excellent, though the "beef" was best as it was deep fried. (You can NEVER go wrong with that!)
Then we went to learn how to waltz at a rotating event called Friday Night Waltz - never mind the fact that it was, in fact, Saturday. I learned the cross-step waltz, and we got to dance some, and watch a lot of other really cool dancing. And they danced to the Harry Potter waltz, from The Goblet of Fire! It was an ordinary waltz step, but really cool to see people dancing to that swirly music that seemed to get faster and faster.
So today - chilaquiles for breakfast, followed by a total of five miles of walking, which included a stop at the farmer's market and a LONG-needed haircut. It's shown above, but here's a couple more:
Oh yeah, and dinner, fresh from the market:
Now it's just on 8 o'clock and it's only now really dark. hooray for longer evenings!
Tonight Kristin and I went to Swig for a Media Bistro event that my friend E hostesses. It was a good-sized crowd, but my favorite part was watching the bartenders vie over the volume. The guy kept cranking it up, while the woman would then turn it down. I'm sure that he made the mix and wanted to be sure everyone in the room caught every beat in the marrow of their bones.
After we left, Kristin was hungry, so we stopped at a cool-looking old-school deli down the street called David's Delicatessen. Kristin ordered a pastrami sandwich. I figure, hey, it's a Jewish deli, I have to get a knish! ... then the waiter tells me they're out of knishes. hm.... okay. Well, what's a kasha varnishke? It's basically a knish, but made from kasha instead of potato. Okay, I say, I'll try that. ... and then the waiter comes back and says they're out of that too! hmm. ooookay. Well, uh, how about the cold plate? It comes with potato, kasha, or rice; I'll take the rice. ...and the guy comes back and they're out of rice. wow.
I fell back on roasted chicken, and finally I hit *something* that was available. I think I was taking it in stride, but turns out the nice elderly gentleman down the counter from us was THE David of David's. He went back into the kitchen and sent out a sample-sized plate of the goulash for me to try. Damn was that good! They offered to let me change my order but I didn't, foolishly. The chicken was okay but by no means stellar. Kristin's sandwich, on the other hand, was rocking my world, as was her potato salad. She was very generous in her sharing, thank goodness, because they were fantastic.
And then they brought us a piece of cake to split, courtesy of David! It was the chocolate decadence and it was *killer* - wow.
So thank goodness David intervened. It was pretty expensive, but it's been there since 1952, and I have soft spot for old school things like that, even though if I were objectively comparing their food to other, newer places, the newer places might win out.
Nevertheless, I'll go back. And I'll be torn between the pastrami and the goulash. But if they have the knish? I'm totally getting them.
I fell asleep last night pinned to the bed by the weight of the amazing dinner I'd had at Zuni Cafe - what a pleasure for all of my senses! The menu is short, and doesn't offer much for vegetarians, but the three of us dined magnificently.
We shared an appetizer of baked ricotta (with a beautifully arranged side of two fresh radishes, three orange cherry tomatoes, and four small green roasted peppers); M and C each had a Caesar salad, while I had a mix of radicchio and frisee with a champagne vinaigrette, walnuts, and the freshest Mission figs I've ever tasted. We'd been warned on the menu that it takes up to an hour for the freshly-roasted chicken, so we also ordered shoestring fries which wound up arriving with the main courses: M and C had the roasted chicken and bread salad for two, and I had halibut with fingerling potatoes, covered with an amazing pepper-cream sauce. Although my dinner was fresh and tender and delicious, their chicken and bread salad was transcendent. I'm delighted that I got to keep the leftovers!
We finished up by sharing a creme brulee and some coffee, and wandered happily back to the BART.
I am a brilliant selector of recipes! From the same cookbook as earlier this week. I may have to return the library copy and buy my very own!
Summer Spaghetti Salad
Dressing:
2 T red wine vinegar
3 lg garlic cloves, minced (I pressed them)
1/2 t salt
freshly ground pepper
1/3 c olive oil
The salad:
1 lb spaghetti
3 medium *ripe* tomatoes, cored, seeded, diced
1 c finely shredded fresh basil
1 c chopped arugula
1/4 c toasted pine nuts
1. boil lots of water
2. mix up the dressing in a jar and shake shake shake
3. cook the spaghetti til firm NOT mushy; drain well; put in large bowl and add *half* the dressing; toss; let it cool; toss it occasionally
4. mix in the tomatoes, basil, arugula, pine nuts, and remaining dressing. Let it sit for at least one and up to 8 hours. If you chill it, bring it up to room temp, add salt if needed.
Okay well, I roughly chopped the tomatoes and basil, and ripped the arugula apart by hand. I was not able to wait an hour to eat it, but I did hold off 30 minutes, and I bet it got better with time. This is supposed to serve four as a main course; that's a lot of pasta, but somehow I managed to eat my share.
it was delicious - really fresh and flavorful. I love arugula, and the sharpness of it blended nicely with the softer taste of tomato. The dressing was fantastic. I think I could see making a bit less pasta and using the same amount of dressing - coating the hot noodles with the garlic-y dressing was genius; I think they really picked up a a lot of flavor that they wouldn't have gotten if they were cold when the dressing was added.
