Recent meal roundup:

Farro Minestrone with Brussels Sprouts, Butternut Squash, and Chestnuts with Buttermilk-Dill Rolls from the freezer. The soup was pretty good, though a little strange. I love the chewy texture of the farro (spelt) and the sweetness of the squash and chestnuts. Not bad!

Pasta alla Amatriciana with Fresh Egg Pasta, accompanied by a spinach salad with bosc pear, shallots, and blood orange-honey-mustard dressing (based on this recipe). My boss lent me her KitchenAid pasta maker attachment, and I was excited to make fresh pasta. Using the pasta maker was a little tough starting out, because the dough was too moist, and it all stuck together as it was extruded. After I added a little more flour, it was easier, though it still stuck together a little bit. When we had pasta alla amatriciana in Italy, it was served with bucatini (thick, hollow spaghetti). I figured maybe if I made long macaroni noodles, it would be similar. But it turned out to be too much pasta. Macaroni is short for a reason. The sauce was good though.

Lentil-Chestnut Soup with Multigrain Pancakes (to celebrate Pancake Day!) and roasted cauliflower. The soup was still good, and I really enjoyed the pancakes! The secret is using ground up muesli in place of some of the flour. They were sweet and nutty, and I am very happy to have some more pancakes waiting in our freezer for a rainy day. Yum!

Pork and Stir-Fried Vegetables with Spicy Asian Sauce with brown rice and Ginger-Garlic Broccoli. The stir-fry was pretty good, though not great. I liked the ginger and garlic flavors with the broccoli, but 10 minutes was way too long to cook it. Even though I stopped cooking it early, it was still kind of mushy. Maybe broccolini takes longer to cook than broccoli.

Fresh Egg Pasta (fettucine this time; much better) with Classic Bolognese Sauce and an arugula, fennel, and parmesan salad. Apparently ragus are in at the moment. Although it took 4 hours to cook, most of that was unattended stove time, and it tasted just like I'd expected it to. Cook's Illustrated comes through again. It was a good dinner.

And for dessert--Chocolate Pudding made with a mix of whole milk and 1% milk. I used a beautiful brick of Callebaut semisweet chocolate. I kind of just wanted to gnaw at the chocolate and forget the pudding, but I'm glad I didn't. It was gooood pudding. My only mistake was that I didn't cover it with plastic wrap because I like pudding skin. But the skin that formed wasn't very good. It wasn't as thin and uniform as Jello pudding skin. Oh well!

I made a batch of White Chili to take for lunch this week, along with some Chipotle Cornbread sprinkled with pepitas. It wasn't as good as regular chili, but at least it was healthy!

Our latest dinner was quite enjoyable--meatloaf sandwiches with homemade challah (similar to this recipe, but from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook) and Barbecued Meatloaf with mayo, melted Bellwether Farms Carmody cheese, and caramelized onions; accompanied by a salad of fennel, red onions, parmesan, and Phat Beets, which sadly did not taste as good as I'd hoped. I liked the jar label though.

The meatloaf was fine (it generated a lot of liquids while it was cooking, but it was still pretty moist after draining); the challah was great, if I do say so myself. I'm sad we don't have any leftover for French toast. I'll have to make more sometime soon.

P.S. Music and Lyrics was better than Because I Said So. Perhaps I have earned back a little of my chick flick credibility with Patrick now.

We had our second Dutch baby face-off (sorry I insist on calling them Dutch babies instead of puff pancakes, Tracy!). We compared the 2-egg recipe (left) with the 4-egg recipe (right), and both of us liked the 2-egger better (but from the first face-off, I like 3 eggs even better than 2--I always have to make things difficult!).

Here's our final recipe (though I reserve the right to decide I like a different recipe even better sometime in the future). As Shuna says, Dutch babies are very forgiving, so play around with the recipe! Next I get to try using less ordinary ingredients, like almond extract and buckwheat flour! (But first a brief waffle excursion in preparation for an upcoming coworker ski trip)

Caitlin's Basic Dutch Baby Recipe
(makes 2 servings)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 c all-purpose flour
• 1 T white sugar
• 1/8 t salt
• pinch of cinnamon
• 2-3 extra-large eggs (2 for Patrick-style, 3 for Caitlin-style)
• 1/2 c milk (we use 1%)
• 1/8 t vanilla extract
• 1 T unsalted butter

1. Place shelf in the lower third of the oven. Preheat two 6-inch cast iron skillets at 425F (or double the recipe and use a 12-inch skillet).
2. Stir together dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon) in a medium bowl.
3. Whisk together wet ingredients (eggs, milk, vanilla) in a measuring cup.
4. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and blend (I use a stick blender) until no dry pockets remain.
5. Split the butter between the preheated skillets, and let melt for ~1 minute in the oven. Swirl the skillets to distribute butter.
6. Pour half of the batter into each skillet and bake for 20-25 minutes. Watch through the oven door as the pancakes puff up majestically!
7. Remove skillets from oven, transfer pancakes to plates, and serve immediately, sprinkled with powdered sugar with lemon wedges on the side.

A good movie at our local independent theater (with frozen Junior Mints!) followed by a nutmeggy cup of custard and a tall glass of steamed milk at Cafe Borrone. It was a good Friday night.

We've been preparing for a ski trip we'll be going on in a few weeks with some coworkers of mine. Neither of us has ever been skiing or snowboarding, so this will be interesting. Patrick's in charge of researching snow sports, and I'm working on finding a good waffle recipe to make for a group breakfast during the trip.

This morning, I made two different Cook's Illustrated recipes--Best Buttermilk Waffles (on the left) and Yeasted Waffles (on the right), topped with a little maple syrup. Patrick squeezed us some orange juice (made with a blend of tangelos and blood oranges from our box).

I felt sure one of them would turn out to be the perfect waffle, but neither was quite right. The buttermilk waffles had the right texture, but they had too much baking soda--they had a funny salty chemical flavor. I doubled the recipe (to use up buttermilk, of course), so it's possible I shouldn't have doubled the amount of baking soda; I know leaveners sometimes don't scale the same as other ingredients. However, I think the blame at least partially rests with Cook's Illustrated; after the fact, I checked The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, and they had the exact same recipe, except using 1/4 of the baking soda listed in the original recipe. Too bad I didn't see that earlier! So it's possible their buttermilk waffle recipe would fit the bill if I used less baking soda. I'll have to give it another chance sometime.

The yeasted waffles were exciting to make (I love doughs that rise overnight in the fridge!) and turned out very light and crisp (some might even say they were ethereally light and crisp). There was nothing wrong with them, but I'm looking for a waffle that is denser and more filling. Also, I prefer a sweeter waffle. These certainly have their merits.

So neither of today's waffle candidates were winners (and now we have a freezer full of waffle leftovers; not a bad situation to be in). I'm going to try two more next weekend, and if all else fails, I have two recipes that I know are pretty good (Plain and Easy Breakfast Quickies and Honey-Yogurt Waffles, both from Dorie Greenspan's Waffles: From Morning to Midnight). While searching for waffle recipes, I was reminded of the totally awesome Belgian sugar waffle that Patrick had at Le Pain Quotidien a while ago. It looks like these waffles go by many names, frequently called Liege waffles. I found a few recipes online that look promising (1, 2, 3, 4). I'll have to try making them someday when we're going to go on a long bike ride after breakfast, to work off all the butter and sugar.

Late last week, Patrick prepared dinner at my request: Apricot and Lamb Tagine, whole wheat couscous with pine nuts and scallions, and Roasted Cauliflower. The tagine was easy to make (slow cooker!), but the lamb turned out kind of dry. Also, I'm not sure if I actually like lamb. The apricot part of the dish was nice though, as were the couscous and cauliflower (I like the Cook's Illustrated approach of cutting the head of cauliflower into eighths instead of into little florets).

Last night, I made my third and final fresh pasta dish with the borrowed KitchenAid pasta maker attachment: Shrimp Fra Diavolo with homemade thick spaghetti (using the same Fresh Egg Pasta recipe as before), accompanied by Orange-Glazed Acorn Squash and steamed broccoli.

Of the three pasta shapes I tried, the spaghetti was the most tedious to make, because I had to separate each and every strand as it came out of the extruder plate. It was good, but not worth the work, in my estimation. Patrick took care of the sauce (including the flambeeing), which turned out very well. The shrimp was perfect--firm and slightly sweet. The squash was yummy, as before.

We watched Patriot Games tonight, and afterward we decided to keep up our Jack Ryan streak by watching our copy of Clear and Present Danger. Sadly, when we opened it, the DVD was missing (the security sticker on the side had been slit). We bought it at Borders a while back, and apparently somebody stole the DVD out of it and put it back on the shelf. That sucks. Sadly, we have no other Harrison Ford DVDs (we need to get the Indiana Jones trilogy one of these days, even though Temple of Doom kind of sucks), so we had to make do with Ocean's Eleven instead.

I went a little crazy two weekends ago and decided it was finally time to buy a (very) nice Dutch oven. I didn't have a very good excuse for it, though it will be good to replace the peeling non-stick Dutch ovens from our grad school days. Plus I wanted to make a pot roast, which required a large-ish oven-safe pot. Anyway, Patrick was cool with it, so I went on down to Williams-Sonoma and bought a 7 1/4 qt. red Le Creuset Dutch (French) oven. Oh, it is so beautiful! And it is, as expected, a joy to use.

I used it to make Classic Pot Roast, accompanied by Potato and Cheese Biscuits, baked in our cast iron skillet. Our beautiful new pot got pretty dirty, but it cleaned up pretty easily with some Bar Keeper's Friend and some elbow grease, courtesy of Patrick.

It was a fine dinner (considering that both recipes were "light," I'd even say it was a good dinner). I used my scalloped biscuit cutters for the biscuits, but the dough was pretty wimpy, and they kind of oozed into each other. Still tasty though!

Later that week, after the pot roast leftovers had been exhausted, we had a meal similar to this one, but not quite as good: Pan-Seared Salmon, Multigrain Pilaf with Sunflower Seeds, and Braised Fennel with Orange.

The fennel wasn't nearly as good as the Moosewood recipe linked to above, and the salmon wasn't quite as good as last time (maybe because I used coho salmon instead of wild salmon). I liked the pilaf a lot though. The flavor was good, and the sunflower seeds added a nice muted crunchiness. My only complaint was that the overall pilaf texture was kind of mushy and creamy. I like it better when pilaf grains are distinct from each other and retain a little more bite. I would definitely make this recipe again though.

To celebrate Patrick's birthday, I made yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting (using the Cook's Illustrated recipe, as usual) this weekend. My frosting job didn't turn out quite as pretty as before, but they still tasted good.

We conducted our second round of waffle tasting this past weekend (round 1). This time we tried Cinnamon-Raisin Whole-Wheat Waffles (on the left, from Waffles: From Morning to Midnight) and Multigrain Waffles (on the right, using the Cook's Illustrated Multigrain Pancake recipe from a few weeks ago, but doubling the amount of butter and beating the whites of the eggs until moderately stiff and folding them in at the end).

Both turned out well. The cinnamon-raisin waffles were enjoyable, but not amazing. The multigrain waffles were great. I think I like them in pancake form a little better, but the waffles had the same sweet, nutty flavor and slightly crunchy texture as the pancakes. Yum! I'll definitely be making the multigrain waffles this weekend, along with a few other recipes, still to be determined.

It's a good thing waffles freeze well!

In unrelated news, the weather has been beautiful recently (sunny and mid-seventies, compared to overcast and mid-fifties in Portland--we kept checking the weather forecast for the two cities this weekend, trying to convince ourselves that we could handle the change), and our poppies are all blooming. They make me happy.

Okay, this is the last round of waffles for awhile, I swear! Patrick thinks I've gone a little crazy, making so many waffles. But I had buttermilk and sour cream to use up before the weekend, and I wanted to try out a few more recipes. Starting at 12 o'clock and going clockwise, we have:

• Sour Cream Waffles from Waffles by Donna German. These were good--light, tender, and a little sweet. But there wasn't anything remarkable about them, and if you're going to load up waffles with sour cream, they've got to be awesome!


• Buttermilk Waffles from America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook (same recipe I wrote about here, but with 1/4 of the baking soda). These tasted much better than the buttermilk waffles from last time, and they had a good sturdy exterior with a tender interior. A classic waffle, done right.


• Buttermilk Waffles with Bananas and Pecans. This is the buttermilk waffle batter sprinkled with slices of banana and chopped pecans, at my coworker's recommendation. This waffle took a little longer to bake than the others, and I had to press down on the top of the waffle iron to cook it properly. Patrick wasn't impressed, but I liked it. Tasty!


• Gingerbread Waffles from Waffles: From Morning to Midnight (recipe included in this article). These were tasty, but real gingerbread is so much better! They were also kind of floppy. Of course, the original recipe pairs them with ice cream and crystallized ginger, and I bet that would be good. On their own, they fall a little flat.

Ski trip is this weekend; it'll be waffle go time! We've decided to snowboard instead of skiing, and we bought some snowboarding clothes on sale at Any Mountain. They're not exactly my style, but I don't think I'll be wearing them very often. But you never know, I could totally love snowboarding! We definitely need to try skiing at some point too. We thought about trying both this weekend, but it seems better to choose one and take a few days to learn how to do it right (or just fall down a lot and get really sore).

We went on our first ski trip this past weekend. I am bruised and sore, but I enjoyed myself overall.

We left work early on Thursday and drove up to Tahoe. We ran into some nasty traffic in the East Bay and actually got to Tahoe a little after my coworkers who left 3 hours after us. Go figure. We stopped along the way in Davis to get a little dinner. Patrick's friend Arnold went to school in Davis, and Patrick remembered Woodstock's Pizza fondly, so we went there for dinner. We split a Mediterranean Masterpiece and enjoyed the pizza parlor ambience. It seemed like a good place.

We had a bit of a time finding the cabin in the dark. I was super impressed when we got there. My coworkers found it on Craigslist. There were about 20 of us there for the weekend, and we all fit comfortably in this cabin (with a few people on the couches instead of in bedrooms). It was nicely furnished with a well-provisioned kitchen (and a nice Safeway a mile or so away) and plenty of wrap-around porches on which to enjoy the balmy Tahoe spring weather.

On Friday morning, we all got up at a reasonable hour and headed to our ski areas of choice. Patrick and I went to Kirkwood, because it was relatively close and had affordable snowboarding lessons. We had rented our gear down in the Bay Area, so we just had to pay for lessons and a beginner lift ticket.

We put on our boots (they're so hard to walk in!) and signed up for a 2-hour first-time snowboarding class. We got out there just before the class started. There were about 6 other people there. The instructor, Ian, was really nice and patient.

I had worried that the lesson might not go very well, as I have a tendency to get frustrated when I can't do something right the first time. When I was in junior high, I took a group tennis class one summer and hated it because I just could not hit the ball, and everybody else learned things so quickly. My fears for the snowboarding class were well founded. I didn't pick things up as quickly as the others, and I kept falling down and getting more and more frustrated and upset with myself. I wish I could be more patient and have a sense of humor when I suck at something, but I can't control it.

I was pretty miserable during the lesson. I fell on my face while getting off the ski lift (I wasn't the only one, so that wasn't too bad), and then it took me an hour and a half to get down the bunny slope because I would fall back down every time I got up (the rest of the class went on ahead because I kept falling so much, and the instructor came back to check on me and encourage me every so often). I was miserable and kept bursting into tears on and off throughout the lesson. The crying and the falling made me really tired, which just made things worse. I would stand up and lose my balance and fall back over, or else I'd get going too fast and panic and forget how to stop and totally wipe out. Blah, it sucked.

I wasn't the only one having an awful time on the bunny slope though. There was a teenage girl who skiied halfway down with her class and then sat down and refused to move any farther. Her instructor had to call ski patrol to come get her. So I didn't feel so bad. At least I got all the way down the hill without taking off my snowboard. It just took me a really long time. It's so hard to get back up after you've fallen down 20 times in a row.

The instructor was really sweet about the whole thing. He said that this may be one of the hardest things I ever do in my life (it sure seemed that way at the time). He made me agree to try snowboarding twice more before giving up on it forever, and my coworkers said the same thing. Once was enough for this winter though. I actually did start feeling a little more comfortable toward the bottom of the hill, once Ian came back and showed me some stuff after everybody else in the class was done (he gently suggested that next time I get a one-on-one lesson and said he'd be happy to be the one to teach me).

Patrick picked up the snowboarding much faster than I did, and he went down the mountain a few more times after lunch, while I sat in the ski lounge, exhausted. I'm glad he enjoyed himself. He even went back on Saturday and by the end of the day got off the ski lift and made it all the way down without falling once! He's awesome.

Although I was absolutely miserable during my lesson, I'm willing to give snowboarding another chance next winter. Maybe I'll be able to do it without any tears next time (though I'm sure there will still be plenty of falling down).

We were the first ones back to the cabin that afternoon, totally sore and exhausted, and it turned out that the cabin was locked, and we didn't have the key. Luckily, Patrick is resourceful. He found an open window, popped out the screen, climbed in, and let me in the front door. That could've been bad; we would have been sitting on the front steps for 2 hours if that window hadn't been open. Instead, I got to take a wonderful hot shower and ice my knees. Most of my snowboarding falls were forward, so my knees were totally banged up, but my tailbone was spared.

Patrick and I went to Nepheles for dinner. They offer post-dinner hot tub reservations, but we just went for a meal, no hot tubbing. It was a nice, cozy restaurant with good food. We started with their famous swordfish eggrolls with black bean dipping sauce. I had the venison stew with portabello mushrooms and roasted peppers, and Patrick had the house salad, which had a great creamy herb dressing (the waitress told me it had tarragon, shallots, honey, and balsamic vinegar). Next, I had the pork loin with ginger-soy marinade and pear-guava barbecue sauce. Patrick had the cashew-encrusted ahi tuna with lemon-coconut-ginger sauce. He wasn't impressed with the tuna, but I really liked the pork. I felt entitled to dessert after my crappy snowboarding experience, so I got the Tahoe glacier crepes (berry sorbet and cream cheese in crepes with blackberry preserves). It was pretty good, but I liked the rest of dinner better. I would definitely return to Nepheles on future Tahoe trips.

On Saturday, I got up early and made waffles for everybody. The waffles were well received. I went with buttermilk, multigrain, yeasted, and honey-yogurt. I had pre-mixed all of the dry ingredients before we left for Tahoe, so it didn't take too long to get the waffles going that morning. I made way too many waffles, so now we have even more waffles in our freezer!

After breakfast, people left to go skiing or hiking, and I had the whole cabin to myself. I washed all the breakfast dishes, had a snack, sat in the sun on the balcony, read some Sunset, and made some brownies (Classic Brownies recipe from Cook's Illustrated), half with pecans and half without. It was a good, relaxing way to spend the day, and people were really grateful to have brownies waiting when they returned. The brownies were really good. Cook's Illustrated knows what they're doing.

On Sunday, we all packed up and left Tahoe. Patrick and I stopped in Davis once more for lunch, this time at Bistro 33. We had some yummy panini and made it home pretty quickly compared to the drive up. We stopped in Burlingame for pearl milk tea at Tea Celsius (good stuff!).

We walked to Gambardella's for dinner. My boss had recommended it, and we enjoyed our meal there (not as good as Osteria, but better than Angelo Mio and Carpaccio). I started with a salad of roasted shiitake mushrooms (which tasted eerily like crispy bacon), aged ricotta, and mixed greens. For our entrees, I had egg-battered petrale sole with capers atop artichoke risotto, and Patrick had shrimp fra diavolo. Both dishes were good. We shared an excellent chocolate souffle for dessert. We ate well this weekend.

Patrick's off in Tahoe again this weekend (this time with his coworkers instead of mine), so I took this chance to sample the fruit cake that I won at my company's white elephant party in December. You know, I think I actually like fruit cake. All the candied fruit in neon colors is so pretty! And it's so nice and dense and sweet. I guess I'm weird.

Sadly, I have no idea how long this fruit cake was around before I received it (I got the impression it was at least ten years old, but maybe my coworker was joking). It looked and smelled normal, so I figured it would be okay. Still, it makes me really nervous to eat something of such dubious age (apparently you're only supposed to store it for 3-4 months, and it has been in my fridge for that long!). I mean, it didn't make me nervous enough not to sample it, but I think I'll get rid of the rest of it without eating any more. I'm afraid that consuming ancient fruit cake might cause long term ill health effects, even though the slice I tried didn't make me sick.

Anyway, yeah--fruit cake. Not so bad! Hopefully my body doesn't rebel in anger at my consuming such a well-aged specimen. Maybe next Christmas I can get some Christmas Cake from June Taylor. When I took the marmalade class with her, one of my classmates bought a Christmas Cake, and it looked really good. I would've bought some too, except I already had two bricks of decades-old fruit cake in my fridge. Sad.

In addition to the fruit-cake-eating, today I cleaned our apartment a little, read the latest Real Simple (my boss got a free subscription for a friend with hers, and she gave it to me--she's so nice!), and watched some movies. A good lazy Saturday. Patrick doesn't like Real Simple because it reminds me of all the life-simplifying things I'm supposed to be doing. Like vacuuming behind the fridge! Real Simple makes my to-do list longer instead of shorter. True, reading it doesn't always relax me, but I still enjoy it. I'm just going to pretend I never read about how I'm supposed to vacuum behind the fridge and watch The Wedding Singer instead.

We had a slow-cooked dinner yesterday: Spring Lamb and Flageolet Beans, Beer-Rye Bread, Hashed Brussels Sprouts with Poppy Seeds and Lemon, and Baked Spelt Pudding.

The lamb and beans took about 4 hours to cook in a 300F oven after bringing to a boil (2 hours covered, 2 hours uncovered). It turned out soupier and blander than I was imagining, but a squeeze of lemon juice right before serving helped make it better. Still, I expected more from my pretty Rancho Gordo flageolet beans. I still hold out hope that someday I'll make a really excellent bean dish. I just haven't found the right recipe (well, there are these awesome baked beans, but they don't really showcase the beans).

The bread turned out pretty well. The recipe came from a recent issue of Sunset, which featured our favorite hometown brewery, New Belgium. Way to go, you guys! The bread was faintly sweet, flavored with rye and caraway. I was surprised that it had retained some of the beer flavor (I used New Belgium Springboard, a seasonal ale brewed with wormwood, goji berries, and schisandra). It would've been even better slathered with butter or cream cheese.

I wanted to like the Brussels sprouts, but they turned out a little bitter and uninteresting. I'm guessing I either cooked them too long or used Brussels sprouts that were past their prime (but they were from the farmers' market, so that's something!). Were I to try it again, I might try this version, since butter makes everything taste better.

I was excited about the pudding because I had been craving rice pudding, and it let me use more spelt as well as a whole bottle of Straus 2% milk (it's too expensive for everyday milk, so it's a treat when I get to use it in recipes). I made it in a loaf pan in our toaster oven, and it took a little under 3 hours to bake. When it was done, I spooned it into our recently acquired set of 351 1/2 Hall custard cups (from eBay, inspired by this outing) and chilled it.

The pudding turned out denser and firmer than I'd expected. Well set--like it had been thickened with gelatin (when really it was just ground up spelt and long, slow baking that thickened it). I was hoping for a creamier texture, but this stuff was hearty and a little chewy. Although it wasn't what I was expecting, I liked it. It's unique, and eating it makes me feel healthy! However, it didn't satisfy my rice pudding cravings. I've got my eye on these three recipes, and I'd better try one of them soon, since it won't be rice pudding season for much longer.

I also made another batch of Classic Brownies to use up the leftover butter and chocolate from the Tahoe trip. Most of them went to work with me today and were well received by my coworkers. I let the brownies cool for the full 2 hours this time, and they cut more cleanly, though there was still some crumbling. It seems that people prefer pecan-topped brownies to plain, since on both occasions the plain brownies lasted longer. I always thought most people didn't like brownies with nuts, but I guess that's not the case. They're yummy, either way (as the sign indicates).

I bought some cute scraps from Kozo back in December. I wanted to be able to enjoy them every day, so I made a little paper quilt using small pieces of the paper. I cut 1.75 x 2.5-inch rectangles (and a few larger pieces) and sewed them together with a 1/4-inch seam allowance. Unfortunately, some of the pieces got a little puckered, so it doesn't look totally smooth, but it's good enough. Now I can enjoy the monkeys and bunnies every time I go into our guest room!

Quilt made of Kozo paper scraps