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

Oh man, I've let things pile up, and now I have a bunch of stuff to write about. Let's see...

Recent meals:

I made a batch of Smoky Beef and Bacon Chili from Sunset a week or two ago. It was good, certainly smoky, but I like Stef's chili better. The weather has been great, so we enjoyed our chili al fresco on our patio with a variety of sides--cornbread and chard one night; popovers, gingered broccoli (from Moosewood Low-Fat Favorites), and roast asparagus the next. We don't have a popover pan, so I made the popovers in a muffin tin, and they were shaped a little strangely. But they tasted good! We had the extras for dessert with some jam. The gingered broccoli was fine, but not awesome. I doubt we'll make it again.

I bought Heidi's new book, Super Natural Cooking, last week. It has lots of exciting recipes, and the food is beautifully photographed. We made two recipes from it for dinner last week--Clemenquat Salad and Big Curry Noodle Pot, both charmingly named. The salad consisted of thinly sliced celery and kumquats, walnuts, parmesan, and clementine segments. It was yummy, if a little unorthodox. The noodles were a little too spicy for my tastes but were pretty good. I would make the salad again, but probably not the noodles. I'm excited to try more recipes from the cookbook in the future!

I also bought Whole Grains, Every Day Every Way by Lorna Sass, and I got even more cookbooks from the library, including Feast (like most everyone else, I'm thoroughly charmed by Nigella Lawson). On Thursday, Patrick made Sake Steak (from Feast) accompanied by steamed spinach and Brown Rice Salad with Asian Flavors (from Whole Grains). The brown rice salad was yummy and pretty easy to put together if you cook the rice the night before. The steak turned out really well. We used rib-eye steaks (grass-fed). Nigella's cooking method leaves them pretty rare, and they were a beautiful ruby red on the inside. We wouldn't normally eat our meat so rare, but this stuff was great--tender and delicious. It was also pretty quick to make, since the steaks were marinated a few days in advance.

Baking adventure: English muffins

Last weekend, I made English muffins, inspired by the pretty pictures at Delicious Days. It had never occurred to me that I could make my own English muffins! I used this recipe, which gave me a chance to use my food scale to weigh out the ingredients. Exciting! I love doughs that rise overnight. I mixed it up in about 15 minutes last Friday night (it made a pretty sticky dough, but it turned out just fine), and then I made us English muffins for breakfast on Saturday morning. This took longer than I'd expected because I had to cook them in two batches, as I was using our cast iron skillet. Next time I'd probably try to do them all at once on our griddle.

The English muffins looked surprisingly like storebought, and when I split them with a fork, they were full of nooks and crannies, just like they were supposed to be. It's like magic! I'm not sure if they exactly fit my English muffin ideal, but I was pretty happy with the overall outcome. We topped the split and toasted muffins with poached eggs and smoked salmon and had grapefruit halves and fresh-squeezed blood orange juice on the side. The poached eggs were perfectly cooked (I love you, Cook's Illustrated!), but some of the poaching water clung stubbornly to them, so they made the muffins a little watery. I'll have to get a better slotted spoon.

We topped the leftovers with butter, cinnamon-sugar, and jam. Yum!

Apart from taking longer than I'd expected, I found the English-muffin-making experience quite enjoyable. I'd do it again. Since these worked out so well, I think next I'll tackle homemade Graham crackers!

Dinner at Oliveto:

Last Sunday, we were in the East Bay, so we went to Oliveto with Tree and Andrew, for the first time. We got to Rockridge a little early so we stopped in at Bittersweet and tried a Chocolate Thai Iced Tea. It wasn't very good--kind of gritty and strange-tasting. I guess we'll stick to their hot chocolate from now on.

I'd been wanting to visit Oliveto for awhile, as everybody who'd been there seemed to love it, and it's fun to walk around Rockridge. As it turns out, Oliveto deserves all of the good reviews--it is excellent Italian food. It's the best Italian food I've had in the Bay Area, but I haven't been to the big hitters in San Francisco yet. It's certainly worth a trip to Oakland.

When we were seated, we were given a bowl of delicious green and black olives and some yummy bread. We started by splitting the salumi platter for two (it was large enough to divide between four people). I can't remember the different kinds of cured meat we tried, but they were all really good. I don't eat enough salami!

Next, we shared two starters: shaved purple asparagus with fennel and parmesan, and cured steelhead salmon with baby beets and chervil. The salmon starter was especially good. For our entrees, we all had housemade pasta. Mine was topped with a pork rib ragu, which was awesome. So satisfying.

We split three desserts four ways: (1) bittersweet chocolate cake, (2) a rhubarb tartlette with rosewater cream, (3) chocolate, vanilla, and apricot zuppe inglese with amaretto sauce. All three were very good; I think the chocolate cake was my favorite. I love being able to sample multiple desserts in one meal!

In my opinion, Oliveto is well worth the trip. It's relatively expensive, but both dinner and dessert were outstanding. Since their menus change daily, we'll clearly have to go back frequently to see what else they come up with!

Garden news:

Our dwarf Meyer lemon tree appears to have handled the cold weather just fine, and we have a bunch of baby lemons a-growing, as well as lots of lemon flowers blooming (the smell of citrus blossoms is so wonderful!). Here's the biggest lemon on the tree, as of last weekend. I wonder when we'll have our first lemon harvest!

Yesterday was the second annual pie bake-off at my place of employment. I organized it this year, and I chose to hold it on the same date as last year's. This was a poor choice, as it turns out, since many schools had Spring Break, so lots of people were on vacation. It was also Good Friday, which is apparently a day of fasting for Catholics (I knew it was Good Friday, but I didn't know about the fasting). And it was during Passover, when Jewish people aren't supposed to make or consume anything that has been leavened (apparently pie crust falls into that category). Way to go, Caitlin! If I organize it again next year, I will definitely think more carefully when choosing the date.

Despite my poor date choice, we had a decent turnout, with 14 pies entered, and a lot of people came to eat the pies after judging was completed. Patrick left work early to come and be a judge, which I very much appreciated. It didn't seem like a huge sacrifice on his part :)

I made two kinds of pie for the contest. Both were received very well (better than my banana cream pie from last year) and got good scores, but I didn't count them when determining which pies won awards, as it would have been a little awkward for me to win things when my husband judged and I counted all the votes. Knowing that people liked my pies was award enough for me :)

Pie #1 was actually a bunch of tiny pies. Remember when I made those mini chiffon pies in grad school, over three years ago? Well, I finally got around to making more of them, this time with blood orange juice. It took me long enough! I ended up using the Blood Orange Chiffon Pie recipe from The Baker's Dozen Cookbook (which I got from the library), but I used a gingersnap crust instead of a chocolate crumb crust. The recipe was almost identical to the Citrus Chiffon Pie recipe in Williams-Sonoma Pie and Tart.

I had a heck of a time finding organic blood oranges, but Whole Foods came through for me. I used Meyer lemons in addition to the blood oranges. Since I didn't have enough crust last time, I made 1.5 times the crust; this was more than enough. I had enough crust and filling to make 48 mini pies (using a mini muffin pan and mini liners) and 6 regular cupcake-sized pies.

The pies turned out well. The filling was a beautiful fairy-tale pink, light and airy. I overheard one of the judges saying that she thought it was too citrusy, but I liked the flavor. I topped each pie with a swirl of whipped cream and candied blood orange peel (the blanching removed most of the red from the peel, so it didn't turn out exactly as I'd imagined it). Good stuff. I'd say this recipe was a winner, though not my favorite pie ever. The chiffon filling alone would make a nice light dessert if you plopped it into ramekins.

Pie #2 was Mighty Fine Apple Pie (made using the Damn Fine Apple Pie recipe from In the Sweet Kitchen, but renamed so as not to offend anybody). It's not exactly apple season, and the apples I used (1 lb each Granny Smith, McIntosh, and Gala) weren't very crisp, but it didn't seem to make a big difference. I used the Baker's Dozen all butter crust recipe. This was my first time making pie crust since taking Shuna's pie dough class, and I felt much more confident making the pie dough. It all just felt right and familiar, and based on the small taste of pie I got after the pie contest, my pie crust turned out just right! It was tender and flaky, just like it's supposed to be. I'm so proud of my crust! Shuna's pie dough class was definitely a worthwhile investment. This apple pie was a winner.

I made hot cross buns for the first time today. I had noticed a recipe for them in the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook when we first got it, and I decided to make them at Easter-time. Conveniently enough, Feast, which I borrowed from the library last week, also has a recipe for them, so I combined the two.

They tasted exactly how I'd hoped--rich, tender, sweet, and a little tangy, full of dried fruit bits. They didn't look as perfect as I'd imagined, but that's not a big deal. They made the apartment smell really good while they were baking, and they were quite nice indeed when eaten hot out of the oven (and at room temperature). I'm so glad they turned out well!

Hot Cross Buns
(Adapated from the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook and Nigella Lawson's Feast)

Ingredients:

Dough

• 3/4 c buttermilk
• 6 T unsalted butter
• zest from 1 orange
• 1 clove
• 2 cardamom pods, crushed
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 4.25 c all-purpose flour
• 1/4 c white sugar
• 1 envelope (2.25 t) rapid-rise yeast
• 1.25 t salt
• 1 t ground cinnamon
• 1/2 t ground nutmeg
• 1/4 t ground ginger
• 1/2 c currants
• 1/4 c golden raisins
• 1/4 c candied citron (I might leave this out next time; the storebought stuff tastes a little funny, and I'm not sure what to do with the rest of it)

Egg wash

• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 1 T water

Crosses

• 3 T all-purpose flour
• 2 T water
• 1/2 T superfine sugar

Glaze

• 1 T superfine sugar
• 1 T boiling water

Directions:

1. Heat buttermilk, butter, orange zest, clove, and cardamom pods until butter melts, then turn off heat and let infuse, ~5 minutes or until body temperature. Remove clove and cardamom (this was a little fiddly because of all the little cardamom seeds).
2. Whisk the eggs into the buttermilk mixture.
3. Mix 4 cups of the flour, sugar, yeast, salt, spices, currants, raisins, and citron in a standing mixer fitted with a dough hook. With the mixer on low speed, add the buttermilk mixture and mix until the dough comes together, about 1 minute.
4. Increase the speed to medium-low and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. If, after 5 minutes, more flour is needed, add the remaining 1/4 c flour, 1 T at a time, until the dough clears the sides of the bowl but sticks to the bottom. (Even after adding the remaining 1/4 c flour, my dough was still pretty sticky)
5. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead by hand to form a smooth, round ball, about 1 minute. Place the dough into a lightly oiled bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Let rise in fridge overnight, then let come to room temperature in the morning (or just let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, 2-2.5 hours).
6. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and cut into 12 even pieces. Roll each piece into a tight ball. Arrange the balls in a greased 9x13-inch metal baking dish and cover tightly with greased plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm place until the rolls have nearly doubled in size and are pressed against one another, 1-1.5 hours.
7. Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 350F. Using a sharp knife, cut an X through the top 1/4 inch of each bun. (Nigella has you do this before the second rise, which might be better, as cutting the X's after the second rise caused the buns to deflate somewhat. But they recovered in the oven and puffed up anyway)
8. Whisk the egg and water together and brush over the buns. For the crosses, mix together the flour, water, and sugar, and dribble over the cut X's. Bake until golden and puffed, 25-30 minutes.
9. Mix the sugar and boiling water to make the glaze. (I used leftover citrus-infused simple syrup from candying the blood orange peels for my chiffon pies; it might be nice to add lemon zest or extract to the glaze to get a similar effect) Remove the buns from the oven and brush with two coats of the glaze. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then either serve hot or let cool on a wire rack.

After reading this article and this one in Sunset about Angel Island, I decided that we should go camping there this April. I reserved campsite #5 (supposedly one of the best on the island) for Easter day, and we headed out yesterday morning, along with Tree and Andrew.

We drove up to Tiburon, a charming little town, and caught the 11 o'clock ferry to the island. The ferry ride was brief, maybe 10 minutes, which, as Tree stated, was a good amount of time--not so long that it got boring. We even saw some of Andrew's family friends sitting on the deck of their bay-front house as we ferried by. Andrew called to tell them to look at the ferry, and we all waved to them.

When we landed, we went to the camping registration kiosk to check in. Official check-in time wasn't until 2pm, but they let us check in at 11:15am without any problems. The only issue was that the ranger had mistakenly directed another group of campers to our campsite instead of to the site they had actually reserved. As we hiked to the campsite (about a mile hike, mostly uphill), we worried about how we would nicely inform the campers that they were in our spot, but when we arrived, nobody was there, and they never showed up. So that was good--no unpleasant confrontations.

Campsite #5 was indeed awesome. It was right next to Battery Wallace (built in 1901 to defend San Francisco from attacks, but disarmed in 1915). Near the campsite entrance is a picnic bench and raccoon cupboard (the island used to be connected to the mainland by a strait, and raccoons still live there today). A little trail surrounded by sweet-smelling foliage leads from the eating area to a grassy clearing big enough (just barely) for two tents, with views of Tiburon, the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco skyline, and the Bay Bridge. There were other small clearings nearby where more tents could have gone if our group had been bigger. There's a pit potty and water faucet a minute or so away, at campsite 6.

Our campsite was on a little hill above Perimeter Road, which runs around the island. Here's the view from the road below our campsite, to give you an idea of what it was like. That's the Golden Gate bridge on the right, the Bay Bridge on the left, and San Francisco in the middle.

We had a good lunch of crackers, Fuji apples, triple-cream Mt. Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, and salametto from Fra'Mani. Both cheese and salami were soooo good. I love having access to such good food.

After setting up our tents and securing our food in the raccoon cupboard, we headed out to hike up to the summit of Mt. Livermore. It was a pretty steep walk, and it took a little under an hour to get up there. There were pretty wildflowers along the way, and the view at the top was awesome, as promised. We sat at the top for a while, watched what appeared to be two pirate ships sailing in the bay, enjoyed a snack (coconut macaroons, sesame snaps, and ginger thins), and then headed back down. Here we are at the summit. I got a lot of use out of my camping hat on this trip.

We headed back to our campsite, stopping to explore Battery Drew along the way. Upon returning to our campsite, we were all pretty tired (Patrick and Andrew were both suffering from colds, sadly). We had more snacks and played a game of Zaire.

For dinner, we set up Tree and Andrew's little camping stove, and we had vegetable-lentil soup out of a can and grilled cheese sandwiches (made with hearty religious bread and a mix of muenster and cheddar cheeses). The grilled cheese sandwiches weren't perfectly cooked, but they turned out pretty well. None of them were too badly burned or undercooked. For dessert, we had Cadbury creme eggs (it was Easter after all) and half a bar of Maya Gold chocolate. Tree and Andrew brought some jammy red wine, in hopes of teaching me to enjoy red wine, but I'm not quite there yet. It was a good try though!

We had beautiful weather both days we were on Angel Island. As the sun set and it got chillier, we made a batch of hot cocoa (from a packet, with marshmallows!) and went and stood on the hill near our tents and admired the view and the twinkling lights in Marin and San Francisco. It was so nice! And then we secured our food in the cupboard and hunkered down in our tents for a good night's sleep, around 8pm.

We slept pretty well. I got a new sleeping bag (in My Little Pony colors--aqua and light purple) for this trip, and it kept me toasty. I tossed and turned a little bit, worrying I could hear animals outside our tent trying to get in, but it was just the wind. Apparently it rained a little overnight, and Tree and Andrew had some water seepage into their tent, so they didn't sleep as well as we did. That's too bad!

We got up around sunrise. The grasses and bushes around our tents looked so pretty covered in dew with the sun shining on them. Sadly, when we walked up to our picnic area, we found that the raccoon cupboard had not been very effective. The latch was kind of loose, and it looked like a team of at least two raccoons had raided it, one reaching down through a gap in the top, and one reaching up between the bottom of the doors. Our breakfast (McCann's instant Irish oatmeal, milk powder, brown sugar, dried cherries, slivered almonds, and mini chocolate chips, as well as four hot cross buns) was mostly gone, with the remaining scraps trashed and inedible. I hope those raccoons enjoyed our breakfast!

Luckily, the raccoons weren't able to reach the dinner leftovers, so we each had a slice of bread and a few pieces of cheese for breakfast, as well as tea and cocoa. I also had a tin of smoked oysters that I'd forgotten to have at lunch the previous day, but nobody else wanted any (Tree bravely sampled one and declared it an acquired taste. I can see how that might be the case; the women in my family enjoy smoked oysters, as well as liverwurst).

We were thinking about renting bikes after breakfast and riding the 5-mile loop around the island, but we decided to catch the 10:20 ferry back to Tiburon and have an early lunch instead. We packed up, hiked back to the ferry landing, and waited around in the sun for a while. The ferry was late because of engine troubles, but it wasn't a big deal. We had a nice chat with the park ranger about how wiley raccoons can be. She sympathized about them eating our breakfast.

We were pretty much the only people on the return ferry. We dropped our bags off at our cars (by the way, there's a lot on Tiburon Blvd. next to WaMu a little bit before Beach St. where parking is only $4/day and overnight parking is allowed; it seemed like the best option for Angel Island campers), and then walked over to Sam's Anchor Cafe, on Main Street in Tiburon. Sam's only served lunch, and we passed a breakfast place giving off delicious breakfast smells that might have been a better choice given our situation, but Sam's was good too.

We were seated out on the patio, overlooking the dock. This turned out to be less idyllic and picturesque than we'd anticipated, as there were some very ballsy seagulls wandering around. One gull even swooped in and stole a few onion rings from a neighboring table, knocking over the rest of the onion rings in the process. We covered our food protectively after that incident. It wasn't the most relaxed meal ever. I guess that's the price you pay for nice views of the water.

Tree and Andrew had a basket of onion rings, and they were certainly tasty. Tree and I both had the rare Ahi tuna sandwiches, which were quite good. After lunch, we walked down Tiburon and got ice cream (peanut butter fudge gelato, yum!) and ate it in front of a pretty fountain/kinetic sculpture nearby. Then we parted ways and headed home.

Despite our raccoon troubles, I really enjoyed this camping trip. After Sea Otter, I was a little wary of camping, but this was much better. It was my first time camping without a car, and it went really well. I think staying just one night was good, as it let me feel like I was roughing it without actually getting too grungy or being deprived of creature comforts for too long. I definitely recommend Angel Island for hiking and camping (especially campsite #5); just make sure your food is raccoon-proof!

(Full picture set is here)

A little something crafty, after a long craft hiatus:

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 scrap quilt. 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!