Menu for El Puerco de Julio

Once again, I’ve surprised myself by how long it’s taken me to post. I have been so busy I can hardly see straight. Somewhere in the chaos of daily life, I’ve come up with the menu for our second annual El Puerco de Julio Fiesta. Here ’tis:

• Watermelon
• Cole Slaw
• Pulled Pork
• The Man’s World Famous Gluten-free Mac and Cheese
• Cornbread (gluten-free and maybe even a vegan version as well)
• Ice Cream (coconut milk and agave based/gf vegan)

I’m still not sure about the ice cream flavor. We’ve been tossing around a lot of ideas, including just going vanilla and then providing fruit sauces such as peach, cherry (our trees are so weighted down with cherries at this point), lychee, and strawberry. I really like this idea, but honestly, it sounds like a lot of work, which is time I just don’t have right now. Other ideas are peach (using black-peach tea with peach chunks) and strawberry. I’m torn. Naturally, I want it to be perfect, so I’m having a hard time committing. I really need to kill my inner Martha!

Any ice cream flavor suggestions out there? What is traditional (since my menu is traditional) yet super yummy and maybe a little different too?

Growing My Dinner Salad

Look, Look, LOOK at this!!!

Went to a garden party, sat around with my old friends...

It’s my first garden salad of the year! By that I mean that I grew everything in this bowl. Well, I didn’t grow it, I put the seeds in the ground and they grew themselves, like great little children. And now, I must eat them!

What we have here are: spinach, rouge d’hiver, salad bowl, Australian yellow, crinkly cress (man that stuff is spicy) rocket, flat leaf parsley, marjoram, and some other stuff. I tossed all of this in a little olive oil, red wine vinegar, and salt and pepper. It’s so fresh it’s still bleeding, so what more could it need?

I’m really, really pleased about this because this year I gave up on anything remotely fancy for my garden (ix-nay on the ucchini-zay, eets-bay, etc.) and just gave the garden what it most likes to grow, and that is LETTUCE. Et voila, gardening success! Finally!

Best Food Writers, or, Even More Fun with Food Metaphors

I have my home page set to Poetry Daily. It’s awesome to get a new poem every day and to learn about poets I’ve never heard of. But TODAY’S poem, “Elizabeth Sloughter’s Heart,” by Sarah Kennedy, really knocked me out! Why? Because it’s about food, history, and women, three of my favorite topics.  I’m off to order Kennedy’s book, Home Remedies, now.

This got me to thinking about my favorite food writers. I’ve taken turns through Ruth Reichl, Jeffrey Steingarten, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain, and hmmm, who else? I always loved R.W. Apple Jr. and, of course, MFK Fisher. And I’m leaving Michael Pollan off that list because while he is writing about food, he is not often also writing about pleasure.

But I asked myself, who am I missing here? Why haven’t I yet read Edna Lewis or Elizabeth David? Here is a really excellent discussion on the topic of best food writers, from which I have built a new reading list for myself (I’m really terrible at follow-through, so don’t hold me to this). There are really just too many to choose from!

• Edna Lewis, The Taste of Country Cooking
• Elizabeth David, anything
• Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
• Jonathan Gold, Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles (I love listening to Gold when he’s on Good Food)
  

And here you were thinking: Oh how nice, a post about poetry. See, food isn’t the only thing this girl thinks about.

What about y’all? What are your favorite non-cookbook books about food? I’d love to know.

Ch-ch-changes! And fun with food metaphors…

For those of you not reading this with your new old-folks reading glasses (ahem), you’ll notice that I’ve added some techno-forward socially-webby stuff to my sidebar. I have wanted to do this for a while, but had not yet gotten to it. Alas, there’s no time like the present lunch hour at work!

I’ll do my best updating the old Titter, Delicious, and Flickr stuff. I have to say Flickr could go a LONG way towards improving the usability of its interface. If WordPress offered a Picasa widget, I’d have been on that like white on rice, for sure. Anyhoozles, those photos are certainly stale as bread, from the December snow storm.

Lunch is over now, so I gotta make like jelly and jam.

Serious Food for Thought

Today I got my newsletter update from celiac.com. Included was this incredible article about a study whose results were recently published in the British Journal of Nutrition. Long story short: your gut health can be negatively affected by a gluten-free diet. BEHOLD, UNIVERSE! This is major news in my world! It validates what I have been thinking the past few months: that I have something wrong with my gut that is causing (at least in part) my arthritis/joint pain. Call it candida, call it bad bacteria, whatever. The point is that when I go off-roading from the SCD (which is mostly an anti-candida diet), my symptoms tend to intensify.

Since I don’t have any kind of diagnosis for my Mystery Illness, it’s nice to have some kind of Unifying Theory for it. And I’ll definitely be asking my doctor about this next we meet since she’s the one who told me about the SCD in the first place.

So I’m going to soldier on with the SCD because it’s the one thing I’ve found that improves things. I’m grateful to have something I can do that gives me some measure of control and actually seems to help.

The Melon-Eye

When I was a kid, my parents would often take my older sisters, brother, and I back to their small hometown in California’s Central Valley. Think cotton fields, dust, unbelievable heat, drive-in movie theaters, strawberry soda, and the smell of alfalfa everywhere. One of my uncles, whom I’ll call Floyd Owens, was a real character. Think bolo tie, cowboy boots and hat, thin lips, Texas accent, and a major leg-puller of small, gullible children. He used to call me “Melon-eye”, which now sounds to me like an exotic Hawaiian cocktail, but at the time was one of those mildly annoying things about Uncle Floyd (when you’re twelve, “Melon-eye” just doesn’t sound cool somehow).

As I mentioned in my last post, my market had a sale on galia melons. I got to thinking about aguas frescas and how much I love them. Then the Craving started, and I knew it would have to be satisfied. Hence, I bring you, The Melon-Eye. Improvise as you wish. Methinks it cries out for vodka, but you probably have better ideas (which you naturally should let me know about).

The Melon-Eye

serves 2

1. Select a galia melon. I typically push in the bottom gently with my thumb and smell it. If it smells like melon and my thumb can push in just a bit, it’s ripe.
2. Cut up the melon, discarding the seeds and peel.
3. Place the melon pieces into a blender or food processor, pulsing until blended.
4. Strain through a colander or sieve.
   
5. Add agave syrup to taste. I use 1-2 T per glass.
6. Add ice and serve.

Like I said, this just screams cocktail! and next time I make it, I’ll probably add some vodka and maybe a sugar or salted rim. I mean, it is summer after all, and one must make the most of it.

The Melon-Eye

The Crazy-Busy Update

Even I can’t believe how long it’s been since I posted. Meanwhile, my fellow bloggers pals are writing laps around me. But that’s okay. We gotta be free to be you and me, and lately it’s all about me being super busy.

The good news is that my busy-ness was in large part about being on vacation and away from computers! Wooohoo! The Man and I took our spring vacation out to Malheur to look at birds. We saw ten new species, including the amazing and majestic Swainson’s hawk, which we had wanted to see for a long time. We also discovered that there are quite a few hikes available on or near the refuge, which we had somehow missed the other times we had been there.

The more good news about this is that I’m feeling a LOT better lately. I have been riding my bike, lifting weights at the gym, and just generally being fantastically active. I actually feel “normal,” which is something I haven’t felt in a few years. Currently my only symptom is the swelling hands thing and occasional muscle soreness. I haven’t had any reactions to foods lately either, although I’m still sticking to the SCD, generally speaking.

I’m truly grateful for this reprieve. My monkey mind keeps thinking the shoe will drop and I’ll have to pay for this normalcy later, but my enlightened mind tells me that I can’t predict the future and enjoying each day is what’s important. So I’m trying to do that.

In food news, I’m praising the goddess of summer. It’s not summer yet, of course, but it’s been 80F in Portland for the past ten days in a row, so it feels like summer. My market had a sale on galia melons and I went a little crazy with those. I’ll post a little drinky-poo recipe soon. I’m looking forward to being sick of melons and strawberries a few weeks from now.

Oh yeah, and it was also my birthday earlier this week, so I got busy with that too. It was a Significant Birthday and we celebrated by going to Carafe, one of my favorite French restaurants in town and one that participates in the local gluten-free restaurant thingy. After that we went to see Un Baiser, S’il Vous Plait, a great French film. Did I mention I’ve embarked on learning French? Mais, oui! Hence, the francophilean birthday this year.

That’s all the big news and the super-busy update stuff. I’ll actually get back to the food now in my next posts, I promise.

Oxtail Pate

My apologies for taking so long to post once again. I got busy with moving NS and getting the chicken feet. The feet handoff went very smoothly and included freshly picked strawberries and a jalapeno plant from my sister’s garden. The strawberries were spectacular and may have inspired me to actually try planting some myself next year (however, not holding my breath as my garden intentions always outdo my garden realities).

Oxtails had been on my mind due to my recent economical meats kick. I saw them on a local menu a few weeks back as something like “braised oxtails with orange” and knew that was the next thing I’d tackle.

They’re pretty cheap, though not as cheap as I thought they would be. I got three-ish pounds for $18. Not exactly the price of pigs’ feet, but this dish made it plenty worth it.

I first looked at this recipe to get an idea of what to do, and then went off-roading from there.

Oxtail Pate

3 lbs oxtails

5 T butter

1 c red wine

2 T bacon fat (optional)

1 onion

1/4 c orange juice

2 t drained bottled green peppercorns

4 cloves, ground

2 t salt

1. Melt 3 T butter in a dutch oven. Add 1 c red wine and the oxtails. Cover and roast in the oven for 3.5 hours at 300F.
2. Remove from the oven and try not to eat them all because they are super delish at this stage. Remember, you’re going all the way and making pate.
   

   Sooooooo good

3. Let cool a bit and then remove the bones using your fingers. It’s much harder to do with a knife and you risk losing a finger. Bad times.
   

   Meat separated from bones

4. Saute the chopped onion until golden in some leftover bacon fat that you have lying around, or 2 T of butter.
5. Add to the bowl of your food processor: oxtail meat, sauteed onion, orange juice, peppercorns, cloves, and salt. Pulse until fairly well minced but not to the point of a fine grind.
6. Pack into a loaf pan and refrigerate overnight or until well set.
7. Loosen the sides by running a spatula around the edges and plop out onto a serving platter. Serve at room temp with some seriously good crackers. This makes enough for two people to last a week and is plenty for a dinner party.

The Man’s comment on this pate was that it was good enough to serve to “normal” people and was actually quite yummy. I thought of it more as a great holiday dish that I won’t have to make excuses for (i.e., “This is my allergy-friendly dish that only I will find tasty.”)

Please take me to a dinner party so I can make people happy!

Chicken Feet Text Message

It’s not every day that oldest my sister texts me with this message: “Do you like chicken feet?” Hmmm. Where could this question possibly be leading? I text back: “Maybe?”

Her text: “We are slaughtering chickens today. Do you want the feet?”

My text, following a mad Web scramble for chicken feet recipes: “Sure!”

So now we are on our way to San Francisco to move a friend to Portland. On the way back, we’ll rendezvous with my sister in Redding to get the chicken feet. Good times!

Pearls Redux

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that my essay, “Pearls,” was going to be reprinted by the amazing folks at Menda City Review. Well, their newest issue is now posted and “Pearls” appears in the Commentaries section. Yea! I’m so grateful “Pearls” is enjoying a second life.