Fig walnut bread

Today, I saw a basket of figs at the farmer's market, so I made pizza and a fig walnut bread with the figs.

I love love love figs. (But I suppose you knew that from the title of this blog.) Their season is so fleeting, it makes me want to covet them even more when they are around.

I found the fig bread recipe in the Mercury News. I saw it last year when fig season was headed out, so filed the recipe for "later" and just came across it yesterday when I was looking for another recipe. Ah, serendipity. . .

This is the recipe. As is my usual habit, I didn't follow the recipe to a T.
*There is absolutely no reason you need 1.5 cups of sugar. I used 1/2 cup of snob brown sugar, and it is plenty.
*I cut the oil in half and used yogurt as the rest of the filler. It seemed to work fine.
*I freshly grated nutmeg and some of the cinnamon.
*I also added freshly ground ginger--but evidently, not enough, since I can barely taste it.
*Not sure if I was supposed to do this, but I folded in the sherry with the batter. It gives the figs a nice brandied flavor.

It's quite good. A bit crumbly (so no pics, alas), but yummy.

My week of salads

1. Raw kale Caesar salad (recipe and post forthcoming):
2. Salad made with fresh butter lettuce from TL's garden:
I really wanted to make this salad with pear, but I didn't have any handy, so I made it with apples instead, which were a respectable substitute. I made it a few days later with pear and the combination was bliss. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture (or I did, but forgot to put the memory card in the camera, and uploading these photos entails more work than I care for right now), but the perfect butter lettuce salad consists of:
-butter lettuce (preferably from TL's garden, but if you are not TL or someone who lives upstairs from TL, then regular butter lettuce will do. Baby butter lettuce tastes better.) washed and roughly torn
-shaved bits of Parmesan cheese
-a ripe pear (a quarter or however much you want, thinly sliced into wedges)
-freshly and coarsely ground black pepper that you grind yourself
-a drizzle of very good olive oil

The sharpness of the Parmesan and the bite of the ground pepper complement the butteriness of the pear and lettuce really well.

You can add more things if you want, but you really don't need anything else.

My cashew addiction

I'm in trouble. It's not as if cashews aren't already addicting enough. I try not to keep them around the house, because I can eat gobfuls in one sitting if I'm not carefully monitoring my cashew intake. There are plenty of other nuts and seeds with far more nutritive value that I can consume. (Though cashews do provide you with lots of copper.) So I keep my cashews far out of reach in my cupboard. Still, it's hard to resist the occasional cashew or two. Or three. Or twenty.

And this is with plain old boring raw cashews.

So take a plain old boring cashew and add just two flavor elements:
1. roasting it to bring out its nuttiness
2. sauteing it with a little bit of melted butter and curry leaves

Now you have cashew-turned-crack. It's really that addicting, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether you think this is a good thing. I made a cup of this a few weeks ago, and I ate all of it in one weekend. I mean, these are things you're only supposed to eat maybe dozens at a time or so. (I give myself a little bit more leeway with serving sizes since I mostly don't eat meat, so this is one way to up my protein intake.) And oh dear. . .the recipe says it makes enough for six.

The curry leaves give it a wonderful indescribable smoky aroma. Of course, roasting anything brings out its flavor. (Though I don't like buying already-roasted cashews, b/c for some reason, the store-roasted ones sometimes taste rancid. I'm strange like that.)

I found the recipe in the SF Chronicle. I hope this link still works. It's really a heavenly combo. If I were a beer-drinking type, I think it would go splendidly with beer.

Paella!

I made paella with the pan that Celadon gave me. She also gave me a book with a zillion recipes, so I had trouble deciding from all the yummy-sounding recipes, but I finally decided on a shrimp paella. I had a little trouble keeping the pan from browning, but I think it's because it's my first time using it. It is supposed to get better with use and repeated seasoning.

Since there were about 4 shrimp paella recipes, I borrowed a little bit from all 4 recipes. I also added sun-dried tomatoes, since I was out of broth and sun-dried tomatoes make everything taste better. Mmmm.

Well, when all was said and done, I had about 6 servings of paella. I still need to work on my paella-making technique, b/c while it was pretty good for a first try, the shrimp came out kindof dry, despite my adding it at the last minute possible, and some of the rice came out al dente, which is fine if it were pasta, but I don't think rice is one of these things that is supposed to be al dente. I also think it would've been much improved by using a really good fish broth, which I didn't have.

A good homemade fish broth requires me to deal with fish carcasses, and I'm not sure if I want to deal with a decapitated fish head. Thus, I used veggie broth+sun-dried tomatoes instead, which didn't quite do the trick.

I think that next time, I'm going to make this at someone's house so I can share the fruits of my labor!

A sophisticated butter cookie

Orangette. How do I love thee? Let me count thy ways.

This blog has been the source of endless food inspirations. I mean, I don't even like butter cookies all that much, and yet, I have been fantasizing about these buckwheat butter cookies for months. Part of the appeal was the novelty factor. Another part of it was the intrigue factor: buckwheat with nibs? Hmm. I wonder how that will taste? But mostly, I was drawn to this recipe b/c I really like both buckwheat and nibs. I just never had them together, and what better excuse than in a little cookie?

It took me a while to find nibs, but I found some last week at Whole Foods and then had the perfect excuse to make these this weekend.

This is a very sophisticated and understated cookie. The buckwheat gives it that perfumey earthiness and really complements the bitterness of the nibs. The bitterness, the grainy texture and the buttery-ness all round each out quite nicely. I couldn't stop eating these.

At first glance, they kind of look like they can be mistook for stiff chocolate chip cookies.
But then you bite in expecting to taste chocolate and the flavors are much more intense, yet subtle. I love the burst of not-quite-chocolate flavor from the nibs. I am in cookie bliss. . ..

Barley risotto

Ah, asparagus, the harbinger of spring.

In graduate school, my then-roommate and I once kept a picture of asparagus in our living room. Its green caps symbolized the advent of spring.

Well, there hasn't been an asparagus sighting at the farmer's market quite yet, but yesterday, I saw a bunch of asparagus for $1.99 per pound at the grocery store, and while I generally don't like buying imported versions of any veggies that are otherwise available in California (e.g. buying garlic from China at a grocery store, when I live 50 miles from the garlic capital of the world? Come on.), I couldn't resist the asparagus. At $1.99 per pound, organic and buying local be damned.

I had a Mark Bittman recipe for a turkey barley risotto that I had been meaning to try, but needed a good substitute for the turkey and the asparagus delivered.

I also had green garlic (another herald of spring), so I modified Bittman's recipe and concocted a green garlic asparagus risotto with sundried tomatoes. I was a bit skeptical of the barley as rice thing, but the result turned out quite well.
Plus, unlike regular risotto, there is none of this constant monitoring of rice and adding of broth. In this risotto version, you just pour in the liquid all at once and are done with it. It's quite low-maintenance that way, but with satisfying results. The barley imparts a nice "crunchy" texture. Not "cookie" crunchy, but an earthy texture that has a pleasant mouth-feel. I think I might even prefer it to regular risotto. Next time, I need to cook the asparagus a bit longer, but otherwise, I was impressed with the results.

More lentils

I have been on a lentil kick lately. I made a lentil pilaf, then a lentil soup a few weeks ago, and now this past week, I tried spiced lentils. This SF Chronicle recipe (scroll down to the very bottom till you get to "lentil and vegetable stew (Dhansaak)") piqued my interest. This recipe calls for hand-grinding a zillion spices, then making an herb paste. I cut the recipe in half, but kept the proportions of the herb paste and spices, figuring that more flavor couldn't hurt.

Since I don't have a food processor or spice grinder, I pounded and ground each of the 9 herbs (except the cinnamon stick, which I grated) with a mortar and pestle. Had I realized that I would have to grind my own herbs, perhaps I may have never tried this recipe, but then I would've missed out.

I don't think I'd make this on a weeknight, but the grinding of the herbs was well worth the effort. The melange of freshly ground spices really added oomph to an otherwise comforting but frumpy lentil dish.
(And now, thanks to fabulous photo-taking tips from my downstairs neighbor, I can actually take close-up pictures that make any dish look quite appealing. )

I lived on this dish for almost an entire week.