un-brittle

Rather than make my usual holiday fare, I decided to take a stab at making brittle this year. I saw a recipe for walnut brittle in Cooking Light that looked intriguing. Plus, I remembered my former H.S. bio teacher talking about making brittle and how it was an annual tradition for his family and how it was a highly coveted item. It also seemed far less time-consuming than baking cookies and making rum balls.

The only problem with the recipe was that it calls for a cup of corn syrup, and in addition to my goldilocks method of baking, I also employ the "one percent" doctrine when it comes to potential problem ingredients, which is not to be confused with Cheney's one percent doctrine: if there is a one-percent possibility that I might want a person who has an allergy to a particular ingredient to try my finished product, and there is an easy viable substitute to problematic ingredient, then I use the substitute.

I have one friend who is allergic to corn. That coupled with my own weird conceptions of a hierarchy of the virtues of different sweeteners (Brown sugar>regular sugar> corn syrup>HFCS), I was happy to substitute another sweetener for corn syrup.

The problem was in the science. It turns out that corn syrup has a useful purpose in baking. The longer chains of glucose molecules present in corn syrup disrupt the motion of the molecules thereby slowing down the crystallization process. Corn syrup, according to Harold McGee's wonderful On Food and Cooking, is also slightly acidic, so when you add baking soda (NaH₂CO₃) at the end, you get a nice neutralizing reaction that produces carbon dioxide bubbles and gives brittle that characteristic hollow bubbled consistency. The alkaline properties of baking soda also make it useful for speeding up the browning process.

Is it possible to make brittle with just sugar? I posted this query on my favorite food board and promptly got answers. Yes, it was, with careful temperature monitoring and a few modifications.

Thus I tried the all-sugar method with thermometer in hand: brittle batch #1 was toasted hazelnut brittle. The first thing I discovered was that my thermometer is not a candy thermometer, and therefore, doesn't register temperatures nearly high enough to be useful.

So long for meticulous temperature measuring. I was on my own now. So I dumped the sugar and water into a pan and waited.

At some point, the sugar began to look murky. The crystallization had begun. Being the novice candy-maker that I am, I then started stirring with a metal spoon in the hopes of retarding this process, but it kept getting worse. It didn't have the characteristic light-browned hue of brittle yet, but since it was on the brink of crystalizing, I poured in the butter, nuts, cream of tartar and then spread it out on a pan.

Batch #1 was a disaster, but I was loathe to waste a whole thing of hazelnuts. Thus once it cooled and hardened and looked like an opaque whitish mess, I stuck it in the oven, which didn't exactly turn it into brittle, but helped salvage my product. Instead of the characteristic opaque hue of brittle, "brittle" #1 was translucent, but with the requisite browned hues.

I posted more queries on the food board, read up on the science of crystallization and why you absolutely do not want to stir the sugar (the agitation increases the bumping motion of the sugar molecules and helps the crystallization process.) and if you must, then why you absolutely do not want to use a metal spoon (the lowered temperatures caused by the metal spoon form pockets of super-saturated sugar areas, thereby potentially initiating a crystallization process.) to do the stirring that you are not supposed to do in the first place.

Thus, with brittle #2 (walnut brittle), I vowed not to stir. But again, despite my diligent non-stirring, the crystals started to form again. At one point, the entire pot was one white opaque mass.

However, this time, instead of stopping, I waited. And waited.

Eventually, the crystals melted and the sugar became brown and liquidy again. The consistency of brittle #2 turned out to be the same as #1. So some kind of carmelized sugar glass candy with nuts, but a far cry from brittle.

Still, it was edible, so I decided to give it to people anyway and told them it was "not brittle".

I think next year, I will stick with my usual holiday fare and give people rum balls.

A tale of two breads

This is the story of two breads-- or more precisely, the bread-bakers, and their bread-baking outcomes.

Both aspired to make Mark Bittman's famous no-knead bread.

Baker 1 followed Bittman's recipe to a T.

Baker 2 more or less followed Bittman's recipe to a T.

Well, except that she increased the amount of yeast to 1 tsp, b/c she read in a more recent version of the no-knead recipe, that the scant amount of yeast means a long rising time and the need for a dutch oven to contain its amorphous shape. Baker 2 doesn't have a dutch oven. She also didn't have an apartment that would stay at 70 degrees for 20 hours straight, so she attempted to get around this by increasing the yeast content. After all, recipe #2 calls for a tablespoon of yeast.

She also didn't add 1 5/8 cups of water, because she doesn't have a measuring cup that measures down to the eighth of a cup, so she averaged the two water quantities given in the two recipes.

She also used all whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose bread flour, because she hasn't baked white bread in years.

And mixed in some smoked mozzarella and radicchio, because it needed to be used up.

Ok, so baker 2 didn't adhere to Bittman's recipe at all, except maybe the salt content. (Baker 2 has Baking ADD and often employs the "goldilocks" method of following recipes, which is to say, if there are two recipes for the exact same thing, instead of adhering to one, she will average the two recipes.)

At the end of the rising period, the two bakers put their breads in the oven. Baker 1 followed Bittman's directions and put hers in a pot with a lid. Baker 2 followed the other recipe's directions and baked on a pizza stone.

Baker 2's bread came out fine, but with a funny crust. It was good and edible enough, but nothing to wow over. The consistency was very dense.

Baker 1's bread came out looking like artisan bread-- with a hearty crust, flecked with just the right amount of flour and with a beautiful golden crust. This bread could've been sold at a bakery.

Baker 2 is yours truly. Baker 1 is my downstairs neighbor.

When it comes to baking, I suppose it pays to follow directions.

"Three" Ingredient Recipes Part II--I Heart Chowhound

For someone as obsessed with food as I am, Chowhound is a wonderful resource. I've asked several questions on the board, and 98 percent of the time, I've gotten an answer. Then there are the times I find a fabulous idea for a simple recipe. Like the "3 ingredient" beer recipe that someone put up just yesterday. I haven't had a whole lot of time to bake, with choir and finals and everything else going on, but here was a perfect way to get rid of my Guinness beer that I've had in my fridge for 8+ months. Plus, this bread required no kneading to boot. Thus, while eating dinner, I baked this bread. I tweaked it a little by adding rosemary and grated gruyere cheese, and using half whole wheat flour. I just pulled it out of the oven 10 minutes ago and had it with the wonderfully yummy pumpkin seed butter that Patita gave me. YUM.

Someone on the board called it 3-2-1 bread:
3 cups self-rising flour
2 TBSP sugar
1 12 oz. bottle of beer

If you use regular flour, you add 3 tsp of baking powder and 1.5 tsp NaCl to help it rise.
You bake in a 375 degree oven for 1 hour.

Be forewarned-- it does have that distinct beer taste, but the rosemary, cheese and the sugar abated it a bit or complemented it nicely. It goes splendidly well with this pumpkin seed butter, though, and would make a grand side to a hearty soup.

It was my first try, so I need to do some tweaks (the crust came out too dry/hard, for example), before I can bring it to a party and wow people with it, but 3-ingredient recipes--even if the "three" is really a "five"--are a godsend around this time of year.

It frees up time for me to blog and extol the virtues of such recipes, for example. :)

Brussels sprout pasta

My friend sent me a recipe for a brussels sprouts pasta dish that called for 3 ingredients: brussels sprouts, fettuccine, and pine nuts. Ok, it calls for butter and olive oil, too, but I don't count those as ingredients. She raved about this recipe so much (plus the fact that it called for just 3 items), that I had to try it.

Oh my gosh. It was sooooooo simple and delicious. If you don't have a food processor, you will spend a bit of time thinly slicing the brussels sprouts, but after that, the recipe doesn't take long. You want to have the water boiling before you start sauteeing the brussels sprouts, b/c they will cook very quickly, and you don't want to get them to turn brown. You basically saute the brussels sprouts in some fat (1/2 butter and 1/2 olive oil), which alone is quite good, but then you mix this in w/ pasta and toasted pine nuts. I sprinkled Pecorino cheese on top, and voila.

It says it makes 4 servings, but it was so good, I probably ate 2 servings worth. It's not as good the day after, so this is the perfect dish to invite yourself over to other people's places and cook for them.

Thanks to Celadon for helping me rediscover brussels sprouts.

Killing the last vestiges of summer

Last weekend, I finally killed my tomato plant. I have been in denial for the past month, but bidding adieu to my tomato plant is my way of finally admitting that fall is here. For a while, I was refusing to buy squashes and apples in protest and denial of summer going away, but now that tomatoes are starting to taste like cardboard, and figs, peaches, and nectarines--quintessential summer fruits of yore--no longer taste like they should, the boycott was getting a bit silly. Besides, I couldn't resist the butternut and delicatas any longer. Thus, after I got back from the farmer's market with all this fall produce, I reluctantly dug up my tomato plant. Actually, I hadn't meant to kill it off, really. But the plant was getting unwieldy and tall, so it started out with just a pruning. Then I got carried away and eventually ended up just digging up the entire plant.

I also made what is probably the last batch of pesto with the remnants of my basil plant, whose leaves are turning yellow and getting tougher. Plus, what's the point of having basil w/o any tomatoes?

Now I have to wait another year for juicy yummy tomatoes. . ..

How sad.

Un-soy milk

It's amazing how some words are so onomatopoeic that one can instantly figure out what a word means upon first encounter. Take "meh" for example. The word just exudes its definition, the apathy, the "ugh"ness, the negativity.

It is the perfect word to describe how I feel about all soy milk, organic, fru fru, fresh, sugared, flavored or otherwise, that I have tried in this country. In fact, how dare it call itself soy milk. Thanks to it, many of my friends think soy milk is "nasty". That's because they've only had white people soy milk. (Pardon my un-PC ness.)

For real soy milk, they need to go to Asia, where it is unadulturated and has no remote resemlance to the stuff that masquerades as soy milk.

First, real soy milk does not have that nasty annoying chalky taste that is so pervasive in soy milks sold in stores here.

Real soy milk doesn't have that disgusting aftertaste.

Real soy milk doesn't come in cartons whose shelf life is over a year.

The best soy milk I've ever had was in a department store right across the street from where Verdant Broccoli lived, in Beijing. In fact, I got so hooked on it, that I had it at least once a day the whole time I was there.

Now, as I sit here drinking its vastly inferior cousin sold in the U.S., I yearn for more of that real soy milk I had while I was in Beijing.

This soy milk was ever so slightly greenish in hue. Not surprising, since soy milk comes from soybeans.
It had no chalky aftertaste. It had no added sugar, yet had a tinge of natural sweetness. It tasted like lightly perfumed pureed soybeans.

How I wish I could return to Beijing for more of that good stuff.

Super yummy sauce ala BJ

With all of the postings about tomatoes (here and here) of late, I wonder if I shouldn't change the name of this blog to "tomato musings". . ..

I went over lala and bj's for a dinner and movie night the other day. BJ concocted this really good tomato-y ricotta sauce. I admire people who can just stare at things in their cupboards and fridge and invent fabulous dishes out of thin air. I cannot do such a thing. I am a follower-- perhaps a modifier and a tweaker, but never an original.

Let's see. Let me see if I can describe what she said she did. She put sun-dried tomatoes (the oil-packed kind) and tomatoes in a food processor, mixed it with ricotta cheese, some Parmesan cheese, half and half, seasoned it with basil, and let it simmer on a stove top. To this she added tiny diced up bits of firm tofu (pre-sauteed, before adding it to sauce).

In a combo that I would've never thought of partnering, Italian meets Asian. And splendidly so.

This was served over pearl barley. YUM. It reminded me a bit of korma sauce or butter chicken sauce, with the Indian cheese.

Tomato Paella

Yes yes, I know. I've been remiss about posting anything for a while. . .. However, sometimes the best time to blog is when you've had a blog-worthy meal that truly wowed you, as I did tonight. Tonight, I tried a tomato paella recipe that I saw in the 5 September edition of the NYT. A Mark Bittman recipe, which is usually very simple, but sometimes hit or miss, in terms of flavors. Well, this one was right on. I think because it called for saffron and smoked paprika and roasted tomatoes, which I believe will make anything taste very good, but I was truly wowed by the robust flavors, and even better still, the recipe was very easy to boot.

One thing I like about recipes in the NYT is that the author/cook explains the recipe a little and then presents the recipe, which puts the recipe in some sort of tangible context for me.

In his article, Bittman started with the premise that normal paellas are time-consuming to make. Indeed, this is why I hardly make them. I did make a seafood paella earlier this year. But paellas usually end up being once- or twice-a-year things for me, for precisely this reason. (It also usually makes about 8-10 servings, which means I need help eating it.)

Bittman promised a very simple recipe in his tomato paella recipe. It almost being the end of tomato season, today (the first day of autumn) was the perfect day to bid summer farewell and bring in the fall season with a tomato paella recipe.

I used brown rice instead of white rice, but the recipe worked beautifully. I cooked it slightly longer on the stovetop before putting it in the oven to account for the brown rice.

The recipe calls for smoked paprika and saffron, both of which Bittman says are "optional", but in my unhumble biased opinion, I feel that this is hogwash. The whole reason this paella tastes so good is because of the smoked paprika and saffron. I cannot imagine how this would taste without these two key ingredients, especially the smoked paprika. Bittman says that regular paprika is a fine substitute, and that may very well be the case, but the smoky flavor was what I think made such a strong impression in my mind (and taste buds).

How sad that I've only discovered this recipe just as tomatoes are on the wane. . ..

Tomatoes for dessert

I saw an intriguing recipe for a tomato-based dessert in the SF Chronicle the other day. I have to admit, I was a tad skeptical, but given that I conveniently had a surfeit of sungolds, some mascarpone cream and some cream cheese left over from my mango cheesecake experiment, I decided to give this recipe a try. However, I don't like making dessert just for myself, so I invited one of my college friends over to be a guinea pig. From salad to main dish to dessert, it ended up being an all-tomato affair. But back to this dessert.

I had to halve the recipe, since the original recipe made 10 servings.

The first thing I liked about this recipe is that I didn't have to modify the sugar content much. The custard part has a mere 1/6 cup of sugar, which I may have reduced slightly, but turned out to be not cloyingly sweet and nicely offset by the slight acidity of the lemon. As for the tomato compote part, this called for less than 1/2 cup of sugar, which after you add the lemon peels, raisins, and tomatoes, ended up being the right amount. If you have a sweet tooth, you might even add more.

The result was a pleasant surprise, to which none of the pictures I took can do justice:
The budino is an Italian steamed custard. It almost tastes like a very light, subtle cheesecake. This one had a light citrus flavor from the grated orange and lemon peels that the recipe called for. It tasted pretty good unaccompanied. However, the tart/sweet tomato compote enhanced and really brought out the latent citrus flavors. The tomato in dessert thing actually worked really well. The compote is essentially candied lemon peel w/ carmelized cherry tomatoes. The one modification I made was to use really good demerra brown sugar, which imparted a rich toffee-like taste. The slicing and roasting of tomatoes was a bit of a hassle, but without the roasting/carmelizing, the compote would not have tasted the same.

All in all, I was pleased with the results. My friend, who is not much of a dessert-eater, even seemed to like it enough to finish his portion.

I am now a tomato-dessert convert.

Mango Cheesecake

For the longest time, I've had a recipe for mango cheesecake sandwiched between one of my recipe scrapbook pages. I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake (unless my mom makes it; she has a really good non-heavy cheesecake recipe), but the bright yellow color caught my eye. I thus clipped the recipe and added it to my ever-growing pile of to-try-someday-when-the-inspiration-hits recipes.

Pretty though the yellow hue may be, it sat in my recipe pile for a few years for a variety of reasons.
First, the recipe is a Nigella Lawson recipe from the NYT, which typically means that the recipe is very involved. (It was. More on this later.)

Second, her recipes typically call for a lot of butter and sugar (It did.), and not that there's anything wrong with that, but to assuage my guilty conscience, it often means modifying her recipes, which takes a few attempts. I'm not sure I like cheesecake that much to want to try multiple renditions before I declare it edible.

Third, as I mentioned, I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake. Thus, I can't just make this when I'm having people over. I need a party or something to bring it to, so I don't have too many leftovers. (Cheesecake also doesn't freeze well.)

But on this weekend was hot, and I was going to a barbecue birthday celebration in Berkeley, and when I flipped through my recipe pile in search of inspiration, the brilliantly yellow-hued cheesecake jumped out at me. Well, not literally, but still, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try this dessert.

My first mistake was grossly underestimating the amount of cream cheese I needed. I don't really like cream cheese much, so I hardly ever buy it, unless a recipe calls for it. The recipe calls for 1.5 pounds of cream cheese. I thought one package of cream cheese was one pound, so I bought two, thinking I'd have half a container left over. Wrong. I ended up needing another package. That is three packages of cream cheese. More cream cheese than I've bought in the past ten years, mind you. Perhaps this was reason number 4 for not having tried this recipe before.

The graham cracker crust called for a stick of butter. I looked at the 3 packages of cream cheese appallingly and made my first recipe modification. I used a WF whole grain graham cracker recipe, which called for 2 tbsp of butter total and worked perfectly fine as a graham cracker crust.

The recipe calls for a cup of sugar. Second recipe modification: I cut that as well-- but since I was taking it to a barbecue where others were eating it, I didn't cut it as much as I would have were I making this for myself.

The recipe is straightforward enough. (But still very time consuming.) First you make the graham cracker crust, then puree mangoes, mix with the cream cheese (all 3 packages of it), sugar, and 6 eggs. Then it calls for baking it in a water bath for about 2 hours. I was a little skeptical about this, b/c I don't remember my mom ever baking cheesecake in a water bath. Plus, 2 hours of oven time in the heat of summer was just a very long time. Ah well, at this point, I was committed.

2 hours later, the cake came out beautifully. I really wanted to try a sliver to make sure it was fully cooked and also make sure it was edible, but it probably would've looked odd to bring a cheesecake with a gaping hole in it.

The verdict? Well, let me start with a picture of it. It came out looking very impressive and very pretty. Here it is garnished with raspberries. (The raspberries was C's idea.)

Despite the many compliments I received on it, I think I was more impressed with its looks than its taste. I did like it better than a typical cheesecake. It turns out that the water bath steams the cheesecake, which makes it seem deceivingly fluffier/lighter, and also I think helped prevent cracks, which made the above photo op possible.

The mango taste was very subtle-- in fact a little too subtle, for all the time I spent pureeing mangoes.
For the amount of time it took, I wasn't overly wowed by the taste. For this reason, I don't think it is a practical all-purpose or weekday (or even weekend) dessert. However, it does make a good crowd dessert. It has the mango-unusualness factor. It is also very photogenic. It might make a very good alternative to your quotidian pumpkin pie at a thanksgiving gathering.

In the end, I ended up keeping the recipe precisely for that reason.

Foolproof pudding with a few modifications

A few weeks ago, I clipped out a recipe that I saw in the NYT, b/c the title caught my eye: "Foolproof pudding".

Now I am all for foolproof, since I seem to have a knack for mangling the simplest of recipes. But it gets even better. The author promises the dessert will take no more than 20 minutes, and it calls for a vanilla bean. A foolproof dessert that takes 20 minutes to make and calls for only 4 ingredients? Who wouldn't want to try making such a dessert? Plus other than the lack of fresh fruit, it sounded like a very quintessentially summery-sounding dessert.

I bought all of the requisite ingredients (whole milk and a vanilla bean, since I already had the sugar and corn starch and salt) last weekend and set out to make it sometime this week.

Unfortunately, I had a little mishap w/ the milk expiring before I ever got around to making the dessert, but undeterred, I got another container of milk.

The recipe calls for 2.5 cups of whole milk or half-and-half and 2/3 cups of sugar. It wasn't quite the appalling 1 cup of sugar that I often see in recipes, but the sugar content still seemed a tad high, so I cut it to 1/2 cup, which granted, isn't a whole lot less than 2/3 cup.

Well, after mixing the sugar, milk and vanilla bean in a saucepan for a bit and tasting it, I decided that even with this slight reduction, it was still too cloyingly sweet for my tastes. What is it w/ recipes and their annoying penchant to overestimate the amount of sugar one needs to put in a recipe? Anyway, I ended up dumping the entire carton of milk--which btw, is twice the amount of milk that the recipe originally calls for--into the saucepan. The result?

Not counting the cooling time, the dessert did really only take about 20 minutes to make. I was a little skeptical about the corn-starch overpowering the delicate flavors of the vanilla, which it did a little when it was hot, but when cooled, the corn-starchiness disappeared.

The end product lived up to my expectations. It was simple to make, called for minimal ingredients, and tasted yummy. I would still cut the sugar even more, perhaps, if I were making it for myself (especially if I plan to have it as part of breakfast as I did today. . .), but it came out quite well, otherwise, and looked cool, bespeckled with vanilla bean specks.

The recipe calls for either vanilla bean or vanilla extract, but if you are like me and get excited at the sight of real vanilla bean specks, it is well worth the $3 or $4 per vanilla bean pod to splurge for the real thing. I mean, look at how beautiful the specks look amid the pristine white surface:
On the other hand, if you decide to go for option b. and turn it into a chocolate pudding (by adding a few finely chopped up shards of chocolate to your liking), then don't bother with the vanilla bean. Vanilla extract will suffice.

I discovered that it makes a good weekend "almost breakfast" item (hey, the milk has protein!). I think this one is going in my dessert scrap book.

Figs and Tarragon

Where did I get the title of my blog? From this divine combination.

It's such a simple combo, but truly divine. Just figs. And tarragon. That's it. You can grill the figs if you want, for an added bonus, but just plain will do the trick.

My New Favorite Bread

It is not exactly bread-baking season (especially given that I live on a second floor apartment where it gets sweltering in the summer), but I had been fixated on the idea of eating an orange rye bread for a while, so on Saturday evening, when the temperature seemed deceptively cool (outside), I decided to whip out my Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book and give their orange-rye recipe a try.

I've had this wonderful cookbook for years, and as with many cookbooks, I have my stock favorites. I tend to make probably the same 10 recipes over and over again, while there are others that I have yet to make. In fact, I could probably plot a nicely skewed bell curve of the frequency with which I make the various breads in this cookbook.

I made the orange-rye a while back, precisely to break this habit/skewed bell curve pattern and ended up liking the bread and wondering why I hadn't made it all of these years.

Thus, here I was at a too-late-to-start-making-bread hour poring over my Laurel's Bread Book, debating whether to go through with it and bake this bread that I had been fixating over for the past two weeks.
However, while pondering over this and resolving to make the bread after all, another recipe for a honey-spiced rye on the opposite page caught my eye. I compared the ingredients and decided that the latter had more interesting stuff (honey, almonds, lots of interesting spices, orange rind, as opposed to just orange rind and honey for the orange-rye recipe), and made that instead. It calls for a 1/2 cup of almonds, but since I didn't have enough almonds, I also added toasted hazelnuts to the mix.

It called for a mere "pinch" of anise seed, but I added 1 tsp of caraway seed. (The next time I make it, I plan to increase this by another teaspoon.)

The other modification I made to the original recipe was to chop up slightly chunkier bits of orange peel (boil or soak in hot water to slightly soften) than the recipe called for.

Unfortunately, I didn't put it in the oven till 11-ish, so I didn't get to try it till the following morning, but I liked it so much, I think I must've devoured a third of the loaf in just a day.

For the time being, I've dubbed it my new favorite bread. Well, ok, favorite "quick" bread.

The quintessential summer salad I

I have a feeling I will be posting about many quintessential summer salads, and hence the need for the modifier, "I". . ..

About a year ago, a woman brought a wonderfully yummy savory watermelon salad to a potluck. The salad had watermelon chunks, some white thing that tasted like bland feta cheese, but had a good mouth feel and went really well with the other things in this salad, and toasted pine nuts. I found myself coming back for more and more.

I found my friend later that evening and asked her for the recipe. I also asked her what the mysterious white things were. Turns out the recipe is on epicurious, and the white thing is ricotta salata.

Here is the recipe. Note how few items the recipe calls for. Aside from the salad dressing (oil, lime, basil), it calls for just three items.

I have been making this recipe weekly for the past few weeks. I usually cut the watermelon into cubes and let it sit in a colander for a day or two in the fridge to sap out the moisture, as the salad tends to otherwise get soggy. I also add very little salad dressing and prefer to add it as I eat it, rather than pour it all at once. Actually, you could even eat this salad w/o the dressing.

The melange of the different flavors--the toasted nutty taste of the pine nuts, the succulent sweetness of the watermelon, and the firm texture of the cheese--and the slight tartness that the lime vinaigrette imparts complement each other so well. It is also colorful to boot.

Did I mention it also takes 5 minutes to make and requires no oven use (except to toast the pine nuts), and thus is the perfect summer dish? In fact, it is salad, main dish, and dessert in one!

Today, I made this very salad with yellow watermelon instead of the usual red. I enjoyed the colors (and of course, the taste) just as much. Next week, I might get both red and yellow watermelon and mix the colors.

Attempting to Replicate Pizzaiolo's Salad

Although I would never make a great food blogger due to the fact that I often fail to remember to take photos when I go out to eat, I do like coming home and trying to reconstruct recipes of things that I tried elsewhere that I liked. Yes, I am a shameless idea-stealer in that regard.

For example, the other night, I attempted to recreate the yummy salad I had at Pizzaiolo where I interrogated my friend about his engagement status. Theirs was a faro salad; I made mine with hulled barley, but it came pretty close. Or perhaps I am flattering myself, but I liked the nutty taste and the combination of flavors that resulted.

I combined cooked hulled barley with fresh corn kernels, cherry tomatoes (the bigger ones chopped in half so the juices mix), toasted pine nuts, dressed it with olive oil and vinegar, then sprinkled shaved pecorino cheese over this, and put all this on a bed of arugula taken from my garden.

Voila.
The toasted pine nuts were my addition, but I have been putting toasted pine nuts in everything lately, and am convinced that they go well with everything, especially salad-type stuff.

Cherries in a savory dish

Cherries are finally in season! Hurray! Now that apples are about to go out of season, I need other easy, colorful and yummy things to make with seasonal ingredients. This cherry crostini recipe fits the bill.

This cherry crostini takes about 20 minutes to assemble (maybe more--I cheated, b/c I already had the cream cheese made and the watercress washed and chopped up), and 5 minutes to eat, but is fully worth it. It is a winning recipe from one of our iron chef parties.

Need:
spreadable cream cheese (low or fully fatted)
dill
finely chopped walnuts
thinly sliced slightly stale (or toasted) baguette
watercress
chopped cherries

You mix the cream cheese with dill and walnuts (to taste), then spread a thin layer of this over the slightly stale baguette, then put watercress on top, and then top with cherries. I used brooks cherries in this photo, but you can use any kind, really. I also like them with rainiers. Make sure you admire the vibrant colors before you eat. Oh, and if you're a slob like me, make sure you are not wearing white when you eat this.

It probably sounds weird to combine dill with cherries, but I found that the combination of the strongly flavored dill, the nutty walnuts, the bitter watercress and the sweet cherries works really well.

Bon appetit!

A food blog?

The last thing I need to do is start another blog, but I keep coming back to the idea of starting a food blog. In fact, in my other blog, I write about 4 things: food, rants and other random musings, history, and foreign policy. Lately, though, I've been writing more about food. I've also been reading lots of good food blogs, which of course is making me want to start my own food blog and obsess about food. (Just ask my friend N, who gets weekly updates of my new obsessions. Actually, she is the cause of most of my food obsessions.) Of course, I'm also supposed to be studying and doing other things, so I don't know how frequent my posts will be.

Since I always forget to bring a camera when I eat out, I will probably make a terrible "foodie", but we shall see what becomes of this.