pb and j

"Can I make my own PB and J daddy?"
Sure.
"Okay." She runs off into the kitchen.
It takes me a minute (when I realize how quiet she is being) to really appreciate this request. Big girl can do it all by herself. I'm stricken with a Universal Parenting Moment (UPM for short).
When did my baby get so big?


I made this last year from incredibly ripe fruit, so, lacking in some pectin, and me failing to think of this, it is really more of a thick syrup than a jam. The monkey could care less. It is lip smacking good, and favorite pancake fare. This gets dolloped on first, then seeing me salivating the sticky spoon is offered to me.
Really?
"Mmm, hmm."



"Daddy, is this the hard peanut butter or the normal kind?"
The normal stuff sweetie.
"Good, 'cuz that other stuff is stupid and disgusting. It tears the bread, but this kind is smmoooooth!"
What's your real opinion on that honey?
"What daddy?"
You'll understand in a few more years hon. Just keep spreading the smooth stuff.

"Now we cut it! I can cut it all by myself, with a sharp knife and everything, because I know how to do it, like how to hold the handle, because I do the dishes and sometimes, you let me dry the knife, right daddy, right?
Uh, yeah. Ummm.......yes, correct, sorry, that took me a minute to digest sweetie.
"But we haven't even eaten it daddy, that's silly!"

I oversee the cutting, sharp knife and all. It presents another dilemma though. Do I strive to encourage proper ergonomics as well and have her stand on a foot stool where she doesn't have to cut with her hands up near her shoulders? But she could fall off of this while holding a sharp knife? Another UPM.

Fingers intact, there are sixteen pieces to reassemble. Granted, jigsaw puzzles are a fun thing at any age, but this reconstruction speaks volumes to me. Of me. It makes me think that the mapping gene, the need for constantly orienting oneself and having a general grip on your spatial relationships, runs strong in this one. Things like legos and tetris appeal to her. Time will only tell, but so far, this monkey has a knack for directions.

At the table, the sandwich went fast. Unbelievably, there was near silence while it was snarfed down. This is a rare thing around here. With her constant chatter and little dude's learning about sentences and practicing incessantly, it is oh so rare. I reflected on the quiet. Enjoying all minute and 23 seconds of it. Then I thought about how carefully the sandwich was prepared. How mindfully the sharp knife was used. How much the reconstruction spoke of her character. Then again, how big, my little girl is.

I laughed out loud.
How was your UPM sandwich honey?
"My what? This is a PBJ. You're silly daddy!"
Then cocking her head to the side and sporting a growing smirk she says "hey, maybe I can make one for you?"
Anytime, my darling. Anytime.
"How about now daddy? I can make one for you right now, because I just made one and ate it and it was really good. You should have one with this apricot jam daddy, it is ever so delicious. It's a bit runny but if you are a really good PBJ builder like I am then you can easily do it and, like no worries on cutting it because I can use a really sharp knife all by myself and cut it into as many pieces as you want, like eight or nine or ten or eleven or twelve or maybe even fifty...................

zucchini: fried and baked, hold the steam

We've entered that time of year when the garden is a jungle. Even here in foggy ol' oakland, in a yard with southern exposure and nicely amended soil, you too can enjoy the sensation of summer squash coming out your ears. And if you have corn currently doing the tassel and silk dance, it can be coming out both of your ears. This is great and all, but about now is the time when you've had it steamed so many times that you need a new preparation or you just might hurl. Childhood memories, formed by a full stomach at my italian grandma's house are recalled and I find myself reaching for the fry and bake method. One that is very near my heart in the kitchen.

We browsed in the yard, wondering what the take would be today. A bowl full of squash and tomato. Hmmmm. What to do now? I brought the loot in the house, then decided we needed some fresh mozzarella. This meal would become a one-two garden variety punch. One I was craving. One simple, with bright flavors.

With my ingredients assembled, I gave the squash a cursory wash and began cutting it into 1/4 inch slices. I halved our cherry tomatoes. With a dip in a simple egg and milk wash, then finished with a lightly seasoned whole wheat and corn meal dusting, the disks were placed into a large pan with a nice layer of hot olive oil. A quick fry, turning once, followed by a quick rest on a rack to drip, and our bases were nearing completion.

Arranged on a cookie sheet, with the oven warming, I placed a cherry tomato atop each disk and then sprinkled it with a healthy pile of finely grated dry jack cheese. It was a little hard to not eat them at this point. (Well, a few disappeared, but really, they wouldn't fit on the pan without ruining the symmetry so I had to do something.) With our assembly complete, I put it in the oven and turned my attention to part two.

This next one was really easy. You probabaly all know the drill: Drain the mozzarella ball and slice. Slice the rest of the tomatoes, Go pick some basil, maybe give it a chop or tear and get out a bit of olive oil, and you're done.

Plated, I was in heaven. We we're having squash. Again. But this time the steaming basket was nowhere near. It was a celebration of summer, with all ingredients from the yard or the farmers' market. Well, wait, I used black pepper, and that came from a distant land. Whatever. I've been over that one before. Besides, grandma would probably not approve of me flouring squash without it. With a picture of her on my kitchen wall, it's a nice reminder of where dishes like this that fall out of my head really come from. They emanate in my heart, travel up through the memory bank up top, where through my hands it gets expressed as dinner. Which with some thoughtful chewing resides again in my stomach, next to my heart.

I wish you were still here to share this with me grandma. You'd be proud.

fresh picked produce

This past weekend, we went on down to Reedley, to my wife's folk's house. Being that it is the month of July, and her father is a gardening fiend, a trip to their house is like a trip to the market. As usual, we picked stuff for a few hours before packing the car and heading back home, this time resulting in a whopping 111 pounds of produce. Which come to think of it, is about half of our all time biggest load.

While visiting, I was speaking with my father in-law about our recent jam adventures and intentions of preserving stuff from this trip. He mentioned some of the things his mom used to "put up," including elderberry and blueberry when the berries had a good year. His reference to putting up food struck a chord with me. It reminded me of being very small and wandering into my grandma's pantry to stare at the multi-colored glass jars filled with food. He meant preserving and putting on the shelf for storage too, and coming from a child of the depression, this was something nearly everyone did. It wasn't considered liberal, or hippy or new age. You weren't considered weird or even strange in the least bit. You had an excess of a particular kind of food, so you feasted on it and then preserved it for later. No contemplating whether you needed to, or should. No pledging to folks that you would. You just did it.

So are we. I guess that makes me a child of the depression. Only this one is defined as the time when we forgot for the most part, how to grow, prepare and preserve our own food. We rely on others for our processed food needs, keeping the source obscured, cheap and distant, resulting in a massive depression of another kind marked by excess filled with emptiness.

As I write this, we have golden ketchup, seasoned tomato sauce and dried figs. There are peaches to jam, dry, or cut up for freezing. Plums to eat. Not pictured was corn and carrots. There were a number of white onions. That paper bag was half filled with green bell peppers and these light yellow, medium-hot kindamagigs. After picking up a pork roast, tomatillos and jalapeños yesterday, I've been having fun with chile verde in grandma's test kitchen today, and the aroma is making me weep with happiness.

Keeping this one short today, so I gotta go. Gotta stir, peel, chop. Salt and boil. Try not to burn the hell out of myself in the process. A lot of work, that will be yummy later. September and beyond is going to be delicious.

Time to put up.

the sound of one hand clapping

Life with a new one involves a lot of holding. Little people need touching and love like fish need water. It's a basic requirement that ends up tasking the parents with cradling them when doing just about anything. Walking from here to there, you have to relearn where your periphery is, lest you stub a toe trying to negotiate toys while carrying a squirmy eight pound weight. You end up having one arm immobilized with the itty-bitty monkey, while the other arm does everything else. You become quite proficient in living your life one handed, while your kid lives their own life with your other.

Sometimes, when you are eating dinner, with what you think is a sleeping baby, a tiny foot juts up and obscures the view. And by now you were thinking how easy it was getting, living one handed. I mean, you can still sit down and eat a meal. You just might not be able to see it.

Then it dawns on you, in one of those moments of clarity. For some unknown reason the solution presents itself out of the ether. Maybe this happens in the shower, or while sitting on the toilet, the point being it generally occurs during a task that involves doing something that is so automatic, it gives your brain a chance to wander the dials and see what is coming in on the other stations. For me, this last frequency check I heard something say "sammich'."

There it was. I need to eat more sandwiches. So I started with breakfast.

With everyone home, and all of us adjusting to new schedules, we often wake up cranky and hungry. The monkey is adjusting in her new role of sharing the spotlight, so I've been trying to ease the rough spots by getting us off to a good start. Toasted english muffins with laid yesterday egg scramble and high-fat Jersey cow melty cheese. This one felt good to hold in one hand and chomp into while the butter ran down my chin. It was a nice start indeed.


The monkey and her momma were heading out and spotted a plate on our doorstep. I quick call to Aunty revealed it to be homemade gravlax, slices of sourdough olive loaf, and a generous portion of creamy cheesey. As the little tyke and I chilled at home, what else to do? I turned the gift into a sandwich! With the wee one konked out asleep, I had two hands, I relished in the ability and ate it open face style.

Wow! Holy salted salmonoidae sis', this was really good! Like, killer good. But next time, please cure an entire salmon as one serving was simply not enough.

Pancakes aren't a sandwich, I know. But at breakfast the monkey had so politely asked for them, that come lunch time we were willing to cave in. To keep the sandwich day theme feast, I stacked them and put a layer of butter and powdered sugar in the middle. If I had done up some bacon and jammed it between, maybe I could call it a real sandwich. But I'm still giving it marks for resembling one as having two pieces of bread with a discrete middle, and if it comes right down to it the ability of being eaten one handed.

They call black cod "butterfish" for a reason. Dredged in a hot rub and flour mix (giving it an Ethiopian berbere quality) and fried, it lent this pita a nice spicey note to compliment the two rounds of heirloom tomato, avocado slices and tomato basil hummus. Although a bit tough to grasp with one hand and keep together, this middle eastern/african inspired sandwich continued the theme for the day nicely. Now, just how to end it all on a high note after the buttery goodness of the fish. Hmmmmm, there must be a way............?

.........with more, prodigious amounts of butterfat, how else? The cookies are a chocochip and oatmeal base with coconut and walnuts, surrounding a fresh mint and choco-chip ice cream. The mint was a mixture of the four kinds around our house, with an emphasis on the spearamint end of things. It was refreshing and crunchy where needed, anchored in the sweet cream and bitter chocolate. Now that, that there is definately easy eatin' with one hand.

Afterwards, when one hand was free, I realized I had survived my day o' sammich', I gave myself an applaud. Applaud like singular; just one. Having practice now at this too, I enjoy the sound of one hand clapping.

what's your favorite soup ?

Winter weather makes you want warming comfort foods. Soup has a long history of filling this requirement for many, and I am no exception. Winter is fully here, you have many root vegetables and things, and I think "Mmmmm, having soup enrobed in a thick white cover." When others are contemplating that steaming bowl, thinking of a nice fleecey coat or blanket to snuggle up with, I'm thinking of a cauldron of soup with a sort of fleece IN it, served with a thick blanket ON it. I love this time of year, and I prefer satiating my comfort needs by wearing my sheepy products on the inside, so I make up a huge pot of minestrone.

This recipe takes a little planning, and alot of time, but the results are.........well, according to my friend and family, most excellent. After feasting on it the first day, you are usually left with upwards of 5-6 quarts of leftovers, so the time invested will either stock your freezer or make you many friends. It is also easy on the pocketbook (considering the portions) to make because it contains beans, cabbage, potatoes, celery, onions, and parsley, simmered in chicken stock, butter, olive oil and grated romano for hours, then finished with a dollop of pesto and cooked some more. Twenty minutes before serving, I ladle a few quarts into another pot and add noodles. When finished, serve with copious quantities of more romano. Doesn't now sound like the perfect time for making it?

If you are lucky enough to have a nearby farmers market, you can get most of the produce needed this time of year. If you are shopping for the ingredients at the store, it will be easy to find the ingredients any time of year. So, this weekend, while Aunty and I wandered around the saturday berkeley farmers' market, I purchased the fresh produce I needed and asked her about her thoughts on alternate beans to use in the recipe. Aunty is five years older than I, and thus the keeper of this much more familial food knowledge, so I value her opinion highly. Also, if there is anyone in the world who is capable of detecting the slightist bit of ANYTHING in a particular dish, and capable of reporting on it accurately, the person in my life like this is my sister (the monkey's aunty, thus the title). She suggested using some heirloom beans she had in her cupboard, and we agreed to a swap of ingredients for finished product.

These beans were absolutely beautiful. They looked like little spotted horses or something, which was rather hilarious to me because the recipe calls for pintos in the basic version. They need to have a bath overnight, so I soaked these as soon as they entered the house, in preparation for their big day tomorrow. This is often the hardest step to making this soup, beacause the alternate (canned) will not give you the same results. I say this now, so please listen, SOAK YOUR OWN BEANS for this dish and you will be rewarded. I tried it the "other" way once, when I was young and stupid (in college). It was an immediate culinary lesson in "good things come to those who wait." I had at least 20 years of experience eating this soup, so the "canned" version tasted like......canned. It is quite possible that if you should ignore the warning, it would still turn out to be the best canned soup you ever had.

With the beans soaked, I rinse them and place them in an 8 quart pot with about two quarts of veggie stock. Then I assemble the rest of the ingredients to look at an optical illusion that is part of this dish (the first picture up top). Everytime I see the ingredients all laid out before me I think: "I'm gonna need a much larger pot than this one, just look at all this stuff!" But I have something called faith. Faith that comes from witnessing miracles. Faith that with only an inch or so of the pot sides still showing, I can add a whole cabbage into this soup. Okay, faith really that cabbage is just like the rest of the universe, made up of alot of space. The reality is that you do not just plop in the head of cabbage. Doing this, after chopping and adding everything else, would indeed displace enough volume to slosh over the sides. But sliced up fine, minced even, and added slowly in batches, you can indeed add the entire thing.

Put the butter and olive oil into the pot with the soaked beans and stock (in this case veggie) and start boiling on the stove. Chop the onions, celery, potatoes and parsley and add. Some garlic too if you feel like it (I did, and usually do). Now, time for a medium (15 ounce) can of diced tomatoes. Yes, I did say canned. Of critical importance here is the addition of that concentrated juice, so doing this imparts that tangy acid component needed here. Note: that is a medium can being added to an 8 quart pot. This is not at all a tomato based soup, like the one most americans associate with minestrone. You can substitute fresh tomatoes, but I highly recommend doing it with garden tomatoes from your yard and making sure to use all the juice. For making it the first time, use the can of diced tomatoes to calibrate for yourself what this does to the soup. Now, with all of the veggies except the cabbage added, add grated romano. And finally, slice and dice that cabbage, and add very carefully.......

Put it on a low simmer for at least three hours. The cabbage will disappear from sight, as will most of the potatoes and celery. When this has happenned, add the pesto and cook for another hour. While waiting for this last bit, and trying not to eat it before it is done, I recommend baking a nice sourdough loaf of something. Which of course means you just have to dip the bread into the soup, to do any final tasting adjustments, right?

This last time, I baked a loaf of olive bread, with olives that were the first harvested from the monkey's tree. She has a manzanillo olive growing at G&G's down in Reedley that had a first crop of 36 olives this past fall. It wasn't many, but certainly worth experimenting with. We cured them over the last few months and I used about a dozen of them in the dough. Very, very satisfying personally, because to me sourdough and olives are a match made in heaven. With both the sourdough and the olives coming from sources I had a part in producing, I was beside myself with the combination getting me one step closer to making it from 100% family sourced ingredients. And how about the cool lines on the bread from using my new brotformen I got for being a good boy this past year? Now I can make loaves that don't just taste respectable but have a recognizable form.

Round about 6:30pm, after sampling the soup with bread several times, I put some ravioli dough trimmings into a small pot of simmering minestrone. When this was finished, I grated a large bowl of romano and settled down to the first heaping bowl. Warm, oh yeah. Nourishing, brothy veggies, grassy herbs and yummy sheepy goodness, you bet. If any of this appeals to you, then get out your pen and paper, or click and drag, copy and paste, whatever it is. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best soup I make, at the best time of year for making it (seasonable availability and reason to make something else with beans, cabbage and potatoes) and is a staple in my family that dates back at least five generations on my father's side. If I didn't share this one, and now, I could not consider this blog at all realistic in its portrayal of what we eat, because we will be eating this one for the next week.

And since folks appreciate an actual recipe, and I have a desire in keeping my new friends interested, I offer this as a generic outline for making this soup.

Minestrone
1 lb of dried pinto, pink or cranberry beans
1-3 quarts of chicken stock
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup olive oil
2 medium onions (yellow or white or both)
2-6 cloves of garlic (optional here, lighter on the garlic is more great grandmas style on this one)
6 or so stalks of celery (more if using smaller heart sections)
4-5 big white potatoes (russet, red or white, yukon gold)
1 bunch italian parsley
15 ounce can of stewed or diced tomatoes (fresh tomatoes will work too but make sure to use plenty of salt and include all juices - summertime is best for using fresh)
1/4 - 1/2 lb of Pecorino Romano
1 smallish green cabbage

Pesto fixings:
1 cup chopped basil
1 Tbsp - 1/4 cup pine nuts
Parmesan
salt and olive oil to taste

Soak beans overnight. Or for two nights (especially for the harder pintos) if you have the luxury time and memory to do so. Rinse and drain soaked beans and transfer to an 8 quart pot. Add water and chicken stock until at least a third full. Adjust salt according to how much stock you use. Bring to a boil. Add olive oil and butter. Add chopped onions, celery and garlic. Peel potatoes and dice to no bigger than a fingertip and add (note: DO NOT add actual fingertips.) Mince parsley and add. Add tomatoes and any juices possible. Add about a cup of grated romano. (if you are using a Microplane this may turn out to be closer to 2 cups; the pre-grating weight is 3-5 ounces regardless of grater used.) Cut main stem from cabbage, slice very thin and add (in batches as it will be hard to incorporate at this point.) Cook together, covered with occasional stirrings, at a simmer for a few hours. Add 1/4 - 1/2 cup of fresh pesto (go with more like 1/4 cup if using store bought), stir and simmer for at least another hour. Remove one meals worth to another pot, add tagliarini (egg fettucine will work fine) and cook until pasta is soft (soup is usually getting paste-like before adding pasta, so add some water to compensate for what the cooking will take, more for dried, less for fresh.) Serve with a fresh loaf of your favorite sourdough and copious quantities of grated romano. Oh yeah, just about any wine will go great with this.

Enjoy!

Please let me know what you think if you make this one. The folks who I have given this recipe to refer to it simply as "the soup" then their eyes get glazed over as they manage a Homer-esque "Mmmmm, minestrone." If I had a dime for each individual person I have served this to and they enjoyed it, I would be a......well, at the very least 10 bucks richer, or about halfway on my way to making another batch.