Taking a hiatus

Posted on | October 28, 2009 | 4 Comments

I know posting has been spotty the last few months. Work is super busy, which is a wonderful thing. I’m so grateful for the work right now. I’m also itching like mad to do some writing for me and I’ll sit down to do it, thinking about my novel and thinking about this blog and end up frozen in front of the keyboard unable to choose.

Well, I need to choose and I’m going with novel for a while. I’m going to keep the blog up because I still see a lot of hits for some of the recipes and I like knowing folks might land on them and have an enjoyable meal for the effort. At the moment, I don’t feel like I have anything much to add to the story here. I’m so grateful for the connections and friendships this blog has brought to my life. It doesn’t feel right to say goodbye, so for now I’m going to say see you soon. I’ll just be over here working and getting that story out. Wish me luck and much love to you all.

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Homemade pasta on a Sunday afternoon

Posted on | October 16, 2009 | 8 Comments

OK, so it was TWO Sundays ago. Things have been busy around here. I’m working my hind end to a pancake sitting in this here chair, typing-typing-typing and trying to find just the right words. Work is good. Very good. Yay, work!

But so yeah… two Sundays ago this happened:

Lila had to be in on the fun. She’s fast with her little hands.

and she’s an excellent pasta machine technician.

but then she went to play at the neighbor’s and I got to fold and slice the Tagliatele.

and foolishly piled the nearly two pounds of noodles all in one giant lump, then had to toss them so they wouldn’t stick together while the water came to a boil. The noodles stretched and twisted and became a big mass of awkward.

That tasted like heaven anyway. Most delicious noodles I have ever eaten. Ever.

Note to self: buy some studio lights, fer feck sake. Enough with the yellow-glowing food shots. Jeeze.

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Falling into fall

Posted on | September 28, 2009 | 7 Comments

Wow, it’s just barely above 50 degrees this evening and I left the upstairs window open all day, so the house feels cold and breezy. I worked on-site today, and planned a simple dinner of pasta with pesto from the freezer and a nice green salad. The salad greens froze in my crisper drawer (not the kind of crisp I had in mind) and my feet are cold, so I’m craving something comforting in my tummy. I set the idea of salad aside, and just sliced up a few of the leftover pickling cucumbers from yesterday’s mad, final pickling extravaganza, then moved on to one of our six volunteer butternut squashes instead.

Roasted. With butter and brown sugar. Hello, almost October!

I can’t believe how the weather changed today from sticky and warm and thunder-stormy to windy and cold. Driving home, wet leaves were blowing all over the road and I had to dodge rogue branches pinwheeling out of the sky. The clouds scudded across the landscape and plunged me into darkness, then bathed me in blinding white light ten times in the course of a second. The constant shifting of shadows made me feel haunted by ideas, and the racing matched my flying thoughts. Oh, how I love the voice-recording app on my iPhone. So fun to capture all of that gobbledygook.

So yeah, the sugar maples are starting to turn circus tent yellow-pink-orange and blanket the browning lawns with their curled edges. Inflatable pumpkins pop up on porches all over town, and trees sprout those bizarre witch crashes. Fall is upon us and winter is breathing down her neck with icy fingers reaching for her soft tissue.

Did I mention my cold feet? It’s time to dig out my socks and my beautiful Maxcine-Made fingerless gloves. I washed the flannel sheets today, but I’ll wait a bit to put them on because we’ll get another heat wave in October, and night sweats are not pleasant. Flannel makes them worse. I will, however, throw an extra blanket on the bed tonight.

I don’t know, you guys. Is there anything more delicious than the first winter squash of the season? You know the kind: roasted for an hour, cut side down, then flipped over and popped back into the oven for another ten minutes with the cavities dotted with butter, dark brown sugar and a sprinkling of sea salt?

I didn’t think so.

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I dream of ravioli

Posted on | September 17, 2009 | 13 Comments

When I asked Chris what he’d like for his birthday dinner this weekend, he thought for a few minutes, then said ravioli.

Ravioli?

Really?

Bo-ring.

At least, boring for me. I like to have a challenge when making a special dish for someone I love, and dumping a couple of bags of frozen ravioli into boiling water isn’t remotely challenging. Sure, I can jazz it up with homemade sauce, some spicy sausage from Butcher Boy, a fresh and zingy salad and a decent bottle of the grape, but still.

What about homemade you ask? Well, yes, that’s the question isn’t it?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for nearly two decades just about every time I wipe away the boiling water splashes on the stove top after emptying the frozen, lumpy nuggets of gooey pasta out of a plastic bag into the pot. I always think to myself: one of these days I need to learn how to make ravioli.

The first time I ate handmade ravioli was when I waited tables back in the late 1980s at Pasquini’s, in Yuba City, California. An awesomely kind lady, (I think her name was Alice, but don’t hold me to it, that was six lifetimes ago), came in with her basket of goodies through the back kitchen door a couple days a week to make the raviolis and cannelonis. She rolled the dough out by hand with a thin wooden rolling pin on a peninsula style counter while the kitchen staff bustled all around her, prepping for the night.

We worked our legs off at that restaurant, which was always busy because the food was always fresh and homemade. I’m really excited to see that the new owner has taken it to a whole new level. He planted a 2 acre kitchen garden next to the restaurant, and serves that truly local produce to his customers. If I ever make it back that way, it’s at the top of my list of places to eat. I think my two years working there informed a great deal of my enthusiasm for preparing fresh, yummy food for my friends and family, and gave me a much better understanding of how to cook meat that’s helped me turn out some great roasts.

But, I wish I was more curious in my early 20s. I enjoyed cooking, but I just muddled through anything new on my own. It never occurred to me to ask for direction from the many masters in my life. I was just focused on making enough money to pay for school and rent, and having enough leftover to keep me well-supplied with Miller Genuine Draft and Long Island Iced Teas. And let us not forget the many late nights out dancing. Oh, how times have changed.

I remember standing at the same counter with Alice, slicing hearts of palm for the house salads while she rolled and shaped and pressed. We chatted about her kids and my school work. I watched her hands move with confident precision. Habitual motion with no recipe to refer to, just the one in her mind and in her hands. I can see her now, her sleeves rolled up, apron tied around her middle, the fluorescent light flashing off the lenses of her huge 80s style glasses. She made the most succulent little pasta pockets filled with sweet-salty cheese and tender little bits of meat and herbs.

I wish I could go back and ask her to show me how.

I spent a little time searching the internet recently, thinking about this question of how to make good pasta. I attempted fettuccine with my KitchenAid attachment, and it was a complete disaster. That was ten years ago, and I haven’t dared try it since for fear of wasting precious time and still having to order pizza at the end.

Perusing Michael Ruhlman’s blog, I saw this post on making sheet pasta. It’s got some good technique info and inspired me to stop being afraid.

Yes, that’s the same photo you see above, taken by Michael’s very talented wife, Donna. She awesomely invites bloggers to use her medium resolution photos to illustrate their own writing. How cool is that? (I really need to start taking pictures again, though. So much to learn!)

Next I turned to a couple of my new-to-me, used cookbooks: Jamie’s Italy and Lidia’s Family Table, both of which have great information on making homemade pasta (though not specific to ravioli).

So that leads me to you, dear readers. I’m ready to dive in and make my own ravioli, but I need some pointers. What are your favorite recipes? Do you have a trusted resource you’d be willing to share? Any tips on the best techniques and ingredients?

It may not happen for the weekend dinner, but it’s definitely the next thing I intend to learn to do well. Enough frozen gummynuggets already. And if you’re wondering what Kelly wants for Christmas this year? Yeah, baby. One of these would do me just fine. Hey, I’ll make you dinner!

Photo: Pasta Large Noodles ©2009 Donna Turner Ruhlman, used with permission.

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Further thoughts on blight

Posted on | August 30, 2009 | 3 Comments

I haven’t had time to get out to the garden to pull and bag the blighted plants yet, and we’ve had several days of rain again, so I’m sure it’s spreading through the neighborhood. But school started on Wednesday for my first grader, and on our morning walk I noticed dozens of small gardens or potted tomatoes also in collapse. At the market yesterday tomatoes sold faster than the farmers could load up their boxes and I overheard many conversations about home gardeners losing their entire crop.

Marcy reminded me in her comment on my last post that it’s late blight, not early blight. We are about to step into September, after all. She also mentioned spacing and pruning, which I meant to talk about in my post, but obviously got all caught up in the drama of oh, my tomatoes! So yeah. These tomatoes got planted directly into a new lasagna bed with something like a 12″ spacing give or take an inch or five. In other words, all wrong. I pruned the heck out of them when I first did the runner strings from the bamboo trellis, then I went away for three weeks. During that time, it rained every two days and the sun blazed in between. By the time I returned, my tomato plants had grown into an unruly hedge that crept across the grass in every direction. I did my best to trim out the most offending runners, but good gracious, those branches were heavy with fruit and who wants to sacrifice fruit?

Silly me.

I doubt I would have survived the blight even with better spacing and pruning this year, but I know I’ll manage my crop with a little more precision and care next year, and will consider covering the soil with black plastic to keep the spores down. My sister and brother in-law do that with their blight-prone crops and I swear their garden was the only one in New England that didn’t succumb.

I did pick a big bowl of almost ripe tomatoes but didn’t have time to process them that day and overnight they rotted in the bowl. That was disturbing. I keep thinking of what would happen if I’d blanched and frozen them. Would they rot in the freezer? Or instantly when thawed? Ugh.

Also in the comments, in case you missed it, Farmgirl Susan pointed me to her green tomato relish recipe, which sounds super easy and delish. So, I’m going to get out there today in the 65 degree sunshine to pick the rest of the green ones. Thanks so much, Susan.

I hate to waste so many tomatoes, and we do like relish.

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