Mysterious creatures

I am celebrating the long weekend by decking my kitchen with spatters of flour and bowls of shoggoths yeast sponges for various attempts at not-so-quick breads. The tasty results conflict with my continued efforts to stay with the Couch to 5K (hah, typed "Couth to 5K," which is like the running except in white gloves) but are good with strawberry-rhubarb jam.

Today, fortified with barbecue, La Mère and I popped over to a NoVa Chinese supermarket, Great Wall, to see about getting supplies for tea eggs. Somehow, the place stocks everything you could possibly want except whole star anise in something other than a one-pound jar ("Son, your great-grandmother bought these spices back in 2009. And unless you squander this patrimony, your great-grandchildren will have enough left for them. It is one of the treasures of our family"). Tea for the tonsils? Chicken extract with ginseng rhizomes? Big crystal chunks that look like rock candy, carefully labeled "alum"? Mysterious cuts of beef marked "meat department"? Yes, yes, and oh yes. Durian, whole, or as ice cream, or in moon cakes. Glistening bins of live snails. Masses of frozen dumplings: cabbage, mixed vegetable, pork, seafood, red bean, or lotus. An entire aisle of sriracha and suchlike heating delights, including bottles of "chily oil," ginger oil, and tiny whole fish in pepper oil. Huge jars of dried scallops, with big warning signs: "Do not sample or eat!" Inscrutable vitamins: "Sheep placenta—with RNA/DNA! From 100% healthy sheep!" The aisle labeled "American foods" started off with white bread and peanut butter, but by halfway down gave up and segued into mochi, bao, yucca extract, and pickled galangal; another aisle, more confusing labeled "Asian foods," mixed Thai, Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese junk food with abandon. "Hardly worth going to China," murmured my mother. "This is stuff I haven't seen since Beijing."

Not wanting to tip off Il Padre, a reliable overshopper who tends to lose control in good ethnic supermarkets, and disappointed in our hopes for a reasonable amount of spices, we escaped with just my personal indulgence, a couple of red-bean mochi. At $1.29 each, they're a fiendish bargain.

Inconstant craving

Ordinarily, I can reassure myself that whatever I'm yearning toward, I want because it provides some vital nutrient of which I'm running short. Steak? Iron. Eggs? Vitamin A. Beer? Vitamin Ah. But nutritional science sheds no light on why I woke up on Monday with a profound jones for pancakes. My workday morning ritual being one that runs on split-second timing to accommodate the maximum number of whacks at the snooze button, I couldn't get around to dealing with this pressing breakfast situation until today.

As is so often the case, the web proved a boon ("The internet isn't for porn," Gee-Clef commented the other day: "It's really for whatever obsessive people want. Granted, what they usually want is porn, but that's not what it's for"). Behold the glory that is the cinnamon sour cream pancake recipe over at culinary blog Whipped.

Granted, busting out the mixer just for egg whites seems like needless hassle—so much effort on a Saturday morning, isn't that contra some ley naturam?—but it pays off in pancakes so delicately fluffy that they practically float up to your mouth without the intervention of fork or fingers. I halved the recipe, since this was for my own solitary consumption, and can say with reasonable assurance that had I made the original quantity, I'd have et the lot. These are the perfect match for red currant or lingonberry jam, something that doesn't overwhelm their natural sourness with too much sweetness (I used maple syrup this time, but next time, red fruit all the way). Not a recipe for every day, at least not if your ambition doesn't involve outgrowing successive pairs of pants, but for the occasional random craving, I'll subscribe to the Nanny Ogg school of nutritional medicine: "A bit of what you fancy does you good."

Cultured individuals

As someone who never really found the joy in cooking, I am always pleasantly surprised when my kitchen endeavors turn out as they're supposed to. This culinary trepidation is related in part to the incredible trauma that ensued when a high school friend and I decided to essay making kulich one year. Kulich is an ambitious multi-stage undertaking that probably shouldn't be entrusted to by kids who are easily distracted by, if memory serves, mocking Kevin Costner's accent in "Robin Hood: Prince of Cheese." Then, too, for reasons largely outside our control, namely that the local firebug set alight the woods behind her house just as we started the first kneading, we got sticky yellow dough all over the place as well as the phone when we dialed up the guys in big red trucks. (Imagine the thrill of said friend's mother, who had overcome her doubts about leaving us alone with this ambitious baking project, on returning home to find the firemen deploying hoses toward her back yard, a thin pall of smoke over the block, and her neighbors standing on the street staring toward her home. Thank God for the person who caught her by the shoulders as she barreled toward us, shook her firmly, and said, "Elaine. ELAINE. It wasn't. Your. Kids. And everyone's okay.")

Anyway, once in a great while I find a recipe that calls out to me in its simplicity and promise of tasty result, and if it involves the lazy chef's friend, the slow cooker, well, sign me up. So finding out that you can make yogurt in a crockpot with a minimum of skill sounded just the ticket. The local farmers market has a new vendor, Clear Spring Creamery, that carries whole unhomogenized milk. It was fate.

The tendency of people to talk to one another at farmers markets, in defiance of the modern rule that we politely ignore one another, is a mixed blessing, but this time I'm grateful for it, because the guy next to me mentioned that his family makes yogurt at home and that you can just put the stuff in the oven with a light on, even if you're not using a gas oven. Hm. That offered a lower potential for disaster than the original instruction to wrap the crockpot in towels, so I tried it.

Half a gallon of milk, some Chobani plain yogurt as a starter, into the oven with the lot, and lo, when I crawled out of bed today, ecce marvolo! A giant crock of tangy-smelling...stuff! I drizzled honey onto some of it for breakfast. Wow. No wonder some people enjoy this cooking business.

Make time for what's important

Weebat and Herr Professor are in town, so DC is about a million times cuter thanks to their decision not to leave their 10-month-old daughter at home alone. The Wee Weebat is scoring very well in many of the preliminary rounds, dominating the Charming the Waiters, Grinning Gummily to Show Off Her Two Teeth, Not Crying, and Making Squeaky Amusing Noises rounds. She's enthusiastically trying to manipulate her immediate environment, so there's a steady brownian movement as everyone tries to keep cups of yogurt, full plates of dim sum, glasses of wine, and switchblades out of her reach without spoiling our own fun.

And boy, having savvy fressers in town is just the bestest thing. We started with Friday dinner at the sadly misnamed Hong Kong Palace ("More like Chengdu Closet," said Seesterperson), where the waiter remembered spilling nearly a full bottle of wine on Herr Professor and where Auntie A native patois-ed up a banquet of allium-enhanced deliciousness that we were forced, out of defensive politeness, to nearly finish. On Saturday, there were cupcakes and pizza and I lost my gaming cherry to a long round of Shadows Over Camelot (as Sir Tristan, adding Iseult to injury).

Herr Professor has a regrettable work ethic and didn't join us for dim sum (as in, I'll have some of dim, and some of dose, and def'nitely some of dese) at Hollywood East this morning. Weebat called him to lament that he was missing out on a table-straining variety of yummies, including chicken feet, shrimp-and-seaweed dumplings, two kinds of roast pork bao, and the best egg custard tarts outside of China. "We haven't eaten like this since Taiwan," moaned Auntie A. "They offer dim sum every day. We could come tomorrow!" For the sake of fitting into my pants on a regular basis, I cannot afford to know that this place is within three blocks of a Metro stop. But for this week, when Tuesday means patient standing in the chill, a few extra lipids aren't a bad idea. (It's warmed up, too; quoth La Mère, "After Friday, temps in the 30s make me want to run around naked outside." The neighbors are probably not prepared.) After that, if I were to take a few weeks off eating little more than carrots, it might be wise.

A little nostalgia for us all in the last few days before PEBO loses his E:
Someone quotes Cromwell, beautifully.
Mocean makes us a promise.
And Senator PEBO makes a few more.

The green fairy

Thoughts from the Christopher Elbow reception at Biagio:

• The pretty people of DC will come out in furtive hordes for free truffles in a sexily dim back room.
  
• Surreptitious cell-phone conversations relaying location and urgent pleas for back-up before the truffles run out: many.
• Confessions of a chocolatier: yes the spice bar contains ginger, no I will not tell you the recipe.
• Chocolate-scented candles: better in concept than execution.
• Banana curry truffles: "Wow, these are very...interesting."
• Yuzu-laced dark chocolates: I swear, they were just here.
  
• Macademia pralines: how many can I fit in one purse? Being a Gedankenexperiment.
• ABSINTHE TRUFFLES. You, Christopher E, are MY kind of pervert.
  

Will nobody think of the children?

Biagio Chocolate should not have its own storefront. It should, by rights, be stuck behind a grubby curtain in an otherwise family-friendly candy store. The curtain should have a laminated cardstock sign safety-pinned to its folds: "Adults Only Beyond This Point." Those interested in what is on offer beyond the curtain should have to sidle in furtively, looks of mingled desire and guilt on their faces, and slink away with their purchases tucked into bags or pockets. But the world has gone to the dogs, vice holds sway on every corner, and Biagio is out there in front of God and everybody, flaunting their iridescent Christopher Elbow truffles and their Vosges flying pigs and their piles of neatly wrapped bars of chocolate so dark that it approaches the event horizon. So what if you have to descend a rickety set of iron stairs and feint toward the vintage clothing shop to get there; people can still see. Children will still ask questions. They might even want to try what Biagio sells. Oh, it's enough to give a person the swoons just thinking about it.

Ordinarily I'm not the sort of person who lunges for anything theobromic, but once the salespeople started listing all the different chocolate-chili mixes on the shelves, I had to bolt before I signed over my entire paycheck. My wallet sustained minor flesh wounds, but now I have a bar of Coppeneur 72% dark with whiskey and ancho peppers (store rule: if you moan, you must own) and a No. 2 Christopher Elbow chocolate with spice and chilis. Elbow's ingredients list is carefully vague on which spice he uses, but ever since I had a piece my eyes have been Cherenkov blue and I've been just itching to fold space.

Not just for the coffee

It's been hard to get excited about heading to Seattle in February. I have nothing against the city, given that my past brief acquaintance with it has consisted mostly of flying through it on beautiful summer days, the mountain bright under an early-evening full moon or gleaming against a perfect blue sky.* But I do have something against the month, multiple family birthdays and concomitant opportunities for cake notwithstanding, and the few SeaTackers I know grumble about how February is particularly dreary. I was not, as the surfers of my youth would have had it, stoked about the prospect.

HOWEVER. As has been amply established here, my affections can be bought with food. It's common knowledge that Seattle has good coffee, and I follow Orangette's lyrical descriptions of things she's made and eaten there with a voyeuristic glee, but somehow it took hearing about Mario Batali's father's Seattle-area salumeria for it to click that, you know, it might be worth it to sneak out of the hotel, umbrella in chilly paw, and hit the streets for some caloric insulation. Now the NYT has put up a Frugal Traveler article about living off the city's happy hour food, and I'm starting to feel serious hunger pangs. Cascadia's alpine martini, in particular, sounds like heaven: "a vodka martini garnished with Douglas-fir sorbet and an actual cedar frond...crisp, aromatic, inventive and cold, cold, cold." Maybe that's not the traditional remedy for the wintertime blues, but doesn't it sound lick-the-glass amazing? I could find out how the Daily Dozen Donut Company's products measure up against Krispy Kreme's (although it's clear that the name wouldn't scan right in "Doughnut Girl," the world's best song about love, junk food, and Route 1). After Weebat and Herr Professor talked me into a recent jaunt to a local crab house and thereby reminded me of how good snow crab can be, I'm a-drool at the possibility of having some of it superfresh down at the Pike Place Market. And all this is just scratching the surface of the options within an easy walk of the convention site...oh, how choirs of angels sing.

In other words, February in Seattle may well turn out to be just as grey and gloomy as the doomsayers predict, but I'm worrying less about seasonal affective disorder and more about the chance that work will keep me from eating my own body weight in three days.

*I still wonder why I was the only person the Seattle customs guy pulled out for a series of pointed questions about purchase and/or use of illegal smokeables during my Vancouver sojourn and whether had I brought anything of the sort back with me. It can't have been that serious an investigation, since he relied on the "are you telling the truth? really really?" interrogation technique rather than, you know, actually searching me, and I don't think I looked so much stoned as post-camping scruffy (granted, a fine line). I was very polite, because Customs officials have vast power to make your life a living hell, but eventually I said, "Really, I was kayaking every day for a week, I needed every bit of lung space I had, and I don't smoke anything anyway. Do you want to check my bags?" He sighed and waved me on my way to a cab (which later caught fire on the road, for reasons that the driver did not sufficiently explain). Seattle ain't responsible for any of that, though; it's just an odd story.

Consulatory expedients

I am currently road-blogging, having for reasons lost in the mists of what must have been stupendously good drugs agreed to drive some grand-relations to and from northern New Jersey. Draw your own conclusions from the fact that I'm chuffed that I have only once so far had cause to threaten to leave someone by the side of the road.

As a distraction, I am trying to come up with a list of mood-enhancing supplies for a forthcoming week-long conference. Energy bars and fruit and bottles of water are all very well, but around day four something stronger will be indicated. My go-to recipe for truffles (chocolate, cream, butter, and scotch) got nicknamed Naughty Chocolates, but y'all, Dagoba's chili-laced Xocolatl is downright kinky. It's expensive and dark, with a slow burn that builds as the spice prickles through the slightly sweet and undeniably rich chocolate base, and it fades away to a hint of cinnamon and a whisper of citrus. This isn't a treat to snarf down in a search for a ten-minute energy fix; this is something to savor without interruption, phone turned off, lights down low, and a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. (Available as a bar or as hot chocolate, be still my beating heart, and offering some healthy goodness in the form of cacao and capsaicin. You know, if that's what you're into.)

ETA: Some spoilsport must've told the NJTP Starbucks franchise that "éxito aquí" does not mean "exit." Now all the lines are properly labeled "salida." This is a loss.

The summertime is fading

We're coming up on the last week of the Silver Spring farmers market, sniff. After this weekend, getting Stayman apples (ostensibly for Doc, really mostly for me) will entail riding a whole stop down the Metro to Takoma Park, which has a larger market but which is a lot more crowded. Also it lacks the European Gourmet Bakery stall, whence comes my cinnamon roll fix. Woe.

But there's still a weekend left for the local market, and this time I am heading straight for Babes in the Woods, a stall that sells forest-fed pork. Yeah, go ahead, figure out the name; it took me a few seconds and then I was torn between grimacing and laughing hysterically. The proprietor and his uber-cute daughter explained how they let the pigs run loose on 78 acres of land, only bringing them in for vet checks or slaughter, and I imagine that the meat is pretty damn good. After missing last week's market for Festing, I was doubly determined to pick up something there this weekend, maybe a pork loin to fix with rosemary and garlic and salt, but then I read Orangette's post about brats and apple compote, and now a pack of sausages has to make the list. Blow winds and crack your cheeks, I'll be fixing comfort food to keep you at bay.

Brevity, thy soul is peaches

Having successfully resisted the lure of the deep-fried things at the Maryland State Fair, yea even unto the funnel cakes (and, no problem here, the batter-fried banana twinkies and peanut-butter-and-marshmallow-fluff sandwiches), I hereby recommend a recipe for enjoying the last of the summer's stone fruit while being too lazy to do actual cooking.

For each person, take one peach, cut it in half, and remove the pit. Fill the hollow with a small pat of butter and some cinnamon and sugar. Put the halves back together and wrap the whole in a piece of foil. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until yt be done (times will vary by the size of the fruit). Remove the peaches from the oven, unwrap each into a bowl, and fill the pit hollow with a spoonful of FireFly Farms' meadow chevre with ginger, almonds, and honey, resisting (or not) the urge to make Serenity jokes. Serve immediately.

Damn materialism

Do I need more stuff hanging off my keychain? No. No I do not. Between the gym card, the library card, the supermarket card, and the all-important coffee card ("In case of emergency, apply caffeine directly to veins"), there's barely room for the keys. But the Post wrote up a bottle opener/iShuffle holder, and now I can think only WANT WANT WANT. Of course, it would increase the aggravation factor, already quite high, of losing my keys.

The weather's too ghastly for much outside time, but I scuttled out in the early morning and hit the farmers market for peaches and fresh tomatoes. A friend recommends cutting up tomatoes and basil with a bit of salt, leaving them to sit for 15 minutes, then mixing the resulting juice and pulp with fresh pasta for a low-effort summer treat. I may insult his vegan sensibilities by adding a bit of goat cheese, but otherwise it sounds tasty and easy. The dry weather has been great for tomatoes this year; they're abundant and intensely flavorful.

The peaches are likewise excellent this time of year. The super-ripe ones from the farmers markets need just a bit of blanching to slip from their skins; a bit of careful knifework and a frozen piecrust later, they're ready for the oven. A tiny bit more effort to make a basic egg custard (ta, Weebat), and all that remains is to resist the temptation to eat the thing whole. Heat, sugar, and peaches: Ecce marvolo.

What is the sound of one miga frying?

Texas does NOT need rain. My mother and I are pretty infallible rainmakers for the state, to the point where we even managed to bring snow on Christmas one year, thrilling the pants off Victoria County’s headline writers ("Christmas miracle! First snow in 100 years!"). This year it appears that we’ve surfed in on the edge of a spectacular wave of storms, although I wish we’d managed not to drag the tornados along with us. On a more positive note, the long wet spring has provided a spectacular crop of wildflowers, including the famous bluebonnets. Catching bluebonnet season is about as easy as seeing the cherry blossoms in DC: You can make a guess at the date, but the best way to ensure that you see them is to have a completely flexible schedule and a local who can call you in on a week’s notice.

The other really good news, at least from a personal standpoint, is that the in-flight magazine had a piece about Austin’s breakfast tacos, and La Mere and I followed its instructions to one of the scroungiest places I’ve ever been. The reviewer said she had driven past the place for five years, not because she thought it looked like a bad restaurant but because she thought it was a condemned building. For those of us who grew up snarfing down cha gio in Northern Virginia’s minimally decorated Vietnamese restaurants and barbecue in cinderblock hulks where oilcloth-covered tables were swank, that sounded like a genuine Mark O’ Qualitah. The Tamale House turned out to be a tiny place with a concrete porch overlooking a parking lot and Route 183 (justly not famed in song and story), a counter for placing orders (“No checks, no credit cards, no debit cards, no exceptions” and “Don’t complain about the heat; AC is expensive and this way your food is cheap”), and an open kitchen staffed by several portly women stirring enormous skillets of potatoes and eggs. We ordered platters of migas, and for a bit less than five bucks got Styrofoam trays of eggs scrambled with ham, cheese, tomatoes, tortilla frag, and jalapenos; refried beans; and potatoes fried with an inordinate amount of coarse black pepper. Clearly this is one of the mother foods for recovering from hangovers. We swiped the foam clean with fresh tortillas and promptly shoved off; space was at a premium and our cherry spot overlooking a pickup was coveted by a couple of guys in feed caps.

Storms permitting, tomorrow it’s a road trip to San Antonio. There’s something there I’m supposed to remember, but what the hell could it be?

Texas loves you anyway

Step one on the road to official travel madness is going to be a stop in the exotic land of Texas, for a visit with my grandmother and her twin sister, who will be celebrating 80-something years of life. We're trying to get my grandmother to write her autobiography, and every time we chat she comes up with some story that illuminates parts of her life I didn't know about--standing outside in a New Jersey winter, supervising school recess while the wind whipped around her ankles, at a time when women weren't allowed to wear pants; traveling New Zealand with her second husband; picking cotton to earn money for college--but I suspect that many of those revealing details aren't getting onto paper.

Texas is everything everyone says and then some: hospitable, hotter than blazes, stark and beautiful and depressing in turn, and, yes, the land of the best barbecue ever, bar none, thank you Kansas and all those eastern states for competing, but there wasn't a competition to begin with. It's just better in Texas, and in Texas, it's better at Black's. The first impressions were not promising--a salad bar? turkey sandwiches?--but the blackened ovens, the fact that menus scribbled on posterboard are full of misspellings, and, most important, the smell in the air tell the real story, which is this: It's amazing. Order the sliced brisket, grab a wedge of watermelon (skip the banana pudding, which is disgraced by Cool-Whip), grab a receipt for a beer, and don't forget a handful of white bread on your way out to the drinks counter, and you'll be a happy camper by the end of the first mouthful. It'll be a meal to remember in 20 years when you're dealing with high blood pressure. "Yes," you can think then, "I have to take aspirin and exercise and lose weight and be tutted at by physical trainers half my age. And by God, it's worth it. How much are airfares to Austin?"

Edited to add a picture of the pr0n. Sliced brisket, peppery beans, white bread, banana pudding (learn from my mistake and at least scrape off the whipped stuff), watermelon, and the appropriate wine for mesquite-smoked beef. "Look well--look well, o wolves!"