Crepes A La Mo + Watermelon Soup – The Easy Bake Oven Way

Look how soft and spongy the crepe from her book looks—pictured here. Mine turned out like corn tortillas. But I’m not complaining, I’m thrilled they turned out at all. A couple of them got stuck on my dehydrator screen. I couldn’t figure out whether to use parchment paper or not so I tried it both ways. I guess parchment would be the safer bet if there ever is a next time. The crepes are made from golden flax, green apple, some spices and water. I took a departure on her version of sour cream. I just don’t like the graininess of coconut, so instead used sunflower seeds with the cashews, a splash of rejuvelac and a little honey. It was pretty good.

I forced the Curried Crepes with Yogurt Sauce on my poor unsuspecting music tutor who is always hungry, why? Because he never eats. He just works and works. The mother instinct in me wants to feed the poor man. He was so hungry he ate standing up. I’m glad he enjoyed it. I keep having these close calls with nobody eating my dinner, thanks for coming through, Curt.

Making food like this reminds me of being a kid. You don’t have to worry about burning yourself. I have this “play” oven (dehydrator) with these cute plastic trays and screens, it’s like putting together a puzzle. To make soup I just toss in ingredients and press a button on the cuisinart and presto: soup. Of course there’s the danger of cutting yourself, and I am far too careless with the mandolin, making elegant juliennes. But cooking like this is like having a play kitchen for me. Everything is fresh and colorful; there’s no secret, really other than letting all the flavors meld together and taking a chance on the sauce. I mean it’s not like learning the finer technique of flipping a crepe or the science of baking the perfect cake.

Watermelon Salad was dessert, really. Longans again. This is the second recipe calling for these obscure “longans.” My Food Lovers Companion describes them as a small soft fleshy fruit with a tough outer shell and large seed. But no one’s ever heard of them around here. How about a lychee? If you look lychee up, it’s basically the same description. Those I can find, living here in the multi-cultural San Francisco Bay Area, so lychee instead of longan it is.

And so it is. When I had my solo tea parties as a kid, I didn’t have tea so I found some vinegar and used that for my tea. God it was sour, but I lived in pretend land so developed a tolerance for it. And so it is.

Wanted: Last Minute Eaters Recipes 21-22: Lasagna and Kabocha Soup

It took a few weeks but finally the administrator in me came out and now I have an actual “chart” (isn’t that sick?) of the coming week’s menus, with a list below each day ticking off items I will need to buy AND special notes if I need to get something started that day for the next day’s recipes. Oh, but it doesn’t end there. I now have a list of every grocery store with the phone number and extension# of the produce department taped on my cabinet. The low point came today when I started a frickin’ price comparison spreadsheet of bulk items that I regularly buy with the prices from all the grocery stores. That means I have to now bring that spreadsheet with me next time I go shopping and fill in the blanks. Once done, I’ll know who’s got the least expensive flax seeds in the area and so on. Don’t worry, I’ll post it so you can save money too.

So now that Daniel is clear on not sharing live food dinners with me, the routine is that when a recipe seems like it’s going to turn out, I start madly calling my neighbors to drop by for dinner, at the last minute. I can never give them advance notice because, what if it’s a disaster? So tonight when I lifted off the “terrine” (as opposed to a tureen, Justine-thanks, now I know what a terrine is!) and the lasagna didn’t spread out like blobby lava, I knew I had a winner. I frantically started calling around. “Sue, want to have dinner?” Not sure, she has to call me back. “Deb, want to have dinner?” I left a message. Who else to call? My husband was napping so I suddenly felt very alone. I went ahead and started pureeing the kabocha squash for the soup. That looked like it would turn out too. And then my heart was heavy. Nobody to share it with. Not even the dogs, they hate this type of cuisine.

I got the camera out and starting snapping. But I needed to actually cut the lasagna for the photo so people could see the layers. God, I hated to cut into it. What if the whole thing fell apart? Just then the phone rang. Deb saved the day! She’d be right over. Suddenly my whole world lit up. I confidently sliced into the lasagna and it didn’t fall apart. Snap, I got my photo.

Lasagne was a winner! The photo from the book was so intimidating, I can’t believe I made this and it wasn’t even that difficult. In fact it was fairly straight forward. The only hassle being I had to start the herb cheese a day or so back so it would be ready today. This dish was absolutely delicious and really tasted like lasagna, only better!!

The Kabocha Squash Soup with Sweet-Sour Sultana Sorbet was supposed to be a dessert, but I think it’s better placed as an appetizer or between-course palate cleanser, if you do that kind of thing (I don’t, but maybe I should start!). What are sultanas? Apparently they are a small, white raisin from somewhere else in the world, so it’s comparable to a Thompson grape here. That’s what I used.

So if you want to be a last-minute-call-to-dinner friend, drop me a message. I need last minute eaters.

Penetrating Love: Recipes 19 and 20 Heirloom Tomato Soup with Olives +Greek Salad

Love has penetrated the walls of this house. I will look back on these days as the fullest of my life.—Susan Frey

Moving around our kitchen, I’m a little more aware of the splatters on the wall, how clean the stove top is these days since I don’t “cook” and my sister’s poem that hangs on the wall. I look at it often. Sometimes I feel it’s true (the love part) and sometimes it couldn’t be further from my experience. And then I feel sad, because I never want to look back on a time behind me as the fullest of my life, like all the fullness could be over. It seems each year in these times of mine feels fuller and fuller. Music with Daniel and Rick, cooking like a maniac, running a small business that I love, singing with a choir, loving our Sonoma place, our dogs, each other, my huge family of friends…it’s so full. May it stay so.

And as Daniel declared he can take the raw food no more, he must have MEAT!, I served the Tomato Soup and the Greek Salad. Not before I made him take the photos, though. We continued to argue through most of dinner. About nothing. About “I am aggravated, so it’s your fault” kind of stuff. Stupid frustrations of living with a person who is as dynamic and headstrong as yourself. Who doesn’t see it your way. Feels like most of the time. But then we ended up singing songs in the kitchen, which is my favorite thing in the world. That and making food: Heaven. I love him for that, making our kitchen heaven.

I’m sure that is what Susan meant for me, for us, when she gave the poem as a wedding gift. Letting the loving times fill us up.

Mystery Ingredient Soup and a Salad only the Cook will Eat

Does it make you a good cook if you know you could have whipped up a tasty meal for your loved ones if only you hadn’t followed the recipe?
Or does it make you a bad cook because you couldn’t get the recipe, written by two high-end gourmets, to taste very good.

Or are my friends just complainers? I mean I expect it from my closet food-critic husband, but my girlfriends? Just because the Red Bell Pepper Soup with Mango Dollops had strands of “white things” in them…I mean, why make a big deal out of that? They said the “white strand things” distracted them from the taste. What sissies. I gulped mine right down. I thought it tasted pretty good. What white strand things? Finally Susan dug one out of her soup. Huh, I thought, weird. Then Justine piped up with the same complaint. What could it be? It looked like hairs from a bottle brush. Could it be the fibers from the turnip thing I added that was supposed to be juiced horseradish? No, it was too tough for that. In a word, inedible. I gave up on trying to figure it out and poured their soups through a sieve, but neither of them accepted the refined version. Doesn't say much for their adventurous spirit, does it?

To stay in theme, today (the theme of fixing meals my guests won't eat) I made the Creamed Cauliflower Soup and the Marinated Artichokes, Turnips and Beets. The soup should be called Boringly Bland White Stuff that has no flavor. After you puree basically only cauliflower, water and some vinegar you’re supposed to put it through a sieve, but if you did that, there would only be one bowl of soup. No matter, no one would eat it anyway. Although I ate most of mine. I’m the only one around here with any determination.

The Beet-Artichoke Marinade turned out surprisingly tasty. To me, that is. No one liked that one either, but the thinly sliced beets, turnips and artichokes flavored with a vinaigrette, a bed of date, jalapeno and cranberry sauces is really delicious. And loved ones who don’t like your food? At least I keep them entertained and obesity at bay.

18 Down and 33 To Go! 54 days left.

Dolmas and Broccoflower Couscous and Neighbors of the Mayacamas

I don’t like traditional dolmas very much. They taste vinegary and mealy, but these live-food Dolmas with Dill-Sour Cream Sauce were crispy and fresh with a delicate sweetness. The “rice” in the dolmas was the ever-popular pulsed parsnip which I am finding in so many of Roxanne's recipes and I could not find dried currants so used fresh ones. How the coconut and cashews could wind up tasting like a dill sour cream sauce was pretty amazing to us all. But when I do the recipe again (and I will!) I won’t bother with the sauce, the dolmas were so delicious they didn’t need a sauce. Thank you to Sarahndipity for the photos.

I served this on the 4th of July when we were up at our Sonoma place and invited our crazy neighbors Karen and Jannell over. Karen, a product of the Berkeley-Hippy era who still lives by the finer virtues of that time, and Jannell who lives next to her in a tiny cabin and grows a sprawling and beautiful flower and vegetable garden. They brought over the illustrious Ricky, master-of-all-things-at-age-24 and a few other friends. Sarah and William have been up planning out their huge deck that will surround a tree, and we had Cath, a prior guest at Cinque Terre also there with her faithful dog Molly to grace our table. What a party.

Couldn’t find broccoflower, so did the most logical thing and simply mixed cauliflower and broccoli heads. No champagne grapes so used red grapes. The curry oil finished the recipe, giving it the spicy flavor it needed to not be bland.

Being up on top of the wine country in the mountains is a sublime and cleansing experience. The atmosphere is wild and wonderful, as are most of our neighbors who I refer to as the “Smiling Eyes Tribe.” To see the fireworks we all piled in the car (including the dogs) and drove along the incredibly bumpy and dusty road over to Random Ridge, Bill Hawley’s place which sits up on the southwest side of the mountain and overlooks the entire Bay Area and downtown Sonoma. Since Bill is a grape grower, there was plenty of his wine flowing, I had my wands glowing and we all enjoyed the fireworks show from our tailgates. http://www.randomridge.com/place/photos.html

I never made it to the soups and looks like I’ll be taking tonight off too. Still recovering from the alien party in my gut, I guess.

Heirloom Apricots Losing Ground

Ever heard of Blenheim apricots? They’re only grown down in the Santa Clara Valley region and anyone who’s tasted one says they are the best tasting apricot in the world. Forget the bland Turkish apricots with the great shelf life. But sadly these dreamy fruits don’t travel well and Blenheims often have green and yellow colors on their skins, which fool consumers into thinking they have no flavor. People just want to buy the pretty rosy-orange apricots, but if they took one bite, they would be so happily surprised!

Slow Food has added the Blenheim to their endangered list as farmers throw in the towel when competing with the visually perfect and tasteless apricots at our groceries. And we lose so much farmland to developers too. Luckily Nancy Kux invites me each year to accompany her to a farm where we can either pick, or simply buy a nice quantity of the Blenheims. This time we were directed by Blenheim Apricot advocate Barbara Anderson to Bertuccio’s in Hollister.

We toured their facilities and came home with 25 lb boxes of the little jewels. Pictured here drying. I’m giving them away like crazy as they don’t last long. They are an ‘eat now, always remember’ fruit. I hope the few of us who trek down every year, and those who buy the dried Blenheims will be enough to keep a few orchards in business.

For more info, check out: http://www.freelancenews.com/printer/article.asp?c=60974

Internal FireWorks make Holiday in my Gut

I’d like to say I took it easy over the 4th of July holiday. Instead I invited aliens into my house for a party. Aliens being bacteria and house being my stomach. Can you say food poisoning?

Should I blame it on the evil beef burger or the killer squash blossoms?
Here I’ve been on this insanely healthy diet, feeling so energetic and healthy and then I had a beef burger at a friend’s party. Could it be that it was such a shock to my body?
Or could it be that the raw food I didn’t wash harbored the bad guys?
Nobody knows but my innocent and suffering intestines, but I confess I suspect the innocuous-looking, delicate squash blossoms. Look at them, so colorful and pretty. Those deceptive little imposters.
Photo courtesy of: http://www.seasonalchef.com/recipe0805b.htm

I consider this rude experience (yes, I writhed in pain on a public bathroom floor for 45 minutes, unable to move) to be a sort of graduation, an awakening if you will of the degree of respect I must now have as a raw foodie. I’ve always been so cavalier and trusting about the cleanliness of the produce I buy. When the squash blossoms came in a shrink wrapped container (and knowing that I did not want them to wilt for the photo I would be taking of them shortly) I skipped over my usual step of soaking produce in a solution of grapeseed extract water.

Verily, verily I say unto you: many foreign hands hath touched thy produce. Lo, false prophets shall attack your belly if you do not obey the god of sanitization (sanity?).

Even (and especially) sprouts need to be washed. Those tiny hard-to-wash onion, daikon or sunflower sprouts apparently love to harbor unfavorable bacteria.

The bacteria party is over, but my cells are still sweeping up, repairing the damage and pulling the house back together. And who knows, a lot of the time people need antibiotics to recover from food poisoning, I didn’t. Maybe all this healthy eating put my body in a better position to ward off the evil aliens all on it’s own. That’s what I’d like to believe.