squash!

This may come as a surprising confession from someone who has identified herself as a chocolate and wine addict, but I’m also addicted to squash. I cannot believe how many varieties of the stuff there are, and what can be done with them all. Acorn, butternut, spaghetti, zucchini. I slice them up and spice them up and no matter what I do, they always turn out to be some perfectly balanced combination of sweet or savory. Squash is a great vehicle for herbs and spices, and is great grilled, broiled or sautéed. It’s delicate or hearty, and never fails to add color to my plate.

When I was a kid I could only be force-fed acorn squash when the stuff was served as a maple syrup boat. It wasn’t until I started to demand jurisdiction over the grill that I recognized the potentials of soft summer squash, which in turn led me into a winter-wonderland of Butternut covered with cinnamon and toasted in the oven.

Literally all I do is cut my squash into thin slices, smooth on some olive oil, and cover it with whatever herb or spice will most compliment the meal at large. Butternut with cinnamon is my favorite, though sometimes it’s nice to serve alone (though it’s gone over well paired with lemon-honey glazed salmon or a cream of tomato soup). It bakes in about 45 minutes at 400 degrees—or fewer, depending on how thinly you slice it. I hoard the seeds, which collect oil and spice and crunch. It’s great the next day, chopped up and mixed in with salad or grains—like quinoa or couscous. I add toasted pecans and dried cherries for texture.

The more fragile summer squashes are best served savory, in my opinion. With those, fresh oregano or dried French herbs are my go-tos. The sweet, soft texture also works well with salt alone—it dries the edges a bit, makes them crunchy, and gives the dish that cracker-jack appeal of sweet meets salty.

blueberry muffins

I made blueberry muffins the night before last in response to a request. Since I can only get local blueberries from the farmer’s market, these muffins were both time-sensitive and valuable…$10 for two piddley pints.

I was really nervous about the investment. I’d never made blueberry muffins before and was prepared for something to go awry. Only one thing did: at the last minute the Streusel topping was over-mixed and turned into a glaze rather than a crumble. Worse things have happened to me.

The recipe I used was for Streusel Topped Blueberry Muffins from allrecipes.com, one of my favorite food sites. This one was vetted by over a hundred users, had a very high rating, and included lemon zest. I was sold. Plus my go-to cookbooks, The Joy of Cooking and The Silver Palate lacked exciting muffin options.

I learned a couple of very nifty things: first, one must dust the berries with a tablespoon (or two) of flour to keep them from running in the oven once they are folded into the batter. This prevents purple muffins. Can you believe it? Ingenious.

Second, I realized that a lot of important mixing gets done in a larger bowl than you’d anticipate. For example, I had to mix 2 cups of flour, salt and baking soda in a bowl that was not as large as the bowl I used to mix a single stick of butter, some sugar and two eggs. Hmmm.

I wasn’t sure why I was putting the relatively small slab of butter into my biggest glass bowl, but as the recipe unfolded, the mystery was solved—because the dry mix and berries are folded into the butter / sugar combination, and there must be enough space to accommodate the burgeoning batter. So much thought into this budding dozen.

I’ve photographed most of the steps I took in the process, though not necessarily in order. My only piece of advice is not to over-mix the butter/ sugar mix at the very end, or your topping will melt instead of Strudel-ing.

When I pulled my muffins from the oven, I noted that some of the topping had crusted over the baking tray and crystallized. Instead of letting all of that golden goodness go to waste, I stuck the sharp edges into the dough in artistic shapes—like those thin wafers that fancy restaurants prop into ice cream and mousse. I am really moving up in the culinary world.

Quickies: Guacamole, Pico de Gallo, Black Bean and Mango Salsa

Sometimes things have to be done in a hurry. Last night I made blueberry muffins and had the luxury of spending 9 to 10:30 pm observing the textures of flour and sugar and eggs. Most often, I don’t have that kind of time. Especially when people are on their way over.

Usually when I do things quickly, some small (or large) disaster ensues. The following recipes are virtually no-fail, fresh and delicious. These three salsas require chopping, mixing and tasting. They’re basically just cold arrangements. Clumsy as I can be in a rush, these salsas got done without a hitch. The only thing that required some pre-doing was baking tomatoes for the Pico de Gallo and roasting garlic (for the Pico and Black Bean salsa).

If I’d accidentally mixed the wrong ingredients together, the difference would have been negligible, unnoticed, or perhaps even appreciated since virtually all of the ingredients overlap. Because of the similarities between the recipes, I was able to prepare all three simultaneously–with the exception of adding avocados to my Guacamole base, which I did at the last minute. I just divided whatever I had chopped into three piles, to be used as I prepared each dish. This kitchen synchronicity was especially helpful since I still had to shower and mop the bathroom before the guests arrived and saw me unbathed, or my tiles imprinted with wet footprints.

Back to food. The process was simple:

*Dice 2 jalapeños (serve 1 in a side dish for people to add independently)*Dice 2 onions*Roast a head of garlic*Roast 6 Roma tomatoes, cut into quarters*Chop a bunch of cilantro (depending on how much you like the stuff)*Drain and rinse a 15oz can of black beans (unless you’re using your own boiled beans)*Cut up 2 mangoes into cubes slightly larger than the black beans*Sautée a diced shallot in olive oil*Chop 2 tomatoes, removing the juices and seeds, set aside (for Guac)*4 limes,coarse salt and black pepper to taste. Add as you go.

I did all of the preliminary work about two hours before people arrived so that the salsas could marinate. Once I was showered and my bathroom was clean and dry, I peeled the avocados and mashed them for the Guacamole—they have to be prepared last so they don’t brown. (The other Guacamole ingredients should be prepared beforehand along with the salsas.) The doorbell rang as I slipped the tub of green into the fridge, to be spooned onto a platter when people were ready to sit down after peeping at the house–it was a first visit.

Guacamole:

Set aside 3 or 4 avocados.

Mix your chopped (fresh) tomatoes with 1/3 onion, 1/3 cilantro, and the shallots. Set aside in fridge. Wait on the avocados until 30 minutes before the guests come. When that happens, cut them in half, scoop out the green meat and puree it with your fingers. (Don’t be gross: wash your hands and cut your fingernails before you do this!) If this makes your squirm, you can use a fork, but it’s much less fun. If your guests are squeamish, close the kitchen door or have a co-host distract them. When you are done, and hands are re-washed (it’s hard to follow the next steps with slippery fingers) add lots of lime juice to make the mix smoother. Mix in the toms, 1/3 of your onions, 1/3 of your cilantro and all of your sautéed shallots. Add 1/3 of your jalapeño pepper as well. (With this and all recipes, you can alter j. pepper according to taste–omitting entirely if necessary.) Add lots of salt. Put this away in an air-tight container and refrigerate to keep Guac from browning. Lime juice is key in preventing oxidation.

Pico de Gallo:

(prepare at least an hour beforehand)

Chop roasted Roma tomatoes, peeling off skins and discarding seeds and slime. Throw them together with 1/3 of your cilantro, 1/3 of your onion and 1/3 of your jalapeño pepper. Put some chopped, roasted garlic into the salsa if you’d like.

Black Bean and Mango Salsa:

(also best mixed an hour or more beforehand)

Add the 15oz can of black beans (rinsed) to the remaining cilantro, onion and jalapeño. Add your chopped mango. Add a clove or two of roasted garlic. (You can also omit garlic from any of these recipes.) Add lots of lime juice and salt. Mix and serve.

(The ingredients in full form, pre-blade.)

Serve with tortilla chips and fresh, chopped vegetables for guests who prefer carrot sticks to corn. No pictures of the final product this go ’round–I thought it would be rude to flash at people’s fingers in the food.

The leftovers from these salsas were delightful additions to salads for a couple of days after they were made. Unlike the browning Guacamole, the Pico and Black Bean Salsa seemed to get better with age. Who knows how long they would have improved? They were gone in two days.

last lettuce

These have been my salad days.

From early April until now, as the lettuce season ends. No lunch or dinner (and rarely a breakfast) is complete without leafy greens. A bed of lettuce is the perfect way to heap together all of the motley items you’d like to eat, but can’t always justify putting together any other way. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish, leftover pasta—can all be tossed together and camouflaged between the leaves of a Boston Bibb, a loose mix of mesclun, or a crunchy mass of Romaine.

Gone are the days of childhood picnics, when each food group had to be carefully separated by at least an inch of white space on the plate. Ketchup could never touch the lettuce; broccoli was not allowed near the macaroni and cheese. Now, I have to camouflage how many ingredients I mix together, afraid that even adventurous eaters will look askance at my zany combinations.

Thank you lettuce, for making my surreptitious eating possible. I sure will miss the heads I’ve bought straight from the ground in these first months of spring. My fridge is full of more leaves than I can possibly eat before they begin to wilt. I’ll have to share or sauté. But who could blame me when I heard these words at Saturday’s market, “Yep, get ‘em while you can. This is the last batch of lettuce for the season.” Shakespeare must have been talking about the delicate greenery of April and May when he invented the term that has defined the last few weeks of my life at the local table.

(Other favorites on the wane.)

hydrangeas

I’ve mentioned these before, but have been overwhelmed by them lately. I found them especially comforting on a dreary New York afternoon, when I was suddenly reminded of how grey the city can seem when the sun’s hazed over and the spring weather lapses autumnally.

One petulant cloud made his angry way over the sky and stayed all day. The whole place felt like Gotham City—or could have. But I was saved by Manhattan’s high taxes, and the generosity of a few green-thumbed neighbors who offered their own pots and plants as deliverance from the asphalt. There’s really nothing as generous as planting flowers.

When I got home, I added a couple to my own stoop. Lupe loves to chew the petals. Here she’s beguilingly patient, hoping I’ll spot a neighbor and get wrapped up in conversation so she can feast. If only I could employ her eager claws for precise hole-digging and her jowls for weeding. The garden would thrive.

yoga cookies

I was first wooed into practicing yoga regularly by cookies. I agreed to accompany my mother to a Saturday morning class when she told me that the instructor rewarded her yogis with treats after practicing. Few things are more enticing for a twelve year old that then scent of hot dough, packed with chocolate and pecans. I imagined sitting cross-legged and levitating, one cookie in each hand. The reality was not so different: I sat patiently as the smell gathered in the corners of the pale blue room while a buxom blonde teacher puffed through her slim nose for an hour and fifteen minutes and struck poses that made my jaw drop.

While the middle-aged women tried to replicate her grace (or at least her hair color) I sat cross-legged, transfixed by the wicker basket behind the table, whose smells produced some commingling of Christmas kitchens, fancy chocolate shops and French bakeries. The class seemed to stretch eternally as I tried to imagine what sweet lumps lay under the billowing napkins lining the basket. When the final gong reverberation faded, I was up like a lissome prairie dog, scanning the room from side to side for competitors in my race to the batch. These were golden brown patties with more chocolate chips, pecans and cranberries poking out of them than there was dough holding them together. I have been a yoga fanatic ever since.

The teacher (who looks younger with each year that passes) brings baskets of these “yoga cookies” with her for every class. Despite advancing past the age of 12, I am still the first one off the floor, rummaging through the offerings in search of the lumpiest, most laden cookie. I leave class sheepishly, my jacket stuffed. When I get home, I search for rogue crumbs in my pockets.

I have a terrible sweet tooth. I am also one of those women who becomes murderous in my need for chocolate every so often–predictably in sync with the moon. When these tides turn, it is important for me to have mounds at the ready so that I don’t harm the innocent…that old lady who took too long to check out at the grocery store and kept me from my Skoar bar a second too long… that little kid at Amy’s Ice Cream who just couldn’t decide on his toppings of choice…

These yoga cookies have saved me from rage and ravenousness. They are perfect–loaded with dark chocolate, nuts, dried fruit, ground flaxseed, soy flour and honey. They have no sugar, and no wheat. It’s hard to eat them in downward dog, but I am happy to put yoga on hold for a batch or two.

Recipe:

1 c soy flour / spelt flour mixed

3/4 c local honey

2 c oats

1/2 cup ground flaxseed

1 c dried fruit (i love dried cherries / cranberries mixed)

1 c nus (pecans, cashews, walnuts and almonds work well–together or seperately)

1/2 c sunflower seeds

2 c dark chocolate

2 tsp each cinnamon / ground ginge

1/2 tsp each nutmeg, baking powder, salt

3/4 c sunflower oil

1 egg

Mix dry ingredients together. Beat oil, egg and honey in a separate bowl. Mix everything together. Let stand 10 mins in fridge. Form 3-4 inch rounds on an oiled cookie sheet. Bake 13-15 minutes. You can’t mess this up–unless your chocolate is too bitter. As mine was last night. I have had to pluck the chunks out and make granola instead for this go ’round. Shhh.

Namaste.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

There is a layer of dried sugar along my chin. I couldn’t wipe it off while grabbing at zucchini, blueberries and tomatoes, and daring to eat a peach. I forgot to lick the stickiness off until just now. I hadn’t paid when the juice started to dribble–the farmer (the only organic blueberry producer in Texas!) assumed that I soon would, so I greedily stuffed my paper sack and watering mouth with a summer peach. In May. I’ve never seen this kind of produce up North before June. July, even. It felt forbidden, my May 6 peach.

For a long time, I refused peaches entirely. I thought the little hairs of their skin got stuck in my chin like fine needles. I was afraid that I would get a rash from the prickly stubble of their thin, tearable skin. (Downed with light brown.) I plucked nectarines from the grocery bins, and avoided their paler neighbors. Now I realize, that is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all.

It was merely the sugar juice, dried on my chin. Not needles or hairs at all. I wonder when the nectarines come back, will they have the same effect? Will they be half as good as these forbidden peaches, that fell from a tree this morning and made their way into the cup of my palm, to the pit of my pit?

I smelled the bag when I got home. I stuffed my face into the brown paper darkness and inhaled until I was dizzy. It smelled like a wide open summertime field, that little corner on my kitchen counter. And when I emerged from the sack, high as a kite on the scent of July, I really did feel glad to be a Texan. I’ll have an extra month (or two or three!) of these young, juicy things. Before autumn comes and I wonder “will it all have been worthwhile?” falling in love with the fruit of the summer–only to face the white haired waves of winter roll over the dormant fields?

Yes. I will be happy with winter squash in lieu of fiddleheads and zephyrs. I will not have an existential crisis, and picture myself an old man, drowned by human voices. These photos are from today’s farmer’s market, where I fondly remembered a high school English teacher’s love of blueberry picking. She also loves Proofrock and peaches. Here’s to you, Beas.

a pickled belly

I feel like a pickle. I am pickled. I have had too much wine, too much chocolate and too much coffee in recent days. It’s important for me to enjoy being with people I love, and when I don’t get to see them often, I am prone to opening an extra bottle of wine, having an extra scoop or two of chocolate ice cream (on Thursday night I had two desserts after my berry cobbler failed to satisfy) and drinking unending cups of caffeine during the day to keep me going through my physically soggy state.

I arrived in Texas this morning, determined to return to what the hungry, hungry Hippo(crates) said about food–that we must make it our medicine.

For the next few days I will be cooking with this in mind, and beginning each day with a saintly cup of warm water with a floating slice of lemon. A few yoga twists in the morning will also help me wring out my blackened innards. Delicious!

Now I am sipping peppermint tea instead of coffee and cream, which I would usually slug at this hour of the afternoon. (Mind you, this detox plan includes a cup of coffee in the morning, a glass of wine every night and some dark chocolate after every meal, because it would definitely be a health hazard to give up those flavenoids altogether.)

May the pendulum swing back to intestinal cleanliness for a minute, but may I not forgot the many wonderful meals I had in New York. Worth your time: scallops at Nook, a BYOB in Hell’s Kitchen (the cheeseburger is also good, if only for the potatoes, fried with a Midas touch). Also try the farmer’s veggie plate at Westville in the West Village, aptly named. I had a combination of butternut squash, mushrooms, artichoke hearts with goat cheese and beets with walnuts. That night I also ordered the salmon, then the berry cobbler. Then the chocolate soufflé.

Before dinner at Westville I had drinks at The Rusty Knot on the West Side highway–the most excruciating yippster crowd I’ve stumbled into since crashing a prep school party at somebody’s parent’s Park Avenue penthouse. It was like a recurring nightmare: all of the pretties prep school kids I’d ever met, together in one place, floating in paisley and pinstripes as if they were bobbing on a Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard boat instead of hobnobbing (land-locked) by the dirty Hudson. There they were, all grown up, drinking gin and tonics and wearing pink pants with flannel shirts for a bit of that just-rolled-out-of-bedness. At least Dorian’s stays in its rightful zip code.

Buzina Pop was another inadvertent stop-over. I went there after a very clean meal at Candle Cafe–the vegetarian platter serves up at least a bottle of Centrum’s-worth of vitamins and minerals. In need of a kick in the gut, I bought myself a sack of earl gray infused dark chocolates from Payard (across the block from Buzina Pop) and had a glass of Miolo Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon outside, which was almost enough to keep me warm, but not quite. It was very good wine–maybe the best glass I had all week. Nevertheless, it was very cold outside. So cold that I ate all of my truffles and ordered another glass.

Today I raise a mug of lemon-infused water and toast to that decision.

walking down the street

…is something I miss about New York when I’m in Houston. I especially love stumbling into tunnels and unexpected pathways in the park–like this incredible mosaic ceiling by the Central Park Boathouse.

I’ve been doing a lot of meandering while I’m here: trying to look up at the faces in the crowd while also taking in the buildings, the smell of halal trucks (undoubtedly my favorite urban odor), the men’s pink ties, the girls with gold sneakers. There is so much humanity crammed on this little island, and still room for street bouquets.

Hydrangeas are a favorite. I was late to work today because I took so much time to smell these blue bulbs. I also paused to photograph red tulips that look surprisingly like Christmas ornaments. I just can’t believe how many corners of the city are crammed with thoughtfulness.

Like the office bathroom, where I met a woman (while changing from my comfortable sneakers into my fancy work slippers) who had just acquired the most beautiful tomato I have seen since September. She was washing it gently in the sink like a baby’s bottom, and drying it off carefully between the ridges. She really was proud of her acquisition. Proud enough to model it for me when I came running back to the sink with my camera… But only under the condition that I pose (and post) with it, too.

new york tulips

I spent the morning admiring one of the most fleeting scenes in this concrete landscape. I am lucky enough to stay in a part of the city where tulips are planted in long rows, and where getting to Central Park is a five minute affair.

On my way, I got coffee at Via Quadronno. Whenever I go (it used to be a daily, impoverishing habit) I am struck by how good coffee can taste. But then I pay the check, and realize that at $4.50 for a regular cup, the beans must be hand plucked, shucked, roasted and ground, one by one.

The dog outside made me miss Guadalupe, who’s currently kenneled with a pair of elderly neighbors . They have a special love of moth balls, and I worry that when she gets home, she’ll have lost her sense of smell. I wish she could be here now sniffing around Manhattan’s roots–though I’m sure she’d just be digging up the bulbs and gnawing at the pedals. Next year, when she’s not so inclined to chew and scrounge in the dirt, I’ll plant some bulbs in the yard. As always, BBC Gardening has specific advice.