Let Mother Nature Eat Cake!

At the end of April, Anchorage starts looking a bit like spring.
Snow banks disappear, and spring flora start making their debut. Families trying desperately to pretend it's already summer flock to the city's brown-grassed parks. The wild geese return and with their early morning squawks, seem to be signaling the arrival of spring.


At least all of this was true until this past Friday, April 25th when it dumped more than a foot and a half of snow.




The wintry scene that resulted would have been enchanting... in January. But in April, coming upon May, I could not embrace the winter wonderland with open arms.




What is the former Californian Madwoman to do in the face of such snowy adversity? She takes to the oven!




So I decided to pass the climatically confused weekend by baking cakes. The first was for the end-of-year taiko drumming potluck and performance. It has been an awesome year of taiko, with the exception of the cancellation of this year's Cherry Blossom Festival. To make amends, I made a cherry blossom cake and in the spirit of our Tomodachi Daiko group (which literally translated means, "Friends taiko drumming"), I included the character for "friendship" printed on the group's t-shirts and paraphenalia.




Those who know me well understand that it is no secret that sometimes I resort to cake mix, particularly when I have complicated decorations in mind. My favorite for this purpose, which I heartily and frequently recommend to others, is the Pillsbury Deluxe German Chocolate Cake Mix. Why Deluxe? It has pudding in the mix and produces a very tender cake. Why German Chocolate? It is much more subtle than a standard chocolate, a little less sweet perhaps in anticipation of its intended, very sticky sweet pecan caramel topping (which I rarely prepare). I find that the best complement to this cake is a simple, lightly sweetened whipped cream frosting. The sooner the frosting hits the cake, the sooner it seals in all the moistness. For this application, I stabilized the whipped cream for decoration using gelatin.


Stabilized Whipped Cream Frosting:


1 cup whipping cream
1 T unflavored gelatin


Dissolve gelatin powder in small amount of cold water in a glass measuring cup. Let stand for a few minutes. Heat cup in saucepan of boiling water, stirring until all gelatin is dissolved. Drizzle over whipping cream as you are whipping. Should yield about 2 cups.

Like any baking by the Madwoman, there are bound to be irregularities, and the Cherry Blossom cake was no exception. I had baked the cake the night before but did not unmold it until the day after. Bad idea. As a result, I had to carefully pry the cake out of the pan. I also may have overmixed the batter because the cake yielded a very tender crumb which was delicious to eat, but hard to work with in terms of structural integrity. That's why the cake in the photo is a slightly truncated 9 X 13 (I lost the top inch to disintegration during excavation). The tender crumb was seemingly so disastrous that I almost scrapped the whole cake. But the Madwoman is nothing if not resourceful in last-minute fix-ups.


The second cake was to celebrate Staff Appreciation week at my office and did not suffer as many irregularities. The recipe called for 3 layers of 9 inch rounds, but since I had only 2 such pans, I decided to just use 2 and then split them for a 4 layer cake. The closest I got to an irregularity in this endeavor was the batter was fairly stiff and hard to spread out evenly. For whatever reason, the cakes came out somewhat lopsided. I could have sliced off the tops for evening, but I hate wasting cake and these days, eating mistakes is a very fattening last resort. So I just sliced the layers and hoped for the best, having come to terms that if you want to make a pretty homemade cake, nothing says homemade love than a little lopsided layer.

Monkey See, Monkey Do!

Last night Jaja and I stayed up until midnight to make a birthday cake for my roommie who turns 28 this week. For the last four years, I have made her some form of a commemorative "G" cake in honor of the her name. The first year, it was a simple cut-out from a 9 X 13 pan. This year, I wanted something with a little je ne sais quoi, so the FBI agent in me figured out how to secretly procure her mother's phone number. When I asked G's mom what kind of cake G might like, to my surprise, she said, "You should bake her a monkey cake!"

Apparently G was very fond of the monkey character Zephir from the Babar elephant series. In fact, little stuffed Zephir still resides at her mom's house in Minneapolis. Judging from how quickly G's mom answered my question, I figured this must be her traditional birthday cake, but out of curiosity I asked when was the last time she made it for G.

"Oh I guess she was about six years old."


Perfect! Nothing like a bit of nostalgia to ring in a new birthday. I won't go into the details of how much butter, how many eggs, or how much buttercream frosting ended up in our bellies, but suffice it to say, making a monkey cake is a bit of monkey business. As late as it was last night, Jaja and I had a blast decorating what we both agreed was the best monkey cake we'd ever made.


Tonight, we will eat monkey!

The Art of the Manly Pie

This Easter, I had the pleasure of tasting one of the most delicious apple pies I have ever eaten in my entire life. Tragically, I almost missed the experience because after gorging myself on holy ham, I had little room left for dessert.

But who can pass up a slice of homemade pie?

Apparently not I.

What was supposed to be an obligatory taste of dessert turned into an unexpected love affair. This pie was like a warm embrace... like finding an unexpected meadow of flowers in the middle of a dreary hike. Yes, I do believe the clouds parted and divine light shined through as I ate this pie.

Did I mention woodland creatures came out of the forest to greet me?

Suffice it to say, it was good pie, good enough that I ate a second slice even though I was stuffed to the seams with holy ham.

The subject pie was provided by Minty Monty, a self-taught maker of pies. I immediately contacted him to see if I could learn his secrets or better yet, serve as an apprentice during his next pie-making session. Monty was gracious enough to agree to the latter. His email confirming our pie-making session summarized our goals aptly:

"We shall make pie. Then we shall eat pie. "




If you're thinking this looks like pie porn, it is.
















We also made a commemorative customized turnover with extra crust scraps.




Thank you, Minty Monty, for the best apple pie of the year.

Holy Ham!

It had been five weeks of Arbitrary Vegetarianism, many days full of challenges and introspection. In these last five weeks, I've looked Salami, and Brats, Lamb Chops in right in the eye and managed to stand firm.

So what happened on Sunday?

On Sunday, the Lord was resurrected.

And maybe I ate a whole lot of Ham.

Although I knew that there would be ham at Easter, my consumption was not premediated. I was helping Jaja out in the kitchen and was tasked with dealing with the glaze. I dutifully juiced some lemon and orange into a bowl of marmalade and then proceeded to heat the mixture until it was nice and thick. Then I went over the ham and drizzled the hot luscious glaze all over that big hunk of wonderful meat.



You can see where this story is going.

After all, am I not human?

After getting that close and personal with an Easter Ham, is it reasonable or even possibly fathomable that I would not partake in the proper celebration of the Lord's resurrection? My mind started racing as I tried to squeeze this large hunk of ham into one of my exceptions. Definitely not a broth/juice. Definitely not wild game. Definitely not a Small Bit (my favorite exception)... unless you're an ogre. Unless you're an ogre!

Oh wait, I'm not really an ogre.

As I ran these scenarios in my mind, I wondered why I didn't see it fit to have a religious exception. I mean, Religious Exceptions are some of the most established and widely accepted exceptions out there.

Oh right, I'm not really religious.

Years ago, while hiking to a church at the top of Marseilles, I had an epiphany that the physical hunger of my bottomless tummy was actually symptomatic of a deeper hunger - a sad spiritual emptiness. Suddenly it became all too clear to me that it was my a-religiosity that compelled me to try and fill myself with worldly goods, and yet, I knew that fulfillment could never be truly had this way. At least this was my explanation for why my a-religious self was weeping during church services conducted in a language I couldn't even understand. This revelation was all fine and good until I left the church and then immediately started wondering what was for lunch. Mu and I ended up eating a large platterful of raw seafood:



Doesn't quite look like spiritual emptiness, does it?


So back to Easter. What better way to fill an empty aching soul than with a huge hunk of ham? Suffice it to say, my soul was very very full this Easter, so full that I wish I had been wearing elastic pants.


But then again, what's a religious holiday without a little commemorative sin?

So Big!

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a taiko fundraiser benefiting the local Japanese immersion program. One of the highlights was the Roll-Your-Own-Sushi booth. That's right, for four raffle tickets, you could make your own California roll, with the aid of the friendly Japanese people staffing the booth. First, we were provided with a sheet of nori with sushi rice. Then, there was a plate full of toppings (imitation crab, cucumber, egg, roe, avocado) to add. After that, with a quick squeeze of a bamboo mat, presto, I had my own personal California roll.

When I got to the part of the station where the nice Japanese lady cuts your sushi, she lifted her knife and remarked, "So big!" I was a little embarrassed because I was with a friend who clearly heard the comment. My roll didn't seem incredibly large to me - I just wanted all the toppings, but I didn't want any gaps. (It's just terrible when a bite of roll is missing a key piece of avocado, for example.) The Japanese lady kept saying stuff to me in Japanese, but I just smiled and nodded. If you allow a Chinese person into a roll-your-own-sushi line, you have to expect that you are going to get some "so big!" rolls.

The solution: make your own rolls at home, where you can yell, "So big!" out loud freely! With no shame! In your underwear!

(*Note: I did not make the below-depicted sushi wearing only underwear, but you get the point. )

"Govern a country..."

"... like you cook a fish. Do not overdo it." - Lao Tze.

The answer: filet of halibut steamed with Chinese black beans, ginger, and scallions.

Treat fresh fish gently, and it will never disappoint.

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

There's nothing like having ox tail stew for the first time, a long-neglected cut of meat. A dish for only those with Patience and Fortitude, it takes at least two hours to simmer and some degree of social boldness to pick the meat off the bones.


Also introducing for the first time, Emergency Company Noodles:

As usual, headcount was entirely uncertain until hours before dinner, and as usual, I feared bellies would leave still hungry. So I whipped up some seafood chow mein, aided by the use of Korean instant ramen. The package yields al dente ramen noodles (decent level of hi-gluten flour), one packet of red hot seasonings, and one packet of dehydrated vegetables -- all helpful ingredients in a pinch. I enhanced by adding shrimp (sliced lengthwise to double the quantity); dried shrimp, dashi, shiitake mushrooms (to add flavor); and baked tofu strips (to add bulk).

The result? Empty plate, hopefully full bellies.

Food From the Mothership

Little Bro says Mom's vegetarian potstickers taste like meat dumplings, the ultimate compliment.

Chinese Hug in a Bowl

Winter blues got you down? Nothing like a steaming bowl of homemade wontons to ease the soul. Wonton soup is very popular restaurant fare but almost always made badly. Outside the home, you'll likely get (1) too few wontons, (2) wontons of insufficient meaty bulk, (3) deadened artificial-looking broth and (4) my worst nightmare - flappy wonton skins. The home version is a subtler, more delicate affair. After all, wonton soup should be a restorative experience, not a slap in the face.














WON TON BROTH
½ t dried shrimp
1 can chicken broth
leaves of nappa cabbage, cut lengthwise
1 stem of pickled mustard green, chopped
1/8 t dashi
3-4 slices of ginger
soy sauce to taste
salt
splashes of rice wine
3 T scallions (chopped)
1. Saute ½ t dried shrimp until aromatic. Add chicken broth, dashi, pickled mustard and enough water to fill pot halfway. Add salt and soy sauce. Bring to boil.
2. Add wontons. Bring back to boil once. Add ¼ c cold water. Bring back to boil again.
3. Add scallions. Serve hot, immediately.

The Art of Leftovers

Although the blogging has been quiet, the Tummy has not. Sometimes I'm too busy eating to write it all down. Two weeks ago, when eight of my favorite people came over for potstickers, I discovered the hard way (namely in the form of frozen foods hurling toward my toes every time I opened the refrigerator) that my freezer is overstocked. I am a hoarder by nature, and my freezer is definitely no exception.

So I resolved to eat out my freezer, slowly, mostly in order to make space for future hoarding. It turns out it is no easy task. I have Costco-sized bags of frozen vegetables, fish and berries from yesteryear, and all kinds of irregularly shaped items that make it hard to close the freezer door without risk of injury. Years ago, when I was a more accomplished Type A personality, I kept an Excel spreadsheet labeled "FREEZER INVENTORY" on my refrigerator door. It was a good idea because my freezer now has become some kind of fantastical, mysterious Narnia - full of items such as eel, home-cured salmon, wontons, potstickers, berries of many varieties, bagels, shrimp, bread, frozen veggies, meats of many sorts... the list goes on and on.

In step with my renewed dedication to eating what I've made rather than making more food, today's lunch was comprised wholly of leftovers - a little bit of leftover rice, leftover wonton soup (now minus any wontons which were greedily gobbled up days ago) with leftover spinach from an undressed spinach salad with walnuts, and leftover meatballs made from leftover dumpling filling. I had originally planned to have the leftover wonton soup, but aside from the wontons that formerly populated the soup, it was completely vegetarian. I know my own tummy well enough to predict that I could not be satisfied with just vegetarian soup. The rice served to add some bulk and body to the soup, and by dropping two happy frozen meatballs into the mix, finally I had a well-balanced lunch.



There are many who turn their noses up at leftovers, but a leftover meal can be a more complex second life to your food, if treated properly. Think of leftovers having gone to a better place (the worse place being the trash). With the addition of chopped fresh scallions, I daresay I could have served this soup to normal people (myself being an exception). The only miscalculation was the occasional stray walnut that had made its way from its first life in a salad to its second life in a soup. Walnuts don't really work well in soup.

Nevertheless, until the freezer avalanche at home subsides, I look forward to more cobbled together meals bringing back pleasant memories of meals of yesterday.

Sometimes Looks Matter

Results of the entirely unscientific poll are in: people like the Chocolate Chocolate Chip Amish Friendship - what I described in a previous entry as "sin without the redemption." While there remain a few purists who prefer the plain Amish Friendship, the overwhelming response was, I liked the one with the chips. In other words, not only do the masses prefer sin, they like it to be studded with little chips of solid sin.

With Christmas looming near, I took to the kitchen yesterday armed with a 24-egg-count carton of Costco eggs. I baked from morning until quite past night (given that it's getting dark around here before 4pm). My Sunday passed in a blur of baking, punctuated by a little bit of living.

As it always goes for me in the kitchen, there were irregularities. For those who have been gifted the results of my Sunday efforts, fear not - these irregularities were merely cosmetic. But in baking, cosmetic irregularities are often noticed. I recall that I once made wonderful mini-cheesecakes to take to a law school class (why I am always toting desserts to inappropriate places, I do not know), but had made a poor choice in transport tupperware. The result: the mini-cheesecakes were squished, intertwined with their fruit toppings. I offered one to a classmate with the disclaimer, "They look bad but they are delicious."

He gave them one look and said to me, "Madwoman, sometimes looks matter."

I have never forgotten those words.

Sometimes looks matter.

I heard these words again after my first batch of plain Amish Friendship, which I can only describe with two words -

squashed shoe:



My baking had been proceeding all too normally when I realized at the end of the bake time that I had neglected to sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on top of the loaves. Not a huge deal, but the bread is rather plain without the delightful sugary and crispy crust. Since the eight plain loaves were just about done baking, I knew the tops would be too dry at this point for the cinnamon sugar to adhere. So I did what any Madwoman would do.

I spritzed the tops of the loaves.

Let it be said that spritzing water while baking has many benefits. It creates steam in the oven, making heat distribute more quickly, and it helps keep the moisture level up. I recommend it while baking bread, for example. But what else should be said is that one should probably never spritz directly onto the rising surface of a baked good.

The cinnamon sugar stuck really well, but that brief moment of satisfaction dissipated quickly when the loaf started to deflate from the inside, no doubt confused and bogged down by the new and sudden moisture up top. As the loaves cooled, the situation only got worse until all the loaves reached the Squashed Shoe Stage. I suddenly had eight squashed shoes where eight loaves of Vanilla Amish Friendship had been before.

But sometimes catastrophe is the mother of invention. I selected two shoes that seemed to make a good pair, slathered a layer of Nutella between them for adhesion, and voila - Amish Friendship with Hazelnut Filling. Whether this tactic worked or not will be the subject of yet another very unscientific poll.

Stay tuned and find out whether Nutella can bridge The Gap Between Sin and Redemption.

Walla Walla, Where Have You Been All My Life?

Yesterday I had a profound experience.

As I often boast, I've been eating for a long time and often make the mistake of thinking that I've eaten it all, when in truth, I am only in the middle of a life-long pursuit to eat it all. After all, my palate still gets caught off guard on occasion. For example, seven years ago, I was very much taken aback by the sticky snotty look and taste of nato, Japanese fermented soy beans. That humbling experience has stuck with me.

Last night, BB re-introduced me to the sweet onion. I've seen these onions before lying in the next bin over from the regular onions at Costco. I've noticed mostly that they are slightly more expensive and more squatty in shape. I've even eaten them before but never clued into the sublime difference.

All onions are sweet, but sweet onions lack the level of sulfur that gives onions its characteristic bite. Nine times out of ten, I am sauteeing onions rather than eating them raw - probably because I'm not particularly fond of the sulfurous bite. Last night, in BB's salmon dip, I realized what I have been missing.

A raw sweet onion has all of the bright texture of a regular onion accented by crisp lingering sweetness. It can truly wake up a dip. I kept waiting for the onion to bite back, but it never did, and hence I kept on eating. The remaining flavors in my mouth were happy and pleasant - if push came to shove, this was a mouth that could still kiss!

Once again I am humbled by a simple root vegetable.

So for all of you lovers out there, get out your mistletoe and your sweet Walla Walla onions and make this Christmas delicious.

Don't Squeeze Me Today!

There's starter in my pocket.

That's right, there's Amish Friendship Starter in my coat pocket, a conglomeration of milk, sugar, and flour. Technically speaking, it is in a ziploc bag in my pocket. But you get the idea - squeezing me could be very dangerous.

Why am I running around Anchorage with Amish Friendship Starter (which by the way, looks basically like goo) in my pocket? I am taking the recipe's admonition against refrigeration to heart, and unfortunately, all of Anchorage is a giant refrigerator right now. I am aiming to deliver a batch of starter to an unsuspecting friend about to join the "Friendship Circle," but I had a series of errands today and left alone in a parked car, who knows what would have happened to the starter.

I shall not be responsible for the Death of Any Amish Friendship.

So I am doing the next logical thing - keeping it at room temperature in my pocket.

I am pleased to announce that by working hard to bake a total of four loaves in the last two days, I actually only have one starter to unload. The other one I will save for myself, get a sitter for it this weekend since I'm going away, and deal with next week. The last two loaves I tried a variation - chocolate pudding mix.

Having been cautioned by JaJa that the chocolate version isn't so chocolately, I substituted 3/4 c of sugar and 1/4 of unsweetened cocoa powder for 1 c of sugar. With the pudding mix, I felt as though the bread was sufficiently sweet already. I divided the batter into two loaves, and added 1/4 c chocolate chips to one of them just to kick up the chocolate factor. Various loaves were distributed yesterday and I am still waiting to hear the results of the public-at-large survey.

This morning I myself had a slice of the chocolate chocolate-chip loaf, and while decent, it doesn't seem to taste much different from the chocolate chocolate-chip muffins you can buy at Costco. Suffice it to say, that was not what I was aiming for. If the regular vanilla variety of Amish Friendship tastes like Sin and Redemption in One Bite, perhaps it can be said that the chocolate chocolate-chip loaf tastes like Just Cheap Sin In One Bite. It lacks the spiritual depth of its paler brother.

If the masses have a different opinion, you will be the soon to hear.

But for now, don't squeeze me today!

Battling the Darkness

What better way to battle the growing darkness than with cake! Like a Citrus-Scented Winter Solstice Cake Roll....



Would have looked much better on a shiny meat platter.

Have You Seen This Meat Platter?

LOST:
One shiny meat platter, about two feet long. Meat not included. Sentimental value. Please call if found.

Like people, sometimes food needs an accessory or two. This morning, when I reached for my trusty shiny meat platter to serve as the presentation dish for an office birthday cake, it was not in its normal storage spot in the cabinet. I then proceeded to turn the kitchen upside down looking for my shiny friend.

If I concentrate really hard, I realize that I have no idea whatsoever when was the last time I saw my meat platter. It was often used this summer at barbecues, and occasionally gets trotted out for receptions, but no recent memory of its being comes to mind. At the same time, at two feet, it is hard to misplace.

So my theory is that Mrs. Chao has taken my meat platter. The story of Mrs. Chao started over fifteen years ago, when my mom was running a steamed bun business out of our kitchen. Word got around that she was commercializing and soon, the orders started pouring in. My dad and I did our best to help out, mostly by eating Red Bean Buns that had failed to rise properly. But it soon became clear that my mom needed extra help - real help.

Perhaps tapping her Amway experience, my mom decided to get a friend involved, Mrs. Chao. Mrs. Chao was apparently a horrible cook, but sometimes those who are clueless in the kitchen can be good assistants as they will do exactly as you say. Looking back on this, perhaps my mom enlisted Mrs. Chao because she was less of an espionage risk. Whatever she learned in my mom's kitchen, it seemed doubtful Mrs. Chao could replicate it herself elsewhere.

One day, my mom was doing inventory (which was stored crammed into our family freezer) and noticed that she was short one hundred dumplings. How my mom could so precisely account for her dumplings, I don't know. She turned the kitchen inside and out looking for dumplings. I mean, a bag of one hundred dumplings does not just get up and walk out of the kitchen.

Or does it?

As they day wore on and dumplings remained MIA, my mom settled on a suspect - Mrs. Chao. Mrs. Chao had stolen her dumplings! One hundred of them! An inside embezzlement job -- a shrewdly calculated crime.

I personally wondered why Mrs. Chao would steal one hundred dumplings. I can't remember how my mom paid her for her help but certainly an arrangement could have been struck using dumplings as currency. (They are, after all, modeled after Chinese currency from the old days.) But my mom was sure - Mrs. Chao had stolen the dumplings, betraying her in a way she never thought a friend could. This was not the Amway way.

The next day, my mom found the dumplings. She had miscounted. Mrs. Chao was exonerated, but there must have been some kind of confrontation because I never saw Mrs. Chao after that. Shortly thereafter, the steamed bun business folded, and the kitchen was thankfully returned to ordinary family use.

To this day, the family often jokes about Mrs. Chao when we can't seem to find something.

"Where's the vacuum cleaner?"

"Maybe Mrs. Chao took it."

"Have you seen my favorite jacket?"

"I think Mrs. Chao is wearing it."

"Mrs. Chao has been stealing the socks out of the dryer again!"

Mrs. Chao was and still is everywhere. In fact, she followed me from LA when I moved to Alaska. My first year in the Little Yellow House, when our snow shovel disappeared, I cursed Mrs. Chao, waving my empty hands at the piles of snow.

"MRS. CHAAAOOO!"

I know that Mrs. Chao has my meat platter. Who can blame her given its wonderful size and shiny, mirror-like surface? If there is a platter to be coveted, it would be My Beloved Meat Platter. That Mrs. Chao is no fool.

Regardless, Mrs. Chao, if you're reading this, please give my meat platter back! I'll trade you a bag of dumplings.

Please Be My Amish Friend

Last week, I came back from the Thanksgiving holidays to find a beautiful loaf of bread on my kitchen counter. My dear friend JaJa had made my roommate and me a loaf of "Amish Friendship Bread."

Judging from the name, I figured it was probably plain basic white bread. But as I peeled away the foil and sampled a piece, I was stunned by the unconventional deliciousness that met my lips.

Amish Friendship Bread is a cinnamonny sweet bread, kind of like a banana nut bread except without the banana and nuts and much more delicious. It is simple in its looks - light coffee-colored crumb flecked with cinnamon - but the flavor is complex, full of depth, the kind of bread that encapsulates sin and redemption all in one bite!

I immediately wanted to know the recipe. And therein lies the rub.

The Amish Friendship Bread is made with a starter made of milk, sugar, flour, and I suppose whatever is in the air. I have worked with sourdough starters before and it is true that they require some degree of care and concern, but not much. A sourdough starter needs to be fed but can survive periods of dormancy. For example, legend has it that Dick Proenekke's historic sourdough starter sat dormant for ten years before the caretakers of his cabin poured off "the sludge" and started using it for hotcakes again. My own starters have started looking upset with me... maybe I should feed them soon....

As much trouble as it is caring for a sourdough starter, it is nothing compared to having a high-maintenance Amish Friendship Starter. This starter has a 10-day cycle which requires feeding, massaging, and abstention from metal utensils. (I have yet to figure out if this is just an Amish quirk or something about reactive metals.) I half expect the starter to ask me to take it on buggy rides in the countryside.

The recipe is as follows:

Amish Friendship Bread
DO NOT REFRIGERATE. IF AIR GETS INTO THE BAG, LET IT OUT & RE-SEAL.
Day 1: Do nothing.
Day 2-5: Mush the bag.
Day 6: Add 1 c sugar, 1 c flour, 1 c milk to the bag.
Days 7-9: Mush the bag.
Day 10: Follow directions below.

1. Poor entire contents of bag into non-metal bowl & use non-metal spoon. Add 1.5 c flour, 1.5 c sugar, 1.5 c milk. Stir until smooth.
2. Measure out 4 equal batters into ziploc bags -- 1 c each. These are your new starters. Keep them, give them away, or toss them.
3. Take what's left of the batter after removing the starters and add:

3 eggs
1 c oil
1/2 c milk
1 c sugar
2 c flour
1.5 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
2 t cinnamon
1 large box of instant pudding
1 c chopped nuts, raisins, etc. [OPTIONAL]

4. Grease 2 large loaf pans.
5. Mix 1/2 c sugar and 1.5 t cinnamon. Sprinkle some of this mixture into the greased pans. Pour batter into pans and sprinkle remaining cinnamon sugar on top.
6. Bake at 325F for 1 hour.

Although the Amish are not proud, their starter is not so modest. Through feedings, it propogates exponentially like a pack of rabbits.

As I read the instructions for splitting the batter into four new starters, I couldn't help but be reminded of my mother's brief foray into Amway. I was only about ten when she joined Amway, but to this day, I still feel the effects of this decision (and not just in the sub-par laundry soap from the 80s that still stocks the shelves in our laundry room). The business propagated, it seemed to me, mostly by tricking your friends into joining and making them buy products. Amway was a transformative experience for my mother. Prior to Amway, in home movies, my mother was a soft-spoken woman. I can't say the same today.

It was not until college, in Sociology 101, that someone drew a scholarly link between the socialization tactics of cults and Amway. Thrown into the mix in that chapter were Mormons, the Moonies, and if anyone had known about the Amish Friendship bread, perhaps the Amish would have gotten a few paragraphs.

For anyone who seriously cooks in a kitchen, waste is an enemy. All food has the potential of providing nourishment, so it makes little sense to throw things away. The Amish should know better; I cannot possibly throw away perfectly good starter that has been lovingly fed milk, sugar, and flour! There are starving people in Africa who would kill for a spoonful of that Amish Friendship. Under these circumstances, there's only one thing left to do, what any good Amway distributor would do: get your friends involved.

As I thought about who among my unsuspecting friends could be burdened with a high-maintenance starter, I began to see the recipe for what it truly is.

An Amish Pyramid Scheme.

The whole recipe seemed a bit suspicious to me. One large box of instant pudding? How can instant pudding be Amish? Isn't that the baking equivalent of a proud zipper? Were it not for the divine crumb on this bread, I would throw in the towel and throw out the starter. But salvation is not an easy road!

With respect to the recipe itself, it is fairly straightforward. The splitting of batters into starters should leave you about 1-2 cups of batter to start your own batch of bread. The admonition against metal utensils was frustrating as Kitchenaid Mixmaster Thor could have made this bread quickly, with his eyes closed. Instead, I had to do it, first with a wooden spoon which didn't feel like it was getting enough beating done. Deciding that there was no sense in denying my heritage, I reached for a pair of wooden chopsticks, which coincidentally was what my mother first gave me to use to make cake batter when I was kid. (Thank you, Mom, I suppose, for this Lesson in Patience.)

Other things to note: The amount of cinnamon sugar topping called for by the recipe is a little too much to sprinkle evenly over two loaves, and the extra sugar ends up making the bread dusty. A nice even layer will brown and crisp the top of your bread. I ended up using two silicone pans, which seemed to work well enough.

By the time I got these two loaves into the oven, it was already past 9pm which is usually my cut-off for turning on any heat-producing devices in the kitchen, having learned the hard way that a sleepy Madwoman makes for some irregular and catastrophic baking. High maintenance and late hour aside, the Friendship Bread, true to its name, made the recipe worth it.

Here it is, lying in a lovely (and coincidentally Amish) basket I bought at a local crafts show last month:



And if that isn't Holy Redemption In a Basket, I don't know what is.

Local Sandwich Makes Good

The office ordered from Muffin Man today for our monthly meeting, and when the delivery man arrived, he said that my sandwich almost didn't make it because he almost ate it after making it.


As described on the menu:

PESTO CHICKEN: sliced chicken breast, roasted red peppers, caramelized onions, fresh mozarella, and housemade pesto on baguette

I have to apologize for the truncated sandwich, but I got a few good bites in before I thought about taking a picture. The sandwich was slightly on the salty side but was otherwise vibrantly flavorful. The chicken breast was moist and juicy and the sauteed onions, pesto, and mozarella melded together well, making each bite interesting and exciting.

At first I was both intrigued and disturbed that the delivery man/cook almost ate my sandwich, but after the last bite, I understood why. Had the tables been turned, I'm not sure it would have escaped my belly.

Thank you, Muffin Man, for the rarely found Decent Sandwich In Anchorage.

Pierogi Redux

Ah, there's nothing like waking up in a house that smells like onions sauteed in the richness of butter!

Last night I cooked a large serving of pierogis for a group of friends, using the frozen pierogis I manufactured some weeks ago out of that seemingly endless five pounds of potatoes.

As part of my prep, I had spent the afternoon thinking,

just how many pierogis are needed to feed a ninja ladder?

Months ago, during one of our basement parties, a trio of men decided to build a ninja ladder to the basement window notwithstanding a basement ceiling probably no more than eight feet high. Suffice it to say, it was a very compressed ladder that ultimately resulted in some regrettable injury.

Since The Great Collapse of the Ninja Ladder, I had not seen much of the Rungs lately.

The invite to yesterday's dinner started with the Middle Rung. I had encouraged him to invite a friend, so before long, the Bottom Rung was also added. With only hours left before dinner, I resisted the urge to "complete the set" by trying to find the Top Rung.

And then I started the business of calculating just how many pierogis are needed to feed Two Thirds of a Ninja Ladder.

I had a lot of pierogis but the Bottom Rung is a contractor who works very hard on the job and is reputed to eat only one meal a day - a very LARGE meal. A moderate dinner portion for me (after all, I'm only five two and three quarters) would be about 10 pierogis.

For the average boy, maybe double?
And for a hungry contractor - ???

Even assuming the hungry contractor is just an average boy (which he is not):

10 (me, self-described "small person")

+ 20 (average boy)

+ 20 (average boy)

+ 20 (average boy used as proxy for contractor)

= 70.

70 pierogis sounded like a lot! My calculations reminded me of a college interview I had with a reputable consulting firm in which I carefully and painstakingly estimated that the number of AA batteries used in the US per year was roughly...

...a jillion.

(I ended up going to law school instead.)

Half an hour to dinner, it turned out the Top Rung was watching football with the Bottom and Middle Rungs, and it was as if God had spoken to assemble the entire Ninja Ladder. At that moment, the urge to complete the Set won me over, despite concerns about the pierogi population. The boys said 10-12 pierogis per person would be enough, but as a former dumpling-eating champion, I knew this would be a drastic miscalculation. I decided I would simply make LOTS OF PIEROGIS and let it be a free-for-all.

The problem with putting LOTS OF PIEROGIS in one pot to boil is that pierogis, like wet laundry in a dryer, must tumble freely.



A standard pot can handle a pierogi count in the high teens but probably no more. The pierogis also must be added carefully one by one, "swishing" each as it enters so as to not allow it to stick to the bottom of the pot. During boiling, a gentle stirring is needed to keep them in movement, or else they may find it irresistible to stick to each other. (Here I use my Magic Wand utensil, a Chinese favorite, to stir gently and also to ladle them out while draining at the same time.)

I would also advise anyone making pierogis from scratch to leave the dough thick enough to withstand the occasional jab of a cooking utensil or rough contact with a fellow pierogi. In my haste to use up as much potato filling as possible, I may have pushed the pierogi envelope a little too far at times. Unfortunately, I was seriously paying for it in pierogi shrapnel.

I had to make another pot of pierogis to replace the fallen, and then another, and perhaps another... by the end of dinner, I had stopped counting.

But to answer the question, how many pierogis does it take to feed a ninja ladder?

Roughly a jillion.

Plastic Is Not Eternal.

Even a longstanding eater like myself can make a mistake once in a while. It's embarrassing to state the obvious, but I'm going to do it anyway:

DON'T EAT FOOD THAT IS TOO OLD.

We all have our individual ideas of where we're comfortable along The Spectrum of Food Safety. Some people, like roommate, are wary of eating pizza that has been left out overnight. Others see this pizza the next morning and are overjoyed to find their absolutely favorite thing to eat waiting for them the morning after. If forced to classify myself, I probably fall into the latter category.

Mind you, I have two standards of Food Safety: one applicable to the entire world, including my dining guests (fear not eating at my table!) and another standard applicable wholly to myself. It is this second rugged standard that sometimes gets me into trouble.

Take for instance, this morning, when I spotted two sticks of string cheese in the refrigerator and thought, wouldn't these be good and healthy office snacks during those slow hours in the afternoon? I threw them into my bag, gave them a home in the office fridge, and looked forward to my emergency snack later in the day.

Minutes ago, I chewed probably 20% of one of these sticks before realizing that, well, it just didn't taste so good.

I chewed a little more, mostly absent-mindedly. And then I thought, I wonder of this thing has an expiration date on the plastic wrapper.

Indeed it did:

26AUG2006. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that I am now in the year 2007, but my cheese is from yesteryear. And apparently, plastic is not eternal.

I suppose plastic almost is eternal in the landfill but not particularly so when it comes to protecting perishable dairy products. Why my own palate, which critically dissects the unrotten food prepared by others, got so dumbfounded by this piece of old cheese, I'm not sure. Perhaps it is because the Chinese have limited experience with dairy. We drink milk, but cheese and butter, the Two Pillars of French Civilization, are largely less thoroughly explored by us.

In fact, cultural backgrounds and family traditions have much to do with Where One Lies On The Spectrum of Food Safety. People in some countries still don't have regular refrigeration and must rely on other methods to avoid Death By Rotten Food:
- storing food in naturally cool places (holes in the ground, cellars, etc.)
- procuring only the amount of food you will eat for the day (fresh veggies at the market)
- repetitive heating to kill bacteria.

If you're raised by parents subscribing to alternative food preservation methods, you're bound to be one of those who are Pushing The Envelope of Food Safety. In truth, we all make these micro-judgments on a daily basis. Do we not all recognize that unmistakeable irridescent "sheen" that develops on ham when it's starting to go? What about giving the milk carton a good sniff?

Who's above doing that?

The Sheen and the Sniff are all widely accepted methods but sometimes neither protects you from absentmindedly eating old cheese. After all, isn't cheese really just some kind of fancy mold? Some cheeses are revered for their stink!

I figure I was doomed from the get-go.

The good news is after a few absent-minded extra bites, the String Cheese of Yesteryear went straight into the trash.

(After I took a picture of it, that is.)

And sometimes the Tummy has to say it one more time, just to be safe:

REMEMBER, DON'T EAT FOOD THAT IS TOO OLD!

Edibles in the Californian Garden

Although winter has arrived in Anchorage, nobody sent the memo to southern California. The clime's good enough for outdoor grilling and trees are even bearing fruit. My parents had a sizeable persimmon crop this year, which I would be packing in my suitcase if it weren't for the TSA and the Californian fruit fly problem.

The pomegranate tree isn't doing bad this year either. My dad and I spent the morning picking those that were ready to join us inside.

'Tis the Season

On the day after Thanksgiving, what better way to bridge the gap between the holidays than with a snowflakey pumpkin cake?



Like many things, tastes best when served with whipped cream.

Calling All Bellies....

Food is good in theory but can be even better in practice. The contents of this blog are about to jump off this page and into your bellies with two classes this winter term, to take place at the Spenard Recreation Center:

THE WOOING DISH 101
They say the way to the heart is through the stomach. This class is designed for men and women alike who are a bit afraid of the kitchen but who would like to learn how to create a simple, attractive dish. Learn about basic tools, techniques, and principles to help you look good. Remember, sometimes butter makes the heart grow fonder!

$20
January 7
6:45-8:30pm

CHINESE COOKING 101
Tired of always going out? Learn to create the food of the ancient civilization that invented gunpowder! Kung Pao! One authentic Chinese dish per session. Choices include Classic Fried Rice, Fried Potstickers, Shrimp with Snow Peas, and any other dish based on class interest.

$100 for a 5-class cycle
6:30-8:00pm
every other Monday starting January 14th
(1/14, 1/28, 2/11, 2/25 and 3/10)

As these classes progress, I'll include recipes, links to other useful information like my thoughts about Life-Changing Devices, photos of what we made and ate, etc., etc., until we've got a really big Melting Pot of Food.

Bring your appetite, but remember:

Watch out for your fingers!

Pierogi Purgatory

With cold weather comes the desire to eat warm, comforting foods. This weekend, Anchorage finally got its first snowfall, and what better way to mark the occasion than by wrapping a carb around a carb! To celebrate, I selected the Eastern European answer to comfort - the pierogi.

I should note first that I had never really eaten a very good pierogi. The few pierogis that have crossed my path were sad limp things, reconstituted from grocery-brand frozen foods. The memory is vague, but the word "mushy" comes to mind.

Lacking a happy food memory, what would motivate me to make a pierogi? First, the knowledge that a friend of mine really likes pierogis, and second, curiosity over what the fuss is about.

I did some Internet searching for pierogi recipes and finally unearthed a basic, no frills recipe that looked like a reliable start.

FOR PIEROGI DOUGH:
- 2 cups flour
- 1/2 t salt
- 1 egg
- 1 T oil
- 1/2 cup hot water
- butter and onions for sauteeing
- filling of choice

The dough was simple enough to make, especially when left to the able hands of my Kitchenaid mixer, Thor. Mix dry ingredients first and then beat the egg and oil - add all at once. Finally, drizzle in the hot water. Thor did his business for 5-7 minutes, and voila! Pierogi dough, ready to rest for 30 minutes.

"Filling of choice" however was another matter. Not having much experience with pierogis, I decided to use what was described as "standard fare" - the potato and cheese filling. Suggested embellishments included bacon bits and parsley, the former I could not resist, and the latter I had in abundance as one of the last herbs saved from the summer garden.

I think the history of the potato is intertwined with the Western Hemisphere because the Chinese do not use a lot of potato. I love potatoes, but myself, do not work with them frequently. So I blithely read "five pounds of potatoes" and didn't blink once.

I should have.

"FILLING OF CHOICE"
- 5 pounds of red potatoes
- 1 large onion
- 8 oz grated cheddar cheese
- salt, pepper to taste
- suggested "enhancements": bacon bits, parsley

Five pounds of potatoes is A Whole Lot of Potatoes. It wasn't until I finished peeling them, boiling them, and mashing them that I realized I had created a Vat of Potatoes. Nothing to do but move on.

The Magic Bullet made short shrift of the bacon, turning it into bacon dust in seconds. I threw in some chives along with the parsley and admired the lovely green sprinkles. I grated some smoked cheddar and then promptly ran out, supplementing with pre-grated Costco Mexican Blend cheese. (Next time, if there is a next time, I may try an Irish cheddar.)

Mixing the conglomeration was no easy task. My frail Chinese forearms tensed against the resistance of five pounds of Western Hemisphere. As a break, I turned to rolling out the dough.

I recommend the use of a pasta machine to make nice flat even sheets that can be cut using a cookie-cutter, largely because I lack such a pasta machine. In its place, I rolled the dough out by hand with my cursed tapered European rolling pin (a purchase made in the early days when some cooking show urged this to be a good idea). The result - a slow process with some unevenness that sometimes approached the 1/8 of an inch commanded by the recipe.

I prepared the pierogis factory-style, the same method I use to mass-produce potstickers. Scooping out a little bit of filling onto each wrapper, smearing the edge of one semicircle with water, and then press. After the pierogis are sealed, I pressed the edges of one side with a fork, being too lazy to add this ornamentation onto the other side. (To be expected from someone whose family only decorated one side of the Christmas tree.)

Once sealed, boil the pierogis until they float up. Drain and allow to dry while sauteeing one minced onion in butter. Fry the pierogis in this mixture until browned and crisped to your liking. Although not told to do so by anyone, I used the More-Cheese-Can't-Hurt Principle and sprinkled some grated Mexican Blend over it all.



Pierogis can be refrigerated for a few days or frozen for a few months. One dough recipe yields roughly 40 pierogis. One "Filling of Choice" recipe yields who knows how may pierogis. I'll tell you this - it's more than 120 pierogis which is where I stopped last night at midnight using my third batch of dough.

And here is where the trickiness becomes apparent. Handmade pierogis are handmade. I started on Sunday night and after three nights of diligent pierogi-making, I am still not done. After all, I am only human - I have only have two hands, ten fingers!

And five pounds of potatoes.

And that is how I found myself in Pierogi Purgatory.

Tonight will be Pierogi Night Four. One more batch of dough is in the works and if it fails to absorb the rest of the filling, well, it will be time to get out the spoon and just do the deed myself.

After all, a tummy's got to do what a tummy's got to do.

Eleven Pounds of Honeysuckle Goodness

Eating isn't always about the act of consuming food or even the process of cooking it. Sometimes it is just about Getting The Food.

Last night was about Getting The Food. My roommate G was tasked with making The Turkey, as in The Turkey To Feed the Entire Faculty At Her Elementary School. Her librarian gave her a Fred Meyers' coupon touting a very familiar holiday promotion: Spend $100 and get a free 10-20 pound turkey!

With coupon in hand, we ran around the store buying enough of our hearts' desires to meet the $100 mark and then proceeded to the frozen turkey aisle to claim our prize. Because it is no easy task feeding a horde of under-appreciated elementary school teachers, we were, logically, looking for the biggest bird.

I ceremoniously zipped up my winter parka and announced, "I'm going in." I opened the door to the Narnia of Frozen Turkeys, determined to not return until I had found Mr. Right Bird.

Unfortunately, we kept encountering only 14-15 pound birds - large by standard measure but sure to cause a brawl between hungry teachers. And to make matters worse, a number of large frozen fellas kept rolling out of the doors as I dug through the pile.

In minutes, after I had inserted almost all of myself into the freezer section, I began to get quite cold man-handling inadequate birds. I finally spotted a large lump at the very bottom of the pile, in the way back of the freezer. Its hard-to-reach location seemed to suggest that this one might be an undiscovered gem. I pushed a few hard birds aside and finally got in far enough to reach for the tag.



19.19 lbs!

A winner! A good four pounds over his trim brothers, this bird was going home with us. Now there was the business of clearing a birthing canal for the bird. I burrowed into the precarious pyramid of poultry, shoving the giant turkey boulders to the side, and when I got a good grip on The Turkey, G did her best to yank me out.

I gave a little yelp, but The Turkey remained silent.

A sense of pride filled us as we took our free turkey to the cashier. "NINETEEN POINT NINETEEN POUNDS!" we exclaimed, hardly believing our good fortune. She was skeptical and tried to downplay our miracle.

"That's too big. You can't get a free turkey that big." Waving the coupon in the air and pointing to the "10-20 pound" provision, we proved her wrong!

We took the turkey home and put it into the refrigerator for its long thaw-out. There was a debate as to how long it would take to defrost a nineteen-pound turkey which reminded me of the last time I personally defrosted a turkey.

I was in my last year of law school at Michigan and had been gifted a turkey from a classmate going to an out-of-town Thanksgiving and who no longer needed his bird. We had a conversation about the turkey drop-off and finally decided he should bring it to class on his last day in town.

M showed up that morning with Eleven Pounds of "Honeysuckle Goodness," as the turkey's outer packaging boasted. The turkey sat through the lecture, like all of us, and was handed over at the end of class. Because I had additional classes that day, that turkey became a very well-educated Eleven Pounds of Honeysuckle Goodness. (After all, very few poultry have the opportunity to receive an education at a top ten law school.)

Legal knowledge aside, Eleven Pounds of Honeysuckle Goodness was also the very best tasting Thanksgiving turkey I have ever prepared. Perhaps it had to do with the fact he was pre-injected with broth (hence his "honeysuckle goodness") or maybe it was because we roasted him upside down, allowing the juiciness of his fatty dark meats to permeate his dry breasts. Or maybe it was because one of the cooks was a vegan. Regardless, I have been unable to recreate the recipe perfectly, so the perfect Thanksgiving turkey still remains somewhat of a Holy Grail for me.

Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey
- Make sure it has "Honeysuckle Goodness" written on the packaging.
- Defrost using one day of law school classes.
- Have a vegan rub it with butter and spices.
- Roast it upside down.

The truth is that the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey is somewhat of a Holy Grail for all Chinese people. For whatever reason, even though the Chinese are an omnivorous lot and finely gifted in the art of eating and cooking, the turkey is an ungainly, unfamiliar bird to us. I often urge friends to turn down Thanksgiving invitations if they come from a Chinese home. We do NOT understand the turkey. In case I have not made myself clear:

DO NOT GO TO A CHINESE HOME FOR THANKSGIVING.

This doesn't just stem from my personal memories of our family Thanksgiving, which admittedly are nightmarish recollections of what was a misunderstood holiday around our house. My parents always got the free grocery store bird but always went for size rather than tenderness. So I am sure we roasted our share of 19.19 pounds of bird. In an era before the flavor injector had been invented, my father would inject the turkey with soy sauce using the kind of needle he probably would have used at the hospital. My mom would inevitably start roasting at around 8pm, thus ensuring that we had to eat turkey no sooner than midnight, in our pajamas.

The bad Chinese Thanksgiving was not confined to my immediate family, however. In college, I once went to my uncle's house for the holiday and was served a half-frozen turkey loaf and giblet stuffing. The turkey loaf was horribly processed but alarmingly not fully cooked. (Nothing is scarier than raw processed turkey loaf!) The giblet stuffing caused every bite to have a rather disconcerting crunch and was included in the dinner only because "It's President Clinton's favorite stuffing," and my aunt was priming my little cousin to become President some day. On the side was a serving of lifeless canned green beans. Presidential stuffing or not, it was the worst Thanksgiving meal of my life and that includes yet another Chinese Thanksgiving where the turkey had been prepared by local Kroger grocery store and a Thanksgiving meal eaten at the Hyatt Hotel in Princeton, New Jersey.

But this year, the Nineteen Point Nineteen Pounds of Goodness in our refrigerator will not fall into Chinese hands. G will roast it for school, and I'll be going home and bracing myself for my own Thanksgiving with the Chinese.

Saying Goodbye To Summer

It's that time of year when snow is imminent and soon to cover all vestiges of our summer. Before we say our goodbyes, here's what happened in the garden this year.

FAVA BEAN CROP
This year's fava beans were made possible by a well-muscled friend who, while waiting for goods to come off the grill, took it upon himself to tear up enough sod to make a nice fava bean patch. It was planted during a game of charades and in between beers. An auspicious beginning.

The crop took off, reaching alien heights. One plant almost lost its life during a break encounter with the weedwacker, but the little nick was repaired with duct tape and the plant was almost as good as new.


Unfortunately, for all its foliage and vertical growth, this is not a high yielding crop. I think there was fertilizer in the dirt. Maybe I could have watered more. Behold the entire season's worth of fava beans:

THE LONE APPLE:



You are looking at the sole survivor of a rampage by the only gardener left in the yard at this time of the year.



Although it happens every year, for some reason I am always shocked to find my veggies sheared and my apples trees robbed of their already modest fruits. I had left this one apple, the only one of a size that could be generously called "normal," to get as fat as it could on the tree. Somehow it had fallen and escaped from moose consumption.

CARROTS
I think I planted a baby variety this year and by the end of the summer, had a nice bowl of little carrots. The flavor was good but unremarkable. It breaks my heart to thin out the carrots, and the seedlings take a significant amount of time to produce a carrot big enough to be worth picking. Next year: likely skip the carrots.

SNOW PEAS


Excellent climbers and adorned with beautiful pink and magenta flowers, these buggers, like many pea plants growing in Alaska, are prolific. They produce a pod thinner than the snap pea but are not as sweet. Next year: plant them for looks but look to snap peas for eating.

Sometimes Looks Matter

In every ambitious endeavor, in the beginning there is a vision. A vision requires faith, perseverance, and let's be honest, a bit of insanity.

September 19 is National Talk Like A Pirate Day, and the gang decided to celebrate by unilaterally transforming a birthday party scheduled for this past weekend into a pirate celebration. No pirate bash would be complete without an edible piece of pirate paraphernalia, namely a pirate cake:



And a pirate cake must be delivered by the right crew, thus accounting for the debris on my bathroom counter the next morning:
- a pair of scissors
- a roll of duct tape
- an eye patch
- an earring

Yar, here's to doing it all over again on next year's National Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Resetting the Belly

Seafood and Rice in Broth.


Sometimes all the tummy wants is something simple and familiar.

Foccacia of Today

With the Starter of Yesteryear (Dick Proenekke's historic starter), I made a sundried tomato focaccia for a friend's gallery reception. I was complimented many times on this "pizza." I corrected a few people, but by the end of the night, even I admitted the pizza was gone.

Celebrating Summer

Nothing says summer like a homemade peach pie.


And nothing tastes like summer like eating it.

The Naturalist's Meal

9:00pm. The thought of dinner occupied most of my hike in Port Alsworth. Dinner will be Lake Clark style – what did I pick today and what do I have leftover? The highlights: bolete mushrooms picked during my hike, radishes from my garden, udon noodles from Anchorage, half an onion and a tomato leftover from J. In half an hour, I am eating Lake Clark Minestrone straight out of the pot. I deem it a delicious meal but let's be honest, after that hike, I might have eaten my own hand.

Foods of Yesteryear

This is a jar of historic sourdough starter - a direct descendant of the starter that kept Dick Proenekke company for those years alone in his cabin at Twin Lakes, Alaska. Thank you to Kay and Monroe, the cabin's caretakers, for your generosity in sharing Dick's starter... and your delicious hotcakes.

About those hotcakes ... Kay mentioned they picked their first quart of blueberries today, and I sampled a few along the path, the best blueberries of this season so far. All of the talk of starter and blueberries got the Park Ranger to thinking about a feast of sourdough blueberry hotcakes he had with Kay and Monroe several years ago. Our hosts, upon revisiting this memory, quickly got up and started making “sourdoughs,” as Monroe calls them.

Monroe’s Sourdoughs:
- bowl of sourdough batter/starter
- some salt
- 1 egg
- some oil
- handpicked blueberries
- maple syrup

Monroe makes a paste of baking soda and water and adds a spoonful to a small bowl that holds enough batter for two hotcakes. He says if he added the baking soda all at once, the last cakes wouldn’t have any rise left in them.

In Lieu of Oven

During a hike through Port Alsworth, the Historian, who describes himself as "on exile from Maine," gave me his recipe for baked beans.

The Historian's Boston Baked Beans:
- 1 ceramic bean pot
- 1 bag of beans from Maine (red or pinto will also do)
- dried ginger
- dried mustard
- molasses
- 1 onion
- Canadian bacon

Soak beans overnight. Boil in soaking water. Take spoonful of beans, blow on them, and if peels move, take off heat. Drain liquid. Put whole onion at bottom of pot. Mix other ingredients into paste. Add paste to beans, add water. Bake for 12 hours at 350F.

After trying to keep up with him during the brisk hike, I was too tired to turn on any heat-producing device to make dinner, but of course, I still wanted dessert. I solved the problem with a helping of Lake Clark Lazy Man Bread Pudding:

- Sauté chopped white peaches in a pat of butter.
- Add half can of mango juice to thicken into syrup.
- Add chopped bread and vanilla yogurt.
- Dust with cinnamon.

Do Not Eat This Sh*t Under Any Circumstances

When flying to Lake Clark, you are told to pack whatever food you intend to eat. However, since I was going to be in Lake Clark National Park for less than two weeks, I did not think to pack ingredients for pancakes. My friend J had a bag of amaranth flour that had a pancake recipe on the back, but we were missing several ingredients. I made an executive decision that anything missing that had a granular texture would be substituted with multipurpose flour, which J had in his tent cabin. Since we did not have maple syrup, I added a few tablespoons from one of my instant maple-flavored cream-of-wheat packets into the dry ingredients, then chopped up a white peach I had brought from Anchorage, sautéed the fruit in a precious pat of butter, and dumped half a can of mango juice to reduce into a syrup (having not brought sugar). What resulted was a satisfying stack of Lake Clark pancakes.

As I was making this breakfast, it occurred to me how scarcity deeply affects the value of things in our lives. In Anchorage, I frequently buy eggs eighteen at a time at Costco for a couple of dollars, and I think nothing of them. But for my short stay at Lake Clark, I brought only a precious three eggs. J gave me two more, but after today’s breakfast, I am down to only two. These last two eggs will likely be The Most Important Eggs of My Life. Not having what I needed to make pancakes also forced me to be a little bit resourceful. At home, I would have absentmindedly reached for the good Vermont maple syrup I keep on hand and hence would have never wandered into the white peach mango fruit chutney we ultimately had for breakfast.

Scarcity gives every resource here a multifaceted life. Everything used here has to be burned or taken back to a landfill in Anchorage. Everything eaten here has to be hunted, grown locally, or more likely (because the soil is so poor), flown in from Anchorage. In my few days living out of small boxes of food, it has become clear that waste is a luxury and curse of big city life. Port Alsworth, on the other hand, is a place built and constantly fixed with broken parts – odds and ends given second, third lives through the efforts of hardworking people. In this sense, I understand Port Alsworth.

It has also become apparent to me that the people of Port Alsworth have come here to be left alone. While everyone is very friendly and is genuinely happy to see you trudging up the path, there are few invitations into someone’s home or plans to get together. Despite this strange strain of indifference, I feel an overwhelming desire to feed this entire community, to say something in food to replace the silence of words.

J and I ended the day with yet another resourceful dinner in the form of old MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) found stored somewhere in a shop cabinet. As part of reorganizing the shop from floor to ceiling, the MREs had been alphabetized and placed next to the microwave for anyone to eat. J and I had sampled the Fudge Brownie and Pound Cake as fuel while bottling homebrew. I recommend both highly. J is of the opinion that the Pound Cake may be the best MRE ever. For our dinner snack tonight, however, he wanted to try something different. We had Cheese and Crackers, but I didn't have much appetite for dry stale crackers and cheese out of a plastic bag. The really scary MRE we sampled, however, was Omelet With Ham. It should have been more properly labeled as "DO NOT EAT THIS SH__ UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES." The Omelet With Ham tasted something like soggy cardboard. I've never eaten soggy cardboard before, but I think the taste is unmistakable. While I took no more than my initial bite, J polished it off. Boys are funny that way.

"Making of the Sausages"

After dinner, J and I embarked in yet another series of common activities in Port Alsworth, AK: preparing salmon for canning and transformation into jerky. The Park Services historian had agreed to lend us his heavy duty pressure cooker for canning, and we got tips and equipment for the jerky from the maintenance and safety officer. J and I spent much of the evening washing fish, cutting fish, stuffing fish, grinding fish, mixing fish.

I have to admit, however, his stash of sockeye reds was truly amazing. J had frozen much of it in solid ice, having run out of vacuum bags, and the soft bright red salmon flesh seemed to be as beautiful as it must have been on the very first day.


To make salmon jerky, you must remove the skin from the filets, thoroughly debone the fish with needlenose pliers, and put it through a grinder. For grinding, we borrowed an old-time contraption stored in an original box happily labeled "Making of the sausages" in four different languages.

At the end of our rainbow, we had a beautiful pot of ground up salmon. Patting the salmon jello was a strangely satisfying thing to do, but our work was not done. After adding jerky seasoning, the mass has to marinate overnight before being stuffed into a tube that looks like a caulk gun and then piped out onto a grate for drying in the oven. Luckily those steps will be saved for tomorrow because I am pooped out.

Goodies in Talkeetna, AK

Unlike Anchorage, Talkeetna offers a very decent breakfast at The Roadhouse, which also boasts affordable modest rooms in addition to solid baked goods. For breakfast, I gobbled up some very satisfying biscuits and gravy in addition to the day's special, banana pecan sourdough pancakes. Unless you're a burly lumberjack, however (and often I think I eat like one), order the half-plate.

Breakfast also comes with fresh juice and coffee included! You've got a love a policy like that.

Fatty Things Frying In Their Own Fat

With a flash in the pan ... and little bits of bratwurst frying in their own grease, my brief bout of vegetarianism comes to an end during a camping trip in Denali National Park.

It is only fitting that the Meat of My People (aka any form of pork) would be the thing to bring me back into the fold. Thank you, Pork.

A Stroll Through Europe

Greece: Summertime in Anchorage has made a real appearance in the last two days with temperatures above 70 degrees (positively scorching by local standards). Last night, we had a desire to dine with Summer, but I wanted to avoid turning on the stove.

The solution: a fresh pasta salad with Greek elements: tomatoes, herbs, roasted red bell peppers, cucumbers, red onion, feta and halloumi, lemon juice, olive oil, salt/pepper, and of course, kalamata olives. The kalamata olive turned out to be the necessary accent to each bite and hence, midway through the meal, I decided to add them chopped rather than whole. The result: a summery shower of fresh tastes and flavors.


France: Today's experiment was a Marjolaine, a birthday request from a lover of hazelnuts and described by my cookbook as a "French pastry shop favorite." The Marjolaine is a torte, meaning mostly made of ground nuts (in this case, hazelnuts) folded into egg whites. I think only the French would pick nuts, pulverize them, take the white of the egg, whip it up, fold the everything together, and sell it at a pastry shop.

Although the Marjolaine was well-received, an afternoon of dealing with meringues, buttercream, and ganaches has led me to believe that the point of going to France is to indulge yourself with pastries you cannot make. Why mess with the Order of the Universe? If God intended me to make French pastries, he would have made me very French and very thin. He did neither.

But it is true that I've always had a personal weakness for French pastries. My most recurring "nightmare" is one in which I come upon a buffet of delicate, exquisite French pastries, but there is never enough time to eat them all. This dream dates back to my childhood. As a little girl, I was rather fond of the Napoleon and frankly knew of the pastry before of I knew the dictator.

I suppose it is this recurring dream that initially drove me to become a baker (that and a gift of baking pans for my sixteenth birthday, courtesy of my mom and a major clearance at J.C. Penney). I wanted to achieve in my real life what I could not have in my dream life - lovely French pastries at the tip of my fingers.

Over the years, however, the only permanent part of my repertoire that is solidly in the French pastry category is the pate a choux, or as we Americans know it, the lovely cream puff. I like this pastry because for all of its delicateness and deliciousness, it is actually very straightforward and simple - the essence of a fine dessert.

In contrast, following the multi-step process of making a Marjolaine made it a little hard to fully appreciate the resulting torte. Sometimes too much knowledge of the background context can muddy the experience of the Exact Moment. In this sense, the guests get the best seat in the house - they sample a thin sliver of cake without closely experiencing the disaster of the kitchen or knowing intimately the calorie count that comes with French proportions of heavy cream and butter. In the end, the Marjolaine is the kind of cake where for the baker, the experience is perhaps the process, not consuming the final dessert.

Still, it was lovely to pretend to be French, even if just for a moment in the afternoon.