Terrorist Fries and Caprese

Tonight, fried potatoes and caprese for everyone! I know, you're thinking what is she feeding her poor family? Has she gone vegetarian and taken them down with her? Dear Husband is as suspicious as you are, and even more suspicious of my excuse of forgetting to buy meat today, but the caprese won him over. (Secretly, though, I have been leaning in the meatless direction. It's so healthy, and good for your heart, and I get tired of meat every day. I don't need to worry about what the DH thinks, he never reads my blog, thank God.) It's a hit all around, so colorful and so Italian! Little freddie hates tomatoes, but after I forced him to eat one bite of caprese--a slice of tomato, a slice of mozzarella, and a basil leaf or two--he couldn't stop eating it. I had to slice up some more tomatoes and pick more basil from our little garden to make us more!

look at that delectable little tidbit,
like a tiny Italian flag

The tomatoes I planted back in early July have finally been putting on fruit and ripening beautifully. Nobody believed me that they'd grow because I'm a black thumb, but I like to think it's getting a bit grey, maybe. Here they are, deep red, sweet, and with that wonderful tomato smell.

DH calls the potatoes I make "terrorist fries." That's not an insult. He loves them, but from day one has called them that. To be honest I've forgotten why. Oh yes, the first time I made them it was during the Bush years, and there was all this anti-French sentiment floating around, which he had to mock by calling them Terrorist instead.

~

Well, as fun as that was, I can't really see the point in making fun of Mormon mothers who blog about cooking for their families. Really it would be much more fun to read them yourself. I cannot possibly match the genius of: "My hubby and I have a new house rule for guarding our waistlines. If you MUST have it, you must MAKE it from scratch!"

And the end, about my imaginary husband's political commentary (actually my brother's), just sounds like me anyway.

There is a problem with fall: that it is fall. I don't really need to spell it out for you, but I will. Summer is ending. The light is lower. It's getting colder. The porch is already getting covered in dead leaves. I've apparently given up trying to write semicoherent posts.

Anyway, I'm surprised that I haven't posted something about "terrorist fries" here before. Maybe it was because I didn't want to share the silly name. Really I'm not sure what else to call them. Chips? What does one call thick-sliced potatoes roasted with lots of olive oil. They taste more or less like french fries, but round, and with a somewhat different texture (in part because the potatoes are never Russet, the variety used for french fries). Like french fries or chips they're good with barbecue sauce, or salt and malt vinegar, or this time I used balsamic because I didn't have any malt vinegar.

There are a limited number of foods I make when I don't really know what to make, and these are one of them. When I need something starchy to go along with odds and ends from the fridge, I often make these. Somehow, throwing them in the oven set to 450 F seems easier than, say, putting on a pot of rice. Their delicacy lies in how thickly they are sliced (about 1cm), which somehow seems less daunting than the subtleties of timing and proportions of water to rice. Sure, I could overbake the potatoes, too, but as long as I check them every couple of minutes, they're very easy to visually assess. When they are browned to your liking, they are done.

They are my brother's creation, although I suppose I increased the oven temperature, at first more out of haste than to create the desired consistency. I don't remember exactly how they came about, but I believe it was when we were having a LAN party. If you know what that is, then I need not say any more, and if you don't, you need not know any more. We were making baked beans and tangelo meringue pie, and, well, maybe we wanted something to go with the baked beans. Maybe we had no potato chips, and one of us suggested (it seems like this would be me) that we make potato chips. I think that was it. I remember us saying to each other that they weren't quite potato chips (they weren't crispy all the way through), they were still really good. Good enough to have stuck, apparently.

Gluten-Free Baking Part II: Bob's Red Mill Shortbread Cookies and Chocolate Chip Cookies

I suppose I should have photographed the whole process, showing you everything, plenty for your tactile imagination to chew on. But this isn't The Pioneer Woman Cooks! or some other shiny cooking blog. All I have are photos of the baked cookies themselves, which don't much illustrate the difficulty of making them. You can see the paraplegic cat, and a few other limbs broken off. This could've happened at one of a few points: transferring the cut dough shapes from the counter to the baking sheet, transferring the baked cookies off of the baking sheet, and simply handling the cookies to eat them. The package told us, like the chocolate chip cookie mix of the same brand, that the dough would seem dry, and that we needed to squish it together with our hands, and to roll it out between parchment paper and plastic wrap to 1/4 inch. How exactly did we do this without the dough crumbling to pieces? With difficulty. The package suggests using a cookie cutter. It does not suggest the acrobatics involved in getting the cut dough to the baking sheet. We carefully removed the layer around the shapes, trying not to break the shapes themselves, and used a spatula--quickly, quickly--to lift them in one piece (or, if the maneuver isn't executed perfectly, several). Irregular shapes with lots of limbs sticking off didn't fare well. The pumpkins were okay, being essentially a circle with a tiny bit sticking off (the stem).

I've never made shortbread cookies, regular or no, but what was the structural integrity these cookies were lacking? Gluten. I imagine regular (dare I call them that?) shortbread dough would stay together easily enough that it could handled with less care than nitroglycerin, and that the baked cookies would not be so delicate that they faint when they see a mouse. (Of course, when I saw a mouse in my kitchen at night I might've hit my head I jumped so violently.)

I complain, but the shortbread cookies were good, if messy, to eat. How can you go wrong with something that's mostly butter? The texture was a little grainy, becoming not quite the fine paste in the mouth that I'm used to from regular shortbread, but rich and a little sweet, as they should be. A nice tea biscuit.

Apparently, all legumes taste similar. Bob's Red Mill is partial to garbanzo bean flour in gluten-free baking mixes. Their chocolate chip cookie mix is mostly comprised of it, at which our noses twitched in mild disgust. Garbanzo beans and chocolate chips? Ew. Why not, say, oats? (The funny thing about gluten-free baking mixes is that each has a completely different approach to achieving the texture and flavor desired. Some are mostly rice, some oat, some garbanzo, some teff. Usually the actual ingredients are downplayed; the end result is everything. Which is odd these days, when every "organic" or "natural" product is busy bandying its ("simple," "pure") ingredients.) We didn't trust it, but we did already open the package, so what the hell. The cookies turned out beautifully, melting into the pan in folds of buttery chewiness (sorry, no photos). The flavor was unexpected, but not at all unpleasant. I devoured five in one sitting. I gave two to my brother, who when I asked him what kind he thought they were said "they're peanut-butter chocolate chip, right?"

Gluten-Free Baking Part I: Simulation

I found myself making a strange conversational comment about gluten-free baking today: "Here," I said, "it's more of an experiment, whereas there it can be traditional." The over-there in question was Japan, because the owner of the recently opened Ichigo Cake, who is one of those male Niponophiles who is married to a Japanese woman, mentioned a type of rice-based chiffon cake made in Japan. There is a kind of hysterical traditionalism that the idea of gluten-free baking excdites in me at times. It's not just traditionalism, but a metaphysics of substance: No, I think, how is it bread if it isn't made from wheat?! The whole idea of gluten-free baking is heretical and challenging to this mindset. One tries to make something without the ingredients that have traditionally defined it. There is also the kind of gluten-free baking that adapts to the different qualities of other grain flours, making something entirely new and owning rather than trying to hide its uniqueness. But most gluten-free baking reaches toward realness: seeming indistinguishable from the gluten-based baked-good that it simulates.

It is because of how it resembles transexual politics that my knee-jerk reaction of "it's not real" seems so backwards. But there is of course a more visceral reason to defend gluten-free baking: for some, gluten really is poison. For my brother it's an allergen, something which makes him mucousy and plugged-up like he has a cold; it causes my girlfriend's immune system to go haywire, damaging her digestive system in its violent wake. (This is my dramatised picture of Celiac.) There are also, I hear, those who vow to go off wheat or gluten for health reasons, even though they have felt no ill effects. I find these people hard to disginguish from those who quaff wheat grass at juice bars. Children have the best neologisms: healthoholics.

When I said "experiment," i was thinking of a gluten-free bakery that's starting uncertainly in Phoenix (about five miles away), Gia's. The small, slapped-together storefront feels harried as you walk in. There isn't an employee at the counter, but a man with a walkie-talkie who I have a feeling is either related to or married to the baker. He communicates with the bakery itself across the parking lot, radioing that we're out of this or that, are you making more? This leads me to think that they have so little startup capital that they must reduce their risk by making tiny, on-demand batches and/or they just don't have the oven space to make enough at once to meet demand. Just opened a month ago, they're stilll figuring out how much of what customers will buy, and moreover are still probably gaining customers as the word of their existence spreads around those that want gluten-free. For the time being they'll just use what they've got. The cash register is a laptop hooked up to a receipt printer. The occasional cashier will come away from the bakery into the shop only when customers are afoot.

But as well as a business experiment, it's an experiment in baking. They're perfecting their recipes, looking for the right combination of flours and for the kinds of pastries people like. I am told the lemon bars are a hit. Personally I fell for the succulant carrot cake, which I didn't even realize was gluten-free until I felt the texture of rice flour in my second bite. My father had brought some home from the Talent Art Show (this is not some horrible exercise in naming--Talent is a town a few miles north of Ashland) where they were selling cupcakes as teasers for their bakery that was yet to open. There was chocolate and carrot cake. At least one of you is laughing at me, but I'm telling you, the carrot cake was far more tempting. At the time I didn't know its lusciousness (alas, there are only so many adjectives one can use to describe cake) was gluten-free; it was just some delicious cupcake from wherever. This, I suppose, is the simulationist gluten-free baker's dream. Gia's is exactly that. A recent Mail Tribune article says that "Jan Thorsell wants fellow sufferers of celiac disease to feel 'normal' when they walk into her new bakery." The normal customers also get to feel normal cake on their tongues.

Next, in Part II: a recent joint foray into gluten-free baking: chocolate-chip cookies and shortbread cookies.

Pizza

My father has decided that "they" call me "Isaac 'Pizza' Skibinski." Not without reason. I've made pizza three times in the past week.

In the summer I always seem to be drawn to making pizza, despite the fact that turning on the oven when it's ninety degrees outside seems absurd (or, alright, just environmentally insensitive). When it's not delivered to your door as the quintessential late-night food, baked (or rather fried) in "deep dish" swimming with grease, two-inches thick and covered in various kinds of meat, I think of pizza as a summer food. In part this is because I grow basil in the summer (for some reason I've never been one of those enterprising people who grows it in a little windowsill pot when it's too cold for it to survive outside). What is pizza without fresh basil? (Yes, I know, I'm stuck on this.) It's also simply because my image of pizza is a summery image: thin, brightly colored, light(ish), bathed in sunlight.

In other words, my love of fresh pizza is slightly sneaky nostalgia for Italy. Even though what I make bears little resemblance to the thin snack I devoured there, it is that which I long for by making these things, I admit. I know it's not cool any more to think of Europe as the gastronomical promised land (unless you're Elizabeth Gilbert), as it was in the 30s and 40s when M.F.K. Fisher was visiting and dreaming of France. Nor is it 1961. Nor am I Julia Child. But let's be honest: I have silly idyllic daydreams of European food. There is nourishment and there is nourishment. I create this delusion that I'm creating Europeanness for myself more via the combining of Mediterranean ingredients than any meticulous attention to technique or finished product. As long as it has the right stuff--tomato sauce, mozzarella, fresh basil, maybe olives--and sort of looks like I imagine it should, I am content.

Generally I put these ingredients atop thin slices of good bread (in Ashland that's hearty, sour New Sammy's Cowboy Bread or La Baguette's French Sourdough, which is so fluffy that it becomes rock-hard stale in two days), and throw it in a hot oven for fifteen or twenty minutes. Recently I've discovered that the Ashland Food Co-op makes pizza dough and sells it in plastic bags. I've been looking for exactly that ever since I left Bar Harbor, where the local bakery sold bags of the stuff as well as the supermarket, but only recently did I actually find it here (because god forbid I, you know, ask). If I were one of the bazillion mothers who blog about what they feed their families, I would say that I have found a relatively quick and easy way to make pizza "from scratch," and wink as if I'm passing on some scandalous corner-cutting secret.

I wish I could say that their fresh dough is immeasurably better than bread. While the flat bread that comes out of the oven is fresh, its texture is tame and crispy like a cracker, where the bread slices are chewy and crunchy. This could be because I haven't kneaded the dough; it hasn't been stretched into the pizzeria crust I'm wishing for. But it's hard enough squishing the dough into the right shape without kneading it at all. Should I be kneading it and tossing it? Is that the only way to get it to not bounce eagerly back into itself?

I think, however, there is a certain romance in my lazy pizza-crust-making process. I plop the blob of dough into the glass roasting pan (we lack a cookie sheet or anything else more appropriate at home), which has a little olive oil on it. I dust the top with some white flour to keep it from sticking to my hands, and mash it down with fingers and fists. Once it's relatively flat, I begin stretching instead of squishing, until it roughly fills the whole pan. When the oven reaches 475 degrees, I lather and arrange all the ingredients on top of the dough, and bake it.

Banana Bread: A Recipe in Photos

Over-baked Lemon Cake

Sometimes when things go awry they go right. There was very little that went the way I intended baking this lemon cake. Wanting to make the two-layer yellow cake from the Tick Tock box, MinCat’s recipe for lemon cake with lemon glaze looked delicious and like it could become what I wanted. Rather than using a bunt pan, I would divide the batter into two circular cake pans and use the glaze both over the top and between the two layers. It would look like the tiny picture. I do not have even have one circular cake pan. But no matter. Excited about my plan, I bought four lemons. They sat on the counter for almost a week, and my brother informed me that one of them was molding. The mold transformed the urgency of making cake from always present every morning but always put off, to this must happen today. It was only at this point that I actually read the recipe, and discovered that it called for yogurt, which I did not have. I didn’t care, I just wanted to make cake, to use the damned lemons, and to get material for this post. The layering would still happen somehow. I would bake a 9x13 cake, cut it in half, layer the halves on top of each other. I just had to make the batter. Recently I have noticed that I am almost incapable of actually reading a recipe. This time my skimming reduced making the cake batter to: sift the dry ingredients, mix together the wet ingredients (including sugar), and then mix the dry with the wet. I missed the fact that the lemon juice was not one of the wet ingredients, but a part of a syrup that is poured over the cake when it’s just out of the oven, and the rest goes into the glaze. While it was baking I toyed with making the syrup anyway for an ultra-lemony cake. I still had two more lemons, only one of which I needed for the glaze. But the syrup and and the glaze both got tossed out as ideas after I forgot about the cake and left it in the oven for at least twenty more minutes than I meant to. The edges came out a bit burnt. I rationalized that I didn’t want to waste glazes and syrups on such a bungled cake, but I think I was just already so half-assed about making this cake that this one thing gone slightly wrong gave me an excuse to give up on the endeavor entirely. But the thing is, this slightly over-baked lemon cake is good. Unadorned, unpretentious, and refreshingly but not overpoweringly lemony, it goes very well with tea. I’ll try the layer cake when I have the proper pans and all the ingredients.

1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup water
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
zest and juice from 2 lemons
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Whisk the water, sugar, eggs, zest, juice, vanilla, and oil until well combined. Whisk dry into wet mixture. When combined, bake for roughly 50 minutes, or until fork comes out clean from the center.

Caramelized Onion Tart

3 large onions

3 tablespoons olive oil

pinch of salt

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon tamari

2 tablespoons water

1 unbaked tart shell

Slice onions radially into slices roughly 1/2 inch wide at their widest point. In a large saucepan on medium-high heat, fry onions with olive oil, brown sugar, salt, and black pepper. Mix to coat onions with oil. Stir and scrape pan every few minutes, allowing the onions to brown between stirring. After roughly ten minutes reduce heat to medium. After roughly another twenty minutes reduce heat to medium-low. It's not important to be exact about these timings; the important thing is to have the heat at such a point that it deeply browns but does not quite blacken the onions. As the onions brown and reduce, they burn more easily. When they're mostly dark brown, add lemon juice, tamari, and water, and scrape pan thoroughly with spatula to deglaze. Remove from heat. Spread caramelized onions evenly in tart shell. Bake at 400 F for ~30min.

Caramelized Onion, Olive, and Mozzarella Tart

This tart went from whatever to tantalizing to whatever. I wanted to make it because I wanted to write a blog post about it. But I soon became interested in the process of making it although I was not particularly looking forward to the result. Chopping and cooking the onions helped me think; the world became spacious with the sound of frying onions. But I was not salivating yet. That happened when I put the assembled tart in the oven. I wanted to eat it. I rejoiced: this was an achievement. Was it as good as I anticipated? No, not really. Too much of too thick of a still somewhat doughy crust. The whole thing was just ridiculously heavy, and I thought the cheese actually detracted from the caramelized onions. And I’m not sure the olives were necessary. If I made this again I would use four onions instead of two for the same size tart, I would not use whole wheat pastry flour in the crust (I ran out of all-purpose flour), and I would not add olives or mozzarella. And wine might be a nice addition. Or something else a little fruity. Maybe tomatoes, or even apples.

In the morning the cheese has hardened into a tough, dry scab. This tart has a very short shelf life; it lasts from the time it begins baking until it’s tasted. But I nibble on the caramelized onions, which never needed to be packaged and garnished at all.