A couple of weeks ago, I paid $133 to keep me in produce until Thanksgiving. A coworker helps out at a farm that has a CSA, and they were doing a middle-of-season share push. I am all about supporting CSAs, but as I am often cooking only for myself, my produce bin can easily be [...]
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I’m pretty ace at saving recipes. Letting them sit in my mind long enough to want to recall them when it’s time to consider dinner, however, not so much. I subscribe to CHOW’s daily recipe and Splendid Table’s Weeknight Kitchen, and both provide extra tastiness to my morning e-mail check. 9 out of 10 get [...]
You don’t need a recipe for this, right? I didn’t think so. Filed under: Uncategorized
So let’s talk about the things I don’t like. Celery. Boletus mushrooms. Blue cheese. (Majorly.) Truffles. Hard boiled eggs. (See previous post.) Radishes. The thing is, though, you can make me eat all of these things if you use them properly. (Not the blue cheese, though. Never, ever the blue cheese.) The right amount of [...]
I am weird about eggs. I like custard, I like cake, I like clafoutis. But serve me toad-in-the-hole, sunny-side-up, even hard-boiled, and I can’t bring myself to swallow. I allow no runniness in my eggs. Give me migas, oh lord yes. Give me delicately scrambled sunshine, I gag. I will scramble an egg for myself, [...]
As we approach the Ides of March, I can finally look out the window to the skies that are still (still?) gray and say to myself, “Ah! February is over.” This means that winter is shedding, and that my brain is waking up a little bit. This February I spent a great deal of time [...]
I forget sometimes that my spice cabinet is awesome. I mean, I know that I’ve got everything I need, and that’s great, but a friend will be over for dinner and I’ll open it up to grab some fennel seed and if my dinner guest is a foodie, I’ll hear a little gasp coming from [...]
Every now and then, usually a couple of hours before dinnertime, my chat program will ding with a message from a friend. “I have cauliflower, tomatoes, and three dried figs. What should I cook?” I enjoy these challenges. It’s not dissimilar to my job, where I find ways to use up 10 extra pounds of [...]
Peter and I ambled through the travel section at Powell’s. “Where would you like to visit next?” he asked. This is a small-talk question. Same as “What kind of food do you like to cook?” or “Do you enjoy your job?” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with these questions. They can lead to perfunctory answers [...]
I don’t do well with winter. Short, gray days are the norm in this rainy northern climate, and my good humor is squashed into small confines of available sunlight until the green begins to return in the spring. I get angsty. Real angsty. I try not to annoy my loved ones with it, but inside [...]
It’s pretty hard for me to stay put sometimes. I’m in Portland on a mission, to not go anywhere for three years. This has proven a mostly easy place to do that: good house, good friends, good city. I’m two years in to my three-year commitment and I have no plans to go anywhere else [...]
This entry is for Emily, who made this soup with me way back in March. I have been promising her for a year that I would (a) make this soup and (b) write a blog post about it. When she … Continue reading →
I can be a little coarse sometimes. I think there’s a difference between being nice and being kind, and often those two things work together perfectly, but I can stumble into the latter while forgetting the formalities of the former. … Continue reading →
I have always had a nice stash of cookbooks, but lately, as they begin to spill off the shelves and all over the house, I’m beginning to admit to myself that I’ve passed the level of blithe enjoyment and moved … Continue reading →
This year I discovered yard sales. I grew up in the country, where we don’t really have yard sales. We have big rummage sales run by little old fundamentalist ladies wearing seasonally decorated sweatshirts, who put up signs like this: … Continue reading →
I have selective hearing when it comes to family history. On one level I recognize that there are books’ worth of stories about the people that came before me whose lives intersected and spread, wandering through countries and continents, cities … Continue reading →
My pantry exploded a few weeks ago. I went on an unnecessary but fascinating grocery shopping trip, and as I was unloading my treasures, I put a bottle of juice on the shelf, thinking, “Wow, this shelf has held up … Continue reading →
Forgive the hyperbole, but this really is the easiest thing ever. Grate or julienne a few radishes. Mix it in butter. Good butter. Sea salt, black pepper. Now, go back outside. It just got warm. Filed under: Uncategorized
I am not a great cook.
I’m usually a good cook. Some days I’m a very good cook. When I have the occasion to put cinnamon and garlic in the same pan, I’m a damn fine cook. But there are no culinary revolutions being staged in my kitchen. I spend my days [...]
You can tell a foodie by how she packs for an extended trip abroad. When I moved to Bulgaria, I brought black beans and quinoa, and I left a list of foods that my friends and family should feel free to send any time they had an urge to put a care package together. [...]
Usually, I am responsible about not overscheduling myself. I know that I need plenty of time each week to do Nothing in Particular, by myself, on my own time. These past few weeks, though, have been full of activity, and while I love, absolutely love, spending time with so many friends, I’m near [...]
I was back east last week. (“Back east”, to people on the left coast, means anything past the Rockies.) It was the longest time I’ve been out of Portland since I moved here, a year and a half ago. I went to visit the old homestead, in Asheville NC, and to remind [...]
Every few days since I wrote the last entry, I would say to myself, “I really should update the blog.” I’ve been cooking, and taking pictures, but when it comes to writing things down, I’ve just gotten lazy. Let’s blame it on… shorter days, less sunlight, hibernation-with-book tendencies, busyness at work, misaligned planets, [...]
All summer long, I’ve been thinking of ice cream. And sherbet, and sorbet. And all the wonderful things I could do if only I were to drop fifty bucks on a kitchen appliance instead of on a fancy dinner. (It’s really hard for me to not spend money on a fancy dinner, [...]
My house runneth over with produce. This seems to be a not-uncommon problem for foodies in Portland in the summer – a combination of farmers’ markets within walking distance and more CSAs than we can shake a stick at means that our fridges and fruit baskets are positively stuffed. Does this stop me [...]
My father does not like strawberries or Japanese food, both for the same reason – his eyes are excited but then his tongue is disappointed. He likes strawberry jam and he likes tempura, sweet and rich and salty enough for his hearty palate.
His love, too, of wild strawberries made me wonder if he just [...]
I know of at least five friends from college who have ended up in Portland. One of them grew up here and found her way back home, but the rest of us have come out one by one, for jobs or family or simply a good soft place to land. I often think [...]
We displaced Southerners are picky when it comes to restaurants claiming to serve down home food. We have grown to expect tasteless grits, chewy biscuits, and unsweetened iced tea when we leave the red clay states, and we groan at the very mention of “nouvelle Southern” in association with a dining establishment. I [...]
Shortbread, short entry.
This is an infinitely adaptable basic recipe: one part sugar, two parts butter, three parts flour (by weight). Because it’s so simple, you should bring out the good butter for this. Or the good… coconut oil?
Coconut Lime Shortbread
makes about 20 cookies
2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (one stick) [...]
I have an announcement. Are you sitting down?
The sun has been shining in Portland for 10 straight days.
It’s been amazing.
I was lolling on the grass one sunny day in college, Back East, and my friend Natalie, who grew up here in Portland, turned to me and said, “I’m from Oregon. We don’t really [...]
It’s 7:00 on a Saturday evening. I had plans – I was going to go contra dancing, twirling and stomping and grinning for three hours. But they have been thwarted by sunshine.
I was worried that this would happen when I decided that I would spend the afternoon lazing about on a grassy knoll. [...]
I have decided that in order to appreciate spring, you’ve got to live someplace with a real winter. I remember reading food magazines in Marches and Aprils years ago and wondering if the only vegetarian recipes they’d ever offer in springtime would be baby vegetable sautés. Tiny carrots, radishes, new potatoes – get [...]
I’m so glad my friend Zeke has started taking French lessons on the weekends, because the language school is a few blocks from my house, and it gives him an excuse to come over on Saturday mornings. Zeke is wonderful at encouraging me to dig in the back of my pantry for the right [...]
I left the country for the first time when I was 16, on a three-week school trip to Paris. I haven’t much looked back. Five continents visited, three foreign countries lived in, four languages studied, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll never feel well-rounded or satisfactorily traveled.
The more I cook, the more [...]
I travel light.
After doing the requisite college European backpacking trip with a giant black pack that necessitated very few stops for laundry but a grumble every time I tried to lift it, I came home and stuffed the cumbersome luggage into the bowels of my parents’ basement, never to be seen again. [...]
What do you do when skies are gray and the days aren’t yet long enough?
You open the freezer to find the sour cherries you picked and put away last summer! And then you make a cake.
I made this last February, when a bunch of other volunteers crammed into my little apartment for a weekend [...]
I grew up in a wonderful progressive community in southern Appalachia, where vegetarianism was never a confusing concept. I don’t remember ever learning about tofu - it was something people ate, and the bean curd patty was never a revelation for me. Any sense of “you mean you don’t eat meat/dairy/wheat/Doritos - what [...]
When I first started cooking with any intention, I wasted a tremendous amount of money. One day, years ago, I was home from college for the summer and a few friends came to visit for the weekend, and we decided to make a curry for dinner. The recipe we picked was, of course, [...]
When I arrived here in Portland at the end of the summer, the long-time transplants warned me about winter. Not so much the weather, but the reaction to it.
“This city shuts down under an inch of snow,” warned native midwesterners, suppressing groans.
I understood - both the fact of the matter, and the annoyance with it. [...]
This weekend, my goals have been:
1. Above all, do as little as possible.
2. Spend many happy minutes looking at Mt St Helens and Mt Adams from my window, as it’s often too cloudy to see them.
3. Listen to NPR in live form, not podcast.
4. Make the rutabaga bisque whose recipe has been sitting in my [...]
A few months ago, I mentioned my love for Crescent Dragonwagon, a self-professed “closet vegetarian” for years who finally outed herself in her wonderful cookbooks. She’s done a lot to influence the way I think about food, and has much to do with my refusal to see vegetarianism as a limitation.
So imagine my surprise when [...]
Today is a monumental day in the Lauren Mitchell History of October: it’s the second day in a row that I have off from work. My days have been going thus: wake up. Go to work. Come home. Don’t go out for fear that I’ll get back too late to get enough sleep. Shower. Sleep. [...]
I’m writing up a post on sweet potato-corn chowder, but I couldn’t let this sandwich go unheralded. So here’s a short intermission: If I ate this every day until I died, I’d be happy. Red or white onions are fine. I used a toasted English muffin, but I’ve yet to put this on any kind [...]
One of the first Bulgarian language sessions we ever had was on food. We learned how to say, “I like honey” and “I don’t like honey.” We learned the words for butter (краве масло), milk (прясно мляко), tomatoes (домати), apples (ябълки). Before long, we were reading menus with aplomb and bumbling through restaurant orders like [...]
Well, it’s been quite a rowdy couple of weeks! For some reason, I didn’t expect to be that stressed out during the week that I both started a new career and moved into my apartment in a new town. Total blood pressure rocket! Who knew?
So I cook now for a living. I’m definitely at the [...]
There’s a scene in Kissing Jessica Stein when the two main characters are discussing the phenomenon known as Sexy Ugly. Famous men falling into this category include: Mick Jagger, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, and Alan Rickman. (I’m adding Alton Brown to the list as well.) Upon doing some more research into this descriptor, I [...]
Hello dear Parsnippians! I bet you thought I disappeared, didn’t you? Ha! Fooled you. I am indeed still up and at ‘em - only now I’m in Portland, OR. Not Bulgaria, not Asheville, not in the stressville that was my life the week before I hauled it cross country to land in this strange utopia. [...]
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