a spring tonic

I got some nice rhubarb at the farmers' market on Sunday and used some of it to make this juice. It has a really nice, revivifying tang. You can see from the above photo that I included some pineapple cores, but those aren't really essential to its success--I just had them around because there had been a bargain on organic pineapples, so I made a bunch of dried pineapple. 

Spring Juice

makes about 5 cups

20oz carrots, scrubbed and trimmed

2 fat rhubarb stalks

2 oranges, peeled

cores from 2 pineapple (optional)

Run through your juicer a couple of times, then chill.

a cheering pink drink

 

































Poor Annie was feeling gloomy yesterday: the weather was too hot, and she was failing to tick off of her list most of the myriad tasks she had set herself. I was on my way home from a trip to West Seattle when she called me to propose a jaunt to our favorite restaurant, the Canterbury. 'It may dispel my gloom,' she speculated.

Annie had a shandy and a giant plate of hash browns ('They'll go right to my waist,' she lamented, and it turns out she was right), and I had a nice salad and  a gimlet (with more gin and less Rose's Lime Juice than Philip Marlowe's preference). Afterwards, replete and cheered, Annie came to my house to take some pictures for her blog. I persuaded her to try my tasty new drink, the Salty Setter (it's like a Salty Dog, but pink). 'Not too strong, now! I have to ride my bicycle home and don't want to get a ticket! And I don't like gin!' The one I made her (which she liked despite the gin) was semi-virginal, with only half of the specified amounts of gin and Campari.

Salty Setter
1oz each, gin and Campari
2oz grapefruit juice
juice of half a lime, plus a lime slice
salt

Rub the rim of your glass with the lime slice, then roll it through a little saucer of salt .
Fill a cocktail shaker half-full of ice, then add the gin, Campari, and grapefruit and lime juice. Shake well, and strain into the glass. Garnish with the lime slice.

an excellent work lunch

I made a couple more recipes from Rawvolution before I returned it to Nurse Lu. She had encouraged me to try the 'famous onion bread,' so I made that along with some mock tuna salad (I'm a real tuna lover, and always looking for good vegan facsimiles). Both recipes required heavy modification--the bread looked like it would be far to oily and salty if I made it straight from the book, and the tuna had what looked like way too much mustard. They both turned out really well, though, and I will tell you how I made them for both our benefits (if I don't document it here I might forget what all I did). As you might guess from my remarks, I like this book but can only really recommend it to experienced cooks who will notice when something looks off about a recipe and can fix it to their tastes.

Onion Bread
makes 27 pieces

The amount of water is an approximation--if you use sweet onions, for instance, you will need less water than if you use storage onions. Start low so you don't end up with overly sloppy dough!

1kg onions
100g flax meal
100g sunflower seeds, chopped in your food processor till they're the size of polenta
1/4C soy sauce (nama shoyu if you want to be strictly raw, tamari if you you want your bread to be wheat-free)
3T olive oil
1/3C water

Peel the onions and halve or quarter them, depending on the size of your food processor feed tube. Slice them with the food processor (or cut them as thinly as you can by hand, wearing glasses to save yourself from onion tears).  Put in a big bowl and mix in the remaining ingredients. Squish with your hands to get the onions to release their juices.

 Divide the dough in three and spread each portion into a nine-inch square on a non-stick sheet. Put in your dehydrator and dry at 118° for about twenty-four hours. After at least ten hours, peel the breads off of the sheets and return to the dryer.

When they're done, cut each sheet of bread into nine squares. Store in an airtight tin.

Tuna-safe Salad
makes four generous servings

dressing:
1/2C coconut water* or regular water
2 cloves garlic
1/3C lemon juice
1t kosher salt
1/2C each macadamia nuts and cashews
2t seedy mustard

salad:
2C sunflower seeds, soaked 2-6 hours and drained
3 stalks celery, diced
4 green onions, sliced
2-3T dulse flakes

Whiz the dressing ingredients in a blender till thoroughly smooth.

Chop the soaked sunflower seeds in your food processor till they resemble flaked tuna, then transfer to a bowl and mix in the remaining ingredients. Add the dressing. Let rest an hour before eating. See below for a serving suggestion!

*The coconut water makes the dressing a little sweet and Miracle Whippy. The sweetness dies down a little after a while, but if you really object to sweetness in your tuna you should opt for regular water. That way you won't have to open a young coconut either.

oh-so-easy cauliflower couscous

One of the things I fixed for dinner in Orland was cauliflower couscous. It's a tasty and super-quick side dish, as long as you have a food processor. I'm just going to give you a basic template, and you can add whatever tidbits you see fit. This is adapted from Rawvolution, a book with lots of good ideas but recipes that are far too oily and salty for my taste. In Orland I pretty much followed the recipe below, except that I added a handful of almonds, soaked and then chopped, and some pretty purple celery we got at the farmer's market. At the bottom of this post you can see a wild, hippie version I made for my work lunch: I used a mixture of white and purple cauliflower, which turns magenta when the lemon juice touches it, and added almonds, goji berries, hunza raisins, and minced fresh turmeric root.

Basic Cauliflower Couscous
Serves 2-4, depending on what else you're having. Enough for 3 work lunches!
A small cauliflower, leaves removed, roughly chopped
A bunch of parsley or half a bunch each of parsley, coriander, and mint (or other herbs you have and think would be good), stems included except for woody ones like on the mint, very roughly chopped
A big handful of green olives, seeded and torn apart
Juice of a lemon
2T olive oil
salt and pepper (be stingy with the salt till you've tasted it, as the olives will add salt)
Optional: nuts, dried fruit (unless it's really hard, don't soak it), zest from half of your lemon if it's organic (chop it, then add it to the food processor with the herbs), small amounts of spices you think would be good (Aleppo pepper, cumin, ground coriander), other seasonal vegetables....

Chop the cauliflower in your food processor till it looks like couscous. If you don't have a big one it would be better to do this in a couple of batches, so it gets chopped evenly. Scrape the cauliflower into a big bowl, then chop your herbs in the still-dirty processor. Scrape them into the bowl, then mix in the remaining ingredients. Let it rest for half an hour, then taste for seasoning. More salt? More lemon? Serve!

our trip to Orland

Rachael and I just got back from a trip to Orland, where we got to see Granddenny and Granni Di for the first time in five or six years. We were expecting the weather to be warmer in sunny California--after all, it was still snowing in Seattle, while the weather reports said that Orland was consistently at least five degrees warmer--but we ended up being chilly much of the time. I was sorry I hadn't brought my hat and mittens!



Right outside the kitchen window there's a quince bush which is always covered with birds. We saw hummingbirds, house finches, warblers, and lots and lots of sparrows. The sparrows like to eat the quince blossoms, which is probably why the bush has only borne one fruit in the thirty or so years Granddenny's lived there. Below are pictured a white crowned and golden crowned sparrow I saw while I was fixing dinner:





We got to meet Lolly, the cute new Kelpie. Granddenny and Granni Di kept telling us that she was a naughty girl, but Rachael and I saw no sign of it except that she kept trying to herd her big sister Genna. She was really pretty, with her big expressive eyes and giant bat-ears--Granddenny thinks she looks like Anubis. She was sweet and cuddly, too, and followed Rachael around the house to be petted.



We went to John Carter in Chico (Rachael's a big Michael Chabon fan and Granddenny liked the books when he was little), and afterwards took a tour of Bidwell Mansion. Granddenny and I had last gone there over thirty years ago, and neither of us remembered much except the case of stuffed birds in John Bidwell's office and the life-sized painting of him from which his eyes follow you all around the house. Unfortunately, budget cuts will close up Bidwell Mansion forever on May first unless its friends raise a bunch of money.



One of the high points of our trip was a visit to the Chico farmers' market. When we went to it in previous visits it was always summertime, and it was pretty similar to farmers' markets in Seattle except that the tomatoes and eggplants were cheaper. It was really different in March! We saw sugarcane,



avocados,



and olives.



My favorite rice farm had a booth,



and I got a real bargain on these unpasteurized almonds which were only $15 for five pounds.

my sewing machine

Twenty five years ago, Grandma Ryan gave me a sewing machine for my birthday. She actually recruited our friend Mary to get one in Seattle, so as to save on shipping costs, and Mary took me along so I could help pick it out. We went to a cluttered sewing machine/vacuum cleaner store in far-off Ballard, where  the man recommended a Dorina Hobby 541. 'It's made by Pfaff, and has the durability and quality of a Pfaff, but is much cheaper.'

I waited till after my birthday to try it out, as I'm a stickler for doing things at their proper times. I took it around to Annie's, and she warned me as we set it up that I should have signed up for lessons at the vacuum cleaner shop. 'But it's all the way in Ballard,' I protested, 'and my sewing machine is too heavy to take on the bus. And the man at the store really didn't look like a seamstress!' 'Well, we may never be able to figure out the tension', she said. 'It can be really hard to get it set up at first.' We followed the instructions in the booklet for winding the bobbin and threading the machine, and tried to sew a seam. It sewed about one-and-a-half stitches, then made a terrible grinding noise and stopped. 'That's the tension,' Annie said. 'You'll have to go to Ballard.' I gave up, told Grandma I loved my present, and had Annie sew her a little book cover (pretending it was made by me with my present) to hide her trashy novels. My sewing machine has been at Annie's house ever since.

Rachael's been expressing an interest in sewing lately--she wants a hobby and doesn't really like knitting--and I decided to try to figure out my sewing machine's tension so Rachael and I could have fun sewing times with it. Surely, with the internet, it couldn't be too hard to figure out without going all the way to Ballard!

(this is a pincushion Rachael made me in Family Life in the sixth grade)



My sewing machine had been in Annie's closet for many years, then gotten lost for a while before resurfacing in the basement, so its outside had gotten pretty dirty. I washed it off and looked it over. The case had protected it from dust pretty well, and the only obvious thing it needed was a replacement for its broken needle. I got it a needle, set it up, and tried to sew. It made a stitch-and-a-half, then a terrible grinding sound! Its instructions were nowhere to be found, but I managed to find a free low-fi PDF  (nice printed copies were at least $20!). According to this, the problem was most likely that the bobbin tension was too tight, and I should loosen a little screw in the bobbin case.  I did this and tried again.



It worked! I decided to make a patchwork dog for which I'd bought the material and even cut out the squares fifteen years ago, but abandoned at that point. I'd originally intended to sew it by hand, but it would provide a valuable opportunity to practice making many, many seams with my sewing machine. It was a litlte tedious, but I got it done. Here he is right after I finished the sewing:

 

and here he is a few days later, after I stuffed him:



I think he turned out pretty well! His name is Celestin.

a happy birthday

Today is Rachael's 23rd birthday, and she didn't want a big party so we had the aunties over for lunch. The menu was a qualified success; Rachael wanted Asian food, and the aunties have conservative, western palates. We had rice, mapo tofu (with hardly any chile but with the rest of the seasoning intact),




kai-lan (AKA gai lan, Chinese kale, or Chinese broccoli),




an apple daikon salad modeled on a salad I liked at Bako,




and clementine cake with chocolate sorbet (I forgot to take a picture till the party was over).



Everyone liked the rice and, somewhat surprisingly, the tofu, but the long pieces of kai-lan were a little hard for the aunties to manipulate and neither had heard of daikon so didn't want to try it. Rachael liked the kai-lan, though--she thought it was vastly superior to the baby bok choy I'd initially planned to make. 'Mommy, you could just substitute this whenever a recipe calls for bok choy!' We also both liked my salad, so I'll record its recipe in case I want to make it again.

Apple Daikon Salad
serves 4-6, depending on what else you're having

a medium, red apple, quartered, cored, and thinly sliced
about 12oz of daikon, peeled, halved lengthwise, and thinly sliced
2 celery stalks, thinly sliced on the diagonal
3 or 4 green onions, thinly sliced on the diagonal
2t yuzu juice or 1t each lime and orange juice
2t peanut oil
1t toasted, crushed sesame seeds
salt

Mix everything together in a big bowl, then transfer to a pretty platter to serve.