First things first

I really enjoyed reading the entries for the cookbook contest! And I especially loved the recurring theme of “here’s an awful meal I made for someone I love…who ate it without complaint.” So sweet!

The winner (determined by writing names on pieces of paper and randomly choosing one) is Deb at Chappy’s Mom! Congratulations, Deb! And thanks to everyone who posted their stories!
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I feel I ought to share my own tale of culinary tragedy. Well, I’ve made many mediocre meals, but there are two true disasters that come to mind. The first was when I was in high school or so and was instructed to roast the (then-thawed) whole chicken my mom had pulled out of the freezer that morning. This was in my pre-vegetarian days, but even then I think I knew less about meat preparation than I do now. I seasoned the chicken, put it in the pan, and put it in the over…all without removing the bag of stuff (giblets? guts?) from the interior. (I didn’t even know it was in there, much less that it had to be removed.) Yeah, we did not end up eating chicken that evening…

The other disaster involves literally burning the teflon off a non-stick pan while trying to stir-fry something. I’ve actually done this twice. (And I’ve since learned that teflon does not like being covered with oil that is then heated to a very high temperature.)

Dogwood buds do indeed look like E.T. heads (and chickpeas). In just a few weeks the ghost trees in my neighborhood will be making their (fleeting) appearance.

Whenever the seasons turn, I love seeing other people’s blog posts—and photos—about these changes. Back in February a guy in Portland was talking about forsythia blooms, last month someone in South Carolina showed off the daffodils in her yard, and right now I’m telling you all about my dogwoods.

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Don’t forget to enter my cookbook contest. (Please! I need to find a good home for these books!)

Real-life/local friends are eligible to enter. And though the thought of rigging the draw so I don’t have to give any money to the USPS is tempting, rest assured that local friends have no more chance to win than far-off ones.

And if your own shelves are groaning under the weight of too many cookbooks and you don’t want to enter the contest, that’s fine. But please do feel free to share your tales of cooking woes and triumphs!

I have a lot of cookbooks. A lot.

With the exception of the top shelf (which is glass and can’t bear much weight), this bookcase contains only cookbooks. An identical bookcase on the opposite side of the piano contains the overflow (a few more books, back issues of Cooks Illustrated and Vegetarian Times, file boxes of printouts and photocopies), but the bulk of my cooking library is here.

For a long time I worked hard to increase my cookbook collection. But last spring, when we remodeled our living room, I resolved to have no more cookbooks than those that would fit comfortably in the bookcase. No more stacking them higgledy-piggledy, leaving towers of books in the corners of the room because the bookcase was full.

So I went through my collection as honestly as I could. Haven’t opened it in years? Gone. No chance I’ll be using it in the near future? Gone. The result: a nice stack of cookbooks that need a new home.

Here are the vegetarian cookbooks:

• Vegetarian and Vegetable Cooking, by Christine Ingram
• Indian Vegetarian Cookbook, Pat Chapman
• The Complete Vegetarian Cuisine, by Rose Elliot
• The Shoshoni Cookbook, by Anne Saks and Faith Stone
• Natural Foods Cookbook, by Mary Estella

And here are the nonvegetarian cookbooks

• Martha Stewart’s Healthy Quick Cook, by Martha Stewart
• The de’Medici Kitchen, by Lorenza de’Medici
• Pizza Art, by Karin Neidermeier
• Fresh Start, by Julee Rosso (one half of the Silver Palate and New Basics duo)

These are all great cookbooks, and they’re all in like-new condition. But they overlap with many of the ones already on my shelves. (For example, I have a gazillion books on Indian vegetarian cuisine. Well, maybe not quite that many. Let’s call it a half-gazillion.) And because these are the ones I consult very rarely (if ever), they obviously need to find a new home.

If you’re interested in getting a box full o’ cooking inspiration in the mail*, leave a comment to this post and tell me about your greatest culinary triumph—or your most horrific culinary disaster. (If you’d rather post your tale in your own blog, that’s fine; either include a link there to this post or put a comment here telling me to go read it there.) Each story is an entry, so if you have a triumph story and a disaster story, you get two entries!

I’ll let this marinate for a week. Next Wednesday evening (April 9), I’ll randomly select from the entries one person to get this mini-library of gastronomic goodness!

*I regret to add that, because of exhorbitant postage rates (ah, international media mail, how I miss thee!), this contest is open only to people in the USA. There are a lot of books, and the box will be heavy!

The other day I made a batch of pasta sauce. Two batches, actually—I figured I might as well be efficient while I was at it. Oh heck, let’s just call it what it is: a vat of pasta sauce.

I ended up with about sixteen cups of sauce, which I ladled into two-cup portions in freezer bags, leaving another portion for the fridge. I love using bags for this sort of thing. I lay them flat and once the sauce is frozen, the little sauce bricks can be stacked in the freezer to use the space efficiently.

The green flecks, by the way, are bits of three different green plants: parsley, basil, and kale. This vat of sauce has a whopping five cups of fresh kale in it!

During the last fall I was in college, I met a botany major named Todd who taught me how to recognize dogwood trees in the winter. “Their buds look like little E.T. heads,” he explained.

That description came to my mind the other day when I was preparing a chickpea, onion, garlic, and spinach soup (in Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Soups) for dinner. After cooking the chickpeas with aromatics, I set about removing their skins. It’s an optional step that Madison recommends, but Sylvia gets skeeved out by chickpea skins (and is usually happy to eat them if the skins aren’t visible), so I did it. “Look at all those little E.T. heads,” I thought to myself.

The soup, by the way, was delicious—so much so that I’d already eaten half a bowlful (note the “high soup line” on the inside) before I remembered to take a picture of it. I’m generally not much of a soup person, but this dish is definitely going into my repertoire.

Fifteen years ago this month, I decided to become a vegetarian. My reasons then and now are varied and rooted in ethical, environmental, social, and health concerns. I had been thinking about vegetarianism for a while at that point, and the proverbial straw for me was an article in the January 1993 issue of Outside about an athlete and fitness trainer named Steve Ilg (and later I read his book, The Outdoor Athlete, which is somewhere in the book storage room in my basement).

He advocated vegetarianism partly out of compassion for animals but also out of the belief that eating meat negatively affects your body and makes it hard to reach your fullest potential when rock climbing, kayaking, cross-country skiing, etc. (In the early 1990s he also advocated—well, for himself, at least—wearing a Kajagoogoo-esque hairstyle. Fortunately, he no longer seems to be riding that trend.)

Aside from infrequent longings for seafood (for which vegetarian substitutes are few and far between), I haven’t missed meat. I never was a steak lover, pork chops didn’t thrill me, and even Thanksgiving turkey never appealed to me much. I’m still pleased with my decision—and delighted to have married a vegetarian (Jan’s coming up on twenty years this fall, I believe) and happy to be raising a vegetarian daughter.

So it seems only fitting that I recently had an urge to return to an old culinary favorite. Yes, I love Deborah Madison’s cookbooks (and Madhur Jaffrey’s and lots of other people’s), but when I am looking for vegetarian food that can be described as “homestyle” or “down home” or “comforting” or “basic,” I turn to something like Laurel’s Kitchen or the Moosewood cookbooks—both the ones by the Moosewood Collective and the ones by Mollie Katzen.

One of the first cookbooks I ever bought was Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I bought it during my first semester of graduate school, when I was responsible for cooking all of my own food (since I no longer lived in campus housing) and worked in a local health-food store.

I loved this book—I still do. My copy is food stained and well worn, and my favorite recipe in it is the one that give the book its title. Rooted in a bed of herbed brown rice held together with eggs and cheese is a forest made up of broccoli trees. I hadn’t made this dish in at least nine years, and I’d forgotten just how good it is. So had Jan, who remarked, “I didn’t remember that this dish was so good.” Sylvia wasn’t terribly impressed (she’s in a food phase now, and it seems there are only about three or four things she’ll deign to eat these days), though she did love the “magic broccoli forest.”

A few days ago I made a leek-and-goat-cheese galette for dinner. I’ve written about galettes here before, but I figured I’d include some work-in-progress photos this time.

The leeks are braised (with some garlic) in butter and water, then finished with some white wine. The dough is not unlike a pie dough in that it includes butter (twelve tablespoons, baby–this dish is not for the butter-adverse) and is held together with a small amount of ice-cold water. Usually the dough is rolled into a rough circle, but this time, since the chunks of butter were still pretty large (and not pea-sized as they should be), I took Jan’s suggestion and treated the dough like puff pastry, folding it over itself and rolling it into a rough square.

Once the leeks and goat cheese had been placed on top of the dough, I folded the edges over to create a “border.” Note that I am getting some help here from my little sous-chef.

While the galette baked, I steamed some broccoli, to which I added butter, salt, and pepper to make a simple side dish. This little crock here is a Vermont butter keeper, which is based on a design used in France. (I’ve no doubt that this design existed in many other European countries, too, and that there are lots of updated versions of it. But this is what I know about the particular one I have.) Attached to the lid is a little upside-down bowl, and you fill it with softened butter. Then you fill the large bottom bowl with cold water, put the lid (with the inverted bowl) on top, and set the whole thing on your counter. The water seals the butter, preventing oxidation (and rancidity) while keeping the butter at room temperature. I love this thing.

And here’s the final result. It was delicious. But then again, pretty much anything with that much butter in it is going to taste good.

I’ve been very fortunate to have some terrific upstream swap partners, and now I have another name to add to that list. Chris is my partner for the Knitters’ Coffee Swap (not upstream but sort of sideways–we know each other’s identity from the beginning and send each other a package), and her package for me arrived in yesterday’s mail.

To quote Mr. Slinger from Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse: “‘Wow.’ That was just about all he could say. ‘Wow.’”

There’s coffee, of course (fair trade! shade grown! organic!)–Peace Coffee from a Minneapolis roaster. I haven’t even tried it yet and I already love it. To go with the coffee are two bars of chocolate and after-coffee chocolate mints. A notepad (which Chris stamped with a cat image) and a photo album with a coffee cup on it will help me keep track of notes and photos, and a bar of Oliba’s Three Bean Kitchen Coffee Soap (which, contrary to its name, is going in my shower) will ensure that I start the day smelling nice. There’s a mix CD of twenty-seven songs that all have the word “coffee” in their titles–great listening for when I’m knitting up some socks in the fabulous “Mocha Java” sock yarn that Chris dyed just for me and using the coffee-bean stitch markers (how cool is that?) to mark my place.

What a great set of gifts–all just perfect for me. Thanks so much, Chris! (FYI, anyone who has a thing for cute cat photos–I’m looking at you, Gina!–should definitely check out Chris’s blog.)

Oh, and those little hands at the top of the picture? Those belong to Sylvia, who was very excited to “help Mommy open her present” and could hardly wait to get her hands on the photo album.

“I need to take a picture first,” I told her. “Can you be patient?”

She nodded solemnly. “Yes, but sometimes it’s hard to wait.”

Last week I made a batch of stuffed peppers, using a recipe from one of the Moosewood cookbooks. (I can’t remember right now which one it was, and I’m too lazy to go to the cookbook bookcase and figure it out. I know it was Moosewood, though. We have nearly all of their books except for the most recent one and the one for cooking for a gazillion people at a time.) The filling is millet, corn, onion, and black beans. I included a couple of small purple peppers on the trap in the hope that their color might entice my purple-obsessed daughter to eat them; only when I took the tray out of the over did I remember that cooking turns the exotic purple peppers into pedestrian green ones. And no, she didn’t eat them.

My husband and I did, though, and were fairly pleased with the result. The millet was drier that I would have liked. It’s possible that I overcooked it; this isn’t something I’ve cooked more than once or twice before, so I’m not sure how it’s supposed to turn out. I wonder if cooking it in my awesome rice cooker might result in something moister. Hmmm.

Any millet cookers out there who can offer tips for preparing this grain? Do any of you have any vegetarian stuffed-pepper recipes that you love? I like the idea of this dish, but I think I need to try a different angle.

Twelve people entered my blog-birthday contest, which asked entrants to name the three things they’d take with them to a desert island (and explain why).

In spite of some similarities (many said they’d bring an Internet-connected computer–who needs to bring a boat to use to get off the island when you’ve got e-mail and blogs to keep up with, right?), there was a lot of variety in the responses. Food items such as coffee and good wine made it to the list, as did spouses, children, and pets. Some people thought in terms of basic survival (Leatherman tool, anyone?), and the knitters all put yarn on their lists (though one declared that he wouldn’t need to bring needles because he’d make his own from twigs–talk about resourceful!).

I posted my own answers, too, and briefly considered making those items the prize package for this contest. But a solar-powered computer was way out of my budget, and tastes in yarn vary wildly (and not all entrants are yarnophiles). And Chuck Norris said he was too busy.

So I opted for stuff that I think would be nice to have on a desert island but didn’t necessarily make my list. (Come on, it’s hard to top a computer, yarn, and Chuck Norris, you know?)

Reading material: The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono. (And I’m delighted that the end of this contest coincides with Buy a Friend a Book Week. Hooray!)

Sustenance: Cherry Moon Green Tea (mildly caffeinated, so you can be alert when the rescuers arrive!), and chocolate from Iceland’s Nói Siríus’

Skin care: Pure shea butter soap from the Out of Africa project (the soap is handmade by women’s cooperatives in Benin, West Africa, and a portion of the price helps fund children’s education in Benin), and all-natural lip balm (with “NO FAKE CRAP” on the label–love it!)

Optimism: An affirmation ball (because when you’re marooned on a desert island, more than ever you need to be told nice things like “You smell nice” and “You rock!”)

It took some coaxing, but I managed to get Sylvia to draw a name from the hat, er, mixing bowl. The winner is Jennu!

Thanks, everyone, for playing! I really had a fun time running this contest and seeing what sorts of things people came up with. I can definitely see another contest in my future. Soon. Stay tuned.