Bean Foam

Harris is wearing a glow-in-the-dark spaceship onesie while he cooks a massive amount of beans. I think the onesie is the leisure version of coveralls. The beans soaked all day long and the water was dark purple when he rinsed them out. And then when he started boiling them, there was a great grayish-purple foam. I think that’s the stuff that makes the farts, right?

Other than potty humor, I haven’t added much to the cooking. I made a really fancy dinner for myself by putting a yam in the oven and forgetting about it for an hour while I got lost in some websites about tacos and burritos. I’m particularly enamored of Burritoeater and their twelve-point scientific rating process, but they should take some field trips down to the Peninsula. On that end, California Taco Trucks picks up the slack, providing some broader commentary, minus the in-depth rating system and moustache apparel.

Exploding Taco

Thanksgiving and Persimmons

I hadn’t met a persimmon until this fall, when one of my co-workers dropped a grocery bag of them on our conference table and said that he had twenty more bags for anyone who wanted them. Luckily, another coworker volunteers at the food bank and took the bulk of the fruit, because even one bag is too much to deal with. I brought them home and they’ve been slowly ripening for the past month. Some were finally ripe today, so I took a shot at persimmon bread. It’s baking right now, but I can tell you that the batter was pretty good, perhaps because of a special ingredient that has been popping up in our recipes lately…

Chicken Soup, with Peanuts

We’re making this West African chicken soup for dinner tonight, from Mark Bittman’s Minimalist column. Lots of good stuff going into this: ginger, garlic, cayenne, sweet potatoes. And peanuts! It’s smelling pretty good right now… Hell yeah!

“Don’t Call the Cops” Cookies

We had a pretty big party last night and made cookies for our neighbors on Thursday night as a preemptive strike against noise complaints. We live in a pretty quiet neighborhood, and we hadn’t met our neighbors yet anyway, so it made sense to do build some positive associations. Because it was so important to make a good impression, Sarah and I made my all time favorite cookies, pumpkin-chocolate-chip-oatmeal. Sarah is an inventive and spontaneous baker who can make up recipes and eyeball amounts. She does most of her measuring in handfuls. I need a little more structure in my life, and the recipe below is roughly what we made, from an index card that I found in her recipe box this morning. And, for the record, the party went well, without any complaints.

Deep Sea Fishing

Sometimes this happen that totally surpass my childhood expectations about adulthood. Sometimes, you get something really awesome. Especially on a farmers’ market day, this is a really great email to get:

I went deep sea fishing on Friday as part of my bro’s quasi bachelor party, and nobody had a way to transport their fish home… except for me. So I’ll be returning home tonight with ~15lbs of fresh (as of Friday…) red snapper. I’m not a great cook, and might need some help, but who’s down for some fish tacos tonight???

And I’m pretty excited that my life right now includes that kind of stuff. Hell yeah. So, besides just glowing with the possibilities, we did actually do something with all that fish.

Meal one: fish tacos! Did I mention that I love tacos? We pan-fried the snapper, just a minute or two on each side, in olive oil. Also available for custom taco-making were endless cuban beans, brown rice, fresh salsa, and special select Costco bell peppers. Also, too-hot peppers from the market at the Civic Center in San Francisco, which I over-enthusiastically bought for $1/pound and have been totally unable to eat more than a quarter of a pepper in a meal without numbing my whole mouth. No wonder they were so cheap. We also chopped up lovely bright purple cabbage, one of my least favorite foods, but really perfect on top of it all.

Meal two: ceviche. Well shit. I… don’t really like ceviche. But it looks beautiful, all cilantro and tomatoes and onions (and fish, obviously). And although we made way to much (fifteen pounds of any fish-based dish is bound to be too much), everyone has really been enjoying it. What’s it going to take for me to get over that raw-fish issue? I like sushi, but the whole “cooking in acid” explanation doesn’t convince me. Yet.

Mondrian Cake

Hey,

It doesn't actually look that good...

Remember when you wanted to eat the Mondrian Cake at the SFMoMA? Yeah, I saw it there. But I didn’t eat it because it was too much money. I had coffee instead.

Love,

Lily

Hog Island Oysters

 

Chard at the Filoli Gardens

 

My parents were in town two weeks ago, so I took Monday off and we drove up to Petaluma and then across to Tomales Bay. It was a clear blue day, and the grass on the hills was in perfect late summer gold. In Petaluma, we stopped at the seed bank, an outpost of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company that has set up shop in a lovely old bank building. My parents picked up some beans, new lettuce seeds, and postcards. I brought back a packet of flamingo pink swiss chard seeds that are just now sprouting in the cooler-planter in the front yard, now that the tomatoes and peppers are hitting the end of their lives. I think two dollars for neon pink chard is some of the best money I’ll ever spend.

I was especially excited about chard after seeing the vegetable gardens at Filoli Gardens earlier in the weekend. The formal gardens are lovely, but I have a real soft spot for the working gardens. As impressive as the pools and hedges and formal beds are, it’s the vegetables and the cutting gardens that really get me. I liked the kitchen in the house better than any of the other rooms, too – but maybe it’s just that I can’t imagine living in the rest of the house or in the formal gardens. I can only really see myself living in the working quarters, in the kitchen, picking chard from the garden.

After our stop in Petaluma, we drove west to Tomales Bay, where it was cool and foggy. We stopped at the Hog Island Oyster Company and had a dozen Kumamoto oysters in their outdoor picnic area. The people next to us were clearly experts – they brought a table-cloth, flowers, champagne, asparagus, and coal to grill their oysters and clams on the barbeques in the picnic area. We weren’t so well prepared, but were happy to eat them raw, fresh out of the bay, with a little bit of lemon for good measure.

Picnic at Hog Island.

 

Shucking oysters.

Preheating the Oven

We’re making progress here, but there are some other projects that are priorities right now. We’re taking a month to brew some ideas, shuffle some recipe cards, and get our mise en place… en place.

Until then, one of the things we’re thinking about is Young Invincibles!

Let’s get rolling.

This is my first post. Basically, I made an executive decision and chose a name for the blog, because we’re all busy people here, the name doesn’t really matter, and now we can get started. So there. If you don’t like it, you’ll probably get used to it, right?

The real question is: What’s next?