I'm back...

I was in California visiting family for a bit. When I got back, I promptly got a cold. Isn't that always the way? It's funny to go back to California; it is not my home anymore. And it finally has stopped feeling home-- at least my home anyways. But I lived there for so long that it definitely doesn't not feel like home. Dizzying, I know.

Because of this almost-home feeling, there is no pressure to do things, see stuff, wake up early and hit the tourist destinations. But I came back to Connecticut with California booty just the same. They weren't snow globes with the Golden Gate Bridge in them, or a UC Berkeley hoodie, they were even better. Here is what California means to me in food.

Blue Bottle Coffee- The single-best roaster that I have found. They used to hand-deliver beans to our apartment in Berkeley every week. That was before they got super popular. Delicious, soulful, rich, I bring back beans every time I visit my parents. I know I could get them shipped, but it wouldn't be the same.

Citrus fruit- Cara Cara oranges, they're mild and sweet, with less acid than Navels. A few of these were squirrelled away in my suitcase next to some beautiful, soft-skinned Meyer lemons. I didn't even have to buy the lemons. They were given to my mom by a neighbor who has a tree. Now that's local!

Okra snacks- Fried okra treats, from Berkeley Bowl, one of my favorite markets. I went there four times this trip, I was in CA for nine days. Need I say more?

See's chocolates- The chocolate of my childhood. Hell, this would be the chocolate of my adulthood too, if I still lived on the west coast. You can take your Godiva any day, I will gladly take a morsel of See's. Just the right amount of milk, softly sweet, indulgent buttercream. I may just have to break into box number two when I finish this post.

Some people bring back trinkets from their vacations, I bring back food. While I may not have a memento to remember this trip by, I certainly will have a happy belly.

20 Years

In elementary school, did you ever start an avocado plant from the pit? I did. I remember waiting for weeks, as the stone steeped in tepid water, for the roots to burgeon, and a spindly plant to sprout. But I don't really remember much past that point. I don't remember planting the pit in soil, or watering it, or most of all, an avocado tree actually growing. Maybe that's because this takes 15-20 years. Yep, you read that right. 20 long years!

As daunting as that figure seems, and as unfortunately black as my thumb is, I have not been deterred from forcing my very own pits. I have always felt rather moderately about avocados. I could take them or leave them. But did you know that California grows 90% of all the avocados that we eat in this country. That is a lot of fruit! It forced this once-California girl to take notice.

Perhaps it is a bout of homesickness, or the fact that as I write this post, the Connecticut snow falls softly onto the chain-link fence outside my window, but it makes me long for a bit of California, right here in New Haven. So, I bought a few avocados, even though they're hardly a local fruit, gobbled them up, stuck the pits with toothpicks, and plunged them into some water.

Now comes the waiting game. It could take weeks for the pits to root and even longer for a plant to sprout. I will be patient, but I also won't hold my breath. But if all goes well, just think of what a delicious salad awaits me when I am 51.

Mashed and Then Some

I love mashed potatoes, always have. When I was young I even appreciated potato buds. You know, those dessicated flakes of potato to which you add boiling water and a pat of butter? I even liked those. Guilty. I have always loved their warmth, their smooth consistency-- for me, mashed potatoes are the ultimate comfort food.

Well, nowadays my palate has become a wee bit more sophisticated than it was when I was seven. I still love mashed potatoes, but now will eat them mashed with buttermilk, with a sprinkling of chives, with the skins on, or even-- mashed with another vegetable. Take celery root for instance, that often ignored vegetable sitting at the market next to the other root vegetables. It's delicious!

This knobby vegetable is crisp when eaten raw, supple when cooked, and tastes like celery, without all of those pesky strings. Simmered with a waxy potato, like Yukon golds, and roughly mashed, this puree makes yet another ideal comfort food. My recipe for this puree is over at iVillage Food.

Just call me Campbell...

As in the soup, because I made my own cream of mushroom-- for a very specific purpose. This week I had my first tuna-noodle casserole. I did not grow up with casseroles. My dad never liked a one-pot meal, and my mom didn't really care, so I had a childhood free of Durkee French Fried Onions. Frankly, I never liked tuna fish from a can until I was in college, so a tuna casserole was not in my culinary lexicon.

But recently my mother started making them for herself . Maybe she was finally feeling that empty-nest syndrome, or maybe she was hearkening back to her own childhood in the 1950s, filled with tuna-noodle casseroles. Either way she started to rave about them. At first I was appalled; this casserole always sounded like a train wreck to me. But then, as I started thinking about it, and alterations that I would make-- tuna-noodle casserole came up in my estimation. So much so, that I had to make one for myself.

Here is what I did:

I sliced and chopped from fresh button mushrooms and sautéed them with an onion. I then made a velouté sauce in the same pan as the mushrooms. You can read about making this sauce here. I threw in a few branches of thyme, and let sauce simmer for a bit.

I cooked about 8 ounces of egg noodles part-way, draining and rinsing them. I also drained two cans of tuna. (If you must know, one of them was in olive oil.)

I then added the noodles and the tuna into the sauce, with the zest and the juice of Meyer lemon. A few handfuls of frozen peas were added. Mixing well, the whole mess went into a casserole dish.

Freshly-made bread crumbs were sprinkled on the top, and the casserole was baked until bubbly, about 25 minutes at 375 degrees.

And you know what, it was delicious: comforting, warming, creamy. I get it. Granted, this might not be the tuna-noodle that my mom makes, but at my house, it was pretty darn good.

Chickens in New Haven

In September of '09 there was legislation passed in New Haven making it legal for residents to own chickens. Bring on the urban farms, and the fresh eggs! I recently wrote an article for The New Haven Advocate, our free weekly, arts and entertainment paper, all about it. So I can now tell about coop construction, buying chicks, etc. I also met some really interesting ladies with some hens of their own. Now these women can really tell you anything you want to know about raising chicks.

You can read the article here.

As Promised

Christmas came and went with a flurry. The New Year was rung in with a bash. And now-- it is January. I must say, that as ready as I am for the holidays to come, each year, I am equally ready to say farewell!

For me, it is was the holiday of cakes. A bûche de noël for Christmas, and a crepe cake for New Year's Eve makes for one sugar-kissed girl! I know that the holiday has passed, but here is a picture of the bûche anyways. Until next year!

Happy Holidays!

Is it possible that Christmas is already here? It feels like only yesterday that I was laying a butter-drenched cheese cloth over my Thanksgiving turkey, and shoving it in the oven.

This Christmas we're breaking our Jewish tradition of a day at the movies, followed by a meal of Chinese food. We're going to Brooklyn to celebrate the holiday with friends who are fabulous cooks in their own right. So, I am off kitchen-duties for this holiday. But I do have one contribution to the meal-- dessert. I decided to get festive this year, and make my very first bûche de noël. It has been a process, but with eggs, sugar, and butter as my companions, I have made it through relatively unscathed.

There is the vanilla genoise as the cake. It is so light and thin, perfect for rolling. I decided the filling would be a Hazelnut Bavarian Cream Soufflé. I infused milk with hazelnuts and incorporated the mixture into beaten egg whites. There will be French Chocolate Buttercream, for frosting my bûche. But the decoration I am most excited about are the countless meringue mushrooms that I made this week to embellish my faux bois.

Dusted with a bit of cocoa, I think that these fungi are so cute, I can hardly wait to gobble them up. As I was constructing them, carving out a divot in the underside of each cap, and then securing the stems with additional meringue, I flipped the mushroom, right side up, and each made me laugh. In fact, I kept saying, "Hi!" to every one. (I know; but it's has been a long week!)

We're off to Brooklyn in just awhile, but I had to show you. Let's hope all of the mushrooms make it down safely. I'll try to snap a few pictures of the bûche de noël, completely constructed.

Have a wonderful holiday!

Fruitcake?

Have you ever looked through a cookbook and seen a recipe that was so bizarre, with such a unique list of ingredients, that you could not imagine what it tastes like? It recently happened to me.

I checked out the New York Times Heritage Cookbook by Jean Hewitt from the library. It is an out of print tome from the 1970s celebrating regional American cooking. While glancing through the dessert section from the Midwest, I stopped at Dymple's Sausage Cake. If I were driving a car, I would have slammed on the brakes so hard, whiplash would have set in. Among the usual list of sugar, flour, and spices, were a few ingredients that made me stop in my tracks. Listed were: lean sausage meat, raisins, walnuts, pulverized gumdrops, and cold, strong coffee.

I read it again and again. There were no eggs, and only a very little bit of additional leavening in the form of baking soda and powder. I showed the recipe to a few friends, both adventurous cooks in their own right, and they couldn't imagine what it would taste like either. Rightly intrigued, we made a date to bake this cake; and this is what it looked like:

Fruit cake, right? And I guess it tasted like fruit cake too, at least that was what we all imagined as we took slices of Dymple's Sausage Cake, still warm from the oven. But it was hard to forget what it felt like to plunge your hands into the meaty dough to fold in the raisins. We just didn't think about the black coffee cascading into the batter, darkening the raw sausage, or the brightly colored gumdrops getting tarnished by the warm spices. Right.

Surprisingly enough, it wasn't the sausage that was the biggest turn-off. Upon baking it sort of disappeared, leaving behind only a trace of porkiness. It was actually those gum drops that tossed this cake over the edge. I imagine they were intended as substitutes for candied fruit; but yellow gumdrops do not a candied citron make.

But we had to give it try. We came, we saw, and we sort of conquered. The closest thing that I could find to Dymple's Cake on line, was this one. It however, omits the gum drops-- good thinking.

The Leftovers

Did everyone have a splendid Thanksgiving? Was it filled with turkey, pie, and maybe a little bit of booze? Was there enough food? That is a silly question. If your Thanksgiving is anything like mine, it is all about abundance. Abundance is great; but after the turkey is packed up, the sides are nestled in their Tupperwares, the brussels sprouts two ways (yes, you read that correctly) are chilling in the refrigerator, and each guest has his or her own care package to take home, and you still find yourself looking at a bowlful of homemade cranberry sauce, what are you to do?

Make scones, of course!

For the past two years one of our guests has made the most delicious cranberry sauce, based on this recipe. The cranberries are tart yet sweet, flavored with just a hint of orange, and blooming with those warm spices of the holidays. This sauce kind of makes one wish that we ate cranberries all year round.

But with so much leftover, I needed to do something that would do justice to this luscious sauce. After some hemming and hawing, I decided that scones would do the trick. It was perfect! The sauce is shiny, and thick, so I basically filled the scones with it, then baked them.

This is my basic scone recipe. They are light in texture, slightly sweet, and offer a neutral base for any filling. In the summer I stud the scones with fresh berries; in the winter, dried fruit fits the bill; and now, come Thanksgiving time, I have to say cranberry sauce is my new favorite.

Scones with Cranberry Sauce

1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup corn meal, fine ground
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, and cut into chunks
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup sour cream (light is fine, I would avoid fat-free)
1/2 cup cranberry sauce, chunky
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
additional Demerera sugar for sprinkling (optional)

Makes 8 scones

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix well the flour, corn meal, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Add the butter, and with your finger tips, work into the flour mixture until coarse, pea-sized pieces are obtained. Mix together the milk and sour cream. Pour into dry ingredients all at once. Stir gently until just combined. Do not overmix.

Divide the dough in half. Place eight portions of dough on a parchment paper or Silpat lined baking sheet. Slightly flatten the dough. With a teaspoon, place a portion of cranberry sauce in the middle of the dough. Now with the remainder of the dough, top each spoonful of sauce. It is not necessary to cover the sauce completely.

In a small bowl, beat the egg and the 1 tablespoon milk. Brush the egg mixture on top of each scone, and sprinkle with additional sugar, if using. Bake scones for 13-17 minutes, or until tops are golden-brown.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Is everyone gearing up for, hands down my favorite holiday-- Thanksgiving? I know that I am. There is pie crust to be made, bread to tear for stuffing, and a rustic pate to be assembled-- and that is just on today's schedule. Tomorrow the real work begins; but I am hard-pressed to call any of it work. Gathering together with loved ones, and cooking a fantastic meal, hardly seems like work to me.

For the past several years, brussels sprouts have always been the green vegetable of choice for the Thanksgiving meal. They are synonymous with holidays for me-- as synonymous as a cruciferous vegetable can be!

I recently started blogging at iVillage Food. There, I will have a weekly column about eating seasonally. So what was one of my first entries? You guessed it, brussels sprouts. If you have yet to decide on the green vegetable to go with all of those glorious starches, there is a recipe on iVillage for Brussels Sprouts Braised in Cream.

So, have a wonderful holiday! Don't eat anything I wouldn't eat-- which isn't much! Gobble, gobble!