Cornmeal-crusted roasted potatoes

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Magpies

Cornmeal crusted roasted potatoes

I like to think about a time when people walked everywhere. Not just all around town, but from town to town, because there weren’t cars or bikes or busses or trains, and they couldn’t afford carriage fare. Like Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield walking from York to London, and having adventures along the way, of course: and thus a novel is born. A novel seems to move along at a walking pace, which is maybe why I like novels, because I love walking. I like to go for a walk before breakfast and a walk after dinner. I like to walk when I don’t feel well, because I honestly believe it will make me feel better. I like to walk when I have something I need to think about, or to work out in my mind. I like to walk when I’m trying to write a story. I like to walk when I’m trying to clear my mind. I’m glad to have a dog so I don’t look like the crazy person walking around town for no reason. I’m glad to have a son who always wants to go for a walk with me, no matter the time of day or season of the year. I’m glad to live in a town that is so extremely pleasant for walking through. I’ve been semi-obsessed lately with Bob Dylan’s Time out of Mind. It’s so sweet and sad and haunting and strangely hopeful. To me, the whole album has a walking pace. Not a speed-walking or power-walking pace, but a slow, thoughtful, steady pace, the pace of a person walking from town to town and then further on. The very first song on the album Love Sick, opens with the lines

And the whole album carries on at this pace, moving from song to song with a quiet, steady beauty. So today’s Sunday Interactive Playlist, is on the subject of walking. Songs about walking, songs that sound like walking, songs you like to walk along to. As ever, the playlist is collaborative, so feel free to add what you like, or leave a comment and I’ll try to remember to add it for you. I’ve been bad about this lately, but the boys go back to school tomorrow and I’ll have hours and hours to drag songs into playlists. And now, we’re going for a walk!

We got these tiny potatoes from the farm. I scrubbed them, coated them with a little beaten egg, coated them in herbaceous cornmeal, and then roasted them in olive oil. They turned out nice and crispy on the outside and soft and tender in the middle. Perfect! And very very easy. I used sage and black pepper, but you could use any kind of herbs you like.

Here’s a link to the walking playlist.
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Leeks, white beans and French feta AND smoked eggplant-couscous croquettes

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Magpies

Leeks, white beans, & French feta

Back in the days before cable, when VCRs hadn’t yet been invented, there were a few movies my brother and I would watch every single time they came on television. (Which was maybe twice.) One such movie was Breaking Away. I hadn’t thought about it much in the intervening decades, but the other night we watched it again with the boys. Well! It’s a beautiful film! It’s beautifully filmed! It’s deceptively spare and simple in a manner that hides a genius of elegance and grace, which places it in the tradition of Ozu or Rohmer. The only non-diegetic music is a continuation of the Italian songs that Dave sings in his attempt to convince the world that he’s Italian. Much of the action seems to happen off-screen, between scenes, in best Ozu fashion. An entire romance and marriage takes place, and we feel real affection for the couple, though we only see them in a few scenes, in passing. The film is about one summer in the life of four teenagers, and it’s full of the kind of latent drama underlying every teenagers’ existence. At any minute they might dash their heads on a rock or crash their car or bike, or be crushed by a truck, they might fall out with friends they love, they might tear their family apart. Any of this could happen, and if this was any other kind of movie it probably would, but here it doesn’t, and this makes it feel more real, more like life. The film glows with a flat, pale, nostalgic light, like a dream of the late seventies, of the mid-west, which people have been trying to capture since in photo filters and iPhone apps. The film is sweet, smart, funny, thoughtful; it’s about infatuation and disillusion and the return of hope. It’s about friendship and family, imperfect and enduring. It’s about freedom and escape, and finding a way to achieve these things without leaving your home. And it’s about work, which makes it a good film to discuss after labor day weekend. The fathers of our four teenage friends were cutters, they cut limestone out of the quarries, and cut them into smooth rocks to build the local university. And now all they have left is a big hole in the ground where their boys swim, and a college full of teenagers who mock their boys. At one point Dave’s dad says he wants his son to find a job and be miserable just like he was. But we know he doesn’t really want his son to be unhappy, and we know that he enjoyed his work as a cutter: he was good at it, he took pride in his work. The boys have to decide what work they’ll do when the work that made their world isn’t an option any more. They have to make their own new world. Doesn’t it remind you of Seamus Heaney’s Digging?

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Eggplant couscous croquettes

Leeks! I just love them. I treated myself to some French feta, which is milder and creamier than most fetas I’ve had. I sauteed my leeks with white beans, white wine, thyme and capers, and then I crumbled the feta on top. Delicious!! We ate it with plain couscous. And later in the week I combined the leftover couscous and white beans with eggplant roasted until smooth and smoky and pureed with smoked gouda and bread crumbs. I fried this in olive oil as little croquettes, and served them with an impromptu dipping sauce of maple syrup, dijon mustard and tomato paste.

Here’s Kimya Dawson with I Like My Bike.

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Broccoli rabe with corn, tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Magpies

Broccoli rabe with corn, tomatoes, basil and mozzarella

Here’s my wish for labor day! I hope that everybody finds the work they need to do. I hope that everybody finds work that fulfills them creatively and keeps them lively and alive, and is financially rewarding enough that they have food to eat and a roof over their heads, that everybody is comfortable. I hope that everybody finds work that feels important, for themselves and the people and the world around them. I hope that everybody finds work that keeps them guessing from day-to-day, or that becomes pleasant as a routine–that they take some joy in rolling that boulder up the hill, in doing a good job. I hope we can all come together to help with the jobs that nobody wants to do, but which have to get done, that we can share them equally, and even find the value in them. I wish that the daily work of getting up and getting along and carrying on is light and bright and gratifying. And now I have to get to work, so I’ll quote Camus again, “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” And I’ll post a link to today’s Sunday interactive playlist. It is, of course, about work! I posted a list last year, but it wasn’t interactive, so this year I invite all of my friends to add to it, or leave a comment with the song of your choice, and I’ll try to remember to add it myself.

Broccoli rabe, corn, basil, tomatoes and mozzarella

I love broccoli rabe, but I always felt selfish making it, because I didn’t think anybody else in my family did. Imagine my surprise to find that they like it prepared this way!! We had some leftover corn on the cob, so I sliced off the kernels and combined them in a kind of quick fresh flavorful tomato-olive oil sauce. I combined this and the warm tender broccoli rabe with fresh broccoli and small pieces of mozzarella, which melted under the heat of the greens and tomatoes.

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Pistachio chocolate chip cake

Posted on August 30, 2013 by Magpies

Pistachio cardamom chocolate chip cake

Sad news about Seamus Heaney! It’s strange because I’ve been thinking about him lately. As you may have notice I’ve been semi-obsessed with mythological characters–reading about them, writing about them, reinterpreting the lives of ordinary people as if they were mythological characters, following some pattern of characteristics of all mythological characters in all cultures. Back in March I declared Heaney a poet laureate of The Ordinary, and I said this about him…

His poems seemed washed in the affectionate, melancholic light of memory, so that everything he touches quietly glows. We all cast mythical shadows in his poems, we’re all the gods and goddesses of our own creation. However humble our labors may seem, they become honorable in his words.

Probably not a very scholarly or accurate thing to say about his poetry, but that’s how it feels to me, and that’s how it fits my mood lately.

When asked to choose two poems that summed up his life’s work, he chose two with mythical overtones. In The Underground, he imagines a scene from his honeymoon in light of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

Damned if I look back!!

This is a mild, plainish cake, with subtle flavors. A tea-cake, if you will. Good with your coffee in the morning, your tea in the afternoon, and your wine after dinner. It’s very easy to make, I did it all in the food processor in a matter of minutes. It has pistachios ground right into the batter. It’s flavored with vanilla and cardamom, and of course it has chocolate chips, because all good cakes have chocolate chips!! I made it in the French style, with whipped eggs and no extra leavening.

Here’s Seamus Heaney reading The Underground, for your song today.

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Leek and caper tart

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Magpies

Leek and caper tart

Au Hazard Balthazar, an austere, scathingly honest film, feels beautifully simple and full of meaning at the same time. Much has been written about the possible meanings of the film, and in particular about its function as a religious parable. In this light, it does seem packed with symbolism: Balthazar has seven owners who could represent the seven deadly sins, the seven stations of the cross; he endures great suffering and is called a saint; the film is bathed in images of wine and bread, and in beautiful shots of hands. And yet aside from all of this, beneath all of this, Au Hazard Balthazar is the life story of a donkey. The film begins with a ringing of bells, and Balthazar as a foal, suckling from his mother on a beautiful hillside on a beautiful day. He’s given to some children as a pet, and they seem to love him. The next shot shows him many years later, as an adult, surrounded by a group of men who beat him brutally. And so the film goes, Balthazar passes from owner to owner, some are crueler and more abusive than others, but none of them are kind, none care about the donkey. The film is, in many ways, a study of human cruelty and indifference on every level. It’s a very depressing and pessimistic view of mankind. And yet there’s something transcendent and very nearly hopeful about the film–about the fact that somebody made an empathetic film about a donkey, about the chance to look at our world from a different perspective, and about the great beauty of the film itself. Ultimately, the bread and the wine don’t feel like religious imagery, to me, they feel very human, and they remind us that religion addresses our very human needs and frailties. And the beautiful disembodied shots of hands, which could be from paintings of saints, are living human hands, reaching to one another with kindness or cruelty or grace. At the end of the film, the wounded donkey is surrounded by sheep, they stream around him like a river, showing him the first real compassion and kindness that he’s experienced in the film. You feel such love for the donkey and for the sheep, who have found something that all the humans in the film have missed, when they clutter their lives with boredom and casual cruelty and self-imposed misery. I think as humans we tend to make everything hold meaning for us as humans, but what the sheep and the donkey know feels deeper than allegories and metaphors and stories humans need to tell ourselves, it feels fundamental and honest and beautiful, and the movie ends the way it began, with the ringing of warm bells.

I think my favorite thing we’ve gotten from the farm this summer is leeks. They’re supposed to be a peasant food, they’re supposed to be something that the characters in Au Hazard Balthazar might eat when they’re down on their luck. But they’re quite expensive around here! So it has been a treat to get thin, beautiful, sweet bundles of leeks from the farm. I decided to make a big flat tart with some of them…almost like a pizza with a pastry crust. I sauteed the leeks with thyme, capers and white wine, and then made a custard of eggs, milk, and two kinds of cheese. I suppose gruyere would be the ideal cheese to use here, but it’s beyond our budget at the moment, so I used a combination of sharp cheddar and mozzarella.

Here’s Ride Your Donkey by the Tennors.

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Semolina crusted roasted eggplant, potatoes and butterbeans

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Magpies

Semolina crusted eggplant, potatoes and butterbeans

It’s been a strange day. It’s been a strange week. I started this hours ago, and I was going to talk very wisely about Au Hazard Balthazar, but nobody slept last night, it’s rained hard all day, and the power went out. So here we are, hours later, and everything feels very serious, very heavy. The anniversary of the March on Washington–fifty years–sets you thinking about how much has changed and how much has not, both in the country and in the lives of all the people that lived through it all, and are still living through it every day. I’m scared of another war and sick of awards shows of any kind. It’s hard to know where to turn your mind. Well! The other day I accidentally discovered this video of The Washboard Serenaders, and I just love it. They seem so happy and alive and glad to be together making music. They combine humbling amounts of speed and technical prowess with real grace and space, or so it seems to me. Kazoo!

I tried to find more information on them, and apparently they were a loose collection of musicians that collaborated and travelled under various names, and went on to work with other groups in other styles. I love the idea of artistic collaboration, be it musical, or visual, or filmic. Especially when they’re bursting with love for what they’re doing and who they’re doing it with, as they seem to be here.

Here’s another video of The Washboard Rhythm Kings, with some astounding washboardery.

Semolina coated eggplant, potatoes and butterbeans

More crispy eggplant! Which is really the only way I like it. I combined slices of eggplant with slices of potato and big buttery butter beans, marinated them with fresh herbs, coated them all with egg and semolina flour, and roasted them in olive oil till they were crispy. They need a sauce, too, I think. We ate them with a spicy sauce made from fresh tomatoes and baby spinach, but any simple tomato sauce will do.

Here’s a whole album of The Washboard Rhythm Kings.

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Pecan, coconut, chocolate chip cookies and Cornmeal almond cinnamon cookies

Posted on August 27, 2013 by Magpies

Cornmeal almond cinnamon cookies

Last night we watched Au Hazard Balthazar. I found it incredibly moving and beautiful, but I need to think about it more before I talk about it, so I’ll talk instead about something that it reminded me of. Which is, of course, Zola’s Germinal, which takes place in the same part of the world about 100 years earlier. Au Hazard Balthazar is the story of a donkey, a working animal in rural France, who faces abuse and cruelty at the hands of his many masters. Germinal tells the story of a community of miners in rural France whose world is awash in casual and thoughtless cruelty, at the hands of their masters and amongst themselves. Of course this cruelty extends to the animals who live with them, who work for them, and whom they eat, it’s all part of a cycle of violence and poverty and need. And this cruelty is a source of tension and anxiety in the novel, it adds to the suspense of a situation that is becoming unbearable, which is about to violently explode. Souvarine is a young Russian revolutionary who believes the entire world needs to be razed clean with blood and violence. He cares for nothing and nobody, except for a fat rabbit that has the run of the house where he boards. And she loves him, too, she loves to sit on his lap while he gently strokes her ears. It’s a scene of real affection and peace, and it’s followed immediately by a scene in which the entire town feasts on rabbits. We worry for her, for Souvarine’s friend. Just as we worry for the finches tied sightless and motionless in cages for a singing contest at a fair, and for the horses who spend their entire lives in the pit, five hundred meters below the earth. On Etienne’s first day in the pit, he’s horrified by the hellish conditions there, and his journey back to the surface is delayed by the nightmarish scene of a horse being lowered into the pit.

There’s more about the horse’s fall into hell, and Zola continues to imagine the horses’ dreams of the pastures and sunshine of their youth. In a book as gritty and factual as Germinal, it’s a rare flight of fancy. It’s this empathy that makes you feel more moved by the plight of the humans, and gives you hope that they will learn to be kinder to each other. If you can understand the suffering of a horse, and can sympathize with the animal, you can’t be blind to the suffering of your fellow humans, you can’t have turned yourself off and resigned yourself to the cruelty of the world. You can allow yourself the euphoric pleasure of dreaming of a day when everybody is equal, and justice reigns, and “all the populations of the earth are totally transformed without a single window being broken or a drop of blood being spilled.”

Pecan chocolate coconut cookies

I’ve been making lots of cookies, lately, so I thought I’d tell you about two kinds at once. They’re both very easy and quick. I made them both entirely in the food processor, but if you don’t have one you could make them by hand. One is a pecan coconut chocolate chip. It’s chewy and crispy and very sweet–like a candy bar almost! But irresistibly good. The other is cormeal, almond cinnamon. It’s more of a cakey cookie, soft and dense. But it has a built-in crunch from cornmeal and finely ground almonds. I said almond and cinnamon remind me of Christmas, and David said he could eat these all the year round.

Here’s Odetta with All the Pretty Horses.

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Pistachio basil curry with crispy pistachio crusted eggplant sticks

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Magpies

Pistachio basil curry

Well the moon is broken
And the sky is cracked
Come on up to the house
The only things that you can see
Is all that you lack
Come on up to the house

All your cryin don’t do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross
We can use the wood
Come on up to the house

So goeth Tom Waits’ Come on up to the House, and so goeth our interactive Sunday playlist. We’re looking for songs about strange and intriguing places. They could be hotels, houses, islands, parks, churches, but there should be something mysterious about them, something that makes you want to explore them. Maybe they’re sheltering, maybe they’re scary, but they’re the stuff of local legend.

Pistachio crusted eggplant

Wasn’t this a green meal? It’s a curry with chickpeas, red peppers and cherry tomatoes in a sweet spicy sauce of pistachios, baby spinach, and lots of basil. And I made thinly sliced crispy pistachio-crusted eggplant to go with it.

Here’s a link to your interactive playlist.
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Mint leaf and chocolate chip cookies

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Magpies

Mint leaf and chocolate chip cookies

I think I’ll change the name of The Ordinary to Tales of the towpath. Today’s tale is my favorite kind of story, seemingly uneventful and yet somehow significant. Here’s how it all began. Last night David’s beautiful sister and her beautiful wife and their beautiful 5-week old daughter came by for dinner. After, we wanted to go for a walk, because the air was perfect. Of course I thought of the towpath because I always think of the towpath, and because the town was rapidly filling with tourists here for the fire works. At first it was bright enough…there were few trees and the way was lined with porch lights and street lights. After about a block the streetlights stopped and a tunnel of trees arched over the path, making it shadowy and dark. The boys raced into this, laughing and gleaming. Clio pulled my arm off trying to reach them, so I asked Malcolm to slow down, but he just laughed and said “You can’t catch us!” Well, obviously I can’t, but Clio can, so I let her go! (I told you this is an uneventful story!) She raced into the tunnel of dark trees, and then all three of them adventured through together: Clio of the sea-grey eyes, Isaac with the sun-bright hair, and fast-swimming Malcolm. They flew to the next island of light, further down the path, and danced in mad circles, trying to catch Clio. I walked into the tunnel of trees at my own slow pace. It wasn’t a frightening darkness, here in the tunnel, it was the good kind of darkness that transforms something well-known into something mysteriously beautiful. The branches were dark as night, but the sky reflected in the water had a lingering lilac lightness to it. Behind me walked my family with a brand new life, and ahead of me danced my life…life I had made and life that has made me. When I reached the light I caught Clio’s leash and we all went into town and got ice cream. It was fun. The end. (In literature, this is known as an Isaacian ending.)

Malcolm had the genius idea to make mint chocolate chip cookies with fresh mint from our garden!! He wanted them to have extra sugar and extra vanilla in them, so they do. They were surprisingly delicious. I didn’t know how the mint would like being baked, but it seemed to like it just fine. Perfectly minty, if you know what I mean. I used the mint growing wildly in our garden, and I’m not sure what kind it is, but I think any fresh mint would do. I made these completely in the food processor, but you could chop the mint finely with a knife if you don’t have one.

Here’s Whistling in the Dark by They Might Be Giants, which is Malcolm’s favorite song at the moment.
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Crispy potatoes with peppers, tomatoes, and pine nut chipotle aioli

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Magpies

Tomatoes, yellow squash and peppers

Every day lately, Malcolm has wanted nothing but to go to the river. The river! He wakes in the morning and thinks about walking down to the river, he wants to spend the long hot afternoon there, he wants to go back after dinner when the sinking sun makes a bright path on the darkening water. He and Clio splash in like some sort of mythical dolphin-otters, she bounds after sticks, and he dives for stones. When we walk home he’s bright and wet and barefoot, and he has an armful of rocks swaddled in his soaking shirt. Our house is full of stones! River stones, creek stones, pebbles from the seaside. Smooth black stones, dusky grey stones, pockmarked stones, and craggy striated rocks, stones that were slick and beautiful when wet, and now seem dusty and plain, but still worth keeping. We have a wooden bowl on our kitchen table spilling over with stones of every size. Our outside table is piled with stones, my desk has little heaps of small smooth pebbles, Malcolm’s desk is covered with a ruckus of rocks, and he’s got boxes heavy with many more of them. The washing machine is piled with stones from boys’ pockets. We all collect them, we all bring handfuls into the house. They seem full of meaning and life, with all their weighty calm; they’re so silent and still, but surely they hold old stories and myths and spirits inside of them. I love the cairns throughout our house, marking our paths, showing us where to go and where we’ve been, spelling our time here, commemorating our adventures; so hard to clean around, such a sweet testament to our collective madness.

pine nut chipoptle aioli

This meal is like a mound of stones! Well, if the potatoes were stones, and if they were covered by a fresh, juicy spicy sauce, and a smooth very tasty aioli on top! I was thinking of the tapas dish Patatas bravas when I made this. So it’s got crispy sage-roasted potatoes–I used the ones from the farm and they’re tiny, only about half an inch across. If you have larger ones, just cut them into smaller pieces. Atop this we piled tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers and yellow squash–all from the farm. And my favorite part was the pine nut chipotle aioli. Simple but with a smoky haunting flavor. It would be good with any other kinds of roasted vegetables as well, I think.

Here’s Bill Evans with Milestones.

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Out of the Ordinary

extraordinary food from an ordinary kitchen

Category Archives: recipe

Cornmeal-crusted roasted potatoes

Leeks, white beans and French feta AND smoked eggplant-couscous croquettes

Broccoli rabe with corn, tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella

Pistachio chocolate chip cake

Leek and caper tart

Semolina crusted roasted eggplant, potatoes and butterbeans

Pistachio basil curry with crispy pistachio crusted eggplant sticks

Crispy potatoes with peppers, tomatoes, and pine nut chipotle aioli

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