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Almond aioli

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almond aioli

Memorial day gets me all confused. So full of mixed emotions. Part of me can’t stop thinking about how war is so horrible, in every way. Part of me can’t not dwell on the fact that we should have figured that out. Why haven’t we stopped it? How can we allow something so unspeakably evil to continue, seemingly perpetually? It’s impossible not to think about these questions, today, but I know this isn’t the place to address them, or the day.

And I do love the idea of taking a day to remember. Time is running and passing like a caravan freighter, and I love to think that, as a nation, we stop everything for one day, to remember. And to be grateful. And to celebrate being with our friends and our family. And, yes, of course I love the idea that the way we celebrate is by making a meal together, because, as far as I can tell, after the parade, that’s what memorial day is all about.

So, if you happen to be grilling anything this weekend, think about this almond aioli as an accompaniment! We don’t eat mayonnaise in my family. David had a supermarket deli job as a teenager, and that gave him a healthy aversion to mayonnaise from which he will never recover. I like it, but I don’t need to eat it. I’m okay without it. I make it, from time to time, and that’s nice, but I eat it all by myself. Well…I had the bright idea to make it with almonds instead of eggs. I think it turned out very nice!! It’s intensely flavorful, with dijon, capers, and roasted garlic. So you just need a bit. I’ve been putting it on everything!! Roasted veg, beans & greens stews, french fries. I think it would be lovely with grilled vegetables. It didn’t get quite as smooth as mayonnaise, but I made it in my blender. I wonder if you had a good food processor if it would get more creamy? It’s good, anyway, with a bit of texture.

Here’s Bob Dylan’s Two Soldiers. So sad and beautiful.

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Pastry cream ice cream

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Apricot – cassis ice cream

I’m absurdly excited about this! I feel like it’s a major culinary breakthrough! I’m sure that either people have been doing it for centuries, or there’s some reason they haven’t that I’ll discover eventually, but for now I have a new medium to explore. As I’m sure you’ll recall, on the last episode of As The Ordinary Turns, we made apricot cassis pastry cream to accompany a cake. Well, there was quite a bit left over, and the mad scientists of The Ordinary developed quite a fiendish gleam in their eye. They headed into the kitchens with their bowl of pastry cream, ready to hit it with their freeze ray!! I love ice cream, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s my favorite. My first and longest lasting job (to this day!) was as a soda jerk. I recall, back in those days, I noticed something interesting about the various brands of ice cream we carried at the ice cream parlor. Some turned nice and creamy and smooth as they melted, some melted into a weird sticky jelly-like substance. Since those days, I’ve made my own ice cream, many a time, and I’ve always had trouble making it thick and creamy. It always melts into something like milk. Well, here was a conundrum. How to thicken it without adding guar gum or carageenan or whatever else commercial companies add? A few months ago, when I discovered pastry cream, and developed a little admiring crush on the creamy substance, I began to ponder the possibility of freezing it. When you make ice cream, you generally start with a custard, and then you add unwhipped heavy cream. (At least that’s how I’ve always made it.) What is pastry cream but a thicker, more substantial custard? Why shouldn’t it freeze nicely? And why not lightly whip the cream before you add it, for an even creamier texture? So that’s what we did. It worked!! It’s thick and creamy. You can actually scoop it with an ice cream scoop, and it stays in a little ball!! I’ve never been able to do that with home made ice cream!! I use an old donvier ice cream maker, but I wonder how this would work on a more fancy one. I’ll have to try it some day and find out – there are so many different flavors to try!!

**update** We tried this again last night, but we didn’t whip the cream before we stirred it in (Malcolm’s suggestion). It might have turned out even creamier. If you whip the cream it’s like a frozen mousse, which is nice, but if you don’t, it might feel more like authentic ice cream. Nice both ways!

Here’s Ice Cream Man by Jonathan Richman.
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Apricot almond cake w/ apricot-cassis cream

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Apricot almond cake

I love the idea of a cake with apricot glaze – I always have. It’s strangely associated with some childhood notion of sophistication in edible form. Strange, because I can’t remember the actual moment that I ate an elegant cake with an apricot glaze. I can remember plenty of battenburg cakes, wrapped in plastic like the block of modeling clay that they resembled. They had a layer of apricot glaze under their oddly chewy marzipan layer. I loved them! But I’m sure I never thought of them as elegant. The truth is, whether sophisticated or not, a layer of apricot makes sense in a cake! It adds a pleasant fruity tartness that offsets the sweetness of whatever else happens to be in the cake. This cake happens to have almonds – a classic match with apricots – and bittersweet chocolate, which adds its own version of bitter-with-sweet, to complement the apricots.

Inexplicably, I became semi-obsessed with making apricot-cassis cream. I thought about a million different things to make, but I kept returning to this. So I turned to my new BFF, the pastry cream, and I added a purée made of apricots and cassis, and then folded in a little lightly whipped cream. I thought it was very nice with the cake – I don’t think I’ve ever had pastry cream or any of its subsidiaries alongside a cake before, but I thought it was a lovely combination of textures. You could easily eat the apricot cream on its own as a mousse, with some crispy cookies!

I just can’t not share this! It’s a song called Apricot, by the Armenian Navy Band, and it has my Malcolm dancing around the room in his pjs.
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Spring herbs & greens tart

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Garden

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot–
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not–
Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign;
‘Tis very sure God walks in mine.
-Thomas Edward Brown

I used to love this poem, when I was little. I know … it’s overblown, it’s stilted, it’s very Victorian, but I thought it was great. I learned recently that the poem spawned a word, “godwottery.” Godwattery refers to a) gardening in an elaborate and affected style, or, b) affected use of archaic language. I love that! I love the word, I love the idea, and the gentle teasing quality of the whole arrangement.

My parents gave me a small part of the yard to make a garden in. I used to plan it furiously. I had a little garden book. I drew pictures, I researched seeds. I visited the Cloisters in New York. I read overwrought victorian poetry about gardens. I was never quite as good at actually planting the garden, though, or weeding it, or taking care of it. I did make a nice little space, for a while. Where we live now, we have a tiny yard, and an even tinier space set aside for a garden. We grew tomatoes for a few years, but we’re giving the soil a break, and this year we’re planting herbs and small greens. I’m thrilled! I’ve always loved a tangled combination of greens and herbs in any food. Not carefully planned out, but all thrown wildly together, so you get a small taste of each, and it forms a beautiful, complicated whole. I love the way this works year round. In winter you have kale and spinach, winter savory and rosemary. In summer chard, more spinach, basil and thyme. In fall, small, bitter greens, sorrel and sage. In the spring – you have a big jumble of small spicy sassy plants. Chervil and tarragon, tiny beet greens, arugula, lovage, summer savory. (I was never the most organized farmer – this is more my bright idea about how things might fit togehter! The names are a pretty part of the plan!)

I love recipes that combine a wild mix of herbs and greens. Soup meagre, or small salads that combine a few herbs and greens. You can mix them with butter, or toss them with pasta or mashed potatoes. Or bake them into a tart! Which is what I did! I combined baby arugula, baby spinach, basil, summer savory, tarragon, chervil, parsley, bull’s blood beet leaves, lovage, and chives. Most of these things we’re growing; some I bought. It doesn’t matter! It all tastes good! You can use whatever you like – whatever you can find. The only other flavoring I used was a clove of roasted garlic. And the crust has some ground pecans – a nice nutty combination with the herbs. I think it turned out very nice – every bite has a new combination of flavors. It’s possible to distinguish one or two, now and again, or just to enjoy them as they come.

Here’s footage of Louis Armstrong with Royal Garden Blues
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Tomato & basil toasts

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The sky is flat, dark, slate grey, gathering over the roofs and trees to the southwest. The sky is bright on the other side of the horizon, but the rooms of our house are becoming dusky-dark. The bright green leaves are showing their pale undersides, and a spattering rain is edging over the house. The wind smells remarkable – cool and green and sharp, after a day of damp and heavy air. A storm is coming! I’m a little phobic about storms. It’s tedious for my family. I won’t leave the house if a storm is predicted. Well – that’s not quite true any more, because they predict storms every day from May to September in this day and age, and I do leave the house in every once in a while during those months. The truth is, though, that I love a good storm, if all of my people are safe and sheltered. Storms seem to capture so many seasons and hours of the day in their cycle of anticipation and relief. The heavy stillness that precedes them, which you can feel weighing you down; the drama of the storm itself; the clearness of the world when it’s all over. And storms are creatures of the summertime, of course. Warm and ripe and bursting – like summer tomatoes. We don’t have any summer tomatoes, yet, but we do have lots of basil! And half a ciabatta baguette to use up! So I made these tomato basil toasts. This could probably be called bruscetta, actually. And it’s one of those things that’s so simple, you feel silly posting a recipe. But it’s perfectly delicious. I add capers and roasted garlic, to the trinity of tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella. The juice of the tomatoes mingles with a bit of olive oil and balsamic to create a lovely juicy sauce to dip your bread in. And that’s about it!

Here’s The Storms are on the Ocean by The Carter Family. I really love this song! It’s so driving, in their understated way.
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Brown butter caramel ice cream with chocolate chips

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Brown butter – chocolate chip ice cream

This is a story of redemption! This is a story of ice cream that lost its way, somewhere on the journey, but found it again to become glorious. (And was then eaten.) It started out with so much promise. A lovely brown butter caramel was made, and it was worked into a custard that thickened and didn’t curdle. Good custard!
Obedient custard! And then it sat in the fridge all day in a spacious bowl, getting nice and chilled, just like you hoped it would. But when you tried to put it in your little antiquated ice cream maker, it was all, “Whatever, I’m not going to freeze! That’s so totally uncool!” You tried a few times. You coaxed it, you tried to talk its language. To no avail. So, in despair, you set it aside. And it spent some time in the cold dark underworld we’ll call your freezer. Hobnobbing with the ne’er-do-well frozen peas, the reprobate frozen waffles. Chilling story! The next morning, faced with the harsh light of day, the ice cream was a mess. Weirdly icy in the middle, with a strange sugary coating on top. Well, we’ve all been there. We all know what it’s like the next morning. But you gave it what for! You worked it up good! And what you had before you, after a rigorous workout, was a creamy, slightly icy confection that you really needed to eat three bowls at a time.

So! If you have a regular functioning way to make ice cream, you don’t need to go through all this drama. You can just make the ice cream. I started by browning some butter; added the brown butter to some brown sugar; cooked till it was bubbly (but not petrified); made that into a custard, with the slight addition of a tablespoonful of tapioca flour. To thicken and preserve against curdling. You could easily leave this out or add the same amount of cornflour. I added chocolate chips, but I processed them first in my tiny food processor. This meant that you had some solidly chunky chocolate pieces, and some pieces of flaky chocolate “dust.” I think this was one of the absolute best things about this ice cream!! You could also just chop the chocolate chips with a big knife, and be sure to include all the little gravelly bits, if you don’t have a processor.

Here’s Blackalicious with The Fall and Rise of Elliot Brown

THE CUSTARD

3 T butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 cups milk
1 T tapioca or corn flour
pinch salt
1/2 t cinnamon
2 eggs
1 T vanilla

1 cup heavy cream
1/2 t seasalt

Warm the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat till it’s toasty and brown. (Ten minutes?) You’ll have brown solids on the bottom of the pan. Strain through a paper towel, collecting the brown liquidy part in a clean bowl.

Put the brown butter back into a saucepan with the sugar, and heat again at medium heat till the sugar is melted and boiling away. After about 1 minute of boiling, take it off the heat.

In a small bowl, combine the tapioca flour with a bit of the milk. Whisk to mix well. Pour this mixture into the rest of the milk, and pour it all into the sugar/butter combination. Whisk it all together until it’s well combined, and add the vanilla and the salt and cinnamon.

In the same bowl, whisk the eggs till they’re light and fluffy. In a slow stream, add the warm milk, whisking the whole time. Then pour the whole mix back into the saucepan, and cook over low heat, whisking the whole time, for about 10 minutes. You don’t want to let anything boil, or the eggs will curdle everything. After 10 minutes, it will just leave a light coating on the back of your spoon.

Pour it into a cool bowl, cover, put in the fridge, and leave for 5 hours or over night.

When you’re ready to freeze it…process 1 cup of good bittersweet chocolate chips for about a minute, till they’re mostly in tact, but they have some flaky dusty bits of chocolate all around them. Stir this into your custard, stir in the heavy cream, and then freeze according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. I shook a bit of sea salt in before freezing as well!

Chard, raisin, pecan pesto & black pepper pasta

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Chard, pecan, golden raisin pesto

I had a little tantrum yesterday. It was not my proudest moment. It was about ice cream – I was like the kid that drops the ice cream cone, except that instead of tears there was lots of swearing and self-pity. Why did this happen? Let’s take it back. As they say in the TV shows, 18 hours earlier…

The night before I’d mixed some yeast and sugar and a little bit of flour – I’d made a starter. Then I’d gone to bed and thought about all of the interesting things I could make to go with my bread. The next morning I’d added all the other ingredients for the bread, and I had, almost simultaneously, made a brown butter caramel custard to turn into ice cream later in the day. For some reason, I cooked the heck out of everything in the house yesterday! I wanted to make everything from scratch. Bread, pasta, sauce, ice cream. Why? I don’t know! I was seized by some dormant Little House on the Prairie-longing, perhaps. But it all seemed so easy and pleasant. Everything was just a little bit of effort now, a little bit more later. I had fun kneading the dough, I didn’t panic whilst making the custard. I felt positively light-hearted!

Then things started to go wrong, as they usually do. But I couldn’t take it in stride, for some reason. The bread had a really nice crust, but the inside didn’t have the big holes I was hoping for. I really want to make bread with big holes. The pasta was fine, I think, but Isaac wouldn’t even try it. He always eats pasta, and he would not take one bite. Not one! Malcolm ate his pasta like a dog, which is probably normal behavior for a nine-year-old boy, but it did me in. He relented and ate with a knife and fork, but I’d gone to the dark side, by then. And then the mother-flipping ice cream wouldn’t freeze. I have a child’s toy of an ice cream maker from the 80s. It’s not ideal, but it does the job, usually. Not last night. Sigh.

I sat in the backyard enjoying the silence and the greenness and the smell of our lilacs and roses, and the sight of tiny little fireflies. (Why have I never noticed them before? Are they just young fireflies? They’re lovely!) The boys came out and asked for dessert. Goddamn dessert. Then came the cursing, the regret over wasted ingredients, the desire for one peaceful meal, the wistfulness for the ice cream that might have been. I threw squares of bittersweet chocolate at them, which they absconded with happily. Hopefully they’ll remember that, rather than be scarred for life by their mother’s moodiness.

This pesto is really tasty, though, I think! One of my all time favorite combinations is greens, raisins and nuts. (I’ve said it many times, I know!) I’ve baked it into savory pies plenty of times, and it was time to try something different. I thought to myself, why not put it all together? I love pesto, and I like to experiment with different kinds. So that’s what I did. You’ve got chard, pecans, almonds (because I didn’t have many pecans left), golden raisins, roasted garlic, rosemary and smoked paprika. Savory, sweet, and a little smoky.

Here’s Tom Waits with All the World is Green. I love this song, I’ve listened to it so much lately. And all the world is green, right now! And this pesto is a lovely, mossy sort of green.
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Black barley with baby kale (and roasted mushrooms, potatoes & pecans)

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Barley & kale

I know I shouldn’t go on about it, but it’s on my mind. My dog died a couple of months ago. I still miss her everyday. I still look for her each morning, where her bed used to be. I dream about her incessantly. I’ve dreamt of her as a puppy, I’ve dreamt that she’s lost or not well, and I can’t save her, I’ve dreamt that she never died at all. The strangest dream was probably the most like actual life. She died, and I missed her, and it felt so unaccountable. Why do the most literal dreams feel so odd? I don’t want another dog, I really don’t. But I miss canine companionship. Our house feels so human, somehow, without her. The other day Isaac said, “Mom, you can’t just go up and pet every dog you see!” And he’s probably right, but that’s what I’ve been doing, and trying not to think that Steenbeck would have gone crazy if I’d gone home smelling like another dog. So yesterday, when I went to get the boys from school, and I saw a tiny, dark, bundle of puppyhood…I attacked it. I dropped everything (literally! it’s lucky no little children were standing below me because my umbrella is quite pointy). I grabbed it. Oh, the soft, round little belly. The hot little body, the racing heart. The little puppy eyes and ears! The puppy smell!!!! She didn’t really want to be held by me – she wanted to be running around, with the kids her own age. But I wasn’t taking the hint. I couldn’t let her go. My boys looked at me with sideways, skeptical looks. “Who is that?” they asked? The little kids who actually owned the dog danced around me, looking anxious. “When is she going to give it back?” they asked their nanny. Never! I cried. But I did. I put her down. The little dog was sort of blacky brown. She had that short, dark fur that looks almost purple or blue in certain lights. In other words, she looked like black barley. You see? There is a connection. Barley would be a good name for a dog, wouldn’t it?

This black barley dish is almost like a risotto, but like a risotto made by a very lazy person that didn’t want to make a broth or stir it every minute of the day. The barley is cooked till it’s tender but toothsome (if that means al dente). And it makes its own creamy sort of sauce, just like a risotto. I warmed some butter and white wine and herbs in a big frying pan, and added the barley with its creamy broth. Then I added some water and let that cook down a bit. I found baby kale at the grocery store, and I was quite excited about it. It does have a kale taste, but not as assertively. It has a little bite. I cooked it for much less time than I usually cook kale – I tossed it into the barley broth towards the end, and cooked till it was nicely wilted. (You could easily use regular kale, cooked first, or baby spinach, which wouldn’t need to be cooked at all.) I also made roasted mushrooms and tiny crispy roasted potatoes, to toss on the dish. And I toasted some pecans. I like all of these tastes together – and they all go so well with sage, rosemary and thyme, which I used to flavor pretty much every element involved. I topped mine with some crumbled bleu cheese, too, which added a lovely creamy/salty element, but nobody else in my family did, cause they’re not fans of the bleu cheese. The whole thing added up to a very savory, meaty meal – the smell of barley and roasted mushrooms lingered in my house all evening. It’s a nice smell!

Here’s Rebecca Sugar with Sleepy Puppies. I think it’s lovely!
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Banana, peanut butter, chocolate chip cake

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Peanut butter, banana, chocolate chip cake

There’s a flea market just down the road from us. It’s not the kind I remember from childhood, with fake leather boots, airbrushed t-shirts, rows and rows of new, cheap shiny things. This one is an antique flea market. You can find anything there. Any strange object that you can imagine, will one day show up at this flea market. The sellers always seem so Dickensian. I wonder about their lives – how far they’ve travelled, how they’ve come across all of these treasures, how much of their history is packed into their vans and pick-up trucks. And every object could tell a story. From old happy meal toys, two for a dollar (my poor boys aren’t ever going to go to an actual McDonalds) to super-8 cameras, ottomans, settees, paintings, scooters, antiquated medical equipment, old woodworking tools, beads, baubles, entire family photo albums, magic lantern slides, daguerreotypes… And of course, vintage military supplies. Knives, uniforms, binoculars, shell cases, canteens – all camouflage and olive drab and khaki. It always makes me think of Tom Waits’ Soldier’s Things…

A tinker, a tailor
A soldier’s things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
And this one is for bravery
And this one is for me
And everything’s a dollar
In this box

When I was little I wanted to write a story that juxtaposed scenes in a museum, of armor or weapons, with scenes of those weapons being used – the actual story of the people that killed with them, or died by them. Maybe I will some day!

My favorite thing to find at the flea, lately, is china. Mismatched, cracked, beautiful plates and bowls. Well, on mothers’ day, David bought me a cake plate! I’m so excited! I’ve never had one, and this one is a beauty. From the fifties, maybe. Lovely, milky translucent form, with a foot, and a sweet silvery-gold polka-dot fleur-de-lis pattern. Of course I had to make a cake! We had two extremely ripe bananas. I wanted to do something a little different with them. I thought about one of David & Malcolm’s favorite sandwich variations – banana and peanut butter. And the rest is history!!

Tom Waits – Soldier’s Things
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Eggplant pie with greens, quince, and hazelnut

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Eggplant pie with greens, quince & hazelnuts

We started bird watching back in our courting days. We’d wake up as close to dawn as we could muster, we’d stop at Dunkin Donuts for some sweet coffee, and we’d listen to the Sudson Country radio show on the way out. Despite having been born in Kansas, I’d never listened to a lot of country music, and I’d never heard the classics. Kitty Wells, the undisputed queen of country; Lefty Frizzell, with his sweet, gentle voice; Hank Williams, with his twangy sass – they all seemed to fit, somehow, with our sleepy mood and the slanting morning light. Then we’d find our field or our trail, and we’d begin the slow, silent walk, stopping at every flutter of wings in the trees over our heads. It’s hard to describe the thrill of seeing your first yellowthroat, your first oriole, warblers, vireos…good lord – wood thrushes and veeries – with their hopeful, haunting songs. It boggled my mind that all of these birds had been here, all along. They weren’t new. I’d never bothered to look at them, I’d never taken the time to look up, and discover the teeming world in the tangled branches of the trees. We’d come home and write our finds in a little turquoise-covered blank book that I’d been saving for years for something special. Then we’d check each other for ticks. Birdwatching is a little like falling in love, in a way – you catch a glimpse of something bright and beautiful. You can’t believe it’s really alive, with its small warmth and its fast-beating heart. You’ve heard about it; you’ve read about it in your bird book. Other people claim to have seen it, but, frankly, you’re a little skeptical. You’re not convinced it even exists. Then when you’ve got it, you hold it in your sight, you know you’ll never understand it, but you try to identify it, this wild, fragile, lively thing.

We don’t have a lot of chances to go bird watching any more, what with children and real life and all of their demands. But we went on a lovely bike ride this morning, and it makes me happy to know they’re all still there. We can still catch a glimpse of a bird and know what we’re seeing. We’ll hear a sweet little song, or a hoarse call, and we know what we’re hearing. We’re still part of their world, and they’re still part of ours.

Eggplant pie

So! Eggplant pie! It’s got thin layers of crispy rosemary/balsamic-marinated breaded eggplant. It’s got layers of chard and spinach, sauteed with garlic and red pepper and mixed with quince jam. It’s got layers of crispy toasted hazelnuts, and it’s got layers of melted cheese. Odd combination, you say? Oddly perfect together!! All in a crispy crust. If I do say so myself (when have I not, eh?) it turned out really delicious. I think this would be nice for a party or a picnic, because it tastes good even when it’s not hot out of the oven, and it holds together well for carrying around with you. So you can take it for an evening-time picnic, and walk around with it as you look for all the birds that come out at in the gloaming!

Here’s Left Frizzell with I Love You A Thousand Ways.
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