Although I've been writing this blog for a (relatively) long time, this is the first time I've been tagged for a meme, by The Wednesday Chef. I'm to go back to my 23rd entry (May 7, 2003) and rerecord my 5th line. Unfortunately it's not a very interesting one:

I also sauteed some bulk turkey sausage and then added sliced garlic (which burned while I wasn't paying attention so I picked it all out and threw it away) and some broccoli.

Three things struck me when I read this over. First, I have a tendancy to try to fit the whole recipe in one sentence. I guess I imagine it gets across how easy whatever I'm making is to do (but probably just muddies the whole recipe). Second, that I burned garlic in the pan and didn't throw the entire pan out. I wish I could remember how it tasted; I just wonder if my standards have changed since 2003. Third, the entry was labeled Comfort Food and polenta was the star of the dish, so I'm just struck by how "comfort food" always means carbs to me and now I know there's a scientific reason behind it.

When I wrote this my life was so different. I didn't have to chop furtively while the baby naps. I worked in an office with a test kitchen. My zeal for cooking was fresh, and every technique and ingredient was new. (Not that I'm an old hand at it now, but 2 1/2 years does make a difference.) I still turn to food for comfort, though. In fact, I've been wondering lately if I do it too much, but reading my old entry give me some reassurance, because it's not a new development, and I think it's just fine.

I realized that I'll never post this if I have to come up with 5 folks who would appreciate being tagged, so I'll just list out the 2 I think would like it, and if anyone else wants to give it a go you can e-mail me to let me know. Julie's blog, Juggling in My Kitchen, is so new that she might have to alter the rules to come up with something (maybe 23rd line, 5th word?). And the Crash Test Kitchen folks (www.crashtestkitchen.com) seem so game, I think they might like to give it a go (if they haven't been tagged already).

Posted by Kim at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Eating out during our visit to the Finger Lakes was an extremely frustrating experience. August goes to bed around 7, 8 at the latest, so dinner out wasn't really an option (I also feel weird about taking him to a nice place for dinner). I had picked out a few restaurants, most of them at wineries, but found out that during the off season most of them don't serve lunch, and many of them aren't open early in the week, which was when we were there. Most of the time I found this out in advance, but we had one very frustrating day where we showed up and the place was closed, so we ended up at Denny's.

I did have a few good meals, even if it wasn't fine dining.

Market Street in Corning was destroyed by flooding a couple decades back and was rebuilt as a nice, pedestrian-friendly shopping district. I can't help but feel it caters mainly to those who work for the glass company Corning, which has offices nearby; it almost felt like it was part of a Corning "campus," especially since most of the shops were closed on Sunday and it was really a ghost town. But we managed to find a good pizza place that was open and seemed to attract lots of locals. We also went to Old World Cafe for lunch one day and topped off the meal with some Purity ice cream, which is a "crunchy" (in a Moosewood sort of way) Ithaca brand. I tried the pumpkin, which seemed a little crumbly, but Todd's over-the-top combo of all sorts of nuts and caramel and fudge was creamy and good (I think pumpkin ice cream just tends to be a little bit crumbly, I guess because a lot of the cream is replaced with the squash).

In Skaneateles (which is the place to stay if you like upper-scale touristy little lakefront villages) we had a memorable meal at Doug's Fish Fry, where they get fish from Boston 5 times a week and have placards on their posted menu that say when the different seafood came in. Also fantastic soft-serve custard, which we ate in a fresh peach sundae. I gave August a little bit of the creamy, mild fish, which he didn't seem to mind. It has a fantastic thick crust that almost seems to seal the fish in and steam it.

In Rochester we tracked down the original Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, and though I haven't been to the NY one I am sure they haven't been able to reproduce the "genuine honkey-tonk" vibe of the place. First, it's in Rochester, which overall seems to be an armpit of a city (we could've missed the beautiful areas of the city, but if so they're hiding them pretty well). It's right next to a river, which it has views of, but it's a skanky looking, spider infested river. One of the waitresses came over to coo at August and said, "Are you flirting with the hot Dino girls?" So I had to have a beer and some ribs, which were really good, with decent coleslaw and dirty corn. Todd had a gumbo side that was fantastic, rich and gumbo-ey. It made me wonder what that gumbo flavor is. Is it a dark roux? What is file? Is that in there? Because a couple days later he had gumbo at Doug's that was basically minestrone with shrimp and okra. I wasn't impressed by Todd's brisket and pulled pork, but I gather from the menu that the chicken's the thing there. Key lime pie was good, but sweet potato was teeth-achingly sweet.

Posted by Kim at 09:15 AM | Permalink

We spent last week in the Finger Lakes, and I made it into a gigantic shopping trip, so we came home with a huge load of food:

Red Jacket Orchard turned out to be a farmstand on an ugly stretch of commercial highway, but I did pick up some apples, maple syrup and a New Hope Mills whole wheat pancake mix. It was our first stop and these items were my priority.

Arbor Hill Grapery was pretty touristy and commercial, but we tasted some things we liked there, including their classic traminette, a wine grape developed, I think, at Cornell specifically for the region (which is temperate because of all the lakes) from the Gewurztraminer grape. To me this seems even more drinkable than the Alsatian wine (which I like), spicy and fruity and really easy going down. We also got some Gewurtz jelly and balsamic-style vinegar.

One of my favorite stops was at Bellwether (hard cider), where the proprieter apologized for not being dressed up because they were bottling on the day I visited and then told me about Johnny Appleseed, who was basically a bootlegger, planting apple seeds for hard cider (since apples from seeds are unreliable and rarely edible). We brought home a bottle of his Liberty Spy Hard Cider and some peach-tamarind chutney.

Maybe part of the reason I enjoyed Bellwether so much was because the day before we stopped at Belhurst castle and tried some of their wines. The woman doing the tasting rushed me to choose what I wanted to try, and when she left mid-tasting the man who took over gave me the same spiel, verbatim. Just employees, and it felt like it. I bought a bottle there anyway; meant to get a cabernet franc and picked up a merlot by mistake, which I hadn't even tried.

Todd took a tour of the Ommegang brewery (while I sat in the car with the sleeping baby) and bought a giant bottle of the Abby Ale, which he had tried in a restaurant the night before and loved. Really smooth (it didn't give me that bitter beer shiver I usually get).

The New Hope Mills factory shop isn't much to look at, and after hunting it down we felt like fools until I went inside. Dollar bags of oatmeal, ground almonds, steel-cut oats and other flours. I also got cornmeal and, because we needed a snack, s'mores snack mix, maltballs and dried fruit.

We missed the grape festival in Naples by just a few days, so I had to pick up some grape cookies (Todd says they're like fig newtons, but I thought they were more like soft sugar cookies folded in half over a grape filling), peaches and gourds at Joseph's Wayside Stand.

At the Cooperstown farmers' market I rounded out my shopping with a tomato, zucchini, eggplant, buttercup squash and an English tea cakes sampler, which included a Welsh cookie, which looked like a scone but crumbled like a cookie, and three tarts: lemon, pecan and almond-cake. Also got a sunshine squash (or something like that) at the farmers' market in Ithaca.

Posted by Kim at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Whenever I have an ingredient left over from a recipe I feel a lot of pressure to use it up before it goes bad. Dairy is particularly stressful, so some buttermilk I had in the fridge was making me crazy. Since buttermilk is about the same thing as yogurt, I decided to make a lassi, and it was really great, cool and refreshing (yes, refreshing; must be the tartness that keeps it from being dairy overkill). I thought strawberry and buttermilk were a traditional combo, but then I've been wanting to make a cardamom lassi.

It was so easy to just throw into the blender a couple of green cardamom pods, a few frozen strawberries, sugar to taste and about 1 1/2 cups buttermilk. I let it sit in the fridge for a while to marry the flavors and get it nice and cool.

Posted by Kim at 09:25 PM | Permalink

I ate this combo for lunch yesterday and for dinner tonight, in two different guises. Tonight I dressed mixed greens with a balsamic-style cider vinaigrette, then tossed them with cubed cantal, diced apple and toasted walnuts. It was a great combo, the crisp, tart, sweet apple and bitterness from the greens and walnuts balancing the richness of the cheese and olive oil in the dressing.

Yesterday for lunch I split a roll, layered on shredded cantal, a slice of ham, thinly sliced apple, another layer of cheese and some mustard, then wrapped it in foil and baked it for 10 minutes.

Posted by Kim at 08:03 PM | Permalink

Fresh Direct has introduced a lot more prepared foods, now organized as full meals for two or four (with two different categories, Fast Meals and Sunday Dinners, which are basically Cheap and Expensive, respectively). So I ordered the meatball dinner for four and stretched it into a week of meals for Todd and I (August is still on the pureed stuff). It came with spaghetti (which heated up amazingly well and was really quite good), meatballs, ciabatta rolls and salad.

Night 1 was the spaghetti and meatballs with some of the salad. Night 2, open-faced meatball sandwiches on the ciabatta rolls with provolone melted over the top. Night 3 I started adding other ingredients, a couple slices each turkey, ham and Swiss, sliced hard-boiled egg and dressing for a chef's salad. Night 4, the rest of the pasta tossed with some homemade pesto. We still have a couple of rolls left, but that pretty much used up the whole meal. At $22 and maybe another $5 for other ingredients, it was still cheaper than takeout. And the convenience was worth it to me.

Posted by Kim at 01:47 PM | Permalink

My friend Lisa gets a garden plot during the summer where she works, and this year she had a bumper crop of colorful tomatoes, which I plundered to make this tart. (I shared with her, so I don't think she minds.) It was so easy to do, too, that I'm tempted to go out and get more 'maters to make another one for a mom-friend on Tuesday.

I just rolled out a sheet of puff pastry dough a bit (to 1/8-of-an-inch-ish) and poked it all over with a fork to keep it from puffing up, leaving 1-inch edges unmarked. Then I baked it at 425 degrees for 5 minutes to get it kind of brown. The fork trick hadn't worked, so I just poked the center of the tart back down before spreading on some mustard and about 1/4 pound of grated gruyere. Overlapped sliced tomatoes on top, then sprinkled with salt, pepper and some chopped herbs from Lisa's garden (rosemary and oregano). Baked that for another 12 minutes, then allowed it to cool and cut into squares. (I had chopped up some basil and put it in some olive oil to drizzle over the top, then forgot to do it.) We ate it in the park with a lot of other picnic food (chicken fingers, corn and bean salsa with homemade chips, a tomato and mozzarella salad with pesto, mint tea and blueberry-nectarine cobbler with homemade ice cream for dessert).

Posted by Kim at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)