my cool new friend

Living in the DC area can make you think that you are profoundly lacking in social skills. Then, when you relocate to another area, you realize that most people don’t demand to know where you work within two minutes of meeting you, don’t give a sh** where you went to college, and don’t vie to prove who has the highest stress level.

People are FRIENDLY! Here in NC, there’s this fabulous thing called southern hospitality!

One beautiful late summer evening, I headed out to the grocery store when I spotted my pal Jocelyn and her adorable five year old son Kane. Naturally, I commenced furiously chasing Kane around on the grass while chatting with his mama, at which point Coen, the equally adorable four year old boy who lives across the hall (who was, as always, clad in his Batman tshirt and cape)  and his mama Roxanne showed up, and the running and the chasing and the making dinosaur noises just got funner. So we planned a cookout for the following weekend, for all of our fun neighbors to hang out.

Gender roles divided pretty hilariously, with Steve and the other men grilling outside and discussing extreme sports…

 

And the ladies inside, teaching the kiddos how to play the drums on packs of plates (courtesy of my roommate Alli, the girl who will start a drum circle anytime, anywhere).

I offered to bring meats for the meal, spending a small but worth-it fortune on organic ground beef for burgers as well as organic turkey and beef hot dogs.

Everyone else also contributed too, though I only got a few pictures. Jocelyn’s guacamole and AWESOME watermelon-basil-feta salad.

Steph’s carrot cake cupcakes (uhhhhhhhhhhhhhmazing- packed with walnuts) and Charlie’s stuffed mushrooms (which I didn’t eat because I’ve recently been unable to stomach the thought of eating a pig and they were stuffed with pork… but everyone else said were very tasty!)

Jocelyn and I are extra tight, so we’ve had a few fun date nights with each other. Most recently on my 25th birthday (!!!) when I stayed home sick/”sick” from work and she set aside her freelancing for a few hours to gossip, eat chicken soup, and together watch Dances with Wolves.

We are really kindred spirits- the first night we met, she ended up creating astrological charts for me and Steve. And then we excitedly gabbed about antioxidants. And psychoanalyzed the men in our lives.

Another time we got together, Jocelyn made me the best roast chicken I’ve ever tasted (a title I can sadly no longer give the Zuni Cafe recipe). I sadly neglected to take a picture, but I’ll describe: she begins with the Martha Stewart recipe, which involves a plethora of fresh and dried herbs and an olive oil basting technique. Bringing her own delightful new age sensibilities to the proceedings, she then says several prayers over the chicken, thanking it for its sacrifices, and rubs the herbs in.

Anyway, dessert was extra fab. Jocelyn has an impressively well-stocked pantry and a Vitamix (jealousssss). She threw together in the Vitamix some cacao powder (on which she waxed poetic for a bit regarding its health benefits)…

 

… agave nectar…

… and coconut cream which, who knew, they now sell at Trader Joe’s.

 

With strawberries dipped in it, it was pretty epic. (To be truthful, the boys focused on the brewskies and the girls focused on the dessert!). It was also vegan, gluten free, paleo, yadda yadda. None of those are necessarily my scene, but if they are yours you hafta try this dessert!

Then when I returned the favor, I made an oh-so-easy and oh-so-tasty soup. I roasted a chicken and used its bones to make stock. I sauteed zucchini, sweet onion, and corn in oil then cooked it with the stock and pureed it with a ton of fresh parsley. AMAZING SOUP. I took the chicken off the bone and made a Caesar salad, with Romaine lettuce and yummy cheese. And because Jocelyn’s kiddo Kane can’t have gluten (she experimented with taking it out of his diet since he was having a crazy bloated belly and not only did the belly get better, his asthma disappeared!), I made my favorite gluten free specialty: socca!

It was quite the feast.

The soup was particularly delicious- homemade chicken stock is SO easy and SO delicious. Kane, the five year old, got seconds, which I thought was a real vote of confidence in the recipe!

 

Funnest of all, after dinner we played blocks. Because I am currently teaching preschool, and thus there are fun toys all over my house. These are particularly cool- you can make skyscrapers out of them! Trees on the roof optional.

Fact: when you are five, the most fun part of building with blocks is knocking them all over.

Easter, etc.

Cookies!

 

Inquiring minds who want to know: oatmeal date nut cookies, which are already vegan, can also be made gluten free. They’re just a little crunchier and snappier, and who minds that?!

I baked those tasty things for a church choir potluck. For Easter! It being June as I write this and Easter, of course, not being a June holiday, let me clarify. I celebrate Orthodox Easter (the Easter of the Orthodox Christian church- if you have Greek, Russian, Lebanese, Romanian, etc. friends it may be theirs, too) and it’s on a different calendar than Catholic and Protestant churches. So it was a LOT later than American Easter. (Though, er, still awhile ago).

So anyway this Easter potluck was so we could practice the complicated and difficult music. Except only five people showed up (and two of us were related). So it was not all that successful, except the food part!

Making the food was actually a fun challenge since for food to be Lent-appropriate, it should be vegan (I don’t eat totally vegan during Lent because of calcium fears, but many in my church do, and the food served at the church itself should be supportive of the church’s official policy, obvi).

It also had to be gluten free (or should be, out of kindness) because both our church’s choir director John and his wife Betty have Celiac disease.

Also, Betty for charming reasons best understood by her had come up to me in the middle of church one Sunday and handed me this pad thai sauce container:

I appreciated her gift, and figured I might as well use it on something I could share with her.

So I cooked up some rice noodles, made some tofu:

threw in some veggies:

And voila, pad thai. Ish. No final picture- it was ugly. But good!

And we also brought, of course, dessert.

But the really exciting dessert was a week later, on Easter itself. Something I have allllllllllways wanted to make? Olive oil cake!

I discovered this scrumptious-sounding if ever so slightly vague recipe for olive oil cake and mostly followed it (subbing a mix of white flour, whole wheat, and semolina for the plain flour) then consulted this overly complicated but methodologically clear olive oil cake for timing (which caused me to let the cake rise for two hours before baking it) and anyway it was great!

Heat some olive oil

Infuse with lemon

 

Plus anise seeds (mm)

 

The recipe wasn’t clear whether or not you were supposed to strain out the seeds, and I thought a few might be nice to help retain the flavor, so I casually poured the oil mixture in the batter, leaving behind the lemon and approximately half the seeds in the pot.

Batter was SUCCULENT! Could’ve eaten the whole thing with a spoon. So dense and creamy.

Baked that off- it didn’t rise much but it was real tasty! For the finished cake, I improvised a glaze which involved orange marmalade thinned with water- not a lot more complicated than that.

This ended up REALLY good.

 

Meanwhile, right before Easter, we received a VERY generous Easter basket from a very sweet family friend. It contained this GI-NORMOUS sweet, almond-paste-studded Easter bread.

   

And the Easter celebration itself was at my sister’s godparents’ home. They had gotten a lot of it catered. The spread was quite beautiful.

 

They had requested that all the lamb be cooked well done (…) I snuck into the kitchen with the caterers and begged them to save a medium rare bit for me. They obliged, and were very very nice :)

My dinner plate:

Blessedly medium-rare lamb with scads of tzaziki (definitely eyes>stomach on that one, but Steve was nearby so all was good), grilled vegetables (done by caterers- EXCELLENT! Perfectly cooked!), spinach and cheese pies, roasted potatoes that were wonderful, and salad. And wine! Gave up booze for Lent. Such a worthwhile thing to do. I’m no lush, but I only want to drink when I feel like drinking, not when everyone around me is. It was a useful exercise in mindfulness.

Spent much of the meal lounging by their pool, looking at their e-normous house!

 

Believe me when I say this barely scratched the surface on dessert. Phase 1 was enjoyed poolside.

Gazillions of berries, koulourakia (traditional Greek cookies), some of my olive oil cake, one of Steve’s oatmeal-toffee cookies.

adventures in chickpea flour

My thoughts on gluten are influenced by some insufferable people in my life being unable (or allegedly unable) to tolerate it. This is unfair to people with Celiac disease, an increasingly growing portion of the population.

However, some brief venting.

- My sister’s ex boyfriend claims he can’t have gluten. I hate him. Also, he is a regular beer drinker. Really?

- Gwyneth Paltrow claims she can’t have gluten. Actually, according to her exhaustingly hilarious (that’s a phrase) newsletter,, a “doctor” diagnosed her with anemia and told her to consume “no coffee, no alcohol, no dairy, no eggs, no sugar, no shellfish, no deep-water fish, no wheat, no meat, no soy, nothing processed at all!” Someone on Jezebel commented about a correlation between increasing income and increasing inability to eat normal people food.

- Several of my old coworkers were constantly “eliminating” things from their diets to feel “freer”, including gluten. Mostly in a certain department. They know who they are. Potlucks were tedious.

Anyway, before everyone thinks I’m a horrible person, let me share my love for the wonderful and kind and generous and warm-hearted Betty, who sings with me in the church choir, someone diagnosed with Celiac disease by a medical doctor. Going off gluten made her quit having the stomach pains she’d had for her ENTIRE LIFE. Can you imagine how awful that must be/ how amazing it must be to finally be brought to good health through a change in your diet?

I’ve made gluten free goodies for her, like the simple and worth-replicating gf shortbread recipe I linked to in this post. And now, what?! Her husband has Celiac too! Causing everyone at church to joke (joke? maybe scared joke) that it’s contagious.

Fortunately, one of my new favorite things to cook with is: CHICKPEA FLOUR!

For some reason I feel compelled to point out that this is chickpea flour from the Indian store. Something about buying chickpea flour at Whole Foods still feels a little too insufferable to me. (As a general note, I love the Indian store and it has amazingly affordable legumes and spices, along with big ol’ sacks of chickpea flour).

My first undertaking was crackers.

Making crackers is really satisfying for someone as methodical as I am about things. In addition, you can manhandle gluten-free batters and doughs as much as you want because you don’t have to worry about overdeveloping gluten and making them mega-chewy. This is great for stirring addicts like my best friend.

Anyway, they looked pretty coming out of the oven.

Bubbly! Ooh. Ahh. Crispy brown edges.

 

But ended up a bit… cardboardy. Wouldn’t recommend this particular recipe. If I hunt one down that I love I will! I did enjoy the addition of sesame and poppy seeds- worth repeating.

 

So I made SOCCA. All you need to do is Google “socca” once to become aware of a huge socca-loving portion of the population. I had only a vague idea of what it even was, and sort of associated it with obnoxious bloggers who never eat normal food (sorry.)

Anyway, then I read about it in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, a book full of both normal and extraordinary food, and decided it was time for me to try it instead of being judgmental. And LUCKY ME.

For those of you not in the know, socca is essentially a salty, peppery, olive oil-y, crisp edged, dense, heavenly chickpea flour pancake.

Bittman has you bake and broil it.

It makes me SOOOOOOOOOO happy!

Have any of you guys had the Orville Redenbacher salt ‘n pepper popcorn? (If not, may I recommend pausing your reading and getting some? Cause it’s good!) Anyway, this, like that, is really a pepper and oil vehicle. And I mean that in the best possible way.

And is perhaps even better the next day, when you pop leftovers in the toaster oven to make them even CRISPIER!

Plus kale salad.

  

Plus yogurt ‘n fruit ‘n lord knows what is in that other dish, I made this meal a good long while ago.

  

Anywho, I then tried to make that boss sweet potato pizza crust again, incorporating some chickpea flour just for funsies. The toppings were great (caramelized onions, goat cheese, balsamic roasted broccoli), but the chickpea flour taste was just too strong and weird with the sweet potatoes.

What made it palatable, nay delicious, was when my weird boyfriend mixed spicy African hot sauce with mayo and smeared it on top. He’s so weird/a genius.

Anyway, that experiment abandoned, I went back to socca.

Served leftovers with an old favorite: what I call Austin brussels sprouts. Based on a meal I ate at Snack Bar in Austin (<3<3<3) oh, almost three years ago now.

Half brussels sprouts. Lightly film the bottom of a saute pan with olive oil. Brown one side, then the other of the sprouts. Add dijon (2 tsp?), honey (1 1/2 tsp?), dill (1/4-1/2 tsp?) and water to deglaze it all.

Cook til awesome.

 

suffering cookies

Every year we hold a post-Christmas party for family, church friends, work friends, significant others, neighbors, random strangers… lots of people. This year that party proved Murphy’s Law.

Let’s start with these cookies, which have been dubbed “Heartache cookies”, “$60 Cookies”, and “Suffering cookies” at different intervals.

They are a great big pain in the ass!

It started with the Washington Post cookie special in the Food section. They do it every year. This year ALL the recipes looked like a pain in the ass. Weird ingredients, complicated methodologies, general sense of fussiness. However, my mom thought the Oaxacan Chocolate Cookies, from Jaleo, Jose Andres’ original restaurant in D.C., sounded sufficiently interesting that they were worth the fuss.

Well, let’s recount what happened:

- The recipe called for 2 teaspoons of mezcal. Mezcal, for those of you who do not know (as I did not until relatively recently), mezcal might be considered the Scotch of tequila. It’s agave liquor, aged. Wonderfully smoky and delicious. But we only needed 2 teaspoons. And the smallest amount the liquor store carried was a fifth. For $28.

- Then we needed 10 1/2 ounces of very high cacao percentage dark chocolate. My sister was kind enough to donate two chocolate bars she got for Christmas to the cause. We needed one more and opted to get Mexican chocolate, as the recipe called for. A bar of Taza chocolate (which is delicious, and direct trade, admittedly) was $9, without tax. Absurdly expensive ingredient #2. And let’s not forget the massive amount of butter going into this, too.

- The methodology was bizarre, and instructed the cookie maker (my mom, at this phase in the process) to quit using a mixer and fold, by hand, an enormous amount of flour into wet ingredients that were not all that wet and did not particularly care for that process. It took forever, and resulted in dough with the consistency of gravel.

- Then that gravel was supposed to be formed into logs. Yeah. Right. When my mom finally succeeded (seemingly) in forming one log, she wrapped it in wax paper and went to, per the recipe’s instructions, chill it in the fridge. When the log promptly collapsed, causing a very very large amount of dough to scatter all over the kitchen floor. Awe. some.

- Lest you think the suffering was complete, after the lengthy chilling time we then had to follow absurd instructions that involved baking for seven minutes, rotating sheets, baking another seven minutes, brushing the cookies with egg and salt (which I made the executive decision to change to sugar, spiked with salt to make flavors pop, because the cookies were barely sweet at all)

The cookies were good, but NOT WORTH THE SUFFERING.

   

Along with suffering cookies, however, I completed a fun and emotionally satisfying baking project: vasilopita. Also known as Saint Basil’s bread, it’s a Greek tradition: every New Years Day (which is the Saint’s Day of Saint Basil a major saint in the Greek Orthodox church) this bread is made. Inside is hidden a coin. Whoever gets the slice with that coin supposedly has good luck for a year.

This was a recipe from Flavors of Greece, truly the only Greek cookbook you will ever need. It has the perfect, Platonic (get it? get it?!) recipes for all of the Greek standards, as well as some creative unexpected recipes. This vasilopita was quiiiiiite decadent, with lotsa butter, honey, sugar, etc. But what gives it its signature va-va-va-voom is a flavorful combination of anise and orange. SO good.

Furthermore, we very sadly lost my dear great aunt Rose, very unexpectedly, a few weeks before I made this. She made delicious traditional Greek specialties, and her vasilopita was always gorgeous and tasty.

So this was also a bit of a tribute to her.

Also, it was ENORMOUS.

 

Also on the list of things made by me was gluten-free shortbread. Our choir director’s wife Betty, who sings soprano with me, has Celiac disease.. and her husband just got diagnosed too! Guys, is it contagious?! If so, I NEED TO STAY AWAY FROM THEM.

But at least I know how to make good gluten-free shortbread. This recipe, using all-purpose gf flour and rice flour, pleased everyone, including those of us who can (thank God) process gluten.

 

I wasn’t around these parts for Thanksgiving this year, but according to multiple sources, the White House recipe for thyme-roasted turkey, which my aunt Jeanie made for that holiday, was “the best turkey ever”.

So my sister nominated it for our party.

Hint: butter.

 

(Go Redskins! Or Seahawks?! Both Washingtons are in a certain sense my home! Eek!)

My sister also made bacon-wrapped dates. SO good.

 

And deviled eggs with caviar on top, which people ate in like thirty seconds.

ANOTHER Murphy’s law story: we had a container of caviar in the kitchen, which my mom said she had bought for deviled eggs in the past. But the not-too-distant past. But there was no expiration date.

So, we called the company, gave them the serial number on the jar, and they said the caviar didn’t expire until March 2013. Awesome. Oh, but… “We see there are some black spots in the caviar. Is that anything to worry about?” “… We’ll call you back.”

Well, fortunately they did, because it turns out that the kind of caviar we’d bought had been discontinued in 2011. Furthermore, the serial numbers apparently repeat (?!) in canned goods and as a result the jar could’ve been from 2003 or 2006. SO IT’S GOOD WE CHECKED HUH?

Let the record state, my family doesn’t buy caviar regularly. (Clearly!)

Also present at the party were dips: lotsa dips.

Our “secret family recipe” for artichoke dip (artichoke hearts from a can, mayo, garlic, and cheese), made by my mom. A white bean dip I made.

 

From the Greek store, labneh (white) and taramosalata (pink).

My favorite project, a new recipe. The Washington Post food section (attempting to redeem themselves in my eyes for those cookies? I’m sure) did a special section on vegetable pates. The carrot ginger pate caught my eye, as I anticipated great flavor and beautiful color. It delivered on both fronts. Make it! It’s a keeper!

The bacon wrapped dates and, in the other category of stuff-wrapped-in-meat, cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto.

More Murphy’s Law: my mom brought fruit salad to Christmas Eve. We went to H-Mart a few days prior, which can usually be counted on to have beautiful produce that’s exceedingly ripe. We got mangos, pineapple, and cantaloupe. And… Christmas Eve, none of it was ripe. The other stuff got used, but I figured out-of-season melon would be best served with something else.

It was good with the prosciutto. My grandma made that, back in the day.

Took ANOTHER trip to the delightful Red, White, and Bleu, my new favorite cheese shop, because my mother had bought the Groupon too!

This was a delicious selection that disappeared almost immediately.

Unpictured are the finished meats, but in addition to the turkey (which was good but not earth-shattering, in my opinion) we also had a ham. People went NUTS for the ham, which is funny since I spent a total of 20 seconds making the glaze for it (you’ll see why below)- dumped mustard, brown sugar, and cider vinegar in a bowl, tasted it, went “yeah okay”.

For making little sandwiches, we bought an assortment of rolls. They all looked similar, so you were playing “roll-ette” (HAHAHA!)

Anyway, here’s a photo conveying the general scene.

 

The reason there are fewer pictures, and perhaps they’re a bit blurred, was the state of UTTER CHAOS in our house prior to the party.

I have two words for you: plumbing emergency.

I’m not shedding details, but suffice it to say that while it wasn’t fun running out for a last minute emergency errand to buy scented candles, praying the plumber would be there by the time I returned, it was really nice getting out of a very stressful house.

Anyway. It all worked out. The cookies were good.