Cheese, Bread and Julia Child

Yummy cheese, photo from Zabar

Edward has good cheese karma; I have to start with that. He chose a lovely taleggio he had never tried to take to my mother's in October, and last night he came home from Central Market with this Alta Langa Cravanzina. It is from the Piedmont region of Italy and a lot like a brie, maybe a little earthier, maybe a little tangier...I don't know, it's hard to describe the difference. Very, very soft, very delicious.

From Zabar's in NYC: A delicate and lovely little round from the Italian Piedmonts; in the "paglia" family of cheeses, so named because they are aged on beds of straw (paglia = straw). Covered with a bloomy rind, the voluptuous paste is mild, creamy, buttery, and a little musty. Eat it quickly, otherwise it might run right off the table - not that something this good will be around for that long.

He also brought home a big, lovely pain de campagne, which was almost identical to the rustic bread, with a touch of rye, that I made from the America's Test Kitchen cookbook - still my best home baked bread effort.

My bread, also yummy

I may be thinking about matters of food and cooking more than usual (nahh), because I just finished Julia Child's memoir of her years in France, mostly Paris, (1948-54) and the trials and tribulations of cooking school, testing, writing and publishing her first cookbooks and the (accidental) beginning of her career as a TV chef. She and her husband didn't even have a television when she made her first TV appearances.

I love her absolute enjoyment of food, and the exacting detail that went into her preparation of her recipes - truly hundreds of hours of research and trials to perfect a single recipe that would be foolproof to American cooks and housewives of the 50s and 60s who knew nothing of French cooking but wanted to learn. And her sense of fun.

Unfortunately, I now want to buy most of her books, particularly From Julia Child's Kitchen, a cookbook that also includes comments and stories, my favorite kind. "Unfortunately", because I know most of these early books are full of recipes that I will NEVER make or eat, eel, tripe, brains, rabbits...crazy foods, foods that I wouldn't have considered cooking or eating even if I had not become a vegetarian and also just a lot of beef and chicken recipes and recipes heavy with absolutely perfected French sauces full of butter and cream. And now, even though the holidays are over, and I am ready to trim back on the cooking and eating and shed a few pounds, I am pretty sure that I will be researching the one or two Julia Child cookbooks that I simply must have.

Trip to Iowa Part 2: Snow and Kansas City Ethiopian

Rn or I had never been north before in the fall or winter. When you are bound to a school schedule, almost all your traveling takes place in the summer months. We were hoping for SNOW, a nice snowy, picturesque Iowa Thanksgiving, over the river and through the woods in the sleigh to grandma's house. Well, it was cold (we bought gloves and thermals in preparation for the trip) but sunny, very sunny, the whole time, until the morning we left.

An hour or two down the road we started getting drizzly rain, then suddenly we said, Hey, is that slushy frozen stuff in those little raindrops on the windshield. Just as we crossed into Missouri, it turned into full fledged snow with the flakes getting bigger and fluffier as we continued (strangely enough) south. Not long after crossing into Missouri, we had to pull off the highway and stop to see how the snow was falling. (Okay, I know a lot of people are thinking, Yeah, we had to put up with snow on Thanksgiving week, big deal, but we live in Texas, so snow always seems a little miraculous.)

So then, of course, we had to get out and run around in it, on this barren side street in northern Missouri.


And then it was necessary that a snowball fight ensue:




By the time we got to Kansas City, it was just a cold drizzle, and we had put off stopping for lunch to go to the Blue Nile for Ethiopian food. It was R's first experience with having big, flat bread as a plate and eating with no utensils. She enjoyed the injera and a few of the milder offerings, like the lentils and carrots with turmeric, on the double order of this vegetarian plate we had, with a sampling of all of these things:

1. Gomen - $8.95
Fresh collard greens cooked and seasoned with onion, ginger, and garlic.

2. Misir Watt - $8.95
A stew made from organic red lentils cooked with sautéed onion and berbere, then flavored with ginger, garlic, and cardamom.

3. Atiklett - $8.95
Cabbage mixed with chunks of potatoes and carrot cooked with yellow onion and flavored with ginger, garlic, and trmeric.

4. Yekik Watt - $7.95
Seasoned yellow split peas slowly cooked with ginger, turmeric and garlic.

5. Fosolia - $8.95
Fresh green beans and carrots cooked with onions, fresh garlic, turmeric and ginger.

6. Mushroom Shiro - $8.95
Roasted and powdered chickpeas and sliced mushroom simmered in spiced red sauce.

7. Dinich Watt - $7.95
Chunks of potatoes cooked with garlic seasoned in tomato and berbere sauce.

8. Shimbera Assa - $10.95
Baked and sliced ground, garbanzo bean dough, simmered in a medium spiced stew with onions, berbere, tomatoes, ginger, garlic and a touch of mustard and nutmeg..

9. Veggie Combination - $12.95
A platter featuring items #1 through #8.

It was all quite yummy, but what I think she enjoyed most was the attention and instruction from the super friendly young waitress who explained to her all about the traditional Ethiopian table and eating styles in the family and the Ethiopian alphabet. This young woman was absolutely adorable, as I whispered to Edward, and then when we went up to pay, and R was busily creating a personal note writing code for her, she whispered to us about R, She is adorable. So cute. It was a great eating experience.

About my garden in December: When we got back I really needed to water, but the plants looked pretty good. On Dec 2, I harvested a number of tomatoes and a beautiful orange pepper.

Mid-morning today it was a very temperate 65, but a little after noon it became very windy and grey and winter was blowing in. Now, a couple of hours after we left Edward's parents' they got the same winter storm that we ran into on the drive back and got 4-6 inches of that snow R and I had been hoping for. This evening in Texas, rain and sleet or snow and sleet are in the forecast. It won't stick, but it would be nice to see it fall. We've just got to get out and pick or cover all the little delicate things growing in our garden.

Baking bread

Last weekend in the midst of kids in tents, visits to area farmers' markets and a surprise water heater emergency (as if there's a such thing as a planned water heater emergency) I decided to bake bread. Not throw the ingredients in the machine and push a button bread, but three different risings and kneading bread. Bread that matured and became more complex and interesting through its longer, cooler rising times and over night stays in the fridge. I started the bread just after noon on Saturday as a half whole wheat and half unbleached white all purpose poolish (a watery starter that sits out and develops), and we ate it at dinner Monday night. Bread is a deceptively simple thing: flour, water, yeast, a little salt (unless you're in Tuscany, but that's a different story, and you can always just throw a few grains on a slice when your host or waiter isn't looking.) Serious bread makers usually have brands and types of flour they prefer, and some recipes very definitely specify bottled or spring water. This time, just by accident (water heater, remember?) I used bottled water in the poolish and in the dough itself. After the first rising of the dough, it was so big I didn't know if it would fit on my pizza stone.

Dough ready to go on hot stone

This is basically the America's Test Kitchen Rustic Country Bread with a little rye flour. The loaf was gorgeous.
Rustic country bread in the oven

However, while the bread was yummy, and made great toast for our artichoke-crab dip later in the week, the crumb was a little dense; it didn't have those big holes I thought it should have. I think I'd add a little more water next time.

To go with the bread...because after 3 days in the making, the bread was really the focus of the meal...I made a very fresh and light lentil and basmati rice soup with diced carrot, cumin and fennel seed, and diced yellow squash, shredded spinach and arugula from the garden. It was even well accepted by the 10 year old, and the cup of it that was left over was even better for lunch the next day.

Lentil spring vegetable soup

And yes, I finally got a hot shower.