It's electric! (... boogie woogie woogie.)

Yesterday morning and today, I had chocolate cake (left over from B's birthday Monday) and black coffee for breakfast. Delicious. Of course, this is my weekend, so I'm not worried about the inevitable energy crash.

B, being the earlier-riser, had been the primary A.M. coffee-maker. He's mentioned it before, but not until my own recent forays into home coffee brewing have I noticed that the coffee grinder magnetizes the grounds.

Huh??

No, I'm not walking around the kitchen holding a magnet, but it seems as though when the receptacle for the grounds is pulled out of the grinder, and when the lid's removed, grounds splay out in patterns that look like the same ones metal filings make. Remember Wooly Willy? Where you drag the magnet-pen to make his beard and hair and mustache? Like that. It's kind of a pain to get coffee dust to behave.

Well, after much Googling and not-really-what-I-was-looking-for information about magnetic therapy, I found this in a review of a coffee grinder:

* Grounds receptacle builds up static charge. This is an amazing thing. I had no idea coffee beans could so convincingly mimic the properties of magnetized iron filaments, as they cling together in a lump on the wall of the plastic container. I am forever scraping them off into the coffee filter. Sometimes they take to flight, perhaps attracted by the magnetic force of the International Space Station, only to settle scatter-shot all over the counter.

Makes sense.

A review for another grinder claims that the slow bean-grinding speed doesn't magnetize the grounds. Yet another site is pro-grinder magnetization, but I can see why they'd want to conserve as much product as possible.

So now I know a little more about the science causing the Wooly Willy coffee grounds, but I'm still not sure what to do about it. I really like the grinder, and it was free. Funny thing: Until looking it up just now, I didn't know that it claimed to have an anti-static bean container.

More Googling yields this coffee-grinding nugget: The static charge can be created by the speed of the burrs when coupled with the wrong humidity and temperature.

Looks like plenty of other people have had this problem, as "static" is mentioned in more than a few coffee grinder reviews. I guess once this one dies, it'll be good to have a reference. Until then, it doesn't sound like there's a way to fix the current problem. Throwing some Downy in with the beans is not exactly appetizing.

OK, OK... this post totally doesn't count...

I really really realllllly meant to do a full post today. Except, see, the boyfriend took a snow day, and you know, really, I couldn't tell you the last time we had an entire day together. So we stayed away from the Interweb in general and walked and did groceries and laundry and cooked dinner. Is this what normal couples do? I'm sure we'd get sick of each other after, like, three days of this.

But - this is what I was talking about when I said the weird stuff came to me.

Or, as my friend S asked when I showed her this picture, "Why did you take a picture of turds?"

Recap

Danielle, aka Fran, gave "Moroccan wine" a thumbs-up.

What I made in SLC, except for the already-recapped Italian (photos here):

Cuban: Cornmeal-crusted whitefish with an almond-butter sauce, and a cinnamon-mango crisp. Caroline (aka Vera) came over and did accounting homework while she ate. This one was so easy - and it must have been good, too, because after this she brought her own Tupperware for leftovers. From this cookbook.

Indian: Chicken vindaloo. Really well-seasoned, with small amounts of many spices. Spicy, but not burn-your-mouth-for-days hot. There's a picture of it in an earlier post somewhere down there...

Thai: I made pad thai and a potato curry. They were delicious. The curry comes together really quickly, too, so I've made it a few times since. From this cookbook.

Mexican: This was so good!!! There was an almond mole, almendrado de pollo. I also made mexican rice because, well, it was easy and we needed something to put the mole on. I think both recipes were from Mark Bittman's book, which felt like cheating, but he seems pretty authentic. (E.g., in Asian recipes, he's not afraid to use plenty of fish sauce.)

Japanese: Teriyaki chicken (unlike any I'd had before), yakisoba noodles, and edamame. The chicken was coated in cornstarch before cooking it, which worked really well. Not a crunchy texture, but not soggy either. The sauce wasn't what I'd thought of as teriyaki - it wasn't sticky sweet like it as at most places.

Irish: I'll be honest, this was an easy pick, as I cooked on St. Patrick's Day. I made an Irish beef stew, and colcannon (mashed potatoes with leeks). Friends brought Guinness and beer.

Colombia: I found this cookbook at the library, and for that one book alone, I miss the SLC library a bunch. I haven't been to the little one here in this little town, but it'll be interesting to check out the breadth of their selection. I made fried bananas, coconut and black-eyed pea rice, and a stew with fish and plantains. The first two dishes were fantastic. The stew, well... I don't know if the plantains were extremely unripe, or if that's just how plantains are supposed to be in savory dishes. The fish kind of started to fall apart. On the off chance I were to make the stew again, I think I'd get riper plantains, and cook only add the fish when the rest of the stew is close to done. Maybe even fry it first for better texture? Anyway, I learned a lot with that one...

Last, but not least, Moroccan: I don't know how I decided on this one. It's entirely possible that I just picked up one of the prettier cookbooks on the shelf at the Trib and went for it. In this case, the book was Arabesque, and I could almost smell the spices when I opened it. I made harira, a traditional Moroccan stew, from the book, and a lentil, onion and rice "salad" from a recipe I found online. We had been getting wine from the same country as the dishes, but I couldn't find any wine from Morocco at the state store down the street. So I picked up one bottle from Spain, and another from South Africa, and decided to split the difference. (I didn't say the difference was split equally by geography!)

That turned out to be the final SLC cuisine night, because a week or maybe two later I was packed up and on the road to New York. Even in the new apartment, it's been hard to plan dinners like those because
1) I don't have friends to invite over to eat. There's me, B, and the puppy.
2) I work nights and weekends.
3) It's harder to find weird ethnic ingredients because this is a smallish city. What I should be doing is planning way ahead, so I could go down to the city on one day off and get ingredients, and on the second day off, cook my brains out.
That said, with No. 3, it's not as hard as I thought, and sometimes the weird stuff comes to you... More about that tomorrow. (Yes, tomorrow. Wednesday, January 28.)

New year, new (well, two months old) kitchen, new blog post

The first things I unpacked? Wine glasses and Larousse Gastronomique, parting gifts from my Trib family...


Despite the kinda-success of my actual resolution of cooking dishes from a different country every week, execution of the blogging portion (can't remember if that was part of the resolution) SUCKED.

Since reading so many stunningly beautiful food blogs, with amazing photos, it has become really hard to post my lo-res camera phone pictures. It's like, why bother? Everyone's done this, and they've done it prettier. And it's been intimidating to try and catch up on the backlog of projects - I just realized that today, January 5th, it's been one year since the Italian kickoff. Unbelievable.

I moved again November 1 to a great apartment in a great town, and have been cooking a pretty fair amount with the boyfriend, B. He loves to cook and eat as much as I do, except he's a little more adventurous and a little more confident that his adventures will turn out tasty. (He's usually right.) He makes the best breakfast burritos ever.

He and I hosted Thanksgiving, and his parents and brother came down. We made these caramelized root vegetables (sans dried currant sauce, which sounds pretty damn good), two pumpkin pies and an apple pie, and a cranberry relish, whose recipe I got from my Aunt Judy last December when my family organized a "Chris-giving" during one of my rare trips back to SD. There's nothing like Christmas by the beach... (Really, this is where I grew up. That place is a block and a half from the beach.)

This blog kicked off with a little bit of a yoga tirade, and although my passion for it hasn't dropped off, my practice certainly has. Without that point of reference, I never would have gotten where I am today, physically/geographically and mentally. I've been to two classes since moving to Beacon. This first one I did in a studio in six months (maybe more) was on Thanksgiving Day. It was for my friends and family who helped me get to this point too. Cheesy, but true.

I know I always say this, but... Updates to come. I promise. They're already in a draft post. For now, though, I need to do some groceries. :)


Nutella bread pudding, again, but this time with dried cherries! For New Year's Day brunch in Ithaca with Katie and Jon.

night at the fair...

Dutchess County, New York, is covered in farms. They're everywhere. The last fair I went to was the then-Del Mar Fair (apparently it's now called the San Diego County Fair, but that just sounds wrong to me), a pretty big one that seems to be dominated by vendor booths selling every product I've already glimpsed while flipping through shopping network channels. Although I half-thought the Dutchess County fair would be quaint, with a plethora of bunnies, I really didn't know what to expect from tonight's venture.

By way of comparison:
Del Mar Fair, from flickr.com's teamtauni (I forgot how to embed the credit, oh well).


Dutchess County Fair, from flickr.com's jeanphony.


It was a little quaint, but I'll take a plethora of bunnies over a plethora of ShopVacs any day.

More to the point, here's what I ate, with some help from B. There may have been some local fare among these. Note: I hadn't eaten anything between 9 p.m. Monday and getting to the fair at 4 p.m. Tuesday. I tried to prepare...

Started with kielbasa, potato and cheese pierogis (which, when eaten at a deli around the corner from my Bay Area elementary school, we pronounced as "piroshkis") from a stand whose awning blared "MILLIE'S." Three and sour cream for four bucks. Not bad, kinda gummy, but I was unfulfilled. Maybe I should have been more adventurous and tried the prune one.

But still hungry, so onto the chicken skewer. It was actually B's idea, but I ended up doing most of the eating. It was, again, okay. Yakitori-style chicken on a skewer. Not seasoned very much at all. Pretty basic.

Went on a couple of rides before having a corn dog. This was the culinary highlight of my trip to the Dutchess County Fair. Unfortunately, I couldn't handle the just-out-of-the-fryer, crispy-shelled, perfectly salted (and I don't even like salt) dog, dropping it about two-thirds of the way through. Also unfortunately for my taste buds, I'd given B's niece Riley a couple of bites. The girl had never tasted a corn dog before! So, glad she got to try a good one; sad I didn't devour the whole thing more quickly.

Then it was time for more serious fair fare. We found a spot at some picnic tables in the shade, and ventured out for more serious food. I came back with a pulled pork barbecue sandwich. It was basic, but awesome (but not as awesome as the corn dog). Meat, sauce, bun. Don't waste my time with accessories like pickles, you know? Other people had some weak-looking burgers, and fries that came in a cardboard bowl that looked like a dog food dish. Weird. (The fries actually weren't too bad.)

Had to drink something, too, you know? I'm a big fan of lime, so when I saw the "Lime Fizz" sign, it was, well, a sign. I guess the booth primarily purveyed lemonade, but we can get that anywhere, you know? Lime it was. The girl working grabbed a couple of limes, hacked them open, and juiced them. She poured the juice in a cup, squirted what I am pretty sure was simple syrup (sugar water), and added soda water. A few swirls of the straw, a sip - sublime. Get it? Sub-lime? Ahahaha, just kidding... (It would have been good with vodka, too. But that would likely have precluded going on any more rides.)

I think we headed out for more rides and a tour of the horticultural building. I saw a cow put its hoofs up on a teenage girl's shoulders and wasn't sure if it was some kind of stunt or something - I'm a city kid, remember? - but the look of terror on her face let me know... Fortunately, someone moved the cow and all was well. The girl was probably happy to sell it for any price at the 4-H auction.

Then we had to get a shake. These shakes are legendary (I guess). Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. I was under the impression that they were something SPECTACULAR, like they workers shot the milk from a cow's udder into a cup, into which fell some kind of magical glittery ice cream and then with the first sip, we have world peace, and a unicorn is born right in front of you (maybe in the barn where the cow was mounting the girl), and there's no wait when leaving the parking lot post-fair. I got a strawberry one. It was - okay. The proceeds benefit the local 4-H, I think. (I just spent way too long looking at the fair's Web site and still couldn't find the info.) Good for them.

After walking around even more, we stopped for fried dough. It tastes better than it sounds. Kind of funnel cake-y, covered in confectioner's sugar - be careful not to inhale. I only had a few bites, as I was busy trying to cool my coffee down by alternately spilling it and blowing on it. Plus, I wanted to save what little room was left for a cream puff.

A cream puff? Yep. I'd been waiting alllll summer long for this cream puff, the favorite carny food of the fair's new director, which he'd raved about in the Hudson Valley Table magazine. I bought one; the chocolate syrup surprised me. It was kinda heavy. Maybe I'd been thinking about something more like a popover? Fluffier, you know?

But it was cool. B and I sat at a picnic table next to a radio booth that was blasting cheesy hair metal. We gave the popover our most valiant effort (I wondered why they gave us a knife - it was kinda tough). Then we called it a night and waddledheaded to the car. Naturally, I finished the cream puff on the way home. I had to - I waited all summer for that and I'll be damned if I wasn't going to finish it!

Now, if only we'd taken pictures...

in the meantime...

Since arriving here, I've done a little cooking. The photos are from when I made the dishes in SLC.
A repeat of the chicken vindaloo:



A repeat of the Thai potato curry; apparently, Caroline liked it:



I made the Nutella bread pudding again; that was good but my timing was off as two of the other four people I'm living with had just gone out of town and I was about to. It was a little too much, too rich, for the people left behind.

Got a puppy on July 1 and he's had some digestive problems, so recently my cooking has looked more like this:

C'mon, who doesn't love sweet potatoes, chicken, yogurt and rice? Speaking of the pup, it's time to walk him so I'm outta here... I hope to have more (and better) pictures up soon, and new dishes.

hey there, 'member me?

it's been a while. i actually was doing okay with the whole national-dish-a-week resolution - until i picked up the first week of may and moved to new york. no, not the city, but not toooo far from it, either.

don't exactly have my own kitchen, so it's been hard to stay up on cooking, but that should change soon. maybe another two months?

i made this buttermilk-chocolate cake when i was here in april for job interviews and dear friend (of the flame le creuset)'s birthday.

pictures and blurbs of the national dishes to follow.