Rebecca Weger

I’ve had quite a number of homes over the years.  Today I landed back in NYC for the first time in five years.  I lived here for two years in the mid to late 90s and I miss it regularly.  It still feels like home.  We arrived late this afternoon and decided to head right for comfort food.

Dinner was at my favorite Japanese restaurant, Marumi.  I’m not enough of a connoisseur to claim I can tell the “best” Japanese food or “best” sushi.  But it is for sure my favorite.  Partly, its the memories.  I ate my first Japanese food here with a former roommate of mine.  She was an exchange student from Seol, and took me out as a hospitality gift.  I ate many meals here in graduate school when I lived just a block away.  Hot mustard, wasabi and a bottle of Saporo got me through a few bad colds and a flu one year.  Then there were the nights I sat at the sushi bar cramming the last few pages of reading in before my next class.  Or the memory of my mom’s first attempt at salad with chopsticks.

Joseph gamely ordered my two favorite dishes that I can no longer eat:  fried shumai with hot mustard, and yaki udon (now with organic chicken).  I don’t believe he was at all disappointed.

I did not ask any gluten-free questions.  I travel with my own gluten-free tamari.  I settled in with a bowl of chilled edamame and some sushi.  The salmon avocado sushi simply melted in my mouth.  We shared a bottle of sake.

After dinner we took a walk through the village and stumbled on Varsano’s Chocolate.  Having already gorged myself on sushi, a couple of cocoa truffles was more than enough for dessert. The discovery of an actuall bathtub in our hotel led to a brief detour by LUSH for the purchase of a bubble bar (there will be a full-on shopping excursion before the weekend is over) and we were back at our hotel.

A pretty good start to a few day getaway.

My first thought after pouring the last of the coconut milk into the soup? “Oh.  You should have saved some of that to drizzle on top of the soup in some fancy pattern.  You’re never going to catch on to this food staging business.”  Luckily, that had nothing to do with how dinner tasted.  That, after all, is the priority.

Tonight’s dinner held lots of bits of excitement all rolled up together.

For one, it was the second time I’ve used our brand new crockpot.  My crockpot died a painful death a number of years back and I just never got around to replacing it.  It was expensive.  Where would I store it.  I stopped eating meat.  Recipes frequently called for things like canned soup that I can’t eat while gluten-free. Then we started eating some local meat.  Then the peer pressure set it ( you know who you are).  We bought it Friday. Saturday it was christened with a batch of stew.  That batch of stew helped burn off all the weird chemical smells of the new appliance.  Today we just got to smell dinner.  Starting at noon.

Exciting bit the second, I found a new cookbook.  I’ve had lots of cooksbooks over the years, and I simply rarely use them.  Long ago I had some slow cooker cookbooks, but they just weren’t my style.  Too many packaged foods used to cook food I don’t really like.  On our way to buy the new crock pot we stopped at a bookstore to see what was out there now.  We hit the motherlode.  I discovered “Make it Fast, Cook it Slow” by Stephanie O’Dea – hot off the press. On page 4 of the introduction I see a subheading: Everything is Gluten-Free.  I proceed to flip through the book and find the majority of her recipes use actual food ingredients.  Then noticed many of her recipes are vegetarian.  Since I couldn’t find the fabulous squash soup recipe I made up/cobbled together/wrote on the back of an envelope last year, I thought I’d try hers.

And third, we bought an immersion blender. Oh. My. Goodness.  And on a friend’s recommendation we cleaned it by using it in a container of hot soapy water.  I may never use my blender again.

So we made squash soup.  I followed Stephanie’s recipe to the letter until the end.  Well, except for adding a few cloves of garlic.  And her recipe called for a butternut squash.  I had two very small ones from the CSA share and a small acorn squash from our share a week or so ago.  We used all three of them together.  Then I added more cinnamon and a can of lite coconut milk.  I almost didn’t use the apples, but we had some tart ones around and I threw them is.  I’m glad we did.  It added just the right bit of sweetness.

We made a batch of one of my favorite breads, the same artisan seed bread from this post.  It was earthy and nutty, with 2 T of sunflower seeds and 2 T of toasted sesame seeds.  In a shocking performance we whipped up the bread, set it in the warm oven to rise, dashed to the mall for errands, and made it back just in time to turn up the heat and set it to baking. A couple of emails and tweets later we were pulling fresh bread out of the oven and beginning our first session with the immersion blender.  See above comment.

Dinner was on the table at a reasonable time, and despite making bread and soup, we didn’t actually spend all day at home making it.  The soup and the bread were both vegan and gluten-free, which just expanded our potluck repertoire – as long as I remember.

I just received this notice today.  I went to a similar but different event in the spring.  This one is going on my calendar.
Sunday, October 25, 2009  2:30-5:30 PM
Women’s Community Building, 100 West Seneca St., Ithaca, NY
Consumers can meet at least 15 livestock producers from across our region, learn about their farms and products, and taste samples prepared by Chef Sean O’Brien of Serendipity Catering.  There will be presentations on how consumers can process a whole chicken into smaller cuts, recipes for unfamiliar cuts, and other information on buying local meats.  Producers of beef (grass-fed and natural grain/grass fed), pork, lamb, goat, chicken, rabbit, turkey and duck will be present, and some meats will be available for sale. Admission is $5/person.  So that the caterer may prepare an appropriate amount of samples, please register in advance by calling Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County at (607) 272-2292. For additional information, please contact Matthew LeRoux at (607) 272-2292 or mnl28@cornell.edu.

Farms confirmed for the Meat Fair as of 10/5/09 AM:
1.   Kingbird Farm, Berkshire, NY, Tioga Co.- Beef, chicken, duck, pork, turkey
2.   Straight-Way Farm, Montour Falls, NY, Schuyler Co.- beef
3.   McDonald Farm, Romulus, NY, Seneca Co.- Beef, chicken, lamb, pork, turkey
4.   Sabol’s Farm, Ovid, NY, Seneca Co.- Beef, chicken, duck, goose, goat, lamb, pork
5.   Orchardland Farm, Interlaken, NY, Seneca Co.- beef
6.   Porkchop Valley, Ithaca, NY, Tompkins Co.- pork
7.   Ever Green Farm, Rock Stream, NY, Yates Co.- chicken
8.   Birdsall Beef, Homer, NY, Cortland Co.- beef
9.   High Point Farms, Trumansburg, NY, Tompkins Co.- beef, lamb, pork, chicken, rabbit
10. Quinn’s Irish Hill Farm, Freeville, NY, Tompkins Co.- chicken, lamb
11. Ort Family Farm, Bradford, NY, Schuyler Co.- beef, chicken, duck, lamb, pork, rabbit, turkey
12. Angus Glen Farm, Watkins Glen, NY, Schuyler Co.-beef, goat, chicken
13. The Piggery, Trumansburg, NY, Tompkins Co.- pork
14. Ellis Hollow Farm, Ithaca, NY, Tompkins Co.-lamb
15.  Autumn’s Harvest, Romulus NY, Seneca Co – rabbit, chicken, pork & beef

Potato Leek Soup

It was the first cool weekend day that demanded fresh bread and homemade soup. We went to the market in the morning, picking up what felt like tons of food. When I could no longer figure out how to carry anything we came home (but not before tasting the chocolate-covered bacon at the Piggery).  Joseph cooked us some brunch, and I went about preparing two batches of bread – a redux of last week’s sandwich loaf, and two loaves of the artisan seed bread.  I toasted the sesame seeds for the seed bread, which really upped the flavor.

For dinner, there was soup.  I was curious how the colors would work out with those brilliant purple potatoes, and in the end it did turn a bit brown.  That just helped me resolve the question and decide to add some cream to lighten it up.

Potato and Leek Soup

Saute in large stock pot until soft:

• 8 leeks, white a light green parts washed and sliced
• 3 T butter
• 1/2 c water

Add:

• 8 small/medium potatpoes sliced thin
• 6-7 c vegetable broth

Bring to a boil

Simmer 30 minutes or until potatoes are soft

Add pepper

Blend in blender in small batches

Stir in cream if desired

Fresh Baked

For a while I was fairly content with the gluten-free breads we were buying in the store, but lately I found I just wasn’t satisfied with them anymore. The frozen ones are abysmal, but the Le Garden bread made locally wasn’t too bad.  I was always a bit frustrated that it isn’t vegetarian, and I’ve started to notice that the taste was overpowering anything I ate on or with it.  I’ve been hearing good things about Udi’s breads, but they don’t sell them around here (although I think I read they might be coming to Wegmans at some point).

Today I finally tackled baking my own sandwich bread. I used my trusty Analise Roberts cookbook and tried her sandwich bread recipe. The one change I made was to use a vegetarian fruit gel instead of gelatin in the recipe. The results were outstanding.

The first post-baking project was a test with a grilled cheese sandwich.  It was the closest to perfection I’d had in a long time.  The bread toasted beautifully on the outside.  The cheese melted just right.  The texture was delicate and the taste was a little bland but really quite good.  I might toss a bit of teff flour into the bread next time if I wanted it to have a heartier flavor.

Toasty

I feel a bit guilty, and I don’t want to alienate my vegetarian friends here.  But we’ve had some very good meat lately.

I’ve been vegetarian for much of the last 2 1/2 years.  I think its the right thing for me to do by most calculations, and yet, my body doesn’t always seem to agree.  Lately it has wanted meat, and one of my trusted health care professionals think it might be good for me right now.

As I’ve wrestled through ethics, responsibilities, environmental and health concerns, I’ve figured out this much.  If I’m going to eat meat, I want it to be local.  I want to know who raised it and that they treat their animals well.  As it is, we know two former vegans who raise pigs, chickens and ducks on a certified organic farm nearby and sell at the farmer’s market.

Growing up we had pork chops broiled with Shake -N- Bake.  I thought it was one of the best things in the world, and even better if we had it with Rice -A- Roni.  I suspect as a young adult I made it as a comfort food.  But neither of those are on the list for my gluten-free lifestyle.  Tonight’s alternative and maybe better menu:

• Pork chops from Kingbird Farm, salt and pepper, broiled.
• Lundberg Farm Wild Blend Rice
• Green beans from our CSA (Early Morning Farm), steamed, with Kingbird Farm bacon

Last weekend we spent down in Baltimore visiting friends and family.  My father was having a birthday of significance while we were there.  Like most families, we celebrate with food.

We started the visit with omelets.  They were delicious – I made them.  My mom had just “forgotten” to tell me in advance that I had cooking responsibilities.  We’re lucky there was enough coffee and they turned out well (I had feta, mushrooms, red peppers, onions and spinach).  There wasn’t a hope for remembering to take pictures.

Lunch followed, with the first of the birthday cakes. My mother made an amazing fondant frosting that had a bit of white chocolate in it.

Dad's Birthday Cake the First

Lunch of course transitions to coffee which transitions to dinner. Well, not dinner exactly. Crabs.  Crabs should not be misunderstood as a simple item that is part of a meal.  They are, in and of themselves, an event.  You may never have worked so hard for your food.

Crabs Hon

After dinner there was a last food event for the day.  Cake the Second.  Cake the Second was more exiting for me, because this was one I could eat.  My mom used one of the Gluten-Free Pantry mixes and baked a chocolate cake.  Joseph lent a hand with whipping up some cream cheese frosting (and consequently got a taste of just how sweet a stand mixer would be).

Cake the Second

A “full” day to say the least.

When I was growing up, my parents had blueberries in the backyard.  They were enclosed in with blue wire fencing, covered with netting.  Mirrors or unused AOL cds hung in between to scare the birds away.  Mom made the best blueberry muffins and blueberry cobbler.  I think of those cobblers each summer as the blueberries get ripe here – much later than they did in Maryland.

We made a simple adaptation to Mom’s cobbler recipe and tastes much as I remember it. The recipe calls for a 9X9 pan.  I’m sure we didn’t have one of those, but substituted a glass oval baking dish instead.  They’re easier to clean than a metal pan anyway.

Fruit Cobbler

Grease pan.

Add 3-4 c fruit.

Mix together:

• 2/3 c sugar
• 2 T gluten-free flour mix
• 1/2 t cinnamon
• a few grates of nutmeg

Pour mixture over fruit.

Dot with 2 T of butter, cut small.

For topping combine:

• 1 c gluten-free flour mix
• 1/4 t xanthan gum
• 1 t baking powder
• 2 T sugar
• 1/3 c vegetable shortening
• 3 T milk
• 1 egg

Drop spoonfuls of topping onto fruit until well covered.

Bake @ 350* for 25-30 minutes until the crust is golden brown and the fruit is bubbly.