Buttonwillow Six Eats

new round of posts

2010-11-07T15:26:00.000-08:00

I am going to try posting more often than I have been lately. It is likely these will be shorter posts, late at night. I have been thinking a lot about Costco, Chard, vending machines, and other topics. We shall see how it goes!

Is this thing on?

2010-10-06T22:13:00.000-07:00

The 5 am feeding is the perfect time to check to see if my iPhone blogging app is still hooked up....

Posting!

2010-08-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that I have a lot to post about, moving, pregnancy, and work have all conspired to keep me from posting! I have some things to share from my new locale, so hopefully I will get to that soon. In the meantime, I am just sorry that I won't be delivering at the hospital with the "Best Hospital Food" rating. Sigh.

Long Time Between Posts

2010-05-01T14:35:00.001-07:00

Things have been very hectic here, so I haven't had a chance to post as much as I would like. We are moving to Utah, and then eventually Seattle, so there has been a lot to think about.

In preparation for the move to Utah, I am thinking of eating nothing but Trader Joe's for the next 4 weeks....

Sad Blender

2010-03-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

My KitchenAid blender apparently wasn't quite up to the task of a "smoothie-each-morning" routine for very long. We have been having delicious smoothies made mostly from frozen fruit each morning for around 2 months. But I think the frozen bananas finally got to it. The little rubber teeth that connect the motor to the blades started to rip, and now will no longer turn the blade.

Apparently this is a pretty easy part to replace. This makes me happy, since I would hate to throw out the whole blender just because of this one little part!

Where is My Milk From

2010-03-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder where your cows live? Where is My Milk From? is a cool new site for tracking where your dairy originates.

I checked my Trader Joe's %1 Milk and my Brown Cow yogurt. I couldn't find a code on either that was valid. Still, a cool idea (and worthy, perhaps of an iPhone app.)

There Is Advertising on My Banana

2010-03-03T22:20:00.000-08:00

I really don't know what to say...

Cooking Frenzy!

2010-02-24T22:15:00.000-08:00

My daughter and I had a cooking frenzy this weekend!

It all started because we agreed to cook and deliver dinner on Saturday for a family that needs a little extra help at the moment. We picked a simple menu: steamed broccoli, mashed potatoes, gravy, and meatballs. Mashed potatoes and meatballs are already in my daughter's cooking repetoire, so she was easily able to shoulder some of the work.

While I was prepping everything, I started thinking about her request for a cheesecake. I happened to have the ingredients for a ricotta cheesecake, so I got that started too. As a result, at one point I had all four burners AND the oven going. When we came back home later that day after running errands, I could scarcely believe it was time now to start cooking again, this time for our dinner.

My daughter so liked our cooking on Saturday, that she decided she wanted to make something herself on Sunday, from start to finish. She decided on soup, I suspect because there is a lot of good stirring and chopping involved.

So Sunday I taught her how to make a basic mirepoix, dice an onion (she made me take a close-up), peel garlic, sweat the vegetables, make some broth, and use the submersion blender. She ended the morning with a white bean and garlic soup!

Beets!

2010-02-14T17:42:00.000-08:00

This week we had a nice beet salad with goat cheese and capers.

During beet season, I try to have a bunch of cooked, sliced beets on hand. Beets are very easy to prepare ahead of time, and I think they taste even better after a few days in some vinegar. Once you have a container of them in your fridge, you can even get out just one or two to add a pretty garnish to your plate.

Limp Asparagus

2010-02-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

A few months back I bought a HUGE container of aspargus at CostCo. I lightly steamed it and made myself about 5 freezer bags worth. I thought I was being clever and thrifty. I imagined tossing it in the steamer for a few more minutes whenever I failed to have a green vegetable handy.

As it turns out, you can't freeze asparagus. Unlike peas or green beans, asparagus basically turns into mush. Like this:

I was so disappointed, I didn't touch the remaining asparagus until today, when I defrosted it to make asparagus soup. I also happened to have some frozen turkey stock, so I chopped all the asparagus, threw in some lemon juice and zest, and tossed the whole lot into the stock. I let it simmer for a half an hour. After it cooled, I puréed it all.

Here it is served with some sour cream. It was pretty good (and definitely the only use for limp asparagus that I can think of.)

BPA

2010-02-08T17:32:00.000-08:00

I am getting on the BPA-concern bandwagon a little late here, but I am now firmly on it. When I first heard of it, I basically threw out my old gym bottle and got a new aluminum one. But, all it took was a scary TV show to send me scouring our cupboards for clear plastics that might contain it, and to the internet to find out how much is out there.

I only found a few things in my kitchen with the (now ominous) 7 on the bottom. Unfortunately, two new storage containers and two of my favorite measuring cups have to go. But the rest of my storage containers and the clear plastic storing my juice all seemed to be fine. So I can breath a sigh of relief, right?

Well, no. I like canned food, and it turns out the liners in a lot of canned food (including soft drinks!) contains BPA. Combine that with how long canned food stays canned, and it seems a little scary. So I decided to do some more research to find out if there was any way to tell if my can was safe.

In one study, the highest BPA concentrations were found to occur in infant formula (!), raviolis, and chicken soup, all things you might feed to your kid. BPA was even found in cans labelled "BPA-free". Gah!

On the up side, my BPA fear made me reconsider how to get the things I used to get in cans. Primarily these were staples like black beans, garbanzos, kidney beans, crushed tomatoes, and tomato paste.

Sadaf, a middle-eastern brand available at many stores near here sells tomato paste a glass jar (which in addition to being safer, is also handily re-sealable). As for the beans, I soaked and cooked a pound of black beans the other day. Not only were they delicious, it yielded about 3 cans worth of beans for about one-can's worth of cost. So, this might be a good scare.

Food Calendar!

2010-01-26T07:37:00.001-08:00

Possibly one of my best Etsy purchases yet: a hand-letterpressed, illustrated perpetual gardening calendar from Krankpress. I expect this will be hanging in my kitchen for a long time to come.

Fried Rice and Roasted Grape Tomatoes

2010-01-16T21:06:00.001-08:00

I haven't done too much cooking this weekend so far, but I have had some successes. Yesterday I made a great fried rice out of leftovers. I was inspired, in part, by the memory of a great rice dish at Tamarine in Palo Alto which is served with an egg perched right on top.
I took leftover rice and added it to leftover beef and tofu (which I had sliced into thin strips) and then added fresh bean sprouts, pea shoots, and carrots. I fried it all together quickly, and then topped it with a poached egg. This is probably the yummiest thing I have made in awhile. For once the leftovers were actually quite a bit better than the original meal.

Tonight for dinner we had one of those meals where basically I put out a bunch of tasty things (like cheese, avocado, spinach salad, bread, etc.) and we basically snack. One of my favorite things to add to this are slow-roasted grape or cherry tomatoes. They are quite easy to make, and are a great way to use tomatoes that don't look like they are going to live up to your expectations otherwise.

I take a pack or two of tomatoes, toss them lightly in olive oil and a little salt, and put them in a roasting pan. I then turn on the toaster oven to 225, pop them in, and leave them there for 2.5 hours. Probably they would make a great soup or sauce, but I don't have the patience to process them further. I like to eat them with goat cheese and bread.

Dinner!

2010-01-13T20:27:00.000-08:00

I didn't forget I was going to blog dinners, I just temporarily forgot yesterday. So here are three nights of dinners: last night, tonight, and tomorrow:

Tuesday: We had two kinds of veggie curries with rice and yogurt. One was chickpea curry (my favorite!) and the other was lentils with the leftover sweet potatoes and swiss chard from the other night. I didn't have high hopes for the leftovers curry, but it turned out to be the better of the two.

Wednesday: Today I went to 99 Ranch, so tonight pretty much had to have an Asian flair. After staring at the incredibly cheap pre-fried tofu at Ranch 99, I still came home and fried my own. We had Golden Tofu, string beans in plum sauce, and thinly sliced Kobe beef that had marinated in Mirin, ginger, and soy. There are enough leftovers here that I am contemplating a pretty interesting fried rice.

Thursday: Dinner out with friends! Gives me plenty of time to figure out what to do for Friday.

Name Change and Dinner

2010-01-11T17:27:00.000-08:00

I finally changed the name of this blog to Buttonwillow Six Eats. Why? I almost never post about anything other than food. When I started, I thought maybe I would post about all sorts of things I like: video games or art and design, mass transit, libraries, and maybe even politics. And I have, a little. But not very often. So this is now exclusively a food blog from here on out. Eventually I will even put up a new banner/design.

To kick that off, I will be posting my dinner menus as often as I remember to do so. I troll the web looking for dinner ideas, so I will add some of mine to the mix.

Tonight we are having sweet potato and black bean enchiladas, with a side of swiss chard and extra black beans.

Sweet potatoes or yams taste great with cheese and enchilada sauce (especially the Trader Joe's Enchilada Sauce I am currently hooked on). Sometimes I make swiss chard and cheese enchiladas too, but tonight I decided I wanted it on the side with a squeeze of lemon.

Gingko

2010-01-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

I love ginkgo trees. I used to live on 10th Avenue in NYC, and would walk past a row on 20th Street. They were so pretty, especially in the autumn.

But they smelled TERRIBLE. The smelly, smelly nuts would get crushed underfoot for about a 2 week period, and I would become tempted to walk on the considerable less-scenic 19th Street.

So I will surprised and intrigued to read this post at BoingBoing about eating ginkgo nuts. First off, I had no idea they were edible.I had figured that something on the tree was ingestible from all of the ginkgo biloba products I had seen, I just hadn't figured it was that nut.

Also, happy new year!

Carbon Calculator

2009-12-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

Kind of fun/depressing from Bon Appetit:

Low Carbon Diet Calculator

Try throwing some farmed salmon in there...

Prickly, Prickly Pears

2009-11-21T15:06:00.000-08:00

When I saw this in my mom's backyard, I immediately had thoughts to harvest them all.

I was going to make prickly pear lemonade, prickly pear syrup, maybe even prickly pear jam.

I decided to see first if the prickly pears were ripe, and then read up on how to prepare them. This seemed like an OK idea at the time, however I would now suggest to anyone in a similar situation to read up on prickly pears before embarking on such an exploratory expedition.

I went out the backyard, found a promising looking pear, found a spot to grab at it without encountering the large spikes, and picked it. So far so good. I brought it into the house and sliced it in half.It was seedier and an more orange than I thought it would be, so before digging in with a spoon, I decided to sit down at the computer and look up more about prickly pears. This is when I noticed that someone had stuck daggers into my fingers when I wasn't looking.

It turns out prickly pears have, in addition to the large spikes, have tiny-hair-like spikes as well. They are nearly invisible, but are extremely painful. These are insidious little things that attach themselves to everything (I was attacked by one 3 days after this initial picking.) Apparently you are meant to remove all of the outside spine, which can be done by rolling them in sand, before doing anything, and certainly before bringing them into your home.

So, after spending more than a little time picking spikes out with a tweezer, injuring my mother, and contemplating what one of these spikes would do to my digestive track, I have lost my nerve. The prickly pear harvest will have to wait for another time.

Seriously?

2009-10-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

From the "nutritionists" at Target.

Kiwi Fruit

2009-10-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

Apparently my new hobby is trying new fruit. I thought I would have to leave the country to get anything interesting, but fruit I have never tried keeps popping up around me. Last night it was kiwi berries, which they sell at my local market.

They are just like little kiwis without the fuzzy outside, and with a slightly sweeter overall taste. I included a raspberry in the shot so you can see the size. They would be very pretty cut up in a fruit salad.

I was told they have a VERY short season, so if you see any in the store, give them a try!

Help Papawow find the mystery ingredients

2009-10-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a lot of interesting food blogs lately, and Papawow's post about KFC's mysterious buttery spread caught my eye. Spread the word, help him solve the mystery. I tried to go to the link he provided to ask them what the ingredient list is, but it isn't active anymore. So call 1-800-CALL-KFC and ask. If you get an answer, post to Papawow (but tell me too!)

I also think it might be interesting to guess what is in it. I will have to give this more thought.

Pim

2009-10-13T19:19:00.000-07:00

Hey! Pim of Chez Pim bought nectarines (on video) at the orchard I posted about here. It reminds me I have to go back soon! I remember when much of the valley looked like this.

Ghormeh Sadzi

2009-10-12T15:55:00.000-07:00

As I alluded to in an earlier post, the best thing about Orange County food (for me, so far) is the availability and pervasiveness of Persian cuisine. This is something I didn't experience much of in NorCal, and is one of the few points of foodie interest down here.

I am very fortunate to have a Persian neighbor who is an amazing cook. He makes some of the best rice I have ever had, and is always willing to share what he is up to with me. I now understand why I should want particular types of kebab skewers, what spices go well with lamb, how to serve lavash for a snack, and many other good ideas.

So I was very pleased to enter his apartment to see this site the other day:
He was prepping to make some sadzi, which includes vast quantities of herbs, black-eyed peas, spinach, and onions. It also includes these, which I had never seen before.

He explained these soften up in the stew and impart a citrus-y flavor. They are served with the stew. While you don't eat them, you do break them open over the rice. I was lucky enough to have some of this the next day:

As promised, the dried lemons gave everything a pleasantly lemon-y flavor. Yum!

Cactus = Food

2009-10-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

I had my first really great dragon fruit the other day courtesy of a friend with a very nice tree/plant or whatever you would call the crazy beast that grows dragon fruit. She refrigerated it so that it was cool and crisp. I could definitely see eating more of these, but only if I can get them straight from the source. The ones in the supermarket here look like they have been in the back of a truck for a couple of months (and are something like 6 dollars apeice.)

I gave a slice to my daughter who said, basically, "this doesn't taste like anything." She then went back to eating her apple.

My mother has a HUGE prickly pear plant. I have had prickly pear margaritas, so I think the flavor is nice. But I have never done anything with the fruit directly. This nice dragon fruit inspired me to crack some open next time I am in her back yard and figure out what is what. This recipe for a prickly pear vinagrette might be a good place to start.

Another great food blog

2009-09-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

Check out: http://www.fancyfastfood.com/. This dovetails nicely with a little food project I have planned. More details soon.