Italian food and Simplicity

Bowl full homemade of goodness

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of having some incredible, made from scratch, Italian food. I have never been to Italy (or Europe, yet) but I have to confess that in the past I was somewhat of a food network addict and watched that channel often. I hardly dared to ever recreate anything that I saw. Sometimes I visited the web site to swipe recipes and translate them to my own liking, but never directly tried to recreate something from those recipes.

I do make a pretty good red sauce of my own concoction, but usually I skip the making pasta part and just roll with some store bought goodness (thanks America's Test Kitchen). I always figured it was the sauce that made the pasta anyway. And while I may be correct in certain aspects in my train of thought, it is now incredibly clear to me that having both home made red sauce and good fresh hand made pasta is, how do I say, a culinary delight of the highest order.

Apparently Italians eat their pasta separate from their meat (beef, lamb, what have you), so that was how we enjoyed the evening. The sauce that was used on the pasta was the same sauce the beef cooked in for who knows how long. It had good, deep flavor and roundedness that can only be coaxed out of food with time and deliberate love and intention.

The pasta itself was tender, wide, and thick, with just enough topography to have the sauce cling desperately to its sides and not slip off when the fork is half way between your mouth and the bowl. It was perfect.

The beef, I'm not not sure of the cut, the brand, or about the recipe used to prepare it. I do know that it was delicate, moist and , like the sauce, had flavor that was deep and rich, but not over powering on any note. It was the kind of beef you could eat for dinner for days, no months, on end and never get tired of it. So, it was much like the pasta.

Dessert was the real Italian deal. Authentic almond biscotti (direct from Italy in fact I think) that we dipped in some after dinner wine (of which the name escapes me). Espresso and some more wine made the night fly by, and before we all knew it, the new day was upon us.

I dare say, with all due respect to my mother, it was the best birthday meal I have had since, well, my mothers home made lasagna. Many thanks for good friends. Next meal is on me (I mean the cooking, not literally).

Simplicity

It seems the more and more I explore the craft of food, the saying "less is more" is very true. Basic good, local and fresh ingredients, mixed and made with love and care always outperforms any and all other foods, period. A simple beet salad, lentils with curry, a glass of vodka straight from the freezer; small and simple delights will never lose their appeal.

The sun has begun to poke it's head around, and I am glad. I am ready to start hitting the trails again, ride my bike everywhere, and get back to letting you all know about the hiking around here. One of the main reasons I enjoy doing this is that it makes me look to new areas to hike in and around. So I get to see new areas, and hopefully you get to read about hikes that not everyone in the GPNW has already been on or blogged about. And the trails I do end up hiking on that have been done before, I hope that I can see it or present it in a new way to you.

Jamie Oliver has a new campaign going called Food Revolution. He is on an education trail to empower people in eating well (which usually also means better tasting also) with a focus on children and school meals. It is a great cause and I encourage you all to sign his petition on his sight.

Popcorn built the Aztec Empire

It's a"maize"ing

(ugh, sorry about that)

I love me some popped corn. Especially when it is cooked proper like; in a big pot with salt, pepper, oil and butter. Of course I occasionally add other spices as needed; like oregano or Lawry's. If I end up using coconut oil to pop the corn in, I add curry as well as salt. What you end up with is some very tasty coconut curry popcorn that is as addicting as it sounds.

Food & Good are only one letter apart. Coincident? I think not.

Molly Wizenberg @ Cascadia Community College

Hi everyone, it has been awhile since I posted. How have you all been?

First of all, let me give you some advice. If you ever blog, please write all your entries in word or some other doc format. I had over half of this entry done and usually blog spot auto saves every so often. However, something went batty and nothing was saved. Redundancy, it's never a bad idea.

Food, the one thing that I can truly say is important in everybody’s life. You only live once; you deserve to eat good food. A life well lived is filled with amazing foods right?

But what I recently discovered is that when I prepare meals just for myself, the food is usually just meet my nutrition standards (and those fluctuate from time to time). I never really go out of my way to prepare great meals for myself. But when I cook for friends, look out.

Why? Well, Michael Hebb (this article) and Molly Wizenberg’s (public speaking at Cascadia Community College) pointed out some very interesting things to me.

Cooking food, for me, has never been all about the food, but about bringing people together around good food. For me, it is about taking care of other people and surrounding myself with good fun happy people. For exqample when I make myself breakfast (when it is not just buttered toast and our the door!), I will fry up some eggs, heat up some refried beans, dollop some cottage cheese on top, sprinkle some hot sauce on it and call it done.

The Breakfast of champions

But when I cook for others, it’s all eggs Benedict with hollandaise from scratch and free range chicken eggs. Or fresh picked berries from the alley to put in the pancake batter and in the warmed syrup.

Soup and Trees, what they mean to me is everything.

Which brings me to this: I love soup. My grandfather, Morris, has always been a mastermind when it came to making soup and being able to identify trees of all sorts. He makes the best soup out of leftovers: raid the fridge, scraps of pasta, maybe some canned tomatoes from the garden, and bang, the best ham slop you ever did taste.

Cabbage Soup

I made some cabbage soup recently, andI made a huge batch of really good spicy cabbage soup. While the soup was good, the best part was the fresh cracked pepper. I loved savoring the half cracked bits of pepper in my mouth. I relished the experiencing of getting to know the spice and did not grab for a glass of water to wash it out. How else am I supposed to get acquainted with it? Spices make the world go round.


The cabbage soup recipe was a snap. Water, cabbage (both red and green), spices (I used a handful of dried green ones like basil, oregano, etc), salt, pepper, a dash of hot sauce, onions and garlic. I first sautéed the onions and garlic in the bottom of the soup pot with some spices in a little butter and olive oil. Then the water, cabbage and fennel went in. Simmer it all until warm and ladle it out. Easy peasy.

Steak, the other white meat

I also have to plug Bill the Butcher in Woodinville WA. His steaks and raw goats milk are local, hormone and antibiotic free. Plus he dry ages his steaks. They are more than amazing. His butcher's choice ground meat for burgers and chili is concocted of the scraps of meat he has lying around (pork, lamb, steak, etc) and let me tell you, that stuff makes the best burgers (or anything for that matter) in town. Some of that, and his local bacon, were used to make this:

Possibly the best baked beans, ever.

And now a preview, the star of an upcoming event, real Russian vodka. I have no idea what the label says, so if any of you speak Russian komrad, please tell me what this says.

Russian Star

Creative Arts Club presents...

Dear Blog Readers,

I would like to invite you all to a speaking event taking place next Tuesday, January 19th at the North Creeks Event Center of Cascadia Community College. The Creative Arts Club is proud to present Molly Wizenberg, local Seattle Author (Books and blogs) and owner of Delancey's will be reading selected passages from her book beginning at 4:30pm. There will be light refreshments for this event.

This event is free and open to all, so if you come bring friends! This is sure to be a great event, and did I mention it is free!

I hope to see you there.
Joshua

Egads!

Look at what my diet has degraded into! Ashamed, a little. But it has been fun and liberating in some odd way. (that is chicken strips in the plastic sack right of the cereal, btw)

The Eve

My view this morning

Hello Faithful Readers! By now it might be obvious that while on break from school I have WAY more time to write my blog, but just in case you did not I thought it was worth pointing out.

What an early morning barker may look like.

I awoke today to the sound of a dog barking as I am dog sitting, prompting me to get up let them out and feed them. After a fitful yet restful night of sleep, probably due to the recent splurge of poor diet and reading the first 59 pages of "How I became a Famous Novelist" by Steve Hely, (btw, a pretty good book) I rose to do so.

Self explanatory picture of the book I am reading

It was an amazing view as everything was frosted in white frost and the was just beginning to reveal itself lazily on the horizon. Oh how I could relate.


After letting the dogs out, playing with them, and feeding them, I returned inside invigorated from the crisp morning air. I felt inspired so I turned on the television with high hopes some great seasonal show would be on. To my dismay and non surprise, GMA, Today and The Early Show all had on the usual fair of depressing news: air travel mishaps, missing person cases, etc. No all day festival of being grateful that I hoped for. So my choices were between Sesame Street and White Christmas; it was a close race but White Christmas won.

There happen to be a few extra ripe banana's in the house, so I am going to bake some banana bread using this recipe today. Seems to be a fine thing to do today, bake that is.

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread with some holiday sprinkles

If you have not had a chance to try Beecher's side dishes, do so as soon as humanly possible. This one is filled with kale, copious amounts of the real thing. It was incredibly good and cheesy. Normally I do not like frozen dishes, well not as a grown up anyways. But this one caught my eye the other day and I was feeling lazy, so I bought it. What a treasure I found. It seriously reminded me of the kind of dish I would make if I were to make a really good brown rice cheesy kale casserole. Those people over there in that Beecher's test kitchen experimenting making this type of goodness, yeah, they have it rough.

Heat in the oven and BAM, good eats.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

Cookie Attack!!!

The Aftermath

No seriously, I woke up Saturday under attack by the baking bug. Don't laugh, this isn't funny. I had no choice in the matter. So I baked a few batches of cookies.

Chocolate Chip

The first one I made was a standard chocolate chip, but the recipe I found and used called for a 1/2 cup butter and 2/3 cup sour cream. I did not include the unsweetened chocolate and I may have added a little extra vanilla. These are by far the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever made. Soft, moist, tender with a great chocolate chip to cookie ratio i.e. these cookies are packed with chocolate chips! (there's no such thing as too much chocolate)

In the fridge, M&M sugar cookies waiting for a baking.

The next batch I made was a sugar cookie that I added nutmeg and cinnamon to and added both dark and milk chocolate holiday M&m's.

Trail Mix Cookies

The third cookie I made I just followed the Chocolate chip base recipe and instead of adding chocolate chips I added a bag of trail mix and some cayenne and cinnamon (Next time I make these I am going to make my own trail mix to add instead of using a store bought bag). They turned out much hotter than I anticipated, but were still pretty dang good.



Also in each batch I also added a splash of Chaokah brand coconut milk and a dash of fermented coconut water. You know, just to make things interesting.

Happy Holidays.
Joshua

Happy Seasons!

Hello faithful readers! I guess being busy with school studies, final exams and papers, and being involved in school clubs takes up more time than I realized. I have had no time to cook, hike, or go visit any new bands live. So that leaves me with the question, what am I going to blog/report about?

So I am going to share a couple recipes that I would have loved to have made these last few weeks, share about some bands that I have been using recently to help me get through these days, and share a little about what my life looks like and why I think I may have made a mistake.

A friends cheesy potato recipe

I have had these in the past, and man, they are incredible. No one has ever complained about these showing up for meals.


"Quarter and boil some gold potatoes, 8 to 12, for about 45 min to an hour, until they are soft and the skin starts to peel off. Drain the water completely, then add a block of Philadelphia cream cheese. Beat until smooth. Add a couple few dollops of sour cream and beat in until the potatoes are the consistency you want. Finish off with 2 or 3 tablespoons of butter on top, and put a lid on the pot so the butter melts. That's it!"

Too easy.

This is how I roll

This is a recipe I found at Simple Daily Recipes.

I recently made these and they turned our very nice. I used a little more butter in the recipe and next time I would cook them for a little less time and or make them larger (I was a tad conservative in pinching them off).

The recipe is in the linky link also.

• 1 package quick-acting active dry yeast
• 1 1/3 cup milk (105 to 115F degrees)
• 3 to 3 1/2 cups flour or whole wheat flour
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon melted butter (I used 3, 2 in the mixer with the oil and the rest melted on top)
  
• coarse salt
  

Dissolve yeast in warm milk with sugar in electric mixer bowl. Stir in 1 cup flour, oil, and salt. Beat until smooth. Stir in enough remaining flour, scraping dough from side of bowl, until soft dough forms. Cover and let rise in warm place until double, about 45 minutes.

Heat oven 400F degrees. Punch down dough in center and fold over a few times. Prep a 12 cup muffin pan with non-stick cooking spray. Pinch off 1 inch balls of dough and quickly roll in palm of hands. Put 3 balls to one muffin cup, brush with melted butter; sprinkle with coarse salt.

Bake until crust is light golden brown, about 15 minutes. Immediately remove from pan.

New Music?

Well...I have not explored this part of my social life recently. I do listen to 90.3 FM KEXP as any good person should and there is always good music on, and some of it is new as well. If not new in generally then at the very least new to me. Sadly I have not had the pleasure of discovering a new band or stumbling over a lost treasure. Actually, I take that back. I stumbled across some funk that is just great. I can not even recall where and when I was exposed to it, but I immediately went to Pandora and created a station for it. It was Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band.

I also have been listening to some older bands that I think are great. Such as Jawbox who recently reissued their first album "For Your Own Special Sweetheart" ala remastered. It sounds great.

And Sparta, while they are good, I think some of their songs are redundant. All though almost each song on "Wire Tap Scars" has some sort of power pop-ie hook melody like thing that grabs you.

Also The Promise Ring, The Helio Sequence and Nada Surf. BTW, I like some of the things that Pitchfork has to say, but mostly I like them because they offer free music. I find some of their review scores to be biased and actually I hardly ever take into account what others say as far as reviews go as I am my own person and am more than capable of creating my own interpretation of things.

Go download the KEXP podcasts right now to your MP3 player and soak up some good tunes. (Podcast 81 song 4 "The Heavenly States - The Race", clearly they have called the Fountains of Wayne Hotline...oh song 5 is great as well "MGMT - Kids")

What else is going on?

- On December 5th, my old stomping grounds, the Kirkland branch of the KCLS is re-opening! This is the first time it will have been open since it closed for the remodeling it has undergone. Should be great.

- On December 12th, the 12 Bars of Seattle charity pub crawl is taking place. This year they are raising money for Dynamic Family Services. Sounds like a good time.

- Also on Saturday December 12th the Juanita Woodlands and Denny Creek area are looking for volunteers to plant trees. This is where you will find me.

And now a formal Apology

As you may or may not know, I am currently in school earning a degree in Environmental Technologies and Sustainability. Why you ask? How did this happen?

Well, it came about in equal parts haste and desperation. It was the best of all possible options in front of me at the time (mind you it has turned out incredibly well, mind numbingly so).

The fact remains that I have some regrets.
I regret not taking a harder look at culinary school.
I regret not taking a closer harder look at earning a musical degree.

I do not regret being back in school and learning, that much is certain. And I realize I can complete either one of these above mentioned goals easily upon the completion of my current studies. Which I intend to do.

I resolve that upon completion of my current school curriculum, I will immediately enroll in either a culinary program and then a music program (or the other way around). It is just common sense.

Duh

Merry Jubilation!