September 2008 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Canning Tomatoes, Feeling Domestic

About a month ago, I got it into my head that I wanted to try canning. It seems like canning has been all over the place lately, and that makes sense, as it fits right into the burgeoning local food movement. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a sucker for the domestic arts, and also a sucker for trying things that seem very time consuming and complicated. So of course I was thinking about canning.

I mentioned my interest it to a friend of mine who grows tomatoes in his yard down on Cape Cod. And when I say he grows tomatoes, I mean he grows lots and lots and lots of tomatoes. Beautiful, bright red roma tomatoes, all grown organically. And one day he showed up with a five-pound flat of those beautiful tomatoes for me, so I could preserve them and enjoy them all winter long. So that clinched the deal: I was going to try this canning thing.
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Sometimes you just need a quiche

Quiche is one of my favorite things. It’s something I remember my mom making when I was a kid, a special event brunch kind of food. I have memories of mom squeezing and squeezing so much defrosted spinach in paper towels, and I think quiche was one of the first egg-based dishes I ever actually liked. And when Smitten Kitchen featured spinach quiche a few weeks ago, it was all over. I had a craving, and I needed a quiche.

Thank goodness for all that leftover pie dough from my nectarine galette experiment. The pie dough is the only potentially tricky thing about quiche, and honestly? Most of the time I buy it pre-made, because who needs to fuss with that stuff in the morning anyway? Not that I think quiche must be relegated to breakfast. In fact, this quiche made several satisfying lunches and dinners for me. And thank goodness for tart pans. I never thought to make quiche in a tart pan before; I’ve always used 9-inch pie pans. But the tart pan, while it does produce a thinner quiche, halves the cooking time, which made me very happy when I was very hungry. Who woulda thunk it? Oh, yeah, Deb at Smitten Kitchen.
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Curried Cauliflower and Potatoes with Black Beluga Lentils

A few weeks ago I rambled on and on here about how great it is to share recipes with people you actually know, to keep a collection of recipes given to you by friends and family, passing on traditions and stories and all that sentimental stuff. And then I admitted that some of the most fundamental things I learned about cooking I learned from the internet. I’m such a hypocrite.

Well, here is another recipe passed along to me by a friend. She knew I like to cook, and one evening she handed me a sheet of paper with this recipe scrawled across it. I thought, “That looks kind of boring,” and I filed it away in my recipe folder and promptly forgot about it. Until last week. Let me tell you, it’s not boring at all. And while it might not be that attractive, don’t let its relative monochrome palette deter you. This stuff is wonderful. It’s both exotic and comforting at the same time. Alright, I might leave out the lentils in the future, and serve it over rice pilaf instead, but serve it again I most certainly will. Even if I’m just serving it to myself.
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I’m in love with steak burritos.

I’m very firmly against this whole idea that Labor Day somehow signals the end of summer and, more importantly, the end of grilling season. So last weekend, we decided to throw a “Summer’s Not Over Yet” barbecue, to keep the love of the grill alive. Of course, the weather was totally crap: over 90% humidity and rain, rain, rain. But we were not to be daunted. We fired up that grill anyway, and everyone huddled on the back porch and sweated.

I decided to forgo the typical burgers and potato salad route in favor of a Santa Maria-style barbecue. Or rather, a Boston-style Santa Maria-style barbecue, seeing as how some of the staples of the central California coast are unavailable on this side of things, including tri-tip steak and pinquito beans. I have on several occasions expressed my love for the tri-tip, but in my 20-some years of living in California, I’ve never really heard of this traditional Santa Maria barbecue, and I’d certainly never heard of pinquito beans. In the last few weeks, however, I started reading about this California tradition seemingly everywhere, and I knew I had to pay homage, even if my homage was a bit flawed.
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Where I learned how to cook: Lan Nguyen’s Ex-Boyfriend Stir-Fry

In my last post, I blathered on about the importance of sharing recipes with friends and family, and continuing old school traditions of index cards in recipe boxes. And then what do I do? I turn around and tell you all that almost everything I learned about cooking I learned from the internet. What a hypocrite!

Ok, it’s not exactly true that I learned how to cook from the internet. But this stir-fry recipe is what I always think of when I remember cooking my first real, grown-up meal in college. It’s the first thing I cooked for friends (including the boy I had a big fat crush on), and when I look back at the smudged computer print out, I realize it’s the first time I really learned about improvisation in the kitchen. A lot of my cooking quirks and habits probably originated from this recipe, like serving stir-fry over pasta instead of rice, and putting in any old darn thing I want, even if people say something like “sun-dried tomatoes don’t belong in Mexican food!” And you know where I got this recipe? A random stranger on the internet.
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A Combs Family Favorite: Tamale Pie, or 1960s Southwest Style

These days there is no shortage of places to find new recipes. On the interwebs alone you’ve got food blogs, recipe forums, and an endless array of culinary websites like epicurious and Eating Well. Food magazines seem to multiply every time I go to the newstand, and new cookbooks are published almost daily, not just from the big name publishing houses but by individuals using print-on-demand services like lulu.com to sell their own culinary expertise. All of this recipe abundance makes me think about my tattered blue folder stuffed with scraps of paper and print outs and index cards. It makes me think of the way people acquired recipes in the decades before cheap printing and the internet: from other people.

I suppose you could say that finding a recipe on a blog is still getting it from another person, and it’s true that the food blogging community is tight-knit. I feel like I know the writers whose blogs I read regularly, just by reading their words and seeing pictures of their kitchens and exchanging the occasional email or comment. There is a big element of the personal in food blogs, and of friendliness, but it’s still not quite the same as tasting someone’s spinach cheese bites at a party and telling them you simply have to have the recipe, or yet again pulling out the stained index card on which your Grandma wrote her Russian Tea Cake recipe.
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