An Onion, Both Sliced and Julienned

It sure feels surreal to step on the speedy river raft of a Life Dream.  When you fantasize about something for so many years–decades, even–it’s weird to start experiencing the real-life details that accompany the dream.  Fluorescent lights.  Combination locks.  Attendance.

The first week of culinary school was a heaping platter of details.  We survived a four-day onslaught of information about the school’s program and individual instructor expectations.  Being in a cohort-style group, the 26 of us managed not to get lost by more or less shuffling around together from place to place. 

Seattle Culinary Academy’s program itself is brilliantly organized, and it runs like a well-oiled machine.  The whole system must have taken years to perfect.   I wish I could draw you a diagram of how it all works–it’s that cool.  Anyway, as first-quarter students, we’ll rotate through many experiences during these next weeks, both in our own kitchen and those of the more advanced students. 

Some days I’ll be in our 1st quarter kitchen doing prep for SCA student lunches, other days I’ll be in the galley washing pots, and others I’ll bus tables in the school’s two restaurants (for which the more advanced students cook).  On other rotation days, I’ll visit the advanced students’ kitchens, and they’ll give me something innocuous to do while I observe them in action, making me both useful and able to absorb what’s to come. 

The teachers themselves seem amazing, too.  I’ll likely be telling more about them as the weeks and quarters pass.  Chef Gregg Shiosaki, the one who teaches us the bulk of our first quarter theory and practicum, comes from a well-rounded professional background and obviously holds high standards for himself and us.  I reckon this is the kind of chef you want teaching the new lot–a teacher that people want to work hard for.  On the first or second day he told us that we should walk with purpose and pride when we are in the kitchen.  When we cook, we hold ourselves accountable, and we present what we have prepared with pride, not carelessness. 

Here’s something I liked from his knife demonstration yesterday.  It’s about onion slices versus julienned onions (example pictured above).   During the demonstration Chef Gregg was showing us sliced and julienned onions. To explain the different cuts, I’ll pretend the onion’s a globe, with north and south poles.  If half an onion lies north/south on a cutting board, flat side down, then onion slices are cut through the “lines of latitude,” east to west, basically making half onion rings.  Julienned onions are cut north to south, like lines of longitude, or time zones.  Julienned onions require angled cutting near the cutting board to create consistent shapes.  In the picture above, the slices are on the left and the juliennes are on the right. 

So, why do we care about the difference between slices and julienne cuts for onions?  When you cut slices, you have cut against the grain of the onion, which makes them easier to break down easily in soups, and also makes them easier to eat in salads; julienned onions, since they are sliced along the fiber lines,  would be more stringy and less easy to eat raw in salad.  Sometimes you want your onions to retain their form in certain cooked dishes, though, such as a stir fry.  So juliennes are better for that. 

On some level I must have known all of this and how the onion fibers affect different cut types.  It’s common sense, right?  Chef Gregg reminds us to use our common sense quite a bit.  Still, though, this small fact has filled me with geeky glee today.  It’s the sort of “Ah ha!” that I’ve been hoping will fill my next 7 quarters.

For me, this new month of October is so full of awesomeness that I don’t even know what to do with myself.  First of all, tomorrow is my first day of culinary school.  I am giddy with excitement and might be up late tonight.  After years of teaching school, I forgot what it’s like to be on the student end of the business, having no idea of what is in store for me.  It’s a wild feeling, like sitting on a surfboard anticipating a really gorgeous and gnarly wave.

The other excitement in October is the Opportunity To Be A Better Person. With Unprocessed October we get to eat healthier, greener, and probably cheaper.  I’ve made a good menu.   And by good, I also mean that I took seasonality into account, along with keeping everything as local as possible. 

Wow.  I am (and probably you are) wondering: when school starts, am I going to be able to be this intentional anymore?  That’s one of the great things about Seattle Culinary Academy, though.  Their mission includes sustainable practices.  These people walk their talk.  So hopefully, it will be a breeze to walk right alongside them and feed the family well in the meantime!  This is what I’m hoping for, and I’ll definitely keep you posted.  Green, healthy, frugal, busy?  What has to give? Does anything?

One sustainable practice, of course, is to avoid wasting food.  Here’s where the leftover pork chops come in.  On Friday I tried a new recipe for spice-crusted pork chops that had an intriguing-sounding combination of spices.  I will not share this recipe with you, because it was, in a word, gross.  Did the recipe writer even taste this dish? Ever?   It reminded me of a potluck, where you put too many different flavors on your plate, and, while chatting and plate-balancing, you accidentally take a bite of several people’s contributions at once.  Hmm.  I detect notes of kitchen sink.

Meanwhile, though, I had a couple pounds of good pork that had been cooked and crusted within this gross-kitchen-sink combo.  What to do? 

Sunday night I tackled the problem with pork fried rice.  I trimmed the outer layer off the pork, sliced it thinly, and sauteed it on high heat with onions, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, mixed veggies and a batch of cooked rice.  At the end, I added a couple of beaten eggs and stirred them in, frying everything some more.  The secret to good fried rice is to not stir too much.  The crusty bits are mighty fine, especially after you add the egg. 

After dinner I realized that I had not used all the pork.  “Are you kidding me?” I asked the tupperware dish.  Tupperware does not kid.  Having used all my big containers to freeze items for Unprocessed October, I had split the large pork chops in two small, unfunny containers. 

So, tonight I trimmed the pork outsides again, rinsed them off, and really shredded them up.  I threw the bits in a slow cooker and added my mom’s barbeque sauce.  With a few hours of cooking, a Tall Grass Bakery baguette, and salad greens from our garden, suddenly we were living large and not eating gross leftovers. 

So.  What to do with leftover porkchops?  In a nutshell, cover the previous flavors with strong elements like soy sauce and barbeque sauce.  Feel grateful and don’t waste stuff.

In our cheesemaking class last week we had a milk tasting, which was surprisingly eye-opening.  The contrast between cow’s milk in four different states–raw, pasteurized, pasteurized/homogenized, and ultrapasturized—really showed up when we tasted them one after the other. 

The raw milk, in its original form from a Jersey cow, was our first taste and seriously intense in flavor.  Everything was there in the glass.  The pasture was in there.  The wind was in there.  I was a baby calf drinking it.  And yet, I found the flavor a little wild for my sheltered palate’s comfort zone, because I’m used to pasteurized milk.  Imagine the benefits of that flavor complexity for cheesemaking, though!

Next we tasted pasturized milk, which is raw milk that has been heated to kill bacteria, which can make it safer by killing potentially harmful bacteria, but it also kills some of the extra flavors and potentially beneficial bacteria, too.  Drinking milk that is not pasteurized, in its raw form, is controversial.   Anyway, that’s a whole different topic.  As far as flavor goes, this milk, which was pasteurized by the instructor on the stovetop, tasted less “interesting” than the raw milk but was still creamy and lush.  Pasturized/not homogenized milk is sometimes called “cream line” milk because after sitting awhile, the cream rises to the top and needs to be re-shaken if you want to incorporate it back in.

Further altering milk’s flavor is homogenization, which is the act of breaking up and dispersing (through a tiny tube) fat globules throughout the milk.    I don’t know if it was the power of suggestion, but our third taste, the homogenized milk, didn’t taste quite as good to me as the pasteurized-only milk.  I went home later and compared my cream-line (i.e., not homogenized) pasteurized milk and my husband’s organic pasteurized/homogenized milk, and I preferred mine.  I asked my husband to try the two in a blind taste test, and he could identify which one was not homogenized and said that it tasted richer.  

By the way, I just now went to the fridge to double check if I could taste the difference, and I can.  I just drank (only) 1% fat cream-line milk versus some full-fat homogenized milk.  Before I poured the cream-line, I shook it up, as always, to re-integrate the cream/fat  into the milk.  Surprisingly, the two milks, despite the difference in fat content, tasted equally rich.  The cream-line tasted like pure, perfect, childhood milk.  Sitting in a tree with a plate of cookies.  Somehow the homogenized milk tasted…corporate.  What am I saying? I don’t know.  There was a different aftertaste and it reminded me of office buildings. 

Meanwhile, back at the class, our fourth glass to taste was ultrapasturized milk.  Ultrapasturization uses even higher heat than pasteurization and kills all organisms in milk.  It was the clear loser in flavor, a sad-clown letdown compared to the others.  Sure, you can store it for months.  You can also store watered-down Elmer’s glue for months.    You can’t make cheese with glue or with ultrapasturized milk. 

In terms of cheesemaking, raw milk seems to be a winner.  Because it still contains so much beneficial bacteria, less needs to be added to make good cheese.  In U.S. stores, cheese made from raw milk must be aged for 60 days or longer before it is sold, to be fully rid of potential harmful bacteria.   If you make cheese with pasteurized milk, you’ll need to have a bacterial starter for most cheese recipes.  If you use homogenized milk, your curd is softer (less firm) and you might need to adjust a recipe for this as well by adding calcium chloride. 

Myself, I’ll probably be making cheese with pasteurized milk (not homogenized) and plan to add more bacterial starter.  If I ever get a good, affordable source of raw milk—as in, healthy, grass-fed cows—I’ll do that.  But for now, look out, pasteurized milk.  I’m going to cheddar you.  Soon.

Can you get “slow food” out of quick steps?  Turns out, yes.  Three nights in a row we ate really well, even though I was feeling deeply lazy. The only thing keeping me from ordering pizza delivery on Saturday was that something was about to go bad in the fridge. 

Monday’s polenta squares started as Saturday chicken guilt.   

Saturday

The “use or freeze by” date was upon us.  I cleaned and rubbed the waning chicken with lots of rosemary, thyme, sea salt, and peppercorns.  It went into the mini-rotisserie (or a low-heat oven would have been fine) for an hour and a half.  Nestled on top of some fresh greens, that chicken was mighty fine, considering the amount of hands-on cooking time was about 10 minutes. 

After dinner we threw the bones in a pot with chunks of onion, carrot, celery, parsley, and bay leaf, with enough water to cover.  I brought the pot to boil while cleaning up the kitchen, and let the pot simmer until it was time to go to bed. 

When we strained the stock into a bowl, we tasted it.  It was a rockstar quality stock, though a mite salty.  I knew it would become a science project if I didn’t use it up quickly, because I would be too lazy to find the right dish to freeze it in. 

Sunday

I was late getting home.  The quickest stock-using solution I could think of was to peel a butternut squash, shred it in the cuisinart, and boil it with the stock, along with some nutmeg, honey, and white pepper.  The cooking was quick–about 10 minutes–because the squash was in small shreds. Rinsing the cuisinart during boiling time and using it to puree the soup added almost no time to the whole deal.  We had butternut squash soup, along with bacon sandwiches (bacon prepared on a cookie sheet in the oven).  Dinner took about 15 minutes to make. 

After dinner, we had lots of leftover soup, which I was sure would become next week’s compost if we didn’t morph it into something new, ASAP.   So it became two other things:  the base for a lunchy lentil soup (Easy! Boil rinsed lentils in the soup with some extra water for a little over half an hour),  and the liquid for cooking polenta.  

While Michael gave Rosalie a bath I made the polenta, washing dishes in between polenta stirrings.  When it was ready, I spread the polenta in a flat layer on a greased jelly roll pan, covered it with wax paper, then slid it into the fridge.  I was feeling super smug at that point.  Most of the work was done now!

The next night, a tired Monday night, all I had to do was cut the smooth, flat polenta into squares, dip it in egg and bread crumbs, and fry the squares in olive oil with slices of onion.  I served the squares with tomato sauce, the fried onions, and Parmigiano-Reggiano.   These little squares were crispy on the outside and full of butternutty, corny richness on the inside.  We ate so well and so happily.  I felt truly recharged by this accidentally thoughtful meal.

Is there a cookbook out there that shows how you can do this on a regular basis?  Using part of one night’s meal to make the next night’s meal  is not just efficient; it’s bringing love and luxury into your day.  It’s the gift of time that you somehow stole, the pleasure of slow food by staggering or layering your meals.  You get something slow out of something quick!  Magic.

Last Friday I was excited to teach a cooking class — “Cocina Con Amor” — a Spanish-themed meal for February.  Yes, I wanted to take Valentine’s Day into consideration, but really that kind of love was not the sole inspiration for the class.

The central ideas–and a huge driving force in my cooking–had to do with increasing joy in the kitchen and having that translate to even more delicious food for your beloved family, friends, & guests.  The techniques and tips focused around decreasing annoyances & avoiding feeling overwhelmed (as with a dinner party).  I talked about the mostly make-ahead dinner and gave a sample plan for the week before a dinner party, and I gave some concrete cooking and anti-annoyance prep tips.   The evening was so much fun, thanks to the lively and wonderful class participants!  I’ll list the menu at the end of the post.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to keep my mood joyful when preparing food.  I mean, moods happen.  What do you do when you’re feeling tired, grumpy, sad, or distracted?   Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:

• Play favorite guilty-pleasure music.  This one is huge for me!  I have one CD that will make my tired and grumpy body start dancing, in spite of me.  I feel a little like a marionette, tugged upward against my will by guitar strings, but it spreads to my brain eventually. It shocks me how well this one works.
• Think about some things I’m grateful for, especially the people who will be eating the food
• Pay close attention to the thing I’m doing right then.  This most often occurs to me when I’m cutting things.  Thank goodness, right?  It’s nice having my fingers.  It’s also fun to listen closely to the rumbling bubbles of pots boiling.
• Drink water.  This helps the tiredness, anyway.
• Don’t cook, after all (frozen pizza is our lazy last-minute standby)

What are your tricks?

Cocina Con Amor Menu

• Tapas/Pintxos – idiazábal cheese skewers with caramelized pearl onions; marcona almonds; olives 
• Salad – mixed greens with dried apricot, hazelnuts, and sherry vinaigrette
• Main -cerdo al chilindrόn (saucy braised pork with serrano ham, tomatoes, and fresh & dried peppers)
• Side -  fideo con azafrán y limones preservados (short capellini scented with saffron & preserved lemons)
• Dessert – traditional spanish flan

Michael and I love chickens.  We own The History of the Chicken on DVD, we took a class on chickens, and we dressed Rosalie up like a baby chick for Halloween 2008.  They are so adorable, so alert, so interesting!  

Anyway, I probably am genetically predisposed to love chickens; my mom is passionate about keeping chickens and has done so for more years than I can accurately count. This picture of the rooster above is one of “The Three Stooges,” some banties that Mom and Stan raised from eggs this year.  They do not produce the bulk of the eggs in the household, but they sure are friendly and cute.  They roam around the property and stick together like a little club, the three of them.

We plan on having chickens here in the city, too.  Anytime now.  The class Michael and I took was about keeping chickens in the city, and we know what we need to know.  Our neighbors up the street also have a few, so we have neighborly and parental support.  But we keep not having chickens.  Why?  You know, because blah, blah, blah, blah.  It will happen.  We have joked before that we were waiting for Rosalie to help care for them, but that excuse is out the window.  She was just feeding the chickens this morning before we left the farm to come back home. 

So.  Why have chickens, besides their companionship and occasional entertainment?  You know the word: eggs.  Oh, there is a difference.  Check it out:

Hmm.  Guess which egg came from a happy, free, well-loved chicken?  Which one came from a “cage free” egg carton at the store?  If you guessed that the egg on the left, with the robust, vibrant, perky yolk came from Mom and Stan’s place, then you’re adept at picking up my subtle hints. 

Below is another compare/contrast that I took last spring with the same thought in mind.   I imagine you can tell which is which.

Our neighbors insist that caring for chickens is virtually effortless once things are set up.  My mom would agree, too, although she keeps more chickens, so it may require a bit more effort at her place.  

If you are interested in keeping chickens in your backyard and you happen to live in Seattle, then I recommend taking a class for taking care of chickens at Seattle Tilth.  The guy that taught our class was so great–he had a degree in chicken husbandry, I believe, and he talked about the natural history of the chicken before launching into the nuts and bolts of their care.  By the way, did you know that chickens’ ancestors lived in the jungle? 

If having chickens in your backyard or jungle is not an option, or if your parents don’t have a few chickens handy of their own, there is still hope to eat fresh and beautiful eggs.  Go to the farmer’s market in your area and look for the stalls where they sell eggs.  Identify the stall that always has the longest line as your first clue; then come back extra early another day and get eggs from that stall.   Hope you have a great brunch!

Baby Spinach

Happy Thanksgiving!  Did you have pumpkin debates at your house, too?  Ours hit us by surprise.  World Championship Punkin Chunkin’ was on TV, and after a particularly good launch, some dude on the show commented, “Not bad for a vegetable.” 

“Except that a pumpkin’s a fruit,” I commented, probably smugly.

Mom protested with equal authority, “Except that it’s a vegetable.” 

“Pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers, watermelon.  All fruits,” I insisted.  “They blossom, they have seeds on the inside.  Fruits!  Oh yeah, by the way, did you know that strawberries aren’t really fruits? Their seeds are on the outside.  They’re in the rose family.” 

Now Mom’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, a look I recognize from the bluffs we try to pull on each other during Scrabble games, trying to sell fictional words with made-up definitions.  She informed me,  “The only reason I’m not checking this out right now is because I decided I wouldn’t use my computer on Thanksgiving…”   I was already opening up my laptop bag and getting online. 

Sure enough, I was right.  So was Mom. The ideal argument conclusion for a day of thanks.

Each time I’ve ever learned about another “vegetable” actually being a fruit–tomato, capsicum, eggplant, squash–I’ve gotten a mini thrill.  On a botanical level, they are considered fruits (and yes, the strawberry is botanically a “false fruit”). Knowing this feels like being in on a botany secret. 

However, as I picked up these nuggets of info, it didn’t occur to me that there’s not an equivalent ”vegetable” botanical category as with various fruits. Scientists do use the word vegetable to refer to plants, such as “vegetable matter.”   However, fruits and vegetables are not mutually exclusive.  So much for that mental game of Red Rover in which we sort out who’s who: “Oh, goody, spinach still gets to be on my side!  The veggies are ahead!  Oh well, you get beans.”  

The word “vegetable” is a culinary or cultural term.  Any edible plant or edible part of a plant can be considered a vegetable: leaves, roots, stems, flower buds, bulbs, and even fruits.   And, of course, since the term is culinary and cultural, that means people can come together to decide whether something’s a vegetable or not.  For example, in 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled the botanical fruit, tomato, to be a vegetable for taxation purposes.  Cultural vegetable, botanical fruit.   

 Well, now that that’s settled, I have to say: Punkin Chunkin’???  A World Championship for it?  This is the first day I’ve heard of it.  It’s a whole different area of food-related science I’ve been missing out on: physics.

Information Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/624564/vegetable#

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squash_(plant)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_vegetables

Safety advisory: Lego and train not edible.

The post below is a continuation from the post a couple of months ago about the “shiny science of chocolate.”  

When dipping truffles, you can easily tell if your chocoloate is in temper or not by how quickly it sets.  In this picture below, the truffle on the left was dipped in chocolate that was simply melted to 108˚ rather than tempered.  It is still wet, even though it was dipped quite a bit earlier than the truffle on the right, which was dipped in (almost!) tempered chocolate.  Notice, however, that there are a few faint streaks in the truffle on the right.  This is because I jumped the gun on the dipping, and the chocolate wasn’t completely in temper yet.  Not enough cocoa butter crystals had formed to be completely stable and consistent yet–I believe this is why you can see those very faint swirls.

Thanks to the new and fabuloso tempering machine, the chocolate did reach perfect temper a few minutes later, and I managed to make some streak-free chocolates. 

However!  There are so many other tiny details that affect the outcome of a truffle.  For example, even when in temper, chocolate can vary in viscosity with each 10th of a degree.  This affects how thick of a crunchy coat the truffle will have.  It’s something to think about:  Do you want an eggshell-thin coating around your soft ganache, or something more substantial? This subtle variation  is just one factor to consider.  Others include the texture of the surface–smooth, or swirly ridges?  Perfectly smooth looks elegant, although there is no room for error.  If you choose imperfect ridges, you get some textural interest, plus it’s a bit more forgiving.   Also, the sheen can be affected by how you dip the truffle.  If you use a dipping tool, you have the option to make your chocolate very shiny because nothing comes into contact with the surface.  However, it takes longer to use a tool than your fingers. If you do use only your hands, then contact with your fingers gives the chocolate a pearly matte glow, which also looks very pretty, and you can dip much more quickly this way. 

Yep, I’m probably going to try the infinite variations.   If I run out of truffles to practice with, I may move on to rubber duckies.

One year, around the holidays, I took a turn for the crazier and decided that our geometry unit would be so much more fun if we applied it to making gingerbread houses.  Hey! We could re-visit fractions by tripling recipe amounts, then launch right into architecture plans, calculating the area of gingerbread needed for the square, triangle and rectangle panels to build the houses.

Yes, that’s correct.  No graham crackers for me, boy.  Let’s get 19 pre-pubescent kids into the school kitchen to make dough, roll it out, cut it into shapes, bake it, and build it–all in a couple of 40 minute periods. 

I’ve blocked out many of the specifics from this purgatory.  Mostly I remember the moments.  The most vivid one involved me staring in disbelief and panic at my hand mixer that had just been killed dead by attempting to mix the gluey boulder of a gingerbread dough-hunk in a triple-recipe-sized bowl.  From where I stood in the cloud of spilled flour, I could hear something that sounded way too fun over by the tables; it was possibly a dough fight or exuberant winter break plans, or both.  Meanwhile there were multiple pleas for me to come moderate arguments over the hot commodity decorating items like red-hots and pretzels.   

At the end of the day, not one house was completed, and yet all of the candy was gone.   You might be asking yourself,  “What the hell was she thinking?” or, “How did she grade her students on that?”  or, most importantly, ”What kind of lame-ass recipe would break a hand mixer?”   I couldn’t even investigate that last one, because the recipe is long gone.   I will likely never make gingerbread again for fear of the PTGD (Post Traumatic Gingerbread Disorder).

After that bitter, chaotic day,  “GINGERBREAD!”  became my new cuss word for the year when something was pissing me off.  For a couple of months, the word actually had a greater shivery-rage impact on me than any of those other four letter lightweights.  For me, this word encompassed the feeling you get when you accidentally dump yourself into hell.  Maybe you don’t ever accidentally do that.  I do try not to.

But who am I kidding: I think I’ve found a new cuss word for the season.  That word is “LEMONBARS!”   Most of the lemon bar recipes I’ve tried  so far said the same thing in their opening blurbs: Lemon bars are so easy to make!  Shut up, recipes.  It probably is easy to make if you’re not ME.  Seriously, though, I have learned important tips if you are planning on making lemon bars this holiday season.

First, most lemon bar recipes seem to follow the same concept: Make a quick shortcrust dough, press it into a pan, and briefly bake it to give the shortcrust a head start on cooking.  Make a liquid of eggs, sugar, lemon juice, flour and (sometimes) lemon zest.  Pour it over the crust, and bake it again.  So simple! 

Simple until you remove your zesty treat from the oven, only find your crust has turned into a shrunken cracker floating in lemon sauce–or a springy sheet of lemon gummy worm.  How to avoid these?  Apparently by disregarding all baking times.  They vary wildly in both published cookbooks and internet recipes, even with those same ingredients in similar quantities. 

Most recipes I found state that the crust will bake at 350˚ for about 15 to 20 (or even 35??) minutes, depending on the type of material your pan is made of.  But ignore these times.  If I were you, I’d start peeking at 10 or 15 minutes.  You don’t need to brown the thing.  It should only be barely starting to brown around the edges, and most definitely it should be not shrinking yet. 

Some recipes will tell you to cool the crust before adding the lemony liquid, whereas others will tell you to pour it in immediately after removing the parbaked crust from the oven.  I liked the texture of the bars best when pouring the liquid immediately on the hot crust. 

Regardless of whether you poured into a hot or cooled crust, and regardless of the cooking time your recipe advises, remove the bars when the top surface doesn’t jiggle when you tap or shake the pan.  I removed my last lemon bar batch yesterday at about 25 minutes, which was less than half the cooking time of a recipe in a well-edited, reputable cookbook.  Oh, also: several recipes out there mention that for this second round of baking to reduce the temp to 300˚.  This seemed to work well for me, especially after the trauma of a previous gummy worm slab.

Finally, I feel that it is helpful to cut the bars into tiny pieces to be palatable.  They are intense and will leave you gasping for water if you make them into the size of a piece of cake.   I am from the lemon zest school of thought, which necessitates generous amounts of sugar to balance the commanding sourness.  So much sugar, in fact, that I’m questioning how important lemon zest is to me, after all. 

Perhaps a mellower (and less sweet) bar will better match my vision for this dessert item for the Corks & Forks menu.  It’s a great bite-sized dessert so far, with a trio of happy, sour harmony–the lemon & shortbread cube, the cranberry coulis and the sliver of dried sour cherry.  It’s just that I’m curious what would happen if I made the lemon bar play backup singer rather than fronting the band.  That cranberry flavor is quite a party animal and needs more play.

Oh, lordy.  It’s true.  I’m going to have to try yet another version. 

LEMONBARS.

I eat all my French fries on the way home from the burger place.  According to many people’s upbringings, this is not the best idea, especially for kids.  There are so many reasons to wait: maintaining good habits of eating at the table, keeping  the car clean, and developing maturity through delayed gratification.  I ponder this as I reach my hand into the hot, salty bag at the stoplight.  Because there are many reasons to eat fries now, as well.  Well, one reason.  They are hot and perfect now.  This precious moment is fleeting, not to be wasted on my maturity.

You know that fable about the ants and the grasshopper?  The busy ants work hard, preparing through the summer for the colder months to come, and the grasshopper plays all day, enjoying life.  The grasshopper does not heed the ants’ stern warnings, and he winds up croaking dead once the first snow hits.  No way are the ants giving that slacker any of their hard-earned food.  The Disney version actually depicts the ants as much friendlier folks, and they invite the grasshopper inside for food and shelter during the winter, as long as he’ll be their fiddler. 

With fries, the decision to be a grasshopper is simple.  My semi-impulsive personality jibes with the hot French fry.  But actually, I do work hard.  I do try to make efforts to be antly whenever possible.  After all, there are bigger concerns in the world where thinking ahead trumps carpe diem.  I’m thinking savings accounts.  I’m thinking insurance policies.  I’m thinking tomatoes.

At the moment there are five varieties of tomatoes growing in my backyard.  I forget about them for one day, and kablam!  More tomatoes have exploded with color than I would have predicted.   Languid, heavy and vibrant, they invite you to pick them and eat them immediately, still warm from the sun.   Sometimes we control ourselves enough (or engorge ourselves enough) to actually get a few into that colander which I optimistically bring outside for picking.  Then we can have fresh tomato salad, gazpacho, a myriad of sauces, or just some slices with dinner.   If it involves tomatoes, I’m happy. 

 “Sun” drying tomatoes is an example of being antly, yet lazy.  How cool is it to place supple, round tomatoes into a barely warm oven, and after hours of doing absolutely nothing, remove impossibly delicious dried tomatoes from that oven?  Suddenly you are able to bring sunshine with you, deep into December, without much effort at all.

Sun dried tomatoes’ versatility, as you probably know, is vast.  I add them to sauces, appetizers, sandwiches, and salads.  They’re great in a frittata, bread, and hash browns.  Heck, you could eat them three times a day, with all the meals.  I probably would, but unfortunately I have an unsurprising problem:  I have a hard time keeping enough of these sun-dried morsels to store at all.  Most go straight from the pan into my mouth. 

And here come those cold days.  Too bad I can’t play the fiddle.

“Sun” Dried Tomatoes

Generally when I make dried tomatoes I use nothing but tomatoes, because I want flexibility in how I use them later.  However, if you have recipe in mind for using these dried tomatoes, herbs and flavorings can come in handy.

These are directions for drying tomatoes in the oven, but today I am actually borrowing a neighbor’s dehydrator. It’s pretty great, and I may even get one, eventually.  But the oven is essentially as straightforward to use.

Ingredients:

• Several pounds of ripe, firm, organic tomatoes.  People say that Roma tomatoes are the best for this, but I use all kinds, from Black Prince heirlooms to regular slicing tomatoes to Sungold cherry tomatoes.  Just choose the best tomatoes you can find.
• Sea salt or kosher salt(optional)
• Dried herbs, such as basil, thyme, or marjoram (optional)
• Olive oil (optional)

Directions:

1. Set your oven at 150˚ or the lowest setting possible. 
2. Wash the tomatoes and prepare them for drying: If the tomatoes are small, like Roma, then split them in half lengthwise, notching out the core.  If using larger tomatoes, make several slices to approximate the thickness of half a Roma and remove the core from the slice that holds it.  If using cherry tomatoes (note that tomatoes shrink to about ¼ their original size, so the cherry varieties won’t yield much dried tomato), dip the cherry tomatoes in boiling water for a moment until their skins split, then quickly remove them. Don’t worry about their cores.
3. Spread out the tomato halves, cut side up, (or slices) on metal cake racks or sheet pans.  Cake racks are better, because they allow better circulation and require less turning. 
4. If desired, sprinkle salt, herbs, and/or oil over the tomatoes.  Remember that their flavor will condense considerably when they dry.
5. The amount of time it takes to dry the tomatoes depends on the thickness of your cut and the heat of your oven.  Plan on warming them for 10 or even up to 20 hours.  The heat is very low (hey, not that much higher than a very hot day in Oklahoma!), so this is why this takes so long.
6. After about 8 to 10 hours, remove the racks and turn the tomatoes over.  Rotate the racks to different levels to achieve balanced heat.
7. Check the tomatoes again after 4 to 6 hours.  Leave them in if they need more time.
8. You know that  the tomatoes are ready when they have the rubbery, leathery feel of fresh raisins.  They should not be crispy, nor should they be very sticky or resemble their original smoothness or size.  They will probably be about ¼ the size of the original slices.   You’d probably better go ahead and taste one or two (or five) to make sure.
9. When they are finished, remove the racks from the oven and cool completely on the counter.  Store in an airtight container.  They will last for months.

Makes the same number of slices that you started with, minus the bites you took to “test” the texture.