risotto

Still wearing pajamas, I locked myself out of the house today. That was around three o’clock in the afternoon. What can I say, the day started early and I never got around to getting dressed. I made two quarts of homemade yogurt and a pot of risotto, took almost two hundred photographs, and wrote ten sentences.

I looked through the rain streaked windows on the front porch. The houses across the street were damp and quiet and the push of cars uphill had slowed. I ran around the house through the mud in leopard print slippers and hoped that no one caught a pair of hot pink penguin pants running around the yellow bungalow on the corner.

As it turned out, the back door was unlocked. I removed my slippers and walked into the kitchen. Into the smells of roasted squash, homemade vegetable stock, and sweet stewed pears where I forgot all about the mud and the pajamas and the shower less morning(s).

Risotto turned this dark rain-soaked Sunday into a warm bowl of summer. Arborio rice simmered in dry white wine, caramelized onions, and homemade vegetable broth made with ginger, parsnips, carrots, celery, onions, garlic, cilantro, parsley, and black peppercorns with a light sprinkle of salt. When the rice was cooked, roasted kabocha squash, stewed pears, blue and Parmesan cheeses transformed the plain white risotto, which on its own is a thing of beauty, into salty sweet comfort.







The 2010 March Daring Cooks' Challenge was hosted by Eleanor of MelbournefoodGeek and Jess of Jessthebaker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.

carrot cake with lemon cream

I'm one of those people who love a good salad. I always have.

Even in winter.

Take me to dinner, and it's almost a sure thing that I'll order a salad as my meal.

It's more than silly since I eat so much salad at home. When fattoush salad or a roasted beet and goat cheese salad with maple balsamic vinaigrette is on the menu, salad is a sure thing.

As for a fresh well-stocked salad bar, just throw in the towel because I surrender.

This past winter, even with the abundance of fresh salad greens in our house, I haven't made a salad but a few times. In fact, I've wanted anything but salad.

Roasted squashes, thick hearty vegetable soups, and grilled Reuben sandwiches have kept me warm during these almost saladless cold months.

I decide to break the no salad streak today. I have to. We have three heads of green leafy lettuce, one small bag of mixed baby greens, and a few cups of arugula.

I mix a little of each green in a bowl with a homemade miso ginger dressing and top them off with shredded carrots. I finish the bowl out of obligation, but the carrots are what get me to the last forkful.

Carrots coated with dots of miso and ginger.

kasha

I have to tell you, I'm in a rut. A grain rut.

I cook so many pots of rice that I have a cupboard stocked with recipe inspiring grains. Jared and wholly ignored.

So the other day, when I removed the brown basmati rice jar from the shelf, I actually thought about it for a moment. Do I really want another bowl of rice and vegetables for dinner.

Really?

tiramisu

As I write this it's white outside, snow white. The dark tree trunks and limbs peer through powder their powdery layers.

I am reminded of an André Kertész (1894-1985) photograph of snow in Washington Square, New York. The one angled from a building above with people and trees and seats and fences looping through a spacious snowy landscape below. It's nothing like the tangle of trees above. But, when I close my eyes, I see Kertész's image, poetry in black and white.

Washington Square, 1954, André Kertész

[T]he moment always dictates in my work....Everybody can look, but they don't necessarily see....I see a situation and I know that it's right. – André Kertész

Love Soup

Read my latest cookbook review, Love Soup: 160 All-New Recipes from the Author of The Vegetarian Epicure, by Anna Thomas, published in The Daring Kitchen.

Mythic Pizza Dough

A week or so ago, I found an unforgettable recipe for pizzettas (little pizzas). The crust, when perfectly baked, is edible gold with enough spring and chew beneath a thin but lustful crispness. As far as pizza goes, I enjoy a slice or two now and then, but homemade pizza sprinkled with crumbly blue cheese, ripe pears, walnuts, fresh thyme and chives, is something truly meant for the gods, or more specifically Bacchus (known as the god of fruitfulness, wine, and intoxication in Roman mythology). I think he would also dig into a pizza topped with butternut squash, blue cheese, gruyere cheese, garlic, and fried sage leaves with equal abandon.

Bacchus, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1595

I set to work making the dough. This was before I checked the kitchen supply for blue or gruyere cheese, pears, and chives, none of which were available, except for the walnuts stashed away in the freezer and the package of fresh thyme hidden inside the cheese drawer.

mezze at home

In the middle of the week, I made mezze (read "mez-ay") featuring Mediterranean flavors for the February Daring Cooks' Challenge. Mezze is a variety of small dishes served together.

While making hummus and pita bread were the only challenge requirements, I made lemon hummus, pita bread, and falafel. I bought all the ingredients to make cucumber raita, tabouli, and baklava, but I ran out of time. So, I'm saving them for the next mezze, which I hope will be soon.