bad metaphor

Halloween has always been one of those holidays that, for me, is full of heightened expectations and subtle letdowns. You get all dressed up, and yes it’s fun and exciting to see what costumes people have concocted. The fun of that is kind of ephemeral, however, and it seems like this year a lot of people didn’t even bother dressing up, no doubt due to the spooky state of the economy. (My own costume probably cost me less than a dollar overall, due to copious borrowing and innovation). There are long lines at bars you could ordinarily just stumble into without a second thought. And the parties…ehh.

Here is a song that sums up how I typically feel after Halloweens:

Skip to 1:42 for the song.

I did bake some cool brain bread to go with my zombie chef outfit, though:

Although, since the bread got super poofy, it doesn’t really look like “brains” to me, so much as “challah bread gone waaay unkosher.” What do you think?

Once upon a time, I thought I did not like beets. I’d only ever had the canned kind, and I have an instinctive distrust of things that come out of cans that are that color. I think I’d probably lumped them in, unfairly, with that atrocious Thanksgiving cranberry jelly abomination – the kind that slurps out of the can, still retaining all the ridges and botulistic bumps of its container. Blergh.

Then I had real beets: roasted while still wrapped in their native clothes, drizzled with a little olive oil. Beautiful! How could I have gone through my entire life, without having realized such a simple thing. Beets = totally awesome. After this epiphany I ate nothing but beets for three days straight, pausing in alarm when I discovered that, well, that color? Yeah, that lingers post-processing.

Ahem. So my good friend Marie, of Happy Plate, is leaving for El Salvador soon, and she is a long time beet-advocate. She is even planning on getting a beet tattoo when she returns to the states! Naturally, here is my going away present to her:

A glamorous lady beet!

Since I learned that there are such things as gold beets and even candy striped beets, a new rainbow of potential knitted toys has been opened up for me. What lovelies!

Finally, a meal that wasn’t instantly devoured before I could have a chance to photograph it! My dinner collaboration with my friend Marie resulted in this:

Sometime I simply must invest in a good light source, a ring mold, and maybe a non-chipped plate or two.

Marie made the wontons on the right. The filling consists of tempeh, celery greens, and onions. I am not the biggest fan of tempeh, but this was all right. The tempeh was made locally by a farmer friend; Clayton’s I believe? At any rate, this was a much more pleasant tempeh experience than the ones I have had before, which have tasted of burnt plastic.

The beet salad was my contribution: red beets, gold beets and boucheron goat cheese (which tastes like buttery, heart-clogging heaven). I adapted the recipe from Epicurious, with a few modifications. I omitted the pistachio oil because I don’t know where to get pistachio oil, and it would probably cost a million dollars anyways. Ditto the mâche. Olive oil and parsley worked well enough. I didn’t have any pistachios on hand to crumble and sprinkle over the salad, either.

Also, I own a lot of kitchen equipment…yet strangely enough, no cookie cutter or anything else I could jerry rig into a ring mold. So the salad wasn’t quite as pretty or fancy as the one featured on Epicurious. But it tasted good, and ultimately that’s what matters. And I learned of the existence of gold beets. It was already quite a revelation when I discovered I actually like normal old blood red beets when roasted. But gold beets? Shit, I am totally putting these on everything from now on.

Eli is currently off traipsing around the fjords in western Norway. Yes, not even two whole months since we returned from Asia, and he’s off again! Solo this time, as I am soon off on my own trip to visit this very special person:

My sweet little niecelet!

But I digress. Since Eli is gone and has taken his picky dietary restrictions with him (good luck with that lutefisk, by the way!), I have been hard at work laboring over strange meats and brews that are more to my liking*. For starters, earlier this week I went over to my friend Marie’s house and had some lovely gazpacho while we made ricotta from scratch – using goat milk she had collected herself! And then yesterday, I made this:

Pate de campagne, using a recipe from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

My roommates make fun of me because I tend to make things that are “high effort, low return.” I guess if you’re thinking in terms of sheer volume, that’s true (though this recipe, even halved, yielded enough pate to feed an army of hungry Frenchmen). Obviously quality isn’t factored into that viewpoint. Sure I could heat maybe fifty cans of Progresso in the time it takes me to make a chicken soup from scratch. But the latter is going to taste better and make me feel better too.

What you can’t get from a can: the slow, methodical ripples across the surface of barely simmering water. Eddies of foam rising from the submerged chicken. The aroma of poultry and water-infused with bouquet garni that permeates the house, subtler and gentler than the reek of scalded autolyzed yeast extract nuked at high heat – more akin to a mother’s touch. The heat that envelopes both you and the chicken, radiating from the pot.

Cooking things from scratch is not unlike performing a bit of magic, or kitchen sorcery. Especially when that preparation involves steps that seem absolutely silly to outside observers like my roommates. I needed a weight to press the pate into its final form, so I scoured the yard yesterday searching for a cleanish brick.

As I stood in the yard, hosing mud off the brick and watching traffic pass by, I thought to myself, “well, this is certainly something I have never thought to do for the sake of food before.”

* -ah, who am I kidding, I do this sort of stuff when he’s here, too. I just have to hear a bit more whining about it!