tilted skillet

peachapalooza

There aren’t many reasons I’d leave work early on a Friday afternoon to jockey for position on the 101 en route to Selma, CA. In case you haven’t spent time in this garden spot, let me describe Selma’s whereabouts: southeast of Gilroy, the smelly garlic capital of the world; and just south of Fresno, a blazing hot and dusty town whose only redeeming quality is an In-N-Out Burger (according to at least one burger-phile I know). But if there’s one thing that never fails to motivate me, it’s food. Surprised? I’m not.

While the prospect of frozen yogurt or warm chocolate chip cookies can inspire me to brave a seven-block walk on a cold and windy SF night, the promise of organic peaches and nectarines ripe and ready for picking is enough to almost have me singing the praises of the Fresno In-N-Out. Almost. Just because In-N-Out only uses the meat from one cow to make one patty does not mean that the steer are raised in humane conditions, but enough about animal welfare. Back to peaches and nectarines!

In what might make a convincing post for the blog Stuff White People Like, we participated in a tree adoption and harvest at the Mas Masumoto Family Farm in, as previously established, Selma. To adopt a tree, wannabe farmworkers and fervent fruit-lovers apply to pre-purchase the harvest from one of the Masumotos’ organic peach and nectarine trees. After a competitive application process, selected ‘adoptive parents’ clear their calendars for a period of six consecutive weekends in the summer in anticipation of the birth (really extending the analogy, here) of their tree. Or, to put it another way, when all of the fruit is nearly ripe.

On the pre-selected birth/harvest date (this is like a C-section, friends), temporary farmworkers converge in the Masumoto orchard for a stiflingly hot morning of fruit-picking, sorting and packing. Of course doing so gives you a very brief and coddled (i.e., sweat-wicking clothing, ample SPF and plenty of water) experience of the extremely hard work many farmworkers endure, but, more importantly, it gives you fruit. A lot of fruit. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of peaches and nectarines that will likely ripen on the same day and then descend into moldiness. Scary.

With my many peaches in tow, I headed home covered in dust, sweat and peach juice and spent my weekend doing what any normal 26 year old would do: jamming, canning and otherwise stuffing my face with stone fruit. In between processing jar after jar of peach jam, I snuck in a refreshing green tea-nectarine smoothie to both cool off after many hours spent at a hot stove, and benefit from a refreshingly cold caffeine kick. This smoothie would be great with any stone fruit, such as peaches or cherries. Bottoms up!

click through for recipe

observations: New York and Boston

I just spent a long weekend (okay, probably better described as a short week) visiting New York City and Boston. As you might expect would be the case in late July, these crowded urban centers were in no way hot, humid and claustrophobic. That was a joke. I think the only time I stopped sweating was while showering, but it’s possible that I was experiencing a phenomenon I call the Swimming Laps Effect*.

Regardless, I was fortunate enough to temporarily fulfill my calling as an interior design consultant by helping a very dear, accomplished friend move into a new apartment at Harvard Business School. Among our greatest weekend accomplishments were:

• neither getting lost nor otherwise blaming Google Maps for failing to provide adequate ‘Continue on [insert street name]’ clarification on exactly two of our perhaps ten car trips in the greater Boston area;
• jury-rigging together two tension rods, two 3M wall hooks and two West Elm curtains…without anchoring anything to the wall (I hereby claim no legal responsibility for future ‘falling heavy objects’ injuries);
• and my impressive self restraint in refraining from almost peeing my pants from laughing on multiple occasions as we tested the limits of our mental, physical and comedic endurance. Win.

Oh, and continuing our cross-country food tour! Don’t think I bought $5 stretchy black pants at Target for the plane ride home because I thought they looked better than my overpriced skinny jeans.

A few other epiphanies and kernels of truth I distilled over the last six days: 

• When it comes to Ambien consumption on an Economy redeye to JFK, more is always better.
• If you take the subway the wrong way from Central Park, you may quickly end up in Harlem. This is not the end of the world, especially if you’ve just eaten a lime popsicle and are with a good friend.
• If you take a cab from midtown to TriBeCa and fail to realize that ‘Broadway’ and ‘West Broadway’ are very different avenues, your cab driver may smirk at the GoogleMap on your iPhone and kick you out of the cab. This feels like the end of the world because it is very late, your iPhone has failed you, you are alone and some crazy just asked if you’d be his sex slave.
• A flourless chocolate cake with caramel sauce and whipped cream may be a reliable and cheap thrill (thanks Kath!), but will never let you and your sweet tooth down at either the end of a meal or the middle of the day. Or at breakfast.
• When in doubt, wear the dress. With the comfortable shoes, of course. It’s unfortunate that sometimes we must sacrifice fashion for comfort. Fortunately, as clearly evidenced by the photo above, sometime you just don’t have to choose. Embrace these moments.
• Long bus rides require an extreme level of fortitude and flexibility. Please see the above photo for visual guidance on how to avoid neck cramps while sleeping in an upright position. This may make you look like you a malformed giraffe with no chin, but I guarantee it’s a sacrifice potentially more worthy than wearing the dress with the comfortable shoes.

*In which you swim laps for an hour and feel completely clean and ‘not at all sweaty’ when you emerge, heavily chlorinated and ready to take on the day sans shower.

I'm back (with peppered goat cheese, fresh cherry and corn tartines)!

The funny thing about going radio silent for months on a fairly nascent blog that precious (love you, Mom!) few people read is that nobody really cares, even if for some odd reason I feel like I’m letting everyone down. For the record, I’m sorry – but I’m back. I’ve still been cooking, but my day-to-day focus has centered more on eating. And working and working out. In my case, ebbs and flows in these endeavors often go together. 

As I return to the self-interested creative outlet I call Tilted Skillet, I hope you’ll indulge my occasional desires to share with you other ideas, things and themes that catch my fancy. These may include the obvious solution for would-be ranchers without access to land (pygmy livestock, of course), a handcrafted leather wine bottle holder…for my bike, and the proliferation of what I call bread bricks (to be covered in a later post). 

But back to cooking! I whipped up this fresh, summery dish in about 20 minutes on a weeknight, utilizing a hodgepodge of ingredients that in no way adhere to the adage of ‘what grows together goes together’. In other words, just ignore the fact that I’m suggesting you eat fresh cherries, peppery goat cheese, olive bread, corn, mint and walnut oil in the same bite and just, well, take a bite. 

Valentine's Day: parting shot

This morning, after a weekend of much sugar, butter, flour, and more sugar...I brought approximately 85 conversation heart cookies (and edible pens) into the office for people to decorate and eat. 

Final count as I get ready to leave the office? Three! For an office of no more than twenty, I call that a win.

These cookies, a riff on a standard sugar cookie that I amped up with almond extract and Meyer lemon zest, are fun and flavorful. I'll follow up with a recipe soon, as having a better-than-usual sugar cookie recipe up your sleeve is never a bad thing.

Happy Valentine's Day to all, and to all a sweet night.

Embracing the cluster

Apparently oysters have aphrodisiac qualities. I've never eaten them specifically for that purpose, but I'm giving you this recipe just a couple of days before Valentine's Day so consider yourself warned (in a good way?). Anyway, after a rather unfruitful, yet very enjoyable, mushroom foraging expedition in Point Reyes a few weeks ago, my fellow forest-traipsing friend and I headed up to Marshall for fresh oysters. Marshall is less of a distinct town than it is a collection of oyster shacks and farms, beach houses and small enclaves of homes and shops dotted somewhat randomly along the coast. 

We made our way to Hog Island, an oyster company popular for its sustainably-farmed and extremely delicious Kumamoto (Pacific), Atlantic and Sweetwater oysters, as well as its superb mussels and Manila clams. Even on cold and foggy days (i.e., most days), Hog Island's picnic tables and charcoal grills, which are nestled along the beach with incredible views of Tomales Bay, draw a crowd. As we waited in line to buy our oysters, we noticed on the chalkboard menu an enthusiastically-written 'We have clusters!' My word association with 'cluster' is a word that will not be repeated here, but fortunatey the mind behind Hog Island's clusters is substantially more mature than mine.

Clusters are two or more oysters that have fused together, thus rendering them unsalable to nearly all of Hog Island's restaurant customers, who usually serve oysters on the half shell. These misshapen, mutant clusters are uglier than your average oyster - but I say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'd be lying if I said the price discount wasn't a factor in my decision to embrace the clusters, but I figured I could still serve them on the half shell, and then flip them over for half shell round two!

And indeed I did. I recruited a friend to help me plow through the insanely large number of oysters I'd scored for a more than reasonable price, and threw together a zingy Asian-inspired mignonette that complemented the briny oysters and lovely Sunday afternoon quite well. We sat on rickety chairs on my apartment building's rooftop pseudo-patio and, as predicted, enjoyed our clusters on the half shell - twice (and for a few, thrice).

Strawberry-Fig Newtons

Are there any foods you associate more with their texture than their taste? For me, anything gelatinous, chicken feet dim sum, crème brûlée and Fig Newtons come to mind. I haven’t had a Nabisco Fig Newton in a long time, but I distinctly remember my favorite way to eat them growing up: pressing an entire cookie to the roof of my mouth with my tongue and letting it dissolve into sugary nothingness. I always thought that the cookies, what with ‘fig’ in their name and all, were a more nutritionally virtuous choice than, say, Oreos.

At a recent meeting, our company’s Registered Dietitian used a nutritional index to show us how common foods – both processed and whole – measured up. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when Fig Newtons received practically the same nutritional score as that classic harbinger of highly-processed and additive-laden chocolate and ‘creme’, Oreos! As figs are naturally high in sugar, the addition of high-fructose corn syrup doesn’t help Newtons’ lackluster nutritional profile. Plus, bleached all-purpose flour is generally a nutritional no-no. Add to these dings an overly-long list of mysterious ingredients, and you might as well just have an Oreo. Buy maybe not a Double Stuf.

Naturally, all this talk about Fig Newtons made me want to eat one. While I sometimes indulge in Downtown Bakery’s oversized Fig Newtons at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, I realistically wasn't going to wait until Saturday and had heard through the office grapevine that our resident pastry expert was a Newton aficionado. A few conversations and days later, I set to work on my own version. These Newtons are more involved than your standard one-bowl drop cookies, but their flavor and texture are infinitely more complex. Also, as you can tell from the photo they’re substantially thicker than Nabisco’s Newtons. It’s a feat of trans fats and modern machinery that Nabisco manages to flatten the dough so thin without breaking. When homemade, the Newtons are inherently more rustic, charming and delicious. Just don’t try to flatten an entire one against the roof of your mouth!

And nearly a dozen tortillas disappear

To say it’s been soup weather lately is an understatement. I know I referenced the weather in my last post but that’s because, in my seven-plus years living in the Bay Area, never have I experienced such consistently cold and inclement weather. In my opinion, there are many things that rain and sub-50°F temperatures make undesirable (although usually still unavoidable): getting out of bed, showering, and bicycling to catch the Caltrain to work are among them. Noticeably absent from this list: picking up CSA poultry and eggs from Soul Food Farm.

I feel so fortunate to have access to pastured eggs and chickens from this small-scale family farm in nearby Vacaville, CA. Once a month, I pack my messenger bag full of fresh chickens and multi-colored eggs before carefully cycling home, doing my best to avoid potholes so as not to prematurely scramble my eggs. This month, we had the option of purchasing stew hens, or laying hens that have reached the end of their useful on-farm lives. Since stew hens aren’t raised for their meat and are past the age at which most meat hens are culled, their meat is generally tougher and less flavorful, and takes well to moist preparations (think braises, stews and soups) or stock. A couple stew hens seemed like the perfect winter purchase, especially since I’d been dreaming up a mouthwatering soup that I knew would be best with homemade stock.

When I tell you that I made a tortilla soup, your immediate thought might be that it’s the type of tortilla soup with fried tortilla strips and big dollops of sour cream atop a brothy chicken-enhanced base. If so, you may be thinking you’ll be disappointed by my version – but hang on, because this tortilla soup received rave reviews, and elicited requests for second helpings, from my four taste-testers. In what I considered a brilliant (although probably not original) move, I dissolved ten toasted Rancho Gordo heirloom corn tortillas into the soup for body and no-cream creaminess. Since I’d devoted the entire stew hen to making stock, I added cooked black beans to bulk the soup up a bit. Hatch green chilies, bell peppers (still in season from Happy Quail Farms), canned tomatoes and a bottle of Mexican beer round out this immensely-satisfying one-bowl meal. Don’t skip the garnishes, as they provide freshness and textural contrast. I served this soup with a refreshing jicama salad, but you could skip a side dish. You may then get requests for third helpings, and I’m not sure what could make a home cook feel better about him/herself. You’re welcome.

Amazing (lack of) grace

I’d like to talk a little bit about grace. Or, more specifically, my current lack of the aforementioned quality. Over the weekend I churned out one culinary creation after another, and in the process churned my kitchen into a danger zone so scary that even my ever-curious cat avoided it like she does the vacuum. Maybe it was the flax slurry that I somehow flung all over my one remaining bar stool, or the homemade Massa Organics almond butter that I found coated like a layer of paint on the tile backsplash. I’m assuming the latter was the result of my naïveté in operating my new food processor, but those almonds are so expensive and sumptuous that I strongly considered eating the butter off the wall (with a spatula, of course). I will neither confirm nor deny what may or may not have happened next.

But somewhere between nearly lighting a spice-rubbed venison loin on fire and knocking a cutting board full of chopped onions off the counter, I found a bit of grace…in cake, naturally. I had offered to bring a festive dessert to a friend’s winter cocktail party, so I was in search of individually-portioned desserts appropriate for the freezing (okay, by Bay Area standards) weather we’ve had lately.  Flipping through the ‘Early Winter’ chapter of Jesse Ziff Cool’s Simply Organic, I was intrigued by a dessert recipe that simultaneously sounded appetizing and possibly ick-inducing thanks to its two-word title: Gingerbread Fruitcake.

I love gingerbread, especially when it’s redolent with other warming spices like allspice, black pepper and cinnamon. Fruitcake, meanwhile, does not keep me coming back for more (or any). I can summarize my dislike for traditional fruitcake in two key areas: too much booze, and artificially colored, overly saccharine glacéed fruit. Jesse’s fruitcake forgoes booze for buttermilk and actually uses real fruit; specifically, organic, ideally unsulfured dried fruits. I was running low on dried fruit, so I added dark chocolate chips (reflected in the adapted recipe, below). I highly recommend you go the chocolate route, as there are few times in life when adding chocolate is a bad thing.

These cakes are more than edible plain, but I served them with a zippy lemon pastry cream to offset the cakes’ warm, rich flavors. Lemon curd or fresh, softly whipped cream would also be nice.

Pancakes for the win!

I’m a breakfast opportunist. On weekdays, I tend to eat my morning meal in stages: a quick 5am lick of almond butter off the back of the knife as I make toast to pack for the morning Caltrain commute; post-swim, said toast with a few big gulps of water; a more substantial meal between 8am and 9am; and sometimes, if I’m still ravenous, a handful of nuts or piece of fruit to tide me over until lunch. 

Come Saturday or Sunday morning, though, all bets are off. I relish the rare weekend morning that doesn’t involve waking up early to volunteer at the farmers market, exercise, or schlep down the peninsula to work. Accordingly, I often celebrate these special mornings with exceptional breakfasts. From eggs and sausage to smoothies (okay, marginally healthier ice cream shakes) and pancakes, I don’t mess around with lazy-morning meals.

These pancakes are no exception. My dad, a big-breakfast aficionado, proclaimed them the ‘best pancakes I’ve ever had’. I asked if I could quote him on that, since he’s said that in another lifetime he’d like to be a short-order breakfast cook, and I figure that makes him the Sam Sifton of pancake prowess. Chock-full of oats and pecans, these pancakes don’t disappoint. I used a combination of spelt flour and whole-wheat pastry flour, but you could substitute all of one for the other. You might be wondering how the oats have a chance to properly cook in the couple minutes a pancake spends on the griddle. The key is a short soak in buttermilk, which tenderizes the oats and seems to partially ‘cook’ them in a way not unlike the effect of citrus juice on ceviche. I don’t like thinking about ceviche in the same sentence as pancakes, so that’s all I have to say about citrus and fish. 

As I write, I’m enjoying a leftover pancake toasted, split like a bagel and spread with almond butter. It’s way better than regular toast. Happy new year!

Because the only thing better than pork is more pork

It’s not often that I’m given the opportunity to cook eight pounds of pork all at once – let alone for Christmas dinner, which in our family is usually reserved for the exclusive consumption of pasties, cheese and dill pickles. Now, before you start thinking that my family sits around the table eating these, let me reassure you that instead we are feasting on meat- and potato-filled flaky pastries that weigh about as much as a brick and set you back a good day or two’s worth of calories. With beef, pork and suet-enhanced pastry, they’re certainly delicious. They’re also quite a project. This year, time constraints preempted us from carrying out our tradition, and my mom was more than happy to put Christmas dinner duties on my plate (pun intended). Thrilled, I started brainstorming immediately. In the absence of pasties, a meat- and starch-centric meal was in order to quell any would-be dissidents.

Since in our family the only thing better than pork is more pork, I settled on a Bon Appétit recipe for roasted pork loin stuffed with, among other edibles, prosciutto (a thinly-sliced cured Italian ham). Pastured pork is harder to come by in my hometown of San Diego than in my adopted hometown of San Francisco, so I planned ahead, calling the few butchers that I know carry sustainably-produced meat. Five or six calls later, I secured the pork from Homegrown Meats, an artisanal butcher shop in La Jolla that specializes in grassfed beef, but will order just about any meaty good you’re carnivorous heart desires. Come Christmas Eve, I dragged my dad along to pick up the pork and brave the holiday crowds at Whole Foods as I loaded our cart with paper-thin slices of imported prosciutto, five bunches of festive red chard, Worcestershire sauce and organic tomato juice for Christmas morning Bloody Marys, fancy chocolate bars for stocking stuffers, and a kaleidoscope of purple, red and pink potatoes for roasting.

This entrée is great for a crowd, and can even be prepped a little bit ahead of time. Unless you get your butcher to do it, you’ll have to butterfly the pork loin. It’s not too technically difficult, but make sure that your knife is sharp and you budget some time for it. Also, don’t be scared by the whole lemon slices. Use that sharp knife to slice them as thin as possible; they’ll be rolled up inside the pork and after roasting, will be surprisingly tender (and edible). Don’t skip the gravy, as its acidity really complements the lemon-infused pork. As for sides, we went with roasted heirloom potatoes, and sautéed chard with toasted pecans, currants and herbed olive oil.

Happy New Year!