Not so holy guacamole
2007-03-03 06:26:17
People tend to be fairly opinionated about their guacamole
. Chunky or smooth? Should it just be a mashed up avocado with some salt and lime, or should there be more to it? Are tomatoes appropriate? What about garlic? Cumin? Well, I’m in the “stuff in my guacamole” camp. Avocados are delicious, but they’re even more so with a good fistful of cilantro and a generous squeeze of lime juice. And onion and tomato add a great flavor and texture contrast. I do put lots of fresh garlic in my guacamole, which I’ll admit is controversial. The aroma and bite that the fresh garlic brings to the party really complements the creamy avocado and tangy lime.
While the exact recipe is debated over, everyone agrees that good, ripe but not overripe avocados are the essential ingredient. Look for avocados that give slightly to the touch, but don’t go ’round the market squeezing the bejeesus out of all the avocados to see if they’re ripe. They’re a ver
A new luscious layout
2007-03-02 18:32:36
I’ve just given my little blog a makeover. I was tired of the generic Wordpress.com Blix theme, and frustrated with the fact that the width of the content was only 450px, when the standard horizontal Flickr image is 500px. So, I decided to give css customization a go. There is still a little tweaking to be done, but otherwise the update is complete. What do you think? Does everything display nicely on your browser?
For the header, I used a photo of Droste dutch process cocoa swirling into cream for ice cream. Man, I need to make that ice cream again sometime soon, it was sinful! I made the header and background all girly-pretty with some brushes in PS7 that I had collected from Echoica a long time ago. Yes, it’s true that it’s a sickeningly sweet swirl of chocolate and vanilla, but I love it. It makes me want to lick the screen, or maybe even go for a swim in that chocolate cream swirl up there.
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Happy thirty
2007-02-25 03:01:29
Henning’s 30th birthday is March 6, and my mom will be back in Washington, DC by then, so she invited Henning and me and four of our friends over for dinner, drinks, and hot tub last night. Henning and I and two of the friends stayed the night, and this morning we were treated to french toast and bacon. Mmmm.. bacon.
For dinner, my mom made bbq ribs and sausages, and I made some cabbage slaw and spiced roasted sweet potatoes to go along side. For dessert, I made an extremely decadent chocolate torte. Super rich dark chocolate mousse is spread over a nearly flourless chocolate cake and then topped with whipped cream and raspberries. It was absolutely fabulous. I’m too tired to write more, so I’ll just let the photos speak for themselves.
(…the recipes)
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Sprouts for an army
2007-02-23 06:41:38
Cleaning out the cupboards the other day, I ran across an unopened bag of boring American brown lentils that I’d bought before I discovered the luxury of Du Puy and Beluga lentils. They must have been sitting in my cupboard collecting dust for about 8 months, buried behind cans of diced tomatoes and half-empty bags of rice. They don’t stand a chance at getting used in a lentil soup or salad anytime soon, not as long as there are half-empty bags of Du Puys and Belugas sitting next to them.
I remembered Madhur Jaffrey having a few recipes involving lentil sprouts in her wonderful World Vegetarian cookbook, so I googled lentil sprouts and found that all that is involved in sprouting them is a bowl, some water, and a few days patience. Without checking the yield of a given quantity of dry beans, I dumped the entire one pound bag into a large bowl, covered it with water to rinse, drained, and then covered with water to soak for 12 hours. When I came back to drain them, oh goodne
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Believe the hype
2007-02-21 06:06:18
In addition to the gorgeous honey that caused security problems for me at the Oakland airport, I also brought home some Rancho Gordo beans. Good Mother Stallards, to be precise. Henning is not the hugest bean fan, but I thought some of these gorgeous heirlooms might win him over.
On Sunday, Henning and I had dinner at my parents’ house. My mom is in town, and I had been salivating over the memory of some Rick Bayless chicken enchiladas that she made a while back. I thought that it would also be a good chance to try out the beans and to request a reappearance of a certain fruit and jicama salad that my mom made last time she was here.
The enchiladas were good, though not as wonderful as my memory of them. The beans and the salad, on the other hand, were out of this world. I did as Rancho Gordo says and cooked the Good Mother Stallards simply, with just a mirepoix. They gave off the most amazing pot liquor I’ve ever tasted, and were just the perfect texture. Creamy and lusci
A Persian Valentines Day
2007-02-15 07:06:33
This past weekend I was in Lincoln, Nebraska. Oh, the lovely places you get to travel for math conferences! Besides Lincoln, I’ve been lucky enough to visit Bloomington, IN, Ithaca, NY, and North Conway, NH. I’m still waiting for the conference in Hawai’i. The conference in Lincoln was the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics, and I was an invited graduate student, which meant that my major purpose there was as a mentor, role model, and answerer of questions about graduate school. It was lovely to see so many undergraduate women interested in math, but the conference didn’t have much to offer in the way of food.
I returned to San Diego on Sunday night. On Monday, neither Henning nor I felt like cooking, and we both had some work to do, so we went down to University Heights to Cream and then for dinner at Sultan Banoo, a cute little Persian
restaurant on Park Blvd. The food was delicious, as usual, and I was inspired to try my hand at a Pers
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Just some oatmeal cookies
2007-02-09 00:22:23
I woke up this morning itching to bake something. I didn’t have to be at school until 1pm, and the oven was just calling to me. I rummaged through the cupboards and fridge and determined that I had the ingredients to make some chocolate chip cookies, though I didn’t want to make just the usual plain ol’. Flipping through Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, his oatmeal cookies caught my eye. I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, except that I upped the cinnamon, added ground ginger, and dark chocolate chips. The resulting cookies are chewy with oatmeal and warm with just a hint of spice. The cinnamon and ginger are not overpowering, in fact, they barely whisper to you that they’re in there. They lend a subtle complexity that makes people wonder just what’s in those little cookies. I suspect a little nutmeg would be good as well, though it might give itself away more readily than the ginger and cinnamon.
I don’t own an electric mixer, so
Lifting a fog as thick as pea soup
2007-02-05 05:43:55
Since I was feeling a bit better this afternoon, Henning and I went to Pannikin Coffee & Tea in Leucadia to try to get some work done. My head was still a fuzzy cloud wrapped up in a blanket of goo, but we had hopes that a little fresh air and tea would help clear the fog. And besides, it was a beautiful day (seriously, 73 degrees and sunny in February?!). Well, I managed to stare at my papers for an entire hour and a half, trying to make my brain think, before giving up. Math was just not happening for my brain today, the sick fog was just too thick. We went for a quick walk on the beach (also supposedly to make me feel better, but it ended in a coughing fit), and headed home.
On the way, we stopped at Trader Joe’s to pick up the ingredients for a simple chicken noodle soup, a most reliable fog-lifter. Though I couldn’t compute the homotopy of ER(n) in the afternoon, I was pretty damn sure cook some chicken noodle soup. And oh, it was like therapy, coarsely chopping th
Read more: Lifting
A milk chocolate microwave miracle
2007-02-04 01:26:52
I love chocolate, especially super dark, super rich chocolate. I’ve been known to eat 85% Lindt out of hand. So why, then, am I posting about milk chocolate? Inspired by Michel Richard and Gourmet, I decided to give milk chocolate a try. And while you won’t find me replacing my daily nibble snapped from a cold bar of Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Ritter Sport with any milk chocolate variety, I’ve come to terms with the fact that milk chocolate, too, has its place in the world of chocolate.
For their February issue, Gourmet assembled a team of chocaholics to sample and rate 25 milk chocolates. I’ve been avoiding milk chocolate for years, since every time I have a little nibble it just tastes like waxy condensed milk, probably because I would never choose milk chocolate over dark chocolate in the store, so the bits that I have sampled always come in the form of foil-wrapped holiday novelty candy, destined to be a far, far cry from what milk chocolate could be. After re
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, miracle
Plain ol’ plantains
2007-02-01 00:20:03
My mother just returned from a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she ate plantains fourteen different ways at every meal. She recreated one dish for us at dinner last weekend: peppers stuffed with plantains, cheese, and a bit of bacon, then roasted. They were delicious, but our peppers were small, so we ended up with one plantain leftover, which I brought home. It sat on my counter for a week and then, this afternoon, Henning asked “What’s going to happen with that plantain? Are you going to fry it?” So, I did.
I never thought that it would be so easy to recreate such a delicious exotic treat at home. I’ve eaten fried plantains at my favorite ‘expensive’ restaurant, El Q’ero (formerly Amici), several times before. These turned out pretty much exactly like theirs: crisp and caramelized on the outside, smooth, creamy, and sweet on the inside. I sprinkled them with salt just as I took them out of the oil, and served them with a drizzle of yogur
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Simple, sweet
2007-03-05 18:18:49
We’re still celebrating Henning’s 30th birthday, and it hasn’t even happened yet. Last night, we had a semi-celebratory dinner for just the two of us, since on his actual birthday I have to teach until 6pm. It was only semi-celebratory because we both didn’t have much time to hang out. Henning is giving a talk in the Topology seminar on Tuesday (his birthday!) and I have a lot of research to work on.
I made some pasta with Italian sausage and peppers and a simple orange scented almond cake, since Henning loves almond desserts. Cakes made with almond paste are amazing—they retain such great moisture and they tend to have a delicate, soft crumb and a nice chewy crust. Working with almond paste can be a bit of a pain, but I’ve got some tips that make it much easier (I don’t own a mixer, remember?). The only difficult thing about working with almond paste is getting it evenly incorporated into the batter. I’ve found that if it is ground to t
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San Diego coffeehouse roundup - Part 1
2007-03-06 09:06:02
Being a graduate student in math certainly has its downsides — low pay, hard work, teaching calculus to hoards of unappreciative undergrads — but it also has its perks. One of the better ones is that I can do my work a-ny-where. I don’t need a computer or lab equipment or loads and loads of heavy reference books; I just need a few printed out papers, a pencil, some scratch paper, and my brain. Unfortunately, my brain is not always on board, and I have to lure it to the table with offerings of warm, caffeinated beverages. As a result, I end up spending a lot of time at coffee shops. Over a few installments, I’ll give my opinions on some of our local ones here in San Diego
. My drink of choice is a latte, so my coffee comments are pretty much restricted to that beverage. I’m no coffee geek, but I can tell a bad latte from a good one. I drink a lot of tea as well, and it doesn’t take much to convince me to try out various cake offerings.
This first insta
Read more: San Diego
It’s good to be in DC
2007-03-09 18:20:13
Remember how I complained that I never get to go anywhere interesting for math conferences? Well, right now I’m in Washington, DC, and will be attending a conference in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University tomorrow through Monday. This certainly beats Lincoln, NE, or Bloomington, IN. My mom works in DC and keeps an apartment here, so rather than getting a hotel in Baltimore, I’ll be taking the train up and back each day. Not only do I not have to stay in Baltimore at night, but I get the added luxury of going out to dinner with my mom back in DC. In fact, my dad is flying in from San Diego tonight, since he has a meeting in Boston on Monday, and my parents will celebrate their anniversary at Citronelle. I don’t get to tag along for that one, but I’ve already been spoiled with two insanely good meals. Sorry, no photos from either, I’m too shy to take my camera to such nice restaurants.
I flew nonstop to Baltimore on Southwest on Wednesday, and took the MA
Last supper
2007-03-23 20:13:25
Phew, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s the end of the quarter here, and I’ve been holding extra office hours and grading piles of linear algebra exams. But, last you heard from me, I was wining and dining my way around DC, courtesy of my mom and her fabulous taste in restaurants. After Palena and Komi, we visited Obelisk, and then two local Woodley Park eateries: the Afghan Grill and Lebanese Taverna.
While Obelisk was good, it paled in comparison to Komi the night before. The style is similar to Komi, though it’s Italian inspired rather than Greek. The appetizers were again the highlight, with the best of those being a gorgeously oozy burrata swimming in a puddle of the most wonderful olive oil. The Afghan Grill was, as usual, outstanding, and a certain bewitching baklava eaten there has been following me around for nearly two weeks, begging me to attempt to recreate it (see below). The mezze meal we ate at Lebanese Taverna was also delicious, though no
Getting over the hump
2007-03-27 19:05:15
Molly is right to be fumbling around in her pantry at this time of year. It’s that funny bridge between the seasons, when the weather can’t decide if it wants to be winter or spring, and neither can the farmer’s market. All of the winter staples are looking tired and pale, while the first of [...]
Bonding with the Link
2007-03-29 19:27:42
Last night was my fourth visit to the Linkery, after three visits in three weeks in January, so I think it’s about time that I weigh in on that little joint. It’s definitely not the swankiest, most high-brow food that I’ve eaten, but there are a lot of things to love. Their attitude towards food and community is just fantastic, the menu is well-thought-out, and the food is not pretentious. Plus, the servers (male & female) are hot.
At the Linkery, they use sourced, seasonal ingredients. They make their own sausages and grind their own hamburger meat, which makes for just about the best burger I’ve ever had. They bill it as the “Complete Burger” and I agree that it’s not missing anything. When I had this burger on my first visit, it was topped with pineapple, rocket, grilled onions, bacon, gouda, and a fried egg. Mmmmm. Now they’ve added some amazing house-pickled beets to the stack. They are confident about grilling their burgers to m
A homecoming, times two
2007-04-03 02:38:06
Ok, Jef has rightly pointed out that I’m a whiny, spoiled Californian. How can I complain about access to fresh produce whilst living in San Diego? Really, Maia. People in North Dakota are still buried under snow, and you want to complain that there are too many greens and not enough strawberries in March? Come on. But really it’s not so much lack of access to produce… more that I am sick and tired of winter greens (and greys), and am was chomping at the bit for spring to go ahead and get here already. And it seems that all my complaining has paid off in the form of gorgeous strawberries and adorable baby zucchini and carrots. Spring has arrived. That’ll teach me.
For the last ten days or so, Henning was away in New Hampshire, holed up in a cabin with a bunch of other math graduate students and postdocs, trying to understand the construction of tmf. I took advantage of the break and spent time with my dad at my parents house. The sun was shining and the lure o
A bridge, Bombay to New York
2007-04-09 09:10:12
Indian food is the ethnic food that grabs, and holds, my attention more than any other. I am always intrigued by the rich array of spices and amazing depth of flavors that Indian food brings to the table. Floyd Cardoz’s One Spice, Two Spice views “American food through the kaleidoscope of Indian spices,” as New York
Times critic Ruth Reichl wrote about Cardoz’s restaurant Tabla when it opened in 1997. Cardoz, who trained in Swiss culinary school, is a native of India, and Tabla is his bridge
between Western and Indian cuisine. I’ve yet to eat at Tabla, but if One Spice, Two Spice is any indication of the food served there, I think I would probably be floored.
I bought One Spice, Two Spice with a little gift certificate my parents gave me for Valentines day. I took a chance on this cookbook, having never eaten at Cardoz’s restaurant and having read mixed reviews of the book. Some complained that the cookbook was inaccessible to inexperienced cooks, an
SanDiego.Eats.It
2007-04-08 19:57:16
Just a quick note to let you know about a new resource for eating in San Diego. SanDiego.Eats.It tries to take the best parts of the bigger food sites, streamline them, and focus on dining out in San Diego. The site is driven by restaurant recommendations (not reviews), and encourages in depth writing, rather than a sentence or two. The more people use it, the better resource it will be, so go write a couple recommendations yourself!
Also, I chopped my hair off. More than 12 inches gone. Gone!
Pavlova lovah
2007-04-10 21:29:42
Yes, pavlova is taking over the foodblogging world this month. Something about strawberries and Easter is inspiring pavlovas left and right. Deb, Elise, and Adrienne are already on board, just to name a few, so guess I’ll throw my meringue disk into the ring as well.
I have faint memories of my mom making this incredible spring dessert for Easter when I was younger, but it’s been years since she made one. When my sister, who doesn’t like strawberries (!!!), reminded me that pavlova exists and is great, I somehow became fixated on the gorgeous little things. I had to make one. And then I had to make it again. And then just once more, you know, for good measure. For me, a perfect pavlova has a beautiful, cream-colored crispy crackly crust concealing a soft, succulent, marshmallowy center. Breaking the crust of a perfect pavlova is enormously satisfying, in the same way that cracking a perfect creme brulee crust is. (Have you seen Amelie?) And once you top that crusty c
An old standby on a sunny day
2007-04-15 19:27:29
Friday was an absolutely gorgeous day in San Diego. Granted, these are not so few and far between, but the past week has been a bit chilly, gloomy, and grey. The sudden onslaught of bright sunshine and warm temperatures, coupled with the cancellation of the afternoon number theory lecture that Henning and I attend, just begged for us to be outside. We decided to go for a little hike in the Elfin Forest, which happens to be relatively close to my parents’ house in Cardiff, and then go for a swim and cook dinner for my dad afterwards.
While we were hiking, I thought about what to make for dinner. I had visions of a beautiful, bright spring pasta with spinach, peas, feta cheese, and lemon. Then I called my dad. The conversation went something like this:
“Hey dad, we’re coming to make dinner for you tonight.”
“Oh, great! I’ll heat up the hot tub. So what are you going to make… steak?”
“Uhm… well…”
“Steak is so
Wah-HA-ka
2007-04-19 21:50:58
My first experience with pioloncillo sugar was not nearly as romantic as I’d imagined it would be when I watched Tio Tomas gently break small chunks of the stuff from its cone and stir it into a pot of steaming Champurrado in the movie Quinceañera (a fantastic film about gentrification of Hispanic neighborhoods in LA). Tio Tomas lived in a back house in an Echo Park neighborhood, surviving by selling Champurrado from a grocery store shopping cart that he pushed around the neighborhood.
My pioloncillo sugar was as hard as a rock. I tried to break off pieces, but the best I could do was to break it in half, and only that by gripping it firmly with both hands and grunting like a strong-man. Hrmm. Next, I tried to grate it with a grater. This worked better, though the progress was slow and my arm felt as if it would fall off after I’d only made half a centimeter of progress. So, I went for the big guns—the food processor. At first, I put the whole cone half in and turne
Chi-town
2007-04-25 22:50:51
I’m back from Chicago. Finally, I got to go somewhere interesting for a math conference. The conference was great—a bunch of really good talks, plus the good company of fellow graduate students in topology. I arrived in Chicago late Thursday night without having taken any time at all to plan activities or meals. The conference wouldn’t start until Saturday, so I was free to check out Chi-town on Friday. I really did not do my homework before this trip, but thankfully my friend and fellow graduate student Dave didn’t mind just wandering around downtown. First, we stumbled across a gorgeous amphitheater, designed by Gehry, and spent quite a while wandering around it and taking pictures. It seems that every major city has something designed by Gehry by now.
Next, we went to the Cezanne to Picasso exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. I had never before been to an exhibition that was organized around an art dealer and paintings promoted by him. This was an in
When the moon hits your eye
2007-05-01 05:08:11
Ah yes. Pizza. Everyone’s favorite food, one of my least favorites. At least it was, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered the joys of homemade pizza at my friend Tom’s place. Gone was the greasy Real CheeseTM processed cheese food product, the sugar sauce, and the bland, soggy crust. Instead, I found crispy, crackly, olive-oily crust and endless topping possibilities—garlicky spinach and feta cheese, olive tapenade, caramelized onion and goat cheese… and the list goes on. I had to try this myself, so I got a pizza stone and pizza began to make regular appearances on my table. Then my pizza stone cracked. Boo. I continued to use it occasionally for a while, just setting the two halves next to each other in the oven and hoping for the best. Not exactly elegant, but it worked. And then: my sister gave me a Mario Batali enameled cast iron pizza pan for my birthday.
Joy of joys! Tonight Henning and I gave it a go and I couldn’t be happier with it. I
Market
2007-04-30 05:18:39
Last night, to celebrate my birthday (again), my parents took Henning and me out to dinner at Market
Restaurant & Bar in Del Mar. In short: absolutely fabulous food, grotesquely upscale ambiance.
Living in La Jolla, I’m used to seeing excess money flaunted about like nothing, but pulling into the complementary valet parking lot at Market, the scene blew anything I’ve seen before right out of the water. There was no less than a million bucks worth of cars parked within fifteen feet of the door. I mean lordy, there were two Bentely’s. Two! This was a minor warning as to what to expect as far as clientele inside the restaurant. Looking around the dining room, it was hard to find a woman who hadn’t had plastic surgery. It was really quite impressive. The style of the dining room matched the clientele—decidedly upscale and bland. The food, however, was definitely worth enduring this painfully affluent-generic background.
We arrived early for our 8pm reserva
Vienna Vegetable Orchestra
2007-05-02 21:04:44
Oh goodness. I’m speechless. Just watch.
To learn more about the instruments, visit Gemueseorchester.org
Read more: Vienna
, Vegetable
, Orchestra
Mi corazón está en México
2007-05-11 06:25:54
My mom was in town and taking inspiration from Cinco de Mayo, we cooked up a little Rick Bayless Mexican food last Friday night. I’m on this Mexican kick lately. I just can’t seem to get enough. Seriously. There is really an amazingly rich and complex world of Mexican food; it’s sad that most Americans just know about cheese enchiladas with rice and beans.
We made Rick Bayless’s Tacos de Picadillo Oazaqueno and oh man, were they good. Picadillo is a standard meat filling that’s often made with ground beef or pork, but Bayless recommends an alternative method of slowly simmering chunks of pork and then shredding them, which gives the meat a wonderful texture. The shredded pork is then pan-fried with onions for a while before a roasted tomato sauce—hot with chipotles and aromatic with spices—is added. With a little sweetness from raisins and crunch from almonds, the final dish tastes almost like a deconstructed mole, sans chocolate. On a warm, s
Michael Pollan in San Diego
2007-05-17 18:20:49
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, will be in San Diego
to give a lecture on Tuesday, June 12. I’ve just finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which Pollan takes a hard look at four modern food chains, so as to ascertain what it is that Americans are really eating. The results are quite disturbing and made me happy that I rarely eat processed foods. The book has gotten a lot of press, for example in the New York Times and on NPR, and seems to be causing a stir in the food world.
The lecture is hosted by UCSD Extension’s Revelle Forum. Tickets are $35 and advanced registration is recommended. For more information, visit the Revelle Forum website.
Read more: Michael
, San Diego
A minivacation
2007-05-16 09:18:21
This past weekend, Henning and I took a minivacation to Santa Barbara. We had to pick up Henning’s new passport at the German embassy in LA on the way, so we spent the day going to a few museums there. The Modern West Landscapes exhibition at LACMA is a bit boring, save the part from the 30’s. MOCA’s feminist exhibition Wack! was ok, if lacking a pulse—I expected more. The highlight of our art tour was some new Tim Hawkinson pieces at the Getty. I adore Tim Hawkinson. He is one of the best working artists right now (along with Hung Liu). His work is always incredibly inquisitive and ingenious. The Getty commissioned four pieces and is also showing the Uberorgan, a wonderous instrument of giant organ-shaped plastic sacks connected with tubing. Every hour on the hour, a belt of wide white plastic with black dots begins to turn, and the organ begins to make incredible bbbbfffffffrrrrgggggg noises. It’s great. Unfortunately, the exhibition only had the four ot
May Gray
2007-05-18 19:19:26
The weather has been awful here for the last week or so—cold, cloudy, and damp. It seems the June Gloom has come a few weeks early. It’s perfect soup weather, though, and Henning came back from the Talbot workshop at the end of March claiming to have enjoyed a black bean soup. Amazing, for a man who “doesn’t like” beans. He said that one of the virtues of the soup was its smooth texture, rather than chunky beanyness. I had most of the ingredients for a simple black bean soup laying around, so I decided to have a go at it.
For some reason, I thought Rancho Gordo’s Vaquero beans were black beans. Maybe it was their black spots, or the text on the Rancho Gordo site singing the praises of their black pot liquor. As they were cooking, I noticed the black fading to brown, and when I pureed the soup, it had a telltale brownish color. I tasted it and worried that Henning wouldn’t like it, because it was indeed quite beany. But when I had him taste it,
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