Up In Knots

For months it seemed like I had no time to write on here.  But now, on my 2nd day staying home sick from work, I've found some time.  And it feels great to sip at some potato (beer!) soup and get back to Vagabond basics while listening to Feist's new album, Metals. 

Looking out my window, the wind is racing, and changing the day from gray to sunny to gray to sunny and everything in between.  It's a continuous movement, and I find myself mesmerized by how constant the weather changes are.  The reliability of change.  A lovely thing, once I start to think on it a bit more.

From The Vagabond Table

Another lovely thing is my finally cracking open Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce (a Christmas present I'd begged for last year) and trying my hand at a few things, most notably the Soft Rye Pretzels (!) for our annual Oktoberfest shindig that went down last weekend.

From The Vagabond Table

In all honesty the roomie and I made 2 types of pretzels, and while the 2nd recipe might have been slightly easier in terms of rising times, this one was the more hearty and flavorful of the two, being a mix between white and rye flours.  If the idea of rye conjurs up images of rye bread, try your best to put them aside...rye bread also gets its flavor from caraway seeeds, not necessarily the rye, and, in an earnest suggestion between you and me, rye deserves a  second chance.

From The Vagabond Table

I found that pretzels are pretty fun to make...kind of like when you rolled play-doh into logs and worms when you were a kid (which is quite a useful skill to maintain in the making of pretzels) and that it's even more fun to knot them up and boil them and sprinkle them and bake them and suddenly have pretzels on your hands.  Real Pretzels! Not the hard kind from a bag at the grocer, but the warm, crackly, soft kind, (mall-variety, but infinitely better).

From The Vagabond Table

These pretzels are even better when served with this Beer Mustard recipe I'd adapted a few years ago, these Bratwurst Bites and this incredible red cabbage dish .  Happy Oktobering to you all and may you soon find a Soft Rye Pretzel in one hand and brew in the other.  Prost!

A Funny Thing

Space is a funny thing.  Sometimes you crave it, a little distance from x-y-z, or sometimes it happens when you didn’t even mean for it to (ie, not writing on here for about 2 months now) and a lot of times, when you get exactly what you (un)intentionally wanted, it isn’t always rainbows and puppies.  (Case in point, I've missed you, Vagabond Table.)

But space is good, too.  It’s good to refocus, to reflect, to put all your energies into one or two things instead of 20 things, because sometimes just a few things require that much time to get through, or, in some cases, get over.   And, either way, or all around, or however you end up interpreting this, that distance is a great healer, encourager, and clarifier.  And lets you value yourself, and your relationships, and your goals in ways that you never quite had the time to do before.   Maybe it even gives you some good ideas for what you want to do in your 29th year of life, as you gratefully bundle up all the 28 years that came before and see what other adventures you can get lost in. 

Taking a step back also helps you realize that simple things somehow end up being most important.   Things like taking 5 minutes to just pause before the day even starts, when you’re still curled up in bed.  Or give a long, long hug to a Grandmother you never get to see.  Even just spending the night chatting about anything and everything with a soul-friend, celebrating a new life coming into this world, your brother’s new start at college, a good friend's wedding (in Colorado!) and remembering to never, ever, ever, sell yourself short of the good things in life. 

Coffee in the morning.  Being lazy on a Saturday.  Listening to summer thunderstorms (or hurricanes!) outside your window and watching the lightning electrify your walls.  Tostada and movie nights, homemade stovetop popcorn, curling up in the blanket your mom knit you ages ago, listening to records, and feeling the first break in heat as Fall starts creeping up.  Late summer peaches being turned into pies.  A gift or rosemary from a friend’s garden.  Simple things, good things.  

And sometimes space works to your cooking favor… for example spaces work most excellently on said Peach Pie, with the classic lattice-woven crust that lets the fruit caramelize while letting the steam out.   Maybe that’s all a bit of space is good for in life…letting things cool off, letting the steam out, letting things settle, and then, when it’s time to dive in, all that patience and space leads to something much better.

Use up those peaches and plums, my friends.  Put them in a pie, put them in a jar, just put them somewhere you get to enjoy every lovely bit of them.  And here's to allowing yourself to pause enough to focus on things you love, and to diving in.  Just like we dived into this Rosemary Peach Pie, but hopefully the benefits of that last longer than how long this pie lasted.  Which, between 3 people, was less than a day.  

It Reminds Me

I don’t know what it is about summer, but I want to eat seafood All. Of. The. Time.  Shrimps! Fish! Ceviche! Crab (and crab cakes!) Mussels and Frites!  There really isn’t a downside to any of this.  Actually, there’s an additional plus.  All of these thoughts of seafood reminded me of Red Lobster, which immediately brought to mind Cheddar Bay Biscuits, the true source of everyone’s obsession with the place.


I found a riff on these in the form of Cheddar and Jalapeño Scones from Smitten Kitchen, and by golly I had to have them one Friday night not too long ago.  It wasn’t a convenient time to make them: 

A) It was after work.  On a Friday. Which usually equals happy hours and a lack of work. 
B) It was before a concert (that I ended up ditching out going to anyway, but still).  
C) There aren’t a lot of scones being baked at 7pm on a Friday.  It's kind of weird...it's a breakfast food. 

As you might already know, I am, unabashedly, a cheese lover. And I had to have these scones. Nothing could deter me! I was a woman with a mission, and that mission, once it was ingrained in my head was one that needed to be completed.   And complete it I did, in all its buttery, cheesy, glory.  These scones are most excellent fresh out of the oven, though they’re fine put back in the oven the next day to warm up a bit.  I wish I had some crab and butter or a nice green salad to go along with them instead of just hoarding scones for my dinner that night, but c'est la vie. 

However... these white cheddar scones were met with approval from a bevy pre-concert peeps that night, and I’m sure would meet approval with your own crew of summer devotees.  So for your next clam bake, BBQ, picnic, or crab-fest, make these and you won’t think twice about needing to turn your oven on for a few minutes, even in the midst of summer heat.  Your cheese-loving soul deserves it. 

Catching Up

Things have been so dang busy these past several weeks that I’m realizing Spring Fever isn’t necessarily about getting excited for Spring…it means you’re completely caught up in the whirlwind of activity that arises after the sleepy quietness of winter.  Did you know that almost everyone and their mother (mine and Roni’s included) have birthdays in May? And that it's also the month of Graduations and Weddings and Very Important Events?  At least it seems that way, and I’m never one to turn down a righteous birthday/graduation/wedding celebration.

I kind of love the hubbub that has come with all this great weather…people in their plaid shorts, dudes in brown flip flops, summer dresses, sandals, and this carefree way of laughing and getting together that suddenly makes life so brimming with fullness that you (accidentally) don't do laundry for two weeks and also forget to go to the grocery store for just as long.

Do you know what that calls for? Emergency meals that feed you for at least 4 days and are kind of great for the odds/ends left in your fridge.  Like a ridiculously easy Pasta Puttanesca, which takes those odds and ends and delivers something authentic between all of the glasses of white wine and runnings-about-town that usually replace real meals with fun goings-on.

Canned tomatoes.  Some olives and garlic.  Parmesan and some parsley. Tuna (in this case I got real with it and did anchovies, but I feel everyone has a can of anchovies or tuna somewhere in a cupboard), leftover dried spaghetti noodles from the last time you made spaghetti noodles, and voila! Pasta Puttanesca, and it is very, very good.  It’s even better the next day (bonus!) and sounds a bit fancier than what it actually is.

Also, happy Memorial Day to everyone!  I'm currently writing you from sunny San Diego (more on that in a future post) but I'd like to take this quick second to congratulate my brother Christian on his high school graduation (Go Hawks! and now...Go Sun Devils!) and also Brennan and Julie on their wedding.  Love you guys. 

The Secret's in the Crust

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster these past few weeks.  Being apart from my fam, it’s been even harder, but, I think, things are starting to buck up again.  It also helps that my street is drop-dead gorgeous with its tall arching trees, old houses, and a winding, dipping path down to the zoo.  Families and young people are out, dogs are being walked, people are laughing, and, thankfully, the humidity hasn’t set in so I’m not quite looking like Sideshow Bob yet. 

I’ve also re-encountered a new, easy, and favorite breakfast food.  I think I’d accidentally forgotten about it, but thankfully, Banana Bread hadn't forgotten about me.  I like to think it's been lingering around in the back of my mind, waiting (just like the frozen bananas in the back of my freezer) for some months now, and the gift of a week of real and true Spring (!) was the perfect time to make this Coconut Banana Bread,  slather on some butter, and watch the happy wanderers below my window.

This bread is good, with a spattering of sweetened coconut inside, a whisper of rum, and a crackly crust. To be honest with you, it's the rustic and uneven crackly top (thanks to a hefty sprinkling of sugar) that absolutely made me fall in love with it.  This was also the first time I used frozen bananas in a quick bread, and it was kind of nice knowing I had the foresight to save overly ripened fruit in my freezer for further works of baked goods.  It's also reassuring to open my freezer and still see three frozen bananas waiting for their next repurposed dessert... banana cake perhaps?  The options are endless, as is my love of banana bread for breakfast. 

Comfort Cookies

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.                                     ----T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I don't know if I've indulged myself in sharing my complete and utter devotion to T.S. Eliot with you before, but man do I have a poet-crush.  This crush has lasted for the past 9 years, so I'd be comfortable with saying it's now a deep-seated love, not just a poet crush, but either way, isn't that stanza just beautiful?

The images are gorgeous and tangible and tantalizing.  The verbs at the end of each line sound like a weird recipe.  And lilacs?  The heavens couldn't smell better, all glazed in spring rain.  It captures April perfectly.

But the thing is, I think of this stanza when things get hard throughout the year, not just in the spring, and definitely just not in April, and I think it's because Eliot was perfect in his mixing of nature and emotion and letting the images translate for themselves.

I'll be honest.  This is a hard time for my family, for me, and for some of my friends.  And not just small things like being late for work or for sitting in gum or having a bad hair day.  I'm talking big things, that seem to be made all the more big by being 3,000 miles away from home.  But how can I dwell on the spring rains and the gray and not see all the beauty that's stirring around me?  How can I witness something like multiple trees of flowers spontaneously burst around me and not stop dead in my tracks?  How can I not smile?  And that's when I think of Eliot, and this poem, and that the flowers always come through the rains, and even when it's hard, good things are working deep within.

If I was back home, I'd make a big batch of these Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies for everyone I know, especially my Grandpa, and serve them warm and fresh with an ice cold glass of milk.  We'd play some card games, laugh, tell stories of old hunting and fishing trips around the kitchen table, and forget about the fickleness of spring and the funny way life sometimes is, and sometimes isn't.

Because these cookies are so silly easy, and are so silly good, and so necessary.  Sometimes, just a plate of warm peanut butter cookies are good for more than just a few minutes.  They're good for a lifetime.

National Grilled Cheese: The Salute

Ladies and gents, I'd like to wish you a (slightly) belated National Grilled Cheese Day!

Just the fact there's a day devoted to the awesomeness of a grilled cheese inspired me to get all crazy on the original concept and concoct my new fave grilled cheese.  Yay for creativity and the original grilled cheeses (cheesus?) that supported it.

I've been a big fan of grilled cheese sandwiches (with tomato soup!) for...I don't know...27 years now?  Seriously. I love me my grilled cheese, my soup, and now, 30 Rock playing on Netflix as I snuggle into a chair with this purest of comfort foods.

With dark German wheat bread, a dash of a cayenne sprinkled over my Naani's Apple Chutney, thin slices of red pear, brie, and some fresh spinach leaves, this sandwich was a beauty.  Also, ridiculously filling.

It's been a gray week, with extreme flashes of warmth and sun...the perfect Grilled Cheese weather, if you ask me.  So join me in saluting our national treasure, the Grilled Cheese Sandwich!