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THURSDAY 27 DECEMBER 2001
HAPPY NEW YEAR! SEE YOU AGAIN IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS
Well, that was a quick week, wasn't it? How was your Christmas (if you celebrate it)? We had lots of family - it's the first time in a few years that we've seen everyone right around the holidays. Had two crab dinners, some abalone that my dad caught, rack of lamb for Christmas dinner, good wine, good company, all the requisite celebratory things.
And now Catherine & I (and Spec!) are hitting the road for a couple of weeks. New Mexico, Colorado, Utah - visiting friends and family, eating lots, skiing lots, driving lots. Entries here are going to be few, if any - no laptop on this trip.
I hope all of you had a lovely Ramahanukwanzaasolstimas - and very best wishes for a happy and healthy and safe and joyous New Year. Peace be with you - I'll be back soon.
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FRIDAY 21 DECEMBER 2001
Last night dinner came in under my record of 15 minutes or less due to a combination of practice and pre-prepared ingredients. Corralitos smoked pork chops were the main thing - they're already cooked, so you only have to sauté them to brown and heat them. While they were cooking (in 1/2 butter, 1/2 olive oil), I made some coleslaw, which I now have down to a habit; no thinking required. A quarter head of green cabbage, shredded, 1/4 of a red onion, sliced THINLY, a spoonful of mayonnaise, splash of cider vinegar, some sugar and a sprinkle of salt and pepper - that's it. As soon as the pork chops come out of the pan, I add some sliced apples and fry them long enough to soften them. Take them out, deglaze the pan with some apple balsamic and a little water, and we're ready to eat. Fifteen minutes, always the goal, seldom achieved.
That was last night.
Tonight we were at the DreamTime Christmas party. I love office Christmas parties, don't you? It was the good version - lots of mutual admiration and compliments, good food, good wine, a little dancing. None of the bad Xmas party experiences - getting too drunk, flirting with the wrong people, saying something you didn't mean to say (that's my usual problem - I've progressed from the previously mentioned one). It was a lot of fun.
Although you as an outside reader have no way of knowing how long it took me to type this entry.
And Secret Santa! I got my very own copy of Paula Wolfert's Cous Cous and Other Good Foods from Morroco. It's lovely to get a present in the mail from someone you don't know. Thanks very much, whoever you are!
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THURSDAY 20 DECEMBER 2001
What a great day today. We're having a real storm - the wind is BLOWING the sheets of rain across the street and making whistling sounds around the corners of the houses. I love to sit and watch the trees when it's windy like this. If the rain stops later, I'll take Spec for a walk on the beach - I love the beach on a stormy day. Especially when it's windy but it's just rained, so all of the sand is wet and stays on the ground instead of blowing in your face.
I wish I had soup on the stove. Which reminds me that I should have lamb stock on the stove right now - better go put it on. I bought lamb neck bones, pretty meaty, last night at the store. We're having rack of lamb for Christmas dinner, and I thought I'd be particularly organized and make stock. It's that Christmas overdrive kicking in again.
I think I saved the brioche. I took the mess out of the fridge this morning and let it come up to room temperature. It took another 15 minutes in the mixer with 2 tablespoons of flour, but it finally turned back into the "cohesive dough that slaps the side of the bowl." I won't really know how it turns out until I eat one of the sticky buns on Christmas morning, but it looks right, so I'm pretty sure it will be OK. One thing that you learn after cooking for a long time is that most things can be saved. And with five eggs and half a pound of organic butter, that dough was much too expensive to give up on!
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WEDNESDAY 19 DECEMBER 2001 - AGAIN
Egads. I'm in the middle of a potential baking disaster. The week before Christmas, I go into overdrive, which means that I never get sleepy and I always want to be doing something. Tonight, even though I worked all day and went to the gym, I wanted to make brioche dough, that tomorrow will be made into pecan sticky buns.
Why didn't I start this morning, when I had a lot more presence of mind, not to mention having the house to myself?
I'll tell the rest of the story tomorrow, when I know the ending, but the short version is that brioche dough takes a long time to mix in the mixer - 25 minutes or more, emphasis on the more - and my mixer, while being very heavy-duty, enough to do this job, thank goodness (and my mother-in-law - it was last year's Christmas present!), is also rather loud, and Catherine, who's still sick, is trying to watch a movie, and our house is very small. All of these things add up to a mess of raggedy dough and butter that I just shoved in the fridge. We'll see if I can fix it in the morning.
Not before Catherine wakes up, of course!
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WEDNESDAY 19 DECEMBER 2001
My friend Ruth was here to visit for two days but left last night. I hate it when people leave, don't you? I hate saying goodbye at airports, and I miss her so much already.
On the other hand, I'm very happy that I got to visit with her, and we got to do all of the important things that you must do when you've been away from Santa Cruz for a long time. Lunch at Tacos Morenos. A couple of walks along the cliff looking at the ocean. Drinking Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company coffee - some at home, and some downtown. Sitting around the table after dinner drinking wine and talking, staying up too late and enjoying your friends. It really was a nice visit, and a very lovely Christmas present.
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SUNDAY 16 DECEMBER 2001
CATHERINE BAKES COOKIES
Catherine is on the edge of getting sick. Tonight she was at the point of feverish activity. You know, when your body wants you to lie down and go to sleep, but your mind knows that in a little while you're going to feel REALLY bad and won't be able to do anything, but Christmas is coming and the house isn't ready and you'd better clean something or cook something or make something or wrap something and why not all at once?
So she decided to make dinner, which in itself is unusual. When dinner was almost done and she didn't have to pay attention to it anymore, she decided to make cookies. I finally made dough the other day, but it's been sitting in the fridge because I haven't had time to roll it out. I think that Catherine wanted to cross one more thing off the list.
It didn't go well from the start. She couldn't find the flour - I'm mostly out, but luckily I had some White Lily in the fridge. The dough stuck to the rolling pin because she only floured the board, and forgot to flour the top of the dough. She rolled the dough before getting a pan ready, and then found out that I'm also out of parchment paper, so she had to grease the pan. Since dinner was still cooking, the kitchen was pretty warm, so by the time the pan was ready the dough had gotten very soft. She started to lift the cookies to the pan with her fingers, but they pulled apart as she was lifting them. Most of them weren't cut all the way through, they were stuck to the board and now they were melting.
"Forget this," she said, and scraped up all of the dough back into a ball and threw it back into the fridge. "That was NOT my childhood cookie-baking experience."
"What was your childhood cookie-baking experience?"
"MY MOTHER DID IT. My mother baked the cookies while I got to eat the dough!"
It's not nice to laugh at a sick person, but it was pretty funny.
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FRIDAY 14 DECEMBER 2001
I think that I have finally made some progress in the area of personal growth and self-improvement. I am a terrible procrastinator - many of you know this already. But I think today I took some steps forward.
The chore that is the current procrastination problem is my office. "It looks like something came in here and exploded," Catherine says. Yesterday as she was walking out the door she tripped over a stack of CDs, spilling them even further across the floor. "I'm not even going to say one word," she said. The mess really is a problem, because my office is also our guest room, and my friend Ruth is coming to visit next week.
My usual method of procrastination when I clean is to get stuck on one thing. One unrelated thing. For instance, if I have to put something away in the chest that happens to hold all my old photographs, I can get stuck going through all those photos for an hour or more. I can just forget about about ever trying to reorganize my bookshelves because I just end up browsing. You get the picture.
But today! Today instead of cleaning my office I procrastinated by cleaning my kitchen. Really cleaned - scrubbed the cutting board, cleaned UNDERNEATH it, lined up the bottles of oil and vinegar, wiping them off as I went, removed all the burners to clean the stove...
It doesn't get me one step closer to making the office look like a welcoming place to spend the night, but on the other hand at least SOMETHING got clean. Isn't that progress?
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WEDNESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2001
Jon Carroll, a columnist for the SF Chronicle, is on my list of daily reads. He had a great column yesterday which I think everyone should read. It's a good reminder that although we have all given to the NY Firefighters Fund, or the Windows on the World Fund, or the Red Cross - all worthy causes - there are still people in our own neighborhoods who need help.
My personal thing, especially because it's easy, is to drop food in those food-drive barrels. Instead of going through the backs of the cupboards (if that weird can of off-brand soup has been sitting on your shelf for 3 years, do you think anyone else wants it?), I just add a few things to my cart every time I go shopping. I go shopping at least once a day - sometimes three times if I'm in the middle of baking Christmas cookies and realise I'm missing most of the ingredients! - so it adds up to a lot of contributions to the barrel. I just buy all the non-perishable items I would buy for myself. (Although I used to have a friend that would buy the jars of caviar so that someone could have a treat on Christmas.) Especially things with protein in them, because they're always more expensive. A can of beans is 89¢, a can of chili made with free-range turkey is $2.59, for instance. Since I believe in organic products, that's what I buy. And, since the grocery store where I usually shop has one of the food-drive barrels right by the door, it makes it very easy to drop in the food on my way out.
It only takes about two extra minutes, and it makes you feel good, and I hope it makes someone else feel good, too. Christmas commercialism is much less rampant this year, I've noticed - selfish shopping seems in very bad taste when people are dead and other people are having bombs dropped on them - so maybe it's a little easier to remember that some people are too hungry to think about presents.
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MONDAY 10 DECEMBER 2001
So, I ate at House of Prime Rib on Saturday. I didn't know quite what to expect, and I was a little nervous - the last time Catherine & I had prime rib, about three months ago, it made us both (and Spec!) not feel so well afterwards. But this place was great! Very old-fashioned, full of ceremony. When the waiters dress the salad, tableside, they spin the salad bowl as the pour on the dressing. They have specially-made serving carts that they take around from table to table so they can carve the beef to order. And they carry containers full of burning coals through the restaurant to put in the bottom half of the carts to keep the beef warm. There is not one token vegetarian item on the menu. They even have a dessert cart.
And the beef tasted really, really good. Which is, after all, the point of eating there. I had the English Cut (sliced thinly), and I ate almost all of it. I was looking forward to the creamed spinach, but it turned out that what I liked the best was the Yorkshire pudding. I ate all of mine, half of Catherine's, and if I had known some of the people at the table a little better, I would have asked for theirs too. Next time I eat there, I'm asking for extra Yorkshire pudding instead of a baked potato (which I didn't eat anyway - had to save room for the Yorkshire pudding!).
Happy birthday Alison! Thanks for dinner, Andy!
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FRIDAY 7 DECEMBER 2001
My friend Rene is from Mexico and I asked him about some of the things he missed the most. He told me about how his mother makes beans. She never soaks them or brings them to a boil, but cooks them very very slowly - six or eight hours - at a bare simmer the whole time. After he told me that, I tried it, and the beans were amazing - creamy, unbroken. Now I can't cook my beans any other way, but eight hours is a pretty big committment.
Unfortunately, today I didn't start my pot of beans until noon. By the time I was ready for dinner, the beans were not ready for me. I kept putting dinner off by twenty more minutes... okay, thirty MORE minutes... ended up eating the rest of the dinner without the beans. Of course, as soon as we were finished eating, the beans were finally done. They ought to make a good breakfast, though!
I'm waffling back and forth about getting a crock-pot. On one hand, I don't have any cupboard or counter space for another piece of cooking equipment. On the other hand, I feel a huge amount of worry when I leave the house knowing that the stove is on. The whole time I'm gone I imagine the cat jumping up on the counter, knocking something into the OPEN FLAME! and burning down the house. So maybe for my peace of mind I should just get one. If you're going to cook something for eight hours, you really can't stay to babysit it the entire time. I don't know, still up in the air. But try beans that way; you'll like them.
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THURSDAY 6 DECEMBER 2001
Publicity is a very exciting thing! I just got an email from someone in Thailand who would like to subscribe to NOBODY'S FOOL. Maybe there comes a time for other people when each individual subscriber becomes just another sale, another name to enter in a database, another entry on a "to-do" list, but for me, every single person that wants to subscribe is a joyful surprise. I'm sending my newsletter to Thailand! That's very exciting!!
(I have noticed a deplorable surplus of exclamation points in my entries and emails lately. Sorry about that. I'm sure I'll calm down eventually!)
My sister Jennifer lived in Thailand, in Chiang Mai, as a student, and I got to visit her while she was there. Isn't it better to visit a country when someone who lives there can show you around? She had a favorite som tum vendor - som tum is green papaya salad - who had a street cart around the corner from my sister's house. To get the same effect as a shredder, the Som Tum Lady would take a small machete and vertically whack at the papaya in her hand over and over again. She would then slice horizontally against the vertical cuts so pieces of papaya would slide off into a mortar as long thin shreds. Lime juice, dried shrimp, green beans, chilies, and peanuts were the rest of the ingredients that got pounded together with the pestle. Jennifer would stop at a storefront restaurant down the block to get rice as an accompanitment - after six months living there, she could eat very spicy dishes, but usually with rice.
I'd love to go back there some day, stay longer than the too-short three weeks that I was there before. I can't think of any place that I've been that I wouldn't like to go back to, in fact. I always need one visit to get my bearings, and then another to check out all the things I noticed the first time around.
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WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2001
Hooray! I finally have DSL at home.
However, that excitement pales in comparison to the excitement of being written up in the paper today. Christina Waters had lovely things to day about NOBODY'S FOOL, and I hope that everyone who comes to the site to visit decides to subscribe.
I celebrated by having lunch at Tacos Morenos, where you can get what is easily the best carnitas I've ever had.
Publicity, DSL, and a carnitas taco - what a great day!
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TUESDAY 4 DECEMBER 2001
Nice to cook dinner for a change tonight. I think that a week off was just what I needed to put me in the mood again. Catherine's gone skiing, so I made things for myself that she doesn't like - broccoli and fish.
If you've never had long-cooked broccoli, it's worth a try. Onions, garlic, the broccoli cut in chunks, a little water, all cooked covered until the broccoli is nice and soft, about 15-20 minutes. It's very different than crisp-steamed broccoli, but really good.
And mahi-mahi, which I love. A little sauce made by squeezing half an orange into the pan (after I took the fish out) and then adding about a teaspoon of butter.
Fits into my usual goal of dinner in 30 minutes or less. And delicious. And healthy. All in all a very virtuous dinner.
Made even more virtuous by the fact that I had no wine with dinner. In the interest of pre-Christmas weight loss, I've decided that until then, I won't have any wine two nights a week. So now I have to figure out what else to drink. Hot lemonade is on my list of evening drinks, as are herbal tea, and warm milk with 1/2 teaspoon each of honey or sugar and vanilla. I'm looking for other suggestions, though, so if you have any non-alcoholic, warm, not too sugary drinks that you like, please let me know.
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MONDAY 3 DECEMBER 2001
Well, lots to catch up on!
The last day in Seattle I finally got to spend a nice long time in Pike Place Market. Catherine took Spec with her to the press check, so that I didn't have to feel guilty about leaving her in the hotel room. Spent the morning walking around, looking at all the things I wish I could have bought - the meat counters were particularly appealing. And wild mushrooms! Chanterelles for $6.99/pound - that's wholesale in CA. Black trumpets for $8.99, still a bargain. And hedgehogs and pompoms - I never see those in Santa Cruz. There are definitely benefits to all the rain. And yes, I did see the gys throwing fish.
The best part of the day was my lunch. The first place I ate was at Cafe Yarmarka, a Russian stand in a faraway corner of the market. They had pierogi and pelmeni and stuffed cabbage and borscht. I only had borscht - it was cold and rainy outside, perfect soup weather. I wanted to have a second bowl, it was so good, but then I decided to take myself on a soup tour. (I was having a hard time eating at just one place - there are only so many meals you can eat in one day, something that frustrates me when I'm travelling!)
After the borscht, I went to Jack's Fish Spot and had a cup of clam chowder, northwest style. It was a creamy chowder, like New England, but had some kind of spice in it that made it taste different than the Boston kind. A little bit of curry, maybe? Anyway, it was damned good.
I had planned on at least one more stop on the soup tour, but that was all I could handle. I toted all my purchases (blueberry chutney, a cazuela from the Spanish Table, a few bottles of Washington wine) back to the hotel.
One more thing to tell you about... Had breakfast in Tacoma at a place called the Southern Kitchen. If you're ever there, I can't recommend it enough. Chicken fried steak and eggs, grits, a biscuit, homemade lemonade. (I didn't eat again until we got to Yreka!) YUMMY. It was hard choosing what to eat, because they also had pork chops, panfried butterfish (I like fish for breakfast), and their pancakes were so fluffy they were about an inch thick. Again, the frustrating part about knowing that you're only going to eat at a place one time is that there's only so much one person can eat in one meal.
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