Because...Lasagne

From 2015, I never got around to posting this.

Lately, though, dairy has been more unfriendly than usual to my gut so we haven't made this recently. Definitely time to make the sauce again, though, because it is soooo good.

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Many friends are aware that Kent and I follow a strictly (or almost strictly) no-sugar-no-grains approach to food. Kent follows more of a strictly Paleo diet that I do but at home you won't find one speck of rice, wheat, etc, in our cupboard. We allow ourselves to wander off the reservation, so to speak, under certain circumstances - say, when waffles are on offer at Chris & Irene's, or for a tasting menu at fancy-pants starred restaurant. Let's be clear: we don't have allergies. I have a few sensitivities, and we have made lifestyle choices - and we choose to ignore them when confronted with something like Michel Roux's menu a couple of weeks ago because we can afford, and choose, to not substitute ingredients. 

This is all just to say: we have made choices, and pasta-in-it's-gorgeous-semolina-goodness has been absolutely verboten. I love pasta in all it's forms. Flat, ruffled, stuffed. And I've found a substitute for flat thanks to three special people. Long-ish story. Settle in, chaps.

Special Person #1: Mom, who introduced me to zucchini-noodle lasagne during her visit last year and started me on this adventure of reintroducing ragu back into our world. Slicing up zucchini is a great option! For my taste, it has to be roasted first to dry it out a bit. We have such a tiny oven that this really does take several rounds of roasting. The zucchini shrivels up so you have to do quite a lot to get the right amount for a proper lasagne. 

Special Person #2: TS, a lovely woman who was my first real friend here in London, introduced me to a few of her favorite places in Camden. One of them was a vegetable shop, Parkway Produce (Parkway Greens? I can never see the writing on the awning), has 95% fresh produce and 5% other. There are veg I've never laid eyes on in this place. They supply local Camden restaurants with goods. They are constantly moving, busy, boxing up produce, unboxing produce. Best prices on unwaxed lemons in town. Best looking lemons in town. Best lemons in town. Anyway, TS told me about celeriac. Whaaaa? I've never used it. She gasped and said "Oh, you MUST try it. Such a lovely mild flavor. Mash it or slice it into matchsticks and put it into salad." (Note: right across the street from The Tiniest Whole Foods Ever)

Special Person #3: Mark Sisson, of Mark's Daily Apple. A few days after this discovery of Parkway Produce, I was reading on Mark's website about his version of lasagne, where he uses celeriac (celery root). 

Hm. This obviously got me thinking about how I could change up my lasagne. I make my own bolognese sauce for it, a riff on two sauces in Stanley Tucci's family cookbook, so I'm already spending a great deal of time on that. I didn't like how much more time the zucchini takes to roast. Celeriac, eh? Great big monster of an ugly root. You have to carve the outside off. It's very firm and a little difficult to slice, but easier than a butternut squash. Mark parboils 1/8" slices in batches of four or so - whatever fits in the pan, so that's what I did. Worked great! Made BEAUTIFUL if somewhat wonky "noodles" for lasagne. I did a crappy cutting job - very uneven - but DH loved it. It has just the right consistency - firm enough to layer but soft enough to cut through with a fork. But oh mercy standing in front of the stove parboiling slices of celeriac...MANY slices of celeriac...in my tiny galley kitchen...not my favorite thing to do. But I did it a few times because...lasagne! Then I read somewhere about steaming it. Maybe on the BBC food website. Maybe somewhere else. 

Okay, what the heck, I try that. 

Success! I can steam half a head of celeriac slices at a time! Woohoo! And, I can steam another set of slices to freeze for next time. Oh, yes by the way, it freezes lovely. Thaw it in the fridge for a day, use it in lasagne that night or the next day. Yummy.

Fine, it isn't the best photo but it's in a proper big American Pyrex casserole dish,
you know what I'm talking about.

Then Kent ponders: "I wonder if we can spiralize it and use it as...spaghetti?" Well, shit yes that actually works too. Steam a head of spiralized celeriac for about 9 minutes, drain it, salt it, cover it with sauce and sprinkle with parmesan. It works. You could just boil them in salted water, too, and it would work just fine. I've read that it's good to add a little lemon juice to prevent it from going brown (might be for storage in fridge) but that hasn't been a problem for me. That spiralizer we bought two years ago has finally come in handy. 

There is almost nothing better than a big plate of spaghetti with homemade bolognese and sprinkled with fresh parmesan cheese after a run (you knew I had to mention that somewhere, right?) - made with ingredients that are consistent with our dietary choices.

Life is good. 

What does pork smell like?

Well, not much, turns out. Not ground pork, anyhow. No wonder there are mass quantities of seasonings in the meatloaf cooking away in the oven. Pork mince (in Brit parlance). Onions. Shrooms. With bacon on top.

Ah. Bacon. Bacon. A perfect food. Everything is better with bacon. I get Homer Simpson-drool going on when bacon is cooking. Today I put "lashings" of bacon on top of ground pork meatloaf or, as Nom Nom Paleo calls it, Super Porktastic Bacon-topped Spinach & Mushroom Meatloaf. Fun blog, awesome recipes, and oh damn I forgot the nutmeg. 

Crap, I forgot to add the nutmeg! I can't even blame my martini for that miss because that happened waaaay back before noon. And it's now waaaay past noon. Shoot. Well, probably it'll be okay without it. 

"Lashings." I don't really even know what that is but it is also a decidedly Brit word which seems to indicate some kind of schmear of something, or stripes or strips of something. On my meatloaf I have strips of bacon across the top, which I think qualifies as "lashings of bacon." Meh. 

I might forever associate this meatloaf with writing a presentation on what I can do for Company Not Named. Next week I am to do a panel interview (as in, the subject is ME and the panel is several of the company execs) in presentation (PowerPoint) mode. I'm not particularly thrilled and I'm totally anxious and the presentation isn't done and I'm pretty sure I've completely overthought this and I have one day to rework it before we go out of town. I want it DONE by the time we get on the train. So. Ugh. I keep asking myself "how badly do I want THIS specific job?" It happens that I'm a pretty good fit. But if, after all this, I don't actually GET the job, "do I want to bother continuing to look?" The first interview as January 14. Start date is April 1. 

So, pork smells like my presentation to Company Not Named. 

As Kerry says: le sigh. 

Hi, my name is Erin, and I'm a foodie.

"Although the two terms were sometimes used interchangeably, foodies used to differ from gourmets in that gourmets were epicures of refined taste, whereas foodies were amateurs who simply loved food for consumption, study, preparation, and news.^[1] Gourmets simply want to eat the best food, whereas foodies want to learn everything about food, both the best and the ordinary, and about the science, industry, and personalities surrounding food.^[2] After some time of differentiating between the two, the term Foodie is now considered the term for food exploration and enjoyment, whether gourmet or not, thus superseding the term Gourmet."--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodie

I should be coding my monster Excel project for work, and instead I am scheduling our next trip to New York City. Partly because I feel like crap (BPPV again), my eyes hurt, and the thought of staring at code for three hours is migraine-inducing. Because of the vertigo.

Oh hell, call it was it is: let's just say Manhattan because we won't go north of Central Park, or further west than the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge. 

We were at Sinigual, this really wonderful Mexican restaurant in Midtown with Kent's cohort from CAPE, and one of them said "So, are you guys foodies?" We'd been raving about Colicchio & Sons, and that place in Pittsburgh with the amazing beef, and I said "nah, I dunno, seems like it has such negative connotations." Snobby. Then I started thinking. Hm. I think everyone who knows us would probably call us foodies. 150 (estimated) cookbooks, and three of them are Michael Ruhlman and one is Thomas Keller. We pine for Top Chef when it's on hiatus. We attempt unique and interesting cooking adventures at home. I spend quality time with Roberta's food dictionary whenever we visit her home. We go out of our way to find the right knife, not necessarily the best knife, and the right pot, not necessarily the best pot - although Le Cruset is pretty much the be-all-end-all for enameled cast-iron cookware. And who needs more than two? We use them all the time. LOVE. We make our own stock. Why? Well, for one I have a yeast sensitivity and it is almost impossible to find stock that doesn't contain yeast for flavoring. But when we finally finessed the crap out of our stock, we discovered that it is a) the easiest thing in the world to make and requires almost no attention and b) tastes amazing without adding anything else to it. It's stock with attitude. See note about Michael Ruhlman, our hero for pulling back the veil of CIA mystique and bringing beautiful food to the home. 

Yeah, I'm gushing. Which also makes me a foodie, I guess. Kent, too. The nicely balanced (no kidding) habanero slaw at Luna Maya. The juicy drippy crispy grinder at Zero's. Fellini's perfect french fries. Meatloaf at No Frill Bar & Grill. Actually, just about everything at No Frill is outstanding, but their portions are enormous and it's a bit of a turn-off. Cucumber panicotta at Colicchio & Sons. I just love the Tortilla Soup at Max & Erma's and the Southwestern Omelet at Charlie's. I will swear by  Ivar's Fish & Chips, and their clam chowder, as the best until the day I die. Bryant Park Cafe's french fries on Sunday - the oil gets old fast and it's freshest on Sunday. Go figure. Kent has a thing for the perfect french fry. I have a thing for great fish and chips. We both have a thing for yummy food, wherever it might be. 

(And while I was wandering off picking up the Michael Ruhlman link, I stumbled across one of his posts about the from-scratch BLT using his Big Green Egg. Oh. My. Goodness. Want. Someone please buy my baby grand so I can buy a Big Green Egg!)

Granted, most of this I can't even eat anymore because of the dairy and yeast thing, When I do decide to risk it, I want it to taste really, really good.

9/17 Update: Last night we caught up on Top Chef Masters - he waited for me to return from CW Seminars. Gooooooooo, Lorena! Woo!

Don't poached eggs just make you go weak in the knees?

I like eggs, clean, unspoiled by melted cheese eggs. Scrambled, fried, hard boiled, soft boiled, poached...My dad, Jim, used to make soft-boiled eggs when I'd come to visit. This is when he lived on Erlands Point in Silverdale. Let me say that Jim is not a culinary genius, but he's as good a cook as anyone else who doesn't have their own cooking show on Food Network. He's just no Anthony Bourdain. But when we dipped English muffins into those soft boiled eggs it just made my heart sing. Maybe it was the amazing view of Dyes Inlet out the picture window, maybe it was just about Eating Breakfast with Dad. I was 13 years old. 


Then I discovered Eggs Benedict. Whoa, Nelly! I do kinda like a little Hollandaise on my eggs once in a while, but only if Canadian bacon and an English muffin are between it and the plate. French, Canadian, English, Holland ( hahaha ) how very international. I'm sure I thought I was so sophisticated when I ordered it. There was a restaurant in Seattle, on Denny Way, that served THE BEST Eggs Benedict and hash browns. Again, perhaps it was the atmosphere. After a concert or Rocky Horror, midnight, smoking and goofing off with friends, sitting on the patio in the summer...or on a Saturday morning. It was a 24-hr place.


Dad used to also make corned beef hash with the egg fried in the middle, which essentially poached it...and I'd stick my fork in the middle and mush it around and the yolk would ooze into all the little crevices of the hash that hadn't been crisped...


Huevos Rancheros is best with poached eggs. Try it with roja. Poached eggs are to die for on pancakes with breakfast sausage and a little drizzle of maple syrup - no drenching, just enough to get an occasional reminder that it's there.


I was surfing Chow.com for an appetizer to take to a friend's Thanksgiving dinner and ran across some ideas for leftovers...it included turkey hash and a poached egg. Sounds good to me. See how it derails me? 


I have so many posts "in progress" but this one demanded to be written right now.

Scorecard Purgatory & Other Miscellany

Back in March I wrote (but forgot to finish/post):

I've been upgraded from eternal damnation to mere endless suffering. Once upon a time only one day a week was devoted to dealing with The Scorecard. Now it's two and a half days a week plus the odd 2:00 AM call with developers whose time zone is 10 hours ahead of Eastern daylight.


That was my month of March.


So, in the background Roxio is installing...and for the love of Pete it takes forever! Sheeeeeit. Oh. Because I upgraded to Windows 7 in January and am loading software as I require it. Photoshop was required soonest :) Roxio is required now because I don't like using Windows Media Player for DVDs (it's a Microsoft thing) and I can't put a DVD into my iPad. I bet there's a solution for that.


We're in green smoothie heaven. I know this probably doesn't sound wonderful, but 4 cups of spinach, 1 1/2 cups of strawberries and 1 banana in a high speed blender make 2 quarts of awesomeness. Less sodium than V8. Drink your veggies, people! Oh, I'm not doing the whole "green smoothie revolution" or raw diet thing. I just know I needed more veg in my diet.

As it turns out, that was my April, too. Now it's May, and for two months I've been dashing off posts in my head that never make it to the keyboard. I suppose everyone needs  break now and then. My break is over. I'm renaming the blog, and soon I'll move it to a new address. DH and I were joking around about flutes, and he commented about my playing a bent flute (my alto flute with the curved headjoint). I liked it, so I'm using it. As always, he's The Namer. It's perfect on so many different levels!


I'm still drinking my veggies. I started doing that shortly after I started taking synthetic thyroid hormone, so I don't know if the change in my energy is because of the have a functioning thyroid, the green drink, or both. I don't care enough to mess with it - I just know that 24 ounces of green smoothie first thing in the morning and another 16 ounces or so in the afternoon and I have all the energy I need, no more crashing fatigue that requires two hours of sleep (unless I really haven't gotten enough sleep the night before, ha ha!) Better focus, too, but that's almost entirely due to the thyroid stuff. DH has discovered that this green drink thing is pretty awesome, too. He loves it after yoga. We are purchasing huge amounts of kale and spinach. It's amazing how fast you can go through the greens when you're smooshing a tightly packed four cups (or more) into a blender. Usually we're mixing kale and spinach about 50-50, then either a cereal bowl's worth of frozen strawberries and one banana, or two mangoes and one banana. Thank goodness for Costco's bulk packages. These two seem to be our favorite combinations. Blueberry plus banana is yummy, too. DH did one with avocado but I wasn't that keen, but he also used the "artisan" greens instead of spinach, and I do not like those "artisan" greens.  Blech. As good as the blender is, it still has a hard time with raspberry seeds so we don't bother. 


What doesn't really work? Besides the artisan greens: grapes. Maybe a sweet red grape would be better than the green ones. Romaine, surprisingly. Romaine is my favorite in salads, but for me the taste doesn't really translate in the smoothie realm. There are LOTS of recipes out there on the internet and clearly we've only dipped our toes into that water.


Other things we are doing with our super-duper blender: hummus! Chickpeas, garlic, sesame seeds, olive oil. OMG so tasty with those "Food Should Taste Good" multigrain chips (again from Costco). Tortilla chips too, the thick ones. It's my new go-to comfort food. We're whizzing the tomato soup in the blender. We'll be doing margaritas this summer. We've done an applesauce, with pears, very tasty. Watch out for pears in this type of concentration: can produce gas.


And that's the news that's fit to print.

Soupy Sunday

Not only the weather but in the kitchen, too. There's only one thing better than tomato soup and artisan bread for lunch on a blustery winter day. Today certainly qualifies as blustery. Windy, rainy, gray, and cool. I can't say cold because it's in the mid-50's.

What one thing is better, you ask? Homemade tomato soup and homemade artisan bread. And I haven't taken food pictures in a while. It is time.


I've really Martha'd myself. No, wait, to do that I'd have had to grow the tomatoes and sow the wheat. Never mind. I think I could probably do both these recipes in my sleep. I've made the tomato soup two or three times and it is simple. On the America's test Kitchen website, it's the "Creamy Creamless Tomato Soup."

The bread was even simpler, ingredient-wise, but sneaky. I tossed the first batch because it never rose. I'm almost certain that my yeast was old and dead. The second batch didn't rise as much as I'd hoped, but both times I felt the dough was just a teensy weensy bit too dry. The second batch rose (enough) after I let it sit overnight so I baked it this morning. Hmmmmm...the smell of fresh baked bread in the morning? There's no word for it, just a sound of drool.

Let's be clear: I do not have a professional oven with steam injection. My oven runs 100 degrees too hot, is a piece of crap, and I got this result anyway. It tastes as good as it looks. I started another one tonight. I can do this from memory. Well, mainly because I've prepared three in the last three days. A scale is very handy, and I added an ounce more water because I am convinced that the house is so dry the flour just needs that extra bit. Unlike the summer, Virginia does not have a high humidity problem and, because we have forced air everything, our abode is pretty dry. Nor-easter's not withstanding.

Both recipes (and the one for the croutons) are from the guys at America's Test Kitchen, aka Cook's Illustrated aka Cook's Country. I don't get what the difference is but the food is so good that I don't care. The soup is a little involved. It helps justify what we spend on kitchen equipment. In this case, dutch oven and blender. We simplified by using the stick blender which does a perfectly adequate job of whizzing the soup into smooth tomato-y perfection. I can't recommend the KitchenAid stick blender highly enough. There's a place for blenders, and a place for sticks. This recipe suggests using a blender, but using the stick leaves you with fewer dishes to clean, and I don't think it took any more time to get achieve soup smoothie.

Canned whole tomatoes (shocking, I know), white bread, onion, garlic, bay leaf, red pepper flakes, brown sugar (just a tiny bit), olive oil, chicken stock. That's it. We've used plain canned tomatoes, we've used tomatoes canned from a friends garden, and we've used a combination of canned whole and diced tomatoes. Someone had a hankering and we had what we had in the pantry. All of them were fine. In fact, in the first version all I had on hand were whole toms with basil. I plucked the whole basil leaves out but there was still a tiny bit of basil flavor and it was nice. We've used Pepperidge Farm country white, sourdough bread, and Inn Keeper's Whole Grain bread. I thought the whole grain bread would leave lots of seeds but they got whizzed, too. If you tasted them all side by side you could probably tell the difference, but I think it's probably marginal.

I cut the crusts from the bread thickly and used them for croutons. Toss with oil, season with salt and pepper, bake them at 400 for a few minutes until they look good and golden or dark golden, let them cool, serve with soup.

Almost No-Knead Bread
Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup

This looks like a fun project: Macaroon Knitted Purse