Check out the scary cheddar spread that I made for my company’s Halloween party. Okay, so there isn’t anything all that scary about the spread itself (I mean, the recipe is a little white trash which, in a way, is scary.) The truly creepy part of this dish is my kalamata spider garnish. The spiders weren’t nearly as labor intensive to make as last year’s skull and bones crostini, but I think they’re just as cool. Simply use half an olive for the body, and then cut thin strips for the legs. If you wanted to up the creep factor, you could even use a couple of peppercorns to replicate those gross bulging eyeballs that spiders sometime have. I didn’t go there - the shiny, black kalamata skin gave these spiders enough of a menacing quality for my taste! Happy Halloween!

On last week’s episode of Mad Men, Don Draper snapped at his secretary and chauvinistically demanded “Get me a bear claw!” Robert thought it was hilarious and has been saying it to me all week long (yeah, real funny Robert.) In the end, I relented. I’m such a good woman. It was kind of hard to say no when I was already planning to make breakfast this Sunday and I just happened to have all of the ingredients on hand for bear claws (even almond extract, which is amazing considering how tightly I control the kitchen’s inventory - normally, if I discover an ingredient that I haven’t used in the past year, I toss it.)

Once I started researching bear claw recipes, I realized that I didn’t actually know what a bear claw was. I mean, I knew that it was a pastry and was made to look like a bear claw but, if you were to ask me what a bear claw is traditionally filled with, I would have been clueless. You would think, with a cool name like bear claw, I would have eaten one once as a child. Robert says kids usually pass them over because they aren’t filled with jelly or covered in sprinkles and frosting - makes sense. Traditional bear claws are indeed quite simple - a sweet yeast dough filled with an almond paste filling and topped with slivered almonds. Like everything else, they have been bastardized; nowadays, you see doughnuts and fritters being passed off as bear claws or, worse, bear claws that are filled with chocolate chips and coconut.

I decided to keep things traditional with my bear claws. I found a dough recipe online that was easy and called for significantly less butter than most. I made the dough Saturday evening reducing much of the work the next morning. Most of the filling recipes I saw called for almond paste, an expensive ingredient that I did not have on hand and wasn’t willing to buy. Instead, I used a combination of ground almonds and a few drops of almond extract. I didn’t have quite enough almonds so the filling ended up on the thin side and oozed out the sides of the claws a bit (refrigerating the filling overnight might have helped to remedy this.) The process of assembling the bear claws wasn’t difficult and, since I was only making six, it wasn’t very time-consuming. I used the instructive photos over at Joe Pastry (where, incidentally, I also got the recipe for the filling) as a guide. The only thing I did differently was to place the rolls seam side down. Also, I didn’t have any slivered almonds so I used some sliced almonds to make decorative claws instead. My bear claws tasted great, and I think they turned out pretty cute too!

Click here for my Bear Claw recipe >>

It’s officially fall, and the weather in Seattle the past few days has really driven that point home. This weekend’s gray skies and cool weather put me in the mood to turn on the oven and bake! Lucky for me, I had plenty of opportunities to do so.

On Saturday, my knitting group hosted a bake sale to raise money for the Obama campaign. This definitely wasn’t your typical bake sale. The knitters’ plan was to target the late night bar crowd on Pike Street in the center of Capitol Hill’s clubs and bars. Pitching baked goods to hipsters and drunks? Genius! I helped out by making Heidi Swanson’s peanut butter cookies. I’m not really into vegan baked goods, but these looked so yummy that I couldn’t resist. They turned out a bit softer than I normally like but had plenty of delicious peanut butter flavor. I finished my cookies with a light dusting of gray sea salt (I wasn’t trying to be fancy or anything; I just know that drunks are drawn to salty foods.) I couldn’t participate in the sale itself, but we stopped by for a quick visit and got to witness plenty of zany late night action and a number of sales too (some people even asked for vegan treats – woo hoo!) It was surely a lot of work (the bake sale ran until 2:00 AM) but the team raked in a whopping $400. Good job knitters!

Cookies are easy to make, but bread is another story and my bread-making skills have proven to be pretty mediocre so far. My sister, on the other hand, is slowly becoming an expert so we decided to get together on Sunday for a bread-making day. Our first bread of the day was a ciabatta. This can be a tricky bread; mixing, shaping and baking the bread is actually very easy, but ciabatta has a tendency to form one huge air pocket inside rather than a bunch of small ones. Three out of our four loaves were plagued with this giant pocket problem, but the bread tasted so good we didn’t care. In addition to the ciabatta, we made sourdough rounds using my sister’s homemade starter as the base. We mixed the dough and shaped the loaves but didn’t bake them; in order to develop that signature sour flavor, the loaves need to sit overnight in the refrigerator. It was a great day – I learned quite a bit (especially about the benefits of folding and stretching the dough vs. punching it down) and I came home with two loaves of ciabatta, two uncooked loaves of sourdough and a little jar of starter. I baked the sourdough tonight and served it with a hearty soup – delicious!

While our breads were rising, we snuck off to Bakery Nouveau for lunch. Bakery Nouveau is widely regarded as one of Seattle’s best bakeries. What a place to go for some baking inspiration! Their breads are all beautiful and their croissants are like none that I’ve ever seen before – super crispy and browned, not soft and squishy like most croissants. I had a delicious caprese sandwich made with some kind of chewy, hearty bread. While we were there, they were passing out free samples of recently-baked items including a peanut butter cookie that completely put mine to shame (sorry vegans, cookies just aren’t the same without butter.)

Sunday evening, we headed over to our friend Jason’s house for more baked goods, this time in the form of pizza. Jason has been making pizza from scratch every week and has a clever method for making the crust. He grills the crust on one side on an outdoor grill and then adds the toppings and finishes the pizza in a hot oven. The grill gives the crust a subtle smoky flavor, but finishing it in the oven allows you to get the cheese nice and browned. Because the crust is partially cooked before it goes in the oven, there is no fear of it sticking to the pizza paddle (the tool used to transfer the pizza to the oven.) With this method, you could easily make a bunch of crusts at once and freeze them. Simply do the first step of grilling and then transfer the grilled crusts to the freezer. Next time you are craving pizza, it can be ready in mere moments! The pizzas were delicious, and I even got to make one myself. Fall kicked off to a carb-heavy start, but I’m perfectly okay with that!

Atole is perhaps best known as a traditional Mexican beverage made from masa (cornmeal), water, brown sugar, sweet spices and sometimes chocolate or fruit. In New Mexico however, atole more commonly refers to a finely ground cornmeal made from blue corn or the porridge derived from it. Blue corn chips are pretty common these days, but since blue corn is native to the region, it finds its way into many traditional New Mexican dishes. Enchiladas made with blue corn tortillas are about as authentically New Mexican as you can get. Unlike regular cornmeal, blue corn atole is ground so fine that it resembles flour. In that respect, it can be used in place of flour in virtually any kind of bread or baked good except, ironically, for blue corn tortillas; for that coarser ground blue cornmeal is used (although, I suppose you could get creative and mix a little blue corn atole with some flour and make blue corn-flour tortillas!)

In New Mexico, blue corn atole is mixed with hot water to make a very austere beverage that is traditionally consumed by the elderly (for energy) and the sick (for its reputed healing qualities.) It is often served for breakfast much like cream of wheat. A plain, grayish porridge made from just water and atole doesn’t exactly sound like the most appetizing food in the world. In fact, Huntley Dent, author of The Feast of Santa Fe found it to be so awful that, although he writes about it for the sake of providing a comprehensive look at New Mexican cuisine, he makes a specific point of not providing a recipe. However, neither Robert nor his mom seems to think that this beverage is particularly bad. Perhaps it is a taste acquired only by those born in New Mexico. Perhaps the sentimental memory of being home sick on a cold day improves the taste. Or, maybe Robert and his mom are just pulling my leg. I’m dubious but curious. Next time I am sick, I’m going to try it (I’ll just keep a bottle of honey or cocoa powder nearby in case it needs a little something.)

For my first experiment with blue corn atole, I decided to go with a much less risky choice: pancakes! Inspired the blue corn atole & piñon pancakes that I had at Tecolote Café in Santa Fe, I set out to make my own version. Using a basic buttermilk pancake recipe as my base, I simply replaced half of the flour with blue corn atole and then threw in a handful of toasted pine nuts. I used plain yogurt thinned with a little milk in place of the buttermilk because that’s what I had on hand. Also, because I prefer my pancakes thin and crispy as opposed to fluffy and cakey, I added more liquid than the recipe called for. They were super easy and delicious! The pine nuts added a special texture and richness while the subtle earthy flavor of the blue corn atole proved to be the perfect foil for plenty of warm maple syrup. The atole also gave these pancakes a pretty lavender hue. What a fun twist on pancakes!

Click here for my Blue Corn Atole-Piñon Pancakes recipe >>

For the past few months, I’ve been trying to devote a portion of every Sunday to one or more cooking projects. Yogurt, ravioli, fresh fruit popsicles, Thai curry pastes…these are all things that I enjoy making on a Sunday afternoon. But, my favorite Sunday project is homemade bread. I really think Sundays were meant for baking bread. I’ve gotten pretty good at making freshloaf.com’s Daily Bread so, this Sunday, I decided it was time to branch out and try something new: Multigrain Struan. I don’t know what a struan is, but the photos of this bread looked so good that I couldn’t resist trying it. Plus, I liked the fact that it was chock full of whole grains. If you go overboard snacking on this bread, you don’t have to feel bad about it!

There isn’t anything too complicated about this recipe; you just need to plan ahead a little bit. The day before you plan to bake the bread, you mix up a batch of sturdy whole wheat dough and place it in the refrigerator to rest overnight. You also make a sort of porridge out of milk, flour and mixed whole grains (both cooked and uncooked.) The porridge is left out at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours (I made mine right after I made the dough and let both sit overnight.) The next day, you combine the dough and the porridge together with a few other ingredients and, from that point on, the process is no different than it is for regular bread (knead, rise, shape, rise again and bake.)

I’m always a little leery about bread recipes that call for only whole wheat flour because they have a tendency to turn out rather dense. In this recipe, I used whole wheat flour whenever it was called for except in the step where you combine the dough and porridge and are told to add extra flour to achieve the right consistency. At that point, I switched to all-purpose flour. In the end, I probably used about 2.5 cups of whole wheat flour and 1 cup of all-purpose flour. For the whole grains, I cooked up some wild rice along with the remnants of a bag of Trader Joe’s Brown Rice Medley which contains brown rice, black barley and daikon radish seeds. For the uncooked grains, I used coarse polenta and red quinoa. The colorful seeds and grains sprinkled throughout made this a very pretty dough. For added texture, I topped my loaf off with a smattering of poppyseeds.

The bread turned out delicious! It smelled and tasted just like a really good, whole-grain bread should. It was slightly sweet with a crisp crust and a soft, moist interior. My only complaint is that the overall texture wasn’t as uniform as I would have liked. The bread was a bit denser toward the bottom of the loaf. I’m thinking that, since is shaped and baked in a pan, maybe the bottom didn’t have enough room to expand. Next time, I will try making it into a couple of small free-form loaves instead. This recipe would also make excellent dinner rolls. This is the perfect bread for two of my favorite indulgences: havarti cheese, sweet onion and avocado sandwiches and toast slathered with good, crunchy peanut butter.

Sunday is normally Robert’s night to cook. Frequently he gets the night off due to family events or those times when I feel like making a meal with lots of prep work that just isn’t suited for the weeknights when I normally cook. So, for a long time now he has gotten by on a pretty small repertoire of tried and true dishes including tuna fajitas, green (or red) chili stew and his famous “bastard ramen” (noodle stir-fry.) Recently, he decided it was time to branch out a little. I suggested that he try making a chowder (yes, in case you’re wondering, it is still chowder weather here in Seattle.) Last night, Robert took my suggestion and made chowder but not your average, everyday chowder. Instead, he made a very special Salmon & Sunchoke Chowder!

They have been selling sunchokes (also called Jerusalem artichokes) at our farmers market for a couple of weeks. Sunchokes are knobby, brown tubers similar in appearance to ginger. They can be eaten raw, in which case they taste sort of like a nutty water chestnut, or they may be cooked just as you would cook potatoes or any other root vegetable. I don’t know if this is always true with sunchokes, but the ones at our farmer’s market have been amazingly cheap ($1.00 per pound) making it nearly impossible to resist buying them. Last week, I used them to make a delicious sunchoke and potato puree. When he decided to try his hand at chowder this week, Robert thought it would be fun to add in a few sunchokes.

To make Robert’s Salmon & Sunchoke Chowder, do the following: Open a beer and turn on some sort of punk rock or 1980’s music. Relax for a moment, then begin cooking. Cook about a cup of diced onions in bacon fat (or oil) until soft. Then, add a couple pinches of dried thyme and a spoonful of flour and cook for another minute. Add a couple handfuls of cubed sunchokes and/or potatoes and then slowly stir in a few cups of chicken stock (enough to just cover the vegetables.) Simmer until the vegetables are just cooked through. If you like, add a small handful of frozen corn. Gently, lower a fillet of skinned and deboned salmon into the soup and cook through. Once cooked, break the salmon apart into bite-sized pieces using a large spoon. Add cream, half and half or whole milk until it looks like chowder and season with salt and pepper as needed. Serve with crusty bread and a salad on the side.

Robert rarely follows recipes when he cooks so this is my approximation based on what I observed. This is obviously a very rough recipe but that makes it very adaptable too. You can add or subtract vegetables as you wish. You can also easily substitute any seafood for the salmon. Salmon does make it a very colorful chowder, however. I buy the frozen skinned and deboned salmon at Trader Joe’s. It’s not the most premium fish out there, but it is wild (very important) and cheap and incredibly easy to use in this recipe. Sunchokes need only to be scrubbed before eating, but I prefer them peeled for this dish. They are firmer than potatoes, even after lengthy cooking, so this soup has a nice texture to it (or, as Robert says, it gives you some breathing room - if you accidentally cook the soup for too long, you don’t have to worry about everything turning to mush.) We enjoyed this chowder very much. It was tasty and unique and the perfect remedy for a cold, rainy June evening. Yippee, Robert has a new recipe to add to his list!

I was charged with making the dessert for our family get together this weekend. The prospect of making dessert is always exciting for me because I rarely make dessert and, therefore, this gives me the opportunity to try something completely new. The only problem is figuring out what to make. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there are billions of dessert recipes out there! It’s like a whole other world of cooking that I know nothing about. When you only make dessert a few times a year, choosing a recipe from the masses can be pretty tough.

In general, I prefer fruit-based desserts (notable exceptions being creme brulee, anything made with spicy Mexican chocolate, and my family’s Christmas cookies which all fall into the nutty, buttery category.) Since it is spring and rhubarb is really the only “fruit” in season in Seattle right now, I narrowed my choice down to rhubarb something (crisp, cobbler, pie, something.) Not only would this be in keeping with my goal to eat more seasonally, it would also allow Robert to dust off his pet name for rhubarb: disco celery!

Inspired by this delicious-sounding recipe for Cornmeal Cake with Buttermilk Ice Cream and Rhubarb Compote, I decided to try my hand at making a rhubarb upside down cake. I followed the cornmeal cake recipe exactly as written. Instead of making a separate rhubarb compote, I whipped up a simple rhubarb topping for my cake. For the topping (or I guess it would actually be the bottom since this was an upside down cake,) I cut up about 4 cups of rhubarb. In a large pan, I melted 2 tablespoons of butter and added the rhubarb along with 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar and 1 teaspoon grated orange zest. I let that cook for only a minute or two and then turned off the heat. After resting for a few minutes, I was left with a pretty watery mixture. I knew the liquid would thicken up eventually during baking but, since I was using a spring form cake pan rather than a one-piece cake pan, I was worried that the sugary liquid would leak out of the pan and cause a fire in my oven. And, sure enough, as I was spreading the cake batter over the rhubarb, some of the liquid began to dribble out the sides. To be safe, I placed a large baking sheet on the rack below the cake to catch the drippings. 45 minutes later, I had a perfectly cooked upside down cake and one very caramelized baking sheet!

Later that evening, my mom told me I should have just lined the cake pan with tin foil (duh - why didn’t I think of that?) Oh well, it didn’t matter in the end. I didn’t burn the house down, and now I know, if I ever make an upside down cake again, not to use an unlined spring form pan. And, the cake turned out really good! It tasted like sweetened cornbread with a nice, layer of rhubarb jam on top.

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned how tiny our Broadway farmer’s market was compared to the more established markets around town such those in Ballard and West Seattle. Well, I am happy to report that things seem to have picked up a bit this year. There are still only a handful of farm stands selling fresh produce, but I know for a fact there is at least one that wasn’t around last year. Although the offerings are kind of slim at this point, it is still very early in the season. I’m sure the produce will become much more abundant over the next few months. In addition to the farm stands, there are more prepared food vendors this time around which helps give this year’s market a much livelier spirit. The recent sunshine is no doubt helping out in that regard as well. Many of my memories from last year’s market involve farmers huddling under their tarps trying to stay dry while the few patrons brave enough to face the rain ran around trying to do their shopping as quickly as possible. Give us a sunny day here in Seattle and people will gladly spend all morning wandering around the farmer’s market.

Although the variety of produce is much more modest this early in the season, I still managed to find a number of interesting things; things I probably never would have paid much attention to if it wasn’t for my brand new cookbook: Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets by Deborah Madison. This was actually part of our annual staff gift at work along with a reusable shopping bag (can you tell I work for an environmental company?) This is a perfect gift for me as I am a longtime fan of Deborah Madison. Her early cookbooks, The Savory Way and The Greens Cookbook, are classics in my family and, although I’m only part of the way through it, I wouldn’t be surprised if this new book also makes the list of favorites. Not only is it a fantastic collection of recipes, Local Flavors is also a really great reference guide for some of the less common fruits and vegetables that you often see at farmer’s markets. In preparation for this book, Deborah visited farmer’s markets across the nation, and she recounts plenty of interesting stories from them making this a very pleasant book to read. Deborah’s recipes are all very simple, allowing the exceedingly fresh and flavorful produce that farmer’s markets are known for to shine through. Some recipes feature regional fare that may not be available everywhere, but most rely on ingredients common to all farmer’s markets.

After reading through the chapters related to spring vegetables, I felt ready to approach my farmer’s market with new eyes. I excitedly picked up two vegetables I had never used before: sorrel and lovage. Sorrel is a leafy green with a bright, lemony flavor. It can be used raw in salads or may be cooked. Lovage is an herb that has a flavor similar to that of celery. From my new cookbook, I decided to make Risotto with Sorrel because it was so simple and therefore seemed like it would be a good showcase for the sorrel. The basic risotto is made from nothing more than butter, onion, Arborio rice, vegetable stock and lots and lots of sorrel. A few herbs and some cream are stirred in right at the end, but I actually thought it tasted great even before adding those extra ingredients. The sorrel cooks down to a deep olive-colored puree. It was amazingly buttery in texture, and I was quite surprised at how little of its signature tart flavor was lost even after cooking for nearly 45 minutes. The risotto tasted very Greek to me, like a complex spinach & dill flavored rice with lemon even though it was only made with sorrel. I served the risotto with salmon and a mix of braised spring vegetables including baby turnips, asparagus and green garlic which I seasoned with a dusting of minced lovage. It was a perfect springtime meal!

Still looking for the perfect dish to serve at that upcoming Mother’s Day brunch? How about Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid? I made this last weekend, and it was awesome. I’m not really in the habit of making extravagant breads such as this, but I might just need to start. Although it looks complicated, this bread is actually pretty easy to put together, and much of the work can be done the night before. The dough is much easier to work with than a regular bread dough because it contains butter which keeps it from being too sticky during the kneading process. The end result is a soft, rich, slightly sweet bread. The blueberry and cream cheese filling is wonderful, although nearly any filling would be good here. Poppyseed with rum-soaked raisins or lemon curd with sweetened ricotta cheese sound like excellent alternatives to me. Or, like the recipe suggests, you could even do a savory version with mushrooms and cheese. Yum!

This recipe comes from a really great baking website called The Fresh Loaf. If you are interested in learning to make delicious bread, be sure to check out this site. They have wonderful written lessons for beginners and even a few helpful videos. There are also book reviews, a community forum, baker blogs, and plenty of recipes for scrumptious-looking breads (and some desserts too.) All of the recipes have step-by-step instructions with pictures. So far, I have only had a chance to try the Daily Bread and the Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid. My sister made the Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal Bread, and she said it was really, really good. It’s enough to make me want to buy a huge jar of yeast and spend each day baking a new kind of bread!

Leftovers are kind of a big deal in my household. I’m not a fan of waiting in long lines and paying downtown prices for lunch so I usually try to plan dinners that work well as leftovers. That way, I can take them with me to the office to have as my lunch the next day. Sometimes, no matter how good a planner you are, you end up with leftovers that just won’t do as a lunch. Perhaps you simply miscalculated and didn’t make enough extra food for a full lunch or maybe you ended up with only one component of the meal, like vegetable stir-fry but no rice. Or, perhaps you made something that is currently on the microwave blacklist at work (fish is banned at my office and, yes, we did have a staff meeting about it.) When this happens, you have a couple of choices. You can suck it up and throw the food away. You can wait until you have accumulated other oddball leftovers and eat it all together as one big leftovers feast (and hope that nobody makes fun of you for eating spaghetti with a side of curried vegetables.) Or, you can take your leftovers and repurpose them into a whole new meal. That last one is my favorite option because it forces you to be a bit creative.

Friday night, Robert and I went to our neighborhood Korean joint, Kimchi Bistro. Normally I get the Soon Doo Boo but, since it was such a nice day and spicy tofu soup didn’t seem appropriate, I decided to boldly try something new: grilled mackerel. I love mackerel, and this one was certainly delicious, but it was also enormous! I ate most of the rice and stir-fried cabbage that came with it, but I could only manage to eat half of the fish before I was completely stuffed full. I decided to take the rest home with me even though half of a crispy, charred mackerel didn’t seem like it would be very good as is for lunch the next day. It was time to get creative and do a little repurposing!

Well, if I had had the time to go to Uwajimaya for ingredients, I would have made the Grilled Mackerel Salad from my Thai cookbook. That’s one of those recipes that always sounds good to me but that I never actually consider making because, you know, when am I ever going to have grilled mackerel in the house? But, I barely had enough time to go to the grocery store on Saturday let alone to make an extravagant salad. So, for all you Top Chef fans out there, I considered this my own personal quickfire challenge: what can you make out of leftover mackerel in a short amount of time using a limited number of easily available ingredients?

Mackerel is similar to salmon in that it is strong-flavored and oily so I started thinking along the lines of what I would do if I had leftover smoked salmon. Then, it was obvious: use it as a spread for crackers! I removed the bones and flaked the mackerel into a small bowl. Then, I mixed it with mayonnaise, a squeeze of lemon juice and, for crunch and a sweet note, finely minced granny smith apple. That’s it! The mackerel was already so flavorful that I didn’t need to add any seasonings. I served this on whole wheat crackers, and it was a perfect lunchtime treat. It may not have been the most creative way of using up my mackerel, but it was definitely easy and delicious. What is your favorite way of repurposing leftovers?