Celebrating Liz

Our friend Liz is coming over tonight to celebrate news of her impending tenure/promotion. There'll be champagne, sure, but before that there will be chana masaladar, raita, sambhara, and a dish full of mascarpone-stuffed dates. Try them: Buy a pound of dates; if you don't want to get sticky digging the pits out, buy pitted dates (d'oh!). Split the dates open so that you have little date clamshells. Meanwhile, mix a teaspoon each of sugar and cinnamon into a small tub of mascarpone. Each date gets a blob of this lovely mélange along with a mint leaf. Simple and sexy, those are the best dates.

Chiles from Christi

Christi (aka Hossy) just got back from a long weekend trip to the Hatch Chile Festival, which is truly one of the finest things on god's parched, dry, heteronormative earth. That's her trunkful of roasted chiles, nestled in plastic bags and tucked in ice chests. I received a share, for no other reason than Christi knows I appreciate the wonder that is the Hatch green chile.

New Mexican Green Chile Relish
6 fresh (roasted) Hatch green chiles
3 finely chopped garlic cloves
Small onion, minced
Good pinch of coarse salt (the eating kind, not the kind you use to dissolve ice up in Washington state)

Directions: Mix it all up. Don't puree it or mash it too much--it's relish! Let it sit for half an hour, then it's ready to eat. Usually, you'd put this alongside roast meat, but if you're not much of a beastie-eater, you can always put it on....um, anything else except chocolate cake (and even that's a possibility, I guess). Refrigerate what's left over, but if you keep it longer than a couple of days, squirt some lime juice in to brighten the flavor.

Hammerheads

I love 'em. Three or four shots of espresso, fill it up with coffee. Sure, after a couple of weeks of daily hammerheads, my eyelids start twitching from a potassium deficiency, but at least I'm awake to enjoy the light show. For a summer afternoon, they're iced. Today's cold little lovely comes from Fox Coffee, right here in downtown Redlands. The LAW and I have been poaching the free wireless connection here, since our home connection has better things to do than hang out with us.

A question: in the world of lesbian coffee dates, is caffeine level a measure of one's desirability? Hey baby, look at me, THREE shots, yes MAMA. I doubt it--I mean, you might as well be saying "HEY! HEY! HEY! I'm PERKY but I'll have to PEE at any moment!" Not cool. Luckily, I'm married.

Chana Masaledar, officially [and really]

I'm handing you the official recipe and my variation. I'm not eating out tonight unless somebody invites me over.

• 6 oz chickpeas, soaked overnight || 2 cans. Drain 'em.
  
• 4 – 5 tbsp. vegetable oil || no, no no...use ghee. Or regular butter, in a pinch.
  
• quarter tsp. whole cumin seeds || a half-thumb
  
• 1 medium size onion, peeled and chopped || medium, large, whatever. Don't chop it too finely.
  
• one – one and a half tsp. garam masala || a thumb, and you better be using homemade garam masala!
  
• 1 tsp. ground coriander || half-thumb to thumb, freshly ground seeds
  
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced || oh no, at least four. Don't be a pussy.
  
• piece of fresh ginger, about half an inch square, peeled and grated || thumb-to-knuckle, and really, who has a ginger grater? Chop it extra-small.
  
• 1 tbsp. tomato puree || or a couple of chopped tomatoes. Whatever.
  
• 1.5 tsp. salt || great big grainy kosher sea salt, if you have it. And why don't you?
  
• 1.4 tsp. cayenne || Oh fergawdsake. Toss in two or three dried chiles. See note on "garlic" re: pussy-ness.
  
• 1 tsp. ground amchoor OR 1 tbsp. lemon juice || no, no, no. There's no OR. Why don't you have amchoor? Sigh. In a pinch, use lemon zest, not juice.
  

Serve with

• 1 firm tomato, washed and quartered
  
• medium onion, peeled, and cut into coarse slivers || I go for green onions here. Easier to get ready, and by now dinner's probably running late and you're running out of beer
  
• 4 fresh hot green chiles || Serranos. Jalapenos. Slice 'em thin.
  
• good handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
  
• chunks of lemon
  

Cook the chickpeas. Put them aside. Heat the fat, add the cumin....add the onion. Pause. Pause again (you're browning the onions, silly.) Lower the heat: add garam masala, coriander, garlic, ginger. Pause. Add tomato. Pause. Add everything else: chickpeas, salt, chiles, amchoor. Cook for half an hour; stir it every once in a while so it doesn't burn. Invite me over while you're setting the table, and crack me open a beer. Serve the chana with all the extra vegetables; every bite can be different....

Tonight: Soleil Westwood

Soleil is a bistro in Westwood, slightly south of UCLA. The LAW and I are going on a double-date with the Fusenet-Boyz: dinner, then the Laurie Anderson concert at Royce Hall. I'm jacked about the concert--the food is just extra fun for the evening.

Soleil's menu looks so French it's Fransh, as Tater might say--y'know, escargot, pâté maison, meat with sauce. I used to eat escargot with the Finn, but that was part of her mission to "civilize" me 20-odd years ago. My sense of snails is tempered now by the multitude of them that swarm over and under the candytuft in the back yard. I make the LAW deal with them--so much for butchness. Les escargots dans mon jardin sont vraiment terrifiants!

And what can I say about pâté? I have a longstanding aversion to organ meat. I don't even like my own guts. And yet, after a number of fine pâtés de campagne in France, I've embraced my shameful desire for the innards of little feathered beasties. Still, after traipsing about in food cities like Portland and New Orleans in the last month, I feel the need to recover a sense of my, hmmmm, "ludic Buddhism." While that means that I can take delight in my physical body and the fun things one can do with it, I shouldn't eat other animals.

However, as Sarah Turnbull says in Almost French: "France has this effect on foreigners. It turns your eating habits and food principles upside down so that before long you're rhapsodizing about the delicate silkiness of foie gras entier without a thought for the fat content, let alone the poor goose or duck who was force-fed through a tube down its throat. The damage is irreparable--there's no turning back to muesli after flaky pastries filled with ribbons of dark chocolate" (257). I don't know if that's true, since the LAW still maintains a healthy interest in muesli after a number of flaky-pastry tours of France, but I do know that my opinion of pâté changed somewhere outside of Rabastens (that's the walled city, below).

But that's French pâté. The last pâté I had was a generous serving at Chez Loma (on Coronado Island), and there was just this whiff of, I dunno, wet dog to it that put me off. So. No more squished-innards-on-crackers until Paris.

I officially love Portland.

I was so turned on by the wild salmon hash at Mother's Bistro & Bar (in Portland, OR) that I decided to write about it--I'm much in favor of using language to get at what turns us on, after all. I was tired of my own bellybutton over at Shehun's House of Why, and I thought it might be time to focus. And, so, welcome to the new blog, complete with the cast of characters (and then some) from the old blog. I have so many foodie friends with varying levels of expertise that I should have material for weeks and weeks. Tater's knowledge of coffee alone would keep us occupied through spring '08.

Thursday, April 27: The LAW and I walked through drizzly downtown Portland to get to Mother's, a place she'd tracked down on some online eating guide. I'd just wanted to go there because I'd seen an advertisement in the promotional crap in the hotel. The ad boasted a rather, hmmm, severe-looking woman reminiscent of my Great-Aunt Pencie, who I only met once, on a Thanksgiving, and who spent part of the day spitting nonchalantly into the kitchen sink. More on that later. Maybe. Or wait, no, that's enough on Pencie. Anyway, in the Mother's ad, the woman was saying, "Give me dumplings or give me death." I'll tell you, after several weeks of trying to eat with my health in mind, death-dumplings were mighty appealing.

What was it about the hash? I'll admit that I figured the hash would be like the gooey corned-beef-hash paste that you get in cans, only with salmon. I ordered it anyway (I don't mind the paste so much, since it reminds me of camping in the Canadian Rockies in '86 with the Finn--my taste in food tends to be heavily influenced by memory and tendresse). Actually, however, Mother's potatoes and salmon chunks were discrete, marble-sized, in a very light cream glaze and sprinkled with leeks. I ate the hash, along with two eggs (over medium, thanks very much), and drank a lot of strong coffee that, really, you can only get in the Pacific Northwest. And then, the next day, I came back for more. And two days later, I went back with a new group and had a third serving. As Tater might say, it was foodgasmic.

Cheese, Grommit!

Brin de paille. A cheese that, to translate from the back of its little package, "surprises everyone with its melting heart and the finesse of its aroma." It comes on a round of wood, atop a little bundle (brin) of straw (paille). Air it out, smear its melting little heart on some crusty coarse bread, and you will have a new love in France. It's like butter's sexy older sister.

Below, from YouTube, "Le chat avec un brin de paille!" You'll get the idea.

Last night, we took a long walk, from our apartment here in the 13th arrondissement down to the 5th, where we had dinner at the Foyer Vietnam (my current favorite Vietnamese restaurant); and then down to the Seine, crossing at Pont Neuf; then going down to the river itself on the right bank, since it's plage season in Paris. That's right, two miles of beach constructed next to the Seine each summer. In the evening, it's not particularly full, but the people who are there are making the most of it--artists crafting fabulous sand sculptures (next to the sculpture, a box with a few hopeful euros and a handwritten "MERCI" above); kids playing in big temporary fountains; a group with guitars and a hookah.

We're off to Honfleur for a couple of days. A revoir (until Wednesday).