Life of Wry

It was fun to discover a new open space place to hike.. Jim and I will need a few places to put in some hilly miles before next summer. Not too hilly, not too many miles.. but if we put on packs and take the trails at a good pace, we’ll get some good exercise out there.

Most of all, today was about seeing Carol and Bill. That doesn’t happen very often, so these meet ups are special. (It was especially fun to see her, as I’d spent some time recently with my nose in a journal written during the years we’d spent a lot of time together at UC Davis. Formative, self-absorbed, out-there years.) And here we are today: mature adults with most of a lifetime under our belts… hiking among the cow patties.

Life is beautiful that way.

Some pics:

I can’t place the year. The photo popped up on my phone on one of those photo collages set to music that the Apple universe treats me to, randomly, every day.

What I know is this: I’m grateful for Peter’s affinity for music. For playing music, that is. Self-motivated and self-taught, largely.

Nothing sweeter in the world than listening to Peter and Maya play and sing together. Humble and self-effacing, and utterly unabashed in sharing their latest song.. often something I know, like a Simon and Garfunkel song, or Fleetwood Mac. Their repertoire is growing. Would love to be a fly on their wall as they work out the chords and notes and lyrics, and practice together. It’s gentle. Sometimes funny. Always sweet.

As in… I’m starting to develop a complex.

I’m not a great cook. I’ve learned a lot over the years, especially the last 4 years or so since I started cooking more, motivated during the pandemic to tackle The Great Recipe Project and literally sorting, selecting and trying hundreds of recipes. But I’ve still got so very much to learn.

Lately, I’ve really been messing up. I thoroughly screwed up the dressing on Thanksgiving, I blew the chocolate mousse for my Dining Divas dinner last weekend, and today I scored a 1 1/2 out of 4 on my dishes for our hiking group annual holiday gathering.

As I mentioned yesterday, I tend to try new recipes on guests, which is a gamble. I would guess, overall, I have a more or less decent record of cooking for guests, but again, lately, man… a ton of failures. [Hangs head.]

The plan for today was a midday gathering, but instead of doing a normal sort of lunch, I thought a whole bunch of heavy appetizers would be fun. I had a bunch of unopened cheeses from Thanksgiving that were still good, and our usual marcona almonds, and Jim’s guac. I had nice crackers and a fresh baguette. And then I wanted to try a baked feta cheese with honey. Susan offered to bring a salmon mousse which I thought was a great addition! All that could be munched as we stood around the kitchen with some wine, but then I thought we could sit down and have these other things I wanted to try: an Alsatian cheese tart with bacon and onions, some Brussels sprouts with garlic and that celery-apple-blue cheese salad I wrote about yesterday.. still in the app category, but easier to eat at the table.

Here’s what happened.

:: The baked feta was blah. Absolutely nothing special, lacked flavor, and toughened as the cheese cooled.

:: I’d only done one or two puff pastries before, so thought the Alsatian cheese tart would be a good one to add to the repertoire, but it was a total fail, inedible. The pastry never cooked through, not sure why. Wasted all that good stuff.

:: I’d never cooked Brussels sprouts before but have been loving them, so thought it was time to try a simple implementation. I had no idea they’d brown so quickly, so sorta burned them on the stove (the recipe didn’t address the length of time to brown them). They were then to go into the oven to bake through, which they did, but they were quite burned and a bit soggy, if you ask me. Edible, but only halfway acceptable.

:: That celery-apple-blue cheese salad was well received. So yay.

1 1/2 out of 4. Ugh.

Susan brought bread pudding which was excellent and Jim made peanut butter cookies, which were perfectly wonderful.

And, you know… it’s not just about the food. Right? But I’m a little embarrassed by all my debacles. Gonna need some food successes soon.

Def no pics today.

In my long tradition of trying new dishes on guests, I decided I would make a celery-apple-blue cheese salad, which seemed interesting and fresh. And let me back up here: this is for a gathering tomorrow, Saturday, with our hiking group, which doesn’t hike anymore and which has shrunk to, nominally, six, two of whom can’t make it tomorrow due to foot surgery, leaving us with just Susan, Ricker, Jim and me.

Anyway, I got a jump on the celery-etc salad today.

When I actually looked at the ingredients to make a shopping list and saw celeriac (celery root) I almost bailed, but then thought, w e l l … why not? …. not sure exactly what it is, not sure if the coop carries such a thing…. but decided to press on.

This is a celeriac:

Good lord, right? I mean, what the hell.

It’s not something you wash.. rather, you just start hacking away at all those roots..

…and eventually you get down to something that looks like this somewhat misshapen blob. Yum.

This was the point at which I summoned Jim. I needed help with that mandoline you see in the background. Mandoline’s are among the scariest of kitchen apparati* because of their very sharp blades and the closeness with which your fingers get to those blades.

The idea for the celeriac is to slice it up in paper-thin slices and serve it raw in the salad, along with apples (also thinly sliced), real celery (that you PEEL, yes), and other things.

Turns out, the mandoline didn’t produce slices thin enough so we abandoned that and went straight to the food processor, which worked beautifully.

Next up, apples..

It’s fun eating apples that are that thinly sliced.

Back to the peeled celery…

I’m not sure what the benefit of this is .. perhaps it just removes the tougher outer layer and renders a less fibrous stalk of celery. It’s nice, I guess, but not sure I’d go to the trouble next time.

I’m not even sure the celeriac adds much.. but maybe crunch. The base is celery, celeriac, tart apple, crumbled blue cheese, coarsely chopped roasted almonds, and parsley (from our garden!). The dressing has olive oil, shallots, mustard, lemon juice, lemon zest and sugar.

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Note: I thought I was grammatically clever in using apparati, but turns out:

The Latin plural of the noun apparatus is actually apparatus. (Sometimes the Latin is spelled singular apparātus and plural apparātūs; the vowel lengthens in the plural, but that’s not usually reflected in the spelling.) This is because it’s fourth declension. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when most educated English speakers had studied Latin, apparatus was sometimes used as the plural; I believe this usage is quite rare today.

Another note: We attended a Hanukkah party at Matt and Phyllis’ tonight. Jim and I aren’t Jewish (there were a few non-Jews), but it was nice to be in a gathering of Jewish people, lighting a Menorah, singing songs (sorta), trying to find some light in a lot of darkness right now. I was touched to be there. Here’s Matt offering the challah ..

I’m pretty sure this shot finds its way into my viewfinder each and every year. I shall try to remember that by about December 7 of each year, this spot hits its peak (more or less).

I did do one thing to improve this picture: I removed the ID plaque on the left-most tree. It’s just that it’s all you see if your don’t edit it out..

See?

The other thing to remember about December 7 (well, besides Pearl Harbor), is that the sycamores around town are also at their peak. Very yellow-fallish. I actually don’t have a picture of this.. maybe tomorrow.

This guy acquiesced to sitting outside tonight at Sudwerk as we pub quizzed our way to 4th-to-last place. It wasn’t our best showing (in fact, it may have been our all-time worst!), but, sitting outside, we could actually hear the questions. I’ve been complaining mightily for weeks that the acoustics inside the restaurant were so horrible that I couldn’t hear and all but begged Jim to endure the cold — something he hates — to see if we could hear better outside. Which.. we definitely could. The sound was perfect. Though… in spite of many layers, a table right next to an outdoor heater, and frequent refills of hot tea, it wasn’t all that warm. And it was only in the 50s. Imagine later in the winter when nighttime temps drop into the 40s.

Not sure what this means for winter-time pub quizzes. More clothes, maybe, or suspending pub quiz until the weather warms up and we can sit outside comfortably.

These are the problems…

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I know the world is on fire. As I sit here writing, I’m listening to the news.. heinous atrocities committed against women in the name of war, another mass shooting on a college campus, a presidential candidate getting applause for his statement about ruling as a dictator, another candidate endorsing replacement theory. The challenge always remains: keep your eyes open; stay informed; stay engaged; act where you can, when you can, with whatever you’ve got.. and live life, find the joy, appreciate the beauty. Play pub quiz.

Know what made my day? Hearing from this guy:

He may not be able to maintain a healthy sock collection (in spite of lots of new socks every Christmas from us!), but he is living his best life. Today’s unexpected call (and news dump) included all kinds of juicy bits about conferences he’s been invited to speak at (two this summer), summer trips he’s hoping to take, and the confirmation that he and Maya are seriously considering joining us in Italy for a hiking trip in the Dolomites. Calls like this, if they happen at all, typically come in at about 9am Pacific time (noon in Ann Arbor) and coincide with his walk from his office on campus to The Lunch Room, a vegan restaurant a few blocks away, where he orders (I believe) the same thing every day. In the course of our conversation with him, we often overhear his arrival at the restaurant, the greeting he receives (“Hey Peter,” “Hey Matt”), and the thank yous he responds with as he’s walking out the door… it’s pretty sweet to be along for that little slice of his daily life.

Our take away: he’s happy, thriving, comfortably settled.

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That picture was surreptitiously taken over Thanksgiving (as he sat in the very chair I’m writing this blog from). Lol.

Lazily, I abused preposition placement twice in one blog post. [Hangs head.]

I know. More mousse story. Really now.

This one’s short: Jim doesn’t like the idea of eating raw eggs, so we (mostly he) decided it would be fun to bake the chocolate pudding cups (aka loose mousse), rather than try to salvage them by reconstituting with added butter. So we did that:

How ’bout those!

Not mousse, not brownies, not anything normal… but tasty nonetheless.. Probably best when thoroughly cooled because they’ll get a bit denser as they cool. Hot, they were a bit too soft, like hot pudding (with a nice crust).

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Another postscript: turns out, I’ve made mousse before… a blueberry white chocolate mousse, also made for a Dining Diva dinner (in April of 2015!), also at Madeline’s, funnily enough. The theme that time was Boreal cuisine. Here’s a snippet from that blog:

Madeline drew mainly from The Boreal Feast: A Culinary Journey through the North by Michele Genest.
She chose a boreal as her theme, inspired by her recent trip to Alaska and Yukon territories. I’m still not quite sure what all a boreal feast entails, but found this description online: “wild ingredients found in the boreal forests from Yukon to Alaska to Scandinavia.”

So a White Chocolate Mousse Blueberry Parfait it was!

It’s weird that I have such a terrible memory that I don’t even remember making mousse before!

Dining Divas was a French-themed dinner tonight so I’d decided (weeks ago) to make chocolate mousse.. and not just any chocolate mousse: Julia Child’s version. I’m probably only going to make mousse once in my life because I’m not really a mousse eater, so I wanted to make a real one.

Let me preface this by also saying, today’s mousse making had to be extremely efficient and tightly choreographed because I was flying in from Portland and had very little time to make the thing and get it sufficiently chilled before taking off for Madeline’s house. I bought all the ingredients before leaving for Oregon so I was ready to hit the ground running. I had no time to waste. I arrived home and went straight to the kitchen.. no unpacking, no settling in, no nothing. And.. because it’s Julia, the recipe is fussy, and it’s also my first mousse, so: extra pressure (if we can really call it that.. I mean.. it’s just the Dining Divas).

Anyway, that’s the set up.

Quoting myself on Facebook: “So I separate eggs, beat the yolks with sugar, then beat them again over hot water, then beat them again over cold water, then mix them with some melted chocolate and strong coffee, then add butter to that, then beat the egg whites until soft peaks form, then add sugar and beat until the whites are stiff, then delicately fold into the egg yolk thing… then… I look over the counter to make sure I used everything I was supposed to use (so nervously measured earlier because: proportions!), to discover I’d forgotten to add the Kahlua way back at the yolk beating phase. Sh*%#*t!! So… just mixed it in. What the heck. Only Julia knows how they’ll turn out.”

Here are a few pics:

Beating yolks and sugar:

Beating yolks and sugar over hot water (and then again over cold water to cool it down):

Adding chocolate, melted with strong coffee and then some added butter:

Beating and then folding in whipped egg whites:

Pouring into ramekins and chilling:

You already know, from above, that the Kahlua was to have been added during the egg yolk part. I added it just before the ramekin part, which I think, actually, had no effect on the final product. But as they were chilling, I was grabbing a digital copy of the recipe to send to the Divas (sharing recipes is what we do). The one I chose to send was the same, but had some additional (very helpful) detail.

Like, for example, the old recipe listed butter in the ingredients list as “6 oz of butter.” The new recipe added the clarification that 6 oz of butter is 1 1/2 sticks. In my haste, I’d portioned out 6 Tablespoons instead (which is 3/4 of a stick of butter — half of what was required. This resulted in a mousse that was more like thick pudding instead of something dense and creamy.

I decided I couldn’t serve them, so I ended up going to Nugget and buying an assortment of marcarons. I did take one ramekin and let everyone sample it. Tasted good, just wasn’t mousse. The macarons were great, though!

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It was also an extremely dish-intensive dessert to make!

Whelp, it was another dark, wettish, coldish day in Oregon. We managed to dodge the rain and got out for a nice walk in the Peavey Arboretum, just outside of town. Mossy trees, slick logs, mushrooms, final fall leaves, blueberry crops in their red-foliage state (beautiful!)… stuff like that.

We had a wonderful early dinner (in fact they called it “Recess,” the time between 2:00 and 5:30 and served a limited, small plates menu.. which was excellent!) at Castor. Gumbo, beef stew, a broc salad, prosecco (Carrie) and stout (me). The salad had airlie apples, typical of the area.. pink-fleshed and interesting.

All in all, another great day. Some pics: