Toluu

Bitter Greens

Pie without a netJuly 9

Apparently summer in Ireland smells like gooseberries. Ross and I went to the farmer's market Saturday where they had gooseberries in quantity. In the US, I've only seen a few, and never tasted them. They also had fresh blackcurrants, which I've never seen or tasted. I asked Ross if we could make pie with both, and he said it's not traditional but sure. These two photos show before & after trimming the fruit, and were taken an hour and a half apart. No fucking around either, just 90 minutes of straight work resulting in a miniscule pile of discarded stems. This explains why no one grows this stuff in the US.

2 ExperimentsJuly 6

I'm here in Berlin with very limited kitchen equipment, unpredictable food varieties, and no spices, so it's like I'm in college again, improvising, experimenting with simple combinations and base ingredients I'm not too familiar with. Eggplant, I repeat too often, can either be the best vegetable or the worst vegetable, depending on how it's prepared. I never cook eggplant because it's just so bad when it's bad. When Natalie was visiting during my first few weeks here, we tried making eggplant parmesan. We made the breadcrumbs with a mini-baguette, the sun, and the back of a spoon, and even so it turned out delicious, so I was inspired to try cooking the mysterious vegetable again.
First I diced up one small eggplant, salted it, and tossed it with olive oil. I roasted it in the oven just above 200 celsius until it was all brown and caramelized as shown. Meanwhile, I sauteed a finely diced small onio

I love DenmarkJune 16

I skipped out of work at noon on Friday.  The last couple of weeks have been so tiring that just leaving work early was magical enough.  I rented a car and hoped it would have an aux input jack (don't all new cars have them nowadays?), but it didn't.  I popped into the used CD store across the street for a quickie 10 minutes/€50 driveby that turned out awesome.

8 hours later I was in tiny, windy, rainy Låsby, Denmark.  It was 11:30pm and just finally getting dark. 
I really like Denmark.  It's all low plains, rol

Grocery adventures in BerlinMay 28

One of the reasons I thought I’d want to come here is that they eat food I like, and they eat plenty of healthy food. Anyplace whose default breakfast is whole grain bread and cheese is aces in my book. Angry teenagers hanging outside the subway stops munch on dried apricots while they drink their giant beers. Everyone is eating fresh fruit at the park and zoo. There are about 300 kinds of muesli at every grocery store. Not so good for me, but at least “wholesome” is that sweet jesus do they eat a lot of dairy. Ice cream, like beer, seems appropriate for any time of day. The yogurt section at the grocery store is epic. 

 “Spiese” seems to mean “food,” thus as near as I can tell, “spiesequark” indicates that it’s the food kind of quark in that package, not the sub-sub-atomic particle kind. Food-quark is a soft, spreadable cheese, probably made by draining yogurt until it’s a bit wetter than cream cheese. The plain kind is unsalted, and it comes in fruity and herby varieties. I’ve been eating it on rye bread, either with a bit of salt and sliced cucumbers, or with a thin layer of apricot jam underneath. For something so simple, it’s got a strange richness - a magnification of the flavor of yogurt, richness from protein rather than fat. 

Even though it's in a beer bottle and has a bicycle on it and bikes are cool and combine well with beer, do not buy Radler “beer” thinking it’s beer. Atten

Leftovers pieMarch 10

I had all this leftover meat from last week - some lamb, a bit of beef.  It was getting to the refrigerator-age where I didn't really want to eat it, but I knew it was still good.  I also had a miserable collection of vegetables - a crusty, banged-up old parsnip, a bunch of high-maintenance (tiny) shallots, and some celery.  I waste so much food week to week; I thought if I could do something about it this week, perhaps I could pay a bit of karmic debt.

So yesterday (between turns of my danish pastry dough which was complicated but unremarkable) I made a couple pie crusts in anticipation of tonight's dinner.  Stupidly, I put one in the freezer.  I guess I was thinking the meat pie I'd make would be so small I wouldn't need a double crust?  I don't know.  Realizing my mistake, I took the frozen dough out of the freezer and tried to defrost it in its