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08/20/10 - Luau 2010

We held the annual Kaleberg Luau a while back, but we didn't post any pictures. We've been holding the luau since 2002, so it really has become a tradition.

That's the spread. It's not a luau without a pineapple.

Our motto: served in a skull. Those are South Sea Bubbles served in the champagne flutes. That's pineapple champagne, pineapple gum syrup and bits of pineapple.

Godzilla - in the spirit

Hawaiian spice chicken, made with Indonesian spices

Watermelon salad with tomato, coriander, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar and mozzarella, adapted from Spago Wailea

Lau lau - in action

Those are mai tais made with blue curacao - don't ask - in the punch bowl in front of this year's cupcake heiau.

Keywords: hawaii, food, luau

08/05/10 - Salmon Truck

The Rite Aid parking lot on Lincoln Street has a free market air. You'll often find someone with a pickup truck selling firewood, flowers or freshly caught salmon parked towards the main street. This salmon vendor was typical. It's one of the great things about living in Port Angeles.

A seasonal sight

Keywords: port angeles, food, salmon

07/27/10 - Moroccan Lamb With Okra

We recently made a new dish from Paula Wolfert's Moroccan cookbook, her Moroccan Lamb and Okra Tagine. As with so many things, it started at the Port Angeles Farmer's Market. The woman at the Family Farm had a tub of okra for sale. Okra looks like what you imagined pod people would look like, except smaller and green. It is also a hot weather plant grown in the American south and sub-Saharan Africa. This has been a cool summer, even by local standards, and Port Angeles is not known for its tropical heat. We have no idea of how she managed to grow okra around here. We eagerly bought a pound or two and broke out a shoulder of Romney lamb from Heritage Foods. The tagine, basically a Moroccan stew, is on the right. It is seasoned with cinnamon and turmeric. The red stuff on top is tomato. We wish we could let you smell it over the web, or even better, offer you a taste, but that will probably have to wait for HTML 6.

That's the dish, en cocotte.

Keywords: food

07/09/10 - The Death Cake Returns

It's that time of year again. The Death Cake has returned. This is a chocolate cake so rich and dense that you can actually see it warping the fabric of space and time around it. The cake itself is fudge cockaigne. The filling is acid orange, not unlike the fillings of the gas giant planets. The icing is simply fudge, extra rich fudge.

The Death Cake in all its glory

Keywords: food

06/05/10 - Gaze In Horror

We had a sudden desire for an old fashioned dish, the kind that dominated the women's magazines of the 1960s but has long since vanished. In this case it was a dish of Moll's Untamed Enchiladas, done in the true 1960s style. It was called enchiladas, but it was actually more of a lasagna with layers of
  • meat with mexican spices, garlic, onions and regular green bell peppers - We substituted pork for beef.
  • queso fresco and some other cheese we had lying around the house
  • real, full fat sour cream and canned black olives
If you make this, be sure to use a regular green bell pepper, not one of those fancy mexican peppers, and use those canned olives, not those fancy Italian ones that come in bottles. That is, if you want the true 1960s taste.

We know it looks rather terrifying in the picture, but it was pretty tasty, though horribly rich.

Behold ye mighty ...

Keywords: food

05/14/10 - French Fry Folly

These may look like mild mannered french fries with ketchup, but appearances can be deceiving. They are actually strips of pound cake with some raspberry jam for dipping. The genius behind this conceit is a retired chef. Her big thing is pizza, and she's even produced a book on the subject. Sorry, we don't have her recipe for pound cake, but if you want to try this, consider using this recipe from Edna Lewis.

These are not french fries. No, they aren't liberty fries either.

Keywords: food, recipe


Bay leaves with flowers

05/12/10 - Bay Leaves in Bloom

Our bay bush is in bloom, so now our bay leaves have blossoms on them. They are definitely prettier than just plain bay leaves.

Keywords: flowers, food

03/08/10 - Sefrina

Sefrina isn't the next town after Hilda. Sefrina is a Moroccan cholent, a great, easy to make Moroccan stew with a ridiculously long cooking time. We found out about it in Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. Aside from the six hour cooking time, it is an easy dish to make. That's right, it cooks for six hours total, but your oven does all the heavy lifting. Everything gets wonderfully tender, and the eggs develop an amazing creamy texture as they hardboil.

We made this version with a 3lb 10oz pot roast from the Clark Family Farm. It had a nice big marrow bone which you can see floating there in the photo. The potatoes were from the Johnston Farm and the eggs from Westwind Farm, so this qualifies as a Port Angeles Farmers' Market dish. We also used dried chick peas, but they weren't from the Farmers' Market. You can make this dish with canned chick peas, but this is obviously not a dish you can throw together in a hurry, so why bother with time saving conveniences?

Our Moroccan stew

The eggs get tan and creamy.
 The recipe:
  1. The night before, soak a cup of dried chick peas in water overnight.
  2. Start boiling six cups of water in a tea kettle.
  3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
  4. Take a big casserole with a lid and dump in the chick peas.
  5. Add 3 or 4 pounds of beef cut into big chunks. Pot roast is great, but it is better if there is a bone or two.
  6. Add six potatoes.
  7. Gently tuck six raw eggs into the ingredients so far.
  8. Chop up four cloves of garlic and sprinkle them on top.
  9. Sprinkle with a few pinches of salt, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon of saffron or turmeric.
  10. When the water comes to a boil, pour it on.
  11. Cover and put it in the oven for an hour.
  12. Lower the heat to 250°F and let it cook for another five hours.

Keywords: farmers' market, johnston farm, port angeles, food, westwind farm, clark family, recipe


Yes, we smoked it in the snow.

12/06/09 - Smoked Steelhead

For the last few weeks Tuna Dan has had steelhead at the Port Angeles Farmers' Market, so that means we've been having smoked steelhead. We use brown sugar, black pepper, kosher salt and coriander seeds for our rub. We don't smoke it long, but that doesn't matter. We usually eat it pretty quickly.

Keywords: farmers' market, food

11/20/09 - Beef Daube

Beef daube is a wonderful, hearty winter dish. We make a version from Andre Daugin's cookbook. He ran the wonderful Hotel d'France in Auch, the heart of d'Artagnan country. Not only does beef daube, a French beef stew, taste wonderful, it is fun to make. One of the steps is flaming the browned chunks of beef in armagnac, an underappreciated strong spirit. To get a sense of how strong, check out the flames. For a better sense, click on the picture and play the movie.

Click the image for flaming action

Keywords: food

11/14/09 - If The Moon Was Cheese

Mount Townsend Creamery has a new cheese made from Dungeness Valley Creamery milk called New Moon. You can see a slice from one of the wheels in the picture on the right. We grabbed ours at Good To Go, and gave it a taste. It's a great Monterey Jack like cheese with a good tang and rich under flavor. We're looking forward to melting on something Mexican style. Thanks to our great local milk, we have another great local cheese.

The new cheese

Keywords: good to go, food, mount townsend creamery

11/06/09 - When French Women Cook We had been neglecting one of our favorite cookbooks, Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook: A Gastronomic Memoir . Some of this is because a lot of the dishes call for a full cup of heavy cream. For example, the pizza like dish to the right is the Alsation version of pissaladiere. That's 3 lbs of onions in the topping along with a half a stick of butter, a full cup of heavy cream, and two ounces of prunier d'agen to give it a little kick. Those are bacon bits on top. Needless to say, one slice went a long way.

Flammkuche

Noisette of Pork with Prunes
 The dish to the left is a bit lighter. It is from Touraine. We sliced up a seven pound pork loin from Heritage Foods into slices and seared them in butter. That part was simple. We soaked 30 or 40 prunes overnight in a bottle of red wine, then cooked that wine down, without the prunes, to a mere cup or two. Then, in the typical French manner, we made the sauce in the pan we used for cooking the pork so we got all the cooked meat flavor. We added a cup of heavy cream, then a cup or two of veal stock and the cup or two that was left of the prune wine. Then, we cooked that down to a cup or two. Nearly six cups of liquid were cooked down to perhaps one and a half. That's why they call it a reduction, and it was a wonderful reduction with the pork and prunes.

Keywords: food

09/15/09 - Filet of Beef Lucien Tenderet

It looks like the monster from outer space, but it's just an escapee from Kaleberg Labs. That's our filet of beef lucien tenderet, beef tenderloin stuffed with morels, pistachios and dry cured black olives. It's an amazing dish. Did we mention it's wrapped in bacon? We'll admit it's pretty lurid. We got our recipe from mad scientist Alice Waters in her original Chez Panisse cookbook. We too remember the 80s.

The menace from the oven

Keywords: food, recipe

08/23/09 - Aloha, Welcome to the Kaleberg Luau

Another year, another luau. Once again it was time for lau lau, ahi sushi, and Balinese chicken. This year we used Balinese fish spice instead of chicken spice, but nobody noticed. It's a long story. We also went a little crazy with the foldout pineapples, and the real one.

The Kaleberg Luau - Note the cupcake heiau in the foreground.

Welcome to the Pacific Ocean area.

Keywords: food, luau

08/07/09 - Scalloped Oysters

While we haven't been in an R month for a while now, the local oysters are still in great shape. We made a big batch of scalloped oysters for a party and we were most impressed. The recipe was pretty simple, but it took a bit of baking time. This is a recipe for a big batch, you can scale it to suit.

INGREDIENTS

  • one BIG loaf of sourdough bread (or two smaller ones)
  • 4 10 ounce jars of oysters
  • a half gallon of the best milk you can get (we use milk from Dungeness Valley Creamery)
  • worcester sauce
  • a stick of butter

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Tear up the bread into crumbs and toast them in the oven on a metal tray. Keep a close watch so they don't burn.

2. Put half the oysters into the baking dish to form the bottom layer. Add a few shots of Worcester sauce.

3. Put half of the bread crumbs on top of the oysters to form another layer. Add a few more shots of Worcester sauce.

4. Put the other half of the oysters into the dish to form a second oyster layer. Add a few more shots of Worcester sauce.

 5. Spread the rest of the bread crumbs across the top for the final layer.

6. Pour in enough milk to wet everything but the topmost bread crumbs of the top layer.

7. Dot the top with chunks of the butter.

8. Bake at 350F for about an hour. Add milk if it is getting dry too soon and to keep the top bread crumbs from burning.

Keywords: food, recipe

07/03/09 - Good To Go Danish

We've been working our way through the pastries at Good To Go. This time we tried their danish, one black raspberry and one rum raisin. The results were much as we expected. They were delicious. Good To Go has a great danish pastry dough, buttery and crispy, with just the right amount of flake.

Black raspberry danish

Rum raisin danish
 They use a real good black raspberry preserve in the black raspberry danish. There's none of that synthetic, barely there flavoring, and definitely no chemical after taste. An awful lot of places take short cuts like that, and their danish are barely edible.

The rum raisin danish had lots of good cinnamon and cardamom flavor. Once again, Good To Go used real spices, and it makes a difference. While we still miss Bonny's cinnamon rolls, we miss them a lot less with these danish pastries in town.

Keywords: good to go, food

06/29/09 - Good To Go Is Now Baking

Good To Go is now baking from Wednesday to Saturday, and we can say from first hand experience that the chocolate chip cookies and croissants are delicious. They also have good looking muffins, focaccia, and a few other goodies, but we haven't tried these yet.

The chocolate chip cookies are great. They are the thick kind, and sort of gooey. They use big chocolate chips, so the chip flavor doesn't wash out, and the cookie itself has a good brown sugar and vanilla flavor, so it isn't just something to hold the chips. The balance makes for a real treat.

A chocolate chip cookie, good to go

A croissant, good to go
 The croissants are as good as the ones at The Little Oven, and have a good buttery flavor. There is a good flake, but the real treat is the rich pastry itself. Too many industrial croissants are too light, too puffy. There is no "there" there. Good To Go croissants have something inside, and it is completely delicious.

Rumor has it that the folks at Good To Go are planning a wood fired brick oven for baking bread. Right now they are still getting used to 4 AM wake up calls, to get the current baking done, but they are ambitious. We'll keep you posted, on the brick oven, and as we try other baked goods at Good To Go.

Keywords: good to go, food

06/15/09 - QuilBay Oysters

We are always warned not to eat oysters in months without an "r" in them. We have never taken this rule too seriously, so we tried out a dozen QuilBay oysters. They were spectacular. They smelled of the sea and had a sweetness and a mineral note. QuilBay also sells other seafood at the Port Angeles Farmers' Market.

Keywords: farmers' market, food, oysters

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