05/05/13 - Catalan Salmon

04/22/13 - Winter Crespeou

Our crespeou had five layers, from bottom up:

1. some baby potatoes, sauteed in olive oil until tender.
2. some dandelion greens and parsley from our garden, sauteed in olive oil with dry cured black olives
3. diced roasted red pepper with pine nuts
4. diced raddicio, sauteed in olive oil, with anchovies
5. diced tomatoes with mint This dish takes some preparation, slicing, roasting and dicing the various ingredients, but it doesn't require much of each. We cooked each layer separately in a crepe pan, and then stacked them to make a lovely five layer crespeou. Knock wood, that will hold us until late summer, or maybe not.

03/31/13 - Late Season Duck Confit

03/08/13 - Memelas of March

The Corn Chips

• 2 cups masa harina
• 1 1/3 cup water
• 1/2 tsp salt

Heat up a frying pan (or even better, a cast iron skillet). Wait until the pan is nice and hot before cooking the chips or they'll stick.

Cut the blob of dough into 16 roughly equal pieces. Press each piece of dough in a tortilla press using wax paper or parchment to keep it from sticking. Cook three or four chips at a time, until each side is golden brown. This takes us about 2 minutes per side, but keep an eye on them so they don't burn.

The Sauce

• 1 lb tomatoes
• 1 jalapeno pepper, 2 serrano peppers or 2 tbsp nacho sliced jalapenos
• 1 small onion, or 1/2 a larger one, chopped
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 - 1/2 cup fresh coriander, chopped

Toss the tomato skins and put the tomatoes, the jalapenos, the onion and salt in a food processor and puree everything.

Heat up a pan and add the olive oil. When it is very hot, add the puree slowly, a bit at a time so that the sauce is boiling furiously. Cook the sauce, stiring now and then, until it thickens, for maybe 3-5 minutes.

Turn off the heat and add the coriander and stir it in so it cooks.

Assembly

Put the tray under a broiler (or in a hot oven) to melt the cheese.

Serve as they are, or you can add jalapenos or fresh chopped sweet onion or ....

10/29/12 - Halloween Spirit

We started with a Spider Cake. That's an orange cake with chocolate fudge cockaigne filling and a thick layer of orange icing on top. We drew a spider in her web on top using chocolate frosting.

Then we made little buffalo burger devils. Those are little buffalo burgers on Parker House rolls with Kaleberg ketchup, pickles and onion. The devil horns were cut from a red pepper.

No Halloween is complete without disembodied eyeballs. It's a cliche, but an important one, so we hollowed out some of the last tomatoes of the season and filled them with a mixture of cut up iceberg lettuce, bacon crumble, chopped up tomato and mayonaisse. It's sort of an inside out BLT without the toast.

Finally, we made sausage mummies. You can see one of them being wrapped below. We used chorizo and andouille and strips of puff pastry. They're really easy to make, and as we know from excavations of ancient Egyptian burial sites, they're a dish with a long tradition.

10/19/12 - Grilled Salmon

07/24/12 - Home Made Tofu

We brought the soy milk to a boil, let it cool to 190 degrees, then added two teaspoons of nigari. Nigari is a mineral salt, related to epsom salts. Within a few minutes, the soy milk had started to curdle and, maybe ten minutes later, we had big, cloudy curds floating in soy milk whey. We strained out the curds in a cheese cloth and pressed out the excess liquid using a little tofu press. Thanks to the miracle of high speed photography, you can see the final block of tofu in the photo before we Kalebergs got to it.

07/10/12 - First Salmon

An awful lot of fishermen simply discard the roe, but salmon roe, when cooked, tastes an awful lot like shad roe. We're originally from the east coast, so we always looked forward to spring and the shad runs. Now, we look forward to the salmon season. We cook the salmon roe just the way we'd cook shad roe, in a bit of butter, with capers, with onions, with eggs. It makes a great breakfast omelet, especially for the salmon season.

03/19/12 - Munchings and Crunchings

01/28/12 - Cracked Pot

12/10/11 - Cassoulet in Progress

Then, our cassoulet took over our kitchen. We brought out our stained, wrinkled cookbook and double checked the post it note warning us "Do not TRIPLE this recipe." Some years back we had tripled the recipe and had so much cassoulet we couldn't store it in the refrigerator and had to put an overflow pot of it out in the car. Luckily it was a cold New England night.

As you can see in the photos, making a cassoulet is quite a process, but then again, cassoulet is quite a dish.

09/13/11 - Wood Fired Pizza

09/07/11 - Pickled Tomatoes

The recipe is pretty simple. There is the pickling liquor made by boiling 5 liters (or quarts) of hot water, 8 tablespoons of kosher salt, 2 cups of white sugar and 2 cups of white vinegar. For each one to two quart jar add 4-5 cherry tree leaves, 2-3 currant bush leaves, 2-3 tablespoon chunks of fresh horseradish root, 1-2 horseradish leaves, 5-6 cloves of garlic, 1 dill flower "umbrella", 10 black peppercorns, 4-5 whole allspice berries, and 2-3 cloves. All right, maybe it's not that simple.

Bring a big pot of water to boiling. Stuff as many tomatoes as you can into each jar. Feel free to squeeze them a bit, but don't reduce them to a pulp. Then, pour boiling water into each jar to sterilize the tomatoes and the pickling spices. Then, using a strainer to catch anything that tries to escape, drain each jar and top it off with the hot pickling mixture. Be careful to shake the jar around a bit to get out any air bubbles. Quickly screw on the lid and flip the jar over.

Store all the jars, upside down, wrapped in a heavy blanket. They'll stay hot for at least two days, cooking and ripening all the time.

07/03/11 - Orange Cardamom Cookies

We like to use freshly ground cardamom, and often use a bit more than the 1 1/2 tsp recommended. It's great stuff. Our recipe goes something like this:

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 pound unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 large egg yolk
• 2 tablespoons heavy cream
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tablespoons grated orange zest
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom
• 1 teaspoon salt

1. Work the butter until it is soft. Then work in the sugar.
2. When the mixture is creamy and a bit fluffy, work in the cream and egg yolk.
3. Add the flour, orange zest, cardamom and salt. (Don't leave out the salt.) WOrk the mixture into a grainy dough.
4. Make the dough into four "pancakes", rolling them to about 1/4". Wrap them in plastic and let them rest in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
5. Roll the pancakes out to about 1/8" thickness and either cut them into cookies with a knife or use cookie cutters.
6. Bake on parchment covered cookie sheets at 350F for about 8-10 minutes.

06/02/11 - Salmon BLT

Now, of course, we can get wonderful wild salmon, and Pane d'Amore has great local bread, so when we started craving a salmon BLT, we didn't try to figure out how to get back to San Francisco; we just made a couple. That's a simply roasted salmon filet in the middle, with just salt and pepper, but there is also some good Hempler's bacon from Sunny Farms, slices of tomato, a handful of lettuce and store bought mayonaise.

They were better than ever, thanks to our local salmon. Now we don't have to go to San Francisco.

05/27/11 - St. Germain and Champagne

In any event, we recently came across of a bottle of St. Germain. That's the elderberry flower liqueur that they added to the champagne. We tried it at home, and it brought back the memories. Unlike our dubious encounter with Creme de Violette, an overly sweet and rather cloying violet flavored liqueur in the early 80s, St. Germain is a winner.

04/21/11 - Mangosteens

04/14/11 - Willapa White Sheep's Milk Cheese

04/12/11 - Halibut Pot Pie With Fennel

INGREDIENTS

• 1 1/2 lbs skinless halibut filets
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 fairly large heads of fennel or more smaller ones
• 1 cup peeled and sliced shallots
• 2 tbsp flour
• 1 lb spinach leaves (or more if you really like spinach)
• 1 - 2 lbs potatoes, suitable for mashing (e.g. not hard red ones)

1) Boil the potatoes in a pot of water until they are tender. When they are ready, drain, mash in a big bowl adding salt and pepper to taste, and set aside. You can go ahead with the other steps while the potatoes are cooking.

2) Cut off the fennel tops and slice the bulbs into 1/4" (roughly) slices. Slice the shallots, if you haven't already.

3) Melt the butter and saute the fennel and shallots until they start turning a bit golden. This caramelizing gives them some sweetness. (It usually takes us 10-15 minutes, but your stove may vary.)

4) Sprinkle with flour, salt and pepper. Toss and cook for another 2 or 3 minutes.

6) Cut the fish into 2 inch squares. If the spinach is in big, broad leaves, you might want to cut them up a bit, but it doesn't really matter. Add the fish and spinach. Cover and cook for about 10 minutes.

7) Preheat the broiler. Put the fish, fennel and shallot mixture into an oven proof baking dish. Spread the mashed potatoes across the top.

8) When the broiler is ready, put the baking dish on an upper shelf in the oven and let bake until the potatoes start to turn golden brown, usually about 10 minute, though this will vary with your oven and your potatoes.