Summer Hash

Unfortunately, this is not a thing of beauty to look at--nor is it a happenstance of photography. The picture looks ever so slightly better than the dish did in real life. But the flavor was sublime. Really earthy and wonderful. So here is what I did. We got a few of these and a little of that from our CSA, and I chopped it all up into 1/2" cubes, tossed it with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roasted it for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees. The melange included a few new potatoes, 2 spring onions, a few cloves of garlic minced, a pepper of medium heat, some green beans, an eggplant, and a few summer squash. I served it with a roasted chicken (obtained from a farmer who has unusual interpersonal skills and rather strict guidelines on when and if you can come and get your pre-ordered and pre-paid free-range chickens, but the cost is reasonable, as is the quality) with a piquant gravy, and a salad bursting with tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. It was really delicious, despite it's rather humble looks.
This is my first summer that has been substantially without children in the house. I should really say offspring, because they are definitely men, not boys. While I adore having them to dinner, this would not do for a Kline boy meal. Not as the only starch, that is for sure. But for people in the middle of their lives trying to increase their vegetable intake and decrease the other food groups, this is a wonderful way to empty the vegetable drawer of dibs and dabs before they all go bad.

The New Year

L'shana tova! I am ready for the new year and ready for it to be sweeter than the last. We had our dinner in our new house, which we have by no means moved into, but it is entirely ready for us, so cooked the meal there (both ovens worked magnificently--I am unexperienced when it comes to cooking meat, so I almost managed to torpedo the centerpiece of the the meal, but avoided that disaster, and it was through no fault of the appliances!) and served it in the two front rooms of the house.
It was a small group--but all ages were represented, as befits a holiday event, and the house lent itself to dispersement--the college students in one area, the little kids in another, the adults remaining around the table, and some intermingling amongst the factions occurring regularly. I have three of my four boys in town, which is such a gift, especially when it comes to holidays (as well as crises--which can be overlapping categories!). I couldn't have pulled it off without their help.
I loved that everyone came to our new house, and that the tables looked festive and the food was plentiful, but the absolute best part of the evening was before it even started, when I was done setting tables and cooking, and just sat on the gorgeous front porch reading. I looked up as Joel pulled into the entrance, and I could watch him drive up the long driveway to the house--it seemed like estate living, where the house is so far from the entrnace to the property that it takes time for visitors to arrive.

Grilled Eggplant and Summer Squash

Joel looked at the contents of our CSA box and demanded that he get the eggplant and summer squash. Why, I asked. Apparently he heard The Splendid Table over the weekend, and one of the recipes was a marinade for vegetables. The one that appealed to him was fairly simple: olive oil, lime juice, cumin, garlic, and salt into the blender, whirl until it is a paste, and toss with vegetables that have been cut into 1/2" slices. Marinade for at least 1/2 an hour, and then grill until tender. he had been thinking about this ever since he heard the show, and so felt he needed to make them to get them out of his head. I love it when we grill on exceptionally hot says because it makes the kitchen so much more pleasant for clean up (and so much less of that to do as well). The end product is not much to look at but they were absolutely wonderful. These vegetables can be bland as can be, or sublime--they have very little in the way of innate flavor, but they are flavor sponges, sopping up whatever you put on them. The recipe will be repeated later this week!

$9.99

Best described as an urban fairy tale that is neither utopian or dystopian--it is other worldly and yet familiar, difficult and yet somehow the claymation makes the story somehow softer. And make no mistake--this is an adults-only animated movie--not quite on the level of 'Team America', but definitely in that neighborhood.
The involves a diverse group of people who live in a corner apartment building. The movie follows a young boy (voiced by Jamie Katsamatsas) who pines for a new toy, a man and his fiancee (Joel Edgerton and Claudia Karvan) who are having relationship issues and a lonely old man (Barry Otto) as he takes up conversation with a bonafide foul-mouthed angel (Geoffrey Rush). These characters all play a part in a story which centers on a father (Anthony LaPaglia) hoping for the best in life and for his two sons, Dave and Lenny. Lenny (Ben Mendelsohn) is a repo man that has fallen for a supermodel and will go to any lengths--which are extreme and Lenny does them without a thought or a care--to make her happy. Dave (Samuel Johnson) is unemployed and while he whips up magnificent food, he is deemed unqualified to be a telemarketing agent. In his despair Dave buys a $9.99 booklet claiming to have the secrets to the meaning of life, which serves to play a significant role in his life while becoming the theme of the film itself. Or at least it seems to.

$9.99 does its best not to ask any questions, or really answer them, in hopes the audience will come to grips with their own personal curiosities and formulate their own questions as they best see fit when it comes to the eternal question – "What makes you happy?" And no one character seems equipped to help us answer that. Dave comes the closest, but does so with a book that he has received but did not order. The angel seems gratuitous and unhelpful. And almost nobody makes any gains in the whole movie--which may indeed be the message for us. Not a feel-good movie, and one that some may really dislike, but I thought it was thought-provoking and unusual.

Baked Stuffed Squash Blossoms

Make the Filling:
1 c. panko
1 teaspoon basil or mint or parseley, minced
3 oz. chevre, room temp.
salt and black pepper to taste

mix ingredients--should hold together and be moldable
To Finish the Blossoms:
6 or 8 medium male zucchini blossoms
3 tsp. olive oil drizzled over blossoms before baking

Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Divide the filling into roughly equal portions, one per blossom--size of blossoms may very, and therefore so should filling amount. Roll each portion into a cylinder to fit into the core of each blossom, and slide it in, closing the blossom gently around it. Have your baking pan ready and lay the blossoms in it as you work. Once they are all in, brush their tops with more oil.
Bake the stuffed blossoms for 15 minutes, until crisped and browned in spots. Serve hot.
These are delicious--we never got them onto a serving tray, just ate them out of the oven as we were cooking the rest of dinner, with a little fresh salsa on them.

Long Provincial Vietnamese Restaurant, Seattle

The food in Seattle is sublime. Especially if you like Pacific Rim fusion food, with an emphasis on the Asian side of the rim. One excellent spot we ate on a recent visit was this restaurant. They had wonderful cocktails. The one that I had read about was the Watermelon Chili Martini, but what ended up being the table favorite was the Basil Lemon Drop--minced basil added to the traditional vodka, triple sec, and lemon juice mixture.
The meal was remarkable from start (the cocktails) to finish. our waitress let us know when we were getting into too much food, and she stopped us right at the edge of the junction between sated and stuffed.

The appetizer that you cannot skip is the squid sate--it is grilled to perfection, it is plentiful (easy to share, even with a big table) and full of flavor senasations. The meatball sate is good, and the prawns were as well, but the squid won, hands down.
The Vietnames crepe (as they call it--you may have had it as a 'pancake' in the past) is also exceptionally good--ask for a second plate of herbs and lettuce, because there isn't nearly enough to properly balance the crepe contents with the mint, basil, and then wrap it in a lettuce leaf. The Asian emphasis on salty, sweet, tart, and spicy is well represented in this dish. So next time you are in Seattle, give this place a whirl--it is downtown, near the convention center, at 1901 2nd Ave.

Seattle Art Deco

I admit it. I was sensitized to architecture after my trip to Tulsa. I discovered a love of buildings of a certain age, and once you know what you are looking for, you start to see evidence of your new found love around every corner. But Seattle is not my discovery. The National Park Service has a tour on their web site for 37 historically interesting buildings in Seattle (link provided), and many of them are in the downtown area. I was in Seattle for the American Cheese Society annual meeting, and managed to spend enough time outside walking to fall in love with the architecture of the city.

Where to start. Well, as is almost always the case, where you are is as good a place as any, and I bet within a block of where you are you will find a building that will touch your fancy.
What is deco? Here are a few ideas of others about what to look for. What it is and what it is not.
Whether curvy or angular, 1920s or 1930s, certain overall principles can be identified in art deco design:
• This was the art of the machine age and all that this implied: It was about power, about speed, and about the (then) new. It was a style that adapted to machine-made production as well, giving the common man access to mass-produced facsimiles of more expensive handcrafted goods.

• This was the style of popular glamour. Hollywood broadcast this style to the world, and the world bought it. And loved it. And wanted more.
• It expressed a certain optimism and excitement about the modern age. This optimism even held through the depression years of the 1930s when streamline styling began experimenting with “futurism.” Futuristic-deco promised even better things to come (think Flash Gordon or the 1939 New York World’s Fair).
• It explored a fascination with geometry. Gone were the strict architectural interpretations of classic Greco-Roman forms. Gone too were any designs directly depicting nature. These were replaced by often richly layered repetitions of geometric forms. Any figural forms that did find their way onto the sides of buildings were usually flattened to their geometric essence, much like cubist paintings. Geometric designs of native peoples were also common motifs in this period. In the 1930s, architects began experimenting with eliminating ornament altogether, relying on the geometrical shapes of the building’s construction to speak for the inherent beauty of the structure. These “modern” and “international style” buildings were the bridge from deco to the more austere modern style, which developed after World War II.

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

The subtitle of the book is: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. And that pretty much sums up the content in a nutshell. Which is what Bourdain is known for, I guess. Concise, abrasive, and largely accurate commentary. He is not one to mince words. It is possible his accuracy is lacking as well--on that account I am largely unable to comment. One example: did Alice Waters really write Obama and suggest that she knows best? Yes, that happened. She was on '60 Minutes', she wrote an open letter in the New York Times--she openly campaigned for a change in the White House Chef. Did she really have no idea who the current chef was and what her background and priorities are? That also has some corroborating evidence--here is a piece in Gourmet that verifies Bourdain's assertion that Waters had little to no knowledge of Cristeta Comerford's philosophy and practices, and that she instead painted the White House Chef with the brush of the Commander in Chief: http://www.gourmet.com/foodpolitics/2009/01/white-house-chef-wars.
Comerford is the first female White House Executive Chef, with street cred as a locavore as well as experience in the White House kitchen. Waters may be the mother of the slow food movement, but she did nothing for the advancement of women in a male dominated career. Shame on her for that. She is not alone--women are known to be harder on other women than their male peers are, but it is nothing to be proud of.
Waters conceptualization of the job of the White House Chef is also incredibly naïve. This is not a PR job. The White House Chef doesn't go on tour, talking about food. It is a real 'boots on the ground' job, and Obama is under tremenous pressure to perform, to put on fabulous White House dinners. Suggesting he allow three celebrity foodies choose his chef is preposterous. So I think Bourdain was right on target with that one. He is not kind, but Waters really didn't deserve kindness. While she 'backtracked' on her comments, she never apologized (at least not publically), and she clearly demonstrated that she had no idea what the White House food supply is, nor is it likely that she had any idea of the complexities related to security that surround procuring food for the White House kitchen. Rather than criticize Comersford, she should have been singing her praises for grace and innovation under fire.
This is just one of the many stories Bourdain relates and comments on. It is a book that I might have hated if I read it on a different day--the abrasiveness is not quite balanced out by the smartness and insightfulness of his comments, and the fact that largely, I share his priorities and world view. I would just rather have people think that I am nicer than that. Bourdain, on the other hand, purposely stirs people up. Must be the New Yorker in him :-)

The Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

The New York Times review of this book describes Isabel Allende as a lone female amongst authors of the 'Magical Realism' school of writing, and that is a wonderfully descriptive title for her. Starting with 'The House of the Spirits' she has walke din the footsteps of the great South American authors that came before her. This book is less in that vein, but no less of a compelling story for all of that.
The story is told from a female perspective, which is a hallmark of Allende's work. Her women are not lucky, nor do they always fare particularly well, but they are strong, they are resilient, they are flexible, and they survive. The story takes place in the late 18th century--beginning in Haiti. Zarité is a slave who we follow from young girlhood into her life as a grandmother--which doesn't take as long as you might think. Pretty girls who are enslaved become 'concubines' early, as young as 12 or 13 years old, and so have children early as well. As do their children, being born into life as a slave as well. The book moves to New Orleans at the beginning of the 19th century, as Napoleon's empire is starting to show a crack or two and France looks vulnerable, beatable even. As that happens, Haitian slaves begin to rise up against their viscious, hard-hearted masters, and Haiti moves from an island of brutal slavery to one of brutal independence with a vestige of slavery thrown into the mix of misery. The extended family moves to New Orleans for a variety of reasons, and are there at an uncertain time--when Napolean sells the Louisianna purchase to Jefferson, and the Spanish and the French in the city are uncertain what the change of nationality means for them.
Napoleon Bonaparte, upon completion of the agreement to sell France's holdings in the U.S., a piece that is equal in size to what the young nation already has, stated, "This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride." A fine example of why cutting off your nose to spite your face is never a particularly bright plan. But their loss was the United States and Jefferson's gain, and the story that Allende weaves includes all the historical truths of the time, but it is told in a wonderful and accessible way. This might be my favorite story of hers to date.

We Bought This House Today!

As the day approached for us to close on this house, I thought long and hard about the choices we are making. One reason is that the summer has held more than it's fair share of sadness. Prior to going to the bank, I sat at the bedside of the mother of one of my very closest friends as she is slipping very quickly from her mortal self. I felt drained, unhappy, and helpless. Not the winning combination of emotions, to be sure. This is the third time in the past two months that I have sat in essentially the same spot and felt the same emotions. When I reach that point in my own life, where people are feeling that way on my account, I want to have the years leading up to it to have been full of new projects, new ideas, and work that gratifies me.
I have a trait that is both a gift and a curse--I really need to be busy. When I am not, I am hopelessly unproductive. And unhappy. I am always amused when people suggest that I relax First, I am terrible at it--the worst. I go from relaxation to lethargy without stopping to smell the roses. It doesn't make me happy, it makes me sluggish. As I have gotten older, with each passing decade I have noticed some diminution in my energy and productivity--what I can do is reduced. But I need to have a new project, a new goal, a new idea to focus on, none-the-less.
So today we have purchased a remarkable house that represents projects for years to come--something that will never be done. Wish us luck! May our work on it be gratifying, and you are all welcome to offer up ideas and expertise as we embark on this new journey.