Ohhhh! After a long winter (and this year, despite my love for this year’s prolonged cold weather, even I must confess it was a looong winter), Spring fruits and vegetables are a welcome sight! I can’t wait until tomatoes come into season–but for now, I’m very happy with what’s coming out of the ground these days.

My garden, much more sparse than last year (because of my hunt for the gopher), is still bringing me great culinary delights.

I mean, check out the potatoes in the garden–in my overzealous search for gopher tunnels, I decided to uproot a potato plant. Surprise, surprise! Baby potatoes! Of course I snatched all the baby potatoes right away.

I had no idea that the potatoes were anywhere near ready for harvesting. These potato plants are just the best find ever, first having sprouted from potatoes I’d thrown into the compost pile and now blessing me with unexpectedly early baby potatoes.

The potatoes, by the way, were so delicious. I’ve never had potatoes fresh out of the ground before and I am going to plant some more. If there was ever an excuse to gorge oneself on carbs, this is it–a fresh potato straight out of the soil is a piece of heaven, I think.

In the springtime, we eat a good number of baby veg, little miniature delights, straight from the soil. Not just potatoes. It’s our impatience, and my curiosity–what *is* lurking beneath the soil? I have to know. So I’ll pull out a baby carrot, or in this case, a baby cherry belle radish.

I paused to take a photo, but then hurried back into the house where I rinsed the red globe, and took it out to show my husband who was washing cars on a sunny Saturday afternoon. “Mrmmm! Bring it over!” He ate it right up. He loves radishes, and he’s the reason I planted a few this year.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Yummy!”

And what my garden does not produce, I seek out at the store. This morning, finding myself in a remarkably calm and optimistic mood (maybe it was finding the radish in the garden), I chanced the crowds at Berkeley Bowl, a market I normally avoid on weekends. It’s CRAZY on weekends there. If you can find a parking spot, you still brave the crowds inside. I mean, there’s a reason for those crowds (the diverse and high quality produce, nevermind the meat and seafood counter and wide variety of baked goods) but it’s still maddening to shop there.

Still, I decided to head on over. I had a hankering for some fresh produce. I hadn’t been to the Bowl in months, and I was getting sick of the apples and oranges and other usual suspects at Andronico’s and Whole Foods. The Bowl didn’t let me down.

It was there, while browsing the aisles, having parked my shopping cart at the end that I realized how happy and content I was feeling. (you’re crazy if you want to actually stick with your cart the entire shopping time there–you’re better off parking the cart occasionally and then roving the aisles, especially in the produce section). How long had it been since I’d gone grocery shopping by myself, as an act of luxury?

It had been MONTHS. I found myself beginning to imagine the foods and dishes I would make out of the ingredients before me, I found myself delighted at finding Haydn mangoes (not just Tommy Atkins), at the amazingly red and plump flats of strawberries!

And…I discovered ramps. Ramps! The Bowl had ramps! I’ve been reading a lot about ramps these days, and was dying to try them. But they’re not too easy to find in the Bay Area–they’re wild leeks local to the Appalachians.

I quickly grabbed them. I found my hand sullied with dirt, they were so fresh. The Appalachia (or what other far away place these ramps came from) was on my hands, and though I would normally wipe the dirt quickly away, I let it linger as I shopped.

When I got home, I used the ingredients to make a spring pasta–not a primavera, but my own “hacked together” (as they say in high tech) version: ramps, morel mushrooms, peas, and asparagus.

Aren’t they beautiful? I also saw fiddlehead ferns at the Bowl–I regretted not grabbing some of those to make a perfect Spring vegetable bouquet.

Just chopping them up and sauteeing them together made me feel more alive, healthier. It has been a long winter, and I’ve missed my vegetables.

I was out of town a month ago when we spotted this can of Bud Chelada, aka Budweiser+Clamato. Hrm. Intrigued, we bought a can and then took turns drinking from it and making funny faces, and then doubled over with laughter, we took sips again just to keep on laughing.

Needless to say, we were not too entranced by the taste.

But then the other day, I came across a Slashfood’s post on Michelada–at first, knowing of Bud Chelada, I thought this was perhaps a proprietary name for the Michelob version of this same drink.

Nope. It’s some other concoction–one that you can make with Michelob even though it’s preferable to use a dark beer.

Not being a beer fan, I’m not a fan of the beer cocktail, either.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who drove all over town looking for matzo last week before Passover began. Unlike others, I found one box of matzo. However, I could not find, to save my life, kosher-for-passover matzo meal or chrain (grated, bottled horseradish).

I drove to no less than seven stores in search of matzo meal and chrain (I’d bought the matzo a few days earlier on what turns out to be a fortunate lark). I’m talking: Whole Foods, Andronico’s, Afikomen, Star Grocery, two Safeways (note to self: Safeway had the best assortment of Kosher-for-Passover foods, sans matzo, matzo meal and chrain), and (you never know–but they ended up having no Passover items at all) Trader Joe’s. NO matzo meal. NO chrain. And though this was a day before Passover began, I was still surprised: after all, Passover lasts EIGHT days. There’s got to be enough kosher-for-Passover eats for eight days and it was incredible to me that stores ran out before the holiday even began.

But here’s the important question, the reason for my frantic matzo meal and chrain search…

How was I going to make gefilte fish?! Matzo meal is a crucial ingredient (other than ground up whitefish) in gefilte fish, and chrain is a crucial accompaniment. And gefilte fish is, at least in our household, a crucial dish served at the Seder table. Alas, I found an old container of matzo meal from Passover past. Not entirely kosher–and I fretted before I used it, rationalizing that I’d done my best to hunt down matzo meal, to no avail. (I wonder how many other Jewish families had to make compromises this year with the matzo shortage).

I was first acquainted with gefilte fish when I used to buy and devour the kind in jars. I remember my preference used to be Rokeach brand over Manischevitz. But that all changed when I tasted my mother-in-law’s gefilte fish for the first time. She made hers by hand. It was fantastic–the texture of the gefilte fish was firm but not like something out of a rubber mold, the aspic just light and with distinguishable flavors.

I had to make mine from scratch too! I watched her make gefilte fish the next year, helped her form them, put them into the boiling broth, complete with fish heads, and vowed to make my own from that point on.

I thought it would be complicated–it isn’t very complicated at all. Just a tad time consuming with a very delicious outcome. You’ll want to start the gefilte fish the day before the dinner because it requires overnight chilling in the fridge to assure a firm aspic. And remember to put your order in for ground up whitefish far ahead of Passover (and also to buy your matzo meal in advance) so that you have all you need without the stress of hunting down ingredients.

Recipe follows after the jump…

Gefilte Fish
Makes 16 fish balls
INGREDIENTS

For the stock:
2 carrots, sliced (you need at least 16 slices, as these are also to be used as garnish)
1 onion, sliced
1 or 2 fish heads (not oily)
2 teaspoons salt
1-3 teaspoons sugar
¼-½ tsp white pepper or 6 peppercorns

For the fish balls:
1 medium onion
2 eggs
2 teaspoons or more salt
2 teaspoons or more sugar (for Polish gefilte fish, add more sugar)
White pepper
½ cup medium matzo meal
2 lbs fish fillets skinned and processed (choose 2 or 3 from pike, whitefish, cod, haddock, bream, whiting, and hake). A good fishmonger in a Jewish neighborhood will often have the fish ready and processed for Passover.

DIRECTIONS:
Put all the stock ingredients in a saucepan, add about 10 cups of water, enough to cover the fish heads, and bring to a boil. Remove the scum and simmer for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, work on the fish balls…

For the fish balls: put the onion, quartered, in the food processor with the eggs, salt, sugar, and pepper, and blend to a cream. At this point, I like to taste to make sure the seasonings are correct.

Pour into a mixing bowl and stir in the matzo meal.

*If the fish isn’t already processed, you can now cut the fish into pieces and process for about 5 seconds, until finely chopped (do NOT turn into a paste).

Add the fish to the onion and matzo meal and mix very well. Leave covered in the fridge for half an hour.

Wet your hands and shape the mixture into balls the size of a tangerine or into oval patties (the shape of a gefilte fish). Lower them into the fish stock and simmer, covered, on low heat for 30 minutes.

Cool, then lift out the fish balls and fish heads and arrange them in one layer on a deep serving dish.

Ladle a bit of the stock over the fish and reduce the rest by boiling it down, then strain over the fish.

Retrieve the carrot slices and decorate each ball with a slice of carrot on top.

Leave to cool overnight in the fridge, by which time a firm aspic will have formed.

Serve with chrain (horseradish).

I know, it’s been a month since the last post on Muffin Top! March was a crazy month with a lot of business-oriented travel. In terms of food, that meant a lot of rushed and convenient meals at home resting between trips…and then a lot of rushed and convenient meals on the road. But we’re back. It’s April. And good news: it’s crawfish season.

We have a crawfish boil every year–an homage to family roots in Louisiana. We began our tradition tentatively several years ago, not knowing at first where to order live crawfish, and treading through the logistics carefully. We did our research and found the Louisiana Crawfish Company–every year they deliver 100+ pounds of fresh, live crawfish to us, with nary a dead shellfish (impressive).

Just make sure to have them delivered the same day as your boil, they don’t keep very long at all! We hunt down the outdoor burner at a local party rental place, and have industrial-sized boiling pots from our local Smart and Final. The list goes on. But we’ve got that list down pat.

And now we have our own tradition, resembling those of my husband’s childhood. He boils the crawfish, and I make the etouffee halfway through the boil. The organization is now like second nature, and the boil proceeds with a breezy familiarity, despite the hustle and bustle and occasional wayward crawfish making his way to freedom. We do sometimes wonder if one or two make it, as we don’t live too far from a creek.

Crawfish boils are a jolly occasion. I love cooking, as you know, but I especially love food as a center of social gatherings. And there’s just something about getting an order of live crawfish, boiling them along with potatoes and ears of corn in a spicy concoction, spreading them out in a large pile on a table, and then, communally, shelling each one.

Food tastes better when your friends are a part of the cooking process, when there is a community around the eating. Mrmmm. And not just because it makes shelling go faster! (Seriously, when you’ve got over 100 pounds of crawfish, it takes several hours to plow through it as a crowd, let alone as an individual).

There’s always a communal bowl on the table–not for the shells, but for tail meat. We make sure everyone knows to keep shelling and filling the bowl with tail meat. Don’t stop shelling! we joke. Keep filling that bowl! Because that bowl of crawfish tails becomes…etouffee.

Oh yes. Etouffee, a Creole dish of butter smothered crawfish, is my favorite culinary part of the boil. There’s something about the red crawfish stacked in piles on the table, the cheerful hubbub of shelling, everyone focused on getting that tail meat out that makes it one of my favorite annual occasions. But nothing beats the etouffee part of the boil for me. I eagerly eye the communal bowl–and as soon as there’s at least four handfuls in that bowl, voila! I whisk it off to the kitchen and disappear for about half an hour as I make the etouffee.

It takes about as long as it takes to make basmati rice. So start the rice when you start making the etouffee, and you’ve got a perfect pairing at the end: rich buttery smothered crawfish paired with rice. Say it with me: mrmmmmmmmm.

And–later on, the crawfish tails that don’t make it into the etouffee? You pack that up in little ziploc bags, and give to your guests to take home. No one ever seems to get sick of crawfish. One of our guests also takes home a garbage full of shells each year–he makes crawfish butter with the stash, in an illustration of the adage, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The gorgeous crawfish keeps delivering!

By the way, there’s never ever any leftover etouffee.

Recipe for crawfish etouffee follows after the jump…

Crawfish Etouffee

INGREDIENTS (for 4 servings, you can easily double this)

1 stick butter
2 cups chopped onions
1 cup chopped celery
1 pound crawfish tails
2 bay leaves
(NOTE: I personally HATE bell peppers, and so they’re excluded here. But it is very traditional to include them–if you do, chop an equal amount to celery and add them at the same time).

1 T flour
1 cup water
1 tsp salt
1/4-1/2 tsp cayenne (or to taste)
2 T chopped parsley
3 T chopped green onions

DIRECTIONS:
1. Melt butter over medium-high heat in a large saute pan (I use my Le Creuset braising pan). Add onions, celery, and saute until soft and golden, about 10-12 minutes. Add crawfish and bay leaves, reduce heat to medium. Stir occasionally, cook until the crawfish throw off liquid, 10-12 minutes.

2. Dissolve flour in water. Add to crawfish and season with salt and cayenne. Stir until mixture thickens, 4 minutes. Add parsley and green onions, cook for about 4 minutes.

3. Remove bay leaves and serve with rice.

Spring is around the corner. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the cherry trees have begun to blossom, the cars are covered with a fine dusting of bright yellow-green pollen, and my allergies have begun to act up. The wild turkeys in my neighborhood are courting, and I’ve put away my winter scarf.

Elsewhere, I know, winter has not unloosened its firm grip–I was just in the mountains and in the midwest, where the trees are still encased in ice, laden with snow (and not blossoms), and you can’t leave the house without a hat and a down jacket. It’s beautiful–but the residents are long-weary of the cold and snow and ice. As I pranced around, admiring the snow and ice and cold, they looked at me as if I was insane and remarked, “You’re a very cheerful person!” Well. It’s easy to be cheerful, I guess, when you don’t have to live in the snow for months on end.

Regardless of snow or spring blossoms, my palate is craving some bright, light flavors. After a long winter of rich stews and soups and pies and all other such heavy eats…I am craving FRUIT. I am craving something that has CRUNCH! And I don’t mean a parsnip or turnip. Or an apple. I want a melon! I want something other than anemic looking tomato!

So when I saw a stack of seasonal blood oranges, something clicked in my head: a SALAD. A salad full of bright flavors and colors. Blood oranges and pickled beets. Tart and sweet.

On my day off, I indulged. I sliced the blood oranges and pulled pickled beets out of the fridge (these days, I always have some pickled and on hand! They’re delicious). I took some baby greens and tossed them in a vinaigrette piling them atop the blood orange slices and beets.

Oh, and I dotted some goat cheese atop the salad for good measure.

Delicious. And it fulfilled my craving for spring with ingredients easily found in late winter.

Until I read Shuna’s ode to mandarinquats, I had never heard of the fruit before. Maybe they had been there all along but I’d ignored them in the piles of citrus fruit every winter.

But this year? I noticed them–and piqued by curiosity and encouraged by Shuna’s enthusiasm for the citrus fruit, I bought a bagful.

I bit into one, sending a jet of juice into my hair.

They’re not quite as easy to eat as kumquats. Kumquats are thumb-sized, small enough to pop into your mouth whole, thus containing the juice spray and filling your mouth with an intense orange-y flavor, peel and all. Not so with the mandarinquat–juice everywhere!  They’re the size of a small child’s fist, somewhere between a kumquat and a lemon.  And they’re a bit tangier than kumquats.  A bit tart for eating out of hand, at least in my opinion.

So I candied them, buoyed by Shuna’s suggestion to candy them, pith and all, in their wagon-wheel shape.

First I sliced them thinly.

I can’t tell you how much this sight cheered me with the brilliant color! And the smell? If I could smell this every morning, every day would be a good day.

Then I prepared a simple sugar syrup (boil about 1 cup of sugar to 1.5 cups of water and whisk until the sugar dissolves). Into which I put the slices and boiled for about 10 to 15 minutes, until the slices became translucent.

I drained and dried them. It takes a bit of patience–the pieces take awhile to dry. Resist the urge to eat them!

Until I coated them with more sugar and stored them in an airtight container. Voila…candied mandarinquats. They should keep, in that airtight container, for a few weeks. But mine are gone already.

It’s citrus season–there are more than just mandarinquats out there. There are key limes and meyer lemons, too! I think I’ll be candying more citrus fruit.

When my wonderful friend Justin took off with his partner on a 3 month backpacking trip through Europe and Africa nearly ten years ago, he asked me what souvenir he could bring back for me. “Absinthe,” I replied immediately. I had just enjoyed a Valentine’s Day meal at Absinthe in San Francisco, and was fascinated by the stuff, especially since it was, at the time, strictly illegal in the States (they weren’t serving it at the restaurant). I didn’t actually expect him to bring it back - I explained that it would be contraband, but lo and behold he simply declared it and customs just waved him through. I fantasized about planning all sorts of belle epoque themed dinner parties, but just never got around to it.

A few years ago, when I was visiting Justin in Paris, we happened upon an absinthe shop in Place St. Catherine, a charming and discreet little plaza in the Marais (A glimpse of it is visible as Treadstone’s Paris branch in The Bourne Identity). In addition to selling the stuff, they also sold absinthe accoutrements. I purchased a spoon and a finger sized bottle.

Recently, the United States legalized absinthe, and as luck would have it, the only domestic distiller producing it, St. George Spirits, is right in my backyard. The first release was on December 27, 2007. Demand was high, and after customers endured 6 hour waits in the rain, the product sold out in two hours. I figured that since I already had a bottle, there was no need for me to subject myself to such insanity. But the next day, after enjoying a leisurely German brunch, the bartender brandished a bottle towards us as the busboy cleared away our glasses. “This stuff ain’t for chumps.” I looked at my husband and we shrugged “Why not?” and ordered a shot to share. It was served with a cup of ice, to be mixed to our liking.

Maybe it was the two beers beforehand, but one small sip, and we knew we wouldn’t be operating heavy machinery. “Now I know why Van Gogh went mad,” slurred Zack before we tottered home. I promptly passed out on the couch, and Zack went out to get ice cream (he usually avoids junk food, but wanted something caloric to absorb the alcohol).

When we came to our senses, we opened the bottle already in our possession. It wasn’t nearly as strong, nor were the flavors as complex. I immediately put myself on the mailing list for St. George’s next release. Last week, I received the newsletter notification that the sophomore batch would go on sale this Super Bowl Sunday.

The distillery opened at noon, so I drove up shortly after my Sunday yoga class. By 12:30, the line stretched past the building, around the fence and spilled over into the next parking lot. I dutifully got in line and waited. The view of the City was stunning, and the air was brisk. And by brisk, I mean cold, wet and windy. Although a few distillery employees cheerfully marched up and down the line, proffering cups of hot chocolate, there was not much they could do to speed up the line… which took THREE HOURS.

Yep, yours truly waited in line for three hours for a bottle of newly legalized liquor. I’ll subject myself to Tartine’s line, but the last time I waited in a line that long, I wound up in the front row of a U2 concert. I was also next to a group of drunken but generous Irishmen who taught me all manners of Gaelic toasts that I will not repeat here.

But I digress. Anyways, while I was in the line, I finished 3 podcasts of This American Life. I also contemplated how much of an alcoholic I might be to wait in a line this long for a bottle of booze. But once I got to the front, I found it didn’t concern me anymore. I had only planned on buying one bottle, but since I’d waited so long, I bought two. I seriously considered three (the limit) but decided that might be a bridge too far. I took the bottles home, where Zack was anxiously waiting with his finger on the TiVO decided to hold off on opening a new bottle we had gotten closer to finishing the initial (imported while contraband) bottle.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Over at Offal Good, Chris Consentino makes an angry and impassioned commentary about the price of cheap meat.  And by price, I mean the exorbitant humane price of how cows are treated as they go to slaughter.  There is a secret video taken by the Humane Society at a meat processor in Chino, CA–the same meat processor that also supplies meat to children in schools.

It is disturbing to watch. They break, it looks like, every rule in the book for the sake of making money: drag the cows to slaughter, forklift them, beat them, electrocute them, until they stand and walk to slaughter. (They have to be able to stand in order to be slaughtered).

I’m no vegan, I’m no longer a vegetarian, and I know slaughter is still killing…but there have GOT to be more humane ways to treat and slaughter animals.

Know where your meat comes from.  Humane certified.

I love girl scout cookies, especially Samoas (aka “Caramel de-Lites”)–this unique and tasty conglomeration of butter shortbread cookie, caramel, coconut, and chocolate. Soooo deliciously evil, especially as they come on the heels of the holiday, threatening to sabotage any new year’s diet.

I put in my order for girl scout cookies (samoas and thin mints) with a coworker and friend selling boxes on behalf of his daughter. But damn the wait!

I found a recipe for Samoas at Baking Bites–not only can I indulge my desire for Girl Scout Samoa cookies more immediately, I can avoid trans-fats by baking them at home!

Mine didn’t come out perfect, but I got my craving satisfied (and there are a couple dozen, packaged, to take to work tomorrow).

Some caveats for making them at home:

1) They take some effort (make the cookies, prep and apply the coconut and caramel coating, and prep and apply the chocolate). More than chocolate chip cookies, less than a fancy cake.

2) I’d add waaaay more caramel next time. I added the prescribed amount of coconut and it overwhelmed the caramel, such that the mixture was waaay “tougher” than it should have been (the caramel even when set, should be fairly “squishy”).

3) I’d skip the hole in the cookies. See the picture below:

They’re a waste of time–I went to the trouble of cutting a hole in each, about the size of a straw…but the caramel-coconut topping covered the hole entirely. See the picture below:

If you insist on having a hole, make the hole a lot bigger.

4)  The dough can get a bit “sticky”–the recipe said it should be a ball, but I don’t stress out if you don’t have a smooth ball of dough.  Add a little extra flour if you think it’ll help…and chill the dough in the fridge before rolling it out.  Even so, you’ll find yourself peeling the cookie rounds off of the parchment paper.  A delicate operation.  Don’t roll it too thin–otherwise, they’ll be too delicate and break when you start applying the gooey caramel topping.  See the broken pieces above?  You’ve been warned!

Overall: yum yum!

I consider myself a bit of a Asian noodle soup connoisseur. I could eat a bowl of noodle soup every day, and probably not tire of it, as long as the origin of the cuisine varied. Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Burmese, Chinese… I never met a well prepared bowl of noodle soup of any Asian cuisine that I didn’t like. Whenever the components are available, I like to squirt a couple circles of sriracha, a few dollops of chili paste, a dash of chili oil and two or three pickled jalapeno slices.

Recently, I returned to an old favorite of mine, Vien Huong, in Oakland Chinatown. A friend of my then-boyfriend introduced us to it in 1994. It’s one of those bare bones, hole in the wall places that seat different parties at the same large table in order to get customers in and out as quickly as possible. You have to order quickly and clearly, or else you’ll earn a scowl and the possibility of not being served again. Early on, they used the practice of dumping hot tea on the table to wipe it down, though I haven’t seen them do this in a while. Also, if you can’t use chopsticks, you have to request a fork. Charming, I know, but these kinds of places have their virtues - the food is cheap and quick. Look to the line outside the door, and it’s a sure sign that the food is also tasty.

The menu has about 20 different noodle soups. You can choose between rice noodles and egg noodles. There are also various chow mein/fun noodles and rice plates, but everyone gets the noodle soup. The broth is to die for. (The fried fish cake appetizer is also tasty.)

When I first started coming here, I ordered the rare beef ho fun soup. They don’t mess around with their rare beef - the bowl arrives instantaneously and steaming hot, so that the beef is still perfectly pink throughout. As much as I love pho and Thai boat noodles, many restaurants seem content to let the bowl sit for a little longer so that the beef is more medium well rather than the medium rare that I prefer.

I also tried the seafood ho fun, which was tasty, then I went experimental and tried the pork kidney ho fun. It arrived sprinkled with fried garlic. I took a cue from the other customers, and made a dipping sauce with the sriracha and hoisin sauce for the kidney. Yum! This sent me on a offal kick that is with me to this day. I also made special requests (which they’re happy to accomodate), mixing up shrimp, kidney and rare beef.

Now I get the house special - the chow jew ho fun, which includes shrimp, ground pork, kidney, fish balls, beef balls and the chef’s choice in meat (barbeque pork, duck or roast pork). Next time, I just might have to ask them to throw in some rare beef with the chow jew.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Uh-huh, that’s nice. Why is this post called ‘Go Away, Baby!’?” Well, back when I frequented this place with my friend, Justin, one of the food runners was a gruff, heavyset woman with stout arms that came from a lifetime of balancing multiple trays filled with bowls of noodle soup. She was quite a marvel to watch, barreling back and forth between the kitchen and the tables, sometimes carrying over a dozen hot bowls of soup.

One day, we watched her drive out of the kitchen loaded down with a few trays, then stop on a pin as an errant toddler wandered directly into her path. She paused for half a beat, then bellowed “GO AWAY, BABY!!!” at the top of her lungs. The child was subsequently retrieved by his guardian. Justin and I immediately rechristened the place as “Go Away, Baby!”.

Vien Huong (aka “Go Away, Baby!”) is on 712 Franklin Street, between 7th and 8th Streets, in Oakland. Their phone number is (510) 465-5938, and their hours are Monday-Sunday 8:30 am - 6:00 pm. Cash only.