The wild winds of Tropical Storm Fay are whipping around the magic cottage today.
So we’re making my favorite breakfast food, pancakes, with crispy edges (more edges in HD version here):
Recipe: 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp salt. Stir. Crack one egg in middle, add 1 cup buttermilk. Stir. Drop 1/8th cup circles in pan with 1/2 in vegetable oil over med-high. Cook until bubbles begin to pop; flip. Cook 45 seconds more. Take out of pan; repeat. Serve with (a dash of truth and) honey/syrup + butter or crème fraîche + salmon eggs. Or eat straight out of the pan.
reading recommendation: A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle
As we wait out a tropical storm in Miami, I am thinking of a sky loom rather than the looming sky, inspired by this part of Anthony Doerr’s breathtaking, brief piece in this summer’s Granta:
Salmon, wildebeest, locusts. Storks, swifts, snow geese. What if the torrents of animals migrating past us every year left behind traces of their routes? What if Arctic terns sketched lines through the sky as they poured out of Antarctica and back; what if steelhead trout left thin, colourful filaments behind as they muscled up our rivers? The skies above our fields would become a loom; the continents would be bundled in thread.
My good friend Antony, who lives in Sydney, just reminded me of this great clip with New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo.
My favorite part is the supermarché aisle sequence, and it strikes me that many of my beautiful American readers may be in vacation towns with less stellar grocery options this summer.
This recipe is a simplified version of this 2003 Food and Wine riff on a pea salad. I find when I travel, especially in the summer, I crave a big plate of green that only requires a few minutes in a pan.
My version is ready in five minutes, can be made with supermarket, supermarché, or farmers’ market peas. Remember green + pink + white (veg + delicious + dairy). It’s all in the video (the HD version is here).
Recipe: 1 cup of snow or sugar snap peas in a pan over med-high with 1/2 cup of water, let the water cook out (skip this if the peas look great), add 2 tbsp oil, stir rapidly for 1 min. Put peas in bowl or on plate. Add 1 slice of some sort of bacon diced to pan, crisp, add 1 scallion chopped and 1 minced clove garlic, cook 20 sec. Take off heat, add peas back in. Squeeze lemon over (if you have), salt, plate. Dot top with goat cheese or grate parmesan over. Eat hot, warm, cold. It’s nice with a poached egg on top.
I think Rhymenocerous & Hiphopopotamus would like this—I can see them making it at the supermarché salad bar (you can eat sugar snaps and snow peas raw). This dish is beautiful, and greens are what you want to eat…
p.s. For my vegetarian friends using soy bacon and the like: add a little balsamic vinegar or tamari to the pan as you toss together for extra flavor–
reading recommendation: In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
Last week, I found another reason to worry about disappearance of honeybee hives.
Like touring punk bands, bee swarms travel a country pollinating different audiences (more widely in the United States than abroad), and their demanding migratory schedule may be one of many reasons for their rapid decline in recent years–part of a syndrome called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
I’m the more concerned as I just began incorporating local bee pollen into my diet as a supplement and alternative protein:
I’ve dreamt of keeping bees for years, and now, it seems, we all need to become backyard beekeepers to keep the bees. What if the next iterations of guerilla gardening included hiding apiaries? The international greening of rooftops seems an appropriately aerial place to begin.
For more on CCD, you can watch the entire PBS Nature episode “Silence of the Bees.” Mark Molaro interviews filmmaker Doug Schultz here.
Last July, I presented ways to blog smarter to the American Television Critics Association in Los Angeles with my colleague Kevin Dando at the PBS Press Tour, where we held a Stax Records event (PBS show Great Performances premiered their “Respect Yourself” episode a few weeks later) with Issac Hayes. A kthread cooks tribute to his legacy:
(More glorious butter detail in the HD version here.)
Recipe: For the butter (Saveur instructions), leave heavy cream out for six hours, then whisk soured cream in large bowl until buttermilk separates from pea-sized butter (will take three to five minutes). Drain through (at least three) layers of cheesecloth, aerate by smushing against sides of a large bowl. Shape into log on wax or parchment paper; chill. Keeps for three weeks.
For the cream drop biscuits, stir 2 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 tbsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar in a bowl. Stir in 2 cups heavy cream. Drop in 1/4 c piles on ungreased baking sheet, bake at 400 degrees for 17-18 minutes. They should be uneven. Let cool briefly before splitting and spreading with butter. (Based on a Marion Cunningham recipe; consider purchasing her amazing cookbooks. Feeding hungry Democrats? Try her Truman’s Ozark Pudding.)
listening recommendation: Hot Buttered Soul, Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man”, any video where Hayes does the gold reveal
I went for a walk this morning, doing sun salutations,
looking at the dew,
laughing as spider webs swayed out of focus…
and this afternoon, digital scholar of note danah Boyd Twittered from the Knight Commission gathering in Aspen; “listening to madeleine albright talk about her pins. today: a spider since we are talking about the web. powerful women make me drool.”
I Skyped my boss Marc, who then took a video of Ms. Albright and said pin, posted it on Vimeo and Knight Blog, and I thought I’d share it with you:
Spiders often align with powerful, supernatural bodies, and I wonder what the spider means Ms. Albright’s mood was today. While Ms. Frizzle remains my fashion icon, Ms. Albright now joins her as my accessory role model.
All of which is to say, I’m a bit starstruck today and readying for the Perseids meteor showers tonight… (find your local star chart here)…
Recipe: Make a batter of 1 cup all-purpose flour, add 1 cup of a golden beer, dice and add 1/4 to 1/3 lb. conch meat (tenderized twice with a mallet), mince and add 1 clove garlic. Heat oil in a pot at least 1 inch up the sides to medium-high (360 degrees) for 5 minutes. Stir together the batter, drop spoonfuls in the oil, turn after one minute, cook another minute. Remove from oil, drain on towels, salt, squeeze lime wedge over. Serve with aioli, ketchup, chutney, or dipping sauce of your choice.
reading recommendation: Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh
A few years ago, on the sixth day of June, I attended a party at my friend Eric’s house and partook of vodka cured with smashed atomic fireballs and other fiery delicacies. Needless to say, this is the only picture I can share of the event, and don’t look too long—those are snakes on my head.
Tonight, I celebrated the eighth day of August 2008 with food I twirl on my fork so it doubles back on itself; a looping, continuous strand of carbohydrates celebrates simple sustenance as the rain pours down on Miami.
Aglio e olio is the simplest of pastas, and I employ a secret ingredient from a shiny tin that travels well—an important consideration for infinity food.
The rough cut episode below shines a bit more in the HD version.
For two (you + the universe) you’ll need: a pot of boiling water, half a box of spaghetti cooked 1 minute under al dente (it cooks in the pan at the end), two tablespoons olive oil heated to medium-high, two cloves of garlic sautéed for ten seconds, as many anchovies as you can handle added with the garlic, tongs to swirl the cooked pasta in the pan with the garlic (the anchovies dissolve). Serve with haste.
Reading recommendations: Everything and More, David Foster Wallace; Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino
