A creature of habit

Perhaps Katie knows it better (and suffers from it more) than anyone, but I have an almost limitless capacity to eat the same dish at the same restaurant, week after week. When we feel like going out for dinner, we frequently have the following conversation:

Shan: How about the Ale House?
Katie: We just went there last week. And really, there are only so many things on the menu that I like to eat. I just can't have turkey and swiss on a baguette every week.
Shan: But why not?

The truth is that the only thing that varies in my trips to the Ale House is what kind of soup accompanies my barbeque burger, well done please, no lettuce necessary because I'll just shove it to the side, with bleu cheese crumbles and a side of tartar sauce. And the even sadder truth is that I could, wallet allowing, happily eat this once a week. At least.

You can get almost anything you want to eat in Seattle. But as much as I love her pantheon of restaurants, once I fall for a venue or a dish, I tend to fall hard, and I am very loyal -- sometimes to the chagrin of my dining companions. I order the same tomato, avocado, and ridiculous amounts of feta omelet at Leena's; the same potato chana masala at Cedars; the same Park Chop Salad at Volunteer Park Café. I'd be willing to bet that as soon as Delancey opens up, it'll be one pizza and one only for me.

Predictably, my food fixations have followed me into my own kitchen. Sometimes I'll get stuck on a recipe and make it for weeks. This year, I ate cheese grits all winter and corn salad all spring, and I made macaroni and cheese every time Joe came to visit. But my standby for years -- ever since I moved to Seattle -- has been an overstuffed quesadilla.

I do vary the ingredients from time to time, but I always follow the same formula, and my quesadillas never fail to come out of the pan too hot to hold, with fetching bits of burned cheese creeping out of the sides. The constancy is comforting. I like knowing that I'll burn my tongue on the first bite, and that the crispy edges of the tortilla will crunch under my teeth, and that I definitely added too much Sriracha, but the giant dollop of sour cream on the side will cool things off in short order.

Lately I've been making these for two, and despite the lack of surprise in our dinner menus, Joe has complimented me on every single one. Further evidence that he is a keeper! And it's a good thing, because let's face it, I don't see the quesadillas leaving the rotation anytime soon.

Dinner quesadilla

This is barely a recipe, but here's the formula. My quesadillas always include beans, but they don't have to be the refried ones from the can. They could be whole black or pinto beans. Or, the adventurous among us (you know who you are) can refry their own. Similarly, the cheese varies based on what's chillin in the fridge, and I usually add a gob of an interesting sauce or condiment (lately I've been experimenting with jalapeno hummus in addition to Sriracha). One more suggestion: if you have any leftover mashed potatoes lying around, add some just after the bean layer. It's fantastic.

Two tortillas (I usually use white flour, but whole wheat are good too)
About 1/4 can of refried beans, or 1/3 can of whole beans
As much cheese as you want (pepper Jack, regular Jack, and cheddar are good -- I bet cottage cheese would be interesting, too)
Dried minced onion, to taste
Sriracha or other hot sauce, to taste
Hummus, salsa, or any other sauce or dip that sounds good to you
Sour cream

Place one tortilla in a frying pan. Spread beans over entire tortilla. If using hummus or sauce, add it now. Top with cheese, minced onion, and a few shakes of hot sauce, in that order. (If I'm using only beans and cheese, I'll sometimes add a dash of thyme in place of the minced onion, which gives the whole operation quite a different flavor. This would be extra good with the abovementioned mashed potato variation.) Complete the quesadilla with the remaining tortilla and cook over medium heat, flipping occasionally, until the cheese sizzles and the tortilla turns an appealing shade of brown.

Cut in half for convenient eating and serve with lots of sour cream.

posted by shan at 10:42 PM; 0 comments

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Bye bye, Broadway

This is it, Capitol Hill. It's about to be over, but we had a pretty good two years, didn't we? Remember all those imaginary boyfriends? (Funny how they all worked in food service.) Remember Mojito Mondays and trivial Tuesdays, Sunday mornings at Top Pot and lazy brunches at the B&O? Sure, I'll miss the pointy library and the walk to downtown, Sunday nights at St. Mark's and the confluence of Bellevue-Bellevue-Bellevue. I'll miss the sound of the 14 screeching to a halt every 20 minutes in the mornings, and the way it sounds like the rain is actually happening in our apartment. I'll miss those things, but it's the food that reminds me and the food that'll bring me back.

There's a food memory lurking around every corner of this neighborhood. Toscana pizza on the couch with Evgenia, spicy crab cake sandwiches at the De Luxe with Katie, sweet potato ravioli at the Broadway Grill with Alison, Piecora's Green Machine with Lauren and Garth, La Puerta's mole enchiladas with Nic and Noella and John. I went to Pho Cyclo with Aaron and Than Brothers with everyone else. There was a farewell dinner with Evgenia and Erin at Café Septieme, and then, because we just couldn't let go, a farewell breakfast at the B&O the following morning. When Marissa came to town, we ventured out to Bleu Bistro and discovered the horseradish grilled cheese. If I think hard enough about it, I can almost taste the squishy-salty duo of Via Tribunali's prosciutto and mozzarella.

And then of course there was all that food we made ourselves. The Tuscan grape cake Erin and I made one lazy Sunday, from which our oven has never quite recovered. Evgenia's adventures in Greek cookery. Erin's crepe dinner and the pizza party we threw for Katie's birthday. Ginger muffins during the Pride Parade. Meg always getting stuck with the stirring. An evening of strawberries and cheese and Hugh Laurie, and many many evenings of sitting on the couch with a historical romance novel and a bowl of lentil-couscous salad, a gob of polenta, or a fat, drippy quesadilla.

A few weeks ago, Katie and I took a deep breath, handed over our Social Security numbers and salary information, and chose Wedgwood. Afterward, we felt like going out to dinner to celebrate, and as soon as I mentioned the B&O we both knew what we wanted. We walked over in the rain and sat in the window seat. When the servers came by, we both ordered Chinese noodles, tossed with sesame seeds, shredded carrots and scallion and topped with slices of gingery chicken, and we started planning. There's no way we're giving up brunch at the B&O or mojitos on Monday. But we'll have to make some doughnut boyfriends at a new Top Pot, try the Mongolian beef at Snappy Dragon, and search high and low until we find our local pub. It's not easy, but it feels like a good time to start new.

Sometimes it's hard to believe I'm really leaving. But then I remember: I can hop on a bus, and half an hour later, I'll be back on Broadway, fogging my glasses over a bowl of pho or weaseling a free vanilla americano out of a cute coffee guy. And the air will still smell like rain and cigarettes.

Peppery goat cheese polenta

I thought for a while about a recipe that would say something about the last two years, and here it is. If I've developed a culinary specialty, it's got to be comfort food, and this is the perfect example. It's easy (five ingredients, a few minutes of stirring) and delicious (who doesn't love goat cheese?), and just as good a weekend breakfast as a late-evening dinner. When the going gets tough, the tough should try this polenta.

Ingredients:
4 cups milk (skim works fine)
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 cup cornmeal (coarse or medium, not finely ground)
Black pepper
Crumbled goat cheese (one 4- or 6-oz. tub) or equal amount of gorgonzola

Combine milk and cream in a saucepan over medium heat; bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Slowly whisk in the cornmeal. Reduce heat to medium low and cook, stirring frequently, for about twenty minutes. Toward the end of the cooking process, stir in as much freshly ground black pepper as you can stand (I grind it to an almost alarming degree of coarseness). Once the cooking is done, remove polenta from heat and stir in the goat cheese. Gorgonzola works well too, but the flavor can be a bit overpowering and it doesn't melt as well. This polenta is approximately the consistency of a very thick oatmeal, but it firms up quite a bit after chilling. If it doesn't taste good cold as well as warm, it's not comfort food in my book, and this one passes the test with flying colors.

(By the way, much as I'd love to be able to take credit for the strawberry photo, I can't. It's by Katie.)

posted by shan at 8:17 PM; 6 comments

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Potlucky

Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to have coworkers that I sincerely like. Most people get along with their 9-to-5 buddies just fine, but I spend my workdays surrounded by people I'd actually choose to hang out with. And, even better, most of them are just as enamored of food as I am. Every Monday, film archivist Hannah and I give each other The Food Report, a rundown of everything memorable we consumed over the weekend. We all swap recipes and links to food blogs, descend en masse upon the vegetarian buffet at Flowers, and even poll the room for suggestions on what to have for lunch or whip up for a dinner party.

The only thing better than having awesome coworkers who love to talk about food is discovering that all of them can actually cook, too. When Hannah came up with the idea for a potluck to thank all of our coworkers for ruining their poor eyes matching negatives to contact prints, cleaning film until they nearly keeled over from the fumes, and just generally slaving away on our various projects, we had no clue what delightful dishes awaited us.


The King and Queen of the Grill fixed up grilled summer veggies, flank steak, and sockeye salmon from the mini-mart fishmongers. We piled our plates high with slices of vegetarian quiche, dollops of cold rice salad with olives and artichoke hearts (a hit even with the younger members of our party), and gobs of corn-avocado-black-bean salad (my first willing corn consumption in years).


The devilled eggs were gobbled up before I had a chance to take a picture. And then there were the desserts -- lemon yogurt cake with real whipped cream, blueberry cobbler, homemade brownies, fruit-and-yogurt parfait, and my own cheating contribution, an assortment of Top Pot doughnuts.

We stuffed ourselves until we couldn't eat another bite, and then we left Hannah with the leftovers. The next day, she turned them into a dinner party, and, true to form, came in on Monday and told us all about it.

posted by shan at 11:14 PM; 0 comments

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Pretty in pink

My favorite chapter in Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latté is the one in which Amanda (is it wrong that I feel we should be on a first-name basis?) finds herself home alone with Mr. Latté out of town. She describes several foods she only eats when she's by herself, then goes on to talk about the dishes her women friends make when there's no one else around. Spaghetti with fried eggs, truffled egg toast, polenta with Parmesan. This is a chapter I read over and over, not just because of the recipes, but because (as Hesser says of one girlfriend's solo specialty dish) "it is a model for all single women because it is at heart about taking the pains to treat yourself well."

Tonight, without even consciously thinking about it, I found myself making my own single-girl dinner. Last night, I picked up a bunch of grape tomatoes at the store. I ordinarily don't favor them -- there's just something peculiar about their flavor -- but they were on sale, and I'd been wanting to try the tomates confites from Chocolate and Zucchini. (C&Z, by the way, is a fantastic French food blog with excellent recipes and pictures to match. I can't wait for her cookbook to come out!) The base recipe looks great, but after poking around in my cupboard, I ended up adding paprika and pretty pink peppercorns. The latter are a long-ago gift from Lauren, pink and pepper being two of my favorite things. I stirred the sliced tomatoes together with salt, just a pinch of sugar, a few dashes of paprika, and a bunch of whole peppercorns and popped them into the oven on low heat. When they came out, it smelled like a pizza joint, but sweeter and spicier. I almost ate them right then and there.

I spent my off moments at work today dreaming up ways to use up the tomatoes waiting at home in the fridge. Should I toss them with bowtie pasta? Make a squishy sandwich with fresh mozzarella and some pesto? Eat them by themselves, maybe sprinkled with one of the approximately five million leftover bits of fancy cheese in our refrigerator?



When I got to the store, the answer appeared right in front of my face, in the form of French dinner rolls at an unbeatable sale price. I brought them home, split them open, and spooned some tomatoes into each one. Then I topped them off with plenty of feta and popped them under the broiler. A mere four minutes later, the smoke alarm alerted me that they were done. Very done, in fact. Fortunately, I like my toast burnt and my chicken blackened, so they were just right. I'd waited a full twenty-four hours to try the tomatoes, and they were worth it, sweet (in just the way that tomatoes are supposed to be sweet, and raw grape tomatoes almost never are) and a teeny bit spicy. The feta was just sharp enough to keep the tomatoes from being cloying, and the overdone bread produced a very satisfying crunch.


I could've eaten them with my fingers, flomped on the couch in front of the television, but instead I sat at the table, ate with a knife and fork, and looked out the open window. Something tells me this may just end up on my list of single-girl foods; you could easily serve it at a party, but I think it might be even better for a cool June evening on one's own.

Dinner-Roll "Bruschetta" with Slow-Roasted Tomatoes and Feta

Tomates confites recipe adapted from Clothilde Dusoulier of Chocolate and Zucchini

For the tomatoes:

Thirty or so grape tomatoes, halved
Olive oil
Salt
Sugar
Paprika
Pink peppercorns

Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Mix tomatoes with a dollop of olive oil (not too much), a fair amount of salt, just a touch of sugar (I used about a quarter teaspoon), a few shakes of paprika, and a bunch of pink peppercorns. They're really too soft for a grinder, but you can crush them with your fingers or in a mortar and pestle, and I just left them whole. Other peppers would work, too, of course; one of those peppercorn melanges (you must say this with a funny French accent, it is the rule) or just some good old-fashioned cracked black pepper would do just fine.

Pour mixture into a baking dish and bake for as long as you want. C&Z recommends two or more hours at 210 degrees; I left the heat a little higher and cut short the baking time to about an hour and a half. This was just right, although I did use grape tomatoes instead of Romas. This recipe actually makes a few more tomatoes than you need, so you could make extra rolls or just save them for something else.

For the bruschetta:

Two dinner rolls
Slow-roasted tomatoes
Feta cheese, crumbled

Preheat broiler.


Tear two nice dinner rolls in half with your hands, squishing them a little bit to make a hollow for the filling. Add a couple of spoonfuls of the tomato mixture to each one. Then top with feta to taste. (My taste is to use a lot of feta, and also to eat some out of the container while you're at it.) Place on a baking sheet and broil for about 3-4 minutes or until your smoke alarm goes off.

posted by shan at 10:11 PM; 0 comments

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Pesto dreams

Shan: They're so cute, I don't know if I'll be able to eat them when the time comes.
Mom: But then you would be depriving them of all the meaning in their lives.
Shan: That would be sad.


Grow, little baby basils, grow.

posted by shan at 10:25 PM; 0 comments

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Girl meets steak

This is how we rationalized it:

1. Dad was staying at the Hotel Shan & Evgenia and didn't have to spring for two nights in a Seattle hotel.
2. I just got a job. How often do I get a job? Celebration must ensue.

It was the only way we could justify the Metropolitan Grill, a Seattle standby that's reportedly one of the best steakhouses in the country. Photographs of famous people, mostly sports figures, decorate the walls of the foyer. Even at 5:45 p.m., the place was packed with business guys in suits, trendy twentysomethings and their trendy boyfriends, and at least one father-daughter duo in search of meat and potatoes.

It took me a few minutes to get past the price tag on my filet mignon. At one point, I actually whimpered, "I think it's sinful to pay that much for a piece of meat." Not quite $10 million celebrity-wedding sinful, but still. So I made up for it by eating the whole thing: filet mignon cooked medium well, doused with herb jus and showered with cracked black pepper (Dad gave it an eight out of ten; since it was my first ever and I had no basis for comparison, I give it an eleven); garlic mashed potatoes topped with snipped chives; clam chowder with sherry cream and a swirl of Tabasco (Alison wasn't joking -- this is the best chowder I've had in Seattle or maybe anywhere); and a sloe gin fizz that had a remarkable effect despite the volume of food I'd just inhaled.

When the smoke cleared, half of Dad's potatoes and a sizable chunk of his halibut (stuffed with Dungeness crab, tomatoes, corn, and morels and lounging on a bed of asparagus spears) remained on his plate. I had done all but lick mine clean. The busboy raised his eyebrows. "I was hungry," I said defensively. "Wow," he replied, "we don't see that happen every day."

For about twenty seconds, I felt like a complete oinker.

Then I decided I was kind of proud.




(This picture is in no way related to steak, but isn't it pretty?)

posted by shan at 8:47 PM; 1 comments

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Etiquette question

Am I allowed to post about restaurants, rather than cooking?

posted by lauren at 9:11 PM; 3 comments

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