Beetzza

I just returned from a brief trip east, undertaken in part to see long-neglected friends, spend time with my little sister, go on much-delayed adventures, and finish up that Master's degree I've been paying for, but primarily to make a beet-goat cheese pie that's been over a year in planning.

And by pie, it turned out we meant pizza pie. Which, of course, called for a pizza party.

My bosom friend Barbara and I made a lot of pizza doughs (Smitten Kitchen's recipe x16), bought way too much cheese and one very large can of tomatoes at Claudio's (which got smushed and mixed with garlic, olive oil, and basil), turned up the oven to 500°F, and invited over a bunch of folks with the instructions to bring either pizza toppings or beer.

And people brought such good things! Peppers, mushrooms, asparagus, prosciutto, homemade pepperoni... there was no overlap and an abundance of everything. And everyone got a chance to do a little baking (that's everyone's favorite part of a party, right? Not just me?) and sharing and eating.

For our contribution, we caramelized an onion, boiled and sliced a bunch of beets, crumbled some goat cheese, artistically (or perhaps the more accurate term would be drunkenly) layered it all on a pizza crust, and baked it for about 15 minutes.

It was so damn good.

Eat Really A Lot

Eat Real is Oakland's annual food festival, held in Jack London Square, a bipolar part of the town that seems half bourgeoisie wharf area with expensive restaurants and new condos, and half sketchy warehouses and dive bars. Not somewhere I frequent, but one weekend a year I pass the looming local jail, walk under the freeway, and through the blocks of overpriced, empty condo buildings to get to the tightly packed foodie frenzy known as Eat Real.

The Bay Area gets its summers late; June, July, and August are mostly marked by the dense layers of fog that roll in off the Pacific, pulled inland by the heat of the Central Valley. As the rest of the state cools down, the fog withdraws, making September often our warmest month. So wandering around in public with a jar full of beer feels particularly glorious in the lovely, sunny, perfectly temperate climate. 

It was so enjoyable in fact, that I didn't pick up my camera again until the jar was nearly empty and the Green Guys had opened their new Eritrean-Irish food truck, serving out a huge portion of doro wot, injera, and salad.

And even though I split it (with Ben, on a work trip from Philadelphia, who shares an appreciation and capacity for good food) some serious recovery time was needed before the next food truck foray. So we watched Chef John Fink of The Whole Beast carve up a roasted lamb.

An aside: a good, but rarely utilized marketing strategy is to decorate your bad-ass sign with drippings.

The jars were empty, so we headed over to the "Jam Bar," a misleading name designed to trick people into drinking cocktails. Ben got a really excellent grilled watermelon and basil-infused vodka thing from Wood Tavern, and Robyn and I shared something with rye in it, which was also pretty good.

The huge paella booth from last year was gone, but Venga Paella brought it with a rich, wet, seafood paella that was so good it didn't even matter that it was a bit on the salty side. It probably made it taste even more like the sea.

Friday, the first day of the three-day festival, is the day for ice cream vendors. I'm actually very familiar with the ice cream people in the Bay Area, and so I didn't brave the lines for Scream Sorbet or Nieves Cinco de Mayo. There was a brief moment, however, when Ici Ice Cream – an Alice Waters influenced ice cream venture – had just a few people in front of their booth. The line for their College Avenue storefront is usually down the block, so I jumped at the change to buy one of their ginger cookie and meyer lemon ice cream sandwiches in under twenty minutes. It was so phenomenal that i saved the ingredients list, just so I can try to recreate it at home. But I'm not optimistic; Ici goes above and beyond rational expectations for their product.

The only thing that could have possibly surpassed the taste of that ice cream would have to be an astounding, utterly life-changing, and deeply moving event. Like these shoes. And that was Friday.

Saturday evening I went back to the festival for dinner, starting off with a lovely rice and chicken dish from Soliel's and some absolutely amazing beignet de banana, which is French-African for "delicious fried sugary things with bananas in them that you just ruined your appetite for dinner with."

I've eaten beignets, and I've had a lot of fried bananas in my time, but these were so fresh and so good that I'd consider going to Soleil's restaurant just to eat them by the plate. For real. I even ate the one that fell on the nasty-ass ground, because it hurt too much to waste. 

 Then I got a bacon-studded hot dog on a stick from 4505 Meats, just for the novelty of meat-on-a-stick. It was pretty tasty.

And then, as the sun went down, we hung out with the hippies by the bread oven, who were super awesome and helped us figure out how to build one in my boyfriend's backyard.

And then we tried some plum-jalapeño gelato from Gelateria Naia, which was almost as good as my vanilla-habañero ice cream, and I bought a Rickey Henderson t-shirt from 57-33, and we went home.

But not before we saw a piglet humping a cabbage.

The sweet deliciousness of mass murder

Jews are notorious for kvetching about the trials and tribulations of being Jewish. Everyone is always ostracizing them, banishing them, trying to obliterate them from the face of the earth - it's a rough legacy. Most of the well-known Jewish holidays celebrate situations where one of these scenarios was narrowly avoided - rather solemn occasions that extol the extraordinary survival abilities of the Chosen People.

So it makes sense that a holiday where no Jewish people were harmed in any way is a little less formal. That a holiday where the Jews not only saved themselves from their oppressor, but got to exact revenge as well is a cause for joyous, raucous celebration. That a holiday where the Jews got to turn mass murder around and slaughter someone else for a change demands lots of noise, hundreds of cookies, and copious alcohol consumption. And the Torah itself demands generations of joy and celebration, so much that even most rabbis - even Orthodox rabbis - will allow congregants to dress in drag for one day out of the year.

That day is Purim, and I may have gone a bit overboard on the cookies this year.

When I called my friend Julia to discuss hamantaschen dough, we both managed to recommend the same recipe to each other - one that we'd both made and discussed the year before. We like it because of the butter (many hamantaschen recipes, on account of being kosher, are made with oil which is probably why so many Jews don't like hamantaschen) and also because of the funny little drawing of Haman with the hamantaschen hat. It's unclear how many cookies the dough recipe makes, since they can be different sizes, but I multiplied it by six (the photo below) and then made another double batch, and it made approximately a million cookies.

We made two different sizes of cookies, and forgot to count, so I don't have a very clear estimate. But I had about 17 or 18 people who all ate quite a few cookies, and managed to get through maybe half of them. Maybe. Next time, for the same number of people, I'd quadruple the dough recipe and count on some leftovers.

The cookies are filled - traditionally with fruit or poppy seeds - and there's a lot of lovely recipes floating around. Variety is always good, so we made quite a few.

This prune recipe is filled with additions, making it less like something your grandma might eat to stay regular and more like something delicious.

I used this apricot recipe as a base, and added some raisins and candied ginger (about half a cup of each) for a little kick. Next time I'd skip the raisins and add more ginger, although as someone inclined to eat large chunks of candied ginger on a regular basis, that could be a personal preference.

A lot of people really like chocolate, and if you're someone who finds that a little dull and also has something of a ginger fixation, it's quite easy to add some pieces of candied ginger to this basic chocolate recipe. Or just dip some ginger in the chocolate and eat it without the cookie. That's okay too.

I also cut some apples into slices, covered them in sugar and cinnamon, and then cooked them in a pan. Cut into small pieces (not puréed) they made a nice turn-over sort of cookie

You can also use any sort of premade jam - the apple-beet hamantaschen were surprisingly sweet and delicious. And the lemon curd was my favorite store-bought flavor. 

But perhaps my biggest stroke of genius was picking up a container of dates and a few blood oranges at the store. I didn't have any specific plans for them, but cooked together with a little orange juice and some sugar, they made by far my favorite flavor of the day.

I didn't pay much attention to amounts, but I think it would be hard to go wrong with this combination. The orange balances the sweet of the dates, the juice adds enough liquid to soften everything before it goes in the food processor, and the sugar - well, it may not have even been necessary. Depends on your blood orange. Mine was a little sour, so I added a little sugar.

Cooked together for ten minutes or so, and then puréed, this one almost didn't get turned into cookies. It's one of those flavors that makes you lose track of the world for a second as it hits your tongue - just enough kick to shock your taste buds into action, not enough tart to ever stop eating it.

It's also real pretty.

And then all that's left is to fold the cookies into little triangles (really mash down those tips too - they like to come undone in the oven), bake them until their edges are golden, and eat all your mistakes (and most of the blood orange-date filled ones) to hide the evidence.

Make sure to coerce some friends into helping you fold - particularly if you've vastly overestimated how many cookies you need. Remember to feed them before the party starts. And after forcing 24 cups of flour into the standing mixer, you may need to change your shirt.

Then have a drink and retell the glorious story of Esther, how the Torah asks us to remember with joy and celebration the time the Jewish people triumphed over evil by using the tools of mass murder and sexual coercion, and how an evil man's hat inspired fruit-filled deliciousness for generations and generations of drunken, costumed Jews and their slightly confused goy friends.

There may have been some goyim this year who went home with the idea that Mordecai ordered Esther to organize a ménage â trois with Haman and the king in order to save her people, which isn't quite canon, but these things happen when the Torah tells you to drink yourself to confusion.

Happy Purim!

Good things come in little boxes that have my name on them.

 

A combination of thesis writing, thinking about credential programs, and trying to generally figure life out as I near the end of my time in Philadelphia has made for an inclination towards some difficult moments. Mostly they consist of trying to plow through books and ideas and writing through the thick fog that envelops my mind whenever I try to think about too many things at once.

So, on the occasional Monday where the workload seems a little overwhelming, and the sharp, witty, knowledgeable, intelligent self seems conspicuously absent, getting little boxes carefully wrapped in brown paper in the mail is unbelievably exciting.

When those little boxes are from a dear friend and filled with aromatic dried petals and spices and a tea recipe, they seem spectacularly well-timed.

When you realize that you have another little box, delivered by another dear friend over the weekend, that contains a single, brightly colored, lidded teacup from her mother, then life seems, for an instant, in perfect alignment. 

And the day seems like an optimistic start to a week that will contain many hopeful cups of warm, spicy tea.

Persian Spice Tea with Rose Petals and Cardamom

from Lea

Boil 

2 1/4 cups of water

Reduce heat to a simmer, and add

1/2 ts ground cardamom

1/4 ts ground cinnamon

1 tb dried rose petals (or 2 ts rose water)

5 whole cloves

Turn off the heat and let the tea steep, covered, for 5 minutes. Strain through a coffee filter into a nice cup. 

[As you can tell from the photos, I put the ingredients in a teabag, which also worked, although it makes a slightly weaker tea.]

(We just celebrated Purim this past weekend, and I'd like to tell you all about it, but you have to wait until I'm able to look at a hamantaschen again. Or even a photograph of one.)