crisp and refreshing summer sangria

unlike many members of my family, i do not agonize before making decisions, i actually enjoy the process.   there is one decision that gets me every time though, what to drink before dinner.  my husband, jonah and i often go to dinner with friends and when we meet for a drink before dinner, i get completely stuck.  cocktails just don’t do it for me and i always end up with a glass of wine which somehow just doesn’t feel right.

i love when my sisters come to visit. emily and jonathan were in town recently for a wedding and were able to come over for dinner on friday night with our parents.  i was browsing through my most recent issue of gourmet, trying to decide what to make when i stumbled across this delicious sangria recipe.

it is unlike any other sangria that i have tasted and green is really the best way to describe it.  made from granny smith apples, green grapes, mint and dry white wine, it is truly crisp and light.  cool and refreshing for summer, i have a new favorite drink before dinner.

click here for the gourmet magazine recipe on the epicurious site.

City Gardening

Our parents planted an amazing vegetable garden every summer, so we were fortunate enough to grow up eating the most delicious, fresh produce. Thinking back on my childhood (and with the price of food sky-rocketing) I got inspired to grow my own vegetable garden.

Dan and I live in an apartment in Portland and we knew it was going to be a challenge. City gardening requires a certain amount of creativity. We scoped out the grounds of our building and found a great little nook behind our kitchen (if you have landscaping, you may want to check with your landlord before planting).

After choosing a spot, we went to the Portland Nursery to pick out our plants! We chose Roma tomatoes, Cayenne peppers, Green Bell peppers, California Purple Bell peppers, Japanese eggplant, Basil, Sweet Leaf, Rosemary, Lavender, and Spearmint. We also bought some planting soil and natural fertilizer. The fertilizer is actually chicken poop in pellet form which sounds pretty gross and smells even worse. It works, I promise!

We started by pulling up the grass and weeds. Then we did our best to make a straight edge and loosened the dirt. Then we added our planting soil and got to work. We barely fit everything we bought into the space we had. I recommend researching how much room each plant needs and analyzing your space before you buy. Most vegetables need at least 12 inches around them. It’s been about 2 months and things have been going great. That is, until last weekend…

We went camping up in Washington for the 4th of July weekend and came back to find half our garden missing! All the peppers, the eggplant, and the lavender had been pulled out and the dirt was neatly smoothed out where they had been. It was as if they had never existed! It was a devastating blow. For a few days we thought they had been stolen, which sounds totally crazy, I know!

It turns out nobody stole them, someone just pulled them up and threw them down a 7 foot well by the basement window. Outrageous! Well, that tragedy aside, we still have our tomatoes and the rest of the herbs. They’re doing great!

*Tomatoes, Basil, Rosemary, and Sweet Leaf. You can see the area to the right where the “missing” plants were.

I’ve had so much fun gardening, even in such a small space in the city. It really takes me back to childhood in Michigan. I can’t wait to take my first bite of fresh Roma tomato!

Vegetarian Biscuits and Gravy

This recipe draws inspiration from three fabulous Atlanta-area restaurants I am delighted to share with you: The Flying Biscuit Cafe, Radial Cafe, and The Grit.   The Flying Biscuit is homey in a free-range, murals-on-the-wall kind of way, especially at the original McLendon location.  It is famously good, so go before 10am on weekends or you will be waiting for an hour.  Radial is a hip breakfast and lunch joint on Dekalb Ave in Candler Park.  The walls are a gallery space for interesting local artwork and the servers are good to look at too, though service can be slow (it may not be the best place to take a sister before she has to catch a plane back to Michigan, for example).  Radial is also a certified green restaurant, which I appreciate.  I’ve only been to The Grit a few times as it is located in Athens, GA, but those times were memorable.  If you are ever in Athens, go there immediately and order the Golden Bowl with a side of gravy.  If you are lucky, you may see Le Tigre there before their show because it is that cool.

Mmmmm, biscuits!  My biscuit intake definitely spiked when I moved to the South, making me a happy girl.  I was also pleasantly surprised to discover they are quick and easy to bake at home, perfect for a relaxing weekend breakfast.  Sometimes I make them just to have on the side of some eggs, with butter and strawberry jam.  Warm and fresh from the oven, they can start things off on the right foot.

I use the recipe from The Joy of Cooking for Quick Drop Biscuits with only a couple minor changes.  I like to replace a quarter to a third of the white flour with whole wheat flour, as I often do when baking.  It makes me feel healthier and adds some flavor without changing the texture.  I also sprinkle a little sugar on top of my biscuits before I pop them in the oven, a handy little trick I picked up from The Flying Biscuit, where the biscuits are large, fluffy, perfect, and lightly sweet on the top.  To be honest, I haven’t ever tried rolling my biscuits out to achieve perfect size and shape, but that extra effort seems so unnecessary after you’ve been reading in bed until your stomach is rumbling, which is how I enjoy spending weekend mornings.

Some vegetarians, including my sister Ashley, don’t enjoy fake meat products like Soysage.  In fact, when I told Ash I was sharing this recipe on sisterfood, I believe her reply was “gross.”  I try not to eat a lot of processed soy products, but sometimes a little soysage hits the right spot.  Nonetheless, the gravy by itself is finger-licking good.  Thanks to The Grit for the use of nutritional yeast and tamari in this recipe.  My friend Chloe, (interestingly the same friend who introduced me to The Grit gravy and the sighter of Le Tigre there – I miss you Chloe!) knew the owner or someone important at Radial and shared a secret to their savory herb-infused gravy: fennel.

Jonathan loves to go out for breakfast, maybe more than any other meal, and we clearly have some amazing restaurants to choose from.  But for those lazy weekend mornings when you don’t even want to get dressed, stuff yourself with so much homemade biscuits and gravy that all you can do is fall back into bed and finish your book.

Vegetarian Biscuits and Gravy

• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1/3 package Lightlife Gimme Lean Sausage Style, crumbled
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2-3 tablespoons flour
• 2 cups milk
• 2 teaspoons tamari
• 4 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 1/4 teaspoon crushed rosemary
• 1/8 teaspoon ground fennel
• fresh ground pepper to taste

Using a medium skillet or saute pan, cook the crumbled soysage in canola oil over medium heat until browned.  Set aside.  Without cleaning the pan, melt the butter then stir in flour to make a roux.  Cook, stirring continuously, for a minute or two until golden.  Whisk in the milk until smooth, then add the tamari, nutritional yeast, rosemary, fennel, and pepper.  Simmer 5-10 minutes until thickened.  Return the soysage to the pan, stir to combine, and spoon over warm biscuits.

Serves 2-4.

Pistachio Ice Cream, As You Please

I had a delicious bowl of pistachio ice cream last night.   Jonathan made it, all by himself.  He shelled all the pistachios by hand, too.  Isn’t that sweet?

First, thank you again to Marisa for the ice cream maker which made this tasty treat possible!  For Christmas last year, she and Jonah gave each sister: a Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker; a Reisenthel Market Basket filled with gourmet goodies like palm sugar, champagne vinegar, pure vanilla bean paste, and Italian herbed salt; AND a hand-typed collection of recipes in a russell+hazel binder, including Marisa’s very own Best Vanilla Ice Cream (which will have to make it’s public debut here on sisterfood sometime).  It was way over the top, thoughtful, generous, and stylish to the max – just like our sister Marisa!

All my sisters know that I love ice cream (I mean, I LOVE ice cream).  They have a story they like to bring up at opportune times, while laughing hysterically, about an instance when we were wee children.  I got up from the dinner table while everyone else was calmly finishing their ice cream and just helped myself to another bowl, without even asking.  I never understand why it’s so funny.  I just wanted some more ice cream – what is this, Oliver Twist?  I don’t remember even getting in trouble, but my sisters were cracking up.  I guess they were shocked that sweet and mild Emily was so emboldened by …. ice cream.

So back to this pistachio ice cream and the present day, when I’m not quite so shy.  As a matter of fact, I can be a little bossy sometimes, particularly in the kitchen.  I like to do things right, and it just so happens that I usually know which is the right way.  I can’t help it that I like to spend hours researching food-related topics!  For example, if I’m going to try making ice cream, I read several recipes, check techniques for cooking custard, then refer to the manual for the ice cream machine.  You could say that I’m thorough.  Jonathan doesn’t always see the necessity of this extensive preparation, and sometimes finds it annoying to be commanded, “wait, no! you have to pour the ice cream in while the paddle is running!”  I am working on this; on not always having things my way, so that Jonathan and I can enjoy cooking together and live happily ever after.

So while I was busy with a landscape design (the same one mentioned over the holiday weekend, getting closer to completion now!), he whipped up some ice cream and I offered no unsolicited advice.  And though I was worried about the custard curdling and the inclusion of some finely chopped pistachios, the texture was right on and the flavor was pistachio-licious.  See?  things don’t have to be so complicated.

Jonathan used “Pistachio Ice Cream II Recipe” from cdkitchen.com.  We both agreed that the cardamom was a little strong, so we recommend halving the amount called for.  But this is Pistachio Ice Cream, As You Please.  You can make it however you like, and have as much as you want!  We promise.

Cherry Berry Pancakes for the 4th

Happy Independence Day! I hope everyone is having a lovely day, preferably outside, to celebrate the summer. I’m off to a slow start this morning as a direct result of Aris and I going to happy hour last night–too many PBR’s and another bar later, we wound up having nachos and chocolate pudding at midnight and watching “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (which Aris had never seen!). We were celebrating being close to wrapping up a project we’ve been working on for awhile that launches in one week.

To cure our mild hangovers and get one of my favorite holidays off to a good start, I decided pancakes were in order. But not just any pancakes, special 4th of July extra delicious pancakes: Roly Poly Pancakes with Cherries and Berries.

I don’t really like most pancakes in restaurants, they’re too think and oddly textured. When going out to breakfast, I am a savory girl–eggs, potatoes, and toast–almost every time, very rarely sweet.

I’m not sure when it started with me and Aris and the pancakes. One day we decided that we loved them more than we knew and started eating them almost every weekend. We made pancakes of every variety–old fashioned oatmeal pancakes, classic white flour, silver dollar, whole wheat, crepes, buckwheat, cornmeal, pecan or other nuts, cinnamon apple, yogurt raspberry, with fruit inside or on top, with sauces and assorted syrups, and my personal all time favorite German Apple Pancake. Over time, our pancakes consumption has tapered off and these were the first pancakes I’ve made in recent memory.

I’m not sure where the name Roly Poly came from, but these are a family favorite that I remember from childhood.  I didn’t have all of the necessary ingredients, so I adapted my mom’s recipe to my pantry’s current contents. I had been wanting blueberry pancakes, but I couldn’t find any around the house. Luckily I had a brand new bag of Trader Joe’s Frozen Cherry Berry Fruit Mix. Though the whole cherries are almost a little large for pancake batter, they are so delicious it’s worth the extra time you need to cook the pancakes to make sure all of the batter around the cherries cooks through. It’s important to have a lot of patience with these and wait until the tops are covered with little pockets before you flip them.

I like to cook my pancakes in butter and then eat them with a drizzle of real maple syrup.

Cherry Berry Roly Poly Pancakes
Adapted from Margy’s recipe

1 cup unbleached white flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
3 TBSP wheat germ
2 tsp baking powder
2 TBSP brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
1 cup milk
2 TBSP vegetable oil
1/2 cup fresh or frozen fruit such as whole dark sweet cherries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries

Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl.
Add egg, milk, and oil.  Mix until smooth and creamy.
Add fruit and stir gently.

Enjoy with maple syrup on a lazy morning.

Watermelon for Breakfast

Happy 4th of July! Jonathan and I actually aren’t doing much to celebrate. We were out of town 3 weekends in June, so we are looking forward to being at home and relaxing . . . and working. I have a landscape design I need to finish and Jonathan is starting to study for his Professional Engineer Exam. But this is a 3-day weekend! So we are leisurely. Reading in bed, then eating watermelon for breakfast on the deck. That’s celebratory!

The weather has been nice this week, for a Hotlanta summer. Highs below 90, a couple nights around 60, and a break from the intense humidity – it’s cool enough to turn off the air-conditioning and open the screen door. Sometimes we bring Isabelle out on the deck with us, which makes her day! She enjoys walking along the railing, inspiring fear in us, yet awe at her grace and agility.

This is the watermelon we bought with the Vidalia onions on our way back from Savannah. I mostly spit my seeds in a little dish, but Jonathan likes to practice his aim by spitting at various targets.

I planted a container on the deck with a lovely rex begonia and some impatiens a month or so ago. As they grow, they’re weaving together beautifully and making me smile.

We’ll be taking the rest of the day as it comes. We may laze about, we may do some of our work (it’s possible!) We may go watch fireworks, or to the movies.  But we’ll definitely be enjoying ourselves and doing things only as the mood strikes – like eating watermelon for breakfast.

Caramelized Vidalia Onions, on Pizza

Jonathan and I went on delightful weekend trip shared with and inspired by our friends Laurel and Katharine. They are doing a 1000-mile bicycle ride along the coast of Maine to Prince Edward Island and back during the month of July. Our 55-mile ride was a warm-up and gear check. We camped on Skidaway Island and rode to Tybee Island to go swimming and picnic at the beach. We ditched the bikes the next day (due to sore butts all around) and walked through beautiful Spanish moss drenched Savannah.

On the drive back up to Atlanta, we stopped at a roadside stand to buy some Georgia peaches, a watermelon, and some genuine Vidalia onions.  Similar to regionally named wines, Vidalia onions are only grown in 20 counties in southeast Georgia, as regulated by state law. They are harvested from late April to mid-June, and sold until fall. They are large, sweet, mild, and perfect for caramelizing! I used to hate onions. Maybe because sharp raw onions give you bad breath and make your fingers stink. But sweet onions are a different story, and caramelized onions are like candy! They are rich, deeply flavored, and surprisingly versatile. Last night, we tried ours on pizza.

Pizza is a Jonathan classic, with homemade crust and all. I will have to share his delicious crust recipe another time. We added some red bell peppers to our caramelized onions for the last five minutes of cooking, then spread the mixture over the tomato sauce. We topped with some rounds and crumbles of goat cheese and baked, then snipped some fresh basil over the top.  We have a little basil plant growing on the deck.

The pizza was amazing. I had been tempted to skip the tomato sauce so as to really highlight the onions, but Jonathan said “then it would be focaccia, not pizza.” It was a good point. The tomato sauce, sweet onions and peppers, and tangy but creamy goat cheese married beautifully. It was also a good summertime pizza: a little lighter and fresher, but packed with flavor – perfect after a long bike ride.

How to Caramelize Onions, Vidalia or Not

Preheat a large heavy skillet over the lowest heat possible. Add equal parts butter and olive oil, about 1 Tablespoon of fat per pound of onions. Slice your onions thinly and add to the pan, tossing to coat. Sprinkle with salt, stir, and cover for the first 10 minutes. They will cook down A LOT, so don’t be shy. You can’t have too many caramelized onions – there are so many delicious ways to use them! This pan has about 2 large onions and you can watch them shrink magically.

Remove the lid after 10 minutes and continue to cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for another 30 to 40 minutes.

When they are totally limp (and you are starting to get impatient), turn the heat up to medium and stir frequently for another 20 minutes or so. They are finished when they are decidedly golden and partially brown. If they started to stick during cooking, splash them with some water, wine, or vinegar and scrape the bottom of the pan to deglaze and reintroduce all those flavorful bits.

Caramelizing onions is simple. All you need is time and patience. If you are short on both, you can cheat and speed things up – I’m talking 20 minutes total: 10 over low heat with the lid on and 10 over medium-high heat with the lid off, just keep up the stirring. The result won’t be quite as fabulous, but it will be passable, and sometimes, that’s just what you need. Try them on pizza, pasta, omelets, sandwiches, burgers, crackers – or even all alone, right out of the pan.

Bibimbap at Genwa

Growing up in Michigan, I never encountered Korean food.  It wasn’t until I moved to California and met my friend Elaine, a first generation American Korean, that I was introduced to kimchee (spicy fermented cabbage), banchan (the assorted side dishes that come before every Korean meal), toasted nori (tasty seaweed strips that are flavored with sesame oil and salt and used to pick up rice), and donuts filled with sweet red bean paste.  I immediately had an affinity for it.  I love spicy foods and the flavors found in Korean cuisine–the sesame oil, the heat from chilies, and the tang from pickling–found a happy home with me.

My absolute favorite dish is bibimbap.  It consists of a bowl of rice covered with assorted vegetables, a fried egg, spicy chili paste called gochujang, and usually beef (though not for my vegetarian self).  In a cuisine where meat appears in most dishes, bibimbap is a vegetarian’s safe haven. Its mix of vegetables is always exciting and often includes mushrooms, zucchini or cucumber, soybean sprouts, daikon, spinach, some mysterious root-like vegetables, and a sprinkling of nori–which are artfully arranged atop the rice. When presented in its most thrilling variation it comes to your table in a sizzling stone pot atop a wooden platter with a large spoon.  The gochujang is added to  your taste and then the large spoon is used to mix everything together, scraping the bottom and sides of the pot so the crispy rice on the edges gets mixed in.  When completely and thoroughly mixed, it is a steaming spicy version of fried rice that will singe your mouth with it’s heat and fill your belly with its goodness.

On Saturday night, I had the pleasure of accompanying Elaine and some other friends to Genwa, a relatively new Korean BBQ restaurant west of Koreatown.  Two of our Korean friends refused to go saying that Genwa is too gentrified, they were not interested in its non-authentic Korean food.  Elaine laughed it off and assured us that Genwa is good, just a bit nicer and more upscale than most of the places in Koreatown. At 7:30 on a Saturday night we walked into an empty restaurant.  I figured it was because the location–a strip mall on Wilshire–is a little odd for a restaurant.  It had a very pleasant atmosphere and we all sat down and ordered a ridiculous amount of food.  The banchan was a nice assortment of long green peppers with a mildy spicy bean paste, kimchee, pickled daikon, spicy pickled cucumbers, some little anchovies, a potato salad, nori strips, and pumpkin pudding for everyone.  Then we had a gigantic salad and the main courses started rolling out.  My bibimbap arrived last and was absolutely gorgeous.  Though the sauce was not nearly as spicy as I’ve had anywhere else, the flavor was quite nice and the vegetables aplenty.  I ate maybe half of it and was too full to try the kimchee vegetable dumplings that arrived late in the meal.