Oh, dear! Is it October already? Off-topic post on websites

This blog was supposed to be about cooking what comes in my weekly CSA box, but life happened, my kitchen is too messy to take pictures in, my brother died, I quit and started and quit drinking, it just was not to be. I'll be back on track again soon, I hope. So this completely off-topic post is about websites.

In 2003 I went with a friend to New Orleans. We attended the Jazz Festival (including a cool jazz shabat at a temple on Charles Street, complete with Ellis Marsalis and a kletzmer band). I took a ton of pictures with my new digital camera. When I got home, I wanted to share the pictures with friends and family, and I knew just emailing them wasn't a good idea. I messed around with AOL's drag-n-drop web page creator for a bit, but in the end I bit the bullet, went to the library and checked out 5 web design books, and spent the next weekend never getting out of my pyjamas. Coincidentally, at the same time, a friend who has a vacation rental house in the Dordogne told me she needed a website to showcase her house. I'm not saying I'm that proud of the site I "designed" for her, but I did figure out how the whole things works. And over the years I tried to keep up (using CSS to style and getting away from table construction, etc.). It's occasionally been additional income to my day job, and I've been able to do things for free or cheap when it's been a worthy cause.

On of my other obsessions (besides food and cooking) is reading, mostly mysteries. I subscribe to a listserv devoted to the topic (though there is more emphasis than I like on TV shows), and it's pretty exciting to read posts by people whose books I admire...like chatting with celebrities.

I think a lot of authors, though, are a bit like my clients. They know they want/need a website, but their main focus (in addition to their day jobs, if they haven't made enough by writing yet to give those up) is writing their books. This can be a big mistake, though.

If you have a website, let me ask you this: who is the host? Who is the domain registrar? When do your hosting/registration expire? If it is set to auto-renew on the expiration date, are you the one who receives the frantic emails notifying you that your credit card has expired? Do you have a user name and password to access this information? Or did you leave all that to your web designer? Let me share with you a quotation from a support person at Dreamhost, where my biggest client is hosted and where a much admired author who posts to DorothyL also has registration and hosting:

Note that access is provided only to the DreamHost account holder, so if you as "the site owner" are not the "account owner" you *will not* be granted access to the account.

The solution for this common scenario is very simple: As site owner you should also be the DreamHost account owner for the account under which your domain is registered/hosted. To set this up any other way (such as with your site being hosted/domain registered under your web developer's account) is not wise, for the very reasons you have seen.

Account ownership has *no relationship" to "site" ownership, and even if you are the "site owner" you will not be given access credentials by DreamHost to any account that you do not own.

So, as you see, if your web designer lives next door, you may be fine, but he or she could be hit by a bus, or just drop out of sight. You need to have control of your website, even if it's only to hand it off to yet another person who knows how to write html. It doesn't matter if your website is www.marysmith.com and you are Mary Smith. If your name is not on the account, it's not your site.

Is it Tuesday already?

Man, I haven't eaten nearly enough of my vegetables.  Better get cracking.  Going to finally fix that salad for lunch and the garbanzo bean/chard dish.  Roasted a truly ancient butternut squash this a.m. (working from home so can take breaks to stick something in the oven, load the washer, etc.); I love the stuff but didn't know it would last so long; going to add a can of sweet potato and make a variation on Heidi Swanson's Thai-spiced pumpkin soup. Guess I'll just sauté and steam the spinach and stick it in the fridge for tomorrow's lunch; had better have another piece of chicken with that, then freeze the remaining pieces and make stock with the bones.  Still haven't braved the dandelion greens and not sure how/whether they will keep.  Going to a continuing ed dinner tonight at Scott's Seafood, where unfortunately I will be eating beef (limited choices at these kinds of dinners and I am really over salmon just now).

Speaking of butternut squash, and this probably won't be an issue again before the fall, that sucker was hard to peel. Usually I chicken out and roast it halved in the oven, then scoop out the good stuff.  But encouraged by a few internet videos, I decided to halve, scoop, peel and cut prior to roasting this time, and all I can say is, if a serrated peeler is what it takes, then I'm going to have to get one.  What an ordeal!  But it smells really nice now, and I am looking forward to all that coconutty and spicy, creamy goodness.

Yesterday made quite a bit of progress in the kitchen, and I was able to fix brown basmati rice and the lamb and fava bean stew.  The stew, in spite of its relatively simple preparation, was delicious.  I left out the sugar, not on purpose, but the tomatoes provided enough sweetness, I think.  The fava beans, after I had parboiled them and tediously peeled them out of their tenacious little skins,  constituted such a tiny pile that I can scarcely credit them with contributing to the flavor of the lamb.  I am running out of mealtimes to eat all this stuff, so they may very well go into the freezer; after all, it will be nice to have a healthy meal ready to nuke when I get home Sunday night!

TJ's Soy Chorizo and other vegetarian things

Finished up the soy chorizo I bought at Trader Joe's last week; had it in my eggs.  It's surprisingly not too bad but I doubt I'll be buying it again.

A much more interesting vegetarian item is this recipe for vegetable stock "base" found on another food blog, crediting in turn a book by Pam Corbin.  Heidi Swanson's blog has a lot of nice lentil recipes; tempted to try the red lentil one.

Having a lazy day today--was not in the plan, but I did work really hard yesterday, so I guess it's okay. Something about a snoozing cat on your legs.  Will roast the chicken for dinner and then pack some of it for the freezer.  All the stuff I am making, actually, will go at least partly in the freezer, as I'm spending the (long) weekend at a meeting in Reno.  This also means I'll have to prep and do something with next week's box, which per the email I received Friday will contain:

carrots
baby spinach
fresh onions
green garlic
sweet potatoes
asparagus
strawberries
dried peaches
French Breakfast radishes
chard
rosemary
Fava beans OR sugar snap peas

I'm looking forward to the sweet potatoes and the rosemary.  Guess the spinach and chard will just need to be sauteed and stuck in the freezer; everything else should keep okay in the fridge for 4-5 days. 

Per Eatwell's newsletter they are having a hard time with the rain, which is having a particularly brutal effect on the strawberries.  I've eaten up this week's already, mixing them with some kiwis I found at Porter's market, along with slightly sweetened Greek yogurt.  Yum.  Also finally squeezed a bag of limes and 4 Meyer lemons and froze them in ice cube trays yesterday--I'll move them into ziplocs then.

Since I struck out on the organic bacon, guess I will use the salt pork I bought a couple weeks ago instead--vagulely thinking of some kind of bean soup when I bought it.  Might as well use it up in the dandelion dish; might need to be parboiled first if too salty.

Kitchen and veggie progress

First some urls for recipes I am choosing:

Lamb with fava beans
Dandelion salad w/hot bacon dressing
Chick peas and chard
Brine for roast chicken

Unfortunately, the kitchen is taking longer to clean than I expected; I've done two loads in the dishwasher and have the prepped vegetables in the fridge, the TJ chicken is brining there, but I've not done any actual cooking yet.  A couple more hours tomorrow morning will do it, though, and then I can probably cook everything but the lamb in the afternoon; I plan to cut the young onions and the carrots, coat them in a little olive oil, and roast them alongside the chicken.  The spinach can be a side dish to the lamb, just steamed w/olive oil and parmesan or butter and raspberry vinegar.


Yesterday was kind of a wash as far as cooking/cleaning.  I ended up spending most of the day shopping.  I had discovered some inexpensive baled glass storage bottles at Ross on Wednesday ($7 for 3), so I decided to check out a couple other local Ross's.  They also had some amazing prices on small ceramic baking dishes, so I picked up a couple of those, too.


I failed to score at the store that was supposed to have the organic pork.  They do have organic chicken, though, and decent-looking seafood, so it wasn't a complete waste.  Then a trek to Grocery Outlet, where I got 15 tins of the yellowfin ventresca.  I put gas in the car, too, so all in all it was semi-productive but didn't get kitchen clean or food cooked.


The good news is that by tomorrow the kitchen should be clean enough that I will be able to take pictures of what I am cooking.

What I am doing with the veggies

It's a little embarrassing, but I have to admit I really need to clean up my kitchen before I can cook in any reasonable way, and so I am using a furlough day today to do just that.  So, just a few thoughts as I enjoy my last cup of coffee before tackling the job.

It doesn't take deep thought to realize a lot of this week's box consists of similar things.  Chard, dandelion greens, and spinach look alike and for the most part cook alike.  I could saute any of them in olive oil with a bit of onion and garlic, and the optional sprinkling of parmesan, and they would be delicious side dishes.  My goal here, though, is to make them the star of the main course, with enough non-meat protein to make them nourishing as well as delicious.  Obviously one way to do this is by adding high-fat elements such as eggs and cheese (the egg-and-chard bake I found at the Sunset magazine website called for 18 eggs!).  I don't really want to go there, though, and at least initially I'd like to avoid hunting down exotic ingredients such as farro.  I have so far found an intriguing-sounding recipe for chard that uses chick peas (garbanzo beans) and tomatoes, so I will probably try that.

Yesterday I was rushing to finish a project at the office, so I actually worked on it in the morning instead of spending time fixing lunch, so all I did was grab 4 of the small carrots and 4 spears of asparagus, along with an organic avocado I'd picked up at TJ's on Tuesday.  At lunch time I was going to buy a side salad from the cafe downstairs, but when I went to the kitchen to wash my salad bowl, I found the leavings of what had obviously been a salad tray for some sort of meeting--happens a lot where I work.  So I took the remaining lettuce and cut veggies, including a few olives, and put them in my bowl with a can of yellow fin ventresca tuna (note to self:  must see if there is any left at Grocery Outlet--the stuff was a steal and is so good!), the sliced avocado, and a little container of vinegar and oil dressing that had also been sitting with the salad remains.  I steamed the asparagus spears in a damp paper towel in the microwave for about a minute and a half and put that in the salad, too.

The peas, in case anyone is wondering, ended up being about a half a cup worth after I hulled them--I popped them in the microwave with a little water, salt, and brown sugar and ate them on the spot.

Last night I didn't use any of the veggies--bad girl!  But, anyhow, I hope to get the remaining stuff prepped and put away properly today.  I have a chicken from TJ's that needs to be roasted, so will probably just do a side-dish kind of prep tonight:  maybe that's a good time to make a lovely salad with the lettuce, with some canned beets and artichoke hearts.  I could stuff the chicken with some sherry-and-onion sauteed rice.  I will report.

First Eatwell Farm CSA Box

I picked up my first CSA box today.  You can see everything in this picture but the asparagus and the punnet of "bad" strawberries, which I have just consumed (delicious!).  The most challenging elements are the dandelion greens, which I have never cooked before, and the fava beans, which are a bit fiddly, needing to be pulled out of their pods and then shucked again after they're cooked.

I think I'll use one of the green garlic bulbs to replace the shallot in Mark Bittman's basic vinaigrette recipe.

Except that I hope to track down a local source of organic bacon Friday to try a Pennsylvania Dutch vinegar dressing for the dandelion greens, I don't really have a plan yet, except that I need to eat at least 2 kinds of veggies every day and have either eaten or prepared and frozen everything before the next box arrives next Wednesday.  All suggestions welcome!

Yet another start

Well, I haven't managed to keep up with my ambitions yet, but I keep picking myself up and starting over.

Last week I came to one new realization:  it's time to just say no to meat from Safeway and its ilk.  I've already signed up for and will take delivery of my first basket of goods from a CSA.  I chose Eatwell Farm, which has a weekly drop-off in Castro Valley.  According to the email I received today, my first load will consist of:

Asparagus
Strawberries (we may only have enough for a few berries per box, and if we get a lot of rain there may not be any!)
Carrots
Fresh Onions
Lettuce
Spinach
Green Garlic
Peas (We're not sure how much we'll have for this week, but you'll get at least a little bit!)
Fava Beans
Chard
Dandelion Greens OR Radicchio

A bit dull, perhaps, as dictated by the season, and I'm going to have to augment the fruit with frozen and farmers'  market, but a few of these items are a bit scary.  I've only made fava beans once, and I remember it was a pretty labor-intensive process.  Dandelion greens, hmm, vague memories of Pennsylvania Dutch bacon vinaigrette shimmer to the surface.

The meat question, though.  I did some research last week into various local CSA and other types of free-range, grass-fed, etc. meat providers. There doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-me solution, so I may have to select a couple of providers, buy a small freezer, and go in with some friends. What's wrong with Safeway? Hormones, cruelty, eco-impact, but also the wasteful assumption that consumers only want the "good" cuts. I can remember picking a random white-paper-wrapped package out of the freezer at my parents' home when I was a kid, and it could be stew meat or steak, we used all cuts--not offal, perhaps, we are after all white bread americans, but certainly not only the grillable. I'm happy to have lamb shanks as well as leg, chops, etc. I could get around some of that by shopping in the Chinese and Mexican markets that surround my neighborhood, but I'm still left not knowing where and how the animals were fed, contained, and slaughtered. Trader Joe's, I thought, might provide a piecemeal compromise, but their lamb, at least when I went to look early this a.m., was all imported from New Zealand--hardly supportive of the world's environment or the local economy. So, in the long run, a small freezer is in my future, and some trips to outlying ranches and farms, and coordination with my friends. In the short run, I have discovered that a local market is a retailer for Llano Seco, an organic pork producer out of Chico, so I'll be checking out Porters Market in the Manor neighborhood of San Leandro tomorrow. I'll be posting photos of my haul tomorrow, and I welcome any ideas for recipes.

Getting Started: Saturday Farmers' Market

So I do a little research on what is likely to be at the market and head down there about 9:30 Saturday morning.  I end up with:

3 tangerines
2 oranges
2 baskets of strawberries

I try to hold back on fruit because I've still got a bunch of geriatric granny smith apples lazing around the kitchen.

Veggies:

1 bunch asparagus
1 small bag of mixed new potatoes
1 bunch dill
1 bunch lemon grass
1 head cauliflower
2 broccoli crowns
2 huge artichokes for $1.50 each, possibly my best coup.

Total expenditure about $25.

I'm going to get the mp3 player and go prep the produce next (listening to the Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith), but just for now, kicking around some ideas for what to do with the swag.

Asparagus:  I can use this at least twice, one serving maybe to be steamed (en papillote?) with a halibut filet I have thawing in the fridge; this will be flavored with ginger, sesame oil, rice wine, spring onions, for a vaguely oriental effect.  Brown basmati rice will accompany this for my dinner tonight.

I'd like to use a funky recipe of Alton Brown's for some of the cauliflower and all the broccoli, which will leave me with half a head of cauliflower to bake or make soup of.

Not sure I'd've let myself be tempted by the potatoes, but with the dill being available, I felt I had to.  We'll see what I find.  The lemon grass makes me want to make some kind of Thai chicken soup; will have to go get one of my staples, frozen boneless chicken thighs, for that.  I've got coconut milk and straw mushrooms in the pantry, and kaffir lime leaves vacuum packed in the freezer.  Maybe some salmon, if it's not already in the freezer, to go with some of the dill, as well.  Artichokes...hmm, big questions is will I take the time to do a hollandaise or just pick up some low fat mayo at TJ's?

Just thoughts for now, time to go prep, then do some paying work.  I'll post back when the plan comes together.

Wednesday: Baby steps

So there I sat Wednesday morning, a work-at-home day, with an eggplant way past its sell-by date and a butternut squash of equal vintage. On my lunch hour the day before I had gone down to Safeway for some basics: low-fat milk, fat-free half-and-half for my coffee, and a cross-rib and a bottom roast, a pair of Cornish game hens, a tray of pork chops, and 3 half-breasts of chicken. I popped all but the cross-rib roast and 2 chops and 1 breast half into the freezer and roasted the beef in the oven. That accounted for dinner Tuesday night and, I afraid to say, breakfast Wednesday, when I took off at noon to pick up a ream of paper and stopped by a nearby Asian market for red Thai curry powder; I picked up a bunch of cilantro and some green onions while I was at it.

That evening, I sautéed the ancient eggplant in a blend of Indian spices and butter, then simmered it until it was soft and delicious. (Note to self: need some new cardamom pods, and where the heck are the cilantro seeds you bought last year?) A little chopped cilantro went on top. At the same time I made some lentils flavored with cumin according to a recipe I found on Chowhound. The lentils would be good for about 3-4 meals, the eggplant for two. The entrée was to be a half breast of chicken prepared according to the Cook's Illustrated methodology; however, when using a probe thermometer to ensure the proper doneness of meat, it's important to actually hook the cord up to the unit. I had some crispy chicken skin and my cat had some shredded, dried out meat.

None of this was rocket science, but it did ensure I had something to take to work for lunch on Thursday and Friday. I'm not saying there were all good dietary choices, but just getting it done is the goal for now. Friday morning I had a pita with scrambled eggs for breakfast and pan-fried the two pork chops in between showering and dressing, so I could take one, with leftover lentils, to work. This would have been great, but I had eaten it all by 10:30, so ended up going down to the Juice Joint for eggplant parmesan and a peanut butter cooking at 3 p.m. This was not in the plan.

On the plus side, I never did want any supper, just had my nightcap of two glasses of low-fat milk.

Renewing the food blog

This blog, with a different name, was originally set up to teach my friend David, who retired to Mexico a couple of years ago, to cook. I could have started a new blog, of course, but I like some of the things I had written, as well as the layout and photo, so I decided to keep them.

This is about a new venture, though, another culinary project, on a path I've been down before: using my love of cooking to help me lose weight and improve my health. My last successful attempt at this was via Atkins/South Beach and involved a lot of exercise. Now I'm older, and issues such as blood sugar, blood pressure, and possibly arthritis have reared their ugly heads, and so I think perhaps an approach that doesn't include huge hunks of fatty meat might be more suitable at this time in my life. (Oh, yeah, there's that exercise thing, too. And the ongoing challenge of defeating alcoholism and depression.)

I'm using three tools: a book by Oprah's Dr. Oz, You on a Diet, a 3-month online subscription to Weight Watchers, and Living Cookbook, software that lets you organize your recipes, meal plans, nutritional info, etc.

The idea is to watch your intake, of course, but this is not your mother's Weight Watchers, and you get credit for eating whole, filling, fiber-loaded foods rather than treating all calories as equal.

As for the ethnic part, I realize a lot of people are blogging about food now. One woman has embarked on the ambitious project of cooking a meal from every country in the world. An admirable endeavor, and you can bet your buppie I will be stealing recipes from her, but her reasons and methodology are different from mine. She is doing research and coming up with a complete, dinner-party-worthy menu for each country, and then she posts background info, music, I'd not be surprised if she makes costumes, too (and I mean that in the nicest possible way).

I'd like to give dinner parties, too, but what I am aiming at is something different: spend two weeks to a month exploring one country's or ethnic/religious/geographic group's cuisine and develop everyday meals that I can incorporate into my daily diet. I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up having some kind of dal pancake for breakfast when this is all done.

To this I want to add the locavore aspect; that is, create menus appropriate to the season. I live in California, where fresh produce of every kind is available not 30 miles from my farmers' market, so why not exploit that?

I think that my first country will be Egypt, and I've two books on order through Link+, due to be delivered to my local library in Alameda County tomorrow, with any luck at all.

In the meantime, I will try to post about things I have been cooking, focusing simply on mindfulness, making things from scratch, and figuring out how to get the stuff done so I'm not required to fall back on fast-food from around my office building or impulse-dial to the pizza man. When my kitchen is sufficiently tidy, I will start posting photos, too!

Just one more note: a lot of food bloggers take the approach: choose a recipe, go shopping for the ingredients, and a couple hours later, voila! A meal fit for Ruth Reichl. But again, I'm more interested in working out a system that works for me. Three days a week I get home at 6 p.m., which conventional wisdom suggests it pretty close to the latest you should be having supper. I have received a lot of inspiration from another two books, Monday to Friday Cooking by Michelle Urvater, and The Pleasures of Cooking for One, by Judith Jones (the editor who pushed for Knopf to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking). I'll review these in more detail in another post, but the short version is that they both give you good ideas about planning your meals a week at a time instead of dinner by dinner.