Zucchini Rice Casserole

When I was in my 20s, I moved into my own apartment for the first time. My mom bought me a set of cutlery, as well as some glasses. Someone gave me a copy of "The Joy of Cooking", and I bought myself "The New York Times Cookbook", written by Craig Clairborne. Another friend came over and laid down new brick colored vinyl tiles in my kitchen, and the pots and pans were salvaged from an assortment of friends and relatives. When I was in my 20s, my cooking came from cookbooks, with additional help from my nose. I would open each jar of herbs and spices, give each a sniff and think "yes" or "no" about including them in the dish I was making. It was just a little scary, deviating from the recipe before me, but somehow I trusted my nose, and the dishes were usually quite edible.

When I met my husband and moved to New Mexico, I rarely got to cook. Bob loved cooking, and I was his sous-chef. He would tell me what he wanted chopped or sliced, and I would watch as he deftly maneuvered pots, pans, water, oil, various meats and vegetables. He opened jars of spices and threw handfuls into the pot without ever sniffing them. Then he'd walk over to the fridge and look into the door compartments or the bins below the shelves for something he might have forgotten. The first time I saw him cook, it was also a little scary. He was so brazen with his use of herbs and spices, I imagined that the outcome would be more than my palette could handle. He never followed a recipe. His food is what truly won my heart.

From Bob I learned to start with what I've got in my fridge. I learned not to be shy with my ingredients. That garlic needn't be doled out in half teaspoons, and that mushrooms could be thought of as an herbal addition to other veggies instead of being used as a vegetable dish. And I learned about prinicples - that if a recipe called for lemon, for instance, and I didn't have any, I could use a bit of vinegar instead. It would give me that sour taste. Or that beer was a perfectly good liquid to add to a stew, even if I didn't drink it as a beverage.

Now I live on my own again in a small house, and create meals which I can use all week. I start with what I've got in my fridge because shopping for food trumps shopping for clothes in my book, so my fridge usually has interesting ingredients. I love my farmer's market and the organic produce I get at various markets. With a few fresh ingredients and a little imagination, I now find it easy to throw together a dish which can satisfy for days. This one was made with the skills I learned from Bob and it had organic zucchinis and cherry tomatoes, onions and garlic, herbs, rice, and peccorino-romano cheese sprinkled liberally on top. And I ate it with a fork which I still have from my first apartment, on a plate which I inherited from my mom.

Boring meals and bad photos

I can be a bit obsessive. For instance, when I start on a project that interests me, I have a hard time tearing myself away from it and going to sleep. When I was a child, this translated into reading in bed under the covers with a flashlight. (Didn't everyone do that?) And then the next morning telling my mom that I felt awful and my stomach hurt and my head ached. She'd let me stay home from school, and once she and my dad were gone, I'd grab that book and spend the day in bed finishing it.

Nowadays this obsessive tendency manifests as an inability to turn out exciting meals. I rely on my old standbys - a scrambled egg, a roast chicken, open a can of salmon and make salmon salad - a bit of celery, some onion, a squeeze of lemon. No more capers left in the fridge. Oh well...at least I've got bread in the freezer, and the lettuce is still recognizable. It will do.

I've never been a food photographer. I marvel at the way so many of you make me want to jump through the screen, fork in hand, and start digging in. This is a special talent which I do not possess. Instead, I am primarily a people photographer, interested in travel, photography and writing. And that, my dear readers, is where I've been for the last...almost month. I've been re-doing my photo website. Because good has never been good enough. So I've been at work on my images, creating a new look to the site, and making it feel more the way I want it. It's been exhausting. I fall into bed at weird hours, my neck aching from sitting in front of my computer for so long. All of this has been inspired by a photography workshop I took in March in Santa Fe.

But at long last, I can say that I am happy with the results. Yesssss!!! If you are interested in visiting the site, here's the link: wanderingeye-photo.

I should mention that my sister is having one of those "big" birthdays in June, and I have decided to put together a slide show for her. Photos of her when she was a child, all the way through the present tense, adding appropriate music. Another big project, but not quite as big as redoing my website. I will try to visit everyone's blog, but if I don't get to yours, please understand. I will be back. Promise!

In the meantime, I have posted a lousy photo of a pretty good stir-fry I threw together recently. It was some crazy hour of the nite when I photographed it and couldn't stand the yellow color of everything. So I did something, and right now I can't remember what it was. The result? Pink peppers. Yuck! At least the stir fry tasted good.

Sometimes food is more than food....

Dear Mom,
I made matzohbrei this morning and thought of you....standing there in your blue robe, the skin on your arms grown almost paper thin, your nails perfectly polished. You held the spatula and waited patiently as the egg and matzoh mixture simmered slowly. Periodically you would carefully lift an edge and peer under to see if the underside was done - a toasty golden brown.

I see you in your kitchen, surrounded by the things of your life - your Good Housekeeping cookbook, the small, cream-colored pitcher with the gold band around it, the beautiful cobalt and white bowl in which you kept fruit - bananas for dad's cereal, oranges because you lived in Florida at the time and could get them even sweeter than those of my childhood...perhaps grapes, if they looked good. New things are in that kitchen, too -- your George Forman grill (did you use it more than once?) and a brand new, red tea kettle. ("Please drain and dry it after using it!")The radio is on, playing classical music softly in the background, (sorry, but I had to change it from that "elevator music" that you had going when I first arrived. Not that you minded classical, but the elevator stuff was much more consistent, like a daily dose of oatmeal), and we sat down to eat off your Blue Danube dishes.I have those dishes today, but not the tall, clear plastic pepper mill in which you kept black and white pepper corns, which I used in abundance on my matzohbrei. Nor do I have the etched crystal glasses with the round blue bases - almost like wine glasses without stems. I don't have the beautiful linen tablecloth and napkins, or the "good" silverware we used for our seders. And most importantly, I don't have you.Are there foods which play an important role in your life - not because they are elegant, or complex and rich, but because they evoke your childhood?

I'm back....

Springtime can be unpredictable in Santa Fe. I drove there for a week to do a photo workshop in portrait photography - not studio work, but working under all kinds of conditions - from the streets of the city, to being outdoors in the blazing sunlight in the middle of the day, to being indoors in a Harley dealership under fluorescent lights. The week started and ended with a blizzard...
I was a little concerned because my car didn't have snow tires and has rear wheel drive. But "fiddle-dee-dee", I said, and drove off to the workshop, conducted by the Santa Fe Photography Workshops and taught by Paul Mobley - a commercial photographer whose major interest is in photographing people. His latest book - "American Farmer - The Heart of Our Country" - is available on Amazon. It's filled with gorgeous, heart-felt photographs and touching stories from farmers and ranchers across this entire country. I know that if you're reading this blog, it's because you have an interest in food - cooking it and eating it. Well, this book fills in another piece of that story - the people who grow and raise the food for us - and it presents them with great dignity.
So, as I started to say, springtime can be unpredictable in northern New Mexico. The workshop started with a dinner given in a lovely gated community near the workshop facilities. When I arrived in Santa Fe, it was sunny. By the time I finished having lunch with a friend and finding my way to the house I was staying it, it had begun to cloud over. By the time I left for the dinner, I was driving in blizzard conditions. I managed to make it both there and back, even though the street sign was covered in snow by the time I drove home.
The next morning proved....interesting. All of the windows of my car were covered in sheets of ice. Needless to say, I didn't have an ice scraper. I live in San Diego, after all. I found a package in the trunk for a wheel lock (don't ask me what that is!), which comes with the cardboard on the back and that molded plastic on the front -- you know the kind - the stuff that you need a hacksaw to tear open? I used it to chop away at the ice on the windshield. It barely budged. My windows wouldn't go down, either, as they were frozen in place. So I held the door open with one hand and backed slowly out of the driveway, leaning out of the car to see where I was going. Fortunately, no one was coming, and I managed to maneuver myself onto the road with no mishaps.
But I knew I couldn't drive the 4 minutes to the workshop with the door open and my head hanging out of the car. So I pulled over, grabbed my improvised snow scraper and began hacking away again at the ice. This time I was more successful, chipping out a modest hole in the front and back, and a small hole on the side window. It was just enough visibility to ensure that I wasn't hitting anything, and I made it to the workshop, although I was shaking a little by the time I got there.
I knew that if I could make it there, then by the time we took off for the day's shooting, the sun would be out and the ice would have melted, which is exactly what happened. The rest of the week was sunny and warm - perfect spring weather. and then the last day - snow again!
But as they like to say in New Mexico, if you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes. It will change. And so it did...
Anyway, that's where I've been and what I've been doing lately. Not much cooking - eating out in restaurants instead. That's something I rarely do at home. One of my classmates took some shots of the food at Maria's - my favorite New Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe - but so far I haven't received them. If I do get them in a reasonable amount of time, I'll post them. If not, I will no doubt have lots more to post here of my own cooking. I'm still editing and sorting when I'm not at work. But my kitchen will not remain idle for long - it's still my favorite room in the house!

Oh - and if any of you are interested, here's a link to the final show of the students' work from the workshop. What I can tell you is that the people who walked in the door were snapshot photographers at the beginning of the week, and photographers by week's end. Paul was truly an amazing teacher!
Friday Nite Show

Fresh, fresh, fresh

I once tried to do a week's worth of cooking based on the alphabet. I don't know what came over me, but I decided that I'd try making each meal with the main ingredients of only one letter. For "A", I think I might have used apples, but I could have just as easily used "Asian pears". (I'm flexible. I don't recall now what I paired that with (Angus beef?)"B my name is butternut squash"....and I'd be delicious with bass..C is easy. I love cauliflower! And it could be paired with crab, or made into a chowder with corn.
D can be done with delicata squash..and Dover sole?You get the picture. The only important thing then, as it is now, is that the food be fresh.

I'm not sure how far down I made it before I was invited out to join other people for dinner. There's no way to do this in a restaurant, so that ended my alphabet soup. Or stew. Whatever.

Have you ever done anything quite this crazy? What's your version of playing with your food?

Lox, because I can

When I was growing up on Long Island, lox and bagels were standard Sunday morning breakfast. Sometimes we would be treated to smoked whitefish too, but lox was a given. That and the Sunday New York Times. My parents would disappear behind the paper while my brother would either be teaching me some math he had learned (he was 2 years ahead of me in school), or we'd finish our bagels and head off to the basement where he'd be building his latest radio.

When I was growing up I never gave a thought to where lox came from, because I knew where it came from. It came from Max's delicatessen. That's where all the best stuff came from, including the best stories. It was kind of the central point of town, and every one of my parents friends shopped there, and everyone had their own funny story of what happened that day at Max's. Max was a character, to say the least. To begin with, Max was not actually his real name, but when he bought the store sometime before recorded history, it had a sign on it that said "Max's Delicatessen". So rather than change the sign, he changed his name.

My favorite story is one which could never happen in today's world, but is indicative of what it was like back in the days when people trusted each other. Max had a policy of giving any cop who was on his beat a sandwich for a quarter. Yes, you read that right - 25 cents. While it's true that everything cost less back then, 25 cents was still cheap enough to not cover his cost, I'm sure. But Max did it anyway. Max also used to yell at everyone who came into the store "Whaddaya want to buy this junk for???" Everyone laughed and Max would laugh too. One day Max looked out the window and saw a cop about to write a ticket for one of his customer's cars which was double parked outside. Max dropped his knife and ran out the door shaking his fist and screaming "If you give my customer a ticket, I'll poison you the next time you come in here!!!" The cop put away his book, and walked away laughing, as did everyone in the store. No one left Max's hungry, and no one left grumpy.

So, back to the lox. We always bought it from Max's, and it was always sliced paper thin, which was just the way we liked it. I've had different versions of it since then, and while I've always loved lox, some is better, and some - while perfectly edible - isn't the best. It wasn't until years and years later, at one family gathering at my brother's house, when my niece Rachael (who is a rock star chef, if you want my opinion) brought gravlox which she had made, that I realized that people actually could make lox. Not only that, but it could be smashingly good. Now, I know that gravlox is lox with a college education, but still, when you get down to it, we're talking salmon which has been salt cured.

Fast forward again to another family gathering (we do love to get together!), this time at my other brother's house in Florida, and my sister in law served lox and bagels for breakfast. It was terrific, and when I asked her where she got it, she said "I make it." (She's from Siberia.) "You did?" "Yes. It's seeemple. You just take 3 tablespoons salt to one tablespoon sugar. You mix together and then rub all over salmon. Cover it and leave it on counter over night. In the morning, there will be water in dish. Dump out water, wash salmon, take paper towel and dry. Rub a little olive oil on it and put in refrigerator for 3, 4 days. You have lox."

I've been making it ever since. I miss going to Max's and hearing him shout at everyone. But at least I can have lox any time I want - even on a Tuesday.

One Note: Use the fattiest lox you can find - it's better.

Crab Chowder for a Rainy Day

Or should I say rainy week? It's not that I'd want to live in a place where it rains all the time, but I do love the rain we're having. I wish I had the time tomorrow to drive up to the Laguna Mountains to photograph in the snow. It seems to fall on the evenings where I have to go to work the next day. Most uncooperative! When I was up there last weekend, it looked like this:
It was raining when I took that photo. I drove up hoping that when I got above 4,000 feet I'd find some snow. No such luck. The predictions are that the snow levels should be down around 3,000 feet this evening. The photo above was taken closer to 6,000 feet. I'd love to see the world blanketed in white, and have the sounds of traffic muffled by the snow. If it lasts until Thursday, maybe....just maybe....

But the canyons are green and the little seeds I've planted from those heirloom tomatoes I bought at the farmer's market are getting a good soaking. I'm excited about having tomatoes in my garden again this year. Meanwhile the chard is up and thriving, and I also planted radicchio for the first time. Why not? That's something that makes San Diego special -- all the things that grow here with barely a nudge from me.

I don't have a fireplace in my little house, but if I did, I'd certainly fire it up. These days are made for fireplaces and soups. I think when I was younger, I had this fantasy of being able to spend my winter days curled up in front of the fireplace with a good book, some classical music playing softly, and a bowl of hot soup on the table next to me. Well, I've got the classical music. I've even got an incredibly good book I've been reading -- "The Short Stories of Lydia Davis". She's a spare writer with an astonishing grasp of psychology. And now, thanks to a little "extra" time (what on earth is that supposed to mean?), I've got a rich, warming soup.
Chowders are wonderful repositories for this and that - the things you don't have a lot of but which add depth and complexity to a meal. I've made clam chowder before, and I thought of this as a variation on that theme. With some milk and fish stock as a base, you can pretty much add any of the standards of a good chowder. For me that included a couple of small potatoes I had gotten at the farmer's market - red ones that hadn't made it into another dish. I started with them, some onions, a couple of stalks of celery, a little garlic (of course!) and a red pepper, sliced and put into a pot to saute in butter before adding the stock and milk.

I'm usually conscious about the amount of fat I consume, but this rain and the cooler temperatures it brings has made me crave more of it than usual. So instead of using Earth Balance, I used real butter. Even added some cream to make it richer. Let's just say that when I decide to "sin", I don't mess around! I used canned crab meat, but if you've got the time and patience, you could use fresh, and you could combine different kinds of crab meat - snow and king are good choices. And because there was a little bit of corn left in that bag in the freezer, I threw it in as well. A pinch of salt, a dash of sugar and another dash of cayenne pepper brought the whole thing together.

The only part of the picture that doesn't match that fantasy? I have to work tomorrow. But fortunately I enjoy what I do! And I'll have some wonderful leftovers waiting for me at the end of the day.