Food Archives - Page 2 of 3

Coffee week: 1

November 2, 2015 by Laurie King 13 Comments

My husband was a tea man. He drank proper tea, from a pot, and although he was a truly and creatively dreadful cook, Noel made a better pot of tea than I did.

Coffee, though: that was all me. I have a long history with coffee. When I was putting myself through university, I worked in a coffee store called the Bean and Leaf, which sold, as one might guess, coffee beans and tea leaves. A few years later, a friend started up a coffee store in Los Gatos, and I was about the only person he knew with any actual experience with coffee apart from drinking it. So he hired me to set up and manage the store.

(This was at the same time I was starting my theology MA, and becoming involved in a whirlwind romance with my husband. Hey, why not?)

We called the store Kaldi’s, after the mythic goatherd who noticed his goats acting particularly frisky one day after they’d been eating the red berries from a shiny-leafed bush.

(My friend Ken Orrett painted a fabulous mural on the wall: goats, coffee, and dancing goatherd.)

Kaldi gathered some of the red berries, rubbed off the outer hull, and dried them in the sun on long tarpaulins—wait, no, that was in Papua New Guinea when I was there in the eighties.

But be it an early goatherd or highland PNG or a coffee house in Santa Cruz, the inner beans get roasted, ground, and brewed into…ahhhh.

I may drink tea that’s been brewed in “bandages,” but when it comes to coffee, I’m a purist, and a snob.

Tomorrow: JS Bach, coffee lover.

Tea and the Death of Civilization

October 27, 2015 by Laurie King 40 Comments

I start my day with two (large) cups of camellia sinensis, which has a fraction of the caffeine that coffee does, and allows me to ease into the day rather than hit the ground running.

Yes, this is black tea (as opposed to herbal tea, which M. Poirot calls his tisane, or Mma Ramotswe’s bush tea, which is Rooibus.) My first cup has a slight taste of almond in it, to build up my immunity to…um, no, wait, it’s just almond, not cyanide, and I like it because it’s friendly. My day’s second has been, for a long time now, Peet’s Russian Caravan blend, a blend of Chinese black teas with a trace of smoky Lapsang.

Green teas, where the leaves are immediately treated with a quick steam and a fast dry, are the more delicate product of camellia sinensis, refreshing and slightly bitter, particularly in the Japanese form. Here’s what they look like growing around a small settlement in Honshu.

Black tea is the same leaf, only fermented—or rather, oxidized, with the freshly picked leaves left to wither for a while, then battered around and left to darken before being dried, then sorted. “Orange Pekoe” (which has nothing to do with oranges) refers to the grade of tea, the fresh tip and bud of new growth. (“Fannings and dust,” on the other hand, are the very lowest grades of tea, being what’s left over when the good stuff is picked off, and those are what go into most tea bags.) And Lapsang Souchong is a Chinese treatment of the lower-quality leaves (ie, not the tip) by smoking them over a fire, which gives you the Laphraoig of the tea world. A cup of pure Lapsang is a bit assertive for most tastes, but often adds a thread of interest to more mellow teas. Such as, yes, Russian Caravan.

To my great sorrow, Peets tea is no more. My last tins of Russian Caravan are slowly disappearing over the horizon, and although I know there are substitutes—I could even blend my own, I suppose—my mornings just won’t be the same.

Now, George Orwell had some firm ideas about the making of tea—“one of the main stays of civilization.”

From the Telegraph.

In 1946, when England was under rationing, he wrote an essay about the art, noting that the manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

His eleven golden rules (the essay is here; do read it) begins with using Indian or Ceylonese tea, and goes on to insist on a warmed teapot and sufficient tea for a strong cup. (“All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.”)

He continues: The tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. Then, the water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. After which one stirs the tea, lets it steep, pours it into a tall, not shallow cup, and adds milk (without the cream) to it. This is important: tea first, then milk.

Me? I am a sinner, at all levels. I even admit to what my mother’s English aunts would have scorned as “tea in bandages.” Beyond that, I imprison the Russian Caravan (which comes as loose leaves) in what would cause Mr Orwell to rise and declare the death of civilization: a filtering device made out of nylon mesh that drops into my cup.

And, I use an electric kettle that probably fails to keep the water at precisely 212°.

Oh, the shame. Well, at least I pour in my milk (non-creamy) afterwards.

I am more of a snob with my coffee, but let’s talk about that another time.

Another weird foodstuff

October 2, 2015 by Laurie King 6 Comments

Long-time followers of my Mutterings will be aware that I like to try weird fruits and veggies. I just came across another one:

It’s called Melothria scabra, also known as mouse melon, which is a particularly adorable name. It’s a type of cucumber that looks like a grape-sized watermelon, and in fact tastes a bit like a watermelon rind, crunchy and a bit sour.

Do you have any weird fruits & veggies that you particularly like, that I should watch out for?

Meeting Mamay

July 5, 2015 by Laurie King 6 Comments

I can’t resist new life forms, particularly when they inhabit fruit and vegetable stands. The other day I wandered into the one in the Stanford shopping center, and spotted a soft, heavy football with a scratchy skin. It wore a nametag: Mamay.

Hello, Mamay.

Mamay is a Cuban native weighing two or three pounds, which is a lot of fruit if you don’t like the flavor. But I did. It’s a delightfully weird fruit, not super sweet, with the texture of baked sweet potatoes and an overtone of its relative, the sapote (known in India as the chiku.) It has a giant and very shiny seed (the one in the photo is nearly the length of my hand) which was sprouting merrily inside. However, I was relieved to read that the seeds don’t necessarily grow true to type, because I’d have felt obligated to put the thing in my garden, and there I would have been, standing on the street giving away three-pound footballs that taste like sapote crossed with sweet potatoes.

Fiddleheads!

April 21, 2015 by Laurie King 22 Comments

A while ago I was at San Francisco’s Ferry Building on a Saturday morning, when the place just explodes into the Bay Area’s most fantastic farmer’s market. And so I bought…stuff. Berries and Chinese broccoli and hot sauces and things I knew. But the fun part of a market like this is the produce you don’t know. So I bought a little punnet of fiddleheads–fern shoots. Aren’t these just the cutest thing in the world?

The seller told me that, being Western fiddleheads, they needed two trips through the blanching pan, so I did that, and then sautéd them in some butter. They taste vaguely artichoke-ish, and they’re firmer than I expected. Whenever I cook something new I make it very basic, so I taste what it is rather than the flavorings. Next time I might use garlic, and a flavored oil.

Have you tried fiddleheads? Any other odd veggies you love?

MWA cooks

March 24, 2015 by Laurie King 5 Comments

So, this crime writer walks into a kitchen…

Or maybe a bar—it depends on what story you’re after, and what you’re hungry (or thirsty) for.

Whether it’s drinks to curl your hair or a soup to warm your heart, Kinsey Millhone’s peanut butter & pickle sandwich or Valentine Wilde’s chicken fricassee, or maybe a cup of Jack Reacher’s coffee with one of Mrs Hudson’s coffee-sheet cookies, there’s enough here to keep you fed and watered for weeks to come.

Besides that, the book is really gorgeous–

with pictures of scampi & bullets, spaghetti & pistols, and food porn that makes you want to ring up Nero Wolfe and invite him over for a plate of Alafair Burke’s run-soaked Nutella French toast. Check it out, here.

Pardon me, I’m feeling a bit peckish. Maybe it’s time for me to slip out to the grocery store…

The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook is available today, from your local Indie bookseller, from Barnes & Noble, from Amazon—or until April 3 you can enter to win a copy at Goodreads.

The Mystery Writers Cookbook, by a hundred or more of us murderous sorts: recipes to kill for.

Mary Russell’s Coffee Maker

September 3, 2014 by Laurie King 23 Comments

Coffee plays a large role in the Russell memoirs, and I believe we can now see the kind of pot the Holmes household possesses:

Love the Boing Boing channel.

The covered market

August 8, 2013 by Laurie King 7 Comments

One of the chief reasons I always stay within striking distance of Oxford when I come to England for a few weeks is the Covered Market.
The Market is a Victorian glass cover over a hive of shops, from carrots to watches, shoes to fresh pasta, coffee to cheese. It’s where I head if I crave those gorgeously fresh, tender English strawberries–the kind that reveal tiny wisps of the actual straw that has cushioned the berries from the ground–or a loaf of the wholemeal bread I’ve tasted from nowhere else in the world.
I understand the Oxford city council is about to make a series of rent increases that will drive many of these independent retailers out of the Market, which would be a tragedy. Mary Russell passed through here, drank tea here at Brown’s Cafe,

dodged delivery vans here.

During the times I’ve lived in Oxford, I’ve passed by the supermarket fruit-and-veg departments to shop at Bonner’s, where the men who worked the stall did all the math in their head. (Of course, if they were wrong, would I have known?) The younger generation now uses paper, but the fruit-and-veg are still superb.
If they disappear from the Market, Oxford will be the less for the absence.

There’s some interesting history of the covered market,

here

. And if you would like to sign a petition to help save the market, that is

here

Summer delights

June 26, 2010 by Laurie King 9 Comments

Oh, I do love this time of year, every morning:

Strawberries, pineapple, blueberries, and raspberries.

Ahhh.

Flowers for Christmas dinner

December 16, 2009 by Laurie King 14 Comments

Jeezie Louisie, I look up from digging myself out from under a pile of papers and computer tasks and find that in nine days we’ll be sitting down to the traditional pumpkin pie breakfast with a heap of wrappings burying the carpet. How the hell did that happen? What happened to the memo cancelling November?

I blame two of the women in my life: my editor, who deliberately chose to drop the proofs onto my desk the week before Thanksgiving, and my daughter, who dawdled overseas instead of coming in the door on December 1st demanding that we set up the Christmas tree. And since the tree is usually the thing that gets me moving (must be the smell that triggers the reaction of Fir tree=shopping impulse) and we’re not getting the tree until Monday (and I just don’t want to think about the Charlie Brown trees that’ll be available then) I’m only now turning my mind to the question of Christmas.

And to the Christmas meals.

The night before Christmas, I like to keep the food light but festive. Some years we’ve done crab or shrimp along with a soup that balances those flavors, but since I don’t much like seafood in general and shellfish in particular, I can now use an excuse a new Jewish family member to remove them from the options. I may take another look at the take-away menu of the Gayle’s Bakery & Rosticceria (fabulous food, as are Gayle and Joe themselves) so I can join the festive and put off the work.

But for the 25^th itself, my family is adamant: Christmas equals turkey. Even if we’ve just managed to get the bones and leftovers out the door from Thanksgiving, we have to have turkey, a form of protein that rivals tofu on the boringometer. Which means that I have taken to playing with all the peripheral elements of the meal. One year I substituted celery root for some of the potatoes in the mashed potatoes. I often start with a small serving of tart crunchy salad (again I often depend on celery root here) balanced by a tiny cup of sweet, rich soup (cream of carrot with a pear tossed in, perhaps, or something with chestnuts) just to set up the taste buds for dinner. And although parsnips are not a part of our traditional family diet (my mother must not have liked them) I often make the yams roasted, tossed in a bag along with some cut up parsnips and a bit of oil and salt, and roasted high after the turkey comes out.

But I’m thinking this year of doing delicata flowers instead.

Delicata squash are one of the gifts of the modern foodie movement, that has brought us arugula and brown mushrooms. They’re small and elongated, the perfect size if you want to split them lengthwise and fill them with anything—sauteed vegetables and ricotta cheese are a favorite here—but the great thing is, the skin is tender enough to eat. So if you choose the delicatas with the most raised ridges to them, and just slice them crosswise, you end up with these very interesting rings. Drop them into a plastic bag with a little olive oil, salt, and whatever spices go with the dinner you have planned—Chinese five spice powder, Mexican chili mix, Moroccan spices or just cinnamon and nutmeg—then roast them in a nice hot oven for twenty minutes or so, turning once on the cookie sheet. Voila: delicata flowers.

Your family won’t even notice the turkey.

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