Chaos By Choice: Polenta Fruit and Jam Cake

-Tasty cakes for when things are literally being torn down around you.-

My bare feet are currently covered dust. Ceiling dust, mind you. Let's be very specific. It is dust from the ceiling as opposed to common floor dust. This fact alone is alarming because it's very difficult to get ceiling on your feet.

Then again, so it is with home repair. The odd often becomes quite unsurprising, if not altogether lackluster and common. Wires reaching out from gaping holes in the wall. Water pooling about in the living room. The fridge is also screaming at me in a shrill tone. Something to do with the wiring in the wall that my contractor was working on set another something off. Now it sounds like a warning alarm, as if the condiments and produce are preparing to storm the kitchen and I should bastion myself in the bedroom before their revolution begins. (Can you hear the pea shoots sing?)

We're finally getting around to a bit of home repair - some necessary electrical work in the walls and a few minor upgrades while we're crawling about the attic. There's reggae music and conversations in Oaxacan dialect serenading me from above and it's all rather surreal if not also somewhat entertaining. If you've never heard Bob Marley's, "Jamming," in Spanish while people saw apart your home it's quite the auditory mindfuck.

Gone But Still Here: Coffee Bean Chocolate Chip Cookies

-"There's milk in the fridge.-

(Originally posted in 2011)

Brian has been rather busy lately and as such I barely see him it seems.

I don't think I've actually ever explained what he does. He's in the army reserves (the threat of deployment always hovering) as a staff sergeant and CPR/First Aid instructor. He also goes to school for his EMT license, which is insane as he's a seasoned combat medic with the army, but somehow the fact that he can patch up a collapsed lung under gunfire the civilian world says he still isn't qualified to be a basic nurse. During all this he just picked up work doing security. It's not a job he is thrilled with, but he likes his coworkers, it works around his school schedule, and pays him rather well.

The serious downside to his job is that as he's the new guy he gets the crap schedule. This means late night and swing shifts on random days. It means when I get home from my 8-5, he's already left for his 5-1.

It means we can go days without seeing each other.

And it sucks.

Passover Potluck: Honeyed Kumquats

So this thing right here. This.

You want this.

Kumquats preserved in honey.

It is all that it sounds to be. Sultry, sexy, seductive. Kosher. (Sexy kosher.)

I've teamed up with the ever fabulous history buff and kitchen scholar, Tori Avey, for her annual Passover Potluck. She challenged a few non-Jewish food bloggers to try and cook something nifty following the proper Passover culinary guidelines. For a lapsed Lutheran like myself than meant kumquats and honey.

I highly recommend it, so get yourself over to ToriAvey.com and check it out.

Wine and Cheesy Poofs

-Cheesy poofy goodness.-

"I'm bringing champagne," might well be the most uplifting sentence in the history of mankind.

I have a few friends who work in wine, and Chris - who brings me champagne and the occasional rose of interest - is one such person. He's a former opera singer turned semi-professional sommelier who both adores and despises his line of work. When it comes to enological knowledge he's a man that - by the young age of late-twenty-something - has earned his stripes.

Even better is the fact that he's rather blasé about his line of work - which is a good thing, I think. There's been actual conversations of what wine pairs well with what Star Trek series. I firmly believe that is information that should be put on a poster somewhere because when is that not going to come up at some point? Furthermore, while I trust his expert opinions on what wines to buy at my very nonprofit-slash-freelancer budget, I've seen him hold up a bottle and, upon my inquiry, his response was, "I don't know. It was $8."

One must appreciate a wine aficionado who chucks pretense for Two Buck Chuck.

Yet, the last thing he'll want to do is cook something up to pair with wine. Or, talk about it when he's not at work. God forbid you recommend taking a trip to a winery on your vacation as it will induce a cringe so fierce it will reverberate out from his body and shake the very walls of the room you're in.

So as he texted that, indeed, there would be champs I proposed to make cheesy poofs - or as I suppose some like to call them gougeres. (Grammarians and linguists, please use the grave accent in your head as I cannot for the love of god recall how to type it.) Bits of egg and flour mixed with a practically inappropriate amount of cheddar and Parmesan baked into airy, crispy puffs.

Terribly addicting and the perfect pairing for champagne. If you desire you can cut them open and stack  them with aioli, arugula, and pancetta for simple sliders. What I love most is how stupidly easy they are: Boil. Mix. Spoon. Bake. Yet the payoff is huge and upon eating them hot out of the oven you're considered a pastry wizard and that's a pretty darn awesome title to have.

Indeed, if there is a most complimentary sentence in the English language, then it must be, "I'm baking gougeres!"

I've been using this recipe as of late. It's a few more dishes, but there's no pastry bag involved (which I love) and I find the consistency is far more reliable than others I have tried. Give it a whirl and let me know how it pairs with your bubbles.

Garrett out.

P.S. If you haven't yet, I would highly encourage you to please follow my Instagram account. Instagram is what I've been using for images for this blog for sometime now, but I realized I never really promoted it. Ever. So, please be sure to subscribe. You'll find a lot of food porn that never makes it to the blog! User name is protogarrett, because some dumb hooker has been sitting on vanillagarlic for three years and not using it.  

 -For all your drinking needs.-

Apricots and Kumquats: Fighting the Nor Cal Winter

-Royal Rosa apricot blossoms. This tree is only a few years old and it's going bonkers.-

Somehow we will survive this trial. I know you on the East Coast are going on your, what, tenth snow day is some places? Roads are shut down. You're trapped in your home with children (read: ankle-biting, stir-crazy goblins). You're doing things like salting the drive and snow-plowing, things I've only heard about in stories.

We on the West Coast are suffering as well. Have you heard about the record drought? The utter lack of water from the sky? It might mean nothing to you now, but when California is producing much of the meat and produce the rest of the nation consumes you'll feel it in your pocket book this spring and summer when the cost of fruits and vegetables skyrockets to two bucks per stick of celery.

-Too. Many. Kumquats.-

I'm trying my best to survive it. This Valentine's Day I braved into the 80 degree weather in shorts and a t-shirt. I plucked fifteen pounds of kumquats off the tree. Took an hour. Tree is laughing at me. Telling me to 'eff off. It groans in a mocking tone wighted with easily another hundred pounds of fruit.

Bernadette the Apricot Tree is in full freaking bloom. In February. The hell? At this point I almost have to hope there's no crazy rain storm like last year when spring hit us in February. All the stone fruit bloomed early and crazy March rains knocked off every last blossom and fruit. (It's why your cherries were so bloody pricy in 2014.)

It's a burden, but we Californians will survive.

Do not weep for us, rather, cheer us on.

Garrett out.