Home of the Snarkmaiden

I was going to say that I may be less active with the writing here because school starts Wednesday (Wednesday! What rational school starts classes on Wednesday?) and I'm taking another run at third year Mandarin. Which always does a number on my free time (Mandarin, I mean, not the second run at third year, which, of course, I've not done before so there's no "always" about it.) But it's hard to be less active here than I've already been, thank you very much. I think my writing brain is off again. This happens sometimes. My process and focus wander hand in hand into drawing brain or language acquisition brain or having pointless arguments on the SMOFS list brain, and the writing brain just decides to take a nap. I find myself going along through my life occasionally thinking of things that would make a start of a post or an essay or even a story but then they just bubble away into the ether before I actually set anything down.

Saturday we got together with Scott and Carl, who'd looked out for the house and cats while we went down to Mariposa. They were down for the Kent Saturday Farmers Market (Scott and Carl, that is, the house and cats already being in Kent) and stopped in to drop off the keys. After the initial chit-chat, we all went down to the market. Scott picked up yet more hot peppers from the Mexican-American family farm, even though he's already made three gallons of hot sauce this season, while I settled for heirloom tomatoes, smoked cheddar, and smoked beefstick. Oh, and macrons. A new bakery selling at the market was doing Chinese-five-spice- and green-tea-and-white-chocolate macrons. Both quite nice. And much more convenient than going to Ballard (home of the very fine Honoré, noted for scrummy macrons). We then withdrew to Airways Brewing to support our local brewpub, where our waitress explained that if Scott wanted to sell any of his hot sauce, she had two eager buyers lined up, one of whom was at the bar just then. I reckon I must try this hot sauce.

Sunday we braved the successive blustery downpours to catch the State Fair on its last day. Liked the goats, especially one very sweet kid who liked having her chin skritched, and was quite impressed with the draft horse show/demo, but we had missed the rabbits and cavies and therefore only got chickens. The young 4Hers were out in force, however, and eager to 'splain all about their various fowl, including the runner ducks, which to me look like they ought to be from China, but turn out to be from India, where they developed that odd, tall stance to be able to see over the grasses in rice fields where they are kept as pest control.

Never did manage to buy any fudge or anything on a stick. I fail at fair food.

Preheat oven to 450° F

2 cups flour (bread, or all purpose)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl

1/2 stick butter (or 50 grams, if you're following the recipe precisely)

Cut up butter into small cubes and blend into dry ingredients until small and crumbly. I just use my fingers.

1/2 cup milk or buttermilk (recipe says 100ml but it lies -- you will need more)

Add milk to mixture a little at a time until it forms a firm dough. Do NOT knead. Cut dough ball in half and roll or hand-pat the two halves into flat disks formed directly on your baking sheet. Cut each disc into quarters (or smaller) and prick the tops liberally with a fork.

Bake for 8-10 minutes. Consume while still warm, slathered in butter.

I thought I had already blogged a version of this salad/dressing recipe but now I can't find it, so I'm (re-?)posting for my own reference -- this time with adequate tagging!

Cilantro Cabbage Slaw with Asian Dressing

• 1/4 cup sesame seed
• (1/3 cup sliced almonds, or chopped walnuts, or hulled pistachios)
• 1/4 cup rice vinegar
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• (1 teaspoon grated peeled ginger)
• 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
• 1/4 cup regular sesame oil
• Soy sauce
• (1 fresh serrano chile, finely chopped, with seeds)
• 1 small head Napa cabbage or green cabbage, finely chopped
• 1 bunch scallions, sliced
• ½ yellow onion, cut to small ribbons
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro
• fresh ground pepper to taste

Parenthetical ingredients are optional. Liquid ingredient amounts are VERY approximate -- adjust to taste. But don't skimp on the cilantro. It's critical.

Toast nuts and seeds in oven on a cookie sheet. Mix oil and vinegar with sugar, a dash or two of soy sauce, garlic, and, if using, ginger and chopped peppers. Whisk to emulsify.

Toss together cabbage, scallions, onions, and cilantro, and dress with the oil & vinegar mixture. This salad actually benefits (imho) from being allowed to sit and percolate in the fridge *after* it’s dressed, so at this point you can cover and refrigerate until the rest of the meal is ready, or add the nuts,seeds, and pepper immediately, and serve.

If you have leftovers, save them. The dressed salad is even better the next day.

This variant on a recipe I found on the internets worked rather well last night. The slits in the meat were deep enough that the garlic mixture didn't over-cook and lose its wonderfully garlicky pungency. Very yum. As usual, I forgot to deglaze the pan for gravy. Recipe also works nicely if you add cherry or apricot preserves to the garlic mixture, but I did not remember it this time.

Garlic roasted tenderloin of pork

1 lb tenderloin of pork
5-6 cloves of garlic
2 tsp chopped fresh rosemary
3-4 T olive oil
1 small lime
A handful of pistachio nuts, chopped
Salt and pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Crush the garlic and mash it together with the rosemary, olive oil, pistachio nuts, and the juice of half the lime. Blend thoroughly to a paste, and add salt and pepper. Squeeze the juice of the other half of the lime onto the meat and rub it in. Salt lightly. Slit the loin in several places along its length with a sharp knife. Fill the slits with the crushed garlic mixture and rub the rest over the meat, adding olive oil as needed. Place the loin into a pre-heated cast-iron pan lightly coated with olive oil and brown the bottom and sides. Transfer the pan to the oven, and roast for about an hour, basting periodically.

When the pork is cooked through (this seems to happen at the rate of about 1 hour per lb of meat), remove from the oven and place the loin on a plate or cutting board to rest for a few minutes while you de-glaze the pan with wine or beer or whatever fluid you have handy.

Serve with herb-baked potatoes that have been cooking on the other rack in the oven.

This is a cross-post from life_in_kent -- things are a bit moribund over there (to say the least), so I thought I'd wander in and get something started. In particular, since there are a bunch of things I like about living in Kent -- you'd have to hope so, since we so doggedly pursued finding a house here -- I figured I could just concatenate some of them into a Four Things post. And so, dear friends, I give you:

Four Things I Like About Living in Kent

Russian Tea at The Velvet Goose. I thought what made tea Russian was sweetening it with jam, and drinking it out of glasses, but apparently that's not the only Russian trick with tea. This stuff is brewed up with a stick of cinnamon in the water, and the brewed tea is flavored and sweetened with orange juice, so that the spicy, aromatic result is wonderfully cosy on a wet, bone-chilling afternoon. And it is served in a glass. Once at the Goose, I generally spend at least a few minutes poking around the Mad Hatter antique mall in the same building.

The parking lot at the Kent branch of the King County Library. It's full. Completely packed whenever I go. Normally navigating a crowded parking lot only makes me crazy. But the charm of a library that's so popular at all hours and on all days that you can't find a place to park on a Saturday afternoon, so popular that a crowd forms outside the doors waiting for opening on Sunday, that wins me over. There are a lot of people who read in Kent. I like that.

Sunday Brunch at Wild Wheat. Best. Blintzes. Evar. You can get them with half-and-half of whatever fruit you prefer. I recommend strawberry and marionberry. And all the breads they bake are crusty, fresh, and perfect. If you're drinking hot tea (notice the tea theme working here), the water comes in a decent sized teapot, rather than one of those weedy little cup-and-a-half jobbers. The staff is always friendly, which makes up for the occasional lapses in service.

Thrifting on Meeker. Our old Christmas tree stand went astray in the move. So I picked up a used one at Meeker Street Emporium -- better than the old one, actually. I got it for $1.31. Yeah.

I bought some baby asparagus late last week, and only used less than half. Foolishly, I didn't think to bag the rest before putting them in the fridge. Come yesterday, the spears were looking very sad indeed: floppy and wilted from dehydration. "Well, hydrate, then," thinks I. So I cut off the bottoms, as you'd do with cut flowers, and popped the spears into a pint glass of water. This morning they're just as springy and firm and upright as you could wish. Whee. Now if I can pick up some salmon tonight, I'll make salmon hash with asparagus. Yum.