I just may get the hang of this baking thing yet, cause this one turned out pretty damn good. Baking has never really been my strong suit, as I tend to cook in a more fly-by-night, who-needs-a-recipe style that permits for a little more riffing than is usually appropriate for baking.

But I’m learning.

I have Saint Tigerlily and Gourmet.com to thank for this one – so, thank you for bringing this awesome Summer dish into my life.

Yet another way to deal with an abundance of tomatoes, this pie is seriously delicious. It also gives a great opportunity to use some of the wonderful Silver Queen corn being harvested now in our area, and on top of that you even get a chance to flex your new mayonnaise knowledge.

This is a pretty multi-purpose pie. You can serve it for brunch, lunch, dinner, whatever. It can serve as a vegetarian meal in and of itself, or as a side or appetizer. Makes a great snack, can be served warm or cold, and it re-heats pretty well too.

The crust is one of the best parts about this dish, it’s not a typical pie crust but rather a biscuit crust – so, you definitely want to make the crust from scratch along with the recipe rather than using any store bought stuff. It’s pretty easy though, so let’s get to it.

Prep time: 30 minutes
Bake time: 35 minutes
Cooling time: 5-10 minutes

Ingredients…

- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 tbsp baking powder
- 1 3/4 tsp salt
- 3/4 stick unsalted butter, cold
- 3/4 cup whole milk
- 1 3/4 lb tomatoes (large, preferably)
- 1/3 cup mayonnaise (1 egg yolk, 3/4 cup olive oil, 1 tsp dijon mustard, 1 tsp lemon juice)
- 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
- 3 ears worth of corn, cut from the cob
- 2 tbsp fresh chopped basil
- 1 tbsp fresh chopped chives
- 1/4 tsp black pepper, fresh
- 1 1/2 cup cheddar cheese

You will need a 9-inch pie dish, a stock pot, a large mixing bowl, and some wax or parchment paper.

First thing to do is assemble the dough.

Mix together the flour, baking soda, and 3/4 tsp salt in a large bowl. Add the butter, chopped into small 1-inch square cubes for better dispersion.

Having washed your hands thoroughly before we even started, go ahead and plunge them right into the dough mix and work your fingers through it until it resembles coarse meal.

Slowly add the milk while continuing to work the dough. You can do this in a pastry blender too, if you have one, but hands-on is more fun.

Split the dough in half and roll it up into two large balls. Then, roll one ball out in between two pieces of wax or parchment paper, until it is about an 11-12 inch circle.

I have seen tons of recipes suggesting to use plastic wrap for this step, including this one from Gourmet. I don’t get this. Plastic wrap is a serious struggle, and usually turns your dough into an awful mess and you lose a lot of it to the plastic itself. Saint Tigerlily and I both recommend wax paper instead.

Use the first 12-inch circle in the bottom of the pie dish.

Repeat the same process with the second ball of dough, and set aside.

Next, set the oven to pre-heat at 400 degrees F, and start boiling 4 cups of water in the stock pot. We’re going to peel the tomatoes using the same method we learned in the recent post about stuffing tomatoes with shrimp. Follow that process, peel the tomatoes, then slice length-wise at your desired thickness.

In a small bowl, whisk together 1 egg yolk, 3/4 cup olive oil, and 1 tsp lemon juice to make mayonnaise from scratch. This should only take about 5 minutes or so, but if you absolutely HAVE to, you can sub in store bought stuff. Once the mayonnaise is finished, whisk in another 2 tbsp of lemon juice.

Shuck corn and cut down the sides of the cob. The best method I have found for this is to break the ears in half, so that the corn doesn’t fall off while you’re cutting it and go all over the counter and floor. Then, put the corn in a bowl after it’s cut from the cob, and set a small bowl next to it filled with water. Dip your hand in the water, then run it through the corn lightly to break up the corn chunks and to catch the strands of corn… hair… string… I don’t know what you call that stuff. Anyway, it will stick to your hand, then you can put your hand in the water and repeat until you have removed it all from the corn.

Chop up your fresh basil and chives and you’re ready to start assembling the pie.

Start with a layer of tomatoes, overlapping, and sprinkle with half the corn, half the basil and chives, some salt and some pepper.

It’s so festive, no?

Repeat for a second layer and add half of the cheese on top.

Pour a layer of all the mayonnaise down, top with the rest of the cheese, and cover with the second dough circle (previously set aside). Make a couple vents in the top of the crust, brush the crust all over with melted butter, and it’s ready to go in the oven.

Bake at 400 degrees F for 30-35 minutes, or until crust is a golden brown. Let cool for 5-10 minutes before serving.

Your pie is now ready to be devoured.

You can vegan-ize this dish easily by leaving the cheese out and using a mayonnaise substitute, and a butter substitute in the crust.

What’s your favorite type of pie? Bonus points for fruits or veggies.

Let’s talk about zest.

Bit of a confession here to make. As a home cook, I’ve largely ignored the power of a good citrus zest to top off a dish. It’s not because I didn’t realize it makes a difference, and it’s not because I didn’t want my food to be the best, but rather it’s because of that one ever-nagging nemesis of cooking and of pretty much all things creative – pure laziness.

I never really quite got the hang of how to even do it properly, so for me every time I tried to zest something it was somewhat of a struggle. And then there’s the fruit you just wasted. And the fact that you barely even got anything out of it to begin with, other than maybe a few small strips of hard-to-chew, oversized pithy pieces of zest. Every once in awhile I’d find some fancy new zester at a store and feel inspired to try it again for a little while, but inevitably if I saw a recipe calling for zest? It got skipped.

That’s all in the past now. I have conquered the citrus zest thanks to two tricks that I’ve learned in the past month or so. And, on the assumption that I’m not the only one out there who felt this way about zesting, I’m going to share those two simple things with you here.

First, use a microplane. Don’t even bother with “zesters” – for one thing, a zester is a single-user tool, which is a no-no for any kitchen – and for another, they just don’t really ever work all that well. A microplane, on the other hand, can be used for grating citrus zest, sea salt, chocolate, ginger, garlic, and all manner of things.

Next, instead of trying to grate the fruit over the microplane, instead hold the fruit in your hand and lightly drag the microplane over the fruit – top facing up. This will collect far more zest, and it’s much easier to keep from grating too deep into the peel, which will wind up giving you a chewy and bitter zest.

The zested fruit should still have a somewhat thick skin of pith around the whole of it, even after you’ve fully zested it. It will look something like this –

Zesting your fruit this way is absolutely so much easier. It was like a light bulb went off in my head and angels started singing.

Next up, tip number two.

To prevent waste, any time you zest a fruit – zest the whole thing. Even if your recipe only calls for a little pinch of zest (which is usually the case). Instead, zest the whole fruit, and put the extra zest into single portion sized clumps on a plate. Then put the plate into the freezer.

It helps if there is just a little bit of water on your fingers as you clump the zest. Once it’s in the freezer for about thirty minutes, you can take it out, and put all the portion sized frozen clumps into a zip loc back. Then it will keep in the freezer for three weeks to a month.

And all of a sudden, zest has become totally easy.

This dish was inspired:

My CSA has inundated me lately with absolutely gorgeous and delicious tomatoes. I’ve been trying to keep up with them all, and frankly, haven’t been too upset at including tomatoes in some shape or form in all my recent meals.

But this one monster tomato, well, I had to do something special with it. So.. I stuffed it.

Looking for a chance to try out some home made mayonnaise? Here it is.

Serves 2. Easily doubled. This is a pretty low calorie meal, but there’s a decent amount of fat in those calories from the bacon and the mayonnaise, so bear that in mind.

Prep time – 20 minutes
Cook time – 20 minutes

Ingredients…

- 1/2 lb. raw shrimp, peeled and de-veined
- 2 huge or 4 large fresh tomatoes
- 2 celery stalks
- 1 red bell pepper
- 1 jalapeño (optional)
- 1/2 cup homemade mayonnaise
- 3-4 strips of bacon

You’ll need three burners – one for a stock pot full of water, one for a pan full of bacon, and one more for either a skillet or a pot.

First, get the things on the oven going. The dish will be served cold, or cool at least, so you want to go ahead and get your cooking started right off.

Poach or sauté the shrimp in your favorite seafood spices, make sure to include some lemon juice. Remember that shrimp really doesn’t need a lot of time to cook, and it will keep cooking for a few minutes after you’ve removed it from the heat.

Cook the bacon to your preferred doneness.

While these are going, blanch, skin, and core your tomatoes. I had never actually done this before, so if you’re like me you’ll need a bit of an explanation.

To skin and core tomatoes, you want to blanch them like you would any other vegetable. Prepare a bowl of ice water deep enough to fully submerge your tomato. Meanwhile, bring a pot of water up to gentle boil – make sure there’s enough water to cover the tomato.

Submerge the tomato in the boiling water for 30-45 seconds, and then immediately shock it in the ice bath to stop the cooking. Let it cool in the ice bath, and then remove.

It’s easier to core the tomato before removing the skin, as the skin will help you from destroying the thing in the process. Cut a sizable hole around the top of the tomato and slightly inward. Twist core and remove, and dig out as much seed from the inside as possible.

If you’ve done it well, this will leave you with a pretty beautiful little vegetable to build your dish on.

By now, the bacon and the shrimp are probably about done.

Remove the bacon from the skillet and place on a paper towel to drain grease. Remove the shrimp from the pot or skillet. Allow both to cool at room temperature.

Vegetable dicing time. Chop up the celery and pepper(s) into fine cuts while the rest of the food is cooking.

In a bowl, mix the mayonnaise with the diced vegetables. If you’re using a plain mayonnaise, chop up some fresh parsley or basil to include for some interest.

Add cooled shrimp to the mayonnaise mixture.

Carefully spoon the mix into the skinned and cored tomatoes. Leave some shrimp hangin’ out for a nice garnish.

Crumble the bacon into pieces in a fresh paper towel, and for your last touch – sprinkle it over the top of your stuffed tomatoes.

This is really a great way to use up a *lot* of tomato all at once. If you wanted to get really crazy, you could even dice some up and include that in the mayo mix, but it might be a bit overwhelming.

I paired mine with Thomas Keller’s creamed corn (recipe from Ad Hoc at Home) – which I can not seem to get enough of – and a biscuit.

What’s your favorite way of dealing with a tomato rush?

Homemade mayonnaise is just about one of the easiest things you can make, and it’s so much better than anything you can get from a store. There’s really no excuse for not doing it. It takes just three basic ingredients… THREE… to make mayonnaise. Egg yolks, oil, and some acid – this could be anything from citrus, to wine, to vinegar, etc. For this method we’re going to use just a couple more ingredients, but only to fancy it up a little. They are not entirely necessary.

One of the cool things about something like mayonnaise is what makes it work – emulsion. In a mixture like this, with two substances that don’t combine naturally, you need a little science to help out the cause. That’s where the emulsification comes into play – emulsification is a mixture of two or more of these typically un-mixable liquids. The most common emulsions are fat and water, such as in the case with mayonnaise, but emulsions can also apply to things like vinaigrettes, or fat combining with protein and water to make hot dogs. Hollandaise is an emulsified sauce. Milk is an unstable emulsification, if it is not homogenized, which is why raw milk will separate over time and the cream will float to the top and form a layer of fat.

By whipping the oil and egg yolk into a frenzy, you separate the microscopic bits of fat apart from each other by working the emulsifier in between them – in this case the emulsifier being the water from an egg yolk. As the water works it’s way into the fat, you wind up with a new texture and a new mix unlike either the fat or the water, a third product which is wholly different from the two combined parts. The water then holds these parts of fat away from each other, which holds the mix at it’s particular unique texture and fluidity. If the mixture “breaks,” it’s actually the fat particles coming back together, and thereby separating from the water again. You can see this with butter sometimes, if perhaps you’ve tried to re-heat a particularly buttery dish in the microwave – you might wind up with a bunch of bits of fat and oil rather than one consistent substance.

Knowing how emulsification works, you can fix broken sauces or mixtures pretty easy. All you need to do is get the emulsifier (water) back in between those fat particles. In this instance, with mayonnaise, you can fix a break by getting another egg yolk, beating it slightly, and then slowly adding the broken mixture back into the new yolk. This will re-establish your emulsification.

Ready? Okay, let’s do this.

You will need:

- 2 egg yolks
- 1 1/4 cup of olive oil
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tbsp Dijon style mustard
- salt and pepper to taste

The key to a good emulsified sauce is to take your time. This will require a lot of whisking, but it’s a good work out. If you *really* want to, you can make this in a food processor by drizzling the oil slowly into the top while the rest is blending, but I think you get a much more even and smooth texture doing it by hand. Plus, come on, it’s not that hard.

Start by combining the egg yolks, lemon juice, and mustard in a large bowl. Beat together until well mixed.

With your oil set out in a measuring cup, start slowly drizzling it in. The very beginning is the most important part, you want to really make sure that every single drop of that oil is well whisked into the mixture. Start with just a couple drops. As you establish the emulsion, you can slowly speed up until you have finally added in all the oil. This is really the only even slightly difficult part of the process, because it takes patience and a good deal of arm strength. If you get fatigued, switch arms.

Aaaaand guess what. You’re done. Homemade mayonnaise will take you about 15 minutes tops, for a whole jar’s worth. And it only calls for ingredients that you’ve probably already got in your kitchen.

To spice it up a bit, you can add some flavors in towards the end. For my batch here, I used a little more lemon juice and some fresh basil leaves. But feel free to get creative – any kind of fresh herbs, garlic, shallots, wine, vinegars, peppers/cayenne, spices, etc. will make for a tasty and unique mayonnaise that you’d never find on a store shelf. Get creative.

Extra credit: make up a batch of your own homemade mayonnaise and I’ll have a great recipe for you to use with it on Friday. If you flavor it, think fresh and garden veg rather than savory.

I recently encountered the phrase “mental mise en place” while reading Michael Ruhlman’s book The Making of a Chef. Great book, by the way, it takes you step by step through the entire curriculum at the CIA as Ruhlman goes through the school himself – getting granular to the point of explaining the very techniques learned but also staying far enough removed to allow a healthy amount of observation and reflection. Anyway, Ruhlman discusses this idea of “mental mise en place” and how a chef working a restaurant needs to, in short, be sure all his mental ducks are in a row.

Stepping back a bit, mise en place means simply that all of your ingredients and preparations are set and you are ready to begin cooking. Literally translated, it means “putting in place.” In restaurant terms, a chef’s mise is his diced vegetables, his spices, his tools, cuts of meat or fish, everything he will need to use to work his station throughout the service.

Mise en place is not often something the home cook really needs to concern themselves with, as in most instances where a home cook is going to work they will only be preparing a very limited number of a certain dish (two for a couple, or perhaps a few more for a family) – and even then it usually only needs to be done once to serve many, family-style. It can be useful if you find yourself with extra prep time (cause we all know that happens often), or if you’re expecting lots of guests and have an elaborate meal planned. Other than that though, it’s usually not all that necessary.

But this idea of mental mise en place kind of struck me, and it’s been turning over in my head for a couple weeks now. Though I’ve never worked as a cook in a professional kitchen, I have worked in the front of house and I’ve had my experience working with kitchen staff – I can understand the significance of needing to know that you, and everything about you, is in the right place to do the right job before the job starts. It’s a matter of getting your head straight.

For a professional chef’s mental mise en place to be in order, he needs to know that, first of all, his physical mise is there, but also that he can rely on himself for the focus, the foundational skills, and the clarity of thought to take him through a hectic service – regardless of what might be thrown his way. It’s knowing that the staff he has to rely on will show up for him, and for his restaurant, and that the choices that he’s made leading up to the moment before a service have been the correct ones – thinking everything through from the start and being ready to take it through to it’s conclusion.

I found myself being able to relate to this idea in a lot of different ways, despite the fact that I’ve never actually been a restaurant cook. As a project manager in my “real life,” it’s all about planning and prep work. Collecting requirements, setting objectives, creating work task structures. But what interested me was thinking about the idea of mental mise en place in terms of what it means for the cook in a home kitchen. The differences between a home cook and a restaurant cook are endless, but I saw some certain similarities here when approached from this perspective.

Mental mise en place for the home cook is of utmost importance. It seems to me, that being a home cook is always very much about balance – the balance of life, of passion for food and cooking, of time management, of family, and everything else that comes into play. Without a doubt, it takes some significant effort to cook at home on a regular basis. And a lot of times, even the smallest little thing can throw you off your groove and it can be hard to recover sometimes.

I would imagine that this is a bit different for every home cook but revolves around a few consistent things. I have different feelings towards my kitchen on different days, as I’m sure most of us do.

In order for me to be really on my game, I need energy. Weeknights tend to suffer, of course – I think without a doubt I make my best meals on the weekends. Apart from just the energy itself, it can be hard to come home from work and get a clear head and focus on the tasks in front of me without being distracted. Although there are some days, admittedly, where the kitchen is the perfect escape. Music definitely helps.

I need to know that I’m going to have the time and the resources I need available to me. This one is rare – even in just a two person household, it seems like someone is always starving, and there’s *always* something else that needs doing. As far as resources go, there’s nothing my cookbook collection and my netbook can’t handle.

I need to have a plan, or, barring that, I need to have a well stocked kitchen. For me, again, the weekends work best for this. I rarely tend to plan more than one meal in advance, and in fact, I often find myself coming to the kitchen – even on weeknights – without much of a plan at all. But if I know my kitchen has food – protein, starch, vegetable – then I know I can make a dinner out of it. Sometimes this spawns creativity, sometimes it spawns failure (in the form of creativity, of course).

We get food from our CSA every other Thursday and I hit the market pretty much every Saturday morning now. It has become routine. Then that’s supplemented by the Whole Foods which is, thankfully, only a couple blocks away.. because I find myself there pretty often to fill in the gaps. Grocery shopping, the finances behind it, and the scheduling of it, are absolutely aspects of the greater mise en place picture.

And then there’s the emotional element, intricately linked to our diet and our food. This is maybe one of the biggest things – when you’re upset, or depressed, or just not “right,” it’s really hard to motivate yourself to cook a good meal. This is when the frozen pizza comes out, or the Chinese food gets ordered. What’s tough about this is that it’s a self-perpetuating thing – the more crap food you eat, the worse you’re going to feel emotionally, and the less you’re going to feel like cooking your own food. It easily turns into a cycle that you then need to break back out of.

I know that when my family is larger than just the two of us, there will be all kinds of additional things I have to deal with before my mental mise en place can be where it needs to be. I look forward to the challenges that that will bring to me as a home cook, but of course there is a healthy dose of trepidation in play, too. I know without a moment’s doubt that there will be times I reminisce about the past.

So what does mental mise en place mean for you? What is your ideal cooking situation, in a perfect world? What do you need in order for you to really do your best?

I wasn’t sure, having been away for a week and change, how my deck container garden would fare while I was away. I had recruited a neighbor to help while I was gone, to check on things and make sure everything was getting enough water.

Turns out, it rained quite a bit while I was gone and there was some pretty remarkable growth. Coming back to see how things changed was really thrilling, in a way that I think you may not totally understand if you haven’t been through it yourself. I certainly wouldn’t have.

But I’ve now finally eaten some real actual (and delicious) vegetables grown from dirt and pots on my back deck. I have successfully eaten (as opposed to attempting to eat and failing) three Early Girl tomatoes, and two green bell peppers.

Before leaving for our trip, there was one tomato on the Early Girl plant, and two bell peppers. That’s it. Everything was a decent size, but no real vegetables showing.

After coming home, things in my garden had exploded. I’ve got four Czechoslovakian black hot pepper plants, showing sixteen black peppers now – of varying sizes. I’ve got one green bell pepper plant with three peppers on it. I’ve got two yellow bell plants showing six different peppers between them.

Two of the black pepper plants are in one of my favorite containers… I ran out of pots.

And the tomatoes are really starting to take off. Mostly Green Zebras now – they are seventeen Green Zebras (none large enough to eat just yet), and six Early Girls. The Cherokee Purple is doing well too, but no tomatoes yet. Same with the soybeans – huge vines growing like crazy, but they are not showing any beans just yet. I’m not really sure what their time to maturity is though.

Also, potatoes and asparagus. The potato plants are huge and healthy, but of course I have no idea what kind of potato production might be going on underground. As for the asparagus – that’s a bit of an experiment, as they are not said to do well in containers, and they won’t be putting up shoots/spears for another year at least anyway. You can see the asparagus fern there in the front.

Compare that one to how those potato plants looked a month ago.

It’s wonderful to see it all coming to life so vibrantly. It totally changes the atmosphere hanging out on my deck, too.

What I’ve tasted so far has been incredible. I can’t wait to see what the coming weeks and months will bring.

So yes – Colorado! And to a lesser extent, Utah. I have to admit, I never thought I’d actually be spending vacation time in… Utah. But yes, I did. It was dry. Hot. Lots of rocks.

Let’s go back a bit first, get a little backstory to fill in the why of this trip. About 29 years – give or take. Early 1980’s. My mother’s father, Alfred, owns and operates a farm in Grand Junction, Colorado. He’s getting up in age at this point and doesn’t have a particularly extensive catalog of farmed products. A few various things here and there, some hay, chickens, a turkey. Occasionally grazing the neighbors cows on his fields. That sort of thing.

This farm in Grand Junction was the central hub of the universe that is my maternal family for many, many years. Spread out across the Western United States, this was where we all gathered every Summer to be together.

I’d love to say that I got a real farmer’s education from this place, but my memories (being the age I was) extend only to feeding chickens, running away from the turkey (his name was George but we called him Monster), collecting eggs, picking cherries and fresh peaches, and floating boats and rubber balls in a race through the irrigation ditches. Very little time was spent in a kitchen, I was too busy playing in the treehouse.

I hadn’t been to this place since I was 13. 16 years ago now – my grandfather passed away in 1994. At that point in my life, I had been coming to the farm every Summer – so it was admittedly a bit difficult to see it all go away like that. There had been plans to sell the farm and move him closer to my parents, but whether a change like that happens abruptly or with anticipation – it’s always a bit difficult.

So last year, my oldest brother Sean, proposes a reunion here. My nieces and a nephew, the next generation, should see the places that meant something to us out there. It had been close to two decades since we visited each other in Grand Junction.

The following is a story of ten days in hot, dry, crazy places, in altogether too close quarters with my family. Don’t worry, it’s primarily a picture tour. I’ll leave out the gory bits. And yes, Thomas Keller’s Rib recipe is coming. It’s ridiculously awesome, I promise it’s worth the wait.

The first three days there were spent at a B&B that our family took over. I mean, we booked every single room in a giant house. There was family there from Virginia, Maryland, Idaho, Washington (state), Montana, Colorado, Louisiana, and Hawai’i. The number fluctuated from 13 to 22, depending on the day.

The bulk of the trip revolved around this hub at Grand Junction (really a nearby town called Fruita, but there’s no real need for the distinction here).

While there, we visited the Colorado National Monument, and a particular trail called the Devil’s Kitchen – a very well known place from my childhood.

We also visited my grandfather’s old property, which had been sold to new owners. They tore down the farm house and built a new home – a shame but the new home was pretty beautiful – and have converted the place into a sod farm.

Not terribly exciting, I have to admit. But sod is a far sight more profitable than anything my grandfather ever did with the property, so there you go. There used to be a beautiful little cherry tree grove about halfway down the field there.

Back at the house, I made Thomas Keller’s pork spare ribs one night, along with some creamed corn. Every time I made food on this trip it felt a little like something out of Kitchen Impossible – I had no idea what ingredients I’d have access to, I’d be working in a strange kitchen that may or may not have the equipment I need, and I’d be cooking for 15-20 people or so. This time it was 20 – I made 4 racks of ribs so I tripled the amount of dry rub I made.

Ingredients…

- 1 cup light brown sugar
- 2 tbsp kosher salt
- 2 tsp sweet pimenton/Spanish paprika (regular paprika will work in a pinch)
- 2 tsp cayenne
- 2 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp ground allspice
- 1 tsp red papper flakes

Mix all the above in a bowl for the dry rub. Thaw rib racks, and cut into 2-3 rib pieces. Cover ribs thoroughly with dry rub, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 2-6 hours for the flavors to set.

While the ribs are sitting in the fridge the rub will draw juices out of the meat, so you should make sure to put them on a plate or expect a bit of a mess.

Next, take the ribs out of the fridge and sear them on a grill over high heat – about 2 minutes each side. Alternate them at 7 o’clock and 11 o’clock for a nice cross-hatch pattern.

Remove ribs from grill, and bake in an oven for 2 hours at 250 degrees F. Remove from oven, let rest 5-10 minutes, and serve.

A word of caution – if you double or triple this recipe like I did, you may want to be conservative with the cayenne and red pepper flakes. My tripled recipe turned out seriously HOT. Not that that’s always a bad thing, but it should be kept in mind.

Next up, we drove from Grand Junction down to Moab in Utah, and stayed in some cabins for two nights. Moab is basically the middle of the desert. There’s really not much there at all, except for some serious mountains, a *lot* of bats, and of course Arches National Park.

Arches was very surreal. Like other-planet surreal. The magnitude of this scenery doesn’t translate well through photograph; it was all pretty intense.

We did a few hikes in the park here, and played some music in the cabins. Then we moved on.

Another 3 hour drive later and we were back in Colorado, in a little town called Mancos. Another house taken over by the family. This location was chosen for it’s proximity to Mesa Verde, another national park with all kinds of ancestral Puebloan structure.

Stayed two nights in Mancos. Finally, we drove back up north to Grand Junction again, through the San Juan mountains. We passed through Silverton, near Telluride, an old mining town known for it’s brothels.

While in Silverton, we overheard some cheering down the street and went to go check it out. Turns out it was the finish line for the Hardrock Hundred – a 100 mile foot race through the mountains. The elevation at Silverton is about 10,000 feet, and we got winded just sitting in a car. These people ran 100 miles over an equivalent elevation change to running up Mt. Everest – and back. And the first place runner did the thing in 27 hours, straight through. So about 15 minutes per mile.

So crazy. And inspiring. I can’t even imagine.

So anyway, there it is. 10 days out west. Really more of a tour than a vacation as there wasn’t too much time to spare for relaxing, but we saw some great things. And it was good to spend the time with family.

I want to start this post off first by thanking Hyun and Bryan for their work on the guest posts last week. They did a great job and I’m looking forward to getting a chance to try out some of those recipes – the photos looked fantastic.

So I imagine the more clever among you have probably figured out by now that Amanda and I were out of town last week. We spent the time away at a family reunion in Colorado – more on this later in the week, some pics to come too.

Instead I’d like to use this opportunity to rant about one of my bigget pet peeves – food options for the captive audience. In this particular instance my feelings are motivated primarily by airports and air travel, but this topic extends to so many different circumstances: car travel, train travel, events like concerts or sporting events, any kind of situation where you’re stuck in one place for an extended period of time with particularly limited food choices. Concerts and sporting events are less of an issue, for me anyway, because they are more voluntary and usually don’t take up as much time. Air travel, car travel, etc., are all but unavoidable at some time in your life, and often span one or more typical meal times.

You pretty much always know, or at least should, that going into these situations you’re going to be out of luck when it comes to any sort of morally sound, or even relatively healthy options for feeding yourself. Sometimes it’s certainly worse than others. Of course, it’s best to supply as much of your own food as possible I think, but many circumstances just don’t allow for this option – you simply won’t make it past security with it.

So already the people providing you with your food in these instances are selling to customers with a drastically lowered standard than they might normally have. Nobody is ever really going to expect a great meal in an airport, with great ingredients, made with care, and therefore people will be less inclined to be upset about the fact that they didn’t even get anything close to resembling good food. The people providing your food know this – they know it very well – and it shows. They simply don’t care because you don’t have a choice, and you’ll be forced to keep spending your money there regardless. There is no competition in such a market.

Amanda and I had breakfast – or, I should say we tried to have breakfast – at Dulles airport on the way out to Colorado. Name and shame time – we “ate” at the Firkin and Fox. Now, I am a pretty steady believer in “the Grandma Rule” (as explained by Tony Bourdain in his awesome new book – Medium Raw) – basically, different situations do call for different standards, and if you’re not paying a lot for your food you’d be foolish to expect haute cuisine. But we spent $45 at this place for french toast, an egg wrap, and two bloody marys. Even accounting for staff expense and general overhead, that should be plenty of money to at least provide us with halfway decent ingredients. What we got instead was absolutely inedible. My toast was hard as a rock, her eggs tasteless as styrofoam – we couldn’t get through the meal, even knowing we had 6 hours of travel ahead of us. The drinks, too, were so bad we had but a sip or two – and if nothing else gets my point across, the fact that we actually bought alcohol and left it sitting there on the table should speak volumes.

I don’t even remember the last time I’ve left food at a table like this while still hungry. It wasn’t just the food either, the service was plain piss-poor. I tend to hate making a deal out of situations like this – I’m actually pretty sensitive to coming off as a total food snob (I’m hoping my blog – or the fact that I even have a blog about food – doesn’t betray me completely on that point).

Knowing in a situation like this that complaints aren’t likely to go far, I reacted just by getting us out of the situation as fast as possible. Amanda had her own way of dealing with it.

Our server didn’t care – or even seem to notice – that we had barely taken a nibble. I’m not going to even get into how atrocious the service itself was, but I assure you it was a failure all around. Never again.

As a consumer who believes that the vote of my dollar is a powerful tool, I feel downright abused when I’m taken advantage of in such a fashion. I just can’t see any reason at all why it has to be this way, and I’m choosing now to give as little as possible to support such infrastructure – even if it means going without from time to time, as best as I can.

I don’t believe that we should accept the fact that all food in such circumstances – food for a consumer without much time to spare, or without large sums of money to throw around – needs, of necessity, to be such awful crap.

Michael Pollan will tell you that farmers deserve more money for their product, and I believe – with conditions – that this is true. But I don’t believe that the weight of that should all fall on the consumer. I actually think it’s a bit naive to imagine that it even could. I think farmers deserve more but I feel that the primary reasons for their general lack of financial prosperity are a more direct result of middle man symptoms – meaning, anything from the government subsidies that give certain farmers an unfair edge in the market, to regulatory expenses, to transportation, marketing, and so on. All these things drive up the bottom line for farmers, particularly small farmers, and they’re often the reason why they are forced into farming using methods they would prefer not to use in order to remain economically viable.

Airports and travel hubs should be a vast market for local farmers, in the same way that we are seeing other large institutions – schools, colleges, prisons – become so. All it really takes is for some on service side to start caring about the product they provide, and for consumers to be more discerning and selective in their choices – changes we are seeing take place elsewhere in the food landscape on a daily basis.

Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow food, will tell you that meals simply should not be eaten on the run, that all food should be given the time it deserves, and I again believe – with conditions – that this is true. But it’s simply not practical to eat this way 100% of the time. And I don’t think we should have to surrender so much of our time – at every single point of food consumption – in order to eat well (healthy, clean, good, and fair food).

I fiercely support the idea that on a general level we should all be spending more time with our food. But there will always be exceptions. When you’ve got a flight to catch, you’re not going to be likely to get to the airport 3 hours early for a 9 course tasting menu. Though this does cause me to wonder – if offered the right restaurant, chef, and product, maybe you would?

I realize that my idealism is showing here in this post, really I do. And I also realize I haven’t proposed any great awesome miracle solutions. I wish I had some. But such is the situation in so many circumstances we find ourselves in, and I know that many of you share this frustration with me. How do you deal with it? What do you think could be done, either long term or short? I worry for a time in the future when I will find myself in these situations with a child, because I cringe at the thought of even giving them the opportunity to eat some of the things that pass as food in these places. Surely, “suck it up and deal,” is not the only choice we all have?

This post concludes guest week here at MSCK. All posts this week were provided by Hyun, and the photos by Bryan Johns (flickr link). We hope you have all enjoyed the recipes!

-Liam

For the longest time, I had this horrible fear of bread making. Two reasons why:

1. I have issues with failure, and frankly, EVERYONE will fail at one point when making bread.
2. I hate wasting food. To go through all those ingredients for it to fail is such a waste of time, money, and supplies.

Don’t close the screen. There is hope.

In the end, it’s worth it. All the failures I have encountered in bread making have only taught me where I went wrong. Eventually, I got it right and I love it.

My friend Christian is the one who encouraged me to start making bread. I usually consult him with all my baking issues and questions. He’s an amazing chef, a good friend, and someone who will definitely become big in the culinary world.

Christian sent me this recipe from Naturally Ella (it has since disappeared from the site though). It’s simple and straightforward enough, but I did make a slight modification. I replaced the 1/4 cup of sugar with a 1/4 cup of honey and 2 tablespoons of sugar. Honey is the way to go – the natural sweetness of it only adds to the flavors of the challah.

These directions apply to the use of a stand mixer; however you can do this by hand – if you do this by hand, you will have great arms.

Prep time -

Active: 30 minutes
Inactive: 1 hour 30 minutes – 2 hours

Bake time: 25 – 30 minutes

Yields 1 large loaf

Ingredients…

- 3/4 cup warm water (110 – 115 degrees F)
- 3/4 tbsp yeast
- 3 tbsp sugar
- 1/4 cup honey
- 1/2 tbsp salt
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil
- 3 whole eggs
- 4 cups flour

In a bowl, combine water, yeast, and 1 tablespoon of sugar in stand mixer bowl. Let sit for 5-10 minutes until yeast activates (foam will appear at the top)

Whisk in 2 eggs, oil, honey and the remaining sugar to the mixture. Once combined, attach it to the stand mixer. Use the dough hook and start mixing while slowly adding flour.

Once all the flour is in, continue to knead the dough in the mixer, about 10 minutes (timing it is highly recommended).

Once dough is kneaded, place dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and place in a warm spot. Give it about an hour to rise (until double in size).

I usually put the oven on warm, crack the door open and put the dough right by there. Another option is getting a heating pad, put it on low, cover with towel and put the bowl over it. Room temperature plays a huge role in the dough rising.

After first rise, remove dough from bowl. Divide and braid the dough.

If you’re not sure how to braid bread, there are video tutorials on YouTube – here’s a good one.

Place loaf on a lightly oiled or silicone lined tray/cookie sheet. Whisk last egg and brush the bread. Place the dough in a warm spot, cover and let it rise for about 30-45 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Before putting the dough in the oven, brush one last time with the egg.

Optional: you can put poppy seeds or sesame seeds on top.

Bake for about 25-30 minutes – until top is golden brown.

What are some of your most disastrous baking failures?

Guest week continues here at MSCK. This week’s content is provided by my friends Hyun and photographer Bryan Johns (flickr link).

-Liam

I always thought scones were hard to make. Maybe because growing up, I didn’t know anyone who made it from scratch, so I immediately assumed that it was something only for professionals to make. Silly me.

Thank you God for Food Network. Especially for Tyler Florence.

During the blizzard earlier this year in DC, I was stuck at home, bored, nothing to do. So when I’m bored, I bake. I found this recipe on the Food Network site and it looked simple enough, so I went ahead and made it. It tasted great. However, as time progressed, I began wondering whether or not I could change this recipe to make other types of scones. I eventually managed to modify it to make ham and cheese scones, chocolate chip scones, white chocolate craisin scones. Which leads me to today’s recipe and my personal favorite: Oatmeal and sugar pecan scones.

There’s something hearty about this particular scone recipe. It feels like a good quick breakfast, but it would also be great as a dessert…warmed scone broken up into pieces topped with vanilla ice cream. Yum.

This recipe calls for sugar pecans. You can find that recipe here. If you don’t have time to make the pecans, I would recommend using 1 cup of chopped pecans and adding ¼ cup of sugar rather than 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Prep time: Active: 15 minutes
Bake time: 15-20 minutes

Yields: 12 scones

Ingredients…

- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tbsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 5 tbsp unsalted butter, cold, cut in chunks
- 1 cup heavy cream, plus more for brushing the scones
- 1 cup sugar pecans coarsely chopped
- 1 cup toasted oats
- Sugar in the raw for sprinkling over scones

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Sift flour, baking powder, salt, sugar and ground cinnamon in a bowl. Using either a mixer, 2 forks, or a pastry blender, mix butter in until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs.

Make a well in the center of the mixture and pour heavy cream. Mix until everything is incorporated, but do not overwork the dough.

Fold pecans and toasted oats into the dough. Using your hands, thoroughly combine the pecans and oats to the dough.

Press the dough out on a lightly floured surface into a rectangle about 14 x 3 inches. Cut the rectangle in 1/2 then cut each halves into thirds leaving you with 6 squared pieces total. Cut the squares diagonally until you have 12 triangle pieces.

Place the scones on a cookie sheet covered in parchment, brush the top with heavy cream and sprinkle about 1 teaspoon of sugar in the raw on each scone.

Bake for about 15 – 20 minutes.

Has there ever been a food you were afraid of making, but wound up being pretty easy to make? How did it turn out?