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10 Legs in the Kitchen

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10 Legs in the Kitchen

Tag Archives: Kathleen Flinn

Humble Pie

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Stacey Bender in the kitchen

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amy Pennington, Apple dumpling, IFBC 2015, Jess Thompson, Kathleen Flinn, Tom Douglas

FullSizeRender

When I was about to graduate from Cornish, I volunteered to head up the committee to organize the food for our BFA show.  Of course, my role was related to food, because in hind-sight, that was my real passion.  We had an extremely limited budget though, so I painstakingly got on the phone to companies around town to ask them to donate food for the event.  To my surprise, as hard as it was for me to actually bring myself to make the calls, I found it exhilarating!  I was, in-fact, pulling together an amazing menu through my efforts and loved the connections I was making to our local community.

The toughest phone call I made was to Marcella Rosene, Founder of Pasta & Co (now owned by Kurt Beecher Dammeier from Sugar Mountain Foods).  She was my idol.  Pasta & Co was the type of store I wanted someday, to own.  When I called her, she seemed so personable.  So friendly.  So real!  She did not donate her food but she gave us an amazing deal and personally came to the event to set it up on beautifully stark white platters with handwritten labels describing each dish.  It was so perfect!

Meeting her in-person was pivotal for me.  I was absolutely floating after the event and probably should have gone into event planning, catering, or something else, right then and there!  But I didn’t.  I went on to work in my chosen field of Commercial Interior Design at one of the largest architectural firms in the country, actually, the world.  Years into this job, I begin to long for a career involving food (which is why I moonlighted at Etta’s Seafood two days a week for Tom Douglas).

I wanted to reach out to Marcella once again, but this time on a personal quest.  I wanted to take her to lunch and ask her advise.  I wanted to know how she got started, what it would take for me to get started, and how hard the journey would be if I embarked on one.

I never did.  I was too afraid to pick up the phone, or simply, even send an email.

After the company sold, Marcella stayed on as a vital employee and continued to leave us all feel that she was still the owner.  I was secretly disappointed that it hadn’t been me that was fortunate (or wealthy enough) to be the one that had taken over the reins of her wildly successful food model.  I still didn’t call her or write.  Ugh.

Some twenty years later, I am still a designer and am still in love with the world of food, and still love shopping at/eating from Pasta & Co.  More recently, I have wanted to reach out to people like Molly Wizenberg, Kathleen Flinn, Amy Pennington and Jess Thompson, but for years, have been far too intimidated.

Me, intimidated, how ironic, since I have been told often that I, myself, am intimidating (me?)!

I am an introvert and while I might be loud sometimes and talkative (even a “fast talker”), I am happier huddled up in my kitchen with the other eight legs (Ginger and Buddy), a glass of wine, and my pots and pans, cooking.  The music is always on and Tom is usually hanging around fixing or cleaning something or conversing, a safe distance from under-foot. I talk about things I want to do and people I want to reach-out to, but never do.

This year at the International Food Blogger’s Conference, I actually met Kathleen Flinn, Jess Thompson and Amy Pennington (and still hope to meet Molly one day, but she wasn’t there, that I’m aware of).  I also listened to them speak their wisdom and I did, in-fact, hang on every word!  One of the big come-aways from this event, for me, was that the people we look up to or admire, are real people and are often quite approachable.  They too are passionate about what they do and are actually inclined to help others reach their goals as well; sometimes, all you have to do is ask.

Kathleen Flinn, author of “Burnt Toast Makes you Sing Good” and “The Sharper Your Knife, the Less you Cry”,  spoke about journalism writing.  She holds writing classes which you can find out about at her website. I sat in the front row but was caught off guard when she called on me.  I was completely unprepared to answer the simplest of questions “What is your Blog about”? (note to self – apologize for that!!!… and figure out a better answer).

From IFCB’s 2015 Website Agenda:  “Hungry for Words: Journalism 101 for Food Bloggers” :  “Get a crash course from award-winning author and former journalist, Kathleen Flinn, in the fundamentals taught at J-school and exercised by working journalists. You’ll move from Who/What/When/Where/How/Why to methods for conducting successful research, working with the AP style guide and interview techniques. We’ll also cover the elements that define good explanatory journalism (which includes most food writing). Finally, the session will shift to some basic reporter tactics, including designing your own “beat,” developing sources, keeping a tickler file and developing an editorial calendar. Even if you’ve got a recipe-based blog, this jam-packed session is aimed to help you avoid embarrassing mistakes, organize your thinking and make your work feel more professional. Hopefully, it will also inspire you to reach beyond your comfort zone and look at old subjects with a new, more inquisitive perspective.”

Jess Thompson spoke at a session, author of the food blog Hog Wash and co-author (most recently for Renee Erickson’s book,  A Boat, A Whale & A Walrus).  I introduced myself after her talk.  I wish I had been more prolific in what I said (or at least been myself) because she is the type of person I would be friends with if I had gone to school with her.  She and I might have been best friends (if we had actually met).

From IFBC’s 2015  Website Agenda:  “(Writing): Honing the Craft “:  “No blog succeeds without good writing. Join award-winning food writer Jess Thomson (Hogwash) as she explores what makes personal narrative work, how she’s developed her voice, and where her own writing process starts. She’ll identify the tenets of good memoir, and lead a writing exercise that allows participants to put their new knowledge to use immediately. (View her presentation here).”

Amy Pennington, author, cook, farmer and all-around fancy, foot-loose food lover, wore many hats in marketing, working at and helping coordinate this (IFBC) event.  I was lucky enough to catch-up to her in the hall and introduce myself.  We have in common, personal tenures at Tom Douglas’ restaurant empire some many years past yet our paths never crossed back then.  She is very approachable and I hope to catch-up with her again in the future.

From Amy’s Website:  “OFFICIALLY: Amy Pennington is a cook, author, and urban farmer. She is the author of Urban Pantry: Tips and Recipes for a Thrifty, Sustainable and Seasonal Kitchen, Apartment Gardening, Apples from Harvest to Table AND Fresh Pantry – Learn to Love Your Vegetables, One Month at a Time. She is also the host of the PBS show Check, Please! Northwest. Pennington has been named one of Seattle Magazine’s 2013 Top 50 most powerful players in Seattle’s food scene and as a 2012 Bon Appetit Tastemaker. She has been featured in Bon Appetit, Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, GOOP.com, and Apartment Therapy. She runs GoGo Green Garden, an urban farming service specializing in organic edible gardens for homes and businesses. Pennington lives in Seattle.”

Well, let’s cook!

close up1

Humble (Apple) Pie – makes 4 individual pies

This is loosely adapted from Tom Douglas’ Apple Dumplings, a dessert he has had on his menu at Etta’s Seafood for years.  It is a long-time favorite of my Tom’s but one I do not often make (being a cook rather than a baker and all).  Mine is quite “humble” looking and yet, still extraordinary in taste.

Tom Douglas serves his with homemade cinnamon ice-cream and a maple sauce but it is just as fine with a good quality vanilla ice-cream or even just a dollop of creme fraiche.  Dusting the top with cinnamon is not a bad way to go either.  I use fresh figs rather than dates and use almost no sugar; it is sweet enough as it is with the apples.

INGREDIENTS

2 apples, cut in half lengthwise
2 fresh figs, stemmed
2 tsp butter
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp turbino sugar
A pinch of kosher salt
1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar
Lemon juice to drizzle

1/2 recipe (or more as needed) pastry dough: (You can use many number of recipes but basically, add 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour, 1 TB raw cane sugar, 1 tsp kosher salt, 2 sticks chilled butter to a food processor.  Process and then add ice water in 1 TB increments until it comes together.

The butter should be chilled and sliced smallish when added to the mix.  The mix in the processor will seem wobbly but when removed will mold together like a good wad of Playdo.  Divide in half and press each half into a circle.  Cover with wrap and chill for an hour before proceeding.

PREP

Chop the figs, butter, cinnamon and salt together on a chopping board.  Add the balsamic and mush together.

Scoop the middle of each apple half to remove the seeds and create a small “bowl”.

Divide the fig mixture among each of the four apple halves; drizzle with lemon juice.

IMG_7302

Roll out the pastry dough into a square (if possible). Cut the square into quarters. Cover each apple with a square and wrap it to encase the whole apple.  You might need another piece to cover the bottom but just tuck and wrap creating as messy or as neat of a package as you like.

Slice a few air holes into the top and place on a baking sheet.  Sprinkle the tops with cinnamon and sugar.

Bake in a 400-degree, pre-heated oven for approximately 25 minutes or until the apple is cooked through and the crust is slightly golden.  Serve hot from the oven.  They can be kept refrigerated until you are ready to use and then re-heated before serving.  They also freeze well.

IMG_5108We like apples…and figs!

Burnt Toast (and IFBC 2014)

19 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by Stacey Bender in cooking basics, the kitchen

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Blendtec, Burnt Toast, corn butter, Cream Biscuits, Healthy Cream Biscuits, IFBC 2014, Kathleen Flinn, Orangette, Quinoa Flour

PS3_biscuit 1

There are several ways to cook corn, none of which I spent too much time pondering until recently. For me, corn always goes on the grill and often gets treated with butter before biting into, straight off the cob.

It was pointed out to me though, during a series of semi-“deep” discussions regarding corn at our recent family reunion in Minnesota, that if you are not lucky enough to eat it raw when it is freshly picked, the microwave might be the most perfect method for it’s cooking. I was skeptical, but willing to listen and then, eager to give it a try. I also wanted to share a few other methods of cooking corn and an idea (or two) of what I like to do with it every summer (one of which I already did). However, I realize this might be less-than-timely seeing that the summer is coming to an end, for now, so perhaps I will pick that thought back up again next year…

As I ponder the subject of corn though, I turn to pondering the subject of eating. This brings me to food, which of course, is the center of this years International Food Blogger’s Conference (IFBC 2014) taking place at the Westin in downtown Seattle, which brings me to writing. Many of us attending the conference (obviously) write about food. My guess is that most of (if not all of) us enjoy food, more than might be considered normal. I am happy to fit into this category of “not” normal because it means I eat particularly well and who can complain about that?

What most excites me about the upcoming conference (beginning tonight), is the optional workshop I signed up to attend on Sunday. The workshop is about writing, creatively, concerning food, but also concerning memoirs (clarifying voice and story). This is of particular interest to me because I have been trying to write just that. Not just about food but also memories, and memories about food. Well, not just memories about food but memories that involve food (which is an extensive bank of memories).  Actually, what I really want, is to write about those things in a way that captures my voice and makes you want to read what I am writing, enthusiastically.

Burnt Toast

Not only is the content of the workshop something I am looking forward to, it is being led by New York Times Best-Selling food writer Kathleen Flinn, author of “The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry” (which I have read and thoroughly enjoyed) and her third book “Burnt Toast Makes you Sing Good” (which I have not read, but will read as soon as I can buy a copy). The title of that one makes me smile because my father is a notorious burnt toast fan and I just sent him an after-surgery care package containing some burnt biscuits I made because they tasted of burnt toast. Needless to say, burnt toast doesn’t travel well and they went to the trash. Perhaps I will ring the hospital and ask them to prepare him some freshly burnt toast? Or not. In any case, I will ring him to share my experience after the workshop and if we are lucky, I will have learned a thing or two to make me a more engaging writer (when I share the experience with you). That is the plan.

If you haven’t read Kathleen’s writing, I encourage you to pick up a copy of one of her books; well worth the read. Also, if you are attending the conference, perhaps I will meet you there and maybe you are joining the workshop too, which you do not need be at the conference to sign up for, cost is $75, you can sign-up here). Until then, inspired by the title of Kathleen’s third book, I have gone to the kitchen in the hopes of recreating the perfect burnt toast without the “burn” (and come to think of it, without the toast). Curious?

PS_biscuit 3

Biscuits and “cream”
(Aka: not “burnt” toast)
loosely adapted from Molly Wizenberg (and Marion Cunningham)

I know what you’re thinking. I think I do anyways, because if Kathleen were writing this, I would be thinking “burnt toast has nothing to do with biscuits and certainly to do more with butter than with cream”. Hear me out though.

Biscuits are where I started and biscuits I am still trying to make. Ones that don’t taste of burnt toast (even though I think Dad would have liked them straight from the oven before being shoved into a wobbly envelope and flown across the country). I started out wanting to make buttermilk biscuits. I bought one from “Honest Biscuits” at the Pioneer Square Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago. It had butter dipped into the center and honey too, which oozed out the side. They were tall (double story tall) and slightly reminded me of the biscuits I missed out on at the Willow’s Inn. Almost, but not quite. I say not quite because they didn’t look quite as pretty (as the ones at Willow’s Inn).  In reality, I never actually tasted the ones at Willow’s Inn (if you recall from my lengthy post) but this Honest Biscuit was a very good biscuit.  Very good, yes.

I did not want to recreate the Honest Biscuit. What I actually wanted was a cream biscuit. One that was fluffy and moist. One that tasted, well…of cream. What I didn’t want was to actually use cream. Or white flour. But that was a minor detail. What I ended up doing was going to Orangette to find Molly’s cream biscuits I had read about years before. She has a version by Marion Cunningham (no, not the one from Happy Days) that she swears “you can’t screw up”, yet I am here to tell you that I did (screw up), twice. I had only made a few alterations: I used quinoa & whole wheat flours + corn meal rather than all-purpose flour. I used honey rather than sugar and (most notably) replaced the cream and butter for buttermilk and yogurt. So you can see why I was surprised with the unforeseen outcome?  No?

Well, I do confess that there were two attempts at this recipe, because after the first version, I was convinced that the flop was to do with my outdated baking soda (expired February of 2013) and I (reluctantly) had in-fact brushed the outside of the biscuits with melted butter (only 1 TB, but that was likely why it tasted of toast at all; their only redeeming feature). I thought the burnt part was to do with using honey (and perhaps that darn TB of butter that I diligently brushed on even the underside of the biscuit; the side that actually did burn)?  In any case, as it turned out, this was the better batch of the two (yikes!).

PS_close burnt

The second batch received a freshly-opened can of baking powder (no, not the whole can), just 1 TB).  I reduced the amount of quinoa flour and corn meal by half, replacing it with more whole wheat pastry flour.  Then, thinking I needed some “cream”, rather than use actual cream, I used 1/2 cup cream on top, whole milk yogurt (which had already been depleted of said top cream) in addition to buttermilk (because I really didn’t learn the first time).  I also opted to use sugar rather than honey but I brushed the tops with yogurt instead of butter (not advised).

So now that you know what not to do, this is what I just did.  Just a few moments ago.  I don’t have burnt toast and I don’t have (real) cream biscuits, but I do have something that looks more like a biscuit than a hockey puck, and tastes more like a biscuit than a (hockey puck) piece of burnt toast.  Plus, it is healthier than a cream biscuit (although, full disclosure, it does use actual cream).  If you didn’t read about my corn butter, I think you should.  I replaced half of the cream with the same portion of corn butter.  I used spelt flour rather than whole wheat.  I kept with the quinoa flour (because I like the color and the sweet richness) and I replaced the cornmeal with fresh sourdough breadcrumbs (because it started out as bread, which is what we use to make burnt toast; you following?).

I made the breadcrumbs without toasting the bread, hence the term “fresh” bread crumbs.  The bread I used was the sourdough from London Plane in Pioneer Square, but any good bread will work just as well.

NGREDIENTS

1 cup spelt flour
1/4 cup *quinoa flour
3/4 cups fresh breadcrumbs (simply purée day-old bread inners, not crust, in a blender or food processor until coarsely crumbly; it will be warm and moist to touch)
1 TB baking powder
1 tsp kosher salt
1 TB honey
1/2 cup whipping cream
1/2 cup corn butter (or another 1/2 cup cream)
Another bit of corn butter or melted butter for brushing

*quinoa flour can be purchased from some grocery and specialty stores (for a hefty price).  When I discovered the Blendtec, I am now able to make my own (well worth the small investment).

PREPARE

Pre-heat the oven to 425-degrees.

Mix the flour, breadcrumbs, salt and baking powder in a medium-sized bowl.  With a fork, blend in the honey, then add the cream.  Continue to blend with a fork until it quits “shagging” (Marion and Molly’s term).

Lay it out onto a floured work surface (which I find helpful to have fall onto a piece of wax paper).  Knead to pull it together (it will be wet and sticky). Roll it out with a pin.  In order to keep it from clumping onto the pin, I had to throw a handful of flour onto the dough.  Then, because it looked pasty, I threw over a teaspoon of corn butter to rub over too.  Roll it to 1/2″ thickness.

dough only

Now, you could cut into 12 squares (as Molly says) but I prefer round.  It was quite sticky and did not cooperate very well so my rounds were cattywampus and thin.  This is where I had an epiphany.  I took my thin discs and doubled them up with a layer of corn butter in between.  I also left one or two single-layered and half of them were top-coated with melted butter, while the rest were coated with more corn butter; all of them turned out just fine.  Better than fine, actually.  They are quite good!  yes, this is me admitting to them being good (my family will be shocked).

try thisPretty is not what these are about…

Sometimes it is about the food and flavor, not the…pretty.  Think about that. (pretty gutsy for a lead in to a food bloggers conference…no food porn here)!

How ’bout a random cute photo of my cutie pies instead?

PS_random 2They are acting a little pouty because they don’t get to go to the International Food Blogger Conference even though they are part of the “team”.

PS2_with preserves
Pretty good with boiled down blueberries though (no additives).PS_bittenI guess I should give the pups a nibble.

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