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The ultimate comfort food
We have a tradition for the first meal we eat on our first night in a new apartment. It’s not particularly original – we order pizza. I remember when we moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, in one of the most hellish days I’ve ever spent – just try to imagine navigating a U-Haul through the streets of the Big Apple – and we finally allowed ourselves to relax, surrounded by boxes, with a pesto pizza from the parlor a few blocks down Amsterdam Ave.
Last weekend, we moved from our well-appointed but tiny apartment in Wallingford to a more spacious pad in Madrona. We now have a washer and dryer, a dishwasher and a (gasp) full-sized refrigerator. The first night, with an almost-bare fridge and most cutlery still deep in boxes, we again ordered pesto pizza, indulging in a garlicky chicken topping.
You get a freebie on moving day. But after that, you have to roll up your sleeves and put away enough kitchen supplies to actually make use of that nice fancy kitchen you wanted so badly. For me, the odds are good I’ll break in my oven with cookies.
The critical components
It used to be chocolate chip was my standby, but Jeremy loves snickerdoodles with an almost-religious fervor. I can get behind that. Snickerdoodles are essentially sugar cookies with the addition of cream of tartar for that distinctive tang, given a quick roll in cinnamon and sugar. Some bakers believe they should be thin and flat, and I’ve made them that way before. We prefer, however, a plumper cookie. That gives you a slightly crunchy crust on the exterior that gives way when you bite it into a chewy center.
My recipe is adapted from an AllRecipes.com entry called “Mrs. Sigg’s Snickerdoodles“. It might not be that glamorous to use an online recipe, but I’ve tried the America’s Test Kitchen version and it honestly wasn’t as good. Also, the AllRecipes one has almost 2500 reviews and over 33,000 versions saved. Sometimes, the masses are just right.
Mmm...cookies...
Snickerdoodles
From AllRecipes.com
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1/4 cup shortening, such as Crisco
- 3/4 cup white sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1 1/3 cups flour
- 1 tsp. cream of tartar
- 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1/8 tsp. salt
- 2 Tb. sugar
- 2 tsp. cinnamon
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Using a hand or stand mixer, cream together butter, shortening, sugar, egg and vanilla. Slowly stir in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt (ok, ok, you can sift the dry ingredients together first if you’re legit like that.)
Cover a baking sheet with a parchment paper. In a small ziplock sandwich bag, mix the sugar and cinnamon.
Shape the dough into small balls about 3/4 inch in diameter. I find it works best to do this with your hands. Then drop each ball of dough into the ziplock bag and shake it around so it’s coated on all sides.
Arrange the balls of dough on the baking sheet with some space in between and then gently press on the top of each one – don’t flatten them, just dimple the tops a bit.
Bake 8-10 minutes, until the bottoms are light brown and the tops start to crack a bit. Don’t wait until the tops are golden-brown – they will be dry and overcooked at that point.
Makes 18-24 cookies, depending on size.
Private lunch for the lucky few
Salumi, the tiny storefront and deli in Pioneer Square, is probably one of the most well-known restaurants in Seattle. That could be because their house-cured meats are out-of-this-world good, or because it’s run by a family with the last name of Batali (as in Mario). Foodies, local workers and tourists on their way to Sea-Tac wait in hour-long lines for their sandwiches, sometimes lining up at 10:30am just to make sure the legendary porchetta doesn’t run out.
The sandwiches are justifiably amazing, but Salumi also offers a more private, sit-down experience — as long as you have a half-dozen friends willing to join you and are proactive enough to book two months in advance. This is the Salumi “backroom lunch”, a private five-course meal for 8-10 people served in the small backroom of the restaurant. It’s only offered on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and for $40 per person (plus tax, tip and wine) Chef Bryan cooks whatever he’s feeling that’s fresh. You just sit back and eat for three hours.
Spurred by a query by Jeremy on Twitter back in January, a group of friends booked a meal for a couple weeks ago. Wine bottles in hand, we breezed past the hungry lineup for the sandwich counter and settled in at our reserved table in the backroom.
First uncorked was a bottle of Carabella 2007 Pinot Gris (thanks to Frank), while we snacked on some appetizers laid out on the table. There was a platter of some of Salumi’s cured meats, like salami, prosciutto and the mole salami, as well as their house-spiced olives and fresh baguette.
Meaty goodness
Once everyone arrived, Brian brought out some lardo-wrapped breadsticks. Lardo is cured pig fat, served warm so it melts on your tongue. He thoughtfully brought out a plate of leftover scraps as well.
So porky
While we tapped into the house wine, Farnese Montepulciano d’Abbruzzo, Brian started bringing out the first courses. Surprisingly, given the meaty focus of the restaurant, he presented us with platter after platter of vegetables. First came out balsamic mushrooms and cipollini onions, cooked until tender and sweet. Then came baby artichokes with parmesan and green beans in pesto.
Naturally, pork was not completely absent from the vegetable parade. One of the best dishes was sauteed Brussels sprouts with guanciale (pork jowl), and asparagus stalks arrived wrapped in prosciutto.
Guanciale makes Brussels sprouts happy
At this point, someone at the table mentioned they’d seen a sign out front offering chicharrones (fried pork skins). Apparently they only offer it rarely, about 10 times a year total, when they have it in stock. Brian kindly brought out a plate full of the warm, crispy, porky goodness for us all to share. These bites were like essence of pork and COMPLETELY addictive.
Chicharrones!
We then tried to take a moment to take photos, but Brian said “gnocchi waits for no one” and delivered a massive platter of gnocchi with sage “made by Mario Batali’s mom.”
"Gnocchi waits for no one"
The main course — and yes, we were quite full at this point, but soldiered on — was a beautifully presented dish of Vermouth chicken with leeks and broccoli rabe. I would love to learn how to make this myself. The chicken was tender and immensely flavorful, and the slight bitterness of the broccoli rabe was a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the caramelized leeks.
A truly dominating spread
Finally, as several of our party tapped out and went back to “work”, we finished off the meal with a not-too-sweet dessert of red wine-poached pears with chestnut ricotta and honey. Light yet complex, it was the perfect coda to an epic, unforgettable meal.
The perfect finish
With so many food options in Seattle, it’s not often where we make a point to eat in the suburbs. But there we were in Issaquah on a random Tuesday night with a group of friends, in the land of chain restaurants and big-box stores to dine at one of the best Thai places we have in Western Washington.
This would be Noodle Boat, a family-run operation nestled inside a strip mall. Dismiss the nondescript decor and the far-flung location and focus instead on the cuisine, which ports traditional Thai dishes in a family-style setting – with a few surprises.
Chicken Soaked With Rum, Set Ablaze
As you can see, the menu includes a flaming chicken dish called the “Volcano Gem Hen”, soaked with Bacardi 151 and lit afire. You must be 21+ to get the full alcohol-soaked blaze. We asked the server the point of the pyrotechnics and she said, “It’s cool.” Well, there you go.
Showy display aside, the chicken itself was delicious, the meat so tender it fell off the bone while the skin was deep-fried and crispy. Lisa gave up fork and chopsticks and went after it with both hands.
We also ordered a dish I had our first visit, the Talay Hot Plate, which is a sizzling platter of shrimp, squid, scallops and vegetables. Given our group size (eight people), the goal was to create a smorgasbord of varying options, allowing us to graze over the different plates.
You can hear the sizzle
Some other standouts were the Ka-Pao-Rad-Khow (stir-fried ground pork with chili, bell pepper and Holy hot basil); a spicy Koa Soi (egg noodle curry); and the “Queen of Banana”, which according to the menu is “steamed banana blossom, shrimp, chicken mix chili paste, lime leaves, coconut milk, roast coconut, lemon grass, mint, onion and cilantro put in a banana leaf.” Yowza.
What also makes this place worth a visit is the friendliness of the staff. It’s a family of about a dozen, with members of all ages doing the cooking and serving. They close the entire restaurant for 6 weeks every year to go home to Thailand to acquire ingredients and visit family. One of our servers told us wistfully about her excitement at getting to go home in just a few short weeks (this year it’s April and the first half of May, so get to Noodle Boat soon or face a long wait!)
In Seattle, you hear stories of these types of places all the time, the hidden find beyond the beaten path. Someone will ask if you’ve checked out the Indian restaurant out on the Eastside in BFE (rather, Factoria). Or if you’ve discovered the Mongolian BBQ place in Mill Creek (a place my UW coworkers RAVE about). One thing we love about Twitter is how viral a new restaurant/find can become. One recommendation leads to a caravan of foodies hightailing it over the 520 Bridge in search of a new meal.
A laden table, just the way we like it
All evidence why quality dining in Puget Sound is not limited to just the 206, or the celebrity chefs now flexing their muscles in Bellevue. Better yet, hidden finds such as Noodle Boat come cheap. Our group split a ton of dishes and had several drinks, and each of us left $24 lighter in the wallet, including tip.
Even though been a while since we’ve posted, it’s not that we haven’t had anything interesting to share. Definitely the opposite — the fall has been packed with our usual mix of eating, drinking and sporting events.
Rather than highlight any one event, I thought I’d just do a roundup and give some link love to some of those who are actually motivated enough to blog responsibly. I realize this also makes it seem like we eat all the time, but I figure people would rather read about food than the grueling Crossfit workouts, hours sweating in a hot yoga studio, or late nights at the UW athletic communications office or on the road in exciting places like Kalamazoo, Michigan.
- The Rachel Dinner, aka Foods That Scare Us, in honor of Rachel’s food phobias, including tongue, blue cheese, tendon and chicken liver. May I just say that the pigs’ ears were absolutely delectable?
- There was Chinese-Jewish (aka “Chewish”) night, that came about from some matzah-ball soup-related Twitter trash talking and evolved into a massive potluck that included standards like the classic aforementioned soup, knishes and brisket (my contribution, from Joan Nathan’s recipe), as well as more creative efforts like Naomi‘s guanciale-spiked kugel (kugel is SO much better with pork!) and Lorna’s red-cooked pork belly which is the perfect combination of melty crispiness.
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Protest Nachos
Thanksgiving, which I desperately wanted to be Mexican-themed but we’re not all yet quite enlightened enough. One day. It still featured “Protest Nachos” as an appetizer and five kinds of pies.In the head-to-head of Columbia City‘s pumpkin vs. my Aunt Maureen’s, the homemade version was a clear winner.
- Cookies and Dumplings, originally two events but combined into one glorious afternoon. Picture, if you can, a piano top with every inch covered by plates of cookies, from chocolate to maple to meringue to chocolate chip and chocolate chip and chocolate chip. And lest you get distracted by the sugar, noticed that dumplings of all kinds are being cranked out in the kitchen, some Chinese-inspired, some that go hand in hand with long-stewed chicken in a restorative broth. The bag of cookies I took home from this lasted a solid week.
- Latkes, which happened because every Hannukah that I’m in Seattle I make my father make latkes. No one makes them lighter or more spidery. Trust me, spidery is a very good quality in a latke. (Sorry, didn’t get any photos of them. Next year, maybe.)
- I went to The New Guard‘s holiday party, which brought together art, music and food by Poppy pastry chef Dana Cree, who re-envisioned an old-fashioned holiday meal of ham, green bean salad, homemade onion dip (addictive) and many, many kinds of pie.
Breakfast tacos, I love you
- And finally (though I’m probably forgetting some things) we went to Austin, Texas, and dined on breakfast tacos every morning while managing to squeeze in swimming, biking, exploring and BBQ, of course. But really, the breakfast tacos were the best. I’ve never had flour tortillas as soft and buttery as the ones we had in Austin. Filling them with fluffy scrambled eggs, bacon, avocado and hot sauce was practically overkill. They were so good that we had to smuggle 20 extra home in our suitcases.
It’s been an incredible year being in Seattle. We can’t wait to see what we’ll do (and eat) in 2010.
Pierogies in front, sausage in back
One of the things we love about Seattle is that we are always discovering new food experiences. Whether it’s an authentic Mexican dinner for 40 on a rooftop or a soft opening at one of the hottest new restaurants in the city, it seems like we’re constantly learning of (often through Twitter) meals both unique and delicious.
One place we learned of recently through friends is the Polish Home, and more specifically, the PB Kitchen. Every Friday night and Sunday afternoon, the local Polish association serves dinner in their basement/dining hall. Pierogies, sausage, stuffed cabbage, and of course stout bottles of Polish beer.
Being from Pittsburgh, Jeremy was raised in the U.S. capital for Polish immigrants and pierogies. And my Russian ancestry makes me conditioned to go for the little dumplings at any opportunity. So we knew we had to check this place out.
Just don't ask us how to pronounce it
When we arrived around 8 p.m., the place was packed with Capitol Hill hipsters ironically munching on pork hocks, groups of yuppies 10 to a table, and community members chattering away in fluent Polish. It was loud and bustling, and it was easy to feel like you were in some Eastern European beer hall, especially when ordering beer at the bar went something like, “I’ll have a Zy…a Zoo…uh, the one that starts with Z” (aka Żywiec, a nice Polish lager.)
We ordered a mixed plate of pierogies — meat, sauerkraut & mushroom, potato & cheese — a plate of sausage, sauerkraut and potatoes, and some fried mushrooms to nosh on for an appetizer. We considered the stuffed cabbage and cranium-sized pork hocks we saw passing by, but decided to stick with the basics for our first visit. It was a busy night (I suspect they always are) but the people-watching made the time pass quickly until our food landed.
For a cold, rainy, Seattle fall night, nothing hits the spot like Eastern European comfort food. The sausage had a nice snap to it, and the pierogies were cooked perfectly. I liked the tangy beet salad they served alongside. Plus, they sprinkled bacon across the pierogies — how can you go wrong?
We definitely will be going back for a repeat visit, this time with a crew of friends in tow. It’s the kind of place you want to bring a large group along to share in the over-sized beers and platters of savory comfort food.
When I used to live in Pittsburgh, I became acquaintances with a coworker, a student at Carnegie Mellon, at Starbucks who was from San Diego. Whenever I would walk up Forbes Ave. at 5 a.m. through a foot of snow to open the store in the winter, I would always ask why he left sun-drenched SoCal for our ice and frigid temperatures.
Cameron’s response was that he wanted seasons. I countered by shaking my head in incredulity. Who moves from San Diego to…Pittsburgh?
Leaves on a sidewalk
Years later, I can understand his desire for change. This is why I’ve always looked forward to fall, the time of year when the heat breaks and the leaves turn. Fall meant college football, foliage and warming up with a coffee in neighborhood cafes — three of my favorite experiences.
For the most part, Seattle has amazing summers. The clouds stay tucked behind the mountains and rain is almost non-existent. Sun glasses come out and Green Lake fills up. Mt. Rainier makes a glut of appearance and shutterbugs dash off to Kerry Park. But despite those three months of perfection, I looked forward to when the skies would return to their normal slate color, and when I can see my breath in the morning. I’m not sure why that is exactly.
Fall colors in Seattle
This is my first real fall in Seattle. The rain has returned, but the city has responded with a spectacular outburst of color. The leaves on the maple trees are sporting their best reds, yellows and oranges. I came in thinking the Pacific NW would be full of evergreen pines, and therefore lacking the fall look I was accustomed to on the East Coast. Wrong. And while Seattle is not quite on the level of an October in Burlington, VT., it’s amazing in its own right.
For some reason, I thought of this earlier today on a walk through the Mt. Baker neighborhood for coffee and breakfast at Sweet & Savory, a nearby cafe. Lisa and I took Cooper, her Golden Retriever, with us as we walked past the Craftsman homes and up the hill. The leaves were out in full force, and it was worth it to take our cafe haul over to the view park on 31st. It was a small section of a rather mundane October Sunday, but it somehow resonated with me.
Change is good.
It emerged on Twitter, of course, where all good food parties are born. I don’t even remember how the topic came up, but someone started talking about comfort food and someone else brought up macaroni and cheese and another person chimed in with fried chicken and the next thing I knew, a bright-orange Evite was in my inbox announcing a Macaroni & Cheese / Fried Chicken Potluck.
A spread of cheesy goodness
I decided to go for the mac n’ cheese, which like any good human being I love, though oddly before this weekend I had never made it myself. I’ve always tended more toward the quick and dirty boxed variations, growing up with the occasional Kraft or shells + Velveeta before graduating to the more virtuous Annie’s. For whatever reason, I never felt the urge to make it from scratch.
So this was the perfect opportunity. Naturally, I obsessed about it for days. Basic? Bacon? Mushrooms? Green chiles? An attempt at the legendary fried mac n’ cheese wedges from Denver’s Cherry Cricket?
Ultimately I did the obvious thing and turned to one of my most reliable cooking resources: my cousin Megan, currently a pastry chef at the delicious Columbia City Bakery, always ready with recipe suggestions and sure-fire potluck winners. We consulted, and she gave me the guidelines for her crab mac n’ cheese with Gruyere, Comte, and chives.
I ended up using a Barefoot Contessa recipe for lobster mac n’ cheese as the template for Megan’s crab mac n’ cheese, and I have to say I was pleased with the result. It’s always nerve-wracking making something for the first time, especially when you are making it for other people and even more so when you aren’t going strictly off a recipe. But it turned out gooey and bubbly, with the sharp bite of the Comte cheese giving it a nice kick while the savory crab paired well with the chives.
The reviews from the others at the potluck were positive too, and almost all of it got eaten — which is the best kind of feedback, especially considering there were about 8 or 9 other kinds of mac n’ cheese and a few types of fried chicken.Some of the other offerings: Lorna‘s prize-winning macaroni and cheese had six kinds of cheese and a pound of bacon (!), Valentina creatively rolled up long, wide noodles individually, and hosts Sarah and Frank fried up ridiculous amounts of popcorn chicken that everyone devoured like…popcorn. [Update: Lorna thankfully has better photos in her blog post.]
I only took one hurried photo before diving in, but you can see my little mac on the right side in the red casserole.
If you need a dish for a potluck, macaroni n’ cheese or otherwise, I’d recommend this one. It makes a ton of food so you’ll need some help eating it. I have an entire pan full of it in the freezer still.
Crab Macaroni n’ Cheese
Adapted from Megan Bokan
- Kosher salt
- Vegetable oil
- 1 pound cavatappi or penne
- 1 quart whole milk
- 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, divided
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 12 ounces Gruyere cheese, grated (4 cups)
- 8 ounces Comte cheese, grated (2 cups)
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1 pound cooked crab meat (canned is fine unless you’re a high roller)
- 1/2 cup chives, chopped
- 1 cup panko (optional)
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Drizzle oil into a large pot of boiling salted water. Add the pasta and cook until just al dente but not completely done. Drain well.
Meanwhile, heat the milk in a small saucepan, but don’t boil it. In a large pot, melt 6 tablespoons of butter and add the flour. Cook over low heat for 2 minutes, stirring with a whisk. Still whisking, add the hot milk and cook for a minute or two more, until thickened and smooth. Off the heat, add the Gruyere, Comte, 1 tablespoon salt and the pepper. Add the cooked noodles, crab, and chives and stir well. Place the mixture in 1 big casserole or 2 medium ones.
Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter, combine them with the panko, and sprinkle on the top. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until the sauce is bubbly and the noodles are browned on the top.
You say you want a Canvolution?
A few months ago, the ridiculous yet continuously inspiring thing that is Twitter sprouted yet another movement: The Canvolution. Essentially, one person asked if others were interested in learning more about canning and the art of “putting food by.” The response from all corners was resoundingly positive, and the result was a summer and fall full of classes, events and blogging on canning and preserving. The Canning Across America homepage has more details, and mastermind Kim O’Donnel has blogged about the Canvolution’s full history.
I got involved because I was also curious to learn more. I know little about canning myself, so my paltry contribution to the effort was to organize the group email list. I have canned before, though — when I was about 8, I went over to my aunt Maureen’s house and we spent several hours canning peaches and tomatoes. So this summer, when I wanted to revisit canning, I cornered Maureen and told her I wanted to learn at the feet of the master.
“Sure!” she said. “What do you want to do? Blackberry jam? Peaches? Pears? Tomatoes?” I lost track at that point. Suffice to say, the Canvolution was in full swing.
Millions of peaches, peaches for me
On a rainy Sunday about a week ago, we finally made it over to her house in Ballard. While Maureen and her husband Don grow some fruit and vegetables in their garden, to get enough peaches for canning they bought a few boxes worth. We decided to make some regular canned peaches and some with Cognac and schnapps. Maureen said my newfound enthusiasm inspired her to “get creative” and raid the liquor cabinet.
While my teenage cousin Mariah provided adolescent commentary (“Mom, why do you always take the jars out of the oven without mitts? What is wrong with you?”) Maureen walked us through the process. First, she sterilized the jars in the dishwasher and then kept them in a hot oven while preparing the fruit. She had three kettles boiling, one for processing the cans, one for scalding the peaches, and one of sugar water for the syrup.
Jeremy's a pro at this already
We dunked the peaches in the boiling water for a minute or two, then dunked them in an ice bath. That helped the skin slide right off. We cut the peaches in halves or quarters, depending on the type, and then put them into the syrup.
After they had cooked in the syrup, we grabbed the sterilized jar and slipped the peaches into it. Then we filled them to the brim with the rest of the syrup, put the lids on, and popped them into the canning kettle to process. About 15 minutes later, we had gleaming jars of golden fruit, just waiting to be opened months later on a dark Seattle winter evening.
We also made some smaller jars for the alcohol-soaked peaches, and then Mariah cranked out some peach jam and Maureen cooked down the scraps of skin to make a thick peach syrup for pancakes. It was a lot of work, but it was fun work, the sort that only gets better the more people are involved.
We came away impressed with the ease of it and itching to try making our own red pepper jelly. I’m also looking forward to trying some of those Cognac peaches on top of pound cake or ice cream in a few months…
Shelf life of about 3 hours
One of the great things about living in the Pacific Northwest is that every summer, right around the beginning of August, the landscape erupts with blackberries. I mean, the little buggers are everywhere: in vacant lots, in alleys, climbing out of retaining walls, in traffic circles, along every road. I’ve read that they’re comparable to kudzu in the South; crawling over everything like weeds, resistant to extermination.
If something has to be so pervasive, hey, at least it produces fruit. There’s really no reason to buy blackberries in the store or even the market, when I can take a bowl, walk around the block, and pick a good half-pint. My father said he went to a 5-foot swath south of the city, shook the branches, and enough for a pie literally fell into his waiting bowl.
Today I took a little stroll around my neighborhood and down to Greenlake and returned with, as usual, more berries than I knew what to do with. There’s a fine line when picking blackberries — you go from “hmm, will I find enough?” to looking down and realizing “holy crap I just picked three pounds of blackberries” rather quickly. Once you find a fruitful patch, you go into a blackberry frenzy, picking every plump berry in sight until you suddenly snap to reality and accept that you have way more than you need.
I decided to make free-form blackberry tarts, which is another way of saying I didn’t want to worry if they looked pretty. A good thing, too; these were, shall we say, “rustic” in appearance, though they tasted just fine – maybe a little more sugar needed to counter the tartness of the berries. Or vanilla ice cream on top would work as well.
I really do feel fortunate to have so much good quality fruit at my fingertips. We don’t have enough room for a garden, yet I’m still able to walk out the door and within minutes have ample fresh produce in hand. Seattle in the summer, to me, always means blackberry picking.
Free-Form Blackberry Tarts
(adapted from How to Cook Everything)
Dough:
- 1 1/8 cups flour
- 2 Tb. sugar
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 1 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
- ice water
- 1 egg yolk
Filling:
- approx. 2 cups blackberries (or could use another berry of your choice)
- 1-2 tsp. sugar, depending how sweet the berries are
- 1 tsp. cinnamon or nutmeg
- 2 Tb. melted butter
To make the dough, put flour, sugar, and salt into a food processor and pulse a few times to blend. Add in the butter and pulse for about 10 seconds, until mixture resembles cornmeal.
Turn mixture into a bowl and sprinkle 3 Tb. ice water and egg yolk over it. Using a wooden spoon, gently mix until it starts to come together — you may need to add another half Tb. of ice water. When you can, use your hands to mold the dough into a ball. Wrap it in plastic wrap, flatten into a disk, and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
Mix the berries with sugar and spice, but gently so they hold their shape.
When the dough is chilled, take it out and cut it into four pieces. Roll each piece out into a rough circle, about 1/8 inch thick. Place all four circles onto a baking sheet.
Put berries in the center of each circle of dough, leaving about an inch of dough from the edge. Fold up the edges around the berries so they’re tucked in, but don’t try to cover the berries with the dough entirely.
Brush the dough and the fruit with melted butter. Bake for 20-30 minutes, until fruit bubbles and the crust is golden brown.
Serve with powdered sugar, or vanilla ice cream, or whipped cream. If they look misshapen, just tell people that’s the idea.
Fug-tastic tarts
Last week I attended a screening for the documentary The End of the Line, a film to be released later this year that details how overfishing is essentially eradicating every single species of fish from the ocean.
Held at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle, it included seafood hors d’oeurves (all sustainable, of course) like smoked salmon, oysters and geoduck ceviche. The food was fine, but the movie was what left an impact.
If fishing continues at the same pace, scientists predict there will be basically no fish left in the sea by 2048.
2048. That’s well within my lifetime and that of almost everyone I know.
We’ve blogged before about the film Food, Inc. and how jarring that was. But this film was even more upsetting. Maybe it was because it taught me so much I didn’t know. Like that bluefin tuna are being overfished so far beyond the suggested quota that they are on the verge of extinction — yet restaurants like Nobu continue to serve it on their menus, the equivalent of selling orangutang or white rhino. Or that unagi, or eel, one of my favorite dishes to order at sushi restaurants, is 95 percent extinct.
It was shocking, and it made me wonder what I can do to avoid being part of the problem. Like in Food, Inc., the film recommends letting money talk – buying sustainable seafood and asking your fish provider where the fish came from and how it was caught. I also picked up a fish guide that lists what the best, okay, and worst options are for buying and eating seafood. Sustainable Sushi is another great resource. And it turns out that local organic grocery chain PCC is one of the best places in the country to buy fish you know is sustainable.
It’s a good thing we like anchovies, because along with sardines and mackerel, those are some of the best fish you can eat: low on the food chain, full of Omega-3s, and abundant. They’re also cheap, which shows that eating sustainable seafood doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive at all.
So the good news is that there’s reason to be optimistic, if people are aware about the issues of eating a lot of seafood out there. I would like to still be eating salmon 40 years from now. Wouldn’t you?
Lisa
Jeremy
