where in the world is erin?

I think I suffered from major burn out after trying to blog every day in November. Fortunately it doesn't mean we didn't have a fun and entertaining December.

The primary goal we had was for Marius to finish up at Claremont McKenna and then for us to find him an apartment in St. George so that we could move him as soon as we returned from visiting my parents. Here's the town.



This shot was taken from a "small" park on the outskirts of town. Here:



Such a pretty place! However, it may have a sinister side as well. We were listening to The God Delusion on tape on the way out and having one of our regular conversations about friends' concern over our immortal souls when I repeated a comment I use often in response to offers of people "witnessing" for me, which is that if there is a deity that needs/wants me to believe, they can speak to me themselves. Just then we turned a corner to this:



The giant red shaft of light had largely faded by the time I dug out my camera but it was very funny. Apparently I now must believe in a deity that appears as a giant red light.

We did manage to find something that will work for Marius and then drove back to California through an insane construction generated traffic jam.



To entertain ourselves we switched on some AM talk radio. I rarely think to check what crazy stuff those folks are spouting but it does take the edge off of a bad traffic jam as long as you can see the humor in what they say. I even have proof (as I know some of you won't even believe it).



All in all a good trip. We managed to hit the frozen custard place one night and even spent some time looking at houses and condos in case this becomes a permanent thing.

In the meantime, I plan on fully enjoying California and still have those great pics from my weekend back up in Santa Barbara to post.

In the meantime, everyone have a very happy new year!

Menu for Hope III

Stolen shamelessly from Chez Pim:

Every year, Food Bloggers from all over the world get together for a fundraising campaign. We call it 'Menu for Hope'. Last year, we raised $17,000 to help UNICEF.

This year, Menu for Hope III raises funds to support the UN World Food Programme, which provides hunger relief for needy people worldwide. To us Food Bloggers, food is a joy. On our blogs, we celebrate food as a delight or even an indulgence. Unfortunately, for many others who share our world do not share that privilege. For them, food is a matter of survival. This "Menu for Hope" is our small way to help.

On our Menu this year is a great list of amazing food related prizes. We hope that they will entice you to give whatever you can, and with some luck you can win unique and wonderful food gifts offered up by food bloggers from around the world.

The rule is pretty easy. For every US$10 you donate, you may claim one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. The more you give, the better your chance to win. The campaign is scheduled to run from now until Friday 22nd, 6PM PST. So get a move on!

The Prizes are listed by category. Feel free to click on any category to jump directly there. Roll your mouse over the thumbnail photos to see prize code and description. Click on a photo for more details.

Have a meal of your life..
Delicious experiences..
Feasts for the eyes: books and more..
Tasty treats..
Cooks' tools..
Drink yourself silly..

Or you can jump to the donation instructions.

Okay, that's the end of the shamelessly stolen description of the contest.

I sent out a few emails to my favorite food suppliers and my favorite local olive oil company, Joelle Olive Oil, agreed to donate one gallon of their fabulous Mission olive oil with shipping to anywhere in the U.S. (a $65 value). This is a great all purpose olive oil and is very smooth (and one of their two best sellers!).

Sadly, there were so many donations from the west coast that the person administering those prizes has closed the list for new prizes! This is great news for the fundraiser but I'm sad that this wonderful olive oil won't be included. Pim did invite Joelle Olive Oil to donate next year so I'll be sure to provide links then if Janet agrees to participate next year.


Thanks so much for your generous donation Janet! Since you can't get it from the raffle, Joelle has a booth at the Saturday Santa Barbara Farmers Market (and Sunday's up in Goleta and a few more as well I suspect but I haven't been to know for sure). I normally end up getting their blended oil as it offers some of the best of both worlds for indecisive people like me. It has the wonderfully peppery taste I love of their Manzanillo as well as some of the butter of the Mission. The next time I'm up there I might even be brave and just buy one of each in the hopes of ending my inability to pick a favorite!

(Shhh! don't tell them but when I was up this past weekend I strayed and bought olive oil from another local producer at the Farmers Market, Joelle's is SO much better!)

To further promote this oil I give you my favorite salad recipe for a great peppery olive oil:

Baby arugula (1 bag from Trader Joe's now that they have a quality supplier again or a bunch of adult arugula)
1 tablespoon white balsamic vinegar (which you can also get at Trader Joe's, in fact you can get all of these ingredients from Trader Joe's except for the olive oil)
1/2 cup walnut pieces (halves are fine but harder to eat and more expensive)
1/2 cup Parmesean shavings
1 pear (Bartlett or D'Anjou are my favorites for this) thinly sliced
salt and pepper to taste
3-4 tablespoons peppery olive oil like Joelle's Manzanillo oil

Whisk vinegar, oil, salt and pepper together.
Toss together with all other ingredients and serve.

It's that easy and really tasty. The next time I make it (which is about once a week), I'll post photos.

My weekend in SB

I'm not quite ready to upload the pics from the Santa Barbara farmers' market but Thuy has already posted twice about our weekend.

Check it out here and here. As a bonus you can see how manic I get when I get my hands on a chocolate malt. We had lunch at the Habit, just scroll down on the second link.

Good times.

it did actually arrive

My package did arrive today. I almost dropped the groceries I was carrying when I got home and saw the giant box sitting in our living. I was that surprised.

To be honest the supervisors at the UPS call center were good. Not only did they call the local distribution center to make sure the guy there called me but one of them checked on my package this morning, saw that it hadn't been delivered yesterday as promised and called the local guys again to get on their case. She then called me to let me know that they had promised it would arrive today and that they would be calling me to confirm that.

So now I have my fancy memory foam mattress that will be heaven to sleep on. I'm still grumpy with UPS over the whole thing but I do appreciate the attention the call center folks paid to my situation. It really was ridiculous.

Tomorrow I'll upload some photos from the Santa Barbara Farmers' Market. I was in town for about 24hrs this weekend and Thuy and I managed to get to the Saturday market. It was fun being a tourist there since I used to dash in, grab what I needed and dash out again when I was living there. It really is photogenic.

UPS is officially on my sh*t list

This is beginning to approach the ridiculous.

A package was scheduled for delivery on the 8th. One of us was home all day. They didn't leave a notice or anything of that nature. Online, it said that they would make a second attempt this monday the 11th.

I stayed home all day.

They didn't come.

They didn't leave a notice.

The online tracking information went from "out for delivery" to "receiver unavailable..." at around 6pm claiming that they had stopped by around 4:30. Now around this time, I saw a UPS truck make a u-turn in the entrance to our parking lot, but no one came near my front door.

The online tracking said that they would make another attempt today. I also called to find out where exactly they had attempted to deliver my package since it hadn't been my apartment. I got all sorts of promises about people who would call me to verify the delivery and none of them ever did. This morning someone from the local distribution center finally called me and said he would have the driver call me. This did not happen.

It is now after 10pm and the online tracking information says that delivery has been rescheduled for tomorrow.

I have spent TWO friggin' days holed up in my apartment waiting for these idiots. Tonight the best they could do was leave a note for the local distribution center to call me. The last time that happened, I didn't hear from them until another person called them directly to instruct them to call me well after their deadline for returning the call.

I am tired, stir crazy and really ticked off. This makes me want to never order another thing from a retailer who will only use UPS. They have wasted my time and lied to me repeatedly. It is so absurd I don't even know what to make of it anymore.

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

food safety and the government

Not that I am prone to trying to publicize the wrong-doings of Republicans (okay, maybe I am) but there was an excellent op-ed piece by Eric Schlosser (of Fast Food Nation -read the book, don't see the movie) in the NYTimes. Slow Food LA has saved a pdf of the article on their site so you can see it without worrying about the date you found this post or creating an account with the paper.

He points out that since Bush (yes, a little more republican bashing, I apologize but I couldn't help myself) was elected to office, major lobbyists for various food industries have been given positions of regulatory power in the government while the budget for the FDA has been cut to the extent that they now only have money to perform 10% of the number of inspections they were performing in the 70's.

And we wonder why there seem to be so many health risks associated with eating these days.

The hunt for clover plastic mini circulars

So I'm working on two Durrow sweaters as some of you know. One of them I am working in the round from the bottom up and I have discovered that while I normally love dpns (double point needles), I really don't love them when working with six inches of knitting AND trying to work several cables. There is such a thing as too much when it comes to sharp pointy things and I have reached my limit apparently.

So of course I am now on the hunt for what appears to be the only alternative for a knitter who REALLY dislikes the magic loop method of knitting (okay, I lied, I could try working them on two circular needles but I'm too stubborn now that I've decided that I need to do it a different way). My solution are the Clover plastic mini circular needles. However, not many places still sell them for some odd reason. They were introduced to the US market in 2001 and I have seen them periodically since then but never in large numbers and they have become even more rare as time has passed. On top of it all an internet search pulls up statements from retailers suggesting that Clover might not continue making these lovelies.

Noooooooooo-oooooooo-ooooooo!

I found a few places still selling them like here (scroll down a bit and you'll see them on the right). But of course, I need a size 5. Since I first decided I needed an 8.5" needle in the size 5 I have purchased nearly ten of these needles in the hopes that the different size system used in Japan will mean that a size 4 or 6 might be a US 5. Nope. Today I received my first shipment of these babies in sizes 4, 6, 8, and 10 and while the size 10 is really closer to a US 8 and the 8 is somewhere between a US7 and a US 8, the 6 is almost indistinguishable from a US 6 and the 4 is just a smidge smaller than the US 4. So no luck there.

However, it does mean I have started a lovely collection of these for future projects:


Hmmm, me thinks that this photo is blurry but -it's midnight, so I'm not going to worry about that now I'm afraid. I promise a better photo when the next shipment arrives which will include a 10" size 5 which may work now that I'm up to nearly eight whole inches of knitting for the sleeve I on which I am currently working.

Keep your fingers crossed folks.

And...

If anyone out there knows where to get an 8.5" size 5, I'd really love to hear from you!

Red lentils with zucchini

I don't know what I was thinking. Here I am with a new camera and all and I didn't think to take a photo of dinner until half way through it. However, it doesn't look all that different since there is really no way to attractively plate the stuff. It is just yellow goop with zucchini in it over rice.

But it is very tasty yellow goop with zucchini in it and leads me to once again highly recommend Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. Nearly everything I have made from this book has been great. I love this cookbook. It's now the one I reach for when I want to try something new to the exclusion of everything else. Eventually Marius will revolt and demand more creative suppers with meat but for the time being it's all vegetarian baby!

The recipe (I'll do the first bit separately since it has to sit and cook for a while):

1 cup red lentils (masoor dal), picked over, washed in several changes of water (for real here folks) and drained

1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
1-1.25 teaspoons of salt

4 cups water

Combine in a pot larger than needed to contain all of this (you'll be adding more stuff later) and bring to a boil. You should note that boiling red lentils FOAM. I don't mean the way pasta or potatoes can boil over if left unattended. You will get inches of fairly substantial foam developing on the surface of the water and you really want to watch for it or it will be burned to your stove top and the outside of your pot if you let it overflow (yes I learned this tonight). As it develops, just skim it off and toss it down the drain.

Once it boils, add the turmeric, stir once and reduce heat to low.

Cook for 40-50 minutes until lentils are tender. Add salt (we didn't and didn't miss it)

Part 2 (what you'll be adding to the lentils once they're cooked so you may want to just do all of the prep first and start cooking this part later, I didn't but it still turned out okay):

1/4 cup canola or peanut oil (I used canola this time, might be good with peanut)
4 whole cardamom pods (I used green)
1 1.5" cinnamon stick (mine was 3" and fine)
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
1 medium onion, very finely chopped
2 teaspoons peeled fresh ginger grated to a pulp (microplanes are great for this)
3 garlic cloves, peeled and mashed (I just chopped)

Note: you could just roughly chop the onion, ginger and garlic and throw it in a food processor but you'll get that freakish blue-green color that McGee talked about in his NYT column and blog.

1 medium zucchini, cut into 1" rounds and then halved crosswise
1/4-1/2 teaspoon cayenne (we used 1/2 and liked it although my nose ran a little)
freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/2 cup water
a few squeezes of fresh lime juice

What to do:

Heat the oil in a frying pan. When very hot, add cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaves and cumin seeds and stir for a few seconds.

Add the onion and stir until medium brown

Add the ginger and garlic (another reason not to go for the blue color) and stir for a minute

Add the zucchini, black pepper and cayenne (and a pinch of salt if desired -again we didn't) and stir for another minute

Add 1/2 cup of water, cover, turn the heat to low and cook for two minutes

Uncover and stir gently

Empty the contents of the frying pan into the lentils (obviously wait until the lentils are cooked), stir gently and cook for one minute

Serve with rice and a yogurt sauce (or just plain yogurt as we did since I was feeling lazy) and squeeze the lime juice over the top before serving. I made brown rice to go with this and it was excellent. Just be careful not to bite into a cardamom pod (they are obvious if you look for them).

So good! Seriously folks, you need to buy this cookbook.

new toy

Santa came early this year. Marius got me a new point and shoot digital camera, the Casio Exlim z1000. This sucker has 10.1MP! That's not a typo folks.

Here's the baptismal photo of the gift giver himself:

If you want to know what 10.1MP looks like, you can see it in all it's gory glory (remind me to never allow anyone to see my skin at this resolution!) here. You have to click on the image to see it at the highest resolution.

Mrs. Ball's chutney recipe!!!

Realizing that we were completely out of Mrs. Ball's after we had finished that dish of bobotie, I went online to see what it would cost to order more (we used to get it at an import store in Santa Barbara). Instead, I found a S. African women's magazine had posted the official recipe!!! Woo-hoo!

Here it is if you care:

Mrs. Ball’s secret recipe.
Edward Ball, Mrs. Ball’s grandson scaled down this original recipe to make 18 bottles of (mild) chutney.
612 g dried peaches 238 g dried apricots 3 litres brown wine vinegar 2 1/2 kg white sugar 500 g onions 120 g salt 75 g cayenne pepper 1 to 2 litres of brown wine vinegar for soaking About 2 litres of brown wine vinegar for mixing
The fruit should be left in the soaking vinegar overnight, then cooked in the same vinegar until soft. Drain. Put the fruit through a mill. Add the sugar (dissolved) and onions (minced) and cook in a pot with the brown wine vinegar. The amount of vinegar depends on the consistency: it should not be too runny or too thick, but have the same consistency as the end product you find in the bottle. Add spices and cook for one to two hours. Stir occasionally with a wooden spoon to prevent burning. Sterlize your bottles and spoon in the mixture. That's it - you've got Mrs Ball's Chutney.
To make the chutney hot, add 75 g chopped chillies.
To make peach chutney, omit the apricots and use 850 g dried peaches instead.

Thank you Sarie Magazine!

World Aids Day and Bobotie

Today is World Aids Day. Sadly India has surpassed sub-Saharan Africa in the number of newly infected individuals. The good news is that two Indian companies have agreed to produce AIDS drugs at a fraction of the current price as a result of several large foundations guaranteeing sales at a profitable level (one of these is the Clinton Foundation if all of you red states can believe it). You can help when you are shopping for holiday gifts. Just go (red).

So it's fitting that I post the recipe for bobotie today given that it is a S. African recipe heavily influenced by south Asian cultures. The recipe comes from "Kook en geniet" by S.J.S. de Villiers. It is published in English but only in S. Africa and so is very hard to come by in the U.S.

What you need:

2 onions

cooking oil or butter (to fry above onions)

1kg minced meat (lamb or beef -I have never been served lamb just FYI, 2lbs works fine)

1 slice bread

1 cup milk

2 eggs

1 tablespoon medium curry powder (S. African curry powders are missing something found in U.S. versions so it will taste a bit different if you don't have a store nearby that imports the stuff)

1.5 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/2 tablespoon turmeric

2 tablespoons vinegar or the juice of one large lemon

6 almonds, quartered

1/2 cup seedless raisins

4 lemon or bay leaves or zest of one lemon (say from the one you are about to juice)

3 tablespoons chutney

What to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F

2. Slice the onions thinly and fry lightly in the cooking oil (note, if you're cooking the meat now you can probably just cook them together and leave out the extra oil), if uncooked meat is used, fry with the onions until slightly browned

3. Soak the bread in the milk, squeeze out the milk and mash the now wet bread

4. Mix all ingredients (except 1/2 cup of the squeezed out milk, 1 egg and the leaves or zest)

5. Spoon the mixture into a greased oven dish, roll up the leaves and insert them in an upright position in the meat mixture (otherwise you'll have to fish them out later, this way you can easily pull them out once it's cooked)

6. Bake for 1 hour if uncooked meat is used and for 45 minutes if cooked meat is used (for those wondering, this is a traditional way to use up left-over meat -yes, this is probably the only culture on the planet to have 2lbs of "left-over" cooked meat sitting around, but there you have it)

7. Beat the remaining egg with the reserved milk and pour over the meat 30 minutes before the end of the cooking time.

8. Serve with rice and chutney (traditionally Mrs. Ball's)

Okay, now for the reality check. I rarely measure any of these ingredients because it is VERY difficult to screw this dish up (unless your oven doesn't have any sort of temperature control in which case this could result in a very embarrassing moment for you and your in-laws, yes I've been there). Feel free to substitute apricot jam for the chutney in the actual dish (do not use it as a condiment though!), leave out the sugar, salt, and/or pepper), substitute other dried berries for the raisins (I used cranberries this time and it worked nicely) and substitute other nuts for the almonds (I used sliced almonds as you can tell from the photo below). As I wrote in an earlier post, there are as many recipes for bobotie as there are for meatloaf so it's a fun dish to experiment with. I even have versions that are vegetarian using steamed dried fruit instead of meat. The end result should look something like this:

When you dish it up, it looks like soggy ground meat with stuff in it but it tastes great and it's super easy. Enjoy.