When I’m pensive, worried or stressed out, I often find myself in my kitchen, dazed and chopping for the sake of chopping. There is an element to cooking that I find amazingly cathartic, like the concerns of real life, like the vegetables on the board, are being deconstructed into perfect squares–bite size palatable chunks [...]
Posts Tagged ‘cooking’
kohlrabi 2
Weeks ago I dumped some sliced kohlrabi into a brine in the hopes of creating something good out of something bad. It didn’t work. My tasty brine did not do much to the kohlrabi, and the damn stuff tasted like it did when fresh (meaning not much), except now covered in my tasty [...]
Teff cakes
I once dated a girl who had celiac-sprue disease, a horrible gluten-intolerance that cripples not only your diet, but your fun quotient–so little is known about the disorder, one could get differing opinions of a product’s safety from equally qualified sources. Wine, liquors, exotic grains and food additives are all hotly debated amongst gluten [...]
kohlrabi
I bought some kohlrabi. I’ve never worked with kohlrabi before, mostly because, well, they look like something i don’t really want to eat. The upside-down octopi of the vegetable world, or something similar. I’ve seen alien beasts on star-trek that resemble these things, sputtering at passersby with nasty, toothy grimaces that appear [...]
Music, my soul and my stomach
I recently performed a Mozart Requiem with my alma mater’s orchestra (apparently my skill set and willingness to work for free keep me on my conductor’s speed dial). I have a long standing superstition of staying backstage for the whole of any show in which I participate, even the slightest bit. The admittedly [...]
I love beets, I do borscht
The SE PDX food co-op does a farmer’s market every Wednesday. I went yesterday, and ended up with some gorgeous Beets. More interestingly, one guy had a variety of mustard leaf called wave-form or something similar.
“this stuff looks good” I said.
“Try one.” said he–It was sharp and spicy unlike any mustard green I’d [...]
super bowl
wow.
I don’t think i’ve ever consumed that much beer without becoming intoxicated. It must have been the food:
Bagels! This batch didn’t turn out as well as it could have, which I attribute to two things: my inexperience with the fresh cake yeast I conned out of the bakery @ New Seasons, and my [...]
beans are glorious
Those of you who know me know I hail from the dry, despotic land of the sonoran desert. Most people who learn this respond with one of the following:–oh.–ouch.–I’m sorry!–it must be hot!
I accept all of these with gratitude, as the desert does suck, it is hot, and you should be sorry that people [...]
strange fruit
Lately, I have found myself making strange food. Now, for the two people who might read this, ’strange food’ is nothing new for El Gastronero. The strangeness in recent creations, however, is palatte, not palate. In honor of the beginning of the 2005-2006 NBA season, I made a dish that is a [...]
when catering leads to football
On saturday a few weeks past, I was 1 in a crew of 4 catering a wedding in Estacada on a commune. The bride was a hippie, the groom Indian. While we were there to do dinner service on the first day, they planned to parlay that into a three day hippie psycho-trance [...]