Here we are at the end of September, the first part of the second school year. After the wheat was harvested (and all the respective little towns went back to school the week following their own individual harvest schedule), everything went back to the same kind of grind. Rob in school 10 hours a day, the sunlight hours noticeably dwindling already. It's hard this time of year not to be extra homesick, when the feeling in the air changes and its easy to think about the bowls of hot, porky ramen we could be eating at Ippudo, the last of the outdoor concerts at Central Park, the mimosas at brunch we could be enjoying with friends. I don't know what it is about changing seasons that makes it so much harder to stay put here in the middle of nowhere, but it's hitting me hard this autumn.
But before I get all bummy and miserable, I do have to admit we had an awesome summer. We went to Portland about once a month to visit family, explore, shop, and dine in hipstery restaurants that reminded us of home. It was a great way to recharge.
On our last visit, we had a great early dinner at The Farm Cafe, sitting in their cute backyard and soaking up a few Northwest rays of sun. The salty, crispy trout with summer vegetables was enough to make up for many months of no fresh seafood in Pullman.
The next morning, a tapas-style brunch at Tasty n Alder was literally all I could eat all day. I suppose we didn't really need to order four things when it's just the two of us. There was fried oysters with bacon and a cheddar biscuit. There was polenta with stringy fresh mozzarella and a sunny side up egg. Thinking of our favorite tapas spot Tia Pol in NYC, we gave in to the patatas bravas with aioli. And an egg. And then, just to try something sweet, we tore into some french toast with raspberry-apricot maple and whipped cream.
It was great fuel for our touristy stop at Multnomah Falls on the way home. The waterfall is so high and the stream is so thin in comparison, it's hard to get a good picture of the whole sight. It's also hard to block out all the heads of the other tourists and their five million kids with ice cream cones that are dripping everywhere.
By far, the best thing we did all summer (I mean aside from get married and the honeymoon and all that) is our camping trip to the Gorge. I know, I did not expect to do camping again anytime soon, and especially to enjoy it as much as I did. But the only way we'd be able to see the Arcade Fire at this glorious location was either to drive 40 minutes to an overpriced motel in Moses Lake, or just bite the bullet and set up camp.
We don't know what we're doing when we show up to these places like everyone else does. All of a sudden there are sleeping tents and overhead tents and RVs and awnings and barbeques, there's a whole community to our little two-person tent with an aerobed inside and that's it. Luckily, we wound up next to a pretty awesome group of people that took us under their wing, fed us grilled sandwiches and gourmet cheese, showed us where to pick up the bus when the concert was ready to start.
I really don't think anything could have prepared me for the truly breathtaking setting. It's like I walked onto a painting. I couldn't make sense of the river far below or the size of the clifs. My brain literally could not comprehend all the beauty, and combined with phenomenal acoustics of our favorite band that reminded me of Brooklyn, I don't think it could have been a more perfect concert.
We left early the next morning and waved goodbye to the one or two friends that were awake already. I didn't want to ask their full names or try to keep in touch. It made me too sad to think about following them on Facebook and reading their posts about what they ate for breakfast that day and marring the real connection we had that made the night before. That's how things worked back at Woodstock, and with all the talk of Woodstock that inevitably came up that day, it seemed only right to respect experience in the time period this type of experience was born in.
But I am hoping we see them again next summer. Next time, grilled brats are on us.
I don't know where I got the idea that I'd start making cheese and tofu and other things out of curds. There's really nothing that appetizing about taking a liquid and turning it into a solid food. Maybe it's all that money I'm spending at Winco and Trader Joe's and at the Moscow Food Co-Op that screams that these items are too expensive and easily enough made at home.
Well, a few weekends of experimentation has taught me a few things. Making mozzarella is fun and relatively easy. Making ricotta is not easy and not fun. Making tofu is harder work and lesser fun. So, mozzarella wins!
It's actually pretty
surprising how easy it is to make your own fresh balls of mozzy
goodness. The hardest part is finding rennet and citric acid. Luckily
for me, Moscow Food Co-Op had both! But they're both kinda pricey,
especially the citric acid, which makes you rethink the whole economics
of it. But it's an art! And curdled milk is your palette.
You can get the whole step-by-step right on the Kitchn, which has nice pictures that guides you through the whole daunting process. I'll give the Clif's notes version.
You
warm up about a gallon of milk, which seems like a lot, but it yields
very little actual cheese. On the other hand, you end up with about a
gallon of whey, which at first you wonder: what the heck do I do with
this? I fed some of it to the dog, who loves it, but then she had to pee
every five seconds all night. I boiled it and cooked pasta in it. That
was a better choice. I also tried using it to make ricotta, but it
didn't take. The tiny curds that formed just went straight through the
cloth that was supposed to catch them and down the drain.
I'm getting off topic.
Okay, so to make
mozzarella, you warm up the milk with the citric acid, then you add some
rennet, and watch the curds appear. When they hit the right
temperature, you sift up the good stuff, microwave them, and stretch
with gloved hands. Such glee to stretch your own mozzarella! It's easy
to get carried away and overstretch them to the point where they get
rubbery. That was my problem. But it was still very good baked into
lasagna, stir fried in a scramble, and chopped up in salads.
Be warned that homemade
mozzarella doesn't really melt very well. The top of the lasagna looked
more like roasted marshmallows than cheese. But it wasn't awful.
The tofu endeavor was not as much of a success. And it was way too much work! To do the whole process in its entirety, I started with whole soy beans, which I soaked overnight and then turned into soy milk. From there, making tofu is an exhausting process of blending, un-frothing, heating and reheating and separating and squeezing and in the end, I didn't even get whole blocks of tofu. I got what I guess you would call "silken tofu," or, "watery messed up tofu".
My neighbor came over for our Sunday night dinner & Girls episodes ritual and asked "is that the tofu?" and I was like YEAH don't wanna talk about that, I'm just gonna fry up some burgers with goat cheese and arugula and honey mustard dressing and forget about the tofu. No one argued.
Later I wound up just scrambling it up with some eggs whites and serving on toast with some avocado. I'm nothing if I'm not being crafty in my nutrition.
(Says the girl that hides caramels behind dog treats and grabs one at every chance).
The tofu-making wasn't a complete loss, though. On the first sift-through, you wind up with all the pieces of soy beans ground up in the food processor. According to this website article on tofu making -- and I can't vouch for the validity of a site called La Fuji Mama -- this junk is called okara and you can use it to make a sort of granola. Baked with a little cinnamon, agave and vanilla, it's tolerable. I've been stirring it into my yogurts in the morning. I try not to think about how its basically a weird soy cereal.
I might as well buy some Birkenstocks and call it over. New York keeps feeling farther away.
But Spring is here, the lease is resigned, and we've almost made it a year! That's a win for sure. Definitely worth celebrating with cheese and caramels.
