Brooklyn's Five Leaves Burger in Pullman

I'll be honest: I've been kind of homesick for the city lately. Maybe it's because I don't have the wedding to keep me occupied anymore and now here I am actually feeling present in the present moment and who wants to do that when you live in the boonies! I miss my friends and the subway and the artsy people and the random finds and the crazy connections. Woody Allen said it best about the country: there's no place to walk after dinner.

In my fit of NYC-homesickness this past weekend I dug out the old New Brooklyn Cookbook with recipes from some of my favorite haunts. In my old life as a Brooklyn restaurant blogger I made my favorite burger once and felt quite proud of myself. This time I felt inspired to do it again, but do it BETTER, with all my post-registry kitchen items. And so, ladies and gents, the post-wedding, Pullmanized Five Leaves Burger!

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The Five Leaves burger is known for its unique combination of sweet pineapple, pickled beet, creamy egg and spicy mayo. It's such a fabulous combination for a burger that you don't even realize there isn't cheese on it. 

We tried to make everything home made in this burger. I should have grabbed some of my coworkers' home grown eggs, but instead I bought a dozen. I should have tried to make my own rolls in the bread machine but that didn't happen either.

I did buy a whole pineapple -- not canned this time -- and marinaded the slices 48 hours in the boiled vinegar-honey solution.

The beets I bought whole and raw, baked for an hour, then marinaded in the pineapple solution with some lemon juice. It was the lazy person's pickling.

The meat was a chuck steak that we ground with the Kitchen Aid attachment, hand formed into patties, and grilled on our brand spankin' new grill out back.

I couldn't find harissa, so I made the sauce with mayo, Sriracha and juice from a whole lime.

The final product had that wobbly, amateur finish -- the pineapple slices still had coriander seeds stuck to it, the ciabatta roll was a little big for our little burger patties -- but man, if it didn't feel good to sink my teeth into a Five Leaves burger on a hot summer day.

Pretty good imitation, huh?

Want to try your hand at it? Find the full recipe here. 

What to do with Bum Watermelons

What's with watermelons this year? Every time I excitedly slice into a new green melon ball I am immediately disappointed with the dull color, the low sweetness and mealy texture.

 


It's a sad way to end my happy song of "My Own Personal Watermelon" sung to the tune of Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus but in Johnny Cash's version. Only Jesus instead of Watermelon.

Some fruit to hear your prayers,
some fruit that's not pears.

Anyway, if you are bogged down by the same sad fruity affliction, I have some ideas.

First, watermelon salsa! Full credit goes to Cooking Light for this great sweet-spicy-fresh recipe, that tastes awesome on steak tacos and revives dull melons ASAP. I changed the amounts a little because "2 cups of watermelon" is a stupid method of measurement.

Watermelon Salsa in Normal-Person Measurements
-Half a small (of your own... "personal"...) watermelon (see, much better)
-2 sprigs of fresh mint, chopped
-enough lime juice to coat the top
-same amount of olive oil
-1 chopped serrano chile 

If you think adding a spicy pepper to a watermelon is a good way to ruin it, I can understand that. If you're married to the idea of keeping it sweet, why not pulverize it with a little honey? I think watermelon smoothies are a little risky -- especially since we're already dealing with bum watermelons -- but I messed around with the measurements and ingredients and found one that's acceptable.

Watermelon Smoothie
-The other half of your own personal watermelon
-Tablespoon of honey
-The ice from about half an ice tray 
-Splash of lime juice
-Handful of hulled strawberries

Drink it fast, because it separates quick.


At least the cherries are good this summer.

Alone Time + How I'm Learning to Cook

When my new husband (!) left for Seattle for a few days this morning, I was kinda bummed. I was thinking The honeymoon is really over! and How is this fair for newlyweds to spend 3 whole days apart? But then I remembered I'm an INTROVERT and I haven't had alone time in WEEKS and how else am I going to regenerate my energy?

So after work I skipped merrily along to the farmer's market and came home with lots of fun goodies for my first solo night in a long time.

Now back in NYC I would head to the Union Square Market and pretty much shrug at everything because how am I supposed to cook that? And shouldn't I just let the experts do it and it's too hot to cook anyway but gee it sure looks pretty in that box and maybe I should just take a picture and then get a beer somewhere before I head back on the L train.

There are no such distractions here in Pullman, and no such luxuries as "someone else will cook it better" because they WON'T. I think it's this feeling of "it's me or no one" that has pushed me to actually start chopping things up and putting them in hot oil and then wow! Dinner!

My home cooking endeavors started off as finding a recipe, going out, buying all the ingredients, measuring everything, and carrying out all the tasks listed in the grease-splattered cookbook. But like any other craft, you start to get the hang of it. You read through a recipe and take the parts you like. You remember cooking techniques that work and apply it with different ingredients and flavors. And you stop measuring! Because unless you're baking then there's really no point. 1/4 teaspoon of salt should really be more, anyway, so why not just eyeball it? And then you save money because you're skilled at tailoring dinner towards what you have and not what's $10/lb at the grocery store. (See? I've learned to be frugal, too!)

Tonight I think I advanced a little more with a beet salad I made up with veggies from the market, a fried rice I tweaked from Cooking Light and a chicken I cooked on a memory and an instinct. I tried to match the dinner to the hot weather, to give me some cool relief with little nods to a fiery sun. I wanted something light and bright with little hints of earthy spiciness.

I call it Yogurt-Dill Chicken with Lemongrass Rice and Honey Beet Salad.

Whoooo-what! That sounds crazy. Like a real adult person's dinner and not what I used to do when Rob went away which was... um.. an excuse for a giant takeout pepperoni and ricotta calzone from a place on Manhattan Ave with lots of pictures of Italian people on the walls.

Oh, memories.

Well I'm not skilled at writing recipes yet (because again, I don't measure) but maybe you're an eyeball-er too and just want the highlights.

The chicken breast was marinated in plain yogurt, lots of fresh dill from the farmer's market, garam masala, lemon juice, garlic powder, curry powder, red pepper and cumin. Shook off the marinade. Sauteed about 4 minutes per side, then into the convection oven at 350 for about 15 minutes because its way too hot to turn on the actual oven. It didn't come out yogurt-y at all, just had lots of great aromatic Indian spices, and the creamy freshness from the yogurt adhered all those great flavors to the meat.

  
The white rice I cooked as usual, without salt or butter. Then I sauteed some onions in oil with lemongrass powder, added the rice in, turned the heat off and added lemon juice and lots of parsley.

The salad took a bit more creativity. I don't know if you're supposed to blanch beets or not, but I did. And as I was boiling them, the grassy smell made me think of peas, so I blanched some of the sugar snaps, too. Then I remembered I got cucumbers from the farmers market too, so I salted those and chopped them up. Fresh, green, crunch. Mixed everything together and chilled it. I made a vinagrette with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, honey and lemon juice. It tasted awful. I adjusted the amounts. It tasted better. I added more honey and a little orange peel. Perfect. Glazed it over the beet salad.

Then I set the table with new Crate & Barrell placemat and napkin from the registry and put the farmer's market snapdragons in water. And maybe I had a Topcutter IPA too. I'M ALLOWED!

Being a newlywedded introvert with a budding talent for fresh and local cooking is kind of awesome.

I still think about that calzone sometimes, though.

One Year Since Brooklyn

It was kind of funny timing that we flew back into Spokane from our honeymoon on June 30 -- a year to the day since we finished out our lease and hit the road towards Pullman. 

So much of it felt similar to last year. We came in late at night, kind of disoriented, back into the quiet town after a few weeks of craziness and disorder. When we got home, it had that smell of no-one-living-in-old-house. I felt sad things were changing, or rather, that things were over.

But the better part about coming home to Pullman was that feeling that we weren't completely alone this time.

Our well-fed and well-loved dog came to greet us after being taken care of by friends. People we didn't know existed a year ago and who we didn't think twice about handing our house keys to. And a list of dog instructions. 

Over the past few days, there has been welcome-home drinks and looking at wedding photos and reading guests books and dinner out and just general so-happy-for-yous that so genuinely match those of our long-time family and friends that its impossible not to feel proud of finding our way into a good crowd out here.

And while last summer it was kind of a lonely waiting game for September, with new job and new classes, now we're in a groove with what we have to do and try to juggle it with fun things -- trips to Portland, lunches out, drinks on porches, walks through parks.

It's kind of like being a townie, but in someone else's town. One minute you consider yourself a somewhat professional New Yorker and now you're cruising along the road to Idaho throwing snappers out the window. Because it's the Fourth of July and all.

Did I mention that it's my favorite holiday? Simple celebration of summer, patriotism and BBQ. No pressure, no presents. And no matter what we end up doing, it will be more fun than the hotel bar in Chicago we were stuck in last year.

Anyway, tonight I am feeling blessed, patriotic, town-ish and married. Finally, officially married. Things are feeling merged and settled and finalized and good.

It's been quite a year.

We Made it to May!

Here we are: We have made it to May! I can't believe that after this year, this super long year where I thought I felt every minute of every day, is just about a full notch in my belt. Rob finishes his finals next week and then he's on vacation. We are getting married next MONTH. I guess the most confusing part is that this has crept up on me. How could it creep, when I stared at the calendar every single day? But it did.

I've been too busy just getting through each day -- work, wedding planning, gym, yoga, cooking, cleaning, dog walking, sleeping -- that I haven't written in this blog in awhile, and I feel bad about it. That post about tofu was from March and I was too lazy to upload the pictures until now. That's how busy I've been! I think about blog writing and video game playing and novel reading and then I get to the end of the day and I'm too tired to do any of it. 

Now that the days are a lot longer -- it's light til 8pm! -- I feel like my brain is coming up from hibernation and my consciousness is slowly pouring back in. And with this big school-related milestone coming up next week, I gotta piggyback on the success that Rob has earned and pat myself on the back too, because we made it through year 1 of 4! This was the hard year, where we had to make friends and I had to find a job and we had to settle in and make a home in a remote town that was nothing like Brooklyn NY. And we did it! I am pretty proud of us, and so grateful for the family and friends that have helped us through it. Those that remembered us, flew out and visited us, sent us air-mail treats, wrote us postcards from home. Thank you guys. It means more than you'll know.

One of the things I've prided myself on was adjusting to the slow rhythm of the Palouse. My favorite part of New York was riding that energy wave, knowing what was open when, knowing which bus was coming next and the best path from A to B. It's harder out here with so few things to do and very few different ways to get there. But I've found a rhythm of sort. It's not the same, but it's mine.

Saturday mornings: Sage bakery is open. Only Fridays and Saturdays, but since I work Fridays, then Saturdays it is. If I'm headed to Lewiston, I stop for a soy latte. Or maybe I just go for the sake of it. It's 20 minutes down the road in the two-horse town of Unionville. You blink and you pass it. So it's almost like those bars that were hidden behind fake barbershop fronts. You had to be in the know. And I'm in the know! One of my favorites is the savory scone with pancetta and cheese and rosemary. Their sandwiches are fabulous -- roast beef with gorgonzola my favorite. Cinnamon buns. Macaroni salad. It's all amazing! No table service, just a nice lady or two behind the counter.

You would think that everyone would rave about a BBQ place that was just a few miles away over in Moscow, right? I mean, house-smoked meat! The stuff we would wait in line forever for back in Brooklyn! They have it here in Moscow and no one even freaking notices it. I don't get it. We'll head over on a Friday night and by the time we're done eating the place has cleared out and it's 8pm and they're ready to close up. I don't totally understand it but as long as they're open I don't really care. It's called CD's Smoke Pit and it's just a little tiny bit off the beaten path of Main St./6th St. Moscow. They have beer on tap that they serve in Mason jars. We always get the Animal Farm, which is like a big meat combo with chicken, ribs, brisket, 2 kinds of sausage links. The cole slaw is pretty fantastic too. The dinner rolls are terrible but they're free so I'll forgive it.

 

There aren't a lot of events out here. Pullman has the Lentil Festival and that's seriously it for Pullman. But if you know the right people, they know when worthy things are happening in the Lewiston/Clarkston area. There was this beer festival that, despite the complete lack of ambiance, had a pretty okay beer selection. I texted this to a friend and she asked if I was at a PTA meeting. It made me drink more beer than I was expecting to. Maybe this was part of the Lewiston brewmeister's mastermind plan all along.

Then last weekend was the Lewiston Dogwood Festival, with artisans on a green and food trucks! Actual food trucks. Sometimes doing things that remind me of home make me miss home more. Snoop Dogg last weekend and all the kids left before the encore so there was no encore and nobody knew it except me and Rob and like five other people. I get on the bus and I get a wave of nostalgia but only 3 other people are on the bus and it cost me a quarter. This is another example. I missed the quirky crafts and funky eats of Smorgasburg and only being in a place like this really reminded me of how much I missed it. But I bought some handmade soap from a girl with an Etsy shop and had a huckleberry lemonade because where else can you get huckleberry anything and I felt a little better about it.

And now we do it all over again. Summer will come and we'll hopefully get to play a little like last year: tennis and basketball and jogging, only with friends this time! Maybe we'll go camping, and fishing on the river, now that we know where to go. I'll show Rob around Lewiston because he's never been, and I'll take him to Sage Bakery, because he's never been there either. We'll hit the Lentil Festival to mark the start of a second year here and start all over again. I'll buy snow tires when winter comes and I'll go the back roads way to town on extra slippery days. I'll keep an eye out for robins in berry trees when spring comes and I'll celebrate at the dogwood festival that isn't anything like the cherry tree fest in Brooklyn and isn't supposed to be. 

All the locals love to tell me that I'll fall in love with the Palouse and will abandon my plan to move home and will never want to leave. They are wrong. But I am confident that we can ride out another three years out here, and I can entertain visitors or occupy myself for a few days when Rob has fallen into another Psychology book. It's a pretty good feeling. So even though I don't have final exams next week, I'm gonna celebrate with the best of them when they're over. One school year down, three to go. It's an accomplishment worth a pancetta scone and huckleberry ice cream, for sure.
 

Homemade Mozzarella & Hand-Squeezed Tofu

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.

Strange Signs of Spring and Red Velvet Cupcakes

At work the other day, the tree outside my window all of a sudden became full with fat, feathery robins.

"Look, look!" I exclaim to my coworkers. "Robins are here! Spring is coming!"

They just looked at each other and laughed. I guess every single day I'm going to say something that sounds like common sense and learn that over here, it is pretty much the opposite. 

"Where do you think the robins were back in December?"

I don't know where they went, but I'm pretty sure they weren't around here. I mean, I think I would know. I watch out for birds a lot. But I didn't say anything.

"Come here. Let me show you something." Now my self-doubt has moved to full on coworker-skepticism, but I follow him into the office next door. He points to a tree full of red berries. "You see that tree? When spring is REALLY coming, all the robins will start eating the berries off that tree. They aren't eating them now, because the berries aren't ready. They need to be fermented to a certain degree. The robins eat them, get drunk, and lay around on the ground. THAT'S when you know spring is coming."

"So you're telling me that seeing robins alone is not an indication of spring, its a group of robins getting collectively drunk."

"Yes."

I was fairly certain he had made the whole thing up when wouldn't you know it, a day or two later the woman from the next office -- who wasn't there the day of our discussion-- shouts out: "They're eating the berries! They're doing it!"

I guess it's really going to take at least a full year before I can start to understand the strange norms and traditions of the Palouse. Also, I'm less inclined to believe them now that it's been snowing for the past 14 hours.

Anyway, I like hanging out with the girls in Rob's program because they all come from seemingly more normal places and can understand the adjustments it takes to live out here. So when it was a new friend's birthday, obviously I felt inclined to make some cupcakes, something way better than what you can get at the town's only bakery, Sweet Mutiny. 

I did some research into what would make the perfect red velvet cupcake. I wanted a recipe that had a good technique for making that bright red color. I liked the idea of making a paste from cocoa powder, vanilla extract and red food coloring to get the chocolate nice and bright before adding red to an already-chocolatey-brown cake batter. Only a scant amount of white vinegar. Buttermilk was fine, but I'd have to make my own with lemon juice and milk. No other weird ingredients aside from the sugar, eggs, flour basics. I decided on this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker, which came out great. 

As for the frosting, I didn't want the cream cheese kind. I read that the real traditional frosting for red velvet cakes were "cooked", but I didn't know what that meant. So a little further investigation proved that indeed, you cook down milk and flour into a non-buttery roux, cool it completely and add it to a whipped butter-sugar mixture. It's alluring because it winds up super fluffy, like whipped cream, and only slightly sweet, as the milk/flour tempers that pure sweet flavor of regular icing. I went with this recipe because I liked the pictures and the step-by-step instructions, which I needed because I was doing this on my lunch break and needed these done stat.

Anyway, I sort of botched this whole thing because after one batch of cupcakes I realized I'd need to make another, but I didn't think I had any more red food coloring, so I made them regular. Of course I found more red food coloring tucked away a few days later. And as for the frosting, all my butter was frozen, and I'm not the best at defrosting the proper way. So the consistency was all wrong. But boy I know the potential is there. 

Don't let my semi-failure deter you and try this cake+frosting combination out! Because regardless of what the drunk robins are telling you, spring's not here and bikini diets can wait.