Posts filed under 'Breakfast'
home at last
It’s been a heck of a summer. At last count, I’ve spent it in no fewer than six states: Minnesota (thrice), Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and California. Illinois, too, of course, though it seems like that state—my home state—fits squarely at the end of the list. To be honest, all the traveling has left me feeling a little frayed around the edges. The individual little trips have combined to give me a sometimes-overwhelming feeling that’s part jet lag, part homesickness and part exhaustion.
But never, not once, did I go hungry. These travels all came with the happy byproduct of wonderful meals and time spent cooking atop other people’s stoves; sitting around other people’s dining tables; washing, drying and returning the dishes to other people’s cupboards. These things eased the pangs of longing for my own kitchen, my regret at missing week after week of my farmers’ market.
pancakes with a story
While we were in Northern Minnesota, my grandpa made us all a big platter of pancakes for breakfast one morning. As he sat on his kitchen stool flipping the hot cakes, one by one, my grandma told us the story behind the recipe: Pancakes by Norma. My grandparents used to drive the hour south to Duluth every so often to spend the night “in town.” They’d stay with my grandpa’s brother and, in what became a tradition, his wife Norma would serve them her pancakes—the very pancakes my grandpa was frying up that morning.
On one trip to Duluth, my grandma jotted down the recipe and, when she got back to her own kitchen, scrawled it into the margins of one of her most well-used cookbooks for safekeeping. Now, my grandma’s handwriting has a tendency toward illegibility—at least for the uninitiated. But I’ve read countless pieces of mail from her—sometimes featuring her golf game, other times providing a garden update, always recounting the weather—and I’ve learned to decipher her hand. Here’s the recipe in her cookbook (but, don’t worry; given your lack of practice, I’ve translated it for you below):
perils of the purse switch
On Sunday afternoon, I visited a little corner of hell. It wasn’t subterranean, it wasn’t all that hot, but hell it was, right there in Lincoln Park, at the corner of Kingsbury and Sheffield. Chicagoans might recognize this location: it’s the site of Chicago’s brand new, super(-duper)-sized Whole Foods—a sprawling spectacle of food and booze and carts and people.
To be fair, I’m kind of a sucker for spectacles and I actually quite this new Whole Foods. But I apparently only like it before the hour of 9 a.m., or some similarly unpopulated hour. I can tell you one thing for sure: I do not like it at the hour of 3 p.m. on a Sunday.
puckery buggers
This summer, I seem to be just a step behind when it comes to the coming’s and going’s of seasonal produce. I’m still craving asparagus, for instance, even though the bundles of spears danced out of season weeks ago. And I’ve got some lovely rhubarb recipes that will have to remain dog-earred until next spring, when those sassy stalks reappear. Recently, I posted a salad studded with freshly-shelled peas, just as early summer was sliding into mid-summer, pushing peas out the door. [For the record, though, peas were back at the Wicker Park Farmers' Market this weekend!] I’m afraid that my timing is off again here, with today’s recipe—a quick bread dotted with tart cherries.
Tart cherries (any cherries, for that matter) were nowhere to be seen as I walked through the market on Sunday morning, with Kevin and my mom (!). They slip in and out of season in a flash, which is not a bad plan, on their part—as it just leaves us wanting more. But maybe you’ve been smart enough to squirrel away a pint or two in your freezer. Or, better yet, maybe the cherries are still gracing the markets where you live (for all I know, they could still be around here too, especially at the larger markets like Green City). Or maybe you’ll be good enough to save this recipe for the next time cherry season rolls around. Or, hey I know!, maybe you’ll think of just the fruit to stand in for the cherries.
zucchini bread season
The end of a long holiday weekend, I find, inspires a renewed resolve in the diet realm. Where I was slathering a brat with mustard and reaching for another frosty beer just a day or two ago, I am now yearning for leafy greens and sparkling water. The Fourth of July, it seems, breeds an earnest in me. For a couple of days, that is.
And this bread is just the post-holiday thing, ready to chase away any over-indulgences of the weekend past. Chalk full of whole grains, super-powered flaxseed, and tangy yogurt, this bread is about as earnest as it gets. Sure it’s got a sweetness, but it’s only a whisper. The main ingredient of this bread is a vegetable, for pete’s sake!
just this once
I usually consider a frittata to be an anything-goes affair. An excuse to clean out your fridge, if you will. You can use any cheese banging around your fridge door. The produce that will be sliced and diced and ultimately become suspended in the baked eggs can change right along with the seasons, as can the herbs. If you are lucky enough to have just made a batch of homemade ice cream, say, and you have a bunch of yolk-less eggs on hand, you can use those in the skillet in place of whole eggs. And I usually feel free to throw in any salty pork product that suits my fancy.
This recipe, though, has changed all that. It’s really meant to be made exactly as its written. As someone who has accumulated a rather lengthy list of heavily adapted recipes, I don’t make this claim lightly.
just the nudge you need
For a long time, I was under the impression that scones were a fancy sort of breakfast pastry—one that was fussy and time-consuming. Actually, for a long time before that, I didn’t even know what a scone was. In the pre-Starbucks days, scones were just not the sort of thing that populated the bakery cases I visited as a kid. (That, or I was so blinded by the chocolate-glazed long john’s that I just didn’t have eyes for anything else.)
I’ve since grown to love scones—how they hover on the line of sweet treat, without ever fully crossing the threshold; how they manage to achieve that buttery, crumbly texture that demands a coffee chaser; how they’re always a little misshapen, no two looking exactly the same; how they’re a blank canvas, waiting to be spiced and spruced however the baker sees fit.
stick a candle in it
Over the weekend, my kitchen—usually a storm of activity—was, for the most part, quiet. Kevin and I celebrated his birthday by spending Saturday night in Milwaukee, where the Cubs were playing the Brewers. So, while we ate plenty of delicious things and drank our fair share of the beverage for which Milwaukee is known, we didn’t do much cooking. But I had grand plans for a Sunday birthday cake project once we got back to Chicago. We even had the perfect recipe picked out.
But, by the time we got home on Sunday, neither of us had the heart for making or eating a decadent birthday cake. The sun was shining and beckoning us out into the day, so we walked, we jogged and we even opened the windows while we unpacked. Time slipped away and with it went all hopes for the birthday cake.
take two
I spent a good part of Saturday engaged in that greatest of all post-winter rituals: Spring Cleaning. As always, it was necessary, cathartic, and, in the end, exhausting. I must say, I had envisioned my Spring Cleaning to be, well, a little more Spring-like. I pictured myself throwing open the windows, letting in the sounds of birds chirping (and the rumbling El train, too, of course) and a gentle breeze. Instead, given the frigid forecast, I cranked up the heat and proceeded to banish my sweaters to storage. In a cruel twist of fate, it would begin snowing that very night leaving me sweaterless and shivering on a cold Sunday morning. Hrmph.
But aside from my sweaterless-ness, I discovered the same thing I do every time I go on a cleaning binge—hidden treasure. I rediscovered a few old favorites that had been hanging in my closet, shoved to the edges, forgotten for months. I unearthed a couple gems in the kitchen too: my apron (why did I stop wearing it?); a vanilla bean tucked in the back corner of a cupboard (not exactly a gold dubloon, but close); three speckled bananas at the bottom of a bowl of fruit sitting on the counter.
better late
I am fanatical about time. Promptness, I was raised to believe, is next to godliness. Cleanliness is fine and dandy, but you should really, really be on time. So you could say that my college experience got off on the wrong foot, to put it mildly, when I showed up late for my orientation. An entire day late.
I had signed up for the orientation backpacking trip the school offered for incoming freshman. I had a new backpack and hiking boots and I had staunchly refused to watch the Blair Witch Project all summer: I was ready. The day before I was set to leave for Chicago, between a couple last-minute errands and packing, I got a phone call. It was Ben, the student leader of the trip calling to find out when I planned to arrive. Tomorrow, I told him, probably before noon.