breakfast at noon

ahem. this is Grace reporting on my status in foods. shown right here is my breakfast at noon. (no-i did not wake up ant noon. ) these are english whole wheat muffins with philadelphia straberry cream chees. the brown gunk on the top is a generous helping of cinnamon sugar. of course, this would be better on a real bagel and with plain cream cheese. alas, we did not have either. but if you want to stop by with bagels and cream cheese, that would be greatly appreciated. i understand that you have not seen the before pics of tis years gingerbread house... only the devestated after's. here you go-well, aparently, it didwhere i wanted to, but who cares. thats the completed gingerbread house,yogi, and a doll started eting the gingerbread house. i think i'll call this one "when plastic dolls attack. and Carolyn... have you looked at your sandwich comments latley?

Just an Average Meal for The Sandwich Sensei

Well, it was 4 pm and my stomach started grumbling so I knew what I had to do: forfeit my appetite for dinner and make myself a sandwich.



That’s provolone cheese, green onion (sliced the long way), avocado, tomato, and lettuce on toasted whole wheat with a thin layer of mayonnaise and a generous portion of “French Hot Pepper Mustard,” courtesy of the Stark n’ Barry’s.
Served with a couple of sliced kosher dill’s and followed by one of my mom's apple cupcakes, I’m stuffed.

Christmas on Agatite

The evening started off with a olive and fennel tapenade made by Brian, along with his "signature" selection of roasted peppers, olives and artichoke hearts - I think there was prosciutto too. One of Brian's Christmas gifts was a selection of salt from the spice shop in Evanston. We had a selection of Kosher flake salt, red alaea hawaiian sea salt, black lava hawaiin sea salt and portuguese salt cream. The salt looked beautiful on tiny little plates, but what was really good was the beef tenderloin, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, ravioli salad, regular salad, Pam's most excellent lasagne and other salads. Erin made her first roux - something I fondly remember my mother teaching me. The roux provided a base for a gravy made from beef stock that I had made the day before. After all that effort, the gravy was just OK.

After a fine meal, we had a chocolate torte provided by Ann, apple spice cupcakes provided by Pam, and crescent cookies by Sheila. After dessert, Pam conducted some impromptu science experiments using knitting boots, keys, quarters and our german pyramid nativity scene. Then we opened presents. During the evening, Grace gave people massages with the back massager she had received for Christmas. I'm also posting a few shots of Grace and Carolyn wearing Grace's cape. (We think Carolyn really wants a cape as awesome as Grace's cape)

Thanks to everybody for all your help, the food was great, but the company was even better. Mike, Lori, John, Sean, and Janet and Freddy were missed but it's great to see all of your posts and photos.


The buffet was elaborate enough that many variations were possible, from Kevin's plate, above, to Brian's and Anne's below. Note that everyone seems to have endorsed Brian's decision to buy green beans rather than asparagus (see earlier entry Christmas food shopping). (These photos and commentary added by Pat.)

Peace in 2008

After opening the presents and having a Christmas feast of tamales and more, Nanette and I and her parents took a walk along the coast, where we saw this "peace in 2008" sand sculpture, plus dozens and dozens of surfers.

I posted a bunch more photos on flickr.

A feast at Sandra's, made by Edith and Ray

This blog is turning out to be a great venue for sharing news and photos from our extended families, and it is certainly proof positive that the participants -- from California to Florida to Chicago -- enjoy both cooking and eating. Thanks to all for their posts and comments, which are a pleasure to read.

Last night for Christmas Eve we headed over to Sandra's place where we snagged a rare parking spot just around the corner -- "the best ever" -- and when we got up to the 19th floor found Edith and Raymond busy in the kitchen fixing up a fusion feast that combined Peruvian, Japanese and vegan cuisines.

Let's start with the palmito salad, an adaptation by Edith of a Peruvian ceviche dish, without the fish. It included hearts of palm, artichoke hearts, lettuce, oranges and julienned strips of carrot. Excellent.

There were also Peru-style stuffed avocados with peas and carrots; miso soup with seaweed; purple potatoes with a rich mushroom sauce that combined shitake and other 'shrooms, providing a chewy texture as well as flavor; El Milagro totopos (corn chips) and a very powerful Peruvian hot sauce direct from Ay Ay Picante, the best of Chicago's Peruvian restaurants. I put the hot sauce on the palmito salad as well as the potatoes; what's not to like? We contributed "Carolyn's spicy peanut noodles," made by Pam.



We topped it all off with a lovely dessert called Masa Morada, or purple corn. I didn't taste the corn so much as a delicious sweet pudding with chunks of pineapple and orange segments in it.

All the while we discussed home repairs, the Republican presidential candidates (about whom Sandra seems a bit obsessed, perhaps because she's worried one of them could win), and Raymond and Edith's recent trip to Thailand. And food, of course. We talked about food and what we were going to cook next.

Christmas Eve at the Rickers

Sean and I drove down to the Santa Cruz mountains yesterday afternoon to the home/horse ranch of Nanette's twin sister Bernadette and her family -- the Rickers. Here are some photos of the festivities. Captions to come.

The hosts were Bernadette and John and their two daughters, Mari and Teddy, and their three dogs. Also present were Lee and Elena, Nanette's two kids, the Tuckers -- Sonia (Nanette's neice) and her husband Mark and their kids Alex and Jason. That's Jason above with his great grandfather, Ted (Nanette's father). More later.

Back in the Sunshine State

Merry Christmas Eve!
I arrived back in Sarasota, FL yesterday, on a thankfully uneventful, and un-delayed flight. After Freddy was through seeing his psychiatric patients, we had a relaxing day of grocery shopping, watching The Planet Earth (a gift from Kevin and Carolyn), cooking, and gardening. Freddy made a Red and Green Winter Soup, loaded with kale (and I LOVE kale). Our garden feels truly complete now, with the addition of our new watering can, T-Runk. Tomorrow's Christmas dinner menu consists of left over soup, crab cakes, zucchini bread, and a mixed green salad straight from our lanai garden. We miss all you Barry's, but I have to admit I couldn't be happier in the warm Florida humidity.

Christmas Food Shopping at Family Fruit

I got out of bed reasonably early Saturday morning to do my Christmas dinner shopping at Family Fruit Market. It’s on Cicero and Belle Plaine, and we’ve been going there for about fifteen years now. It’s got that Northwest Side ethnic mix to it – owned by Italians, staffed by Mexicans, selling to Poles. Thus you can get Polish magazines there, all sorts of dried Mexican chilies (I picked up a bag of anchos recently) and true Parmigiano-Reggiano.

I was there for the best-priced beef tenderloin in town ($7.99/lb) and all the sides and fixins for our Christmas for thirteen. I picked up about twenty California navels, first of the year, and only $39 a pound. Later I added a bag of California clementines, so we’re OK on the citrus for a while. The asparagus was overpriced (I actually counted the number stalks and weighed a rubberbanded bunch and, figuring five pieces per person, I was lookin’ at about $16 for asparagus). So it’s green beans this year. I got some Yukon gold potatoes and some fennel (later found out I should have got fennel seeds – oh well).

The staff and the customers all seemed to be in good moods. Two firefighters in their logoed sweatshirts talked across the tomatoes. “Don’t tell him you saw me,” one said to the other. “I owe him a day.” The other, a woman who seemed to too old to be a firefighter, asked “Chili?” “Of course!” was the response. Later, I saw the chili chef at the deli, putting in his order in broken Spanish. All the deli staff wore Santa hats.

Christmas observed -- with Royal Family Dosa

We decided to have an early Christmas celebration because Janet is leaving town tomorrow, and I had promised to make my "famous" dosa while all the kids were home, so this was our opportunity. And we invited Granny to join in the festivities.

Dosa are those South Indian pancakes that you serve with a spicy soup/sauce called sambar, and they aren't so hard to make thanks to MTR (Pure and Perfect Since 1924, a company out of Bangalore) Instant Mix Rava Dosa. Like it says on the package, "Whether it's a snack or part of a meal, crisp golden dosa are now so easy to make."

What you need is a good hot cast iron frying pan filmed with a bit of oil, or in our case, three of them going at once. You mix the powder with enough water so that when it hits the hot pan it makes a great sizzling noise and creates bubbles in the batter, which is mostly semolina and rice flour. Before flipping the pancakes, you garnish with chopped onions, cilantro and thin slices of fresh jalapeño.

I had trouble flipping some of them because the dough broke apart, but the one in the picture and a few others came out perfectly. Dip them in the MTR sambar, which is redgram (lentils) and spices with added potatoes, and you have yourself a nice spicy meal. For a cooling balance, we also had Pam's new Mexican Christmas salad, with jicama, roasted beets, pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, lettuce and oranges.

That was fun, especially all the frenzy around the hot frying pans, but there was one incident. The raw jalapeños were pretty strong, and I was sweating pretty well from eating them, so I wiped my face near my eyes, but YOW! I was wiping with the hand that I used to sprinkle the peppers onto the dosa, and in about three seconds my eyes were blazing and tearing enough that Janet rushed to the laptop to seek remedies. She suggested aloe vera, so I cut a branch off a handy plant (thanks Sandra!) and everyone laughed at me as I swabbed my nose and around my eyes with aloe juice. Ahhh, what relief.

We opened our own presents and then Brian and Sheila and Erin and Adam and Grace stopped over and we opened a few more, all of us jammed into the kitchen because the rest of the first floor is out of commission due to construction. It was a fine pre-Christmas celebration.

Full House

Kevin and Tesla Cat arrived yesterday. Our house was again filled with “tech talk” some of which I could actually follow. Kevin is developing ways for several robots to share information using gum-stick computers. It’s great having everyone home. Of course we all miss Freddy, but he is keeping in touch by phone and blog.

Once of the best things about having so many Barrys together is meal planning, cooking and eating. I had a plan and the ingredients and quickly put the kids to work assembling spring rolls. There was much laughter as they learned spring roll technique. Carolyn claimed the title of best assembler as she ate the evidence of less then perfect specimens.

Janet’s college roommate Avita joined us for dinner. Along with spring rolls we had bean and kale soup and Mexican Christmas salad with roasted beets. Dinner conversation centered on food, school, travel and family, a very typical Barry dinner.

Tonight we are taking Pat out for his birthday and good family conversation. This is what it’s all about!

Mystery Diagnosis Case

I am seeking the opinion of the polished botanists out there. Our unfortunate tomato plant, just days after suffering a major amputation, has come down with some sort of opportunistic infection. This pattern is found over about 25% of the plant's leaves. If anyone has seen this sort of blight before, we would appreciate your differential diagnosis and treatment plan. Thanks!

Rosarito Reconnaissance

This is a photo from the deck/balcony -- one of three -- in one of the two houses we visited near Rosarito, Mexico. I posted the rest of the photos here on flickr -- these are mostly from a place we visited in San Antonio del Mar, about four miles north of Rosarito, and 60 miles north of Ensenada. A little more than an hour from San Diego airport.

There are also a couple of photos from Ensenada, which is quite a nice place for a day trip -- for shopping, fish markets, wineries...

I'll write more tomorrow. The place is not perfect, but it's pretty nice, and seems to meet almost all of our requirements for a family reunion spot. And it's definitely in Mexico.

Here's the web site of the place. There's also a slide show (sort of long) with dozens more photos.

http://vacationrentalsbaja.com/index.html

Home Remodeling and Food - together at last

The perfect amalgamation of home improvement and food. Here is a link to Grace and last years gingerbread house. I have a photo of this years house, but my cable is misplaced, so this will have to do for now. http://flickr.com/search/?q=gingerbread&w=82302491%40N00



Grace and I have been decorating a gingerbread house every year for several years now. The gingerbread house in the photo was christened the "california house" because if you look closely, you can seen a large crack due to an earthquake. As you can see, the house starts out with a lovely mosaic of candy on the outside. After several days, it looks like Katrina has struck. On Christmas when you all come over, you can check out this years house - after all the candy has been eaten off. When Adam was younger, after Christmas was over it was his important responsibility to smash the house outside for the squirrels. He did it with great zeal, and I hope he's not too old this year to carry on the tradition.



For Christmas this year, Pam is in charge of lasagna and other goodies, Ann has dessert and Brian and I will provide the rest.

And now Janet's home

The scientist from Sarasota flew into Midway Saturday evening and was only slightly delayed by the snowstorm. We needed to eat and Janet had a hankering for real Mexican food, so I suggested Atotonilco Taqueria on 47th west of Ashland, the flagship restaurant of the company that makes what I consider the best tortillas in Chicago (yes, better than El Milagro). So we moved slowly through the snow from Midway and had an egg torta (Janet) and egg or avocado tacos (Pam and me), with orchata or licuados to drink.

I wish I could say the food was great, as that's what I remember from when I discovered the place maybe 15 years ago, but it was just so-so, a bit dry and with big pieces of winter tomato that didn't make things better. And they were frying up a bunch of carnitas for the next day's
Sunday-noon traffic, which didn't make things especially appetizing for us non-carnivores. But the tortillas were good, very fresh (the factory is half a block west) and a bit crispy.

Now our own Sunday lunch, that was better. Pam made her famous chipotle potatoes with sides of green beans and avocadoes, and I fried up some Phil's free-range eggs. We cleaned our plates while Janet told Granny about her new concentration in cancer immunotherapy and Granny told us about her awesome immune system and her quick recovery from the recent stent placement in her leg.

That's two kids home with Kevin due to arrive on Wednesday, so Pam and I went to Dino's (now known as Devon Market) and filled up the shopping cart with wide variety of foodstuffs, just like in the old days when we had to feed five hungry people every day.

That's what I call fun stuff.

Viral marketing for the food blog

To drive traffic to the blog, we're feeding people to get them to say nice things about it. This is Carolyn's friend Brenda telling her sister about it.

Carolyn comes home

Carolyn finished her last final at 8:45 p.m. Thursday and jumped into a speeding car driven by her friend Brenda, who had come to visit, and arrived on Newgard just before midnight. The next day, Brenda joined us for a celebratory dinner, when we enjoyed zitoni (those are the fat hollow noodles that could serve in a pinch as straws at a bubble tea shop), with tomato-basil sauce, fresh mozzarella, asparagus and sautéed collard greens. They regaled us with stories of their college adventures and we had a fine time.

After dinner they headed off to a JUMP Company dance show, then we got a call asking if we had certain baking ingredients in the house, then the doorbell rang at 11:30 p.m. because Carolyn had forgotten her keys, and then there was a great deal of laughter and cooking noises filtering up from downstairs. In the morning, we found a nice batch of cookies on the kitchen table.

The oatmeal-and-cocoa cookies came in four variations: chocolate chip, peanut butter chip, coconut-cranberry-walnut and chocolate chip-walnut.

And since Carolyn is the master of sandwich making, she invited Brenda and her sister Vicky over for lunch and made us each a grilled sandwich to our specifications.

This changes everything

We thought the pocket door might make a nice piece of monumental wall art or shallow cabinet or something, but once we dug into the wall we realized that the former opening between my office and the dining room could be a great way to open things up a bit. If the door worked, that is.

It works. We cut out the hole from the office side first, took a good look at the overhead joist that the track is built into, and saw that all we had to do was remove the four two-by-fours on each side that had been inserted in 1931 or so when they closed things up. One side was covered with just plaster and lathe, the other had the drywall on top of the plaster, from our dining room/kitchen job three years ago. So fresh it wasn't even painted!

Pam was the driver, pushing us to keep going despite my physical therapist's strict orders to go easy on the shoulder to avoid inflammation. Nothing big, just some work up high on the ladder with the Sawzall.



I babied it pretty well while working on the office side but then we had to do the heavy cleanup and after a rest and some icing time with a bag of frozen peas on my shoulder, Pam said, let's get it done, so the hell with the shoulder, we got down to the heavy work of cutting out the other wall in sections that weighed from 75 to 300 pounds each (we let that big one down on the "hinge" of drywall tape and mud, so it wasn't too bad, then cut it apart on the floor).

You should have seen the dust flying as I cut out the opening from the dining room side with a circular saw, through five-eighths inch of drywall and an inch of plaster and lathe. It was like a whiteout in there, and despite drapes and dropcloths on everything, the dust seeped through and even made it upstairs.

There was one surprise: the dining room side is painted an ugly green.

We spent a few hours bagging up debris and de-dusting last night and a few more hours today, feeling very good about things.

The door pulls right across with a little effort. When open, it allows light to pour in from both sides of the house, and with a five-and-a-half-foot opening between rooms, our dining room-office combo can now seat 20-25 people. Add in the kitchen and we could do 30.

And it makes my office different, too. More open and light, though that means I'll have to keep it a bit neater. Which I plan to do. Absolutely.

A very exciting discovery

We've been making nice progress on finishing my office job, staining the old oak around the windows (looks great) and getting ready to paint. But there are a lot of niggly technical details that have to be dealt with, like having working electric outlets.

The outlet on the wall between my office and the dining room is dead because we cut out some old circuits, so in prep for having the electrician back, I opened up the wall a bit so that the electrician could put an outlet into the dining room wall at the same time.

But I hit an obstruction. A second wall inside the wall, made of old 1 x 6 tongue and groove. I cut through it with the Sawzall. Hit something else behind it, not the other wall, but what, some molding? No. A pocket door. In roughly the same place as where the bar was at 6739, a connection between the original dining room and the original long living room with its fireplace, also roughly the same as at 6739. The door was probably closed up into the wall in 1931, as part of the conversion to a two flat.

It's not just any pocket door. It's solid oak, eight feet tall, 68 inches wide (yes, five feet eight inches wide), a single door that was pulled across the opening. It's magnificent, is what it is. I have some major demolition ahead to get it out of the wall, but could barely sleep last night thinking through the possibilities of using it, probably as a gigantic piece of molding or maybe, with some elegant modifications, a shallow cabinet/shelf unit in the dining room.

It fits the house perfectly. In fact, it looks like its been here since 1893.

Food-based science project

Pam's creativity may be getting away from her. Today she arrived home from a work shopping trip with the car literally full to the brim with "materials" for the latest workshop for science teachers. From the looks of the pile, they are going to do something with colorful acids -- or maybe make a gigantic salad dressing -- since there are about 64 bottles of vinegar, a few cases of lemon juice, a bunch of vegetable oil, and maybe 30 boxes of food coloring. Plus plastic baggies and trash bags by the thousands.

She claims that she doesn't even know what the experiment is . . . that one of the other science educators worked this one up.

But no worries. Lugging all that stuff into the house, we were hungry, so we put together a nice stir-fry with rice and a side of collards. No photos of that, but here's dinner from a few nights ago: enchiladas en mole con rajas y queso (enchiladas with roasted poblano peppers and cheese, in dark mole sauce), green beans and avocado. Yum.

And below that, Freddy grilling up some eggplant last time the Floridians were in town.

(sorry about the stray code below. I had to move the photos around manually ["edit html"] and obviously I don't know what I'm doing. Perhaps someone else will jump in with a fix. [Edit: Got it. -KB])

Pizza Friday

In order to keep up the trend of including people in the culinary photos we decided to publish our Friday night feast. I don't know if anyone recognizes this girl, but she's one heck of a cheese grater. We constructed this pie from double proofed dough, tomato sauce, whole milk mozz, olives, green peppers, and onions. Then we baked it at 550 degrees for about 8 minutes on a stone. It also has a twin brother, so there will be pizza for breakfast all weekend. Ciao!

Thanksgiving Photos a Week Late

We had several Thanksgiving meals -- and much to be grateful for -- but only one to immortalize with photos. This was last Friday at Nanette's with her kids and parents.

I mean no offense to the vegetarians, but Sean looks so happy holding the turkey. That good-looking apple pie was Lee's work, and the rasberry vinegar carrot dish, which I made, was interesting and photogenic, but not especially popular.