Finding Fault

I know, I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been settling in here in the house and in my new office, and getting back to work big-time. So, not much to write about lately. I still need to go on a photo safari of my new town, and I also need to work on finding some good hot weather recipes. (And, yes, I need a new picture for the blog banner.)

In the meantime, I’ve been settling into Southern small town life. It’s a pretty big change from Northern big city life, only I can never be sure which changes are Southern and which are small town.

For example, the friendliness. As Kathy advised me on my first day here, it is customary to greet people when you walk past them. Having grown up in the midwest, I’m finding the friendliness pretty easy to slip back into, even after several years of learning not to make eye contact with others. I’ve also met more of my neighbors and local shop owners in the last few weeks than I did in three years in Queens.

All in all, I’m finding the town pretty charming. The small downtown has most of what I need, including a family owned grocery that lets me buy on account (seriously), a fancy wine and cheese shop for when I’m feeling bourgeois, and an awesome public library. There are a couple of supermarkets on the edge of town when I need them, and a mall several miles down the road. I’m mostly biking places, and it seems that a lot of other people do this too.

I’m sure I’ll miss some things. There is one nice restaurant in town, and otherwise, it’s mostly chain restaurants near the highway. But, Richmond is only 20 minutes away, and that should be enough city for me.

I’m feeling pretty self-satisfied this weekend, mostly because I did three things:

1. I mowed the lawn. For the first time ever. I haven’t had a lawn since I lived with my parents, and luckily I also had a brother, and that’s what brothers do. But in this new place, without Scott here yet, I managed to figure it out. Yay me. (Very lucky for me, the lawnmower that the landlord provided has an electric starter, because I already know I can’t pull start an engine to save my life.)

2. I innovated. I like to make my coffee at home in the morning and bring it to work with me. Now that I’m biking to the office, I wasn’t sure what to do. I can’t hold my travel mug. I tried to get up earlier and have my coffee at home but then I got to work and wanted to drink coffee while I was checking email. (There is a coffee maker, but I’m a coffee snob and like to drink my own brew.) So, instead, I fashioned my own cup holder for the basket of my bike. I knew I needed to keep the cup upright, and I figure some sort of shock absorption would be good. So I carved a big divot in a sponge and rigged a couple of bungee cords to do this:
(top view)

(side view)

I’ll see how it works on Monday!

3. Baking. Kathy and Vance are having some people over tonight for their Grizzly marathon. They’re showing Grizzly Man and The Grizzly Project. Grizzly Man is legendary with them. When they went to see it in the theater without knowing much about it, Vance thought it was a mock-umentary, and laughed his way through it. Anyway, we are having bear-themed food, and I decided to make Cub-cakes.

Get it?

Cub-cakes.

It’s a yellow cake cupcake, with strawberry buttercream frosting, chopped up trail mix, and a Teddy Graham.

Last Friday, I had Kathy and Vance over for dinner in the new place. I don’t have chairs yet, so we moved the coffee table into the dining room and sat on the floor around it.

Chicken livers had been a topic of conversation earlier in the week, so I looked for a good recipe and found a bacon-wrapped chicken liver appetizer recipe. Easy and very delicious (assuming you like liver): Dip the livers in bread crumbs, wrap in half of a slice of bacon, and secure with a toothpick. Bake on a roasting pan on at 350 until the bacon is done how you like it (45 minutes for medium cripsy worked for us). When they come out of the oven, sprinkle with grated parmesan.

For the main course, I made the Ligurian Chicken recipe that I got from Rachel a few years ago. I loved it when she made it for me, and it has become a good recipe for me to use for company, since it’s pretty hard for me to screw up.

Here’s the recipe (from the NYTimes, adapted by Rachel):

2 Tblsp. flour, mixed on a plate with salt and pepper
1 four pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces (bone-in)
[I usually use a mix of legs and thighs, since I like them better]
2 Tblsp. olive oil
4 fresh rosemary sprigs
6 thinly sliced garlic cloves
1 1/2 cups white wine
1/2 cup Kalamata olives, with or without pits
3 ripe plum tomatoes, halved, seeded, and coarsely chopped

Dredge the pieces in 2 Tblsp. flour, mixed with salt and pepper, then saute them in olive oil over medium-high heat. Don’t be tempted to touch them until they develop a golden crust and the juices are sealed in. Turn them over, adding four little branches of rosemary and 6 cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced. When garlic softens but does not color, add 1 1/2 cups white wine and bring to a boil. Then add 1/2 cup kalamata olives, and 3 ripe plum tomatoes, seeded and coarsely chopped. Simmer partially covered until chicken is cooked and broth is reduced and tastes savory.

I served the chicken with oven roasted potatoes.

And we finished the evening with the peach blueberry crisp and Reese’s Klondike Bars. A winning combination if I’ve ever had one.

I spent nearly a decade living in Western Massachusetts where there were tons of farms and farm stands, and I didn’t really take advantage of them. It’s nice to be back in an area like that, now that I am learning what to do with vegetables. At the end of my moving day, Kathy asked me whether there was anywhere I wanted to go before she dropped me at home (me being without a car for the week), and I said no, too tired. But she decided on the best possible stop over on the way back – her favorite produce stand. It turned out to be a fantastic idea. I got a bunch of local produce, including beets, the tomatoes that are famous in this area, and peaches (from Georgia, but they smelled so good when I walked past that I couldn’t resist).

Some of the things I made this week (sorry, I only have a picture of one):

• Beet salad with goat cheese, crumbled bacon, balsamic vinegar and oil.
• Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwiches
• Peach blueberry crisp (the only dish I couldn’t figure out a use for bacon in.)

I missed this week’s Farmers Market in the center of town, but will go next week and see what I can find there.

Today I’m doing some shopping with Kathy, including finally buying a food processor with a gift card I got from my coworkers. This will open up a whole world of recipes…

I’m having a pretty exciting week here in my new place, and everyday I’m discovering some gem in this town. I will start posting some of that soon, but didn’t want to leave out one of the good food episodes we had during the vacation in Martha’s Vineyard last week.

On our yearly beach vacation, we usually set aside a couple of nights to get dinner out, and then assign people different nights to be responsible for shopping and cooking for the whole house (usually about 8-10 of us). I felt some added pressure (since I’ve been food blogging and all can’t talk about anything but cooking lately) that I was going to have to do something special. I decided on homemade pizza and teamed up with Heather to become Team Tuesday.

Heather had a brilliant idea of trying to do grilled pizzas, and we found instructions on the web. Many of these sites make it sound really complicated, and we expected we were going to need a few pairs of hands, three spatulas and tongs to make this happen. We decided to try a test pizza, and stay ready to use the oven if need be. All of our concerns were unfounded – this was so easy to do, and it made fantastic pizza.

For the dough – I didn’t want to spend half the day waiting for dough to rise, so I bought 5 16oz. pizza doughs at the Stop and Shop. For each pizza, we used half of one of these. On a floured surface, or floured hands, roll or stretch out the dough. Back in my freshman year of college, I worked at the campus pizza place, and learned a little about this part. The key is to use the tops of your hands and knuckles (not your fingertips, which will easily poke through) to gently stretch the dough. Primarily pull from around the edges, and the middle will pull itself thin on its own.

We heated the gas grill to medium-high and sprayed it with an olive oil spray before the first pizza, but then didn’t add any more, so I’m not sure whether that is really necessary on a well-seasoned grill. We put the dough down, and without getting burned, pulled the edges out a little more. We constantly checked it until it was crisp and brown on the bottom, and then flipped it over. It took one spatula and a couple fingers to do it easily.

Toppings: Once we flipped it, we worked quickly to add sauce, cheese and toppings. Then we closed the lid to circulate the heat to melt the toppings while the bottom cooked. You can’t load too much on these pizzas, and you have to precook all the toppings, since they’ll only be on the grill for 5 minutes or so.

We had a range of toppings available and took special requests, including:

• Buffalo chicken and blue cheese (my favorite)
• Shrimp and roasted garlic
• Combinations of pepperoni, sausage, onions, mushrooms, eggplant, red peppers

One warning on making these pizzas – I would not make these for a large group again. Because we could only do one pizza at a time, after we finished four of them, we let everyone start eating, and we kept cooking. So we ended up spending a good two hours at the grill and were finally able to join everyone (already stuffed) at the end. While we were outside, we heard some chanting from inside, and when we came in, we were treated to an original cheer, led by Brittnie, called “Pizza on the Beach.” It was the awesomest response that a cook could get. I didn’t save the lyrics, but maybe someone from the group could post them in comments?

The final product.

(All photos by Kristen Beam.)

More than a few times in the past, I’ve picked up and moved somewhere new on my own to start school or a job. Now I can’t imagine how I did that without the amazing help I’ve gotten this time from Kathy and Vance. I highly recommend to anyone who wants to move somewhere, find a Kathy and Vance. They are not only the most knowledgeable people about this area, they are unfailingly generous and fun to boot.

On top of that, they are both amazing cooks. And the day I arrived, Kathy had some dough rising on the stove waiting to be baked. It was Chocolate Babka. She got the recipe from here.

It tasted perfect, soft chewy dough with dark chocolate chunks. She also left half a loaf with me in the house, so I’ve had more of it for breakfast every day.

I’m back on land, and settling into my new digs in Virginia. Everything seems great here so far, with the exception of an unwanted tenant in the attic. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s nocturnal and likes to run around a lot at night over my bedroom. Oh yeah, and it totally freaks me out. Last night, I grabbed a pillow and blanket and slept on the floor in the guest room. If all goes well, it will be captured and taken away soon so I can start sleeping in my bed again.

I’ll catch up with some posting in the next couple of days, including the following exciting posts:

• Pizza on the beach
• Chocolate Babka (made by Kathy, eaten by me)
• My new local produce fix

And finally, a quick shout out to my big brother, Scotty, who lurks here, and turned 37 on Monday. Love ya, bro, and even more important, I’m still younger than you.