It’s been a tough few weeks for me. Instead of scheduling supermarket demos this weekend, I decided to get out of town. I’ll get back to the usual routine next weekend. Assuming my new shipment arrives, I will need to go to Portland next weekend.

I drove over Stevens Pass to Leavenworth, through Snohomish County. Fall certainly seems to have set in; the non-native deciduous trees have been turning. Fortunately, the dreary rain dropped off as I crossed over the pass.

In Leavenworth I ate some Kartoffelpuffer and drank a glass of Glühwein, both of which were often offered as street food when I was in Germany, but were served at a middle-brow restaurant here. After lunch, I walked past Kitschdorf (no, that’s not an official name for the center of town, but it fits) down to a walking course along the river, where I noticed a few fallen chestnuts and the occasional river fish.

When I got home, I realized I had a fair amount of ingredients which I had originally quite specific plans for, but which no longer had a clear fate. Rather than let them go to waste, I set out do do some serious improvisation.

Roasted potatoes with chive sour cream, and cabrales salad

My leftover cabrales cheese needed a final send-off, so I decided to use it in a salad. I incorporated a small amount into a sour cream/mayonnaise based dressing with a mustard kick. I’m not much of an aficionado of creamy dressings, but this worked quite well. In a frying pan, I let some butter cook at low heat with garlic and chopped tarragon, and added some pieces of my remaining rye bread to toast for croutons. Just a bit before pulling the croutons off heat, I added some of the cabrales cheese, so I could taste the contrasting flavors of raw and cooked blue cheese.

Alongside, I served some roasted potatoes with chive sour cream. The contrast between the blue cheese and the lightly flavored sour cream meant some subtlety in the sour cream was lost, but I was being frugal here, not trying to win any culinary contests.

Roasted cauliflower in white Cheddar sauce

I had half a cauliflower left after making my “nests” last week, so I roasted the cauliflower and served it in a white Cheddar sauce. This was essentially a cream and garlic enhanced bechamel with a fair amount of sharp white Cheddar.

Dinner ended up being fairly dairy-intensive, but of course, it was quite comforting. I think later this week I’ll probably switch gears back to more sappari food.

Last night I walked to a small-scale town meeting in my neighborhood to listen and quietly participate in discussions about the upcoming election. Jennifer advised me to bring finger food, but I got home a bit later than I intended, so I didn’t get started preparing food until about 20 minutes before the event.

My intended contribution was slightly more time consuming than this allowed, and I didn’t have a backup plan, so I arrived about an hour past the official starting time. Even though I was running late, I wanted to stop and take a little photo.

Fortunately, the group had only started their planned agenda a few minutes before we arrived.

Channa gobi masala nests

This looks elaborate, but much of the preparation time is idle, waiting for something to simmer or finish baking. I needed to chop onions, cauliflower, and chickpeas, and I grated some ginger; I toasted and ground some spices, and I melted butter to coat some prepared shredded filo dough.

To form the nests, I pulled clumps of the butter-tossed shredded filo and pressed the threads into a mini-muffin form, taking care to leave a depression for the filling in each muffin cup.

For the channa masala, I used a blend of garam masala,  fenugreek, cumin, cloves, brown mustard seeds, and one or two things I’ve since forgotten, toasted and ground them, and brought them back into the pan with some ghee. I cooked down some onions, added cauliflower, then included some chickpeas and tomatoes, and a little amchur powder for a hint of acidity. I forgot that I wanted this to be a bit thicker, since it was a filling, so close to the last minute I added a little starch dissolved in water. Each vegetable is chopped very finely to make it suitable for bite-size portioning.

After the filling was ready, I spooned it into the nests and baked for roughly 20 minutes, until the bottoms of the nests were lightly browned.

I got a decent night’s sleep Monday night, and woke up early and started plugging away on my work. Somehow everything just went better than average, and I blew past a bunch of things that usually don’t quite go so smoothly.

The only thing that distracted me was a truck, which was in front of me, trying to maneuver through an underpass just south of the Highway 99 bridge between Fremont and Queen Anne. Over about 10 minutes, a few cars started to pile up and then everyone got smart, realizing the truck driver wasn’t going to give up anytime soon, and wasn’t likely to try to get out of everyone else’s way; we backed out and popped back into traffic on the 99. I was on my way to a customer meeting, so this delayed me a bit, though it turned out to contribute to 5 minutes tardiness.

Tuesday night, however, didn’t go so well. I did some work in my office late at night, and then went home with an open issue with one of my vendors in Asia. They called me about 1:30 in the morning, and we tried to settle things, which took about 40 minutes on the phone. After that, my generally insomniac mind was unwilling to become restful again; a little stress goes a long way to unsettle my sleep patterns. I should probably consider this a health problem; it sure causes me a lot of trouble.

Tuesday nights I usually go to a Japanese language meetup in Seattle, and so dinner tends to be simple, and often eaten on the run. This time, I managed to make something simple that I had partially prepared the night before.

Red lentil soup

Spiced with some garam masala, some chilies, and a few adjustments, this lentil soup provided both comfort and heat. Cold weather makes me crave fiber and warmth… this works for me. Red lentils turn themselves into a bit of a puree, with no intervention required, assuming the liquid ratio is about right. It’s a nice low-effort soup-like dish.

Grilled cheese with chanterelles on caraway rye

When I’m in a hurry I feel little concern with making the ethnicities of my cuisine particularly closely aligned. My soup was aggressively seasoned, but I went with something mellow and brain-dead to nibble on.

I took some caraway-seasoned rye bread, a decent white cheddar, and some more sweated chanterelles and turned them into grilled cheese.

Omija-cha

Jumping regions again, I served a medicinal Korean drink that I cooked up on the weekend. Omija-cha (occasionally romanized without the hyphen, i.e. omijacha) is a “tea” made from the fruits of something occasionally translated as magnolia vine, or alternately as schizandra berry.

It takes me about an hour or so of simmering the very expensive berries to get the right level of flavor intensity, and I’m sure you could find someone who tells you it needs to be done much longer. I rarely make it, but I thought it would be a bit refreshing and maybe keep my little cold from relapsing. It’s served cold and fairly heavily sweetened.

Omija-cha is often a bit darker, but I might have been stingy with the berries this time. The name refers to the “five flavors” of the berries, the classic five flavors of Chinese cuisine: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent. I like it, but I’m sure it’s an acquired taste. In Seoul I once ordered it while sitting alone at an art gallery/cafe, and I’m sure the young girl at the counter was a bit perplexed, though she understood my awful Korean.

Hiromi passed very sad news to me this weekend. One of my ceramic artists, Minowa Yasuo, died of a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a kind of stroke which occurs when blood vessels near the surface of the brain burst. This type of stroke can affect people of any age, so it was completely unexpected. Before the stroke, Minowa-san was quite healthy.

Minowa-san and his wife were very kind and welcoming to Hiromi and to me. They often invited us to the workshop on the outskirts of Mashiko and served us English tea and Danish butter cookies as we talked about ceramics and unrelated trivialities.

Mrs. Minowa called Hiromi’s home while she was at work on Friday. Yesterday Hiromi talked to Mrs. Minowa by telephone to express sympathy… it turns out that Mr. Minowa died on September 2 and Mrs. Minowa called just after visiting family near Hiromi’s home.

During their conversation yesterday, Hiromi learned that Mr. Minowa had a son from his first marriage, and they hadn’t seen each other since both Minowa and his former wife remarried. That son moved to the US at some point to work, and somehow discovered one of my web sites, then found a way to contact his father in Mashiko. They had planned to meet again later this year, although it didn’t quite work out.

I’m not quite sure how to react yet. I have more of a personal connection with the Minowa family than other potters I buy from, so it came as a shock to me.

My cold seems to be better. I tried to take the weeekend easy, but somehow I didn’t sleep much better. I spent a lot of time playing with web code on Saturay, and enjoyed some cheap entertainment on Friday. This afternoon, I did a bit of work in my office, met with a customer, and then decided to make a simple dinner.

Grilled pear, caramelized onions and cabrales salad

Tamara Murphy’s restaurant in downtown Seattle, Brasa, gives a lot of space to cabrales cheese, particularly on their bar menu. At Brasa, cabrales is often paired with grapes, and this is perfectly sensible. The pungency of the cheese and the mild flavor and light sweetness of the fruit complement each other. I spotted some nice Bosc pears tonight and noticed a fair deal on cabrales cheese, so I chose to grill some pears and caramelize some onions, and serve these atop some red lettuce dressed with my signature yuzu dressing. A few toasted pine nuts scattered about add a bit of aromatic complexity.

Potatoes au gratin with chives

I remembered I had a remaining stash of chives from a baked potato dinner a few days ago. I spotted some inexpensive Washington-grown Yukon Gold potatoes and decided I needed to give my mandoline a workout, so I made this gratin. I used half cream, half milk, a bit of salt, and a hint of garlic.

Whatever is affecting my sleeping pattern and energy level bit me hard last night. Fortunately I had a light workload, so I decided to do some cleaning at home, which I’ve neglected a lot since I moved to my current apartment, so there’s always something out of order.

I’m in a bit of a comfort food mode recently, but tonight I balanced my need for something comforting (lentil vegetable soup with some tarragon) with something a little more drama. The mushroom season is in full swing, so I got a few chanterelles again, and some oyster mushrooms, which I briefly sweated with a hint of thyme and a dash of salt in olive oil. I didn’t feel like making any sort of sauce or pesto, so I just rubbed garlic and olive oil on my pizza dough, added a bit of mozzarella and parmesan, and baked the pie with the mushrooms. Upon finishing, I sprinkled some arugula on top.

I have been a bit under the weather for a few days, and my energy level has been all over the place, but mostly low, punctuated by occasional nervous tension or something like giddiness. My body gave me hints of battle with some minor cold… occasional sneezing, a moderate fever, occasional chills.

I don’t really get to stop working, but I’ve just been moving really sluggishly since Saturday. I got things shipped, took care of a number of incoming orders from wholesale customers, worked to prepare for a new shipment from Hong Kong, and so on, but I’ve just felt a kind of weariness that’s been hard to beat.

Even dinner has suffered. I’ve been keeping it brain-dead… I had a bagel for dinner yesterday, and I’m completely unable to remember what I ate on Monday.

Tonight I got home a bit late and kicked off a couple of baked potatoes. I tried to do a bit more, so I blanched some broccoli, but I was attempting a bernaise-style sauce and fought with it all the way. I nearly tamed it, but I cheated by adding some milk and mustard, since it didn’t want to emulsify with just the egg yolks. It resembled bearnaise only because of the presence of tarragon and egg yolks. The flavor and texture worked, but it wasn’t quite bernaise.

It wasn’t a very restful weekend, perhaps, but I did skip my usual demo routine. Today, I had a slow-paced afternoon, a relative lack of productivity.

I didn’t really have lunch today, but I made some mochi-mochi an pan in the morning, which I ate around 11am or so. It was just a milk-based yeast dough with a bit of mochi-ko in it, and I made small balls filled with anko, sweetened red bean paste. I made two flat savory rolls also: gomashio, black sesame and coarse salt.

Somehow I was craving a savory, quichelike tart today, but I didn’t want to have a meal mostly composed of butter, cheese and eggs, especially since I’ve been slightly dairy-heavy this week.

So I made a little salad, and I roasted halves of delicata squash stuffed with shredded satsumaimo. The satsumaimo was still tossed with a modest amount of melted butter, and a little black sugar and salt. It allowed me to serve a lighter portion of the tart.

I made the tart with a half-wholemeal crust, a lot of butter, and a little mace. I caramelized some shallots with some thyme, and I sauteed some incredibly cheap chanterelles with garlic. For the cheese, I used a cheap, unremarkable raclette from Trader Joe’s. I usually expect raclette to be a bit more aromatic, but this was a pretty bland one; that turned out to be just fine for the purpose of making a quiche, but I would have been disappointed if I actually made raclette.

My crust turned out to be fairly crumbly. I think my beads were a bit too fine to produce a very flaky result, but the texture worked out to be pleasant enough.

I slept around 2 am last night, which is in fact earlier than I have been sleeping recently, but not healthy. I don’t know why, but I’ve just been unable to get to sleep at night for a while. I’ve often had issues with insomnia, throughout my life, but it’s been worse the last 6 months. Personal and business stresses conspire to keep me awake.

Unfortunately, eventually, this sleeplessness catches up with me. I headed off to Bellevue Uwajimaya for an in-store demo but I wasn’t feeling very well, and due to some side errands required to do my demo I ended up arriving a bit later than I expected. I went in to say hello to the grocery manager, and he said I wasn’t looking well…

I’m not sick, although a few days ago I had the first hints of a cold. A few sneezes later, my morning congestion disappeared, and I thought I was back in the swing of things. Even if my immune system is still functioning, though, my body appears not to be.

Anyway, I set up a little store display and took his suggestion to skip my demo, though I ignored the part about getting some rest. Having driven to the Eastside, I felt I should at least make good use of my mileage, and stopped at my grandmother’s house for a bit.

Afterward I went to check on another customer, wandered a bit, and found myself talking another shopkeeper’s ear off, and finally made my way back to Seattle, where I coincidentally ran into Eugene of MyGreenTea, who was taking a rest after a hard day constructing a walk-in cooler in his new warehouse facility, where he will store his tea in a carefully climate-controlled environment.

I never did get a “rest,” but I ended up with a rather improvised day, which is almost as good.

I don’t know how I got so busy today, but a huge number of Internet orders came in last night, and I also had to rush off an order to a special event on the East Coast. A company picked up my green tea white chocolate enrobed fortune cookies (made with matcha) for a film premiere.

It didn’t help that I had a bit of an office supply shortage. Yesterday I ran out of ordinary paper and started printing invoices and shipping labels on bright yellow paper. This meant that at some point today I also needed to make a trip to get more paper.

After making my final dropoff, I met up with a friend who is attending classes with Urasenke Seattle, and I played the role of clueless guest at one of their Thursday night classes. In Japan I usually consumed matcha in tea shops, not tea ceremony, so I have a lot to learn even just to be a properly dignified guest. Fortunately, the instructors are both patient and informative. Since I had a fresh batch of cookies, I left some behind for other people to enjoy.

Of course, I got home quite late, and dinner was ready around 9:30 pm. I was in the mood for comfort food, though I suppose something Spanish would have been appropriate considering the hour.

I made a quick macaroni and cheese, using pennette instead of elbow macaroni, and topped with buttered panko. I snuck a little bit of wasabi in there because I was out of regular horseradish.

Chanterelles seem to be fairly plentiful right now… I got some on Sunday, thinking I got a deal, but the price seems to be even better today.

Mine were apparently locally-grown. Chantrelles always seem to have a fondness for butter, so of course I used some, and shallots, garlic, thyme and cream. I served them with spaghetti.

I don’t really use spaghetti all that often… for some reason, the ubiquity of spaghetti works against it for me, and I just never think of buying it. But a while back I got a strange craving for long pasta, and I bought some and used it a few times when I needed a quick lunch.

I thought today was going to be relatively light-duty, but it turned out busier than I expected. I took care of a bunch of things that have been suffering, but new tasks came in before I got very far. Tomorrow will be more eventful, because I have another very time-sensitive order and a long list of new internet orders that came in tonight.