The Nature of Blogging

We spend a lot of time on our computers thinking about blogging, but not.


This is what the mini fridge looks like, kept at 60degF by a thermostat. It's 2 gallons of dortmunder (made with kölsch yeast), which Marissa has yet to name.

Domesticity

Home stuff makes us happy. Some recent acquisitions have put some big smiles on our faces. See?

Mãe got these for us on her trip with Aunt Cila to Portugal. Obrigada!

My grandmother knows us well. We are pretty messy in the kitchen. For those of you who don't know, roosters are prevalent in Portuguese art, so I was pretty excited to see them on my apron, and Porto is the city where my dad was born.

We picked this up on sale at our favorite supermarket. Gorgeous.

 We also now have a kitchen scale. For accurate measurements!

We made chicken tagine, a Moroccan dish, with our preserved lemons. Surprisingly, lemons that you leave in pickling salt for months are really salty. Who knew?

Toby has become a master of Asian food, as seen in this beautifully plated pad thai.

 Here I am devouring one of the best Italian meals we've ever made. We finally found a ratio of all-purpose flour and semolina that suits our tastes. This spaghetti came out heavenly. Also pictured is a focaccia that Toby made and chicken breasts stuffed with baby Swiss cheese, arugula and prosciutto.

 Newsflash: Seattle gets sunny sometimes. I got excited and wore a sundress that ties at my neck and proceeded to stay out in the sun so long that I got a sunburn. Tan lines in Seattle. It's possible!

Our garden loves the sun. We've added a cherry tomato plant and a pepper plant.

This little guy is going to be a tomato someday.

Another future tomato.

The dill plant has a ton of new blossoms.

Not the greatest photo, but you can see that the dill is almost as tall as the porch railing.

Shoes. OMG shoes.

Toby gets excited about Japanese chef knives. I get excited about custom made dance shoes.

A fellow salsera who went to USC with me now designs dance shoes, so I ordered a pair from her. She asked for specific measurements of my feet so that the shoes could be made to fit me exactly. But the best part? LOOK AT THAT HEEL!

A Brief Thorough Check-In

It was brought to my attention that peeps have been checking the blarg and wondering what happened to the updates. I told Maeve that it's because we're doing awesome stuff. For example, here is what we did this weekend: made and canned a bunch of chili, made and ate and froze some baguettes, hung artwork in the apartment, checked out the Ballard farmers market and bought some cherries, made vegetable stock, made pork liver pâté grandmère, washed/dried/folded three loads of laundry. So now we are both tired and not really up to writing extensively on our projects. Instead, here are some photos to give you a little glimpse into our daily life.

Toby's comments will be joining us in teletype.

A cabinet full of homemade stock.
Top left, vegetable stock; top right, chicken stock; bottom, veal stock.

Pressure canning is a way to turn low-acid foods (like stock or chili) into non-perishable goods. The stock shown here was made in one long long sunday's worth of work, but will last up to a year in the cabinet. Or not, because we've used almost all of it.

Dinner.
We saw some king salmon on sale at Central Market and were compelled to buy it. Bright pink flesh. Mmm... This was a new method: we poached it for most of the time, and broiled at the end as the liquid was almost gone. Result: crusty delicious. We used Julia Child's method for green beans, supposedly the french method. That means a whole lot of water real hot, little bits of vegs at a time. Means crisp green beans. We finished the beans with moar butter. Potatoes, real easy: roastville.

Another dinner.

Julia Child has been teaching us a lot. I love this method of cooking an egg, mostly because it's so cute.

We use a lot of olive oil, so I proposed to Toby that we order some from the orchard I visited in Spain.
He was totally on board once he found out we could get it in a 5L tin.

I made these flowers out of clay! Idea courtesy of Martha Stewart's Craft of the Day.

The Tobester searing some meat for beef pot pies.

You may notice that the gloves I'm wearing are not typical oven gloves. That is correct. We had some standard oven gloves that behaved pretty typically, but they couldn't hold the extra-hot stuff. Go out to the grill, get burned. Well, I went to an industrial supply catalog and ordered some real hot gloves. The ones I'm wearing are good up to 1000degF (intermittensly) and let me laugh at 500degF pans.

The finished filling for the beef pot pies.

Our first attempt at homemade ravioli.
Those are filled with dungeness crab that Toby bravely prepared and cooked himself.

Toby's first baguette. Crispy on the outside, spongey on the inside.
Beautiful and delicious.

It's going to take me years (literally) to get consistently good bread. It seems like the usual outcome is bread that tastes pretty good but looks awful. It turns out that the "artisan" bread you buy in the grocery store uses all kinds of shortcuts not available to the home baker. Baking a loaf the real way takes about 24 hours. With added enzymes, you can get in done in a few. The funny part is this: we do all this baking without a stand mixer. It turns out that you can fully develop bread dough without much work at all. Stretch, fold, wait. I've apparently been making bread wrong this whole time. The dough is way wetter than I thought was workable.

Another important thing I wish someone had told me: dough won't stick to wet hands; if you dip your hands in water before working dough, it won't stick to you.

My first attempt at a cherry pie. I pitted every single one of those cherries with a bobby pin.

Behold my flaky crust!

Cluttered desk, now with portraits I made in high school.

I don't really go swing dancing any more, but this is a cute photo so I included it.

Dancing with Alberto at Salsa Con Todo. This is the studio that I have joined in Fremont.
I taught a freestyle workshop there last weekend.

update your nightmares

We finally bought a chef's knife. Ended up ordering one from Shinichi Watanabe, the Kaibou (as it was sized and shaped most like the chef's knives I am used to). Construction is typical japanese, with a very very hard high-carbon steel sandwiched between two layers of "wrought iron" (mild steel). The style of finish is kuro-uchi, which means hammer-finish. A somewhat crude look, but a really well-balanced and nice piece of cutlery. Right now it's sitting on a little shrine on the towel it came with. It's sharp like the beast, able to cut thin slices of paper unsupported.

The japanese have hundreds of very specific knives for different tasks, almost all of them much smaller than the one I bought. When it comes down to it, though, I'm a brute-force-fits all kind of man, so I got what I loved: a huge knife.

***

Today I make:
- lye pretzels
- a goat wat
- some italian bread.

We had brunch with some friends of Marissas at a place run by the people that run Le Pichet. Mom, if you're reading this, Uncle David would be proud. I managed to get the check and pay it from the inside seats of a table against the wall without getting up and unnoticed by the couple sitting across us, towards the waitress. Marissa was supposed to "go to the bathroom" and accomplish the mission, but could not tear herself away from her roasted eggs and chocolate baguette long enough to do so before the food was gone. I'd tell you my game plan for next time, but they may read this eventually.

***

I haven't been writing about my job (and therefore haven't been writing) because it sounds somewhat interesting, but isn't, really.

I spend a lot of time doing a lot of math and working out there on the plane solving problems, but nobody wants to hear about how I managed to get a spline curve fit for some stubborn data in excel and can solve joint analysis problems a little faster now. It's not a good story.

Suffice to say I love my job and I really like almost all of the people I've met. I just love talking about all the other stuff I do, because it's cooler.

A solo adventure

Thursday was a beautiful sunny day, so I went to the Space Needle!

I went up the north elevator, facing Queen Anne. It's a fancy shmancy neighborhood on one of the first settled hills in Seattle with great views of Lake Union and Elliot Bay.

Lake Union, where the sea planes take off.

Elliot Bay, which leads out to Puget Sound.

Downtown and the waterfront.

Right next to the Space Needle is the Experience Music Project. I didn't go in, but they have stuff like Kurt Cobain's handwritten lyrics. The building itself is pretty psychedelic. I took some crappy photos of it.

And a dramatic parting shot!

Now I must return to the kitchen. Yesterday Toby made salsa verde, today we canned a batch of veal stock (which is different from the first one. It's leaner and darker, the color of grade B maple syrup, and flavored with tarragon and savory) and right now we've got chicken simmering for enchiladas to enjoy with the sangria I made.

We Got a Grill!

Isn't he handsome?

Right at home with the potted herbs.

So we made burgers. With grass-fed Washington cows. And biscuit buns. And german mustard.

This recipe usually makes a dozen buttermilk biscuits. Today it made four buns.

No, we did not have people over. Those are all for us.

This might be the best burger of my life.

We ended up eating one and a half burgers each, so Toby will take the last burger to work as his lunch tomorrow. If his coworkers didn't drool over the lamb kebabs he brought in yesterday, they will certainly envy this.

P.S. We're having golden rain again. This has happened a few times, and I think it's magical. One time we had golden hail. The picture does it no justice.