Quarantine Tiny Pleasures

1) When you think you are out of lemons, and so you cut your last lemon into more and smaller wedges, but then you find a bag of lemons at the back of the fridge, so you take TWO of those little wedges.

2) Very Good working lunches. Here, kimchi fried rice (at least twice a week).

3) Here, grilled cheese (at least once a week). It actually makes my gleeful day when there is a hole in my slice of bread (where I guess a particle of yeast exhales), and the cheese oozes through and makes a crunchy cheesy bit. It is SO GOOD.

4) Hanging out with Miss Thistle.

5) Hanging out with Miss Cricket.

Good Eats

I have a backlog of food photos to share! I have organized them by meal.

Breakfasts

Omelette with turkey, bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes, topped with queso fresco and chives from the garden:


The breakfast the morning after taco night, with leftover guacamole and pico de gallo:


Yum! My love of pico de gallo is why I always keep my knives razor-sharp.

Huevos rancheros, with black beans, salsa from a jar, and cilantro from the garden (and of course queso fresco because what is life without cheese?):


Lunches

Grilled cheese and tomatoes!


Oh I guess that's it for lunches. They are a bit less interesting...

Suppers

Guacamole and pico de gallo in the making!


Now everything is ready for tacos!


Heating tortillas and beans:


Pan-frying the fish (this is cod, but I also do this with rockfish and halibut):


Oh dang I never photographed our actual tacos. Oh well.

OK here is moosey noodle soup with collard greens:


Here are crabcakes!


We had crab legs for DL's birthday dinner, and the Best Thing in the World to do with leftover crab is crabcakes! I thought of the perfect thing to go with crabcakes; this potato salad that has green beans!


A perfect meal!


Here are roast veggies, from the least exciting veggies from our CSA: red beets, yellow beets, and kohlrabi. I added olive oil, salt, and thyme from my garden:


They came out... okay. How exciting can roast veggies be?


A fine thyme was had by all.

This is chicken and peanut stew:


The recipe hails from Ghana. I learned about it on the underside of a peanut butter jar. I had forgotten that it calls for sweet potatoes, so didn't buy any. I substituted yellow potatoes and carrots. It is topped liberally with cilantro:


It's absolutely delicious, and it inspired me to order a Ghana cookbook. I wonder what else they eat in Ghana!

Dessert

My rhubarb is going nuts, as usual, so I got some strawberries to make a classic strawberry rhubarb pie. That combination is just so magical. The syrup that comes out is like ambrosia. Well, I got lazy and didn't feel like making a pie, so I stewed the berries and rhubarb with sugar and lemon juice to make a simple compote:


It had the same magical flavor as a pie filling, without me having to make a pie!


Here is an obligatory photo of my faithful kitchen supervisors:


The fireweed is juuuuuuust starting to bloom. They don't look so vivid pink in the rain:

Good Eats

As the weather is warming up, we are eating the last of the cold-weather foods that I love so much.

Well, fish tacos are all-season! These are made with rockfish:


These avocados were tiny and sad-looking on the outside, but had this inner beauty. Look at the tiny little pits! That means more avocado goodness!


Pico, guac, and queso fresco for the tacos:


In Very Exciting News, I bought a cast iron pizza pan, and here is my first pizza on it:


And here is my second! Like everyone else, we are having difficulty getting yeast, so I got some refrigerator pizza dough. It was a rectangle, so I cut off the corners and pasted it into a circle. It was... okay. Not as nice as a real crust, but definitely okay!


Salmon chowder!


Singapore noodles:


The leftovers were great for breakfast, with runny eggs added:


So I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover, but when this image showed itself to me in a popup ad:


I decided that I had to read this book. I thought it would be funny and sarcastic, and it was. A lot of the schtick was this Midwestern woman growing up and living in big cities and displaying fish-out-of-water humor. Anyway, she even gave a recipe of the kind of food she grew up with! A casserole of macaroni, hamburger, cheese, tomato paste, and some spices. Of course I had to try it before the weather got too warm. I splattered tomato paste in the book! A sign of true affection:


It was, unsurprisingly, really tasty, and probably not something I'll make again until deep winter:


Of course, being Californian, I had to make a side of steamed veggies, something Samantha Irby's mom would NOT have done:


Also, since my oven was on, I made a blueberry cornmeal cake:


Here is a moose stew. Definitely a winter-only meal.


Mmmm moosey:


My lunch today! A salmon melt:


I discovered the Red Blossom Tea Shop in San Francisco's Chinatown as an online shop after I had moved to Fairbanks. I have been ordering from them faithfully ever since. Every time I place an order for my regular mid-grade tea (Tung Ting and Guan-Yin's Iron Goddess of Mercy), they include samples of the next fancier level tea, hoping, I think, that I will upgrade to more expensive stuff. Well, this time they included a sample of Mao Feng, as well as this extremely fancy chocolate bar made with said Mao Feng:


Apparently it was made in New Hampshire by a friend of the tea shop owner, who in his shop, the Dancing Lion, makes small batches of Very Fancy chocolates, and he had made one while reminiscing about visiting the tea shop:


You guys. This chocolate bar was, for a brief moment in time, possibly the fanciest item in all of Fairbanks. DL and I devoured it:


It was very good, really very good! I had thought that, like wine, chocolate would have a point of diminishing returns, and this Very Fancy Chocolate could not possibly have been that much better than my favorite from Chocolove. But, my friends, it was. And now it is gone. Thus a lesson on the ephemerality of physical pleasures.

In other news, Thistle seems really comfy with us now. Do you think she looks comfy?


Cricket still loves to snuggle with DL:


Hail Queen Thistle!

Happy Chinese Easter!

This is the first time in a long time we celebrated Easter instead of Chinese Easter. Usually we get a half-priced ham the day after Easter, and have it with friends a week later (that would be today). But alas, there are no gatherings at this time. Funnily enough, I had a half-priced ham in my freezer from the day after Christmas last year, so I decided that as long as we were breaking with tradition, we'd go all out and have it on actual Easter. What a shame that we could not have anyone over to share it with us. But DL was so kind as to inform me that he would happily eat an entire ham with me. He is so kind! Actually, most hams in the supermarkets today are half hams, not whole hams, which would be what Dorothy Parker was referring to when she defined eternity as "a ham and two people". :)

My first task for the feast was a pie:


And here is the ham!


For a veggie, I braised collards with garlic:


A rare photo of DL, with the ham:


There it is!


There was extra pastry dough from the pies, so I made tiny cheese empanadas. Another trick from loyal reader and meatworld friend Rena!


The finished pie!


Peach is DL's favorite. And I finally mastered a semi-healthy crust, made with half barley flour, which is less gritty than whole wheat.


Leftover ham uses!

Grilled ham and cheese sandwiches:


And now we interrupt our food reportings with a photo of the dogs cleaning their fangs!


Yes, fangs!


OK now a classic ham and white bean soup, which kale and carrots:


And finally, the last ham scraps in omelettes, which we had exactly one week after Easter:


Omelette you enjoy this photo. DL staged it: