The Vanilla Bean

I don't know about you, but I've always looked at recipes that called for vanilla beans, and dismissed them as "too fussy." Vanilla beans are expensive, and often hard to find. (I think maybe my local Fred Meyer may carry them nowadays, but that's a pretty recent development.)

The instructions always sounded so nebulous, too: "Split open the vanilla bean with the tip of a sharp knife, and scrape out the seeds with the flat of the blade." Why did I need a sharp knife? How sharp? Could I use my fingers to scrape out the seeds? Was there some special mechanic about the sharp knife and the blade that was required for this sort of thing?

Last spring I taught a special topics class, "Chemistry in the Kitchen", and while teaching that class I purchased a vanilla bean for use in the class. As luck would have it, I never ended up using it in cooking during the class, and I remembered that as I was reading a recipe in Molly Wizenberg's "A Homemade Life", which my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. The recipe was "Vanilla Bean Buttermilk Cake with Glazed Oranges and Creme Fraiche". It does sound kind of fussy, doesn't it? Do you stock creme fraiche in your fridge? What the heck is creme fraiche, anyway? Well, I knew what creme fraiche was -- also on account of the class I taught last spring, and I did happen to have it. And I had buttermilk. And last week my son decided he wanted egg whites for breakfast. Three of them, it turned out -- cooked one at a time. Hey -- eggs are good for you, so I wasn't going to complain. But that meant I had three egg yolks in the fridge, and I'd been trying to figure out what to do with them. So...I remembered this recipe. I probably shouldn't re-print it here, since she just published the book...

It's actually kind of funny -- with all of these relatively unusual ingredients at hand (like creme fraiche and a vanilla bean) -- the main impediment for me to make this recipe was that I didn't have any cake flour. Now, I know that cake flour has less protein in it than other flours, so I did a bit of reading in "CookWise", by Shirley Corriher, and figured that I could probably just substitute some of the flour with cornstarch. So I did, and I hope it works!

But back to the vanilla bean. Like a good scientist, I followed Molly's directions, and split the vanilla bean length-wise. What a thing of beauty -- a vanilla bean is packed full of these tiny, black, lustrous seeds. They're kind of like poppy seeds, only smaller, blacker, and shinier -- pretty much more appealing in every way, especially because they smell heavenly. And as directed, I used the side of the knife (and the tip, because it seemed appropriate) to scrape out all those gorgeous seeds. Well...most of them. They do stick to the inside of the pod. The pod I buried in some sugar, also as suggested by Molly. In a couple of months I'll see how it turned out.

The cake is in the oven. It, too, smells heavenly. I'm not sure if I'm going to bother with the glazed oranges, mostly because I don't have any large oranges. Satsumas, yes. Navel oranges, no. I don't think I want to fiddle with little ones. I might make a lemon glaze for it, though.


Footnote: In case you're not familiar with it, vanilla beans come from the vanilla orchid, Vanilla planifolia. I'm a big fan of orchids. I've been an orchid enthusiast since I bought my first dendrobium, around 15 years ago. While I was in college I had a V. planifolia, which grew fairly well for quite some time, but never bloomed, to my significant disappointment. It wasn't that I was hoping it would produce vanilla beans, and I wouldn't have to buy them; it was just that I thought it would be extremely special if I could see a real vanilla orchid make a real vanilla flower. I've never lived anywhere tropical, so I haven't seen them in the wild or anything. (Anyway, I think it languished when I started moving across the country, and otherwise neglecting most/all of my plants. Too bad. Maybe I'll get another, now that I'm settled.)

Delicious memories

I just got back from a visit to PCC to pick up some raw milk (I'm going to endeavor to make cheese curds tomorrow), but while we were there, my son and I meandered through the cheese aisle, and after deflecting him from choosing some really expensive cheese, I was surprised to discover two offerings from the Grafton Village Cheese Company, of Grafton, Vermont. One was their conventional cheddar; the other was maple-smoked cheddar. Mouth watering, I didn't look t the price, but just purchased the latter.

Now, you probably haven't heard of Grafton, VT, or their cheeses, but to me it conjures up some pretty vivid memories of walking from our house in Montpelier down to the co-op, and purchasing packages of the "ends and pieces" of Grafton's smoked cheddar, which were priced extremely low considering the extremely delicious cheese inside those packages. Pretty they might not have been, but I've never considered that a significant factor when choosing cheese.

This small block of maple-smoked cheddar is enough to send me into a rapture of memory about Montpelier. We moved to Montpelier when our son was four months old so that I could take a position teaching at Norwich University (in Northfield, VT, about ten miles south of Montpelier.) We lived there for less than a year before we answered the call to return to the west coast, but Montpelier made a big impression on me, and a lot of it revolved around food.

Although Montpelier is extremely small, it is home to an amazing array of extremely delicious food offerings. Aside from what wonders you can purchase at the co-op, it is home to Manghi's Bread, a bakery that specializes in bread, but also features a few pastries. My favorite was their maple-walnut bread. It was amazing fresh, in sandwiches (with Grafton's smoked cheddar, among other things), toasted...pretty much any way you wanted to eat it.

Manghi's is also a place filled with really sweet, generous people. In addition to loaves of bread, they also make rolls, and I was charmed to discover that they sell them for a pittance to the hungry students who come walking by in the afternoon -- the bakery is a block or two from the local school. They have a sliding scale -- little kids get charged a nickle or dime, older kids a little more. When we lived there, my son mostly was still too little to eat much variety of food, but by the time we were getting ready to move, the ladies at the counter would usually hand a roll to my cute sprout in the kid-backpack. He'd suck on it, and nibble some of it; sometimes I'd get a bite, too.

Montpelier is also the home of the New England Culinary Institute, and that worthy body sponsors three eateries in town, so that the student chefs can get some real-world experience. If you live in a city where there's a culinary school, do find out when they serve meals, and go have a wonderful experience. We ate at the NECI bistro many times. From time to time we wouldn't have as good an experience, but then they would comp us the dish, or the meal, and probably bring us a free dessert, and we would feel entirely mollified, and come back again the next week or so. They certainly new how to treat their customers!

In addition, it was an entertaining place for us to eat with our son, Tristan, because they had a window into the kitchen where customers could watch the student chefs work. Unlike some children, Tristan was not one of those that would happily sit in the high chair for 30-60 minutes while you ate your meal. We would be lucky to get 10 minutes of sitting out of him, and then one of us would have to walk him around to look at things (like the student chefs) so that the other could eat, and then we'd switch. It wasn't very romantic, but it was fun to watch the chefs. The student chefs were also generally quite amused by us, since Tristan's favorite toys were kitchen implements. So Tristan would generally be looking in the window into the kitchen, firmly clutching a wooden spoon, or a spatula, or what ever the tool of the day happened to be. The student chefs would look up and see Tristan with his tool -- so they'd grin, grab their own spoon or spatula or what ever, and show it to him through the window. There were generally a lot of smiles involved.

I could keep rhapsodizing about the eateries in Montpelier for some time. I'm leaving out the Black Door, the little Thai place whose name I don't remember, and several others. But I will conclude by mentioning one of the two (at the time) coffee places -- Capitol Grounds. Both coffee places in Montpelier made very good coffee, but Capitol Grounds was extremely notable in that they roasted their own, and it was extremely good. It tickled me that, in addition to their House blend, they also had a Senate blend. It was their darkest roast, and was extremely good. I'm glad to be back in Seattle, and we do have some good coffee here, but I really miss that Senate blend.

Tomorrow I will amaze my husband, Peter, when I pull out the little block of Grafton's maple-smoked cheddar, and we sign, and remember all the good things that we miss about Vermont.

(More if you love it)

A couple of years ago my friend Suzanne gave me a copy of her recipe for pesto. I'd been complaining that I hadn't found one I liked yet. Although the weather had been awful for gardening that summer, I had actually managed to grow some basil, and I wanted to do something with it that would endure into the winter months.

Suzanne's pesto recipe is, indeed, very fine. But the thing that really caught my fancy about the recipe itself is that, when it lists how much garlic to use, Suzanne added a comment next to it, in parentheses: more if you love it. I do love garlic, and so I do add more, and it's fabulous.

But really, "more if you love it" is a good way to think about the world. I don't think of it in terms of it encouraging excess, but merely encouraging you to revel in the things that you love. I want to do that. It's not really different from how I already live, but I want to do it deliberately, and, as often as I can, revel in the things that I love. You never know how many days you have, after all. I can try for more, because I do love it, but at the end of the day I'll take what I can get.

As a good beginning to a blog, to a new year, and to what ever the future brings, I think that "more if you love it" has an auspicious ring to it, and I think it makes an auspicious beginning.

Although it's totally the opposite time of year from when a pesto recipe will do you much good (at least if you live in the northern hemisphere), here's Suzanne's recipe.

Classic Fresh Pesto
3 cups loosely packed fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
3 large cloves of garlic (more if you love it)
1/2 cup pine nuts or pecan meats
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese
1 teaspoon fresh oregano or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (or to taste)
1/2 to 1 cup fruity olive oil (or more)
salt to taste

Instructions: Combine all the ingredients in a food processor or blender, adding enough olive oil to make a thick, smooth sauce. Add salt to taste.

Tip for people with pathetic blenders: If you're like me, and you have a cheap blender that only works so-so, rather than follow the instructions above, try this instead: start at the bottom of the recipe. Put 1/2 cup of the olive oil into the blender, and add everything except the basil. Blend all of the other stuff first, then start adding basil. Add more olive oil as needed to get the consistency you're looking for.