I am not, as a rule, a gadget maven although my two favorite objets techniques of all time - you know, the ones I will grab before fleeing from a burning building - are my Smartyphone and my Kindle. And my iPad.
Three objets techniques.
I love my Smartyphone because of all the cool stuff it allows me to do. I can save myself a fruitless trip all the way upstairs by texting the Kid Squid from the kitchen to find out whether he wants to join me in a cup of tea or go for a walk. I can keep track of the gluten-free shopping and take pictures of all the exotic ingredients I require so others can reconnoitre the supermarket without me. I can play Angry Birds and Scrabble to my heart's content - much-needed relaxation after an afternoon wrestling with a g/f baking experiment. I am able, now that I have given in and paid the introductory fee of 99 cents, to follow all the latest happenings (and recipes!) as revealed by the New York Times. I can even obtain directions to that fabulous new boite that's been the subject of so much local buzz lately.
I'm just kidding about that last one: the Valley is scandalously short on boites and their ilk, but a girl can dream.
My iPad is necessary for streaming Netflix videos and downloading volumes with pretty pictures or diagrams - such as cookbooks and On Food and Cooking - which don't transfer well to Amazon's 'reads like a book' device. It is also useful for downloading photos when I am travelling, so I can free up valuable space on my camera's wee memory chip.
As for my Kindle, well, you know that I refuse to buy dead tree anything anymore and that's that.
But none of these devices, tragically, does it all. I don't really like reading novels on my iPad (there's too much glare and I don't like the tricky swiping maneuver required to turn the pages - also the battery doesn't last that long) while the Kindle is useless for movies and web browsing. The Blogger interface is compatible with exactly none of them, so when I think the mood will strike I have to ensure access to a computer: when we travel, that means I need to carry my little HP netbook or borrow the Squid's laptop when he isn't looking.
True story: when DMR and I presented ourselves at security at JFK in May before our flight to Johannesburg, I was taken aside and questioned at length by the TSA for having my iPhone, my Kindle, my iPad, and my netbook in my carry-on bag. 'You don't need all four,' the big scary guy exclaimed, while pulling them out of my bag and spreading them accusingly on the metal table. 'Why do you have all four?' I light-heartedly quipped that my husband had asked the same question while I was packing, ha ha ha, but the Uniformed One was having none of it. It was touch and go there for a bit, I kid you not, but I was eventually allowed to proceed despite the alarm-raising profile prompted by all my redundant technology.
Sometimes, though, one can't help oneself. From curiosity, or aggressive marketing, or the need to be au fait with the cultural currency (such as it is) of this modern age we live in, one finds oneself doing something outrageous. And that is why, despite the fact that I didn't really need it, I bought myself an early Christmas present this week: a shiny new Kindle Fire. It arrived fortuitously yesterday while I was lying on my Second Empire fainting couch, recovering from Sir's long-distance lecture about I-forget-what. I am pleased to report the improvement to my mental and physical well-being was instantaneous. I removed the device from its earnest-looking recycled cardboard box (it might have been constructed from the leavings of gluten-free bread manufacturing), charged it up, and stood back to see what would happen.
Joy of joys! My entire Kindle collection was already on its virtual library shelf in full and glorious technicolor. I discovered that I now have access to the New Yorker (an exclusive contract with Amazon, oh my), Saveur and yes, even Bon Appetit if I feel so inclined, without a single tree having to give up the ghost for the cause. My cookbooks look awesome and I can access the USDA nutritional database on the web if I need to do some sudden high-ratio baking. I can watch movies, hooray, and play Angry Birds to my heart's content.
But best of all, thanks to non-Apple technology I am now able to do this:
Huzzah for Androids: now I can blog on the go.
Campers, I have safely returned from my awesome cheese-making adventure! The secrets of cheddar, camembert, vacha toscano, and cultured butter have been revealed to me by the cheese-meister himself, the redoubtable Jim Wallace, and I am all the better for it. There is so much to tell and so much wisdom to impart (none of it mine, I must hastily add) that it will take several days of scrupulous blogging to do the weekend justice.
I met the sorts of remarkable people that one might expect, given an enterprise such as this. There was Jim himself, of course, who (when not yomping around high Alpine meadows with artisanal Italian and French cheesy-types) lurks in his cave in Massachusetts, teaching professionals, serious amateurs, and enthusiastic suburban wannabes like me a thing or two about the alchemistical world of bacterial cultures; raw milk; coagulation, and affinage. Jim's long-suffering and very lovely wife Robin good-naturedly cooked delicious lunches for the crowd and allowed us the run of her beautiful home as we dripped whey everywhere and invaded her privacy for two days of dairy-related brouhaha.
The students this weekend included a pair of pizza entrepeneurs from Southern India who want to offer their customers home-made mozzarella with their pies; a cool and groovy cook-book author; a book-seller and his son all the way up from Oaxaca (which is in Mexico, I discovered); and a Swedish-descended shepherdess who sings to her goats (and already makes excellent cheese, to boot). There were enthusiasts from Calgary and Ohio and New York and other places far and wide - I even met a couple at my B&B who'd flown in from Nice (the one in France, I mean) for the privilege of attending another course. That people would come from France to Massachusetts to learn about cheese says something about the caliber of the expertise on offer. Although the pair were quick to point out that the South of France is not a region known for its frommage, I wasn't fooled. People make the pilgrimmage from around the globe to sit at the feet of Jim Wallace and Ricki Carroll, the Cheese Queen.
I will divulge more about their philosophies in the days to come - but first, a few words about where I spent my weekend.
A highlight of the experience was the crazy place I stayed, a gem that I believe could only exist in this little corner of the world - the Do-It-Yourself-Inn. That wasn't its real name, of course, but I'm concealing its identity and exact location for reasons that will become obvious (any readers desiring further information should contact me directly: only after they have convinced me of their seriousness and contributed a small honorarium to my camembert-production fund will I reveal further specifics about this remarkable place).
The Do-It-Yourself Inn is exactly that: a picture-perfect B&B that is completely and utterly without adult supervision: there is no lock on the door and no staff in sight. Guests show up, claim their room, and come and go as they please. There was a cosy living room full of books, a kitchen where we could cook meals (heaven for a gluten-freedom fighter such as myself, although my rapture was not uncomplicated, as I shall describe); and country walks and bucolic views whichever way we turned. There was even a general store across the street where we could present ourselves for breakfast if we so desired.
There was rumored to be an emergency number we could call if the place caught on fire; we became unaccountably trapped under a heavy object; or were attacked by bears; and elves came in at some point during the day to straighten the towels and make the beds, but apart from that my six companions and I were left to our own devices. It was beyond fabulous.
My joy was marred by only two rainclouds (loyal readers know there's nothing I love more than complaining about rainclouds on an otherwise perfect day). The first was the unfortunate fact that the kitchen of the Do-It-Yourself Inn also served as the bakery for the general store. If the big calendar on the wall marking off days with notations such as banana cake (Wednesday); walnut coffee cake (Saturday); Danielle's birthday: chocolate cake (next Friday); and pineapple upside-down cake (a week from now) hadn't been a sufficient clue, the well-used oven gloves and ginormous Hobart standmixer under the window would have given the game away. But worse - far, far worse - was the sweet aroma of baking that permeated every pore in the kitchen cabinetry and every molecule in the sitting room upholstery. Of the baker, there was no sign - but the olfactory evidence left behind by her activities was palpable and heart-wringing. Rarely have I more strongly longed to do anything more evil than present myself across the road for a sticky bun, a blueberry muffin, and a big slice of Black Forest cake.
The second rain cloud involved my precious Smartyphone. To my utter dismay and chagrin, it didn't work in the village.
In fact, Massachusetts' gloriously mysterious and picturesque Pioneer Valley seems to be nothing more than a big, extremely frustrating collection of dead zones. Rarely have you seen a more deflated group than me and my fellow B&Bers when we discovered we were Out of Contact with the Rest of the World. The folks at the general store told us there was sometimes reception on top of the hill behind the Inn, but in retrospect I think they made that up just to enjoy the sight of us city folk horsing up the road, waving our cell phones in the air in extravagant Figure Eights. It might have been my imagination, but I'm pretty sure I heard guffaws from behind the screen door as we peeled out of there in vain search of our little green bars. It probably counts as worthwhile Friday night entertainment for the locals - and who can blame them? We were ridiculous.
So I tried to remind myself of these deficits as I stood before the window of Coldwell Banker in Shelburne Falls yesterday morning, examining the converted churches, two-hundred-year-old clapboard houses, and 20-acre smallholdings (barn included in the sale!) offered up to those with sufficient means. 'I could do this!' I fantasized. 'I too could look after goats and keep exotic chickens and make cheese and preserves and say good-bye to the world of laboratory duties and the sorts of lawns that need mowing. Hello to dirt roads lined with maple-sugar bucket-laded trees; ice-covered ponds (in April!); and old forests as far as the eye can see.
But then I remembered my Smartyphone. Being without it might just be too high a price to pay for all that rural bliss.
Next up: Jim makes cheddar and I discover why I am very, very lucky to live in Pennsylvania after all.
A butternut squash is a funny thing.
Prior to last weekend's purchase for my Down-with-the-Tyrant melange with chickpeas, I don't suppose I had ever examined a butternut squash up close, preferring to buy each one already peeled and diced by Wegmans' master food prep artistes. However, in my new gluten-free spirit of economy and thrift I bravely entered 'Butternut Squash: one [1] each' on my Smartyphone app and waited expectantly for Sir to return from his scrounging expedition to the shops.
Twenty minutes after leaving the house, he phoned from the produce department, asking me to clarify how much of the vegetable I needed for my recipe. This rather defeated the intended purpose of our cloud-residing electronic list of convenience, but I tried to be helpful. Truthfully, I told my personal shopper that I needed about two pounds. There was incredulous silence on the other end of the line, followed by a wounded sigh.
I waited on tenterhooks to see what might I find in my recycled grocery bag after Sir had completed his rounds.
The answer was a five-pound behemoth that looked like an orange apatosaurus. It was shocking, quite frankly - the Kid Squid made an extremely rude observation before fleeing back up the stairs to his room, cackling delightedly at his own wit. Sir explained (rather defensively, I thought) that he'd bought the smallest specimen he could find and it wasn't his fault they were all the size of wombats, if wombats had long necks like apatosaurs, which they don't.
I made him a soothing cup of tea and addressed the monster.
Not only did it look like an apatosaurus, it had the skin of an apatosaurus. Even with my sturdiest, sharpest knife I had difficulty making headway. I didn't peel the thing so much as excise its entire outer and inner epidermis. Its flesh was so tough I had to hack at it with some energy in order to cleave its midsection (cutting my left thumb rather dramatically in the process) - but after it was divided into manageable one-pound hunks, slicing and chopping became easier.
When I was finished, I had a mountain of butternut squash cubes eighteen inches high.
I roasted the pieces as per the recipe's destructions (tripling the number of garlic cloves), and half an hour after they went into the oven they emerged soft, caramelized and delicious. Sir and I could not believe how good the aroma was and how complex the flavor of the squash had become.
But I only had enough chickpeas to adorn about one-third of my savory Toubkal, so I was left to ponder what to do with the remaining veg.
I made Butternut Squash and Sage Advice Risotto. I ate some of it all by myself, since Sir was out entertaining The Swedes and the Kid Squid has decided winter squashes are not amongst those ingredients he counts as his favorites. In the course of my studies, therefore, I discovered that the dish has the potential to be served over several meals, keeping in the fridge and microwaving beautifully.
Here follows my method. I filled my largest saucepan with about 20 fl oz of vegetable stock (chicken stock would be good too, I bet, but I used all my chicken carcasses to make rich brown stock in January) and brought it to a simmer. Meanwhile, I chopped up several shallots and sauteed them in butter (using my favorite round-bottomed copper pan, of course) until they were soft. I plucked out some of the roasted garlic cloves from the squash pan and squeezed them onto the shallots. I added 5 ounces of arborio rice and sauteed it for a while, then hit the whole thing was a big splash of dry white vermouth. I let it bubble away contentedly for a bit, then started adding the stock in ladlefuls until the risotto was almost ready, about half an hour later (for those of you who are wondering about this week's stirring companion, I can reveal that I am currently re-reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson). Mindful of The Heimlich Maneuver's stern stipulation that risotto should wave rather than pile, I made sure my rice was nice and soupy.
At the end, I added roasted squash cubes until I judged my mixture to be sufficiently rich, toothsome, and ochreous. I threw in a small handful of chopped dried sage from the garden, added a blob of butter together with a quick squirt of freshly-squeezed Meyer lemon, then clapped the lid on the pan so that the rice could become desirably mantecato.
I checked for the dish for seasoning, then doled it out and hit it with some coarsely-grated parmesan and a drizzle of pompelmo-infused balsamico bianco for brightness. The result was sheer bliss.
I still have one final container of roasted (but otherwise unmodified) squash left in the fridge and believe me - nobody's laughing now.
Yesterday, I drove to Philadelphia to meet The Diva and her Significant Other for a Vietnamese meal in Chinatown. On the way, I made a pit stop at the Whole Foods in Plymouth Meeting, which according to the market's website is - at a mere 45 miles away - the closest of their stores to my humble abode.
This was only my second visit ever to this temple of organic eating, my first being back in November when I quickly ducked into its sister establishment in Fort Lee, NJ during my Mitsuwa pilgrimage. Readers may recall that some of my most successful gluten-freedom ingredients and products were serendipitously purchased during this brief foray, including Dowd and Rogers chestnut flour and lemon cake mix and King Arthur Gluten-Free Multi-Purpose Flour, the only flour I will now use for general baking.
There were a few things listed in my shopping app for which I was on the prowl. Since my last WFs visit, I have become passionately devoted to organic russet potatoes and cauliflower, which are not always available locally.
In addition, I had been hearing a lot buzz on the web and elsewhere about Bionaturae pasta, an Italian gluten-free product that is supposedly beyond excellent. That, too, is unavailable nearby. I have not eaten pasta in weeks and weeks, as the only varieties to which I have access are not worthy of the name. I was briefly encouraged by a locally-available brand of corn spaghetti until a batch literally disintegrated and disappeared down the drain one evening when I accidentally tipped the colander into the sink. It was heartbreaking and I swore never again. But I am a sucker for the shilling that goes on in Bon Appetit magazine, so I was determined to give the Italian stuff a try. What do the Canadians know about pasta, anyway?
I presented myself at Whole Foods at 2:30 pm sharp, iPhone and recycled shopping bags in hand, and didn't get out of there until an hour later. Sadly, the Plymouth Meeting branch doesn't carry Dowd and Rogers products (shame! shame!) but there were many other riches to console me:
Two kinds of Bionaturae pasta (rigatoni and spaghetti); King Arthur Flour g/f chocolate cake mix (which I just know will be awesome); a new variety of spice cake mix; sweet biscuits from Glutino, makers of the best g/f crackers of all time; and two beautiful jars of fancy-schmancy preserves for corn-bread* adornment. I am also the proud new owner of several bags of organic vegetables and tubers, which should keep us going for weeks.
I now have the material for several days' worth of trial and experimentation and will be reporting my findings in due course. Who knows? This time next week, I just might be eating pasta again.
*
Fractured Amy apologizes for an egregious typographical error in her cornbread recipe. The blooper was discovered this morning, after a disastrous episode involving a hungry family anticipating Sunday breakfast; two newly-opened jars of sour cherry jam and bitter orange marmalade; and an over-leavened pan of burnt cornbread that proved inedible to man and beast. A hasty check of the recipe revealed that tablespoons rather than teaspoons of baking powder and soda were mistakenly specified in the relevant posting. This inaccuracy has now been rectified.
Fractured Amy's only defense is that the procedure was published on January 1st, when a girl is never at her best. She humbly apologizes to any readers inconvenienced by the lingering effects of her New Year's Eve revelries and assures one and all that she has now Learned Her Lesson.
There are very few culinary gadgets in the kitchen chez Fractured Amy. I love my pots and pans, of course, as has been well-documented. I have a reasonable collection of knives. My electric appliances are few and basic: a good food processor, a toaster, a standmixer, an electric handmixer, and a coffee grinder. My kitchen has traditionally been an analog sort of place: I have digital kitchen scales (metric and standard units!) and a digital timer, but a quick survey of the countertop reveals very few blinking red lights.
Until last week, that is, when for work I received a brand new Smartyphone.
My new phone has become something of an obsession in recent days. There's nothing like a convert: last week I was the sort of person who never, ever carried a mobile (I did have one, but it was never turned on and only the immediate family knew the number) and now my Smartyphone never leaves my side. I have given the number to everybody I know. I have been texting anyone I can think of and configured all my e-mail accounts for instant access. I have downloaded about a zillion apps: Kanji practice! a pedometer! the New York Times' daily sudoku! an old episode of Pushing Daises and a few of the Kid Squid's South African travelogues (just to demonstrate my Smartyphone's video capabilities to interested bystanders, you understand).
It is very exciting.
But never in my wildest imaginings did I dream that my new toy could have an impact on my kitchen in general, or my gluten-freedom in particular, until a couple days ago. Whilst getting my hair did at my estimable local salon, I was chatting with the Random Lady in the Chair Next to Me (as one does) about the wonders of mobile technology. A Smartyphone aficionado from way back, the RLCNM had lots of suggestions for possible uses, most of which I found pretty pointless, frankly - a calorie counter? I don't think so. eBooks? I am still devoted to my Kindle, thank you very much. Twitter? It's as much as I can do to keep up with Facebook. But one app about which she waxed lyrical made me sit up and take notice, at the risk of losing an ear to my hairdresser's snip-snipping.
A grocery shopping app.
'It's fabulous!' she enthused. 'The whole family can put things on the list and then whoever goes to the market can cross it off! It's really convenient!'
Hmmm. Sir and I have great trouble with the shopping: there is generally quite a bit of duplication of effort (at last count, we had three unopened bottles of ketchup in the pantry and four gallons of milk in the fridge) and we often go without paper towels and Bounce for weeks. I can never remember the exact variety of corn flakes Sir requires for his breakfast and he can never remember the flavors of yogurt I eat in the morning (cherry, apricot, or blueberry, if you'd be so kind - but never banana or strawberry, which taste like airplane glue). Now that gluten-free selections have been thrown into the mix, shopping has fallen firmly into my purview, since the choice of chia seeds, Hunza raisins, and reasonable g/f baking flour requires the sort of expertise only bitter experience can provide.
My incredible new app deals with all these challenges. Don't know what kind of corn flour is certified gluten-free? Take a picture of it and add it the appropriate list! Need to tell Sir to add dried apricots to the evening grocery run? Add it to the list on my phone and - Bob's your uncle - it's automatically uploaded to his! And because Wegmans thoughtfully provide WiFi for their coffee shop customers, we don't need to use up precious GBs while we are doing the rounds.
Of course, I have now become one of those people glued to a phone in public places. But this is a small price to pay if it means Sir can help out with the gluten-free shopping. There is, after all, an app for that.
