Fresh Cracked Pepper

This week has flown by. Reunited with my love of swimming (thank you, one-week trial gym pass!), I plunged into cool water on Tuesday night after two months of land-based workouts. I emerged an hour and fifteen minutes later with my sore muscles, a refreshed mind, and a hungry belly.

Thank goodness this was waiting for me when I arrived home.

On Monday night I’d finally gotten around to trying this recipe, collecting digital dust in my recipe bookmarks. It’s the kind of thing you just might already have everything on hand for, provided you’re a hummus, stew, and salad eater who always has garlic around.

In other words, me.

I don’t know why I bookmarked this particular recipe, and I don’t know what made me pick it out of my long list of delicious-sounding dinner candidates. It’s not that it looked that different—I make things with curry and tomatoes and chickpeas all the time. The appeal of habit? Perhaps.

Well, it turns out it lived up to its bookmark-worthy status. With a depth and complexity of flavor I can only describe as more “authentic” than my usual curry-powder based curries, this stew radiates turmeric, cumin, garlic, and ginger. I learned later that its author (the famed Indian chef Madhur Jaffrey) deems this dish characteristically Punjabi. Perhaps that’s why it seemed new to me.

And I always like a recipe that suprises: usually, you chop up the garlic and saute it along with the onions, right? Not in this stew. I had to re-read the recipe about four times until I believed that yes, putting garlic, ginger, and water in the blender would produce something I’d want to add to my dinner.

This frothy mixture, and the addition of lemon juice at the end, take this bright yellow curry to a whole new level: you just might want to back your chair up a little from your co-workers if you decide to take it for lunch.

Continue reading ‘punjabi spinach and chickpeas’

My weekend was filled with firsts. My first smart phone arrived in the office mail late Friday, and I rode the metro home with the box tucked into my bag, excited to spend a homey evening in, importing and consolidating my contacts, and downloading free applications (I’m particularly excited by the ones from epicurious and public radio).

the brewery's offerings

I’ve always thought of myself as fairly un-technological,  and now here I am, an iPhone owner. My life is about to change dramatically.

On Saturday, I did my first D.C. yoga class, and later that day I brewed beer for the first time. Luckily I had my iPhone’s built-in camera to document the process. The quality of the pictures still isn’t up to snuff for fresh cracked pepper, but it will come in handy for those times I just want a record.

packed with people

And as you can see, the record was of the vertical sort. Apparently I didn’t realize my new gadget could take landscape as well as portrait, and here are all my pictures, lovingly rendered in vertical (instead of this blog’s usual horizontal). I laughed at myself when I uploaded them…the learning curve may only continue to steepen!

our working recipe

So after yoga downtown with my housemate, I biked the 13 rolling miles out to the industrial armpit of Alexandria to meet my new friend Rick. He’s the brewer for the church I’ve started attending—St. Mark’s on Capitol Hill. We were convening at Shenandoah Brewing Company, a brew-on-premise and brew-pub rolled into one.

bins of grain

I was expecting the inside to look like its surroundings—bare, soul-less, empty. But the door creaked open into a Willy Wonka factory of beer: cauldrons stewed and steamed away at the periphery of a room full of people. Long wooden tables were piled high with pretzels and chili, the merry makers clinking their pint glasses and getting louder with each passing minute. In other words, I was home. (I later found out that much of Shenandoah’s equipment is from Canada, so I was more home than I even knew.)

grinding our grain

Shenandoah is a special place. Couples, connoisseurs, and (apparently) church people alike come here to brew beer for their weddings, cellars, and in our case, congregations. First, we received our recipe (picture 3 above) for our “steam beer,” the afternoon’s project.  Then, we dipped into the stores of  grain to find our “caramel 60″ and “Munich mix” or whatever it was that we needed. We hand-ground the grain into a bucket lined with a cloth filter: basically a giant tea bag.

tying up the "teabag"

Here, the guys are tying the tea bag closed so that it can be lowered into the steaming pot of “wort,” another grain mix that the brewery takes care of beforehand. When that was finished, we added a huge pitcher of sweetener: wort reduced down to a thick, honey-like syrup.

the brewing begins

I stirred the mix as Rick added the sweetener, using an old apple-sauce spoon from Pennsylvania. It was a rugged spoon fit for a Father Bear, and that’s precisely when the thrill of beer brewing hit me. Here I was, bent over the steaming broth of one of my favorite beverages (perhaps my favorite—this fact is still up for constant debate between Mark and I). It was a beautiful moment.

the old applesauce spoon

Next we added the hops. We’d selected two different strains (the names of which I’m now forgetting), distilled into rabbit-food-like pellets that smelled…well, like beer. The first round (“bittering hops”) goes in for 60 minutes, the second (“flavoring”) for 20, and the third (“finishing) for 10, equaling a 90-minute hopped beer when all is said and done.  The reason you do this is because you want the natural preservatives and the bitterness to equal out appropriately.

hops hops hops

My friend Rebecca picked me up for a movie before we could get to the yeasting (see the vials picture following) and the aerating (where the two brew masters push a barrel back and forth between them). After downing an IPA and a Stony Man oatmeal stout, however, I was ready to relax in front of George Clooney and Vera Farmiga’s collective sexiness.

the yeast vials

Go to Shenandoah. It’s worth the trip to the end of the blue line, or, if you have a bike, from the far-flung haunts of Hyattsville.

If there’s a life conducive to food blogging, it’s being unemployed in a college town and newly attached. Conversely, if there’s a lifestyle conducive to letting that blog go stale as an opened box of wheat thins, it’s a nine-to-five job in a full-fledged city with your mate 370 miles away.

These things—with all their promise, exhilaration, and loneliness—have wrecked the most havoc here on these pages.

The excuses fly in: I don’t have the time. I’m too tired and too transient. I don’t have a car. I already spend my days thinking about and working on food. With three new housemates, there’s no space in the fridge for leftovers.

But every good excuse has a better antecedent: I have my weekends. I need the energy and the sense of home good meals bring. I have my bike, the metro, and a great co-op nearby. I can never get enough of food. And lastly, when you share life with great people, there are seldom leftovers anyway.

Perhaps without knowing it, my new housemates have helped eased my transition back into domesticity after more than a month spent country, county, and couch hopping. (Shout out to my wonderful sets of parents, June and Raul, and Rebecca and her parents for their respective hosting!)

They’ve been there with cookies at midnight after long days exploring the city. They’ve offered liver and onions before a treacherous bike ride through D.C.’s morning traffic. They’ve shared roast chicken and salad after a long day at the office, and left notes on perfectly-ripe avocados to spread on my evening slice of supper toast. And they’ve introduced me to Japanese hot pot: a first, and a delight to come home to one chilly Monday night.

As the chef herself put it, nabe is a “true communist meal”: each diner gives and takes according to their ability and need. There’s one big pot in the middle, steaming and stewing away with fresh cabbage, spinach, and seafood. Rather than tending your own little morsel, as is the case with fondue, you simply toss things into the pot at will and fish them out as you so desire.

In the end, everyone is amply fed.

I’m slowly relaxing into life here: exploring the smooth corners and rough edges of the communities around me, giving my hours to this new world and taking from its pool when I need to. There will be times, I know, when take-out will triumph and I will succumb to canned soup. But because I believe in and love good food, my fully-stocked (and darling) kitchen will call me back to a place I hope to never unlearn.

Until then, I owe it to my housemates.

Continue reading ‘yosenabe (Japanese hot pot)’

You remember the Chia pet ads. The kitschy, half cat, half pig-looking planter that with little care, promises the instantaneous growth of a green mop. Well it turns out that 80’s fad was on to something: the power food of the next millennium.

I have to partially credit my “clean eating” mom with this one. Always one step ahead of me when it comes to healthy trends (even with my obsessive reading of websites, magazines, and newspapers), she informed me of this wonder seed in the fall. Before even trying it, a 12.6-ounce container had graced my Christmas stocking—the perfect kick-start to a new year, a new city, and my third triathlon season.

Then, chia made a second appearance: in the pages of Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. After seeing the acclaimed writer on the Daily Show, I was intrigued by his account of the Tarahumara, a northern Mexican tribe with incredible long-distance running prowess. I received the book for Christmas, and as far as inspiration goes, it’s already right up there with my tri guru’s cycle classes.

I was reading McDougall’s friendly prose one afternoon when I came across an anecdote from one of his research trips to Mexico:

The cup was full of gooey slime that looked like rice pudding without the rice, lots of black-flecked bubbles I was pretty sure were frog eggs in mid hatch … “Great,” I said, looking around for a cactus I could dump it behind. “What is it?”

“Iskiate.”

I poured the iskiate into a hip bottle that was half full of water I’d purified with iodine pills, then tossed in a couple of extra pills for good measure … I wasn’t desperate enough to risk a yearlong bout of chronic diarrhea from waterborne bacteria.

He continues to learn from the Tarahumara, who live in the Copper Canyons in the province of Chihuahua and regularly run up to 100 miles for fun. The story is full of characters so wacky they seem fictional, interspersed with the ripping history of ultrarunning in the U.S. The journey is personal, too, as McDougall travels between the U.S. and Mexico, struggling between discovering the secret of the “running people” and letting them be. But he makes a few discoveries along the way; and one of them is this chia:

Months later, I’d learn that iskiate is otherwise known as chia fresca—“chilly chia.” It’s brewed up by dissolving chia seeds in water with a little sugar and a squirt of lime. In term of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone. As tiny as those seeds are, they’re super-packed with omega-3s, omega-6s, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants. If you had to pick just one desert-island food, you couldn’t do much better than chia, at least if you were interested in building muscle, lowering cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease; after a few months on the chia diet you could probably swim home. Chia was once so treasured, the Aztecs used to deliver it to their king in homage. Aztec runners used to chomp chia seeds as they went into battle, and the Hopis fueled themselves on chia during their epic runs from Arizona to the Pacific Ocean. The Mexican state of Chiapas is actually named after the seed; it used to rank right up there with corn and beans as a cash crop …

Even with the medicinal after-bite from the pills, the iskiate went down like fruit punch with a nice limey tang. Maybe the excitement of the hunt had something to do with it, but within minutes, I felt fantastic.

- Christopher McDougall, Born to Run. Random House, 2009. p. 43-44.

And then, lo and behold, chia made another appearance—this time at my local food coop Glut. (Which, by the way, I am completely in love with.) There it was in the bulk section, at a mere $6-something per pound. (At Costco, it costs somewhere around $13 for under a pound.)

So as I adjust to the energy demands my new life in D.C. is already bringing, I know I’ll rely on chia seeds for a Tarahumara-style kick every now and then. And even if I can’t yet tell if it’s making a difference, at least I know it’s good for my body. And since the lime fresca mixture didn’t really do it for me, I’ll stick to sprinkling it on salads, oatmeal, and granola, and blending it up in smoothies and muffin batter.

And maybe one day I’ll be able to run 4 marathons in a row too.

Here at freshcrackedpepper, I rarely include pictures hawked from Flickr. In this case, however, the sandwich made me do it.

On the way back from our Berkshire winter escape, we decided to check out Rubiner’s cheese shop in Great Barrington. The resident food guru at my new workplace had recommended it, and we had some extra time for lunch en route to New Haven.

Photo by ★keaggy.com

We found a parking spot near the cheery main street, lined with all the shops and novelties we needed to combat road boredom. Rubiner’s blends in with the charm, yet stands out from behind the regal columns that mark the building’s past life as a bank. We were greeted by towers and slabs of the one food I’d eaten too much of over the holidays: cheese.

Matthew Rubiner, the shop’s owner, wasn’t in that day.  We were well looked after by Austin, however, who served us with knowledgeable congeniality. We browsed the cheese shop briefly, but on the instruction of our stomachs decided to get lunch at Rubi’s first, the shop’s adjoining cafe.

The Reuben we ordered was far better looking than this Flickr specimen—the closest I could find to the sandwich that held me captive. I should have sent Mark out to the car to grab the camera sooner. I should know better.

And because of that sandwich—the bread pressed into a crunchy, yielding crust, the meat falling apart under its blanket of saucy sauerkraut—all I have to offer is the aftermath of  our memorable lunch at the rustic cafe.

Rubi’s isn’t your standard sandwich shop. You won’t find much in the way of lettuce, tomatoes, or hummus. There aren’t rows of fillings or long lists of dressings. At Rubi’s, you’ll find bare, simple sandwiches, made perfect by their ingredients: cured meats matched with complimentary cheeses, dressed with things like cornichons, small-batch sauerkraut, or preserved lemons. Their strength is small and satisfying meals, delectable espresso, and rustic baked goods, which we tried in happy succession.

After deconstructing the Reuben and Cuban sandwiches we shared (how such perfect sauerkraut? I’ve never seen a baguette-panini!) we sipped cappuccinos and had a few bites of perfectly-sweet lemon pound cake.

We lingered for a while, watching as families, couples, and solo diners sat down together at the communal wooden table. Back at the main shop, I somehow found room to sample a variety of cheese, each one bearing a helpful label. There were cow and sheep and goat’s milk varieties spanning a full spectrum: dank and musty, fresh and tangy, creamy and crumbly. We took home a slab of Cheshire Cheddar and two domestic chocolate bars.

Our cheese treasure was later devoured by our friends’ dog, who I’ve concluded is my food-loving soul’s doggie doppelganger. She is too cute to stay angry at, and at least we had a few morsels before she nipped it from our grasp!

And of course, there’s more where that cheese came from: Rubiner’s will hopefully be waiting for us on our next Bay State adventure, however far in the future that lays.

It’s the 25th of December and I’m not in Winnipeg. I’m not even in Canada. I’m in Massachusetts, a state I’ve never visited and still need help spelling. Perched on the edge of the Berkshires, a small range of hills in New England, Mark and I are spending our first Christmas ever “just us.” Each of us had previously spent only one Christmas away, so we’re not exactly practiced in family-free holidays.

Risotto with mini Brussels sprouts, Vermont sausage and blue cheese

As I reflect on our time so far, I must say that it has been great. We’ve stayed up and slept late, watched movies and meandered around pretty towns. We’ve visited small-town bookstores, cafes, and gourmet food shops. We’ve sipped eggnog at 2 am while stringing popcorn for our “tree” (a fake plant in the hotel room).

P.E.I. mussels with white wine, garlic and butter; salad with pecans, blue cheese and pears; Hob Nob Pinot Noir.

This Christmas will be memorable for many reasons: the quiet, the togetherness, and of course, the food. My mom’s (and mom-in-law’s) food this has not even paralleled. But it has been ours.  We’ve dined out on fancy fare and stayed in to cobble together what we can on a tiny electric range.

This smorgasbord post is not meant to provide any inspiring holiday dishes, but to help me remember what we ate on this first Christmas—gathered around a cheap pine table, happy, but yet so far from home.

George DuBoeuf 5$ Beaujolais

Above there are pictures of our first few meals in our unit: Risotto (our favorite throw-together meal) with mini Brussels sprouts, Vermont sausages and fantastic blue cheese. We also managed to steam 2 lbs of mussels in the small saucepan that came in our kitchen—a tasty concoction with its garlic and white wine broth, pear and pecan salad, and local bread. Most of these two meals were procured at Guido’s, a helpful and welcoming gourmet grocer in nearby Pittsfield.

Our first meal out (after a chilly day spent walking and browsing) was at Fin Sushi in Lenox. Our expectations were high, as the restaurant had been featured by a prominent seafood writer in The Atlantic. Our appetizer was pleasing: three large prawns stretched out on skewers and wrapped in what seemed like thin tempura sheets. The accompanying sweet chili dipping sauce was delicious, if not particularly unique. Our Fire Dragon roll featured bbq’d eel, cucumber, and avocado, and was topped with perfectly-done torched salmon sashimi. I admired the addition of pea shoots in our Crispy Yellow Tail rolls, but overall, Fin was more “standard sushi” than life changing. Maybe the more sushi one eats, the harder one is to please.

Crispy shrimp appetizer at Fin Sushi, Lenox, M.A.

Dinner for two: Crispy Yellow Tail and Fire Dragon rolls

We saved our special meal out for Christmas Eve, and taking the advice of our mussel-monger reserved a table for two at Perigee in South Lee, M.A. The contemporary, mid-scale restaurant is only five weeks old and boasts “Berkshire cuisine.” We settled on two bowls of their French Onion Soup (made with Berkshire Brewing Co. porter beer–good, but not as good as my Mom’s!), an order of their crab cakes (delicious), and two plates of the Juniper-scented Venison Osso Buco.

I was a bit worried when the main courses arrived looking more like country beef stews than something a fine restaurant might serve. But once I dug into the first shank and the meat melted off the bone into its moat of lightly juniper-scented stew, I was changed. Once we were given our marrow spoons, I proceeded to dig into the bone, excavating every last morsel of fatty, earthy-sweet tissue. Their wine recommendation—Château Fleur Badon St. Emilion (a Bordeaux)—was juicy and bright, but a too light to keep up with the heavy texture of the venison. Service was sufficiently cordial, but a bit awkward and uneducated. (What kind of server uses a plastic rabbit-ears corkscrew anymore?)

new england crab cakes starter

venison osso bucco with root vegetables

the menu at Perigee

Never a fan of the ubiquitous dessert tray that our server proffered, we headed back to Lee to try out Chez Nous. Their offerings were much more appealing, and we settled on a Blondie sundae with sea-salted caramel, rum-soaked raisins and Tahitian vanilla ice cream. Second in line was a chocolate-hazelnut Yule Log rolled in ganache and adorned with “traditional garnishes,” including a meringue-turned-toadstool and candied orange peel.

They were the perfect hits of sweetness to keep us up through the gorgeous service at St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Pittsfield.

After this, I could forever renounce the Brownie

the Yule Log

Today, after a luxurious night’s sleep, we feasted on eggnog-spiked apple-bread French toast and those same Vermont sausages. With apologies to my brother-in-law (whose eggnog scrambled eggs I apparently rebuffed last year), we were delighted by the leftover egg-and-nog batter we scrambled up in the pan. For dinner, we sauteed turkey livers with loads of red-wine caramelized onions. Later tonight if I’m missing home too much, at least I’ll have my Ward family nuts n’ bolts to offer solace.

And while I’m sorry that I haven’t been sharing many recipes as of late, I have been enjoying tracing this shifting life of mine, and tracking the noshes and nibbles that keep bringing me such delight.

“And they all went to bed tired and happy.” – line from my favorite childhood Christmas story

For this Christmas week, I’m grateful to have a post from my friend Kristen, of Birthing Beautiful Ideas. On her blog, you’ll find spirited musings about breastfeeding, feminism and philosophy. Her blog is foodie-friendly, too: Kristen loves eating, sharing, and the occasional tryst with an elusive, erotic lobster tail.
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When my husband, Tim, and I were expecting our first child, we lived far away from our respective families.  We were a day’s travel from their warm and inviting homes, from impromptu morning coffees and family dinners and holiday celebrations, and (in the forefront of our minds as our son’s birth approached) from the very people whose parenting we hoped to emulate.

Wanting to have our family a bit closer as we began a family of our own, we invited both of our mothers to stay with us for the first two weeks following the birth of our son:

Tim’s mom, the night owl, to help us on what we anticipated would be many sleepless nights of newborn care.

And my mother, the inimitable cook, to help us ensure that we didn’t collapse into a life of take-out meals and boxed food and cold cereal as we adjusted to parenthood.

Thanks to her, we dined on crab cakes and roasted chicken and gargantuan green salads and cheeses and fresh fruit and chocolate cake in the days after our baby was born.  She would bring our meals to our bedroom if I was nursing our son.  She would set a magnificent dining room table that made me forget that I was still in my pajamas at six in the evening.

And each morning, she would fill a tray with coffee, tea, juice, and two scrumptious muffins and set it outside our bedroom door.

These muffins were her “famous” raisin bran muffins.  Warm, slightly crunchy, cinnamonly mild, and chock full of tangy cranberries in those first wintry days of our son’s infancy.

The first two weeks of my son’s life passed with tender moments and insomnia and many delicious meals, and it was soon time for my mother to return to her own home.  (But not before she stocked our freezer with over a dozen meals!)

Before she left, she made sure to whisper in my ear that “the muffin batter makes nearly five to six dozen muffins, so there should be enough batter in the fridge for you and Tim to have muffins for at least the next three or four weeks.”

During those next few weeks, after many sleepless nights, on the days when Tim and I could barely muster up enough energy to pour milk over our cold cereal, it didn’t take that much more effort to scoop some batter into our muffin tray and bake a couple of delicious additions to our morning meal.

And it made Mom feel not so far away after all.

Kristen of Birthing Beautiful Ideas.com

Raisin Bran Muffins

Makes 5 to 6 dozen

4 eggs

1 qt. buttermilk

1 cup oil

5 cups flour

2 1/2 cups sugar

5 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 (15 oz.) box Raisin Bran cereal

2 T cinnamon

1 1/2 cups coconut

1 cup chopped pecans

1-2 cups seasonal berries or fruit (e.g. blueberries in summer, cranberries in winter, etc.)

1. Mix together eggs, buttermilk, and oil until well-blended. Add flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt.  Mix well.
2. Stir in salt, cereal, cinnamon, coconut, and pecans. Refrigerate mix for 24 hours in an airtight container.  (Batter may be stored in refrigerator up to six weeks.)
3. Preheat oven to 400 F. Line muffin tin with paper muffin cups. Fill cups 2/3 full with batter. Add desired berries (blueberries, cranberries, raspberries, etc.) to each individual muffin, making sure to push some of the berries into the batter.
4. Sprinkle muffin tops with sugar and cinnamon before baking. Bake for 15-20 minutes.

Last weekend I said goodbye to a city that had just started to feel like home. Sadness and excitement tumbled at the edge of my emotions, keeping real tears at bay. As the burritos and watering holes of Westcott St. receded behind me, I wondered, will I ever see you again? As we passed one of the corners along my 4-mile running route, my eyes started to sting. How many times have I run around that corner, I thought.

It seems sometimes like leaving the familiar and commonplace things hurts the most. That corner, that alley, that tiny stretch of street. It’s the small scenes, not the landmarks, that make our lives inimitable.

a P.A. landmark -- watch out Tim's!

Take donuts. Small and inconsequential, they have often turned road trip minutes into small indulgences. On the advice of a friend, we stopped at the original Maple Donuts shop on our way through Pennsylvania. Started in 1946 from the back of a bicycle, this place was no Dunkin’ or Tim’s. Stepping into the shop was stepping back to a simpler time.

Rows and rows of donut flavors I’d never heard of were stacked behind a brightly lit, cafeteria-style counter. Two uniformed women yapped away as we stood drooling before apple fritters the size of footballs, barely noticing us in their throes of small-town gossip.

claim to fame

We finally decided on a box of six, sticking to safe flavours like sour cream glazed, chocolate, honey glazed, and seasonal pumpkin. Out of pure cruelty (and hopeless addiction), I made Mark wait until we hit a Starbucks five miles down the highway so that I could enjoy the experience properly.

And proper it was: As I bit into the crust of the heavy ring held gingerly between my fingers, Tim Horton’s, the Canadian road trip cornerstone, faded into obscurity. Maple Donuts knew how to do a cake donut — something I normally didn’t prefer. (Their honey-glazed was less exciting, but the sour cream was also worth its weight in holes.) The interior was soft and dense, and not a pinch too sweet. It was all the best of pumpkin pie, muffins, and cheesecake rolled into a gently crumbling shell of thin icing.

inside the box

old-fashioned pumpkin bliss

The next day, after a night in Baltimore with friends of Mark’s, we drove into the District of Columbia in a flurry of temporary snow. My new home would be temporary, too, but I was ready to embrace it with the same conviction as so many other places I’ve lived.

After an afternoon of looking at Craigslist rooms (worth a post of its own) and being introduced by our host to Trader Joe’s, we hit Dukem on U street with hungry bellies, inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” segment on D.C.’s famous Ethiopian restaurants.

recommended by Anthony Bourdain

One thing I’ve missed while living in Syracuse is Ethiopian food. So much so that whenever we go to Ottawa, we eat at Horn of Africa with my friend Lenora to satiate us for the injera-less months ahead. According to Bourdain though, my new city is home to some of the best Ethiopian food outside of Addis Ababa.

Meeting up with another of Mark’s old friends, an international journalist who just returned from Mali, we set out to demolish our huge platter of homemade cottage cheese, spicy lamb and chicken stews, lentil and cabbage purees, and the dish we’d both been waiting for since watching the Bourdain show:

Dukem restaurant, U St. D.C.

Kitfo.  Ahhhhh, kitfo. How you embody everything I eschew in my life of health and triathlon, yet embrace all that is dear to my taste buds: raw beef and butter. It sounds awful, I know, but it is an Ethiopian delicacy of slightly warmed minced raw beef that has been mixed with a herb-and-spice-infused clarified butter.

I was a little wary, but couldn’t pass it up. Trusting the good folks at Dukem, and its obvious popularity, I took my first bit of raw beef since Alex’s prairie maki I tried eight years ago. Well, this wasn’t your average hunk of ground beef (my least favorite meat and my least favorite “cut”). The soft, almost sauce-like mixture, heaped onto a piece of sour injera, delivered a tender, clove-infused warmth to my whole mouth. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff — despite the fleeting thoughts of how much butter I was really ingesting.

everyone should try kitfo at least once

And then there were the times the camera did not see: The cheery Mexican stop in Alexandria, and wood-fired pizza with a good friend. There’s been “Virginia ham and biscuits” at George Washington’s church after a carols service, and “Baltimore cookies” waiting at my cozy crash pad. (Can you see I’m a sucker for anything billed as regional?)

And so has been my first week in food in this robust and lively new place, where I hear many new languages on the metro each day, and where treasures wait around new corners. One day I’ll probably have to say goodbye to those corners, too, but for now, it’s all about the hellos.

For this week’s Muffin Monday, I’m happy to introduce someone very special to me. Meet my cousin, friend, and fellow wordsmith, Meghan J. Ward, of Banff, Alberta. Megan is a freelancer writer on health and wellness, mountain culture, and outdoor sports.  She writes and reflects over at Back on This Side of the Door, and brings her spirited observations today to the topic of food.

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I have always been a “dive in head first” kind of person. I rarely read directions and choose instead to figure things out as I go along. However, two things have made me think I might want to do otherwise: Baking and IKEA. After recently moving and putting together an army of IKEA furniture, I learned the hard way that taking apart a chest of drawers with that Star Trek looking wrench is much harder than doing it right the first time using the instructions. My baking exploits in the past have been slightly disastrous too, so today I challenged myself for this muffin post to actually follow a recipe.

This meant delving into the unknown corners of my grocery store here in Banff. Living in a National Park, I wondered if certain ingredients simply would not be available. I also wondered if I’d spend more than my university tuition buying the ingredients for my muffins at the ridiculously inflated prices of this tourist town.

I did.

I chose to use a muffin recipe from Eat, Shrink & Be Merry!by the Podleski sisters. Janet and Greta brought me through my university years and they could do it again. The recipe I chose, wittily titled A Bran New World, aptly described my venture into the unknowns of muffin making.

Soon after getting home with my loot of food, I realized this baking thing would still be improvised no matter how much I wanted to follow the directions. I didn’t have a mixing bowl big enough, and had to settle for using Tupperware and a giant wok instead. The sweet potato I had purchased was soft and mushy on one side, so I performed emergency surgery on it. I nearly blinded myself making orange zest. I had forgotten to buy allspice. I didn’t own a whisk or an apron. Turns out I really was just a wanna-be Muffin Maker.

I did some things just like the pros. I spilled muffin mix on my recipe book, which gave it the “well-used and well-loved” look even Martha Stewart would be proud of. I also remembered to preheat my oven (this is a big step for me!) OK, that’s about all that I did so professionally, but in the end, I didn’t miss a step, and those darn muffin cups looked so happy full of gooey, bran flakey, muffin mix!

As I placed the muffin pan in the oven, I recited my cooking mantra just for good measure, which goes like this: ‘Don’t burn them, don’t burn them, don’t burn them!’ I am notorious for burning things, usually because I am multi-tasking while I bake. Not today! Other than taking a few pics along the way, I stuck to baking until those muffins were in, and out of, the oven.

My new kitchen filled with the smell of a job well done. I didn’t have a toothpick to check if they were done cooking, though, so I had to leap forward in faith and take them out before I burned them into oblivion. My little colony of Bran Muffins were almost ready for the ultimate test: my mouth.

Was it worth my small fortune to make my batch of muffins? Absolutely. And while it’s already Winter in The Rockies, the sweet potato, dried currants, and cinnamon of this batch would also make it perfect for Fall. They warmed my happy soul, and warmed my new apartment with the love that only orange zest and cinnamon have to offer.

Now I know that if I can conquer A Bran New World, I can conquer anything.

A Bran New World

makes 12 regular muffins

1 cup cooked, mashed sweet potato (about 1 medium potato)

1 cup buttermilk (I substituted plain yogurt)

½ cup packed brown sugar

3 tbsp vegetable oil

2 eggs

2 tsp grated orange zest

4 cups Bran Flakes cereal

1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

½ cup dried currants

½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts (I used pecans)

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp each ground nutmeg and ground allspice

1. Preheat oven to 375˚ F. Spray a 12-cup muffin tin with cooking spray and set aside.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together sweet potato, buttermilk, brown sugar, vegetable oil, eggs, and orange zest. Add Bran Flakes and mix well.
3. In another large bowl, combine flour, currants, nuts, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and allspice. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix just until dry ingredients are moistened. Batter will be thick.
4. Divide batter evenly among muffin cups. Bake for 17 or 18 minutes, or until muffins are golden brown and a toothpick inserted in center of muffin comes out clean. Remove muffins from pan and cool slightly on a wire rack. Serve warm.

from Eat, Shrink & Be Merry! Great-Tasting Food That Won’t Go from Your Lips to Your Hips!by Janet and Greta Podleski