Biscotti

One of my favorite gifts this holiday season was Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food from my sister. Though I grew up just a few blocks from Chez Panisse, I've never eaten there because it is tres expensive and fancy, but it seems like everyone in Berkeley worships Alice Waters anyway. Anyway. After mastering oatmeal cookies (Freeze them for 1/2 an hour before you bake for the perfect chewyness factor!) I've been looking for a little more of a baking challenge: On my list is bread (like the kind made with yeast. Whoa!), custard tart, paleo/low-carb pumpkin pie, and biscotti. All are covered in my new favorite cookbook except for the low-carb pumpkin pie because... well it's normal food. Today's project is biscotti!

Cherry-Pistachio Biscotti

(adapted from Anise-Almond Biscotti in The Art of Simple Food)

• 2 1/4 cup unbleached, all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 3 eggs, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon lemon zest
• 1/4 cup shelled, coarsely chopped pistachios
• 1/4 cup coarsely chopped dried cherries
• Optional: some melted semi-sweet chocolate (about a handful of chocolate chips)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the flour, baking powder and nutmeg. In a separate bowl, combine the eggs, sugar and zest and beat until the mixture forms a ribbon. Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients and stir until just incorporated. Gently fold in nuts and cherries.

Form the dough into two 3-inch wide loaves and place on a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet about 3 inches apart. Bake for 25 minutes, until lightly golden. Remove loaves from the oven and let cool for 10 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 300 degrees. Slice the loaves into 1/2 inch thick cookies and bake on cookie sheets cut side down for ten minutes on each side, until golden brown. Drizzle with chocolate if desired.

Of course, you can shake it up as far as the nuts, fruits and spices go. The original recipe calls for 3/4 teaspoon aniseed instead of nutmeg and almonds rather than pistachios and cherries. It also suggests raisins and walnuts, candied citrus peel, and/or fennel seeds or coriander.

So much cooking!

I have been doing a lot of cooking lately, and sadly not a lot of photo-taking before stuffing it all in all in my mouth. Here's a run down:

First there was Thanksgiving. I make "my" stuffing every year, which is actually inspired by a stuffing my dad makes, and I don't know from whence that was inspired. It is composed of wild rice, long grain rice, mushrooms, chestnuts, dried cranberries, onions and celery. Gluten free! Not that anyone cares.... I will post a recipe at some point. Maybe next Thanksgiving. I also tried making my own pie crust this year, using the good ol' Crisco recipe (but I used Smart Balance shortening instead). It was a little dry, and once baked had a kind of sandy texture. I'm told by pie maker-extraordinaires that that has to do with the fat I used so I'll be trying butter next time. Filled with my trusty pumpkin pie filling.

Then there was a delicata squash lying around. With a more delicate taste and skin, it worked as a great replacement for butternut squash in a winter minestra. And it has my favorite ingredient: Kale!

Finally just this weekend, I attended the bridal shower of a friend. The host requested that we bring a homemade dish and print out the recipe for the bride - nice idea. I made two recipes that were new to me but pretty simple: smoked salmon dip and mini crab cakes. My notes are this: an electric mixer with a paddle fixture would have been great, but I used my [cheap] trusty food processor and it worked fine. For the crab cakes, I used canned crab and of course they would have tasted better with fresh dungeness or, if you're on the east coast, blue crab. I ended up adding bread crumbs to the crab mixture in addition to the buttered crumbs, and for those buttered crumbs I used about half the butter that the recipe calls for. I used a mini muffin tin and baked them for 30 min rather than 20, with the last 2 min under the broiler. I'll also say this: use low fat or non-fat sour cream if you must but DO NOT use reduced fat cream cheese. It has a distinct 'lite' taste that will contaminate everything. Just don't. Everything turned out great and I got a lot of compliments!

Finally Some Good Satellite News!

This year was a bad year for weather satellites. First, the Glory mission literally went up in flames on the launchpad due to federal contractor incompetence. Not only did the scew-ups at Orbital Sciences Corp. destroy a $400 million satellite, they did it in the exact same way that they destroyed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in 2009. Why these yokels got even one more contract and were allowed to flush even one more weather satellite down the toilet eludes me. There are no plans to replace Glory, leaving a gaping hole in observations of aerosols and solar radiation that are sorely needed for monitoring and studying climate and climate change, and all the scientists who had planned research and applied for grants around Glory were left the lurchiest of lurches. I personally know scientists who were brought to tears at the news of the explosion following launch.

Then the news came this week that hackers had briefly gained access of Landsat and Terra several years ago. Much of the commentary has focused on the damage that could be done if hackers were able to access more "sensitive" satellites, like those guiding military operations or handling communications, but messing with weather satellites is just as sinister to me. Imagine someone taking out our geostationary satellites during an active hurricane season - we wouldn't be able to track storms or warn people in threatened communities until it was too late. Here on the West coast, satellite imagery is an extremely important tool in identifying winter storms because unlike the midwest, we don't have any radar coverage west of us, where the storms come from. Just ocean. Furthermore, what if someone made slight changes to our polar orbiters without anyone noticing? Data sets that are crucial to the study of climate change, air pollution, tropical rainfall, etc, would be contaminated and useless for years. Or they could just swing out of orbit and fall to Earth years before the end of their useful life, without plans in place to quickly replace them. (OK so my coworker Tyler, who is much more involved in satellites than I am corrected me here: The hackers did not actually gain control of the satellites, but did divert the incoming data. Polar orbiters are only controlled from one spot on Earth, but because their line of sight is constantly changing, they send data back to many points on Earth which what got hacked into. Basically, small chunks of data are missing. That's still not good.)

That's all pretty depressing, but like the title promises, there was a glimmer of hope today. The new NPP polar orbiter was launched today, and it got up into space in one piece (it was not launched with the aforementioned yokel's Taurus XL rocket, but rather a Delta II rocket made by United Launch Alliance/Boeing)! Not only is it taking measurements to back up and replace the MODIS satellites (Aqua and Terra) it is testing out new instruments, too, and is a proof-of-concept project for the upcoming Joint Polar Satellite System. JPSS is a cooperation between NOAA and NASA and is a revised project after the scrapping of a planned joint satellite project between NOAA and the Defense Department called NPOESS. The DoD gets to go it alone now with their Defense Weather Satellite System.

I'm looking forward to more successful launches of shiny, new satellites in the next decade and in the meantime - someone put some better security on those things!

Where to go for weather forecasts?

Friends and family often ask me for forecasts. Sometimes it's a joke and sometimes they really do want to know what the weather is going to be. I imagine doctors get "hey can you take a look at this rash real quick?" from their family, and maybe folks who studied accounting get asked to review friends' taxes every once in while... And you don't always feel like it. So I tell them where I get my weather forecasts instead. What? You thought I spend the time to make a good and accurate forecast every day? There are people who do that professionally and I'm not one of them (as of yet, anyway, although I am theoretically qualified). And the key word here is PEOPLE.

Lots and lots and lots of people use weather.com and accuweather.com. These are AUTOMATED sites. Their forecasts are not vetted by real people. I believe it was perhaps two or three years ago during a cold snap that weather.com forecast a low of minus five degrees for Seattle. Yes, five degrees below zero FAHRENHEIT. Any human knows that that was a completely unreasonable forecast (it has never been below zero in Seattle). These sites do OK during normal weather - which often gives many people the impression that they are reliable and accurate - but they break big time when there is unseasonable or extreme weather. And those are the times when you really need a good forecast!

My local WFO (Weather Forecast Office) webpage. Space to input your location circled in red, link to forecast discussion in yellow.

So where should you look? I recommend the National Weather Service - weather.gov. Humans still add value to forecasts and the humans at the NWS are all highly educated and have been trained on the job as well. They are the experts, and nearly all private forecasting services use the information from the NWS. From the front page, click on your region of the country to go to your local forecast office's homepage, or type in your location in the upper left corner of the webpage. If you want to read a more detailed forecast and the reasoning behind it, go your local office's forecast discussion. It can get technical, but if you really want to dig in to all the possibilities of how the weather is going to evolve, what's most likely and why, this is the place.

If you want more of a layman's discussion, go to the website of your favorite local news channel. Yep! Their forecast won't be much different from the NWS because they're getting a lot of their information from them anyway, but it's their job to communicate in straightforward terms to the public and show clean, easy to understand graphics. Take heed though, every once in a while I see local news channel forecasters getting a little sensational - especially when there is snow in the forecast (in Seattle). They are less likely to talk about uncertainty.

Just please, don't let me catch you checking weather.com.

My Favorite Thing to Cook (and Eat!)

My friend was on Reddit.com and ran across a guy who says his wife doesn't like steak or seafood and asked me "who would marry someone who doesn't like good food?". Good question, though there are plenty of people who don't eat seafood and meat (*ahem* vegetarians *ahem*) and some people might say that there is no good vegetarian food but I would disagree strongly.

Here's an awesome vegetarian recipe that I make at least once a month, and if my future spouse doesn't like broccoli or kale well... there will be problems.

Garlicy Roasted Broccolini and Kale

One bunch of broccolini (aka rapini or broccoli rabe) tough ends cut off, cut in half crosswise
One bunch of kale (I prefer lacinato, an heirloom variety) tough stems removed, cut in roughly one inch squares
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 clove garlic, crushed and minced (1 teaspoon garlic powder works in a pinch but is generally recognized as kitchen blasphemy)
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (optional)
juice and zest of 1/2 a lemon (optional, I use amazing meyer lemons that my parents send up from their garden)
1 tablespoon chopped capers (optional)
1 teaspoon champagne vinegar (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss all ingredients in a bowl to coat, spread onto a foil-lined baking sheet and roast for about ten minutes or until kale is tender and rapini florets begin to singe. Devour.

I ran across a dish like this in a neighborhood whiskey bar which will remain unnamed and tried it - not to be vain, but I think I do a better job (i.e. theirs was too oily and over-salted). Broccoli is notoriously hard to pair with wine though, so why not try a little whiskey instead? ;)

The Bonfire

...But if you shrink from being scared,
What would you say to war if it should come?
That's what reasons I should like to know -
If you can comfort me by any answer."

"Oh but war's not for children - it's for men"

"Now we are digging almost down to China.
My dears, my dears, you thought that - we all thought it.
So your mistake was ours. Haven't you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o'erhead than all but stars and angels,-
And the children in the ships and in the towns?
Haven't you heard what we have lived to learn?
Nothing so new - something we had forgotten:
War is for everyone, for children too.
I wasn't going to tell you and I mustn't.
The best way is to come up the hill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.

(From The Bonfire, by Robert Frost)

Knitting on my mind

Having two projects on my needles really can't keep me from planning ten pieces ahead... the lace shawl that is a surprise for someone is coming along slooowwwly - it's challenging! I've gotten to the nupps and should have taken Gallia's advice - yarn over loosely because it's a drag to purl seven stitches together! The shrug should be done soon if I can find the time. I'm going to block the body/sleeves properly before adding the collar on.

Then there's...

'Cold Mountain' lace shawl... easier and more geometric than the one I'm working on now.

A baby version for some mini-practice before a real sweater... and yes, I do actually know a baby or two who might like it.

The REAL thing... I'm in love with the Lepidotera cardigan and think it would be fabulous in navy blue (don't you go copying me now...)

And the long promised hat for Ian (first one was gauged wrong and didn't fit :(

And speaking of knitting... I was visiting Orcas Island a few weeks ago and they're all artsy out there. When checking out a cafe/art collective thingamajig, I noticed some very simple knit hats (I could replicate them easily from looking at them) turned over the price tag and... WHAT THE @$#^?? $55!! Baby sweaters for $120... I get that they're handmade but all I could think was... I got to see how much I could get for a Bonnie-made hat on Etsy... Graduate knitting collective anyone?