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Kitchen Stories – surviving the food allergy apocalypse (archive)

surviving the food allergy apocalypse (archive)

Category: Kitchen Stories

Do the things in your kitchen tell stories? Ours do.

Coffee Snobbery, a weekend coffee odyssey.

This is where my coffee grows. Photo taken at Mountain Thunder Coffee, February 2018.

Coffee. Coffee. Blog post. Coffee. Tea drinkers, go here. This post isn’t about the history or origins of coffee, but about making one great cup each weekend when mornings suck a lot less. Denise will laugh at the entire idea of ONE cup of coffee, but we do both love it in different quantities. Coffee is great because it’s not an allergen for most people — but drinking coffee out can have its pitfalls — most coffee shops serve treats (gluten, egg, dairy) and milk and nut milks. Coffee can be processed with ingredients that cause some people issues — I haven’t hit those yet, luckily. So here’s my coffee journey.

In 2016, as regular readers of the blog know, I moved across the country to Seattle, a city well-known for its coffee culture. In part, this is climate. I learned to really drink coffee in Oregon, my first foray into the Pacific Northwest, where winters are grey and damp and only a hot beverage will get you through the days. In Eugene, you can’t go half a block without hitting coffee, at least not near the university. Seattle’s not that different, though a lot of the shops are Starbucks. I’ve seen the first espresso cart that came to the city (imported from Italy, it’s now in the collections at the Museum of History and Industry), and every time we get to try a new coffee house, I get a little excited. I’ve become a coffee snob, but that doesn’t mean I’d turn down archaeologist coffee.

For the most part, I’m a simple coffee drinker. I learned to make mochas at my sandwich shop job last century, and while I did not like coffee much, I loved complicated coffee beverages. But I truly love the taste of coffee now, and most days, I want a cup of black drip coffee or an Americano (espresso + water). Occasionally, I like a good almond milk latte, and there’s one place that makes a great cappuccino with almond milk.

But my home coffee game has definitely gotten more complicated. I’ve owned drip brew coffee makers (messy to clean a reusable filter & makes too much) and French presses (terrible to clean). I went through an instant espresso phase (and still keep that around for baking. I don’t drink a lot of coffee, but I need that cup.

I tend to only make coffee on the weekends — in the past, I’d drink coffee at work no matter how terrible it was. (Fun side note, I was banned from making coffee at a former job because I made it too strong). But work now, we have excellent amazing coffee from a local roaster, Pine Drop.

Aeropress. Star Trek mug.

After some research, I decided that an Aeropress might be the best fit for me. This tube system would travel well, and making only one cup means that you’re almost never going to drink cold coffee. Making coffee in the Aeropress feels like a game. Cleaning it is a breeze, as the coffee just pops out into the trash or compost. And the coffee itself is good.

JavaPresse coffee grinder and lovely beans.

But after I determined that Jack wasn’t suddenly going to become a coffee drinker in Seattle, I started buying whole beans because my ground coffee was getting stale. I bought a small burr hand grinder, as I hate noise in the mornings. When we went to Hawai’i, toured a Kona coffee plantation, got hyped on samples, and bought fancy coffee I adore.

My coffee set up, minus the electric kettle

So this is my hipster weekend coffee routine:

I hand-grind about 2 Tablespoons of Kona coffee from a plantation I personally toured in my burr grinder. This takes about 2 minutes. Meanwhile, I heat up water to 185 degrees in my adjustable thermostat electric kettle. I put a paper filter in my Aeropress and set it atop one of several Star Trek mugs, and I press out one shot of coffee. I then add a bit more water for an intense Americano, or occasionally I steam some almond milk for a homemade latte.

Ground beans = magic.

Here’s what I use [not affiliate links]: Mountain Thunder coffee, JavaPress Manual Grinder, VonShef electric kettle, Aeropress coffee maker, and the Secura Automatic Milk Frother.

As a “bonus” bit of fun, I made a video of using the Aeropress.

April 30, 2018
WW: Why Hot Pot is the Allergy-Friendly, Interactive Meal You’ve Been Waiting For

Steamy Hot Pot

This past holiday season, my boss’ treat to our small staff was a trip to a local hot pot restaurant. With a little effort, we were able to work around my food allergy issues, and it was a really great staff lunch. Well, except for the being too full to walk afterwards part.

I started thinking about how hot pot could be adapted and made at home. It’s not horribly hard, it turns out, and thanks to my need to packrat all of my parents’ 1970s entertaining supplies when I moved out, I had so equipment that could be adapted to home-style hot pot. I used a chafing dish, though I also have a fondue pot, and I think the latter might allow for more heat. Both the chafing dish and the fondue pot are designed for small cans of Sterno fuel. A portable electric burner is used at most of the local hot pot restaurants, though a few have tables with built-in burners. An electric wok or frying pan would also be an excellent option.

But I’ve labeled this post “Kitchen Stories” because it includes this pot. My parents were very social people, and they were married for a good number of years before kids. All of the 1970s-era cookbooks I’ve collected feature things like my parents’ chip-and-dip set (white and gold grapes) and things like this chafing dish, in a less tarnished state. Those types of parties, with large spreads of food, are a feature of my early childhood. But while we got a bit of the food, we soon went off to bed. I remember the chafing dish primarily from Friday night dinners during Lent, when my mom would make cheese fondue for a meatless dinner.

Like all of the outdated kitchen stuff that ended up in the basement, I scavenged this chafing dish when I left home (difference between the chafing dish and a fondue pot — the water pan between the heat and the food that spreads out the heat). It’s been used a few times, but mostly it has served as a decorative piece in my kitchen, and it’s rather terribly tarnished. Good tip — a paste of salt and white vinegar helps a ton to take the tarnish off copper). It felt really good to use something I just paid to move across the country, and the hot pot is an amazing use.

Glass noodles, thinly-sliced squash (not thinly sliced enough), and mushrooms

The basic idea of hot pot, if you haven’t had the joy of the experience, is that a tasty broth is heated to boiling and then used as the vehicle for cooking a host of raw meats, seafoods, vegetables, and noodles, which are then eaten with a personalized dipping sauce. The remainder of the feast is soup. What’s awesome about this — well, actually, there are two things. First off, hot pot is an experience as well as a meal, and it’s fun. But the second thing, and what is moving me to write about it and post, is that if you make this all at home, you can customize it to suit you. Exclude your allergens, cater to your tastes, accommodate a variety of people’s needs.

Napa cabbage and baby bok choy

For my homemade hot pot, I started with homemade chicken stock. I think beef would be more traditional, but I had the chicken bones and veggies around. Because of the style of dipping sauce I wanted to use, I used roasted garlic and fresh ginger in the stock, as well as extra peppercorns. I did not use much salt. Your broth can be customized to your tastes!

For hot pot dinner, I reheated the broth to a good boil before adding it to the chafing dish. I added the tomatoes to the broth, as that was an addition in our broth at the restaurant that I really liked, plus we had them in the house. In retrospect, I would have boiled the squash for a bit on the stove top, too.

For table top cooking, we had thinly sliced pork butt and steak, which I can buy locally. Hot pot slicing is about a thick deli slice thickness. If you’re slicing at home, I’d suggest freezing the meat you’re using for 15-20 minutes and using a Very Sharp Knife. We had small mushrooms (enoki would be my recommendation), napa cabbage, baby bok choy, and some winter squash, though this didn’t cook through very well.

Tamari (in our maple syrup crock), the little Nessie soup ladle, and gluten-free gochujang

Dipping sauces can be customized to your tastes, but for our use we had tamari (gluten-free soy sauce), scallions, minced garlic, sesame oil, cilantro, and red pepper flakes. Mix them up and figure out what suits your tastes! Or try any other dipping sauce you have on hand. It’s all about experimentation with flavors.

The Hot Pot spread.

Hot pot is fun and adaptable and is definitely worth a try. If you do try it — or if you go out to a place where you can find food that meets your needs, let us know about it in the comments!

March 8, 2017
WW Kitchen Stories: Mary Kate's Rice Cooker

Mary Kate’s Rice Cooker

If you are gluten-free, you might find that rice becomes an even more important staple in your diet. I actually discovered the variety of rices out there when I tried out eating vegan for a while right after I cut out dairy (and as far as I know, my friend Cathy may still be eating all the random bits of rice I passed on to her when I moved, many years ago). With the right rice to pair with the right foods, rice becomes more than just a base for Chinese takeout. I still really do not like brown rice with “traditional” Chinese(American) style food; white rice tastes right. But brown rice with roasted veggies is fantastic, sushi rice with saucy foods, jasmine rice with delicate flavors. Rice is amazing. I can see why it’s a staple food in many parts of the world.

But you may have noticed that, while I make a lot of rice dishes, my instructions for rice usually boil down to “cook it. However you can.” That’s because despite being reasonably adept in the kitchen, my sad truth is that I cannot cook rice on the stovetop. In a pot, with water, like a normal person.

Or, as my college roommate put it in the birthday card that came with the rice cooker, “I don’t know why you can bake a 10-layer cake but not cook rice, but here, this should fix it.” That’s not verbatim. I may have the card somewhere, in a box, but it was along those lines (but possibly with more profanity. This is the same person who sent me Geritol for my 30th birthday.)

This is true. My first baking “experiment” was a concoction called the “Heaven and Hell Cake.” Go ahead and Google it. I found it in a USA Today while my family was on vacation in Florida, along with a story about a chef whose parents ran a diner, and his childhood conundrum: angel food cake? Or devil’s food cake? So he combined them into an 8-layer cake, alternating angel food and devil’s food, with peanut butter mousse between and a chocolate ganache over it all. Ridiculous. And also full of so very many things that I cannot now eat, so I’m glad I got a chance to try it.

But standard rice? Even of the Uncle Ben’s variety in the nice orange box with very specific cooking instructions on the side? Stymied me. It was always mushy or partly cooked, or otherwise barely edible.

A rice cooker fixes that pretty solidly. You still need to measure the rice and the water. In my rice cooker, a spritz of oil on the bottom is necessary or it sticks pretty badly. But after that, you turn it on and let it go. It turns down to warm when it is done. Easy, right? Yeah, it still took me 6 months to get it right regularly.

Rice cookers come in super-basic models which basically turn on when you plug them in, to super-fancy models that should be able to know when you’re getting home from work and have a 5-star meal on the table. When I took a Chinese cooking class from a local Chinese restauranteur in Bismarck, our instructor told us that spending a lot of money on a rice cooker was pointless (or at least unnecesary). His advice was to buy a basic cheap one, use it until it died, and then buy another. I think I’ve had this one 10 years and as long as I measure the water right, it has never failed me.

I’m mostly in agreement with Alton Brown’s rants against the evils of single-use kitchen devices, but this one solves a very great need. My rice cooker not only fixes one of my basic culinary inadequacies, but it also frees me up to concentrate on the vat of stir-fry I’m making or the sushi salad veg I’m working on, or whatever else I am doing. In theory, I could also steam veggies in the basket that came with the rice cooker, but I’m not sure which box it’s in. This appliance may be a one-trick pony, but it’s a really good trick.

August 6, 2014
WW Kitchen Stories: Rosemary or Denise's Spice Issues

My name is Denise and I have an addiction to spices and some sort of spacial evaluation dysfunction where I am unable to translate how much a quantity of spice I am ordering will actually be in real life. I have a free standing wooden cabinet that is five feet tall and about a foot wide and a foot deep in which I keep all the spices. Except that I ran out of room, so I now also have a banker’s box which is full of spices, and a plastic file folder box full of chilies, which are both kept next to the spice cabinet, circled below. Oh, and looking at the picture, I forgot about jars on top of the spice cabinet, and the string of chilies hanging on the side. Oops.

My Spice Cabinet and Annexes

I also have a spreadsheet on my Google Drive which has my spice inventory on it, so that I can keep track of what I have, and can access it on my phone so that I do not buy something I already have while I am out and about. The spreadsheet has 169 items on it.

Screenshot of my Spice Inventory

One day, I believed that I was out of rosemary, which was annoying since I had just received a massive order from Penzey’s Spices not a month before. But since I had just ordered from Penzey’s, I did not have enough items to order to get free shipping. So I looked for other sources with shipping and ending up deciding that it was a good idea to order a pound of rosemary because it was such a good price.

What a one pound bag of rosemary looks like.

The picture you see above, note the helpful measure tape to show you how big it is in real life, depicts a pound of rosemary. I’m not sure how I’m going to use this much rosemary in my lifetime. What is even more ironic, is that I had forgotten that my friend Mary, the kale whisperer, had put in an order with Penzey’s a couple of weeks after I did, and I had purchased a four ounce bag of rosemary in her order. However, I had forgotten to note it on my spreadsheet and forgotten to mark it off on my to-do list. So I ordered a pound of rosemary, because I thought I didn’t have any, even though I did. So now in addition to the behemoth bag of rosemary above, I also have a four ounce bag kicking around.

We will not speak of the three pounds each of yellow and brown mustard seeds that may have been purchased before the rosemary incident and the two pounds of fennel seed that may have been purchased after. However, if anyone has some ideas for using massive quantities of fennel seed, I’d love to hear them.

July 30, 2014
WW Kitchen Stories: Denise’s KitchenAid Mixer

Denise’s KitchenAid Mixer

So in Mary Kate’s inaugural kitchen story post she asked what the workhorse pieces in your kitchen are and if they had a history. My workhorse piece is my KitchenAid mixer. And it does have a bit of a story.

When I was a kid (there’s some debate over the exact age, I thought it was around 15, but my mother claims it was before that, maybe 12 or 13), my father decided to buy a KitchenAid mixer for my mother for Christmas. Now, this was mostly because my dad’s friend had bought one for his wife, and my father was a “Keep up with the Joneses” kind of guy. Keep in mind that my mother was working 10 or 12 hours a day, she wasn’t all that interested in cooking anyway, and I was basically responsible for getting dinner on the table at that age already. To complete the picture, my mom has often said that she made a pie once before I was born, just to say that she could do it, and that was enough. So a KitchenAid mixer wasn’t an appropriate gift for my mom in any stretch of the imagination.

I tried to explain this to my father while we were shopping. He didn’t listen, because that was not his thing anyway, and I have to admit that I didn’t try as hard as I could have to convince him that it was a stupid gift for my mother because. . . it was a KitchenAid mixer! (Cue heavenly chorus.) I knew that the use of the said KitchenAid mixer would default to me, as the main cook in the family. So sue me, I let appliance lust sway me from the straight and narrow path of insisting that my father pick a Christmas gift that my mom would actually like.

The KitchenAid mixer was purchased, and as predicted by me, my mother wanted nothing to do with it. So I used it during the years before I left for college. I didn’t take it with me because there really wasn’t a place you could stash a KitchenAid mixer in the dorm rooms at Wellesley, although I did have a food processor for making strawberry daiquiris. During my second year of law school, my mother finally decided to get a divorce. Let’s just say it was not a shock to anyone, and it was certainly about freaking time. When she told me she was moving out of the house, I told her that she needed to take the KitchenAid mixer. She was puzzled and said that she didn’t want it. I said, “I know you don’t, but I do.” She took the KitchenAid mixer, and since I was living in an apartment at that time, the KitchenAid mixer and I have been happily together since. I’m now 42 and my relationship with the KitchenAid mixer since its purchase has lasted either 27 or 30 years depending on who’s memory is accurate (maybe my sister will weigh in for a tie-breaker).

Last year I noticed that the KitchenAid mixer had developed an oil leak. I was devastated, but I did my Google-Fu and figured out what was probably wrong with it. And then I found out that the nearest service center was in another state and I might have to mail it. I couldn’t imagine mailing it, let alone the cost of mailing it, and the cost of the repair seemed excessive. So I did my Google-Fu again and found a video that showed you how to repair what was most likely the problem. I decided to take the risk. If I killed it, it’d had a good long run, and if I didn’t, I’d put the money I didn’t spend on the repair towards a new one. (They have purple ones now, just saying.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eKHVvNX5eY&w=560&h=315]

So I ordered the materials and waited for them to arrive. When they did, I spread newspaper out on my kitchen floor, and got my Kindle Fire out so I could watch the video over and over again as I did the repair. It took me about an hour, just because I was working so carefully and slow to make sure I did it right, and I wanted to remove as much of the decades old grease as I could. When I got it back together, it worked like a charm. No leaks, no drips, no nothing. To celebrate, and to make up for contemplating replacing it for a younger, hotter, and purple model, I got it a purple dragon decal (go here on etsy, but she’s on vacation until July 5) to match my dragon tattoo. Here’s hoping for another thirty or so happy years!

Pretty purple dragon decal on Denise’s KitchenAid Mixer

June 25, 2014
WW Kitchen Stories: Mary Kate's Kettle

Hey, we sort of hit a wall writing about living with food allergies, just like we hit a wall before that writing about personal care products we make, and home cleaning products we make. It turns out, sometimes there are only so many things to say about any given topic. At least for now. We haven’t officially retired any of our series; we’re just letting them hang out until we’ve got more to say. We’re also going to go back through and make sure the posts are all properly categorized in case you ever want to find them again. As always, we’re a work in progress. Isn’t that life, with or without allergies of any sort?

Mary Kate’s Kettle

So for a lighter topic, I’m happy to introduce to you today our Kitchen Stories. The first post kind of explains it all. I was looking at my tea kettle over the weekend as I was making tea and realized it was just one of many of my kitchen tools that have a story.

My first kitchen was a harvest gold masterpiece (there were flecks of metallic gold in the counter top (formica)! It was, as my roommate and I would have described it at the time, “Klassy with a capital ‘K’.”) It was this so-awful-it-makes-a-great-story 1970s cinderblock masterpiece, with no insulation and radiant ceiling heat. We could grow mold on the walls, and every fixture in the bathroom and kitchen was apparently leaking into the ceiling of the apartment beneath us. But my roommate and I were thrilled beyond measure to be in an “adult” apartment where we had to figure out how to feed ourselves on a daily basis.

We had a full block of knives (my birthday gift from my parents that summer) and a decent number of kitchen utensils we’d bought or scavenged from our parents’ kitchens before moving out. But we were woefully low on actually useful cooking things. There was a Goodwill a few miles from our apartment that was a source for most of the rest of what we needed, and my first good score was the Revereware kettle that I still use today. I’d had a fancier kettle in college, a red one that I think my mom bought because it was a nifty color, but it was dropped once and the paint started flaking off, inside and out. I want to say that I splurged on this kettle — I think I paid $5, and I did buy some SOS pads at the grocery store to shine it up.

That was in 1999. Last century. That kettle has made thousands of cups of tea — nothing else gets you through a damp Oregon winter, or a well-below-zero North Dakota winter, or just a plain fun northeastern New Hampshire winter. It served me through the Cup-O-Noodles phase that happened between grad school and finding a real job. Mostly, it’s made tea. And some coffee. But tea. A literal ocean of tea. I was raised Irish, and therefore firmly believe that tea will likely solve any problem. Or, if not solve it, soothe it or give you a break from it. Tea is magical. As such, the ever-important kettle is rarely ever put away. It is always on the stovetop, ready to serve (and likely full of the leftover water from the last round of tea).

This kettle is the workhorse of my kitchen, and sometimes, using it reminds me of the first kitchen that was “mine.” It’s been with me for the 6 subsequent kitchens, as well.

What are the workhorse pieces in your kitchen? Do they have history?

June 4, 2014