Check out my buns!

Check out my beautiful french buns! As you know, it's been raining in LA and I have felt the need for coziness. So I needed to bake! I found a recipe for french buns that didn't take four days to make (although they may have been better if they had). These beautiful buns are the result. I got the recipe from "The Practical Encyclopedia of Baking". Sounds boring but has some wonderful recipes. Baking is just like cooking. You need to try it out one time, then tweak the recipe for your own taste.

The recipe said to put a "roasting pan" in the oven and then preheat to 450 degrees. It then said to add a cup of water to the roasting pan when I am ready to put the buns in the oven. I asked Noah to help me and gave him the job of pouring the water in the roasting pan. As soon as he started pouring in the water, the glass Pyrex shattered into a thousand pieces! Holy shit! We were both standing in the line of fire and I'm surprised one of us didn't end up in the ER with shrapnel injuries! After a long oven clean out, we started over and had success! I think the roasting pan with the water made the oven have more moisture as the bread baked thereby creating a more moist inside with a nice crispy crust.

Noah made a pan seared Lake Superior whitefish with pan sauteed brussel sprouts, radishes, and bacon. We watched "The Order of the Phoenix" and then he made roasted lamb loin with baby heirloom carrots and quinoa with hen-of-the-wood mushrooms. He is such a sweet guy. He loves to cook and has rarely made the same dish twice since we started our relationship. If I offer my help he will put me to work picking parsley or peeling vegetables. Otherwise he lets me sit at the computer sipping wine while he cooks. I feel bad because I rarely have the chance to reciprocate my knowledge for his. Sure, I've steri-stripped his surf induced foot lacerations and disinfected and bandaged many a burn. But he provides his gift to me on a daily basis. It's interesting that we both chose careers in the service industry.

If you have suggestion on how I could have made my buns a little lighter and fluffier, let me know. I would love to be able to bake better than my husband!

Had another fabulous dinner tonight. Drove out to our friends' house, Gina and Gavin, in Santa Clarita. It's about 30 minutes north of us (with no traffic, haha). We've had them over to our house a couple of times and now it was time to hang out in their 'hood. Gina and I made fresh pasta and had Noah cut it into papperdelle. Gavin made homeade bolognese with ground veal to go with our pasta. Noah made a salad with super fresh lettuce and a caeser-like salad dressing. Everything was so fabulous! We drank chianti, shared stories, and laughed a lot. They are some of the funnest people we have met since being in Los Angeles and we enjoyed every minute with them! Thanks G and G!

Summer is probably my favorite food time. It seems so fleeting... I get greedy with the heirloom tomatoes and corn. We buy every fig and soft shell crab we can get our hands on. I almost feel a desperation to eat as much as I can, while I can. I don't feel this way in the fall or winter. We spend many nights on the patio, with rose wine and plates of cool food. Farro salads with cucumber and tomato. Barbequed NY Strip and cold yukon potato salad. Seared pork with shell beans and beet puree. It's difficult spending time with non-"foodies". I was invited to a BBQ recently where the salads were from a bag and the ribs were bulk from Costco (shudder!)..Most people have lost sight of good food. It's always refreshing to hang out with people who know the difference between a roma tomato and a heirloom tomato. I just read a great blog from a chef's wife called dcw that inspired me to write more about my experience of being married to a chef. So hard to not be a food snob when my husband makes scrambled eggs and morels for breakfast before I go to work.

Another toughie on being a chef's wife: Making a reservation at a great new restaurant and husband knowing half the servers, managers, and other chefs who happen to have the night off and also dining at the restaurant. One of the most difficult things is that it's hard to get people to relate to my job. It's easy to talk about cooking...But what about nursing? Every great story I know is usually inappropriate for the dinner table. Pretty much inappropriate at any setting. So I let him have his glory while I stand supportive by his side, looking as pretty as I can.

My nights as a domestic goddess...

I love to cook! My husband, a wonderful, professional chef opened my eyes to the fabulous world of food. A vegetarian for ten years when I met him, he has introduced me to ingredients and techniques I never knew existed. On one of our first dates I asked him to cook for me, it didn't have to be vegetarian. He made me a simple pasta dish with broccoli and spicy pork sausage. We sat on the living room floor of my small apartment eating from large bowls in our laps. I haven't been a vegetarian since.

On my nights off, I love to putter around the kitchen with a glass of wine, dicing and blanching and seasoning. I try to time it so that when Noah comes home from work around midnight, our dinner is ready to go. I watch cooking shows --not Rachel Ray or Emeril--but Nigella Lawson, Alton Brown, or a program on PBS hosted by Julia Child. I peruse Noah's extensive selection of cookbooks, usually guided by an ingredient I have at hand. Wednesdays is Farmers Market day. Noah comes home with all sorts of baggies filled with produce and I search them excitedly, picking one or two ingredients that I will base our dinner on. Today he brought home some Oregon morel mushrooms, asparagus, baby carrots, spring peas, fava beans, strawberries, and rhubarb. Spring is here! My favorite season for produce.

I went to the nearby seafood market and picked out a beautiful peice of halibut, wild caught from Alaska. I'm going to shell and blanch the spring peas, then saute them, with the morels, in shallots, butter, and a small amount of homeade chicken stock. I'll pan sear the halibut, put it on a white plate, then top the fish with the peas and mushrooms. I'll drizzle the juices all around the plate and add some chopped Italian parsley at the last minute to finish. This is how Noah taught me to cook. No measuring, no following a precise recipe, just taking what is in season and letting the simplicity of the ingredients create the dish.

Last night, I was heavily involved with a sewing project (simple but fabulous dinner napkins) and didn't want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I made a recipe that I learned on Nigella Lawson's show for times just like this. She seasons and rubs with olive oil two chicken legs (drum and thigh together) and places them in a shallow baking dish. Then she scatters a variety of chopped vegetables around the legs, chopping them to approximately the same size. For my dish I used potatoes, onions, unpeeled garlic, cauliflower, cremini mushrooms, and an orange bell pepper. But you can use whatever you have on hand, even apples, eggplant, broccoli, whatever. She tosses all the vegetables in olive oil and salt and pepper, then sprinkles dried thyme over everything. (I used herbs de provence.) I figured Noah was going to get home around 11pm, so I threw the dish in a 425 degree oven at 10:15. At 11:15, when Noah was already home and relaxing on the couch, the chicken was done. He taught me a trick to check if the chicken is cooked through: Put a small knife through the thickest part of the leg, then quickly touch the knife to your bottom lip (why there? I don't know). If the knife is hot, the chicken is done. We plated some vegetables in the middle of the plate, cut the leg apart where the thigh met the drumstick and placed that on the vegetables, then we drizzled the accumulated pan juices all around. The chicken was really tender and the vegetables were delicious, especially with the herbs. So easy, and it only took me about 5 minutes to chop the veggies and assemble the dish. I added the left over vegetables to scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning.

After we ate our dinner last night, Noah looked me in the eyes and said, "Naomi, you are a wonderful cook. I appreciate, and look forward to, coming home and eating a delicious meal with you. But...a man has got to have some sweets at the end of the day. You rarely make desserts!" He's right. I don't often crave sweets and I rarely order dessert when we go out to dinner. I prefer savory flavors. I would rather eat some cheeses at the end of a meal instead of something sweet. When we have ice cream in the fridge, I never touch it. Noah has the whole pint to himself. So, I am in the process of making some homeade vanilla ice cream and a rhubarb and strawberry compote. The cream, eggs, vanilla, and sugar have been boiled and tempered and watched very carefully and is now cooling in the fridge before I put it into our automatic ice cream maker. The strawberries and rhubarb will simply be cooked down with sugar and lemon zest until soft, then served warm on top of the ice cream.

I've got a lot to do tonight, finish my ice cream, start my compote, shell my peas...why am I still blogging?