I take my ham to heart

If you would like to know what is just so satisfying, in a way that is only fulfilling because of its simplicity, I will tell you. If you guessed ham on toast, you are correct. I would eat ham on toast every day if it wasn't for the slathering of butter I love to brush over the toast before the ham goes floating over the top.

There are, of course, a few ways of doing this. Today for example, after being out and about in this gloriously day dreaming weather, I was hoping to have a ham sandwich when I arrived home. This nearly always calls for the freshest bread.

Actually, a ham sandwich ALWAYS boasts fresh bread, but we're heading to Vancouver BC tomorrow and I didn't want to buy more bread and have it grow lonely and old while we were away. So after thinking I could get away with two day old bread, very border-line acceptable, I found that it was growing a beard on it's crust and developing a sourish odor that did not appeal to the likes of a ham sandwich.

This of course left me no choice but to toast up some English muffins that needed to be eaten anyway.

Far from the school lunch-time feeling of eating a ham sandwich, but adjustment is just another ingredient today.

When you finally decide to make a ham sandwich for your lunch or your afternoon tea break, you must remember these few important rules.

• You must only buy the simplest ham there is. Thinly sliced deli ham. If they ONLY have honey ham or black forest ham, you must back away from the counter very slowly and run to your car, never to return again. These are of course products of disgrace and will leave you with flavours other than butter and ham lingering in your mouth.

• This really does go without saying, but it must be said. PLEASE ONLY USE FRESH BREAD. PLEASE DO NOT USE BREAD THAT YOU WILL FIND IN AN AISLE OF A SUPERMARKET WITH SPECKLED SWEET BITS ON IT AND TWICE WRAPPED IN CRUNCHY PLASTIC.  IT IS CRAP.

• If you're going to eat ham, really try and find a place that will sell you the organic way of life. It truly does taste better knowing that your lunch wasn't ridiculed and full of it's own shit before it was slaughtered to become a tub of tasteless antibiotics disguised as ham.

• Just butter. Just butter. Just butter. I would instruct you to go out of your way and use butter that tastes like butter, such as any kind you will find in the Southern Hemisphere, or even a European butter. So long as it's not WHIPPED SWEET CREAMED BUTTER. But, if that's what you have than I guess that will have to do. Just butter. Don't forget. No mayo.

I guess these are the only instructions. If you are going to have ham on toast, it will be fine to use older than day old bread. That is acceptable.

Also if you are going to have ham on toast, you may find it quiet scrumptious to spread a thin layer of Coleman's Hot Mustard on after you lather on your butter. This is the kind of mustard that will block up your sinuses and leave you with watery eyes.

There is just one thing to be aware of when making ham on toast. You might discover that you have eaten all the slices of ham while you are waiting for the toast to cook. Be careful.

It's okay to fail sometimes (sometimes being the operative word)

One reason I believe I have a hard time following recipes is because I don't take time concentrating on reading them, than of course following through with the instructions, the part that kind of really matters, which in my mind, means being told to do something a certain way, and therefore, not my own.

So when I decided to go and buy a rabbit from Pike Place Market, overseeing the fact that it wasn't portioned already, I had to than go out and buy a cleaver. A cleaver. I love it and now want to butcher all the meat I buy whole.

Being that I had never cooked rabbit myself, I was thinking that I would just roast the whole thing intact, kind of like a chicken, than portion it off to my dinner guests at the table.

You see though, I found a recipe in David Tanis' beautiful cookbook, A Platter of Figs, a book that leaves me wanting to cook a dinner party for eight every night, which called for the rabbit to be portioned. So of course I went ahead and followed the recipe, mostly.

I will just put it out there now: I am finding it really hard to successfully comply to recipes. I feel  disconnected to the final product, like I'm observing and my hands are moving but I'm not really a part of the creation. Hmmm, we'll see if that can change.

I guess what it is I'm trying to say, is that at some point in the kitchen, we will create something, yours or another, that we can really call a failure. Maybe not a complete failure, since at the point of realizing this failure you're finding all the parts that were actually just okay. The parts that have you believing in yourself again, the parts that have you convinced as you're falling asleep, "maybe it really wasn't that bad, I know I can certainly do a hundred times better, but really, it was fine". Than you wake up every morning for the rest of the week with a sad, burning feeling in the pit of your stomach that reminds you that you really did fail. Like I said, not a complete failure. Your crafted meal was eaten with positive banter and munching, but you, YOU know it's not where your standards lie.

My yoga instructor, of recent times, says a quote after each class, which is considerate after sitting in a hot room for an hour and a half sweating out buckets of the outside world, and the quote that struck me like a brick shit house was something along the lines of, "Those things that are worth doing good, those things of importance to you, can not be perfected by doing only once". Sounds a little like what you might read in the 'self-healing' section at a book store, but it worked for me when I needed it to.

Right there though, is what I usually do the opposite of, that is for sure. I can only remember doing the things that fascinate me in the kitchen once, or maybe twice, because if I can't get it right the first time, I get frustrated than give up.

So right now, right here, I am publicly vouching for myself, I'm swearing upon the cover of Stephanie Alexander's, The Cook's Companion, that I will just give it a go. By giving it a go, I mean that I will cook the way I know how to cook, the way I LOVE to cook. Cooking the way I was inspired to cook. Simple, fresh ingredients and doing it well. REALLY WELL.

I'm going to get my hand amongst the essential ingredients. Back to making beauty with a handful of blueberries and a the zest of a lemon.

I'm going to make cakes. I'm going to make cakes and call my dad and tell him that I wish I could cut him a slice and serve it to him with fresh whipped cream, the way he loves it.

So after much pondering of how to tackle recipes, I will simply be inspired by them, maybe saving the following of instructions for baking only. That's usually a good idea.

Food and balls of water

I began this post some other place but have decided to creep on up here and tell you about our first 'Summer Outside Dinner' in Seattle for the year. Other than smiling for most of the summer, I'm planning on hosting a bunch of dinners outside where I randomly have strangers and friends over for dinner, nourishing the good life. Tonight, my dinner guests are Glenn, and the infamous Caroline. Caroline is our niece. I have inherited her since marrying Glenn and I just fall in love with her every time we're able to hang out. So, although this story is going to be about the delicious food we made and devoured, I think it's really about Caroline. She is truly a character with or without a story.

Oh, but first the food. The food will always be there. It is, by far, the first thing I'm thinking about when I wake up in the morning. "What will I make today" and "I wonder how long I have to lay here for until by bladder will burst" are my first thoughts of the day.

To take bursting to a whole new level, I can tell you that when you squeeze a lemon with a hand held citrus juicer, it will squeeze out every ounce of liquid that little sucker has in it to squeeze. I've never owned or used one of these juicers. I've only done it the way you do it when you're in a kitchen with five male chef's and nothing more manly than the clench of your fist will do. So I am happy I have discovered this toy.

I will be holding that hand held juicer all year round. All of a sudden you have this plump, half of a lemon sitting there in it's place, than SQUISH, a flattened disc, a little less rounded, but no less lemony than it started out to be. This lemon has served it's purpose well.

The objective: to marinate organic chicken thighs in about six lemons and about double that of garlic and a little extra virgin. Later, after hours of sitting and patiently waiting in all that goodness, I will grill them on the BBQ, slice, than serve to my special dinner guests. That, my friends is as simple as it gets. Although Caroline informed me that she might only eat the middle of the chicken, (? not sure how she will manage that one) because she didn't like the taste of the outside. That taste was the char-grilled part.

Honesty has it's place.

Corn also has it's place; picked right from the field than straight on the grill, all wrapped up in its cozy bed of husk. Well, this time I bought it from the market, but ideally I would want Farmer Brown to hand it to me from his road side stand.

I once worked in corporate catering, a wee little company in South Melbourne, where I was mentored and made to wear stiff, white painters overalls even in the dead of a Victorian winter. It was there though, that the words, "give it a nice little CRUNCH" was repeated to me over and over so as not to forget that CRUNCH will seal the deal. Sugar snap peas are going to give you just that.

We sliced these beauties and tossed them through a salad of grilled halved tomato's, mixed greens and shaved Parmesan.

If Caroline found any imperfections with this, she didn't mention it. I took her shoveling tomato's than piling up snow peas than shoveling them into her mouth as a good sign.

When our feast was mostly all eaten up inside our very full bellies, we thought it would be a great idea to fill up water balloons and hurl them at each other. While I was inside filling up my balloons, Glenn and Caroline were outside filling up about twice as many. I don't know how many Caroline had burst on her face as I threw them at her with full force, showing no mercy, but she was showing no fear. She also showed no fear as she was trying to sneak down the back steps, which was missing the third one down, and plummeted to her knees. At about the same time as I nearly choked from laughter, she was yelling out, with her water balloon still raised above her head, "I'm alright, I'm alright, I'm good, I'm good". What a sport.

                                     

Water balloons are just good fun.  

Even if they do leave bruisers the colour of your most purple balloon.

And that is the way we spend the first day of summer in Seattle. A city, for most of the year, that has you wondering if there are even people living in it. A city that has you playing childish games when the heat comes on, the heat that has you looking around the streets smiling at strangers because you have all of a sudden realized that there are people around. People walking, people skipping and looking up at the sky in wonder.

This is where you spend the late times of the day and the early hours of the night feeling the warm air on your skin, just wondering what you'll cook for dinner tomorrow night.

A short tale of where the sun has taken me today

For those of you who have aunts or uncles, in laws or perhaps parents of step-parents in your lives and only insist on calling them when absolutely necessary, because when you do call them you feel the pang of nothing to talk about predicatively roll on in. Than the inevitable conversation about the weather, this is usually the life of the phone call, exposes itself. Well my friends, today that is going to be me. It just need got to be said.

Also, I will tell you about joy. The joy from the sun, that of which I'm choosing to hold onto now, now that it is after July 5th, and not just because it says so in the weather report. I'm choosing to hold onto the joy because I think there is a jumping castle sized possibility that if I don't hold onto the joy, and of course hope, than I may just pack up earlier than planned and head for the hills. The feeling of living in a plastic container with the lid closed very tightly is becoming a little too much for my soul to bare. Oh, and my sanity.

I've lived in Seattle for just over three years now and this is the first year I have yearned for sun. I arrived on an Amtrak voyage from L.A. and can still remember the feeling of my stomach as it flipped over and over with pure excitement as we made wide turn after wide turn around gentle snowy peaks. It was the end of May and their was only eye-squinting blue sky to be seen and the unmistakable feeling of new territory. Although I recall some raining days here and there, it really didn't matter what the weather was like, I was in a new and exciting country. Sun? Who really cares about sun? I've got better things to do than label the weather, right?

Than, winter arrived and had me falling in love with this place all over again. I had never seen snow. Well, I lie. I've been on snow, via a pair of skies in Melbourne, and I also touched it as a kid along the side of the road, but to live amongst the snow is something else, the falling snow. For a girl from the Australian bush where drought sets in like a face full of wrinkles, it doesn't get more magical. There's a feeling of nesting. Something I have become pretty great at in the last three years. I do love to nest.

Nesting aside, last winter came and went with zero snow, with only the idea and the longing for it to come floating down from above. This snow, I've come to realize, is the ultimate line dividing the otherwise ten months of many shades of gloom that casts upon Seattle's pasty residents. Which brings us to now, the other line that divides the gloom belt; sun. What pure joy it brings me. Just, simply, joy.

It's been two days now of just lovely warm air. The kind of days where you walk around your neighbourhood plodding from street to street. These are the days you stand on round-abouts in the middle of busy streets dancing with your husband, round-abouts that are being over ran with daisy's that sing to you.  

The kind of sunny morning where you visit your favorite little cafe and buy a wonderful homemade piece of quiche. Cloud City Cafe stands for quiche. I think they should be by the lake throughout the year and sell quiche as people walk on by. I love that when I make the stride across to the glass cabinet, there will always be mismatched pieces here and there waiting for any takers. With out a doubt I have never walked in there and not eaten quiche.

I guess for some, today being me and my quiche there has to be an end , it just feels like it is nearing a little too close the second I poke my fork in. Oh well, the hot sun is shining brightly upon my golden crust of egg and cheese, and I'm going to let it rightly do so, so all I can do now is drink my cup of tea and savor each bite hoping that I don't go in any buy another piece.

These daisy's truly do brighten up my day when I get to walk past them on the way home from anywhere. I think I'll go pick some now and listen to them sing all the way home. This, walking in the sun with a belly filled with savoury deliciousness, is my joy today.