Tom and I returned from a long weekend in San Francisco on Monday evening. Guided by Tom’s brother Mike and a rented PT Cruiser (never even consider buying or renting this car by the way… it will only confuse you!), we walked the Mission, Upper and Lower Haight, and a drove through several other neighborhoods. Coming from Minneapolis’ very new spring, it was wonderful to see so much green and so much color in the architecture of the city. On the downside, much rain welcomed us to San Francisco but as you can see in the above photo there were moments of sunshine in between. I was happy to get to know the deYoung Museum, particularly its viewing tower of the city, and the SFMoMA. Thanks to Mike for sharing a great dinner at Contigo, where we enjoyed fantastic tapas accompanied by a bottle of cidra and plenty of tips on local beers, bars, and eateries.

We’re still sorting through about 400 pictures to determine just what to do with them. Finding photos of what we ate and drank, however, was quick and easy.

Not exactly my favorite holiday, but I’ll take any excuse to bust out my heart-shaped molds!

As January comes to a close, it’s really starting to feel like 2010. This weekend, while less activity filled than, say, our cross country ski marathon, was well enjoyed. On Saturday morning I was inspired by Bon Appétite to prepare crêpes for breakfast. With only one so bad it had to go straight to the trash (that was #3, one and two came out just fine), I am no longer afraid of this thin egg pancake with a French accent. Bon Appétite may be right, “crêpes are a cinch, with no special… pan required.” We enjoyed ours with a mix of cheeses inside (gruyère was the clear favorite) along with chopped cilantro and green onions and the occasional splash of chipotle Tabasco. If you’d like to try your hand at the recipe, hop over to Bon Appétite’s website. Don’t worry if you don’t have buckwheat at home; not about to run out on a Saturday morning, I used a mix of rye and whole wheat flours instead.

Martha: café con leche, largo de leche (left). Tom: tinto (right).

See you in February!

For Christmas my parents gave everyone in the family a bag or tub (depending on family size) of homemade granola. They used the same recipe my Mom worked with when I was growing up. I remember eating Mom’s granola from cereal-boxed shaped Tupperware containers alternately atop a bowlful of yogurt or served with milk. Having received my granola in a bag, I decided I needed such a container for ours too. I didn’t go as far as to have a Tupperware party, but one of the first things I did after returning home from Christmas was to purchase a Sistema cereal box from the Container Store to house my granola. Since then I’ve been enjoying breakfasts of granola with homemade yogurt (thanks to Tom). Yesterday I noticed we were almost out of granola, so I called home for the recipe and decided to dive in and learn to make it myself.

With only a minor variation or two, the recipe comes from The More with Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre (1976). The book is (still!) available and is described (on Amazon.com) as a gathering of:

500 recipes from Mennonite kitchens that tell us how to eat better and consume less of the world’s limited food resources. All recipes have been tested by professional home economists. This cookbook is written for those who care about their own health and the food needs of others in the world.

The recipe makes about 2–3 quarts of granola. The recipe is very basic (measure, mix, bake), but I’m going to have to train my nose to sense the granola’s doneness. The batch I put together today has the right taste and texture, but there’s a little burn in there too. The hardest part for some, depending on your access to high-quality bulk foods, may be sourcing the ingredients. Unsweetened coconut, if not available at your standard supermarket, can be found in health food stores. Wheat germ will be in the refrigerated section if it’s available in your grocery’s bulk foods and can otherwise be found sold by Bob’s Red Mill or jarred in the cereal or baking section. (The Wedge was out of bulk wheat germ, so I went with a bag from Bob’s Red Mill which I am now storing in a Ball jar in the fridge. I plan to start secretly adding it to everything.) Be sure to look for raw nuts and seeds in all cases.

Set the oven to 325º

Mix in Large bowl:

• 1/2 to 1 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut
• 4 cups old fashioned oatmeal (ideally not quickoats)
• 1 cup hulled, raw sunflower seeds
• 1 cup wheat germ
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup sesame seeds
• 1 cup slivered almonds
• 1 Tablespoon cinnamon

Bring to a boil:

• 1 cup honey
• 1/2 cup canola oil

Pour honey mixture over dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Grease two cookie sheets and, dividing the mixture in half, spread the granola evenly across the sheets. Jelly roll pans will work best as you’ll avoid spilling any of the grains when stirring the mixture in the oven.

Bake for a total of 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes and watching carefully in the last 10 minutes to avoid any burning (as I said I may have caused a bit of burning today, but no matter!).

I don’t know if it was the blue skies, all the rain we’ve been getting lately, or all the wine I drank last night, but there was magic in the air at the Farmers’ Market today—vegetable buying magic. The produce on offer was for the most part the same as last week, with a few promising new additions: tomatoes are starting to appear everywhere, although it is still a little early. Next week I imagine everybody will have them and maybe the price will go down a bit. Still, I could not resist a bowl of cherry tomatoes. I was also happy to see the tomato’s green-skinned, husked cousin tomatillo available from one vendor. Fresh tomatillos in season bear only the slightest resemblance to the dried up, rotting ones you can find in some forgotten corner of the produce section most of the year: their husks are bright green and soft and they have a crisp, bright aroma. Leeks were also new this week, but the most exciting, summer-is-here development was sweet corn. Corn on the cob, corn salsa, corn salad, corn soup; so many possibilities.

Cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, sweet corn, purple cabbage, cilantro, fingerling potatoes, tomatillos, purple carrots, leeks. Exciting! Magical!

I couldn’t wait to cook some of it up. Arriving home, I fried the sliced potatoes with some onions and then tossed in an ear of corn. Martha brewed the coffee, and with some fried tomatoes and sausage and eggs (sausage and eggs not from farmers’ market) it was a breakfast fit for a farmer—or a farmers’ marketer.

We started the day with a big breakfast of toast, sausages, coffee, and strawberry banana smoothies. Yum. Tom and I don’t eat enough fruit… we talk about this a lot without doing much about it. On my last trip to the grocery store, I decided to take action. Bananas and frozen strawberries make a great addition to breakfast or an after dinner dessert, and all the while you feel like you’re eating an ice cream treat. The strawberries I bought were organic, and naturally the recipe on the side was for a hippy-smoothie: add banana, soy milk, ice, and wheat germ. This made me laugh. Growing up my mom was always sneaking wheat germ into our food whenever possible. Wheat germ went into waffle and pancake batter and got sprinkled atop our macaroni and cheese. Tom said we had a bag in the fridge, but I couldn’t locate it so we skipped the wheat germ this time. Instead of milk, I added plain yogurt. Plain strawberries and bananas will do the trick, though. The only bad part? Having to clean the blender!

This afternoon we also made a trip to Trader Joe’s to stock up on wine (six bottles), beer, cheese (two kinds), and olive oil (also two kinds). While there, I couldn’t resist a bunch of orange-pink tulips for just four bucks. I thought I’d share:

Tom says they’re too droopy… but I like them just the way they are. Later we’ll be getting together with friends South of Minneapolis to enjoy some time outside with our lawn chairs and a frisbee or two. How are you celebrating or remembering today?

Even being in Egypt for a short time as I was, one can’t avoid encountering fuul. Fava beans show up all over Egyptian cooking (more deliciously, in my opinion, in ta’amiya) but simple fuul is one of the basic staples of the Egyptian diet.  It is Eaten at all times of day, especially at breakfast. In the hotel I stayed at in Alexandria, it was the breakfast served to Egyptians, while foreigners got the Syrian treatment of bread, cheese and fresh vegetables (at this point in the trip the last thing I needed to eat was more beans so I embraced my foreignness).

Fuul is, at heart, a big pot of beans, cooked slow until soft and mashable. There is a actually quite a variety of fava beans available in this world, and in fact fuul is the general Egyptian term for them, but it most commonly refers to this dish of small, round fava beans cooked until they are mushy (fuul medames to be exact). People make this at home in special pots, but I also often saw housewives and children go to local restaurants to have whatever container they happened to have filled up with the stuff.

I’ll concede that that doesn’t look or sound too appetizing. For me, the best part of fuul is not the beans themselves, but all of the toppings: fuul is served with a variety of additions, which each diner can add in at their preference. I assembled a fine passel of ingredients, including lemon (very important), ground cumin, aleppo pepper, pickled beets and rutabagas, minced parsley, salt and pepper and yogurt (the yogurt is more of a Levantine thing as well. I just gravitate that way). Chopped hard-boiled eggs are traditional, but yuck, none of those for me.

Once you’ve added all your fixins’ you mash it all together on your plate and then eat it with plenty of pita bread.

OK, so it’s a little disconcerting to dig into a big pile of beans for breakfast, nor does it bode well for anyone who needs to spend time with you that day in an enclosed space. But if you can get over that, this gives you a really hearty start to your day.

In Sweden, Waffle Day is celebrated on March 25, called Vårfrudagen (Our Lady’s Day). For Catholics, today is known as the Feast of the Annunciation—celebrating the annunciation given by the angel Gabriel to Mary that she was to become the mother of Jesus.

According to our friends at the American Swedish Institute, Vårfrudagen was in some Swedish dialects pronounced Vafferdagen, and later it became Våffeldagen (Waffle Day). As as result of all of this calculated, waffle-inducing pronunciation, every March 25 people in Sweden bake waffles, eating them with lingonberry jam and whipped cream. And, so did we.

I’ve been craving McDonald’s sausage biscuits all week for some reason, but the grocery store is closer than McDonald’s. Buttermilk is a wonderful thing.