Life is in the Details

Brown Butter Pistachio Financiers #latartinegourmande #baking

The cutie cakes are nutty and sweet and gluten-free (using rice flour and nut meal as the main part of the dry mix). These French cakes, called financiers, are usually made with almond meal but this variation uses pistachios, giving it a pretty, light-greenish hue. If you have a spice mill or coffee grinder it'll make quick work of turning the 1/2 cup of shelled pistachios into pistachio meal.

Once the butter has browned it is steeped with crushed cardamom pods and a halved vanilla bean and its seeds. Oh, what a heady aroma this creates! I want to find a perfume that smells exactly like this.

I think I should have whipped my eggs a little more for a lighter texture so I've made a note of it for next time. Both kids loved it as their dessert tonight and I'm packing up the leftovers to take with us for tomorrow night's picnic dinner.

This recipe is from La Tartine Gourmande and if you don't have this book you can find the recipe here: http://www.marthastewart.com/902952/brown-butter-pistachio-and-poppy-seed-financiers (I left out the poppy seeds but feel free to leave them in if you are so inclined.)

Word (of the Week) interrupted

This week's Word of the Week (debris) has been interrupted due to some recently uncovered criminal events of my pre-teen daughter. Not to be alarmed... they are only a crime against our rules.

It was discovered that J had her phone with her in her room after being tucked in (she isn't allowed to have it except on weekends unless she has our permission) and was texting way past bedtime.... THE NIGHT BEFORE HER LAST standardized test at school. Grmpmhf!!

And so in it's place of the originally scheduled word, I present to you the new Word of the Week.

We're thinking of letting J find this about our discovery on her own (as she passes the new word up on the wall in our hallway). Her phone has been taken away at least until the end of school (and in my mind, indefinitely, or at least until further notice).

Thank you, Mike, for you continued humor and keen intellect!! We had so much fun laughing together about this incident and how we're handling it this afternoon!!

The lost photo

Trying again to include the photo as it appears to be left off the original entry (posting from TypePad mobile).

Starting another starter

You don't even want to know how gross my neglected sourdough starter had become sitting in the back of my refrigerator for too many months. The start date on it was 2-10-11 and i remember baking a bunch of loaves with it but what's missing the "neglected since..." date. I'll spare you the details and any photos. But there was mold. Ewww! Ick!

Suffice to say, I'm starting a new starter this morning using the Tartine method. If all goes well, in two weeks I'll have a good sourdough culture from which I'll bake.

The bowl on the right is the rosemary no-knead dough that I'll bake off this morning in a cast-iron pot for a nice, crusty loaf to serve alongside my famous black bean soup tonight. Although I'm sad that baseball practice will likely be cancelled tonight due to the rain, I'm delighted that the four of us will be gathered around the dinner table together instead of what normally happens when baseball and dance fall on the same night (2 of us eat early and go off to the game; 2 of us eat late after dance, a tag-team sort of affair that I'm content to break with tonight). I'm ready for our summer schedule already!

Another advantage to the rain: the seeds & seedlings (sunburst and Peter Pan pattypan squash, Zephyr and other summer squashes, cucumbers, hearts of gold cantaloupe, lavender, jalapeños) that we planted over the weekend need to be watered as well. Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

Happy Monday!

Word of the Week

I just realized I'm a few days days late on changing our "word of the week" (something I started doing a couple of months ago to help bring new words into the kids' vocabularies to encourage them to be stronger readers and to enrich their writing). It's no secret that I adore words and am a voracious reader and my kids are no different. Ryan loves to read and is going through a Pokemon phase. Jessi has chosen to take a creative writing class during a summer program she's enrolled in that offered jewelry making and mixed-media art in the same time block.

I suppose I haven't changed last week's word because I am enamored with it and wanted to live with ILLUMINATE a bit longer.

I love its meaning.
I love its sound.
I love its richness.

Some progress on the canvas!

I moved my easel into my dining room last night (aka the kid's art room) in preparation for today. Ahhhhhh... the gorgeous natural light of a giant window. After delivering lunch to J's teacher for teacher appreciation week, I came back home, cranked up some music (The Black Keys), picked up my brush and got to work/play.

This canvas had been sitting idle for far too long (even before I hurt my back) and it felt so good to get reacquainted with it and add to the area that before I was too fearful to create. That fear kept me away, and I let it (!!!), finding other things to do that just delayed the inevitable. And it's a shame. It's just paint.

When I reminded myself of this - that it's just *PAINT* - I was able to get out of the way of myself. I was no longer worried that I'd mess it up. I opened myself up to possibilities, released the attachment to what existed and what *I desired to make it become*... and instead listened to what it wanted to become.

Every mark is there for a reason, whether to become another layer or to stand tall on the painting's surface.

Today was forward progress for me and for that I shout... OOOH YEEAAHHH!!!

Look at how my babies have grown

I planted seeds in this garden flat the exact morning just an hour or two before I herniated a disc in my back. These seedlings are the fruits (and vegetables and flowers) of my labor.

These have grown very well so far and now it's time to transition them to larger containers (okay, a little past due) filled with nutrient rich soil and in a few weeks they will be planted out in the garden.

Happy Friday everyone! Wishing you a fun-filled weekend!

Signs of spring

Yesterday, my neighbor showed me this beautiful nest that resides in a nearby tree. We all came over to take a peek.

I love spring and all that it brings.

Isn't that nest perfect?!

Vacation Green Smoothie #greensmoothie

Happy May! The weather is back in the 80s again (hallelujah) so tea is on hold. Here's today's after-school smoothie:
3 pineapple spears (frozen from some extras), a half of a frozen banana (for that smooooth texture), orange juice, water, and baby spinach. Pineapple just feels like a vacation to me and that's just the kind of feel I could use this month. This might just be my favorite.

Breakfast rut breakout #soup #greens #healthy #breakfast

(photo of Green Soup with spinach, kale, chard, cilantro)

I had been in a breakfast rut for a while. I didn't want to eat bread with cream cheese, my stomach can't handle oatmeal (I may have developed a sensivity?!). I didn't want pancakes (oatmeal or chocolate chip),  egg whites or eggs (over medium OR scrambled with garlic chives). I tried nut butter on whole wheat bread which has been good. But on the cold mornings we've been having I wanted something warming.

Then I thought to how many cultures in the world eat a savory soup for breakfast and though I didn't yet make leblebi (though I plan to), I thought about something more green, as in sipping my greens. I remembered how much I love Anna Thomas's Green Soup and it just flowed from there! This green soup is rejuvenating and soul-warming and so so healthy too!

For the past two weeks I've been making a big pot of Green Soup over the weekend and, each weekday morning, ladling up a big bowl of soup for breakfast. I have now broken out of the breakfast rut. I find that I often need to add something more to this (lentils or chickpeas to make the calorie count and protein count higher or plan on having a mid-morning snack as, after all this is just broth and greens, but it's easily modified to suit what I have on hand).

Here's a basic recipe for Green Soup from Anna Thomas from her interview on The Splendid Table (my favorite food podcast).

TODAY

• teach yoga class
• learn some Spanish
• eat a ridiculously early lunch so I can make it to.....
• physical therapy
• work in my art journal (it might be only for 10 minutes)
• plant peppers seedlings in the vegetable garden
• make a haircut appointment

Dinner tonight: If baseball gets rained out: Veggie Quesedillas, salsa, guacamole (I wonder which child will get to make the guacamole tonight!), etc. If it DOESN'T get rained out: sandwich night.