something queer going on

1) My seven-year-old Sony ebook reader has, after long and faithful service, bricked itself. *sigh* I don't like reading on my computer (plus I'm having some vision problems that make it easier to read on a screen or book that I can hold close to me), but I'm reluctant to put my ebook files on my phone because, um, quite a lot of them were acquired through alternative means because I have no money. And as much as I love my phone and use it all the damn time, I still think of it as corporate spyware I carry around with me. I may need to buy a Kobo if I can ever afford one. I don't want to get a Kindle because Amazon, spyware, etc., plus I have the Kindle app on my phone anyway so I don't need a separate reader.

I'm nearly ashamed to admit this, but I don't think I like paper books anymore. Except if it's cookbooks, or books that aren't available in any other form. But I've gotten used to the light weight of an ebook reader, and the adjustable type size, and the built-in dictionary, the search function, etc.

Plus, it's much harder to find decent affordable secondhand books than it used to be. Maybe it's where I live now (a small town without a university), or maybe it's that ebooks + amazon are killing used bookstores, I dunno. But when I go into local used bookstores I can never find anything interesting.


2) I was a bit startled when the most recent episode of The Good Place turned out to be the last of the season. I liked S2, though I didn't think it was nearly as brilliant as S1. But the premise of S3 is amazing and I'm looking forward to it.


3) Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency got cancelled by BBCAmerica, which apparently wants to air nothing but gardening and antiques shows in the daytime and Doctor Who reruns and 1990s movies at night. Any hope that Netflix (which was BBCA's partner in making the show) will continue it is fading as the weeks go by with no announcement. It's a shame, because it's a really good show and I recommend it a lot. (S2 does have a proper ending, no cliffhangers or anything, so the two seasons make a satisfying watch. I just want more.)


4) I've been watching The Doctor Blake Mysteries (which my brain keeps renaming Doctor Blake, Medicine Woman even though Dr. Blake is a man) on Netflix. It's an Australian show set in 1958, about a mystery-solving police surgeon with a Tragic Past, and it's . . . okay of its kind? Slightly above average? None of it's terrible in terms of objective quality, but none of it's great, and it does this annoying thing where it wants to be socially relevant but doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions, so that, for example, we get queer characters for one episode where queerness is a plot point, and all the main characters get to demonstrate their tolerance, but none of the main or recurring characters is queer. Similarly for immigrant characters and characters of color. And so far there have been no indigenous Australian characters at all. Yet I keep watching. It's very much a popcorn show--like popcorn, there are both tastier and more substantial things you could be consuming, but it's easy to munch down a lot of it.


5) Speaking of consuming, I've managed to do a little cooking and baking. Yesterday I baked some Blue Sky Bran Muffins, using some peach and sour cherry compote from my freezer as the fruit. I fiddled around with the recipe, as I tend to do--I substituted oat bran for a little of the wheat bran, and whole wheat flour and barley flour for a little of the all-purpose flour. And I mixed the compote into the batter instead of making a little pocket of it--I've made the recipe both ways and in my experience, the result of trying to put the fruit in the center is not worth the trouble. Anyway, they came out nice and now I have a bunch of them in the freezer.

I also made some cornbread with bacon, cheese, and green chiles. I based it on this recipe at Serious Eats, but with changes. I used 1.5 cups of cornmeal and .5 c flour, cut the sugar by half, omitted the scallions/green onions and added some roasted chopped green chile. Also I don't have a cast iron skillet so I used a metal pie tin instead, and it worked fine. I should note that I followed another Serious Eats tip and cooked the bacon in the oven (on a rimmed baking sheet lined with aluminum foil, at 425 Fahrenheit for 20 minutes) and it worked great. I will never cook bacon on the stovetop again.

Today I'm going to made stuffed red peppers using things I have on hand, namely rice, some cheddar and blue cheeses, and some of the vast quantity of ham I still have leftover from Thanksgiving.

I've discovered lately that many kinds of leftovers can be successfully turned into soup. Perhaps this was only news to me? Anyway, I've made soup from the leftovers of a baked rice + tomatoes + ham dish (added to commercial chicken broth along with some beet greens) and from leftover potato gnocchi in what turned out to be an excessively strong puttanesca sauce--yes, I know, but it seemed like a good idea at the time--once again added to commercial broth along with some spinach and some frozen bell-pepper-and-onion mix. (I've been buying frozen veg because at this time of the year it's as good as the fresh vegetables in the supermarket and both cheaper and easier, which helps me eat more vegetables when my desire to cook is fairly low.) In both cases, dishes that had been no more than okay in themselves made quite tasty soups. This makes me happy, because I take a weirdly strong pleasure in using/transforming food that might otherwise go to waste, and because it's a way to have soup for virtually no effort.


6) And now I should start cooking the rice.

1) Something I've cooked recently:

Soup and stew weather is gloriously here, yay! Last weekend I made an autumnal white bean stew with escarole and sausage. ( Recipe under the cut )

A few days ago I bought a 1 lb bag of frozen mixed seafood (squid, octopus, mussels, and shrimp) because it was on clearance. Today I used it in something I'm calling ( Seafood and Chickpea Stew with Spanish Flavors )

I haven't baked much, but last weekend I did make my favorite apple cake. I've eaten about a quarter of it and the rest is in the freezer, awaiting the hour of need.


2) Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future:

Today, to go with the stew, I bought a loaf of bread with herbes de provence. I forgot, if indeed I ever knew, that "herbes de provence" in the US includes lavender. Yes, lavender-flavored bread. Imagine my surprise. Now, I do actually like lavender, although not in bread and not with seafood stew, so I'm hoping to salvage the bread by turning it into a bread pudding with a lavender caramel sauce.


3) Something I'm vaguely thinking about cooking someday: US Thanksgiving is less than three weeks away (how did this happen?) so I should probably decide if I'm going to cook anything, and if so, what. I might make a savoury pie the weekend before and freeze it, or I might decide to repeat last year and buy a frozen lasagne--because, to be honest, I tremendously enjoyed doing nothing on Thanksgiving but resting up in preparation for Black Friday.

Something I've cooked recently: Not a lot. I've been on a mission to eat all the summer peaches and tomatoes, and so there's been a lot of bread + tomatoes dressed with olive oil, and bread + tomatoes and mozzarella dressed with olive oil, and bread + tomatoes and ricotta dressed with olive oil. Also I have been "roasting" lots of red bell peppers under the broiler; I should freeze some, because I don't love the jarred kind.

I have baked a couple of nice things with peaches. Last weekend I made this peach and almond upside-down cake. I made a few modifications, as I tend to do: I increased the almond meal to 100 grams and cut the flour down to 155 grams, reduced the sugar in the cake batter to about 180 grams, omitted the almond extract since I didn't have any, and added about half a teaspoon of cardamom to the batter. It turned out very well despite the changes; the cake is a bit crumbly due to the extra almond meal but I don't mind that, and it's definitely sweet enough for my taste despite the reduced sugar.

Today I finally made a recipe I've wanted to try literally for years: Peach Slump with Ricotta Dumplings, from The Joy of Cooking.

( more info and recipe under the cut )

Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: I don't have any concrete plans, except to keep eating tomatoes and peaches while they last.

Something I vaguely intend to cook someday: tomatoes and peaches aside, I am looking forward to autumn cooking. I want to bake my favorite apple cake again, and maybe a pumpkin roll or pumpkin muffins, and cook chicken with olives and preserved lemon, and make soups and bake bread. And maybe I'll try that Ottolenghi recipe for roasted vegetable tart, although I should probably do that soon while the veggies are still in season.

I haven't done a huge amount of cooking, because on Tuesday it's my turn to host the potluck and Buffy watch, and I've been trying to get my place ready. Yesterday I thought I'd give my kitchen a quick clean, believing that it was fairly clean already. But once I started cleaning attentively, my views on the subject . . . adapted, and so there was wiping down of cupboards and cleaning under the stovetop and washing the windowsills and scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees (luckily it's a small kitchen, because ouch). I'd never realized how many little dirt-trapping crevices and nooks my kitchen possessed, and I badly want to know what fool thought it was a good idea to install cupboard doors with lots of paneling detail--sort of like this, but a much cheaper, uglier imitation--instead of nice flat ones that would wipe clean easily.

Anyway, let's talk about food.

Something I've cooked recently: The lavender shortbread and lemon-lavender posset I mentioned last week were a big hit at the potluck. The posset in particular is exquisite; I decided to strain out the lavender rather than leave it in, and the result was gorgeously creamy and smooth. I found the lavender shortbread a teensy bit dry--the dough was dry, but I was hoping it would be all right after baking--so next time I'll use a little less flour. I live in a very dry climate, so the recipe might work fine elsewhere. By the way, the recipe will easily serve eight, rather than the four to six that Hollywood specifies, and I say that as someone who loves rich things and usually scorns tiny portions.

Yesterday after cleaning the kitchen I did my best to dirty it again by making one of my favorites, pasta with a sausage and tomato sauce. The sauce is basically: brown some hot Italian pork sausage links in olive oil, set aside, use the oil to cook an onion chopped fairly small, when the onions are pretty well cooked add some finely chopped garlic and cook just until the garlic is fragrant. Then add a big tin of tomatoes--I usually buy tinned whole tomatoes and cut them up myself--a bay leaf and any other herbs you like, return the sausages to the pan and simmer for about half an hour. Yesterday I gussied it up a little bit by adding two diced peppers, one red and one yellow, to the onion, and adding some wine to the cooked vegetable mixture and cooking it down before adding the tomatoes. I rarely use wine in cooking because I rarely have wine around, but a couple of weeks ago I impulse-bought a bottle of wine, didn't like it enough to drink it all, and so I froze it in ice cube trays. It's a useful trick for all those annoying recipes that call for half a cup of wine.

This morning I made another loaf of beer bread because (a) I really liked the last one, and (b) I still had a couple of bottles of Smithwick's that are probably too old now to drink with pleasure but are perfectly good to cook with. I used this recipe again as a base, but altered it a lot to make cornbread. I used 2 cups of medium stoneground cornmeal from Bob's Red Mill and 1 cup of bread flour, and I added about 4 ounces of grated cheese, roughly 3/4 cup of leftover corn kernels that were cooked with green chiles and a little cream, and about three tablespoons of additional green chiles (roasted and chopped, from a jar). I reduced the salt a little because of the cheese, and as before I stirred about 3 tablespoons of the melted butter into the batter and brushed 1 tablespoon on top before popping the pan in the oven. The resulting cornbread is seriously, seriously good. It's got a beautiful moist texture and a strong corn flavor, with sweetness from the corn kernels and honey and a bit of kick from the chiles.


Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: For the Tuesday potluck I'm going to make a potato-and-spinach curry from Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries--it's a nice easy one with panch phoron and coconut milk, and I'm going to buy some supermarket naan to serve it with. And I've got to buy some gin for g&t's, because I told everyone I had gin and someone else agreed to bring the mixers, and then it turned out I didn't have nearly as much gin left as I thought.


Something I vaguely intend to cook someday: No idea. The weather's supposed to turn hotter again after a blessedly cool weekend (by which I mean, high temps of about 80F/26.6C rather than 95F/35C). I don't want to cook. I want a beautiful man to bring me delicious salads and perfectly ripe fruit, and preferably to fan me while I eat them.

1) Something you've cooked recently: This has been the week of the Great Chain of Leftovers. Last Sunday I made a meatloaf, which I ate in sandwiches and so on throughout the week. But on Friday there was still a pretty big hunk of it left and it needed to be used right away. That, plus my strong and unseasonable craving for pasta e fagiole (inspired by a TV commercial, of all things) led to an untraditional, even Frankenstein-ish but tasty hybrid dish.

( What I did )

Yesterday, finding myself in possession of a lot of nectarines and raspberries (both were on sale cheap), I made Peach Melba Squares, substituting 4 small nectarines for the peaches. I also used a lot more raspberries than called for, because I found a few moldy ones in the container and thought I'd better use up all the rest immediately. The result was that the cake is . . . let's call it very moist, shall we? I made a couple of other small changes: I let the melted butter brown a bit, because I'd seen a recipe for a brown butter nectarine cake and I thought the nuttiness of the brown butter would enhance the almonds. And I sprinkled a little bit of extra ground almonds over the top because I didn't have flaked almonds. Plus I didn't add the icing sugar at the end, because I found the cake sweet enough already. It is a very tasty cake, if perhaps a bit too buttery for me. The slightly tart fruit keeps it from being too cloying.


Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: No concrete plans. I'm going to a friend's house on Tuesday for a potluck-and-Buffy-watch, so I need to think of something to bring. I've got some cooked chickpeas in the freezer so I might do some homemade hummus with pita bread, plus a melon salad. Bringing hummus is lazy, maybe, but I feel like its being homemade should let me off the hook? Plus, it's been hot and everyone will probably want salad-y things. Will think about it some more, anyway.


Something I vaguely intend to cook someday: It's been so hot--yesterday the temp topped out at 91F/32.7C--that I'm losing the urge to cook even summery things. I think the future holds a lot of salads--grain salads and cooked vegetable salads as well as the raw kind--and pasta, with the occasional lazy lapse into hot dogs or boxed macaroni and cheese.


2) I watched all three series of Shetland over the last week and a half. I wouldn't call it great TV, but I liked the characters a lot and the scenery-porn was excellent (though I was sad to find out that a lot of the series is filmed on mainland Scotland rather than on the Shetland islands). The mystery plots were ho-hum, but at least not full of sickening, "shocking" details like some modern mysteries. There was a canonical queer relationship for a recurring character, plus some unexpected slashiness for the male protagonist. And a plot development in S3 that at first seemed gratuitous and fail-y turned out to be handled well and meaningfully.

Apparently there's going to be an S4, and I'm looking forward to it. I've started reading one of the books the series is based on, but so far I like the TV show better.


3) Last night, having finished Shetland and being in the mood for some light relief, I looked for Netflix movies with Alan Rickman and found The Gambit, a caper comedy with Alan Rickman and Colin Firth and Tom Courtenay, written and directed by the Coen Brothers. Got to be a great movie, right? Alas, it was so terrible that after about 20 minutes I gave up. The jokes were dumb, hackneyed, and often imbued with stereotypes (repressed Brits, freewheeling American) and the actors looked painfully aware that they were in a bad movie. I looked up some reviews and found a tendency to blame the awfulness on Cameron Diaz, playing the above-mentioned freewheeling American, but she was no worse than anything else in the movie (though unlike the other actors, she didn't seem embarrassed so it was impossible to feel sorry for her).

Something I've cooked recently: I finally got around to making the potato salad with anchovies and olives that I kept mentioning. It's delicious and as simple as can be: boil some waxy potatoes until tender, dress them with anchovy vinaigrette, add a few olives (pitted and chopped if you like, or whole) and maybe some parsley. I made the vinaigrette with one 2-ounce tin of anchovies (drained), a medium-sized minced shallot, a clove of minced garlic, a generous teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a substantial amount of olive oil (maybe 3/4 cup?), and red wine vinegar until it tasted right. There was of course quite a lot of vinaigrette left over, which I used during the week on various salads. It turns out that arugula with anchovy vinaigrette is fantastic. Keep the vinaigrette refrigerated and use it up within a week, though, because oil + raw garlic + storage can equal botulism.

Also last week I finished the last steps for the pickled cherries. The process is that you soak the cherries overnight in vinegar, then add spices and sugar to the vinegar and boil it and then soak the cherries in it at room temperature for three days, then boil the liquid yet again and pack it and the cherries into sterilized jars and refrigerate for at least a month. The leftover vinegar solution tasted really good, so I'm optimistic. If they taste good in a month I'll post the recipe.

I've started using the brandied cherries that I made a week or so ago. I can report that they are delicious with chocolate ice cream. You can also make a tasty spritzer by putting a few cherries and a good glug of the brandy into the bottom of a tall glass and topping it off with a 12 oz can of cherry-flavored unsweetened sparkling water. Lime flavored would probably be good too. ETA: No, definitely use cherry flavored.

Today I made a farro salad with roasted vegetables and arugula. I roasted a bag of mini-peppers, cored and quartered lengthwise, and a thickly sliced large onion in some olive oil at 400 F until everything was tender and sweet and just slightly charred at the edges. While the vegetables roasted and cooled I cooked about a cup and a half of farro in lots of boiling water--the same way you'd cook pasta--and drained it when it was tender but chewy. I added two minced cloves of garlic and the juice of a lemon to the hot farro, then mixed in the veg and let it cool down to room temperature. At that point I added a nice bunch of roughly chopped arugula and a few finely chopped mint leaves along with just a splash of oil, and then mixed in a couple of ounces of crumbled feta. The result is both pretty and delicious, though if you like lemon as much as I do you might want to use two, and don't forget to add the zest as well. ( Here, have a picture. )


Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: I've got chickpeas in the slow cooker, some to become hummus and some to be frozen for future use as who knows what? And later today I'm going to cook Amalfi-style zucchini/courgettes based on Marcella Hazan's recipe. It's basically fried zucchini dressed with garlic, wine vinegar, and mint. Hazan's recipe calls for the zucchini slices to almost deep-fry in a lot of oil, but I'm going to saute them in olive oil instead, because I have never had a good experience deep-frying at home and anyway I feel, with apologies to the doyenne of Italian cooking for Anglophone audiences, that they'll taste better that way.

I also have a hami melon I bought on sale. Depending on how it tastes I may eat it plain or dress it up a bit with lime juice, honey, and yet more mint. Actually the dressed-up option is extremely tempting regardless, because I recently bought some Turkish honey from Trader Joe's and it is so good that I went back and bought a second bottle just in case TJ's suddenly stops carrying it, as is their wont with many of my favorite products.


Something I vaguely plan to cook someday: I have no immediate plans to bake, because my freezer is still crammed with rhubarb coffee cake, orange and almond polenta cake, and half a recipe of uncooked dough for digestive biscuits. And yet I am longing to bake J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's Best Chocolate Chip Cookies, and now-ish is the time to do it so I can use up my chocolate before the weather gets too hot. Otherwise I seem to have switched into summer eating mode. I've got little multicolored tomatoes that aren't bad for out of season, and some ricotta to eat them with, and various salady things, and tons of pasta because whenever I see decent pasta on sale I buy multiple packages. I still have a piece of Spanish-style chorizo to use in something, and some calf's liver in the freezer, and chicken bones that should go into stock, and etc. etc. I want to try as much as possible to just do vegetables + pantry and freezer supplies for a while.

I would quite like to eat some Indian food, but cooking it is so labor-intensive that I don't know if a mere craving is sufficient motivation. Hopefully one of these days I'll have a weekend where I want to cook elaborate things, as opposed to one where I want to cook easy things and then watch cooking shows on Netflix and YouTube.

Something I've cooked recently: Inspired by the rhubarb challenge at weekly_food_challenge, I bought some rhubarb and used it to bake this big crumb coffee cake. For once I mostly followed the recipe, apart from substituting plain yogurt for the sour cream and a few high-altitude adjustments. It is completely delicious, as you might expect from anything with that much butter in it.

It's not a glamorous-looking cake and I'm not a good photographer, but have a pic anyway:

( under the cut )

The coffee cake only used half my rhubarb--I bought a lot because I originally planned to make jam with it, but then I discovered that the jam recipe required pectin and I was too lazy to go out and buy some. I didn't want to make another sweet thing, so I decided to use rhubarb as a vegetable. Some thinking about what would be enhanced by rhubarb's sourness quickly led me to curry, specifically a red lentil curry. I couldn't find a recipe that really suited me, so I improvised. I cooked it this morning and ate it for breakfast, because I'm like that.

( Here's what I did )

Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: Today I definitely intend to make a batch of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's digestive biscuits--I meant to do this last weekend but didn't get around to it. (The recipe sounds great, but I admit to also being attracted by his name, which is so quintessentially upper-class-English that I keep picturing him as a young Hugh Grant.) And I'll probably make some potato salad with anchovies and olives from Marcella Hazan's recipe. Three different cuisines in one day, why not?


Something I vaguely plan to cook eventually: Not much. I have a lot of salad fixings, and some frozen tamales that I bought on clearance for super-cheap and which are taking up a lot of freezer space. So the plan for the week is tamales and salads. And I shouldn't need to bake again for ages, since I've still got a ton of last week's orange, almond, and polenta cake in the freezer as well as yesterday's coffee cake, and soon there will be biscuits as well. Although I do have some chocolate that needs using up . . .

On Thursday I accidentally cooked a pot roast. The accidental part was that I had originally intended to cook beef rendang, but then at the last second I found that I didn't have enough lemongrass. Nor did I have the time or energy to go out and buy more lemongrass, but the beef had been thawing in the fridge for a couple of days and needed to be cooked, so I improvised a pot roast based on what I had around (i.e. an onion, a stick of celery, some dried shiitake mushrooms, a few fragments of dried porcini mushrooms I found while looking for the shiitakes, and some sherry). So on Thursday I ate pot roast with mashed potatoes, then on one of the intervening days had some leftover pot roast over pasta, and tonight I made a sort of cottage pie with the remaining pot roast topped with the leftover potatoes. I was amused to realize it was in fact the same meal as on Thursday, only upside down. (But for some reason the pie tasted better than the original pot roast + potatoes. Maybe it's true that stews and braises get better--within reason--after they've been around a while?)

I still want to make beef rendang, but now I have no beef. I'll need to wait for beef chuck to go on sale again, I guess. Or beef short ribs, if I'm incredibly lucky. It's a dish I've wanted to try for years, in part because, while I love the idea of braised beef, I have seldom loved the thing itself. But to my taste it's very hard to go wrong with coconut milk and spices.

Speaking of braised beef, a while back I picked up some beef cheeks on sale. They're in the freezer, and I'm thinking of cooking them for Thanksgiving. Anyone have ideas for how to cook them that are more exciting than the usual "stew them in wine or beer" sort of thing? (I don't think they're suitable for beef rendang because they require v.v. long cooking.)

In other cooking news, I think I might try baking an apple pie on my next days off.

Today I cooked the pork and kimchi stir-fry I mentioned before. SO GOOD. I've never used gochujang before, but now I want it in everything.

A few notes: I halved the recipe, although I probably used about a cup of kimchi, in part because I like kimchi and in part because the original recipe calls for such a large amount of meat to a small amount of kimchi that I do wonder if it's been adapted a little for western tastes. Oh, and I ended up using a whole onion even in the halved recipe because I hate using half an onion. (The problem is the other half. No matter how well you wrap it, it will tend to be stinky and will also dry out quickly. And I can't just throw away perfectly good food.) I omitted the bell pepper and jalapenos.

I used pork loin because that's what I had around (but I'll bet it's even better with pork belly). Because pork loin cooks fast, I changed the order of the steps. I cooked the onion first on fairly high heat until it had softened and was barely beginning to brown, then added the pork, then the kimchi when the pork seemed about half cooked, and the carrot and green onion in the last minute of cooking.

And I am eating the delicious result, along with recipe and a cucumber salad dressed with rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and sugar, as I type this. It's spicy but by no means too spicy for my taste (and I used the full amount of gochujang, plus extra kimchi as I said). The chiles are balanced by the rice, of course, and by the complexity of the sauce which has sweet and tart flavors as well. Seriously, this is the best thing I've eaten in quite a while.

Something I've cooked recently: Lack of cash means I'm relying on things I had on hand. This can have the pleasant side-effect of making me cook more creatively. Today I improvised a tagine-ish chicken dish.

( click here to read more )

I hadn't meant to bake because it's been hot here, but then I needed bread, so yesterday I baked a loaf of the four-grain pot boule I like, which also handily used up the last of my bread flour.

While I was at it, I made some peanut butter and chocolate chip brownies. Recipe under the cut is from the Bon Appetit Cookbook, ed. Barbara Fairchild, 2006.

( Recipe )

So now in my freezer I have a bunch of brownies, plus about a quarter of the orange cake from the other week, and a few brownies and a bit of orange cake in the fridge for more immediate consumption. The downside of baking for one is that you really have to stick to recipes that can be frozen and stored (a full-sized cake filled with whipped cream and fresh fruit, say, would just go to waste) but the upside is that you end up with a freezer full of tasty sweet things to be eaten as the mood strikes you.


Something I have definite plans to cook in the near future: Not until after payday, but I want to try this pork and kimchi stir-fry soon, since I have 3/4 of a jar of kimchi that's a little too fermented to eat raw (for my taste) and therefore is perfect to cook with. Last week I used some of the kimchi in an improvised stir-fried rice noodle dish, and it was very tasty.


Something I'm idly thinking about cooking someday: It's a little early yet but I'm craving summer foods like sweet corn and, if I can manage to get some, good tomatoes. And peaches. The peaches here are seldom good enough to eat raw, in my opinion, but they make a perfectly nice clafouti or cobbler. Oh, and I'm in the mood (again) for potato salad with blue cheese and bacon, which is the most delicious thing in the universe and which I might eat with bratwurst, since I've been craving something hotdoggy. (Basic recipe for the potato salad: Cut some bacon into small pieces and fry it up until crisp, then set the pieces aside. Cut some red potatoes into bite-sized pieces and boil until tender. While they're boiling, mash up some room temperature creamy blue cheese with a bit of mayonnaise and yogurt. Slice some green onions thinly. When the potatoes are done, drain them and leave them in the colander until they're lukewarm, not hot. Stir them into the blue cheese mix and sprinkle in the green onions and bacon pieces.)