Cookies and Hari Merdeka

Today I bring you a reminder of a favorite recipe. These cookies are a success everywhere I take them, not just because their flavor can be adjusted to suit every palate, but because the dough bakes into a crumb that melts away in your mouth. I'm telling you, these unpretentious little treats never disappoint.

Do you know what day it is today? It's Hari Merdeka! Okay, I didn't know what it was either, until today, when I gathered around picnic tables with a smattering of Malaysian students who brought together the most delicious food to celebrate the day of their country's independence. Apparently, the official proclamation of freedom from British colonial rule was delivered on August 31, 1957 .

Over rice, curry, fruit, and chocolate chip ginger cookies rimmed with sesame (there was no way I was cooking Malaysian food for Malaysians!), we enjoyed the warm late summer evening. Not that the intense spices or nibbly grains of rice before us needed any help, but it's undeniable that food always tastes better in good company.

I am so grateful for my Abilene friends, old and new. Wish you could have been here too.

Happy Weekend

Phew, I made it through the first week back in classes and managed to post on this blog three times. I generously rewarded myself with a nap Friday afternoon and an evening with two of my favorite people. Actually, the evening stretched into a late night, including two grocery store runs, plenty of Sondre Lerche, waiting for pita bread dough to rise, sipping away at coffee while matching our personalities with cities and countries, and finally sitting down for dinner at 11:15 P.M.

We tore apart pieces of pita, weighing them down with hummus, and picked away at chunky tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions in a Greek salad, then went to bed.

Today began with coffee mugs around an ever-welcoming dining room table and plenty of giggles and shrieks (girls dominated the company, can you tell?). Our size shrunk, and four of us transitioned to one of Abilene's few coffee shops for conversation and the feeling of hot mugs in our hands.

Shortly after nooon, two old lunch buddies and I sat down together and, with drippy burritos before us, marvelled at the different places and decisions we now faced after one summer apart.

I came back to my familiar apartment that, gratefully, hasn't changed since last semester. The same dear people live here, and the kitchen continues to be the place to bond. Though it's small, three of us crammed around the counter, oven, and stove and made a beautiful, necessary mess.
The sun disappeared early tonight, thanks to the low lying thunderclouds that are hanging over Abilene. Now, I'm about to settle into some studying so that I can make the most of my day tomorrow.

Hope your weekend is slow and peaceful.

Bewitched by Color

I have always been easily bewitched by color. And by color, I really mean any and every color. Whether it makes me cringe or draws me in, I am fascinated by the human attraction to color and lack there of (black and white).

My sophomore year of high school I did a research project on color psychology and played with the idea of going into color/art therapy. Then, junior year I encountered Mark Rothko and have been yearning to see one of his gigantic color block paintings ever since.

I can walk into a store like Anthropologie and be entertained for hours by the fabulous colors and diverse textures on display. And then I can walk into a room made up simply of "shades" of white and want to never leave.

All this brings me back to the color of food. Don't things look ten times more delicious in color? Okay, maybe those who prefer steak or chicken fried steak and potatoes can't agree with me, but every once in a while, aren't you dying for some color on your plate? Thanks to the food my mom raised me on, color is mandatory, and while in Japan this summer, I couldn't help noticing how much people valued attractive looking food, which often meant there was plenty of color.

I was wowed by the pure greenness of this salad dressing before I even tried it on a pile of bright veggies, but I can assure you that my love only grew after tasting its fresh medley of herbs married with maple syrup, mustard, and garlic.

I don't remember where my mom came across this recipe...I think it was a newspaper clipping from several years back, but she adapted it into our family recipe collection and dubbed it "Lael's Tangy Garden Salad Dressing."

Without an herb garden, I always get a bit anxious when I acquire this many fresh herbs, hating to see them go bad, but this recipe is so worth it. Just look at your leftovers as a reason to make dill bread or snip chives into tomorrow morning's omelet, or make a batch of hummus with a generous drizzle of parsley oil (hm, possible future posts?!). I mean, having plenty of herbs on hand is hardly something to complain about.Tangy Garden Salad Dressing

2 green onions, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled
2 Tablespoons pure maple syrup
4 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon chopped fresh chives
1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley
1 /2 cup olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt

Combine all ingredients in a blender and puree until smooth.

Feel free to adjust according to taste once you've given it your first good whirl. I had mint in my fridge, so I threw some of that in and added more parsley and dill until it was just how I liked it. Oh, and poppy seeds. Why not? I have an almost full jar of poppy seeds that's not disappearing anytime soon, so I shook about a teaspoon into the dressing. Yum.

Not Quite What I Was Hoping For

My habit of simply scanning recipes finally caught up with me. My eyes grazed the first few steps of my latest baking endeavor, then I scrolled through each picture and jumped in, thinking that the sooner I started the better because it was likely going to take me till 10:00 P.M. to pull this bread out of the oven. If only I had known that my rising and shrinking ball of dough would keep me awake until 2 A.M....And yet I can't quite get upset with these squares of focaccia bread sitting on my kitchen counter like I think I deserve to be.

I was threatening to call the entire thing a flop this morning but got enough compliments on it that I'm trying to keep an open mind and see the whole long ordeal as a learning experience.

Do I still sound a bit disgruntled? Well, the issue isn't really with the length of time it took to make the focaccia -- I love the process of kneading, waiting, rising, kneading again... -- though I wish I had sat down with a calculator and figured out that starting my ferment at 5:00 P.M. would not allow me to be in bed by midnight. The issue is more with how difficult it was to work with the dough and how off my converted measurements felt.

You see, I selected pastry flour for this recipe because Fanny over at Foodbeam had used a superfine French flour and it seemed like a good substitute. However, I did not realize until I was researching flour types on Cook's Illustrated halfway through the process that I had not made the finest choice involving a yeast-based recipe. Also, I failed to notice on the flour packaging that "whole grain" was written vertically on the side of the label. I assumed I had bought a white pastry flour and was planning on using half white and half wheat flours. When it dawned on me that I was already dealing with a whole grain flour, I did not have any white flour in my cupboards to temper the density of the dough.

So, what I ended up with this morning for breakfast was a thick slab of flat bread, slightly sweetened, and flecked with apricots and pine nuts. For a whole wheat bread, it actually had a decent crumb to it and a few humble air bubbles inside, despite the fact that it was more willing to rip than stretch as I worked through the last stages of folding around 11:30 at night.

The thing is, I was fixated on this recipe from the moment I saw it on Foodbeam and wanted to take a stone fruit approach, still maintaining a nuance of olive oil and brown sugar. I ended up being far too modest with my deposit of fruit on top, though at the time it looks like I had covered the surface quite generously, which is another thing I would fix.

All that to say, I stand before you humbled and educated by this experience, and not at all at a loss because, even though I didn't make the focaccia of my dreams, I have had a homemade gift to pass around to friends today, plus leftovers to nibble on as a hearty breakfast bread for the next few days.

With all Fanny's helpful steps and descriptions, this recipe is certainly worth a try, and after all her raving about Dan Lepard, I made sure to add two of his books to my ever growing Amazon wish list.

Fruit Focaccia Bread Recipe

Perfectly Fit

I have always loved receiving recipes from people. A well loved recipe really is a perfect gift. And that's one thing I've come to enjoy so much about the food blog world. Each recipe posted is a conversation as well as a gift to others.

Though this recipe wasn't handed directly to me, I feel like it was. Simply reading the title of Deb's post at Smitten Kitchen, I knew I had been handed something good. It was a recipe perfectly fit for me...and, of course, everyone else out there who shares my good taste.

The thing about fresh herbs is they can keep a recipe simple while making it extraordinary. Take for example, Molly's three ingredient lunch featuring snipped fresh thyme. Or the basil leaves tucked into my broiled figs. In this dish, the fresh mint combines beautifully with a few other simple ingredients and makes for a quick, delicious lunch or side at dinner (though I would have been completely satisfied with it as a light dinner if I could have gotten my hands on some crusty bread to mop up the leftover capers and mint bits in my bowl).

Obviously, I was sold on these flavors from the start, so I didn't tamper with the recipe at all and was completely satisfied. The vinegar was strong, which I never mind, the olive oil was smooth and fragrant, the mint dominant to a perfect degree, the capers crunchy, and the eggplant soft enough and subtle enough to let the marinade's flavors shine through. I am looking forward to the leftovers sitting in my fridge, begrudgingly waiting to be eaten at lunch tomorrow.

Marinated Eggplant with Capers and Mint Recipe.

Welcome to Texas

I couldn’t help it. As our headlights illuminated the “Welcome to Texas” sign on the side of the dark, lonely highway, I let out the words dear Lord, help me. We had just stepped foot into the state I have been vacillating between dreading and anticipating during the past month. Confused butterflies have constantly been in my stomach.

I get this way each time I come back to Abilene, and I don’t know why I build it up to be such a difficult task for myself. But, right now, as my sleep-deprived body is sitting in the back seat of yet another car on yet another stretch of highway, I’m quite looking forward to my bed in Abilene, and I’m getting closer by the minute. Even though it sits in an empty bedroom with scratchy white walls and a desk with a summer’s worth of dust, and I’ll need to put stilts back underneath the legs and tuck sheets around the corners of its mattress, it’s the most familiar bed I know.

Along with the image of my bed come visions of faces, faces I have missed dearly in my time away, faces I only get to see when I’m in Abilene.

And notice the picture below? Yes, that is my window that I got to come back to. The view of tangled branches, whether dressed in leaves or stripped of green, is a little bit of beauty the Lord has given me to get me through.

Road Trip: Part 2

I had no idea what I was getting into. When I heard we were camping one night at a national park and going to be doing some hiking, I thought, great, isn’t that what road trips are for, anyway?

Well, I walked into Mesa Verde National Park, completely unaware that this place was so much more than hiking trails and nice views. In fact, I was surprised to encounter at least as many Europeans as Americans on our tours because, as a resident of this country, I had never heard about the ancient cliff dwellings located in the alcoves below this expansive mesa, so I was surprised to find it such an international attraction.

Without getting too deeply into everything I saw and learned, let’s just say they were pretty amazing, and the whole experience made me even more regretful about my lack of knowledge of Native American history. Oh, and you should definitely go see them too.

We spent a freezing cold night in the park’s campgrounds and, after much needed showering, headed toward Durango, Colorado for a mid-afternoon lunch.

We all decide we liked Colorado very much, and kissed it a loving goodbye as we passed over New Mexico’s border and turned east toward our ultimate destination of Wichita Falls, Texas.

During this leg of the trip we resumed a neglected task of finding cowboy hats to wear in the car, and stopped at a dollar store and mall, but had no luck. By this point, the high of road tripping was beginning to fade, anyway, and I was happy to save a couple bucks. We kept our pact to stop for a midnight meal, though, and pulled into a Denny’s in Tucumcari, New Mexico, around 11: 30pm. The whole idea was a fun one, but the cheap, greasy food weighed heavy in my stomach as I drifted off to sleep in the backseat, hugging a massive sleeping bag to me and tucking my legs up against the car door.

At five o’clock in the morning, it was my turn to drive, and, minus a few yawns, I was refreshed enough to take us all the way to our destination, my friend’s parent’s home outside of Wichita Falls.

I’m sure you’ll understand, when I say the rest of the story is we promptly crawled into bed and slept until noon.

[The pictures above and below are from a gorgeous sunset we caught at Park Point in Mesa Verde on Friday night.]