Our friend Walter recently brought over a portfolio of his paintings which we enjoyed at our Devotional Meeting. Most of the acrylics were part of an experiment Walter did about 10 years ago. Since then, Walter has had a stroke and must relearn some of the procedures of his craft. It is poignant, listening to his enthusiasm for his art, knowing that he must work even harder now to regain lost skills. However, the enthusiasm and joy are still there, making our visits so special.

I thought I'd try to get back into some of my drawing and painting, so I hunted through my things to find the 'old bridge in China' I'd started about two years ago. I looked through all my drawers, the closets, the old sketchbooks, cleaning them out as I went along. By the end of my search I hadn't found any old unfinished drawing, but I did discover things I'd forgotten I had, like my mother's old passport, her driving license from Germany, old report cards and test scores from my childrens' school, and a nest of old letters from my dad. It was so enjoyable becoming reacquainted with all these old momentos.

We are in the process of getting ready for Baha'i Pilgrimage, securing flights, making hotel reservations. We arrive in Haifa, Israel mid-April for an 11-day visit and will stay in one of the little German Templar dwellings along Ben Gurion Avenue.

The Haddad Guest House offers wonderful accommodations, a little kitchen where we can cook meals, and is a 15 minute walk from the gardens on Mt. Carmel. It is surrounded by little cafes and restaurants with outdoor tables for visiting and relaxing. When we discussed what we wanted for accommodations, we didn't want the Holiday Inn experience in Haifa, which is something we could get here. We wanted to stay in one of the old stone buildings nestled in the hub of the city, even if comfort levels were compromised. I think we've found just the right place!

I've brought home some books on Israel, one of which is the Insight Guide to Israel by Brian Bell. I like the pictures, and the depth. It explains the cultural mix of the people - Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, Israeli Arabs, Orthodox Jews, Secular Jews, and the Zionist Movement. Another book, by Doughty/El Aydi is "Gaza: Legacy of Occupation - A Photographers Journey" features the people of Canada Camp. I hope someday that all areas in Israel will be totally integrated, so there is no separation and exclusivity - people learning to appreciate cultural differences without conflict and willing to share the same neighborhoods together.

Yes, I've been cookin'. I made two beautiful rounds of cheese, one from goat's milk, the other from raw cow's milk. The one on the left is laced with a small amount of turmeric, to give color. Both loaves have chives and seeds, sun-dried tomatoes, and a little walnut coating.

I used my cheeses on a home-made flatbread called 'Naan', making several large pizzas.

Naan is so easy to make, so flavorful and soft, like a puff of air.

This is a corn-tomato succotash, using berbere, an Ethiopian blend. It is baked with a corn-chip/crushed pumpkin and squash seed topping.

I cooked barley in left-over whey from cheese-making and added some of my goat cheese on top.

I've achieved an understanding of how to regulate the consistency of yogurt. I wanted to get a texture that was super-smooth yet ultra-firm, so it could hold its shape in a crepe. With a few experiments, I prepared a wonderful huckleberry-kumkwat crepe using yogurt rather than cream cheese. I made a huckleberry sauce for the topping, featuring crushed pecans and a light crackle-crisp texture that complimented the sweet softness of the yogurt inside. I served these huckleberry crepes for breakfast on Saturday.

This is my first crop of the year - fenugreek seedlings. I've been pulling them up, washing them, and adding them to salads. They have a unique pungent taste which, when chopped, also enhances scrambled eggs.

I wanted to drive up to Seattle last weekend, to visit Pike's Place Market, but George wasn't eager for that, saying it is too touristy. So he took me to Trader Joe's (I just wanted a Market experience), and the place was packed, jammed with people. We ran into our old neighbors and had a nice chat, but I cleared outta there so fast, just knowing that the longer we stayed the more we'd spend! I bought a special sweet lemon that when sliced is stunningly refreshing (my friend Karen recommends it), some 'pasteurized' whole milk (not the ultra-pasteurized which seems to be everywhere so it can retain absurd shelf-life standards. Dead milk, I told George. You can't make cheese or yogurt out of it. Nothing happens.)

And an Armenian flat-bread, Lavash, which I hope to make next week.

I 'got lost' exploring Flickr shots featuring Lavash, and found another bread Romal, or Barbari, which is made all over Iran. It can be purchased at a neighborhood bakery, but in many rural households, it is made daily. This bread has a boiled soda-flour wash that is pasted on top of the loaf before it is baked, resulting in a beautiful glaze. Pieces are broken off during the meal, mopping up stews and gravies. A good bread for hot winter soups, too.

Just a Little of This 'n' That

This week was a flood of activity, with bread-baking, cheese-making, and yogurt experiments. Pictured above: Goat Cheese with Chives and Walnuts.

After I learned how easy it was to make my own cheese I figured I could just as well learn how to make yogurt. The experiments proved amusing: I made something better than my usual store-bought brand of plain yogurt, Organic Nancy's, and something almost as good as my favorite honey yogurt by Greek Gods. So home-made it shall be from now on.

It is really quite simple to make yogurt:

Heat one quart of organic whole milk in the top of a double boiler.

After it has reached 180 degrees, when it begins to froth, remove from heat.
Cool the milk down to 112 degrees by immersing it in a cold-water bath.
Add 1/2 cup powdered milk to the cooled milk, and stir well.
Add a starter culture, either freeze-dried or 2 Tbs of active-culture yogurt.
Mix the starter culture in gently; don't create bubbles.Pour the mixture into two wide-mouth thermoses, and let set overnight. Place thermoses in refrigerator with caps off, to cool down.

Be sure the milk mixture is at least 100 degrees. Also warm the inside metal of the thermoses. The incubating temperature inside must remain above 100 degrees for the culture to do it's little dance.

I hope to work in a little more cream in my next batch, so I can achieve an end result like 'Greek God's Yogurt'. It is simply sublime...and mine will get there with practice. I noticed that mine didn't need honey; it was wonderfully smooth and sweet, perhaps because I didn't incubate it over 8 hours. The longer the yogurt incubates, the more tart it becomes.

We like our yogurt with blueberries.

This was the flaxmeal bread I baked on Monday.

A hearty lentil soup made from left-over whey (cheese-making).

Couscous, pine nuts, and vegetables. East-Indian spices.

Sprouted fenugreek for salads. I'm trying to grow a few plants from these sprouts on my windowsill. The seed-packet was four years old, and it still worked!

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Hachapuri Cheese Bread ~ Simply Divine

The Georgian recipe is simple, the bread fantastic! I found a recipe in Nigella Lawson's "Feast" cookbook for Hachapuri, a cheese-bread made with baking soda rather than yeast. The crust is chewy, and the filling is a blend of my home-made goat cheese and ricotta (from the market).

Hachapuri is substantial - holds any filling - so I divided the dough into two loaves and filled them differently. This Hachapuri is filled with cherry pie filling and huckleberries from my freezer. Once filled, I flipped one side over the other and crimped the edges shut.

This is Moroccan Chicken Tagine, simmering with plenty of Madras curry powder, fresh ginger root, sliced onions, garlic, and a blend of oregano, cayenne pepper, turmeric, paprika and cumin. It smells wonderful, has a strong flavor, and is delicious. Tiny Israeli couscous is part of the broth.

Naan is east Indian bread, very easy to make.

This last meal was Kheema Shahzada, also east Indian. Although it doesn't look great in this photo (primarily meat and cashews) it was simply wonderful. The trick to east Indian cooking is to make the curry (the gravy), cook the vegetables as indicated in the proper order, and roast-fry the spices before you add them (except for the Turmeric, which is always added at the end. It's impact doesn't sustain long-term cooking.)

We've had some pretty cold, rainy weather lately....I'm sure all of you have heard about the flooding in Washington state. Interstate 5 is flooded south of Tacoma; Amtrac has been routing busses to Vancouver B.C. and Bellingham. If transportation lines remain blocked for more than a few days many imported goods will get stacked up at the Port of Tacoma, and ships leaving for Asia could risk leaving without their cargo. Container trains headed for Puget Sound ports in yards near Portland have to wait out the rain and floods.

I'm currently reading (among many other things), Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle ~ A Year of Food Life". She asks, "Will North Americans ever have a food culture to call our own? Can we find or make up a set of rituals, recipes, ethics, and buying habits that will let us love our food and eat it too? Some signs point to "yes." Better food - more local, more healthy, more sensible - is a powerful new topic of the American conversation. It reaches from the epicurean quarters of Slow Food convivia to the matter-of-fact Surgeon General's Office; from Farm Aid concerts to school lunch programs. From the rural routes to the inner cities, we are staring at our plates and wondering where that's been. For the first time since our nation's food was ubiquitously local, the point of origin now matters again to some consumers. We're increasingly wary of an industry that puts stuff in our dinner we can't identify as animal, vegetable, mineral, or what."

Kingsolver also adds that the drift away from our agricultural roots is a consequence of migration from the land to the factory, then into a world of regulations and high yields, often with the government intervening to promote growing certain crops, like soybeans and corn. The government wrote rules on commodity subsidies, guaranteeing a supply of cheap corn which was used, among other things, to make high fruit corn syrup - the horrible sweetening used in so many sodas and fruit drinks.

70 percent of all our midwestern agricultural land has shifted gradually into single-crop corn or soybean farms, each one of them highly mechanized production system which are capable of producing 3,900 calories per U.S. citizen per day. That is twice what we need. Kingsolver writes, "And here is the shocking plot twist: as the farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day." That was the job of marketing specialists. Packages and portions got bigger, sugars and fats proliferated. Americans are now feeding a generation of children most of whom will be be afflicted with chronic health issues related to obesity.

Well, I can tell that Kingsolver is exploring the same issues that motivated me to grow my own food in the summertime. I want locally grown, from garden to table ... with no middlemen. Keep the costs down, the flavor up, and enjoy eating good flavorful food.

Old World Wisdom ~ Cheese-Making

I spent last week learning how to make cheese: Researching procedures, talking to the folks at the health-food store about goat's milk, and experimenting with a variety of recipes.

Only a few basic ingredients are necessary, and the procedures are very simple: A gallon of milk, a quart of buttermilk, and vinegar or rennet. Have some cheesecloth and a candy-thermometer on hand. That is all!

Place the milk in a non-reactive kettle, which is then placed in another kettle filled with water. It will act like a double-boiler. Slowly, the milk is heated almost to boiling, then removed from the heat-source. This can be done visually through experience, or with the use of a candy thermometer. I use the thermometer, and prefer to work with pasteurized milk. (Raw milk is available at most health-food stores and makes a better cheese, but there are risks involved that are not worth the worry.)

When the milk has cooled down to 100 degrees, add the rennet or vinegar, and the separation of curds and whey is almost immediate. A thin layer of yellow-green whey remains at the top, and the white curds settle at the bottom. Let this remain undisturbed for several hours on the kitchen counter.

Then place a sterile, double layer of cheese-cloth in a strainer. Pour off the whey and save the curds. They settle into a nice wad in the bottom of the strainer. Pull the cheesecloth ends together and tie up into a bundle. The whey will drain out, leaving the most wonderful curds. This is a time-consuming process, so it is done in the refrigerator - I hang my curds from a spoon handle propped in the refrigerator.

Be sure to save the whey. It is excellent for soups, sauces and gravies. It can be frozen if not immediately used. I used some of mine as the base for a 3-Bean Soup.

At some point you'll want to start twisting the cheesecloth, which extracts more whey. This can be done a number of times, then the soft cheese is ready to be 'seasoned'. Place it in a bowl and cut it up, if necessary, and add salt and seasonings, like chives. Mix it up. Place the cheese back into the cheesecloth, twist it shut so it molds into a shape, and let it cure for several days in the refrigerator. This last step can be fun, if you want to use cheese-molds for a particular design.

My 'Goat Cheese' is seasoned with chives throughout, with a thin scattering of caraway seeds on the outside. It is very rich and creamy, and crumbles like a Feta cheese. I've used this cheese on salads and on bruschetta toasts.

This 'Neufchatel Cheese' has dried, minced apricots throughout and finely crushed walnuts rolled on the outside. This cheese is good on oatcakes and crackers, a beautiful holiday cheese.

My third batch, 'Queso Blanco', is a mild fresh-flavored Latin American cheese. I'll use it with ricotta inside crepes when it has finished curing. (BTW, there are recipes online for ricotta made from left-over whey.)

My sister recently sent me a link featuring well-known chef and scholar Dan Barber. He presents a fascinating challenge to global food production. He not only strives to learn the best ways to grow, harvest and cook food, but contrives to feature old world wisdom with new world technology. Co-Owner and chef of Blue Hill Restaurants, he also owns

Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. He speaks provocatively about the bland taste of many super-market foods:

"...after the uprooting of a thousand years of agrarian wisdom, we chefs have discovered something really terrible — no, not that the agricultural system we help support hurts farmers and devastates farming communities, or that it harms the environment and our health. What we’ve discovered is that the food it produces just doesn’t taste very good. "

I've noticed this when I grocery shop. So many fresh fruits and vegetables just don't have any flavor. Food is packaged and over-handled, tasting like chemicals. When I decided to make cheese it was because I wanted to learn how to do it, but also because I wanted natural cheese without any xanthan gum, locust bean gum, guar gum and other stabilizers...or artificial colors or flavorings. I just wanted simple fresh cheese made 'the old world way'.