Button, button, who's got the button?

I finally got around to poking through my vintage button supply and sewing some on my raglan wrap (rav link), finished just before Thanksgiving and previously blogged about here and here. I didn't have enough of the ones I liked best, but I'm perfectly happy with the plastic sunburst ones I ended up using. I still didn't have quite enough of those either, to be honest, but snuck in a plain one at the top where it's hidden by the collar.

The only problem was that the shanks on a couple of them were worn through.

Two coats of superglue gel over the break left them as good as new though.

And I love, love, love the finished product, with the front worn either open...

or closed. I wore it to work three days this week over long-sleeve t-shirts and would have been perfectly happy to wear it every single day.

Mushroom tarts

These were a riff on one of my favorite Deborah Madison recipes for tomato/olive/rosemary tarts. Since I had to miss an Easter brunch to which I was supposed to bring stuffed mushrooms for nine people, I had kind of a lot of mushrooms to use up. I'd always meant to play around with other fillings for this dough and I had a friend coming over for dinner last Saturday, so I put these together. I use all all-purpose flour when making the tomato variation, but thought that the strong, earthy mushroom flavors would benefit from some whole wheat flour in the crust. They were fantastic both hot out of the oven and at room temperature for lunch at work and they kept pretty well. I made them on Saturday and just ate the last one today, Thursday.
I don't really have a recipe for the filling, but what I did, more or less, was: brown an onion in butter, then saute about a pound and a half of finely chopped mushrooms with a splash of wine and some thyme, then stir in a spoonful or two of sour cream to bind it together and salt to taste. I happened to have some olives around and chopped up about 1/3 c. to put on top.

Galette dough
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 t. salt
12 T cold, unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1/3–1/2 c. ice water

Preheat the oven to 425F. Mix flour and salt together. Cut in the butter with a pastry cutter, two knives, or your hands, leaving some pea-sized pieces. Sprinkle the ice water over by the tablespoonful and toss until you can bring the dough together into a ball. Press it into a disc and refrigerate for 15 minutes.

Divide the dough into 6 equal parts and roll or pat into a circle roughly 8" in diameter. Spoon 1/6th of the filling into the center and spread out to about an inch from the edge. Sprinkle chopped olives on top of the mushrooms and drizzle with walnut or olive oil. Fold the edges of the dough over the mushrooms, creasing every inch or so. Bake until crust is golden, about 20–25 minutes.

I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Saturday morning, mostly because I was hoping that their lilacs would be blooming (and also because it's free admission from 10–12). They weren't, but plenty of other stuff was.

I was particularly intrigued by the variety of green flowers in bloom:

I liked that this tree looks like it's draped in cobwebs. This is the tree Miss Havisham would picnic under.

These seem to be the only cherry blossom-related photos I took. Because I'm, like, so dark.

Pretty color! And in focus!

Going out and looking at things without a particular agenda is one of my favorite things to do. It refills my creative coffers in a way that nothing else quite does; I actually figured out a way around a problem in one of my writing projects while I was walking around. And if I hadn't been there, I would have missed the way the sun was hitting these blossoms. And that would have been a pity.

Rais(ing vegetables on) the roof

Yesterday, as part of a Crop Mob, I spent four hours doing some work at Eagle St. Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint. It's exactly what it sounds like — a farm on the roof of a warehouse in an industrial corner of Brooklyn, right on the East River. The soil is 4–7" deep up there and they're growing pretty much everything, plus introducing chickens and bees in the next few weeks. I used to live about a block and a half away and moved just before they started getting a lot of publicity last summer. I've been paying attention in a vague kind of way since then and was pretty excited to have an opportunity to get up there and see the operation for myself.
There were a lot of volunteers, maybe 25 or so, so we split into small groups and I started off sorting through rubble at an empty lot next door to find whole bricks that they were going to use for something (planters, rumor had it). I didn't have my camera on me at that point, but it felt a bit like being in the opening scene of Law + Order, like we were about to unearth a body at any moment. No one I was working with thought that was funny.
Then we went up to the roof and planted a couple of rows of lettuce. The soil that they use on the roof is mixed with a fair bit of gravel and shale to keep it less dense and, therefore, less heavy, so we brushed the gravel off the surface and made it as level as possible before making the furrows and winnowing in the seeds. Then I went back downstairs and helped assemble trays for the beehives.
I've been having major garden envy lately, since half of the people I follow on twitter and/or whose blogs are read are in a planning/planting frenzy. I loved getting a look at the place and getting some dirt under my nails, and I left kind of in awe of Annie Novak, the farmer. She was doing a million things at once all day — herding volunteers, mixing seeds, teaching people how to do all kinds of things, checking on the people who were working with the compost, being gorgeous and warm and friendly, talking about why she had chosen the particular seeds she had and how she balances the plants that take nitrogen from the soil versus the ones that put it back in, and paying attention to and signing off on every stage of everything that happened. Completely amazing.

Mmmm, fleshy petioles....

I love rhubarb. I've loved rhubarb since I was a wee Stephanie who used to sit at our kitchen table every spring, dipping the end of a stalk from our backyard rhubarb patch in a little dish of sugar, gnawing on it, dipping again, and working my way up. I was utterly fascinated — still am, really, if I take the time to think about it — by the fact that the very same plant is both poisonous and delicious. My adult self loves the very strict seasonality of it, that it's not really popular enough for anyone to bother making it available year-round, and so its scarcity makes me appreciate it more fully. I also love the flavor; even more than a sweet or salt tooth, I have a pretty serious taste for all things tart and sour. I even like it raw, a few thin slices to whet my appetite if I'm chopping some up for another purpose.

Michelle and I had a bit of a get-out-of-my-head moment last week when she emailed to say that she was thinking about infusing some vodka with rhubarb and I had been thinking about the same thing. I didn't have any vodka at home and wasn't going to be anywhere where I could get the really cheap stuff — plastic jug and all — and I found this recipe for rhubarb syrup that I thought would be nice to have on hand for mixing with seltzer or making whatever the rhubarb equivalent of a kir royale is.

Also, it really couldn't be easier: boil some rhubarb with sugar and water for 20 minutes, then strain.
The solids that are left behind after straining were a little flat-tasting, I thought, though a splash of vanilla and the juice of half a lemon fixed that easily enough. You could use it anywhere you'd use jam or fruit butter, but I can't really imagine doing anything but pairing it with the rest of the ricotta ice cream in my freezer, because HOLY HAMMER OF THOR THIS WAS GOOD.
I haven't tried the syrup in anything yet (no seltzer in the house last night), so I can't really say anything about it other than it's super sweet and I'd probably halve the sugar next time, but look how gorgeous it is:

Fun with math

+

=

Best to-do list ever.

A little ambitious, sure.

I knew I was going to be spending most of the weekend inside, working on a freelance editing project, and that I wouldn't have much time to do anything else, but I cooking actually works really well with this kind of project. I need to get up regularly to stretch and make sure I'm focusing my eyes on things that are more than 18" in front of my face, so checking on something in the oven or mixing up a quick batch of proto-ice cream is the perfect thing to get me out of the chair. Plus, I wanted to make sure I had plenty of good things to eat to make up for working all weekend.

The ricotta ice cream came about because of a conversation with some friends over Michelle's outstanding homemade strawberry ice cream. We were talking about our favorite places in the city to get ice cream (fwiw, Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory and Il Laboratorio del Gelato are mine) and I mentioned that I had heard about a combination dry cleaners/gelato place in Bensonhurst that was supposed to be amazing. It turned out that it was actually a tanning salon/gelato place and that it's now closed, but my friend Rose's response to that post ("Ricotta ice cream! OMG") got me thinking. And then it got me googling. And then it got me, well, stirring and whisking; there's no actual cooking involved.
Ricotta Ice Cream
adapted from The Traveler's Lunchbox

1 c. heavy cream
7–9 T sugar
1 lb-ish container of the best ricotta you can find (the stuff I got at Sahadi's was a little under a pound, made somewhere nearby, and listed as its ingredients 'whole milk, starter, trace of salt')
1 c. milk
zest from 1 lemon
1/3 c. honey
1/4 t. cinnamon (you could increase this, even double it; I didn't want it to overwhelm the ricotta, but I couldn't even taste it)

Whisk the cream until soft peaks form, adding sugar gradually. In a separate bowl, whisk the other ingredients together, then fold the cream into the ricotta mixture gently. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight. In the morning, stir gently if the cream has risen to the top, and run through your ice cream maker.

I was really, really happy with how this turned out. And the couple of people who stopped by over the course of the weekend who tasted it were also pretty pleased. It tastes like a frozen Italian cheesecake. The ricotta is pleasantly grainy on the tongue, the honey is a gentle, earthy-sweet undertone, and the little bits of lemon brighten it right the hell up.

Saturday afternoon, I roasted a chicken, which is something I've never managed to do well — until now. I was always so paranoid about cooking it all the way though that it ended up drying out. I followed Deb's directions for the Zuni Cafe chicken and even though the skin totally ripped both times I had to flip the bird over, it was easily the best chicken I'd ever made, all burnished skin and succulent, rosemary-scented meat. A friend stopped by for a late lunch after her shift at the Coop and we did a pretty good job of ripping the carcass to pieces after I snapped a quick photo.
Later in the evening, I took the remaining meat off the bones and made stock, which, honestly, is one of the homiest, coziest, making-love-out-of-nothing-at-all activities I know of. I've never thought my homemade stock was anything special when I've done it in the past (bone-to-water ratio off, maybe?), but this batch was kind of out of this world. I'm putting it in the freezer for now, but I think there's going to be some Very Serious Risotto in my near future.

I didn't make the stuffed mushrooms, since they were going to be my contribution to an Easter brunch I had to miss because I was still working on Sunday, but book club is meeting at my place this week, so I'll make them then. Ditto the rhubarb upside-down cake. I did make the hibiscus lemonade though, sort of. I had picked up some dried hibiscus at Sahadi's and brewed some strong tea from it (1/2 c. hibiscus to 3 c. water), added 2/3 c. lemon juice (three lemons' worth), 1/4 c. sugar and filled the rest of the pitcher with water. It's more just like lemony hibiscus tea, but very tasty and somewhere between neutral and very good for you. I didn't take a dedicated picture of it, but you can see it in the photo of my workspace here:

In addition to chicken and ice cream, I like beverages and tidy piles of paper.