Monthly Archives: May 2013

Rhubarb Strawberry Muffins

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IMG_2029On a drive back from Asheville, my food and photography consultant Grace and I were discussing something new to do with muffins, or something new to do with rhubarb, or both–I’m not quite sure which. Either way, it was a lively discussion, and this recipe is the result.

 

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups flour (Whole wheat, white, both, as you wish)
  • ¾ cup of sugar
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • ½ tsp cardamom
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ½ cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup diced rhubarb
  • 1 cup chopped fresh strawberries
  • ½ cup rolled oats
  • ½ cup walnuts
  • 2 cup cooked sweet potato (I like it baked, but I assume canned will do)
  • 3 eggs
  • ½ cup buttermilk or Greek yoghurt
  • ½ cup oil (it might work without this; I liked making it with coconut oil.)
  • 2 tsp. vanilla
  • ½ cup brewer’s yeast (optional)

 

Step 1, Prepare Ye the way: Preheat the oven to 350°, chop the rhubarb and the strawberries, either grease the muffin tins or put in the cupcake liners (I usually spray a little canola oil in the bottom of these to make things come out easier). I get 2 dozen medium sized muffins out of this mix.

Step 2, sifting the dry ingredients: In one bowl crumble up the brown sugar, then sift (mix if you don’t have a sifter) in the flour, white sugar, baking soda, cardamom, and salt. Mix thoroughly.

Step 3, mixing the wet ingredients: In another bowl, mix the oatmeal, rhubarb, strawberries, walnuts, sweet potato, eggs, buttermilk, oil, and vanilla.

Step 4, combining the big mess: Add the dry ingredients to the wet ones and mix well. You want to make sure the individual bits rhubarb & berry are each coated to keep them from getting too clumpy. The consistency should be much firmer than batter, but a little more liquid than cookie dough.IMG_2026

Step 5, baking: Fill two dozen or so muffin tins. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. See how they look. Stick a toothpick in one and see if it comes out battery.

Step 6, sharing: I think that muffins are an ideal sharing food. Sure, they are a great breakfast to hand to a family member as she rushes out the door, late for work, but they are even better to share for a liesurely breakfast with black coffee or strong tea sweetened by conversation. Of course, they work just as well for an afternoon tea. As always, they are a great gift to share at work, or to mail, or otherwise sneak to lovely people.(Note: if your only means of postage is messages in old bottles, they are a bit awkward.)

A Guide to Philosophers Here at the Bistro

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After Wode Toad locked him out of the building last week, Chef Robert got a little behind schedule and asked me to pick up some of the slack. He tasked me with putting together a guide to some of the Philosophers we serve here at the Bistro. Customers have been asking, for instance, what Philosopher goes best with a wine spritzer. Especially because we’re so eclectic in the ingredients we use – insisting only that our Philosophers be organic and free of blue mold – we thought this guide would be a big help. Here’s the first installment:

We especially seek out Philosophers whose heads can also be used as sundials.

  • Name: Socrates. Just Socrates.
  • Qualities: Refined and classic, with a mild hemlock aftertaste.
  • Pair with: Rationality, questioning authority, figs.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at Hegel’s fondness for metaphors involving owls. They haven’t studies this picture.

  • Name: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (in the American South he would have been called Billy Fred).
  • Qualities: Thick and hard to cut, like a well aged cheese, alleged to induce Naziism.
  • Pair with: Any counter-fascist agent, sardines.

 Portrait of Cousin It as a Young Man.

  • Name: Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Qualities: Literary styling, anti-rationalism, alleged to induce Naziism.
  • Pair with: Penicillin.

Only Charlie Chaplain could make that mustache work.

  • Name: Martin Heidegger
  • Qualities: A crisp, authentic taste. Actual Naziism – no allegations necessary.
  • Pair with: Atonement, Pepto Bismol.

  • Name: Hannah Arendt
  • Qualities: Diagnosing totalitarianism, never banal.
  • Pair with: Chateau Le Pin Pomerol 1999. (We’re usually out. Try the spritzer!)

Ah! The teeths. They burns us. 

  • Name: Joel Osteen
  • Qualities: Perky, hair can also be used as scouring pad.
  • Pair with: Prosperity gospel, brylcreem.

Putting the deep in Deepak since sometime a little after 1947.

  • Name: Deepak Choprah
  • Qualities: The warm feeling you get from a little too much wine or just before you freeze to death.
  • Pair with: Discontinued – too many customers thought they were ordering the Tupac (exactly as NSFW as you would probably expect).

Photo credits: Some Greek dude,  probably some German dude, some romantic dude – most likely a Czech or something, you gotta think some Nazi, right?, almost surely a beatnik, I’m guessing Deepak.

Turing, Touring, Turn, Turn, Turn.

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One of the most important ideas of the 20th Century came from a rather odd but terribly brilliant man, the Cambridge Mathematician and Philosopher Alan Turing.WT brownies2

Normally, I would spend a few minutes telling you stories about Turing, but Wode Toad is holding a tray of brownies with peanut butter cream frosting hostage. (Thanks, Jodie—we stand in awe to your magical skills. The lemon bars last month were great, too)

The problem this mathematician was facing was how to design a machine that could answer your mathematical questions. His solution was to rethink the problem. Most of us would have thought of trying to program answers into the machine, so that you had a huge number of answers like “2+2=4.”
The problem is that the amount of information to be programmed in is not just huge, it’s prohibitive.

TuringIn a paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem,” Turing rethought the problem. Imagine a movable machine and a long line of squares laid out on paper strip. We call this imaginary device a Turing Machine. Put the machine at the second square, and teach it that “+2” mean to travel two squares, which put it at the fourth. Put another way, what the machine needs to know is not that “2+2=4,” but that if it is on second and somebody yells “Plus Two!” it needs to hustle two spaces, which puts it on the four.
If, instead of the infinite line of squares, we can allow the machine to have an astronomically high number of binary combinations, we have the basis of modern computing.

The key here is this: don’t think of the machine as knowing an infinite amount of little things; it only needs to know one thing, one very important thing.
It needs to know what to do next.

At roughly the same time and the same place, the philosopher WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein applied a similar idea to how language works. Languages are not logical representational structures; to use a language is to understand that when Wode Toad mutters “Order Up,” my response should be to finish the presentation (he ignores that) and get it to one of our guests.
What I need to know is what to do next.

This week, I have discovered that this fundamental question seems to be vexing a large number of my close friends, and the Bistro’s staff and patrons, and seems to be at the core of my own perplexity. What to do next?

Passage DifficileOur world keeps changing, and all the plans and dreams we thought we have keep shifting. Everybody I know seems to be either at the beginning of adulthood looking for how to start or in the middle looking to start anew. The ground beneath our feet, the markets and workplaces, even the professions themselves seem to be at least shifting, and possibly evaporating. This next week, a brand new crop of graduates will be cast out into the world (geworfenheit, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth).
The challenge is knowing what to do next.

We are all in the uncomfortable position of knowing we must move, Shakespeare & Co stairsbut not knowing to where. We found ourselves thrown, but are still figuring out where to go, perhaps even still spinning and trying to figure out which direction to stand up. If we knew what we wanted, we might be able to figure out how to get there, but we don’t even know that.

At this point in my weekly entrée, I wish I had an answer to neatly tie this up, serve you dessert and coffee, and send you back into the night like the proverbial existentialist sparrow.

I wish I did.

I do not.

At best, I have two observations.

Remember that there is the dream and there is the plan.
The dream is not the plan, but may shape it. Since the plan may or may not fail, you had might as well make the dream big. The dream will tell you what you want, so don’t be a Jeff-says-I-can’t with your dreams. Plans will always be cut down to size by the actual circumstances, reality will force you to improvise, so don’t begin by cutting the dream down to size.
Let it be grand and glorious and very much you.

You don’t need to have figured out everything, just what to do next.

…and if you can’t figure out what’s next, sometimes if you just start you will figure out where you are going before you get there.
It’s how I got to the Philosophy Bistro.

We don’t know how Wode Toad got here; I think he is a fugitive from something, but is quite vague. He also denies having manipulated the Asian currency markets, whatever that means.

Myself, I haven’t figuredRoan Mountain Walk 013 out the next step. I seem to have become boxed in a dead-end, or rather trapped like a wolf in a pit. So, I have decided to take a step back. This summer, I will be backtracking to the city I lived in for a big chunk of the 70s, Tübingen in Germany. Once upon a time, I assumed that I would either live there or in New York or London. Maybe the open road will give me an idea of where I am going before I get there.

One dream I have accomplished though, I managed to become who I 44signatuream, and I have had the good luck to be,  your affectionate friend,

White Bean and Rosemary Dip

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White Bean DipMy daughter acquired this recipe while staying at and working with the community at Koinonia Farms in Americus Georgia. They are a wonderful group of people, and also grow great pecans.

 

 

Ingredients:

  • ¼ cup olive oil
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
  • 2 cans (15 oz. each) white beans (Great Northern, cannellini, or white kidney beans) or the equivalent of dried cooked and drained.
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 3 sprigs fresh rosemary, rinsed
  • 2 large or 3 small tomatoes, chopped
  • Basalmic vinegar and freshly ground pepper to taste

 

Step 1, in the beginning: All origin stories should begin with olive oil, onions and garlic. Heat the olive oil sauté the onions until semi-translucent, add the garlic and rosemary and sauté until fragrant, being careful not to brown garlic, about 1 minute.

Step 2, the dip thickens: Add white beans and warm and soften them through. Add the salt and balsamic vinegar and mash the mixture to get it somewhat smooth.

Step 3, finishing: Remove from heat, the tomatoes and more balsamic, salt or pepper to taste. Garnish with rosemary sprigs.

Step 4, to the table: Serve to friends, preferably on the terrace IMG_2019or in the garden, with pita chips and a fine chilled white wine. We served it with home made pita vread (forthcoming recipe), my roasted beet salad (also forthcoming), and a green salad.