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Mom’s Norwegian Meatballs with Gravy (Kjøttkaker med brunsaus)

May 20, 2013 5 Comments

Tell me you didn’t miss it? You didn’t did you? I’m sure at least some of you celebrated – right?

We sure did!

It was Syttende Mai, Norwegian Independence (er, ok, Constitution) Day last Friday!!! Best day of the year, you know.

Last week was busily full of baking – especially things with cardamom, mmmm – and meatball making and cheese acquiring and gravlax marinating.

This year, since we are back in Minnesota, we got to go to the big party with my family. And a couple of our best Boston friends flew here to join us. We still have visitors, so I won’t take too much time describing the day and the party. Also, I’ve told you a bit of what Syttende Mai is like before, like here, and here, and I don’t want to belabor a point.

Cacio e pepe pasta handkerchiefs with asparagus

May 15, 2013 8 Comments

In an effort to share more of our very most every day meals, the ones I throw together with whatever’s left in the fridge, or the staples I can make with my eyes half closed at the end of a long day, I’ve started posting occasional short, simple posts just about these meals. I call it vær så god, Norwegian for “bon appetit.”

There are few things more useful than an easy but delicious pasta recipe to have in your back pocket when you are strapped for time and ingredients, but tummies are growling and dinner needs to get made pronto. Cacio e pepe is one of the very best recipes to suit just such a situation.

Cacio e pepe translates to cheese and pepper, and beyond pasta, that’s practically all you really need. You toast your coarsely ground black pepper (a ton of it!) until it is absurdly fragrant and floral, then melt in some butter and oil. In the meantime you put a pot of pasta on to boil and steal a cup of the pasta water when it has gotten nice and starchy.

Normally cacio e pepe is made with a thin pasta like spaghetti or buccatini, but I’ve become taken with fazzoletti, aka pasta handkerchiefs. They’re incredibly easy to make yourself (I like this recipe), which we like to do, and barely make your dinner any less of a weeknight pantry clean-out than it would have been if you used dried pasta. Of course, you can also break apart sheets of lasagne noodles to get the same effect, or you can just use spaghetti.

The pasta and pasta water get mixed with the pepper and a generous amount of cheese, merging into a sauce both rich and lively. And you’re ready to go! This week I added sauteed asparagus pieces to round out the meal because, hey! it’s asparagus season. I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to have asparagus at least 2 out of 3 meals a day for the duration.

Rhubarb crumble cake

May 12, 2013 15 Comments

Hi guys! Now, I know Julia Child said a hostess should never apologize, but since this isn’t a meal we’re talking about per se, I’d like to start off with an apology. I don’t know to what extent you’ve noticed or been bothered by it – I’ve tried to fix or get fixed everything as quickly as possible, but quickly is never quick enough when you’re the harried one trying to make it happen! – but we’ve been dealing with some little (ok, and some big) glitches with the website over the past couple of weeks.

I loooove the new site, the look, the new functionality, everything, but we’ve been having some totally unanticipated (obviously! If they’d been anticipated, we’d have done something preventive beforehand!) problems with the server host and with data usage issues, which have caused the site to crash three times now in, what? two weeks? Ugh. I’m sincerely sorry that this has happened at all, let alone more than once. I’m mortified. It hasn’t been anyone’s fault, just unexpected stuff that happens and has to be dealt with, and it’s been dealt with absolutely as fast as possible each of those times. There’s a learning curve with this stuff, and sometimes I feel like I’ve gone shooting off the curve entirely (I’m telling you, I’m really bad with computers and internet things and technology. So bad.). I’m really sorry if you’ve been bothered by it, and we’ll keep doing our best to prevent future problems.

Can we still be friends?

Phew!

The other big news this week – besides the fact that my committee meeting actually went really well and I came back totally inspired and motivated to work harder than ever on my dissertation, and how often does that happen? - is that we found out on Wednesday that we’re having a little boy!

This is SO exciting and cool. And, me being me, it also sent me off into a major panic attack. Of course.

Kimchi meatloaf

May 7, 2013 9 Comments

Oh meatloaf. I’m pretty sure meatloaf will never be glamorous or sexy. Most every other comfort food has been high-browed over the past decade or so. Restaurants have glammed up mac and cheese, chicken and waffles, grilled cheese, tater tots…you name it, it’s been turned into a glorified gastro version in a high-end bar or pub somewhere.

But, I’m pretty sure even if you doused it in shavings of white truffles, laced it with foie gras, and accompanied it with caviar, meat loaf still wouldn’t be glamorous. After all, it’s called meat. loaf. It doesn’t really stand a chance.

And that’s ok.

Because in all of its simple, unattractive meaty loaf shape, meatloaf is there for you. (If you eat meat. If you don’t, can you make a lentil or tempeh loaf equivalent, or some such? I feel like that would fill the same role.) It is easy and it is delicious and it makes a fantastic leftover sandwich, an attribute that gives any particular meal at least 5 extra points in its favor.

Sweet potato hummus flatbread with yogurt sauce

May 2, 2013 10 Comments

How’s this for a little of my weeknight cooking madness for you?! Even more than that, these flatbreads helped with a bit of refrigerator clean out before we took off for Maine and Boston for this week. But, I swear there’s a method – maybe even a little magic – to this madness. Sure, Joel and I both looked at our dinner when I put it on the table and said, “this is kind of weird.” But, it was also all kinds of delicious.

These wonky little flatbreads were partially inspired by a sandwich from Saltie, in New York. They have a naan sandwich with hummus, bulgur, pickled vegetables, and yogurt. I can’t eat hummus or bulgur, but when we happened to have a couple of leftover pieces of naan, plus some roasted sweet potato, and pickled taco veggies, I decided that a hummus-like smashed sweet potato spread might make for a nice stand-in topping.

This is a particularly speedy supper if you have already cooked sweet potato around, but even if you don’t, roasting one isn’t too terribly strenuous, and it gives you the chance to make some mellow roasted garlic alongside. The sweet potato is mashed up with the roasted garlic along with a bit of fresh lemon juice and a spoonful of tahini to create the texture and basic flavor of hummus, enriched with the plush sweetness of the potato. Spread this onto your naan (or other flatbread – homemade if you’re lucky) along with a little sprinkling of feta, and heat them in the oven until they’re toasty. Then pile on whatever pickled vegetables you have (or have made for this purpose!) and a few slips of avocado. Top it off with an herbed and spiced drizzle of yogurt and you’re ready for dinner.

Vær så god!

Double coconut ice cream with stracciatella – to celebrate!

April 29, 2013 24 Comments

Ta-da!!!!!! Here she is ladies and gents! The new look for Five and Spice! Isn’t it stunning?!

I hope you love it as much as I do because I totally adore it! Sure we’ll still be working out some little kinks and hiccups over the next few weeks be they little spacing issues or some lost subscriptions, but who cares?! It’s here! Yeehaw!

Melissa and Erin did just the most wonderful job working with my ideas and my confusing stream of consciousness feedback and answering my many, many anxious questions. I can’t say enough about what a pleasure it is to work with them or how talented they are. You ladies rock!

So now, take a look around and let me know what you think! The recipes page should be more useful and easier to navigate (and prettier!); all the down to basics post are gathered in one place so you can find them; recipes from here on out (and maybe going back if I have time to fix them) have a nifty button to give you an easily printable version; there are social media buttons allowing you to discover that I have secretly been on pinterest and instagram and all those things this whole time, though I really only started figuring out how to actually use them in the last few months – my days of being a reticent social media hermit may be over, eh? It’s pretty much the awesomest (that’s the scientific term).

So there you have it. And now let’s celebrate with some ice cream, shall we?

Risotto with radishes, kale, and lemon

April 25, 2013 17 Comments

Before we get to risotto, I have a few little announcements to make, housekeeping style. I trust the risotto can wait a couple moments, even though it is not known to be the most patient of rice dishes. But anyway, as I mentioned a little bit ago, this here little blog is undergoing a spiffing up process. It’s like Five and Spice is going on Project Makeover! That’s not a real show is it. Extreme Makeover? Anyway, that’s beside the point.

The point is that some major, and (so!) exciting renovations are happening, led by the (brilliant) ladies of Wooden Spoons Kitchen. In order to make it all work, starting sometime on the later end of tomorrow (Friday) the site will be down for a while. It will stay down over the weekend while the magic happens in the background. Then on Monday morning it’ll be back with its brand new look and also at a new URL. Instead of being at wordpress.com the site address will be plain old fiveandspice.com (took me long enough to make the change, right?! Some weird Estonian company or something had snagged that URL, I think in hopes of getting me to buy it from them. But when their lease on it expired, I snapped it up. Take that!).

I’ll have the old site set up to redirect, so old links will all still work and whatnot, but just know that henceforth you’ll be able to look for me at that new address. Now this is important (hence the bold typeface) if you subscribe by email, that should keep working without interruption (at least in theory. Fingers crossed.) but if you subscribe via an rss feed/reader type of thing, you will have to resubscribe. But, this should be easy enough, right? You did it once! I bet you can do it again. (I, on the other hand, have no idea how to subscribe to an rss feed. I am a luddite. This is why other people are in charge of moving the site over, and holding my hand, and talking to me in reassuring voices the whole time.)

So, with that taken care of, let us turn to the risotto.

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Roasted cod with pistachio pesto, carrots, and arugula

April 23, 2013 12 Comments

This is about as typical of a weeknight supper as you get in our house. Roasted fish plus roasted veggies. Bam! Done! Thank you very much. Of course, the ways you can change this up are infinite with different spice rubs or sauces, different types of fish or veggies. We eat salmon most often, caught by our friend Dave who fishes commercially in Alaska. But, this time I had some cod.

I roasted it very simply, but then fancied it up by adding a pistachio and herb pesto – which was nothing but my way of saving the wilting ends of a couple bunches of herbs and the remnants of a bag of pistachios. Roasting a lemon or two with the carrots not only lends flavor to the carrots, but it also emboldens and rounds out the juices of the lemon. The arugula I tossed in at the last minute, to lightly wilt it. Easy peasy lemon squeezey (literally in this case, ha!).

Vær så god! More

Warm potato salad with artichokes and herb dressing

April 19, 2013 29 Comments

I’ve started thinking a lot about love lately. To be more specific, I’ve thinking about love in the face of an uncertain, sometimes scary world.

That sounds dour, doesn’t it. I can’t help it for the moment. Adjusting to this new idea and identity of becoming a parent coupled with feeling that uncertainty acutely, especially because of the madness of the weather and current events and all that stuff, it leaves me really wondering how I’ll do. I struggle with love, you see, because I can be, well, an anxious person sometimes. I’ve been strongly affected by watching loss and sadness ever since I was very small, and somewhere along the way I just stopped trusting that there was benevolence in the universe.

And when you don’t trust, you armor yourself, guarding yourself against strong attachments because of the fear that something will happen, and you’ll be left bereft. But then (thankfully!) there are people in my life who mean so much to me, Joel, my family and community, Squid (so she’s a fur person not a person-person, but she counts), that my love for them handily bursts through any shields I have raised to try to protect myself. This is wonderful, but it’s also frightening.

I’m sure that baby, when he or she comes, will be the same. Except better/worse. I mean, let’s face it, I love our darn dog so insanely much I feel like I would be destroyed if something happened to her. How the heck am I going to handle the amount of love that comes with having a baby????

This little one makes my day

Because the world is uncertain, and mostly out of our control. We can set up all the plans and safeguards we can imagine, but we still can’t protect ourselves or others from absolutely everything. And dwelling on that sort of thing, my friends, is how you make yourself anxious (you know, in case you were wondering).

In the past 5 or so years, after I had noticed myself stuck in this sort of pattern of thinking, I started trying to work on it. Meditate or pray, I’ve been told. Journal. Develop the habit of thinking of yourself as lovable; this allows you to love others. Make note of things that you are grateful for, new things every day.

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Vær så god: Toad in the hole with kale salad

April 15, 2013 30 Comments

I wrote this post yesterday, before the horrifying explosions in Boston, and I’m posting it anyway as it is, but I cannot not start by saying that my heart is sobbing for Boston. For the past seven years until this year, every marathon Monday I have either been cheering near the finish or running the marathon, and so many people I care for were nearby today, though they are all safe as far as I have been able to discover. The Boston Marathon is such a joyful pageant, a show of camaraderie and of the amazing strength of the human body. It is tragic, it is unbearable as always, to see such goodness attacked. That’s the very essence of an act of terrorism, I guess, to attack something good and meaningful to try to frighten people out of participating in the goodness life has to offer. I often don’t actually feel strong enough to keep hoping and living joyfully in the face of such uncertainty, pain, and cruelty. I am overcome with sorrow. I pray for strength for Boston, and for all of us.

I’m in the process of working on a redesign of this site (and it will in a couple weeks be moved, finally, to fiveandspice.com, woohoo!). And when I say I’m working on it, I really mean that the wonderful and talented Melissa and Erin of Wooden Spoons Kitchen are doing the heavy lifting, and I’m pelting them with questions and thoughts, and they’re helping me and making sense of it all admirably. I can’t wait until it’s ready and you all can see it!

In the redesign process, I’ve had to spend a lot of time thinking about what this site is about and what makes it unique, while also spending lots of time looking at other beautiful blogs to guide the redesign and show what I like and don’t like in a look, and voice, and so on. This, I’m sorry to say, sent me into a nice little bout of comparison, which is a worthless way to spend your time. Comparison is the thief of creativity, and yet is nonetheless something that I am horribly prone to. When I go down the road of comparison, I forget that I exist as anything except as how I stack myself up against others (and I never ever stack myself favorably).

There are so many cooking blogs, I wailed to myself. So many are so gorgeous, clever, unique, thoughtful, creative, have well-tested recipes. What am I even doing trying to participate? Am I just adding to the clutter of an already crowded space? Just adding noise to the din of the argument about what and how we should eat? I’ll never be the best (wah)! What’s the point?

I worked myself into quite a sad, sorry state of worthlessness. And then of course I ran into some nicely lettered quote on pinterest that said something like, “The forest would be a quiet place if only the very best songbirds sang.” Which was totally annoying to see in that moment because I wanted nothing to do with sage advice, or with the truth, or with being reasonable at all. I didn’t want to be an adult! I wanted to wallow!!!! I wanted to fester, to poke at my (self-inflicted) bruise!

And then I had to laugh at myself. Because as soon as I could admit that my ego really just wanted to throw my own little pity party with me as guest of honor, I could see the pointlessness of that behavior, and how utterly true that “annoying” quote was. We exist totally separately from how we compare to others. We each exist in our own remarkable uniqueness. We each have our own voice, and adding that voice to the chorus, if we are singing true, will never be adding clutter. More