All of a sudden last Saturday the farmer’s market became GREAT!!!

From left to right: tiny Walla Wallas, miniature garlic, asparagus, STRAWBERRIES, snap peas, CHERRIES!, and a little bundle of sage that I picked off the plants growing near 45th Street on the UW campus!

I have already devoured about 3/4 of the strawberries and well over half of the cherries. They are completely delicious, and I am incredibly excited that the market will get better and better every single week until at least October, when there are cranberries and kiwis! And hopefully when October passes I will be ready to face a root vegetable again. Besides tiny onions and garlic, of course; I can already face them fearlessly.

The year is almost over for me; I have but one test remaining on Wednesday morning. Afterwards I will meet with the professor for the class I’m grading this summer, and then I will go for an incredibly long walk in a nearby park. Then I will visit the Wallingford farmer’s market and buy another pound or so of cherries to eat over the next day and a half, because my current batch will certainly be gone by then, and then I will relax and pack for my week in Minnesota. It will be glorious. Oh, and I will attend the happy hour at Zig Zag Cafe in the Pike Place Market for the second time, hopefully with several mathematicians in tow.

Today I got frozen custard at a new establishment on 65th St in Ravenna called Peak’s Frozen Custard. I recommend it; the waffle cones are quite good and the custard is tasty.

This post is about squash and the delicious bread you can make with it. But first, unrelatedly, here is a recent, pretty picture from my window:

Also unrelatedly, but attractively, here is a dinner I prepared with almost no effort at all: it’s just two types of cabbage (red and savoy) sauteed quickly on high heat with oil and some spices, over rice.

Back in the summer when the getting was good, I took pictures of my market purchases. I freely admit that the winter market is in every way less dazzling than the summer market, but I love it anyway and would like a photographic record of a nice midwinter trip. Thus I give you this: a moderately hulking (yet non-intimidating) ten-pound squash of indeterminate variety, potatoes, golden turnips, a parsnip, impressively crisp and beautiful Fuji apples, and a spriglet of rosemary from one of the plants near my apartment.

The squash was a huge pain to carve, because it was large and hard and my knives are incredibly dull! I long for a high-quality kitchen knife; perhaps I will treat myself to one when I finish this quarter. But that is neither here nor there. I finally managed to chop this one up into four pieces, and refused to divide it further.

I scooped out the seeds, which were curiously large, and lightly oiled the quartered squash. Then I baked it for a long time. I also baked the seeds with what I claim is perfect technique, but they were not remotely tasty. I blame the squash.

I squished up the squash with my hands and froze it for later use. I ended up with twelve cups of squash mush, which will transform into many loaves of bread! This is a batch I made several weeks ago:

And now I present the recipe, which I got from my mom. She, in turn, got it from her friend Karen. Thanks, Karen! It has persisted as my favorite bread throughout most of my life. The recipe yields two moist, delicious loaves. You can put the loaves in greased pans or you can make freeform loaves on a baking stone (or, presumably, on a greased baking sheet). You can use any type of squash, though I strongly recommend you do it with pumpkin whenever you get the chance. I believe that pumpkin is the most glorious of all winter squashes, because it is richly colored and flavored. I also have had great results with delicata and butternut squash. I think a good rule is this: the more flavorful and creamy your squash is, the better your bread will be. Also, a more colorful squash yields a more beautiful bread. I used delicata squash for the bread in the photo above.

Ingredients:
1 T yeast
1/2 c warm water
2 c cooked squash
1/2 c melted butter
2/3 c sugar
1 tsp salt
1 egg, beaten
About 5 c flour

Instructions:
Dissolve yeast in water. Mix squash, butter, sugar, salt and egg into yeast. Gradually add 2 1/2 c flour, beat well. It should have the consistency of very thick batter. Let rise until double. Then add the rest of the flour. Knead. Let rise 1 hour. Form into loaves, rolls or other shapes, let rise. Lightly brush with additional melted butter, bake at 350° until done (about 10-15 min for small rolls, 30 min for loaves).

I would like to issue an open apology for not writing anything interesting, or even anything boring, for the past week and a half! I also must sheepishly note that I do not have photographs for tonight’s post, which is about some of the neatest foods I’ve ever cooked. Evidently I misplaced my camera, and while I’m confident it’ll turn up in the giant pile of clutter that is my apartment, I do not currently know its location.

Anyway, here is a weirdly excellent Valentine’s Day dinner. File it away for next year.
+ Beet and Squash Lasagna
+ Chocolate Orange Custard
+ Cider

I am very proud to admit that beet and squash lasagna was my brilliant idea. In fact it’s quite similar to the spinach and squash lasagna I wrote about in December, except it’s pink, includes smoked cheese, and lacks béchamel sauce (just because we lacked milk; it would be really good with sauce, too!). The ingredients were as follows:
For the pasta: Eggs, flour, salt, one cooked and pureed beet
For the other layers: Delicata and sweet dumpling squashes, nutmeg, salt, pepper, loads of Parmesan cheese, small cubes of smoked cheese from Estrella Family Creamery

We used incredibly delicious farmer’s market eggs for the pasta, which came out to be pleasantly chewy and delightfully, evenly pink. I think it might be even more attractive with two beets instead of one, but one went a long way. I love to make pasta, even though rolling out the dough is incredibly tedious! It’s completely worth it. And I really can’t believe how beautiful and tasty beet pasta is. You should definitely try it sometime; just use any pasta recipe and include a pureed beet, compensating for the additional moisture with flour.

The squash was also really good. I recommend the following procedure for making a squash filling: cut open the squashes and take out the seeds and pulp, cover with a bit of olive oil, and bake (with the skin on) until they start to get crispy on top. Then take them out, peel away the skin, smoosh up the flesh with your fingers, add a bit of salt and pepper, and grate in an astonishing quantity of nutmeg.

The lasagna ended up looking as if it were made of ham, since the noodles were flat and pink. It also smelled like ham, because of the smoked cheese. It was kind of ridiculous, and also fantastic. I will definitely make this again, with pictures.

The custard was similarly adventurous; it consisted of eggs, half-and-half, sugar, baking chocolate, orange zest and orange juice. The melted chocolate hilariously froze back into hard little drops when we added it to the cold eggs, but re-melted almost all the way when we added the warm milk and cream. I find custard to be truly amazing; I am always shocked when it actually works. This particular batch was very nicely textured, though it could have used a lot more chocolate. Also, the chocolate was weirdly grainy (probably from repeatedly freezing and melting).

The cider was from the market too. I had never tried hard cider, and I think it’s good.

I think it’s neat that lots of the ingredients we used came from local farms, namely: beets, squash, eggs, half-and-half, smoked cheese, cider. I eat really well from the farmer’s market, even now that it’s February. I am afraid of the day my favorite apple stand runs out of fruit, though. It’s drawing near; they sold the last of their Honeycrisps weeks ago and have since exhausted their Braeburns. It’s down to Fujis and Jonagolds. I suppose I will buy semitropical Californian fruit when that day comes, and I will probably enjoy the variety because I’ve eaten apples almost exclusively since the other local fruit ran out in October or so, but I will still be sad. I’m very lucky to love apples so much, since that’s really all the market has had for a long time.

The squashes are also running low at the market, which is similarly sad. But potatoes, cabbage, carrots and beets are plentiful, and there will always be Estrella Family Creamery cheese. I am excited for summer at the market, but I am happy to eat roots for the time being!

Math is good lately, though certainly still hard and stressful. We just did the Riemann Mapping Theorem in complex analysis and everyone in the class learned the proof really well because we all suspect it’ll be on the midterm. In algebra we have been studying modules for several weeks, and I like them more than I expected to. We started vector fields in manifolds class and I still don’t understand them fully, but did a lot of good work with my classmates this weekend and am much more comfortable with them than I was mere days ago.

Tomorrow I have no school, so I will celebrate with pancakes and, hopefully, a proof of Reeb’s Theorem: if M is a compact smooth n-manifold that admits a Morse function with precisely two critical points, then M is homeomorphic to the n-sphere Sⁿ!

Pasta Ingredients: flour, eggs, water, spinach
Other Ingredients: milk, butter, flour, mushrooms, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, pumpkin
Edit: The full recipe is now transcribed!

Toby and I made an amazing lasagna yesterday, completely from scratch. We used a Mark Bittman recipe for the pasta and approximated another Mark Bittman recipe for the lasagna. I love making pasta; it’s incredibly satisfying and delicious. Also, the kitchen smells like eggs for hours afterwards. This particular pasta contained a lot of spinach, and hence was extremely green in hue.

Speaking of eggs, I poked two small holes in one of the eggs and successfully used my breath to force the contents of the egg outside the shell without breaking it! I had never tried that before; it was kind of cool.

The mushrooms were amazing. We got two kinds from the U-District market: hedgehogs and black trumpets. I sauteed them in butter, olive oil and rosemary. The pumpkin was also incredibly good: it came from the market too, and it was richly orange and flavorful. I squished it up into a smooth-ish puree with my hands, which was enjoyable in the way that squishing wet sand through one’s fingers is enjoyable. (Except perhaps even more so.)

Here is the first layer: pasta, pumpkin, mushrooms, cheese, béchamel sauce. It repeated thrice.

Here are all the layers, topped with another half-layer of pasta, cheese and béchamel. The snowy stuff is the cheese.

This is the finished product. It was really good.

I made some unusually soupy cranberry sauce for a side dish. It was also delicious, though it could have used a bit more texture.

Mmm, cranberries. I should stock up on them before the holiday season is over.

Yesterday’s market haul: An obscene number of apples (for pie!), a pumpkin, six huge beets and their leaves, chanterelles, garlic, Concord grapes, kiwis, Gouda cheese, “Black Creek Buttery” cheddar cheese, and a little pizza for lunch!

Oh, and I had espresso for the first time in three years. I enjoyed it.

Yesterday’s supper was pasta topped with the following: chanterelles, garlic, grapes, beet greens, and a basil flower. (Somehow my basil plant produced an attractive and tasty flower, even though the days are short and cloudy lately.)

I also made some nice bread loaves to bring to a Halloween party yesterday. Someone else brought Brie, so it was perfect! I also learned some stuff about complex analysis yesterday, though I’m still worried about tomorrow’s test.

The answer to the puzzle is that yes, it’s possible to shrink the circle to a point without intersecting the threaded line. So if we were sewing in 4-space, we’d have to design new needles. Fortunately no one sews in 4-space.

I spent last weekend doing complex analysis homework and not much else. I didn’t even finish three of the thirteen problems, alas alas. I ended up spending seven hours of Saturday and four hours of Sunday in the math building! I need to figure out a sustainable week schedule so I don’t end up living in my office. My office is nice, but it lacks cats and therefore is inhabitable.

I took a math break to see the farmer’s market in the University District on Saturday with my classmate Toby, and it was amazing. Much better than the Broadway market, which isn’t too shabby either! The Seattle markets are more expensive than New York’s, I think. Toby, who hails from Brooklyn, agrees. For example, I could get a half gallon of amazing local apple cider at the Union Square market for $3, which I think is reasonable. But here it is kind of absurdly expensive. Also, good (read: non-Red Delicious) apples could be found for $1 per pound at the New York markets — even the most amazing apples of all, Empires, were that price — but here they are minimally $2 per pound. Also in New York markets I could sometimes get three pounds of reasonably tasty apples for a dollar, and there are no such deals to be found here. Oh well. My applesauce will just be a bit pricier this year, I suppose.

There was a cranberry stand at this market and I got a pint of them. Next week I think I’ll get many more than that. Whee! I love cranberries more than I love most edible things. I also got chanterelles again, which was similarly thrilling.

School is still fun yet exhausting. Like I said, I need to devise a schedule I can sustain. Until then, I have manifolds homework to do and I assume I’ll spend tonight and all of tomorrow on it! We’re learning fun stuff, though, so it’s okay. For example, we start talking about surfaces (2-manifolds) on Wednesday. For the record, a manifold is something that looks a lot like Rⁿ when you get really close. For example, a curve looks a lot like a line (R¹, or one-dimensional space) when you look at it closely. Similarly, the surface of a doughnut looks a lot like a plane (R²) up close. You get the idea.

Today I visited the Broadway farmer’s market intending to purchase only peaches and tomatoes. But I ended up with much more than that, because I have minimal self-control when I’m shopping for produce. Ultimately I came away with a few peaches, a few tomatoes, a zucchini, a crookneck squash, a butternut squash (!) and a half pound of chanterelle mushrooms.

I know it’s weird to be excited about winter squash when it’s still summer (the seasons are late in Seattle), and I know I should probably hold off on gorging myself on butternut and acorn squashes until winter because I’ll be eating them almost every day then. But I was really thrilled to see the giant, colorful pile of winter squashes at the market, and I really couldn’t help buying one.

The mushroom guy was there today, as you probably guessed from my list. I capitulated and splurged on fancy mushrooms. I’ve been wanting to try chanterelles since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma two years ago, and I’ll surely write about them when I eat them! Hopefully that will be tomorrow.

Yesterday two of my friends got married, and it was a very nice ceremony! There were nasturtiums on the cake (!) and figs to munch on as snacks. The bride, Megan, has a pet python; it was the ring bearer. The groom’s (Tom’s) brother was the ring bearer bearer.

When I got back to my apt after the wedding, I watched the Olympics again — in particular, the last half of the women’s marathon, a few swimming finals and the men’s 100 meter dash. They were all pretty amazing. I think Dara Torres is spectacular, and I really enjoyed watching the relays. The marathon was incredible: the Romanian winner went out really quickly and maintained her minute-long lead throughout the last half of the race. Her splits were insane. Some of her miles were in something like 5:20 time. GOSH! I could never do anything even close to that for one mile.

Then I was equally enthralled by the men’s 1500 meter swimming final. The guy who ended up with the bronze medal was ahead for the first few hundred meters, and his first length (50m) took him less than 27 seconds. My very best time ever for just a 50 yard sprint, in a short-course (25yd) pool (which allow much faster times, since you get more turns and pushing off the wall is faster than swimming) is not under 27 seconds. (It’s possible that I got a 26 point something in a relay once; I can’t remember.) But he still had 1450 meters to go, and didn’t use a flip turn to get that 50m time. And his time didn’t register till his feet hit the wall on the flip turn, whereas my time ended when my outstretched hand touched the wall at the end of my 50yd sprint. Incredible. And then his split after the first 100m was just under 56 seconds. I got a 58.2 once (maybe even 58 flat, but I never got in the 57’s) for 100 yards, also in a short-course pool.

And then I was thrilled to see the 100m track and field event; I love that the guy with the last name of Bolt and the gold shoes won it with a world record even though he spread his arms in celebration and pounded his chest a couple times before crossing the line! NBC mentioned that his instantaneous running speed was probably as high as 30 miles per hour at one point in the race. I can’t even conceive of that. His average speed was faster than ten meters per second, and I cannot imagine that either.

Today I visited the market for the second time; this is what I got:

Unfortunately the mushroom vendor was not there today, or else I’d've purchased a bunch of those too. As it was, I acquired a cantaloupe, a nectarine, a peach, two apricots, a pound of cherries, three summer squashes, two carrots, two artichokelets, two shallots, five tomatoes, a little head of broccoli, a mini pepper, and a bunch of rainbow chard. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it all, but I know it will be good.

Today I visited the market on Broadway in Capitol Hill for the first time! It was really nice. Unfortunately it’s only on Sundays, but there are others around the city throughout the week. Until I have a bus pass, though, I’ll probably stick to this one.

I bought a good amount of nice produce. Some things were pretty cheap (zucchini, beets) and some were rather extravagantly priced (heirloom tomatoes), but I managed to get a great-looking pile of food.

Clockwise from upper left: cherries, peaches, beets, a hilariously shaped carrot, summer squash, potatoes. Center: heirloom tomatoes.

Yesterday I visited Value Village — a nearby thrift store — to get cheap kitchen things. I succeeded magnificently. This (except for the new canning jars on the left, which I bought at Target) is what I came away with, along with two big-ish pots that I didn’t photograph:

What do I need canning jars for, you might ask? Well, that’s easy. I’ve picked about three quarts of blackberries and a cup and a half or so of cloudberries so far, and there are many, many more where those came from!

Today I will attempt to make jam! I hope it goes well. You’ll know via this website soon enough.

The line above was inscribed on the Fulton Ferry Landing on the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Apparently it is Walt Whitman’s, which is neat.

Today was highly adventurous! I sat around and did nothing for a while, and then I did a lot of enjoyable things.

First I bought foods at Union Square for the last Friday ever. This is really sad! I love the Friday market; I will dearly miss it. Behold — my last-ever bottle of Milk Thistle milk!

Later in the afternoon I met Wendell and Ashley near the Brooklyn Bridge to see this hilarious art piece called the Telectroscope! It was neat. We waved to Londoners and they waved back.

It was a gorgeous day (a bit windy, though) and I took lots of nice pictures. I’ll post them in an album later because there are really a whole lot. For a preview, you can look above and also at this especially dramatic example:

I tried (and failed) to find the elusive “promenade” that I’m told exists in the area; hopefully I will succeed within the next week. Or never.

Then we walked over the bridge to Manhattan and dined at Vegetarian Dim Sum House in Chinatown for the second time in a week, which would be ridiculous except the place is really quite marvelous. It was a great end to a long-ish journey.

Finally, we visited our friend Jessica at her new apartment. It was really nice! I am seriously impressed with the apartments I’ve seen lately. Her ceilings were about twelve feet high or more, and she had a set of three big windows. And shiny wood floors. I really want wood floors in my future Seattle apartment; I hope I can find them!

All in all it was a spectacular day, full of high adventure and delicious food. Tomorrow: apartment-hunting with Ashley! Apparently I’ve become a frequent tag-along on apartment searches.