Mushroom Orzo with Truffle Salt

So, I've been gone for a while. Winter was particularly long this year and, having worn the same four outfits over an over for months, I started going a little stir crazy and couldn't concentrate on blogging. Not enough vitamin D, I guess. But now, with the sun out more often, and the trees finally turning green, my skin is itching with creativity again...

Around the corner from this little shoebox I call home, is a place called Astoria Bier and Cheese, which is probably one of my favorite shops in the neighborhood. It has a selection of beer and cheese that would melt your heart. So, while buying myself a couple bottles after a long day of work, I noticed a little bottle of truffle salt and had to have it.

I spent the week sprinkling it on just about everything that needed salt, until finally deciding to build a recipe around it. Naturally I wanted something with mushrooms and, since I'd smelled it in the hallway some days before, I had a hankering for stroganoff, too. So, I thought I'd make my recipe something similar, but with orzo.

And thus, without further ado:

Mushroom Orzo with Truffle Salt

Estimated Ingredients

4 Baby Portobello mushrooms

4 Shiitake mushrooms

1.5 cups Orzo or Risoto

1/2 Garlic clove

2 tbs Scallions

1/3 cup Milk

1/4 cup Heavy cream

1/2 cup Mushroom stock

Olive oil

Parmesan cheese to taste

Truffle Salt(!)--as much or little as you want!

 

As always, please remember that I don't use recipes and can only estimate the amount of ingredients I use. So don't take it too seriously. Play with your food.

1) Start boiling the orzo/risoto. I added a teensy bit of the mushroom bullion to the water so the pasta would absorb the flavor.

2) Chop up the mushrooms into little pieces and the chicken into little cubes.

3) Chop the garlic and scallions finely.

4) Throw the chicken, mushrooms, garlic and scallions into a pan with olive oil and saute for a bit. Add some truffle salt.

5) In another pan, start making your mushroom sauce. Start with a little mushroom stock and add some milk and cream to thicken. You can add a bit of truffle salt here, too, if you want.

6) Add the chicken, mushrooms, scallions and garlic and slow cook for around half an hour.

7) As the sauce is absorbed, add milk/water/cream when necessary to keep it thick. Mix in the orzo/risotto.

8) Sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese on top, serve with some veggies or a salad and enjoy!

This is super easy to make vegetarian, just by removing the chicken. I've done it and it's (almost) as good.

Misfits Thanksgiving

Nick and I are transplants from California and all we have in our little world of New York is each other. Our families are still in California, with a few scattered about middle America.

New York is--and has been for a very long time--a huge amalgamation of human transplants, from all over. And, of course, it's a very expensive place to live, making the ability to visit family members from elsewhere very difficult.

So, every year Nick and I host "Misfits Thanksgiving" for those friends who have no place to go.

I, unfortunately, didn't get too many good pictures of the feast, I normally take many, many more, but these two will do.

A Feast of Sides

As much as I love the turkey--and I do make one mean turkey (recipe coming soon... perhaps)--it's the sides that really make Thanksgiving. Every year I try something new. The pierogis , which are now a holiday staple were once, years ago, a "new thing." They were an experiment on the first Thanksgiving that my brother came to visit and they took hours. More than five hours. The next day, my arms ached.

Quails have been a bit of a theme these past two years. Last year, I made glazed quail that I arranged around the turkey like tiny little roasted babies, nestled 'neath their roasted mother. It was pretty beautiful.

This year, I thought I'd try quail eggs. Sadly, it was not to be. I had planned on making Scotch eggs, but ran out of time. Instead, I hard boiled them and we made a salted butter and truffle dip for them. Needless to say, they were delicious. But--seriously--everything made with truffles is delicious (within reason, obviously, I'm fully aware that there are bad cooks out there).

Our good friends supplied the absolutely delicious bean dip, bread pudding and spinach dip.

Feather Scarf Part #1

1)  Cut fabric in the scarf shape you like and arrange the feathers by length and the direction to which they bend.

2) Use the longest feathers for the first layer. Tallest feather in the middle and place the ones that bend to the right on the right hand side and left bending on the left side.

3) Add a dab of glue to each feather to hold it in place for the next step.

4) Sew the feathers to the fabric.

5) Repeat, using shorter and shorter feathers for each layer until the fabric is covered.

6) Add a trim to the bottom in order to cover the feather stems and keep them from irritating your neck.

Some of my favorite memories are of trying to communicate with birds. I remember sitting on the dilapidated fence in our side yard, looking up at doves on the telephone wires and trying to speak to them in what I now call "bird talk." Which was actually just human talk in a cooing birdlike voice. Eventually I actually became good at emulating their twittering and was even able get them to respond back.

Now, as an adult, I tend to twitter and chirp (literally, not electronically), while thinking. It's something I don't even notice doing until someone points it out. And, of course, my love of feathers has never faded.

In the summer, I wear feathers in my hair almost daily, but in Winter, scarves and jackets tend to damage them. So, they hang on the wall among my necklaces until Spring when it is warm enough to shed my outerwear.

Lately, I've been trying to find a way to incorporate feathers into my winter wardrobe in some non-destructive way. So, I thought, why not a scarf?

This is the first step, which is repeated until the entirety of the fabric is covered. Feathers are somewhat difficult to sew through, even with a sewing machine, and there is quite a bit of hand sewing that must also be done. Despite this, the design is relatively simple. All together, with the gluing, sewing by machine and by hand, it took almost 10 hours, so give yourself a couple days and prepare to be patient.

The Annual French Halloween Bash

I look huge in this picture, oh well, I'm over it (I swear I'm not this big in person)

A 'hind view of my antlers.

As you might have guessed, Halloween is a pretty important holiday for me. In fact it's a family tradition to have an Annual Halloween Bash.

I grew up on a rather secluded, converted farm. Our house was at the end of a long dirt road with only two neighbors, and we were in the middle of a particularly industrial area--a loud and somewhat dangerous area that people tended to avoid. So, the outside world tended to stay--well--out. Because it used to be a farm, the front and back yards were quite large, we also had two side yards (one of which held the tree in which I spent the majority of my time).

Every Halloween, we would build a huge cemetery in our front yard with very realistic gravestones that my dad made himself, from our tree we hanged a life size skeleton (I'm not sure why my dad knew how to tie a noose) and, underneath that tree was our huge coffin. I remember climbing into that coffin with our giant and soft Frankenstein's monster and taking naps--or pretending to take naps, so I could be alone.

The whole spectacle was extremely realistic, so much so that once, when we had ordered pizza, the delivery man refused to get out of his car. My brothers and I ran gleefully to pay for our pie, so happy that we had managed to scare a grown man.

Though I now live more than 3,000 miles away from my family and certainly can't build an entire cemetery to scare the neighbors, I try to--or rather can't help--keeping our family tradition alive with my own Annual French Halloween Bash.

This year--as I do every year--I did a lot of research on my costume. I decided to be an Ancient Druid or Dryades from shortly after the iron age. So, I made a cloak from curtains, bought some huge earrings and weaved a pair of my antlers into my hair.

The antler weave took a considerable amount of time--about an hour--and I ended up having to use all of my hair to do it. My hair, because it is very straight, is also very slippery. So, the night before our Halloween Bash, I slept in pin curls to give it enough waves to accept bobby pins. From there I wrapped my hair around the antlers, switching between twisting the hair towards and away from my face for better structure.

In the end, the antlers stayed on my head for around four-ish hours and did not come off until I removed them myself.

It was Chilly, so I Put on a Hat

Nick and I decided to go for a walk the other day. It starts to get chilly this time of year in New York and chilly weather, for me, is hat weather. There is something so comforting about wearing a hat on a cool day. Even a felt hat--one that is not particularly warm--keeps my head nice and toasty.

I love hats; it's a fascination I've gained from my father and I have accumulated a pretty impressive collection of them. I'll never understand how these things went out of style--what better, more attractive way to keep your head warm than a nice hat? And I don't mean beanies or baseball caps (note I use the word 'cap' and not 'hat'), they don't count.

Now, it's not that baseball caps and beanies don't have a place in the world of headgear, after all, they're both indicative of several pretty huge subcultures (not least of which being Steve Zissou), however, hats should have a history to them or bring to mind a time in history. Preferably a time in history more than forty years ago--after the 60's (and even during the 60's, really), hats became much less striking.

This particular hat was given to me by my father for my birthday. My father works in a retirement home where he plays games with Alzheimer's patients to stimulate their brains. This hat belonged to one of his residents who passed away, recently. Such a beautiful and precious gift.

Odds and Ends

My grandmother and I are very fond of succulents. She told me she's always dreamed of having a garden of all natural desert plants.

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If you look at the middle bird feeder, you can see one of the many hummingbirds that live on my grandparents' property.

My Grandparents rent their back pastures to the neighbors for their horses.

We can't help feeding them.

Oh man, I love the faces horses make.

Hah! Such a great expression.

This is Mxyzptlk or Mxys. The beautiful 1974 bug that my dad drove and fought with for many year. I loved that car. Now it sits in my grandparents' back yard.

I just love the little paw prints.

My dad gave me a rose from his rosebush, so I put it in my hair.

My dad has had a handlebar mustache all my life. He's a pretty cool dude.

I thought about bringing home some of those antlers, but they were disintegrating from sitting outside in the desert sun for years.

Somewhere among the slate are some fossils. I couldn't find them this trip.

Old wagon wheels.

I always wondered why that horse's neck was painted red.

This used to be the hobbit hole where my brothers and I and our father before us used to play.

Someday this will be the sidecar on my grandpa's motorcycle.

My Grandparents and I have not always gotten along, I was a pretty rebellious kid and my "youthful ideals" did not disappear after my teen years. I grew up and became a bigger version of the obsessive, dark minded, bisexual weirdo I always was. All things my grandparents are not fond of.

But, one thing we've always had in common is the ability to see beauty and value in the most common and asinine objects. Their home is an incredible reflection of my family's eclectic personalities.