Wet, Windy, and Irish

Last night the rain pelted the bedroom window and the wind beat against the flimsy 80s building construction of our apartment. Sleeping inches from the window and wall I felt as if the rain and wind were massaging me to sleep. Luckily, the bedroom was warm and dry, but the weather transported me to the last time I felt so close to the weather. Shortly after I graduated from college I had the audacious idealistic idea to test my ability to live off the grid. Having spent my senior year learning about the environmental crisis and the extent to which the American infrastructure and lifestyle is unsustainable and feckless, I decided I would build a humble dwelling that could supply it's own energy, water and waste. I am fortunate enough to have a small plot of family land that is uninhabited in the northern rural country of the Republic of Ireland. From the dry, sunny, desert chaparral-coastal highland climes of Los Angeles' Inland Empire I resettled in the windiest portion of Europe and an island I'm convinced literally floats in the North Atlantic; it is so thoroughly soaked from top to bottom in water.

When I arrived on the land I found a derelict old historic stone farmhouse. Keeping in accordance with the low-impact project goal, I decided (along with my colleague) to renovate the farmhouse instead of building something from scratch. The corrugated tin roof had been rusted through and large holes were gaping along the rotted rafters. The plaster walls were covered with mold and the shoddily linoleumed cement floor was peeling all over. In order to dry out the room for repairs, we had slung a large blue tarpaulin over as much of the roof as it would cover and secured it with rope around large stones and heavy timber. Fortunately, we had brought a large tent with us that we set up amongst the debris. While rain on a tin roof may be romantic, rain on a tarpaulin is menacing. The angry windstorms that often plagued this time of year in Ireland would drag our heavy stones along the undulating roof all night as the gaps in the tarpaulin would rise and slam down on the tin the rain driving needles against the whole fiasco. The thin nylon tent would test the flexibility of its poles as it heaved to and fro with the wind blowing through the broken windows and large holes in the roof. We were lucky the whole thing didn't come crashing down on us.



The memory last night put a smile on my face. But what does this have to do with food? On a serious budget in Ireland, we had begun making small fires from wood and whatever else we could find in the driest corners of the house, straight on the cement floor. Letting the wind whip the smoke out windows and the roof, we would huddle around our precious baby as we watched a tin can brown in the center. Within that can would be our 75 cents of "Irish Stew". The meal was offensive, globs of fat suspended in what looked like brothy mashed potatoes and always over-salted required so much work that it was strictly its warmth and heaviness in the stomach that made it satisfactory. We slowly would turn the browning can with needle-nose pliers until we could eventually prize open our food.

A couple weeks ago, as the weather had first begun to turn here, I kept that canned stew in mind and since Ryan has rarely experienced the cuisine of the British Isles (cough cough). I decided to make a version of the Irish stew I had so laboriously fawned over while crouched in the corner of a stone house. On a matter of culinary principle though, I refused to use white pepper. The stew was hearty and delicious. A perfect version of my own comfort food. A stew that would pair nicely with a glass of whiskey perhaps with some coffee. Looking out of the apartment at the rain and cold, it was the perfect bowl to hug.

Of course, I replaced the globs of fat with chunks of mutton. I sauteed the mutton in fat, though before adding the other ingredients. For once, I had to do most of the grocery shopping because as I watched Ryan trying to read all the labels on the produce looking for parsnips and turnips I was afraid we'd be shopping for hours. We decided to make the stew luxurious and bought fingerling potatoes from the farmers' market and used bulk yukon golds for the base. Otherwise, chopped carrots, parsnips, turnips and onion rounded out the rest of the ingredients. Simple. Watching my salt use, I balanced the taste with black pepper and spiced with parsley and thyme. I made sure to play Simon&Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair just for effect.



Delicious, warm and hearty, the stew froze and reheated really well.

Comfort for a Comfort Foodie.

Oh Pizza. I often have to travel to Italy for work and in a past life this would have been heaven on earth for my gluttonous gluten self. However, now I am confined to the ‘secondi’ portion of the menu and the old staples of vegetables and meat. This isn’t to say Italians don’t do these well, in fact I am quiet lucky they prefer to cook almost exclusively with olive oil as opposed to butter, but these just don’t hold a candle to a margherita pizza. It could be asked what about Pasta? To this I say, try the Quinoa kind, it is hands down the best substitute I have found and satisfies this craving quite well.

It is the Pizza that has been so elusive. The chewiness of the crust paired with the structure of the slice, and well, the utter melted deliciousness of the cheese. Unfortunately there is no good substitute for cheese, however there are few that come close and I prefer this one. I think the one thing the removal of cheese has done is made me come to appreciate the importance of the other ingredients. For starters, the perfect red sauce is your base, the fresh herbs your structure, and within this you can layer as you wish. The key here is fresh. There are no good substitutes to fresh veggies and herbs, these are what really matter and until now I was oblivious to this fact.

The last, and arguable most important piece is the crust. Now, the perfect replacement has remained elusive, and I will update as I experiment on Sean, but for now Whole Foods has a great gluten free option. And, on a recent ‘Indian Summer’ evening, we went about allying those gluten desires.

My favorite pizza happens to be Pesto, and for this I always start from scratch. Fresh basil is the most vital part, and from this base it is fun to experiment with novel ingredients. For this round I looked to a current appetence of mine: cashews. Cashews blend into a smoother and creamy paste than pine nuts, thus I had the idea they might help make up for the exclusion of cheese. From here I shaved a bit of lemon, added the necessary olive oil and garlic while spicing with salt and pepper as I blended these together. The smell of freshly ground garlic and basil started to fill the kitchen and I knew it was going to be a good night for epicureans. From here I went on to simmer freshly peeled and pureed tomatoes with garlic and red wine as my second base. And, if you are going to do pizza you might as well go for broke, so I created a third base of sautéed garden fresh cherry tomatoes, basil, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar with caramelized onions.

To each crust I added my sauce; for the pesto I layered multi colored heirloom tomatoes with my ‘mozzarella’ of choice and topped this with a couple extra leaves of basil, as if the pesto wasn’t enough. For the tomato sauce I added fresh bell peppers, red onion, and porcini mushrooms to create a hearty vegetarian. Lastly, for the sautéed tomatoes I kept it simple by just adding my ‘mozzarella’ of choice and fresh basil so the sweetness of the tomatoes could shine.

Although it would be a stretch to equate these to a traditional ‘comfort food pizza’, slices drowned in cheese and grease- soggy in all their gluten glory and yet so gloriously satisfying; they are and were a new comfort for me. Awash in the heat and aroma of baking red sauce, cooking garlic and basil, and the satisfying pull of ‘cheese’ in your first steaming bite, these were my comforts. New comforts, novel ones, fresh ones; and hell these were some tastey pizzas.

I cooked under the assumption I would be saving some of these for lunch the following day as an easy shortcut past the ‘cafeteria’, but alas when you get two gluttons around pizza it is guaranteed not to last. It is nights like these that make me forget the old life and appreciate the simplicity of my new way of eating, consuming, and living. Make it simple, we do.

Married to Food

I am continually thankful for Ryan's food allergies. Perhaps, it is an enjoyed thankfulness because I don't directly live with many of the negative consequences. I do, however, get to enjoy almost all of the positive consequences. I am thankful for Ryan's food allergies because they force him to be mindful and aware of food. It heightens the relational dynamic he has with it and food becomes personified in our home. Guilty by association, I think more about food, on the rare occasions I go grocery shopping, I can't just grab what looks good. Farmer's Markets, being a great source of gluten/dairy free food, also force me to come face to face with who is behind the food.

Part of the reason I enjoy this mindfulness is because I have an odd memory. To most people, it would seem like I have barely a sliver of memory at all. It is a familial joke that a finite portion of memory is continually split each time a new generation is born. My grandmother has quite a normal functioning memory, my mother's is rather troublesome and I seem to have been born without one entirely. But I do have a memory, albeit an odd one. I remember snippets, bits and pieces, emotions, colors and temperatures. I'm reminded of this eccentric memory of mine by this post because I have a memory from several years back of a linguistic idiosyncrasy relating to food. Someone once pointed out to me, that it was odd how many different names we have to disguise where our food comes from. I remember thinking it fascinating. While, I now understand that many of the substitute names are more indicative of how a food is prepared as opposed to where it comes from, I still think the intuition was correct.

We tend to distance ourselves from the 'dirtiness' of raising and growing food. Perhaps, not as much as in the efficiency, modern technological gabfest of the 50s and 60s, but we certainly would still garner a few strange looks if we ordered a cow patty with cheese. An example from our own home (nobody's perfect!), comes from just the other day when Ryan while munching happily on a bag of baby carrots, stopped and examined one tiny orange spear. He suddenly wondered aloud, how do they make these? It seems a perfectly natural question in our common attitude, but to think of plain raw ingredient (not some fancy carrot dish) as having nebulous origins, especially as mundane as a carrot is odd.

Not everybody can be a farmer and roll their hands through soil and hold the butcher's knife, but everybody does eat. Food is a central part of lives, we astonishingly! depend more on food than on our cell phones or the Internet. It takes a lot of work to run a farm or manufacture 'food products' like twinkies and tv dinners. I find peace in the symmetry of spending extra time, effort and work on preparing our meals. If I'm not out there growing food, or studying chemistry in a lab to mimic food, then I should at the very least, spend some time cooking food. And in that sense, I should spend some mental and physical energy, putting food back in the center of my life. The cultivation and consumption of food is the single most important meaning making activity known to our species, because really, what is the point of our lives if not to sustain ourselves and sustain ourselves well.

A Christian scholar at Yale Divinity School gave a sermon about restlessness, a relationship with food and land, and Christian faith. Putting respective religious institutions and organizations aside, the sermon was moving in Professor Jenkins recollection of Biblical analogies of marriage. The intimacy with which we should treat our environment and food is as the intimacy we should treat our marriages, both human and divine. I must say, I like the idea of being married to food.

A book I'm reading now reminds me how central food already can be to many Americans, Barry Glassner, a sociologist at USC wrote The Gospel of Food which chronicles along with other major food books I've read (The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan and Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser) how fear, anxiety and neurosis are often the reason food is at the center of our lives. I proudly can say, that I put food at the center of my life because I like it. Good genes, sure, but also that American streak of getting what I want. And I want good tasty food.

This post was sparked by a TED talk (surprise!) by Carolyn Steel about how food shapes our cities. Thinking about the centrality of food markets and routes in the development and urban planning of pre-Industrial cities, reminded me of how distanced we'd become from our food. However, I attempted like a good young idealist should, to live off the grid in rural Ireland for several months. Through the astonishing and eye-opening experience, I was confirmed in my convictions about food, but also my love and need of the city, the urban center, the metropolis. And as Ms. Steel points out, many many more of us will be living in cities in the future. Check out the video and if you haven't read any of the above books, they're worth a gander.

Shall I close with a cliche? Food for thought.

Welcome-Home Cake and Saving Seeds

Ryan's work took him to New York for four days. Leading up to his departure we were scrambling to amass enough GF/DF bars, snacks and mini-meals for him to pack to last him through long work days where the only sustenance provided would be sugary baked goods and glasses of milk. Since we would both be leaving shortly after he returned, we also were in the mindset to clear out the fridge. Oops. I hadn’t realized until after Ryan left that I had lost my chef and was facing an empty pantry. As luck would have it, I also came down with a nasty sinus infection that left me moping around the apartment with even less energy and gumption to feed myself. I subsisted on simple white rice, plain lettuce and Echinacea tea. Surprisingly, I was having trouble getting over the cold. So I broke down and went to the store. I brought home some Vitamin Water, Saltines and vegetable broth. Not surprisingly, I recovered shortly thereafter.

While Ryan was gone, his brand new KitchenAid mixer arrived courtesy of his mother and I hatched a plan to bake him a welcome-home cake. Immediately, I thought of the gorgeous birthday cake I had seen Shauna James Ahern of Gluten-Free Girl receive. With a few modifications, I knew I could make this both gluten-free and dairy-free. So on a cold drizzly Seattle Saturday the non-chef, the kitchen klutz decided to try his paws at baking. After the Sounders soccer match of course. Although, after 90 minutes out in the drizzle, the baking would have to be postponed after a short couch nap.

Thank goodness for Whole Foods. And while I’m at it, I want to give a shout out to the Broadway Market QFC on Capitol Hill. The selection of organic, local, gluten-free and dairy-free products offered at these “conventional” markets is stellar. We are all too spoiled, as we were reminded several times this summer as we ventured into Eastern Washington to the hot dry climes to float down the Yakima River in summer jubilation. The culinary landscape was much bleaker than the beautiful dry hills guarding the swift clear blue river snaking its way through the land.

Cake baking. I accumulated all the needed ingredients for the endeavor at my aforementioned Meccas and enlisted the help of a foodie friend to make sure I didn’t screw anything up. Reveling in the beauty of the mixer we whipped up a cake, lemon cream filling and raspberry frosting all from scratch. Totally ambitious in my book. Not only that, but it turned out fantastic and the tired boy returned home to a beautiful cake and a clean apartment. The cake is but a few hours old and half of it is gone.

Now that I have a bit of confidence in which to cloak myself, I may just make this baking thing a regular habit. I realized baking is an ideal activity to accompany long days spent studying and writing. GF/DF baking utilizes many starches and flours I had previously never known. (it also is a nice nod back to the hours spent in chemistry lab in college.) I came across the video below a few days before baking this cake and it came back to mind while I was mixing the variety of grains and starches together. Just another call to biodiversity. Why don’t we get it, yet? These projects could also, be money-makers.

Just let it cook.

One of my most vivid memories from studying abroad in India was this small restaurant just a few blocks from our hostel in Bangalore. It wasn’t much more than a small poured-concrete box with a few old tables and a collection of mismatched worn wooden chairs. But the decor wasn’t the first thing one noticed rather it was the pervasive aroma. The scent would envelop you like a blanket in a sweet and spicy complexity that would calm any sort of misgiving you might have regarding any adherence to health codes. With a generous smile you are invited to take your pick of seats and are quickly brought two things: a giant banana leaf and a small cup of water. In front of you there is neither plate nor silverware, just the thin banana leaf and water.  With the water your task is to wash the leaf without tearing it or your lap will become your new plate. Before you’ve nearly had enough time to prepare, a server comes around with a round bowl full of rice and places it upside down in the center of your freshly washed leaf. The server then scoops five vibrantly different curries onto your leaf in a half moon around the rice. As if this wasn’t enough, a small bowl of unsweetened yogurt is placed at the top of the leaf rounding out a beautiful collage of color, texture and spice. Each portion of the moon is distinct, ranging from the southern staple of spicy dal to a spinach and chickpea curry; each is as aromatic and delicious as the next. You eat with your hands, scooping rice and curry together intermittently using the sourness of the yogurt to cut the spice. Before you realize it, you begin to see green reappear under your food.  This can be remedied with the slightest gesture for those with insatiable appetites.  The server is always at the ready to refill your leaf.  For the mere mortal, a simple half moon will do.


I loved Indian food before I had ever been there.  But the Indian food I loved here in the States was not the same as the Indian food I encountered in Bangalore. The richness and complexity Indian cooks were able to create from the simple combination of rice, lentils, coconut, coriander, and chilies, was novel to me and beautiful in its simplicity. Traveling around the country gave me the ability to sample the diversity in these simple combinations.  I noticed a liberal widespread use of stewing wherever I went and it was this running theme that inspired me to experiment in the kitchen. The idea had been foreign to me: the longer you cook something the better and more complex it could taste. In my experience, the longer I cooked something, the more burnt my vegetables were, the drier my meats became and the soggier my pastas got. Granted, until that point the extent of my culinary aptitude was derived from a short tutorial my mom gave me before I left for college two years previous and the “Family Favorites” cook book she gave me the subsequent Christmas. Or worse, the brief instructions found on the back of frozen dinner box. After a wonderful experience abroad, I returned home with grand culinary plans, but at best, mediocre hands.


The beauty of Indian cooking is you simply cut, dice, spice, and simmer. The learning curve is forgiving and the probability of utter failure is small. You learn pretty quickly what works and what doesn’t. We were paired perfectly; a novice culinary student and a food suited for beginners. Even now, when gluten and dairy are the devil, the intriguing culinary traditions of India stand by me. And the skill of stewing has only become more instrumental to my dietary survival as the foundations of most stews are naturally gluten and dairy free. With a few minor adjustments, (no more na’an!) I stand by those culinary traditions in turn.  They bring me back to where my passion for cooking first started and are a reminder that simplicity in cooking doesn’t mean a sacrifice in flavor.


Yesterday I swung by the grocery store on my way home thinking that the beautifully overcast day might lend itself perfectly to a slow cooked meal. I wanted nothing more than to warm my apartment with the aroma of stewing spices and the boiling of my kettle. I wanted to sink into my couch and let the world outside pass by while being blanketed in the weaving of herbs and spice, and slowly sip a fresh glass of spiced chai. I wandered the grocery store struggling to figure out just what to layer and how to spice. Often I walk into the store with merely the direction I want the meal to take, not a list of foods I need to get. Sean finds this type of shopping to be infuriating and I am sure it has more to do with the backwardness of grocery store layouts than anything else. I was struck first by how delicious the rainbow chard looked. Rainbow chard in Indian food? Sure. I knew from our previous experience with the chard from the Farmers’ Market that the peppery overtone and natural salinity of the beet plant would lend itself perfectly to slow stewing. From there I simply layered the framework with other fresh vegetables.


I eagerly stepped out the automatic doors into the chilly and overcast early September air ready to settle into an evening of slow cooking and a blanket of warm spices. I diced  cauliflower, chopped two onions, garlic, and a green bell pepper. I sautéed this all and added the coconut milk with a healthy smattering of spice and popped the top on to simmer for a couple of hours. Next, I sliced the chard, red onion, and mushrooms, which I then added to the skillet.  Once in the skillet, I spiced the veggies and left it covered to simmer with a bit of vegetable stock.


The result, despite the wait, was well worth it. Simple, just let it cook.

Something Simple. Something Complicated.

Food. For some, it's easy. For Sean and me, it's seemingly more complicated.

That is not to say we can't eat. God knows we can, and do.

Sean likes to joke that my body must hate life, and to be truthful there was a time when I agreed; almost anything and everything I could eat that your average person takes for granted today would cause me to be violently ill. That is because I am allergic to both gluten and dairy. Which might be easier if it weren't for how our society has chosen to prepare, package, and produce the common foods we eat.

So what does that mean? Because I am not the best expert, I will try to make this simple. Gluten is a protein within the endosperm of some grains that acts like a glue in most things we eat today. Which grains are those? Wheat, Barley, and Rye. However, it isn’t that simple. Wheat consists of a plethora of different types, and barley can be malted and added to make many different foods (not limited to just beer).

So what can I eat? A short list is rice, potatoes, quinoa, buckwheat, and corn. The tricky part is all of the different ways food scientists have been able to add gluten to seemingly innocuous every day items. Take for example soy sauce; the second ingredient is wheat. Or even dried fruit from the grocery store, it is dusted with flour to make it not stick together. There truly is an endless list.

Now, dairy. This one may seem easier; it is just milk and cheese, right? Unfortunately, No.  Food scientists have invented innovative ways to utilize every portion of milk. In doing so it has been added to just as many things as gluten, the easy ones are things like flavored chips or pasta sauces. However, some things bear a surprise, like soy cheese. That's right, soy cheese. Casein (a milk protein) is used as a texture enhancer.

So at this point, it could be said there is nothing simple about how Sean and I go about eating. However, we would argue the way we used to eat was complicated. This, this is simple. And this blog, and the passion behind it, is to make things simple. Simple, delicious, natural food. It just so happens everything you will see here is dairy and gluten free. I bet you wont even notice, we don't. Well, most of the time.

Late Summer Farmers' Market

On almost any day of the week there is a Farmers' Market in a Seattle neighborhood.  Our neighborhood lands luckily on Sunday.  I'll be honest.  I have lived within short walking distance to the market for over 18 months and hadn't yet visited it.  My work often began early on Sundays and the rare free Sundays were spent nursing a hangover or traveling to some nice day trip locale. 

The summer is about to turn to fall in Seattle and the market is in full swing.  Ryan was quite overwhelmed.  The beauty of farmers' markets is the freedom they seem to bring from "profitable crops".  When I asked why Ryan was so silent while I was brimming with excitement, he said, "I don't even know what half this stuff is!"  Ryan, with his business background, explained why the grocery stores didn't carry 8 varieties of tomato, 6 varieties of potato, or what looked like hundreds of pepper varieties.  It made the grocery store seem pretty boring.  

To be fair, an excellent grocery store (by grocery store standards) is one block closer to us than the farmers' market.  But it's just not the same.  After picking up some rainbow chard, red-green tomatoes, apricots and a bag of mixed potatoes we headed home to cook some lunch.  It took a fair amount of coaxing to get Ryan to try the tomatoes.  They looked ugly, with weird red green patterns, some healed splits on the top and their irregular shape.  It only took a bite.  He was hooked.  They were so sweet they tasted like candy but so much better for us! 

Then we had to figure out what to do with the chard.  We picked up a huge bunch of rainbow chard with white, yellow and red stalks.  We decided to sauté with just a simple dash of salt and pepper.  The red stalks were sweet and the yellow stalks were salty.  It was a great mix together, plus look at all the nutrition in chard!

Simple was the theme for lunch.  The potatoes were boiled and salted.  The tomatoes were sliced and topped with chopped carrot and cucumber and dressed with basil olive oil.  We were full and felt healthy all the way around.  With a little coffee we were ready for the rest of the day.   Ryan remarked as I carried the plates into the kitchen, "How nice it was to talk to the farmers."  And I agree.

Cultivate. Cook. Consume. Responsibly.

Food. It's pretty good. It's even better when it comes from the ground.

This blog is a journey, a manifesto, and a challenge. Boys are picky eaters and when they carry a chip on their shoulder about social responsibility and a grab bag of dietary restrictions, it can make the kitchen a creative place.

We live in a small apartment with an even smaller kitchen in a small city. We aren't rich. We aren't over zealous. But, we do like to eat and we do like to drink. Hopefully, here at the Sensible Epicurean we may learn to save the world through our stomachs and have a damn good time doing it. Join us.