not every meal is worth mentioning...but i will anyway

I'm by myself this weekend and therefore putting less effort into meal planning. It's less satisfying to cook when you are the only one around to compliment the results. This morning's breakfast was therefore a random assortment of things I had in the fridge: potatoes I started chopping up maybe a week ago before we decided to go out to brunch at Z cafe instead (fabulous restaurant hidden in between car dealerships right near our house). I stuck them in a bowl of water in the refrigerator and was surprised that they survived the week looking nonetheworse for wear. Threw in some jalepenos, garlic, and onions and then fried up some of my current obsession: okra. The guys I like to buy okra from at the market weren't there this week, so I'm finishing up last week's supply. I decided to try rolling them in the flour/spice batter without dipping in buttermilk, which has been my preferred method of late for frying, because I figured they're sticky little buggers on their own so why is this liquid dipping necessary? The flour stuck really well onto the okra but once they hit the oil in the pan most of it came off, so I think that's the reasoning for the liquid dip. Live and learn. In an attempt to cut the greasiness of my meal, I sliced up one of the more visually appealing tomatoes Sele and I selected yesterday. And then because I noticed my fingernails matched the tomato so nicely I had to take pictures and play with the limited effects of picasa on my computer.
I'm sharing my breakfast routine with you not because I think it's that interesting, but because I've been looking at a lot of cooking blogs lately while trying to learn about blogging - and their snobby photos make it look like every meal they prepare is perfect and stunningly beautiful. And I want you to know that I fry up random stuff from the back of the fridge and pretend it goes together as a meal. And I'm ok with that.

market score of the day: pluots

Sele and I headed to the Lake Merritt Farmers Market this morning with the expressed purpose of finding more things to can. We settled on pluots simply because they were so beautiful. I like the idea of pluots: plums and apricots put together, what's not to love? But I'm always disappointed with their taste. So I was scheming on what to add to pluot preserves to make them more appealing: Sele thought basil. I'm skeptical about this, but was willing to do purple sweet basil, just for aesthetic wonder. We sniffed the purple basil and decided against that idea. I'm still considering star anise - not really because I think the tastes would go together, but again solely for aesthetic reasons. I can picture the pink translucent flesh of the pluot along with the sharp angles of the star anise in the jar and it's so appealing. The spiced jam idea is inspired by my friend Rachel's mom, Mindy's recent batch of strawberry-cardamom jam, which got my wheels whirring. I couldn't quite bring myself to pay for strawberries and then not eat them fresh, so I'm working on a less expensive alternative with the pluots. We'll see what comes of it.
In other market-related news: heirloom tomatoes are still out in force and so fabulous. Here's Sele with some particularly great selections.

oklahoma goodies

sipping saturday morning coffee today inspired me to feature my favorite recent find: the oil rig coffee mugs. we found these treasures at a thrift store on our recent trip to oklahoma. i love them, partly for the irony of cherishing this symbolic image of our impending doom, and partly for the aesthetic accuracy of comparing oil to the type of coffee I insist on brewing, no matter how many guests can't drink it.
here they are making appearances next to the ongoing dragonfly quilt project and the other baby-related craft i finished in oklahoma: knit baby hat. this is baby hat number 3 for our friend justin's new baby, nasra. the first two i completed with grandma ho's help while in hawai'i - one crocheted and one knit, but i was trying to figure out how to decrease without a pattern on the knit hat and it turned out with a few extraneous angles, so this is my redo attempt, a few sizes bigger so she can grow into it.

fabricating dragonflies

Several years ago I started inexplicably collecting dragonfly patterned fabric. I don't have a particular affinity for dragonflies nor did I have a project in mind for the fabric, so its been boxed up at my mom's house awaiting an opportune project to surface. On our recent trip to South Dakota I met baby Payton Sky - who does have a particular affinity with dragonflies - and so the quilting project emerges at last.
Thanks to mom's diligent postal assistance I now have the fabric and a paper piecing pattern for dragonfly squares. First of all, I'd never heard of paper piecing before - miraculous. It's like paint-by-numbers for quilting. You literally just take scraps of fabric and sew them together on top of the actual paper pattern - no thinking required once you figure out that the piecing is kind of counter-intuitive, meaning you end up pressing the pieces into place after stitching them right sides together so it takes a minute to figure out how to lay them so they press into the right places.
I ended up copying the pattern by hand onto tissue paper (easier to rip off the piece once its done than regular paper - newsprint would have been the ideal weight, but I didn't have any) thus the picture of the pattern taped to the window of my new sewing studio.
After a week of obsessive paper piecing I now have a flock of seven dragonflies, which I think is all I'm going to make since the number seven is significant in baby Payton's culture. My task now is figuring out what the rest of the quilt is going to look like and how to incorporate all these dissimilar dragonfly prints together to make something appealing.
Since I'm working with regular quarter yards and fat quarters for once and not scraps I feel like I should make a regular patterned quilt, but regular patterns bore me - I like to work with things that are a little wonky and irregular so we'll see what comes out. I am considering tacking felt up on the wall of the studio to create a design wall, but I priced felt at Longs where I found myself this morning at $6/yard and I'm too cheap to go that route, so carpet design remains the strategy of choice for now.

canning continues

before my housemate, aryn, moves back east to pursue her graduate degree, i've been garnering all i can of her knowledge of canning. a couple weeks ago we went to pick peaches and plums in brentwood, ca - which turns out to be a disorienting gated-community-type suburb with random orchards hidden in the middle of it. we made peach and plum jam with this pectin i found at whole foods - and while i normally despise having to shop at "whole paycheck" as aryn calls it, this time they provided some pectin that changed my whole experience of jam. this stuff, pomona's universal pectin, uses calcium instead of sugar to activate its jelling power - meaning you can use a fraction of the amount of sugar that normal pectin requires (often one to one fruit to sugar, eew). now i can't justify using any other type of pectin. not to mention they have a "jamline" - really, that's what they call their phone question line.
following the success of our peach and plum jamming experience, aryn and i jarred up some heirloom tomatoes - taking advantage of that season and anticipating the long hard winter aryn has ahead of her in worcester, ma. we roasted the tomatoes in the oven until they melted into little puddles and then scooped them into sterilized jars, layering with lemon juice (to prevent botchalism, nobody wants that), olive oil and basil leaves. then put the jars back into the water bath for about 45 mins. all the jars sealed up tight (though i didn't do a good job of getting all the air bubbles out of my tomatoes, i hope that won't be a problem) and they look pretty and tasty.