The main idea was making your own tomato sauce with thinly sliced zucchinis, onions, garlic, oregano, and freshly cracked pepper. There are both Parmesan in the sauce and big dollops of fresh mozzarella on the sides of the completed pasta. Throw some sausage in the sauce and call it a day. Delicious.

weeping willows and trees for, well, more munching:

and lovely reflective ponds to drink out of. All while stomping on manicured gardens, which is just fun.

Click the more button to read about the other buildings:

The accents on the old churches are out of this world. I can’t believe the intricate carvings wound all around doorways and pillars. It takes attention to detail to a whole new level. The third picture of a church below was from a different building I happened to wander into on a Sunday, just an hour before a wedding happened. How do so many spiritual places exist, just tucked away like that?

Both of these photos below are from my walk to class.

I actually have no photos of the beach, known as the “Marvelous Beach,” as theft was very common, so I took no valuables when I went. But it had a lapping, warm saltwater ocean and was packed with chatting teenagers, families, Spanish women without tops on and men in tiny swimsuits that were purple, neon, or pink. Unironically. It would be hard to capture that sense of the teeming miles of beach with just a photo, but I can say that the sand was warm, the people were laughing, and I was invigorated, relaxed, reflective, and at peace.

I have a ziplock bag filled with a bubbling, liquidy-paste that lives in my refrigerator. If that doesn’t sound appealing, I’ll tell you that it has been living there since 2006 when I took a cup of the starter from my mother’s, who had gotten it from a friend perhaps 8 years earlier. And it was alive before then at someone else’s house. Despite these nebulous beginnings, though, this starter dough is amazing. It can live without me even looking at it for 6-8 months and then within two weeks with some rising and ingredient additions, produce a sugary sweetbread that is usually gone while still warm. I just gave away my first cup of this friendship bread to Lily, continuing the chain, and if anyone else wants some, it is yours.

This website, among others, has the exact step by step, especially for giving it away to people more often. I’m going to share the modified recipe I’ve been using for maintaining it for years. Here is how to make the starter from scratch, in case you are faraway. Recipe follows below:

Amish Friendship Bread

1. Take your starter out of the fridge, where it has been living for 2 weeks to 6 months. Add 1 c flour, 1 c white sugar, and 1 c milk (not soy…needs to be real milk). Mix it in by scrunching the bag. Let it sit on the counter for five days, making sure to let out the air on days 4 and 5.

2. Save 1 c of the mix for next time. Put that in a new ziplock bag and put it in the fridge.

3. With the remaining starter, add it to a metal bowl with the following:

–1 c oil

–1 c sugar

–3 eggs

–1/2 t salt

–1 large bag instant vanilla pudding OR an extra 1/2 to 3/4 c  sugar instead (this part is decidedly not Amish!)

–2 c flour

–1/2 t baking soda

–1/2 c milk

–2 t cinnamon

–1 and 1/2 t baking powder

4. Mix. Grease two bread pans with butter. Put cinnamon sugar in the bottom and dust it around like you would flour for a cake. Pour the bread evenly into the two pans. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top. Bake at 325 degrees for one hour.

Yup, I found the Tassajara recipe. And the yeast packets that had been relegated to the back of the baking cabinet behind the fancy chocolate chips. And I did it. It had to rise four times, but I have that kind of time. I want to make fresh crostini with it, maybe this chickpea recipe, but that’s another story. Here’s to getting flour everywhere and making sandwiches with fresh whole wheat bread. If you are feeling too lazy right now, make this recipe instead. But if you are game, keep reading:

I stood in front of the faucet for a while making sure the water was actually “lukewarm,” and a little on the warmer side at that so that it would still be warm by the time I got the yeast packets open. I took photos at various phases in the process when I didn’t have too much dough on my hands. I was very surprised by how natural kneading felt, from mostly having watched it in the past. At every step, I felt shocked that the bread actually did what it was supposed to–I expected failure at every step. This time, I won the battle.

Tassajara Whole Wheat Bread

Makes 2 loaves, adapted minimally from the Tassajara Bread Book (namely the tattered original one in my mom’s kitchen).

Ingredients:

Stage 1:

3 cups lukewarm water (feels warm against your wrist)
1 1/2 tablespoons dry yeast (2 packets)
1/4 cup sweetening (honey, molasses, or brown sugar)
4 cups whole wheat flour (can substitute 1 c of this with white flour for it to be a little less dense)

Stage 2:

4 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup olive oil
3 cups additional whole wheat flour (can substitute some wheat bran, oat bran,oats,  millet, other flours, etc. Don’t do more than 2 and try to keep it under 1 cup total or it may become too dense)
1 cup whole wheat flour for kneading

Directions:

Dissolve the yeast in water. Stir for 2 min. Stir in sweetening. Stir in the 4 cups of whole wheat flour to form a thick batter.  Beat well with a wooden spoon (100 strokes…I counted). Cover loosely with a towel. Let rise 45 minutes. 

Should look like this after the first 45 min.

Fold in the salt and oil. Fold in an additional 3 cups of flour until the dough comes away from the sides of bowl. In this case, I used 1/3 c each of cornmeal and oat bran. Knead on a floured board, using more flour (about 1 cup) as needed to keep the dough from sticking to the board, about 8 to 10 minutes (time yourself…the first 2 min do not count as 1o min), until the dough is smooth.  Let rise 50 to 60 minutes until doubled in size. 

This is post-kneading, before I covered it with the towel.

Punch down. Let rise 40 to 50 minutes until doubled in size.

Shape into loaves and place in greased bread pans.  Let rise 20 to 25 minutes.

This is before it rose for the last time in the pans.

Brush tops with additional olive oil (or egg wash). Bake in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour, or until golden brown. Take out of the pan soon and, once cooled, make sure to wrap tightly with foil so that the bread doesn’t get dry.

I scanned through earlier posts and found an oatmeal chocolate chip recipe, but I liked the ratio better on this one. Besides, it has golden raisins, so it is like a totally different experience. There are no photos of the finished cookies because they are that delicious, especially when hot.

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Oats and Golden Raisins

Adapted from two allrecipes sites (by individuals named Panthera?! and Beth Sigworth)

• 1 c salted butter
• 3/4 c packed brown sugar
• 1/2 c white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 t vanilla extract
• 1 and 3/4 c white flour
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 and 1/2 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t cloves
• 1/2 t nutmeg
• 3 c quick cooking oats
• 1 c chocolate chips
• 1 c chopped golden raisins

Directions: Cream butter and sugars. Add eggs and vanilla. Add pile of flour with soda and spices. Mix. Add oats. Add chocolate chips. Add golden raisins. Bake at 335 for 12 min (350 was too hot).

Cookie Update: Liz got ahold of the original recipe that I’d been dreaming of (thanks Liz and Bambi!). Main difference: more sugar and some mace (otherwise, almost exact proportions). From ‘The Rest of the Best: Volume 2″ from 1998.

To follow that recipe: Increase sugar amount to 1 c white sugar and 1 c brown sugar. Add 1/2 t ground mace and reduce flour by 1/4 c. Bake at 350 for 8-10 min. Can also add up to 1 c chopped nuts.

I am just now getting comfortable with saying that: I’m 25. For those of my friends who are turning 30 soon, or for my mom who I am sure is shaking her head as I she reads this, I am sure I will garner little sympathy. But, I’d argue, this is one of the birthdays that makes you pause and reflect.

For example, over the past year, there have been a lot of changes: I’ve moved from the Addison Ranch in Los Altos Hills to the Castro in San Francisco. I’ve finished my second year of teaching. I’ve done another full year of physical therapy which has made me stronger, and slowly, ever so slowly, able to add in a few more cardio activities. I’ve seen old friends and made new ones. And since my birthday last year, my little brother graduated from high school and did his first year at Harvard and my little sister graduated from Colorado College.

While those are the big level changes, there are also the smaller, more minute ones that show you how time is passing. For example, I have 10 or so white hairs currently existing on my head. I pulled out maybe 10 others in the past few months–some small, but all entirely silver and in one suspicious patch, but Paul convinced me that I can’t continue to pull out my own hair, so I am letting them live. I’m aging and it is real. I am slowly getting to know San Francisco, branching out from 18th street to explore and finally connect the dots on how the disconnected places I have been to actually connect on a grid. And now that it is summer, I am reading a lot. Specifically with this young adult fantasy genre that I haven’t explored (Ender’s Game, The Lightening Thief, The Hunger Games) that I am hoping will build into Stranger in a Strange Land and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I am remembering that I am a person with hobbies and who can let her guard down, especially after another year of teaching when I don’t always have those luxuries on a day to day basis.

But speaking about luxuries, here’s a cake from my actual birthday:

Claire and Stef brough Barefoot Contessa Brownies and made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. And they helped Paul bake me two cakes, one raspberry crumb cake with a layer of jam in the middle (he found that) and my favorite family cake recipe, chocolate mocha dot. This recipe is actually from the 1946 Ladies Home Journal, passed from my grandmother to my mom to me. The recipe is listed with ingredients and steps combined.

Chocolate Mocha Dot Cake:

Sift together:

• 1 and 3/4 c flour
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1 t salt
• 1 t soda
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 c cocoa
• 1 and 1/2 c sugar

Add:

• 1/2 c butter
• 1/2 c strong cool coffee
• 1/3 c buttermilk or sour milk (made with 1 T lemon juice or vinegar per cup of normal milk)

The answer is that the end of school is total chaos. Especially teaching seniors, it means that I serve as an emotional counselor for this big transition of exiting high school/going to college. And I do that as I am myself in the midst of figuring out how to let them go. Over two years of knowing the kids, through the individual ups and downs, you get really attached to them, and it is both a merciful sense of closure and a nagging emptiness when you realize that they don’t need you anymore. Graduation, then is a bittersweet moment, the climactic end. The below photo is the only one when I don’t look like a confused, sad, or entirely exhausted person.

During this end of year time, I’ve been eating a lot of frozen pizza, breakfast quesadillas for dinner, Kasa roti wraps, etc. Every now and then, I cooked at like 10pm, making enough food for the next lunch and dinner or so, but was so tired that we ended up doing half brained ideas like this: trying to get all our t0-go containers to cool in the window so that we could refrigerate them and get to sleep (I think this is bulgar and chicken).

Now that it is summer and I’ve finally got a copy of Super Natural Every Day, I am ready to get back into cooking and figure out, as in every summer, how I do actually use free time. It has been a week since I finished grading, I am finally getting off the couch. Here’s to more cooking ahead!

In case you are interested, here are some recent links about the high school where I work:

Here’s a news article about one of my students who is going to Stanford: “Working on Building Engineering Dreams“

Here’s a video about Eastside by New American Media: “School Churns Out College-Bound Grads in East Palo Alto”

Videos about the graduation ceremony itself: “Kron-4 News Spot” and “Eastside College Prep 2011 Graduation”

Thank you video the students made for the faculty: “Salute to Our Teachers”

First of all, let’s take a moment to reflect on the persona of Calle Ocho, the Cuban neighborhood catapulted to public notice by Miami based rapper Pitbull. Yeah, although many of his rhymes are downright embarrassing, I have  a weakness for Pitbull’s beats (“Give Me Everything,” for example)

Versaille, the famous Cuban restaurant right on Calle Ocho, Paul and I were some of the few gringos in the large, loud room. The actual Cubans around us were using excessive hand gestures, entirely wrapped up in their emphatic discussions in Spanish. And the food. My mojito (yes, it was 11am, don’t judge) had a sugar cane stick to gnaw on for sweetness. Paul’s cafe con leche was almost pure warm milk, with a little bit of spice and coffee poured in. And the paella and tortas were amazing. We ate until we were far too full.

.

This makes me want to try to craft paella at home. Like soon.

On Friday, we went to a lovely dinner party at our friend Katie’s house in Atherton. She made some of the best flank steak I’ve had, which she said she got from a butcher in downtown Menlo Park. The marinate was out of this world. As Paul and I drove back, we somehow ended up with all the to-go containers of steak. Our win.

My initial craving was to eat the steak for breakfast–or at least steak and eggs, but Paul convinced me that was a bit too aggressive that early (to which I replied: steak and waffles?). I then thought of steak sandwiches with caramelized onions and a hard cheese. But then, later on in the afternoon, I got an intense craving for polenta. I recalled the following recipe from memory (and intentionally forgot some of the butter on the way) from an Italian cooking book I used in high school. There was one questionable incident back then in which I messed up sifting buckwheat flour and actual polenta and made a mush of inedible, brown, dense mush. My family cackled as I threw stick after stick of butter in the pot, but it still tasted like eating dirt. I’ve been a big proponent of the tube kind since then. And recipes as easy as this.

Mushrooms with Polenta, Goat Cheese, and Steak

Directions:

1. Buy a tube of polenta (what, you thought I had more energy than this?). Heat it in a pan over the stovetop, adding 1 T olive oil and milk as needed until it is at a desirable consistency.
2. Chop 2 cloves of garlic. Heat in butter. Add sliced mushrooms (any variety will do) and saute with salt, pepper, and any other fresh spices on hand. After a few minutes, add a 2-3 T of balsamic vinegar and 1-2 T water. Let simmer.
3. Heat some steak. Or cook some if you are feeling energetic.
4. Make sure you have high quality goat cheese on hand. You can either stir it into the polenta and let it melt or add a dollup at the end and let the consumer mix some in with each bite.
5. Compose on plate, making sure to pour on the sauce. Ta da!