Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Sigh. It's summertime everyone! Even though earlier this morning it drizzled just enough to make me regret wearing new sandals but not enough to justify my umbrella use. Being a student is signing yourself up for a roller coast of stress, living the extremes!! 9 months of the year is devoted to mind numbing frustration, 2 sets of mental breakdowns during finals weeks (3 if you're on the quarter system), sleep deprivation, seasonal affect disorder, and coffee intoxication. Then there are 3 glorious months when the sun shines, sleeping too much becomes a problem, everything blooms, and life is worth living again!!! Let's not talk about September and school starting.

Even though I'm not completely off the hook this summer and am still working full time, something about just the thought of summer is magical. It makes me want to eat. Screw swimsuit season, this is stuff-your-face-season. I think this is mostly because the nice weather makes eating a portable activity. Picnics! Snacks on sticks! Street fairs!

S. and I make a strawberry rhubarb pie to share for a friendly poker get together. What he doesn't know is I slipped something into the pie to befuddle his friends and win all their money. Muahaha. Not really.

And what's better for a summertime dinner than something light like seared ahi tuna? Here is dinner from a bit ago; I seared the tuna with sesame seeds and served it with greens, sprouts, avocado, and a sweet soy ginger dressing:

Sesame Seared Ahi Tuna Salad

To bean, or not to bean?

Chili con carne:

It's been a busy few weeks, and with studying for (and finishing!) finals, I might briefly have slipped into the black hole that is eating takeout. But! knowing that this was a possibility, I wisely made some things to post, post operation-get-good-grades-and-work-on-a-career. It seems that this semester after the initial release of my last test and putting away weeks of notes and flashcards, there wasn't that expected zombie phase where I get to catch up with some much needed television; instead, I was making up lost time at work and arranging my quick trip to LA to visit family.

Anyway, *gesture above* here's my chili con carne! A friend and I had a discussion later whether a "real" chili has beans or not, resulting in an obligatory googling and hundreds of posts from people who also felt that this issue was more controversial than, I don't know, whether or not we landed on the moon (we did). People are passionate about their chili. This particular chili con carne is bean-less, but to give it some added textural depth, and also because of a certain diva butcher, it's made with chunks of beef chuck and ground beef.

And for dessert? Marcel Proust's Rememberall, the madeleine. I have a mold made in france that I proudly bought at an antique store for 2 bucks, and it makes beautiful orange and lemon zest madeleines that I later gave away (S. was disappointed). Interestingly, these particular madeleine's are accidentally whole grain...those who know me well know I'm awful with reading details in emails and on packages; luckily, this time the flub resulted in something that's not totally catastrophic, and possibly even good for me (disclaimer!! remember everyone, whole grain does not equal whole wheat. It's different).

Young at heart

Iced coffee with vanilla ice cream... much needed mojo for some serious studying

This is how we roll

For some reason, even though no one I've met who has actually eaten cake rolls has disliked them, these moist-and-creamy-sponge-cake-cylinders-of-subtly-sweet-deliciousness are highly underrated. I think most people know what they are (I hope! if you don't, go get one now!) but if you're looking for one at your grocery store, chances are you won't find it. I don't think I've even seen it before at our beloved Berkeley Bowl (which I learned recently sells elk sausage. S. was excited.). Up till the day I made one myself, I've only bought them at Asian bakeries even though nothing about them is Asian. I'm not totally sure where the origin is. They sometimes go by the name Swiss cake rolls, so perhaps they're Swiss? Who knows, maybe cake rolls are to the Swiss as fortune cookies are to the Chinese, at the end of the day who the hell cares, just eat the damn thing.

They are surprisingly versatile, with flavors like matcha green tea with azuki bean filling (ok that one's Asian, but that's an adaptation), chocolate with strawberry cream filling, whatever you crave with your tea or coffee. The sponge cake is light enough for a mid afternoon snack, but the cream is what makes it perfect for after dinner dessert. Or before dinner dessert.

My mocha cream marble cake roll:

And because the summer bug is getting to me (finals are almost over!), I wanted something light and refreshing for dinner, so I put together some store bought seaweed salad, made some miso soup and rolled up some sushi! Now, I am no sushi chef. In fact, the fish I hacked so elegantly to fill and top this sushi would make any sushi chef from the discount 99 cent sushi stand in the back of a convenience store weep. But the colors were pretty and I liked the idea that we ate a day of rolls so here it is:

No Knife Needed

The last couple of hours in a stew or a roast or whatever it is always seems to follow a trend. The meat is chewy, sinewy, gets stuck in your teeth, so you put the lid back on and figure you'll come back and check again later. This is the longest, most drawn out time in the stewing process, because the meat's cooked, it's edible, and goddammitI'mhungry. It doesn't matter how many times you check that beef, each trial taste is an advertisement for floss and a masochistic exercise in patience. Until suddenly! It's like that hunk of cow decided to jump off a cliff and beat itself silly on the way down so it could melt in your mouth one day. Every little cow's dream.

For this particular stew, which is technically a pot roast plus beef shank, the meat was marinated in a red wine sauce (preferably overnight, but for lack of proper planning, it was just from morning till the time I got off my butt to cook this shoulder). The shank is what makes the sauce really comes together - the collagen melts off the meat and bone and makes the sauce thick and rich. And to top it all off, there's this little stub of bone with what Anthony Bourdain has appropriately termed, God's Butter. Oh yeah. That's marrow in there. Well, not in this picture, because I sucked that out well before the stew was done. Shank isn't the best source of bone marrow; if that's what you're looking for, better go for marrow bone (duh) and roast it, but what you can dig out of that little stub in a shank is a nice little cherry on top.