ashe blogs

I don’t normally think of Ann Arbor as a tourist destination, but if I were going to spend a week in a cute city visiting museums and attending concert, I could certainly do worse!  That said, I think it’s really cool that they’ve got a Frank Lloyd Wright house available as a vacation rental.

“The Palmer House is a multilevel brick and cypress late period Frank Lloyd Wright house, the plan and design of which is based on the equilateral triangle. The Palmer house exemplifies Wright’s open, American organic architecture in which all parts are related to the whole and are linked to the environment in an adaptation of form to nature. In addition to the main house, there is a tea house located on the 2 acres of woodland surrounding the home.”

Last weekend when we were in the vicinity for a baby shower, friends told us of an awesome corn stand on 23 Mile near Mound Road.  We picked up a ton of stuff, actually - juicy tomatoes, crunchy and colorful bell peppers, juicy pears, a couple sweet little cantaloupes, and a pot of fresh basil which is still growing on our windowsill.  But the fresh sweet corn in bunches of twelve was really the raison d’etre.

Only trouble is, we don’t have a grill at the moment. How do you enjoy sweet corn-on-the-cob if you can’t grill it?

Turns out there’s a decent way to cook it in the oven.  Soaking the corn in a bucket of water for a couple hours (after removing the silks) becomes ever more important, as the corn will otherwise dry out during the long cooking time.  Just before baking, I rubbed a pat of cold salted butter across the kernels, and tied the remaining husk at the tips to keep the butter in.  Then I roasted the corn at 350° for about 45 minutes, which is longer than most of the Internet advice seems to suggest, but necessary.  The husks should be starting to brown, as in the upper right of the picture below.

Isn’t it beautiful?  I think I’ve found one of the treasures of living in the Midwest.

Update (thanks Rob): Garrison Keillor agrees with me, and has actually written said ode.

This has been one of the best attempts at dinner in recent memory, mostly because the fajita marinade I chose is so simple and so perfect. You don’t even need the guacamole and the sour cream and the cheese if you don’t want to bother.  Just salsa is great.  I recommend “Jack’s Special” from Garden Fresh, which is definitely the best stuff on the market if you’re a cilantro lover.

The key to these fajitas: cut everything huge.  You get juicier vegetables that way, and meat that is medium rare but still boasts fajita-style char.  I was using only 1-2 strips of meat in each fajita, and the peppers and onions were sized to match - a task made easier by their gargantuan size this season.  I bought two onions and only ended up using one when I realized that this onion was easily the size of a grapefruit.  I sautéed the onion and pepper strips - as many as I could fit into the skillet - but covered them for a time to make sure they got soft.  Then I turned up the heat to char them at the end.  Voilà!

Steak Fajita Marinade (adapted from Simply Recipes)

• 1 lime (for juice)
• 2 cloves garlic
• ½ fresh jalapeño pepper
• ¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
• ½ teaspoon ground cumin
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Juice the lime, mince the garlic, chop the cilantro.  Stems are okay.  Remove seeds and white stuff from the jalapeño, and chop it finely.  Mix all ingredients in a zip-lock bag and throw in the flank steak.

The marinade is sufficient for a 1-lb flank steak.  As is usual with marinades, give the meat as much time in the juice as you can manage… overnight really is best.  If you don’t have that much time, cut the meat into strips before marinating so you get more surface area.

How To Cook Like Your Grandmother has more nuts-and-bolts tips on the cooking technique than I could ever enumerate here, so give it a look.

These fresh-tasting fajitas are great with fresh corn, and Bobby Flay has the ultimate recipe if you like lime butter.   It’s from his grilling cookbook, which my boyfriend gave me for my birthday last year.  Tragically, we don’t have a grill at our disposal right now, so I’ve included workarounds using the oven and broiler.

Mexicali Corn (adapted from Bobby Flay’s Grill It!)

• 2 bell peppers (red, orange, yellow, or a combination)
• 4 ears fresh corn
• 1 red onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 serrano chile
• 2 tablespoons fresh cilantro
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 lime (for juice)

Rub the bell peppers with oil, and roast them.  If you don’t have a gas grill or stove, use the broiler.  (Do not use jarred peppers, they don’t taste right for this.)

Remove the silk and soak the ears of corn for 10 minutes in a salt bath.  Then grill them in the husk, if possible.  Otherwise, you can roast them in a 350°F oven, directly on the rack, for 30 minutes or until soft.

Dice the raw onion and roasted bell peppers.  Finely chop the garlic, serrano chile, and cilantro.  Juice the lime.

Sauté onions on high heat until soft, then add garlic and serrano and cook for an additional minute.  Stir in the bell pepper and corn to re-heat as necessary.  Stir in butter, lime juice, and cilantro.  Serve.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the most glorious uses of butter in the world.

I have exciting news — I’m going to San Francisco for my race!  This week, my aunt told me that she won the lottery for entry to the Nike Women’s Marathon, which gives me a shot of extra motivation to raise the higher minimum.  I’m looking forward to seeing all my friends and family out there, and it’s going to be a great experience running my first race with my aunt!

Of course, San Francisco has hills.  So it’s appropriate that this week’s training was our first hills run.  Hills in southeastern Michigan, you say?  Actually, yes.  Today’s run in Bloomfield Hills had 164 feet of climb!  There’s a reason it’s called Bloomfield Hills.  Fortunately, the Nike Women’s Marathon course has “no cable-car hills,” according to the website.  But it will have enough hills that I should add a regular weekly hill run to my training.

I’ve been quite busy lately getting organized after our move to the new apartment, so I haven’t had a lot to report on the cooking front.  That changed last night, when in an attempt to use up leftovers (particularly cilantro), I made a whole bunch of salsa.  Two different kinds, in fact.  Having already decided to make salsa to get rid of excess tomatoes and cilantro from the Fourth of July caprese salad, it was an easy step to also make a fruit salsa to accompany dinner.  Having had some excellent plums from Whole Foods the other day, I decided to see if plums could in fact be salsafied.  The answer is yes, spectacularly:

Then the question became what to serve it with.  It’s best with salsas to let them rest overnight so that the flavors meld, so I took the opportunity to thaw the other half of the duck breast I bought for my boyfriend’s birthday.  And today I discovered an excellent spice rub combination to put on the duck.  It turned out to be an auspicious combination, and this is a dinner I will remember for a long time.  Not quite as euphoric a success as the day I learned to make risotto, but close.  The sweet potatoes are from a mix, so don’t get too excited there.

Recipes, with my notes, are below the fold.

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This was a glorious week of training.  For the past two weeks, I’ve been running eight mile long runs.  I’ve hit just under a 12-minute mile pace in the end on each, and feel I could go still faster!  However, I still have a tendency to go out too fast, particularly when surrounded by sub-10 rabbits.  Running 12-minute miles feels actively slow, making me concentrate unduly on the weight of my feet and ankles.  In contrast, 10-minute miles make me feel like I’m flying.  This past weekend I ran the first four miles at a 10-minute pace because that’s what the group was doing, and I was impressed that I stuck with them for so long.

Unfortunately, working at too high an intensity does trigger my asthma, and once my lungs have been set off, it’s hard to run at any speed.  I don’t know if that’s something that will improve drastically with further speed training or is just a particular obstacle of mine.  So I’ll be strategically switching between a run and a fast walk during the marathon.  Fortunately, water stops during most marathons are every two miles.  I can run at a faster clip for the majority of the two miles, then walk quickly through the water stops to keep my lungs happy.  Apparently this is a common strategy.  I’m a fast walker with a long stride, so the walking doesn’t hit me with a tremendous time penalty.

What matters is that I’ve felt GREAT after my long runs, and I’m running them at what I feel is a respectable pace.  I can do this!!

The other after-effect I am noticing, is that I hit a fatigue wall hard at about 3PM after my long runs.  I’ve taken a two-hour nap for the past two Saturdays, without intending it.  I will simply stop by the couch to watch something vaguely intriguing on the television, and am out like a light within five minutes.  I suppose this can’t be a bad thing, as rest and recovery are important.  But it’s pretty dramatic behavior for someone like me, who hasn’t taken a nap since the age of four. Googling suggests either that I need to better electrolyte replacement, or that I am running my long runs too fast.  I will work on the former, but I suspect the latter.  Don’t see any reason to slow down though, as I still feel great at the end of the long runs, and I’m a noob.  Of course my body is going to take some adjusting.

What matters is that I wake up from the naps feeling FANTASTIC.

Next week is hills training!  Since I’m a week behind the group’s schedule right now, I won’t be running the full 12 miles on the schedule.  Hills are intense and it’s clearly the wrong week to catch up with them.  Instead, I’ll be running the 6-mile hills course once, then returning home to run 4 miles on my own later in the day.  My coach told us last week that the benefits of the long run are achieved as long as the mileage is covered within a 10-hour period, which is a handy factoid.  I can imagine that it would be very useful on a busy Saturday when I’m having trouble finding the time to run — no excuses!

I am so impatient to run again!  I haven’t gotten through a full week of training recently without something getting in the way!

I permitted myself to be a little lazy last Saturday, since I was on a short and awesome trip to visit my best friend in Champaign, IL.  There just weren’t two hours in the day to run, between breakfast at the Farmers’ Market and Art Mart, and the Taste of Champaign fair, and shopping and hanging out.  Perhaps we could have taken a nice long walk instead of my run, but we spent most of the day on our feet anyway.  I figured that I could as easily run on Sunday night or Monday, without taking time out of our vacation.  Trouble was that I flew home with a whisper of migraine, and it took a couple more days for that brain fog to dissipate.

Now, this weekend, we’re moving to a new apartment.  I’ve hired a local moving company to take care of  the larger pieces of furniture, but there is plenty to do in the way of preparation.  For one thing, I have been moving all the furniture I can lift to one corner of the kitchen so there will be more space in other rooms for boxes.  And on Wednesday, I jammed my big toe into the base of the ottoman while moving it, and snapped the toenail in half.  I’ve done this before - once in middle school, a week before having to perform in a ballet on pointe.  I managed.  But this time the injury was somewhat worse.  Fully half of the toenail was separated from the nail bed, and it took a good thirty seconds of ungodly pain before I could regain my composure.

“NOOOOOO!!! MY TRAINING!!” was my first thought.  Toenails take a very long time to heal.  The split will probably still be there in October when I’m running the marathon, as if I needed a greater challenge!  Runners are somewhat susceptible to toenail issues in the first place, and I don’t want this injury compounded.  Fortunately, I could e-mail my coach for advice.  Apparently a couple days of rest followed by a good toenail trim should take care of it.  Much better than I was fearing.

Here’s hoping July is a better month for training!

Well, I had all the greatest intentions to keep with my training schedule, but these past two weeks have been quite trying.  I am proud to say that though I’ve missed training runs, I haven’t flaked due to insufficient willpower.

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Back now to the reason I re-started this blog: to serve as a festival of food and repository of recipes. I haven’t found much time for cooking lately, but in the interest of cleaning out the refrigerator, I made cinnamon apples this evening.

That was about all that could be done with the apples; the sorry things had been in the crisper since April, when I decided that getting a whole case at CostCo was a good idea. I figured I’d eat more apples if I had them in the house. But I go through phases with fruit, and apparently I haven’t been in the mood for apples. Lately it’s been sweeter, tangier things: pineapple, peach, strawberry. So the apples have gone uneaten, and have started to get a little dehydrated and rubbery. Somewhat unappetizing to eat raw, but quite recoverable through the magic of heat, butter, and sugar.

If you’ve never made cinnamon apples before, they’re fast and foolproof. Cut 4-5 apples into 1-inch chunks and toss them in a saute pan. Then add the good stuff: a half-cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg if you’ve got it. To make all that into a syrup, you’ll need to add 1 tablespoon of butter and 2 tablespoons of water. Cook it at medium heat for fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally; I like to kick it up to medium-high for the last five minutes so I get a nice, bubbly, thickening syrup. Serve alone if you’ve a sweet tooth and are trying to pass it off as a legitimate side dish, or with vanilla ice cream as a simple dessert. It’s also simple to make in large batches, great for beginner-level dinner parties. Re-heats like magic.  A sprig of mint on top for elegance.  Can’t go wrong!

Welcome to Week Two, in which a mystery is solved and miracles happen.  My advice to new runners now starts with this:  Find someone knowledgeable to evaluate your form.

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