The Hungry Tiger

"Inconvenient" granola

Two years ago I posted a recipe for "very good granola." That granola was indeed good. I ate it with pleasure and would happily eat it again. This granola, however, is better. It's a bit more trouble, but I don't think it actually takes more time. For one thing, that old recipe (like many others) involves toasting everything at a truly excruciatingly low temperature, which is unnecessary and takes forever.

In the interim, I have been convinced by this method if not quite those ingredients. I abominate sunflower seeds in granola and was also influenced by a New York Times piece a little while ago about the virtues of using olive oil and extra salt. And then, rather than mix in dried fruit at the same time as everything else, I add it to the bowl just before eating -- why not? That way you can choose something different every time, if you like. These days I am fond of dried cherries and Persian green raisins, which are beautiful and have their own very nice flavor, not quite like any other raisins I've had.

I also claimed that the "very good" recipe made "a fairly enormous quantity" -- half a gallon, including the dried fruit. In light of the quantities of granola now gracing my kitchen, this seems slightly comical. The recipe here makes at least fifteen cups before the fruit gets involved at all. 

Beets, pickled

Beets are a divisive vegetable. On the one hand, they are beautiful and delicious. On the other, they dye everything in their path, including your fingernails if you are not careful, and some people are of the opinion that they taste exactly like a big clod of dirt.

Both undercooking and the absence of acid tend to make beets taste less pleasantly "earthy" and more unpleasantly "like dirt," and so one of the nicest things you can do with a beet is to pickle it. Indeed I think it is a mistake under almost any circumstances to serve a beet without including a little something acidic to raise it up. A squeeze of lemon or splash of vinegar will pull together a plate of roast beets, a pink risotto, or a beet rösti the way that butter finishes a sauce. As the Dude's rug is to his room, so is a touch of acid to a beet-oriented meal.

Psst.

This website and its archives have been sitting under wraps, behind a wall of password protection, for nearly a year. Its old location was tied too closely, I decided, to the material I'd posted online about my academic research. Colleagues and potential employers could stumble across it with no effort at all, just by searching for my real name or a paper I'd written. And while writing about food is hardly the most frivolous or embarrassing hobby I might have, it's generally best for junior academics, especially junior academics who haven't yet landed a tenure-track position, to efface all signs of personality or interest beyond their work, at least on first acquaintance.

So the wall went up and the Google spiders slowly went away, and so, of course, did all my readers and anyone who wanted to find a nice recipe for plum cake, godlike snacks, or preserved lemons. I was happy to give out the password, but how was anyone to know? You had to ferret out my email address and ask me right out, in the face not of some friendly page inviting you to get in touch, but the impersonal glare of a "401 Authorization Error."

I was charmed and flattered to find that there were a number of people willing to go to the trouble. I would certainly not have done the same, in your place. I'd be too shy -- and there are so many good food websites these days, it's easy to find more to fill the space where one hungry tiger used to be.

As you can see, though, I've finally moved the site to a place where it doesn't need to be password protected. Even I was tired of the creaky old setup, the need to log in, the impossibility of searching for old recipes with Google. While I was importing the site into Typepad, I also made an attempt to update the way the archives were organized and categorized. So many old entries weren't well tagged, and the set of categories I'd built up over the years was more idiosyncratic than useful. I hope you (and I!) will find it easier to navigate the archives now, and easier yet once I add a few more refinements and indices I have planned.

If, after all that obfuscation and inconvenience, you're somehow here and reading this, thank you. Although I'll never return to the volume of posts I managed when I was a sprightly new grad student with a shiny new website, there will be new material. Welcome back!