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Such read the text message I received one Sunday morning from a friend attending the Broadway Farmers' Market here in Seattle. There is a friendly, laid-back guy at the market who sells baked goods - delicious ones - representing Heavenly Pastry & Cake. And he's resurrected his german grandmother's soft pretzel recipe (or something like that), in my opinion for true benefit to the general public. The pretzels live in a brown paper bag that advertises their buttery goodness by looking buttery itself. The pretzels themselves are smaller than expected, golden-brown and irregular. Covered in flaky kosher-style salt, they're chewy and dense and a little bit sweet, too. And oh so buttery! A squeeze of yellow mustard and you're off to pretzel heaven.
I'll post a picture next time I go get a pretzel. While eating the two I bought last weekend I forgot about basically everything else.
UPDATE:
I went to the market today and arrived just after all of the pretzels were eaten. Damn. But instead I made do with something called a Big Cheezy, a cross between a biscuit and a scone made with cheese and jalapeños - rich and tangy and a little salty, but good for breakfast because there's still a bit of sweetness in the dough in addition to all the savory goodness.
There's no accounting for taste, and sometimes differences in individual sense of taste can get you condemned to the culinary doghouse for longer than you might expect. May the two following examples serve as warning to the gastronaut seeking to share an adventure in food with unprepared or skeptical companions.
I love cheese, in a Wallace and Gromit kind of way. Almost every kind of cheese is delicious (I hesitantly except Morbier from my general love of cheese but that's a story for another time.) But many people are unprepared for the variety of cheeses available, or for their occasionally pungent nature. I was to see some friends one evening many months ago and I thought to bring some bread and cheese along with me. I chose a baguette and a few favorites - Boucheron (an aged log of goat's cheese,) and I think a wedge of Rogue Creamery's Smokey Blue Cheese, and, most particularly, a small crock of St. Marcellin, a cow's-milk cheese that becomes soft and runny as it ages so it is sold in small pottery dishes. It can be particularly pungent, but the taste is actually quite mild and milky despite what the nose may say (and I think it smells rather good, but apparently I can't be trusted!) 
In ignorance, I laid out the cheeses with a brief description of each and the assembled company fell to, trying the more familiar first and then moving on to the St. Marcellin. One of my friends took up a small piece of bread with a small dab of the cheese, tasted it, immediately pulled a pained and disgusted face and whether she spit out the morsel or not I cannot recall. Exclamations of horror and dismay followed, along with solemn vows never to trust my taste in cheese ever again. My credibility was shattered. I've spent the time since slowly rebuilding my cheese reputation and paying much more careful attention to the tastes of everyone else when I plan to introduce a potentially dangerous cheese.
But even with ample forwarning will an experiment not to everyone's taste cause long-standing condemnation of or skepticism toward of one's cooking skills or sense of taste (not to mention state of sanity.) I refer, for illustration, to the Garlic Chocolate-Chip Cookie episode (of which there actually have now been two, since I was foolhardy enough to attempt to win over some skeptics by a second try.)
I love garlic, to an extent which may be considered a fault by some. It does not necessarily belong in everything, but I am always interested to find where else it might be delicious. My mother was given a recipe for garlic chocolate chip cookies from the Garlic Lovers' Cookbook and shared it with me. I decided to make them. The first time I made them, I followed the recipe. The second time I experimented. Changing the recipe didn't have much of an effect on the taste, rather on the texture. But I'll describe the variations later.
The first time, I also made the absurd leap of faith that unproven garlic chocolate-chip cookies would be improved by lavender icing. The combination proved absolute sensory overload to many of my friends, whether they would have liked either part independently. It didn't help that I made the first batch of lavender icing way too strong - three or four times too strong. As such, while some liked all of the above, even in combination (once I'd weakened the icing), for others the reaction was dramatic - one friend memorably describing the experience as like to "being hit in the mouth with a bar of soap wrapped in a dirty sock." Lovely.
But despite the negative press, I cajoled many to try both the first and the eventual second versions. Some really like the concept and the result, others can't understand why one would ever try such an abomination and certainly can't abide the fruit of it. And still others come with an open mind and then can't figure out whether they like the cookies or not. Generally, though, for all but the people who like them, my standing as a cook of taste and sanity is called into question, accompanied by constant asking about future public offerings, "is there garlic in that?"
With that colossal grain of salt, garlic chocolate-chip cookies are very much like regular chocolate-chip cookies, just with a bit more depth and complexity. The chocolate-chip cookie is a good foundation for experimentation because it is already delicious. The garlic just adds a savory warmth to the flavour, with more or less sweetness or garlic aftertaste depending on how exactly you cook the garlic before mixing it into the cookies. Version one followed the simmer-garlic-in-maple-syrup original recipe, while version two was the slightly more aggressive boil-sugar-and-caramelize-garlic-in-that experiment that was a little scary and ultimately much more garlicky. The texture of the first version was much more like regular cookies, crispy and a little chewy, getting a bit stiffer over the few days I had them. Version two was much harder and a bit stickier at first and then softened up over the next few days in the cookie jar - weird. The method was scary because I poured boiling sugar and garlic into the cookie dough, which promptly became almost liquid - baking really is edible chemistry and I think I messed with the standard experimental procedure a wee bit, hence the odd final texture. And the caramelized sugar defintely added a slightly smoky caramel taste, too. Best start with the original recipe, transcribed from Accidental Hedonist where the description of the flavour is much the same as my own experience, so I'm not entirely crazy...
GARLIC CHOCOLATE-CHIP COOKIES
Makes 5 dozen or so.
10 cloves Garlic
½ C Maple Syrup
1 C Unsalted Butter, softened
¾ C Brown Sugar
¾ C White Sugar
2 Eggs
1 t Vanilla
½ t Salt
2½ C Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
½ C Walnuts, chopped (optional)
2½ C All Purpose Flour, sifted
1 t Baking Soda
3 bowls
Boiling Water
1. Drop whole, unpeeled garlic cloves into boiling water and cook until tender (about 7 minutes). Remove garlic from the water, peel and chop. In Bowl #1: soak garlic in the maple syrup for 20 minutes to one hour - the longer you soak the garlic, the stronger the garlic taste.
2. Preheat oven to 375°F.
3. In Bowl #2: cream together butter, sugars, eggs and vanilla until light and fluffy. In Bowl #3: sift together flour, salt and baking soda. Mix flour mixture into butter mixture. Add chocolate chips and walnuts, mixing until evenly distributed.
4. Add maple syrup (+/- garlic) to dough. (If you want more garlic flavour, leave the garlic pieces in, otherwise strain them out and just use the syrup.
5. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets, about 2 inches apart from each other. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes (or however you prefer your cookies.) Remove from oven and cool on racks.
LAVENDER ICING
Be very sparing with the lavender essence - it is stronger than it seems. This is also very much a try-as-you-go recipe that you have to make to your taste and texture preferences.
Sweetened Condensed Milk
Powedered Sugar
Lavender Essence (you should be able to find culinary lavender essence somewhere - it happens to be readily available in Washington.)
Start with a few tablespoons of the condensed milk. Mix in the powdered sugar by the teaspoon until the icing is thick enough. Mix in 2 drops at a time of the lavender essence. Taste after each addition and err on the side of too little - just a hint is sufficient. Use at will.
Sometimes after work I arrive home to an unfriendly and mostly empty refrigerator that does not readily offer up any particularly obvious tasty morsels for dinner. On such days the fridge does not so much lurk in a corner - like the one conjured by Douglas Adams to terrorize the kitchen of his 'Holistic Detective', Dirk Gently - but it does exert a somewhat chilling influence on the atmosphere of the kitchen and on my spirits at the end of a tiring day. And a barren fridge certainly does not dull an emptiness of stomach, either.
Before getting too carried away with the bleak imagery, let me clarify. On the particular evening in question, my refrigerator contained the following: one bunch of rather old asparagus, four ageing rutabaga, three partially-finished bottles of wine of varying ages, some jam, half a carton of Trader Joe's vegetable broth, some gouda cheese, and a bottle or two of beer. (Let's ignore for the present that some consider beer a suitable substitute for dinner, especially in the case of Guinness, shall we?) So technically my fridge was not empty, but neither did any of the above seem to make much of a warm or comforting, let alone tasty, meal.
One of the media that seems to lend itself well to combining odd combinations of ingredients is risotto, with the added benefit of its making a generally savory and satisfying meal. I had some arborio rice in the cupboard so I set about to make Odds and Ends Risotto, which I imagine I will make again, at some point, with completely different results dependent on my refrigerator's capricious whim. Risotto is also wonderful in its essential simplicity - one cup of rice, a splash of olive oil, and four cups of liquid are all that are necessary for the base, taking about half an hour and almost no work. Where the adventure begins is when choosing what to use for liquid and also what else you want to throw in the pan.
A typical liquid mixture is three cups chicken stock and one cup white wine. Recipes abound for what vegetables are best and how best to pre-cook them, when to mix them in, what cheeses are best, &c. so I suggest you poke around a bit to see what other people have tried, too. Or you can try something like this:
For liquid, I used the remainder of the vegetable broth, the remainder of my white wine, and the remainder of my red wine, since that added up to just about four cups. For the vegetables, I rescued and chopped the few salvageable asparagus spears (about one and a half cups chopped) and also cut up two of the rutabaga into half-inch cubes (about 2 cups chopped.) Oh, and some of the gouda to make it all stick together a bit more at the end. An odd mixture, to be sure, but I hoped that the asparagus would give the dish an earthy yet fresh and green taste, the rutabaga a subtle sweetness and a little crispness, the red wine a bit of warmth, and the aged gouda a slightly tart and lemony tang.
The easy way to make risotto involves little more than heating rice and olive oil in a heavy saucepan until the rice becomes a little translucent and golden, and then throwing in the liquid and simmering until all the liquid is gone, stirring occasionally. The more labour-intensive method is to slowly add the liquid a bit at a time and simmer and stir constantly until the bit you added has been absorbed before adding more. This latter method certainly allows for more precision in determining the final texture of the dish, but does not allow for either cooking vegetables in with the rice (as I did with the rutabaga and asparagus) or for doing anything else while you wait hand and foot on the risotto pan. So I cooked everything together, tossing in the rutabaga shortly after pouring in the liquid at the beginning (they do well with a nice long simmer), and waiting until I thought it had about five minutes to go before adding the asparagus so it wouldn't overcook.
The result was tasty, and also a funny purple color which I don't normally associate with risotto - especially dotted with orange and green as it was by the vegetables. And it tasted much as expected, which only added to the satisfaction of the meal. Thankfully the vegetables remained crisp, not overcooked, which was a good contrast of texture, too. Next time, who knows what hidden gems the lurking fridge may contain.
ODDS AND ENDS RISOTTO
This is an intentionally general recipe, for use as a springboard into the waters of delicious unknown risottos.
1 C Arborio Rice
3 T Olive Oil (if you need more to coat the rice completely, add more)
4 C Liquid (Generally around 3 C Stock of some kind and 1 C wine)
½ C Grated Hard Cheese, though I imagine blue or goat cheese could also be mighty tasty. (Optional, but highly recommended.)
3 C (approximate) Other Stuff (This could be vegetables such as I used or pre-cooked sausage or other meats, or a combination.)
Herbs, Spices, Salt, Pepper to taste.
1-2 T Butter (if you want it to be really rich!)
Combine olive oil and rice in heavy saucepan over medium heat, stirring to make sure all rice is coated in oil, until rice is translucent and starting to turn a golden-brown (2-5 minutes.) Add liquid and bring to boil. As soon as it boils, turn down to a simmer (still bubbling, but small, gentle ones.) Simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally to make sure the botom doesn't stick, until all liquid is absorbed (about 20 minutes.) Add cheese (and butter if you're using it) and stir until melted in.
If using vegetables:
Root Vegetables: Chop into half-inch to one-inch cubes and toss in as soon as the liquid boils.
Squash/Zucchini/Mushrooms: Cut into slightly larger pieces and toss in about half-way (after simmering the rice for 8 minutes or so.)
More Delicate Vegetables: Chop as you like and add closer to the end. Add the vegetables later than you think you should because they will continue to cook after you take the pan off the heat.
If using meat:
Cook the meat beforehand, at least partially, to make sure it is fully cooked when the risotto is done. Sausage, bacon, pork or poultry are good, shellfish, too, though I've never tried it myself. Not sure what I think about beef or fish - if you try it, leave a comment with directions. Mix the meat in near the end if you want it to retain its own flavour and a different texture (like crispy bacon or sausage), or earlier if it has a strong flavour you want to impart to the overall dish.
Serves 4-6.
