Fat Girl Gone Thin

There is a coffee company near my house, Batdorf & Bronson. The place is as iconic as the city itself in many ways – like the fish throwers at Pike Place Market – anybody who’s worth their snuff in these parts has been to this place.

Outside their orginal cafe, affixed to the windows, is an image of a dancing goat. Easily two feet tall, the picture is a throw back to the company’s roasting division which goes by the name (you guessed it) Dancing Goats.

Why goats? And more importantly, why are they dancing? Good question. Millions of people drink cup after cup of coffee each day and I would venture to guess that all but a handful are unaware of the origin of coffee – a.k.a. the legend of the dancing goats.

Coffee has been around for nearly 900 years now. It was first brewed in open pits with crushed beans and boiling water in the area that is now Ethiopia. In the high mountain regions, a goat herder by the name of Kaldi discovered that his wandering animals had returned from the fields with an extra spring in their step. When Kaldi searched the area he found his herd feasting on red berries from a patch of bushes and gathered some for himself to try. Later, he dried and ground the berries and made a tea of sorts. The result was the first cup of coffee … and presumably, the first recorded caffeine high.

Now you know about the goats, but are wondering why are they wearing grass skirts -right?

The answer to that has to do with pizza. Confused yet? Hehe, I’m getting there.

Something about the idea of Hawaiian pizza being Hawaiian simply because it has pineapple on it has always struck me as funny. Same with those yummy little chocolate covered macadamia nut things. If you go to Hawaii, people always ask you to bring those back, like you can’t go to Walgreens and buy a box yourself there. Something about the macadamia nut and the pineapple seems exotic to people.

So when the urge for a strong cup of coffee and a cookie hit me in the late hours last night, I decided to pull out some coconut, macadamia nuts, dried mango, almaretto and make biscotti instead. Then I decided to call it Hawaiian biscotti because it seemed like the appropriate cliche at the moment.

This is why I should not be left alone in the kitchen. With a coconut. And Jimmy Buffett CDs.

Anywho, I threw the basic of the thing together -the flour, butter, egg stuffs – then went to town with every Hawaiian-inspired ingredient I could think of along with some white chocolate chips … because those just sounded good.

The result was a lightly sweet, entirely delicious biscottini* (that means oops, I made the biscotti too short so I changed the name to something small and cute sounding).

I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did along with a fresh cup of java. The recipe is over in the sidebar.

Utter exhaustion is the only thing I can think of to describe how I felt this morning. I haven’t felt that way since finals week my junior year of college when my Japanese final got moved up three days.

I got a call last night from one of my vendors for a last minute holiday order of my soaps – in a scent I was entirely out of – which meant many many hours of unplanned melting,stirring, mixing, drying, cutting …rather than running to the closet to grab some of my pre-made stuff.

It wouldn’t have been as bad if I hadn’t stayed up till the wee hours the night before (and I do mean wee, like 3 a.m. wee) and if this order hadn’t been needed by 9 a.m. the next day. Days like today are why I could never be one of those oh-so-healthy folks who refuse to drink coffee. I heart coffee. I heart it very very much. And I heart Starbucks for opening at 5 a.m. even on the weekends.

I tinkered with the idea of taking 15-minute naps while each batch set but I thought better of it in the end. The only thing worse than being tired is then sleeping just long enough to remind your body how great sleep is. Anything under 2 hours is usually always a dangerous proposition for me.

By 8:30 I’d packaged the last of the bars and loaded them in the car when, in one of my most brilliant moves ever, I ran back to the house to turn on my electric blanket. I was so tired that when I got to the store it was still 5 minutes till opening and I didn’t even wait to hand the product over in person. I just wrote a quick note, said I would give a call later, and tucked them in the front door alcove.

Pulling back into my driveway I actually toyed with the idea of just turning off the car and sleeping in the driver’s seat for a few minutes instead of running in the rain all the way to my front door and then my bedroom. Those 50 feet felt like 5 miles!

But I am oh so glad I decided to muster my strength and go inside because I cannot possibly describe what a beautiful thing it was to kick off my shoes and crawl into the warmth of my buttery-soft flannel sheets. Nothing, and I mean nothing, feels quite as good as being tired and knowing you have nothing to stop you from sleeping for as long as you want.

I think it was somewhere around 1 p.m. when I final emerged from my cave. The day already sufficiently shot, I decided to stay in my pajamas and make myself an exquisite dinner to make up for my calorie-free coffee breakfast and lunch. I perused my cookbook collection but the only thing that seemed right for the occasion was my new copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking  – my latest must-have purchase after watching Julie and Julia.

I decided on the beef bourguignon from the recipe that was so predominately featured in the film. All in all, the recipe is not that bad as far as guilty eating goes in the world of french cooking. A tablespoon of butter here and there, a couple slices of bacon, but the dish serves 6, so it didn’t seem all that bad.

What really caught my eye was the part that called for a 3 cups of wine. A whole bottle when you count the glass I poured for myself. A whole bottle! How could this recipe go wrong?

In all it took 5 hours to make. There was boiling of bacon (have you ever heard of such a thing?), then frying of bacon, followed by browning of beef in said bacon fat. Then browning of vegetables in – you guessed it – the bacon fat. But after that things straightened up and it was time to add the wine! A little of this, a little of that, and the whole thing went into the oven for 3 hours.

I thought I could use that long reprieve to wrap presents or do something productive, but a closer look at the recipe had me browning onions for an hour and sauteing mushrooms for 40 minutes and by the time I had done that and washed a few dishes the beef was ready to come out.

The smell in my kitchen was indescribable. It was the smell of developed flavor that only comes from an evening of laboriously preparing a meal. There were about 8 more steps to finish off the dish after it came out of the oven, but I will save you the trouble of reading through all that. Suffice it to say that the dish turned out like perfection, just like Julia Child said it would.

I served it up with some Le Sueur peas. Peas because that’s what Julia recommended and Le Sueur because that’s the brand Samantha describes in Sex In The City, season 4 as “the best” – so naturally, I’ve been curious since. All I can say is, they tasted like peas.

Dessert was a deliciously sweet and fresh pomegranate. The perfect ending to a perfect evening.