I have real kitchen swagger!

pan bagnat

I've now made all the sandwiches from Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini cookbook, and it gets an A+ for sandwiches. In my view, any book that reminds me how good homemade sandwiches are, how you can get protein, starch, vegetable, and salad in a single easy, cheap package and call it dinner deserves a gold star.

pan bagnat. Classic Provencal sandwich featuring tuna, tomato, olives, olive oil, and greens on baguette. (Or focaccia.) Wet, zesty, refreshing. Much loved by all. I'll make this again for sure.

curried turkey sandwich. Turkey chopped and mixed with curry powder, goat cheese, and raisins. Yellow and softly spicy. Much loved by my husband and me, but not Owen, who objected to the raisins. He is silly. I'll make this again after Thanksgiving.

cantal cheese sandwich with mushrooms. My personal favorite. You cook cremini mushrooms until soft and broil them on bread with cheese. (She calls for cantal, which I've never encountered, so I used tomme.) Much loved by all. Owen apparently didn't notice he was eating mushrooms. I'll make this again.

And last night I served her sardine club sandwich. You spread toast with tomato jam (she offers a recipe, but I used the leftover jam from last month's Mourad dinner), goat cheese, and mashed sardines. Add some greenery. She calls for an extra slice of bread in the middle of all this, but I skipped that. Very tasty, though I probably won't make it again as Isabel wanted to eat neither sardines nor tomato jam. 

I also baked an excellent ricotta poundcake from Dolce Italiano last week. Ricotta is strange. It's so bland on its own, and yet baked in this cake you could taste it clearly through the sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs. This is a wonderful cake. You should make it. The recipe is here.

It looked like this on the first day:

And like this on the second:

And I hardly ate any! As you can see, I baked it in a bundt pan rather than a loaf pan. I also omitted the vanilla bean and used 1 tablespoon of vanilla, and as I didn't have cake flour,  I used all-purpose.

I also reviewed a book for the first time in ages.

On another subject -- perhaps more exciting than sandwiches and poundcake? you think? --  I cooked in front of TV cameras all day Thursday and Friday. The Food Network was making a so-called "sizzle tape" to see if my eccentric cooking life and mild personality have any TV potential.

Whatever! It was fun. I made Nancy Silverton's pizza dough (the best), pizza, marinara sauce, goat's milk mozzarella (not my best; Natalie's milk was off), chevre, pesto, graham crackers, frozen yogurt, flour tortillas, pork-apple sausage patties, croutons, salad. I also milked the goat, talked incessantly, pretended to collect eggs, applied and reapplied lipstick, ate, opined, served a big dinner to my extended family, wished I weighed 12 pounds less.

 One of the cameramen said I had "real kitchen swagger." That made my week.

Then everyone left. Yesterday morning, Owen and I returned to work on the oven. Props to friends Melanie, Tom, and Isaiah for helping mix disgusting, squelching cob with their feet. Twas no walk in the park.

75% of my crew

I'm thinking everyone is bored hearing about my oven. Well, it will stop soon. We've put down the clay sub-floor, built a cob wall around it for insulation, and today we'll put down the actual oven floor, construct a brick arch for the door, and, if we're energetic, build the sand dome and cover it with cob. Then it's a sprint to the finish line.

I mean, really, what does Nigella have that I don't?

 Oh, be quiet.