Tuesday, October 28, 2014

I had no idea she loved sweet potatoes



Last night I put the honey-roasted carrots from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty More on the table and before I even returned with the rest of the meal (bockwurst), Isabel had started eating them.

I said: “Like the carrots?”
Isabel: “That’s what’s wrong with them! I thought they were sweet potatoes. Really bad sweet potatoes.”
Jennifer: “Carrots.”
Mark: “That happens to me all the time in this house. I see some chocolate chip cookies, pick one up, take a bite, and, ugh, raisins.”
Isabel: “I know, right? I see a beautiful cake on the counter and I go over to cut it, but instead of chocolate it’s. . . .”
Mark: “Cardamom!”

Ha ha ha. We all laughed. It dawned on me that while I’ve failed to provide my family with meals they loved, I’ve provided them with spontaneous comedy routines. 

A family needs lore and we are all set. 

The Plenty More carrots were good and, after complaining, Isabel continued to eat them. They’re roasted in a mixture of honey, olive oil, crushed coriander, and cumin, and you dip them in a yogurt-tahini sauce. I could eat anything dipped in yogurt-tahini sauce, but I would have eaten these carrots on their own. 

Ottolenghi says to serve them warm or at room temperature. I say: warm. The recipe calls for twelve carrots, which seemed like a lot, but they shrank and we finished almost the whole batch. I wouldn’t request these on my deathbed, but they're certainly tasty. Recipe here

Monday, October 27, 2014

Plenty More and plenty more

my sister's ceramics and old lady china
Did you read the New York Times story about the young Japanese organization expert and her approach to de-cluttering a home? It’s charming. To summarize: When deciding whether to keep something, you ask yourself whether it “sparks joy.” If not, thank the item for its hard work and send it on to its next destination.

Over the weekend I tried this method while continuing my pantry clean-up and found it to be fast and effective, even revelatory. The power of the approach is that you’re not thinking. I’ll give you an example: Sitting on a shelf in our pantry, we had a Nambe bowl that a distant, much older relative gave us for our wedding. Based on its scratched, slightly stained condition and the way it was wrapped, I imagined she'd probably pulled the bowl out of her cupboard the morning of the wedding and thought, "This will do." I don’t hold it against her. Not at all. We barely knew each other and she was kind to give us anything at all. Nonetheless, the painfully obvious regifting has always cast the faintest shadow over the bowl, which we’ve kept in one pantry or another for 18+ years. 
In case you were wondering, this is a Nambe bowl. 
If I ask myself, “Do I even like this bowl?” the answer goes like this: “Hmm. Do I? It’s a bit shiny and cold for my taste, which runs to old lady china and my sister's pottery. But I can see that it's handsome and I know at least two people with amazing taste who love Nambe bowls. I should definitely learn to like the Nambe bowl. Plus, aren't Nambe bowls expensive?" Then I put it back in the pantry for another half decade.

However, when I posed the question this way: “Does this bowl spark joy?” the answer was immediate and unequivocal: "God, no. Zero joy. Actually, it bums me out a little just looking at it."

I haven't figured out where the Nambe bowl is going next, but it's going. I can't quite bring myself to put it in a Hefty bag and take it down to the Goodwill drop box with Owen's old khakis, but I know someone else will be happy to have it and we will not miss it. Shall I set up a blog contest and the Nambe bowl can be the prize? It's nice! You might love it. Someone should.

On another subject, for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be cooking from Plenty More, Yotam Ottolenghi’s bounteous and handsome new vegetarian cookbook. It's a wild, exciting book, much more so than the original Plenty. There are Malaysian puddings here, Persian stew, Sri Lankan curry, a carrot dish that originates in Tasmania, grilled ziti topped with feta, and a beautiful, beautiful meringue roulade with rose petals and fresh raspberries. I'm totally into it.

So far I’ve cooked only the easy tagliatelle with lemon and walnuts.  Butter in a hot skillet, add some shredded sage, lemon zest, and a splash of cream. Toss with pasta, parmesan, toasted walnuts, and lemon juice. 

If I were making the dish again, I’d use a little more butter and cream. Also, walnuts are awkward with long, flat noodles. I think the better choice would be shells, which might trap the nuts, but Ottolenghi disagrees. Aside from minor quibbles, I and my small, picky family liked this dish a lot. Recipe here. 

Thursday, October 23, 2014

My lost Wednesday

exciting!

There are lots of big, juicy cookbooks on the shelf (and horizon) this fall: Plenty More, Prune, Flour + Water, Bitter, Heritage. I want to cook from them and write about them and am resuming my cookbook reviews.

I was going to start small. I was going to start yesterday by whipping out a review of a new cookbook sent to me by a publisher. It's a low-profile cookbook that you probably haven’t heard of, but I was intrigued because it used up a lot of an ingredient I was trying to get rid of. I read the book cover to cover (earnest, inconsistent), studied the recipes (some appealing, some appalling) and cooked five dishes (just ok) from its pages over the weekend. I thought this review might take an hour, maybe two, from my morning and then I could move on to another project. I expected to be done by 9 am. I started typing.

At four in the afternoon, I was still typing. I had long ago migrated from the treadmill to the sofa. I kept moving sentences around, struggling to establish the right tone -- friendly and appreciative of the merely adequate dishes I’d made, but also gently baffled by some of the super-weird recipes and several other serious glitches in the book's concept. Shouldn’t be so hard, should it? What was wrong with my brain?

Seriously frustrated, I took a late afternoon break and went to the library, hoping to find Lena Dunham’s book on the “lucky day” shelf. Instead I found Lila, which I had thought I wanted to read, but realized the instant I saw it that I actually didn’t. While wandering through the stacks, it hit me the way things do when you step away from a problem: I had spent the whole day trying to bullshit my way through a post. I had tried to review a cookbook without saying what I actually thought. 

It seems like bullshitting would be easy, but it's really, really hard. Once you decide to tell the truth, everything just flows. But I couldn’t tell the truth. The truth was that I thought the book was amiable, confused, misguided, full of outlandish things I’d never want to eat, and, basically, a failure. I’d spent eight hours trying not to say this. 

And I was right not to say it. Unfortunately, I couldn't write around it, either. I came home from the library and erased the file. A small book like this one needs to be left in peace. If Prune or Plenty More disappoints, I wouldn’t hold back. 

Today I got up and wrote this post. It’s not much, but I had to squeeze something out of my lost Wednesday.
 instead of Lila 

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

This is NOT where I tell stories

I wish I'd bought this a year ago. 
I apologize for my absence. The minute I started thinking of this as my storytelling space, I was in deep trouble. Instead of the Blogger template into which I've been merrily typing for years while drinking coffee on the sofa, the blog became a platform for storytelling, like I think I'm Ira Glass or Jonathan Ames or something. It froze me right up. I wrote some blog posts. They weren't good enough. Every day it got a little harder. This morning I was lying in the dark in bed thinking, how am I ever going to post on the blog again? 

Type type type, press publish, go buy yourself a frozen custard. That's how. That's the plan, anyway.

Have you read this excellent piece by Sarah Miller about why she decided to stop cooking?  In the growing body of cooking backlash literature (see this and this), it’s the smartest thing I’ve read, mordant and full of truth, though not quite as much truth as I thought on first reading. Miller has such a crisp and decisive voice that it took me a few days to disentangle her truths from my own. I’ll limit myself to this pretty big difference: I do plenty of stupid things trying to get people to notice and love me, but cooking isn’t one of them. 

I also liked this essay by Miller and have found myself thinking about it hourly.

Here’s a little anecdote. Not a story. Definitely not a story. Last week I made banana blondies with brazil nut toffee from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet, a gem of a cookbook. I’ve made these blondies a bunch of times before and they are, in my view, outstanding -- sticky, golden, a little crunchy, perfumed with banana. As with about half the things I bake, no one in the household touched them but me. There was even some jesting about Mom's banana blondies. I expected this. I'm used to it.

On Saturday, Owen spent the day at his friend Max’s house. On Saturday night, Max’s father dropped Owen off while Mark and I were out. Max’s father doesn’t like to drive up our street, which is extremely narrow and steep, so he leaves Owen at the bottom of the hill. This is totally fine with me. I mention it only because no one in his right mind would choose to walk up our hill without a really good reason.

When Mark and I came in later, Owen said, “Mom, Max really liked your blondies.” 

I said, “Max was here?”

Owen: “Yeah, he walked all the way up the hill in the dark and made his dad wait just so he could see what kinds of cookies we had. I told him the blondies were weird and really bad and he probably wouldn’t like them (emphases mine). But he liked them.”

I was starting to glow. I said, “So he came up just to see what we had in the cookie tin?”

Owen: “Yeah, he’s always searching around to see what kinds of things you’ve baked.”

I couldn't care less what Max thinks of me and I don't want him to love me, but it's gratifying when someone actually eats the stuff you bake. I was so pleased! I told Owen how pleased I was and he quickly tried to paint Max as selfish, greedy, and rude, referring to his behavior with indignation as "making raids on our cookie tins." 

Does he think I care? The idea that Max might one day walk up the hill and find the cookie tins empty is now unthinkable. 

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Fun with blue cornmeal

The Navajos should object.
Over the past week I've discovered some ways to use up a bag of New Mexican blue cornmeal, most of them bad.

To start with, you can use your blue cornmeal to make the unappealing triple corn Navajo muffins from Blue Corn and Chocolate by Elisabeth Rozin. These squat, super-sweet muffins call for yellow cornmeal, blue cornmeal, and canned creamed corn. Why all three? I'm guessing because "triple corn muffins" sounds sexier than "corn muffins." But sexy these jaundiced midget muffins were not. I imagined I could detect the mucilaginous creamed corn in every bite. So yucky.

A very slightly better use of your blue cornmeal would be to whip up a batch of the blue corn pancakes from Culinaria: The United States.
I don't know what Owen was doing with his hand -- some kind of wizard move to make the leaden pancakes go away?
Thick, stiff, heavy, and gray, drenched in maple syrup these pancakes weren't inedible.

Another alternative: the worst chocolate chip cookies in the world!

Mark: "These are going to be around for a while." 
Crumbly, sandy, cakey, gritty, and sickly looking, the blue cornmeal chocolate chip cookies were baked from a Bob's Red Mill recipe. Thanks, Bob, for keeping things real. There are so many recipes for amazing chocolate chip cookies out there these days, I'd forgotten it was possible to make bad ones.

After three bummer dishes, I gave up on recipes calling specifically for blue cornmeal. I used the last of the blue cornmeal in these lovely and inspired pancakes  from the Essential New York Times Cookbook. 

To make these pancakes -- formally known as Kathleen Claiborne's hot cakes -- you cook your cornmeal (blue or yellow) into a sort of mush and then mix it into an airy batter and fry. What you end up with are beautiful, crusty pancakes with a soft, cornmeal mush center. Mark raved about them. Owen didn't rave -- complimenting me is against his principles -- but requested seconds. All the pancakes were eaten before I thought to take a picture.

And with that delicious breakfast, the blue cornmeal was gone.

I'm not sure how much longer I can continue this little pantry-cleaning series, because it's not turning out to be as inspiring and rewarding as I'd hoped. I'll give it a few more weeks. At the very least need to tackle the dessert wine.