The Tipsy Baker

Good things come in twos and so do other things

2012-01-26T12:15:00.000-08:00

Two salads from Nancy Silverton's Mozza:

1. Nancy's chopped salad. Envision (or just look at the picture above) a mountain of chopped iceberg lettuce, radicchio, red onion, salami, aged provolone, and chickpeas tossed with an oregano vinaigrette. One of the few salads that not only survives, but improves overnight. It does lose crunch and starts to resemble sauerkraut, but it tastes zestier on day 2 than on day 1. Which is good because there was lots left over. Husband: "How many does this serve?" Me: "I think four." Isabel: "Four elephants?" Yes, my saucy daughter. And now it is all gone. What does that tell you? The recipe is here, although the online version calls for twice the quantity of cheese and salami as the version in the book. I think 4 ounces of each was plenty and healthier.

2. Little gems with gorgonzola and dates. I separated all the little gems (found at Whole Foods; like tiny heads of romaine) into individual leaves to wash them, and then it turns out the salad was supposed to be made wedge style, with the leaves not separated. Forged ahead. Tossed the leaves with an incredibly decadent and copious dressing made from yogurt, buttermilk (I used milk), thyme, sherry vinegar and huge chunks of gorgonzola. Served with a few thinly sliced dates. The combination of the sweet-jammy dates, creamy-salty gorgonzola, and crunchy-refreshing lettuce: crazy genius. (Too much dressing though; you can make this salad three times over with the quantity Silverton's recipe produces.) The recipe is here. Try it. Small portions.Very rich.

Two obstacles to full engagement with the glories of Mozza this week:

1. We have two ovens and both of them are broken. The parts have been on order for a month. This eliminates about half the recipes from Mozza, including the veal stracotto, walnut biscotti, and pizzas. Of course that leaves the pastas and the Greek yogurt gelato. Except. Except. Except.

2. Sheepish about this because I have always thought they were ridiculous and have been opposed philosophically and emotionally, but I am on a reduced carbohydrate diet right now and have to eat my words because I like it and it is working. I was not screwing around when I started a diet back in December, and when the militant calorie counting/exercise yielding dismal results, I changed tactics. Not Atkins or South Beach, just zero starch (grains, potatoes) or processed sugar and almost zero alcohol. A modified version of this. I'm not doing his bizarre exercise program (although I'm curious about it) and he doesn't endorse gorgonzola or salami, not to mention oil, so very modified. Also, he says to eat 10 servings of vegetables per day and I am incapable. I am not, after all, an elephant. More to say about the diet in the future. Prepare yourselves.

Anyway, this is why I am not throwing myself at Silverton's gnocchi with chanterelles or her goat cheese and bacon pizza or her coconut sorbetto. One day I will, although it looks like I'll have to be altogether more moderate going forward than in the past.

Two movies I dread, but will probably see:

1. Albert Nobbs. The preview is a complete turnoff, but then there's this.

2. Melancholia. Kept putting it off. Now someone in the house is insisting.

There are better ways to eat squid

2012-01-23T17:55:00.000-08:00

why didn't the boys want to come see Pina with us?

Isabel and I came home from seeing a movie yesterday afternoon and found the house occupied by people watching football, drinking beer, and snarfing up tortilla chips. Children were eating pretzel sticks and tracking crumbs around like Hansel and Gretel and it was all generally kind of messy and after I said hello and disapprovingly plucked a few wet leaves someone had tracked onto the impractical pink rug, went into the kitchen, made myself a cup of herbal tea, and started cleaning squid for dinner. Diets can be so isolating. Dieting can make me into such a priss.

in fact, not tempting at all

My sister came in to the kitchen and I saw a fork in the road. I could continue drinking tea and feeling aloof, or I could take the other road. The low road. Or was it the high road? I haven't had a good conversation with Justine in a month and if there is ever a time for a dieting person to have wine, this seemed like that time. We had wine. We talked about friends. We talked about shoes. We talked about my experience with the eccentric exercises advocated by Jonathan Bailor. We talked about the Food52 Cookbook, which Justine believes to be almost flawless, albeit confusingly organized. It was very fun. It was definitely the high road.

As we talked and drank, I made Nancy Silverton's red wine braised squid, which entails, as the name suggests, braising squid for an hour in red wine, olive oil, and brandy, along with a chopped orange (rind included), garlic, celery, and carrots. Serve with homemade garlic mayonnaise and garlic toast.

Justine had to take her kids home before the meal was ready, but her husband, Michael, stayed for dinner and to see the end of the game. I wonder if he was glad he stayed for dinner. I know he was unhappy with the end of the game.

polite

The squid was very tender -- not rubbery at all -- but I actually like the elastic crunch of squid and missed it. The broth was a purplish black and studded with chunks of bright orange peel. It was intimidating to look at. It was a very weird dish.

What we thought:

-Isabel didn't touch the squid or mayonnaise, but ate lots of garlic toast.

-Owen liked the squid, but said he couldn't eat very much because it was "too hard."

-Michael said the squid made him feel like he'd taken a vacation on an Italian island, but he wouldn't come out and say he liked it.

-My husband said the squid was too challenging to eat on its own, but that when he put it on the toast and added mayonnaise it was great. Which is exactly what Silverton writes in the headnote: "The rind gives the sauce a slight bitterness that can seem overwhelming until you eat it on crostini with a dab of mayonnaise, and then it all comes together." My husband, culinary savant.

- I liked it okay. Ate lots of the mayonnaise mixed up with the squid, which was not exactly a glorious diet moment, though I told myself it was acceptable because I skipped the toast. Later, I had bad dreams.

About squid: so cheap. If you're trying to save money at the supermarket, consider squid. At Whole Foods it costs $3.50 per pound cleaned and $2.50 per pound with beaks, globular eyes and lots of translucent jelly that must be squeezed out of the bodies and rinsed down the drain. I bought it uncleaned and spent 25 minutes prepping the cold, slippery squids and cutting off their tiny bulbous heads. By so doing, I saved $2.50 which will buy me a small Diet Coke next time I go see a movie.

Alternatively, I could have spent 25 minutes carefully hand-washing the shirt I was planning to take to the dry cleaner today and saved $6. Or, I could have cleaned out the car, which is a disgrace and causes my heart to sink every time I get in. Or, I could have read a few good stories in the Sunday newspaper, which remains untouched. Or, I could have wrapped and packed away my mother's wedding china which will otherwise be destroyed in an earthquake. Et cetera.

The correct choice is to buy your squid already cleaned. And yet I know that when I'm standing there at the fish counter again I'll go for uncleaned. I just can't leave $2.50 sitting on the table. This is called thinking small.

On another subject, over at the Tournament of Cookbooks, Tender got a big, wet kiss from Jacob Weisberg today. I would guess that in the final rounds it will come down to some combination of Tender, Mozza, and Super Natural Every Day. Tender would be my last choice among these three for some of the very reasons Weisberg loved it.

Bring me flesh and bring me. . . oh, I wish

2012-01-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

You in the heritage apron, what are YOU smiling about?

To make Nancy Silverton's porcini-rubbed rib-eye bistecca from The Mozza Cookbook, you first go to a butcher counter carrying a big wad of cash. Ask for bone-in rib-eye steaks, cut really thick; they should look almost like roasts. (If you remember, tell the butcher to "french" them, but if you don't remember, it's okay. I didn't.) Brace yourself. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut when I saw the price, but am glad I recovered and sucked it up, as you will see below.

Once you've got your hands on the steaks, find the biggest bag of dried porcini mushrooms at the supermarket. The recipe calls for 2 ounces and I thought that would be a wee packet, but it turns out to be a large sack. Porcini are both bulky and light.

Back home in your kitchen, pulverize the mushooms in a spice grinder. Then grind some black pepper and red pepper flakes and mix these with sugar, kosher salt, and the mushroom dust. Spread the dun-colored powder on a big plate and coat your steaks thickly on all sides. Now, grill them or cook them in a super-hot iron skillet, flipping occasionally, until they are as done as you like them. (Rare!) Let them rest for 10 or 15 minutes. Slice against the grain and eat with gluttonous abandon, because these steaks are disgustingly expensive and by far the best steaks I have ever cooked.

Why so good? First, I almost never buy such premium meat and it makes a difference. I know I shouldn't, but I often buy the thin, cheap steaks at Safeway and it turns out you get what you pay for. This meat, when cooked, resembled tuna sashimi -- tender, pink, compact, and plump -- and was almost as pleasurable to gaze upon as to eat. I think these would have been the best steaks I've ever cooked even without the porcini coating. But the umami of that mushroom powder pushed them off the charts. I served the steaks with Nancy Silverton's simple and delicious recipe for broccolini sauteed with red pepper flakes and vinegar. (If you make this, you can safely halve the olive oil with no loss of savor.)

As Simon Doonan would say, it was a very heterosexual meal.

Which brings me to the second subject of this post: Gay Men Don't Get Fat by Simon Doonan. This book has brought me even more joy than those steaks. After I ate my 4.6 ounces of beef, I took Gay Men Don't Get Fat to the gym and laughed so hard that I almost fell off the treadmill. (Life with almost no alcohol = walking on the treadmill after dinner.)

Doonan quote relevant to my recent adventures with DIY:

"The fabulous irony of all this Depression era fetishization is particularly piquant for moi. My mother, Betty, left school at the age of thirteen in rural Northern Ireland and was sent to work with a pork butcher. As she hacked off the trotters and ears of the unwittingly organic animals, she dreamed of the day when she could tear of her authentic work wear, escape to the big city, bleach her hair, wear nylons, drink gin cocktails and never step in animal feces again. She would have been amused, as am I, to see people a the apex of urban glamour donning heritage aprons and willingly, ardently, passionately and enthusiastically electing to earn their living by deep-frying artisanal doughnuts in hand-harvested pig lard."

(I have sometimes stepped in animal feces while drinking a gin cocktail.)

The two chapters everyone interested in food should read: "Macaroons are so Gay!" and "Jamie Oliver is a lesbian." If I start quoting from these chapters I won't be able to stop and Doonan's lawyers will come after me for copyright infringement. Sufficeth to say, "lesbian food" is a supremely useful term for farm-to-table cooking that features wholesome grains, locally sourced vegetables, and communal tables. Which is to say, the predominant -- and wonderful -- cooking style of the moment. I wish I were bold enough to drop "lesbian food" into conversation, but I think I would blush and feel the need to explain and worry I was offending someone, which I probably would be. We're not all Simon Doonan.

There is only one chapter -- about the taxonomy and sex lives of bears -- that I hesitate to endorse. Unless you are curious about the subject, you might want to skip "Operation Goldilocks." I was curious about this subject and appreciated the enlightenment, but even so winced a few times like the prudish straight chick that I am. Chacun a son gout and that chapter might not be to your gout. (Doonan endorses sprinkling your conversation with French.)

Anyway, highest recommendation on this book with one big caveat: If you are my father or my husband or my father-in-law or, come to think of it, maybe just if you are a straight man who has ever in his life worn Dockers or participated in a naff belching contest, don't bother with Gay Men Don't Get Fat. You will not like it.

Mozza: Opening Night

2012-01-17T23:10:00.000-08:00

Isabel savors Nancy Silverton's mussels

Well, here we go again. Tonight I made the steamed mussels with tomato passata, chiles and herbs from Nancy Silverton's Mozza and they were fabulous -- garlicky, spicy, salty -- but only my husband and I would eat them. Isabel doesn't like shellfish, so she just ate the garlic toast and some tangerines. Owen dipped the garlic toast in the broth, but wouldn't eat the mussels. I ate the mussels but wouldn't -- well, didn't -- eat the garlic toast. My husband ate the toast and mussels both and washed them down with a big, fattening beer.

At least we all sat at the same table.

It's an outstanding recipe, easy and straightforward and delicious. Cook some garlic and scallions in olive oil, add white wine, tomato sauce, and mussels. Steam for 3 minutes, turn off the heat, and stir in masses of fresh oregano, basil, and chives. Serve with the aforementioned garlic toast. Here's the actual recipe. My one suggestion: If you don't love salt, cut the quantity called for by a half teaspoon. I do love salt and would describe the dish as super salty, which means a lot of people will find it far too salty.

I hadn't been all that excited about Mozza, which looked like just another Italian cookbook. Now I'm excited. Given ongoing slimming efforts, I'm not sure how to handle the pizzas, pastas, and rivers of olive oil running through its pages, but will figure it out as we go along.

Incidentally, Mozza is one of the titles competing in the Tournament of Cookbooks, which starts tomorrow and which I have been eagerly awaiting since the last one ended more than a year ago. Roz Chast is judging; I wonder if her verdict will appear in the form of a cartoon.

Most of you were very patient with The Best of the Best from California. Thank you. It was a horrid book. The minute Isabel chose it, I regretted telling her she could choose. But I could not renege.

At least Betty Friedan had Friedan

2012-01-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

That picture is so 5 minutes ago.

Owen and I are in Seattle for the long weekend and day before yesterday we drove out to the Quimper Peninsula where the writer Betty MacDonald lived for a few miserable years in the late 1920s and raised chickens. I'm sorry she suffered, but the experience did provide the material for The Egg and I, and I'm not sorry she wrote that great book. MacDonald's literary reputation is essentially nonexistent today, which is a mystery and a tragedy given her wit, talent, and enormous popularity back in the day. Is it because she was named Betty? It's hard to take a Betty seriously these days. And I don't think MacDonald helps. Nor, come to think of it, does a masterwork called The Egg and I.

MacDonald's onetime hometown of Chimacum, Washington is forlorn and depressing, at least in January. We drove the length of Egg and I* Road and somewhere along that stretch sits the farm where MacDonald was so memorably unhappy. No landmarks, but you get a strong sense of clamminess, chill, and dank houses inhabited by men with bushy gray beards. After our brief tour, we went to Port Townsend and wandered through antiques stores where I refused to buy Owen a $28 vintage Star Wars kit that he insists is a canny investment and will be worth hundreds of dollars in a few years. "When I'm an adult it will sell for $180," he said. "You just don't understand."

a meaningful sight, at least to me

At dusk, we returned to Seattle and ate dinner at Delancey. I've wanted to eat at this Ballard pizzeria ever since I watched it come to life on Orangette. It was exactly as I had expected -- studiously simple and handsome and urban-rustic. There were battered concrete floors and candles in jelly jars. Our young waitress was beautiful, soft-spoken, and tattooed; a lesbian couple with their baby sat at a nearby table. It could have been San Francisco, except that too many of the young men were dressed like lumberjacks. We felt right at home.

The salad -- radicchio, green leaves of something, blood oranges, and pistachios -- could not have been prettier. It was also very delicious, though I might have toasted the pistachios.

proof we were there

The pizza that followed was a nearly perfect rendition of the austere Neapolitan pizza so popular now.

For dessert, Owen ordered the cannoli. Looking back on it, I think the menu might have said "cannoli" not cannoli which should have tipped me off that it was going to be a playful deconstruction rather than a strict interpretation. Instead of crispy pastry tubes filled with cream, he got a few lace cookies sitting atop blobs of cream. No, no, no! That's like serving sliced ham alongside two pieces of bread and calling it a "sandwich." Or putting some raspberries on a plate next to a shortbread cookie and calling it a "tart." Bad trend, this.

Still, other than the cannoli bait-and-switch, thumbs up on Delancey.

Apparently the diet is on hold this weekend.

*can't get Blogger to accept ampersands

How insulting to Jamaicans

2012-01-07T09:10:00.000-08:00

"Fresh from Wisconsin"

I can't decide which is the most revolting recipe in Best of the Best from California.

Is it the chip shot chicken? (Coat chicken thighs in nonfat sour cream, roll in crushed barbecued potato chips, bake.)

Or is it the Jamaican chicken? (Slather chicken breasts in blend of instant coffee and lowfat vanilla yogurt. Bake. Top with pineapple slices.)

How about the hot chicken salad casserole? (Mix chicken meat, canned water chestnuts, canned cream of chicken soup, chopped hard boiled eggs, rice, and mayonnaise in casserole dish. Top with buttered cornflakes.* Bake.)

See? Impossible to choose. The name for this style of cooking is "American Grotesque."

The other night for my husband's birthday I served the lemon chicken pasta, a recipe Isabel had flagged when she chose the book. It sounded pleasant enough, but with Best of the Best even apparently innocuous dishes can turn out to be deeply weird once you start cooking. To make lemon chicken pasta, you saute sliced chicken breasts and mushrooms, then season the mixture with oregano, lemon juice, and Butter Buds. (If you're unfamiliar with Butter Buds, it's a cheap yellow powder that smells like movie theatre popcorn and supposedly contains no fat but loads of butter flavor.) To the chicken-mushroom-Butter Buds mixture, you add some broth and cornstarch to make a really thick sauce that gives the whole dish the shine and slippery, gelatinous mouthfeel of a Chinese stir fry. My husband said, "This is just terrible."

Fortunately, his birthday cake was somewhat better, a mocha torte that calls for only staple ingredients like nuts, chocolate, flour, and cream. The book is inconsistent like that, veering from the synthetic and outlandish to the respectable and pretty good. Confusing!

the rare dessert recipe that doesn't contain instant pudding, Cool Whip, or a can of fruit cocktail

But even a pretty good mocha torte can't compensate for the overall heinousness of Best of the Best from California. The authors, Gwen McKee and Barbara Moseley, claim to be trying to preserve America's culinary heritage by plucking the most beloved and "popular" recipes from regional spiral-bound cookbooks like The Tahoe Parents Nursery School 40th Anniversary Alumni Cookbook and We're Cookin' in Cucamonga.

A thoughtful anthology of great spiral-bound cookbook recipes would be a wonderful thing, but this isn't it. No thoughtful anthology would claim that a salad of sugar-free Jell-O, raspberry wine, cranapple juice, crushed pineapple, and pine nuts represents the best of California cooking.

I've made 12 recipes from the book and most of them were either so-so or pretty good. That sounds like a very decent return, but bear in mind those were carefully selected recipes. After perusing the ingredients I was game to tackle Mexican stroganoff and chicken lasagna. But I could not bring myself to make the cream of broccoli soup spiked with Cheez Whiz. And I had no interest at all in the Tunnel of Spuds meat loaf, which contains hamburger meat, instant mashed potatoes, Parmesan cheese, applesauce, catsup, lemon juice and grape jelly. Call me a food snob. I don't care.

Here are two things I have liked about the book:

a. the recipes are easy

b. I am not even slightly tempted to eat them.

I'm calling it a day with Best of the Best. I may let Isabel choose another title, because I didn't spend very long with this one.

On another subject, if you are in the Bay Area, I am speaking/reading at Omnivore Books in San Francisco on Wednesday at 6 p.m. Please come!

*I have no idea how you butter cornflakes.

Apparently I actually could live on air

2012-01-04T19:30:00.000-08:00

It looked better after it was roasted, but not much.

I'm not screwing around with this diet and it's interfering with my blog. I haven't been cooking anything except tedious low-calorie foods like the turkey breast pictured above. The recipe comes from Best of the Best from California and involves making a paste of parsley, garlic, and dried herbs into which you dip thin slices of orange. Then you stuff the coated orange slices under the skin of the turkey and put the turkey in the oven. As far as I could tell, the orange slices did nothing for the flavor of the meat, just made the skin bulge in an ungainly fashion. That said, it was a tasty and juicy turkey breast and 1.3 ounces of the leftover meat made a great lunch today when mixed with 1 chopped celery stick and 1 teaspoon of vinaigrette.

I've been on the diet for 20 days now and have lost 4.5 pounds. The weight is not exactly melting off. What excellent survivalist genes I must have! There have been a few slips, like the night at Animal and New Year's Eve, but mostly abstinence. No alcohol. No baking. Do I have to rename the blog?

Last night, after a 140 calorie chicken sausage and a spinach salad with 1 tablespoon of vinaigrette (that was before I weighed myself this morning and cut back to a teaspoon), I went to the gym and walked very fast on the treadmill for 90 minutes. I like the treadmill because you can read the newspaper while you exercise. It's remarkable how many newspaper stories deal with having too much or too little to eat.

I read about anorexics.

I read Tara Parker Pope's depressing story about how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. (You probably should not read this unless you are naturally slim.)

I read about kids in Congo who are so poor that they only eat every other day, a problem that puts my own "problem" in perspective.

I read a lot of other stories, too. It was my New Year's resolution to read the newspaper cover to cover every day, like the Italian mother in The Imperfectionists. Sadly, I'm going to have to modify this very enjoyable resolution because it turns out I don't have three hours a day to read the newspaper which is what the task seems to require, at least when the paper is the New York Times. The obvious solution would be to cut back to reading just the stories that interest me. Except that's what I've always done and means I end up reading mostly stories like this and this. Thoughts? How do other people filter the news so you get enough, but not too much?

Today is my husband's birthday. We are having a festive dinner tonight, including a mocha torte from Best of the Best which means tomorrow I will have something to write about, even if I won't be able to tell you what it tastes like.

Mostly resistible meals

2011-12-22T08:10:00.000-08:00

not my idea of a thrilling collection

My in-laws, Mary and David, came from Boston for Christmas and during their stay Mary cleaned Owen's room with him and took him to the Container Store to buy a shelf for his collection of Transformers. Until a few days ago, he stored his Transformers under the bed, on the bed, and all over the floor. He sat there one night organizing them on that Container Store shelf and singing Christmas carols and it was one of my happiest moments of the whole season to watch him discover the pleasure of organizing a ridiculous collection. A pleasure I know all too well.

not most people's idea of a thrilling collection

Cleaning Owen's room was a monumental feat. Mary is a hero.

And this is how I repaid her: By cooking a series of one-dish casseroles out of The Best of the Best from California, a book that pays homage to the wonders of condensed cream of mushroom soup and Jell-O instant pudding.

Meal #1: chicken and wild rice casserole.

Could it be any uglier?

I appreciated how easy this hideous casserole was. To make this you basically cut everything up, season with pre-mixed poultry seasoning, scrape into a big dish, and bake. I thought it was inedible -- dry, bland, sagey, soupy.

But Mary and David loved it, as did their son, as did their grandchildren. My kids sat around crowing about how the tables are now turned! That finally I know what it's like to sit down to a meal I don't like! I wondered if bad taste is genetic and whether I could blame Mary and David for this, but then I reminded myself that they do nice things like take Owen to the Container Store and squelched this line of thought.

Meal #2. Lasagna in a bun.

To me, they look very tasty.

Fry some hamburger and onion then add jarred spaghetti sauce. Hollow out hoagie rolls, mix preshredded cheeses and ricotta. Stuff the buns with meat and cheese, then top with more shredded cheese. Bake. I really think this concept has potential, not that the dish met its potential; no one liked them very much. I could imagine what these tasted like, so didn't actually taste them because I'm on a diet.

Meal #3. Chicken lasagna. You take meat off a rotisserie chicken, make a white sauce, layer the meat and sauce with noodles and mozzarella. Bake. Everyone liked it; Mary said it reminded her of chicken a la king. I knew from her description exactly what it tasted like, so didn't taste it.

Eat your heart out, Norman Rockwell.

Meal #4. Mexican stroganoff. To make this bastard dish, you fry hamburger and onions, season heavily with chili and paprika, stir in mushrooms and sour cream, then pour over egg noodles. I took a tiny taste for seasoning and it was enough to know that Mexican stroganoff is both absurd and delicious.

By the way, if you're wondering what it's like to cook meals you don't eat, the answer is: not that hard as long as you also make a really good salad that contains enough -- but not too much! -- feta cheese.

Finally, I did make one Best of the Best dessert, a Hershey's Kiss pie for David's birthday. Mary had earlier in the week reminisced about a Cool Whip dessert she loves, chuckling as she "admitted" this. I took that as license to serve a Cool Whip dessert, which is not ordinarily my thing. To produce this pie, you melt the unwrapped contents of a 12-ounce bag Hershey's kisses with 1/4 cup of milk in a saucepan. Then you add an 8 ounce brick of cream cheese and stir until it melts. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in 12 ounces of Cool Whip until the mixture is homogeneous. Pour the chocolate cream into an Oreo crust (frozen or homemade) and refrigerate until firm.

I did eat a .75 ounce portion of this and almost fainted it was so good. You don't realize how much flavor is contained in a one centimeter shard of Oreo crust until you go on a diet.

Anyway, I didn't do any holiday cooking this year because we were invited other places. It was very restful .

Mary and David are back in Boston now and we are in Los Angeles. We went to this great restaurant the other night and ordered small plates of pig's ear salad, burrata with tomatillo salsa, veal sweetbreads, poutine with oxtail gravy, hanger steak, pork belly sandwiches, gnocchi with liver sauce, and balsamic barbecued ribs. The kids were game and cheerful and ate more than I'd expected. I tasted everything.

Happy New Year, everyone.

So who's really slagging who?

2011-12-19T07:53:00.000-08:00

They look so innocent.

Have you been following the whole bake sale kerfuffle?

First, you have to read Jennifer Steinhauer's story in the New York Times. If you don't have 7 minutes to spare, I'll offer a brief recap: People are bringing store-bought food to pot lucks and bake sales and Steinhauer is irritated:

"Nothing is quite as depressing as the modern bake sale, where amid the veritable celebration of poundcakes and misshapen cookies are the inevitable Ziploc bags filled with Oreos or perfectly formed bakery bought treats. In the countless sales I have attended over the years, I have been amazed by the number of packaged cookies, high-end cupcakes and impeccably round marzipan-covered confections that people plop down on the table, with no compunction, to be resold."

For the record, I think Steinhauer's tone could have been more diplomatic and I think that some of the people she quotes sound snotty. Moreover, I don't agree with her about pot lucks, another target of her disappointment. In my view, you can bring whatever you want to a pot luck, from a bucket of KFC to a homemade croquembouche, and everyone should say, thank you so much. With feeling. Acceptance and inclusiveness are hallmarks of the pot luck.

Bake sales are different. About bake sales, I wholeheartedly agree with Steinhauer. I don't think Oreos belong at a bake sale and I wouldn't buy them there. I'd rather just make a donation. I don't think anyone should ever be forced to contribute to a bake sale or guilted into it and if we can't drum up enough homemade treats from willing bakers, maybe we should scrap the tradition. I love a good bake sale and where's the fun when the merchandise is just repackaged from Ralph's? As Steinhauer puts it, "Look at it this way: You would not resell socks you bought at Macy’s on the art-sale crafts table. Respect the cookie!"

I saw nothing controversial about this statement.

Well, I am in a minority, at least if noise on the internet is an indicator. Over the last few days I've read many criticisms of Steinhauer's piece. The gist of most of them: she is scolding women who can't find time/can't afford/don't want to bake. And that her piece is sexist. Most critics have made lucid points even when I don't agree with them.

But in another category altogether are the vituperative Twitter and Facebook broadsides of the inimitable Ayelet Waldman, who went on a real tear after reading Steinhauer's essay. Some choice excerpts:

"This homemaker fetish is retrograde and anti-feminist and women like JENNIFER STEINHAUER are just PC, liberal Phyllis Schlaflys."

"When are these women going to figure out that this fetish for raising chickens and baking the perfect bundt cake is retrograde, oppressive, and nothing more than latter-day Phyllis Schlafley (sic) bullshit? You know what you don't have time for when you're obsessing over the candied lavender on your Christmas Cookies? Outrage over the political and economic crisis, that's what."

"Oh, I'm too busy baking and raising my own chickens for the fresh fresh eggs. I have no time to, um, work. Or be politically active."

But here's my favorite -- a real gem -- addressed to Steinhauer:

"Hey, you sanctimonious bitch, I have 4 kids, a fulltime job. I don't have time to bake cookies. Lucky you that you do."

It's not Jennifer Steinhauer who strikes me as the sanctimonious bitch.

First of all, I think Waldman needs to consistently spell "Schlafly" right if she's going to use that dated reference as often as she does. I know, it's a bear. But it just seems like good form for a chest-thumping "full-time job" writer to spell correctly in the same way that it's good form for a retro homemaking fetishist to, say, make the bed.

Second, I think it's hilarious that Waldman, a stay-at-home novelist who tweets endlessly about her weight, Devachan haircuts, and where she buys toilet paper (amazon), is sounding off self-righteously about her super-busy life to Jennifer Steinhauer. Jennifer Steinhauer! Who has 2 children, contributes to bake sales, writes a weekly column for Food52 and in her spare time covers Congress for the New York Times. Yes, she really needs to get a life. Good one, Ayelet.

But what really impresses me about these tweets is how Waldman is not just going after Steinhauer's mildly controversial piece. She's going after all us twitty bundt cake bakers and candied lavender fans.

I lost sleep over this for reasons I didn't understand until I got up in the morning and realized I felt personally offended. Baking has now officially been dragged into the stupid Mommy Wars! Great. I don't judge people who do not bake. I hope this is abundantly clear in my blog and in my book and in person. I do not judge people even to the minor degree that Steinhauer does in her article. And Waldman is judging me -- for baking! Except "judging" is too polite a word. "Sliming" is better. Slimed by a professional mean girl for a totally innocuous hobby.

Since then, I've thought far too much about bake sales, baking, the hateful, pointless Mommy Wars and Ayelet Waldman. Herewith, once and for all and hopefully never again, my thoughts:

I've been a parent in the California public school system for 16 child years. Bake sales are few and far between, at least in our district. We are asked regularly for money, rarely for brownies. Would that the two were reversed! In any case, all solicitations are gender neutral so there's no reason women should feel they are being unfairly targeted for bake sale bondage. We're not. No one is ever forced to contribute and anyone can bake those cookies -- Dad, the kids, Mom. You can buy the cookies if you want, though it's sort of a bummer for the customer, at least when the customer is me.

Still, it's true, I have observed, that females do most of the baking and "manning" of the bake sale booth. I've worked the bake sale booth myself. I've brought cookies. My husband? Never.

And yet it doesn't seem terribly sexist or unjust because it is also true that after every school walkathon and fundraiser I've attended, it is men -- dads -- who spend the remainder of their Sunday afternoon picking up grimy half-eaten hamburgers and smashed cupcakes off the basketball court, dragging around Hefty bags, loading dumpsters. You know what I'd love to see? A pissy internet throwdown between downtrodden dads who set up chairs for the silent auction and cool, ballsy dads who tweet that they're too busy with their fulltime jobs and political activism. Maybe Michael Chabon could weigh in.

Honestly. Bake sale duty has taken about 2 hours per year, if that, out of my precious life. My husband has spent many times that doing the various gross janitorial jobs the men get stuck with. I'd rather bake. Even if I didn't like to bake, I'd rather bake.

But I do like to bake. You don't? That's fine with me. My mom didn't bake unless she really had to, and when she did she used a mix. But baking is a little spot of grace in my life -- which isn't always full of grace. It's how I relax, a way I show affection and share. I truly like to bake for other people, including people who go to bake sales, and I expect nothing in return -- except, I suppose, a modicum of respect. I always thought it was a nice thing about me, the baking, something to value. I still do. So you can shove it, Ayelet Waldman. And you can shut up about the chickens, too.

Who is this harridan and what have you done with Jennifer?

2011-12-15T07:57:00.000-08:00

frown

Gretchen Rubin says to "act the way you want to feel." Doesn't work. I have been acting like Donna Reed these last few weeks, and still feel like Medea.

I haven't been very nice lately. I haven't been very happy. Is it the holidays? Is it hormonal? Too many hours spent gazing at the river of time? Too much time cooking things that people make fun of? An innately bad disposition?

Last night I prepared our first meal from The Best of the Best of California, which Isabel chose for me to cook from over the coming weeks. I made the enchilada casserole, which she had flagged. Brown some ground turkey and chopped onion in a skillet. Add taco seasoning from a packet, a cup of yogurt, two boxes of thawed frozen spinach. Layer with corn tortillas, salsa, and pre-shredded low-fat cheese. Bake. It's like something Roseanne would have cooked, except she would have used ground beef, sour cream and full-fat cheese and it would have been better. I, too, used full-fat cheese. I didn't see any low-fat cheese at the market that looked at all appropriate or Mexican.

Everyone was ostentatiously infatuated by this casserole. Owen ate three cups in about three seconds. "This will reheat great as leftovers!" exulted my husband.

whatever

I sulked.

I baked for dessert the Milky Way cake. I can't pretend I wasn't excited about melting six Milky Way bars with a stick of butter and pouring it into a bowl of cake batter.

Let me tell you, that was some delicious cake batter. But the recipe in The Best of the Best of California makes a point of saying not to grease or flour your bundt pan. I read this and thought, no, no, no, this is wrong. But I sighed and obeyed.

I brought this to the table, vengefully.

The broken cake tasted fabulous. I sulked. (Pioneer Woman has a somewhat different, very enticing recipe for Milky Way cake, if you're interested. And you should be!)

Then, yesterday afternoon, I went to visit a weight loss counselor. I never thought I would do this -- losing weight isn't a mystery!, it's all about character, etc. -- but I made an appointment and kept it. I'm glad I did because it was both clarifying and motivating. This nutritionist was sensible and reasonable and her estimate of what I should lose, based on body fat content (sobering), height, weight, and age: 27 pounds. That's not nothing. If I manage to lose it, I will be right back where I was five years ago, except this time I will actually believe I am thin. Or thinnish. Or only need to lose 5 pounds. Or maybe 10. Okay, ideally 15.

I guess this will probably influence how I blog for a while. I hope not too much, but probably some. Certainly fewer Milky Way cakes for a while. It's a drag in short run, but in the long run for the best.

Christmas parties and happiness projects

2011-12-08T07:00:00.001-08:00

Spice clutter

Has anyone else read The Happiness Project? I suspect this is one of those books that everyone has a completely different response to. Here's mine: a slightly prissy, unintentionally funny yet infectious account of a high-achieving perfectionist's attempt to "master" happiness like you master multiplication.

Maybe it is possible to master happiness. I don't know. Gretchen Rubin certainly makes the case and while I resisted her whole premise and approach, at the same time I couldn't help succumbing to some of her recommendations. Which is why, over the weekend, instead of sitting in my pajamas on the sofa posting about what we ate for dinner and then going to see New Year's Eve, I decided to alphabetize our spices.

We have a lot of spices. Imagine all the spices a person could possibly own and then double that because the person is messy and can never find the spices in the disorder of his/her cupboards or pantry and so has to go out and buy more spices. Rubin is obsessed with order -- obsessed with cleaning closets and eliminating clutter -- and I couldn't help but think about my pantry when I read her sermon. The spice alphabetization involved a trip to the Container Store, the labelmaker and consolidating multiple jars of mustard seeds. It took many hours over four days and I finally finished yesterday. Question: would you file Aleppo pepper under Aleppo or pepper?

In any case, I'm not sure I'm happier. I do know that I now feel like master of a very tiny universe and this will continue for a day or two. And then some innocent making cinnamon toast is going to misfile the cinnamon and I'm going to detonate, which will make not just me but everyone else in the very tiny universe unhappy. This is the problem, I feel, with linking control and happiness. This is one major problem, I feel, with The Happiness Project.

Of course, there's more to the book. Rubin also has felt unappreciated by her family the way I did last week.

Rubin: "Whatever the reasons I knew I should get over my need for Jamie (husband) to applaud the nice things I did, and, even more, I should get over my need for Jamie even to notice the nice things I did. So I made the resolution 'Don't expect praise or appreciation.'"

Well, that's one approach. When you don't get what you want, stop wanting it. I'm going to try it out.

The other night I made this dinner:

pork tenderloin with oranges from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. (Very good, but overly fussy for a weeknight dinner because it involves cutting oranges into segments, ugh.)

contemporary take on creamed spinach from Nigel Slater's Tender. (Wilt spinach, puree with creme fraiche. Easy, grassy green, very delicious.)

crushed potatoes with cream also from Nigel. (Boil little potatoes, smash them, drench in warm spiced cream. Delicious.)

The exceedingly unappealing plate of someone trying to diet.

poached quince yet again, from Nigel. (Peel rare expensive quinces you bought at Safeway because you never, ever see them and wanted to try them, then cook in butter and sugar in a skillet until soft. Delicious.)

For this fine meal, I got much polite praise and appreciation. Isabel said sweetly and earnestly: "I like quinces a lot; I like them more than I like pears."

It's nice when I get it, but I'm going to try not to want it.

Since then, I've hardly cooked. Sunday night, Owen and I went to a party thrown by my mother's beloved friends who have been throwing the same big, boisterous Christmas party for four decades or more. I have memories of this party from earliest childhood and have attended dozens of times. The hostess, as she always does, served egg nog in a big cut glass bowl, steak tartare, incredible shortbread and cut out cookies with tiny silver candy balls for eyes. My mother never missed this party; she basically planned her year around it and would stand at the grand piano singing carols, hoisting a little plastic cup of nog. We all loved/love that party. Attending last night for the first time since her death was very poignant and my sister stood facing the Christmas tree for a while and wept.

But it was healing, also. Because our mother is gone, but the world -- her world -- goes on. That was one part of it. The other part of it -- which will seem paradoxical -- is that things change for everyone. I had persisted on some level in thinking that my mother was cheated, had been singled out. It seemed deeply unfair that she had to suffer and die while everyone else from her world stayed exactly the same, which is how I imagine people I don't see on a daily or even yearly basis.

This is absurd, of course. There have been divorces and big moves and babies born and other happy and difficult developments that I would have heard of from my mother, but have missed entirely. Her world is the same and it is completely different. One of my mother's closest friends didn't recognize me, just gave me a blank look and a cool smile. I hadn't seen her since my mother's funeral 18 months ago, and I made a joke to a childhood friend: "X didn't recognize me. I didn't think I'd gained THAT much weight." Which is actually what I thought, being the self-conscious ninny that I am.

Then my childhood friend told me there was another reason my mother's friend didn't recognize me, a much worse reason that has nothing to do with me.

That was terrible. But I needed to know it. I talked to people I've talked to all my life, ate the shortbread I've eaten once a year just about all my life, listened to carols lustily sung by men and women drinking egg nog, could feel and hear and see the river of time which is sometimes hard to glimpse. It was poignant and beautiful and made me a lot happier than alphabetizing spices.

Food incompatibility: the Q & A

2011-12-03T13:28:00.001-08:00

And her word is law.

Q: Hey, where've you been? Basking in glory of seeing Make the Bread, Buy the Butter chosen as one of the notable 2011 cookbooks by Pete Wells of the New York Times?

A: Actually, yes, I was basking for a day or two. But then I plunged into a self-pitying funk.

Q: Seriously? You couldn't bask for more than a day or two? Anyway, tell me about this funk.

A: Like all funks, it's hard to explain.

Q: Try.

A: Well, the other day I did a radio interview and the interviewer said, more or less, "It seems like you do all these great experiments with food and your husband and family aren't into them at all. That must be hard. I could never be in a relationship with someone who isn't into food. Tell me about how that works. . . "

And I thought, wow, what a bold and intimate question! Can I answer this on the record? I did, though, because it's something I think about all the time.

Q: Well, what was the answer? What is it like?

A: Food incompatibility? It's not a deal-breaker, but it's pretty rough. That very night, with that interview still on my mind, I made this great dinner. Really, it was great. I made the fregola sarda with caramelized butternut squash from Food52. I made Dorie Greenspan's beet salad with "icy" onions (delicious), and I sauteed the shiitake mushrooms left over from Thanksgiving in a lot of butter (ridiculously delicious.) Then, for dessert, I made Dorie's long and slow apples which are AMAZING and to accompany this genius apple dish, I baked the cardamom-honey madeleines from a lovely book called Maman's Homesick Pie by Donia Bijan.

A respectable dinner, no? But to hear the sighs of my family members, you'd think I was trying to pass off roasted toad with hemlock sauce. They were all joking and grimacing over the beets, two of them wouldn't touch the mushrooms, and then no one would eat the cardamom madeleines except me. And suddenly I felt very sorry for myself. Couldn't at least one of my children love food?

Q: I'm sorry, but in the scheme of things, this is a pretty trivial sorrow.

A: And that just makes it worse. Thanks a lot. Because not only do I feel bad about the actual thing, but I feel bad for feeling bad.

Q: It might help if you tried to sympathize with your husband. For someone who doesn't care about food it must be hard to be married to YOU.

A: Hey, who's side are you on? But you're right, of course. Poor him. When we were first dating he told me he would like to take all of his nourishment in the form of a pill. And now he has to eat homemade salt pork and lots of kale.

Q: What're you going to do about this funk?

A: I decided I need more family buy-in. So I'm going back to an old plan, which is to let other people in the family choose the cookbooks. We'll do a rotation. My husband has chosen All About Roasting by Molly Stevens, which I just purchased on Saturday after hearing her speak at Omnivore Books. (She was terrific.) Owen chose The Mozza Cookbook by Nancy Silverton and flagged about 15 recipes. I was pleased with that choice and hold out hope that one day he will be an enthusiastic eater. Then Isabel chose The Best of the Best from California. We bought that book together a few years ago because we both think this series is hilarious.

Q: Why?

A: Let's see, is might be the cake that contains a can of fruit cocktail. Or maybe the chip shot chicken that involves rolling chicken thighs in nonfat sour cream and crushed barbecued potato chips.

Q: That recipe sounds like the worst of the worst.

A: I asked Isabel if she wanted to reconsider the book when I pointed out all the recipes that contain Cool Whip and she said, "Your blog readers will like it because you can make fun of it." I'm not so sure, but I told her she could choose any cookbook, so any cookbook it is. And, to be fair, all the recipes she flagged look quite delicious. I'm particularly excited about the Milky Way cake.

Q: On another subject, any dishes you've cooked lately that you want to tell us about?

Cheese + chard = very happy marriage

A: Yes. I made the best chess pie ever form Nancie McDermott's Southern Pies (thank you Steven). and it has permanently supplanted my old recipe. The shallow tart of chard and cheese from Nigel Slater's Tender is excellent. His carrot and cilantro fritters are also tasty, though they need quite a bit more flour than he calls for if you want them to hold together. The cocoa-cumin tri-tip roast from Eat Good Food is superb.

Q: So, have you finally broken free of that enslaving CSA?

A: YES! I'm done. I missed being able to choose my vegetables and I hated the waste. Oh, one more thing -- I'm doing some guest blogging here this week. I can't answer half the questions -- I have no idea how to make condensed cream of mushroom soup from scratch to use in a casserole -- but I'm doing my best.

Owen and friend borrowed my camera. Not sure what this means.

**Correction. Owen just told me what the photograph means: He is a cereal killer.

Such a happy family

2011-11-28T18:28:00.001-08:00

Was this the problem?

I was very pleased yesterday because, thanks to the CSA, I had everything in the house to make Dorie Greenspan's spiced squash, fennel and pear soup for dinner. (I am into pear soups right now.) That meant I could delay going to the grocery store one more day, but also serve a real meal.

So I made the soup. A basic and super-easy pureed vegetable soup. Very orange. I served it just to the kids and me on the early side, and left some on the stove for my husband.

It was the kind of family meal that makes me think I've botched everything entirely, that it's all been a big bust, that I should have known I could never raise children right because I am myself so deeply flawed. I won't go into detail like I did when my children used to throw themselves on the floor and scream about the chickpeas. But I will say that behaviors on display at the table included eye rolling, sarcastic needling, stern lecturing, humming, teasing, cajoling, bickering, sighing, outright complaining, sniping, whining, near-tearful indignation. Somehow we packed all that into a meal that lasted about 7 minutes, start to finish.

As for the soup: cloying. I don't think butternut squash is well served by the sweetness of pear. I wondered whether if we'd liked the soup a little more we would have gotten along better. I wondered if we would have had such a disspiriting mealtime experience with something we loved to eat in front of us, like, say, pesto pasta or takeout enchiladas or macaroni and cheese. I wondered if I'd forbidden Owen to use his allowance to buy a cinnamon roll at Starbucks at 4:30 whether he would have eaten the soup instead of sniveling. I wondered if I set the negative tone because I was tired and crabby. I wondered how my children will remember their childhoods. Et cetera.

Then I put on my coat and went to meet my friend Debra to see a movie, a monthly tradition. We saw The Descendants. And if you've seen The Descendants you'll understand why I suddenly felt slightly more okay about my own family.

Onward.

The boots I ordered don't fit over my calves. I wonder why.

2011-11-25T08:22:00.001-08:00

Cocktail hour around newly painted hearth

I know the last thing anyone wants to think about right now is Thanksgiving, but in my role as recipe recommender and anthologizer, I need to offer a quick recap of what was cooked at our house and what we thought, as some of it is applicable to Christmas. I'm late with this report; I had a mild case of PTSD over the weekend.

THE MENU

*seasonal cocktail. Brought by my sister. There were two: a negroni and a fabulous sweet-sour-smoky Scotch creation the recipe for which I have requested. I drank three. Strangely, I never became drunk. Adrenaline?
*gougeres (from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table). Excellent, as always.
*sardines rillettes (Dorie again). Excellent, as always.
*creamy sausage-stuffed mushrooms (Food52) Enormously popular, although there was twice as much stuffing as required for the number of mushrooms. Highly recommend.
salted almonds (Food52) Good. Unexciting
---
**pear soup with pancetta and blue cheese (Food52) Jennifer Steinhauer does not lie or even exaggerate. I'm printing out the recipe and putting it in my binder and will try very hard to remember it next Thanksgiving. This soup really tastes of pear and yet is unquestionably a savory. We had leftovers of everything except this soup, but this is what I most wanted leftovers of. You should bookmark this right now. You could also serve it for Christmas. Or tonight.

----
roasted turkey
*ciabatta stuffing with chorizo, mushrooms and sweet potato (Food52) Good! Although next time I would omit the sweet potatoes, which I found incongruous.
*green beans with hazelnut crumbs. The sleeper hit of the party. The recipe came from the Frog Commissary Cookbook, which I pulled out to make the mocha buttercrunch pie. (See below.) I spotted the interesting bean recipe while idly flipping through the book and since I had all the ingredients, made it. Very glad I did. (Recipe below.)

*apple, brandy and walnut cranberry sauce (from Food52) Great. Just be sure to add a pinch of salt. (FYI, the recipe calls for pears, but apples work fine.)
mashed potatoes
*spinach-jalapeno casserole (brought by my aunt, made from Laurie Colwin recipe) Wonderful, as usual. A standby and my aunt's signature dish.
*kale salad (brought by my sister, made from Martha Stewart recipe) Wonderful, as usual.
peas These were supposed to be brought my maternal grandmother, topped with a limp piece of lettuce in an old CorningWare dish with a little blue flower on it. These did not appear. The end of an era? Or just a hiatus?
---

*chess pie. "My" recipe for this supersweet Southern custard pie calls for a tablespoon of cornmeal, which I forgot to put in. I had always wondered if the cornmeal mattered and now I know: It does. Even without the cornmeal, it's my all-time favorite pie.
*mocha buttercrunch pie. It was absurd and gaudy and creamy and rich and big. And it was unspeakably delicious. For the last few days I've had trouble passing the refrigerator without eating a big spoonful of cold leftover mocha buttercrunch pie. Today I put the last bit of pie in the sink and ran water over it to stop myself.

*pecan pie. Also hard to resist. I tried the recipe from the Frog Commissary Cookbook and it was excellent.
sour cream apple pie. Also from Frog Commissary and very good.
peanut butter pie. Isabel made this out of a charming cookbook called Sweety Pies by Patty Pinner. Rather than a cold, creamy peanut butter pie with some kind of chocolate embellishment -- which is what I'm used to -- this was a baked, cakey peanut butter pie. Very unusual, very tasty.
pumpkin cheesecake. Isabel made this from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion. Quite good.

All in all, a wonderful Thanksgiving with 17 of my favorite people. I missed my mother something awful, though. She would have loved that mocha buttercrunch pie.

GREEN BEANS WITH HAZELNUT CRUMBS
from The Frog Commissary Cookbook

1/2 cup hazelnuts, toasted, skinned (to the extent possible) and finely chopped
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1 pound green beans, trimmed (use haricots verts if you can find them)
6 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon minced shallots
kosher salt to taste
black pepper to taste.

1. Mix the nuts and the breadcrumbs.
2. Blanch the green beans in boiling salted water for 2 minutes, then drain and rinse under very cold water to stop the cooking.
3. Heat the butter in a skillet. Add the shallots and cook until softened. Add the green beans, salt, pepper, and hazelnut crumbs. Cook for several minutes, turning the beans to coat them with the crumbs. Serves 6.

Cranberry sauce down, pear soup, only a dozen more dishes to go

2011-11-19T09:41:00.001-08:00

You can guess the mystery ingredient.

Before I get to Thanksgiving, here's my primal beet story: One day circa 1975 my somewhat reproachful and intimidating paternal grandmother set out a bowl of beets on her laminate dining table in Brigham City, Utah, very likely alongside a tiny roast cooked to a charcoal gray, a plate of sliced white supermarket bread, and an iceberg lettuce salad. There is zero doubt that the beets were canned.

"I don't like beets," I announced.

"Have you ever tried beets?" she asked, giving me the cold blue eye.

"No," I said nervously.

"That's very silly."

I promptly tried a beet. It was crunchy, slightly sweet, clean-tasting. It was good enough. Not great, but good enough and certainly not repulsive. She was right; I had been silly. I have eaten beets ever since. Score one point for stern authority.

Clearly, I do not exercise such stern authority over my own beet-fearing family.

The other day I said to my husband, "Haven't I been doing well using up our CSA produce?"

My husband appreciates self-congratulation almost as little as he appreciates beets. He said: "I admire your efforts, but I think a beet challenge is like an episode of Fear Factor. What can we ruin next? Grilled cheese -- with beets! Peanut butter and jelly -- with beets!"

He didn't mention, "chocolate cake -- with beets!" But Nigel Slater has a recipe for just that cake in Tender -- chocolate, eggs, grated beets -- and I baked it. I didn't tell anyone what was in it and they loved this cake. I let my husband ramble on about how it tasted like it was full of "puddin' packs."

Then I announced that it contained beets.

"Interesting," he said glumly. "I wish you hadn't told me."

And I wished I hadn't too. It's not much fun tricking people once you're past the age of 11.

Enough about beets.

It looks like it's going to be a Food52 Thanksgiving. We're hosting 18 people. Here's the menu.

seasonal cocktail (brought by my sister)
gougeres (from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table)
sardines rillettes (Dorie again)
creamy sausage-stuffed mushrooms (Food52)
salted almonds (Food52)
---
pear soup with pancetta and blue cheese (Food52)
----
roasted turkey
ciabatta stuffing with chorizo, mushrooms and sweet potato (Food52)
green beans
apple and cranberry relish with brandy and walnuts (adapted from Food52, which calls for pears, but I used apples. It's great, but benefits from a big pinch of salt)
mashed potatoes
spinach-jalapeno casserole (brought by my aunt, made from Laurie Colwin recipe)
kale salad (brought by my sister, made from Martha Stewart recipe)
peas (brought by my maternal grandmother; they will undoubtedly appear, topped with a limp piece of lettuce, in an old CorningWare dish with a little blue flower on it.)
---
Many pies, flavors tbd, but definitely chess pie and pecan pie. I've already started the mocha buttercrunch pie referred to in this fun story. I was a little upset to realize the it contains raw eggs, but by that time I'd already mixed the crust so I'll forge ahead. Don't mind eating raw eggs myself, but I'm less keen to serve them at a party.

What are you cooking? And are you as exhausted on Thanksgiving Eve as I am?

Some recipes you'll want to make -- and some you won't

2011-11-17T13:51:00.001-08:00

1. When I finally and inevitably cancel our CSA delivery, it will be on account of the beets. Every week, beets. What am I gong to do with all these damned beets? One night last week I cooked Nigel Slater's beet-lamb meatballs which you serve with a minty yogurt sauce. They tasted fine, but just look at them. As the saying goes, we eat first with our eyes and while I can't speak for anyone else, my eyes were distressed.

2. Another night I made borscht using the Joy of Cooking recipe. It was tasty -- a big bowl of cabbage and root vegetables with a little beef -- but nothing I'd go rushing to make again. And even after that mighty pot of borscht, I still have beets to use up. According to the CSA web site, even more will be landing on Tuesday. Maybe farmers should stop growing so many beets? Just a thought.

3. Nigel Slater's apple and courgette cake is really good.

I don't think loaf pans do a cake justice.

Much better than it sounds and much better than it looks and it uses up approximately 2 small zucchini and one apple. It's flat and pale, full of raisins, very sweet. You can find the recipe here if you scroll down to the bottom of the article. Recommend, though you will have to make metric conversions using a calculator like this one or buy a scale that measures both grams and ounces. (I vote for the scale. I bought such a scale a few years ago and use it every day.)

4. Slater's pork with leeks and green peppercorns: UNBELIEVABLE. The recipe is here and you should absolutely make this. Serve it with soft polenta or bread or mashed potatoes as you need something to soak up all the delectable sauce. Also, use the best mushrooms you can afford. I used half wild mushrooms and half cheap white mushrooms and I can tell you we all picked around for the wild ones. This is my number one favorite recipe of the last week. (If you decide to make this and don't want to make the metric conversions, see my footnote supplying the conversions from the American edition of Tender.)

5. That same night I made the amazing pork, I baked the chewy sugar cookies from the Food52 cookbook and we were a happy family. They're soft and have a slightly crispy toffee-like crust and a strong vanilla flavor. Very easy. I will make these again and soon. My only complaint with the recipe is that I think it should be doubled.

My brandy alexander

6. Finally, I highly recommend Slater's pear-pecan tart which is actually more of a cake but whatever you call it, delicious. You make a sweet, thick batter, scrape it into a pan, and drop chunks of fruit and nut on top. Bake. Serve with whipped cream.

All his cakes are flat and homely; only some of them are actually wonderful.

Recipe here. It's very slightly different from how it appears in the book. For instance, in the book Slater uses only 2 pears and slightly less flour and butter. I would actually go with three pears as I felt the fruit was scant. Again, you'll need to make metric conversions.

On another subject, Natalie is back from her breeding. At the farm where the buck resides, they raise both Nubians and Nigerian Dwarves and while I do love a stolid little Nigerian tottering around on stubby legs, Nubians are incredibly lovely and winning. In another life, I want a Nubian.

Nigerian stands in the left foreground. Nubians have the ears.

And, since Deane asked, Peppermint (our Nigerian Dwarf) is fine. She is "overconditioned," which is a goat word for "fat," but fine. According to her breeder, Nigerians are so hearty and disease resistant, they put on weight more easily than other, more delicate breeds. Is this also true of people? I like to think so. We will have to sell some of our goats one of these days -- three is too many -- but I guarantee it won't be Peppermint.

Sweet Peppermint

*Here are some translations: 650 g leeks = 1 1/4 pounds. 40 g butter = 3 TBS. 500 g pork and 500 g mushrooms = 1 lb of each. 500 ml. stock = 2 1/2 cups, 140 ml cream = 2/3 cup. Heat the oven to 300 degrees F. Make this recipe!

Behind the green (room) door

2011-11-14T16:29:00.001-08:00

One day I'll stop talking about guacamole and hummus.

On Monday, to promote Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, I appeared on 7Live, a local afternoon TV show. There was no fretting about wardrobe for this television appearance, my second, as I can only fit into one outfit right now: black J. Crew cords, black shirt. I came with props (food) that we set up on a long wheeled table backstage. Then the producer's assistant escorted me to the green room.

For all you mere mortals, I will describe a local TV station green room.

Imagine a tiny, windowless burrow with a television on which is playing a soap opera. There are some out-of-date magazines (but good ones!), a tub of pinkish face powder, a soft sofa, two soft chairs, a mirror, a coffee machine, and a massive tray of food. No straight bourbon such as Michael Ruhlman describes appearing in Martha Stewart's green room. Boo. But there is a wide array of tasty packaged snacks that Martha would never countenance, like Nutter Butters and Teddy Grahams. I eat two Hershey minis and a granola bar. Drink coffee. Take a picture of myself. Read about Kate Gosselin. Hyperventilate. Drink more coffee. Read about Brad Pitt. Hyperventilate.

Other guests eventually join me in the holding cell. I mean, green room. Specifically, the embattled authors of a self-published novel called Tales from Swankville that takes place in Pleasanton, California. Tales from Swankville has, I learn from the very nice authors, infuriated various thin-skinned citizens of Pleasanton who feel they have been depicted in an unflattering light. The uproar is why the authors are appearing on 7Live. I am now tempted to read the book.

There is a lesson here: If someone depicts you in an unflattering light in their self-published novel, don't make a big, ugly fuss. Because if you do, they may go on TV and everyone will suddenly want to read the self-published novel in which you are depicted in an unflattering light.

That was my green room experience. Then I went on air with with Lizzie Bermudez, who was very pretty and wearing what I think might have been Christian Louboutin shoes. Until about a month ago, I didn't know what Christian Louboutin shoes were and then someone told me and now I encounter them everywhere. In Joan Didion's Blue Nights, on The Good Wife, on Lizzie Bermudez.

The appearance was quick and fun. Lizzie got the name of my book wrong and I had to make a split second decision about whether to correct her. Didn't. Don't regret it. No sooner had I made my last witty remark than they had me out on the curb, packing my stuff in the car. Slam, bam thank-you. . . except no one said thank-you. Hey! That's no way to treat an authoress!

Kidding. It was fine. I was giddy for about 15 minutes and then crashed. Came home totally drained, good for absolutely nothing for the next 24 hours except to drink wine and wander glassy-eyed around the internet looking at shoes. Not Christian Louboutin. Neither my style nor my price range,

The authoress in the KGO green room showing off her mad camera skills.

On another subject, Natalie came into heat today and the instant I noticed the "symptoms" I dragged her into the car and drove up to Split Rail Farms where she reconnected with Kentucky, the sire of Sparkles. She's spending the night and will return tomorrow. Sparkles, meanwhile, is undone by the absence of her mother. It is dark and she's wandering around the yard, crying loudly. Good times.

I miss the babies they were, but I like the people they are becoming.

2011-11-12T06:37:00.001-08:00

The Hunger Games, mug of egg nog, fire

Yesterday was Veterans Day, the kids didn't have school, Husband went to work, Owen never changed out of his pajamas, and it poured rain. It was really gray and drippy and cold and I didn't have a plan. Historically, this does not bode well for family happiness.

But I discovered that something has changed, something big and permanent and bittersweet: My children are old. They make their own breakfasts. They pour their own egg nog. They unload the dishwasher when I ask them to and feed the chickens and read quietly for many hours at a stretch.

It was the loveliest of days. In the afternoon, I built a fire and we all sat there reading and I was overwhelmed with gratitude, a rare Soule Mama moment for me. Kind, healthy children, a warm, comfortable house. . .

I made dinner and it was perfect, especially perfect on this particular day. I made a warm pumpkin scone for a winter's afternoon, one of Nigel Slater's many Hobbity dishes. I have never eaten a non-sweet scone, so I was skeptical, but if you have pumpkins from your yard, or if your CSA gave you a pumpkin like mine did, make this now because it is easy and cheap and seasonal and delicious. But more than delicious: it is cozy.

Pumpkin Scone

I've adapted this recipe very slightly. You could use another squash if that's what you have.

pumpkin -- about 11 ounces after peeling and seeding (300 g)
1 large egg, beaten

6 tablespoons milk (90 ml)

2 teaspoons minced thyme leaves

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour (140 g)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
5 tablespoons cold butter (70 g)
black pepper
butter for cooking

1. Cut the pumpkin into chunks and steam until soft and mashable. (I put it in a colander which I placed inside a large saucepan with a few inches of water. Covered it and let it cook for about 25 minutes.) Mash. Stir in the egg, milk, and thyme leaves.

2. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

3. Whisk the flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl. Cut the butter into chunks and rub it into the flour like you're making biscuits or pie crust. You're not after a smooth dough; you want a clumpy dough.

4. Stir in the pumpkin mixture. Season with black pepper. The damp dough will look something like this:

dough

5. Heat the butter in a non-stick skillet with a metal handle. (Or, you can use a cast iron skillet, which I did.) Heap the dough into the skillet and then flatten into a thick patty, about the circumference of a dessert plate. Cook until the underside is lightly browned and the cake is firm.

6. Oil a dinner plate. Loosen the underside of the scone with a spatula. Put the plate over the top of the pan, then flip the scone onto the plate. Slide the scone back into the frying pan. (If you are using a cast-iron skillet, unless you are Captain America you will need help with this.)

7. Cook the cake for a few more minutes to brown the bottom, then slip the pan in the oven for 7 minutes to bake through. Serves 4.

repast

Slater says to serve it with bacon and/or cheese. Quote: "I love this with grilled Orkney bacon and slices of Cheddar sharp enough to make my lips smart -- a fine contrast for the sweet, floury 'scone' and its squishy center."

I served both bacon and cheese, but next time would serve only the cheese. I was able to focus on the perfection of the sharp cheese-squishy scone combination, but others were too intent on getting an extra strip of bacon. Bacon is so distracting.

For dessert, we had Slater's deeply appley apple crisp which entails sauteeing apple cubes before putting them in the baking dish and topping with crumble. This didn't redefine crisp for me, but it was very tasty.

dessert

I overate. That was the only bad part of yesterday.

Then I went to bed and dreamed that I gave a reading in a bookstore and only four people came. I really did dream that, which was odd because I thought I wasn't nervous at all about my reading today. Don't let my dream come true. If you're in Marin County: Book Passage, Corte Madera, 1 p.m.

The Nigel Slater seesaw

2011-11-09T18:57:00.000-08:00

worth extracting the retainer for

On Tuesday, I am scraping Nigel Slater's revolting duck, marmalade, and turnips casserole into the garbage and mentally composing my resignation letter from Project Tender.

On Wednesday, Owen and I are eating Slater's braised oxtail straight out of the pot an hour before dinner because it is so hideously delicious. And I do mean hideously.

Trust me: GOOD

His recipe for prawns with limes and leaves didn't work at all.

But his beef stew with onions and beer may have been the best beef stew I've ever made.

His apple marmalade tart was unusual and surprisingly tasty, especially the thick shortbread crust of which I ate far too much.

What is it with Nigel Slater and marmalade?

But the beet seed cake was a dry brown lump.

Although the batter was pretty. What happened to all that pink?

Slater may in fact be cosmopolitan and polished, but I picture him as a hobbity eccentric in a cardigan and soft-soled shoes who futzes around a thatch-roofed cottage scooping marmalade into his pot of braised duck, currant jelly into his stew, and grated beets into his cakes. He is definitely weird. I like that. Sometimes his freaky ideas work and sometimes they are just horrendous, but interacting with this book is always interesting. I've never had a cookbook experience quite like this one.

I'm sticking with Tender, but I'm also going to start cooking from both the Food52 cookbook and Eat Good Food because they're my other new cookbooks of the season and they're full of appealing recipes. No need to live in a straitjacket.

A reminder: I will be reading and signing Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California on Saturday at 1 p.m. It would be great to see you there.

Thank you, Evey Benjamin. Or do I really mean THANKS A LOT, Evey Benjamin.

2011-11-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

She looked a little like this, but older.

My first grown-up job was as a fact-checker at a business magazine, a position I held for five long years. Everyone knows what a fact-checker is, right? The lowliest members of the staff were responsible for making sure every single fact in the publication was correct; I really did put a little dot on top of every word. This was before the internet, so you can only imagine the phone calls and bulging files of documents and visits to the library. If a single mistake slipped through, the fact checker was scolded and shamed, potentially fired. If no mistakes slipped through, the fact checker was completely ignored. Which is to say, you only got attention if you screwed up, a management model that really messes with your head, at least if your head is susceptible to being messed with, as mine most definitely was when I was 22. I've gone back an forth over the years on whether it was a good and necessary messing, or destructive and stunting. I was rather "mellow" before I had this job, and have never been mellow since. The job made me compulsively self-doubtful and tense. Sometimes I'm sorry about that. Sometimes I wish I'd had the job before I went to college because I would have gotten much better grades.

Evey Benjamin was my first boss. She was terrifying and fabulous, a word (I hope) I use sparingly. She was slender, had long Veronica Lake hair, and was about my mother's age but seemed much worldlier and more glamorous. She wore high, skinny heels, silky shirts, heavy masses of jangling jewelry and lots of perfume. This made it possible to both smell and hear her coming from around corners and run to hide,* because every encounter with Evey was potentially disastrous. I just googled her and I couldn't find a single mention, let alone a photograph to prove how gorgeous she was, or that she even existed. She looked like Patricia Clarkson, but more ravishing. Another word I hope I use sparingly.

She looked a lot like this, except slightly older.

The other day I was working on a promotional piece for my book (all I seem to do anymore) on the subject of hosting a frugal Thanksgiving dinner. I wrote that among the many reasons you should bake your own pecan pie is that frozen pies contain "almost no pecans." Then I thought about that. Was I sure? Was I one hundred percent sure?

What her tutelage wrought.

A cup and a quarter. That's how may pecans there are in an Edwards frozen Georgia pecan pie. And I'm damn glad I checked because that is exactly the amount I put in my own pecan pie. So I guess I really do mean, thank-you Evey Benjamin, wherever you are, because I was THIS close to wrongly impugning the reputation of the Edwards frozen pecan pie and the world would be an ever so slightly worse place if I had.

On a related subject, I am concerned about my pancetta. It is not as firm as it should be. My sister tested the recipe for me and had a similar problem a year ago, but I dismissed her issues because she was drying her pancetta in a shower stall, which I deemed potentially damp and incorrect. I have never had problems before. I will unwrap the meat today and see what is happening, and then I will continue my tutorial, probably with disclaimers and caveats. My inner Evey Benjamin is very displeased.

*Actually, I'm not sure you could actually smell her perfume around corners. Thanks to Evey Benjamin, I'm unable to take poetic license without a disclaimer. I do know that once I was in a toilet stall when she entered the ladies' room and I thought I'd just wait her out. But she was freshening up her makeup and stood in front of the mirror for 15 minutes while I huddled in the stall, hoping she couldn't identify my shoes. She was that intimidating. I was that timid.

Some good cakes you should bake

2011-10-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

A-

1. A pear cake with muscovado sugar and maple syrup from Nigel Slater's Tender. (The recipe can also be found here.) You saute chunks of pear with cinnamon then add maple syrup and cook until bubbly. Spoon this over a dense, somewhat scant batter. The cake will look like the photograph above just before it goes into the oven; when it comes out it will be flattish and golden-brown, a thick, almondy cake with sticky lodes of pear. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

B+

2. An apple cake with marmalade. Also from Nigel Slater's Tender. Recipe here. This was like one of those big nubbly "health food" muffins that paradoxically contains several tons of sugar. My favorite kind. RECOMMEND, though not quite as highly as the pear cake.

A-

3. Plum almond cake from the Bi-Rite Market's beautiful, brand new book, Eat Good Food. I made

this a few weeks ago so I don't remember very much except that the cake was rich and almondy, the fruit juicy and tart, and the whole production a delicious dessert. RECOMMEND, although not as highly as . . .

A+

4. Chocolate sour cream bundt cake, also from Eat Good Food. CAN NOT RECOMMEND MORE HIGHLY. And I don't even like chocolate.

This is the recipe almost exactly as printed in Eat Good Food. The one thing I will do differently next time is to try milk chocolate in the glaze.

Cake

1 cup unsalted butter
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup water, or black coffee
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 large eggs
1/2 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Butter and flour a bundt pan and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. In a small pan, melt the butter with the cocoa, salt, and water/coffee over medium heat. Cook until melted and combined. Cool slightly.

3. Whisk together the flour, sugar, and baking soda. Gradually whisk in the melted butter mixture and beat well. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Whisk in the sour cream and vanilla.

4. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and bake until the cake tests done, about 45 minutes. Let the cake cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then invert onto a rack. Cool completely, then place the rack on top of a sheet of newspaper that will catch drips. Glaze.

Glaze

4 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped

1 1/2 tablespoons corn syrup

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

1. Put the chocolate and corn syrup in a bowl. Heat the cream and sugar in a saucepan until the sugar is melted and the mixture is hot.

2. Pour the cream over the chocolate and whisk until melted and smooth. If it is too runny (it was) let it sit for a few minutes to thicken. Pour over the cake and let it run down the sides.

Outstanding, this cake. In fact, everything I've made from Eat Good Food has been excellent. The book also includes a recipe for a pear skillet cake that I want to try next week, when the CSA drops off another 6 overripe pears.

And I wonder why I'm not skinnier.

Outfit update/Pancetta tutorial, part 2: Spices

2011-10-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

Pancetta spices

Thank-you for all your help with the outfit. I wore the skirt, sweater, and a pound or so of pancake makeup. The outfit hardly mattered, though, because I also wore a flowery apron that made me look like a 1940s British housewife. I like that look; I'm dissing myself. The whole Good Morning America taping experience was straightforward, fun and thoroughly exhausting. When I know the air date, I will post it.

Meanwhile, if any of you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am reading at Books, Inc. in Berkeley next Tuesday, November 1, at 7 p.m. I will also be reading on November 12 at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 1 p.m. And in January, I may have a date at the incredible Omnivore Books in San Francisco, which is devoted entirely to cookbooks.

Now, pancetta.

Above is a picture of the pancetta spices used in Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn which is my meat-curing bible. But there's a lot of flexibility here, and you can omit or add spices, depending on your tastes. I've made pancetta without juniper berries and I couldn't tell the difference; I doubt I'd notice if I omitted the nutmeg. Next time I want to add red red pepper flakes. The three really essential components are salt, pink salt and sugar. And probably pepper and garlic

This is the basic spicing for 5 pounds of boneless, skinless pork belly:

6 cloves garlic
2 teaspoons pink salt
1/4 cup kosher salt
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 tablespoons black peppercorns
2 tablespoons juniper berries
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 chunk nutmeg

Grind the whole spices; mince the garlic. Mix the spices and garlic with the sugar, salt and pink salt. (In my book I say to put everything in your spice grinder and grind, which worked for me once, but when I did it the other day almost caused the engine to blow out. So don't do that. Sorry!)

Slather this gritty mixture over your pork belly; be sure it's really well jacketed. Now, put the meat into a bowl into which it fits snugly, and cover tightly. Place the bowl in the refrigerator, where it will sit for the next seven days. You should turn the meat around in the spices once every day or so, just to be sure it's well covered in cure.

Do you have cheesecloth? You'll need it for the next step. Part 3, coming soon.

Wardrobe code red

2011-10-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

My mother's Benetton sweater and the long-lived Banana Republic skirt?

The Good Morning America producer told me to wear "what feels comfortable."

The media professional told me to wear a fitted top, jewel-toned, perhaps with a scoop neck. And a striking piece of jewelry.

I told myself to wear a "pretty" outfit that doesn't look totally absurd adjacent to a chicken.

Then I went to the mall. Found nothing. Went through my closet. Found two options. I have 36 hours to make adjustments before GMA comes to my house, so your ideas and opinions (gently expressed!) are more than welcome. Some things I'm going to have to live with, like fifteen pounds. But I have time to buy new boots, dig up a better necklace, consider slacks, apply makeup.

Or the year-old Anthropologie dress?

Pancetta tutorial, Part 1: Pink salt and pork belly

2011-10-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

Hey, I was trying to take a picture of the sign.

I haven't forgotten my promise to do a pancetta tutorial, although I have regretted it. Cooking from my own book? Talk about nerve wracking. What if I find a mistake? Why did I try so hard with the jokes? Why is there smoke coming out of my spice grinder when I'm just following my own instructions? Damn.

Without further dithering, pancetta.

Pancetta is unsmoked Italian bacon and it adds salt and savor to pastas, soups, risottos, and big cheesy polenta casseroles. It is super-easy and relatively (sometimes extremely) inexpensive to make, but you do need two ingredients that you will not find at your typical big-box America supermarket. Once you have these ingredients, the pancetta practically makes itself.

First, you need some pink salt, a.k.a. salt cut with sodium nitrite. This cheap Pepto Bismol-colored powder prevents botulism in bacon, pancetta and many of our favorite carcinogenic luncheon meats. No, it's not healthy, though neither botulism. If nitrites worry you, you probably shouldn't eat pancetta. My personal motto: moderation. You can order pink salt here or from the butcher supplier of your choice.

You also need pork belly, a deliciously fatty cut of pig that is the foundation of bacon, salt pork, and many exquisite restaurant entrees. No, it is not healthy. But you can choose between moderately unhealthy pork belly and very unhealthy pork belly, depending on how much you want to pay.

If you can afford it, you should special order your pork belly from a boutique butcher shop. Where I live, that would be Marin Sun Farms, which sells only pastured meats. The Marin Sun Farms price for boneless, skinless pork belly as of this writing is $7.99 per pound. This is as pure and wholesome as pork belly gets. I love Marin Sun Farms, but acquiring their meat is expensive and inconvenient and I go to the trouble less often than I should.

Alternatively, you can walk into just about any Chinese market and find pink rafts of pork belly in the display case near the tongues, chicken feet, and gelatinous blobs of coagulated pig's blood. The other day I went to my beloved Richmond New May Wah on Clement Street in San Francisco and bought 5 pounds of pork belly for $3.99 per pound. (Important: Wherever you buy your pork belly, ask to have the skin removed. It's no fun to do at home, but will take a skilled butcher roughly 30 seconds.)

I thought $3.99 per pound was a great deal. Then, walking back to the car, I stopped in at the Wing Hing Fish Market. In addition to live crabs, lobsters, and every manner of finned creature, Wing Hing sells meat. Wing Hing price for pork belly: $2.69 per pound. That was so cheap that it creeped me out a little, but I bought some, as I was curious to see if there was any difference at all between cheap pork belly and dirt cheap pork belly. Back home, I smelled the meat samples. I studied them. I could detect no difference whatsoever. Both are nonorganic, nonpastured pork from pigs that probably led horrendous lives and ate disgusting diets. Not that pigs had such awesome diets in the old days, at least not on Deadwood.

I guess my point is, if you're going for the cheap pork belly, you should go for the cheapest pork belly you can find.

But, truly, I don't think you should go for the cheap pork belly, I think you should buy the best pork belly you can afford. I had buyer's remorse; I know not to buy cut-rate meat and bought it anyway. I'm sure I'll do it again, but that doesn't mean it's right. People, be better than I am.

Pancetta part 2, coming soon.

Pork belly should have a thick layer of creamy fat, but also plenty of meat.

The tyranny of the CSA box

2011-10-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

Cabbage, aged gouda, milk, bread crumbs

It's obviously an error when a dish that Nigel Slater calls "a gratin of white cabbage, cheese, and mustard" does not include any mustard.

I only noticed the omission after I sat down to eat Saturday night's dinner and thought, wow, this gratin is kind unctuous and could use some. . . hey, wait a second! I assumed I'd missed a step in the recipe, but I reread it and mustard is mentioned at no point except in the name of the dish.

Mistakes happen. Even without mustard, the gratin was hugely popular with the males of our household, who seemed to mistake it for macaroni and cheese. I was not so easily fooled. I feel cooked cabbage is too watery for cheese sauce, which just slid off the limp, sodden leaves. If I am going to eat a fattening cabbage dish, I would choose cole slaw.

Now, I only have two more cabbages left in the refrigerator, plus a bunch of collards, a couple of Delicata squash, many radishes, several weeks worth of beets, some spoiling, slimy bok choy, and much more! They hit us again tomorrow. This is the tyranny of the CSA box. Tyranny that could (and one of these days will) be ended with an email.

An admirably healthy dinner

2011-10-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

Doesn't quite make your mouth water.

Cooking from Tender and powering through my CSA box, last night I made lentil chard soup. Or, as Nigel Slater prefers: a soup of lentils, bacon and chard.

The instructions puzzled me. Specifically, Slater calls for you to set aside "four beautiful (chard) stalks and their leaves" while chopping the rest and cooking them into a sludgy soup. You are supposed to steam those four beautiful pieces of chard separately -- and whole -- then stir them into the soup at the end. I wonder if chard is smaller in Britain, because my every leaf of chard was the size of a tennis racket, or racquet, and I could not see how I could possibly steam these things whole. Also, I was unexcited about steaming something to put into soup, especially lentil soup, which is supposed to be easy and frumpy.

So I ignored this part of the recipe. I just chopped all the chard and cooked it together with the lentils, pancetta, onion, etc. My husband said he loved the soup, "except for that green stuff." When he went back for seconds he said he was going to "sieve out the kale." (He didn't end up sieving it out, but he didn't eat it.)

I liked the soup a lot. My only complaint about this recipe is that I didn't really need it: I could have improvised the soup. I am worried this will be true of a lot of Slater's recipes.

Incidentally, I bought the pancetta for the soup, even though homemade pancetta is easy to make and much cheaper. (Interested in making pancetta? I am going to do a tutorial on the blog next week.) But I didn't want to wait a week for it to cure. Then, after I'd bought the pancetta, I was digging around in the freezer and discovered a big bag of pink chunks that appeared to be frozen homemade pancetta. Sometimes I think the most valuable and underused tool in my kitchen is a Sharpie.

On another subject, I was on Marketplace the other day, interviewed by Tess Vigeland, who is as lovely and warm as she sounds on the radio. I have not listened to the clip, but my husband says that I did not embarrass myself.

Why lite not light?

2011-10-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

At least it was lite.

I'm on a 30-day no-alcohol challenge, and yesterday -- day 13 -- I took a short break. It's like when you're swimming across a pool and you have to come up for breath. Right? Okay, not really. But that's what I reasoned at the end of a very unpleasant day in which I interacted with the most unpleasant human I have encountered in 2011. I drank two sidecars while fixing dinner. The bad news is, I failed at my challenge. The good news is, I don't want to do it again any time soon. This morning my husband showed me a picture he took at around 9 p.m. when I was sitting on the sofa in my sleeveless nightgown eating lite Cool Whip out of the tub. The picture is sobering in all senses of the word. I need to stick to my 30 day challenge and I need to go the gym and learn how to use those bicep machines. The picture is also funny and I would post it, but I only post extremely flattering pictures of myself, in case you were wondering why almost all the images of me in "about Jennifer" and "Family" are vintage.

If you are surprised that I even have lite Cool Whip in the house, I will explain. I bought it last spring to make unkind comparisons to real whipped cream, which was easy to do. That I didn't throw it out, well, that is harder to explain. Except, it's not. When it comes to food, I pretend otherwise, but I'm basically a junkyard dog.

On another subject, last night I also started cooking from a new book. Soul of a New Cuisine was fine, but only fine. Marcus Samuelsson's recipes are too expensive and not quite delicious enough. One day last week I spent $90 on two pieces of meat -- a veal shoulder and a rack of lamb -- to cook Samuelsson recipes, and neither was a hit. I decided I was done.

The new book is Tender by Nigel Slater. I walked into Barnes and Noble with the intention of just browsing for 15 minutes, but I could not walk out of the store without Slater's recipe for beet seed cake. I haven't made that yet, but it's coming. Last night I did make his Southeast Asian stir-fried lamb with broccoli and as I recall it was pretty tasty.

Honestly, though, it was sort of a blur.

Cardamom cake, as requested

2011-10-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

Maybe my #1 cake. Maybe.

Cardamom cake was the first dessert I made when I started this blog and I've made it many times since because it is easy, elegant, exotic and awesomely delicious. The recipe comes from Niloufer Ichaporia King's My Bombay Kitchen. Although this is a Parsi cookbook, the recipe is Swedish. People who dislike cardamom will dislike this cake intensely.

butter for the pan
3 tablespoons sugar
sliced unblanched almonds, 1/3 to 1/2 cup
4 large eggs
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
1 1/3 sticks unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
1 tablespoon cardamom seeds
1 1/3 cups flour
pinch of salt

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Generously butter a 9 inch springform pan and sprinkle with the sugar. Shake so the bottom and sides are covered with sugar. Don't worry about extra sugar on the bottom. Now sprinkle the almonds across the bottom of the pan.

2. With a mixer, handheld or stand, beat the eggs,and sugar until thick, pale, and tripled in volume -- a few minutes. Bruise the cardamom seeds in a mortar.

3. Gently fold the flour and salt into the egg and sugar mixture, then add the butter and cardamom. Pour into the pan.

4. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until the cake tests done. Cool for 5 minutes, then remove from the pan. Serve cool. This cake is wonderful the next day.

My mom's apple cake

2011-10-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

She used to make the apple cake. She also made the plate.

It has happened. I have become self-conscious about my blog. I don't know what to do about it except confess, forge ahead, and apologize in advance if I sound more stilted than usual. I'm supposed to be doing a lot of Twitter, Facebook and other squirm-inducing self promotion/book promotion, and somehow my blog has gotten mixed up with all this in my mind to ill and inhibiting effect. I've done so much cooking in the last week, had so many subjects I wanted to write about -- Marcus Samuelsson's rack of lamb (now known forever by us as hack of lamb), Nigel Slater's Tender, the tempting new cookbooks at Omnivore, cottage cheese pancakes, my day with Layne -- and yet whenever I sit down to the computer it's like sitting down to write a college application essay.

Here goes.

Last week I decided I was going to make Smitten Kitchen's mother's apple cake, as I love recipes that come from mothers. But the very day I was going to bake that cake I got an email from my own mother's friend Ellen. She wrote:

"Jennifer - I've been thinking of Checka so much lately and when I found out I had to bring dessert to my book club meeting, I suddenly thought of Apple Dapple Cake which is in a cookbook your mother recommended. She wrote little notes about some of the recipes and this one she said was "fantastic." I've made it before and knew it was delicious and I just finished baking it."

I remembered apple dapple cake! But like so many things associated with my mother, I spent years distancing myself, which now seems very silly and sad. If you have a mother with a powerful personality it is understandable and forgiveable if you distance yourself. Distance may be necessary if you ever want to become your own person, and I would probably do it all over again. But it still seems silly and sad, now.

I am definitely my own person now and instead of Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, I baked apple dapple cake. It is my caloric undoing, this incredible cake. It is moist and appley, which is baseline good, but what pushes it over the top is the diabolical glaze of melted butter, cream, and brown sugar that you pour over the cake and which soaks into the crumb and at the same time forms a super-sweet, brittle caramel crust. I highly recommend apple dapple cake. It has vaulted into my top ten cakes, right up there with cardamom cake and Laurie Colwin's nutmeg cake. For perspective, the Orangette/Nigel Slater plum cake I mentioned a post or two ago is merely in my top 50 cakes. I should really keep a ranked list.

The recipe is barely adapted from the San Francisco A La Carte cookbook published in 1979. The book omits an oven temperature; I went with 350, always a safe choice. You will cringe when you see how much oil and sugar the recipe calls for, but steel yourself and make it anyway.

APPLE DAPPLE CAKE

2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups neutral vegetable oil
3 large eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

3 cups finely diced, peeled apples
2 cups chopped pecans
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

GLAZE

1 cup brown sugar (light or dark)
1/4 pound unsalted butter
1/2 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
2. Combine sugar and oil and beat well. Add eggs one at a time.
3. . Sift dry ingredients together and stir into the egg mixture.
4. Beat in apples, nuts and vanilla. Pour into a greased, floured tube pan (angel food cake pan) and bake for one hour or more, until a slender knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. (This is a deep cake and a toothpick doesn't reach far enough.)
5. When the cake is almost ready to come out of the oven, combine the glaze ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Let boil for 3 minutes. Reserving 1/3 cup, pour over the hot cake, still in the pan. Cool, and remove the cake from the pan. Just before serving, pour the rest of the glaze over the cake.

Makes a lot.

On another subject, I had never heard of kiwiberries until they turned upin last week's CSA box. I hope they catch on because we loved them a lot.

No fur, no fuzz

I persist with my aggravating CSA, because I like being surprised like this. You can't really tell from the photo, but these cute fruits are about the size of olives and they are essentially tiny kiwis, but with smooth edible skins so you can pop a whole one in your mouth, no wet, onerous peeling required. They were gone in an hour.

My canning problem, birthdays, a good-bye

2011-10-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

the work of a domestic goddess.

I knew I didn't like canning applesauce.

But I let a beautiful post by Soule Mama, who makes every household task look like poetry, sway me. Yesterday, I canned applesauce.

our apple tree

I think everyone in the family would have been happier if I'd gone to the gym, or to the Container Store, or stayed in bed all day, because peeling 12 pounds of wormy apples, sterilizing jars, and cooking down the sauce put me in such a bitchy mood even I couldn't stand me. It was tedious and sticky and took hours, but I was determined to fill the kitchen with the fragrance of cinnamon, load the shelves with golden organic applesauce, capture the moment, celebrate fall, etc.

Even at this advanced age, I still confuse the symbols of domestic happiness with actual domestic happiness. Canning is just not my thing.

My misspent Sunday

It's great applesauce, though!

After the applesauce was done, the day quickly improved: Isabel and I went to see Contagion. As someone who has in the past worried obsessively about infectious disease, I approached the movie with trepidation. But I never even had to stop eating the popcorn. Nothing Steven Soderbergh conjured was as horrifying as what I've imagined while staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. It all looked pretty tame to me, though I don't know how anyone could ever cheat on Matt Damon.

Back to cooking and cookbooks: Owen turned 11 and his cousin Stella turned 6 last week. We threw them a joint party at which I served Marcus Samuelsson's za'atar roasted leg of lamb out of Soul of a New Cuisine. It was good, but not photogenic and not something I'd go out of my way to make again. The next day, I used the rest of the meat to make a Fannie Farmer casserole that I have served many, many times. It is the best vehicle I've ever found for leftover lamb, one of the less appealing leftover meats. Make sure the mixture is good and lemony before you put it in the oven; this rich casserole needs bite.

CRACKER-TOPPED LAMB CASSEROLE

2 cups chopped leftover lamb roast
1/2 onion, chopped
3/4 cup lamb gravy, lamb stock, or chicken stock (listed in order of preference)
2 cups cooked long-grain rice
salt and pepper to taste
pinch of cayenne
3 tablespoons lemon juice, or more, to taste
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup Ritz crackers, coarsely crushed

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and oil a casserole dish.
2. Mix everything but the butter and Ritz in a big bowl. Scrape into the casserole dish.
3. Melt the butter and mix with the Ritz crackers. Sprinkle this on the casserole.
4. Cover the casserole and bake for 20 minutes. Uncover and bake for 15 minutes more.

Just to keep up with my cookbook reporting, I also baked Marcus Samuelsson's peanut cake from Soul of a New Cuisine over the weekend. It's a gremlin recipe. Even in the best of cookbooks, you'll find recipes that simply don't add up. (Hopefully not in mine, but I'm pretty sure. . . in mine.) I knew when I poured the thin, scant batter into the pan that it was not going to right itself in the oven and I was correct. We ended up with a spongy, chewy, very flat, very wrong loaf cake. Complete fail.

It was about 1 inch tall.

The chickens loved it, though. Pecked it all up.

On another subject entirely, eighteen months after my mother died, my childhood home has been sold.

I will miss you, dated pink bathroom.

This morning I went back for very last time. This was the real good-bye, when Justine and I picked up the final dustballs and garden art before the new owners arrive tomorrow. I walked through those empty rooms and I touched every surface, ran my hand down the banister, flipped the light switches, turned the old brass doorknobs I have been turning since 1969. I had the weirdest impulse to hug and kiss the house, to lie down on the floor and cry. (I didn't! Although I might have given one of the walls a very quick kiss.) I can feel my mother in that house and remember her in a way I can't remember her anywhere else.

I'll miss you too, creaky stairs.

The new owners told us we can drop in any time, but I don't imagine I ever will.

Beautiful plum cake and heinous injera

2011-09-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

Orangette/Nigel Slater plum cake

I'm starting with the pretty because that seems more polite.

I read about this beautiful plum cake on Orangette and it was one of those recipes that was going to haunt me until I tried it. So I tried it. Very easy, very rewarding! It was delicious warm last night, but it was even better this morning, cold. Read Molly Wizenberg's description. You're going to want to try it, too.

Would be good with whipped cream, though it's great plain.

Okay, now for the not pretty.

injera batter

A few days ago I mixed injera batter (teff flour, water, yeast) using the recipe from Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford's Flatbreads and Flavors. I let the batter bubble and sour and separate for 48 hours and I watched a little swarm of fruit flies form over the (covered) bowl. I had hopes. This seemed like the way injera should be made.

Something went wrong, or the recipe is wrong, I don't know. Hopes were dashed. My injera cooking skills are lacking, so the pancakes broke, as you will see below. But even had I been able to make the injera look like injera, it didn't taste like injera. It was only moderately sour and lacked that wonderful spongy texture. I served this nasty pancake with a dry, bland Ethiopian ground beef dish (also from Flatbreads) and it had to be one of the most heinous dinners I've ever put on the table. Which is odd, because those Duguid-Alford books are usually excellent. What is also odd is that my family ate it without complaint. I have beaten them into complete culinary submission. Not sure how I feel about that.

sorry excuse for injera

I don't know what to do about my injera quest. I have a copy of Exotic Ethiopian Cooking by Daniel Jote Mesfin, but his recipe looks almost identical to the Duguid-Alford formula. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

On another subject, credit for my beautiful new blog design goes to my sister, Justine. Credit for the chicken picture -- and the impetus to upgrade -- goes to my publisher. I'm a little freaked out every time I open the page. It's like I've been living in a cozy basement with a bunch of rescue cats and posters thumbtacked to the walls and now I'm in a loft with framed Audubon prints and glass coffee tables. I love it, and I'm sure it will feel like home soon enough.

It's Istanbul, not Constantinople

2011-09-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

Tortilla, Abyssinian wine, grandmother

On Sunday, Owen and I picked up my grandmother and told her we were going to an Ethiopian restaurant. She seemed unclear about exactly what cuisine we were talking about. "Indian food?" she asked. When we got to the restaurant she looked around at the people and said, "Oh, this is an Abyssinian restaurant."

I said, "No, no, Ethiopian. Ethiopia is a country in eastern Africa . . . "

I stopped myself, checked on my iPhone, discovered she was right. Or at least not wrong.

My grandmother did not like eating with her hands, and did not understand the role of the injera -- the spongy flatbread you use to scoop up the various dishes -- until about halfway through the meal. Lightbulb moment: "This a tortilla," she said.

I said, "No, no, it's actually a sourdough pancake made with teff flour. . ."

She looked at me darkly. "I know. But it's like a tortilla." After that she ate with gusto. My grandmother is a pip.

Zeni is the best Ethiopian restaurant I've been to in the Bay Area, and I'm just sorry it's in San Jose, where I hardly ever go. The injera comes in a basket and it is rolled up tightly, like hand towels. See lower left-hand corner of photo below:

It is pliable, grayish, slightly damp, intensely sour, so good. I am determined to learn to make it, or something like it. To go with the injera, we had super-spicy ground meat, homemade cheese, chicken sauteed in butter, cabbage sauteed in butter, salad, all delicious. One order of baklava for dessert, which I would have skipped, but my grandmother insisted.

I thought about how and what my grandmother eats. It's very simple: She eats everything, including wine, salad, and dessert, but everything in moderation, at mealtimes. It makes me think of the Michael Pollan maxim: Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. That strikes me as the soundest of all dietary advice.

The night after the Ethiopian dinner out, I made an Ethiopian dinner in. I made yataklete kilkil. Or, spiced vegetables.

The recipe comes from the The Africa News Cookbook and you start by simmering butter with spices (ginger, turmeric, cardamom, etc.), onions, and garlic for a full hour. Then you strain out the solids -- both dairy solids and bits of spice and onion -- so that you're left with pure golden butter imbued with a subtly exotic fragrance. It's beautiful. You'll want to dip a crust of bread in it, but try to resist.

Once you have your spiced butter, steam some cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and potatoes, then saute them in 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the butter. Salt to taste.

spa food meets spiced butter and salt

I served the yataklete kilkil with basmati rice and everyone loved it except maybe Owen, who didn't seem to eat much. Isabel had seconds. Again, I started thinking about the peculiarities of the American diet. How it's all or nothing, you're eating like a bird or you're eating like Orson Welles. When I hear the words "steamed vegetables" I wince, because I have only met steamed vegetables in their most austere, unbuttered, unseasoned, you're-on-a-diet form. If all steamed vegetables were sauteed in a little spiced butter, I might actually eat steamed vegetables more than once per decade and be a healthier person for it.

Last night, I made Algerian spicy vegetable soup (chorba hamra), also from Africa News. I will have to write more about this soup later because I didn't really eat any so can't comment on its flavor. I just left the pot on the stove for my husband and went to meet a friend of a friend for a drink. There, in the Marinitas bar in downtown San Anselmo, I consumed so many tortilla chips that I didn't feel like eating vegetable soup when I got home at 8:30 p.m.

My grandmother never would have done that. First of all, she never would have left my grandfather to fend for himself with a pot of soup and two children while she went out for a drink. What kind of negligent wife does that? No comment. But second, and more germane to the subject of this blog, my grandmother never would have stuffed herself with tortilla chips then come home and eaten a Skinny Cow caramel cone washed down with a glass of wine while watching Breaking Bad and called it dinner.

I like to think I have a healthy, traditional diet, but when I actually look at what I eat, that isn't quite the case.

The mysteries of gluten and tempestuous little girls

2011-09-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

Gluten-free pasta

About six months ago I was invited to join a book club and I was delighted. I'd never been in a book club before, and every woman I know is in a book club. It's the midlife equivalent of a sorority, except you can't really be "against" book clubs. What was wrong with me?

Then my friend Susan asked me to join her book club and I did and it was great. I haven't missed a meeting since, even though I never got past page 40 of What the Body Remembers.

This book club involves someone hosting dinner. There is the usual depressing understanding among women: No one wants to get fat. But meal planning is more complicated than that with this group. One woman is vegan. One woman absolutely can not eat gluten. One woman was on a cleanse the month I hosted, so she didn't eat anything at all, just drank herbal tea.

Dinner this last Friday, hosted by Alicia, started with homemade cashew "cheese" and gluten-free crackers. Alicia promised to send the recipe and when she does I will print it here, because this cashew "cheese" was sensational. Not as a replacement for cheese itself, but as something delicious in its own right.

We sat down to dinner. Two lasagnas: one vegan and gluten-free, the other merely vegan. We were allowed to choose. Here's what puzzled me: Everyone wanted the gluten-free lasagna. I understand why people with celiac disease can't eat gluten, but most people don't have celiac disease. When I said I didn't mind having the gluten-full lasagna, I felt slightly uneasy, like I'd been left out of yet another important girly secret.

We talked about the book (Shopgirl by Steve Martin) and movies and Michele Bachman and then, over coffee and soy creamer, the conversation turned to cleanses and the whole gluten business. Apparently, it's all about something called inflammation.

Unlike me, you probably know about inflammation, which leads to heart disease, stroke, cancer, pain, everything you don't want. Apparently, some foods are inflammatory, and some foods are anti-inflammatory. White foods -- including potatoes -- appear to be inflammatory and are to be avoided. Alcohol: very inflammatory. (The women in the group do not seem to mind this particular inflammatory.) Tomatoes and eggplant: inflammatory. Blueberries: anti-inflammatory. My book club members believe gluten is also inflammatory, although this turns out to be controversial. For the record, Dr. Weil does not see any reason to avoid gluten if you are not gluten sensitive.

So perplexing. So interesting. I was gazing into the middle distance while processing my thoughts about inflammation when a woman said gravely, "Jennifer, are you okay?"

Everyone fell silent and looked at me, which was awful. I said, "Oh I'm fine. I was just thinking about white foods."

Anyway, this is how dietary theories inform/complicate my life: Last night I was going to cook African food, but in the end I didn't want to go to the supermarket and I kind of wanted to try the box of gluten-free quinoa spaghetti that I'd inherited from my mother and which had languished in the cupboard for over a year. I made a sauce of olive oil (good fat), a whole head of garlic (major anti-inflammatory), broccoli (ditto) and red pepper flakes and served it with the gluten-free spaghetti. Then I added some inflammatory Parmesan cheese, because the pasta didn't taste good until I did. How was it? No one could even tell it wasn't "normal" spaghetti. I drank inflammatory white wine and ate some extra broccoli to offset the wine. This morning when I made my coffee I wondered if soy milk might be a better choice than super-inflammatory dairy milk. But isn't soy milk a white food? Or is it beige? I was going to have a slice of toast with some peanut butter for breakfast, but there's gluten in my bread and we only had Jif, which contains sugar, a white food.

And so I ate a pear with 1 ounce of inflammatory cheddar cheese and felt like I'd started the day on the wrong foot.

Inflammation. Just one more thing I'll worry about when I'm trying to decide what to cook and what to eat, without ever really believing that these inflammatory foods that people have eaten for centuries can be truly bad. On the fence: The story of my life.

Next month's book club book: The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer. It was that or the Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness. I voted for cancer.

On another subject, yesterday we went to a high school football game. It was not exactly like one of the games on Friday Night Lights and I'm sorry to report that while the teenagers in our town are very good looking, they're not as good looking as teenagers in Dillon.

At half time, I walked home with Owen and his cousin Stella, who is 5. I started a conversation with Stella. We discussed school, her friends and her upcoming birthday, for which she would like a rock tumbler. I thought I was being a benevolent and interested aunt when I asked, "Are there any cute boys in your class? Do you have a boyfriend?" She yanked my hand, glared at me, and burst into tears. She cried stormily for the next three minutes while I apologized helplessly and Owen berated me: "MOM! No one likes it when you ask those things." He started to cry tears of sympathy with Stella and pinched the inside of arm so hard there's a purple bruise now.

Life is so confusing!

Would you want her promoting your book?

2011-09-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Not the perky one on the left, the OTHER one

Funny. Neither would I.

Nonetheless, I'm going to be on a panel next Friday at the Eat Real Festival in Oakland, California. Come!

Back to our usual programming:

Wednesday night I got back from six days driving around Oregon gathering notes for some travel stories. It was lots of fun, though I find it increasingly hard to fall asleep in hotels. I drank a huckleberry milkshake, which was delicious, and picked thimbleberries which are even more delicious. I hiked through evergreen forests, had the opportunity to bungee jump and declined, visited the Timberline Lodge, which I admired even more than I did the first time, and toured a botanical garden that made me want to come home and work in my sorry yard.

The last night of the trip, I was eating a chicken salad in the hotel lounge when two older ladies plopped down across from me and we got to chatting. I ended up buying them a round. I realized later that I'd never bought strangers "a round" before, or even said the words, "we'll have another round." I liked the way it made me feel -- not just light-headed and drunk, but big-hearted and convivial.

Then I went back to my room and did not fall asleep the entire night.

Just another crappy photograph of something I liked

The highlight of the trip was a tour of the Gordon House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for a farmer and his artist wife. It's the third Frank Lloyd Wright house that I've visited, and each time I come out of one of these residences I feel sad that I will never get to live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Life is hard.

The kitchen looks hideous in my pictures, but trust me, tomato soup-colored countertops notwithstanding, it's a seductive room: unfussy, utilitarian, the perfect size and shape for one or two people who are trying to produce a meal. It isn't aiming to be the "heart of the home" with an island the size of Bermuda, homework center, wine refrigerator, puffy sofa, big screen TV. I think the backlash against the great room kitchen is inevitable simply because of how good -- how refreshing -- this small, thoughtfully designed kitchen looked.

The banquette was designed so it feels like sitting in the seat of a Chevy truck.

I haven't had a chance to cook a meal since I've been home, but when I do, it will be African.

Pink gin, piri piri prawns, PDX

2011-09-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

piri piri

Lately, I've read several books in which people drink pink gin. Pink gin. It sounded magical and beautiful so I looked up the ingredients, but they don't sound magical or beautiful at all, which was both disappointing and a relief, because the last thing I need is another cocktail to fetishize.

One of the books in which pink gin gets drunk is Alexandra Fuller's new memoir, Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Like her first book, Cocktails is populated by eccentric white Africans who shoot guns, imbibe great quantities of alcohol and eat very little food. One of the foods they do eat in Cocktails -- or talk about, anyway -- is piri piri prawns. The words piri piri prawns had the same effect on me as pink gin.

But the ingredients sounded a lot better. Piri piri prawns -- which originated in Mozambique -- contains chili peppers, garlic, butter, and big, meaty shrimp. There are recipes in both Marcus Samuelsson's Soul of a New Cuisine and The Africa News Cookbook. Since Africa News is growing on me in a big way (more on that later), I opted for their recipe.

I looked forward to dinner all day long as the the shrimp marinated in the refrigerator. You're supposed to grill them, but I couldn't pull it together for grilling, so I cooked them quickly in a very hot cast-iron skillet and they came out perfectly. But after three prawns, I didn't want to eat anymore. While I love them all individually, I just don't like chili peppers, garlic, butter, and shrimp all together, and I don't know why. Too rich, I suppose, but usually I love rich.

To go with the piri piri shrimp, I served a Sudanese eggplant salad, also from Africa News. It involved frying peeled chunks of eggplant, chilling this grey-green mush, then mixing it with lemon juice, garlic, and crushed peanuts. It sounded so drab I almost didn't make it, but it was fantastic. I would type the recipe into the blog, but I don't have the cookbook with me right now.

Sudanese salad

Plus, despite my high praise, I don't think a single person would actually make it. A shame.

It looks like there's a pattern emerging here: On another night last week, I thought we were going to love Marcus Samuelsson's lamb stir fry, but it seemed like it really wanted to be stew and we didn't love it.

He suggests serving the stir fry/stew with chunky mashed vegetables, which sounded like a horrendous porridge of sweet potato, carrots, green beans, and chili powder.

chunky mashed vegetables

It was almost as delicious as the Sudanese eggplant salad.

See, you never really know about a recipe until you try it. Almost never. I knew the chocolate rum cake from Samuelsson book would be lovely, and it was.

Although, calorie for calorie, I'd go for hot fudge pudding.

On another subject, I'm in Oregon on a short business trip, if you can call riding a chairlift, drinking huckleberry milkshakes, and visiting botanical gardens "business." If you have any suggestions -- food or otherwise -- for the Mount Hood and/or Silverton areas, send me a note!

African Food & Hot Fudge Pudding

2011-09-02T16:20:00.000-07:00

red penne

I can't tell you how sad I am that summer is over. Isabel started high school a two weeks ago and yesterday morning Owen strapped on his 50-pound backpack, picked up his giant trombone, and set off down the hill to the middle school whence he emerged seven hours later cheerful and full of stories, but looking a little stunned. An hour later he fell apart because he had already lost his homework planner and he was sure he was going to be sentenced to eternal detention. "They're really strict about that in middle school!" he cried. I told him I thought the teachers would have compassion in the first week of school and that if they didn't I would homeschool him (?), but that meanwhile he really needed to figure out how to pay attention to his belongings. Then I left him disconsolate under a mountain of school supplies and drove Isabel to dance class.

Over the summer I thought I had outgrown my taste for alcohol. I thought, what an unexpected and wholesome development!

Yes, well. Cheers.

Three African dinners to report on:

1. Red penne. A lustrous pasta sauced with harissa (pepper paste) and ground almonds from Soul of a New Cuisine. Marcus Samuelsson likens it to pesto, which it somewhat resembles, except spicier and red. It is very delicious, though not quite as delicious as pesto. Another solid recipe from that very solid book.

2. I've been testing recipes from Marcus Samuelsson's Soul of a New Cuisine against the same recipes from The Africa News Cookbook. I was secretly rooting for the humble spiral-bound Africa News over the shiny chef's book, but the chef's book easily wins this round. The bobotie (Malay-inspired ground meat curry) from Soul of a New Cuisine was tender and fragrant. The bobotie from Africa News dried out in the baking so the top formed a mahogany brown crust studded with puffy burned raisins. I have spared you the photograph. To accompany, I made the buttery Africa News yellow rice which we liked, but which couldn't really compete with Samuelsson's "fancy" yellow rice, full of mango, yellow tomato, expensive saffron and corn on the cob. Not a fair fight, but Samuelsson still wins.

pretty and humble

3. Thursday night, I made Samuelsson's doro wett, an Ethiopian chicken stew with hard-boiled eggs. I hoped to present it, as he recommends, with a big plate of injera, the sour, soft, spongy flatbread that serves, in the course of an Ethiopian meal, as a platter, a utensil, and a tangy starch. I've only ever tasted injera in Ethiopian restaurants and it's the main reason I love going to Ethiopian restaurants. I had read disparaging reviews of Marcus Samuelsson's injera recipe and I am sorry to report that the naysayers were correct. His recipe calls for whole wheat flour, club soda, baking soda, and yogurt and yields a large brown pancake that is very tasty, but in no way resembles injera. It seemed much too easy and was. I am going to learn to make proper injera if it takes me the rest of the year.

Pass the maple syrup.

On another subject, I haven't been able to throw away any of my mother's clipped recipes and they sit n stacks and binders and files around the house. I have all my late grandmother's recipes too, and while I know that to keep them is silly, I think it's a benign kind of silliness, like keeping too many measuring spoons. No. It's better than benign. It makes me happy. When I look at my mother's and grandmother's recipe collections, I see those two women at their most youthful and hopeful. Recipe clipping and collecting is such an optimistic gesture, full of the expectation that there will be many days to come in which you will prepare and partake of braided holiday breads, homemade marshmallow eggs, oven-fried chicken, hot fudge pudding.

The following recipe for hot fudge pudding was at the top of one of my mother's stacks. I'm pretty sure she never made it. Clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, it's one of those wacky recipes that has you mix ordinary cake ingredients and then pour hot water over everything to make a horrendous mudpie that miraculously bakes into something coherent and wonderful. It is super-easy and calls for ingredients you might actually have in the cupboard right now.

Homely, but so good

HOT FUDGE PUDDING

1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup sugar
6 tablespoons cocoa
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup chopped nuts (I used almonds)
1 cup light brown sugar
1 3/4 cups hot water

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F and butter a 9-inch square pan.

2. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and 2 tablespoons of the cocoa into a mixing bowl. Stir in milk, butter and nuts.

3. Spread the batter in the pan. Mix together the brown sugar and remaining cocoa and spread over the batter. Pour the hot water over everything.

4. Bake for 45 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream.

It reheats well. Last night, since the homework hasn't kicked in for real, Owen and I sat on the sofa and ate leftover pudding and watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, which I remembered as hilarious but is actually awful. Owen loved it, though, and told me he wished he was a Bushman.

My video shoot

2011-08-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

my props

Friday morning I went to Safeway and bought a box of Uncrustables to use as a prop in the promo video for my forthcoming book, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. For the record, I think Uncrustables are silly. These popular frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cost more than a homemade sandwich and don't taste as good. Very broadly speaking, this is the subject of my book.

Some backstory on the video: Earlier this summer, the publisher sent me a Flip cam and Isabel made a video of me grinding peanut butter in the kitchen of my mother-in-law's beach house. We didn't have a script and I told Isabel to shoot from above to make me look skinnier. As a result, I look like I'm being filmed from a security camera in the ceiling. You can see the video here and you may understand why the publisher wanted a new video shot with a real camera at eye level by professionals.

Andy, Max, Nick

Professionals were found. The sound technician was young enough to be my son, and I'm not talking about a teen pregnancy.

We met Friday morning in the kitchen of a cooking school that happens to be a few doors down from 40-year-old Chez Panisse and directly across the street from the 44-year-old Cheese Board Collective. Around the corner, is the original Peet's Coffee (45-years-old). We met, in other words, at what is arguably the birthplace of the farm-to-table American food movement, not to mention gourmet coffee.

Many sweaty, self-conscious hours passed. I demonstrated the mixing, boiling, and baking of bagels and talked about my book, repeating the same lines dozens of time. I tried to project, tried not to put my hands in my pockets, not to slump, tried to remember what I wanted to say and to say it with heartfelt verve to these patient young men whom I suspected I was boring to death.

I hadn't eaten breakfast and suddenly it was one o'clock. We took a break. You could practically smell the River Dog Farm chicken legs roasting in the wood oven down the street at the Chez Panisse Cafe. At the Cheese Board there was organic vegetarian pizza. Next door: Lush gelato. And on the counter squatted that box of Smucker's Uncrustables.

Yeah. You guessed it. And they were delicious. Sometimes all you really want is to stop being hungry, fast. To repeat: Very broadly speaking, this is the subject of my book.

On another subject, a few nights ago I made the lamb curry from Marcus Samuelsson's Soul of a New Cuisine and served it with his yellow rice. The curry was fabulous, as was the rice. You may have eaten yellow rice before, but probably not like this yellow rice.

It is yellow from the saffron ($$), but also from chunked corn on the cob, mango, yellow tomato, and yellow pepper. We ate it all up. I'm so happy with this book. The Africa News Cookbook has a lot to live up to.

demo bagels

Is this hoarding?

2011-08-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

I cleaned out the kitchen drawers today. Forty-one measuring spoons.

And I can't bear to part with any of them.

They aren't okra fans

2011-08-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

South African hot dish

I miss Africa. It reminded me of Wyoming, but with elephants, and I've been missing Wyoming my entire life. The other night I watched a movie called White Material, the kind of movie that made me never, ever want to go to Africa before I went to Africa. Like Hotel Rwanda.

But having been to Africa, I completely understood why Isabelle Huppert did what she did in order to stay on her plantation, despite the bad men with guns, child soldiers with machetes, and a decapitated ram's head left in her coffee beans. It wasn't pretty, but I understood.

I didn't think much about food when I was in Africa, not because the food wasn't delicious but because food in Africa is dwarfed by everything else. It is dwarfed by the trees full of baboons and the vast plains, the hippos and lions and giraffes and monkeys trying to get in your room, by the waterfalls and rivers, and, of course, the problems. It seems frivolous to talk about African cooking rather than African poverty, political instability, AIDS, and rhinoceros poaching.

Yet if all that you feel comfortable discussing about a place are its noble landscapes and problems, the place is no longer relatable and human. African food is wonderful. The food served to tourists, anyway, which is the only kind I ate or had the opportunity to eat. I realize this is not what ordinary Africans eat, but is still African food: food cooked by Africans in Africa using African recipes and African ingredients. It did not taste like any food I had ever eaten before.

African food, in my brief and very limited experience, is strong and spicy and hearty, often served with pap, a starchy cornmeal porridge much like polenta, but not cheesy or buttery. We ate a lot of this porridge alongside curry-like stews accompanied by chutneys and incendiary pepper pastes. (A creamy spinach-peanut braise served with some porridge was the best thing I ate the entire trip, and I am determined to replicate it at home.) I worry that some of the flavors will be impossible to capture here -- the beef tasted different and better than American beef, and I ate a butter cookie that tasted 10 times better than any butter cookie I ever encountered in my many decades of butter cookie consumption. I started thinking maybe it was made with cape buffalo butter after someone told me they make cheese out of cape buffalo milk. It is a brave man or woman who tries to milk a cape buffalo.

Anyway, when I got home, I immediately opened The Soul of a New Cuisine by Marcus Samuelsson to learn more about African cooking.

This is a beautiful and inspiring cookbook, full of gorgeous pictures and tempting dishes, but it is very high end and cheffy, with recipes for things like quail-foie gras soup and tangerine consomme. Tangerine consomme sounds lovely, but it doesn't sound African to me. Amazon reviews of the book are mixed, as are the notes from Eat Your Books. I am especially discouraged by a thumbs-down report on Samuelsson's injera recipe as I am determined to learn to make injera.

Then I pulled out The Africa News Cookbook, which I bought some years ago. I can't remember why.

It is a homely looking spiral-bound cookbook, lacking lush photography or lavish recipes. Amazon reviews of this book are outstanding.

My plan is to cook a few dishes from Samuelsson's book this week and then cook similar dishes from Africa News next week, and choose the cookbook to proceed with on that basis.

I started cooking from Soul of a New Cuisine a few nights ago. Results so far:

1. My father came over on Saturday and I made bobotie (see photo on top.) Bobotie is essentially South African hot dish, an easy and frugal everyday casserole of spiced ground meat topped with custard. This recipe was excellent and I kept eating even after I was full. It was that kind of excellent. I served the bobotie with an easy mango sambal -- a.k.a. relish -- from Samuelsson's book and some creamed chard. Dinner was a big hit. For dessert, Isabel made turtle bars from an Alice Medrich recipe that you can find here. (You should bake these immediately; they are that kind of excellent, too.)

sweet

2. Monday, I made Samuelsson's Jollof rice and it was gummy, dark, spicy, and studded with peas -- a one pot arroz con pollo. Owen: "I thought it was good. Not make-it-every-night good, but it seems nice for once a month." Isabel: "I thought the chicken was good but the rice had too much stuff in it." Husband: "The chicken would be better if it didn't have any bones in it."

Jollof rice

3. Tuesday night, I made Samuelsson's kofta meatballs with okra tomato sauce. I had expected meatballs with a little sauce that you could serve on a plate, but ended up with a viscous okra soup in which floated big, tender meatballs. It was gumbo-like and I loved it. I was alone. Isabel: "The meatballs would have been better by themselves." Husband: "I thought it needed a noodle in it. The okra is a little bit off-putting." Owen: "I liked the flavor of the meat, but that vegetable is not the kind of taste that I like."

He misses Africa too.

Super Natural Every Day: Earnest Summation

2011-08-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

I spent a lot of time analyzing my relationship with Super Natural Every Day while I was having the relationship. Here's what it was like: like dating an impossibly beautiful, cool, and graceful person who you really want to mesh with, but don't, quite. Like The Way We Were, and you're Barbra Streisand.

I admire this book a lot. I admire the sensibility, the aesthetic, the photography, the principles of restraint and mindfulness that underpin every gorgeous page. But I'm just not that restrained or mindful and the food -- simple vegetarian dishes -- wasn't what I, or the people I live with, wanted to eat.

Except when it was! There were some big hits. So the spread here is very unusual.

Of the 23 recipes I cooked from Super Natural Every Day:

worth the price of the book -- 2 (lemony yogurt on the outstanding farro soup; broccoli gribiche)
great -- 5 (I craved the white beans and cabbage and Swanson's oatcakes.)
good -- 5
so-so -- 9
flat-out bad -- 2

For the record, here the designations "so-so" and "flat-out bad" reflect sharp differences in taste, not recipe glitches. At this house, we simply like sweet things sweeter, cheesy things cheesier, alcoholic drinks more alcoholic, and we're not lovers of millet and tempeh. I wish we were, but we're not. Still: an exquisite cookbook, with some excellent recipes. This book stays.

Around My French Table: Earnest Summation

2011-08-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

When I was in South Africa, I met a woman from New Jersey and we immediately connected over our love of Dorie Greenspan's cookbooks. She has a lot of fans, that Dorie. I think I've effused sufficiently about Around My French Table over the last 8 months, so I'll be quick. This has become one of my most cherished cookbooks -- for the sardines rillettes, the beggar's linguine, the cheese crackers, the perfect brioche, the super-easy curried chicken and peas that you roast in a triangle of foil. For the generosity and reliability and abundance. I keep going back to this book and suspect I always will.

During my initial fling with this book, I made 32 recipes:

Worth the price of the book -- 5 (the recipes listed above)
Great -- 12
Good -- 13
So-so -- 2
Flat-out bad -- 0

One of the best ratios since I started this blog.

Now, a little Heidi Swanson, a little Guy Fieri, and I'm current.

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen: Earnest Summation

2011-08-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Last fall, I spent a few weeks cooking from Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen. Can you remember back that far? I can't, but I'm updating my cookbook reviews, which I haven't done for almost a year and which has been bugging me for almost a year. Not that anyone cares anymore, but for the internal integrity of the blog, I have to do this.

A recap: Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen is a handsome, earth-toned book full of enticing pictures of rustic food as prepared by a famous Seattle chef, the owner of How to Cook a Wolf and Tavolata, among other restaurants. Charlotte Freeman, who writes the Cookbookslut column at Bookslut, hated Stowell's book with a white hot fury. Its cheffy pretensions -- reminders about using only best quality ingredients, the "tone of haughty hyper-reverence" -- made her want to "stick hot needles" in her eyes.

I don't disagree with any of Freeman's points, which are all valid criticisms, but this book didn't make me want to stick hot needles in my eyes. (In fact, I can think of nothing that would.) To the contrary, I enjoyed Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen. Probably because I spent very little time reading the headnotes, which are indeed irritating, as I was so completely smitten with the recipes, which I found fascinating and exotic. Opening the book again this morning, I saw at least a dozen unusual, seductive dishes that I'd like to cook in the appropriate season: espresso granita with grappa cream, pear-star anise ice cream, soft-shell crab bruschetta with spring garlic aioli, canneloni with braised pork cheeks and sweet cicely.

That is, if I knew where to buy pork cheeks or sweet cicely without making a dozen phone calls and a trip to Berkeley.

Which is why, last fall, I cooked only 13 recipes from this book. (By comparison, I made 57 recipes from the Moro cookbook; 36 out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home; 52 out of Claudia Rodin's Arabesque.) A lot of Stowell's dishes, maybe even a majority, call for obscure ingredients I could not readily find: ramps, rabbit loin, lobster mushrooms, Thumbelina carrots, Cacio Faenum cheese, snails, live sea urchin, lamb's tongues, nettles. Et cetera. Sometimes I'm up for a scavenger hunt. In October 2010, apparently, I wasn't.

The recipe tally:

Worth the price of the book -- 0
Great -- 6 (roasted figs with chocolate espresso ganache, endive lemon salad)
Good -- 6
So-so -- 1
Flat out bad -- 0

While I don't think it's a shelf essential, Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen still shines for me. I plan to throw away cookbooks that don't review well on the blog, and Mixt Salads is long gone. This book stays.

Done! On to Dorie Greenspan.

Words failed me

2011-08-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

Avoid the final picture in this post if you are soft-hearted or squeamish..

It was hard to blog from Africa because internet access was at first nonexistent, then intermittent, and never powerful enough to post photographs. There was so much I wanted to say that I ended up saying nothing.

A very quick summary of two weeks in Africa with Owen:

Jamie Oliver is correct: Township food is better than much American food.

We started the trip in Johannesburg, where we ate stewed tripe, beans, and cornmeal porridge in a restaurant in Soweto, which was a highlight for me. Not the tripe, Soweto. Owen had no idea what it meant, but he was an excellent sport.

Mandela House

We flew to Zambia and drove through brushy countryside that looked like I had expected Africa to look, in both good and difficult ways. The border crossing/ferry to Botswana was exactly how I'd expected Africa to be, but only in the difficult ways. At our Okavango Delta camp (it bore no relation to camping, but it is called a camp) we saw cheetahs, zebras, giraffes, kudu and warthogs, and had a close encounter with a baboon. It was altogether magical.

Then we moved to the Chobe River.

Multiply by 1000.

The Chobe River is crocodile infested and let's not forget the water snakes. Here, I ate curried warthog. Here, Owen fell ill. Here, I realized I would rather not travel than stay in hotels where I don't want to touch the doorknobs. I am ashamed that I am like that, but too old to pretend. Despite seeing many handsome elephants and hippos, plus sinister crocodiles and horrifying water snakes, this was the nadir of the trip.

Then, our luck changed and held. Owen recovered and at Victoria Falls he beat me at chess. I've seldom seen him more pleased with himself. Monkeys tried to get into the room and I saw a hippo swim by at sunset. Victoria Falls is indescribable, so I won't even try.

This does not begin to capture it.

But while we saw a lot of magnificent sights and animals throughout the journey, it was not until we arrived at a place called Londolozi that we began to understand how it all fit together -- the thorny trees, the rockpiles, the many and varied creatures. Our ranger here knew everything about the animals' sagas so you weren't just seeing cookie cutter leopards, you were seeing specific leopards. You were seeing specific lions, from specific prides and coalitions with noble and ignoble histories, lions involved in epic clashes and Shakespearean power struggles. It was a lesson in the power of narrative. We sat at dusk in a jeep, shivering and watching three enormous lions do absolutely nothing, and I think we would have sat there all night just to hear the ranger tell their stories.

This is the one part of the trip -- Londolozi -- that I think my husband and daughter would have loved.

But they're not into animals and they didn't want to go to Africa. I respect that. I also think they're a little crazy.

The most memorable African meal

From exotic to EXOTIC

2011-08-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

The newest addition to my collection

I grew up in California and I find everything about New England exotic. The other day, my mother-in-law's brother Edward gave me a copy of A Taste of the Somerset Club. He belongs to the Somerset Club. What is the Somerset Club? I had no idea, but perusing the cookbook, it became clear that the Somerset Club is exclusive, old, and the last redoubt of lobster sauce, Stilton cheese sauce and Madeira sauce ("The Club serves this classic sauce with chicken, veal, beef or pheasant.")

I love this cookbook. I own no volume quite like it.

Two nights ago, I was assigned to bring hors d'oeuvres to a family gathering at Edward's beach house. I thought it would show my gratitude if I cooked from A Taste of the Somerset Club. There were only six hors d'oeuvre options, five of them deep-fried. The non-deep fried option: little pinwheel sandwiches of pita bread, roast beef, and curry powder. Since my brother in law Chris was making beef for dinner, and despite the fact it was miserably hot, I took a deep breath and decided to deep fry.

Made:

-coconut shrimp. Weird, enticing concept. You dredge shrimps in flour, egg, and sweetened (!) coconut, then dip them in a thick, spicy (by New England standards) batter and fry until puffy and crisp. Serve with a syrupy orange juice-horseradish sauce. I loved the idea of the sweet coconut and the sweet sauce, but it didn't quite work. A few people praised these fritters, but I think they were just being polite.

There was something on my camera lens.

-Somerset Club fishballs. Tough to say "fishballs" with a straight face. According to the Somerset Club: "Fishballs are our most favorite hors d'oeuvres and quickly disappear off the tray." To make them you saute some fish with wine, flake, and mix with vegetables and instant mashed potatoes, shape into orbs, roll in bread crumbs, and fry. Serve with Dijon mustard. As promised, they quickly disappeared off the tray. I preferred them to the coconut shrimp.

fishballs

That said, my favorite appetizer was the onion soup dip that used up the rest of box of Lipton onion soup mix I bought to make dip a week ago. Am I insulting people when I serve this dip? I think it's irresistible, but maybe I'm oblivious to sighing and eye rolling.

They should serve THIS at the Somerset Club.

Anyway, the party was fun. And exotic. Sometimes, when my in laws have big family parties, I feel like I've stepped into a Ralph Lauren commercial. Lanky blond youths play touch football on a grassy knoll overlooking a glittering bay as elders repose in wicker chairs and sip gin and tonics. Only in this setting, do I and my children appear swarthy.

Polo, by Ralph Lauren

Owen and I are in the airport now, about to leave for Africa. There we will appear as we actually are: very, very white.

Food mysteries of the South Coast of Massachusetts

2011-07-28T05:46:00.000-07:00

Delectable Portuguese custard tarts surrounded by barely edible cookies

Interesting and mysterious to me, the juxtaposition of grimy ethnic mill towns and beautiful WASP beach communities you find in this part of Massachusetts. Interesting and somewhat less mysterious, at least if you've read Cheerful Money, that the best food is found in the grimy ethnic mill towns.

I volunteered to cook another summer house dinner the other night and my brother-in-law Chris took me to New Bedford (grimy) to stock up at Sid Wainer, the great specialty market he discovered when he was living in the area. This dark and cavernous place carries all manner of spices, breads, anchovies, exotic fresh vegetables, jellies, chutneys, and imported cheese, but is situated in the most depressing of strip malls. And, I'm telling you, the South Coast of Massachusetts boasts some depressing strip malls. We went to Fall River the other day, and the words Fall River now make my skin crawl -- and not just because Lizzie Borden lived there.

At Sid Wainer, I bought cheeses -- from Spain, Italy, Wisconsin and upstate New York -- as well as an incredible pomegranate-lime jelly to serve with them. You can't buy cheeses and condiments like this at the Wareham Shaw's, where vacationers usually shop. Why not? So strange.

Mostly gone within 20 minutes

After visiting Sid Wainer, we went to a fish market and bought bluefish for $3.69 per pound. I almost didn't want to buy such scarily cheap fish, but did. At a nearby Portuguese grocery, I acquired the gorgeous cookies and custard tarts posted at top. Lots of enticing Portuguese restaurants, bakeries, and butchers in this area. I want to explore.

An odd grilling technique, but it works.

Back in the beautiful WASP beach community with groceries from the grimy ethnic mill town, I repeated the bluefish dish I made in Cape Cod last week: cover the filets in mustard, lemon and breadcrumbs, grill for 40 minutes. It wasn't as delicious this time, but it wasn't bad, and I served it with my version of creamed corn. (Spicy creamed corn: Scrape corn from cob, soften chopped shallots in butter, add corn and fry, stir in Thai red curry paste and coconut milk, cook until bubbly, add lime juice and cilantro, salt to taste.) There was a moment when I thought the meal was going to be a disaster, but it turned out okay. Maybe too many strong flavors on one plate, but not a disaster.

The Portuguese custard tarts: huge hit! Very similar to the Chinese custard tarts you get in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bakery, but denser, sweeter, less eggy. Soggier crust, better filling.

But once the tarts were gone we were left with a mountain of awful, chalky, stale cookies. Later, I found a gang of children playing blackjack with a plate of the Portuguese cookies in the middle of the table. The loser had to eat them.

Subset of the kid mafia playing cards

I have to read The Big House

2011-07-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

Kyocera ceramic knife -- you need one.

With no wireless, I can't keep up with this vacation blogging! There's only so much Dunkin' Donuts coffee a woman can drink.

Alright, deep breath.

My husband's family has owned and loved the same Massachusetts beach property for several generations, property that has been divided and now comprises four summer houses for various branches of the family and a fifth that is the year-round residence of a cousin. The property is lovely, heavily wooded and threaded with trails. It has its own stretch of rocky beach. There are outdoor showers, a swing set, screened-in porches, hummingbirds, and many mosquitos. The kids get here and run off in a pack of cousins and aren't heard from until someone idly mentions she might be willing to take the boys to see Captain America at which point suddenly I am thronged and regretful.

Cooking is done for a crowd and people volunteer for meals. The other day I produced a modest dinner: potato chips with onion soup dip, burgers, cole slaw, and s'mores bars (baked by Isabel.) My in laws are not really into elaborate food and I try not to overinvest. I succeeded, perhaps too well. I wasn't exactly bursting with pride at that dinner. As always, everyone loved the s'mores bars.

Friday, Isabel and I drove out to the Cape Cod summer home of her good friend Juliet, whose mother is my good friend Lisa. We swam in the sea, swam in a pond, shopped in shops, and then Lisa and I cooked for her extended family. As the menu took shape, it became clear that Lisa's family is very into elaborate food. We made negronis and served grilled bluefish with mustard and lime, scalloped oysters, salad, corn roasted with agave and soy sauce, and there was a lasagna for the kids. Dinner was late, loud, drunken, and delicious. As usual, my photograph doesn't do the food, people, or anything else, justice.

It was fun, really!

I'd never cooked or eaten bluefish before, and was very pleased with the recipe, taken from a Cape Cod cookbook on Lisa's shelf. You put the fillets in a foil pan, smother in mustard and lemon juice, then cover in bread crumbs, and grill for 40 minutes. I liked it so much I'm making it tonight for my in laws.

For dessert: another batch of s'mores bars.

Thank-you, Anne Thornton.

Sunday, Isabel and I drove to Boston to make a pilgrimage to Flour, the bakery owned by Joanne Chang, the author of Flour, a newish cookbook we like a lot.

Good bakery in desolate-on-Sunday neighborhood

We got there 8 minutes before it closed. I didn't even have to ask her -- Isabel jumped out of the car while I parked to be sure we got an order in. My girl.

Hazelnut cookie was best.

She bought a hazelnut cookie, an oreo, and a raspberry crumb bar. The hazelnut cookie was unbelievably good, the oreo tasted just like the ones we've made from the cookbook (amazing), and the raspberry crumb bar was tasty. Like Baked, Flour is a homestyle bakery -- a place you go to buy high quality treats you could conceivably and easily make at home, especially when the owners publish an excellent cookbook.

Coincidentally, Flour is just around the corner from Sportello, a Barbara Lynch restaurant. Lynch wrote a wonderful book I cooked through last year -- Stir -- and since Sportello was just about to open for dinner, we went.

And such small portions

I'm hesitant to say anything negative because I'm having a very happy vacation and we loved Stir, but, okay, twist my arm. We were the first ones in Sportello and there were paper towels all over the bathroom floor, the trash basket was overflowing, and everything on the menu was a little too expensive. Maybe a lot too expensive. Isabel's flat pasta with bolognese sauce cost $24. My porcini ravioli cost $25. The salad was, if I remember correctly, $14. All good, not great. Maybe that's what it costs to keep a restaurant afloat, and maybe this was an off night. I don't know.

Anyway, I still recommend the cookbook.

Sportello is very handsome and very white.

Travels, part 1

2011-07-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

Pilgrimage

The photo is of Di Fara Pizzeria in Brooklyn, New York, but this wireless connection is brought to you by the Dunkin' Donuts in Marion, Massachusetts. That's how far I've traveled and fallen behind.

I don't know exactly when or why the idea was first planted in my head, but I have wanted to go to Di Fara for years. (And years.) On Saturday I collected Isabel from camp in NYC and she agreed to make an expedition to Di Fara. It took us an hour on the subway and when we got there at about 1 in the afternoon, the place was packed. I ordered two cheese slices to go and assumed it would take 20 minutes. We waited an hour and a half. An elderly man was making all the pizzas himself, very methodically, and people were taking pictures of him. I felt shy about doing that, but I did photograph his handiwork.

I wouldn't wait 90 minutes for it again, but it was outstanding pizza. Thin crust. Lots of basil flavor. Oily. Delicious.

After our late lunch, Isabel wanted to go to Baked, the owners of which wrote two of her favorite cookbooks (Baked and Baked Explorations.) The bakery is also in Brooklyn, but very far away from Di Fara and there was no subway line in operation so we rode several crowded buses to get there. This ended up taking another hour and a half.

Baked

I'm so glad she's my daughter and enjoys riding public transportation in sweltering heat for many hours to visit farflung eating spots. I can't imagine a better vacation day or a better companion.

Sweet and salty is their thing.

At Baked, we ordered, clockwise from left, a peanut butter crunch bar, a sweet and salty brownie, and a sweet and salty cupcake. All was tasty, but we liked the peanut butter crunch bar best. In the end, we agreed that we wouldn't ride the bus for these treats again. Baked is a good neighborhood bakery, but you can bake like this at home, especially if you have the Baked cookbook.

On the other hand. . .

Midtown location

Sunday, we went to Momofuku Milk Bar and you can't really bake like this at home, unless you are a demented genius. Milk Bar was a 5 minute walk from where we were staying and there was no line, no wait, no bus ride. But I would ride buses and wait in line 1 1/2 hours to get treats from Milk Bar.

Cereal milk soft-serve

This stuff was not just delicious, it was crazy. We got crack pie, candy bar pie, cereal milk soft-serve, and a compost cookie which contained crushed potato chips and coffee grounds, among other weird ingredients, and was diabolical in its deliciousness. I wanted to go back the next morning and buy a black sesame croissant, but didn't have time.

Pizza people should go to Di Fara, lovers of the Baked cookbook should go to Baked, but everyone should go to Milk Bar.

On Monday morning, we rode the train to New England and are now staying at the beach house of my in laws, which is lovely and peaceful.

It's wicked humid here, but the views are pretty.

This morning my mother-in-law's sister, Meg, made johnnycake with special stone-ground white cornmeal. It's just this very wonderful cornmeal plus liquid, stirred into a paste and fried in butter. When she described it to me, I thought, okay, whatever, doesn't sound that great.

For the terrible picture hall of fame

But it is the best thing I've eaten since the compost cookie. Next week I'm going to the mill to buy some of this magic cornmeal and learn to make johnnycake myself.

On another subject, I have a story in Slate on the subject of food TV shows.

Amateur hour photo shoot

2011-07-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Composed, professional, maybe a little mean.

Today my sister came over and shot possible author photos for my forthcoming book. The photos are due tomorrow and I put them off until the last possible minute in the hopes that I would lose all twenty-two of my cookbook-writing/mother-grieving pounds. I lost seven. Of the sixty or so pictures Justine shot, I disliked fifty-seven. But I liked these three pictures a lot. If you disagree, don't say anything.

She looks nice. I'd have an Aviation with her.

Rad cookbook collection

I've been neglecting the blog. For the last few weeks my kids have both been gone and I've been finishing up with the emptying of my mother's house (I turned over my keys to the real estate agent yesterday), correcting proofs of the book, turning in assignments, milking a goat, yelling at a goat, debating selling a goat, and preparing to leave at 4:30 a.m. on Friday on a big trip with many stops and packing requirements. When I spring clear of this quicksand and actually get out the door, I plan to visit with long-lost friends and family, take walks, read books, look at lions, and write blog posts. Friday can not come soon enough.

Books, books, books

2011-07-04T08:39:00.000-07:00

Grown-up furniture in my very own house.

My childhood home is almost empty. On Thursday, all my mother's furniture came across the Golden Gate Bridge to my sister's house and mine in a truck. Finding places for serious brown antiques in houses that previously contained no serious brown antiques has been a challenge for both of us, one we take seriously. Our mother loved her things. During chemo sessions she liked to talk about who should get what and where everything should go in our houses. It made her happy and peaceful.

In addition to a lot of brown furniture, my mother had thousands and thousands of books. Books in practically every room of her house. There were strict systems for where books went. She relegated tacky-looking paperbacks to the shelves along the staircase to the basement and, of course, that was always the best place to find something you actually wanted to read. Something by Toni Morrison or Len Deighton or Herman Wouk or Judith Krantz. These were mostly books my sister or I brought home as teenagers.

Boring, handsome, old books -- noble books that her father gave her -- went in the living room. When I was a child, I remember one of my mother's friends ribbing her about the pretension of keeping pompous books you didn't read in the living room. I thought he had a point, but I also remember thinking he was being pompous in his own way. I took the boring, handsome books from my mother's living room and put them in my living room. It's not pretentious. This is just how I grew up thinking a living room should look. And it looks great.

Although. . .

What are the sources of the Japanese tradition?

Meanwhile juicy paperbacks and contemporary books are in the room where we watch TV. These are mostly books that were already in my house.

I love that The L Word is about an inch away from The Fabrication of Farmstead Goat Cheese. I keep intending to put these books in some kind of order, but maybe I won't.

The cookbooks, of course, are absolutely in order. I could not stand to have a disorderly cookbook collection!

When we put in this shelf eight years ago I swore I would cull before I let the cookbooks overflow.

But I didn't.

The books have overflowed to the jam shelf and a new shelf we lodged in the skinny space between the stairs and a wall and they are starting to pile up on the floor. The pile is only getting higher because

there were about thirty cookbooks to be taken from my mother's house and I couldn't resist any of them.

Treasure!

I finally found this, which I had been hunting for madly a few months ago. It contains the recipe for the first cheesecake I ever made when I was about twelve. I did not remember that the cheesecake contained dry milk, which sounds dismal to me now, but I swear it was the best cheesecake ever. I am going to bake it again soon.

And then there were cookbooks I wasn't looking for, but which I can't let go of.

I could never cast aside a cookbook that contains such gorgeous pictures:

See, I am helpless. Being a hoarder of cookbooks helps me empathize with people who are hoarders of everything, which, by a miracle of fate, I am not.

Happy 4th of July, everyone.

I take it all back about the Aviation

2011-06-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

A perfect ashy-purple drink.

It's not technically an Aviation, but the Violetta at the Ashland Springs Hotel in Ashland, Oregon is very close. When I saw it on the menu I could barely contain my excitement given that, per the comments on my recent post, I clearly hadn't experienced a proper Aviation.

Right you all were. The Violetta contains Aviation gin (made in Portland), Deviation dessert wine (in place of maraschino liqueur), creme de violette, and lemon juice. The bartender drops in a tiny viola and though the color is less lavender than sooty, it's exquisitely beautiful. It is also delicious -- delicate and aromatic. The Violetta/Aviation makes a Negroni, my favorite cocktail of recent months, taste coarse and brassy. I think it's a good sign that I no longer like Manhattans (at all!) and that I may now be transitioning from Negronis to something daintier. Soon, I'll be a white wine spritzer drinker, and, after that, maybe just spritzer. A girl can dream.

All hotel lobbies should look like this.

Today we see plays. Isabel loves plays and while I do not love plays, I do love Isabel.

Even lucky boys have bad days

2011-06-24T21:11:00.000-07:00

Gargantuan "Irish" cheesecake

Today Owen boarded a plane to Boston and he will not be back until midway through August. During the time he is gone, he will visit Ireland with his grandfather, spend time on the beach in New England with his cousins, and go to Africa with his mother. He has no idea how lucky he is.

pepperoni lasagna

Day before yesterday he and I got our shots and pills for Africa, then Owen chose his farewell meal from Guy Fieri's cookbook. He chose pepperoni lasagna and Irish cheesecake -- "because it's Irish and I'm going to Ireland!"

I could not imagine a more ridiculous meal. I kept my mouth shut.

Yesterday I cooked the meal and while I was cooking he came down with a blazing fever from the shots. He lay on the couch whimpering while the rest of us ate his lasagna and Irish cheesecake. He left this morning without tasting a morsel.

How was the lasagna? Big, rude, unwieldy. I would not make it again.

How was the cheesecake? It contained Bailey's, melted semisweet chocolate, sugar, cream, eggs, and two pounds of cream cheese. It was grotesque, absurd, and delicious. But my husband remarked, and I agree, that you can't beat a plain cheesecake with a graham cracker crust and some cherry pie filling on top. These super-sweet, chocolatey cheesecakes lack tang. Tang plus richness is what makes cheesecake great, not just richness.

An inadvertently artful shot

On another subject, this is a bean pie I made the other day using a lovely book called Southern Pies by Nancie McDermott. I wrote a story about oddball regional pies and felt I had to try baking the oddest recipe I could find. According to McDermott, the bean pie was developed in the 1930s "as part of the nutritional teachings of the Nation of Islam." To make it, you mash some navy beans and stir them up with eggs, sugar, melted butter and spices then bake the fragrant custard in a pie crust. I thought no one would touch this funky pie, but everyone in the family liked it. I think they may have liked it more than they liked the Irish cheesecake.

It does a body good

2011-06-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

Where to put the chaise lounge?

My husband built a milking stand and we've begun regularly milking Natalie. Some first impressions:

-Milking is enjoyable and satisfying when the goat cooperates.
-Milking is maddening and messy when the goat doesn't.
-Milking forces you to confront earthy realities about food which is currently very voguish but also, I think, basically a good thing.

While I've known that milk comes from live animals since I was 3, until a week ago I had only ever acquired it from a carton at the supermarket. It has been disorienting, therefore, to suddenly start squeezing milk from the body of a bony, noisy, inquisitive mammal who tries to eat the buttons on my shirt and never, ever, bathes. Then to take the white fluid up to the kitchen and put it in my coffee? How weird.

But, of course, it's not weird at all. What's weird is that I would ever think it was.

Deborah Solomon stopped by last night

2011-06-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Q: Wow. That is one gorgeous drink. What is it?

A: Isn't it lovely? It's called an Aviation and it contains gin, maraschino liqueur, lemon juice and something called creme de violette that renders it lavender. Steve Martin describes this cocktail in his novel Object of Beauty and I've been obsessed with trying it for the last week.

Q: Is it as good as it looks?

A: I don't know! Wait just a second. . . . Hmm. Okay. No. It is perfumey. I don't love this.

Q: Who cares, so festive.

A: I am sitting on the sofa beside my son who is watching Phineas and Ferb and it feels not very festive. Today I had to replace my falling-apart jeans and that required much self-scrutiny in the harshly-lit mirrors of Macy's, Sundance, and J. Crew. So, I decided to skip evening spin class, buy a bottle of creme de violette, and try a new cocktail.

Q: How's that approach to dieting and discouragement working out for you?

A: I don't think that's a nice question.

Q: Yeesh. Sensitive. Fair enough. You've been working through Food Network star Guy Fieri's new cookbook. How's that going?

A: I've been moving slowly and doubt I 'll get very far. I do like Guy, but his recipes are mostly gimmicky and only moderately delicious. The other night I made his version of beer can chicken. You heavily season the chicken, impale it on an open beer can, and pop it in the oven. The beer supposedly evaporates and keeps the bird moist, while the outside crisps up. Fieri's twist is to drape bacon over the skin.

Q: And that wasn't awesome?

A: It was fine, but I would not go so far as "awesome." Plus, I had to buy a whole 6-pack of Bud. Our supermarket doesn't sell singles.

Q: Quite a change of pace from Heidi Swanson.

A: I know. I miss Super Natural Every Day. Not a lot of vegetables in Fieri's book. I was very hopeful about the Bomb Bakers (recipe is here) but they were not a hit.

You brine the potatoes for 8 hours, roll them in oil and Lawry's seasoned salt, then roast them for an hour. I was very curious about brined potatoes, except to me they just tasted like baked potatoes with inedible, salty skin.

On the other hand, I loved Guy's pork blade steak piccata. Recipe is here.

Q: What's on the table tonight?

A: Bloody Mary flank steak. It's been marinating in V-8, vodka and a lot of other stuff for the last 24 hours.

Q: On another subject entirely, how's the little goat?

A: Wild and impish and she charges at the chickens. We're petting her lots, but pretty soon we're going to need a lasso.

Q: Are you liking the Aviation better now that you're getting to the bottom of the glass?

A: It is vile. I like it so little that, to my shock and disappointment, I'm going to stop at one.

All about bedrooms and a little about brisket

2011-06-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

8th grader no more

"Bedroom community" strikes me as the wrong term for a suburb, at least the suburb in which I live. This feels more like a factory town where the product is children. I'm not talking about babies, which, yes, are traditionally made in bedrooms. But in fact, they're often made in urban bedrooms and eventually (some) parents bring the babies out to the suburbs for finishing. I grew up in a city. That was fun. But this seems fun, too.

June is a big month, as product starts coming off the assembly line. Day before yesterday, Owen graduated from elementary school. He and his cohort have mastered their math facts and can sing Congolese folk songs. They are of middling height and physically awkward. According to the inspirational quotes they recited, they believe in striving, friendship, and the value of being true to one's self. Admirable! At the graduation, there were a lot of dresses with "bubble skirts" like this. While the ceremony was sweet, it did not feel momentous and I went straight from the graduation to buy goat ration and fly traps.

Goof

A few hours later, Isabel graduated from middle school. That ceremony was not sweet and it did feel momentous. There were a lot of dresses like this. At one point during the distribution of diplomas the principal called the name of a girl named Ella C. who spent the night at our house several times circa 2006. I said to my husband, "Well, they screwed up. That's not Ella." He said, "That's Ella." I squinted my feeble old eyes. I still couldn't see that this was Ella.

But later I confirmed: it was Ella.

This happened again and again and again. Everywhere wandered radiant young people I've known since they were five, almost all of them taller than me with vaguely familiar faces and very long legs. It was poignant and unsettling.

Isabel went to a graduation dance in the evening where the dresses got shorter and tighter, the heels higher. I had bad dreams all night. One involved raising a baby albino alligator that I was feeding with an eye dropper until the baby alligator ate the eye dropper and swam away. In another dream, I excised a very tiny kid goat from inside of a Bartlett pear. And in the worst nightmare of all, I overheard a friend say that my bedroom looked "like a pig pen." I did not, in the dream, deny that my bedroom looked like a pig pen, merely chastised this friend for gossiping about the way I keep house. If you know how to analyze dreams, please, please don't.

Back to our scheduled programming: The other night I made Guy Fieri's Bring It On Beef Brisket. About half of his dishes have gimmicky names like that, which doesn't bother me when the recipes work. This one didn't, not for me. It was the most disappointing kind of bad meal, because I was so looking forward to it. The photograph in Fieri's book shows the brisket is falling to shreds, collapsing under a blanket of what appears to be glossy barbecue sauce. I thought about that brisket all day and it cooked for what seemed like all day. But the the meat never softened, remaining an implacable raft of stiff gray cow flesh. The sauce lacked zest.

Three possibilities:

1. the recipe is wrong
2. the piece of brisket I got was wrong
3. I did something wrong

Last night, I made Fieri's ginger carrot soup. My husband thought this was great, but I could not eat it. I've grown accustomed to vegetable soups made with only vegetables, and the homemade chicken stock was overpowering, too chickeny, and I couldn't taste the ginger.

None for me, thanks

Tonight: Fieri's pork blade steak piccata. The grill is heating as I type.

On another subject, we've begun milking Natalie. Last night, Owen helped milk and then I went upstairs and made him hot chocolate with the fresh milk. He couldn't get over how awesome the whole experience was. I don't think I could persist in our onerous and messy animal project without him. I appreciate not just the work he contributes to keeping them, but his sheer joy at having them.

At least it wasn't Twinkle

2011-06-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

Owen named her Sparkle. I tried to point him in another direction, any other direction, but he is adamant: She is Sparkle. And she is perfect.

The other night, I cooked Guy Fieri's lamb chops with mint pesto, my maiden voyage into Guy Fieri Food. They were excellent. I wish Guy didn't try so hard, what with the tats and the slang and the Phyllis Diller hair, because I think he has good ideas and sound recipes and all that shtick just makes him seem insecure. But I guess shtick is required these days to become a Food Network star.

It seems tasteless to post a photograph of lamb chops adjacent to a photograph of a baby goat, so I'll skip right to Fieri's chicken-under-a-brick, which I served last night.

To make this, you spatchcock a chicken and season it well, then heat oil in a skillet, splay the chicken out in the hot fat, and top with another skillet weighted down with four foil-wrapped bricks.

Roughly thirty minutes later, the chicken looks disturbing, but tastes wonderful. Serve with green sauce.

I know.

Does anyone watch much food TV? Favorite shows? The other day, Owen and I watched Anne Thornton make s'mores bars on a program called Dessert First. It's sort of stunning that shows are devoted to recipes this remedial, but still, we watched. When it was over, Owen said, "Mom you HAVE to make those."

I did.

And they were insanely good. One of those desserts -- buttery, a bit salty, crumbly, chocolatey but not overwhelmingly so, crunchy, gooey -- that you can not stop eating. You just want more, more, more. I have a problem with this kind of dessert as there's no built-in stopping point. Satisfaction is impossible. But I would be derelict in my blogging duty if I didn't tell you that the recipe is absolutely phenomenal. (I omitted the chipotle powder, as Thornton does on the show. Come to think of it, chipotle powder might make these easier to stop eating.)

It's a doeling!

2011-06-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

Twenty minutes old.

Natalie gave birth to a beautiful baby girl today.

The labor was fast and agonizing in the agonizing way of all labors in my limited experience. Finally, I gave a gentle tug on the tiny hooves that were emerging from Natalie's body, as I have seen done in YouTube goat birth videos, and to my complete wonderment and shock, about one second later there was a slippery, squirming miniature goat in my hands. I'd read that you needed to wipe the baby down with towels and clear its throat and nostrils, but Natalie was instantly all over that kid, licking and nuzzling and possessive. All that was "needed" from Owen and me was to dip the newborn's navel in iodine and step away.

Isabel and her friend Juliet were up in Isabel's room. As Juliet said, "The goat was screaming, but Owen was screaming louder."

That's it for our summer 2011 kidding season. Short and sweet. Peppermint never caught.

Not that this would make Peppermint feel any better -- probably, it would gross her out -- but the new baby is her very own half-sister.

From focus and momentum to mild confusion and indolence

2011-06-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

Monday, I used 6 inches of red pencil in 5 hours.

Wind me up, set me off in a direction and there I go. Put me on the sofa, and there I sit. Shifting course is what's hardest for me. Maybe everyone?

The last 10 days were intense. I would admire my own work ethic except it felt less like an ethic than brute momentum. I did nothing but pore over the manuscript of my book to the point of neglecting to brush my hair, sort the mail, or attend zumba class, and I would have done so for the rest of my life had a deadline not forced a change of course.

Day before yesterday arrived that deadline. I reluctantly carried the proofs to the UPS store and overnighted them (old school!) back to the editor in New York and then, hair still uncombed, wearing jogging shoes and least attractive jeans I have ever owned, drove straight to the Century Regency on Smith Ranch Road to see Midnight in Paris.* The ship has been forcibly turned and I am back to my usual, semi-indolent ways. It will take a new deadline to get me to change again.

By the way, if there is any place on the planet you can confidently go with uncombed hair and wearing unflattering jeans, it is the Regency midday on a Tuesday. As usual, it was just the field trippers from the retirement home and me. I was very happy to be back.

Last night, I was going to try one of Guy Fieri's chicken recipes -- the one with the brick, or the one with the beer can -- but I ended up driving a young trombonist and a young pianist/dancer all over Marin County from 1:50 p.m. until 7 p.m. Not an exaggeration, a time sheet, as mothers of children in their middle years need not be told. So we had sushi. I felt tired and sorry for myself. I went to bed. I read 40 pages of Janet Malcolm's Reading Chekhov, which is extremely enjoyable and comprehensible even if you have never read Chekhov, which I have not. But should. I studied Malcolm's inscrutable half-smile in the jacket photo. What will my jacket photo look like? I woke up and checked on Natalie, who is still pregnant. Am I balking at starting Guy Fieri's book because he is so irritating? Or because I really don't want to eat a dish called Guy-talian Nachos? Except, who am I kidding. Of course I want to eat Guy-talian Nachos. There is no time to cook one of Fieri's chickens tonight, as I am returning to zumba class, but maybe his linguine with clams.

But then I'll look puffy in my jacket photo!

Can't wait for Tree of Life.

*Should you see it? Rachel McAdams negates her prettiness with convincing portrayal of crass shrew. Owen Wilson makes a more appealing Woody Allen than Woody Allen. Michael Sheen is wasted behind that beard. Plot: mildly amusing. Actor who plays Hemingway very cute. Altogether, Bridesmaids was better. Albeit, of course, filthy.

My yard is a petting zoo

2011-05-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

We babysat our niece and nephew last weekend so that Justine and Michael could go away for their anniversary. Ben sat on the deck and sprayed himself with the hose just about the entire time. I tried to remember what my own children were like at 18 months. I tried to remember what they ate, how I got them to sleep, when they woke up, how they liked to play. Couldn't. None of it.

For dinner, I served the children Heidi Swanson's mostly-not-potato salad out of Super Natural Every Day.

My mother would have loved this.

It's in the big bowl, but the humans were cuter than the salad. I was very drawn to this recipe -- a melange of chopped celery, green beans, tofu, and a very few potatoes -- because it seemed like a good diet dish, which it was. But it was not so much fun to eat, at least not when your mind is on potato salad. Conceptually, it's on a par with mostly-not-avocado guacamole or mostly-not-chocolate brownies. I mean, it tasted nice, but maybe it needs a new name. Like, chopped celery salad with potatoes?

On Sunday morning, I got up early and made Swanson's baked oatmeal. I had one of those dangerous self-congratulatory thoughts as I prepared this pretty, pretty dish. I thought, "Stella is going to love this and remember forever the baked oatmeal she had at Aunt Jenny's." Having deceived myself in this manner repeatedly over the last 14 years, I immediately I self-corrected: "This is not going to happen. Just thinking it actually ensures it's not going to happen."

I am a sage! It did not happen. I served the oatmeal to Stella who wrinkled up her nose and said, "I don't like it. I don't like nuts."

Owen said, "I don't like oatmeal that is baked."

Isabel looked at it and said, "Oh, it has fruit in it. No thanks."

My husband thought it was tremendous and ate heartily, and I agreed: tremendous. The recipe is here. If I were to make it again, I might increase the sweetener just a bit.

Apart from complaining about the baked oatmeal and spraying themselves with the hose, the children spent a lot of time with the goats and chickens.

I know. Funny, given I don't like eggs.

I have turned into the eccentric woman with the crappy (all senses) back yard and too many animals. I did not see this coming.

Stella is holding a prized Penedesenca chick.

In case you couldn't see the prized Penedesenca chick.

On Monday, I made Swanson's dilled green beans and seitan. The little kids were gone by then -- I would not have imposed this on them. While I loved the chewy, spongy seitan, no one else ate it. No complaints, no fights, just no one ate it. My husband pushed the seitan to the side of the plate.

It was better than it looks.

And with that I was done with Super Natural Every Day. I still want to make Swanson's bran muffins, tutti frutti crisp, and carnival cookies, but I decided not to force myself. They are fattening treats and this isn't the spring for fattening treats.

Anyway, there's a sweet coda to my short expedition through this lovely book. On Tuesday, I found myself with aging CSA corn, aging CSA fava beans, aging CSA green peppers, and brand new CSA cilantro. I concocted a dish that was entirely inspired by Heidi Swanson, using up ingredients I bought to cook from her book. It was fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that I wrote the recipe down.

Super Natural Homage Succotash

1 pound fava beans (week old is okay)

4 ears corn (they don't have to be just picked -- week old is okay)

2 tablespoons coconut oil (or vegetable oil)

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 small green bell pepper, finely chopped

1/2 cup canned coconut milk

2 tablespoons Thai red curry paste

kosher salt to taste

handful of fresh cilantro, finely chopped

1. Shell the fava beans, peel off the skins, and blanch for one minute in a pot of boiling water. Drain.

2. With a sharp knife, scrape the kernels off the corn.

3. In a large skillet, heat the coconut oil with the onion and green bell pepper. Cook for about 5 minutes until soft. Add the corn. Cook, stirring, for 3 minutes.

4. Add the coconut milk, curry paste, and fava beans and a splash of water. Stir and cook for a few more minutes. Taste for salt. Scrape into a bowl and top with cilantro. Serves 4.

I served the succotash with steak, which was not very Heidi Swanson, but is very Guy Fieri, whose book I start tomorrow night.

I didn't notice quite how fatty until just now.

Poor Natalie

2011-05-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

I'm drowning in page proofs of my book, but that's better than being due in 11 days.

The incredible, inedible egg

2011-05-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

We feed our chickens well.

I'm an adventurous eater, but like most people I have a few intractable aversions. And they are pretty lame. I haven't drunk a glass of milk since I was 5 and I don't think I've ever eaten an entire egg. I like the yolk of a fried or soft-boiled egg, but the white makes me skin crawl. Hard-boiled eggs are out of the question as are deviled eggs and egg salad. But worst of all: scrambled eggs. I can barely stand to watch other people eat scrambled eggs. I would as soon eat a fetal duck egg as a scrambled egg.

Which is why I should never have attempted Heidi Swanson's seasonal vegetable frittata from Super Natural Every Day. I like frittata when there's so much cheese and vegetable that you can convince yourself the egg is just there to help the other ingredients coalesce This was not Swanson's seasonal vegetable frittata.

I'm not sure zucchinis are in season, but they were in our CSA box, so I used zucchini as our seasonal vegetable and sliced up some potatoes. Swanson calls for a mere ounce of goat or feta cheese for 10 eggs, so I doubled that, given my need to disguise the eggs. I thought it was a very handsome frittata.

But while I was hungry, I was apparently not hungry enough. It was too eggy for me. At the same time, it was too full of zucchini for household scrambled egg lovers. "Not the best, Mom," said Owen. "No offense."

I don't fault Swanson's recipe. I just don't have a feel for egg cookery. We fed the leftovers to the chickens, who love eggs with a disturbing ardor. Which may have something to do, though I'm not sure exactly what, with why I'm turned off by eggs.

Our second favorite Heidi Swanson pasta salad.

Last night, I made Swanson's tortellini salad using CSA broccoli and supermarket asparagus. It was tasty, but compared unfavorably to the orzo salad I described in a previous post, the recipe for which you can find here. Try it!

As I've mentioned, I'm going to cook from Guy Fieri Food next. It appeared in the mail and Owen has been flipping through it and folding back pages of he-man dishes like spaghetti and meatballs and pork ribs. Every day he asks me when I'm going to stop cooking from "the vegetable book."

I know. But Owen has eaten a lot of tempeh and broccoli lately and I owe him. And for all the noisy graphics and dudespeak, the recipes in this book look delicious and solid.

Meanwhile, here's what's left on my Swanson to-cook list:

-baked oatmeal. Because Soule Mama loves it.
-dilled green beans with seitan. Because I've never eaten seitan. (Or, as Buddy Garritty calls it, "satan.")
-repeat of the cauliflower soup. Because there's a CSA cauliflower to use up
-mostly not potato salad. Because there are CSA potatoes to use up.
-carnival cookies. Because: popcorn, peanuts, bananas, chocolate chips, ground almonds.
-Tutti frutti crumble. Because the picture is so beautiful.
-Bran muffins. Because I have been searching for the perfect bran muffin recipe since I was 18.

Mama Bear cooks faster than she types

2011-05-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

This boy likes white bean dip.

The cooking from Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Every Day continues:

Saturday night, my sister invited us over for dinner and I contributed Swanson's white bean spread and served it with crackers and cucumber slices. I somehow got it into my head that the instructions included steeping a 5-inch branch of rosemary in olive oil. The resulting spread was delicious, but very, very, very piney and resinous. This struck me as interesting, because Swanson usually has such a light hand with the flavoring. I was puzzling over this until last night when I reread the recipe and saw that she calls for a teaspoon of rosemary. The dish is satisfying and hummus-like and I suggest you make it as directed by Swanson. You can find the recipe here.

That was Saturday. No one invited us to dinner on Sunday night, so we stayed home and I made Swanson's broccoli and potato gribiche. You roast small, thin-skinned potatoes and broccoli then toss the warm vegetables in a tangy dressing (gribiche) of hard-cooked egg yolk, olive oil, vinegar, shallots, mustard and herbs. Spectacular.

gribiche

Three comments:

1. I might in future omit the potatoes, because the broccoli held the dressing better.

2. But if I were to make it with potatoes, I would steam or boil them, as soft steamed/boiled potatoes absorb dressing better than roasted potatoes.

3. I omitted the chopped hard-boiled eggs you're supposed to toss with the broccoli because I don't personally like hard-boiled eggs.

This boy likes gribiche, but won't let me photograph him eating anymore.

Monday night, I made Swanson's weeknight curry, a super-quick stew of Thai red curry paste, coconut milk, cauliflower and zucchini. It was exactly as billed -- an easy weeknight dinner.

The next morning, I baked her millet muffins. Having eaten almost no sugar for a month, I am probably not the best judge, but I thought they were outstanding.

Hunger is the best sauce.

I'm not sure what the tiny, chalky pellets of millet add to the muffin, but I don't mind them.

Tuesday night, I made Swanson's orzo salad, using whole wheat macaroni because I couldn't find whole wheat orzo. You blanch some broccoli and use about half of it to make a pesto. I'd never tried broccoli pesto and it was great. Toss the pesto with the rest of the blanched broccoli and your boiled pasta, add some chunked avocado. Rich, sharp, tangy, cheesy, nutty, much loved.

I am coming to the end of what I can do with Super Natural Every Day. There are a few more recipes I want to try, but I've pretty much powered through that book. I went to the library yesterday to try to borrow Swanson's prequel, Super Natural Cooking, but every copy in the Marin County Library system was checked out. Popular! So, regretfully, within a few days I guess I'll be moving on. The next cookbook has been chosen. Not by me, but with my consent. Owen has even gone through and folded back the pages of dishes he wants me to cook. It will be a test of my theory of dieting, which is that it's all about portion control.

Speaking of which, the other day a friend told me I looked thinner, that my face looked "less poofy." It's one of those compliments you turn over a few times in your head before you let yourself be truly happy about it.

Last night, I went out to dinner with my family and the waitress brought me a glass of wine and said, "Here you go, Mama Bear." It's one of those passing comments you turn over a few times in your head before you decide it's the waitress, not you.

We kilt those green bell peppers

2011-05-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

You're not welcome anymore.

Blogger erased my last post, which is not a huge loss except that I wanted someone to make Heidi Swanson's white beans and cabbage from Super Natural Every Day and then to reassure me that it is as incredible as I thought it was. I've reattached the recipe to the end of this post. I worry that I'm losing my critical faculties, as being on a diet has made everything taste wonderful to me.

Almost everything. I still don't like green bell peppers. Although this is the season of asparagus and cherries, in our CSA box last week they gave us cold storage apples, zucchini(?!) and three green bell peppers. I really hope they don't keep this up or I might have to shop around for new A to CS.

I've only ever made one recipe in my life that highlighted green bell peppers to good (or any) effect. I remember it like it was yesterday. To my shock, when I looked up this recipe, I saw that I made it in September 1998. Owen was -2. That's a long time to remember a recipe.

Was it really that good?

I made it again on Friday night and, yes, it is as improbably delicious as I remembered. You cook small pieces of green bell pepper in olive oil with onion and parsley until they combine to form a soft, sweet melange, then you toss this lovely green sauce with pasta shells and some Parmesan. I probably wouldn't go out and buy green peppers just to make this -- it only encourages the farmers -- but if you need to use some up, this is the recipe you want. It comes from Verdura by Viana La Place, one of my favorite cookbooks. I've made a few very slight changes.

Pasta shells with green peppers and herbs

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 small yellow onion, minced
3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1/4 cup Italian parsley, chopped
3 green peppers, cored, seeded and cut into small dice
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 pound whole-wheat pasta shells
2 tablespoons softened butter
Parmesan

1. Heat the olive oil and onion in a wide skillet and cook until the onion is translucent. Add the garlic, parsley, green peppers and some salt and pepper. Cook until the peppers are tender.

2. Meanwhile, cook the pasta in a big pot of boiling, salted water. When the pasta is almost done, scoop out about 1/3 cup of the water and add to the skillet of warm peppers. Drain the pasta. Add it to the skillet, toss in the butter, and stir until everything comes together. Serve with Parmesan. Serves 6.

Small portions, no seconds. Anything can be diet food.

And here is the recipe for Heidi Swanson's white beans and cabbage. If you make it, let me know what you think.

2 tablespoons unsalted butter or olive oil

4 ounces thin-skinned potatoes, unpeeled, scrubbed, and finely diced

kosher salt

1 large shallot, thinly sliced

2 cups cooked and cooled white beans (I used navy beans)

3 cups very finely shredded green cabbage (about half a head -- though I would use more next time)
pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)

Parmesan

1. Warm the butter or olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add the potatoes and cook until they are cooked through, 5 to 8 minutes. Be sure to scrape the pan and toss the potatoes once or twice along the way so all sides are browned

2. Stir in the shallot and the beans. Let the beans cook in a single layer for a couple miutes until they brown a bit, then scrape and toss again. Cook until the beans are crusty on all sides

3. Stir in the cabbage and cook for a few minutes until it "loses a bit of its structure." Serve with Parmesan.

Self pity is such a good look on me

2011-05-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

Next time I'll make chocolate mousse.

I can't really explain why my diet isn't working. It has become a source of despair and of that I am ashamed. Despairing about weight is foolish and frivolous. But I can't help it. I am despairing. A diet is a powerful metaphor for effecting change in your life and it is every bit as powerful when it doesn't work as when it does. Just in a profoundly discouraging way.

I wish I could make a joke about my feeble will power but my will power hasn't been feeble. I wish I could make jokes about my slothful habits, but my habits haven't been slothful. I've been spinning and hiking and yesterday tried something horrendous and mortifying called "Pilates Abs." I've also forbidden myself to sit down except when necessary, like to compose a blog post or watch Fringe. The other day when the temptation to sit overcame me, I baked Heidi Swanson's oat cakes from Super Natural Every Day.

I would have been better off sitting. Even sleeping.

These oat cakes are:

a. very delicious
b. very fattening

Whole grain pastries are tricky. They seem like a good idea -- oats and spelt flour, flax seeds and nuts! -- but I think a fluffy white cupcake would have been more dietetic. It's the granola syndrome: a cup of granola is more nutritious, but Frosted Flakes are less fattening.

Anyway, I can't make these again because basically all I eat now is scrambled tofu, fish, and kale.
However! If you are not a diet, I highly recommend these oat cakes. You can find the recipe here.

Jenny Craig? Adderall? Master Cleanse?

2011-04-30T07:51:00.000-07:00

Cabbage soup -- thin, brothy, and jaundiced yellow

I've been listening to Born Round, Frank Bruni's memoir of his struggles with weight and bulimia before becoming the restaurant critic for the New York Times. I like it a lot. Bruni is an excellent companion -- clever, confidential, self-deprecating -- and I turn him on whenever I'm cleaning or driving or cooking. He's my new gay best friend, notwithstanding the fact we've never met. Sometimes he overshares, but I like that it in a gay best friend. Or any best friend. Plus, it's gratifying to hear about someone who is (or was) far more extreme and neurotic about weight than I have ever been. It makes me feel better.

And worse.

Because -- and I don't want to be mean, but Bruni says it himself! -- he ate like a pig when he was fat. He ate chickens and left piles of bones in his car. He emptied minibars. He got up in the middle of the night and made mountains of pasta. He consumed multiple ice cream sandwiches at a sitting. And then when he finally started eating slightly less and generally understanding about portion control and moderation and exercise, the pounds melted away.

That's how it works. For men.

My husband stops buying candy bars, restricts himself to 6 homemade chocolate chip cookies per night, and a week later weighs what he did in college. I eat tiny portions of cabbage soup and oatgurt, lay off the negronis, do not touch the Easter candy, not even a Peep, go to bed hungry, yet remain as sturdy as a draft horse. I am losing weight, but at the rate of a few ounces a week. You have to admire an implacable body like mine. It is a stalwart body, a strong body, a good body in a famine. I'm trying to look on the bright side.

I've made a few more dishes from Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Every Day:

-kale salad. Imagine kale chips tossed with toasted coconut and quinoa. Unfortunately, I don't love kale chips. If you do, try this recipe. Otherwise, try Martha Stewart's kale salad and skip to Swanson's green lentil soup.

-green lentil soup. There are a gazillion lentil soups out there, but Swanson's is special. (She credits Small Shed Flatbreads, a fabulous little restaurant here in my town, for the inspiration.) You cook down some onion and garlic in coconut oil, then simmer your lentils and when it's all soft and falling apart, puree with coconut milk and stir in some curry powder and butter. (The recipe is here; I used water instead of broth.) I've made this twice in a week, once for a family dinner and a few nights later as the opening course of a tiny dinner party. It's super-easy and somewhat fattening, but if a modest bowl of this is all you eat for dinner, I consider it a reasonable meal. Perhaps erroneously.

Ravioli

-Ravioli in harissa. I made this for the second course of the small party that opened with green lentil soup. Storebought ravioli, olives, broccoli, feta, harissa. I ate one raviolo. Based on that one raviolo, it was a fine dish.

-Two days ago, frustrated at my inability to lose weight, I made Swanson's delicious but very austere cabbage and chickpea soup for lunch and ate a single bowl. It's brothy and you feel thin and deprived when you're eating it. You also feel poor. It tastes like what I imagine Flemish peasants ate in the 16th century, except with lots of curry powder. I had it again for lunch yesterday and will have it again today.

Now, it is time for the highlight of my day: spin class.