Fran Gage by way of Sitka

You can't buy frozen peanut butter and jelly cake.

Fran Gage devotes a chapter of Bread and Chocolate to her food-loving hairdresser, Jerome, who taught her to make tamales. The stories about Jerome are sweet, but the tamale recipes leave something to be desired.  I made his family's classic tamales a few weeks ago and they were glitchy, so I knew there was potential for trouble with "Jerome's" tamales. To make his twist on the classic, you mix the masa with coconut milk and butter rather than lard, use chicken breast and roasted anaheim peppers for filling, and wrap the tamales in big, glossy banana leaves.

Well, the tamales were a mess. The banana leaves kept shredding into thinner and thinner pieces until some of them were but threads. The chicken was dry and underseasoned, the wrapping instructions didn't make sense to me, and maybe I just wasn't in the correct, calm tamale-making space because I had to get up at 4:45 the next morning to fly to Alaska. In any case, I do think tamales require very detailed instructions -- maybe even diagrams -- and this is not the book where you'll find them.

Fortunately, dessert that night -- peanut butter-and-jelly cake -- made up for everything. Gage devotes another chapter to Elizabeth Falkner's now-defunct bakery, Citizen Cake, which was located a few blocks from where I used to work in San Francisco. Like Gage, I was a fan. I used to walk over there sometimes at lunch and buy one minuscule, exquisite cookie, or a tiny cup of ice cream, and eat it very slowly as I walked around Hayes Valley. Nothing was cheap, but it was all so good.

Falkner's cake is wonderful, though you should be prepared for a dessert that really does taste like a lunchbox peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. You make a flat, peanut butter sheet cake, cut it into rectangles and sandwich with jam. Frost with peanut butter-flavored whipped cream. Yummy. Do you want the recipe? It's really easy and I can type it out when I get home.

As I mentioned, I'm in Alaska. Business, but business that is a pleasure. Saturday, I caught a beautiful king salmon.

a "before" picture for the paleo diet?

You know how proud I must be of the salmon that I posted that picture.

Sitka is extremely lovely and interesting, with a rich Tlingit-Russian history I knew nothing about until I got here. Such mountains. Such totem poles. Such lush and colorful gardens.

I like.

Not everything is pretty, though.

I like less.

The Pioneer Bar sits right outside my hotel room window (innocuous beige building in that photograph) and people reel out of there, screaming and sobbing, and I'm not just talking about girls. At 1 a.m. they plop themselves down on the curb to have a smoke and slur out their life stories at the top of their lungs for the next hour. They chase each other. They shout obscenities. I guess there's not that much to do in Sitka at night.

I don't actually mind, although I've heard other hotel guests complaining. I have trouble sleeping in hotels under the best of circumstances and you'd probably find me falling off a stool at the Pioneer Bar were it not for Netflix streaming and books.  In the the last two nights I've watched Girl Cut in Two (B), Marwencol (A-), When a Tree Falls (B), Tuesday, After Christmas (A), and A Very Long Engagement (C+). I finished Gone Girl (A-) and am a third of the way through Buddenbrooks. Hotel insomnia is Buddenbrooks-proof, Ambien-proof, everything-proof. Time to go home to cookbooks and sleep and roasting that gorgeous salmon.

Alaska: Mad Housewife Day

That's a mighty fine-looking baked Alaska, though I didn't make it.

I thought I would jump back into the whole cooking thing this morning, but I began the day by having "words" with our nice painter over whether the beams should be linen or bright white. Please feed me to a grizzly bear now. I have become the most disgusting of bourgeois cliches, the remodeling matron worrying over the different shades of white. 

Tension still crackling from that strained interaction, I drove Isabel to the orthodontist, basically ranting the whole way, and we were very, very late. Owen wore his pajamas and stayed in the car. We ate Krispy Kreme donuts. I gradually calmed down. 

Home again, some peacemaking with the painter, a conference with the contractor, and at this point it was noon and there were eleven people in the house, most of them speaking Spanish, and I still had not brushed my hair and was wearing dirty blue jeans and jogging shoes. Dumpy gringa! Way to keep it together, Tipsy Baker! 

Had to escape the house and since I'm officially still burning vacation days, I took Isabel and Owen to see Kit Kittredge, that Abigail Breslin movie about a family purportedly suffering privation during the Depression, but doing it ever so picturesquely in a gracious old house filled with gorgeous, radiantly lit antiques. What a crock! 

And yet I wept. The scene when Chris O'Donnell returns from Chicago and embraces Julia Ormond. . . .

My children need to grow up so I can stop seeing these horrible, treacly, manipulative movies.

The day seemed like a complete bust as I hadn't even made it to the supermarket to purchase halibut and ingredients for baked Alaska.

BUT: When we came home my copy of Oakland, Jack London, and Me had arrived. A most excellent and crazy book. I started reading, and decided to heat Red Baron frozen french bread pizzas for dinner. Perhaps the sanest decision I've made all day.

And, come to think of it, a truly Alaskan meal.