She was such an imp

She wasn't born yesterday.

Isabel is 16. The boilerplate next sentence: "It seems like yesterday that she was born!" Except it doesn't seem like yesterday. It seems like forever since she was born. It seems like. . . 16 years. Good years!

Sometimes I'm shocked that I'm not really old yet. It feels like I've been living for such a long time I should be frail and finished and yet here I am still shopping at J. Crew and getting crushes on TV actors.

We threw a surprise party for Isabel on Saturday night at a restaurant and she cried when we made toasts. Owen gave her a giant Gummi Bear and Mark and I gave her a charm bracelet. I asked what her friends gave her a few minutes ago and she wondered why I wanted to know. Yesterday, which was her real birthday, I cooked spaghetti carbonara and a chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese icing, per her request.

obnoxious diva

Carbonara: yum. Not sure what to make of Canal House Cooks Every Day, which was the source of the recipe. Do we need another recipe for spaghetti carbonara?  The book is beautiful, full of luminous, dreamy pictures of apple galettes, sugared berries, beet soup. But what is new here? Not sure. Everyone seems to love it. I want to love it.

Chocolate cake: yuck. Everyone else liked it, naturally, because they're under chocolate's spell. I've written before about my personal grudge against chocolate, who is an overbearing drama queen and never lets vanilla, butter, almond, walnut, lemon, or anyone else get a word in edgewise.  I had a theory that shy people don't like chocolate, but Isabel is shy and she loves chocolate.

I hope everyone is well. I am busy. I am happy. I might build a fire. Owen is asking for canned food for the food drive. Do you think they would accept jackfruit and coconut milk? We still don't have a Christmas tree.

A banana is Burt

Last week, my friend Debra threw a party and I baked this spelt-olive oil-rosemary cake from Good to the Grain for the occasion. Naturally, I worried about bringing a spelt-olive oil-rosemary cake to a party, but reports had been good and I trust Kim Boyce. Plus, this was a crowd -- kombucha-loving females of Marin County, California who met in a spin class -- that might actually embrace an alternative cake. Not that I would EVER stereotype.

The cake was easy to make because you don't have to deal with butter, i.e. no creaming or melting. Two bowls and into the oven it went in about 4 minutes. Cake was unfrosted and firm and traveled well. I brought some creme fraiche for garnish, though I now think whipped cream would have been better, or nothing. As you can see, the cake also contains dark chocolate chunks. I would have preferred it without, but am alone in this aversion.

Although no one at the party took seconds, everyone praised the cake -- which was exotic in flavor, moist, austere, not very sweet. Someone said, "You outdid yourself!" which made me glow. On the face of things, a hit. Certainly not a flop. But for me, at least, there was something quietly wrong.

When I got home I lay in bed and started analyzing what I didn't love about this elegant, arresting dessert. I realized I didn't like this cake as a person . I think I may have still been a little drunk. But it became clear to me, lying there in the dark, that I subconsciously assign genders and personalities to foods. All foods. Steak is an alpha male in his thirties, roast beef is an alpha male over fifty, and potatoes are their brutal, stupid henchmen. Roast pork loin is a pompous bald man, peas are eunuchs, bread is a monk, ice cream in a cone is a fun gay guy, but in a dish is a sensible middle aged woman. Pie is a grandmother, but the kind of grandmother who has too many grandchildren and can never pay specific attention to any one of them. Chocolate chip cookies are tomboys and ginger snaps are great aunts. Dark chocolate is Bea Arthur, milk chocolate is my mother, an uncooked hot dog is Ricky Gervais. Et cetera.

I'm telling you, it was weird! But I don't have to tell you. Here's my question: does everyone subconsciously do this? And if so, do your food personalities match mine at all?

Anyway, I hadn't met this spelt-olive oil-rosemary cake before nor anything like her, so it took me a while to figure her out. And the cake is a her, though that was somewhat unclear at first because she's handsome, angular, and wears drag. I'm fine with all that, but what I didn't like was her hauteur. When I tried to engage with her, she remained cool and contemptuous, perhaps enjoying my bourgeois confusion? I decided I don't want to have dinner with her again, but if you think you might, the recipe is here.

The Sweet Life in Paris: Short & sweet

Fromage blanc souffle: delicious. Like a very mild, fluffy, not-too-sweet cheesecake. David Lebovitz calls for sprinkling the top with sugar before baking so it forms a crispy, candy-like crust not unlike creme brulee. Big hit. 

Bunch of girls over here today doing naughty teen things (or so I suspect) on the computer and then running out and playing with the chickens like they're in second grade. Twelve is a funny age. To feed them, I "whipped up" some of Lebovitz's chocolate yogurt snack cakes because I am June Cleaver. 

They seem to appreciate the cakes. I'm not even tempted. I love that about chocolate. 

The Sweet Life in Paris: On a chocolate bender

"Don't expect a light airy cake," David Lebovitz writes of his chocolate spice bread. "Pain d'epices is meant to be dense and packed with flavor." And so it is, just not a flavor anyone in this family relished. Too chocolatey for me, too "weird" for everyone else. I think they were referring to the anise. 

Also made Lebovitz's chocolate mole  which I served with chicken.

 

Ugly picture. Sorry. It tasted better than it looked, though as with all the moles I've attempted, this one struck me as less than the sum of its parts. Children did not appreciate, but I didn't expect them to. 

On the other hand, they loved the basic, severely chocolatey chocolate mousse. I had forgotten how easy it is to make chocolate mousse. 

Perhaps because I don't like chocolate.

 

Finally, I baked Lebovitz's cheesecake, which only looks like chocolate because our oven is so dysfunctional.

Despite the charred appearance, it was actually very delicious.

Here are the remaining desserts I'd like to make before finishing with Lebovitz's book:

-absinthe cake

-chocolate chip cream puffs

-lemon-glazed madeleines

-cinnamon vacherin with espresso caramel ice cream, chocolate sauce and toasted almonds

-floating island

-fromage blanc souffle

-salted butter caramel sauce

-chocolate-coconut marshmallows

Given that I want to move on to a new book after Thursday, what should I definitely do and what should I drop? 

Living the Sweet Life in Paris: je suis triste parce que je n'aime pas le chocolat

I tasted a single crumb of David Lebovitz's chocolate cake the other night and thought, I'd rather just eat the whipped cream plain. Meanwhile, my family was hacking at the cake like a bunch of starved trolls. 

They said it was stupendous. No reason to doubt them.

I want to love chocolate. I keep trying. Trying works with everything else. I hated Breaking Bad until episode five, but now have a rich appreciation for a thoroughly sick TV show. I worked on my coffee aversion and was able to become addicted by age 19. My innate detestation of alcohol, another rousing success story!

Why not chocolate? 

To be continued.

In other news:

-For years I've idly suggested to my father that we go to Vietnam together and he said no. A few weeks ago I idly suggested to my father that we go to Vietnam together and he said yes. July. Booked the tickets yesterday. This is almost unbelievable.

-I'm starting to hate our insane Ameraucana chicken who (I imagine) infects all the other docile little birds with Big Ideas. She's striped with wild, malevolent eyes and weird chalky greenish legs and would rather dive beak first into a snake-infested blackberry bramble than be carried lovingly by Isabel to the hen house. Owen named her Arlene after the pink cat in Garfield. I call her by other, unprintable names.

 

-I'm making  the spicy potatoes from the January '09 issue of Cricket as requested by Owen. Recipe calls for a staggering quantity of paprika, cayenne, and chili powder (YES! All three) given that this is a kiddie magazine. I'm hoping Owen will feel some obligation to eat them, but doubt it.

A Homemade Life: still living vicariously

My in-laws are visiting from Boston and they have now eaten two Molly Wizenberg-driven meals.

Saturday night: an innocuous chana masala*(Indian chickpea stew) that I served with some Indian accoutrements, most notably the banana raita out of Anne Mendelson's Milk. I have no idea what made this raita so special (the 1/2 teaspoon of cumin? the supersweet, bordering-on-blackened bananas?) but it was very special. For dessert: Wizenberg's fabulous macaroons (so moist they're almost juicy -- like the inside of a Mounds bar -- the recipe is printed here) accompanied by dishes of black pepper ice cream.

The ice cream gave me pause. It occurred to me that black pepper ice cream could be perceived as a hostile gesture by visitors on their first night in town. Food is so loaded and symbolic maybe it would be better to go with, you know, strawberry.

But to thine own self be true and all that. If I'd served strawberry ice cream it would have been completely phony, and then what would the message be? I served the pepper ice cream. And while it was strange, it was also delicious, the dusty pepper kind of sneaking up on you towards the end. I don't think I'll make it again, but it turned out to be a delightful experiment and David and Mary are still speaking to me.

Last night, we had Wizenberg's lovely fennel and Asian pear salad, in which I substituted some Manchego for Parmesan. Just pristine layers of thinly sliced crispy fruit, vegetable, and cheese lightly dressed in lemon and olive oil. You feel like eating a salad like this is a spa treatment.

This was not true of  Doron's meatballs made with turkey, pine nuts, raisins, cilantro along with the more pedestrian meatball components, like egg and breadcrumbs. Served these fatty, delectable little numbers with a lemony Middle Eastern-ish yogurt sauce. As always, in my fear of undercooking meatballs I overcooked them so they all had a thick dark crust. Still excellent. Also, blurry.

I hate it when all I can think of to do is list the food I've cooked, but this morning, that is all I can think of to do. We finished with chocolate glazed chocolate cupcakes. They were likened to Ho-Ho's by those who enjoy chocolate, which was everyone at the table but me. I made the chocolate cupcakes as penance for the black pepper ice cream, but actually eating them would have been martyrdom. Sometimes, I feel so alone. 

*This is Wizenberg's now-husband Brandon's "recipe." Except, he doesn't use a recipe, he cooks by ear, and this is her attempt to capture his formula on paper. She encourages the cook to tweak to taste, which I did. A lot. The dish still never quite came together.

Milk: Unfriendly chocolate pudding

I prefer a dessert that is too sweet to one that is not sweet enough. Anne Mendelson's old-fashioned chocolate pudding calls for 2 cups milk, 2 squares unsweetened chocolate, and 1/3 cup sugar. It was incredibly, almost inedibly, austere. For comparison, I looked at my 1946 Joy of Cooking, which also contains a recipe for chocolate pudding. This one calls for 2 cups milk, 1 ounce chocolate and  1/2 cup sugar. Very sensible! More sugar, less chocolate, almost certainly a milder, tastier pudding.

What is with our weird national obsession with ever darker, harsher chocolate? It's ruining all the desserts! You know what's a good way to eat chocolate? In a malted. Or in a Hershey's bar. Or in a thin layer coating the coconut in an Almond Joy. I'd sooner eat a bowl of boiled cabbage than a big hunk of fancy bittersweet chocolate.

UPDATE: Actually, I'm all wrong. I just saw a copy of the ancient Fannie Farmer cookbook from which Mendelson took her severe chocolate pudding recipe. It is exactly the same. I guess my theory is a bust; people were already going for the extra-dark chocolate in 1948. Maybe it really is just me.

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Vanilla finally stands up for herself

Doesn't look like much, especially as iced in sloppy manner by me, but this was a marvelous and fascinating cake. 

Mark Bittman's chocolate vanilla layer cake contains both cocoa powder and a whole chopped up vanilla bean. I have never chopped up a vanilla bean, and when I read the recipe had to try it immediately. As I've said before, one of my problems with chocolate is that it overpowers all other flavors, especially shy ones, like vanilla. 

But maybe vanilla is not so shy as we had thought! The flavor of this cake was spectacular. It was definitely chocolatey, but there was this intense, warm vanilla presence unlike anything I've tasted before in a cake. Bittman describes it as a "perfumey and musky aroma" and I guess that will have to do, though I'm never sure about using the word "musky."

The cake contained little bits of soft vanilla bean that some people took for raisins. I think if you ground the bean in a food processor you could avoid this, though it wasn't really a problem.

I am now eager to chop up more vanilla beans and throw them in sugar cookies and shortbread and ice cream and if I buy them from amazon, I can actually afford to. No, I'm not shilling for amazon, I'm just shocked at how much cheaper they are in bulk from amazon than at the supermarket. I wonder if the amazon beans are any good.

Chocolate & Salami

I was in Della Fattoria yesterday, one of those lovely overpriced Italian-inflected cafes of which we have so many in Northern California. The bread is chewy, the eggs all "farm," everyone sits at harvest tables reading the New York Times, quietly smiling whenever they see an allusion to president-elect Obama. I was famished and ordered the pressato of salami and fontina. I think it was fontina. Anyway, the whole ordering decision was based on a blur of treat-like images: salami, cheese, baguette, pressato. 

I should have known better. I did know better! But I was in starving, go-for-all-the-delicacies mode. Here's what was wrong with that $12 (yes) sandwich.

 

1. Certain cheeses, particularly "good" ones, shouldn't be melted. Something terrible happens in the minute it takes for expensive cheese to go from solid to semi-solid, something that makes it too powerful, too rich. Is it related to the way the fat beads on the surface? I don't understand this phenomenon, but repeated disappointments making grilled cheese with sharp white cheddar have taught me that the better the cheese, the worse the melting experience. 

 

2. Strong cheese and salami are too much of an exciting thing. Salami -- especially thick-cut Fra Mani salami which this was --  needs a sweet, unctuous foil like mayonnaise to set off the garlicky meat. Salami can handle Swiss cheese, which is kind of thin and sarcastic, but basically mild. It was sadly overpowered by the fontina or havarti or whatever they melted on this fancy sandwich.

Upshot: wrong sandwich made with right ingredients. I blame both the person who put it on the menu and the greedy one who ordered it.

Okay, now the happier story of the chocolate gingerbread magnificence pictured above.  

After resounding success with chocolate pumpkin bread I started looking for chocolate-spice recipes with the idea that my chocolate problem might be solved by giving the ingredient something lively to play with, something that can aggressively push back. A few years ago I made Nigella Lawson's awesome chocolate gingerbread and decided to try the chocolate gingerbread in Dorie Greenspan's Baking. 

I would need to taste Nigella's and Dorie's cakes side-by-side for a scientific analysis of which is more delicious (party concept?!) but have meanwhile decided that, generally speaking, chocolate gingerbread is better than either chocolate cake or gingerbread. Chocolate and ginger and dark sugars belong together, unlike salami and fancy cheese. I am groping blindly towards some larger culinary theory here and maybe in a few decades you can read about it. 

Meanwhile, gratuitous picture of my beautiful niece pensively eating chocolate gingerbread:

Chocolate & Pumpkin

Going off-book today. Some delicate flower told me that my descriptions of Kenny Shopsin's food make him queasy, so I'm foregoing full write-ups of the noisome Senegalese soup (chunks of apple and chicken floating in curry-flavored cream) and Carmine Street enchiladas and taking a short time-out.

A few weeks ago I bought a copy of a dessert book called Baked after a friend described its recipe for Sweet and Salty cake. While I haven't found the occasion for S&S cake, I made the chocolate chip pumpkin bread last night with canned pumpkin left over from slutty cakes.

As I've said before, I don't like chocolate, the Bea Arthur of flavors. Its bossy personality and booming voice drown out everyone else at the party -- butter, vanilla, brown sugar. Only mint can overpower chocolate, and that's because mint is so freaking mean.

So I hesitated before introducing chocolate chips to pumpkin bread, but being a compulsive recipe-follower and cookbook worshipper, finally threw in the whole bag. 

You'd think dominatrix chocolate would mop the floor with pumpkin, who is hearty and fat and jolly and dull. Except pumpkin's fellow travelers are cinnamon and allspice, powerful little operators with a streak of cruelty. . .

Anyway, enough of this nonsense. Upshot: pumpkin bread is amazing with chocolate chips. 

Eat Me chronicles resume tomorrow.

Cuisine of California: More on Chocolate

I'm not done with my chocolate bashing. 

"This is a creamy, nutty, rich chocolate ice cream," Diane Rossen Worthington enthuses in the characteristically treacly headnote to her chocolate-hazelnut ice cream recipe. "Hazelnut liqueur is added for a special touch."

Well, that special touch is wasted. You might as well pour your lovely Frangelico straight down the drain. You can't taste the liqueur against all that chocolate, which is the problem with chocolate: It overpowers every other flavor. Only mint can stand up to chocolate -- because mint is a mean, ugly bully. The thing is, everyone knows that about mint while everyone thinks chocolate is just so great.

A while ago I wrote about how foods have characters, like people, and that we subconsciously transfer our feelings about certain kinds of people onto their analogous foods. I know this sounds wacky and maybe I'm the only one who does it. But I doubt it. 

In any case, I like hazelnuts. I think hazelnuts have something interesting and thoughtful to say, and I want to hear it. But then chocolate -- that pathological attention hog --  starts talking and the polite hazelnut is silenced. Hazelnut and vanilla can have a fascinating conversation. But it's always ALL about chocolate. And I resent that!

Growing up, I was always a hazelnut. Actually, I was probably a walnut, which was even worse. 

Down with chocolate! Up with walnuts!