Various and sundry

I'd been to Safeway and Whole Foods before anyone in the house got up this morning and as soon as I walked in the door I started cutting 6 pounds of beef chuck into 1/4 inch cubes. Energetically at first, and 20 minutes later, resentfully. Chili has a reputation for being easy, casual, no big deal, c’mon over, it’s just chili! but that is not the case when it’s The Homesick Texan chili. I'd forgotten. 

As soon as the chili was on the stove, I pulled out my copy of Sweet by Valerie Gordon, a newish baking book I’m infatuated with, and flagged a handful of enticing desserts to consider for tonight’s family dinner/Oscars party. I asked Mark and Owen, “So, which of these should I make: Chasen’s banana shortcake, Bullocks Wilshire coconut cream pie, or Blum’s coffee crunch cake?” 

Neither looked up from his computer. I asked again. Neither looked up from his computer.. 

I said, “Mark? Please answer my question.”

He said, “Yeah, sorry, why don’t you just serve the cookies that are in the cookie tin?”

“That isn’t what I asked you!” Maybe I snapped. You’d have to ask Mark. 

“Ok,” he said, still not looking up from the computer. “Read me the choices again?”

Cookies from the tin it is and I'm going to see Tim's Vermeer this afternoon. If there are typos or the links don't work, it's because the movie starts in 17 minutes in another town. Feel free to complain in the comments and I'll fix.

****

Waiting for the Benton’s bacon to make its way here by mule wagon, I thought I was betwixt and between cookbooks. But yesterday I realized I’d started cooking from Sweet without meaning to and might as well make it “official.” 

True to form, I baked the easiest things in the book first. On Friday I baked Gordon’s brownies and on Saturday, her sugar cookies. Both were excellent. Both were also very mundane and fail to capture the essence of this gorgeous and exotic book. I have fattening and ambitious plans for further explorations in the coming week.

This is a really cute story by the husband of the woman who tested all the recipes in Sweet.

****

To follow up on something I mentioned in passing a while ago, if I had to write a list of 10 dinners that my family loves it would be this:

1. pasta with pesto

2. pasta with vodka sauce

3. pasta with tomato, onion, and butter

4. spaghetti and meatballs

5. spaghetti carbonara

6. mac n' cheese

7. burgers

8. steaks

9. carnitas

10. pork dumplings

The dumplings, mac n’ cheese, and pesto recipes are all in my cookbook. The pasta with vodka is a Cook’s Illustrated recipe. The pasta with tomato, onion and butter is a Marcella Hazan classic. Nancy Silverton’s meatballs are the current favorite. Lately I’ve been using The Homesick Texan carnitas recipe. Steaks, burgers, and carbonara -- any old way.

After coming up with that list, I decided to open my recipe binder and revisit dishes I used to make to family acclaim, even if they weren’t obvious contenders for the top ten.

The other night, I served a stir fry of sugar snap peas and Chinese sausage that was very popular around here circa 2001.  I tore the recipe out of Gourmet early this millennium and made it repeatedly, pre-blog. 

Here’s what we thought in 2014

Jennifer: Not as good as I remembered, but I do love Chinese sausage and sugar snap peas. Also, easy.

Mark: I find Chinese sausages greasy. I’d rather have sausages on pasta than with peas and rice.

Isabel: Sausages are only good by themselves, never with things. 

Owen: I liked the sausages.

Earnest Summation: The Homesick Texan

Fifty-one dishes, y'all. I made 51 dishes from The Homesick Texan by Lisa Fain and it's only taken me 4 months to get around to writing the conclusion to that epic project. Talk about ending with a whimper. But I'm crossing it off the to-do list today, damn it.

I'll keep it short and sweet: I loved The Homesick Texan. I picked it up after spending the fall cooking from a Syrian Christian cookbook followed by Burma, and while I love novelty and challenge, opening Homesick Texan was like getting off an 18 hour flight from Asia, stretching out on the sofa with a cold drink, and turning on Friday Night Lights.

The book has flaws. Fain neglects to mention the size of pans in her dessert  section (where it matters!) and seems to think that adding 1/2 teaspoon of Mexican chocolate to a gallon of chili could possibly affect the flavor. The recipes are not blazingly original and maybe not even original at all, as some Chowhound naysayers have suggested. But what great recipes are? People regularly give Marcella Hazan credit for pork loin braised in milk, but the dish appeared in Ada Boni's Talisman Cookbook decades before Marcella started writing. And who knows where Boni got it? Who cares? It's a living, breathing recipe, not a military code, and the further it travels the better. Right?

Ah, but there are gray areas. I'm seeing more and more of them as I type. Much to say on the subject of recipe plagiarism, but I haven't figured out exactly what I think and in the interest of finishing this post I will do that figuring out later. Last December when I first opened The Homesick Texan, I just wanted to eat delicious tacos, chili, and enchiladas, and the recipes inside helped me do that. The end.

By the numbers:

worth the price of the book  -- 1 (marinated skirt steak from the small apartment tacos)
great -- 13 (chili, posole, meat loaf)
good -- 30
so-so -- 7
flat out bad -- 0

Shelf essential? If you've already have cherished recipes for Tex-Mex classics, you don't need this book. I don't and do.

Beer just ain't as cold in old Milwaukee

warm golden kolaches

The Tournament of Cookbooks started at Food52. My Super Bowl.

I didn't need to cook as much as I did on Sunday, but I wanted to get The Homesick Texan out of my system. I succeeded.

Pour yourself a drink, tilt back the barcalounger. It's a long road to the bottom of this post.

I began Sunday by baking kolaches, a soft, yeasty sweet roll of Czech origin that, according to Lisa Fain, is a specialty of the Texas town of West. After reading the naysaying on Chowhound about Homesick Texan, I briefly questioned my love for this book. I tried to find a flaw with the kolaches recipe, but apart from the dough needing a little extra flour, it was flawless. The kolaches themselves were flawless. The recipe is here and you should try it. I made the cream cheese filling, but the fruit alternative looks tempting.

As soon as breakfast was over I started on snacks and dinner for the family Super Bowl party.

Aversions are intractable and unpredictable.

smoky deviled eggs I feel about deviled eggs the way others feel about tripe. I couldn't even bring myself to taste the filling to ensure it was properly seasoned. Mark did it for me and when he said it was perfect, I added a little more salt. I don't know anything about deviled eggs, but I know my man! Owen complained that these were overstuffed, but everyone else must have liked them because there weren't any left over. I can't describe what they tasted like, but will quote Fain: "My deviled eggs are on the simpler end of the spectrum, although lime juice, smoked paprika, and garlic give them a lift beyond the classic mustard and mayonnaise combination." Recipe is here.

passionless

proper Texas nachos Not long before my mother died, when she was still feeling bouncy and awesome, we went for a drink at my cousin Billy's fancy hotel on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. Billy asked if we'd like some nachos. My mother said, "Oh yes, nachos are my passion!" My sister and I looked at each other. Only our mother. Three years later, I can't see a plate of nachos without thinking, "Nachos are my passion!" Sometimes I say it aloud.

Anyway, I don't think my mother would have been passionate about Fain's proper Texas nachos. They're too proper, maybe even uptight.

To make these you quarter corn tortillas, fry, salt, top each segment with a modest little pile of cheese and a single slice of pickled jalapeno. Instead of arriving in a big, slovenly heap under seven pounds of salt, fat, and refried pinto beans, each trim little nacho stands on its own. Like a canape. Who could ever feel passion for a canape?

They're good canapes, though. Recipe is here.

/

 second time out of the box in 14 years

chile con queso  It's overkill to serve both nachos and chile con queso at a party, but I had to make queso before I quit this book. Eight years ago we went to Austin on vacation and noticed everyone was eating this  melted cheese dish they called queso. I'd never even heard of it. We went queso crazy for a week and then came home and haven't had it since. Until Sunday. Fain effectively apologizes for using cheddar instead of Velveeta in her queso. Is she worried it makes her look like a food snob? Not to me it doesn't. I thought this was delicious. The recipe makes a lot. She says it serves 4 to 6, but I would double or even triple that estimate.

guacamole  If you have a good guacamole recipe already, you don't need Fain's. But you could do a lot worse. You'll find it here.

ceramics by Justine Reese

carne asado Carne asada is grilled beef. Carne asado is cubed pork shoulder braised for hours in dark purple chile paste. A West Texas specialty, according to Fain. I'd never heard of it before and didn't love it. The recipe on her blog is close to the recipe in the book, but her carnitas are a better use of pork shoulder.

frijoles a la charra Pinto beans doctored with bacon, chipotle, and tomato. Delicious. Recipe here.

a few people I love

fried apple pies To make these cute little turnovers, you mix a lard pastry dough, cube some apples and saute with butter, sugar, and cinnamon until soft. Roll dough and cut in circles, put some apples in the middle of each circle, fold into a half moon shape, seal. Fry until puffed and golden, dust with powdered sugar, serve warm. Mark compared them favorably to McDonald's apple pies and my father said he could have eaten the whole batch. This may be the only recipe from The Homesick Texan that isn't online and I'm not going to change that. There needs to be some incentive for people to buy this book.

I hung up my apron on Sunday night and haven't put it on since.

All cooking business today

winter lettuce on the deck: a rare gardening triumph

No bobcat for 3 days. Fingers crossed.

I made one last Homesick Texan shopping list, bought one last load of serrano chiles, cilantro, pork shoulder, fire-roasted tomatoes, and limes. Mark thinks we're having a family Super Bowl party tomorrow, but we're actually having a Homesick Texan finale party.

A list of recent Homesick Texan dishes and how they turned out, with links when available:

biscuits. Very good and basic. If you already have a biscuit recipe you love, you probably don't need this one. Not sure what is accomplished by beating the dough with the rolling pin. Recipe here.

tortilla soup. Rust red, cheesy, packed with crunchy tortillas strips, wicked good. Recipe here.

gorditas with picadillo. The English translation of gorditas is "little fatties." You mix a masa dough, form buns, fry, split, and fill with picadillo. Top with cheese, lettuce and salsa. The buns are adorable and have an amazing crispy golden crust. However, the picadillo, a Latin American ground beef hash, was dry and lacked personality. I used to make a Cuban picadillo with rum-soaked raisins and pimento-stuffed olives that I much prefer. It came from a book called Cooking Caribe and if anyone wants the recipe, I will provide. I served it with rice and cornbread and it was one of the staples of baby Isabel's diet. That makes it sound like pablum, but it's an exciting and delicious dish. I served this to the same friends so many times in a row that it was embarrassing.

Uncle Richard's hot sauce. This is Fain's family hot sauce and entails doctoring crushed tomatoes with onion, garlic, pickled jalapeno, cumin, cilantro, chili powder, and lemon juice. The recipe on her blog is quite different from the one in the book. She implies it's an improvisational salsa, one you make differently every time depending on what ingredients you have around. It was good. Not something I'd go out of my way to make again, but good.

black-eyed peas. Excellent and full of bacon. Again, the recipe on her blog isn't exactly the same as the one in her book, but it's hard to mess up black-eyed peas.

  definitely an 8x8 inch pan next time

lime shortbread. Fain says to pat out the dough in a "large baking pan" then cut into squares. This is awfully vague. Maybe she just means to bake the dough free-form? But that doesn't make sense because it's hard to cut neat squares if the dough isn't tightly packed into a pan. Anyway, it didn't fill a 9x13 pan, as you can see. Next time I'd try an 8x8 brownie pan or an 8-inch cake pan and go with wedges. Great, gritty shortbread, perhaps on account of the tablespoon of cornmeal. Not overly limey. Might benefit from a little more salt.

steak tacos. BLOCKBUSTER OF THE WEEK. I saved this for last to reward patient readers who made it all the way to the end of this list  Mix a simple lime juice marinade and let skirt steak soak for 2 to 8 hours. Cook the steak in a super-hot skillet and finish under the broiler. Let rest 10 minutes then slice your tender, juicy, super-flavorful meat and wrap in tortillas or, if you're on a diet, a lettuce leaf. Just as good cold the next day. Make this. It's easy and spectacularly delicious and I couldn't recommend it more enthusiastically. Recipe is here. 

Thanks. Wow. Help.

unbaked

The green chile posole from Homesick Texan has supplanted the seven chile chili as my favorite recipe in Lisa Fain's wonderful book. It is tangy, spicy, hearty, and brothy. And green. I had been missing vegetables. I made chicken broth from scratch for this perfect soup which probably contributed to its perfection. Recipe here. Make it. Don't omit the lime or the shredded jack cheese. They're essential.

pre-baked

Lisa Fain's grandmother's chocolate pie was swell, like chocolate pudding in a crust with a ladylike cap of meringue. We enjoyed this tasty old-fashioned dessert. Isabel offered the first dissent on the vegetable oil crust, said she didn't like it as much as my usual crusts which are made with butter and/or lard. I would have to taste two crusts side by side to opine with authority, but I think she means the vegetable oil crust is "crackery" rather than flaky. It has less body and less flavor. But the difference is slight and this crust pre-bakes like a dream. Fain's recipe doesn't call for weighing the crust down with rice or beans when you pre-bake. Unheard of!  She says you can use weights if you want, but she doesn't call for it. Who wants to line a pie shell with rice? I don't. I dread it. It's that irksome extra step that puts me off making a pie that requires a pre-baked shell. So I tried baking without. Miracle. No bubbles, no shrinkage. I like this pie crust recipe.

filled

There will be no more Homesick Texan reports until the weekend. I am on Catalina Island. Magazine business. I'm moving off of food topics now, because I've got other stories to tell and a few people, like my sister, will enjoy them, but you can safely stop reading if you're here for the recipe commentary.

Yesterday I mistook the arrival time of my flight in Los Angeles for the departure time from San Francisco. I dawdled at the library looking for books for the trip and was happily eating a tofu wrap at the Marin Airporter bus stop, about to open my "in-demand" copy of Anne Lamott's Help. Thanks. Wow., when I discovered the hideous mistake. Raced back to the car, rollerboard rattling behind. Miss the plane, miss the last boat to Catalina, oh you foolish and careless girl . . .  One hour later I was buckling the seatbelt of 18A, holding my shoes, gasping for breath. If you have any idea what's required to get from the Manzanita bus stop in Mill Valley, California to a seat on a Virgin Atlantic flight to LAX in 60 minutes flat, you are either raising a glass to my awesomeness or pursing your lips at the speeding and unseemly begging into the first-class security line.

I read Help. Thanks. Wow. on the plane. Those are Anne Lamott's three basic prayers. I wasn't raised with religion and am always trying to understand it and this short book was amusing and mildly helpful. Very mildly. I thanked the universe for letting me get to that plane without killing anyone or myself. Thanks. I would have done that anyway. I often thank the universe. It doesn't feel like how I imagine prayer.

Then I started my second "in-demand" library book, Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. I read it on the molded plastic chair at the Long Beach boat terminal, I read it on the boat as we rocked across the channel in the dark, I read it while I drank a buffalo milk (more on that ridiculous and delicious sundae/cocktail later) at a bar here on Catalina. The book is big-hearted, funny, wise, fantastically well written, and I guzzled it down because it was so totally delicious. Wow. Unlike the rest of the world, I didn't get into Wild, but I'd finished Tiny Beautiful Things by midnight.

This book will rub some people the wrong way. I need to say that. Strayed has a strong voice and not everyone is going to dig it. For a while I was recommending Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman to everyone I knew, but I've stopped because one of my best friends and my sister-in-law definitely did not dig it. This is a spot-on and super-clever review of Tiny Beautiful Things if you want to know more before one-click ordering or requesting it from the library. (Justine, you don't need to read the review, just request immediately.)

Anyway, Strayed is one of those cool women writers who toss off  ass**** and mother****** and get away with it and it makes me so jealous. They're tough, useful words, but when I type them I see my mother's face and she looks sad. Disappointed. I'm going to try to embrace jackass, though. That's another Strayed favorite and when I type jackass my mother smiles, very faintly.

The fruit at the hotel continental breakfast here tastes like it was cut with the same knife used to make sashimi. I'm unsure how I'm going to tap into the wonders of this scrubby, rocky island in 2 frigid days and write a sparkling, fun story about it.

Help. And another cup of coffee.

Go Niners!

pavement, cake

Yesterday I was downstairs reading and I heard Mark shouting at the TV. I  came up and he said, "The 49ers beat the Falcons." I said, "So they won the Super Bowl!" Ha ha ha, except I wasn't joking. I know about as much about sports as he knows about Texas sheet cake. And yet somehow it works.

Such great and interesting comments on the last few posts I'm going to address some of them here.

1. A commenter and now a friend have asked whether The Homesick Texan is a reasonable book for vegetarians and the short answer is, not really. You'd be stuck cooking around the edges of the book. There are some cheese dishes and one enchilada recipe featuring mushrooms, ricotta, and spinach (although it also calls for chicken broth.) It's a pretty meaty book.

2. I can't wrap my head around this vegetable oil pie crust. Why aren't we all using this recipe all the time? Is it because of the unappealing words "vegetable oil?" That seems possible. Anyway, I just mixed up another batch, this time adding sugar, and the oily doughball is resting in the refrigerator prior to being employed in Lisa Fain's grandmother's chocolate pie, which is Fain's favorite dessert. Tonight.

Also, I pulled out my copy of Cooking for Mr. Latte by Amanda Hesser on the recommendation of witloof, because it contains a similar v******** o** tart dough.  As soon as apricots come in season, I'm making this tart. Flipping the pages I remembered how much I loved this book when I acquired it back in 2003. For about 6 months the only salad I made was Hesser's refreshing romaine, arugula, and dill chopped salad. Meanwhile, my friend Amy became fixated on the walnut cake.  Every time we went to her house, there would be the walnut cake. She fed it to her kids for breakfast. Once we went over and she couldn't get it out of the pan so she scooped it out in ragged chunks and served it with whipped cream and it was delicious. I think of it as Amy's cake and always will.

3. I have enjoyed having a big pot of chili around. Friday night Mark went to a basketball game, Isabel went to babysit, and I heated up leftover chili and Owen and I ate in front of the TV. We watched Queen of Versailles. I won't say much about this bizarre and improbably moving documentary because A.O. Scott already said it all better than I ever could. In fact, all I will say is that you should see it. Chili and Queen of Versailles. They kind of go together. A perfect Friday night.

4. The best fish tacos I've ever eaten were at Tacos Baja Ensenada in Los Angeles. They had crunch (unhealthy coating on deep-fried fish?) and a creamy, mayonnaise-like sauce. Crunch and creamy mayonnaise are now my personal preferences in fish tacos. The Homesick Texan's fish tacos, which I made the other night, satisfy with the creamy sauce, but aren't crunchy enough. You marinate tilapia (or cod) in a chile paste, quickly saute, and fold in tortillas with cole slaw. If you want to see a picture, they are on the cover of her book. They were good, just not my ideal.

5. Yesterday morning I made her pecan coffee cake (Mickey cake).

deck railing, cake

It's a very standard streusel coffee cake baked in a cast-iron skillet, fluffy and delicious. Her mother called coffee cake "Mickey cake," an allusion to Maurice Sendak's phenomenally creepy In the Night Kitchen, which Fain loved as a child. Fain: "I'm pretty sure In the Night Kitchen influenced not only my desire to live in New York City but also my love of cooking. A most significant coffee cake indeed!"

6. Yesterday afternoon, I baked her Texas sheet cake and even as I was mixing it knew I wasn't going to like it because it contains one of my least favorite combinations of flavors: chocolate and cinnamon. Strictly a matter of taste. I took the cake to my sister's house for Sunday dinner and the others scarfed it up with enthusiasm, so if you like chocolate and cinnamon, give the cake a shot. Recipe here. I prefer the Pioneer Woman's chocolate sheet cake, which is almost identical, minus offensive cinnamon.

7. Finally, before we got to the cake, my sister served a stupendous kale and brussels sprout salad. I ate fourths even as Mark was muttering, "brussels sprouts are not a human food." Like I said, somehow it works! The recipe for the salad is here. 

Chili and chess pie

There used to be a story with this.

Yesterday I posted about The Homesick Texan's pumpkin empanadas (good) and carnitas (great) and my new prescription reading glasses (life changing) and two people commented, one of them praising the photo of the empanadas and the other telling me I was "too funny." Thank you. Both those comments made me happy. This morning I did something stupid and the post is gone. Here's the link to the carnitas recipe. You should try it. That's the big takeaway from the lost post.

Also, here's the grapefruit desserts story I was working on last month. Maybe I'll do a sequel after I make grapefruit tart, grapefruit souffle, grapefruit pudding, and grapefruit curd. I just couldn't squeeze them all in before the deadline.

Ok, back to The Homesick Texan, which I obviously love. Lisa Fain's seven chile chili might be my favorite dish in the book. Is it outstanding chili or do I just love chili? I don't know. But we ate it last night and it was a smash hit.

Fain offers two chili recipes in her book. I made her one-hour chili for the frito pie and as the name suggests, it's a quick and easy ground beef concoction. We've all had a variation on that chili before and it's fine. This second chili is a heroic production that begins with a trip to the Mexican market to try to track down ancho, pasilla, guajillo, chipotle, pequin, and arbol chiles. (The seventh chile is powdered cayenne.) Then you need to chop a 4-pound hunk of beef chuck into 1/4 inch pieces, an experience I enjoyed about as much as getting my eyes dilated. After that you cook the beef with the chiles for roughly 6 hours until the mixture thickens. It's incredible looking stuff, this chili, dense, iridescent, almost black. I doubt it matters that you use every single variety of chile she lists, but it's fun to imagine it does. Recipe for monumentally delicious chile is here.

For dessert I made Fain's chess pie, which has some issues, starting with the name.

I would call this lemon chess pie, because it contains 1/2 cup of lemon juice plus zest and it tasted like lemon pie, whereas plain chess pie tastes like sugar and butter. But it's her pie and she can call it what she wants. She doesn't tell you what size pie plate to use so I assumed 9-inch, the most commonly used size, and that worked perfectly. I was skeptical of her crust recipe, which comes from her grandmother and was suspiciously uncomplicated. You essentially just stir flour, salt, vegetable oil, and milk in a bowl. No chilling the bowl, no rubbing fat into flour with your fingertips, no home-rendered lard, no vodka, no ice water. And it's a superb crust. Not flaky, but crispy, tasty, absolutely great. I think maybe we get too worked up about pie crusts.

But the biggest issue with the chess pie was my apparent failure to mix the filling until "creamy and well-combined" and while the pie was baking clumps of leathery egg white floated to the top. You can see them in the picture. Blecch. Very unappetizing when you bite into one by accident.

Otherwise? Delicious, delicious lemon chess pie. The recipe for both crust and filling are here.

What a Mommy I had

Now that's a workhorse cookbook.

Hello. Happy New Year. Is the light in January harsher and more fluorescent than in December? Or is that my imagination?

Yesterday, I pulled out my copy of San Francisco a La Carte to make yet another batch of Nanaimo bars (I will link to the story when it runs, which will probably not happen until I write it) and the book almost fell apart in my hands.

Way back in 1979 my mother gave me a copy of San Francisco A La Carte and she inscribed it, as she inscribed all the cookbooks she gave me. One day I will write about those books, but not today. This post already rambles enough, as you will see.

Can you read that?

Opening the book yesterday and rereading the inscription, I was surprised to see that "Mommy" was still in play in 1979. I was 13, which is old for "Mommy." My children haven't called me "Mommy" in years.

But here's a sad/sweet/strange little story. When I was 42 and sitting at my desk one August afternoon, decades after I had last called my mother "Mommy," the phone rang. It was my mother, weeping, phoning from a doctor's office, and she said, "Jen, I have a tumor." And I cried out, "Mommy!"

That was definitely the last time.

I cooked compulsively from San Francisco A La Carte when I was 13, 14, 15. Do you think maybe I was a nerd? I just counted: I made 82 recipes from the book, including the cold peach soup and the molded cucumber mousse, and I know this because, as I've mentioned before, I write in cookbooks. My copy of San Francisco a la Carte contains 82 stilted and sometimes funny notations. Unintentionally funny.

No, rancid butter is never a good idea. 

Anyway, while ambling down memory lane, I spotted a carrot cake recipe and since Mark loves carrot cake and it was his birthday yesterday, I baked it.

And I thought I was such a good speller.

The cake was lovely, not at all "average." It was very soft, simple, and carroty and made me think we went wrong when we started putting pineapple, coconut, and walnuts into carrot cake batter, a trend I date to The Silver Palate, though I'm no culinary historian.

Isabel asked me why I would ever make a cake that I had once deemed "average." I told her I didn't know anything about carrot cake when I was 13, which clearly I didn't.

My one carrot cake wish is that it would look as odd, orange, and wonderful after it is baked as it does before.

The recipe is at the end of the post. It's really good and really easy.

Our love for The Homesick Texan continues to grow. No pictures because I've given up flash photos after dark as the results are always dismal. New Year's night I made Lisa Fain's barbecued brisket (slab of beef robustly seasoned, tightly wrapped in foil, baked for 6 hours) which I served with her coffee-chipotle barbecue sauce  (recipe here) and terrific string beans with cilantro pesto (recipe here.) I couldn't have been happier.

No, I could have been happier. The next night I made her Frito pie and I was happier. Do you all know about Frito pie? Chili poured over Fritos. I didn't grow up with this, but have eaten it on a handful of occasions, including straight out of a cut-open Frito bag. You need to make Fain's Frito pie. A non-pharmacological mood enhancer for glum January. Forget the diet, and while you're forgetting, try Fain's Dr. Pepper ribs. I'd give them 45 extra minutes in the oven to ensure melting tenderness. Recipe is here.  With the ribs I served Fain's cornbread, which is of the unsweetened Southern variety. This upset Owen, but no one else. I've never used bacon fat in cornbread before and highly recommend it as the crust positively crackled.

Yes, I have willfully forgotten the diet. I have not even told you about the nightly milk punch experiments. Milk punch = warm, alcoholic milkshake. But the new year doesn't really start for a parent until the kids go back to school and that is next week.

Carrot cake

I changed this only slightly, reducing the cinnamon, omitting lemon extract from the icing, and using parchment in the pans.

Cake

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
heaping 4 cups grated raw carrots (9-10)

Frosting

8 ounces softened cream cheese
4 tablespoons softened butter
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 3 8-inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment.

2. Whisk together the the dry ingredients. Beat the eggs until frothy in another bowl, then beat in the oil. Add the dry ingredients and stir well. Stir in the carrots. Pour into the cake pans and bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick tests clean. Cool completely and turn out on to a cake rack.

3. Put all the frosting ingredients in a bowl and beat until thoroughly creamy and smooth. It's very easy to under-do this and end up with lumps of cream cheese, so beat hard and long.

4. Ice the cake, using just a little frosting between the layers. Frost the top and sides. I thought this might not be enough icing, but it is. I think as a culture we sometimes overfrost cakes. Serves 12-16.

Don't get me wrong, I love babies

How do you photograph a storm? There is a storm.

It's been raining like the end of the world, about which, fortunately, the Mayans were wrong. Today I am staying in and baking pfeffernusse for my grandmother.

Thursday night, I made salpicon, a giant salad of romaine, shredded brisket, shredded cheese, out-of-season tomatoes, avocado, and spicy dressing. From The Homesick Texan by Lisa Fain, of course.  I loved it, but my husband thought the beef was stringy and that the dish was "very unattractive." He couldn't understand why you'd put brisket in a salad: "If you want to serve brisket, serve brisket and have salad on the side."

I suspect half of you will agree with him, half with me. Recipe is here.

Friday night, I made Fain's sopa de fideo, which was, as Isabel put it, like a bowl of spicy SpaghettiOs.  I loved this and will make it again and the recipe is here.

inside

I am now about to write about a non-food topic.

The other day I took Isabel and two of her friends to the mall. They talked, I drove, the rain pelted down. Sometimes while chauffeuring I ask questions or make jokes, but I have to be in the mood to feel like a dork and I wasn't, so I remained silent. At the mall I killed time while they shopped by seeing This is 40. Are you familiar with this film? It's a Judd Apatow comedy about an attractive, frazzled couple played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, limping into middle age.

A short list of things I hated about This is 40:

Pap smear gags. Mammogram gags. Prostate test gags. Fart gags. Checking for hemorrhoid gags. Wife walks in on husband as he sits on the toilet gags (multiple). Viagra jokes. Megan Fox. Looking up Megan Fox's skirt jokes. Saggy breast jokes. Lena Dunham's pigtails. Lifestyle porn.

But what I hated most of all, was the ending.

SPOILER AHEAD SO STOP READING NOW IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO SEE THIS MOVIE DESPITE MY ADVICE NOT TO.

Ok, the ending. The Promethean punishment dressed up as a happy ending for this struggling, bickering middle-aged couple with two children, including a teenager they can barely handle is . . . an unplanned pregnancy.

Which is to say, a brand new baby.

Look, I'm a sap about babies, but another kid is the last thing the dispirited couple in this movie needs. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann aren't going to get to start an exciting new chapter as their beautiful chicks fly the nest, they're going to just do it all over again, right from the beginning, and we're supposed to feel happy for them. I felt terrible for them. Is it impossible for Hollywood to imagine fresh, non-baby adventures for a fortysomething couple as their kids grow up? I love my children more than life, but I can imagine a thousand things I'd rather be doing 16 years hence than sitting alone in a mall movie theatre on a rainy afternoon waiting for teenagers to shop.

It's the pleasant yet very tiring time of the year

soon to be salpicon

I love The Homesick Texan. I want to cook all Lisa Fain's recipes except the fried chicken livers and the chorizo bread. And the frog's legs. Not those either. But everything else.

The other night I made the pork chops with green salsa rice. You sear chops in a skillet, put some uncooked rice atop each chop, pour salsa over everything, and roast for an hour, tightly covered. These were a smash hit, even though the rice never fully cooked. That's a big "even though," but these were so popular I'm letting it go. And it is always possible I made some mistake. You can just cook the rice on the stovetop while baking the chops.

The recipe calls for thick pork chops which Fain says should weight about 1/2 pound each. I appreciated the clarity. Recipes often fail to specify and you're left wondering whether to buy the pork chops from Safeway, each one the size and weight of a slice of bad supermarket sandwich bread, or the chops from Whole Foods, each the size of a small Easter ham. It's like they're totally different foods! Shouldn't they have different names?

The next night, I made the jalapeno mustard roast chicken. You marinate a spatchcocked chicken in yellow mustard, spices and salt, which simultaneously flavors and brines the bird. Delicious and super-easy. Sure was ugly, though.

 unflattering

Do you all know about spatchcocking? It just means to cut the backbone out with a pair of shears so the chicken cooks faster and more evenly and looks creepy.

I have also cooked a brisket (5 hours in the oven, tightly wrapped in foil) to make Fain's salpicon, but I can't comment on that dish yet as we're going to eat it tonight.

On another subject, a few weeks ago I read a sentence in a book that described how noisy old clocks affected our perception of time. I decided I wanted to know a bit more about noisy old clocks, maybe buy one. Whoa. Match to pile of dry leaves. Now I think about old clocks all the time, stalk them on the internet and in charity shops, have crushes on some clock styles and grudges against others. I found an Ingraham clock in a shop and was thinking of buying it, then I walked down the street and saw an antique French grandfather clock that took my breath away and made me forget the Ingraham clock. But I can't afford a grandfather clock. I also want a banjo clock, which I can afford if I strike, so to speak, at the right moment on eBay. I lost a bidding war on for a stunning Sessions banjo clock and another for a New Haven banjo clock that I'm relieved I didn't get, but now I'm in the running for a miniature banjo clock, an adorable starter banjo. Don't you dare outbid me.

I won't bore you about clocks again, don't worry. But the clock fixation is not entirely unrelated to why I started this blog, which was to address the cookbook fixation, which I haven't done. I've described the fixation and had a lot of fun wallowing around in it, but the roots remain obscure.

Why clocks? Why cookbooks? Besides beginning and ending in hard consonants, what do they have in common? Why not birds? Why not opera, Victorian teacups, rowing, or mid-century gravel art? Why do we love what we love? Why am I like this and you're like that and why in the world does anyone collect barbed wire?

Maybe I'll figure it all out in 2013. I'll let you know.

Ruby red

Brown Derby cake

I've become badly distracted by photography education and the fruitcake project to the detriment of paid work, Christmas tree purchasing, and this blog. Life is full of surprises; I did not see this coming.

We finished Burma. Friday, I opened The Homesick Texan by Lisa Fain because I remembered it contained a recipe for grapefruit sweet rolls and I'm writing a story about grapefruit desserts. As I flipped through the book I thought, yum, all this chili and brisket and poblano macaroni and cheese and ribs looks delicious and I'm going to cook from this book because everyone is going to like it and I won't need to go to the Richmond New Way Mah market for a while, field any complaints, or chop any more shallots.

That night my sister-in-law Laura and her oldest son, Joseph, arrived from Oregon for the weekend. We did some touring and Joseph and Mark watched sports, but mostly we talked and ate Homesick Texan food and grapefruit desserts.

cousins

siblings

brunettes wearing brown

Friday night: Tex-Mex meatloaf, which threw off a lot of unsightly orange chorizo oil, but was delicious, "tender and smooth," as Fain puts it. I'm picky about meat loaf and have two benchmark recipes: Naomi Judd's mother's meat loaf from Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken (a great book I cooked from extensively in the early 1990s) and Paul Prudhomme's Cajun meat loaf. This meat loaf joins them in the pantheon. It's not quite as perfect as the other two, but gets points for uniqueness. You should make it; the recipe is here.  With the meat loaf we ate Fain's potato salad, which I found too vinegary, and leftover Burmese black eyed peas. Full Burma write-up coming soon.

I took pictures, but there was no natural light so the pictures were ugly and I'm not going to post them.

For dessert there was Brown Derby grapefruit cake, grapefruit cookies, and grapefruit mousse. Everyone was game about tasting and opining even though they would all have preferred Nanaimo bars.

Laura: "I don't like fool stuff."

Saturday night: Homesick Texan's Fancy Pants King Ranch chicken casserole which was AMAZING. Ordinarily, writes Fain, Texans make this with canned cream soup, but her recipe omits this distasteful component. I'm glad because I'm a fancy pants. A few years ago I made a Pioneer Woman recipe with canned cream soup and was very, very sorry. Fain offers both a typical canned soup recipe and a fancy pants version on her blog. It's not quite identical to the recipe that appears in the book, but it is close. The recipe involves a lot of steps, a lot of pans, and a big mess, but it is worth it.

With it I served her radish and cabbage slaw (perfection) and slightly mushy (I am not the only cook who had this issue), very tasty red rice.

I should say here that I have noticed that her dishes need additional salt.

After the chicken casserole we ate the best grapefruit dessert I've made. If I tell you about it now I won't have anything left to say in the actual article, so I will refrain. All will be revealed very soon.

not strawberries, grapefruit!