Never pick up hitchhikers

Clearly, I am a fan.

All I want to cook right now are quick, easy dinners that everyone will like and eat and not complain about. I currently have no desire to bone chickens, stuff dumplings, master cassoulet or even fry doughnuts. What is happening to me?! Have I become normal? I keep wanting to say, “I’m so lazy,” but falling back on “lazy” is what’s lazy. Lazy would be actually wanting to cook an elaborate dinner and then slumping on the sofa to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre instead. I don’t want to cook an elaborate dinner, I choose to slump on the sofa watching classic horror movies. 

And for this state of mind, Nigella is really just perfect.

Someone in the comments asked me to pick the best Nigella Lawson book and the short answer is, I can’t. Her voice and style are so distinctive and consistent that it’s hard for me to remember which book a recipe comes from. For instance, the two fantastic dishes I made this week -- Korean kheema and crustless pizza -- came from Nigella Kitchen, but they were so quick and easy I thought they’d come from Nigella Express. I flipped through Nigella Express looking for them so I could describe them to you and soon realized it was the wrong book. Maybe as I cook steadily from Nigella’s oeuvre I’ll get a better handle on the identities of the different books, but for now, I’ll just say I like them all.

So, here are the two recipes I loved this week:

-Korean kheema. The name could use some work. Kheema is an Indian ground lamb dish and this is a ground turkey dish with Korean flavors. It’s powerfully spicy, so if fire isn't your thing, skip this altogether. The original recipe includes peas, which I replaced with big handfuls of baby spinach. Pre-washed from the bag, naturally -- not lazy, a choice, and a good one, albeit a bit expensive. I almost substituted ground beef because I don’t like ground turkey, but trusted Nigella and was rewarded. There’s so much flavor (and so much sugar!) in the sauce that you won’t be able to tell what protein you’re eating. Also, I have wondered whether Nigella meant to call for rice wine vinegar, which is tart, rather than rice wine/mirin, which is sweet.  Or maybe she intended to call for a non-sweet type of rice wine? I used mirin, but it would be interesting to see if rice wine vinegar added another dimension. Maybe next time I’ll try it. Finally, you will need gochujang, available in Asian markets. If you want another use for it, have a bunch of friends over and make bo ssam.

I doubled the recipe and this is reflected in my adaptation:

Whisk together 1/4 cup gochujang, 2 tablespoons honey, 2 tablespoons rice wine (mirin), 1/4 cup soy sauce. Stir in 1 pound ground turkey and let marinate as you get everything else ready. Chop a bunch of scallions. Heat a tablespoon oil in a skillet. Add the scallions and a few big handfuls spinach. Cook for several minutes until the scallions are soft and the spinach has shrunk to almost nothing. Add the turkey and stir-fry 5 minutes or so until it’s cooked -- it’s hard to tell when it’s done because you can’t really see the color. Err on the side of caution and cook longer rather than shorter. Mix 1/4 cup rice wine with 1/2 cup water and use this to swill out the sauce residue in the turkey bowl. Add to the pan. Cook for a minute or so until everything is bubbling and very hot. Serve with rice -- you need a foil for all that flavor -- and top with chopped cilantro. Sometimes you can skip the garnish, but the cilantro really brightens this rich, spicy dish. Serves 4, or 3 with leftovers.

*Nigella’s crustless pizza is, in my opinion, dreamy. Sadly, not so good for you. Also, “crustless pizza” is a misnomer because the pizza actually makes its own crust. That’s the magic of it. You mix egg, flour, salt, and milk, and fold in some shredded sharp cheddar. (Nigella doesn't specify sharp cheddar, but I recommend it. Also, buy the pre-shredded if it’s cheaper, as it was at my supermarket.) You pour this batter into a buttered pie plate and bake. It will puff almost to the top of the pie plate, like a popover or Yorkshire pudding. Now top with more shredded cheddar and pepperoni and whatever else you want. I used some fresh mozzarella and I think the dish benefited from the extra cheese. Bake a few minutes more until everything is melted and hot. The crust is crunchy on the edges, slumped, cheesy, and tender in the middle. I doubled the recipe and made two pizzas.  Three of us ate one and a half. The recipe is here. I wanted to make a salad to go with it, but in the end, I could not be bothered. Yes, that was a choice, but it was a stupid one, and lazy. Serve this pizza with a salad.

Omani food, Nigella Lawson, book recommendations

The "love cake" from Meera Sodha's Made in India = dense, buttery confection of ground cashews, semolina, and spices

I had to turn in an essay for the class I’m taking right around the time the Piglet got interesting and since I couldn’t simultaneously finish the essay and stalk the Piglet, I let the Piglet drop.

If were paid to write this blog, I’d have been fired by now. Or, as Donald Trump might tweet: "She should be fired! Lightweight blog that no one reads anymore. SO SAD!"

cardamom fry breads

Are you following DT's Twitter feed? You should. His Twitter voice is fascinating.


Anyway, I’m not paid, no one can fire me, and I’m back.

I couldn't style Omani food better than they did in the book, so I didn't try.

A perfectly respectable book won the Piglet. Not the book I would have chosen, but Hot Bread Kitchen is a perfectly respectable book that I haven’t yet mustered the energy to cook from because, as the title suggests, it's mostly bread and I haven't been in a bread-making mood. Of the books I got to know during the tournament, I really liked Zahav, of course, and Meera Sodha's Made in India, but I ended up falling hardest for The Food of Oman by Felicia Campbell. Initially, I was just fascinated by the obscurity of the topic. Later, I was happily surprised by the workability and deliciousness of the recipes. I expected Omani fare to be standard Middle Eastern, but it’s not, as anyone with a solid grasp of geography might have guessed. Oman is closer to India than to Egypt and you can taste that in these dishes, which are spicy and rich with coconut milk.

So far, I’ve made Campbell's caramelized beef, which involves cooking cubed chuck steak in a pot with spices, onions, cilantro, and water and for hours until the strong flavors have become one with the super-tender meat. I served this with a big pot of coconut spinach and pillowy, slightly sweet, sopapilla-like cardamom fry breads.  I’ve made those fry breads twice more since then, that’s how much I liked them. Some pan-seared meat dumplings were delicious as well, a zesty beef and onion mixture encased in a sticky, chewy dough, like curry potstickers. Only the soupy Omani coconut curry chicken has disappointed.

Omani caramelized beef

The weather has turned fresh and springy over the last week and Omani food is dark and serious. On Monday, I tried to figure out what I wanted to cook next from Food of Oman. The answer was, nothing. It's all too heavy for this time of year. I flipped through Hot Bread Kitchen. Nothing. I thought about Mamushka. Not feeling that either. I wanted something else entirely. But what? I browsed my shelves and when I got to the Nigella Lawson section, I stopped. Nigella. It was time for some Nigella.

What a good call that was. You could live a long and happy food life cooking only from Nigella Lawson's oeuvre. She’s funny, smart, and charming. Her recipes are fabulous and easy. I’m now going to link you to four of them. You are most welcome.

Monday night, I made salmon with mirin from Nigella Express (her “fast” cookbook). You mix soy sauce, mirin, and brown sugar in equal parts, marinate your salmon fillets for a couple of minutes, fry two minutes on one side in a dry skillet, flip, pour over the marinade, cook two minutes more. Remove fish, add a splash of rice vinegar to the pan, pour sauce over fish. Divine. Owen uttered words that have never before crossed his lips. “Is there any more salmon?” 

That night I also served a lovely strawberry crumble that Nigella promised would render bland, watery supermarket strawberries palatable. It did. Recipe for the easy, irresistible crumble is found in Nigella Kitchen (her "catch-all" cookbook) and here. 

Tuesday night, I served so-called meatzza from Nigellisima (her Italian book), which is pizza, but with a crust of seasoned ground meat, not bread.

meatzza

I hate the name, but that's the only downside to this simple dish. It's perfect for all you gluten-free, low-carb eaters and pretty damn great for the rest of us. Recipe here. Use a pound of ground beef, a 15-ounce can tomatoes, and 6 ounces mozzarella. She doesn’t specify the quantity of salt, which I resent in a ground meat recipe like this one as I had to cook several tiny meatballs to get the seasoning just right. A heaping 1 1/2 teaspoons of Diamond Crystal kosher salt did the trick.  

Finally, last night I served another killer Nigella dish, the broccoli-stilton soup from Nigella Express. I've made it before and written about it before, but I doubt anyone remembers. Ten minutes of "active" time to make this soup. Frozen broccoli! Love. Try it. 

  

Now, some books that have nothing to do with food:

LUCY

I read this haunting and lovely novel by the author of Olive Kitteridge in two hours and so can you. So should you. It's about the secret childhood histories we carry around with us that no one in our adult lives can ever really understand. The details of the story are highly particular to narrator Lucy Barton’s troubled family of origin and yet almost made me cry in the ways (good ways) it reminded me of my own not-so-troubled family of origin. 

This book by a former colleague of mine is a thoughtful, big-hearted, and candid non-fiction portrait of life in a small Texas town. Karen Valby gets to know restless high school students who drive hours to the nearest movie theater and conservative older gentlemen who convene pre-dawn every day to drink coffee in the general store. There are towns like this all across America, but I sure don't live in one. I enjoyed getting out for a bit and meeting people I otherwise wouldn't. Highly recommend.

Peacekeeping deals with politics, intrigue, and Americans in Haiti. Mischa Berlinski is a superb writer and his novel started out strong. But page by page my interest seeped away. I got to page 265 and gave up with only a hundred pages to go. I just didn’t believe the story or care what happened anymore, and that’s a big shame because the book has a lot going for it. This review pinpoints the problems, I think. 

Now it's back to War and Peace (page 1022), Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, and easy Nigella dinners.  

I'm a busy and important person with a very stressful life

french toast that looks like pancakes

I forced myself to choose some recipes from John Besh's My Family Table: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking and am going to cook them and decide whether to keep the book or donate it to the library. I only bought the book a month or so ago, but it rubs me the wrong way, starting with the subtitle. More on that later.

Yesterday I made Besh's Nutella-stuffed french toast. I had to. Every day Owen comes home from school and spreads a piece of untoasted bread thickly with Nutella and that is his snack. I made Nutella from scratch a few times, but he prefers the waxy store product and I gave up trying to elevate his tastes. It's not very healthy and I should stop buying it. Wait! I don't buy it. My husband buys it.

Besh's Nutella-stuffed french toast involves putting a dollop of Nutella in the middle of a slice of sandwich bread which you top with another slice. I would not use rough whole wheat bread or artisanal bread for this; it should be soft white bread, storebought or homemade. Now cut a circular shape around the blob of Nutella, sealing the doughy edges of two slices of bread. (Besh specifies a dull juice glass and you mustn't substitute a biscuit cutter; I tried and it doesn't smash the bread together enough form a seal.) Soak very briefly in a rich french toast batter (eggs, melted butter, sugar, milk, vanilla, orange juice) and fry. The recipe is here.

Should you make it? I don't like Nutella and only ate the plain bread part, so can't comment on whether this is an exquisite treat or disgustingly rich. Owen said it was "more like dessert than a breakfast." My husband had thirds.

before it looked like pancakes, it looked like Uncrustables

Some thoughts:

-wasteful of bread. We gave the crusts to the chickens and of course you could make bread crumbs. But french toast that uses the entire slice is more efficient.

-unhealthy

-the french toast batter: excellent. On account of the melted butter? The boatload of sugar? Orange juice? Made very sweet and custardy french toast.

-Besh specifies frying french toast in oil. I think it was Molly Wizenberg who swore by frying french toast in oil. I remember thinking at the time, no, no, no, she's wrong, butter. I've changed my mind; she's right.

This morning, I decided to check A Homemade Life to be sure I hadn't misremembered Wizenberg's comments on the subject, but couldn't find the book anywhere. Distressing! I started thinking about other recipes from her book that I didn't want to lose and remembered the chocolate chip banana bread. Or at least I thought there was a recipe for chocolate chip banana bread. . .

Then I started thinking about banana bread. I love banana bread and make it a lot. Why are some recipes so much tastier than others? Decided to cross-reference the recipes in Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, and other stalwarts to see what I might learn. Got carried away and ended up looking in the indexes of all my cookbooks and "studying" banana bread recipes.

Fact: There are 104 different banana recipes under our roof.

When I staggered to my feet after this riveting exercise, hours had passed. It was lunchtime. I ate a piece of banana bread I'd baked recently using Recipes from Miss Daisy's. It's a bit dry and I now knew why: because it calls for butter. I had figured out that all the recipes I most love call for oil, which yields a moister bread. Obviously. Because oil is not just moister than butter, oil is actually liquid. This is unappetizing when you think about it.

I am now a banana bread expert. Ask me anything! I can tell you that some people replace the oil with whipped prunes or applesauce and use egg whites instead of whole eggs. Dwight Yoakam likes banana bread made with whole wheat flour. Nigella soaks golden raisins in rum and tosses them into her loaf, while Mark Bittman prefers coconut and the wizardly Shirley Corriher folds whipped cream into the batter. (This, I am going to try.) Other people fortify their banana breads with Wheat Chex, wheat germ, bran, and Bisquick. Cooks stir in black coffee, maraschino cherries, candied citron, sesame seeds, mango, fresh cranberries, cocoa powder, or marmalade. You can flavor with rum, almond extract, vanilla, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, lemon peel, orange oil, allspice, cinnamon, or none of the above. Use more sugar or less, or replace the sugar with honey or Lyle's Golden Syrup. Barley flour? Sure. Rice flour? Why not. You can even make sourdough banana bread, though I wouldn't.

It was fun.

I may be a little underemployed.

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:

Must Go: More Nigella

She makes illustrating a blog post easy, doesn't she. 

But I'm DONE opining on Nigella's looks and am going to opine today, albeit briefly, on her writing and her Bang Bang turkey, a fabulous minty/spicy/peanutty Asian salad that uses up three cups of leftover turkey. Writes Nigella: "I know it's a bore having to get hold of the Chinese vinegar and chilli-bean sauce but it's these ingredients that set off the glotally clotting gooeyness of the peanut butter."

Glotally clotting gooeyness. I'd never have come up with a phrase like that -- too glotally clotting and gooey -- but I know exactly what she means! I envy the lack of inhibition. She's an effective communicator, Nigella, and that Bang Bang Turkey was so delicious I may risk ptomaine by eating the rest of it today for lunch.

Do you think she dyes her hair to achieve that black licorice color? Is it flattering, or would she be better with something softer? 

Nigella Lawson: The Tipsy Baker Warning

She's smart and impertinent and saucy and funny and her recipes are wonderful. Her pistachio macaroons will change, possibly ruin, your life. There is so much to admire and love about Nigella Lawson but her books are dangerous. Sisters, you know what I'm talking about. The woman is unbelievably gorgeous and fleshy and you see a photo of her licking the cake batter off a beater and the temptation to delude yourself becomes almost overwhelming. Enough with this weight watching nonsense! I'm going to let myself get bountiful and bosomy and beautiful just like Nigella! 

Wouldn't that be lovely? I certainly think so.

 

Except, as we all know, the ways we ladies fatten are as many and varied as the colors of our skin. Some of us become husky, others stout, others adorably plump, others unadorably plump. There are those whose legs stay slim as their bellies balloon, and there are women who grow mountainous from the neck down but somehow retain the sculpted visages of Renaissance madonnas. And then there are the Tipsy Baker and her kin, who, fifteen pounds up, begin to resemble hearty Irish peasants, thick of ankle and calf, round-faced, fond of a pint.

Which is to say, not the type that someone like Charles Saatchi would ever marry. 

Not that we'd ever want Charles Saatchi to marry us (though we don't actually know this for a fact) but I'm making a point here! 

No, Saatchi and other discerning billionaire alpha males opt for the Nigellas, who only become more stunning, more bodacious, more lusciously upholstered with every forkful of spotted dick. Kate Winslet is another of this enviable breed, as is Mad Men's  Christina Hendricks. Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe.

But not Elizabeth Taylor. No, for Liz and the rest of us, sadly, less is usually more.

I attach no moral virtue to being slender. Our culture is crazy and boring and pathetic on the subject, and if you want to eat ten pounds of Nigella's sticky toffee pudding pancakes right this instant, bon appetit! But please understand that you're not going to look like Nigella when you're through. I have succumbed to this delusion myself, and it is my only warning about the otherwise divine works of the Domestic Goddess.

 

Now that's settled, let's move to the whole point of this staggeringly shallow post: Nigella's North American salad. What an efficient pantry cleaner! Plus, easy. In roughly four minutes the salad took care of leftover turkey, the remains of a box of wild rice, plus a handful of prunes which I substituted for the called-for dried cranberries. The tangy dressing was sweetened with leftover cranberry sauce, and there were some pecans for crunch. 

Frugal and delicious.

Didn't eat too much of it, however, as I was mentally composing this post and found my appetite strangely diminished.