Back to my knitting and here I will stick

After two months, I suspect that my failure to consistently cook from and blog about Thai Street Food is my review of Thai Street Food. It is just too much of a strain.

pat thai

ingredients

Melted on the stove during Thai cooking. Still works.

stir-fried minced beef

crispy roast pork and chinese broccoli

I made a valiant effort in December, but never posted about any of it. I'm not sure why. Almost everything I made was excellent. I especially loved the charred noodles on page 140: You take wide, fleshy fresh rice noodles and put them in a skillet with just a drop of oil and let them blacken and blister and develop a crust. I made these twice, the first time with the accompanying chicken, the second time to serve in place of rice. Delicious. The other standout dish was the stir fried minced beef, which I also made twice, and which we all loved. I would make it regularly, but you absolutely need Thai basil and I can't get that without driving to the Asian market in San Francisco, where tracking stuff down is like a scavenger hunt. Which is the problem with this whole book. 

 I hope a day will come soon when I can (re?) dedicate myself to this exotic and beautiful volume, but December was busy and January is going to be completely nuts. I need a book that is easy and accessible that I will actually cook from and blog about.

That book is going to be Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. Curiously, Gabrielle Hamilton's negative review picqued my curiosity. Here's a passage in which Hamilton describes the lack (in her view) of appealing dishes in Around My French Table:

I did not want to make, for example, her guacamole with tomatoes and bell peppers any more than I would want to make a pissaladiere out of a Rick Bayless cook book. I did not want to make sweet and spicy cocktail nuts, or tzatziki, or gravlax or dieter's tartine or cola-and-jam spareribs or pork roast with mangoes and lychees. I hope it is self-evident why I didn't.


In fact, it is not self-evident. Not to me, anyway. I do agree that this book includes an odd mash-up of recipes and I take her point about turning to Greenspan for a guacamole recipe. But what is wrong with sweet and spicy cocktail nuts? They sound like something I could get very fat on. Pork roast with mangoes and lychees? Weird, but perhaps delicious. In any case, interesting. I'm going for it.

I have already made from the book:

sardine rillettes -- spectacular

Marie Helene's apple cake -- superb 

gougeres -- good.

And the other night I made those cola-and-jam spareribs, which sounded delicious to me. They were certainly easy. You just paint them with some orange juice and jam, baste with a can of Coke and let them roast for a few hours.  It was so very relaxing to pop ribs in the oven and know that dinner was making itself as I worked at my desk throughout the late afternoon. We ate all the ribs that night and there were none left over for lunch the next day. I would not make them again because I suspect there is a better rib recipe out there, probably in a Texas Junior League cookbook. But Dorie's was perfectly respectable.

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On another subject, I have fallen into a deep, dark pit called The Passage by Justin Cronin. We started listening to this 37-hour vampire saga on CD during our vacation, but while my family has lost interest, I've become a mad fan. I listen to it while I'm driving, cooking, folding laundry, washing dishes, eating lunch. It has character, metaphor, power writing, moral philosophy, metaphysics, dreams, creation myths, blood sucking freaks, epic battles, propulsive narrative drive. It's like Lost, The Road, The Lord of the Rings, and Shirley Jackson's Lottery all rolled into one. RECOMMEND!

Who doesn't love a bundt cake?

People, it is not hard to cook from Thai Street Food. It is hard to shop from Thai Street Food. There's not one dish in this book you can make using Safeway ingredients and over the last few days it's been impossible for me to get to the Asian market in San Francisco. I will get there soon, I promise. I want to be the first cookbook reviewer who actually cooks extensively (or at all)  from David Thompson's beautiful book.

Since I couldn't do Thai the other night, I decided to make a dinner from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. I really admire Gabrielle Hamilton's writing, but when I first read her review of Greenspan's book on Food52 I thought she was perhaps overly harsh. Then I sat down to choose what to cook from the volume and I found myself curiously and completely uninspired. Almost every entree looked heavy and old-fashioned, stodgy and unappealing. Nothing tempted me except for the cola-and-apricot jam spareribs, but they required long cooking and I didn't have a long time.  In the end,  I only used Greenpan's book to make dessert, which was Marie Helene's apple cake.

I chose the cake because Gabrielle Hamilton approved, as did David Lebovitz. Also: easy. My family hardly touched it, deemed it too plain. At first I agreed, but when I had a piece the next day, I changed my mind. This is a cake that improves with age. It's very moist and rummy, almost like a pudding or clafoutis, almost refreshing. I just now had another delicious wedge for lunch dessert, two words I should probably never use together again. You can find the recipe for this excellent cake here. I'm going to subject Dorie Greenspan's book to further scrutiny in the future.

On the subject of cakes, we are celebrating Isabel's fourteenth birthday tomorrow. Last night I asked, "What kind of cake do you want?"

She sighed and replied, "Oh, I don't really care. You pick." Then she disappeared to her bedroom.

A few minutes later she came running down the stairs with a wild look in her eye, pointing a finger at me accusingly. "NO BUNDT CAKE," she said. "You always run out of time and end up making a bundt cake. I do NOT want a bundt cake."

I knew the teenage diffidence was just an act!

Then she casually pointed out a cake she wouldn't mind having. It consists of angel food and devil's food cake layers sandwiched with peanut butter mousse and frosted with chocolate ganache. It makes me tired just to look at it. Here are some more pictures of said cake. 

Of course, she was absolutely right. I was going to think about it and think about it and eventually just make a bundt cake. 

Lamingtons and some soup

That's a Lamington cupcake made last night by Isabel. It looks like a cuddly mammal and tastes like a Sno Ball if Sno Balls were actually delicious.

Lamingtons are an Australian treat, typically square in shape and sometimes, I have read, sandwiched with jam. This American recipe comes from The Craft of Baking and involves dipping a spongy white cupcake in liquid chocolate icing and rolling it in coconut. The result is a tripartite confection: fluffy and white/sticky and chocolatey/coconutty and crunchy. All day I have been thinking of the Lamington cupcake I am going to eat, very, very slowly, tonight after dinner. Martha Stewart has an appealing recipe here, if you're interested in baking some. I would be!

I've started cooking from Thai Street Food by David Thompson. It seems futile and silly to try to replicate Southeast Asian street food in a temperate zone First World kitchen, especially in late fall, but I love this kind of food and will persevere through ten recipes. I said this was my plan, so my plan it is.

Last night, we had Thompson's roasted duck and noodle soup.

To make this, you pick the meat off half a Chinese roast duck (bought at a Chinese deli) then put the bones in a pot with some chicken stock, star anise, oyster sauce, sliced daikon and rock sugar and let it simmer for a few hours. Meanwhile, you slice the duck meat, deep fry some garlic, blanch some choy sum, boil noodles, and chop a tablespoon of Chinese preserved vegetable. You put all of these goodies in soup bowls then pour over the broth. Not exactly hard, but labor-intensive, requiring a special trip to the Asian market, lots of little steps and pinches of exotic this and even more exotic that and while the results were tasty, this was not a soup that I would go to the trouble of making again.

Lamington cupcakes are another story.

On another subject, I took the goats in for blood tests last week and am awaiting the results. Provided they're in perfect health, I'm sending them to spend some time with a buck in a week or two. This one, I think.

Where is my beloved fog?

I started some bacon on Saturday and made some Parmesan stock on Sunday, both from Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen, but it has been too hot to smoke the bacon or use the Parmesan stock or do anything in the kitchen but eat cold grapes and drink beer. Today is probably the perfect day to try making these enticing crackers using solar energy and perhaps I will do just that.

Sundry other stuff:

-Owen got three bizarre and adorable new chickens for his birthday. One of them looks just like this. Another laid the smallest egg we have ever seen -- about the size of a large jelly bean. It was oddly disturbing. We fried the micro-egg, but no one wanted to eat it.

-Terrific essay about not reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

-This review made me take Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw off the shelf which in turn made me revisit

-this, which I must remember to bookmark. Who the hell is Forelock?

-this is right-on, but you'll probably only enjoy it if you watch Rubicon.

-If you have baked a lot of Dorie Greenspan recipes you might enjoy seeing her in action. Am I the only one who doesn't understand the apple pie-cheese concept?

-If you don't subscribe to Bon Appetit, you might have missed this fascinating recipe, which I am going to attempt right before I start the next diet.

-I can't wait to start cooking from Thai Street Food, but am holding off until I have finished writing the book. Meanwhile, controversy.