The (Over) Loaded Roast

I'm afraid you'll have to wait for dessert.

       Earlier this month, the New York Times published a roundup of its most popular recipes of 2016, one of which was the infamous Mississippi roast.

       Forgot about the Mississippi roast? I’ll refresh your memory: Sometime circa 2001, a  Mississippi woman named Robin Chapman put a piece of beef chuck in a crockpot with a stick of butter, a packet of Ranch dressing mix, a packet of au jus gravy mix, and some bottled pepperoncini. Eight hours later, her family was chowing down on what would become known as the Mississippi roast. Chapman’s roast proceeded to become a huge hit with “the mom blog set,” thanks to a church cookbook, a blogger in Arkansas, and Pinterest. Based on the demographics of Chapman and the cooks who seem to have embraced the dish with the most enthusiasm, I will call this original roast the Red State Mississippi Roast.

At some point, New York Times food columnist Sam Sifton got wind of this recipe and last January wrote a story about its genesis and popularity. Good piece. Different. I’d love to read more stories about how everyday people around the country cook. But when it came to including the actual recipe, Sifton just couldn’t. He expressed some mild distaste for the artificial ingredients and “faint chemical bite” they imparted to the meat. So he devised his own recipe for Mississippi Roast that eliminated the offending powdered mixes. 

I have to pause here to say that while I understand why he did this (as you will see), I think this was a questionable editorial decision, like writing about the popularity of kale salad then featuring a recipe that substitutes iceberg lettuce because you find kale unpleasant.

        Based on Sifton’s demographic and the paper he works for, I’ll call his version the Blue State Mississippi Roast. 

        Here are a few of the choice comments Sifton’s piece inspired:

Jim Propes Oxford, MS January 27, 2016

There is an unsettling tone of condescension running through the story. . . . Once again, we see the reluctance of "experts" to acknowledge the source of their subject. I chuckled at the "improvements" made by the writer. Really? Call it a variation based on culinary correctness.

Been There, Caught That NC mountains January 31, 2016

Wow, the NYT, that bastion of political correctness, has allowed Ivy-Leaguer Sam Sifton to use its pages for a blatant example of cultural appropriation, taking a down-home, wildly popular, Mississippi-born recipe and turning it into a New York-ified culinary mashup designed to appeal to food snobs. . .  Who but an effete easterner would try to tart up a humble Southern recipe that is monumentally popular due to its simplicity and great taste, and then try to tell readers doing so is a good idea. 

cbahrcbahr Southwest January 31, 2016

This turns out to be a wonderful article... rich (if tinged with snotty) in itself but the comments are where the truth (unknown at the NYT) emerges: there actually is a real America still out there!! Congratulations, AMERICANS.

         When I first read Sifton’s story in January, I too rolled my eyes. There was something that seemed slightly prissy and, yes, condescending. Good grief, are readers of the New York Times so fine they can’t survive a little MSG? I might live in a bastion of food snobbery, but I was, to quote cbahrcbahr, a real AMERICAN.

At least until I made the Red State roast. 

Mississippi roast was an insult to cattle. No steer should have lost his life for this cloying, salty, brown abomination that tasted like a hospital cafeteria smells. Two shiny $1.89 envelopes of chemicals had completely vanquished the noble flavor of beef, replacing it with something ersatz, aggressive, and smarmy. This was truly one of the grossest things I’d ever cooked. You couldn’t pick around the bad parts as the bad parts had impregnated every molecule.  Now I knew why Sifton hadn’t included the original recipe. Not because he was an effete Ivy Leaguer snob, but because it was awful. 

        

        Maybe he should have just said so. Maybe he was too polite about everything. Maybe his diplomacy read as condescension. I don’t know

        But the result was that a lot of the ensuing conversation had nothing to do with the quality of the roast itself. It was about perceived slights, phoniness, snobbishiness, political/culinary correctness. The roast became an innocent football in a little pick-up game of elite-bashing.

I thought no more about the Mississippi roast until Mark’s sister visited this past weekend and I was looking for something to make for a small crowd with minimal effort. I happened to see the Blue State Mississippi roast in the Times’ “most popular recipe” roundup. This’ll do, I thought.

If you ever make a Mississippi roast, remove the stems from the pepperoncini. I learned the hard way.

And boy did it. You salt and pepper a chuck roast, dredge it in flour, brown it, put it in a low oven (or slow cooker), with some butter, pepperoncini and a homemade ranch dressing that takes about a minute to stir together in a cereal bowl — mayonnaise, vinegar, paprika, dill. Go decorate the Christmas tree or read comments on the New York Times web site and come back many hours later to a pot of the richest, beefiest beef you’ve ever put in your mouth. It was not significantly harder than the Red State Mississippi Roast (I am super lazy these days and would not lie about this) and it was several million times better.

          

        My point? The Sifton version of the roast is awesome and you should try it, but mostly this: I have read dozens of essays on Donald Trump’s mystifying (to some of us) popularity, and it was amazing last week to find all of it right there, seething in the comments on a seemingly innocuous piece about pot roast back in January. 

a wicked, wicked, wicked cake

 On another subject, after many years of wanting to, I finally baked a Harvey Wallbanger cake, named for a vile-sounding cocktail popular in the 1970s. (Funny history of said cocktail here.)  Into your butter cake batter go orange juice, Galliano (a lurid yellow herbal liqueur), and vodka. Bake in a bundt pan. Remove from pan, cool, drizzle with a sugary, boozy glaze. Slice. Overeat. There was a faint metallic edge of alcohol under all the butter and sugar — and while that sounds potentially nasty, it was wonderful. Dangerous. A very subtle flavor, like that elusive flavor of the alcohol in the Harvey Wallbanger cake, makes me want to keep going back for more to see if I can finally catch it. I loved this cake to distraction and on Tuesday afternoon ate such a big, fattening, filling chunk for a snack that I could not face making or eating dinner. I used the scratch recipe from Vintage Cakes  because that’s the first recipe I saw, but apparently the original was made with cake mix and vanilla pudding mix. I wouldn’t hesitate to go with the mix version. Yes, I know this whole post was about my dislike of a dish made from mix, but cake mix is different. Only an effete Ivy Leaguer easterner snob would object to cake mix.

Never resist a generous impulse

How I came to acquire seven Korean cookbooks is a long and eerie story that I struggled -- and failed! --  to write about it in its full, bittersweet richness. I told Mark it was like I was trying to do a twisting flip and kept falling off the beam. Too many feelings, too much backstory, too complicated, taking way, way too long. I was driving myself nuts and we can’t have that, can we. 

Here, then, is the short version of the story of how I came to acquire seven Korean cookbooks: Someone who was very important to me when I was young died a month ago. Russell Miller dated my mother in the 1980s and he became a great friend of mine as well. An unforgettable man, Russell. Tart, candid, energetic, full of ideas, unlike anyone I’ve ever met. I still can’t believe that someone so vital could die. He called me “kiddo” and he believed in me a lot more than I believed in myself when I was 24. He gave me a piece of advice that I have thought of on a weekly basis ever since: Never resist a generous impulse. 

I learned of his death via Facebook. Has that happened to you yet? Coming across a post about an old friend’s death on social media amid pot belly pig videos and anti-Donald Trump rants?

A few days later, I received an email from Russell’s lawyer. Russell had left me a $1,000 bequest “to buy some books and bake something special.” 

I do not get remembered in wills every day. There’s something incredibly moving about receiving an unanticipated gift like that from beyond the grave, from someone who owed you nothing and expects nothing from you, someone who thought of you not just with affection, but with such precision. He knew me well.

It was like I had been touched by a magic wand. I can’t explain it better than that. I still feel like I’m living in this little bubble of grace.  It has nothing to do with the money. 

But there was money and I plan to spend it all as directed. Which brings me to my stack of brand-new Korean cookbooks. Korean food, which I love, has always seemed an impenetrable and forbidding cuisine to tackle at home. I was ready for a challenge and have been cooking industriously and happily ever since the beautiful books arrived. Why have I not posted about my Korean cooking adventures? See paragraph one. 

Over the last couple weeks we have eaten Korean meat loaf and Korean roast chicken, hand-torn noodle soup, two versions of fiery stir-fried pork belly (this one was really good), black bean paste noodles, pan-fried dumplings, and a spicy soft tofu stew. Last night I made kimchi fried rice, easy and unbelievably satisfying. Mark said, “You’ve really hit a sweet spot with the cooking, don’t you think?”

I do think. My fixation on Donald Trump has given way to a fixation on jjangmyeon. This is much healthier.

Here is the list of books I bought:

Eating Korean by Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee

Dok Suni: Recipes from My Mother’s Korean Kitchen by Jenny Kwak

Koreatown by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard

Discovering Korean Cuisine ed. Allisa Park

Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

A Korean Mother’s Cooking Notes by Chang Sun-Young

Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking by Maangchi

It’s a motley collection, ranging from the hyper-masculine Koreatown to the Korean Mother’s Cooking Notes, a wonderful and eccentric little volume that includes recipes for baby food and instructions on the proper scrubbing of pots. 

I’m not going to write in detail about everything I’ve cooked so far, I’ll just try to do better going forward. I plan to stick with Korean for a while. These books are precious to me because of the way they came into my life and I want to do them justice. 

It was a beautiful cake until Owen and that tub of frosting got involved.

On another subject, I finally watched The Great British Baking Show, which I loved, of course. 

pretty much

Orange hair, red tomatoes, green rhubarb

Life, early August, 2016:

Wake up, coffee, read headlines to catch up on Donald Trump news that erupted overnight, check Talking Points Memo to see what they have to say on the Donald Trump news, then Politico, then Slate, then the National Review, then Twitter. After this, it’s time for Facebook to see which friend chose today to post an impassioned call for everyone to come together and vote for Hillary, no matter how we feel about her, because the alternative is unthinkable. A fight in the comments inevitably ensues, ignited by either a representative of the small number of Trump supporters in my universe or a progressive who announces that he/she will under no circumstances vote for Hillary to prevent Trump, that’s like choosing between Pol Pot and Hitler, he/she is voting for Jill Stein. These fights go on for dozens, even scores, of comments. By the time I’m done reading them, Trump has almost surely said or tweeted something new and amazing so I go back to the headlines and the circuit begins again. Round and round it goes. Soon it is time to start making dinner and I feel like I have just wasted a whole day because I have.

Sometimes I can successfully avoid the vortex, but this only happens if I go cold turkey, zero internet starting from the moment I get up. A productive, peaceful day is then possible unless, mid-afternoon, I decide to go to Whole Foods and there’s a line at the check-out counter. After I’ve studied what the person in front of me is buying and concluded yet again that I really can’t afford the 200 calories in an Ocho chocolate-coconut bar, I remember my phone is in my bag and . . .  he said what?

The rest of the day is lost.

The other salient feature of my life, early August, 2016: cherry tomatoes. We struggle to grow big tomatoes, but the cherry tomatoes are flooding the kitchen. I can’t keep up with the buggers. This week I made two dishes that employed cherry tomatoes to excellent, very different effect, and yet there are still several pounds of cherry tomatoes attracting fruit flies in a bowl on the counter and hanging off the bushes out back. Those bushes show no signs of knocking off. Hardly something to complain about, too much food. I’ll stop.

Here are the cherry tomato dishes, both of which I recommend. As it happens, both also contain kale. 

*Toasted bulgur bowl from Lukas Volger’s Bowl. I don’t hate or even dislike tabbouleh, but I could happily give it up for the rest of my life. Not quite salad, not quite starch. Watery. Insipid. Not Volger’s version! It’s a robust meal. Nutty, toasted bulgur fortified with kale and chickpeas and enriched with toasted almonds and garlicky tahini sauce. I made it even heartier with some feta. Try it. You’ll be pleased. It keeps, too, so you have healthy lunches for the next couple days. Recipe here.

*One-pot tomato and kale pasta. Many thanks to the publicist who sent me A Modern Way to Cook by Anna Jones. What a lovely surprise, coming home to find this handsome book full of vegetarian bowl recipes on my doorstep. Last night I tried Jones’s version of that one-pot pasta you’ve probably heard about. I’m talking about the pasta you make by putting uncooked spaghetti, sauce ingredients, and water in single pan and boiling for 8 minutes or so.

Cool, no? 

I may have actually tried this before, but I can’t remember. Too much cooking, getting old. It was easy and worked beautifully. The pasta and lemony tomato sauce marry in a wonderful way when they’re cooked together and the kale, which you add at the end, eliminated the need for a salad. Not that I would have made one anyway. I loved this and Mark did too. Recipe here.

The final noteworthy event in my August so far: I baked the ugliest cake ever. Our rhubarb patch is almost as fecund as our cherry tomato plants, but, alas, the rhubarb variety we grow is green. It tastes exactly the same as pink rhubarb but if it is true that we eat first with our eyes. . .

I think it is true.

The recipe comes from the irresistible Vintage Cakes and consists of a rich, yogurt batter that you top with hot rhubarb compote and bake.

This soft, tangy cake tasted fine, but not as fine as the Food52 rhubarb cake of a few weeks ago, which had the added advantage of hiding the color of the rhubarb. I will never dig up our rhubarb patch, which has been going strong for about 8 years now (I started with seeds), but I might have to plant some red rhubarb next year.

This and that, part XVII

So much to talk about today. Topics: a pretty Japanese movie, unfrosted brown cakes, tomato-mayonnaise pie, turmeric lattes.

* The new film Our Little Sister follows the daily lives of four Japanese sisters sharing a rambling old house over the course of a year or so. Minor romantic complications arise, festivals, arguments, cherry blossoms, soccer games, tears, hugs. Plot-wise it’s not exactly, I don’t know, The Shallows. But the characters are lovely, their intertwined stories absorbing, the way the sisters take care of each other moving. A major theme running through the narrative is food. The sisters pile whitebait on toast, they cook seafood curry the way their mother taught them, but above all, they make, drink, give away, and talk about plum wine. The making of plum wine is beautifully rendered. We watch the sisters pick hard, green plums from their tree, prick them with a needle in unique designs, then place the plums in crocks that they store in a cellar with wine made by previous generations. I have so many unfinished projects going that I dread the appearance of a new one, but I hope I can make plum wine happen here next spring.

Mark found the film slow and overly delicate. I can’t say he’s entirely wrong. From my description you can probably tell whether you’d enjoy Our Little Sister or not. Obviously, I did. 

*Speaking of sisters, I told mine that I’d bring dessert to dinner the other night and while I intended to make a pie or layer cake, I ended up bringing an unfrosted, one-layer, brown cake. As always. You know the kind of cake I’m talking about. Marion Burros’ famous plum torte falls into that category, as do Marcella Hazan’s great walnut cake and Laurie Colwin’s nutmeg cake, to name but a few among thousands of unfrosted, one-layer, brown cakes. 

While the cake I brought was delicious, I felt vaguely sheepish about it. I realized that the unfrosted, one-layer, brown cake has become my lazy default dessert. I can tell myself I make these cakes because they are understated, elegant, vaguely European, but I know in my heart that these days I mostly make them because they are easy. The unfrosted, one-layer, brown cake has begun to feel like the home baker’s equivalent of an Eileen Fisher tunic: comfortable, neutral, tasteful, middle aged. Not that there’s anything wrong with Eileen Fisher tunics. There’s nothing wrong with unfrosted, one-layer, brown cakes, either. But what about the occasional trifle? Baked Alaska? Lemon meringue pie? 

I need to get out of this rut.

I’m not sure the previous paragraphs did anything to sell the Food52 rhubarb almond crumb cake, which is the unfrosted, one-layer, brown cake I brought to my sister’s. I’m sorry, because it was a winner. (Someone even described it as ambrosial.) It’s a basic butter cake with rhubarb folded in and a crunchy almond streusel topping.  You could use more fruit, you could change the fruit, you could change the nuts, you could swap out the almond extract for vanilla, you could experiment with different flours. If you have a crazy rhubarb patch like I do, bookmark this recipe. It’s a really handsome tunic. You can wear it anywhere.

*On July 4, 1996, nine days before we got married, I baked a tomato pie that Mark has talked about ever since. I know the date because it is written in the margins of Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking next to the recipe for tomato pie. It’s a bizarre recipe, involving a double biscuit crust with a filling that, in addition to cheese and tomatoes, includes a big dollop of mayonnaise. Mark loved this pie and wanted me to make it again immediately. I was displeased with this pie as it was very soupy. A cook doesn’t like serving a soupy pie. It feels like failure. 

not for company

This past Tuesday, six days after our 20th wedding anniversary, I made Mark a second tomato pie. I used a recipe in Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year that looked a lot like Colwin’s, but I hoped would be less soupy. Reichl’s recipe does away with the top biscuit crust, reduces the cheese, and quadruples the mayonnaise. If you lived through the low-fat mania of the 1980s, slathering that cup and a half of glistening mayonnaise over sliced tomatoes might give you palpitations. 

How was the pie? Very good. As good as it was fattening? Not in my opinion. Would I rather have pizza? Yes. Was it soupy? Yes. Did that bother me? Yes. Did Mark love the pie? Yes. The recipe is here. I followed Reichl’s instructions exactly, though skipped the “little flurry of chopped parsley” in the biscuit dough.

*We are living in the golden age of the experimental latte. I for one feel very lucky. I want to try them all. A couple of weeks ago I went to a restaurant that listed something called a misugaru latte on the menu. The waiter explained that misugaru was a kind of Korean cereal and convinced me not to order it. I’ve regretted listening to him ever since. One of these afternoons, I plan to drive into San Francisco and try a sweet potato latte. I was hoping that afternoon would be this one, but today’s blog post has taken too long to write, damn it.

Naturally, I was fascinated by the recipe for a turmeric-ginger latte in Tess Ward’s Naked Cookbook. I tried it yesterday. You toast some turmeric powder, ginger, and cinnamon in a little skillet, combine with steamed almond milk and an optional 1/2 teaspoon honey. I was suspicious of that meager “optional” 1/2 teaspoon honey and rightly so. The latte wasn’t even slightly sweet and I had to add a lot more honey to make it so. Unless you’re on a strict no-sugar diet, you should quadruple, maybe even octuple, the honey. A bigger problem with the latte, though, was the fact that the turmeric powder did not really dissolve. It settled thickly on the bottom of the cup so that as I got towards the end of the latte a bitter sludge of turmeric filled my mouth and guess what? It was yucky. A cheesecloth-lined sieve would solve this problem, but next time I’m going to try the Goop turmeric-ginger latte which looks more delicious anyway.

Goop is such an ugly word. Why did Gwyneth choose it? I don’t even like typing it.

blueberry mochi from Benkyodo in San Francisco

Let them eat mud

Be still, my heart.

Where the hell did the time go? Not just the five weeks since my last post, but the nine months since I weepily saw Isabel off to college? I just drove fourteen hours up to Walla Walla, Washington, packed her and her Birkenstocks, her suitcases and her friend's skateboard, into our car and drove fourteen hours back home. We listened to The Looming Tower and I saw my first Trump signs. We had a lot of time to talk. I told Isabel that I hate Donald Trump to the point of borderline derangement. She told me she doesn’t wear shoes to class sometimes. I told her she should wear shoes to class. She told me it’s not hampering her life, not wearing shoes, so why should she? I told her I hoped she at least hasn’t started wearing pajama pants in public. She told me she hasn’t. I told her she should see The Meddler. She told me I should read The Souls of Black Folk. I told her I have a lot of ideas but can’t seem to finish anything I start. She told me she wants to study in Vietnam or Thailand. I told her I’m pining after a dog, but her father doesn’t want one. She told me not to get a dog. We saw a lot of abandoned motels and barns. I kept hoping we'd see some abandoned puppies too, but we didn't. Now we are home.

This morning over breakfast Mark said, “I wonder where the Trump Presidential Library will be, Mar a Lago or --” He had to stop because I attacked him with a dirty dishtowel. 

I don't ordinarily mention politics on this blog, but my dislike of Trump isn't fundamentally political. It's animal. 

Anyway, friends, I’ve been cooking, but I haven’t been thinking about cooking and it’s the thinking, not the cooking, that gives me something to write about. I started wondering if maybe I should fast for a day or two because nothing makes food sparkle like going on a diet. The minute I decide to restrict my eating in some way I become completely fascinated with food, particularly the food I'm not allowed to eat. That would be great for the blog. I'd be so inspired! Alas, I’ve also found that nothing makes me get fat quicker than going on a diet. 

On a diet, I'd be obsessed with that picture. It would be full of poetry, mystery, sex appeal. Not on a diet, I just think the cake looks tasty.

So I did not start a diet yesterday. I made a Mississippi mud cake instead.  You bake a chocolate-pecan sheet cake and, while it's still warm, top with a lot of mini-marshmallows. After the marshmallows have softened a bit, spread with a fudgy icing of butter, cocoa powder, and sugar. According to a story in the Houston Press, the recipe "is believed to have originated post-World War II in the kitchens of domestic cooks eager to make sweets using new-fangled packaged ingredients, such as mass-produced miniature marshmallows. The texture and appearance. . . struck some as resembling the banks of the muddy Mississippi river, and so the name stuck."

I doubt it. I don't think anyone looked at the cake and thought it looked like the banks of the Mississippi River. Because it doesn't.

The cake was good. It was good. See? What a wan little addition to the food writing oeuvre. My writing would be much improved if I were on a diet. On the other hand, I had a small piece of the cake and that was plenty. If I were on a diet, resisting a second small slice would have been a mighty struggle.

There are lots of recipes for Mississippi mud cake on the internet, but Paula Deen's looks particularly luscious. The recipe I used came out of America's Best Loved Community Recipes.

I was trying to weed out my shelves and this cookbook looked pretty lame, until I opened it and discovered it was full of enticing recipes.

more of those new-fangled mini-marshmallows put to use

Maybe "enticing" isn't the right word for this one, but I am definitely intrigued. 

I felt I had to give a couple of the recipes a try before jettisoning the book. Prior to the Mississippi mud cake, I made a very solid beef stroganoff and a fabulous sweet potato poundcake that we demolished in a few days.

It was light, soft, and you could really taste the sweet potato. If anyone wants the recipe, I will happily supply.

Also, the book had a vintage inscription from Mark. He'd given it to me for my 32nd birthday.

So I can't get rid of it.

He was a boldly colored cat, and burly in his prime.

In closing, we had fifteen good years with our beloved Krazy Kat. He disappeared for a couple of days last week and then Owen found him in the yard, gaunt, mewing feebly, and covered with cobwebs. I took him to the vet straight away, the vet examined him, sighed, said Krazy was suffering the classic ills of feline old age, gave me some options, strongly recommended euthanasia, brought out the needle when I nodded my head, and that was all she wrote. He was a dear cat, a rugged, independent cat, our easiest cat. We loved him. We will miss him. 

Our quotidian meal

babka

Five hours until Mark comes home and we can continue watching Making a Murderer. I am in agony. Are you watching this incredible show? It’s a 10-part Netflix documentary about an uncanny crime saga in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin involving a wild, enraging, heartbreaking cast of characters and I would have stayed up all night to see the end if my companions had been willing. I can't recommend it more highly. 

A couple of stellar dishes from Michael Solomonov’s Zahav yesterday, although I was the only one who thought so. I'm 100% right, of course. These two dishes aren't even on the borderline. Total winners.

Dish #1: Mina with ground beef, coffee, and cardamom

Michael Solomonov: "Mina is the Ladino word for pie. This Passover dish, common throughout the Sephardic world, is almost good to be true.”

I have a serious question: Is it sacrilegious to make a Passover dish when it's not Passover and you're not Jewish? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is just eccentric, like a Jew or Muslim making buche de noel in July? Or is it none of the above? 

I did some internet research and found this in an Atlantic story about the recent cafeteria crisis at Oberlin:

“People don’t usually think about food as something that deserves respect, but food is reflective of the heart of different cultures. I identify as religiously and culturally Jewish and I would be offended if someone prepared a traditional Seder plate incorrectly at some time other than Passover. This would de-sanctify the religious meal of Passover and reduce it to just another quotidian meal."

Thoughts? 

As Solomonov puts it: "Once the matzoh is soaked and baked, it magically transforms into something more like traditional pastry than unleavened bread." 

In any case, what's done, is done. 

To make this Sephardic pie, you fry up a simple hamburger filling of meat, onion, garlic, a tiny bit of coffee and cardamom. Soak some matzoh in water until pliable and line a baking dish. Spoon the filling atop the matzoh. Top with more matzoh. Bake. Unmold. Serve this lovely, spicy, satisfying pie with a charoset of carrot, apple, raisin, and walnut. It's more like a salad than the charoset I've had at seders. (I think I'm more comfortable calling it "salad.")

Owen wolfed his slab of meat pie down in under a minute. He was in a horrible mood. I said, “So you like that!”  

He replied, “I’m only eating this because I’m really hungry.” Shortly thereafter, he and Mark got into a big, dumb fight and Owen stormed off. He yelled, “Now I’m making a quesadilla, Mom. That food was bad.” 

Talk about de-sanctified. A minute later Owen was back, shoveling more pie onto his plate. He said, “I’m only having seconds because we don’t have any of the good kind of tortillas.” Then he stormed off once more.

Isabel did not try the mina. 

Mark knows his role on this blog and plays it with verve. Of the mina he said, “It’s too weird. All the parts are good, but why not serve a nice hamburger with some bread on the side?”

Recipe at the end of this post.

*Dish #2 chocolate babka 

Lord, this was delicious. Make a sweet, rich yeast dough, roll it around a buttery chocolate crumble, freeze, slice, assemble the slices in a loaf pan, top with more crumble, bake. I believe the Zahav recipe can be found if you search Google Books, but the URLs are too long for me to link. If you do find and decide to make this splendid recipe, expect to add lots more flour than called for. Just keep adding flour until you have a soft dough and you’ll be fine. Better than fine.

Look at those pretty spirals.

Mark:  “It’s good, but it's not a cake and you wish it were a cake.”

No, you don’t.

***

Mina with ground beef, cardamom, and coffee, adapted from Zahav. I added kale to the meat filling, used more onion, doubled the raisins and apple in the salad and made a few other changes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and generously oil a medium-sized baking pan of some kind (I used a deep 9-inch pie plate). Brown 1 pound ground beef (I used chuck) in a little oil in a wide skillet. When it’s brown and crumbly, add 1 chopped onion, 5 minced garlic cloves, and a little salt. Cook for a few minutes and add a bunch of kale, stems removed and leaves shredded. Cook until all the vegetables have softened, but not browned. Add 1 teaspoon finely ground coffee and 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom. Mix well. Taste for salt. Now, soften 5 or 6 sheets matzoh in water, just long enough that you can bend them a bit but not so long that they disintegrate. Line the oiled pan with the matzoh, overlapping slightly if necessary. (It won't be tidy looking.) Spoon the meat into the matzoh shell. Layer more damp matzoh on top, pressing the edges to seal. Brush with some beaten egg and bake until the pie is golden and crisp, about 30 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes. Invert onto a platter and serve with the following salad.

Carrot salad 

Grate together 4 carrots (peeled), 1 apple (peeled), and a small chunk of fresh horseradish. Mix in a bowl with 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, 1 cup chopped cilantro, 1/4 cup raisins, and 1 tablespoon cider vinegar. Add salt to taste. 

We didn't inhale

Isabel's new home

Boy, is it hot out here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hot and dry. Did I ever mention that our mulch caught fire last month on a day just like today? A day just like today except about 20 degrees cooler. A workman was reinforcing some concrete near the road and a warm piece of rebar he’d just sawed through fell into the fluffy, dry, redwood mulch. Whoosh! Instant fire covering about 20 square feet of the front yard. The workman came and banged on the door and I ran out barefoot and we extinguished the blaze, but it took 10 minutes or so of me spraying with a hose and him beating down flames with his shovel. We killed a lot of plants and broke some of the watering spigots. No point to this story, except: mulch? And: lucky.

California is ready for you, rain. 

I’m really betwixt and between right now, hence the lack of much interesting cooking or any posting at all. Life should straighten out next week. For real.

Here’s what’s been happening in the kitchen and out:

I've served several batches of the easy, delicious bread-and-tomato soup from Viana La Place's Verdura. According to my margin notes, I've been making this since August 1999, a year before Owen was born. That's the definition of a keeper. The recipe is at the end of the post and you should try it before the sweet summer tomatoes disappear.

almost effortless

I baked yet another kouign-amann from Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune. I love this cake madly, despite the fact that it always comes out looking burnt. 

it's all about the French butter and orange flower water

I think next week I have to write about my extensive and rewarding experiences with Hamilton's cantankerous cookbook. I've been putting this off.

One night for dinner I made the hearty riso al forno  (Arborio rice, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, olives, capers, provolone) from a recipe posted by The Wednesday Chef and it was really good. Recommend.

the kind of dish that is sometimes called "lusty"

The focaccia with chard and tomatoes in her previous post is also a treat. 

That's about it for food.

At the very end of August, we went up to Washington and installed Isabel in her dorm at Whitman. Mark and I spent a few days observing the other kids (Birkenstocks, more bros than I’d expected at a little liberal arts school), listening to uplifting faculty speeches, traipsing from Home Depot to Walmart to Macy’s to Walgreens, buying fans, towels, sheets, et cetera. All is good. 

No. All is great. I'm not sad anymore. Not even a little. There’s a certain lightness you feel watching a very competent, composed child venture out into the world where she can grow in ways she no longer could in your care. I’ve been trying to explain it to people and this is the best I can do: Imagine you’ve spent 18 years teaching a kid to ride a bike, running alongside, encouraging, looking out for potholes, worrying she's going to fall and break her collarbone or get hit by a car.  You've really given it your all and she's gotten better and better and needed less and less help and finally you let go and now she’s disappeared to ride around the block, pedaling like a pro.

How do you feel? You feel lost for a few minutes, but then you sit down on a bench. You look around. It's a beautiful day. You gradually notice there are birds singing and there's a pleasant breeze and maybe you should wander over to that cafe and have a celebratory affogato while you wait for her to return some months from now. (It's a really big block.) You have that affogato. It is delicious. Where should you go next? So many options. Hmmm. Strange. What is the word for this bizarre feeling? Is it freedom? 

Suddenly you and your spouse start going out more, doing silly stuff you haven't done since you brought that first baby home from the hospital. You can't wait to hear what the girl has to tell you when she gets back from her ride and it dawns on you that you might have some new stories yourself.

I don't actually say all that to people. It's what I would like to convey without having to resort to a dumb bike metaphor.

Ok, speaking of silly stuff you might do with a spouse as your kids grow up, Mark and I went to a legal recreational marijuana shop while we were in Washington.  Is that what you call them? Marijuana shops? We were curious to see what it's like to buy cannabis in a store. In case you didn't already know, this is what it's like to buy cannabis in a store: You pull up in front of a nondescript building just off the freeway near a McDonald’s. You walk in and read signs telling you to put away any cameras. At a pharmacy window you show someone an ID. They admit you to a bland-looking back room with glass display cases that contain, among other things, cool little pipes. Other than the wares, it resembles a room where you might buy a cell phone. There is a United States map into which customers stick pins to show where they're from, and the whole country is dotted with pins. You somehow manage to squeeze another pin into the dense blob of pins on the San Francisco Bay Area. A friendly clerk hands you a menu with lists of marijuana products (cookies, joints, candies) and asks surreal questions like:  “Are you looking for something exhilarating? Or more relaxing? ”

I can’t remember what we said. We bought a caramel. Why not? 

surprisingly creamy and yummy

Anyway. Legal, guys! It was 100% legal. As legal as a bottle of Snapple. As legal as a Starbucks scone. And yet. I went to lunch with some casual friends the other day. I’m very fond of these two friends and we meet every few months for lunch, but I don’t know them that well -- which is a nice category of friend, the people you don’t know that well and may never, but are always pleased to see. I told them of my field trip to the marijuana shop because it seemed like a moderately interesting story. Not one of those great, urgent stories you tell when you first get together with casual friends, but the fourth or fifth story you bring out, when there’s a lull in conversation. I thought there was a lot to discuss, but my friends basically fell silent. One of them politely asked if I had a prescription for the pot and I explained that recreational pot is legal in Washington. Then there was silence again. I felt mildly embarrassed and wished I hadn't said anything. It occurred to me that some people probably still think marijuana is wrong, even if it's legal. Like abortion or gay marriage, I guess. On some level, I must think that too, given that my kids have seen me drink, but I would never smoke a joint in front of them.

Then again, I'm completely ok with them reading this post. The mental image of Mom and Dad buying a pot caramel is probably enough to turn them off drugs forever.  

Here's the soup recipe from Viana La Place. I feel like I've posted it before, but no. It's fantastic.

1 1/2 pounds tomatoes, peeled and coarsely chopped

1/4 cup olive oil

1 onion, chopped

a few basil leaves, coarsely chopped

2 bay leaves

kosher salt and pepper

pinch sugar, if needed

2 heaping cups crusty bread, cut into chunks or torn. (A stale baguette works great. Even if you have to break it with a hammer, it will come straight back to life in the soup.)

shredded sharp cheese (Parmesan, Pecorino)

1. Combine olive oil and onion in a soup pot and cook over low heat until onion is softened. 

2. Add the tomatoes, basil, and bay leaves and season with salt and pepper. Cook for 15 minutes over medium-low heat. 

3. Add 2 1/2 cups water and bring to a boil. Add the bread, stir, and turn off the heat. Taste. It might need a pinch of sugar. Cover and let sit for 10 minutes. Serve with cheese. Serves 4.

Just to be clear!

Although his views on cooking and animal husbandry drive me nuts, Mark is a super-nice guy and when I write about him and our disputes, it's never serious. He's got a sort of sardonic, caustic persona and can come off in the blog as a curmudgeonly character, which he really likes. In fact he's very kind, funny, and considerate. He would never tell me to "fuck off" except when he was joking around. I worried I got the tone wrong in the last post.

I'm so happy I pulled The Hakka Cookbook off the shelf yesterday because last night's dinner was a smash hit. It's been ages since I delved into a Chinese book and it feels like coming home.

"The Hakkas' humble dishes have stayed largely sequestered in home kitchens, rarely appearing on restaurant menus."

More detail on Hakka coming soon. For now, I'll just tell you what we ate:

and

You can find the recipe for the pork here and the spinach here and the fantastic Dorie Greenspan strawberry shortcakes I made for dessert right here. Everyone loved everything. Best meal I've cooked in ages.

Nichols and May? George and Martha? Sam and Diane?

defunct bee boxes and squalor

Owen now refuses to eat Parmesan as he says it makes his mouth hurt and he picked off all the cheese I’d sprinkled on our pasta last night.

WILL THIS TORTURE NEVER END??? 

Dinner wasn't worth writing about, but what happened after was most exciting. I decided to see what was up with the bees hovering around our defunct bee boxes lately. The boxes have been mouldering on our deck for several years, waiting for me to cart them to the dump. 

I had to use a chisel to pry off the lid.

a visual in case video doesn't work

Yow! Apparently, a swarm of bees found our boxes and set up housekeeping. I only got stung once last night, which was amazing.

This morning I asked Mark if he wanted to take charge of the new hive, as he was always fascinated by the bees and less scared of them than I.

He said no.

Jennifer: Why not?

Mark: I don’t want to take the time. We already went down that road and the bees died. Are you quoting me for the blog? I think if we want to invest in bees we should give to a bee charity. The other thing is, no one uses the honey. If you got bees that made sugar and flour, that’s something I’d consider helping with.

Jennifer: By that logic, you should help with the chickens because we go through a lot of eggs.

Mark: The chickens aren’t consistent about laying year round. Until they’re consistent year round, I won’t help.

Jennifer: But you thought the bees were so cool.

Mark: I think a lot of things are cool that I don’t do. 

Jennifer, typing: Can you elaborate?.

Mark: Fuck off! I’m going to have breakfast now.

Jennifer: What are you having?

Mark: Cold leftover Domino's pizza.

Good one. Lately, he's been playing his part with real brio.

This Bon Appetit strawberry cake is delicious. You have a layer of rich almond cake, a layer of fresh strawberries, and a layer of streusel made from butter, almonds, and freeze-dried strawberries. Trader Joe's carries freeze-dried strawberries and a 1.2-ounce bag sufficed. I'd make this cake again.

Finally, a book report, nothing to do with food:

"Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvia said, it was secrets that could save a marriage."

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson is my favorite living novelist, but I wasn't sold on God in Ruins until the final pages when there came a dazzling passage that turned everything that had happened thus far upside down. The passage gave me goosebumps and I read it again and again. This is a brilliant book. Unfortunately the brilliance isn’t spread evenly throughout. To put it another way: the plot (long life of pleasant Englishman) lacks momentum, but if you make it to the thought-provoking finish line, you’ll be amply rewarded.

Verdict: Recommend with hesitation. If you’re new to Kate Atkinson, start with Case Histories.