Sorry, but there's just nothing like a pretty face

This morning I read a review of a restaurant called Trou Normand written by Michael Bauer, the veteran San Francisco Chronicle critic. I stopped when I got to this paragraph: 

The food embraces you like a warm hug. The space is alluring, but not altogether comfortable - it's like a woman who doesn't have the prettiest face but still attracts attention for how she puts herself together.

Gag. Couldn’t continue reading. There are thousands of unpaid, unedited restaurant bloggers who would die of shame if they published a paragraph so trite, muddled, and offensive. Do newspapers have a death wish? 

*****

Flour kept me busy this week. There are two types of coconut macaroon: rich and lean. Rich macaroons call for egg yolks and/or sweetened condensed milk and tend to be sticky and heavy, while lean macaroons involve little more than coconut, egg whites, and sugar and are generally snowy white and a little grainy. Joanne Chang's are some of the best I've made in the "rich" category. As you can see in the photo, they got a little singed, but that didn’t diminish our love for them. Highly recommend. Recipe is here.

Even better than Chang's macaroons: her coffee ice cream with cacao nib brittle. (Chang says it's one of her favorite recipes in the book.) The recipe is here and you should try it.The cacao nib brittle is great, but a big hassle and not strictly necessary so I probably won't include it next time. Coffee is Mark's favorite ice cream flavor and I've tried a number of recipes. This is our #1. I might stop here.

Finally, Chang’s almond-anise biscotti are good, though they're the dense, floury type of biscotti and I prefer the kind that are super-brittle and porous, like coral. Do you crave biscotti? I don't. I think that's the beauty of biscotti. They're not addicting. You can stop at one, which isn't the case with, say, chocolate chip cookies. I'm not sure whether desserts should really be "irresistible." Do other cultures know something we don't?

I finished up Ming Tsai’s Blue Ginger, but that’s for the next post. 

And now for some Flour

misshapen but delicious

In Flour, Joanne Chang writes that she grew up in traditional and "fairly strict" Chinese family where, aside from the occasional plate of sliced oranges, sweets rarely appeared on the table. She was exposed to cakes and cookies at her friends' homes and at a young age developed a "full-blown obsession" with desserts and pastries.

Chang:  "I pored over baking books and food magazines; I read and reread dessert descriptions wherever I found them. I lingered at pastry cases at the supermarket. Most of the time I never tried the desserts I was dreaming about. Instead I could only imagine how they must taste: Turkish delight (I read about it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,) snickerdoodles (Good Housekeeping,) sticky toffee pudding (The Joy of Cooking,) double-crust apple pie (Little House on the Prairie,) New York cheesecake (first spotted at a Safeway in Houston!)"

I completely relate. Her story supports my theory that childhood dessert deprivation can lead to an almost romantic ardor for sweets. The longer and more hopelessly you pine, the brighter those gorgeous and mysterious desserts glow. I should say that I don't view this is as a problem. Ardor is not the same thing as compulsive bingeing. Chang has built an amazing career from her passion and certainly looks like she exercises healthy restraint.

As I mentioned in the last post, Chang majored in math and economics at Harvard, then got a job at a big international consulting firm right out of college. After a couple of years, though, she decided she really wanted to spend her life baking and quit her consulting gig to do so. She opened her Boston bakery, Flour, in 2000. Her yardstick for a dessert: Would you serve this to your mother?

I'm not a complete newcomer to her book. Chang's banana bread is the only banana bread I make anymore and her oreos were the basis for the oreo recipe in Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. I can take no credit whatsoever for those incredible cookies. I would have happily served both Chang's banana bread and oreos to my mother. 

Last week, I made her brioche and the recipe is a masterpiece of clarity and detail. I've baked a dozen or so different brioche recipes over the last few months, and this is my favorite, simply because the whole process went so smoothly. I used half the dough to make a loaf of bread and half to make her chocolate brioche buns, which contain not just bittersweet chocolate, but a lovely layer of pastry cream. I baked three of these beauties (see photo at top) and froze the rest to bake later. My mother would have flipped for the chocolate brioche buns and been very pleased with the tender, buttery brioche.

I'm not quite as sold on Chang's so-called luscious cheesecake, which I baked yesterday for our weekly extended-family dinner. It wasn’t quite dense or tangy enough for me and the reviews were curiously contradictory. Mark declared it the best dessert I’ve ever made, while Isabel said that homemade cheesecake is always “kind of gross.” Seriously?! My sister commented on its "caramelly" flavor, which is odd because it contained no caramel. Maybe the top caramelized in the oven? Or did the caramel notes come from the thick graham cracker crust? I would have served this cake to my mother and she would have praised it extravagantly, but I probaby wouldn’t have served it to her again. 

I do have to mention a couple of Ming Tsai recipes I also tried last night, just to keep up.

His shrimp lollipops from Blue Ginger are a variation on a Vietnamese dish that consists of spiced shrimp paste that you mold onto the end of a stick of sugar cane. Tsai has substituted lemongrass stalks for the sugar cane and has you present these tasty appetizers with a spicy almond pesto. The lollipops were very, very good, but there was general feeling that some mayonnaise, bland and rich, would have been a better foil than that spicy pesto. You have to really love the flavors of lemongrass and Kaffir lime not to want them cut with a little mayonnaise. The recipe is here. (FYI, the lollipops in the book are pan-fried, not grilled, and there are some small differences in the quantities of several ingredients.)

I told my father to hold up a lollipop for me so I could take a picture 

and my sister cried out, "No! I'll do some food styling for you." 

I don't know. Her shot is definitely better, but maybe food styling doesn't run in our family. 

I also made Tsai's napa slaw which is not a refreshing salad, as I'd expected, but a relish, very pungent and sharp, full of fish sauce and vinegar. We ate it on burgers. I would not make it again.

On another subject, Owen texted me from camp requesting pictures of the goats and I took some shots this morning. I hesitated, wondering how it would go over in New England, the goofball from California showing off homely pictures of goats hanging out in a dust bowl. But I sent them. I'm including this picture to illustrate the stark difference between a yard with goats and one without.  It's like the border between North and South Korea. We're the North.

First they eat all the plants, then they grind the earth into talcum-fine sand with their little hooves. Currently, they spend hours every day trying to get through the fence into the neighbors' yard so they can continue with their mission of global destruction. 

Overpriced produce, Blue Ginger, and Ronnie Lott

You'll pay almost 3x as much to buy identical sprouts directly from the farmer.

Does $8 per pound for organic brussels sprouts seem like a lot to you? That’s how much a woman is charging at our local farmers’ market. Meanwhile, non-organic sprouts cost $1.99 per pound at Safeway and organic sprouts at the Community Market (a store) were $2.99 a pound on Friday. 

I think it’s reasonable to expect to pay more for organic, locally produced food at a farmers' market. But how much more? Slightly more? Twice as much? Three times as much? Four times as much? I might (might) be able to see the rationale for a 400% mark-up if you’re talking about a fragile, highly perishable, super-delicious peach. But a brussels sprout? You’ve lost me there.

Prices seem increasingly out of whack at the farmers' markets around here. I have a theory about what's going on and it's very simple and obvious, but for some reason it's deemed tasteless and cynical to question the prices farmers put on their wares. So I'll be tasteless and cynical: While it's true that people don't become farmers in order to get rich, farmers are not saints and they're not stupid. When they see a river of Michael Pollan readers streaming into the market, people who consider it a moral obligation to pay more for their food, it's only natural to figure out exactly how much more they're willing to pay. The farmers will take whatever they can get. Wouldn't you? 

So the prices keep going up and up and up, buoyed, I guess, by a very thin tranche of very rich, well-meaning shoppers. While I suppose this is good for the vendors in the short run, in the long run it hurts the whole farmers' market cause. Eight-dollars-per-pound brussels sprouts give farmers' markets a bad name and loyal, long-standing customers will eventually get annoyed and stop going. I know this, because I'm one of them. 

In fact, I'm writing this on a sunny Sunday morning in June when, historically, I would almost always be at the San Rafael Civic Center farmers' market. But I'm going to do my shopping later today at the store. 

Ok, back to the cookbooks at hand. Ming Tsai, author of Blue Ginger, went to Yale and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. Joanne Chang, author of Flour, went to Harvard and graduated with a degree in applied mathematics and economics. Make of this what you will.

Blue Ginger has been a success so far. Tsai's recipes draw from different Asian cultures and I made a Japanese grilled fish, a Thai soup, and a Chinese stir-fry this past week. All quick and easy.

-Tsai’s salmon teriyaki involved marinating the fish in soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger, and orange juice before grilling it. Very tasty, but not sweet enough for my taste in teriyaki and I’d give the recipe a B. Commenters on the Food Network site were more enthusiastic.

-Tsai’s stir-fried beef and asparagus was terrific. I’d give this recipe an A-. 

-But my favorite meal was his Thai spiced soup with mussels. You spike chicken broth with chili peppers, ginger, kaffir lime leaf, and fish sauce, then add mussels and shredded leeks.  This recipe gets an A. Sadly, I was the only person who got to taste the delicious soup. The first night I was going to make it, Mark had a migraine. The next night was the NBA draft, which meant he had to work late, and I ate alone in front of the TV.

An interesting report card had come in the mail, one that necessitated a sedative beer.

I decided to use this opportunity to watch something from the Netflix queue that Mark wouldn't be into, which turned out to be Bridegroom, an interesting, moving, somewhat syrupy documentary about a young gay man mourning the death of his lover. There was too much on-camera weeping, but I liked the film. The trailer will give you an idea whether this is your cup of tea. It wouldn't have been Mark's.

We're very different, Mark and I. I couldn't name a single player in the NBA draft and he wouldn't buy a brussels sprout at any price or appreciate a movie like Bridegroom. Last night, I dragged him to the Central Kitchen in San Francisco, a newish restaurant where everything is made in house, from the seaweed pasta to the crackers. When the waiter brought the jam jar of chicken liver mousse, he let us know that we were allowed to swipe it out with our fingers. Yuck. No thanks! Mark is usually sarcastic about playful, trendy restaurants and as he sat down, said, "Oh my God." I thought he was launching his schtick before even glancing at the menu, but what he'd seen was Ronnie Lott at the next table. He was so star-struck and distracted that he couldn't be bothered to mock the restaurant and actually praised the food. We spent the whole meal trying to figure out if anyone else in the dining room recognized Ronnie Lott. The answer appeared to be no. A great evening. I think Mark actually ended up liking Central Kitchen more than I did.

My progress in Flour will have to wait until the next post. 

Flour and Blue Ginger

breads from the lovely Clear Flour Bakery in Brookline, Mass.

Since last I wrote, Isabel went to Chicago with her friend’s church, did good works, returned, and enrolled in a summer dance program. Owen graduated from 8th grade, got a smart phone, had all his baby teeth pulled, and is now at a camp in Massachusetts where I installed him on Saturday. I put sheets on the bed, explained how to do laundry (glazed eyes, not going to happen), bought him a fan, stocked the bureau with a few dozen homemade Chips Ahoy and Biscoff cookies (from Jennifer Steinhauer's Treat Yourself), and chatted with the counselors while he pretended not to know me. Who is this weird lady who’s trying to hug me? Thank God she’s leaving! Perhaps she’s homeless. So sad. 

I stayed with Mark’s parents at their home in Cambridge while getting Owen settled. Cambridge = gorgeous and exotic to a Westerner like me. Every time I went outside there were people sculling on the river and the New England architecture and foliage remain mysterious and fascinating. Hostas? Never seen them in California. No clay tennis courts or old colonial houses either, and no Dunkin' Donuts, though apparently that's about to change. 

The short trip helped me decide which cookbooks to explore next. 

Someone had given my mother-in-law, Mary, a few slices of a simple, elegant chocolate tart made from a recipe in Joanne Chang's book Flour. She cut the slices into slivers and we all got a tiny piece for dessert one night. That tart was sublime. I plan to replicate it today or tomorrow and decided this is the moment to "do" the Flour cookbook. Five to ten recipes, no more, no less. 

Because Flour contains few savory dishes, I'm also going to be doing Blue Ginger by Ming Tsai, a long-ago gift from my father-in-law. Again, five to ten recipes, no more, no less.

Have you heard of Blue Ginger? It's the name not just of Tsai's cookbook, but of his celebrated Wellesley, Mass., restaurant. I've been wanting to eat there ever since I read a New Yorker profile of Tsai many years ago and have schemed to do so practically every summer that we've gone back to visit Mark's family. To no avail. Sunday, though, the stars finally aligned. Owen was launched at camp and my father-in-law wanted to watch the World Cup and shout at the TV, so Mary and I drove out to Wellesley to dine at Blue Ginger.

Given its glowing reputation and high prices, I expected glamour, but Blue Ginger is casual, situated on a placid suburban street next door to a saddle shop. There were many tempting items on the menu, like a Korean-style fried chicken, but I'd decided in advance that I needed to try Tsai's famous miso-marinated sablefish. It did not disappoint. The white fish separated into big, sweet, tender flakes reminiscent of Nobu's legendary miso-marinated black cod. In fact, I began to wonder if it wasn't identical to Nobu's legendary miso-marinated black cod. According to wikipedia, sablefish and black cod are the same animal and I couldn't detect any difference in the flavoring. Later, I found Tsai's recipe and it's not quite identical to Nobu's, but it's pretty damn close. I guess you could call it a clone.  

Anyway, it was fabulous. But there was a problem.

It was too easy to eat! With a steak or pork chop the same size, you'd be salting, cutting, and chewing for half an hour. Eating this soft, sweet fish was about as challenging as spooning up some custard. A knife wasn't required, and probably not even teeth. Meanwhile, Mary had ordered a dish that contained roughly a pound of noodles plus a busy curry sauce and various interesting crispy and crunchy garnishes. I'm not a fast eater, but I dispatched with my fish in about four minutes and proceeded to consume every crumb of bread in the basket while Mary tried to make a dent in that mountain of noodles. She didn't come close and left with a giant box of leftovers. 

We both agreed that this was a real glitch in our otherwise excellent dining experience. Life is very hard. 

I flew home last night to discover that someone who shall remain nameless had left the gate open and our goats had spent a few hours in the part of the yard where beautiful things  -- bougainvillea, roses, Shasta daisies, two young princess trees, pelargoniums, grapes -- had lately been growing. Not anymore. Gone. Like they were never there. It will be a few days before I can speak of this with composure.

A funny little party

 A new photojournalistic low, but I don't like to post pictures of people without asking. That would have meant explaining what a blog is. Maybe even the internet. Maybe even computers.

It’s hard to do justice to the charm and oddity of the ESL class where I volunteer once a week as an aide, but I’ll give it a shot.

Picture a group of (mostly) senior citizens just about evenly divided between sophisticated Iranians and working class Latin Americans. There’s so little cultural overlap between the two groups, it’s not even like apples and oranges. It’s like apples and shiitake mushrooms. A couple of the Iranian women dress like movie stars from the 1960s. A couple of the Latin American men are illiterate. One woman has Alzheimer’s. Another hobbles along with a cane. A few students are very earnest and motivated and a few of them come only to socialize. But everyone likes Wenceslao, a cheerful Salvadoran who wears a hat, plays the accordion, and has something like 57 grandchildren. Personal charisma transcends culture.

The end-of-term party on Wednesday was sweet and, well, a little funky. Mohammed brought Iranian CDs and played them very loud. He and Fatemeh danced for a while. Mohammed was an accountant in Iran and now breaks down boxes on the nightshift at Safeway. “But I’m happy!” he said, happily. I talked to Orfelina and Isila about the difficulties of making pupusas and Orfelina said she doesn’t stuff them, just mixes all the filling ingredients with the masa and fries ‘em up. Adolfo gave me a can of Coca-Cola for Mother’s Day. 

I'd brought in my two Persian cookbooks for vetting by the Iranian ladies, who dismissed The New Persian Kitchen, winner of the 2014 Piglet, but approved of the stout, encyclopedic New Food of Life by Najimieh Batmanglij. (I think New Persian Kitchen is too slim and contemporary for old-timers.) Najar had cooked a lentil dish for the party and Fatemeh had prepared a platter of really tasty baqala polow (rice with dill and fresh fava beans), a recipe for which I found on page 162 of Food of Life. Rosario, who is Mexican and whose front teeth are capped in gold, contributed a big foil container of very soft spaghetti.

Boy, did I eat. I ate like someone who'd spent the morning baking and hadn’t consumed anything except coffee, brownie scraps, and blueberries as of 2 p.m. and now had a splitting headache. I ate and ate and soon the headache was gone.

I ended up bringing a bunch of old favorites: these Essential New York Times Cookbook brownies, the Flour banana bread, Marcella Hazan’s (gluten-free) almond macaroons, and some cut butter cookies from Alice Waters’Art of Simple Food. 

All winners, except the butter cookies. I’d always frosted them before and learned that without frosting they’re not sweet enough.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever found myself in this strange, delightful group of people for whom I feel so much affection, but the answer is simple: I answered a Craiglist ad back in December. One of my best decisions of 2013. 

Banana bread buried in the middle

The prettiest thing I've made lately, if not the very best.

Day before yesterday, late afternoon, I was about to unload the dishwasher and thought I would mind the chore less if I had something to listen to. Although I had tried and failed to read it several decades ago, I decided to download The Screwtape Letters. by by C.S. Lewis because it was cheap ($5.95) and short. For the next 3.5 hours I did not at all mind unloading the dishwasher, cleansing a mildewy lunchbox, reducing tangerine juice, sterilizing the drawer organizers, mixing another loaf of banana bread, and then baking a completely gratuitous marmalade tart for dessert because I could not stop listening. A book beloved by both Sarah Palin (well, supposedly) and David Foster Wallace? And me?

You have to read this book!

I've baked three banana bread recipes since I last posted on the topic, omitting nuts and chocolate (when called for) partly because they would skew the comparisons, but mostly because I like the texture of banana bread to replicate the smooth, custardy texture of an actual banana.

perfect banana bread and burnt banana bread

1. The banana bread recipe from Joanne Chang's Flour (recommended by Nora K and printed here) was the most perfect and beautiful loaf. Owen thought it was less moist than my usual Beth Hensperger's recipe, but ate huge chunks of it nonetheless. He was right about it being slightly less moist, but then he and I like banana bread that is almost wet -- a bread some would describe as "dense" and "heavy." Chang's bread is light. Her recipe calls for cinnamon which I would omit in future because I like unadulterated banana flavor. But that's just my taste. This is a truly fantastic banana bread and I highly recommend. (If you make the recipe using the version online, choose a 9x5 inch loaf pan and please note that the original recipe as printed in Chang's book calls for heating the oven to 325 degrees F. Nora K said yogurt can be substituted for the sour cream/creme fraiche so I used yogurt and it worked great.)

2. The roasted banana bread from Kristin's recipe smelled incredible, first when the bananas were roasting and later when the bread was baking. I also loved the way the recipe was written. I don't ever actually mash bananas in a bowl, always drop them directly from their peels into the mixer and I appreciated seeing a recipe acknowledge this shortcut. Sadly, I managed to burn this loaf -- a thick layer of burn. But that the unburnt middle layer had the mightiest banana flavor of the loaves I've baked so far.

3. The Braddock Tavern banana bread recipe posted by Sarah Policastro in the comments to the original banana bread post is the closest to the benchmark Hensperger recipe. I think it might be better, but I would have to taste the two side by side. This recipe uses butter (which you cream rather than melt), 5 bananas (required to fill 2 cups -- lots!) and some applesauce. I made one big loaf, baked it for a longer time than specified for two small loaves, refrigerated the loaf overnight and ended up with a custardy and creamy bread, almost like a pudding. I love this bread, which is totally different from the other two banana breads and probably the closest to my personal ideal.

maybe underbaked, but very tasty.

4. I also baked the banana blondies from Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard. (Recipe here; you'll need a metric scale.) They are a gooey confection packed with bananas, white chocolate, and brazil nuts and of course they are in a whole separate category from banana bread. These blondies are the work, as Screwtape might put it, of "our Father below." I ate one blondie and am not allowed near the rest.

End of banana bread claptrap. For now.

******

On another subject, Nancy Silverton's Mozza got me started cooking mussels which I'd always thought of as "special," but which turn out to be fast and cheap and great for weeknights. Don't wait to order them in restaurants; they're much easier to make at home than a pot of soup. The other day I steamed mussels according to Big Sur Bakery Cookbook's very rudimentary recipe (white wine, herbs) but the resulting mussels couldn't hold a candle to that original zesty Silverton recipe. My husband said, "You should only make those first mussels you made." He is right. I have found my mussels.

Owen: "I didn't like them."

This past week, I also made seared scallops with cauliflower puree and tangerine reduction out of The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook. It sounds fussy, but was super-easy.You start with big sea scallops -- expensive, but you only need 2 per person. Boil 1 cup of tangerine juice (recipe says fresh; I used bottled) until it's reduced to 2 tablespoons of jammy syrup. Boil a cut-up head of cauliflower for 12 minutes and puree with 1/2 cup warm cream and 1/4 cup of chicken broth. You season then sear the scallops in a lightly oiled skillet, 3 minutes per side. Scrape cauliflower puree onto a plate (you can put everything on one platter, but I think this dish looks better apportioned to individual plates), place scallops on cauliflower, pour tangerine reduction on scallops. You now have a dinner that looks fancy, tastes wonderful, and requires almost no effort. Your kids might not eat this, which means more scallops for you. Detailed recipe is here.

topped with grapefruit, blood orange, cara cara orange

Finally, as mentioned, I baked the gorgeous marmalade tart from Big Sur Bakery. It's a generous rectangle of sweet dough topped with a cup of marmalade, homemade almond cream (sugar, orange rind, butter, chopped almonds) and sliced citrus fruit. My husband was wildly enthusiastic, but only after he picked off the wheels of stringy and bitter grapefruit. A very slight adaptation of the recipe is here; I agree with Blue Ridge Baker that the dough needs much more liquid than called for. If you try this, I'd go with oranges for the topping and skip the grapefruit, which (unlike bananas) is apparently not enhanced by baking.

I'm out of breath now and you've probably stopped reading, but this recipe from Food52 is intriguing.

Too many banana blondies?

Fat: A chicken dinner

I broke my fast and roasted a chicken last night using Jennifer McLagan's recipe from Fat which differed from the norm mainly because it called for slathering the bird with almost a stick of butter. Not strictly necessary to make a tasty chicken, but it was a very tasty chicken. On the side, served maple roasted sweet potatoes and green beans. 

After dinner I went on Facebook. The latest status update was not, as usual, from one of my friends in New York soliciting sympathy because he spilled Jasmine pearls green tea on his laptop. It was from Isabel. She had written "Isabel just had a very satisfying dinner." 

My girl.

Everyone always talks about how satisfying and comforting roasted chicken is, how easy and foolproof. I want to comment on how cheap it is.

Here's what dinner cost, minus cooking fuel which I have not figured out how to estimate, and may never:

-roasted chicken: $9.63 ($8.98 for the chicken; 65 cents for the butter; herbs I got from pot in yard)

-sweet potatoes: $2.30 ($1 for potatoes, $1 for maple syrup, 3o cents for butter)

-green beans:  $3 (a guess, I bought them a while ago)

Total: $14.93

Obviously, you can go lower than that. For instance, you could buy a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, which costs as little as $6 around here. (Burning question: WHY ARE ROTISSERIE CHICKENS CHEAPER THAN HOME ROASTED? Answer: Economies of scale. Next question: Why roast at home? Answer: Don't know. Maybe "cooking-at-home-is-cheaper" is, in fact, a big lie.) You could also buy a less expensive raw chicken. I bought a "natural chicken" from Whole Foods, which is somewhere between organic and Foster Farms* in price and pedigree. Also, the sweet potatoes were organic and maple syrup is always absurd.

 

But four of us were fed with leftovers of everything. Mark just made a chicken salad sandwich for lunch; I made broth from the chicken and it will be turned into soup for Isabel's lunch box.

That $28 oxtail is going to have to work pretty hard to justify its bony self.

*do I know for sure that it is healthier to buy "natural" chicken than Foster Farms? No. Do I know that it tastes better? No. Do I know for sure that the chickens are happier? No. Do I trust Whole Foods and the supposedly saintly vendors at farmers' markets? Not completely and no. Do I trust Foster Farms? Hell no. It drives me crazy. I feel like a chump, lacking complete information. One of the best things I've ever did was taste test organic flour vs. conventional. I still don't know if the organic flour is actually healthier, but it made a vastly better loaf of bread. At last, a tangible reason to choose one product over the other.