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

When will there be good news?

talk about hideous

The news has been relentlessly hideous. I’d feel like a simp if I launched into a chipper post about marrow bones and broccoli soup without at least mentioning how wrong and unstable everything feels, and by “everything” I mean Turkey, Orlando, Donald Trump rallies, bickering about bathrooms, shootings of civilians by cops, shootings of cops by civilians, inflammatory rhetoric on both the right and left, irritating smugness in certain quarters, intolerable racism in others, the stupid, stupid politics of sushi, self-pity, self-righteousness, speeches full of empty pieties, speeches full of utter nonsense and nauseating bigotry. Everything.

And as I was writing this, Nice. 

The world is coming unglued. 

Like a lot of people, I’ve been darkly obsessed with the news lately. Now, I shall proceed with the aforementioned chipper post about marrow bones and broccoli soup. 

*If you have only ever ordered marrow bones in restaurants, you need to try roasting them at home. Five bones made an easy, curiously luxurious meal for two and cost less than $5. I used the marrow bones prep method in Jennifer McLagan’s Bones: Soak the bones in water with 2 tablespoons of kosher salt for 24 hours. Change the water (and salt) every 6-8 hours. Pat bones dry. Salt and pepper. Roast on an oiled baking sheet at 450 degrees F for about 25 minutes. Serve with gremolata and crusty bread. Delicious.

*The same day I bought the marrow bones, I also bought beef cheeks, which were also unbelievably cheap. I’d never seen them in their uncooked state and they really do look cheeky -- round, plump, red. The meat requires the same long, slow cooking as short ribs or chuck, but is softer, the shreds finer, the flavor subtly different. I used the cheeks to make these terrific rich, dark barbacoa beef cheek tacos from Food52. I used a guajillo pepper instead of the ancho (no reason, that’s just what I had), forgot the peanut butter, and recommend patting dry the cheeks before searing. Otherwise, I followed the recipe as written, including making the excellent pickled onion accompaniment. Highly recommend. 

*Since that meat extravaganza, it’s been all vegetarian food from Love & Lemons, a book I will own in a few days if the librarian thinks it looks damaged. I’m afraid to say that the book might, to a very discerning eye, look damaged. I would probably say it looks gently used but will not argue if asked to replace it. I should have been more careful.

While I don’t buy cookbooks anymore, I’d be happy to add this one to my collection. The dishes in Love & Lemons are great. I’ve liked everything I’ve tried, particularly the light, lovely chickpea- carrot ribbon tacos. I think of this as young people vegetarian food. Millennial vegetarian food. Love & Lemons is full of bowls, grains, nut milks, miso, lemon. Lots of mixing of raw and cooked ingredients, everything bright, breezy, and streamlined. I worked my way through the entire soup chapter of one of the Greens cookbooks (Baby Boomer/Gen X vegetarian) in the late 1990s and I would be chopping vegetables for hours to make one pot of soup. In Love & Lemons you cook a few vegetables quickly, puree them with nuts or miso or coconut milk, and you have dinner. Here’s the recipe for a  Love & Lemons broccoli-coconut soup that we liked a lot. I used an onion instead of a leek and chicken stock instead of vegetable, but if you follow the recipe exactly, it’s vegan. I’ve got a super-easy cauliflower soup in the works for tonight, freeing me up to spend even more time reading about current events and muttering to myself.

It was a short affair, but passionate

Bread is in the eye of the beholder.

June 10: The recipe for a “life-changing” gluten-free bread appears on Food52. Gazing at the picture, you shake your head. Calling this brick of nuts and seeds "bread" is like calling soy paste shaped into a cylinder “sausage.” You write a note to a friend: “I would eat this -- it looks very crunchy and tasty -- but it's not bread. In 30 years we'll be scoffing at the ridiculous things we cooked and believed about nutrition in 2014. It's the honey-sweetened carob brownie of our era.”

You tell ‘em, Jennifer. What a snot. But you grew up on health foods and look where that got you? You’re no healthier today than all your friends from the 1970s who got to eat real brownies.
 

July 15: You stop by your sister’s house to drop off the DVDs of Borgen. She says, “I want you to taste this strange health bread Margi (friend) made.” She toasts and butters a slice of dense, seedy bread and presents it to you. You take a bite. It has a complex texture and nutty flavor with just a hint of underlying slime. The slime doesn’t bother you at all, just adds to the complexity. You say, “Oh my God, this is amazing bread! I love this. Where did Margi get the recipe?” 

Justine: “Food52.”

Sigh. Of course.

July 16: Why are all the people who work at Whole Foods so young and groovy and all the people who work at Safeway so . . . not?  Do the managers at Whole Foods look for fabulous people with nose rings who are saving for a trek through Nepal while the managers at Safeway look for downtrodden lifers with kids? Honestly, you prefer Safeway, but for today’s errand -- buying the ingredients for that delicious bread -- you must endure Whole Foods. You search around and finally have to steel yourself to ask one of the groovy clerks: “Where can I find the psyllium husks?” It turns out they're about 2 feet away from the chia seeds, also on your list. Then, so the cashier can be sure you’re a real nut, you grab a bottle of a coconut probiotic drink from the refrigerator case. 

July 17: You mix the dough, which isn't beautiful and springy like yeasted bread dough, but a damp, rough, swarthy paste. You let it sit for a few hours and then bake the paste. You cut a slice. Divine. It has the rich flavor of coconut oil and that pleasant hint of slime -- from the psyllium husks? the flaxseeds? -- plus lots of gentle crunch. Perhaps it’s a bit crumbly, but you can fix that in future loaves. 

July 18: Mark was skeptical but loves the bread. He calls it “birdseed bread” and toasts it for breakfast and dinner. You eat a piece with butter for your afternoon snack. YUM! A new staple for the household. You don’t personally care that it’s gluten-free, but appreciate that it’s so full of fiber and Omega 3 fatty acids from the chia seeds. You’re not sure exactly what fatty acids are or why Omega 3s are good, you just know they are. 

July 19: You have a piece of the bread for breakfast with some avocado. Maybe the coconut oil flavor is a bit unctuous. Perhaps there's still a place in your life for the occasional Acme baguette.

July 20: You have another piece of the bread with butter for a snack. Today, it brings to mind an under-seasoned veggie burger. You can't finish your snack.

July 21: You think about having a piece for breakfast. You stare at the remainder of the loaf, oily and coarse, and try to think how you can make it palatable. Peanut butter? Jam? Yuck. No. What happened? You adored this bread only three days ago! Mark looks at you looking at the bread and says, “I'm done. It’s bread you can only take in very small doses.” 

You take the remaining chunk of bread down to the dung pit, a.k.a. yard, for the chickens, but the goats head butt the birds out of the way so they can have at it. Bullies. If they'd asked nicely, maybe you'd let them keep it. Instead, you take the bread away from the goats and crumble it into tiny pieces that you scatter all over the yard. The chickens devour the crumbs, which means their eggs will be full of Omega 3s, whatever those are. You just know they’re good for you.

I think I get it now

Not to belabor this, but I made the Roberta’s Cookbook burrata and apple salad last night for our first course, and I made Ed Lee’s sauteed squid and bacon salad from Smoke and Pickles for our second, and all my questions about yesterday’s Piglet verdict were answered. I think. I will never know for sure what Aran Goyoaga thought about these cookbooks other than what she wrote, but I may have a better idea of what she was getting at.

The Roberta’s salad consisted of chopped, cold Pink Lady apples tossed in a bowl with burrata (glorified, creamy mozzarella) which fell apart and coated all the apple chunks. You’re supposed to add sorrel, but there was no sorrel to be had, so I added watercress leaves, just a few. Then I lightly salted this salad, put it on plates, and drizzled with honey. 

It was clean, bright, light, refreshing, all the flavors distinct. Beautiful. I flipped through Roberta’s and can see that this is typical of the Roberta’s style, at least in the salad department. Most of their salads don’t have dressings. For instance the other salad Goyoaga made was a beet salad that is “dressed” with just some creme fraiche. Another salad is “dressed” with celery juice.

To assemble the Ed Lee salad, first you make a really delicious, intense dressing of tahini, Asian sesame oil, and lemon. Fry some bacon. Fry some squid. Put it all together on a bed of arugula. Find the antonyms of all the adjectives I used in the first two sentences of the last paragraph and you have a roughly accurate (but highly unflattering) portrait of this salad. Messy, murky, a little heavy, not too pretty. But you could also say: gutsy, dark, rich, and full of strong flavor. (A chef could make this salad handsome, even if I couldn’t.) One of Goyoaga’s complaints about Lee was the “sauciness” of his food. This salad was definitely not "drowning" in sauce/dressing, but it had a dressing, a very assertive dressing that tied everything together. If you don’t want everything tied together, if you like your flavors pure and clean, you’re going to resist this salad and probably most the dishes in Lee’s book. 

This is a completely valid reason for choosing Roberta’s over Smoke and Pickles. Depending on your tastes, this could also be a completely valid reason for choosing Smoke and Pickles over Roberta’s.

I like both styles of cooking. I preferred the burrata salad to the squid, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of Lee’s dishes, too. I think the deciding factor for me would be that there are about five dishes I can make from Roberta’s without mail ordering 'nduja, black truffles, or bottarga, begging the butcher for pork collars, smoking my own ricotta, or figuring out how to grow sucrine. 

But it’s all moot because in the final round this morning, Roberta’s lost to The New Persian Kitchen. 

A misspent Monday

This post is for serious cookbook nerds only. Anyone else who reads it will roll their eyes and pity me, so please go do something else.

Ed Lee’s Smoke and Pickles lost to Roberta’s Cookbook in the Piglet this morning and I found myself surprisingly put out. You can read the judgment here . I had a handful of problems with this verdict and here they are:

First of all, I’ve made the salmon rice bowl from Smoke and Pickles that reviewer Aran Goyoaga tested and it was not, in my opinion, “too saucy.” I thought it was lovely, one of my favorite dishes from the book. The sauce she refers to is a remoulade that you add to your individual rice bowl and it was as easy to control how much you dolloped on your portion as it is to control how much butter you put on your toast. She made the same “too saucy” criticism of Lee's sauteed squid and bacon salad, which I haven't tried, but here again, it looks like one could easily calibrate the quantity of dressing so as not to “drown” the squid. I had plenty of problems with Smoke and Pickles, which I cooked from extensively last year, but her criticisms didn’t add up.  I felt that Goyoaga’s indifference/dislike was about something more than "too saucy," something that she didn’t or couldn’t pinpoint, or pinpointed and chose not to articulate. I wish she had. I still might have disagreed, but the review would have made more sense to me.

Second, I couldn’t see how the dishes she described from Roberta’s Cookbook -- burrata salad, beet salad, sea bass, gingerbread -- offered more “surprise” than the food in Smoke and Pickles. A beet salad? Were there other truly "surprising" dishes in the book that she just didn't happen to mention in the review? Or was "surprise" an unfortunate choice of words? Because from what I read in the review, Lee's was by far the more "surprising" cookbook.   

Third, I have an outsider complex and wanted the Korean guy from Kentucky to prevail over the Brooklyn pizzeria where they shot an episode of Girls. This is a problem with me, not Goyoaga's analysis. And it is silly.

Since I’m taking the week off, I decided to misspend the day and drove over to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy of Roberta’s. My family will be delighted to know that we’re having both a burrata salad and sauteed squid and bacon salad for dinner tonight. Someone should videotape this meal. 

Meanwhile, I baked the Roberta’s gingerbread, which Goyoaga describes as “moist and full of flavor and surprisingly easy to convert to gluten free.” How could it not be full of flavor when it's so full of ingredients? This gingerbread contains twenty two ingredients, including black pepper, caraway seeds, cinnamon, coriander, celery salt, juniper berries, almond flour, regular flour, cornstarch, honey, molasses, brown sugar. . . 

You could probably edit that list without losing much.

Results? It’s spectacularly good and seriously hot. Your whole mouth glows from the spices, especially if you eat it while it’s warm. I love that heat and guarantee I will be the only one in this household who does. 

There's only one problem with this gingerbread, but it's a big one: STRINGS. The grated ginger had long, tough fibers that you absolutely do not want in your gingerbread or your mouth. I followed the book’s grating instructions to the letter and when I looked at the photo of gingerbread in the book, saw that there are strings in their gingerbread too. How is this possible? Do they really serve gingerbread with strings in it? Are my strings just tougher and more offensive than theirs? Was something wrong with my ginger? How did Goyoaga not encounter the string problem? Did she encounter it and not mention it? Is this something a Vitamix might fix? Something one could avoid by mincing instead of grating the ginger? 

see? 

Anyway, if you're still reading: While the Roberta's gingerbread is fabulous, strings or no, I still think the wrong book won. I have a lot more to say on this. Sadly.

The uninteresting life of a late adopter

bad old peeler and wonderful new one

I haven't been cooking anything interesting lately for various uninteresting reasons, but tomorrow I'll be able to throw myself back into it.

The salmon salad from Sunday Suppers at Lucques was the last straw for me with Suzanne Goin as it required 10 separate cooking/holding vessels. It’s a delicious, opulent salad of beets, tiny potatoes, and roasted salmon atop dandelion greens dressed in a mustardy vinaigrette. While the beets quickly bled into the salmon (ugly), that didn’t matter because I was the only one who ate this salad. I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a couple of days and was very happy until I was suddenly so sick of it I had to throw it to the chickens. Depressing, given the cost of salmon, but I couldn't force down another bite. 

My complaint about the dish is my overarching complaint about Goin's books: Too many steps, too many dishes to wash. I like Suzanne Goin, I like her cookbooks, and next time I go to Los Angeles will try to eat at one of her restaurants, but I just can’t cook like this. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll see what Tad Friend has to say about The A.O.C. Cookbook vs. Roberta’s over at the Piglet. I wait with bated breath.

Ok, about  the Piglet. So homogenized this year! I’m going to swim agains the current and say that while I rolled my eyes at the time, I sort of miss those weird wild card judgments of Piglets past. Eccentric, half-assed verdicts like Roz Chast’s. These bizarre write-ups added spice. They got my dander up. Rather than telling people to write balanced reviews informed by conscientious recipe testing, it seemed like the Piglet organizers just sent the books out to a bunch of creative people and let them respond however they chose. While the results were sometimes lame, they were also very genuine and oddly illuminating. I learned a lot from Roz Chast’s review. I got a glimpse of how many ordinary people approach cookbooks, which is to say, they don't really give a damn. And while I didn’t love Alice Waters’ nose-holding verdict, she was using her own personal yardstick, not following a template. The Piglet organizers have clearly raised their standards and I, for one, find that I am a little sorry. 

My two favorite reviews ever:  Nora Ephron’s and Gabrielle Hamilton’s. 

Still waiting for the Benton’s bacon so I can’t start Momofuku. What should I do in the meantime?

The pasta that broke my spirit

Twelve vessels to make a pasta dish, people. Twelve. I’m counting saucepans, skillets, baking sheets, and bowls. I blithely waded into Suzanne Goin’s penne with cauliflower, kale, pine nuts and currants from Sunday Suppers at Lucques last night and soon found myself drowning. I love Goin as an author and cheerful kitchen spirit, but this dish made me so grumpy. When the pasta was finally done I didn’t even set the table, we just hunched in our corners and ate. After all that work, it wasn’t even particularly good. Mark said, “When are you going to start making some of your staples again, the ten dishes you know we like?”

I don’t think I answered.

I looked on Chowhound and other cooks have run afoul of this dish. That is some consolation.

I also baked Goin's outstanding olive oil cake with candied tangerines, but because the pasta was so elaborate, never got around to candying the tangerines. I don't feel even slightly bad about that. Fortunately, this cake can stand beautifully on its own. It's moist and very plush, almost downy. Yes, it's plain, but in a delicious way. It's also easy and you should try it. A version of the recipe is here, though Goin has you use a 9-inch pan and does not call for orange zest.

So far so good with the Piglet, no? I would have chosen Whole-Grain Mornings over Summerland, but Christina Tosi did a snappy job overall. I'm completely fascinated by her description of the pistachio-apricot jam-cacao nib granola she improvised after reading Whole-Grain Mornings. 

Bryan Boitano isn’t such a graceful writer, but then I can barely stand up on skates, so I will shut up. At least he makes it perfectly clear why he chose the book he did (The New Persian Kitchen), which has not always been the case with Piglet judges.  

Forget it, Jake, it's February

Are you my Benton's bacon?

I’ll briefly rouse myself from February doldrums to link to the first round of the 2014 Piglet in which Suzanne Goin's A.O.C. Cookbook trounced Balaboosta by Einat Admony. Judge Sam Sifton, fellow lover of low-hanging fruit, was, like me, won over by Suzanne Goin's easyish lamb meatballs. 

I told you they were good! I wish someone would plagiarize the recipe so I could link you to it.

I spent some time with the losing Balaboosta a few weeks ago at the library and, like Sifton, found the recipes almost aggressively unappealing. A chopped salad of canned beans, canned corn, and canned fried onions (or something like that) convinced me not to check it out. In judging a cookbook there's no substitute for actually trying the recipes, but Sifton is correct that the author first needs to persuade you that you want to.

Poor Balaboosta. I don't like criticizing a book I haven't cooked from. I'll probably have to check it out now as penance.

Since the last post I've "officially" started cooking from Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques which, like its sister volume, A.O.C., is full of composite dishes that require significant chunks of time and special ingredients. This hasn't deterred me from making a few inroads. I haven't written about them, though, because here's something else that requires significant chunks of time and special ingredients: writing blog posts. By special ingredients I mean "interesting material," obviously. When a writer is in high spirits she can do a lot with bland ingredients, but it's February, guys, and I'm not at my best in February. Sort of like a deciduous fruit tree. 

A roundup dishes I've made from Lucques over the last few days will illustrate the lack of interesting material:

-Goin's winter squash risotto with radicchio was superb. The radicchio cut the monotonous sweetness of the risotto nicely. But if there was anything fresh to say about winter squash risotto, I couldn't think of it. 

-Goin's winter squash soup with candied pepitas was also lovely. I was hoping the candied pepitas (pumpkin seeds) would give me a new angle on squash soup, but when I was about to candy the pepitas to sprinkle on the soup I realized I didn't have any pepitas. Is there anything duller than prose about winter squash soup? Not a blog post.

-Dark, coarse, and full of molasses, Goin's chocolate stout cake is a type of cake I personally dislike. Harsh. Blackish. The problem is me, not the cake and I didn't want to write about that. I did, however, love the Guinness ice cream that Goin suggests as an accompaniment. Rich, mellow, slightly slushy, delicious. If you've ever struggled to imagine what Doc’s beer milkshake in Cannery Row tasted like, make the ice cream. It will help. (Note: she only uses 1/3 cup sugar in the recipe as printed in the book and I'd go with that.) This could have been a blog post. A short one.

-Over the weekend I was all set to make Goin's leg of lamb with chorizo stuffing, romesco potaotes, and black olives, but the 40-minute trip to the Mexican market to pick up chorizo never happened. The piece of lamb I'd bought started to get old and I ended up making a Joy of Cooking lamb curry. I'm not sure why I didn't use a recipe from one of my Indian cookbooks. Probably because I suspected they'd call for curry leaves or some spice I didn't have in the house. The Joy lamb curry was unbelievably bland -- not worth writing about, reading about, or eating. 

As you can see, I'm wallowing in Lucques without a lot of verve. As with the chocolate stout cake, the problem is me, not the book. I'm telling you, it's February.

Meanwhile, a batch of David Chang’s cabbage kimchi ferments in the refrigerator and my order of Benton's bacon (a favorite Chang ingredient) is waiting to be filled. Although they charged my credit card on January 22, the Benton's web site now indicates the delay is 5 weeks, which takes us into March. I don't love March, but it's better than February. That had better be some good bacon.

Making blog posts out of molehills

Maybe we should've drunk the extra glaze.

You should know I'm a big fan of Smoke and Pickles no matter how much I might complain, which is what I’m about to do. 

Tuesday night I cooked Edward Lee’s pork chops with ginger-peach glaze, a recipe that involves brining chops in a fascinating black syrup of gin and sorghum (or molasses) then searing them in a cast iron skillet.

You spread peach glaze (3 fresh peaches, wine, honey, ginger) on the seared meat and crumble pistachio gremolata (garlic, pistachio, parsley) over the glaze. Put the skillet in the oven and 12 minutes later you have delicious, juicy pork chops with a fragrant peachy-nutty topping. Loved by all in the household.

But let's focus on the negative: After making the pork chops, there was more than a cup of peach glaze and roughly a cup of gremolata left over. There was more left over than I’d used and it wasn’t like I’d been stingy. How annoying. I checked Chowhound, where they’re also cooking through Smoke and Pickles, to see if anyone else was irritated by the waste of peaches and pistachios. No. No one was irritated. One cook remarked equably that he/she had tossed the extra gremolata into sauteed green beans. Another used it to flavor some beets. 

I admire their resourcefulness, but I really didn’t want extra peach glaze and gremolata. Chef Lee can store extra glaze and gremolata in his walk-in refrigerator and use it on the next round of pork chops or maybe some fabulous new dish he dreamed up because he's an artist. It's like he just mixed a little extra paint. 

I’m not an artist and our refrigerator is a hellhole of  juice boxes, caperberries, hoisin sauce, leftover pizza, mayonnaise, beer, about-to-expire cream, tuna salad, horseradish, sprouting carrots, and parmesan rinds. How I feel about my refrigerator is how Nora Ephron felt about her purse.

I hate to waste food, but it took me a lot longer to write this than it did to decide to throw out the glaze and gremolata. I waste food all the time and usually it's my fault, but this one's on Edward Lee. A shame either way.

Conclusion: Great pork chops. If you make them, cut the glaze and gremolata by two thirds.  

Lee’s warm roasted okra and cauliflower salad, which I served with the pork, was less of a hit. Oh, what am I saying! It wasn’t a hit at all. My friend Melanie and I ate it for lunch the next day so it didn't go to waste, but don't bother making this for picky eaters. Like you needed me to tell you that.

On the other hand, these quinoa chocolate chip cookies were a hit with picky eaters. Soft, crunchy, substantial. You can tell they’re healthy, but after 24 hours they're almost gone. The unholy power of chocolate chips. 

Sixty days to Halloween

One day soon Owen is going to stop making things out of every box that comes in the door and I will be sad.

Everyone in the the household under the age of 17 is back in school as of yesterday. I let so much material pile up without posting that I must now resort to a list just to clear the decks.

-This Food52 ceviche is lovely. Halibut is expensive and the piece I bought came attached to skin which made it hard to cut the meat into neat cubes unless you’re really adept at skinning fish. I’m not. In future, I’d buy something skinless and less costly. I initially wrote “skinless and cheaper” but the word “cheap” is a turnoff when discussing fish, as is the word “grey.” In the Time/Life Cooking of Latin America the ceviche recipe calls for “grey sole” and I frowned and turned the page. Irrational. The really beautiful part of this particular ceviche is the watermelon. You think you're just eating a melange of fish and soft red tomato and then you get a bite of crisp, intensely sweet red watermelon. That’s as exciting as eating salad ever gets. Inspired by the excellent ceviche, I tried making this tomato and watermelon salad last night and it just didn’t work for me. Soggy. Since we now had watermelon around and I’m apparently on a Food52 kick, I also whipped up a batch of their boozy watermelon rosemary lemonade in the Vitamix and it was refreshing and not especially intoxicating, which I appreciated.

-Yes. I bought a Vitamix. That's the box in the picture above. My sister picked it up at Costco and it was a pretty good deal, though I'm not sure any Vitamix is precisely a "good deal" unless you inherit it. We’ve used the Vitamix to make milkshakes, creamy alfredo sauce, frozen margaritas, and the aforementioned boozy watermelon lemonade and while I’ve not yet made a kale smoothie, it's true that the minute you buy a Vitamix you start thinking about kale smoothies. I was going to wait to buy the Vitamix until the end of the year and see if the desire passed, but it was preoccupying me to the point of obsession. As Oscar Wilde said, “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it," and while that didn’t work out so well for Oscar, I think it’s sound advice, certainly when what you're talking about is the purchase of a blender. There’s no point in obsessing about a blender for months if you can just go buy the blender and free your mind up to obsess about other things. Like date ice cream. I've always wanted to make date ice cream and I think with a Vitamix this will at last be possible. 

-I was reluctant to end my allegiance of 20 years to Katharine Hepburn's brownies, but this brownie recipe from The Essential New York Times Cookbook is a knockout. I should be glad that I can now bake even tastier brownies, but discovering this recipe was wrenching and unsettling and I feel disloyal to the Katharine Hepburn brownies.

I'll get over it.

You can't judge a book by its cover, chapter 17,033

This is Fireworks. When we got her I thought she was the scrawniest, ugliest chicken I had ever seen and I found Owen's choice of a name darkly funny. I don't think he meant to be darkly funny. I think he chose "Fireworks" because she was orange and maybe because she looked like she'd just survived an explosion. She's some kind of bantam frizzle and she's very shrill and quick, always racing around and squawking.

She was so runty and hideous that I assumed she had to be a loser in all departments, including intelligence. When will I ever learn? All day I've been trying to think of a specific and dramatic example to illustrate Fireworks' cleverness, but it's hard with a chicken. I'll just say that on many occasions I've noticed her snaking a bread crust away from a bigger chicken or chasing off a crow. There is also the fact that she's managed to survive countless bobcat, hawk, and raccoon attacks on the flock. That's no mean feat. At this point, she may be our most senior hen.

see how much smaller and homelier?

Last night I got home at 10 and went straight down to shut the chickens up in their house. I found Fireworks pacing around in the run, muttering. Odd. All the hens are usually inside well before dark. Had she forgotten how to climb the ladder to the door? I picked her up, popped her inside the house, shut the door.

We aren't carpenters.

The door doesn't close cleanly and I fumbled with the lock for a nanosecond and when I couldn't get the rod to go through the slot, gave up because it was dark and I figured it wasn't a big deal. This is called cutting corners. I turned around to leave when -- BOOM -- the door flew open and Fireworks and the other bantam, Birthday, came screaming down the ladder. Slithering after them came a skunk. The skunk promptly sprayed and vanished into the night.

My point is this: freaky little Fireworks was the only hen smart enough to leave the house when that skunk turned up earlier in the evening. All the rest of the hens were up there thinking the skunk might be too full after eating all their eggs (which he had) to bother eating them. More likely, they weren't thinking at all. But Fireworks? So on the ball.

Of course, most of the hens were roosting on a pole a few feet above the skunk and because Fireworks doesn't roost she was in a particularly vulnerable position. But Birthday doesn't roost either and she was just hanging out with the skunk. Frankly, I think any hen, roosting or not, would have been wise to make herself scarce when that skunk appeared. As Brad Pitt said in World War Z, "Movement is life." Or something like that.

The other point is that sometimes you're rewarded for laziness. If I'd taken two seconds to actually lock the door like I knew I should, the skunk would have been trapped in the hen house all night and Lord only knows what I would have found in there this morning.

*****

I just made this roasted broccoli with smoked paprika and almonds for dinner. It is fabulous and easy and you should try it.

I owe him big

could be lunch, could be breakfast

Our goat Natalie was supposed to kid last week and I planned a short business trip to Monterey based on that calculation. But yesterday I could either leave with the kids yet unborn or forfeit the hotel deposit. What would you have done? As I was about to walk out the door, Mark said, "I'm freaking out about the things being born while you're gone."

I don't know the details, but there were three things and at least one of them has its father's floppy Nubian ears and Owen and Mark were out there in the dark. I know this because Mark sent pictures that I found in my in-box this morning. The absence of text could mean nothing and could mean he was too furious to type at 1:24 a.m. when he pressed send.

I cooked two noteworthy dishes this week. Both are Amanda Hesser recipes.

The first was yogurt with quinoa, dates and almonds, a recipe she posted a year ago on Food52 that I knew I would one day have to make. Wednesday was the day. It's one of those strange dishes I didn't exactly love as I was eating it, but have found myself thinking about ever since. It's a little sweet and a little salty, the yogurt creamy, the dates  sticky, the nuts crunchy and the quinoa crunchy in a completely different way. The tiny amount of olive oil you drizzle on top is crucial. You should try this recipe and see what you think. My only "complaint" would be that 6 ounces of Greek yogurt was more than a delicate little bird like me could eat at a sitting.

Veal is expensive. It should be.

There's a whole category of dishes I've heard about all my life but never actually tasted. Offhand: crepes suzette, syllabub, summer pudding, steak and kidney pie, blancmange, beef Wellington, lobster Newburg, Cornish pasties. Hundreds of them!

Vitello tonnato -- cold poached veal served with tuna mayonnaise -- topped the list and because it was hot last week, I made it. Used the recipe from The Essential New York Times Cookbook.

Too bad we only had half a lemon, as this is a dish that requires serious garnish.

First of all: expensive. Second: ugly. And not just when I make it. In fact, my vitello tonnato is comparatively lovely. Third: Delicious.

Sadly, the price and appearance guarantee I won't make this again.

I wonder if this is one of these dishes no one will make in 50 years. The recipe will exist forever, of course, but once people stop cooking it, the dish is dead. Few enough people make vitello tonnato now that I'd never seen or eaten it and I don't see that trend reversing, certainly not when the meat of baby cows costs $20 per pound. Plus: baby cows.

Or am I wrong? Do a lot of people make vitello tonnato and I just don't know about it?

Mark gets to choose everything I cook for the next 10 days.

Just a little more from the shrill schoolmarm

Doesn't that look heavenly.

I'm an early riser by nature and Mark is an early riser because he has a job. Isabel gets herself up and out the door without any help or encouragement and has done so since she was, I don't know, 6 weeks old? But Owen burrows under the covers and waits until we've gone from gentle nudging to hoarse shouting. I realize this is not unusual behavior in a 12-year-old American boy and, yes, that does make it easier.

Once Owen is up and dressed, after he's dawdled over breakfast, he will announce he can't do his morning animal chores (feeding chickens and goats, 7 minutes total) because it will make him late for school. Then we argue and I tell him, no, it won't make him late for school, he has plenty of time, he settles down in a chair and counters with some long-winded rationale that takes longer than the chores themselves, etc. etc. etc.

Day before yesterday Owen was spectacularly late getting up and I had arrived at the end of my rope. I told him that he has to do his animal chores and I don't CARE if it makes him late for school, I don't CARE if he has to do detention, and going forward this is the rule so he can stay in bed or he can get up when we wake him up, his choice. I think the neighbors might have heard me "say" this.

He did the animal chores, ran all the way to school, wasn't late. It's too early to declare victory, but yesterday he popped out of bed and we had a great morning. I made Smitten Kitchen's big latkes with fried eggs.  I didn't have any; breakfasts aren't my thing. Mark loved the whole dish. Isabel ate only the latke and liked it. Owen ate the egg, took a single bite of the latke, and declared it "not the best." He took the uneaten latke out to the chickens, didn't have to be told.

Analyzing the differing reports and knowing the sources, I feel confident saying that the big latkes from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook are sensational. Recipe is here.

The verdict on her broccoli rabe panini with mozzarella was also mixed. I loved it and Owen exulted that this was the first dinner he's liked in a long time. Isabel opened her sandwich and picked out every tendril of broccoli rabe. Mark would have done the same, but tried to put on a good face.

Poor guy. I love broccoli rabe, but even I can see how hard it could be to love.

More soon. It's 5:37 a.m. Pacific Time and as of 5 minutes ago they STILL hadn't posted the day's Tournament of Cookbooks results.  

Just make the shrimp and make the cake. The end.

Thirteen people tasted 13 ice creams.

Pretty much the only thing I have been making is ice cream, and lots of it, but that's for a larger project so I can't share insights here. All I will say is: curry powder in chocolate ice cream? Not as horrid as you would think. Beet sorbet? Worse.

Beyond ice cream, not much happening in the kitchen, although I made a few good dishes over the last 10 days.

-fougasse from Bread and Chocolate. It's been impossible to stay "on book" lately, though this week I plan to tear through a bunch of Fran Gage recipes. I did make her version of fougasse, the decorative Provencal bread, that was soft, oily and rosemary-scented. I think it was supposed to look like this, but I failed to slash the bread all the way through and it looked like this:

looked stupid, tasted great

 Both loaves were gone within two hours of being baked.

-steak for a Brooklyn backyard barbecue from The Food52 Cookbook. Meat rubbed with chopped garlic, mint, Spanish smoked paprika, salt, and olive oil, and grilled. Contributed to Food52 by Giulia Melucci, author of the memoir I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti, but more importantly, sister of our  great friend Matt Melucci. Recipe here. We loved.

-spicy grilled shrinp, also from The Food52 Cookbook. These were even better than the steaks, and that's saying something. Super-easy. Made them twice in one week and that is also saying something. You should try this recipe. They are a bit spicy and some people won't like that. Let them eat hot dogs. More shrimp for you.

-Finally, because I have been making so much ice cream, we've had a lot of extra egg whites. Cups and cups of them. It led me to a chiffon cake from Susan Purdy's The Perfect Cake. I love a lot of dishes that I never make again because they are too tricky, too time consuming, too fattening, too expensive, or maybe in the end we just didn't love them quite enough. I've made this cake twice in ten days. It is not a "special" cake, just a delicious, fluffy everyday vanilla cake with the springiness of angel food, but a little something extra. Something extra that has a name: oil.

Chiffon cake, barely adapted from The Perfect Cake

(Purdy says to use cake flour, but you can use all-purpose. She also says to bake for 65 minutes, but I  would start checking at 45.)

1 cup egg whites at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 1/2 cups sugar (10.5 ounces; 300 g)
2 1/2 cups flour (8 3/4 ounces; 250 g)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup neutral vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Line the bottom of an angel food cake pan with parchment paper.   Do not grease the pan.

2. Beat the egg whites and cream of tartar until foamy. Gradually add 2/3 cup of the sugar, beating until  satiny, nearly stiff peaks form. Set aside.

3. In another bowl, sift together the flour, remaining sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the water, oil, and vanilla and beat until well blended.

4. Fold the egg whites into the batter, gently so as to preserve the volume. Pour into the pan and bake until lofty and golden. A cake tester will come out clean.

5. Cool in the pan. Run a knife round the edges to loosen and invert onto a rack. Peel off the parchment. Slice with a serrated knife.