Bayless v. Kennedy: The winner is. . .

The Bayless versus Kennedy competition? Bayless wins. But you already guessed that. I haven't done the tallies for all the individual books, and I'm not even sure Bayless will prevail in a by-the-numbers comparison, but the dread with which I came to approach the Diana Kennedy books can not be overemphasized. In the last week or so of this experiment I only wanted to cook from Bayless because he was friendly and encouraging and didn't bombard me with dishes calling for young iguana and a special mushroom that you can only get in late April in northern Chiapas when it's raining. I made that up, but it's a fair exaggeration.

I'm going to assess the cookbooks one by one and I'll only offer a review if I made ten recipes or more. Is that fair? Ten? Or should it be fifteen? 

Here's the first:

 

Mexico, One Plate at a Time

Rick Bayless

I made 16 dishes from this cookbook:

Worth the price of the book -- 0

Great -- 3

Good -- 10

So-so -- 3

Flat-out bad -- 0

Mexico, One Plate at a Time is a companion to Bayless's TV show, and the ratio of flowery preamble to recipe is definitely too high. On the other hand, there's a useful Q&A section attached to each category of dish and I learned a lot just reading these. I like this amiable, conversational and informative cookbook and will use it again. But I don't think it's as strong as Bayless's other books, and it isn't a shelf essential. 

 

Not quite so many nooks and crannies

Make an eggy yeast dough and let it rise. Cut, as for biscuits.

Cook in a skillet, as for pancakes, except without butter and for about five times as long.

 

The discs of dough rise straight up, like the cylindrical towers on a storybook castle. Cool. Split with a fork, toast, butter, top with jam.

 

I have no brief with Thomas's, but homemade english muffins are tastier, less flimsy, less cottony, albeit also less craggy. Overall, better. But how much better? I don't buy english muffins very often so I probably won't make these very often, but it was fun, as always, to see the mystique of another supermarket staple evaporate, and so quickly.

We had old friends over for dinner the other night. It seems like yesterday that they were new friends, but suddenly they're old friends. I braised beef short ribs a la Mexicana from Rick Bayless's Mexico, One Plate at a Time, a dish that showcased the unholy alliance of poblano chiles, white onions, and tomatoes. I'm putting a black mark in the book beside this recipe for the faintly kidney-like flavor created by those ingredients. I only ate kidneys once, eleven years ago, in Ireland, and that sufficed for all eternity. 

Here's Bayless on the dish: "Red white and green -- joyous colors on the national flag of Mexico. Red tomato, white onion and green chile -- awesome, amicable flavors on the plates of Mexico."

I don't agree with him, but he's such a cheery guy.

Here's another Bayless effusion: "Mexico is a hunble country that's been kept together, in great part, by rice pudding."

Wild overstatement, but sweet.

I served Bayless's rice pudding, an easy stovetop dish flavored with cinnamon and orange rind, and dotted with raisins. At the end of his recipe, where most cookbook writers would coldly command you to "serve immediately," Bayless writes: "A wonderful, warm treat awaits." 

The pudding was warm, but too soupy to be quite wonderful. (The soupiness may have been my fault; although I followed his instructions to the letter, I believe I misinterpreted.) In any case, I can't bring myself to photograph food when there are people around. Even old friends. 

It is coming on time for a new cookbook. I was truly devastated by yesterday's news from Conde Nast, and I think I have to do a Gourmet cookbook. But which one? The old leather maroon Gourmets with the gold lettering? Or the fat, shiny yellow one from a few years ago? Or the brand new one Ruth Reichl was pimping on Forum the other day? Or something else entirely? Suggestions? 

Bayless & Kenndy: Some little white lies

Sometimes I wonder why I am not skinny anymore. And sometimes I wonder why I am not much fatter. 

That is a chicharron from the Azteca market in San Rafael. Diana Kennedy translates "chicharron" as "pigskin," but I think "pork rind" is more appetizing, if not much. The bright orange pork rinds you buy in bags, like potato chips, are foul, but the kind they sell hot and fresh at Mexican delis are satanically delicious. You can get big, crunchy sheets of pure skin or thicker pieces with hunks of meat attached. Yesterday, I asked a woman at Azteca which type she prefers and she gestured with tongs to the meaty variety, glistening under a heat lamp. I took her advice and bought some.

But I now think I should have gone with the skinny skins. I suspect the effect Diana Kennedy was after in her chicharron in green sauce was that of limp, soft bits of rind swathed in thin, tart salsa. I had something like this once on a torta five years ago, and have never forgotten. What I produced with my meaty chicharrones was hearty and tasty, but not what I remembered and not what I had pictured. I have not pictured it for you because pork rind taco filling makes a poor advertisement for itself.

We'll see if anyone in my family reads the blog, because I did not use "rind" in the description of the tacos last night. Not a lie, an omission.

Now for the lying. 

Do these look like pumpkins?

 

When you puree them with brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves and cream and bake in a pastry shell as for Rick Bayless's spicy plantain pie they do.

So I called it pumpkin pie. I served this comforting dessert warm, with whipped cream, and Husband was uncharacteristically enthusiastic. "They really know what they're doing with pumpkin pie in Mexico," he said. He's from New England and considers himself an expert on pumpkin pie, popovers, pancakes, potato salad, milkshakes, and grilled cheese sandwiches. All other foods are suspect or pretentious. Plantains? Don't be silly.

Isabel, who eats like a hummingbird and hates bananas, consumed a large slab.

 

After I'd finished my slice, I reached and took a little bite out of the pie plate -- you know, to neaten it up --  a habit that Husband finds irritating. "You want seconds of the pumpkin pie?" he asked as he slid the whole pie plate onto my placemat and handed me a fork. He and Isabel both laughed. It's sweet that they have this bond.

Tipsy: Pumpkin pie? You mean PLANTAIN pie.

Isabel: I just ate banana pie? Gross. 

Tipsy: No, you ate PLANTAIN pie.

Husband: You lied to me like I was 2-years-old.

Tipsy: And I'm not sorry!

Really, they should thank me. It was amazing pie.

Bayless: Next year more tomatoes, no pumpkins

Author: Rick Bayless

Book: Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen

Recipes cooked: smoky braised Mexican pumpkin 

Used pumpkin from garden. Peeled, chopped, made it into a pumpkin stew that I served to my mother for dinner last night. Children did not touch, which was silly because everything tastes okay slathered in Mexican sauce, topped with avocado and wrapped in a homemade tortilla, even pumpkin. 

Homemade tortillas, by the way, were kind of a thrill. I didn't have time to go to the Latin grocery store, but had a bag of Maseca, so we made them. Masa flour, water, flatten, bake for a minute in a hot, dry skillet. Easier than finding the car keys and better than anything you can buy.

The dessert you could not buy if you wanted to.

"When I tasted Huguenot torte, a recipe that ran in The Times in 1965, I had but one thought: Why isn't everyone making this weekly?" Amanda Hesser wrote in the NYT Magazine on Sunday.

Last night, I baked Huguenot torte and had but one thought: What she said.

The recipe is here. It's a one-bowl cake made with humble ingredients, and it's ugly, ugly, ugly

but unless you are on a diet, you will thank me. This torte is easy and gooey and chewy and nutty and moist from chunks of apple and has a candy-like meringue-like top crust that shatters when you cut it. Four of us ate almost the whole thing, picking at it in a way that drives my husband bananas, except he wasn't home.

My story about killing a chicken is here. As a postscript, I would add that there is not another chicken in our flock that I would be comfortable slaughtering, except maybe whichever one is eating the eggs. 

Kennedy v. Bayless: Solid Gold soup

Here's a straight up-and-down comparison in which I prefer Diana Kennedy. 

I made Rick Bayless's tortilla soup on Friday night (Book: Mexico, One Plate at a Time.) The recipe and florid preamble stretched to four pages and included this: "My favorite tortilla soup dances salsa in the bowl. While swaying with deep, sweet tones, it surprises with colorful flourishes. It gently slides its hand around your waist, then does an unexpected turn with the muscle of herby epazote. It tickles you with the tangy fresh lime, then nudges you gently with fresh cheese and creamy avocado. And then comes the whirlwind of turns. .  ."

Et cetera. He goes on, but it seems kinder to look away. 

Diana Kennedy's recipe for sopa Tarasca barely fills a page (Book: Art of Mexican Cooking) and I made it last night. It tastes just like Bayless's (spicy, delishcious) and contains almost precisely the same ingredients. But fewer trees had to die.

This round goes to Mrs. Kennedy.

Bayless: He's definitely lower maintenance

Much culinary activity to report. Let's start with Friday

Author: Rick Bayless

Book: Mexico, One Plate at a Time

Recipes cooked: green tomatillo salsa, classic guacamole, tortilla soup, mushroom and cheese quesadillas, rustic cajeta apple tarts with berry salsa

Score: 7.5

Only one complaint: Tomatoes, get out of my guacamole. You may be vine-ripened and heirloom and FROM MY VERY OWN GARDEN but your presence is not always welcome. You don't belong in green salad either. Your proper place is beneath a slice of fresh mozzarella, or in a BLT with lots of mayonnaise. 

Mushrooms, on the other hand, do amazing things for a quesadilla.

 

That pretty item at top is the rustic cajeta apple tart, one of Rick Bayless's friendly Mexican-inspired desserts, as opposed to the scary authentic Mexican desserts preferred by Diana Kennedy. 

I already know who wins this contest between Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless, and probably so do you, but I'll proceed with testing for a few more weeks. It's not exactly a hardship, and the kids are really happy. 

 

Moore Home Cooking

I promise this is the last post about Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, which I've finished, which made me cry, which still seemed vaguely off-key.

Two passages to share.

On cookbooks: "I would study their notation, their confident sorcery, their useful busyness. They were the opposite of poetry, except if, like me you seldom cooked, and then they were the same."

They are still the same.

And then there's this, with which I absolutely don't agree, but also do: 

"A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick."

The novel is actually very sad and soft-hearted about children, despite flinty and sometimes discordantly flip observations. 

We're having a taco party tonight that includes only people who are not related to us by blood. Do you know how rare this is? Rick Bayless calls a taco party a taquisa, which is a swell word.

I just wish Mexican desserts were more enticing. 

Bayless: stirring, stirring, stirring

Author: Rick Bayless

Book: Mexico: One Plate at a Time

Recipe: cajeta

I got prodigious amounts of work done this morning by heeding the wisdom in this piece by Laura Miller, the book critic at Salon.com. A certain writing project, over which I have agonized and intermittently labored for months, was almost completed in under two hours just by forbidding myself email, Facebook, and online shopping for a duvet cover. I imposed other restrictions: no snacks, no fussy tidying chores, no visits to the henhouse to look for eggs. The increase in productivity has been shocking. I should have done this years ago. I should do this every day. 

But the two hours off-line are up, I've earned my screen time, and am also making cajeta -- Mexican goat-milk caramel sauce -- because I bought the goat milk a few days ago, it needs to get used up, and my mother and grandmother are coming to dinner. This cajeta recipe takes an hour during which you are supposed to stir the simmering milk, sugar, and cinnamon stick "regularly." Here's Bayless on cajeta: "Perfect cajeta is like perfect wine: silky smooth, balanced and complex."

The wine comparison -- not the most vital simile. But I love the long, impassioned, scholarly preamble about his collection of antique Mexican cookbooks (in which he has found recipes for desserts containing jicama and fava beans) and the history of cajeta. I like Rick Bayless. He's friendlier than Diana, who can be very starchy and severe.

The plan is to read and stir. I'm no longer sure A Gate at the Stairs is working for me. Specifically, I don't feel that the narrator's voice is that of a college-age Midwestern farm girl. It's the voice of a nervy, worldly, middle-aged woman, i.e. Lorrie Moore. It's one of my favorite voices, but an underage virgin who grew up on a potato farm and has never flown in an airplane just doesn't know this much about Bartok, and marriage, and race relations, and the semiotics of food, and she probably doesn't use words like "verklempt." 

Though maybe Moore will convince me that she does. Maybe all will be redeemed in the end.

Must finish now.

Kennedy: There may be maggots

Author: Diana Kennedy

Book: From My Mexican Kitchen

Recipes: banana vinegar, pineapple vinegar 

I've always wanted to make vinegar, but the recipes have made it look harder than I was up for, requiring trips to a winemaking shop, mothers, jugs, airlocks, crocks.

Diana Kennedy, however, offers several recipes for vinegar that involve no special materials. They also look like recipes written by an insane person, but I have now started both. 

Banana vinegar. You slit the skins of overripe bananas, put them in a colander over a bowl, drape with cheesecloth, leave in a "very warm" place until the fruit emits all its juices. "Turn the mass over from time to time and gently press down to extract the liquid," Kennedy writes. "Lots of little flies will swarm around because of fermentation." Within several weeks there will be a cloudy fluid that you mix with crushed piloncillo (Mexican brown sugar) and continue to ferment. Kennedy insists it is delicious. 

Pineapple vinegar. This involves placing the peelings of a pineapple in a jar with water and pounded piloncillo. Macerate. This seems more reasonable than the banana vinegar, until: "If things don't go according to order, small white maggots will float on the top (they may anyway.) Strain the liquid, and if it doesn't become acidic within a month, throw it away and start again."

Rick Bayless would never write recipes like these, and despite their obvious grotesqueness and the fact that I doubt they will work, I love these recipes. I hope they work. I can always bake banana bread, but a way to make use of pineapple peel is on a par with watermelon rind pickle.

Bayless: Apologies, Rick, we're talking about Julie Powell today

Author: Rick Bayless

Book: Rick Bayless' s Mexican Kitchen

Dishes cooked: Chipotle shrimp, spicy corn, black rice

Score: 7.5

It was all generically tasty, like something you'd eat at a posh Mexican restaurant where they serve $10 margaritas and the guacamole comes in an actual molcajete. I don't like those molcajetes; how do you ever get them truly clean? None of the pictures were appetizing, so I'm just skipping all that today.

Something else is on my mind. 

I saw Julie & Julia a month ago and I appreciated it as the airy, toothsome confection that it was. I didn't give it much thought, but yesterday, I stumbled across this blog post harshing on Julie Powell and decided to offer my own two cents. Because I know how very much it matters.

Julie & Julia has pitted Amy Adams against Meryl Streep, but also Julie Powell against Julia Child. Neither is a fair fight, particularly the latter. Were we meant to compare Child's monumental, hard-won achievement with Powell blogging her way to a book deal? Did Nora Ephron deviously engineer it so people would? Or was it just how the movie shook out?

I was probably one of the few people who went to see Julie & Julia more interested in Julie than Julia. I revere Julia Child, etc., etc., what everyone else says. But I also think Julie Powell is a crazy good writer. Undisciplined and self-absorbed, but she cops to all of it and usually manages to make it amusing. She was miserable and lost and living in New York City, she wrote herself out of a hole, and watching her do it was like seeing a fantastic piece of performance art. I don't begrudge her a thing.

Amy Adams was an ethereal fairy in Enchanted, but she played this saucy, earthy, slightly manic young woman by getting a dowdy haircut and throwing tantrums. SUCH tedious tantrums. Ephron and Adams convey the selfishness and hysteria of Julie Powell, but none of the vitality and charm, none of the kooky intelligence, disarming candor and wild humor that made her blog great. The book was not great, but yes, I thought her blog from which it sprang was great. 

 

I sometimes cringe at the honesty in Powell's work, and she makes choices that strike me as reckless. I don't know how a marriage can survive the excruciating (ouf! trust me) essay about sex that she contributed to Behind the Bedroom Door. (That whole book brought out my inner Victorian, which, to be fair, isn't that hard.) I'm equal parts worried and fascinated to read Powell's forthcoming Cleaving, which I fear will be an expansion of the painful material in that essay. Still. Her writing crackles. She's not a towering icon of our culture like Julia Child, but neither is she a boring drip. 

Kennedy: She loses the tinga throwdown

Author: Diana Kennedy

Book: My Mexico

Dishes cooked: tinga de pollo

Score: 8

Behind on my posting. On Monday, I made Diana Kennedy's chicken tinga: "This recipe is an interesting version of the better-known pork tinga of Pueblo," she writes. 

As some of you may know, a tinga is a super-spicy, rich melange of meat, tomatoes, chorizo and chipotle chiles that you eat with tortillas and/or rice. A week ago I made a killer pork tinga from Rick Bayless, and I chose this Kennedy recipe to compare. Not a fair fight. Kennedy's tinga rocked, but pork -- especially pork shoulder -- always wins. The only meat pork shoulder can't trump is aged ribeye.

Owen: "This is hot sauce with little sprinkles of chicken. I want chicken with little sprinkles of hot sauce."

I've started making Kennedy's banana vinegar, but I think that bizarre procedure deserves its own post.

Kennedy: Pictures only a cook could love

Book: The Cuisines of Mexico

Author: Diana Kennedy

Dishes: chilaquiles, queso de Napoles

"The word chilaquiles comes from chil-a-quilitl, meaning 'herbs or greens in chili broth' -- colloquially, a 'broken up old sombrero,'" writes Kennedy in the introduction to her recipe for chilaquiles, a bubbling cauldron of which you can see above.  This recipe -- "a real peasant version that resembles a tortilla soup and is wonderfully robust" -- came originally from her maid, Godileva, and is full of fatty chorizo, queso fresco, tortillas, and chile sauce, topped off with a generous cup of crema.

Kennedy says chilaquiles makes good hangover food, and I believe it; you don't have to think when you eat, just shovel. Unfortunately, what I most like about Mexican food is how you customize every bite, how you can mix cool things with hot things, spicy with mild and creamy. I like the tiny bit of thinking involved when you eat even a plate of Chevy's nachos. I don't know if hearty stewishness is true of all chilaquiles, or just Godileva's version. Bayless's chilaquiles recipes look totally different -- one includes Swiss chard. Maybe I'll try that one this week.

Dessert, not quite a disaster, but close.

 

This is queso de Napoles (Neapolitan cheese) which Kennedy describes thusly: "a white delicate flan with a spongy, nutty layer at the bottom."

It contained egg whites (no yolks), milk, sugar, almonds, a caramel coating for the dish, and it reminded me of those old-fashioned lemon puddings in which the pudding separates into a foamy layer and a creamy layer. Except this just wasn't right. For one thing, look at it; for another, no one objected when I suggested feeding the leftovers to the chickens. 

Speaking of the menagerie, our alpha cat, Emily, has expressed extreme displeasure with the unnamed new cat, and that makes us all sad because Emily is a strong, beautiful queen who will look you in the eye for hours and purr, then go off and catch giant rats. Krazy Kat is totally fine with the new cat, possibly because he now has an ally against Emily, who barely tolerates him. Or possibly because he is an incurious dolt who would accept a coyote into the household.

I'm still pissed at myself for letting this happen. The cats were coming and going, mewing and growling and scratching all night. It was a delight.

Bayless: I hate writing headlines

I completely lost it this week. So many reasons, serious and trivial, but I'll just focus on one of that is neither: Owen's homework. After a peaceful summer I can't believe we've joined this stupid battle again, struggling through dittoed worksheets. He's a dreamy fidgeter who would rather cry, bargain, and draw microscopic Transformers on his eraser than get a job done, and supervising his homework turns me into a witch. I never once had to sit with Isabel when she did her homework. I used to think the mothers who did that kind of thing were overinvolved and silly. 

I was so smug. I got what I deserved. 

The kitchen smells like chorizo, there's something wrong with the dishwasher, and it's really, really hot. My mother came over the other night after a rotten few days (biopsies, new chemo starts tomorrow) and I wanted to treat her to an evening of domestic tranquility, but instead I was a glowering witch in a soiled apron and she ended up on worksheet duty. Which, I must say, she is very good at. 

She's nice, my mom. She's the most enthusiastic and grateful person I cook for. She only mentions the situation in my kitchen window box every few months. 

 

Anyway, I made a  tinga Poblana -- it was sort of a stir-fried stew -- that included pork shoulder, chorizo, potatoes, and canned chipotle chiles, using a recipe out of Rick Bayless's Authentic Mexican Cooking. (I am focusing on a single book by Kennedy and Bayless each night, so I can determine their best work.) I've been picking dishes that look easy, and this was that. We ate the tinga (I feel inexplicably creepy every time I type that word) with the incredible fresh tortillas from the Azteca Market which are soft and puffy and chewy. You can buy these tortillas by the dozen still warm in plastic bags and I can't get home from the store without eating one in the car.

Homework remains a minefield, but we seem to have come to an end of the food fights. Owen ate seconds of the tinga -- rich, spicy, brick-red, delicious -- a dish he would have cried over just three months ago. 

As I type, macho boy is eating leftover tinga for breakfast with scrambled eggs. 

I also made a jamaica cooler from the same Bayless book. See photo at top. Ha! I bet you thought it was sangria, but we're cleaning up our act. I saw the dried jamaica flowers ($3 for a giant bag) at Azteca and bought them because I knew they'd be good for something, and I was right. You steep the petals in boiling water, add sugar, strain, chill. There's an astringency to this drink, like cranberry juice, that we liked a lot. You can find a recipe here, though it is slightly different from the one in the book. 

Score for dinner: 9.5. 

In other news, there's a rooster in the neighborhood, I heard him crowing yesterday and again today. He is not ours. I had no idea there were any chickens at all in the vicinity, and I really want to meet the person who owns this rooster. Maybe she is a female with medium-sized children who is also losing it. We can become best friends. 

Also, Owen started 4H yesterday. He loves it. At the 4H host's house we saw our first "frizzle" hen and I am posting an internet photograph of a frizzle chicken because it's one of the funniest animals I have ever seen.

 

Kennedy: She pulls ahead with the enchiladas

You might need an MFA to attractively style and photograph Mexican food. 

I made enchiladas verdes last night using Diana Kennedy's recipe in From My Mexican Kitchen. They were filled with roasted poblano peppers and rotisserie chicken, sauced with tomatillo salsa, topped with queso fresco, lettuce, crema. 

I give this dish a perfect 10. 

It was also easy. Rick Bayless has his work cut out for him.

 

Bayless: Too busy to do you justice today, but that was a kick ass dinner

I don't want to fall behind because I take this Bayless v. Kennedy competition seriously. But I am actually busy with work-work. I forgot what this was like. It is not as much fun as I remembered.

I was very, very smitten with the casserole-style zucchini tamal I cooked last night from Mexico: One Plate at a Time. Fantastic and super-easy -- like a tamale, but without any tedious wrapping in corn husks or banana leaves. You just mix masa flour with water and butter and baking powder, then add some chopped ham, grated zucchini, watercress, and green onions. Steam in a pie plate. I served it with guacamole and salsa.

 

"This is not very bad, but it is not very good," said Owen. When I pointed out that he had cleaned his plate, he looked aggrieved. "Because I was HUNGRY," he said.

The child has a reputation to uphold, however disagreeable.

I like how versatile this recipe is, how you could substitute almost any grated fresh vegetable. You could use a different meat, or omit the meat. You could add cheese; you could add olives and chili peppers and raisins. 

For dessert: Mexican chocolate streusel cake from the same volume. This I won't make again. Bayless calls for grinding the Mexican chocolate into "coarse crumbs," but the chocolate bypassed coarse crumbs altogether, moving straight from unwieldy chunks to fine powder. I fear this had a deleterious effect on the cake. Something had a deleterious effect on the cake, which was dense and heavy.

As I mentioned, I'm switching off cooking dinner from books by Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless in order to decide who writes the better Mexican cookbooks. Melvil Dewey had suggested I come up with a funny algorithm for picking a winner, but I'm not feeling very cunning this afternoon, so I'm going to just give a numerical score to last night's dinner as a whole: 7.5 on a scale of 1-10. The cake brought the whole thing down at least a point.

Maybe I'll come up with a better measurement in a day or two.

In other news, I have a review of a very amusing novel here. 

And Owen starts 4H on Thursday. I really hope he doesn't decide he wants to raise rabbits. 

Bayless v. Kennedy

Here's how it's going to work. 

One night I'll do a Kennedy meal, the next night I'll do a Bayless meal. Since they've both published numerous books, I'm going to cook from a single book each time. Maybe at the end I'll be able to declare one title the hands-down best Mexican cookbook.

Or maybe I'll just move to Saigon and chuck all this domestic ambition. I had forgotten just what a slog these late afternoons are. The driving, man, the DRIVING. To the school, to the supermarket, to dance class, to piano lesson, back home, mix some masa, to the dance class, bake the cake, set the table, fight over homework, check for the bobcat. . .

Tonight: Bayless' Mexico: One Plate at a Time. We're having a casserole-style zucchini tamal. It is steaming and now I am running out the door for my last pick-up of the day. Sometimes I leave my apron on when I drive carpools. I think that's perfectly okay, because in an emergency, I can just take it off. I feel differently about driving in pajamas.