I just want to keep typing Sju Sorters Kakor over and over

From Fika, by Anna Brones and Johanna Kindvall:

“To have a real fika means using the classic recipes that everyone knows (what the Swedes call klassiker), either those from one of the Swedish cooking bibles like Sju Sorters Kakor (Seven Kinds of Cookies) or Var Kokbook (Our Cookbook) or those passed down from one generation to the next.”

As luck would have it, there was an English edition of Sju Sorters Kakor on amazon. How could I not? 

First published in 1945, Sju Sorters Kakor has been revised several times and it’s a dazzling, bright, cleanly-designed, and compact book with an astonishing variety of desserts packed into 188 pages. Pretty little color pictures accompany most recipes, some of which call for hartshorn salt. 

I’m not even going to pretend I’m sheepish about buying yet another cookbook. That would be the kind of reflexive, coy, apologetic female self-deprecation I despise and at which I excel. (Right there? That was an example of the self-deprecation I was talking about.) 

I love owning this book. Good purchase.

Birgitta's almond torte from Sju Sorters Kakor

Nothing new was cooked this weekend, except the Swedish pancakes from Fika, which are lovely, fragile, soft, and crepe-like. I squeezed lemon and sprinkled sugar on them and when Owen saw them he complained that they were “thin, like tortillas, and won’t carry flavor.” I said, “Yes, they’re really disgusting, don’t feel like you have to finish.”

He came back for seconds, said, “I don't want you to waste the batter.” 

This morning I asked if he wanted more of the “disgusting” pancakes and he said, “Yeah, but only because I’m really hungry.” 

I don’t want to make Owen out to be a brat.  He’s not. You’d like him. He’s kind and earnest and talkative and interested in stuff.  Complaints about my cooking are a joke and a habit in this house, a family tradition. He and are great friends and then sometimes I take away his computer keyboard and he gets really, really mad and insults my cooking. At this point, I could not care less. 

Fun with blue cornmeal

The Navajos should object.

Over the past week I've discovered some ways to use up a bag of New Mexican blue cornmeal, most of them bad.

To start with, you can use your blue cornmeal to make the unappealing triple corn Navajo muffins from Blue Corn and Chocolate by Elisabeth Rozin. These squat, super-sweet muffins call for yellow cornmeal, blue cornmeal, and canned creamed corn. Why all three? I'm guessing because "triple corn muffins" sounds sexier than "corn muffins." But sexy these jaundiced midget muffins were not. I imagined I could detect the mucilaginous creamed corn in every bite. So yucky.

A very slightly better use of your blue cornmeal would be to whip up a batch of the blue corn pancakes from Culinaria: The United States.

I don't know what Owen was doing with his hand -- some kind of wizard move to make the leaden pancakes go away?

Thick, stiff, heavy, and gray, drenched in maple syrup these pancakes weren't inedible.

Another alternative: the worst chocolate chip cookies in the world!

Mark: "These are going to be around for a while." 

Crumbly, sandy, cakey, gritty, and sickly looking, the blue cornmeal chocolate chip cookies were baked from a Bob's Red Mill recipe. Thanks, Bob, for keeping things real. There are so many recipes for amazing chocolate chip cookies out there these days, I'd forgotten it was possible to make bad ones.

After three bummer dishes, I gave up on recipes calling specifically for blue cornmeal. I used the last of the blue cornmeal in these lovely and inspired pancakes  from the Essential New York Times Cookbook. 

To make these pancakes -- formally known as Kathleen Claiborne's hot cakes -- you cook your cornmeal (blue or yellow) into a sort of mush and then mix it into an airy batter and fry. What you end up with are beautiful, crusty pancakes with a soft, cornmeal mush center. Mark raved about them. Owen didn't rave -- complimenting me is against his principles -- but requested seconds. All the pancakes were eaten before I thought to take a picture.

And with that delicious breakfast, the blue cornmeal was gone.

I'm not sure how much longer I can continue this little pantry-cleaning series, because it's not turning out to be as inspiring and rewarding as I'd hoped. I'll give it a few more weeks. At the very least need to tackle the dessert wine.

I wonder if Roy Choi's dad ever washed his mouth out with soap

Her hard work deserves our respect, Roy.

I’ve now read about how Roy Choi became a low-rider, scrounged pizza crusts from trash cans on Hollywood Boulevard, and spent a week smoking crack in New York City. I’ve read about his gambling addiction, how he stole from his parents, endured crappy service at Campanile, drank, got in fights, almost died in fights, and was reborn one day while watching Emeril on TV. Where I left off he's about to enroll in the Culinary Institute of America. He’s crazy as hell and L.A. Son is a crazy engrossing book. I recommend it.

I have qualms about the recipes, however. To start with, the selection is bizarre. I don’t want recipes for French onion soup, creme brulee, cobb salad, or pancakes from Roy Choi. Why would I? Why would anyone? He appears to have slotted innocuous mainstream recipes in there as a backdrop to stories from his past and most of them have no interesting twist or Choi touch to recommend them.

Then he goes and issues ridiculous instructions like calling for 1 1/2 eggs in those pancakes. He wants you halve an egg! In pancakes! The world is full of excellent pancake recipes that don’t require mixing an egg in a little bowl and throwing half of it away. I made the pancakes just to see what was up with that halved egg. Nothing was up. The pancakes were not special in any way. Do you know what fits of profanity this idiocy would elicit if I had the mouth of Roy Choi?

My father did wash my mouth out with soap when I was a kid. I said, "God damn you!" to my sister and was scraping flakes of soap out of my back teeth for the rest of the day.

Choi's pork and bean recipe -- an homage to the canned beans of his youth -- calls for pork belly and three tamarind pods. First of all, pork belly. You can’t just walk into any supermarket and buy it, you have to call around or find an Asian grocery. When you do get your hands on the pork belly, Choi's recipe doesn't do it any favors, rendering the cut gray and fatty. I would have preferred pork shoulder or no pork at all. To get the tamarind pods I had to make a special trip to a Latin market and that would have been fine with me if the tamarind pods had made the beans sing. They didn’t. The beans, like the pancakes, were totally undistinguished.

I made Choi’s chicken piccata because commenter Melvil Dewey, whose opinion I respect, mentioned that it was delicious, the sauce in particular. It was delicious, that sauce. But better than other chicken piccatas?  

What I want from Choi’s book are recipes for the kind of dishes he sells off his Kogi trucks, food that is alive and spicy and exciting, drawing from different traditions and recombining flavors to create something new and delicious.

Alongside the chicken piccata I served brussels sprouts with kimchi and they were terrific. You cook the sprouts quickly in oil then add minced kimchi and finish with butter, French-style. Sprouts + kimchi + butter = unexpected and really good.

I also made Choi’s kimchi and pork belly stuffed pupusas and they were a hit. That pork belly in its brick-red sauce of chili paste, pear, lime juice, and sesame oil had incredible flavor. I kept snacking on it as I was making the pupusas and realized I was far less interested in the food itself, than the flavor, if that makes sense. Such rich, strong, complex, amazing flavor.  

Ok, so I had a little trouble with the pupusa stuffing. Not easy and Choi's directions are vague. I think this is what you’re aiming for, but the only way I could get my pupusas to work was to pat out two thick tortillas, place some filling in the middle of one, top with the other, and try to seal. I would have much preferred Choi include pupusa-making diagrams in his book than the boilerplate recipe for a club sandwich. Or a caesar salad. Or pecan pie. 

I'll finish L.A. Son today and cook one last Roy Choi meal tonight. Owen is having a friend over and I'm "tackling" Choi's ramen with American cheese, followed by his donuts made from Pillsbury biscuit dough. I think I have the perfect audience for this finale.

Eating Down the Fridge: Food Wars, Part XXVII

That's Owen, yesterday, trying to finish his homework and eat the 4-grain pancakes I made out of the Joy of Cooking. According to the notes in the margin, I first made these in August '06 and the kids "loved" them, probably because they are full of honey and cinnamon and taste like oatmeal cookies.  Mark rolled his eyes when he watched me mixing the cornmeal, oats, and wheat flour, but once again Owen "loved" them. Isabel, for whatever reason, did not partake.

So, this morning I pulled out the remaining batter and Isabel said: "I don't like pancakes with oats in them."

I then turned to Mark and asked, "Would you like some?"

He said: "I don't like wheat pancakes."

A vision of loveliness I was, standing there with uncombed hair and mismatched pajamas, holding a bowl of batter and shrilly berating my husband. Betty would never scold Don, nor allow him to see her in such disarray. I accused Mark of "poisoning the well," but I think what I meant was "poisoning the minds of our children." I hadn't poured my first cup of coffee and was not mentally agile.

Lately there's developed a little conspiracy between Isabel and Mark to make fun of me and my cooking. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand: infuriating. It's unhelpful for a grown man (George H. W. Bush is included in this indictment) to boast of narrow food preferences in front of children, pointing out the gory aspect of beets, the hatefulness of broccoli, a distaste for whole grains, etc. 

On the other hand, dissent is healthy in any political regime and I like to think of the kitchen as a benevolent dictatorship with me, naturally, serving as wise and revered president-for-life. I don't want anyone to seriously challenge my supremacy, God forbid, and maybe the best way to avoid that is to give my subjects some freedom. Let the peons doodle mustaches on my image and quietly hum the Internationale so long as they show up at the dinner table and obey.

 

Plus, if it brings them closer together, cements a father-daughter bond to resist Mother and sneak cans of Chunky classic chicken noodle soup into the house during the Challenge (which they totally did yesterday) then pretend to "find" them on the pantry floor, maybe it serves the greater good. They can chortle about their hijinks for years to come, beside the fire, around the Thanksgiving table, laughing through uncontrollable tears at my memorial service. Yes, I want that for them.

Owen didn't hear the pancake commentary and is enjoying his pancake breakfast as I type. I intend to recruit the little boy to my side.