Milk & Fat: We had a feast and then we watched some TV

That's my mom feeding the meat into the stuffer, that's her friend Kathy easing it into the casing. Sausage was trickier than any of us had anticipated and I sense we made many errors, but it was nonetheless exciting and gratifying. The sausages -- Jennifer McLagan's lamb, red wine and rosemary sausages out of Fat -- turned out beautifully. They were leaner and more finely ground than what you buy at the market, lacking the discrete globules of fat I have come to expect, and/but were very tasty.

Making sausage definitely brings to mind indelicate subjects. Not just one, several. You can imagine, and I will let you.

The rest of the dinner was fantastic. I broke my scalloped potatoes losing streak with the help of Anne Mendelson's elegant and precise recipe. What was I doing wrong all those years? They are so easy.

I can't praise Mendelson's book Milk highly enough. Her crisply written history of dairying, which includes the most sensible analysis of the current raw milk controversy that I've encountered, is riveting. The recipes are all for simple dishes, but they have so far proven flawless.

For vegetable: McLagan's double butter salad. You make the dressing by melting butter until it begins to brown, add cider vinegar and salt, then pour it over some butter lettuce. Tastes like butter, but also like salad, and is delicious.

And for dessert: McLagan's choux paste beignets -- cream puff dough spiked with Pastis (or Pernod), fried in lard, and dusted with fennel-flavored sugar.* Served with hot chocolate. 

After this, the ladies went home and the children and I retired to the sofa for two episodes of Friday Night Lights. The longstanding Wednesday night DVD tradition (it began when Mark took the Wednesday night shift) may seem questionable because we stay up too late and watch shows with "mature" content. But Isabel and Owen fight so much the rest of the time, this seems to be the only way the three of us can enjoy ourselves together. It's a happy shared ritual and that feels important, more important than bedtime or going to our separate rooms to read worthy books. Plus, FNL: awesome.

*Put sugar and fennel seeds in a spice grinder until powdery 

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Ravioli & frozen yogurt

Another Wednesday, another pasta night with my mother. Yesterday, she taught me how to make a whisky sour and showed Isabel how to stomp on egg shells until they're the perfect consistency for the worms in our new worm box. She's a great mom. 

Mark Bittman's pasta dough is supple and lovely, the filling for his spinach and ricotta ravioli superb. If we'd just made a butter or tomato sauce, all would have been well. But I was determined to make the walnut sauce which Bittman describes as "a rich, bread-thickened nut sauce that's unbelievable with stuffed pasta."

Mistake. The sauce was super-garlicky and rich and totally overpowered the delicate spinach ravioli. Don't know what he was thinking.

For dessert: blondies (identical to recipe in How to Cook Everything, but with a small amount of whole wheat flour subbed in) which were fine, and frozen yogurt.

 

Isabel and I are slightly obsessed with replicating Pinkberry frozen yogurt. If you've never had Pinkberry, imagine a tangy, snow-white cream with a pure, very sour yogurt flavor. Bittman's recipe calls for some yogurt, a little milk, sugar syrup and lemon rind. We omitted the lemon rind and you would think the resulting dish would taste purely of yogurt. And it did. Which is when I realized that Pinkberry tastes more like yogurt than yogurt does. How is that possible? An internet search quickly revealed things I didn't really want to know about Pinkberry.