Interesting times

Metaphor? Or just a bleak picture I took the other day?

A kind reader emailed inquiring whether I was ok because I hadn’t posted in a while. I’m fine. I haven’t been posting because I haven’t been thinking about cooking, I’ve been thinking about . . . you know what I’ve been thinking about!

It’s been some pretty intense thinking. I foresee more of same in the months and years to come. If you’re cursed to live in interesting times, you might as well take an interest. I have been doing so. 

The effect on my gastronomic life has been that I make the same easy, delicious dishes again and again, stuff that won’t distract from vigilant monitoring of Twitter. Endless rotation of Korean spicy pork, Nigella’s fattening crustless pizza (with extra cheese on top), these lamb meatballs (minus the fussy romesco sauce),  Thai stir-fried beef (minus the egg, but with spinach added towards the end), and Marcella’s tomato-and-butter pasta. Sometimes as I’m casually stirring a skillet of sizzling meat while watching Keith Olbermann on my phone, I think, wow, what a nonchalant, badass cook I’ve become.

I love Keith Olbermann. He’s nuts, but I love him. 

Some stuff that I thought about when I wasn’t thinking about, you know:

*I was totally inspired by this lecture by a University of Toronto professor. About chaos, order, and how to live. Highly recommend. The professor, Jordan Peterson, is in the news right now over the issue of personal pronouns, but this isn’t about that. Not controversial, just fascinating and relevant. 

*Owen has asked me to assemble a collection of all his favorite recipes so that he’ll be able to cook for himself when he moves out in a year-and-a-half. This is pretty damn funny for a lot of reasons, but particularly because he still makes retching noises when he walks through the kitchen and sees me cooking. I will happily oblige, of course. 

vintage Owen

*Do you find it uncanny that both Elizabeth Gilbert and Molly Wizenberg came out this autumn? Two gifted writers who published thoughtful best-selling memoirs about falling in love with their husbands have now left those husbands for women. Is this just a curious coincidence? Or is there something about the temperament of a memoirist that requires new chapters? Would the response of their fans (appropriately warm and supportive) be different if they had left those husbands for other men? I think the answer is yes, but haven’t come to a firm conclusion as to why. Just something I thought about for a few days.

*Gabrielle Hamilton also fell in love with a woman after divorcing the husband she wrote about in her memoir, but that wasn’t such a surprise. For one, she seemed to hate him. For another, she’d been gay before she married him.  This account of her recent wedding banquet is a snappy, fun read thanks to Hamilton’s writing style which is straightforward, vivid, decisive, slightly aggressive. I love the sound of that veal breast — “a succulent, fatty, tender magnificence.” But what about the salt-baked pears. Yea or nay?

Until recently I had never liked Prune, Hamilton’s restaurant. On a visit a few years ago, I ordered fish and received an ugly, blistered whole fish on a plate. No garnish or vegetable. Not impressed.

But when I went to New York last month on business, a friend and I met at Prune and this time it all clicked. Hamilton’s cooking is just like her writing: straightforward, vivid, decisive, slightly aggressive. Don’t those adjective pretty much describe a salt-baked pear? 

At the Prune dinner, we started with some austere steamed vegetables with a little bowl of anchovy sauce. Delicious, if not dazzling. Simple duck breasts with some beans — perfect. My dessert was a slice of crusty bread spread with melted chocolate. Very plain, very frugal, very good.  I heard the music. It’s not my favorite music, but I heard it. 

Mark says I have to blog three or four times a week or not at all. I have truly enjoyed the time I spent writing this today as it kept me away from other things, so I’m going try for the former. If I have any readers left, apologies for the long absence.

Try this, won't you?

January is a grim month. I have some good news, and some bad.

We’ll start with the good. Grapefruit. It’s in season and it’s delicious, especially the pink kind. Not as delicious as a peach, but, hey, it’s January. So go buy some pink grapefruits. Come home and cut one in half. Preheat the broiler. Use a grapefruit spoon or a little knife to loosen all the sections, but leave them inside the grapefruit. This should take about 25 seconds.

The ancient grapefruit spoon on the left is soft, worn, small, and perfect. The one on the right is big, shiny, sharp and new. It mangles the grapefruit. If you want to find a good grapefruit spoon, check eBay.

Mix 2 tablespoons salted butter (or unsalted plus a pinch of salt) with 1/4 cup brown sugar until clumpy, like streusel. Add 1 cup Wheat Chex, crushing just a little bit so you have some small bits but also a lot of whole Chex. Mix briefly and gently. Pack about a third of this irresistible stuff on half the grapefruit. Put the rest of the streusel and the other half of the grapefruit in the refrigerator for subsequent meals. Broil the grapefruit until warm and slightly bubbly. Enjoy.

It looks like a bad joke, but it's my favorite food discovery of 2016.

If you're like me, you have doubts about the idea of streusel-topped, broiled grapefruit. How does sour, sharp, cold, and juicy possibly meld with sweet, buttery, warm and crunchy?

No idea. It just does. Miracle. Try it.

Now for the bad news: You won’t want to eat a grapefruit any other way after you've tasted it broiled and topped with streusel. The pleasure of unfattening plain grapefruit has been lost to you.

Don't thank me, thank Gabrielle Hamilton. Here's the recipe exactly as printed in Prune. 

Some other recommendations to brighten your January:

*The kale-apple-walnut salad from Zahav is tart, crunchy, and terrific. Recipe here. 

In the book it's called "tabbouleh," but it contains no bulgur. Really, it's just a salad.

*Also wonderful: the Zahav lamb shoulder, a superrich, hearty, easy, cheap, long-braised feast dish. Recipe here. You'll have lots of leftovers with which to make Suliman's pilaf.

*The sliced fresh oranges with honey from Zuni Cafe make a refreshing dessert after something rich like lamb shoulder. (Not that fresh fruit is ever a proper dessert.)

*The Zahav tahini cookies are a cross between shortbread and halvah. Couldn't be tastier. Couldn't be easier. 

*This is a stunning piece of writing.

*Karina Longworth’s fascinating history of Charles Manson's Hollywood on the podcast You Must Remember This enlivened many hours of tahini shortbread-baking, dishwashing, driving, folding, and sweeping last week.

*I saw the movie Brooklyn twice, most recently with a 10-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy, both of whom were enthralled. As was I.  It's a wondrous film, romantic and funny, but also thoughtful, compassionate, and poignant. I've seen all the Oscar best picture nominees. This is my favorite by far. 

Be careful what you resolve

Pumpkin caramel tart from Bon Appetit -- I was going to write about this, but something fascinating happened in world news, can't remember what, and I got distracted. It was tasty, but I would stick with regular pumpkin pie.

About two months ago, I started listening to a time management book called Getting Things Done that the writer Atul Gawande had once mentioned liking. It's an earnest, sort of dorky organization manual intended for harried business executives, which I’m most definitely not. But I absolutely loved the book. If you’ve spent time with me recently, you’ve heard my infomercial. The book has changed my life. I really did just type that. I have more to say about Getting Things Done, but of relevance today is the fact that it got me to start reading the newspaper. 

To be clear, the book itself isn’t pro-newspaper. The book simply encourages you to take inventory of everything that you want, must, or should be doing and “capture” it all in writing. Everything. This can take several days and my list was unbelievable. But the author was correct -- once my 10,000 item to-do list was captured on paper and things properly filed, I felt unburdened. And somehow, without even really trying, I started getting things done. 

Like reading the newspaper. It always bothered me that I didn’t read the newspaper very carefully. I could not have told you with full confidence what ISIS was a few months ago and I felt bad about that. I felt ill informed because I was ill informed. But one day not long after I finished listening to Getting Things Done, I started reading the New York Times, pretty much cover to cover.

Delicious marionberry pie milkshake from Shari's, a chain restaurant, that I was going to write about until I got distracted by something in the news. They put a whole slice of pie into the blender with the vanilla ice cream. Highly recommend. 

Soon I could tell you not just about ISIS, but about the election in Myanmar and Bernie Sanders and Paul Ryan and the unflattering things George H. W. Bush said about Donald Rumsfeld. Oh, I was so proud. Full of newfound self-respect. It was exciting, too. I started having opinions. For a few days I was livid about the overuse of arbitration clauses. Then I was loathing Donald Trump. Feeling sorry for Jeb Bush. Pondering the campus protests. I began looking for more information on my favorite topics online. I start reading tweets and political websites and -- best of all -- comment threads. I love comment threads.

The grossest looking dinner I've ever served. I was going to write about it, but . . . 

I didn’t feel bad about not reading the newspaper anymore. 

Instead, I felt bad about neglecting my blog. 

And how are the two connected? 

I don’t know about you, but there’s always some narrative running in my head. I’m always thinking something through. Earlier this fall, when I wasn’t otherwise mentally engaged, I was thinking a lot about Gabrielle Hamilton, composing blog posts as I drove around or washed dishes or did the rowing machine at the gym. This all changed when I started reading the newspaper. It was hard to focus on Gabrielle Hamilton because I was too busy thinking about riveting topics like the Christakis Halloween email. 

Oddly, you don't season the lamb before you wrap it in the won ton skins.

This could not go on. I love this blog. I do not want it to die. I decided I could will myself back into caring about food. Monday night I made the manti -- tasty little Turkish dumplings -- from Prune and a strange Pennsylvania Dutch cracker pudding dessert that I’d been wanting to try for eons. It was an interesting dinner. Monday night I thought: I’m back! Tomorrow I’ll do a blog post.

Yesterday morning, I sat down to write, but somehow an hour passed and I was still reading about whether it was bigoted to be more engaged with the carnage in Paris than the carnage in Beirut. Then I had to drive down to help my aunt clean out my grandmother’s house. Ordinarily I would have been writing the blog post in my head as I drove, but all I really wanted to do was find some provocative political radio show where they were talking about Syria, maybe, or Ben Carson, or the resignation of the Claremont McKenna dean.

I am sorry to say this, but there's no way around it: Once you start paying attention, current events are more interesting than cracker pudding. 

I was sure I took a picture of the finished dumplings, but I can't find it. 

But I'm going to try to find my way back. Here goes: The toasted manti from Prune involve cutting wonton skins into quarters and filling each with a lamb meatball smaller than a marble. You toast these in the oven then cook them in canned beef broth and serve with garlicky yogurt and some spiced butter. Owen said they were “too spicy.” Mark said they were “flavorless.” I liked them a lot, but for obvious reasons I'm not making them again.

To make cracker pudding, you cook some milk, egg yolks, sugar, Saltine cracker crumbs, and flaked coconut into a thick custard and then fold in beaten egg whites. Eat warm. Like coconutty tapioca pudding. Good, but not great, and it looked like curdled vomit. (Sorry.) I would not make this again.

As you can see, my heart was not in that account of Monday's dinner. I can't fake it. But I just made a bargain with Owen and holding up my end involves cooking two appalling dishes he found on BuzzFeed. This is one of them. If I can't think of something to say about waffle cupcakes, I really do need to pack it in.

The pause that refreshes

I think extreme close-up photos of food will become my trademark.

I od'd on Gabrielle Hamilton and had to go cold turkey. A couple of weeks ago I made her ratatouille sandwich (yummy, oily), dandelions braised in olive oil (pretty good, oily), and the eggplant parmesan (a monumental pain in the ass, delicious, quite oily) and was suddenly tired. Tired of fats, tired of strong flavors, tired of Hamilton's mind games. I took time off from Prune. I'm still taking time off.

Have I turned on the book? Not at all.

But then I've never said Gabrielle Hamilton was pleasant. She's not. She's impossible. One minute she's dictatorial and highly specific ("6 Forelle pears, 1 day short of perfectly ripe") without explaining why or offering alternatives. The next, she is oddly vague, assuming you know what she means by "a rather generous hunk" of salted French butter for dressing the cold tomatoes. Is that two tablespoons? Four? Six? Well, yes, you can make a good guess and things will work out fine. It's the casual imperiousness of it all that bugs me. Her voice is crisp, super-smart and and original, but also snippy, scolding, and verging on contemptuous. I love it. I also hate it. I think she's brilliant and a total bitch.

Random House sent me a copy of Ruth Reichl's new My Kitchen Year and if she is brilliant, that brilliance does not show itself in this cookbook/memoir, which is warm, genial, confiding, and familiar. Reichl writes: "To me, recipes are conversations, not lectures; they are a beginning, not an end. I hope you'll add a bit more of this, a little less of that, perhaps introduce new spices or different herbs. What I really want is for my recipes to become your own."

You will never hear Gabrielle Hamilton say something like that.

Prune is a more interesting, visionary cookbook by far -- and I'm not done with it. But the spinach-ricotta gnocchi and applesauce cake I served for dinner last night from My Kitchen Year were lovely, and cooking from Reichl's recipes was restful. More on both books coming soon.

Like a cold, sticky, semi-solid black jelly bean

I don't know about you, but I think my food photography is improving. 

Prune success, Prune failure. 

Success: roasted onions with onion butter sauce and seeds A good dish with the odd twists I’ve come to expect from Gabrielle Hamilton’s odd cookbook. You trim onions (she calls for several varieties), toss with a little oil and salt, and roast. 

As you would predict, the scallions were done before anything else.

Meanwhile, you use the trimmings to make an onion “tea.” When the tea is dark brown and oniony, you mix some of it with butter to create a superrich, superflavorful sauce that you pour over roasted onions. Sprinkle seeds -- poppy, sesame, flax -- and some millet on top of everything. The idea is to replicate the “uncanny” (her word) flavor of an everything bagel. I didn’t taste that, exactly, but what I tasted was plenty delicious. I'd make this again. If you have a magnifying glass and want to try this recipe, it is here.

Failure: black licorice granita. I don’t love black licorice, but every time I flipped past this recipe I grew more curious. I started imagining how it would taste: intense and tar-black, but icy and refreshing. Yum. Had to make it.

You boil 1 cup sugar and 2 cups water for ten minutes to form a syrup, "flavor with" (quote marks there for a reason) 1 cup blackstrap molasses and a tiny bit of anise extract to capture the “uncanny” (GH's word again) flavor of black licorice candy. Put in freezer, scrape with fork periodically to create coarse, icy granita. 

Well, in theory. This was like trying to freeze lava. The mixture got colder and colder and denser and denser, but it never got icy or even completely firm. Completely smooth. I figured I’d made a mistake. Maybe I didn’t put in the second cup of water at the very beginning? Because it was so easy I made it again right away. This time it got a little bit icy, but nothing close to a granita or even a rough sorbet. It was weirdly sticky. 

Second batch: you can see it was a little icy, but the texture was more like brownie batter. The most disgusting brownie batter ever.

And the flavor was horrid -- way too sweet. Overpowering. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to use the full cup of molasses she calls for? She does say to "flavor" the mixture with molasses and anise extract, so does that mean you shouldn't use the full cup she calls for? Then why specify a full cup? Maybe 10 minutes is too long to boil the syrup? I don’t know. If anyone makes this, tell me what happens. I'm done.

I put the pans from the freezer straight into the dishwasher without rinsing because I figured the goo would rinse right down the dishwasher drain. And it did. I opened the dishwasher this morning and the dishes were sparkling clean but holy hell, the licorice fumes! All the other dishes had to be rinsed in the sink because they smelled of licorice.

Remember SnackWells? Dry baked potatoes? Rice cakes?

I’ve never worked with a more buttery cookbook than Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune. Everything swims in butter, but especially the vegetables. 

This raises some interesting questions. Most of us can agree that it is healthy to eat vegetables but not so healthy to eat huge amounts of butter.  But what if butter helps you to eat more vegetables? (And what constitutes a "huge" amount of butter, anyway?) What if butter makes vegetables so tasty that your son who goes weeks without consuming a plant actually eats a (buttery) tomato and says, “This is really good?”  What if a mountain of butter contributed to a pumpkin dish so indescribably salty/sweet/nutty/butterscotchy and delicious, that you drove home to reheat leftovers today rather than getting a frozen custard for lunch?

Obviously, I'm talking about actual Prune dishes.

Beefsteak tomatoes with warm French butter: Peeled, sliced, juicy tomatoes topped with sizzling salted butter. Not so appetizing when the butter eventually congealed all over the cold tomatoes, but so damned good when first brought to the table. 

Pumpkin in ginger beer with nutritional yeast: You slice pumpkin (I used red kuri squash) in wedges and pour over some ginger beer, sprinkle with nutritional yeast,* top with gobs of butter, and roast. How much butter? A third of a pound for a recipe that serves six. Does that seem like a huge amount of butter to you?  More than a stick? It seems like a huge amount to me. That’s just under two tablespoons per person. So many calories.

But then is that really so bad if it gets you to eat the pumpkin? And then after you eat the pumpkin (and the buttered beefsteak tomatoes and small pork chop) you are completely contented and full and don’t have any urge at all to see if there are Eskimo Pies in the freezer? 

I have no answers.

Ok, I guess I do have an answer. I think there’s too much butter on Prune's vegetables for everyday eating, but there’s probably too little butter on a lot of other vegetables. Habits of the fat-phobic1980s die hard.

 *Gabrielle Hamilton uses the terms “nutritional yeast” and “brewers yeast” interchangeably, but I have read they’re not the same thing. I used nutritional yeast.

Mastic fondant

mastic

The dish I most wanted to make from the minute I got my copy of Prune was the mastic fondant in ice water. The photo is so mysterious: a plain glass of ice water containing a blob of white paste and a spoon. Here’s a lovely picture of some fondant that resembles the shot in Prune. Can you see why it was intriguing?

Gabrielle Hamilton's vision for Prune didn't include headnotes explaining her recipes, so I had to turn to the internet to learn about mastic fondant. Mastic fondant comes from the apparently vast world of Greek spoon sweets: intense, sugary confections that are served in tiny portions with a glass of ice water.  Spoon sweets can be syrupy preserved fruits, eggplants, nuts, even olives, in addition to the fondant, which comes in different flavors. Mastic, in case you were wondering, is the resin from a Mediterranean evergreen tree; it emerges as sap, but by the time you buy it will look like very small, beige chunks of rock candy. Its flavor is faintly piney.

The other day, I made the mastic fondant. You grind your mastic, cook a syrup of sugar and glucose to 240 degrees, add the ground mastic, cool the syrup to 110 degrees, pour it onto a cold countertop and push it around with a bench scraper for a minute or so until it turns opaque and becomes so stiff that you can’t move it anymore. You then maneuver it into a jar for storage. When you want to serve it, you scoop up a spoonful and put it in a glass of ice water.

It all came off perfectly. I wasn’t going to serve this to anyone in my family so there was no point in waiting. I scooped myself some mastic fondant immediately, for breakfast. It was supersticky and dense with a barely discernible piney flavor. Mostly it tasted like the fondant you might find on a wedding cake, except wet and creamy.  Eating it is fun -- you sort of nibble at it and lick it and dunk it back in the glass where it softens a little more and every tiny bite comes with a refreshing film of cool water. Irresistible, though it wasn’t exactly delicious. It was more like having a delightful new toy.  I couldn't stop eating it. I ate mastic fondant all day and little else, pausing every few hours for another scoop of glucose.

just so you know I'm not making this all up

I felt like bloody hell by 5 o'clock.

Obviously, I love mastic fondant. I knew I would the minute I saw that photo of the white goo in the glass. You can probably tell from what I've written whether mastic fondant is your thing or not. I'm guessing it won't be.

I have to say, I love that Gabrielle Hamilton just threw this super-weird dessert in there between recipes for lemon panna cotta and pear tarte tatin, no context or explanation. Seriously, I love it. It makes the book more exciting, somehow.

Perfectly bent

English muffins spread with parsley butter await big, fat, grilled Prune burgers. 

Ok, Prune. Ouf. I have really dug myself into a hole with this one because instead of writing about it piecemeal the way I’ve written about other cookbooks, I got to know Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune on the sly, cheating on whatever I was doing with the blog to cook a dish from Prune every now and then. I did a lot of this over the last year and in the process all my feelings about the book changed dramatically. When I first got my copy of the cookbook I hated it with the fiery passion of the disappointed fan. Now I think it’s a masterpiece. And now I have to explain why all at once. Ouch.

Prune is not easy to love and not easy to cook from. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Prune is a cookbook by Gabrielle Hamilton, a famous badass New York chef who runs a tiny, fetishized downtown restaurant. The book has no index, no introduction, and no headnotes. It is modeled on the massive recipe binder used at the restaurant and contains a multitude of scrawled, scolding notes from Hamilton as well as underlinings and fake stains.

The burgers -- made with beef and lamb -- were delicious. It looks like I didn't quite get that cheese melted.

The book isn't warm and friendly. It isn't charming. That's the point. You might well hate Prune, but the things you most hate about it are the very things that make it great.  It’s as if Hamilton looked at a sweet, pretty, puffy contemporary cookbook, read a few cloying headnotes, and said: No fucking way. Her book is tart, precise, bitchy, opinionated, uncompromising, personal, tight, and totally original. In my view, it was the best cookbook of 2014.

I love reading the recipes in Prune. They have a real voice and rhythm. (They also work, but more on that next time.) They can be funny. They can be sensual. Sometimes both in a very short space. Here's a segment from the recipe for sweetbreads (which I will never make):

"Thoroughly and neatly peel the membrane -- the thin, slippery, translucent 'skin' that encases the gland -- which will come off in a rather neat sheet. Trim off any waxy fat clusters which tend to cling to the underside of the gland, and gently tug out any egregious muddy brown veins. Try to pull out the tubular looking arteries as well. If you've made it this far and are not retching into a garbage can, leave the minor little capillaries intact in order not to have the lobe fall apart into nuggets. Portion into 4-ounce pieces, as possible.

Hamilton is wonderfully acerbic on the subject of organic produce, farmers' markets, and the like. From her Bloody Mary mix recipe:

"Be sure to inventory properly midweek to keep the house fully stocked so that we are not having to make Bloody Mary mix over the weekend with some crappy organic tomato juice or 'artisanal' 'small-batch' Worcestershire handshopped in an emergency at Whole Foods."

God forbid.

And here's a favorite passage of mine from the spaghetti carbonara recipe (which I have made and which is very good):

“Pay attention to the toothsomeness of the pasta -- don’t get lost in your timing and let this just boil away in the pickup until it is flabby and bloated and disgusting. . . . Ideally we want the strands slick with yellow, eggy egg yolk and smoky, salty, uriney pancetta fat, with all the granules of sweet, nutty grated parm clinging to the strands. You want to see the black pepper, taste the floralness of it, and feel the warm heat of it in the dish -- but don’t obliterate.” 

It looks tossed off and maybe even sloppy, but it's not. It's vivid. It's loose. It's great.

In the first episode of her run on the PBS series Mind of a Chef, Hamilton says that she’s a perfectionist, but that her idea of perfection is is different from others people’s. She says that she likes things “perfectly bent.” 

Prune is perfectly bent. 

Tomorrow: some food.

Eat, eat, read

Maui is pretty.

I’ve been having fun. Last week I went to Upcountry Maui on a magazine assignment and ran around looking for cool things to do and eat and found them in abundance. Meanwhile, I was also reading and reviewing two new self-helpy books by Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic) and Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough), so all these inspirational lines about being generous and bold and receptive to inspiration and grateful and tackling life like a motherfucker* were floating through my head as I toured pineapple vodka distilleries and ate Spam musubi on the lush slopes of a tropical volcano. It was basically the ultimate high. I felt so energetic I started wondering if I was bipolar and having a manic episode.

Then I came home. It wasn’t a manic episode. I was just happy. Now that the homemaking/parenting years are drawing to a close, I wonder whether by embracing domesticity with such ardor I was simply making a virtue of necessity. I think I love my cozy nest of a home with the high-maintenance farm animals and 1000+ cookbooks, but I feel so much more alive when I’m racing around with my notebook trying to find the best bento box in Upcountry Maui and sleeping in a room I do not have to clean.

This was my only glimpse of beach. I was supposed to stick to inland Maui and dutifully did so. 

There are two categories of Hawaiian food and they could not be more different.  First, there is the slab of $42 macadamia-crusted ahi that you get at tourist restaurants. It is fresh, local, and good, though I always find myself struggling to finish fish like this because after few bites it becomes monotonous. The crust is delicious, but the inside of the fish is fish, bland fish. I finish, though, because it is so expensive I can't bear to waste it. Also, an ahi or an opah or a mahi mahi gave its precious life for me and I'm going to leave it on the plate? 

Then, there is the food that local people eat. For the most part, it isn't very fresh or local, not by Alice Waters standards. The plate lunch, the shave ice, the manapua, the warm $2.19 Spam musubi that you find under a heat lamp at Foodland. I was revolted by the idea of Spam musubi until last week when I finally tried it. I sat there in the supermarket parking lot eating Spam musubi and wondering what I was going to do when I got back to the Mainland and had to live without Spam musubi. Are you familiar with Spam musubi? Imagine a piece of nigiri sushi the size of a Twinkie, but warm, and instead of fish, it's topped with a slice of salty, delectably fatty, sausage-like meat. It is the best thing I ate in Upcountry Maui and I ate a lot of great stuff.

The second best thing I ate was the loco moco at a divey restaurant located in a trailer. Loco moco is a hamburger topped with fried egg and smothered in gravy, served over sticky white rice. The huge serving of loco moco I got at this dive also came with some macaroni salad and when you mixed that creamy macaroni salad with the rice and the salty brown gravy? I know how déclassé and gross that sounds, particularly when you consider that the gravy likely came from a can, but it was heaven. I had to physically push the plate away and ask for the check in order to stop myself from finishing every last bite. I needed to be able to wear my clothes home.

The red thing is a Surinam cherry from the Kula farmers' market. It was the fourth or fifth best thing I ate on Maui. It's got a super thin skin, sweet-tart juicy flesh, and a pit like a standard cherry. I couldn't figure out how to photograph it to best advantage, as you can see. If you ever have the chance to eat a Surinam cherry, do, but be sure it is really soft and ripe. 

Anyway, if you go to Hawaii, be sure you get out of the tourist restaurants and give that local food a chance. It may not be your thing, but I personally would always choose the $12 loco moco over the $42 macadamia-crusted ahi.

About those two books I reviewed. Strayed’s Brave Enough (it comes out later this fall) is a short collection of quotations from her previous work that apply to all kinds of profound life quandaries, like losing your mother or ending a romantic relationship. I’m not currently facing a profound life quandary but I still find myself flashing on her counsel ten or twenty times a day to solve the most trivial problems. Two I like especially:

"You know what I do when I feel jealous? I tell myself not to feel jealous. I shut down the Why not me? voice and replace it with one that says Don't be silly instead. It really is that easy. You actually do stop being an awful jealous person by stopping being an awful jealous person."

Don't do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do . . . It's hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it's not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do -- have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep tolerating someone who treats you terribly. There isn't a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it."

The incredibly sweet pineapple in Hawaii might have been the third best thing I ate. 

As to Big Magic, it's imperfect, but warm and inspiring. I love Elizabeth Gilbert. You may feel differently; we can still be friends. I think she’s open-hearted, smart, and a force for good in the world. She helps me shut down the mean drill sergeant in my head who constantly yells at me for not keeping my boots spit-polished. 

I liked both the books a lot and my review is here. 

Speaking of drill sergeants, I’m going to cook from Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune for the next week or so. I was just flipping through the book trying to figure out what to make for Sunday dinner, resenting yet again the lack of an index. Gabrielle Hamilton is such a jerk. I wish her recipes weren't quite so good.

*Update: Cheryl Strayed word. Allusion. My father emailed me about it within 2 hours. 

We didn't inhale

Isabel's new home

Boy, is it hot out here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hot and dry. Did I ever mention that our mulch caught fire last month on a day just like today? A day just like today except about 20 degrees cooler. A workman was reinforcing some concrete near the road and a warm piece of rebar he’d just sawed through fell into the fluffy, dry, redwood mulch. Whoosh! Instant fire covering about 20 square feet of the front yard. The workman came and banged on the door and I ran out barefoot and we extinguished the blaze, but it took 10 minutes or so of me spraying with a hose and him beating down flames with his shovel. We killed a lot of plants and broke some of the watering spigots. No point to this story, except: mulch? And: lucky.

California is ready for you, rain. 

I’m really betwixt and between right now, hence the lack of much interesting cooking or any posting at all. Life should straighten out next week. For real.

Here’s what’s been happening in the kitchen and out:

I've served several batches of the easy, delicious bread-and-tomato soup from Viana La Place's Verdura. According to my margin notes, I've been making this since August 1999, a year before Owen was born. That's the definition of a keeper. The recipe is at the end of the post and you should try it before the sweet summer tomatoes disappear.

almost effortless

I baked yet another kouign-amann from Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune. I love this cake madly, despite the fact that it always comes out looking burnt. 

it's all about the French butter and orange flower water

I think next week I have to write about my extensive and rewarding experiences with Hamilton's cantankerous cookbook. I've been putting this off.

One night for dinner I made the hearty riso al forno  (Arborio rice, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, olives, capers, provolone) from a recipe posted by The Wednesday Chef and it was really good. Recommend.

the kind of dish that is sometimes called "lusty"

The focaccia with chard and tomatoes in her previous post is also a treat. 

That's about it for food.

At the very end of August, we went up to Washington and installed Isabel in her dorm at Whitman. Mark and I spent a few days observing the other kids (Birkenstocks, more bros than I’d expected at a little liberal arts school), listening to uplifting faculty speeches, traipsing from Home Depot to Walmart to Macy’s to Walgreens, buying fans, towels, sheets, et cetera. All is good. 

No. All is great. I'm not sad anymore. Not even a little. There’s a certain lightness you feel watching a very competent, composed child venture out into the world where she can grow in ways she no longer could in your care. I’ve been trying to explain it to people and this is the best I can do: Imagine you’ve spent 18 years teaching a kid to ride a bike, running alongside, encouraging, looking out for potholes, worrying she's going to fall and break her collarbone or get hit by a car.  You've really given it your all and she's gotten better and better and needed less and less help and finally you let go and now she’s disappeared to ride around the block, pedaling like a pro.

How do you feel? You feel lost for a few minutes, but then you sit down on a bench. You look around. It's a beautiful day. You gradually notice there are birds singing and there's a pleasant breeze and maybe you should wander over to that cafe and have a celebratory affogato while you wait for her to return some months from now. (It's a really big block.) You have that affogato. It is delicious. Where should you go next? So many options. Hmmm. Strange. What is the word for this bizarre feeling? Is it freedom? 

Suddenly you and your spouse start going out more, doing silly stuff you haven't done since you brought that first baby home from the hospital. You can't wait to hear what the girl has to tell you when she gets back from her ride and it dawns on you that you might have some new stories yourself.

I don't actually say all that to people. It's what I would like to convey without having to resort to a dumb bike metaphor.

Ok, speaking of silly stuff you might do with a spouse as your kids grow up, Mark and I went to a legal recreational marijuana shop while we were in Washington.  Is that what you call them? Marijuana shops? We were curious to see what it's like to buy cannabis in a store. In case you didn't already know, this is what it's like to buy cannabis in a store: You pull up in front of a nondescript building just off the freeway near a McDonald’s. You walk in and read signs telling you to put away any cameras. At a pharmacy window you show someone an ID. They admit you to a bland-looking back room with glass display cases that contain, among other things, cool little pipes. Other than the wares, it resembles a room where you might buy a cell phone. There is a United States map into which customers stick pins to show where they're from, and the whole country is dotted with pins. You somehow manage to squeeze another pin into the dense blob of pins on the San Francisco Bay Area. A friendly clerk hands you a menu with lists of marijuana products (cookies, joints, candies) and asks surreal questions like:  “Are you looking for something exhilarating? Or more relaxing? ”

I can’t remember what we said. We bought a caramel. Why not? 

surprisingly creamy and yummy

Anyway. Legal, guys! It was 100% legal. As legal as a bottle of Snapple. As legal as a Starbucks scone. And yet. I went to lunch with some casual friends the other day. I’m very fond of these two friends and we meet every few months for lunch, but I don’t know them that well -- which is a nice category of friend, the people you don’t know that well and may never, but are always pleased to see. I told them of my field trip to the marijuana shop because it seemed like a moderately interesting story. Not one of those great, urgent stories you tell when you first get together with casual friends, but the fourth or fifth story you bring out, when there’s a lull in conversation. I thought there was a lot to discuss, but my friends basically fell silent. One of them politely asked if I had a prescription for the pot and I explained that recreational pot is legal in Washington. Then there was silence again. I felt mildly embarrassed and wished I hadn't said anything. It occurred to me that some people probably still think marijuana is wrong, even if it's legal. Like abortion or gay marriage, I guess. On some level, I must think that too, given that my kids have seen me drink, but I would never smoke a joint in front of them.

Then again, I'm completely ok with them reading this post. The mental image of Mom and Dad buying a pot caramel is probably enough to turn them off drugs forever.  

Here's the soup recipe from Viana La Place. I feel like I've posted it before, but no. It's fantastic.

1 1/2 pounds tomatoes, peeled and coarsely chopped

1/4 cup olive oil

1 onion, chopped

a few basil leaves, coarsely chopped

2 bay leaves

kosher salt and pepper

pinch sugar, if needed

2 heaping cups crusty bread, cut into chunks or torn. (A stale baguette works great. Even if you have to break it with a hammer, it will come straight back to life in the soup.)

shredded sharp cheese (Parmesan, Pecorino)

1. Combine olive oil and onion in a soup pot and cook over low heat until onion is softened. 

2. Add the tomatoes, basil, and bay leaves and season with salt and pepper. Cook for 15 minutes over medium-low heat. 

3. Add 2 1/2 cups water and bring to a boil. Add the bread, stir, and turn off the heat. Taste. It might need a pinch of sugar. Cover and let sit for 10 minutes. Serve with cheese. Serves 4.

a new lemonade, a failed curry, a Gabrielle Hamilton dessert

 tangy, fresh, and way better than it looks

THE LEMONADE 

In the glass above: “nose-to-tail” lemonade (regrettable name) courtesy of New York magazine via Julia Turner on the Slate Culture Gabfest.  You blitz a whole lemon in a blender, skin and all, with sugar, water, and ice for about a minute to create an invigorating drink with the froth of an Orange Julius and the bracing zestiness of real citrus zest, which you don't usually get in lemonade. I made the recipe as directed and thought it needed more sugar. In fact, I doubled the sugar. The fabulous lemonade I ended up with contained almost exactly the same amount of sugar as Coke and I never drink Coke because it contains too much sugar, so I guess I won’t be drinking much of this lemonade. But it sure was refreshing and delicious on a hot, droughty August day. Try it. You don't need to add as much sugar as I did. You might not even want it.

rich, spicy, and way better than it looks

THE THAI RED CURRY 

I was going to give you the recipe for the red curry with chicken that we made at the Thai Farm Cooking School after I triumphantly reproduced this dish in my own home, but something went wrong. It tasted good, but I think it’s obvious from the photo why this red curry wasn't a triumph. I'll spell it out: IT WASN'T RED.  I have no idea what I missed and I’ve read and reread the recipe, which I followed to the letter.

THE GABRIELLE HAMILTON DESSERT

Last night I served peaches on buttered toast, another one of those mysteriously wonderful, stupidly simple Gabrielle Hamilton dishes from Prune.  You toast crusty, craggy bread (I used sourdough) then butter thickly and top with sliced, unpeeled, ripe peaches. Sprinkle with sugar. That's it.

Mark said: “Excellent together, better separate. Why not just have some buttered toast and a peach? I’m not saying this to be a jerk. Eating them together, you’re just making things difficult for yourself.”

I love the guy, but he’s wrong. The sum of this dessert was so much greater than the parts. The heat from the toast and the sprinkling of sugar relaxed the peaches so they softened and released just a little bright, fresh juice that mixed with the warm, melting butter and the bread soaked them up. The flavors were pure and vivid.  I think the word "revelation" is overused, but if I used it, I would use it here. It would be condescending to tell you that this dish depends on the quality of your peaches, butter (I used Kerrygold), and bread, so I won’t.

I think this might work with apricots and plums, but probably not strawberries. 

Prom, Cookie, Cookie, Selfie, Stinger, Audiobook

immature cookies

I brought the big, brash birthday cake cookies from Ben Mims's Sweet and Southern to Isabel's prom potluck last weekend.

sophisticated ladies

I was pleased with this contribution until I put the tin on the table and took a good look. Nope. You serve cookies like these at a kindergartner's birthday right after the clown finishes up, not to a flock of delicate 18-year-old gazelles in 7-inch heels. Although the cookies were fantastically delicious, no one touched them. Wrong occasion. I will provide the recipe shortly, but I need to iron out one kink in it before I do.

Interesting fact: Isabel and her friends went to prom without dates. 

Cause they're a buncha wallflowers, obviously.

Seriously, though, things have changed since I went to the prom. (Like no one says "the prom," it's just "prom.") Exuberant, eminently presentable girls like these would have had no trouble getting dates and if for some reason they did, they would have stayed home. Girls certainly did not go off to prom in big, boisterously happy packs. What does this all mean? Explain it to me!

A few nights later I brought jammy dodgers made from Justin Gellatly’s excellent Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding to Owen's band bake sale. 

Jammy dodgers are a British butter cookie sandwiched with, as you probably guessed, jam.  I've made a few versions, but Gellatly's is the best and easiest: you put all dough ingredients into the food processor and push the button. Refrigerate dough. Roll it out, cut shapes, cut a little hole in half the shapes, spoon jam onto the other half, sandwich, bake. The cookies sold out. Recipe here. You should try it. (Apologies, but you do need a scale for this. If you don't have a scale, you should think about getting one even if you don't want to make these cookies. Once you start baking by weight you won't want to go back.)

And now for something completely different.

If only I'd taken off that apron.

A few nights ago I mixed my first-ever stinger, a classic cocktail that is made of equal parts creme de menthe and brandy. I decided to take a picture because it was such a cool-looking, Scope-colored drink, but when I saw the blurry shot I forgot all about the stinger, so dazzled was I by my own youthful allure. Boy, was I pleased! The smudged camera lens had taken decades off my age.

The blurry photo gladdened my heart and gladdens my foolish heart as I look at it now, even though I know exactly what I really look like. This is called "willful delusion" and I highly recommend it to anyone who is starting to feel bad about her neck. I have given this some thought and decided that at a certain age it's perfectly ok to embrace the blurry photos and erase the realistic ones. I also believe it's preferable to remove your glasses before checking your make-up in the car mirror midday; you really don't want to see yourself that clearly. And I'm sure everyone can agree that it's essential to detach any satanic magnifying mirrors you installed in your bathroom when you were 30. Be on the alert for these horrible mirrors in hotels, especially expensive ones, and drape with a hand towel promptly lest they ruin even one minute of your vacation. In short, there is nothing to be gained from close, realistic scrutiny of one's visage after age 45 and much to be lost, like high spirits, self confidence, and money. If you only ever see blurry pictures and are careful about your mirrors, you will have more bounce in your step and never require Botox.

Do I really mean this? I just might. Full manifesto coming soon.

Back to the stinger. I made it after reading the cocktails chapter in the endlessly intriguing and irritating Prune. Gabrielle Hamilton's conceit in the book is that she's addressing her restaurant staff, and at the end of the stinger recipe she writes: "Give me a heads up if anyone orders this; it's rare that anyone does but I'd like to meet them."

One day I will go to Prune, order a stinger, and see what happens.

I enjoyed my homemade stinger, but one was definitely enough. In a cocktail, that's a feature, not a bug.

I'll finish with an audiobook recommendation: David Rakoff’s rhyming novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, is a small, sui generis masterpiece. Characters include a lonely girl, a horrid socialite, a mistress, a spurned husband, and a gay cartoonist. Topics range from romantic anguish, to art, sexual liberation, the culture wars, and AIDS. The narrative voice is by turns silly, highbrow, bitchy, tender, furious, funny, and rueful. David Rakoff's actual voice (he narrates) is hoarse and weary, but he delivers his lines with a relish and poignancy no actor could ever match. He died of cancer at 47, something like two weeks after he finished recording. Such a loss. Such a strange, lovely audiobook. I've listened to it twice and will probably listen to it again before the week is done. Highly recommend.