I keep wanting to type "Tyler Perry"

I detached the keyboard from the computer the other day because Owen hadn’t done his chores and seemed incapable of separating himself from Team Fortress 2. Based on his reaction, Owen would have preferred I detach a few of his toes, maybe even a foot.

Direct quotes:

“You’re the worst mother in the world.”

“This is my day off! I have so few days off and I just wanted to be happy.”

“I’m NEVER going to unload the dishwasher again unless you give me the keyboard back.”

“But I wanted to write a movie review on the computer! Don’t you want me to write movie reviews?”

“I’m going to step on your phone.” 

“That cauliflower soup you made last night was uneatable, the worst dinner ever. You should burn the cookbook that it came from. It left a really awful taste in my mouth and later when I tried to eat cereal to get rid of the taste, even the cereal tasted like vomit. I wasted a lot of cereal, Mom. You should know that.”

Guys, the soup (recipe here) was not that bad. It’s a very eatable, even tasty, cream of cauliflower from Tyler’s Ultimate. You make it by simmering cauliflower in milk with thyme, bay leaf, and butter, then blitzing in a blender. Toss some bread crumbs and pine nuts with more butter, toast in the oven, and strew this rich, salty, crunchy topping on the soup. Yum.

Tyler's Ultimate does not deserve to be burned. Good cauliflower soup notwithstanding, I did give it to Goodwill. 

I guess I need to back up.

A year or so ago someone left two cookbooks on the free table at the gym: Tyler’s Ultimate and The Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook. Both of them were signed. The Tyler Florence book was warmly inscribed to someone who shall remain nameless.

I took the books, of course. But did I really want them?

My shelves are getting tight again, so recently I decided to cull a few titles. It seemed logical to start by evaluating books I never actually chose.

I decided I had to try one recipe (the soup) but other than that I didn’t see much I liked in Tyler’s Ultimate. If you love Tyler Florence, speak now and I will listen respectfully. I didn’t delve deeply and could well be wrong. But the recipes appeared standard, the pictures almost grotesquely huge, the overall feel, flashy, showy, not my thing.

Tyler's Really Good -- now there's a title!

You know, because I’m really subtle and modest and elegant.

Tyler went.

Macrina, by Leslie Mackie of the Macrina Bakery in Seattle, is as drab as Tyler's Ultimate is gaudy. Which is not to say that I adore the look of this book, which is full of illustrations like this:

I think that is supposed to be a slice of toast.

No color whatsoever. You flip through this book and feel like you’re in a shabby apartment, late afternoon, with the blinds drawn. You can’t find a light switch.

Still, lots of intriguing recipes. And I do love to bake.

First, I tried the rustic potato loaf ("Macrina's most sought-after loaf") and it was perfect.

You boil potatoes in their jackets, mash, work them into a dough and bake into a lovely dense bread. I ate a piece of this every day last week for breakfast. I’d make it again in a heartbeat. Recipe here.

A few days later, I baked the Guatemalan hot chocolate bread. Really unusual. The flavor is that of chocolate cake, the texture that of yeasty bread. Big chunks of chocolate throughout. We ate roughly half the loaf before the novelty wore off. I wouldn’t make it again, but it was an interesting experiment.

chocolate bread, obviously

Friday, I made the Macrina chocolate chip cookies with dried apricots. 

Conversation transcribed almost verbatim:

Jennifer: Did you try those cookies?

Mark, frowning: Yeah, I did. What kind were they?
Jennifer: Chocolate chip.

Mark, still frowning: Really?

Jennifer: Chocolate chip with dried apricots.

Mark: AHA!!!! I knew it!! I tasted one and spit it out. It was like there was a worm in there. 
Jennifer: You did not spit it out.
Mark: When you’re expecting a regular chocolate chip cookie, you don’t want to bite into something gross.

Jennifer: Dried apricots aren’t gross. 

Mark: I will not be having another one of those cookies.

Jennifer: Are you kidding? 

Mark: Don’t tease me like that. It’s like me expecting you to go to the basketball game with me. 

I live with crazy people. The cookies (recipe here) are delicious.

Macrina stays. 

Other things cooked since my last post:

-condensed milk ice cream from Smashing Plates with 1 teaspoon of orange flower water added. Needs a new name, this ice cream. Otherwise delicious. If you have the book, you will not be disappointed by the ice cream.

-This Bon Appetit lamb and lentil dish which I liked, Mark deemed “flavorless,” and Owen said was “too spicy.” Can a dish be both flavorless and too spicy?

-The delectable little peanut butter chocolate sandwich cookies from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook. Recommend.

What IS my cooking?

happy homework days are here again

On our last night in Wales we were sitting under an umbrella in the garden of a grotty pub waiting for our fish n’ chips as hundreds of shrieking sea gulls wheeled overhead. (“We’re not responsible for what the gulls do,” the dour barman had said before suggesting we sit under that umbrella.) Looking anguished, Isabel said, “I really can’t wait to get home so I can eat food I like.”

 “Aha!” I said. “So you do miss my cooking!”

She studied me for a moment then replied, “You never make the same thing twice. I don’t even know what your cooking is.”

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Isabel wasn't being 100% fair, as I pointed out to her. I make the same green salad almost every night and the same kale salad every couple of weeks. Same pesto, same brownies, same popovers, same carnitas, same cole slaw, same cornbread, same pancakes, the list is long. But there was truth in her words. When I started this blog, I became obsessed with trying new recipes. And it's been big, big fun.

Since returning home from vacation, I’ve cooked only recipes that I've tried before. As an experiment and to silence critics. Is it a coincidence that I’ve only written one blog post in two weeks?

Here’s what I’ve learned:

A lot of the dishes I tried once and chirped about in recent years didn't sit well on second making. A short list of recipes that didn’t survive round two: Ed Lee’s piggy burgers from Smoke and Pickles, Smitten Kitchen’s gnocchi in tomato broth, Smitten Kitchen’s red wine velvet cake, Smitten Kitchen’s Mexican-style eggs. There were no outright failures here, but for whatever reason, we changed our minds about all of these dishes.

A few recipes held up beautifully. Smitten Kitchen’s immense and cheesy eggplant calzone was even more popular the second time than the first. Also great: The cocoa-cumin tri-tip from Eat Good Food and Dorie Greenspan’s chocolate gingerbread. 

You don't really know a dish until you've made it a few times. I didn't really know any of these dishes and it makes sense that some of them lost their luster on closer acquaintance. It was only when I started mining the deep past that I began consistently digging up treasures. Pre-blog, I had what some people call “a rotation.” Easy, reliable dishes that I made again and again. Unsurprisingly, everything from this pool of recipes has been fabulous. Roughly once a week I used to serve Marcella Hazan’s famous chicken with lemons. How did I live without it all these years? I made it last week, I’m making it again tonight, and if you've never had it, you must try it. Rub a roasting chicken all over with kosher salt (under the skin, on the skin, in the cavity) and let it sit in your refrigerator overnight. Then proceed with Hazan’s recipe. 

I also took another pass at Hazan’s messy, time-consuming eggplant parmesan, a dish I loved in the 1990s. I reminded everyone in my family of how much they enjoyed Smitten Kitchen's eggplant calzone and referred to this as "eggplant lasagna." Despite my efforts, it didn't go over well. I sat there crowing about how good it was while they all tried to separate the eggplant from the cheese, which is like trying to enjoy an omelet without consuming any egg. The recipe is excellent, you just need the right audience.

More popular was the mulligatawny soup from Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking. No complaints from any quarter, despite the fact that it contains parsnips and lots of curry powder. Last night we had Yunnanese pork from The Seductions of Rice. That was a big favorite back in the day and I would say it's a big favorite today. Try it. There are few easier dinners. 

So why haven’t I felt compelled to post about any of this? I'm not sure. Maybe it's that I find it a little boring. Where's the adventure? Where's the learning curve? I like novelty and excitement and growth, which is great. But on some level my relentless kitchen experimentation over the last eight years has been very selfish. This is part of what Isabel was saying and why it made me defensive. What I need to do in the future is find a better balance. 

The particular sadness of apple cake

R.I.P. Marcella Hazan. If you don’t own any of her books, you should change that. They’re all excellent except Amarcord, her memoir, which made me dislike her a little bit. But you don’t have to be a warm, big-hearted person to write excellent cookbooks. If you only buy one of her books, I'd buy Essentials of Italian Cooking and make the pasta with tomato and butter sauce. Perfection.

I apologize for the long absence. I’ll explain. But first, some recipes, most of which I served at a family party:

-chai pickled grapes from Ed Lee’s Smoke and Pickles. Wonderful. Easy. You should buy some crispy red grapes and pickle them today. I served these with manchego cheese (Lee’s suggestion) and this might be the most memorable dish I’ve prepared from his book. The recipe for the grapes is here. I cut it by two thirds because I don’t own a restaurant; as I've mentioned before, Lee doesn’t always scale for the home cook.

-Lee's oysters on the half shell with rhubarb mignonette were nothing special. Raw oysters, thin vinegary sauce. I could not taste the rhubarb. Almost stabbed myself while shucking oysters. 

-Lee’s pulled lamb barbecue was expensive and a fair amount of work and had the gamy, funky lamb flavor that I enjoy only in very small portions. I worry I'm on the brink of not liking lamb. An interesting experiment, but I prefer pulled pork. Also, the recipe calls for boneless lamb shoulder and then instructs you to cook it until the meat “falls off the bone.” That’s a challenge. It leaves you unsure what meat you're supposed to buy. I went with boneless and it worked fine. The recipe is here and if you love lamb and have a day to devote to cooking it, give this a shot. 

-Cheesy broccoli casserole came from a book called Real Cajun by Donald Link and it’s a hearty, rich casserole in the hallowed American tradition that relies on Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. But instead of opening a can, this recipe has you make your own. Your kitchen will look like it was hit by a tsunami and you’ll be scrubbing pots for an hour, but the casserole is worth it. The perfect dish to bring to a potluck or someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner when you don’t have to cook anything else.  

-For a weeknight dinner I made Lee’s habanero-lemongrass marinated steaks. Confusing because on the plate was something that looked like an expensive T-bone steak but tasted like stir fry. I’m conditioned to want expensive steak to taste like steak. You might feel differently. If so, give these a try. 

So that’s the cheerful cooking wrap-up. Now I'll tell you why I had to take a break from cooking and blogging.

About 10 days ago I baked Smitten Kitchen’s mother’s apple cake. Believe it or not, this cake was even prettier than it appears in Deb Perelman's photo. It was really delicious. It wasn't weird or healthy or gluten-free. Just a beautiful, fattening, old-fashioned cake full of sugar, cinnamon, and apples. 

No one except me ate it. My children did not even taste it. 

A day or so after baking this cake, I flew to Las Vegas for a magazine story I’m writing about thrill seekers. For research, I rode the XScream, an instrument of torture atop the Stratosphere. Have you ever ridden the XScream? My hatred of the XScream is boundless. I would like to say you couldn’t pay me to ride the XScream, but apparently you can. The next day I did a zip line and after the XScream I could have napped on that zip line.

I thought everyone was as freaked out as I was until I saw the photo. Red t-shirt and jeans.

During the 30 hours that I was gone, Mark decided to bake a tube of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls that he’d been keeping in the refrigerator. He and the kids gobbled them all up. When I came home from Las Vegas, exhausted and maybe the tiniest bit strung out, I found an untouched apple cake and an empty cardboard tube that had recently held Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. 

Oh boy. Bring on the crazy. 

Tearfully I told Mark that Pillsbury cinnamon rolls were redundant when there was a homemade apple cinnamon cake on the counter, that he and the kids didn't appreciate me, that I'd wasted years cooking for this family because all anyone ever did was make fun of me or complain, that he’d turned the children against my cooking with his jokes and Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. That our children don't eat vegetables because he made hating vegetables seem cool and funny. Because he is cooler and funnier than I am! And why did he refuse to eat homemade jam? Et cetera. I told him I felt like I’d been living for the last 17 years with Ronald McDonald. 

So much ire and sorrow over an apple cake, but of course this wasn’t just an apple cake. This was the beautiful bundt-shaped symbol of hundreds of dishes I've written about on this blog and hundreds of dishes I made before I started the blog, dishes that no one but me would eat. It’s depressing to cook for people who truly don’t care about food. One hand clapping, year after year. Over time it makes you feel stupid and lonely. Occasionally, furious. 

It’s also a drag to face the wrath of a weeping wife when all you did was bake some dumb cinnamon rolls. 

I was pretty nuts. He was pretty nice about it. You don't have to like food to be a decent person. Steam was let off. Peace restored. 

Sunday, I told my aunt about the apple cake conflagration and she said, “Did you ice the apple cake?”

No.

She said, “Just a little powdered sugar icing drizzled on any cake and I bet they’ll eat it.”  

Owen said, “That’s what I keep telling you, Mom!”

Frosted cakes from now on. Easier than finding a new family. 

 

Smitten Kitchen: Earnest Summation

As you may recall, a few months ago I spent some time cooking through The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. I always get around to the cookbook summaries eventually, if not in the timely fashion I originally intended.

There's a disconnect between Deb Perelman's tastes and mine. I was looking through the book this morning trying to put my finger on it, but there is no single "it."

I'll start with the first difference that jumps out: There are people who love brunch and there are people who don't and Perelman clearly falls into the former category. The breakfast chapter is one of the longest in her book and it is full of eggy, starchy dishes that serve a sociable crowd, i.e. brunch foods.

I am not a brunch person. It is 6:42 a.m. on August 4 as I type these words and I am fully dressed, drinking coffee, crossing items off my to-do list (including this post) like the insufferably peppy morning person I have always been. I can not imagine anything less appealing than waiting until 11 to drink mimosas and eat a slab of New York breakfast casserole. This isn't a value judgment, it's a difference in biorhythms.

But I also can't imagine anything less appealing than New York breakfast casserole at any time of day and that isn't a difference in biorhythms, it's a difference in taste. New York breakfast casserole is a savory pudding of bagel chunks, cream cheese, eggs, and half-and-half and nothing about that makes my mouth water. I'm not saying my taste is superior. Flummery? Just different. A lot of Perelman's dishes are, for want of a better word, dense. Chocolate chip brioche pretzels. Fig, olive oil, and sea salt challah. Cheddar swirl breakfast buns. These do not tempt me at all.

It sounds like I'm panning the cookbook. I'm not. Because where our tastes overlapped, I was consistently delighted. The dishes I loved from this book, I really, really loved. Broccoli salad. Red wine chocolate cake. Avocado tartine. Gnocchi in tomato broth. Eggplant and three cheese calzone. Grapefruit olive oil cake. Now that it's summer, I want to dip back into the book and try the peach dumplings with bourbon hard sauce. They look fabulous and I'm sure they are. I don't, however, want to try the tomato shortcakes with whipped goat cheese or the corn risotto-stuffed poblanos and that's the taste issue again. I can happily overlook it. Four dishes that are worth the price of the book? That's a shelf essential.

I cooked 31 dishes from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook and here's how I'd rate them:

worth the price of the book: 4
great: 6
good: 12
so-so: 8
flat-out bad -1

The one dish that I deemed "flat-out bad" was possibly "bad" due to an error on my part. I doubt the gooey cinnamon squares are really flat-out bad because Perelman doesn't publish bad recipes. But my rule has always been that if can't figure out what I did wrong, I go with the results. I could not figure out what I did wrong and these were too sweet for anyone in this house and some of us like shoofly pie.

My Smitten Kitchen problem

transference /trans·fer·ence/ (trans-fer´ens) in psychotherapy, the unconscious tendency to assign to others in one's present environment feelings and attitudes associated with significance in one's early life. . .  

I was chopping broccoli for Smitten Kitchen's broccoli slaw on Friday -- the fourth time I've made this great salad -- and decided it was time to write about my Smitten Kitchen problem. Or, I should say, my former Smitten Kitchen problem. This all happened a few months ago and I wasn't sure how to tell the odd story, and I'm still not, but here goes.

I'll start in the middle.

I used to be a semi-regular visitor to Smitten Kitchen, Deb Perelman's recipe blog. I read her posts and skimmed the hundreds and hundreds of loving comments appended to each one.  If you're unfamiliar with Perelman, though I doubt you are, she's a thirtysomething woman who lives in New York City with her husband and pre-schooler son and writes about cooking. Her chummy, confiding persona is that of a charmingly obsessive perfectionist. She's not my soulmate, but she's a real pro, cheerful and consistent in her posting, reliable and often inspired in her recipes, a strong photographer.

Yet I found myself holding back approval from her blog. When her book was published last fall, I bought it right away but again held back. I was even a little sorry when the first recipe I tried, the buttered popcorn cookies, turned out to be so delicious. I was reading her in a mean spirit, looking for faults. This is no way to read a cookbook or anything else.

Was it jealousy?  I wrote a cookbook that did fine and Smitten Kitchen wrote a cookbook that was a huge hit. I pondered this at length, because it seemed like the most obvious explanation. But while I should have been jealous of her sales, which translate into tangible benefits like money and professional opportunities, I didn't feel so much as a twinge of envy. It was something else. I thought and thought and then suddenly it was clear as day and since that moment of clarity I've had no problem with Deb Perelman at all.

I went to all-girls schools from kindergarten through 8th grade, a period I think of as my own private Dark Ages. I was excruciatingly shy and struggled to navigate the intensely social and socially intense culture of an all-girls school. I was constitutionally unable to sit on other girls' laps, talk baby talk, dance gracefully around the maypole (seriously!), excel at field hockey, join in spontaneous renditions of Rainbow Connection, or jump up when Fiona or Mindy walked into the lunchroom and cry out "Sit here! Sit here! I saved you a place!"

That's one of my chief memories of 8th grade: Mindy or Fiona entering the lunchroom and the competing cries of "Sit here!" "No! Sit here." The more one girl begged the harder the other girls would plead. They sounded like seals begging for sardines. I'm sure they thought I resembled a hermit crab, if they noticed me at all.

At the end of the school year there were tears and promises and big group hugs.Yearbooks were serious business, the pages blanketed with sentimental notes signed with nicknames that originated at slumber parties, every "i" dotted with a heart. There were drawings of flowers, drawings of Snoopy, smiley faces.

I tried to throw out my old yearbooks last year, but Mark made me keep them. In preparation for writing this post, I pulled out my 8th grade volume of Works and Days. I was sure I would have nervously solicited signatures from  Lisa Bransten, Lindsay Dunckel, maybe Leslie Howes and a few others. But there is only one signature in the book.

Thank you, Margaret.

Fast-forward to 2013: Smitten Kitchen's most recent post got 261 comments. Mine got 14.

Do I need to connect the dots?

Sure, no problem.

I wasn't envious of Deb Perelman's professional success as reflected in sales, which would have been sensible. I was envious of her popularity among girls. When I read her blog and the hundreds of comments I felt like I was back in 8th grade, standing meekly in the corner watching an outgoing girl get her yearbook signed.

I like to think I've changed completely, yet 33 years later: exact same hairstyle.

Just recognizing what was going on solved the problem instantly. I don't know how that works, but it does. I'm now very fond of Smitten Kitchen.

This is all just to say that our feelings about cookbooks can be far more complicated than whether we love a certain recipe for broccoli slaw. Which we do.

While I was flipping through that old yearbook, walking down bad memory lane, I saw a picture of Mr. Bell, who taught English and P.E.

Mr. Bell was handsome, wasn't he? I didn't think so at the time, but a 13-year-old girl can't see past facial hair. Nor should she. I think Mr. Bell may have something to do with my Michael Ruhlman problem. He has everything to do with why I hate field hockey.

Just so you know, honey, I really don't want to know

lemon bars

I made Nancy Silverton's asparagus, fontina, and prosciutto sandwiches Thursday night. No special alchemy, just a decent idea for a sandwich that I wouldn't have come up with on my own. You roast asparagus and toast some bread. Rub the bread with garlic. Put asparagus on bread, top with a poached egg, top with fontina, melt under broiler for 30 seconds, top with prosciutto, eat with knife and fork, then eat all the asparagus your kids took out of their sandwiches ("Just so you know, Mom, I don't like asparagus,") load the dishwasher, go to bed.

This involved a lot of dishes for sandwiches, but given sandwiches are all we ate, fewer dishes than usual. Recipe is here.

I'm trying to cook one thing a day, no more and no less. On Friday I made Smitten Kitchen's whole lemon bars which involves pureeing a lemon, skin and all, with sugar and egg and pouring this over the shortbread crust. Definitely easier than juicing the lemon and scraping the zest as I've done in the past with Joy of Cooking lemon bars, but how will I ever know which is the better bar unless I test them side by side? I'm not going to do that. There was a day not long ago when I would have, but I've come to value sanity over the scientific method. Smitten's lemon bars are good. Joy lemon bars are good. You won't go wrong with either.

I put the pan of lemon bars in the refrigerator to firm up on Friday night so I could cut them into pretty squares on Saturday morning, but Isabel's two best friends started the job for me after I went to bed. Isabel told me that her friends thought the lemon bars were "too eggy," but I think the pan tells another story.

Teenagers are cute.

I didn't cook anything on Saturday. Does that mean I have to cook two things today? 

Don't cross me today!

oeufs Francis Picabia

I apologize for the disgusting spam that's been popping up in the comments lately. It should stop now and if it doesn't I will take further measures.

A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to read The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, so I stretched out on the sofa and read it cover to cover. There were a few clever lines, a few recipes I wanted to try, and lots of complaints about servants. Gertrude Stein really bugs me. She was so toweringly smug and with good reason, but still: smug. I'm boycotting Gertrude Stein going forward. That'll take her down a peg. I'm glad I read the book because now I don't feel like I need to anymore.

Anyway, one recipe that fascinated me was oeufs Francis Picabia. I don't eat scrambled eggs, but Owen does and this morning I decided to give him these fancy, buttery eggs, which are named after the painter who provided Toklas with the recipe. According to the recipe, you cook 8 eggs very slowly in a saucepan and whisk in 1/2 pound of butter -- "not a speck less, rather more if you an bring yourself to it." The cooking should take half an hour and the eggs should have a "suave consistency."

I used 2 eggs and cut the butter back proportionately, but could not stretch the cooking process past 21 minutes on our stove. At first the eggs absorbed all the butter and appeared velvety, like custard. I should have taken them off the heat at that point, I suppose, because then they firmed up, curdled, and began to expel the butter. Butter was seeping out of the eggs when I scooped them onto the plate, as you can see if you look closely at the unappetizing photograph. Owen gamely ate about half the eggs and said they were gritty, "like cornmeal." I was thinking I might try again tomorrow, but I just looked up Francis Picabia so I could explain who he was in this post and I dislike his quotations so much that I'm adding him to my boycott list. I'm a regular crank today.

My in-laws were here for the last couple of weeks which was lovely -- truly lovely! -- but I lost my cooking rhythm. Also, I've been in a strange mood for the last month. Just not myself. I did make a few more Smitten Kitchen dishes: The gnocchi in tomato broth was delicious; everyone loved the butterscotch banana tarte tatin; the pork chops with cider and horseradish were dry. That's always a risk with pork chops and I don't blame Smitten. I think I will make her lemon bars today or tomorrow, but am otherwise done with her book and now owe you write-ups of both that and the Homesick Texan.

I'm sticking with my one-dish dinner strategy going forward and the next book I'm going to cook from is Nancy Silverton's Sandwich Book. 

Fantastic, delicious, fantastic, delicious

Oreo-like

Every time I sit down to write a post I think of all the dishes I need to describe to bring the blog up to date and decide not to write a post after all. It's hard to describe food without using the same fluffy adjectives again and again and again and sometimes I just can't bear to type "fantastic" or "delicious" one more time and I also can't think of alternatives.

But I've drunk a lot of coffee and am prepared to get this out of the way so I can start with a clean slate tomorrow. Here's what I've cooked from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook since last I wrote and here's what we thought:

red wine velvet cake. Fantastic. Delicious. Coconutty, though it contains no coconut. I don't know why this cake works so beautifully, but it does. Oddly, the recipe Oprah printed is not the same recipe that appears in the book. This is very close, if not identical. You should make it.

gooey cinnamon squares. Yuck. Not fantastic. I must have made a mistake, because they were inedibly sweet and didn't look like the squares in the picture here.

too gooey

broccoli slaw. Delicious. Second time I've made this crunchy salad and I loved it even more than the first. It's my favorite recipe in the book.

blue cheese and black pepper gougeres. Second time for these and again they were flat rather than puffy as gougeres should be. Recipe is here. It appears that the gougeres puff nicely for other cooks, so maybe you should give them a try because the flavor is both delicious and fantastic.

sad little gougeres 

eggplant calzone with three cheeses. Fantastic. I can't find the recipe online and I don't have the book with me.

Now I'm all caught up and it really wasn't that hard.

Oh you again, duck fat

Egg season is here once more.

The Tournament of Cookbooks, a.k.a. the Piglet, is over and a little sparkle has departed from my mornings. One judge was flagrantly lame, but I thought the rest did a pretty decent job even when I didn't agree with their decisions, as I often didn't. People interact with cookbooks very personally and I'm as interested in these idiosyncratic passions and aversions as I am in rigorous criticism and mad recipe testing.

By now the whole world knows that April Bloomfield's Girl and Her Pig trounced Smitten Kitchen in the final round. I didn't even own a copy of Girl and Her Pig and immediately rushed to Barnes and Noble to correct this oversight.

What do I think? Here are some of the ingredients you need to cook from Girl and Her Pig: smoked haddock, veal kidneys, guinea hen, duck fat, octopus, pork cheeks, whole suckling pig, pig's ears, pig's trotters, sweetbreads, ramps, suet, Old Tom gin, Sardinian gray mullet bottarga, young carrots "about the size of your pointer finger," spring garlic stalks, and "beef tongue that has been trimmed of any firm or hard bits."

My personal favorite: "a brain-in, tongue-in lamb's head (3-4 pounds), skinned and split lengthwise by your butcher."

Clearly April Bloomfield hasn't met my butcher.

This list irks me in a way that having to buy fish sauce to cook Vietnamese or sumac to cook Middle Eastern doesn't. It almost seems designed to make ordinary home cooks feel dorky. Like all the cool kids know about this awesome duck fat hook-up, but no one bothered to tell me about it. Outside Provence, what home cook has so much duck fat hanging around that she can casually roast potatoes in it?

No further commentary until I've spent more time with the book.

Meanwhile, I'm still ambling along with Smitten Kitchen, liking it more and more. Maybe her loss in the Tournament made me feel protective? I'm trying to make one dish every night. Just one dish. I've been in a funk and cutting back on the cooking has helped a bit.

Here's what we ate this week, all recipes from Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen Cookbook:

-ranchero eggs with blistered cheese. You make a simple, mildly spicy tomato sauce, poach eggs in the sauce, blanket in shredded jack, bake until the cheese is "blistered." Top with tortilla strips and sour cream. A solid breakfast-for-dinner dish that required no grocery shopping. I would take the eggs out of the oven even sooner than she indicates. Recipe here.

-avocado and cucumber tartine Pretty open-faced sandwich. Entails splitting and toasting baguette then topping with avocado. Make a little salsa of minced cucumber, toasted sesame oil, and rice vinegar and spread over the avocado. Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds. Delicious.

-honey and harissa farro salad You cook farro for 20 minutes, toss with roasted parsnips and carrots, lemony vinaigrette, feta cheese. Superb. You should make this. Recipe is here and I agree with the reviewer's commentary and tweaks. Leftovers make a great lunch.

-eggs with greens and hollandaise Wilt chard (or kale, or spinach), saute with onion and garlic, enrich with cream. Scoop the greens into ramekins, top with eggs, bake. Serve with big dollops of citrusy hollandaise. Fattening, maybe a little fussy, and definitely dirtied too many pans. I liked it, though. Mark liked it. Owen didn't like it and let me know and we had words.

I found this fascinating.

And I loved this movie, which Isabel and I saw when we were in NYC. The trailer itself is beautiful, the music haunting.

Transference in the cook-cookbook relationship

You should make this.

The title of the post is the title of the post I wanted to write, a searching essay about the the cook-cookbook relationship that would encompass the more mystifying rulings in the Tournament of Cookbook, my own muddled feelings about Smitten Kitchen, and field hockey. But that tour de force proved beyond my abilities today, maybe beyond my abilities full stop. I'll keep working on it and we'll see. Meanwhile, in order not to fall behind. . .

I know something about grapefruit desserts and the grapefruit olive oil cake from Smitten Kitchen is a standout. Moist, tender cake with a tangy, sugary glaze -- like a sublime lemon cake, but with the unexpected sparkle of Fresca. After 2 days the cake is almost gone and it's a loaf cake, the lowest of the low. Layne once likened loaf cake to "going out on a double blind date and finding out you get the ugly friend." My children would agree.  Most loaf cakes are beneath consideration, but we are devouring this one.

We were also fans of the Smitten Kitchen black bean ragout over garlic toast. Want to get a 12-year-old to eat black beans? Pour the beans over garlic toast. The dish is exactly what it sounds like and very tasty, if not revolutionary. The recipe is here. I don't have a slow-cooker, just cooked it very slowly on the stove.

The maple bacon biscuits?

 bacon, bacon fat, and syrup in biscuit form

Not for me. There's a "too muchness" to some of Deb Perelman's recipes. She takes something simple and perfect and loads it up with extras like bacon and maple syrup to make it even better, even more irresistible, but in the end it's not. I think she tries a little too hard.

But there are worse things.

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.  

French toast, grilled cheese, rice pudding

I ask gently if the homework has been started and then I request that the homework be started and a little while later sternly command that the homework be started and after that slyly suggest that maybe we can watch The Walking Dead if the homework is started and shortly thereafter I bark that the homework has to be started right this second and pour a glass of wine and wish I kept bourbon in the house, which is exactly why I don't.

The "mean schoolmistress" phase of parenthood. That's what I'm calling this. Or maybe "shrill schoolmarm."

Cooking pulled ahead of blogging again. I'll try to catch up quickly right now and get back into a reasonable rhythm later in the week.

I'm cooking from Smitten Kitchen. This will be a short interlude as there aren't many dishes I want to cook from the book. Deb Perelman is all about maximally delicious food, beautifully photographed, but her idea of maximally delicious food is very different from mine. She loves savory pastries and eggs -- in frittatas, baked, on latkes, deviled, mashed into salad -- and hearty breakfast casseroles and breakfast in general more than I do. Black bean stew poured on toast. Heavy baked pasta dishes. Dense cakes. Everything seems very dense.

Elizabeth Spiridakis in the Tournament of Cookbooks criticizes the dark photographs and maybe that's at play too.

I'm trying to keep an open mind. I've heard good things from friends.

I made Owen go through and write an "O" on every Smitten Kitchen dish he would like to eat. I'm focusing on those. So far we have eaten:

linguine with cauliflower pesto You blitz raw cauliflower in the food processor until it forms couscous-like crumbs (Perelman's image and very helpful.) Put this in a big bowl while you blitz almonds, herbs, cheese, capers, and sun-dried tomatoes in the processor until reduced to crumbs as well. Mix with the cauliflower. Add olive oil and some vinegar. Serve on pasta. I thought this was a knockout. Owen ate 2 helpings and then said it was "only ok." Would I make this again? You bet. Will I? Possibly. Recipe is here.

emmentaler on rye with sweet and sour red onions You saute red onions until jammy, pile them on rye bread, top with Swiss cheese, cook in a skillet. I expected to die of happiness when I bit into this sandwich, but I'm still here, typing and yelling at my son to practice trombone. I make a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches and always use cheddar or pepper jack. While I like to think I'm open to change the emmentaler didn't work for me. It tasted flat and wan. Would I make these sandwiches again? No.

vinegary slaw with cucumbers and dill Very tasty for a salad that contains no fat. Crunchy and refreshing. Where you usually add oil or mayonnaise, she has you add cold water. Would I make this again? Sure. Will I? Unlikely. I like my usual cole slaw recipe better.

cinnamon french toast The custard didn't cover enough of the bread and this "casserole" was dry, overly crispy. The picture on Smitten's web site sure looks pillowy and delicious. Maybe I did something wrong? I can't imagine what. Would I make this again? Only to figure out what I might have done wrong. Will I? Almost surely not.

gingerbread spice Dutch baby A flat, eggy, brown pancake. Smitten: "not puffed, but rumpled like a bed sheet. The edges are a little crisp. The center is something you'll daydream about later in the day." No one in this house daydreamed about the gingerbread spice Dutch baby later in the day. Again, I might have done something wrong, though I can't imagine what. Would I make this again? No.

more "Nevada desert" than "bedsheet"

tres leches rice pudding This, I am happy to report, we loved. You cook rice until tender then mix with a can of evaporated milk, a can of condensed milk, a can of coconut milk, and one egg. Cook until thick, stodgy, and dense. Chill and top with whipped cream. The recipe is here. Would I make this again? Absolutely. Will I? Likely.

Forgive typos. I have to go make some broccoli rabe panini. Full report tomorrow.

The pause that refreshes?

I fell behind.

In fact, nothing needed refreshing. The pause happened because living/cooking/eating/plotting got so far ahead of posting that catching up started to feel impossible. Weeks went by. The hole got deeper. The only solution is to do the most cursory catch up, forget the rest, and move on like I never missed a beat.

Cursory catch up:

1. I wrote a story on antique pie recipes. I've wondered about those mysterious old pie recipes for decades and now I don't have to anymore -- and neither do you! -- because I baked enough obscure vintage pies to learn that recipes go extinct for a reason. Well, usually. In case you don't want to read the whole story, Jefferson Davis pie is delicious, dark, and raisiny, though you really have to love both highly spiced Christmas puddings and the gooey part of pecan pie to appreciate it. Butterscotch meringue pie is also excellent, though you really have to love both butter and sugar to appreciate it. Since that includes almost everyone, I made the butterscotch pie again for Thanksgiving and my sister and I agreed that it was the best pie of the night.

2. I wrote a story about berries, which I turned in last week when no berry except the cranberry is in season. It was challenging to describe the exquisite appeal of a Hood strawberry or an Idaho huckleberry when I've never seen or tasted either, but I've always suspected I could write fiction. We'll see whether the editor agrees. I became fixated on berries while writing the story and was inspired to bake a red raspberry pie for Thanksgiving. This was my husband's favorite pie and while it was very tasty, it was no butterscotch meringue. I used frozen berries because Janie Hibler said it was ok and she wrote the book on berries. 

No one was hooked.

3. I also turned in a story about the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook.  I'll spare you the big think on Milk Bar until the story runs. If it runs. I will just say that the Milk Bar crack pie  was the least popular of the Thanksgiving pies and that Milk Bar's Saltine panna cotta is revolting.

inedible

4. In addition to the aforementioned pies, Isabel and I baked rhubarb pie, lemon chess, chocolate cream, pecan, and pumpkin. Various wags referred to the rhubarb pie as "celery pie" because the rhubarb, which came from our garden, was green. Do you like the word wags? I hope not because I will probably never use it again.

celery pie 

5. That's about it for Thanksgiving, but I made the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook S'more cake for Owen's birthday party. It consists of graham cracker-flavored layers sandwiched with milk chocolate ganache and iced with meringue. Predictably, the boys were in awe of the cake's billowy bakery shop beauty and that counts for a lot. It was a fine cake, but after the first day, no one ate any. If you cut a cake and no one touches it for five days, this is not a cake you should make again. A great cake is always in play.

Why wasn't this cake great? I can't really put my finger on it, but the pieces just didn't quite work together. It was less than the sum of its parts.

great looking, not great

7. However, every last floret of Smitten's broccoli slaw vanished within 24 hours. The recipe is on her site and you should make it. More than the sum of its parts.

8.  November is a hard time in America to concentrate on the cuisine of Southeast Asia, but I've tried. The tender greens salad from Burma is a wonderful melange of blanched pea shoots, fried garlic fried shallots, roasted peanuts, and lime juice. The recipe is here. The grapefruit salad was less harmonious, but with some tweaking could be great. The sweet tart chicken was very plain, and the beef stew with shallots was tasty. I may take a hiatus from Burma, as the next few weeks just don't feel Burmese.

9.  Tomorrow I am going to British Columbia on magazine business for a few days. If you have any restaurant suggestions in either Victoria or Richmond, please send them my way.