Are we a melting pot -- or a bowl?

hippie food

Lord, I love a bowl. Rice bowl, quinoa bowl, ahi bowl, teriyaki zen bowl, any kind of nauseatingly trendy bowl, bring it on. I feel like a twit every time I use the term “bowl,” but the thing itself -- an assemblage of raw/cooked/pickled/creamy/crunchy/spicy/leafy ingredients with some kind of starch and unifying sauce in a single vessel -- I love unreservedly. I know Asians have been eating one-bowl meals forever, but when did bowls become a thing (to use another term that makes me feel like a twit), in the United States? 

I like to eat bowls in restaurants because they often feature the Asian flavors I most love. Just yesterday, Mark and I stopped for lunch at KoJa Kitchen on Clement Street in San Francisco, a windswept counter-service Korean-Japanese restaurant with a lot of delectable bowls full of rich meats and zesty sauces on the menu. I ended up ordering a so-called KoJa, which was a warm sandwich between crispy-crusted rice cakes, but I thought about getting a bowl.

All the dishes at KoJa Kitchen look like bowls even when they're not. The waffle fries at right are topped with barbecued beef, kimchi, mayonnaise, red sauce, and scallions -- totally a bowl!

But while I love restaurant bowls, the most exciting application of the bowl concept, I think, is at home.  What brought all this to mind was the roasted carrot and grain bowl I made last night from the new and very pretty vegetarian cookbook Love & Lemons.  

That's not a bowl on the cover, it's a salad.

This recipe was healthy, moderately easy, cheap, and damned good. Into a bowl (obviously) you put cooked millet, roasted carrots, roasted tofu, avocado, chopped almonds, and lettuce. Now, toss some chunked raw carrots, garlic, oil, tahini, lemon juice, and orange juice into a blender, pulverize, pour over your bowl, and go watch Broadchurch.

Did I mention that bowls are ideal for eating in front of the TV? 

It wasn’t the best bowl I’ve ever made. The best bowls I’ve ever made were from Ed Lee’s Smoke & Pickles, but then of course they were. Ed Lee is a restaurant chef and his bowls contain elaborate remoulade sauces and ingredients like salmon and pork belly. They are super-fattening and take forever to make, unlike that nice roasted carrot bowl.

I fell asleep last night inventing bowl recipes and spent a half hour this morning looking up bowl recipes online. Some of those recipes don’t meet my exacting definition of a bowl. What is my definition of a bowl? A bowl must contain some warm ingredients, and some cool. It needs a variety of textures, and some crunch is absolutely essential. Starches (rice, farro, quinoa) seem standard, though I could imagine a bowl without one. There should be a fatty treat in the bowl; if it’s a vegetarian bowl, that probably means cheese and/or nuts. There has to be a fantastically delicious sauce to bind everything together, of course, and a bowl must contain at least one vegetable. The vegetable is the whole point. There’s so much happening in a bowl, you don’t even realize you’re eating vegetables. If there’s no vegetable in the bowl, you might as well go have a burger. 

Speaking of burgers, happy 4th of July! Everyone is pretty grumpy about this country right now, including me, but what do I really have to complain about? Nothing. We’re not having bowls for dinner tonight. Two middle-aged people eating bowls in front of the TV on Independence Day seemed sad. We’re not having burgers either, though. Two middle-aged people grilling burgers on a deck in the fog all by themselves also seemed sad. So we’re having roasted marrow bones and peach ice cream in front of the TV, which seemed weird and fun. Now I have to go make it happen.

I'm on a quest for a great peach pie recipe. This wasn't it.

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. 

I think I get it now

Not to belabor this, but I made the Roberta’s Cookbook burrata and apple salad last night for our first course, and I made Ed Lee’s sauteed squid and bacon salad from Smoke and Pickles for our second, and all my questions about yesterday’s Piglet verdict were answered. I think. I will never know for sure what Aran Goyoaga thought about these cookbooks other than what she wrote, but I may have a better idea of what she was getting at.

The Roberta’s salad consisted of chopped, cold Pink Lady apples tossed in a bowl with burrata (glorified, creamy mozzarella) which fell apart and coated all the apple chunks. You’re supposed to add sorrel, but there was no sorrel to be had, so I added watercress leaves, just a few. Then I lightly salted this salad, put it on plates, and drizzled with honey. 

It was clean, bright, light, refreshing, all the flavors distinct. Beautiful. I flipped through Roberta’s and can see that this is typical of the Roberta’s style, at least in the salad department. Most of their salads don’t have dressings. For instance the other salad Goyoaga made was a beet salad that is “dressed” with just some creme fraiche. Another salad is “dressed” with celery juice.

To assemble the Ed Lee salad, first you make a really delicious, intense dressing of tahini, Asian sesame oil, and lemon. Fry some bacon. Fry some squid. Put it all together on a bed of arugula. Find the antonyms of all the adjectives I used in the first two sentences of the last paragraph and you have a roughly accurate (but highly unflattering) portrait of this salad. Messy, murky, a little heavy, not too pretty. But you could also say: gutsy, dark, rich, and full of strong flavor. (A chef could make this salad handsome, even if I couldn’t.) One of Goyoaga’s complaints about Lee was the “sauciness” of his food. This salad was definitely not "drowning" in sauce/dressing, but it had a dressing, a very assertive dressing that tied everything together. If you don’t want everything tied together, if you like your flavors pure and clean, you’re going to resist this salad and probably most the dishes in Lee’s book. 

This is a completely valid reason for choosing Roberta’s over Smoke and Pickles. Depending on your tastes, this could also be a completely valid reason for choosing Smoke and Pickles over Roberta’s.

I like both styles of cooking. I preferred the burrata salad to the squid, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of Lee’s dishes, too. I think the deciding factor for me would be that there are about five dishes I can make from Roberta’s without mail ordering 'nduja, black truffles, or bottarga, begging the butcher for pork collars, smoking my own ricotta, or figuring out how to grow sucrine. 

But it’s all moot because in the final round this morning, Roberta’s lost to The New Persian Kitchen. 

A misspent Monday

This post is for serious cookbook nerds only. Anyone else who reads it will roll their eyes and pity me, so please go do something else.

Ed Lee’s Smoke and Pickles lost to Roberta’s Cookbook in the Piglet this morning and I found myself surprisingly put out. You can read the judgment here . I had a handful of problems with this verdict and here they are:

First of all, I’ve made the salmon rice bowl from Smoke and Pickles that reviewer Aran Goyoaga tested and it was not, in my opinion, “too saucy.” I thought it was lovely, one of my favorite dishes from the book. The sauce she refers to is a remoulade that you add to your individual rice bowl and it was as easy to control how much you dolloped on your portion as it is to control how much butter you put on your toast. She made the same “too saucy” criticism of Lee's sauteed squid and bacon salad, which I haven't tried, but here again, it looks like one could easily calibrate the quantity of dressing so as not to “drown” the squid. I had plenty of problems with Smoke and Pickles, which I cooked from extensively last year, but her criticisms didn’t add up.  I felt that Goyoaga’s indifference/dislike was about something more than "too saucy," something that she didn’t or couldn’t pinpoint, or pinpointed and chose not to articulate. I wish she had. I still might have disagreed, but the review would have made more sense to me.

Second, I couldn’t see how the dishes she described from Roberta’s Cookbook -- burrata salad, beet salad, sea bass, gingerbread -- offered more “surprise” than the food in Smoke and Pickles. A beet salad? Were there other truly "surprising" dishes in the book that she just didn't happen to mention in the review? Or was "surprise" an unfortunate choice of words? Because from what I read in the review, Lee's was by far the more "surprising" cookbook.   

Third, I have an outsider complex and wanted the Korean guy from Kentucky to prevail over the Brooklyn pizzeria where they shot an episode of Girls. This is a problem with me, not Goyoaga's analysis. And it is silly.

Since I’m taking the week off, I decided to misspend the day and drove over to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy of Roberta’s. My family will be delighted to know that we’re having both a burrata salad and sauteed squid and bacon salad for dinner tonight. Someone should videotape this meal. 

Meanwhile, I baked the Roberta’s gingerbread, which Goyoaga describes as “moist and full of flavor and surprisingly easy to convert to gluten free.” How could it not be full of flavor when it's so full of ingredients? This gingerbread contains twenty two ingredients, including black pepper, caraway seeds, cinnamon, coriander, celery salt, juniper berries, almond flour, regular flour, cornstarch, honey, molasses, brown sugar. . . 

You could probably edit that list without losing much.

Results? It’s spectacularly good and seriously hot. Your whole mouth glows from the spices, especially if you eat it while it’s warm. I love that heat and guarantee I will be the only one in this household who does. 

There's only one problem with this gingerbread, but it's a big one: STRINGS. The grated ginger had long, tough fibers that you absolutely do not want in your gingerbread or your mouth. I followed the book’s grating instructions to the letter and when I looked at the photo of gingerbread in the book, saw that there are strings in their gingerbread too. How is this possible? Do they really serve gingerbread with strings in it? Are my strings just tougher and more offensive than theirs? Was something wrong with my ginger? How did Goyoaga not encounter the string problem? Did she encounter it and not mention it? Is this something a Vitamix might fix? Something one could avoid by mincing instead of grating the ginger? 

see? 

Anyway, if you're still reading: While the Roberta's gingerbread is fabulous, strings or no, I still think the wrong book won. I have a lot more to say on this. Sadly.

The kids are alright

I think we are done now.

The local middle school cut Mandarin this year and because no amount of pleading would get them to restore it, Owen and his orphaned Mandarin classmates now take classes twice a week at someone’s house. As of a few days ago, our house. I didn’t know how I’d feel about this, but I love it.  There are two girls in the class and twelve boys, half of whom are enormous, the other half, elfin. They're unbelievably fun to watch. 

There's a tendency among some of my friends to grumble about how kids in this town don’t have manners. I don't think it's true and I really don't think it's true after hosting the Mandarin students. They're polite, they're just not naval cadet polite. I'd say they're imperfectly polite. Clearly no one has ever told them to answer “yes ma’am” or rapped them on the knuckles with a willow stick for not looking you in the eye when they say hello. But someone has taught them to say thank you and to take their dishes to the sink and to try to be considerate, whatever that means. You can see them trying to figure out the details for themselves. It’s hard! About 15 seconds after they possibly should have said please, you can see them thinking, oh, wait, maybe I should have said please. And they say please. Or if I try to take a dirty glass out of their hands to put it in the dishwasher, they hesitate. Do they let me? Or do they insist on doing it themselves? What are the rules? Maybe it’s the decline of civilization, but I find this touching in a way that impeccable manners learned by rote at age three are not. 

Since they come straight from school, a parent supplies a snack. Monday, a parent brought bananas and pretzels, which is what I would have brought as it is healthy and unobjectionable. This snack didn’t go fast. It didn’t go at all. But we had these store-bought cookies someone had given Isabel and Owen that had been sitting in the car, bag open, getting stale for a few days. I asked if anyone wanted one before I threw them away and in about 90 seconds the stale cookies were gone. Dumb, stale cookies trump bananas and pretzels.

Yesterday I put out granola bars and some banana bread I’d made using the uneaten bananas from Monday. Moderately popular. Only Owen got excited about the granola bars and I think there was one boy who really liked the banana bread. Stale cookies trump bananas, banana bread, pretzels and granola bars.

I was downstairs when I heard class ending so I came up to say good-bye to the teacher. I found four of the boys looming over the plate (like I said, imperfectly polite) on which sat the unappetizing remains of Owen’s John Gore birthday cake that I'd hidden in a corner of the kitchen.  The frosting was drying out and family members had been shaving off tiny pieces with butter knives for the last few days. Not a pretty cake. I heard one of the boys say, “Owen, why were you keeping the red velvet cake from us?” 

 “You don’t really want that do you?” I said. 

They really did. A feeding frenzy ensued. I got more compliments on that cake in five minutes than I’ve received on everything else I’ve baked for the last month. Frosted four-layer red velvet cake trumps all. 

Another boy came into the room and saw the cake, now just a shadow of its former self. He said, “You made banana bread AND a layer cake!” 

I said, “Oh, the layer cake is from Saturday, I didn’t just make it for this class.” God forbid anyone think I have time to custom bake Mandarin snacks, even though I do.

He said in wonderment, “Still, you made them.” 

Sweet kids. Good job, parents. 

I’m pretty much done with Smoke and Pickles. Monday night I cooked the piggy burgers which I loved because they were so easy and tasty. You make pork patties (flavored with hoisin sauce), fry them, put them on buns and dress with a sun-dried tomato ketchup that sounds hard, but takes about 5 minutes. The recipe makes way too much ketchup, of course, unless you want to use it on your sandwiches every day for the next month. 

Tuesday night I made lamb rice bowls which were tasty but not easy. You make a lamb meatloaf that involves pureeing your meat mixture until it becomes a repugnant paste and then packing this weird paste into a loaf pan, baking it, cutting the cooled meatloaf  into slices, frying the slices, and serving these on top of rice with a yogurt-tomato sauce. Tasted likes gyros. Owen did not like the rice bowl, but he was mistaken. It was delicious and I will never make it again

Last night, I served Lee’s spare ribs with sauerkraut and horseradish cream.  Lots of bones, lots of liquid, soupy sauerkraut, horseradish. Yuck. Not my thing at all, but maybe I was mistaken. Owen loved it and cleaned his plate.

Watering the blog

 I am a bad cake decorator.

Sorry. Another long absence. I’ve spent many hours pondering the comments on the last post, comments that -- taken as a group -- have made me radically rethink personal grievances and long-held assumptions about cooking. Radically. I thought I was the only enthusiastic, ambitious home cook serving “deadbeat” eaters. Clearly not so. It’s a trend, a syndrome, a blight. I have thoughts!

But I’ve been laboring over a post on this topic day after day, day after day, and I’m stuck. Maybe because it's argument driven rather than anecdote driven and apparently my brain doesn't want to do that anymore. It’s driving me crazy. Meanwhile, I've been letting the blog wither and that's also driving me crazy.

So I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been cooking and shelve the dissertation for now.

I’ve now made all the rice bowls in Edward Lee’s Smoke and Pickles except the version with lamb, and I bought the ground lamb for that today. We love rice bowls. They’re great because you can customize based on your likes and aversions. We dislike rice bowls because you have to make fussy, fussy remoulade. We will probably never eat rice bowls again because of that, but it was fun while the remoulade lasted. 

Unfortunately, it's impossible to find the recipes for the following rice bowls on the internet and I think I know why. You have to type out the remoulade recipe, then the rice recipe, then the recipe itself. This will deter even the most ardent plagiarizer, including me. But, if you have Smoke and Pickles, here are the last three rice bowls I've made, listed in order of preference. The salmon rice bowl and beef rice bowl described in earlier posts were also terrific.

-The lovely tuna rice bowl (raw tuna, avocado, pork rinds, hearts of palm, jalapeno remoulade) was crunchy, cool, spicy, and creamy. I love anything -- novel, movie, song, rice bowl -- that brings together such different and seemingly discordant elements and then reconciles them. The seemingly discordant elements here were not just textural, but cultural. The world seems momentarily whole when you're presented with a dish that contains sashimi, hearts of palms, and pork rinds. Make this. Don't skip those pork rinds, no matter how gross you think they are. 

-The pork rice bowl was also fabulous. You make delectable pork sausage patties and fry. Serve atop rice with jicama sticks, and kimchi remoulade. It's been decades since I bought a jicama and I wonder if I will ever buy one again.

-The chicken rice bowls were not my favorite. You make chicken sausage patties and fry. Serve atop rice with orange segments, peanuts, and miso remoulade. Sweet, refreshing, burstingly juicy orange segments in a savory context? Blecch. All the other rice bowls I've made were much tastier. Tomorrow we'll have a verdict on the lamb rice bowl.

I also made Lee's cinnamon-honey roast leg of lamb. I marinated the expensive lamb for a day in a spiced buttermilk mixture and then glazed it with honey and cinnamon as it cooked. Not as good as it should have been given the special treatment and it brought me just a little closer to going off lamb altogether. 

Per his request, I made Owen a John Gore (see photo at top) cake for his birthday party on Saturday. I told him I didn’t think I could pull this off artfully, but he insisted. I was right.

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. 

 

Making blog posts out of molehills

Maybe we should've drunk the extra glaze.

You should know I'm a big fan of Smoke and Pickles no matter how much I might complain, which is what I’m about to do. 

Tuesday night I cooked Edward Lee’s pork chops with ginger-peach glaze, a recipe that involves brining chops in a fascinating black syrup of gin and sorghum (or molasses) then searing them in a cast iron skillet.

You spread peach glaze (3 fresh peaches, wine, honey, ginger) on the seared meat and crumble pistachio gremolata (garlic, pistachio, parsley) over the glaze. Put the skillet in the oven and 12 minutes later you have delicious, juicy pork chops with a fragrant peachy-nutty topping. Loved by all in the household.

But let's focus on the negative: After making the pork chops, there was more than a cup of peach glaze and roughly a cup of gremolata left over. There was more left over than I’d used and it wasn’t like I’d been stingy. How annoying. I checked Chowhound, where they’re also cooking through Smoke and Pickles, to see if anyone else was irritated by the waste of peaches and pistachios. No. No one was irritated. One cook remarked equably that he/she had tossed the extra gremolata into sauteed green beans. Another used it to flavor some beets. 

I admire their resourcefulness, but I really didn’t want extra peach glaze and gremolata. Chef Lee can store extra glaze and gremolata in his walk-in refrigerator and use it on the next round of pork chops or maybe some fabulous new dish he dreamed up because he's an artist. It's like he just mixed a little extra paint. 

I’m not an artist and our refrigerator is a hellhole of  juice boxes, caperberries, hoisin sauce, leftover pizza, mayonnaise, beer, about-to-expire cream, tuna salad, horseradish, sprouting carrots, and parmesan rinds. How I feel about my refrigerator is how Nora Ephron felt about her purse.

I hate to waste food, but it took me a lot longer to write this than it did to decide to throw out the glaze and gremolata. I waste food all the time and usually it's my fault, but this one's on Edward Lee. A shame either way.

Conclusion: Great pork chops. If you make them, cut the glaze and gremolata by two thirds.  

Lee’s warm roasted okra and cauliflower salad, which I served with the pork, was less of a hit. Oh, what am I saying! It wasn’t a hit at all. My friend Melanie and I ate it for lunch the next day so it didn't go to waste, but don't bother making this for picky eaters. Like you needed me to tell you that.

On the other hand, these quinoa chocolate chip cookies were a hit with picky eaters. Soft, crunchy, substantial. You can tell they’re healthy, but after 24 hours they're almost gone. The unholy power of chocolate chips. 

A slightly oddball roast chicken

the Library of Congress image bank, a treasure trove

I’m not much of a roast chicken person anymore. I roasted a chicken once a week for many years and then I just quit. It's an easy meal and everyone in our house eats it, but the others are just as happy with grilled cheese sandwiches and I’m happier. Zuni, Bouchon, beer can -- nothing moves the needle. I seem to be over roast chicken. I don’t expect anyone to share my feelings. 

But Edward Lee’s potato-stuffed roast chicken from Smoke and Pickles looked novel and beautiful and I had to try it. I'm glad I did. Unlike a lot of his other recipes, this one is simple and you can buy the few ingredients at any supermarket. The results are lovely.

Here's the story: You peel and grate an 11-ounce Yukon Gold potato (or any waxy potato) then wring out the extra liquid as for potato pancakes. Season the shreds with salt and pepper and saute in butter for "exactly 2 minutes, no longer." Cool. Gently separate the skin from the chicken’s breast and slip the potatoes between skin and meat, spreading them evenly over the meat. When you're done, rub oil all over the chicken and season with salt and pepper. Sear the breast quickly in a very hot cast-iron skillet, flip the chicken over, place the skillet in the oven, and roast at 400 degrees F for about an hour. 

The idea is that the layer of buttery potatoes will keep the breast moist while the fat from the chicken skin flavors and further enriches the potatoes. The whole thing works exactly as advertised.

Let's start with the potatoes. Dangerously good. They melted into a rich, luxurious substance that resembled very soft, very flavorful hash browns. The only problem was that we each got about a tablespoon and wanted more. Could you stuff more potato shreds under the chicken skin and end up with more of these incredible hash browns? Lee doesn't say. I bet you could add half again more potato without messing up the recipe or damaging your health, but won't swear by it. 

The chicken itself: tasty and moist. But I just can't get excited about roast chicken. If you want rhapsodies, folks really, really adore the chicken over at Chowhound. 

A choppy week in the life

The Vitamix box is now a mask. But a mask of whose face? The first person to answer correctly in the comments wins a copy of Smoke and Pickles. 

Shorter, more frequent posts going forward. This one wore me out.

LAST WEDNESDAY I made the yellow squash soup with pickled strawberries from Smoke and Pickles and a prettier soup you’ve never seen. Just look at it. Sadly, it's a cold soup and I don't love cold soup. I thought maybe I'd changed, but no. I heated the leftovers for lunch the next day and in my view hot is the way to go with this and all soups except gazpacho. Pickled strawberries sound daunting but are just sliced berries tossed with salt and sugar and allowed to sit for an hour. The recipe for the soup and strawberries is here. 

THURSDAY Made fudgy, soil-black brownies from Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite. The batter calls for both unsweetened chocolate and cocoa powder, then you sprinkle sea salt on top of the brownies before putting the pan in the oven.  (The recipe also calls for cayenne, which I omitted.) Mark and Isabel declared these brownies the best I've made. I liked them, but The Essential New York Times brownie remains my #1. You can decide for yourselves. Clark recipe is here. 

FRIDAY In Smoke and Pickles Edward Lee offers a handful of recipes for what he calls "rice bowls:" individual bowls of hot, crusty rice onto which you pile a variety of other ingredients and then mix into the rice with a spoon. It's a dish that appears sloppy and effortless, like something a young drunk guy  throws together when he comes home starving at midnight and then shovels into his mouth while standing at the counter of his crappy apartment in Ballard or Oakland or Brooklyn. 

Well, it's not like that at all. No drunk person could assemble an Edward Lee rice bowl except maybe Edward Lee. Friday night I made Lee's rice bowl with beef and this “simple but satisfying rice bowl” contains 43 ingredients including homemade remoulade, freshly shucked corn, cooked collard greens, marinated flat iron steak, and fried eggs. It’s a little deflating to go to the trouble of gathering/making all these components and then see everything dumped into a little bowl and mixed up. But I got over it real quick. The steak was tender and full of flavor, the collards rib-sticking and almost meaty themselves, and the crunchy-creamy-salty corn remoulade tied it all together. The recipe is here and you should make it before the last of the summer corn disappears. This is a stupendous dish.

My family, of course, is not a family of eaters. Isabel didn't eat the collard greens or egg. Mark didn't eat the collards. Owen wouldn't eat the collards, remoulade, or rice (which he complained was "mushy") and because he was in a lousy mood he also informed me that despite all evidence to the contrary, he hates brownies and why would anyone put salt on a brownie?

Eighth grade is a hard year.

SATURDAY I decided to help Owen clean his room, which hasn't been vacuumed in 6 months. The floor was covered with Legos, Optimus Prime figurines, Joker drawings, clown wigs, school papers, and dirty jeans in layers so thick and ancient that you couldn't even see the the floor much less vacuum it. In the course of our cleaning, he yelled at me. I yelled at him. Mark came up and gazed at us both reproachfully and asked if we couldn’t do this without yelling. I wanted to throw Decepticon at him. After several hours, the room was 67% of the way toward vacuumability and Owen went to a birthday party. 

I decided to sign up for a 10-day free meditation program. 

SUNDAY Owen woke up with puffy eyes. Apparently we'd stirred up a hive of dust mites during our cleaning, but I decided this should be a day of rest. I went to see Short Term 12 which is wonderful. Did day #2 of the meditation program and felt calm for about 3 minutes afterwards. No cooking.

TUESDAY Owen woke up with puffy eyes again and had to take a Benadryl before leaving for school. He begged to stay home because he thought he looked "freaky," but I said no because he didn't look freaky. We argued. He slunk off to school. We're not getting along, but we'll always have Cuzco. I decided I’d finish cleaning his room myself and get it vacuumed. I scooped up fistfuls of Legos and dirty Kleenexes, petrified gray socks, stuffed animals, a grotesque horseshoe crab shell, crayons, unwanted Harry Potter books, Archie comics and a broken picture frame on which I cut my hand. Once finished with his room, I booked a business trip, made a dental appointment, answered a query letter from the IRS, bought batteries and a canister of Comet, paid the auto insurance, ordered a cover for the Weber kettle grill, and sorted laundry. I did meditation session #4 and took a moment, as directed, to “notice my mood." Mood: foul.

But it improved. Since we had leftover remoulade, I made Lee's rice bowls with salmon for dinner. Holy smokes, this is an amazing dish. Even better than the rice bowl with beef. Marinated salmon, shiitake mushrooms, proscuitto, remoulade, slivered dried mango. Big hit with all. I can't find the recipe online, so you'll need to track down a copy of Smoke and Pickles.  Library, bookstore, or start trying to identify that mask.