New ways to eat your colors

I made the strangest, loveliest soup last night. If you scroll down here, you'll find a reprint of the recipe for kesakeitto, a Finnish vegetable soup that is unlike any soup I've ever made. (Source: The Cooking of Scandinavia, Time-Life.) You quickly poach many vegetables (string beans, cauliflower, carrots, spinach, potatoes, peas, radishes) in water, which becomes a very light broth. Then you add milk, a little cream, and some shrimp and cook but briefly. The resulting soup has a consistency and color -- brothy and milky -- unknown in American chowders and soups. This will sound completely unappetizing, but it reminded me of what happens when you add too much milk to herbal tea. Except the soup, unlike the tea, is delicious and full of flavor. If I were to improve this, I might add some rice to thicken it just a bit, but I'm not even sure I'd do that. Try it. The recipe says the shrimp is optional ("a touch of luxury on special occasions"), but I wouldn't leave it out.

That's dill on top.

Here is the enchanting passage in which the soup is introduced in the book:

"If you are looking for a blunt, outspoken dish, look no further than slaughter soup -- the kidneys, liver, heart and meat of an animal, chopped up, boiled with carrots and potatoes and served with little barley and wheat dumplings flavored with blood. Almost as though to compensate for such ruggedness, there is a delicate soup, kesakeitto, made from summer vegetables. . . picked at their absolute peak of freshness and simmered in a creamy base. This soup is much favored by Finnish women, who think they are dieting when they eat it -- but with their consciences thus eased, usually go on to finish the meal with several small pancakes and strawberry jam."

Or, in the case of an American woman, strawberry shortcake. Recent comments on the blog made me crave shortcake, so I tried the recipe from American Cooking. Although this is not a salty, pie crusty type of shortcake, it is stellar. A sweet, pillowy biscuit sandwiching barely sugared strawberries. As Owen wolfed it down he said, "Make this again, exactly like this."

Strawberry shortcake (adapted from American Cooking)

I halved the recipe. I also found that when I baked the little biscuits atop the big ones, they browned deeply on the outside before their doughy middles were done. I would bake them separately, although this could make them a little too crusty. Just be sure not to overbake and I think all will be well.

4 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons sugar
5 teaspoons baking powder
2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
12 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into bits and chilled
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
2 tablespoons melted butter (sated butter would probably be good here)
2 pints strawberries, coarsely chopped; reserve 6 whole berries for tops of cakes
sugar for sprinkling berries
1 pint heavy cream, lightly whipped for topping

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Sift the dry ingredients together in a big bowl. Add the cold butter and rub it into the flour until you have a coarse meal. Add the liquid heavy cream and stir until a dough is formed. (This dough is delicious.)

2. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough a scant 1 inch thick. Cut 6 circles with a 3-inch biscuit cutter and then cut the rest of the dough with a 2 1/2-inch cutter. You will have to reroll scraps to do this.

3. Place the biscuits on a cookie sheet and brush lightly with melted butter. Bake for 12-15 minutes until golden. Don't overbake.

4. When they've cooled a bit, place the larger biscuits on dessert plates. Spoon the berries over the larger biscuits and sugar the berries to taste. Top with the smaller biscuits, then top the smaller biscuits with whipped cream and the whole berries. Serves 6 very, very amply.

Cornish pasties

'Cornish pasty' is one of those terms I don't like to speak aloud because if I pronounce it correctly people might think I'm mispronouncing and if I pronounce it incorrectly they might think I'm ignorant. You just can't tell until they say it themselves.  For the record, you pronounce it like this. Like nasty.

When I went to buy the the beef for the pasties, the butcher said, "What are you making?"

I said, "You know, those Cornish. . ."

He said, "Oh Cornish pasties. I made those about a month ago." He pronounced it like you'd pronounce "pasty" when describing someone's complexion.

Then we talked pasty crusts. He made his with Crisco and shared a long description. I didn't tell him I was going to make mine with lard because I didn't want him to feel unmanned. The lady customer is using lard and I, the big butcher, used Crisco?

You can have no idea how I pined for pasties when I was a kid flipping through American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland. That spread was one of my all-time favorites. You can't easily tell from my photograph of the photograph, but if you look closely at the middle photograph on the right you'll see they placed the pie on a shovel for the shot. Miners in Michigan supposedly used to put their pasties on shovels and then heat them with the candles in their head lamps. Do you believe that? Could a candle really heat a pasty through a shovel? Wouldn't that take several hours?

So I made the pasties and they were tasty and not hard at all. Here's a recipe that's very close to the recipe in the book. For the record, I used a turnip, not a rutabaga, and did not apply an egg wash. I halved the recipe and the pasties still fed three of us for three nights in a row, so be aware that this is a lot of hearty food. We had more filling than dough, and after the first night I fried the leftover filling like hash for myself and let the males in the house eat the actual pasties because they seem to have faster metabolisms. It was delicious hash. The pastry is like packaging and you don't need that when you're eating at home.

Verbatim conversation with Mark this morning as I sat at the computer trying to write this post:

J: "What did you think of the pasties?"

M: "The meat pies?"

J: "Why don't you say 'pasties?'"

M: "Because that sounds like a gross word. But then meat pie does too. It was pretty unattractive, the meat inside looked like dog food, but it tasted really good. You're a good cook."

Orange and strawberries

Sea-Tac. Starbucks. Beautiful glass. Sheraton. Insomnia. Starbucks. Beautiful glass. Sea-Tac. Writing. Self doubt. Writing. Self doubt. Very little cooking. This past week I’ve been unexpectedly busy, traveling and re-doing work I thought I’d already done and trying to get into the groove with Orange is the New Black.

And, unlike everyone else in the United States, I have failed.

The first episode featured an image so upsetting I couldn’t wash my mind’s eye clean for days and I trudged through four more episodes then gave up. Everyone else seems to be getting so much pleasure out of that show and damn it, I wanted pleasure too! 

What did give me pleasure last week: strawberry flummery from a recipe in American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland. It's a cornstarch-milk-sugar-egg pudding that you serve with berries, much like panna cotta, but sturdier. While the Time-Life volume is reticent on flummery’s origins, Amanda Hesser isn’t. According to Hesser, flummery is a descendant of a Welsh dish of very dense boiled oatmeal. Dictionary writers have defined it variously as “bland custard” and a “sort of pap and “Something insipid, or not worth having.”

For those of you who love bland custard and pap as much as I do, here's the recipe:

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/3 cup cornstarch
pinch salt
3 cups whole milk
1 egg yolk, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 pint fresh strawberries

1. Mix 1/2 cup sugar, the cornstarch, and the salt in a heavy saucepan and, whisking constantly, pour in the milk in a slow, thin stream. Cook over moderate heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and thickens. Turn the heat down as low as it will go.

2. Ladle a few spoonfuls of the hot cornstarch-milk mixture into the beaten egg yolk, mixing well, and, still whisking, pour it back into the pot. Cook for a few minutes more, but do not let it come to a boil. 

3. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the vanilla. Pour into a serving bowl and refrigerate until very cold. 

4. Just before serving, hull and halve the strawberries. Toss with the remaining sugar and then arrange them on top of the flummery. Serve immediately. (Leftovers are tasty, but after a while the strawberries collapse and their juice starts to run into the custard and the whole dish looks a lot less appealing.)

This, too, would probably be better in winter

Nantucket. Never been there.

I made Nantucket scallop chowder last night. Delicious. Easy. Expensive. Are scallops cheap anywhere? I don't ordinarily love scallops -- for a sea creature, they are curiously rich and unctuous  and they make my teeth feel strange -- but in this chowder they were lovely. I might try making this was a more affordable fish, though I doubt it will be as good.

The recipe is adapted from American Cooking: New England. Their recipe calls for adding an additional spoonful of butter to each bowl when you serve the chowder, but the soup was already plenty buttery. Maybe when people harpooned whales for a living they needed the extra fat, but I sure don't.

5 tablespoons butter
2 yellow onions, peeled and sliced
1 quart whole milk
1 large boiling potato, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1 pound sea scallops, cut into 1/4 inch slices across the grain

1. Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter in soup pot and saute the onions until soft but not colored. Add the milk, bring to a simmer, turn the heat to low and cook gently for 15 minutes. Watch carefully and adjust heat so the milk doesn't boil over. Strain the milk through a fine sieve and discard the onions. Return the milk to the pot.

2. Bring a small pot of salted water to a boil and cook the potatoes for 3-4 minutes until firm-tender. Drain.

3. In a skillet, melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter and saute the scallops for a couple of minutes, until almost cooked through.

4. Add the potato and scallops the the milk broth and heat. Taste for seasoning. It will need just a little salt. Serves 6.

This morning Owen pulled out the Tupperware of leftover chowder thinking it was waffle batter. The waffle iron was heated and we were about 30 seconds from disaster when I caught him. 

roquefort grapes and strawberry pie

Other than roquefort grapes, the most memorable thing that happened in the kitchen yesterday was that I said to Owen, "One day I'll be dead and you'll be sorry."

I used to think lines like that were reserved for mothers in Philip Roth novels, but have proved myself wrong. The remark came out at some point during our never-ending conversation about putting cereal bowls in the dishwasher, setting the table with the utensils facing the same direction, picking up socks, practicing trombone, turning off the TV after 7 or 8 hours, and whether or not RIPD is actually an awesome movie and my refusal to see it means I'm closed-minded.

We pretty much keep this going round the clock, with breaks for camp, sleep, and trips to the supermarket. He was unfazed by my remark. I don't know whether that's good or bad.

It was our turn to host Sunday dinner for my family and I tried to compose an eclectic meal consisting of delicious dishes chosen without regard to food groups and convention. I was inspired by a spectacular meal my friend Mary served recently comprised of lobster bisque, lobster tacos, and chicken tagine. No vegetables, salad, or dessert.

I was pleased with my free-wheeling menu on paper. Here's how it worked in reality:

We started with cute little roquefort grapes that people consumed on the deck while drinking wine, shucking oysters, and making "jokes" about how I should just give our baby goats to the organic meat vendor at the farmers' market and ask for their pelts as payment.

I love how she's studying him.

I wrote about roquefort grapes in the last post and don't want to repeat myself, except to say that I love them inordinately. The trouble with roquefort is that it's too rich and salty to eat in quantity. Refreshing, thirst-quenching grapes solve this problem! And introduce another. We had leftover roquefort grapes and I snacked on them all day today. They are irresistible and, aside from the grape part, terrible for you. The recipe is at the bottom of the post.

my new love

After a while we moved on to the oysters casino I came across in Time-Life's American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland. What are oysters casino? A New York specialty made by topping oysters with bacon and sauteed vegetables then popping them under the broiler. Sounds swell, no? I'm not giving the dish itself a thumbs down, just this particular version, which lacked richness and zest. Not a hit with anyone. I might try this recipe next time I spend all that money on oysters.

Next came the chicken potpie. According to Time-Life's American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland:

"In Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, potpies are pieces of noodle or baking powder dough. They are boiled with meat and often potatoes to make rib-sticking potpie stews that are named for the kind of meat used. Thus . . . chicken potpie, though it bears no resemblance to the pastry-encased potpies typical of other parts of the United States."

In short, this was not potpie but thick chicken noodle soup. Nourishing fare for a cold Monday in January when you're recovering from the flu. Less ideal for a Sunday dinner in July.

overdid the color enhancement

We finished with fresh strawberry pie from Time-Life's American Cooking: The Northwest. Half of the berries were uncooked, the other half simmered into a sweet cornstarch paste that held everything together. This pie was popular, but not quite delicious enough for me to disseminate the recipe.

Only the roquefort grapes were that good.

Roquefort grapes, adapted from Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres.

Wash and dry 1 pound of seedless grapes (green or red). Toast some nuts (walnuts, pecans, almonds; I used walnuts), then chop fine. Cool completely. In a mixing bowl, beat together 8 ounces of cream cheese, 1/4 pound of roquefort, and 2 tablespoons cream until smooth.  Roll the grapes in the cheese until they are covered with cheese -- but not too thickly! This is crucial: You want a very thin coating of cheese. Think of the earth's crust on one of those models from elementary school. Thin like that. After the grapes are covered with cheese, roll them in the nuts. Chill for a few hours. You want these to be cold and firm, not at all gooey.

Pickled peaches

I pickled peaches yesterday using the easy recipe from American Cooking: Southern Style. Criticism right off the bat: the recipe doesn't tell you to process and seal the jars, so you can't store them and give them as holiday gifts and that's a shame because THEY ARE SO GORGEOUS. They practically glow. They have to sit for a few days before we eat them and are meant to be served with Virginia ham and now I'm thinking about mail ordering a Virginia ham. I will tell you how they taste and post the recipe if they are great. If they are less than great I am going to try this recipe next.

By the way, I'm truly sorry I insulted a reader with my tirade about the canning jar tattoo last week. It was a very ugly tattoo that set me off, but I shouldn't have generalized about all canning jar tattoos. I think a tattoo of a jar of pickled peaches, to name just one possibility, would be beautiful.

Last night Mark and I went to a party and one of the appetizers was roquefort grapes. I've seen that recipe so many times and thought, yuck, no thanks, but I'd never tasted a roquefort grape. Last night I tasted one. Then I tasted another. Today I bought roquefort and grapes. I'm hosting our weekly extended family dinner  and am trying to produce an eclectic, eccentric meal like my friend Mary served us in Maine of which roquefort grapes will be a piece. We'll see if I can resist making a boring salad at the last minute.

My first and probably last seed cake

If you read a lot of British novels, you've probably come across references to something called seed cake that is served when the vicar comes to tea. I'm back at the Time-Life books with a vengeance and while flipping through The Cooking of the British Isles yesterday, saw a recipe for this mysterious and enticing cake. Since it was simple to make and we had all the ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, egg, caraway seeds, baking powder), I put on my apron and 7 minutes later the cake was ready to go in the oven, which was still heating.

I've since looked at other British cookbooks to see how they handle seed cake. Jane Grigson has a version that incorporates ground almonds which she says "make all the difference." Fergus Henderson's recipe calls for more eggs and consuming the cake at 11 a.m. with a glass of Madeira, a delightful idea that would ruin the rest of my day. Leon Baking and Puddings calls its seed cake "Madeira cake" and that made me think of Nigella Lawson's recipe in Domestic Goddess for "My mother-in-law's Madeira cake." I wonder if that was her first or second mother-in-law. Poor Nigella. I looked up her recipe and it doesn't contain seeds, but she does offer a seed variation.

All this is academic, though, because for a mature American palate, seed cake has a fatal flaw: caraway seeds. I associate caraway seeds so strongly with rye bread, that I can't appreciate the flavor in a dessert. Neither could Mark. It's just too confusing. This seed cake is in no way repulsive -- it is like a dense, soft shortbread -- and I will continue to nibble at it for the next few days, but it is not something I ever need to bake again.

Speaking of novels, when I was pulling the pictures of the seed cake off my camera, I found the photos I took last week at The Mount, Edith Wharton's house in western Massachusetts. I don't think any of the furnishings were original, including that pretty cane bed, but I was interested to learn that Wharton used to do most of her writing in bed.

I, too, often write in bed. When I'm writing anywhere else (on the sofa, at a desk) the impulse to stand up and do something practical, like run the dishwasher or sweep or fold laundry, makes it dangerously easy to quit writing. But when I'm lying down, I want to stay lying down so much that I keep writing, even when the writing gets hard. It's one of the few times I can make laziness work to my advantage. Try it some time.

I'm talking about the little boy goats, OBVIOUSLY

I have some new carrot soup recipes to try. Thank you!

But I won't be making carrot soup or anything else this weekend because the refrigerator quit on Thursday. Freezer too, which was a big old mess. This morning it was actually warm inside the fridge, making it the ideal place for rising bread. Smells terrible. Almost everything had to go except mustard, jam, and yeast. It was hard to part with that prosciutto, let me tell you. No repairman until Monday.

Looking on the bright side: clean refrigerator, clean slate, new leaf, will have to eat out some this weekend.

The other day I made "s"-shaped butter cookies out of The Cooking of Germany. They contain sugar, butter, flour, and only the yolks of eggs. They're very rich and dense and we like them. Each cookie is filling, like a meal, like a cookie you'd take on a backpacking trip through the Black Forest. My only quarrel with the recipe is the addition of lemon zest. Even a little lemon turns a butter cookie into a lemon cookie and that interferes with something deep and mellow and boundless about the flavor of butter. It's not that I don't like lemon, but sometimes I want to hear what quieter flavors have to say.

The addition of lemon was one of my two complaints about Nanci McDermott's rhubarb pie recipe from Southern Pies. I made it a few weeks ago and it was almost perfect, but there was this hit of lemon that kept getting in the way of the rhubarb. Also, there wasn't enough fruit for me; the pie seemed flat and underfilled. So I made it again adding more than twice as much fruit, doubling the sugar and thickener (flour,) but omitting the lemon. This time it was perfect in all ways except:

Can you see how soupy? You need a spoon to eat it. Layne suggested pre-cooking the filling so that's what I'll try next. I have to keep on with it, because I wrote "perfect rhubarb pie" down on my list.

About the list. Everyone has their own way of keeping track of life and mine is a crazy list that I retype every year and add to constantly with hand-written notes. I've kept it going for at least 15 years. It is many pages now, full of books I want to read, movies someone recommended, donut shops I "need" to visit, people to call, projects to finish, medical tests to schedule, chores involving the goats (see below), clothing items to mend. It sounds unwieldy, but works for me. I flip through it every day and every time I get to this page I stop for a split second.

By coincidence, we are about to go as a family to Doughnut Dolly and Donut Savant as there's nothing to eat in the house and no milk for coffee and it just feels like the morning.

Carrot soup vs. carrot soup

Carrots are so gaudy.

Carrots. Not my favorite vegetable and yet a refrigerator feels empty without a bag of carrots. Why is that? I go to the supermarket, can't remember if we have carrots, buy carrots, come home, see that we already have carrots. Repeat. Funny how I don't have a problem remembering whether we have cherries or camembert or salami.

I made two different carrot soups this week and didn't start out planning to make any carrot soup at all. Carrot soup isn't high on my list of delicacies or even on it.

1. carrot soup from The Cooking of Provincial France. I'd thawed chicken stock to make asparagus soup from Provincial France, but ultimately couldn't justify spending $14 on asparagus when we had a crisper full of carrots. I switched soups. This soup, whose French name is potage Crecy, calls for cooking sliced carrots and onion in butter, then adding stock, a tiny bit of tomato paste, and rice. Cook until the carrots are soft. Puree and stir in 1/2 cup cream. Smooth, rich, and delicious! There was a time when I would have balked at the cream and that time was the 1980s when people were really down on cream. But a half cup of cream is not a lot of cream and I now think it's smart to put 1/2 cup of cream in a pot of vegetable soup if it means everyone will eat and enjoy vegetable soup. Seems like a net gain for human health. Everyone but Owen, who doesn't like soup, ate and enjoyed this vegetable soup. GRADE: A-

2. carrot and orange soup from The Silver Palate Cookbook. I know! Blast from the past. Next thing you know I'll be getting a perm and cooking chicken Marbella. This soup popped into my head and wouldn't leave, probably because it was the first carrot soup I ever cooked. According to notes in Silver Palate, I made it on May 29th, 1986 and deemed it "a wonderful soup." I remember it seemed sophisticated and edgy to put orange juice in carrot soup. In fact, carrot soup itself seemed sophisticated and edgy back in the day.

Sour cream helped.

To make this soup you saute lots of onions in butter, add lots of carrots and stock, cook until the vegetables are tender. Puree. It's very similar to the previous recipe until this juncture where, instead of adding cream, you add orange juice.

In my view, a mistake. Carrots are sweet to begin with and orange makes them cloying. This soup is stark and lean, sweet and garish, and I missed the mellowing cream. I would say the Silver Palate recipe reflected the 1980s fear of cream, but there's too much cream elsewhere in the book to make that argument. Mark and Isabel both liked this second carrot soup and seemed disinclined to elaborate or discuss. Odd. What could possibly be more interesting? GRADE: B

I started thinking I should try even more carrot soup recipes and then checked the impulse. Off the top of my head, here are a few things I'd rather make than carrot soup in the next week or two: veal shanks in pickle sauce, spaetzle, trifle, rigo jancsi, cronuts, Black Forest cake, corncob jelly.

On another subject, the bobcat is back. He swiped a chicken today while I was standing in the yard not 30 feet away. Nervy.

I'm so light, fluffy, and creamy I might just blow away

This was intended to show how many components go into a taco. 

I saw a fascinating movie today called Fill the Void about love and arranged marriage in an ultra Orthodox community in Tel Aviv. I don't know if this is a spoiler, but it's definitely an alert: the ending is abrupt and devastatingly ambiguous. For the last 20 minutes of the film I thought, please, please, please not an abrupt, ambiguous ending and then the movie ended. Abrupt. Ambiguous. Ending aside, it's a wonderful movie and you should see it. If you do, I would like to discuss.

Back to cooking: Tacos are casual but they aren't easy and I need to remember that next time I decide to make a low-key dinner for a crowd. I saw a recipe in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday for fish tacos and thought, perfect! That's what we'll have on Thursday night when Ben and Stella (nephew and niece) come to stay for the weekend. I'll just throw together some tacos.

It's easier to barbecue a brisket.

To make these particular tacos you season cod with various fiery spices, fry the fish, grate cheddar cheese, wash and slice radishes, trim and char scallions, mix chipotle peppers with sour cream, and then -- so weird! -- toast tortillas. I don't understand that step. When you toast tortillas they stiffen and break but what you want is for them to soften and fold. So instead of fish tacos we had fish tostadas. Fortunately, we like tostadas.

This was an elaborate taco recipe, but even with the simplest taco you need three or four components and each component needs its own plate that you subsequently have to wash and everyone reaches around to assemble their tacos and they drop shreds of cheese and fish on the table. When a 3-year-old eats a taco? Food all over the chair and floor. This is also the case when Owen eats a taco. Or, come to think of it, anything at all.

They were good tacos, but I won't rush to make them again.

The thing on the plate is sachertorte.

We've had a sachertorte sitting on the counter for the last few days. Here's Rick Rodgers, author of Kaffeehaus, on the genesis of the classic Viennese chocolate cake:

"The story begins in 1832 with Klemens, Prince von Metternich, one of the masterminds of the Congress of Vienna and no slouch in the party department. Here was a man who knew what he liked and got it. He had a big party coming up and he ordered his personal chef to create a new dessert. The prince wanted to make a splash, so he instructed the chef to come up with the opposite of the light, fluffy, creamy "feminine" Torten popular at the time, and to surprise his guests with a dryer, more compact "masculine" cake. 

"The chef was never able to fulfill the princes's request because he fell ill. The kitchen's sixteen-year-old second apprentice, Franz Sacher, would have to take over in the master's absence. Chocolate, one of the most aggressive and "masculine" flavors in the kitchen would be his cake's motif, tempered by the tart tang of apricot preserves. . . ." 

I used the sachertorte recipe from The Cooking of Vienna's Empire, but substituted a double recipe of the Indianerkrapfen chocolate glaze from Kaffeehaus. (Any simple chocolate glaze should work; the fussy recipe from Vienna's Empire had already failed me once.) This cake has kept well and been popular with everyone who tasted it, including me. I especially love the "tart tang" of the apricot jam between the layers of chocolate sponge. That little vein of apricot is enough to change how I feel about chocolate cake, never my favorite.

I'm not having as much success with the entrees from Time-Life Foods of the World. Last week, I made the recipe for paprika schnitzel (veal scallops with paprika and sour cream) from Vienna's Empire which resulted in skinny gray cutlets cloaked in coagulated bright orange sauce. Edible, but barely. Another night I made risi e bisi (risotto with peas) from The Cooking of Italy and it was tasty but you'd be better off with a Jamie Oliver risotto. More evolved, more exciting.

 Even risotto is easier than tacos.

Coffee cake and little cakes

The cherries eventually sink into the batter and disappear.

Last week I bought some cherries at Safeway because they cost $2.99 per pound and looked ok. They were not ok. They had no structure. You bit into one of these cherries and it collapsed. Cherries are my favorite fruit, but even I didn't want to eat these cherries.

Yesterday, Isabel and I went to the farmers' market and bought some Utah Giant cherries ($5 per pound!) that are almost black. You bite into one and it crunches like an apple. I love these cherries so much I would never cook them.

Rather than just throw them to the chickens, I decided to see if the Safeway cherries would improve when baked into a coffee cake and the answer is: YES. I made the cherry-almond coffee cake from Rick Rodgers' Kaffeehaus and it's easy and very tasty. You can use flabby cherries because all cherries, no matter how gorgeous and firm, become flabby after you bake them.  Rodgers writes in the headnote that in Hungary and the Czech Republic cooks don't pit the cherries "so the stones can add their subtle almond-like flavor to the batter; no one seems to mind spitting out the pits." Then he goes on to say that his version calls for pitting the cherries. What? I ignored him and didn't pit the cherries and not even Mark complained. If you feel compelled to pit the cherries or if you have beautiful Utah Giants, don't make this cake. This is a cake for mediocre cherries, unpitted. Recipe here.

Back to Indianers, the Austrian cake that somewhat resembles a cream puff. I've made three batches now. The Rick Rodgers recipe from Kaffeehaus calls for baking them in an aebleskiver pan but that didn't work for me -- they shrunk and got stuck -- so I went back to the muffin tin which does. I know they're not authentic Indianers because according to LizA they need to be made in a pan like this. Oh well. I tried brushing apricot glaze inside each cake as Rodgers does (Flo Braker also does this in The Simple Art of Perfect Baking), but I couldn't taste it so I'm skipping the apricot glaze.

One was my grandmother's, one was my Mom's.

Because someone asked how you eat the cakes without the cream falling out the bottom, I watched the way I and others ate the cakes and there's really no trick it. The cream just isn't an issue. It's very thick and seems to cling to the cake like the "cream" inside a Ding Dong. Eating them is easy. Too easy. These cakes are fantastic and I'm going to eat the last one right now.

Indianers, adapted from both The Food of Vienna's Empire and Kaffeehaus

Batter:
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
4 eggs, separated
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Filling:
1 cup heavy cream, chilled
2 teaspoons sugar
3/4 teaspoon vanilla

Glaze
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 ounces semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Generously butter and flour a 12-cup muffin tin. Sift the flour and cornstarch into a bowl.

2. Beat the egg whites until foamy then, 1 tablespoon at a time, add the sugar, continuing to beat until the whites form stiff peaks.

3. Use the same beater to mix the egg yolks with the vanilla just until blended. Now stir 1/4 of the egg whites into the yolks with a rubber spatula. Pour this yolk mixture over the remaining whites and sprinkle the flour and cornstarch on top of the yolks. Fold the batter gently until no trace of flour remains.

4. Scoop the batter into the muffin cups, using an ice cream scoop if you have one. Divide the batter evenly; each cup will be almost full.

5. Bake for 12 minutes until puffed and lightly browned. Remove from the oven, run a sharp knife around the edges and lift the cake out of the tin. Cool completely. They will shrivel a bit; don't worry.

6. Whip the cream with the sugar and vanilla until it's very thick. Not soft peaks, firm peaks. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

7. Slice the bottom off each Indianer and scoop out the insides. Eat, save, or discard. Fill each shell with cream. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

8. Heat the cream to a boil, remove from heat, add chocolate and stir until melted and blended. Put the chilled Indianers on a rack over a cookie sheet, cream side down. Pour the chocolate over the tops of the Indianers. Refrigerate until cold. They keep for at least 3 days.

Leaning in to the blog

the annual manicure

The first homemade pasta I ever tasted was cannelloni my parents' friends Steve and Jeannette Grant served from the Time-Life Cooking of Italy. This was circa 1978 and I'd never eaten noodles so silky, never known noodles could even be silky. The meat was suave and incredibly rich, thanks, I later learned, to the addition of chicken livers. I made the cannelloni last night and have two overarching comments:

1. This cannelloni is so fussy and involves so many little pieces of noodle and meat and butter that toward the end you will wish you were an octopus.

2. It is delicious.

The recipe in brief: You saute a mixture of onion, beef, spinach, and chopped chicken livers. You make a tomato sauce. You make a bechamel sauce. You make very thin egg pasta and cut it into many rectangles that you must place flat on a floured surface because if you place them on an unfloured surface they will stick and you will have to scrape them up and roll and cut them again just like I did. Boil your pasta pieces, drain them, and now you must carefully place them flat on paper towels. If the pieces get folded, they will stick in that folded shape and in trying to restore them to flat rectangles you will rip a great deal of pasta, just like I did. One by one, roll your intact pasta rectangles around spoonfuls of meat and place in a pan. Top with the bechamel, tomato sauce,  bits of butter, and Parmesan. Bake.

Clearly, it's useful to have a helper for this. Owen was with me the whole time and he's wonderful company, but not a helper. Isabel is a wonderful helper, but she's never here anymore. I think she's gently preparing us for that dreaded day in September 2015 when she moves out. At this rate, we won't even notice.

While I was struggling with the cannelloni, Owen took several dozen candid flash photos of me from odd angles. When that got old, he stuck a butter knife in the pasta roller and turned on the machine, just to see what would happen. If you're curious, the butter knife gets stuck. Really stuck.

Supposedly, he'll be leaving us in 2018. Hard to picture.

When Mark walked in the door I was spitting tacks, as my mother liked to say. Mark helped Owen get the knife out of the pasta machine and while the cannelloni baked I asked Owen to take a picture of Mark and me for my 25th college reunion book. He immediately started taking pictures of cats and spiders; he climbed up on the retaining wall, crouched to try arty angles, fiddled with the camera settings, etc. Mark, at least, was amused.

Is he going to stick a butter knife in the camera now?

The photo shoot was a bust. What would happen if I sent that picture in to the reunion book? Would people think it was funny, tragic, or just very, very weird? Obviously I won't send it, though I'd sooner send a picture in which I look like I'm going to kill someone than a picture in which I look radiant, joyful, and fat. Yes, I have certainly matured over the last 25 years.

As for the cannelloni, like I said: delicious. Owen wolfed it down and went back for thirds. I ate a ladylike portion. Mark wouldn't eat the filling because of the chicken liver, so he picked it all out and said, "The meat is too dominating. When the noodles are this good you really just want noodles and butter." Isabel, as mentioned, was out.

All in all, a hit, but we won't be eating cannelloni again anytime soon.

On another subject, I've made two more batches of the Indianer cakes and mastered the recipe, but want to try the apricot variation before calling it a day and posting. Interesting how much apricot jam Austrians use in their pastries.  

So who did invent whipped cream?

Indianerkrapfen

Trying to cook from the 27-book Time-Life international series is overwhelming! I sit down to write a grocery list, happily flip through one book after another, and 3 hours later look up and don't have a grocery list which is cool because I no longer have the energy to go to the grocery store. I may have to refine my approach.

Indianerkrapfen. Not a pretty word in English, so we'll call them Indianer cakes. The recipe comes from The Cooking of Vienna's Empire (part of the Time-Life series) by Joseph Wechsberg, a revered food writer whose Blue Trout and Black Truffles I once read but remember nothing about. He offers an account of the invention of Indianer cakes that is so silly I almost don't want to waste the energy typing it. But will: A Hindu tightrope walker traveled to Vienna in 1850 and a woman was watching him traverse the tightrope between two towers when her husband told her to quit staring This pissed her off and she threw a lump of dough at him. The dough landed in a pan of hot fat and when she pulled it out she filled it with whipped cream, iced it with chocolate, and named the new cake in honor of the Hindu tightrope walker.

This is the stage where you think you have failed.

Do you believe that? Neither do I. Wechsberg also writes that a Viennese housewife invented whipped cream and while the Austrians do seem to eat a lot of it,  I don't believe that either. Wikipedia concurs.

To make Indianer cakes, you mix an airy batter of cornstarch, flour, sugar, and egg and bake in a muffin tin. Cool the muffin-cakes, which will be sunken and misshapen, scoop out the middle of each, and fill the hollow with whipped cream. Turn the cakes cream-side down and glaze the tops with chocolate. The cakes resemble profiteroles, but instead of firm, bland choux-paste shells, the Indianer shells are tender and sweet, like a French cruller. I loved them. Everyone did. They were gone in 24 hours.

The recipe had problems, principally, the glaze. You're supposed to melt unsweetened chocolate with water, sugar, corn syrup, and cream, then whisk in beaten egg at the end. I knew this was going to fail and fail it did, yielding a thin, oily fluid full of scrambled egg bits. I threw it out and made an easier glaze from Kaffeehaus by Rick Rodgers that worked beautifully. Rodgers offers a somewhat different technique for Indianer cakes that I want to try, as well as a more plausible story of their origin. I will print a recipe for Indianer cakes as soon as I've got it perfected because they are really, really special.

like greasy quesadillas, but less tasty

Less special: the Tunisian brik from Quintet of Cuisines. You place a mound of seasoned ground lamb on a square of fillo dough, crack an egg on the lamb, fold the fillo into a triangle, and fry for a few minutes. A diagram would have helped with the fillo origami and I also could have used a few words on how to fry the brik because: too fast and they will brown before the egg inside has cooked. This happened. Wet, gelatinous egg, tasty lamb, oily filo. I would give the recipe another shot and try to correct my errors, but just don't love savory fillo pastries enough to bother.

On another subject, I had to go back to Monterey this past weekend and saw something in the backyard of a historic adobe that reminded me of a big project I have not yet completed:

Oh, go away, not now.

I was so gung ho about our pizza oven last fall, but the weather got bad so we had to stop before applying the final layer of insulation and plaster. Now the weather is lovely again and all I want to do is sit on the deck eating cherries and flipping through books on Austrian pastries.