Pioneer Woman meets Ethan Stowell

 Start with two delicata squash.

Now, cut the squashes into halves and scoop out the seeds.

Slice them up into half-moon discs and saute them in olive oil until really brown.

Oops. I don't know how THAT got in there. One of my little cowpokes doing his chores. Sorry. Another story for another day. Where was I?

Oh right, squash. Put it in a roasting pan, dot with butter and drizzle generously with honey. Plenty of butter. Plenty of honey. Don't hate. Appreciate.

Roast until molten. Mmmmmmmmmm.

------

Homage/affectionate parody over. For the last 24 hours I've been unable to get PW's sweet potato cobbler recipe out of my head. I want to make it for Thanksgiving, but don't see where it fits -- seems too sweet for a side dish, at least in our house, and dessert is always pie. Thoughts? Should I just go for it as a side?

The squash above is not a PW recipe, though. It's Ethan Stowell's roasted delicata with chestnut honey. This was very tasty, albeit more caramelized than I like. I bought chestnut honey just to see why Stowell specifies it in several recipes and the flavor is indeed distinctive, with almost a metallic edge to it. Don't love it. Now I know.

Even better than the squash, though unphotographed, was the brussels sprouts salad I served with it, made using this brilliant Food52 recipe. Raw brussels sprouts taste nothing like cooked, so even haters should try this. It's fantastic.

Two thoughts about the sprout salad:

1. You could reduce the cheese and still have a delicious salad. I think you could get away with 1/4 cup, if you're at all concerned about calories.

2. She says to serve the salad right away, before it wilts. Actually, it doesn't wilt. I ate leftover salad the next day for lunch and it was crunchy and delicious. The beauty of brassica salads, as I've recently discovered, is that, unlike lettuce salads, they keep. My sister and I have in the last month both become hooked on this Martha Stewart kale salad and I seem to always have a bowl of it in the fridge. Between brussels sprouts and kale, I may never buy lettuce again.

Just another Tuesday night

This is the kind of foreboding my cooking inspires in a 10-year-old boy:

I picked Owen up from school yesterday and he asked, in broad daylight, while still in the car, "What are we having for dinner tonight?"

I replied, "Chickpea soup with mussels."

He said, very quietly, "I guess I won't be having dessert again."

Then he pointed out that he was expressing himself the way I had asked him to the night before -- calmly and politely, at low volume.

I thanked him for that.

His low expectations of Ethan Stowell's chickpea and mussels soup turned out to be in order. He didn't touch it, and the rest of us ate it without gusto. Mussels are cheaper than clams, but I just don't know if they're worth doing at home and I definitely don't like them with chickpeas. Chickpeas are grainy and nubbly and mussels are visceral and chewy and they didn't harmonize in a soup. That was Ethan Stowell recipe #10.

Despite mediocre soup, everyone was happy and we were having such a pleasant evening that Owen got to have dessert anyway. It was a good dessert and to deny him would have been cruel.

First, there was Stowell's toasted walnut ice cream (recipe #11). To make this, you toast whole walnuts then let them steep in hot cream. You strain them out after an hour or so, by which time they have imparted their flavor and color to the cream. This ice cream was superrich and pale brown, and I could not stop eating it.

To go with it, I baked Stowell's cardamom sables (translation: shortbread) which were agreeably easy and tasty and reminded me of a giant Parsi cardamom cookie I made a long time ago. Recipe #12.

I have now exceeded my quota of recipes from Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen, but may give it one more night. I can't go to San Francisco today to buy the ingredients to start Thai Street Food. That is going to require both serious planning and momentum and I don't think I can pull it off until Monday.

On another subject, if you haven't been following Food52's Tournament of Cookbooks, check it out. Today's writeup and decision, by Salon writer Francis Lam, was especially generous and thoughtful. And then I read this. Now I want that Dorie Greenspan book, which I need like another mollusk dinner.

Or another scoop of walnut ice cream. I actually untagged some photos of myself on Facebook today because I looked so plump. I was almost as ashamed of the untagging as I was of the chubbiness. But not quite.

I forgot how to blog

A draft of the book is done-ish and I am back to normal life and back to my cookbooks. I didn't just neglect the blog over the last few months. I throw open my french doors in the morning to gaze out at the garden and . . . want to close them.

I did stumble across this carrot growing there. I planted the seeds last spring and then forgot about them. Beautiful, no? Sadly, I waited too long to harvest. Not delicious at all. It tasted rooty.

I think where I left off blogging was in the middle of making Duck Egg Ravioli with Ricotta and Swiss Chard out of Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen. This would have been recipe #7 from the book. One night about a month ago, I stood there dotting a strip of pasta dough with fresh ricotta and into the middle of each ricotta blob I put a duck egg yolk. It took forever and it didn't work out right -- the dough was too sticky -- but the idea behind the recipe was so fascinating that I did it again the next night with a better dough recipe. Again it took forever, though this time it worked beautifully. The eggs barely poached inside the thin ravioli and so when you cut into the pasta, the yolks broke and formed a sauce.

I thought, I can't cook like this and blog about it and at the same time finish writing a book.

Anyway, this recipe is on page 104 of Stowell's book and if you make it with Marcella Hazan pasta dough, it is great. I would make this again, except we gave away the ducks.

This cookbook reviewer really loathes Ethan Stowell. He makes her want to poke hot needles into her eyes. I agree with many of her points, that this book is overly precious and "cheffy," but I think her reaction is a bit extreme. I'm also puzzled by the fact that she didn't seem to cook a single recipe. I'm always interested in a conceptual critique, but also think you need to try the recipes before weighing in on a cookbook. This particular book becomes far less irritating when you actually use it -- there are some fantastic recipes in here, not all of them cheffy and ridiculous.

Last night I made Ethan Stowell recipe #8: Clam Risotto. We haven't had a real barn burner family fight at the dinner table in a while, but the clam risotto go us going. Felt like old times. Owen screaming, me yelling back, Isabel rolling her eyes, etc. Classy. Just the words "clam risotto" may go down in family lore. I liked the clam risotto fine and it was simple to throw together, but the associations are now very bad. Also, it was gray. And clams cost more than I think they're worth. Not so into clams.

But we had the best salad to go with it: Endive Salad with Creamy Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette. Owen was outraged that there wasn't enough for him to have seconds. That was part of the fight. It was that good. I am putting the recipe here with a few changes. You have to boil the lemon rind three times, which caused me to roll my eyes, but it is so easy, just do it. Also, it calls for a raw egg yolk which would probably weird me out if I bought supermarket eggs after the events of late summer. So probably you should invest in farmers' market eggs if you make this salad, or get some chickens. I tell you, it is a gem, this recipe.

Ethan Stowell's Creamy Endive Salad

8 heads endive (he calls for four, but I think you should double)
3 lemons, preferably Meyer
2 tablespoons water
1 fresh egg yolk
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
salt
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup pistachios, toasted
1/2 bunch Italian parsley leaves picked
5 radishes, thinly sliced

1. Remove the outer leaves from the endive and trim the stems, leaving enough intact so that the endives hold together. Quarter the endives lengthwise. Soak them in salted water for 10 minutes.

2. Peel strips of zest from one lemon. Wide is fine. Put in a small saucepan with water to cover, bring to a boil, then drain. Repeat three times.

3. Juice the lemons. Put the juice, the boiled lemon rind, the water, egg yolk, mustard and salt in a a blender. Pulse. Add both the oils in a slow steady stream. You'll end up with a mayonnaise-like dressing, very soft and pale yellow. Taste for salt.

4. Place endives, nuts, parsley in a bowl and toss with dressing to lightly coat. (You may have dressing left over -- don't overdress.) Top with the radishes. Beautiful! Should serve six.

Explanations

Folks, I didn’t mean to drop the ball. I’ve cooked several interesting meals from the Ethan Stowell’s New Italian Kitchen over the last week but one day I realized I’d never finish writing my book if I didn’t cut back on the blogging. In the morning I’d write a blog post and if I was happy with it I’d have this swell feeling of accomplishment that eroded the motivation to write anything else and the day would be lost. I can't afford to lose any more days. Hell, I can’t afford to lose any more hours. There’s the small matter of the deadline, plus, if I don't finish the book soon, I will become mad. Writing a book is like driving all alone through a long dark tunnel that you’re not sure is ever going to end and might, in fact, never end.  By contrast, blogging is like zipping around in a convertible on a sunny day, waving to people. I can not tell you how I miss the daylight.

My last four meals have consisted of BLTs made with Ethan Stowell’s home-cured bacon and his homemade mayonnaise, which is absolutely lovely. I could eat it by the spoonful.  It turns out that two things you can’t do while you’re finishing a book -- or at least I can’t -- are diet and blog.

Back very, very soon, I hope.

I wish I could stay and chat

Busy today, but I don't want to fall behind.

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen recipe #4: duck leg farrotto with spinach

It's bugging me the way that strand of spinach stretches out of the frame in the picture. In any case, this was incredibly delicious. The recipe uses farro instead of rice in a risotto-like preparation which seems healthier and worked beautifully. Bought the duck at the Chinese deli in San Francisco yesterday, which made it all very easy. Speaking of ducks. I'll be sad to see them go, but they are so rough on our chickens.

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen recipe #5: roasted figs with chocolate sauce.

These are the figs pre-roasting; my photo of the finished dish was hideous. You toss figs with brown butter and honey and roast until they're dry and super-concentrated, then serve hot on a bed of cool chocolate ganache. This was a rich, intense, and unusual dish and we all felt it was more of a dessert garnish than a standalone dessert and would have been better served over ice cream. Nonetheless, every last fig got eaten.

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen is a lovely cookbook and I don't know how I'm going to stop myself at ten recipes.

You win some. . .

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen recipe #2: bacon

The fire was not his fault. I was so proud of my stovetop smoking method -- developed and "perfected" over several months during which I smoked many batches of pastrami and Canadian bacon -- that I was going to unveil it in the blog today. Now I think I'll wait until I've ironed out some of the kinks. For the record, Stowell recommends smoking bacon in a smoker.

Anyway, I smoked one batch of Stowell's bacon successfully on the stovetop and then with the second batch, I foolishly turned up the heat to super-high, left the room, came back to the fragrance of barbecue, opened the pot, allowed some spattering of fat and . . . you can see. It wrecked the pot, wrecked the bacon, and did not want to die, that fire. I poured all our baking soda on it and after that an entire bag of flour and only then did it sputter out.

That said, the bacon from the first batch was fantastic, very sweet and curiously, deliciously fruity. Stowell calls for Aleppo pepper, which is an exotic spice, but cheap if you go to a Middle Eastern market. I've made a lot of bacon recently -- it's surprisingly easy -- and this was one of the best. I'd give you a tutorial, but my confidence is shaken.

Ethan Stowell New Italian Kitchen recipe #3: corn and chanterelles soup

First, you make a rich broth by simmering in a big pot of water all the mysterious and desiccated rinds of old Parmesan and Pecorino in your refrigerator. If necessary, scrape off the mold. I'd been saving rinds for years.

Then you scrape the kernels off of two ears of corn, quarter eight ounces of chanterelles, chop some onion, combine with the broth, and within 20 minutes you have an easy, tasty soup. I don't mind spending money on chanterelles for a dish this satisfying. Eight ounces of chanterelles is cheaper than anything at the butcher counter.

For you're amusement, here's a fried silkie egg:

As you can see, the yolk is about the size of a man's thumbnail.The new oddball silkies haven't yet merged with the rest of the flock and are being bullied by our evil ducks. Some of the silkies have problems jumping up onto the roosting pole, but some have managed to do so just fine. They're a mystery, those silkies. Incidentally, as soon as I have collected eight more duck eggs to try a duck egg ravioli recipe from Ethan Stowell's book, we are getting rid of the ducks. If anyone is interested in four noisy, dirty, unfriendly, violent birds, let me know.

In other news, here's a very nice review of the new Dorie Greenspan book.

Five & ten

The other night we hosted a joint birthday party for Owen and his cousin Stella, born five years and one day apart. Although we served burgers, which are not a very Ethan Stowell "new Italian" kind of dish, I did manage to embark on the new project by making one of Stowell's appetizers.

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen recipe #1: bruschetta with fresh ricotta and salsa verde.

 You whip the homemade ricotta with a little olive oil, spread it on your baguette toast, then top with a zesty sauce of parsley, anchovies, lemon peel, and pine nuts. Easy and great.

To go with the burgers, I fried a pile of potatoes that ended up looking like something you'd find in a coral reef.

I'd dog-eared the recipe in Aquavit years ago because I'd hoped it would make something like tater tots. You fry potato sticks as for french fries, then roll them in cornflakes and fry again, but since we didn't have corn flakes I rolled them in Total. Could that have been the problem? In any case, they were leaden and dry, altogether bad and not at all like tater tots.

I also made a variety of ketchups. Clockwise from top: Cindy Pawlcyn's ketchup from Mustards, River Cottage ketchup, Heinz, and some old-fashioned banana ketchup I canned over the summer.

I have concluded that homemade ketchup is a fool's errand. The homemade ketchup tasted "better" than Heinz -- less cloying, less synthetically smooth -- but none of it was ketchup. It was like dipping your onion ring in delicious sweet-tart marinara sauce. The banana ketchup was spicy and different enough that it was worth making and I would serve it in sandwiches, with roast pork, with pretty much anything, but Heinz defines tomato ketchup. It's a waste of time to try to replicate it when you could spend your time more profitably making things people will really appreciate, like bruschetta with fresh ricotta and green sauce. Or going to see The Social Network. Go see The Social Network!

Also at the party: my grandmother and her great grandson, born 97 years, 9 months, and 16 days apart.

I want to be a good person. But.

I wish I had not discovered this fascinating and eclectic list of cookbook recommendations because I want them all and they are all extremely expensive.

Or are they? They're all extremely expensive if you buy them by clicking on the link, which takes you to Omnivore Books, a wonderful and much-loved independent cookbook store in San Francisco with a discerning owner who really knows her wares. Omnivore hosts great author events, like the forthcoming visit from the authors of Baked, which is one of Isabel's favorite cookbooks. I want to support Omnivore!

But I checked and of course you can get the titles for a fraction of the price on amazon, saving $10 or $20 per book. That's real money and it's real money you could spend supporting local organic dairies or buying magazine subscriptions for the public school library or donating to a worthy cause. If you're incredibly selfish, I suppose you could keep the money you save. But who would ever do that.

I'm not buying any of these books today or tomorrow or the next day, but I will say that it's much easier to support local bookstores when you're actually in the shop. I would find it impossible very hard to pay such a premium for books online.

Thoughts?

Mixt Salads, the earnest summation

Herewith, a very short review of Mixt Salads, one sorry ass cookbook.

I made only 8 recipes rather than the planned-for 10 because this book was such a dud. I ceased to trust it after about the third recipe and began to resent it. The book calls for too many obscure ingredients, plays fast and loose with expensive ingredients (chanterelles, caviar), contains annoying errors, and, most egregiously, fails to produce tasty food.

The tally of recipes:

worth the price of the book -- 0

great -- 0

good -- 1

so-so -- 7

flat-out bad -- 0

The "good" recipe was a non-recipe: sliced tomatoes sprinkled with oil and salt. I do not doubt that Mixt, restaurants serve fine salads, though I would have to actually eat one to know for a fact. I wonder if the cookbook was just a promotional tool for the restaurants, in which case silly me for taking it seriously.

But I do take cookbooks seriously. We middle class Americans inherit a problematic home cooking tradition -- shall I pull out my grandmother's recipe for a molded lime Jell-O salad with horseradish sauce as proof? -- and we need our authorities to be authoritative. After years of cooking through and reading and collecting cookbooks I can cook without books, but I could never have gotten to this point without them. Almost all of the books I've reviewed here have shaped how I cook, taught me a new trick, brought me a new recipe, given me ideas. This one didn't.

End of review.

A couple of links:

-This is wonderful.

-A crime novelist I'd never heard of but now want to read. The only thing that worries me is his reported weakness on plot, as I like plot.

Where is my beloved fog?

I started some bacon on Saturday and made some Parmesan stock on Sunday, both from Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen, but it has been too hot to smoke the bacon or use the Parmesan stock or do anything in the kitchen but eat cold grapes and drink beer. Today is probably the perfect day to try making these enticing crackers using solar energy and perhaps I will do just that.

Sundry other stuff:

-Owen got three bizarre and adorable new chickens for his birthday. One of them looks just like this. Another laid the smallest egg we have ever seen -- about the size of a large jelly bean. It was oddly disturbing. We fried the micro-egg, but no one wanted to eat it.

-Terrific essay about not reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

-This review made me take Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw off the shelf which in turn made me revisit

-this, which I must remember to bookmark. Who the hell is Forelock?

-this is right-on, but you'll probably only enjoy it if you watch Rubicon.

-If you have baked a lot of Dorie Greenspan recipes you might enjoy seeing her in action. Am I the only one who doesn't understand the apple pie-cheese concept?

-If you don't subscribe to Bon Appetit, you might have missed this fascinating recipe, which I am going to attempt right before I start the next diet.

-I can't wait to start cooking from Thai Street Food, but am holding off until I have finished writing the book. Meanwhile, controversy.

I had the feeling I was being watched

I should send this to Andrew Sullivan.

Eight down and I'm calling it

No one can say I'm not a trouper. A compulsive idiot, maybe.

Mixt Salads recipe #6: Porky. That mess up there was some roasted butternut squash and overseasoned pork tenderloin served over mixed greens. Conceptually great; in fact, problematic.

Problems:

1. the meat.

a. Andrew Swallow calls for 3 pounds of pork in the ingredients list, which is clearly too much flesh for four people. Then, quite reasonably, he only utilizes one pound of the meat in the recipe itself. But what are you supposed to do with the other 2 pounds of pork? Careless mistake, wasteful of the inattentive reader's resources. Demerit.

b. seasoning on pork tenderloin: too spicy. Far too spicy. Like maybe another mistake?

2. the dressing.

a. bland! Like all the dressings I've tried from this book. How can a salad maven make dressings this tasteless? I don't get it. Is it just me? Do I lack the proper Andrew Swallow/Mixt Salads decoder ring?

b. too much. All of Swallow's dressing recipes make about 5 times more than you need. I've started cutting each vinaigrette recipe in half, but there's still too much and I now have three jars of only slightly different, very bland vinaigrette in my fridge, including the vinaigrette to dress. . .

Mixt Salads recipe #7: Autumn.

This was, in fact, okay, despite bland dressing. Chunked beets, pine nuts, and cambozola cheese on butter lettuce. There was no genius to the recipe, but it was edible and I enjoyed making a big, healthy salad for lunch like someone who takes really good care of herself. Interestingly, I think the gesture of taking really good care of myself meant more than actually taking really good care of myself. I made the gesture again today and prepared. . .

Mixt Salads recipe #8: Green

Chopped apples sprinkled with lemon juice, cayenne, cumin, chili powder, lime zest and red chile flakes. This was very easy and I made it just to move us closer to the next cookbook. As I type my face is sweating and nose running from the cayenne and chile flakes. I would never serve this to anyone else -- it's a freaky, masochistic, fatless salad -- but I kind of like it!

So, I just went to the Mixt web site. Andrew Swallow looks nice and now I feel mean. I don't want to be the Ken Starr of food bloggers. I know what I think about this volume and there's no need to run it into the ground, so I'm quitting Mixt Salads reviewing right this second. I did not know I was going to do this when I started typing this post.

This sounds like an enticing and crazy cookbook.

Hey, what's wrong with watermelon?

My father hosted a family dinner last night and early in the day I called and offered to bring, in addition to an apple pie, a salad. I am trying to whip through Mixt Salads as quickly as possible so I can move on to something more exciting, like Thai Street Food.

Tipsy, flipping through Mixt Salads: How does this sound, potatoes with truffle cheese? It's not really gooey-looking, just roasted potatoes with some cheese. I think it looks amazing.

Father: (silence.)

Tipsy: Or this: Tomato and watermelon. I could chunk up some of your homegrown tomatoes, combine with watermelon, and add some feta. Might be interesting.

Father: (silence.)

Tipsy: Or wow, this one: grilled sourdough with heirloom tomatoes.

Father: (Silence.)

Tipsy: Or grilled corn with baby tomatoes. Is there still corn in the market?

Father: I think there's still corn.

Tipsy: This one is incredibly boring: heirloom tomatoes with olive oil and sea salt.

Father: I think simple is better.

Tipsy: What does that mean?

Father: Just that simpler things are usually better.

Tipsy: Are you saying I should just do the heirloom tomatoes with sea salt?

Father: I think that would be best.

Tipsy (affectionately but not without exasperation): You're so boring!

Father (exasperatedly but not without affection. Presumably.): This just means you don't have to buy a fucking watermelon.

Tipsy: Don't use 'fucking' with me!

Father: Don't you think simple things are always better?

Tipsy: I'll be there at five with the pie and I'll make the boring salad.

Father: You're a good person.

Click.

For the record, I do not think simple things are always better. I think simple things are sometimes better.

Mixt Salads recipe #5: Pure Heirloom. You slice tomatoes, sprinkle with sea salt, dress with olive oil, garnish with torn opal basil. It was simple and it was really good and it was boring and I didn't need a cookbook to tell me how to do this.

Pleasant evening. My father fusses over his orchard like some people fuss over their orchids, with the result that he has the most beautifully pruned, productive and orderly backyard orchard I've ever seen. Owen and Stella get a thrill out of picking fruit. See photo at top.

Teenagers get a thrill out of laying a gracious table.

See how thrilled?

I can't believe "jeggings" is an actual word.

Friday night excitement

Mixt Salads recipe #4: Field

I misplaced my camera. Not that Field was visually exciting, though it was quite pretty: a salad of pale butter lettuce with contrasting dark stripes of tarragon and a tiny bit of blue cheese. Nice and basic. Again, though, the proportions seemed off. I felt there was too much lettuce, too little cheese, too little oomph, that I have improvised more interesting green salads, that a handful of toasted nuts would have made a huge difference. Andrew Swallow calls for two heads of butter lettuce for four people. I bought one and maybe it was just an extraordinarily large butter lettuce, but we still had far too much. I can't quite get the hang of this book.

I served Field with veggie burgers made from The Frog Commissary Cookbook. These contained garbanzo beans, tahini, vegetables, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, wheat germ, and soy sauce and they were falafel-like and delicious, but again, too soft and crumbly. I'm going to try again and add more . . . more what? What would make these bind better? I share the aversion to using an egg, though I'm not sure why. I will try the recipes suggested by commenters. Thank-you.

After dinner, we watched a mesmerizing documentary on DVD called Sweetgrass about sheepherders in the mountains of Montana. Basically nothing happens and there's no talking but for occasional furious profanity directed at sheep. I highly recommend this movie, but please reread the first three words of the last sentence. I'm not exaggerating and wouldn't want anyone to be disappointed.

I'm losing faith

Mixt Salads recipe #3: Heaven

Heaven: a frisee aux lardons salad plus chanterelles. Has everyone eaten the classic frisee aux lardons? If not, briefly, it's frisee lettuce tossed with small chunks of bacon, optional croutons, a vinegary dressing, and a poached egg. The yolk breaks and melds with the tart dressing to coat the bread cubes, salty bacon and crispy pale green frisee, which somehow manages to keep this salad lively and refreshing. It's an incredible treat, a perfect dish.

Does this exquisitely calibrated salad really cry out of chanterelles ? It does not. Is it in fact diminished by chanterelles? I would say, sadly, yes.

I was very excited about Heaven, because I love frisee aux lardons and I love chanterelles. Chanterelles are wonderful sauteed and then mixed with cream, because they're soft and slippery and sweet and love to be coddled. They were not meant to be tossed in an assertive salad where everything has to hold its own. Every element of the frisee aux lardons supplies some absolutely necessary component -- salt, fat, crunch, acidity -- and there's just no role for a tender, mild-mannered mushroom. The pieces of mushroom clung limply to the frisee and got in the way. What a waste of an $8 bag of chanterelles.

I don't like saying punk things about a book day after day, and I'm sure if the authors knew about it, they wouldn't like it either. I feel like maybe I should abort if the next couple of recipes don't turn out great.

Because I doubted Isabel and Owen would like the salad, I also served tempeh burgers from my old friend Gourmet Today. Practically every non-meat product in the kitchen-- seed, spice, grain, tempeh, canned chile, dried tomatoes, fresh vegetables, herbs -- went into this dish and each seemed to require toasting, grinding, simmering, soaking, chopping, chilling, or shredding. I'd forgotten how much work vegetarian cooking requires.

But the results were very tasty, if not as chewy and dense as we would have liked.

Does anyone have a veggie burger recipe they love and can recommend?

Like asking Dwight about beets, Obama about healthcare

It's really hard to photograph goats. I quote Owen far too much, but as he puts it, "They're like paparazzi when they see us." Which is exactly right. We step outside and they come running, madly bleating, and then slavishly follow us around.

Owen isn't hugging Peppermint, he's trying to keep her from jumping on the lap of the photographer.

I would say they're in it for the food, as aren't we all. But Peppermint will neglect grain, melon rinds, popcorn, and tortilla chips to butt gently at my legs until I give her the attention she remembers from her pampered indoor babyhood: holding, scratching, conversation. Then when I go back inside, she finds a shady spot and chews her cud. Goats are the greatest pets. We're going to breed them in November and will hopefully have kids and milk in the spring.

We just had some kind of mushroom

Mixt Salads recipe #2: Noodle

Last night, I was going to make Heaven (chanterelles and duck eggs) but Isabel was so aghast I put it off and made Noodle instead.

Andrew Swallow gives all his recipes names and the reason for this one is obvious. Noodle consists of cool Japanese soba noodles tossed with a miso dressing and lots of vegetables: sprouts, cucumber, red bell peppers, enoki mushrooms. "It looks like the compost!" Owen said, not unkindly. We all liked and ate the salad.

But about enoki mushrooms.

All fungi are freaky. Usually I can handle it. I do think, though, that the enoki is freakier than most because it's skinny and albino and has a pinhead. Plus, it travels in a pack, so you're faced with hundreds of skinny albino pinheads.

The enokis came from Korea and I told myself I really liked them as I snacked on them while I was making the salad and later as I ate them in the salad. They're sweet, bland, and refreshing. But, of course, flavor isn't everything. We had to go to Isabel's back-to-school night and as I sat there listening to the cute algebra teacher talk about study groups my mind kept wandering back to those sickly, spidery mushrooms that had traveled from Korea in a plastic pouch. I thought about this Haruki Murakami story called "Crabs." It's an amazing story, but I can't recommend that you read it because every time you feel irrationally uneasy about something you ate, you'll remember "Crabs" and feel even uneasier.

My aversion to enokis is not Andrew Swallow's fault. Noodle was a modest success, and we enjoyed it a lot more than Mashup. May the upward trend continue.

Meanwhile, a new cache discovered in the garden today contained 18 filthy eggs.

I think this might just be the most unappetizing food post on the entire internet today.

The chickens loved it, so that's something

Mixt Salads by Andrew Swallow, recipe #1: Mashup

This recipe -- Swallow's twist on the chopped salad -- made a huge trough of boiled cruciferous vegetables scantly embellished with treats like feta, pine nuts, and bacon. While the concept is sound, the proportions seemed off. One head of cauliflower, one head of broccoli, and one pint of cherry tomatoes, which is what the cookbook specifies, is simply too much plant matter for four humans.

I think I failed to cut the broccoli and cauliflower tiny enough, which may have adversely affected our experience. (Swallow says to cut the vegetables into "small" florets, which I interpreted as a lazy person would.) But I still don't see how amid that ocean of vegetable anyone could possibly taste 1/4 cup of feta or a single tablespoon of olives. With half the quantity of base vegetable, I think the recipe might have worked beautifully. After eating what was on our plates, we all lingered at the table, fishing the precious pine nuts and bacon from the giant bowl of watery cauliflower and chatting. Although it goes against everything my mother taught me about manners, I sometimes suspect communal picking at food is better for fellowship and conversation than plates.

Anyway, I will make no sweeping judgments based on one disappointing recipe. Tonight I am attempting an enticing recipe that involves an $8 bag of chanterelles from the supermarket and four duck eggs from the backyard.

In other news, I started A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan last night and it is so incredibly good that I was reading at 2 a.m. I can't describe the novel without making it sound overcomplicated and pretentious and since it's no longer my job to try to do so, you'll just have to trust me! It's wonderful.

Eat your salad no dessert, get that man you deserve

Someone from Random House has put me on the cookbook publicity list and now these gorgeous cookbooks keep turning up in the mail.

I'm trying something new: Just for a month or so, I'm going to actually review new (ish) cookbooks in a brisk and timely fashion. I will cook ten recipes, assess, and move on. You can tell a lot from ten recipes. This last wallow through Barabara Lynch was fun, but I need to pick up the pace, at least for a while.

I'm starting with Mixt Salads by Andrew Swallow, which I received last spring. It's not "brand new" but it contains nothing but salad recipes. This appeals to me right now because

a. late summer/early fall produce

b. one-dish meals

c. slimming

After Mixt the lineup is:

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen

Thai Street Food by David Thompson

My Sweet Mexico by Fany Gerson

Ten recipes per book, brisk pace. Hold me to it, guys.

Thomas Keller & Barbara Lynch: earnest summations

I had to go back and search through the blog to ascertain that I'd never actually summed up my experience with Ad Hoc at Home. I didn't, did I? This wasn't meant to be a Keller-Lynch horse race, but since they're both chef books, I'm reviewing them together.

I made 36 dishes out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home:

Worth the price of the book -- 1 (fried chicken)

Great -- 13 (biscuits, mint chocolate chip ice cream)

Good -- 10

So-so -- 11

Flat-out bad -- 1

I made 40 dishes out of Barbara Lynch's Stir:

Worth the price of the book -- 2 (eggplant salad, stuffed tomato)

Great -- 15

Good -- 17

So-so -- 6

Flat-out bad --- o

I think as time passes a lot of really wonderful recipes tend to fade in my memory. Looking through my margin notes in the Keller I had written "fantastic" beside dishes I only vaguely remember making and loving, like mint chocolate chip ice cream and his mother's coconut cake. So some of his "greats" might have been "worth the price of the books" if I'd done this summary in a more timely fashion. In any case, at the high end, I really think these two books shine equally brightly.

But I didn't have as many disappointments with Lynch. That I'm sure of. Thomas Keller's iceberg lettuce salad was a time-consuming flop. The roasted halibut, the roasted game hens, the pomegranate-glazed quail -- not hits. A lot of these recipes are attempts to show how to make impeccable, very simple, down-home food which would be fine, except they didn't consistently work. I don't need a $50 cookbook to show me how to make boring food that doesn't taste amazing. I can do that on my own. The exception: his Santa Maria tri-tip was simple and fabulous and that "boring" recipe might have been worth the price of the book. On the fence about that.

Barbara Lynch wraps her chicken in bread dough and puts caraway gnocchi in her soup and whipped cream in her risotto. She taught me how to stuff gnocchi and tear up pasta dough and make a pizza out of brioche topped with honey and pistachios. Even when I didn't absolutely adore the results, the experience was always interesting. Mostly I adored the results.

If you have unlimited cookbook dollars to spend on fat, beautiful chef tomes, buy both books. But after cooking 76 recipes from these two fine volumes, I would say if you have limited funds, buy Stir.

Very excited to move on to a new book. I've got something a little different in mind for the next month or so. I'll save that for the next post.

Here in Topeka

I don't know what happened here because I've had this post mostly written for almost a week. The other day I had to explain to Isabel what procrastination meant. She knew the technical definition, but she just couldn't understand why people would ever do it and as I described the mixture of perfectionism, dreaminess, anxiety, and laziness that I struggle against every day, she looked at me blankly.

Wednesday night I cooked my last Stir dinner: prune-stuffed-gnocchi with foie gras sauce, which is Barbara Lynch's "most requested" recipe.

Roughly two weeks ago, I ordered foie gras online from D'Artagnan. With shipping, four lobes (disgusting word) cost $68 which puts a lot of pressure on the cook. I was excited and nervous all day thinking about this expensive grand finale and bought a bottle of red wine to mark the occasion.

At 5 o'clock, I poured a glass of the wine and got to work. First, I simmered prunes in Madeira until they were soft and then pureed them. I boiled the potatoes, riced them, mixed them with eggs and flour, formed a gnocchi dough, rolled it out, and cut it into biscuit shapes. In the middle of each biscuit I put a teaspoon of pureed prune, folded the whole ensemble into a potsticker-shaped crescent, stood it up on its fat side, and made a sauce-catching dent in the top. Watching this artistry distracted Owen from his homework and he came over to help. Usually, it's the eraser on his pencil that distracts Owen from his homework. I poured another glass of wine.

The sauce is made by creaming together foie gras and butter then chilling it until firm. I warmed some shallots, spices, and Madeira in a saucepan and started throwing in chunks of the cold foie gras butter. Weird: You chill the butter and then right after it's really cold you melt it? This is the chemistry part of cooking that I have to take on faith. I strained the sauce, which was like melted foie gras-flavored butter. In fact, it was melted foie gras-flavored butter.

I sliced the remainder of the foie into thick chunks and heated the pan to sear it. I brought the water for poaching the gnocchi to a rolling boil. It was seven o'clock, the hour when my handsome husband usually walks through the door to find table set, dinner ready, me in high heels and fresh red lipstick holding a chilled cocktail shaker. The first half of that joke sentence isn't a joke. Promptly at seven the phone rang and Husband said he was so sorry, he was going to be an hour late, was just leaving the office, weren't we having something special tonight, like foie gras? He was so so so so sorry.

I said, You think you're sorry now, buster.

I wish I'd said that. I don't remember what I said.

I poured another glass of wine, tossed the salad, cooked the gnocchi, and seared the foie which, in under one minute, threw off several cups of fat and shrank to little planks of soft brown liver. The kids and I sat down to eat. Isabel was immediately and completely repulsed by the foie gras and nudged it to the side of her plate. She said,"I would have liked it better if you'd just made regular gnocchi."

"The gnocchi tastes really weird with the prunes in it," Owen said. "The meat (he meant the foie gras) is pretty good, I'd give it 3-and-a-half out of 5. But the salad is 5 out of 5!"

Foie gras was my mother's favorite food. She discovered it late in life, and thought it was very decadent and wicked, and she loved being decadent and wicked in completely innocent ways. I got weepy at dinner, due to missing my mother and drinking too much red wine and wasting an expensive delicacy on children. I liked the gnocchi a lot. If you close your eyes and imagine Gerber prunes, Madeira, duck liver, and soft, doughy potato dumplings you will have a sense of what the dish was like. Delicious!

But I won't make it again. Next time I'm going to order it.

And so we come to the end of the long season of Stir! I have tallied the recipes and will provide a full write-up . . . soon.

Penultimate Stir dinner: rabbit food

I can't think of much to say about this Barbara Lynch salad of haricots verts, fennel, cucumber, celery and roasted potatoes except that it made a very pleasant meal, especially if you're on a diet.

What I really want to talk about are homegrown potatoes, how tender and creamy and gratifying they are. My limited storehouse of culinary adjectives fails me. I put less effort into burying those cheap seed potatoes last spring than I expend in any given week updating my Netflix queue. And six months later I have a small mountain of incredibly tasty spuds! I planted blues, fingerlings, and russets from the nursery, then buried some sprouted red supermarket potatoes in a defunct redwood pot on its way to the dump, and neglected them all for months while I went about more important activities, like reading and staring into space and watching TV. While the fruits on my tenderly staked and fertilized tomatoes are rotting, still green, on the vine, the potatoes are literally popping out of the earth. I don't know why everyone shamelessly gushes on about prima donna tomatoes when they could be growing and eating friendly, forgiving, delicious potatoes.

Now that's a pretty table

Last night's dinner featured the loveliest recipe I've made out of Stir: a peeled tomato hollowed out and stuffed with seasoned fresh ricotta then placed round side up on a plate. You surround it with finely chopped celery leaves, scallions, sliced radishes, and homemade croutons. The dressing: olive oil, vinegar, chopped Nicoise olives, shallots, and golden raisins. It was exquisite and scrumptious and not all that fattening and I haven't made a dinner I liked more in ages.

Afterwards, Isabel and I completed our petit four experiment.

The pink petit fours are sandwiched with black raspberry jam; you can see the chocolate petit fours in the lower left-hand corner. You can also perhaps see that our icing technique needs work. We used a poured fondant that didn't quite blanket the squares completely before it ran out. I need to pursue this further, because petit fours are delicious and beautiful and cool, providing all the goodness of a whole cake in a single tiny bite. I just wish bakeries would quit with the scones and muffins and get back to making the hard stuff I can't really make at home, like petit fours and napoleons.

Dutiful dinner report

Friday night Stir dinner:

Chicken soup with caraway gnocchi. You brown chicken, onion, carrot, celery, and various herbs, add water and simmer for an hour and a half. Meanwhile, make potato gnocchi the usual way, but with caraway seeds. Poach. When the chicken is falling off the bone, strain the broth, then add some chicken meat back to the broth, plus broccoli, cauliflower, and shredded cabbage. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Add the caraway gnocchi.Great soup.

For dessert: chocolate mousse. I'm not crazy about chocolate mousse, but decided to try Barbara Lynch's recipe because we had cream to use up and, of course, lots of eggs. Lynch's mousse was rich and airy and smooth, like any proper mousse, and everyone liked it a lot. I even liked it a lot, if not quite as much as everyone else.

Today, Isabel and I used the leftover mousse to make petit fours. We're still in the middle of that project, so I can't report.

Half the petit fours will be sandwiched with mousse, half with kirsch-spiked black raspberry jam. This isn't a Lynch recipe, just something we wanted to try.

A propos of nothing, we collected our first duck egg today. It's very long and narrow and the shell is shinier than a hen's egg, has a waxy sheen. It will have to be an awfully delicious egg to justify the irritation of keeping our messy, noisy, unfriendly, weird-looking, chicken-bullying ducks.

No one has been hospitalized after 23 hours, so I'm calling it a success

I've stalled out on Barbara Lynch's Stir, a great book that I've been dawdling through for months. I was going to call it quits yesterday, but one reason I started this blog was to force myself to actually delve into my cookbooks on a regular, even daily, basis. DELVE. Like, cook stuff I don't know how to cook already. It felt wrong to quit when there's so much delving potential left in Stir.

I decided to take the next few days to cook as many interesting dishes as I can, then wrap it all up on Wednesday. On Wednesday, the foie gras arrives. I felt that before I moved on I had to make Lynch's "most requested" recipe: prune-stuffed gnocchi with foie gras sauce. This is the kind of dish I reflexively skip over because it looks difficult and expensive. I hope it is worth the money. I hope it is worth the misery of the ducks.

About last night's dinner. My father had invited himself over and since it was a hot day and he's a game guy, I planned a cold meal, all of it from Stir, most of it involving serious delving. Then my maternal grandmother, who is 98, unexpectedly turned up. So it was a party, a very unlikely party given that my parents divorced 25 years ago. My camera battery conked out hence lack of pictures.

We ate:

-oysters on the half shell with sparkling mignonette. At a local market yesterday, fresh oysters cost $1.19 a piece, which is less than half what you pay for oysters at a restaurant. Of course, you have to shuck them yourself which I had never done. By unfortunate coincidence, I sliced my finger while mincing the shallots for the mignonette and then had to shuck oysters with two Band-Aids and a piece of cheesecloth wrapped around my gory finger and while I am confident that no blood sullied the shellfish, the shucking took twice as long as it should have. Also, I used a butter knife. If you shuck a lot, you should definitely invest in the right shiv. The sparkling mignonette, which contains Prosecco, was fabulous and really did sparkle from the bubbles. Here's how you make it: Mix 1/2 cup Prosecco with 1/2 cup white wine vinegar, 2 finely chopped shallots, a generous grinding of black pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt. If you like oysters, try this dish. I can't believe it took me so long to shuck my own.

-butcher shop steak tartare. Even though I bought quality filet mignon and used salmonella-free eggs from our chickens, recent newspaper stories cast a pall over this segment of the meal. I always order steak tartare if it's on the menu because it's something I don't make at home. Now that it's something I do make at home, I might be done with steak tartare. Did I only order it in the past because it was exotic? Lynch's recipe, which is classic, calls for chopped raw steak, raw egg yolk, mustard, capers, and chopped cornichons. It tasted fine and I ate it, but not with tremendous enthusiasm and can not explain this sudden aversion.

-toasted bread salad with tomato and cucumber. Very pretty twist on a summer standard. Halved cherry tomatoes are tossed with fennel and cucumber and served on long baguette crisps spread with olive paste and adorned with sweet roasted red onion. Lovely.

At one point, Owen was sitting on the sofa between my tiny grandmother and my father telling them about something absurd (rockets? robots?) while they all three merrily ate the oysters. I wanted so badly to take a picture of those three right there, right then. It was like my own private Halley's Comet. I'll probably never get them all in the same room again, let alone the same frame, and certainly not in that giddy oyster-slurping mood. I had to make do with a mental snapshot.

Very fun evening. No crowd I'd rather shuck oysters for.

Housekeeping

I have a book due next month and last weekend I printed out everything I'd written, checked in to a hotel, read the manuscript start-to-finish, cut it up with scissors, put it all in a new order and stuck it back together with Scotch tape. After about seven hours of this fun, I stood up and was so stiff I could barely hobble to the minibar to extract the $12 bag of cashews.

Diabolical minibar aside, the hotel turned out to be a fantastic idea. I worried I'd feel just as unfocused in a rented room as I do at home, but it was astonishing how much more easily I could concentrate without internet, children, cooking, dust bunnies, goats, chickens, garden, books, phone calls, bills, Lost DVDs, et cetera. Let me repeat that first part: It was astonishing how much better I could concentrate without internet.

About the book. I got the contract early this year, just before my mother died. Later, I put off posting about it because I didn't want to jinx the writing, about which I was extremely anxious. Now I feel coy not posting about it, like I have to explain why I haven't been chatting about the book cheerfully and self-promotionally for months. Two word answer: nervous wreck.

The book is about food, of course. For some reason, the publisher was not interested in using my photography. More details to come. Fall 2011.