Just like Carrie Bradshaw

About an hour ago.

A friend of mine razzed me about never posting photos of myself unless they're really flattering and kind of glamorous. Like when I'm wearing a new skirt and drinking a cocktail at a restaurant in New Orleans on New Year's Eve. You know who you are, "friend." This one's for you.

Onward:

My husband's phone takes better pictures than my camera.

Last night I made Dorie Greenspan's pissaladiere from Around My French Table. It's an onion tart with anchovies and olives, traditionally made in the South of France. I told Owen it was pizza and he ate it, but said he didn't like it as much as normal pizza. I wouldn't expect him to, and was impressed that he ate it at all. I thought the pissaladiere was delicious and very handsome.

Sometime you start cooking from a book that looks very enticing (Mixt Salads, Platter of Figs) and then the recipes keep disappointing and you end up wanting to throw the enticing book into the fireplace.

And then there are books like this one, that look old-fashioned and predictable, but in which every recipe is so well expressed and works so beautifully that you decide you want to cook everything, even the veal marengo. It's like in college, when you realize that it's not the subject that makes a class interesting, it's the professor.

I bet there are a lot of startled children out there this week

Looks like someone's baking a fruitcake.

Here's how you make Dorie Greenspan's gorgeous beggar's linguine: Boil water for pasta and melt a stick-and-a-half of butter (!) in a skillet. Add chopped almonds, pistachios, figs, and golden raisins and cook until the fruit is soft, the nuts are starting to toast, and the butter is dark gold. Cook the pasta. Drain and toss with the mixture in the skillet, making sure that every strand of linguine is coated with butter. Add a half cup of grated Parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, and the grated rind of an orange. Toss some more. Serve.

Magical! This is not for everyone, but it's definitely for me. If I ate this in a restaurant, I would go straight home and post a report on Chowhound about the genius chef. This dish was easy, cheap, unusual, incredibly delicious, and worth the price of Around My French Table. I will make it again soon.

So that was last night's dinner. Owen lit candles for the table, and I also served a special dessert.

I bought creme brulee dishes at a garage sale 15 years ago, back when I thought life would be full of dinner parties and creme brulee. I have never once used them. Dorie Greenspan has a creme brulee recipe and for Christmas my father gave me a torch, so it was time to dust off the old dishes. That was gratifying. I don't think I got the sugar topping thing quite right -- the shell was very, very thin. But at least there was a shell, and the cream tasted lovely. I will experiment more with this.

Sadly, while eating this nice dinner we had a big argument over what we should all watch on TV together afterwards. Because of the whole Tiger Mother business, the word "garbage" has been banging around in my head.  I would never call my children "garbage," ever, but, probably emboldened by Amy Chua, I did tell Isabel to stop being such a . . .  something else. I felt bad. I felt I was right. I felt bad. I felt I was right. I felt bad. I was right.

Harsh, but right. 

Anyway, we watched The Town. It was good. 

More Around My French Table reports:

-Greenspan's gorgonzola and apple quiche. Delightful. Not eggy -- gorgonzola-ey.

-Greenspan's cheese souffle. Also delightful. Not eggy -- cheesy. I ate so much I had to put myself to bed right after dinner. Interesting to compare Greenspan's souffle formula to Julia Child's: Greenspan uses more than twice as much gruyere, more than twice as much milk, but only slightly more egg. I prefer Greenspan's recipe.

Some meals are just kind of boring

Should I call her Dorie? Or Greenspan? Dorie seems disrespectful and possibly sexist, as I didn't use "Thomas" when I was blogging about Ad Hoc At Home. Then again, she seems to want us to think of her as Dorie. She's friendly and confiding -- she's such a Dorie!

I think I'll go with Greenspan.

When I first flipped through Greenspan's Around My French Table I thought it was stodgy, a magpie collection of recipes for dated dishes like veal marengo and quiche. Maybe it is; I haven't reached a verdict. But whatever it is, I am loving it. I'm not sure I've ever worked with more encouraging, more generous, more precise recipes. Greenspan takes into consideration every possibility and question and describes what you will be seeing as you cook a dish (though sometimes, as with her armagnac chicken, she is wrong -- or I am wrong), and tells you what to worry about and what not to worry about. She is warm and conversational. The recipes are not always exactly to my taste, but, so far, to a one, they have worked beautifully.

Last night's dinner:

-orange-scented lentil soup. Greenspan tells us that the secret to her particular lentil soup is is the addition of citrus peel. One day she was snacking on a clementine while a pot of soup bubbled on the stove: "Just as I was about to toss the peel in the trash, I backed up and dropped it into the soup pot. I've been flavoring the soup with orange, tangerine, clementine and mandarin peel ever since." I don't know if I like that story, and I did not taste the orange peel, but it was nonetheless a superlative bowl of lentil soup.

-coupetade. You fry French toast, put it in a pan, pour sweet custard over it, and bake.

Isabel: "It's a little too much right in the middle between French toast and pudding. . . .she said as she licked her plate."

Tipsy: "Do you want seconds?"

Isabel: "Are you having any?"

Tipsy: "Yes!"

Isabel: "Okay."

We liked coupetade a lot, but eating it for dessert was a bit confusing. It tastes like a breakfast dish.

Tonight we are having quiche and I have to go take the crust out of the oven.

I really hate mopping

My new kitchen.

I taught a cooking class yesterday at our local community center. I was excited about it and now that it is over I can admit that I was nervous about it. Even though, or especially because, I was teaching 6th and 7th grade girls. I attended an all-girls school in 6th and 7th grades and those years were surpassed in awfulness only by sophomore year of high school and 2010.

We made pizza from scratch, which the girls liked, and we made honey gelato, which they did not, and I brought them Italian almond cookies that I had baked out of a Marcella Hazan book to show them what they could do with the egg whites left over from gelato. These, they loved.

Brutti ma Buoni cookies

Altogether, it was interesting, fun, fairly successful, and about 150 times more labor-intensive than I'd expected. I had to bring everything to the community center kitchen -- every spoon and mixing bowl and grain of salt and bag of flour and quart of milk and paper towel -- and take it all away with me when I was through. I'm being paid a small sum by the community center and I'll be lucky if I break even, but I don't care about that at all. It was the time and schlepping that got to me.

Some highlights:

1. I bought both a ball of beautiful fresh mozzarella and a pouch of factory-made Lucerne pre-shredded mozzarella for the young ladies to taste test and compare. It did not occur to me that they would prefer the pre-shredded mozzarella. But they did. I'm not sure if this was herd dynamics at work, or a true preference, but they fought over every last flaccid shred of Lucerne in the classic "nice" girl way: "You guys, that's not exactly fair. . . "  I realized then that I had been aiming way too high with this whole project, and that they would have been psyched to talk among themselves and make English muffin pizzas with jarred ragu and sliced hot dogs. I am adjusting my approach for the next class.

2. Chickens have pecking orders, as do goats, as do middle school girls. I knew this, but had forgotten just how obvious and poignant and nerve-wracking it is, even when you're a bystander. On a couple of occasions, I could feel even my own steely will bending to the charm and power of the alpha girl. It was shameful.

3. Still, kids are fascinating and funny and they get so excited about separating eggs and stirring and eating pizza and watching ice cream machines churn. I like kids and I like watching kids and I like listening to kids, especially now that I am no longer a kid.

4. An hour after the class ended, I finally had the kitchen clean, had washed down the counters with sponges and sanitized them and scrubbed the sinks with Comet and swept assiduously and emptied the trash in the dumpster and carried all my fifty loads of dirty dishes and fresh mozzarella and unused ingredients back out to the car. It was dark and I was late to pick up Owen and I was just giving the room a final look-over when I saw the sign informing kitchen users that they must mop the floors.

Maybe if the floors had been dirtier.

But, you know, maybe not.

I wonder if they're going to fire me.

They are going to get themselves arrested

Sunrise -- and she didn't sleep a wink.

I collected our goats yesterday from the stud farm and they have not shut up since. They cry and cry. They cried all night and are crying as I type and it is making me very anxious. They have never cried like this before, which I believe is why our neighbors tolerate them. I may have to do a big egg distribution this morning.

Quick post about a very good dinner

Not a pretty chicken, but an excellent chicken. Or, as Dorie Greenspan describes J. Jacques' Armagnac Chicken: "une petite merveille." You put potatoes, carrots, onions, herbs and your seasoned chicken in a pot, add some brandy (or Armagnac), and bake, covered, at high heat for an hour. Could hardly be easier. The chicken (recipe found on page 204 of Around My French Table or here) comes out silky and tender, the potatoes come out infused with flavor, and all you need to complete the meal is a salad. I served it with this brussels sprouts salad, which I have now made twice and love inordinately.

Anatomy of a surprisingly great Friday night

Yesterday evening, my husband called to say he was running late but he called early enough that I hadn't started cooking dinner and so I simply didn't. Instead, I made grilled cheese sandwiches and ate sunflower seeds while leaning against the counter waiting for Dorie Greenspan's quatre quarts cake to bake and listening to The Passage. I drank two sidecars made from the miniature liquor bottles my sister gave me for Christmas and it was very fun. I wasn't drinking to feel better, I was drinking to feel even better, one of several lines from the fairly lame How Do You Know that I can not get out of my head.

Of Dorie G's cake, which is basically a poundcake, Owen said: "That's not cake, it's flavored bread."

Isabel said, "It's kind of eggy."

I said, "Very eggy."

The cake was easy and plain. It was eggy. It was flavored bread.

After we'd tasted and rated the quatre quarts, we watched some vintage episodes of House which prompted illuminating, if fractured, discussions of drug abuse, medical drama plot formulas, and Hugh Laurie. My husband came home in the middle of this and, as I've noted many times before, a night of TV, booze, and cheese sandwiches turned out to be altogether more joyful and interesting than when we follow the rules and all sit down at the table for a proper roast bird and try to talk about our days.

Which is what we're doing tonight. There is a chicken in the oven and a brussels sprouts salad on the table as I type and I'm drinking tea. No dessert.

Back to my knitting and here I will stick

After two months, I suspect that my failure to consistently cook from and blog about Thai Street Food is my review of Thai Street Food. It is just too much of a strain.

pat thai

ingredients

Melted on the stove during Thai cooking. Still works.

stir-fried minced beef

crispy roast pork and chinese broccoli

I made a valiant effort in December, but never posted about any of it. I'm not sure why. Almost everything I made was excellent. I especially loved the charred noodles on page 140: You take wide, fleshy fresh rice noodles and put them in a skillet with just a drop of oil and let them blacken and blister and develop a crust. I made these twice, the first time with the accompanying chicken, the second time to serve in place of rice. Delicious. The other standout dish was the stir fried minced beef, which I also made twice, and which we all loved. I would make it regularly, but you absolutely need Thai basil and I can't get that without driving to the Asian market in San Francisco, where tracking stuff down is like a scavenger hunt. Which is the problem with this whole book. 

 I hope a day will come soon when I can (re?) dedicate myself to this exotic and beautiful volume, but December was busy and January is going to be completely nuts. I need a book that is easy and accessible that I will actually cook from and blog about.

That book is going to be Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. Curiously, Gabrielle Hamilton's negative review picqued my curiosity. Here's a passage in which Hamilton describes the lack (in her view) of appealing dishes in Around My French Table:

I did not want to make, for example, her guacamole with tomatoes and bell peppers any more than I would want to make a pissaladiere out of a Rick Bayless cook book. I did not want to make sweet and spicy cocktail nuts, or tzatziki, or gravlax or dieter's tartine or cola-and-jam spareribs or pork roast with mangoes and lychees. I hope it is self-evident why I didn't.


In fact, it is not self-evident. Not to me, anyway. I do agree that this book includes an odd mash-up of recipes and I take her point about turning to Greenspan for a guacamole recipe. But what is wrong with sweet and spicy cocktail nuts? They sound like something I could get very fat on. Pork roast with mangoes and lychees? Weird, but perhaps delicious. In any case, interesting. I'm going for it.

I have already made from the book:

sardine rillettes -- spectacular

Marie Helene's apple cake -- superb 

gougeres -- good.

And the other night I made those cola-and-jam spareribs, which sounded delicious to me. They were certainly easy. You just paint them with some orange juice and jam, baste with a can of Coke and let them roast for a few hours.  It was so very relaxing to pop ribs in the oven and know that dinner was making itself as I worked at my desk throughout the late afternoon. We ate all the ribs that night and there were none left over for lunch the next day. I would not make them again because I suspect there is a better rib recipe out there, probably in a Texas Junior League cookbook. But Dorie's was perfectly respectable.

------------

On another subject, I have fallen into a deep, dark pit called The Passage by Justin Cronin. We started listening to this 37-hour vampire saga on CD during our vacation, but while my family has lost interest, I've become a mad fan. I listen to it while I'm driving, cooking, folding laundry, washing dishes, eating lunch. It has character, metaphor, power writing, moral philosophy, metaphysics, dreams, creation myths, blood sucking freaks, epic battles, propulsive narrative drive. It's like Lost, The Road, The Lord of the Rings, and Shirley Jackson's Lottery all rolled into one. RECOMMEND!

Thanks y'all and Happy New Year!

Katrinaland.


What a trip.

Thank-you for all your suggestions. Very quickly, mostly in pictures, a New Orleans restaurant report.

catfish po-boy

The line was out the door at Casamento's -- and I was the only one willing to wait -- so we went down the street to the Ignatius Eatery for catfish po-boys and boudin-stuffed meat loaf. I was grumpy about this, but the food turned out to be fantastic.

Harry Potter.

Owen barely spoke the entire trip.

muffaletta

The line for the Central Grocery was out the door -- and I was the only one willing to wait -- so we went down the street to the French Market and ate muffalettas from a stall. I was grumpy about this, but the sandwiches turned out to be fantastic.

mediocre oysters, wet and gray

The line for the Acme Oyster House almost wrapped around the block and even I was not willing to wait, so we went across the street and ate oysters at Felix's, where the line merely stretched out the door. I was grumpy about this.

worth the money

The best thing I tasted in 2010: bananas foster at Commander's Palace. I don't even like bananas. 


I wanted to go to Cochon, August, or Herbsaint, but the only place we could get a reservation on New Year's Eve was Pascal Manale's. 

Awkward photo, but classic tableau with Harry Potter and 899th (?) drink of 2010


While it's no Commander's Palace, Pascal Manale's was very festive and we had a great time. I had barbecued shrimp. 


My resolution is the same as it was last year: 100 drinks for the year. I lost count during the trials of 2010, but have high hopes for 2011.

Las Vegas hate/love/hate story, part 4

When I was in my teens I thought I would only grow more confident in my judgments as I got older. I thought that the workings of the universe would become ever clearer to me. This seemed logical and obvious.

Now, of course, it seems sweet and naive. In my twenties, I started hemorrhaging certainty. Example: When I was 20 and road-tripping with my sister, I took one look at Las Vegas and thought: What a tacky hellhole. We did not even stop our car. If anyone asked, Las Vegas was totally not my thing.

When I was 29 and flew to Las Vegas to look for my uncle, I took one look at Las Vegas and sighed. What a tacky hellhole. But other people loved Vegas. What was I missing?  There must be something here that I couldn't see or appreciate. I must try to figure out what that was.

I'd become compulsively and exhaustingly self-critical. Every failure was my failure of imagination or intelligence or discernment or humanity. The problem with Las Vegas was my problem. I was like the cartoon of the woman walking down the street telling her friend, "I'm trying to see things from my point of view."

The other day, I searched for my journal from this period. I used to be a great keeper of journals, but while I have many pages of mortifying tiny print documenting loneliness, fights with my mother, and crimes of perfidious boyfriends, I wrote nothing about this trip to Las Vegas to find Richard. So this is all from memory, sitting in a Starbucks in Houston fifteen years later. Lack of notes explains lack of dialogue and specific detail.

I do remember the heat with some precision: It was 114 degrees in Las Vegas when I got there. Walking across the parking lot to the Stardust Hotel was like walking under a giant blow dryer turned to high. Inside that dark, mirrored building, I had to penetrate through a thick rind of slot machines to get to the elevator bank. My room smelled like an ashtray. The first thing I did was call the police department to see if they had any record of Richard in their files. They did not. So I pulled out the phone book, wrote down a list of places one might look for a penniless alcoholic, marked up the map, and started driving around.

Away from the Strip, Las Vegas is vast, dun-colored, and featureless with wide, endless streets like airport runways. It reminded me of a penal colony on the moon. There were no bookstores, no neighborhoods, no trees, no shade, and the only people you ever saw walking were men and women who appeared to be poor or homeless. I could not fathom why this horrible place existed or why anyone would come here on vacation. What was wrong with me?

Once you start looking for homeless people, you see them everywhere in Las Vegas: Black and white and Native American, pushing shopping carts and hauling around plastic garbage bags, dozing under freeways. I drove around to homeless shelter after homeless shelter, carrying around my picture of Richard, which I showed to everyone I met who looked remotely official. Everyone was very nice; nothing bad happened to me. But I wasn't reporting a story and I didn't hang around asking questions like some kind of cool young guy journalist. I just wanted to find Richard.

At the end of each day, I went back to the Stardust, where Chuck Norris was staying with his pretty wife. I think this was her. At night, I would go up to my room, get under the covers and read some Edith Wharton or Barbara Pym or one of those books in which I was earnestly looking for how the world worked. No wonder I was confused.

I called my father and told him I was in Las Vegas looking for Richard. He was irritated. What was I going to do if I found him? I did not know. I just wanted to find him.

The day before I left, I called the jail. I had assumed that the police department and the jail were connected, but at the time they (apparently) were not.

Richard was in jail. He had been in jail the entire time I was there. The charges were "drunk and disorderly" and "indecent exposure." Richard had been "bathing in a gutter."

He had a court date the next day, so I extended my ticket. The next morning, I set out for the courthouse and got lost. Trying to correct my route on those airline runway streets, I ended up missing him by half an hour. I flew home that afternoon. I had not seen Richard, but I had found Richard.

Las Vegas hate/love/hate story, part 3

Richard and John. 1940s.

If you're coming late to this story, the first two installments are here and here.

In 1995, a month or so after the state mental hospital in Utah bought him a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and put him on a plane, my uncle, Richard Reese, disappeared. My father received a few phone calls from third parties requesting money, purportedly on Richard's behalf, and he sent the money. And then there was complete radio silence.

What do you do when your only sibling, a fiftysomething cowboy with longtime mental and substance abuse problems, disappears? For decades my grandparents had waited for Richard to straighten up and fly right. They bailed him out of scrapes and drove halfway across the country to track him down when he ran off and let him live in their extra bedroom for years at a time and checked him into the hospital as necessary. They were amazing people. But Richard was not exactly grateful. Richard was (quite rightly) convinced that they had thwarted his dreams, which involved an apartment of his own, sleazy friends, and gallons of cheap Scotch -- preferably in Las Vegas. Now that my grandparents were dead, was it my father's job to pick up where they left off, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow? Or was it time for Richard to sink or swim? Did any of us for a minute think he was going to swim? So, really, was it time for Richard to sink?

I saw The Fighter the other day, and the charismatic crack addict character played by Christian Bale reminded me a bit of Richard, and the sober, responsible Mark Wahlberg character reminded me a bit of my father. Addicts are impossible, and Richard was an addict. When Richard disappeared, my father let him disappear. I don't blame him at all.

But I was young and sentimental and it bothered me that we didn't know where he was. He could be dead. He could be in jail. He could be living on the streets. He was part of our family! He was my grandparents' son! And, as impossible as he was, Richard was also very dear. So I flew to Las Vegas to find him. I rented a car, checked in to the Stardust Hotel, called the police station, and then began a 4-day tour of every homeless shelter and freeway underpass in greater Las Vegas.

Texas & Louisiana vs. San Francisco

Sartin's. Beaumont, Texas.

Here, they have deep-fried barbecued blue crabs. There, we have steamed Dungeness crabs, which are bigger and less greasy. Point: San Francisco.

 Mulate's. Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Here, they have fried alligator, which tastes like chicken fingers. There, we have sourdough bread. Point: San Francisco.

Where is the corpse?

Here, they have cypress swamps. There, we have redwood forests. Point: Texas & Louisiana.  Redwoods = John Muir effusions. Cypress swamps = James Lee Burke.

Here, they have racially integrated Starbucks. There, we have liberals who voted for Obama. Point: Texas & South Louisiana. The African-American population of San Francisco: 6.5%. The African-American population of Lafayette, Louisiana: 29%.

We're driving to New Orleans today. If anyone has recommendations for what to do and eat, please let me know!

Christmas Miscellany

Santa has a sense of humor and is also very astute. Lucky Mrs. Claus!

Obviously, I've been off my blogging game lately, but I've felt like a dandelion in a strong wind these last few weeks. As, I'm sure, have many of you. But now I am lying in a Houston airport hotel with two snoring children while my husband avails of himself of bad coffee downstairs at the free breakfast buffet.

Christmas was terribly sad but was (therefore?) of the sweetest Christmases ever. I got all my shopping done in time, I almost made all my work deadlines, Isabel and I baked and distributed many dozens of cookies, I learned that my book must be restructured (and, after taking to my bed for a day, accepted the fact), I arranged for our goats to be bred. My dandelion head remains intact. I am proud.

On the plane last night, I started reading a book I can't recommend highly enough: You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. It's a brilliant, beautifully written and soulful critique of the shape the internet seems to be taking as of 2010 and how that is changing the way we think about people. Lanier is a computer scientist and pioneer of virtual reality, so this isn't just another crabby rage against the machine. I can't do justice to this book in a blog post written from an airport hotel in Houston, all I can do is urge you to read it.

Just a pretty picture

I saw these oil paintings of petit fours in the window of a gallery yesterday. What I really want to see are petit fours like this in the window of a bakery.

Boy goats

Dan as a lad.

Kentucky in more innocent days.

You learn something about the earthy roots of the English language when you spend time around farm animals. You're idly observing your chickens one day and suddenly a lightbulb goes off about some dumb phrase you've thoughtlessly used all your life: Rules the roost, pecking order, hen-pecked, flew the coop, clipped her wings. For a while I kept a list, and it was long.

One day I was watching our goat Peppermint after a meal as she went around kicking her heels into the air and I thought, she's really feeling her oats. Ding!

I took the goats up to be bred today and I won't see them again until 2011. I've spent time with bulls and tomcats and unneutered male dogs, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer goatishness of a full grown buck goat. You could smell these dudes from fifty feet away and they did not look like the sweet pictures above.

They looked more like this:

Except they had their tongues stuck out and were making crazy noises. We put Natalie and Peppermint in with the boys and as I walked away Dan was already humping Peppermint while she wailed and tried to squeeze through a 4-inch hole in the stock panel. I felt a little bad. I know it's natural and all and this is the price we pay for cheese and baby goats and life itself, but Dan and Kentucky were acting like a couple of nasty old goats.

Didn't mean to leave you hanging

Heaven and Hell cake.

There's been a lot going on, what with work deadlines and a sick goat.

But Isabel got her Heaven and Hell cake. She seemed pleased. As a commenter to my last post pointed out, this cake is tall. Like, ridiculously tall. Like, move the shelves in your refrigerator tall. The ganache icing alone was 3/4-inch thick and very firm; it was as if I had affixed a thick, firm chocolate bar to the top and sides of the cake. Come to think of it, every element was firm -- firm, dry layers, firm, dryish filling, firm ganache frosting.

Better picture here. 

I felt it was a waste of angel food cake. You just can't appreciate angel food cake for the lovely fluff it is when it's squished between chocolate and peanut butter mousse like that. To achieve the brown and white effect next time I would probably replace angel food with marshmallow or white mountain filling, which would bring some moisture and creaminess to the experience. Overall I think this is a better concept than cake, but sometimes that's enough.

The best thing I made for Isabel's party: the sardine rillettes from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. I kid not. It sounds hideous but is so very good. All you do is mash up canned sardines, cream cheese, shallots and lemon juice, give it a little cayenne pepper, and wow. I am so happy to have this recipe.

I was thinking of switching over to Greenspan's book, but then I got inspired and bought all my Thai groceries yesterday. I recommenced Thai Street Food last night and will write a separate post about that.

Who doesn't love a bundt cake?

People, it is not hard to cook from Thai Street Food. It is hard to shop from Thai Street Food. There's not one dish in this book you can make using Safeway ingredients and over the last few days it's been impossible for me to get to the Asian market in San Francisco. I will get there soon, I promise. I want to be the first cookbook reviewer who actually cooks extensively (or at all)  from David Thompson's beautiful book.

Since I couldn't do Thai the other night, I decided to make a dinner from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. I really admire Gabrielle Hamilton's writing, but when I first read her review of Greenspan's book on Food52 I thought she was perhaps overly harsh. Then I sat down to choose what to cook from the volume and I found myself curiously and completely uninspired. Almost every entree looked heavy and old-fashioned, stodgy and unappealing. Nothing tempted me except for the cola-and-apricot jam spareribs, but they required long cooking and I didn't have a long time.  In the end,  I only used Greenpan's book to make dessert, which was Marie Helene's apple cake.

I chose the cake because Gabrielle Hamilton approved, as did David Lebovitz. Also: easy. My family hardly touched it, deemed it too plain. At first I agreed, but when I had a piece the next day, I changed my mind. This is a cake that improves with age. It's very moist and rummy, almost like a pudding or clafoutis, almost refreshing. I just now had another delicious wedge for lunch dessert, two words I should probably never use together again. You can find the recipe for this excellent cake here. I'm going to subject Dorie Greenspan's book to further scrutiny in the future.

On the subject of cakes, we are celebrating Isabel's fourteenth birthday tomorrow. Last night I asked, "What kind of cake do you want?"

She sighed and replied, "Oh, I don't really care. You pick." Then she disappeared to her bedroom.

A few minutes later she came running down the stairs with a wild look in her eye, pointing a finger at me accusingly. "NO BUNDT CAKE," she said. "You always run out of time and end up making a bundt cake. I do NOT want a bundt cake."

I knew the teenage diffidence was just an act!

Then she casually pointed out a cake she wouldn't mind having. It consists of angel food and devil's food cake layers sandwiched with peanut butter mousse and frosted with chocolate ganache. It makes me tired just to look at it. Here are some more pictures of said cake. 

Of course, she was absolutely right. I was going to think about it and think about it and eventually just make a bundt cake. 

Las Vegas hate/love/hate story, part 2

Nice grandparents, 1983

Some backstory to the Las Vegas narrative I started the other day, to explain how my uncle moved to Las Vegas, and why I cared so much when he vanished.

For Mormons, my paternal grandparents had very few children. They had just two, my father and his younger brother, Richard. We were a small family, but close. When I was a kid, the only vacation my family ever took was to visit my grandparents, which meant visiting Richard as well, because he always lived with them, or near them. They kept him out of trouble and when they couldn't keep him out of trouble, they bailed him out of trouble.

Bob, Glade, Richard

And Richard got in trouble. Richard was trouble. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Richard was bipolar. Or schizophrenic. Or something. The diagnoses varied, but even when he wasn't sick, Richard was completely crazy, in all the best and worst meanings of the word. He was extravagantly warm and opinionated, loving and funny, stubborn, belligerent, and morbid, and he had the most amazing cackling laugh. In a family of mild, moderate people, he was intransigent and passionate in his likes and dislikes.  He loved Scotch, Joan Baez, Bear Lake raspberries, and Navajo jewelry. He disliked Aunt Ida, pigs, pork, and several tight-lipped "witch" ladies in my grandmother's ward. He drove a brown Mustang until he lost his license for drunk driving, and he smelled like cigarettes and drug store cologne.

Richard was extremely sentimental and, perhaps because he had no children of his own, he was particularly sentimental about his nieces. The world is full of bad, abusive, and merely indifferent uncles. Richard, for all his problems, was a prince among uncles. My sister Justine and I could not have loved him more, and it went both ways.

I don't want to romanticize, though.  By the time I was 15, I knew Richard was a wreck, irresponsible and impossible, a heartbreaking burden that gradually became a crushing burden on my well-meaning grandparents. Here's what my grandparents and Richard taught me about parenting: You do not necessarily reap what you sow.

In the mid-1990s, Richard was checked in to the state mental hospital in Provo. While he was there, my grandparents both died, within months of each other, almost like they needed to hurry up and check out before he was released because they were too old and tired to take care of him anymore.

Shortly thereafter, without consulting my father, someone on staff at the hospital bought Richard a one-way ticket to Las Vegas, gave him a wad of cash, and put him on a plane.  I don't know who that person was, but what a heel.

Richard, of course, was delighted. Vegas was his Xanadu. He checked into the Stardust Hotel, called us drunk and jubilant late at night, spent all his money, and within a few weeks, disappeared.

Part 3 coming soon.

How to spend 90 minutes in St. George, Utah

Conoco station 


The cashier showed me how to crack the swarthy little nuts in my teeth. 

If you've never eaten pine nuts straight from the shell, they're softer and fleshier than what you buy pesto-ready from the supermarket, and have a tiny green sprout in the middle. There's a resinous flavor on the shell that I didn't absolutely love.

There was nothing about Nielsen's frozen custard that I didn't absolutely love.

Brother Brigham's stove

I also toured Brigham Young's summer home, which I highly recommend if you're ever in St. George. 


Now, with great joy, I am going home.

Las Vegas, a hate/love/hate story, pt. 1

My first car looked like that, but blue and with a "Save Mono Lake" bumper sticker.

I know I've drifted from my cookbook-reviewing mission, but I'll get back to that when I return home on Sunday. I have a lot on my mind and if I don't post about it, I'll never write it. Or, I'll write it, but never polish it and no one will ever read it. So what's the point?

I'm in Las Vegas, though leaving momentarily. I have a long, emotional, and surprisingly rich history with this challenging and (to me) unappealing place. I'm going to write about it in installments.

I.

When we were in college, my sister, Justine, and I went on a road trip around the Southwest in a used Toyota Tercel. We camped and slept in the back of the Tercel and sometimes stayed in motels, which made our mother happy. One of our first planned stops was to be Las Vegas, where neither of us had ever been. We rolled into town and drove down the Strip. As earnest young admirers of Edward Abbey, we were appalled and disgusted. We never even stopped the car. Vegas was not our thing at all. We could not get to Canyon de Chelly fast enough.

A few years later, our only and beloved uncle, Richard, who was bipolar, moved from Utah to Las Vegas following the death of our grandparents. Vegas was totally Richard's thing. Getting to move here was his lifelong Rhinestone Cowboy dream. He checked in to the Stardust Hotel right on the Strip, spent down his small wad of cash, and promptly disappeared. Which led to my second, very strange trip to Las Vegas circa 1995 to try to find my uncle.

But that's chapter 2.

Now, I have to get in my Ford Focus and drive to Springdale, Utah.

It was a pretty good movie other than that

It doesn't look like a horror movie, does it.

Many years ago, I went on a date to see Lorenzo's Oil, a movie about a little boy with a degenerative neurological disease. About twenty minutes into the movie, watching Lorenzo's health deteriorate, I began to feel very hot and ill. I excused myself and went to the lobby and standing in front of the counter of popcorn and Junior Mints, passed out. When I came to, I had no idea where I was. Eventually, with the help of the concessions clerk, I figured it out and all was well, though I never saw the end of that movie.

Eighteen years passed. No more vapors. I'm just not the fainting kind. 

Last night, I decided I'd go see Love and Other Drugs at the theatre in Jackson, Wyoming. The story, briefly, is this: pretty Jake Gyllenhaal and pretty Anne Hathaway fall in love, but Hathaway has Parkinson's disease which complicates their romance. About an hour into the movie, watching Anne Hathaway's health deteriorate (very decorously, I might add) I began to feel hot and ill. Then unbearably hot and ill. I thought, I have got to get out of here NOW. But as I walked up the aisle,  I passed out. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back with all these people standing over me in this big dark room with lots of chairs. I had no idea where I was. That was the weirdest part. 

They had called the EMTs and cops and everyone was very kind, but ouf, how embarrassing trying to explain what happened, which is that I can not sit through cinematic depictions of neurological disease without having a panic attack. I'm unfazed by so many "difficult" things -- killing poultry, dead rats, blood, 127 Hours -- but tell a Hollywood actor to fake a tremor and I'm out like a light.

Nothing to do with food, but bizarre enough to share. Do others have mysterious psychological quirks like this? You must!

Yesterday in a picture

The interstate looks so peaceful when you're not on it.

I tried to drive up the east side of Idaho yesterday. The first three hours were a bit icy, but fine. The last half hour, when, through the crazily swirling snow I could barely see oncoming trucks barreling up the center line (or what I guessed was the center line), I was pretty sure I was going to die. Thirty miles from my destination, I gave up, turned around, and very slowly made my way back to Jackson, Wyoming, whence I came. Possibly wimpy, but definitely alive.

As expected, Good to the Grain won the Tournament of Cookbooks, tapped in the final round by Mario Batali. I'm sad this is over. Where will I get my cookbook talk now?