Feeling bad about your life/house/slatternly self?

Well, I am here to make you feel better.

Does your sink look like this?

Does the walkway to your front door look like this?

Does your son's room look like this?

Does your "garden" look like this?

Did goats knock down the bee hives on your back deck? 

Are you having company for dinner in 3 hours?

See? You're in great shape.

People, I'm so under water, what with finishing my book and cleaning out my mother's house and then I start feeling bad about broken promises regarding this blog. So I suppose this is my way of apologizing and explaining.

I made Danish pastries this morning. For the book. Of course. They're pretty but they puffed way too much and I don't know why because I made them as I always do and now I'm worried about the recipe which means I'll have to test it again.

As you can imagine, the prospect fills me with joy.

Vanity scones

Pie and ice cream? Focaccia and whipped butter? Chicken and mashed potatoes?

I dislike the word clotted and it almost ruins clotted cream for me. But not quite. I made scones this morning to serve with the clotted cream of the other day and it turns out I can get over clotted. So very delicious.

I made the scone recipe I've been working on for months. This was to be the last testing of this recipe for the book, a recipe that involves candied ginger, dried pears, whole wheat flour and heavy cream and makes a great and buttery scone, though I decided this morning that the dried pears need to go (not plump enough) and will be replaced by dried apricots. So I guess this wasn't my last testing of the recipe. And then I began doubting the whole enterprise. I'd wanted a scone recipe that was unique -- my very own! -- just like every other cooking person. But why? As I was eating my delicious vanity scone I started thinking maybe we've gone overboard with scone personalization here in the U.S. Because what I really craved with the clotted cream was a chalky white scone with currants -- a generic British scone -- and when was the last time I saw one of those?

And then my husband ate a scone and said, "Thanks for making these great muffins, honey."

But my scone is good. I'm not going to talk down my scone.

Clotted cream!

I wouldn't be me if I styled the photos.

If you were reading my blog a couple of years ago, you know I have tried to make clotted cream. I have tried repeatedly since then with equally dismal results.

Then, the other day, I saw a recipe in the brand new and very appealing One Block Feast by Margo True, an editor at Sunset. The recipe goes like this: Pour a pint of heavy cream into a pan and put it in the oven. Turn the oven to 175. Ignore the cream  and the oven for 12 hours. Take the cream out and turn off the oven. Cover the cream and put it in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, you will peel off a thick layer  of the most incredible clotted cream I've ever eaten. I ended up with a cup and quarter, exactly what the recipe promised. I am beside myself with happiness.

Plenty of ceramics and china finger bowls

Before. 

I started cooking from a new book last week, but have been so overwhelmed with cleaning out my mother's house, plus taxes, plus euthanizing chickens, plus watching the entire first season of Community, that I haven't had any energy for posting. I'll do better.

The cookbook I started was Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. This was the cookbook that Gabrielle Hamilton chose over Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table in her infamous Tournament of Cookbooks review last year. That review caused me to start cooking from Greenspan's book, which I adored, and also caused me to become obsessed with the writing of Gabrielle Hamilton. I'm not sure I'm going to adore or become obsessed with Plenty, but it completes the trifecta. Did I use "trifecta" correctly? In any case, it's a cool sounding word.

To decide what I think of Hamilton's review is one reason I chose Plenty. The other reason: it's a vegetarian cookbook and lately the dishes I make again and again are all vegetable dishes. Like this, and this, and this. I subsist on these three dishes and I want more like them in my repertoire. Will Plenty deliver?

Last week I made the sweet potato cakes with yogurt sauce.

You steam sweet potatoes and then mix them with chopped scallions, soy sauce, flour and hot pepper and form the batter into patties that you fry and serve with a delicious yogurt-olive oil-cilantro sauce. The cakes themselves tasted quite lovely, but were gummy. Were I truly dedicated to making a fabulous sweet potato pancake, I would play with this recipe and improve it, but apparently I'm not dedicated. Grade: B+.

I also made the cacophonous saffron cauliflower. Too much going on in that melange -- raisins, saffrons, olives, onions, cauliflower -- with nothing to bring everything together. I ate this dish, but did not like it, nor feel any interest in ever eating something like it again. Grade: C+.

Last night, I made the chickpea and chard stew with tamarind. It was sour and contained caraway seeds and I've had better greens and beans preparations. I'm pretty sure I could make better chickpeas and chard without a recipe. Grade: B-.

It dawned on me last night that my kids now accept everything I serve them without complaint. This takes some of the comedy-drama from the blog, though it it certainly makes my life more pleasant.

And after. Back to the old house for more china and Christmas ornaments today. 

Nippin' on tequila and suckin' on limes

We had 15 people at our maiden barbecue feast, and apparently it was too much excitement -- or maybe just too much tequila -- for me to remember to take a single picture of the meat. Instead, I took a picture of the onion dip. Margaritas make me stupid. Happy, but so stupid.

Producing the barbecue was an all-day endeavor, though not actually difficult. Early in the morning you light the coals, drop them in the belly of your Weber kettle grill, top with some hardwood, insert the grill, place you meat on the grill, put the top on the kettle and try to maintain the temperature at 200 degrees. To accomplish this, you only need to make finicky adjustments to the vents and wood every 20 minutes or so for 12 hours. I thought the results were quite great -- two big, shiny, mahogany chunks of pork shoulder that practically fell into shreds when I put them on the cutting board. After the pork was "pulled," I doused it in a sharp vinegar sauce. The meat was a little too spicy and smoky, which I will adjust for next time. Otherwise, I was proud.

About that onion dip. For an appetizer, my sister challenged me to make onion dip from scratch to see if it could possibly outperform Lipton soup mix stirred into a carton of sour cream. The verdict: It can't. There was unanimous preference for the dip made from the Lipton box. I think Alton Brown's recipe could be improved with the addition of a crushed beef bouillon cube and some MSG, but if you're going to start adding crap to your dip, why not just use the mix? Use the mix.

In other news, the tests on three dead chickens I sent to the state lab indicate that they died of three different conditions: leukosis, Marek's disease, and peritonitis. I feel cursed. Marek's was a fluke. Peritonitis may be a fluke as well, depending on the cause. But leukosis is a scourge that may kill all of our chickens -- and may not. You can't vaccinate against it and you can't treat it. We will watch and wait. Big sigh.

We have/had a big vacation planned next month. To Japan. 

I am trying to make barbecue

6:30 a.m.

I had a theory about making Southern barbecue at home that went something like this: Yeah, you can probably do it, but it's never going to be like eating pulled pork with a bunch of rednecks in Holly Hill, South Carolina or buying ribs from an old black man in a one-room shack in Arkansas or ordering brisket in Texas or mutton with a side of burgoo in Kentucky. Any barbecue you produce in your non-Southern backyard is going to lack mystique and context. This is what I wrote in the most recent draft of my book.

But it was bugging me because:

a. I did not really know this.

b. Once I got started thinking about pulled pork, I began to crave it. I really did eat pulled pork with some rednecks in South Carolina once, and it was a highlight of my 20s.

In fact, the amount of time and preparation required to make pulled pork on my deck is providing plenty of mystique and context. I may not be an old black man, but I was out there in my robe at 6:30 a.m. spilling lighter fluid everywhere and trying to get the coals to smolder and I know I looked like a "character" because Isabel refused to make eye contact with me when I came inside and asked her about her plans for the day. I may or may not be serving delicious barbecue tonight, but either way we're "makin' memories," to quote my boyfriend Tim Riggins.

Too much red chile.

I put a very heavy, spicy, dark red rub on the meat -- which is supposed to smoke for 12 hours -- and I'm thinking that was a mistake and it's going to take the pork in Mexican direction, which I don't really want. At this point, no choice but to go with it and make margaritas.

In other news, our chickens are dropping like flies. Three down, two sick. I sent a corpse to the state lab for a necropsy last week and await results. But our chicken scourge is a depressing story for another time. Today, I just want to focus on the barbecue party.

Except. Damn it. Now it looks like it's going to rain.

Nothing in its place and no place for anything

Uncomfortable, but it's been there since 1969.

Cleaning out a house inhabited for 42 years by a super-organized woman who never threw anything away, including her ex-husband's Army towel and a popcorn popper that stopped popping in 1973, takes time away from cooking and blogging. Especially because I come home after each visit to my mother's house with boxes of sentimental treasures that I now must incorporate into my own much smaller house.

This has inspired a flurry of reorganizing. I should reword: This has inspired a flurry of organizing. I've always been "relaxed" about housekeeping, but suddenly, overnight, I want an orderly home just like my mother's, where I can actually find the Scotch tape and the hammer, the Christmas cookie cutters and the tax returns. The disorder has become agitating and intolerable. A few weeks ago, I bought a label maker and an ugly little shelf to hold the label maker and I love both of these purchases inordinately. I lie in bed at night fantasizing about shopping sprees at the Container Store.

Pathetic, the joy this brings me.

A few people have suggested it was silly to keep stuff the way my mother did -- all those books, and old jackets, tote bags, candle stubs, kid gloves, Easter baskets, bits of decorative ribbon, the electric typewriter on which I wrote papers in high school. I've thought so in the past. But that house, it's like the Smithsonian of our family. It reminds me that everything actually happened, that we used to squeeze orange juice with that antique juicer and pop corn before watching Wild Kingdom with that kettle popper, that I once wore a pink mohair sweater dress and covered a wine bottle in yarn and that our great grandmother collected Japanese knicknacks and our father served in the United States Army. It all happened and that my mother thought it all mattered, makes it matter.

The very sofa on which we watched Wild Kingdom.

Decluttering is very fashionable and there's nothing I enjoy more. But while even just a few weeks I could see no downside, now I can. While throwing things away may unburden your psyche and leave your house looking cleaner and your basement emptier, sometimes you do throw away more than stuff.

I miss cookbook reviewing and will get back to it soon. Most of the cooking I've done lately has been scattershot or related to my own forthcoming book. Two recipes I highly recommend:

The last oreo. Thank goodness.

-Joanne Chang's recipe for oreos from Flour is worth the price of that beautiful book. (You can also find it here.) These are perfect cookies and dangerous to have around the house.

-But the kale-quinoa pilaf from Food52 is even better because it's not just insanely delicious, it's also easy and healthy. Leftovers are fabulous cold, for breakfast.

Every drawer neatly packed, very full.

Cleaning out the childhood home and thoughts on packaging

Heirlooms

Eleven months after our mother died, Justine and I are finally facing up to cleaning out her house. I was 3 when we moved into that house and I remember curling up on a shelf of the empty linen closet and thinking this was going to be such a good hide-and-seek house! And it was. I cleaned out that linen closet on Sunday, and it is empty again for the first time since 1969.

Justine and I have to divide up the "treasures" and so far have been accomplishing this peacefully, even happily, remembering our mother. Justine let me have the glass flour and sugar bins with the cracked yellow lids. These are truly prized possessions. Thank-you, Justine.

Our mother always decanted flour and sugar into these bins and stored metal scoops inside. What a shock when I went away and had a kitchen of my own and tried to pour flour and sugar out of bags into measuring cups. So stupid and messy. Could this be one reason cooking is in decline -- bad packaging of staples?

Good design

Take baking powder. The old-fashioned Clabber Girl baking powder container is both beautiful and useful. You scrape the spoon on the straight metal lip attached to the top and it completely flattens the baking powder, which is the kind of precision you need in baking. My mother showed me how to do that when I was about 5 and I've enjoyed doing it ever since.

Bad design

Notice how Whole Foods baking powder -- a relatively new product -- lacks that lip for leveling your measuring spoon. It's a tiny, tiny flaw, but it irks me every time I use this baking powder. Is this intentional? To discourage us from baking and make those 365 cookies all the more appealing?

Doubt it. Though it's always more fun to imagine malevolent conspiracy than boring incompetence. 

Back to sugar and flour. As an adult,  I went my mother one better and got wide-mouth bins for my sugar and flour. I especially love this flour bin, purchased at the Alameda flea market.

Perfect design

Sometimes I worry it contains lead, but I've been scooping flour out of this for eight years so the horse is long out of the barn. You can scoop your flour into the measuring cup over the bin and spill not a grain on the counter. Very tidy and frugal.

Labelmaker -- fair design

And now I have my mother's bins -- for the bread flour and the high-gluten flour.

We go back to the house today to proceed with our task. If you are a thief,  there are hotel soaps, Fisher Price toys, petite Talbot's jackets, tote bags, spools of thread, shower caps, ancient containers of mace, old copies of Martha Stewart Living, cracked Pyrex bowls and half a bottle of Canadian Club for the taking. There are also hundreds of photographs of me at all stages of life, as well as early finger painting projects, beautifully framed. Please. Take.

It's 5 o'clock somewhere

Recipe testers

I turned a new age yesterday. My grandmother forbade me to say the number because no lady should ever say her age until she's in her 90s. So I'll just say this: I'm halfway to 90.  My thoughtful husband bought me a little key chain with recordings of Sarah Palin (halfway to 94) saying "In what respect, Charlie?" and "We eat therefore we hunt." My sister gave me some hollowed-out eggs on which she had painted detailed portraits of our chickens and which she is turning into a mobile. (Photo tk of fabulous artwork upon completion.) My father gave me old-fashioned cocktail glasses. My kids gave me. . . nothing?! Can that possibly be? I received many birthday messages on Facebook from people I've known at different phases in my life and I have to say, despite mixed feelings about Facebook, this made me very, very happy.

We went out to dinner at  Poggio and I ordered every weird item on the antipasto menu for the table -- tripe, pig trotter croquettes, octopus, sardines -- which was possibly inconsiderate. Everything was okay, but everything was one degree off -- one squeeze of the lemon, one pinch of salt -- from being truly delicious. Carlos Santana walked by while we were dining. Poggio isn't good enough for Santana.

Left: cookies made with Clabber Girl baking powder. Right: homemade baking powder.

I've been super-busy with work and with cooking constantly from my own book, testing and retesting recipes, which is why I haven't been posting at all. Or should I post about my own recipes? Of course I should. I will. Why am I so dense?

Lydia

I moved Lydia, our malingering chicken, out to the coop for a few days, but she just huddled in the corner and every time I went outside I thought I'd find her dead so I brought her back inside last night. She's very droopy and I'm feeding her lots of scrambled eggs. I'm still bitter about that vet bill.


It was supposed to snow here today, but the sky is blue and the sun is out so I guess we're out of luck.

My drug of choice

I was crazy busy for most of last week and then I got my hands on this book and fell into a trance-like state of complete reading happiness such as I haven't experienced in ages.

 I haven't forgiven Gabrielle Hamilton for her smart but mean little review of Dorie Greenspan's big and generous Around My French Table last fall. Her review was a great read, but there were a few too many gratuitous barbs. But then Hamilton isn't nice. She doesn't pretend to be nice. You don't read her new memoir Blood, Bones & Butter and think, golly, I'd like to meet that nice Gabrielle Hamilton and be her best friend because she's just such a warm and lovely person, especially when she's having one of those low blood sugar tantrums/breaking furniture/telling employees they "f****** s***/ stealing/snorting coke/turning a cold shoulder on her septuagenarian mother/criticizing her husband's Italian family/et cetera.

 You think, I will read anything -- anything -- this woman writes and I hope she writes something else very soon.

 A+, as I would have said in a previous life.

Shield your eyes, ugly things ahead

I cut down the prosciutto I started curing many months ago and hung in my crawl space. It is the most horrible thing I've ever created, covered in gray-green mold and cracked peppercorns that resemble dead beetles. I've read East of Eden and I know about botulism. I've seen House and I know about trichinosis. What should I do? I am scared of this prosciutto.

On another sad subject, one of our chickens keeled over and died a few weeks ago. My father recommended doing a necropsy to be sure there's no pestilence in the flock, but I did not heed his advice. A couple of days ago another chicken began to look very sickly and became unable to roost. We call this chicken Lydia. She was one of our first chickens and therefore has a name. More recent acquisitions go  by: "one of the brown ones" or "the little spotted one."

Anyway, yesterday, concerned about the possibility of an epidemic, I made a terrible mistake: I took Lydia to a pet hospital. Not just a pet hospital, but a "rare and exotic" pet hospital in San Rafael, which is the only place I could find within a 30 minute drive that will see chickens.

Chickens are wonderful, but they are not rare and exotic pets.

It was a little bit tricky, the way this worked. First, I met the glowing and lovely assistant who took notes and called Lydia "sweetheart." Then I met Dr. Bacon, with his beard and chunky class ring, who asked all the same questions his assistant had and unplugged Lydia's pasted vent. (Look it up if you must; it put me in his debt.) He said he wanted to x-ray Lydia and I asked, "So, how much will that cost?" He looked annoyed and said, "I don't have it at my fingertips." Then he went out and sent his office manager in with a treatment plan, prices attached. Just like when you go to buy a car.

The diagnostic and treatment plan recommended for the droopy hen: $662. The biggest line item, of course, was the x-ray.

Look, I like Lydia. She's a fine hen. But $662 is 220 times what I paid for her. I would like to say I smiled tightly and said, are you deranged? That's more than the average Burundian earns in a year!

But I am so easily shamed. I am ashamed of how easily shamed I am. They made me ashamed of not wanting to spend money to fix my chicken, and there were three of them. The business manager did not like it at all when I nixed the x-ray. She sighed and the corners of her mouth turned down and she explained that the vet really needed to see what was going on inside Lydia. I held my tiny bit of ground on that x-ray. Then I committed myself to an obscene amount of money to provide Lydia with antibiotics, fluids, and a blood test.

Driving home I was ashamed of myself. I was ashamed of devoting resources to pumping an Australorp full of fluids. Decadent. Wrong. UGH. Can't think about it. Must put it out of my head now.

In future, I only take livestock to livestock hospitals, even if that means driving to Cotati.

Found object, 2/10/11.

Graduation party

Hot homemade donuts.

The girls got to pick what they wanted to cook for their last day of class, and they chose donuts and bagels. My friend Melanie said hopefully, "I wonder if seeing how donuts are made will affect how they feel about eating them."

I would say the answer was . . . no.

Hot homemade bagels.

Here's the lesson I repeatedly tried to impart during yesterday's class: When you nervously drop a doughy object from a height into very hot liquid, it will splash and burn you. But if you move your hand very close to the hot liquid -- a centimeter or so away -- and gently release the doughy object, all will be well. Closer is safer. I must have said and demonstrated this fifty times but it was almost impossible for most of the girls to do it. Too fearful. It's one of those "tricks" they never mention in books and even when a wise instructor repeatedly explains, you only really learn through experience, later, on your own.

Newspapers. Wouldn't teach another cooking without them.

Here's the lesson the girls repeatedly imparted to me over the weeks of this class: Everyone wants her own mudpie. Everyone wants to craft her own beautiful bagel -- her own tiny donut, her own heart-shaped pizza, her own extra-fat dumpling -- and then keep track of it through the entire process, admire it, show it off, and eat it.

Great, great girls. Fun class. I'm sorry it's over.

Strawberry buttercream shrimp

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Photo hoisted from Trip Advisor.

While Fresno is  a bit depressing these days, what with the shuttered shops, yard sales on every other block, 17% unemployment, and all-around disspirited vibe, I can't complain about the food.

Best Chinese dinner in memory on Thursday night at the Hunan. I was going to go somewhere and have a salad, but then I read about buttercream shrimp. Sounded like a joke. Sounded disgusting. Sounded too good to be true!  I was in the car before I'd finished arguing with myself about whether this could possibly be a wise diet choice. I already knew the answer.

Hunan is an unlikely restaurant to find in Fresno. There's a story to this restaurant. The upshot: lucky Fresno. I ordered dan dan noodles, which were hot and red and crazy delicious, and had the shrimp for "dessert." I left some of both on my plate, which was a feat.

How to describe those shrimp. . . warm, firm and crunchy, sweet, suave, buttery. I know this dish sounds weird and questionable, but I'm telling you: it is magnificent. I'm considering returning tonight for more and if you are ever within 30 miles of Fresno, go.

Yesterday I spent some time looking for a Hmong restaurant, as there are a lot of Hmong people in Fresno. But all my leads petered out, the places I'd read about had been closed.

Not just closed -- abandoned, defiled, gutted.  I gave up on Hmong food, which is how I ended up at the well-regarded Lao Cafe 2.

I met some real charmers in front of the liquor market.

Excellent restaurant. I ordered nam khao. Here's a factual description of how it's made. Here's how I experienced it: sour and crunchy, salty and meaty, spicy, addicting. I would rather have this than any cake and I could not stop eating. I intended to eat about 1/3 of what they served me, but ate more like 4/5. Skipped dinner.

I've been to Fresno before and really liked it. But while I've had some pleasant experiences here these last two days, met a couple of lovely people and gone to several interesting museums, they feel like tiny islands in choppy and cold waters. I've written a lot of travel stories about unlikely places, but this time I'm having trouble seeing it.

If anyone has any ideas, please send.

Today: Finish coffee. More museums. Historic house. Armenian bakery. Tower district. Zoo. Strawberry buttercream shrimp?

Around My Skinny French Table

Not one of my favorite things. Not at all.

I have to move on from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table fairly soon, but it seemed unsporting not to see if the book contained a few low-calorie recipes. It does. More than a few. I've now tried two.

1. Night before last I made Greenspan's creamy cauliflower soup sans cream.

I was not looking forward to this. I was not looking forward to this all day long.

But the soup was superb -- rich and flavorful and hearty. My sister and Isabel, who are not on diets, will back me up on that. The boys did not try any; they ate leftover Outback Steakhouse chicken wings. Foolish boys.

It's an easy soup -- one pot, not much peeling and chopping. The recipe as printed here is slightly different from what appears in Greenspan's book -- she calls for 6 cups of broth, and this recipe calls for five. I'd go with six. I used 2 cups of broth because that's all I had, plus 4 cups of water. To compensate for the missing broth, I added  5 garlic cloves instead of two, and I did not stint on the freshly ground white pepper, which is crucial. (I bought white peppercorns for the first time a few months ago and I don't know why I waited all these years.) Greenspan suggests pushing the soup through a sieve, but I say no: More work, a sieve to wash, and the soup is great as is, slightly rough. I didn't add any of the fattening toppings. Doesn't need any. Please make this soup! You will be so happy. And slender.

2. Last night I made Greenspan's chicken breasts in foil packets with curry and peas. Again. Not looking forward to this. Not looking forward to this all day long.

But all the same adjectives apply: Superb. Rich and flavorful. Easy. You just cut up some chicken breasts, mix with curry powder, sliced bell pepper, onions, frozen peas, and the tiniest bit of olive oil (4 teaspoons, total). Season with salt and pepper. Wrap in foil packets and bake for 20 minutes. You will be astounded at how moist and delicious are the contents of those dumpy foil packets. I might in future add a little more curry powder and some cayenne, and I would probably try to come up with a precise amount of salt, as it's hard to season raw chicken to taste. But these are details. My husband, who is not on a diet, said, "You should make this once a week, every week."

Recipe is reprinted here along with a very pretty picture of the dish using orange peppers.

I love non-diet food that actually is.

Here I go, bragging again

I just turned in draft #2 of my book. I ran down the clock without actually getting everything in perfect order and it was very hard to turn in work with so many obvious problems still to fix.

Question: Is this a variant of the "humble brag" where, by announcing that it is hard for me to turn in imperfect work, I am actually pointing out that I have very high standards and usually turn in perfect work? I've become preoccupied with humble brags lately, as they are rife on Facebook and Twitter. The other day I realized that if I ruthlessly edited out all humble brags, I would have to shut down Tipsy Baker. As in, I write a story about a fight with my kids, but the point is not the fight but the fact that I've made it sound funny because I'm funny. Could that be construed as a humble brag? Possibly!

But this way lies madness. I like writing my blog and will proceed as usual with my bragging, humble and otherwise.

As to the manuscript issue, it reminds me of how I present myself in public. I don't usually look all that great, but never do I go out with both slip and bra strap showing and the back of my hair uncombed. I like to think my manuscript has inner beauty, and I will continue untangling her hair  over the next few days and weeks.

Speaking of how I go out in public. I recently saw a picture of myself holding my handsome 1-year-old nephew, Ben. I am wearing a long-sleeved dress, but even under clingy jersey knit one might suspect that I am a professional swimmer, hurler, or shot putter. Never has a baby looked more secure than Ben does, supported by those burly arms. Hay-baling arms. Steer-wrestling arms. Big, solid, baby-holding arms. And I don't even work out!

It's sort of wonderful, watching ancestral genes express themselves in your physique. Someone long, long ago in Wales or Switzerland or England or Spain had such arms and I hope they were very useful to that someone. They are not so useful in my life. They are not my ally in a sun dress. Or, lately, any dress.

But I am much fonder of them than I used to be. I seem to be as incapable of truly disliking my body now as I used to be incapable of truly liking my body. Something changed when I watched my mother dying. I realized that any healthy body is a perfect body. Chubby legs that walk are perfect legs. Hefty arms that can hold a baby are perfect arms.

The upside of thinking this way: Inner peace.

The downside: Weight gain. What is the motivation to eat undressed salad for dinner when you have a perfect body?

But while my body may be perfect, I still really need to lose some weight. For my long-term health and so I can wear my clothes. I've gained seventeen pounds in the last year.

While I do realize this is an unpopular topic and a downer on a food blog, I am going on a diet. I haven't figured out how this will feature in the cookbook reviews, but I wanted to get it out there.

My lovely grandmother had a big birthday

Wedding china, inherited goblets, loud tablecloth.

My maternal grandmother turned 99 yesterday and we threw her a party. I guess I can say it, now that there's no one around to have hurt feelings: While I loved all my grandparents a lot, she was always my favorite.  When I was a child I used to worry she was going to die and I'd never see her again. I would get weepy when we said good-bye because she was so tiny and seemed so fragile.

She is even tinier now, but clearly she was not so fragile.

Keeping me company, pre-party.

Tonight she told me, "You look pretty and happy, but once you were very slim and that was wonderful."

Hmmph.

Some other pearls of wisdom gleaned over the years:

-"Don't chase the boys, let the boys come to you."

-"Latin boys think all American girls are fast."

-"Girls look very coquette when they wear a skirt that moves when they walk."

-"Couldn't you put on a little lipstick?"

-"Couldn't you put on a little rouge?"

-"Don't put your elbows on the table -- it makes them look old."

-"You need to make exercise."

-"You should wear dangly earrings."

And right she is. Usually.

I've made her sound shallow and hypercritical, which she isn't at all. She's just a Tiger Mother of the vintage Guatemalan variety.

The meal:

-Old-fashioneds. Because my grandmother likes them.

-Dorie Greenspan's tuna rillettes. Easy and fabulous. Tuna + creme fraiche + shallot + curry powder + a pinch of allspice, pureed in food processor and chilled. Serve with crackers.

-Greenspan's sweet and spicy nuts. HIT.

Brazil nuts, pistachios, pecans, cashews, almonds.

-Greenspan's mustard batons. Pepperidge Farm puff pastry spread with mustard and baked.

-Vadouvan mac n' cheese. Not a Greenspan recipe. I've made this rich and exotic and very delicious dish probably ten times now and it's ideal for parties because you can have it all ready ahead of time. The recipe is here. I can't recommend it more highly. My one piece advice would be to ignore the instructions with regards to the breadcrumb topping and do this instead: Put  6 ounces of crusty bread  (or rye bread) in the food processor and break it down to feathery bits. Heat 4 tablespoons of butter and fry the crumbs until crisp. Otherwise, the recipe is perfect. You can order vadouvan spice blend from Kalustyan's. I've tried making it, but it's better bought.

To complete the meal, my sister brought kale salad and two excellent cakes, including a domed green Princess cake.

Happy Birthday, Dita!

Flower barrettes. Very coquette.

Crafty chickens and the tween scene

While looking for the hose today, I found 23 eggs in the damp, spidery crawl space between our house and the back stairs. How long have they been there? Not going to think about it. Going to use them. Every week or so the hens move their communal nest to a new location in the yard. People say chickens are stupid. I see no evidence of that.

Are quail dumb too?

99 cents

I bought quail eggs at the Chinese market and put some under our broody hen, Lily, a few days ago. So far the eggs are still there and so is Lily. I put the chances of a hatch at 5%.

And now for the human news. Middle school cooking class, chapter 2:

We made pot stickers. They were a big success. But food is so much less interesting that footwear.

One day they will cringe.

Five of the girls wore Ugg boots and two wore Converse sneakers. I commented on this, in a friendly way, as I have a daughter who attends the same school and alternates between Ugg boots and Converse sneakers.

One of the Ugg wearers, M., pointed to another (apparent) Ugg wearer, K., and said, "Those are Fuggs."

"Yeah," said K. sheepishly. "They're Fuggs."

"Fake Uggs," M. explained.

It wasn't a kind thing to say, but was it mean? When I was a kid, I perceived calculated malice everywhere among my peers. But as an adult watching children, I just see (mostly) casual and careless snottiness.

I wonder. I wonder if childhood perceptions are more acute or just more paranoid.

The Abercrombie hoodie. Another essential piece of the uniform.

Root beer cake and kelp cookies

Little tornado

Owen made a tornado in a bottle for his science fair project which meant we had to buy a bunch of  plastic bottles of root beer and empty them out. There was more root beer around here than even he could drink, so I finally made the mysteriously alluring root beer cake from Baked.

How do you frost a bundt cake?

To make this cake you melt butter with cocoa and 2 cups of root beer, then mix the warm, dark sludge with flour and eggs and bake it all in a bundt pan. The frosting contains more root beer, more chocolate, and more butter. I really wanted to taste a root beer-flavored cake. This was not it. This was a fudgy cake with fudgy frosting, my least favorite kind of cake and while everyone else was thrilled with it, I was able to partake in moderation. In fact, after the first bite, I was able to partake not at all. Win-win!

I guess.

More Dorie Greenspan reports:

Cheez-it crackers. Delicious. Like cheese straws, but better than any cheese straws I've ever eaten. I need to examine her recipe to figure out why. Another one for the scrapbook.

Cheez-it and seaweed cookie. 

Seaweed sables. Strange. You chop up dried Japanese seaweed and mix it into a sweet, tender butter cookie dough, then add a lot of salt. These are definitely cookies, but they're also salty and seaweedy and totally confusing. I liked them quite a bit. Greenspan borrowed the recipe from David Lebovitz; his version is here.

Vegetable-barley soup with Indian spices. Good and easy and vegan, since I made it with water instead of broth. A rare dish in which I found parsnip inoffensive.

In other news.

My favorite.

Our Japanese bantam hen, Lily, weighs about a pound and, when she's laying, lays a small, pretty egg almost every single day. She's currently not laying, though, because she's gone broody for the fifth or sixth time since we got her, which is to say, she's trying to keep a clutch of eggs warm under her body until they hatch. She leaves the nest for ten minutes to eat and drink every morning, and then rushes back, settles herself over the eggs, fans out all her feathers and clucks. Here she sits, day and night. It breaks my heart. Not only will none of the eggs on our property ever hatch (we have no rooster), but she isn't even sitting on eggs this time. She's sitting on the golf balls we put in the nesting boxes to trick the hens to lay there rather than in the goat shed.

I find this so sad. I might go to Trader Joe's and get some of their fertile eggs and replace the golf balls. Or maybe the Chinese market for quail eggs? Give the little gal a fighting chance.

From really good to unbelievably good

veal marengo

Some more delicious dinners from Dorie Greenspan.

Monday:

Chicken breasts diable. Really good. Chicken breast pounded and sauteed, then served with a sharp-creamy mustard sauce.

Broccoli with crunchy breadcrumbs. Really good. Broccoli is steamed, butter is melted with garlic, crispy breadcrumbs are rolled in the garlicky butter, the broccoli is rolled in the buttery, garlicky breadcrumbs. I needed to throw in a little extra butter to make it all come together; I suspect that only made it better.

Tuesday:

Veal Marengo. Really, really good. Veal is stewed with tomatoes and wine, then served with buttery pearl onions, mushrooms and potatoes.

Carrot salad. Unbelievably good. And easy. Carrot is shredded, topped with raisins, served with a honey-mustard-oil-cider vinegar dressing. Best carrot salad I've ever made. Going into the scrapbook.

Caramel sauce. Unbelievably good.  Also easy. Sugar is melted and caramelized, then mixed with cream and butter and salt and, when it cools to a saucy thickness, poured over ice cream. Another one for the scrapbook, and by scrapbook I mean the binder of recipes I make again and again.

The upshot? Yesterday I joined a gym. It's been a year and Around My French Table brought me to yet a new crisis point. I like to read on the treadmill. Here's what I finished on the treadmill yesterday:

Pageturner! And funny and self-deprecating and I highly recommend it, even if you were extremely annoyed by the Wall Street Journal excerpt and are now sick of the whole subject. The book might surprise you. David Brooks, as always, has an interesting take.

Brooks also has a curious and fascinating piece in the New Yorker. I'm souring on Gabrielle Hamilton given how widely her review of Dorie Greenspan's book missed the mark, but the woman sure can write. She has a personal history in the same issue and I'd link to that too, but it's behind the firewall. If you see the 1/17 copy of the magazine, check it out.