Oh you again, duck fat

Egg season is here once more.

The Tournament of Cookbooks, a.k.a. the Piglet, is over and a little sparkle has departed from my mornings. One judge was flagrantly lame, but I thought the rest did a pretty decent job even when I didn't agree with their decisions, as I often didn't. People interact with cookbooks very personally and I'm as interested in these idiosyncratic passions and aversions as I am in rigorous criticism and mad recipe testing.

By now the whole world knows that April Bloomfield's Girl and Her Pig trounced Smitten Kitchen in the final round. I didn't even own a copy of Girl and Her Pig and immediately rushed to Barnes and Noble to correct this oversight.

What do I think? Here are some of the ingredients you need to cook from Girl and Her Pig: smoked haddock, veal kidneys, guinea hen, duck fat, octopus, pork cheeks, whole suckling pig, pig's ears, pig's trotters, sweetbreads, ramps, suet, Old Tom gin, Sardinian gray mullet bottarga, young carrots "about the size of your pointer finger," spring garlic stalks, and "beef tongue that has been trimmed of any firm or hard bits."

My personal favorite: "a brain-in, tongue-in lamb's head (3-4 pounds), skinned and split lengthwise by your butcher."

Clearly April Bloomfield hasn't met my butcher.

This list irks me in a way that having to buy fish sauce to cook Vietnamese or sumac to cook Middle Eastern doesn't. It almost seems designed to make ordinary home cooks feel dorky. Like all the cool kids know about this awesome duck fat hook-up, but no one bothered to tell me about it. Outside Provence, what home cook has so much duck fat hanging around that she can casually roast potatoes in it?

No further commentary until I've spent more time with the book.

Meanwhile, I'm still ambling along with Smitten Kitchen, liking it more and more. Maybe her loss in the Tournament made me feel protective? I'm trying to make one dish every night. Just one dish. I've been in a funk and cutting back on the cooking has helped a bit.

Here's what we ate this week, all recipes from Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen Cookbook:

-ranchero eggs with blistered cheese. You make a simple, mildly spicy tomato sauce, poach eggs in the sauce, blanket in shredded jack, bake until the cheese is "blistered." Top with tortilla strips and sour cream. A solid breakfast-for-dinner dish that required no grocery shopping. I would take the eggs out of the oven even sooner than she indicates. Recipe here.

-avocado and cucumber tartine Pretty open-faced sandwich. Entails splitting and toasting baguette then topping with avocado. Make a little salsa of minced cucumber, toasted sesame oil, and rice vinegar and spread over the avocado. Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds. Delicious.

-honey and harissa farro salad You cook farro for 20 minutes, toss with roasted parsnips and carrots, lemony vinaigrette, feta cheese. Superb. You should make this. Recipe is here and I agree with the reviewer's commentary and tweaks. Leftovers make a great lunch.

-eggs with greens and hollandaise Wilt chard (or kale, or spinach), saute with onion and garlic, enrich with cream. Scoop the greens into ramekins, top with eggs, bake. Serve with big dollops of citrusy hollandaise. Fattening, maybe a little fussy, and definitely dirtied too many pans. I liked it, though. Mark liked it. Owen didn't like it and let me know and we had words.

I found this fascinating.

And I loved this movie, which Isabel and I saw when we were in NYC. The trailer itself is beautiful, the music haunting.

I dreamed a dream

We ate every soft, sighing crumb.

I understand that oaks, suburban public schools, and backyard goats are incompatible with Filipino gastropubs, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and blood orange donuts, but I wish that just a single atom of the creativity and ambition and artistry that abound in NYC would migrate to Mill Valley, California.

To wrap up our trip to New York:

-According to the Village Voice, Dough sells the best donuts in New York City.  Quote: "Dough pushes gorgeously light, plus-size doughnuts with soft, sighing middles." We went there. We ordered four donuts: dulce de leche, cafe au lait, cheesecake, and raspberry jelly. All delicious. Light. Soft, sighing middles. The neighborhood seemed sketchy, but Dough did a brisk business and at one point a paddy wagon pulled up and a cop came in and bought a passionfruit donut. If you're ever in Bed-Stuy, go.

-We saw Book of Mormon. Maybe we weren't in the mood, maybe it's been overhyped, maybe Book of Mormon humor has so thoroughly permeated our culture that what once seemed fresh and transgressive now seems coarse and obvious. I was mildly amused, mildly offended, mildly bored.

-Dirt Candy. Tasty vegetarian food, genial service, punishingly small restaurant. I could touch the lavatory door from my seat and every time someone went in or out I got a view of the toilet and a big gust of warm bathroom air. Not gross or foul smelling, but definitely bathroom air. I loved Pete Wells' review and wanted to exult in this little restaurant, but couldn't. I wish them well. I wish them a bigger space.

We did some more stuff, but it seems like a noisy, gray anxiety dream now that we are home. Home seems like a different kind of dream, quiet and sunny and calm. The bobcat turned up to welcome me back and even he seemed like a creature from a dream. I've been taking cold medicine and it messes with my mind.

Justine (sister) and family came over last night and we watched the Oscars.

My mom would have loved this.

I like to think the Seth MacFarlane humor went over their heads. Or at least some of their heads.

Our fin de siecle New York vacation

my Jersey Girl

New York is freezing and full of Europeans and young women wearing their hair in very high topknots like this. I've been spending money like a drunken sailor while wondering how I'm going to earn any ever again. This was the first place I ever held a full-time job and also the last. I have no idea what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

Worries can wait until next week. Because Isabel loves theater, we've seen Fried Chicken and Latkes and Old Jews Telling Jokes and they were both pretty good, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was better and you should see this production if you have the chance. It was funny and dark and I am in awe of Tracy Letts.

We've been to Carlo's Bakery in Hoboken (the Cake Boss's place) and Isabel explained to me who Joey and Madeline were and it was a delightful expedition even though we had to wait for an hour to buy our cupcakes and I would never, ever go back in a million years if you paid me and twisted my arm and it was the last bakery on earth.

fans, Joey, Madeline

We've eaten pizza at Eataly and it is good, but the pizza at Roberta's in Brooklyn is better. I like Brooklyn and at 16 would have aspired to live there, but as a mother and viewer of Girls, I hope Isabel does not.

my Girl? 

We've eaten a handful of non-pizza meals, but the best by far was at Ssam Bar. The pork buns. The toasted bulgur. The hanger steak. The crispy rice cakes. The service. Everything.

But even better than the dinner at Ssam Bar was when I bought Isabel a dress, a cheap dress on lower Broadway, and we were walking out of the store and she said, "Mom, you're the best."

I don't care if it's just because I bought her a dress. I'm buying happiness this week and that made me profoundly happy.

Actually I'm not the worst photographer in California

Nigella, Justine, me 

Do you have night vision goggles? In that case you can see that Nigella Lawson is signing copies of Nigellisima for my sister, Justine, and me. What a pathetic and disappointing memento!

For my birthday, Justine bought tickets to a luncheon to promote Lawson's new book and it was the best present ever, a convivial meal, decorously drunken bacchanal, brush with celebrity, and memorable sisterly adventure all rolled into one.

The event was sold out and I did feel like a groupie, but it wasn't a bad feeling. Lawson is even more beautiful in person than she is in pictures, which is to say, scarily beautiful. I had aways wondered how much her loveliness had to do with makeup, tight dresses, and artful camera angles. It turns out, very little. In person, it is clear that Nigella was born beautiful.

She seemed almost shy at moments, which was endearing. Her speech (about her longtime aspiration to become Italian) was smart and droll and she fielded politically loaded questions and boring questions with wit and grace. I wanted to ask her about her cookbook collection, which supposedly puts mine to shame, but the moment got away from me. The only thing I personally didn't admire were her shoes.

But I did admire her fashion-forward moxie and that cancels out the shoes themselves.

Isabel and I are at the airport about to board a plane to New York City. On the agenda are some plays, a trip to the Cake Boss bakery in Hoboken, a visit to our New Haven family, and Eataly. They're boarding us now so, bye. 

Transference in the cook-cookbook relationship

You should make this.

The title of the post is the title of the post I wanted to write, a searching essay about the the cook-cookbook relationship that would encompass the more mystifying rulings in the Tournament of Cookbook, my own muddled feelings about Smitten Kitchen, and field hockey. But that tour de force proved beyond my abilities today, maybe beyond my abilities full stop. I'll keep working on it and we'll see. Meanwhile, in order not to fall behind. . .

I know something about grapefruit desserts and the grapefruit olive oil cake from Smitten Kitchen is a standout. Moist, tender cake with a tangy, sugary glaze -- like a sublime lemon cake, but with the unexpected sparkle of Fresca. After 2 days the cake is almost gone and it's a loaf cake, the lowest of the low. Layne once likened loaf cake to "going out on a double blind date and finding out you get the ugly friend." My children would agree.  Most loaf cakes are beneath consideration, but we are devouring this one.

We were also fans of the Smitten Kitchen black bean ragout over garlic toast. Want to get a 12-year-old to eat black beans? Pour the beans over garlic toast. The dish is exactly what it sounds like and very tasty, if not revolutionary. The recipe is here. I don't have a slow-cooker, just cooked it very slowly on the stove.

The maple bacon biscuits?

 bacon, bacon fat, and syrup in biscuit form

Not for me. There's a "too muchness" to some of Deb Perelman's recipes. She takes something simple and perfect and loads it up with extras like bacon and maple syrup to make it even better, even more irresistible, but in the end it's not. I think she tries a little too hard.

But there are worse things.

Just a little more from the shrill schoolmarm

Doesn't that look heavenly.

I'm an early riser by nature and Mark is an early riser because he has a job. Isabel gets herself up and out the door without any help or encouragement and has done so since she was, I don't know, 6 weeks old? But Owen burrows under the covers and waits until we've gone from gentle nudging to hoarse shouting. I realize this is not unusual behavior in a 12-year-old American boy and, yes, that does make it easier.

Once Owen is up and dressed, after he's dawdled over breakfast, he will announce he can't do his morning animal chores (feeding chickens and goats, 7 minutes total) because it will make him late for school. Then we argue and I tell him, no, it won't make him late for school, he has plenty of time, he settles down in a chair and counters with some long-winded rationale that takes longer than the chores themselves, etc. etc. etc.

Day before yesterday Owen was spectacularly late getting up and I had arrived at the end of my rope. I told him that he has to do his animal chores and I don't CARE if it makes him late for school, I don't CARE if he has to do detention, and going forward this is the rule so he can stay in bed or he can get up when we wake him up, his choice. I think the neighbors might have heard me "say" this.

He did the animal chores, ran all the way to school, wasn't late. It's too early to declare victory, but yesterday he popped out of bed and we had a great morning. I made Smitten Kitchen's big latkes with fried eggs.  I didn't have any; breakfasts aren't my thing. Mark loved the whole dish. Isabel ate only the latke and liked it. Owen ate the egg, took a single bite of the latke, and declared it "not the best." He took the uneaten latke out to the chickens, didn't have to be told.

Analyzing the differing reports and knowing the sources, I feel confident saying that the big latkes from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook are sensational. Recipe is here.

The verdict on her broccoli rabe panini with mozzarella was also mixed. I loved it and Owen exulted that this was the first dinner he's liked in a long time. Isabel opened her sandwich and picked out every tendril of broccoli rabe. Mark would have done the same, but tried to put on a good face.

Poor guy. I love broccoli rabe, but even I can see how hard it could be to love.

More soon. It's 5:37 a.m. Pacific Time and as of 5 minutes ago they STILL hadn't posted the day's Tournament of Cookbooks results.  

French toast, grilled cheese, rice pudding

I ask gently if the homework has been started and then I request that the homework be started and a little while later sternly command that the homework be started and after that slyly suggest that maybe we can watch The Walking Dead if the homework is started and shortly thereafter I bark that the homework has to be started right this second and pour a glass of wine and wish I kept bourbon in the house, which is exactly why I don't.

The "mean schoolmistress" phase of parenthood. That's what I'm calling this. Or maybe "shrill schoolmarm."

Cooking pulled ahead of blogging again. I'll try to catch up quickly right now and get back into a reasonable rhythm later in the week.

I'm cooking from Smitten Kitchen. This will be a short interlude as there aren't many dishes I want to cook from the book. Deb Perelman is all about maximally delicious food, beautifully photographed, but her idea of maximally delicious food is very different from mine. She loves savory pastries and eggs -- in frittatas, baked, on latkes, deviled, mashed into salad -- and hearty breakfast casseroles and breakfast in general more than I do. Black bean stew poured on toast. Heavy baked pasta dishes. Dense cakes. Everything seems very dense.

Elizabeth Spiridakis in the Tournament of Cookbooks criticizes the dark photographs and maybe that's at play too.

I'm trying to keep an open mind. I've heard good things from friends.

I made Owen go through and write an "O" on every Smitten Kitchen dish he would like to eat. I'm focusing on those. So far we have eaten:

linguine with cauliflower pesto You blitz raw cauliflower in the food processor until it forms couscous-like crumbs (Perelman's image and very helpful.) Put this in a big bowl while you blitz almonds, herbs, cheese, capers, and sun-dried tomatoes in the processor until reduced to crumbs as well. Mix with the cauliflower. Add olive oil and some vinegar. Serve on pasta. I thought this was a knockout. Owen ate 2 helpings and then said it was "only ok." Would I make this again? You bet. Will I? Possibly. Recipe is here.

emmentaler on rye with sweet and sour red onions You saute red onions until jammy, pile them on rye bread, top with Swiss cheese, cook in a skillet. I expected to die of happiness when I bit into this sandwich, but I'm still here, typing and yelling at my son to practice trombone. I make a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches and always use cheddar or pepper jack. While I like to think I'm open to change the emmentaler didn't work for me. It tasted flat and wan. Would I make these sandwiches again? No.

vinegary slaw with cucumbers and dill Very tasty for a salad that contains no fat. Crunchy and refreshing. Where you usually add oil or mayonnaise, she has you add cold water. Would I make this again? Sure. Will I? Unlikely. I like my usual cole slaw recipe better.

cinnamon french toast The custard didn't cover enough of the bread and this "casserole" was dry, overly crispy. The picture on Smitten's web site sure looks pillowy and delicious. Maybe I did something wrong? I can't imagine what. Would I make this again? Only to figure out what I might have done wrong. Will I? Almost surely not.

gingerbread spice Dutch baby A flat, eggy, brown pancake. Smitten: "not puffed, but rumpled like a bed sheet. The edges are a little crisp. The center is something you'll daydream about later in the day." No one in this house daydreamed about the gingerbread spice Dutch baby later in the day. Again, I might have done something wrong, though I can't imagine what. Would I make this again? No.

more "Nevada desert" than "bedsheet"

tres leches rice pudding This, I am happy to report, we loved. You cook rice until tender then mix with a can of evaporated milk, a can of condensed milk, a can of coconut milk, and one egg. Cook until thick, stodgy, and dense. Chill and top with whipped cream. The recipe is here. Would I make this again? Absolutely. Will I? Likely.

Forgive typos. I have to go make some broccoli rabe panini. Full report tomorrow.

Beer just ain't as cold in old Milwaukee

warm golden kolaches

The Tournament of Cookbooks started at Food52. My Super Bowl.

I didn't need to cook as much as I did on Sunday, but I wanted to get The Homesick Texan out of my system. I succeeded.

Pour yourself a drink, tilt back the barcalounger. It's a long road to the bottom of this post.

I began Sunday by baking kolaches, a soft, yeasty sweet roll of Czech origin that, according to Lisa Fain, is a specialty of the Texas town of West. After reading the naysaying on Chowhound about Homesick Texan, I briefly questioned my love for this book. I tried to find a flaw with the kolaches recipe, but apart from the dough needing a little extra flour, it was flawless. The kolaches themselves were flawless. The recipe is here and you should try it. I made the cream cheese filling, but the fruit alternative looks tempting.

As soon as breakfast was over I started on snacks and dinner for the family Super Bowl party.

Aversions are intractable and unpredictable.

smoky deviled eggs I feel about deviled eggs the way others feel about tripe. I couldn't even bring myself to taste the filling to ensure it was properly seasoned. Mark did it for me and when he said it was perfect, I added a little more salt. I don't know anything about deviled eggs, but I know my man! Owen complained that these were overstuffed, but everyone else must have liked them because there weren't any left over. I can't describe what they tasted like, but will quote Fain: "My deviled eggs are on the simpler end of the spectrum, although lime juice, smoked paprika, and garlic give them a lift beyond the classic mustard and mayonnaise combination." Recipe is here.

passionless

proper Texas nachos Not long before my mother died, when she was still feeling bouncy and awesome, we went for a drink at my cousin Billy's fancy hotel on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. Billy asked if we'd like some nachos. My mother said, "Oh yes, nachos are my passion!" My sister and I looked at each other. Only our mother. Three years later, I can't see a plate of nachos without thinking, "Nachos are my passion!" Sometimes I say it aloud.

Anyway, I don't think my mother would have been passionate about Fain's proper Texas nachos. They're too proper, maybe even uptight.

To make these you quarter corn tortillas, fry, salt, top each segment with a modest little pile of cheese and a single slice of pickled jalapeno. Instead of arriving in a big, slovenly heap under seven pounds of salt, fat, and refried pinto beans, each trim little nacho stands on its own. Like a canape. Who could ever feel passion for a canape?

They're good canapes, though. Recipe is here.

/

 second time out of the box in 14 years

chile con queso  It's overkill to serve both nachos and chile con queso at a party, but I had to make queso before I quit this book. Eight years ago we went to Austin on vacation and noticed everyone was eating this  melted cheese dish they called queso. I'd never even heard of it. We went queso crazy for a week and then came home and haven't had it since. Until Sunday. Fain effectively apologizes for using cheddar instead of Velveeta in her queso. Is she worried it makes her look like a food snob? Not to me it doesn't. I thought this was delicious. The recipe makes a lot. She says it serves 4 to 6, but I would double or even triple that estimate.

guacamole  If you have a good guacamole recipe already, you don't need Fain's. But you could do a lot worse. You'll find it here.

ceramics by Justine Reese

carne asado Carne asada is grilled beef. Carne asado is cubed pork shoulder braised for hours in dark purple chile paste. A West Texas specialty, according to Fain. I'd never heard of it before and didn't love it. The recipe on her blog is close to the recipe in the book, but her carnitas are a better use of pork shoulder.

frijoles a la charra Pinto beans doctored with bacon, chipotle, and tomato. Delicious. Recipe here.

a few people I love

fried apple pies To make these cute little turnovers, you mix a lard pastry dough, cube some apples and saute with butter, sugar, and cinnamon until soft. Roll dough and cut in circles, put some apples in the middle of each circle, fold into a half moon shape, seal. Fry until puffed and golden, dust with powdered sugar, serve warm. Mark compared them favorably to McDonald's apple pies and my father said he could have eaten the whole batch. This may be the only recipe from The Homesick Texan that isn't online and I'm not going to change that. There needs to be some incentive for people to buy this book.

I hung up my apron on Sunday night and haven't put it on since.

Always ready to take the blame

apricot ginger bread

Good morning. Big day in our household. One of us has a lot of TV to watch and the other has a lot of cooking to do. Kids are on their own.

Last week someone tweeted that the apricot ginger bread in Make the Bread, Buy the Butter was too salty and asked me to help troubleshoot. I was out of town and started scrambling for any explanation that didn't involve author error. Heaven forbid.

Came home. Braced myself to re-test the recipe. Who wants to confront her own salty mistake? I baked the bread. The bread is fine. It's better than fine. It's delicious. But it's still my fault that the reader's bread was salty. Looking at the recipe, there are two problems, the first one major, the second minor.

1. I didn't specify Diamond Crystal kosher salt (what I use) which is significantly less salty than Morton's kosher salt (what she used.) This piece lays out the differences pretty clearly. When using Morton's, you need to cut the amount of salt by almost half. What this means is that her bread would have been almost twice as salty as mine and quite awful.

2. I didn't use weight measures in the book and they really do eliminate variability. I had reduced the amount of flour in the standard no-knead recipe to 2 1/2 cups because that worked best for me, but yesterday the dough seemed a little wet, so I used closer to 3 cups. Every 2 1/2 cups of flour holds a different amount of flour and if her 2 1/2 cups was light, as mine was yesterday, the ratio with every other component, including salt, would be off.

But the flour wasn't the critical issue. It was the brand of kosher salt.

*****

Here's the picadillo recipe I mentioned in the last post. It comes out of Cooking Caribe by Christopher Idone and I've made only a few minor adjustments, like the omission of something called annatto oil. I've substituted ground turkey for the beef and pork, but, unsurprisingly, it isn't as good.

1/2 cup dark raisins
1/2 cup dark rum
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 green pepper, seeded and finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 serrano chili, seeded and minced
2 pounds ground chuck
8 ounces ground pork
1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes and their liquid
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/4 cup pimento-stuffed green olives, chopped
1 tablespoon capers
1 cup chicken stock
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. In a small bowl, soak the raisins in the rum. Set aside.

2. In a heavy skillet, heat the oil and cook the onion, bell pepper, garlic, and serrano until softened. Add the meats and cook, breaking up clumps with a spatula, until browned all over. Add the tomatoes and cumin and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes.

3. Add the remaining ingredients, including the raisins and rum, and simmer for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve with rice (or in gorditas.) Serves 6.

All cooking business today

winter lettuce on the deck: a rare gardening triumph

No bobcat for 3 days. Fingers crossed.

I made one last Homesick Texan shopping list, bought one last load of serrano chiles, cilantro, pork shoulder, fire-roasted tomatoes, and limes. Mark thinks we're having a family Super Bowl party tomorrow, but we're actually having a Homesick Texan finale party.

A list of recent Homesick Texan dishes and how they turned out, with links when available:

biscuits. Very good and basic. If you already have a biscuit recipe you love, you probably don't need this one. Not sure what is accomplished by beating the dough with the rolling pin. Recipe here.

tortilla soup. Rust red, cheesy, packed with crunchy tortillas strips, wicked good. Recipe here.

gorditas with picadillo. The English translation of gorditas is "little fatties." You mix a masa dough, form buns, fry, split, and fill with picadillo. Top with cheese, lettuce and salsa. The buns are adorable and have an amazing crispy golden crust. However, the picadillo, a Latin American ground beef hash, was dry and lacked personality. I used to make a Cuban picadillo with rum-soaked raisins and pimento-stuffed olives that I much prefer. It came from a book called Cooking Caribe and if anyone wants the recipe, I will provide. I served it with rice and cornbread and it was one of the staples of baby Isabel's diet. That makes it sound like pablum, but it's an exciting and delicious dish. I served this to the same friends so many times in a row that it was embarrassing.

Uncle Richard's hot sauce. This is Fain's family hot sauce and entails doctoring crushed tomatoes with onion, garlic, pickled jalapeno, cumin, cilantro, chili powder, and lemon juice. The recipe on her blog is quite different from the one in the book. She implies it's an improvisational salsa, one you make differently every time depending on what ingredients you have around. It was good. Not something I'd go out of my way to make again, but good.

black-eyed peas. Excellent and full of bacon. Again, the recipe on her blog isn't exactly the same as the one in her book, but it's hard to mess up black-eyed peas.

  definitely an 8x8 inch pan next time

lime shortbread. Fain says to pat out the dough in a "large baking pan" then cut into squares. This is awfully vague. Maybe she just means to bake the dough free-form? But that doesn't make sense because it's hard to cut neat squares if the dough isn't tightly packed into a pan. Anyway, it didn't fill a 9x13 pan, as you can see. Next time I'd try an 8x8 brownie pan or an 8-inch cake pan and go with wedges. Great, gritty shortbread, perhaps on account of the tablespoon of cornmeal. Not overly limey. Might benefit from a little more salt.

steak tacos. BLOCKBUSTER OF THE WEEK. I saved this for last to reward patient readers who made it all the way to the end of this list  Mix a simple lime juice marinade and let skirt steak soak for 2 to 8 hours. Cook the steak in a super-hot skillet and finish under the broiler. Let rest 10 minutes then slice your tender, juicy, super-flavorful meat and wrap in tortillas or, if you're on a diet, a lettuce leaf. Just as good cold the next day. Make this. It's easy and spectacularly delicious and I couldn't recommend it more enthusiastically. Recipe is here. 

Brought to you by Mutual of Omaha

our special kitty

The bobcat situation is a mess. He was back nine times today starting at 7:30 in the morning and most recently just a few minutes ago. The poor chickens go berserk, the goats get agitated, and Mark or I run outside and chase him away. We carry a baseball bat now; that cat is big. No more chicken deaths, though, because they're locked in the coop.

Yesterday, I visited the county web site to see what our options were and called one of the agencies listed there. The woman I talked to was well-meaning. Well-meaning to bobcats.

I briefly explained our problem, asked for suggestions. Her reply began with lines to this effect: "One of the reasons we all love living in this beautiful county is the abundance of wildlife. Have you heard the coyotes at night lately?" She asked the question with joy and wonder in her voice and I should have ended the call right then because we were so clearly tuned to different stations.

She told me that bobcat control is not about removal, but coexistence. She warned me that to trap and relocate an animal it is both inhumane and illegal. I had not brought this up, but apparently she worried I might I start looking at Havahart traps online, which of course I had already done. According to her, we need to either get rid of our own own animals or erect insuperable barriers, like "coyote rollers," that would be installed on top of our existing fence at considerable expense. Then she pointed out that if we have overhanging trees, which we do, these will allow the bobcat access to our backyard no matter what barriers are in place, including coyote rollers or an electric wire.

He stalks around the coop as the chickens have a collective nervous breakdown.

In short, she had nothing to offer. The bobcat can kill every chicken and goat on the premises and there's nothing we can do about it. Legally, he seems to have the run of the place. Is this possible? Did I misunderstand something? I will make more calls if the reign of terror continues much longer.

Every time that bobcat came back today, I hated him a little more. Forcing people to accept the presence of aggressive predators in their backyard does not breed respect and awe, it breeds rage. I would add that a wild animal who subsists on pets in a suburban town is not living a very wild life.

I know this is a sensitive and controversial subject and some people have strong feelings on the other side and I respect that. Let me assure you that no harm will come to this cat at my hand. The plan is to keep the chickens in their coop for the indefinite future and hope the goats are too big to tempt him. I will chase him off as necessary. By May when Natalie kids, maybe he will have forgotten about us or moved on or been hit by a Prius.

He can write about this on his college applications.

Meow

I just handed in my story about Catalina, an uncommonly fast turnaround for a pro like me who likes to forget everything she thought and felt while reporting a story and then try to piece it together again months later when she's completely lost interest.

So, we have a serious bobcat problem. On Saturday, a bobcat took a chicken from our yard. The other chickens started yelling, I ran outside, saw the cat slithering over the fence with a dead chicken in its mouth. Well, well, well, I thought, what a brave and naughty little animal. I was not overly upset. I decided it was a female who was pregnant or had cubs (kittens?) and I would not begrudge her a chicken.

This morning, the bobcat took another chicken. Same routine. I felt less magnanimous and the bobcat became a male. I thought, at least he didn't get Rhoda, our favorite hen, and I'm sure he's full now, but tomorrow the chickens are staying in their coop.

You know where this is going. Rhoda. That was about an hour later. I was working on the Catalina story and heard the chickens yelling. I threw a watering can and scared the cat away before the kill was complete and Rhoda died on the patio while I patted her feathers. A minute later, as I was putting Rhoda in an empty feed sack, the chickens started freaking out and I saw the bobcat had jumped back on the fence to our yard and he just crouched there staring at me, which felt like the bobcat equivalent of giving me the finger. I threw a pot at him and he jumped off the fence onto the street. I ran out to the road and chased him into the shrubbery and blackberry vines across the street, way deep, far, far, far, and by the time I came back up and had walked in the front door, the chickens were again screaming and I went out and the bobcat was heading over the fence with the third dead chicken of the day.

A temporary solution is to keep the chickens in their coop for the indefinite future, which they will hate, but if they had bigger brains I know they'd agree that dying is worse.

I got to thinking. Would a hungry, ballsy bobcat try to take down a goat?

According to the internet, yes.

I have no idea what I'm going to do, but I really hate this empowered bobcat killing things on our patio in the middle of the day. I would call animal control, but let's just say there are some issues related to our beloved goats that I would need to think through beforehand.

We had a rat problem about a year ago. I didn't talk about it much as it was shameful and vile. I put out traps and never caught a single rat. I locked one of our cats in the coop and she never caught a rat. There were more and more rats down there all the time, rooting around in the chicken coop, scuttling down weird little holes, and, once, running right across poor Mark's foot. I would see 4 or 5 rats at a time and it became so disgusting I started thinking about getting rid of our chickens.

And then one day Mark and I realized we had not seen a rat for a month. And now it has been many months. It was one of those blessed and mysterious gifts from the universe.

But I don't think it was a gift from the universe anymore. I think it was the bobcat.

Thanks. Wow. Help.

unbaked

The green chile posole from Homesick Texan has supplanted the seven chile chili as my favorite recipe in Lisa Fain's wonderful book. It is tangy, spicy, hearty, and brothy. And green. I had been missing vegetables. I made chicken broth from scratch for this perfect soup which probably contributed to its perfection. Recipe here. Make it. Don't omit the lime or the shredded jack cheese. They're essential.

pre-baked

Lisa Fain's grandmother's chocolate pie was swell, like chocolate pudding in a crust with a ladylike cap of meringue. We enjoyed this tasty old-fashioned dessert. Isabel offered the first dissent on the vegetable oil crust, said she didn't like it as much as my usual crusts which are made with butter and/or lard. I would have to taste two crusts side by side to opine with authority, but I think she means the vegetable oil crust is "crackery" rather than flaky. It has less body and less flavor. But the difference is slight and this crust pre-bakes like a dream. Fain's recipe doesn't call for weighing the crust down with rice or beans when you pre-bake. Unheard of!  She says you can use weights if you want, but she doesn't call for it. Who wants to line a pie shell with rice? I don't. I dread it. It's that irksome extra step that puts me off making a pie that requires a pre-baked shell. So I tried baking without. Miracle. No bubbles, no shrinkage. I like this pie crust recipe.

filled

There will be no more Homesick Texan reports until the weekend. I am on Catalina Island. Magazine business. I'm moving off of food topics now, because I've got other stories to tell and a few people, like my sister, will enjoy them, but you can safely stop reading if you're here for the recipe commentary.

Yesterday I mistook the arrival time of my flight in Los Angeles for the departure time from San Francisco. I dawdled at the library looking for books for the trip and was happily eating a tofu wrap at the Marin Airporter bus stop, about to open my "in-demand" copy of Anne Lamott's Help. Thanks. Wow., when I discovered the hideous mistake. Raced back to the car, rollerboard rattling behind. Miss the plane, miss the last boat to Catalina, oh you foolish and careless girl . . .  One hour later I was buckling the seatbelt of 18A, holding my shoes, gasping for breath. If you have any idea what's required to get from the Manzanita bus stop in Mill Valley, California to a seat on a Virgin Atlantic flight to LAX in 60 minutes flat, you are either raising a glass to my awesomeness or pursing your lips at the speeding and unseemly begging into the first-class security line.

I read Help. Thanks. Wow. on the plane. Those are Anne Lamott's three basic prayers. I wasn't raised with religion and am always trying to understand it and this short book was amusing and mildly helpful. Very mildly. I thanked the universe for letting me get to that plane without killing anyone or myself. Thanks. I would have done that anyway. I often thank the universe. It doesn't feel like how I imagine prayer.

Then I started my second "in-demand" library book, Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. I read it on the molded plastic chair at the Long Beach boat terminal, I read it on the boat as we rocked across the channel in the dark, I read it while I drank a buffalo milk (more on that ridiculous and delicious sundae/cocktail later) at a bar here on Catalina. The book is big-hearted, funny, wise, fantastically well written, and I guzzled it down because it was so totally delicious. Wow. Unlike the rest of the world, I didn't get into Wild, but I'd finished Tiny Beautiful Things by midnight.

This book will rub some people the wrong way. I need to say that. Strayed has a strong voice and not everyone is going to dig it. For a while I was recommending Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman to everyone I knew, but I've stopped because one of my best friends and my sister-in-law definitely did not dig it. This is a spot-on and super-clever review of Tiny Beautiful Things if you want to know more before one-click ordering or requesting it from the library. (Justine, you don't need to read the review, just request immediately.)

Anyway, Strayed is one of those cool women writers who toss off  ass**** and mother****** and get away with it and it makes me so jealous. They're tough, useful words, but when I type them I see my mother's face and she looks sad. Disappointed. I'm going to try to embrace jackass, though. That's another Strayed favorite and when I type jackass my mother smiles, very faintly.

The fruit at the hotel continental breakfast here tastes like it was cut with the same knife used to make sashimi. I'm unsure how I'm going to tap into the wonders of this scrubby, rocky island in 2 frigid days and write a sparkling, fun story about it.

Help. And another cup of coffee.

Go Niners!

pavement, cake

Yesterday I was downstairs reading and I heard Mark shouting at the TV. I  came up and he said, "The 49ers beat the Falcons." I said, "So they won the Super Bowl!" Ha ha ha, except I wasn't joking. I know about as much about sports as he knows about Texas sheet cake. And yet somehow it works.

Such great and interesting comments on the last few posts I'm going to address some of them here.

1. A commenter and now a friend have asked whether The Homesick Texan is a reasonable book for vegetarians and the short answer is, not really. You'd be stuck cooking around the edges of the book. There are some cheese dishes and one enchilada recipe featuring mushrooms, ricotta, and spinach (although it also calls for chicken broth.) It's a pretty meaty book.

2. I can't wrap my head around this vegetable oil pie crust. Why aren't we all using this recipe all the time? Is it because of the unappealing words "vegetable oil?" That seems possible. Anyway, I just mixed up another batch, this time adding sugar, and the oily doughball is resting in the refrigerator prior to being employed in Lisa Fain's grandmother's chocolate pie, which is Fain's favorite dessert. Tonight.

Also, I pulled out my copy of Cooking for Mr. Latte by Amanda Hesser on the recommendation of witloof, because it contains a similar v******** o** tart dough.  As soon as apricots come in season, I'm making this tart. Flipping the pages I remembered how much I loved this book when I acquired it back in 2003. For about 6 months the only salad I made was Hesser's refreshing romaine, arugula, and dill chopped salad. Meanwhile, my friend Amy became fixated on the walnut cake.  Every time we went to her house, there would be the walnut cake. She fed it to her kids for breakfast. Once we went over and she couldn't get it out of the pan so she scooped it out in ragged chunks and served it with whipped cream and it was delicious. I think of it as Amy's cake and always will.

3. I have enjoyed having a big pot of chili around. Friday night Mark went to a basketball game, Isabel went to babysit, and I heated up leftover chili and Owen and I ate in front of the TV. We watched Queen of Versailles. I won't say much about this bizarre and improbably moving documentary because A.O. Scott already said it all better than I ever could. In fact, all I will say is that you should see it. Chili and Queen of Versailles. They kind of go together. A perfect Friday night.

4. The best fish tacos I've ever eaten were at Tacos Baja Ensenada in Los Angeles. They had crunch (unhealthy coating on deep-fried fish?) and a creamy, mayonnaise-like sauce. Crunch and creamy mayonnaise are now my personal preferences in fish tacos. The Homesick Texan's fish tacos, which I made the other night, satisfy with the creamy sauce, but aren't crunchy enough. You marinate tilapia (or cod) in a chile paste, quickly saute, and fold in tortillas with cole slaw. If you want to see a picture, they are on the cover of her book. They were good, just not my ideal.

5. Yesterday morning I made her pecan coffee cake (Mickey cake).

deck railing, cake

It's a very standard streusel coffee cake baked in a cast-iron skillet, fluffy and delicious. Her mother called coffee cake "Mickey cake," an allusion to Maurice Sendak's phenomenally creepy In the Night Kitchen, which Fain loved as a child. Fain: "I'm pretty sure In the Night Kitchen influenced not only my desire to live in New York City but also my love of cooking. A most significant coffee cake indeed!"

6. Yesterday afternoon, I baked her Texas sheet cake and even as I was mixing it knew I wasn't going to like it because it contains one of my least favorite combinations of flavors: chocolate and cinnamon. Strictly a matter of taste. I took the cake to my sister's house for Sunday dinner and the others scarfed it up with enthusiasm, so if you like chocolate and cinnamon, give the cake a shot. Recipe here. I prefer the Pioneer Woman's chocolate sheet cake, which is almost identical, minus offensive cinnamon.

7. Finally, before we got to the cake, my sister served a stupendous kale and brussels sprout salad. I ate fourths even as Mark was muttering, "brussels sprouts are not a human food." Like I said, somehow it works! The recipe for the salad is here. 

Chili and chess pie

There used to be a story with this.

Yesterday I posted about The Homesick Texan's pumpkin empanadas (good) and carnitas (great) and my new prescription reading glasses (life changing) and two people commented, one of them praising the photo of the empanadas and the other telling me I was "too funny." Thank you. Both those comments made me happy. This morning I did something stupid and the post is gone. Here's the link to the carnitas recipe. You should try it. That's the big takeaway from the lost post.

Also, here's the grapefruit desserts story I was working on last month. Maybe I'll do a sequel after I make grapefruit tart, grapefruit souffle, grapefruit pudding, and grapefruit curd. I just couldn't squeeze them all in before the deadline.

Ok, back to The Homesick Texan, which I obviously love. Lisa Fain's seven chile chili might be my favorite dish in the book. Is it outstanding chili or do I just love chili? I don't know. But we ate it last night and it was a smash hit.

Fain offers two chili recipes in her book. I made her one-hour chili for the frito pie and as the name suggests, it's a quick and easy ground beef concoction. We've all had a variation on that chili before and it's fine. This second chili is a heroic production that begins with a trip to the Mexican market to try to track down ancho, pasilla, guajillo, chipotle, pequin, and arbol chiles. (The seventh chile is powdered cayenne.) Then you need to chop a 4-pound hunk of beef chuck into 1/4 inch pieces, an experience I enjoyed about as much as getting my eyes dilated. After that you cook the beef with the chiles for roughly 6 hours until the mixture thickens. It's incredible looking stuff, this chili, dense, iridescent, almost black. I doubt it matters that you use every single variety of chile she lists, but it's fun to imagine it does. Recipe for monumentally delicious chile is here.

For dessert I made Fain's chess pie, which has some issues, starting with the name.

I would call this lemon chess pie, because it contains 1/2 cup of lemon juice plus zest and it tasted like lemon pie, whereas plain chess pie tastes like sugar and butter. But it's her pie and she can call it what she wants. She doesn't tell you what size pie plate to use so I assumed 9-inch, the most commonly used size, and that worked perfectly. I was skeptical of her crust recipe, which comes from her grandmother and was suspiciously uncomplicated. You essentially just stir flour, salt, vegetable oil, and milk in a bowl. No chilling the bowl, no rubbing fat into flour with your fingertips, no home-rendered lard, no vodka, no ice water. And it's a superb crust. Not flaky, but crispy, tasty, absolutely great. I think maybe we get too worked up about pie crusts.

But the biggest issue with the chess pie was my apparent failure to mix the filling until "creamy and well-combined" and while the pie was baking clumps of leathery egg white floated to the top. You can see them in the picture. Blecch. Very unappetizing when you bite into one by accident.

Otherwise? Delicious, delicious lemon chess pie. The recipe for both crust and filling are here.

Burma: earnest summation

I agree with almost everything this reviewer writes about Burma by Naomi Duguid. It's an important book, an informative book, a beautiful and thoughtful book about a little known country and cuisine.

Having said that, I did not find the recipes to be universally spectacular or even universally good. Of the 26 recipes I made, an alarming number fell on the bottom of the ratings chart. Check it out:

worth the price of the book (Kachin pounded beef)  --- 1

great --- 3 (the silky Shan soup, the carrot salad)

good -- 9

so-so -- 12

flat out bad -- 1 

Looking through my notes, I find "not that great" scrawled in the  margin of the recipe for three layer pork with mustard greens and tofu. On the next page beside the recipe for lemongrass ginger sliders: "not my thing in terms of flavor -- very pungent." Next to warming beef curry with tomato: "Unimpressed. Thin. Small chunks of meat in thin spicy broth."

What I'm remembering are a lot of dishes that didn't quite take off, lacked zip, needed serious tinkering. It's always possible the problem was in the execution, but there are enough mediocre results here that it can't be all my fault. And maybe it's not even Duguid's fault. Myanmar hasn't exactly prospered over the last few decades, culturally or economically, and why wouldn't its cuisine reflect its troubles? Why wouldn't its beef stew be thin? It feels snotty to dip into a book about Burmese cooking and complain that not every dish pleases my dainty Western palate.

So let's pretend I didn't just do that and move on to my rapturous praise for the handful of dishes that were totally stunning. Long after I've forgotten the meals I didn't love, I'll remember those that I did, because the winners here were among the best things I've ever cooked. They were so incredibly good I don't regret for a minute buying this book and devoting a couple of months to cooking from its pages.

I'm talking about three dishes in particular: Kachin pounded beef with herbs, carrot salad, and the strange, wonderful silky Shan soup.  These happen to be the most exotic dishes I tried in the book and I'm wondering if that might be more than a coincidence. The Kachin beef and carrot salad both involved pounding the central ingredients to break down their fibers. The soup, thickened with chickpea flour, was like a dense, scrumptious porridge. Are the real rewards in Burma found among the recipes that take us furthest from our comfort zone? Did I do myself and the book a disservice by gravitating toward the easier, more familiar dishes?

If I were to throw myself into the book anew I would go straight for the Shan tofu salad made with Shan "tofu," which is not in fact tofu but a simple paste of chickpea flour that you cut into squares. Duguid calls it "one of the great unsung treasures of Southeast Asia, beautiful to look at and a pleasure to eat." I would make the Kachin rice powder soup with chicken and ginger, which appears to be another divine porridge. I'd make the Inle lake rice with garlic oil, which involves kneading jasmine rice with boiled potato, poached fish, and garlic oil. The recipes that call for kneading or pounding -- those are the ones I'd pick if I had it to do over. I'm almost tempted to dive back in.

The book isn't perfect, but given the dearth of books about Burmese cooking, I'm calling it a shelf essential. 

My misspent day

I've spent the better part of this cold, sunny, dismal Sunday trying to write a blog post that linked The Homesick Texan, Hee Haw, Lina Wertmuller, the bad sagas I loved as a teenager (see above), my father, and the SATs, which are looming on Isabel's horizon. I'm throwing in the towel. Can't get the tone right, can't get the argument right, can't get the jokes right, can't get any of it right except the bare-bones Homesick Texan report, which I'm going to post right now while I wait for the oven to heat and listen to the family "respond" to the Golden Globes from the other room, which amounts to Mark calling out that Amy Adams looks pretty.

Wednesday, I bought a 32 oz. brick of Velveeta (smallest size available) to make The Homesick Texan's soft cheese tacos and confirmed that I don't like processed American cheese except on greasy cheeseburgers. American cheese is fundamentally lame and because my mother didn't buy it, I never acquired a taste for it the way I acquired a taste for Tang, equally lame, which she did buy. To make The Homesick Texan tacos, you roll tortillas around really tasty cheddar, lay them out in a pan, then smother in American cheese sauce, a high-low, bland-sharp combination of flavors that, as Lisa Fain puts it, gives the dish "complexity." Yes, it is complex. Still not my thing. Moderately popular with everyone else.

Her carne guisada, however, is great. You cook beef chuck with chiles and tomatoes for a very, very long time until it basically melts into spicy shreds. We've been working our way through the pot of this delicious stuff for the last 5 days.

Hard to see how I was ever going to get from there to Swept Away. I almost pulled it off, but  not quite. Wish me better luck with the next self-imposed assignment.

What a Mommy I had

Now that's a workhorse cookbook.

Hello. Happy New Year. Is the light in January harsher and more fluorescent than in December? Or is that my imagination?

Yesterday, I pulled out my copy of San Francisco a La Carte to make yet another batch of Nanaimo bars (I will link to the story when it runs, which will probably not happen until I write it) and the book almost fell apart in my hands.

Way back in 1979 my mother gave me a copy of San Francisco A La Carte and she inscribed it, as she inscribed all the cookbooks she gave me. One day I will write about those books, but not today. This post already rambles enough, as you will see.

Can you read that?

Opening the book yesterday and rereading the inscription, I was surprised to see that "Mommy" was still in play in 1979. I was 13, which is old for "Mommy." My children haven't called me "Mommy" in years.

But here's a sad/sweet/strange little story. When I was 42 and sitting at my desk one August afternoon, decades after I had last called my mother "Mommy," the phone rang. It was my mother, weeping, phoning from a doctor's office, and she said, "Jen, I have a tumor." And I cried out, "Mommy!"

That was definitely the last time.

I cooked compulsively from San Francisco A La Carte when I was 13, 14, 15. Do you think maybe I was a nerd? I just counted: I made 82 recipes from the book, including the cold peach soup and the molded cucumber mousse, and I know this because, as I've mentioned before, I write in cookbooks. My copy of San Francisco a la Carte contains 82 stilted and sometimes funny notations. Unintentionally funny.

No, rancid butter is never a good idea. 

Anyway, while ambling down memory lane, I spotted a carrot cake recipe and since Mark loves carrot cake and it was his birthday yesterday, I baked it.

And I thought I was such a good speller.

The cake was lovely, not at all "average." It was very soft, simple, and carroty and made me think we went wrong when we started putting pineapple, coconut, and walnuts into carrot cake batter, a trend I date to The Silver Palate, though I'm no culinary historian.

Isabel asked me why I would ever make a cake that I had once deemed "average." I told her I didn't know anything about carrot cake when I was 13, which clearly I didn't.

My one carrot cake wish is that it would look as odd, orange, and wonderful after it is baked as it does before.

The recipe is at the end of the post. It's really good and really easy.

Our love for The Homesick Texan continues to grow. No pictures because I've given up flash photos after dark as the results are always dismal. New Year's night I made Lisa Fain's barbecued brisket (slab of beef robustly seasoned, tightly wrapped in foil, baked for 6 hours) which I served with her coffee-chipotle barbecue sauce  (recipe here) and terrific string beans with cilantro pesto (recipe here.) I couldn't have been happier.

No, I could have been happier. The next night I made her Frito pie and I was happier. Do you all know about Frito pie? Chili poured over Fritos. I didn't grow up with this, but have eaten it on a handful of occasions, including straight out of a cut-open Frito bag. You need to make Fain's Frito pie. A non-pharmacological mood enhancer for glum January. Forget the diet, and while you're forgetting, try Fain's Dr. Pepper ribs. I'd give them 45 extra minutes in the oven to ensure melting tenderness. Recipe is here.  With the ribs I served Fain's cornbread, which is of the unsweetened Southern variety. This upset Owen, but no one else. I've never used bacon fat in cornbread before and highly recommend it as the crust positively crackled.

Yes, I have willfully forgotten the diet. I have not even told you about the nightly milk punch experiments. Milk punch = warm, alcoholic milkshake. But the new year doesn't really start for a parent until the kids go back to school and that is next week.

Carrot cake

I changed this only slightly, reducing the cinnamon, omitting lemon extract from the icing, and using parchment in the pans.

Cake

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
heaping 4 cups grated raw carrots (9-10)

Frosting

8 ounces softened cream cheese
4 tablespoons softened butter
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 3 8-inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment.

2. Whisk together the the dry ingredients. Beat the eggs until frothy in another bowl, then beat in the oil. Add the dry ingredients and stir well. Stir in the carrots. Pour into the cake pans and bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick tests clean. Cool completely and turn out on to a cake rack.

3. Put all the frosting ingredients in a bowl and beat until thoroughly creamy and smooth. It's very easy to under-do this and end up with lumps of cream cheese, so beat hard and long.

4. Ice the cake, using just a little frosting between the layers. Frost the top and sides. I thought this might not be enough icing, but it is. I think as a culture we sometimes overfrost cakes. Serves 12-16.