The quality of gratitude

quadrant of excellent pecan and the over-spiced sweet potato

My sister, Justine, hosted Thanksgiving this year, bless her heart, and I just brought dessert. 

Isabel made a Milk Bar grasshopper pie (like a mint-flavored brownie) and I made a Milk Bar pink grapefruit pie (stupendous, exotic), plus pecan, sweet potato, and raspberry pies. The pies were all done the day before Thanksgiving, so I dedicated myself to savoring a day of serious leisure, my first Thanksgiving off in eons. Relax. Enjoy. Feel grateful. Let someone else set the table, brine the turkey, have a fit. That was the plan. 

I'm an extremely early riser, but I stayed in bed later than usual on Thanksgiving morning trying to think of everything I was grateful for. Gratitude has become one of those vexing words, not quite ruined by use as an alternative lifestyle slogan, but almost. I wondered whether you have to be grateful to someone or something or whether you can just be grateful without any implied thank you. Would a better word be gladness? Except there’s something smug and unseemly about celebrating one’s gladness. And gladness for gastronomic bounty in 21st century America with our diabetes and junk food and industrial farming is problematic, and ugh, ugh ugh, you get the point, instead of feeling gratitude or gladness I was mired in tortured semantics before dawn.

 raspberry

Got up. After a short time, lay down again to read a book I wasn't loving. Because reading spy novels is what you do on a day off. Thought about going to see Dallas Buyers Club, thought about taking a walk, but those activities required too much effort so instead I got into little quarrels with Mark and Owen. Felt glum because I hadn’t posted anything on the blog in ages, but wasn't about to wrestle with those particular demons on a day of rest. Ditto putting the last swathe of plaster on the pizza oven or the final touches on the hard-hitting magazine story about grilled cheese sandwiches. So I took a nap that left me feeling groggy and even crabbier than when I lay down.

The grapefruit pie was a stunner.

Finally -- finally! --  it was 4 p.m. and we drove to Justine’s. Owen was holding the raspberry pie in the back seat and kept pretending he'd broken the crust and that juice was spilling everywhere because it’s hilarious when your mom shrieks. At Justine's I immediately commenced stuffing myself with bacon-wrapped water chestnuts. My father asked how I was. I said, “Kind of restless and grumpy and at loose ends.” He said, “Well, how about writing another blog post one of these days?”

I sighed and kept eating bacon-wrapped water chestnuts until I discovered the Alton Brown spinach-artichoke dip. That stuff is diabolical. You should make it.

grasshopper

Then suddenly I was feeling it. The Thanksgiving spirit. All these people I love were there in the same room, wearing their party clothes, and my sister had made two kinds of stuffing, two different salads, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, rolls, a magnificent turkey. My grandmother, who will turn 102 in January, looked like she’d come straight from a White House tea. She kept fretting that there were 13 of us at the table, but it wouldn't be a party if she didn't. My cousin and his wife convinced me to watch Orphan Black and I attempted to sell them on Enlightened. I ate so much of my aunt’s signature spinach casserole that I felt physical pain that persists as of this writing, but it was so delicious, that casserole, and I won't get to taste it again until Christmas. The raspberry pie was a soupy mess, but my niece Stella wolfed it down anyway. I'd made it just for her and it was a pleasure to see her pleasure.

Lovely night. You can't will or think gratitude into being, it just comes.

They look wistful. What were they thinking about?

How I learned to stop worrying and tolerate the supermarket

Don't let this be you.

In the last few weeks I've figured out how to enjoy grocery shopping, which I have dreaded and hated for many years. I just go more often. Counterintuitive, but it works. Is this what people are now calling a "life hack?" Can a change that makes you happier but less efficient be a life hack?

I used to try to cram all the grocery shopping into one grim, efficient marathon on a Sunday or Monday. I'd trudge to Safeway for staples and detergent, then to Whole Foods for quality. Recently I added Trader Joe's to the rotation. Wheeling a giant grocery cart around, I slump over the handlebar and feel 10 years older, 30 pounds heavier, and like I have 9 children instead of two. Ridiculous, but we are ridiculous animals.

A few weeks ago I was in Safeway picking up a few things I'd forgotten the day before and it dawned on me that I actually love going to the supermarket when I'm just picking up a few things. Shopping becomes a delightful break in the day, rather than a dreaded slog. Yesterday, I started writing the usual epic grocery list and the cloud of gloom descended. I reminded myself of the epiphany and the cloud lifted. Off I went and bought just what we needed for the next couple of days and was back in 27 minutes. I timed it. It took me less than a minute to put stuff away and I felt no resentment whatsoever that Mark was sitting on the sofa watching NFL Red Zone the whole time. Zero. That in itself is a miracle. If I'd been gone for several hours and come home with 47 bags, my smile of greeting might have been a little forced.

On another subject, I’m currently getting to know Classic Desserts per the new plan I described a few posts ago. The idea is to have short, shallow relationships with more cookbooks, rather than long, tortured affairs with just a few.

Classic Desserts is a volume in the Time-Life Good Cook series, published between 1968 and 1970 and edited by Richard Olney. If you’re wondering what constitutes a classic dessert, as far as I can tell it is any sweet that isn’t cake, cookie, pie, pastry, or candy, as there are other volumes in the series devoted to those categories. There are some pretty funky antique recipes in this book. 

appealing recipes in Classic Desserts:

magnolia petal fritters

black forest bombe

French flummery

frangipane souffle

candied chestnut pudding

unappealing: 

celeriac custard

macaroni pudding with pears

avocado whip

black coffee jelly

red wine froth

I have so far made: 

-crepes suzette. Crepes spread with orange-flavored butter and briefly warmed in the oven. A real classic and well liked by all. I always thought crepes suzette were supposed to be flamed, but Olney disapproves. Olney: "Although some cooks douse the crepes with spirits and set them afire, purists believe that this ruins the presentation. In the words of one famous chef, flaming crepes suzette are 'operetta, not cuisine.'" 

-tea cream, chosen because it appeared to be the easiest dish in the book and we all love low-hanging fruit. This delicate, milky pudding was a dream. My dream. Probably not your dream. I don't understand it, but a lot of people don't appreciate aromatic puddings. Owen took a bite, pushed it away, poured himself a bowl of Wheat Chex. But Mark and I liked it a lot and I'd make this again if it was just him and me. The recipe is adapted from Mary Jewry’s 1868 Warne’s Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book and the directions are interesting. You should read the recipe, even if you don't make the cream.

If you do try this recipe, you'll need a rennet tablet, as in Junket. (Sorry about the font in the directions. I can't seem to fix it.) 

Tea cream

2 1/2 tablespoons loose green tea 

1 1/4 cups heavy cream

1 1/4 cups whole milk

1/4 cup sugar

1 rennet tablet dissolved in 1 tablespoon cold water

1. Combine the tea and milk in a small saucepan and heat to scalding. Let sit for a few minutes. Strain into another bowl. Add the cream and sugar. 
2. The mixture should feel lukewarm. Add the rennet. Stir.
3. Pour the mixture into a serving dish (or dishes) and cover.  Leave at warm room temperature for a few hours, until the pudding is set. Serves 6.

Matzo ball soup and Suliman's pilaf

funny, the things we yearn for

A few years ago, Nora Ephron wrote that she was “a Jew with a big crush on WASP food.”

I’m a something-or-other with a big crush on Jewish food. Knishes, blintzes, brisket, challah, kugel, latkes. This is probably because I had a lot of Jewish friends growing up and read All-of-a-Kind Family at least seventeen times. 

The only Jewish dish that has never appealed to me is gefilte fish. I first saw a jar of gefilte fish in some supermarket circa 1975 and was traumatized by the disintegrating vomit-colored blobs floating in a cloudy liquid. Looking at jarred gefilte fish still makes me a little queasy. We all have our triggers. I'm sure gefilte fish can be edible and attractive when prepared at home. I mean, this doesn't quite make my mouth water, but I'd eat it. 

Long story short, I made matzo ball soup last night. Not for the first time, but this was a particularly great version with big, light, fluffy matzo balls. I made a basic chicken soup with celery and carrots then used Wolfgang Puck’s matzoh ball recipe which you can find in this New York Times story. The formatting is crazy, but the recipe really is in there. 

If you choose to make Puck's matzo ball soup, some tips:

a. I didn't clarify the butter
b. used sparkling water, not club soda 
c. used about a teaspoon of thyme because that’s all we had 
d. left the batter in the refrigerator for one hour, not two
e. cooked all the matzo balls at once 

Given that the soup was wonderful, you are safe doing the same.

Here is the Suliman’s pilaf recipe I promised, adapted from Lamb. The biggest change I made was to cook the rice by the absorption method using Madhur Jaffrey's formula. Supposedly soaking the rice enhances the flavor. I’ve never tested this; I just soak the rice.

Suliman’s pilaf

2 cups basmati rice

1 tablespoons olive oil for the rice

1/4 cup olive oil for the lamb

1/2 pound chopped lamb 

1/3 cup chopped onion

1/3 cup raisins

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 tomatoes, fresh or canned, optional

2 tablespoons pine nuts or blanched, slivered almonds

thick yogurt
kosher salt and pepper

1. Wash the rice well and put it in a bowl. Add 5 cups water  and 1 teaspoon salt. After 30 minutes, drain.
2. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a saucepan then add the rice and cook for a minute, stirring. Add 2 1/4 cups water and 3/4 teaspoon salt.  Bring to a boil, cover the pot, lower heat to the lowest possible setting, and cook for 20 minutes. Lift the lid, mix rice gently with a fork, cover, and cook for 10 minutes more. 
3. While the rice is cooking, heat the 1/4 cup oil in a skillet and add the onions. Cook until softened. Add all the other ingredients except the yogurt. Cook for a few minutes to heat and let the flavors meld. Season with salt and pepper. Add the rice and gently fold together. Serve with yogurt. Serves 4-6.

Two recommendations and a recipe

I opened a canister of maple sugar a few weeks ago to make these superb cookies and since I was on a maple sugar roll (so to speak), this past weekend decided to try the rye-maple danish from Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain, a terrific book that won all sorts of accolades back in 2010. If you haven’t bought the book already, Boyce's chocolate chip cookie recipe will convince you to do so. The danish pastries aren’t in the category of the chocolate chip cookies, but little is. They're just very tasty.

Here’s the thing. For me, a danish really needs to be plump, soft, blond, and sweet. These estimable danish are lean, angular, brown, and not very sweet. I envision the ideal baker of these danish as a restrained minimalist who lives in a modernist house decorated with austere textiles and landscaped with gray-green native grasses. That is not me. Owen and I both felt the danish needed more sugar and I kept thinking they would be perfect if thickly frosted with maple icing. But that would be like throwing your grandmother's afghan over the back of the Eames sofa. All wrong. In short, while I liked the recipe, some people are going to adore it and I hope that after my description you know who you are.  

Done with food for now. 

Recommendation #1: Mark and I went to see Captain Phillips on Saturday night and I thought it was stunning. Highly recommend. I’ve read virtually nothing about Captain Phillips, but it made me think about justice, poverty, maritime law, and American military might. I'm still wondering whether the ending was happy, tragic, or intentionally ambiguous. Meanwhile, I’ve read dozens and dozens of articles about Blue is the Warmest Color, which was poignant, but incredibly long and left me wondering about little except why the central character never brushed her hair. 

Recommendation #2: Have you watched Enlightened? I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve searched for reviews that capture its radiance and oddity, its blend of cringe-inducing comedy and transcendent sweetness, but can't find one. I don't think the trailer does a good job of capturing the feel of the show, either. You just have to see it for yourself. HBO canceled Enlightened but there are two whole seasons to enjoy on DVD if you find it is your cup of tea.

Persillade, pistachio cake, new plan

Who was Aunt Sassy?

I don’t currently have the patience or obsessiveness to delve deeply into a single cookbook for weeks or months at a time. Perhaps you've noticed. I don't want to have long heart-to-hearts with a few cookbooks anymore. I want to shake hands and make small talk with lots of different ones. The other day, I decided to start in the upper lefthand corner of my shelves and cook five recipes from the very first book then proceed to the next in line. 

Unfortunately, the first book on the shelf was Lamb from the Time-Life Good Cook series. Lamb. So gamy, so funky, so expensive. So rich and unctuous when hot, so congealed and fatty when cold. I was tempted to skip over Lamb, but couldn't go changing the rules so soon. Six days later, I am done with Lamb.

If you're not interested in hearing about lamb (or Lamb), skip down to the last paragraph of the post in which you will get the details on that incredible cake.

Sunday night, I roasted a persillade-stuffed lamb shoulder for my father's birthday party. This was a $58 butterflied lamb roast that I spread thickly with a butter-parsley-garlic mixture, rolled up, tied, roasted. See how masterfully that roast was tied?  

Sometimes, if only by accident, even I can take an arty picture.

All thanks to the very useful pictures in Lamb. I tied a pork shoulder a few weeks ago and there’s a reason I didn’t post a picture of that. 

It was an expensive roast, or so I thought when I swiped my credit card at Mill Valley Market. But the roast served nine at the birthday dinner, four the next night in leftover form, four again the next night, and there were leftovers of all the leftovers. In the end, it provided protein for approximately 23. Not as cheap as lentils, but on a par with a nasty little supermarket chicken. So I take it back about the costliness of lamb. If you're willing to stretch the leftovers to their limit -- which this book helped me do -- a lamb roast can be reasonable.

Do you know about the Time-Life Good Cook series? It was published between 1978 and 1980 and edited by Richard Olney, a writer whose brilliance I've seen extolled a hundred times but never experienced for myself. Each book covers a category of food (lamb, pork, breads, candy, et cetera) and the first half is dedicated to basic techniques and the second to recipes drawn from a truly vast range of books. Among those recipes, at least in the case of Lamb, are some that call for leftovers. I really appreciated this.

On Monday, I used some of the leftover roast to make Suliman’s pilaf, a recipe adapted from Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. We liked this pilaf more than we had liked the original roast. You chop your cold, cooked lamb, fry it in olive oil with onions, toasted nuts, and raisins, then toss all of this with hot basmati rice. I made some changes to the recipe and am going to type it up for my recipe binder and if you are interested, I will share. It was super-easy and super-delicious. 

On Tuesday I made a so-called French mousakka using the remainder of the leftover lamb. Richard Olney excerpted this recipe from his very own French Menu Cookbook and I'm afraid it is not a  dish that does him proud. You fry some eggplant and line a casserole with the slices. Then you mix leftover lamb with onions, garlic, tomato, egg, and dry breadcrumbs. Scrape this into the eggplant-lined casserole. Bake. Unmold. Stare. Mark said, "This is grotesque."

I wouldn't have said "grotesque" but it was definitely odd. Fussy presentations like this are totally out of style. I could have embraced and even celebrated its quaint appearance, but the thing was not that tasty. The combination of reheated lamb and dry breadcrumbs made me think at every bite: stale.

I managed to find a recipe in Lamb that did not include lamb. This was a melange of crispy green beans and soft shelled flageolet beans that Olney suggests makes an excellent accompaniment to lamb. I wouldn't go that far. That was recipe #4. 

Recipe #5, which I served last night, was a Greek dish of lamb cubes (fresh) mixed with onion, olive oil and oregano then placed atop squares of tin foil, topped with feta, sealed up, and baked. I wouldn't make this again nor recommend that you make it even once. It sounded lovely, but the lamb (too much!) was strangely grainy and swimming in liquid. You could definitely troubleshoot this recipe and solve its many problems, but that is not my mission in life. As of today, we are on to Classic Desserts. 

Verdict on Lamb after a mere five recipes: If you don't own it, you don't need to buy it. That Elizabeth David pilaf was incredible, but you should just buy her Book of Mediterranean Food. Or ask me for my excellent adaptation of the recipe.

But to get back to the picture at the top of this post, by far the most thrilling thing I made this past week was the exquisite, perfect, tender, rich, breathtaking, amazing, splendid and so on Aunt Sassy Cake from Baked Explorations. Torte-like layers of pistachio cake iced with honey buttercream. One of the best birthday cakes I've ever baked. The recipe is here. You must try it. 

Recipes recipes recipes

Everything that can be frosted is now frosted.

Some of the best dishes to come out of my kitchen in the last year were cooked in the last 10 days. Since I have no stories to tell today, I’ll just describe the food and link you to some excellent recipes: 

-After the flaming bananas foster at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, this "fancy pants" banana pudding is the most delicious banana dessert I’ve ever eaten. I flagged the recipe in Salon a few years ago and finally got around to making it last week for a family party. It was lots of work and monumentally fattening, but worth it. The recipe says it serves four "demurely" so I doubled it for nine. Don’t do this! Francis Lam must hang out with sumo wrestlers. We gave leftover pudding to the neighbors and were eating banana pudding for days and days. Ladies, are you prejudiced against Jessica Simpson’s clothing line? Until I tried on one of her sweater dresses -- flattering, affordable, jaunty, even sort of elegant -- I was a horrible snob about Jessica Simpson clothes. I decided to wear my cherished Jessica Simpson sweater dress today for the very first time. I lay in bed this morning happily thinking, today's the day. I put on the dress. Too tight in the arms. Banana pudding.  

-This pork roast out of Real Cajun by Donald Link is juicy, flavorful, and cheap. My sister said, “Don’t you feel that when you cook a pork shoulder you somehow end up making money?” Yes. Pork shoulder is a magic cut. This isn’t the usual cook-until-it-falls-apart pork shoulder recipe (bo ssam, pulled pork, carnitas) but a bona fide tied-up roast infused with the mighty flavors of garlic, fennel, rosemary, salt, and pepper. My father, who is not a man to use such words, called it “succulent.”

-Isabel baked some Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies. They're all over the internet and look stupid and gimmicky and they are stupid and gimmicky, but they’re also delicious. And filling. You eat one and you can’t even think about eating another until the next day. I like a cookie with a built-in stopping mechanism. You should try these. Unfortunately, Isabel has been too busy to show me the exact recipe she used. She told me to do an image search for Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies and the first picture that appeared would take me to the recipe. Maybe that's it, maybe it isn't.

-Last summer in Peru I met a British woman who casually mentioned a Stilton and broccoli soup she makes using her Vitamix. It was one of those concepts that I couldn't get out of my head. I came home and immediately bought a Vitamix. Last week I finally made broccoli and Stilton soup using a Nigella Express recipe and my Vitamix. It's a fabulous soup. Although. Although it really isn’t as good as plain Stilton. I ate bits of Stilton as I was crumbling it for the soup and it seemed criminal to dump this perfect, voluptuous cheese into a big pot of broccoli and broth. Have you eaten plain Stilton lately? Make it happen. And when you’ve had enough plain Stilton, make the soup. I don’t know why Nigella calls for "garlic-infused olive oil" when you can just put smashed garlic cloves into the oil as it heats. Also, this soup needs lots of salt.

-Owen’s Mandarin class got these maple-brown sugar oatmeal cookies for snack yesterday. You need maple sugar to make them and I wouldn't go out and buy it just for these, but if you have some in the cupboard, go for it. They're chewy and hearty and have the icing of a Starbucks maple nut scone. I used maple extract in the icing per the instructions, but next time wouldn’t. So artificial tasting. I used to like that brash artificiality, but am growing up. The Mandarin kids ate all the cookies and they also ate all of our bread. I’ve been hiding everything I don’t want them to eat. It had not occurred to me they would eat a loaf of bread.

-Last night, I made creamy quinoa soup, something I’d tasted in Peru and loved. I chose this recipe  from Barbara Kafka’s Soup: A Way of Life (I can’t see that title without rolling my eyes) which looked about right, even though it's Ecuadorian. Very tasty, rib-sticking, chowdery vegetarian soup. Not as wonderful as the soup I had in Peru, but nothing I make at home is ever as good as what I eat on vacation. 

I don't know what I'm making for dinner tonight or what cookbook I'm cooking from next or if maybe it's time to come up with a new organizing principle for the blog. I'm sitting here at the library wondering if I should work this afternoon or go see Captain Phillips. It seems like a waste of a flexible work life -- or should I say "work" life? -- if I just sit in the library on a sunny fall day when I could be sitting in a pitch black movie theatre. 

This won't surprise you, but the Safeway version of the cronut was dry, stale, bad.

The kids are alright

I think we are done now.

The local middle school cut Mandarin this year and because no amount of pleading would get them to restore it, Owen and his orphaned Mandarin classmates now take classes twice a week at someone’s house. As of a few days ago, our house. I didn’t know how I’d feel about this, but I love it.  There are two girls in the class and twelve boys, half of whom are enormous, the other half, elfin. They're unbelievably fun to watch. 

There's a tendency among some of my friends to grumble about how kids in this town don’t have manners. I don't think it's true and I really don't think it's true after hosting the Mandarin students. They're polite, they're just not naval cadet polite. I'd say they're imperfectly polite. Clearly no one has ever told them to answer “yes ma’am” or rapped them on the knuckles with a willow stick for not looking you in the eye when they say hello. But someone has taught them to say thank you and to take their dishes to the sink and to try to be considerate, whatever that means. You can see them trying to figure out the details for themselves. It’s hard! About 15 seconds after they possibly should have said please, you can see them thinking, oh, wait, maybe I should have said please. And they say please. Or if I try to take a dirty glass out of their hands to put it in the dishwasher, they hesitate. Do they let me? Or do they insist on doing it themselves? What are the rules? Maybe it’s the decline of civilization, but I find this touching in a way that impeccable manners learned by rote at age three are not. 

Since they come straight from school, a parent supplies a snack. Monday, a parent brought bananas and pretzels, which is what I would have brought as it is healthy and unobjectionable. This snack didn’t go fast. It didn’t go at all. But we had these store-bought cookies someone had given Isabel and Owen that had been sitting in the car, bag open, getting stale for a few days. I asked if anyone wanted one before I threw them away and in about 90 seconds the stale cookies were gone. Dumb, stale cookies trump bananas and pretzels.

Yesterday I put out granola bars and some banana bread I’d made using the uneaten bananas from Monday. Moderately popular. Only Owen got excited about the granola bars and I think there was one boy who really liked the banana bread. Stale cookies trump bananas, banana bread, pretzels and granola bars.

I was downstairs when I heard class ending so I came up to say good-bye to the teacher. I found four of the boys looming over the plate (like I said, imperfectly polite) on which sat the unappetizing remains of Owen’s John Gore birthday cake that I'd hidden in a corner of the kitchen.  The frosting was drying out and family members had been shaving off tiny pieces with butter knives for the last few days. Not a pretty cake. I heard one of the boys say, “Owen, why were you keeping the red velvet cake from us?” 

 “You don’t really want that do you?” I said. 

They really did. A feeding frenzy ensued. I got more compliments on that cake in five minutes than I’ve received on everything else I’ve baked for the last month. Frosted four-layer red velvet cake trumps all. 

Another boy came into the room and saw the cake, now just a shadow of its former self. He said, “You made banana bread AND a layer cake!” 

I said, “Oh, the layer cake is from Saturday, I didn’t just make it for this class.” God forbid anyone think I have time to custom bake Mandarin snacks, even though I do.

He said in wonderment, “Still, you made them.” 

Sweet kids. Good job, parents. 

I’m pretty much done with Smoke and Pickles. Monday night I cooked the piggy burgers which I loved because they were so easy and tasty. You make pork patties (flavored with hoisin sauce), fry them, put them on buns and dress with a sun-dried tomato ketchup that sounds hard, but takes about 5 minutes. The recipe makes way too much ketchup, of course, unless you want to use it on your sandwiches every day for the next month. 

Tuesday night I made lamb rice bowls which were tasty but not easy. You make a lamb meatloaf that involves pureeing your meat mixture until it becomes a repugnant paste and then packing this weird paste into a loaf pan, baking it, cutting the cooled meatloaf  into slices, frying the slices, and serving these on top of rice with a yogurt-tomato sauce. Tasted likes gyros. Owen did not like the rice bowl, but he was mistaken. It was delicious and I will never make it again

Last night, I served Lee’s spare ribs with sauerkraut and horseradish cream.  Lots of bones, lots of liquid, soupy sauerkraut, horseradish. Yuck. Not my thing at all, but maybe I was mistaken. Owen loved it and cleaned his plate.

Watering the blog

 I am a bad cake decorator.

Sorry. Another long absence. I’ve spent many hours pondering the comments on the last post, comments that -- taken as a group -- have made me radically rethink personal grievances and long-held assumptions about cooking. Radically. I thought I was the only enthusiastic, ambitious home cook serving “deadbeat” eaters. Clearly not so. It’s a trend, a syndrome, a blight. I have thoughts!

But I’ve been laboring over a post on this topic day after day, day after day, and I’m stuck. Maybe because it's argument driven rather than anecdote driven and apparently my brain doesn't want to do that anymore. It’s driving me crazy. Meanwhile, I've been letting the blog wither and that's also driving me crazy.

So I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been cooking and shelve the dissertation for now.

I’ve now made all the rice bowls in Edward Lee’s Smoke and Pickles except the version with lamb, and I bought the ground lamb for that today. We love rice bowls. They’re great because you can customize based on your likes and aversions. We dislike rice bowls because you have to make fussy, fussy remoulade. We will probably never eat rice bowls again because of that, but it was fun while the remoulade lasted. 

Unfortunately, it's impossible to find the recipes for the following rice bowls on the internet and I think I know why. You have to type out the remoulade recipe, then the rice recipe, then the recipe itself. This will deter even the most ardent plagiarizer, including me. But, if you have Smoke and Pickles, here are the last three rice bowls I've made, listed in order of preference. The salmon rice bowl and beef rice bowl described in earlier posts were also terrific.

-The lovely tuna rice bowl (raw tuna, avocado, pork rinds, hearts of palm, jalapeno remoulade) was crunchy, cool, spicy, and creamy. I love anything -- novel, movie, song, rice bowl -- that brings together such different and seemingly discordant elements and then reconciles them. The seemingly discordant elements here were not just textural, but cultural. The world seems momentarily whole when you're presented with a dish that contains sashimi, hearts of palms, and pork rinds. Make this. Don't skip those pork rinds, no matter how gross you think they are. 

-The pork rice bowl was also fabulous. You make delectable pork sausage patties and fry. Serve atop rice with jicama sticks, and kimchi remoulade. It's been decades since I bought a jicama and I wonder if I will ever buy one again.

-The chicken rice bowls were not my favorite. You make chicken sausage patties and fry. Serve atop rice with orange segments, peanuts, and miso remoulade. Sweet, refreshing, burstingly juicy orange segments in a savory context? Blecch. All the other rice bowls I've made were much tastier. Tomorrow we'll have a verdict on the lamb rice bowl.

I also made Lee's cinnamon-honey roast leg of lamb. I marinated the expensive lamb for a day in a spiced buttermilk mixture and then glazed it with honey and cinnamon as it cooked. Not as good as it should have been given the special treatment and it brought me just a little closer to going off lamb altogether. 

Per his request, I made Owen a John Gore (see photo at top) cake for his birthday party on Saturday. I told him I didn’t think I could pull this off artfully, but he insisted. I was right.

The particular sadness of apple cake

R.I.P. Marcella Hazan. If you don’t own any of her books, you should change that. They’re all excellent except Amarcord, her memoir, which made me dislike her a little bit. But you don’t have to be a warm, big-hearted person to write excellent cookbooks. If you only buy one of her books, I'd buy Essentials of Italian Cooking and make the pasta with tomato and butter sauce. Perfection.

I apologize for the long absence. I’ll explain. But first, some recipes, most of which I served at a family party:

-chai pickled grapes from Ed Lee’s Smoke and Pickles. Wonderful. Easy. You should buy some crispy red grapes and pickle them today. I served these with manchego cheese (Lee’s suggestion) and this might be the most memorable dish I’ve prepared from his book. The recipe for the grapes is here. I cut it by two thirds because I don’t own a restaurant; as I've mentioned before, Lee doesn’t always scale for the home cook.

-Lee's oysters on the half shell with rhubarb mignonette were nothing special. Raw oysters, thin vinegary sauce. I could not taste the rhubarb. Almost stabbed myself while shucking oysters. 

-Lee’s pulled lamb barbecue was expensive and a fair amount of work and had the gamy, funky lamb flavor that I enjoy only in very small portions. I worry I'm on the brink of not liking lamb. An interesting experiment, but I prefer pulled pork. Also, the recipe calls for boneless lamb shoulder and then instructs you to cook it until the meat “falls off the bone.” That’s a challenge. It leaves you unsure what meat you're supposed to buy. I went with boneless and it worked fine. The recipe is here and if you love lamb and have a day to devote to cooking it, give this a shot. 

-Cheesy broccoli casserole came from a book called Real Cajun by Donald Link and it’s a hearty, rich casserole in the hallowed American tradition that relies on Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. But instead of opening a can, this recipe has you make your own. Your kitchen will look like it was hit by a tsunami and you’ll be scrubbing pots for an hour, but the casserole is worth it. The perfect dish to bring to a potluck or someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner when you don’t have to cook anything else.  

-For a weeknight dinner I made Lee’s habanero-lemongrass marinated steaks. Confusing because on the plate was something that looked like an expensive T-bone steak but tasted like stir fry. I’m conditioned to want expensive steak to taste like steak. You might feel differently. If so, give these a try. 

So that’s the cheerful cooking wrap-up. Now I'll tell you why I had to take a break from cooking and blogging.

About 10 days ago I baked Smitten Kitchen’s mother’s apple cake. Believe it or not, this cake was even prettier than it appears in Deb Perelman's photo. It was really delicious. It wasn't weird or healthy or gluten-free. Just a beautiful, fattening, old-fashioned cake full of sugar, cinnamon, and apples. 

No one except me ate it. My children did not even taste it. 

A day or so after baking this cake, I flew to Las Vegas for a magazine story I’m writing about thrill seekers. For research, I rode the XScream, an instrument of torture atop the Stratosphere. Have you ever ridden the XScream? My hatred of the XScream is boundless. I would like to say you couldn’t pay me to ride the XScream, but apparently you can. The next day I did a zip line and after the XScream I could have napped on that zip line.

I thought everyone was as freaked out as I was until I saw the photo. Red t-shirt and jeans.

During the 30 hours that I was gone, Mark decided to bake a tube of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls that he’d been keeping in the refrigerator. He and the kids gobbled them all up. When I came home from Las Vegas, exhausted and maybe the tiniest bit strung out, I found an untouched apple cake and an empty cardboard tube that had recently held Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. 

Oh boy. Bring on the crazy. 

Tearfully I told Mark that Pillsbury cinnamon rolls were redundant when there was a homemade apple cinnamon cake on the counter, that he and the kids didn't appreciate me, that I'd wasted years cooking for this family because all anyone ever did was make fun of me or complain, that he’d turned the children against my cooking with his jokes and Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. That our children don't eat vegetables because he made hating vegetables seem cool and funny. Because he is cooler and funnier than I am! And why did he refuse to eat homemade jam? Et cetera. I told him I felt like I’d been living for the last 17 years with Ronald McDonald. 

So much ire and sorrow over an apple cake, but of course this wasn’t just an apple cake. This was the beautiful bundt-shaped symbol of hundreds of dishes I've written about on this blog and hundreds of dishes I made before I started the blog, dishes that no one but me would eat. It’s depressing to cook for people who truly don’t care about food. One hand clapping, year after year. Over time it makes you feel stupid and lonely. Occasionally, furious. 

It’s also a drag to face the wrath of a weeping wife when all you did was bake some dumb cinnamon rolls. 

I was pretty nuts. He was pretty nice about it. You don't have to like food to be a decent person. Steam was let off. Peace restored. 

Sunday, I told my aunt about the apple cake conflagration and she said, “Did you ice the apple cake?”

No.

She said, “Just a little powdered sugar icing drizzled on any cake and I bet they’ll eat it.”  

Owen said, “That’s what I keep telling you, Mom!”

Frosted cakes from now on. Easier than finding a new family.