Ssam and Shrek cookies

The Momofuku cookbook is eccentric and absorbing, but I’ve been consuming it in tiny chunks because David Chang has a pungent, supercilious persona that I find hard to digest. Here’s something that really turns me off: He repeatedly describes losing his temper with his employees. He’s apparently famous for it. Every time he brings it up, I hate him a little. I can’t help it. I identify with the employees. 

But here’s something I love about him: His devotion to American country hams. After tasting some great country ham, he became convinced that Ssam Bar "had to serve country ham, had to put money in the pockets of people who are preserving an old American tradition, and had to do it in New York before anyone else." With great passion he tries to persuade the reader to start buying and eating country ham. He succeeds. I ordered a country ham. One day soon I will make red eye mayonnaise, warm up a baguette, and slice some salty, pink Tennessee ham. He’s an interesting guy, David Chang. He should stop yelling at people.

Since the last post I’ve cooked two new Momofuku dishes: pork sausage ssam and steak ssam. Ssam is food (Korean) that’s wrapped in lettuce or some other leafy green, sort of like tacos. You may have heard of Chang’s bo ssam, a great, sugary-salty shoulder of pork that is slow-roasted for many hours and served with oysters, rice, and various sauces, along with a big bowl of lettuce for wrapping. It’s a tremendous party dish -- bounteous, communal, delicious, easy. I can’t recommend it more highly. I consider it a staple now; I’ve made it six or seven times and it never disappoints. 

These two new ssams aren’t quite as brilliant. They’re relatively easy and quite delicious, but don’t feel bounteous and communal. Rather than pulling chunks of meat from a giant shared haunch, you serve yourself neat little portions. Steak ssam = marinated beef that is grilled, sliced, and served with rice and pureed kimchee. Pork sausage ssam is made by mixing ground pork with various Vietnamese ingredients (fish sauce, lemongrass), baking it in a brownie pan, cutting it into rectangles and grilling it for a few minutes. This ssam is served with fish sauce vinaigrette and scallion ginger sauce. Both ssams are very good. Realistically, I probably won’t make either again. 

The same is true of the last two recipes I’ve tried from Valerie Gordon’s Sweet. Her matcha cookies with white chocolate and macadamia nuts are superrich, intensely sweet, and only faintly tea-flavored. We all liked them, but they sat around for a week, disappearing at the sluggish rate of maybe one per day which means they got stale before they got eaten. Was it their warty green appearance? I called them Shrek cookies, but no one knew what I was talking about, so apparently that cultural reference is dead. 

But maybe it wasn't their looks. Maybe everyone in the house is sick of cookies. No one ate the salted peanut blondies either, and they were tasty, tan, and conventionally attractive. I can’t explain. 

Noodles and coconut cream pie

It’s warm and springy here in northern California and the mood at our house is correspondingly warm and springy. I realize the weather elsewhere remains less than tropical so I apologize for crowing. Your time will come, Easterners, and when it does, unlike us you will probably be allowed to water your plants. 

This is  just a quick post so I don’t fall behind: The Momofuku noodles with ginger scallion sauce are tasty, though I agreed with some of the commenters here that the “sauce” could use a little more oil to help coat the noodles. I used fresh ramen from Ranch 99 and added toasted nori and David Chang’s quick-pickled cucumbers. The whole meal took about 20 minutes to prepare, start to finish. Predictably, Owen and his friend didn’t like this, so we gave their leftovers to the chickens who thought the ramen was a pile of worms and went wild with joy.

We don’t need any more desserts in this house, but since it was Pi Day, I baked the Bullocks Wilshire coconut cream pie from Sweet on Friday.  What’s unusual about this pie is that the flavor comes from coconut cream, the stuff from a can that you use to make pina coladas. You mix this sweet, artificial goo into a custard filling that you cook on the stove and then pour into the pie shell and bake. Too much cooking! The custard became very, very firm, losing all its velvety softness. This could be easily fixed by shortening cooking times all around and then I expect this would be a lovely pie.

If I notice any pattern in Sweet it’s that the grand statement desserts tend to fall short while the humbler productions, like the cookies, are generally excellent. 

Momofuku: chapter 1

The Benton’s bacon arrived so we’ve started our Momofuku phase while continuing with the Sweet desserts. 

If you didn’t already know, Momofuku is a famous, fashionable New York City restaurant group that includes Ssam Bar, Noodle Bar, and the painfully expensive Ko. Founder David Chang, 36, is the original Korean-American bad boy chef and one of the people we can thank for adding “fuck” to the cookbook lexicon.

That’s Momofuku. Momofuku is Chang’s 2009 book (written with Peter Meehan) about founding and building Momofuku. It’s a real, readable book with roughly equal quantities of text and recipes. As of page 123, here’s what I’ve learned: Chang excelled at football and golf as a kid, majored in religion at Trinity College, and daydreamed about writing “a screenplay that told the story of the Bhagavad Gita through the lens of the Civil War with Robert E. Lee in the hero’s role.”  (Joke? I can't tell.)

He also daydreamed a lot about noodles and ran off to Japan to apprentice in a ramen shop. After working in various restaurants in Japan and New York City, he eventually decided to pursue his ramen dream and in 2004 opened Momofuku, a tiny noodle shop in the East Village. Where I left off reading, he’s just opened his second restaurant, Ssam Bar, and while things are going badly for hot-tempered, foul-mouthed David Chang, I sense a big turnaround is afoot. It has to be, or this book wouldn't exist. 

Sprinkled throughout the text are recipes and a lot of them are daunting. In order to do the book justice I will have to tackle Chang’s ramen recipe, which involves seven component recipes. Eight, if I decide to make the noodles from scratch, which I won’t. 

But there are some easier recipes I’m using to warm up.

The first recipe I tried was Chang’s Napa cabbage kimchi. I made this last month and let it ferment in the refrigerator until a few days ago. I’m not a kimchi connoisseur and suspect this version contains more sugar than is strictly proper, but I love it. The sugar is probably why I love it.  Be warned that it is very, very sweet and will not work on the Paleo or Atkins diet. The recipe is here. 

On Monday, I used the kimchi to make one of Chang’s brussels sprouts recipes. You roast some sprouts, toss with chopped bacon (Benton’s, of course -- Chang is hung up on Benton's), and then serve on a bed of pureed kimchi. It was really tasty. Not life-changing and not as streamlined as Roy Choi’s brussels sprouts/kimchi dish, but really tasty. 

The next night: asparagus with miso butter and poached eggs. You beat together white miso and butter, warm this with a little sherry vinegar, and serve with sauteed asparagus and a poached egg. My family would be aghast if I put this in front of them, so I made cole slaw and bratwurst for them. I alone ate the asparagus. And it was a very lonely meal indeed.

Not to mince words, but I hated this dish. You’ll find the recipe here followed by many glowing reviews, so don’t let me deter you from trying it.  Chang writes that the miso butter-egg combo resembles hollandaise sauce -- “in a similar appealing fat-on-fat sort of way.”

I found it unctuous, overpowering, cloying, and totally unappealing. Hollandaise has a nice, lemony bite that cuts through the “fat-on-fat." While the vinegar was probably supposed to do this for the miso butter, it didn’t, or not enough to suit my particular palate. The egg yolk mingled with the miso butter and pale yellow liquid ran all over the plate. Jokes were made. At the end of dinner, Isabel stood up to clear the table, looked at her father, and said, “Do I have to clear her plate?”

You get the idea.

For dessert: tangerine cake from Sweet. We all ate the same dessert and all agreed it was delicious. What Momofuku put asunder, Sweet joined together again, if only for about 7 minutes.

Flour children

What is that weird and gorgeous thing?

Recipes I've cooked from Sweet by Valerie Gordon: 

1. brownies (A)
2. sugar cookies (A-)
3. Durango cookies (A+)
4. goat-cheese cheesecake (B+) with almond crust (B-)
5. whole-grain muffins (A)
6. Blum's coffee crunch cake (C+)
7. oatmeal raisin cookies (A)

Even with the C+, that's a pretty stellar GPA.

I've written about the brownies, sugar cookies, and Durango cookies. (I didn't do the Durango cookies justice in the last post. They're magical. Make them.)

Durango cookie, whole grain muffin

Now, about the goat-cheese cheesecake:

Isabel thought it was too lemony. Mark wasn't a fan. Owen didn't try it. I thought the cake was dry (in a good way) and had a lot of great, goaty character. That said, I didn't like it as much as I like a creamy, snow-white cow's milk cheesecake with a supersweet graham cracker crumb crust. I feel this is like admitting I like grape juice better than wine.

About the whole-grain muffins:

As I wrote in the last post, Gordon grew up with a big crush on a glamorous San Francisco bakery called Fantasia, but she later reveals that there was a second, very different San Francisco bakery that shaped her baking style: Tassajara.

The Tassajara Bakery was the offshoot of a Zen Buddhist center and while I don't remember the bakery itself, I remember the breads -- big, rustic, rugged loaves that were sold at a famous vegetarian restaurant called Greens. If Fantasia was the impossible dream, Tassajara was the earnest, earthy reality of San Francisco in the '70s and early ‘80s. My reality.

Just look at my mother circa 1978:

Although never a hippie, she favored ethnic clothing, sweetened everything with honey and ground her own whole-wheat flour. If she made brownies, they were carob.

You can see the Tassajara influence on a handful of Gordon's recipes, like her whole-grain muffins. On Saturday, I got up early and baked a batch of these because it seemed like a nutritious breakfast for Isabel, who was heading off to take the SATs. They’re full of everything considered healthy in the Aquarian Age: whole-wheat, millet, oats, honey, prunes, yogurt, eggs, mashed bananas. There's not a single ingredient on that list that is universally embraced by the dietary police of today. Not one.

When they came out of the oven, the muffins looked like big blobs of indigestible hippie love and Isabel said, apologetically, “I really don’t want something heavy right now. Can I have one for breakfast tomorrow instead?” 

I understood. Isabel headed of to the SATs on a breakfast of peanut butter toast, bacon, and a Starbucks vanilla latte.

Then I ate a muffin and was happily surprised. What you can’t tell from their lumpy brown exteriors is that these muffins are actually very light, fruity, and delicious. A lovely homage to a bygone baking era.  

About the Blum's coffee crunch cake: 

I'm getting sick of writing about bygone San Francisco bakeries, but there's no escaping it. Blum's was yet another legendary and influential San Francisco bakery, one I don't personally remember. (The last Blum's closed in the late '70s.) It was famous for a coffee crunch cake that consisted of layers of white cake frosted with coffee whipped cream and topped with chunks of cinder-like coffee-flavored toffee. People who grew up with this cake are obsessed with it, among them Valerie Gordon who created her own version of this "extinct" (her word) dessert.

I didn't grow up with this dessert and am not obsessed with it. I baked and assembled Gordon's version of the cake and took it to my sister's last night. Everyone complimented me, but I was deaf to their praise. The cake layers were lemony!  I've never understood lemon peel in espresso and I don't understand why you'd want to eat a lemony cake slathered in coffee whipped cream. Maybe you just have to grow up with it. That was my first issue. Then, there was a problem with the coffee crunch topping, which looked fabulous, but tasted of baking soda. I've looked at other recipes for coffee crunch and the proportion of baking soda in Gordon's version does indeed look a bit high. It's also possible I made a mistake. 

In any case, the cake was beautiful, but in my view, a bust.

About the oatmeal raisin cookies: 

These were amazing. The cookies in this book have been so consistently amazing that I'm planning to make them all.

Fantasia love

from the Fantasia cookbook

Like me, Valerie Gordon, author of the handsome new baking book Sweet, grew up in San Francisco. Like me, one of her first baking inspirations was a patisserie called Fantasia. After she revealed her Fantasisa love on page one of Sweet, I was putty in her hands.

I won’t bore you with a long description of Fantasia, which closed in 1989. I’ll just say it’s a type of neighborhood bakery that was much more common 30 years ago than it is today, specializing in old-fashioned European pastries -- napoleons, kringles, lace cookies, nut tortes, stollens  -- and staffed by older ladies dressed like nurses. When my mother was at the supermarket down the street, my sister and I used to run in to Fantasia and “steal” free samples that they put out on the counter. We’d each snatch a single free sample and rush out, hearts pounding, thinking we'd really gotten away with something. 

Here's Gordon on Fantasia: “The tables were occupied by beautifully coiffed ladies and the entire picture was one of unspeakable joy to my eight-year-old eyes. It was almost too much to take, such beauty and splendor in one room. . . .The image of the petits fours is seared in my mind to this day.” 

Mine too.

Sweet is a collection of greatest hits from Gordon's career as a baker and confectioner in Los Angeles. I don’t see Fantasia's influence on Gordon's desserts, aside from the coffee crunch cake, which was invented by Fantasia's owner. (More on that later.) What I see are a lot of attractive contemporary desserts made with extremely high quality ingredients. Gordon uses only Plugra butter and specifies Bazzini  peanuts in her blondies. I had to buy a jar of vanilla paste just to make her sugar cookies, but I don’t hold it against her, because: Fantasia.

Reviewers on amazon have found errors in some of the recipes, but there’s nothing wrong with the ones I’ve tried. Most recently, I made Gordon's Durango cookies -- huge milk chocolate chip cookies bulked up with roasted almonds and cacao nibs and sprinkled with smoked salt. They're great, great cookies, but I wanted them to taste smokier!  I love the Roxbury Road ice cream from Jeni's so much that I thought smoke and almonds would work similar magic on these cookies. In addition to dusting the cookies with smoked salt, I used smoked almonds instead of plain roasted almonds and yet no smokiness registered. Am I wrong to think that sounds delicious? 

I think I get it now

Not to belabor this, but I made the Roberta’s Cookbook burrata and apple salad last night for our first course, and I made Ed Lee’s sauteed squid and bacon salad from Smoke and Pickles for our second, and all my questions about yesterday’s Piglet verdict were answered. I think. I will never know for sure what Aran Goyoaga thought about these cookbooks other than what she wrote, but I may have a better idea of what she was getting at.

The Roberta’s salad consisted of chopped, cold Pink Lady apples tossed in a bowl with burrata (glorified, creamy mozzarella) which fell apart and coated all the apple chunks. You’re supposed to add sorrel, but there was no sorrel to be had, so I added watercress leaves, just a few. Then I lightly salted this salad, put it on plates, and drizzled with honey. 

It was clean, bright, light, refreshing, all the flavors distinct. Beautiful. I flipped through Roberta’s and can see that this is typical of the Roberta’s style, at least in the salad department. Most of their salads don’t have dressings. For instance the other salad Goyoaga made was a beet salad that is “dressed” with just some creme fraiche. Another salad is “dressed” with celery juice.

To assemble the Ed Lee salad, first you make a really delicious, intense dressing of tahini, Asian sesame oil, and lemon. Fry some bacon. Fry some squid. Put it all together on a bed of arugula. Find the antonyms of all the adjectives I used in the first two sentences of the last paragraph and you have a roughly accurate (but highly unflattering) portrait of this salad. Messy, murky, a little heavy, not too pretty. But you could also say: gutsy, dark, rich, and full of strong flavor. (A chef could make this salad handsome, even if I couldn’t.) One of Goyoaga’s complaints about Lee was the “sauciness” of his food. This salad was definitely not "drowning" in sauce/dressing, but it had a dressing, a very assertive dressing that tied everything together. If you don’t want everything tied together, if you like your flavors pure and clean, you’re going to resist this salad and probably most the dishes in Lee’s book. 

This is a completely valid reason for choosing Roberta’s over Smoke and Pickles. Depending on your tastes, this could also be a completely valid reason for choosing Smoke and Pickles over Roberta’s.

I like both styles of cooking. I preferred the burrata salad to the squid, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of Lee’s dishes, too. I think the deciding factor for me would be that there are about five dishes I can make from Roberta’s without mail ordering 'nduja, black truffles, or bottarga, begging the butcher for pork collars, smoking my own ricotta, or figuring out how to grow sucrine. 

But it’s all moot because in the final round this morning, Roberta’s lost to The New Persian Kitchen. 

A misspent Monday

This post is for serious cookbook nerds only. Anyone else who reads it will roll their eyes and pity me, so please go do something else.

Ed Lee’s Smoke and Pickles lost to Roberta’s Cookbook in the Piglet this morning and I found myself surprisingly put out. You can read the judgment here . I had a handful of problems with this verdict and here they are:

First of all, I’ve made the salmon rice bowl from Smoke and Pickles that reviewer Aran Goyoaga tested and it was not, in my opinion, “too saucy.” I thought it was lovely, one of my favorite dishes from the book. The sauce she refers to is a remoulade that you add to your individual rice bowl and it was as easy to control how much you dolloped on your portion as it is to control how much butter you put on your toast. She made the same “too saucy” criticism of Lee's sauteed squid and bacon salad, which I haven't tried, but here again, it looks like one could easily calibrate the quantity of dressing so as not to “drown” the squid. I had plenty of problems with Smoke and Pickles, which I cooked from extensively last year, but her criticisms didn’t add up.  I felt that Goyoaga’s indifference/dislike was about something more than "too saucy," something that she didn’t or couldn’t pinpoint, or pinpointed and chose not to articulate. I wish she had. I still might have disagreed, but the review would have made more sense to me.

Second, I couldn’t see how the dishes she described from Roberta’s Cookbook -- burrata salad, beet salad, sea bass, gingerbread -- offered more “surprise” than the food in Smoke and Pickles. A beet salad? Were there other truly "surprising" dishes in the book that she just didn't happen to mention in the review? Or was "surprise" an unfortunate choice of words? Because from what I read in the review, Lee's was by far the more "surprising" cookbook.   

Third, I have an outsider complex and wanted the Korean guy from Kentucky to prevail over the Brooklyn pizzeria where they shot an episode of Girls. This is a problem with me, not Goyoaga's analysis. And it is silly.

Since I’m taking the week off, I decided to misspend the day and drove over to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy of Roberta’s. My family will be delighted to know that we’re having both a burrata salad and sauteed squid and bacon salad for dinner tonight. Someone should videotape this meal. 

Meanwhile, I baked the Roberta’s gingerbread, which Goyoaga describes as “moist and full of flavor and surprisingly easy to convert to gluten free.” How could it not be full of flavor when it's so full of ingredients? This gingerbread contains twenty two ingredients, including black pepper, caraway seeds, cinnamon, coriander, celery salt, juniper berries, almond flour, regular flour, cornstarch, honey, molasses, brown sugar. . . 

You could probably edit that list without losing much.

Results? It’s spectacularly good and seriously hot. Your whole mouth glows from the spices, especially if you eat it while it’s warm. I love that heat and guarantee I will be the only one in this household who does. 

There's only one problem with this gingerbread, but it's a big one: STRINGS. The grated ginger had long, tough fibers that you absolutely do not want in your gingerbread or your mouth. I followed the book’s grating instructions to the letter and when I looked at the photo of gingerbread in the book, saw that there are strings in their gingerbread too. How is this possible? Do they really serve gingerbread with strings in it? Are my strings just tougher and more offensive than theirs? Was something wrong with my ginger? How did Goyoaga not encounter the string problem? Did she encounter it and not mention it? Is this something a Vitamix might fix? Something one could avoid by mincing instead of grating the ginger? 

see? 

Anyway, if you're still reading: While the Roberta's gingerbread is fabulous, strings or no, I still think the wrong book won. I have a lot more to say on this. Sadly.

Various and sundry

I'd been to Safeway and Whole Foods before anyone in the house got up this morning and as soon as I walked in the door I started cutting 6 pounds of beef chuck into 1/4 inch cubes. Energetically at first, and 20 minutes later, resentfully. Chili has a reputation for being easy, casual, no big deal, c’mon over, it’s just chili! but that is not the case when it’s The Homesick Texan chili. I'd forgotten. 

As soon as the chili was on the stove, I pulled out my copy of Sweet by Valerie Gordon, a newish baking book I’m infatuated with, and flagged a handful of enticing desserts to consider for tonight’s family dinner/Oscars party. I asked Mark and Owen, “So, which of these should I make: Chasen’s banana shortcake, Bullocks Wilshire coconut cream pie, or Blum’s coffee crunch cake?” 

Neither looked up from his computer. I asked again. Neither looked up from his computer.. 

I said, “Mark? Please answer my question.”

He said, “Yeah, sorry, why don’t you just serve the cookies that are in the cookie tin?”

“That isn’t what I asked you!” Maybe I snapped. You’d have to ask Mark. 

“Ok,” he said, still not looking up from the computer. “Read me the choices again?”

Cookies from the tin it is and I'm going to see Tim's Vermeer this afternoon. If there are typos or the links don't work, it's because the movie starts in 17 minutes in another town. Feel free to complain in the comments and I'll fix.

****

Waiting for the Benton’s bacon to make its way here by mule wagon, I thought I was betwixt and between cookbooks. But yesterday I realized I’d started cooking from Sweet without meaning to and might as well make it “official.” 

True to form, I baked the easiest things in the book first. On Friday I baked Gordon’s brownies and on Saturday, her sugar cookies. Both were excellent. Both were also very mundane and fail to capture the essence of this gorgeous and exotic book. I have fattening and ambitious plans for further explorations in the coming week.

This is a really cute story by the husband of the woman who tested all the recipes in Sweet.

****

To follow up on something I mentioned in passing a while ago, if I had to write a list of 10 dinners that my family loves it would be this:

1. pasta with pesto

2. pasta with vodka sauce

3. pasta with tomato, onion, and butter

4. spaghetti and meatballs

5. spaghetti carbonara

6. mac n' cheese

7. burgers

8. steaks

9. carnitas

10. pork dumplings

The dumplings, mac n’ cheese, and pesto recipes are all in my cookbook. The pasta with vodka is a Cook’s Illustrated recipe. The pasta with tomato, onion and butter is a Marcella Hazan classic. Nancy Silverton’s meatballs are the current favorite. Lately I’ve been using The Homesick Texan carnitas recipe. Steaks, burgers, and carbonara -- any old way.

After coming up with that list, I decided to open my recipe binder and revisit dishes I used to make to family acclaim, even if they weren’t obvious contenders for the top ten.

The other night, I served a stir fry of sugar snap peas and Chinese sausage that was very popular around here circa 2001.  I tore the recipe out of Gourmet early this millennium and made it repeatedly, pre-blog. 

Here’s what we thought in 2014

Jennifer: Not as good as I remembered, but I do love Chinese sausage and sugar snap peas. Also, easy.

Mark: I find Chinese sausages greasy. I’d rather have sausages on pasta than with peas and rice.

Isabel: Sausages are only good by themselves, never with things. 

Owen: I liked the sausages.

The uninteresting life of a late adopter

bad old peeler and wonderful new one

I haven't been cooking anything interesting lately for various uninteresting reasons, but tomorrow I'll be able to throw myself back into it.

The salmon salad from Sunday Suppers at Lucques was the last straw for me with Suzanne Goin as it required 10 separate cooking/holding vessels. It’s a delicious, opulent salad of beets, tiny potatoes, and roasted salmon atop dandelion greens dressed in a mustardy vinaigrette. While the beets quickly bled into the salmon (ugly), that didn’t matter because I was the only one who ate this salad. I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a couple of days and was very happy until I was suddenly so sick of it I had to throw it to the chickens. Depressing, given the cost of salmon, but I couldn't force down another bite. 

My complaint about the dish is my overarching complaint about Goin's books: Too many steps, too many dishes to wash. I like Suzanne Goin, I like her cookbooks, and next time I go to Los Angeles will try to eat at one of her restaurants, but I just can’t cook like this. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll see what Tad Friend has to say about The A.O.C. Cookbook vs. Roberta’s over at the Piglet. I wait with bated breath.

Ok, about  the Piglet. So homogenized this year! I’m going to swim agains the current and say that while I rolled my eyes at the time, I sort of miss those weird wild card judgments of Piglets past. Eccentric, half-assed verdicts like Roz Chast’s. These bizarre write-ups added spice. They got my dander up. Rather than telling people to write balanced reviews informed by conscientious recipe testing, it seemed like the Piglet organizers just sent the books out to a bunch of creative people and let them respond however they chose. While the results were sometimes lame, they were also very genuine and oddly illuminating. I learned a lot from Roz Chast’s review. I got a glimpse of how many ordinary people approach cookbooks, which is to say, they don't really give a damn. And while I didn’t love Alice Waters’ nose-holding verdict, she was using her own personal yardstick, not following a template. The Piglet organizers have clearly raised their standards and I, for one, find that I am a little sorry. 

My two favorite reviews ever:  Nora Ephron’s and Gabrielle Hamilton’s. 

Still waiting for the Benton’s bacon so I can’t start Momofuku. What should I do in the meantime?

The pasta that broke my spirit

Twelve vessels to make a pasta dish, people. Twelve. I’m counting saucepans, skillets, baking sheets, and bowls. I blithely waded into Suzanne Goin’s penne with cauliflower, kale, pine nuts and currants from Sunday Suppers at Lucques last night and soon found myself drowning. I love Goin as an author and cheerful kitchen spirit, but this dish made me so grumpy. When the pasta was finally done I didn’t even set the table, we just hunched in our corners and ate. After all that work, it wasn’t even particularly good. Mark said, “When are you going to start making some of your staples again, the ten dishes you know we like?”

I don’t think I answered.

I looked on Chowhound and other cooks have run afoul of this dish. That is some consolation.

I also baked Goin's outstanding olive oil cake with candied tangerines, but because the pasta was so elaborate, never got around to candying the tangerines. I don't feel even slightly bad about that. Fortunately, this cake can stand beautifully on its own. It's moist and very plush, almost downy. Yes, it's plain, but in a delicious way. It's also easy and you should try it. A version of the recipe is here, though Goin has you use a 9-inch pan and does not call for orange zest.

So far so good with the Piglet, no? I would have chosen Whole-Grain Mornings over Summerland, but Christina Tosi did a snappy job overall. I'm completely fascinated by her description of the pistachio-apricot jam-cacao nib granola she improvised after reading Whole-Grain Mornings. 

Bryan Boitano isn’t such a graceful writer, but then I can barely stand up on skates, so I will shut up. At least he makes it perfectly clear why he chose the book he did (The New Persian Kitchen), which has not always been the case with Piglet judges.  

Forget it, Jake, it's February

Are you my Benton's bacon?

I’ll briefly rouse myself from February doldrums to link to the first round of the 2014 Piglet in which Suzanne Goin's A.O.C. Cookbook trounced Balaboosta by Einat Admony. Judge Sam Sifton, fellow lover of low-hanging fruit, was, like me, won over by Suzanne Goin's easyish lamb meatballs. 

I told you they were good! I wish someone would plagiarize the recipe so I could link you to it.

I spent some time with the losing Balaboosta a few weeks ago at the library and, like Sifton, found the recipes almost aggressively unappealing. A chopped salad of canned beans, canned corn, and canned fried onions (or something like that) convinced me not to check it out. In judging a cookbook there's no substitute for actually trying the recipes, but Sifton is correct that the author first needs to persuade you that you want to.

Poor Balaboosta. I don't like criticizing a book I haven't cooked from. I'll probably have to check it out now as penance.

Since the last post I've "officially" started cooking from Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques which, like its sister volume, A.O.C., is full of composite dishes that require significant chunks of time and special ingredients. This hasn't deterred me from making a few inroads. I haven't written about them, though, because here's something else that requires significant chunks of time and special ingredients: writing blog posts. By special ingredients I mean "interesting material," obviously. When a writer is in high spirits she can do a lot with bland ingredients, but it's February, guys, and I'm not at my best in February. Sort of like a deciduous fruit tree. 

A roundup dishes I've made from Lucques over the last few days will illustrate the lack of interesting material:

-Goin's winter squash risotto with radicchio was superb. The radicchio cut the monotonous sweetness of the risotto nicely. But if there was anything fresh to say about winter squash risotto, I couldn't think of it. 

-Goin's winter squash soup with candied pepitas was also lovely. I was hoping the candied pepitas (pumpkin seeds) would give me a new angle on squash soup, but when I was about to candy the pepitas to sprinkle on the soup I realized I didn't have any pepitas. Is there anything duller than prose about winter squash soup? Not a blog post.

-Dark, coarse, and full of molasses, Goin's chocolate stout cake is a type of cake I personally dislike. Harsh. Blackish. The problem is me, not the cake and I didn't want to write about that. I did, however, love the Guinness ice cream that Goin suggests as an accompaniment. Rich, mellow, slightly slushy, delicious. If you've ever struggled to imagine what Doc’s beer milkshake in Cannery Row tasted like, make the ice cream. It will help. (Note: she only uses 1/3 cup sugar in the recipe as printed in the book and I'd go with that.) This could have been a blog post. A short one.

-Over the weekend I was all set to make Goin's leg of lamb with chorizo stuffing, romesco potaotes, and black olives, but the 40-minute trip to the Mexican market to pick up chorizo never happened. The piece of lamb I'd bought started to get old and I ended up making a Joy of Cooking lamb curry. I'm not sure why I didn't use a recipe from one of my Indian cookbooks. Probably because I suspected they'd call for curry leaves or some spice I didn't have in the house. The Joy lamb curry was unbelievably bland -- not worth writing about, reading about, or eating. 

As you can see, I'm wallowing in Lucques without a lot of verve. As with the chocolate stout cake, the problem is me, not the book. I'm telling you, it's February.

Meanwhile, a batch of David Chang’s cabbage kimchi ferments in the refrigerator and my order of Benton's bacon (a favorite Chang ingredient) is waiting to be filled. Although they charged my credit card on January 22, the Benton's web site now indicates the delay is 5 weeks, which takes us into March. I don't love March, but it's better than February. That had better be some good bacon.

Rich, complex, layered, soft

Is it the thoughtful wife who leaves a casserole when she goes out? Or the controlling one?

Here’s my question for the day: In traditional print media, novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry, and virtually all other categories of books have historically been reviewed, their merits and shortcomings vigorously hashed out. But not cookbooks. 

Why not? 

Has the assumption been that most people don’t want to read about cookbooks? Has this been tested and proved correct? Has there been no advertising to back it up? Are cookbooks just deemed too fatuous to merit any kind of critical analysis? If so, why review restaurants? Why review frozen chicken taquitos? 

Given how little book criticism get published these days, I wouldn’t want to see a single inch of space taken from novels and devoted to cookbooks. So I'm not indignant, I'm just curious. Over the years I've found more sharp, thoughtful writing about cookbooks in amazon.com customer reviews than in the New York Times and  San Francisco Chronicle combined.

Which brings me to this: The Piglet is coming. A week from today, friends. It’s the only thing I look forward to in February, now that I no longer eagerly welcome my birthday.  

I did some more exploring in The A.O.C. Cookbook over the last few days. After much recipe reading and somewhat less recipe cooking, this is how I would characterize Suzanne Goin’s California/Mediterranean cuisine: rich, complex, layered, and soft. She likes dates and prunes, squashes and sweet potatoes, persimmons, cheese, and egg yolks. If I were doing her colors, she’d be an autumn.

Since last I posted, we ate a delicious baked pasta dish that contained 1 1/2 pounds of cheese, milk, cream, walnuts, shredded radicchio, and squash. Having listed the ingredients, I probably don’t need to tell you that it was rich, complex, layered, and soft.

The next night I grilled tetilla cheese sandwiches that were topped with quince paste and romesco, a potent brick-colored sauce of ancho chilies, nuts, bread, tomatoes, and olive oil. The sandwiches were rich, complex, layered, and soft. Also delicious.

Other Goin dishes that I haven’t made but suspect would fit this description: dates stuffed with parmesan and wrapped in bacon; salt cod potato gratin with piquillo peppers, currants and mahon; corn pudding with poblanos and queso fresco; roasted kabocha squash with dates, parmesan and pepitas. 

Since we have a big bowl of romesco left over from those sandwiches, I'm going to use the remainder tonight to make one final A.O.C. recipe -- a melange of sweet potatoes, spinach, and bacon -- before closing this short, sweet chapter. Prediction: It will be rich, complex, layered, and soft. 

Tomorrow I'm moving on to either Momofuku or Sunday Suppers at Lucques, depending on energy levels, the arrival of an order of Benton's bacon, and my progress with David Chang's kimchi.