You know that place between sleep and awake?

lobster nachos

This will sound like a joke after the last few posts, but I’m writing a story about Disneyland and to that end Mark and I spent the weekend wandering around the happiest place on earth. Decidedly bizarre to be there without kids, but not un-fun. At first we resisted, but you’re sort of forced to roll with the silliness because there's absolutely nothing edifying or high-minded to do at Disneyland. Believe me, we looked. So Mark took his first-ever, last-ever roller coaster ride. We played arcade games at the ESPN Zone. Failed to get scared in the Haunted Mansion. Acquired hangovers from pathetically small quantities of alcohol. Ate fried biscuits, Matterhorn macaroons, cherry malts, lobster nachos, you get the idea. I'm bulging out of my clothes and my notebook is bulging with observations, but I need to save the anecdotes for the story, so I’m going to cut myself off for now. I'll just say this: If Disneyland figures in your near future, send me an email, tipsybaker@gmail.com. I have advice, mostly about what to eat, naturally.

sarsparilla manhattan: clever idea, but undrinkable

Matterhorn macaroon: as tasty as it is cute

Back to cookbooks.

When I failed to “get” the Yotam Ottolenghi phenomenon based on mixed results cooking from Plenty More late last year, some of you shared favorite Ottolenghi recipes. Thank you. I’ve been working down this great list for the past month. The Jerusalem hummus, which included the new-to-me addition of ice water, was excellent. Although I erred in the execution of the lemony leek meatballs, I could see how these would be superb if you didn’t puree the leeks to an army-green mush as I did. The lamb and cannellini bean soup: rich, hearty, delicious. A sweet-salty-leafy-crunchy-sticky baby spinach salad with almonds, dates, and pita made a welcome alternative to lettuce or kale. Another Jerusalem winner and I highly recommend.

I liked the milk pudding, also from Jerusalem, though sadly no one else shared my enthusiasm for this elegant, bone-white dessert. However, we all loved the caramelized garlic tart from Plenty and so will you if you have a taste for tangy, creamy goat cheese, mellow garlic, and buttery puff pastry.

But the standout dish so far has been the stir-fried brussels sprouts and tofu, also from Plenty. Love! Easy, healthy, spicy, lively, Chinese, delicious, cheap, perfect the first time out. I was so happy to discover this dish. My favorite recipe so far in 2015. 

The sprouts and tofu will be hard to beat, but there are a few more of your Ottolenghi recs to try before I move on to a new cookbook or cuisine. On my list today: Mail order freekeh. Buy a rack of lamb. Write Disneyland story.

Lifting a glass to Mrs. L

It's blurry and resembles milk or Alka Seltzer, but is in fact a delicious gin fizz.

Thank you for your sweet notes of sympathy. I promise I’m not turning this blog into a pity party, but I have one more story about transitions to tell. It happened since my last post. After this, it's back to good cookbooks, good cheer, and bad photography. Swear.

Day before yesterday, I called one of my mother’s closest friends, someone my grandmother had particularly loved, to share the news of her death. I hadn’t seen Mrs. L since my mother’s funeral five years ago, though we’d exchanged emails in the months right afterwards. I knocked on her door once last year. No one answered. I let it go.

I met Mrs. L when I was about 8. She was one of those adults who looked you in the eye and said outrageous, hilarious things that you weren't quite sure how to respond to. At first, she terrified me. Roughly five minutes later, I was putty in her hands. Mrs. L. was a character, a force of nature, politically incorrect, opinionated, warm, feisty. She was extremely candid and I loved that about her: you always knew exactly where you stood. She had this unforgettable gravelly voice and wouldn’t hesitate to tell you if you’d put on a few pounds or that she didn’t care for your current boyfriend. Apparently she was down with Mark because she threw us an engagement party at which she served a stupendous aged beef tenderloin with little soft white rolls. If I ever throw anyone an engagement party, aged beef tenderloin and little soft white rolls are on the menu. Get in line, girls.

Mrs. L knew how to do things right and that tenderloin was just Exhibit A. As an adult, if I needed to find a jeweler or a shoe repairman or wanted to know which brand of chafing dish to buy (this never happened, but it would have been the perfect question), I’d call my mother and if my mother didn’t know she’d say, “Hmm, let me ask Mrs. L.” Soon, I’d have my answer, plus instructions on precisely how much to pay, which salesperson to ask for by name, and strict orders to tell him or her that Mrs. L had sent me.

Although she was Jewish, Mrs. L threw a fabulous Christmas open house every year at which she served gin fizzes. I only went to that party once, but my mother attended annually and always wobbled back down the street in an extra-jolly mood. They were great friends, those two. Mrs. L saw my mother through thick and a lot of thin over 35 years, took her side in every fight, remained stalwart right up to the end. 

I set aside some time for the phone call to Mrs. L because she’s a talker. I was looking forward to it. Mr. L answered. He said, “Mrs. L isn’t here.” I pictured her at CalMart, perhaps complaining to a cowed, charmed manager about substandard artichokes.

You can guess where this is going. “When will she be back?” I asked. He said, “Well, Jennifer, Mrs. L doesn’t live here anymore. She’s had some health problems and dementia and I kept her at home as long as I could. . .” 

Mr. L sounded the same as ever, wry and cheerful, and that was heartening. That was the only heartening part of the conversation. 

You lose track of people and this is what happens. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Mrs. L just seemed unsinkable. 

Carpe diem, everyone. That seems like the answer to everything, lately. Unfortunately, I don’t have any idea how to actually carpe diem -- it's so much harder than it sounds -- but last night I decided that making gin fizzes in honor of the inimitable Mrs. L might be a step in the right direction. It does indeed take a village and she was a prominent and beloved citizen of mine. Here’s to Mrs. L.

milk pudding from Jerusalem, next post

She was the best

Aida Marroquin Gardner: 1912-2015

My grandmother died on Saturday night. No pain, ambulatory until the day before, fell asleep in front of the Christmas tree, never really woke up. There are worse ways to go. Like, almost every other way.

I’m writing a short speech for the memorial service and while I could tell dozens of stories about her charm, quirks, strength, stubbornness, unnerving intuition, and unwavering devotion to family and friends, I keep thinking about how she blossomed in her 90s.

My grandfather died in 2002 and people worried my grandmother might quickly follow him, as partners in long-married couples sometimes do. Au contraire! They’d been devoted to each other, but he was a towering figure and it was as if she saw a fleeting chance to move out from under his substantial shadow and be more completely herself -- lively, sociable, game -- and she went for it. She had just turned 90.

94?

99th birthday party?

Amazing the light and vitality I see in those pictures from her 90s. My bookish grandfather disliked parties, to put it mildly. My grandmother loved parties and there she is at 92, 96, 99 sparkling at party after party, the last guest standing, dressed like a doll, making up for lost time. I have pictures of her eating “Abyssinian” food in obscure South Bay restaurants with me, photos of her hanging out in my kitchen letting Owen entertain her with his antics (he never found a better audience), shots of her batting around balloons with her great grandchildren. Both my aunt and I noticed that she seemed to actually get smarter in the years right after my grandfather died. It was a true Indian summer. 

95?

That’s what I want to talk about at the memorial, but I'm not sure I can do it without making my lovely grandfather sound like a repressive ogre, which he wasn't. I don't want to imply that their marriage was stifling to her, also profoundly untrue. I'm not sure I can give this speech without short-changing my grandfather's role in her life. In all our lives. I just want to say, and maybe I can only say it here, that these last thirteen years with my grandmother were unexpected and beautiful. I saw her in a whole new light.

94?

The twilight of the chickens

I sure do miss that little chicken fancier.

In the last post I wrote about a couple of transitions I see in my near future. There's one more and it's comparatively trivial, but since I'm on a roll here, I'll just finish up and then we can get back to cookbooks and cooking in 2015. 

One night a few weeks ago Owen came in from the yard and said “We really need to get rid of the chickens. It’s so sad, seeing them out there. It’s like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone in one of their recent action movies. Have you seen those movies? Those guys are pathetic compared to what they used to be.”

It was funny, but his simile didn't quite work. Schwarzenegger and Stallone really have changed. The chickens haven’t. What's changed is Owen’s enthusiasm for them. At fourteen, he'd rather read comic books and play Portal in his cozy room than head out into our cold, mucky, skunk-ridden backyard to take care of a bunch of clucking birds. I can not imagine why.

Isabel and Mark have always disliked the chickens and now Owen has begun nagging me to find a new home for them every time I ask him to do his animal chores. I answer that we can’t in good conscience give our chickens away as they might still harbor red mites (we had an epic infestation last fall), but he nonetheless keeps bringing it up. I suspect he’s hoping I'll get so sick of his hectoring that I'll start doing his animal chores myself. Good luck with that, buddy. From a source of connection and joy between us, in the last month the chickens have become a source of strife.

We got our first batch of chicks six years ago and they've mostly been a wonderful addition to our lives, bringing lots of drama, amusement, beauty, and eggs. I get sad thinking of the yard without hens chattering and pecking and giving themselves ecstatic dust baths on hot afternoons or racing to see what food scraps we’ve brought out for their delectation. But an integral part of the pleasure was sharing it with a sweet, sunny little boy who named the birds, played with them, worried about them, studied their quirks, and, as late as this past fall, spent a hellish weekend with me trying to eradicate billions of red mites from every nook and cranny of their coop. I couldn't have done it alone. I don't want to do it alone.

Now Owen is over chickens. He’s moved on. He’s growing up. I hate that! But I can’t stop this transition any more than I can stop Isabel from leaving home or my grandmother from dying or myself from growing old and gray.

We won't be giving the chickens away, nor will we be leaving them out for the neighborhood bobcat to pick off one by one, as Mark suggested. Owen is going to have to man up and do his chores for a while yet. But when the last of our current flock of seven departs this earth, it will be time for something new.     

getting food for his chickens

Aging naturally, not skinny, doing great

Is there CrossFit for cats?

How was your 2014? Was it a good year? How do you determine whether a given year is good or bad if nothing spectacularly good or bad happens? Is a good year simply one where nothing bad happens? I made myself think back over 2014, season by season, and my general sense is that it was a lovely year. Not a year full of accomplishment, but a really good one. 

I seem to have skipped right over the month of December on this blog -- the holiday parties, storms, Wild, the terrific Ottolenghi spinach salad with pita, dates, and almonds, the Christmas gifts of the Dominique Ansel, Tartine Bar, and Portlandia cookbooks, as well as the moment when an old friend who hadn’t seen me in a while said I was “aging really naturally and nicely.” Definitely a compliment, but one that required a moment to process. 

Having chirped about the goodness of 2014, I will now report that December was a strange, heavy month during which I gave little thought to cooking and cookbooks. Isabel was applying to colleges and it stirred up a surprising amount of emotion. I haven’t been so preoccupied with her well-being since she was a newborn, nor so acutely aware of my love for her. I wake at 4 every morning worrying about her. I didn't expect this. Parents of younger children, you've been warned.

The other reason December felt heavy was that my grandmother has been fading. Owen and I drove down to Palo Alto yesterday planning to visit for a couple of hours then waltz off to see Top Five. But our New Year’s Eve didn't unfold as planned. My grandmother struggled to find the breath to greet us and a few minutes later, taking microscopic steps, oxygen tube trailing, pushed her walker over to her blue armchair in the living room where she settled herself, shut her eyes, and couldn’t be roused for the next six hours. Nudging her, talking loudly, nothing evoked any response whatsoever. My aunt Stephanie and I stared at each other. She telephoned the nurse, who never appeared. We sat. We talked. Hours passed. Stephanie put a log on the fire. We ordered Chinese food, lit the Christmas tree, and Owen helped Stephanie sign up for Facebook. It felt like a vigil, cozy, companionable, and sad. Lord knows I wish my grandmother could live forever, but this wouldn’t be a bad way to go, I thought, twenty-eight days shy of her 103rd birthday, dozing in her favorite chair with the Christmas tree lit as a daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandson talked in the background.

Ah, but no. The call of nature. Suddenly she was wide awake and ornery and toddled slowly off to the ladies room and then to the kitchen where she consumed a good deal of beef chow fun, Trader Joe’s cheese puffs, refried black beans sprinkled with sugar (?), and pineapple soda. “Lazarus!” my aunt said. It really was uncanny. At one point my grandmother assessed me and said, “You are skinny. No, not skinny. You are just good.” 

Classic. It would have been amazing if those were the last words she ever spoke to me, but we didn’t leave right then and I may well talk to her again anyway, so there goes that story.

I have a bunch of 2015 resolutions, but other than launching Isabel smoothly into the world, the one I really care about involves writing more and better and regularly, both on this blog and elsewhere. So: a little more accomplishment in 2015, keep the happiness level steady. As of noon on New Year’s Day, so far, so good.

I wish you all a joyful day and year. 

Bracing for the storm

Not cooking. Not cooking at all. It was my turn to host family dinner on Sunday night and we ordered pizza and watched my sister’s children (small, excitable) decorate the Christmas tree while my children (big, blase) occasionally glanced up from their phones when asked to place an ornament on a high branch. I didn’t even make a salad. I just haven’t been tuned in to the cookbook and cooking channel since Thanksgiving. Not enough bandwidth. 

Did I just mix metaphors? Are channels and bandwidth compatible? I don’t know! Who cares.

Here's what's been up:

-Work. Lots of work, the kind of writing work that never seems to end and may in fact never end, as opposed to magazine articles and blog posts which end quickly and with a satisfying snap. 

-Worrying. About the “storm of the decade” which was supposed to hit 26 minutes ago. School is closed tomorrow on account of this storm and I might have looked forward to a cozy day at home with the kids, popcorn, fire, et cetera, had we not removed all the blackberry vines and their stabilizing roots from the hill above our house last month, leading my father to send a concerned email yesterday that included the word “mudslide.” 

-Reading. Meghan Daum’s new essay collection The Unspeakable is as smart and polished as Lena Dunham’s memoir was smart and underbaked. I compare them only because they’re both by female authors who write unflinchingly about the zeitgeist and themselves. Topics Daum covers in her engrossing, entertaining book: Why, though straight, she dresses butch. Her mother’s death. A dinner party at Nora Ephron’s house. Joni Mitchell. Dogs. Choosing not to have children. 

-Seeing movies. I really, really liked, maybe even loved, The Homesman. It’s a Western starring Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank and while I’d heard it was tedious, I found it witty, poetic, ribald, sad, dark, and more thought-provoking than Theory of Everything, Birdman, and The Imitation Game combined. 

That's all I've got tonight, friends. I'm quite tense right now, probably because of this stupid storm and our deforested hill. Back soon. I hope.

Roasting, rolling, mashing, reading, resting, raining

our freeway exit

So much has happened since my last post, so much that I wanted to write about but couldn’t because of shopping, baking, roasting, mashing, cleaning, carving, hosting, resting, and, when that was all over, because I’d forgotten how to write. It happens! I was on an unprecedented writing roll before the holiday, barreling ahead on two different projects, keeping up the blog, feeling superhuman. Then I took a few days off to host Thanksgiving and can't get back in the groove. At least I’m warm, dry, and fed. One of these years I'll hit another sweet spot.

Something I've learned about blogging is that if you don’t capture the moment at the moment, you have to let it go and just move on. So I’m not going to tell you about the most affecting piece I read on the terrible Ferguson conflagration nor the essay that explained why I shouldn’t like it as much as I did. I'm not going to even mention the fact that I’m suddenly tempted to block several friends on Facebook because I get so agitated every morning by their political posts and find myself arguing with them in my head for hours and hours. I’ll forego describing the amazing Ottolenghi celeriac with lentils and hazelnuts that I cooked per a suggestion one of you made in the comments. It was truly great, and I don't often say that of lentils, celery root, or hazelnuts. THANK YOU.

Six days have passed now and it's too late to let you know that the New York Times salty pluff mud pie was the one real loser on the Thanksgiving menu, or that the grape salad was weird, but not terrible, and that these brussels sprouts in peanut vinaigrette were the best part of the meal. I bought more sprouts yesterday so I could make them again. 

I’d wanted to write something about Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, a noble meditation on the end of life that I read in one sitting the day after Thanksgiving. The book is full of wisdom and grace, but also snapping femurs and mild symptoms that turn out to be metastatic cancer. Approach this important book with caution and, perhaps, some Ativan. Unfortunately, the moment to recommend/warn you about Being Mortal  has passed. So, too, the opportunity to share my my mixed reviews of the raunchy John Waters Christmas show, which wasn't as clever and funny as we'd hoped, and Mockingjay, the first Hunger Games movie I haven't loved, mostly because I can't understand why anyone would pine for Josh Hutcherson.

Fortunately, life has calmed down now that Thanksgiving is over and the kids are back in school. Plus, we've been hit by some awesome storms and rain is in the forecast for the next few days and I don’t want to leave the house lest I get swept down the hill in a flash flood. I'll have no trouble finding time to keep you up to date on thrilling developments in my mind and kitchen as I putter around in slippers, researching tramp art picture frames on eBay and trying to get my writing mojo back.

Thrilling developments like this: I’ve never seen Owen wolf anything down with such gusto as he did this ground beef dish from Orangette last night. Mark and I made pigs of ourselves as well and there wasn’t a crumb of meat left for poor Isabel when she got home from dance. I’ve decided I’m going to make this every two weeks until Owen goes to college or starts complaining, whichever comes first. So easy and delicious. For the record, I used a pound of ground beef (adjusting the other ingredients accordingly) and added a 5-ounce box of about-to-expire baby spinach intended for a salad that I never got around to making. Other vegetables could be safely incorporated, rendering the dish slightly healthier. I plan to experiment. Also, I omitted the fried eggs. A real hit, this dish. Try it. 

And I'm not even very strong

Owen: We’re out of goat food.

Jennifer: There’s a whole bag in the driveway.

Owen: You know I can’t carry that down.

Jennifer: If I can carry it, you can definitely carry it. 

Owen: Not everyone does CrossFit, Mom.

Jennifer: Owen, you’re 7 inches taller than me and 34 years younger. If I can carry the goat food, you can carry the goat food.  If you can’t, that’s pathetic.

Owen, in his loud, aggrieved voice: Mom, that is SO sexist. Just because I’m a guy doesn’t mean I’m all strong and everything. You never tell Isabel that she’s pathetic when she’s not being all strong and stuff.

Claiming physical weakness and crying sexism to foist chores on his middle-aged mother?

This can not stand.

****

Here I go, as promised, eating my words on Prune. Some of them, anyway. 

Monday night, I made Gabrielle Hamilton’s braised lamb shoulder with lemons, tomatoes, and cinnamon. I’ve never worked from a recipe that was so oddly written, bossy, affected, minimalist, sensual, and vivid. I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

You start by browning lamb shoulder in a “rondeau” (I used a Dutch oven) in “blended oil” (I used vegetable). Snotty of her not to explain these and other terms, but it wasn’t hard to muddle through. Remove the meat to a plate, add cinnamon sticks and 3/4 cup garlic cloves and “stir around in the pan, kind of toasting and picking up the fond in a way.” 

Weird prose, no? And yet I could totally see it as I rarely can when working from a conventionally- written recipe.

After this, add a cup of lemon wedges and deglaze the pan, “loosening and scraping up the fond with the juice of the lemon wedges as you crush them with your wooden spoon.”

I’ve never deglazed a pan by crushing lemon wedges with the back of a spoon and I’ve deglazed a lot of pans. So that was interesting and fun. 

Once the pan is deglazed, pour in some wine and canned tomatoes (“crushing each one briefly in your fist”), add back the meat, put the “rondeau” in the oven, and four hours later you’re ready to eat. Hamilton: “On the pickup, make sure each portion gets a nice soft, cooked lemon, if you can. And take a good look to see that you haven’t given anyone an all-fat portion.”

I dislike “on the pickup” and other lines where Hamilton's pretends she’s writing for her restaurant crew. Silly. But the rest of the recipe was intuitive and visual and fresh and I found myself wondering why recipes are generally so gray and voiceless. Seriously, why?

The meat was dark, meltingly tender, intense, superrich, and delicious. Easy. Six ingredients. A week ago I made a 17-ingredient lamb shank recipe from the New York Times that wasn’t half as good. I served the lamb shoulder with bread and salad. Big hit with the family, though I felt stuffed and sluggish the next day because: lamb shoulder.

I'd barely recovered from the lamb shoulder when dinner rolled around again. Last night, I roasted a chicken and made Hamilton’s fennel baked in cream. You cut up fennel, put it in a “hotel pan” (so tediously annoying, those restaurant terms), then mix a pint of heavy cream and some Parmesan and pour over the fennel, “drenching” the vegetables. Dot with butter, cover tightly, bake for an hour, top with additional cheese, bake for thirty minutes more, eat, marvel at how delicious it is, listen to your husband opine that it would be better if you replaced the fennel with potatoes, feel puffy, stuffed, and sick for the next 24 hours because: pint of cream, butter, Parmesan.

Will all the Prune recipes be this fun to cook? Will they all yield more such superb dishes? Will they all be so rich and stuffing? 

This is spot-on and funny. And this is the only reason I came to a cafe this afternoon to write a blog post rather than lying down on the sofa to sleep off the fennel.

Under the wire

sludge with a generous dollop of kashk

In about twenty minutes a Prune lamb shoulder comes out of the oven and I really want to say a few concluding word about Plenty More before galloping off with Gabrielle Hamilton.

I’ll get straight to the point: I have no idea why Yotam Ottolenghi is so phenomenally popular. He comes across as urbane and amiable. His dishes feature intriguing, seductive combinations of ingredients. The photographs are gorgeous. But the food I’ve cooked from Plenty More fails to live up to any of that. It's possible I picked the wrong Ottolenghi book to cook from, so help me out here, Ottolenghi fans. Which is his best book? What are the classic Ottolenghi dishes? I will happily cook them. I want to understand. 

Unfortunately, I have to end the Plenty More chapter with a downbeat round-up of recipe reports.  I don’t like writing these. I feel like a prig, picking apart dishes that didn’t please her majesty. But since they're integral to my critique of the book, here goes:

-The Iranian vegetable stew with dried limes was a tart, frumpy melange of butternut squash, spinach, potatoes and barberries. I made a pot of this for my lunches and by the middle of of the week it was a struggle not to jump in the car and drive over to the frozen custard shop instead of heating up another bowl of nutritious sludge. It was a struggle I eventually lost. 

-You’ve made dozens of tastier pasta dishes than the misleadingly-named grilled ziti with feta, a tomato sauced pasta that you top with three kinds of cheese and run under the broiler so the cheese gets leathery and the noodles crunchy. Needlessly fussy. Not great.

-The sweet potatoes with orange bitters required too many ingredients and too much work (fresh-squeezed oj boiled down to a syrup, bitters, two heads of garlic, sage, thyme, goat cheese), given the pedestrian dish I eventually put on the table.

-Ok, the halvah ice cream with chocolate sauce and roasted peanuts was delicious, although halvah ice cream isn’t as exciting as it sounds. I wouldn’t make it again. You could achieve much the same effect by crumbling halvah on store-bought vanilla ice cream. 

Here’s the breakdown from the thirteen Plenty More dishes I tried:

worth price of book -- 0

great -- 1 (the squash with chili-spiked yogurt and cilantro pesto)  

good -- 8

so-so -- 4 

bad -- 0

Shelf essential? No. 

Sleep apnea is a new low for us

Last night, we celebrated my father's birthday and I took the opportunity to delve deeper into Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty More than the tastes of my nuclear family will generally allow. 

The menu: 

yogurt and kaffir lime leaf spread with pita toasts (Plenty More)  

--

spiced lamb shanks (last week’s New York Times) 

roasted red onions with walnut salsa and goat cheese (Plenty More) 

saffron, date, and almond rice (Plenty More)

---

pear and chocolate pudding (Laurie Colwin)

Fairly good meal. 

Thoughts: 

The yogurt and kaffir lime leaf spread was essentially tzatziki, the bland yogurt-cucumber dip you’ve probably eaten before in Greek restaurants, but jazzed up here with minced kaffir lime leaf. Tasted only mildly exotic. The recipe calls for a tiny amount of melted butter to enrich and mellow the yogurt, but knowing what I do about Ottolenghi’s palate, I added more butter than called for. You should too. We liked this, though there was a suspicious amount left over. Recipe here. 

The superrich spiced lamb shanks used up all the saffron in the house. Expensive. That was strike one. Strike two: 24 hours later I'm still full. Not entirely fair, given the other heavy dishes on the menu, but I blame the lamb.

The roasted red onions were dressed while still hot with a salsa of olive oil, vinegar and walnuts, then served on arugula with chunks of goat cheese. About that salsa: punishingly sour. Three tablespoons vinegar to one tablespoon oil? I sloshed in extra oil until the salsa didn’t make me pucker. Doctored with additional fat, we liked these onions immensely. Recipe here. (But remember about the extra oil.) 

The saffron, date and almond rice was, as the name suggests, a pot of rice (basmati) studded with crunchy fried almonds and chopped dates. As the name doesn't suggest, you can make this without the saffron. I'd used all our saffron in the lamb and was resentful. I resent saffron! It wasn't worth $8 or $15 or $20 to me to render some already delicious rice marginally more fragrant and delicious. You may feel differently. 

I first made chocolate pear pudding in March 1996, according to my note in the margin of Laurie Colwin's More Home Cooking. Isabel wasn't even born yet. Last night I mindlessly stuck little candles in the pudding while it was still warm and they were almost all melted by the time my father blew them out. Not the ideal birthday cake, but a truly wonderful dessert. You should try it. Recipe here. 

Anyway, a sweet family party. We discussed Isabel’s college applications, the catcall video, sleep apnea, my sister’s smashing new GAP cords, and whether anyone at the table could do a handstand push-up. That last sentence sounds like a grim joke and I've tried to remember some zany or profound topic we covered to make this dinner sound less boring, but I can’t. Nothing.

In truth, it wasn't boring. In truth, it was lovely.

She can infuse a recipe for banana bread with hostility

I was all wrong about the Prune cookbook, which I bought yesterday. I don’t have a problem with the recipes, it’s the writing I hate. Hate. It's likely my feelings will change and change again, but we’re capturing the moment, here.

In case you don't follow cookbook news, Gabrielle Hamilton owns a tiny, celebrated Manhattan restaurant called Prune and Prune is her long-awaited cookbook. A few years ago she published a stunningly well-written memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter, which I adored. She was clearly an imperious, thorny, stormy, difficult woman, but I didn't care. We weren’t going to be friends. I just loved her writing.

But the relationship you have with a cookbook is, in fact, a bit like the relationship you have with a friend. The author is speaking directly to you and offering advice and instructions. And I really don’t like the way Hamilton talks to me. 

In case you haven’t seen Prune yet, which 99% of you haven’t, the book is supposed to resemble the fat binder of recipes in the kitchen of a successful restaurant, a compendium that has been spilled on (there are fake stains on the pages) and endlessly amended. No friendly headnotes telling you how a dish is going to taste or where you might start looking for, say, caul fat. Just commands and notes scribbled in the margins in black marker. Scolding notes. Needling notes. 

one of the stains and another snotty note

It's definitely original. And you could argue that Hamilton is just showing how it’s done in a restaurant, nothing more, and we should admire her wit, vision, and chutzpah. I'm open to this argument. Please, someone, make it! I want to discuss.

I can't believe how annoying I find this.

Personally, though, I think there’s more to it. She strikes me as a bully to core. The choice to write her cookbook in this way was a choice to talk to the world -- to you and me -- exactly the way she talks to her disappointing underlings at the restaurant. But with deniability.

I think you are a nightmare and it shows.

A winner, a loser, Lena Dunham

The squash with chile yogurt and cilantro sauce is the best dish I've made from Plenty More so far, by far. Toss sliced squash with olive oil and cinnamon, roast, top with Sriracha-spiked yogurt and a paste of cilantro, garlic, and oil. Sprinkle with some toasted pumpkin seeds for crunch.  Recipe here. The only thing I would change, and I can’t say this loudly enough: PEEL THE SQUASH. Other than that, perfection.

Not even close to perfect: the taleggio and spinach roulade, which is like a too-sharp, too-salty, loaf-shaped pizza full of leathery sun-dried tomatoes. Avoid. 

I’m going to persist with Plenty More, but it will be hard when I get my hands on a copy of Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune, reviewed yesterday in the New York Times. I first fell for Hamilton's writing when she explained everything that was wrong and right about Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty in a notorious I Piglet essay. She nailed the problems (too tart, “not quite careful”) that I’ve been finding with Ottolenghi's recipes, but also captured why his books are so seductive. Prune is 576 pages long and while I'm not sure I'm going to love the recipes (broiled grapefruit) I can't wait to curl up on the sofa and read it.

Finally -- and this relates to cooking only thanks to the puerile food diary in which she records the calories in single bites of tofu and lemon tart* --  I read Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl over the weekend. FTR, I didn’t pick up on any sexual abuse of her sister. None. I had other problems with the book, however. I’ll just name one: I wanted to hear more about Dunham's ambition and accomplishments, less about her degrading hookups. All the youthful bad sex with unappealing man-boys started to depress me, mostly because I couldn't figure out why she was doing it. I detected no sexual desire, not a glimmer of real longing, in this book crammed to bursting with sex. Zero. It sometimes read like she was throwing herself into situations for research purposes, gathering up mortifying erotic experiences for her art. Or maybe she thought sexual adventures were expected of groovy 21st century girls? 

I was perplexed. If you’re in your twenties or thirties and shaking your head because you loved and related to Not That Kind of Girl and think I’m dead wrong, please remember that while it would have been a (barely) teen pregnancy, I’m old enough to be Lena Dunham’s mother. Isabel thinks the book is great and hilarious. I can not fathom why she and I have not yet discussed it at length.

Which reminds me: I love how tenderly Dunham writes about her parents.

**Isabel appears to have taken the book to school, so I can’t fact check whether tofu or lemon tart appear in the food diary. I think they did, but the diary was so boring I skimmed and can't remember.

Kashk

You want this.

One of the first dishes that caught my eye in Plenty More was the Iranian-style pasta, but it called for a Persian dairy product called kashk -- and where was I going to find kashk? I kept flipping past that recipe. Wasn't going to happen.Then I started to feel like a lazy bum and decided to see how hard it would be to track down some kashk. Why bother with a book like Plenty More if you're not going to really go for it?

Seek and ye shall find. Acquiring kashk took nothing more than a quick internet search and a fifteen minute drive to the Jasmine Market in San Rafael where I found not just kashk, but kishk, dried limes, halvah, yogurt sodas, vast sheets of flatbread, labneh, Turkish delight, candied bergamot, baklava, reshteh, and much, much more. I’ve been back to the market twice since I “discovered” it last Tuesday.  I'm a fool for ethnic grocery stores.

an acquired taste

So what exactly is kashk? 

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food, kashk is "dried buttermilk."

According to Yotam Ottolenghi: “Kashk, kash, and kishk signify different things throughout the Middle East, Turkey and Greece, but they are often used to name foodstuffs produced by the process of fermentation and then drying of yogurt or curdled milk and turning them into a powder that can later be reconstituted.”

Clear as mud.

I found a recipe for homemade kashk in The New Food of Life and it goes like this: Leave some yogurt out at room temperature for a few days until it gets sour, then mix it with water and salt, boil it, drain it, roll it into balls, and dry them on a cookie sheet.

Whatever. Here's all you need to know: the jar of kashk I bought at the Jasmine Market contains a thin paste that resembles horseradish sauce, but tastes like a creamy, cool, tangy, nutty, ultra-delicious cheese. It's one of those flavors you want back as soon as it’s gone from your mouth. I have no idea how you get this intense umami from balls of dried yogurt, but trust me, the stuff is great. If you live near a Persian market, go buy some kashk, taste it, and send me a note telling me how much you love it. 

Other than eat it with a spoon, though, I’m not sure what you should do with your kashk. One thing you shouldn't do is use it to make the Plenty More Iranian-style pasta. 

The pasta was a flop. First of all: fussy and time-consuming. Roast eggplant for an hour, cool, peel, drain for 30 minutes. Cook onions and cumin in oil, add eggplant, garlic and lime juice. Marinate dried mint in oil. Make saffron water. Cook some kashk gently for a while, cool, then cook it again with yogurt. Boil noodles. Bring everything together on plates and top with fresh mint. The resulting dish was ugly, gray, heavy, rich, tart, and gloppy.

There were many little glitches. For instance, if you put two teaspoons of dried mint in a bowl and add a tablespoon of olive oil, per Ottolenghi’s instructions, you’re not going to have “mint oil” that you can “drizzle" over the pasta. You’re going to have slightly oily mint leaves that you might be able to “scatter” if they weren’t all clumped together. But why would you want to? They're bitter. The eggplant needed more aggressive seasoning and could have done without the lime juice, given that the dish already contained plenty of acid from the yogurt and kashk. And I don’t know how 1/2 teaspoon of saffron was supposed to lend any fragrance whatsoever to a pound of pasta and almost three pounds of eggplant. It was lost and, given the price of saffron, sadly wasted.

Maybe if I hadn’t been rushing to get dinner on the table I would have troubleshot the recipe, finessed the details, plated it all with flair, and written a very different blog post. But I didn’t. I merely followed the recipe to the letter.

No hard feelings, though. If not for this troubled recipe, I would never have tasted kashk.