My sister and brother-in-law are doing something very right

We write about our meals.

My 9-year-old niece Stella and I go out to dinner every Thursday and this past week, we went to Bar Tartine. Unlike my own children who are timid eaters, Stella’s eyes gleam when she hears the word “oysters” or  “mochi” or “black sesame ice cream sandwich” and she will eagerly try any new food you put in front of her, including sea urchin. We spent a good chunk of a car ride several weeks ago debating whether Alison Krauss’s voice is more like “honey” or “syrup” and then sat down to big bowls of ramen, which we analyzed in detail. Girl after my own heart.

Bar Tartine is a warm, wood-paneled oasis in San Francisco’s trendy-seedy-noisy Mission District. Great jars of preserved lemons on display, earthy ceramic plates and cups that feel good in your hand. Soft light. Eclectic music. Stella deemed this the “coziest” restaurant we’ve been to yet and from her that is highest praise. 

The menu, though, was a puzzler. We read it over and over and over and over and over looking for something we wanted to eat, but apart from the bread and butter, nothing appealed. On paper, it was drab and stern, like every dish was wearing a gray Russian headscarf and a pair of work boots. I’d pay $10 not to eat a beet salad with turmeric, sumac, and fenugreek and would only order sauerkraut with green horseradish if I had scurvy. So many roots and bitter greens on this menu, various “black” ingredients, zero enticing adjectives, no creamy polenta or mashed potatoes or cheesy spaetzle or dumplings or harmless attempts at seduction. The descriptions of the dishes were plain and dispiriting, as in chicken with beans, schmaltz and brussels sprouts. Roasted chicken? Boiled? Marinated? Breast or leg? Lima beans, string, pinto, black? Garlicky brussels sprouts? Fried? Oh, forget it.

They’ve changed the menu a bit already, but you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’ll find it all tantalizing, in which case: 561 Valencia Street. 

Happily, almost everything was less austere than it sounded. They just don’t do flirty menu at Bar Tartine. We ordered pork belly, lamb sausage, and some falafel-flavored croquettes and were very content, if not beside ourselves. The best part of the meal was the country bread ($4) from the mother ship Tartine Bakery, which was super-sour, slightly damp, crazy-making delicious. We also loved the “ginger water kefir,” a milky, effervescent drink so refreshing I was tempted to order a refill. There’s a recipe in the Bar Tartine cookbook that I plan to try once I acquire water kefir grains.

I hesitate to mention the dessert because I remain baffled by it, but the cheesecake with whey caramel and flax brittle was inedible. Have you experienced whey caramel? It was salty, barely sweet, overbearing, and funky -- almost barnyardy. Is that flavor profile a thing? If so, it’s new to me and both Stella and I recoiled from it. The British woman at the next table, who had also ordered the cheesecake, watched our reaction, wrinkled her nose and said, “It’s awfully ‘cheesy’ isn’t it.” I don’t like sending things back so didn’t, but wish I’d at least asked the waiter what was up with this whey caramel as it’s bugging me two days later. I need the concept of whey caramel explained. 

Dessert aside, it was a nice experience. I’m glad we went. Unfortunately, other than the water kefir, there was nothing I wanted to rush home and cook. Instead of piquing my interest in exploring the Bar Tartine book, it put an end to it. 

I'll have some rye porridge, please, and a beet kvass

In case you’re just joining me, I’ve been comparing cookbooks in advance of the Piglet. I'm currently weighing the relative merits of David Lebovitz’s amiable My Paris Kitchen and the daunting Bar Tartine. It’s been fascinating to me, this exercise. Everyone who loves cookbooks should try it.

Bar Tartine is a famous restaurant in San Francisco and until Santa Claus brought me the Bar Tartine cookbook for Christmas, I’d assumed from the name that it was French or even just vaguely French. It’s not. At all. In the pages of Bar Tartine I see Japanese, Danish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, and hippie influences, but no French. A lot of paprika here, a lot of dense rye bread, root vegetables, carob, honey, sprouts, kefir, and kvass. Does all that sound good to you? To me, not so much. But it’s definitely interesting.

The Bar Tartine cookbook couldn’t be more different from Sean Brock’s Heritage, but it has the same problem: The barriers to entry for the home cook are extremely high. Not insurmountable, but you have to be really motivated to crack this book. Motivated enough to track down kefir grains and make your own kefir cream, kefir butter, and kefir buttermilk, which figure in many, if not most, of the recipes. You’ll want to set aside a few weeks to ferment honey and age a quart of pear vinegar. Be prepared to char some bread then pop it in your dehydrator for eight hours before grinding it into “burnt bread powder” that you can use in the recipe for slow-roasted carrots -- which also calls for homemade charred green onion powder and carrot top oil.

Some people will find this all exhilarating, others will find it exhausting. I fall into the latter category. I’m just not at a place in my life where I see a recipe for “pine oil” and start scheming to get my hands on “young fir tips.”  There was a day when I would have. I think I wrote a book about it.

I counted four dishes in Bar Tartine that I could make with supermarket ingredients and equipment already in our house. The easiest was the cauliflower and chickpea salad. I know! Eerie. I just had to go with it. I thought this would probably be the first and last dish I cooked from Bar Tartine because it really didn’t sound that promising.

But it was inspired, unusual, and utterly delicious, a melange of crisp vegetables and soft, earthy chickpeas in a honey-spiked yogurt dressing augmented with lots of fresh dill and tarragon. Thinly sliced serrano peppers supplied bite, toasted sunflower seeds, crunch. I loved it, Isabel ate quite a bit, Owen ate a milligram, and Mark said, “You should just make that cole slaw you made on Sunday every night.” 

The recipe is here. I omitted the mushrooms.

I can’t draw conclusions about Bar Tartine from a single recipe, but the lovely salad motivated me to persist with this challenging book. Yesterday, I thought I was going to have to vote for My Paris Kitchen. Today, I’d put money on Bar Tartine. 

More data required. 

Dukkah

dukkah

From David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen:

“Americans are known to the French for the frequency with which we utter the phrase ‘Oh my God!’ for anything we’re even remotely excited about. I never really thought about it until I moved abroad, but even if a French person speaks no more than ten words in English, three of them are invariably ‘Oh my God!’ with a pitch-perfect American accent, so there must be some truth to it. 

One thing I’ve never heard anyone say ‘Oh my God!’ about is cauliflower. . . .”

So reads the headnote to Lebovitz’s roasted cauliflower with dukkah and yes, I made it. When you find a motif, you have to run with it, however blah. Roasted cauliflower just keeps popping up.

I hoped last night’s dinner would yield some clarity about My Paris Kitchen -- intense love or solid indifference. It didn’t.

Lebovitz’s cauliflower involves chopping a cauliflower into small florets, roasting them, then topping with dukkah, a Middle Eastern nut and spice powder. I first read about dukkah in Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking and knew from her description that I would love it. I wanted to make it. I planned to make it. Twenty years later, I made it. 

Per Lebovitz’s recipe (which doesn’t differ much from Colwin’s), you roast hazelnuts (or almonds), pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, and black pepper.  Mix in some salt. Grind until you have a coarse powder. Done. 

Oh my God. I ate a spoonful of this fabulous mixture as I was cooking dinner, and then another spoonful and then I sprinkled some thickly on a piece of bread. Toasty, spicy, salty, crunchy, and superrich -- but in a sneaky way. The spices and crumbly texture somehow mask the the fact that it’s basically nut butter. When I sat down to dinner I had just eaten the equivalent of a small peanut butter sandwich plus a few spoonfuls of plain peanut butter. 

So I was not in a position to fully appreciate the meal. The cauliflower with dukkah was very tasty, but I didn’t have any appetite for it. I’d also made Lebovitz’s pork and chard sausages, a melange of chicken livers, ground pork, and greens that you bake in bacon-draped ovals, like serving-size meatloaves. I didn’t mention the liver part to my family and these were popular -- they tasted like cannelloni filling -- but I could only eat a few bites. In effect, I couldn’t eat a good dinner because one element was so ridiculously good that I stuffed myself before we even sat down. 

You’d think this would redound to Lebovitz’s credit, but does Lebovitz get credit for dukkah? Certainly he gets points for including something as delicious as dukkah in his grab-bag French cookbook and providing such a solid recipe. But he didn’t invent dukkah.  I have a dozen cookbooks with very similar dukkah recipes. 

On the other hand, Bar Tartine contains not a single recipe you’ll ever find anywhere else. Kefir ice cream floats? Carob semifreddo? Even seemingly familiar dishes like Liptauer cheese, beet salad, and lentil soup are full of twists. The book is blazingly original. And that presents its own set of problems.

Tomorrow.

David's Paris Kitchen

nephew, niece, croque-monsieurs

First, a public service announcement: You need to watch Getting On, a television comedy of such charming oddity and intermittent, unexpected sweetness that after Mark and I finished the final episode last night, we were tempted to start all over again from the beginning. Don’t let any initial distaste for the setting (the geriatric ward of a hospital) or the characters (you’ll see) put you off. Just keep watching. The series is worth a subscription to HBO, but Season 1 is also available on DVD through Netflix. 

Ok, now to cooking: I own a few more of the Piglet books and I went to the library and collected as many of the others as I could. I’ve said my piece on Prune vs. Heritage and it was such an interesting exercise that I’ve decided to pursue this a little further. 

Next up for consideration: David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen vs. Bar Tartine by Cortney Burns and Nicolaus Balla.

I’m a longtime fan of David Lebovitz and opening My Paris Kitchen this past weekend was like catching up with a gossipy old friend. Lebovitz is droll, smart, and a total pro. A former chef at Chez Panisse, he lives (as you probably guessed) in Paris and writes a popular blog that weaves together wry stories from his daily life with unimpeachable recipes. He’s like a less funny David Sedaris who bakes a lot. His dessert books are terrific and I enjoyed his memoir, The Sweet Life in Paris.

The trouble with this attractive new cookbook is that while Lebovitz is as entertaining as ever, the recipes are incredibly boring. Not to put too fine a point on it. Grated carrot salad, tabbouleh, olive tapenade, baba ganoush, hummus, onion soup, coq au vin, mashed potatoes, roasted cauliflower (ahem), chocolate mousse, madeleines, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting . . . need I go on?

All good stuff, but not fresh or exciting, at least on the face of it. 

On Saturday, I made his very basic croque-monsieurs and they were exemplary. I put a platter of these rich, salty, ham-and-cheese sandwiches in front of a bunch of kids and watched them vanish.

photo of the photo -- very appetizing

Lebovitz includes a few non-French recipes in the book and on Sunday I served his smoky barbecued pork to Super Bowl spectators. It was some of the best barbecued pork I’ve ever made, involving little more than spices, beer, bottled barbecue sauce (I used Stubb’s), and the oven. I’ve barbecued pork shoulders outdoors over wood chips, ministering to them tenderly for hours, and this was not only easier, but better. Sort of galling. I served it French-style with mashed potatoes and mixed vegetable slaw, per Lebovitz’s suggestion, using his recipes. Both potatoes and slaw were great. Let me add that barbecue and mashed potatoes are a brilliant combination.

For dessert: kirsch babas with pineapple -- delicious yeasty little cakes drenched in alcohol. The recipe is here, but do not serve these to children or recovering alcoholics. Seriously.

Everything I’ve made from My Paris Kitchen so far has been perfect. Nothing I’ve made has been particularly original. The excellence of the recipes almost compensates for this lack of originality. Maybe it does compensate. I haven’t decided yet.

To be continued.

We experienced a deep contentedness when feeding

Sean Brock has you impale the cauliflower on a biscuit cutter so it remains upright while cooking. 

I first became interested in Sean Brock, chef at Husk and McCrady’s in Charleston, after reading this lively New Yorker profile a few years ago. It began with an account of Brock’s love of pigs and pork, followed by a physical description of Brock: 

“Short and barrel-chested, he wears a baseball cap and T-shirt in the kitchen and keeps a stash of Slim Jims at his desk. He has small, keen eyes embedded in pink cheeks and seems to have absorbed the best qualities of his livestock. There is a placidity and a watchfulness about him, a deep contentedness when feeding, and a braying outrage when his territory is threatened. ‘I feel like this sometime,’ he told me, holding up a picture on his iPhone. It showed an angry Ossabaw hog about to charge.”

Brock is attempting to preserve venerable Southern foodways and to that end only uses ingredients from south of the Mason-Dixon line at Husk. He’s also trying to collect all the American cookbooks published in the 19th century. Fascinating guy. Last year when I heard about his book, Heritage, I promptly ordered it. The book arrived. I admired the handsome pictures, read the polished, generic prose, studied the recipes, and sighed. I wished I hadn’t bought the book and put it on the shelf. 

The rowdy personality from the New Yorker profile is absent from Heritage and the recipes are impossible. I’m not faulting Brock for the recipes -- this is how he cooks. I’m faulting myself for ordering the book sight unseen. There’s almost no dish here for which you don’t need to mail order einkorn flour, Carolina Gold rice, or black walnuts. You require a budget for truffles and foie gras, a stomach for lamb hearts and sweetbreads, a local source for wild licorice, ramps, and pokeweed, plus a dehydrator, juice extractor, immersion circulator, and sous chefs. Even just to bake Brock’s Appalachian grandmother’s apple cake, which you’d think would be one of the easier recipes, you need 27 cups of chopped apples. 

Heritage is pitted against Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune in the Piglet and I had to really rev myself up for this little comparison project. Brock presents his recipes as super-elaborate composites, so the pork chop recipe is actually: cornmeal-fried pork chops with goat cheese-smashed potatoes and cucumber and pickled green tomato relish. The green tomato relish wasn’t happening because it’s January and I nixed the smashed potatoes because I suspected that the cauliflower was going to be trouble enough and I was right.

Stripped of trappings, the pork chops turned out to be a breeze. You pound the chops until thin and supple, like fabric, and soak in buttermilk overnight. When you’re ready to cook, dredge them in cornmeal and fry in a lots of oil. They were fantastic -- crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, and really bad for you. They easily trumped the sturdy gray chops from Prune. Unanimous. Point went to Sean Brock on the chops. 

tiny, stackable mise-en-place bowls made by my sister, who really needs to open an etsy store

I haven’t tackled a recipe as absurd as Brock’s roasted cauliflower with Meyer lemon and brown butter, watercress and pink peppercorns in years. Abridged narrative that you should feel free to skip: Cook cauliflower whole on the stove top while basting in butter, then roast in oven. Remove stem, peel, and slice the stem’s tender core. Reserve. Slice cauliflower head into serving portions. Make a puree from cauliflower scraps, broth, and cream. Make a sauce of browned goat butter, lemon, turmeric, and home-pickled ramps. (I substituted capers.) The kitchen is now a heartbreaking mess, but you’re almost ready to eat: Pour puree from the blender onto warm plates, top with cauliflower slices, add some watercress leaves and the reserved pieces of cauliflower stem. Drizzle with brown butter sauce and garnish with lemon zest and pink peppercorns.

Only I could make Brock's dainty cauliflower look like a hearty Asian soup.

The cauliflower was a bit too crunchy and the puree too thin, for which I fault the inadequately detailed recipe.But there’s no denying that on that ugly little plate were delicate, beautiful, evanescent flavors that you seldom experience in home kitchens and never in mine. This dish had hints of greatness. I can’t really describe it better than that without going all purple on you. By comparison, Gabrielle Hamilton’s roasted cauliflower seemed tasty, rude, and workmanlike. 

And yet I feel about Heritage exactly as I did going into this experiment. The needle didn’t move. The book is attractive, way too fussy for a home cook, generically written, and full of opulent dishes that I’d like to eat -- at a restaurant.  Prune is voicy, obnoxious, and sui generis, full of strange, dumpy things I have no interest in making, let alone paying for in a restaurant (canned sardines with Triscuits?), but also eccentric dishes I can’t stop thinking about. Prune engages me, Heritage doesn’t. For me there’s no contest here, Prune all the way.

The word for the day is "plain"

The plastic handle of my spatula melted onto the surface of the stove last night because I was trying to write the previous blog post while cooking dinner. I will miss that nimble little spatula. She was my favorite. If you ever see one of those flexible old granny spatulas with the super-thin, corroding metal edges and half-melted plastic handles at a garage sale, buy it. If you foolishly don’t want it for yourself, send it to me and I will reimburse you. 

As previously mentioned, I decided to compare the pork chops and roasted cauliflower recipes from Prune and Sean Brock’s Heritage in anticipation of the upcoming Piglet. I suspected this might not be the most exciting blog stunt and now, having cooked the pork chops and cauliflower from Prune, I am sure.  But I will stick to the plan.

Alda

Gabrielle Hamilton’s recipe for salt and pepper pork chops is so simple and stern that I couldn’t imagine it would work. This is a recipe borrowed from her revered Italian mother-in-law, Alda, to whom Hamilton devotes a whole chapter in Prune. There’s a lovely paean to Alda and her old-school cooking here, though I can’t promise you won’t hit a paywall. I’ve said it before: Gabrielle Hamilton can really write. 

Do you have your magnifying glass out? 

To make these chops, you heat a dry skillet until blazing hot, season sirloin pork chops with salt and pepper, put them in the pan and cook for five minutes, flip, cook eight minutes more, remove to a platter and smear with soft butter. Hamilton: “Do not garnish.” 

How were they? Plain. Appreciated. No weird spices, no questionable sauce. There’s a lot to be said for plain food served at an old dining room table on a mid-winter Monday night after a long hard day of school, work, and looking at Oriental rugs on eBay. If I ordered these pork chops in a special restaurant like Prune, though, I would be bummed.

Hamilton’s whole roasted cauliflower with fried capers and brown butter bread crumbs was also very easy. The name says it all, but here’s the two sentence blow by blow: Roast cauliflower whole with a lot of olive oil for 50 minutes then transfer to serving bowl. Fry some capers and breadcrumbs in butter and scatter this over the cauliflower. 

How was it? Zingy from the capers, crunchy from those buttery breadcrumbs. Appreciated. If I ordered this in a restaurant like Prune I wouldn’t be overjoyed, but I would be satisfied. It’s a good one.

As a bonus, I “whipped up” Hamilton’s pizza rustica, an Alda recipe that I was curious about because, like the pork chops, it looked so plain I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly be good. You make a dough of flour, egg, and butter, put half of it in the bottom of a pan, top with fresh mozzarella season with salt and pepper, top with the other half of the dough, and bake. You do mess up your counter when you roll out the dough, but otherwise, a cinch.

How was it? Warm, it was plain in the most wonderful way, a soft, unchallenging, buttery, cheesy pastry. Cold, it was plain in a bad way, inert and flavorless. So eat it warm. Recipe here, though again, there might be a paywall.

Tonight: Sean Brock’s version of this same meal, minus the pizza. 

blizzard?

peppermint patties with cold candied lemon?!

January was bad for a while, but now everything is really good again. The bag of freekeh I ordered finally came so I made the Jerusalem spicy lamb and freekeh soup which was tasty and wholesome. I also baked the Ottolenghi macadamia-caramel cheesecake, not wholesome, which we demolished. Few cakes get eaten down to the last crumb around here (and loaf cakes don’t get touched), but this sticky-crunchy-creamy beauty was gone in two days. 

You'll get cavities just looking at it.

The Ottolenghi chapter is closed for now. I came around on him, thanks to all your strong recipe suggestions, though I still don’t feel quite the same passion for his books that others do.

Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune? I feel loads of passion for this one, but it’s passion of the thin-line-between-love-and-hate variety. I’m over my initial fiery loathing, though every time I flip through the book’s 570 pages looking for something I know is in there somewhere, I curse Hamilton for omitting an index. It was super-rude and I think that’s exactly why she did it. 

I have to confess, over time I’ve become deeply attached to some of her recipes. I made her braised lamb shoulder with lemons, tomatoes, and cinnamon twice in the space of a month, an intense, dark braise of soft, fatty meat and soft, stewed lemons. Does that sound amazing to you? Or disgusting? I love it, but would hesitate to serve it to anyone outside my family because I can so easily imagine someone hating it.

There are lots of slightly odd, not-for-everyone recipes like this in Prune. For about a week I ate Hamilton’s weird, delicious bacon and marmalade sandwiches on buttered pumpernickel for lunch every day. And her dessert of Grape Nuts with vanilla ice cream cone and cold maple syrup has become a deadly habit. I’ve eaten my lazy adaptation (ice cream in bowl, sprinkle with Grape Nuts, drizzle syrup, don’t bother with cone) so often over the last few months that I don’t even think of it as a recipe anymore. Like pouring milk on cereal, this is just how I eat ice cream now. 

Some other peculiar, enticing desserts in Prune:

cold candied oranges 

mastic fondant in ice water

broiled ruby red grapefruit with Wheat Chex streusel

fried mascarpone with fennel sugar

peppermint patties with cold candied lemon

sliced peaches on buttered toast

strawberry milk

frozen milk punch with sesame biscuits

battered and fried brandied cherries

You’re either going to hate those cold candied oranges or they’re going to be precisely the dessert you’ve been waiting for all your life.

Prune is up against Sean Brock’s Heritage in the Piglet next month and since I own both books, I thought it would be interesting to make some pork chops and roasted cauliflower from Prune tonight, then some pork chops and roasted cauliflower from Heritage tomorrow, and draw comparisons. I wouldn’t have chosen pork chops and roasted cauliflower for the test menu, but this was the only do-able overlap between the two books. So it’s a plan. 

Anywhere but here

Iceland, take me away.

I’ve been a ball of anxiety and haven’t been sleeping! I put the exclamation point there to make that announcement sound less doleful because who wants to read about how tense and tired someone else is? We’re all tense and tired. I’m just a little extra tense and tired right now. First thing in the morning I burst into tears because I knocked over a full cup of coffee and had to make more, poor me, and when I went upstairs to do so found that Owen had left his laundry in the middle of the kitchen. Owen is very lucky that he’d already departed for band practice.

Seriously, though, death, grief, burial, college applications, Disneyland, and, yesterday, public speaking. The first 14 days of January were rough. The other night at dinner I startled myself and everyone else at the table by saying that when Mark retires I want the two of us to move to India for a year. Really? I want this? Mark in India? Mark with all those cows? The next day I wrote Isabel a mystifying email saying that if she’d like to go to Iceland with me over the summer, we should discuss. 

Iceland? WTF. She has yet to respond. 

The eulogy I gave at my grandmother’s funeral yesterday went fine. I read a couple of anecdotes from the archives of the blog and I think it worked. Here’s what was really cool about this experience though: while looking through the archives, I found so many stories about my grandmother that I’d completely forgotten, days we spent together, verbatim dialogue, really sweet stuff. I never intended the Tipsy Baker as a family scrapbook, but among other things, that’s what it's turned out to be. I uncovered a trove of memories that would have been lost forever had I not been packing them away like a typing chipmunk, year after year. Not just memories of my grandmother, but of my mother, father, kids, Mark, our life, all of it. Maybe you’re wondering how I didn’t realize this before now. I’m wondering that too. I just didn’t. Now I do.

So that’s happy. 

Cooking.

-This is a very good, healthy, easy, green soup.

-The Ottolenghi macadamia-caramel cheesecake is baking as I write. Full report after tomorrow night, but it smells divine.

-The Ottolenghi marinated rack of lamb with cilantro and honey was intended as an expensive weekday dinner earlier this week, but on the night I was planning to serve it both my kids had theater obligations down at the high school and for various boring reasons I couldn’t postpone the lamb so I cooked it, didn’t bother with salad or vegetables, and Mark and I ate it standing at the counter. Then he went to see the theater production and I stayed home and finished the eulogy. It was a sorry and unceremonious way to serve a luxurious and delicious meat, but hey, the kids have lives of their own now and I have to deal. The recipe is nice because rather than pouring away the marinade you boil it for 15 minutes and use it as a sauce, an extremely punchy, flavorful sauce. This was another great recipe suggestion from the comments. Thank you commenters. I’m almost done with all your Ottolenghi suggestions and then. . . what? 

Interesting, don’t you think, that Plenty More didn’t turn up in the Piglet lineup? Maybe they decided that Ottolenghi's books have gotten enough Piglet play in past years. I couldn’t disagree. Perhaps I’ll explore some of the Piglet titles over the next few weeks. 

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.