A good cake, a good TV show, what more could you want?

Obviously, I used raspberries.

*The Fika blackberry almond cake is simple and great. You should try it.

*The new Netflix series Chef’s Table is even better. You must watch it! The three episodes I’ve seen have been intelligent, engrossing, vivid, detailed, and altogether superb. Each installment delves into the psychological forces that drive a single noteworthy chef (in all but one case, a him) to do what he does. It’s more about character than cooking; food is treated as a manifestation of personality rather than the main event. You’ll start to see the way the intricate, precise creations of Los Angeles chef Niki Nakayama, reflect her intensity, integrity, and thoughtfulness. The Argentine cook (and long-ago Piglet winner ) Francis Mallmann is bold and unapologetically sensual, as are the pink chunks of brook trout he pulls out of a remote Patagonian fire pit, the primal slabs of juicy meat he slaps onto a hot pan.

In Mallmann’s case, my feelings about the food actually tracked my feelings about the person. At the start of the episode, Mallmann’s dishes -- succulent, elemental -- made me drool. But the more he talked, the less I liked him (you just have to watch and make up your own mind) and the less I wanted to eat that food. Gradually, the unadorned hunks of flesh and rudely smashed potatoes came to embody Mallmann’s selfishness and unchecked carnality. By the end, I was completely turned off by the man and had lost all interest in his food, which was sort of interesting. Anyway, terrific TV. 

You might like Mallmann, by the way. Each to her own.

*Isabel and I are going to Thailand and Myanmar this summer. Her graduation present. We started with a joke about Iceland and somehow ended up in Chiang Mai. I owe her, after the three exotic trips I took with Owen. Any thoughts or suggestions, please send them my way.

Mjuka pepparkakor and kinuskikaka

Finnish caramel cake

Finally, a couple of recipes from the charming Fika by Anna Brones and Johanna Kindvall that I can’t rave about, though both were still pretty tasty.

1. According to Brones and Kindvall, soft ginger cookies (mjuka pepparkakor) are “nice and thick, most often spread with a layer of butter and topped with a slice of cheese.”

Spicy cookies with butter and cheese? Weird! Just my kind of thing.

The batter was easy to mix, rich with molasses and vigorously spiked with black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Baked, the cookies are substantial, dry, and extremely spicy. They aren’t too delicious, which is to say, you can eat one with pleasure, feel satisfied, and stop. It’s a feature, not a bug, the built-in stopping mechanism, one we undervalue here in America where foods are salted, sweetened and/or infused with fat to the point of rendering them totally irresistible. Everyone is always trying to engineer the ultimate chocolate chip cookie, the ultimate burger, the ultimate fish taco. I believe this is one reason we’re a chunky people.

There was nothing ultimate about these ginger cookies. They were middling delicious, if that.  I spread them with butter and added some little slices of cheddar cheese, wrapped them up, and took them with me on my errands yesterday. They kept well for a few hours in the glove compartment of the car and were eaten in a San Rafael, California parking lot at two in the afternoon. Hardly ideal lunch/fika conditions, but those ginger cookies made a very satisfactory, enjoyable, and cheap meal.

That said, I won’t tell you this is a culinary experience you absolutely must pursue because it’s so obviously not. 

Diet food? In a way, yes. 

2. The Fika caramel cake (“sweet and decadent and not for the lighthearted”) is made using a Finnish recipe and I served it for Sunday dinner. The cake itself is a dense, delectable, marzipany confection that you’re supposed to blanket with caramel sauce. To make this caramel sauce, the recipe instructs you to simmer cream and brown sugar for 30 to 40 minutes, but I hadn’t simmered the sauce for 15 minutes before it grew alarmingly dark and seemed on the brink of burning. I took it off the stove and let it cool a bit before pouring it over the cake where it hardened into a granitic slab of shiny toffee that couldn’t be cracked neatly with a heavy knife or at all with human teeth.  Everyone ended up with a mangled slice of cake and jagged shards of rock-hard caramel on their plates. I doubt this is how it’s done in Finland; a few adjustments to the caramel sauce recipe might yield better results. Next time, I’d cook the sauce very, very slowly.

Today’s fika was a peanut butter smoothie from Jamba Juice using the gift card they gave me at the oral surgeon’s office. My poor mouth had a gruesome experience this morning, but I did as I’d resolved and requested the nitrous right off the bat rather than waiting until I was about to have a panic attack. I always go in wanting to seem strong, but real strength means asking for what you want and need immediately. With nitrous, it really wasn’t that all that bad. Like something hideous happened to my mouth, not to me.

They told me I can’t exercise for 48 hours. In every cloud, a silver lining.

A fika at home, a fika out

It does look a bit like pretzel salt, I guess.

Note: I apologize for the funky typeface lately. I will try to fix.

Friday’s fika: Jasmine tea at home with Martas skurna chokladkakor -- handsome sliced chocolate cookies with a sprinkling of Swedish pearl sugar on top. From a Fika recipe, of course. Such a great cookbook! Not a single recipe has disappointed me yet. These were easy and especially delicious when dipped for a split second into the flowery jasmine tea. They’re not overly chocolatey, which I like. The kids also approved.

Mark did not. He said, “Do you want the truth? These get a C-. They have no flavor except for the salt on top.”

Possibly there’s a problem with his taste buds.

Today’s fika: cinnamon toast and a cortado with Mark at a tiny, popular, and really peculiar cafe called Trouble in San Francisco. John Gravois in the Pacific Standard describes Trouble as a “willfully obscure coffee shop with barely any seating in a cold, inconvenient neighborhood” and I can’t do much better than that. Trouble sells whole coconuts, cinnamon toast, espresso drinks, shots of grapefruit juice, and that’s about it. Gravois explains the reasons for this kooky and limited menu in a This American Life segment on the shop and its mentally troubled owner. A fascinating story, if you have 15 minutes to spare and want a slice of San Francisco life. 

Baristas here have reportedly yelled at customers who take pictures. No one can call me a coward.

Anyway, Trouble was the germ of the much-mocked San Francisco toast craze but I wholeheartedly approve of this trend. Cinnamon toast is delicious. Better than cupcakes. Easier to eat than pie. Less pretentious than cronuts. Obviously, you can make toast more cheaply at home, but you can also make coffee (and almost everything) more cheaply at home. At Trouble they slice fluffy white bread extra thick, like Texas toast, then generously slather it with butter and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. I don’t want to imply there’s any special wizardry happening here. It’s cinnamon toast; you’ve eaten it before. But the magic of cinnamon toast  -- any cinnamon toast -- is potent and I’m surprised it took so long for people to start selling it. I wish even more places served warm, buttery cinnamon toast.

Fika-wise, Trouble was a mixed bag. Mark and I agreed that Trouble’s cinnamon toast gets an A+ , but that its ambiance -- loud, cramped, chilly, and dominated by brusque, intimidating baristas -- was totally unsuitable for a proper fika.

Definitely worth checking out, though, if you’re ever in the neighborhood. 

Sweet potatoes, sesame seeds, more Swedish cake, Clouds of Sils Maria

my idea of beautiful

I knew when I read the recipe that the roasted sweet potatoes with yogurt and sesame seeds from this New York Times Magazine story were going to be salty, creamy, sweet, tangy, full of umami, and super-delicious. They were all that and more. Mix yogurt, olive oil, and lemon juice and spread on a plate. Top with warm, thickly-sliced, roasted sweet potatoes. Drizzle with a bracing salsa of olive oil, lemon, fish sauce, minced onion, and sesame seeds. Ignore everything else on your plate.

This is the only way I want to eat sweet potatoes going forward and I think Owen might feel the same way. I had some leftover yogurt and salsa, so yesterday morning I roasted a sweet potato and simply opened it and topped with the yogurt and salsa like you would top a baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits. I wish I could say that this sloppy shortcut worked just great, but the topping smothered the poor sweet potato and threw off the flavor-texture balance. So: assemble your sweet potatoes as directed in the recipe. Highly recommend.

Oddly, although the story is about seeds, I barely noticed the sesame seeds in the finished dish and think they could be omitted.

I’ve continued my exploration of the delightful little book Fika by Anna Brones and Johanna Kindvall and the other day baked their excellent cream-filled hazelnut meringue torte. I think at this point the authors should put me on some kind of publicity retainer, don’t you? The torte is a fascinating recipe because you pour your rich cake batter into two pans, sprinkle with chocolate chips and chopped hazelnuts, then spread the top of each unbaked layer with some meringue before popping it into the oven. Did you catch that? You bake the meringue layers right onto the torte layers.

That was so cool, but it didn’t turn out quite as I’d expected. The recipe says to remove the pans from the oven when the meringue “looks crispy,” but while the meringue eventually “looked crispy,” it never became crispy. It remained spongy, like the topping on lemon meringue pie. Did I make a mistake? I think crunchy meringue would be better, but the torte was still dreamy, all those textures and flavors -- buttery cake, soft meringue, nuts, chocolate -- bound together with cold whipped cream.

Then Mark gave it a C+. 

Dispute ensued.

Jennifer: “What?! That cake was way better than a C+.”

Mark: “It’s weird and only ok. I ate the whole piece but I could have stopped. It’s not irresistible. I won’t eat any more of it.”

Jennifer, unpleasant edge to her voice: “So what does it take for a cake to be irresistible?”

Mark: “To be irresistible it has to be chocolate cake, carrot cake, or a cupcake.”

With all due respect to the good man I married, this is like saying you only really like movies that are part of the X-Men franchise, star Emma Stone, or requires 3D glasses. I mean, taste is taste but there’s such a thing as developing your taste. 

Sadly, Mark’s desire to develop his taste is about as keen as my desire to develop an interest in the NFL draft, NBA playoffs, or Kentucky Derby, all of which he finds riveting.

I would give this torte an A- and write it a fairly glowing recommendation letter. This torte would definitely get into a good college, at least if your definition of good college is as broad as mine has become after looking at colleges for the last year and reading Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be and the interesting, very flawed Excellent Sheep. 

Which brings me to this: Isabel is going to Whitman College. She just decided. She is on a couple of wait lists, but I think and hope she will end up at Whitman.  Last summer we flew to Seattle to visit the University of Washington and decided to take an 8-detour en route to the University of Oregon to check out Whitman, a small liberal arts school in eastern Washington. Why? I wanted to go to a spudnut shop in the area. Seriously. That was why I thought we should go. There was no way Isabel was actually applying to a school in Walla Walla, Washington! Ha ha ha ha ha. 

But Whitman is magical and we both fell in love and she applied to Whitman and didn’t apply to either the University of Washington or the University of Oregon and here we are.

I did see a downside to Whitman last night when I went to my movie club. One of the women asked where Isabel was going to school and when I said, “Whitman” she replied, “I’ve never heard of it. What’s Whitman?” I briefly explained, but her eyes started to glaze over and I thought, boy, this is going to be a drag for the next four years, explaining Whitman to people who basically don’t care and probably now assume that Isabel isn’t so smart and accomplished because if she was, wouldn’t she be going to, you know, Yale? Or UCLA or Northwestern or the University of Washington or Cal Poly or some school they’ve at least heard of?  

Such is the heavy cross I must bear. 

I don’t know about movie club.  Last night we saw The Clouds of Sils Maria which I had chosen and advocated for strenuously. I was sure that a heady, arty French drama about a beautiful, aging actress would be the perfect movie for a group of women. But I don’t know these women well and it emerged over dinner that the others had been hoping to see Cinderella.  I smiled, nodded agreeably, and thought WHAT???!! I knew then that I had gravely miscalculated and, sure enough, the women on either side of me were sighing and shifting during the film. My companions liked Clouds of Sils Maria even less than Mark liked the hazelnut meringue torte.  

I just want to keep typing Sju Sorters Kakor over and over

From Fika, by Anna Brones and Johanna Kindvall:

“To have a real fika means using the classic recipes that everyone knows (what the Swedes call klassiker), either those from one of the Swedish cooking bibles like Sju Sorters Kakor (Seven Kinds of Cookies) or Var Kokbook (Our Cookbook) or those passed down from one generation to the next.”

As luck would have it, there was an English edition of Sju Sorters Kakor on amazon. How could I not? 

First published in 1945, Sju Sorters Kakor has been revised several times and it’s a dazzling, bright, cleanly-designed, and compact book with an astonishing variety of desserts packed into 188 pages. Pretty little color pictures accompany most recipes, some of which call for hartshorn salt. 

I’m not even going to pretend I’m sheepish about buying yet another cookbook. That would be the kind of reflexive, coy, apologetic female self-deprecation I despise and at which I excel. (Right there? That was an example of the self-deprecation I was talking about.) 

I love owning this book. Good purchase.

Birgitta's almond torte from Sju Sorters Kakor

Nothing new was cooked this weekend, except the Swedish pancakes from Fika, which are lovely, fragile, soft, and crepe-like. I squeezed lemon and sprinkled sugar on them and when Owen saw them he complained that they were “thin, like tortillas, and won’t carry flavor.” I said, “Yes, they’re really disgusting, don’t feel like you have to finish.”

He came back for seconds, said, “I don't want you to waste the batter.” 

This morning I asked if he wanted more of the “disgusting” pancakes and he said, “Yeah, but only because I’m really hungry.” 

I don’t want to make Owen out to be a brat.  He’s not. You’d like him. He’s kind and earnest and talkative and interested in stuff.  Complaints about my cooking are a joke and a habit in this house, a family tradition. He and are great friends and then sometimes I take away his computer keyboard and he gets really, really mad and insults my cooking. At this point, I could not care less. 

Ska vi fika?

I’ve fallen in love with Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break by Anna Brones and Johanna Kindvall, a review copy of which landed on my doorstep a few weeks ago. It isn’t just a great cookbook, it’s also an affordable and adorable object and a fun read. I like this little book so much I recommend you buy it not just for yourself, but in bulk to give as gifts. The audience for Fika is broad, but there’s a certain type of person whose life will be incomplete without it. If you have a friend who bakes, collects vintage china, wears a Marimekko apron, and/or covets an AGA, buy her Fika this instant! 

Does it sound like I’ve suddenly started promoting products on this blog? Never.

In case you don’t know, fika is the Swedish ritual of pausing at some point every day to regroup with a hot beverage and a baked good, of carving out a “magical moment.”  “You can do it alone, you can do it with friends,” write the authors, but fika is “something everyone does, at least once a day. It factors into travel planning, work schedules, and even a relaxed weekend at home. Life without fika is unthinkable.” 

I always wondered how Mrs. Olson knew so much about coffee. Fika.

I often “fika” (the word can be used as a verb) at American cafes that sell giant to-go lattes and giant brown muffins. Giant muffins and Starbucks increasingly happen in Sweden too, but there’s a countervailing tradition of daintiness, variety, fine china, creating a sense of coziness (mysig), and home baking. (At one point, proud Swedish housewives prided themselves on offering seven types of homemade cookies when they served coffee.) This is the legacy that Fika celebrates.

Clockwise from upper left: ginger meringue, hazelnut crisp, oatmeal sandwich cookie with a layer of ginger-spiked chocolate inside. The photograph makes them look big, but they are very small.

I’ve been on a bit of a Fika tear and I have nothing but praise for the recipes. All the cookies I’ve made from the book have been crispy and bursting with bright flavors of ginger, hazelnut, chocolate and/or butter. American cookies seem heavy and floury by contrast. These cookies are also quite small -- after all, if you’re serving seven kinds of cookies, you don’t want people to fill up on their first.

These are also, for the most part, easy cookies. To make hazelnut crisps, my favorite Fika recipe so far, whisk together 1 egg, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup melted butter, 3/4 cup very finely chopped unblanched hazelnuts, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, and a pinch of salt. (I always appreciate a recipe that doesn’t make me blanch the hazelnuts.) Drop by teaspoonfuls onto parchment-lined baking sheets, bake at 350 degrees F until dark golden brown at edges, about 10 minutes. Leave on sheet until firm, remove to racks. SO GOOD.

Yesterday Mark and I were killing time in San Francisco while Owen finished his painting class and we ended up at a place I’d heard about called the 20th Century Cafe and I finally had a chance to try their famous honey cake. 

This will ruin you for oafish bundt cakes.

Just look at that magnificent slice. Look at that pretty china. Only as we were leaving did I realize we’d just had a perfect fika.

So: buy Fika and if you ever come to San Francisco, fika at the 20th Century Cafe.

Two healthy recipes to recommend:

I’ve made this refreshing and satisfying brussels sprouts salad from River Cottage Veg Every Day about a dozen time in the last couple of weeks, usually for lunch. Thinly-sliced sprouts, aged cheddar, apple, some thyme leaves, big squeeze of lemon, olive oil, toasted nuts. To the recipe as printed I would add: walnuts are better than hazelnuts or almonds and you should chill the apple. It’s not going to rock your world, this recipe, it’s just a nutritious, tasty salad, that you can make very quickly, day after day, without going to the grocery store to replenish your lettuce supply. Brussels sprouts take weeks to wilt, unlike wimpy lettuce.

It's really good, trust me.

Also: I love, love, love this smooth parsnip soup, also from River Cottage Veg Every Day. (This recipe might actually rock your world.) I highly recommend adding the yogurt when you serve it -- the cold yogurt in the hot, gingery soup is a wonderful contrast. I should say that Owen didn’t care for this soup at all -- and kids in general might not. He politely pushed his bowl away at dinner. Later that night, after I removed his computer keyboard because he hadn’t done his chores, he got furious and began insulting my cooking, one of his new “things.”  He said: “That soup? It’s like you vomited into a pot and tried to feed it to me.”

I laughed and didn’t give him his keyboard back.

The soup is great.

Finally, I came out of reviewing retirement to write about the chef Nora Pouillon’s memoir, My Organic Life, and you can read the piece here.   

Time got away from me

sampita

Rather than try to catch up on all the stuff I’ve cooked for the last 10 days, I'm going to pretend none of it ever happened and start fresh. But there are a few recipes and thoughts I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention:

-Although I stand by my contention that Sean Brock’s Heritage is impractical for home cooks, I read enough about his recipe for hoppin john to decide I had to try it for myself. So I ordered Carolina gold rice and heirloom Sea Island red peas from the revered Anson Mills and made the dish. It was spectacular, damn it. Very aggravating because if I want to eat this hoppin john again and again and again, which I do, I will have to keep ordering expensive rice and peas from Anson Mills.  

I recommend the recipe anyway.

-A new cookie in my life: Dorie Greenspan’s croquets from Baking Chez Moi. Nutty, super-crunchy, delicious, easy. If you need to use up egg whites, look no further. 

Hot Pot Island, 5512 Geary. It may not be the best hot pot place in San Francisco, but it's our hot pot place. 

-This review made me want to check out Steven Satterfield’s Root to Leaf, but it’s not yet available at the library. Has anyone seen a copy?

-Inspired by this story (and using the accompanying recipe) I made a gorgeous Montenegrin sampita for family dinner last night. Author Francis Lam describes sampita as “a plank of yolk-rich cake piled with glossy meringue, a kind of open faced marshmallow sandwich.”  I can't do any better than that. Another layer of cake would make this dessert more delicious, but then it wouldn’t look quite so magnificently absurd. How magnificently absurd? Some pictures. Really fun, tasty, sticky, ridiculous, beautiful dessert.

-Yesterday I took Mark outside and asked if he thinks we should replace our front walk. I’ve been asking him about this at intervals for the last six years, ever since the roots of the oak started to push up the concrete blocks in earnest.

I worry someone is going to trip and sue us. 

He said, “It’s good enough. We don’t have that many visitors. I think we should wait and fix the path just before we sell the house so it will look as new as possible.” 

I worry someone will slip on the slimy piece of plywood covering the mud hole and sue us.

We came inside and he said, “But if you want to fix it sooner, go ahead. Don’t worry about me. You know what I’m like.”

I worry that the condition of the front walk is liberating out our inner slobs. 

I said, “Thanks. I hired someone last week. He's starting on the 21st. I was just asking for your thoughts so I could quote you on the blog.”

I’m not sure if you think that’s funny, but he did. I’m not sure if you think our front walk needs a little facelift, but I do. 

Mostly, I just really, really hate how it looks. 

Sometimes the stars just align

I cooked from Smashing Plates by Maria Elia last night and produced one of those perfect meals I manage to get on the table once every few years, if I’m lucky. It was an extended family dinner and something about the menu just worked in a big way. This meal was more than the sum of its parts. 

Its parts:

-slow-roasted leg of lamb. You cut little slits all over a leg of lamb (I did semi-boneless) and insert many, many slivers of garlic. Slather in a mixture of cinnamon, cumin, oregano, lemon juice, olive oil, fresh dill, and salt. Wrap in parchment and marinate overnight. Still in its parchment pouch, roast for 4 hours (or more -- I’d do more next time) until it’s soft and shreddable and every morsel imbued with flavor. Serve with a starchy foil like

-gigante beans plaki. Huge, velvety beans, oniony tomato sauce.  This dish lacked zip on its own, but was delicious in partnership with the flavorful lamb and the 

-fried feta with honey and toasted almonds, which has zip in abundance.  You slice feta into little bricks, dip in egg and flour, fry in olive oil. Place on a platter, drizzle with honey, top with toasted almonds. Everyone gets a piece of soft, warm, tangy cheese, a little honey and few crispy nuts. 

A bit of feta, a bit of lamb, a big, soft bean? 

My niece, Stella, said, “I want more of EVERYTHING.”

So far, very pleased with Smashing Plates. 

It gets pretty black on top. That's the one thing I'd like to fix about this cake. Foil towards the end of baking?

Dessert was Gabrielle Hamilton’s Breton butter cake which I’ve now made twice, both times with staggeringly good results. I have so much to say about this cake and Prune in general that I’m saving it all for a dedicated post at some future date. 

Meanwhile, if you have the book, make this cake. It’s not anywhere near as hard as she says it is and it is so, so, so delicious. You can read her account of trying to put the cake on her menu here, though be aware the recipe is not the same as the one in the book. As I’ve said before, the woman can write. 

The boys and I took a walk after dinner, discussed implements suitable for killing zombies.

I keep wanting to type "Tyler Perry"

I detached the keyboard from the computer the other day because Owen hadn’t done his chores and seemed incapable of separating himself from Team Fortress 2. Based on his reaction, Owen would have preferred I detach a few of his toes, maybe even a foot.

Direct quotes:

“You’re the worst mother in the world.”

“This is my day off! I have so few days off and I just wanted to be happy.”

“I’m NEVER going to unload the dishwasher again unless you give me the keyboard back.”

“But I wanted to write a movie review on the computer! Don’t you want me to write movie reviews?”

“I’m going to step on your phone.” 

“That cauliflower soup you made last night was uneatable, the worst dinner ever. You should burn the cookbook that it came from. It left a really awful taste in my mouth and later when I tried to eat cereal to get rid of the taste, even the cereal tasted like vomit. I wasted a lot of cereal, Mom. You should know that.”

Guys, the soup (recipe here) was not that bad. It’s a very eatable, even tasty, cream of cauliflower from Tyler’s Ultimate. You make it by simmering cauliflower in milk with thyme, bay leaf, and butter, then blitzing in a blender. Toss some bread crumbs and pine nuts with more butter, toast in the oven, and strew this rich, salty, crunchy topping on the soup. Yum.

Tyler's Ultimate does not deserve to be burned. Good cauliflower soup notwithstanding, I did give it to Goodwill. 

I guess I need to back up.

A year or so ago someone left two cookbooks on the free table at the gym: Tyler’s Ultimate and The Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook. Both of them were signed. The Tyler Florence book was warmly inscribed to someone who shall remain nameless.

I took the books, of course. But did I really want them?

My shelves are getting tight again, so recently I decided to cull a few titles. It seemed logical to start by evaluating books I never actually chose.

I decided I had to try one recipe (the soup) but other than that I didn’t see much I liked in Tyler’s Ultimate. If you love Tyler Florence, speak now and I will listen respectfully. I didn’t delve deeply and could well be wrong. But the recipes appeared standard, the pictures almost grotesquely huge, the overall feel, flashy, showy, not my thing.

Tyler's Really Good -- now there's a title!

You know, because I’m really subtle and modest and elegant.

Tyler went.

Macrina, by Leslie Mackie of the Macrina Bakery in Seattle, is as drab as Tyler's Ultimate is gaudy. Which is not to say that I adore the look of this book, which is full of illustrations like this:

I think that is supposed to be a slice of toast.

No color whatsoever. You flip through this book and feel like you’re in a shabby apartment, late afternoon, with the blinds drawn. You can’t find a light switch.

Still, lots of intriguing recipes. And I do love to bake.

First, I tried the rustic potato loaf ("Macrina's most sought-after loaf") and it was perfect.

You boil potatoes in their jackets, mash, work them into a dough and bake into a lovely dense bread. I ate a piece of this every day last week for breakfast. I’d make it again in a heartbeat. Recipe here.

A few days later, I baked the Guatemalan hot chocolate bread. Really unusual. The flavor is that of chocolate cake, the texture that of yeasty bread. Big chunks of chocolate throughout. We ate roughly half the loaf before the novelty wore off. I wouldn’t make it again, but it was an interesting experiment.

chocolate bread, obviously

Friday, I made the Macrina chocolate chip cookies with dried apricots. 

Conversation transcribed almost verbatim:

Jennifer: Did you try those cookies?

Mark, frowning: Yeah, I did. What kind were they?
Jennifer: Chocolate chip.

Mark, still frowning: Really?

Jennifer: Chocolate chip with dried apricots.

Mark: AHA!!!! I knew it!! I tasted one and spit it out. It was like there was a worm in there. 
Jennifer: You did not spit it out.
Mark: When you’re expecting a regular chocolate chip cookie, you don’t want to bite into something gross.

Jennifer: Dried apricots aren’t gross. 

Mark: I will not be having another one of those cookies.

Jennifer: Are you kidding? 

Mark: Don’t tease me like that. It’s like me expecting you to go to the basketball game with me. 

I live with crazy people. The cookies (recipe here) are delicious.

Macrina stays. 

Other things cooked since my last post:

-condensed milk ice cream from Smashing Plates with 1 teaspoon of orange flower water added. Needs a new name, this ice cream. Otherwise delicious. If you have the book, you will not be disappointed by the ice cream.

-This Bon Appetit lamb and lentil dish which I liked, Mark deemed “flavorless,” and Owen said was “too spicy.” Can a dish be both flavorless and too spicy?

-The delectable little peanut butter chocolate sandwich cookies from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook. Recommend.

It's called logrolling

page 83 of Fancy Desserts

The Piglet is over and I’m so ready to move on, but I’d committed myself to actually reading Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts cover to cover just to see what the fuss was about. As some of you know Bill Buford chose Fancy Desserts as the Piglet winner over David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen the other day, a highly controversial choice.

I was happily reading Fancy Desserts and transcribing lively quotes to share with you, because there are lots of lively quotes in this book, when I came across the passage at top. Perhaps this problematic passage has been noted elsewhere in which case, forgive me, but I almost fell off my treadmill desk.

In case you need help, I have typed it out to highlight the important parts:

“I met Dario Cecchini on my first trip to Italy. If you’ve read the outstanding Heat, by Bill Buford, you already know way to much about this maniac butcher from the tiny village of Panzano in Tuscany (If you haven’t get to your local independent bookseller and snag a copy immediately.)”

I don’t think Bill Buford should have been disqualified from judging Fancy Desserts, BUT HE SHOULD HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED THIS SENTENCE IN HIS REVIEW. I’m shocked he didn’t. I’m also shocked that one of the two recipes he made from Fancy Desserts was the red pepper sauce by Dario Cecchini, subject of his own “outstanding” book.

I disapprove.

But it’s not Brooks Headley’s fault. He really is a good writer. His yeast ice cream was delicious. Beery. I ate it and so would you.

maybe ostrich egg whites

He will be reading it again and again!

Darling, would you like a little yeast gelato?

You could feel it coming, but that was still a really jarring Piglet win for Fancy Desserts and the Bill Buford review did nothing to persuade me that it was justified. I came away thinking it was even less justified than I had going in.  

I have a miserable list of errands and jobs today, but some half-baked thoughts before I go. I may change my mind about everything, so cut me slack:

*It’s possible Headley's victory reflected gender bias as laid out in the Helen Rosner essay, given that the book was advanced three times by men who seemed thoroughly dazzled by his prose style and rocker persona. Buford on Fancy Desserts: “It is humble. It is brave. It is extreme. It is wacky. It is by far the best anti-cookbook cookbook I have ever read. I will be reading it again and again. It is genius.”

Perhaps Headley should be considered for the Nobel? He sure can make those boys gush. 

Then again, Rosner, no dummy, also loves the book. I should refrain from commenting further on its literary merits until I have actually sat down and read it cover to cover.

*Does the win for an “anti-cookbook” that few people will actually use (a fact, trust me) reflect growing boredom with affable mainstream voices and cookbooks? Maybe a variant of the boredom described in the Lottie + Doof essay? Have we been so saturated with food everything that we’ve reached some kind of decadent, late-stage ennui where it’s not enough for a cookbook to be a nice, usable volume of good recipes, it has to be a crazy, rule-breaking, dysfunctional, super-stimulating anti-cookbook? 

*The recipes are sloppy. I’ve already talked about the failed chocolate chip cookies. I mixed Headley’s yeast ice cream yesterday morning because I had the ingredients and 10 minutes and what the hell. He calls for 1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon yeast//36 grams. I measured 36 grams and looked at that mountain of yeast and thought, this is more than 1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon. It was. It was a third again more. I know I gave Mimi Thorisson a pass on the little errors I spotted in her book, but it’s extra aggravating when you stumble on a mistake in the middle of cooking. This is the second time it’s happened with Headley.

Also: why would you say 1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon when you could say “3 tablespoons?” 

Or am I being petty to care about something like that when considering a humble, brave, extreme, wacky work of genius?

It’s possible I am. But I don't think so!

A report on the yeast ice cream and maybe more fully-baked thoughts coming soon.

And with a few keystrokes, the day is shot

Pretty flowers I saw the other day. What are they?

I have a new rule about not going on the internet until noon so that I can focus on my non-blog projects without distraction. It’s been stunningly effective because once I take even a tiny peek at the internet, including email, all is lost. It’s as if my brain is hijacked, polluted, fill in your negative word of choice. I can’t stop going back, like an addict. If you have similar problems, try this some time. Very liberating. And then at the stroke of noon. . . .

Obviously, I just broke my rule so I might as well write off March 9, 2015. But I had to check the Piglet, where Kate Christensen chose David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen over Maria Elia’s Smashing Plates.

Oh well! There went all my hopes for Smashing Plates.

I can’t but agree with Christensen’s superb review, though. She cooked the hell out of Lebovitz and persuaded me that his is the better book. It’s hard to argue with this:

"I choose the one that feels more substantial, more truly literary and classic, the one that welcomed me more thoroughly into its world, if only because the author has lived there for ten years rather than a summer with childhood memories. I choose the one that feels like a future long-treasured friend."

Good for Lebovitz. He’s a pro and I can’t begrudge him anything. The book is terrific.

Honestly, of all the cookbooks in the Piglet cohort, Prune interested me most going in, and still does. I like it best for a host of reasons, which is funny given how much I loathed it when I first got my hands on it.

Confusing, illogical, hilarious, disarming, vulnerable, and intimidating

This post for cookbook geeks only. 

Ferociously smart Eater essay about the Adam Roberts/Mimi Thorisson flap right here. Serious critical intelligence brought to bear on cookbooks. I wish I’d written it, or even thought it. 

And this offers a different perspective on the dispute, lamenting how boring, homogeneous, and uncritical most cooking blogs are and how insular the food community.

Now, to the Piglet.

Thanks to John T. Edge’s rhapsodic Piglet review the other day, I bought Smashing Plates, an attractive 200-page collection of Greek recipes by Maria Elia, a British chef of Cypriot heritage. Although I haven’t cooked anything from it yet, I like what I see, starting with honeyed fried feta and some kalamata olive gnocchi. The desserts are especially fetching, which I didn’t expect from a Greek cookbook. Curious about the orange and fennel seed ice cream and the almond, rosewater, and chocolate Mallomar chimneys. I’m hoping this book blows me away because I’m not 100% satisfied with the other candidates to win the Piglet, now down to David Lebovitz’s Paris Kitchen and Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts. 

We’ve been dining almost exclusively from David L. lately, and dining well. Multigrain bread, tarte tropezienne, lamb tagine, caramel ribs, butternut squash panade, lemon-pistachio couscous.  The last two dishes on that list are my favorites, but all have been strong.  I really, really, really like this book, but it’s The King’s Speech of cookbooks -- impeccably executed, intelligent, enjoyable, unsurprising. My Paris Kitchen could definitely win the big prize and there’s an argument to be made on its behalf, but you won’t hear it from me. It’s far from the most interesting cookbook of 2014.

Fancy Desserts, meanwhile, is without doubt one of the most interesting cookbooks of 2014. Ed Lee served up a powerhouse Piglet review the other day. Ok, it’s a little purple, but I like the energy:

"All of these desserts will alter the rest of your life, if you have the patience to make them. They’re that good.  Fancy Desserts, with its recipes connected like a mystery novel, can be confusing, illogical, hilarious, disarming, vulnerable, and intimidating -- and I could not put it down. Part culinary manifesto, part punk rock tapestry, part New York City folklore, this book is not just a fascinating read, it’s a portrait of a person, of a time, and of a place so unique you feel lucky to live it through the pages of a book. I wish more chefs were this honest about themselves. Hell, I wish more people were too. 
What I will say is this: Don’t attempt to make a recipe until you’ve read the whole book -- every page, cover to cover. . . ."

All of these desserts will alter the rest of your life? All of them? Even the borrowed Good to the Grain chocolate chip cookies reprinted with a fatal mistake?

Whatever. Enthusiasm is nice. 


I’ve made a handful of Headley’s recipes, two of them really splendid. I already wrote about the ricotta gelato (super-easy recipe here) and last week tried his cashew gelato, which was the most velvety ice cream ever scooped out of my machine. It was just as creamy the next night and the next and I don’t know about the next because by then it was gone. To make this magical dessert, you roast raw cashews until coffee brown and steep in milk overnight. Remove cashews from milk, combine infused milk with sugar, dextrose powder, honey, milk powder, condensed milk, cream, and raw egg yolks. Blend. Chill. Churn. It’s not going to alter the rest of my life, but it was stupendously delicious.

So what’s wrong with Headley’s book? Nothing, there’s just not enough stuff I want to try here. I don’t want to taste the yeast, sage, parsley, or basil gelatos. I’ll never make the corn-corn huckleberry cookie or the chocolate eggplant confection, sweet pea cake, candied carrots or even that cucumber creamsicle both Lee and Adam Roberts so loved. No interest in the sunchoke or artichoke desserts, nor the strawberries in a pool of avocado puree. I’m sure it’s all wonderful, but I still don’t want to make it.

Maybe that says more about me than it does the book. Maybe Fancy Desserts should win. I’m just saying I personally have trouble getting behind it.

The exciting cookbook I don’t want to cook from vs. the semi-boring cookbook I can’t stop cooking from. This is why I have my hopes pinned on Smashing Plates.

****

A few final words about Mimi Thorisson’s Kitchen in France: it’s very good and I had almost universal success with the recipes. Her garlic soup is delicious, creamy, and simple. The apple tart with orange flower water is tasty, though a bit severe and not something I’d make again. The almond mussels, as I’ve told you, are a knockout. The galette Perougienne is a lovely, bready, rustic dessert, the pear flognarde, a lovely, custardy, rustic dessert. The cocoa meringues worked perfectly and the chicken with creme fraiche was a treat.

There’s some funkiness with her volume-weight conversions, especially when it comes to butter. The recipe for Sarah Bernhardt cakes (very seductive-looking Icelandic cookies) calls for 10 tablespoons//300 g butter. Clearly a mistake, as 10 tablespoons butter = 141 grams. I happened to make Thorisson’s gougeres and her almond mussels for the same meal one night and noticed that while both call for 7 tablespoons of butter, for the gougeres she offers a weight measurement of 80 g and for the mussels 100 g. I spent a few minutes going through the book and in different recipes a tablespoon of butter is weighted at 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 grams. This isn’t a big deal when you’re talking about a couple of tablespoons, but the disparities add up. For instance, in one tart dough Thorisson calls for 14 tablespoons//150 grams of butter. The difference between 14 tablespoons and 150 grams of butter is almost half a stick. Adding a half stick more of butter, or a half stick less, will significantly change a tart dough.

Is this a grave matter? No. All the recipes I made worked, most look sound, and mistakes happen. To any stray Mimi fans who might stumble over here and accuse me of being a frumpy jealous hater for pointing out these errors, put down your flamethrowers. Maybe frumpy, but not jealous, not a hater. I thoroughly enjoyed Mimi Thorisson’s Kitchen in France, will make her mussels again and again, and would recommend the book without hesitation.

On another subject, I’d never heard of cruffins, but now I have and need to plan a field trip.