All about chickens and egg whites

We got chicks. Six Buff Orpingtons, the only chicks available in the greater Bay Area. I know because I called everywhere and chicks are apparently very trendy these days, probly for the "free eggs." As with vegetable gardens, I think it's going to turn out to be more expensive to raise hens just based on yesterday's starter costs: $55 for feed, dishes, sawdust, chicks, lightbulb and clasp lamp to keep them warm and alive through the night. 

They're very fun to watch scamper around, pecking and scratching and cheeping. Isabel and Owen are ecstatic. Mark: not ecstatic, but putting on a game face, which I appreciate.

Despite distractions, I cooked dinner, made a lovely "Maltaise sauce" flavored with the juice and zest of a blood orange. Recipe out of Jennifer McLagan's Fat. Served it with asparagus and salmon, but sadly no one in my ascetic family is keen on buttery sauces except me. 

Isabel also baked this unintentionally marbled mocha angel food cake that was, contrary to my expectations, delicious.

We used egg whites that had been stored in a jar -- an uncovered jar -- in the refrigerator for two months. I hesitated to type that because, yuck. But why write if you don't write the truth? You don't really have to throw out egg whites until they grow a layer of mold.

The kids are back

To quote the charming food writer and mediocre novelist Laurie Colwin: "Did people create families in order to keep themselves from wondering what the purpose of life was? With children it was a snap. Children were a purpose, and generally there was so much to do in their behalf that you might never stop to think at all."

I can handle the existential stress, but it's definitely restful to be picking up Star Wars figurines and mixing pancake batter after a week of somberly contemplating the horizon. What will I do when my purposes go to college? Is that why I ordered the bees? Why did I order the freaking bees?

Budget matters: 

On 4/15 Mark spent $11 at the supermarket on bread, lunch, etc.

Yesterday, after collecting the kids at the airport we went to Champa Garden, a Laotian restaurant in Oakland, and spent $55.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and haven't been already, you must, must, must go to Champa Garden. Order the sampler appetizer plate, a dish that stopped all conversation for ten minutes while we devoured every last crumb of rice ball salad, sausage, and spring roll. The kids must have been starving because they didn't stop eating long enough to complain that they don't like "Chinese" food. Champa Garden is in a funky neighborhood and looks like a converted corner liquor shop or laundromat, but of course that made it all the more exciting. We staggered out of there stuffed and very happy because of the fantastic food and because we're all together again. Honeymoon should last until noon today.  

Going forward: Two more nights of cooking from Fat and Milk to wrap up and use the caul fat, then I'm going to start Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen.

Hived off

I'm panicking about the bees.

It all seemed very doable and simple in the days after the beekeeping class, but a few weeks have elapsed and I started reading up on bees last night, bouncing around on hobbyist web sites, until I finally had to shut off the computer and get under the covers. There were a picture of a woman IN SHORTS retrieving a swarm of her bees that had migrated into a neighbor's yard. Swarm, swarm, swarm, swarm. There is a horror movie called The Swarm.

Our bees arrive in 9 days.

With my coffee this morning I was reading Laurie Colwin's Family Happiness in which the saintly heroine infuriates one of her brothers and his wife. She does something unforgivable: she insists on having them to her place for dinner when they want her to come to their place. Such is the high drama in a Laurie Colwin novel. Anyway, here's some dialogue:

"Geez, you'd think you put a nuclear device in their elevator, Well, they're pretty hived off."

"Hived off?" said Polly. "What does that mean."

"It is a swarm of bees leaving their nest," Andreya explained.

Hived off. If I believed in signs . . .  but I don't.

Abrupt change of subject. Laurie Colwin just isn't a great novelist. I'm almost done with her complete oeuvre, and while I find her fiction very readable, it's painfully tame and cozy. Cookbooks should be cozy -- it's why I love them -- but life isn't really cozy and when I read fiction I want a little life. You know, anguish and loneliness and contempt and sex and dark comedy. Colwin is way too distracted by poached eggs and china patterns. 

I do not love nature

We had a windstorm yesterday that blew out a small section of our fence and during the brief period before I noticed the breach, deer entered our yard. Our young pear and apricot trees have both been denuded of their leaves, and the apricot lost its single fruit. The gooseberries were partially stripped. Deer are very sweet and graceful when grazing on remote hillsides, but when they break into our garden I hate them with such vitriol I would have no trouble running Bambi through the new sausage machine. Ok, maybe not Bambi, but Bambi's childless uncle. It would be payback for countless past crimes against the loquat tree (R.I.P.), the grape vines, the ceanothus (which they supposedly do not even like), the roses. 

Sadly, illegal.

Mark is turning over soil as I type. I had to leave the scene to escape the resentment vibrating from his body in squiggly lines, like in a comic strip. The only thing he would enjoy less is to pay someone.  

A new diet trick

Try to eat a smuggled-in turkey sandwich while watching a matinee of The Wrestler. You will have trouble doing so. Moreover, you won't want to eat a turkey sandwich again for a long, long time. I can see why this movie is powerful and special -- acting, tragic antihero, fascinating glimpse into a bizarre subculture, etc., but I had to be ready at all moments to cover my eyes which made it hard to hold the sandwich. There was the stapling scene, the vomiting scene, the bug spray scene, the hand-in-meat-slicer scene, and the degrading sex with skanky woman in public bathroom scene, which was possibly the most upsetting of all. 

Ending this budget stuff at the end of the month, as it is not fun or interesting, but I want to make it until April 30: 

turkey sandwich     $4.99

sushi dinner w. Mark 62.40

total               $67.39

Here is a piece in USA Today about gardening with which I fully agree, having reached the end of my puny soil amending strength. Now I have to enlist/bribe my husband or hire someone. I just don't shovel fast enough or deep enough and at this rate it will be August before the beds are done. 

April 13 $$

I've completely lost my cookbook momentum. Without anyone to cook for, why would I? And when I don't cook, what is the point of this blog? 

Kids return from Oregon on Thursday. I collected Mark from the airport last night. We went out to dinner at a Chez Panisse-like (very limited menu, everything restrained and tasteful and super-expensive) restaurant called Camino and spent $110, which is more than you pay for a whole packet of bees. The $25 lamb entree seemed to be comprised of a bunch of scraps. The term "scrag ends" keeps coming to mind but I don't exactly know what it means. Now I do, and it's about right. Tasted lovely, but: scrag ends.

April 12 $$

Crissy Field, where we had our Easter picnic, is practically in my mother's backyard. Lucky her, and she knows it. I was a lazy bum and only contributed two bags of potato chips to our pleasant lunch: $6. My grandmother isn't supposed to eat salty snacks like ripple-cut Lays, but does anyway.

That's her under the umbrella next to my sister. That's me on the left looking cool and sullen in my new(ish) skinny jeans. The jeans look especially fabulous from a distance when I'm sitting down.

 

Here's a better picture of my grandmother:

You know why she looks good? Because she's spent 97 years sitting under parasols while simultaneously wearing a HAT, a lesson she clearly imparted to my mother, but not to my cousin Marina. Actually, I think the hat thing is a big hoax. They were all three born with tan skin that wouldn't burn on a scorching afternoon in Andalusia and everyone knows the real secret of graceful aging is not botox or Oil of Olay or hats, it is an olive complexion. Duh.

Thank-you, Dad, for the pallor.

 

The taxes are almost done. Lots of lavender going in to the garden today because it will make the bees feel at home. I do not even own a hat, but am thinking, hoax or not, I should go buy one. 

 

April 11 $$

Because the no-photo posts are bumming me out.

I don't cook nice meals for myself when I'm alone. Last night I saw I Love You, Man, bought popcorn and that was dinner. 

popcorn $4.75

Movie was moderately amusing, fairly coarse. Paul Rudd: excellent. Jason Segel: excellent. Rashida Jones: good enough, though I'll always resent her for dating Jim when he so clearly belonged with Pam.

I also read this funny piece, amended a tiny amount of soil, moved some bricks, smashed several dozen centipedes nesting in the bricks, thought hard about whether or not to get chickens, fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon while trying to read Riven Rock, and collected tax documents. I bet the chickens would eat the centipedes.

April 10 $$

Mark bought a chicken sandwich at work  $3.95

I bought some milk             4.39

We all went out to dinner*  61.78

Total $70.12

*We went to The Ark, a Chinese restaurant in Alameda near the airport. Years ago I read something that made me badly want to eat there, but I think the chef might have changed. Even I've made better cumin beef. After dinner, I dropped my companions off at the Southwest terminal to fly to Oregon and I returned to our lonely abode. Plans for the next few days include: taxes, garden, taxes, I Love You, Man, taxes, Easter with my family of origin, TAXES. 

April 9 $$

ZERO

Milk & Fat: We had a feast and then we watched some TV

That's my mom feeding the meat into the stuffer, that's her friend Kathy easing it into the casing. Sausage was trickier than any of us had anticipated and I sense we made many errors, but it was nonetheless exciting and gratifying. The sausages -- Jennifer McLagan's lamb, red wine and rosemary sausages out of Fat -- turned out beautifully. They were leaner and more finely ground than what you buy at the market, lacking the discrete globules of fat I have come to expect, and/but were very tasty.

Making sausage definitely brings to mind indelicate subjects. Not just one, several. You can imagine, and I will let you.

The rest of the dinner was fantastic. I broke my scalloped potatoes losing streak with the help of Anne Mendelson's elegant and precise recipe. What was I doing wrong all those years? They are so easy.

I can't praise Mendelson's book Milk highly enough. Her crisply written history of dairying, which includes the most sensible analysis of the current raw milk controversy that I've encountered, is riveting. The recipes are all for simple dishes, but they have so far proven flawless.

For vegetable: McLagan's double butter salad. You make the dressing by melting butter until it begins to brown, add cider vinegar and salt, then pour it over some butter lettuce. Tastes like butter, but also like salad, and is delicious.

And for dessert: McLagan's choux paste beignets -- cream puff dough spiked with Pastis (or Pernod), fried in lard, and dusted with fennel-flavored sugar.* Served with hot chocolate. 

After this, the ladies went home and the children and I retired to the sofa for two episodes of Friday Night Lights. The longstanding Wednesday night DVD tradition (it began when Mark took the Wednesday night shift) may seem questionable because we stay up too late and watch shows with "mature" content. But Isabel and Owen fight so much the rest of the time, this seems to be the only way the three of us can enjoy ourselves together. It's a happy shared ritual and that feels important, more important than bedtime or going to our separate rooms to read worthy books. Plus, FNL: awesome.

*Put sugar and fennel seeds in a spice grinder until powdery 

April 7 & 8 $$

April 7

Bought caul fat at Cafe Rouge butcher shop            $16.75 

bacon cheeseburger at 900 Grayson in Berkeley*  14.00

Mark to Safeway (oil, Cheerios, oj)                         21.73

April 8

Mollie Stone for lamb & sausage casings**             21.07

TOTAL  $73.55

*I had read about this burger and always wanted to try it, but thought the bacon was too smoky. Too-smoky bacon is like too-dark chocolate, overwhelms all other flavors.

 

**6 ft. of sausage casing = 75 cents. Too bad you have to fill it.

A picture even a mother can't love

This post is only to bury the photo of the monstrous sausage. Tonight's dinner was great and I have more to say about everything, but it is time to watch TV. 

Fat: What is it they say about making sausages?

Nice, eh? 

You have to grind the meat a couple of hours before you stuff sausages, so I decided to do that right before I went to pick up Owen from school to drive him to piano lesson. I thought it would take me just a few minutes to run the meat and fat through the grinder and I'd be on my way. (I'm making the lamb sausages from Jennifer McLagan's Fat.)

I eventually called the piano teacher and told her we'd be late. I called fifteen minutes later and told her we couldn't come. You can't leave the house for an hour with a grinder full of half-ground meat. It took close to forty-five minutes, start to finish, as stringy and sinewy bits of lamb and sludgy fat kept getting stuck in the machine and I had to repeatedly disassemble and clean the whole apparatus. My fault. I didn't read the manual before I started, which is a really awful habit. Then my mother called in the middle of this: Aren't you supposed to be at piano lesson? Lecturing ensued, and I almost threw the phone across the room. That is another really awful habit.

She is here now. I just heard a car pull up. She has brought one of her oldest friends, an amazing cook, and I think that despite the rocky beginning, sausages will be fun. I just got a look at the casings and they are slippery and very strange and I like that! We're also having scalloped potatoes, a salad with butter dressing, and homemade donuts for dessert. I've never made good scalloped potatoes, but if anyone can point me in the right direction, it is Anne Mendelson. 

Rethinking Rose Levy Beranbaum

Yesterday, I saw Scate Bakes' admirable resolution to read Rose Levy Beranbaum's master's thesis, "Sifting Flour Affects the Quality of a Yellow Cake." I thought this was a joke until I clicked on the link. It turns out that there is such a thesis* and it's fascinating, not so much for the science of sifting as for what it reveals about the mental processes of the woman who wrote it. If you don't want to read the whole thing, though I recommend skimming it, you should do as Beranbaum suggests and scroll down to her addendum. 

I own Beranbaum's Cake Bible but have never warmed to its stiff and prissy perfectionism. I grow weary even thinking about halving egg whites. But yesterday afternoon I was at Barnes & Noble and, inspired by that strange thesis, pulled out Beranbaum's Bread Bible. The whole tone was different, looser, funnier, more effusive. She still comes across as obsessive and kooky, but in a charming way. I almost bought The Bread Bible, but have forbidden myself new cookbooks. 

Today, I read this Believer Q&A and like Beranbaum even more. 

*I just pulled out The Cake Bible and see that Beranbaum writes in the introduction about showing her master's thesis to her husband on their first date. Oddly, she says she got an A+ on the thesis, when in fact she only got an A. That's a revealing little slip, not something you'd expect from such a perfectionist. Except, of course, it makes complete sense.

April 5 & 6 $$

Fell behind. 

Sunday was a spendy day. 

Safeway (strawberries, Sure Jell, sandwich)     20.38

Whole Foods (eggs, milk, flour, cabbage, ground lamb, etc.)  80.48

pound of French Roast (bought by me) 10.45

another pound of coffee (bought by Mark) 13.45

Monday was cheap.

Mark bought an It's It  1.50

Total for April 5 & 6        $126.26

Milk: There's a lesson in this

The scones were great, the clotted cream disgusting. It's all my fault because I got greedy.

I followed Anne Mendelson's recipe to the painstaking letter until the crucial last step. To make clotted cream, first you mix together cream and milk and let it sit for a day in a cool room. Then you heat it very slowly on the lowest possible flame of your stove. The cream gradually forms a beautiful, wrinkled, golden crust atop the milk and after four hours, during which time it must not boil, you put the whole pot in the refrigerator for at least eight more hours.

This morning, I carefully lifted off the crust, which is the clotted cream. It was lovely and buttery and smooth. I put it in a bowl. Then I noticed the milk below was filled with lumps. More cream! I carefully scooped those into the bowl on top of the cream. I actually thought: Anne Mendelson might have MENTIONED in her recipe that the milk is filled with lumps of cream. Silly lady.

I should have known better, because as far as I can tell, Mendelson is perfect. Finally, I tasted one of the clumps and it was flabby and grainy, like faintly sour, curdled milk. But by this time it had contaminated all the cream, which I could not retrieve, or even find, when I poked around in the bowl. I tried to eat it anyway, but ugh. 

Actually, it is a manic Monday

Busy, busy, busy today. Fortunately, clotted cream practically makes itself if you just let it sit around. First you let it sit around in a cool room, then on a burner turned very low for four hours, then in the refrigerator for eight.

Interesting fact from my utility company: To heat an ordinary electric oven costs 32 cents per hour. 

Shocking fact from my utility company: The average person spends $1.65 per month to use their gas stovetop. 

How can that be? So cheap. I ran a calculation based on the specifications of my particular stove and the price of energy in our area and it turns out that it really IS cheap. Though my math and logic are always questionable, it appears that it costs me 14 cents an hour to cook something at high heat (boiling pasta) and 9 cents an hour to melt butter. To make the clotted cream, therefore: 36 cents of gas. 

Back to work.

April 4 $$

Mark hit Safeway yesterday. He spent $51.07 on store-brand cheese, store-brand chicken soup, peanuts, beer, cherry 7-Up, and some other junk. I mean, food. 

Plus, there's a carryover from April 3 when he went out to a goodbye party for his boss and estimates he spent around $25.

Total: $76.07

Bad. But what can you do.

Fat: I'll just have a little of the white meat

I like pork belly. I used to love it, but have cooled as time passes because, like foie gras, it always makes me feel a little sick. Why? Superrich. Once a year is about right, and Cheong Liew's braised pork belly out of Jennifer McLagan's Fat did nicely for 2009. 

You start with the raw belly (which I always buy at a Chinese supermarket where you can get it for less than $2 a pound*) and marinate overnight in soy sauce, wine, spices, and tangerine peel.

Then you braise for 1 or 2 hours, ending up with tidbits of mahogany brown meat clinging to hefty chunks of succulent, velvety fat, all of it cloaked in an extremely delicious salty-sweet sauce. 

 

I served this last night with some long beans, rice, and green onion pancakes, also from a McLagan recipe. Big success.

For dessert: lemon tart out of Anne Mendelson's Milk. Like all her recipes, it was simple, elegant, and impeccable. A tart tart was definitely called for at the end of a pork belly dinner. Sorbet would have been even better, but I didn't have my thinking cap on.

 

*Warning: There's the chance that a Chinese butcher will give you the belly with skin attached, which is good, but also with nipples, which is disconcerting. This happened to me once and I won't say I didn't wince when it came time to carve everything up. But we need reminders of where food comes from, however macabre.