The good, the not so good, the ugly

First the good.

- Milk mayonnaise. Please make this. It sounds odd and doesn't look like much, but it's much. The recipe and a beautiful description are here. I've made it two nights in a row and have a big crush. 

- Isabel. She now makes dessert every evening after she finishes her homework.

The Nigella Lawson cinder toffee didn't work -- she burned the sugar -- but she cleaned the pot herself without being asked. I was shocked. When I was 13, I would have left the pot for my mother and gone upstairs to watch Bob Newhart reruns.

- Isabel's brownies. 

- Christmas tree is gone.

 

Now, the not so good and the ugly.

-The Moro tortilla was unwieldy and swimming in oil. The instructions call for you to flip the wet mass of egg, potato and onion, and  I seriously considered doing it. 

I stood there at the stove with a pot holder, ready to execute. Then I said, no, and put it under the broiler.

 It wasn't attractive or delicious, but at least it wasn't on the floor. Accompanied by milk mayonnaise, an acceptable dinner.

-Moro roasted skate wing with caramelized garlic and sherry vinegar.

I went to the Chinese market to buy sardines or mackerel and when there were none to be had, decided to try skate wing, which was splayed out on the ice right next to the sole. Everyone loves sole, and the two fishes looked kind of alike. Skate wing is cheap: $2.99 a pound, which would be a steal except. . .

It's an extremely thin piece of fish covered with slippery gray skin and it really does sort of feather out at the edges, like a wing, or a fin. Handling the fish back home, I realized I didn't know what a skate was and went to the computer to check.

It's a relative of the ray. The Moro recipe calls for searing and then roasting the skate, which made a bad thing worse.

And though it tasted fine -- pleasant, even -- this was one of those mind-over-matter meals. Frankly, looking at this photograph, I'm appalled that we even tried.

- Cream of tartar biscuits from this recipe out of Yankee magazine.

Jeff Bridges makes cream of tartar biscuits in Crazy Heart. I'd never heard of them, but found recipes all over the internets. And? They were intensely sour, flat, inedible. Straight to the chickens. I have to try again with another recipe.  Or is it possible I forgot to add the baking soda? It is possible. I really wanted a biscuit this morning.

Duck breasts & another problematic dessert

Having now cooked my first duck breasts, which were meaty and succulent, I don't want to ever roast another whole duck, which inevitably emerges from the oven gray and desiccated. Is there a recipe or technique out there that I'm missing? Should I just give up on roasted duck?

The Moro duck breasts with pomegranate molasses looked like steak, but were more tender and, in my opinion, more delicious. They were also dead easy. As Sam and Sam Clark might say. You sear the meat in a cast iron skillet, pop it into a very hot oven for 15 minutes, then make a quick pan sauce with a splash of water and some pomegranate molasses. If you haven't tried pomegranate molasses, it's inexpensive, keeps like ketchup, sells at Whole Foods (at least in this town), and tastes like very tart jam. Try it!

For dessert: rosewater and cardamom ice cream.

Moro: "This ice cream is not to everyone's liking, but those who appreciate the exotic, heavenly scent of rosewater will adore it."

I do appreciate that exotic, heavenly scent, but did not adore this ice cream, which was thin and insufficiently sweet. Not exactly bad, but nothing any of us needed to eat ever again, or even just the next day. The desserts in Moro have been a disappointment. In fact, this was the biggest hit yet. The churros & chocolate were a fiasco, the Malaga raisin ice cream was inedible, and the walnut, lemon and cardamom cake moved almost directly from oven to chicken coop. Odd, since almost everything else from this book has been wonderful.

Tonight: a Moro sardine or mackerel recipe, if I can find sardines or mackerel. Otherwise: Tortilla Espanola. Whatever I end up cooking will be served with the reportedly amazing David Leite/Amanda Hesser milk mayonnaise, featured on food52.

We're going to eat a lot of persimmon pudding

I've been derelict, not cooking at all, serving everyone grilled cheese sandwiches and pancakes. The last week has been nutty  -- in good ways! Chief among the positive developments: My mother came home from the hospital, is eating with gusto and feeling better than she has since September. The new chemo is doing its job. Cancer will shock you when it goes on a mad rampage, but it can shock you every bit as much when it suddenly turns tail. The last few days have been disorienting in that regard, but we're not complaining.

Garden update: 

Back in December, I ordered a bunch of bare-root trees and they finally arrived. Yesterday, we planted. I went overboard with my order, but especially in the persimmon department: fuyu, chocolate, and hachiya. What is wrong with me? They are very beautiful when fruiting in the fall (see aspirational photo at top), but we struggled to find places for those three trees. If even just one survives, we are going to be drowning in persimmons.

Which is a truly nightmarish image. 

This is how a young persimmon tree looks in February:

Can you even see it? The tall stick in the foreground.

 

We also planted four fig trees along the street outside the fence, since deer do not eat fig leaves. We can never have too many figs. And we put in some (more) raspberries, grapes, blueberries, and two columnar apple trees, which are wonderful because you can plant them in tight spaces. They grow straight up like . . . columns. This is what the Scarlet Spire columnar apple tree looks like as of 5 minutes ago:

An asparagus.

After the big morning in the yard, my husband threw an all-boys Super Bowl party and I went to the movies to escape the shouting and potato chips. I didn't love watching Jeff Bridges throw up, but otherwise really enjoyed Crazy Heart.

(I should say, I have a horror of watching people throw up, even in movies. Maybe especially in movies, because you can't leave the room. Others will probably not be similarly offended.)

Again I am wrong about something

This is the tiny frizzle hen that inspired me to buy Owen a frizzle hen last fall. Owen's black frizzle was ugly, miserable, and cantankerous and a rogue dog killed her a few weeks after we brought her home, which was almost sadder than if she'd been nice.  This one looks like a fluffy chrysanthemum with a little chick face sticking out, and she's very sweet.

I had misgivings about yesterday's 4-H visit to the retirement home because it struck me as patronizing. Just because people are old, doesn't mean they want to sit around and watch show-and-tell with scraggly barnyard animals. 

Oh, but they did. I was so wrong. When the 4-H club arrived, there were about 20 people waiting in the lounge, pumped for the show, wheelchairs drawn up to formica tables.

 

Each of the kids made a brief (or, in Owen's case, meandering) presentation, and then brought their animal around for residents to meet and admire. 

It went on for about an hour, and by the end the kids were no longer shy, everyone was chatting, the animals were running around, and there were a few moderately amusing mishaps. I don't want to get corny about the healing power of animals/the rightness of generational mixing, but it was an unexpectedly lovely afternoon. 

Hanging up the hatchet

The handsome and burly bird on the right? Our third rooster. The "science" of sexing newborn chicks could use some new talent.

The photograph doesn't do this bird justice. Darlene (I don't choose the names!) has a silky white neck ruff,  his back is splashed with gold and gray, his long tail feathers are an iridescent emerald green, and he's absolutely gorgeous.

 

But he does rude things to the hens accompanied by violent squawking, which is embarrassing when you're trying to chat with a neighbor. I could live with that, except he also crows for about an hour just before daybreak and therefore, by the law of our suburb, has to go. I'm listening to him crow as I type, just him and the garbage trucks. Someone is going to complain, it's only a matter of time.

I'm done with do-it-yourself culling. The Humane Society says they'll take Darlene, though they can't promise to find him a home. Even if they eventually euthanize him, I assume it will be done via needle, which can only be easier than the messy executions meted out to Floppy and Arlene. 

Anyway, they do have some success pushing the roosters, so fingers crossed. 

The Moro victory lap

The picture is as bad as the dinner was delicious.

I'll start with the pastry triangle at top. Moro calls these fatayer, and they are like Syrian calzones. You make a simple yeast dough and let it sit while you roast and puree some squash. Then you roll the dough into four circles, and fill each one with squash, feta cheese, lots of chopped fresh oregano, and toasted pinenuts. 

Pinch into a rough triangle and bake.  As Isabel pointed out, these are like a bready version of the pumpkin ravioli you get at Italian restaurants, but in ravioli the counterpoint to the squash is grated Parmesan, which sometimes lacks the power to overcome its cloying sweetness. Here, the counterpoint is feta, and nothing can shout down feta, not even squash. They're evenly matched and the oregano, in the role usually played by sage, adds complexity. Everyone loved fatayer.

 

Some of us loved the chickpeas and spinach even more. It's not like other chickpea dishes, so don't stop reading!

You cook your chickpeas, cook your spinach. Set both aside. Heat some oil in a skillet and add cubed bread and fry until golden, then add garlic, cumin, fresh oregano, and red pepper flakes and saute a little more. At this point you put the beautiful fried bread into a mortar (or food processor) and mash (or puree) with vinegar. 

I had assumed the bread cubes would be a garnish, and thought the mashing step was a mistake when I first read the recipe. I reread the sentence. Did as told and ended up with a crumbly, dark paste that I toss this with the chickpeas and spinach. It was brilliant. The bread crumbs hold the intense flavors of the spices and garlic and cling to the chickpeas better than any liquid sauce.  A great, great dish.

On the other hand, the  beetroot soup with cumin

is not a great, great dish. I like the British terms "aubergine" and "courgette" but prefer the American  word "beet." I made a pot of this vegetarian Moro soup for my lunches because no one else in my family likes beets. I'm glad I didn't try to convert them with this soup, because while it was cooked for a long time, it tasted curiously raw. It was much better the second day, as soup often is, and I will keep eating it for the vitamin C and betacyanin, but would rather eat leftover chickpeas.

By the way, that's the Jim Lahey whole wheat bread on the plate. His cookbook, My Bread, is fascinating and contains recipes for 

-banana leaf rolls (long-rise, no-knead bread that incorporates fresh bananas and dates and is baked in banana leaves)

-bread made from seawater

-peanut butter-and-jelly bread

-celery root pizza

-a pancetta, mango and basil sandwich.

Bread update

As requested by a few commenters, the other day I baked the Moro bread (left) substituting whole-wheat for some of the white flour. For comparison, I also made a loaf of Jim Lahey's no-knead wheat bread (right).  (As many of you know, Lahey is the New York City baker behind the "no-knead" bread popularized by Mark Bittman a few years ago. )

Lahey uses a 3:1 ratio of white to wheat flour, a proportion he came up with after much experimentation. To make his bread, you mix the dough roughly then let it sit for 18 hours. After this you shape it into a round, let it rise for 2 hours, and bake in a Dutch oven. I wish I'd photographed the bread when it emerged from the oven, as it was a dark and noble loaf.

 

Because the 3:1 ratio worked for Lahey, I used a 3:1 ratio of white to wheat flour in the Moro bread. It took longer to rise than usual -- maybe 6 hours -- but otherwise worked beautifully. And it was better than the Lahey bread -- chewier, crustier, tastier. I don't understand how this can be, as they contain the same ingredients and it goes against all logic that the "quick" bread would be better than the long-risen. But it was better. The vote among four tasters was unanimous.  

Speaking of voting, Isabel and her friend Juliet have taken to playing Top Chef, and today I got to judge. The ingredient was flour tortillas, and here's one of the more appetizing dishes they presented: plain boiled macaroni on tortilla strips garnished with cold tomato paste. 

 Yum. Especially the unwashed lettuce.

Moro yogurt vs. Brown Cow

On the left is homemade yogurt with strawberry jam. What's on the right was marked down at Whole Foods this week.

Although I make yogurt all the time, I've hesitated to send a child to school with homemade yogurt in a canning jar because I worried it might be embarrassing, like going to school in a dress made from a flour sack. But Owen, who is a 9-year-old ecofreak, loved the idea. I questioned whether, for all his scruples, he would find strawberry jam an acceptable substitute for "fruit-at-the-bottom." He did. Amazing. It has really bugged me to make great yogurt and then feed the kids expensive and mediocre single-serving cartons of Dannon/Yoplait/Brown Cow just because they're pre-sweetened and portable. Non-serious problem now solved.

As for the yogurt itself, I used the Moro recipe, which is much fussier than my go-to recipe in Anne Mendelson's Milk. 

 

Mendelson's recipe involves heating milk and cooling it, adding a few spoonfuls of "starter" yogurt then putting the mixture somewhere warm to sit overnight.  In the morning, you strain the yogurt for a few hours to thicken. It's like Greek yogurt, and it's fabulous. (This is virtually identical to Mendelson's formula, and if you've never made yogurt, you should try it.)

The Moro recipe calls for boiling milk until it reduces by a third, which takes a while, then adding cream. You cool this decadent mixture, stir in your starter, and put it somewhere warm to sit overnight. It is also fabulous, perhaps slightly more fabulous than Mendelson's yogurt, if not fabulous enough to merit the extra effort. It is also extremely fattening.

 

Still, I count this yogurt as one more reason to love the Moro cookbook.

In other news, I finally got around to reading Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Not for everyone, this best-selling mystery, as it is lurid, grisly, intricately (some might say "implausibly") plotted, and overpopulated with sadistic Swedish sex maniacs. I never wanted it to end. Have now embarked on the sequel instead of taking down the Christmas tree. There are times when serial killers are better companions than sentimental Christmas ornaments, though I really do need to take down that tree. 

This soup is good food

I bought dried fava beans a few weeks ago to make Moro's fava bean, potato, and cucumber soup, but last night could not find them in the chaos of the pantry. Used lentils instead, with no ill effects. This soup could not be much easier. You cook the lentils (or favas) in one pot, while you saute onions, potatoes, and some fresh dill in another. Add lentils and their liquid to the softened vegetables, puree, reheat, add a big heap of grated cucumber, and serve. 

It was the idea of cool, grated cucumber added to thick, hot soup that drew me to this recipe. It's supposed to make the robust soup more refreshing, and it absolutely did. Recipes like this one -- simple, delicious, and novel -- make me love the Moro cookbook.

Obviously, it is not an exquisite broth you would serve in demitasse cups, but it made a hearty, healthy dinner enjoyed by everyone, even Owen, who puts soup -- "except clam chowder" -- on his list of loathed foods. 

Meanwhile, my mother has been in the hospital for 5 days and might go home tomorrow, though they say that every day. Her appetite is not the heartiest and she eats about three bites of every meal and then we scrape the leftovers into a bag and I take it home for the chickens. I am oddly uncomfortable feeding the chickens pasty hospital oatmeal and revolting overboiled vegetables. It's sad that a person feels creepy providing birds with "food" that is routinely brought on carts to ailing, demoralized human beings. 

January 25, 2010

It hasn't been a great month. 

Blood sausage is better than it sounds

The other day, I bought morcilla -- the polite Spanish name for blood sausage -- at the Spanish Table to make the intriguing Moro recipe for migas, which the authors describe as a thrifty and traditional way to use up stale bread.

You fry onions, green peppers, and pancetta in olive oil and 100 grams of lard, which, if you can't visualize it, is a hunk the size of a man's fist. That's a lot of lard. When the onions and peppers are soft and caramelized, you pour this fatty melange over chunks of bread and add the morcilla.

Bake. Top each serving with one or two poached eggs.

Looks like hash.

Morcilla, which is made from beef blood and onions, could be perceived as gross. It isn't gross, it's rich and satisfying. Like stuffing, the whole migas ensemble was crispy in places, and delectably soggy and melty in others, delicious and greasy, or delicious BUT greasy, I haven't figured out which. The first night I was unequivocally enthusiastic; we had the leftovers for dinner the next night and afterwards I felt like I needed to drink a big glass of ice cold vinegar.

I also served chard, blanched and dressed in oil and lemon juice, per the basic Moro recipe.

Pretty. Not so pretty in the finished dish, but tasty and healthy.

In other news, I reviewed P.D. James's new book about detective fiction here. It's an impressive and fascinating book, but will probably only appeal to fans of detective fiction. I interviewed James for a story many years ago. She was patient with my endless questions, forthcoming, intelligent, and an altogether lovely person. I was starstruck.

I am consumed with guilt over my pastor's dried out veal

It's surprising how nervous I felt posting that Moro bread recipe, and then my iffy conversions from metric. What if I made a typo or mistake? People might take the time and effort to bake the bread and it would be bad and it would be all my fault.  I don't know how cookbook writers sleep at night.

Apparently, they don't. I just read this in supereditor Judith Jones's sweet, smart blog, which I discovered via Bookslut. I convinced my father to buy Jones's Pleasures of Cooking for One after reading a warm review, also in Bookslut. Dad, make note of Jones's "errata" before you attempt the blanquette de veau or Sauce Gribiche. 

I want that book for myself, but this really isn't the time. 

A rambling post about a really happy Thursday

Here's a sentimental little story about a day that started badly and ended well. There's a lesson in here, one I manage to repeatedly unlearn.

 

My sister-in-law Amy is visiting from Connecticut, along with her 8-year-old son J. It was just J and me the other day, after everyone else went off to job, conference, or school, and I figured we'd hang around the house, he'd play with Legos, I'd do some work, do some cleaning, and wallow in sadness and anxiety over my mother. It's become one of my favorite pastimes.

Right after breakfast, J came into the room and said brightly, "Do you think we can maybe leave the house sometime?"

 

Tipsy: Sure. What would you like to do?

J: Maybe we could take a walk to, like, an ice cream store?

Child after my own heart. Suddenly the lack of a decent plan for J's day seemed unforgivably lame. His special trip to California and the mopey aunt can't change out of her robe?

So I took him to Chinatown. We went to the live poultry market, the Clarion Music Center, old St. Mary's Cathedral,  and the Golden Gate Bakery, where they sell the best warm egg custard tarts.  

J did not care for the tart. I always make people try these custard tarts, but they never love them as much as I do. 

 

We rode a cable car, which I have not done in 30 years. I couldn't tell if J thought it was super-cool, or boring, because he was so grave and watchful. I thought it was super-cool. The City has a completely different aspect when you observe it from a side-facing position in an open vehicle. Everyone looks at you like you're a clueless tourist, but jaded San Franciscans who go 30 years without riding the cable car are the clueless ones.

Then we walked to Hang Ah Alley to have lunch at the Hang Ah Tea Room, where my father used to take me when I was a child. 

There's something about the feng shui of Hang Ah Alley that's very special. You enter from the middle of a extremely steep and busy Chinatown street, but the alley itself is always calm and quiet. It adjoins a playground, and right next door to the tea room is a mysterious club where elderly Chinese people sit around all day playing mah-jongg. (I thought it was dominoes, but did some research and it seems more likely that they are playing mah-jongg.) If you stand silently you can hear the tiles softly clicking and kids shouting and cars going up and down the hill and it's really nice. That's the best I can do by way of explaining the magic of Hang Ah Alley.  

Since the tea room was closed, we found another dim sum restaurant and did some serious over-ordering. My children are delicate, nervous eaters, but J is neither and ate the way I used to eat when presented with exotic fried and steamed tidbits involving shrimp, pork, and garishly colored sauces. It was fun to watch.

Those look like an alien life form, but were extremely tasty.

After lunch we tried to buy gifts for everyone we could think of at the cheap trinket shops. J took great care with his selections, and we examined many small green buddhas, swords, and tacky paper fans. He got a license plate with his name on it for himself, a black satin jewelry box for his sister, a pink jewelry box for Isabel, a dragon pendant for Owen, and a tiny creamer shaped like a cow for Amy. At one point he picked out a cute little bronze chicken and held it up with a triumphant expression on his face. I said, "You want to get that for Owen?"

He said, "Maybe for you?"

I almost burst into tears. Love my chicken.

 

Then we collected Owen from school and finally made it to the ice cream store. 

An unexpectedly lovely day.

Bread recipe conversions

Enough people have mentioned that they wished I'd posted conversions for the bread recipe that I'm going to do it. Most graduated cup measures have metric conversions, so you probably don't need mine.  I measured a kilogram of flour and it was roughly 8 cups. I've read so much about the imprecision of measuring by volume that I didn't want to mess with the perfect kilogram, but it will probably work fine. Just remember, the dough is supposed to be damp. 

1 kg flour -- about 8 cups

125 ml water -- slightly more than 1/2 cup (4.4 ounces.)

700 ml -- about 3 cups

Bread & soup & failed ice cream

I want someone else to bake this Moro bread so we can discuss. It's stunningly easy if you have a mixer. This is the third batch, and it's better than almost any bread I've ever baked, and I've baked a lot of bread. 

The recipe below is true to the book, but I've added slightly more salt. I've left the metric measurements in because I fear conversions might jinx the excellent results, so you'll need a scale. I hope someone tries it and tells me what they think.

 

MORO BREAD

1. Dissolve 1 teaspoon yeast in 125 ml. tepid water.

2. In the bowl of a mixer, combine 2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, 700 ml. tepid water, 1 kg. bread flour (or plain), and the yeasty water. Mix until smooth and elastic. It will be too wet to handle.

3. Oil 2 bread pans and sprinkle with flour. Pour in the dough. You'll need a rubber spatula to ease it into the pans.

4. Cover with a damp towel and let rise for 3-5 hours or until doubled.

5. Heat oven to 450. Bake loaves for 30 minutes, then remove from the pans and bake on the oven rack for 15 minutes more.

The crust on this bread is hard and crackly, and when you slice there are biggish bubble holes. 

The flavor and chewy texture are, in my opinion, perfect, like the best artisanal bread but in sandwich-friendly loaf form. And it's simpler than  Mark Bittman/Jim Lahey no-knead bread because you don't have to think a day ahead. In future, I might increase the salt even more, and try to omit the flouring of the pans. I also wonder if you really need a separate step for dissolving the yeast.

My sister-in-law, Amy, is visiting and we have spent a lot of time talking about food, though we come at it from very different perspectives. She's writing her dissertation on food in women's prisons, but she is not, herself, a cook. She said, "I feel about cooking like I do about skiing. I don't care if I can ski, and I really don't care if I can cook." She goes to Stop & Shop and buys the same reliably tasty things every week-- chicken, veggie burgers, pre-made pesto, pre-crumbled goat cheese, and then comes home and assembles it. I, on the other hand, spend untold hours obsessing about what I'm going to cook and then cooking it. Is this perhaps the reason that I, unlike Amy, will never have a PhD?

For dinner, I served the Moro's version of harira, a classic North African soup that includes a lamb shank, lots of vegetables, turmeric, chickpeas and lentils. Moro: "We always imagine the name of this soup being spoken with a guttural Islamic tongue, and being eaten without ceremony at the edge of a busy bus stations somewhere in Morocco. The flavours of the spices and coriander are very evocative, and only the bus fumes are missing. "

Nice!

Malaga raisin ice cream was a fiasco. I had frozen some heavy cream a while back, defrosted it for the ice cream, thought it looked a bit grainy but since it tasted okay went ahead and used it. Lesson: don't ever do this. When churned, this ice cream contained little flecks of hard butter. "You shouldn't have told me!" said Amy. "I thought those were tiny white chocolate chips."

 

In other news, my mother is very sick. I don't know how to weave this into my goofy food blog, and the idea of trying to do so makes me way too sad. But if I'm going to keep writing a blog that is any way honest, I can't pretend it's not happening.  I'll just leave it at that for now.

A few good things on a dreary January weekend

1. Made marshmallows with agave nectar, just to see how it works. It works and they were lovely, big and sticky. I don't understand how brown agave nectar yields a snow-white marshmallow,  but it does. I also don't understand agave nectar. I was under the impression it was healthier than corn syrup, but then I read this. 

2. Since we had a surplus of marshmallows, Isabel and I made Rice Krispie treats with homemade marshmallows. They tasted just like Rice Krispie treats made with store-bought marshmallows, which is to say, delicious.

3. I had dismissed Matt Damon as uncrushworthy following Mr. Ripley and The Departed, but it turns out his lack of appeal in both those movies was just ACTING. I have reassessed after watching the first two Bourne movies this weekend with Owen and might need a picture of Matt to tape inside my locker. Jokes aside, what excellent movies! I like Franka Potente too, especially when she's got the red hair. Highly recommend.  

4. Though it's no Soviet Kitsch, Regina Spektor's new album, Far, is fantastic. This is probably the only thought about music I will have in 2010 and possibly 2011. 

5. Finally, my friend Mary P. came over last night and we baked a dobos torte, which is a multilayered Hungarian cake of extreme fussiness and decadence that her mother used to make and curse over.

The luscious filling calls for 6 eggs, a quarter pound of chocolate, and a cup of butter, and the whole thing is topped with hard caramel. It was a culinary feat and not at all unpleasant to eat, though ours was a bit sloppy looking. Mary also helped take care of our superabundance of Meyer lemons by preserving them with salt, Moroccan-style.  

So pretty. It was an unusually fun and productive Sunday night. The bad news is, I drank 3% of my 2010 alcohol allotment.

Blondes are more fun, but . . .

Walnut, lemon and cardamom cake is the first recipe I've made from Moro that was truly unpopular. Not bad, exactly, just not popular. I don't know why I have to lead with the negative, since I've been loving this book so ardently over the last few weeks, but I'll get to the good news soon.

The cake was flourless and gained substance from chopped walnuts, almonds, and polenta. My father and I decided that if this were served in a thin slice at a restaurant with a scoop of fancy ice cream, everyone would find it delicious and elegant, its extreme graininess exotic. But at home, with no ice cream, it was severe to the point of punishing. The recipe calls for 3 to 4 tablespoons of freshly ground cardamom and much though I love cardamom, even I was put off. It was like eating cardamom-scented grit. Just a spoonful of whipped cream would have worked miracles.

 

Buen provecho, chickens.

 I've fallen so behind in my food reporting that this will be a long, listy Moro roundup. 

Some highlights:

-A mushroom and almond soup was designed for people who love the flavors of sherry and dried porcini mushroom, which I don't, but I still enjoyed the soup. The pounded almonds went in at the end and while I'm not sure what they contributed, they certainly did not detract.

-A chicken stuffed with garlic and coriander made us all happy. 

There was a lot of salt and pepper on the skin, which explains the dark blisters. Looks obscene, like all roasted chickens.

-Hummus with lamb was substantial and tasty. The meat turned one of my favorite snacks into a meal.

It floors me that anyone can object to hummus, but neither of my children will touch it and ate only the Moro flatbread I'd made to go alongside. The breads of Moro are so spectacular they get their own post.

-A saffron pilaf called for almost a stick of butter, which pretty much guaranteed triumph. The recipe suggests the optional addition of "barberries" which I had never seen until a few days ago, when I was in my favorite imported foods store and happened to come across a little baggie of them. So exciting. They are very tiny and taste like sharp, exceedingly sour raisins. Unfortunately, eating them wasn't as much fun as finding them.

-Finally, back in December I mail-ordered mojama, a "wind-dried" tuna from Spain, the recipe for which dates to the Phoenicians. Or so says Moro. Do you think they really dry it in the wind? 

The mojama arrived in the form of a rock-hard, burgundy-colored brick

which you are supposed to shave it into the thinnest of slivers and use as an accent in salads and starters.  

It is chewy, super-salty, fishy and very delicious. Rich. A little goes a long way. If you can imagine tuna prosciutto, you can imagine mojama.  

On Christmas Day, I served mojama with spinach oregano and lemon

which was a hit, though I did not slice the mojama thinly enough, as you can see.

Last night I made mojama with piquillo peppers and caperberries which was basically just a clumsy salad.

 

I am not fond of capberberries unless they are chopped up, and didn't like the salad. (This is by far the best recipe I've ever made with caperberries. If you like delicious food, you should try it.) 

We have a large slab of mojama left and you can eat it like you would beef jerky, though that seems like a waste of a delicacy. I keep thinking it would be excellent on a pizza with manchego cheese and pumpkin seeds. Many months ago, I saw a picture on Facebook of such a pizza (minus mojama) and can't get the image out of my head. It's on the 2010 to-cook list. 

Speaking of 2010 goals, my only New Year's resolution is to drink less. Back when I merrily started and named this blog, I was a much heavier drinker than I am now. Last year I cut back drastically, and this year I'm cutting back even further. I have a deep terror of a certain disease, not unreasonable given my family history, and alcohol consumption is one of the few controllable risk factors. So I'm trying to control. The goal is no more than 100 drinks in 2010, which sounds like a lot until you do the math. 

Yes, she's blonde. So what?

"Late one cold November night, in the suburbs of New York, a thirty-one-year-old blonde was sobbing on her bathroom floor." 

That's the first sentence of Ariel Levy's New Yorker review of Committed, the new memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert. At the time of the sobbing incident Levy describes, Gilbert was the author of a book of short stories, Pilgrims, and a novel, Stern Men. But she's not introduced as a "thirty-one-year-old writer." She is introduced as a thirty-one-year-old blonde.

I might refer to Gilbert as "a blonde" when chatting with my sister because Gilbert is indeed very blonde. But Levy is not chatting with her sister.  A staff writer at the New Yorker, Levy has written a thought-provoking book called Female Chauvinist Pigs, and this memorable 2005 profile of a 57-year-old redhead. If I were writing in the New Yorker about Levy I would not describe her in the opening lines of my piece as "a 35-year-old brunette." To do so would be patronizing, irrelevant, and sexist. Has anyone ever described Dave Eggers as a 39-year-old brunet? 

But there's another, more mundane reason I wouldn't do it. Let's play with Levy's opening sentence:

 

"Late one cold November night, in the suburbs of New York, a thirty-one-year-old brunette was sobbing on her bathroom floor."

Doesn't that sound stupid? David Remnick, a 51-year-old brunet, would never let such a lame lead sentence into his magazine. Why does blonde, however sexist, sort of work, while brunette falls flat? 

We all know the answer to that: Blonde has implications. Levy is signaling something when she refers to Gilbert's hair color. You could argue that her radiant blondness figured in the success of Eat, Pray, Love, which it probably did. Looks help and hurt people every day, in ways large and small, tangible and not. This isn't news. But Levy isn't making this or any other argument; she's just implying something intellectually belittling and not quite nice, and doing it in what strikes me as an underhanded, not quite nice way. I'm sure others read it differently, and others will skip right over it, and others will think I'm making far too much of it. Of course I am! But I'm a 43-year-old brunette and this is the kind of snottiness that gets on our nerves.  

I'd wager there are 3 points in that big old glass, Mr. Beard

The chalkboard outside our local kitchenware shop bore these words of dubious wisdom yesterday: "A gourmet who thinks about calories is like a tart who looks at her watch." -- James Beard.

YUCK. But why? Because I think he's wrong? Because it's a weird analogy? Is it the word "tart?" Or just the word "tart" spoken by him? Because I am a humorless bluestocking?  

No need to reply.

I was planning to cook for my husband's birthday last night, but my sister invited us to go out and we're trying to be more spontaneous and so we did not eat the scheduled Moro hummus and lamb and churros  and chocolate, but instead went to the new and much hyped 54 Mint. What a sweet restaurant! Small and airy and overseen by a guy with an Italian accent who told us when we were ordering foolishly and gently steered us back on course without making us feel stupid or patronized. Most the food struck the right balance between comfortable and challenging. The best thing we ordered was a squid ink arancina that was the size and shape of a small paperback book, rather than the usual orb. We cut it into four squares, and under the crumbly fried crust was molten black rice of extreme lusciousness. I could never make that at home. The salt cod fritters with aioli: I take back all the mean things I've said about salt cod.

Many, many calories. I was looking at my watch.