She needs a haircut

I poured a glass of wine, pulled out my wallet, and Owen and I ordered some chicks the other night. What with shipping, you pay a pretty penny for your chicks when you order from My Pet Chicken, but they offer a huge selection, and you can buy as few as three. Most hatcheries require orders of 25. We requested:

-1 blue Andalusian, because Owen likes its looks

-1 Marans, because I still want chocolate brown eggs

-1 Welsummer, again, it's about the chocolate brown eggs

-2 Easter Eggers, because we still want green eggs and our surviving Ameraucana doesn't lay them

-1 buff laced Polish (see photo at top), to attempt to replace the irreplaceable Alberta Einstein

We have a few slots left and are holding out for a Penedesenca, currently unavailable. We would also like a silkie bantam, preferably black. 

Meanwhile, Owen and I have been reading My Fine Feathered Friend by former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes. This sweet, droll book recounts the true story of a bossy Australorp hen that mysteriously turned up in his tiny New York City back yard one day and made herself at home, eating the cat food, roosting in a tree, and laying eggs in a little nest. I've read this book twice before (it's very short) and can't recommend it more highly.

Something else I can't recommend more highly: this toasted coconut ice cream recipe. Serve with chocolate sauce.

The cleaning stage of grief

I've never spring cleaned like I spring cleaned this last week. Focus of mania: the pantry. Loose birthday candles, light bulbs, jars of chutney, kitschy Fire King china bought in thrift shops, precious china bequeathed by deceased loved ones, gag food gifts (canned spotted dick), bags of Chinese mushrooms, rock sugar, bonito flakes, teff flour, vases, fondue kits, and skewers had accumulated in such unruly masses that I often couldn't find things I knew I had. And so I bought more -- more Chinese mushrooms, rock sugar, bonito flakes, etc. 

The other day I took everything out. I sent the kitschy china and much more to Goodwill, and threw out any foodstuff that looked like it might kill us. Then I cooked an enormous pot of ancient beans and rice for the chickens, and put everything else that was remotely edible in a bin. See photo at top. It doesn't look like much, but it is much.  The goal is to empty the bin, and to that end I have been improvising our meals. I've been more creative than usual in my cooking. Also, not coincidentally, less successful.

Here's what I made the other night. 

Pasta puttanesca. 

The puttanesca was, in fact, very successful. I made it without looking at a cookbook so I can legally print "my" original, totally unoriginal recipe: Saute one big chopped onion and 5 cloves chopped garlic in 1/4 cup olive oil. Add one 28 oz. can of chopped tomatoes, 2 TBS capers, 2/3 cup wrinkled black olives that you have torn into nice, meaty chunks, 5 oil-packed anchovies that have sat in your fridge for several years and which you have roughly chopped, 1/2 teaspoon oregano, a pinch of red pepper flakes, lots of black pepper, and salt. Simmer until it looks like sauce (25 minutes) and toss with a pound of boiled spaghetti. Huge hit. 

 

Strawberry jam cake. I made many jars of strawberry jam last spring, labeled them prettily, then forgot to give them away. They have been cluttering the pantry and making me sad. It doesn't seem polite or generous to give away year-old jam and as a family we only eat so much jam, ergo: strawberry jam cake.

Here's the mediocre recipe I concocted using spice cake as a rough guide: Cream a stick of butter with 1/3 cup white sugar and 2/3 cup light brown sugar. Beat in 3 eggs until combined. Add 1/2 cup about-to-expire Greek yogurt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 cup strawberry jam, and 1 cup flour. Pour into a buttered 9-inch pie plate and bake at 350 for 45 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. It's extremely damp, sticky, supersweet, fragrant, and a rich, nutty brown -- not the best cake that's ever crossed your lips, but you could d0 worse.

Palm sugar ice cream. Thought this might complement strawberry jam cake. Coarse and gritty, palm sugar has a low glycemic index and an earthy, even dirty, quality that I kind of like. But the bag I bought last year had overstayed its welcome, so I devised this way to get rid of it: Heat a cup of cream and a cup of milk in a saucepan. Whisk 6 egg yolks with 1/2 cup palm sugar and whisk in some hot milk. Pour mixture back into saucepan and, stirring constantly, cook gently until it forms a custard. Strain. Cool. Stir in 2 teaspoons vanilla. Freeze in your ice cream machine. Or, better yet, just put the palm sugar straight into the trash. The putty-colored ice cream had a funky flavor and no one, including me, wanted to eat it.

Fruity teff cookies. My niece Stella helped me create these cocoa-colored mounds of horror.

We started with a standard shortbread formula, then substituted teff flour for some of the white flour. (I've had great success baking with teff, so I was genuinely hopeful.) Stella requested raisins, so we added "tiny raisins" (a.k.a. currants, of which I have several pounds) and, in an attempt to produce a fluffier cookie, an egg and some baking powder. The cakey blobs we pulled from the oven a short while later had a repugnant sandy texture and tasted salty and altogether vile. 

So there you have it. An off-road cooking adventure like this is fun every once in a while, and helps me appreciate recipes.

Numb is the new normal

I never appreciated the variety and loveliness of eggs until our hens started to lay. I keep waiting for a green egg. One young Ameraucana survived the recent massacre, but she has yet to pony up a green egg and we worry she may be one of the Ameraucanas that doesn't. At dusk the other day, I was putting the chickens to bed and this particular pullet stood on the rickety ramp up to the hen house, cocked her head, and, for a good long minute, peered at me sideways out of one glittering amber-colored eye. She has this heavily feathered brow that makes her look fierce and commanding, and standing there, gazing into the eye of this beautiful and elegant animal, I realized . . . well, I don't know what I realized except that for all the heartbreak, if we'd never gotten chickens I never would have known them for the funny, various, and mysterious creatures that they are. 

 

After everything that's happened in the last few weeks, it seems strange to go back to posting dowdy pictures of what I cook, but that's what I'm going to do. On Thursday, the night after my mother's memorial service, we held a subdued little party with my sister's family and my husband's parents, who had flown out from Boston.

On the menu: Pioneer Woman enchiladas. I was deeply grateful not to have to chop a lot of vegetables, shop for exotic ingredients, or worry that children were going to complain -- the charm of all Pioneer Woman recipes. Filled with hamburger, canned olives, and canned chilies, then topped with canned sauce and shredded cheddar, these enchiladas were exactly like what you get on a combination plate in a Mexican-American restaurant that serves frozen raspberry margaritas and fried ice cream. 

I remarked on this, perhaps in a slightly sour way. "But Mom," said Isabel, "that's a good thing."

She's right, it was a good thing, a very good thing. It just wasn't an interesting thing.  

I made PW's chewy, crusty, sugary blackberry cobbler for dessert

which is as restrained a dish as you'll find in the PW sweets repertoire. (Tasty. Recipe is here.) Anything Ree Drummond can frost, she will frost, but even she can't frost a cobbler. 

We need a bunker

This is a terrible story. 

As longtime readers may recall, we used to let our chickens range freely through our fenced yard. But in October a dog broke in and killed five of our hens. After that, we built a protected chicken run where we enclose the birds when we are not around. 

Like yesterday. Yesterday, my sister and I took care of business related to the upcoming memorial for our mother. For instance, we bought a casket, paid for the chapel, and went to meet the deacon who will be officiating at the funeral.

 

We were discussing biblical readings with this nice, grandfatherly man at his office when my cell phone rang. A neighbor reported that two terriers had broken into our yard and somehow penetrated our locked chicken coop.

 

When I got home shortly thereafter, the police, a representative of the Humane Society, and various appalled neighbors were standing around in our sideshow of a yard. The dogs had been sent home and onlookers had very courteously stuffed the ten -- ten -- dead chickens into bulging Hefty bags. Our favorite chickens all died. Alberta Einstein (see above), whom Owen was going to show at the Marin County Fair in a few months, perished; so did July; so did our two cuckoo Marans. It's a mystery how the terriers got into the coop. The only breach in the perimeter was a strip of chicken wire ripped off an impossibly tiny gap in the elevated main door of the hen house. But then they're tiny dogs. According to onlookers, they showed remarkable teamwork, one of them herding, the other killing. And, of course, the chickens had nowhere to fly, nowhere to hide, stuck as they were in their coop.

We have legal options which I am seriously considering this time. I don't want to be a nasty, vindictive neighbor, but the owners of the dogs broke the law and as a result we lost not just property, but our much loved pets. The dogs didn't dash out and do this while the owner was looking the other direction. According to one neighbor, they'd been running around loose for three hours. They had plenty of time to strategize and storm that coop. 

We have a handful of chickens left. When I picked him up after school, Owen wept furiously and said he wants to get more as soon as possible. I loved our chickens, but I'm deeply discouraged and unsure whether I can stand more heartbreak.

                                                                          

My mom

Although she couldn't eat and was frequently incoherent after she came home from the hospital 10 days ago, my mother often asked for a tiny cup of coffee. Overjoyed that she actually wanted something, we made the coffee, even knowing she wouldn't drink it. She'd clutch the hand-made mug (she was a potter) in her bony, jaundiced fingers and attempt to bring it to her lips, usually hitting somewhere in the middle of her chin. Then she would just lie there, fingers laced around the warm cup, eyes shut. I worried she would fall asleep, spill the hot coffee and burn herself. I would try to extract the mug from her hands. The other day when I thought she was dozing, she said, "I'm going to do this for 45 minutes just to drive you crazy."

I would say she was as funny as ever in her final days, except it's not precisely true: She was funnier.

On Tuesday, she again requested coffee. Then she mumbled, "newspaper." I brought in the day's Wall Street Journal (she was an obsessive WSJ reader) and propped it up on her tented legs. She tried to put on her owlish red glasses, but had lost the ability, so I did it for her. For 20 minutes she sat there absolutely still, clutching the coffee, newspaper propped up, sunken eyes closed. It was pitiful, but it was valiant, and it's the last image of my beautiful, exuberant mother that I will remember with any pleasure. After that, all I saw was the cancer.

She died early Friday morning, my aunt and sister holding her hands. She was ready to die -- she'd said it many times -- and I am glad for her that she is free.

I am not glad for myself. I used to call her every day, often more than once. I keep having the urge to pick up the phone, an urge I think is only going to get stronger as everyday life starts up again. Talking to my mother was my everyday life.

An update

My mother's health, already shaky, took a precipitous and irreversible turn for the worse this week. If my flight to Israel had not been canceled, I would have been there these past few days, not here. The cancellation of that flight, so disappointing at the time, was a blessing in disguise, one of the biggest blessings of my life.

This is a very hard time, but my mother is surrounded by people who love her -- my sister and me, my aunt, my grandmother. And countless friends. No one has more friends than my ebullient and warm-hearted mother. She will go home later today. I probably won't post again until it is through.

Oh well

I was correct about the traveling weather. My flight to Israel was canceled last night, as was every other flight out of JFK, which made for the gnarliest airport scene I've ever witnessed. The fact that we'd all traveled to the airport through the raging storm made it impossible to lay all the blame on Delta, tempting though that always is. They couldn't book me on another flight until Tuesday, which was too late. Meanwhile they lost my brand new suitcase, which contains all my brand new traveling clothes.

I was ridiculously excited about this trip. It was a tour arranged by the great Jewish food writer Joan Nathan and it was designed for American food writers. Everything but the airfare was paid for by an Israeli agency. Sometimes when I was stressed this winter, which was often, I would lie down on the sofa and reread the itinerary and think, well, this may be sad and hard, but soon I will be touring a Tel Aviv spice market.

The trip just wasn't meant to be. There were signs all along, and after pouting for 12 hours, I've accepted this. I have a nice place to stay in NYC until I can retrieve my suitcase and get a flight back to California. Today, I'm going to buy a toothbrush, see Inglorious Basterds, finish The Help, and take the train to Brooklyn to finally eat some Di Fara pizza. Just typing that last sentence, I'm all cheered up.

Almost.

Up in the air

I've been in New York for some meetings, which always requires a big mental readjustment. I used to find NYC agitating and overly intense, but now I find it deeply restful, as all my most pressing obligations are on another coast. The other day, when I was in the middle of a meeting, I got a call on my cell phone from a neighbor telling me that seven of our chickens were running around on the street back in California. My heart sank. I love those silly chickens. I explained my situation to the neighbor and she agreed to catch them and toss them over the fence into our yard. Her exact words: "It will be an adventure." We have very nice neighbors.

Two hours later my husband called and bellowed, "I came home and our yard is full of chickens that don't belong to us." He sorted it all out, returned the wandering chickens to their rightful owner. He's not a fan of chickens, but he's a very nice husband.

Today, I ordered an obscenely large pastrami sandwich at the Carnegie Deli. It was sort of raucous and fun and touristy, but I just can't eat that much pastrami anymore. I would have wrapped up the pound-and-a-half of leftover fatty pink meat and rye bread and carried it cross-country to the chickens, but I'm actually supposed to fly to Israel tonight. It's a food-oriented trip, so I'll try to post daily about goat farms and spice markets, and will resume Pioneer Woman when I return.

Although. This weather. It's raining and gusting pretty violently out there and I have a hard time believing that a plane can take off into this muck.

Chickens are such attention hogs

I had been neglecting our bees. For the first time in a few months, I went into the hives yesterday afternoon and found gallons of honey, but not a single bee. I had been scrupulously leaving the honey for them to enjoy over the winter, but apparently that was unnecessary. So I removed a frame and manually extracted the honey by scooping the comb into a cheesecloth and squeezing it into a bowl which was, as you can imagine, a colossal, sticky mess. I did manage to extract a pint and a half and it's delicious honey. If the bees were alive, I'd be disgustingly smug.

Given our substantial investment in bee infrastructure, I'm going to order more bees and try again this spring. If I can keep them alive for an entire year, maybe I'll buy a honey extractor. 

Meat & ketchup

I'm not going to ding the Pioneer Woman for adding sugar to her ketchup-based comfort meatball sauce because yesterday was long and hard and these soft, fluffy meatballs were the nicest part. Not just super-easy to make, but delicious. I have been hard on Pioneer Woman. I realize that I don't find bland, creamy foods (chicken pot pie, chicken spaghetti) tasty or comforting, I find them silly. But give me some slow-cooked red meat in a sweet tomato sauce and I care a lot less about nutrition, calories, and fake ingredients. Inconsistent, I know.

Not for everyone, this recipe, but we loved it.

Maybe I'm just jealous

As Azure Song pointed out in a recent comment, Pioneer Woman aims straight at the taste buds of American men. She's the dream wife who never scolds, nags or serves brussels sprouts, never drags her spouse to a Cambodian restaurant, Romanian movie, or the ballet. Instead, she fries him up some battered chicken and nicknames him Marlboro Man. 

I like Pioneer Woman, like her lack of pretension and her humor and heart. But sometimes she bugs me. Here's the foreword to her breakfast burrito recipe: "If you're looking for fancy chipotle-asiago-chorizo poblano-fancy-o breakfast burritos, you've come to the wrong wife and mother. And I've tried that route; believe me, I've tried it. The problem is, my family -- my husband and four children -- just don't like chipotle-asiago-chorizo-poblano-fancy-o stuff."

Wait a minute. Chipotle, asiago, chorizo and poblano aren't really "fancy-o stuff," they're inexpensive Mexican/Italian staples you can find at Safeway, and while you wouldn't want to eat them all together, each on its own is, in my shrewish opinion, more delicious and nutritious than, say, cream of mushroom soup. Moreover, I'd sooner put poblano and chorizo in a burrito than frozen hash browns (per PW's recipe), not because I'm "fancy-o" but because I think the burrito would taste better.  C'mon, Pioneer Woman, lead your timid family into some new culinary frontiers! You're making the rest of us look bad.

I'm not sure Pioneer Woman's rustic flat apple pie, which I baked the other night, was as man-pleasing as her usual fare. It's essentially apples and sugar folded in a free-form crust. PW seems to realize this is rather austere and elegant, maybe even healthy, and offers a suggestion: "For extra sweetness, drizzle on jarred caramel topping after removing the pie from the oven."

This chick does not fight fair. 

Pioneer Woman vs. Thomas Keller

Since both Pioneer Woman and Thomas Keller have published recipes for chicken pot pie, and given they occupy opposite ends of the culinary spectrum,  I thought it would be illuminating to bake their pies and compare. So we held a pot pie party the other night. One Safeway rotisserie chicken yielded enough meat for both pies.

Unsurprisingly, the pot pie from Pioneer Woman Cooks was a breeze to make, as Ree Drummond is all about the breeziness. You saute vegetables (frozen peas, carrots, celery, onion) in butter, toss in some flour, shredded chicken, broth, a bouillon cube, and cream. Briefly simmer, then pour into a pie plate. Pioneer Woman calls for just a top crust, which she makes with flour, shortening, and an egg. I did not enjoy working with this sticky, unwieldy dough  and would not use her crust recipe again.  Total number of pots, bowls, and other cooking vessels PW calls for: 3.  

Unsurprisingly, the pot pie from Ad Hoc At Home was painstaking, as Thomas Keller is all about the pains. You blanch vegetables (potatoes, carrots, celery, pearl onions) in four separate saucepans, then make a bechamel that reduces for 40 minutes (an eternity when you're trying to keep milk from boiling over) and requires much subsequent pot-scouring.  The all-butter double crust, however, was very straightforward and user-friendly. That recipe is a keeper. Number of pots and vessels Keller calls for: 10.

For fun, I also heated a bunch of frozen pot pies.

Sadly, I forgot which was which after I took them out of the boxes so we couldn't really rank them, though it hardly matters. My husband and brother-in-law got all misty gazing at the boxes and reminiscing about their bachelor days, but the frozen pies? Universally nasty. In isolation, I'm sure they taste fine, but sampled side-by-side with homemade pies, they were noisome. As Isabel said, "It's like they have water in them."

That sounds weird now, but in the moment, tasting the storebought pies, I knew exactly what she meant.

She used to wear that little purple suit.

So, both of the homemade pies were hands down more delicious than any of the storebought pies. Deciding which of the homemade pies we liked better presented more of a challenge.

 The crust on Thomas Keller's was flaky, almost like a croissant, very buttery. Everyone loved this crust. There was also unanimous agreement that a pot pie needs a bottom crust, which his has and PW's doesn't. The interior of his pie was firm and cohesive so you could actually cut it into neat slices, though some critics thought the filling lacked flavor.

 

Certainly, by contrast with PW's brashly seasoned pie, Keller's was a bit bland. There was nothing subtle about the flavor of PW's pie, thanks to a bouillon cube, chicken broth, and dried thyme. Whether this was good or bad depends on who you ask. Her pie was also exceedingly runny, called for a ladle rather than a knife. I'll let the tasters speak for themselves:

My mother: "I liked the potatoes in the first one (Keller's), and the crust was unbelievable. But I liked the second one (PW's) very much. They both needed more vegetables."

Justine: "I want the two pies to get married because Thomas Keller crust is fantastic, but I wish it had fewer potatoes and more flavor and was maybe a little runnier." 

Fastidious Isabel, gesturing in disgust at the soupy Pioneer Woman pie: "This is why I don't like chicken pot pie!"

Owen had a similar reaction and refused to even touch the PW pie: "You know I don't like soup."

However, the two adult males at the party, both of whom consider themselves pot pie experts, praised Pioneer Woman's pie.

Brother-in-law: "The critical issues with both of these is they're not in individual portions! They're not supposed to be actual pies, they're SUPPOSED to be soup in a crust."

My husband agreed. I don't have any quotes from him because he was to busy shoveling pie into his mouth. You know what word I detest and can't even use except to say how much I detest it? Pie hole.

We held a vote. Keller got four votes, though Justine was a pretty wobbly supporter. Pioneer Woman got two votes, and there was one abstention. Given that he is Thomas Keller, I think this is a win for Pioneer Woman. Or at the very least, a tie. 

For the record, I was staunchly in the Keller camp. But I was thinking later how very little I love chicken pot pie, even an elegant Thomas Keller pie that involves ten cooking vessels and a 40-minute bechamel. I'd rather consume empty calories in the form of potstickers, cheeseburgers, BLTs, potato chips, manhattans, or blue Shropshire cheese. I'm just not that into chicken pot pie. 

Still, it was a fun party.

Mmm mmm, not bad

To make the chicken spaghetti from Pioneer Woman Cooks, you poach chicken, pull the meat off the bones, then boil spaghetti in the broth. Drain spaghetti and mix in a big bowl with pimentos, onions, cream of mushroom soup, the chicken, and a mountain of shredded cheddar cheese. Top with more cheese. Bake. Growing up, I enjoyed many such soft, mild, cheesy casseroles at the home of my paternal grandmother. I always wished my mother, who eschewed processed foods, would take some pointers.
Of course, I have grown up to be just like my mother. Covering that warm, freshly poached chicken with canned ecru sludge made my skin crawl. Did you know Campbell's mushroom soup contains MSG? Until yesterday, I did not.


Everyone liked the casserole, as Pioneer Woman promised. But my husband loved it. He informed me that he's having the leftovers for dinner tonight, which is nice, I guess, though I find his zeal for this foray into old school American cuisine just slightly disconcerting, like I put on a naughty schoolgirl outfit for kicks and now he never wants me to go back to grown-up clothes.

Read this book. Try this chocolate.

I recently read Katharine Weber's excellent new novel True Confections (my review is here) which is narrated, very unreliably, by a woman who works for a fictional New England candy company. Towards the end of the book, the narrator is walking through a candy convention and a representative of Green & Black's offers her a sliver of white chocolate. Her response:

"I said, No thanks, I don't like white chocolate, and he laughed at me, holding out a small square on the tip of his knife, which I took. I put it in my mouth. Ecstasy! Revelation! Incredible mouthfeel! Creamy vanilla pleasure flooded through me. The intense chocolateness of this ambrosial substance was hidden in plain sight. He laughed at me again, holding out another square on the tip of his knife."

This epiphany inspires the narrator to invent a disastrous new candy. This epiphany inspired me to search for Green & Black's white chocolate everywhere I went for almost a month. In vain. I started to doubt its existence until I found a bar at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco last week. I was so happy. Seriously, finding that chocolate made my boring day. Never underestimate the non-trivial pleasure of even a trivial quest. 

And the chocolate? It's not waxy or yellowish, like so much white chocolate, but a rich beige, visibly flecked with vanilla bean. On the flavor of this stupendous chocolate, at least, the narrator of True Confections can be relied: Ecstasy! Revelation! I should have bought ten bars when I had the chance. 

Breakfast of cowboys

Here's a surprise: Muffins are even better when you dunk them in a half pound of melted butter and roll them in sugar. 

The Pioneer Woman calls these French breakfast puffs, but they did not strike me as very French. They struck me as very American. Also, very delicious. If you're interested, this is one of the recipes that appears in both the Pioneer Woman's cookbook and on her web site. 

First, you make a fluffy, sweet, nutmeggy muffin. PW calls for shortening, which somehow seems nastier in a muffin than in a pie crust, but since I had a tub in the refrigerator, I used it. Pale, puffy muffins emerged from the oven 25 minutes later.

I thought that a half pound of butter (Pioneer Woman calls for salted butter) was more than we needed for dunking the muffins, but Isabel ran out before the last two muffins were coated. You don't just dip the crowns in the butter, you drench the whole muffin.This meant that there were two sticks of butter coating 10 muffins, which is about 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter per muffin. Is that a lot? How much butter do people who butter muffins put on their muffins?

 

After buttering, we rolled the damp muffins in cinnamon sugar. 

"Don't be afraid to really coat 'em up," writes Pioneer Woman. "Let the kids help!" 

I let my kid perform the whole messy operation.

"Cinnamony sweet perfection!" gushes the Pioneer Woman. "The deliciousness of these beauties is not to be underestimated." One of the mysteries of Pioneer Woman is how she manages to be both immodest and charming at the same time, which she does.

At any rate, we all agreed with her -- cinnamony sweet perfection! All except Owen.

"Tastes like a donut," said Owen. Then: "No offense, but it's a little too sugary and you can taste salt in there." 

He was responding, I think, to the salted butter. I told him he's crazy, that salt, sugar and fat are the qualities we look for in a food, and that when he gets the whole trifecta in a single dish he should rejoice, and that he should never say "no offense" because just those two words are offensive. 

I didn't really say that. I don't think I said anything. This morning I offered to toast one of yesterday's leftover puffs for breakfast, but he declined. He wants pancakes, so I am now going to make Pioneer Woman's pancakes. They appear to consist mostly of sour cream.

I must say, canned clams are very convenient

I made the linguine with clam sauce out of Pioneer Woman Cooks the other night and we all gobbled it up because it was so very delicious.

The gist of a subsequent conversation with my husband:

Tipsy: She calls for 3/4 cup of cream in her clam sauce, in addition to butter and Parmesan. Everything tastes better with cream! I could make any of my boring recipes better if I sloshed in some cream. She's like that person who always tells you what you want to hear but doesn't really have your back.

Husband: I disagree. It's not her job to make things healthy, it's her job is to publish recipes that taste really good.

He has a point. Julia Child didn't stint on the cream. Subject requires more thought.

He also told me I should post this link to a story about ballpark food. I would eat the poutine, but nothing about a Twinkie cheese dog sounds appealing.

I'm psyched for the chicken-fried steak

Someone sent me this book a few weeks ago and I immediately sat down and read it cover-to-cover. It's a charming, scrapbooky volume that sucks you in with the gorgeous photography and anecdotal sidebars. I find even the recipes -- some of which are on the Pioneer Woman site, some of which aren't -- fun to read. When Isabel saw it she had the same response and told me I had to cook from it it next. She asks very little from me, so I agreed.

Yesterday, for my birthday, my mother bought me a copy of Michael Pollan's Food Rules. Rule rule #41: Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Greeks. 

What he really meant, but was too polite to say: Don't eat like the Oklahomans. Under any circumstances. Ever. I have scoured Pioneer Woman Cooks, and it contains nary a recipe that doesn't break some food rule or another. Except maybe the salsa. Everything is swimming in heavy cream or fortified with ground beef or drenched in icing. Apparently, the Marlboro Man doesn't like vegetables or fish, so Ree Drummond simply doesn't cook them. They seem to have an unusually happy marriage. It makes a person think.

Last night, I served Drummond's meat loaf,  a mighty 12-inch ziggurat molded from ground chuck, milk-soaked bread and Parmesan cheese that is then wrapped in bacon and slathered in sweetened ketchup and baked. Fabulous. Owen ate an enormous wedge. My own Marlboro Man almost kissed my feet. It was very awkward.

I owe a final review of Moro. Coming soon.

Some pretty pictures of food. For a change.

Peppermint stick milkshake at Lunchbox Laboratory in Seattle. 

Cheeseburger plate at Lunchbox Laboratory.

 Bacon cheeseburger at Lunchbox Laboratory. 

I apologize for this nasty picture, but can you see how much bacon is on there? That sounds like a good thing, but wasn't. Too smoky. It's the right kind of mistake for a restaurant to make. We loved this place.

Golden Grahams milkshake from a food truck in Portland. I couldn't get the kids to order this so I had to order it myself.

Okay, so this is not pretty, but we ate it all up: pandan ice cream on a bed of warm sticky rice showered with a pound or so of chopped peanuts. Served to us at Ping restaurant in Portland's very petite Chinatown.

I was going to say that the food in the Pacific Northwest is the best in the country, but once you leave the big cities it deteriorates sharply. A few years ago, when Owen and I were visiting the town of Fossil, Oregon, the waitress asked him to break open one of his chicken fingers to make sure it was cooked. The sad part is, we had to go back the next night because the only other restaurant in Fossil had been shut down by the health department. Above is a "sundae" Owen ordered in a diner in the town of Phoenix, Oregon. I thought it was funny, but he was totally fine with it. "I don't like rice on sundaes," he said. It does make the Ping sundae look like a little grotesque.

850 miles

Over the weekend, my children and I drove from San Francisco to Seattle and I won't mince words: It was miserable -- wet, monotonous, endless. Next time, we're flying. If not for audiobooks, I think we would have turned around at Eugene. Old Man and the Sea -- huge hit. My Antonia -- less of a hit, but tolerated. It's not really a boy book. Here's a passage in which the narrator recalls the bread Antonia's immigrant mother baked:

I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread she gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin peck measure that Krajek had used about the barn. When she took the paste out to bake it she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped the sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

Today, of course, we call this a starter, and "sour, ashy-grey" bread is very fancy. 

We love Seattle. In addition to touring the Ballard Locks with cousins and watching GI Joe: The Rise of the Cobra with friends, we've eaten much delicious food. Highlights: The chicken liver and kimchi fried rice at Joule, and Tilth's butterscotch pudding, which actually tasted of Scotch. 

Today, unfortunately, we have to get back in the car. 

 

Better cream of tartar biscuits

Every photograph ever taken of Owen would look like this if he had his way. He's eating biscuits, watching League of Super Evil, and no one's making him get dressed. 

Thanks to An Honest Cook, who recommended this excellent recipe, the second batch of Crazy Heart-inspired cream-of-tartar biscuits was stellar, producing 18 tall, tender, very light and fluffy biscuits. Far above average in the biscuit department and I highly recommend.

The kids and I are supposed to start driving to Seattle this afternoon, otherwise I would use the leftovers to attempt this incredibly tempting recipe for biscuit pudding from Salon.