Dystopia envy

My weapon would be the spatula.

Owen and I saw The Hunger Games yesterday and loved it, but afterwards I felt strangely blue. I say "strangely" because I was not feeling sorry for the district kids who have to run around the forest murdering each other to save their own lives, but sorry for myself because I never do anything urgent or athletic or noble involving arrows or wasps or homicide. The biggest challenges of the weekend involved remembering the password to our credit card account and describing the vistas of Big Sur without using the word "majestic."*

When we got back from the movie I started cleaning the kitchen, which was probably not the right move, but the other day I read that Elizabeth David's kitchen was a room of "orderly clutter." That is exactly the kind of kitchen I want! And I've already achieved the clutter, so, halfway there.

I'll just fast-forward through the first hour of cleaning until I to got to the spatulas, which were the exciting part. Okay, the "exciting" part.

I had six spatulas, only one of which I actually purchased, sometime around 1990. I needed to put one spatula in the Goodwill box in order to achieve "orderly clutter." But which spatula?

You see why I might want to be reaped?

It turns out that my favorites are the two little jankety-looking old spatulas with the thin, rusting, flexible heads and the black plastic handles. These are the vintage spatulas that came down from the kitchens of my mother and grandmother and they are very precise and light and while the handles of both are gnarled from accidental melting episodes, they are my top-rated spatulas by far and not for sentimental reasons. They are simply the finest tools.

much used

I basically hate the stainless steel spatulas because they are heavy and stiff -- more like bludgeons than delicate implements for manipulating fried eggs -- and the handles get very hot.  As a people, we really went overboard with the stainless steel in the '90s and '00s. But even worse than the stainless steel spatulas: the plastic-headed spatula. It is thick and dull and you feel like you're flipping pancakes with a spoon. Sound the cannon for the plastic-headed spatula.

Takeaway from all this? Some things have gotten better in the last 40 years, like cars, which use less fuel, spew less pollution, and are generally safer for human use. Some things have gotten worse, like spatulas.

Oh, I was in such a crabby mood after The Hunger Games.

security potholder

I still couldn't throw away anything associated with my mother, like the quilted potholders she sewed from old sundresses or the vintage peanut butter jar filled with rock salt from the time we made ice cream circa 1975. I will have to incorporate that Skippy jar into orderly clutter.

the weirdest, most useless item in our kitchen

Speaking of my lovely mother, today is the second anniversary of her death. She's never far from my thoughts but I will say that the second anniversary finds her older daughter in much better mental condition than did the first.

Real life is actually full of terrible, lonely challenges. For the most part they don't involve arrows, genetically altered wasps or running very, very fast. Sometimes I wish they did.

the very last picture I ever took of her

*not written into the contract; personal challenge

Banana jelly

too custardy even for me

A few posts ago I described Shirley Corriher as "wizardly," an assessment based on having read CookWise and BakeWise, but never actually testing one of the recipes.

I baked her banana bread yesterday, the one that involves folding whipped cream into the batter. The first glitch I noticed was her specification of a pan (8 x 4.5) into which the batter would not fit.

So I buttered and floured and parchmented another, larger pan. Then I filled it with the batter and put it atop a hot baking stone in the oven, per her directions.

After her specified baking time (a suspiciously short 35 minutes), the bread was still jiggling under a  thin, pallid crust. So I baked it for another 30 minutes after which it was still wobbly, so I left it in for another 10 minutes. When the bread seemed firm and tested done with a toothpick, I took it out. Let it cool. Cut it. It was like a block of jelly. Not precisely underbaked, but strange. Like it had been steamed or I had forgotten to add flour. Which I hadn't.

I refrigerated the loaf overnight and ate a piece for breakfast and it was tasty, but you would not serve this bread to anyone outside your own family. I found this disillusioning thread on amazon which confirms my fears about BakeWise. I really did believe that Corriher was a wizard and that in BakeWise I had a masterful book of spells! Sad.

Day before yesterday, the goats finally breached the fence between our yard and our neighbors' yard. We love our neighbors. Joan is in her seventies, Bill in his eighties, and they go on epic camping trips in the Nevada backcountry and grow a beautiful vegetable garden that I can see from the window right now. The goats topped the chard, so now there are some red stalks sticking up in the air. They didn't eat all of the chard. As Joan put it, "They just had a little hors d'oeuvre."

Needless to say, we felt terrible and are going to rebuild the fence so this doesn't happen again.  Joan told me that she would accept as compensation for the chard any leftover baked goods my family doesn't eat.

Well, my family isn't going to eat this banana bread, and neither is Joan. This loaf is for the chickens.

On my family table

A few weeks ago I decided to purge the cookbook collection and made several towering stacks of  books I might be willing to part with. Couldn't just toss them, though. Each book was going to get a chance. I'd cook a few recipes and then decide whether to jettison the book or keep it. 

I started with Around My Family Table by John Besh. I'd only recently bought the book and already wished I hadn't. Besh is a handsome chef who lives in Louisiana with his wife and their four young sons, whom Besh often calls "lads." Although Besh is a busy professional with numerous restaurants, he is deeply concerned about the decline of everyday home cooking. The subititle of his large, handsome book: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking.

No need to explain what rubbed me the wrong way when I can simply quote:

"For eight years we have raised our own Charolais cattle on rolling, grassy pastures north of New Orleans. It's the beef we have at our house. Of course, a big freezer is the only way to afford and keep good beef. . ."

"If you have difficulty finding a shoulder, use venison shanks instead." 

"Keeping it simple and delicious means deliberate strategies for planning ahead. I make intensely flavored broths, then freeze them in ice cube trays and empty the cubes into Ziploc bags."

"With meat from the neck of our Mangalitsa pigs, ground and seasoned with crushed peppers and cane syrup, sometimes I'll make sausage patties that fit perfectly on a biscuit, the way Jack likes it."

"Shredding the potatoes for these super-crunchy 'nests' is made easy with a clever device called a Benriner Turnning Slicer, or use a heavier Japanese mandoline. . ."

"I am almost never around on weeknights."

Done quoting now.

I'm happy to report that while the text and photographs rubbed me the wrong way, the recipes have been mostly terrific.

lemon ice box pie. Sounds quaint, grandmotherly, humble and delectable, and I loved the actual pie even more than the name. Beat together 3 egg yolks, a can of sweetened condensed milk, lemon zest, lemon juice and pinch of salt. Beat egg whites until stiff, fold into lemon mixture, pour this lovely tangy foam into a graham cracker crust. Freeze and cross your fingers about salmonella. Thaw briefly before serving. I could have eaten the entire pie in one sitting. That is not an exaggeration. The recipe is here; I would serve the whipped cream on the side, not spread on top. Grade: A.

potato dumplings. Orbs of seasoned mashed potato stuffed with bacon and chives then poached and topped with butter and crunchy bread crumbs. Devastating. My silly family said they preferred plain mashed potatoes, but they are unreliable. Grade: A.

lentil soup. I'll let Besh make his case: "I've added cream to this recipe, which I've never seen before in a lentil soup. It gives the soup such a succulent texture." It really went against the grain to put cream in lentil soup, which is supposed to be sludgy, healthy, and dark brown. But why? I don't know. I've always just thought of it that way, as hippie penance food. The first night I couldn't see the payoff of all that cream, but the second night, the soup came into its rich, luxurious own. Don't know about "succulent texture." Grade: A.

angel biscuits. Yeasted. You make and shape the night before serving for breakfast. Tasted like a cross between a buttery croissant and a biscuit. Recipe is here. Grade A.

olive oil roasted cauliflower. As it sounds. Grade: B+.

gingersnaps. Ordinary. You can probably do just as well with the recipe on the back of the brown sugar box. Grade: B.

herb roasted chicken. As it sounds. Grade: B.

carbonara with sweet peas and ham. I've made better. Grade: B-.

sugar snap pea salad with pecans. Excited about this because sugar snap peas sounded like they'd make a crunchy, sweet salad. Didn't quite work, though. Grade: C.

I would keep Besh's book based on the number of excellent recipes it contains, but in the last few weeks my desire to purge the collection has abated. My house will never be a decorator showcase. The cookbooks can stay. They can all stay.

Banana bread buried in the middle

The prettiest thing I've made lately, if not the very best.

Day before yesterday, late afternoon, I was about to unload the dishwasher and thought I would mind the chore less if I had something to listen to. Although I had tried and failed to read it several decades ago, I decided to download The Screwtape Letters. by by C.S. Lewis because it was cheap ($5.95) and short. For the next 3.5 hours I did not at all mind unloading the dishwasher, cleansing a mildewy lunchbox, reducing tangerine juice, sterilizing the drawer organizers, mixing another loaf of banana bread, and then baking a completely gratuitous marmalade tart for dessert because I could not stop listening. A book beloved by both Sarah Palin (well, supposedly) and David Foster Wallace? And me?

You have to read this book!

I've baked three banana bread recipes since I last posted on the topic, omitting nuts and chocolate (when called for) partly because they would skew the comparisons, but mostly because I like the texture of banana bread to replicate the smooth, custardy texture of an actual banana.

perfect banana bread and burnt banana bread

1. The banana bread recipe from Joanne Chang's Flour (recommended by Nora K and printed here) was the most perfect and beautiful loaf. Owen thought it was less moist than my usual Beth Hensperger's recipe, but ate huge chunks of it nonetheless. He was right about it being slightly less moist, but then he and I like banana bread that is almost wet -- a bread some would describe as "dense" and "heavy." Chang's bread is light. Her recipe calls for cinnamon which I would omit in future because I like unadulterated banana flavor. But that's just my taste. This is a truly fantastic banana bread and I highly recommend. (If you make the recipe using the version online, choose a 9x5 inch loaf pan and please note that the original recipe as printed in Chang's book calls for heating the oven to 325 degrees F. Nora K said yogurt can be substituted for the sour cream/creme fraiche so I used yogurt and it worked great.)

2. The roasted banana bread from Kristin's recipe smelled incredible, first when the bananas were roasting and later when the bread was baking. I also loved the way the recipe was written. I don't ever actually mash bananas in a bowl, always drop them directly from their peels into the mixer and I appreciated seeing a recipe acknowledge this shortcut. Sadly, I managed to burn this loaf -- a thick layer of burn. But that the unburnt middle layer had the mightiest banana flavor of the loaves I've baked so far.

3. The Braddock Tavern banana bread recipe posted by Sarah Policastro in the comments to the original banana bread post is the closest to the benchmark Hensperger recipe. I think it might be better, but I would have to taste the two side by side. This recipe uses butter (which you cream rather than melt), 5 bananas (required to fill 2 cups -- lots!) and some applesauce. I made one big loaf, baked it for a longer time than specified for two small loaves, refrigerated the loaf overnight and ended up with a custardy and creamy bread, almost like a pudding. I love this bread, which is totally different from the other two banana breads and probably the closest to my personal ideal.

maybe underbaked, but very tasty.

4. I also baked the banana blondies from Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard. (Recipe here; you'll need a metric scale.) They are a gooey confection packed with bananas, white chocolate, and brazil nuts and of course they are in a whole separate category from banana bread. These blondies are the work, as Screwtape might put it, of "our Father below." I ate one blondie and am not allowed near the rest.

End of banana bread claptrap. For now.

******

On another subject, Nancy Silverton's Mozza got me started cooking mussels which I'd always thought of as "special," but which turn out to be fast and cheap and great for weeknights. Don't wait to order them in restaurants; they're much easier to make at home than a pot of soup. The other day I steamed mussels according to Big Sur Bakery Cookbook's very rudimentary recipe (white wine, herbs) but the resulting mussels couldn't hold a candle to that original zesty Silverton recipe. My husband said, "You should only make those first mussels you made." He is right. I have found my mussels.

Owen: "I didn't like them."

This past week, I also made seared scallops with cauliflower puree and tangerine reduction out of The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook. It sounds fussy, but was super-easy.You start with big sea scallops -- expensive, but you only need 2 per person. Boil 1 cup of tangerine juice (recipe says fresh; I used bottled) until it's reduced to 2 tablespoons of jammy syrup. Boil a cut-up head of cauliflower for 12 minutes and puree with 1/2 cup warm cream and 1/4 cup of chicken broth. You season then sear the scallops in a lightly oiled skillet, 3 minutes per side. Scrape cauliflower puree onto a plate (you can put everything on one platter, but I think this dish looks better apportioned to individual plates), place scallops on cauliflower, pour tangerine reduction on scallops. You now have a dinner that looks fancy, tastes wonderful, and requires almost no effort. Your kids might not eat this, which means more scallops for you. Detailed recipe is here.

topped with grapefruit, blood orange, cara cara orange

Finally, as mentioned, I baked the gorgeous marmalade tart from Big Sur Bakery. It's a generous rectangle of sweet dough topped with a cup of marmalade, homemade almond cream (sugar, orange rind, butter, chopped almonds) and sliced citrus fruit. My husband was wildly enthusiastic, but only after he picked off the wheels of stringy and bitter grapefruit. A very slight adaptation of the recipe is here; I agree with Blue Ridge Baker that the dough needs much more liquid than called for. If you try this, I'd go with oranges for the topping and skip the grapefruit, which (unlike bananas) is apparently not enhanced by baking.

I'm out of breath now and you've probably stopped reading, but this recipe from Food52 is intriguing.

Too many banana blondies?

I don't expect you to agree with me

shudder

I spent the last three days in Big Sur for a story and I'll tell you here what I almost surely won't say in the article which is that I find this place dreadful in the most primal sense of the word. It's incredibly beautiful. That (borrowed) picture doesn't begin to capture the Caribbean blue inlets, the waterfalls, the soaring raptors, the enormous sky. Wow! Beautiful. But Snow White's stepmother is also very beautiful, at least in the Disney movie.

The Pacific Ocean makes me deeply uneasy. Always has. I think it's beautiful, but I also think it's a terrible and annihilating body of water, loud and angry and powerful and it never, ever shuts up. It crashes and roars and smashes itself against rocks and occasionally out of this tumult comes a sleeper wave. The Pacific Ocean is also icy cold. If you get the crazy idea of taking a swim in the freezing water, look around for the sign warning you of dangerous undertow, perhaps featuring a drowning stick figure. The sign is always there. It should be heeded, unless you are a surfer in which case, I am in awe of you. Go with God. My mother's friend Nicole drowned in the Pacific.

Worst of all, the Pacific is full of great white sharks.

Anyway, the Pacific is pretty integral to the Big Sur experience. The other thing about Big Sur: cliffs. Big Sur is essentially one very high, very long cliff overlooking the frigid home of the great white sharks. I can't drive in Big Sur without thinking how easy it would be to accidentally steer off of a cliff. Just one little slip of the hand while replacing the disc in the CD player. . .

It's very beautiful. Really! It's beautiful and scary, at least if you're me. You should come here some day.

Also, there's wonderful food.

my favorite Big Sur landscape

I don't usually drink chai, but the chai at the Big Sur Bakery is incredible, like a nectar in a fairy story. I dipped the donut (homemade) in the chai and spent a very happy three minutes over breakfast on Saturday morning. I went back in the afternoon for another chai, and then went back for dinner and ordered the roast chicken -- brined and cooked in the wood-fired oven -- which was pricey, but great, great, great. I've come around on the Big Sur Bakery since I first visited a couple of years ago. The young husband-wife owners used to work at Campanile and I read their book over the weekend. It charmed me. Yesterday, on the way to hike to a waterfall, I stopped in and bought a really terrific oatmeal-raisin cookie. When I'm done with banana bread, I'm going after oatmeal cookies.

More banana bread claptrap coming your way soon. I drive home today. Actually, right now.

I'm a busy and important person with a very stressful life

french toast that looks like pancakes

I forced myself to choose some recipes from John Besh's My Family Table: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking and am going to cook them and decide whether to keep the book or donate it to the library. I only bought the book a month or so ago, but it rubs me the wrong way, starting with the subtitle. More on that later.

Yesterday I made Besh's Nutella-stuffed french toast. I had to. Every day Owen comes home from school and spreads a piece of untoasted bread thickly with Nutella and that is his snack. I made Nutella from scratch a few times, but he prefers the waxy store product and I gave up trying to elevate his tastes. It's not very healthy and I should stop buying it. Wait! I don't buy it. My husband buys it.

Besh's Nutella-stuffed french toast involves putting a dollop of Nutella in the middle of a slice of sandwich bread which you top with another slice. I would not use rough whole wheat bread or artisanal bread for this; it should be soft white bread, storebought or homemade. Now cut a circular shape around the blob of Nutella, sealing the doughy edges of two slices of bread. (Besh specifies a dull juice glass and you mustn't substitute a biscuit cutter; I tried and it doesn't smash the bread together enough form a seal.) Soak very briefly in a rich french toast batter (eggs, melted butter, sugar, milk, vanilla, orange juice) and fry. The recipe is here.

Should you make it? I don't like Nutella and only ate the plain bread part, so can't comment on whether this is an exquisite treat or disgustingly rich. Owen said it was "more like dessert than a breakfast." My husband had thirds.

before it looked like pancakes, it looked like Uncrustables

Some thoughts:

-wasteful of bread. We gave the crusts to the chickens and of course you could make bread crumbs. But french toast that uses the entire slice is more efficient.

-unhealthy

-the french toast batter: excellent. On account of the melted butter? The boatload of sugar? Orange juice? Made very sweet and custardy french toast.

-Besh specifies frying french toast in oil. I think it was Molly Wizenberg who swore by frying french toast in oil. I remember thinking at the time, no, no, no, she's wrong, butter. I've changed my mind; she's right.

This morning, I decided to check A Homemade Life to be sure I hadn't misremembered Wizenberg's comments on the subject, but couldn't find the book anywhere. Distressing! I started thinking about other recipes from her book that I didn't want to lose and remembered the chocolate chip banana bread. Or at least I thought there was a recipe for chocolate chip banana bread. . .

Then I started thinking about banana bread. I love banana bread and make it a lot. Why are some recipes so much tastier than others? Decided to cross-reference the recipes in Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, and other stalwarts to see what I might learn. Got carried away and ended up looking in the indexes of all my cookbooks and "studying" banana bread recipes.

Fact: There are 104 different banana recipes under our roof.

When I staggered to my feet after this riveting exercise, hours had passed. It was lunchtime. I ate a piece of banana bread I'd baked recently using Recipes from Miss Daisy's. It's a bit dry and I now knew why: because it calls for butter. I had figured out that all the recipes I most love call for oil, which yields a moister bread. Obviously. Because oil is not just moister than butter, oil is actually liquid. This is unappetizing when you think about it.

I am now a banana bread expert. Ask me anything! I can tell you that some people replace the oil with whipped prunes or applesauce and use egg whites instead of whole eggs. Dwight Yoakam likes banana bread made with whole wheat flour. Nigella soaks golden raisins in rum and tosses them into her loaf, while Mark Bittman prefers coconut and the wizardly Shirley Corriher folds whipped cream into the batter. (This, I am going to try.) Other people fortify their banana breads with Wheat Chex, wheat germ, bran, and Bisquick. Cooks stir in black coffee, maraschino cherries, candied citron, sesame seeds, mango, fresh cranberries, cocoa powder, or marmalade. You can flavor with rum, almond extract, vanilla, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, lemon peel, orange oil, allspice, cinnamon, or none of the above. Use more sugar or less, or replace the sugar with honey or Lyle's Golden Syrup. Barley flour? Sure. Rice flour? Why not. You can even make sourdough banana bread, though I wouldn't.

It was fun.

I may be a little underemployed.

This is just to say

In the last 30 hours:

1. I ordered a copy of Yellowthread Street. Anonymous, you have no idea how excited I am at the prospect of not just a new detective series, but one that is set in Hong Kong.

2. I began flipping through Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard. I've owned the book for a few months, but extracted it from a towering stack because of Steven's high praise in a recent comment. I then baked Lepard's rye and raisin cookies.* They are magnificent. Try them! 

3. I bought a Sumo fruit. It was every bit as crazy delicious as Kristin said it would be in another recent comment. Found it at Whole Foods. Marked as a tangerine; only in small print did it say "Sumo fruit."

This is all just to say how much I love your comments on my blog. I'm highly suggestible and if you mention something, it will stick in my head forever. Oreo balls? The chocolate pots de creme from Kate Zuckerman's Sweet Life? Cafe Rehobeth? You've probably forgotten. I haven't.

So thank you.

*Husband thought they were too sweet, Isabel doesn't like raisins, and Owen would rather eat the giant Pocky sticks brought back from Hong Kong and strew the wrappers all over the house. I love my family, but they are mistaken about these cookies. The cookies are outstanding.

I would rather be eating spicy crab

It WASN'T like this.

I have no enthusiasm for cooking this week, a hangover from our trip to Hong Kong. Buy the bread, buy the butter. Better yet, go to a cha chaang teng and pay someone to spread the butter on the bread and serve it to you with sweetened condensed milk and a cup of hot Hong Kong milk tea. Walk home to your shoebox apartment, stretch out on the bed, listen to the air conditioner rattle, and read a John Le Carre novel. Preferably one set in Hong Kong.

We're back from our trip. I loved Hong Kong. LOVED. Much more than expected. As I mentioned before, no one in Hong Kong cooks because home kitchens are tiny and restaurants so plentiful, excellent, and cheap. Honestly, it didn't seem like such a bad way to live. If I could walk down the street for crispy roast goose instead of roasting my own chicken? I'd never turn on the oven again.

But I don't think there's a roast goose to be had in this entire county. The closest restaurant to our house: Taco Bell. And it's not that close.

I made lentil and red pepper soup from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook last night because I was feeling so half-hearted about the domestic arts and the recipe looked really easy. It was really easy and it was really unexciting, as is usually the case with lentil soup. But the oranges with rosemary honey from the same book were even easier than the soup and they were improbably spectacular.

I don't generally gush over simple fruit desserts as I don't think a piece of fresh, seasonal fruit makes the perfect dessert. I think it makes a really disappointing dessert. These oranges, however, are delicious and rich, which is mysterious because they contain no rich ingredients. Don't skip the rosemary; I think the rosemary is what gives that curious illusion of richness.

Zuni Cafe's oranges with rosemary honey

1/4 cup honey
4 teaspoons water
leaves from a small sprig of rosemary, bruised with the back of a knife
4 oranges

1. In a very small saucepan or a large metal measuring cup combine the honey, water, and rosemary. Over low heat, simmer until melted. Watch closely so the syrup doesn't boil over. When it is runny, turn off heat and let it steep until you are ready to use it, at least 20 minutes.

2. Cut the bottoms and tops from the oranges, just enough to expose the juicy flesh. To quote Judy Rodgers: "Set the fruit on end and use a paring knife to carve away the skin and pith in a series of smooth arc-like strokes from top to bottom, rotating the orange a little with each stroke. (Most of us misjudge and miss a little pith on the first go-round, but this is easy to trim once you've removed the bulky skin.")

3. Slice the oranges thinly -- less than 1/4 inch thick -- and lay them on 4 serving plates. Drizzle with the honey. Serves 4.

Our day with the Tiger Cooking Teacher

The scornful eye of Martha was upon her, poor Isabel.

You enter Martha Sherpa's cooking school through a barred metal door of the grim model you might find in a minimum security prison. You walk down a damp, grimy hall and ascend in an ancient elevator to the humid second floor kitchen where Martha holds court. When Isabel and I arrived yesterday, she loomed unsmiling in the doorway and pointed to the shelf where we were to place our bags and umbrellas. No names were exchanged. There were four of us in the class on Chinese bread baking. (Martha also teaches dim sum, wok cookery, and desserts.) In addition to Isabel and me, there was a young Filipina maid whose boss wants her to start baking bread, and an American expatriate businesswoman who likes to cook.

"Do like this."

How to describe Martha? Very hard. Imagine a cross between Amy Chua, Rosie O'Donnell, and Simon Cowell. Give this person a thick Cantonese accent and dress her in a white coat and green surgical mask. This will give you a vague idea of the wonder that is Martha Sherpa.

And this will give you a vague idea of the wonder that is Martha Sherpa's teaching style:

Martha: "Pat that flat."

Student, fumbling, tries to pat some pasty filling on the metal work table.

Martha. "No. Wrong! Like this."

a mighty and dexterous hand

Student tries again.

Martha, wearily: "No. Too slow. Wrong."

Student tries again. Asks: "Is this okay?"

Martha: "Clearly not okay."

She tosses things at you. A rag to wipe the table. A ball of dough to shape. A scraper to scrape up a microscopic particle of dough that you left on the counter and which must be reincorporated into your bread. It is all commands and rebukes and I suppose this is a very gentle version of the way she herself was taught to cook in Hong Kong restaurant kitchens.

And you know what? After a short, bracing adjustment period, it was great. We were mixing, pounding, kneading, slamming, stretching, washing, scraping, baking, and fielding criticism for seven hours and at the end of it we really knew stuff.

I've given the impression that Martha was horrid. She was not. Although she was formidably rude, she was also funny and candid and entertaining and even Isabel was giggling by the end of the day. In between issuing commands and concocting insults, Martha told stories about disgracefully spoiled Hong Kong children and perfidious bakers who lace their bread with chemicals, about the going rate paid to Filipina "helpers" (she blames the helpers for spoiling Hong Kong children) and the foolish entrepreneurs who come to her class for one day and think they can move to San Francisco or Penang and open a restaurant.

pineapple buns

We made five different breads: pineapple buns, cocktail buns, coconut bread, raisin bread, and chicken hot dogs wrapped in dough. All the breads were fluffy, buttery, sweet, and delicious. (Even the hot dog rolls were sweet.)

Some general facts about Chinese bread:

-Butter is always salted butter.

-Whole milk powder is often used, just like in the Milk Bar cookbook; nonfat dried milk powder is not a substitute. I'm going to try to buy some proper milk powder at the supermarket down the street from our hotel.

-Unlike Western bread, Chinese bread is served steaming hot. It is torn apart, not cut, and it is eaten all at once; you don't break a loaf and save the rest for later.

-The Chinese detest crusts, so surfaces are brushed with syrup to keep them soft.

coconut bread

-What the Chinese call bread is what most Westerners would call "sweet rolls."

At the end of the class, the other American woman in the class declined to comment in Martha's guest book. She rolled her eyes and said, "That was fun, but I don't know what to make of her. " Isabel declined to comment as well.

I commented. I wrote that this class was the highlight of my trip to Hong Kong and unless something miraculous happens today or tomorrow, that will be the truth.

Martha's stove

Donut wrapped in a noodle? Oh, why not.

deep-fried carbohydrate wrapped in steamed carbohydrate

We took a culinary walking tour yesterday. Very expensive but the guide, traval writer Daisann McLane, was encyclopedic in her knowledge and explained countless oddities in shops and markets, from bundles of dried fish bladders to sharks' fins and sharks' bones and a weird black grass that symbolizes prosperity and is sprinkled over dinner. We passed a dark little snake shop where cages of serpents surround a table at which customers can sit and consume bowls of reptile soup, a winter favorite. I wanted to do this and Daisann said it was delightful, but Isabel flatly refused.

Everything we ate on the tour was delicious. My favorite was a crusty wand-shaped cruller wrapped in cold, slippery rice noodles and cut into bite sized pieces. See above. You squirt hoisin sauce on top, sprinkle with sesame seeds and, if you wish, dunk this sweet-savory-cool-bready-fried tidbit into a bowl of warm congee. Isabel unpeeled the noodles and ate just the cruller on its own; she said that thus doctored, it was her favorite dish of the day as well.

Atkins friendly

My father most loved the Chiu Chow goose, which sat on a bed of tofu and came with a bowl of vinegar to offset the meaty oiliness. I loved this too. Isabel managed to resist. We also tried a bowl of Chiu Chow rice soup with baby oysters. Lots of baby oysters in this town.

good enough for Chiang Kai-shek

Superlatives apply to the noodles at Mak's, a shop basically everyone told us to visit. The broth was clear and flavorful, the shrimp-stuffed wontons tiny and adorable, the scallions dainty and white, the noodles very long. Isabel thought her bowl of noodles was too fishy, but made a big effort to eat some so as not to offend.

According to Daisann, people in Hong Kong mostly don't cook -- they go out for all their meals because restaurant food is fast, abundant, delicious and cheap and kitchens are minuscule and ovens almost nonexistent. If I could walk out my front door and find any of the dishes we ate yesterday, I wouldn't cook either.

Isabel said to me later, "I don't like Chinese food, but even I feel it's stupid not to eat Chinese food here. I blame you for that."

I have not labored in vain.

A.J. Liebling practiced

potstickers to dream about

Hong Kong is bigger and uglier and the potstickers are infinitely better, but it reminds me more of San Francisco than any city I've ever visited. Both are full of people who speak Cantonese and eat dim sum and in both you will find hunched 4-foot-tall old ladies trying to cross busy intersections. I felt much less sure of the culture and my surroundings in Barcelona.

Like I said, uglier.

Last week I started saving room for roast goose and crab and egg custard tarts and noodles when I was tempted to eat a Valentine's chocolate I would ask myself, would you rather have this or try the congee at King's Palace in Happy Valley that Mike Wolgelenter loved so much he moved to the neighborhood? This wouldn't work for some people, but no question I'd rather have the congee. Yesterday, I declined breakfast at the hotel and watched as my companions ate all that boring Western  food. Not one millimeter of stomach space and not one precious calorie was going to be used on toast or fruit when there were xiao long bao waiting out there.

So we went on our walking excursion and around noon we sat down to our first meal at a recommended dim sum restaurant called the Metropole. I was faint with hunger by then. The Metropole features a vast, vast carpeted banquet hall with low ceilings and animated parties of boisterous people eating and gesticulating and ladies pushing roast duck and egg custard tarts around on carts. It was thrilling to behold. Additionally there was a central hot food station where cooks were frying potstickers and turnip cakes and many more exotic savories on hot, noisy griddles. I wanted to try everything, but we started with the crusty potstickers which were incredible, bulging with meat and scallions barely contained by a thin wrapper. Totally unlike most potstickers I've eaten in the United States in which there tends to be a wide pocket between the dense wrapper and puny ball of filling. My father became obsessed with something called a baby oyster pancake and that was even better than the potsticker, but by then. . .

Okay, here is the sad part of the story. When we got to the restaurant I was so famished I quickly ate a dumpling before either of my companions had even plucked one from the serving plate. Then I drank some tea. I looked around at the wonderful, lively restaurant and thought, this is it, I have arrived at the glorious moment I've been longing for since my obsession with Chinese food took root 14 years ago in Barbara Tropp's cooking class. I ate a second dumpling. I put down my chopsticks, sighed in satisfaction.

And realized that after two dumplings I was completely full.

Oh, I kept eating, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been. Dieting in preparation for an epic eating trip makes about as much sense as lying on the sofa in preparation for a marathon. I will hit my stride, but the training strategy was a little cracked.

The gray tower in the middle is our darling hotel.

The famous pizza

 a miracle of rare device

Finally, I got around to making Nancy Silverton's legendary Mozza pizza. The crust, as promised, was a crispy, delicious miracle. A bit fussy -- you have to come back and check on the dough and do things to it at intervals -- but not at all hard. Contains yeast, water, salt, a little rye flour, mostly bread flour (though I didn't have any so I used all-purpose), barley malt (or honey), and wheat germ. I think this will become, to use cooking-speak, my "go-to" pizza crust recipe. Try it. You can find it here.

Two additional tips from Silverton: Sprinkle salt on the dough before you add the toppings, and heat the oven (with a pizza stone inside) to 500 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour.  The long heating helps despoil the planet, but the pizza cooked faster and crispier than others I've made. If you're going to do it, do it right.

The dough recipe makes six pizzas, which is more than four people could eat. We consumed three margherita pizzas, the most popular, basic, and best. (Silverton calls for 1/4 cup tomato sauce per pie, and 3 ounces of mozzarella.)

I put arugula and prosciutto on a fourth margherita pizza after it came out of the oven, per another Silverton recipe, but this was too hard to eat. You can't really cut it with a knife and when you pick it up the arugula falls off as you try to tear the prosciutto with your teeth.

Silverton's austere clam pizza was not a hit, nor was her potato-gorgonzola-rosemary pizza.

Isabel: What's on this pizza?

Tipsy: Potatoes, mozzarella . . . .

Isabel: What else?

Tipsy: Gorgonzola

Isabel: I knew there was a catch.

Here's my problem with making pizza at home, which I remember every time I make it: You can't relax. Every time one pizza comes out, you're putting another one in. Not restful. But we had such a good time last night, restfulness seems irrelevant. I like to say that living with our kids right now is like living with a young Gelsey Kirkland* and one of the Three Stooges. It's very weird! But for pizza, everyone was totally present and enthusiastic and harmonious and we all went to bed happy.

On another subject, my father, Isabel, and I are leaving for Hong Kong in a couple of hours. Owen doesn't have a winter break this year so he can't come, and my husband can't really bear to be parted from the goats. So it's just the three of us. I'm looking forward shopping with my girl and eating xiao long bao with my Dad. And egg custard tarts.

*minus the anorexia and substance abuse, at least so far

Poor fish

halibut

Last night's menu, all cooked from Nancy Silverton's Mozza:

arugula salad with mushrooms and Piave cheese
pan-roasted halibut with green peppercorns
roasted cippoline onions

Thoughts and lessons:

1. I didn't want to make or eat this particular salad because it calls for raw mushrooms which I don't like. But one of the boons of this blog is that by limiting myself to a single book I end up trying dishes I never otherwise would. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised. Like with this salad. Silverton instructs you "build" your salads, an instruction I had completely ignored because it seemed like a lot of work. I just tossed all the ingredients together in a big bowl on the assumption that it tastes the same. Not true! I went to the trouble of "building" these salads on individual plates and then drizzled dressing on top and they were spectacular. I haven't quite figured out why a carefully built salad is so much better than a tossed salad: is is the drizzled dressing? is it that the ingredients somehow maintain their integrity longer? I will be building more salads.

2. Piave cheese. Parmesan's friendly and affordable little brother. Not grainy or crumbly like Parmesan, but reminiscent. Never encountered before. Loved.

3. Halibut. Sigh. If we were all naturally slender and all felt morally at ease with eating mammals, would restaurants still bother with fish? Would I bother fish? I would not.  I feel bad that all those fish are dying because we want to be slim, not because we love them. Sushi is different. Sushi does justice to fish. Salmon is different, too. Or maybe this is just my personal taste? Very possible.

4. I've never cooked onions as a dish in their own right and the roasted cippolines was a delectable sweet-sour preparation. However, like all Nancy Silverton's recipes, it has too many steps (boil the onions, cook the onions in sauce on the stove top, roast the onions, and so on.) and is not something I will make again. Too much work for onions.

5. While I was making dinner, my sister, Justine, brought over a jar of negronis. I enjoyed two. I have drunk so little in the last few months that I forgot that alcohol is a gateway drug. To cookies.

6. In this case, the cookies were the marshmallow cornflake chocolate chip cookies from Milk Bar, baked by Isabel. Alcohol is a gateway drug to cookies and a Milk Bar cookie is a gateway drug to another Milk Bar cookie. These cookies fall into a category that Justine and I call "too delicious. Which is to say, they contain a very potent combination of salt, sugar, and fat that makes them impossible to stop eating. On the one hand, what a fantastic cookie! On the other hand, what a disaster. As far as I can tell, Milk Bar cookies are all too delicious. Biscotti are an example of a cookie that is not too delicious. Here's the recipe. You've been warned.

7. Tonight: pasta and Meyer lemon gelato.

Happy Valentine's Day.

And I thought I knew a lot about cookbooks

Hannah Glasse: another gap in my learning

I've tried to figure out how to post in an entertaining way about the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference and can't without resorting to commentary on hairstyles and how people were dressed and that was just so beside the point. The event was about ideas and those ideas were vivid and far more "entertaining" than the clothes, but jumbled and complicated and pointing off in all directions and they're more than I can wrap my head around in this space.

However, these ideas will recur forever in this blog. The conference was a pivotal event for me, confirming what I have always known which is that cookbooks are rich and vital documents, communicating complex messages about much more than gastronomy.

Some scattered reflections:

Over three days, I met and heard from scholars and enthusiasts who are studying copper cookware and African-American foodways and The Settlement Cookbook; who are recreating insane dishes from 16th-century Spanish cookery books and pickling rabbits and have devoted themselves to resurrecting recipes from the work and life of Willa Cather. I saw (but did not meet) Madhur Jaffrey, who is very, very beautiful and fierce-looking, like a queen. I have always cooked basmati rice her way.

I brushed up against the quirky subculture of community cookbook lovers who study spatter marks on the pages of books with names like Eatin' Elko (made up name, but typical) and that was a highlight. Trust me, there are fervid eggheads in archives right now poring over your grandmother's Methodist church cookbook.

The names Eliza Acton and Anna Wecker (good luck with that link) were dropped more often than Dorie Greenspan and Mark Bittman (I didn't hear his name once) in this crowd and everyone in the room just nodded knowingly.  Everyone except me, although I plan to address this gap in my knowledge forthwith.

The Harvard-affiliated cookbook scholar Barbara Wheaton impressed me the most of anybody I encountered. Her depth of learning about cookbooks seemed fathomless, her commentary was acute, commonsensical, and frequently hilarious, and all this from a tiny, gentle grandmotherly presence in jogging shoes*. When someone bemoaned the fact that Americans hardly cook anymore because we are inundated with convenience food, she said, "It means more people who hate cooking don't have to do it and this benefits not just them, but the people who have to eat what they cook."

She also opined that it was more important for a family to sit down together over any food at all than for someone to run around fixing it from scratch. Agree.

Molly O'Neill was eloquent on the current high status associated with rugged cookbooks like Seven Fires and the whole "nose-to-tail" genre. Having one of these "bloody" cookbooks on your coffee table shows you're well traveled, well educated, and have evolved past bourgeois squeamishness. (I'm interested in the class analysis of cookbooks in our "classless" society, though find it ultimately reductive.)

I met Suzanne Fass, the opinionated and outspoken copy editor of my own cookbook, and that was a treat. I was glad to see she was as challenging with the speakers as she was with my manuscript.

Laura Schenone was an earthy and funny speaker, and if I hadn't already read The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken would want to.

Peter Kaminsky cited the grilled steak from Seven Fires and the roasted chicken from Bouchon as perfect recipes and I wrote them down to try as soon as possible.

The Silver Palate was cited reverently, as were Laurie Colwin, Marcella Hazan, Richard Olney (like always) and Madeleine Kamman. (Although one commenter referred to Kamman's specification of "12 grinds of the peppermill" in a recipe as "culinary terrorism.")

A woman in the audience had read Tamar Adler's Everlasting Meal three times, which caused me to order it, though I'm too deep into Middlemarch to read or think about anything else.

On the very last day, I sat on a panel about cookbooks and bookstore events. My terrific copanelists notwithstanding, that was not so much fun. I've been blessed in many ways, but not with the gift of gab. After the panel, I needed to come straight to my room and lie there in a state of traumatized mortification for several hours, fully dressed. Not a high point on which to end the conference, but all better the next morning when I went to the airport. To quote George Eliot: "Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know of no speck so troublesome as self."

So true.

Home as of yesterday afternoon. For dinner, I made Nancy Silverton's mussels al forno with salsa calabrese (homemade garlic mayonnaise mixed with a lot of harissa) because it looked so easy and actually was. They were not nearly as good as her other mussel recipe.  My husband cooked the kids hamburgers, because why bother even serving them the mussels? Just a few more days of Mozza and I am trying to figure out the best day for a big pizza blowout. Her crust requires forethought.

Good trip, good to be home.

*just can't stop myself from the clothes.

The Peach or the Prune?

It just lay there like a dead fish.

I came to New York for this cookbook conference and it is even more fascinating and overstimulating than I had predicted. More about the conference later, if I can think of a way to write about it that won't read like boardroom minutes.

Meanwhile, in my limited free time, two gastronomic adventures to report:

1. Because I loved Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir so much, the first culinary goal of the trip was to refresh my tattered 8-year-old mental snapshot of her restaurant, Prune. I remembered it as tiny, shabby and merely okay.

Here's the new snapshot: Tiny, tiny, tiny, and shabby, but in a chic way (though not "shabby chic") and staffed by offhand young women in pink t-shirts.  Pappadums instead of bread. Jars of what appear to be home-pickled onions for martinis on the bar. Open kitchen. Mirrors. Uncomfortable stools. Expensive. For appetizer I ordered fennel with butter and trout roe. The fennel, cooked to melting tenderness, bathed in a thick butter sauce and was saved from unctuousness by small orbs of salty orange roe that burst when you bit into them. It was dreamy.

Entree: less good. Ordered roast branzino, which I never see on California menus and which sounded exotic and enticing. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but what appeared was a gray trout-size fish on a plate with a wedge of lemon and a few twigs of thyme. Not exotic, not enticing, and lacking relish, sauce, chutney, or side vegetable, not very interesting to eat. I like a bite of this, a bite of that, not just fish, fish fish, fish, fish, you're done. It was tasty fish, but too austere for me.

Overall an enjoyable meal, but I prefer Hamilton's writing to her restaurant.

2. After last week's bo ssam dinner and the Christina Tosi near-win in the Tournament of Cookbooks, I also wanted to try a David Chang restaurant. Last night a friend and I went to Ma Peche on 56th Street, behind and below Milk Bar where Isabel and I bought cereal milk soft-serve and compost cookies last summer.

Ma Peche has a vast and glamorous dining room, gauzily lit and theatrical. Could not be less Prune like. We were attended to by two waiters, both skinny boys in t-shirts who looked young, jaded, and tired. I like to think I don't gush too much so you will believe me when I say this was one of the best meals of my life. Not top 10, but probably top 100. Started with a "Last Flight to Mexico" cocktail, which is a mezcal-based Aviation and worth every single empty calorie. Each dish that followed was perfect: raw mackerel; steak tartare; broccoli salad; brussels sprouts. I wish I could offer more detail, but I didn't analyze, just ate and felt very lucky. There are lots of negative reviews of Ma Peche, like this one. I'm not going to let them sway me.

I wanted to try to try a Serbian burger this trip, but tomorrow is full so that probably won't happen. Home Sunday.

This one's for Steven

Mozza balls

So much to say, but I have to catch a plane early early early in the morning and have just taken a sleeping pill and soon will be asleep.

So, very quickly:

We had Nancy Silverton's meatballs for dinner tonight and they are outstanding and also easy, which is not the case with a lot of dishes from Mozza. Soak bread in milk for a few minutes, mix with veal, pork, ground pancetta, eggs, lots of Parmesan, onion, garlic, and red pepper flakes. Shape into large orbs. Brown in olive oil. Braise for an hour in a mixture of tomato sauce and chicken stock. My husband thinks the meatballs need some spaghetti, but I thought they were perfect as is. These meatballs are tender and spicy and flavorful and deserve your full attention.

Is the recipe worth the price of the book? It might be if you couldn't get it for free right here.

For dessert: butterscotch budino.

Not on my diet, but y'all shamed me into it.

Picture doesn't do the pretty pudding justice.

First, you make a butterscotch pudding that is richer and trickier than the butterscotch pudding in Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, but doesn't taste all that different. You scoop the pudding into individual glasses and chill, then top with a fabulous homemade caramel sauce. Sprinkle with some sea salt and garnish with a scoop of unsweetened whipped cream.

I haven't eaten dessert in months and planned to eat but one wee bite. This was not what transpired.

 oh well

I know I'm supposed to say that it was worth it, that it was soooo good and that I'm not sorry, et cetera, but I can't. It was hard to stop eating this pudding, but it was way too sweet, too heavy, too much. Lacked delicacy. I happen to really love the flavor of plain butterscotch pudding, and felt the caramel sauce smothered it.

The recipe is here, though it's slightly different from the version in the book. For one thing, it calls for rum not Scotch. I'd go with Scotch and skip the caramel sauce.

In fact, I might skip the pudding altogether. But don't skip those meatballs!

Next week: pizza.

Someone needs a new barrette

mess of pig

After reading this story about Momofuku bo ssam -- slow cooked caramelized pork served with rice and various Korean condiments -- my friend Lisa and I got the idea to have a bo ssam party. Like half of America, apparently. I went on Facebook yesterday morning and saw a photograph of our Saturday night dinner in Marin County on the table of a friend who lives in New Jersey.

To order bo ssam at Momofuku in New York City costs $200, but it is something you can and should make at home because there is nothing cheaper than slow cooked pork shoulder, nothing tastier, nothing easier. I was napping an hour before Lisa arrived. It's that kind of meal. You brine the pork overnight in sugar and salt, then put it in the oven for 6 hours. For the first hour you'll think you're roasting the meat, but it throws off so much fat it ends up braising in its own "juices." Don't dwell on this. When the meat falls off the bone, it's done. Coat it in sugar, put it back in a super-hot oven for 10 minutes, and serve.

cooks

How delicious was the bo ssam? Very delicious. It's like Korean carnitas, but instead of mixing the pork with salsa and wrapping in a tortilla, you mix it with rice (or not) and fiery sauces (you may need to visit a Korean grocery), and wrap it in a lettuce leaf. It is fun to eat because every piece is different and tastes slightly different, whether it's a mild chunk of meat from the middle or a hard, sugary shard of crust. If I had to choose between Mexican carnitas and Korean "carnitas" I would choose Mexican, but it wouldn't be an easy decision.

Highly recommend.

Also recommended: Gold Rush cocktails, contributed by Lisa. They're spicy-tart-sweet and truly wonderful and we only drank one each so the repercussions were nil. For dessert, Isabel made compost cookies from Milk Bar. I only ate half a cookie so the repercussions of this were also hopefully nil.

cookie

The compost cookies spread a lot and didn't look quite right, but tasted very right. Recipe is here.

Bonus video: In an unflattering sweater, Mark Bittman watches Momofuku's David Chang make another version of bo ssam that looks even better than the one we served.