Recipes recipes recipes

Everything that can be frosted is now frosted.

Some of the best dishes to come out of my kitchen in the last year were cooked in the last 10 days. Since I have no stories to tell today, I’ll just describe the food and link you to some excellent recipes: 

-After the flaming bananas foster at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, this "fancy pants" banana pudding is the most delicious banana dessert I’ve ever eaten. I flagged the recipe in Salon a few years ago and finally got around to making it last week for a family party. It was lots of work and monumentally fattening, but worth it. The recipe says it serves four "demurely" so I doubled it for nine. Don’t do this! Francis Lam must hang out with sumo wrestlers. We gave leftover pudding to the neighbors and were eating banana pudding for days and days. Ladies, are you prejudiced against Jessica Simpson’s clothing line? Until I tried on one of her sweater dresses -- flattering, affordable, jaunty, even sort of elegant -- I was a horrible snob about Jessica Simpson clothes. I decided to wear my cherished Jessica Simpson sweater dress today for the very first time. I lay in bed this morning happily thinking, today's the day. I put on the dress. Too tight in the arms. Banana pudding.  

-This pork roast out of Real Cajun by Donald Link is juicy, flavorful, and cheap. My sister said, “Don’t you feel that when you cook a pork shoulder you somehow end up making money?” Yes. Pork shoulder is a magic cut. This isn’t the usual cook-until-it-falls-apart pork shoulder recipe (bo ssam, pulled pork, carnitas) but a bona fide tied-up roast infused with the mighty flavors of garlic, fennel, rosemary, salt, and pepper. My father, who is not a man to use such words, called it “succulent.”

-Isabel baked some Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies. They're all over the internet and look stupid and gimmicky and they are stupid and gimmicky, but they’re also delicious. And filling. You eat one and you can’t even think about eating another until the next day. I like a cookie with a built-in stopping mechanism. You should try these. Unfortunately, Isabel has been too busy to show me the exact recipe she used. She told me to do an image search for Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies and the first picture that appeared would take me to the recipe. Maybe that's it, maybe it isn't.

-Last summer in Peru I met a British woman who casually mentioned a Stilton and broccoli soup she makes using her Vitamix. It was one of those concepts that I couldn't get out of my head. I came home and immediately bought a Vitamix. Last week I finally made broccoli and Stilton soup using a Nigella Express recipe and my Vitamix. It's a fabulous soup. Although. Although it really isn’t as good as plain Stilton. I ate bits of Stilton as I was crumbling it for the soup and it seemed criminal to dump this perfect, voluptuous cheese into a big pot of broccoli and broth. Have you eaten plain Stilton lately? Make it happen. And when you’ve had enough plain Stilton, make the soup. I don’t know why Nigella calls for "garlic-infused olive oil" when you can just put smashed garlic cloves into the oil as it heats. Also, this soup needs lots of salt.

-Owen’s Mandarin class got these maple-brown sugar oatmeal cookies for snack yesterday. You need maple sugar to make them and I wouldn't go out and buy it just for these, but if you have some in the cupboard, go for it. They're chewy and hearty and have the icing of a Starbucks maple nut scone. I used maple extract in the icing per the instructions, but next time wouldn’t. So artificial tasting. I used to like that brash artificiality, but am growing up. The Mandarin kids ate all the cookies and they also ate all of our bread. I’ve been hiding everything I don’t want them to eat. It had not occurred to me they would eat a loaf of bread.

-Last night, I made creamy quinoa soup, something I’d tasted in Peru and loved. I chose this recipe  from Barbara Kafka’s Soup: A Way of Life (I can’t see that title without rolling my eyes) which looked about right, even though it's Ecuadorian. Very tasty, rib-sticking, chowdery vegetarian soup. Not as wonderful as the soup I had in Peru, but nothing I make at home is ever as good as what I eat on vacation. 

I don't know what I'm making for dinner tonight or what cookbook I'm cooking from next or if maybe it's time to come up with a new organizing principle for the blog. I'm sitting here at the library wondering if I should work this afternoon or go see Captain Phillips. It seems like a waste of a flexible work life -- or should I say "work" life? -- if I just sit in the library on a sunny fall day when I could be sitting in a pitch black movie theatre. 

This won't surprise you, but the Safeway version of the cronut was dry, stale, bad.

The kids are alright

I think we are done now.

The local middle school cut Mandarin this year and because no amount of pleading would get them to restore it, Owen and his orphaned Mandarin classmates now take classes twice a week at someone’s house. As of a few days ago, our house. I didn’t know how I’d feel about this, but I love it.  There are two girls in the class and twelve boys, half of whom are enormous, the other half, elfin. They're unbelievably fun to watch. 

There's a tendency among some of my friends to grumble about how kids in this town don’t have manners. I don't think it's true and I really don't think it's true after hosting the Mandarin students. They're polite, they're just not naval cadet polite. I'd say they're imperfectly polite. Clearly no one has ever told them to answer “yes ma’am” or rapped them on the knuckles with a willow stick for not looking you in the eye when they say hello. But someone has taught them to say thank you and to take their dishes to the sink and to try to be considerate, whatever that means. You can see them trying to figure out the details for themselves. It’s hard! About 15 seconds after they possibly should have said please, you can see them thinking, oh, wait, maybe I should have said please. And they say please. Or if I try to take a dirty glass out of their hands to put it in the dishwasher, they hesitate. Do they let me? Or do they insist on doing it themselves? What are the rules? Maybe it’s the decline of civilization, but I find this touching in a way that impeccable manners learned by rote at age three are not. 

Since they come straight from school, a parent supplies a snack. Monday, a parent brought bananas and pretzels, which is what I would have brought as it is healthy and unobjectionable. This snack didn’t go fast. It didn’t go at all. But we had these store-bought cookies someone had given Isabel and Owen that had been sitting in the car, bag open, getting stale for a few days. I asked if anyone wanted one before I threw them away and in about 90 seconds the stale cookies were gone. Dumb, stale cookies trump bananas and pretzels.

Yesterday I put out granola bars and some banana bread I’d made using the uneaten bananas from Monday. Moderately popular. Only Owen got excited about the granola bars and I think there was one boy who really liked the banana bread. Stale cookies trump bananas, banana bread, pretzels and granola bars.

I was downstairs when I heard class ending so I came up to say good-bye to the teacher. I found four of the boys looming over the plate (like I said, imperfectly polite) on which sat the unappetizing remains of Owen’s John Gore birthday cake that I'd hidden in a corner of the kitchen.  The frosting was drying out and family members had been shaving off tiny pieces with butter knives for the last few days. Not a pretty cake. I heard one of the boys say, “Owen, why were you keeping the red velvet cake from us?” 

 “You don’t really want that do you?” I said. 

They really did. A feeding frenzy ensued. I got more compliments on that cake in five minutes than I’ve received on everything else I’ve baked for the last month. Frosted four-layer red velvet cake trumps all. 

Another boy came into the room and saw the cake, now just a shadow of its former self. He said, “You made banana bread AND a layer cake!” 

I said, “Oh, the layer cake is from Saturday, I didn’t just make it for this class.” God forbid anyone think I have time to custom bake Mandarin snacks, even though I do.

He said in wonderment, “Still, you made them.” 

Sweet kids. Good job, parents. 

I’m pretty much done with Smoke and Pickles. Monday night I cooked the piggy burgers which I loved because they were so easy and tasty. You make pork patties (flavored with hoisin sauce), fry them, put them on buns and dress with a sun-dried tomato ketchup that sounds hard, but takes about 5 minutes. The recipe makes way too much ketchup, of course, unless you want to use it on your sandwiches every day for the next month. 

Tuesday night I made lamb rice bowls which were tasty but not easy. You make a lamb meatloaf that involves pureeing your meat mixture until it becomes a repugnant paste and then packing this weird paste into a loaf pan, baking it, cutting the cooled meatloaf  into slices, frying the slices, and serving these on top of rice with a yogurt-tomato sauce. Tasted likes gyros. Owen did not like the rice bowl, but he was mistaken. It was delicious and I will never make it again

Last night, I served Lee’s spare ribs with sauerkraut and horseradish cream.  Lots of bones, lots of liquid, soupy sauerkraut, horseradish. Yuck. Not my thing at all, but maybe I was mistaken. Owen loved it and cleaned his plate.

Watering the blog

 I am a bad cake decorator.

Sorry. Another long absence. I’ve spent many hours pondering the comments on the last post, comments that -- taken as a group -- have made me radically rethink personal grievances and long-held assumptions about cooking. Radically. I thought I was the only enthusiastic, ambitious home cook serving “deadbeat” eaters. Clearly not so. It’s a trend, a syndrome, a blight. I have thoughts!

But I’ve been laboring over a post on this topic day after day, day after day, and I’m stuck. Maybe because it's argument driven rather than anecdote driven and apparently my brain doesn't want to do that anymore. It’s driving me crazy. Meanwhile, I've been letting the blog wither and that's also driving me crazy.

So I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been cooking and shelve the dissertation for now.

I’ve now made all the rice bowls in Edward Lee’s Smoke and Pickles except the version with lamb, and I bought the ground lamb for that today. We love rice bowls. They’re great because you can customize based on your likes and aversions. We dislike rice bowls because you have to make fussy, fussy remoulade. We will probably never eat rice bowls again because of that, but it was fun while the remoulade lasted. 

Unfortunately, it's impossible to find the recipes for the following rice bowls on the internet and I think I know why. You have to type out the remoulade recipe, then the rice recipe, then the recipe itself. This will deter even the most ardent plagiarizer, including me. But, if you have Smoke and Pickles, here are the last three rice bowls I've made, listed in order of preference. The salmon rice bowl and beef rice bowl described in earlier posts were also terrific.

-The lovely tuna rice bowl (raw tuna, avocado, pork rinds, hearts of palm, jalapeno remoulade) was crunchy, cool, spicy, and creamy. I love anything -- novel, movie, song, rice bowl -- that brings together such different and seemingly discordant elements and then reconciles them. The seemingly discordant elements here were not just textural, but cultural. The world seems momentarily whole when you're presented with a dish that contains sashimi, hearts of palms, and pork rinds. Make this. Don't skip those pork rinds, no matter how gross you think they are. 

-The pork rice bowl was also fabulous. You make delectable pork sausage patties and fry. Serve atop rice with jicama sticks, and kimchi remoulade. It's been decades since I bought a jicama and I wonder if I will ever buy one again.

-The chicken rice bowls were not my favorite. You make chicken sausage patties and fry. Serve atop rice with orange segments, peanuts, and miso remoulade. Sweet, refreshing, burstingly juicy orange segments in a savory context? Blecch. All the other rice bowls I've made were much tastier. Tomorrow we'll have a verdict on the lamb rice bowl.

I also made Lee's cinnamon-honey roast leg of lamb. I marinated the expensive lamb for a day in a spiced buttermilk mixture and then glazed it with honey and cinnamon as it cooked. Not as good as it should have been given the special treatment and it brought me just a little closer to going off lamb altogether. 

Per his request, I made Owen a John Gore (see photo at top) cake for his birthday party on Saturday. I told him I didn’t think I could pull this off artfully, but he insisted. I was right.

The particular sadness of apple cake

R.I.P. Marcella Hazan. If you don’t own any of her books, you should change that. They’re all excellent except Amarcord, her memoir, which made me dislike her a little bit. But you don’t have to be a warm, big-hearted person to write excellent cookbooks. If you only buy one of her books, I'd buy Essentials of Italian Cooking and make the pasta with tomato and butter sauce. Perfection.

I apologize for the long absence. I’ll explain. But first, some recipes, most of which I served at a family party:

-chai pickled grapes from Ed Lee’s Smoke and Pickles. Wonderful. Easy. You should buy some crispy red grapes and pickle them today. I served these with manchego cheese (Lee’s suggestion) and this might be the most memorable dish I’ve prepared from his book. The recipe for the grapes is here. I cut it by two thirds because I don’t own a restaurant; as I've mentioned before, Lee doesn’t always scale for the home cook.

-Lee's oysters on the half shell with rhubarb mignonette were nothing special. Raw oysters, thin vinegary sauce. I could not taste the rhubarb. Almost stabbed myself while shucking oysters. 

-Lee’s pulled lamb barbecue was expensive and a fair amount of work and had the gamy, funky lamb flavor that I enjoy only in very small portions. I worry I'm on the brink of not liking lamb. An interesting experiment, but I prefer pulled pork. Also, the recipe calls for boneless lamb shoulder and then instructs you to cook it until the meat “falls off the bone.” That’s a challenge. It leaves you unsure what meat you're supposed to buy. I went with boneless and it worked fine. The recipe is here and if you love lamb and have a day to devote to cooking it, give this a shot. 

-Cheesy broccoli casserole came from a book called Real Cajun by Donald Link and it’s a hearty, rich casserole in the hallowed American tradition that relies on Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. But instead of opening a can, this recipe has you make your own. Your kitchen will look like it was hit by a tsunami and you’ll be scrubbing pots for an hour, but the casserole is worth it. The perfect dish to bring to a potluck or someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner when you don’t have to cook anything else.  

-For a weeknight dinner I made Lee’s habanero-lemongrass marinated steaks. Confusing because on the plate was something that looked like an expensive T-bone steak but tasted like stir fry. I’m conditioned to want expensive steak to taste like steak. You might feel differently. If so, give these a try. 

So that’s the cheerful cooking wrap-up. Now I'll tell you why I had to take a break from cooking and blogging.

About 10 days ago I baked Smitten Kitchen’s mother’s apple cake. Believe it or not, this cake was even prettier than it appears in Deb Perelman's photo. It was really delicious. It wasn't weird or healthy or gluten-free. Just a beautiful, fattening, old-fashioned cake full of sugar, cinnamon, and apples. 

No one except me ate it. My children did not even taste it. 

A day or so after baking this cake, I flew to Las Vegas for a magazine story I’m writing about thrill seekers. For research, I rode the XScream, an instrument of torture atop the Stratosphere. Have you ever ridden the XScream? My hatred of the XScream is boundless. I would like to say you couldn’t pay me to ride the XScream, but apparently you can. The next day I did a zip line and after the XScream I could have napped on that zip line.

I thought everyone was as freaked out as I was until I saw the photo. Red t-shirt and jeans.

During the 30 hours that I was gone, Mark decided to bake a tube of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls that he’d been keeping in the refrigerator. He and the kids gobbled them all up. When I came home from Las Vegas, exhausted and maybe the tiniest bit strung out, I found an untouched apple cake and an empty cardboard tube that had recently held Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. 

Oh boy. Bring on the crazy. 

Tearfully I told Mark that Pillsbury cinnamon rolls were redundant when there was a homemade apple cinnamon cake on the counter, that he and the kids didn't appreciate me, that I'd wasted years cooking for this family because all anyone ever did was make fun of me or complain, that he’d turned the children against my cooking with his jokes and Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. That our children don't eat vegetables because he made hating vegetables seem cool and funny. Because he is cooler and funnier than I am! And why did he refuse to eat homemade jam? Et cetera. I told him I felt like I’d been living for the last 17 years with Ronald McDonald. 

So much ire and sorrow over an apple cake, but of course this wasn’t just an apple cake. This was the beautiful bundt-shaped symbol of hundreds of dishes I've written about on this blog and hundreds of dishes I made before I started the blog, dishes that no one but me would eat. It’s depressing to cook for people who truly don’t care about food. One hand clapping, year after year. Over time it makes you feel stupid and lonely. Occasionally, furious. 

It’s also a drag to face the wrath of a weeping wife when all you did was bake some dumb cinnamon rolls. 

I was pretty nuts. He was pretty nice about it. You don't have to like food to be a decent person. Steam was let off. Peace restored. 

Sunday, I told my aunt about the apple cake conflagration and she said, “Did you ice the apple cake?”

No.

She said, “Just a little powdered sugar icing drizzled on any cake and I bet they’ll eat it.”  

Owen said, “That’s what I keep telling you, Mom!”

Frosted cakes from now on. Easier than finding a new family. 

 

Making blog posts out of molehills

Maybe we should've drunk the extra glaze.

You should know I'm a big fan of Smoke and Pickles no matter how much I might complain, which is what I’m about to do. 

Tuesday night I cooked Edward Lee’s pork chops with ginger-peach glaze, a recipe that involves brining chops in a fascinating black syrup of gin and sorghum (or molasses) then searing them in a cast iron skillet.

You spread peach glaze (3 fresh peaches, wine, honey, ginger) on the seared meat and crumble pistachio gremolata (garlic, pistachio, parsley) over the glaze. Put the skillet in the oven and 12 minutes later you have delicious, juicy pork chops with a fragrant peachy-nutty topping. Loved by all in the household.

But let's focus on the negative: After making the pork chops, there was more than a cup of peach glaze and roughly a cup of gremolata left over. There was more left over than I’d used and it wasn’t like I’d been stingy. How annoying. I checked Chowhound, where they’re also cooking through Smoke and Pickles, to see if anyone else was irritated by the waste of peaches and pistachios. No. No one was irritated. One cook remarked equably that he/she had tossed the extra gremolata into sauteed green beans. Another used it to flavor some beets. 

I admire their resourcefulness, but I really didn’t want extra peach glaze and gremolata. Chef Lee can store extra glaze and gremolata in his walk-in refrigerator and use it on the next round of pork chops or maybe some fabulous new dish he dreamed up because he's an artist. It's like he just mixed a little extra paint. 

I’m not an artist and our refrigerator is a hellhole of  juice boxes, caperberries, hoisin sauce, leftover pizza, mayonnaise, beer, about-to-expire cream, tuna salad, horseradish, sprouting carrots, and parmesan rinds. How I feel about my refrigerator is how Nora Ephron felt about her purse.

I hate to waste food, but it took me a lot longer to write this than it did to decide to throw out the glaze and gremolata. I waste food all the time and usually it's my fault, but this one's on Edward Lee. A shame either way.

Conclusion: Great pork chops. If you make them, cut the glaze and gremolata by two thirds.  

Lee’s warm roasted okra and cauliflower salad, which I served with the pork, was less of a hit. Oh, what am I saying! It wasn’t a hit at all. My friend Melanie and I ate it for lunch the next day so it didn't go to waste, but don't bother making this for picky eaters. Like you needed me to tell you that.

On the other hand, these quinoa chocolate chip cookies were a hit with picky eaters. Soft, crunchy, substantial. You can tell they’re healthy, but after 24 hours they're almost gone. The unholy power of chocolate chips. 

A slightly oddball roast chicken

the Library of Congress image bank, a treasure trove

I’m not much of a roast chicken person anymore. I roasted a chicken once a week for many years and then I just quit. It's an easy meal and everyone in our house eats it, but the others are just as happy with grilled cheese sandwiches and I’m happier. Zuni, Bouchon, beer can -- nothing moves the needle. I seem to be over roast chicken. I don’t expect anyone to share my feelings. 

But Edward Lee’s potato-stuffed roast chicken from Smoke and Pickles looked novel and beautiful and I had to try it. I'm glad I did. Unlike a lot of his other recipes, this one is simple and you can buy the few ingredients at any supermarket. The results are lovely.

Here's the story: You peel and grate an 11-ounce Yukon Gold potato (or any waxy potato) then wring out the extra liquid as for potato pancakes. Season the shreds with salt and pepper and saute in butter for "exactly 2 minutes, no longer." Cool. Gently separate the skin from the chicken’s breast and slip the potatoes between skin and meat, spreading them evenly over the meat. When you're done, rub oil all over the chicken and season with salt and pepper. Sear the breast quickly in a very hot cast-iron skillet, flip the chicken over, place the skillet in the oven, and roast at 400 degrees F for about an hour. 

The idea is that the layer of buttery potatoes will keep the breast moist while the fat from the chicken skin flavors and further enriches the potatoes. The whole thing works exactly as advertised.

Let's start with the potatoes. Dangerously good. They melted into a rich, luxurious substance that resembled very soft, very flavorful hash browns. The only problem was that we each got about a tablespoon and wanted more. Could you stuff more potato shreds under the chicken skin and end up with more of these incredible hash browns? Lee doesn't say. I bet you could add half again more potato without messing up the recipe or damaging your health, but won't swear by it. 

The chicken itself: tasty and moist. But I just can't get excited about roast chicken. If you want rhapsodies, folks really, really adore the chicken over at Chowhound. 

A fight and then some cookies

my grandmother's cookie jar

Don’t worry, I’m not turning this into a blog about fights with Owen. The following did occur in the kitchen and afterwards I baked cookies. Plus, this dispute was so archetypal I may never need to describe another fight with adolescent Owen again. Only the details change. Good times.

Thursday I came home and found Owen hunched at the table eating cereal. I said, “What happened at school today?”

Owen: “Stuff.” A silence. Then: “When are you going to give me back my iPod Touch? 

He knew the answer to this, but wanted to bicker, to make clear right off the bat that we weren’t friends on this particular afternoon. The answer to the question was: You get the iPod back when you’ve emptied your lunch box, picked up your dirty clothes, finished your homework, and somehow managed not to be a complete jerk during the time it takes to get that done. Good luck with the last part, little buddy. 

The iPod issue passed without detonation.

A few minutes later, he went to the refrigerator, extracted the orange juice, and started swinging the bottle back and forth like a pendulum. It wasn’t a gentle swinging. It was the motion you make when bowling.

“Stop that please,” I said. “It makes me nervous you’re going to drop it.” There is precedent.

He stopped. I didn’t see his eyes light up, but in a cartoon, his eyes would have lit up. Immediately, he began to shake the bottle up and down. It wasn’t a gentle shaking, it was the motion people make when chopping wood with an axe, but faster. I hate the word "bark" when used to describe human speech, especially my own, but I barked: “STOP IT! I told you not to do that.” 

Owen: “What?! You did not!” He continued to shake the orange juice bottle, which I then wrested from his hands and returned to the refrigerator.

Jennifer: “I told you to stop swinging the orange juice.”

Owen: “I wasn’t swinging it, I was shaking it.” 

Jennifer: “You are definitely not getting your iPod back today.”

Owen: “Oh my God, Mom, you're so unfair. I was shaking the orange juice. You have to shake orange juice before you pour it. Don’t you even know that?” The last line spoken with withering condescension.

Et cetera. It went on for about 7 minutes. 

My mistake was shouting at him, engaging, letting know he got my goat. I can break this cycle only by keeping my cool and exacting stiff penalties, but I often find it hard to be unruffled, wise, far-sighted, tired, stern, and intensely irritated in a single moment. 

After that, I made cookies. Owen had said earlier that he wanted chocolate chip cookies, so I made gingersnaps. My paternal grandmother always kept gingersnaps in her cookie jar in the corner of her kitchen. 

 Sometimes when I can't sleep, I walk through their house in my mind. 

Not that anyone other than my sister cares, but you can see the cookie jar against the wall, behind my grandmother's arm. You can even see gingersnaps. They were supermarket gingersnaps the size of silver dollars, dark brown, very hard, incredibly good. I used to get up at night and tip-toe to the kitchen, take a handful of gingersnaps and carry them back to bed where I would eat them in the dark. Why did I feel the need to sneak the cookies? Would my grandmother have reprimanded me for eating them openly? It's possible. She was a cool, strict grandmother, not a soft one. No orange juice-shaking episodes on her watch.

I love gingersnaps. They’re plain-looking cookies, spicy and direct at first bite, but then they open up, become rich, warm, complex. I used the recipe for English gingersnaps from The Essential New York Times Cookbook and baked the cookies at the upper end of the recommended time range so they would be super-hard, which they are, though not as hard as the supermarket gingersnaps Do they use some deadly industrial fat to get the cookies so hard? A chemical? Also, these cookies could use a bit more ginger. But overall? Buttery, lively, crispy, delicious. 

Friday morning I put two gingersnaps in a bag in Owen’s lunchbox. Then I decided to run a little experiment and added two store-bought graham crackers, the '67 Dodge Dart of cookies. 

hopeless

A choppy week in the life

The Vitamix box is now a mask. But a mask of whose face? The first person to answer correctly in the comments wins a copy of Smoke and Pickles. 

Shorter, more frequent posts going forward. This one wore me out.

LAST WEDNESDAY I made the yellow squash soup with pickled strawberries from Smoke and Pickles and a prettier soup you’ve never seen. Just look at it. Sadly, it's a cold soup and I don't love cold soup. I thought maybe I'd changed, but no. I heated the leftovers for lunch the next day and in my view hot is the way to go with this and all soups except gazpacho. Pickled strawberries sound daunting but are just sliced berries tossed with salt and sugar and allowed to sit for an hour. The recipe for the soup and strawberries is here. 

THURSDAY Made fudgy, soil-black brownies from Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite. The batter calls for both unsweetened chocolate and cocoa powder, then you sprinkle sea salt on top of the brownies before putting the pan in the oven.  (The recipe also calls for cayenne, which I omitted.) Mark and Isabel declared these brownies the best I've made. I liked them, but The Essential New York Times brownie remains my #1. You can decide for yourselves. Clark recipe is here. 

FRIDAY In Smoke and Pickles Edward Lee offers a handful of recipes for what he calls "rice bowls:" individual bowls of hot, crusty rice onto which you pile a variety of other ingredients and then mix into the rice with a spoon. It's a dish that appears sloppy and effortless, like something a young drunk guy  throws together when he comes home starving at midnight and then shovels into his mouth while standing at the counter of his crappy apartment in Ballard or Oakland or Brooklyn. 

Well, it's not like that at all. No drunk person could assemble an Edward Lee rice bowl except maybe Edward Lee. Friday night I made Lee's rice bowl with beef and this “simple but satisfying rice bowl” contains 43 ingredients including homemade remoulade, freshly shucked corn, cooked collard greens, marinated flat iron steak, and fried eggs. It’s a little deflating to go to the trouble of gathering/making all these components and then see everything dumped into a little bowl and mixed up. But I got over it real quick. The steak was tender and full of flavor, the collards rib-sticking and almost meaty themselves, and the crunchy-creamy-salty corn remoulade tied it all together. The recipe is here and you should make it before the last of the summer corn disappears. This is a stupendous dish.

My family, of course, is not a family of eaters. Isabel didn't eat the collard greens or egg. Mark didn't eat the collards. Owen wouldn't eat the collards, remoulade, or rice (which he complained was "mushy") and because he was in a lousy mood he also informed me that despite all evidence to the contrary, he hates brownies and why would anyone put salt on a brownie?

Eighth grade is a hard year.

SATURDAY I decided to help Owen clean his room, which hasn't been vacuumed in 6 months. The floor was covered with Legos, Optimus Prime figurines, Joker drawings, clown wigs, school papers, and dirty jeans in layers so thick and ancient that you couldn't even see the the floor much less vacuum it. In the course of our cleaning, he yelled at me. I yelled at him. Mark came up and gazed at us both reproachfully and asked if we couldn’t do this without yelling. I wanted to throw Decepticon at him. After several hours, the room was 67% of the way toward vacuumability and Owen went to a birthday party. 

I decided to sign up for a 10-day free meditation program. 

SUNDAY Owen woke up with puffy eyes. Apparently we'd stirred up a hive of dust mites during our cleaning, but I decided this should be a day of rest. I went to see Short Term 12 which is wonderful. Did day #2 of the meditation program and felt calm for about 3 minutes afterwards. No cooking.

TUESDAY Owen woke up with puffy eyes again and had to take a Benadryl before leaving for school. He begged to stay home because he thought he looked "freaky," but I said no because he didn't look freaky. We argued. He slunk off to school. We're not getting along, but we'll always have Cuzco. I decided I’d finish cleaning his room myself and get it vacuumed. I scooped up fistfuls of Legos and dirty Kleenexes, petrified gray socks, stuffed animals, a grotesque horseshoe crab shell, crayons, unwanted Harry Potter books, Archie comics and a broken picture frame on which I cut my hand. Once finished with his room, I booked a business trip, made a dental appointment, answered a query letter from the IRS, bought batteries and a canister of Comet, paid the auto insurance, ordered a cover for the Weber kettle grill, and sorted laundry. I did meditation session #4 and took a moment, as directed, to “notice my mood." Mood: foul.

But it improved. Since we had leftover remoulade, I made Lee's rice bowls with salmon for dinner. Holy smokes, this is an amazing dish. Even better than the rice bowl with beef. Marinated salmon, shiitake mushrooms, proscuitto, remoulade, slivered dried mango. Big hit with all. I can't find the recipe online, so you'll need to track down a copy of Smoke and Pickles.  Library, bookstore, or start trying to identify that mask.

Sometimes the shoe actually fits

nectarines, rhubarb, pistachios

Here’s something I regret all the time: the name of this blog. 

Back when I started out, I gave zero thought to the fact that I was linking my identity to mild drunkenness. Shame! But if I had to go and do something foolish like that, why didn't I just use the word itself rather than a coy, girly euphemism? 

Too late. 

I neither bake nor drink anywhere near as much as I used to. This past week, however, I did. 

Drinking. I reconnected with various friends after the separation of the summer and that called for alcohol. During the course of the merriment, I mastered the pisco sour. I started out mixing the classic Peruvian cocktail in a shaker, but could never work up a significant head of foam. Then, on Saturday I mixed pisco sours for my friend Melanie in the Vitamix and they were nearly perfect. (Any blender would work, I just like to type the word Vitamix as often as possible.) These drinks were pale, pale, pale creamy green and atop the otherworldly liquid floated a layer of snowy meringue. Showstopping.

Last night Mark and I carted the Vitamix up to our friend Hilary's house in Petaluma and made pisco sours for her and her husband, John. I decided these pisco sours might be a little too tart. After leaving Hilary's, we drove the four minutes to my father's house where I made pisco sours for my sister and her husband. (My father tasted one and went back to his martini.) We added more sugar to the pisco sours and now they really were perfect. It had been a long, hot day, I was thirsty, and perfect pisco sours are dangerously refreshing. Everything after the second pisco sour is a blur. Back home, I fell asleep on the couch still wearing my clothes, setting a wonderful example for my impressionable adolescent children. There will be no more pisco sours anytime soon.

For me, that is. You should try one. Here's my recipe, adapted from the recipe in Boozehound which was adapted from the recipe at Hotel Mossone in Huacachina, Peru. The author says to be sure to use key limes, but I didn't and these were outstanding pisco sours.

Into a blender: 3 ounces pisco, 4 teaspoons powdered sugar (more to taste), 1 ounce fresh lime juice, 1 egg white, a generous handful of ice. Blend until the ice is demolished and the drink foamy. Pour into a highball glass. Top with a dash of bitters. Serves one.

Now, baking.

Yesterday I baked the rhubarb peach kuchen from Smoke and Pickles by Edward Lee, a Korean-American chef in Louisville, Kentucky, and took it to my father's as my contribution to that blurry steak dinner. Smoke and Pickles is full strange, intriguing dishes like tobacco cookies, a chilled squash soup garnished with pickled strawberries, rice bowls that contain kimchi and remoulade.  I didn't have peaches so I used nectarines in the kuchen and didn’t peel them, but otherwise stuck close to the recipe.  I wish it had been slightly more exciting as I want this book to amaze me. The kuchen was a good. I want this book to be better than good.

Also, I baked another batch of brownies, this time using a recipe that calls for cocoa powder rather than chocolate. These brownies are decidedly inferior to the brownies I made from The Essential New York Times Cookbook but still tasty enough that Owen ate ten in under ten minutes. Exaggeration, but not much of one.

Having read some of your comments, I compared the ingredient ratios in the Essential New York Times  brownie to those in the Joy of Cooking and Katharine Hepburn brownies. Adjusting for pan size, the Essential New York Times brownie has twice as much chocolate and butter as Joy's. Otherwise it is identical. It contains the same amount of butter, but twice as much chocolate and flour as Katharine Hepburn's brownies. It calls for the same amount of sugar, but the KH brownies contain unsweetened chocolate so this would indeed make the Essential New York Times brownie sweeter. I don't know what any of this means except that there's lots of leeway in the making of brownies. I shall continue testing brownie recipes until we get sick of eating brownies.

That's a Russian tea cake on the left. I rolled it in powdered sugar that I made in the Vitamix. A cup and a half of granulated sugar plus 1 tablespoon of cornstarch. Blend until powdery. Supercool.

I can’t wait to see where this Slate series on entertaining goes.