Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: XOXO Tipsy Baker

My new miniature Nikon point-and-shoot is great, though there's something bizarre about the perspective in the photograph above. Those are Andrea Nguyen's currant cookies and they look enormous, but were actually tiny. You don't expect to find such a fantastic cookie recipe in an Asian cookbook. These were delicate and chewy, much loved and all gone in under an hour.

Here's a picture Husband took the other night of Isabel and me:

We were watching Gossip Girl and he stood blocking the set, experimenting with the new camera during a crucial scene. Sweet -- he loves us! -- but irksome.  Some scheming girl was texting some other scheming girl and there was about to be a debauched party where everyone wore absurd, slutty dresses and got drunk and betrayed their best friends (or something like that) and we really wanted to see what happened. It's an awful show, which is not to say it's unwatchable. I think we watched the whole first season in three nights.

Anyway, the other day Isabel ran in to get a Gossip Girl disc from the video store and one of the young clerks said, "Your parents let you watch this?" She said, "Yeah, I watch it with my mom." Isabel reports that the clerk shot her a "weird" look and said, "you have a cool mom."

I pondered this. I think that what he really meant by "cool" was "permissive." Permissive in the way of those "hey dudes, come chill at our house, I've got a full bowl and I'll join you" Marin County moms who buy matching Abercrombie bikinis for themselves and their daughters.* Then they sit around together painting their toenails purple and giggling knowingly through Gossip Girl.

Blecch! No.

It is true, though, that aside from verboten Judd Apatow movies, I'm lax about my kids' exposure to pop culture. I could run myself down for having lower standards than almost anyone I know, but I run myself down altogether too much. I respect strict standards but I also respect my standards. Why else would they be my standards? I remember being twelve. I knew the difference between Dallas and reality. I had no trouble understanding that I was never going to have hair like Charlene Tilton or a body like Victoria Principal, and that to sleep with, then shoot, your brother-in-law was profoundly unwise. Did crap 1970s TV change me in any fundamental way? Wouldn't I be richer, more successful, and better groomed if it had? Is crap contemporary TV all that different?

For the last home-cooked Vietnamese dinner for some time to come, I served panfried rice noodles with beef and vegetables. Delicious and popular. And healthy. Look at all those cancer-fighting colors:

On the side, some deep-fried tofu simmered with scallion which had, to quote Andrea Nguyen, "a chewy, almost meaty quality:"

I loved it. "Terrible," Husband said. Kids did not touch. I've given up on the tofu fight. Again, something wrong with the perspective in the photo. Need to read the manual.

Today, my children leave for a month in New England to visit their paternal grandparents. This would ordinarily be a fallow time for Tipsy Baker, but I have a special cooking plan in store for the next week. Details to follow.

*I've never actually met one of these women. I think she's a suburban myth.

The Sweet Life in Paris: Earnest Summation

I owe a wrap-up on Sweet Life in Paris.

Made 26 recipes out of David Lebovitz's quirky culinary memoir:

Worth the price of the book: 3

Great: 4

Good: 12

So-so: 7

Flat-out bad: 0

The three recipes we especially loved: the chocolate chip cream puffs, the bouncy, pillowy chocolate-coconut marshmallows, and the Breton buckwheat cake. That deceptively simple Breton buckwheat cake beggars my storehouse of superlatives. Recipe: here.

If I have one gripe, it's that Lebovitz includes so many chocolate recipes: Chocolate yogurt snack cakes, chocolate financiers, hot chocolate, chocolate cake, two chocolate mousses, chocolate spice bread, double chocolate crepes, etc., etc. 

I know, that's my problem. 

Otherwise, great book.

Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Use your words, Tipsy Baker

No camera to document our kooky 4th of July party. 

Guests: 8 Americans, 4 Guatemalans, 1 Frenchman. Age range: 2 to 97.

Topics of conversation: tennis, chickens, haircuts, my sister's pregnancy weight gain, my sister's (rightful) sensitivity about discussion of her pregnancy weight gain, The Proposal. We're deeply thoughtful people.

Menu: 

-stir-fried beef with Chinese celery (C -- too much celery, flank steak like leather)

-pork riblets simmered in caramel sauce (B+)

-cellophane noodles with crab and black pepper (A-)

-honey roasted duck legs (A)

-quick steamed buns (A+)

-grilled corn with scallion oil (A)

-banana cake (B)

-grilled bananas with coconut sticky rice (B+)

Tiring to cook? Oh yes.

Owen planned the menu, per my shaky new theory that if he's more involved in the process of producing a meal, he will be more inclined to partake. We sat down with Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen and he picked out what looked appealing based primarily on photographs. He was particularly enthusiastic about the cellophane noodles with crab as there's a pretty picture of the dish on page 237.  I flinched because cooking and picking Dungeness crab is labor intensive and, in July, expensive, but why should I always get to call the shots? I bought a crab ($15), boiled her, cleaned her, and extracted all the meat. Dinner came around and Owen was off playing with his cousin. When he finally came to the table he requested the noodles. They were all gone.  That's how good they were.

I think Owen chose two banana desserts because Isabel hates bananas. The banana cake: damp, dense. Not like banana bread at all, as you don't puree the bananas you just slice them and mix them with a very scant batter and bake until the banana flavor is intensely concentrated in a flat, wet, brown cake. Curiously popular. I was not personally a fan. 

The grilled banana with coconut sticky rice -- exciting and exotic. You simmer glutinous rice with coconut milk and sugar until soft and gluey, spread it on a banana leaf, top with a wedge of banana, wrap like a tamale (Owen did this part), and grill. The banana collapses and melts into the rice, you unwrap the packet and eat the sticky, yummy confection with rich coconut sauce. It sounds complicated but, if you have access to an Asian grocery store and a barbecue, isn't. I thought this was fantastic, albeit unusual. 

The real revelation, however, was the quick steamed bun recipe, which you can find here. You know those pillowy, bone-white rolls you get when you order Peking duck? These were them. Take Pillsbury biscuit dough, pat it out into little rounds, fold into half-moons, steam for a few minutes and you have fluffy, tender Chinese buns. A really cool trick.

 

I lost track of Owen during all of this -- I think, in the end, he only ate ribs, which he would have eaten anyway.

We had us a morning

A year ago, our local chicken-keeping friends supplemented their flock with full-grown hens from Chinatown. It worked out great for them and Cathy says they're particularly "nice" chickens. Today, Owen and I were going grocery shopping in San Francisco and he wanted to get a chicken to replace the one we recently lost. I agreed to make a stop at Grant Avenue where there are some infamous live poultry shops, much hated by PETA.

CRAZINESS. Pheasants, peacocks, Chinese silky chickens whose flesh is black, plus the more ordinary laying hens. I asked about turkeys and would have bought some if they'd had any, but they didn't, thank God. I would like to get turkeys, but would prefer they come from a more savory home. Conditions: frankly, awful. Malodorous and crowded and filthy. I had second thoughts as I handed over $8 for a mangy looking chicken -- a Rhode Island red, I think -- in a paper bag, but it all happened so fast I couldn't stop and deliberate. We were in and out of there in under three minutes.

We put her in a laundry basket in the car and did our grocery shopping. Came back, she had shat all over the basket and elsewhere in the car and was huddling on the floor. Overwhelmed with misgivings now. The car reeked. Owen and I drove home mouth-breathing, all the windows open, fretting about diseases she might spread to our wholesome and sheltered flock. I considered stopping and dumping her out of the car in the Presidio. Just couldn't. Couldn't even tell Owen it crossed my mind.

We let her out in the yard with our chickens. She's incredibly docile and wimpy compared to the others, easy to catch, disinclined to move. Our original chickens are a peppy, prickly, and assertive bunch -- all except Alberta Einstein, who has already glommed on to the newcomer, like the lonely little nerd she is. I went out a while ago and the newcomer and Alberta were hanging out in the dark hen house, all the other birds were pecking around in the pretty part of the yard.

We were planning to go for a picnic today, but my grandmother decided to come up from Palo Alto, so now we are hosting a Vietnamese cookout. Owen and I did the shopping and  as soon as he emerges from his disinfecting bath, we are going to start cooking. 

 

How do you solve a problem like Owen's eating habits?

Not his manners. The manners may be hopeless.

Those pictures are from our recent vacation. Throughout the trip, Owen ate like a starving grizzly confronting a salmon run. He out-ate us at almost every mediocre diner we visited, demolishing ribs, pancakes, scrambled eggs, french fries, baked potatoes, bacon, gallons of root beer. And when he was done with whatever he ordered, he devoured our leftovers. In between meals, in the car, he kept busy with tortilla chips, cocktail peanuts, and cinnamon Altoids.

Wow, I thought. Finally. He's growing up, getting an appetite. Boy, it's going to be fun to cook for you when we get home!

So, we got home. The other night, I made a beef stew from Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. It was stupendous; recipe here. You braise chuck in a rich sauce of onion and tomato, with a little lemongrass, star anise, and 5-spice powder for flavor. Chunks of carrot go in at the end. Served with bread. Nothing weird. Like "regular" stew, but zippier. Isabel -- the world's daintiest eater -- loved it.

Owen: I hate soup. Why did you make soup? You know I hate soup.

Tipsy: It's not soup, it's STEW.

Owen: I hate stew, too. And cooked carrots. You know I don't like cooked carrots.

Tipsy: Okay, you can go to your room.

Seeing an opportunity for family drama, instead, he went to the computer. Tipsy then had to put down her fork, lay down law. Husband played good cop, annoying Tipsy because there should be no good cop in such a negotiation. (Right? Please tell me I'm right.) Dinner disrupted, possibly ruined. 

We long ago gave up trying to force kids to eat anything. (I don't know how my parents pulled it off, because I can't figure out the mechanics.) Unfortunately, it's not enough that Owen doesn't have to eat what he doesn't like, he's furious and insulted that I even cooked it. He will actually get up in the morning and say first thing, "What are we having for dinner?" No matter what I answer -- unless it's pesto pasta -- he gives a massive groan and responds with either: "I hate X," or, "I like X, but I don't feel like X today." He'll drag the grievance on and on if he gets so much as a nibble.

I am really loath to pander to his tastes. And if I did, I'm pretty sure it would backfire. What I cook, by definition, is objectionable. 

Why? 

Maybe I have pushed too far. This is possible. I am an extreme cook and have, on occasion, betrayed his trust. Two words: bacon salad. For this, I am sorry. 

But the comedian husband also plays a role. For dessert the night of the beef stew, I made Nguyen's almond jelly with lychees, jackfruit and strawberries. Is it helpful to the cause that husband loudly referred to the lychees as "eyeballs?" 

I have three possible solutions: 

1. Enlist Owen in the cooking. Maybe then it will seem less hilarious and cool when male role models who stockpile Good n' Plenties make side-splitting remarks about the dishes.

2. Ask him what he wants and basically just make that.

3. Grimly wait him out. One day he will come around. Isabel did. She eats almost everything now, including eyeballs.

I am leaning towards #1. In fact, am suddenly filled with excitement about this new tactic. 

P.S. the yummy almond jelly dessert looked a lot like this borrowed photograph, but without the maraschino cherries. I first tasted this dish at a Chinese restaurant when I was a child and it's one of my favorite things, though it involves an appreciation of almond extract.

Dad, will you lend me your camera?

Damage on the broken camera: $224 for the repair, 4-6 weeks.

And I think I pay too much for beef? Not after seeing Food, Inc. to which I dragged Owen this afternoon. I considered the documentary a form of penance for his recent awful behavior (it goes way beyond breaking the camera), but he got deeply into it, as did I.

The movie's not as nuanced some of the books and articles that have been written about our woeful industrial food system. The filmmakers try to cram a lot into an hour and a half, including the mistreatment of migrant workers, E. coli deaths, patented seeds, downer cows, diabetes, revolving doors in Washington, etc., and the production sometimes felt a little rushed. But overall: excellent, horrifying, motivating.

The movie was really good for me. I occasionally get grumpy about the marketing hype and incredibly high prices of organic foods in my area. Maybe more than occasionally. But I can be skeptical about crunchy marketing and still easily see that it's wrong on about five different levels to buy cheap, grain-fed hamburger from Safeway. Must not do that anymore, even in a pinch. Better to give up meat altogether. Ditto for factory chicken, generic milk, and Pringles. 

Not sure, however, that I can live without a camera.

Awash in self pity

My camera is broken -- Owen knocked it off a table "on accident" -- and I have become totally unstrung by this. Need new glasses, need to deal with tax query from IRS, need to book hotels in Vietnam, need to discipline son, need to write content for winery web site, need to lose 15 pounds, need new sneakers, need, need, need. And now the freaking camera. 

We just incurred our biggest single chicken expense yet. Paid $120 to a neighbor boy to close them into their house at night during our vacation. Ten dollars a day. A lot, no? It's a stupidly easy job -- the birds all go inside voluntarily at dusk -- but you have to be there EVERY NIGHT to physically close and secure the door. This seemed like a big, tedious commitment for a 15-year-old boy hence the pay. I still worry that his super-nice parents filled in for him when he had other plans, were down there on our hill locking up the chickens and quietly resenting us.

 

The honey haul

That's my current honey collection. On the left are three jars acquired on the recent road trip, on the right is the honey that I had in the cupboard.

It's shocking how different these honeys taste. The Wyoming honey has an intense flavor that reminds me of molasses; the clover honey from California, is similarly swarthy and robust. Both of these honeys taste fine until you compare them to the South Dakota honeys which are, by contrast, pale ("water white"), delicate, and exquisitely delicious. A totally different and vastly superior food.

Home is comfortable, but a little boring

Came back from vacation to a garden gone beserk.

Lots of beans.

Lots of tomatillos. Too many tomatillos. What to do with these? 

The Kerala red amaranth started to bolt in our absence.

I parboiled the leaves, which leaked red juice in the manner of beets. Sauteed them with garlic and tossed with whole wheat pasta shells. After 10 days of cheeseburgers, granola bars, and motel breakfast buffets, this was a perfect meal. 

Boys went to see Transformers II and Isabel and I ate this girly vegetarian dinner while watching Secret Life of Bees. So many thoughts about that movie. Don't know where to start! I want to live in a pink house in the South and bottle honey and be all centered and wise and nurturing like Queen Latifah, fearlessly speaking calm truths to scary white men and swarms of bees and Dakota Fanning.

It was a silly movie, but pretty good.

Home tomorrow

Last night of vacation. Am upholstered in mosquito bites, smell like a campfire, and have melted marshmallow in my hair. Arms are sunburned and epically freckled. They are also, I notice, massive. Wow. I need a long-sleeved shirt. And an exercise class. And a diet. And a shower. 

It's been an excellent vacation! Lots of hiking and scenery, some camping, more than enough ranch dressing and french fries. Very little culinary to report except that "local" and "organic" are concepts that have made no headway in Wyoming and South Dakota. We did not once see "grass-fed" beef on a menu, though we saw plenty on the hoof.

Sleeping it off in Rapid City

Indian taco, eastern Idaho. 

I intended to blog regularly on this vacation, but internet access has been nonexistent in the campgrounds and cabins where we've been staying. And now that we're in the posh Mt. Rushmore Holiday Inn with wifi, I can't remember any of the fascinating things I was saving up to say.

Vacation has been excellent so far, though has involved far too much driving.

A few things: 

1. I've been trying to track down local honey at our various stops, and only just today managed to find my first  jar -- at a gas station in Sheridan, Wyoming. The gift shops at Yellowstone sold Wyoming "honey" but it was doctored with berry flavors, which is ALL WRONG! I want to taste the local flowers, not "grizzlyberry."

2. Speaking of Yellowstone: amazing. 

3. One of our chickens died. The neighbor boy who is caring for them called and said he found the bird outside our fence, lying face down in the grass with a bloody beak. He doesn't know what happened. I suspect a cat. 

4. Not food-related but my review of Reality Check by Peter Abrahams is here. He's my favorite suspense writer, though as I say in the piece, this isn't his best book. 

Elko is great, but this book is greater

We had an exciting dinner last night at another Basque place, the Nevada Dinner House in Elko. The food was just meh, but at the adjoining table sat a posse of long-haired, fat, middle-aged guys in shorts and tank tops, all of them heavily tattooed. From these elaborate tattoos we gleaned that they are Vietnam vets and one had been a POW. Midway through the meal, one of them stood up, dropped his plate on the table and began complaining loudly that he was being ripped off. He was unbelievably belligerent, tossing his mane of gray hair, glaring at the waitress and saying, "You're tryin' to sell a chicken-fried steak for $30?" He said that over and over again. Eventually the male manager intervened and the party was escorted out. Wild. You don't see much of this in the Bay Area. 

The thing is, Mark agrees with him. He thinks the whole Basque family-style thing is a "scam." He calls it "cafeteria-style food at three star prices." It's true, the food isn't that great and it's not cheap. On the other hand, it's local, it's interesting, it's wholesome (vegetable soup, salad, beans with every meal) and the options are Burger King or a casino buffet.

For years I've wanted to hike in the Ruby Mountains outside Elko (see above), which is what we're doing today. Except I started a book I can not put down: Farm City by Novella Carpenter. It reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but funnier and minus the sanctimony. The author lives in Oakland and raises not just vegetables, but turkey, geese, ducks, chickens, pigs, and bees on the vacant lot next to her gritty, inner-city apartment. It's WONDERFUL and I wish I could stay in our hotel room all day reading. 

When it's not grotesque and/or tragic, Nevada is fun

We're on our family road trip, currently in the Nevada phase of the ordeal  joyful odyssey. Since this is a food blog, I'll try to restrict myself to interesting eating experiences which, given our itinerary (Idaho, Wyoming, and South Dakota) will mean short posts. 

As many of you probably know, Nevada is known for its Basque restaurants, and in Reno last night we hit Louis'. I was too shy to photograph inside the restaurant, so I will describe: communal tables, waitresses in what I took to be Basque peasant garb, faux-wood paneling, and a hearty set menu featuring Wednesday's appetizer: tongue. The platter of tongue, partially submerged in what appeared to be wine sauce, was removed from the communal table twenty minutes after it appeared, essentially untouched. This was sad. I love that they serve tongue, but it doesn't mean I can eat it. There was also a mountain of french fries, a tureen of soup tasting of bouillon cubes, a salad, beans and sausage, steak, and dry Jack cheese to finish. 

Food wasn't great, but we felt better giving Louis our money than, say, Denny.

Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: What would Tami Taylor do?

So, Tyra's going to University of Texas, Tim and Billy bought a longhorn steer, Coach got fired, Matt did the wrong "right" thing. We're done with the Friday Night Lights dvds as of last night, thank GOD. Dillon, Texas has seemed more vivid to me lately than my own life, which is pathetic, and I have begun using Tami Taylor as a guide for my behavior, which is fine, since she's awesome, but hopeless since she's an extraverted TV character and I'm an introverted human being. Yesterday, I drove six hours and spent most of the time in a reverie about the Panthers, which is just sad. Very good thing it's cold turkey until 2010. 

Up top is an opo squash, bought from the Chinese market. It looks sort of like a pear but tasted vaguely like zucchini and made a pleasant, easy soup when boiled with fish sauce, water, and a tiny amount of pork shoulder. My one complaint is that in her opo squash soup recipe Andrea Nguyen does not call for peeling the squash, as even after extra-long cooking, the skin was too crunchy, like the rind of a gourd. The recipe is here, and I recommend it, though would also recommend peeling the squash.

On the side, I served Nguyen's crispy fried eggplant which was delicious, especially dipped in nuoc cham.

I told the children the fried eggplant was fried potatoes, but in a harried way so I could pretend it was an absent-minded slip, should the fib be detected. No one figured it out, and the kids enthusiastically ate the fried eggplant. This is wrong. Tami Taylor would not tell such a lie.

Two caramel sauces

On the right, the caramel sauce from Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, a bittersweet syrup the color of Kikkoman that you make by melting sugar and letting it gently burn. You use this sauce in savory braised dishes known as khos. I've made two khos in the last week, and they were both wonderful.

 

1. beef kho. Nguyen's recipe calls for rough flank, which is not the same as flank steak. Rough flank is a gnarled and gnarly and very cheap cut available at Chinese markets. There's a reason you have never heard of rough flank: the morsels of exquisite meat are sandwiched between thick layers of white membrane that I had to cut with shears. You hack your rough flank into smallish pieces, tie it into bundles, braise for a few hours in caramel sauce, then struggle to serve and eat with a modicum of decorum. The ratio of edible protein to gristle and other tissue was low, but I have to agree with Nguyen that the meat we did eventually excavate was "exceptionally flavorful." It was like pot roast except beefier, the flavors somehow condensed. If you want to try this yourself -- and though I've done a poor job selling, it was good! -- the recipe is here.

2. salmon kho with galangal. I've never before used galangal, which is sold at Asian markets and looks like this: 

You slice it into a pot with salmon, pork belly, and caramel sauce then cook the dish for an hour or so. This kho is fun because you don't have to worry about overcooking the fish, you actually want to overcook it so that the salty-sweet sauce impregnates every melting bite.

It was sort of sad to turn precious salmon into just another sloppy stew -- part of what makes salmon special is its creamy shell-pink color, tidiness, and overall delicacy -- but the results were ambrosial. Recipe is here.

Now for the caramel sauce on the left. This is the salted butter caramel sauce from David Lebovitz's Sweet Life in Paris, a wicked concotion of sugar, cream, butter, and salt. Lebovitz recommends slathering the stuff on buckwheat crepes, which was delicious, but it would also be tasty on ice cream, crackers, toast, waffles, spoon.

Fish gotta swim, girl's gotta pay the mortgage

I recently read Abide with Me, the 2006 novel by Elizabeth Strout, author of last year's Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge. At one point the hero, a minister, worries aloud about being confused. Another character points out that confusion can be good because it's hard to be dogmatic when you're confused.

 

I'm confused all the time, which I hate, but this made me feel better. It's the underlying confusion that I appreciated in Wednesday's article in the New York Times by Mark Bittman about the ethics of buying and eating fish. Figuring out what to do isn't easy, and he wrestles with the moral and practical questions right there on the page. Compare his piece with this passage from a well-received 2008 cookbook:

"Wild salmon is the healthiest and most sustainable salmon, and it's also the best tasting by far. Farmed salmon are as bland an flavorless as factory chicken. They're fed a dubious diet and require antibiotics to control the disease that inevitably results from their crowded, polluting pens. When they escape, farmed fish endanger native species. Need any more reasons to go wild? 'Fish gotta swim for both flavor and health.'"

No, I don't need any more reasons to "go wild." What I need to "go wild" is a trust fund.

Ten years ago, after listening to a devastating radio program, I decided to never buy farmed salmon again -- except at Whole Foods. I like to think (but have no hard evidence for thinking) that Whole Foods holds its purveyors to higher standards that most shops, as they (of course) claim to do. High enough? Don't know. I should research this, but should also spend more time with my grandmother, read the newspaper, balance the checkbook, and find a new job. Meanwhile, this is where I've drawn a wobbly line in the sand with regards to salmon. The other day I bought the Whole Foods farmed salmon -- it's lovely, not "bland and flavorless" - for $6.99 a pound. The wild salmon: $24.99. 

I could be convinced to stop buying Whole Foods farmed salmon. I'm open to informed persuasion. Sell me. I might eventually be willing, if not especially eager, to agree that salmon -- beautiful, velvety, luscious salmon -- should be treated like caviar and chanterelles, a luxury the elite enjoy and the rest of us should basically forget about. If that's what needs to happen, okay. And if that's what needs to happen, we should probably outlaw farmed salmon completely because right now we're expecting an awful lot of high-minded restraint on the part of the middle-class consumer.

 

What I resent is the casual assumption -- common in food literature -- that upgrading to wild salmon is even an option for most of us. It's not. You need money to have your clear conscience and your salmon too. About that I'm not at all confused.

Farm report: The chickens appreciate my cooking

Chickens recycle leftovers that we can't compost or throw into the worm box, like leftover fromage blanc, Vietnamese noodles, and beautiful, not-that-delicious German pancake (see above.)

Since we had such luck with Molly Wizenberg's Dutch Baby a while back, this morning I attempted a variation, the pfannkuchen from the most recent Joy of Cooking. Joy: "Our recipe is based on one by Henrietta Davies, nineteenth century Germany's greatest cookbook author." 

Nineteenth century Germany's greatest cookbook author. Nothing on the internets about nineteenth century Germany's greatest cookbook author, which makes her even more intriguing. Aspiring biographers, take note.

Unfortunately, Henrietta's pancake -- which contained four eggs and 1/2 cup of cornstarch in place of flour -- was deemed eggy and "not as good as a pancake" by husband. The children seemed to concur. I wish I could rebut, but since I no longer have a metabolism, try not to eat pancakes. (I'm making buckwheat crepes with salted caramel sauce tonight, and for those will make an exception.)

Anyway, the chickens relished Henrietta's pancake, and I feel less troubled by the waste, which is no longer technically waste. Ok, it's still waste, but not as egregious.

Getting back to the fascinating subject of the worm box. Last year my mother gave me her worm farm which she'd been carefully cultivating  for years. This was one healthy, industrious colony. I used to lift the lid to see a seething, fleshy pink mass of fat wrigglers which was totally grotesque, but also fantastic. I wanted them to thrive and throw off lots of excellent compost, and since I'm definitely a "more is more" person, I fed them and fed them, carried every last coffee ground and cabbage core and crushed egg shell out to my babies. The box got very heavy and wet and oozed pitchers of so-called worm "tea" which I gave to the plants.

Then, over the course of a week, all the worms died. I had smothered them with kitchen scraps. Husband buried the noisome contents in a bare patch in the garden, and a month later I planted some tomatoes right there. The tomatoes have gone completely bonkers. 

For mid-June in a fog belt, that is bonkers. Note the tiny fruits:

 

Tomato plants elsewhere in the garden are a third the size with no tomatoes.

You don't have to kill worms to reap the benefits, you can just harvest the "soil" every now and then. I have acquired some new worms and, although it is a struggle, am practicing restraint in their feeding. I will spare you a photograph.

It occurs to me that maybe chickens should not be eating fromage blanc and German pancake, that "more is more" might endanger birds as well. I don't think so, but will check on that.

Lemons & cherries

Limoncello on the left, cherry bounce on the right. I started the limoncello (using this recipe) a few months ago, letting the lemon peel -- stripped of all pith -- macerate in vodka. The other day I added sugar syrup and more vodka, and now it has to stew for another month or two. I must say, the tiny taste I took was vile. I've given it my best over the years, but I just don't love vodka. 

I do love bourbon, and the cherry bounce is equal parts unpitted cherries and Jim Beam. It sits for a few months, then gets mixed with sugar syrup and bottled. Sounds like it might taste like cough syrup, but the name is so great I had to give it a shot.

Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: A long catch-up post

Owen is psyched about Vietnamese food.

Last night, I made the rice noodles with Chinese chives, shrimp and pork from Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, a handsome dish that I regrettably neglected to photograph. This whole entire bunch of monster chives went into the noodles:

Beautiful, no? Sadly, eating them was like eating grass, albeit very flavorful grass. Noodles get a B+

 

Another B+: Nguyen's poached chicken with Kaffir lime leaves. (Kaffir lime leaves: the intensely -- intensely -- fragrant foliage of a citrus tree that produces a gnarled green fruit. I bought a Kaffir lime tree last month, and it is thriving in a giant pot on our patio; you can also find the leaves at Asian markets.)

 

But even strewn with the lime leaves, the chicken was exceedingly plain -- poached chicken could be a synonym for plain -- and it was much improved when dipped in nuoc cham, as is everything. If you've never tasted nuoc cham -- lime juice, sugar, fish sauce, chilies -- you need to make some right away. Here's Nguyen's recipe, which gets an A+.

A couple of David Lebovitz desserts to report on: 

Monday, I made his dainty floating islands from The Sweet Life in Paris.

 

Not so lovely to look at, but lovely to eat -- foamy, crunchy, creamy, sweet. For a more cunning presentation of the same recipe, check this out. 

Finally, last night, following a reader's recommendation I baked the fresh ginger cake from Lebovitz's (excellent) first cookbook, Room for Dessert.

Moist and fiery with a crunchy crust, this was by far the best gingerbread I've ever eaten, probably because it contains a full quarter pound of fresh ginger. That sounded like a lot of grating, so I threw the peeled ginger in the food processor which did the job nicely in seven seconds. Even my finicky husband said the cake was "unbelievable," which is unbelievable. You can find the recipe here. 

Bees: This is bad

You can't really tell from the picture, but the bees are clearly in trouble. I went out today and while there are a few bees coming and going from the hive, there is now a large contingent just hanging around the entrance. They seem very sluggish, they are not fanning at all, just crawling slowly. It is strikingly different from their usual behavior. Whether or not this is due to the proximity of the toxic buckeye tree, I don't know.

Options: 

a. Move the bees elsewhere in the yard. But is there any point in our yard that is far enough? And is it too late for these particular bees?

b. Cut down the buckeye.

c. Give up on the bees.

If it could work, "a"would obviously be my first choice. Until two days ago, I loved our buckeye tree.  But if "a" is impossible, I am currently leaning towards "b." It feels like a crime to cut down a native buckeye, plus it will be expensive. But the poor bees.

Horrible.