Beautiful plum cake and heinous injera

Orangette/Nigel Slater plum cake

 I'm starting with the pretty because that seems more polite.

I read about this beautiful plum cake on Orangette and it was one of those recipes that was going to haunt me until I tried it. So I tried it. Very easy, very rewarding! It was delicious warm last night, but it was even better this morning, cold.  Read Molly Wizenberg's description. You're going to want to try it, too.

Would be good with whipped cream, though it's great plain.

Okay, now for the not pretty.

injera batter

A few days ago I mixed injera batter (teff flour, water, yeast) using the recipe from Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford's Flatbreads and Flavors. I let the batter bubble and sour and separate for 48 hours and I watched a little swarm of fruit flies form over the (covered) bowl. I had hopes. This seemed like the way injera should be made.

Something went wrong, or the recipe is wrong, I don't know. Hopes were dashed. My injera cooking skills are lacking, so the pancakes broke, as you will see below. But even had I been able to make the injera look like injera, it didn't taste like injera. It was only moderately sour and lacked that wonderful spongy texture. I served this nasty pancake with a dry, bland Ethiopian ground beef dish (also from Flatbreads) and it had to be one of the most heinous dinners I've ever put on the table. Which is odd, because those Duguid-Alford books are usually excellent. What is also odd is that my family ate it without complaint. I have beaten them into complete culinary submission. Not sure how I feel about that. 

sorry excuse for injera

I don't know what to do about my injera quest. I have a copy of Exotic Ethiopian Cooking by Daniel Jote Mesfin, but his recipe looks almost identical to the Duguid-Alford formula. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

On another subject, credit for my beautiful new blog design goes to my sister, Justine. Credit for the chicken picture -- and the impetus to upgrade -- goes to my publisher. I'm a little freaked out every time I open the page. It's like I've been living in a cozy basement with a bunch of rescue cats and posters thumbtacked to the walls and now I'm in a loft with framed Audubon prints and glass coffee tables. I love it, and I'm sure it will feel like home soon enough.

It's Istanbul, not Constantinople

Tortilla, Abyssinian wine, grandmother

On Sunday, Owen and I picked up my grandmother and told her we were going to an Ethiopian restaurant. She seemed unclear about exactly what cuisine we were talking about. "Indian food?" she asked. When we got to the restaurant she looked around at the people and said, "Oh, this is an Abyssinian restaurant."

I said, "No, no, Ethiopian. Ethiopia is a country in eastern Africa . . . "

I stopped myself, checked on my iPhone, discovered she was right. Or at least not wrong.

My grandmother did not like eating with her hands, and did not understand the role of the injera -- the spongy flatbread you use to scoop up the various dishes -- until about halfway through the meal. Lightbulb moment: "This a tortilla," she said.

I said, "No, no, it's actually a sourdough pancake made with teff flour. . ."

She looked at me darkly. "I know. But it's like a tortilla." After that she ate with gusto. My grandmother is a pip.

Zeni is the best Ethiopian restaurant I've been to in the Bay Area, and I'm just sorry it's in San Jose, where I hardly ever go. The injera comes in a basket and it is rolled up tightly, like hand towels. See lower left-hand corner of photo below:

It is pliable, grayish, slightly damp, intensely sour, so good. I am determined to learn to make it, or something like it. To go with the injera, we had super-spicy ground meat, homemade cheese, chicken sauteed in butter, cabbage sauteed in butter, salad, all delicious. One order of baklava for dessert, which I would have skipped, but my grandmother insisted.

I thought about how and what my grandmother eats. It's very simple: She eats everything, including wine, salad, and dessert, but everything in moderation, at mealtimes. It makes me think of the Michael Pollan maxim: Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. That strikes me as the soundest of all dietary advice.

The night after the Ethiopian dinner out, I made an Ethiopian dinner in. I made yataklete kilkil. Or, spiced vegetables. 

The recipe comes from the The Africa News Cookbook and you start by simmering butter with spices (ginger, turmeric, cardamom, etc.), onions, and garlic for a full hour. Then you strain out the solids -- both dairy solids and bits of spice and onion -- so that you're left with pure golden butter imbued with a subtly exotic fragrance. It's beautiful. You'll want to dip a crust of bread in it, but try to resist.

Once you have your spiced butter, steam some cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and potatoes, then saute them in 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the butter. Salt to taste.

spa food meets spiced butter and salt

I served the yataklete kilkil with basmati rice and everyone loved it except maybe Owen, who didn't seem to eat much. Isabel had seconds. Again, I started thinking about the peculiarities of the American diet. How it's all or nothing, you're eating like a bird or you're eating like Orson Welles. When I hear the words "steamed vegetables" I wince, because I have only met steamed vegetables in their most austere, unbuttered, unseasoned, you're-on-a-diet form. If all steamed vegetables were sauteed in a little spiced butter, I might actually eat steamed vegetables more than once  per decade and be a healthier person for it.

Last night, I made Algerian spicy vegetable soup (chorba hamra), also from Africa News. I will have to write more about this soup later because I didn't really eat any so can't comment on its flavor. I just left the pot on the stove for my husband and went to meet a friend of a friend for a drink. There, in the Marinitas bar in downtown San Anselmo, I consumed so many tortilla chips that I didn't feel like eating vegetable soup when I got home at 8:30 p.m.

My grandmother never would have done that. First of all, she never would have left my grandfather to fend for himself with a pot of soup and two children while she went out for a drink. What kind of negligent wife does that? No comment. But second, and more germane to the subject of this blog, my grandmother never would have stuffed herself with tortilla chips then come home and eaten a Skinny Cow caramel cone washed down with a glass of wine while watching Breaking Bad and called it dinner.

I like to think I have a healthy, traditional diet, but when I actually look at what I eat, that isn't quite the case.

The mysteries of gluten and tempestuous little girls

Gluten-free pasta

About six months ago I was invited to join a book club and I was delighted. I'd never been in a book club before, and every woman I know is in a book club. It's the midlife equivalent of a sorority, except you can't really be "against" book clubs. What was wrong with me?

Then my friend Susan asked me to join her book club and I did and it was great. I haven't missed a meeting since, even though I never got past page 40 of What the Body Remembers.

This book club involves someone hosting dinner. There is the usual depressing understanding among women: No one wants to get fat. But meal planning is more complicated than that with this group. One woman is vegan. One woman absolutely can not eat gluten. One woman was on a cleanse the month I hosted, so she didn't eat anything at all, just drank herbal tea.

Dinner this last Friday, hosted by Alicia, started with homemade cashew "cheese" and gluten-free crackers. Alicia promised to send the recipe and when she does I will print it here, because this cashew "cheese" was sensational. Not as a replacement for cheese itself, but as something delicious in its own right.

We sat down to dinner. Two lasagnas: one vegan and gluten-free, the other merely vegan. We were allowed to choose. Here's what puzzled me: Everyone wanted the gluten-free lasagna. I understand why people with celiac disease can't eat gluten, but most people don't have celiac disease. When I said I didn't mind having the gluten-full lasagna, I felt slightly uneasy, like I'd been left out of yet another important girly secret.

We talked about the book (Shopgirl by Steve Martin) and movies and Michele Bachman and then, over coffee and soy creamer, the conversation turned to cleanses and the whole gluten business. Apparently, it's all about something called inflammation.

Unlike me, you probably know about inflammation, which leads to heart disease, stroke, cancer, pain, everything you don't want. Apparently, some foods are inflammatory, and some foods are anti-inflammatory. White foods -- including potatoes -- appear to be inflammatory and are to be avoided. Alcohol: very inflammatory. (The women in the group do not seem to mind this particular inflammatory.) Tomatoes and eggplant: inflammatory. Blueberries: anti-inflammatory. My book club members believe gluten is also inflammatory, although this turns out to be controversial. For the record, Dr. Weil does not see any reason to avoid gluten if you are not gluten sensitive.

So perplexing. So interesting. I was gazing into the middle distance while processing my thoughts about inflammation when a woman said gravely, "Jennifer, are you okay?"

Everyone fell silent and looked at me, which was awful. I said, "Oh I'm fine. I was just thinking about white foods."

Anyway, this is how dietary theories inform/complicate my life: Last night I was going to cook African food, but in the end I didn't want to go to the supermarket and I kind of wanted to try the box of gluten-free quinoa spaghetti that I'd inherited from my mother and which had languished in the cupboard for over a year. I made a sauce of olive oil (good fat), a whole head of garlic (major anti-inflammatory), broccoli (ditto) and red pepper flakes and served it with the gluten-free spaghetti. Then I added some inflammatory Parmesan cheese, because the pasta didn't taste good until I did. How was it? No one could even tell it wasn't "normal" spaghetti. I drank inflammatory white wine and ate some extra broccoli to offset the wine. This morning when I made my coffee I wondered if soy milk might be a better choice than super-inflammatory dairy milk. But isn't soy milk a white food? Or is it beige? I was going to have a slice of toast with some peanut butter for breakfast, but there's gluten in my bread and we only had Jif, which contains sugar, a white food.

And so I ate a pear with 1 ounce of inflammatory cheddar cheese and felt like I'd started the day on the wrong foot.

Inflammation. Just one more thing I'll worry about when I'm trying to decide what to cook and what to eat, without ever really believing that these inflammatory foods that people have eaten for centuries can be truly bad. On the fence: The story of my life.

Next month's book club book: The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer. It was that or the Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness. I voted for cancer.

On another subject, yesterday we went to a high school football game. It was not exactly like one of the games on Friday Night Lights and I'm sorry to report that while the teenagers in our town are very good looking, they're not as good looking as teenagers in Dillon.

At half time, I walked home with Owen and his cousin Stella, who is 5. I started a conversation with Stella. We discussed school, her friends and her upcoming birthday, for which she would like a rock tumbler. I thought I was being a benevolent and interested aunt when I asked, "Are there any cute boys in your class? Do you have a boyfriend?" She yanked my hand, glared at me, and burst into tears. She cried stormily for the next three minutes while I apologized helplessly and Owen berated me: "MOM! No one likes it when you ask those things." He started to cry tears of sympathy with Stella and pinched the inside of arm so hard there's a purple bruise now.

Life is so confusing!

Would you want her promoting your book?

Not the perky one on the left, the OTHER one

Funny. Neither would I.

Nonetheless, I'm going to be on a panel next Friday at the Eat Real Festival in Oakland, California. Come!

Back to our usual programming:

Wednesday night I got back from six days driving around Oregon gathering notes for some travel stories. It was lots of fun, though I find it increasingly hard to fall asleep in hotels.  I drank a huckleberry milkshake, which was delicious, and picked thimbleberries which are even more delicious. I hiked through evergreen forests, had the opportunity to bungee jump and declined, visited the Timberline Lodge, which I admired even more than I did the first time, and toured a botanical garden that made me want to come home and work in my sorry yard.

The last night of the trip, I was eating a chicken salad in the hotel lounge when two older ladies plopped down across from me and we got to chatting. I ended up buying them a round. I realized later that I'd never bought strangers "a round" before, or even said the words, "we'll have another round." I liked the way it made me feel -- not just light-headed and drunk, but big-hearted and convivial.

Then I went back to my room and did not fall asleep the entire night.

Just another crappy photograph of something I liked

The highlight of the trip was a tour of the Gordon House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for a farmer and his artist wife. It's the third Frank Lloyd Wright house that I've visited, and each time I come out of one of these residences I feel sad that I will never get to live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Life is hard.

The kitchen looks hideous in my pictures, but trust me, tomato soup-colored countertops notwithstanding, it's a seductive room: unfussy, utilitarian, the perfect size and shape for one or two people who are trying to produce a meal. It isn't aiming to be the "heart of the home" with an island the size of Bermuda, homework center, wine refrigerator, puffy sofa, big screen TV. I think the backlash against the great room kitchen is inevitable simply because of how good -- how refreshing -- this small, thoughtfully designed kitchen looked.

The banquette was designed so it feels like sitting in the seat of a Chevy truck.

I haven't had a chance to cook a meal since I've been home, but when I do, it will be African.

Pink gin, piri piri prawns, PDX

piri piri

Lately, I've read several books in which people drink pink gin. Pink gin. It sounded magical and beautiful so I looked up the ingredients, but they don't sound magical or beautiful at all, which was both disappointing and a relief, because the last thing I need is another cocktail to fetishize.

One of the books in which pink gin gets drunk is Alexandra Fuller's new memoir, Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Like her first book, Cocktails is populated by eccentric white Africans who shoot guns, imbibe great quantities of alcohol and eat very little food. One of the foods they do eat in Cocktails -- or talk about, anyway -- is piri piri prawns. The words piri piri prawns had the same effect on me as pink gin.

But the ingredients sounded a lot better. Piri piri prawns -- which originated in Mozambique -- contains chili peppers, garlic, butter, and big, meaty shrimp. There are recipes in both Marcus Samuelsson's Soul of a New Cuisine and The Africa News Cookbook. Since Africa News is growing on me in a big way (more on that later), I opted for their recipe.

I looked forward to dinner all day long as the the shrimp marinated in the refrigerator. You're supposed to grill them, but I couldn't pull it together for grilling, so I cooked them quickly in a very hot cast-iron skillet and they came out perfectly. But after three prawns, I didn't want to eat anymore. While I love them all individually, I just don't like chili peppers, garlic, butter, and shrimp all together, and I don't know why. Too rich, I suppose, but usually I love rich.

To go with the piri piri shrimp, I served a Sudanese eggplant salad, also from Africa News. It involved frying peeled chunks of eggplant, chilling this grey-green mush, then mixing it with lemon juice, garlic, and crushed peanuts. It sounded so drab I almost didn't make it, but it was fantastic. I would type the recipe into the blog, but I don't have the cookbook with me right now.

Sudanese salad

Plus, despite my high praise, I don't think a single person would actually make it. A shame.

It looks like there's a pattern emerging here:  On another night last week, I thought we were going to love Marcus Samuelsson's lamb stir fry, but it seemed like it really wanted to be stew and we didn't love it.

He suggests serving the stir fry/stew with chunky mashed vegetables, which sounded like a horrendous porridge of sweet potato, carrots, green beans, and chili powder.

chunky mashed vegetables

It was almost as delicious as the Sudanese eggplant salad.

See, you never really know about a recipe until you try it. Almost never. I knew the chocolate rum cake from Samuelsson book would be lovely, and it was.

Although, calorie for calorie, I'd go for hot fudge pudding.

On another subject, I'm in Oregon on a short business trip, if you can call riding a chairlift, drinking huckleberry milkshakes, and visiting botanical gardens "business." If you have any suggestions -- food or otherwise -- for the Mount Hood and/or Silverton areas, send me a note!

African Food & Hot Fudge Pudding

red penne

I can't tell you how sad I am that summer is over. Isabel started high school a two weeks ago and yesterday morning Owen strapped on his 50-pound backpack, picked up his giant trombone, and set off down the hill to the middle school whence he emerged seven hours later cheerful and full of stories, but looking a little stunned. An hour later he fell apart because he had already lost his homework planner and he was sure he was going to be sentenced to eternal detention. "They're really strict about that in middle school!" he cried. I told him I thought the teachers would have compassion in the first week of school and that if they didn't I would homeschool him (?), but that meanwhile he really needed to figure out how to pay attention to his belongings. Then I left him disconsolate under a mountain of school supplies and drove Isabel to dance class.

Over the summer I thought I had outgrown my taste for alcohol. I thought, what an unexpected and wholesome development!

Yes, well. Cheers.

Three African dinners to report on:

1. Red penne. A lustrous pasta sauced with harissa (pepper paste) and ground almonds from Soul of a New Cuisine. Marcus Samuelsson likens it to pesto, which it somewhat resembles, except spicier and red. It is very delicious, though not quite as delicious as pesto. Another solid recipe from that very solid book.

2. I've been testing recipes from Marcus Samuelsson's Soul of a New Cuisine against the same recipes from The Africa News Cookbook. I was secretly rooting for the humble spiral-bound Africa News over the shiny chef's book, but the chef's book easily wins this round. The bobotie (Malay-inspired ground meat curry) from Soul of a New Cuisine was tender and fragrant. The bobotie from Africa News dried out in the baking so the top formed a mahogany brown crust studded with puffy burned raisins. I have spared you the photograph. To accompany, I made the buttery Africa News yellow rice which we liked, but which couldn't really compete with Samuelsson's "fancy" yellow rice, full of mango, yellow tomato, expensive saffron and corn on the cob. Not a fair fight, but Samuelsson still wins.

pretty and humble

3. Thursday night, I made Samuelsson's doro wett, an Ethiopian chicken stew with hard-boiled eggs. I hoped to present it, as he recommends, with a big plate of injera, the sour, soft, spongy flatbread that serves, in the course of an Ethiopian meal, as a platter, a utensil, and a tangy starch. I've only ever tasted injera in Ethiopian restaurants and it's the main reason I love going to Ethiopian restaurants. I had read disparaging reviews of Marcus Samuelsson's injera recipe and I am sorry to report that the naysayers were correct. His recipe calls for whole wheat flour, club soda, baking soda, and yogurt and yields a large brown pancake that is very tasty, but in no way resembles injera. It seemed much too easy and was. I am going to learn to make proper injera if it takes me the rest of the year.

Pass the maple syrup.

On another subject, I haven't been able to throw away any of my mother's clipped recipes and they sit n stacks and binders and files around the house. I have all my late grandmother's recipes too, and while I know that to keep them is silly, I think it's a benign kind of silliness, like keeping too many measuring spoons. No. It's better than benign. It makes me happy. When I look at my mother's and grandmother's recipe collections, I see those two women at their most youthful and hopeful. Recipe clipping and collecting is such an optimistic gesture, full of the expectation that there will be many days to come in which you will prepare and partake of braided holiday breads, homemade marshmallow eggs, oven-fried chicken, hot fudge pudding.

The following recipe for hot fudge pudding was at the top of one of my mother's stacks. I'm pretty sure she never made it. Clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, it's one of those wacky recipes that has you mix ordinary cake ingredients and then pour hot water over everything to make a horrendous mudpie that miraculously bakes into something coherent and wonderful. It is super-easy and calls for ingredients you might actually have in the cupboard right now.

Homely, but so good

HOT FUDGE PUDDING

1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup sugar
6 tablespoons cocoa
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup chopped nuts (I used almonds)
1 cup light brown sugar
1 3/4 cups hot water

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F and butter a 9-inch square pan.

2. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and 2 tablespoons of the cocoa into a mixing bowl. Stir in milk, butter and nuts.

3. Spread the batter in the pan. Mix together the brown sugar and remaining cocoa and spread over the batter. Pour the hot water over everything.

4. Bake for 45 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream.

It reheats well.  Last night, since the homework hasn't kicked in for real, Owen and I sat on the sofa and ate leftover pudding and watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, which I remembered as hilarious but is actually awful. Owen loved it, though, and told me he wished he was a Bushman.

My video shoot

my props

Friday morning I went to Safeway and bought a box of Uncrustables to use as a prop in the promo video for my forthcoming book, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter.  For the record, I think Uncrustables are silly. These popular frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cost more than a homemade sandwich and don't taste as good. Very broadly speaking, this is the subject of my book.

Some backstory on the video: Earlier this summer, the publisher sent me a Flip cam and Isabel made a video of me grinding peanut butter in the kitchen of my mother-in-law's beach house. We didn't have a script and I told Isabel to shoot from above to make me look skinnier. As a result, I look like I'm being filmed from a security camera in the ceiling. You can see the video here and you may understand why the publisher wanted a new video shot with a real camera at eye level by professionals.

Andy, Max, Nick

Professionals were found. The sound technician was young enough to be my son, and I'm not talking about a teen pregnancy.

We met Friday morning in the kitchen of a cooking school that happens to be a few doors down from 40-year-old Chez Panisse and directly across the street from the 44-year-old Cheese Board Collective. Around the corner, is the original Peet's Coffee (45-years-old). We met, in other words, at what is arguably the birthplace of the farm-to-table American food movement, not to mention gourmet coffee.

Many sweaty, self-conscious hours passed. I demonstrated the mixing, boiling, and baking of bagels and talked about my book, repeating the same lines dozens of time. I tried to project, tried not to put my hands in my pockets, not to slump, tried to remember what I wanted to say and to say it with heartfelt verve to these patient young men whom I suspected I was boring to death.

I hadn't eaten breakfast and suddenly it was one o'clock. We took a break. You could practically smell the River Dog Farm chicken legs roasting in the wood oven down the street at the Chez Panisse Cafe. At the Cheese Board there was organic vegetarian pizza. Next door: Lush gelato. And on the counter squatted that box of Smucker's Uncrustables.

Yeah. You guessed it. And they were delicious. Sometimes all you really want is to stop being hungry, fast. To repeat: Very broadly speaking, this is the subject of my book.

On another subject, a few nights ago I made the lamb curry from Marcus Samuelsson's Soul of a New Cuisine and served it with his yellow rice. The curry was fabulous, as was the rice. You may have eaten yellow rice before, but probably not like this yellow rice.

It is yellow from the saffron ($$), but also from chunked corn on the cob, mango, yellow tomato, and yellow pepper. We ate it all up. I'm so happy with this book. The Africa News Cookbook has a lot to live up to.

 demo bagels

Is this hoarding?

I cleaned out the kitchen drawers today. Forty-one measuring spoons.

And I can't bear to part with any of them.

They aren't okra fans

 South African hot dish

I miss Africa. It reminded me of Wyoming, but with elephants, and I've been missing Wyoming my entire life. The other night I watched a movie called White Material, the kind of movie that made me never, ever want to go to Africa before I went to Africa. Like Hotel Rwanda.

But having been to Africa, I completely understood why Isabelle Huppert did what she did in order to stay on her plantation, despite the bad men with guns, child soldiers with machetes, and a decapitated ram's head left in her coffee beans. It wasn't pretty, but I understood.

I didn't think much about food when I was in Africa, not because the food wasn't delicious but because food in Africa is dwarfed by everything else. It is dwarfed by the trees full of baboons and the vast plains, the hippos and lions and giraffes and monkeys trying to get in your room, by the waterfalls and rivers, and, of course, the problems. It seems frivolous to talk about African cooking rather than African poverty, political instability, AIDS, and rhinoceros poaching.

Yet if all that you feel comfortable discussing about a place are its noble landscapes and problems, the place is no longer relatable and human. African food is wonderful. The food served to tourists, anyway, which is the only kind I ate or had the opportunity to eat. I realize this is not what ordinary Africans eat, but is still African food: food cooked by Africans in Africa using African recipes and African ingredients. It did not taste like any food I had ever eaten before.

African food, in my brief and very limited experience, is strong and spicy and hearty, often served with pap, a starchy cornmeal porridge much like polenta, but not cheesy or buttery. We ate a lot of this porridge alongside curry-like stews accompanied by chutneys and incendiary pepper pastes. (A creamy spinach-peanut braise served with some porridge was the best thing I ate the entire trip, and I am determined to replicate it at home.) I worry that some of the flavors will be impossible to capture here -- the beef tasted different and better than American beef, and I ate a butter cookie that tasted 10 times better than any butter cookie I ever encountered in my many decades of butter cookie consumption. I started thinking maybe it was made with cape buffalo butter after someone told me they make cheese out of cape buffalo milk. It is a brave man or woman who tries to milk a cape buffalo.

Anyway, when I got home, I immediately opened The Soul of a New Cuisine by Marcus Samuelsson to learn more about African cooking.

This is a beautiful and inspiring cookbook, full of gorgeous pictures and tempting dishes, but it is very high end and cheffy, with recipes for things like quail-foie gras soup and tangerine consomme. Tangerine consomme sounds lovely, but it doesn't sound African to me. Amazon reviews of the book are mixed, as are the notes from Eat Your Books. I am especially discouraged by a thumbs-down report on Samuelsson's injera recipe as I am determined to learn to make injera.

Then I pulled out The Africa News Cookbook, which I bought some years ago. I can't remember why.

It is a homely looking spiral-bound cookbook, lacking lush photography or lavish recipes. Amazon reviews of this book are outstanding.

My plan is to cook a few dishes from Samuelsson's book this week and then cook similar dishes from Africa News next week, and choose the cookbook to proceed with on that basis.

I started cooking from Soul of a New Cuisine a few nights ago. Results so far:

1.  My father came over on Saturday and I made bobotie (see photo on top.) Bobotie is essentially South African hot dish, an easy and frugal everyday casserole of spiced ground meat topped with custard. This recipe was excellent and I kept eating even after I was full. It was that kind of excellent. I served the bobotie with an easy mango sambal -- a.k.a. relish -- from Samuelsson's book and some creamed chard. Dinner was a big hit. For dessert, Isabel made turtle bars from an Alice Medrich recipe that you can find here. (You should bake these immediately; they are that kind of excellent, too.)

sweet

2. Monday, I made Samuelsson's Jollof rice and it was gummy, dark, spicy, and studded with peas -- a one pot arroz con pollo.  Owen: "I thought it was good. Not make-it-every-night good, but it seems nice for once a month." Isabel: "I thought the chicken was good but the rice had too much stuff in it." Husband: "The chicken would be better if it didn't have any bones in it."

Jollof rice

3. Tuesday night, I made Samuelsson's kofta meatballs with okra tomato sauce.  I had expected meatballs with a little sauce that you could serve on a plate, but ended up with a viscous okra soup in which floated big, tender meatballs. It was gumbo-like and I loved it. I was alone. Isabel: "The meatballs would have been better by themselves." Husband: "I thought it needed a noodle in it. The okra is a little bit off-putting." Owen: "I liked the flavor of the meat, but that vegetable is not the kind of taste that I like."

He misses Africa too.

Super Natural Every Day: Earnest Summation

I spent a lot of time analyzing my relationship with Super Natural Every Day while I was having the relationship. Here's what it was like: like dating an impossibly beautiful, cool, and graceful person who you really want to mesh with, but don't, quite. Like The Way We Were, and you're Barbra Streisand.

I admire this book a lot. I admire the sensibility, the aesthetic, the photography, the principles of restraint and mindfulness that underpin every gorgeous page. But I'm just not that restrained or mindful and the food -- simple vegetarian dishes --  wasn't what I, or the people I live with, wanted to eat.

Except when it was! There were some big hits. So the spread here is very unusual.

Of the 23 recipes I cooked from Super Natural Every Day:

worth the price of the book -- 2 (lemony yogurt on the outstanding farro soup; broccoli gribiche)
great -- 5 (I craved the white beans and cabbage and Swanson's oatcakes.)
good -- 5
so-so -- 9
flat-out bad -- 2

For the record, here the designations "so-so" and "flat-out bad" reflect sharp differences in taste, not recipe glitches. At this house, we simply like sweet things sweeter, cheesy things cheesier, alcoholic drinks more alcoholic, and we're not lovers of millet and tempeh. I wish we were, but we're not. Still: an exquisite cookbook, with some excellent recipes. This book stays.

Around My French Table: Earnest Summation

When I was in South Africa, I met a woman from New Jersey and we immediately connected over our love of Dorie Greenspan's cookbooks. She has a lot of fans, that Dorie. I think I've effused sufficiently about Around My French Table over the last 8 months, so I'll be quick. This has become one of my most cherished cookbooks -- for the sardines rillettes, the beggar's linguine, the cheese crackers, the perfect brioche, the super-easy curried chicken and peas that you roast in a triangle of foil. For the generosity and reliability and abundance. I keep going back to this book and suspect I always will.

During my initial fling with this book, I made 32 recipes:

Worth the price of the book -- 5 (the recipes listed above)
Great -- 12
Good -- 13
So-so -- 2
Flat-out bad -- 0

One of the best ratios since I started this blog.

Now, a little Heidi Swanson, a little Guy Fieri, and I'm current.

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen: Earnest Summation

Last fall, I spent a few weeks cooking from Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen. Can you remember back that far? I can't, but I'm updating my cookbook reviews, which I haven't done for almost a year and which has been bugging me for almost a year. Not that anyone cares anymore, but for the internal integrity of the blog, I have to do this.

A recap: Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen is a handsome, earth-toned book full of enticing pictures of rustic food as prepared by a famous Seattle chef, the owner of How to Cook a Wolf and Tavolata, among other restaurants. Charlotte Freeman, who writes the Cookbookslut column at Bookslut, hated Stowell's book with a white hot fury. Its cheffy pretensions -- reminders about using only best quality ingredients, the "tone of haughty hyper-reverence" -- made her want to "stick hot needles" in her eyes.

I don't disagree with any of Freeman's points, which are all valid criticisms, but this book didn't make me want to stick hot needles in my eyes. (In fact, I can think of nothing that would.) To the contrary, I enjoyed Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen. Probably because I spent very little time reading the headnotes, which are indeed irritating, as I was so completely smitten with the recipes, which I found fascinating and exotic. Opening the book again this morning, I saw at least a dozen unusual, seductive dishes that I'd like to cook in the appropriate season: espresso granita with grappa cream, pear-star anise ice cream, soft-shell crab bruschetta with spring garlic aioli, canneloni with braised pork cheeks and sweet cicely.

That is, if I knew where to buy pork cheeks or sweet cicely without making a dozen phone calls and a trip to Berkeley.

Which is why, last fall, I cooked only 13 recipes from this book. (By comparison, I  made 57 recipes from the Moro cookbook; 36 out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home; 52 out of Claudia Rodin's Arabesque.) A lot of Stowell's dishes, maybe even a majority, call for obscure ingredients I could not readily find: ramps, rabbit loin, lobster mushrooms, Thumbelina carrots, Cacio Faenum cheese, snails, live sea urchin, lamb's tongues, nettles. Et cetera. Sometimes I'm up for a scavenger hunt. In October 2010, apparently, I wasn't.

The recipe tally:

Worth the price of the book -- 0
Great -- 6 (roasted figs with chocolate espresso ganache, endive lemon salad)
Good -- 6
So-so -- 1
Flat out bad -- 0

While I don't think it's a shelf essential, Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen still shines for me. I plan to throw away cookbooks that don't review well on the blog, and Mixt Salads is long gone. This book stays.

Done! On to Dorie Greenspan.

Words failed me

Avoid the final picture in this post if you are soft-hearted or squeamish..

It was hard to blog from Africa because internet access was at first nonexistent, then intermittent, and never powerful enough to post photographs. There was so much I wanted to say that I ended up saying nothing.

A very quick summary of two weeks in Africa with Owen:

Jamie Oliver is correct: Township food is better than much American food.

We started the trip in Johannesburg, where we ate stewed tripe, beans, and cornmeal porridge in a restaurant in Soweto, which was a highlight for me. Not the tripe, Soweto. Owen had no idea what it meant, but he was an excellent sport.

Mandela House

We flew to Zambia and drove through brushy countryside that looked like I had expected Africa to look, in both good and difficult ways. The border crossing/ferry to Botswana was exactly how I'd expected Africa to be, but only in the difficult ways. At our Okavango Delta camp (it bore no relation to camping, but it is called a camp) we saw cheetahs, zebras, giraffes, kudu and warthogs, and had a close encounter with a baboon. It was altogether magical.

Then we moved to the Chobe River.

Multiply by 1000.

The Chobe River is crocodile infested and let's not forget the water snakes. Here, I ate curried warthog. Here, Owen fell ill.  Here, I realized I would rather not travel than stay in hotels where I don't want to touch the doorknobs. I am ashamed that I am like that, but too old to pretend. Despite seeing many handsome elephants and hippos, plus sinister crocodiles and horrifying water snakes, this was the nadir of the trip.

Then, our luck changed and held. Owen recovered and at Victoria Falls he beat me at chess. I've seldom seen him more pleased with himself.  Monkeys tried to get into the room and I saw a hippo swim by at sunset. Victoria Falls is indescribable, so I won't even try.

This does not begin to capture it. 

But while we saw a lot of magnificent sights and animals throughout the journey, it was not until we arrived at a place called Londolozi that we began to understand how it all fit together -- the thorny trees, the rockpiles, the many and varied creatures. Our ranger here knew everything about the animals' sagas so you weren't just seeing cookie cutter leopards, you were seeing specific leopards. You were seeing specific lions, from specific prides and coalitions with noble and ignoble histories, lions involved in epic clashes and Shakespearean power struggles. It was a lesson in the power of narrative. We sat at dusk in a jeep, shivering and watching three enormous lions do absolutely nothing, and I think we would have sat there all night just to hear the ranger tell their stories.

This is the one part of the trip -- Londolozi -- that I think my husband and daughter would have loved.

But they're not into animals and they didn't want to go to Africa. I respect that. I also think they're a little crazy.

The most memorable African meal 

From exotic to EXOTIC

The newest addition to my collection

I grew up in California and I find everything about New England exotic. The other day, my mother-in-law's brother Edward gave me a copy of A Taste of the Somerset Club. He belongs to the Somerset Club. What is the Somerset Club? I had no idea, but perusing the cookbook, it became clear that the Somerset Club is exclusive, old, and the last redoubt of lobster sauce, Stilton cheese sauce and Madeira sauce ("The Club serves this classic sauce with chicken, veal, beef or pheasant.")

I love this cookbook. I own no volume quite like it.

Two nights ago, I was assigned to bring hors d'oeuvres to a family gathering at Edward's beach house.  I thought it would show my gratitude if I cooked from A Taste of the Somerset Club. There were only six hors d'oeuvre options, five of them deep-fried. The non-deep fried option: little pinwheel sandwiches of pita bread, roast beef, and curry powder. Since my brother in law Chris was making beef for dinner, and despite the fact it was miserably hot, I took a deep breath and decided to deep fry.

Made:

-coconut shrimp. Weird, enticing concept. You dredge shrimps in flour, egg, and sweetened (!) coconut, then dip them in a thick, spicy (by New England standards) batter and fry until puffy and crisp. Serve with a syrupy orange juice-horseradish sauce. I loved the idea of the sweet coconut and the sweet sauce, but it didn't quite work. A few people praised these fritters, but I think they were just being polite.

There was something on my camera lens.

-Somerset Club fishballs. Tough to say "fishballs" with a straight face. According to the Somerset Club: "Fishballs are our most favorite hors d'oeuvres and quickly disappear off the tray." To make them you saute some fish with wine, flake, and mix with vegetables and instant mashed potatoes, shape into orbs, roll in bread crumbs, and fry. Serve with Dijon mustard. As promised, they quickly disappeared off the tray. I preferred them to the coconut shrimp.

fishballs

That said, my favorite appetizer was the onion soup dip that used up the rest of box of Lipton onion soup mix I bought to make dip a week ago. Am I insulting people when I serve this dip? I think it's irresistible, but maybe I'm oblivious to sighing and eye rolling.

They should serve THIS at the Somerset Club.

Anyway, the party was fun. And exotic. Sometimes, when my in laws have big family parties, I feel like I've stepped into a Ralph Lauren commercial. Lanky blond youths play touch football on a grassy knoll overlooking a glittering bay as elders repose in wicker chairs and sip gin and tonics. Only in this setting, do I and my children appear swarthy.

Polo, by Ralph Lauren

Owen and I are in the airport now, about to leave for Africa. There we will appear as we actually are: very, very white.

Food mysteries of the South Coast of Massachusetts

Delectable Portuguese custard tarts surrounded by barely edible cookies

Interesting and mysterious to me, the juxtaposition of grimy ethnic mill towns and beautiful WASP beach communities you find in this part of Massachusetts. Interesting and somewhat less mysterious, at least if you've read Cheerful Money, that the best food is found in the grimy ethnic mill towns.

I volunteered to cook another summer house dinner the other night and my brother-in-law Chris took me to New Bedford (grimy) to stock up at Sid Wainer, the great specialty market he discovered when he was living in the area. This dark and cavernous place carries all manner of spices, breads, anchovies, exotic fresh vegetables, jellies, chutneys, and imported cheese, but is situated in the most depressing of strip malls. And, I'm telling you, the South Coast of Massachusetts boasts some depressing strip malls. We went to Fall River the other day, and the words Fall River now make my skin crawl -- and not just because Lizzie Borden lived there.

At Sid Wainer, I bought cheeses -- from Spain, Italy, Wisconsin and upstate New York -- as well as an incredible pomegranate-lime jelly to serve with them. You can't buy cheeses and condiments like this at the Wareham Shaw's, where vacationers usually shop. Why not? So strange.

Mostly gone within 20 minutes

After visiting Sid Wainer, we went to a fish market and bought bluefish for $3.69 per pound.  I almost didn't want to buy such scarily cheap fish, but did. At a nearby Portuguese grocery, I acquired the gorgeous cookies and custard tarts posted at top. Lots of enticing Portuguese restaurants, bakeries, and butchers in this area. I want to explore.

An odd grilling technique, but it works.

Back in the beautiful WASP beach community with groceries from the grimy ethnic mill town, I repeated the bluefish dish I made in Cape Cod last week: cover the filets in mustard, lemon and breadcrumbs, grill for 40 minutes. It wasn't as delicious this time, but it wasn't bad, and I served it with my version of creamed corn. (Spicy creamed corn: Scrape corn from cob, soften chopped shallots in butter, add corn and fry, stir in Thai red curry paste and coconut milk, cook until bubbly, add lime juice and cilantro, salt to taste.) There was a moment when I thought the meal was going to be a disaster, but it turned out okay. Maybe too many strong flavors on one plate, but not a disaster.

The Portuguese custard tarts: huge hit! Very similar to the Chinese custard tarts you get in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bakery, but denser, sweeter, less eggy. Soggier crust, better filling.

But once the tarts were gone we were left with a mountain of awful, chalky, stale cookies. Later, I found a gang of children playing blackjack with a plate of the Portuguese cookies in the middle of the table. The loser had to eat them.

Subset of the kid mafia playing cards

I have to read The Big House

Kyocera ceramic knife -- you need one.

With no wireless, I can't keep up with this vacation blogging! There's only so much Dunkin' Donuts coffee a woman can drink.

Alright, deep breath.

My husband's family has owned and loved the same Massachusetts beach property for several generations, property that has been divided and now comprises four summer houses for various branches of the family and a fifth that is the year-round residence of a cousin. The property is lovely, heavily wooded and threaded with trails. It has its own stretch of rocky beach. There are outdoor showers, a swing set, screened-in porches, hummingbirds, and many mosquitos. The kids get here and run off in a pack of cousins and aren't heard from until someone idly mentions she might be willing to take the boys to see Captain America at which point suddenly I am thronged and regretful.

Cooking is done for a crowd and people volunteer for meals. The other day I produced a modest dinner: potato chips with onion soup dip, burgers, cole slaw, and s'mores bars (baked by Isabel.) My in laws are not really into elaborate food and I try not to overinvest. I succeeded, perhaps too well. I wasn't exactly bursting with pride at that dinner. As always, everyone loved the s'mores bars.

Friday, Isabel and I drove out to the Cape Cod summer home of her good friend Juliet, whose mother is my good friend Lisa.  We swam in the sea, swam in a pond, shopped in shops, and then Lisa and I cooked for her extended family. As the menu took shape, it became clear that Lisa's family is very into elaborate food. We made negronis and served grilled bluefish with mustard and lime, scalloped oysters, salad, corn roasted with agave and soy sauce, and there was a lasagna for the kids. Dinner was late, loud, drunken, and delicious.  As usual, my photograph doesn't do the food, people, or anything else, justice.

It was fun, really! 

I'd never cooked or eaten bluefish before, and was very pleased with the recipe, taken from a Cape Cod cookbook on Lisa's shelf. You put the fillets in a foil pan, smother in mustard and lemon juice, then cover in bread crumbs, and grill for 40 minutes. I liked it so much I'm making it tonight for my in laws.

For dessert: another batch of s'mores bars.

Thank-you, Anne Thornton.

Sunday, Isabel and I drove to Boston to make a pilgrimage to Flour, the bakery owned by Joanne Chang, the author of Flour, a newish cookbook we like a lot.

Good bakery in desolate-on-Sunday neighborhood

We got there 8 minutes before it closed. I didn't even have to ask her -- Isabel jumped out of the car while I parked to be sure we got an order in. My girl.

Hazelnut cookie was best.

She bought a hazelnut cookie, an oreo, and a raspberry crumb bar. The hazelnut cookie was unbelievably good, the oreo tasted just like the ones we've made from the cookbook (amazing), and the raspberry crumb bar was tasty. Like Baked, Flour is a homestyle bakery -- a place you go to buy high quality treats you could conceivably and easily make at home, especially when the owners publish an excellent cookbook.

Coincidentally, Flour is just around the corner from Sportello, a Barbara Lynch restaurant. Lynch wrote a wonderful book I cooked through last year -- Stir -- and since Sportello was just about to open for dinner, we went.

And such small portions

I'm hesitant to say anything negative because I'm having a very happy vacation and we loved Stir, but, okay, twist my arm. We were the first ones in Sportello and there were paper towels all over the bathroom floor, the trash basket was overflowing, and everything on the menu was a little too expensive. Maybe a lot too expensive. Isabel's flat pasta with bolognese sauce cost $24. My porcini ravioli cost $25. The salad was, if I remember correctly, $14. All good, not great. Maybe that's what it costs to keep a restaurant afloat, and maybe this was an off night. I don't know.

Anyway, I still recommend the cookbook.

Sportello is very handsome and very white.