Coffee cake and little cakes

The cherries eventually sink into the batter and disappear.

Last week I bought some cherries at Safeway because they cost $2.99 per pound and looked ok. They were not ok. They had no structure. You bit into one of these cherries and it collapsed. Cherries are my favorite fruit, but even I didn't want to eat these cherries.

Yesterday, Isabel and I went to the farmers' market and bought some Utah Giant cherries ($5 per pound!) that are almost black. You bite into one and it crunches like an apple. I love these cherries so much I would never cook them.

Rather than just throw them to the chickens, I decided to see if the Safeway cherries would improve when baked into a coffee cake and the answer is: YES. I made the cherry-almond coffee cake from Rick Rodgers' Kaffeehaus and it's easy and very tasty. You can use flabby cherries because all cherries, no matter how gorgeous and firm, become flabby after you bake them.  Rodgers writes in the headnote that in Hungary and the Czech Republic cooks don't pit the cherries "so the stones can add their subtle almond-like flavor to the batter; no one seems to mind spitting out the pits." Then he goes on to say that his version calls for pitting the cherries. What? I ignored him and didn't pit the cherries and not even Mark complained. If you feel compelled to pit the cherries or if you have beautiful Utah Giants, don't make this cake. This is a cake for mediocre cherries, unpitted. Recipe here.

Back to Indianers, the Austrian cake that somewhat resembles a cream puff. I've made three batches now. The Rick Rodgers recipe from Kaffeehaus calls for baking them in an aebleskiver pan but that didn't work for me -- they shrunk and got stuck -- so I went back to the muffin tin which does. I know they're not authentic Indianers because according to LizA they need to be made in a pan like this. Oh well. I tried brushing apricot glaze inside each cake as Rodgers does (Flo Braker also does this in The Simple Art of Perfect Baking), but I couldn't taste it so I'm skipping the apricot glaze.

One was my grandmother's, one was my Mom's.

Because someone asked how you eat the cakes without the cream falling out the bottom, I watched the way I and others ate the cakes and there's really no trick it. The cream just isn't an issue. It's very thick and seems to cling to the cake like the "cream" inside a Ding Dong. Eating them is easy. Too easy. These cakes are fantastic and I'm going to eat the last one right now.

Indianers, adapted from both The Food of Vienna's Empire and Kaffeehaus

Batter:
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
4 eggs, separated
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Filling:
1 cup heavy cream, chilled
2 teaspoons sugar
3/4 teaspoon vanilla

Glaze
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 ounces semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Generously butter and flour a 12-cup muffin tin. Sift the flour and cornstarch into a bowl.

2. Beat the egg whites until foamy then, 1 tablespoon at a time, add the sugar, continuing to beat until the whites form stiff peaks.

3. Use the same beater to mix the egg yolks with the vanilla just until blended. Now stir 1/4 of the egg whites into the yolks with a rubber spatula. Pour this yolk mixture over the remaining whites and sprinkle the flour and cornstarch on top of the yolks. Fold the batter gently until no trace of flour remains.

4. Scoop the batter into the muffin cups, using an ice cream scoop if you have one. Divide the batter evenly; each cup will be almost full.

5. Bake for 12 minutes until puffed and lightly browned. Remove from the oven, run a sharp knife around the edges and lift the cake out of the tin. Cool completely. They will shrivel a bit; don't worry.

6. Whip the cream with the sugar and vanilla until it's very thick. Not soft peaks, firm peaks. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

7. Slice the bottom off each Indianer and scoop out the insides. Eat, save, or discard. Fill each shell with cream. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

8. Heat the cream to a boil, remove from heat, add chocolate and stir until melted and blended. Put the chilled Indianers on a rack over a cookie sheet, cream side down. Pour the chocolate over the tops of the Indianers. Refrigerate until cold. They keep for at least 3 days.

Leaning in to the blog

the annual manicure

The first homemade pasta I ever tasted was cannelloni my parents' friends Steve and Jeannette Grant served from the Time-Life Cooking of Italy. This was circa 1978 and I'd never eaten noodles so silky, never known noodles could even be silky. The meat was suave and incredibly rich, thanks, I later learned, to the addition of chicken livers. I made the cannelloni last night and have two overarching comments:

1. This cannelloni is so fussy and involves so many little pieces of noodle and meat and butter that toward the end you will wish you were an octopus.

2. It is delicious.

The recipe in brief: You saute a mixture of onion, beef, spinach, and chopped chicken livers. You make a tomato sauce. You make a bechamel sauce. You make very thin egg pasta and cut it into many rectangles that you must place flat on a floured surface because if you place them on an unfloured surface they will stick and you will have to scrape them up and roll and cut them again just like I did. Boil your pasta pieces, drain them, and now you must carefully place them flat on paper towels. If the pieces get folded, they will stick in that folded shape and in trying to restore them to flat rectangles you will rip a great deal of pasta, just like I did. One by one, roll your intact pasta rectangles around spoonfuls of meat and place in a pan. Top with the bechamel, tomato sauce,  bits of butter, and Parmesan. Bake.

Clearly, it's useful to have a helper for this. Owen was with me the whole time and he's wonderful company, but not a helper. Isabel is a wonderful helper, but she's never here anymore. I think she's gently preparing us for that dreaded day in September 2015 when she moves out. At this rate, we won't even notice.

While I was struggling with the cannelloni, Owen took several dozen candid flash photos of me from odd angles. When that got old, he stuck a butter knife in the pasta roller and turned on the machine, just to see what would happen. If you're curious, the butter knife gets stuck. Really stuck.

Supposedly, he'll be leaving us in 2018. Hard to picture.

When Mark walked in the door I was spitting tacks, as my mother liked to say. Mark helped Owen get the knife out of the pasta machine and while the cannelloni baked I asked Owen to take a picture of Mark and me for my 25th college reunion book. He immediately started taking pictures of cats and spiders; he climbed up on the retaining wall, crouched to try arty angles, fiddled with the camera settings, etc. Mark, at least, was amused.

Is he going to stick a butter knife in the camera now?

The photo shoot was a bust. What would happen if I sent that picture in to the reunion book? Would people think it was funny, tragic, or just very, very weird? Obviously I won't send it, though I'd sooner send a picture in which I look like I'm going to kill someone than a picture in which I look radiant, joyful, and fat. Yes, I have certainly matured over the last 25 years.

As for the cannelloni, like I said: delicious. Owen wolfed it down and went back for thirds. I ate a ladylike portion. Mark wouldn't eat the filling because of the chicken liver, so he picked it all out and said, "The meat is too dominating. When the noodles are this good you really just want noodles and butter." Isabel, as mentioned, was out.

All in all, a hit, but we won't be eating cannelloni again anytime soon.

On another subject, I've made two more batches of the Indianer cakes and mastered the recipe, but want to try the apricot variation before calling it a day and posting. Interesting how much apricot jam Austrians use in their pastries.  

So who did invent whipped cream?

Indianerkrapfen

Trying to cook from the 27-book Time-Life international series is overwhelming! I sit down to write a grocery list, happily flip through one book after another, and 3 hours later look up and don't have a grocery list which is cool because I no longer have the energy to go to the grocery store. I may have to refine my approach.

Indianerkrapfen. Not a pretty word in English, so we'll call them Indianer cakes. The recipe comes from The Cooking of Vienna's Empire (part of the Time-Life series) by Joseph Wechsberg, a revered food writer whose Blue Trout and Black Truffles I once read but remember nothing about. He offers an account of the invention of Indianer cakes that is so silly I almost don't want to waste the energy typing it. But will: A Hindu tightrope walker traveled to Vienna in 1850 and a woman was watching him traverse the tightrope between two towers when her husband told her to quit staring This pissed her off and she threw a lump of dough at him. The dough landed in a pan of hot fat and when she pulled it out she filled it with whipped cream, iced it with chocolate, and named the new cake in honor of the Hindu tightrope walker.

This is the stage where you think you have failed.

Do you believe that? Neither do I. Wechsberg also writes that a Viennese housewife invented whipped cream and while the Austrians do seem to eat a lot of it,  I don't believe that either. Wikipedia concurs.

To make Indianer cakes, you mix an airy batter of cornstarch, flour, sugar, and egg and bake in a muffin tin. Cool the muffin-cakes, which will be sunken and misshapen, scoop out the middle of each, and fill the hollow with whipped cream. Turn the cakes cream-side down and glaze the tops with chocolate. The cakes resemble profiteroles, but instead of firm, bland choux-paste shells, the Indianer shells are tender and sweet, like a French cruller. I loved them. Everyone did. They were gone in 24 hours.

The recipe had problems, principally, the glaze. You're supposed to melt unsweetened chocolate with water, sugar, corn syrup, and cream, then whisk in beaten egg at the end. I knew this was going to fail and fail it did, yielding a thin, oily fluid full of scrambled egg bits. I threw it out and made an easier glaze from Kaffeehaus by Rick Rodgers that worked beautifully. Rodgers offers a somewhat different technique for Indianer cakes that I want to try, as well as a more plausible story of their origin. I will print a recipe for Indianer cakes as soon as I've got it perfected because they are really, really special.

like greasy quesadillas, but less tasty

Less special: the Tunisian brik from Quintet of Cuisines. You place a mound of seasoned ground lamb on a square of fillo dough, crack an egg on the lamb, fold the fillo into a triangle, and fry for a few minutes. A diagram would have helped with the fillo origami and I also could have used a few words on how to fry the brik because: too fast and they will brown before the egg inside has cooked. This happened. Wet, gelatinous egg, tasty lamb, oily filo. I would give the recipe another shot and try to correct my errors, but just don't love savory fillo pastries enough to bother.

On another subject, I had to go back to Monterey this past weekend and saw something in the backyard of a historic adobe that reminded me of a big project I have not yet completed:

Oh, go away, not now.

I was so gung ho about our pizza oven last fall, but the weather got bad so we had to stop before applying the final layer of insulation and plaster. Now the weather is lovely again and all I want to do is sit on the deck eating cherries and flipping through books on Austrian pastries.

Go ahead and call me Little Suzy Farm Girl

Sadly, aging chickens have never been a problem for us.

I can't post every day. I don't have enough to say! You would all get very bored. Yesterday I cooked the lamb filling for the Tunisian brik, but failed to remove the filo dough from the freezer in time so I didn't cook anything and had nothing to write about.

Today I do have something to write about. In the comments, Ida asked me what I thought about this impassioned post criticizing people who want backyard chickens -- but don't want to deal with them  once they stop laying. The owners no longer want to pay for the hens' upkeep, but are too wimpy to kill them. So they try to give them away. The author thinks this is bogus:

"There is absolutely nothing ethically superior – and quite a bit that is ethically dubious, if you ask me – about enjoying the benefits of a young laying hen and then turning over the care or slaughter of that hen to someone else once it stops laying.
That is not how animal husbandry works and it’s not how pet ownership works, and those are your two choices. I don’t care which path you take with your chickens, but pick one. Playing Little Suzy Farm Girl until it’s time to get the axe and then deciding you aren’t up for chicken ownership just doesn’t fly with me."

Well, it flies with me. First of all, if you can find someone who wants to adopt and feed your old hens, great. I don't see what's ethically dubious about "turning over the care" of superannuated chickens to someone who wants to take them. It seems like a win-win-win situation.

Or would be if these people existed. If they do, I haven't met them. The author is correct that when your hens stop laying, you will probably have to either suck it up and keep them on as expensive pets or kill them.

But unlike the author, I don't think there's any reason you have to do the killing yourself if you don't want to. What's the point? To prove something? To punish yourself? You kept chickens for eggs and probably gave them a really nice life, however short, and enjoyed their company and now that's over. There are people who will happily take those birds off your hands. I don't think turning the slaughter over to them is unethical. I think it's sensible. You're giving someone a flavorful stewing hen they will enjoy eating and sparing yourself an experience you won't enjoy having. The only loser here is the old chicken, but that was a foregone conclusion.

We've never faced the problem of aging chickens as they've all been eaten by bobcats or contracted fatal illnesses before they stopped laying. I don't know what we'll do if we ever find ourselves with a bunch of elderly hens. Probably keep them. I don't even pretend to be a real farmer.

P.S. I just read through many of the comments on the original post and someone makes the same argument I just did. The author responded very civilly and said she should have worded the piece differently. She objects to people who won't make the DECISION to kill an old hen. She doesn't mean they have to kill it themselves. So there's no real disagreement at all.

That was fun

You can have no idea how badly I wanted to taste that tart when I was 10. 

Thank you so much for your incredibly nice -- and abundant! -- comments on the last post. I've been blushing for the last three days. I wish I had a blockbuster post to continue my hot streak, but tonight it's  business as usual.

A few things:

1. The asparagus and rice soup from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is great. Make it. Owen said it was "pretty good" and Mark gave it a 7 out of 10, but I would give it a 9.5 out of 10 and I'm the one to listen to. It's easy and inexpensive and the recipe is here. It's a very brothy so if you have homemade chicken stock in the freezer, use it.

2. On Friday we had a party and I made pulled pork from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. The first glitch I noticed was that I didn't specify whether the pork shoulder should be bone-in or boneless. BONE-IN. Actually, that was the only glitch. Otherwise, the recipe worked pretty well. Next time you have 12 hours to babysit some coals, consider pulled pork.

3. I'm going to cook from the Time-Life Foods of the World series next. Vintage, out-of-print, still enthralling. These were my first cookbook love and probably, even after all these years, my greatest. I recently started flipping through the books again and wondered why I never thought of doing this before. I'm very, very excited. I was going to make the Tunisian brik from A Quintet of Cuisines tonight, but it looks like I'm going to a high school drama production instead. Like, right this second. Brik tomorrow.

brik

My Smitten Kitchen problem

transference /trans·fer·ence/ (trans-fer´ens) in psychotherapy, the unconscious tendency to assign to others in one's present environment feelings and attitudes associated with significance in one's early life. . .  

I was chopping broccoli for Smitten Kitchen's broccoli slaw on Friday -- the fourth time I've made this great salad -- and decided it was time to write about my Smitten Kitchen problem. Or, I should say, my former Smitten Kitchen problem. This all happened a few months ago and I wasn't sure how to tell the odd story, and I'm still not, but here goes.

I'll start in the middle.

I used to be a semi-regular visitor to Smitten Kitchen, Deb Perelman's recipe blog. I read her posts and skimmed the hundreds and hundreds of loving comments appended to each one.  If you're unfamiliar with Perelman, though I doubt you are, she's a thirtysomething woman who lives in New York City with her husband and pre-schooler son and writes about cooking. Her chummy, confiding persona is that of a charmingly obsessive perfectionist. She's not my soulmate, but she's a real pro, cheerful and consistent in her posting, reliable and often inspired in her recipes, a strong photographer.

Yet I found myself holding back approval from her blog. When her book was published last fall, I bought it right away but again held back. I was even a little sorry when the first recipe I tried, the buttered popcorn cookies, turned out to be so delicious. I was reading her in a mean spirit, looking for faults. This is no way to read a cookbook or anything else.

Was it jealousy?  I wrote a cookbook that did fine and Smitten Kitchen wrote a cookbook that was a huge hit. I pondered this at length, because it seemed like the most obvious explanation. But while I should have been jealous of her sales, which translate into tangible benefits like money and professional opportunities, I didn't feel so much as a twinge of envy. It was something else. I thought and thought and then suddenly it was clear as day and since that moment of clarity I've had no problem with Deb Perelman at all.

I went to all-girls schools from kindergarten through 8th grade, a period I think of as my own private Dark Ages. I was excruciatingly shy and struggled to navigate the intensely social and socially intense culture of an all-girls school. I was constitutionally unable to sit on other girls' laps, talk baby talk, dance gracefully around the maypole (seriously!), excel at field hockey, join in spontaneous renditions of Rainbow Connection, or jump up when Fiona or Mindy walked into the lunchroom and cry out "Sit here! Sit here! I saved you a place!"

That's one of my chief memories of 8th grade: Mindy or Fiona entering the lunchroom and the competing cries of "Sit here!" "No! Sit here." The more one girl begged the harder the other girls would plead. They sounded like seals begging for sardines. I'm sure they thought I resembled a hermit crab, if they noticed me at all.

At the end of the school year there were tears and promises and big group hugs.Yearbooks were serious business, the pages blanketed with sentimental notes signed with nicknames that originated at slumber parties, every "i" dotted with a heart. There were drawings of flowers, drawings of Snoopy, smiley faces.

I tried to throw out my old yearbooks last year, but Mark made me keep them. In preparation for writing this post, I pulled out my 8th grade volume of Works and Days. I was sure I would have nervously solicited signatures from  Lisa Bransten, Lindsay Dunckel, maybe Leslie Howes and a few others. But there is only one signature in the book.

Thank you, Margaret.

Fast-forward to 2013: Smitten Kitchen's most recent post got 261 comments. Mine got 14.

Do I need to connect the dots?

Sure, no problem.

I wasn't envious of Deb Perelman's professional success as reflected in sales, which would have been sensible. I was envious of her popularity among girls. When I read her blog and the hundreds of comments I felt like I was back in 8th grade, standing meekly in the corner watching an outgoing girl get her yearbook signed.

I like to think I've changed completely, yet 33 years later: exact same hairstyle.

Just recognizing what was going on solved the problem instantly. I don't know how that works, but it does. I'm now very fond of Smitten Kitchen.

This is all just to say that our feelings about cookbooks can be far more complicated than whether we love a certain recipe for broccoli slaw. Which we do.

While I was flipping through that old yearbook, walking down bad memory lane, I saw a picture of Mr. Bell, who taught English and P.E.

Mr. Bell was handsome, wasn't he? I didn't think so at the time, but a 13-year-old girl can't see past facial hair. Nor should she. I think Mr. Bell may have something to do with my Michael Ruhlman problem. He has everything to do with why I hate field hockey.

Bumper crops

Yeah, I guess the new goat babies are sort of cute. Check out the ears on the brown one. Now look at the ears on either of the black ones.

runt in foreground

Back in December, we bred Natalie to a Nigerian Dwarf (upright ears), but he didn't seem tall enough to knock her up, so a Nubian buck (floppy ears) was brought out a few minutes later. Now I think we got kids from both of them. Score! We all favor the runt because people always favor the runt.

I'm continuing the policy of cooking only one item every night, although I'm allowed to make dessert if the mood strikes. I harvested half a laundry basket of monster fava beans on Monday and braised some of them with sage and pancetta, adapting a recipe for peas in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I put them on the table next to the rotisserie chicken. (Note: I asked Mark to choose the next 10 dinners, but he declined the offer.)

not sure I'm up to the job

"No fava things for me," Mark said jovially. "I'm on a diet." Isabel tried the favas and disliked their texture; Owen said they didn't taste good. I alone ate the fava beans. Must every blog post include an anecdote of this nature? Apparently. Here's another from the same night:

For dessert, I made David Lebovitz's chocolate-banana ice cream. I used the version of the recipe printed in Ready for Dessert,  but it is also here. It's a super-cool recipe: Puree bananas, melted chocolate, milk, Bailey's Irish liqueur, and rum. Freeze. No machine required. The resulting ice cream is dense, icy, and complex, like a spiked fudgesicle. Mark took a bite and said, "Nope! Too alcoholic." He then served himself a big bowl of Snickers caramel swirl chunk and we sat down on the sofa with our different ice creams and watched Robin Wright have hot flashes on House of Cards. Whatever. The day we start watching different TV shows in different rooms, that's when I'll start to worry.

Last night I made fettuccine with preserved lemon and roasted garlic from The Essential New York Times Cookbook because it looked easy, delicious, and unusual. It was all three. Everyone in the household ate it without complaint. Next time I'd mince the preserved lemon finely like the recipe says, rather than chopping it coarsely like a lazy person does. I'd also add more cheese. It's a great recipe to have on hand for those occasions when you really, really, really don't want to go to the supermarket, which for me is always. Try it.

pretty pound cake baked in new bundt pan

I owe him big

could be lunch, could be breakfast

Our goat Natalie was supposed to kid last week and I planned a short business trip to Monterey based on that calculation. But yesterday I could either leave with the kids yet unborn or forfeit the hotel deposit. What would you have done? As I was about to walk out the door, Mark said, "I'm freaking out about the things being born while you're gone."

I don't know the details, but there were three things and at least one of them has its father's floppy Nubian ears and Owen and Mark were out there in the dark. I know this because Mark sent pictures that I found in my in-box this morning. The absence of text could mean nothing and could mean he was too furious to type at 1:24 a.m. when he pressed send.

I cooked two noteworthy dishes this week. Both are Amanda Hesser recipes.

The first was yogurt with quinoa, dates and almonds, a recipe she posted a year ago on Food52 that I knew I would one day have to make. Wednesday was the day. It's one of those strange dishes I didn't exactly love as I was eating it, but have found myself thinking about ever since. It's a little sweet and a little salty, the yogurt creamy, the dates  sticky, the nuts crunchy and the quinoa crunchy in a completely different way. The tiny amount of olive oil you drizzle on top is crucial. You should try this recipe and see what you think. My only "complaint" would be that 6 ounces of Greek yogurt was more than a delicate little bird like me could eat at a sitting.

Veal is expensive. It should be.

There's a whole category of dishes I've heard about all my life but never actually tasted. Offhand: crepes suzette, syllabub, summer pudding, steak and kidney pie, blancmange, beef Wellington, lobster Newburg, Cornish pasties. Hundreds of them!

Vitello tonnato -- cold poached veal served with tuna mayonnaise -- topped the list and because it was hot last week, I made it. Used the recipe from The Essential New York Times Cookbook.

Too bad we only had half a lemon, as this is a dish that requires serious garnish.

First of all: expensive. Second: ugly. And not just when I make it. In fact, my vitello tonnato is comparatively lovely. Third: Delicious.

Sadly, the price and appearance guarantee I won't make this again.

I wonder if this is one of these dishes no one will make in 50 years. The recipe will exist forever, of course, but once people stop cooking it, the dish is dead. Few enough people make vitello tonnato now that I'd never seen or eaten it and I don't see that trend reversing, certainly not when the meat of baby cows costs $20 per pound. Plus: baby cows.

Or am I wrong? Do a lot of people make vitello tonnato and I just don't know about it?

Mark gets to choose everything I cook for the next 10 days.

Earnest Summation: The Homesick Texan

Fifty-one dishes, y'all. I made 51 dishes from The Homesick Texan by Lisa Fain and it's only taken me 4 months to get around to writing the conclusion to that epic project. Talk about ending with a whimper. But I'm crossing it off the to-do list today, damn it.

I'll keep it short and sweet: I loved The Homesick Texan. I picked it up after spending the fall cooking from a Syrian Christian cookbook followed by Burma, and while I love novelty and challenge, opening Homesick Texan was like getting off an 18 hour flight from Asia, stretching out on the sofa with a cold drink, and turning on Friday Night Lights.

The book has flaws. Fain neglects to mention the size of pans in her dessert  section (where it matters!) and seems to think that adding 1/2 teaspoon of Mexican chocolate to a gallon of chili could possibly affect the flavor. The recipes are not blazingly original and maybe not even original at all, as some Chowhound naysayers have suggested. But what great recipes are? People regularly give Marcella Hazan credit for pork loin braised in milk, but the dish appeared in Ada Boni's Talisman Cookbook decades before Marcella started writing. And who knows where Boni got it? Who cares? It's a living, breathing recipe, not a military code, and the further it travels the better. Right?

Ah, but there are gray areas. I'm seeing more and more of them as I type. Much to say on the subject of recipe plagiarism, but I haven't figured out exactly what I think and in the interest of finishing this post I will do that figuring out later. Last December when I first opened The Homesick Texan, I just wanted to eat delicious tacos, chili, and enchiladas, and the recipes inside helped me do that. The end.

By the numbers:

worth the price of the book  -- 1 (marinated skirt steak from the small apartment tacos)
great -- 13 (chili, posole, meat loaf)
good -- 30
so-so -- 7
flat out bad -- 0

Shelf essential? If you've already have cherished recipes for Tex-Mex classics, you don't need this book. I don't and do.

The people are never wrong

pretty celadon plates by my momma

Per your unanimous instructions, I made the Momofuku bo ssam for book group on Friday and it was a huge hit. I detected mild shock when the blistered 10-pound chunk of meat appeared on the table because, well,

Ugly. But mild shock soon gave way to professions of gratitude. Everyone ate the salty, sugary, fatty bo ssam, everyone said nice things, everyone drank lots of water, everyone drank wine, everyone who had read Nothing to Envy loved Nothing to Envy and I went to bed happy, so happy. Thank you.

Three lessons from Friday night:

1. Fussbudgets make a lot of noise, but most people just like good food and if you serve it to them they will eat it.

2. Strangers read my blog, but no one in book group does.

3. Book club spent more time talking about these gluten-free pecan cookies than we usually spend talking about a book. The cookies look like brown lumps and are dense, intense, and chewy. I was pleased with how they turned out, but the ecstatic reception, which included one woman suggesting I supply a gluten-free bakery, surprised me. Was this because gluten-free cookies are ordinarily awful? Because everyone was drunk? Because these cookies are in fact the best cookies in the whole history of humankind, maybe even the best dessert? I don't know. I do know they're easy and delicious and I will make them again.

Next month we're reading Lean In. How would one plan a theme dinner around that? Not my problem!

It seemed like a good idea at the time

cute little time-wasters

To make Jamie Oliver's Amalfi baked lemons you cut lemons in half, scrape out the flesh, stuff the shells with mozzarella, cherry tomato, and anchovy, then bake. Scoop the melted contents of the lemon  onto bread and eat.

How was this dish? Not as delicious as it was conceptually cool -- that would be impossible -- but quite tasty. Jamie writes that the mozzarella "absorbs the lovely lemon flavor when it bakes" and I was curious to experience this flavor, but all I picked up was a slight, not unpleasant bitterness. Verdict: They were a lot of fussy work and while they double as a conversation piece, once you've had the conversation there is no reason to ever make them again.

I served the lemons for our regular Sunday family dinner with my father and my sister's crew. Mark did his manly duty and grilled steaks (more on manliness and red meat below) and I made roasted sweet potatoes with a k-town kick from Debbie Lee's Seoultown Kitchen. There's a story behind the decision to cook sweet potatoes "with a k-town kick" and that story involves a dilemma and that dilemma has been stressing me out. I'm going to tell the story right now even though it interrupts this riveting narrative of a family dinner:

I'm hosting my all-female book club on Friday. We're discussing Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, the most engrossing and altogether excellent book I read in 2012. Nothing to Envy is about North Korea and in a fit of exuberance a few months ago, I announced I would serve a Korean dinner as a backdrop to our discussion. I had in mind to prepare the only Korean dish I have ever prepared: Momofuku bo ssam, a monumental pork shoulder cooked in salt and sugar for hours and hours and served with chile sauce and rice and wrapped in lettuce leaves. It is delicious, insanely, insanely delicious, and surprisingly easy.

But as the date approached, I began to have qualms. The vegan in our group had a prior engagement, but what about everyone else? Something felt wrong. I sent out an email inquiring about dietary restrictions. The replies were evenly split between "I eat everything" and "I'm dairy/gluten intolerant, but whatever you cook, I'll work around it."

No one said they didn't eat red meat. Yet the misgivings persisted. Finally, one book group member, a lovely person, wrote: "I don't eat gluten, but don't worry about me. I'll fill up on veggies!"

She didn't write, "I'll fill up on the meat!" or "I'll fill up on everything else!" She wrote, "I'll fill up on veggies!"

I knew exactly why she wrote that. She wrote that for the same reason I've been uneasy about the bo ssam menu. Women, including me, assume that other women will feed them veggies. Or fish. Maybe chicken. But not meat, never meat. The first time I made bo ssam I made it with my friend Lisa, but we were having dinner with our husbands, which made it acceptable to serve and eat large portions of fatty pork. Our husbands didn't even know what bo ssam was; Lisa and I were the enthusiastic instigators. But if it had just been Lisa and me, or Lisa and me and two other women, we would not have cooked bo ssam.

Why is this? Why is meat for the men and sole for the ladies? Is it because women are supposed to be dainty and meat is primal and bloody? Because meat involves violence and women are supposed to be gentle? Because women are more health-conscious than men? Because women are always on diets? Because we pretend we're health conscious and on diets even when we're not? Because we find meat "too heavy?" Because we pretend to find meat "too heavy?" Because meat is historically too precious to be wasted on women? Is it about not wanting meat or is it about not deserving meat?

I can barely look at this picture.

Anyway, I decided to try to find some Korean vegetable dishes from Seoultown Kitchen to serve alongside the bo ssam. I started with the aforementioned sweet potatoes and ended with the aforementioned sweet potatoes. You roast them with sugar, spices, soy sauce, and a boatload of sesame oil and they were salty, unctuous, cloying, and sugary. I hated them. No one else hated them, but I hated them so much that I lost all enthusiasm for testing more Korean vegetable dishes.

Here's my question:

Do I forge ahead with the bo ssam and serve a big, substantial salad alongside? Or do I explain that I couldn't pull off a Korean dinner after all and serve black bean chili? I should add that everyone in the book group is great and that no one will complain. I just don't want the evening to be weird. Thoughts?

End of Korean interlude.

Back to Sunday dinner. If you've lost your bearings, it's now time for dessert:

A year ago I saw a recipe for raspberry shortbread in Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking and it sounded magical, like something Mary Poppins would serve. I've wondered about raspberry shortbread ever since and decided to give it a go. I pictured hard, buttery shortbread embedded with juicy berries, but this was not what I pulled out of the oven. What I pulled out of the oven was a raspberry crisp with a very sandy topping. It was delightful served hot with vanilla ice cream, if not exactly what I'd been hoping for. The recipe is here, posted by someone who had the same expectations and results that I did.

Why would anyone think this pistol can subsist on cucumber sandwiches, poached eggs, and blueberries . . . 

but that these two clowns require meat?

What is the fashion equivalent of a FRUITCAKE?

They were having more fun than it appears, or so we like to think.

First we were in Japan, then I was exhausted, now I am trying to remember how to write a blog post.

We chose Japan for our vacation because it looked like an easy flight from San Francisco. Eleven hours in the back of an aged United jet is not easy. It is hellish. But it was the hellish with the payoff of a fantastic vacation.

Impressions of Japan, in brief: Everything you might have read about Japanese good manners is true, as is everything you might have read about Japanese toilets. Also true: the Japanese really do eat a lot of raw fish. We ate a lot of raw fish, we ate a lot of noodles, we ate a lot of sticky rice, and Mark took Isabel to TGI Friday's the first time they escaped my clutches. Although few Japanese people speak English, it is easy to communicate with smiles, rapid nodding, and a calculator. The Japanese are agreeable and deferential with strangers, as am I, so I felt right at home. Kyoto was lovely, especially the Nishiki Market, where we bought sashimi-on-a-stick, and the Fushimi-Inari Shrine. Tokyo was flat-out thrilling. We stayed in a hotel overlooking the incredible Shibuya Crossing. None of us wanted to leave.

I think I've already told you everything we ate: fish, noodles, rice. That was about it. Here is my one moderately interesting and nominally food-related story:

In Tokyo, Isabel and I visited a mall that was populated almost exclusively by girls between the ages of 15 and 20. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of girls. I didn't have my camera and would have felt creepy taking pictures of these particular girls, anyway. I've scoured the internet for photos, but have found none. Get with it, fashion bloggers! Meanwhile, I'll have to use my words.

A typical girl in this mall (a Japanese girl, remember) had long red or blond tresses carefully worked over with a curling iron to resemble Jessica Chastain's hairdo at the Oscars. She had blue eyes, thanks to tinted contact lenses (see the girl on the right? like that), and wore false eyelashes, a lot of rouge, towering platform shoes, bare legs, and either a tiny flouncy skirt or short shorts. Really short shorts. Shorter than the shorts Jodie Foster wore in Taxi Driver, which is what I thought of.

But on top a girl might wear a pink blazer, which was part of the contradiction in the whole get-up. Short shorts, platform shoes, and a pink blazer? The look would have been straight-ahead streetwalker, except the girls favored blazers and infantile, innocent colors and accessories: pink, pale green, lace, bows, pearl buttons. Also, all these girls were immaculately turned out, not a false eyelash out of place. It was as if they had been airbrushed en masse. By contrast, Isabel, no slouch in the grooming department, looked like she was heading out to dig some ditches.

Later, I found myself standing in front of a Japanese bakery looking at the desserts. The Japanese love delicate, fussy European baked goods: napoleons, mont blanc cakes, tarts, cream puffs. You would be hard pressed to find a chocolate chip cookie in a Japanese bakery and if you did it would look all wrong, so brown and lumpy and coarse. Their desserts are pink or pale green, adorned with perfect rosettes of whipped cream, strawberries, melon balls, candied flowers, translucent gels. They are seductive and dainty. They are unabashedly artificial, precisely decorated, and every detail is impeccable.

You see what I saw, don't you? The desserts were edible versions of the outfits. The outfits were wearable versions of the desserts.

(I should note here that most women in Tokyo don't dress like those girls in the mall, but they do dress very, very neatly and well, with far more polish and flair than American women.)

I got to thinking about the baked goods-fashion connection. Here in Northern California, where we still live under the long shadow of the hippies, the rustic pastry remains in favor. We like a free-form galette, a flourless chocolate cake, a chocolate chip cookie. There are exceptions to this, like the cupcake, but rustic is the general flavor. Foods should appear natural and unaffected; too much artifice is untrustworthy; a little disarray and imperfection are considered charming.

And of course you also see this in the way we dress. Or, to compare apples to apples, the way teenaged girls dress. They wear jeans and t-shirts, shorts (though not as short as the Japanese shorts!) and Ugg boots. Makeup, but they spend an hour making it look natural. They want a few rough edges. Intentional imperfections. "Matchy-matchy" is an insult. You could say the teen look is the sartorial equivalent of scones and chocolate chip cookies, with a few cupcakes thrown in for diversity. Pleasant. Maybe a little drab.

I'm not saying that one way of dressing, baking, or being is better than the other. I don't have an opinion on that, though I'm definitely more comfortable with what I'm used to. If you hadn't already guessed, I wasn't so keen on the sexy baby doll look, but there are teenaged girls in this town who wear pajama bottoms to school, which is a serious downer. That is beyond scone. That is the clothing equivalent of a misshapen vegan muffin. Gluten-free and raw and sweetened with grated beets.

Feel free to tell me I'm full of baloney. Isabel already has.

----

I'm not cooking from just one book right now as it makes me monomaniacal. In a few weeks I'll get back to that, but for now I'm cooking whatever looks good from whatever book I pick up. I made meatballs with fava beans (we have several tons growing in the backyard right now) from Jerusalem the other night and they were passable. I would not make them again. I said to Owen: "What do you think of the meatballs? Say something about the meatballs."

Owen: "Something about the meatballs."

That was another thing about the trip to Japan: a solid week of 12-year-old boy humor.

Hey Nineteen

I think Jamie Oliver is adorable. I'm not old enough to be his mother, but I'm old enough to be his mother's younger sister and I would be proud to be his aunt. I'm training myself to think and say "I would proud to be his aunt" and "I would be proud to be his mother." It is time. Not in every situation -- please! -- but where age appropriate. Do you remember when everyone was talking about cougars? I'm glad they stopped.

I've been choosing random recipes to cook before we leave for Japan and since there was a cauliflower in the refrigerator, made Jamie's cauliflower risotto last night. The recipe comes from Jamie's Italy but is also here.  Unless you are on a diet, MAKE IT. As Jamie writes at the end of the recipe: "So, so good!"

He is so, so right! And so, so enthusiastic!

His section on risotto begins: "You're going to absolutely love this chapter," but he often saves his loudest hurrah for the last line of a recipe.  He ends his recipe for eggplant parmigiana: "You'll love it!" Flash roast beef: "Tasty, tasty, and very gorgeous!" Grilled and marinated rabbit: "Simple, honest, and bloody good."

Owen declined to taste the risotto: "I don't like risotto, it's all gooey and unpleasing." I declined to care.  Since Isabel had late dance class and Owen was dining on yogurt, Mark and I watched the finale of Girls while eating the risotto.

A few words about Girls: I have come to hate this show. I'm going to have to think hard next season about whether my desire to know what people are talking about outweighs my dread of watching Lena Dunham stick sharp objects in her ears and Adam Driver do that thing he did in the penultimate episode. In every episode there are at least five moments when I want to bury my head in the sofa cushions and cover my ears. This is not counting my aversion to seeing Allison Williams do anything at all. Am I old and falling out of step? Or is the show in fact depressing and needlessly grotesque? Either is possible. When you fall out of step you don't know it. That is part of falling out of step.

We're leaving the house sitters detailed instructions and a bottle of iodine in case Natalie kids while we are on our trip. She's due on May 2, but is already big as a cow. Japan should be fun so long as North Korea doesn't drop any bombs. Thank you for all your suggestions. They are printed out and tucked in my bag. I will report.

Again and again the same situation

Shakshuka as cooked from Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi is a melange of red bell peppers, tomatoes, garlic, cumin, and harissa (North African chili paste) that you simmer until melded and delicious and in which you then poach eggs. Serve with bread and yogurt. BUT! Before you serve this magnificent yet simple dish, snap at your husband when he jovially (though not jokingly) wonders if he could have his eggs on toast as this looks "unconventional" and how does he know he's going to like the sauce? Tell him he has to try the food before criticizing. Glower. About 15 minutes later snap at your son when he says, neither jovially nor jokingly, that he's tired of the "weird" things you cook. When his father (ahem!) tells him to stop complaining your son says: "If I don't complain, how am I ever going to make change?"

How could anyone object?

Make change. Brood over those words. Eat in stony silence. Feel angry and disappointed and bitchy and deep down sure that this ongoing mealtime discord has to be your fault. Retire alone to the sofa to watch Circumstance, a movie about teenaged girls in Iran who like each other more than teenaged girls are allowed to like each other in Iran.

Back to first person now:  Circumstance was moving and disturbing. I recommend it. By the time it was over I wasn't mad anymore and no one was mad at me because we all basically like each other when we're not sitting around the dinner table.

Last night we didn't. We dined in front of The Walking Dead. I made Jamie Oliver's pasta carbonara with sausage meatballs which consists of linguine, olive oil, sausage, pancetta, cream, Parmesan, egg yolks, and lemon zest and tastes exactly like you would expect. I prefer shakshuka, but Owen ate the pasta carbonara like a walker with a fresh. . . no, that is rude. Owen ate a lot. He did mention that the pasta was "all lemony tasting," probably so I wouldn't get a swelled head. I wonder if he thinks that he is finally making change.

For about 10 beautiful minutes every afternoon the kitchen gets natural light.

How do we go forward in peace and harmony and food that isn't pasta?

There's no need to try to answer that. Isabel is getting her driver's license and Owen sounds like James Earl Jones and the question is almost moot. Disappointing eaters. Good kids.

Don't let my dismal story scare you off shakshuka. It's delicious, easy, healthy, and not "weird" at all. The recipe from Jerusalem has been published here on Food52, though they've cut the quantity of harissa to 1/6 the original amount. I approve; my shakshuka was fiery. This is a totally different version of shakshuka and looks excellent too.

Pride of Madeira

How am I different?

Devastator

I counted my cookbooks this week and there are 1,123 occupying 266 feet of shelf space. I asked Mark how he felt about this and he said, "Fine, although someone with that many cookbooks has no right to tell other people what to do with their s***."

Owen wants you to know: "That's not nearly all of my Transformers."

Mark doesn't have a lot of stuff and neither does Isabel, so I never tell them what to do with their stuff. He was talking about the daily occasions when I tell Owen to take pieces of his Transformer collection to his room. Owen has 83 Transformers and they regularly migrate around the house. After his Transformers movie marathon party, for instance, all 83 had migrated downstairs and I think I gently told him once or twice what to do with his s***.

On Friday, a Devastator (G1) arrived from Hilliard, Ohio. This was Owen's first eBay purchase and I discouraged it. I foresee trouble and I would know.

bible

He wanted to skip his trombone lesson to prepare for Devastator's arrival. I said, "Absolutely not, you have all weekend to play with Devastator." He looked at me as if I'd just tried to put him to bed with a warm bottle and blankie. He said, "Mom, I don't PLAY with Transformers, I collect them. I have to look it over immediately to make sure it's got all its pieces."

He's now saving his allowance for a first-generation Bruticus.

My heart sinks. But what can I say? I understand the ardor, if not the object.

Cooking:

Wednesday. Nancy Silverton's long-cooked greens, poached egg and fontina sandwich. I already wrote about the laborious poaching of the ham shank, parboiling of greens, sauteeing of greens, long braising of greens in ham broth. I counted the cooking vessels: ten, not including cutting boards which also needed to be washed. Mark and the kids didn't like the sandwiches on account of the greens (used kale), which was my favorite part. I would happily eat these sandwiches again, but would never make them again. After dinner Mark said, "What are we having tomorrow? Peanut butter and jelly and tuna?"

Close.

Thursday.  Gorgonzola, honey, roasted radicchio, and candied walnuts sandwich. Silverton calls for roasting the radicchio (under plastic wrap, of course) until you're left with a limp heap of incredibly bitter, blackish-purple vegetable. I can eat it, but wouldn't cry if radicchio rolled back into the pit it came out of 30 years ago. You toast walnut bread, spread with gorgonzola, drizzle with honey, top with candied walnuts and radicchio. Components all fine, sandwich bad. Discordant. Tasted like an orchestra sounds when it's warming up.

I might stretch Nancy Silverton's Sandwich Book over the last few days before spring break because I don't want to get going on a new book and then stop when we go on our big vacation. A short vacation, but big. We are going to Japan. It is the trip Mark booked and planned two years ago that we cancelled because of Fukushima. I have no idea what we are going to do in Tokyo and Kyoto, which is where we are going. Mark is doing the research. If you have suggestions, I will write them all down and pursue.

Friday. I baked The World's Best Cookies from San Francisco A La Carte. This is a brown sugar cookie that contains crushed cornflakes, coconut, chopped pecans and rolled oats. Recipe here. I used to think these really were the world's best cookies, but now think they are merely good. Book club night so I wasn't home to make dinner. Family relieved?

Saturday. We had friends over and served picadillo and black beans with strawberry cobbler for dessert. Old favorites. Can't think of anything to say about the food, but it dawned on both Mark and me how much more fun it is to have friends over when your kids -- and their kids -- are 12 and 16 as opposed to 2 and 6. Suddenly there are these thoughtful young adults at the table who have opinions on Downton Abbey and don't spill their milk. Overnight they've stopped detracting from the occasion and become the most interesting part of the occasion. It's wonderful and a little scary.

Today. I was going to make a Simnel cake to take to my sister's tonight, but changed my mind. Lots of work and no one will like it as much as Laurie Colwin's nutmeg cake so I made that instead.

You're with Stupid Now

I baked the potato bread from April Bloomfield's Girl and Her Pig on Sunday. It rose into a magnificent mound of pale dough and then collapsed in the oven to resemble a deflated football and despite sounding hollow when tapped on the bottom, was almost floppy when baked, with a soft crust. Sliced, it was flecked with potato skins and there were whole seams of mashed potato, as you may be able to see with your magnifying glass:

Bloomfield says of the dough: "It's okay to have a few odd lumps of potato."

Did I allow too many odd lumps of potato?

Having said all that, this was a bread you keep eating because it's so tender and salty and delicious, like a good dinner roll. You couldn't make a proper sandwich with it as the loaf was very flat and the slices resembled biscotti and were too floppy to hold anything anyway. I'm pretty sure this isn't how the bread turns out when Bloomfield makes it and whether the fault is in the recipe or my execution I will never know because I'm not going to pursue this bread.

Moving right along, I'm going to be honest with you (as when am I not?) and announce that I resent Nancy Silverton's Sandwich Book. Fiercely. First of all, the leftover leg of lamb sandwich that calls for roasting a leg of lamb. I will not be making that sandwich.

Second, the wastefulness. Monday, I made her grilled cheese sandwiches with marinated onions. Marinating the onions in oil and vinegar softens and mellows them and they marry well with the Gruyere and this was altogether a better sandwich than the Smitten Kitchen grilled cheese with jammy onions. Except Silverton has you marinate twice as many onions, maybe even 3 times as many onions, as you can use on those sandwiches. Now I have a big bowl of marinated onions in the refrigerator and if I was a chef I would find a way to feed them to paying customers, but I'm not a chef and they're just one more thing I have to worry about using or worry about wasting.

Third, the carelessness. Feel free to call me a moron like my husband did. Alright, he didn't actually call me a moron, but when I explained why there was no dinner when he got home last night, he looked at me like he does when I spend 10 minutes trying to turn on the TV with the remote.

I was going to make Silverton's portobello, braised endive, and teleme sandwiches. You start by preheating the oven to 400 degrees F then putting halved endives in a baking dish with some cream, stock, herbs, and salt. Then you put the mushrooms in another dish (or two -- these mushrooms were giant) with oil and balsamic vinegar. Cover your dishes tightly with plastic wrap and cover the plastic wrap with foil and bake for 30-40 minutes. At the end of this time, you remove the foil and make holes in the plastic wrap to vent steam and bake the vegetables some more.

I did think as I stretched plastic wrap over the endives and mushrooms that I'd never put plastic wrap in the oven before and wouldn't it melt? I scanned the recipe for mention of fancy, heavy-duty chef's plastic wrap, but there was none and you never know what miracles those scientists have worked with plastic in the last 20 years. I had other things on my mind and forged ahead.

You know what happened, of course. Because you are smart! After 40 minutes, I lifted the foil and the plastic wrap had vanished. Closer examination revealed thin, wrinkled clumps of plastic stuck to the dish and atop the vegetables and I tried to pluck these out so we could eat the endives and mushrooms. Then I decided against it. I'm trying to be less cavalier about eating plastic.

I just now read the warning on the box of Safeway plastic wrap and feel even stupider.

But Silverton should have specified! We're not all brainiacs.

This morning I got up and realized I have to cook a ham bone for 2 hours and then parboil kale, saute just the kale stems with onion and garlic, pick the meat off the ham bone, cook the greens in the ham broth for 30 minutes and then I will have one of the components ready for Silverton's long-cooked greens, poached egg, and fontina cheese sandwiches tonight.

I may not last long with this book.

My friend Hilary turned me on to a blog that I find crazy, tough, funny, and sometimes very useful. You might agree. This is it. ((Note: She has written some posts that I don't care for AT ALL, like this one, which was just brought to my attention by my friend Mary.)

Just so you know, honey, I really don't want to know

lemon bars

I made Nancy Silverton's asparagus, fontina, and prosciutto sandwiches Thursday night. No special alchemy, just a decent idea for a sandwich that I wouldn't have come up with on my own. You roast asparagus and toast some bread. Rub the bread with garlic. Put asparagus on bread, top with a poached egg, top with fontina, melt under broiler for 30 seconds, top with prosciutto, eat with knife and fork, then eat all the asparagus your kids took out of their sandwiches ("Just so you know, Mom, I don't like asparagus,") load the dishwasher, go to bed.

This involved a lot of dishes for sandwiches, but given sandwiches are all we ate, fewer dishes than usual. Recipe is here.

I'm trying to cook one thing a day, no more and no less. On Friday I made Smitten Kitchen's whole lemon bars which involves pureeing a lemon, skin and all, with sugar and egg and pouring this over the shortbread crust. Definitely easier than juicing the lemon and scraping the zest as I've done in the past with Joy of Cooking lemon bars, but how will I ever know which is the better bar unless I test them side by side? I'm not going to do that. There was a day not long ago when I would have, but I've come to value sanity over the scientific method. Smitten's lemon bars are good. Joy lemon bars are good. You won't go wrong with either.

I put the pan of lemon bars in the refrigerator to firm up on Friday night so I could cut them into pretty squares on Saturday morning, but Isabel's two best friends started the job for me after I went to bed. Isabel told me that her friends thought the lemon bars were "too eggy," but I think the pan tells another story.

Teenagers are cute.

I didn't cook anything on Saturday. Does that mean I have to cook two things today?