Perfectly bent

English muffins spread with parsley butter await big, fat, grilled Prune burgers. 

Ok, Prune. Ouf. I have really dug myself into a hole with this one because instead of writing about it piecemeal the way I’ve written about other cookbooks, I got to know Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune on the sly, cheating on whatever I was doing with the blog to cook a dish from Prune every now and then. I did a lot of this over the last year and in the process all my feelings about the book changed dramatically. When I first got my copy of the cookbook I hated it with the fiery passion of the disappointed fan. Now I think it’s a masterpiece. And now I have to explain why all at once. Ouch.

Prune is not easy to love and not easy to cook from. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Prune is a cookbook by Gabrielle Hamilton, a famous badass New York chef who runs a tiny, fetishized downtown restaurant. The book has no index, no introduction, and no headnotes. It is modeled on the massive recipe binder used at the restaurant and contains a multitude of scrawled, scolding notes from Hamilton as well as underlinings and fake stains.

The burgers -- made with beef and lamb -- were delicious. It looks like I didn't quite get that cheese melted.

The book isn't warm and friendly. It isn't charming. That's the point. You might well hate Prune, but the things you most hate about it are the very things that make it great.  It’s as if Hamilton looked at a sweet, pretty, puffy contemporary cookbook, read a few cloying headnotes, and said: No fucking way. Her book is tart, precise, bitchy, opinionated, uncompromising, personal, tight, and totally original. In my view, it was the best cookbook of 2014.

I love reading the recipes in Prune. They have a real voice and rhythm. (They also work, but more on that next time.) They can be funny. They can be sensual. Sometimes both in a very short space. Here's a segment from the recipe for sweetbreads (which I will never make):

"Thoroughly and neatly peel the membrane -- the thin, slippery, translucent 'skin' that encases the gland -- which will come off in a rather neat sheet. Trim off any waxy fat clusters which tend to cling to the underside of the gland, and gently tug out any egregious muddy brown veins. Try to pull out the tubular looking arteries as well. If you've made it this far and are not retching into a garbage can, leave the minor little capillaries intact in order not to have the lobe fall apart into nuggets. Portion into 4-ounce pieces, as possible.

Hamilton is wonderfully acerbic on the subject of organic produce, farmers' markets, and the like. From her Bloody Mary mix recipe:

"Be sure to inventory properly midweek to keep the house fully stocked so that we are not having to make Bloody Mary mix over the weekend with some crappy organic tomato juice or 'artisanal' 'small-batch' Worcestershire handshopped in an emergency at Whole Foods."

God forbid.

And here's a favorite passage of mine from the spaghetti carbonara recipe (which I have made and which is very good):

“Pay attention to the toothsomeness of the pasta -- don’t get lost in your timing and let this just boil away in the pickup until it is flabby and bloated and disgusting. . . . Ideally we want the strands slick with yellow, eggy egg yolk and smoky, salty, uriney pancetta fat, with all the granules of sweet, nutty grated parm clinging to the strands. You want to see the black pepper, taste the floralness of it, and feel the warm heat of it in the dish -- but don’t obliterate.” 

It looks tossed off and maybe even sloppy, but it's not. It's vivid. It's loose. It's great.

In the first episode of her run on the PBS series Mind of a Chef, Hamilton says that she’s a perfectionist, but that her idea of perfection is is different from others people’s. She says that she likes things “perfectly bent.” 

Prune is perfectly bent. 

Tomorrow: some food.

Eat, eat, read

Maui is pretty.

I’ve been having fun. Last week I went to Upcountry Maui on a magazine assignment and ran around looking for cool things to do and eat and found them in abundance. Meanwhile, I was also reading and reviewing two new self-helpy books by Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic) and Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough), so all these inspirational lines about being generous and bold and receptive to inspiration and grateful and tackling life like a motherfucker* were floating through my head as I toured pineapple vodka distilleries and ate Spam musubi on the lush slopes of a tropical volcano. It was basically the ultimate high. I felt so energetic I started wondering if I was bipolar and having a manic episode.

Then I came home. It wasn’t a manic episode. I was just happy. Now that the homemaking/parenting years are drawing to a close, I wonder whether by embracing domesticity with such ardor I was simply making a virtue of necessity. I think I love my cozy nest of a home with the high-maintenance farm animals and 1000+ cookbooks, but I feel so much more alive when I’m racing around with my notebook trying to find the best bento box in Upcountry Maui and sleeping in a room I do not have to clean.

This was my only glimpse of beach. I was supposed to stick to inland Maui and dutifully did so. 

There are two categories of Hawaiian food and they could not be more different.  First, there is the slab of $42 macadamia-crusted ahi that you get at tourist restaurants. It is fresh, local, and good, though I always find myself struggling to finish fish like this because after few bites it becomes monotonous. The crust is delicious, but the inside of the fish is fish, bland fish. I finish, though, because it is so expensive I can't bear to waste it. Also, an ahi or an opah or a mahi mahi gave its precious life for me and I'm going to leave it on the plate? 

Then, there is the food that local people eat. For the most part, it isn't very fresh or local, not by Alice Waters standards. The plate lunch, the shave ice, the manapua, the warm $2.19 Spam musubi that you find under a heat lamp at Foodland. I was revolted by the idea of Spam musubi until last week when I finally tried it. I sat there in the supermarket parking lot eating Spam musubi and wondering what I was going to do when I got back to the Mainland and had to live without Spam musubi. Are you familiar with Spam musubi? Imagine a piece of nigiri sushi the size of a Twinkie, but warm, and instead of fish, it's topped with a slice of salty, delectably fatty, sausage-like meat. It is the best thing I ate in Upcountry Maui and I ate a lot of great stuff.

The second best thing I ate was the loco moco at a divey restaurant located in a trailer. Loco moco is a hamburger topped with fried egg and smothered in gravy, served over sticky white rice. The huge serving of loco moco I got at this dive also came with some macaroni salad and when you mixed that creamy macaroni salad with the rice and the salty brown gravy? I know how déclassé and gross that sounds, particularly when you consider that the gravy likely came from a can, but it was heaven. I had to physically push the plate away and ask for the check in order to stop myself from finishing every last bite. I needed to be able to wear my clothes home.

The red thing is a Surinam cherry from the Kula farmers' market. It was the fourth or fifth best thing I ate on Maui. It's got a super thin skin, sweet-tart juicy flesh, and a pit like a standard cherry. I couldn't figure out how to photograph it to best advantage, as you can see. If you ever have the chance to eat a Surinam cherry, do, but be sure it is really soft and ripe. 

Anyway, if you go to Hawaii, be sure you get out of the tourist restaurants and give that local food a chance. It may not be your thing, but I personally would always choose the $12 loco moco over the $42 macadamia-crusted ahi.

About those two books I reviewed. Strayed’s Brave Enough (it comes out later this fall) is a short collection of quotations from her previous work that apply to all kinds of profound life quandaries, like losing your mother or ending a romantic relationship. I’m not currently facing a profound life quandary but I still find myself flashing on her counsel ten or twenty times a day to solve the most trivial problems. Two I like especially:

"You know what I do when I feel jealous? I tell myself not to feel jealous. I shut down the Why not me? voice and replace it with one that says Don't be silly instead. It really is that easy. You actually do stop being an awful jealous person by stopping being an awful jealous person."

Don't do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do . . . It's hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it's not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do -- have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep tolerating someone who treats you terribly. There isn't a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it."

The incredibly sweet pineapple in Hawaii might have been the third best thing I ate. 

As to Big Magic, it's imperfect, but warm and inspiring. I love Elizabeth Gilbert. You may feel differently; we can still be friends. I think she’s open-hearted, smart, and a force for good in the world. She helps me shut down the mean drill sergeant in my head who constantly yells at me for not keeping my boots spit-polished. 

I liked both the books a lot and my review is here. 

Speaking of drill sergeants, I’m going to cook from Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune for the next week or so. I was just flipping through the book trying to figure out what to make for Sunday dinner, resenting yet again the lack of an index. Gabrielle Hamilton is such a jerk. I wish her recipes weren't quite so good.

*Update: Cheryl Strayed word. Allusion. My father emailed me about it within 2 hours. 

We didn't inhale

Isabel's new home

Boy, is it hot out here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hot and dry. Did I ever mention that our mulch caught fire last month on a day just like today? A day just like today except about 20 degrees cooler. A workman was reinforcing some concrete near the road and a warm piece of rebar he’d just sawed through fell into the fluffy, dry, redwood mulch. Whoosh! Instant fire covering about 20 square feet of the front yard. The workman came and banged on the door and I ran out barefoot and we extinguished the blaze, but it took 10 minutes or so of me spraying with a hose and him beating down flames with his shovel. We killed a lot of plants and broke some of the watering spigots. No point to this story, except: mulch? And: lucky.

California is ready for you, rain. 

I’m really betwixt and between right now, hence the lack of much interesting cooking or any posting at all. Life should straighten out next week. For real.

Here’s what’s been happening in the kitchen and out:

I've served several batches of the easy, delicious bread-and-tomato soup from Viana La Place's Verdura. According to my margin notes, I've been making this since August 1999, a year before Owen was born. That's the definition of a keeper. The recipe is at the end of the post and you should try it before the sweet summer tomatoes disappear.

almost effortless

I baked yet another kouign-amann from Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune. I love this cake madly, despite the fact that it always comes out looking burnt. 

it's all about the French butter and orange flower water

I think next week I have to write about my extensive and rewarding experiences with Hamilton's cantankerous cookbook. I've been putting this off.

One night for dinner I made the hearty riso al forno  (Arborio rice, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, olives, capers, provolone) from a recipe posted by The Wednesday Chef and it was really good. Recommend.

the kind of dish that is sometimes called "lusty"

The focaccia with chard and tomatoes in her previous post is also a treat. 

That's about it for food.

At the very end of August, we went up to Washington and installed Isabel in her dorm at Whitman. Mark and I spent a few days observing the other kids (Birkenstocks, more bros than I’d expected at a little liberal arts school), listening to uplifting faculty speeches, traipsing from Home Depot to Walmart to Macy’s to Walgreens, buying fans, towels, sheets, et cetera. All is good. 

No. All is great. I'm not sad anymore. Not even a little. There’s a certain lightness you feel watching a very competent, composed child venture out into the world where she can grow in ways she no longer could in your care. I’ve been trying to explain it to people and this is the best I can do: Imagine you’ve spent 18 years teaching a kid to ride a bike, running alongside, encouraging, looking out for potholes, worrying she's going to fall and break her collarbone or get hit by a car.  You've really given it your all and she's gotten better and better and needed less and less help and finally you let go and now she’s disappeared to ride around the block, pedaling like a pro.

How do you feel? You feel lost for a few minutes, but then you sit down on a bench. You look around. It's a beautiful day. You gradually notice there are birds singing and there's a pleasant breeze and maybe you should wander over to that cafe and have a celebratory affogato while you wait for her to return some months from now. (It's a really big block.) You have that affogato. It is delicious. Where should you go next? So many options. Hmmm. Strange. What is the word for this bizarre feeling? Is it freedom? 

Suddenly you and your spouse start going out more, doing silly stuff you haven't done since you brought that first baby home from the hospital. You can't wait to hear what the girl has to tell you when she gets back from her ride and it dawns on you that you might have some new stories yourself.

I don't actually say all that to people. It's what I would like to convey without having to resort to a dumb bike metaphor.

Ok, speaking of silly stuff you might do with a spouse as your kids grow up, Mark and I went to a legal recreational marijuana shop while we were in Washington.  Is that what you call them? Marijuana shops? We were curious to see what it's like to buy cannabis in a store. In case you didn't already know, this is what it's like to buy cannabis in a store: You pull up in front of a nondescript building just off the freeway near a McDonald’s. You walk in and read signs telling you to put away any cameras. At a pharmacy window you show someone an ID. They admit you to a bland-looking back room with glass display cases that contain, among other things, cool little pipes. Other than the wares, it resembles a room where you might buy a cell phone. There is a United States map into which customers stick pins to show where they're from, and the whole country is dotted with pins. You somehow manage to squeeze another pin into the dense blob of pins on the San Francisco Bay Area. A friendly clerk hands you a menu with lists of marijuana products (cookies, joints, candies) and asks surreal questions like:  “Are you looking for something exhilarating? Or more relaxing? ”

I can’t remember what we said. We bought a caramel. Why not? 

surprisingly creamy and yummy

Anyway. Legal, guys! It was 100% legal. As legal as a bottle of Snapple. As legal as a Starbucks scone. And yet. I went to lunch with some casual friends the other day. I’m very fond of these two friends and we meet every few months for lunch, but I don’t know them that well -- which is a nice category of friend, the people you don’t know that well and may never, but are always pleased to see. I told them of my field trip to the marijuana shop because it seemed like a moderately interesting story. Not one of those great, urgent stories you tell when you first get together with casual friends, but the fourth or fifth story you bring out, when there’s a lull in conversation. I thought there was a lot to discuss, but my friends basically fell silent. One of them politely asked if I had a prescription for the pot and I explained that recreational pot is legal in Washington. Then there was silence again. I felt mildly embarrassed and wished I hadn't said anything. It occurred to me that some people probably still think marijuana is wrong, even if it's legal. Like abortion or gay marriage, I guess. On some level, I must think that too, given that my kids have seen me drink, but I would never smoke a joint in front of them.

Then again, I'm completely ok with them reading this post. The mental image of Mom and Dad buying a pot caramel is probably enough to turn them off drugs forever.  

Here's the soup recipe from Viana La Place. I feel like I've posted it before, but no. It's fantastic.

1 1/2 pounds tomatoes, peeled and coarsely chopped

1/4 cup olive oil

1 onion, chopped

a few basil leaves, coarsely chopped

2 bay leaves

kosher salt and pepper

pinch sugar, if needed

2 heaping cups crusty bread, cut into chunks or torn. (A stale baguette works great. Even if you have to break it with a hammer, it will come straight back to life in the soup.)

shredded sharp cheese (Parmesan, Pecorino)

1. Combine olive oil and onion in a soup pot and cook over low heat until onion is softened. 

2. Add the tomatoes, basil, and bay leaves and season with salt and pepper. Cook for 15 minutes over medium-low heat. 

3. Add 2 1/2 cups water and bring to a boil. Add the bread, stir, and turn off the heat. Taste. It might need a pinch of sugar. Cover and let sit for 10 minutes. Serve with cheese. Serves 4.

Helicopter parents and latchkey kids

Isabel back when I started this blog.

Over the past few weeks, people kept asking me how I felt about Isabel going to college and I would smile vaguely and say, “Sad, but she’s really ready to go.” 

The truth was I didn’t know how I felt.

On Wednesday, I went up to say good morning and see if she was all packed to leave for the airport and when I saw her there in her childhood bed, suddenly I knew exactly how I felt because I burst into tears. Her suitcases were lined up in the cozy room where she’d played in her dollhouse, read Beverly Cleary, had sleepovers, learned her times tables, sewed costumes, written college applications, dressed for the prom. . . 

Oh, it was so sad for me! I was abruptly and totally heartbroken. Eighteen-and-a-half years of cohabitation with this calm, thoughtful, lovely girl were over. I drove her to the airport and said a tearful goodbye. I would like to say I wept off and on for the rest of the day, but that’s a far too graceful term for what I did. I sobbed off and on for the rest of the day.

Do you know what was pathetic? Not the sobbing. What was pathetic was that I felt kind of ashamed of being so sad. I was especially ashamed of wanting to text her and see how she was doing that night. Ashamed of wanting to text her and tell her how much I missed her. Like, get a grip, Mom. At the back of my mind were two hideous little words that had never before made an appearance there: helicopter parent. 

I never liked that term, but I didn’t realize how much I loathed it until for a few fleeting moments I worried it might apply to me. What a contemptuous label to smack on someone whose attention to their child doesn’t fit your idea of what's appropriate.

Helicopter parents are the worst. They hover. They wring their hands. They noisily micromanage. The poor children of helicopter parents are (supposedly) flailing out in the real world because, among other things, their moms text them too much. Seriously. I've read this criticism of parents who text their college-age kids in about a half dozen different places. Eventually, it gets under your skin.

Meanwhile, the cool parents are raising independent “free-range kids," a term that brings to mind happy, organic chickens in a meadow with some buffalo under a big, blue, helicopter-less sky. Unsupervised, these kids learn to make their own decisions. They're taking the subway on their own. They're learning how to handle adversity. They're not being driven to soccer and ballet, they're playing stickball or roaming the woods. They're thriving. They probably don't even have cell phones.

When I was growing up, one of the snidest things you could say of a mother was that she was raising a “latchkey kid.” These pitiful creatures were on their own every afternoon while their parents were at work and this was considered a big problem. Unsupervised, they were forced to make their own decisions. They were taking the subway on their own. They were learning how to handle adversity. They weren't being driven to soccer and ballet, they were .  . . . well, back then it was assumed they were having sex and doing drugs. 

If you think about it, a free-range kid is really no different from a latchkey kid except, I guess, there's someone home to let the free-range kid in when she's done free ranging. Whatever that even means.

Parents are always supposedly screwing it up royally, one way or another. You can't win. And yet generation after generation, most kids have this way of growing up ok. All these labels and theories seem completely bogus to me at this point in my life, and yet there I was, hesitant about texting my own daughter.

Anyway. Wednesday was tragic. Thursday was better. Friday, I'm fine. I texted Isabel twice today, shamelessly.

***

I made these crunchy, chocolatey, peanutty bars and they are great but I’m not sure they're worth the trouble of tracking down the feuilletine and cocoa butter. If you have those two ingredients on hand, by all means go for it. 

I also made Laurie Colwin’s nutmeg cake for Isabel’s farewell dinner. It was her choice and a very good one. I hadn’t baked this cake in a few years and had forgotten how sticky, spicy, and delicious it is. I make it in a 9-inch pan and omit the cloves. 

It's all copy

If you ever see a Nora Ephron audiobook on the shelf at your library, grab it.

For the last ten days I’ve been driving Owen in to San Francisco for summer art school with three other teenagers and after several failed attempts to spark conversation, I finally accepted that the ride would be silent. Dead silent. Once the kids were out of the car, I’d pop in my audiobook and things would liven right up.

I happen to be on a Nora Ephron kick. I love Nora Ephron. I’ve read all her books, some of them several times, but now I’m listening to them as narrated by Ephron herself, with her New York accent and wry intonations. They're a total delight, as fresh and vital as when I first read them. 

Her final essay collections, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing, cover a lot of territory, from interning at the Kennedy White House to Ephron's obsession with the food writer Craig Claiborne. But as the titles suggest, they deal largely with age -- the coloring of hair, buying of skin cream, mortality. I would have said these books would appeal almost exclusively to women and, in particular, women over 40, but I've changed my mind due to an unexpected, rather sweet turn of events. 

On Wednesday morning, Owen was carping at me when we got into the car.  I mean, he was really going at it and had been for about an hour. Usually I switch off my audiobook in the car to be courteous when he's riding with me, but he was being such a jackass, I decided I was going to leave it on as passive-aggressive punishment, force him listen to an older woman narrate a book about her wrinkly neck while we drove to pick up his carpool companions. 

We pulled out of the driveway and headed down the hill. I expected complaints. None came. The car felt oddly peaceful. I glanced to see if he’d put his earbuds in, but he hadn’t. Nor was he looking at his phone. Then, to my surprise, he chuckled. He was listening to I Feel Bad About My Neck and chuckling. I wish I remembered the line that elicited that chuckle, or even the particular essay, but I can’t. I pretended I didn’t notice because were I to notice, he would have stopped immediately and tried to switch on the radio. We got to Walgreens, where we meet the other kids, and I turned off the audiobook. We drove to San Francisco in silence. 

Thursday morning, Owen wasn’t carping, but I left the audiobook on anyway, to see what happened. Ephron was midway through an account of her relationship with the playwright Lillian Hellman, a bittersweet little masterpiece about female friendship, narcissism, age, and regret. It was the tail end of a story about someone Owen had never heard of, but he was fully absorbed. Again, I heard him chuckle.  When we picked up his companion (only one this morning, a 16-year-old boy) I left the audiobook on and the three of us listened to Ephron’s story about having a restaurant meat loaf named after her. The ride was no longer silent. Nora was narrating and the boys were laughing. I’m not talking big, rollicking laughs. That would be too much to ask. But there were a good number of small, grudging, teenaged boy chuckles. We listened to Nora Ephron essays until I dropped them off.

Yesterday morning, I was down to the last, very short essays in I Remember Nothing in which Ephron notes that, at 69, she probably only has a “few good years left.” As Owen and I were driving to pick up his companions, she was listing the things she won’t miss when she’s dead: bras, Fox News, taking off her makeup, et cetera. After that, she listed those things she will miss. It was a lovely list that included her husband, her children, waffles, spring, walks in the park, and dinners with friends. It ended, simply, with “pie.” The book was over. We pulled in to the Walgreens parking lot. Owen said, “That was really sad.”

I said, “I know, and she died just a couple of years later.” 

He said, “Really? So when she said she only had ‘a few good years left’  she actually only had a few years left and didn’t know it?”

I said, “I suppose. She was amazing. Such a funny writer.”

Owen said, “And sad.”

I said, “That last story was really sad.”

He said, “All the stories were sad.”

And he was right. There are a few weak, fluffy essays in these two collections, but most are witty, smart, full of life, and yet also quite poignant. I believe this is what makes them great. A lot of these essays are really, really great. 

I then tried to prolong the conversation by telling Owen and his carpool companions, who soon joined us, that Nora Ephron was married  to one of the reporters who cracked Watergate. None of them knew what Watergate was. I struggled to explain Watergate and then gave up. No one asked me to continue. The Nora Ephron audiobooks were over and we were back to silence. 

Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins from The Essential New York Times Cookbook: excellent. Cakey and tender within, crusty and sugary without. But perhaps they could use more blueberries? If you have a favorite blueberry muffin recipe, I'd be interested to try it.

a new lemonade, a failed curry, a Gabrielle Hamilton dessert

 tangy, fresh, and way better than it looks

THE LEMONADE 

In the glass above: “nose-to-tail” lemonade (regrettable name) courtesy of New York magazine via Julia Turner on the Slate Culture Gabfest.  You blitz a whole lemon in a blender, skin and all, with sugar, water, and ice for about a minute to create an invigorating drink with the froth of an Orange Julius and the bracing zestiness of real citrus zest, which you don't usually get in lemonade. I made the recipe as directed and thought it needed more sugar. In fact, I doubled the sugar. The fabulous lemonade I ended up with contained almost exactly the same amount of sugar as Coke and I never drink Coke because it contains too much sugar, so I guess I won’t be drinking much of this lemonade. But it sure was refreshing and delicious on a hot, droughty August day. Try it. You don't need to add as much sugar as I did. You might not even want it.

rich, spicy, and way better than it looks

THE THAI RED CURRY 

I was going to give you the recipe for the red curry with chicken that we made at the Thai Farm Cooking School after I triumphantly reproduced this dish in my own home, but something went wrong. It tasted good, but I think it’s obvious from the photo why this red curry wasn't a triumph. I'll spell it out: IT WASN'T RED.  I have no idea what I missed and I’ve read and reread the recipe, which I followed to the letter.

THE GABRIELLE HAMILTON DESSERT

Last night I served peaches on buttered toast, another one of those mysteriously wonderful, stupidly simple Gabrielle Hamilton dishes from Prune.  You toast crusty, craggy bread (I used sourdough) then butter thickly and top with sliced, unpeeled, ripe peaches. Sprinkle with sugar. That's it.

Mark said: “Excellent together, better separate. Why not just have some buttered toast and a peach? I’m not saying this to be a jerk. Eating them together, you’re just making things difficult for yourself.”

I love the guy, but he’s wrong. The sum of this dessert was so much greater than the parts. The heat from the toast and the sprinkling of sugar relaxed the peaches so they softened and released just a little bright, fresh juice that mixed with the warm, melting butter and the bread soaked them up. The flavors were pure and vivid.  I think the word "revelation" is overused, but if I used it, I would use it here. It would be condescending to tell you that this dish depends on the quality of your peaches, butter (I used Kerrygold), and bread, so I won’t.

I think this might work with apricots and plums, but probably not strawberries. 

I'm sorry, Mark, I won't do it again

I was driving Owen and his mute adolescent companions to their art program in San Francisco this morning when we passed a sign advertising civet coffee. I'd never seen civet coffee for sale in the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter), and I broke our customary silence to excitedly explain civet coffee to my passengers. No one showed the slightest interest in this bizarre Indonesian coffee tradition. Not a flicker. Adolescents are tough nuts. 

Civet coffee, in case you don’t know, is coffee brewed from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of the palm civet, a cat-like mammal indigenous to Southeast Asia. The civets eat coffee berries which undergo some kind of enzymatic change in the their gut that (supposedly) renders the coffee healthier and more delicious. The beans are eliminated by the civets, collected, roasted, ground, and brewed into a fabled and very expensive coffee. I have just described the process with remarkable delicacy. 

I dropped the adolescents off, started driving home, and tried to talk myself out of stopping at the civet coffee place. So much to do, blah blah blah. Then I thought, why resist? So I could get home to my laptop, dirty dishes, and boring routine a half hour sooner? 

I am $15 poorer, but I can now report that civet coffee has a strong, rich, round flavor with no harsh, acidic bite whatsoever. Per the barista's recommendation, I drank it black, which is ordinarily impossible for me, but civet coffee really is noticeably smoother. It's very good. Is it worth $15 a cup? How absurd! No! Don’t fall for it. No cup of coffee is worth $15, but I’m not sorry I stopped because for a few minutes I felt like I was having an adventure. 

Why does she even bother?

As you might expect, there are ethical issues attached to consuming civet coffee. Another reason not to drink it.

Back to our previously scheduled programming: Unlike a lot of people, I really like Bon Appetit. I actually appreciate that it's flashy and sort of shallow. Maybe because I subscribe to the mighty, unstoppable New Yorker, the idea of yet more high-quality reading material flooding my mailbox exhausts me and I would probably cancel the Bon Appetit subscription if they started publishing great long-form journalism. I just want pictures and recipes and that’s what I get in Bon Appetit. I opened the August issue and it was full of stuff I wanted to make, starting with the grilled corn and chile dip.

To make this, you grill corn and poblano peppers, scrape corn off cob, chop up poblanos, mix everything up in a bowl with sour cream, creme fraiche, and hot sauce. Bake until bubbly and hot. Serve with tortilla chips. I took this to my sister's house for family dinner and it was spicy, smoky, creamy, crunchy, robust, and very popular. 

Two thoughts in case you decide to try this fine recipe:

-The recipe says it “serves 4.” As my father said, “Four what?” The recipe serves at least 10. Perfect for a big potluck.

-While the corn dip worked as an appetizer, I think it would really shine as a side dish. To me, it felt wrong to eat corn on a corn chip. The recipe also suggests serving it with pork rinds, but that doesn't appeal at all. My suggestions is to rename the dish “spicy creamed corn” and serve it like a casserole, to be eaten with forks. 

My niece and nephew collaborated in perfect silence and harmony to braid themselves a whip.  

Eggplant and tangerine

heaven

This morning, an eggplant was sitting on the counter and I thought: I have to eat that eggplant right now, fried and drizzled with honey. 

I first heard of eggplant with honey (and last heard of eggplant with honey) in Laurie Colwin’s classic essay “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant” in which she reminisces about cooking in her tiny New York City apartment when she was in her 20s. She only mentions the eggplant with honey in passing, but this oddly appetizing concept stuck with me. For twenty years that little craving remained latent and then this morning, out of the blue, demanded to be satisfied.

I found some recipes online -- eggplant with honey seems to be a Spanish dish -- and patched a few of them together to devise a simple, quick formula that worked beautifully. Here it is:

1. Slice an eggplant thinly -- 1/8 inch is about right, though if some slices are thicker, that’s ok. It’s nice to have some fleshy pieces, too.
2. Place eggplant in a bowl and cover with milk and a big pinch of salt.
3. Let sit for 45 minutes or so then pat completely dry.
4. Heat a thick layer of olive oil in a pan. You’re not deep frying but you’re not doing a delicate saute, either. I know some people don’t fry in olive oil anymore for health reasons, but the thought of frying the eggplant in any other oil felt wrong to me. Obviously, you should use any oil you like.
5. When the oil is hot, dredge eggplant slices in flour and fry until pale gold and a little crispy on the outside, thoroughly tender on the inside. 
6. Drain on paper towels. Salt to taste. Drizzle generously with honey. 

SO GOOD. The eggplant was substantial, creamy, salty, and exotically sweet from the honey. It was everything I'd hoped it would be. I raved about my eggplant and Mark said, “Maybe you should make me some.” 

The only thing more shocking than Mark asking me to make him eggplant with honey was his reaction after eating a plateful: “Thank you. That was delicious!” 

I’d think he was just saying that, but he never just says that.

So, fried eggplant with honey. That’s my first recommendation for the day. The second is to go see the movie Tangerine. I had to drag myself because I knew it was about pimps, johns, and a couple of transgender sex workers in Los Angeles too poor to buy anything but a single donut on Christmas Eve. Also, it was shot entirely on an iPhone. I couldn’t imagine how this was going to be much fun, but my imagination failed me. The movie is wildly fun, gorgeous, raucous, and touching. I didn’t want it to end. Owen loved it too. I wasn't going to mention that I took Owen because people might raise their eyebrows, but that is cowardly. I'm not ashamed that I took him, nor sorry. 

My only complaint concerns a vomiting scene. I know I've whined about this before, but in every movie and TV show lately you can be sure someone is going to vomit loudly and realistically. Often, it's played for laughs, as in Spy and Dope, so I guess some people find it hilarious. I find it totally gross. The vomiting scene in Tangerine was the most graphic and disgusting I’ve seen to date and it went on for what seemed like five minutes. I later learned that the actor drank a lot of vodka before filming so he could really go the distance and what we’re seeing is actual vomiting.

Awesome. I hate this trend. 

Other than that, Tangerine is perfect.

From tom kaa gai to a cookie Coolatta

Pounding curry paste. I think my arms might be a little "stronger."

Final chapter of trip report:

In Chiang Mai, Isabel and I took a daylong class at the Thai Farm Cooking School, which is located on a working organic farm where mangos are wrapped in paper to prevent birds from eating them before they fully ripen.

It seems like a lot of work, wrapping up every single mango.

The class was fascinating and I discovered just how efficient and simple everyday Thai cooking is. The same small handful of high-impact ingredients come together in slightly different combinations to create very different dishes. For instance: coconut milk + yellow curry paste + fish sauce + chicken = yellow curry. Coconut milk + lemongrass + fish sauce + chicken = tom kaa gai. Coconut milk +  sugar + bananas = dessert. Coconut milk + sugar + mango + sticky rice = another dessert.

Everything is cooked super quickly, too. A few minutes on the stove, nothing more. We each got to make our own soup, curry, stir fry, pad thai (or spring rolls), and dessert from scratch and we did all this in a few hours and ate all this in that same few hours and since everything contained coconut milk, we got very, very full.

Recipe for delicious banana dessert: in a small pot heat 1/2 cup thick coconut milk, 1/2 cup water, a chopped pandan leaf (optional), 1 tablespoon palm (or brown) sugar, a big pinch salt, and two small, thickly sliced, peeled bananas. Cook until bananas are soft. Serve warm. Serves one.

Our teacher, Benny, had an insinuating, sing-song voice and would swivel her hips when she added extra chili to a curry, smile this wicked smile, look around the room and say, “More spicy more sexeeeeee.”  

frying spring rolls

She had a lot of little sayings she'd deliver in that same voice with her saucy smile. I won't lie, Benny was a trip. I don't think anyone in the class knew quite what to make of her at first because you don't meet people like her in the West, ever. Her act just isn't part of our cultural repertoire.

But by the end of the class, I liked her immensely. Underneath all the mugging and bawdy joking, she was an excellent, serious teacher and we learned to make dishes I plan to replicate now that I am finally, as of yesterday, home for good.

Isabel made sticky rice with mango. The blue comes courtesy of a butterfly pea.

Our other Chiang Mai adventure: a day at an elephant rehab center where we watched, bathed, fed, patted, and respected the elephants.

Elephants are awe-inspiring animals and a bit scary. They are not Babar.

We spent our last three days on a beach on an island where we splashed around in the warm water, ate, read, and otherwise did nothing. Really and truly nothing.

What were we supposed to do?

Start to finish, it was one of the best vacations I've ever taken. Isabel and I are solid. I didn't know it when we left, but I know it now, and it means the world to me.

We got home to California and almost immediately left for New England to hang with Mark's family on the shore of another ocean where, again, we did almost nothing.  What is it about the beach that makes people want to do nothing? Even in winter, you go to the beach to do nothing.

I didn't do absolutely nothing at the beach in Massachusetts. I did cook one night for a small crowd, but it wasn't the kind of cooking you write long blog posts about.

Simple, quick, and satisfying is sometimes the right call, but one I've been loath to make in the past.  For dessert: Rice Krispie treats. This meal plan freed up many hours for doing nothing.

On my last day in New England, after a week of sitting in a Dunkin' Donuts for an hour or so every morning, the marketing finally got to me and I caved and bought a Chips Ahoy Coolatta. It was like a chocolate chip cookie slushie and little granules of chocolate chip came up through the straw. Weird, but I liked it. I wanted to stop drinking for health and calorie reasons, but found it hard to stop.

Here's to Northern California.

It's been a great summer. Now I'm home for good and very happy.

From the land of cookie-flavored iced coffee

timid eater no more

I'm writing from my summer office at the Dunkin' Donuts in Marion, Massachusetts where they're blasting the air conditioner and pushing cookie-flavored iced coffees and Coolattas. It's hard for me to believe that a couple of weeks ago Isabel and I were driving across Thailand eating santol fruits and blue vermicelli, but there's photographic evidence. I wish I'd written about all this when it was fresh, but I've been flying, driving, busy, sick, and jet-lagged.

Ok. From Bangkok, which I wrote about in the last post, Isabel and I drove to Chiang Mai, the big city in northern Thailand. Three days. Seventy thousand calories. When he wasn't showing us temples, Mongkol, our guide, kept feeding us. He bought us wonderful fruits I'd never even heard of and salted puffed rice snacks drizzled with caramel and green puffed rice squares that tasted like Kellogg's Sugar Smacks. We tried grass jelly, dried bananas, and fried bananas. Pink cupcakes and fluffy eggy cupcakes. Barbecued duck and barbecued pork. If I asked what something was, he'd buy it and then we'd eat it and even if I didn't ask what something was, he'd sometimes buy it anyway. By the end of the journey I felt like a foie gras goose and became cautious with my questions lest I end up with something else to eat. This is the kind of "problem" you want on a tour. He was the best guide ever and if you go to Thailand, email me at tipsybaker@gmail.com for his contact info.

an ancient Buddha head around which a tree trunk had grown

At one temple we saw an extensive display of life-size statues of people suffering for their misdeeds. This didn't  jibe with my admittedly shallow understanding of Buddhism.

Some culinary highlights: In Ayutthaya, we stopped at a nondescript storefront where they specialize in crepes colored with either green pandan or midnight blue butterfly peas and wrapped around long, dry wisps of caramel. Women made the crepes:

While men made the candy floss:

The strands of caramel were tucked inside the crepes to create a textural combination that is totally foreign to the American palate: Soft, petal-like pancakes containing crispy strands of sugar. First bite was puzzling, but you wanted a second bite, and a third, and later Isabel ate the remainder of our crepes and candy floss in the hotel room.

At the century-old Samchuk market, Mongkol introduced us to these freakishly big meatballs with the smooth consistency of hot dogs:

They look like bread, but were pure protein and extremely heavy. I almost dropped the skewer when I tried to hold it upright.

another Samchuk specialty: rice wrapped in lotus leaf with chicken, egg yolk, and vegetables

One morning, not long after breakfast, we stopped for a mid-morning snack of multi-colored rice vermicelli that came with six types of curry, including a sweet peanut curry, a mild chicken coconut curry, and a fiery pork curry. You ladled some curry on a small nest of vermicelli and popped the whole thing in your mouth. This meal managed to be both filling and refreshing,

all colors tasted the same

Right after we'd finished, Mongkok decided it was time for us to try some noodle soup at another restaurant, our second mid-morning snack for the day.

just some of the things they put in the noodle soup

We could not do justice to this fantastic soup.

my noodle soup (egg noodles)

The ubiquitous condiments at a Thai noodle shop include chili, vinegar, turbinado sugar, and fish sauce. I generally added a little of everything while Isabel didn't add anything.

I didn't ask what this was as I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to try it.

That was our drive from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, a blur of temples, greenery, and colorful, strange, delicious foods.

And monkeys.

They were cute for about 30 seconds, then scary.

Bangkok, Oriental city

one night in Bangkok

Until recently, everything I knew about Bangkok came from John Burdett's crime novels, this Murray Head song, and Lawrence Osborne's memoir, Bangkok Days, in which he wanders around the city by night consorting with hookers and ex-pat sleazebags.

Unsurprisingly, I expected Bangkok to be a grimy fleshpot full of prostitutes and paunchy white male sex tourists on scooters and I'm afraid this is a common perception of the city among Americans. My father said, "When someone says he's going to Bangkok, you almost feel compelled to smirk." Yesterday, I ran into a friend and told her where I'd been and her eyes lit up and she asked me about a sordid Thai sex performance she'd heard about.

In fact, I hadn't caught one of those shows and couldn't provide any details unavailable on wikipedia. I explained, instead, that despite its reputation, Bangkok has a lot more to offer than the sex trade. SO MUCH MORE. I want to shout that because the SO MUCH MORE came as a complete surprise. Isabel and I almost didn't go to Bangkok on account of what I'd heard and read, but it turned out to be the clear high point of our trip.

The word I'd use to describe Bangkok is layered. We stayed in a small hotel with lush gardens, a pool, and a resident cat. In the morning we sat on the patio drinking coffee, peeling rambutans, and listening to the neighborhood chickens. It was idyllic. Step out the front gate, though, and we were in the middle of a huge, chaotic metropolis, just a short walk from the Skytrain, tantalizing street food, movie theaters, malls full of fabulous clothes by Thai designers, and people, people, people. It was like midtown Manhattan, but moreso. With chickens.

Nahm restaurant in Bangkok is worth every baht. I didn't take pictures of the food because everyone else was taking pictures of the food and they looked silly, but in hindsight, I was the silly one. I wish I had pictures! 

One day we ate an intricate multi-course lunch at David Thompson's Nahm. Thompson is an Australian chef and cookbook author, and at Nahm he serves ultra-refined renditions of Thai classics. What I remember best are little rice pancakes with spicy seafood, some exquisite salads, and a dessert of mangosteens and lychees in crushed ice. Every morsel was perfect and the meal cost a pretty penny.

We tried everything except insects and deep-fried chicken heads. It was almost all delicious.

Later, we had an equally incredible late-night dinner of noodle soup and hot doughnuts with pandan custard on the street in Chinatown with about 117,000 of our closest friends. Every morsel was perfect and the meal cost basically nothing.

In Bangkok, you get the high and the low and both are really, really terrific. What I hadn't realized was just how much of the high there is in that city. We stumbled on galleries and artisanal coffee shops and fancy gelato and fascinating Thai designer clothes that I would have coveted desperately were I twenty years younger and twenty pounds thinner. I'm betraying myself as a complete ignoramus because I hadn't expected any of this.

What I'd expected was sleaze. In three days of nonstop walking in Bangkok, we saw school kids in uniforms, colorful Chinese temples, teak houses, ex-pats, coconut vendors, tuk tuk drivers, a grisly museum that you should avoid at all costs, women exhorting us to get our feet massaged, artists, fashionistas, clotheslines, mysterious back alleys, and a lot of nice, everyday people who helped us read our map and cross the street without getting killed. What I didn't see was a single man, woman, or child whom I could positively identify as a sex worker.

I know they're there. But if you want to find them you might have to look harder than you think.

We loved Bangkok.