zryala vuzrast

French lemon meringue tart is prettier than lemon meringue pie, but eggier and less delicious.

Sorry for my absence. I was busy turning fifty.

Mark took Owen and me to Paris for a few days to celebrate this milestone. It was cold and gray and expensive and beautiful. There were police and soldiers everywhere. We saw the actor who plays Carl on the Walking Dead in the Mona Lisa room at the Louvre. We saw Mrs. Roman Polanski outside Cafe Flore. From the cheapest seats in the house, we saw a ballet choreographed by Mr. Natalie Portman. What else? French women do get fat. So do French men, even though a lot of them smoke. Everyone was wearing coats, but the fashions were still fun to study. Ladies, if you want to look Parisian, quit combing your hair so much and never set foot in Lulu Lemon again. Just do the messiest ponytail you can manage and buy lots of scarves, black tights, and boots. But above all, no yoga pants in public, ever.

I like this artful little video of Owen and me on the Metro:

It captures one dynamic of the trip in 7 seconds.

So much as been written about French cooking it's hard to have an original thought. This may not be an original thought, but I fell in love with the simplicity and deliciousness of French salads. The three or four salads I ate there involved big leaves of lettuce of a single variety, not those scrappy mixed greens we favor here. I can’t remember the last time I ate an American salad that didn’t consist of wisps of baby arugula, baby spinach, baby mizuna, baby oak leaf, etc. Fully-developed leaves from an adult head. That’s the salad I want at fifty.

I'm happy to be fifty, by the way. You have to understand, I’ve been bracing for fifty for the last three years and now I can stop. Now I can relax and settle in. The late forties are so ambiguous. Fifty isn't. 

Recently, this acclaimed novel came in for me at the library and I took a short break from War and Peace to tear through it:

It's about an English teacher in Bulgaria and his unrequited love for the male hustler he meets in a public men's room who gives him syphilis. 

Yes, I just made that sounds as unappealing as I possibly could, but think of it this way: A book has to be really, really good to overcome subject matter like that and What Belongs To You absolutely does. If you don’t believe me, believe Dwight Garner ("incandescent") and James Wood ("brilliantly self aware.") 

I mention this book because at one point, the narrator meets a woman whom he describes like this: "She wasn't a young woman, but there was a sense of vitality about her that made me think of the Bulgarian phrase zryala vuzrast, ripe age, which they use for the period of time before one is truly old. She was large, but she carried her weight like a sign of health, her frame softened by well-being."

I like that.

Next post: the 2016 Piglet. I warn you, I'm not engaged like I have been in years past, but I did get as many of the competition books out of the library as I could. It's a very interesting mix. I've never eaten, let alone cooked, food from Oman, Ukraine, or Senegal. But within the week. . .

Some cooking, some reading

Looks like dessert, but isn't.

Two delicious dishes I cooked this week from Michael Solomonov's Zahav:

*The sugar/fat/salt/crunch combo in Solomonov's chicken pastilla cigars makes them even more lethally irresistible for some of us than actual cigars. Have you had b’stilla, that lovely, unusual Moroccan squab pie? This is that, deconstructed. You fry together some ground chicken, onions, fennel, cinnamon, and orange flower water. Roll this into filo dough cylinders (filo can be fussy and if it breaks, just patch and fake it), sprinkle with sliced almonds, bake, and sift some powdered sugar on top. You will enjoy.

*The risotto-like Israeli couscous with mushrooms and kale is another winner. Fairly easy, too. I added Parmesan cheese, which was a good move. I would also next time use the whole bunch of kale and more maitake mushrooms. The vegetables are where the flavors and nutrition is, so I say: maximize. My adaptation of the recipe is at the bottom of the post. 

Israeli couscous  

On another subject, I've been keeping a list of the books I've been reading and the other day I pulled it out. I have only finished two books in 2016! Very slow by my frenetic standards, but there’s a reason.

This is the reason:

One fun part of opening this book was seeing my underlinings from when I tried (and failed) to read it when I was 22, along with the phone numbers of old boyfriends and addresses of editors to whom I was going to send my pathetic college newspaper clips.

Don’t be impressed. Anyone can do it if they are patient. Tolstoy isn't hard, just long. Starting War and Peace is like boarding an ocean liner and you need to settle in for a leisurely journey. I’ve been reading for weeks and weeks and there’s still no land in sight, but I'm not bored at all. Tolstoy's insights into the counts and countesses and scheming blackguards and high-strung maidens of the early 19th-century apply with deadly accuracy to men and women of 2016. Every page or so comes a moment when I stop and think: yes, this is exactly how people are! I’ve had that same subtly awful interaction before and never seen it described. I’ve disliked someone for precisely those reasons -- how did he capture it? And so on.

Here are the books I’ve finished. What a puny list:  

So You’ve been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. It could be you. It could be me. Ronson’s book reads like a long and chilling magazine article about the power of  an internet mob to destroy the lives and livelihoods of unlucky individuals, many of whom have done nothing more egregious than post an ill-advised joke on Twitter. The book dampened my enthusiasm for blogging and if you read it you will understand why.

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis. If you like to ponder the underpinnings of literary taste and often argue with a teenaged boy about the artistic value of comics, which he stubbornly insists are on a par with Tolstoy, this excellent book-length essay will help you frame your arguments. Or maybe just lay down your arms. Who knows? Instead of tackling the issue of whether a book is good or bad, Lewis says we should instead look at the way people who love the book read it. Over the years, I’ve read Experiment three times and I’ll probably read it again -- a sign that it is of high literary quality, per Lewis. I never got into Narnia, but this is an all-time favorite, a short, invigorating gem of a book that will make you feel instantly sharper. The title makes it sound daunting and dry, but it's not at all.

Finally, let me say a few more words about Role Models by John Waters. I’m almost done listening to the audio version, which I touted in the last post. I still recommend these funny, weird, warm-hearted essays, but I had forgotten just how sordid the chapter on outsider gay pornographers is. How sordid? Very sordid indeed, and maybe even nauseating unless you're on the same psychosexual plane as John Waters. I still think Role Models is a great book. I just don’t want anyone to get to the part about Bobby Garcia and shriek, "WTF, Jennifer?" 

You’ve been warned.

Israeli couscous, adapted from Zahav 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. On a baking sheet, toss 2 cups Israeli couscous with 2 tablespoons olive oil and toast for 15 minutes or so, until golden. Meanwhile, warm 2 tablespoons olive oil in a skillet and add 1 grated carrot, 4 minced garlic cloves, and 1/2 cup chopped onion. Cook until softened but not browned. Add the couscous and stir well to coat in oil. Add 1/2 cup dry white wine (or vermouth) and 1 cup tomato sauce. Cook until the wine has evaporated and tomato sauce reduced. Add salt and pepper to taste. Heat 6 cups water (or chicken stock, but water is perfectly fine so why waste the stock?) in another pan and now start cooking the couscous a la risotto. In other words, add a 1/2 cup of the simmering water to the couscous and stir. When that is absorbed, add another half cup. Keep doing this until the couscous is tender, up to 40 minutes. (It went faster than this for me.) Meanwhile, in another skillet, heat another 2 tablespoons olive oil and add 2 cups coarsely chopped maitake mushrooms (or more) and 1/2 cup chopped onion. Cook until onions are soft and mushrooms have released all their liquid and begun to brown at the edges. Add a bunch of shredded kale and cook just until leaves are tender. Fold this into the hot couscous along with 3 tablespoons butter and some grated Parmesan -- as much or little as you want. Serve with additional Parmesan. Serves 6. 

Mississippi roast and chicken albondigas

I wasn't cooking at all for a few weeks. I was busy one night and lazy the next and then Mark was out or Owen was out or I couldn't be dragged away from my marathon viewing of Shoah. It was great for a while, but eventually I started to feel slovenly and unhealthy. In the absence of leftovers, my non-dinner meals had devolved to cherry Hershey’s kisses left over from Christmas and spoonfuls of Jif straight from the jar. That’s not a droll hypothetical. That's a precise description of one of my lunches last week, and probably all of my snacks. There was another day when sustenance consisted of an orange, handfuls of Nabisco gingersnaps, and a chai latte.

Saturday, I decided to start cooking again. Mark’s aunt is visiting and you have to offer a houseguest a meal at some point, plus I missed real food and missed blogging. I decided to warm up slowly. I decided to warm up with Mississippi roast.

Have you heard of Mississippi roast? Sit down, get comfortable, I'm going to tell you all about it.

A few weeks ago Sam Sifton wrote a story in the New York Times about the “improbable rise” of so-called Mississippi roast. The story was both fascinating and unintentionally hilarious, or at least I found it so at the time.

Over the last decade, a 5-ingredient, slow-cooker beef dish -- a.k.a. Mississippi roast --  has become a sensation among, as Sifton put it, “the mom-blog set.” A slab of chuck goes into your slow cooker along with a packet of Ranch dressing mix, a packet of au jus gravy mix, a stick of butter, and a few jarred pepperoncini.  Cook for 8 hours. Dinner.

Sifton tracked down the Mississippi woman who invented the recipe and the friend of hers who subsequently published it in a church cookbook, et cetera, et cetera (this was the fascinating part), until suddenly it was all over Pinterest and the blogosphere. One blogger quoted in Sifton’s story enthused that the roast passed “the hubby test.”  

It didn’t quite pass the Sifton test.

Sifton: “Packaged dry ranch-dressing mix? Packaged dry gravy mix? These are built on foundations of salt and monosodium glutamate, artificial flavors, artificial colors, polysyllabic ingredients that are difficult to pronounce much less identify. Surely they could be replaced without increasing by much the prep time for the roast.”

He came up with a new version of the recipe that involves browning the meat "aggressively beneath a shower of salt and pepper and a coating of all-purpose flour that I hoped would create a fond, or base of flavor, to replace the gravy mix, and give some structure to the sauce.” Then he whips up some homemade ranch dressing. Sifton: “It was exactly the same as the original effort, and took about the same amount of time to make.” (Italics mine.)

I didn't have to try the recipe to know this was absurd. How I chuckled. The original Mississsippi roast was about the miraculous alchemy of a few unfussy supermarket ingredients in a crockpot. It was about magic. By turning it into just another recipe and using the word fond, Sifton missed the whole point.

I was awfully smug. Like I'm so folksy and unpretentious. I made Mississippi roast according to the traditional mom blogger recipe Saturday, emptying two packets of flavoring powder plus butter and pepperoncini onto a chuck roast. I love ranch dressing. I love butter. I was sure it was going to be delicious. 

You've probably guessed from my long wind-up that a dramatic reversal awaits. I won't disappoint.

We sat down to dinner Saturday, I took a bite of the Mississippi roast and cried, “This is is terrible!”

It was terrible! The flavor of real beef had been replaced by salty and revolting “beef flavor.” The roast tasted like it had spent years in a can. It tasted like a hospital cafeteria smells. The difference between the flavor of regular pot roast and Mississippi roast was the difference between the flavor of a real strawberry and strawberry bubblegum. 

Mark said, “I don’t know what you’re so upset about. This is really good.”

Mark’s aunt said, “I like it. It’s delicious.”

Owen said, “It’s weird and too salty, but I like it.”

I’m not sure why this beef offended me so much. After all, I enjoy cloyingly artificial Hershey’s cherry kisses and love garbage like instant vanilla pudding. But Mississippi roast was so not my thing. Disgusting. I just don't get it. I’m sorry I ever doubted Sam Sifton. I bet his fancy Mississippi roast is delicious and worth the ten or fifteen extra minutes it takes to make, I can not recommend the original.

Last night, I continued the cooking revival by making the chicken albondigas (meatballs) from Zahav, which were good, though I thought they contained too much smoked paprika.

A word on meatballs. Everyone thinks they are an easy, homely, weeknight dish, but they're not. Meat loaf is an easy, homely, weeknight dish. Meatballs are a miserable chore. I forget this every time I decide to make meatballs and only remember when I'm in the middle of making meatballs. What is so hard about meatballs? A lot of things, but it mostly comes down to handwashing. If you’re shaping a meatball and the phone rings, you have to turn on the sink with your elbow and wash your hands to take the call. You have to wash your hands to turn on the stove. You have to wash your hands if your son wants you to come over and read his English essay. Then you often have to brown the meatballs "in batches." "Batches" is not a word you ever want to see in a weeknight recipe. 

And in the end, you just have meatballs and no one is as impressed as if you’d made something truly easy, like, I don't know, cassoulet.  

Gosh, I sound negative. I’m actually very cheery, A few things that have made me happy and might do the same for you:

*45 Years. It won't make you happy, exactly, but this movie will make you think and argue (in a good way) with your friends over what actually happened and whether the character played by Charlotte Rampling is justified in feeling as she appears to feel at the end, which I think she absolutely and clearly is. I can't say more without ruining it.

*I read John Waters’s wonderful book Role Models a few years ago and loved it so much I’m listening to it now in the car and I love it just as much, maybe more, because Waters narrates with personality and wit. This book really does make me happy. I find the irony and outrageousness of Waters' movies wearisome, but his writing charms me. He’s an enthusiast whose exuberant, almost wholesome, delight in eccentricity is infectious and life affirming.  Parental warning: I used the words “almost wholesome.” There are a couple of chapters here that must be avoided when driving carpool. 

*Typing the name “Waters” reminded me to say that if you’re ever in San Francisco, the David Ireland House, which I toured last week, is extraordinary and worth a visit. It’s a lovely old Victorian that Ireland, a conceptual artist, used as his canvas, so to speak. You can read all about it here. At the end of our tour of this bizarre, entrancing house the guide had us sit at Ireland’s dining room table which is set with silver bowls filled with cement, candles stuck in blobs of cement, and perfectly round cement balls. She asked if we had any questions. Having heard that Ireland threw raucous dinner parties at this table, I asked, “What did David Ireland cook?” She said, “He cooked very basic things but he was in a relationship with Alice Waters so he certainly ate well.” I said, “A relationship relationship?” She said, “Yes, a relationship relationship.” 

I like to keep this blog nominally about food and I think that brings us back around.

Try this, won't you?

January is a grim month. I have some good news, and some bad.

We’ll start with the good. Grapefruit. It’s in season and it’s delicious, especially the pink kind. Not as delicious as a peach, but, hey, it’s January. So go buy some pink grapefruits. Come home and cut one in half. Preheat the broiler. Use a grapefruit spoon or a little knife to loosen all the sections, but leave them inside the grapefruit. This should take about 25 seconds.

The ancient grapefruit spoon on the left is soft, worn, small, and perfect. The one on the right is big, shiny, sharp and new. It mangles the grapefruit. If you want to find a good grapefruit spoon, check eBay.

Mix 2 tablespoons salted butter (or unsalted plus a pinch of salt) with 1/4 cup brown sugar until clumpy, like streusel. Add 1 cup Wheat Chex, crushing just a little bit so you have some small bits but also a lot of whole Chex. Mix briefly and gently. Pack about a third of this irresistible stuff on half the grapefruit. Put the rest of the streusel and the other half of the grapefruit in the refrigerator for subsequent meals. Broil the grapefruit until warm and slightly bubbly. Enjoy.

It looks like a bad joke, but it's my favorite food discovery of 2016.

If you're like me, you have doubts about the idea of streusel-topped, broiled grapefruit. How does sour, sharp, cold, and juicy possibly meld with sweet, buttery, warm and crunchy?

No idea. It just does. Miracle. Try it.

Now for the bad news: You won’t want to eat a grapefruit any other way after you've tasted it broiled and topped with streusel. The pleasure of unfattening plain grapefruit has been lost to you.

Don't thank me, thank Gabrielle Hamilton. Here's the recipe exactly as printed in Prune. 

Some other recommendations to brighten your January:

*The kale-apple-walnut salad from Zahav is tart, crunchy, and terrific. Recipe here. 

In the book it's called "tabbouleh," but it contains no bulgur. Really, it's just a salad.

*Also wonderful: the Zahav lamb shoulder, a superrich, hearty, easy, cheap, long-braised feast dish. Recipe here. You'll have lots of leftovers with which to make Suliman's pilaf.

*The sliced fresh oranges with honey from Zuni Cafe make a refreshing dessert after something rich like lamb shoulder. (Not that fresh fruit is ever a proper dessert.)

*The Zahav tahini cookies are a cross between shortbread and halvah. Couldn't be tastier. Couldn't be easier. 

*This is a stunning piece of writing.

*Karina Longworth’s fascinating history of Charles Manson's Hollywood on the podcast You Must Remember This enlivened many hours of tahini shortbread-baking, dishwashing, driving, folding, and sweeping last week.

*I saw the movie Brooklyn twice, most recently with a 10-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy, both of whom were enthralled. As was I.  It's a wondrous film, romantic and funny, but also thoughtful, compassionate, and poignant. I've seen all the Oscar best picture nominees. This is my favorite by far. 

If you want to criticize my writing, today ain't the day

I was hard on this book.

You probably didn't know that Alfred Hitchcock once served Jimmy Stewart a meal that was entirely blue, from soup to ice cream, or that Marilyn Monroe ate lamb chops in bed, "dropping gnawed bones onto her signature white sheets." That Marlene Dietrich "reached a deep understanding of dill and always used it with fish" and Michael Caine grew up avoiding chicken because his father told him it was for "nancy boys." You'll find lots of this kind of culinary gossip, plus recipes, in Dining with the Famous and Infamous, a book about the eating quirks of 20th-century celebrities. Am I recommending it? You can read my review here.  

Lauren Bacall's Romanian grandmother taught her how to make kreplach. Dining with the Famous and Infamous taught me how to make kreplach. Here's the recipe, which is pretty good, though I cut back on the cinnamon. Two teaspoons is plenty. Also, I omitted the saffron. Too expensive.

Back to business. I have a lot of business. This is a long post.

Yesterday, I bought Zahav. The library copy was overdue and there were more recipes I wanted to try. Should I buy a copy, should I keep the library copy another week and pay the fines, should I feel shitty that someone else is waiting for the book, should I take it back and put myself on the hold list again, if I buy it where will I put it, if I buy it will I feel like an irresponsible spendthrift, if I buy it will I really use it, et cetera. For about a week, this "issue" was buzzing at the periphery of my consciousness like an annoying little fly.

Smack. Killed that fly. The book is mine. Sorry Mark.

Two more Zahav dishes to tell you about:

Dish #1: Halloumi is a firm, chewy, squeaky Cypriot cheese that holds its shape when cooked. I bought two brands of halloumi at the Middle Eastern market and opened one of them to make Michael Solomonov's fried halloumi with dates, walnuts, and apples. I tasted the cheese straight out of the packet and thought, wow, salty, but this is probably just halloumi, it’ll be ok once it’s fried.

It wasn’t. It was inedibly salty. Product failure, not recipe failure. I would warn you off that brand of halloumi except I threw the packaging away.

To make this dish, you puree dates, walnuts, oil, and water to create a rich, sweet bed for the halloumi cubes, which you fry until golden in a bit of oil. Top with feathery herbs and raw apple. The date-walnut puree is intended to offset the saltiness of the cheese and the herbs and apples are intended to offset the unctuous sweetness of the dates and I’m sure under other circumstances this would be a glorious and perfectly balanced dish, but it wasn't for me, not last week. Recipe here.

The other night I opened the second packet of halloumi and it was pleasantly salty, springy, delicious. We ate it plain, like any other good cheese. It went quickly. 

This is the halloumi you want.

Dish #2: Celery root and apple soup with hawaij sounds bland, doesn’t it? It sounded bland to me. Celery root is barely a food. If it looked so bland to me, why did I make it? Because it also looked easy. If I like to cook so much, why do I always go for easy dishes? Because maybe I don’t like to cook, maybe I just like to have cooked.

As it turns out, the soup wasn’t bland at all and if I’d known the meaning of “hawaij” I’d have known it wouldn’t be. Hawaij is a Yemeni blend of turmeric, cumin, and black pepper, a close cousin of curry powder that you can mix in under a minute using spices already in your cupboard. The soup was sweet, spicy, hearty, cheap, easy, and, if you care, anti-inflammatory, good for brain health, and vegan. It yielded plenty of leftovers for lunches all week. This soup has everything going for it. Recipe at end of post. 

Speaking of brain health, I will now tell you a story.

Recently, I decided to take a class at the community college. There’s an English prerequisite, a basic course in reading comprehension and writing. I thought I should be able to skip this class given how I've spent the last 30 years. 

You have two options if you want to skip English 98 at the College of Marin: provide proof that you’ve passed an equivalent class, or submit to something called the Accuplacer test, produced by the same company that produces the SAT. I have definitely passed many equivalent classes, but excavating ancient college records sounded like a nightmare. I thought, hell, I’ll just take the test. How hard can it be?

So there I was a week ago at the College of Marin in a hushed room full of computers and fellow students, all of whom appeared to be the age of my children. When I sat down at the terminal I found I was shockingly nervous. 

The multiple-choice section of the test wasn’t hard but it was tricky. Sneaky. You’re rewarded for being clever and suspicious, not thoughtful. Fortunately, I can be suspicious. I did well on this section.  Lest you think I'm boasting. . . 

In the final portion of the test, the computer instructed me to compose an essay answering this question: “Is making mistakes necessary even when doing so has negative consequences for other people?”

I stared at the computer, stupefied. I began to perspire. I had the fleeting impulse to leave and forget about my community college course. The phrasing of that question made no sense to me, given my understanding of the words “necessary” and “mistake.” I figured there must be a diabolical trick embedded in the question that separated smart people from aging blockheads.

I pulled it together. I addressed my problems with the phrasing of the question and wrote an essay. I avoided sentence fragments and cutesy blog shortcuts, used all the colors in my writerly crayon box, reread for errors. It wasn't great, but I thought the essay was decent.

The computer scored the essay in under a minute. I bombed the essay. I got a 5/8. There were “lapses in quality.” My essay lacked coherence and exhibited “inconsistent control of language.” 

I was stunned. Indignant. Stung! 

When I got home, Mark said, “Maybe this is a wake-up call.”

Ha ha ha. What a card. I still don't know what to make of this disaster! Maybe I’ve spent too many years trying to entertain rather than rigorously argue. Maybe I don’t test well. Maybe the computer is an idiot. Maybe I'm an idiot. All I know is, I do have consistent control of language and I feel sorry for the kids for whom tests like this really matter. 

I was exempted from English 98 despite the essay. No way I would have told this story if I hadn’t been.

CELERY ROOT SOUP WITH APPLES AND HAWAIJ, adapted from Zahav by Michael Solomonov

Solmonov instructs you to use 2 tablespoons hawaij, total. I’d start with that and see how you feel when you taste the soup. I wanted a lot more spice, so I’m giving proportions that leave you that option. If you don’t want more spice, you’ll have extra hawaij left over that you can mix into your jar of curry powder or save for the next time you make this excellent soup.

In a small dish mix together 2 tablespoons turmeric, 1 tablespoon ground cumin, and 1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper. Set aside. Warm 1/2 cup olive oil in a pot over medium heat, add 1 big onion, thinly sliced, 2 celery ribs, thinly sliced, 1 tablespoon kosher salt, and 1 tablespoon hawaij (the spice mix you just made). Cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables have softened but not browned. Add 2 big celery roots, peeled and sliced, reduce heat to low, cover and cook until the celery root is falling apart, about 45 minutes. Add 2 apples peeled, cored, and sliced, and another tablespoon of hawaij -- or more  Stir. Add 2 quarts of water and bring to a simmer. Cook until the apples are completely soft. Blend with whatever implement you use to blend soups. Taste. Add more spices, if you want, and additional salt. (I thought it needed a lot of salt.) Serve with a dollop of yogurt or sour cream. Serves six.

Our quotidian meal

babka

Five hours until Mark comes home and we can continue watching Making a Murderer. I am in agony. Are you watching this incredible show? It’s a 10-part Netflix documentary about an uncanny crime saga in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin involving a wild, enraging, heartbreaking cast of characters and I would have stayed up all night to see the end if my companions had been willing. I can't recommend it more highly. 

A couple of stellar dishes from Michael Solomonov’s Zahav yesterday, although I was the only one who thought so. I'm 100% right, of course. These two dishes aren't even on the borderline. Total winners.

Dish #1: Mina with ground beef, coffee, and cardamom

Michael Solomonov: "Mina is the Ladino word for pie. This Passover dish, common throughout the Sephardic world, is almost good to be true.”

I have a serious question: Is it sacrilegious to make a Passover dish when it's not Passover and you're not Jewish? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is just eccentric, like a Jew or Muslim making buche de noel in July? Or is it none of the above? 

I did some internet research and found this in an Atlantic story about the recent cafeteria crisis at Oberlin:

“People don’t usually think about food as something that deserves respect, but food is reflective of the heart of different cultures. I identify as religiously and culturally Jewish and I would be offended if someone prepared a traditional Seder plate incorrectly at some time other than Passover. This would de-sanctify the religious meal of Passover and reduce it to just another quotidian meal."

Thoughts? 

As Solomonov puts it: "Once the matzoh is soaked and baked, it magically transforms into something more like traditional pastry than unleavened bread." 

In any case, what's done, is done. 

To make this Sephardic pie, you fry up a simple hamburger filling of meat, onion, garlic, a tiny bit of coffee and cardamom. Soak some matzoh in water until pliable and line a baking dish. Spoon the filling atop the matzoh. Top with more matzoh. Bake. Unmold. Serve this lovely, spicy, satisfying pie with a charoset of carrot, apple, raisin, and walnut. It's more like a salad than the charoset I've had at seders. (I think I'm more comfortable calling it "salad.")

Owen wolfed his slab of meat pie down in under a minute. He was in a horrible mood. I said, “So you like that!”  

He replied, “I’m only eating this because I’m really hungry.” Shortly thereafter, he and Mark got into a big, dumb fight and Owen stormed off. He yelled, “Now I’m making a quesadilla, Mom. That food was bad.” 

Talk about de-sanctified. A minute later Owen was back, shoveling more pie onto his plate. He said, “I’m only having seconds because we don’t have any of the good kind of tortillas.” Then he stormed off once more.

Isabel did not try the mina. 

Mark knows his role on this blog and plays it with verve. Of the mina he said, “It’s too weird. All the parts are good, but why not serve a nice hamburger with some bread on the side?”

Recipe at the end of this post.

*Dish #2 chocolate babka 

Lord, this was delicious. Make a sweet, rich yeast dough, roll it around a buttery chocolate crumble, freeze, slice, assemble the slices in a loaf pan, top with more crumble, bake. I believe the Zahav recipe can be found if you search Google Books, but the URLs are too long for me to link. If you do find and decide to make this splendid recipe, expect to add lots more flour than called for. Just keep adding flour until you have a soft dough and you’ll be fine. Better than fine.

Look at those pretty spirals.

Mark:  “It’s good, but it's not a cake and you wish it were a cake.”

No, you don’t.

***

Mina with ground beef, cardamom, and coffee, adapted from Zahav. I added kale to the meat filling, used more onion, doubled the raisins and apple in the salad and made a few other changes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and generously oil a medium-sized baking pan of some kind (I used a deep 9-inch pie plate). Brown 1 pound ground beef (I used chuck) in a little oil in a wide skillet. When it’s brown and crumbly, add 1 chopped onion, 5 minced garlic cloves, and a little salt. Cook for a few minutes and add a bunch of kale, stems removed and leaves shredded. Cook until all the vegetables have softened, but not browned. Add 1 teaspoon finely ground coffee and 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom. Mix well. Taste for salt. Now, soften 5 or 6 sheets matzoh in water, just long enough that you can bend them a bit but not so long that they disintegrate. Line the oiled pan with the matzoh, overlapping slightly if necessary. (It won't be tidy looking.) Spoon the meat into the matzoh shell. Layer more damp matzoh on top, pressing the edges to seal. Brush with some beaten egg and bake until the pie is golden and crisp, about 30 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes. Invert onto a platter and serve with the following salad.

Carrot salad 

Grate together 4 carrots (peeled), 1 apple (peeled), and a small chunk of fresh horseradish. Mix in a bowl with 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, 1 cup chopped cilantro, 1/4 cup raisins, and 1 tablespoon cider vinegar. Add salt to taste. 

auld lang syne

a cozy scene, that's all

My first reaction when I heard about Zahav, the glossy new Israeli cookbook, was: Another Israeli cookbook? I already have Jerusalem, so why do I need Zahav? 

Dumb question, especially coming from me. If you own Julia Child, does that mean that Madeleine Kamman, Richard Olney, Jacques Pepin, Patricia Wells, and Elizabeth David have nothing to add to the conversation?

 As if.

Naturally, there’s some overlap with Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem, but Zahav is far more personal, more casual, more anecdotal. It’s filled with photos of author Michael Solomonov’s family, which I love, and recipes from his mother and grandmother. I’ve always struggled to find my way into Ottolenghi’s books for reasons I can’t put my finger on; I’ve had no such trouble with Zahav. 

Last night I made my first Zahav recipe, a pumpkin soup with noodles and kale, chosen because It looked easy, healthy, and delicious. (You can see an appetizing picture here.) First you make a spicy stock from the peelings and seeds of a squash, tomatoes, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and a charred onion. Strain. To this broth you add kale, pearl onions, big chunks of roasted squash and angel hair noodles. Cook briefly, serve immediately.

This decidedly exotic soup offered our family a chance to relive the bad old days when I cooked exotic dishes all the time. I am thrilled to report, we have not changed. Owen looked at the soup, groaned, said, “I guess I’ll be having cereal for dinner,” and I mentally gave him the finger while Isabel wanly picked at her portion and said, “How are you supposed to get the noodles without getting all the other stuff?” and Mark said, carefully, “What made you decide to try this recipe?” to which I replied, “I know. It’s weird and lousy. And you’re all unimaginative losers who don’t appreciate me. I’m going to bed.”

I took some artistic license with that dramatization, but flatter myself that it captures the underlying spirit of the meal. 

The soup wasn’t actually lousy. It just wasn’t quite right. The problem was the squash, which Solomonov has you cut into 2-inch chunks -- too big. Then you roast these massive, unseasoned chunks in the oven for 15 minutes until “dark brown but not fully cooked” which seemed and still seems impossible. In my experience, by the time squash is "dark brown" it is always fully cooked, if not burnt. Anyway, after 15 minutes I took out the bright orange, "not fully cooked" squash cubes and added them to the soup, simmering the two together for a scant four minutes, which isn’t long enough. The squash pieces were pleasantly firm, but exceedingly bland, with a flavor reminiscent of underripe melon.

The dish is easily fixed, however. I reheated the soup today and because the broth had permeated the pumpkin by this point, it was quite delicious. Here’s how I would amend the recipe: cut the squash into bite size pieces and season vigorously before roasting. Add to the soup and simmer for fifteen minutes. Cool and let the soup rest overnight. Reheat and serve.

I doubt that this blog post has inspired anyone to rush off to make Michael Solomonov's pumpkin soup, but if you do try it with these amendments, I think you will be pleased.

I may never taste a white negroni, now

The best holiday cookies this year -- ginger florentines and fruit squares -- were from Alice Medrich's Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy. A very brown assortment, I see now.

Happy New Year, everyone.

An announcement before I launch into a new year of blogging: the tipsy baker is not tipsy anymore. I stopped drinking. I stopped drinking in October, actually. 

This requires a brief explanation, I feel, given the name of this blog and its purpose, which is to chronicle as honestly as I can everyday life in and around a kitchen. Mostly around a kitchen. I've strayed a bit. 

So:

For most of my adult life I drank moderately. Then, around the time my mother got sick when I was in my early forties, I began drinking immoderately. A problem. I made resolutions to quit drinking, broke them, set limits, kept charts, gave up on charts, would stop for a month, would stop for a few days, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and it didn’t work and it didn’t work and this went on for a few years and then one day it all worked. I woke up and I was a moderate drinker again. In fact, I was more moderate than I’d ever been before. I gradually became almost (almost!) indifferent to alcohol. This period of moderation lasted for about three peaceful years and brings us to October 2015.

As you may recall, this past fall I read a nerdy self-help book for managers called Getting Things Done that I raved about maniacally in a post a while back. The author of GTD talks a lot about the “open loops” in your life, those uncompleted tasks/unresolved problems that weigh on your mind. I thought, hmmm, drinking. It wasn’t a problem anymore, but didn’t it always sort of weigh on my mind anyway? Would I be more tranquil if I just gave it up altogether and became a nondrinker? Could I actually do it?

The answers: yes, yes, and yes. I started off intending to quit for one month and it was so easy and pleasant I just kept going. Everything improved with booze off the table -- sleep, health anxieties, weight, self esteem, restaurant tabs, parties, mood. It was incredibly restful not to have to decide whether to have a glass of wine. I’d had no idea such decisions were still so loaded for me, but even just having to entertain the question for a few seconds had been stressing me out a little. 

After two and a half months of abstinence, I decided on New Year’s Eve (a.k.a. day-before-yesterday) that I would have a manhattan, once my favorite cocktail, to see if I wanted to resume moderate drinking. Mark encouraged this. He didn’t see why I had to be rigidly abstinent. Neither did I. 

Ay, caramba. Take some time away from manhattans and ... ugh. The ensuing buzz from that one manhattan was claustrophobic and unpleasant and I bitched the whole time about how “not fun” it was and by the time the glass was empty I had a headache. I bitched about that as well. A swell New Year’s date I was. When I went to bed I was queasy. I slept terribly. I woke up grimly triumphant, knowing that I was done with drinking, at least for the foreseeable future.

In hindsight, it's clear that I was never going to give that manhattan a chance. I'd hardened my heart against the drink long before I took my first sip and approached it -- or should I say him? -- with a spirit of vengefulness. For a few grim years alcohol had been like a charming, sociopathic boyfriend who kept doing me wrong, but whom I couldn't seem to get over. Now that I was really and truly over him was I really going to let him come to me with flowers and bonbons and tell me how much he missed me? Well, yes, I was. But I certainly wasn't about to succumb. I just wanted to see him on his knees.

Anyway, that's it. That's my story for today. To be honest, it has felt like a huge life accomplishment.

Mark, on the other hand, thinks this is all very sad.

Yesterday, I made the hoppin’ john from Sean Brock’s Heritage, such a lovely dish, reliant though it is on mail-ordered red peas and Carolina gold rice. One of the many fine dishes I made in 2015 and if I kept a nice, orderly list I would be able to give you some kind of top ten. One of my resolutions for 2016: keep a list of dishes I cook.

I also plan to keep a better list of the books I read so I can compile a top ten books list. Also: movies. In any case, this is the best book I read during the doldrums between Christmas and New Year’s and one of many fine books I read in 2015. 

The bar code hides Dr. Sacks' super-handsome head. Did you know that Oliver Sacks was once a motorcycle aficionado and body builder? That he briefly held the California record for the back squat and hung out on Venice Beach? Highly recommend this memoir.

These were the cookbooks my father, sister, daughter, and cousin gave me for Christmas:

This is the absolutely thrilling cookbook the library brought me last week:

I'm not sure how deep I can dig into it before the due date, but I'm going to give it my all.

Good times ahead. 

TV dinners and tea lattes

Today had its ups and downs. 

Onwards.

Ever since Isabel left for college, our family has felt very, very small. This has completely changed how I cook. Producing dinner went from staging a theatrical production for four to providing three dummies with stuff they want to eat, usually in front of the television. 

Yes, friends We eat in front of the TV almost every night now and I’m not hanging my head in shame. We did this on special occasions for years, but now it’s routine. There’s no lovelier moment in the day than when I sit down on my side of the squishy old sofa next to two of my favorite people in the world with some home-cooked food and we turn on the TV. Judge away!

Here’s what we eat: a lot of pasta and soup. Both can be eaten in bowls and neither needs to be cut with a knife, which is tricky when you're balancing your meal on your lap. 

before the disaster

I got a copy of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s mighty Food Lab from the library and I’ve so far tackled two very solid recipes. The pasta with garlicky broccoli, anchovies and bacon is delicious. You've probably seen a hundred recipes for just such a dish, but Lopez-Alt's little twists (lemon zest and juice, combining the pasta and sauce in the pan) made a noticeable difference. The sauce was saucier, the flavors brighter. 

I’ve also made his white bean soup and while it wasn't exactly original, it was tasty and easy. Canned beans, boxed broth, a little doctoring and it's time for Fargo. You could do worse. You could also do better. I recently revisited the spinach soup from Fields of Greens that I used to make regularly circa 1999 and it's terrific. If you try this recipe, bear in mind I have never used the fenugreek and omit the coconut garnish because the soup is better without. This is the kind of healthy recipe you will see a lot of in about two weeks. Ugh. January.

cute

Cheeseburger cups also appeared on our plates last week. Owen sends me a lot of recipes these days and if they look easy and not too disgusting, I make them. It's fun. Biscuit dough from a tube, ground beef, ketchup, mustard, brown sugar, cheese, a muffin tin. Not totally wretched. Recipe here. 

That about exhausts my recent cooking, though I did try another pie from Patty Pinner's Sweety Pies: Ava Joy's peanut butter cream pie. Unlike most peanut butter pies I've run into, this is a baked pie. Like a pecan pie with peanut butter instead of pecans. Rich and sweet. We liked it. Didn't love. Recipe here.

You really want the tea latte in a mug, not a to-go cup.

In closing, I have fallen in love with a San Francisco cafe called Fifty/Fifty. I would go to Fifty/Fifty every day I lived closer, so it's probably good I don't. Except why did I just type that? It would be great if I lived closer. Expensive and fattening, but great. I'd be so happy.

Fifty/Fifty is a bright, spare storefront on a humble stretch of Geary Boulevard with a few austere tables, typically occupied by students. The atmosphere is mellow and pleasant, but the reason to come is the tea lattes.

not cheap

Everyone knows about chai lattes by now and perhaps you'd figured out, as I had not, that you can make lattes with all varieties of tea. Duh. Of course you can. And they're wonderful.

I'm currently hooked on the lavender earl gray, which is fragrant and floral, just slightly sweet. There's something exotic about this warm, milky drink. It's like something a seductive, evil queen might serve to cold, lost children in a fairy tale before throwing them into the dungeon. That's praise, in case you were wondering.

Anyway, if you come to San Francisco or live here, check out Fifty Fifty and tell me what you think.

The Egg Lady and her oatmeal pie

No, we didn't like that pie at all.

At some point in the 1960s, a gaunt farm wife used to drive around Saginaw, Michigan in a rattletrap station wagon with her developmentally challenged daughter in the front seat next to her and deliver eggs and pies to people like the grandmother of Patty Pinner, author of the cookbook Sweety Pies. According to Pinner's grandmother, the so-called "Egg Lady" was married to "one of those kinds of husbands who leave the house and head for the corner store and you don't know whether they'll be back in six minutes or six months."

Pinner's grandmother was black and the Egg Lady was white, but unlike other white woman who visited the neighborhood in their fur coats, carrying themselves with the "poise of entitlement," the Egg Lady wore tattered housedresses. One day while the Egg Lady was transacting business with Pinner’s grandmother, her daughter got out of the car to play with Pinner. Unsettled by the girl's "slow, backward manner," Pinner refused to play with her, one of those trivial decisions you regret forever. All these decades later, Pinner wishes she could go back and apologize to the Egg Lady’s daughter. I have a few Egg Lady's daughters in my own past, shocking to say.

Anyway, that’s the gist of the 2-page headnote to the recipe for The Egg Lady’s oatmeal pie and it's a poignant standalone story with vivid characters, a glimpse of period race/class dynamics, a little drama, a moral, a conclusion. Headnotes like this are one reason I like Pinner's book so much. The Egg Lady's oatmeal pie is another. You wouldn't think that oatmeal could make an exquisite pie, but a lot of exquisite things have been made from very little -- Shaker chairs, Depression-era quilts, New Mexican tinwork -- and this pie is one of them. Three of us demolished all but one slice of the pie in about 20 minutes the other night, and the person who could least afford to finish it off the next morning did so. (For the record, I baked a half recipe in a 7-inch pan, so we weren't quite as piggish as that makes us sound.) 

It's hard to describe this pie. It's a lot like chess pie -- with oats. Alternatively, try to imagine a very thin, pale pecan pie made with white sugar instead of brown, oats instead of nuts. 

Or maybe just bake the pie and see for yourself. It could not be easier, cheaper, or better. 

Egg Lady's oatmeal pie adapted from Patty Pinner's Sweety Pies.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and have ready an unbaked 9-inch pie crust. In a bowl, beat 2 large eggs, 1/4 cup melted unsalted butter, a pinch salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2/3 cup sugar, 2/3 cup light corn syrup, and 2/3 cup old fashioned oats (not quick cooking.) Pour into crust. Bake for  35-45 minutes until the crust is golden and the filling fairly firm to the touch. Not too firm, though. You’re looking for a delicate crust over a tender jelly-like pudding, not a cookie. Cool. Serve at room temperature. 

I'm mostly in Mama's camp

Two of our seven Thanksgiving pies (brownie peanut butter and apple streusel)

Isabel came home from college and went back to college, pies were baked and eaten, Jessica Jones watched in its entirety, and then the Thanksgiving break was over. Now it’s December and all hell is breaking loose in the world, but my tiny corner of it remains as placid as ever. The worst thing that’s happened to me lately is that I got a parking ticket and the goats broke into the neighbor’s yard. I guess Mockingjay was kind of disappointing, too. Into every life, some rain must fall. 

Two things:

*The easy 'Bolognese' sauce from Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year is terrific, much more exciting than its everyday ingredients would suggest. Or maybe I’d forgotten just how satisfying a big, meaty red sauce can be. 

Here’s the recipe: Chop 1 large onion and soften it in olive oil in a wide skillet. Add two smashed cloves garlic and pinches of red pepper flakes, salt, and black pepper. Cook until onions are translucent. Squeeze 1 pound Italian sausage (I used half mild, half spicy) out of its casing and add to the skillet. Break up with a spatula and cook until it’s no longer pink and raw looking. Add a 28-ounce can good-quality canned tomatoes along with most of the juices, crushing the tomatoes with you hands. (I followed the directions and bought expensive San Marzano canned tomatoes for the first time ever and I regret to say I think they actually made a difference.) Cook hard until the liquid evaporates then turn the heat down, add the remaining tomato juice, and cook slowly for 2 hours or more, adding a bit of water whenever the skillet runs dry. Stop replenishing water as you approach serving time. You want the sauce on the dry side, the tomatoes caramelizing on the bottom of the pan. Cook 1 pound pasta. When it’s done, toss with a couple tablespoons unsalted butter. Toss with sauce. Serve with Parmesan.

*I pulled Sweety Pies by Patty Pinner off the shelf at Thanksgiving like I do every year, but instead of just browsing through the recipes as usual, I sat down and read this charming and eccentric cookbook cover to cover. Pinner, the jacket bio notes, is "an employee of the U.S. Postal Service." I don't know what kind of a cookbook I'd expect a postal worker to write, but it wouldn't be this one, no offense to postal workers. 

As you might guess from the title, the book is a collection of pie recipes. Accompanying each pie is the story -- often a long story -- of the woman who provided the recipe, or just inspired it. The stories have little to do with pies except insofar as the pies further a woman's goals of getting and keeping a man. This is book is about feminine wiles.

A headnote to a recipe might begin like this:

“When I was twelve, Frida, a wonderful matronly neighbor, taught me a tremendous lesson on how to handle womanly setbacks. When Frida’s handsome flirtatious husband Garfield left her, even though she was heartbroken she did not sit at home with a bottle of gin. . .” (lemon chess pie)

or

“According to a tale often told in my family, Sister Bernice Brock, a tall, plain-looking church woman who was as sweet as cherry pudding, had her sight set on Brother Varney, a confirmed bachelor, who got a kick out of entertaining the single ladies. . . ” (grits pie)

or 

“Growing up there were two camps relative to catching a man - the ‘if you don’t chase after your intended some other woman will' camp, to which Mama’s friend Annabelle belonged, and the ‘if you start running after a man you’ll always be running after him’ camp, which Mama embraced. . .” (golden squash pie)

I could go on. Limiting myself to just three passages was hard. Men are presented here as philandering rascals who need to be tricked and tamed by cunning women, and invariably are. The tools of conquest range from tangerine-colored slips to chocolate meringue pie and if that makes you roll your eyes, Sweety Pies is not the book for you. Given that my grandmother thought everything could be solved with a little lipstick and that her last words to me concerned my weight, I am accustomed to this kind of talk and enjoy it.

As to the recipes, you’ll find the usual suspects (apple, pecan) but a whole chapter is dedicated to "cereal pies" and there’s wacky stuff like grape juice pie, orange Tang pie, and white potato pie. The recipes I've tried are solid: For Thanksgivings past, I've made Frankie's coconut pie (Frankie has quite a story) and Aunt Betty Jean's lemon pie and both were good. The other day I baked Pinner's mile-high lemon meringue pie and while the meringue wasn’t a mile high, it was still a lovely pie. The Egg Lady's oatmeal pie is cooling on the counter as I type. I just know Mark is going to swoon.

It does not appear to be a joke.