Omani food, Nigella Lawson, book recommendations

The "love cake" from Meera Sodha's Made in India = dense, buttery confection of ground cashews, semolina, and spices

I had to turn in an essay for the class I’m taking right around the time the Piglet got interesting and since I couldn’t simultaneously finish the essay and stalk the Piglet, I let the Piglet drop.

If were paid to write this blog, I’d have been fired by now. Or, as Donald Trump might tweet: "She should be fired! Lightweight blog that no one reads anymore. SO SAD!"

cardamom fry breads

Are you following DT's Twitter feed? You should. His Twitter voice is fascinating.


Anyway, I’m not paid, no one can fire me, and I’m back.

I couldn't style Omani food better than they did in the book, so I didn't try.

A perfectly respectable book won the Piglet. Not the book I would have chosen, but Hot Bread Kitchen is a perfectly respectable book that I haven’t yet mustered the energy to cook from because, as the title suggests, it's mostly bread and I haven't been in a bread-making mood. Of the books I got to know during the tournament, I really liked Zahav, of course, and Meera Sodha's Made in India, but I ended up falling hardest for The Food of Oman by Felicia Campbell. Initially, I was just fascinated by the obscurity of the topic. Later, I was happily surprised by the workability and deliciousness of the recipes. I expected Omani fare to be standard Middle Eastern, but it’s not, as anyone with a solid grasp of geography might have guessed. Oman is closer to India than to Egypt and you can taste that in these dishes, which are spicy and rich with coconut milk.

So far, I’ve made Campbell's caramelized beef, which involves cooking cubed chuck steak in a pot with spices, onions, cilantro, and water and for hours until the strong flavors have become one with the super-tender meat. I served this with a big pot of coconut spinach and pillowy, slightly sweet, sopapilla-like cardamom fry breads.  I’ve made those fry breads twice more since then, that’s how much I liked them. Some pan-seared meat dumplings were delicious as well, a zesty beef and onion mixture encased in a sticky, chewy dough, like curry potstickers. Only the soupy Omani coconut curry chicken has disappointed.

Omani caramelized beef

The weather has turned fresh and springy over the last week and Omani food is dark and serious. On Monday, I tried to figure out what I wanted to cook next from Food of Oman. The answer was, nothing. It's all too heavy for this time of year. I flipped through Hot Bread Kitchen. Nothing. I thought about Mamushka. Not feeling that either. I wanted something else entirely. But what? I browsed my shelves and when I got to the Nigella Lawson section, I stopped. Nigella. It was time for some Nigella.

What a good call that was. You could live a long and happy food life cooking only from Nigella Lawson's oeuvre. She’s funny, smart, and charming. Her recipes are fabulous and easy. I’m now going to link you to four of them. You are most welcome.

Monday night, I made salmon with mirin from Nigella Express (her “fast” cookbook). You mix soy sauce, mirin, and brown sugar in equal parts, marinate your salmon fillets for a couple of minutes, fry two minutes on one side in a dry skillet, flip, pour over the marinade, cook two minutes more. Remove fish, add a splash of rice vinegar to the pan, pour sauce over fish. Divine. Owen uttered words that have never before crossed his lips. “Is there any more salmon?” 

That night I also served a lovely strawberry crumble that Nigella promised would render bland, watery supermarket strawberries palatable. It did. Recipe for the easy, irresistible crumble is found in Nigella Kitchen (her "catch-all" cookbook) and here. 

Tuesday night, I served so-called meatzza from Nigellisima (her Italian book), which is pizza, but with a crust of seasoned ground meat, not bread.

meatzza

I hate the name, but that's the only downside to this simple dish. It's perfect for all you gluten-free, low-carb eaters and pretty damn great for the rest of us. Recipe here. Use a pound of ground beef, a 15-ounce can tomatoes, and 6 ounces mozzarella. She doesn’t specify the quantity of salt, which I resent in a ground meat recipe like this one as I had to cook several tiny meatballs to get the seasoning just right. A heaping 1 1/2 teaspoons of Diamond Crystal kosher salt did the trick.  

Finally, last night I served another killer Nigella dish, the broccoli-stilton soup from Nigella Express. I've made it before and written about it before, but I doubt anyone remembers. Ten minutes of "active" time to make this soup. Frozen broccoli! Love. Try it. 

  

Now, some books that have nothing to do with food:

LUCY

I read this haunting and lovely novel by the author of Olive Kitteridge in two hours and so can you. So should you. It's about the secret childhood histories we carry around with us that no one in our adult lives can ever really understand. The details of the story are highly particular to narrator Lucy Barton’s troubled family of origin and yet almost made me cry in the ways (good ways) it reminded me of my own not-so-troubled family of origin. 

This book by a former colleague of mine is a thoughtful, big-hearted, and candid non-fiction portrait of life in a small Texas town. Karen Valby gets to know restless high school students who drive hours to the nearest movie theater and conservative older gentlemen who convene pre-dawn every day to drink coffee in the general store. There are towns like this all across America, but I sure don't live in one. I enjoyed getting out for a bit and meeting people I otherwise wouldn't. Highly recommend.

Peacekeeping deals with politics, intrigue, and Americans in Haiti. Mischa Berlinski is a superb writer and his novel started out strong. But page by page my interest seeped away. I got to page 265 and gave up with only a hundred pages to go. I just didn’t believe the story or care what happened anymore, and that’s a big shame because the book has a lot going for it. This review pinpoints the problems, I think. 

Now it's back to War and Peace (page 1022), Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, and easy Nigella dinners.  

How to be a generous critic

Purple cauliflower was on sale at Whole Foods so I bought it. Tastes exactly the same as white, looks less appetizing when cooked, supposedly has a very slight nutritional edge.  

Today’s Piglet review by Michael Twitty weighing the merits of Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year against Hot Bread Kitchen by Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez is perfection. The writing is funny and vivid, but also 100% sweet and positive, which one could not say of Ari Shapiro’s review yesterday nor, ahem, my last post. Twitty presented this as a tough contest between two superb books and didn’t at any point go negative. Big hearted and gracious. I commend him. I have a copy of Hot Bread and look forward to digging into it. I’ve already cooked extensively from Reichl's bright, companionable book (Twitty: "an incredible braid of her Twitter poetry and recipes she loves"), which I regularly pull out when I don’t know what to make and it's 5 p.m. I trust Reichl’s recipes will be practical and tasty and that I might already have all the ingredients in the house. Sunday night's cauliflower pasta (anchovies, raisins, olives, cauliflower) is just one example of a last-minute Reichl feast.

On another subject, I’ve now tackled a handful of recipes from Meera Sodha's Made in India, most of which are very good. My favorite is the cauliflower, cashew, and pea curry, a simple, rich, substantial “doable on a weeknight” dinner. Sodha's spinach with black pepper, garlic, and lemon is also terrific. I have tried Sodha’s method of making rice and it works beautifully, as Sadie Stein noted in her review, but I prefer my old way, the Madhur Jaffrey way, which yields less oily, fluffier rice.  Recipe at the bottom of this post, in case you’re interested. The only miss was the Gujarati potato curry which was exceedingly dry. It calls for a 7- ounce can of plum tomatoes. I don’t even know where you buy 7-ounce cans of tomatoes. I put in a whole 14-ounce can of plum tomatoes and the curry was still too dry. 

Much as I like the particularity of the exotic recipes in this book, I think that when it goes up against J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Food Lab in the next few days, Food Lab should win. I think of Food Lab as the Revenant of this crowd of cookbooks, the biggest, most male, and most ambitious and that therefore it should absolutely win. Kidding. That isn't why Food Lab should win, though I do sort of think of it as The Revenant of the bunch. It should win because unlike The Revenant, Food Lab is a true magnum opus, a singular work packed with Lopez-Alt's vast cooking experience, contrarian sensibility, and hard-won, useful data. The recipes are there to illustrate general principles making them at first glance somewhat generic, and this might lead the judge to choose Made in India, which is full of seductive and unique dishes. We shall see. I'm pulling for Food Lab, though Made in India is pretty great, too. 

Last night, I cracked Food of Oman and made the rich, golden Omani lentil soup It could not have been easier or better.  Dried limes, some spices, onions, garlic, a few tomatoes, red lentils. The backstory of this book is fascinating. Felicia Campbell joined the military as a teenager and was deployed to Iraq. Something about the culture spoke to her. Campbell: “In this wild, ancient place, as a restless 19-year-old, for the first time I learned to be still. In Iraqi cafes I was welcomed by those I thought were my enemies, their warmth and graciousness softening my carefully guarded heart, humbling me. With them I learned to sit and simply be, savoring the minutes or hours spent with my platoon, my tribe, safe from the brutal loneliness that lay beyond our encampment. . . .”

Now we know that at least one good thing came out of the Iraq War. It softened one woman’s heart, broadened her mind, and led circuitously to the publication of a very fine book that may soften other hearts and broaden other minds about a culture unfamiliar to most Americans and unnerving to more than a few. Campbell rediscovered the inner peace of her Iraqi sojourn again in Oman, where she now lives. This extraordinary book is a love story of a person for a place. Of a woman for a culture we don’t think of as particularly hospitable to Western women. I had to look up Oman on a map. I had to google "Muscat" to get a mental picture of the capital city. I have a lot to learn.

Apparently I made this for the first time when I was pregnant with Isabel. In the note I complain about the rice sticking together, which probably means I rushed the rinsing process.

Basmati rice, Madhur Jaffrey's way. I have made this recipe a hundred times. The little 1973 book opens right up to the page. The salt is different in my version below because I use kosher. I don't always measure the salt. A big pinch is ok in both places. I don't measure the butter either and usually put in more to be sure it is extra buttery and delicious.

Rinse 2 cups basmati rice in running water, rinse it really well. Soak for a half hour in 5 cups water with 1 teaspoon of kosher salt. Drain. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add rice, stir to coat the grains. Add 2 1/4 cups water and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt. Bring to a boil, cover, lower heat as much as you can, and cook for 20 minutes. Lift lid. Fluff rice gently with fork. Cover and cook another 10 minutes. If you leave the lid on after it's done cooking, the rice will hold for a quite a while at a nice, warm temperature. I usually start cooking the rice about an hour before we eat. Serves 6.

Clean, clean, clean

Some ripe age ladies I ran into a few years ago. 

Friday's Piglet review of Diana Henry's Bird in the Hand and Pierre Thiam's Senegal was brilliant and made me jealous. I wish I'd written those lines and thought those thoughts, but I didn't. John Birdsall did. Birdsall makes such a strong, fair case for Bird in the Hand that I don't even feel I need to cook from the books to agree. (Though I will.)

This morning Jessica Koslow, proprietor of the adorable Los Angeles restaurant Sqirl, advanced Heidi Swanson's Near and Far over The Food of Oman, a choice I would not have made, though I thought Koslow's review overall was solid. I've cooked nothing from Oman (which looks great) and only the turmeric tea and a pleasant honey-sweetened lassi from Near, but I've spent enough time with Swanson's book (and cooked enough of her recipes in the past) to know that it is just not my thing. I want to be very clear that this is a matter of personal taste, not any failure on Swanson's part. What she does, she does extremely well -- and the better she does it, the less I like it, if that makes sense.

Swanson specializes in lovely, healthy, and delicate vegetarian dishes that she styles and shoots exquisitely, albeit a little wistfully. Everything appears forlorn, pretty, and somewhat wan. In this book there aren't a lot of substantial meal; she seems to be focusing more on dainty drinks and tidbits, grain salads, ricotta bowls and pantry "staples," like quick-pickled rose petals. Swanson: "I tend to keep dried rose petals around and make these now and then for a fragrant addition to couscous or as an accent on fruit salads. . . " She is very fond of rose petals and suggests finishing your breakfast yogurt bowl with optional "fresh or dried rose petals" or "a bit of bee pollen."

Why not fairy dust?

They were terrifying, the cows. 

For some, these touches will be inspiring, evoke a casually graceful and sophisticated lifestyle. In me, they provoke sighs. I find her writing precious. Swanson likes her biscotti "crushed into a little cup of creamy vaniglia or melone gelato." She suggests serving homemade vin de pamplemousse "in a Picardie glass filled with ice. . . I stock up on vanilla beans from the grand cru vanilla bar at Eric Roellinger on Rue Sainte Anne just for this recipe."

In one headnote she describes a big package of raw sugars a friend who lives in India sent her, along with a strainer. The friend tells Swanson in her note that the strainer is "perfect" for making paneer and yogurt. Swanson tells us: "The strainer is flimsy plastic and hard on the eyes, and while I typically avoid plastic, it's effective."

Maybe that last example isn't irritating. I don't know. It just presses my buttons. It would be hard to shop for Heidi Swanson.

What differentiates Near from her previous books is that she's organized chapters around her travels (to Morocco, India, France, Japan, and Italy) and shares dishes she brought home with her and made her own. As Koslow puts it: "This is world cuisine as seen through Swanson's eyes: natural, healthy, clean, simple."

And then, in the next paragraph: "Her recipes rely less on technique and kitchen wizardry, and more on simplicity and brightness through clean cooking."

Clean. I'm not the first person to see the problem of using the term "clean" to talk about food and cooking. Is world cuisine dirty and in need of a Heidi Swanson cleanup? How exactly is Swanson's food cleaner than what they cook in Italy and Morocco? Is it clean because she doesn't cook with meat? Because she explicitly calls for non-GMO products and organic corn starch? Because she avoids plastic? Because she garnishes with rose petals? Does she use less oil? Fewer ingredients?

I don't know if Swanson's food is actually "clean," whatever that means. But there is something overwhelmingly clean about this book, so I sort of understand what Koslow is getting at. But for me, it is not a plus. In the photos of her travels there are no people other than Swanson herself, posing in various exotic, seemingly empty buildings, looking contemplative. In the Indian chapter there is a picture of a ceiling fan with some cute ceiling paper as well as a photo of Swanson wandering in a vacant temple, but not a single Indian person to be seen anywhere. No flooded streets, no cows, no one cooking, no moped carrying a family of five plus their goat. All the colors in her India photos are elegantly muted, too. It's like this great, bright, roiling culture and cuisine has been visually purified and drained of all its dynamism and grit and humanity, not to mention meat and plastic. It is just too pretty. It is just too clean.

FOR ME.

I must repeat: This is a beautiful, thoughtful book. It has integrity. It feels personal and sincere. I'm sure the recipes work. It is going to transport and inspire someone. I am not that someone. You know how it is when you wander into some shop and all the furniture is white and all the coffee tables are glass and you like threadbare old Oriental rugs, antique samovars, and oak? Or vice versa?

I have failed to say anything about The Food of Oman, which I bought and which is packed with dishes I have never seen before and am dying to cook. Coming soon. 

Doable on a weeknight

Oh brother, this presidential election. 

But let's talk about another vitally important contest instead: The Piglet, the always-contentious annual tournament of cookbooks at Food52. 

As ever, they chose a wonderfully eclectic bunch of cookbooks for consideration, works covering the cuisines of Oman, Ukraine, Israel, India, and Senegal, along with a collection of chicken recipes, a baking book, and more. They also selected a fairly eclectic group of judges with the usual complement that doesn’t care about cooking and whose clueless misadventures outrage the vocal subset of Food52 readers that wants substantive criticism. These readers sound off in the comments, this year prompting Food52 editors to write a long, defensive, probably ill-advised post to which readers sounded off in the comments. . . 

And then blogger Phyllis Grant went and did everything right on Tuesday in her terrific review of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Food Lab and Michael Solomonov’s Zahav. Grant cooked the hell out of her assigned books and made the case to advance Food Lab with passion, wit, and earned authority. Yesterday, chef Yotam Ottologenhi followed up with a sturdy little essay weighing the relative merits of Lesley Tellez’s Eat Mexico and Hot Bread Kitchen (which won and which I must acquire asap). Today, Sadie Stein put forth a persuasive argument that Made in India is a better choice for the home cook than Gjelina.

The readers of Food52 appear to be satisfied these recent judges. I am satisfied, though I have no idea if I agree with their judgments. Other than Zahav (love) and Ruth Reichl's My Kitchen Year (like), I've barely touched the Piglet books. In some cases, I haven't even seen the Piglet books. I did a big library run the other day and have since enjoyed a cup of fine masala chai from Made in India and a some anti-inflammatory turmeric tea from Heidi Swanson's Near and Far. I was all ready to mock that turmeric tea, which sounded like a revolting witch's brew of turmeric, honey, black pepper, and coconut oil. But it was a tangy, delicious elixir and instead of making fun of it, I made a second cup.

I've also produced a beautiful chicken soup with dumplings from Mamushka, a seductive collection of Ukrainian dishes. More about this in a subsequent post.

But the Piglet book I've really dug into is Leah Koenig's Modern Jewish Cooking. The sad fact is that while it appeared at first glance to be the blandest, most generic book of the bunch, it was also the most approachable. It's not that the other books are unapproachable, exactly, but as reviewers Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo put it in their critique, the dishes in Modern Jewish Cooking seem "doable on a weeknight."  I am pretty sure this is one of the main reasons they preferred Modern Jewish Cooking to the patently more original Mamushka. And I have a feeling that judgment was a mistake. But who am I to criticize? "Doable on a weeknight" is powerful when you're lazy or tired or busy, and aren't we all.

So, the book. In her introduction, Koenig tells the story of the genesis of Modern Jewish Cooking: As a young adult living in Brooklyn, she decided to teach herself to cook the traditional Jewish foods she grew up with. She mastered borscht, bagels, and blintzes. Eventually, she began to experiment, putting her own contemporary spin on classic fare, adding jalapeno to her matzoh balls and pumpkin to her challah. The book is a compendium of these updated recipes, along with a lot of sundry dishes that I'd never peg as Jewish (and for which I have hundreds of recipes on my shelves already), like a mushroom-goat cheese tart, roasted broccoli, a wedge salad, granola.

I would like to say that despite my initial indifference I've fallen passionately in love with Modern Jewish Cooking, but I can't. It's been a weeklong marriage of convenience. Don't get me wrong, Koenig has written a very smart, attractive cookbook. But I don't daydream about it when we're apart. I think the right audience for her book is a millennial novice cook who is trying dream up hip Shabbat menus. That isn't me.

I made both of Koenig’s oat granolas (apple and honey, black pepper and pistachio) and while both were fine, neither was as good as Alton Brown's. I baked Koenig’s tender honey-cinnamon cake, which was easy and lovely, but not quite thrilling enough for the scrapbook. The other night I served Koenig’s rosemary-maple roast chicken with a side of her toasted almond Israeli couscous. The chicken was great -- juicy and sweet -- but I have roasted so many great chickens that I can't get excited about a new roast chicken recipe, however great. The Israeli couscous made a pleasantly innocuous starchy side and I’ll forget I ever made it in a few days.

Ah, but here's how it works: I was all set to do something more exotic from one of the other Piglet books last night, like a curry from Made in India for which I had already bought all the ingredients, but I was busy and tired and at 6:30 pm decided I'd throw together a ridiculously easy Koenig cottage cheese-noodle dish instead. You cook some shallots in butter while boiling egg noodles. Mix the two in a big bowl with some cottage cheese, sour cream, and herbs. (The recipe calls for mint, but I used dill.) Per Koenig's instructions, I served this with a green salad. Perfect, not-that-nutritious dinner. I could eat it every night.

And yet even now, even after that satisfying, miraculously simple meal, I still don't feel a romantic spark with this cookbook. 

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.