Nimnimim

I'm Thankful

2011-11-23T14:05:00.000-08:00

For this absurdity. Even while it sort of disgusts me.

But it makes me wish I was in New York. Falko, go eat one for me, please. Celery butter, WTF. So much celery butter.

In other news, this makes me want to learn pastry baking the MOST.

Accidental Cake

2011-11-16T22:48:00.000-08:00

I made a cake! Except I didn’t mean to make a cake. I meant to make bread. Please compare my photo to the photos from the recipe I worked from.

Can someone please explain to me why all my bread turns out dense enough to brain cattle? You could use my olive loaves as siege weapons. It’s like yeast has this malicious vendetta against me, this unfounded orneriness. What have I ever done to it? I’ve tried so many ways to befriend it: the temperature of the water, the various proofing, the sugar, the rises. And always my bread ends up so dense it is about to sink into itself into a sort of bread black hole. That said, my parents can’t stop eating it, but we’ve already discussed their foibles.

Anyway, this obviously means I have to go through the hardship of going to a bread-baking workshop, possibly one of those up in wine country in some gorgeous faux-rustic cottage with an enormous gleaming teaching kitchen where you lounge around sipping wine and chatting with your mother or riding horses while your baguettes rise. It’s a grand sacrifice, but I’m devoted.

On the other hand, I have begun to master the art of roast chicken, and both the feeling of gaining mastery and the results have been absurdly delicious. I’ve been utilizing Molly Steven’s roasting technique for a cut-up chicken from All About Roasting (yes! She has a new book! And its title is just as dowdy as her other ones, and its results and execution just as profoundly quality!), but started to get rid of those pesky wings and drumsticks and backs and just doing legs whole and breasts, however many I feel like at the mo. Works like a charm. I made her chicken Dijonnaise, a recipe that is basically a spa process for chicken, in which one soaks the chicken in mustard, bathes it in wine, and blankets it with creme fraiche; and also made her chicken pieces with oranges, olives, and apricots, a phenomenal winner.

By the end of my chicken-roasting week I was so lean with protein but bloated with success that I decided to combine the maple-craving I acquire at this time of the year with what I felt was the fundamental grasp of the process, with inspiration from a maple-rosemary ice cream Falko made while I was in New York, which he thought was fine and I couldn’t stop eating (maybe I shouldn’t tease my mother about her odd cravings quite so much).

And it worked.

And I made maple-rosemary glazed chicken with dried apricots, and it was awesome.

And if I can conquer what I felt to be my mediocre skills with meat, then bread, watch out: I will raise you. And bake you. And you will be the fluffiest and the nicest and have beautiful texture and crusts. And you will be my friend and I will call you Bready and then I will toast you. What? Isn’t that what you do to friends? Cut them up and put cheese on them? Maybe I should work on my concept of friendship.

Maple-Rosemary Chicken Pieces with Apricots

6-8 pieces of bone-in skin-on chicken, mixture of breasts and thighs
1/2 cup maple syrup
Tablespoon or a bit more of apple cider vinegar
1 shallot, chopped fine
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh or dried rosemary
Salt and pepper
20 or more dried apricots

Mix together everything but the chicken and the apricots. Place the chicken in a bowl, pour the glaze over it, and toss lightly with your hands. Cover with plastic wrap and leave out to marinate at room temperature for up to a couple hours (or as little as a few minutes if you just want to eat as soon as deliciousness can be had) or in the fridge for up to 24 hours.

Heat the over to 375 degrees, 350 convection.

Cover a tall-sided baking sheet with aluminum foil, because glazes with sugar, while utterly delectable, tend to burn and caramelize in ways that produce tasty results but immensely frustrating dishes. Scatter the apricots in a single layer, but concentrate them in the middle, so not too many poke out when you place the chicken atop them. Place the chicken, skin side up, on the apricots, and pour any extra glaze over them.

Roast the chicken on a center rack for about twenty minutes on one side, then flip over for twenty minutes on the other side, making sure no pesky apricots try to tag along from the bottom and crisp themselves by flying too close to the sun. Flip them over once more and roast for another five minutes, just to get the perfect color. Molly Stevens recommends 40-45 minutes, and various exercises with taking out smaller pieces and browning the last few minutes in the broiler, but honestly, 45 minutes with this method seemed to work perfectly for me every time. However, do be sure to check that your chicken is done, and not pink. There are various methods for doing so, from meat thermometers to poking a knife in and making sure the juice runs very clear, or just slicing off a thick tip and seeing.

Remove from heat and eat. If you don’t want to be like me and overdose on the maple by making maple-roast butternut squash, you can make butternut squash with orange zest, or mashed sweet potato, or mashed regular potato, or, come one, use your imagination, it’s sweet chicken, it’ll go with anything.

New York: Fragments and Food

2011-10-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

I was less than twenty minutes in Manhattan when Falko took my suitcase up to his office and pointed me in about twelve different directions at once, all of them, of course, directions towards eating establishments. He's so good to me. I walked down Madison, flustered with the utter glory of the city in all its epic vitality, its thrumminghummingbuzzing vivacity, and announced to a complete stranger (with a look of utter madness on my face, I'm sure): "I'm moving here!"

"OK . . ." he responded, tentatively but reassuringly. Probably because I seemed insane, but I like to think that he also supported my enthusiasm a bit.

And then I ate this eggplant stuffed with caramelized onions with tomato bulghar and Turkish bread, served by a crotchety Turkish man who, when asked what was good, replied "If it wasn't good, I wouldn't sell it, would I? NO. I would NOT!" It was, in fact, ridiculously good.

New York, for all that I have never actually lived there, feels like home, the way my parents' house does, the way one's true friends do: a place that makes you your best self. That reminds you of your core being. That you are a person who loves grandly, who thinks sharply, who laughs wildly, who has meals of an enormous potato knish and six Laduree macarons (and relishes the contrast).

And there are friends, too, to remind me. Friends who, without seeming to know how much, set me firmly in context of myself, more than I have been in so long. Friends who remind me of how quality people can be, how good.

And then take one to eat and drink til one literally considers laying down in the patch of grass outside of a Hindu temple and dying, or napping, or just giving up all will and consciousness. Look at that smirk on Falko's face. The steepled fingers of his plotting are just out of camera view.

He certainly knows where to find a completely amazing lemon thyme daiquiri.

And true friendship is when you both end an incredible meal gnawing the vertebra of a goat braised in massaman curry. Followed by a nighttime walk of the high line and then hot cocoa dense enough to be called a solid at Eatly. Perfection. Not to mention two meals with his excellent roommates in the same astounding and for now secret Greek restaurant with mindbendingly excellent legumes and potatoes and fried zucchini and salad and oh goodness the little fried puffs of dough coated in honey and cinnamon. I would tell you where this was but I would actually have to kill you.

And New York! It has sugar pie from Bouchon bakery! Which pie basically has a melted sugar filling, the straightforwardness of which is immensely pleasing to me. (Also an unpictured almond paste and raspberry jam croissant with toasted almonds and a crisp crust that was unthinkably delicious.)

New York has Cafe Sabarsky, the place I am always, always happiest, a place with magic in the curls of the wooden chairs and cream in the coffee and whipped cream next to every cake. Lots of cream. Maybe that's where they store the magic.

New York reminds me of human connection, tingling with hope even as one gazes down at all the massive complex reality condensed into those teeming streets.

And it has pizza with bechamel on it. With just a few lardons for good measure, you know, whatever.

And adorably named pie shops with glowing slices of salted honey pie.

Also some unbelievably soft wontons in richly savory hot oil with pickled ginger. They come into this tiny white shop in neat rows on cafeteria trays, all tucked up like babies.

And then Falko took me to see some art. But he doesn't do museums, so it was performance art. Not just any performance art, but a man handpulling noodles, which is a breathtaking process, like the art of candle carving I posted a while back. Only producing edible art, noodles with a chew and give that is fundamentally satisfying.

And then we spontaneously got off the train to see more art, an explosion of urban energy, color and shape swarming over this building in the middle of a certain city silence.

It made me remember how much I love art, and adventures, and exploration for its own sake. And on one wall, Winston Churchill reminded me that sometimes you have to stop trying to look back at every step you take and plow forward til you exit the thorny bramble, and only then reflect. But first, exit the bloody bramble.

Because as my father likes to say, though there is debate about where the quote originated: "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."

And you know what there will be, at the end, to make it all better than okay? Creme brulee doughnuts. Yes. Yes there will be.

Oh, New York, and all the wonders within (especially my people, and my extraordinary host): thank you. I'll be coming back ever so soon, and hopefully for a good long while next time. We're talking years.

(Apologies for the small picture size and lack of accents on various French words. Don't ask.)

Return To Tea

2011-10-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took about six thousand pictures of the teapot and jar of water sitting at my elbow as I worked, which is how I know I’m getting better. Some absolutely absurd proportion of the pictures I have taken in my life are of teapots and teacups, such that, were I murdered and my archives examined by detectives, I feel sure they would assume I was a tea accoutrements designer, or something of that sort. Actually, I would love to be a tea accoutrements designer. I realized the other day that all my favorite objects are designer kitchen gear, so maybe that’s a good life path. Ah, we’re already on a tangent; yes, I am back.

I’m at Lisa and Ricardo’s lovely apartment above a bookstore in Highland Park, New Jersey. We have made vegan versions of oatmeal pancakes and pumpkin scones using ground flaxseeds (I am continually impressed by the possibilities of vegan baking). We have celebrated Lisa’s birthday with lots of wine and food and a drink called, somewhat upsettingly, a "Victoria’s Secret", which was stickily delicious. We have kept their puppy, Owen, from eating any number of insane things. We have christened Lisa’s new Le Crueset stockpot with an herby vegetable and cannellini bean soup which settled satisfyingly into the bones after a rainy day. I have slept, a lot. We made the most absurdly delicious blue corn tortilla and vegan cheese quesadillas. Yes, vegan cheese. Vegan cheese which melts and goos and tastes of something indefinably savory but creamy and which I will crave constantly. Lisa and I have talked and talked and talked and gone to three grocery stores, and she makes me feel sane and beautiful and whole while being all these things herself. Ricardo keeps finding new Mexican foods to ask me if I’ve tried (choriqueso, guys, sounds like everything I love in life) and tosses out revelations about philosophy or libraries, exactly the sort of clever understandings I love. I didn’t realize for a while that all the philosophy grad students were doing me the favor of saying the whole term “justified true belief” instead of just their shorthand “JTC”. They have an acronym for a Socratic hypothesis! This delights me. I visited Zoe at Princeton with all its fairytale castles and autumn tinging the ends of all the branches, and there were walks and stories and two teashops, ricotta ice cream, and some seriously addicting lavender cookies. It all feels magnificently wholesome and healing.

You might have been able to tell, from the seven month silence: it has not been good. There's been a lot. There’s a vicious cycle I’ve been considering lately: the unwillingness to restrict one’s interest and desires and then the feeling of lost uselessness. And Ramya and Nabz are in Egypt, which is, let’s just be clear, very, very far away, and not all that welcoming at the moment. It feels a bit like having friends staying in Sleeping Beauty’s thorny castle, but with Skype. Thank goodness for Skype. I feel as though this summer I have finally experienced discrimination, and naively not understood til the very last moment, til now, that it was discrimination whose deadly subtle presumption placed silent and invisible obstacles in my way. So that now I know what it’s like to be barred from one’s loved ones by supposed allegiance to a religion or enemy; know what it’s like to be treated like a girl, like some invented characterization implied I would have certain flaws or qualities or allowed certain relations without questioning or discussion; to be treated, without realizing, with the assumption that my friendliness implied stupidity, that I wouldn’t notice. It has not, suffice it to say, been good.

But the best and worst part of it is when you realize that, despite all those outside forces, 98% of the pain is self-inflicted, or rather, the mechanisms for that pain are self-invented for other purposes that happen to lead there. Buddhism, of course, is based on that understanding, but it couches it in terms of desire and desirelessness, which I disagree with. Dave put it better, at lunch the other day, though I can’t remember his exact turn of phrase: it’s about learning to be absolutely fine with whatever happens. To not let one’s self be damaged by the outside weather. I have changed my rhetoric (or it has changed, the causality is uncertain), from the erosive “I don’t know” to the phenomenally destructive “I can’t” to this non-equivalent but satisfyingly aggressive “enough of this bullsh*t.” I so believe in rhetoric, in its ability to change our attitudes, in our ability to channel it to our needs. Next in the progression, I think, comes the equally-unnecessarily-confrontational “let’s do this sh*t”, followed hopefully by something milder and more boundlessly joyous. I may not know what I’m doing next year, but I like the rhetorical path I have planned even more.

So I have not posted in seven months. Honestly, I haven’t really cooked much in seven months, which should be clearly indicative of my state of mind. And this still feels kind of clumsy, these words, melodramatic and then casual, clumsy even the emotions of being okay, like learning from scratch how to feel all right; but I'm sure I'll find my tone, written and actual, again. And there are a lot, a lot of projects bubbling up excitedly on the new tide, and I have fourteen--yes, fourteen--soups to make out of The Country Cooking of Ireland, and about twenty different Mexican dishes to try (huachotle, anyone?) and a lot of traveling to do and: enough of this bullsh*t. Let’s do this.

For starters: doing New York City, hosted by Falko, which I can not even explain how much place and person excitement I am having for look the syntax can't stand it. If I die of a burst stomach, you'll know who to blame. Falko.

A lovely pot of soup, vegan quesadillas

First, find a fantastic old friend and a kitchen ember-like in its warmness and soul, and a big ol' pot.

Soak some beans, whatever you like, cannellini beans are lovely, in water overnight, or for a few hours in some hot water. Brown an onion and some minced garlic slow and low and light with a splash of olive oil. (Let the oil heat a bit while you're chopping; it's the little knowledges like knowing that if you don't, the onion will just suck up all the oil, that make the difference in spontaneous cooking.) Add the beans, drained of liquid, for a minute or two, then fill up with some vegetable stock and a can of diced tomatoes and their liquid. Bring it up to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and add some potatoes, half a pumpkin cut into cubes, some carrots. Toss in as much shredded kale as you fancy, and some rosemary, thyme, and sage, all fresh and lovely, though dried will do. Salt and pepper. And let that simmer as long as you can stand it, forty minutes at least or until the beans are tender, preferably longer. Get some Daiya vegan mozzarella-style shreds (I like that they're called shreds, it makes them sound hip and edgy) and some corn tortillas. Heat a bit of oil in a pan, very little, and place two tortillas in, letting them heat and soften a bit. Add shreds and a generous grind of salt and fold over. Brown on both sides and serve with soup. Hope it rains for the next few days.

The Gift For Soup

2011-03-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

Spring pea and yellow potatoes in broth with a poached egg and pita toast--fancier than it sounds

I've been reading The Crystal Cave, a fictionalized account of Merlin's early years, and enjoying the book's subtle questioning of what it means to have magic; or rather, the subtle implications throughout the book that Merlin doesn't possess magic so much as engineering prowess and possibly epilepsy. I have always been fascinated by the understanding of first or true causes (see skepticism, problems of), been attracted to the magic/technology divide, to automaton ducks and chess-playing Turks and chat bots that try to replicate human conversation. I think the magic/technology question is very similar to the science/divinity question (the automaton duck falls in that intersection, certainly), and to questions of soul, mind, biology, and lifeforce. In a similar though slightly offshoot vein are thoughts about what we know or don't know, such as the premise of Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, which is that we process most of a situation subconsciously in the first few milliseconds, letting us react with incredible quickness and seemingly profound insight. I've studied things such as the impossibility of the act of reading without significant subconscious processing, and used the famous quote by Arthur C. Clark ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") in far too many essays (I know, it's so cliche, but I was studying things like artificial intelligence and robots, it was such a shoo-in.) In The Crystal Cave there are moments when Merlin preforms miracles and prophecies based on knowledge of basic math, or things he heard while sneaking around after bedtime, or memories of where he went camping once, leaving the reader to snigger at the foolish superstitions of all the folk who fall for it as magic. There are also moments where he has apparently true insight, but that's another story, and perhaps hallucination or crazy mushrooms or something.

So Merlin has The Gift, and I, people say, have the Gift for Soup. Unlike Merlin, I am somewhat uncomfortable with this falsity. I mean, soup. I don't mess around with recipes for other things, like cakes, or roasts, or whatnot; I find something that looks good (and therein, I think, lies the gift; more on that later) and follow it. There is a lot of subconscious knowledge I utilize, sure, unspoken memories of what happened the last time I tried to brown something before the butter was hot, or this one line I read about how you can chill a dough for a few minutes to make it workable, or whatever, basic things, but mostly I'm just doing what I'm told. And with soups, well, yes, there's more leeway, because you can boil off some water, add some liquid, season to taste, whatever; soup is just so . . . liquid, and in flux, and infinitely changeable. It's easy to take risks with soup. And anyhow, most of the time I make soup by seeing what vegetables are about to go bad and tossing them in some bouillon-made stock and letting it simmer a while. I mean, how boring could you get? Sometimes I do that and then use an immersion blender, and then we have fancy pureed soup. Or, to impress everyone, I basically steal Zuni Cafe's lifestyle and put a poached egg in it, or some toast. This is not rocket science, nor magic; it's cheating.

But maybe there's no difference between cheating and the Gift of Soup. Maybe cheating is the Gift of Soup. I swear I'm not trying to con anyone.

Now, what does seem kind of magical, even to me, is the weird little bell that goes off in my head when I look at certain recipes. I get very strong emotions about certain recipes, just reading them, and if anyone says "womanly intuition," I'll kick you in the shins. But really, I have had a pretty impossible probability of success with recipes. I mean, I try a lot of things. Not all of them are good. But the ones I know will be good, or rather, the ones the Gift tells me will be good, have an absurdly high rate of success. It happened with panade; it happened with pork loin braised in milk (though that may just have been the malicious joy of how anti-kosher it was); and it happened with this leek and oatmeal soup.

I said, the whole week, that I was going to make leek and oatmeal soup. The gradient of expressions answering this announcement ranged from horror to complete boredom, excepting
Ramya, who trusts me, heaven knows why. My parents, who I have finally trained never to object, said "fine" in that way that expresses skepticism while not leaving them open to my disapproval.

And this soup, rather like Susan Boyle on Britian's Got Talent (I've pulled out my single pop culture reference now), faced its audience of mocking skeptics and sang a culinary version of a complete fricken' opera. It was astounding. We licked the bowl, and the spoon, and the pot, and made cooing noises. This soup shot through the ranks of my favorite foods to shake hands with potatoes boiled in cream. It is profound. It is revelatory. And I know I overuse perfect almost as much as I overuse Arthur C. Clarke quotes, but it is perfect. Hearty and full of the rich taste of stock, the almost barley flavor of long-cooked, astonishingly soft steel-cut oatmeal, a creaminess created by regular ol' milk, and some je ne sais pas perfection of leeks. I can't tell if it's perfect comfort, perfect indulgence, something I would serve at a restaurant, or all of the above. I wish it would stay cold so I could make it every day.

And you know how I found it? By taking a totally illegal snapshot of The Country Cooking of Ireland preview on Amazon, while the Gift's little bell was ringing wildly in my head. Which, illegal though that act was, I will now remedy by buying this book on the strength of this recipe alone.

I can't explain this gift, guys, but I'm happy to share the results of it.

Leek and Oatmeal Soup

1-2 tablespoons butter (I err on the light side)
3-4 leeks, trimmed and sliced into thin rings (or half-rings, if you halve them to clean them)
2 cups stock, chicken or vegetable, plain and rich as possible
2 cups of milk (I used 2%, worked perfectly)
1/2 cup steel-cut oatmeal
Few gratings of nutmeg (the book calls for mace, who on Earth uses mace, I ask you)
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a pot over low heat, then add the leeks and cook, stirring every once in a while, for about 15 minutes, or until the leeks are not browned but are very soft.

Add the milk and stock, raise heat to high and bring briefly to a boil. Sprinkle oatmeal over and stir, then add salt, pepper, and nutmeg, taste, adjust, and return to a boil briefly.

Lower heat, cover, and simmer very very gently for 45 minutes.

Things I Miss Right Now

2011-03-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

(Not people--those there are too many to list.)

Playing piano (somehow I never . . .)
Reading Wittgenstein (which is strange, because I've never read him, yet I miss it as though I have.)
Painting in a studio, early weekend mornings, all alone in big sunlit stained rooms.
Running outside while there's air and sunlight (been too rainy lately, though I love the rain.)
The emotion of everyday events; every day being different and poignant, not blending one into the next in a kind of mild usualness, with no dramatics nor joys.
Walking across campus.
Pre-bundled sets of readings, media, questions, and points to be made (otherwise known as courses).
Usually being by a window.
Snow.
Reading Hebrew.
Deadlines, assignments, always having too much to do and most of it in discreet, check-box friendly form.
Forward momentum.
Afternoons spent making immense pots of soup or 12 trays of bread pudding for Master's.
Being surrounded, constantly, by interesting if slightly crazy people, all active and intense and living alongside me.
DivSchool hot cocoa with amaretto or hazelnut syrup.
The walk to the piano room around midnight.
Trains.
Wearing coats unironically.
Friends, near by, not just catching up but actually living alongside one another, making food for each other, going out, snuggling.
Intellectualism not looked at as frightening or too intense; discussions of prisons and Foucault late at night and discussions of the Good and Plato and nuclear physics in the stairwells.
Stairs. There don't seem to be stairs in California.
Adventures.
The roof with the observatory.
Thought that could be let out, to others, in discussion or papers, molded and prodded and pushed into beauty, and not just cycling in my head stagnating, going nowhere.
Every day having eight beautiful things within it, a warm drink while it was raining, a great interaction, a brilliant reading, a sparkling class, a great hug, flowers, falling leaves, etc.
Light.

The Jam Detail

2011-02-24T13:32:00.000-08:00

I have a lot of thoughts currently in an inchoate state about learning, developing, appreciating, and curating new ways of life, lifestyles, modes of being, but until I get them all sorted out, here's a superficial and yet highly pleasing detail in my current lifestyle, that sort of gets at what I mean: I make jam. Mostly this is because I buy fruit, too much fruit, all the time, and it just breaks my heart when it starts browning and wilting faster than I can consume it (and I assure you, I am a champ, almost inhuman, consumer of fruit).

My grandfather is a lot like David Sedaris' father in Me Talk Pretty One Day; he'll eat everything, even, if he thought it was a cookie, his hat. I am not a Depression-era housewife; I throw things away when they transmute into other lifeforms or become more hole than garment. But there's something so lovely about a mild savior complex, the ability to fix a small hole in the shoulder of your favorite cardigan with just a thread and a needle, the ability to transform a few cups of dying fruit into a jar of jewel-bright sweetness. And it's not just the saving, the feeling of worthy thriftiness, but the process of it, and the product, the whole bundle: the pull of a needle and thread through cloth, becoming suddenly aware of the texture of fabric and the precision of your fingers; the smell of bubbling fruit completely perfuming your house, the viscosity forming as you stir; and then wearing that sweater again, with your favorite comfy jeans; or having that jam on yogurt, bread, or as a tea.

Perhaps it also helps that it's so very easy to do these things; fixing a hole takes less than ten minutes, making jam may take longer but mostly involves you being driven crazy by the bright, extraordinary scent of fruit calmly simmering away on your stovetop, and the only negative effects are possibly some burnt lips from desperate tasting attempts.

So yesterday, there was a rather sad blood orange hanging out on my desk. That, along with the synchronicity of the revelation (made by Ramya) that the lemon tree in my backyard (which I assumed for years was just a normal ol' lemon tree that just happened to produce astounding lemons) is actually a Meyer lemon tree, and this blogpost landing in my RSS feed, all resulted in me making blood orange and Meyer lemon marmalade. It was absurdly easy. It made the house smell astounding. And then I boiled water and made the marmalade into tea for my herbal-tea-only-drinking mother and she swooned--swooned!--and everyone was happy and everybody drank the rind-bitter, jam-sweet, orange-pink deliciousness.

Jam! Marmalade! Jelly! At the crossroads of thriftiness and an appreciation for process, you sit like a perfumed non-Newtonian fluid. I like you.

Oh, and don't forget apple butter.

Protect Each Other

2011-02-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

"Depicted in this photo, an image from an anonymous source on the ground in Egypt, is a team of Egyptian Christians forming a massive human shield to protect their Muslim countrymen as they prayed during the violent protests yesterday. Beauty amid the chaos."

There is a quote commonly attributed to Voltaire, though written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall under the pseudonym of Stephen G. Tallentyre, which seems to me to almost perfectly describe the beauty of real democracy and freedom of speech: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

"Disapprove" is such a judgmental word, though. I think often about what it means to judge other opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and I haven't come to a conclusion as to how to maneuver between critical thinking and humility. I don't know how not to be so caustically skeptical as to deny all things which don't fall into the limited structure of my own logic and understanding; I try to avoid the bitter arrogance of the atheist and the skeptic's society, the glorification of science above all else and a belief (which I, in turn, believe to be highly flawed) in science and reason as independent of subjective humanity and thus human error. I studied science from the outside enough to see some inherent chaos, its personalities, its means and methodologies all muddied by its humanity. At the same time, critical thinking and reason are the methodologies I feel safest utilizing, the ways I actually consider arguments, attitudes, opinions, the sources of confidence and understanding, and I rely on them to avoid bullshit and 'error'.

To actually disapprove of what another says, to me, means to find it totally abhorrent. To disagree would be something else, a difference between the moral and the critical that I haven't quite worked out and perhaps doesn't exist. But regardless of the nuances of those terms, defending the right to say what one believes, defending the ability of others to be free, without judgment (though not, perhaps, without engagement), is so beautiful it strikes me as, in some way, an ultimate goodness. A transcendence of one's limitations. A nobility that indicates being Civilized more than "civilization" has ever really displayed it.

I haven't been following the winter of Arab discontent; the news is poisonous to me, most days, and I find myself too moved by realities far away to be true to people close to me. But this picture, ringing with nobility, seems to me to represent some of the best of humanity, and some of the most comforting behavior I've seen in the last, oh, ten years. If we all protect each other, instead of just fight for our own breath of air, it'll be better for us all. Networks are stronger than nodes.

Beauty as Process

2011-02-14T15:28:00.000-08:00

I took an amazing class in college called Drawing as Process. That something so kitschy as the candle created in the video below can be created by so beautiful and meditative a process is as good an argument as any I can think of for doing something for its own sake, for the process, for the journey. Of course, if what you create is beautiful, all the better, but it’s really the process which has worth; I have tried very hard in my life to do things because they were meaningful while I was doing them, and not merely in the hopes that they would prove beneficial eventually; all my jobs were held in this spirit, all my classes taken in this spirit. Of course, one hopes that it is not just that momentary satisfaction, but that doing what seems right in the moment is part of a good course. That’s Theatetus, again: the good wouldn’t be the good if it weren’t truly the actual good; why would you spend your life, the actual coin of your time, in various ways of waiting for a good life?

And the hands in this video, so utterly confident and precise, amaze me.

A Confection Varied

2011-02-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

The greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue. -Socrates

This blog has been on haitus for a while (you may have noticed; are you even still there?) because . . . but, of course, there’s never one reason for anything. Here are a few explanations I could give you:

1) I composed a faux-cookbook-recipe collection in a Keynote file as a holiday gift to send out to loved ones for the holidays, a gift full of my desire to feed them but without dealing with expiration dates or international shipping. I funnelled my culinary energies in that direction for a while.
2) It’s hard to read Theatetus and write a food blog at the same time.
3) I need to think a little bit less about food and a lot more about a plethora of other things.
4) I am not really comfortable with adding another recipe for cranberry sauce into the universe unless I’m damned sure it deserves recording.

All these reasons are true. The cookbookesque thing was fun, and I put a lot of love into it, and that’s where the neglect of this blog started, but the other reasons, the reasons the neglect continued, are also very true. Reading Plato for pleasure (a good title for a book, I think) leaves one with a lot of concern for The Good; and it’s hard to live with the necessary artifice of sending out neatly story-wrapped recipes every so often when one is really trying to grapple with what it means to do good in the world.

That’s not to say that I dismiss the efforts of others, or don’t rely for my inspiration and enjoyment on a dozen other people devoted to this particular art, or that it doesn’t suffuse me with joy to have a place to go to find a reliable cake recipe or something awesome to do with kale. Some people (I am, of course, thinking of Orangette) make the whole affair personal and true, make writing about leeks and lemons a celebration of life that never even nears stiltedness or spuriousness, but resides always in a tone that seems to ring with the truth of the need to share and the delight of their daily bread. And that’s wondrous, and very lucky for me, but I won’t force it from myself.

Because when it’s forced, there’s something stale about it. Something somewhere between brave and pathetic, something trite, something boring. “Let me tell you about my grandmother; here’s a cookie recipe!” Ill-composed, awkward. And sometimes food doesn’t have stories. Sometimes (and again, Orangette does this really well) you just went somewhere random for dinner and found an absurdly delicious pasta dish.

But that’s not all of it, to be honest.

The truth is, I get tired of bows and polka dots and cupcakes. I keep wanting to say: I'm not that type of girl. Or rather, that's such a tiny sliver of the type of girl I am, and it's not what you think it is, and it would be the first interest against the wall when the revolution came. Not food, of course, but I also don't want to write about food like others do.

Food is important; generally, I think people don't think about it enough; but that doesn't mean I should think about it too much, or compose this digital facade around it. And neglect, in turn, not just other interests (oh, so many other interests), but also the way food weaves in and out of those. I don't want to use this blog, or any other defined endeavor, as a distraction from asking myself what I really want, or a delay tactic to bigger projects, or even to bundle in a fake package something which I want to be just a part of my living, important and thoughtful and adventurous and integrated, but not artificially presented.

This digital world is strange to navigate, and presentation is a core aspect of it, if not the central one for the casual or personal user. In between the news and the people who tweet when they get a latte there’s a whole gradient of information, and not all of it that seems frivolous is unenjoyable, or unworthy. I like receiving images of intricate ice creams in my RSS feed, or learning twenty facts about ancient churches built on lake islands in Russia. But that’s where the bows and the polka dots and the cupcakes come in, or rather, wear out; I don’t mind the deluge of prettiness and randomness, but I’d like a lot more than that. I want to read Plato for pleasure. I want to write things worth writing. I want posed photos of shoes with bows to be mixed in with the importance of the comfort of shoes. I want us to think, to really think, to have our lives span the entire gradient from detail to overarching values and meanings, from the pleasure of teatime to the importance of respect. I think part of growing up, or part of presenting oneself in an RSS feed, or part of the culture these days, is a superficiality which feels like shying away from any depth or solidity, a world of chiffon and baubles, and I get so tired of it so quickly, like eating just candy, and I guess I’m just not that kind of girl.

I’m not good at keeping to one tone, either. Sometimes I want to talk about cupcakes, or rather, the ridiculously delicious prune cake I made for Ramya’s birthday, and sometimes I want to talk about Plato. It occurs to me that this blog is named for a confection varied, for little bits here and there of different colors and sometimes shapes, which is not one’s main course but which decorate and infuse a little joy onto the basic cake, and that seems like a good metaphor to go with. I’m not sure yet what to do with this, but, after all my hand-wringing about presentation, I kind of like this space. I like throwing words and pictures out into the world, I like the sharing aspect of it, and experimenting with that, and trying to curate it honestly, seems like a worthy goal. If I let this space be something other than just-food, if I played with it a bit, would you read it? Are you still there?

And also, let’s be honest. Tonight Ramya and I are making four versions of flapjacks to determine the best combination of butter (salted versus unsalted) and oats (steel cut or rolled). So it’s not as though the food aspect will go away, or even diminish; after all, I eat more than three times a day. It’s just that, maybe, along with flapjacks, I’d like to tell you about how brilliant it is when Socrates talks about how you wouldn’t want a false good, because if the good wasn’t good, it wouldn’t be anything. As for the Flapjack Experiments, results will follow shortly.

What do you say?

Wherein I Admit to Being One of Dem Salad Eatin' B--

2010-07-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

Guess what? I'm about to post an Orangette recipe. I'm sure you're all soooooo surprised. But this time I didn't get it from Orangette! I didn't know! WHY DON'T YOU BELIEVE ME. IT'S ALL RAMYA'S FAULT. No one ever believes me, even though Ramya's ACTUAL and OFFICIAL title at work--thanks to the wily good humor of a work-friend of ours--is "Corporate Gnome." How can you trust a corporate gnome, guys?

If I sound a little loony, it's because firstly, I am. Secondly, it is rather warm in this house. And thirdly, my best friend is a gnome.

So it's warm in this house, the kind of warmth that makes you feel as though you're moving through soup, and all I wanted for dinner was a salad. I do not usually think of myself as what Coolio, in his masterpiece "Cooking with Coolio: Caprese Salad", refers to as "one of dem salad-eatin' b*tches", but I somehow end up eating a lot of salad.

The credit and blame for this post, though, is all on Ramya, who made this salad to open a perfectly fantastic birthday dinner she made for me and our friend Sharz, of collard green fame. It was followed by mushroom bourguignon from Smitten Kitchen, which turned out delightfully meaty, and the most perfect teacups of butterscotch pot de cremes ever, in the whole universe (which were also Orangette's). The meal was exactly right, and on summer days, so is this salad. It is salty, tangy, only as sweet as the lettuce you use, and utterly, perfectly refreshing in every way. It is simple, yes, and humble, but there is something so rightly cleansing about it, that it is going to be my go-to summer dressing from now on. But it is this particular combo: sweet lettuce, soft, salty feta, plump, bursting tomatoes, and creamy avocado, that suits it best. So the next time you get that can't-look-a-plate-of-warm-food-in-the-eye feeling, go for this.

Lime-garlic lettuce salad with tomatoes, feta, and avocado
From Orangette

"For dressing:
3 Tbs plus 1 tsp fresh lime juice
5 Tbs good-tasting olive oil
¼ tsp minced garlic
1/8 tsp fine sea salt"
Lee's note: I strain out the garlic as I pour out the dressing.

"For salad:
Romaine lettuce, washed, dried, and cut with a chef’s knife into rough ½-inch strips
Cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
Slivered red onion
Greek feta"
Lee's note: I skipped the onion and added an avocado, which was brilliant of me, may I humbly say.

"First, make the dressing. In a small bowl or jar, combine the lime juice, olive oil, garlic, and salt. Whisk until emulsified, and set aside.

In a salad bowl, combine romaine, cherry tomatoes, (avocado) and red onion in whatever proportions you like. Toss with dressing to taste, and top with plenty of feta. Serve.

Note: Dressing keeps, covered and chilled, for up to a week. "

Summer Lovin'

2010-07-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

I'm back from camping up by the Russian River, which was glorious, and Ramya and Nabz came up for a day, and we all swam in the river in the late afternoon when the water looked like mercury, accompanied by a mother duck and her chicks, and went on a wild adventure into what we will flatteringly call a cove to rescue a sad blue raft. It was brilliant. Also we went to Raymond's bakery every single day. I have mentioned this bakery before, but let me tell you: their pumpernickel. It is just the best. I don't know what to do with myself when faced with it. Except make crostini. Also, the owners must be the most amazing human beings alive, kind and glowing and smiling and amazing bakers, let's remind ourselves, while juggling six-week-old twins, who are The Cutes. And we grilled things late into the night, over two tin turkey pans with coals in them because we forgot the grill; chicken-apple sausages and portabello mushrooms and tiny bell peppers and zucchini with garlic and olive oil, and lamb with lemon, and of course there were marshmallow-related experiments over the fire ( I have decided my epitomic marshmallow is one done in the patient, perfect manner appreciated by my mother, lover of gooey soft things, til it is entirely mush, but then with one burnt corner to provide some crunchy carmalization. This is less fussy than it sounds, but not by much.) I got a phone call from Sam at the River's End, where the river flows into the ocean, at the end of the world, kind of.

It was so darn summery. I love summer, sometimes, when I can get over the fact that I am not really built for warmth. I have made, as is my wont, a list, of things to do this summer, because everyone on the internet seems to be making this list.

Here it is:

Make more popsicles
Cook cook cook
Grill grill grill
Write outside
Picnic
Tanis' Tomato Crostini
Figure out iced tea
Thai Iced tea
Tapioca tea
Nectarines
Immense buckets of cherries
New sandals
Frozen yogurt for lunch
Bring cold salads to work
Crush all negativity while wearing yellow cardigan
Swim
Make more time for friends, in person or on the phone
Gin and tonics with lime--mostly lime, let's be honest here
Wear more dresses
Allow legs to see sunlight enough for them to become not completely reflective
But wear sunscreen
Make pies

What's your list?

Real and Perfect

2010-06-27T12:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my parents and Ramya took me on a birthday adventure. First we walked in the chilly summer San Franciscan air to the DeYoung to see the Birth of Impressionism exhibit, which was a) amazing and b) stunningly poorly curated. I know I'm a snob, but museums have so much potential to do things intelligently and excitingly that I'm always disappointed by the room of paintings from 1806 followed by the room of paintings from 1807. Lame, is really the only word that comes to mind. Especially the birth of Impressionism! We're talking about an enormous shift not just in subject matter or color palette but in worldview and the definition of art! We're talking about different conceptions of objectivity, for crying out loud! There are so much more interesting things to point out then just the move away from idealized nudes. Meaning, people.

Which doesn't mean that they didn't have some astounding things on display, hidden though they were. One of Monet's train stations! Scumbling, confusing, colorful vapors and shapes fading in and out of being, confused and yet somehow distinct from shadows being cast by hidden shapes, one step away from abstraction and hinting at the materiality of the paint! Pissarro, one chaotic step from pointillism, Manet, one minor inspiration from comics, even my favorite, Caillebotte's Floor Scrapers. Renoir, Courbet, Degas, Bazille, Morisot, Cezanne, Sisley! Twas lovely.

Following that (and an entirely unsatisfactory hot cocoa at the cafe), we went to Zuni Cafe.

I don't know how to express the perfection of Zuni Cafe, aside from stating that it is now my favorite restaurant in the world, hands down. It is real food: unpretentious, incredibly flavorful, real. Real in that it is the best of itself; there is no scent of something that isn't there, no curlicue carved cucumber, there is no decorative art applied to the presentation of their chocolate cake. It's just a damn perfect chocolate cake: rich, somehow both crumbly and light, chocolatey as hell, but perfect, perfect, perfect, with an untidy slosh of barely whipped cream. If I knew how to make that cake, I would declare myself a goddess. There was an almost insanely delicious soup with nettles, farro, and a pouched egg in chicken stock, and I laughed out loud at how incredible their hamburger was, a hunk of beef somehow tasting of everything good about beef, on soft focaccia with a bit of garlic olive oil, sigh, sigh, sigh. Onions pickled with a bit of cinnamon and clove. And a plain old bowl of polenta with parmesan and mascarpone that tasted of Softness itself. I don't know how they do it, but somehow Zuni makes the most minimal, plain dish a real Platonic ideal. This isn't even philosophically legitimate, guys. Unacceptable.

On our way home, me giddy from the culinary revelations, we took a brief walk by the absurdly idyllic lake in the orange light of sunset, which set swarms of gnats sparkling and twinkled on the water. You could almost hear the Pride and Prejudice theme playing.

So, because I am in such a good mood and want to prove that I, too, can make a cake resembling perfection, I give you one of my most perfect cakes, acquired from my friend Andrew Alexander. (Heavens knows where he got it from; maybe a dumpster. That's very Andrew Alexander.) This cake, though it has qualities like chocolate, marmalade, and Earl Grey, doesn't really taste like any of its constituent parts.It just tastes like magic. May I recommend loosely whipped cream with orange zest as an accompaniment? I think I must.

Go forth and be real and perfect, peeps.

Earl Grey-Marmalade-Chocolate Cake
or
Perfectly Incomprehensible Cake
Ingredients

2 Earl Grey Tea bags
2/3 cup boiling water
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
2/3 cup orange marmalade
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

The Cake
Position your rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Butter a 10 inch diameter angel food cake pan. Plate the tea bags in a measuring cup. Pour 2/3 cup boiling water over the teabags. Let stand 5 minutes. Remove the tea bags from the water, squeezing any liquid into the measuring cup. Discard the tea bags and let the tea cool to room temperature

Puree the marmalade in a food processor until smooth. Set aside.

Mix the flour and baking powder in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Melt the 8 ounces of bittersweet chocolate in a double boiler (or microwave if you know how) and stir until smooth. Cool the chocolate to room temperature.

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in the melted chocolate, marmalade, walnuts, and vanilla. Beat in the flour mixture and the tea alternately into the chocolate mixture in 2 additions each. Do Not Overbeat.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until a tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out with some moist crumbs attached (about 1 hour and 10 minutes). Transfer the cake pan to a rack and cool for 10 minutes.Using a sharp knife, cut around the cake to loosen it. Turn out the cake onto the rack to cool.

The cake can be made one day ahead. Cover it with a cake dome and store it at room temperature.

California's Potential and Falko's Accomplishment

2010-05-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes California smells of cinnamon dust; dirt and spice and a kind of warm powderyness, with hints of fiberous eucalyptus and distant seawater. It is such a distinct smell, and I love it not inandof itself so much as for being so perfectly, abstractly representational. And sometimes at night before it's going to rain the eucalyptus comes out even more, and there's a stony, leaf-crush smell, a hint of rosemary. And sometimes in midsummer it smells like Israel in particular hallways, a certain cleaning fluid and dust and dry flora, and sometimes it smells like Italy, a hint of corn cooking and big bright flowers, and sometimes it smells like particular Chicago streets, a very certain smell of popcorn, chocolate, and sewage.

What I'm saying is, sometimes I feel like California can do ANYTHING. Cede from the union, start a utopian democracy, create HAL, world peace, whatever. Mostly, and I know this is ludicrous, but mostly it is about when I notice how many damn vegetables and fruits we can grow. Coming back from Chicago (SCAVSCAVWEWONSCAV) it's especially noticeable, and on days when I feel I don't get enough fruits and vegetables it's laughable.

Case in point, today's menu:
Oatmeal with brown sugar and bananas
Cheeries
Clementine
Aprium (love child of an apricot and a plum, I think? Delightfully less mealy than an apricot while still being yum.)
Polenta with white-wine braised tomatoes and goat cheese and almonds
A mini avocado (WOAH)
Strawberries
An apple
Baby bok choy braised with scallions, garlic, and ginger, served on rice
Rhubarb roasted in white wine and vanilla (oh, Orangette, I will do whatever you tell me to, you are perfect)

I am also at the moment sauteeing leeks for tomorrow's lunch. Last night: polenta with sauteed rainbow chard and buttered shrimp.

Guys, let's count. This is like ten fruits and veggies, not even counting the scallions, ginger, garlic, OR leeks. Or chard. This is CRAZYSAUCE. This is Awesome.

So I've been ravishing the unfortunately expensive but delightful farmers' market like mad, buying fennel and beautiful baby carrots and purple potatoes and I'm going to try to make fava beans soon. Not MAKE them, though California could do that, probs, but cook them. Any suggestions?

This post contains A HIDDEN RECIPE. D'you see it? It is utterly magical and perfect. I recommend it with sweetened Greek yogurt.

But also, I think you need Falko's Braised Baby Bok Choy recipe, a) because it is so alliterative and b) because it is so iterative, meaning, I have eaten it thrice in three friggin' weeks, and that says something.

Here, in his own words, is Falko's intensely delicious Braised Baby Bok Choy recipe. (Note: I am a lazy bum and just do about four cloves of garlic, a chunk of ginger, and two scallions or so. Also once I had to use sake, which worked out fine. This last time I left out the cornstarch, though it makes the sauce Real (as in, man, that shit got Real) because I felt like a very light meal. It works that way too! But consider whether you want Realsauce or not. TM GUYS.)

"The bok choy is very simple. Mince up about a 1/4 of ginger and garlic and about 1/2 cup scallions (all this to taste/laziness of course). Slice the bottoms off of baby bok choy, separate them into individual leaves, and wash them well. Heat up a decent amount of oil to a large skillet on medium and heat aromatics till, well, aromatic. Then add the bok choy and stir till coated with oil. Add enough soy sauce and xiao xing rice wine (dry sherry will do if you don't have it, but this stuff is really what makes the dish), to build up some steam and go about a third up the vegetables. I prefer more rice wine than soy sauce, about 60/40. Cover and let simmer till the bok choy is soft, a few minutes. Uncover, reduce the sauce a bit, and add a cornstarch slurry (1 T cornstarch to 2 or 3 T cold water), a bit at a time, to thicken slightly. Season with salt and/or sugar to taste. If you're into dried shitakes, adding some reconstituted to the pan before covering and using some of their soaking liquid for the braise would be good here."

FALKO, LADIES AND GENTS. MAN OF STRANGELY PERFECT SAVORY DISHES. That is his new title. Except maybe "Czar" or "Emperor" instead of the gender-normative "man". HA, I used gender-normative in a sentence! I'm the worst. This recipe is the best. Sorry for no pictures. Go make it to see what it looks like.

Anti-Negligence Popsicles

2010-05-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

The past few months (heck, let's call it the past year), I have had a feeling, a constant background to my experiences, that I think can be best described by the word "negligent." I know negligent is usually not a feeling but a mode of inaction, but this negligence doesn't seem to be mine, but be put upon me, so we'll call it a feeling, in the same way you get a feeling that you're being watched. There is a kind of laziness inspired by dread, a flimsiness that arises from a lack of structure and clear purpose, that makes me think of ostriches and the myth that they stick their heads in the sand because of their failure to understand the subjectivity of experience; the negligence makes me ignore things because maybe if I don't look, I won't be disappointed. This negligence creeps into my mind and fogs my brain on evenings when I'm trying to decide what to do. And thus I become negligent. I forget to write emails to people, or to call them. I forget to practice piano, or draw, or write, or apply for that thing or do that other thing that I wrote in five different places so that I'll remember. And when I do remember, my mind skitters away from the subject of whatever-it-is-I-should-remember-to-do like a startled cat. The absolute worst part is the feeling, lying down to sleep, of the rush of remembering what I meant to do, and realizing I'll forget again by morning, no matter what note I write. It is a forced negligence, a helpless laziness, it is cruel as facing a deer with headlights or facing a college student with free food while they try to write their thesis. It is terrible.

This blog, which started as a method of negligence (Look towards the future? Nah, I'll write about food!) has since fallen prey to it, tragically, comedically. Because it started to be something I felt responsible for. People told me they liked it. People asked for things. People followed it. Nope, we can't have that, said my brain, and I neglected this too.

But I like this blog. I like sharing delicious things, and stories, I like giving something slightly worthwhile out to the public, I like, basically, giving someone the blueprints to have a delicious morsel. So we're back, guys, and I do promise to be better. Perhaps the words will be compacted, or perhaps we'll miss a picture or two, but dangit, I want to tell you delicious things, and I will.

I have missed many, many tales in the past few months: my trip to the East, my trip to Chicago, SCAV, etc., but I don't want to taint this entry with stress about filling you in, so let's start over now, and I'll fit the stories in here and there later, like patching a brick wall. For now, let's start with newness; let's start as the warmth starts; let's talk about spring.

No, wait, that's too relevant, so let's talk about summer. Let's talk about popsicles.

On my lovely trip to North Carolina, Jody and Ron took me to a local establishment called "Locopops" . . . to which I returned thrice in two days. It was blazing hot in North Carolina's April, and the popsicles were perfect: tangerine-pomegranate, Mexican chocolate, mojito. Popsicles, how could I ever have neglected them? On returning, I immediately bought these popsicle molds, which I whole-heartedly recommend as sturdy, ingenious, well-made molds, despite the rather dorky shape. And on a warm weekend, I made these:

Strawberry lemonade popsicles. May I boast? I am brilliant. Strawberry lemonade is the best thing, made better only be being frozen. I made three batches before my family agreed to let me try something else. And even though the warmth as ceded somewhat, I know it will return soon, so I'm practicing. I've made chai tea, jasmine green tea, jasmine green tea with milk, lemonade with mint, Earl Grey, lemonade with blackberries, and vanilla milk (my mother's ingenuity) with blackberries and chocolate sprinkles. Popsicle molds, guys. Am I absurd to be this excited about all the possibilities? Invest ten bucks in them (or, more cheaply, start making popsicles in an ice cube tray with toothpick handles) and I think you'll agree that the banquet of possibilities, the myriad wonderous cold possibilities, are quite the remedy to laziness. The only problem is only having six molds at a time. Maybe I should buy another set. Hmmm.

Strawberry-Lemonade Popsicles

A very simple and malleable recipe, without measurements (everything to taste).

Make lemonade (or take pre-made lemonade, though it is somehow more fun to make it, and homemade lemonade preserves this fabulous tang).

Cut open a strawberry and mash it into the lemonade til it tints the lemonade, then lift out the pulp or chunk.

Stack slices of strawberry into your popsicle mold; thicker ones at the bottom to be weighed down, paper-thin ones on top so they float up.

Gently pour lemonade into mold.

Freeze for four hours.

Twenty-Something Sleepovers and Southern Greens

2010-03-07T20:34:00.000-08:00

Rams and I just came back from a lovely, lovely weekend up at Sharz's. We need a name for them, guys, like "Twenty-Something Weekends", or something. I don't even know how to describe them (the two we've had, and the more I hope we have), except that they always involve an obscene amount of food, especially a large wedge of apple-garlic cheese from Trader Joe's and a whole box of rosemary-olive oil Triscuits, both of which are totally demolished by the end. They also involve reading Sharz's piercingly beautiful writing, the hilariously emotive parrot Petey, and amazing conversation. They always involve Sharz being the cutest,

and so far have both involved Sharz's fabulous collard greens, recipe and adoration below:

This one involved a fabulous morning of chocolate croissonts (surprisingly by Trader Joe's!), bananas, and maple yogurt,

A chance to see the ever-fabulous Eric Wesley Von Erikson (name changed to protect the utterly fabulous) and a cool friend of his from high school:

A trip to Berkeley for Ici ice cream to see this absurdly idyllic child:

And to eat ice cream ourselves, except when Ramya shoves it into the window of stores we pass (flavors pictured: Earl Grey, Creme-Fraiche Muscat, and Black Pepper Peanut, and Embarrassed Hilarity):

Here's to good friends and twenty-something sleepovers!

And here's Sharz's excellent Southern greens recipe, which I have eaten thrice in the last two months, twice at Sharz's and once in between because dear goodness, greens. Am I ridiculous, for craving greens and prunes? Perhaps. But still, greens. I mean, the bacon helps, and the chicken broth helps, and Sharz's recipe is particularly right, but really, I just have to thank her for introducing me to the whole subject, because, guys, greens.

Sharz's Southern Greens

One bag of Trader Joes' Southern Green mix
A few slices of bacon (can be excluded for vegetarians)
One box of chicken stock or vegetable stock
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
Garlic powder
A few cloves of garlic
Half an onion

Add the whole bag of greens to the stock, and then try to add all the ingredients to taste and simmer til delicious. Oh, look, another ridiculously easy and immensely delicious recipe. Can we tell I have a thing for them?

War and Peace and Mushroom Caviar

2010-02-28T20:43:00.000-08:00

Thursday mornings I hang out at my old middle school with my teacher of old, an extremely awesome and compassionate dude called Stephen, and his Lit Club, which is composed of extremely awesome and compassionate students in the seventh and eighth grade. Thursday mornings are usually chilly, and I walk onto the part of campus that swarms with my memories, and then walk over to the new buildings, which seem unfamiliar and futuristic, and I go to Stephen's room and hang out with him and a dozen spectacularly intelligent, lively, bright kids, talking about books and life. Thursday mornings are the highlight of my week, hands down, no other contenders. 'Tis brilliant.

So first off, Stephen chose the most awesome theme at the beginning of the year, namely: Death. We the Lit Club read a couple of things, a young adult novel called 'The Pigman' that was imbued with realistic confusion, and a young adult novel with an interesting premise but not much narrative energy, and after that one, I think we felt somewhat unliterary, truth to tell. So Stephen suggested we read a classic, whether or not it was death-contemplative. Something people think of when they think 'educated' or 'well-read'. Everyone tossed out a few ideas and then we voted. And here's where you understand the tone and the tenacity of our Lit Club, because what do we pick? War and Peace. That's right; we're epic. 200 pages of War and Peace a week. Stephen calls it "The Ultimate Lit Club challenge," which I believe is a ridiculous understatement.

Somewhere along the line of my intellectual development I picked up the very unfortunate assumption that other people seem certain of, that it's harder to read and digest classics than modern literature or mysteries or science fiction. However, the reality of my reading is that this assumption has proven untrue almost every time. I got much more enraptured with "Jane Eyre" than with "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", was far more anxious about the characters of "Mansfield Park" than those of "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Universe", and as far as I'm concerned "Swann's Way" is the most perfect and pleasurable piece of writing ever. So I don't know why I felt the need to eye the beautifully colored but absurdly heavy tome of "War and Peace" with a resigned determination, because man, is it enjoyable. It has the same piercing social commentary as Austen, an almost "Catch-22" sense of the absurd, and a philosophical musing in the deepest baseline on the nature of people and their desires and history. It is enjoyable, it is Wow, it's just good.

So far I have relished so much of it, including the fact that trousers can be the color of "thigh of frightened nymph", and how I resonated with the moment Sonya "began to cry, because his soul was so good," and how the very perceptive observation that "their conversation would probably have been different, if they had not been talking to the sounds of the song" made me chuckle, and contemplation of the idea that "if everyone made war only according to his own convictions, there would be no war," and, and, and. I have spent the entire weekend reading it; if only it could snow here.

So why am I talking about this on the food-blog? I mean, I've been counting, and though there are many meals, food is almost never mentioned, as of yet. They mention savory pies and various alcohols, and once a cut of meat, in the first two hundred pages. Very sparse, very pathetic. Tolstoy appears to have been vaguely anorexic. But I started craving Russian food, which is silly, because I crave Russian peasant food and here we're listening to a bunch of Russian noblemen talking mostly French, and then not about food, so, you know, my craving doesn't even make sense. But it sprang on me anyway, reasonless as always.

(I mean, can we get more peasant than that?)

So I made borscht again, and we ate it with sour cream and "mushroom caviar," which is just mushrooms and onions sauteed in butter, and hard-boiled eggs and Russian currant tea. It is thematic and awesome, if not exactly accurate, and it is delicious, and I am telling you about it because man, I haven't posted for a while, and as a warning that, since it will take six weeks to read this, there will be a lot of Russian food, even though we're heading into springtime. Right now we're chatting with some Austrians on the battlefield, and I'm feeling Sachertorte and coffee, but later maybe we'll get pelmeni and pierogi and cabbage 'cutlets' and Russian carrot coriander salad and so on. All I wish was that I had snow here, wintery Russian snow. Other than that, War and Peace and the Lit Club and Stephen and I are doing epically fine.

Mushroom Caviar
From the depths of my genetic makeup

Package mushrooms, diced such-and-such
An onion, diced
Butter or butter substitute

Warm butter in frying pan, and then brown onion over medium heat. Once onion is fairly browned, which will take a while, add maybe a bit more butter, and the mushrooms. While they cook down, remove excess liquid, which will allow them to brown and not boil. Cook to desired brown-ness, and serve on toast, with cheese or sour cream or nothing at all.

The Cookies of Youthful Memories

2010-01-17T21:14:00.000-08:00

My family and I used to go to Italy every summer. Listening to other girls' memories of childhood summers, then, I thought that if I was slightly normal I might remember, I don't know, hot Italian boys (though there was this one boy, who looked wordlessly through my sketchbook and then kissed me on the forehead and didn't speak a word of English except "me", "you", and "bootiful") and shiny Tuscan beaches, but mostly I remember art and food. I remember precisely the grip of marble fingers and the impossibly soft and real depression they made in marble flesh, walking around The Rape of The Women of Sabine in Florence in a mossy piazza surrounded by rain-blackened columns under a bright grey sky. I remember the heartbreaking marble folds of Mary's robe in Michelangelo's Pieta, and the delicate, flat brushstrokes of a Botticelli. And I remember lamb chops on buttery polenta, and tortellini soup, and arancini balls in the streets of Rome, and enough caprese to sink a ship, and bacio gelato, and giant golden watermelons. And bakeries full of these beautiful bits of golden bread and cookies and things. I remember feeling young and clumsy and ready to grow up and moved by the huge, passionate liveliness of the Italians, and feeling kind of embarrassed by their vivacity, and at the same time in awe of it. Thank goodness for the Italian influence on my young self.

And thank goodness for these cookies.

I first ate these adorable, intensely nutty, joyful cookies in one of those little bakeries, I think in Milan, in some thin cobbled street where everyone wore good shoes. I was young, remember, and in love, with this cookie, and that may be why the grandmotherly dumpling-shaped woman who ran the bakery explained to me how to make them. I have since lost the notes I took down, but this recipe, reconstructed from some internet version, is the closest I could find. You have to like nuts, it's true, but if you do, these are revelations. And even though they're late for Christmas, they keep pretty well for up to a week, so they make lovely holiday gifts.

Pignoli (Pine Nut) Cookies

A few handfuls of pignoli (pine nuts)
½ cup sugar
½ cup powdered sugar
¼ cup flour
1 8 or 7 oz. can or tube of almond paste
2 egg whites, slightly beaten
A few drops almond extract
Dash salt

Preheat oven 300F, lightly butter baking sheets.

Combine sugar, powdered sugar, flour and salt in a medium bowl and fluff with fork.

Break up almond paste and beat with egg whites into electric mixer. Add extract (and maybe amaretto) and flour mixture and beat til flour blends, about 30 seconds. (Do not overbeat!)

Using a teaspoon scoop drops of dough and dip into pignolis til coated; one good roll will do. You can experiment with how many you want, but my family prefers less rather than more, because they're awfully effective as it is. A dozen or so per cookie, but don't be picky.

Bake at most 25 minutes, til just cooked (don't let them be super-soft, but they will harden when they cool), let cool, dust with powdered sugar, try to save some for other people.

In Which I Reveal How Very Geriatric I Am

2010-01-14T21:58:00.000-08:00

I don't think anyone I know mentions prunes as much as I do. I don't know why they have a bad rap, prunes, because not only are they healthy in all those unutterable ways old people know about, but they are delicious and rich and transform everything into a rich heavenly richness. They are like tiny, dark, wrinkled, generous millionaires, and who wouldn't want a friend like that? I love them on their own, but also I love their transformational qualities, as showcased in this recipe that will not appeal to about 90% of my blog readers and reveal the depths of my depravity but, I'm sorry, I have to: Beef and Prune Pie.

I know you're thinking this blog has been taken over by an aged British person who possibly wears suspenders, but, guys, meat pie. With prunes. I am cooing over here. I promise I will make up for this this weekend with Italian grandmother cookies, but bear with me.

My mother made up Beef and Prune stew a long time ago, and it should be strange, since it is an amalgam, again, of Eastern European Jews and their wacky conceptions of what the Chinese eat, based on that wacky Israeli book I told you about way back when ("The Chinese Kitchen") and my grandmother's goulash and her desire to put a prune in everything. (Now you know where I get it from.) It is basically the accidentally glorious outcome of ignorance, this recipe. The beef stew is made with an unlikely combination of dry and often old ground ginger, prunes, wine, and soy sauce. These things, however, are like people at a cocktail party who've never met but realize they have all the same interests, and the result is a rich but not in that beef bourguignon way, spiced but so lightly, stew that, I don't know, descriptions fail.

The original recipe for this stew is for five pounds of meat, which is mildly terrifying. We always have a lot left over, and one day my mother gave me that ridiculous pout of hers and asked me to bake it in pie. Apparently this is a treasured childhood memory of hers, beef stew pies in downtown Jerusalem. But even though it doesn't have that sauciness that other meat pies have, this combo is so right somehow, or maybe just pushes all my genetic buttons somehow, that I (and my mother) last after it constantly.

For my many and adored vegetarian friends: try the same deal with sauteed onions and mushrooms, and even goat cheese. It's awesome. Just so's you know.

Beef and Prune Pie
(I have halved the meat recipe so that it will fit in the pie.)

For the meat:
2.5 lb of beef for stew cut into small, half-inch cubes
Dash of ginger powder
Salt
Pepper
½ lb prunes
1/2-3/4 cup red wine
Soy sauce
1 T chicken or ficken soup mix

For the pie dough:
2 cups all purpose flour
Pinch salt
Teaspoon sugar
10 Tablespoons cold butter, cut into cubes
1 egg yolk
2 Tablespoons milk, to glaze

Soak the prunes in the wine; can even be done overnight.
Pour just a bit of oil into the bottom of a pot and heat. Add a dash of ginger powder and cook the stew meat, in waves, until all sides of the little cubes are brown, but not much longer. Re-add all the meat back into the pot with salt and pepper, and also the prunes and wine. Add water to just cover the meat, cover the pot, and bring to a boil. When at a boil, add some soup mix and a splash of soy sauce. Reduce heat and simmer for 1-2 hours or until very tender. Let cool.

Meanwhile make the pie dough: Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl, then cut in the butter. I find two knives works all right, though I always get impatient and just start rubbing in butter, which is contrary to all the good pastry rules. I should invest in a pastry cutter. Mix the egg yolk into 1/4 cup of ice water, though you will most likely need more water, and mix the whole together with a fork until it just holds. Add more water as necessary, but it should not become sticky, just old together. Gather into two discs and refrigerate them, either in plastic wrap or a plastic bag, at least 20 minutes.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Then roll out one disc of the dough and lay it at the bottom of a regular pie tin. Poke holes in the bottom with a fork. Gently lay some parchment paper on the bottom with a handful of beans (any beans will do!) and bake for 7-10 minutes, or until the bottom is just starting to really cook under those beans. Take out, remove beans, insert filling (lots of filling!), and roll out the second disc of dough. Cover the pie with that delightful dough, poke some more holes (or, if you're Martha, cut out obscenely precise leaf or cow shapes), and glaze with milk. Place back in the oven for 15 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 350 and bake for another 30 minutes. Let cool, and eat with a green salad. Or by itself, for breakfast. Mmm-old people sure know how to live. Probably because they've done quite a bit of it already.

Seven Recipes For Next Year In Which Hopefully We Will Know What The Heck We Are Doing

2009-12-29T13:55:00.000-08:00

I hope you all had a perfectly lovely year, full of joy and people and food and the joy of people, and the joy of food, and no, the people of food doesn't really work. The food of people? Worryingly ethnic-tinged. Whatever. Anyhow, I know it's been a strange year over my way, and of the people I know to read this blog, for many of them, this has been a strange year too, one of departures and new confused beginnings or preparations for such, and a general what-the-heck-is-going-on-ness has been the seemingly prevailing mood. Just like that, not tinged with a tone of misery or anger or anything, just, what the heck? Is going on? Befuddlement, I suppose you could call it. I am pretty sure this is also how many people in the White House feel about now. Also North Korea. Also the seals from Pier 39 who have mysteriously disappeared. What a strange year for us all—me, you, the White House, North Korea, seals, etc.

I am not a big fan of encouraging transformation through the arbitrary calender system, i.e., through New Years or birthdays or whatnot. I say that with a kind of aloof intellectualism, but actually I parse my goals and quests by the significance of weeks, months, and palindrome hour-minute arrangements such as 10:01, so despite my abstract pretensions, I am actually worse than many an astrologer. Anyway, I have hope for us all, especially the seals; moreover, I know that together and with our stunning willpower we can all be awesome, and now I promise to tone down the smushiness. I hope you face the new year ready to kick it in the aesthetic nads, which phrase I do not remember the origin of, and a Google search is to no avail, and furthermore leaves me with an odd search history of “aesthetic nads”, “kick in the aesthetic nads”, kick+ “aesthetic nads”, etc. I remember Pelks hopping up and down on one foot one June day, some years ago, shouting to me as I rolled my suitcase through a Gothic archway, “I hope your summer kicks you in the aesthetic nads!” So maybe it's the year that should kick us? No, let's be empowered, eh? We don't have to know what the heck we're doing, but let's be confused in joyful style.

And in this holiday season, please accept some gifts from me. Seven like the eight nights of Hannukah but-we-lost-one, through it just happened that way, really. Some things to get you through the cold beginnings of this new year:

Savta Yudit's Borscht (“Chamitza”)

(Apologies for no picture; we kept eating this at night. And it's so pretty, too!)

This is my grandmother's borscht, and my grandmother's cooking skills are legend. I do not get very far in her book by roasting vegetables and making salads, let me tell you, since she heavily favored the white-and-brown spectrum of foods, like potatoes, flour, butter, onions, meat cooked quite thoroughly, more potatoes, more butter, etc. In fact, this is one of her only colorful dishes, and I bet if she had known about golden beets, it wouldn't be. It is also quite perfect. The borscht dishes circulating the internet with their calls for celery and sage and whatnot, well, I have grave suspicions about them. This recipe is simplicity itself, and it fulfills every need for contentment anyone could have, with or without European genes. It can also easily be made vegetarian or vegan, since the beef is, in my opinion, extraneous though traditional.

9 cups water (3-4 more if adding meat)
Soup mix to match (chicken/beef/ficken preferable)
3-4 cans grated beets, and their beety water (if you like, you can leave some of the beets cut in half or sliced, for a potato-like texture)
1 julienned (or in Hebrew, “noodled”) cabbage, which should be cut somewhat thicker, say ¾ inch, if one wants leaves to stay together
5-6 cubed potatoes (big chunks 1 ½ inches are good)
2 T salt, plus to taste
3-4 t sugar
2 lemons
If you're me, a whole head of garlic, cloves peeled and ends chopped off. If you're shy, a T of crushed garlic will be fine.

For beef version: 1 ½ pound stew meat, and maybe a piece of shank, too.
The only step necessary to add for the beef version is to put a T of oil into the pot, heat, and sear the beef first, on all sides, til no uncooked sides show. This can be done in batches if needed. Then proceed as such:

Boil water in a large pot and add soup mix. Add beets, beet water, salt and cabbage. After a quarter hour or so, add potatoes. Simmer for half an hour or a bit more, til potatoes are just soft. Add garlic, and then simmer for about half an hour before adding sugar, the juice of the lemons, and more salt as needed. Serve warm with dark bread like pumpernickel and lots of sour cream.

Latkes

Ah, the traditional Hannukah hashbrown! (Please don't kill me, I know they aren't hashbrowns.) How perfect you are, how glorious! How many wars you inspired between Falko and me over whether or not you peel the potatoes, grate them or food process them, fry them in which oil! For the record, you do peel the potatoes, food process them, and fry them in vegetable oil, and I am right. FALKO.

The other trick, really, is to have a father with large, kind, soft hands that, when patted together, create the most perfect thickness and diameter of latke. So I am a hopeless romantic, so what. I am determined to forever live around men with large, kind, soft hands, so that I may call upon them to make latkes. This is an essential part of my life plan, guys.

5-6 large russet potatoes
Matzo meal, about 1/4-1/2 cup (gosh, our family is not so much with the measuring)
1/4-1/2 cup flour
Salt, pepper
4 eggs
Optional: 1 large onion, cut into ½ inch pieces
Vegetable oil

Pour about half an inch of oil into a large skillet, and heat medium-high. Add one ingredient at a time, in order, mixing after each. Drop an experimental sliver of potato into the oil; if it sizzles but takes at least a minute to start browning, the oil is good. Find a man with large, kind, soft hands, and have him pat the mixture into patties about ¾ inch thick and about 5 inch in diameter. Fry these on each side til golden brown, about 4-5 minutes. Lay out on a paper-toweled plate. Serve immediately with sour cream and apple sauce, or, in a new and sacrilegious but really very tasty twist, Greek yogurt in place of sour cream. I actually kind of prefer it. I know I'm crazy. Also, latkes are very good heated and eaten with eggs in the morning in place of hashbrowns.

(Why does this look like a diner photo? It kind of freaks me out.)

Also, sidenote, can we squeal a little about these fake-poached-egg makers my father bought mum? We've had poached eggs every single day this week, which is not good for our cholesterol but man, are they tasty and perfect and delightfully weird-shaped and I adore them.

Shtekeleh or Bicho-Bicho

Speaking of things fried in oil, usually during Hannukah you have jelly-filled doughnuts known as “sufganiyot.” Our sufganiyot this year, bought from a bakery nearby, sucked. I mean, we didn't finish even one. It was so sad. Luckily, I made shtekeleh.

Shtekeleh are a strange thing which I am going to place in a category I call fictional food, like lambas or Romulan ale. In other words, it doesn't really exist, except in the drooly-dream of some fantastic writer, in this case, Michael Chabon. I just re-read The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is one of my hands-down favorite books, hilarious, poignant, intelligent, gorgeously written, perfect in every way, and containing this description:

“The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trencherman would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither God nor the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires. A panatella of fried dough, not quite sweet, not quite salty, rolled in sugar, crisp-skinned, tender inside, and honeycombed with air pockets. You sink it in your paper cup of milky tea and close your eyes, and for ten fat seconds, you seem to glimpse the possibility of finer things.”

Which is all so very true.

Some dude on the internet posted a recipe for Filipino bicho-bicho, which is a real Filipino street-food that makes me want to go to the Phillipines like, yesterday. Oh, haven't I told you yet? My Kryptonite is sugar-encrusted fried dough. Actually. When Pelks and I used to drive to Chinatown to pick up buns for Masters', I used to get myself these perfectly round fried dough things encrusted with sugar, and weep silently in thanks. Well, these shtekeleh are better.

I first made these shtekeleh for Scavhunt, which for those of you who don't know, is this, the greatest game. I made them around three in the morning, completely sleep-deprived and having eaten nothing for the past eleven or so hours but inhaled much turpenoid while painting my Resident Head in traditional Renaissance garb beheading another Resident Head, which is perhaps why I remember my first bite of shtekeleh as an extraordinary revelation, choruses of angels singing and a strange glow infusing my brain. I served it to the judge with a Styrofoam cup of milky tea, on which I had scribbled out the Dunkin' Donuts name and written, rather shakily, “Pearl of Manila.” It was epic in every way.

These do take, with all the rising, about three hours start to finish, and they should be eaten immediately, though honestly, there's something nice in a degenerate sort of way about eating them cold. But they're so so so worth it, I promise. So very worth it. Also, this recipe can be halved, which is wise if you are only four people, but also, man, you'll eat them all anyway, don't bother.

First, mix two cups bread flour, one teaspoon salt, one tablespoon active dry yeast together. Pour in one cup of lukewarm water, pleasant to the touch but not in any way hot, nor cool, and mix. The dough will be very sticky, but scrape as much as you can together in the middle and cover the bowl with lightly oiled plastic wrap. Let rise half an hour.

Mix together one cup of light brown sugar and one and a half cups more flour, and, separately, two well-beaten eggs and ¼ cup of melted butter. Begin to mix the dry ingredients into your dough, and then add the wet ones, and mix relatively thoroughly, so there are no chunks, but not so much as to completely deflate the dough. Nothing is dire, I promise, but if your dough is streaky with darker-sugar patches, it will be fine, as long as it is fairly well mixed. Cover again and let rise another hour

If the dough is super-sticky, dust it with flour before turning it out onto a floured surface and punching it down lightly. Divide it into two parts, and cover. Let them rise for ten minutes.

Roll each part into a vaguely round-rectangular log about half-an-inch thick and an inch wide. This will not be pretty, because the dough is sticky and likes to break into strange tentacle-shapes, but I assure you it will taste great. The original recipe calls for cutting these into six-inch pieces, but I am going to go out on a limb and say I prefer three-inch pieces, which give you enough soft middle but don't look quite as obscene. And are more appropriate to eat, somehow. Cover these and let rise yet another hour.

Heat vegetable or canola oil and fry til golden brown on each side, about two minutes each side. Pat a bit of oil away, and roll in granulated sugar. Eat immediately with sweet milky tea, and dream of Sitka.

Makes 16-20 3-inch pieces

The Perfect Baked Apple Filling

Baked apples are a favorite around here, though I have yet to find a perfect recipe for them. Here is what I know so far, though:

Take as many apples as you'd like. The trick is to slit them around the top quadrant, so that they don't explode but don't lose their juices. Core them but leave the bottom to hold the goodies, and then fill them and stand them in a baking dish with some red wine and water and lemon at the bottom. Bake at around 350 for, oh, as long as you like. About twenty to thirty minutes, I'd say. Hey, it's the holidays, let me be lax.

I do know that this is the tastiest filling I have yet come up with: pecans, dried cherries, quick-cook oats, brown sugar, and a smidgen of cinnamon. Fill the apples and then top off with more oats, brown sugar, and a knob of butter.

Oatmeal Brulee

This is less a recipe than a concept, but oh, how it works. It is derived from a menu item that appeared at brunch when my parents were staying at a hotel in Chicago, which turned out to be oatmeal with brown sugar, which is lame. So my mother and I came up with this. We are so very wise, my mum and I. I would say it is actually worth buying a brulee torch just for this. If not, you can always use the oven broiler.

Make oatmeal as you are wont to do, mix in anything you like (dried fruit, spices, bit of dried ginger, whatever), and divide it into as many ramekins as you wish, to whatever height you wish. (If you're broiling, fill them a bit higher.) Sprinkle on a hefty but even dose of brown sugar, and over that, another of white sugar. Then either torch or set very close under the broiler for a few minutes, say 3-6, checking every thirty seconds, which I know is a pain. You can serve it with whipped cream or fresh fruit or anything at all. Best brunch ever, guys, no joke.

Pale Fresh Ginger Cake

This, too, is not a recipe so much as a variation. A Homemade Life has a recipe for fresh ginger cake, which looks amazing, but requires molasses. I did not have either molasses or the energy to go get some, or the desire, really. BUT. Remember that yogurt cake? The most magical and versatile cake on the face of the planet? Let me reprint it for you below. All you do is this: substitute light brown sugar for half the sugar, and mix into the wet ingredients two or three tablespoons of freshly grated ginger. I also put some candied ginger on top, to make it pretty. It makes a light, ginger-scented pillow without all the sticky molasses and spices that normally tag along. It is lovely.

French-style Yogurt Cake
Stolen from Orangette blog, with modifications

She measures things by 'jars', which are about 125 ml, or approx. 1/2 a cup

1 jar plain yogurt (I used Greek yogurt from Trader Joe's, which adds a very nice little tang)
2 jars granulated sugar
3 large eggs
3 jars unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 jar canola oil--or vegetable

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large bowl, combine the yogurt, sugar, and eggs, stirring until well blended. Add the flour, baking powder, and zest, mixing to just combine. Add the oil and stir to incorporate. As she says: "At first, it will look like a horrible, oily mess, but keep stirring, and it will come together into a smooth batter." Butter a nine-inch round cake pan (I did an 8-inch, and took much longer to bake, but it worked out) and pour the batter in.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, until the cake feels springy to the touch (but don't actually touch, as I try to sometimes--a better option is to wiggle it back and forth and see the level of springiness or wobbliness) and a toothpick or cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Do not overbake.

And last but not least, a link to smittenkitchen's Vanilla Roasted Pears. She says it all. They are lovely. They would make an excellent welcome to the new year. Much love and joy to you all!

Soft and Luscious Opportunity

2009-12-19T15:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday around noon, while I was idly leafing through People's “Sexiest Men” edition in order to bring myself to the appropriate intellectual level to take the GMAT, a box got dropped on our doorstep that was approximately the weight of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which box I couldn't open then. Because I was going to take the GMAT. And Arnold might have tried to stop me.

I know that those I have kept in the dark might be wondering, the GMAT, Lee? Really? What? Well, there are plans. But I don't really want to tell you those plans until they come to fruition or failure, and I assure you all I'm not going to be a crazed, Blackberry-toting capitalist like my father. For those of you who know my father, you know that's a joke. But still, no, I'm not going to business school yet, despite the fact that according to the GMAT, I am hecka qualified to go to business school. Which I find hilarious.

BUT ANYWAY. After my mother had taken me to Luka's Taproom for a late dinner, where the fig cocktail was sadly unfiggy but the mac n' cheese gratin and the fries and the beignets were all perfectly gooey and crisp and sinfully flavorful, and we had driven home, and I had gotten loopy with tiredness, we celebrated the last night of Hannukah. And I got to open the box.

The box was from Jody, my “adopted aunt” (I adopted her at age 11 or 12, when I was obviously wise far beyond my years). One of the earliest memories I have of her, actually, is of making pumpkin pies with her around Thanksgiving, both of us in white chefs' hats she had brought along, and then climbing in the tree outside with her. And that's so Jody: good times and food. Wasn't I wise?

Inside the box from her, wrapped in about eighty layers, was a huge, gleaming, glowing, new, ship-shape, 12-cup KitchenAid food processor, or “robot culinare.” 12 cups, guys. I could rule the world with this.

Now, I have a very minimalist philosophy about cooking; after all, in college, Ramya and I got by with two knives from Target whose total price was about four dollars, one large skillet, a huge thin-tin stockpot, two plastic mixing bowls, one cookie sheet, and two plates. Sometimes only one plate. Between us. And we did just fine. I understand the beauty and use of good knives, enormous mixers, dutch ovens (oh, dutch ovens, I do want one!), but me, I can go Neanderthal and still be happy. Fire, rock, stick. But food processors, guys! They are, in truth, my sticking point. I don't know if Jody knew this, but nothing, nothing can replace a food processor. I can whip cream by hand (hey, it's an arm workout, right?) and adjust braising temperatures for disposable casserole dishes covered with aluminum, but have you ever tried to puree soup by hand? Or shred ten potatoes for latkes? Or, or, or? Food processors are one of the only gadgets that truly open up an entire new realm of soft and luscious opportunity.

Technically, we had a food processor already. It is tiny, yellowed, leaking, (did I mention tiny?), (did I mention leaking all the time?) thing. When I tried to puree the turmeric-onion sauce for a dish last week, I stained everything in the vicinity yellow. I have to puree Mr. C's acorn squash cloud dish in about ten batches, and had to, oh dear me, eat about a third of it off the sides of the food processor. It is sad, it is pathetic, it is problematic, and though I have feelings of affectionate nostalgia for it, we must part ways. I've found someone new.

I am so excited about this robot culinare that this morning, less than halfway into my cup of tea (which goes to show how excited I truly was, for those of you who know me without my tea), I began to roast acorn squash.

Ingredients combined in the glowing vessel, it took a total of about twenty seconds to create the softest, dreamiest puree the world as ever known.

I am pretty sure everything we eat for the next six months is going to be pureed, sliced, or mandolined. My parents my throw me out of the house. Huzzah!

And while I am congratulating myself on adopting Jody, let me also congratulate myself for pestering Mr. and Mrs. C., purveyors of said acorn squash puree recipe. Mr. and Mrs. C were technically my bosses at this sweet gig I had in college, feeding the dorm once a week (I really should write more on that sometime), and they are the Best. I mean truly the best. Times in their kitchen are the best of times. As I wrote previously, I had a delightful dinner at their place while I was in Chicago, and then proceeded to pester them for Mr. C's acorn squash puree recipe, which makes me go rather weak at the knees. It certainly counts as one of my favorite dishes in the entire world. I am not exaggerating. If you can even stand squashy sweetness, a faint perfume of garlic, and a splash of cream (or, unlike Stacy, if you are human enough to relish the perfect texture of a good puree), make this now. And then make it again, because you will have licked the bowl clean. Thank goodness for Jody, Mrs. C, and Mr. C. And acorn squashes, and food processors. I know Thanksgiving has passed, but with all the giving, I'm pretty darn thankful right about now.

Mr. C's Cloudlike Acorn Squash Puree

2 acorn squashes, medium sized
4 garlic cloves
¼ cup of cream
Salt and pepper to taste
A food processor!

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Place a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet and very lightly oil it. Halve and seed two acorn squashes (tip: a grapefruit spoon is not only essential for seeding grapefruits—it is also wonderful at seeding squashes, making zucchini boats, or carving potato stamps) and lay them fleshdown on the parchment paper. Roast for 45 minutes or until the flesh is wicked soft, and a fork goes through as though the squash were warm butter.

Meanwhile, simmer very gently simmer the garlic cloves, whole, in the cream for about half an hour. When done, take out the garlic cloves and let rest. You might have to skim off the foam every once in a while to, as Mr. C puts it, “keep it gentle.” Trust this man.

Once the squash is done, turn them over and let them cool. When cool enough to handle, scoop out the flesh into your Food Processor of Glory (scooping out the softness is so satisfying, by-the-by), and puree together with the cream and salt and pepper to taste til dreamy-soft. Try to resist eating the entire thing while standing over it, because you will feel sick. Goes very well, as Mr. C has demonstrated, with brussel sprouts and pork.

Wherein everything I eat continues to be orange

2009-12-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

Remember how I had all these plans, for my pumpkin puree? Well, the thing about pumpkin puree in cans is: it can wait. And absurdly overripe persimmons, crying to be turned into puree and then baked goods, can't. They simply can't.

We had a whole heck of a lot of persimmons. My mum and I are rather obsessed with them, but how could you not be? That delicate, almost cinnamony sweetness? The orange, globular joy of them?

There's a lot of things to do with persimmons, but the classic, of course, of every proper British Christmas table, is persimmon pudding. And I have yet to find the persimmon pudding of my dreams, a Jello-like softness dark orange, sweet, and creamy. But I did find this persimmon pudding, which my mother actually ate about 5/6th of within the first few hours of its existence. I realize I seem to relate many tales of my mothers' inability to restrain herself when faced with mushy baked things, which, while containing many crumbs of truth (the crumb of cornbread custard, the crumb of chocolate flourless cake, etc.) but my mother is truly a scarily disciplined woman, a leader of the highest order, the sharpest knife in the drawer, with nerves of cold and unbreakable chocolate and the restraint of a 13 year old Buddhist monk. Except when faced with squishy baked things. If she's a superhero, she has to have a flaw, right? SuperMum, whose kryptonite is persimmon pudding.

No, really now. Maybe it's not that my mother is weak-willed. Maybe it's that squishy baked things are the best. And should be had all the time.

O, yes, and there's the persimmon cake, I made, too, and the bourbon cinnamon sauce I totally made up to go with it. But I'm not going to give you the cake recipe-- you know why? Because David Lebovitz, inventor of said recipe, has one he likes even better on his blog, a persimmon bread invented by none other than James Beard. So I'm going to try that, first, and then I promise to let you know the results. Promise. Also, you know my apricot ice cream? Substitute persimmon puree and a dash of cinnamon, and WOWZER.

I know it's been a while since I last wrote. There are CRAZY THINGS afoot here, PLANS and SHENANIGANS and such, and I will tell you about them, I promise, eventually. For now, culinary-wise, know that I have taken to hugging my copy of All About Braising by Molly Stevens to my chest as I sleep, that I have finally finagled from Mr. C his absolutely and breathtakingly perfect acorn squash puree, that after doing so I nearly burst my own stomach by being unable to steal spoonfuls of said puree throughout the making of it, that Stacy is visiting and apparently I am not feeding her enough, which is highly unusual, and we're making Indian-spiced chicken smothered in onions, which is less violent than it sounds, from, you guessed it, All About Braising. More holiday-related tales to come!

Update: what with all the crazy things abounding, I wrote this and then went off to check on my cauliflower (oh, how I love cauliflower!) and the my computer went haywire and I never posted it. Hannukah was last night, and the latkes, as usual, were utterly delicious, which I thoroughly believe is through the miraculous proportions of my father's hand, which shape the pudgiest latkes, the exact right size to crisp up completely on the outside and be cooked to sweet softness on the inside. They make me want to cry. This morning, after breakfast with my headmaster of old, I finally visited the farmer's market down the street from our house; it was drizzling and grey and thus perfect weather for my romanticism as I wandered through piles of grapes clutching a baguette and a huge bulb of fennel.

Persimmon pudding
This recipe comes from Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crook's Corner and From Home by Bill Smith, chef of Crook's Corner restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC., via persimmonpudding.com, a lovely site with hundreds of ideas for all your persimmony needs!

I halved this recipe, but this recipe feeds 8-10, or my mother.

Ingredients:

3 Cups persimmons
2 Cups buttermilk
1 Tablespoon plus 1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature
1-1/2 Cups sugar
3 large eggs
1-/2 Cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 °F. Grease a 4 x 8 x 12-inch baking pan with 1 tablespoon of butter. Puree the persimmons, which will reduce them from 3 cups to 2 cups. (I prefer to use an old-fashioned food mill such as a Mulinex, but they may be pressed through a sieve or cone strainer.) Combine the puree with the buttermilk. Beat the stick of butter and the sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment until fluffy. Add the eggs one by one. By hand, in a large mixing bowl, stir the persimmons into the butter/sugar mix.

Sift all the dry ingredients together and fold them into the persimmon mixture. Put the batter into the baking pan, and place the pan in a larger pan and fill halfway up with warm water. Bake, uncovered, for 1 hour & 15 minutes, or until the pudding is firm at the center, has pulled away from the sides of its pan, and a paring knife inserted into the center of the pudding comes out clean.

Serve hot with fresh whipped cream.

The Only Failure of Reason

2009-11-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

I often deal with everything with extreme logic; I like the certainty and precision with which the sharp knife of reason allows me to slice things (even as I spent most of college actually cooking with two blunt, wobbly knives Ramya and I had purchased from Target for a total of $2.99.) Those who know me are aware that this use of the most thorough and chilly ratiocination is just a way of making valid the gloopy, clumsy romanticism of my true self; those who know me best know that I do actually strive to let reason guide emotion and emotion warn reason. But the best way, I've found, to communicate with others clearly (though not, necessarily, at the deepest level), is through the crystal purity of a logical attitude; to see, to understand, to peel away layers of thoughts and lay them out on a table like you were deconstructing a radio or some other gadget.

But this all falls apart when I crave things. I can reason myself through and out of and into almost anything, except cravings. It scares me to imagine what I'd be like pregnant, because I sound like the craziest of pregnancy-cravers even now: green olives and mini-toasts with goat-cheese and rose jam; slices of cheddar and apples; a certain salad with almond vinaigrette; that fish from Creola; cassoulet; chicken-apple sausages. Right. Now. Well, I can delay it's satisfaction for up to a week without showing any real symptoms of the crazies, but after that, it's a rapid decline. I can eventually reason myself out of anything else, futile love, rotten friendships, any choice about anything, but with food, it's no use. No use at all. I am helpless to show proof of any sort of free will in the matter. Helpless.

While in Chicago, I had the loveliest of dinners with my old bosses, who supervised my dorm cooking gig; Mr. C is quite a chef, and he made lovely pork tenderloins with a brown rosemary gravy, pureed acorn squash with cream, and brussel sprouts, all of which I craved for weeks afterwards (but I won't tell you how terribly I screwed up the acorn squash puree; never try it with pumpkin, my friends; regret will haunt you.) For dessert, he made a gorgeously humble apple tart, layers of soft, apple-y sweetness surrounded by slightly sweet crumbliness, and oh, it was beautiful. When I came back from Chicago, I wanted it back. My tastebuds latched onto the dream of this apple tart like my rabbit going after a particularly despised jingle-toy; perhaps that image doesn't convey the ferocity, but if you'd ever seen my rabbit's hatred for this particular jingle-toy, you'd understand.

So one night, coming back home after work, I made this tart. It isn't Mr. C's tart, and it isn't as transcendentally delicious as Mr. C's tart, but it is plain and simple good. It is right. It is humble and true and keeps you warm at night, like someone who is very good at snuggling. A soft blanket of real whipped cream, and it settles in for a cozy evening reading detective novels by the fire.

I was satisfied. But, you know, there's this thing that bothers me about time: it just keeps going. And things change, which is ever so frustrating, because of all these things one has to keep up instead of just do, like keeping fit, and practicing piano, and trimming one's nails if one is going to practice piano, and forgetting the plot points of books one read last year even though one can remember the plot of the books one read in middle school. Or trying to organize all one's memories and memorabilia even as one gets more and more, or, you know, dealing with one craving only to get another.

So we dealt with the apple tart, but soon after came the custard cornbread craving. You see, I read about this in that book, a while ago, A Homemade Life, and thought I'd like to make it one day, but then one day, wham, I needed it now. I didn't even know how it would turn out, but I needed it. We didn't have cornmeal, or even polenta, so I snuck to grocery stores late after work and tried to find some, but a series of unfortunate circumstances left me with Trader Joe's cornbread mix, which was not at all what the recipe called for. I was going to start twitching in a day or two, so even the miserable failure of an attempt to make this thing was going to be better than nothing at all. I went with the highly inadvisable tactic of pretending that all the ingredients the cornbread mix already had were in the right proportions (sugar, flour, cornmeal, etc.) and then adding the recipe's allotments for the ingredients it didn't have, like eggs, milk, etc. The supposed trick to this thing is to dump into the runny batter a cup of cream at the last second, taking care not to jostle the pan, and have it spread out and custardize in the cornbread itself, like veins of precious metal.

Well, my precarious technique didn't exactly work—but, then again, it didn't exactly not work, either. What I got was a nice, moist cornbread, topped with the smushiest, lightly-sweet layer of custard. Craving satisfied, certainly, but I (and this time, dragging my mum down with me) became entirely helpless in a new way—helpless to keep ourselves from eating this cake. Usually, once I've gotten a taste, I can let go; it's one of those adult traits I appreciate gaining, a vast difference from my childhood loss of willpower in the face of eggplant slices. But sometimes—with Falko's cassoulet and now this stupid cornbread—I actually, physically cannot resist. In my house we call this “straightening”--just another crumb topped with a tiny smidgen of custard, but now it's kind of uneven, so I guess we should straighten it . . .

When the boys got home, we had hastily tucked the only-half-empty pan behind the Cuisinart in hopes of helping ourselves forget.

At the moment, I am blessedly craving-free, and have been so for a good forty-eight hours or so. Just don't let me start thinking about tomato soup with crusty bread spread with goat cheese. Don't—no—maybe I should start humming—dang it. Dang it all to heck.

Humble Apple Tart
Adapted very slightly from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

Dough:
2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
12 tablespoons (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter, cold, cut in 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 cup ice water

Filling:
2 pounds apples (Golden Delicious or another tart, firm variety), peeled, cored (save peels and cores), and sliced
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
3 tablespoons sugar

Glaze:
1/2 cup sugar

Mix flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl; add 2 tablespoons of the butter. Blend in a mixer until dough resembles coarse cornmeal. Add remaining butter; mix until biggest pieces look like large peas.

Dribble in some of the water, stir, then dribble in more, until dough just holds together. Toss with hands, letting it fall through fingers, until dough begins to clump. Keep tossing until you can roll dough into a ball. Flatten into a 4-inch-thick disk; refrigerate. After at least 30 minutes, remove; let soften so it’s malleable but still cold. Smooth cracks at edges. On a lightly floured surface, roll into a 14-inch circle about 1/8 inch thick.

Place dough in a lightly greased 9-inch round tart pan, or simply on a parchment-lined baking sheet if you wish to go free-form, or galette-style with it. Heat oven to 400 F.

Overlap apples on dough in a ring 2 inches from edge if going galette-style, or up to the sides if using the tart pan. Continue inward until you reach the center. Fold any dough hanging over pan back onto itself; crimp edges at 1-inch intervals.

Brush melted butter over apples and onto dough edge. Sprinkle 1 tablespoons sugar over dough edge and the other 2 tablespoons over apples.

Bake in center of oven until apples are soft, with browned edges, and crust has caramelized to a dark golden brown (about 45 minutes), making sure to rotate tart every 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the glaze: Put reserved peels and cores in a large saucepan, along with sugar. Pour in just enough water to cover; simmer for 25 minutes. Strain.

Remove tart from oven, and slide off parchment onto cooling rack. Let cool at least 15 minutes.

Brush glaze over tart, slice, and serve, preferably with just-whipped cream.

Custardy Cornbread
The real recipe from A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg

3 tbls unsalted butter
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4 cup medium-ground yellow cornmeal
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
3 tbls sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 tbls distilled vinegar
1 cup heavy cream
Pure maple syrup, if needed, to serve

Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter an 8 inch square or 9 inch round pan. Put the buttered dish in the oven to warm while you make the batter.

In a large microwaveable bowl, melt the butter in short bursts (15 seconds or so). Cool slightly.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and baking soda.

When the butter has cooled a bit, add the eggs and whisk to blend well. Then add the sugar, salt, milk, and vinegar, and whisk well again. While whisking, add the flour mixture. Mix until the batter is smooth and no lumps are visible. Remove the heated pan from the oven, and pour in the batter. My (Lee's) advice is then to pull out the oven tray a bit, place the pan in, and pour the cup of cream quickly but calmly into the batter, and close the door then (to minimize jostling). Bake until golden brown on top, 50 minutes to an hour. She suggests serving it with maple syrup, but, well, it wasn't all that necessary, even if it was good. It will last one day covered in plastic wrap and three days covered and refrigerated, but I dare you to try and make it last that long. Ha!

No Recipe But Two Requests

2009-11-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

I know it's been a while; I came back rosy-cheeked and spiritual from Chicago, talking about orange and nostalgia, and then went silent. I have my reasons, cooking-wise and writing-wise, and I'd like to tell you about them, because with at least one, you all can help.

Writing-wise, I am doing this wacky thing called NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is November, which is hecka apt, of course, since it begins “nove,” which sounds like it should be “new” in some ancient language, which, sadly, I cannot find any significant meaning for. Anyhow, I'm writing a detective novel, of course, what with my absurd love for the entire symbolism of detective fiction; it revolves around a bread-pudding shop (of course, given my love of bread-pudding, which is not at all absurd), every trope of detective fiction I can think of, and a rather pavs bookstore-clerk-turned-detective called Robert Robertson. It is far too much fun, let me tell you. In an attempt to rebel against the ridiculous nature of our definition of time, etc., which is not totally silly since it does have to do with moon cycles, but actually just to cheat while I was away in Chicago during the first four days of November, I started on the 7th, and will end on December 7th. 8,000 words down, 42,00 to go! But more importantly, we've found a body (dundun) but we still have to find out whodunit, so, you know, there's a good bit to go. The problem, however, is two-fold, the first of which is that, though my love for detective stories is profound, it is a strange sort of love, that has little to do with trying to keep all the clues in mind or guess who actually did it, and much to do with the whole good-evil-truth-fiction-law-deception-love-subjective-objective-seeing-shadows-light-disguise-being-veils-seduction-money-story network of symbols that allow me to see the detective novel as a genius field whose real topic is the nature of reality, instead of, you know, bodies. But that all doesn't make me very good at writing one, so I kind of veered off; it's not a good mystery, but it is trying to be a good book, one that makes reference to good mysteries and homages them without pretending to be one itself. Tis great fun. The second of my problems, however, is much more difficult: I don't have a good bread pudding recipe. Oh, I have eaten great bread puddings, I have cried at Russian Tea Time's bread pudding with cinnamon bourbon sauce, have rejoiced in versions with peaches and pumpkin, but I do not have an epitomic bread pudding recipe. And I must. How can I be writing about a bread-pudding shop without making bread pudding? It is a travesty. It must end.

So, my first cry for help: send me your bread pudding recipes. Please. Ask your grandmothers, twist the arms of that neighbor who brought one to the garden party til they admit they bought it at a bakery and put it in a nice dish, ask the cashier at your grocery store. The Great Bread Pudding Recipe Hunt is on.

Now for the cooking reasons: you see, I've decided to host a dinner party. I have always wanted to host a dinner party, and so, when Sam and Falko and Stace and Jayne come to visit (or home to) California, I'm going to bundle them and Ramya all up and feed them, as I do. But I take these duties seriously—I mean, no worries, there won't be choix-pastry swans filled with truffle cream or anything, but the recipes must. Be. Right. I'm so excited I would probably explode the house if I didn't do something before December anyway. In the meantime, I am keeping a Google doc (have I mentioned my affection for them?) with a constantly-transforming menu and notes (some of them written as late-night bursts of inspiration, so that you have “imiobs” and “veef”), along with another menu I'm trying to construct for our family's first ever Real Thanksgiving (i.e. not eating Polish stuffed cabbage). But here's the kicker: as long as I am trying out recipes for this dinner party, they must remain absolute secrets, never reaching the ears of those intended to eat these goods, except Ramya, who probably knows what I'm planning before I do. I have developed this dinner party into a massive conspiratorial project, like some crazy coup. Please, humor my attempts to make my world a little more like James Bond's (except involving brussel sprouts—but I've said too much!)

So, my second request: the best Thanksgiving and late-autumn/early-winter recipes you have. I need your help! How does one make cranberry sauce? How on earth do I cook a whole turkey? What is the what?

I know this is completely inadmissible, a post without a recipe, but I've given my reasons. I'm on a pretty path right now, and I assure you, you will all be rewarded soon.

Orange Times

2009-11-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine tells a story of waiting at home one day for a very important email. She was too restless to sit down to a meal, balanced and proper, and ended up fishing crinkly containers and cans out of the back of their cabinets. When her husband came home that evening, she met him with a kind of crazed cheerfulness, proudly announcing that everything she had eaten that day started with the letter 'C', as though it were a Sesame Street episode. She had eaten chips and corn and cherries and . . . Needless to say, they went out for dinner.

Faced with chaos, we seek order; that's one of the oldest tricks in the book, I think, and yes, I did just make a Biblical joke. We try to find a pattern, and derive some meaning, from the arbitrary waves of information that wash around us. It's always fascinated me, this seeking of sanity from insanity, the way we position the things around us according to meaning, the way we weave our representations of the world into a network of symbols. Which is why I enjoy Dan Brown books, despite their very obvious literary failings (be kind towards my guilty pleasures; I am very guilty), and am always disappointed by conspiracy theories (which I have too critical an awareness of the general lack of really cool secrets to really ascribe to) and why I always set my alarm for strange times like 9:33 and 7:14. But those examples are of patterns I choose to construct, or enjoy. Which is different from seeking order from chaos.

The three days before I left for Chicago, everything I ate was orange. Everything. I only realized it at the last moment, but looking back, it was a terrifying truth. I had had persimmons, and a very pigmented omelet, and lobster bisque, and made a butternut squash soup and pumpkin bread and eaten an orange and some Cheeze-its and some dried apricots, and oh dear. I began giggling uncontrollably at the very classy establishment of The Lobster Shack, in a kind of desperate humor. At least orange is definitively the happiest color, to my mind; imagine eating only blue, or only brown (even though, as I have loudly pronounced to a kitchen full of Indians, in gleeful triumph at the saute of some zucchini, I do love brown things). And it could also properly reflect the harvest. See, we're rationalizing already!

Onto the less-crazed musings: the butternut squash soup, which was supposed to be infused with a perfume of pears and vanilla bean, I found strangely lackluster. It's the first Orangette recipe that has fallen short of fabulous, which is good, because I was about to consider her completely inhuman. The pumpkin bread with hazelnuts is also hers, and at first I was a tad unenthused by it, even with my very inspired (if I do say so myself) addition of dried cherries, which adds a chewy tartness. But then I found I had eaten about eight times as many muffins as I meant to, so I guess that's your answer. I combined the bread recipe (which I made as muffins, in cupcake tins) with smittenkitchen's maple cream cheese frosting, and it is problematically good. Problematically for one's attempt to follow the food pyramid guidelines, I mean, not for anything else.

Also, I though, you know, two batches of pumpkin bread, each must require at least a can and a half of pumpkin puree, right? Right? Except that all together they required about a can and a half. And I bought extra. And I forgot we already had some. So, any suggestions as to what to concoct with four cans of pumpkin puree? Anyone? Help? The orange . . . it's surrounding me . . . I'll never get out . . .

By the way, Chicago was also orange.

By which I mean literally, and in terms of orange's emotional connotations. And also strange—to be back at one home, but to be homeless there. Not that I'm deriding Sam and Stacy's floors, which were lovely, but I did keep trying to invite people back to drink tea in a room I didn't have. The weather had the crisp snap of an apple slice, and the fire in the trees was all suspended for that week that I was there, and the dry leaves skritched across the stones, and it was so nice to see everyone and to drink hot lavender water in Krystin's room, the rattle of a china cup and the dim, angelic lighting and her in her magenta robe against the cool brick, and to get a bacon sausage with avocado mayonnaise and cherry tomatoes after a toe-freezing wait with Stacy in the line at Hot Doug's (ooo, and duck fat fries!) and to walk through the crunch of yellow leaf-encrusted pavement with Sam in his usual hat and Neil and his bicycle. But the familiarity produced very little nostalgia, and everyone's current lives there inadvertently clouded my visions of the past, and it was something new and meandering and strange, and it made me feel a little dizzy and a little bland. At some point, I understood that it was no longer mine, that the romance of the place existed in my memories and in the highest arched windows, which weren't enough, and that my sudden piercing of the lives and routines of those for whom this place was still a living caused some to bend themselves passionately to my approach and disturb their own ways for my sake, and some to continue along in their paths and react to me with a kind of casual drifting in and out of my presence, and some to feel guilt because of their own needs and lives, and some to ignore me though I had wished to see them, and that this time I had chosen—too soon, at the very beginning, as I usually was there—blurred the boundary between what was and what is, in this season of the thinness between worlds, and I had confused everything and mostly myself. It was a beautiful visit, and it was a good time to go and come back, and confuse myself in order to learn.

Pumpkin Bread with Hazelnuts and Dried Cherries
Adapted from Orangette blog, which adapted it from The New Joy of Cooking

1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground nutmeg
¼ tsp ground cloves (which I didn't have, but it would add)
¼ tsp baking powder
1/3 cup water
½ tsp pure vanilla extract
6 Tbs unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/3 cups sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 cup pumpkin purée (or cooked, puréed—until very smooth—winter squash, yams, or sweet potatoes), at room temperature
½ cup coarsely chopped hazelnuts
1/3 cup dried cherries

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease (with butter or cooking spray) a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan, or a bunch of cupcake pans.

Whisk together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and baking powder until thoroughly blended. In another bowl, mix water and vanilla extract. In a large bowl, beat butter until creamy, about 30 seconds. Gradually add sugar, and beat on medium speed until lightened in color and texture, about 3 minutes. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add pumpkin purée, and beat on low speed until just blended. Add the flour mixture in three parts, alternating with the water-vanilla mixture in two parts, beating on low until smooth and just combined. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as necessary. Fold in hazelnuts and dried cherries. Pour batter into pan and spread evenly across the top.

Bake about one hour if using loaf pans, or about 18-20 minutes for muffins, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan on a rack for five or ten minutes before unmolding to cool completely on the rack.

Maple Cream Cheese Frosting
Adapted from smittenkitchen

Two (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1/4 cup pure maple syrup

Mix all on medium til fluffy, and add more maple syrup to taste.

The All-Time Low of Soybeans and Yogurt

2009-10-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I've been eating, or writing, or doing. It's kind of insane around here, but not in that productive way in which you have to meet lots of deadlines, but in that way were lots of eating-centric social events and other activities keep me from going to the gym (not complaining there) and also often keep me from realizing what I'm eating. I've been eating out almost every night with an extremely tall and soft-spoken Israeli friend of the family, and we made dinner at Chris' the other night, during which I made naan that tasted nothing like naan and a rather granular cardamom white cake that I won't bother telling you about. A moth landed in the whipping cream I was trying to whip by hand (with a lot of help from my friends), but it was very pleasant outside and very nice to see the boys. I even got snuck into a business dinner at CreoLa, where I devoured my fish almost completely without noticing due to my heightened interest in the conversation, and then was very, very sad (about the fish, I mean). I'm leaving for Chicago on Friday, and have neither packed nor completed the 80 billion things I am supposed to do between now and then. I can't appear to write coherent paragraphs. I did make the yogurt cake with orange zest instead of strawberries, and it was beautiful, but aside from that we've been a bit rushed and ridiculous around here. Yesterday for lunch I had edamame and a yogurt, so you can see what it's come to. Soybeans and yogurt, that's what. Maybe I should move to LA and start a holistic health center. My mother could tag along, but she'd sneak in chocolates and wine; so if I ever start a holistic health center, it will definitely be with her.

I think it's time to go pack now; Chicago, here I come! Please snow for me. I've missed you.

So Sad It's Funny

2009-10-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of the absurd, mostly because understanding the absurdity of things seems to me to be the key trait of sane people. Treating things as though they were serious, or insulting, or demeaning—which I do, all the time—mostly leads to helpless emotion; facing all the stupid and the evil in the world somberly is too much for a heart such as mine to bear. I get angry when science papers contain the merest specks of false reasoning, or at the perspective-taking failures of people cutting in line. ( I think I've mentioned this at least twice already; that's because I consider it one of the worst things ever, and have designed a special circle of hell for those who cut in line, especially old ladies who try to use their age as justification when confronted. Dear old ladies, you know who you are, even if there is no way you will ever read this. In my version of hell you are positioned in front of Satan's mouth, and he always, always has morning breath.)

I think it's clear, then, that I have a hard time when I face logical inconsistency, intentional maliciousness, or anything those people who call themselves realists think is real. You know, grit-and-dirt-and-men-with-no-legs-who-die-alone-and-unloved-always-thinking-their-wife-cheated-on-them-but-she-never-did version of real. William-Golding real. But I wrote my thesis on subjectivity, and before I bog myself down by tearfully trying, yet again, to defend optimism by explaining it as an option of subjective experience, let's move on. I hate Catcher in the Rye, all right? And I really want my mother to come back, so that I'm not living alone with two angsty, and worse, philosophical teenage boys, one of whom is fifty years old. They drive me to rants like this, by constantly trying to point out that a) my optimism is based on making sure I believe things their pessimism says aren't true and b) so is my happiness. Bearded old men should be more cheerful, shouldn't they? Isn't that a Jungian archetype or something?

So I can't stand the angst, which is why I like the absurd. Listening to comedians is not just about laughs, it's about relief. Someone else thinks this is ridiculous, my mind sighs, someone else knows how stupid it is. Intelligent comedy is the best form of ridicule. Jon Stewart is a kind of prophet divining the flaws in our world, a soothing voice revealing not just the truth, but also, and more importantly, confiding the fact that he, too, senses there is something wrong with it all. But at least we can laugh about it together, Jon Stewart and I. Though sometimes it's only my imaginary friend and me. In college I think I shocked a lot of people with my enthusiasm for sexist and racist jokes, and I could never seem to properly explain myself. It's funny because it's not true, guys; you're not laughing because “insert-race-here” is really “insert-trait-here”, and no, there's no truth to it. You're laughing because other people actually believe that; you're laughing at those other people, and thus refusing them a podium on which they get taken seriously. In a way, it's a kind of disrespect, yes, but as we've noted, if I had to respect every looney view that came along I'd jump in the river in despair.

At first, that disrespect bothers me: shouldn't I take everyone seriously? Yet do I really have to listen to everyone equally, with equal objectivity and reserve, even Time-Cube man? I do deeply believe everyone has fathomable reasons for what they believe and who they are; but I also think some of them have to be wrong. I don't want to dismiss anyone's committed and thoughtful worldview, but on the other hand, I don't have enough time to try and thoroughly understand every point in everyone's argument. And so I use humor. Humor is not a way of disrespect—it's my personal test of validity. If I can make it hilarious, it's probably absurd, which means it consists of bad reasoning, which means good riddance; if I cannot laugh at it, I should give it my attention. Like in Pride and Prejudice, come to think of it: “Oh dear, I cannot tease you about that. What I shame, for I dearly love to laugh.”

Of course, then concerned, PC-aware people (who probably are just trying to save me from getting shot) point out that real racists also tell racist jokes. And that makes me angry, because how is it, how can it be, that one can laugh at one's own opinion and still hold that opinion. Illogic! Illogic everywhere! Which takes us down the road that leads to the bridge from which I would jump, so let's not go there.

Let talk about eggplants. Eggplants are not at all absurd, despite what people say about their bulbousness and adorable caps. In fact, if I didn't love pomegranates as much as I do, as well as symbolic consistency, I would nominate the eggplant as the new symbol for the feminine—clothed in darkly seductive night-purple, curvy and yet ever so slightly squishy. Soft. Does beautifully under pressure. Yes, indeed.

But what is absurd is this cookbook.

(I know, finally something absurd. For someone trying to express their love of absurdity, it's been a long haul down this page. It's so sad it's almost funny.) It's an Israeli cookbook from 1979 called “The Chinese Kitchen” by Ruth Sirkis, and while we may prepare to mock it, let us remember it comes from a time when all my fathers' textbooks had to say about China was: “tea and rice grow there.” All it said about the Japanese was that they were small and energetic; hooo boy, were those different times, and am I glad my textbook make slightly less significant overgeneralizations. I don't know exactly what it is about this cookbook, but I laugh almost every time I see it, which is, as we've said, my sign that something illogical is occuring, and my brain trying desperately to make sure I don't freak out about it.

Anyway, this is what the cookbook suggests I do about eggplant: it suggests I tempura-fry it, which, you know, so far so good, and then that I douse it in a mix of vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic, and stick it in the oven for 40 minutes. Maybe this is actually a traditional, rural-hilltop recipe for eggplant; it must be a really deserted hilltop, though, because while I've eaten plenty of eggplant in Asiatic food, this strikes me as the most vanilla version of some Platonic ideal of Chinese cooking, and I find that absurd. What is even more absurd is how finger-licking good this recipe is; we fight over smudges of eggplant whenever my mum makes this, and once I actually ate the last slice and claimed the cleaning lady had thrown it out, even though--I thought I was intelligent, but apparently not--we didn't have a cleaning lady at that point in time. The most prominent absurdity, of course, is the concept of a book of Chinese cooking written for Jews; it must be the only book of its kind, containing all the recipes (.0002% of the total recipes of all of China) edible by Jews. At least Jews who follow orders. I most definitely do not follow orders, as demonstrated by the time I got through a splendid lunch of bacon cheeseburger with a milkshake and popcorn shrimp before I realized it was Yom Kippur. I'm not a very good Jew, but I can make a mean matzo ball, so maybe it evens out, divinely speaking.

And anyway, it certainly gives us something to laugh about.

Eggplants with Soy Sauce and Garlic
Adapted from Ruth Sirkis' “The Chinese Kitchen”

My mother goes to the trouble of battering these and frying them in an inch of hot oil; they do, truly, taste heavenly like that. This is my shortcut, and it tastes almost but not quite as good, so if you're lazy, well, join the club.

Two large eggplants
Kosher salt/rock salt
Sesame oil (only a tablespoon or two) (or regular oil, if you don't feel like this)
Vinegar
Soy sauce
Sugar
Many cloves of garlic (5-6)

(Mmmmm, garlicky recesses . . .)

Slice the eggplants into rounds, and salt with the rock salt lightly. Leave the salt on for ten-twenty minutes, then wash it off. Some eggplants, especially in America, can be crazy bitter, but this technique sucks it right out.
Heat the oil over medium-high heat, and then fry the eggplants on both sides til fairly soft. Make sure they don't burn; the oil, being sesame, will kind of inevitably be absorbed; if needed, add a splash more between batches.
Layer these on a baking sheet and mix the rest of the ingredients together in a cup, to taste. The ratio I use is usually 1 vinegar to 3 soy sauce to ½ sugar, a bit of salt, and crazy hecka amounts of garlic.
Bake at 350 F for at least half an hour; if the garlic appear to be burning, lower the temperature 25 degrees and/or tuck the garlic under the eggplants.

And The Soups of Memory

2009-10-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I delayed a visit to that old haunt of mine, Café Borrone, to see my long-unseen friend Aaron, because Papa wandered over to a meeting I was having and expressed concern that I would be driving in a thunderstorm. I figure, the man’s been taking care of my life for 22 years, I owe it to him not to sacrifice it even for the almost-worthy cause of Aaron and that silky, absurdly perfect Mexican hot chocolate. So I went home early, and stopped by the grocery store, and changed into my pajamas, and made tea, and prepared to cook my fall-inspired heart out.

And then it didn’t rain a drop. Dry as a bone the whole evening. If I had gone, of course, every stormcloud in the Bay Area would have been tracking me like homing pigeons, pelting down their worst. But no.

Which is upsetting, since, because I was, after all, at home in pajamas and warmth, I was eagerly awaiting a storm. I wanted the low groans and the creak of trees and the sheets of water sweeping across the sky. I wanted to watch seas drop from above, and I wanted to do so with a cup of soup in my hand.

Other people hate rain. Me, I hate driving in rain, but love everything else about it: I love rainboots and getting wet and then taking a hot shower and sitting inside and watching the grayness and soup and tea and pajamas. I’ve said this all before, and I’ll say it all again: I was so ready for the misnamed “bad” weather.

So I missed Borrone, but Papa and I puttered about the kitchen and made soup. Papa made our classic, no-fail chicken soup, that childhood companion of every culturally Jewish child, which in Israel they eat with something they call “soup almonds”, but which is translated for some unfathomable reason as “soup mandels” (what on Earth is a “mandel”?) or “mini croutons,” neither of which capture the tiny, crunchy, yellow taste (yes, the taste is itself yellow, along with the exterior, a hearty, bright sort of yellow) of the pea-sized pillows. Our soup mandels here at home, it appears, are from last winter, so they are very stale. But now they sell them in Safeway, so what is the world coming to, I tell you, and anyway, I’m old enough to eat chicken soup without them. When I was little, I would pour about eight hundred onto my soup and be forced by father to eat every one, even if I was finished; which is funny, because my parents weren’t otherwise very disciplinary regarding unfinished food; they were savers, not scolders.

Me, I was going to make borscht last night, but TJ’s only sells beets in odd refrigerated white packets, and baby beets at that, pictured with some elegant feta and the new, fad-ish micro-greens. One cannot use beets that sissy to make the best of Russian soups. So I moped around TJ’s for a bit, nearly getting run over by almost twenty elegantly dressed, polished, and varnished soccer moms (TJs of an afternoon is a kind of death-trap for the unsuspecting), and then was inspired. Hadn’t I mentioned, just yesterday, that gorgeous chickpea stew Russian Tea Time does? How obvious; how excellent; how befitting memory and gray skies and a cup of tea beside it. A few days ago I had the curry of longing; tonight I would have the chickpea stew of memory.

This chickpea stew is actually a rather late addition to our years at Chicago. My mother and I saw Russian Tea Time when I visited as a prospie, and we should have gone in, since we were trudging through knee-high snows; the first time I actually visited, I think, Ramya and I went after my second time in the Art Institute, that magical place followed by a magical meal. We got borscht and tea (they have this special tea, I have no idea what exactly it is, perhaps black currant, which they bring around in white jugs and constantly refill and serve with uneven raw sugar cubes) and the brandy-and-cinnamon-sauced bread pudding, which is certainly one of the top ten foods I would have with me on a dessert island. (Apologies for the pun.) Later we leavened our menu with varnekys and eggplant dishes, and only in our last year did we add this chickpea stew, the beautiful chickpeas floating in their tomato consommé, perfumed with a delicate whiff of cinnamon. We had that soup at our graduation dinner, too, which was the last time I’ve been to Russian Tea Time, after shivering through the most miserable three hours of my life at Chicago, soaked and cold and poncho-ed and listening to droning cancer research scientists who were completely irrelevant. Between my first year and graduation, we must have gone at least fifty times ( you think I’m joking, but I’m not), sometimes with Pelks, sometimes with others, before the opera, after the Art Institute, or sometimes lugging our suitcases into their coat check right before we boarded planes. The owner began to recognize us. Stories were spilled at those tables, much tea drunk, many plans planned on the back of wrapping paper or receipts; we were happy or miserable in turn; we sought solace and revival in the pink potatoes and the steam of the tea. Eating chickpea soup on my kitchen table isn’t the same at all, not even with a cup of tea brewed from the loose leaf I bought from there; not only because it misses the dim lighting reflecting off the Russian dolls and the samovars and the gilt mirrors, or the adorable rotund mustached tea-waiter with the sweet smile and the gold tooth, but because it misses being set into our lives like a jewel in a setting, or a raisin in a pudding, having the context of our coming from and returning to the addled insanity of our beautiful and crazy dorm, in our crazy beautiful school, retreating from all those people and places and times in order to review and relish and absorb them. It’s never the same river, as they say; and time keeps marching on; but that’s why Proust writes thousands of pages in remembrance of things past. But at least we’ll always have the chickpea stew of memory. And at least it's raining today.

Chickpea Stew Scented with Cinnamon
Inspired by Russian Tea Time, Chicago

1 onion, diced
½ tablespoon olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 large can diced tomato
Ficken soup mix
2 cans garbanzo beans or chickpeas (same diff)
1 stick cinnamon
Salt, to taste

Chop the onion as coarsely or finely as desired, and brown in the olive oil at the bottom of a large pot. When nicely browned (not just golden, but darker), add the minced garlic for just a few seconds, so as not to let it burn. Pour in the chickpeas, making sure to roll them about in the onions and cooking them just slightly, about a minute. Then add the can of tomato and boiling water; let all this come to a boil, and toss in a big tablespoon of soup mix and the cinnamon stick. Stir well to combine, then turn the heat down to simmer, cover and let stand for at least half an hour. Taste, add salt, extract cinnamon stick if you feel like it, and continue simmering until you get too tantalized. Eat, preferably with tea and a spoonful of sour cream.

The Chicken Soup of Childhood

4-5 pieces of chicken, preferably thighs and drumsticks
Ficken soup mix, now found in Safeway as well as Arabic grocery stores or online (I cannot recommend this stuff enough; maybe it’s just my memories, but this stuff strikes me as perfect for just about everything.)
Bag of baby carrots
3-4 zucchini, or more to taste, sliced into fat, ¾ inch or more rings
Salt and pepper
Soup mandels

This soup can indeed be made vegetarian, and even vegan, by excluding the chicken. That is the magic of ficken soup mix. Is yeast considered vegan? I hope so.

Pour such-and such water into pot, as much as the soup you’ll want. Add the chicken (or not) and bring to a boil, then adding splashes of ficken soup mix to taste, carrots, and zucchini if you like the zucchini to fall apart. If not, reserve the zucchini and put it in after half an hour or so. Simmer for about an hour, depending on how much soup you’re making—you can’t really overcook this soup, unless your carrots begin to dissolve, which might mean that you need to come home more often. Salt and pepper to taste.
The other thing I love to do with this soup is scoop out carrots, zucchini, and bits of chicken and fry them in a tiny bit of butter until they develop brown crispiness, which is, let me tell you, the tastiest thing ever. In fact, hello lunch.

The Curry of Longing

2009-10-11T13:02:00.000-07:00

“If everyone who's far will not come closer/If everyone who's near will not stay . . .” -Eric Berman, my translation

I am not good at longing; it seems to me intrinsically unfair that I can't hug people, just because of distance, or can't go back to hanging out in the college counseling office pretending to do English reading, just because I'm old. And when thing are unfair, I get angry; I spent most of the seventh Harry Potter being angry because it's so unfair that Harry has to suffer just because some pale kook has evil plans. Poignancy, tragedy, the beauty of suffering, all these things are lost on me. I just get pissed off. Unfairness and illogic, my two pet peeves, along with the subsequent events such as people cutting in line and high ratings for talk shows that make no sense.

I have to say, though I've been warning everyone that it would happen, said over and over that I knew that “come September, my body will think it's going back to Chicago, and I'll be unable to convince it it won't,” but, so far, it hasn't actually happened. I miss Chicago, yes, but not in the way I thought I would, not in deep, bone-wrenching confusion. I miss the things I thought I would—people, of course, and my bay windows and my uncomfortable but beloved armchair with the loose spring, and my teacup-beringed desk, and reading Simmel three times, but I miss them from afar, in away, not from my gut. And it's not that life here makes up for it, quite (actually, truth to tell, I'm getting a little rabid at being not-quite-busy, or having my time filled but not knowing why, and not having many deadlines and events; I look forward to working days almost obscenely (though that may also be because the crowd there is so wonderful, and helps a lot in making up for (and making false) the fact that I don't really have friends around (hey, I'm embedding parenthesis right and left; I'm in my groove, I see)). I just didn't find it strange to not be in Chicago, not til I called Falko last weekend and talked on the phone with him for a good hour or more; people wandering in and out of our conversation, Wesley saying a sweet hello, the mention of certain people's rooms, all hit me suddenly, not in their specificity, but as a feeling. And suddenly I missed that feeling, those rooms, wandering visitors and tea parties. And people. I miss you, peeps; you know who you be.

So I guess I have to get good at longing. But I needn't bear the whole weight of that enormous city and the people in it. Not when I can, sometimes, replicate it here in my own kitchen. Not when I can make mango and chicken curry, inspired by Le Colonial, at the college-appropriate late hour of eleven, and eat it on the floor. Next stop, Quartino's zappoli and polenta sticks and the thin pizza with pears, walnuts, and gorgonzola, and pierogies and bread pudding and those cinnamon-scented chickpeas in honor of Russian Tea Time, and mushroom empanadas and sangria and the heartbreaking, life-altering butterscotch pudding from Cafe Baba Re Ba, and I want an Italian beef sandwich in the snow, sitting at the fogged-up windows of Mr. Beef, and maybe also couscous with Campbell's tomato soup, goat cheese, and toasted almonds, which gourmet invention Ramya and I used to eat on the hideously-carpeted floor of the dorm room, or sitting in the hall. If I have these, and can squeeze the daylights out of the people I love every once in a while, and hear them on the phone betimes, well, I can try to make my peace with longing.

Mango and Chicken Curry, inspired by Le Colonial
I cobbled this together from a half-dozen recipes from various places (it was my destiny to cobble; I made a cobbler yesterday, too, out of some very old peaches—recipe to follow). It was inspired by the similar dish at Le Colonial, a resturant in Chicago, which I believe also has twins in New York and San Francisco. The funny thing is, though I miss the place, I actually like my curry much, much better. You should have seen me hovering over the pot at midnight, 'tasting' it over and over til I gave in and began slurping it down. It's sweet-savory, gingery-curry-coconuty-thingy-thing it has is addictive, to me, at least. You can bet I am pretty darn pleased with myself and my resourceful creativity right about now. (After all, this post could also be called, as many of my posts can be, “what to do when your mother skitters off to the other side of the world after buying a dozen mangos in Costco.”)

1 shallot, diced small
1 clove garlic, minced
A splash of oil (maybe a tablespoon?)
½ teaspoon salt
3-4 tabespoons curry powder, which I understand to be a wildly varied thing which at times does not even have curry leaves in it. The brand I used is Madras Curry Powder, which comes from our Arabic grocer in a quaint, dented little tin, and has a nice hefty dose of cinnamon and pepper that I really appreciate.
2 chicken breasts (I am set on trying this with tofu—I think it will be equally successful if not more so, especially if one uses the infamous “ficken soup” (fake chicken soup) that Osem produces (also Arabic grocer).
Ficken soup, about two cups (here, because I didn't have lemongrass, I resorted to a hilarious but extremely effective ploy: I poured some soup mix into the measuring cup, and then added one of my mothers' Wissotzky green tea with lemongrass and ginger teabags, and poured boiling water over them both. This may have contributed to the awesomeness, but it was certainly amusing.)
Ginger, about 1 in. cubed, minced
Snap peas, two handfuls
1 japanese eggplant, cubed
1 mango, cubed
½ cup coconut milk (I used TJ's light, because that's what we had)

(Gross, or awesome?)

One recipe told me to coat the chicken in two tablespoons of the curry powder mixed with salt, so I poured these into a bowl and coated my chicken breast cubes, and let them sit while I took a shower (I had just returned from the gym.) Don't know how long my shower was, but I'm sure twenty minutes would plenty suffice.
Meanwhile, I diced the shallots and minced the garlic, and heated the oil on medium-high. I then dumped into the oil the shallots and garlic along with the last generous tablespoon of curry (though I kept adding curry, to taste, the whole while), and fried that until it smelled knee0bedingly glorious, about half a minute. I then added the chicken cubes, frying them on all sides til they seemed set in their ways (white-gold on all sides, no pink bits) and then added the snap peas for another minute or two, and the eggplant as well. I then poured over my tea-soup concoction, and threw I the ginger, and let it all simmer together for a bout twenty minutes, or until the eggplant was definitively squishy and not at all spongy. Then I poured in a nice, hefty splash of coconut milk and the mango, and let that cook another five minutes, and then ate quite a bit of it while standing over the stove. Whoops. If you can resist, though, I feel it would be quite, quite nice over rice, and maybe with some sprightly, tangy salad with vermicelli or something. Now I crave Vietnamese coffee. Oh, longing.

Cobbler
From my mum, and who knows where she finds these things in her brilliance

For the filling:
4 cups fruit (peach or plum or apple, etc.)
½ cup brown sugar
A little butter
With certain fruits like pear I add a ¼ cup of wine

For the dough:
½ cup flour
½ cup brown sugar
¼ cup melted butter
A pinch of salt
Cinnamon or vanilla to taste

Preparation:

Slice each fruit into six equal slices.
Mix fruit with sugar and butter (and possibly wine). Pour into a buttered pan.
Mix all the dough ingredients until they form crumbs. Sprinkle over fruit.
Heat oven to 375 F. Bake for about half an hour until crumbs are golden brown. (Eat straight out of the pan, possibly with vanilla ice cream with little black vanilla-bean specks.)

A Cake For Each

2009-10-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

I read Proust's bit about the madeleine two nights ago. (I'm reading Swann's Way, finally, and relishing every word; for those of you who very patiently bore with me while I was reading my thesis, you will be unsurprised to know that Proust is all about subjectivity, just like I think everything else in the whole world is. But he is consciously thinking about subjectivity, which is epically awesome, and this literary work is the closest intentional philosophy to my own, which makes him cooler than all the neuroscientists and philosophers of mind in the world. Also, his run-on sentences, dramatic meaning-seeking every detail, and extreme sensitivity to everything all endear him to me, for obvious reasons.) Anyhow, the bit about the madeleine, you know:

“I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.”

So yesterday, on the way to work, Ramya and I stopped to buy one of those little packs from Starbucks I remember from high school, three oblong, butter-colored shells sliding back on forth on the white card in the crisp plastic. I read her the passage, and we enjoyed the distinction between the thinner, crispier edges and the spongy belly, even if the cakes were ever-so-slightly stale, and also a bit soggy from being packaged. We ate them alongside our afternoon tea, and relished our silly literary homage.

But later, in the sparse kitchen near our cubicle, we ate the cake I had made for Christina's birthday. It was a variation of yet another Orangette recipe, a French-style yogurt cake, in the middle of which I layered fresh strawberries, and the top of which I decorated with more strawberries. When I was trying to choose a cake for Christina, this one leapt out like a crazed squirrel; you see, I have a philosophy about this, which is really just a corollary of the philosophy of putting together bread, dairy, and jam I was discussing earlier. There is a gut feeling, a kind of sixth sense, about choosing food for people; there is a symbolic aptness one needs to be aware of. Or maybe it's just me, believing I can sense people's taste-auras. This cake, though it seems a kind of plain jane, reminds me of Christina: simple, understated, unpretentious elegance. I was certain, illogically, that she would like it. Which she did. What I had not expected was my own reaction.

When she cut it the sides of each slice were a cream-colored cloud of crumbs, among which drifted errant, lazy strawberries. And the second I tasted it, that moist, not-too-sweet, soft-scented taste, I thought of my grandmother, and the tortoiseshell-whorling on her large glasses, and the brown marble tiles of the floor of her house, and the ragged brown flowered armchairs they eventually got rid of, and my nights on a foam pad on the floor of the living room with a slightly scratchy blanket, and the enormous, soft-petaled, violently red hibiscus flowers in front, and the particular scent of kibbutz soap, and the heat in midsummer when one stepped outside, and the taste of her signature cake, a soft sponge cake with orange zest. And immediately following that thought was another: how funny it was, the comparison of our cute little homage to Proust, composed, assembled from ill-fitting bits of modernity, unoriginal, a childish re-enactment, and the genuine onrush of my own memories and feeling triggered by that one taste on the tongue, the same process as Proust's, but my own. And in spite of my attempt to set up that aesthetic moment, Proust's epiphany, it was stagnant and clumsy compared to the reality, the twist of fate, the unplanned moment relished for itself. The best-laid plans are stale-ish madeleines from a chain coffee shop, eaten as an attempt to force poignancy; the best results come from making cakes by whim, for wonderful people.

Post-post-rambling-bits (a remedy for the fact that I like that ending, but have more to add): The other avenue this post could have taken, by the by, would be called, perhaps, “what to do when your mother buys strawberries at Costco in enormous containers you could never finish.” You can make this cake, or, after you make a cake for Sal (going only on the knowledge that he “likes chocolate”), another cake stolen from Orangette blog, what she calls a Winning-Hearts-and-Minds cake, whose absurdly rich chocolate-y, buttery creaminess would definitely find something like fondant inappropriate, you can use strawberries to decorate it.

As Thanh said about that cake, which I made for Sal's birthday, “I just want to spread it on something!” It only has one tablespoon of flour, so it really is a kind of spread pretending to exist in cake form. But it wasn't the perfect Sal cake, like that other cake was the perfect Christina cake; sometimes I win, and sometimes I don't, even when it matters (I am thinking here of a particularly sad plum tart I made for Ramya's birthday once. Sigh.) But Sal reminds me of Italian beef sandwiches with sweet peppers, which I feel would have made a strange birthday cake, even if those sandwiches are one of the most divinely right foods in the world. Another potential title for this post: “Lee Becomes Birthday-Cake-Fairy, has Found True Calling.” Dear peeps, I like you guys a lot. Let me make you cakes. And decorate them with strawberries.

Trivia: do you know my parents were going to name me “Strawberry,” but in Hebrew? Unfortunately, “strawberry” in Hebrew definitely does not sound right in other languages. I don't dare transcribe it here; find someone who speaks Hebrew to tell you. I wish, somedays, I was named Strawberry, but find solace in the fact that now both Ramya and Thanh regularly call me Glee, which is even better.

One last thing: I feel I must defend myself here, as it seems I have no creative power of my own, but steal cake recipes from unsuspecting blogs—the thing is, as I said, I don't mess with baking. I go to trustworthy sources. And it just so happens that I trust her cakes more than anyone else's, certainly more than any cookbook's. She believes in moistness and simple perfection, and so why should I trudge through thousands of mediocre cake recipes when she has already done the very hard work of finding the best? I would be a fool to do otherwise, when it comes to chocolate or plain cakes.

Christina's Cake
French-style Yogurt Cake With Fresh Strawberries
Stolen from Orangette blog, with modifications

She measures things by 'jars', which are about 125 ml, or approx. 1/2 a cup

1 jar plain yogurt (I used Greek yogurt from Trader Joe's, which adds a very nice little tang)
2 jars granulated sugar
3 large eggs
3 jars unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. grated lemon zest (or try orange zest, though the lemon is very delicate and beautiful)
1 jar canola oil--or vegetable
Sliced strawberries, enough

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large bowl, combine the yogurt, sugar, and eggs, stirring until well blended. Add the flour, baking powder, and zest, mixing to just combine. Add the oil and stir to incorporate. As she says: "At first, it will look like a horrible, oily mess, but keep stirring, and it will come together into a smooth batter." Butter a nine-inch round cake pan (I did an 8-inch, and took much longer to bake, but it worked out) and pour half the batter in. Layer strawberries in (they don't have to be pretty, but it's best they are in only one layer) and pour the rest of the batter atop them. Optional: decorate the top with more sliced strawberries.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, until the cake feels springy to the touch (but don't actually touch, as I try to sometimes--a better option is to wiggle it back and forth and see the level of springiness or wobbliness) and a toothpick or cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Do not overbake.

Sal's Cake
Or the Winning-Hearts-And-Minds Cake from Orangette blog, AGAIN

7 ounces (200 grams) best-quality dark chocolate (or chips, which I find easier to work with)
7 ounces (200 grams) unsalted European-style butter (the high-butterfat kind, such as Lurpak or Beurre d’Isigny (note, I used regular butter, it was fine)), cut into ½-inch cubes
1 1/3 cup (250 grams) granulated sugar
5 large eggs
1 Tbs unbleached all-purpose flour (note: told you)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, and butter an 8-inch round cake pan. Line the base of the pan with parchment, and butter the parchment too.

Finely chop the chocolate, or leave chips alone, and melt it gently with the butter in a double boiler or in the microwave, stirring regularly to combine. Add the sugar to the chocolate-butter mixture, stirring well, and set aside to cool for a few moments. Then add the eggs one by one, stirring well after each addition, and then add the flour. As she says: "The batter should be smooth, dark, and utterly gorgeous."

Pour batter into the buttered cake pan and bake for approximately 25 minutes, or until the center of the cake looks set and the top is shiny and a bit crackly-looking. (Note Orangette's important point: I usually set the timer for 20 minutes initially, and then I check the cake every two minutes thereafter until it’s done. At 20 minutes, it’s usually quite jiggly in the center. You’ll know it’s done when it jiggles only slightly, if at all.) Let the cake cool in its pan on a rack for 10 minutes; then carefully turn the cake out of the pan and revert it, so that the crackly side is facing upward. Allow to cool completely. The cake will deflate slightly as it cools.

Serve in wedges at room temperature with a loose dollop of ever-so-slightly sweetened whipped cream, and maybe strawberries.

Mother-Daughter Night: The Rite of Passage

2009-10-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

It's time for a post without pictures, guys; I'm sorry about that, but when your Life Altering Experience happens in the dim lighting that restaurants call romantic, blurry pictures are unacceptable. We're going to have to go with literary imagery for now.

The boys (my father and my little bro) went to see Santana on Sunday, leaving my mother and I tidying the house like good gender-normative housewives of the 1950s. Not for long, however, as we decided to make a night of it and go out to eat, something that has become more and more infrequent since I came home and made the kitchen the headquarters of massive food production. As long as we were going out without the boys, I suggested, we should go somewhere they wouldn't like; whereupon my mother acquired a very mischievous twinkle in her eye that was rather worrying.

“I have an idea,” she said, “you know how, in some cultures, fathers take their boys to prostitutes as a rite of passage?”

I don't know what cultures she thinks do this, or how the comparison arose in her fevered brain, but you can imagine that I was rather anxious to know where this was all going.

“I'm taking you to Creola.” An announcement of scandal.

So we went to CreoLa, a New-Orleans-style place right on El Camino, and sat by huge glass windows that showed the long bright grids of square train windows floating past in the darkness. The waiters were overly solicitous (it was a slow Sunday, after all), the room quite dim, the prices just a tad bit steep. I wondered when the prostitution metaphor was going to make sense. We started with delicious crawfish hushpuppies (sweet, fried carbs, I do adore you) and a sausage-y jambalaya, and it was all very nice, and I was enjoying myself, and we were talking about pleasant things, and then the fish came.

As most of you probably know, I don't really do fish. I was a very limited child, gastronomically speaking, who lived off of chicken nuggets and fries, so much so that when I decided to go vegetarian at the ripe age of four, my father, concerned for my life, spent a good two hours convincing me that chickens, since they only ate vegetables, had to be made of vegetables, and were thus appropriate food for a vegetarian. (To my credit, it did take two hours, and I was very skeptical.) I first ate bell peppers in college, dry pre-sliced green wigglies at the cafeteria; imagine when I tried a whole red one. A revelation. I didn't eat Brussell sprouts til last year (and have since eaten them at least a hundred times). I finally got shrimp, and, after a different mother-daughter adventure, scallops. I adore scallops. Scallops are pillows from the sea.

But despite fish-and-chips and fish sticks and Luke's brave attempt to feed me very well-cooked (it is Luke, after all) breaded white fish, fish always tasted too, well, fishy. Like, I swam-in-salt-and-seaweed-goo-gross. Until now.

This was a succulent hunk of Gulf Drum redfish, brushed with dijon mustard (another thing I have only recently begun to appreciate—oh, I am a philistine!), “bronzed”, which here means cooked to utter, melt-in-you-mouth tenderness, and served with a sprinkle of toasted almonds and a beautiful hollandaise. But it wasn't the fixings, it was the fish. Fish, I understand you now. And I feel that this the beginning of a beautiful friendship, albeit the kind that involves you being dead and cooked, and me devouring you.

It's good having a conniving mother, full of strange metaphors and excellent ideas for rites of passage, and who orders beignets and shares my chicory-cafe-au-lait.

What should one do with dry killer honey bread?

2009-09-27T15:39:00.000-07:00

What we do every time, Pinky . . . try to make French toast!

The wonderful thing about cooking is that once you understand the gist of why a recipe works, the basic why, that technique is suddenly yours. Alton Brown puts it very nicely: “[recipes] can get us where we're going, but that doesn't mean we know where we are when we get there. . . . unless you understand where you are and how you got there, you're a hostage.” (I'm Just Here For The Food, Alton Brown) He compares it to following a set of driving directions as opposed to a map—with a map, you can take some pretty side-streets, get a view of the sea, stop for lunch somewhere, because you can see the big picture. With driving directions, one must not stray.

Now, I'm not much for excessive alteration in baking; baking is a tricky business, and those recipes are devised by unfathomably ingenious people who understand all those white powders to a mind-boggling extent. I might go so far as to add some orange zest or a bit of cinnamon, but really, not much farther. Cooking, on the other hand, is different. My grandmother's recipes have directions like “add a cracked-white-mug-with-blue-flowers-worth of water . . .” and “toss some in of whatever you have.” I trust that kind of recipe, the dash-smidgen-pinch type. Cooking, I find, is extremely forgiving, if you know its ways.

These ways are the simple things we would never think to write down, but eventually get to understand: don't crowd what you're trying to brown in a pan. Add salt after a sauce has reduced or vegetables given off liquid. If you want things to brown, use fat. Make sure your oil is hot, but not too hot, and drop little bread crumbs in to check—if they sizzle, good, if they burn, bad. These tricks are not just tips and tidbits one collects like a preteen boy with his trading cards; they are a part of the whole. They make sense all together. That's why I like Alton Brown's thing of explaining cooking as food+heat—that's all it is, and all these tricks are just a result of understanding how food reacts to heat, when it absorbs things like oil, salt, liquid, etc, and when it releases it's own liquid, salt, oil, etc. And know I am waxing philosophic about the fact that sauteed onions give off water, and that's ridiculous. Moving on!

This vague and holistic philosophy is a result of my elation at understanding French toast. French toast is essentially bread infused with custard. That's all. And custard is, in essence, eggs and milk. And it infuses into the bread because bread, especially stale bread, is dry and thirsty and thus soaks up any moisture. And knowing that, the world is possible.

This stupid honey-bread recipe proposed that if one let the bread sit for seven days, it would get better. It did not. It might have had about a drop more moisture per loaf, but was otherwise unchanged. So what do you do with dry, thick slices of semi-sweet honey-bread? Infuse them with custard and fry them, of course. The dry thickness actually helped enormously, because it soaked up custard like a mad, custard-loving thing, and gave that thick gooeyness of bread pudding. And since I understood the workings of French toast, I left out the sugar and other additions in the French toast recipe below, because the honey bread was already sweet and spiced. I think I may start dipping every bready thing available in eggs and milk and frying it—what could go wrong? Focaccia French toast! Pita French toast! Naan French toast! Bagel French toast! Banana bread French toast (actually, I'm very tempted now . . .)!

But first, I'm going to finish this honey bread. It pleases me so much that failures can be turned into rousing successes with the addition of custard; it makes everything seem jolly and fixable and obliging.

Now, to be honest, I don't really think I'm much good at making things up, or even at altering things much. What I do take pride in is my strange ability at putting things together. Sometimes my tastebuds light up with inspiration, like thousands of tiny culinarily-minded William Shakespeares. It's not under my power, but still, I take pride in it. Like the first time I made walnut bread, and as I put it in the oven, I thought, I'm going to eat this with Gouda and blueberry jam. Just like that. I don't know where the thought came from, but it was exactly correct. Or when I made buttermilk biscuits and decided to spread them with strawberry jam and cornflake ice cream. The best meal I ever had, really and truly, was when I came home one random day and decided to eat mini-toasts with goat cheese and rose-jam, with a side of green olives. I know, it sounds strange, but it was utter perfection. It's like I'm possessed sometimes. Possessed by the need to combine jam, dairy, and bread. And this is another of those moments.

Because you know what goes amazingly on honey-bread-French-toast? Stewed prunes with citrus, and whipped cream. I know I sound geriatric, but I feel I'm right about this.

Stewed prunes with citrus
Adapted from Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life

1 pound prunes
1 small tangerine, clementine, or tiny orange, sliced as thinly as possibly, whole with peel, picking out seeds
1 cinnamon stick
Water to cover

After slicing the citrus as thinly as possible and making sure it has no seeds, combine all ingredients in a pan in as close to a single layer as possible. Pour in water just to cover, and bring to a simmer. Once bubbles begin, reduce heat so that the water just “trembles”, and cook for at least 30-45 minutes, or until much of the water has reduced and the prunes have become squishy, floppy, yummy things that can't quite stand up on their own. She suggests keeping them in the fridge and eating them the next day, but I liked them slightly cooled and poured a top this French toast, and I've been eating them all week. Her suggestion to eat them with oatmeal is also brilliant, if exceedingly geriatric. But that's cool with me. I like eating like I'm 80.

Various Fruits with Various Forms of Cream

2009-09-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

We are having the house painted, which could almost but not quite explain why I am huddled in the corner of the living room with all the blinds drawn and a box of tissues. Scraping noises come ominously from all the walls around me. It's not a pretty picture, guys.

It's not that the house-painters aren't nice—they are, really—but that it's not fun to wake up to the realization that three dudes are very focused on painting the window-frame outside, which is right above your bed, and that, under the blankets, you are not wearing pants. Am I allowed to say this on the Internet? People sometimes sleep without pants, right? Anyway, imagine: three dudes standing right above my head, mid-morning, and me with no pants. My pants, in fact, were across the room. I almost panicked and dashed for them, but luckily the book I'd been reading last night was right next to me, and I just went for that, and burrowed very, very far down into my blankets, and read. And when they went around the corner, I made a mad sprint for my pants and ran to the bathroom, which also had windows and window-frame-painters, but at least there the windows are heavily frosted. This house has way too many damn windows.

But that's why I'm in the living room weeping and—oh, no, they've opened the front door and are painting it, this is absurd, really, I'm going to pretend I have allergies or something. Yes, allergies. No, I mean, I'm not weeping because of them, I'm weeping because of the book. I got it on Tuesday, and started reading it yesterday evening, and have just finished it. It's Molly Wizenberg's (you know, Orangette-blog-lady, the one whose recipes I keep stealing) A Homemade Life, and it's a bunch of short vignettes from her entire life, and either because it's true or because it's written in her casual, speaking-to-you-directly, beautiful-little-insights kind of way, or because I am moved—who could not be moved—by the way se describes the death of her father, or what, it is making me cry as I have not cried since that very important character dies in the fifth Harry Potter, and that goes to show you how extremely poignant this is, or how ridiculous I am, but anyway. It's a gorgeous book—I highly recommend it. And I am well-nigh tempted to make this banana bread with chocolate and crystallized ginger right now, because really, doesn't that sound astounding?

But you know, on mornings like this, when you've been reading a delicious book which involves France and love and childhood and a lot of delicious food, there's only one thing to do; it makes you feel a bit Parisian, and a bit like you're allowed to return to a corner of your childhood, and it makes you love summertime again (yes, I know, I take it all back), and it's simply lovely. It's strawberries and yogurt. Strawberries and cream are good, and I have at times craved them, but strawberries, let to sit for a bit with some sugar and maybe a tablespoon of orange juice, and then smothered with a big heap of Greek yogurt and stirred—that makes for a lovely morning. And, this technique also works with banana, though, if I may recommend a slight alteration, banana rather deserves a big ol' spoonful or two of sour crème drizzled with a bit of milk and sugar. My mother taught me that, a trick from her childhood kibbutz days when both bananas and sour crème were rare delicacies that came around once every few months, and the most had to be made of the occasion. My friend Tara has a fabulous 'skeptical face' that she pulls when people suggest anything strange and uncouth, but after she bravely tasted this, she nagged me to make it for the rest of the year, and I cackled the whole while. Just trust me, guys: bananas and sour crème, strawberries and yogurt, and baked peaches with cornflake-milk ice-creme. Some unions are meant to be. Like me and my pants.

Cabbage

2009-09-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

Ramya, explaining her boy's love for cabbage: I mean, he would pretty much break up with me to go date cabbage!

Me: Well, that's understandable.

I'm such a good friend sometimes.

What to do with stale killer challah

2009-09-20T13:34:00.001-07:00

Make French toast! I managed to snap a picture just before I totally devoured it, but we ate it this morning with baked peaches I made last night. (Last night we ate the baked peaches with cornflake-milk ice-cream, and let me tell you, sometimes I am very proud of my inspirations, and that combination is certainly cause for one of those times.) The lethal density actually made this the most satisfying French toast, because, let's face it, we were basically eating fried bread pudding for breakfast. Which is Best.

French Toast
(Stolen, as usual, from the Orangette blog--I use her as a kind of online cookbook, really.)

1 cup milk (I used whole)
4 large eggs
1 Tbs sugar
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
¼ tsp salt
Mild-tasting vegetable oil, such as canola
6 slices bread (challah!), about ¾ to 1 inch thick

Whisk together the first five ingredients in a wide, shallow bowl or tall-edged plate.

Place a large skillet over low to medium heat, and add enough oil to just cover the bottom of the skillet.

Two or three at a time, add the bread slices to the egg mixture in the bowl, allowing them to rest for a minute or two on each side. They should feel heavy and thoroughly saturated, but they should not be falling apart. When the oil is hot, place the slices in the skillet. They should sizzle a bit, and the oil should bubble lightly around the edges of the bread; take care, however, that the oil is not too hot, lest the egg mixture burn. Cook until the underside of each slice is golden brown, about 2 minutes. Turn the bread, and cook until the second side is golden, another 2 minutes or so. Remove the bread from the skillet to a plate lined with a paper towel, allow to rest for 30 seconds or so, and serve immediately.

Baked Peaches
From The Art of Simple Food, by Alice Waters, which I use when I want something, well, simple. It's more a kind of can-I-do-this book; like, can I roast asparagus? That kind of book.

4 peaches, halved
5 tablespoons apricot jam (really, I think I would use less)
2 tablespoons honey
1 cup water
1 tablespoon lemon zest
2 teaspoons lemon juice

Preheat oven to 400 F.

Halve and pit peaches, placing them cut-side-up in a baking dish. Mix the other ingredients and spoon that mixture over the peaches. Sprinkle a bit of sugar on each one. Bake for 30-45 minutes, checking every 10-15 minutes and spooning some of the juices back over the peaches.
Serve warm, with cornflake ice cream!

The Fun of Fiascos

2009-09-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

It has been a rather challenging culinary week; and I use the word 'challenging' advisedly, for though I am the sort to be rather bummed when my cookies don't turn out marvelously the very first time (obviously I am not in the works to be a cookbook editor—or maybe I am, come to think of it, if I can refit my attitude a bit), I am trying to think of recent baking fiascoes as a challenge, rather than a criticism. One good thing I can say about myself, I always think of them as ridiculously, side-clenchingly hilarious, no matter my disappointment, like that time Lisa and I tried to make bra-shaped cupcakes for the Breast Cancer Research fundraiser, and they came out sagging to the extreme, and Lisa's mum and I were on the floor laughing for a good fifteen minutes. Or that time Pelks and I forgot to put an egg into out-of-the-box brownie mix, and tried to mix that egg into the already-poured pan, and ended up flipping the pan of dry brownies out only to find an almost perfect omelet at the bottom. Pelks and I actually have a lot of these stories: like the time we managed to make rice pudding taste like refried beans (it's all coming out now! The secrets and the lies!), even though Jory really loved it when I described it as maple, but then again, Jory really likes refried beans. I could go on for days.

So it's all for a good laugh, I think, and face my challengers with a chuckle. For example:

Yeast is a magical creature I have not yet tamed; I don't get it, I think. I have now baked a fair amount of bread—loaves of olive bread, rounds of walnut bread, braids of polenta bread—but though my family eats them with apparent pleasure, these baked goods are dense enough to brain walruses. You could use my scones as paperweights. Has anyone read Terry Pratchett's Discworld books? If you haven't, why not, and til you do, I'm not your friend, but anyway: you know the dwarf bread, that the dwarves bake to use as weapons? Lethal scones and such? My bread is like that. You could, in fact, use it to murder a friend on a picnic, and no murder weapon would ever be recognized. (“What, this baguette? Sure, it's covered in blood, but it's just a harmless, if extremely heavy, food item!”)

I made challah a few days ago, round for Rosh Hashana. It turned out nicely, yeasty, slightly sweet—and dense enough to use as a medicine ball. I also tried to make honey cake, which involved no yeast, and baking soda I thought was old, and yet came out about a mile high and heavy enough to weigh gold bars against. I actually broke the whisk while stirring it. And to top that off, it came out drier than my eyes after watching Twilight. Both the recipe for honey cake and the one for challah came from The Book of New Israeli Food, by Janna Gur, in which I have now rather lost faith. It is a beautiful book to look at, I'll give it that.

Thing one I need to master: fluffy bread. It's on.

Another recent and hilarious misunderstanding with my cooking has been with fondant. Marlena, a sweet and often unexpectedly sarcastic girl that I wish I knew better in college, taught me to make fondant in our rather dingy but well-loved dormitory kitchen; she also sometimes ate fried onions for dinner, and nothing else. I highly approve. Anyhow, she made making fondant look breezy, absurdly beautiful. I can't remember if this is her recipe or one I found later trying to scour the internet, but here it is: just stick marshmallows in the microwave for a few seconds with a sprinkle of water (a tablespoon or two for every 16 oz. or so), and then drop that sticky mess onto a mountain of powdered sugar and knead, knead, knead powdered sugar in until the dough is soft, powdery, and fluffy. And then mold, and use, and revel.

Oh, if only it were so easy! First, I exploded the marshmallows, which was beautiful, but terrible. Then, even though I made a glowing ball of fondant, the black food coloring I had bought to make Brad's birthday cake, which was supposed to be a chic, designer grey, turned the fondant lavender. Lavender! I imagined Brad writhing in designerly pain. After much absurd effort in which my paint-mixing skills helped very little, since food coloring appears to have a color-mixing scheme known only to aliens, I got a kind of dark, foggy purple. And once I had lain a perfect sheet over the cake, ripped it, tried desperately to fix it, made everything worse, etc., it resembled nothing so much as, as Brad pointed out, elephant skin. An elephant who ate too many blackberries.

(Note: the fork was an attempt to unstick the marshmallow; I am not that clumsy that I actually microwaved the fork.)

I made fondant again. This time I would do it, I was determined! But I forgot to sprinkle the marshmallows with water, so my fondant actually cracked into tiny shards halfway through. And on the third try, I didn't add enough powdered sugar, and my fondant flower began immediately to droop and attack neighboring cupcakes and stick to them with violent force. Guys, this is like a three-step process that I seem to be incapable of handling. The cake that went under the fondant, which turned out wonderful and delicious, had about ten times the amount of steps. (Recipe at end of post.) Sigh.

Challenge number two: fondant, I will get you. I will.

And lastly, there's something else I should take from that Julia Child movie, along with the revelation to not crowd the mushrooms, which, when I was making a demi-glace with mushrooms this weekend for some steak, I had a kind of trance-like epiphany about, rather as she does in the movie, standing over the pan, muttering: don't crowd the mushrooms, don't crowd the mushrooms. Ahem, anyway, aside from that silliness of mine (but guys, really, don't crowd the mushrooms!), when Julia pulls some heart-breakingly beautiful apple tart from the oven and squishes an apple into place with her fingers, she says “never apologize!” in that ridiculous tone of hers. At this point in the movie, which I saw the same day I spent most of blushing and explaining about the elephant-skin fondant, Thanh looked at me meaningfully, or I looked at Thanh meaningfully, or anyway Thanh was a catalyst of this revelation, and I decided, that's right. Never apologize! After all, leave a honey-cake-boulder dry enough to camouflage perfectly into the Sahara in the office kitchen, and it's devoured in half and hour. But I will find a recipe for that one.

Oh, yes, and one other challenge: learn to use this "good" camera we have at home, instead of my dinky but faithful little point-n-shoot.

And now for the good news:

Perfectly Moist Chocolate Cake
From Orangette blog, (she has so often found the perfect recipe for me, I'll admit), which she adapted from Epicurious
(Please note: when I take a recipe from someplace, as here, I am generally taking it word-for-word and possibly interjecting some small commentary, or deleting a few tidbits I didn't do. I find this means I don't forget to include any important bit, but no infringement is intended. It's all for the greater gastronomic good, I swear!)

Note: this makes an absurd amount of batter, enough for, she says, two 10” layers, three 8” layers, or roughly 36 cupcakes.
Another note: this is the moistest, most perfect pure-chocolate cake I've ever had, rivaled in the chocolate-cake recipe department by what I think of as Max-and-Sam's Orange Marmalade and Earl Grey Chocolate Cake, though I think they got it from Andrew Alexander (where did you find it, Andrew?) which is a beast of a different color.

3 oz fine-quality semisweet chocolate (chips, I found, is fine)
1 ½ cups hot brewed coffee (instant is cool)
3 cups sugar
2 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 ½ cups unsweetened cocoa powder (not Dutch process, she says; I used Ghirardelli, as she recommends)
2 tsp baking soda
¾ tsp baking powder
1 ¼ tsp salt
3 large eggs
¾ cup canola oil
1 ½ cups well-shaken buttermilk
¾ tsp pure vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. If you’re making cupcakes, line the wells of your pans with fluted paper liners, or grease and dust them with flour or cocoa. If you’re making larger cakes, grease pans and line bottoms with rounds of wax paper. Grease paper.

Finely chop chocolate, or just pour chips, and in a bowl combine with hot coffee. Let mixture stand, stirring occasionally, until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth.

Into a large bowl sift together sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. In another very very very large bowl, beat eggs with an electric mixer until thickened slightly and lemon-colored (about 3 minutes with a standing mixer or 5 minutes with a hand-held mixer). Slowly add oil, buttermilk, vanilla, and melted chocolate mixture to eggs, beating until combined well. Add sugar mixture and beat on medium speed, bracing yourself against puffs of cocoa-and-flour dust, until just combined well.

Divide batter between pans. Bake in middle of oven 20 to 25 minutes for cupcakes, or 50 to 70 minutes for larger cakes, until a tester inserted in center comes out clean.

Cool cakes completely in pans on racks. Run a thin knife around edges of pans and remove cupcakes, or invert larger cakes onto racks. If making larger cakes, carefully remove wax paper. Cakes may be made one day ahead and kept, wrapped well in plastic wrap, at room temperature.

Enjoy Your . . . Butter

2009-09-17T14:06:00.001-07:00

I just want to say that I love when I do something like melt three sticks of butter in the microwave, and the microwave, upon finishing, beeps smugly and tells me: "Enjoy Your Meal!"

Besqueeze me, you think I'm gonna eat all that buttah by myself? (And by itself?)

(To which I imagine the microwave, in that same radiating tone, answers the usual answer.)

Rosh Hashana recipes and a rundown of a crazy tomato dinner at Kathryn's coming up!

Anger and the Parsnips: A good name for a rock band

2009-09-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

I don't want to be one of those people who rely on something to work out their anger. I saw Julie and Julia this weekend, and enjoyed Meryl Streep's absurdity very much, but immediately thought two things: oh no I'm one of those people who blog about food, and: I don't ever want to cook just because I can't think of anything else to do with my life. I also don't want to be one of those people who show their frustration, but since I flush bright red and shake, I don't think that's going to happen. I can try.

Kathryn took us to see a dude talk about education technology yesterday; we're going to call him “Alan Nolearning” in this blog; with great foresight, she did warn us he was kind of cracked. He had some good points, all right. I don't remember them now. I can remember nothing but the gems, and by that I mean the ridiculous half-baked slogans he threw out as though they were coins of intelligence for the paltry nearsighted beggars. From what I've found, when people sell ideas, they forget to think them through, because thoughts becomes commodities, and you need to get them out as fast as possible without really working them out. And then you make a fool of yourself, or get rich, or both, but rarely do you do that much good. All this really serves to remind me is that there is so much nonsense in the world, and so much of that is presented by self-appointed experts. I think expertise has a place and a role, but if you think Google translate is a substitute for learning languages, well, I think there's a whole heck of a lot you need to think about.

Ramya, I think the theme song of your empire should be “Think” by Tina Turner. For real.

Anyway, as you can tell, I was infuriated. But I did not go home and cook; I went to the gym, but I didn't work out for longer than usual; I didn't play piano or read. I went and ate a frozen yogurt, as usual, and walked in the park. Things shouldn't be tied to emotions, and while food inevitably is, I don't want cooking to be an escape—it just is, all the time, gloriously. I would rather get angry at Alan Nolearning than escape from my memory of him. I'd rather rant about him on the internet or on a word document and get it out of my system in its pure form, and not in the form of pies or roasts or songs or miles.

But this is what I did the day before that: I made cornflake-milk ice-cream, which turned out splendidly and tasted perfect next to a half a buttermilk biscuit with strawberry jam this morning, and I roasted parsnips. Have you ever roasted parsnips in just a sprinkling of olive oil, salt, and pepper? When you open the oven door, this perfume wafts at you, almost floral, utterly beautiful, almost not like food. Perfume is really the best term to describe it. It made me sigh, and smile, and feel like everything was right in the world. I know it might sound weird, but I think roast parsnips are really going to be my comfort for any kind of stress, anxiety, sadness, or anger. Sigh.

(Sorry for the lack of a good picture--it was dark, and I need a better camera.)

Parsnips Epiphany-Style
Another fabulous David Tanis recipe

Parsnips
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

Quarter the parsnips, coring them (the woody center is gross, but it's worth the effort of peeling it out with a grapefruit spoon or something). Chop big ones into three-inch long pieces, douse in a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast in the oven at 375 until browned and soft, about 45 minutes, depending on your oven. Open the oven door every once in a while and just breathe.

Second Summer

2009-09-12T13:36:00.001-07:00

Dear readers,

I know I gave you a long love-letter to fall and a confident goodbye to summer. It was beautiful and metaphorical and I was so convinced of my attitude and, well, that symbolism still holds. But Kathryn brought these beautiful, beautiful yellow and red cherry tomatoes from her family's garden into the office yesterday, or a few days ago, and I was so addle-brained I forgot about them. Luckily, my mother or father or someone took them home, and this morning, when I slouched into the kitchen and immediately knocked my shin on boxes someone had left out and almost burned myself in the process of making tea, and thought, oh, no, another one of these days, and opened the fridge in a kind of despair, there they were, two pounds of happy, colorful little globes in an ironic Safeway bag. I cannot even begin to describe how immediately I cheered up.

Earlier this summer I went to cooking class with David Tanis, famously of Chez Panisse, who was an extraordinarily sweet and carefully-spoken man with crazy-cool glasses, who I immediately wanted to hug. (Is that disrespectful? I'm sorry, Mr. Tanis. I really like you.) He had a lot to say about organic and local and seasonal, all things I actually tend not to think about much, to my friend Sam's constant mild disapproval, I think, and I agreed with him mildly, but, you know, I wasn't that into it. What I was into were his cherry tomato crostini with ricotta. The seasonality of his equally intensely colored tomatoes, the soft silk of fresh ricotta, the local shallots—well, he made his point. I had seconds and was considering stealing the plate of the annoying ladies next to me.

This morning I made those crostini.

We didn't have ricotta, or fresh bread, or even red wine vinegar—but the tomatoes made up for it. I substituted apple cider vinegar, frozen molasses-sunflower bread from Raymond's Brilliant Bakery in Cazedero (an astouding utopia of a place, run by sainted people) and Greek yogurt at its thickest. And I am going to remember this breakfast for a long time: crisp, slightly sweet toast, that tangy smoothness of the yogurt, and the indescribably beauty of Mr. Tanis' tomato preperation. Oh, and a few fresh strips of basil from my garden. Thank you, summer, you are welcome to another week of my time, or even two.

Now, while I was waiting for the sallots to macerate (I always find the term funny, for some reason), I happened to start reading the intro to Mr. Tanis' book, A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes. It's a beautiful book, and you should all go out right now and find it and read just especially the part in the intro called “the case against restaurants.” It is so me. I can't even spell the word 'restaurant' most days. I mean, listen to this:

“Who knows what the do back there in those restaurant kitchens? Then there's the harried waiter who is saddled with you, and vice cersa. If I'm channeling a restaurant-wary grandmother for the moment, it's not so much fear of physical sickening as anxiety about what will arrive at the table.” -A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes, David Tanis, page 3

His defense of eating predominantly in home suits me exactly—the familial atmosphere he adores, the problems and stress of restaurants, being able to sit at the table all night. It's two pages long, go read it. AND GUYS. Let's have dinner parties all the time.

I haven't even finished the intro, but had to rant about his sensibility and aesthetic. Bravo, Mr. Tanis! And thanks for the extra crostini, and how kind you were. And thank you Kathryn, for those little red and yellow round joys.

Cherry Tomato Crostini with Greek Yogurt
Adapted from David Tanis' A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes

1 shallot, finely diced
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (he uses red wine, and I would go with his suggestion, though mine worked fine)
Salt and pepper
1/2 cup olive oil (he uses half—I just kind of eyeball, and probably did about a fourth)
2 garlic cloves, smashed to a paste was a bit of salt, plus another clove or two (I used less)
2 pounds cherry tomatoes in very happy colors, halved
1 loaf good bread, like ciabatta or a slightly sweet bread, cut into slices
A container of Greek yogurt
A handful of basil, slivered

In a bowl, macerate (let soak) the shallot in the vinegar wit a little salt. After a few mos (Ramya for moments; actually, maybe I started that one), whisk in some olive oil, crushing the shallots in. Add a bit of the garlic paste, and the cherry tomatoes, season with salt and pepper to taste, and toss very gently. Let them marinate for a bit.
Mr. Tanis does the toasts the proper way, in the oven. I just toasted them, then swiped the wole garlic clove over them once, very lightly. As he says: don't push too hard on the garlic—you want the toast to have just a hint of garlic flavor.
Basically as the toast pops up, spread a nice, hefty smudge of yogurt on the toast, sprinkle with a bit more salt, spoon some of your tomatoes onto it according to taste, and top with some slivers of basil. Relish the late summer, think of your friends.

Summer's Summary, Goodbye Cookies, and A Very Affectionate Hello to Fall

2009-09-10T18:00:00.001-07:00

I feel fall coming on; I don't usually notice the weather, but my gut is steering me towards Chicago and my brain is trying to logically demonstrate to it that I'm not going back (at least, not til early November, and not the same way). This new style of life called kind-of-working and being-at-home-but-not-quite and what-the-heck-is-going-on-but-I'm-cool-with-the-ambiguity is strange: there are bouts of a kind of calm nostalgia for the snow I won't see, or the gargoyles, or the Tea Room, or ivy outside my windows, or reading Aristotle, and there are bouts of woo-hooo-I'm-meeting-awesome-people, and lots of started projects that are stopped by a kind of wait-what-now and is-this-really-the-best-use-of-that-“all-the-time-in-the-world”-I-now-have? It feels like summer, still, a very long and mild and transitory state, and it's only when I remember that I'm not going back—that there's no definite end in site—that all my actions seem revealed in their purposelessness. I mean, wow, that sounded hecka emo there, I mean that I have no idea what's going on, which is just fine with me, and that feels a lot like summer, which is to say aimless and sweaty and sticky and being too hot to wear any clothes but not really being allowed to not wear any, and having to endure the self-righteous looks of svelte suntanned Barbies with sunglasses glued to their faces.

Don't get me wrong—we had a good ride, summer and I. We went to Gualala and watched seals bathe and sipped port and ate toasted pecans in the hot tub at night, stargazing, and we went camping, got very dusty, picked blackberries off the berries on the walk to the river, and we went and explored (and ate) almost all of New York, and we T-P-ed Brad's office while he was gone, thus indulging in the pranks we never did in college, and we started some very enjoyable work, and we painted a bit here, went clubbing (kind of), read a lot of excellent mysteries. There were picnics on the beach with Lisa and Ramya, and fields of flowers, and a jazz quartet on a fire escape n New York,and baby birds outside my window. Baby birds with eyebrows.

But what I really miss, what I always miss, what I always want, is fall, fall and then winter. I miss sweaters, and tea being slightly more appropriate, and rainboots and rain and storms, and soup (oh soup!) and stockings and grey light, and the smell of wet wood and blankets, and that feeling of new books smelling of waxy paper, and the turning of one's energies towards the purposes of learning and reading and writing and thinking, and all those glories, and especially I miss winter food.

During the summer everyone goes around the markets exclaiming at the bounty. Oh, the rosiest-cheeked apricots! they declare. Look at the plethora of tender fruits, the radiant green beans, the fat melons everywhere and the greenery practically climbing out of the stalls and attacking one's feet, Bog-monster-style. And yes, I have a thing for cherries, firm dark cherries, and a thing for glowing tomatoes (but in California they always glow), and you know, that's great and all. But it's not what I crave in the heart of my stomach (or some weird meta-organ like that); I'm Eastern European, after all. I want my soup, dang it.

I want brussell sprouts to be in season, even though seasons don't stop my family from making them at least twice a week. I want leeks soft and butter-melty, and cabbage too (whole heads) and carrots sweet and tender, and cauliflower caramelized in the oven and I want to try endives and every root vegetable available and roasted chestnuts and golden chicken soup and persimmons, pomegranates, pumpkins! I want stews, dash it all, thick, warm, bone-settling stews, and, of course, I want potatoes in absolutely everything. What is this summer frippery, I say. Give me my cholent, now.

So summer, you did good, you fed me pounds upon pounds of cherries and even more frozen yogurt, we had some wild times, and I approved. But I'm ready for fall, OK? For soups and sweaters and having a bit more of a purpose. As Ramya would say, there are times. And they are soon.

These are my goodbyes to summer: Jacques Torres's infamous chocolate chip cookies, with a tinge of sea salt and, in my case, the last of summer's cherries. They don't look like much, but I like them a lot. The recipe provided by the ever-amazing Orangette blog, I think this is my poke-in-the-ribs-of-the-seasons. Kind of a, see, we're ready for warm cookies and milk. I'm using the last of my summer fruit, so let's go.

Chocolate Chip Cookies
From Orangette blog, originally from Jacques Torres (I think I was telling peeps 'Pepin'; whoops! All those French names . . .)

2 cups minus 2 Tbsp. (8 ½ oz.) cake flour
1 2/3 cups (8 ½ oz.) bread flour
1 ¼ tsp. baking soda
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
1 ½ tsp. coarse salt, such as kosher
2 ½ sticks (1 ¼ cups; 10 oz.) unsalted butter, softened
1 ¼ cups (10 oz.) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 Tbsp. (8 oz.) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 ¼ pounds bittersweet chocolate chips or chunks, preferably about 60% cacao content, such as Ghirardelli
Sea salt

Combine flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Whisk well; then set aside.

Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars until very light and fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Mix in the vanilla. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Reduce the mixer speed to low; then add dry ingredients, and mix until just combined. Add the chocolate chips, and mix briefly to incorporate. Press plastic wrap against the dough, and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. The dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.

When you’re ready to bake, preheat oven to 350°F. Remove the bowl of dough from the refrigerator, and allow it to soften slightly. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat.

Using a standard-size ice cream scoop – about 1/3 cup – scoop six mounds of dough onto the baking sheet, making sure to space them evenly. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt, and bake until golden brown but still soft, 15 to 20 minutes. Transfer the baking sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then transfer the cookies onto the rack to cool a bit more.
Yield: About 24 (5-inch) cookies.

Ice-creams and Ramya's Linguistic Miracles

2009-09-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

My best friend/soulmate Ramya tends to phrase her opinions and reactions in absurdly vague yet somehow perfectly apt terms; and these sayings, by dint of their vagueness, become expressions of our way of life, because they are thus always suitable. So we skipped a review session to sneak into the math building to see Star Trek movies illicitly? Well, “there are times.” And it’s true that wars abound and shoppers cut in line at the grocery store and sometimes friendly faces hide swirling vortices of inept malice, “but, people.” Anything she heartily approves of is “best,” not ‘the best’, and I used that term so much in high school that my papa finally broke down and shouted that not everything could be best, because then nothing would be best, and didn’t we see that that was the whole point of defining ‘best?’ He was technically right, but when you live with Ramya long enough, you realize he could also be wrong. And anyway, even if something wasn’t best, “the things are the ones.”

Ramya also has an ability to abbreviate (or abbrev, as she says) the unabbreviatable, to produce terms such as “questshs” (questions), “peeps” (people), “biz” (business) and “totes” (totally). Though she has quite enough of her own, she also collects other people’s mannerisms, which is how we got the Eastern-European accented “mmm, no,” the Korean-accented “aw-kward,” the Southern California “legit,” as well as a variety of other ones (the things!) She also has a variety of untranscribable sounds, whose closest renditions in ink might be things like: “gah!” “ghee!” “chechecheche.”

But I have not even started this blog and already I am on a tangent. Does this bode well or badly? Well, it certainly bodes.

Anywho, I have waxed poetic (strangely enough, given the topic) about Ramya’s speech patterns because they somehow (as always) perfectly outline my attitude towards food, which, though I know we haven’t actually mentioned it much yet, is supposedly the subject of this blog.

For example: there are peeps, like my friend Stacy, whose dietary preferences and restrictions could be formatted into a MENSA test question, but, people. So there’ll be some recipes for Stacy, too. And even though pretty much anything at all good can be “best” (hopefully you’ll pick that one up by example), sometimes the things are the ones, which in this case means that though there are eight bajillion things to do with a zucchini, sometimes one recipe at one time is so heartbreakingly perfect that, well, it is the one. More on that later.

Or, for another example, though my family as a whole is almost frighteningly interested in food, my parents’ styles are a bit different, not really in terms of taste but in terms of tendency: so my mother and I go to those fancy restaurants where the crackers have been produced by a grueling eight-step process utilizing ingredients harvested by monks, and my father likes nothing better than stews so well-done that ingredients have lost their independent forms and amalgamate into slop, often with burnt edges. They, and I, appreciate both sides of that coin, because, you know, there are times.

And we eat quite healthily in my house, for a motley collection of reasons, but we do. We eat mountains of fresh fruit, piles of veggies, avoid carbs that are as pale as we are, eat mostly lean meats, avoid seductive combinations of pure sugar and fat, etc. But, well, there are times, like the end of August when it’s still very toasty and you’ve just discovered that your father once long ago on a whim bought an ice-cream maker, when you just have to make a different kind of ice-cream every day for a week. There are times, I tell you.

So all that was merely to introduce you to Lee's first seven ice-creams, produced in a fit of new-gadget glee and a realization that the end of summer was fast approaching. The thing is, I'm not really an ice cream girl. When it's hot, I feel, it's too hot to be that sticky, and when it's cold, I want a hot chocolate, so I very, very rarely want ice cream. But sometimes the cold and creamy nature of ice cream seems the perfect vessel for infusing absolutely anything into. This, I will admit, is pretty much inspired by the two greatest ice creams I have ever had, hands down (not counting gelato): the awe-inspiring porcelain delicacy of the basil ice cream at Ici Ice Cream, introduced to me by my friend Sam, which is in Berkeley and run by the extraordinary Mary Canales, formerly (or still?) the pastry chef at Chez Panisse; and the brilliant, hilariously tasty cereal-milk (cornflake) ice cream at Momofuku Milk Bar in New York, which my friend Falko introduced me to. Both these ice creams not only utilized the cold creaminess, but were also simply brilliant--one's obsession with them was not for the novelty, but for their own perfection. Both of those boys—Sam and Falko, I mean—are pretty best. Props, boys.

One night last week I dreamt that I got to Momofuku before they opened and they gave me a bucket-sized amount of cereal-milk soft-serve, so I woke up with a fervent longing. However, we didn't have cornflakes, or any other cereal, for that matter, except Cap'n Crunch. Now, I have a special place in my heart for Cap'n Crunch, but Cap'n Crunch ice cream? It's even better.

And thus it began. Vanilla? Other people have perfected vanilla. I defer to their expertise. No, I was set to make the unexpected, but before I could continue, I had to use up some of my mum's apricot jam. Apricot ice cream, with pieces of dried apricot, while more along the normal, is still delicious. Turned out a bit sweet, though.

(Picture forthcoming)

Fig yogurt-based ice cream; the figs are amazing right now. Drizzle with honey. I had to make it twice, since my mother basically pouted when the first batch was finished.

I drink a lot of tea. And by a lot I mean at least five cups a day. You think I'm joking. One of my absolute favorites, which Ramya and I would drink constantly in Chicago winters, is called Earl Grey's Lady Violet, from TeaGschwender; it steeps lightly, but the flavor is just gorgeous--earl grey with a tiny bit of a cake-like sweetness, a hint of floral softness. It makes an ice cream my father pulled out the word "divine" for. I was worried the flavor wouldn't come through, but it comes through all right, and smacks you with beauty.

The yogurt shop in downtown, where my father and I sometimes eat 16 oz of frozen yogurt for dinner, purports to have tamarind yogurt sometimes, but I have yet to see it. They have had, at various times, taro, peanut butter, oatmeal, rose lychee, dulce de leche, and more, but tamarind. Well, along with finding that ice-cream maker, I also found a very old-looking bottle of tamarind syrup in the fridge, and poured a good third of a cup into the ice cream (much more than the recommended dose). And it turned out very well indeed—a kind of dark, sweet, date-like flavor that tasted rather surprisingly like the Cap'n Crunch cereal. Strange, but not at all displeasing.

(Picture forthcoming)

To go with the tea theme, my last concoction was made from Arabian Nights, another Tea Gschwender find, an absurdly perfumed and Orientalized green-and-black blend with roses, jasmine, and sunflowers. Sadly, this time, the flavor does no violence to one at all, but is kind of limp; cold is not so good for perfume, I think. But the ice cream is still tasty inandof itself, and what did come out were the pictures!

Here is how you make ice-cream, then. There are many recipes, but I'll tell you the one I like best so far for dumping things into:

You take an egg and half a cup of sugar and whisk them in the pot til they become pale (when I first heard this, I scoffed that they don't actually become pale, but turns out they do—just beat a little longer than it takes for them to be properly mixed, but no longer):

Then you add 1/3 cup milk and simmer it very gently for a few minutes, being very careful not to get sweet omelette-milk by overcooking, stirring all the time and letting it bubble very delicately. Meanwhile, whip up half a cup of whipping cream (that's how it do, Ramya would say) til not too whipped—til the tips, when you pull out the whisk, drop just a bit but hold. However, I don't think it's really crucial how much you beat it. In this case, I added a dramatic and pretty dose of crushed rose petals, for effect:

Then, you mix those two and, my favorite part, you dump them in the ice-cream maker, push the button, and leave it in the fridge til the light goes off. Modern technology, I love you. Just make sure you attached the churning-mechanism, or you will be astounded that it works for six hours and just tries so hard and never stops. Pavs. (Oh, nos! I haven't explained pavs. That's for another day, methinks. Now, since its 85 and muggy, I am going to go eat that ice cream. YES.)

Femme Fatale Cookies (AKA Ragnaroks or Black and Whites)

2009-08-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

I have a thing for symbolism; a taste for themes. I like references and allusions, matching my shoes to the movie, and decorating my room in college as 22B1 Baker Street's sitting room. And I like bringing apt food to a gathering, something fitting, something perfectly timed. Which is funny, the things I say sometimes, you wouldn't think I was very concerned with things being perfectly timed.

Perhaps that's why I've only made these cookies twice: I've saved them for rather silly but enjoyably thematic purposes. But they themselves are anything but silly. They are dangerous, the femme fatales of the cookie world, seductive, beautiful, delicious, and lethal to one's desire for health, focus, or sanity.

They're kind of like this scene from Out of the Past:

Remember this scene? What a brilliant movie.

Anyway, I first made them one morning in senior year of high school, to bring into our Noir Analysis class when it was my morning to bring in baked goods (we had a rotating schedule for the task.) My old-teacher-still-friend Vicky, for whose class I made them, named them Ragnarok cookies, since we had just read Das Rheingold. They are kind of universe-ending sometimes, especially warm with a cup of tea or a cappuccino. I made them again, at long last, yesterday, for the movie-night Ramya and I arranged at work, during which we saw Twilight for our second time. (Don't ask me why we saw Twilight twice; it was a fit of madness, an illusion based on the fact that the first time we saw it, we mocked it so continuously we actually did not hear a word. This time, we heard more of the words, and it significantly reduced the quality of the experience, which was still, admittedly, rather fun.) But the cookies are rather apt for Twilight; I hate to do this, but I would compare them to those sparkly vampires: beautiful, shining, and pale on the outside, evil, dark, and delicious on the inside. I'm on the werewolf team, but I don't think werewolf cookies would taste this good. (Survey: what would werewolf cookies consist of?)

I wrote this paragraph four and a half years ago, the day I made them for Noir, after the cookies had long since been devoured:

'In the fragile, vapor-yellow light of the kitchen which made sharp the still-darkness outside but vague the borders of the window, I stood in warm slippers and my father's musty old shirt, and rolled the dough into spheres which reeked the throat-tinglingly smooth scent of darkest chocolate, and let the perfect globes roll and play in powdered sugar, which reminded me of snow seen from a distance, and when they were baked they cracked like drying earth of the glaze on an aging donut, and reminded me of that Cohen lyric, “there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in,” and as some baked to emerge with crisp white crust and the soft give of marshmallow within, I rolled more and more in the small lacquered sugar bowl, somehow aware of this moment in which the twist of my wrist was perfect, the arc of the dough gathering whiteness, the early incomprehensible light creating a laughably essential moment as I baked cookies this morn before the sun. We're reading Borderliners in Noir (best book, best class) and it is about good but dark underworlds and lighted surfaces and tunnels, and I am really pleased by this thematic shtick. I think Vicky will appreciate it, and the cookies.'

So I was dramatic in my youth of sorts (am still dramatic, really), and really into run-on sentences, but these cookies kind of deserve both drama and run-ons.

Femme Fatale/Ragnarok Cookies
Originally Black And White Cookies
From David Lebovitz's Room for Dessert

8 oz. bittersweet chocolate
3 tbls butter
1 ½ tbls liquor (I used brandy, and a nice splash more than his recipe calls for)
2 eggs, room temp
1/3 cup of granulated sugar, plus more of rolling cookies
1 cup almonds, toasted
½ cup flour
½ tsp baking powder
Powdered sugar for coating (about a cup, I've found)

1)In a bowl set over simmering water (a double-boiler, he means, but it is kind of him to show that one does not need to purchase a double-boiler in order to (what is the verb?) double-boil things) melt the chocolate and butter together with the liquor.

2)Whip the eggs with the sugar until they form a ribbon, 5-7 minutes in a standing electric mixer. Stir in the melted chocolate (he forgets to mentions after it has cooled a bit. Otherwise, unless I'm missing a trick, they'll cook the eggs, and you will get scrambled-egg cookies, which idea actually has potential, now that I think of it. I'm also not sure what he means by 'form a ribbon'--I just mix for the requisite time, til they are super-fluffy and comfy looking.)

3)In a food processor, pulverize the almonds (blanched, be sure) with the flour, then add the baking powder. Stir this into the chocolate batter.

4)Chill the dough in the fridge until firm, 1-2 hours. The dough can be made a day or two in advance, and refrigerated til you want to bake them.

5)Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

6)Sift some granulated sugar into one bowl, and a bunch of powdered sugar into another. Roll the dough into 1-inch-diameter spheres, and toss them first in the granulated, then the powdered sugar, coating them completely and even extraneously. Set them on a parchment-lined baking sheet about an inch apart. Several batches may be required.

7)Bake the cookies for 12-14 minutes (I do 15-16, actually, since they came out very soft, perhaps because of my alcoholic tendencies), rotating the sheet midway through baking. (If you have a convection oven, don't bother with this rotating business.) They are done when they are just slightly firm at the edges but still quite soft near the center. They should slide off the baking sheet when you nudge them. Once they've cooled, store in an airtight container.

Nimnimim

2009-08-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

‘Nimnimim’ is Hebrew for sprinkles, which, as the picture above attests, I have always had a genuine and messy love for. I realize sprinkles might not be everyone’s idea of what is the height of culinary innovation or even, you know, very tasty, but they aptly symbolize the purpose of this blog: small (though with my loquacious tendancies, we’ll see) colorful (both in prose and with photographs) and, yes, tasty little bits from the culinary corner (ha, who am I kidding, culinary infrastructure) of my life. There’s the added bonus that ‘nimnimim’ reflects the Israeli and Eastern-European Jew (because I don’t think Yiddish has a word for sprinkles) tinge that inevitably colors my cooking, and that ‘nimnimim’ sounds a lot like ‘numnumnum’, which is actually what my old college dorm’s resident head’s daughter would say constantly at every meal, for the entirety of that meal. So this blog will hopefully contain descriptions and boasting about various gastronomic delights and hilarious failures, including what I cook, what I eat, and what I dream about eating (mostly bacon chocolate, tea, and potatoes boiled in cream, I’ll tell you that straight out). This will also hopefully include a smaller ratio of words-to-parenthesis than the above paragraph, but again, with me, you never know.

To start with, some proof of my long history of culinary glee:

I think we still own that plate, actually.

Wishing it were tea, I'm sure. (Also, don't mock those . . . pants-things. They were the height of fashion, really.)

Already plotting how to empty and then refill the refrigerator, you can see.

Let’s be honest, though: really this is just a place for me to show off all of what Falko calls my “food porn” and give out those recipes I always say I’ll send and guilt myself into writing and cooking and provide my post-college self with some kind of expressive frivolity (because we were really worried about that, you may think sarcastically.) Also hopefully find some more lovely people who will send me recipes. Mwahahaha; I mean, ahem, lovely people with whom to form lasting relationships. No, really. There’s no better setting for meeting friends than a kitchen.

So, shall we?