I'm a busy and important person with a very stressful life

french toast that looks like pancakes

I forced myself to choose some recipes from John Besh's My Family Table: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking and am going to cook them and decide whether to keep the book or donate it to the library. I only bought the book a month or so ago, but it rubs me the wrong way, starting with the subtitle. More on that later.

Yesterday I made Besh's Nutella-stuffed french toast. I had to. Every day Owen comes home from school and spreads a piece of untoasted bread thickly with Nutella and that is his snack. I made Nutella from scratch a few times, but he prefers the waxy store product and I gave up trying to elevate his tastes. It's not very healthy and I should stop buying it. Wait! I don't buy it. My husband buys it.

Besh's Nutella-stuffed french toast involves putting a dollop of Nutella in the middle of a slice of sandwich bread which you top with another slice. I would not use rough whole wheat bread or artisanal bread for this; it should be soft white bread, storebought or homemade. Now cut a circular shape around the blob of Nutella, sealing the doughy edges of two slices of bread. (Besh specifies a dull juice glass and you mustn't substitute a biscuit cutter; I tried and it doesn't smash the bread together enough form a seal.) Soak very briefly in a rich french toast batter (eggs, melted butter, sugar, milk, vanilla, orange juice) and fry. The recipe is here.

Should you make it? I don't like Nutella and only ate the plain bread part, so can't comment on whether this is an exquisite treat or disgustingly rich. Owen said it was "more like dessert than a breakfast." My husband had thirds.

before it looked like pancakes, it looked like Uncrustables

Some thoughts:

-wasteful of bread. We gave the crusts to the chickens and of course you could make bread crumbs. But french toast that uses the entire slice is more efficient.

-unhealthy

-the french toast batter: excellent. On account of the melted butter? The boatload of sugar? Orange juice? Made very sweet and custardy french toast.

-Besh specifies frying french toast in oil. I think it was Molly Wizenberg who swore by frying french toast in oil. I remember thinking at the time, no, no, no, she's wrong, butter. I've changed my mind; she's right.

This morning, I decided to check A Homemade Life to be sure I hadn't misremembered Wizenberg's comments on the subject, but couldn't find the book anywhere. Distressing! I started thinking about other recipes from her book that I didn't want to lose and remembered the chocolate chip banana bread. Or at least I thought there was a recipe for chocolate chip banana bread. . .

Then I started thinking about banana bread. I love banana bread and make it a lot. Why are some recipes so much tastier than others? Decided to cross-reference the recipes in Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, and other stalwarts to see what I might learn. Got carried away and ended up looking in the indexes of all my cookbooks and "studying" banana bread recipes.

Fact: There are 104 different banana recipes under our roof.

When I staggered to my feet after this riveting exercise, hours had passed. It was lunchtime. I ate a piece of banana bread I'd baked recently using Recipes from Miss Daisy's. It's a bit dry and I now knew why: because it calls for butter. I had figured out that all the recipes I most love call for oil, which yields a moister bread. Obviously. Because oil is not just moister than butter, oil is actually liquid. This is unappetizing when you think about it.

I am now a banana bread expert. Ask me anything! I can tell you that some people replace the oil with whipped prunes or applesauce and use egg whites instead of whole eggs. Dwight Yoakam likes banana bread made with whole wheat flour. Nigella soaks golden raisins in rum and tosses them into her loaf, while Mark Bittman prefers coconut and the wizardly Shirley Corriher folds whipped cream into the batter. (This, I am going to try.) Other people fortify their banana breads with Wheat Chex, wheat germ, bran, and Bisquick. Cooks stir in black coffee, maraschino cherries, candied citron, sesame seeds, mango, fresh cranberries, cocoa powder, or marmalade. You can flavor with rum, almond extract, vanilla, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, lemon peel, orange oil, allspice, cinnamon, or none of the above. Use more sugar or less, or replace the sugar with honey or Lyle's Golden Syrup. Barley flour? Sure. Rice flour? Why not. You can even make sourdough banana bread, though I wouldn't.

It was fun.

I may be a little underemployed.

Buckeye honey

We have an enormous, spectacular California buckeye in our yard that looks like the picture above and every spring grows long, ruffled wands of white flowers. I situated our bee hives a few feet from the buckeye and yesterday realized, wow, we're going to get buckeye honey! How cool is that? I decided to see if there was anything written about buckeye honey. Indeed there is. 

From the USDA: "Do not plant buckeyes near apiaries as the flowers are poisonous to honey bees."

Further reading has only deepened my concern. The bees will have to be moved, the sooner the better. Shockingly bad luck.

My review of Molly Wizenberg's Homemade Life and Giulia Melucci's I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti is up on the NPR web site. You can read it here.

A Homemade Life: Earnest Summation

It would be hard to write anything unkind about A Homemade Life with Molly Wizenberg gazing at me like that.

Not that I want to! I can't think of anything negative to say about A Homemade Life, which is beautifully written, smart, soulful, and gently funny. Do I like a little more vinegar in my reading material? I do. But that's a taste preference, not a critical judgment, and probably reflects poorly on my character. Objectively speaking, Wizenberg has written an almost perfect book, one that transitions smoothly from a wrenching account of her father's death into a sweet love story, and somehow manages to integrate toffee recipes, wacky friends, and trips to Paris, the wide-ranging narrative held together by Wizenberg's quirky sensibility and calm, lovely voice.

You don't need to cook to enjoy this book. But if you tackle the recipes, you'll find them clearly expressed and excellent. I made 31 recipes from A Homemade Life and here's the breakdown:

 

Worth the price of the book: 1 (cream-braised cabbage)

Great: 7 

Good: 18

So-so: 5

Bad: 0

There were some standouts -- the cabbage, the macaroons, Doron's (incredible) meatballs -- but Wizenberg's recipes are much more concentrated in the middle "good" range than other collections I've worked through. I think that might be a given with the culinary memoir where the recipes make the cut by virtue of the role they played in someone's life rather than how they perform in a blind taste test. Wizenberg's father's potato salad, his French toast, her husband's Indian chickpeas -- all dishes I very much enjoyed, but would I make them again? Probably not. If I wrote my own culinary memoir it would include my late grandmother's raisin-spice cookies. I love them because they were hers. You'd like them. You wouldn't bake them twice.

By the same token, there were no outright flops. The recipes that make their way into the fiber of another person's life tend to be reliable and pretty delicious.

It's a terrific book. I've decided to do another culinary memoir that should take me through the end of May: David Lebovitz's Living the Sweet Life in Paris. 

A Homemade Life: Cherry salad

The cherries came to the market in time for me to make Molly Wizenberg's bread, cherry, arugula and goat cheese salad. You don't need a recipe, just those ingredients, plus some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. And try to mash some of the cherries so the juice becomes part of the dressing. I took her advice and threw it together my own way -- didn't remove crust from bread before toasting for croutons, didn't measure anything, forgot about the miniscule quantity of chopped garlic. A terrific dinner for a hot Sunday night. Also, cherries in a salad are just an excellent idea. I'm going to try to remember that.

You'd have to be crazy to date the movie Spock instead of Kirk

Seriously, Uhura needs glasses. Otherwise, Star Trek was swell, entertaining to both sentimental grown woman and excitable 8-year-old boy.

I made a slightly altered, slightly inferior version (see above) of the green tea cake the other day. I asked husband if he'd try it and tell me his thoughts. He said, "No. I've already tasted green tea cake and it's not as good as real cake." 

Funny husband. There's one more version I want to attempt before posting a recipe. 

Meanwhile, my friend D.* is coming over this morning and we are going to make kombucha using a "mother" given to me by Robin, a longtime kombucha-maker and fermented foods expert.

I do not drink kombucha. A few years ago, I was searching for a zero-calorie, non-water drink at Whole Foods when I saw this juicy-looking beverage that appeared to be as close as I was going to get, barring the miraculous appearance of diet Dr. Pepper. I bought it, took a sip, experienced the terrifying shock of kombucha, and have never gone back for more. 

Not everyone feels this way. D. drinks a bottle of kombucha every day and Robin has long extolled the health-giving properties of fermented foods like kombucha, which supposedly help repopulate the gut with "good" bacteria.

D. kept talking about the price of kombucha (high) and wouldn't it be interesting to make it, and I agreed it would be interesting to make it. If not drink it.

I've postponed wrapping up Molly Wizenberg's Homemade Life because cherries have appeared in the market and she has a recipe for bread salad with cherries, arugula, and goat cheese that I want to try. Four of my favorite foods are mentioned in the name of that dish. 

*I can't imagine she will mind being mentioned by name in the blog, but there are lots of things I have failed to imagine.

A Homemade Life: Whatever you call it, we like it

Molly Wizenberg calls it a "Dutch baby" pancake. When I was growing up, we called it "hot oven pancake," which is boring, but probably what I will call it forever. I had forgotten how easy this breakfast is, easier than making pancakes on a griddle. Wizenberg's 2-minute recipe is right here, plus the amusing story of how she acquired it. She recommends topping the puffy popover-like item with lemon and powdered sugar, which I also endorse. Owen however complained that it was "wet" and "not sweet enough."

I said he could have some maple syrup if he wished. 

He replied, "That's what I was hoping, but doubting." 

I think this is it for A Homemade Life, which has turned out to be sweet and wonderful company in the kitchen.

A Homemade Life: Custard-filled cornbread

This custard-filled cornbread is splendid. Molly Wizenberg gives Marion Cunningham credit for the recipe and says it is sometimes called "spider cake." You make a rudimentary cornbread batter and pour it into a buttered pan, then pour a cup of heavy cream over the top. Bake. When you cut into it, the the top and bottom layers are grainy and cornbready, the middle is creamy and warm, like pudding.

 

Wizenberg recommends serving with maple syrup, as do I. (Omit the frozen corn kernels, halve the quantity of salt and this is virtually the same recipe.)

Alas, custard-filled cornbread did not go over well with my children. Isabel couldn't get her mind around putting syrup on cornbread, and she couldn't get her mind around cornbread that was not exactly like every other cornbread she's ever eaten. "I don't like the moist part," she said. 

A hard case, that one. I ate what she left on her plate and what Owen left on his, and now feel very lovely and slim. 

A Homemade Life: I waited in vain and made spaghetti

I spent all of yesterday waiting for a version of the table above, ordered for the large, odd space between our kitchen and dining areas. I hope it fits. My mother is skeptical, sister enthusiastic, husband swears I never told him anything about it. I swear I did.

The delivery company called to say I had to be in between 10 and 3 to receive said table, so I arranged my busy schedule accordingly. Didn't go to spin class or the supermarket or the library. Such sacrifices. Didn't meet my father at our favorite Chinese restaurant in San Francisco for lunch. Instead I made him come here while I waited for the truck. I served him leftover Ed Fretwell soup from Molly Wizenberg's Homemade Life.

It's essentially minestrone and really yummy, though the backstory to how Wizenberg came to have this recipe is sad and it feels ghoulish to make the soup once you know it. (Her family ate a lot of this soup while her father was dying. Mmm.) The orange item on the side is a leftover bouchon au thon, a delightful snack that Wizenberg learned how to prepare in France. Here's a better, if not Saveur-ready, picture of bouchons:

 

You mix canned tuna, tomato paste, onion, Gruyere, and some other things, put them in buttered muffin tins, bake, unmold, and you have these tidy, ladylike patties. I served them night-before-last to my mother and grandmother and yesterday to my father and would eat another right now if there were any left.

Aside from serving my father leftovers, all I did all day was lie on the sofa reading Giulia Melucci's memoir, I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti, while waiting for the table. Finally, I called the delivery company at 2:45 and said, what's up? 

Dispatcher: We're running late. The truck won't come for at least another hour. 

I told them I was going out for 20 minutes to collect children from school. Did so, came back on schedule, the phone rang: I'd missed the truck. I got the manager on the line and threw a small fit. I told him I'd "stayed home from work" to wait for this table. I consider that a white lie.

Then I finished Melucci's book. Why are all stories of single women in Manhattan compared to the utterly fantastical Sex & the City? I relished that show/movie/cloud of cotton candy as much as the next girl, but it's about as realistic as Star Trek. We all know this, yes? I was single in Manhattan in my 20s and it was nothing like Sex & the City. My sister was single in Manhattan in her twenties and much of her thirties and it was nothing like Sex & the City. It was a lot more like I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. For the good of the species, you convince yourself to fall for a self-absorbed, not-that-hot male who even on the first date hesitates to pick up the check. (I'm not old school -- I'm new school -- but picking up the check is such a tiny, simple gesture of grace, generosity and good faith.) Then, just when you've overcome your qualms, the self-absorbed, not-that-hot cheapskate breaks your heart. You aimed low -- and missed! Melucci's memoir is this archetypal story told and retold with great brio until the bittersweet final pages. I loved it. Finished the book and made my kids spaghetti for dinner.

Still waiting for the table.

Platter of Figs: Going back into the bat cave

I'm a sucker for cookbook recommendations, and this list would be more tempting and problematic but for the appearance of Platter of Figs, which makes me inclined to dismiss all of her other tips.

A few months ago, I cooked every dish in the "winter" section of Platter of Figs except the persimmon pudding. Expectations were high for this elegant, much-praised book. Results: stunningly mediocre. Only two dishes (celery root remoulade, octopus salad) would I go out of my way to make again, and the food that didn't work out was not just meh, it was, in some cases, curiously hateful.

 

One of my darker theories is that David Tanis feels contempt for his bourgeois American audience and this book is his passive-aggressive way of delivering the message. Exhibit A: The menu featuring pig's ear salad and chilled prunes, which was even more revolting than it sounds.

On the other hand, it's both foolish and wrong to assume evil motives without powerful evidence, which I don't have. You can't cook at Chez Panisse for 20+ years without being a brilliant chef. Tanis may be a lovely man and culinary genius who simply wrote a lame cookbook. 

 

Also, to be fair, maybe winter isn't Tanis' season. I'm forcing myself to execute two spring menus before I can finish with this book. But which ones? These menus are punishingly expensive, strangely untempting, or both. I could mix and match dishes, but the whole volume is built around purportedly "harmonious" menus. As Alice Waters puts it, "each a little masterpiece."

Bah.

Can't afford the lobster risotto. Ditto the veal with morels. I could do the "five spice duck with buttered turnips and fried ginger" except the starter calls for two pounds of fresh crab. Even one pound is too spendy. A side of wild salmon is out of the question. (I agree with Tanis that there are compelling environmental reasons not to buy farmed salmon, but then he makes one of those statements that drive me beserk: "Farmed salmon are as bland and flavorless as factory chicken." This, alas, is not true. The farmed salmon from Safeway is repellent, but I find the Atlantic farmed salmon from Whole Foods delicious, neither "bland" nor "flavorless," words that, incidentally, mean exactly the same thing. Food that is bad for the world does not always taste bad, though it would be convenient if it did; there should be a name for this fallacy.)

 

Anyway, this leaves me with the following two menus:

How to Cook a Rabbit

-spinach cake with herb salad

-mustard rabbit in the oven

-parsnips Epiphany-style

-apple tart

Can't get revved up for parsnips, unsure about spinach cake. But I'm okay with bunny; I'll just tell the kids it's chicken. No, no more fibbing. I'll tell them the truth, just won't expect them to eat it.

Supper of the Lamb

-warm asparagus vinaigrette

-shoulder of spring lamb with flageolet beans and olive relish

-rum baba with cardamom

This actually sounds amazing.

If these menus turn out beautifully, maybe I'll try one of the splurge menus. If they are innocuous or worse, I'm officially done with Platter of Figs.

I'm still not done with Wizenberg. I love A Homemade Life, especially after the funny dinner we cooked last night, which gets its own post. I got up too late to make the Dutch baby pancakes and I also want to make her custard-filled cornbread. 

After that: back to Tanis, however briefly.

A Homemade Life: some cabbage, some cookies

Won't win any beauty pageants, but Molly Wizenberg's cream-braised cabbage is my favorite dish from her book. You cut cabbage in eighths, brown well in butter, then braise in cream for forty minutes. Since my kids are silly and my husband moderate, I ate almost the whole bowl. As Wizenberg puts it: "Cabbages may be homely, hard-headed things, but with a little braising they're bewitching. Cut into wedges and cooked slowly in a Jacuzzi bath of cream, they wind up completely relaxed, their bitter pungency washed away and replaced with a rich, nutty sweetness. My stomach coos like a baby at the thought of it."

My stomach coos like a baby at the thought of it. Only a very few writers can get away with lines like that. Wizenberg totally does, but I get uncomfortable even typing that sentence in quotations. 

Isabel helped make Jimmy's pink cookies, a plain buttery dough that we cut into hearts and topped with kirsch-spiked icing. Jimmy is the "gay husband" of Wizenberg's friend Rebecca who also has a "straight husband" named John. It's a cute story. Jimmy is the source for Wizenberg's recipe for Dutch baby pancakes, which I intend to make tomorrow for breakfast.

 

Jimmy's pink cookies are delicious. My stomach coos at the thought.

See? Not me. Like red lipstick and the pencil skirt, I just can't pull it off.

A Homemade Life: still living vicariously

My in-laws are visiting from Boston and they have now eaten two Molly Wizenberg-driven meals.

Saturday night: an innocuous chana masala*(Indian chickpea stew) that I served with some Indian accoutrements, most notably the banana raita out of Anne Mendelson's Milk. I have no idea what made this raita so special (the 1/2 teaspoon of cumin? the supersweet, bordering-on-blackened bananas?) but it was very special. For dessert: Wizenberg's fabulous macaroons (so moist they're almost juicy -- like the inside of a Mounds bar -- the recipe is printed here) accompanied by dishes of black pepper ice cream.

The ice cream gave me pause. It occurred to me that black pepper ice cream could be perceived as a hostile gesture by visitors on their first night in town. Food is so loaded and symbolic maybe it would be better to go with, you know, strawberry.

But to thine own self be true and all that. If I'd served strawberry ice cream it would have been completely phony, and then what would the message be? I served the pepper ice cream. And while it was strange, it was also delicious, the dusty pepper kind of sneaking up on you towards the end. I don't think I'll make it again, but it turned out to be a delightful experiment and David and Mary are still speaking to me.

Last night, we had Wizenberg's lovely fennel and Asian pear salad, in which I substituted some Manchego for Parmesan. Just pristine layers of thinly sliced crispy fruit, vegetable, and cheese lightly dressed in lemon and olive oil. You feel like eating a salad like this is a spa treatment.

This was not true of  Doron's meatballs made with turkey, pine nuts, raisins, cilantro along with the more pedestrian meatball components, like egg and breadcrumbs. Served these fatty, delectable little numbers with a lemony Middle Eastern-ish yogurt sauce. As always, in my fear of undercooking meatballs I overcooked them so they all had a thick dark crust. Still excellent. Also, blurry.

I hate it when all I can think of to do is list the food I've cooked, but this morning, that is all I can think of to do. We finished with chocolate glazed chocolate cupcakes. They were likened to Ho-Ho's by those who enjoy chocolate, which was everyone at the table but me. I made the chocolate cupcakes as penance for the black pepper ice cream, but actually eating them would have been martyrdom. Sometimes, I feel so alone. 

*This is Wizenberg's now-husband Brandon's "recipe." Except, he doesn't use a recipe, he cooks by ear, and this is her attempt to capture his formula on paper. She encourages the cook to tweak to taste, which I did. A lot. The dish still never quite came together.

A Homemade Life: And so it is, but you might need a mandoline to make it

Molly Wizenbeg's recipe for zucchini noodles requires a mandoline to julienne squash into long threads that resemble spaghetti. I don't remember how we got our mandoline (wedding present? present present? did I buy it?) all I know is that we've had it since before we moved into this house eight years ago and never once used it. Look at it. Thing is sharp and crazy complicated.

My mother is mechanically minded and manually dexterous with these nimble, bony hands that love to pick wrong stitches out of a needlepoint and assemble a VCR  just for the exercise. She has what my father calls "possum" hands. (He has "pancake" hands, as do I. "Pancake" is the vastly inferior type of hand, but fortunately there's more to life than hands.)

My mother had the mandoline julienning zucchini in under ten minutes. 

You saute the finely cut zucchini in olive oil until soft, then toss with hot spaghetti and pesto. 

Elegant bowl was also made by mother's hands.

 

The spaghetti was tasty, if not as tasty as traditional pesto-sauced pasta without zucchini. I know it is healthier and makes everything less fattening, but we all felt the watery, flaccid strips of zucchini got in the way.

 

For dessert: Wizenberg's vanilla bean buttermilk cake with glazed oranges and creme fraiche. She introduces this recipe with a story about buying too many oranges then having a vision of a white cake with poached oranges, "a little like a Creamsicle in cake form." After much experimentation, she finally settled on a buttermilk cake out of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible as the perfect vehicle for glazed oranges and syrup. Excellent choice. What appealed to me was how the cake itself -- tangy from buttermilk -- tasted like cheesecake but was, in fact, cake cake. Even without the oranges, I instantly loved it.

So, here's the weird thing. I just pulled out my copy of The Cake Bible to see how much Wizenberg tinkered with the recipe (almost not at all) and noticed that I'd already baked this cake once before. On 2-11-01 I wrote: "Fluffy, golden, buttery -- but there IS a tang and I don't like it."

I can not explain.

A Homemade Life: A happy family dinner

Family dinners like this aren't going to save civilization, but no one burst into tears, which is increasingly how I define success.

To go with last night's roasted chicken, I made Molly Wizenberg's potato salad. Actually, it was her late father Burg's recipe, made with mayonnaise, Ranch dressing, and dill. Burg is one of the great characters in her memoir: "He loved being a doctor. He loved Dixieland jazz. He loved the old Alfa Romeo Spider that sat in the driveway and never ran. He loved crossword puzzles, Dylan Thomas, and Gene Krupa banging on a drum kit on the stereo upstairs. He loved omelets and olives. . ."*

We liked Burg's potato salad. Mark was just happy I made potato salad at all. The potato salad I ate as a child was yellow from ballpark mustard and contained sweet pickle relish and if I have to eat potato salad, that's the potato salad I want to eat. But the truth is, I'm really not crazy for potato salad and hardly ever make it.

 

For dessert: Hoosier pie, which contains corn syrup, pecans and chocolate chips and is rich, super-sweet, and gooey. Nice! But you've probably eaten something almost exactly like this before -- it is often called Derby pie -- and perhaps even baked it. I have.

 

I'm jumping the gun with this assessment, but the magic of this book lies in the narrative not the recipes. All the dishes have been swell, but they're distinguished primarily by the fact that they played a role in Wizenberg's life. Which is the whole point; she's not claiming to be Ferran Adria or Julia Child. Her Hoosier pie is attached to a sad, sweet family story and it's about so much more than how it tastes. 

*Anyone can do this, and it's very fun: My father loved being a lawyer but loves being retired even more. He loves sappy country music and Leonard Cohen and a well-pruned peach tree. He loves Ian Rankin thrillers and road trips and insanely spicy Sichuan food, even though he was raised on overcooked meat and potatoes. . .

  

I could do that all day. You should try it.  

A Homemade Life: I have been neglectful

Got some catching up to do. Those are Molly Wizenberg's lemon-ginger scones which we liked very much, though one member of the family spoke up against candied ginger.

 

I also made her uncle Arnold's cider-glazed salmon which was lovely and which I served for Sunday dinner with red cabbage salad. Wizenberg dresses this basic shredded salad with lemon and olive oil then tosses it with finely grated Parmesan. I did that and thought it needed a lot more oomph, so added large curls of Parmesan. Very, very tasty with adjustments.

Last night: Wizenberg's tomato soup with two fennels (fennel seeds and chopped fennel bulbs) served with bread and cheese. We ate a lot of bread and cheese. Sometimes the simplest ingredients come together to make miraculously delicious soup, and sometimes everything looks fine on paper, but never quite clicks. Such was the case with this soup, and it had something to do with using canned tomatoes as the base. I didn't feel like I was eating soup; I felt like I was eating hot canned tomatoes. Maybe because I was?

A Homemade Life: So far, we like this store

Back when I was cooking through How to Cook Everything Vegetarian my sister voiced a complaint about Mark Bittman: "I don't want cream soup with fifty variations. I want him to tell me which is the most delicious so I can make THAT one."

Basically, she doesn't want a department store, she wants a boutique. Molly Wizenberg's Homemade Life is a boutique -- small, spare, exquisite, expressing a very specific and personal culinary aesthetic. I love that kind of shop, and I love this kind of book.

Night One of Homemade Life: big success. Wizenberg's sliced spring salad -- radicchio, endive, avocado, cilantro, feta -- was straightforward and excellent. Elegance and clarity are hallmarks of Wizenberg's prose, and also of her recipes. Here's a strange story. Isabel hates cheese. She picks cheese out of her burritos, barely tolerates it on pizza, and will not touch a quesadilla. While eating this salad she mistakenly bit into a chunk of feta and said, "What is this cheese? I love this cheese!"

Feta. She loves feta but can't stand Monterey jack?

Owen didn't eat any dinner, but that is hardly news and I am willing myself not to care. 

Dessert: yogurt cake. See photo at top of page.  This recipe, first posted on Wizenberg's blog, was how she met her future husband. A friend of his was searching for a French yogurt cake recipe, stumbled on Orangette, etc. "It may be simple, but to me, it borders on the magical," Wizenberg writes. 

It is indeed a lovely cake. I didn't find it magical, but this isn't my boutique.

Night Two of Homemade Life: Owen did eat the dinner, which consisted of arugula salad with chocolate and pistachios.

 

There was a more substantial meal planned, but stuff happened. The chunks and shards of chopped bittersweet chocolate married surprisingly well with the arugula, though arugula is better alone. Or with feta. For dessert: white chocolate coeur a la creme, which was delicious, but would have been even more incredible without the chocolate. If I ever open a boutique, there will be lots of vanilla and nuts, very little chocolate and it will all be milk.

 

In other news: 

-I owe wrap-up reviews for Milk and Fat, both of which were wonderful.

-Have completely lost track of our April food budget.

-The bees are coming on Sunday. 

-There is also this Slate piece that I recently wrote about the cost of cooking vs. buying various basic foodstuffs. I don't resemble the woman in the illustration, though I do covet her purse.

Saving myself from myself

For reasons I'll explain later, I'm postponing the journey Into the Vietnamese Kitchen for a few months. Next up: A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg of the elegant blog Orangette. It's a memoir with recipes, part of a supposedly sizzling publishing trend, and I read it over the course of a recent afternoon. Beautifully written, plus it's packed with enticing recipes, primarily for healthy salads and dainty desserts. There's not a single dish in here that is in any way frightening, gross, or overly ambitious, categories I seem to gravitate towards. My family should be pleased.

So, there's that. I also wanted to amend my recent criticism of Laurie Colwin's fiction. I've started reading her early story collection, The Lone Pilgrim, which is everything her novels aren't: tense, sharp, melancholy, ambivalent. Though these tales reflect her perennial, sometimes stifling, obsession with domesticity and a well-laid table, she's coming at it from another direction here -- from the outside looking in -- and hunger, loneliness, and longing are infinitely more interesting, at least in fiction, than cozy satisfaction.