Mingalaba, friends

We visited a lot of Buddhist temples on our vacation. By "a lot" I mean maybe fifty or sixty. By "a lot" I mean a few too many. 

I write to you from a hotel patio on an island off the coast of Thailand. Palms are rustling, tropical birds chirping, some French kids splashing around in the pool. I can hear, but not see, the ocean. It's pretty nice, but not quite paradise because it's also roasting hot and we're totally lethargic and covered with mosquito bites. My bathing suit is too tight and we keep nervously joking about tsunamis. Did you see The Impossible? Don't! It will subtly darken any future visits to the beaches of southeast Asia.

I won't bore you with a long blow-by-blow account of this beautiful trip Isabel and I took to Myanmar and Thailand. Just a short blow-by-blow.

Day 1: Yangon

I'd decided this trip was a huge mistake about a week before we left. I worried Isabel wouldn't enjoy it, that she'd sigh and complain about the heat and exotic food, I'd lose my temper, we'd bicker and have a miserable or even just mediocre vacation together and then she'd go off to college and I'd never see her again. Something like that.

We arrived in Yangon after twenty hours of sleepless air travel and our guide took us straight from the airport to see a Burmese white elephant. Standing there in the soupy heat looking at this white elephant (actually, pinkish beige) I began fretting about Isabel's state of mind.

They call this a WHITE elephant?  

Was she weary? Was she hot? Was she sighing? Should I ask the guide to take us to the hotel so she could rest? I glanced at Isabel to read her mood and in that instant my worries all evaporated.  She smiled at me, totally radiant. She was into it. Not minding the jet lag, not minding the heat, just dazzled and fascinated by the strangeness and beauty of this new place like any sane, curious person would be. Why had I doubted her? I knew then that this trip was going to be wonderful and haven't worried about anything except dysentery and tsunamis since.

There's more I could say about Yangon -- about the lovely British colonial architecture, the magnificent Shwedagon Pagoda, the Reclining Buddha, how quickly you become accustomed to women with thanaka paste on their cheeks and men in longyis -- but I promised to keep this short.

Day 2-3: Bagan

There are more than 2,000 pagodas in the ancient kingdom of Bagan and we visited a good number of them. (My picture does an ok job capturing Bagan's splendor, but this one does it better.) We climbed pagodas, circled pagodas, admired carvings outside pagodas and murals in the cool, dark interiors of pagodas, where you could hear and occasionally see the resident bats. Has David Quammen's Spillover been translated into Burmese? It should be.

Overheated dogs slept on the terraces of the pagodas. The dogs in Myanmar appeared to be dead all day and then came to life when the sun went down.

Bagan is astonishing. If you have a bucket list, Bagan belongs on it.

In my favorite Bagan temple, an enormous buddha was packed as tightly as a chick inside an eggshell. Super-weird!

It was in Bagan that Isabel and I made our first foray into a Burmese restaurant. The place had been recommended by both a tour guide and hotel receptionist, so we assumed the menu would include dumbed-down Burmese dishes translated into English.

Wrong we were. Myanmar isn't all that touristy yet, and I'm ashamed to report that authentic Burmese food terrified us.

Not only were there no English translations on the menu at this restaurant, there was no menu. We sat down and scowling waitresses began smacking dishes on the table in front of us. Dish after dish after dish of murky, room temperature mystery food. Seventeen dishes in all, including dessert. We finally identified some chicken and pork in oily sauces and a pile of leathery fried fish. There were also pastes and pickles that resembled those we'd just seen an hour ago, mounded in baskets and dotted with flies at the local market.

The hot food definitely wasn't hot, nor was the cold food cold. 

At nearby tables, big, chatty groups of Burmese were happily gobbling up their lunches, but all I could think was: DYSENTERY. We picked at our meal, some of which was tasty enough, like the stir-fried greens, but most of which was repulsive, like the gristly gobs of tepid pork. After we'd made a polite dent in maybe a third of our dishes, we paid up, skulked off into the blazing afternoon, and didn't venture into another Burmese restaurant on our own for the duration of the trip.

Sad, but true.

Days 4-5: Inle Lake

Inle Lake is a vast lake in the middle of Myanmar where villagers live in stilted teak houses built on the water and travel around on long, skinny boats. We saw lots of babies during our time on Inle Lake, but no barriers or baby gates between the living spaces and the water. I'm a product of my (anxious, death-fearing? sensible, life-loving?) culture and couldn't stop thinking about the dangers. Eventually I asked our excellent tour guide if babies ever fall out of the houses and drown. She answered promptly and cheerfully, "Sometimes they do, yes."

And that was that.

There are really easy measures one could take to prevent babies from drowning, and I would certainly take them if I lived on Inle Lake. But then where exactly do you stop? I thought about this a lot in Myanmar, where they have come to very different conclusions than we have.

No answers. 

Because it was monsoon season, we were among the only tourists on the lake and while we were drenched by the rains, it was absolutely great.

In a temple on Inle Lake you'll find a museum that contains valuables -- cash, watches, jewelry -- that devout visitors decided they cared too much about and gave up.

These buddhas in the same temple were originally shaped like humans, but have been so thickly layered with gold leaf that they have become blobs.

Day 6: Mandalay

A few of Myanmar's 3 million monks waiting in line for lunch in Mandalay.

If there's one thing I hate, it's tourists who visit a country for a few days and come away with simplistic generalizations about a whole people. Without further ado, here are my simplistic generalizations about the people of Myanmar: There's a gentleness and languor to the Burmese that was startling and disarming and made both Isabel and me feel jaded, worldly, and slightly sad about the state of our anxious modern souls. I don't want to romanticize underdevelopment and isolation, but you can't spend a week in Myanmar without noticing that the people are strikingly tranquil when compared with people you meet almost anywhere else in 2015. The Burmese drive slowly and calmly and walk slowly and calmly. They don't worry about seat belts, life vests, or, as I've mentioned, baby gates. You will see more people laughing and talking on the street in 10 minutes than you will in Mill Valley, California in a month. I don't think we once heard a child cry or whine during our time in Myanmar, and there were children everywhere. Although everyone we got to know even slightly complained about the repressive military regime, they did so sort of cheerfully.

It would be easy to chalk this up to Buddhism, but Thailand is also Buddhist and we sensed no such tranquility among the Thais.

Make of my facile generalizations what you will.

Next post: Bangkok.

Earnest Summation: The Homesick Texan

Fifty-one dishes, y'all. I made 51 dishes from The Homesick Texan by Lisa Fain and it's only taken me 4 months to get around to writing the conclusion to that epic project. Talk about ending with a whimper. But I'm crossing it off the to-do list today, damn it.

I'll keep it short and sweet: I loved The Homesick Texan. I picked it up after spending the fall cooking from a Syrian Christian cookbook followed by Burma, and while I love novelty and challenge, opening Homesick Texan was like getting off an 18 hour flight from Asia, stretching out on the sofa with a cold drink, and turning on Friday Night Lights.

The book has flaws. Fain neglects to mention the size of pans in her dessert  section (where it matters!) and seems to think that adding 1/2 teaspoon of Mexican chocolate to a gallon of chili could possibly affect the flavor. The recipes are not blazingly original and maybe not even original at all, as some Chowhound naysayers have suggested. But what great recipes are? People regularly give Marcella Hazan credit for pork loin braised in milk, but the dish appeared in Ada Boni's Talisman Cookbook decades before Marcella started writing. And who knows where Boni got it? Who cares? It's a living, breathing recipe, not a military code, and the further it travels the better. Right?

Ah, but there are gray areas. I'm seeing more and more of them as I type. Much to say on the subject of recipe plagiarism, but I haven't figured out exactly what I think and in the interest of finishing this post I will do that figuring out later. Last December when I first opened The Homesick Texan, I just wanted to eat delicious tacos, chili, and enchiladas, and the recipes inside helped me do that. The end.

By the numbers:

worth the price of the book  -- 1 (marinated skirt steak from the small apartment tacos)
great -- 13 (chili, posole, meat loaf)
good -- 30
so-so -- 7
flat out bad -- 0

Shelf essential? If you've already have cherished recipes for Tex-Mex classics, you don't need this book. I don't and do.

Burma: earnest summation

I agree with almost everything this reviewer writes about Burma by Naomi Duguid. It's an important book, an informative book, a beautiful and thoughtful book about a little known country and cuisine.

Having said that, I did not find the recipes to be universally spectacular or even universally good. Of the 26 recipes I made, an alarming number fell on the bottom of the ratings chart. Check it out:

worth the price of the book (Kachin pounded beef)  --- 1

great --- 3 (the silky Shan soup, the carrot salad)

good -- 9

so-so -- 12

flat out bad -- 1 

Looking through my notes, I find "not that great" scrawled in the  margin of the recipe for three layer pork with mustard greens and tofu. On the next page beside the recipe for lemongrass ginger sliders: "not my thing in terms of flavor -- very pungent." Next to warming beef curry with tomato: "Unimpressed. Thin. Small chunks of meat in thin spicy broth."

What I'm remembering are a lot of dishes that didn't quite take off, lacked zip, needed serious tinkering. It's always possible the problem was in the execution, but there are enough mediocre results here that it can't be all my fault. And maybe it's not even Duguid's fault. Myanmar hasn't exactly prospered over the last few decades, culturally or economically, and why wouldn't its cuisine reflect its troubles? Why wouldn't its beef stew be thin? It feels snotty to dip into a book about Burmese cooking and complain that not every dish pleases my dainty Western palate.

So let's pretend I didn't just do that and move on to my rapturous praise for the handful of dishes that were totally stunning. Long after I've forgotten the meals I didn't love, I'll remember those that I did, because the winners here were among the best things I've ever cooked. They were so incredibly good I don't regret for a minute buying this book and devoting a couple of months to cooking from its pages.

I'm talking about three dishes in particular: Kachin pounded beef with herbs, carrot salad, and the strange, wonderful silky Shan soup.  These happen to be the most exotic dishes I tried in the book and I'm wondering if that might be more than a coincidence. The Kachin beef and carrot salad both involved pounding the central ingredients to break down their fibers. The soup, thickened with chickpea flour, was like a dense, scrumptious porridge. Are the real rewards in Burma found among the recipes that take us furthest from our comfort zone? Did I do myself and the book a disservice by gravitating toward the easier, more familiar dishes?

If I were to throw myself into the book anew I would go straight for the Shan tofu salad made with Shan "tofu," which is not in fact tofu but a simple paste of chickpea flour that you cut into squares. Duguid calls it "one of the great unsung treasures of Southeast Asia, beautiful to look at and a pleasure to eat." I would make the Kachin rice powder soup with chicken and ginger, which appears to be another divine porridge. I'd make the Inle lake rice with garlic oil, which involves kneading jasmine rice with boiled potato, poached fish, and garlic oil. The recipes that call for kneading or pounding -- those are the ones I'd pick if I had it to do over. I'm almost tempted to dive back in.

The book isn't perfect, but given the dearth of books about Burmese cooking, I'm calling it a shelf essential. 

Ruby red

Brown Derby cake

I've become badly distracted by photography education and the fruitcake project to the detriment of paid work, Christmas tree purchasing, and this blog. Life is full of surprises; I did not see this coming.

We finished Burma. Friday, I opened The Homesick Texan by Lisa Fain because I remembered it contained a recipe for grapefruit sweet rolls and I'm writing a story about grapefruit desserts. As I flipped through the book I thought, yum, all this chili and brisket and poblano macaroni and cheese and ribs looks delicious and I'm going to cook from this book because everyone is going to like it and I won't need to go to the Richmond New Way Mah market for a while, field any complaints, or chop any more shallots.

That night my sister-in-law Laura and her oldest son, Joseph, arrived from Oregon for the weekend. We did some touring and Joseph and Mark watched sports, but mostly we talked and ate Homesick Texan food and grapefruit desserts.

cousins

siblings

brunettes wearing brown

Friday night: Tex-Mex meatloaf, which threw off a lot of unsightly orange chorizo oil, but was delicious, "tender and smooth," as Fain puts it. I'm picky about meat loaf and have two benchmark recipes: Naomi Judd's mother's meat loaf from Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken (a great book I cooked from extensively in the early 1990s) and Paul Prudhomme's Cajun meat loaf. This meat loaf joins them in the pantheon. It's not quite as perfect as the other two, but gets points for uniqueness. You should make it; the recipe is here.  With the meat loaf we ate Fain's potato salad, which I found too vinegary, and leftover Burmese black eyed peas. Full Burma write-up coming soon.

I took pictures, but there was no natural light so the pictures were ugly and I'm not going to post them.

For dessert there was Brown Derby grapefruit cake, grapefruit cookies, and grapefruit mousse. Everyone was game about tasting and opining even though they would all have preferred Nanaimo bars.

Laura: "I don't like fool stuff."

Saturday night: Homesick Texan's Fancy Pants King Ranch chicken casserole which was AMAZING. Ordinarily, writes Fain, Texans make this with canned cream soup, but her recipe omits this distasteful component. I'm glad because I'm a fancy pants. A few years ago I made a Pioneer Woman recipe with canned cream soup and was very, very sorry. Fain offers both a typical canned soup recipe and a fancy pants version on her blog. It's not quite identical to the recipe that appears in the book, but it is close. The recipe involves a lot of steps, a lot of pans, and a big mess, but it is worth it.

With it I served her radish and cabbage slaw (perfection) and slightly mushy (I am not the only cook who had this issue), very tasty red rice.

I should say here that I have noticed that her dishes need additional salt.

After the chicken casserole we ate the best grapefruit dessert I've made. If I tell you about it now I won't have anything left to say in the actual article, so I will refrain. All will be revealed very soon.

not strawberries, grapefruit!

She was such an imp

She wasn't born yesterday.

Isabel is 16. The boilerplate next sentence: "It seems like yesterday that she was born!" Except it doesn't seem like yesterday. It seems like forever since she was born. It seems like. . . 16 years. Good years!

Sometimes I'm shocked that I'm not really old yet. It feels like I've been living for such a long time I should be frail and finished and yet here I am still shopping at J. Crew and getting crushes on TV actors.

We threw a surprise party for Isabel on Saturday night at a restaurant and she cried when we made toasts. Owen gave her a giant Gummi Bear and Mark and I gave her a charm bracelet. I asked what her friends gave her a few minutes ago and she wondered why I wanted to know. Yesterday, which was her real birthday, I cooked spaghetti carbonara and a chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese icing, per her request.

obnoxious diva

Carbonara: yum. Not sure what to make of Canal House Cooks Every Day, which was the source of the recipe. Do we need another recipe for spaghetti carbonara?  The book is beautiful, full of luminous, dreamy pictures of apple galettes, sugared berries, beet soup. But what is new here? Not sure. Everyone seems to love it. I want to love it.

Chocolate cake: yuck. Everyone else liked it, naturally, because they're under chocolate's spell. I've written before about my personal grudge against chocolate, who is an overbearing drama queen and never lets vanilla, butter, almond, walnut, lemon, or anyone else get a word in edgewise.  I had a theory that shy people don't like chocolate, but Isabel is shy and she loves chocolate.

I hope everyone is well. I am busy. I am happy. I might build a fire. Owen is asking for canned food for the food drive. Do you think they would accept jackfruit and coconut milk? We still don't have a Christmas tree.

Does she. . . or doesn't she?

carefully photographed, possibly oversaturated

I'm going to finish Burma with a burst of energy and enthusiasm.

That doesn't mean everyone else in the house is going to take part. Last night Owen threw a major fit over the Burmese coconut chicken noodles. Am I allowed to write that a 12-year-old thew a fit? Is this a breach of his privacy? I'll ask.

Me: Owen, come here for a second.

Owen: Coming.

Me: Do you care if I write that you had a fit about the noodles? In the blog?

Owen, shaking his head: I don't care. It's not like anyone's going to get angry at me.

Me: You're not embarrassed?

Owen: Why don't you say, 'I wasn't very fond of them.'

He wasn't very fond of them. And so he threw a fit. A gratuitous fit, in my opinion, because these noodles were the definition of inoffensive. Like: "This tactic used to work when I felt like having a box of Ritz crackers and egg nog for dinner, so let's try it again and see if it still works."

It still works. We were watching Homeland and no one was willing to interrupt the show to fight. Except Owen. I ate the rest of his noodles. Yes, we were eating in front of the TV.

The noodle recipe is here. I served with limes and sliced shallots, but did not make the fish balls, fried noodles, or hard-boiled eggs, though I would recommend doing so. The soup (it is more of a soup than a noodle dish) is mellow, comforting, and delicious, an excellent facsimile of the coconut chicken noodle soup my mother used to order at The Mandalay in San Francisco. If you can't find Chinese egg noodles, you can use spaghetti.

Other Burmese dishes we ate this week

-warming beef stew. Like Naomi Duguid's beef stew with shallots, it had little body and the meat was dry and gray. Indifferent.

-three layer pork casserole with preserved mustard greens. You're supposed to slice pork belly very thin, sear, and cook very quickly with rectangles of tofu, and chopped Chinese preserved mustard.

preserved mustard

I was unable to cut the pork thin enough, so the pieces of meat were big and chewy. The dish tasted good, but wasn't quite right. Freezing the meat would have helped with the slicing.

-Burmese carrot salad. This is the second time I've made Duguid's carrot salad and it is fabulous. Unlike American carrot salads, which tend to be sweet, this is forceful, peanutty, and rib-sticking. Eat with rice and you don't need anything else.

The recipe is a hassle, though, because you need to make three of the salad's components (dried shrimp powder, toasted chickpea flour, fried shallots) before you can make the actual salad. I'm not sure how many people are willing to do this. I'm putting the recipe at the bottom of the post in case you're interested, because this salad is one of my favorite recipes from the book.

-semolina cake. The technique of mixing this was one of the funkiest I've ever come across.

very good likeness

First you toast semolina flour in a skillet (it smells incredible), then pour it into a bowl and mix with brown sugar, coconut milk, water, and eggs. Heat peanut oil in the skillet you used to toast the flour, pour the batter into the skillet, and cook, scraping and stirring, until it turns thick and clumpy. Scoop the dough into a cake pan and pat it flat. Pour melted butter over the top, strew with sliced almonds, and bake.

Duguid describes this as a "version of Indian semolina halvah," something I've never eaten. It isn't at all like Middle Eastern halvah, which is fudgy/chalky. This has the texture of cooled of Cream of Wheat. The flavor is subtle, a little nutty. Is "subtle" another way of saying bland? Maybe. I liked it, though. Mark took a bite, made a face, wouldn't eat any more. Asian desserts aren't for everyone. If you'd rather eat any of these than this. you will probably like Burmese semolina cake. Otherwise, not.

Remember Contac?

-Finally, I used colored tapioca from the Chinese market to make Duguid's tapioca-coconut delight.  Yesterday, I discovered I can boost colors and heighten definition in pictures with iPhoto. Can you tell? Do you think Dolly Parton wears a wig?

Looks like French's mustard. Overdid the saturation.

The bottom layer consists of tapioca cooked with water and sugar. You chill this and then top with a blanket of coconut custard enriched with egg yolks and sweetened with brown sugar. The dish is jelly-like, beady, slippery, chewy, and creamy, all at once. I could eat the whole plate and everyone in the house would be relieved if I did.

Ok, here is the carrot salad recipe.

First, you need shrimp powder. You can make more or less, but I would make enough for additional salads.

1 cup dried shrimp (Chinese markets carry these and you should look for big, dark orange shrimp.)

water

1. Soak the shrimp in water for 20 minutes. Drain and pat dry.

2. Put in a food processor and grind until reduce to a fluffy pile of fine filaments. Store in a jar in the refrigerator. Mine is still good after 1 month.

 imo, a cool picture

Then you need toasted chickpea flour. 

1/2 cup chickpea flour

1. Spread the flour in a heavy skillet and toast over medium heat, stirring frequently. Lower the heat if it starts to burn. The flour should be sufficiently toasted in 15 minutes. Cool and store in a jar in the cupboard. Mine is still good after 1 month.

Finally, you need fried shallots.

peanut oil to generously cover the bottom of a wide skillet

as many thinly sliced shallots as you and your eyes can stand to slice, but at least 1 cup, as they shrink

1. Heat the oil until a shallot sizzles when you drop it in. Add the rest of the shallots and cook over medium heat, stirring regularly until they turn golden brown. Turn the heat down if you have to do other work in the kitchen; these burn easily.

2. When the shallots are fried, remove from the oil and place on a paper towel to drain. (Keep the oil to use in other Burmese dishes, or, really, anything that would benefit from a hit of shallot flavor.) My shallots have never gotten very crispy, but they're tasty nonetheless. They keep for a few days in a bowl on the counter if you can resist snacking on them.

Now you can finally make the salad. 

Carrot salad

1/2 pound carrots, peeled and grated

1 tablespoon fresh lime juice, or to taste

1 teaspoon fish sauce, or to taste

2 teaspoons dried shrimp powder

1 teaspoon toasted chickpea flour

1 teaspoon minced serrano pepper (or any hot pepper you have)

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste

1 tablespoon chopped roasted peanuts

2 tablespoons fried shallots

2 tablespoons chopped cilantro

1. Put the carrots, lime juice, and fish sauce in a mortar. Pound. Don't try to turn the carrots into a paste, just hit them for a minute. You're breaking down the fibers and pummeling the flavors into the vegetable. 

2. Place the carrots in a serving bowl. Add everything else. Toss. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serves 4, with a little left over.

And now I'm back from outer space

an orange, a lime, butter, sugar, flour, suet

My husband thought that was a photograph of an egg, but it's a photograph of the most delicious Sussex Pond pudding I've ever made and I've made a few Sussex Pond puddings.

It is a horrible picture.  To be fair, Sussex Pond pudding is hard to photograph. See what I mean?  This picture almost does it justice and this captures the shiny, sticky crust of a perfect specimen.

Here is a photograph of a different Sussex Pond pudding I made:

Jane Grigson's recipe

Sad and deflated in the picture. Steaming and grand in reality!

I'm going to fix this, have resolved to learn to take attractive pictures of food or to stop posting them altogether. I don't love photographs that make food look unrealistically glossy and glamorous, but it's worse when pictures make food look uglier than it actually is. When I make something great and write about how great it is the pictures need to support my words.

I wrote a story on Sussex Pond pudding and will link to it when it goes up.

On another subject, I took the goats to be bred the other day. We got rid of all the babies last summer and are back to just the two goats we started with, Natalie and Peppermint. People always think Peppermint is a male and Natalie a female based on how they look. But Peppermint is short and stocky because she's a Nigerian Dwarf, not because she is a boy, while Natalie is leggy and pretty because she's an Oberhasli. They're both girls.

She's all girl.

The other day, Natalie was in heat and Peppermint wasn't, so the bucks went straight for Natalie and Peppermint waddled off to the corner by herself. Peppermint has never conceived even when she was in heat, and I worry she feels like a failure as a doe. She's become very ill-tempered in recent years and Owen and I are convinced she'd be happier if she had her own kids. I know -- I KNOW -- I'm anthropomorphizing, but I felt  sorry for her when she was ignored by the bucks, like the dowdy girl left sitting on the bench at dancing school.

The attempt to breed Natalie: wacky. Nigerian Dwarf bucks have sired all her kids, but she's continued to grow over the years and is now too tall for them. Robert, who owns the bucks, brought out a young Nigerian Dwarf named Plaid to see what he could do with Natalie. Eager though he was, he couldn't "reach." So back to the pen went Plaid and out came Kentucky, a bigger, older Nigerian Dwarf who fathered Natalie's first kid. He couldn't reach either. "Well," said Robert, "We do have a Nubian who will definitely manage. He's a beast."

He was a beast. It was like rolling out a cannon after trying to storm the castle with pop guns. I'll take the goats up for a longer stay with the bucks around Christmas, so if this didn't take, we'll have another shot.

The trip to Vancouver reignited my obsession with Asian food and made dinner from Burma last night. Half of it was noteworthy, half of it was mediocre. But that gets its own post because it involves a long recipe and now I have to go see if I have any yeast so I can make David Lebovitz's kouign-amann.

The pause that refreshes?

I fell behind.

In fact, nothing needed refreshing. The pause happened because living/cooking/eating/plotting got so far ahead of posting that catching up started to feel impossible. Weeks went by. The hole got deeper. The only solution is to do the most cursory catch up, forget the rest, and move on like I never missed a beat.

Cursory catch up:

1. I wrote a story on antique pie recipes. I've wondered about those mysterious old pie recipes for decades and now I don't have to anymore -- and neither do you! -- because I baked enough obscure vintage pies to learn that recipes go extinct for a reason. Well, usually. In case you don't want to read the whole story, Jefferson Davis pie is delicious, dark, and raisiny, though you really have to love both highly spiced Christmas puddings and the gooey part of pecan pie to appreciate it. Butterscotch meringue pie is also excellent, though you really have to love both butter and sugar to appreciate it. Since that includes almost everyone, I made the butterscotch pie again for Thanksgiving and my sister and I agreed that it was the best pie of the night.

2. I wrote a story about berries, which I turned in last week when no berry except the cranberry is in season. It was challenging to describe the exquisite appeal of a Hood strawberry or an Idaho huckleberry when I've never seen or tasted either, but I've always suspected I could write fiction. We'll see whether the editor agrees. I became fixated on berries while writing the story and was inspired to bake a red raspberry pie for Thanksgiving. This was my husband's favorite pie and while it was very tasty, it was no butterscotch meringue. I used frozen berries because Janie Hibler said it was ok and she wrote the book on berries. 

No one was hooked.

3. I also turned in a story about the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook.  I'll spare you the big think on Milk Bar until the story runs. If it runs. I will just say that the Milk Bar crack pie  was the least popular of the Thanksgiving pies and that Milk Bar's Saltine panna cotta is revolting.

inedible

4. In addition to the aforementioned pies, Isabel and I baked rhubarb pie, lemon chess, chocolate cream, pecan, and pumpkin. Various wags referred to the rhubarb pie as "celery pie" because the rhubarb, which came from our garden, was green. Do you like the word wags? I hope not because I will probably never use it again.

celery pie 

5. That's about it for Thanksgiving, but I made the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook S'more cake for Owen's birthday party. It consists of graham cracker-flavored layers sandwiched with milk chocolate ganache and iced with meringue. Predictably, the boys were in awe of the cake's billowy bakery shop beauty and that counts for a lot. It was a fine cake, but after the first day, no one ate any. If you cut a cake and no one touches it for five days, this is not a cake you should make again. A great cake is always in play.

Why wasn't this cake great? I can't really put my finger on it, but the pieces just didn't quite work together. It was less than the sum of its parts.

great looking, not great

7. However, every last floret of Smitten's broccoli slaw vanished within 24 hours. The recipe is on her site and you should make it. More than the sum of its parts.

8.  November is a hard time in America to concentrate on the cuisine of Southeast Asia, but I've tried. The tender greens salad from Burma is a wonderful melange of blanched pea shoots, fried garlic fried shallots, roasted peanuts, and lime juice. The recipe is here. The grapefruit salad was less harmonious, but with some tweaking could be great. The sweet tart chicken was very plain, and the beef stew with shallots was tasty. I may take a hiatus from Burma, as the next few weeks just don't feel Burmese.

9.  Tomorrow I am going to British Columbia on magazine business for a few days. If you have any restaurant suggestions in either Victoria or Richmond, please send them my way.

Burma, Burma, Burma and a little Smitten

"This is one of the most unusual and delicious dishes I have ever come across," writes Naomi Duguid in the preface to her recipe for Kachin pounded beef with herbs. 

And this is now one of the most unusual and delicious dishes I have ever come across, as well. I hadn't been madly in love with anything I'd cooked from Burma until Tuesday night, when I served the Kachin pounded beef. You need to make it. The recipe is here.

I'd never cooked meat this way before and you probably haven't either, which is part of the magic. Easy magic, though; don't be intimidated. You cut beef chuck into cubes, braise it, saute it, and then pound it to shreds in a mortar with ginger, garlic, Sichuan pepper, cilantro and salt (I recommend a bit more salt than she calls for.)  If you don't own a big, heavy mortar you could probably use a mallet and a cutting board to get the job done. As you pound you're simultaneously tenderizing the meat and pummeling zesty flavor into every morsel, a technique that makes our crude chunks and rectangles of pot roast and steak seem primitive.

I made Duguid's Mandalay carrot salad that same night, another recipe that entails pounding, but here it's carrot shreds that get the treatment. After you pound them with fish sauce and lime juice, you toss the tart, salty shreds with roasted peanuts, toasted chickpea powder (which makes everything mellow and starchy -- I adore this condiment), dried shrimp powder, and caramelized fried shallots.  Serve with rice. I have not cooked a better dinner in ages.

A few nights later, I made Duguid's silky Shan soup which was equally interesting to make and almost as fun to eat. I would call this "velvety porridge" rather than "silky soup" but whatever it's called, it's tasty. You mix chickpea flour with boiling water and cook until it's thick and shiny then pour this rich porridge over tender white vermicelli noodles and blanched greens. Serve in individual bowls and dress it up, congee style, with chile oil, shallot oil, roasted peanuts, cilantro and any other assertive garnishes that appeal.

I could eat this every day and lately do.

My kind of food.  I ate leftovers for lunch on Friday, for lunch and dinner on Saturday, and for breakfast this morning. I should tell you, though, that the reason there was so much left over was that no one else liked it. We don't have a tradition of savory porridge in this country and my family found it "too weird." I have to agree that the texture of this dish takes a little getting used to. It took me about 4 seconds.

On another subject, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook landed 10 days ago. I admire Deb Perelman tremendously. I'm both jealous and in awe of the way she has kept that blog fueled, week in, week out, never missing a beat. It can't be easy. She is a pro and I had to own her book.

And I'm glad I do. Smitten Kitchen is both a supremely polished production and a labor of love. Really, the best kind of cookbook. While I'm not as charmed by Perelman's stories as some readers are, no one is going to force me to read them all. While I'm not personally drawn to 100% of the recipes, I know that they will all work perfectly. I can't wait to bake the S'more layer cake and the deepest dish apple pie and I have already tried her recipe for buttered popcorn cookies. These were so sweet-salty-buttery-delicious that my nephew Ben ate a dozen or so and then cried when he found out there were none left. I wanted to cry, too!

Fiddling while Jersey floods

shards of toffee on whipped cream on cake

What a disastrous week. You Easterners have been very brave! Cookbooks have seldom seemed more trivial.

I decided to keep cooking from Burma because if I stop I might never go back. Last weekend, I served Naomi Duguid's sweet-tart pork belly stew which is made by braising this unctuous, inexpensive cut with lemongrass, shallots, garlic, and dried hibiscus blossoms. The wrinkled blackish hibiscus blossoms serve, in Duguid's words, as a "souring agent" and the stew they soured was unlike anything in my gastronomic frame of reference. You expect braised pork to be rich, fatty, and mellow, but this meat was rich, fatty, and tart. As Michael Ruhlman writes in Twenty (more on that shortly), acid is typically used to "brighten" flavors, and I've had New Mexican pork dishes where tomatillos did just that. But the flavors in this Burmese stew needed no brightening. They needed dulling.

I'm not saying the stew was unappetizing. Not at all. We ate it with modest gusto. But it was just too confusing for our non-Burmese palates and I probably won't make it again.

lots of mystery stems and flowers in there

Nor will I go back to Duguid's smoky Napa cabbage, a pallid, watery stir fry. Duguid writes that oyster sauce gives the dish a "smoky undernote" but I didn't pick it up. Not bad, not good, not worth talking about at length. Maybe I'm just not that into cabbage; I would always rather eat kale.

Monday night, I served Duguid's saucy beef and potatoes. To make this, you fry some shallots (of course) and ginger in hot oil, add cubed potatoes and brown them, add water and simmer until the potatoes are soft, add ground beef, spices, and chopped tomatoes, cook, cook, cook, and serve. It's Burmese hamburger hash, wicked ugly, but delicious and like everything I've cooked from the book so far, quick and easy.

That's all I have to say about lovely Burma for now, but I have so much to say about Ruhlman's Twenty I think I might burst. Twenty won prestigious awards and clearly speaks to a lot of readers and you might be one of them. I am not. I can't help it! It's just not in my nature to like this kind of book. I read Ruhlman's Twenty cover-to-cover and found it grandiose, inexact, and frustrating. Michael Ruhlman argues that cooking depends on twenty elegant techniques, while I think cooking is about ten thousand details. This might be the unbridgeable rift between lumper and splitter.

I'll briefly make my case and then cut to the happy ending.

Twenty is the somewhat arbitrary number of techniques that Ruhlman believes are essential to cooking well.  He's pretty loose with his definition of "technique," and includes ingredients, like salt, eggs, and sugar, because understanding how to manipulate these ingredients entails learning techniques.  For instance the chapter on eggs covers hard-boiling eggs, scrambling eggs (in a double boiler and reportedly delicious), shirring, whipping up mayonnaise, putting egg whites in cocktails, and a short disquisition on custards. Technically speaking, that's at least six techniques right there and you could argue that the very title of the book is misleading. But let's not.

According to Ruhlman, until you master his twenty techniques you're not going to get too far as a cook: "Without the culinary fundamentals nothing, nothing, of importance can be attempted. Classic chef arrogance and truth."

But once you have these culinary fundamentals down, the kitchen is, so to speak, your oyster: "There's virtually nothing you can't do."

Each essay (one per technique) is followed by recipes. I decided to bake Ruhlman's angel food cake, which is topped with whipped cream and homemade toffee because the photograph was so beautiful I wanted to tear it out and frame it. Maybe because I've baked dozens of angel food cakes, nothing in Ruhlman's essays on sugar, eggs, or batter, expanded my understanding of this cake. That's ok. But it was less ok that the recipe was imprecise and glitchy. Ruhlman never specifies what size pan to use nor does he explicitly warn against greasing the pan. In fact, he tells you to pour the batter into a "prepared pan." There are several ways you could interpret this, and a novice might take "prepared pan" to mean a greased pan, which would be the right guess for almost any cake except angel food. When I was learning to cook, I would have read that recipe, greased the pan, and ended up with an angel food brick.

I know this was a trivial slip, a forgivable editorial error, but it's an error that illustrates my point: You can master Ruhlman's twenty noble techniques, but bake your angel food cake in a greased pan and you're screwed. These countless quirky, puny, nettlesome details really do matter. A house needs a foundation, but it also needs doors, windows, and curtain rods.

On Sunday, I baked his cider vinegar tart. For years, I've been fascinated/repelled by the concept of vinegar pie, a mysterious dessert that regularly pops up in vintage American recipe collections, like my 1939 edition of Imogene Wolcott's New England Yankee Cookbook.

In the headnote Ruhlman writes, "Critical to the outcome of this simplest of all pies is the use of a good vinegar -- the tart is not worth making with bad vinegar. Otherwise it's better to use lemon juice!"

Given that good cider vinegar is "critical to the outcome of this simplest of all pies" I wanted to know what brand Ruhlman recommends. Bragg's, maybe? He doesn't say. Is organic better? Wood barrel aged? Unfiltered? Dark? Pale? Cloudy? Clear? Doesn't say. Short of arranging a cider vinegar tasting, does he have any advice? You have to dig for it, but in his essay on "acids" there's this pearl of wisdom: "You usually get what you pay for. A very cheap vinegar tastes that way. The best vinegars are delicious, not simply harshly acidic."

In other words, if you're not up for buying and tasting all the vinegars on the shelf, grab the most expensive one.

This non-answer was almost enough to make me resubscribe to Cook's Illustrated** right then and there so I could see the results of their 2006 cider vinegar tasting, which were hidden behind a paywall. Few people have spent more time pricing and testing supermarket foods than I have, and while you often get what you pay for, you just as often don't. Anyway, I refused to buy expensive cider vinegar  on faith and used the 365 cider vinegar we had in the house. The resulting tart, which I brought to my sister's house for dinner, was barely edible. Imagine a thick, yummy shortbread crust topped with cold, sweet, congealed vinegar.

Looks aren't everything.

If you absorb Ruhlman's breezy generalizations about the importance of acid in cooking (that it will enhance your cream soups, butterscotch sauce, and pulled pork) you will definitely become a slightly better cook. But your tarts are still going to taste like foot juice if you don't know what brand of cider vinegar to buy. Details, details, details. Cooking is all about the details and there are thousands of them.

Now I will tell you what I loved in the book: Ruhlman's method, borrowed from Harold McGee, of poaching eggs. This made the prettiest, tidiest eggs.

loveliness

Heat a saucepan of water. Crack your egg in a ramekin, slide the egg into a slotted spoon and let a little of the loose, watery white drain off (there will be more or less depending on the egg), then slip the egg back into the ramekin. When the water boils, turn down the heat and when the bubbles stop, slide the egg into the water and poach for 3-4 minutes. I will never make poached eggs any other way again.

*Here's exactly what Ruhlman says about angel food cake pans: Even if he had a tube pan, he writes in the headnote, he wouldn't use one because it's so hard to get angel food cake out of a tube pan. (Actually, it isn't hard at all if you have a tube pan with a removable bottom.) He prefers to use a springform pan and after he's poured the batter into the pan, he puts a pint glass in the middle to create the hole. The accompanying photographs illustrate the springform method. At the end of the headnote he writes, "If you prefer a tube pan, line the bottom with parchment/baking paper." There is no mention anywhere of preparations -- parchment? butter? butter and flour? -- for the springform pan in the headnote, but in the recipe he refers only to "the prepared pan." As I said, you could read this several ways. Also, for the record, there's no need to use parchment in the bottom of a tube pan with a removable bottom, although nothing bad will happen if you do.

**This morning I succumbed and bought a 14-day trial subscription to Cook's Illustrated (which I must promptly cancel), so I could access the results of their 2006 tasting of ten cider vinegars. The two top rated vinegars: Spectrum unfiltered (22 cents an ounce) and a French brand called Maille (24 cents per ounce.) White House vinegar (6 cents an ounce) was moderately well liked ("good balance of acidity") while Heinz (6 cents an ounce) was unpopular: "very acidic without much apple." The most expensive vinegar they tested was Verger Pierre Gringras ($1.19 per ounce): "It smelled 'awful' was 'stinky,' and imparted 'burnt, ashy flavors.'"

I might have to keep that subscription.