I have to read The Big House

Kyocera ceramic knife -- you need one.

With no wireless, I can't keep up with this vacation blogging! There's only so much Dunkin' Donuts coffee a woman can drink.

Alright, deep breath.

My husband's family has owned and loved the same Massachusetts beach property for several generations, property that has been divided and now comprises four summer houses for various branches of the family and a fifth that is the year-round residence of a cousin. The property is lovely, heavily wooded and threaded with trails. It has its own stretch of rocky beach. There are outdoor showers, a swing set, screened-in porches, hummingbirds, and many mosquitos. The kids get here and run off in a pack of cousins and aren't heard from until someone idly mentions she might be willing to take the boys to see Captain America at which point suddenly I am thronged and regretful.

Cooking is done for a crowd and people volunteer for meals. The other day I produced a modest dinner: potato chips with onion soup dip, burgers, cole slaw, and s'mores bars (baked by Isabel.) My in laws are not really into elaborate food and I try not to overinvest. I succeeded, perhaps too well. I wasn't exactly bursting with pride at that dinner. As always, everyone loved the s'mores bars.

Friday, Isabel and I drove out to the Cape Cod summer home of her good friend Juliet, whose mother is my good friend Lisa.  We swam in the sea, swam in a pond, shopped in shops, and then Lisa and I cooked for her extended family. As the menu took shape, it became clear that Lisa's family is very into elaborate food. We made negronis and served grilled bluefish with mustard and lime, scalloped oysters, salad, corn roasted with agave and soy sauce, and there was a lasagna for the kids. Dinner was late, loud, drunken, and delicious.  As usual, my photograph doesn't do the food, people, or anything else, justice.

It was fun, really! 

I'd never cooked or eaten bluefish before, and was very pleased with the recipe, taken from a Cape Cod cookbook on Lisa's shelf. You put the fillets in a foil pan, smother in mustard and lemon juice, then cover in bread crumbs, and grill for 40 minutes. I liked it so much I'm making it tonight for my in laws.

For dessert: another batch of s'mores bars.

Thank-you, Anne Thornton.

Sunday, Isabel and I drove to Boston to make a pilgrimage to Flour, the bakery owned by Joanne Chang, the author of Flour, a newish cookbook we like a lot.

Good bakery in desolate-on-Sunday neighborhood

We got there 8 minutes before it closed. I didn't even have to ask her -- Isabel jumped out of the car while I parked to be sure we got an order in. My girl.

Hazelnut cookie was best.

She bought a hazelnut cookie, an oreo, and a raspberry crumb bar. The hazelnut cookie was unbelievably good, the oreo tasted just like the ones we've made from the cookbook (amazing), and the raspberry crumb bar was tasty. Like Baked, Flour is a homestyle bakery -- a place you go to buy high quality treats you could conceivably and easily make at home, especially when the owners publish an excellent cookbook.

Coincidentally, Flour is just around the corner from Sportello, a Barbara Lynch restaurant. Lynch wrote a wonderful book I cooked through last year -- Stir -- and since Sportello was just about to open for dinner, we went.

And such small portions

I'm hesitant to say anything negative because I'm having a very happy vacation and we loved Stir, but, okay, twist my arm. We were the first ones in Sportello and there were paper towels all over the bathroom floor, the trash basket was overflowing, and everything on the menu was a little too expensive. Maybe a lot too expensive. Isabel's flat pasta with bolognese sauce cost $24. My porcini ravioli cost $25. The salad was, if I remember correctly, $14. All good, not great. Maybe that's what it costs to keep a restaurant afloat, and maybe this was an off night. I don't know.

Anyway, I still recommend the cookbook.

Sportello is very handsome and very white.

Eat your salad no dessert, get that man you deserve

Someone from Random House has put me on the cookbook publicity list and now these gorgeous cookbooks keep turning up in the mail.

I'm trying something new: Just for a month or so, I'm going to actually review new (ish) cookbooks in a brisk and timely fashion. I will cook ten recipes, assess, and move on. You can tell a lot from ten recipes. This last wallow through Barabara Lynch was fun, but I need to pick up the pace, at least for a while.

I'm starting with Mixt Salads by Andrew Swallow, which I received last spring. It's not "brand new" but it contains nothing but salad recipes. This appeals to me right now because

a. late summer/early fall produce

b. one-dish meals

c. slimming

After Mixt the lineup is:

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen

Thai Street Food by David Thompson

My Sweet Mexico by Fany Gerson

Ten recipes per book, brisk pace. Hold me to it, guys.

Thomas Keller & Barbara Lynch: earnest summations

I had to go back and search through the blog to ascertain that I'd never actually summed up my experience with Ad Hoc at Home. I didn't, did I? This wasn't meant to be a Keller-Lynch horse race, but since they're both chef books, I'm reviewing them together.

I made 36 dishes out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home:

Worth the price of the book -- 1 (fried chicken)

Great -- 13 (biscuits, mint chocolate chip ice cream)

Good -- 10

So-so -- 11

Flat-out bad -- 1

I made 40 dishes out of Barbara Lynch's Stir:

Worth the price of the book -- 2 (eggplant salad, stuffed tomato)

Great -- 15

Good -- 17

So-so -- 6

Flat-out bad --- o

I think as time passes a lot of really wonderful recipes tend to fade in my memory. Looking through my margin notes in the Keller I had written "fantastic" beside dishes I only vaguely remember making and loving, like mint chocolate chip ice cream and his mother's coconut cake. So some of his "greats" might have been "worth the price of the books" if I'd done this summary in a more timely fashion. In any case, at the high end, I really think these two books shine equally brightly.

But I didn't have as many disappointments with Lynch. That I'm sure of. Thomas Keller's iceberg lettuce salad was a time-consuming flop. The roasted halibut, the roasted game hens, the pomegranate-glazed quail -- not hits. A lot of these recipes are attempts to show how to make impeccable, very simple, down-home food which would be fine, except they didn't consistently work. I don't need a $50 cookbook to show me how to make boring food that doesn't taste amazing. I can do that on my own. The exception: his Santa Maria tri-tip was simple and fabulous and that "boring" recipe might have been worth the price of the book. On the fence about that.

Barbara Lynch wraps her chicken in bread dough and puts caraway gnocchi in her soup and whipped cream in her risotto. She taught me how to stuff gnocchi and tear up pasta dough and make a pizza out of brioche topped with honey and pistachios. Even when I didn't absolutely adore the results, the experience was always interesting. Mostly I adored the results.

If you have unlimited cookbook dollars to spend on fat, beautiful chef tomes, buy both books. But after cooking 76 recipes from these two fine volumes, I would say if you have limited funds, buy Stir.

Very excited to move on to a new book. I've got something a little different in mind for the next month or so. I'll save that for the next post.

Here in Topeka

I don't know what happened here because I've had this post mostly written for almost a week. The other day I had to explain to Isabel what procrastination meant. She knew the technical definition, but she just couldn't understand why people would ever do it and as I described the mixture of perfectionism, dreaminess, anxiety, and laziness that I struggle against every day, she looked at me blankly.

Wednesday night I cooked my last Stir dinner: prune-stuffed-gnocchi with foie gras sauce, which is Barbara Lynch's "most requested" recipe.

Roughly two weeks ago, I ordered foie gras online from D'Artagnan. With shipping, four lobes (disgusting word) cost $68 which puts a lot of pressure on the cook. I was excited and nervous all day thinking about this expensive grand finale and bought a bottle of red wine to mark the occasion.

At 5 o'clock, I poured a glass of the wine and got to work. First, I simmered prunes in Madeira until they were soft and then pureed them. I boiled the potatoes, riced them, mixed them with eggs and flour, formed a gnocchi dough, rolled it out, and cut it into biscuit shapes. In the middle of each biscuit I put a teaspoon of pureed prune, folded the whole ensemble into a potsticker-shaped crescent, stood it up on its fat side, and made a sauce-catching dent in the top. Watching this artistry distracted Owen from his homework and he came over to help. Usually, it's the eraser on his pencil that distracts Owen from his homework. I poured another glass of wine.

The sauce is made by creaming together foie gras and butter then chilling it until firm. I warmed some shallots, spices, and Madeira in a saucepan and started throwing in chunks of the cold foie gras butter. Weird: You chill the butter and then right after it's really cold you melt it? This is the chemistry part of cooking that I have to take on faith. I strained the sauce, which was like melted foie gras-flavored butter. In fact, it was melted foie gras-flavored butter.

I sliced the remainder of the foie into thick chunks and heated the pan to sear it. I brought the water for poaching the gnocchi to a rolling boil. It was seven o'clock, the hour when my handsome husband usually walks through the door to find table set, dinner ready, me in high heels and fresh red lipstick holding a chilled cocktail shaker. The first half of that joke sentence isn't a joke. Promptly at seven the phone rang and Husband said he was so sorry, he was going to be an hour late, was just leaving the office, weren't we having something special tonight, like foie gras? He was so so so so sorry.

I said, You think you're sorry now, buster.

I wish I'd said that. I don't remember what I said.

I poured another glass of wine, tossed the salad, cooked the gnocchi, and seared the foie which, in under one minute, threw off several cups of fat and shrank to little planks of soft brown liver. The kids and I sat down to eat. Isabel was immediately and completely repulsed by the foie gras and nudged it to the side of her plate. She said,"I would have liked it better if you'd just made regular gnocchi."

"The gnocchi tastes really weird with the prunes in it," Owen said. "The meat (he meant the foie gras) is pretty good, I'd give it 3-and-a-half out of 5. But the salad is 5 out of 5!"

Foie gras was my mother's favorite food. She discovered it late in life, and thought it was very decadent and wicked, and she loved being decadent and wicked in completely innocent ways. I got weepy at dinner, due to missing my mother and drinking too much red wine and wasting an expensive delicacy on children. I liked the gnocchi a lot. If you close your eyes and imagine Gerber prunes, Madeira, duck liver, and soft, doughy potato dumplings you will have a sense of what the dish was like. Delicious!

But I won't make it again. Next time I'm going to order it.

And so we come to the end of the long season of Stir! I have tallied the recipes and will provide a full write-up . . . soon.

Now that's a pretty table

Last night's dinner featured the loveliest recipe I've made out of Stir: a peeled tomato hollowed out and stuffed with seasoned fresh ricotta then placed round side up on a plate. You surround it with finely chopped celery leaves, scallions, sliced radishes, and homemade croutons. The dressing: olive oil, vinegar, chopped Nicoise olives, shallots, and golden raisins. It was exquisite and scrumptious and not all that fattening and I haven't made a dinner I liked more in ages.

Afterwards, Isabel and I completed our petit four experiment.

The pink petit fours are sandwiched with black raspberry jam; you can see the chocolate petit fours in the lower left-hand corner. You can also perhaps see that our icing technique needs work. We used a poured fondant that didn't quite blanket the squares completely before it ran out. I need to pursue this further, because petit fours are delicious and beautiful and cool, providing all the goodness of a whole cake in a single tiny bite. I just wish bakeries would quit with the scones and muffins and get back to making the hard stuff I can't really make at home, like petit fours and napoleons.

Dutiful dinner report

Friday night Stir dinner:

Chicken soup with caraway gnocchi. You brown chicken, onion, carrot, celery, and various herbs, add water and simmer for an hour and a half. Meanwhile, make potato gnocchi the usual way, but with caraway seeds. Poach. When the chicken is falling off the bone, strain the broth, then add some chicken meat back to the broth, plus broccoli, cauliflower, and shredded cabbage. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Add the caraway gnocchi.Great soup.

For dessert: chocolate mousse. I'm not crazy about chocolate mousse, but decided to try Barbara Lynch's recipe because we had cream to use up and, of course, lots of eggs. Lynch's mousse was rich and airy and smooth, like any proper mousse, and everyone liked it a lot. I even liked it a lot, if not quite as much as everyone else.

Today, Isabel and I used the leftover mousse to make petit fours. We're still in the middle of that project, so I can't report.

Half the petit fours will be sandwiched with mousse, half with kirsch-spiked black raspberry jam. This isn't a Lynch recipe, just something we wanted to try.

A propos of nothing, we collected our first duck egg today. It's very long and narrow and the shell is shinier than a hen's egg, has a waxy sheen. It will have to be an awfully delicious egg to justify the irritation of keeping our messy, noisy, unfriendly, weird-looking, chicken-bullying ducks.

No one has been hospitalized after 23 hours, so I'm calling it a success

I've stalled out on Barbara Lynch's Stir, a great book that I've been dawdling through for months. I was going to call it quits yesterday, but one reason I started this blog was to force myself to actually delve into my cookbooks on a regular, even daily, basis. DELVE. Like, cook stuff I don't know how to cook already. It felt wrong to quit when there's so much delving potential left in Stir.

I decided to take the next few days to cook as many interesting dishes as I can, then wrap it all up on Wednesday. On Wednesday, the foie gras arrives. I felt that before I moved on I had to make Lynch's "most requested" recipe: prune-stuffed gnocchi with foie gras sauce. This is the kind of dish I reflexively skip over because it looks difficult and expensive. I hope it is worth the money. I hope it is worth the misery of the ducks.

About last night's dinner. My father had invited himself over and since it was a hot day and he's a game guy, I planned a cold meal, all of it from Stir, most of it involving serious delving. Then my maternal grandmother, who is 98, unexpectedly turned up. So it was a party, a very unlikely party given that my parents divorced 25 years ago. My camera battery conked out hence lack of pictures.

We ate:

-oysters on the half shell with sparkling mignonette. At a local market yesterday, fresh oysters cost $1.19 a piece, which is less than half what you pay for oysters at a restaurant. Of course, you have to shuck them yourself which I had never done. By unfortunate coincidence, I sliced my finger while mincing the shallots for the mignonette and then had to shuck oysters with two Band-Aids and a piece of cheesecloth wrapped around my gory finger and while I am confident that no blood sullied the shellfish, the shucking took twice as long as it should have. Also, I used a butter knife. If you shuck a lot, you should definitely invest in the right shiv. The sparkling mignonette, which contains Prosecco, was fabulous and really did sparkle from the bubbles. Here's how you make it: Mix 1/2 cup Prosecco with 1/2 cup white wine vinegar, 2 finely chopped shallots, a generous grinding of black pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt. If you like oysters, try this dish. I can't believe it took me so long to shuck my own.

-butcher shop steak tartare. Even though I bought quality filet mignon and used salmonella-free eggs from our chickens, recent newspaper stories cast a pall over this segment of the meal. I always order steak tartare if it's on the menu because it's something I don't make at home. Now that it's something I do make at home, I might be done with steak tartare. Did I only order it in the past because it was exotic? Lynch's recipe, which is classic, calls for chopped raw steak, raw egg yolk, mustard, capers, and chopped cornichons. It tasted fine and I ate it, but not with tremendous enthusiasm and can not explain this sudden aversion.

-toasted bread salad with tomato and cucumber. Very pretty twist on a summer standard. Halved cherry tomatoes are tossed with fennel and cucumber and served on long baguette crisps spread with olive paste and adorned with sweet roasted red onion. Lovely.

At one point, Owen was sitting on the sofa between my tiny grandmother and my father telling them about something absurd (rockets? robots?) while they all three merrily ate the oysters. I wanted so badly to take a picture of those three right there, right then. It was like my own private Halley's Comet. I'll probably never get them all in the same room again, let alone the same frame, and certainly not in that giddy oyster-slurping mood. I had to make do with a mental snapshot.

Very fun evening. No crowd I'd rather shuck oysters for.

Ricotta gnudi from Stir: Mix ricotta, 2 eggs (book calls for 1, but I used 2 because mixture seemed dry), a little flour and Parmesan. Form into small dumplings, score with a fork as you might peanut butter cookies. Freeze for an hour then boil. Serve with Barbara Lynch's basic marinara sauce (tomatoes, red pepper flakes, onion, garlic). Easy. Stupendous. Not a scrap left over for the chickens.

Speaking of which, the chickens have taken to hiding their eggs. In the last two days we've found 24 eggs hidden around the yard, including a cache of thirteen in the overgrown tomato patch. Later, I found the bantam hen sitting on a clutch of 9 tiny eggs on top of the coop. I know they don't harbor salmonella, but how long have they been sitting out there? Weeks? Months?

Just food, for a change

All summer the fog sat on us like a duvet, and then, out of nowhere, comes this crazy heat wave. Last night's dinner was "light" on account of the weather. I put light in quotes because while its individual components sounded light -- an eggplant salad, some open-faced sandwiches -- this dinner was actually extremely filling.

Everything came from Barbara Lynch's Stir and it was all beyond great. Isabel made fig, ricotta, and prosciutto tartines which were exactly what the name describes, but also included a "drizzle" of honey and "confetti" of fresh mint leaves that you "shower" on top just before serving. I love it when cookbook writers use juicy words like that. Lynch calls for black figs, but the only decent figs at the grocery store were green, so I bought those. The recipe incorporates contrasting flavors and textures -- creamy, salty, meaty, sweet, crunchy, minty -- and I loved these sandwiches immoderately.

We also made the eggplant with dried pear-pine nut vinaigrette and feta.

As you can see, this design-intensive composed salad does not play to my food-styling strengths (or lack thereof), but it's one of the tastiest, most unusual things I've made out of Stir. You melt some feta with cream to make a sharp, rich sauce that you spread on individual plates. On top, arrange some roasted eggplant and over everything pour a fabulous dressing of sauteed shallots, garlic, anchovy, olive oil, sherry, yellow raisins and pine nuts. I had no yellow raisins so used dried pears instead and they worked beautifully. This was another brilliant melding of contrasting flavors and textures, and I think the recipe may be worth the price of the book.

The mother of all catch-up posts

Should we forbid this comportment at the dinner table? Should we laugh it off?

I never would have worn a box to dinner! I wonder if the kids in ancient Rome started wearing boxes to dinner. I bet it was one of the signs.

A few nights later, I asked Owen to set the table and he did this:

I actually think the newspaper place mat is a good idea.

Okay, food. In the bowl in the photo at top is the tomato soup from Barbara Lynch's Stir. I was not so crazy about this soup, which tasted like spaghetti sauce, so Isabel and I changed it drastically, mostly by adding a lot of sugar and cream. I think the two of us were warped by Campbell's and expect tomato soup to be rich and sweet. Doctored by us, the soup was absolutely delicious, and while it is perverse to use canned tomatoes in August, this would be an excellent soup for January. Here's the recipe:

TOMATO SOUP

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, sliced

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

28-ounce can crushed tomatoes

2 1/2 cups water

salt and pepper

1/2 cup fresh basil (or another fresh herb. I think dill would work well.)

2 tablespoons sugar

1 1/2 cups cream or milk

1. In a soup pot, gently saute the onion and red pepper flakes in the oil until the onion softens. Pour in the tomatoes and add salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally to avoid scorching.

2. Add water, basil and sugar and simmer for another 15 minutes.

3. Puree in a food processor or blender until smooth. Return to the pot and stir in the milk or cream. Taste for seasoning and serve, ideally with grilled cheese sandwiches. Serves 4.

A few nights later, on the newspaper place mats, we ate Lynch's cheese risotto, which employs, instead of the usual Parmesan, my favorite cheese: aged gouda.

This ugly photo is strictly to prove that I really did make risotto.

The aged gouda was an excellent twist, but the really interesting aspect of this recipe was that Lynch instructs you to fold whipped cream into the cooked risotto. I don't understand the point of whipping the cream, because it melted as soon as it touched the risotto, instantly reverting to its pre-whipped condition. That said, the risotto was incredible.

All caught up.

Catch-up post #4: apple tart

I've lost the cookbook reviewing thread of this blog in recent months and one of my goals of the autumn is to get back on track. I'll do a few more days of Stir and then start something new on Wednesday with a burst of first-day-of school enthusiasm.

This is the Stir apple tart I took to my father's house the other night. Modest hit. At top you can see the tart pre-broiling: paper thin apple slices arrayed atop tangy apple butter spread atop a baked puff pastry shell. The puff pastry is store-bought, per Barbara Lynch's instructions.

Here's the tart a few minutes later

after I ran it under the broiler and wandered away for 30 seconds too long. I had to trim off a burnt edge, but the tart was otherwise, as my sister archly put it, "elegant."

"Elegant" was one of our mother's favorite adjectives, by which she meant something very fine and restrained and severe and admirable and fundamentally antithetical to her own effusive, expressive personality. She sometimes tried to be elegant, but taupe just never came naturally to her. "Elegant" describes this tart perfectly. The crust was thin and flaky, the fruity embellishment minimal and not overly sweet. Some people love desserts that are not overly sweet and they will love this tart. I feel that not overly sweet=not adequately sweet, and while I appreciated and admired this elegant pastry, I won't make it again.

Catch-up post #2: My Waterloo

I do understand the challenges of writing a recipe for a dessert as rococo as a napoleon, but on this one Rose Levy Beranbaum gets a D-.

The napoleon episode started last week when, in an attempt to entice my grandmother to come for dinner, I promised to make napoleons. My grandmother often alludes to napoleons. Based on passing remarks, I would say that her vision of an elegant and delicious meal consists of an old fashioned with a cherry, cheese souffle, and, for dessert, a napoleon. Someone will pay for the meal with a Charga-Plate.

So, last week, using Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible, I made the fondant and the pastry cream that are essential to a classic napoleon. Then I mixed and rolled and chilled and rolled and chilled and rolled etc etc. the puff pastry. All was well and I had a beautiful slab of buttery dough. Beranbaum calls for weighting the puff pastry with a cookie sheet as it bakes and while I suspected a piece of parchment belonged in there somewhere, she's Rose Levy Beranbaum who wrote her master's thesis on sifting flour and who am I to question? I forged ahead. As I feared, when I tried to lift the top cookie sheet off the baked puff pastry, I ended up with torn, buckled shards.

My grandmother came to dinner anyway. We rued the failed napoleon as we ate hamburgers and Stir french fries.

Aside about Barbara Lynch's fries: excellent. In case you are wondering, the Stir fries are on the left, loathsome frozen Safeway fries on the right.

Since I still had the pastry cream and fondant, I made a new batch of puff pastry the other day -- this time using Jacques Pepin's recipe -- baked it up, and assembled the napoleon according to Beranbaum's directions. I greatly admire Beranbaum, but it is wrong to assume that just because her recipes are written in obsessive, maddening detail they will actually work. The pastry cream was soupy. Her formula for making the chocolate drizzle: addled.

That said, just pouring that fondant and watching it harden into a glossy pearlescent shell on the pastry gave me a thrill I don't get anymore from making a rustic fruit cobbler. Tackling an absurd French pastry dessert was exciting, however lame the results. I want to do more of this.

Catch-up post #1: Wednesday night

Dinner 1: My sister, Justine, and her family came over and we made corn dogs. I used a recipe from Staff Meals at Chanterelle that involves, as all corn dog recipes seem to, dipping hot dogs in a raised sweetened cornbread dough before plunging them into hot fat.

Here's what I wrote about this recipe in the margin of the book in March 2003: "Very crispy-- not too doughy. Tasted good. Quality of the hot dog does matter."

Duh.

Here's what I wrote in March 2006: "Not as great as remembered -- but not bad. Used leftover batter to fry Milano cookies and now those WERE great."

Here's what I wrote in August 2010: "So greasy. Am I over corn dogs?"

Yes. I think we all are. Justine and I used to fetishize corn dogs based on their "treat" status when our parents took us to the rodeo, but at a certain age any food that entails this
becomes vaguely unappealing.

The homemade corn dogs were edible. We ate them. But the frozen corn dogs I bought to compare them to (see suspiciously tidy, symmetrical golden specimen at far right) were repulsive. Someone actually spit out a mouthful, though I won't say who. I tried to get everyone to explain why these were so disgusting and no one could. Even I couldn't. Maybe it's just the concept of a frozen corn dog?

The meal was not all bad. I made a refreshing cole slaw out of Stir, a basic mayonnaise dressed slaw with some carrots. Not worth buying the book for, but very good.
And dessert was fantastic, engineered by Isabel start to finish. She wanted to invent an ice cream and did so: chocolate ice cream with Nutella and marshmallow swirl. I think she froze the Nutella, but I'm not sure.

She also made the cones:A lot of them broke so there weren't enough to go around, but the shards were crunchy and delicious used to scoop ice cream out of a dish. I need to get her to write a guest post to explain how she did it.

It's like they were never gone

My children are home from New England, taller and tanner and worldlier than when we said goodbye on July 2. Isabel has started drinking tea and is of her own volition reading Little Women, which may not sound worldlier than reading, say, The Clique, but absolutely is. Working your way through the schlock to arrive at the classics: worldly.

Our conversation on the subject:

Tipsy: "I loved Little Women! Jo was my favorite character. But of course she's every girl's
favorite character."

Isabel: "Actually, I like Beth."

Tipsy: "Beth? But don't you identify with Jo?"

Isabel: "No, I probably identify most with Meg. Or maybe Beth."

Stunned silence. I didn't realize anyone, ever, identified with Meg or Beth. It's a big, crazy world in our little house.

Anyway, we plunged right back into Stir by making Barbara Lynch's potato gnocchi. It's a basic gnocchi recipe: You boil the potatoes, rice or mash them onto a baking sheet, let cool, mix with salt and eggs, then knead the unruly mass into a shaggy dough.After that, you roll out the dough and cut it into ropes
and then into fat bullet shapes.

For a sauce, I made Lynch's butcher shop Bolognese. Lynch: "The secret ingredient in this rich, meaty, creamy, traditional-style Bolognese sauce is chicken livers. Finely chopped and combined with the ground meat, they contribute an amazing depth of flavor without making the sauce livery (which means their addition can be our little secret.")

Oh Barbara, we're way past that kind of Jessica Seinfeld ruse. Everyone knew about the livers; everyone ate the livers; everyone liked the livers. I was pondering the narrative arc of this blog, such as there is one. Two years ago, dinners regularly involved threats, children throwing themselves on the floor and screaming, parents reaching for alcohol, tears. Today, everyone pretty much eats everything.

Moral of the story: You, too, can break your the spirits of your children! Serve enough pig ear salads, Parsi casseroles, octopus, and oxtails stews, and by the time they are in middle school your babies will eat liver sauce without batting an eyelash.

Even worse food styling than usual

This is how I eat when my family is not around. 

This is how I drink when my family is not around: not at all. Last night I opened a bottle of beer, drank a few sips, realized I didn't want it, and poured it into the cyclamen. Who wants a foggy head when you get to spend the evening on the sofa in a TOTALLY SILENT HOUSE watching In Treatment DVDs, one after the other, until you realize you loathe every single character, most especially Melissa George and Embeth Davidtz? No one. Bliss. I would have made a great spinster.

 

But without my family, I've had no one to cook for, no one to inspire and aggravate me into writing my blog, hence the inactivity.

My children and husband are on the New England seashore eating lobster rolls and french fries. They sent me a picture:

He comes back tonight, but the children will stay for a month with their grandparents and cousins, an annual tradition they look forward to for the other 11 months of the year. As do I -- almost as eagerly as I start looking forward to their return a week or so after leave. I won't be cooking much from Stir until they get back, though I did make Barbara Lynch's citrus cured salmon, which is rich beyond belief. More on that irresistible, sickening salmon later.

In other news, here's my review of Allegra Goodman's new novel The Cookbook Collector which wasn't really about collecting cookbooks. I was sorry about that. While I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I also completely agree with this amusing review by a critic who didn't. 

Do you think I could stretch it into a novel?

 I like to manage expectations. Below you will find an uneventful First World slice-of-life story with no sex, no violence, no dialogue, and one character. 

Once upon a time, there was a woman who had been cooking a lot of fantastic stuff out of Barbara Lynch's superb book Stir for her family. Specifically:

-torn pasta with shrimp polpettini. (See above.) This involved cutting homemade pasta into odd, raggedy shapes, cooking them, then combining with a sumptuous sauce of white beans and poached shrimp dumplings. You can not imagine a more breathtaking pasta -- and it would work almost as well without the shrimp.

-fresh pasta with green beans and potatoes. Exactly what it sounds like and quite tasty. However, the woman and her daughter agreed that pesto made with Lynch's formula had too much bite. 

-pasta envelopes stuffed with Epoisses cheese and tossed with a sauce of celery and apple. This dish was both labor-intensive and expensive, as Epoisses cheese, rich and stinky, costs $26 for a 9-ounce round. The woman's daughter and husband thought the cheese was too stinky. The woman thought the cheese was delicious, but that her unsightly homemade Taleggio was just as rich and stinky and delicious, and cost a lot less. How much less, she did not compute. 

-risotto with aged gouda. A porridgy crowd pleaser.

-yogurt panna cotta. A puddingy crowd pleaser.

The woman wrote a cookbook review blog and she took her unpaid work seriously. She kept meaning to post about each dish as she cooked it, but this was an altogether frantic, anxious time. She had some intense paid work projects to complete, was worrying about settling her recently deceased mother's estate, and got up very day at 5 a.m. to bottle feed warm milk to baby goats. The goats had never once said thank-you. She was also driving children to and from various camps and lessons almost hourly, which made her a 21st century parenting clichee. Sometimes her daughter said thank-you.

 

Whatever. Boring. Everyone was busy. It was the fashion.

 

One day, in between chauffeuring her children to enriching activities, the woman ran a tedious errand in San Rafael and spotted a cafe she'd heard about called Brazil Marin. In this small ethnic supermarket/diner, a couple of slouchy men were watching the Brazil-Chile game on TV. The woman decided to stop; she never stopped. At the counter, she ordered a "cheese bread" and served herself some stew, rice, and beans from the steam table buffet. On top of it all she sprinkled manioc and vinegary salsa. Then she took the plate outside to eat in the sun and read her novel.*

 

The cheese bread was so delicious it almost made her faint: pale and crusty on the outside, borderline glutinous on the inside, chewy, super-cheesy. She started trying to figure out how to make it at home and then thought: Why? Like she needed more chores? She stopped trying to figure out how to make Brazilian cheese bread at home.

 

Then she began eating the beans and rice and stew. Objectively speaking, none of it was as "good" as the pastas she'd recently made from Barbara Lynch. Still. It was so overwhelmingly pleasant to be sitting in the sun, eating homey food that someone else had cooked, that, to her complete surprise and bemusement, the woman burst into tears. She cried off and on for the rest of the day. Then she was okay.

The End.

Questions for discussion: What did eating rice, beans, and stew mean for this character? Was it about missing her "recently deceased" mother? Or was she simply feeding too much without getting fed? Is that a problem for women in our culture? Would the story have been more exciting if the woman had flirted with one of the Brazilian men watching soccer instead of buying lunch? Do we really believe the cheese bread "almost made her faint?" Discuss.

In other news, Isabel and I made a light, nearly perfect cupcake, using many of your suggestions: oil, cake flour, yogurt.

The cupcake has a macaroon-like top crust that is actually very tasty, but not technically ideal. Still, this is close! Research continues. Thank-you.

*Amy & Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout. Whew. Strong stuff. The Epoisses cheese of Elizabeth Strout novels. Recommend!

Is it just me or is it salty in here?

On Friday, Isabel baked these chocolate cookies from Barbara Lynch's Stir and they are blockbusters. I don't even like chocolate, and I particularly don't like chocolate with cinnamon, which these also contain, but trust me: they are cookies for the scrapbook. Somehow, Lynch strikes the perfect balance of overbearing chocolate and obnoxious cinnamon, enabling the two flavors to neutralize and complement one another. But what really takes these cookies over the edge is the sprinkling of sea salt on top -- just like in the famous New York Times chocolate chip cookie recipe. The recipe for Lynch's cookies can be found here. 

We were so enthusiastic about these cookies that on Saturday, when asked to bring a dessert to my cousin's house, I made salted caramel cupcakes, the wonderful recipe for which comes from Cakewalk author Kate Moses's blog. As my friend Zorina put it, the caramel icing tastes exactly like the inside of a See's Bordeaux chocolate. But better! Because of the salt. After a day or two the salt melts into the frosting which doesn't look so pretty, but you shouldn't have many cupcakes left. 

If this keeps up I'm going to find it just as unthinkable to eat an unsalted dessert as I do an unsalted steak. This can't be a good thing. 

Poulet au pie crust

Wednesday night I wrapped a whole chicken in "bread" dough (poulet au pain from Stir), except it wasn't really bread dough, it was pie dough. Flour + butter + water = pie dough, no? So cool! The chicken was completely sealed in dough when it went into the oven, but there must have been a breach because juices oozed forth to make a rich, salty, gooey sauce that was very delicious mopped from the bottom of the pan with shards of pastry. My husband said: "It's not as good as chicken a la king." I think he just said it because he wanted to be quoted on the blog. Even he couldn't believe it. This chicken was special.

I also creamed some spinach per Barbara Lynch's recipe. Creamed spinach should contain cream, of course, but should also be pureed or finely chopped -- creamed -- to minimize the distinction between solid spinach and liquid cream. This creamed spinach failed in that regard, but I am like Popeye in my fondness for spinach in all forms, save salad. Remember how Popeye would punch a hole in a can and pour it down his throat? That used to make me hungry.

Thursday night, it was just Owen and me and neither of us wanted much for dinner, so we ate homemade camembert on toast. The first bites of camembert were fantastic, but it got a bit stinky and intense towards the end. You need to pace yourself with the house camembert.

Alton Brown cookies

I don't know anything about Alton Brown, except that his English muffins let me down and his granola is the most stupidly delicious I've ever tasted. My sister calls once a month to curse me for telling her about it. 

Isabel gave Brown's chocolate chip cookies a high ranking -- too high, imho. But I'm just the secretary. I thought they were lumpish and undistinguished and would rather eat a pound of granola. I just tested two more cookies to confirm my judgment. Yes, very, very bad.

Anyway, here's Isabel's revised ranking:

1. Cakewalk by Kate Moses (Robust cookies flavored with espresso powder, irresistible and possibly unbeatable.)

2. Baking by Dorie Greenspan (The classic -- but better.) 

3. Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce (Crisp, butterscotchy)

4. Alton's Brown "The Chewy" (Thick, soft.) 

5.  New York Times (Fussy to make; thick; salted on top)

6. All Recipes (Stout, chewy, more-ish)

7. Silver Palate (Chewy, butterscotchy)

8. Ready to Bake by David Lebovitz. (Very good -- plus, they contain nuts, which we like.)

9.  Toll House (The classic.)

10. Ad Hoc at Home (Too much severe chocolate, too little cookie)

11. Joy of Cooking, 1975 (Thin, pale, unimpressive.)

In other news, I made a green bean and seared shrimp salad from Stir the other night. You can extrapolate a lot from the name alone, but not the toasted hazelnuts, big handfuls of cilantro, sliced radishes and dressing made with Thai red curry paste and creme fraiche. One day I'm going to quit trying to peel toasted hazelnuts by rubbing them in a towel because it doesn't work. Do hazelnut skins even taste bad? I like this book a lot. I like that Barbara Lynch tells me how to do crazy stuff I've never done before, like wrap a chicken in bread dough, which I did tonight. Haven't eaten yet, or I'd tell you how it turned out.

Speaking of chicken, this story about pollutants and free-range eggs is a real bummer. It doesn't change my feelings about keeping hens or letting them run around in the yard or eating their eggs. I didn't believe that "pastured" eggs were much healthier to begin with, and now I don't believe the opposite. Still, depressing.

This and that

This is the olive and ricotta pizza from Stir that I made the other night using leftover brioche pizza dough. You bake a hot, zesty, salty pie and then top with cool ricotta and chopped scallions. Quite delicious, though it reinforced my preference for a lean, chewy pizza crust. 

That's it. That's all I've cooked from Stir in the last week. I don't know why. Busy. Distracted. Unmotivated. We've been dining on leftovers and cereal and, last night, take-out from the glamorous new Whole Foods of which half the floor space is devoted to prepared foods: salad bar, pizza counter, deli, sushi bar, burrito bar. Crafty! Because while there were long lines in the food court, absolutely no one was buying rump roasts or flaxseed or sugar or flour.  It's like the whole town is a giant campus and this is our fancy canteen. It depressed me.

 

Sunday supper:

Alice Waters would not approve. I don't approve. 

Meanwhile, I've done some baking from Good to the Grain:

Currant scones. Made with spelt flour, these tasted healthy, and I don't mean that in no nice way.

Banana walnut cake. 

Rich and moist, but a bit to sweet. Not a replacement for banana bread. It is not flying out the door.

Graham crackers. 

These did fly out the door. Made with a combination of graham and teff flours, they're less like graham crackers than assertive, swarthy, super-snappy gingersnaps.  Last night I ate the last of them spread with leftover whipped mascarpone.

 

I posted about this before, but have you all experienced whipped, sweetened mascarpone? It's like a miraculous cross between whipped cream and buttercream frosting, but tangier, fluffier, more maddeningly delicious than either. I do not hate myself enough to ever make it again.