Roasting, rolling, mashing, reading, resting, raining

our freeway exit

So much has happened since my last post, so much that I wanted to write about but couldn’t because of shopping, baking, roasting, mashing, cleaning, carving, hosting, resting, and, when that was all over, because I’d forgotten how to write. It happens! I was on an unprecedented writing roll before the holiday, barreling ahead on two different projects, keeping up the blog, feeling superhuman. Then I took a few days off to host Thanksgiving and can't get back in the groove. At least I’m warm, dry, and fed. One of these years I'll hit another sweet spot.

Something I've learned about blogging is that if you don’t capture the moment at the moment, you have to let it go and just move on. So I’m not going to tell you about the most affecting piece I read on the terrible Ferguson conflagration nor the essay that explained why I shouldn’t like it as much as I did. I'm not going to even mention the fact that I’m suddenly tempted to block several friends on Facebook because I get so agitated every morning by their political posts and find myself arguing with them in my head for hours and hours. I’ll forego describing the amazing Ottolenghi celeriac with lentils and hazelnuts that I cooked per a suggestion one of you made in the comments. It was truly great, and I don't often say that of lentils, celery root, or hazelnuts. THANK YOU.

Six days have passed now and it's too late to let you know that the New York Times salty pluff mud pie was the one real loser on the Thanksgiving menu, or that the grape salad was weird, but not terrible, and that these brussels sprouts in peanut vinaigrette were the best part of the meal. I bought more sprouts yesterday so I could make them again. 

I’d wanted to write something about Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, a noble meditation on the end of life that I read in one sitting the day after Thanksgiving. The book is full of wisdom and grace, but also snapping femurs and mild symptoms that turn out to be metastatic cancer. Approach this important book with caution and, perhaps, some Ativan. Unfortunately, the moment to recommend/warn you about Being Mortal  has passed. So, too, the opportunity to share my my mixed reviews of the raunchy John Waters Christmas show, which wasn't as clever and funny as we'd hoped, and Mockingjay, the first Hunger Games movie I haven't loved, mostly because I can't understand why anyone would pine for Josh Hutcherson.

Fortunately, life has calmed down now that Thanksgiving is over and the kids are back in school. Plus, we've been hit by some awesome storms and rain is in the forecast for the next few days and I don’t want to leave the house lest I get swept down the hill in a flash flood. I'll have no trouble finding time to keep you up to date on thrilling developments in my mind and kitchen as I putter around in slippers, researching tramp art picture frames on eBay and trying to get my writing mojo back.

Thrilling developments like this: I’ve never seen Owen wolf anything down with such gusto as he did this ground beef dish from Orangette last night. Mark and I made pigs of ourselves as well and there wasn’t a crumb of meat left for poor Isabel when she got home from dance. I’ve decided I’m going to make this every two weeks until Owen goes to college or starts complaining, whichever comes first. So easy and delicious. For the record, I used a pound of ground beef (adjusting the other ingredients accordingly) and added a 5-ounce box of about-to-expire baby spinach intended for a salad that I never got around to making. Other vegetables could be safely incorporated, rendering the dish slightly healthier. I plan to experiment. Also, I omitted the fried eggs. A real hit, this dish. Try it. 

The quality of gratitude

quadrant of excellent pecan and the over-spiced sweet potato

My sister, Justine, hosted Thanksgiving this year, bless her heart, and I just brought dessert. 

Isabel made a Milk Bar grasshopper pie (like a mint-flavored brownie) and I made a Milk Bar pink grapefruit pie (stupendous, exotic), plus pecan, sweet potato, and raspberry pies. The pies were all done the day before Thanksgiving, so I dedicated myself to savoring a day of serious leisure, my first Thanksgiving off in eons. Relax. Enjoy. Feel grateful. Let someone else set the table, brine the turkey, have a fit. That was the plan. 

I'm an extremely early riser, but I stayed in bed later than usual on Thanksgiving morning trying to think of everything I was grateful for. Gratitude has become one of those vexing words, not quite ruined by use as an alternative lifestyle slogan, but almost. I wondered whether you have to be grateful to someone or something or whether you can just be grateful without any implied thank you. Would a better word be gladness? Except there’s something smug and unseemly about celebrating one’s gladness. And gladness for gastronomic bounty in 21st century America with our diabetes and junk food and industrial farming is problematic, and ugh, ugh ugh, you get the point, instead of feeling gratitude or gladness I was mired in tortured semantics before dawn.

 raspberry

Got up. After a short time, lay down again to read a book I wasn't loving. Because reading spy novels is what you do on a day off. Thought about going to see Dallas Buyers Club, thought about taking a walk, but those activities required too much effort so instead I got into little quarrels with Mark and Owen. Felt glum because I hadn’t posted anything on the blog in ages, but wasn't about to wrestle with those particular demons on a day of rest. Ditto putting the last swathe of plaster on the pizza oven or the final touches on the hard-hitting magazine story about grilled cheese sandwiches. So I took a nap that left me feeling groggy and even crabbier than when I lay down.

The grapefruit pie was a stunner.

Finally -- finally! --  it was 4 p.m. and we drove to Justine’s. Owen was holding the raspberry pie in the back seat and kept pretending he'd broken the crust and that juice was spilling everywhere because it’s hilarious when your mom shrieks. At Justine's I immediately commenced stuffing myself with bacon-wrapped water chestnuts. My father asked how I was. I said, “Kind of restless and grumpy and at loose ends.” He said, “Well, how about writing another blog post one of these days?”

I sighed and kept eating bacon-wrapped water chestnuts until I discovered the Alton Brown spinach-artichoke dip. That stuff is diabolical. You should make it.

grasshopper

Then suddenly I was feeling it. The Thanksgiving spirit. All these people I love were there in the same room, wearing their party clothes, and my sister had made two kinds of stuffing, two different salads, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, rolls, a magnificent turkey. My grandmother, who will turn 102 in January, looked like she’d come straight from a White House tea. She kept fretting that there were 13 of us at the table, but it wouldn't be a party if she didn't. My cousin and his wife convinced me to watch Orphan Black and I attempted to sell them on Enlightened. I ate so much of my aunt’s signature spinach casserole that I felt physical pain that persists as of this writing, but it was so delicious, that casserole, and I won't get to taste it again until Christmas. The raspberry pie was a soupy mess, but my niece Stella wolfed it down anyway. I'd made it just for her and it was a pleasure to see her pleasure.

Lovely night. You can't will or think gratitude into being, it just comes.

They look wistful. What were they thinking about?

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.

The boots I ordered don't fit over my calves. I wonder why.

Cocktail hour around newly painted hearth

I know the last thing anyone wants to think about right now is Thanksgiving, but in my role as recipe recommender and anthologizer, I need to offer a quick recap of what was cooked at our house and what we thought, as some of it is applicable to Christmas. I'm late with this report; I had a mild case of PTSD over the weekend.

THE MENU

*seasonal cocktail. Brought by my sister. There were two: a negroni and a fabulous sweet-sour-smoky Scotch creation the recipe for which I have requested. I drank three. Strangely, I never became drunk. Adrenaline?
*gougeres (from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table). Excellent, as always.
*sardines rillettes (Dorie again). Excellent, as always. 
*creamy sausage-stuffed mushrooms (Food52) Enormously popular, although there was twice as much stuffing as required for the number of mushrooms. Highly recommend.
salted almonds (Food52) Good. Unexciting
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**pear soup with pancetta and blue cheese (Food52) Jennifer Steinhauer does not lie or even exaggerate. I'm printing out the recipe and putting it in my binder and will try very hard to remember it next Thanksgiving. This soup really tastes of pear and yet is unquestionably a savory. We had leftovers of everything except this soup, but this is what I most wanted leftovers of. You should bookmark this right now. You could also serve it for Christmas. Or tonight.

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roasted turkey   
*ciabatta stuffing with chorizo, mushrooms and sweet potato (Food52) Good! Although next time I would omit the sweet potatoes, which I found incongruous.
*green beans with hazelnut crumbs. The sleeper hit of the party. The recipe came from the Frog Commissary Cookbook, which I pulled out to make the mocha buttercrunch pie. (See below.) I spotted the interesting bean recipe while idly flipping through the book and since I had all the ingredients, made it. Very glad I did. (Recipe below.)

*apple, brandy and walnut cranberry sauce (from Food52) Great. Just be sure to add a pinch of salt. (FYI, the recipe calls for pears, but apples work fine.)
mashed potatoes
*spinach-jalapeno casserole (brought by my aunt, made from Laurie Colwin recipe) Wonderful, as usual. A standby and my aunt's signature dish.
*kale salad (brought by my sister, made from Martha Stewart recipe) Wonderful, as usual.
peas These were supposed to be brought my maternal grandmother, topped with a limp piece of lettuce in an old CorningWare dish with a little blue flower on it. These did not appear. The end of an era? Or just a hiatus?
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*chess pie. "My" recipe for this supersweet Southern custard pie calls for a tablespoon of cornmeal, which I forgot to put in. I had always wondered if the cornmeal mattered and now I know: It does. Even without the cornmeal, it's my all-time favorite pie. 
*mocha buttercrunch pie. It was absurd and gaudy and creamy and rich and big. And it was unspeakably delicious. For the last few days I've had trouble passing the refrigerator without eating a big spoonful of cold leftover mocha buttercrunch pie. Today I put the last bit of pie in the sink and ran water over it to stop myself.

*pecan pie. Also hard to resist. I tried the recipe from the Frog Commissary Cookbook and it was excellent.
sour cream apple pie. Also from Frog Commissary and very good. 
peanut butter pie. Isabel made this out of a charming cookbook called Sweety Pies by Patty Pinner. Rather than a cold, creamy peanut butter pie with some kind of chocolate embellishment -- which is what I'm used to -- this was a baked, cakey peanut butter pie. Very unusual, very tasty. 
pumpkin cheesecake. Isabel made this from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion. Quite good.


All in all, a wonderful Thanksgiving with 17 of my favorite people. I missed my mother something awful, though. She would have loved that mocha buttercrunch pie. 


GREEN BEANS WITH HAZELNUT CRUMBS
from The Frog Commissary Cookbook


1/2 cup hazelnuts, toasted, skinned (to the extent possible) and finely chopped
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1 pound green beans, trimmed (use haricots verts if you can find them)
6 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon minced shallots
kosher salt to taste
black pepper to taste.


1. Mix the nuts and the breadcrumbs. 
2. Blanch the green beans in boiling salted water for 2 minutes, then drain and rinse under very cold water to stop the cooking. 
3. Heat the butter in a skillet. Add the shallots and cook until softened. Add the green beans, salt, pepper, and hazelnut crumbs. Cook for several minutes, turning the beans to coat them with the crumbs. Serves 6.

Thanksgiving wrap-up and beyond

Father. Turkey.

The big news from Thanksgiving:  I will never brine a turkey again and neither should you. The method outlined here yielded a succulent and perfectly salted bird. I'm not sure I've ever roasted a better turkey.

Isabel's pies were, of course, stellar.

Clockwise from right: chess, sour cream pumpkin, buttermilk, pecan, chocolate caramel with sea salt.

And the kids -- 1 to 98, as mentioned by my husband -- were wonderful company and perfectly well-behaved.

I know my mission right now is to cook through Thai Street Food, but I'm going to be traveling for most of the next ten days, reporting a fun story that will take me to a handful of small towns in cold places around the West. Owen and I are currently in Groveland, California (just outside Yosemite) where it is raining and we are staying in a haunted hotel.

Owen is the messiest person I've ever met. He's disorganized and overemotional and forgets to put the lid on the goat food. He doesn't take pains with his homework and can never find his shoes or his backpack and he routinely leaves his jacket at school. He worries his parents.

But he's curious about everything, excitable and enthusiastic, and he has this wellspring of joy that sometimes seems like the most precious and mysterious of gifts. You can't imagine the ecstasies over everything we've seen so far on our very modest trip -- roadside petting zoos, haunted hotels, dioramas in small museums, snow. He may never master long division, but he's a peerless traveling companion.

P.S. Brilliant piece comparing two very different cookbooks.

A prettier Thanksgiving post

Thanksgiving 1998

My mother was a great one for holidays. She did not just tolerate holiday parties -- she loved holiday parties. She always dressed up and made toasts and called me the next day at 8 a.m. to rehash every single detail and comment on every single thing we ate. Tonight isn't going to be the same without her, and neither is tomorrow morning. I wish I could tell her how much I miss her.

See my pretty turkey platter?

Three years ago my mother and I wandered into a shop and I said, "I want that platter for Christmas." And she said, "You will have that platter for Christmas."

Isabel has had mixed success with the pies.

Cookies hide crust shrinkage.

She wanted to throw this particular pie away, but I forbade that. She also made a chocolate caramel tart and a pumpkin sour cream pie. I made a chess pie and a buttermilk-maple pie. Too many pies is our tradition.

Time to put on makeup and a festive dress. My mother would want that.

Thanksgiving miscellany

Why I'm not brining. *

1. We're hosting Thanksgiving. I decided not to brine and instead to pre-season the bird as recommended in this recipe. Much neater and easier. We'll see if tastes as good.

2. Isabel wants to bake all the pies -- pumpkin, pecan, chess, and chocolate. I feel both happy about this, and displaced. Mostly happy, though. And proud.

3. Owen left the lid off the garbage can of goat food (again) and it got rained on. When I went out yesterday morning it was like forty pounds of gruel. Soon it will be forty pounds of moldy gruel. He loudly denies that he left the lid off, insisting that someone else did it. The likelihood of this is practically zero, but I can't prove it and therefore can't make him pay for the replacement goat food, which is what I wanted to do.

4. Speaking of goats, we all love our short, dumpy goat Peppermint more than our tall, beautiful goat Natalie, though we try not to show it. Do we love Peppermint more because she has a better personality, or does she have a better personality because we love her more? I worried that because she lived in our house for a month as a baby, cosseted by adoring humans, Peppermint would end up spoiled and high maintenance, like the cat in Babe. Quite the opposite. Peppermint is mellow, quiet, and droll. It's like she never doubts we'll take good care of her, whereas Natalie, who has always lived outdoors like a proper goat, seems less confident that we'll come through for her. She's clamorous and demanding, perennially anxious, really obnoxious. There's a lesson in here somewhere.

5. I saw 127 Hours. It's not for everyone, but I liked it a lot. If nothing else, it will make you feel thankful.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

*photo credit goes to this site.

Eggnog pie

I got the idea for an eggnog pie from Layne, who writes one of my all-time favorite blogs and told me she was thinking of "hacking" a recipe for an eggnog custard pie. Suddenly, I couldn't get the idea of eggnog pie out of my head and had to have one for Thanksgiving. Since I'm no good at hacking recipes, I looked through a bunch of cookbooks and found this fine recipe in San Francisco A La Carte, the outstanding 1979 cookbook by the San Francisco Junior League. It isn't a custard pie, it's a boozy, superrich cream pie and if you eat more than a small slice you will feel fat and tired and sick. But it's worth it.

EGGNOG PIE

1. Bake and cool a 9-inch pie shell. The original recipe calls for a pastry crust, but I think a cookie crumb crust would be a lot better.

2. Soften 1 tsp. gelatin in 1 TBS cold water. Set aside.

3. Scald 1 cup milk in the top of a double boiler over simmering water.

4. Dissolve 2 TBS cornstarch in 1/4 cup cold water and stir into scalded milk. Then add 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp. salt, and 3 beaten egg yolks. Cook, stirring constantly, until sugar has dissolved and it's sort of thick, about 15 minutes.

5. Add softened gelatin and stir until dissolved. Add 1 TBS butter, 1 tsp. vanilla, and 1 TBS bourbon. Stir until butter melts. Cool.

6. Beat 1 cup cream until stiff, fold into filling, and pour into pie shell. Refrigerate a while to firm up. Before serving, top with freshly grated nutmeg.

Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We certainly did. I'm truly grateful to have such a lovely family, both the one I was born into and the one I married into.

But this is a food blog, not a Hallmark card. Here's what we ate:

ajwain cashews 

Parsi cheese crisps

avocado crostini

dried apricots with goat cheese and pistachios

maple sour cocktails (thank-you, Justine and Michael)

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deep-fried turkeys

fresh cranberry relish

candied sweet potatoes

mashed potatoes

red rice

brussels sprouts with butter and garlic

cider jelly 

spinach jalapeno casserole (again, thank-you, Justine)

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chocolate chess pie

chess pie

eggnog pie

pear pie

pumpkin caramel pie

pecan pie

 

It was a Parsi/Cajun/Laurie Colwin/Southern/Joy of Cooking/Gourmet Today feast. Isabel and I prepared everything, save several key contributions from my sister Justine. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work and yesterday we were not so peppy.

I'm going to post two recipes here because they're spectacular and I've made them enough times that I feel some ownership, though I certainly did not invent them.

#1. Paul Prudhomme's cranberry relish

From his Louisiana Kitchen, which is a stellar cookbook. This relish is fresh and tangy and so much zippier than jellied "sauce" that I'm surprised it hasn't caught on in a huge way. You can watch a video of Chef Paul demonstrating a version of this recipe right here.

In a food processor, grind together 1 lb. cranberries, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 tablespoons vanilla, the juice and pulp from 2/3 of a seeded lemon, the sections from 2 peeled, seeded oranges. Refrigerate for a few hours before serving. 

You'll have a boatload of relish; it's excellent on sandwiches.

#2. John Egerton's chess pie

This recipe comes from his encyclopedic Southern Food, another stellar cookbook. I first made this pie in 1996 and have baked it just about every Thanksgiving since. Flat and very sweet and pale yellow, it my all-time favorite.

 

First, make pie dough using any recipe you like and roll it out to fit in a 9-inch pan. Preheat oven to 375. Beat 3 eggs with 1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 tablespoons melted butter, 1 tablespoon white cornmeal, 1/3 cup buttermilk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla. Mix well. Pour into the crust and bake for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 and bake 20 minutes more. It should be mostly set but still slightly jiggly in the middle. It will firm as it cools.

As usual, there is none of this pie left over.

As for the turkeys, they were storebought. They were not heritage. Next year, I vow to do better.

I was going to write about frying turkeys, except we're done with frying turkeys. We fried a bunch of turkeys in the mid-1990s when it first became trendy, then lost enthusiasm. Since my father-in-law really wanted to try one, we hauled out the cooker, the giant pot and seasoning injectors, bought six gallons of peanut oil, and went through the dramatic and laborious process one last time. The turkeys were tasty and spicy and much appreciated, but it's undeniably an ordeal and henceforth, we are roasting. 

Three pies down, two to go

I always thought that I was drawn to cooking because my mother had so few inclinations in that direction. She was always installing skylights, building bookshelves, and working in her pottery studio. Cooking was all mine, and I taught myself to cook using cookbooks. See subtitle of blog. I assumed things would play out this way with Isabel, that she would look for areas where she could  distinguish herself.  And she has. She also cooks. She used to bake with me all the time, and now she bakes without me all the time. I couldn't make a pie unsupervised when I was 12, but she can.

I was watching her yesterday and noticed she's picked up all my "tricks" -- she melts her butter in a measuring cup in the preheating oven instead of on the stove, etc. -- 

but she's neater, more patient and methodical. Like, she puts the pecans in an orderly row.

 I never do that.

I'm the tiniest bit jealous. I'll always be a fake cook who learned from books; she'll be a "natural" cook who learned from her gentle, wise, and beautiful mother.

While Isabel and I were having our wholesome Laura Ingalls Wilder day, Owen took in some serious TV. The trouble with taking pictures of a kid watching Ben 10: Alien Swarm is that you can't get both stupefied child and flashing television in the same frame.