Just so you know, honey, I really don't want to know

lemon bars

I made Nancy Silverton's asparagus, fontina, and prosciutto sandwiches Thursday night. No special alchemy, just a decent idea for a sandwich that I wouldn't have come up with on my own. You roast asparagus and toast some bread. Rub the bread with garlic. Put asparagus on bread, top with a poached egg, top with fontina, melt under broiler for 30 seconds, top with prosciutto, eat with knife and fork, then eat all the asparagus your kids took out of their sandwiches ("Just so you know, Mom, I don't like asparagus,") load the dishwasher, go to bed.

This involved a lot of dishes for sandwiches, but given sandwiches are all we ate, fewer dishes than usual. Recipe is here.

I'm trying to cook one thing a day, no more and no less. On Friday I made Smitten Kitchen's whole lemon bars which involves pureeing a lemon, skin and all, with sugar and egg and pouring this over the shortbread crust. Definitely easier than juicing the lemon and scraping the zest as I've done in the past with Joy of Cooking lemon bars, but how will I ever know which is the better bar unless I test them side by side? I'm not going to do that. There was a day not long ago when I would have, but I've come to value sanity over the scientific method. Smitten's lemon bars are good. Joy lemon bars are good. You won't go wrong with either.

I put the pan of lemon bars in the refrigerator to firm up on Friday night so I could cut them into pretty squares on Saturday morning, but Isabel's two best friends started the job for me after I went to bed. Isabel told me that her friends thought the lemon bars were "too eggy," but I think the pan tells another story.

Teenagers are cute.

I didn't cook anything on Saturday. Does that mean I have to cook two things today? 

Everlasting? This kitchen (and post) is &*#(% neverending

That's, I don't know, 50 sandwiches?

For relatively small animals, goats and chickens are very productive, and not just of babies. Relentlessly productive. I don't know what I would do if I had a cow except maybe jump off the roof. Quart by quart, the goat's milk accumulates, eventually making it hard to find space in the refrigerator for other things, like half a leftover Subway Veggie Delite sandwich or 5 pounds of Meyer lemons or caprine CDT vaccine or Chardonnay.

goat reblochon? we'll see

The other day, I got my act together and used all our milk to make cheese. High five! I made reblochon and ricotta. That took some time but cleared refrigerator space and eased my conscience. Will the reblochon age into real reblochon in our crawl space? Big laugh. First of all, real reblochon is made with cow's milk. Whatever. The milk is gone.

Now there's just the whey. The cheesemaking left behind a gallon of whey and whey makes the most incredible bread. A few years ago I tested this hunch scientifically by baking two batches of bagels, identical except that one contained whey, the other, water. In a blind tasting, everyone agreed that the whey bagels had more tang and flavor and aroma. You can not just pour whey down the drain.

such a burden

So to use up whey, I opened Bread and Chocolate and made another batch of Fran Gage's country wheat bread. I let the starter sit for 20 hours again and the bread was again fantastic. Since one recipe didn't get rid of much whey, I made her polenta bread (dense, excellent) at the same time, and let that starter sit for 20 hours too.

But there was still a lagoon of whey in the refrigerator. So I made bagels.

It's all about the presentation.

There was now a smaller lagoon of whey, but also three loaves of bread and ten bagels on the counter, plus the tail end of a previous loaf of bread which we hadn't quite finished. And you can't throw staling bread away.

The next day, I made french toast for breakfast, which I think of as a "jackpot" food, because it uses not just staling bread, but eggs.

And eggs, people, eggs are the mightiest challenge of all. We have 17 chickens. It is May. I give my sister a dozen eggs a week and my father takes six and a few weeks ago I gave my neighbor Joan 25 eggs that I discovered in a nest hidden in the ivy. They come from a single Blue Andalusian hen who values her privacy.

 means there aren't rats in the ivy

If you're thinking it was rude of me to foist weird not-so-fresh ivy eggs on Joan, don't. She knew where they came from and knew there was nothing wrong with them. Ivy keeps everything cool. Would a Burgundian housewife have declined unrefrigerated ivy eggs? Non. (This fun interview with Tamar Adler explains Burgundian housewife reference.)

Even though we give away eggs, I still have too many eggs. I judge recipes based on how many eggs they use up. For instance, I was disappointed that Fran Gage's Meyer lemon poundcake only used 2 eggs.

It would have been taller if I'd used a smaller pan.

And even though I don't love chocolate, I'm very stoked to make her chocolate pots de creme, which use 10 eggs. JACKPOT.

As of a day ago, the goat's milk was all gone and the whey was on the wane and we were down to 77 eggs. Maybe we had a bit too much bread and ricotta, but everything was momentarily under control.

Then I went outside and when I came back in I was carrying eleven eggs and a quart of warm goat's milk. Yesterday morning I brought in another quart of goat's milk and by the afternoon, seven more eggs. Last night, a pint of goat's milk. This morning, another quart. And in another week, Sparkles comes on line.

Last night, we had Fran Gage's ricotta gnocchi for dinner, which rid us of half of the goat's milk ricotta and 2 eggs.

dumplings soaked in butter

I also made Gage's salade Beaujolaise which I have always known and loved as frisee aux lardons. You may be familiar with this wonderful salad: curly, crunchy lettuce with cubes of bacon, croutons, vinaigrette, all of it topped with a poached egg, the yolk of which dresses the leaves.

I will make this again.

Jackpot recipe because it used up 2 slices of polenta bread and 3 poached eggs. For dessert, we had Gage's strawberry ice cream, which used 3 eggs and was delicious.

Occasionally I leave the kitchen. The other night, Owen and I went to a restaurant in San Francisco called Volcano that serves Japanese curry,  a genre of food we were unfamiliar with but loved instantly and very, very much. While Volcano had fast-food ambiance and prices, you could see people actually cooking and preparing food from scratch behind the counter and back in the kitchen.  Owen's fried calamari and shrimp were spectacular and I can't explain why except to say that they tasted "fresh," which is a useless adjective, but the only one I can come up with. The seafood was crispy. It wasn't at all oily. It was perfect. It tasted fresh.

Owen wanted me order the spiciest sauce -- "volcano" calibre --  on the pork katsu curry because he thinks that watching people eat spicy food is hilarious. He is 11. I obliged because I love spicy food. He taped me eating without telling me he had the camera on, which he also thinks is hilarious. Almost as hilarious as taking fish-eye photos that make people look bloated.

sidesplitting

I have never watched myself chewing nor wanted to, but I enjoyed this video because I now know that I eat just like my mom did. My grandmother eats that way as does my sister.

If it the video doesn't upload, I apologize. You're not missing much. Just the family way of chewing.

The katsu was fabulous but too fiery. If you ever have the opportunity, you should go to Volcano, but order your sauce "medium." After eating about a third of the katsu, sweat was pouring down my nose and I packed the rest of the meal into a box and when we got home I scraped it to the chickens who will convert it into eggs which will be used in Fran Gage's ricotta tartlets later this week.

To be continued. Endlessly.

A few good things on a dreary January weekend

1. Made marshmallows with agave nectar, just to see how it works. It works and they were lovely, big and sticky. I don't understand how brown agave nectar yields a snow-white marshmallow,  but it does. I also don't understand agave nectar. I was under the impression it was healthier than corn syrup, but then I read this. 

2. Since we had a surplus of marshmallows, Isabel and I made Rice Krispie treats with homemade marshmallows. They tasted just like Rice Krispie treats made with store-bought marshmallows, which is to say, delicious.

3. I had dismissed Matt Damon as uncrushworthy following Mr. Ripley and The Departed, but it turns out his lack of appeal in both those movies was just ACTING. I have reassessed after watching the first two Bourne movies this weekend with Owen and might need a picture of Matt to tape inside my locker. Jokes aside, what excellent movies! I like Franka Potente too, especially when she's got the red hair. Highly recommend.  

4. Though it's no Soviet Kitsch, Regina Spektor's new album, Far, is fantastic. This is probably the only thought about music I will have in 2010 and possibly 2011. 

5. Finally, my friend Mary P. came over last night and we baked a dobos torte, which is a multilayered Hungarian cake of extreme fussiness and decadence that her mother used to make and curse over.

The luscious filling calls for 6 eggs, a quarter pound of chocolate, and a cup of butter, and the whole thing is topped with hard caramel. It was a culinary feat and not at all unpleasant to eat, though ours was a bit sloppy looking. Mary also helped take care of our superabundance of Meyer lemons by preserving them with salt, Moroccan-style.  

So pretty. It was an unusually fun and productive Sunday night. The bad news is, I drank 3% of my 2010 alcohol allotment.