Is this the little girl I carried?

Isabel, Owen, Julian Assange

Isabel graduated from high school last week. I'm very wistful. We still have Owen, but I've started flashing forward a few years and, you know, things aren't looking good.

For the graduation party, I served chocolate-covered strawberries from the Joy of Cooking.

going for documentation, not art

How do you feel about chocolate-covered strawberries? I love the idea of them, but have decided they're subtly stressful to eat. You never know when you pick one up if it'll be juicy and nectarous or bland and watery because you can't visually assess the fruit under the chocolate. It's part of the fun of eating fruit, studying the dimensions, shape, color, et cetera, and then taking a bite and finding out if you were right, if that really was a good one. You don't get to play this little game with the chocolate-covered strawberry; it's all up to chance. Plus, when you take that bite, the chocolate falls off in shards and if you don't eat quickly, melts on your fingers. Then when you're done you have to find a place to deposit the damp, scraggly stem.

Yep, life is really hard. Chocolate-covered strawberries don't help. Down with chocolate-covered strawberries.

puffy, buttery perfection

David Lebovitz's madeleines are the opposite of stressful to eat. Soft and pillowy, they're subtly calming. I believe I've raved about these lovely little cakes before. I served them warm from the oven to accompany the berries. Impeccable recipe. 

But the most delicious thing I made for the party: brandy alexanders. The picture I took of my brandy alexander is so atrocious I couldn't post it. That's pretty bad because my standards, as we all know, are not high. This is what brandy alexanders look like. Beautiful.

The history of the brandy alexander is murky, but the cocktail seems to have been invented by someone, somewhere, roughly a century ago. It has been much written and sung about ever since and if you've never heard the Feist song, you should fix that. If you've never tasted a brandy alexander, you might think about fixing that as well. This is a rich, suave, complex and utterly delicious concoction.  Recipes vary considerably and the one we made was heavy on the brandy: 2 ounces brandy, 1/2 ounce creme de cacao, 1/2 ounce cream, shake with ice, strain into glass, shave lots of nutmeg on top. I found it a bit stiff and added more cream. Later, I discovered that I was on the right track as most recipes call for equal parts brandy, creme de cacao, and cream. For a perfect brandy alexander I'd go with 2 parts brandy, 1 part creme de cacao, 1 part cream, plenty of nutmeg.

Now I just need to try a pink squirrel, a zombie, and a Singapore sling and I can stop drinking altogether.

Mark bought this for the party. Not half bad.

In other news, I've cooked a number of bland dishes from The Hakka Cookbook and there's not much I want to say about them because bland=pretty boring. As result of all that Hakka food, though, we've ended up with a mountain of leftover white rice so last night I made the ginger fried rice from Genius Recipes by Food52's Kristen Miglore.

trying out a library copy before I buy

This may be the only fried rice recipe in the world that was specifically engineered for people who don't have leftover rice on hand. According to Miglore, freshly cooked rice won't fry properly (it gets clumpy and soggy), but if you follow this "genius" technique, which she credits to Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Mark Bittman, you can get good results anyway. Fry some bits of ginger and garlic until crispy, then reserve. Soften sliced leeks in peanut oil, add your your fresh rice and cook until warmed through. Scoop it into bowls, drizzle with soy sauce and sesame oil, top with a fried egg, and sprinkle with pre-fried bits of garlic and ginger. These provide the crunch your freshly cooked rice lacks.

Genius?

Nah. But a very easy, cheap, and tasty meal. I often have leftover rice and would not make fried rice if I didn't, so the wizardry of this dish is lost on me. But I did really love those pungent, crispy pebbles of garlic and ginger. They'd be a great addition to any fried rice. I'm making this again tonight. Recipe here.

It's called logrolling

page 83 of Fancy Desserts

The Piglet is over and I’m so ready to move on, but I’d committed myself to actually reading Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts cover to cover just to see what the fuss was about. As some of you know Bill Buford chose Fancy Desserts as the Piglet winner over David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen the other day, a highly controversial choice.

I was happily reading Fancy Desserts and transcribing lively quotes to share with you, because there are lots of lively quotes in this book, when I came across the passage at top. Perhaps this problematic passage has been noted elsewhere in which case, forgive me, but I almost fell off my treadmill desk.

In case you need help, I have typed it out to highlight the important parts:

“I met Dario Cecchini on my first trip to Italy. If you’ve read the outstanding Heat, by Bill Buford, you already know way to much about this maniac butcher from the tiny village of Panzano in Tuscany (If you haven’t get to your local independent bookseller and snag a copy immediately.)”

I don’t think Bill Buford should have been disqualified from judging Fancy Desserts, BUT HE SHOULD HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED THIS SENTENCE IN HIS REVIEW. I’m shocked he didn’t. I’m also shocked that one of the two recipes he made from Fancy Desserts was the red pepper sauce by Dario Cecchini, subject of his own “outstanding” book.

I disapprove.

But it’s not Brooks Headley’s fault. He really is a good writer. His yeast ice cream was delicious. Beery. I ate it and so would you.

maybe ostrich egg whites

He will be reading it again and again!

Darling, would you like a little yeast gelato?

You could feel it coming, but that was still a really jarring Piglet win for Fancy Desserts and the Bill Buford review did nothing to persuade me that it was justified. I came away thinking it was even less justified than I had going in.  

I have a miserable list of errands and jobs today, but some half-baked thoughts before I go. I may change my mind about everything, so cut me slack:

*It’s possible Headley's victory reflected gender bias as laid out in the Helen Rosner essay, given that the book was advanced three times by men who seemed thoroughly dazzled by his prose style and rocker persona. Buford on Fancy Desserts: “It is humble. It is brave. It is extreme. It is wacky. It is by far the best anti-cookbook cookbook I have ever read. I will be reading it again and again. It is genius.”

Perhaps Headley should be considered for the Nobel? He sure can make those boys gush. 

Then again, Rosner, no dummy, also loves the book. I should refrain from commenting further on its literary merits until I have actually sat down and read it cover to cover.

*Does the win for an “anti-cookbook” that few people will actually use (a fact, trust me) reflect growing boredom with affable mainstream voices and cookbooks? Maybe a variant of the boredom described in the Lottie + Doof essay? Have we been so saturated with food everything that we’ve reached some kind of decadent, late-stage ennui where it’s not enough for a cookbook to be a nice, usable volume of good recipes, it has to be a crazy, rule-breaking, dysfunctional, super-stimulating anti-cookbook? 

*The recipes are sloppy. I’ve already talked about the failed chocolate chip cookies. I mixed Headley’s yeast ice cream yesterday morning because I had the ingredients and 10 minutes and what the hell. He calls for 1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon yeast//36 grams. I measured 36 grams and looked at that mountain of yeast and thought, this is more than 1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon. It was. It was a third again more. I know I gave Mimi Thorisson a pass on the little errors I spotted in her book, but it’s extra aggravating when you stumble on a mistake in the middle of cooking. This is the second time it’s happened with Headley.

Also: why would you say 1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon when you could say “3 tablespoons?” 

Or am I being petty to care about something like that when considering a humble, brave, extreme, wacky work of genius?

It’s possible I am. But I don't think so!

A report on the yeast ice cream and maybe more fully-baked thoughts coming soon.

And with a few keystrokes, the day is shot

Pretty flowers I saw the other day. What are they?

I have a new rule about not going on the internet until noon so that I can focus on my non-blog projects without distraction. It’s been stunningly effective because once I take even a tiny peek at the internet, including email, all is lost. It’s as if my brain is hijacked, polluted, fill in your negative word of choice. I can’t stop going back, like an addict. If you have similar problems, try this some time. Very liberating. And then at the stroke of noon. . . .

Obviously, I just broke my rule so I might as well write off March 9, 2015. But I had to check the Piglet, where Kate Christensen chose David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen over Maria Elia’s Smashing Plates.

Oh well! There went all my hopes for Smashing Plates.

I can’t but agree with Christensen’s superb review, though. She cooked the hell out of Lebovitz and persuaded me that his is the better book. It’s hard to argue with this:

"I choose the one that feels more substantial, more truly literary and classic, the one that welcomed me more thoroughly into its world, if only because the author has lived there for ten years rather than a summer with childhood memories. I choose the one that feels like a future long-treasured friend."

Good for Lebovitz. He’s a pro and I can’t begrudge him anything. The book is terrific.

Honestly, of all the cookbooks in the Piglet cohort, Prune interested me most going in, and still does. I like it best for a host of reasons, which is funny given how much I loathed it when I first got my hands on it.

Confusing, illogical, hilarious, disarming, vulnerable, and intimidating

This post for cookbook geeks only. 

Ferociously smart Eater essay about the Adam Roberts/Mimi Thorisson flap right here. Serious critical intelligence brought to bear on cookbooks. I wish I’d written it, or even thought it. 

And this offers a different perspective on the dispute, lamenting how boring, homogeneous, and uncritical most cooking blogs are and how insular the food community.

Now, to the Piglet.

Thanks to John T. Edge’s rhapsodic Piglet review the other day, I bought Smashing Plates, an attractive 200-page collection of Greek recipes by Maria Elia, a British chef of Cypriot heritage. Although I haven’t cooked anything from it yet, I like what I see, starting with honeyed fried feta and some kalamata olive gnocchi. The desserts are especially fetching, which I didn’t expect from a Greek cookbook. Curious about the orange and fennel seed ice cream and the almond, rosewater, and chocolate Mallomar chimneys. I’m hoping this book blows me away because I’m not 100% satisfied with the other candidates to win the Piglet, now down to David Lebovitz’s Paris Kitchen and Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts. 

We’ve been dining almost exclusively from David L. lately, and dining well. Multigrain bread, tarte tropezienne, lamb tagine, caramel ribs, butternut squash panade, lemon-pistachio couscous.  The last two dishes on that list are my favorites, but all have been strong.  I really, really, really like this book, but it’s The King’s Speech of cookbooks -- impeccably executed, intelligent, enjoyable, unsurprising. My Paris Kitchen could definitely win the big prize and there’s an argument to be made on its behalf, but you won’t hear it from me. It’s far from the most interesting cookbook of 2014.

Fancy Desserts, meanwhile, is without doubt one of the most interesting cookbooks of 2014. Ed Lee served up a powerhouse Piglet review the other day. Ok, it’s a little purple, but I like the energy:

"All of these desserts will alter the rest of your life, if you have the patience to make them. They’re that good.  Fancy Desserts, with its recipes connected like a mystery novel, can be confusing, illogical, hilarious, disarming, vulnerable, and intimidating -- and I could not put it down. Part culinary manifesto, part punk rock tapestry, part New York City folklore, this book is not just a fascinating read, it’s a portrait of a person, of a time, and of a place so unique you feel lucky to live it through the pages of a book. I wish more chefs were this honest about themselves. Hell, I wish more people were too. 
What I will say is this: Don’t attempt to make a recipe until you’ve read the whole book -- every page, cover to cover. . . ."

All of these desserts will alter the rest of your life? All of them? Even the borrowed Good to the Grain chocolate chip cookies reprinted with a fatal mistake?

Whatever. Enthusiasm is nice. 


I’ve made a handful of Headley’s recipes, two of them really splendid. I already wrote about the ricotta gelato (super-easy recipe here) and last week tried his cashew gelato, which was the most velvety ice cream ever scooped out of my machine. It was just as creamy the next night and the next and I don’t know about the next because by then it was gone. To make this magical dessert, you roast raw cashews until coffee brown and steep in milk overnight. Remove cashews from milk, combine infused milk with sugar, dextrose powder, honey, milk powder, condensed milk, cream, and raw egg yolks. Blend. Chill. Churn. It’s not going to alter the rest of my life, but it was stupendously delicious.

So what’s wrong with Headley’s book? Nothing, there’s just not enough stuff I want to try here. I don’t want to taste the yeast, sage, parsley, or basil gelatos. I’ll never make the corn-corn huckleberry cookie or the chocolate eggplant confection, sweet pea cake, candied carrots or even that cucumber creamsicle both Lee and Adam Roberts so loved. No interest in the sunchoke or artichoke desserts, nor the strawberries in a pool of avocado puree. I’m sure it’s all wonderful, but I still don’t want to make it.

Maybe that says more about me than it does the book. Maybe Fancy Desserts should win. I’m just saying I personally have trouble getting behind it.

The exciting cookbook I don’t want to cook from vs. the semi-boring cookbook I can’t stop cooking from. This is why I have my hopes pinned on Smashing Plates.

****

A few final words about Mimi Thorisson’s Kitchen in France: it’s very good and I had almost universal success with the recipes. Her garlic soup is delicious, creamy, and simple. The apple tart with orange flower water is tasty, though a bit severe and not something I’d make again. The almond mussels, as I’ve told you, are a knockout. The galette Perougienne is a lovely, bready, rustic dessert, the pear flognarde, a lovely, custardy, rustic dessert. The cocoa meringues worked perfectly and the chicken with creme fraiche was a treat.

There’s some funkiness with her volume-weight conversions, especially when it comes to butter. The recipe for Sarah Bernhardt cakes (very seductive-looking Icelandic cookies) calls for 10 tablespoons//300 g butter. Clearly a mistake, as 10 tablespoons butter = 141 grams. I happened to make Thorisson’s gougeres and her almond mussels for the same meal one night and noticed that while both call for 7 tablespoons of butter, for the gougeres she offers a weight measurement of 80 g and for the mussels 100 g. I spent a few minutes going through the book and in different recipes a tablespoon of butter is weighted at 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 grams. This isn’t a big deal when you’re talking about a couple of tablespoons, but the disparities add up. For instance, in one tart dough Thorisson calls for 14 tablespoons//150 grams of butter. The difference between 14 tablespoons and 150 grams of butter is almost half a stick. Adding a half stick more of butter, or a half stick less, will significantly change a tart dough.

Is this a grave matter? No. All the recipes I made worked, most look sound, and mistakes happen. To any stray Mimi fans who might stumble over here and accuse me of being a frumpy jealous hater for pointing out these errors, put down your flamethrowers. Maybe frumpy, but not jealous, not a hater. I thoroughly enjoyed Mimi Thorisson’s Kitchen in France, will make her mussels again and again, and would recommend the book without hesitation.

On another subject, I’d never heard of cruffins, but now I have and need to plan a field trip.

Stupid, stupid Academy

Today’s is the first Piglet review of the year with which I completely concur. In case you aren’t motivated to link and read the whole review, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt explains in detail why he prefers David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen to Bar Tartine by Nicolaus Balla and Cortney Burns.

I share his feelings. I’ve made two excellent dishes from Bar Tartine -- a cauliflower salad and their fabulous, strange kale salad with sunflower seed pesto, yogurt, and rye croutons, but I will probably never cook from this daunting book again. As for Lebovitz’s affable Paris Kitchen, I’ve already gone back to two of the recipes because they were so simple, tasty, and useful.

Which brings me to last night’s all-Piglet Oscars menu:

Mimi Thorisson’s roquefort and walnut gougeres

Mimi T’s almond mussels

***

David Lebovitz’s barbecued pork (repeat from Super Bowl because it was easy, great, make-ahead, and feeds a crowd)

David L’s vegetables slaw (repeat from Super Bowl because it was easy, great, make-ahead, and feeds a crowd)  

***

Mimi T’s apple tart w. orange flower water

Brooks Headley’s ricotta ice cream

Other than the fact that Boyhood didn’t win Best Picture, everything was good. Two dishes were delicious enough that I actually went to the trouble of typing out the recipes, which I am generally loath to do because it feels like stealing. But you need these recipes and I did make a few amendments to each.

-I’d never eaten mussels as finger food straight out of the shell before and I’m not sure why not. Mimi Thorisson’s almond mussels from A Kitchen in France were a runaway hit. We all sat crowded around the TV with two big trays of these mussels and devoured them like potato chips. You got a little bite of mussel with some crunchy-buttery topping and then you pitched the shell into a bowl. Surprisingly tidy -- no napkins necessary. My niece Stella must have eaten a pound all on her own and I ate another pound, but we deserved the lion’s share because we were the ones who assembled these lovely things, which wasn’t hard, but took a while. Definitely find a companion for this job.  Do it alone and you risk becoming resentful, which makes you a worse host than if you just put out a bag of Fritos. 

In a bowl mix 7 tablespoons soft, unsalted butter with a handful of chopped parsley, 3 minced garlic cloves, and a cup (60g) of fresh breadcrumbs. Season well with salt and pepper. Stir in 1 1/2 cups (180g) finely ground almonds and mix until you have a paste. Cook 4 pounds of mussels in a covered pot for a few minutes with a splash of water until they just open. Discard any that don’t.  Remove the top shell of every mussel and leave the meat in the bottom. (They might be very small and you’ll wonder if that’s ok; it is.)  Top with a teaspoon or so of the almond paste, pressing it down. Put the mussels on a sheet and bake at 425 degrees F for 6 to 8 minutes until hot. Thorisson says “until golden and bubbly” but that never happened and based on what I saw, was never going to. Enough for 8.

2. I’m glad Adam Roberts convinced me to revisit Fancy Desserts because otherwise I wouldn’t have made Brooks Headley’s ricotta gelato, which is a gem of a recipe and so easy I couldn’t believe it was going to work. Three cups ricotta (Headley recommends Calabra brand), 1 1/2 cups simple syrup, 1/4 cup honey, big pinch of salt. Blend well with a stick blender -- or any way you choose. He specifies stick, but I don't see why you couldn’t mix in a stand blender or Cuisinart or whisk by hand or even just stir. Chill. Freeze in ice cream machine. Makes a quart of a fantastic pure-white gelato.

I'll have some rye porridge, please, and a beet kvass

In case you’re just joining me, I’ve been comparing cookbooks in advance of the Piglet. I'm currently weighing the relative merits of David Lebovitz’s amiable My Paris Kitchen and the daunting Bar Tartine. It’s been fascinating to me, this exercise. Everyone who loves cookbooks should try it.

Bar Tartine is a famous restaurant in San Francisco and until Santa Claus brought me the Bar Tartine cookbook for Christmas, I’d assumed from the name that it was French or even just vaguely French. It’s not. At all. In the pages of Bar Tartine I see Japanese, Danish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, and hippie influences, but no French. A lot of paprika here, a lot of dense rye bread, root vegetables, carob, honey, sprouts, kefir, and kvass. Does all that sound good to you? To me, not so much. But it’s definitely interesting.

The Bar Tartine cookbook couldn’t be more different from Sean Brock’s Heritage, but it has the same problem: The barriers to entry for the home cook are extremely high. Not insurmountable, but you have to be really motivated to crack this book. Motivated enough to track down kefir grains and make your own kefir cream, kefir butter, and kefir buttermilk, which figure in many, if not most, of the recipes. You’ll want to set aside a few weeks to ferment honey and age a quart of pear vinegar. Be prepared to char some bread then pop it in your dehydrator for eight hours before grinding it into “burnt bread powder” that you can use in the recipe for slow-roasted carrots -- which also calls for homemade charred green onion powder and carrot top oil.

Some people will find this all exhilarating, others will find it exhausting. I fall into the latter category. I’m just not at a place in my life where I see a recipe for “pine oil” and start scheming to get my hands on “young fir tips.”  There was a day when I would have. I think I wrote a book about it.

I counted four dishes in Bar Tartine that I could make with supermarket ingredients and equipment already in our house. The easiest was the cauliflower and chickpea salad. I know! Eerie. I just had to go with it. I thought this would probably be the first and last dish I cooked from Bar Tartine because it really didn’t sound that promising.

But it was inspired, unusual, and utterly delicious, a melange of crisp vegetables and soft, earthy chickpeas in a honey-spiked yogurt dressing augmented with lots of fresh dill and tarragon. Thinly sliced serrano peppers supplied bite, toasted sunflower seeds, crunch. I loved it, Isabel ate quite a bit, Owen ate a milligram, and Mark said, “You should just make that cole slaw you made on Sunday every night.” 

The recipe is here. I omitted the mushrooms.

I can’t draw conclusions about Bar Tartine from a single recipe, but the lovely salad motivated me to persist with this challenging book. Yesterday, I thought I was going to have to vote for My Paris Kitchen. Today, I’d put money on Bar Tartine. 

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