Time got away from me

sampita

Rather than try to catch up on all the stuff I’ve cooked for the last 10 days, I'm going to pretend none of it ever happened and start fresh. But there are a few recipes and thoughts I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention:

-Although I stand by my contention that Sean Brock’s Heritage is impractical for home cooks, I read enough about his recipe for hoppin john to decide I had to try it for myself. So I ordered Carolina gold rice and heirloom Sea Island red peas from the revered Anson Mills and made the dish. It was spectacular, damn it. Very aggravating because if I want to eat this hoppin john again and again and again, which I do, I will have to keep ordering expensive rice and peas from Anson Mills.  

I recommend the recipe anyway.

-A new cookie in my life: Dorie Greenspan’s croquets from Baking Chez Moi. Nutty, super-crunchy, delicious, easy. If you need to use up egg whites, look no further. 

Hot Pot Island, 5512 Geary. It may not be the best hot pot place in San Francisco, but it's our hot pot place. 

-This review made me want to check out Steven Satterfield’s Root to Leaf, but it’s not yet available at the library. Has anyone seen a copy?

-Inspired by this story (and using the accompanying recipe) I made a gorgeous Montenegrin sampita for family dinner last night. Author Francis Lam describes sampita as “a plank of yolk-rich cake piled with glossy meringue, a kind of open faced marshmallow sandwich.”  I can't do any better than that. Another layer of cake would make this dessert more delicious, but then it wouldn’t look quite so magnificently absurd. How magnificently absurd? Some pictures. Really fun, tasty, sticky, ridiculous, beautiful dessert.

-Yesterday I took Mark outside and asked if he thinks we should replace our front walk. I’ve been asking him about this at intervals for the last six years, ever since the roots of the oak started to push up the concrete blocks in earnest.

I worry someone is going to trip and sue us. 

He said, “It’s good enough. We don’t have that many visitors. I think we should wait and fix the path just before we sell the house so it will look as new as possible.” 

I worry someone will slip on the slimy piece of plywood covering the mud hole and sue us.

We came inside and he said, “But if you want to fix it sooner, go ahead. Don’t worry about me. You know what I’m like.”

I worry that the condition of the front walk is liberating out our inner slobs. 

I said, “Thanks. I hired someone last week. He's starting on the 21st. I was just asking for your thoughts so I could quote you on the blog.”

I’m not sure if you think that’s funny, but he did. I’m not sure if you think our front walk needs a little facelift, but I do. 

Mostly, I just really, really hate how it looks. 

Sometimes the stars just align

I cooked from Smashing Plates by Maria Elia last night and produced one of those perfect meals I manage to get on the table once every few years, if I’m lucky. It was an extended family dinner and something about the menu just worked in a big way. This meal was more than the sum of its parts. 

Its parts:

-slow-roasted leg of lamb. You cut little slits all over a leg of lamb (I did semi-boneless) and insert many, many slivers of garlic. Slather in a mixture of cinnamon, cumin, oregano, lemon juice, olive oil, fresh dill, and salt. Wrap in parchment and marinate overnight. Still in its parchment pouch, roast for 4 hours (or more -- I’d do more next time) until it’s soft and shreddable and every morsel imbued with flavor. Serve with a starchy foil like

-gigante beans plaki. Huge, velvety beans, oniony tomato sauce.  This dish lacked zip on its own, but was delicious in partnership with the flavorful lamb and the 

-fried feta with honey and toasted almonds, which has zip in abundance.  You slice feta into little bricks, dip in egg and flour, fry in olive oil. Place on a platter, drizzle with honey, top with toasted almonds. Everyone gets a piece of soft, warm, tangy cheese, a little honey and few crispy nuts. 

A bit of feta, a bit of lamb, a big, soft bean? 

My niece, Stella, said, “I want more of EVERYTHING.”

So far, very pleased with Smashing Plates. 

It gets pretty black on top. That's the one thing I'd like to fix about this cake. Foil towards the end of baking?

Dessert was Gabrielle Hamilton’s Breton butter cake which I’ve now made twice, both times with staggeringly good results. I have so much to say about this cake and Prune in general that I’m saving it all for a dedicated post at some future date. 

Meanwhile, if you have the book, make this cake. It’s not anywhere near as hard as she says it is and it is so, so, so delicious. You can read her account of trying to put the cake on her menu here, though be aware the recipe is not the same as the one in the book. As I’ve said before, the woman can write. 

The boys and I took a walk after dinner, discussed implements suitable for killing zombies.

I keep wanting to type "Tyler Perry"

I detached the keyboard from the computer the other day because Owen hadn’t done his chores and seemed incapable of separating himself from Team Fortress 2. Based on his reaction, Owen would have preferred I detach a few of his toes, maybe even a foot.

Direct quotes:

“You’re the worst mother in the world.”

“This is my day off! I have so few days off and I just wanted to be happy.”

“I’m NEVER going to unload the dishwasher again unless you give me the keyboard back.”

“But I wanted to write a movie review on the computer! Don’t you want me to write movie reviews?”

“I’m going to step on your phone.” 

“That cauliflower soup you made last night was uneatable, the worst dinner ever. You should burn the cookbook that it came from. It left a really awful taste in my mouth and later when I tried to eat cereal to get rid of the taste, even the cereal tasted like vomit. I wasted a lot of cereal, Mom. You should know that.”

Guys, the soup (recipe here) was not that bad. It’s a very eatable, even tasty, cream of cauliflower from Tyler’s Ultimate. You make it by simmering cauliflower in milk with thyme, bay leaf, and butter, then blitzing in a blender. Toss some bread crumbs and pine nuts with more butter, toast in the oven, and strew this rich, salty, crunchy topping on the soup. Yum.

Tyler's Ultimate does not deserve to be burned. Good cauliflower soup notwithstanding, I did give it to Goodwill. 

I guess I need to back up.

A year or so ago someone left two cookbooks on the free table at the gym: Tyler’s Ultimate and The Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook. Both of them were signed. The Tyler Florence book was warmly inscribed to someone who shall remain nameless.

I took the books, of course. But did I really want them?

My shelves are getting tight again, so recently I decided to cull a few titles. It seemed logical to start by evaluating books I never actually chose.

I decided I had to try one recipe (the soup) but other than that I didn’t see much I liked in Tyler’s Ultimate. If you love Tyler Florence, speak now and I will listen respectfully. I didn’t delve deeply and could well be wrong. But the recipes appeared standard, the pictures almost grotesquely huge, the overall feel, flashy, showy, not my thing.

Tyler's Really Good -- now there's a title!

You know, because I’m really subtle and modest and elegant.

Tyler went.

Macrina, by Leslie Mackie of the Macrina Bakery in Seattle, is as drab as Tyler's Ultimate is gaudy. Which is not to say that I adore the look of this book, which is full of illustrations like this:

I think that is supposed to be a slice of toast.

No color whatsoever. You flip through this book and feel like you’re in a shabby apartment, late afternoon, with the blinds drawn. You can’t find a light switch.

Still, lots of intriguing recipes. And I do love to bake.

First, I tried the rustic potato loaf ("Macrina's most sought-after loaf") and it was perfect.

You boil potatoes in their jackets, mash, work them into a dough and bake into a lovely dense bread. I ate a piece of this every day last week for breakfast. I’d make it again in a heartbeat. Recipe here.

A few days later, I baked the Guatemalan hot chocolate bread. Really unusual. The flavor is that of chocolate cake, the texture that of yeasty bread. Big chunks of chocolate throughout. We ate roughly half the loaf before the novelty wore off. I wouldn’t make it again, but it was an interesting experiment.

chocolate bread, obviously

Friday, I made the Macrina chocolate chip cookies with dried apricots. 

Conversation transcribed almost verbatim:

Jennifer: Did you try those cookies?

Mark, frowning: Yeah, I did. What kind were they?
Jennifer: Chocolate chip.

Mark, still frowning: Really?

Jennifer: Chocolate chip with dried apricots.

Mark: AHA!!!! I knew it!! I tasted one and spit it out. It was like there was a worm in there. 
Jennifer: You did not spit it out.
Mark: When you’re expecting a regular chocolate chip cookie, you don’t want to bite into something gross.

Jennifer: Dried apricots aren’t gross. 

Mark: I will not be having another one of those cookies.

Jennifer: Are you kidding? 

Mark: Don’t tease me like that. It’s like me expecting you to go to the basketball game with me. 

I live with crazy people. The cookies (recipe here) are delicious.

Macrina stays. 

Other things cooked since my last post:

-condensed milk ice cream from Smashing Plates with 1 teaspoon of orange flower water added. Needs a new name, this ice cream. Otherwise delicious. If you have the book, you will not be disappointed by the ice cream.

-This Bon Appetit lamb and lentil dish which I liked, Mark deemed “flavorless,” and Owen said was “too spicy.” Can a dish be both flavorless and too spicy?

-The delectable little peanut butter chocolate sandwich cookies from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook. Recommend.

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.

My life is good enough

I want a piglet.

Perhaps you’ve heard, there was a kerfuffle involving the Adam Roberts Piglet review of Mimi Thorisson’s Kitchen in France. Thorisson wrote a very good cookbook that rubs some people the wrong way for reasons that have been amply discussed, here and elsewhere. Roberts produced a smart, funny review that left Thorisson feeling wounded. Thorisson reacted. Her fans reacted. Roberts’ fans reacted. He reacted to her reaction. I was a bit player. Good times. On the advice of counsel, that is the last I will ever speak of the matter.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. 

Today Dorie Greenspan restored class and order over at the Piglet with her gracious concession (it's in the comments) to Alice Medrich, whose outstanding Flavor Flours won out over her own superb Baking Chez Moi. 

I love both these books. Flavor Flours is probably the only gluten-free baking book on the planet that doesn’t shout “gluten-free!!!!” on the cover, spine, and every single page, which is why it is the only gluten-free cookbook I will have in my kitchen, at least until I’m diagnosed with celiac disease. Medrich’s approach suggests that there is more to recommend these flours -- sorghum, buckwheat, chestnut, etc. --  than just their nutritional profile. I have baked only the teff brownies and they were great, though I’m not sure I could tell the difference between a teff brownie and a wheat flour brownie, which is either good or bad, depending on your point of view. Rosie Schaap’s review has convinced me to tackle the carrot cake which, “made with rice flour and oat flour, is the best I’ve ever made, the best I’ve ever eaten, just the best: moist but solidly constructed, intensely fragrant and full-flavored.” 

Sold.

Actually, not sold. Library copy, so I’d better get cracking. This is one I might buy. 

I’m a Dorie Greenspan completist and bought Baking Chez Moi within days of publication. At Christmas, I made Greenspan’s crispy-topped brown sugar bars for the cookie boxes we gave away and they were lovely. I made her sables last week and they were beyond lovely.

Two terrific books. I only wish they were both advancing in the Piglet, but it would come to a showdown eventually, so might as well be now.

On another subject completely, let’s talk about My Struggle, the multi-volume magnum opus of Karl Ove Knausgaard. Ha ha ha. Not kidding. Are you with me? Anyone? No? Knausgaard is a brooding Norwegian memoirist/novelist who writes in granular detail about his everyday life and I feel like I’ve been reading this blasted series forever. One of Karl Ove’s trips to a coffee shop can last a dozen pages and he never even talks to anyone at the coffee shop, let alone witnesses a murder, robbery, or alien invasion. And yet he keeps pulling me along. I’ll be trudging through an endless stretch in which Karl Ove discusses the breasts on the leader of his daughter’s boring playgroup and I want to throw the book across the room, then suddenly I’m in the middle of one of the most spellbinding scenes I’ve ever read. His account of cleaning out the bottles and alcoholic detritus from his dead father’s home will never leave me. 

During idle moments, like when I’m driving or whisking pastry cream, I find myself trying to capture my feelings about this singular work in a few words. Options always boil down to:

engrossing but a slog

a slog but engrossing

engrossing and a slog

a slog

engrossing

Even if I never decide on the perfect combination of adjectives, I think you have a sense of how I feel about My Struggle and can probably gauge whether it is right for you.

Juventud, divino tesoro

I turned 49 yesterday. Perhaps that accounted for my feistier than usual tone on the blog. I wasn’t upset to be turning 49. On the contrary, I woke up elated and full of it. I didn’t expect that, can’t explain, and feel the same way today. How you feel about different ages and stages of life isn’t subject to conscious manipulation. At least it hasn’t been for me.

A short, personal story.

The night before I turned 47, I was flying home from New York with Isabel when out of nowhere came a wave of dread unlike anything I’d experienced before. Window seat. Crushed slice of Milk Bar crack pie in my pocket. Unflattering vintage red coat. I had a premonition that I was heading into a very rough period. The next morning I lay in bed and basically couldn’t get up. It was as if a switch flipped on my 47th birthday and just like that I was lost in a dark wood. 

I didn’t expect it, can’t explain. Somehow I’d thought midlife crises only happened to men and involved sports cars. 

It was a terrible time. I went to visit my grandmother a few weeks into this period and was so down and desperate that I tried to explain my feelings to her, though she was frail and 101 and I didn't expect her to have anything to tell me. I just needed to tell her, because she was the closest thing I had to a mother. She sat across the kitchen table and as I talked I watched her eyes light up. No one brought problems to her anymore, no one asked her for help, and here I was laying out a real, live problem. She proceeded to quote from memory the opening lines from a Ruben Dario poem about melancholy and the fleetingess of youth, one that had spoken to her during her own midlife confusion. I thought maybe she was hallucinating (so condescending) and looked it up on my phone. She had the words all right, it was a real poem. I had never once heard my grandmother quote poetry or say the words “Ruben Dario.” She had a lot to tell me that night, but the most valuable message I took was that she had been there, that maybe Ruben Dario had been there, that I was not alone. I guess that’s why I’m writing this post.

It wasn’t quick or easy, pulling out of those woods, but at 49, I’m really, really out. Sad, hard, surprising things will happen in the years to come and who knows how I’ll handle any of them, but there will not be another shocking midlife crisis. For me, facing up to the inevitability of those things was the midlife crisis.   

Mark offered to take me out to dinner for my birthday yesterday and I thought about it, because that’s what you’re supposed to want on your birthday, to go out. But I really wanted to stay in. I made Marcella Hazan’s spaghetti with tomato and butter sauce, one of my all-time favorite dishes, and we ate on the sofa while watching The Walking Dead. I looked forward to this all day, getting that bowl of pasta and sitting on my corner of the blue sofa. Owen, Mark and I have seen  every episode of that dark show and I love watching TV with those two and eating dinner on the sofa. I’m not even going to make a joke about how lame that is, because I’m 49. No more self-deprecating apologies for my tastes.

For cake, I baked Mimi Thorisson’s pear flognarde, which is like a clafoutis. Or, as Thorisson puts it in A Kitchen in France: “like a big pancake filled with melt-in-your-mouth pears. . . In the old Occitan language flognarde means ‘soft’ and it can refer to a duvet, so you can just imagine how a bite of this feels in your mouth -- as light as a feather.”

Well, not quite that light, but pretty light and really delicious. Mark described the dessert as “inconvenient” because the pears are cut in quarters and didn’t meld well with the custardy cake. I agree. I think this would be better if the pears were chopped, but I liked the cake, like Thorisson’s book, and like being 49. 

I don't read novels very often and have unsophisticated taste, but here's why Fifty Shades of Darker is better than Lila

Piglet commenters this morning seem to be loving A.J. Jacobs’ review comparing Huckleberry to Lunch at the Shop, but I thought it was one of the weakest yet. Or maybe I just finally lost patience. Nothing against Jacobs, who is smart and funny, but there’s something insulting about asking a guy who admits he “doesn’t make food very often” and has an “unsophisticated palate” to review cookbooks for a community of avid cooks. Like cookbooks are so dumb that anyone who can turn a phrase is qualified to judge them. 

Well, cookbooks are kind of dumb. Do you know what else is kind of dumb? Sports. 

A quick thought experiment. Just for kicks, let’s throw gender into it: 

My husband edits a web site called Bleacher Report that is visited by legions of passionate, knowledgeable sports fans. These readers are predominantly male. If my eyes do not deceive me, the passionate, knowledgeable readers of Food52 are predominantly female. 

What if Bleacher Report invited a clever, amusing lady writer (Lena Dunham? Sloane Crosley?) who admitted that she “didn’t watch football very often” and had an “unsophisticated eye” to weigh in on the relative merits of Peyton Manning and Marshawn Lynch? 

Oh, it would be hilarious! What an awesome joke. Maybe it would even go viral. 

Of course, any suggestion that what this charming female had to say about Marshawn Lynch be taken seriously would be followed by a wave of comments so horrifying your eyeballs would fall out. 

Women are so much more polite than men. I love reading thoughtful, knowledgeable commentary on cookbooks and there’s almost none out there. Sometimes it turns up in the Piglet and I’m just bummed when it doesn’t.

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

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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.

Maybe she's oblivious?

I first saw Mimi Thorisson’s Kitchen in France when I was in Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago trying to figure out if I needed to buy any of the Piglet books. Thirty seconds of flipping through hers was all it took to turn me off. The lavish and abundant photographs never let you forget that Thorisson is gorgeous, slender, young, wealthy and has superb taste in expensive clothes, furnishings, and antique china.  No thank you, Clarkson Potter. I checked the book out of the library instead.

In his Piglet review, Adam Roberts gently mocks Thorisson by marking up some of the glamorous portraits that appear in the book with thought bubbles. I guess it’s debatable how “gently” he mocks, but I thought he was fairly gentle and very funny. He writes that her underlying message seems to be “my life is better than yours.” 

But even as I was enjoying Roberts’s derision, out of nowhere I began to feel sorry for Mimi Thorisson. Ashamed of taking pleasure in her shaming. She looked vulnerable up there with the little balloon comments attached to her pretty face, comments that made her appear vain, coy, and foolish. I felt oddly protective. This protectiveness only intensified when I spent some time reading her blog, which is unguarded, personal, and sweetly rambling. She doesn’t seem like she’s lording her privilege over readers. She seems open and nice.

What if the message some of us take from Thorisson’s photographs -- my life is better than yours! -- isn’t the one Thorisson thinks she’s sending? I’m just floating this out there as a possibility. Maybe Thorisson doesn’t quite grasp how she comes across. Self-presentation is complicated for women, especially beautiful women.

Consider the photo at the top of the page.

You could definitely find the woman in this picture annoying. The leg? No, no, no. 

But there’s another way to look at it. What if the woman simply doesn’t quite understand how close that whole scene is to self parody? Thorisson is half Chinese, half French -- what if this picture doesn’t read as ridiculous and show-offy to someone from that background? What if it reads as lovely and natural?

I don’t know. I’m just thinking aloud. I could go on, but have to  put Thorisson’s walnut-roquefort gougeres in the oven, say hello to my guests, then plant myself in a chair to watch the Oscars. 

What would the world do without me?

I put a note in the library copy of Fancy Desserts. Obnoxious. I'll probably take it out.

A commenter expressed bafflement at my recent posts and I need to provide some context. For those of you who aren’t already avidly tracking the competition, every winter Food52 holds a cookbook contest called the Piglet modeled on the Morning News Tournament of Books.* The Food52 staff and community choose noteworthy cookbooks from the previous year and pit them against each other in a tournament that is judged by a writers, chefs, and sundry qualified and unqualified luminaries. Roz Chast, Alice Waters , and Stanley Tucci have all judged in the past and the quality, sensibility, and style of the reviews varies widely. That’s part of the fun of the Piglet. You see how different people use and value cookbooks -- and how some, like Roz Chast, don’t. In each round, a cookbook is advanced and one is dropped. At the end of the tournament, a single book prevails. Comments on the reviews can get extremely heated.  I love the Oscars, but I love this a little more. 

The other day, writer Adam Roberts weighted the merits of Fancy Desserts by Brooks Headley against A Kitchen in France by Mimi Thorisson. I agreed with everything Roberts wrote in that charming, intelligent, and persuasive review -- except his conclusion. 

 I’m not at all confident that Fancy Desserts is a better cookbook than A Kitchen in France.

What follows will be interesting only to cookbook geeks and boy, do I feel like a cookbook geek even writing it. But here goes.

The first Headley recipe I tried 10 days ago was the fake healthy chocolate chip cookies with lots of salt. (He calls them “fake healthy” because they contain whole-wheat flour.) The dough was oddly crumbly and dry, but I forged ahead and baked a batch, trusting that everything would work out in the end. It didn’t. The cookies were disastrously crumbly and dry and I threw away the rest of the dough. What had gone wrong? I pulled out Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain (Piglet winner of 2011) to see how Headley’s recipe compared to her own renowned and impeccable whole-wheat chocolate chip cookie recipe. His recipe is identical except that he calls for an additional 3/4 teaspoon of salt and an additional 1 1/4 cups flour.

No one adds 1 1/4 cups flour to a functional cookie recipe. This was clearly a mistake. Mistakes happen. But it wasn’t an auspicious start to my experience with Fancy Desserts. And what to make of the fact that, aside from a little salt, Headley’s recipe was identical to one already published and much adored?

A few days later I made his fregolotta -- giant almond cookies you’re supposed to be able to smash at the table. They needed to bake twice as long as indicated and were bendable, not smashable. Delicious. But not as advertised. 

Random frustration: I’d been hoping to try some of Headley’s gelato recipes, particularly the cashew gelato and maybe the yeast gelato as well, if I started feeling hostile towards my family. But his recipes call for dextrose to keep the gelato soft and that stopped me in my tracks. Is he talking about dextrose powder? Liquid dextrose? This? Where can I buy dextrose? Unless I missed something, there is no such information in the book and after 10 minutes of googling, I couldn’t figure out what kind of dextrose you’d use in gelato or where to buy it. I gave up. Do you know the answer?

None of this criticism of Fancy Desserts is a knock on the Roberts review. The opposite. Roberts made a strong case for the book and provided solid evidence. I had decided firmly against Fancy Desserts before I read his review and he convinced me to reconsider. So that’s what I’m doing. 

More to come. 

*The Tournament of Books is great. When people start discussing Gone Girl, I always want to tell them to go read this. 

My one-track mind

some tasty almond cookies from Fancy Desserts

Oh boy, the Piglet has started and right out of the gate: No! Ryan Sutton chose Sean Brock’s Heritage over Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune and obviously I view that as a major upset and mistake.  I’m not going to repeat all my reasons for preferring Prune, will just say that Sutton’s “(expletive omitted) cookbook review” (sic) didn’t change my mind.  

I enjoy seeing how other people experience and judge cookbooks, no matter how vehemently I disagree with their conclusions. 

I so badly wanted to blog more about the Piglet cookbooks before the tournament started, but I was getting carried away. I was walking around thinking about cookbooks all the time. Pondering what recipe I was going to test next, seeking out water kefir grains, figuring out what was wrong with Brooks Headley’s whole-wheat chocolate chip cookies (lots), wondering where I could buy chestnut flour so I could bake from Alice Medrich’s admirable Flavor Flours, trying to articulate why all the beautiful pictures of beautiful Mimi Thorisson in her beautiful Kitchen in France irritated me. I was extremely happy and thoroughly engaged. This was a problem. For about a week there, the blog became an all-consuming, unpaid full-time job and I was only growing more preoccupied with each passing day. Other projects languished. I finally had to lay myself off. 

Gentlemen, I think this is a cookbook for you.

 What I’m saying is that sometimes when I don’t post on the blog it’s not because I care too little, but because I start caring too much.

I checked both out of the library and won't buy either, but prefer A Kitchen in France.

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