Bad Home Cooking

Come away with me!

2007-08-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

Gads, are people still looking here for Bad Home Cooking?

It's at a new locale, www.badhomecooking.com (that's on Typepad). Updated weekly and all. See you there!

Cheers,

The Bad Home Cook

The sure thing

2007-05-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs a dish they can pull out of thin air and impress strangers with. Many people have several. I have one. And I am grateful.

No. I'm not talking about the dish in the photo. Oy.

This dish has accompanied me to every potluck and every picnic I've attended in the last ten years. It's a concoction that not only tastes good, but looks good too. More to the point, it makes me look good.

No matter where I take it, invariably at least three people will approach on hands and knees, begging for the recipe. They've devoured their plate, noted that the communal plate has been consumed in the five minutes it took them to digest, and they make the assumption that this dish is a complicated, secret recipe of my own devising. If I were a more clever woman, I would play on this assumption. Except that would mean I'd be expected to follow up my bravado with a dinner party or something. And that, as readers of this blog know all too well, is a feat I can't much pull off.

So I quickly cop to the truth. Vegetable Couscous. It's a simple recipe, pulled from Jeanne Lemlin's mighty Quick Vegetarian Pleasures. It involves the chopping of an onion and two small zucchini squash, plus measuring out a few spices. Also, the making of some couscous, which in this day and age, with a Trader Joe's around the corner, is an instant, almost idiot-proof task. Yes, thank you, even I can do it. Usually with some semblance of success.

The upshot is, this is one delicious dish. Fresh-tasting yet tangy. The spices beguile. The couscous underneath lends a comforting, buttery starch, for those of you who are squeamish about lots of veggies cooked together. Just about everyone loves this one. Including avowed carnivores and my own ten-year-old daughter. Don't believe me? Take this to your next potluck and see for yourself:

2 Tbs olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 medium onion, diced (or thereabouts. Fineness doesn't really matter here)
2 tsps ground cumin
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp paprika
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
2 medium zucchini squashes, cut lengthwise, then lengthwise again, and chopped into little squares
1 15-oz can of chick peas, drained and rinsed
1 16-oz can of diced tomatoes, including juice
1/2 cup raisins
1 1/2 cups vegetable stock
1/2 tsp salt
1 or 2 tbsp butter
1 cup couscous

heat the oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add the garlic and onion and saute for a few minutes. Add the spices, and cook a few minutes more, stirring often.

Stir in the zucchini, chick peas, followed by the tomatoes, then the raisins. Cover the pan and lower heat to medium. Cook, stirring occasionally, about 15 to 20 minutes, or until the zucchini is tender.

While the vegetables are brewing, prepare the couscous. Bring the veggie stock to a boil with butter and salt (if you're using it, and I say, life's too short not to use butter whenever you can). Stir in the couscous, cover tightly and remove from heat. Let it sit 5 minutes, or however long it takes you to finish the veggies. Fluff with a fork before serving.

You can make the vegetable part of this dish a day or two before with nothing but upside flavor potential. Impress everyone by serving the couscous in an audacious Moroccan bowl with the veggie mixture mounded in the center.

A final aside: Quick Vegetarian Pleasures is one of those rare cookbooks in which almost every entree is a winner. Simple, sure. But even snobs have to enjoy good eatin'.

Happy potlucks!

Perfect

2007-05-15T16:24:00.000-07:00

Quick: What's the most satisfying meal you've ever had? I bet you have several. The perfect meal is hard to pin down because they're all about context. Where are you? How hungry are you? Who are you with? Where did you just come from? What did you do just prior to this perfect meal?

Like you, I have several perfect meals. None of them are fancy. In fact, most are not even technically "meals." They're more memorable tastes. For example, whenever I go to Berkeley my first stop bar none is Gordo's Taqueria, where I sit and eat my black bean, cheese and rice burrito (with just a dollop of sour cream) in a state of complete and silent bliss.

In Santa Cruz there's a bistro called Gabriella's that serves fresh figs wrapped in prosciutto...the only possible response to which is delighted, astounded, laughter.

In North London there's a storefront restaurant with samosas that will render you mute, especially if you haven't had a bite of Indian food in eight, nine months but have spent every day of that time daydreaming about it.

The crawfish at the Cuban place in Orange. The blue fin tuna in Studio City. The egg bagel just out of the oven in New York. That salt cod and garlic dish a friend made on New Year's eve 1999. The meat and potato stew my neighbor brought over an hour after I gave birth to my son, at home. A bowl I finished in minutes and literally licked clean, while my neighbor, a big and radiant woman from Kenya, laughed all the way back to her apartment to retrieve the entire pot for me.

Here's a more recent perfect meal: A grilled cheese sandwich and a pickle. Washed down with a $14 glass of red wine. Tony and I discovered this one at Greenblatt's about a year or so ago.

Greenblatt's is a Jewish Deli on Sunset in LA. It's been there for at least 50 years. It's got much better food than the more famous Canter's Deli on Fairfax. As well as a vaunted wine collection. It's open late and we like to go after a show and slump in a booth and watch the Hollywood people come and go.

One night we were trying to decide what to eat. "Know what I really feel like?" Tony looked over his menu sheepishly.

"What?"

"A grilled cheese sandwich."

My last experience with grilled cheese had something to do with a slice of American cheese between two pieces of Wonder Bread. There is a lot to choose from on the Greenblatt's menu, all of it worthy. So eyebrows were raised. But not for long.

Imagine a place that serves grilled cheese sandwiches for adults...yeah, I know. Tart up a grilled cheese and call it a panini. It's still just a grilled cheese to me -- and that can be more than OK. Tony ordered jack cheese on rye bread. Creaminess with a bite. And then there's that pickle, which is like a satisfying, final exclamation point. I don't know how we came to order the $14 glass of wine. A cab out of Napa somewhere. Our waiter, the tall and improbably-named Gide, told us it would be good. And who the hell has a decent wine with a grilled cheese? Well, exactly.

And thus a classic perfect meal was born.

There's a lot more to be written about grilled cheese sandwiches. They're popping up all over. In the Williams Sonoma catalog, in the New York Times (which irritatingly cancels its free links within days), to the food blogosphere. There are contests. All sorts of grilled cheese chatter. They've also gotten the nod from the heavens. Seems God, some ten years ago, saw fit to affix an image of the Virgin Mary into a toasted cheese sandwich. True believers have been making pilgrimages to see this holiest of grilled cheese in Florida (where else?) until recently, when it was sold at auction on Ebay for $28,000.

I could write a lot more about grilled cheese sandwiches. Even detail my pseudo-successful attempts at making them at home. But not today.

I know you have a favorite meal or two. Let's hear them.

Forget-me-not

2007-04-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

As often happens, this so-called bright idea started with Audge.

Last time I was at my kitchen Goddess friend Audrey Smith's house, she had just a few bites of a blackberry cobbler left on her counter top. She's the kind of woman who whips up things like fruit cobblers for her family. And on weeknights. If my family gets desert at all, it's usually several squares of Ritter Sport chocolate and biscuit, and more often than not, it's usually stolen from the refrigerator by my nits without my knowledge.

She gifted me with a bite. It was, not surprisingly, delicious.

It was also, she said, "obscenely easy to make."

"For someone like you," I muttered. This is my standard refrain whenever Audge tells me how easy something is to make.

"No, no," she said. "It even says it here." She pulled out a copy of Cuisine at Home, Aug. 2005. There, on page 49, was the recipe for Summer Blackberry Cobbler with Coconut and Pecan topping. And in the intro, plain as the nose on my face, were the words, "...plus, it's obscenely easy to make."

In journalism we call the final paragraph or sentence of a piece the "kicker." You can see why here.

Call me naive. Call me gullible. Call me impressionable. But I am easily convinced, and yes, I could probably be the one convinced to buy that bridge in Brooklyn. I re-read these final words, and I looked at the picture, and I ruminated on the taste of that cobbler, seeds still in my teeth, and I thought, "This is obscenely easy to make. I can make it for my BBQ next week."

Gentle readers, I can almost hear your hand slapping your forehead. Silly girl, you're saying. Don't waste your time. Buy a pie if you must. Better yet, buy half a dozen Dove bars and call that dessert. And in any case, you're all going to be eating steaks and potatoes and drinking beer and wine and really, who's going to remember anything about any desert? And you'd be right.

Alas.

Here's the recipe:

8 cups blackberries, fresh or frozen,thawed slightly if frozen. (I bought three bags of frozen.)
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup instant tapioca (good luck finding this item. I had to borrow Audrey's)
Juice of 1/2 lime
Pinch of salt

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup sweetened shredded coconut
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1/2 cup cold unsalted butter, cubed (1 stick)
1 egg

Preheat oven to 375 degree F.

Toss berries with sugar, tapioca, lime juice, and salt in a bowl. Spoon into a 2-quart baking dish.

Combine flour, coconut, sugar, pecans, baking powder, and salt in a second bowl. Using your fingertips, knead in the butter until incorporated. Mixture should look like coarse sand. (this was fun, and made me feel like I knew what I was doing)

Blend in the egg. It will get very sticky, like wet Play-Do. Do your best to arrange this over the berries.

Bake cobbler for 45-50 minutes, or until topping is golden and crisp, and filling is thick and bubbly. Cool on a rack for at least 1 hour before serving. Dang. Will your kitchen smell great.

Serve with creme anglaise or ice cream. (Yeah, righto.)

A couple of problems. First, I had no lime juice, having thrown away one, withering lime about a week ago. I did have lemons, though, so I used half of that. Was this a bad idea? Probably. But isn't citrus citrus?

Secondly, I inexplicably ran out of sugar after the first cup. Since it was 11 p.m., I had no choice but to call Tamlin, the only close neighbor I knew who was still likely to be up, and beg a cup of sugar off her. Luckily, she had it. She had a good laugh at my expense, too.

By midnight I was finished. And there was no way in heck I was going to attempt no stinking creme anglaise.

I would not describe this as obscenely easy to make. If it is for you, don't mention it to me.

Thirdly. We did indeed drink and eat meat and potatoes at the BBQ the next night. And I also forgot all about the cobbler. Two days later, I pulled it out and served a chunk to my kids, who ate part of it with interest, but then said it was too cold. I ate the rest of their portion. Not bad. I could taste the coconut, which I didn't entirely care for. I put it back into the refrigerator...and forgot about it until now. I'd throw it out tonight but for the daunting task of having to wash the dish.

Sigh. It all seems a tremendous waste. I might try this again later in the summer, with fresh blackberries. And I'll halve the recipe. And use a pie tin instead of a deep dish. Oh, and I'll have a lime. And enough sugar. Maybe at that point it will have become, if not obscenely easy to make, then at least perhaps not too hard.

Audrey, meanwhile, asked for the recipe back, (hope she doesn't mind all the smudges), and has since made it again. Her husband and kids have already eaten it.

Eliza, who writes Notes from my food diary, makes a beautiful version of this. Please note that mine did not turn out this beautiful, hence the generic picture of blackberries.

Look at that cobbler. Can you blame me for trying?

The radish spirit

2007-04-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

I bought a daikon radish a few weeks ago at Marukai, the giant Japanese supermarket not far from where I live. It's possible to spend several hours at Marukai, perusing unfamiliar condiments and 27 different kinds of dipping noodles, and never even make it upstairs to where the furniture is. I have my Marukai game down, though. I know what I need, and I procure it quickly: Japanese snacks for the kids (Yam-Yam sticks and honey balls), noodles, dipping sauce, "fish bits" (processed fish roll that my kids, strangely, seem to love), Miso paste, fresh fish and of course, some chestnut mochi, because you know, oishi desu, ne?

And I swung by the produce section to get me some of those crispy Fuji apples. Then I spied the daikon radishes. Oooh. I was inspired suddenly to try my hand once again at the Japanese Breakfast. And didn't I need a daikon radish to make the dashi - the base for miso soup?

I bought one: a large, sturdy specimen. I brought it home. It sat on my counter for a while. I looked up the recipe for miso soup and realized I was mistaken. You don't need daikon for dashi, only kombu, a kind of seaweed, which I didn't have, and bonito flakes, which I didn't have either.

I didn't fancy another schlep to Marukai just for these items. So the daikon sat unused on my counter. I half-heartedly flipped through my Japanese cookbook for ideas on how to use it, but nothing enthused me. So the daikon radish continued to sit on my counter. My kids started referring to it as "The Radish Spirit," after the silent but heaving character in Hayao Miyazaki's fantastic animated feature, "Spirited Away."

Then one night I drew a face on it. I added a little bottle-top cap.

Not long afterwards, I realized the face kind of resembled Tony's.

Seinfeld aficionados will remember the very funny episode called "Fusilli Jerry." Kramer makes a figurine of Jerry out of fusilli pasta.

I call this creation: Daikon Tony.

Daikon Tony sat on my counter for a few weeks, where he lost water and twisted and withered slowly away. I was forced to throw my creation away, for decorum's sake.

One can extrapolate from this that I will very soon, probably this week, be back at Marukai, to procure benito flakes and kombu, and probably some small pieces of salmon to fry up for a traditional Japanese breakfast. Tony - the man, not the radish - is bound by honor to try it.

Me and my almendrados

2007-04-16T15:32:00.000-07:00

Before I tell you how I rocked my own world and made almond-lemon macaroons that actually turned out, I should inform you of several Bad Home Cook standards:

Sunday morning I went to make toast for Tony and burnt black the last piece of bread in the house. Not long afterwards I forgot to watch the half and half warming on the stove for coffee, and it boiled over, making a mess of my stove top.

At least I had the sense not to try and make eggs or anything. Tony swore up and down he wasn't actually hungry, but I think he was just being smart, in the Darwinian sense.

It's my tendency to botch the simplest things that pisses me off most. That's why the Almendrados so delighted me. They've restored my faith in myself. Maybe I can be taught.

Tony, ever helpful, had sent me a link to the New York Times' food section piece about Sephardic cooking from Morocco (I wish the link were still free, it was a wonderfully-detailed article about a woman collecting old Jewish Moroccan recipes that were in danger of being lost forever). One recipe jumped out at me for some reason: Almond-lemon macaroons, or Almendrados.

Four ingredients. Three steps. The name alone had me tasting the Levant. If I closed my eyes I could almost feel the Sirocco wind on my face, smell the lemon tree outside my window and hear a distant Muezzin wailing away the appointed hour.

I opened my eyes again. There was a Santa Ana blowing debris around the yard. I could smell the Lemon Pledge underneath my sink. I listened to the distant drone of the leaf blower. And I knew I'd make these macaroons, damn it. They were calling me.

Here's the recipe, adapted from "Dulce Lo Vivas," by Ana Bensadon (Ediciones Martinez Roca)

2 cups whole blanched almonds, plus about 30 for decoration
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
zest of one lemon

The recipe calls for grinding the two cups of almonds, but that's much too difficult for someone like me, even if I did have a working food processor. I scored a bag of ground almonds from Trader Joe's and used that instead.

Mix the almonds together with 3/4 of the sugar. Add the egg and the lemon zest. Mix together until you have a cohesive dough.

Cover and chill for at least 12 hours. I chilled mine for almost 48 hours because I couldn't get around to baking any sooner than that.

Preheat oven to 350.

Pinch off dough about the size of a walnut and roll into balls. Roll the balls in the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Place them on parchment paper on a baking sheet. Gently press the decorative almond into the center and reshape if necessary. This step made me deliriously happy for some reason. Even my son got into the game.

Bake for between 8 and 10 minutes. Don't touch them until they're cool. This makes them firm and crunchy on the outside and moist on the inside. Oh. My. God. I was so impressed with myself.

I want you all to be impressed, too. Of course, they could look fancier. They could be bigger. And I probably should have used whole almonds instead of the slivered blanched I had in the back of my pantry. But one thing at a time. Besides...the taste....

Macaroons make good monsters, too.

How to avoid bread and pasta for a week and live to tell about it

2007-04-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

Sardines are very tasty. They taste good on crackers, which means they're good on the Bread of Affliction (matzohs) too. If your foodie friend is visiting you, she will not let you eat these out of the can, hunched over the sink, as you intend to do. Rather, she will dish them into a bowl, spread fresh avocado mixed with freshly ground black pepper and capers onto a matzoh, place a single sardine just so, and hand it to you on a plate. She will make you sit down at the table to eat it. And she will make you use a napkin. And it will be good.

Matzo brei is also very tasty. You learned to make it from a Nice Jewish Boy from Long Island many years ago when you were giving the other coast a whirl for a bit. It is his grandmother's recipe. You run several sheets of matzoh under the tap until they're good and wet, shake them out, then crumble them all up into a colander. Then you melt butter in a pan, and fry the damp matzo bits until lightly browned. Then you add three or four eggs, beaten with a little milk, salt and pepper. The resulting scrambled egg and matzo is then eaten, in delicious little bites, with jam and a giant cup of coffee. Your children announce that they love matzo-brei. This will make you feel like a righteous Jew.

Carrot salad with avocado and tofu sounded good (well, maybe not the tofu part necessarily), and since the gorgeous Clotilde at Chocolate & Zucchini eats it for lunch every day, you decide you should try it. You took four years of high school French. There's no reason why you should be so impressed with a dish called Carottes Rapées à l'Avocat, but you are. In any case, the recipe, in English, sounds like simplicity itself. You grate the four carrots. You dice your ripe, medium avocado. You toast your sesame seeds. Then you realize that your lemon is too big and that you probably added too much lemon juice and absolutely too much balsamic vinegar, and then, unable to stop the train wreck, you dump in your carrots before it's all mixed and you can't quite scoop it all out again to backtrack. What you're left with is balsamic-flavored vegetable slop. Good thing you opted not to use tofu in the end.

Refrigeration for a few hours doesn't fix the problem. You eat most of it anyway, because you sense that, if prepared correctly, it could be very good indeed. And at the very least it's probably healthy for you.

Eat the ginger and carrot soup you bought three boxes of from Trader Joe's, for several meals.

Make the kids a lot of hard boiled eggs. Color some and call it Easter, prompting the kids to continue eating them, along with their chocolate.

Have Tony over for more salmon.

Passover is over the next day and dream of the biggest, creamiest bowl of fettuccine Alfredo you can conjure up.

Next year in Greenblatt's.

Una Sopa Romero Malisima

2007-04-09T11:32:00.000-07:00

I could see it, and it was inspired.

Rosemary Red Soup. Delicious. Creamy. Vegetarian. And, like the name suggests, a deep, ruby red.

It would look fantastic in my Heath bowls. Never mind that I didn't have enough for all the guests. Such details were not bothering me at the time. I could only see the visuals.

Details often come back to bite me in the butt, however. Indeed, it's a wonder I have any backside at all these days.

A friend of mine, a fabulous woman with a PhD in Moroccan Jewry and enviable hostessing skills gave me this recipe, promising that it was so simple even I could make it. The secret, she told me, was in the beets and the miso. Red beets give this vegetarian soup its shocking color, while the miso gave it a sort of salty kick from deep within. I made it only once, probably five years ago. But as I recall, it turned out, and impressed everybody so much that nobody minded that it also terminally stained clothes.

As with so many dishes I ruin, this one started out with my focus on entirely the wrong element: I was concentrating on the reaction it would surely win, instead of focusing on the constructive details.

First I bought the wrong kind of beets. We got two kinds at the Farmer's market, neither of them the right ones. We needed red beets. The kind that are red throughout, not the ones that are just red on the outside. The orange beets weren't going to work, either, although yes, they were very pretty and exciting.

The proper beets seem to be an essential element in creating soup of this color. Most cooks would understand this fact. But not me. I have said this all my life, but clearly it remains true: The obvious never occurs to me.

Second problem: We started late in the day, when the Tagine was a bubblin' and Julia was assembling the bitter herb salad and attending to a trillion other details. This would have been fine, had the soup turned out.

Bad enough the soup wasn't the color I'd expected. But it wasn't any acceptable color, unless you like your diarrhea color on the mustard-yellow side of the spectrum. For some reason the puree wasn't as smooth as it needed to be either. Maybe I hadn't cooked the lentils long enough? Hadn't chopped the vegetables enough? Hadn't minced the rosemary right? Realizing you've botched a recipe at the very first, most basic step is pretty demoralizing. But if your dish tastes OK, it's possible to redeem yourself.

Alas. Even Julia, a hardy optimist, was underwhelmed with my Rosemary Red Soup That Was Diarrhea Colored. For a soup with several vegetables, salty miso and an herb widely understood to be taste-enhancing, this was remarkably taste-free. I held out the wooden spoon for her, accepting my fate.

"I don't think it's any good," I said.

She tasted. She didn't grimace, which gave me hope for a small second.

"No. It's not good."

That's when I panicked. It was 6 p.m. People were going to start arriving any minute, and we didn't even have the soup course done.

"We can't serve this! We can't serve this! What are we gonna do?!"

Now I was openly cursing myself. For not paying attention to the ingredient details. For telling Tony NOT to bring Matzo-ball soup as originally planned, because I was going to make my own soup. What the hell was wrong with me? WHY was I even trying to pull off a Seder when obviously it was horribly beyond my abilities, even with more experienced backup? You've heard of fight or flight?

"I'm going to Trader Joe's!" I yelled, running for my keys. "I'm just gonna buy some soup!"

"Wait!" Julia held up her hand. "I have an idea." Obviously she intended to fight.

Her idea involved orange juice. Audacious, I thought. And if it weren't Zero Hour I would have embraced her creativity. But I was already flying. "Ginger carrot soup! I'll just get four boxes of it, we'll heat it up, and nobody will know the difference!"

"Quiet. Taste this now. What do you think?" She'd poured probably 3/4 cup of orange juice directly into the soup and turned up the heat.

I swallowed my heart and tasted.

It had *some* taste. As opposed to the no-taste it had just moments before.

Maybe it would work.

And in fact, in the end, people ate their soup. Some confessed to enjoying it. The two vegetarians at the table wanted more. Wanted the recipe, even. "...this isn't really the soup I'd intended to serve," I stammered.

Here's the soup I intended to serve. Maybe Sher or Janelle or one of the Gracious Bowl gals can make this correctly and show the food-blogging world what it's really supposed to look like:

Rosemary Red Soup
3 medium carrots, chopped
2 beets (RED!!!) chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, diced
2 tablespoons chopped rosemary (fresh)
1 tablespoon chopped oregano (fresh or dry)
1 cup red lentils (washed and picked over)
2 bay leaves
6 cups water or vegetable stock
2-3 tablespoons light miso

Saute onions in oil, add carrots and beats. Saute as long as you feel prudent. Add herbs, lentils, bay leaves and stock. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer 40 minutes. Remove bay leaves and puree soup in blender. Dissolve miso in 1/2 cup water and add to soup. Reheat and serve.

Writing it down now, transcribing from a stained and well-thumbed notepad from another life, I note that I didn't follow any of these simple directions. Saute first?

That'll teach me to cook under pressure. Probably should have made this the night before, with a glass of wine in my system and no time constraints. But that's just one of the many lessons learned this Passover holiday. Stay tuned....

Lamb Tagine with a Thousand Spices

2007-04-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

The recipe promised to bring men running.

"When I made this dish, I left the kitchen window open," writes the anonymous Lisa, who posted this dish on the allrecipe website. "The smell attracted several male neighbors, and when my husband came in, he said that it smelled so good, he hoped it was coming from our house and not from someone else's! Serve with my Moroccan Couscous and Cucumber Raita on this site."

That sounded good to us. Not so much the men coming running bit, since Julia is happily married to an eminent Ancient Near Eastern scholar, and I'm still stupid for the flamenco guitarist. But anything that smells good enough to bring men running must by definition have something extra; some mysterious something contained within the 14 spices (plus lemon zest!) that touches the primal animal. It sounded promising indeed. So we printed it out and ventured into my spice box to see what I had on hand. It was when we saw how much space the spice and jar bottles took up on my table that we gave the recipe its new working name of Lamb with a Thousand Spices.

Sure you can click above and see the original recipe, and you should. But I recreate it here for you. Because I love you. The measurements are strangely worded, because on Allrecipe.com you can change the portions and the ingredient measurements change accordingly.

Lamb with a thousand spices:

1/4 cup and 1 teaspoon olive oil, divided

3 pounds lamb meat, cut into 1 1/2 inch cubes

Ready? Take a deep breath...

1 tablespoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
3/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinammon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
3/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1 1/2 pinches saffron
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated ginger
1 1/2 lemon, zested

*whew!*
3 medium onions, cut into one inch cubes (huh?)
7 1/2 carrots, peeled, cut into fourths, then sliced lengthwise into strips (You know what? Just buy a bag of baby carrots and achieve the same thing.)
4 1/2 cloves garlic, minced (hell, throw in that last half a garlic clove while you're at it.)
1 1/2 (14.5 ounce) low-sodium chicken broth
1 tablespoon and 1 1/2 teaspoons sun-dried tomato paste
1 tablespoon and 1 1/2 teaspoons honey
1 tablespoon and 1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch and the same amount of water (optional, for thickening sauce if need be)

Toss the lamb with two tablespoons of the olive oil. Set aside in a bowl. Measure the spices (the paprika, turmeric, cumin, cayenne, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, salt, ginger, saffron, garlic powder and coriander) into a large, resealable Ziploc bag. Mix well, then add the lamb. Mix well, then refrigerate overnight (or for at least eight hours.)

Brown half the lamb in 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan (we used the tagine). Remove to a plate and repeat with the remaining lamb. Add onions and carrots to the pot and cook for five minutes. Stir in the fresh garlic and ginger; continue cooking for five more minutes. Return the lamb to the pot and stir in the lemon zest, chicken broth, tomato paste and honey. Bring to a boil then reduce heat to low. Cover, and simmer for 1 1/2 hour to two hours (we did two and a half). You can thicken the broth if it's too thin.

Working the night before, Julia spooned out the spices into a gallon Ziploc bag. We doubled the amount because we'd almost doubled the amount of lamb to feed the Seder guests. This is before I remembered that two of the wives in attendance are strict vegetarians and wouldn't be touching the stuff. No matter, I thought. If this dish came out as promised, the men would eat more than their fair share.

It marinated overnight. Already I was all tingly with the thrill of the unknown. The scent of danger. Me! Marinating!

The next day, the day of the Seder itself, we started cooking at about 1 in the afternoon. I chopped and diced, trying hard to stay focused in the face of my growing panic that we'd started too late and that none of this was going to turn out anyway.

The first problem: We had too much lamb for the tagine. We had to split the portions between it and my dutch oven (or is it a soup pot? Who cares. It worked!). Before long, the lamb was bubbling away.

Luke arrived to see the kids and Julia. First words out of his mouth: "It smells incredible in here! What are you cooking?"

Julia and I just smiled.

The second man to show up was my friend E.J., who beat the traffic (and his wife, apparently, coming in a separate car,) to be the first arriving Seder guest.

"It smells fantastic in here! What are you cooking?"

Third man: Dr. Ash. "Oh my God. What are you cooking?"

Fourth man: Tony. "Que Alegria! Is that the lamb?!"

Over the course of its simmering, we noted that the lamb had a significant kick at the end. Maybe we'd put in a bit too much cayenne pepper? Julia suggested adding a lot more honey, which we did. I can't tell you exactly how much. Two twirls around the perimeter with the bear.

Finally. The Lamb with a Thousand Spices was done. Julia added a fistful of prunes to the mix toward the end, because a lot of traditional lamb tagines include prunes, apparently. And at the table she sprinkled it with freshly-chopped coriander.

Did it taste as good as it smelled? I am happy to report that it did. Even though I was running around mitigating the million little details that I had not attended to (like preparing the actual Seder part of the Seder dinner, for example), and serving things up and pouring wine, I finally sat down and tried a mouthful. The lamb dissolved in my mouth like butter. I could taste the honey, and the cardamom, too. There was still a nice little kick at the end. We served it with roasted heirloom potatoes and other vegetables. But oh, for some crusty bread to mop up those juices!

Next time, I suppose. This dish paired great with the shiraz Tony brought and got raves from everyone who tried it. There were some leftovers, but not a lot: The males came through, each going back two or three times for more. In all, it was a vast improvement over my miserable failure two years ago. But that was a wholly different recipe, and of course, I didn't have a tagine yet, either. Lamb with a Thousand Spices will be made again, and soon. Perhaps for a Spring party?

Now if only I could say the Ruby Red Soup turned out as well. More on that next post. Stay tuned!

Date me

2007-04-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

Ever do something and not quite believe you've done it? I like to think of myself as the type who lives by that credo. Yet in reality, all I've ever craved is the comfort of the known and the safety of the un-ventured.

Unless someone has my back. Then almost anything, apparently, is possible. Luckily, my friends seem to believe that I'm capable of impressive feats. They think that I can not only finish my novels but publish them, sell screenplays, knit my own sweaters, grow successful tomatoes and dance flamenco before a paying audience. And maybe with their help these things will come to pass. Or not. But it was a sort of thrilling moment when Julia looked up at me last week and tapped the cookbook she'd been perusing for Seder dinner desert ideas.

"Date and almond truffles."

"Excuse me?"

"Date and almond truffles," she said. "For desert."

"...we can probably buy them from the Lebanese restaurant..."

"We can make them, silly."

We stared at each other for a few beats.

"Can we do that?" I squeaked.

She started laughing.

Things involving food processors tend to scare me away. I had a food processor once, an early '80s-style Cuisinart I inherited from my step-mother. It was huge and unwieldy and resembled a space station, with all that plastic and all those mysterious attachments. And indeed it did take up a lot of space. It took me several months to screw up the courage to try it and when I plugged it in it didn't work. With relief I now use my blender instead. I'm sure it's not as functional as a proper food processor, but it's unlikely I'm going to be getting to those advanced functions anytime soon.

I tell you all this because Tmar Kweerat (or Fatima's Date and Almond Truffles) requires grinding almonds and chopped dates into a paste. Right away I was terrified. Julia took it calmly.

From Kitty Morse's: The Vegetarian Table: North Africa, p. 148

1 1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted.

1 cup pitted dates, chopped

1 tablespoon orange flower water (Ah! This is how Seville smells, they say)

1 tablespoon honey

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 cup shredded coconut (we used unsweetened)

Put half the almonds and dates into the blender and grind into a paste. Do the same with the other half. Transfer to a medium bowl. With your hands, blend in the orange flower water, honey and cinnamon. Shape into 1-inch balls. Roll them in coconut.

We found these cute miniature paper cups at Marukai, and we put the balls into those to chill overnight.

Were these hard to make? Not at all. But I would never have ventured them on my own. Silly, really. These, eaten with sweet mint tea and the end of the Seder meal, were a huge hit. Alas, none survived, and I'll have to make some more if I want to experience them again. Which I will, because now I know I can. Thanks be to Julia for laughing at my panic. Maybe I'll knit a sweater for her.

Stay tuned for details about the Seder entree...lamb tagine with a thousand spices!

Sludge morning

2007-04-06T09:27:00.001-07:00

I hyped the heck out the oatmeal breakfast my kids would be eating this morning, since they can't have their normal breakfast cereal due to Pesach. (No bread or grains for seven days, according to tradition.) Brown sugar! Butter! Blueberries! Apples! And they were game for it, indeed. My daughter was particularly excited about getting to consume parentally-sanctioned sugar for breakfast.

Then I woke up a little later than planned, because Julia and I stayed up late making almond and date truffles for our Pesach spread tonight (but more on them later) and drinking wine.

Then I found I didn't have any brown sugar.

And no more apples.

Then I put too much water into the oatmeal...or something...because I am the bad home cook, remember, and I only just redeemed myself by cooking the hell out of it and hoping to boil off some of the excess water. My kids, hungry and irate already, cast me baleful looks, and I knew I would only be keeping them cooperative if I delivered the goods.

Luckily, I had good local honey from the Farmer's Market. (added bonus: In a bear, which is always more fun than a regular jar), and frozen blueberries. And bananas! And in the end, the kids were happy again.

Tonight's the seder. We've got lamb marinating in a hundred spices in the refrigerator as I write this. We have amazing almond and date truffles rolled in coconut that I can't quite believe we actually made. It's gonna be interesting. My only hope is that I get my traditional Passover Cosmo first, to ease me into my long night.

Stay tuned...

Julie and Julia

2007-04-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

In preparation for my second-night Seder, Julia and I visited the Santa Monica Farmer's Market. This final day of March was sunny and bright and not too hot -- the perfect day for spending several hours perusing organic vegetables and obscure greenery.

"Oh look," said Julia. "Ramps."

"Ramps?" I looked around for the wheelchair ramps, thinking to myself, how cool of Santa Monica to make sure our nation's disabled have full access to organic fruits and vegetables.

She pointed to a box of weeds. "No, ramps. These." She picked one up. It was thin, with long green leaves and an anemic white bulb at the end. Dirt still clung to its roots. It really did look like something I'd pull out of my flower garden. I've never heard of ramps before. But then I don't read my Gourmet magazine very closely.

The vendor smiled brightly. Surely these two women would be buying a nice supply of ramps, priced at only (cough) $16 a pound. They did have a powerful, peppery taste. Maybe we could incorporate these into our planned "bitter herb salad."

Julia and her daughter are staying with us for a few days, and she is the primary reason I'm going ahead with my insane plan of hosting a Pesach Seder for nine adults and seven children next week. She's a foodie who cooked for a Parisian family in Corsica for a few years in her '20s, and continues to live a bountiful, delicious life. She's a woman I can bounce my half-baked ideas off of, someone I can watch and learn from. Best of all, she's someone who can take all the stuff about to go over in my refrigerator and make something marvelous from it.

I got home today and she's cooking up a compote. "I'm making apple sauce out of those five apples that were about to go bad in your fruit dish," she says, maddeningly matter-of-factly.

"Thanks," I say. "And why is the oven on?"

"I'm roasting those beets you forgot about in the crisper."

Later on she sliced the beets and zested some lemon over them. I stood watching her in awe.

I'm so glad Julia is here. She makes my kitchen happy. We spent several hours last night pouring over my cookbooks, and we're gonna have a kick-ass Moroccan-style seder. We're gonna make a tagine! We're even gonna make date truffles. Stand back! It's going to be the kind of dinner party I've longed to have...which is to say, it will be a dinner party that will actually feature edible, nay, exceptional food. Because Julia is here to oversee.

We didn't buy any ramps in the end, because we figured such a gourmet ingredient would be lost on our audience. We did buy $10 worth of heirloom potatoes to roast, however, because they were colorful and presumably tasty, and because I figure that if I can utter, "These are roasted heirloom potatoes," then my transformation from bad home cook into sophisticated foodie will have begun.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Tagine Mon Amour

2007-03-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

¡Mira! Look what the flamenco guitarist bought me this weekend in Santa Barbara!

A tagine! And such a lusciously curved specimen. And in such a deep shade of coral. It's like art pottery...but functional!

Oh baby, this raises the bar on my Pesach seder significantly. This means that something lambish will definitely be on the menu. I can smell it now...even though I'm not sure what's going to be in it yet.

Eight adults and seven kids are coming to my second-night seder. I don't even have eight chairs for the grown-ups. Much less seats for seven kids and one more for Elija, who's supposed to bring the matzo-ball soup.

I suppose this really will be a night unlike any other night. And on this night we brought our own chairs to the seder table. And reclined upon ornate cushions, which were provided by our winsome hostess, and were pleasing to the eye, and to the buttocks. For she is in possession of many fine cushions and other frivolities such as teapots and tea glasses and coral-colored tagines. Alas, she is sorely lacking in furniture.

Now I'm on the prowl for Moroccan lamb dishes. I betcha the gorgeous Clotilde at chocolate and Zucchini has some. Wonder if she's going to be in California in early April. She'd have to bring her own chair, though.

In any event, I'll find something, probably something with cous-cous, since I can't actually use grain on Pesach, and have a test run with the tagine. Tony gets to sample the output. He doesn't have to bring his own chair, unless he wants to.

Probably not a smart idea...

2007-03-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again. Time again to make the nod toward a religion I adopted because it suits my questioning, snarky nature better than the one I was born into. It's time for Pesach (that's Passover to all you goyim out there).

It's time for another seder.

A seder is a ritualistic meal served every year at Pesach, which involves the reading of certain texts and the eating of certain foods in a certain order. It can be a tedious affair lasting many hours, putting everyone in attendance into a miserable mood.

But unless you're observant, which I'm not, there is a lot of room for creativity. And when I have a seder (I've had three or four of my own), I interpret the rituals broadly.

For example, five years ago I launched the much-truncated and hugely popular Seder For Those With Small Children.

I know. I have no business throwing a seder, since I can't be relied upon to successfully steam asparagus much less prepare several large courses all at once. But I have done it in the past, mostly out of a desire to indoctrinate my children with a sort of basic Judaism that they can forget about as soon as they leave the nest. But also because, damnit, I really do like gathering my friends around a table. But it's a lot of work, and the panic I live with in the days leading up to the event take five years off my life. And that's really starting to add up, so it would be prudent of me to reconsider.

But I've ignored the holiday these last few years in lieu of emotional distress and am now feeling ready to face anything, even those four glasses of Manischewitz. Three additional facts compel me as well:

Kitchen Goddess Julia Regalado will be in town staying with me that week. With her at my back, what could go wrong?

If anything does go wrong, I will have Marsha and Terry in attendance with their traditional Passover Cosmopolitans at the ready, and nobody will care if the lamb turns out as bad as it did that last time.

And even if everything goes wrong, think of the blog fodder.

I got two weeks. And G-d help me. Anyone got any good (and easy!) recipes for charoset?

Cooking with Memsahib

2007-03-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

Five things I love that are from India:
Bollywood
Bindis
Bhangra
Burfi
Basmati rice

Oh yes. And the food, of course. Ah, Indian take-out. Is there anything that a good chana dal over rice won't cure, atcha? Or milky, chai tea and sinful gulab jaman? I have loved Indian food and the restaurants that serve it from San Francisco to London. But cooking it myself has proved...tricky. Years ago in another life I had the hubris to pick up Madhur Jaffrey's seminal paperback Indian Cooking, and yes, I did go though a phase of trying to perfect a simple dal, to mediocre results. (I'd never attempt a meat dish, although there are few sensations better than a chicken tika that falls off the bone into your fingers and from thence into your waiting mouth). Indeed, the few attempts I've made at Indian home cooking have given me minimal return on investment, so I typically opt to pay professional East Indian cooks to prepare my Indian food so as not to further insult the cuisine.

But then Deb over at Smitten Kitchen had to go and try the potato and cauliflower dish, and she made the raita, of course, and she took pictures of everything, all while waxing poetic about the scent of cumin. The sum total of her blog entry only served to distract me from work and induce me into a temporary madness in which I decided I had no choice but to either A) fob the nits on someone so I could run off to the sublime Udupi Palace in Artesia's Little India that very night, or, B.) make the one recipe I can pull off from Jaffrey's Indian Cooking: Delhi-style lamb cooked with potatoes.

Babysitters are expensive. I opted for choice B.

I wish I could tell you I botched this recipe. I have in the past. But I have also made it enough to feel fairly secure in my ability to pull it off. This is no small thing if you're going to put in the effort to drive across town and spend $15 on lamb kabobs from the fancy-ass organic grocery chain. And I was willing, even though I knew my kids wouldn't touch it (my daughter will sometimes have a bit of lamb, if I wash the sauce off first) and Tony might find it too spicy for his taste. But forget everybody else for once. This one was for me.

Here's the recipe: For my small family I typically halve everything but the spices.

7 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 medium onions, peeled and minced
1/2 -1 fresh green chili, minced (I routinely omit this)
5 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
2 1/4 pounds lamb (I get lamb kabobs already cut into cubes)
3 medium fresh tomatoes, peeled and finely chopped - canned tomatoes may be substituted (I use one 16-ounce can of diced tomatoes with the juice)
1 tablespoon ground cumin seeds
2 teaspoons ground coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground tumeric
1/4 to 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper (to your taste)
2 teaspoons salt
1 lb medium potatoes, peeled and cut in half
3 2/3 cup water

Heat the oil in a large, heavy pot over a high flame. When hot, put in the onions, green chili, if using, and garlic. Stir and fry until the onions have browned slightly. Put in the meat and stir vigorously for about 5 minutes. Now put in the spices, continue to stir and cook on high heat for 10-15 minutes or until the sauce is thick and the oil seems to separate from it. Add the potatoes and water. Cover, leaving the lid just slightly ajar, and cook on medium-low heat for about 1 hour and 10 minutes or until the meat is tender and the sauce is thick.

I've found that it's prudent to stir once in a while so stuff doesn't stick to the bottom.

Ms. Jaffrey writes that she likes this "everyday dish" with rice, an Indian bread, or Gujerati-style green beans, the recipe for which is in the book. I typically just serve this in a nice bowl with crusty style bread. And nobody seems to complain. Although I haven't made this dish in several years, I am happy to report that it came out beautifully and did not disappoint (although a nice cold Kingfisher beer would have been the ideal accompaniment). Tony finished his entire serving with great gusto. I don't think he believed I actually made it myself.

Great balls of rice

2007-03-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

I lived in Japan for one summer in high school. This expanded my mind and ruined any hope I ever had of being a normal Southern California teenager whose only concerns in life were keeping her tan, driving her boyfriend's Camaro and scoring tickets to the next Journey concert.

The experience lit my passion for travel. And more. Since I went through the Youth For Understanding Toyota Scholarship, I had to write an essay on some aspect of Japanese life. I was assigned food, a topic I was only too happy to tuck into. Among the details I wrote about: In Japan, it's polite to slurp your noodles. Presentation of the food is at least (if not more) important than the taste of the food. And finally, one never eats rice by itself. Why not? It was never explained to me, as my host mother snatched my rice bowl out of my hand and rushed to cut up some fish to go on top of it. It's just not done.

I've revisited Japan several times since then. But I haven't been back since my brother got married to the wonderful Hiromi-chan about four years back. So who's gonna know that I break that cardinal rule with inappropriate regularity?

I found my O-nigiri mold, you see, and suddenly felt nostalgic. And O-nigiri is one thing my kids will eat. O-nigiri (pronounced, I always heard O-nigidi, with a "d.") is a ball of sticky white rice shaped into a triangle. Typically it has a bit of fish or pickled plum in the middle. It's usually wrapped in crispy seaweed. It's the Japanese equivalent of a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich -- casual home food, not something you normally find in restaurants. Moms stack them up for their kids' lunch or picnics in clever little square containers. I ate two almost every day when I was in Japan (and washed it down with a big glass of Calpis), which might explain the sudden weight gain. My host mother made me several to take with me on the plane home but I ate them all in the airport. Oishi desu-ne??! Years later I stumbled across an O-nigiri mold at a Japanese market and promptly went home to try my hand.

As you can see in the photo above; I got the bug to make O-nigiri but not the bug to drive to Marukai and buy any nori, seasoned, crispy seaweed you can wrap O-nigiri in or eat out of hand. As I wrote about for Kids' Cuisine, my kids are all over Japanese snacks. They eat nori like potato chips. A trip to Marukai, a huge Japanese supermarket not far from where I live, is always a treat. But not today. I had no fish to tuck into the middle, either. Nor did I dare stick in a pickled plum (which I did have, deep in the back of the fridge, fermenting freely), or sprinkle the top with sesame seeds or another seasoning. These authentic touches would have rendered the rice-ball inedible to my picky-ass progeny.

So I made them unadorned. And only screwed up the rice a little bit by putting in a bit too much water. I don't do fractions well, and measurements not specifically spelled out in the instructions on the back of the bag of rice will invariably be my undoing. My fourth-grade daughter knows better than to consult me for her math homework.

These plain balls of rice, which would have so insulted my otosan, they were enthusiastically consumed by my nits. They did wonder where the seaweed was, though.

The Kids are all right

2007-03-06T15:54:00.000-08:00

See? SEE? Kids are different from you and I. Their palates are unformed and unsophisticated. They eat in unorthodox and curious manner. So why, I ask you, why do we insist on trying to create anything special for them at all?

I know why. Because we love food and we want the little nits to love food too. But I think I might have shot myself in the foot here.

My kids ate widely, and con mucho gusto until right around their third birthdays, when both of them suddenly became textbook examples of picky eaters. Why? What happened?

At the time my firstborn stopped eating (A. would suddenly only eat white bread, white rice, or curly pasta with no butter), I also had newborn J. and things were frantic. My mother gave me some good advice. "Make it easier on yourself," she said. "Find two or three things you know she'll eat and just give her that." So I did. No matter what rich concoction I was attempting for the grown-ups at the time, A. would get her bowl of plain pasta or chunk of bread (with a little dish of something green). I did the same when her baby brother came of picky age. Only he favored Mac & Cheese, PB&J's and DinoNuggets. Thank God for Costco.

Fast forward ten years. My kids are less picky, but still hidebound in their tastes. They also eat on opposite ends of the spectrum. They never want the same thing. A. will eat my tortilla Espanola, but her brother will not. He will eat buttermilk chicken, or fish fingers, or yogurt, but his sister will not. She loves corn. He likes peas. She loves a good hamburger. He's only interested in grilled cheese. Honestly, I don't know how I feed them at all.

I'm starting to realize that maybe I missed some crucial window of opportunity when they were much younger. Reading around the blogosphere, I'm gleaning that the way to an adventurous eater is to not kowtow to their (limited) tastes. Serve them what you're eating and expect them to eat it or let them go hungry. I agree with this heartily. In theory. In practice, I'm no match for that primal instinct toward feeding my progeny. I try to be tough. I serve them salmon. They refuse. They whine. They beg. I cave and boil the water for pasta. It's a vicious cycle.

Of course, maybe it's just my cooking.

Feh. It can't be. They're not old enough to know what real good home cooking can taste like. And so I continue to dream of the day when my kids start digging on salsa verde or channa daal or butternut squash soup. I can't wait for them to fall in love with all the tastes and colors and smells of good eating.

In the meantime I live vicariously through other food bloggers with kids. I just discovered the Gastrokid site, and I'm already a big fan, although these guys clearly have WAY more prowess in the kitchen then I'll ever have. But apparently their children have more evolved palettes than my children as well. More importantly, they apparently will try new things. I plan to ask them for tips.

Janelle over at Talk of Tomatoes knows all about this conundrum. But then, it sounds like her kids are more adventurous than mine as well. Still, she's got a "Default Dinner" recipe here for Italian sausage and roasted red peppers that....maybe....my kids would try. And I know I'd eat their portions in any case.

Nikki has one here that involves wagon wheel pasta. Lots of potential there. I might try this one tonight. Or I might make Tony take us all out instead.

Never mind

2007-02-28T21:36:00.000-08:00

I'm not one for labels, but damn, am I ADD. I'm probably even ADHD, because that has an extra letter, and so most certainly means extra unfocused and extra spacey. It's no laughing matter, this Attention Deficit Disorder. They put kids on medication for it all the time now.

It's a good thing they hadn't discovered this particular affliction yet when I was growing up or I would never have made it through graduate school.

Because I am a space cadet. In my own little world most of the time. I am amazed I get through every day without forgetting something important like waking up or releasing my parking brake. I'm also amazed I have to ability to eventually finish work assignments, because more often than not, though I do enjoy getting paid, I tend to lose all interest in the topic at hand very quickly, which makes it hard to muster any enthusiasm at all, much less a clever kicker.

But see? I digress. There was this hearty garlic and potato soup recipe in Cook's (my new favorite cooking magazine. A little homespun, true, but they are pedantic about their recipes and I need pedantry when attempting to cook.) At the time I saw the recipe it was cold and rainy and the thought of hearty garlic and potato soup made me sigh with desire. I decided I would make some.

But I needed a few special provisions first. I needed several heads of garlic. And two different kinds of potatoes. I needed some heavy cream. Finally, I needed a leek.

These ingredients took several weeks to procure. I got busy with other things and remember, it's hard for me to focus. While I slowly collected them I read and re-read the recipe. I needed two kinds of potatoes, for example, because one kind broke down easily and provided starch while the other held up better in simmering chicken stock. I had to read the sidebar on how preparing garlic three different ways would lend itself to the perfect garlic taste, and how this taste would blend perfectly with the two different kinds of potatoes. Did I mention that Cook's is pedantic?

Finally, I was ready for a trial run. But wither my leek? I asked Luke, my ex, if he could find me a leek when he went to the Farmer's market on Friday.

He arrived that day to pick up the kids and handed me a pair of long, green leeks. I snatched them from his hand, held them above my head and pronounced, in my finest Elizabethan accent, "If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek!"

"What's that from?"

"Shakespeare!"

"No it's not."

"Yes it is!"

"No it's not."

For the record, Yes, it is. Hah!

I like any vegetable you can quote Shakespeare by. Leeks are fun. It's a silly word. And apparently, according to Luke, the leek is the national vegetable of Wales. I aim to do more with leeks in the future.

Still, it was another week before I could get around to being ready to attempt my hearty garlic and potato soup, and I only did so because I was afraid my leeks would go over in the crisper.

Here is the recipe (Cook's Illustrated, March/April '07, page 12. Written by Rebecca Hays):

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium leek, white and light green parts halved lengthwise, washed and chopped small (about 1 cup)
3 medium garlic cloves, minced, plus TWO whole heads of garlic, with the outer papery bits pulled off and the top third cut off.
6 cups low-sodium chicken broth, plus one cup to thin soup if necessary (huh?)
2 bay leaves
table salt to taste
1 1/2 pounds russet potatoes peeled and cut into 1/2 inch cubes (about 4 1/2 cups)
1 pound Red Bliss potatoes (unpeeled), cut into 1/2 inch cubes (abut 3 cups)
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, minced
1/4 minced fresh chives
garlic chips (recipe below)

Now, this might seem simple to some of you readers, but it's fairly complicated for me. And we all know how I don't tend to pay attention to details. Basically this was a disaster waiting to happen.

First challenge: How to cut potatoes into cubes. At my age I'm too embarrassed to ask anybody how this is supposed to be done. So I make my own approximation of 1/2 inch...shapes.

Again I digress...

Melt butter in Dutch oven over medium heat. When foaming subsides, add leeks and cook until soft (but do not brown), about 5 to 8 minutes. Stir in minced garlic and cook until fragrant. Add garlic heads, broth, bay leaves and 3/4 teaspoon salt, partially cover and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Reduce heat and continue to simmer, partially covered, until potatoes are tender (between 15-20 minutes).

Discard bay leaves. Remove garlic heads and squeeze their garlic mush into a bowl, using tongs or whatever implement you can find. Use a fork to mash the mush.

Stir cream, thyme and half of the mashed garlic into the soup; heat soup until hot again. Taste soup, then add the remaining garlic paste if desired. Using an immersion blender (??WHA? luckily I have a regular blender), process soup until creamy, with some potato chunks remaining. Season with salt and pepper and serve. Sprinkle with chives and add garlic chips (see below)

Garlic chips - 3 tablespoons olive oil
6 medium garlic cloves, sliced thin lengthwise.
Heat the oil, fry the garlic. Sprinkle lightly with salt.

You might think, gentle reader, that your humble narrator stumbled and impaled herself on any one of several sharp challenges this recipe presented. But the fact of the matter is, the soup came out pretty well. But it took well over an hour, and, by the time I doled it out into a bowl to taste, I had lost all interest.

The result? It tasted like garlicky potato soup. Nothing more, nothing less. I had a few spoonfuls, but felt nothing. No ahhing, no soul-satisfying mmm-ing. In fact, it cried out for something, but I couldn't figure out what. And there was no one there to ask. No Tony. No Audrey. The kids certainly wouldn't have anything to do with it.

If you eat soup by yourself does it satisfy anyone?

Then it was bedtime and I poured it all out into my big green Tupperware container and shoved it into the refrigerator to think about on the morrow. Only the morrow came and went and I couldn't be bothered. A week went by and out of guilt I opened the Tupperware to heat up a bowl for lunch and was so affronted by the heavy garlic smell that I threw the whole thing out.

I wonder what Ritalin brownies would taste like?

How to have a happy Tuesday

2007-02-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

I have discovered the key to happiness. It involves drinking just enough to take the edge off the day while cooking something easy enough to make well even while drinking. And dancing. You gotta dance while you're cooking, too.

I remember a friend, the fabulous Paula Davis, telling me that her favorite thing in the world was locking herself in her kitchen, pouring a big glass of red wine, and cooking the family dinner. I remember thinking, "huh." at the time. I guess I just wasn't there yet. I understand now.

Here's my recipe:

Sit the nits in front of a DVD. Give them some pasta to shut them up.

Lock yourself in the kitchen. Figuratively speaking, of course. Unless you actually have a kitchen door with a functional lock. I do not. (which is why you distract the children first).

Open a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck. You can either get a glass or drink it straight from the bottle.

Turn the kitchen iPod onto to something upbeat and dance-y.

Cook something easy but fragrant, like soup.

Wear a faded blue apron an old Russian lady gave you once upon a time a million years ago.

Put your hair up. Wash your hands. Take a swig of Two-Buck Chuck for proper attitude adjustment, and begin chopping vegetables.

Your iPod playlist can vary. Mine includes:

La La La - the Birds and the Bee
Upbeat flamenco (bulerias and alegrias) (various artists)
Aimee Mann selections
Beatles (any)
the Cabaret Soundtrack (original Broadway)
Manu Chao selections
Transglobal Underground selections
Squirrel Nut Zippers selections
Frank Sinatra
Steely Dan selections
The Sundays selections
Beck selections

Serve the soup. If they eat it or not, who cares. You've had yourself an hour's free vacation; you're happy and sweaty and you're about to eat.

I'm starting to wonder how many great cooks out there enjoy this very activity. Have you?

Wake Me Up

2007-02-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

This is picture of my morning cup of coffee. I tried to add a little sugar but dropped the packet in by accident. It floated for a moment, then sunk to the depths before I could save it. I had just taken the trash out, so I couldn't follow up on my first impulse to plunge my hand in after it. In the minute it took for me to go wash my hands and find a fishing implement (my toothbrush), the packet melted open and all the sugar seeped out. So mission accomplished after all, I suppose. But by then the coffee had cooled, and I kept imagining that it tasted...grainier...somehow, and the end result was a wholly unsatisfying morning cup of coffee. I'll try again later, when I'm more awake, and not so hung over.

Lessons learned from this exercise:

One should try to go to sleep before 2 a.m., especially on school nights.

One never needs the better part of a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck to accompany Valentine's Day.

One should always keep a pair of chopsticks handy. Maybe in one's pen basket.

One probably doesn't need sugar in one's coffee anyway.

Rice with chicken crap

2007-02-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

It's hard being a creative type. Sometimes I get inspired to write something or dance something or...cook something...and nobody else on the planet gets it. I am shunned. Ostracized. I get funny looks from my peers and puzzled, "we still love you Mommy" glances from my progeny.

I persevere. Yesterday found me at 5 p.m. scratching my head and wondering once again what to feed the nits for dinner. I had a brainstorm. One of my hardy perennials is lentils over rice: A can of Progresso Lentil soup thrown over basmati rice. My kids love it. But I didn't have any Progresso lentil soup. It's gotten hard to find, for some reason. My friend Joey and I exchange hot tips on where to find it around town ("They've got it at Smart N' Final! Get over here!"). Tony lucked into three cans of the stuff on a shopping trip to Von's lately, and cleverly bought them all. Alas, I went through it.

What I did have, however, was a can of Campbell's cream of chicken soup.

What if I made that and threw it over rice? Wouldn't it be sort of a creamy, Lebanese-style chicken and rice sorta thing?

So I open the can, taking great care to ignore the 2003 "best by" date on the bottom of the can. It's canned, right? It's all preservatives. And everyone knows Campbell's soups have enough sodium to pickle a small mammal. It'll be fine.

Indeed, I shake the cylinder-shaped mass of...chickenish stuff into the saucepan, where it lolls horrifically. Thank God the kids are in the other room because this is like making sausage: You really don't want to see what goes into it. I am still operating under the delusion that they will find this dish palatable enough for me to include it on the regular weekday menu, and yet I'm still cogent enough to know that one glimpse of what currently quivers in my saucepan would put them off of anything I make them forever. I use one half cup water and one half cup milk to cook the stuff up and make it really creamy.

Ah! Cream of chicken soup! Nice ocher color. I ladle some over a nice bowl of fragrant Basmatti rice and mix it in.

I try it. It's good! Warm! Filling!

I put two bowls out for the kids, plus a little dish of carrots.

They run into the kitchen. They're starving, they say. Then they stop short when they see what's on the table.

"What's that?" asks the boy.

"Rice with chicken sauce," I say, wishing I could think of a more enticing name. My own working title for this dish is rice with chicken crap, but I keep that to myself for now.

He looks at me like I'm Andrea Yates.

"It looks gross," he says.

"It tastes great," I counter.

"I'm not gonna taste it," he says.

"You have to at least taste it before you can tell me you don't like it."

He looks at me. I look at him. I see what's happening. So as the Mother, the custodial parent and number one authority, I play the best card I have.

I bribe him.

"I'll give you a dollar if you take a bite," I say, thinking that surely once he tastes the concoction of starch and chicken sauce, he'll love it, and fill his belly.

"Show me the dollar." Where's a six-year-old getting this kind of mercenary talk? I show him the dollar. He takes a bite. Then puts out his hand. He does not take another bite. He focuses his attention instead on the carrots and his glass of milk.

I'm forced to bribe his older sister, too. She takes three bites before pushing the bowl away. I end up eating the better part of their bowls myself, because I'm starving and I, at least, find rice with chicken crap comforting. I wait all night for them to tell me they're hungry, but they don't.

Maybe they're afraid I'll cook something new for them again.

There's nothing to make tonight

2007-01-28T16:57:00.000-08:00

Oh, but there is.

Here's a website that uses what you have in your pantry and sends you recipes.
It's a cool idea. But it has flaws.
For example: I have lemons. And I have rice (among other items, but work with me here). It offered up a recipe for lemon rice, that sounded very tasty and actually like something my kids might eat. Except that I never learned that pesky metric system.
What's 500 ml of water? I'm sure there's a way to Google it and find out (what did we do before Google, anyway?) but my Google is upstairs and my kitchen is downstairs, and you know, that's just too much effort for the Bad Home Cook to expend.
I apparently have all the necessary ingredients to make French onion soup as well. But a quick read of the recipe on offer suggests maybe I don't want to attempt this particular French onion soup. Besides being ignorant of all the pertinent metric measurements, it says I should use a stock cube (red flag!!) and throw in a cup of wine. What kind of wine? Doesn't say. Hmmm.
Maybe I should just try it and see what happens. Could be a giggle.
I still have no idea what to make the nits tonight. Maybe I'll just take them for fast food. I can have a glass of wine and call that dinner. Grapes, yes?
I always loved the idea of the liquid meal. Holly Golightly did it in front of Tiffany's. Why can't I carry on the tradition?

Yogurt and Rice...and all that is nice

2007-01-24T16:43:00.000-08:00

I read cookbooks for fun. A good cookbook comes with recipes wrapped in the adventures of the person who wrote them. I get to read all about their travels and their memories; how their Italian grandmothers used to make this or that, or that back when they lived in Morocco with their first husband and his extended family, this was on the weekday menu. When I peruse the list of ingredients I can often imagine what the dish would taste like. Never mind whether I could recreate it myself -- usually I know better than to even try. My inexperience in the kitchen doesn't prevent me from daydreaming, however. Indeed, this is one of my favorite pastimes. I had a Persian cookbook once filled with beautiful photographs of dishes made with ingredients like rice and saffron and pistachio nuts and rose water. The recipes were completely beyond my ability. And yet I spent a lot of time hunched over this cookbook, staring at the pictures like it was a Victoria's Secret Catalog. But I never tried even one of the recipes myself. Finally I gave it to a woman whose husband was Persian. May she please him with secrets I myself was too timid to try.

I'm just really into Mediterranean food. The graphic you see here has something to do with food and a certain Middle Eastern Religion. Check out the link. Strangely appropriate, don't you think?

But I can always be tempted with less exotic fare. Last week I took my kids to the local library and pulled the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special cookbook off the shelf. I like the Moosewood stuff. Several talented cooks I know think highly of the collective's series of cookbooks, but more importantly, the recipes are generally simple enough for the likes of me. I flipped through its pages one evening as the dinner chaos was erupting around me. And I found the soup of my dreams.

Persian Yogurt Rice Soup. Page 129.

Can you imagine how creamy and delicious this soup must be? When later that night I learned about National Soup Swap Day, I knew right then that this soup would be my offering to the cause.

And OK. I'll just admit it. This soup calls for a blending of egg and yogurt, which I felt was beyond my abilities and frankly promised a terrific screw-up which I would then be able to blog about.

But that didn't happen, damn it.

Instead, the soup, which I made in the half an hour before my soup swap party began, actually turned out deliciously: Creamy and flavorful. Even my Kitchen Goddess friend Audrey uttered a little gasp and rolled her eyes back when she tried a spoonful. I was elated. Her only criticism: Just a little more salt.

Here's the recipe.
1 tablespoon olive oil. (just one? That's what I thought...but it did work out, so...)
1 cup finely chopped onions (I actually used pre-chopped from Trader Joe's to save time)
3 or 4 garlic cloves, minced or pressed (I minced)
1/2 teaspoon salt (or a little more, if you want to listen to Audrey, which you should)
1/2 cup peeled and diced carrots (I chopped up baby carrots)
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/8 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste (this was the one spice I didn't have, so I forwent it)
1/4 cup raw white basmati rice (rinsed and drained)
3 cups water or vegetable stock (I used veggie stock from Trader Joe's)
4 cups stemmed chopped spinach, loosely packed (one bunch)
1 egg
2/3 cup plain nonfat yogurt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
salt and ground black pepper to taste

Warm the oil in a non-reactive (what does that mean, anyway?) soup pot. (I used my beautiful new Le Creuset soup pot, thank you.)
Add the onions, garlic and salt and saute on medium heat for about 10 minutes, or until the onions are translucent, stirring frequently. Add the carrots and saute for about 5 minutes. Then stir in the spices, and keep stirring.
Add the rice and the veggie stock or water. Cover and bring to a boil; then reduce the heat and simmer until the rice is tender, between 15-20 minutes. When the rice is tender, add the chopped spinach to the soup a bit at a time and stir well.
In a bowl, beat the egg into the yogurt with a wire whisk.
Add this mixture SLOWLY to the soup, stirring all the while. Stir in the cilantro and slowly reheat, taking care not to let the soup boil.
Add salt and pepper to taste.

The result was better than I could ever have hoped for. Six friends showed up with soup for National Soup Swap Day last night (Jan. 23), which also happened to be my daughter's 10th birthday. This soup was gobbled down and enjoyed by all.

I made it in my magic new Le Creuset soup pot. And the ingredients for this soup were lovingly brought to me by the Flamenco guitarist. He couldn't be at the Soup Swap because he had a student that night. But he is to be rewarded for his ongoing generosity with a new batch of this very soup tonight. And crusty bread.

I still have the Moosewood cookbook. It's overdue, but I'm not done with it yet. I need to please someone with its secrets.

National Soup Swap Day - Jan. 23, 2007

2007-01-16T00:03:00.000-08:00

I love soup. Any kind of soup. Chicken soup, rice soup, mushroom soup, beet soup, lentil soup, black bean soup, minestrone soup, bird's nest soup, egg drop soup, heartbreak soup and sopa Azteca. Soup makes me shiver with happiness and satisfaction. Soup is easy to make. It's economical. It's tasty and usually good for you. When somebody opts to make you a soup versus heating you up the contents of a can, it's because they love you and want only the best. Soup will heal you. And soup is hard to mess up, although I've been known to do so.

The soup pictured here involves parsnips and almonds. I didn't make it myself, in case you're wondering. But it sure looks dang good, don't it?

So it was with no small excitement that I read about National Soup Swap Day. Since soup is also about friendship and community, I wasted no time in alerting six friends, kitchen goddesses all, to the mission.

Next Tuesday, Jan. 23, we meet at my house to drink red wine and swap soup. I'm going to make Persian Yogurt and Rice Soup. You're right if you think it's unlikely to turn out as good as it sounds. It involves ingredients like lemon and dairy, which tend to curdle if not handled right...and I don't have any idea how to handle it right. Stay tuned.

However, for this event I have a plan B. If I ruin the Persian soup, I'll bang out my signature lentil soup instead. Always a crowd pleaser.

Thanks to Margaret and her blog devoted only to soup: The Gracious Bowl.

How to make your house smell good

2007-01-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

There they were. Two black bananas curling like shrimp in my fruit bowl. Nobody was going to touch them. So I did. I moved them from the bowl, where they threatened to spore up my apples, and onto my counter top, where I let them sit another day. I had a plan. But I didn't know if I could pull it off.

Then on Wednesday night I was struck with a fit of ambition. This happens from time to time. I am truly fearsome to behold when I'm on one of these streaks: I mop the kitchen floor. I finish all my assignments. I write a chapter of my novel. I clean my kids' room. I am organized and clear-headed, capable and up for anything. In these rare moods, nothing is beyond my ability!

Not even banana bread.

And so it was that I brought the kids home from school with a playmate in tow. "Hey kids!" I chirped as they threw their backpacks and sweaters on the living room floor. "Let's make banana bread!"

The two girls didn't say anything, only cast me grave looks that suggested the middle-school years were coming to get me soon.

From my son: Euuuuuwuwwwwww!! Gross! Blechhhh!!!

My children are miserable cretins who don't understand about life-affirming experiences like warm, fragrant banana bread. They don't know from the joys of the thing toasted, and then smeared with peanut butter. They most certainly don't grasp the greatness that is something wonderful made from something horrible and wretched, like two blackened bananas drawing fruit flies in mid-winter.

There is no consensus on what makes the perfect banana. Some like them unblemished, green-tinged, and pulled from the refrigerator. I like them moderately speckled, like this. These are some perfect, fleshy, flavorful specimens. Of course, Deb at Smitten Kitchen writes that these bananas were long gone and so perfect for her banana bread. Hmmm. She does know what she's doing, so who am I to question? (warning: Don't go near her blog if you're at all hungry. The photos alone will do you in) The bananas I used were, um, further along than these. And as has already been well-established here, I don't know what I'm doing. Nevertheless, I had it in my mind that I was not going to waste two perfectly good, nearly rotten bananas.

So out came my How to Cook Everything.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees
grease a bread tin with butter - not too big. What, you think I have measurements on hand?

One stick butter
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas, smashed with a fork until smooth
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/2 cup grated dried unsweetened coconut

Amazingly, I had most of this stuff on hand. But only two bananas. And no coconut.

Mix the dry ingredients together
Cream the butter and beat in the eggs and banana. There were no instructions on which order this action should take, so I, being stupid, creamed the butter in one bowl and mashed the bananas in another, added the butter to the banana and then added the eggs...
The eggs were cold, so the butter clumped, so I had to get out the mixer.....
Anyway...dump this into the dry ingredients and don't mix more than necessary. Add the vanilla and walnuts.

Plop all of this into the bread pan and put it into the oven.
Bake for between 45 and 50 minutes. A toothpick or a knife inserted into the middle will tell you if

it's done or not. Mine wasn't, so back in it went. It ultimately took about an hour and five minutes. But my stove probably sucks.

But half an hour before this my kids started lifting their little noses to the air. "What's the delicious smell, mommy?" And then they started to get excited. The playdate was upset that she had to leave before the bread was done. But I promised I'd bring the loaf to my daughter's Girl Scout meeting the next day. Mostly to get rid of it. It wasn't going to be any good anyway, I reasoned. Might as well fob it off on a bunch of other people's kids. I'm such a bad mom.

I let the bread cool for 15 minutes before turning it out onto a plate. I cut two small slices and offered them up to the fruit of my loins, with milk. They fell on it. They begged for more. I had a piece. Not bad. Functional banana bread. I wondered how it would taste toasted.

The next day I brought the bread to the Girl Scout meeting as promised. There was only enough for a half slice for everyone, and several sniffed dismissively when they heard what it was. "I don't like banana bread," said one girl.

She changed her mind later on, however. In fact, this was the highlight of the year thus far: fourteen 9 and 10-year-old girls loved my banana bread. MY banana bread! And they thanked me. And they asked me to make some more next week. Wow. It filled me with hope. Maybe this will be a breakthrough cooking year after all.

Or not. I'm eyeballing a celery-root puree. Sounds fancy. And where the hell does one buy a celery root, anyway? Stay tuned.

Cook it once, cook it twice: Chicken, chicken soup with rice

2007-01-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

It got cold suddenly. About bloody time. Cold in Southern California means two things:

Put on your Uggs. Make soup.

Chicken soup with rice. Hmmm. The very thought of it hit the spot. I fancied a nice, clear broth, ever so slightly salted. Nothing more than diced carrots and some leeks or zucchini slices. And just enough rice to make it satisfying.

I didn't have a recipe for that, though. So I ventured out on my own. It was a haphazard journey. Ill-thought out. With many detours. And yet I eventually got to where I was going, with results not nearly as disastrous as I'd planned for. My kids even ate a bowl, which continues to be my definition of success, although I don't suppose it should be.

Here's more or less what I put in the soup:

two cloves garlic
Two stalks celery, chopped three green onions, chopped six cups chicken stock
two frozen chicken breast tenders
1/2 teaspoon cumin, and turmeric
1/2 cup of rice.

I couldn't find zucchini. The summer stores must be depleted. Couldn't find leeks, either, since the only place to find those here are in the "better" farmer's markets or a higher end store than the one I patronize. So I went with celery. I don't even like celery. But there had to be a green in there. I know from experience broccoli would make things go from bad to worse and smell up my kitchen in the bargain. So I went with nice, clean celery.

I like garlic. It's tasty and it's good for you. That was the thinking behind two whole cloves of garlic, which I then sauteed in, I don't know, probably three tablespoons of olive oil. That's probably way too much, but that's what happens when you daydream while you pour. Note to self: Use measuring devices; they're made for people like you. Can you saute celery? Maybe you can. Maybe I read that somewhere. So in they went, too.

Keep the heat low so you don't burn the garlic. It burns quickly, just so you know. And it will change the whole flavor on you. Add the spices after a few minutes. Stir them in and let them mingle with the vegetables.

For some reason I did all this in a separate pan than my soup pot. Why? Dunno. I wasn't thinking that far ahead.

In my actual soup pot I used "Better than bullion" soup stock mix from Trader Joe's. It comes in a jar. You use a teaspoon of paste per 8 ounces of boiling water. I used six cups of water and so sparingly used 5 teaspoons of chicken stock paste. Heaping teaspoons, too, not rounded.

Too much. The stock was much too salty. I should have used four teaspoons of stock plus two cups of water. Better yet, I should have just used pre-made chicken stock.

In this salty broth I placed two frozen chicken breast tenders. They cooked through nicely, at which point I removed them, chopped them up, and returned them to the pot.

I dumped the contents of the pan into the broth. Stupid, really, because everything, the burnt garlic and the excess olive oil included, floated on the top of the broth. I had to start chuckling at myself by that point. I really have a rare gift for crap cooking.

I almost forgot to put the rice in, too. At least I had the sense to add only half a cup. I cooked all of this for about 20 minutes, or until the rice cooked through.

I ladled two bowls of this stuff out for my kids, realizing at the last minute that I'd forgotten all about the carrots. I tucked three small, uncooked carrots into each bowl and hoped the heat would soften them up a little before my kids found them.

As an added incentive, I had a nice baguette to offer them. The kids sat down. Inspected the soup closely. Then Annie ventured in and gave her little brother the secret kid nod and the apparent thumbs up. They ate most of their bowls.

Cool.

Maybe I'll get around to making those latkes on New Year's Day - when I have all the kids and no plans.

Bella Bialetti

2006-12-31T20:12:00.000-08:00

I had to move at the end of the summer, because my greedy bastard landlords wanted to sell their house and make a killing in real estate. Too bad for them the market had stopped short and nothing was selling anymore (it sits on the market still). But good for me, because I was forced to leave a house I never liked that had bad energy and unpleasant memories (not to mention a ghost in the dining room) and found my dream home instead. A two-story, sun-filled 1920's Spanish style duplex. Just around the corner.

A benefit of having to pack up and move abruptly: I got rid of mountains of superfluous crap, purging my life and getting ready for a clear new beginning.

I found beautiful items along the way. Among them: My Bialetti (moka pot) from Italy.

All good associations here. Kitchen Goddess Three, Christina Bess, lived in Italy in the mid-90s with her husband Andy. His employer rented them a villa just outside of Florence, in the middle of a working orchard, with a view of the mountains. This villa had a small apartment over the garage. Needless to say, I was there every chance I got. This was before kids, in another life. It seemed somewhat easier to get to Europe in those days, for some reason, even though I was even more broke than I am now. I guess I was richer in time.

And my times there were languid and filled with tastes and aromas and the heavy, fragrant air of Tuscany in late August. In the mornings I'd come down to the kitchen, following my nose to the coffee boiling in this strange little pot on the stove. I'd never seen a Bialetti before. I was more a Mr. Coffee sort of American. I couldn't fathom how such a small appliance could produce enough coffee for four adults. But it was espresso that was being brewed, and as such, it only took a small amount, mixed with three parts warmed milk in a large cup, to perfectly sate. I was so delighted by the output I bought my own to take back home with me.

A lot has happened in the ten years since then. I hadn't even thought of the Bialetti for years. I couldn't even remember how to work the thing when I first found it, deep in the back of a top cabinet. It requires a small modicum of mechanical sense. There are several sections that need to be assembled correctly for it to work. There is a rubber washer involved. The first time I tried to use it, I don't think I packed the coffee in right: The water in the bottom boiled away without ever percolating up into the pitcher. The second time I used too much coffee. The time after that I used too little water.

All standard for me. I thought about giving up. I was not about to Google how to use a Bialetti. Just typical for me not to be able to use a simple appliance. One morning I tried again, using ground espresso I'd bought just for this purpose. I set it on the stove. I was busy, pre-occupied as usual. I had no expectations, and indeed, I had every intention of going out and buying a coffee later on, when this last experiment failed.

I smelled it before I heard it -- a rich, creamy olfactory hit that instantly took away the last ten years and put me back into a kitchen in Tuscany. Then I heard the strange hissing burble and I knew it was working. I sat down and waited patiently. Nothing that tastes the way I hoped this would taste is made quickly.

I had half-and-half left over from my holiday party. I heated some up in a small saucepan. To my delight I remembered the large, artsy teacup set my sister-in-law had given me for Christmas and poured one part espresso to three parts half-and-half into its deep bowl. It was a light brown mocha color. It smelled sublime. I stirred once. I sipped. I closed my eyes.

It's August, 1996. Except that it's December 2006 now and I'm so happy I could weep.

Need more coffee? Here's a great how-to essay by the really smart, irritatingly prolific guy at the Big Picture.

The frosting conundrum

2006-12-31T20:11:00.000-08:00

Some years I bake for the holidays. In select years past, December found me content, organized, focused and flush enough to buy ingredients to bake a variety of items for my friends and family. Sugar cookies are easy because they come in a tube (although you can always burn them, in fine Bad Home Cook tradition). I used to love making bourbon balls. Two years ago I made ginger stars - ginger cookies shaped as stars - to the delight of my children. It was all I could do with the scraps left over from my attempt to make gingerbread men for them. It was the highlight of the year, as I recall.

The trouble with holiday baking, however, is that it often requires decorative frosting. A dawdle for most holiday bakers, no doubt. But to me, it's another simple recipe for me to bollix up and embarrass myself with.

I know I'm not the only one to be ginger-bread-house-challenged. In her yummy blog, What Did You Eat?, Sher acknowledges the various pitfalls awaiting the untrained. But then she's trained. And she eventually comes out on top.

In early December my children started agitating for a gingerbread house. A *real* gingerbread house, of the sort you see in Martha Stewart Living and in various glossy magazine ads. My Aunt Dorothy used to make the most amazing gingerbread houses - all covered in gumdrops and held together with thick white, paste-like frosting she'd squeeze out of a pastry tube. I gave the idea some serious thought for a few days. I did make gingerbread once. Why couldn't I make a few slabs and improvise? Maybe I could start a nice holiday tradition. I'm big on those, since I didn't grow up with any myself.

Then I stumbled upon a pre-made gingerbread house kit at Trader Joe's and realized that, judging from the way my kids were falling over each other in excitement, a store-bought house would make them just as happy. It was a big triangular box, with instructions on the back in German. I decided to splurge.

Inside the box came four ginger-bread like slabs, a dozen colored hard cookies of various shapes and sizes, and two little candy characters, a mom and a little boy, presumably for decoration. But, as always happens when you buy a box intending to assemble the contents within, some key nut or bolt is invariably missing. In this case, it was the frosting. It hadn't occurred to me that a pre-made gingerbread house wouldn't come complete with a plastic bag of stay-fresh frosting-flavored product. It didn't make sense. It was bad marketing.

Why would someone buying a pre-made holiday tradition want to make their own frosting? That's why you buy a gingerbread house in the box. You want it all there for you. Didn't they realize the paradox here? If I could make frosting then I could presumably make my own damn gingerbread house. Right? RIGHT?

It's not like the Germans to overlook such a key detail.

But it was too late to turn back. I'd already opened the box -- in front of my kids, who were watching, waiting for their mother to do something magical for their holiday. Crap. I had no choice. I had to go in.

Upon quick reading, the recipe was simple enough, but it dealt with meringue, which deals with egg whites, which really, if you're a novice, isn't that easy.

For example: I dimly remembered how to crack an egg and pass the yolk from side to side over a bowl to catch the ick (the egg white). It was one of the many valuable skills I learned in my junior high school home economics class. Likewise, I thought I remembered that whipping egg whites would eventually turn them fluffy. In any case, the directions did call for "making them stiff." Ya Woll!

I whipped those egg whites with a wooden spoon until I broke out in a sweat and I could see that I would be getting nowhere fast. I whipped out the electric mixer. And mixed until things indeed got stiff, about 10 minutes.

With A. reading the recipe out to me, I added the sugar, and then the lemon juice and the vinegar.

I had just dumped the liquid in when Annie held up her hand. "Wait!" she said. "It says here lemon juice OR vinegar."

"Not both?"

"One or the other."

Damn. Trying to blot out the extra liquid with a paper towel, predictably, didn't do much, and that was that. My frosting was nice and white and fluffy and had the consistency of whipped cream. But would it hold a house together?

You can judge for yourself here.

"Mommy, why doesn't our house look like the one on the box?" asked my son.

"You ask too many questions," I said, and handed each child their own candy character to eat. This placated them for the evening, and I let the house sit on the counter for two days before slipping it outside into the trash when they were at school.

I redeemed myself a week later, however, when I helped my son's first-grade class make their own gingerbread houses. We all brought candy to decorate them with, and the teachers whipped up a huge tub of thick, white frosting, the consistency of glue. Their secret? There's an icing mix you can buy, apparently, at specialty baking stores.

I plan to investigate this closely for next year.

Too bad I don't remember details...

2006-12-31T20:09:00.000-08:00

My holiday open house was a great success. That's what I hear, anyway. I don't remember a lot of details. This is because my neighbors Marsha and Terry showed up first with a tumbler filled with Marsha's professional-grade Cosmopolitan cocktail. A glass and a half of this later and there was nothing that could have happened that would have flummoxed me.

I ended up only making one thing, my tortilla - which turned out perfectly and was consumed quickly, to universal accolades.

Somebody brought me a clever little bag of these cherry chocolate kisses. I didn't know such delights even existed. Too bad I don't remember who brought them.

I had the help of several experienced and well-meaning people. I must bow low and pay homage to their skills here.

Tony - who apart from being a gorgeous flamenco guitarist, is also an experienced party-giver and an extremely organized person. He made a list. Checked it twice, and made it all happen. He also thought of party elements that would never have occured to me, like why don't I just BUY a big lasagna and feed that to the masses? Make it easier on yourself, he said. And he gave me my party mantra: "This is a party for you. If your friends show up to share it with you, even better." This actually helped calm me the hell down.

Audrey Smith - who agreed to back me up in the food dept. if needed and opened the door to her glorious garage-full of Christmas decorations when I realized I had none of the necessary decorative paraphernalia. She also lent me all of her funky Christmas jazz CDs so I could make the appropriate playlist for the kitchen Ipod. She showed up early, looking festive, and stayed late. She ranted and raved over my tortilla, too, which is particularly gratifying.

Catalano's veggie lasagna was a huge hit. Other people brought dishes. Salad, and bread and lentils and lots of sweet stuff. Audrey made her popular persimmon roll. People stayed and talked for several hours. There was some dancing, thanks to Debbie, who grabbed me mid-party and said, "Remember when we used to swing-dance in junior high?"

"No!" I yelled, trying to avoid the tree. It did make for some comic relief.

A commentator also left a bit of advice that I took to heart. "Drinks, drinks, drinks." he said. I provided plenty of libation and what do you know. It worked.

So this is all behind me, thank God. It was fun, but I think it aged me two years.

It's still Hanukkah though. So I'm bound by honor to try my hand at latkes this week. Should be a real mess. Stay tuned.

Holiday party: What the HELL am I thinking?

2006-12-21T19:08:00.000-08:00

I'm throwing a holiday party on Friday. It's now Monday night. I have to cook things to serve to people. I have relatives visiting from abroad. I have work. I have Christmas-y things to do for my kids' classrooms. I have other frets. And now I have to cook. For people. Lots of people.
Tony talked me into this. He has thrown a lot of parties in his day. He has more confidence in this arena. He said if nobody shows, so what? We'll get drunk and eat all the food ourselves.
I told him we'd have to be really drunk to do this. He said fine. He'll bring a better grade of booze.
Today I asked Audrey, Kitchen Goddess Number Two, if she would help me by bringing a few special dishes. "I would just feel more secure if I know you're there for me," I said. "Watching my back." She happily agreed. "I've been wanting to try this recipe for persimmon loaf," she said.
And what about the hot apple cider, I asked. I want to make the flat smell warm and holidayicious. I want it to smell like a big Victorian house in New Hampshire, with icicles on the porch and a fire crackling in each of three hearths. How do you make it, I queried. Surely you have a traditional recipe for me. Surely you've read something in Martha Stewart Living or Gourmet or have a secret set of ingredients passed down by your grandmother. Reveal it to me!
"I go to Trader Joe's and buy their cider," she said. "And then I put some cinammon sticks in there, and I cut up an apple into really thin slices so you can see the star. And they float around in there. People really like that. They think you've picked the apples off your own tree or something."
I love Audrey.
She also gave me this valuable tip: The day of the party, don't cook anything with parmesan cheese in it. "Or your whole house will smell like vomit."
Yes, this is a gal after my own heart.
Stay tuned for Holiday Party: Tips to Grow by.

Oh My Cod

2006-12-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

As I opined in my last post, the very fact that I'd even attempt something like a cod cake is testament to the virtues of Mark Bittman's brilliant "How to Cook Everything." They're really not too hard, but you need to have the correct ingredients, and you need to have a standard of calm and quiet in the home so you can concentrate. There are several steps you can trip up on.
I'm finding that a primary problem of mine is pressure. I tend to announce my intentions of cooking for another, and that's when I choke. I have a big problem cooking for people. Not my kids. They don't count. In fact they'd be happier if I stopped cooking for them altogether and just fed them breakfast cereal for dinner. I mean other people. Friends. Tony. My Dad. Those close to me who, like anyone, are delighted to accept the offer of a meal and probably expect a taste sensation or at least something edible put before them on a nice plate. I have the nice plates. It's the edible, tasty part that I can't promise.
I don't remember why we were talking cod cakes, but about a month back I got it in my head to cook up a batch again. I haven't made cod cakes since I left Berkeley in 2003. "Oh, I can make a mean cod cake," I bragged to Tony one night, dimly remembering my one or two dumb-luck successes. "You'd love my cod cakes." Before I knew it I was on the docket for that Friday night. Dinner at home. Cod Cakes on the menu.
The first order of business was getting the salt cod. Back in Berkeley I had access to the famous Berkeley Bowl, with its six different kinds of organic endive and 34 varieties of peaches. It sold small loafs of salt cod in a shrink-wrapped package in the freezer section. All you had to do was soak it overnight; change the water three or four times, and by the next afternoon you had cod ready to cut up and cook.
All I have now is a Whole Foods, which is like Berkeley Bowl's skinnier, better-married sister. It's got half the stuff at twice the price but it sure looks prettier. It has salt cod, but it's flat, unpackaged, and kept in a barrel, I suppose to preserve its rustic feel. I supposed they would fill out upon soaking. I had Tony bring down three fillets later that week.
The big day came and typically I wasted time drinking wine and dancing around until it was 5 and time to start dinner for the kids. I put pasta on for them and started the potatoes.
For cod cakes, you mix the cod with mashed potatoes, dredge in bread crumbs and then fry.
First mine-field: Make mashed potatoes. The Bon Appetit magazine I get (but still don't know why) had a Thanksgiving special section that included an article called "Mastering Mashed Potatoes." It promised a four-step process to perfect mashed potatoes. "What's the secret to light and buttery mashed potatoes? It's all about using the right techniques in the right order."
I can read. I can follow a simple to-do list. So I figured I should be OK. I boiled the potatoes for the prescribed time. I "dried them out" by stirring them in the saucepan for "about two minutes," per the instructions. I added the butter. Finally, I mixed in the liquid. The instructions said the milk must be warm so that the potatoes don't become gummy or cold. Check.
What it didn't mention was that you need to pour the milk in a little at a time. I only remembered this after dumping in all the milk at once.
So I had fairly runny mashed potatoes. So much for fool-proof techniques. Bon Appetit should hire me to stupid-proof all their recipes.
Next step. The Cod. Unfortunately, the salt cod floating in water in my refrigerator had not lived up to its promise. I pulled off the skin and was left with two thin flaps of rubbery fish. I cooked it in hot water, which only made it more rubbery. I cut up what I had as best I could and mixed it with my mashed potatoes.
Third step: Dredge in bread crumbs. Because I am detail-challenged, I hadn't bought bread crumbs. I ran out to the store and found some stuff called Panko, Japanese-style bread crumbs. These actually worked great because they're bigger than standard bread crumbs.
Fourth Step: Fry up. Frying is dicey. I don't eat a lot of fried foods and the very act of dumping half my olive oil into a pan caused me great pause, not to mention eye-twitching. I wondered if I shouldn't be using another sort of oil that might pair better with fish, but such instruction was not noted in the recipe.
The frying went off without incident, but throughout the entire cooking process I was vexed by constant fear of failure, anxiety over how I could save face if the meal went horribly awry and Tony was forced to call out for Chinese instead. I felt I didn't dare improvise, such as take a chance with a different cooking oil, for fear I would ruin everything. As it was, with the sloppy mashies and the disappointing cod, I didn't know how things would turn out until I took my first bite.
Tony arrived, bearing Manchego cheese, olives and bread from our favorite place in the world, Say Cheese in Silverlake. My kitchen looked like Hurricane Katrina had stopped by for a quick bite. He set out the goodies and I fell on them without a thought to etiquette, sitting there in my stained apron. When I recovered my senses, I served up the cod cakes without garnish, and realized that I'd failed on the fifth step as well: You can't serve a dish in a vacuum. The cod cakes tasted fine, but I'd prepared nothing to go with them. They became simply another appetizer. Only they'd taken a lot out of me.
Tony seemed to understand. He poured me a big glass of wine and ate his cod cake con mucho gusto, singing its praises with his mouth full. I agree that they were edible, but with better cod and a thicker potato they could be so much more. I was once again reminded that learning how to cook was very much like learning how to dance flamenco: You have to learn the steps before you can concern yourself with artistry.
And so with me you get a cod cake on a plate. But you don't get the meal.

The Only Book that Matters

2006-11-25T21:49:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else, I grew up with a copy of “The Joy of Cooking” in my mom’s kitchen. I never actually saw my mom crack it open, but it stood there on the counter underneath a cupboard for years, along with other yellowing and sticky treatises on culinary arts that were never examined. Because I was a nosy child, I did on occasion pull the tome out to inspect its secrets. It seemed dated even then, in the mid-70s, what with its promise of the perfect casserole and unorthodox uses for gelatin. Always good for a ponder were the recipes for bear, and possum. In junior high school I discovered the recipes for butter icing, also brownies, which at the time were one of the only things that could soothe my bitter soul. (I confess here that I never attempted “magic” brownies, since even then I knew my limitations in the kitchen. And why otherwise waste a perfectly serviceable dime bag?)
As I got older I got more interested in cooking, which isn’t to say I knew anything at all about it. In my 20’s I learned how to make 20-clove garlic chicken and four-can bean soup (one can of tomatoes, three cans of beans, different sorts). I perfected my rice-making. In my early 30s I was married and had a baby and was spending a lot more time in front of the stove than ever before. My then-husband brought home a new copy of The Joy of Cooking (because it was such an American thing, he laughed, and because Brits love to laugh at Americans), and after learning that the recipes for bear and possum had largely been purged (much to his disappointment), we placed it on our counter and rarely opened it again except for use as a reference. How long do you cook an artichoke? Consult the Joy Of!
It wasn't until a few years later that we heard about the Book. It had just been published: A thick yellow tome with the simple title, "How to Cook Everything." I started seeing it around, on the shelves of various people I didn't associate with cooking. I started hearing complimentary things about it. It was basic, I learned, but not so basic as to be boring, said one friend. Everything I've tried to make has turned out, said another. I picked it up one afternoon early in 2000 and flipped through it while everyone else made merry at the Superbowl party around me. Hmm. One of the first recipes in the book was how to marinate olives. Even I could mix garlic with balsamic vinegar. There was a whole section on vegetables (how to buy, how to store, how best to cook), as well as an exhaustive primer on meats. There were recipes for basic dishes: Roast chicken, for example, but also little sidebars on how to make a roast chicken more sexy. What sold me, however, was the recipe for crackers. My own saltine crackers. Easy as mixing flour with water, the author promised. It had never occured to me that you could make your own crackers - or at least that someone like me could do so. Page 239.
Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" became my kitchen Bible. The Joy of Cooking for my age. With it, I actually began to have some rudimentary success in the kitchen. I appreciated his many chapters devoted not to recipes per se, but to basic edification. Those more skilled than I might turn up their noses at an essay on how to make tomotoe sauce, but I, for one, was thankful. "Thirty-one sauces and dishes you can make in the time it takes to boil water and cook pasta" is the kind of side-bar that has supreme relevance to my life.
My copy is now tattered and stained. Whole pages have fallen out (Cookies. And the whole section on beans), and I’ve tucked them back in disorderly along with yellowing newspaper clips of recipes I like the sounds of but may never make. It’s a loved cookbook. Well-used.
The very first recipe I tried: marinated olives. Page 18. It was a boffo success. Everybody ranted about my olives. And I was thus emboldened to push onward.
I learned how to make an ok vinagrette. I learned how to seed a pepper, then roast it (although mine still stick to the tinfoil). I learned how to make really good zuchinni - useful since at one time I had a plot in the community garden that could feed all of China with its zuch ouput.
I learned that if you poke a hole in an egg with a needle or pin before you boil it your chances of successfully making soft-boiled eggs increases dramatically.
At one point I even made cod-cakes! Me! This involved three steps, which dramatically increases the chances of my bollixing up the entire operation. But they turned out pretty damn good, too! I can hardly believe it now, but part of my success was that at the time I lived in Berkeley and hence had access to the overwhelming assets of the Berkeley Bowl. I could go and find salt cod any time I wanted and all it required was 30 minutes or so circling for a parking space nearby.
I used the gingerbread recipe to universal accolades. Blueberry cobbler! Sauteed roast potato with rosemary! Mashed potatos!
You must understand what it’s like to make successful mashed potatoes from scratch when you’re someone like me. I have ruined spaghetti.
Not everything turned out, of course.
Lamb patties with Bulgar. As I suppose I’ve mentioned before, I’m mad for Mediterranean food. Lebanese food, in particular, is something I savor. Kibbeh is a big deal in the Middle East, and it’s a pretty basic part of a lot of yumminess. That’s why this dish sounded appealing. Alas, I’m not too good with meat. I don’t understand it. At any rate, this all came off very badly, made a mess and ruined a perfectly good iron skillet as well.
Chestnuts – did you know that chestnuts will explode in your oven if you don’t score them first? I do. Now.
Red beans with meat. Again with the meat. Bad. Bad. Bad. And then there was the coconut milk that made it worse.
Brown rice with lentils and apricots sounds good on paper, but the version I made was way too sweet. Brown rice pisses me off in any case.
But let us not dwell on the failures. My point is that this book changed my life. It gave me all the meager hope I needed that perhaps not all was lost. Perhaps even I could one day be a passable home cook.
Then again, stay tuned for my latest adventures with cod cakes.

Blogger sucks!

2006-09-27T16:24:00.000-07:00

...so do chickens, according to this fellow.

Retail Therapy

2006-09-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

The flamenco Guitarist and I awayed to Santa Barbara this last weekend. There was sushi, of course. And music, and dancing (even if it wasn't very good), and general merry making, including a giant tapas nosh with my brother Clem and his wife, the fabulous Hiromi-chan. And on the second day of this glorious weekend, the handsome flamenco guitarist walked me down State Street to buy life-giving blended mochas and people watch Santa Barbara's curious blend of co-eds, Mexican families, homeless people and the top 10 tax bracket.
And we were thusly promenading when we ran smack into my favorite place in the world. The Sur La Table store.
I don't know how professional chef's feel about the place, but to me, there is no store more titilating in all of Cookiedom. The colors! The textures! The neat little gizmos in neat little piles that people with kitchen talents can purchase and use!

Think of the cupcakes! And who doesn't think about cupcakes?

Or these clever little pastry tins. Tiny and solidly cast, they're fantastically satisfying. Small and cold. They sit in your hand like a little frog. I've fantasized for two days now about rolling out small circles of pastry, tucking them into one of these darling minature molds, and filling them with tidy spoonfuls of cherry surprise, or blueberry something. If only I knew what I was talking about. Oy.

Even the dish-rags are inviting. I want all of them.

It's really too bad Blogger won't let me upload any more photos. I have some really cute ones.

A little Peas and quiet

2006-09-22T18:08:00.000-07:00

I get a few cooking magazines sent to me every month. Three to be exact. Two of the three baffle me upon arrival in my mailbox. Every month I get my Bon Appetit and I ask myself what I was thinking when I ordered it. Its pages are filled with recipes for gracious outdoor parties and uber-cool dinner salons. The people in the photos are all beautiful and interesting-looking. The kitchens are showcases. The recipes presume a certain level of kitchen know-how and go from there. They also make assumptions about your gear. Naturally the kind of urban sophisticate who throws Tuscan dinner parties on her inlaid-brick patio have all the right equipment. Me? I have what could pass as a patio, but I don't have a George Foreman grill. I don't have a pasta maker. And while I think I may have a lemon zester, I have never actually used it for its intended purpose, which, come to think of it, I'm not really clear on anyway. It did nicely scrape residual tape off my landlord's wood floors recently, though. One day I may have the skill to attempt a recipe within the pages of Bon Appetit, but not this week. In fact, likely not this decade.

I get Gourmet also. I don't remember ever ordering it. Maybe I was sleepwalking? Maybe it's somebody's idea of a joke? Barbara Cleaver Tilsner nudging me from Beyond? Anyway. I flip through it and promptly toss it into the recycling bin. Why would somebody like me even attempt a recipe found in such a magazine? Even the weight of the paper stock intimidates me.

The one cooking title I subscribe to with delight, however, is Everyday Food, a clever, paperback sized magazine that features the kinds of recipes people like me might actually try, and even better, might actually have some success at. Yes, it is published by Martha Stewart Living, but obviously they've found a new, lower-caste niche audience and are exploiting it to great profit. Over the cover title a banner reads: Your Guide to Fast, Great Meals. I like fast. And I like great. Wouldn't it be great if I could actually make great, fast meals for my family?

The book excites me because it makes cooking well seem so accessible. The recipes are all broken down into simple steps. They even include a shopping list so you can actually have all the ingredients onhand before you start (a common misstep of mine). It has features aimed squarely at me and my ilk. "Food Facts" is one page all about a commonly-used foodstuff - honey, for example, or wine, or tomatoes. It has a page about spices, a page about basic kitchen items you might find helpful, like a chef's knife, or a cheese grater. There are recipes on basic sauces, so you never have to guess about how much garlic to use in your vinaigrette ever again.

I flip through the pages and feel my sap rising. Zucchini frittata. Asian chicken and chili soup. Potato leek soup. Gingered carrot salad. I dog ear many pages. I use Post-It notes without restraint. I almost paw the pages. The photos are simple, uncluttered. Inviting. I might be able to make some of this, I think.

I'm not normally prone to deluding myself. As of my most recent birthday, I'm afraid my dreams of being discovered to star in a Broadway musical are long behind me. I will never grow into my looks. My skin will never clear up. I accept all of that and more. And yet, when it comes to cooking, hope springs eternal. I feel that desire to cook well should supercede utter lack of ability and talent. And so I forget past embarrassements and forge ahead.

I forget about the meatball soup debacle, for example. That's a recipe from Everyday Food. And it's for the best that I've blocked out what I did when trying to create the white bean chili featured in the "Cooking for One" section. You just don't want to know. Some things can not be written about.

And so it was with this particular dementia that I flipped through my latest issue of Everyday Cooking and set my eyes upon a recipe my entire family would enjoy (switch on copywriting tone).

Tortellini with peas. My kids like tortellini. They like peas. They like garlic and they like Parmesan cheese (especially when they don't know it's there). I also like all of the above. If I could make this dish I might successfully add to my daily evening repetoire, which these days seems to consist mostly of plain pasta, breakfast cereal, Dino Nuggets and edamame beans.

Tonight I tried it. Although maybe I should have waited until a day that was not Friday, as well as a day that we didn't have a play-date over. Also, it's hard to concentrate when your kitchen iPod is competing with your six-year-old's Godzilla movie in the next room. But when have I ever let chaos stop me from cooking?

Well exactly.

OK. Here's what you need:

1 1/2 pound frozen tortellini (yeah right. Like I live in North Beach or something. Get a package of dried from Trader Joe's)

Some frozen peas

2 tablespoons of butter

1 garlic clove, smashed

1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

course salt and ground pepper

Cook the pasta about two minutes less than it says to on the package, then throw in the peas. Cook on until the pasta is al dente and the peas are tender, two minutes more. Drain the pasta and peas, but reserve 1 cup of the pasta water.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a pasta pot over a medium-low heat. Add the smashed garlic, and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Discard garlic (or eat it, because it's yummy and good for you.)

Dump your pasta and peas, the Parmesan cheese and most of the reserved pasta water, back into your pot with your butter sauce. Mix it all together. Add salt and pepper. Add more water if necessary. Top with additional Parmesan if desired.

Couldn't be simpler, right? Here's where I fouled up.

The timer dinged just as I was yelling at the kids to stop playing with their light sabers in the house and I drained the pasta even as I realized that A) I forgot to put the peas in and B) I forgot to reserve the 1 cup of water.

So I dumped the steaming, not-quite-drained pasta back into the pot, poured the butter sauce onto it, dumped the Parmesan in (I had grated, not shredded) WITH the frozen peas and mixed it all together really quickly, hoping the friction would help cook the peas.

I forgot all about the course salt and pepper.

It didn't look so bad, though. The cheese melted nicely. The peas cooked through. I put some in a bowl even as my children and their friend were rolling pillows and other objects down the stairs, and I gathered up my library book on the Alhambra in Spain, and I sat down at my Ingo table in the kitchen and I ate my tortellini and peas in relative peace and quiet, all the while reading about why things were always better in Andalucia, even 1,000 years ago.

And I had a small epiphany of my own. My kids would sit and eat this dish. When they got hungry enough.

Also this: I don't like peas.

You say Potato, I say Potawto..

2006-08-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

Note: I'd love to have a photo here, of my daughter with flour all over her adorable little face. But I can't, because Blogger, for some reason, can't upload photos today. No reason given. Mabye the photo gods haven't had their coffee yet. Strongly considering ditching this free blog for a better one. Stay tuned.

Christina Bess, a kitchen Goddess I worship, once told me that there are two kinds of people. Pie people and bread people. I am, according to her, a pie person. I went through a phase years ago of making apple pies from scratch at Thanksgiving time. These, to my delight, seemed to turn out deliciously, and won the accolades of everyone who dared a mouthful. Alas, peeling and cutting a bag of apples and making pie pastry by hand takes patience and focus I no longer seem to have, so I haven’t made a signature pie in a long time.
But apparently I still have the baking stuff. For someone who’s a bad home cook, I can bake surprisingly well. Not like Audrey Smith, of course, but I can make edible Christmas ginger snaps and passable Toll House cookies. It’s also a little known fact that I make a mean zuchinni bread.
So the other day my daughter was looking through her “World Cooking” book and asked if we could make scones. I’d made these once before, using the recipe from Mark Bittman’s marvelous “How to Cook Everything” book, and presented them, along with tea and a dozen chipped and mismatched tea cups, for snack to her Brownie Girl Scout troop. They were a huge success. And not too hard, as I recall.
Funny thing about scones. We here in the states pronounce them “Scones,” with a long O, and joke about the hoity-toity British, who pronounce them “Scawnes.” Actually, though, in Britain, where accent dictates who you are and where you sit on the economic and social pecking order, only Sloanes, or the wretched upper classes, pronounce “scones” with a long O. “Only ponces say Scones,” sniffed Annie’s Dad, Luke, a Brit from North London. Non-ponces (middle class and below) pronounce it “scawnes.”
Well. Who knew? I tried to say “scawnes,” for a long while, but in the end, it just sounded too, well, poncey for me, so I reverted to my Yank diction.
At any rate, darlings, making the bloody little things is dead easy.

From Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything”

2 cups all purpose flour (plus some more as needed when it’s time to knead the dough)
1 scant teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
5 tablespoons cold butter
3 eggs
¾ cup heavy cream
1/3 cup raisins, cranberries or blueberries
1 tablespoon water

Preheat oven to 450
Mix the dry ingredients together, reserving 1 tablespoon of sugar
Cut the butter into bits and work them with your fingers into the dry ingredients until you have an ever-so-slightly moist mix.
Beat two of the eggs with the cream. Using a few swift strokes, blend this into this mix. Use only a few strokes to beat your raisins or whatever into the mix.
Turn the now sticky mixture into a ball and place it onto a floured surface to knead, no more than ten times
Press the dough into a ¾ -inch thick rectangle and use a glass or a biscuit cutter to cut into rounds
Place the rounds onto an ungreased baking sheet. Reshape the leftover dough and cut again. You’ll get about 10 scones.
Beat the remaining egg with the 1 tablespoon of water and brush the top of each unbaked scone with this mixture. Sprinkle each with a little sugar from your extra tablespoon.
Bake 7 to 10 minutes or until the scones are a golden brown.

It couldn’t be easier. But of course, you must pay a little more attention to details than I do if you want perfect success. My scones came out OK, but a little dry. When I went back over the recipe, I discovered a few mistakes I made:

I preheated the oven to 350, not 450.
I read the part about withholding one tablespoon of sugar, and withheld one tablespoon of butter instead. So of course my dough was going to be dryer than it should have been.
My daughter was helping me knead, and got carried away, because let’s face it, kneading is fun. Like playing with Play-Dough. I think over-kneading changed the consistency of my dough.
Feh. How typical of me. Christina wouldn't have made such trifling mistakes.
In the end, the scones were OK. Good enough for the kids, anyway. But it was another humbling moment for me, reinforcing my knowledge that a little concentration goes a long way in the kitchen.

Tortilla y ya!

2006-08-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

I did it. I nailed the tortilla. Or at least I made a version of it that both tasted great to me and impressed a flamenco guitarist who grew up on the real thing.
Here's how I did it:
Four small to medium Yukon potatoes, washed but not skinned. Cut in half, then again, then sliced from there.
One medium onion, sliced
two garlic cloves, diced
a cup of oil. Olive oil is fine, but corn oil is more flavorful it seems.
Six eggs, lightly whisked.
A dollop of milk.
A bit of chopped parsley. A tablespoon at most.

Heat most of the oil into a NONSTICK SKILLET. If you don't have a non-stick skillet, your tortilla won't turn out. I don't know how women in Spain did it before this invention, but thank God I live in the plastic age.
Add the garlic and onions - saute for a bit, then add the potatoes. Stir once or twice to cover the potatoes in oil, then don't touch again. Cover
Ccook for about 20 minutes. Don't brown. But a little brown is always ok.
Drain the potatoes. I remove them with a slotted spoon.
Whisk your eggs with a dollop of milk. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Add the remaining oil to the skillet and return the potato/onion mixture. Pour the eggs over this and stir once or twice to cover the potatoes. Don't forget to add your parsley.
Cover. Watch.
As it cooks, shake the pan a little every now and then to make sure the tortilla isn't sticking to the bottom.
When the eggs are almost cooked, (mostly solid except for a small pool of runniness on top) take a plate, put it on top of the pan and FLIP that tortilla. Slide it back into the skillet and cook on the other side. Five minutes or so.
Return to the plate.
Let cool for ten minutes.
Pour your glass of wine, break out your crusty bread, and make merry.
Buen Provecho. Or however you spell it.

I like to watch

2006-08-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I'm the last person on the planet to realize this, but you can learn a lot about cooking by watching somebody else who knows what they're doing. I can credit finally nailing a tortilla directly to the hour I spent a few months ago watching closely as Javier made his version. Tonight my friend and neighbor Tamlin invited me down to her house to try a couple of new recipes she'd dug up on the Internet, and in watching her I learned a few choice tricks about how to prepare a dish. Linguine with clam sauce, for example. A common dish, perhaps, but not one I'd ever deign to try on my own. When the pasta was done she didn't drain it, as I would have done, but rather used tongs to pull it out of the water before plopping it directly into the cooking clam sauce. "You use the water from the pasta to help dilute the sauce," she told me. Oh. Who knew? Likewise, I never knew you could make a marinade in a gallon Ziploc bag. But she did, and threw six half artichokes into the back, shook it up and let it sit for half an hour to marinade. I always thought you had to marinade in the refrigerator, and for hours, in a separate dish.
Small realizations, perhaps, but valuable in the long run. I suppose that's why cooking shows are so popular. Maybe I should get cable.

Dream kitchen

2006-07-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

One day when I have my old house, I will have an O’Keefe and Merritt stove in my kitchen. I don’t require a lot for my dream kitchen. I don’t need granite countertops (but yellow and blue tile would be cool). I don’t need a dishwasher. I don’t need a microwave or a central chopping block. I do need a lot of sun, and a window sill big enough for me to make sun tea on.
Over my stove, I will have hang framed photos of all my Kitchen Gods, so that they might look over me as I bumble through my paces and mayhaps pass on positive blessings.
Here are my Kitchen Gods:

Barbara Cleaver Tilsner. My late, great stepmother, whose pots and pans (and dishrags) I rescued from her kitchen after she unexpectedly passed over to the big kitchen in the sky. This woman could pretty much cook anything, and did so with big love for her family and many friends. She taught me how to roast a chicken. She taught my kids how to make Princess Toast (buttered toast with sugar and cinnamon, cut into quarters, set on a pretty plate). She would love this blog. I miss her every day. With her watching over me, I can’t go that wrong.

Julia and Javier – artistic and intellectual, these friends make magic in a third world kitchen. Dining is an art with them (they did live for several years in France, after all), and when invited to their table, you break all previous engagements and attend. When last at my house they made gazpacho blanco, which involves almonds, and is something I would never deign to even attempt.

Audrey Smith – my friend and neighbor, a Martha Stewart type if Martha had gone to art school. She is the keeper of the womanly arts, circa 1900. She quilts. She grows a verdant garden and cans and jars the output. A master in her kitchen. Her husband and kids do not realize how lucky they are to eat this gal’s cooking. She recently made tomato jam – a French recipe – from her own tomatoes. It’s sweet, and yes, tomatoe-y, but the furthest from tomato sauce it can get. Guaranteed to bring the sweet taste of summer to your mouth in deepest winter. Even my six-year-old loves it.

Christina Bess – a friend from grad school, eldest daughter of a sprawling, slightly crazy Italian family in Rhode Island. Naturally she knows how to cook. She showed me the iron skillet her grandmother gave her and inspired me to find my own at a flea market. She’s sent me dozens of her favorite Italian recipes, including a few family favorites passed down through the generations that I will never try because I will never be worthy. Memorable eating with her include sitting on her villa’s patio just outside of Florence, Italy, drinking chianti and eating pasta she made herself, gazing at the orchard and the mountains just behind them. (“No 26-year-old has the right to live like this,” she commented at the time. I had to agree, but then somebody had to do it, right?). She’s the one who can throw tomatoes and basil into a bowl with a little olive oil and sea salt for an appetizer that will bring you to your knees. I do the same and it’s slop. Her husband possesses similar skills, particularly with fish. Kitchen Gods, both of them.

Tamlin Santos – Tall, blond, busty, a medical professional, tech geek, baseball fan…and she can cook!! (sorry boys, get in line). She Tivoes the cooking shows in her spare (?) time, and walks down the street to share her output with me. Memorable dishes are her Louisiana-style gumbo and spicy pastas. She makes a mean chocolate chip cookie, too, as my kids can attest.

Tortilla espanola take two

2006-06-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

I feasted on Antonio de Jerez's tortilla all week. I had three pieces when it was still warm. That next morning I reached into the fridge and ate it cold, con mucho gusto. I brought a large piece to my neighbor Tamlyn, who often brings me portions of her delicious and soul-satisfying soups and ragoux and who I knew would appreciate this delight. I fed off that beautiful tortilla for several days, until there was nothing left but a few crumbs. And I ate those, too.
And then it was gone. I stared at the empty plate and felt...alone. Insecure. I had the same kind of general sinking feeling I get when I drink the last of my Two Buck Chuck. "Oh no. It's gone. Now what am I going to do?"
Then my daughter started putting the pressure on for me to get her some Pop Tarts. Not Trader Joe brand pop tarts, but the real stuff, in all their chemical preservative goodness. I was hungry. I wanted tortilla. Then I had a brainstorm.
If I'm at Ralph's, I thought, I can just get the ingredients for tortilla and give it another try. It's easy, right? It won't take long.
I can make my own tortilla and eat it tonight!
So the girl got her Pop Tarts (S'more Pop Tarts...igg!) and I procured the necessary items to try, once again, my own tortilla. Thanks to the thoughtful and very good-looking Tony Triana for the list. To be safe, I replicated even the brand names.

Three tablespoons Mazola corn oil (that's what Antonio de J. uses, apparently. Not olive oil)
one and a half Paul Newman organic russet potatoes
one bunch Italian parsely
5 eggs

I peeled and chopped one medium potato, which was much smaller than the russet potato I used on my first attempt, so I added a second, smaller potato.
I fried these up gently in my cast iron skillet, stirring often so they wouldn't stick. I didn't want to let them brown either, just soften.
I added just the tiniest big of chopped onion.
I whisked five eggs in a glass measuring cup, added salt and black pepper.
I chopped up about a fourth of a cup of parsely.
I found a pan I felt sure would mold the tortilla into a pleasing shape, and I oiled it up well.
I drained the extra oil from the potatoes, and transferred them to this new pan.
I added the eggs and the the parsley.
I watched. I jostled the pan so it wouldn't stick. I used my spatula to loosen the sides.
When I felt it was firm enough, I put a plate over the top and flipped the whole thing so that I could cook the other side.
And here's where it all went to hell.
Most of it stuck to my pan. The part that didn't both crumbled and dripped onto the plate.
With no form left, there was nothing to do but scrape it all back into the pan and cook it up.
That's when I realized my many mistakes.
To wit:
- I don't have any sense of proportion. My potato-to-egg ratio was embarrassingly off, to significantly worse results than last time.
- Wayyyyyyy too much parsely.
- structural problems. It stuck to my pan, even though I oiled it and kept it all moving and the result was gloppy chaos. There are some foods that simply must meet a basic aesthetic standard and a Spanish tortilla is one of them. Antonio's was round and firm, like a cake almost. It's pleasing to look at. You can't wait to cut into it.
I'm still very far from my goal. I have the ingredients, but only the vaguest idea of how to combine them properly.

The results of this round: Crap. A potatoe stir-fry with some egg and some parsely.

I think I need better equipment. Maybe the right pan

Viernes Alegria

2006-06-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

Tony actually did it. He paid cash money to Antonio de Jerez to make me a tortilla española. But he wasn't allowed to stay and watch this alchemy, oh no. He brought over all the ingredients, two expensive German beers and one crisp new Jackson but was then sent away. He returned a few hours later to receive the perfect, hot tortilla.
"She really wants the recipe, Antonio. Won't you tell her how you do it?"
"I don't think so," said Antonio. He handed Tony the results of his clandestine labor. "And make sure you bring the plate back."
So Tony brought this beauty down to me, still warm under tinfoil. You can see that it's a flawless piece of art. And it tasted every bit as perfect as it looked - lofty, but dense. Slightly salty. Chewy. Filling. Perfecto, eh? But after careful inspection, we realized we were no closer to its secrets.
Stay tuned...

Tortilla Española Take One

2006-06-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever ate the simple Spanish dish known as Tortilla I was in a restaurant in New York City with my agent and my editor. They told me this place made a killer tortilla so I went ahead and ordered it, wondering in my stupid Southern Californian way about how I liked homemade tortillas as much as the next Mexican but did they really constitute a meal? Anyway, the lovely potato and egg pie that arrived in front of me set me straight. Fast forward about ten years. My agent and editor, along with any alleged publishing potential I may have once had, have dissolved into the sinkhole of time.
And yet. And yet. The tortilla abides. I cling still to that dream. So simple it’s silly. Egg and potatoes. Add whatever you want, it’s still a cheap and nutritious meal. Peasant cooking, really. Comfort food. Starchy. Filling. Good hot or cold, they’re ubiquitous in Spain, where they come in all textures and shapes and grace the counters of tapas bars high and low.
It’s one of those dishes that everyone knows how to make. Except for me.
I’ve got a thing about simple dishes. I want to master them. I want to be able to make good miso soup, or a dal that brings tears to the eyes. I feel like I should be able to whip up the simple but cockle-warming dishes that anyone’s grandma can make. And yet, it’s the simplest recipes that most elude me. My inattention, my many distractions, coupled with wretched self-esteem in front of the stove, foil my best intentions, no matter how elementary the recipe is in front of me.
This is my journey, though. Step onto the road to failure and fail, big time, until I at last get it right. It's kinda fun when you think of it this way.
And nothing is more fun than trying to wring a basic recipe out of a bunch of flamencos who don't really know and wouldn't be able to remember anyway even if they did.
I’d been told that Antonio de Jerez made the best Tortilla in Los Angeles. If you’re into flamenco and you live in Southern California, you might have heard of him. But since you probably aren’t, and so haven’t, he’s a singer, from Jerez de Frontera, Spain. Been here since the mid -70s. Now in his 50’s. About this tall and bitter, and very close-mouthed when it comes to disclosing the secret to his outstanding, perfect tortilla.
I had it at a party once, and indeed, it was an extraordinary thing. Cool, cut into slices that you could eat out of hand or wrap in bread. The fresh, chewy, ever so slightly salted taste of egg cooked with potato. It was hugely satisfying with a salad. If I’d been left alone I could have eaten the whole of it by myself.
I asked him for the recipe. He laughed and walked away.
After a trip to Spain in which I ate a lot of tortilla, but only one, in Granada, that matched his own, I redoubled my efforts.

I pinned him at the bar of a crowded Pasadena restaurant where he was gigging with Tony. "Antonio!" I call. I notice he cringes and tries to turn away.
"What do you want?"
"I want to make your tortilla. How do you do it?"
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”
“C’mon! Tell her,” said his girlfriend, Maria-Jose.
“I can’t! I don’t really know. It’s different every time.”
This is standard Gypsy tact for squirming out of being pinned down on anything. Ah, but I was a journalist for years and years. I can counter squirm.
“Let’s say you have one medium potato,” I say. “How many eggs? Four?”
“More like two. Maybe Three.”
“Three eggs for each potato.”
“…er, yeah, I guess.”
“What about four eggs?”
“Too many.”
“So three eggs then. Firm?”
“I guess.”
“Yes? No?”
“Yes.”

So I used five eggs because that’s what I had left, and what’s the sense in leaving yourself two eggs in the fridge?
And I used one and a half russet potato because just one potato didn’t seem quite enough to counter five whole eggs. I peeled them and chopped them, doing my best to create orderly, proportional squares.
Olive oil. No idea how much. Enough to fry potatoes in.
A little tiny bit of onion.

Onion? Everything starts with an onion, remember.
But oh yeah, not every time.
“No! No onion!” Tony is alarmed when I ask him this over the phone. I don’t tell him that as we speak I am already sautéing an entire medium onion, chopped.
“So never any onion?”
“No!” he says. “OK, maybe just a little bit, for flavor. “But only the tiniest bit.”
Damn. I don’t know why I’m listening to Tony exactly, since I don’t think he’s ever turned on his own stove much less attempted a tortilla. But he grew up on his Dad’s tortilla, so presumably he knows a bit more about its making than I do. And I need a roadmap of some sort, so I take his advice. I spoon most of the onion into another pot, telling myself I’ll use it to make lentil soup later on that night. In my skillet, I leave only the “tiniest” bit.
Next I throw in the potatoes, and cook them up. But I don’t stir them enough or else I didn’t use enough oil, because as they cook they stick to the bottom of my skillet.
I whisk up the five eggs and add them to the mix. Then I put the heat on medium and watch.
There are always secrets with the simple dishes, I’m discovering. How much of this in proportion to that. How long to cook, and on what heat. When to turn, when to stir. Little details not ever articulated or written down in the cookbooks that will trip you up at every turn unless you know enough to intuit them.
“You’ve got to cook it just so,” Tony had warned me. “You don’t want to undercook it, but you don’t want to overcook it, either.”
“Well how long, exactly? What does that mean?”
“I dunno. You have to ask Antonio.”
I watch the tortilla bubbling in my skillet. I'll just have to guess when it's done.
There are also equipment requirements for a good tortilla, I’ve discovered. A simple iron skillet, medium sized, will allegedly do the job, but for me anyway, it’s not the right tool for the gig. Maybe there’s a special “tortilla” skillet – I imagine there is, since the high-end kitchen market is there to meet even the smallest of needs with an expensive and beautiful pan. Anyway, I don’t have such a pan. Only my two cast iron skillets, found at flea markets long ago, that have served me well so far and will be one day passed forward to whichever kid expresses the most interest.
Another tool I lack – a more flexible spatula, so I can get in there and flip that thing. Apparently that’s the challenge of tortilla for most people – the intact flipping of the thing. Tony told me that his Dad used to use the lid of the pan, so I duly try it and, no surprise, fail miserably. It had not yet cooked enough to retain a solid shape. A quarter of the tortilla oozes out onto the lid while the remainder sticks to the skillet. I curse myself bitterly as I dig at it with my spatula, and eventually manage to flip the tortilla, in two pieces, onto its other side to cook. Truly. I just suck the big dog in the kitchen. I’m not worthy of the apron I wear.

And so it sits. My first tortilla Española. In two steaming pieces on a square yellow plate. The top is burnt black, but not exactly scorched. I’ve done worse. Still, I wonder if I shouldn’t just throw it out now and save face. I decide to let it cool first.
Fifteen minutes later I decide to taste it. When I fall on my face, I like to wallow in the pain for a little bit. I’m funny like that. Not only did it look like crap, no doubt it was inedible too. Oh, the suffering. So I cut off a little slice, away from the burnt bits.
It’s chewy. Eggy. Potato-y. It’s not inedible at all. In fact, it’s kind of yummy. I eat another slice.
The girl walks through the kitchen. “What’s that smell, mom?”
“It’s my tortilla.”
Silence.
“Wanna try some?”
Basically I bribe her, promising her fame and fortune on this very blog if she tastes it and tells me what she thinks. She slowly comes around and agrees.
She inspects her piece carefully. She smells it. She takes the smallest nibble. Chews. Considers. She takes another, slightly larger bite (this indicates success already in my book). She takes a THIRD bite and pronounces it “OK. But you burned it.”
Yeah, yeah. Of course I burned it. “But you liked it enough, didn’t you?”
She shrugs, pops the rest into her mouth, and flees my kitchen.
Later on Tony comes over and agrees to try my tortilla. Imagine the hubris! My serving my first tortilla to a guy who grew up eating his Spanish father’s tortilla. I understood where I was on the tortilla totem pole. Would I deign to present this as an actual meal? Not me. To make clear that this was a taste test and not a meal, I handed him a piece on a napkin. Granted, Tony’s prone to forgiving my every fault, but in this instance of ethnic pride, I think he’d tell me if it sucked. The prospect of my total failure perversely excites me. At least I’m on the road to learning. He takes a bite. I search his face for the horrible truth: It's an abomination.
He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. “Actually not so bad,” he says. “A little heavy on the potato maybe.”
“You’re just saying that,” I say.
“No.”
I decide that the proof will come if he takes a second piece. He doesn’t. But he does take a second bite of his first piece. And that, my friends, is not a small battle won.

Lessons learned from this, my first summit attempt:
Less potato. Balance the egg to potato ratio.
Fry the potatoes in a separate skillet to prevent burnage.
Pam that damn skillet up like a greased pig. My next tortilla should pop right out of there.
Cook a little longer over a medium flame. Since I didn’t really time it this first round, I can’t say how much longer that would be. I will try to intuit.

Stay tuned for Tortilla Española, Take Two. The plan is, we’re gonna pay Antonio de Jerez to make one, then we’re going to take it home and dissect it….

The road to hell is paved with...

2006-05-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

I was reading my own blog and berating myself over just how much rewriting I needed to get to when I realized that most every entry features a recipe of something I can actually make. Lentil soup? Got that one down, for the most part. Chicken No-No soup? Yeah yeah. Rice? No problem. Haven’t nailed the Japanese breakfast yet but that’s a work in progress. I realized that I was woefully off-topic only a few entries in. Perhaps this indicated that years of trial and error had helped hone my feeble skills in the kitchen. Maybe I was getting better. I wondered whether my blog name was even accurate anymore. Maybe I wasn’t such a bad home cook after all.
Alas, no.
Just this last week: two culinary disasters,both because of maddeningly elementary reasons.
Audrey S. is a friend and neighbor. A housewife/mom who turns the stereotype on its ear. She’s Martha Stewart if MS was black and went to art school. Her womanly skills are formidable, and her talent in the kitchen is legendary. The woman makes her own jam and ketchup, for God’s sake. When Audrey invites you over to try something, you drop everything, get in your car, and show up with a little gift to thank her for the honor. She is a Kitchen Goddess I will feature at more length in another entry, but I introduce her here because she hipped me to a meatball soup recipe so simple a child could make it. I expressed doubt.
"Maybe your child..." I muttered.
“No, this is really simple,” she insisted. “And it’s delicious.” Only a couple of cans and some frozen meatballs are involved. Nothing could be easier, she promised.
Naturally I tried hers, and it was of course to die for – hearty and piquant, but not greasy or heavy. I’d pay $12.95 at a bistro for that very soup. Especially if crusty bread were included.
So she left the recipe on my message machine that evening.

Two teaspoons of olive oil.
Two thinly sliced garlic cloves
¼ tsp red pepper flakes
One bunch of kale, wilted for three minutes
Two cans reduced sodium chicken broth
two cup or so water
One can canelli beans
20 frozen meatballs

Serve with course salt and fresh parmesan cheese.

That very night I bought some frozen meatballs and some chicken broth from TJ’s. It didn’t sound so terribly hard, did it? And my dad was coming over that weekend. He’d love a nice, steaming bowl of meatball soup, some fresh bread, and a cold glass of German beer, wouldn’t he? What dad wouldn’t?

My first mistake. I cut up half an onion and sautéed that in the olive oil. The recipe doesn’t call for onion, but I have internalized the dictum that all good cooking starts with an onion, and there you go. Right from the start I altered the taste and made it wrong. Heavier than it should have been.
First mistake and a half – Audrey said to brown the meatballs before I threw them into the broth. But how do you do that, exactly? Fry them up in some olive oil? That was the only way I could think, so, into the frying pan they went.
Second mistake. I didn’t have all the right ingredients, and I tried to improvise. Bad move. Others can improvise. I need to realize that with me, improvisation in the kitchen only leads to bitter failure. Why didn’t I write down the needed ingredients on a Post-it note and made sure I either already had them or arrange to buy them at my last trip to the store? Martha Stewart would have done so. But of course that requires forethought and organization, qualities I don’t possess much of. The consequence was that while I was sautéing onions in olive oil and frying up the meatballs, I realized that I didn’t have red pepper flakes. I could have sworn I had red pepper flakes. I searched my cluttered shelves. I pulled out my spice bin and plumbed its depths. Twice. But there were no red pepper flakes. Nor did I have canelli beans. And I couldn’t find kale at the store.
What I did have was red chili powder and garbanzo beans. And I’d bought a big bag o’ greens to use instead of the kale. Greens were greens, right? And the recipe called for only ¼ teaspoon of pepper…how bad could I mess it up by using chili powder instead?
The smell of frying meat hung uneasily in my kitchen. I turned the stove fan on.
I cut the garlic into three clumsy “slices, using the wrong knife.
I threw several handfuls of greens into the pot, covered it, and let steam. After about three minutes I lifted the lid and saw with relief that they had, in fact, wilted as promised.
I added the chicken stock. Plus the two cups of water. I added the meatballs, sizzling, into the mix.
I almost forgot about the beans, but I added half a can of garbanzo beans at the last minute. I simmered for a while, then served.
I threw some sea salt over my bowl, and some ground black pepper. I got my parmesan cheese out of the fridge, but noticed it had gone over. Oh well. I took my first bite, expecting a clean, brothy taste similar to what I’d just sampled at Audrey’s…
No. What I’d made was a greasy, flavorless, urp-inducing soup that I wouldn’t be able to stomach a bowl of myself, much less serve to my father or foist upon my starving children. Once again I had fouled up what, on paper anyway, was a simple, straightforward dish. I threw half of this down my drain and threw the rest into a plastic bowl destined for the fridge. Maybe if I let it sit overnight its flavors would mingle and it would improve.
It didn’t improve. It did mold over nicely when next I checked though.

In my second ruinous kitchen gaffe I quite simply over-steamed asparagus until it fell apart in the tongs I tried to take them out of the steamer in. I have successfully steamed asparagus in the past – but my problem this night was that I was trying to hastily put together a simple meal for a friend and got flustered and lost track of time. It’s not too complicated to correctly time a piece of salmon, with heating crusty bread and steaming a vegetable, but it’s apparently beyond my abilities. Coming on the heels of my soup oops, and because this was for a guest, I was furious with myself. Steam asparagus for 5, maybe 10 minutes – I think…don’t forget about it for 20.
It’s always worse when you’re trying to cook for somebody and it comes out wrong. Even when the guest eats it graciously and proclaims it delicious, as my guest did, the ugly facts remain – I am a miserable, incompetent cook and I’m man enough to admit it. I really want to be a good home cook and nourish my friends and family with my output, but I suck in the kitchen. I have many, many examples of good intentions gone horribly, inedibley wrong, the most egregious of which I plan to share with you on this blog. This week’s fiasco simply reminded me that I’m still a bad home cook, and may indeed always remain a bad home cook. Come to my house and let me make you something.
At your peril.

Movable Feast

2006-05-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

We didn't eat these fellows.

The only book that matters

2006-05-05T16:26:00.000-07:00

Let us now praise Mark Bittman, whose big yellow book, aptly titled "How to Cook Everything" has changed my life and could possibly change yours. Especially if you suck like I do in the kitchen.
Stay tuned, my friends. Tonight I return to Asenabo and will make Mr. Flamenco Guitarist eat something that was all too recently alive and twitching in salt water.

Kitchen Goddess One

2006-05-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

I must tell you about Leah, a girl I roomed with just after college. A girl I shared almost nothing in common with except a great, grinning love of food. Leah was a half-Chinese, half-white twin. Born and raised by artist parents in San Francisco’s North Beach, Leah's most interesting element were her looks. She was a sexy creature, with her long black hair and cinammon skin and indecipherable heritage. Ten units shy of a degree in theater from San Jose State everyone but her knew she'd never finish. A cocktail waitress. A party girl. Men swirled around her: pretty men, older men, playboy bachelors. She was uninterested in anything that wasn't shiny and exciting. She had hundreds of shoes, a mini-skirt in every hue and texture, and not a single book. She came home one afternoon to find my boyfriend and I on the living room couch engrossed in our novels and laughed all afternoon as if she’d never seen such a sight. For a while, we had the perfect living situation – she would get to bed about the time I’d get up in the morning for work, and when I returned home she’d be putting on her makeup to get out the door for her shift at a local nightclub. Sometimes I’d hear her return in the wee hours, often with friends, or a man or two, and they’d quietly take their bong hits or have their final drinks before retiring to her bedroom on the other side of the bathroom from mine. I was just out of college, working part time as a receptionist at an architecture firm and part time at an art magazine. I was madly in love with a man I’d met on the student newspaper, a man with a baritone voice and a 67’ Chevy Impala who wrote like John Steinbeck. This was back before everything. Back when I fretted about whether I’d ever really be a working writer. Back before I even wanted children. Back when $300 in the bank was cause for relief and back when I bought what is still my most valuable possession: a six-inch-thick 1923 Oxford Dictionary, found at a garage sale around the corner for just $10. Leah and I had nothing in common, and, truth be told, we didn't particularly like each other. But she was neat, and considerate in her message-taking and bill-paying. And with our schedules, we never had to spend more than an hour in the same room with each other. We didn't need to be best friends, we agreed, as long as we were good roommates.
The only thing we did share was a fascination with eating. Every month or so we’d meet at a Chinese restaurant somewhere downtown and we’d dine, both of us practically dancing a jig with anticipation. She’d order dishes on the very edge of my Caucasian ability to ingest. And except for the sea cucumber adventure, I went through every door she opened and never looked back.
At home, Leah concocted wild hybrid Asian meals out of ingredients I’d never seen or heard of before. She’d make a giant pot of rice every morning, and use it throughout the day as her staple, over which she’d throw all manner of curious things. She hipped me to kim-chi, that spicy, fermented vegetable glop that graces every Korean table. She’d crumble ground beef into an iron skillet and fry it dark brown and crunchy, almost always setting off the smoke alarms, and on top of that she’d scatter a handful of some dark, mystery ingredient pulled from a dark earthenware jar with Chinese lettering that she kept covered in tinfoil. Then she’d throw the whole thing over a bowl of rice and hand me a pair of worn wooden chopsticks and bid me dig in. Delicious. Smoky. Tangy. I developed a taste for kim-chi over rice as well. She made her own brown rice green tea. Her steamed white rice was always perfect. She kept coral-colored persimmons in her hanging basket by the kitchen window and every so often she'd stop and lean over and snatch one up to hold it to her nose to determine its ripeness.
One day Leah’s waitress shift changed and she started hanging out more during the evenings when I was home, and not surprisingly, we clashed. Soon thereafter I got my first “real” newspaper job and moved up the peninsula and out of her life. We spoke only a few times after that, mostly to argue over the phone bill. We never broke bread together again.
But to this day I remember her. I use chopsticks regularly. My love of kim-chi has surprised and delighted Korean friends met much later. The mystery ingredient she threw into her ground meat was preserved turnip, which you can buy at any Asian market, although I haven’t seen the keen little jar with the lettering for many years. Maybe Ranch 99 is too upscale for that sort of thing. Yes it looks a little funky to white eyes, I suppose, but it's really adds a delicious smoky, tart flavor to meat or rice.
I think of her every year when the persimmons come to market, and I buy them for no other reason than because I love their color and shape on my table. Funny. I bring them home and set them out, and every now and then I snatch one up and hold it to my nose, even though I don't particularly like them.
And Leah’s secret to rice is this: wash the rice first to release its spirit. Drain, spread flat on the bottom of your pot and fill with water so that it reaches the top of your thumb nail, if your thumb is just on top of, not buried in, the rice. Bring to a boil. Cover tightly and simmer for 20 minutes.
Thanks, Leah. Wherever you are.

Chicken No-No Soup

2006-04-05T22:06:00.000-07:00

With a title like this, you’re probably thinking that this is a dish I’ve spectacularly mangled. But you’d be wrong (for the most part). It’s a very easy dish, and one that I’m particularly proud of because my daughter actually requests this from me, which means that when she grows up and has kids of her own, God willing, she may fondly remember something I made for her from her childhood kitchen. I don’t remember anything from my childhood kitchen other than creamed tuna on toast and crock pot chicken over rice. Sorry Mom. I think of you as one kick-ass woman; the dame I’d want in my corner if I ever found myself in the gutter with one nickel and a shot glass. But if I had to ask how to cook a roast chicken, I’d ask someone else first. She taught me how to drive a stick-shift, write a killer resume and stare down an angry man twice my size. Puttering in the kitchen didn’t interest her, which really, is admirable for a woman raised in the ‘50s. I do continue to wonder about her penchant for processed food, though. To this day she can’t see what’s wrong with pre-cooked fettuccini Alfredo in a bag from the 99-cent store and “fresh” bread pulled out of a Pilsbury cardboard roll. No wonder I’m so crap in the kitchen: No early training and questionable culinary genes.

When I’ve polled my friends who cook about what childhood experience compelled them to excel in the kitchen, they all say the same thing: They watched their mothers cook for them. They helped her in the kitchen. They sat down to hot meals at the family table every night. Food and the preparing of it became entwined with their sense of self, home and health. Their stories made me think of large, extended families in gracious East Coast homes; traditions; coherence. These people most certainly did not sit down in front of the idiot box with a TV dinner on a tray. Somewhere along the line I must have decided it was an admirable trait, this cooking from scratch for your family. Because I started trying, in my own feeble way, around the time my daughter started eating solid foods.

And so we’re back to the chicken no-no soup. When my daughter was a toddler, one of the only foods she’d eat was Trader Joe’s chicken noodle soup. It had noodles and veggies and heck, she had to eat, so she had it pretty much every day for probably her entire third year. She pronounced it “Chicken No-No” soup, and the name stuck. Years later I tried making my own version of it, and the concoction I created wasn’t half bad, as evidenced by the fact that my daughter, now hovering around 10-years-old and a full-blown kid with opinions of her own, actually requests it. She doesn’t want the store-bought soup anymore. “Make your home-made soup, Mom,” she says. She likes it; devours two whole bowls of it, and often eats her younger brother’s portion of it, too. Which means she’ll remember it fondly, and tell her friends about it. I imagine her sitting in Paris, where she’ll be studying the art of pastry, and she’ll be a tall, gorgeous young woman who all the French men will covet, because although she’s an American she is tempered by her bookish demeanor and her laughing yet haughty green eyes. And she’ll say, “I know you said this bistro had the most exceptional chicken soup in Paris, Etienne, but you know, my mother made a superior version.” And Etienne will try to argue, but my daughter will wave him away. “Argue all you will. My mother’s is better.”

I’ll have taught her how to make it herself, but she’ll always prefer the bowl I make for her myself. She’ll make it for her own children, and maybe for her grandchildren. “This is what my mother made for me when I was a little girl,” she’ll tell them. And they’ll wonder what kind of woman I was, what I must have been like, to make chicken no-no soup like this that was so tasty and fragrant. And that means that my scattered, no-tradition Southern California family will have created a culinary tradition as good as anyone’s Italian or Jewish grandma.

And in a way, that’s immortality for you. If somebody remembers the chicken no-no soup you made for them, you'll live forever. I’ll take that over fame any day.

Two end notes: Yes, I did once foul this dish up by putting too much pasta in for too long. It got way too starchy and became more a soggy noodle and vegetable dish than a soup.
And no, I’m not on Trader Joe’s payroll.

Mom’s Home-made Chicken No-No Soup

One tablespoon olive oil
One pint Trader Joe’s chicken broth. Free-range or organic, who cares which?
One cup water
One medium onion, diced
Two cloves garlic, diced
One teaspoon ground cumin
One teaspoon ground coriander
One half teaspoon ground tumeric
Four or five pieces of chicken, raw or pre-cooked.
Two small zuchinni squash, cut
Lots of baby carrots
Two handfuls of pasta, preferably the curly kind
Sea salt and pepper to taste.

Cut the onion up as best you can. Smash the garlic with the back of your knife, and chop it up, best you can.
Sauté the garlic in the olive oil quickly to flavor the pot (I learned this on a cooking show I saw once). Add the onions. Sauté until translucent.
Add the spices one at a time. Give a swirl to each before adding the next. Tumeric is great for you and adds a lovely golden color. Sauté gently for another few minutes.
Add the chicken broth and the water
Add the carrots because they take a bit longer to cook.
Bring to a simmer - add the chicken bits. I like to use Trader Joe’s flash frozen chicken bits myself. After they’re cooked through I cut them up into smaller chunks and add them back to the soup.
Add the zuchs.
When the soup has simmered about 20 minutes, add the pasta.
When the pasta is al dente, add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with fresh crusty bread.

Rainy day lentil soup

2006-03-17T16:35:00.000-08:00

Today it rained out of the blue. Didn’t read the weather reports. Had no idea it was going to piss. But it did. And I sat around the house, not writing, hungry and cold. And then I figured I’d do something about it. I pulled out my Xerox copy of the soups from the Convent Garden Soup book and turned to my favorite; Lentil and Tomato soup with cumin and coriander.

I am not a good cook. Much of what I attempt turns out, if it turns out at all, not what it could be. But with lentil soup I seem to have a modicum of touch. It turns out tasty more time than not, which for me is a success.

My theory is that in a past life, I lived somewhere on the Levant. All my life I’ve been drawn to things Mediterranean: the food, the music, the colors, the smells, the men.

My favorite recipe is easy, and almost impossible to foul up. Except that I did once because I used chicken broth instead of vegetable broth. It tasted awful and I couldn’t figure out why until I pulled the broth container out of the trash. That’ll teach me to cook while divorcing.

Pay Attention!

2 tablespoons olive oil.
1 medium onion, finely chopped.
¾ teaspoon ground coriander
¾ teaspoon ground tumeric
¾ teaspoon ground cumin
pinch of ground cloves
1 and ¼ cup red lentils, well-washed and picked over
14 oz chopped tomatoes (in a can, silly)
2 pints vegetable stock (one Trader Joe’s box of veggie stock)
fresh coriander leaves
sea salt and ground black pepper

First, you must rinse the lentils. Measure them out and put them in a bowl. Run water over them and scoop them around with your hand, drain, and repeat until the water runs clear. This might take five minutes or so. But it’s an important step if you don’t want brown scum in your soup. You don’t know where these lentils have been.

Drain the lentils, set aside.

Chop a medium onion (or half a large one) as finely as possible. Even with the fabulous Wusthof chef’s knife Luke got me for my birthday I can’t manage fine chopping of any kind. This wouldn’t surprise my kindergarten teacher. I could never neatly cut anything. I content myself with medium chop. You go ahead and try for fine.

Sauté covered for five minutes. Don’t burn it. That means keep the flame on medium, watch it, and stir occasionally.

You have to try hard to overspice lentil soup.

Add the spices. I round up to one teaspoon per spice. You have to try hard to overspice lentil soup. For that pinch of clove, I crush two or three cloves with the back of my knife and stir that in.

Add the carton of vegetable stock. I use Trader Joe’s brand because it’s good and because it’s convenient. If you want to use your own stock, I applaud your ambition. Using those Herb Ox cubes will diminish the potential of your lentil soup. Just run out and buy a can of veggie stock, would you? Learn from my mistakes.

Add the lentils. Stir. Cover and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20 minutes until lentils are tender, then add the can of tomatoes. Stir again. Simmer some more. Season with lots of ground black pepper and salt.

The original recipe calls for pureeing this liquid with the fresh coriander leaves, and adding a little sauté with fresh green chili. I never do this, and it still turns out OK.

I dish this up with toasted pita bread and a dollop of plain yoghurt. Let the pita bread get soggy in there. Num!

Many lentil soups improve in texture and flavor after they’ve sat in the fridge for a day or two. This is definitely one of those soups. A pot of this will make you a dinner and two happy lunches.

Bon appetite!

Japanese Breakfast: Take 1

2006-03-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at making a Japanese breakfast for a while now, ever since getting a book called, “Japanese Women Don’t get Fat or Old.” Apart from the title, which cracked me up because it’s a snarky take-off on the bestseller “French Women Don’t get Fat,” I got the book because I love Japanese food and figure that since millions of Japanese women cook this stuff at home, why can’t I? I also have been wanting to eat better in general, as part of my ongoing midlife crisis overhaul. Be present. Be content. Stop smoking. Cut down on sugar. Eat better. Practice your inversions.

Eat better. Last time I had a Japanese breakfast I was, not surprisingly, in Japan. We all went to Kobe to attend the nuptials of my brother David to the fabulous Hiromi-chan. The hotel we stayed in offered a choice of buffet-style eating in the a.m. – Western Style or Japanese. I realized long ago, on one of my first trips to Japan, that it’s best to live by the When in Rome credo when it comes to eating. Why would I want the Japanese approximation of a western breakfast (which always included runny scrambled eggs, the whitest of white bread toast, wrong hash browns and a refreshing, space-aged glass of Tang,) when I could revel in what the Japanese do best – which is delightfully presented portions of fresh fish, pickled vegetable, aromatic green tea and a steaming bowl of rice. I suppose this doesn’t appeal to everyone. But to me it’s a no brainer. Naturally I’ll eat a Japanese breakfast any chance I get. It sates, but doesn’t fill you up. There’s no sugar high so there’s no corresponding sugar crash. And you don’t get hungry for a long time.

There are a lot of upsides to eating more Japanese, not the least of which are that it’s healthier than my default bagel and blended mocha. It’s healthier. I’d feel better. My daughter would eat a Japanese breakfast. If I were the sort of mother who could get up 30 minutes before she does to cook it for her, I’m sure she’d appreciate it. This would be hard because I’m not that kind of mother, and Annie is an early bird, rising on her own at 6 or so every morning no matter how little sleep she’s had. But there’s no reason I can’t do a practice run in the middle of the day when she’s at school and I should be writing.

Tony says he’d love to eat more Japanese because it doesn’t upset his stomach. I could make him a Japanese breakfast, but honestly, I think he’s more talk than action. Seaweed and miso? He’d punk out, I know it. But then he can be goaded into trying new things.

I made him eat an octopus tentacle at Asenabo in Studio City the other night. Not a tentacle,exactly, but a suction cup, to be precise. A tiny little white teacup with purple rim. Raw octopus. I asked the sushi chef, the one who looks just like my flamenco teacher, to make me what he wanted, because I’ve read somewhere that that’s what you’re supposed to do at a sushi restaurant and it makes the chef happy, and plus I wanted to prove that I’m no wimp, I can consume sushi like a pro. And I prayed he wouldn’t serve uni, which is sea urchin, and which was once described to me as tasting like rancid mustard that had been sitting in a bucket of sea water for a week. And fortunately, he didn’t. But he did give me octopus, which I’ve had in the past, and which I know to be very chewy but otherwise fairly tasteless, and so I’m game to put the item in my mouth.

Tony, though. Another matter. Although born and raised in Los Angeles, he’d only been hipped to sushi a few years ago, and is a man who likes to play it safe and close to his chest. So I did what you have to do with Spanish men. I played on his machismo.

“Eat this,” I said.

“No way.”

“Come on. Be a man. What are you? Afraid?”

He looked at me sideways like he does and I knew I had him. Glowering at me, he opened his mouth and took the little cup from my chopstick. He chewed once. Swallowed.

“There," I said. "Now you can say you’ve tried something new. You should try something new every day. You’ve just eaten your first octopus suction cup. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Man. He could stop a bull with that look. He muttered an obscenity in Spanish. Something about my mother.

But I digress.

My Japanese breakfast would be basic and traditional. Rice, miso soup, some nori (seaweed) slices and a bit of grilled fish. I'd have to forgoe the delicious pickled bits for now. There's a way to make them yourself but that's not something a bad home cook should attempt on her own. I wanted to approximate the kind of breakfast I enjoyed in Japan. The sort of repast first introduced to me on my first trip there, lo these many moons ago when I was but a lass of 16.

Miso soup is the staple item around which everything else in the breakfast is wrapped. The Japanese drink it every day for breakfast. I’d like to do the same, but that means I have to learn how to make it easily by myself. I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to food – I vastly prefer making my own to opening a packet and adding water. Even though adding water is a damn sight more certain to turn out in my kitchen, I insist on learning how to make basic items myself. Until I do, I don’t make it in the morning for anybody.

However, I’m unclear on the basics of making my own miso soup. When I go to Marukai, the Japanese supermarket in Gardena (and Little Tokyo), I never know whether to get the white miso or the red miso. Often it’s not clear on the label (certainly not in English, either), so I go by color and hope for the best. I’m not clear on measurements, either. One heaping tablespoon of miso per cup of water? I don’t know. And water, or dashi, which is a Japanese soup stock I haven’t made yet because I don’t have the right kind of seaweed….I suppose I could buy it, but often times the stuff you buy is loaded with MSG, which gives me such a headache…
I decided to be organized, and experiment. Here’s how I made the soup this morning:

Three tablespoons (rough) low-sodium miso. I think it’s red.
Three cups water.
½ package bonito flakes
½ cup kudzu
two chopped scallions
diced, extra firm tofu.

My mother-in-law is a rebirther in London and is the kind of tidy, exacting woman I long to be. When she makes her miso soup, she always ads a concoction of kudzu (arrowroot) dissolved in cold water to “hold” the soup, and her soup, I must add, always turns out well. Soup I made without this step once turned out too watery. After I dissolve the miso in the water, I add the kudzu concoction.

I added the bonito flakes when I realized I should have made dashi and used that instead of water to give it the proper flavor. But after simmering for 5 or 10 minutes I decided I should strain the bonito flakes out of the liquid. This I did using cheesecloth because I couldn’t find my big strainer. Always wanted to use cheesecloth for straining. I mean, I have the cheesecloth in my knife drawer, just in case I should get ambitious and try to cook something that requires my using cheesecloth for some aspect of the preparation. So I decided to use it for this. But in typical fashion, I bollixed it all up. I cut the cheesecloth wrong and didn’t get enough of it to cover the bowl. I cut another swatch and the whole things tumbled from my hands to the floor, unraveling as it went. I wasn’t able to pull the cloth taut across the bowl, so when I poured in the soup the bonito flakes, which now strongly resembled something a child pukes up on her pillow at 3 a.m., burbled out and down and largely back into the soup. There was a lot of dripping as well. I could feel the eyes of a thousand old Japanese Okasan spirits watching me with bemused disgust. I know the making of this soup should be serene and as easy as making tea. I didn’t think this was the way it was supposed to work, yet here I was in the middle of it, so I had to stay the course.
I eventually strained out most of the bonito flakes, and put the liquid back into the pot.

I cut the scallions. I cubed tofu. More or less.

I bought little salmon fillets at Marukai, but I don’t have a grill. Note to self: get off the stick and buy one of those clever iron grills I can set on the stove top. So I spray an iron skillet with canola oil, heat it up, and quick fry the salmon.

Rice. I can actually make rice. For someone who makes the most embarrassing mistakes in the kitchen, I have an uncanny knack for the perfect pot of rice. I use the Japanese style rice today – 1 and ½ cups to 2 cups water, bring to a boil, lower heat, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes.

The results? It took almost an hour to make this meal. Too long to do realistically in the cramped morning hour, when I’m trying to bomb my little boy out of bed, monitor what my daughter is trying to wear to school (“It’s cold! Put on long pants!) and get a little something called food into me. But I suspect I could streamline the production enough to pull it off one day. Will I? Nah.

The miso soup turned out surprisingly decent but still, not *quite* right. I did drink the whole bowl, which was a vast improvement over my last attempt, which was so salty I took one sip and threw the rest down the drain. The gold standard test was Annie’s eating a bowl of it that afternoon. You can’t sneak bad-tasting miso past a 9-year-old. I’ll say it was a qualified success. Next time I’ll make some dashi and try it with that as the base stock. I’ve got some daikon rotting in my vegetable crisper as we speak.

The salmon didn’t taste like it did in the hotel in Japan, not surprisingly, but it was ok. It tasted like …salmon. It’s very hard to mess up salmon, although I’ve been known to do so, usually by woefully overcooking it. Maybe there were some seasonings involved that I don’t know about. It would help to have that grill.

My nori was stale. Damnit. That’s what happens when you take out that little packet of freshener so the five-year-old won’t steal it and put it in his bath. I can’t seem to keep my seaweed stashes fresh.

The rice was fine. The green tea, (gen-mai cha – green tea and brown rice) was perfect, although it’s tedious to clean out my old silver tea pot and it makes ensuing cups of tea (of the non-green sort) taste like green tea. Oh well. A small price to pay.

I’ll fine-tune all of this on another date. Stay tuned.