The sure thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¡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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.