Cooking with Two Dudes

Day Eighteen: We Hope Jack White Has Prepared the Fold-Out Couch For Us

2010-08-23T17:35:00.001-07:00

Hello, faithful Aeron-chair travellers. I haven't blogged the past few days because we were staying and visiting with Gainesville friends; I am (a) respecting their privacy (they did not ask not to be blogged - I am just choosing not to put them in the position of declining to appear on my stupid blog and making them feel shabby when they quite rationally do) and (b) trying to restrict my blogging activities to times when they don't interfere with other experiences I should actually be having. No worries on that count right now; we're in the Comfort Inn Music Row in Nashville, TN after a nine-hour-plus day in the car. We got a nice early start this morning and arrived here at about 5 local time.

Can I just state for the record: Tennesee, you are a lovely beauty-queen of a state. Of all the attractive landscape we've driven through in this Great Nation Of Ours, Tennessee is the current belle of the ball, unseating even stunning North Carolina. Rivers, mountains, rock formations, picturesque trestle bridges, the whole ball of scenic wax. We found our cheap hotel with ease and are just a short hop downtown. If it weren't 100 degrees out, it would be a nice half-mile walk to the very picturesque neon-cowboy-boot center of everything. But we drove, to a place called the Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner. My Trusty Guidebook said that it would be a good place for the kids, and despite the fact that it's a chain (didn't know that before we went!), I figured the path of least resistance might be wisest after nine hours in the beige Camry. I also did not realize that there seems to be some sort of preseason football event happening in Nashville this evening, and the place was crawling with special-event-parking foofaraw and jaywalking fans. We felt right at home!

HUGE NEWS. Anyone who knows me even slightly knows that for the past year-and-a-half I have been mentally beating myself up for brazenly, a-holishly stealing someone's parking space almost one year ago this week. I've been passively surrendering parking spots to others in an attempt to atone but still felt guilty. This evening, I got a PERFECT, FREE on-street parking spot a block away from the restaurant. As I was waiting to back into the spot, another car was hovering and continued to hover as it seemed as though I wasn't going to be able to make it into the spot. I was, of course, parallel-parking being my one and only special talent. But here's the thing: the exact same circumstances arose, and the other party did not steal my spot! The universe appears to have forgiven me on this, the anniversary of my major sin. I am still truly sorry and will NEVER EVER EVER steal a parking spot again. It is simply not worth the guilt.

Our meal was uneventful except for the fact that we ate it inside a trolley car that was situated in the middle of the Old Spaghetti Factory's dining room. Ike did not eat his macaroni and cheese, opining that there is a fine line between mac and cheese (desirable) and fettucine Alfredo (despicable, to Ike). Neither boy likes Spumoni ice cream, which makes sense, since it tastes like nothing identifiable and its name sounds like a synonym for upchucking. But downtown Nashville is as charming as can be, even in the throes of football idiocy. As longtime residents of a town - and state- populated by slavering football morons from September to January, we are able to see Nashville as if all of the NFL-related activities are painted on a transparent cel which can be mentally peeled away from the entire city, showing us what a swell place it is when there isn't a game on. The boys are pictured above on a typically superb-looking Nashville street, on which every other storefront is vending some sort of cowboy gear. They have decided that their fondest desire is to own cowboy boots, which dad has vetoed. Cowboy shirts, however, may be on the agenda tomorrow.

Also on the agenda: fried chicken, barbecue, and Mexican popsicles. And sleeping late. And stalking both Jack White and his lovely wife Karen Elson, who seem to have forgotten that they were hosting their best Wisconsin friends these two days and did not leave the key under the flowerpot for us.

Days Thirteen and Fifteen: Karaoke, Ukulele, Cake

2010-08-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

The night before I had my Very Scary Hospital Experience was, in fact, full of frolic and amusement that DID NOT GET BLOGGED, which within the parameters of this particular trip is not to be tolerated. Especially when that frolic takes place at the FREAKING MOOSE LODGE. Of which my mother is a proud member. Shown above is a photo of the three youngsters in our party posing in front of the Moose Lodge's Bingo board. The Moose Lodge was not featuring Bingo on the evening of our visit, but EVEN BETTER it was both Taco Night and Karaoke Night. Nobody has to twist my arm to perform karaoke; afterwards, the audience may wish to perform hara-kiri. My niece Eileen and I signed up for two songs apiece and after essentially no arm-twisting whatsoever, both of my boys put their names in as well. Little did I know that karaoke at the Moose Lodge is a no-messing-around type of event. Every last person sang. The notion of a second song was just a silly fantasy, which is a crying shame since my second song would have been "Private Eyes" by Hall & Oates. Eileen performed the Carrie Underwood revenge-ballad "Before He Cheats;" Ike warbled "Eye of the Tiger" and brought the house down. Oscar's initial pick, "Seven Nation Army," was rejected by the karaoke dj as being "too hard rock," so he performed "Enjoy The Silence" by Depeche Mode to a somewhat baffled elderly audience who clearly did not get how extremely emo Oscar is.

I had no idea how much retired people dig their karaoke. People brought their own CDs. Country-western music was heavily represented, both old (George Jones, Patsy Cline) and new (American Idol C&W). This was perhaps the only karaoke sesh ever held where "Sweet Caroline" would have constituted a bold choice. At nine o'clock, all action in the Lodge came to a screeching halt so that a small xylophone could be sounded to herald a special prayer, accompanied by the illumination of a dangling star above the stage: "Let the little children come to me. Do not turn them away." And so on. After which a Moose approached our table and informed us that, because it was nine o'clock, the kids were going to have to leave. Seriously.

Yesterday was Oscar's ninth birthday. I was feeling a bit low-key, so while Oscar spent his special day watching a meticulously-crafted roster of videos, I flopped around on the couch, read an appallingly stupid book and ate foods high in potassium. Above you see Osk with his birthday cake, made by grandma, and the fireworks with which we marked the event out in the driveway. Little boys + fireworks = true love 4ever. Also, he was subjected to the traditional Bedford family ukulele serenade of "Happy Birthday." Today we are back on the road, heading north to Gainesville and then on to Nashville in our trek home, hoping to encounter cooler temperatures and fewer medical emergencies.

Day Fourteen: You Know You're Giving Me A Heart Attack-Ack-Ack-Ack-Ack-Ack

2010-08-20T04:10:00.000-07:00

In today's blog post, space and time will be warped. I am skipping the account of day thirteen of the epic road trip to give you all my excuse for not posting on day fourteen: emergency hospitalization (SPOILER ALERT: I am just fine). Here's the story: I was out for lunch with Mom, Ron and the boys at a local Venice pasta joint called Luna, which features walls plastered with cheeseball Italian-American paraphernalia and mementoes. Having consumed a light breakfast in preparation for Luna's legendarily massive portions (which they do not bill as "family-size" - they seem to enjoy the bait-and-switch involved in making first-time visitors think they're getting a normal plate of pasta and then GOTCHA! An entire pound!), I dug into the garlic bread with gusto. Shortly thereafter, I started feeling something like the sensation of eating a peanut butter sandwich too quickly and having it get stuck on the way down (not that this happens to me ALL THE TIME or anything). Went to the ladies' to take a breather amidst several signed "Moonstruck" posters when I started feeling like I was going to pass out. Poked my head out the door and encountered Ike, who was en route to the men's. He went to get mom and Ron, who got me into a chair and hooked me up with an ice pack, etc. At that point, I was thinking I was having some heat-related episode, since the entire state of Florida is heated with molten lava during the month of August and as you all know, I am a delicate flower. Half an hour later, I was being spirited away to the Venice ER in Ron's ginormous blue pickup truck.

So the first thing that happened was that my blood pressure was determined to be through the roof. I think it would have qualified as "through the roof" even if we had been in the Capitol Rotunda. They installed me in some sort of exam room and I spent the next hour or so laying prone, staring frantically around that the cast of thousands running all over the place and sticking enough needles in my arms to make me a suitable villain in a horror-movie sequel in which I'd be called "Pin-Arms." (this is a Wes Craven reference; try to keep up) At some point, I was informed that I had probably had a heart attack. WHA???? (Imagine record-scratching sound-effect, if you are old enough to know what that sounds like). Suddenly, the bottom dropped out and I began to think this wasn't going to be one of those IV fluids, try to eat more cheeseburgers types of doctor visits of which we ectomorphs are so fond. They had me sign a release form that started with a cardiac catheterization but also extended to angioplasty and open-heart surgery, if necessary. I am not lying when I say that I thought, "I never imagined I'd have anything in common with Dick Cheney."

So they wheel me up to the cardiac catheterization lab, which oddly-enough turned out to be my happy place. But not at first. The initial five minutes or so of my visit involved the four dudes who run the joint standing around me on the gurney and marveling at my relatively-young age for having a FREAKING HEART ATTACK. Sample quotes: "37? I thought that must be a misprint. 73 is what we usually get." and, accompanied by head-shaking, "Too young. Too young." Because I lament every grey hair and age blotch I accumulate with the passing years, the irony did not escape me that here I was, being kvelled over for being so youthful, and not only could I not enjoy it, I was not even wearing a cute dress from Anthropologie while it was happening.

They gave me a choice: hang around (indefinitely) and be "monitored," or be catheterized and "clear this thing up once and for all." I asked Head Cardiac Cath Dude (who looked like Jim Carrey, but less manic) which choice gave me better odds of getting home that night to the kids and sleeping in my own bed, and thus ended up selecting door #2. As it turns out, getting a cardiac catheterization - not so bad. They did it through my arm and I didn't feel a thing. I also got to see my blood vessels on television, which is cooler than you can possibly imagine. Add in the fact that I was sedated (YES, I did sing the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" on the gurney; would you not have been disappointed with me if I hadn't?) and the additional plus that there was NOTHING AT ALL WRONG with my heart or blood vessels, and you have a fairly kick-ass cardiac catheterization experience all-around. No heart attack, no Cheney-stent, no swearing off cheese for the rest of my natural life.

We now move into phase two of my stay at the Venice, FL hospital. Theme song: "The Waiting Is the Hardest Part." The m.o. at this point was three-pronged: get my blood pressure down, get lots and lots of potassium into me, and incrementally deflate the very cool, Janelle Monae-esque clear plastic inflatable bracelet that was holding my cardiac cath wound shut. Prong one took the longest, but prong two was the worst. Did you know that intravenous potassium KILLS? Take my word for it. The second-worst pain I've ever experienced in a hospital, including giving birth with no anesthetic, was having a blood-pressure cuff tightened onto my filled-with-IV-potassium left arm. (worst: getting arterial blood gases taken. Avoid if possible) Also, I was seriously exhausted but could not sleep due to (a) my headache, and (b) the mechanized blood pressure machine that kept going off to alert the staff that my BP was still insanely high. I turned down the optional morphine LIKE AN IDIOT. Eventually, everything settled down and they let me go home at about ten PM, feeling wrung out but relieved. My entire epidermis is covered with every imaginable variety of medical adhesive. I have an unanticipated piece of souvenir jewelry. My kids and husband are certifiably freaked out. So what are the take-aways from this experience?

(1) The Venice FL ER does not mess around. You would have thought my swoon was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them. I had enough medical professionals in my room at one point to field a basketball team.

(2) My mom is (a) a hero for hanging with me in the hospital with no reading material for nearly eight hours, which I consider worse than what was happening to me. At least I was being distracted, and (b) such a hard-core dyed-in-the-wool conservative that she could not resist buttonholing various nurses and asking them if they didn't agree that my situation was a perfect example of why health-care reform is a terrible idea? What surprised me the most is that the nurses were all, "Oh, yes, I saw on Fox News that blah blah blah." I do not want to make my ER saga into a political discussion, but would just like to point out that after years of working for the City of Madison in a job where it is verboten for me to discuss politics with library patrons, it was very weird to hear hospital staff doing it. Even though Madison is a nearly uniform shade of blue and it's pretty safe to presume that every stranger wants to give Barack Obama a big, wet kiss, it still bothers me when library patrons put me on the spot with their political views. Even if I agree, I still try to respond with something like "It's interesting that you feel that way." It makes me feel like a therapist.

(3) For some reason, people kept asking me how tall I was. Every single nurse and doctor asked me this at some point. I am of a tallish but normal height. Plus, because my brain is warped by law school, I started thinking, "Isn't that a kind of leading question? How tall am I? Wouldn't it be more neutral to ask, 'What is your height?'"

(4) jokes of mine that fell flat in the heart-catheterization lab: (a) telling the doctors that I wouldn't object if they could come up with a medical pretext for shaving my head, since I've always wanted to see what it would look like; and (b) when the doctor asked for a "French 3 catheter" (apparently the unit of measurement for heart catheter tubing), I asked him if she shouldn't be calling it a "Freedom 3 catheter." HAR! Well, they can't all be winners.

(5) things that went though my head while swooning in the Italian-American restaurant festooned with signed movie posters: (a) wouldn't you think an Italian restaurant would not mis-spell Vincent Gardenia's last name? and (b) isn't it a stretch to consider a movie poster for "Dante's Peak" to be a piece of Italian-American memorabilia? Despite the fact that Dante Alighieri was Italian?

That is all. I apologize for the excessively long blog post but I don't want anybody to be worried about my health, which is fine. When I return to Madison, I do in fact plan to procure a book on how to format in Blogger.

Day Twelve Point Five: A Controversial Coif

2010-08-18T04:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, after going to the Mote Aquarium, I took my older son Oscar to SuperCuts to get a mohawk. Reaction to this shearing among friends and family has been wildly mixed, a nearly 50-50 split between enthusiastic and appalled. I was initially surprised, but upon reflection have a greater understanding of the consternation. Here's the thing: crazy hairstyles and I go way back. I've been doing demented things with my hair since I was old enough to wield a jar of Dippity-Do and a curling iron. In junior high, my desire to resemble a punky Molly Ringwald drove me to use vast quantities of glittery copper-tinted mousse to craft my mane into an asymmetrical, glittery, immobile sculpture. So convinced was I that I was, in reality, a redhead that I resorted to henna and Clairol Nice N' Easy throughout high school to make my follicles align with my deep, inner redheaded soul. I also thought that I should have been named "Audrey" and used to put sweaters on hold at the Danbury Fair Mall's Benetton store under my "real" name, but that's another story.

After I let go of my redheaded alter ego, I spent the better part of a decade shaving, cropping, tinting, growing (my hair grows at the rate of kudzu) and then pruning feet of hair. Because Locks of Love is willing to work with wookiee hair, I have sent them my trimmings more than once. Nowadays, I look... normal. Have had natural-colored hair for as long as my husband has known me, and have sworn off the drugstore dye bottle. But my flirtations with crazy hair have given me more happiness and fun over the years than I can possibly express. If my husband did not have an opinion on these matters, I'd currently be sporting the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 'do. Hair grows back. It's easy and cheap to change. If you don't work for a multinational corporation with a dress code or live in a Lubavitcher community, you have unlimited freedom to mess around with it. Oscar and Ike have wanted mohawks for years, and were insanely jealous of the one kid in their school who sported one last year. It's summer vacation, and we're several states away from anyone who knows them. It will take approximately five minutes on the back porch for Oscar's dad to shave his shaggy 'hawk down to the level of the rest of his hair, giving him the haircut he normally has (a bristly quarter-inch buzz). Famous mohawks nowadays include Rihanna, David Beckham and at least one of Angelia Jolie's passel. And besides: Oscar looks so freaking cute.

I think, based on nothing at all except personal experience, that kids need an outlet for sartorial self-expression. Oscar can have whatever hairstyle he wants in high school as long as his grades are good. And if it scratches his rebellious itch enough to keep him away from the tattoo parlor, I feel I've succeeded in some small way. I remember the first time I ever saw Cyndi Lauper circa the She's So Unusual album, sporting her half-shaved, half-orange-and-yellow hairstyle and feeling something click in me - like I had spotted my familiar in the pages of People magazine. Oscar has his entire life to wear a suit and tie and a high-and-tight. For the last two weeks of the summer, he is letting his follicular freak flag fly.

Day Eleven Point Five/Day Twelve: Sonny's and The Mote

2010-08-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Here we are still at my mom's on day twelve, taking in the many sights of Venice, FLA. Yesterday's as-yet-unrecorded event was our first meal at Sonny's, a Florida barbecue chain that my mom and her husband frequent and my boys LOVE. No small part of the appeal of Sonny's is the seizing of many packets of crackers from the salad bar and subsequent crafting of makeshift appetizers using said crackers and the multiple flavors of BBQ sauce available on the tables chez Sonny. Ike can be shown fashioning one of these humble amuses-bouche in the top photo above. I like to get a pulled-pork sandwich on garlic toast, which Sonny's offers with a side dish and drink for an insanely low price. This meal is delicious but makes one want to eat raw kale salad for several meals afterwards in penance.

Today, we went down to Manasota Beach in the morning; the trip was a bust. One of the kids had open cuts on her body, which were aggravated by the salt water. Another of the kids (Oscar) was more interested in the outdoor sand-removal showers than in the ocean itself. Only Ike saw the charm in the particular surf offered by Manasota, which I found just dandy: gentle swells, which could be floated in to replicate the sensation of being rocked like a little baby. *sigh* But insufficient to propel a boogie-board, so sub-par for the little-boy set.

Our afternoon outing was to the Mote Aquarium in Sarasota, which was just grand. Above, Ike is displaying the seahorse tank. He is, in fact, attempting to pose in such a way that the seahorses appear to be resting in the palm of his hand, which has become a photographic meme on this trip. We have taken numerous pictures in which one or both of the kids appears to be presenting some interesting sight like one of the ladies on The Price Is Right. They never get the hand positioning quite right. We saw, among other things, convict fish, sharks, cephalopods, pompano, a preserved giant squid that should be nicknamed Dirk Diggler if it isn't already, dolphins and two manatees, which are my favorites. They look so blobby and unformed, like a rough draft for some more articulated sea mammal. Oscar looks miserable in front of the manatees because a thunderstorm began mid-visit, and he spent half of the visit covering his ears and fretting about being hit by lightning. His spirits were lifted by his post-aquarium haircut: a long-desired mohawk, crafted by the fine people at SuperCuts. He now looks just as though his mother secretly thinks she lives in Brooklyn and pops next door to borrow a cup of sugar from Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Also, today we saw baby seahorses the size of fingernail clippings. AMAZING.

Day Eleven: Library Geekery and Other Entertainments

2010-08-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

It's our first full day in Venice, FLA, staying with my mom and her ebullient husband, Ron. They have a pretty nice setup; their home has a big netted-in patio with seating and a pool (this type of thing is referred to around here as a "cage") and, as you see above, a tricked-out entertainment system that can only be described as SWEEEET. You can see it above: ginormous TV, Netflix on demand, all mod cons. Ron loves to watch tennis, so they chose their set based on what type of display would best allow him to scrutinize line calls. It also receives, among others, The Sacred Channel (Cartoon Network), although we passed a happy mid-day hour today watching "Junkyard Wars." Ike spent that hour diligently maintaining his faux-hawk, pictured above. I am both tempted and reluctant to equip him with the hair gel that would allow him to fully actualize his coif. I have informed the boys that if a real mohawk is desired, now is the time to get short. Dad is not present to object, and the noggins can be shaved clean in enough time to sprout a respectable stubble for the first day of school. No takers so far, but I'm working on it.

The first day in Venice would not be complete without the obligatory library trip. The Jacaranda PL is very close by, so we went brandishing my mom's card and checked out stacks and stacks of kids' books. I may have mentioned the fact that I have something like fifteen books in the trunk of the Beigemobile, so I was only inspecting the shelves out of curiosity. You can see the picayune number of holds sitting on the Jacaranda's shelves for pickup - presumably the number burgeons during the winter months, although if my own circ-worker experience is typical, all of the snowbirds are misguidedly trying to check out books at their own up-north libraries in the fall and asking daftly, "I'm going to be in Florida/Arizona/Texas for three months. Can you check this out to me for that long?". Um, no. Get a Florida/Arizona/Texas card. They have libraries there. I think.

On books and travel: so I don't have a Kindle or iPad, and will probably be behind the curve in getting one. I just love books as objects. Their heft, their covers, turning pages, seeing and feeling the accumulation of read pages and the dwindling of unread ones. Long books are heavier than short books. Trashy books have embossed covers, some with nifty windows through their outer jackets to reveal a cameo of the bodice-ripping portrait underneath. Books books books. I have been reading Justin Cronin's "The Passage" for a week and am on page 559. It is rip-roaring. Books I have seen others reading on this trip: "How To Win Friends and Influence People"; "Firefly Lane"; the new Atul Gawande; some piece of lady-friendly dreck by Kristin Hannah (more than once); lady-friendly dreck by Danielle Steele; "Killer Angels"; "The Catcher in the Rye"; two passengers on the DC Metro, strangers, one reading the first Stieg Larsson and the other reading the second. Yes, I have been keeping a mental list. Once, on a Caribbean cruise I saw a young woman reading a Chuck Klosterman book, "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" and it made me unaccountably happy.

The thing is, at least the people reading the dreck - or what I snobbishly consider to be the dreck - are reading something. Lots of people can be seen sitting around on the beach reading NOTHING. Just sitting there, staring vacantly at the unchanging horizon for hours on end. Perhaps these people are just incredibly Zen and have bottomless reserves of calm and the capacity for deep contemplation the likes of which I will never, ever experience. Or maybe they have the brains of molluscs and require nothing more than the line of demarcation between ocean and sky to occupy all of their grey matter. So right on, Danielle Steele readers. Godspeed, people who desire to Win Friends and Influence People. And a big wet smooch to library patrons everywhere!

Day Ten: Cannonball Run Across Florida

2010-08-16T09:54:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was Day Ten of the Epic Road Trip. It started with yours truly awakening an a bed all by herself for the first time in ten days, in a room looking directly out onto the ocean. I felt as though I had woken up in the middle of an Oprah Book Club book, in which an extremely well-to-do woman takes the radical step of moving into her luxurious beachside home for a year in order to achieve self-actualization and pen her inspirational memoirs. I mean this in a good way. We spent the morning with the fabulous Lauren and her adorable son on Crescent Beach, my kids boogie-boarding and Beck doing toddler-type things in the tidepools. You can see from the photos above that the beach was stunning and practically deserted, like an eerie paradisical dream sequence. However, there were many awesome animal encounters to be had. One large hermit crab, a school of small fish being pursued by a large fish in a tidepool, a gopher tortoise who had strayed from his neighborhood (pictured above) and many subterranean clams.

A few words on the subject of Beckett: not only is he adorable, as you might expect a two-year-old would be, cuteness being a standard factory-installed feature of toddlers, but he is also the successful result of a controlled experiment in which a child is shown to thrive when every bite of food that crosses his lips and every cultural product that enters his brain is of high quality and unimpeachable wholesomeness. I will never forget seeing him, on an earlier visit, scarfing down pieces of raw red pepper as if they were candy. Lauren and her husband Clay have WAY better willpower than I have in resisting the urge to give their kid a Snickers bar or let them watch Ren and Stimpy just to blow his freakin' mind. The result of this is, of course, a kid who does nothing but pester you for candy and cartoons. Like mine. Beck inhabits a Shangri-La in which these things simply do not exist, and he - and the world, probably, when he grows up to cure cancer or suchlike - is the better for it. It makes me feel a bit, by comparison, to those parents you see in the aisles of Walmart smacking their kids and letting them drink Hawaiian Punch. (Angry cease and desist emails from both of these companies will no doubt be winging their way to me shortly)
After our beachside idyll, we drove across the state of Florida as fast as we can. The boys did not notice us driving right past Disneyworld, absorbed as they were in the Nintendo DS (see what I mean about my parenting?). We stopped in Sarasota to buy what I suspect was the only issue of the Sunday NYT in the entire Gulf Coast region (they kept it behind the counter at Borders, like pornography), and made it to my mom's at about dinnertime. Above you see a picture of Ike in grandma's pool, the real "Happiest Place In The World." Cousin Eileen is here visiting as well, so the boys have some welcome older-kid company. We'll be seeing Beck and his kick-ass parents again on the swing back Northwards through Florida.

ps if these pictures seem depopulated, it's because (a) the beach was quite empty, and (b) I'm trying not to plaster pictures of my many gracious hosts all over the internet unless they expressly request it without my even asking.

Day Nine Redux: Ye Olde St Augustine

2010-08-15T14:43:00.000-07:00

I didn't update this blog yesterday because I was having such a splendid time visiting and catching up with Lauren The Estimable Novelist and Her Adorable Brobdignagian Toddler, Beck that I did not have time. So here is the belated update. We stayed in a beach house owned by Lauren's in-laws, who kindly let us crash there for one night. The house has a name - Solstice - which means either (1) that Lauren's in-laws are tree-worshipping pagans, or (2) maybe it's a reference to some sort of astrological phenomenon that has to do with the longest day of the year, which takes place in the summer, and - yeah, it's probably (2). It was GORGEOUS. House on stilts, vast expanses of glass overlooking a picturesque beach that made Myrtle Beach look like the ugly stepsister of beaches. The sand was like talcum powder. A sweet wooden walkway led from the house over the dunes - DUNES! - to the shore. We took the boys down to the water, which they promptly jumpt into in their clothing.

Afterwards, we rode in Lauren's car into St. Augustine, the oldest continuously-inhabited city in These United States. There was clearly a surfeit of historical interest, which on a geekier and less child-encumbered road trip I would have eaten up like so much educational soft-serve ice cream. The boys were less interested, although you seen them above posing for a rare family photo in front of Ye Olde Wooden Schoolhouse. St Augustine was touristy, but in a somewhat classier way than Myrtle Beach. An analogy: Myrtle Beach:tattoo parlors as St. Augustine: Thomas Kinkade galleries. We ate at a restaurant that had the word "Cracker" in its name. Ike ordered gator tail, which he is pretending to relish above but was in fact too spicy for him. I ate most of it (yum. gator tail). Subsequently, Lauren's son and mine had a race to see who could melt down first.

The big success of our evening was Oscar and Ike's purchase of the badass-looking shark-tooth necklaces they are modeling above along with their best intense tough-customer expressions. They would like to never, ever remove these necklaces again. I can think of no good reason not to grant this wish.

Day Nine: Driving, Not Blogging

2010-08-15T04:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we drove seven + hours from Myrtle Beach to Crescent Beach, FL. The boys Nintendoed almost the entire way. I was up late visiting and chatting with my friend Lauren, in whose in-laws' beach house we crashed for the night, so no time to indulge in cyber-navel-gazing last night. I have many photos and will update soon, but in the meantime my many, many readers (including, apparently, one in China!) will have to content themselves with this photo of Ike, staring meaningfully at you with his limpid gray eyes and looking into the depths of your soul(s).

Day Eight: The Warmth of the Sun, b/w Stormy Weather

2010-08-13T18:02:00.000-07:00

Today was a solid day at the beach from start to finish. I built this day into the itinerary with the intention of (a) breaking up the long drive from DC to Florida, and (b) seeing a bit of the Atlantic coast. My original plan was to stop at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, but when I crunched the numbers, it turned out that South Carolina was closer to the midway point. I chose our hotel out of a Frommer's, Myrtle Beach because one has heard of it (I think it was one of those places Bugs Bunny used to mention when he'd pop out of the ground after tunnelling aimlessly around underground and then, after looking around, say, "Eh, this don't look like Myrtle (or Pismo, or whatever) beach!"

So this morning we slept in. The boys were up late watching the Cartoon Network (or as Oscar refers to it, "the sacred channel." Breakfast was cereal and yogurt in our room. Our mini-fridge runs VERY cold so our milk was slushy and my yogurt was a fro-yo. Not a problem; temps down here have been in the 95 range the past two days, so we take the refreshment where we can get it. My biggest concern today has been the avoidance of sunburn. The sun down here is fierce, and my cheap Target beach umbrella was shredded to flinders within five minutes of being erected yesterday. We managed to avoid lobsterdom through the liberal and frequent re-application of sunblock and, for me, the draping of numerous towels while sitting in the sun. I spent a LOVELY day alternating between warm sun and cool ocean, reading "The Passage" in between frolics with my boys, whose bodyboards were perhaps the best $20 ever spent.

Big events of the day: having to temporarily exit the water because of a school of fish (which, the lifeguards claimed, meant that "bigger fish" would be nearby. SHARK! SHARK!); finding the first usage error in "The Passage" on page 399, just as I was starting to appreciate how meticulously proofread it was ("gate" instead of "gait"); and finally, a crazy crazy thunderstorm that kicked up at about 4:30 and sent us fleeing for our hotel room with the wind dramatically whipping the palm trees. This just ten minutes after Oscar pointed out the encroaching storm clouds and I passed them off as "haze." It was in fact a short, vigorous thunderbuster, which Osk spent wrapped in his quilt with his ear-protectors on. He did not even want to leave the hotel to get dinner, so we ordered a pizza in. Imagine my shock when, later in the evening, both boys elected to go out bodysurfing again. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I got some nice pictures which I'll post tomorrow.

I don't have much snarky or clever to say on the subject of Myrtle Beach aside from the general loveliness of our stay. There is certainly a profusion of the tacky and ridiculous around here - a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum, mini golf with volcanoes spewing dry ice, enough piercing and tattoo parlors to seriously comparison-shop - but we steered clear of all of that in favor of the beach itself. Dynamic but not dangerous surf, warm water, populous but not crowded - an all-around grand vacation spot. We never felt like we were competing with the masses for limited resources, and did not see a single incident of unfriendly or boorish behavior. Right on, Myrtle Beach.

Day Seven: The Atlantic Is Not Just A Fine Periodical

2010-08-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

This morning, the dudes and I managed to depart DC right on schedule. An early wake-up got the boys and I out of Eileen's apartment bright and early (although my boys managed to disrupt her AM meditation practice with a spirited discussion of ballistics right outside her door) with approximately one ton of various luggage, the toting of which has crushed my stature by at least an inch. The weather was FINE when we went into the station at Gallery Place, but by the time our train emerged to cross the Potomac, the skies had torn open in a cataclysmic downpour of Biblical proportions. We got into the airport and onto the parking shuttle without getting wet, thanks to the covered pickup area. All got slightly drenched traversing the six feet from the shuttle bus to the shelter nearest our car, and I got soaked to the skin bolting to the car on my own. Gear stashed, parking paid, and sopping wet, we departed DC at 8AM on the nose. Which was my plan. Heh heh.

The drive to SC was uneventful except for the astounding traffic jam heading in the opposite direction: commuter traffic heading into DC, backed up for miles upon miles. About two hours from our hotel, our route diverged from the Interstate for the first time in our travels, and we spent the rest of the trip driving on two-lane through rural(ish) NC and SC: tobacco fields, ramshackle barns, and the music from "Deliverance" never far from my mental soundtrack. The first time we passed a picturesque roadside stand selling boiled peanuts with a hand-lettered sign, I said "Look, kids! A local delicacy!" The second time, I said, "Hey, kids! Let's stop and get some boiled peanuts!" I figured I'd have a few more kicks at the cat on the boiled-peanut front to wear them down, but there were NO MORE STANDS. A missed culinary opportunity.

So here we are at the fabulous Driftwood Lodge Hotel, a pick from a guidebook that was spot frickin' ON. Our room is $89 per night. It is directly on the ocean and has a little pool overlooking same. The parking is right outside. Our chambers are very spacious and clean and feature a microwave and generous fridge, which we are going to use to cheapskate the hell out of our meals. The ocean is warm. We spent the afternoon wave-jumping. Oscar has finally come to admit that he is enjoying the road trip more than he would have enjoyed staying home. Provisions have been laid in for the next day or so. Splurge: boogie boards. We have cable and wifi and air conditioning and DID I MENTION WE ARE ON THE BEACH? A worthy idyll on the way down to Florida, stumbled across through sheer dumb luck and the judicious use of a Frommer's from the public library. TOMORROW: We get salt and sand everyplace it is possible to get salt and sand on - and in - the human body.

Day Six: In Which the Boys Are Underwhelmed by the Charters of Freedom

2010-08-11T15:54:00.000-07:00

Today I discovered that, while to me we are leaving DC with barely a teenytiny scratch on the surface of the many wonders that are here to behold, the boys have a limit when it comes to awe-inspiring relics and historical artifacts. This morning, we started with the National Archives, a place that makes me geek out like you have no freaking idea. Their slogan should be, "Come for the Constitution, Stay For the Wicked Fascinating Exhibits." It's a bait-and-switch of the best kind. There is always something amazing on display once you've paid your respects to the Charters of Freedom, as they're called. I was for the second time in twelve hours unable to instill in the dudes an appropriate level of wonderment at something of this nature. I could not help but feel a bit worried about the Declaration of Independence, which looks to my unschooled eye to be in rough shape (as one might expect). I now have something else to wake up in the middle of the night concerned about. "Argh! The writing on the Declaration of Independence is getting less legible by the minute!" What the boys really dug was the exhibit that enabled them to edit together their own snippets of D-Day footage into personalized short films. Constitution, Schmonstitution.

My strategy throughout our stay in D.C., souvenir-wise, has been to defer spending money by telling the boys that on our last day here, we would return to the place where the thing they wanted most was located and, within reason, buy it. So despite the fact that the gift shop was the first place they wanted to go in every museum, we managed to spend ZERO DOLLARS on gimcracks until today, when Osk decided we needed to return to Air and Space in order to get a remote-controlled airplane. I managed to haggle him down to a $12 model plane and Ike to a $10 set of toy helicopters and am feeling like I got off cheap in that regard. We bought ice cream treats, pictured above. The red-white-and-blue frozen pop Ike is enjoying is no longer called a "Bomb Pop" as it was in my youth, because post-9/11 we do not refer to frozen desserts as "bombs," especially in our Nation's Capital. It is now a "Patriotic Rocket Pop," which to me is like the "Freedom Fries" of kids' ice cream.

On the way back to Eileen's, I dragged the kids through the West Wing of the National Gallery (the old stuff) and into the East Wing, hoping to captivate the boys with some modern art. You can see above that they were utterly nonplussed by Richard Serra. More entertaining was the lunch we had at a downtown McD's, where the street theater was nonstop and CRAZY. The establishment in which we dined required one to BUY A TOKEN to use the bathroom (because of vandalism, according to the signs) and had a strict condiment-handout policy keyed to the size of the meal ordered (one sauce for six McNuggets or fewer, two sauces for ten or more). Do people try to cadge free BBQ sauces and attempt to subsist thereon?

Not pictured: the return trip to retrieve Aunt Eileen's quilt. Pictured: Oscar diligently assembling his model airplane and then engaging in "creative play" with same. Sound effects: "Whoooosshhhhhhhhhhhh pow pow pow Whoooossshshshhhhhh!" etcetera. Dude loves his airplane. Swim. Dinner. Off for gelato (another treat I've been saving until the end). In the morning, we depart for Myrtle Beach, SC where we will engage in Ike's new favorite pastime: chillaxing.

Day Five and a Half: 24-Hour Party People

2010-08-11T05:01:00.000-07:00

After our late-day swim and cable-TV session (Eileen has mad cable! And on-demand! There are SO MANY CHANNELS!), I persuaded the boys to sojurn out yet again. You see, in DC there are monuments. They are awesome, in both senses of the word. I have never seen them at night, and it is said that one must. I had been planning to take the boys to be stunned into respectful silence by gigantic Abe Lincoln on this trip, and the sweltering heat reinforced the decision do to it after dark. I nerdtastically looked up the sunset: eight PM. After overcoming Oscar's perfectly reasonable protest - "I think I've done enough today" - we Metro-ed down to the Washington Monument. A word on buying Metro cards: we are operating primarily with a credit card, which is dandy, but the Metro card machines will only let you make two purchases with the same card before it determines that you are running some kind of short con and cuts you off. This makes refilling metrocards problematic when one is travelling in a group of THREE.

So down we schlepped. A long discussion ensued at the Wash Mon on the following two subjects: (1) why, despite the proliferation of eminently skateboardable structures around, would it be disrespectful to grind a wicked ollie at the Washington Monument? (this from younger son, who does not skateboard except in his active imagination, in which he is Tony Hawk 2.0) (2) please do not ever, ever, EVER take me up to the top of the Washington Monument in that elevator (guess who?).

Oscar has been wanting to visit the WW2 memorial for months and months. You can see them dipping their feet in its waters above. We determined that dipping feet was OK, but wading was disrespectful. Strangely enough, this somewhat overblown piece of monumentry came as close as anything to imbuing in the dudes something approaching reverence. Oscar has suggested that we return to "worship" there again. His word, not mine.

August+ reflecting pool=gnats.

So I stopped the boys on the steps of the Linc Mon. I took out my Droid. I tried to show them YouTube video of the "I Have A Dream" speech right there on the steps. I thought this was a wicked cool idea. Not very interested. They did, however, stand in something approaching attentiveness during my dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address. I managed to get the boys to hike a mile in 90-degree heat to the metro (rather than take one of the cabs that were swarming like, well, gnats) by persuading them that we could only pay with a credit card, which DC cabs tend not to take. I even let Oscar flag down a couple and ask. Whatever works. We made it to the Metro, me piggybacking Ike some of the way and becoming DRENCHED with sweat.

By this time, it was after nine. I was hungry. I wanted to freaking eat at Jaleo, which sits rightacrossthestreet from my aunt's place, taunting me with its tapas and quesos and cured jamon. So in we went. We ate at the bar. Our bartender was from Ohio and refilled the boys' Sprites in perpetuity. I had (in ingles) chicken croquettes, garlicky shrimp and piquillo peppers stuffed with goat cheese. The boys gamely tried all but the latter. Also: the oily sauce in the bottom of the plates, soaked into some bread, was SO. DELICIOUS. Almost better than the tapas themselves. At last to bed at about 10:30. Tomorrow, we are seriously going to relax. And pick up the quilt at the dry-cleaners.

Day Five: Unexpected Dry-Cleaning Errand, Military History, Sweltering.

2010-08-10T12:47:00.001-07:00

The theme of today's post is: terrible photography. Top to bottom, my (and 25% my kid's) barely-competent pictures depict our day, starting with the unplanned trek around downtown DC trying to locate a laundry/dry cleaner. I would be a poor mother indeed if I revealed to my readership, small as it is, that one of my kids sometimes does not make it to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I would be an even worse mother if I felt even the slightest molecule of irritation about having to spend a big chunk of a 90-degree-plus morning in downtown Washington, DC trying to find a place that will launder my aunt's comforter so that we can simply place it back in the closet so that she would never know the difference. I am completely within my rights to be annoyed at Yelp!, which misled me into thinking that a laundry was located within two blocks from where we're staying, a location which turned out to be a traffic island with no laundering capabilities whatsoev. A friendly guy at a gelateria down the block told us about Happy Cleaners, a place two metro stops distant where I had to haggle - Me! Haggle! For real! - to get the quilt clean by tomorrow afternoon. The top picture depicts us across the street from the yellow-awninged Happy Cleaners, a place which made me not-at-all-happy.

From there, off to the Museum of American History, where Ike got to try a John-Kerry-Campaign-Simulator (aka "Windsurfing Simulator") and Osk got to gratify his military history jones. And I got to visit Julia Child's kitchen (again) and fail to impress on my boys the epic radness of the J.Ch. Theme of the trip: Me launching on a fulsome speech about the awesomeness of some historical artifact or locale; boys walking away; bystanders chuckling knowingly. Wash, rinse repeat. Some of it is sinking in, however, or we would not have spent three full hours in the Museum, just looking at stuff. The kids were such troupers throughout the schlepping aspects of the morning that I not only got them McNuggets for lunch, I let them fill their cups at the soda fountain with whatever disgusting mixture they could dream up as long as they would promise to actually drink it. Hey, it's really hot outside. Dudes need to stay hydrated.

Day Four Continued: Regrettable Chinese Dinner

2010-08-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

Above, in chronological picture format, is the second half of our first full day in D.C. After a relaxing mid-day swim, we headed over to the Air & Space Museum, which is pretty much Mecca for nerdy little boys. The first exhibit we took in featured a GINORMOUS SLIDE RULE and was all about the role of computers in aeronautical design. The entire A&S Museum (as Oscar referred to it all day, although to me "A&S" will always mean "Abraham and Strauss") was much more boffin-friendly than I remembered it, and the Star Wars memorabilia I had seen on a previous visit has either been mothballed or returned to the Skywalker Ranch from whence it came. You can see Oscar above, worriedly examining a vintage plane-spotting schematic so that he will be able to tell a German Fokker looking to strafe our house from a friendly British mail-plane.

We then went, after a bit of arm-twisting, out to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where free performances take place every weekday afternoon in the summer. I had chosen the most kid-friendly of these to attend: a revue of numbers from the musical "Mary Poppins." So had every single parent of children in the entire city. After schlepping out to the Foggy Bottom subway station and from there taking a shuttle bus, we found the Center mobbed with parents and their kids, most of whom were little girls. On the up side, the Center itself is just a stunningly grand place, worth a visit just to soak up the unique vintage-y poshness of the surroundings. I have never had the pleasure of treading on a more plush stretch of carpeting. We took a photo in front of the distinctive sculpture of JFK's Gigantic Head, done in a style that makes him look like a Claymation work-in-progress.

Ike requested barbecued pork buns for dinner. I was happy to try and oblige; we're staying very close to Chinatown. However, I was trying to save money, hoping to light on one of those cheap, revelatory hole-in-the-wall joints with paper tablecloths and sensational, flip-your-wig food. You know, the kind that don't exist. We went to a place called Chinatown Express, which had received wildly mixed reviews on Yelp! but managed to distinguish itself from all the other grotty Chinatown holes-in-the-wall by featuring an actual guy making actual noodles in the window. There was no crowd watching Noodle Guy when we went in, or I might have thought to avoid it, but you can see above the postprandial noodle-watching crowd, including Ike in the tie-dye. My veggie noodles were quite oily and not very good, and Ike's pork buns were not BBQ at all - sort of like vaguely garlicky/gingery meatballs in dough wrappers. Oscar, however demolished his plate of dumplings and is now hectoring me for a return trip to Chinatown Express for more. Not happening.

Ike's fortune-cookie fortune read: "You will set foot on the soil of many countries." This blew his freaking mind because, as he said repeatedly as we walked home from the restaurant, "It's true! My fortune is true! It's actually true!" I was not given a fortune cookie (another black mark against Chinatown Express) but if I had, it might have read, "You already regret paying twenty dollars for this meal." We are SO going to Jaleo tomorrow, if I have to DRAG THEM THERE BY THEIR HAIR.

Day Four: The Temple of Democracy

2010-08-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

Above you see a portrait I am entitling "Ike and Ike." It was taken in our nation's capitol, the tour of which was stunning in both the knowledge base of the tourgide and the incredibly small fraction of the building we were allowed to see. The statue of Dwight D. Eisenhower in front of which my own Ike is standing can be found in the capitol rotunda, along with sundry other pieces of deeply impressive figurative sculpture strewn about the capitol building. You cannot swing a cat in that place without hitting a marble or bronze life-sized figure of somebody you've heard of if you were paying attention in history class instead of romantically daydreaming about every not-yet-uncloseted gay classmate in your high school. We saw: a movie about Democracy; the CRYPT, where they were originally planning on burying George Washington but did not realize until after constructing his elaborate crypt that he preferred not to be entombed therein; the rotunda itself; and the sculpture hall, where Fighting Bob LaFollette's marble likeness is displayed along with about one hundred other sculptures, making the room look like nothing so much as a yard-ornament showroom.

Also notable was the oddly asymmetrical painting on the dome itself, which depicted George Washington along with thirteen assorted pieces of skirt intended to represent the original thirteen states. I snapped a picture of it - Washington is the guy who looks like he's about to be neutered by the dame with the sword. It just struck me as funny that the father of our great nation is depicted as spending eternity in a thirteen-member menage without his wife. Hee hee. Also notable: Oscar opted for us to take the Metro back to Penn Quarter, without his protective ear coverings. He is depicted above, enduring an air-conditioned train trip rather than schlepping in ninety-degree weather. We are off for a mid-afternoon swim before we go see the Star Wars gear at the Air and Space Museum.

Day Three: A Day of Firsts, and Our Nation's Capitol

2010-08-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

It was not easy to get the boys to leave the Courtyard Marriott in North Olmsted, Ohio, which the boys now consider their second home. Because I have spent so little time in hotels in my adult life, it did not occur to me that a previous resident of our room may have set the alarm clock until ours went off at six AM. So the dudes and I got an early start on the day, which I never mind much. The boys each insisted on bringing a go-cup of decaf from the in-room machine along with them, although I doubt it's going to make lifelong coffee drinkers of them. We bought a half-gallon of milk at a nearby Wal-Mart and put it into our cooler filled with free hotel ice, a piece of dining cheapskatery topped only by our sitting in the rest stop this afternoon making our own peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch and pouring the milk into restaurant paper cups.

Staggeringly, we made it the entire seven-hour drive without engaging the Nintendo DSI. For once, the boys have sparked an interest in something I've tried to interest them in: the obsessive reading of maps. We hit D.C. at about 4PM, hit next to no traffic and parked in the economy lot. We still had milk left over, and rather than leave it in the car in 90-degree weather, I thought I'd schlep it to my aunt's Penn Quarter apartment on the subway along with the rest of our gear. I then forgot the milk after setting it on the ground in the Metro station to read a map. I realized this later on and hope that the discovery of my mysterious jug of liquid abandoned in the airport subway station didn't result in an emergency evacuation.

Not enough can be said about the luscious and much-needed vegetable-filled meal served to us by the world's best cook, Eileen. I will save my space for kvelling over Oscar's successful (1) taking the subway without complaint, and (2) taking the elevator to the 12th floor of Eileen's building, the first elevator he has taken in years. Photographic proof is above. An evening rooftop swim was enjoyed by all. Yes, that is the Washington Monument in the background of the swimming-pool shot. And last of all, we sloped across the street for a late-night visit to TangySweet, the DC fro-yo place. I forced the boys to stand outside Jaleo (visible in the background of our nighttime cityscape) and read the menu while we were eating our dessert. I am going to take them there. They will sit and watch me eat tapas until I burst, whether they like it or not. And if I can force some cheese-stuffed piquillo peppers into their cakeholes, so much the better.

Tomorrow: We tour the Capitol with the hopes of cornering Massachussetts congressman Scott Brown and asking him some tough questions.

Day Two: Cleveland Rocks!

2010-08-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

Our second day of road-tripping has at last taken us to points heretofore unvisited by the boys. We tiptoed out of Aunt Naomi's lovely apartment this morning at nine after a breakfast of tea, toast and peaches and hit the road for Ohio. I managed to keep the kids from begging for the Nintendo DSI for a little over an hour as we took in the idyllic scenery of the South side of Chicago, which some consider "the baddest part of down." We were very alert for the presence of one of its most notorious denizens, one Leroy Brown, who is said to be badder than a junkyard dog.

Good news of the day: the "IPass" works in states other than Illinois. In fact, it also works in states that begin with letters other than "I". Bad news: at my first attempted gas-up of the doughty Beigemobile, the cash-loaded debit card with which I have been equipped for this trip DID NOT WORK. Either at the pump or inside. The flossy-haired woman working the gas station was deeply skeptical of my attempts to pay for gas with this card, which is emblazoned with the word "Buxx." When I called the customer service number on the back of the card, I was given only the following two options: press "1" if you are the parent or guardian of the cardholder; or press "2" if you are the teen cardholder. I am neither! I am the cardholder, and have not been a teen for nearly two decades, despite the fact that I still feel like an awkward thirteen-year-old and also still get acne. The point being: My husband gave me a teenager cash card for the road trip.

We reached Cleveland in good time, checked into our hotel room, which the boys decided immediately that they never want to leave. They do not have much experience staying in hotels, and find the Courtyard Marriott to be a veritable Xanadu of pleasures. We met up with former MFA colleague Brian and his wife Mary for dinner at a superbly-selected restaurant called Fathead's, where I enjoyed one of the most delicious bacon-cheeseburgers I can recall ever having the pleasure of consuming. The boys sat and read patiently throughout the meal; good on you, boys! We repaired to Brian and Mary's lovely and spotlessly clean home and met their baby son Elliott, who managed to be both adorable and distinguished-looking simultaneously. Brian is a genius who will soon knock the world on its arse with his debut novel, and Mary is raising a future Nobel Peace Prize winner. Also, they have a Wii and let my boys sing "Eye of the Tiger" with their American Idol Karaoke game.

Above you see my guys posing on Brian and Mary's front porch with Elliott, as well as a snap of them enjoying a sybaritic good time in the Marriott hot tub. They have already asked me if we can come back to Ohio next year and replicate this visit in every single respect except its brevity. Tomorrow: Our Nation's Capital! Taxation without Representation!

Day One: Chicago

2010-08-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

Miles: 140. States: 2. Nosebleeds: 1.

Our not-terribly-ambitious first day took us to Chicago, where we're staying in the bijou apartment of my fabulous, youthful and stylish sister-in-law Naomi. We didn't leave Madison until 1:30. An uneventful two-hour drive took us to Mitsuwa, an Asian market I've been wanting to visit for months. The mission was to find a kendama, a wooden Japanese toy with which my boys have been obsessed since seeing one of the swim-team coaches playing compulsively, a la Captain Queequeg, with one throughout the All City Swim Meet. If a swim team coach were to walk around in a pair of giant clown shoes singing the hits of Captain and Tennille and huffing glue, all of the kids on swim team would follow suit. The kids really want kendamas. Turns out Mitsuwa is more of a food and grocery operation. I bookmarked it for later culinary-type shopping trips. We bought fruit-flavored jelly candies and moved on.

A parking-lot-style traffic jam later, we made it to Naomi's and strolled from there over to Wicker Park to grab some food. Above is pictured the takeout window of Big Star, Naomi's pick, where I procured three different tacos: borrego (marinated lamb shoulder with radish and queso fresco); panza (crispy pork belly, guajillo sauce and more queso); and pastor (roasted pork shoulder with grilled pineapple). All scrumptious, chased with delicious limeade while seated in the park. Quite possibly the perfect meal. Sadly, I was so famished I couldn't savor it slowly; three tacos were demolished by me (yes, the passive voice is called-for here. I am deflecting responsibility for the inhalation of said tacos). Then I had to polish off Ike's shrimp basket and some of Oscar's leftover fries, because - say it with me - WE ARE NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF WASTING FOOD. Which is as close as I get to a parenting motto.

So far, the boys have yet to embrace the spirit of the Great American Road Trip. But it will happen, hopefully tomorrow on the way to Cleveland. The 2010 road trip has features my own childhood road trips lacked (GPS, portable video games, wide availability of lattes) but is also missing some things the 1980 version possessed (CB radios, hitchhikers, toll-booth tickets). Time will tell which is superior. Stay tuned for Day 2: Cleveland, a town which, it is rumored. rocks.

The Cross-Country Chariot Awaits!

2010-08-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

I apologize to my reader (hi, mom!) for the moribund quality of this blog for lo these many months. My excuse is primarily technical: new computer, new phone, lost passwords, blah de blah blah. But here I am back up on the blog, and for a special, non-food-related reason: EPIC ROAD TRIP. Oh, who am I kidding. The road trip is just a pretext for eating. The Dudes and I are off today for a nearly three-week tour of the east-southeastern section of this great nation of ours. It's a first in many respects. The boys have never been to 90% of the places we're visiting, I've never planned my very own grownup road trip before, and we're definitely venturing into new vistas of one-parenting. Because it's JUST ME and the guys. I have copious amounts of vacation time and adventure mojo, my husband does not. I have high hopes that, equipped with my new Droid, I am going to blog this trip like no trip has ever been blogged before, because the world breathlessly awaits.

Today's short, initial leg takes us to Chicago. Lodgings: hip sister-in-law's apartment in Wicker Park Adjacent. Departure time: 1PM, after tearful goodbye with sleepy-eyed husband. Planned stop: Mitsuwa, an Asian mall in the suburb of Schaumburg. The twin goals of this trip are to flip the boys' wigs and to spend as little money as possible. Vast amounts of provisions have been laid in. A cooler has been purchased. Many, many library books have been packed with the optimistic hope that all will make the return trip. Like Lewis and Clark (which makes me Sacajawea, I suppose. I'll take it.), we venture forth, calling up the road trips of my youth.

The first obstacle in getting out the door is persuading Oscar to part with the Playstation long enough to dispatch the following simple chore: "Choose your most comfortable pair of sneakers." So far, this task has stymied him for a solid hour. This will not stand.

About de Souffle

2010-02-26T08:35:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are (a) familiar with the French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague, and (b) aware that I am a moron who does not know how to put French accents on my blog, the title of this post will strike you as a clever multilingual pun. The rest of you - tough noogies. My many faithful blog-readers (hi, Mom!) will know that I have been dealing with a surfeit of eggs this winter, and seeking out eggy recipes. It occurred to me recently that I had never made a souffle. This is odd, since it's just the type of dish that would have struck me, when I was a child, as just the type of elegant, tricky thing that I should try to cook. I was always a bit of a freak-job about food, especially food that either sounded awesome or seemed emblematic of the elegant, madcap-heiress life I longed to lead. Every so often, my mother would relent and allow/help me cook something. Jambalaya, once. Chocolate crepes filled with ice cream. I once made candied orange peels, because I read about them in a book somewhere. Nothing practical that would have actually, say, helped my mother feed her family of six. Just flights of mostly-idiotic fancy. Once, on our annual Fancy Dinner trip to the Candlewood Inn, where I had my annual lobster, I ordered a bottle of Perrier to drink because I liked the Frenchy sound of it: perry-yay. Hated the taste, as it turned out: bitter.

But souffle is something else. Although it used a parsimonious three eggs, the recipe I used made the most of those eggs. View as exhibit (a) the glorious crown of crusty cheesiness above. That is my first-ever souffle, made with Gruyere cheese (within) and Parmesan (without). The dish was buttered AND cheesed, creating that splendid rich crust all over its exterior, not just on top. Despite the fact that the necessity of utter peace and quiet whilst baking a souffle is a time-worn sitcom gag (at least from my Julia Child-hood in the Seventies), my souffle did not collapse despite the presence of children in the house. They did refrain from Irish step-dancing or playing the timpani during the baking process, but even their sporadic incursions into the kitchen did not pop my masterpiece.

Even after it deflated, the souffle looked tasty. I was expecting it to slump, post-oven, into a puddle of scrambled-egg-looking barf, but the slices maintained some of their structural integrity on the plate, and the interior of the souffle had a light, fluffy mouth-feel that tasted of the richness of butter and the tanginess of cheese. This is yet another dish where my plodding recipe-following ended up looking like kitchen genius. My husband asked me, "Is this something you can... order at restaurants?" and I had to explain to him that a souffle belongs to a sort of hidebound, traditional sort of canonical French cuisine that is the very definition of outmoded nowadays. I can't imagine what type of place you'd go to order one. It's the type of ephemeral dish that I think would be hard to cook on a large scale, but perfect for a fanciful home cook with eggs to burn. Metaphorically speaking.

Valentine's Cookiepocalypse

2010-02-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, I took a solo weekend trip to a museum in Lausanne, Switzerland called "La Musee de L'Art Brut," which was full of outsider art made by people in prisons and insane asylums. A lot of the art seemed...pathology-specific. You could almost diagnose the insanity by looking at the artwork: a hand-crocheted lace dress made of loose threads collected from asylum bedsheets; pictures of sporting events in stadiums with each member of the audience carefully, individually drawn by hand; a large, wooden mechanical chicken. I was thinking of this artwork while making the above-pictured Valentine's cookies for my kids' classmates. It is beyond debate that there is something a bit off about me upstairs, and this project is the pure manifestation of my compulsiveness, desire to please, and willingness to engage in self-punishing activities, especially if they result in a tasty dessert.

The cookies are also my personal political stand on what I feel to be the utter assiness, for lack of a better word, of commercially-produced Valentine cards, which no longer even include a separate paper envelope - you just fold them and insert a tab into a slot. These, to me, are anti-Valentines, proclaiming, "I care so little about you that I can't even be bothered to lick an envelope on your behalf." My cookies, on the other hand, boldly state, "I am obsessed with you. A stalker. You may want to take out a restraining order."

This project is WAY more for me than for my children, I freely admit. I have always wanted to try my hand at royal icing, which is made with meringue powder, confectioner's sugar and water and makes the glossy smooth surface you see on the cookies they sell at places like Starbucks for three dollars apiece. It turned out to be easy. No cooking at all. You just mix a pound of powdered sugar, five tablespoons of meringue powder (which they sell in the amazing cake-decorating aisle at the Hellmouth known as Michael's Craft Store) and a "scant" half-cup of water (this instruction always makes me mentally substitute "scanty" and imagine that I am required to prepare the recipe in a pair of granny undies and an apron). I added some Meyer lemon juice to the liquid to give my frosting some flavor and tartness (which is, admittedly very subtle. When your recipe includes a pound of sugar, that's the flavor that dominates). The cookies look wicked awesome, and I now feel confident enough in my royal icing skillz to experiment with more Whole Foods-bakery-esque cookies. Also: I actually dislike Valentine's Day with a force that cannot be overstated, but heart-shaped desserts are its one redeeming feature.

PS the one that says "Sweet Cheeks" is for my husband. That is all.

Answer: The egg. Obviously.

2010-01-31T15:30:00.000-08:00

The age-old question, "Which came first: the chicken or the egg?" supposedly has no answer, and sends your mind reeling in an eternal Moebius strip of confusion. This is stupid. Maybe law school ruined my thought processes forever and I'm trying to effectively get off on a technicality, but the question doesn't specify that the egg in question is a CHICKEN egg. Lots of other animals lay eggs. Insects, for one extremely gigantic swath of the animal kingdom. Reptiles and amphibians. Fish lay eggs that taste yummy on top of sushi. Dinosaurs laid eggs that were then fossilized to provide evidence, eons later, that eggs came first. All of these animals predated poultry by a comfy margin. So let's stipulate that the egg came before the chicken, and also stipulate that law school warps your brain and fills your vocabulary with jargon.

Eggs are on my mind this week because I'm once again caring for the Chickens Across the Street. I feed them each morning, freshen up their water, chuck them a handful of cracked corn or expired green vegetables, and collect their eggs. It being January in Wisconsin, this last task is time-sensitive. There's about a four-hour window in the morning when the hens are laying, and I usually end up making multiple trips to the coop to ensure that no eggs freeze and crack. So far, I've only had one egg suffer this fate. Ike (pictured above, proudly brandishing his haul from one such trip) and I collected a single semi-gelid egg, which I reassured him we could scramble and eat. When we cracked it into the bowl, the white stayed in a more or less oval shape with the yolk suspended and semi-visible nestled in its center. It reminded me a bit of those lamps you can buy at IKEA that feature a lightbulb in the middle of a block of clear glass.

So the 5 additional eggs a day we're getting from the neighboring birds are in addition to the weekly dozen of happy-chicken eggs a local farmer delivers to me and my co-workers at the library. This amounts to a serious surfeit of eggs, and the need to seek out recipes to consume them. Spanish tortilla uses a whopping ten. Lemon squares use two whole and seven yolks, leaving the problem of seven whites. Angel-food cake uses twelve to fourteen whites, which would then leave me with five to seven yolks (can you see how this could go on forever?). The good news is that I love, love, love eggs. They are scrumptious and versatile, buttery-delicious on their own but able to serve as a sort of blank slate for all manner of sweet and savory flavors. And these eggs in particular are guilt-free. The birds that produce them are practically members of my neighborhood association. Nearly blood-related. Sometimes I cook one up for breafast before it has even had the chance to cool to room temperature after being ejected from the relative tropics of the chicken's posterior end. More of our egg adventures are to come, including - wait for it - my first souffle.

Fortunately/Unfortunately

2010-01-14T17:25:00.000-08:00

Fortunately for me, I have this AMAZING blender. A Vita-Mix. The kind Charlie Trotter tells you might be worth taking out a second mortgage on your house to own. Unfortunately, I broke it last weekend in an incident that now takes a top slot in my very extensive Annals of Stupidity. Here's the story:

So the Packers made the playoffs, an event that registers in importance for me somewhere slightly above the latest election results from Liechtenstein. It matters to me insofar as it provides an opportunity to produce Man Food for an appreciative audience, and Man Food means chili. My chili recipe involves the following: brisket; beer; fresh cilantro; butternut squash; ancho chiles. It does not involve: beans. This is apparently a Texas thing, although my chile-expert bona fides are flimsy. However, I find it tasty. I set out to make my chili last Sunday morning, a Day That Will Live in Appliance-Destruction Infamy. Soaked the dried chilis, chucked them into the blender along with garlic and lots of other spices that are so super-secret that they can only be found listed in the October, 2008 issue of Bon Appetit. Affixed the mixing pestle gizmo to the lid of the Vita-Mix and turned it on.

What happened next is nearly too idiotic to recount. The clear plastic plug that goes in the Vita-Mix lid when the pestle gizmo is not in use was IN THE BLENDER underneath all of the aforementioned tasty chili ingredients, which in my haste I had thrown in without looking first. Because of my persistent, bull-headed pestling, I managed to do real and permanent damage to the blender, which I could replace for the cost of a plane ticket to Liechtenstein.

Unfortunately, later that day, I discovered that my sister and her family were planning to come over to my house for dinner due to a miscommunication worthy of "Three's Company." Fortunately, I had TONS of chili. Unfortunately, my chili is more spicy than the average under-ten-year-old's palate will take. Fortunately, I had justenoughtime to make some corn bread to bulk out the meal with starch and sugar. Unfortunately, only TWO of the ten guests at my impromptu football gathering would eat my chili. Fortunately, lots of leftovers were available for moi. And MOST fortunately of all, my friend Sarah L. recommended a local appliance-repair business that currently has possession of the hobbled Vita-Mix and is bringing it back to life for, I hope, the price of a bus ticket to Chicago. I am now looking for a new chili recipe.

And, unfortunately, the Packers lost.

Cake Time.

2010-01-09T14:35:00.000-08:00

I've blogged a lot about pie, but not about cake. The two desserts are pitted against each other, in my mind, much like Edward and Jacob in the "Twilight" movies. Each has its own particular allure. To continue the metaphor, I guess pie would be Jacob - less fancy, more comfort-food-ish, humble but sweet - and the cake would be Edward Cullen - lovely to look at, dressed-up, tasty but not at all redeeming. At least a fruit pie has some nutritional value to it, whereas cake is just sugar and white flour and butter and everything designed to rot your teeth and clog your arteries and make you feel a bit regretful for having consumed too much. I have lots more affection for pie, but can and will bust out a cake when necessary.

That's the thing about cake: there has to be an occasion. I'll make a pie just because some fruit or other is in season, but a cake in my household tends to commemorate an event, usually a birthday. The above cake was produced to mark the last day of a longtime co-worker and Bollywood fanatic named Kjerstin who is departing for a two-month trip to India, requiring her to quit working at the library. The scheduling stars aligned properly to allow baking, frosting and decorating of a cake to be delivered during her final shift, as they must. Pie is a one-shot deal, but cake involves steps. Bake the layers, let them cool. Make the frosting and spackle it on. Decorate (possibly involving the production of another batch of frosting), using my ridonkulous collection of pastry tips and other cake-decorating gizmos. I actually took a course on this once, and can turn out a supermarket-bakery-looking cake if that's what you want, but for this one, I decided to be a bit thematic.

The cake itself was a spice cake (get it? Spices! They come from India!), made with fresh grated ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, ground cloves and cardamom as well as half a stick of brown butter. The frosting is made with cream cheese and is a one-bowl deal, no cooking required. The concept here was a mehndi-design cake, like those henna tattoos Indian women and American hipsters apply to their hands and feet. I printed some patterns off of the internet, tinted my extra frosting in my best approximation of the color of henna, and had at it. You can probably tell I didn't really plan ahead. My mehndi-inspired designs were nowhere near as elaborate as the real thing, but hopefully the cake at least looked sort of Indian-ish. Although now that I look at it again, my paisleys look more like parameciums (paramecia?) with hairy pseudopods sticking off of them. Maybe if somebody I know gets a degree in biology, I can make a cake for that, too.

Cheap Ingredients x (Work + Time) = Tastiness

2010-01-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

Today we made ravioli (a preliminary lexicographic note: "ravioli" is plural, like "panini"; no terminal s is required. See, mom, my semester in Italy was useful). This project was inspired by my niece Eileen's newly-minted obsession with ravioli, and by a somewhat-recent trip to visit my aunt Eileen (for whom the niece is named) during which the pasta machine was pressed into service. This is the same aunt who taught me about pesto. She's the kind of cook I'd like to be but will never become: unpretentious, able to improvise, never makes it look difficult. Most of all, she's not show-offy with her cooking. When she throws a dinner party, the food is at the center of the gathering and quality ingredients, prepared simply and well. are at the center of the meal. Last summer when I visited, she made fresh pasta look like something one might just throw together.

For me, it wasn't quite that simple. The location of my pasta machine was the first obstacle. Once the machine itself was located, the handle, without which its dough-flattening drums wouldn't turn, remained elusive. The machine was also in rough shape. At some point, the Two Dudes realized that it could be used to shred paper (a secondary use I've since seen highlighted in Real Simple, the magazine for the type of person who has an extra pasta machine lying around). There was some rusty-looking crud in its undercarriage that made me decide its days in food production were over. I never thought I'd live long enough to purchase a second pasta machine, but there it is in the pictures above, cranking out sheets of dough.

I long thought you had to use semolina flour (not cheap) to make pasta. False. This recipe used two cups of regular old flour, three eggs (from the chickens featured in the previous post) and a tiny tinch of water. Food processor, rest 15 minutes, finished. Through trial and error we were soon producing long, translucently-thin strips of dough. The filling is a mixture of 1 cup ricotta, 1/2 cup each grated mozzarella and parmesan, one egg yolk, some chopped fresh basil, 1/2 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper, mixed together. You don't need a handy ravioli-frame like mine (last picture) but it helps, and makes for uniform ravioli. Eileen told me that I reminded her of Ma Ingalls from the "Little House" books because I like my food to "look pretty." She has no idea that I also wear a mobcap and eat popcorn with my husband in bed. Heh.

The Bird is the Word

2009-12-30T13:58:00.000-08:00

For the last week and a half, my sister's family has, perhaps ill-advisedly, left me in charge of their menagerie of pets. I've developed an intense, personal philosophy on the subject of "companion animals," driven partially by my aversion to the handling and disposal of their spoor, and also by my firm conviction that there is no animal alive whose lot would be improved by living under my roof. I lack the selflessness required to devote myself to the care of a creature that will never grow up and be able watch "Monty Python" episodes with me - and get the jokes. The occasional pet-care gig allows me to reinforce my views, which I like to think are solidly pro-animal but are probably just pro-laziness. Included in my temporary zoo this past week were the clutch of fowl pictured above. The photo was taken at the request of my lovely niece Helen, who is the birds' devoted mistress. She was so bereft while on vacation that she asked me to email her a picture.

My personal experience with these birds is that their personalities, such that they are, are insufficiently magnetic to cause any real bonding to take place. I've fed them chicken feed (looks like grey Grape-Nuts cereal), cracked corn (and I don't care...), organic greens and ground-up oyster shell. I've interrupted the same snowy-colored bird in the middle of the egg-laying process more than once, an experience not unlike opening the bathroom door when the biffy is already occupied. The chicken eyeballed me with just that sort of a look, with accompanying remonstrative clucking: "Shut the door!" I have also discovered the one rooster in flagrante with each and every member of its avian harem. The rooster is named Jesse, but I have determined to name him (privately, in my head) either Uday or Qusay, whichever of Saddam Hussein's sons was the more perverse. He does not relent in his vigorous lovemaking even when I gently nudge him aside to top off the water tank - just scoots aside a bit, nonplussed. He is one determined pecker.

The culinary silver lining here are the eggs - three a day, like clockwork, as fresh as they come. I already have a source for sustainable, fresh eggs free of all the crud that is found in the factory-farmed variety, so the additional bounty has got me scrambling (HA!) for recipes that consume copious amounts of egg. Spanish tortilla is a strong contender, as it uses the whole egg. Many egg-heavy recipes tend to use lots of whites (meringue) or lots of yolks (lemon curd, the most delicious substance known to man), but not both. I love a soft-cooked egg on toast for breakfast, but it's not the most efficient attack, egg-consumption-wise.

As of this evening, the little cluckers will no longer be my responsibility, but we'll be enjoying the eggs for a while yet. Although I don't find them to be compelling conversationalists, even in their native tongue (beak?), I have to respect their ability to produce one of the more delicious, versatile foods extant. Human eggs, by comparison, are microscopic and have no gastronomic potential at all unless fertilized, incubated for nine months, nurtured for eighteen years and then subjected to a stage at The French Laundry. So chalk one up for the chickens. And another, if you count coq au vin, which I do, but Helen most emphatically does NOT.

Team Pie

2009-12-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

My niece Helen turned eight recently. She's hands-down the most appreciative diner who passes through my door nowadays. Not only does she effusively vocalize her appreciation for food, she backs it up by taking seconds and cleaning her plate. What's more, she will specifically request certain dishes in advance, which to me is the ultimate proof that Helen is not just being polite (unless she's a gastro-masochist of some sort and likes to intentionally subject herself to food she dislikes in order to boost the cook's self-esteem). When her mom asked her what she wanted for her birthday dinner, Helen's chosen menu featured chicken and dumplings followed by peach pie - both dishes I feed her family regularly. I go way back with chicken and dumplings. My mom used to make a pot of it on top of our wood-burning stove during the many epic wintertime power outages of my Connecticut childhood and deliver it to one of our elderly neighbors. I've found a recipe I like and serve it to my sister's family because it's one of the few things in my repertoire that reliably serves ten. The dumplings are highly coveted, and I've considered making this dinner in a wider, flatter pan to create more liquid surface area, thus accommodating a greater number of dumplings.

What you see above is a sequential photo-tableau of the dinner - the pot of chicken and dumplings, served at the table right off of the stove and usually as hot as magma. Afterwards, my niece Eileen lit candles on the pie (frozen back in August when the peaches were at their sweetest and most delectable) and I played the "Happy Birthday" song on my ukulele. You see Helen in the next-to final picture, radiant in all her rosy-cheeked ginger-haired splendor, preparing to tuck into peach pie in November. The pie itself retained its shape famously, not slumping into the hole created by removal of the first piece the way fruit pies do so often and so frustratingly. We all went home stuffed with sugar and carbohydrates and pleased with Helen's choice of a home-cooked meal over a pizza at some establishment that also features a video arcade. What can I say? The kid has good taste.

On The Importance of Pictures in Cookbooks

2009-11-12T04:55:00.000-08:00

I dislike cookbooks without pictures. Perhaps this is indicative of a lack of imagination on my part, but if a cookbook lacks illustration I'm likely to just pass it over entirely. A perfect example of this is Bake Until Bubbly, an enticingly-titled casserole coookbook from last year that seemed right up my alley: an encyclopedia of one-dish comfort food retooled for the 'oughties with an elegant package and not a Frito topping in sight. The cover featured a baked something-or-other in a posh Emile Henri dish with a blanket of brown-speckled cheese on top. But inside? No pictures. Feh!

I carve out an exception for Joy Of Cooking, my oldest and most-battered cookbook. That one does feature useful diagrams (its schematic on how to remove the wishbone from a chicken was a particular boon), but its recipes are by an large picture-free. However, just about everything in Joy is so standard-issue that an explanatory image is unnecessary. I know, within a certain margin of error, what meatloaf, or guacamole, and banana bread are meant to look like. It's the new stuff, the exotica, about which I need a visual hint. I encounter the same obstacle while ordering food at Asian restaurants. The menu descriptions tend to be workmanlike lists of ingredients, many of them almost indistinguishable from one another: basil, garlic, ginger, onions, etcetera. Obviously, the dishes are very different, but without knowing the proportions of the flavors, amount, color and consistency of sauce, I'm at a loss, and order with the precision of throwing a dart at a dartboard. Pictures would help. Is this dish going to be brown, or green, or some shade of red or orange?

Because I attack the preparation of a recipe the way a model enthusiast assembles an airplane kit, I'm always thrilled when something I make looks exactly like the photo. I recently found myself in possession of a number of long, bright-red peppers and no idea as to how they might be prepared. In one of those pleasing instances of serendipity, I found a simple recipe for a mezze involving the grilling of said peppers on a day lovely enough to fire up my grill. The book was called Vefa's Kitchen, a gorgeous compendium of Greek recipes almost entirely unuseful to a person whose food budget rarely accomodates the splurge of lamb or seafood. The peppers came out just precisely the way they were supposed to, and what's more, the bowl I served them in, a much-used wedding gift from our friend Zoe, echoed the graphics on the cover of the cookbook. Happiness. Here's the recipe:

1. Roast some long, sweet pointy Italian red peppers - you can throw in a spicy green one or two if you like. I grilled them until the outsides were charred, but you can do this over a gas stove by spearing them with a long fork and turning them over in the open flame of a burner (remove the thingamabob that holds your pots off the burner first) until they are evenly blotched with black. Immediately, put them in a container with a lid, a bowl covered with cling wrap, or a paper bag closed with a rubber band. This steams the skins. Once they're cool enough to handle, scrape off the skin of the peppers with a knife. They will be red and flaccid.

2. Dress the peppers with a dressing made of a 2-to-1 ratio of olive oil and red wine vinegar, seasoned to your taste with pinches of salt, pepper, and/or oregano. Use as much or as little as you please. These are supposed to be better the next day, but I couldn't resist eating them right away. Serve them on a lovely plate or dish.

Brown Food; Or, The Answer to a Hypothetical

2009-11-09T15:09:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time pondering hypotheticals that would never, ever come to pass. How would I survive if I were trapped in an avalanche? What would I do if (and WHEN, darn it, WHEN) a magical time-stopping amulet came into my possession? And given the choice to eat only one color of food for the rest of my life, what color would I choose? This last one was a real conundrum, even though of the three I've just mentioned it's certainly the least likely to come to fruition. Nonetheless, it's been good for a fair number of amusing dinner-table conversations over the years. What would you choose?

Red is usually high on the list for me. Cherries, berries, strawberry ice cream and shakes on the sweet side; tomato anything on the savory side (including, I think, pizza), spicy soups and curries swimming in rich, spicy sauce. Red foods are full of zest and life. Apples are red, but only some and only with skins on. Which brings one to white foods: bread, all dairy, mashed potatoes (a HUGE plus in the white column), bananas, pizza bianca, fettucine alfredo. Do apples count as red or white? What about a sandwich on white bread without any visible filling? And with visible filling, which color rules? Is all varicolored food off the table in my hypothetical, or is the dominant color dispositive? And did law school truly and permanently alter my brain chemistry? (the answer to this last one is a likely "yes")

Brown food wins. I heard on a food podcast recently that to the American palate, "caramelized" is the most-favored flavor of anything and everything. And caramelized food is brown. Almost anything worth eating can be made brown and, in the process, delicious. Apple pie? Brown. Lamb rogan josh? Brown. Chocolate ice cream, beef stroganoff, baked potatoes, roast chicken? All brown. Beer! Mexican coca-cola! Sole meuniere! The list goes on and on. Maybe if I lived in a warmer climate with better year-round access to the full Roy G. Biv of fresh produce I'd feel differently, but when the temperature drops below, say, 50 degrees and stays there for eight months of the year, you want food that is warm and tastes warm. Creme brulee is totally brown, if you do it properly.

The above poorly-lit photos represent an entirely brown meal I served my family this week. The overall brownness was a combination of serendipity, seasonality, and sales (on chuck roast, which I use to make beef stew). Beef stew was my number-one favorite meal as a kid. When I asked my mother later in life for her recipe, she simply said, "I just use beef Soup Starter [pictured above]." That doesn't help me. They no longer make Soup Starter, for one, and I'm not a "starter" type of gal. My beef stew takes about four hours to make and tastes pretty darned good. As does my pumpkin pie, with crust made from scratch. Canned pumpkin, though. There is a quorum among experts that canned is in fact superior to fresh pumpkin where pies are concerned, and having done it the hard way once I'm inclined to agree. My pie above is cracked. You wanna make something of it? It tasted AWESOME and, like the rest of the meal, was well camouflaged on my brown tabletop; we had to just grope around for it.

Next post: some VERY red food.

Nuggets.

2009-11-02T16:52:00.000-08:00

No excuse for the lag in blogging. I have a half a summer's worth of lovely pictures of fruit tarts and salads that have not been dissected and analyzed and transformed into pop-culture-referential blog posts. Tonight we made nuggets. I'm reading a book called "Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 Mom, 4 Kids and 104 Recipes." Even though this woman has clearly stolen my concept, I'm reading it and finding it less unbearably smug than I thought. The author, Emily Franklin, clearly has her shizz together. Her complement of kids outnumbers mine by 100% and she still manages to cook with flair and a sense of adventure, if her book is to be believed. Oscar spotted her "Mom Nuggets" recipe, which is provided in its early pages as an example of an uncharacteristic capitulation to kid-friendly cooking (her swell kids bravely eat curries and tofu and what-have-you for the entire rest of the book), and that was what Osk wanted us to have. He rarely weighs in with a specific meal request, so when he does, it is taken seriously. I'd like him to cultivate some joie de manger as well as relieve a little of the neverending freaking burden of figuring out what to make for dinner, a mental millstone that is ten times more onerous than the actual cooking.

So the nuggets. Photo One here is Ike's illustration of a Swissair passenger jet being loaded with a supply of "mom nuggets" for, he says, "a whole year and more." The second picture depicts the meal itself, which looks gratifyingly (to me) like we dumped a Happy Meal onto his plate. However, our nuggets are accompanied by roasted turnips from the veggie box; I should say roasted turnip singular, since we served our entire family from a single 'nip the size of a baby's head. The honey-mustard sauce we also made ourselves, although we could have probably called my sister across the street and dipped (literally) into her personal collection of scrounged McDonalds nugget sauces. The dinner was a smashing success with the under-10 set (except for the turnips, natch) and yielded enough leftover nugs for tomorrow night's dinner, when I'll be working. Here's the recipe, adapted from Emily Franklin:

2 lbs boneless chicken, white OR dark

1/2 c whole-wheat flour

4 eggs

2 1/2 c panko bread crumbs

olive oil

Cut the chicken into nugget shapes. Do not use dinosaur cookie cutters, because there is something seriously demented about a dead animal formed into the shape of another extinct animal. Dredge in flour, dip in beaten eggs, roll in panko. Set them on a plate to get them all racked up for frying. Heat the oven to 300 whilst you heat a goodly amount of olive oil in a nonstick skillet at med-high. Brown the nuggets in the oil, flipping once. As they are done, put them on a cookie sheet in the oven to keep warm. When they're all done, raise the heat to 375 and leave them in there for a few minutes, or as long as you think they need to be cooked through and/or as brown as you like. Depending on the bulkiness of your nuggets, they may be entirely cooked through straight out of the pan, but you may not want to serve them that way to your family, who will scorch their tongues on the molten-lava-hot chicken.

You can freeze the extras and reheat them on a cookie sheet. Screw you, McDonalds!!!!

Madison Mini Marathon!!!

2009-08-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Another digressive, non-food-related blog post. This morning, my better half and I ran the inaugural Madison Mini Marathon (which was, in fact, a half marathon. Thirteen miles and change). It was our big race for the summer, and only the fourth foot-race I've ever run. It was quite chilly for August, and overcast as well - almost ideal running conditions. But as you can see from the way I am cheerfully snuggled into my sweatshirt in the photo above, it was VERY cold once the running stopped and the resting began. The explicit purpose of this post is to crow about my 1:43:47 finish, which was well within both my stated personal goal (less than 2 hours) and my actual personal goal (less than 1:45). I felt like I was going to purge my breakfast onto the pavement at the end, which is a sign that one has given until one could give no more, running-wise, and my legs felt like two wooden planks. By the time I was able to locate Caleb in the crowd so that he could use our gear-check tag to get my sweatshirt, I was halfway between shivering and teeth-chattering. One decontaminating shower and restorative nap later and I'm feeling pretty good about the whole episode, but unsure whether a full marathon is in my future. Running is such a mentally demanding sport; I'm not sure if I have the toughness above the shoulders to take it to the next competitive level.

Food-related posts will resume with the beginning of the Two Dudes' school year, hopefully. Fall is nearly upon us, and with it some of my favorite cooking of the year - one-pot, slow-cooked dinners that spend all day developing big flavors on a small budget. Example: anything with the word blanquette in it. How great is it that a food that gets you satisfyingly warm is called, well, a blanket? I wish I would have had one on me this morning after the race. A stew OR a blanket, either would have done nicely.

Happy Birthday, Caleb and Barack Obama!!!

2009-08-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

Today is not only the birthday of Our President, Barack Obama, it is also the birthday of my really quite wonderful husband of ten years, Caleb. Even before there were Two Dudes to cook for and with, he was the first Dude in my kitchen and has put up with a wife who is inclined to flights of fancy in the kitchen with general good humor, perhaps because he usually likes to eat what I'm cooking. A brief food-based history of my husband and I:

When we were dating, before they met him, my family suspected he was gay because of his willingness to go to the Farmer's Market with me and shop for fresh herbs, and more so when they heard of his appreciation of my pork tenderloin accompanied by plums ("Men," my older sister warned me, "don't understand meat with fruit.") He did a convincing imitation of enjoying cooking with me until we got married, at which point he abandoned the kitchen altogether. He learned to cook absolutely nothing from his mother, and spent his bachelor years eating frozen dinners and dried pasta with Newman's Own sauce, despite what is in fact a pretty discerning palate. He's a very private dude - this blog post is quite possibly his worst nightmare. I became very upset with him one summer when, after an entire month's worth of half-eaten pastries, he finally confessed that he "doesn't like pie after the first day." (this has changed, thank goodness.) He can actually cook anything he puts his mind to, including lasagna, but doesn't like to share the kitchen. He is also, as you can see above, cute as a sackful of puppies.

The dish you see my birthday-celebrating husband eating above is called Beef In Barolo, one of those recipes that transforms an inexpensive cut of beef into a delicious entree by cooking it for hours submerged in a pricey bottle of wine. Barolo, which I have never actually sipped from a glass, reportedly sells for $30 a bottle everywhere except for Trader Joe's, where it can be had for $13. Sadly, this is still on the spendy side for me when it comes to wine, but whenever they have it in stock at T.J.'s, I pick up a bottle to keep in reserve. If you have a bottle of Barolo in the pantry and a chuck roast in the freezer, you have a really lovely and presentable falling-apart-meat-and-sauce main course for your family or a cozy winter dinner party. If there is enough interest in this, I will post the recipe and then you can all rush down to Trader Joe's and ask for their $13 Barolo, which will create demand and subsequently a more consistent supply of cheap Barolo at all of their locations, hopefully including the one I shop at. Everybody wins!!!

Steph Is The Grillmistress. Bow Before Her.

2009-07-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

I have a long-standing love of kitchen gadgetry. Marriage, in addition to uniting me for all eternity with a really swell husband, also provided me with the opportunity to register for an entire kitchensworth (yes, this is a unit of measurement. I just invented it.) of gadgetry, from austere German cutlery to useful whimsies like truffle shavers and ice-cream machines, all of which I have put through their paces over the years. The grill in my backyard has historically not been one of these gizmos. Maybe because grilling is such a male-associated skill, I've taken a hands-off attitude towards the whole thing, hoping in vain that the aforementioned swell husband might someday take up apron and tongs in order to supply me with tasty charred meats during the brief Wisconsin summers.

That has not happened. Thus, I've decided that this is the Summer I Learn To Grill. We have a gas grill, which has the benefit of ease but lacks a quality I'll call keeping-it-realness. I learned how to change the tank of gas on the fly over Memorial Day weekend, and the episode emboldened me, grillwise. The above shots represent my first attempt at grilling this year, a compromise between the forces of Eating Healthy and Grilltasticness, an ineffable quality that my health-conscious better half believes to be highly carcinogenic. The tasty blackened bits on grilled food, he contents, will make us all rotten with cancer, as crispy and delectable as they are. In a concession to ever-present health concerns, I decided to troll the produce section for anything vegetal that I thought might be grillworthy: corn, Vidalia onion slices, red peppers, portobello mushroom caps and asparagus. The mushrooms were, by my lights, the most delicious. I read somewhere that affixing the asparagus spears to bamboo skewers raft-style, as you can see I did above, would help avoid losing precious green shoots into the fires of Mordor and also make for ease of flipping.

I refrained from brushing these veggies with olive oil until the end, at which point there was some drizzling (I picked this tip up from the Mario Batali/Gwyneth Paltrow "Made In Spain" series, about which my beloved Anthony Bourdain has asked the pertinent question: "Why did you [Mario Batali] go to Spain with the only bitch who doesn't eat ham?"). The kids thought this was a pretty poor excuse for a grilled meal, as no pigs or cows were sacrificed, chopped into bits and either formed into patties or crammed into casings in the process. Caleb and I thought it was just dandy.

I'm a little behind in my posts, to the point where I have pictures of food that I have only vague memories of cooking. This is a good weeding-editing method, as it turns out, and remaining Summer Cooking posts will contain only Highly Memorable Meals. Including - wait for it - The Night I Served My Family Liver and Onions. Coming soon to an obscure, seldom-read blog near you.

Pie vs. Cobbler: Cage Match!!!

2009-07-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I last posted; summer vacation is in full swing, and it began with a whirlwind of local-Midwest travel and a lot of work. I spent the first few weeks working lots of evening shifts at the library, which has meant not a lot of cooking dinner for my family. Hence, no cooking, no blog posts. I'll be trying to remedy that in upcoming weeks as our CSA season has (finally) begun and I'm doing a little vegetable-cooking experimentation with the stuff we've been getting - e.g. kohlrabi and more leafy greens than you can shake a stick at.

Summer also means, for me, PIE. Although there are scores of pies that can be made year-round and are delicious (apple, for one, not to mention all of the tasty chocolate/cream-type pies), their constant availability makes me take them for granted. The fact that you can always make an apple pie means that you can just, you know, get around to it. But summer fruits have to be seized on quickly, in-the-moment, or you lose your chance at making the pies. This year, I embraced strawberry-rhubarb with great gusto. What you see above are the cobbler and the pie that I made using the aforementioned filling. The pie was a particular hit. I served them side-by-side at two sequential cookouts and both were devoured in their entirety. The reception of these two desserts was inconclusive in re: superiority of pie vs. cobbler. It's now the tail-end of the strawberry season and I'm moving deeply into peach-pie making. However, the issue of strawberry pie is one I've been grappling with.

America's Test Kitchen has been my go-to for quite some time, and while they provided me with a swell strawberry-rhubrab pie recipe, their straight-up strawberry-pie recipe was disappointing. There seems to be a school of thought that strawberry pie involves a prebaked pie shell filled with halved fresh berries, which are then entombed in a gloppy, gelatinous glaze like the dinosaurs at the La Brea Tar Pits. I am Against The Glaze. It can be bought pre-made in horrifying red-tinted clear-plastic pouches at the grocery store, a shudder-producing product if ever their was one. If your fresh berries are lovely and not super-firm grocery-store ones (which produce the Worst Pie Ever when combined with the premade glaze - rock-hard berries in unctuous artificial spoo), they can just be eaten plain with some ice cream and good on you. But I've been wondering whether there's a good cooked-strawberry pie recipe out there - one that combines the berries with a bit of sugar, maybe a zest of some sort - underneath a top crust, the juice of the berries creating an oozy compote inside with nice pie-filling texture and no disturbingly anatomical gelatinous globs within. Anyone? Anyone?

Cookout!!!

2009-06-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Recently, for the first time ever, I hosted a family cookout in my backyard. Because I lack some of the prerequisites for cookout-hosting (namely, seating) it was BYOC. The "C" stands for "chairs." This was not a highly premeditated event. Until the last minute, it was unclear how many of my family members were going to show, and the cloudy weather eventually gave way to intermittent rain. Despite these factors, the cookout was a raging success, due in no small part to the grill-masterly contributions of my sister Anna's boyfriend, Phil.

The grill is a bit of a blind spot for me. I don 't have a whole lot of experience grilling meat, although grilled meats number among my favorite foods under the sun. Grilling involves mastery not just of cooking technique (marinating, direct vs. indirect heat, lid up vs. lid down) but also of a whole new apparatus, one that lacks the ease of use and technological gee-whizzitude of my fancy gas stove. I know vaguely of things like chimney starters and smokers but haven't the first notion how they are put to use.

Phil is a Marine and Ultimate Fighting enthusiast (not just as a fan - AS A PARTICIPANT) who lives with my sister and her numerous lizards and her pit bull. No flies on him, as they say. He showed up at my house on the day with coolers full of spice-rubbed and marinated meats as well as three grills to add to my one. You can see the array of grills pictured above. The low quality of the photos reflects the poor light - cloudy day, remember? Phil manned all four grills for at least six hours, cranking out two flavors of wings, two flavors of ribs, regular burgers and turkey burgers with feta and spices mixed into the meat. The magnitude of the grillmastery cannot be understated. You can see some of the glistening trays of pork above.

Besides the venue, I provided dessert (more on this in Cookout! Part 2) and my sister made a scrumptious salad featuring chives from her garden, and bottled drinks were procured from the Carniceria Guanajuato. SIDEBAR (if I were David Foster Wallace, this would be a footnote): In case you didn't know, Mexican Coca-Cola is made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup, it comes in glass bottles that say "Refresco", and it tastes better. The new "Pepsi Throwback" is just a Mexican Coke wannabe, although I admire the sentiment behind it. That and a bunch of Jarritos in an ice-filled cooler are my new Essential Cookout! Ingredient.

My grilling learning curve is steep. Midway through the Cookout! I had to replace the gas tank on my grill, which I had never done before and figured out how to do under the proverbial gun without anything exploding. Emboldened by the success of the Cookout!, I am hatching still more grilling adventures for the summer, all the while trying to eat healthy per husbandly request. How will these two seemingly-dissonant desires collide? Stay tuned, intrepid CWTD reader(s).

First Pesto of 2009!

2009-06-01T05:52:00.000-07:00

The tableaux you see above depict our family's first pesto feed of the year. Sadly, the basil is from neither our yard nor the farmer's market, but from Whole Foods. However, there is something indisputably springy about a big-ass green bowl of noodles with garlicky pesto all over it. Usually, spring-type pasta recipes turn me off a little; they seem naked, just pasty white noodles with a pea or piece of lemon zest here and there, but pesto definitely sauces the pasta. With some really good Parmigiano-Reggiano grated on top, there is just about nothing better.

I have a history with pesto. It's the first thing I learned how to cook that didn't come out of one of my mother's cookbooks. When I was fifteen, I spent a few weeks living with my aunts Eileen and Jean in Washington, D.C., soaking up every little detail of their relatively sophisticated and citified lifestyle. I listened to all their old vinyl records and ate their delicious cooking, which was (and still is) simple and based on fresh ingredients. This was a bit of a revelation to me. One day, Eileen showed me how to make pesto with basil she had growing in her own yard. I'd never had any pasta sauce besides Prego, and the flavor was like nothing I'd ever tasted before - fresh, bold, and addictive. The recipe came from her own wee paperback edition of Marcella Hazan's Classic Italian Cookbook, and that summer Eileen bought me my own copy, which you see above. It's still my go-to pesto recipe and as you might expect, the cookbook automatically falls open to that page.

For a while, I used to make and freeze the "base" for pesto every summer when the basil was fresh and dirt-cheap. I could then thaw it out in the winter, add cheese and butter and have fresh-tasting pesto all year round. Once when I was in college, some disgruntled roommates encountered my frozen dark-green bricks in the communal fridge and, not knowing what it was, thawed it all and washed it down the drain. I have not forgotten this. Vengeance will one day be mine.

Marcella Hazan's Pesto Recipe:

2 cups fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic
2-3 tablespoons pine nuts
1/2 tsp salt

Combine the above ingredients in a food processor. In a separate bowl, put:

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons Romano

Add the contents of the food processor to the bowl and mash it all together with a fork. That is your pesto! This is enough for one pound of pasta. Mess around with the amounts if you like; I usually use a little extra basil and cheese and skip the Romano unless I have it on hand, and sometimes go easy on the garlic (it's VERY powerful in this recipe). To make freezable base, make this as far as the butter-and-cheese part and stop.

LE SECRET: Pesto turns pukey brown pretty quickly after you make it. Avoid processing (or blending) the ingredients until the last possible moment. If you want to use my SPECIAL TRICK, buy some vitamin C powder from your local natural pharmacy or Whole Foods and add a half teaspoon to the recipe. This is referred to as "citric acid" on ingredient labels; it can be used to keep pureed bananas or cut apples from turning brown and doesn't change the flavor if used in small quantities. A jar of it is a bit pricey but lasts for-freakin'-ever and will keep your pesto greener longer.

Inspiration for the Day: WWJJD?

2009-05-21T05:25:00.000-07:00

Yes. It is Joan Jett. In a flight suit. That is all.

Oh, Chauncey, The Ramps Are In Season!!!

2009-05-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

Ramps are, to me, the quintessential food-snob vegetable. 99% of Americans think a ramp is what you use to get on and off the interstate; the other 1% resides entirely in New York, Northern Calfornia, and Farmers Market-blessed Madison, the Berkeley of the Midwest. When the ramps are in season, we are all supposed to descend on the market, trilling and clucking like guinea hens as we snap up the ephemeral veg. I've resisted ramps precisely because they seem like such a food-dork thing to seek out. This year, I got over my damn self and bought some ramps. What followed was RampFest 2009, which will become an annual event if I can stand my smug food-snob self when the dust settles from the Fest.

When I describe this meal as a "Fest," what I mean is that I cooked two ramp dishes and served them in one meal. Both were from Bon Appetit. You see above the ramp and cracked coriander biscuits (during and after) and the ramp-and-sausage risotto. The meal was a bit starch-heavy but good. Ramps are part of the onion family, of which every member is adored by me. Leeks, garlic, onions sweet and spicy - each hold a special place in the culinary pantheon. To go with the "Family" analogy, not the Jacksons (one obvious favorite, Janet) but the Redgraves (so much talent, how do you pick?). Onions are my favorite veg, and the ramps did not disappoint. Their presence in the biscuits was too subtle to make me want to repeat the recipe again. The risotto was delicious and even better as a leftover, a lovely balance of rampiness, Parm-iness and sausagocity. I've found risotto tricky in the past but this one was texturally spot-on. If anybody knows a better way to showcase ramps, hook me up. In the meantime, I am done for the year with both the ramps and the bourgeois ramp-related self-loathing.

I've Got A Luvverly Bunch of Coconuts

2009-05-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

The whole coconut is one of the few high-maintenance gourmet items I remember seeing in the IGA growing up in the culinary wasteland known as the Seventies. The little pile of hairy balls (YESS!) in the produce aisle was a perpetual source of fascination and mystery, an item so beyond the pale of my mother's grocery list that the purchase of one was as likely as my getting a pony for my birthday (THANKS FOR NOTHING, mom and dad). It's difficult for me to imagine any Carter-administration housewife, even one as industrious and skilled in the kitchen as my own mom (ponyless childhood notwithstanding), doing anything with a whole coconut aside from using it as part of a centerpiece at a "Trader Vic's" party. Maybe they cracked them in half and served blender drinks in them? I doubt there was a secret authentic-curry subculture fomenting in suburban Connecticut that I was unaware of, and which the Danbury IGA was supplying.

So I'm trying to be the coconut-buying type of mom, if not the pony-buying variety. My kids usually request a small treat in exchange for good behaviour at the grocery store, which is only fair. The grocery store was the site for many of my long dark midnights of the mothering soul when the boys were babies/toddlers, so the stress-free trips we now enjoy are worth a little lagniappe for the dudes. I love it when they choose something food-adventuresome. We recently brought home this coconut and dismantled it according to the useful and detailed instructions in my battered copy of Joy of Cooking. You can see the many implements of destruction involved in its demolition. The boys were far more intrigued by the process than by the slightly-lame end product you see in the bowl above. Unsweetened coconut is. . . meh. It tastes best consumed on a ramshackle barge in the West Indies along with copious rum drinks. If I had been feeling WonderWoman-ish I could have gone on to make my own coconut milk by grating the meat, boiling it and squeezing the results out of the gratings with cheesecloth and blah blah blah. . . coconut milk from a can is one of the best pantry items there is and one of the only canned goods I do not begrudge the Watergate-era housewife one whit. Perhaps I will crack a coconut for non-experimental, non-child-amusement reasons when Barack Obama and his family come to my house for dinner and I make them an authentic Thai meal, an event my boys are dead certain is going to take place any day now.

Taste 10, Looks 3*

2009-05-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

The dish you see pictured above, that mound of mystery-meat-looking brownness sitting in a puddle of its own leacheate (a dandy term learned in Environmental Law class, and which my ignorant spell-checker does not recognize) is in fact one of the most delicious things cranked out of my kitchen in many a moon. Vegetarians can skip this post. It's a slow-cooker barbecued beef brisket, and the juice in the bottom is the delicious sauce, two cups of which were served on the side and are not pictured here. Now, I have a notorious and snobbish dislike for any type of cookery that includes the word "country." I lump it in the same category as cookbooks full of reader-submitted recipes, most of which tend to include canned cream of mushroom soup or are topped with a crunchy layer of breakfast cereal. And don't even get me started on mayonnaise.

That said, the latest arm of the America's Test Kitchen empire (namely "Cook's Country" magazine and the affiliated show) is an endeavor for which I'm willing to carve out an exception. The basic gist of CC combines the exacting, scientific approach of "Cook's Illustrated" with a more, for lack of a better term, family-friendly approach. The thing is, CI recipes are usually intensely delicious, faultless and reliable versions of familiar but perhaps slightly fancy foodstuffs - nothing terribly outre - but CC takes a simpler, "weeknight meals" approach to comfort food and dishes appropriate for a potluck. I still avoid the reader submissions - they strike me as sketchy - but I had to try this recipe for brisket.

The grill is my Achilles' heel, and I don't mess around with smokers (hoping to change that this summer). This brisket was rubbed with various red spices and canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (my new favorite ingredient), sat twiddling its meat-thumbs in the fridge for 24 hours, and then took a day-long sauna perched atop an inverted mini-loaf pan inside my slow cooker. Beneath said loaf pan was a tasty little mound of sauteed onions and more of the aforementioned adobos. At the end of the process, the recipe assured me that I would have two cups of liquid with which to gin up a sauce. At first, it looked like I had only a meager puddle, but raising the inverted loaf pan resulted in a mini barbecue-tsunami. The resulting liquid measured PRECISELY two cups. And THAT is how America's Test Kitchen ROLLS.

The meat was so tender that it essentially fell apart. The mess you see above is what happened when I attempted to cut it into slices. It was just about too spicy for the boys but perfect for me and the huz. I am considering making a few of these and serving the meat on buns at a Fourth of July bbq - what else, if anyone cares to suggest, would you put on such a sandwich? And since I have no patio furniture, would it be socially awkward to host a BYOC party, the "C" standing for "chair?"

*Mini- CWTD contest- name this pop-cultural reference! Prize: bragging rights. Maybe I will bake you something.

On Letting Them Eat Cake

2009-04-29T09:13:00.001-07:00

Making a birthday cake is the second-most high-pressure baking assignment there is, second only to the wedding cake (which is once-in-a-lifetime, as opposed to annual). To those who think birthdays are important, the cake is the esteem in which you are held by friends and family expressed in pastry form. If your loved ones buy you a Wal-Mart cake and write your name on it with the ossified candy letters they sell at the grocery store, well, you might as well just curl up and die. I realize that my moral universe vis-a-vis baked goods is warped, but when I step up and offer to make a b-day cake it's going to be PROPER.

Above is the cake I made for my niece Nora's fourteenth, on somewhat short notice. Her desire was for an intensely chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, which was delivered as ordered. Unfortunately, her expectations for greatness have been permanently and unfairly raised by the replica Titanic cake we designed, built together and delivered to her class at school several years ago, a flour-and-butter monstrosity that was heavy enough to have served as an anchor on the ship in whose image it was baked. Compared to that one, this cake was fairly pedestrian in appearance, but it tasted OK. I always beat myself up over the gulf in textural moistness between scratch cakes and box cakes. The latter tend to be designed for pure deliciousness rather than the ability of the cake to stand up to vigorous decorating. Box cakes taste awesome but tend to tear and fall apart if you try to spread real buttercream on them. What can you do? If we can put a man on the moon, you'd think this troubling conundrum would be solvable. Maybe Obama can throw some TARP money at cakes.

Pizza: Homemade vs. Delivered

2009-04-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

I've been making my own pizza for a long time- more than ten years. This isn't because I'm a crazy-ambitious home cook who makes everything harder than it needs to be (I am) or because I like to look smugly down my nose at others with less time and kitchen-savvy as they funnel their dollars into the pizza-industrial complex (I do). It's because I took a cooking class at a local shop on the subject of pizza, a class that empowered me to DIY the pie from then on. This is principally due to cheapness. Pizza is one of those foods that is, I suspect, marked up astronomically, and that orderers are charged a premium for the alchemical combination of flour, yeast, tomatoes and cheese and the subsequent delivery of same. Factoring in travel time, homemade pizza (with dough made from scratch) doesn't take that much longer than delivered.

Over the years, my recipe has acquired a few tweaks, most notably the substitution of specialty pizza flour for bread flour (which works fine, but yields stiffer/less elastic dough). But it's essentially the same recipe I scored over a decade ago at Orange Tree Imports. I use 6-In-1 ground tomatoes straight from the can as my sauce and top it with whatever appeals - here, pepperoni. I had to splash out for a baking stone and wooden peel which paid for themselves very quickly in conserved 'za expenditures. It makes for a very easy and interactive dinner party at which guests are easily impressed by homemade dough. All would be dandy in the pizza department chez dudes if only the dudes themselves would abandon their fixation on "delivered pizza", their conviction that it is superior in every way and that the sight of a beat-up 1992 Accord with a light-up delivery sign on the roof pulling into our driveway is cause for delirious celebration.

Vegetables On Parade

2009-04-21T16:24:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, a "balanced meal" included one of each of the following:

A Meat/Protein: some of my mom's standards included oven-baked chicken, filet mignon wrapped in bacon (watch out for the toothpick!), meat loaf, burgers, kielbasa, and the occasional beef stew.

A Vegetable: salad, or some frozen or boil-in-bag. When fresh, broccoli or brussels sprouts (which I liked as a kid - SO???), corn on the cob, nothing too exotic. And the final and most controversial category in my household:

A Starch. That would entail some kind of rice or noodles or potato, generally. My husband insists that this is NOT a category of food, but I think that most kids growing up in regular Seventies families are familiar with the notion of the Starch Course. His own parents were quite young and hippie-ish and he actually got to eat things like fresh beets as a kid. I've recently been trying to re-calibrate my meal paradigm so that the meat is not the main event, for nutritious and environmental reasons. I'm finding myself preparing meals like the one pictured above, in which one or two fairly elaborate vegetable dishes take center stage. What you see here is a cabbage gratin made with Gruyere cheese, shown on the plate alongside some sauteed kale, a standby in our diet. My kale is not perfect - I make it with two slices of bacon - but I like to think the overall result is more halo than devil-horns from a dietary standpoint.

I'm actively looking for good vegetable recipes. It's all too easy to just saute or roast with olive oil and salt and just let the variegated flavors of the vegetables stand out in their delicious simplicity. Okay, that doesn't sound so bad, right? But a little variety never hurt anybody, and my CSA box is going to start arriving one of these days. So if any of my numerous readers have good veg recipes to share, please do. I'm particularly looking for a vegetable curry that will rock my socks off.

Easter Baking: The Only Acceptable Use for Pastels

2009-04-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

The poorly-focused snap above depicts the cupcakes I was requested to bring to my in-laws' family Easter gathering. I have a well-documented (by me) love-hate relationship with the cupcake. I love it as food, I hate it as pop-cultural phenomenon replacing chocolate/kitty cats/painful shoes as the go-to emblem for Things That Make Women Act Irrationally. When assigned the cupcake project for Easter, I naturally made things more difficult than they needed to be by (a) making the cakes from scratch, (b) frosting them with a cooked Swiss meringue buttercream, and (c) decorating them in a floral theme with lots of colors. Frosting flowers get a pass from me when it comes to my general dislike of food that's been manipulated to look like something else. Maybe because one is exposed to the icing flower at such a young age that it seems only natural that sweetened butter should be extruded through a metal tip and made to look like the sexual organ of a plant. Why not?

Pastel colors are one of the spring phenomena that irritate me. Notwithstanding the fact that the brown of mud and earth is the real predominant color of spring, clothing and other retailers seem to think that rising temps will cause us all to take leave of our senses and want to wear things like pale-yellow pants and baby-pink sweater sets. For the love of Pete, I just want to wear grey and aubergine all year long. Is that so much to ask? That said, pastel makes a dandy color scheme for cake frosting. A light touch with the food coloring is, I think, leaps and bounds more appetizing than the alternative, and has the added advantage of not discoloring one's teeth. These cupcakes were a modest hit. The centers of the sunflowers are made with wee chocolate chips. Only one guest REFUSED A CUPCAKE, claiming she "doesn't like chocolate cake." What next? She doesn't like puppies and sunshine? Puh-leeze. I've got your number, great-grandma Lois. You WILL eat one of my cupcakes. (cue sinister laughter)

On Being An Adventurous Eater

2009-04-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

When I was about nine years old, my parents took our family to a restaurant in Boston called Durgin Park. As the story goes, I asked if I could order the leg of lamb off the menu. My mother said, "Absolutely not. She'll never eat the whole thing." And my father, probably with some sort of twinkle in his eye, said, "Let her order it. She'll eat it." And so I ordered it, and ate the whole thing. This anecdote is trotted out as proof that I've always been an adventurous eater, eager to try new things. My memory corroborates this; I recall being taken to the Candlewood Inn for our annual fancy dinner out, at which I invariably ordered a lobster, and requesting Perrier with my meal. Why? Because it had an aura of chic glamour about it. The word, "Perrier," with its French pronunciation, and the drink itself in its distinctive green bottle.

I'm trying to raise Oscar and Ike to have curious palates, or at least to be game to try just about anything. Oscar is being conditioned like a child in a gustatory Skinner box to have a slightly broader food-horizon than most kids his age, but Ike seems to have a genuine gourmet streak. At the grocery store recently, he spotted a display of enormous globe artichokes on sale and immediately seized one, requesting it as his "treat." When asked if he had ever eaten an artichoke before, he responded, "Yes! You dip the leaves in melted butter and scrape off the white part with your teeth!" I think he may have even pantomimed the consumption of an artichoke leaf right there in the produce section. (I suspect he was given one on a recent trip to visit my mother, who likes a good 'choke.) So we brought the thing home.

I had to consult the helpful diagrams in my ever-more-warped copy of "Joy Of Cooking" to dismantle the thing preparatory to steaming it. An artichoke, as it turns out, is a type of thistle. It has to be extensively defanged before you can even think of ingesting it. This one had a lot of fight in it. Once the beast was trimmed and de-choked, I steamed it and served it to the boy with a teacup full of melted butter. He was happy. This will likely become the incident we talk about years from now when we are discussing the early indications that Ike, the James Beard Award-winning chef, had an innate interest in food. We hope.

Multitasking

2009-04-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

The not-terribly-picturesque tableau you see above is the top of my stove (known by, I think, elderly women as the "range") on a typical weekend afternoon. I usually spend the first day of any weekend trying to undo the chaos that has entropically overwhelmed the house during the week, and the second day cooking all manner of random foodstuffs to make up for neglecting my family over the course of the previous five days. Particularly during the winter months I hole up in the kitchen, giving myself an excuse to stand next to a hot stove. From left to right you see: the dough for the loaf of whole-wheat bread that's meant for the evening's dinner; a pot of chicken stock for the evening's soup; and a batch of pretzel dough for my second attempt at replicating the soft pretzels one buys from carts and stadium vendors. My house was warm and smelled good all day. I haven't posted in a couple of weeks for no real good reason, but I'm going to try and catch up soon. I have a mental queue of cooking projects, much like a Netflix queue but with food. My projected lineup includes dishes featuring squid and rabbit (not at the same time), something with a moleh sauce (I don't know how to do accents, so that's my phonetic spelling), chicken doro wat (an African dish), etc etc. If you asked my kids, they might consider these things more threats than menus. I apologize for any typos in this post - I was chopping collards for dinner this evening and nearly took my right index finger clean off. Not to get into too much graphic detail, but the fingernail is hacked just about in half. The entire bloody business is now mummified in three foamy "sport" bandages, creating a blunt instrument with which to tap out hy rapier-sharp prose. Hah! (yes, this was a boring post. mea culpa. better ones to follow.)

Taco Fiesta! Ole!

2009-03-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, a criminal called The Parka Bandit caused me to have a taco party for twelve people at my house. See, this junkie in a black parka was on a crime spree in Madison, so my husband Caleb got some lucrative overtime that took his workday through the dinner hour. The problem was, I had just purchased a bag of five perfectly ripe avocados the day before in anticipation of making a big-arse batch of guacamole and having Family Taco Night. The avocados would not wait. Now, my husband is a bit of a solitary dude. He enjoys himself at parties but having lots of noisy people in our house gives him the howling fantods. So when he's working, I have dinner parties. For this one, I called up my sister and her family (6). One of her daughters had a friend over (7), so in addition to myself and my guys, that made (10). So I called up my friend Sarah and she came over with her son Josiah (12). Spontaneous party!

When I was a kid, my mom made tacos using a kit from Ortega: seasoning, packet of taco sauce and hard shells that could be heated in the oven. Perfectly serviceable tacos. Turns out, I'm a soft-taco lady. I cook the meat with lots of seasonings - cumin, oregano, chili powder, cayenne, etc. - as well as garlic, onions, a little homemade chicken stock and a couple of other bits and bobs. In addition, I made some pico de gallo (with help from Sarah, whose ninja knife skills make me look like Jack the Ripper cutting up veggies). Sarah brought greens. My sister brought cheese. There was fresh cilantro and refried black beans. And for dessert: a selection of authentic pastries from a Mexican bakery called La Concha (also Sarah), each one the size of a small head of cabbage, as well as the lime sugar cookies I made using the zest from the limes I juiced for other taco-related purposes. I wish people were more relaxed in general about having people over on the spur of the moment; a decent time was had by all (I think). Muchas Gracias, Parka Bandit!

Moodily-Lit Soft Pretzels

2009-03-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

The above dramatically-lit pretzels were created as a result of a Facebook post by the superlative writer-friend Nick Lantz, chronicling his own homemade soft pretzel project. I solicited his recipe and took a crack at it myself. I love cooking the type of foodstuffs that are heavily marked up when purchased retail. The raw materials from whence soft pretzels come are cheap, cheap, cheap. The actual cost of producing them must be pennies, yet they cost so much more from a cart on the street, and even more from a kiosk at a stadium. So making them at home is like a big F-you to the craven forces of commerce. My ersatz Cinnabon recipe serves the same purpose: seizing the power from the great baked-goods conglomeration and returning it to the people! Cue "The Internationale."

My pretzel project had mixed results. I think I was a bit cocky. Like, dude, if Nick Lantz, who is a poet, can turn out a rocking perfect batch of pretzels, I should be able to nail this one, right? So I think I let my dough rise for too long, making it overly elastic and difficult to stretch into the requisite long ropes. My ropes kept springing back into a shorter and more-squat shape, which produced difficulties in producing the pretzel form. The boiled (but not yet baked) pretzels were, as Nick had promised, slimy and disgusting, but he had reassured me that I should not fret about this. You can see from the picture that the end result looked puffy and golden and lovely, and tasted precisely like a soft pretzel ought to taste, but maybe a little better because HOMEMADE, beeyotches! I dipped mine in melted cheese. They are now called Nick Lantzels in my house and will be made again multiple times as I refine my technique. I will never be skeptical again about a recipe provided to me by another writer.

Annual Lemon Squares

2009-03-21T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here are my lemon squares. I make them once a year. This annual event is the result of my husband's finally responding to my constant demands that he name his favorite dinner/dessert/whatever of ALL TIME so that I can replicate it and thus cement his undying love, a love which one would not be out of order in thinking was already wearing concrete boots after ten years of marriage and two children. I love lemons almost beyond reason. If I were inclined to perform pagan ceremonies praising the gods for creating specific foodstuffs, lemons would be on the short-list (along with garlic, potatoes, and especially onions). So why are not lemon squares processing constantly out of my kitchen year-round? I suspect it's precisely their year-round availability that makes lemon desserts easy to take for granted. There are always more evanescent, seasonal fruits demanding to be carpe'd before their brief diem elapses, thinks like peaches, Italian plums, or crispy fall apples. There is, however, one lemon that presents the same sense of urgency as the seasonal peach or berry: Meyer lemons, those vivid thin-skinned citrus that can only be bought in springtime around these Midwestern parts.

An article about these lemons in the New York Times several years ago sparked my interest in the lemon that is Meyer, and I suspect the general public's interest as well, because that was the year the Meyer became widely available in markets (at least as far as I noticed, and I'm not one to overlook specialty produce). Its skin is more tender and easily torn and it's smaller than the pithy, horny monstrosities one customarily uses to garnish one's gin and tonic. This year's batch of squares also compelled me to finally add a microplane grater to my kitchen quiver, years after that particular tool became de rigeur. It makes me want to divorce and re-marry my husband all over again, simply to update my kitchen with a fresh Williams-Sonoma registry. So above you see the squares, nothing more than golden ingots of fat. The crust is butter with the smallest possible amount of flour and sugar required to transform it crustwise. The curd is made with youdon'twanttoknowhowmany egg yolks. I stray from the recipe insofar as I do NOT strain my lemon curd before pouring it into the crust. That curd is flavored with lemon zest, which I want to keep in my bars. I don't think the texture of the little zest-shreds is off-putting at all, and adds a bit of lemonsimilitude to the bars. Same time, next year.

Plastic-Bag Cookery

2009-03-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

I have a love-hate relationship with slow-cookery. Don't get me wrong: I LOVE slow cooking, that is to say, taking an entire day to gradually build flavor in my Dutch oven on my stovetop, taking a low-rent cut of meat and braising it until it falls apart. But the slow cooker itself. . . meh. It's essentially a way to leave something simmering on your stovetop all day without worrying about the house burning down in your absence. I see more slow cooker-oriented cookbooks at work than you could possibly imagine, and most of them are a bit scary, concerned more with time-saving than with actual flavor. You know the kind of cooking I'm talking about. Characterized by the use of canned soups. Topped with crushed potato chips. The kind that's euphemistically labeled "country" or "homestyle." I tend to go for the kind of slow-cooker recipe that requires some actual cooking of ingredients before putting them into the cooker, in which the appliance is just a stand-in for the pot/stove combo and the recipe is something you'd objectively eat absent the conveniences involved. The idea of conjuring recipes with that specific appliance in mind feels very cart before horse to me. Because I am a snob, I label one type of cuisine "slow-cooking" and the other, "Crock-Potting." Nothing against the Crock-Pot corporation, which makes a fine product, but against people who say "Crock Pot" whether or not they mean an actual trademarked product made by the Crock-Pot company.

So above is a meal I made in my slow cooker. It was a sort of Moroccan-style dish with beef, sweet potatoes, chick peas (canned), tomatoes (also canned) and spinach (fresh, thankyouverymuch). It caught my eye in a magazine because it touched on so many of my husband's stations of the nutritional cross. The canned ingredients were things I generally use canned as a matter of course. The spinach and peas were added at the end. It was awfully good and only used a pound and a half of meat, so also recession-friendly. Why, then, does it look so disgusting in the photo above? Why might you confuse this picture of a wholesome family meal with a snapshot of a backwater Ukrainian pit toilet?

Because I use a plastic slow-cooker liner so that I don't have to spend hours scrubbing out the ceramic "crock" element in the sink. Yes, they sell these, yes, I am being non-eco-friendly in my use of a plastic sack where none is technically required. But come on, people. I compost, I biked to work today in 40-degree temps, I hang my laundry in the summer, mea culpa. I also kind of like how disgusting it looks. Whereas presentation is normally something I dig, I fantasize about presenting a dinner like this to my family IN THE CLEAR PLASTIC BAG. Just plopping it onto the table and saying, dig in! Meal-in-a-bag!!!!

Cabbage Rolls . . .

2009-03-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

. . . until it gets to the bottom of the hill! HAR!

So the thing you need to know about my husband is that he is a devotee of Eating Right. Lately, he has been taking the lead in the grocery-shopping department, but his purchases are usually motivated by (1) What's on sale, and (2) what contains a wonder-nutrient he has recently read about. Which is how we recently ended up with a long-in-the-tooth head of cabbage in our fridge, taking up precious tiny-fridge real estate with its spherical, nonstackable self. Hence the cabbage roll, a recipe unlike anything I'd ever made before. The filling was made with ground turkey, minced onion and some rice. The recipe involved hucking the entire head of cabbage into boiling water and removing each individual leaf with tongs as it blanches. Each leaf was then rolled around some filling and nestled neatly in the pan as you see above. Ike was deeply involved in the process. Despite the recipe's dire warnings that we should expect a high attrition rate throughout, with leaves accidentally tearing and rolls falling apart willy-nilly, we lost NOT A SINGLE ROLL. We're like the Marines that way. Leave no cabbage roll behind.

The rolls looked creepily like big chrysalises but Ike and I were very proud. Until we had to cover them with tomato sauce, float a clove-studded onion in it, and then simmer for an hour and a half. At some point during the simmer, a perfect HEART appeared in tomato-foam on the surface of the sauce, shown above. Aww. The rolls were beautiful and nutritious both, and the kids, shockingly, wolfed them down. I even got over my dried-fruit-in-cooking issues and included the optional raisins in the sauce. I felt like a glorious Eastern European babushka cooking up this recipe. I even used brown rice instead of white, for that extra-healthy kick. However, I do have a bag of Flamin' Hot Doritos hidden in the house, so I am not completely reformed. Yet.

Digression: Loving Tilda Swinton

2009-03-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

Holy crow. As those of you who've known me for a while (the entire reading audience of this blog, I think) might be aware, I have a longstanding, silly obsession with fashion that has very little to do with what I wear on a day-to-day basis. I like to think that if I became a celebrity (when, dammit. WHEN) I'd dress like Tilda Swinton. Envelope-pushing, sort of scary and demented with a real sense of humor. With an intimate familiarity of my own flaws and the bravery to accentuate them until they're art. She's not trying to look pretty, or cute. She eschews makeup - it's all about the architectural and sometimes nihilistic clothing. Sometimes a photo can just make your freaking day. As I write this, I'm wearing a St. Mary's College sweatshirt that was left behind by a law school friend ten years ago (Hi, Ky!) but wishing I was wearing the frock pictured above, with the library-model Kik-Step from my kitchen concealed under my skirt to create the illusion of even more height and willowy-ness. This makes me want to ransack my closet and search for the combination of garments that will make me most closely resemble a confused visitor from outer space. Swintonicity!

Gwyneth Paltrow Has A Lot of Balls

2009-03-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Confession: I am an ironic subscriber to Gwyneth Paltrow's "lifestyle" e-newsletter, unappetizingly entitled "Goop." Its tagline, "Nourish the inner aspect," invariably causes me to silently add, "While malnourishing the outer aspect in order to fit into that size-zero Stella McCartney." Her personal and guru-solicited musings on philosophy are both hippy-dippy and airy-fairy, and her fashion advice can only be described as economically tone-deaf. But once in a while a recipe of hers looks. . . potentially halfway decent. To her credit, she always gives attribution to the many friends and chefquaintances who are the real authors. Recently, I received a Gwynethgram featuring a family Sunday-night dinner with these meatballs as the centerpiece. They seemed.. .maybe. . .kind of tasty. And given my husband's neverending quest for healthy food, in eternal conflict with my kids' desire for kid stuff, turkey meatballs appeared to strike a nice compromise.

Gwynnie's recipe (I feel like we're besties now!) uses only a pound of ground turkey. I had three. So I optimistically made three batches of Paltrow Balls, hoping they'd be a hit and I could freeze some for later. Plus, In These Straitened Economic Times, I was happy to use up all of the pricey fresh herbs I had purchased for the recipe. They rocked. While I'd be happy to rescind the Oscar for the assy "Shakespeare In Love," I'd give her a "Kiss the Cook" apron for the meatball recipe, which filled the house with herby fragrance. The killer ingredient: lemon zest. I browned my two superfluous batches, froze them individually on a cookie sheet, and bagged them up for future tastiness. To be served: during a filmfest-style screening of "Shallow Hall" and that one karaoke movie she did with Huey Lewis.

Cupcakes, Schmupcakes

2009-03-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

The pop-cultural fetishization of the cupcake irritates me to no end. Working at the library, I see what seems like scores of lame chick-lit books mercenarily illustrated with food-porn pictures of cupcakes in order to capture that 90s-retro-Sex-and-The-City market. The cupcake has become shorthand for mini-decadence. Cutesy self-indulgence for women whose two battling, powerful desires are to be skinny and to eat chocolate. Of course, the show "Sex and the City" is somewhat to blame. I'm convinced that show was basically a live-action "Cathy" cartoon brought up to date with sex and cocktails. I still likes me a good cupcake, if only for the efficiency and portability the form brings to cake-eating. And I also desire a set of the annoyingly-named "Cup-A-Cakes", pictured above and available at Williams-Sonoma, where I can no longer afford to shop. (Analogy: the recession=the linoleum in my childhood home. Stores like Williams-Sonoma= the orange lozenge-shapes, which=HOT LAVA!)

ANYHOW, the lower picture depicts the dark chocolate cupcakes with vanilla bean buttercream that I threw together for the Madison Public Library Staff Association bake sale. They are the rockingest cupcakes ever. The frosting contains real vanilla beans. However, these cupcakes seem to bring humiliation and effrontery with them whenever they are baked. During my MFA, the not-yet-Pulitzered author Junot Diaz came to visit. I made the cupcakes in honor of my visit. Bear in mind that I offer a baked good the way an arms-trading Afghanistani warlord offers you a cup of tea. You. Take. The. Cupcake. Mr. Diaz SPURNED my cupcakes. DEAD TO ME.

After receiving a personal request from a co-worker to bake something for the sale, ("Who, ME? BAKE something? Don't mind if I do!!!") I proudly brought my cuppycakes into work, only to discover that they were going to be sold for ONE DOLLAR APIECE. The deal of the century, cupcake-wise, but the Staff Association might have done better financially by just having me donate the cost of the ingredients. I felt this way about my son's school carnival Cake Walk attraction. One can only conclude, alas, that baked goods are among the least efficient ways to generate money for a charitable organization. Pennies on the dollar, if that. Which is probably why I feel the way I do about things I bake. They're like handmade sweaters, on a smaller scale. Nobody would pay their real value to have them, in materials and man-hours. So when I bake somebody a batch of cookies with real butter and King Arthur Flour, I am giving real effort. So eat my dang cupcakes, people.

Pech Pie

2009-03-07T14:27:00.000-08:00

Peaches might seem like an odd post subject for March, but I wanted to round up the Great Out-Of-Season Turkey Project by highlighting our dessert: peach pie. I have an odd relationship with peaches. Ripe, in-season peaches are one of my top five fruits of all time, and when they are widely available, I'm confronted with utter gastro-confusion. The desire to eat as many juicy ripe peaches out of hand as possible usually overwhelms the motivation to actually cook with them. Peach desserts have never been a big part of my repertoire. The fact that my family inhales every peach that hits the door doesn't enable the kind of contemplative recipe-selection process that usually precedes a hotsy-totsy cooking project for me. Last summer, I tried something new. I bought a few cases of peaches from a local fruit-seller that carries perfect, softball-sized peaches every summer. They are pricey but fail-safe. No hard, green fruit that never ripens, no mealy flavorless blobs. Every peach is perfection, nestled in its little cardboard nest. The sign which advertises these peaches, however, is irritating as all hell: "Chin Drippin' Peaches." Without even getting to that cutesy "n'", the notion of letting the juice dribble freely down one's face is not one I can really get behind.

BUT I bought a couple of ginormous boxes last summer and spent well over a week cranking pies out of my kitchen as if they were Model-Ts. Most of them, I froze, using disposable pie tins and the largest freezer bags I could find. Ike, who was five at the time, labeled them. When cooked, they taste as fresh as if they were made that day. I appreciate the flavor of the peaches so much more in the middle of winter when their lush sweetness is not just delicious but totally out of step with the rest of cold-weather cuisine. Yumminess. More dessert-like posts to come.

New Food-Related Posts Soon!

2009-03-02T05:40:00.000-08:00

I just got a shiny new laptop, but the photos of my most recent culinary endeavors are still on Old Bessie, so until my IT guy (to whom I also, coincidentally, happen to be married) helps me switch the photos over, I am a bit hamstrung, post-wise. Will catch up within a day or two, for all of you who are breathlessly awaiting the post-turkey project (hi, Mom!). (Photo by Brett Rogers, www.beatcanvas.com)

Turkey Triumphant!

2009-02-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

Thar she blows! The most delicious, crispy-skinned golden-brown turkey, roasted in about 1 hour 45 minutes. Does it not look as if it is crossing its legs to avoid wetting its imaginary turkey-pants? And also gesticulating for you to admire its plump and juicy breast(s)? As you can see, the bird portion of Project Turkey was a smashing success. There are, however, some bugs to work out. Here's the rub: the stuffing, which I made the previous day out of challah and sausage and minced fresh herbs, was in the roasting pan underneath the turkey throughout the roasting process, soaking up tasty drippings. HOWEVER: my guests did not like the stuffing very well, I suspect for the same reason my in-laws would not like it. It just wasn't Stove Top. That is to say, its flavor and consistency were entirely foreign to the palate of a family that has come to think Stove Top = stuffing. It did not get eaten. I am OK with making some Stove Top to go along with this bird, but the stuffing also serves a function here: it keeps the turkey drippings from burning in the pan. Remember, this turkey is being roasted at a high temperature. 450, to be exact. When I roast chicken, I put some stock in the pan underneath to prevent the smoke alarm from going off and to keep my drippings from getting black and crispy, but I'm worried that if I do that here, the resulting steam will compromise the skin-crispiness that is the turkey's best feature. What's a girl to do? I've thought of just putting a bunch of crappy damp bread underneath the bird as an ersatz-stuffing, but there must be a better way. Thoughts?

The Secret of the Turkey Hearts Revealed!

2009-02-24T17:08:00.000-08:00

I don't have a photo of Phase 2 of the great turkey project, but that's probably for the best. The day before the meal, I made stuffing out of challah, sausage and fresh sage. My first attempt at purchasing challah resulted in the acquisition of two decent-looking loaves that revealed themselves to be disturbingly flecked with fake-looking orange zest and tinted apricot-colored throughout. Dessert challah! Who knew? A trip to Whole Foods yielded a challah that could swing both ways (sweet or savory). Disaster struck again while mincing three cups of onions for the stuffing. I also managed to mince off a big chunk of my index fingernail. I have very sharp knives. I was fortunate to locate the disembodied nail chunk before it could become lost forever in the stuffing. I now have a gnarly-looking pointer that I enjoy using to direct library patrons around my workplace.

The gravy was made, not with drippings from the turkey itself, but from the narsty bits: the back, the gizzard, the chest plates I trimmed from the bird during the spatchcocking process, the tail (which dear mama refers to as the Pope's Nose) and, of course, the heart. There was at least one other unidenifiable giblet in there as well, but the heart was gratifyingly heart-shaped and even had the little vessels attached as in the diagram above. I roasted all of this detritus along with a mess of coarsely-chopped veg, creating a nice little fond which was later deglazed, combined with some chicken stock and white wine and reduced for hours upon hours. During this period of time, with my hearts and giblets boiling merrily on my stove, I felt as much like a wicked witch as ever I have. This entire turkey project has been tinged with a delightfully macabre quality. Stay tuned: in tomorrow's post, the finished bird will be revealed!!!

Spatchcock!!!

2009-02-23T16:39:00.000-08:00

Above is a picture of a ten-pound turkey which I spatchcocked - by which I mean, I removed the backbone of the bird with a VERY sharp knife and then pounded its sternum vigorously with a rubber mallet until it was a floppy poultry rag-doll. A meat puppet, if you will. The purpose of this spatchcocking (is that not the BEST verb?) is to substantially reduce the roasting time of a big-arse turkey. I will not ruin the suspenseful ending of this multi-part turkey dinner post by telling you whether or not it worked, but can divulge at this point that the spatchcocking itself was breathlessly easy and also made me feel like Sweeney Todd. The floppy turkey was brined in a pot on my back porch for eight hours, nestled in the snow. During that time, I made the gravy and the stuffing, about which more later. When the brining period was over, I disposed of the brine, thinking as I always do while pouring out the liquid in which raw meat has been marinated, "I wonder how much you would have to pay my husband to drink a cup of that?" Which may tell you all you need to know about my qualities as a wife.

Once the brining process was over according to Bridget Lancaster of America's Test Kitchen, for whom I would swim across a lake of fire and whose instructions I gleefully followed throughout this whole shebang, I arranged the turkey as you see above. The posture can be best characterized as legs-crossed-as-if-it-REALLY-has-to-pee. This photo gives a bit of an impression of the masterful feat of three-dimensional tesselation involved in rearranging the contents of our petite refrigerator (affectionately referred to as "the dorm fridge") to accommodate this affair. We had a babysitter that night and when I preemptively showed her the turkey in our fridge by way of warning, she visibly startled like a skittish Preakness contender. So our beleaguered poultry was tucked in for the night in its dark, refrigerated boudoir. To be continued.

Turkey Lurkey Time

2009-02-23T05:56:00.000-08:00

You can't bollix up Thanksgiving dinner. The stakes are too high. Potential pitfalls include undercooked poultry, dried-out breast meat, the destruction of a sacred(ish) family holiday at which the sharing of food is more-than-usually a metaphor for harmony and understanding. So the fact that it's the only day of the year that turkey is roasted has always perplexed me, and my lack of experience at making a full-on turkey dinner has been a barrier to my throwing my hat in the ring for hostessing rights. I saw a cooking video produced by America's Test Kitchen recently that featured a roast-turkey, stuffing and gravy technique that seemed both ingenious and easy, and had the added benefit of front-loading almost all of the work into the previous day. I picked up a frozen turkey on the cheap last month and have been scheming a plan to host an ersatz-Thanksgiving at my place ever since. Tonight's the night. This post will be a multi-parter on the subject of the turkey, the early stages of which were not photographed for reasons too idiotic to explain. But in the meantime, enjoy the above demented video and stay tuned for more exciting Februarysgiving photos and news. I am SO rocking this turkey.

Cookie Puss

2009-02-13T13:59:00.000-08:00

Again with the cookies. Today, BOTH of my sons had Valentine's Day parties at school. What's a compulsive mom with culinary-aspirational tendencies to do? Why, make treats for both parties, of course. Son the elder chose the classic chocolate chip cookies, pictured above left. Younger dude selected Snickerdoodles, a slightly more work-intensive cookie, involving the dreaded rolling-into-balls step. Dreaded because: I tend to shy away from recipes that involve the word "balls." Food that is naturally orb-shaped (like, say, fruit, or tapioca, or on the micro-level, couscous) is never described as "balls." The word "balls," besides being funny and coarse (a plus!), implies a level of handling WITH ACTUAL HANDS that seems a little unsanitary even to a non-germophobe like me. Whenever I have to roll dough into balls, between the palms of my hands, I am reminded of the way little rolls of dirt would magically appear when I rubbed my hands together as a child, generated - magically! - out of thin air. Or, alternatively, from my grubby little-girl hands. My hygiene has improved since then, and since the invention of hand sanitizer, but I still don't like to grope my cookie dough very much before baking it. I tend to give the pre-Snickerdoodle blobs a cursory pat and stick them in the oven looking more . . . rustic than spherical. Both batches of cookies were a success. Time to start planning Lincoln-shaped cookies for President's Day.

Laid Low by A Common Virus!

2009-02-08T11:15:00.000-08:00

I have not been blogging lately because I've had the flu. It started on Wednesday and has presented me with a delightful cornucopia of symptoms, the most tenacious of which has been loss of appetite (along with its constant companion, Nausea, and that annoying party-crasher Puking). So not only have I not been cooking, my diet for the past several days has consisted of "white sodas" (7Up, Sprite and splendiferous ginger ale) and a packet of dry chicken noodle soup mix provided by my physician sister. Life has presented me with a customarily-appetizing parade of foods these past days in which I have no interest whatsoever. It's Bizarro-world. The only good thing about this bug is that it has occasioned a rapturous reunion between me and ginger ale, which was my favorite soda all through college. Canada Dry edges out Schweppes brand-wise because IT HAS A MAP ON IT. I spent the entirety of my cliched European semester abroad trying to locate a can of ginger ale, which is a drink impossible to describe in a foreign language. Unless, that is, you happen to know the word for "ginger" in, say, French (it's "gingembre") and you happen to be in Cannes. Once I return to full strength, there will be cooking and there will be blogging. In the meantime, knock back a Canada Dry for me and toast to my hopefully-returning health. *koff*

Kickin' it Old Skool

2009-02-02T15:11:00.001-08:00

After a long respite, I baked some cookies today. The kids grabbed the recipe for these from a grocery store, I know not where, but whenever they take the initiative and seek a recipe out, I am duty-bound to cook it in order to encourage their interest in food, blah blah blah. These cookies required the purchase of a bag of Hershey's Kisses, TM. I tend to avoid recipes that list name-brand ingredients - there's clearly a conflict of interest involved. Selling product versus objective deliciousness is how I think of it. I also avoid recipes that strike me as too "down-home" or include the word "country." Why? Because I am a food snob who, living in Wisconsin, has no right to be one. And yet here are the Hershey's Kiss cookies. My yield was off by 8, which is going to keep me up tonight. That and the one flawed cookie that I bollixed up with my hand whilst removing them to the cooling rack. Thirty-nine flawless cookies, one demented one. WHY, GOD? WHY????

PS yes, I think Sandra Lee, of "Semi-Homemade" fame, is a delusional biotch and I would like to create a bonfire with all of her "cookbooks" and roast homemade rosewater-scented marshmallows over it.

Loving Bruce

2009-02-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

My husband and I have an ongoing . . . argument? Game? Conversation. In which we try to determine which of us gets "custody" of which musical artists. For example: I get Elvis Costello on my imaginary team because Caleb had only been vaguely aware of the existence of Mr. Declan McManus before meeting me, whereas I had a substantial back-catalog of his albums - on vinyl, no less - and my budding love for Elvis C.'s acerbic music actually prompted me to dump my college boyfriend because it seemed to fit in with my life-soundtrack ("My Aim Is True"). Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Caleb tries to claim Bruce even though he is, to use an appropriate metaphor, the QB in my musical lineup. Before we dated, Caleb thought Bruce was cheesy and only knew the 80s-era synthy hits.

How does a Gen-Xer come to Bruce? For me, it was through my mom, whose musical tastes have drifted all over the place for as long as I've known her. She went through a brief Bruce phase during which she bought (1) Tunnel of Love, and (2) the 3-disc live set, both of which she gave me when she moved on to less-Boss pastures. I was sucked into T. of L. despite its hokey of-their-time production values. It's his "divorce album," full of deeply sad songs. This was back when MTV played actual videos, and his one-shot close-up video for "Brilliant Disguise" won me over. "Tunnel" was the gateway drug that led me to his earlier, grittier stuff. Last night, I was loving the fact that a man who recently put out an entire album of Pete Seeger covers can put on a goofy Superbowl halftime show full of acrobatics and silliness. Bruce seems capable of simultaneously inhabiting all points of the pop-cultural compass. Cool/dorky, high/low, mass-audience/NPR crowd, stadium-anthem/bleak ballad. And he can rock a pair of leather bracelets at age 59. And how DID he know I was eating guacamole while watching the game? Maybe Bruce is omniscient, too . . .

The Stink-Eye

2009-02-01T15:18:00.001-08:00

Tonight's dinner was vegetarian chili. The dish was propelled by (1) my husband's desire to eat only healthy, cancer-fighting comestibles, and (2) my desire to slowly but surely consume the BUCKET of dried red beans that has been occupying valuable countertop real-estate for enough time to qualify for adverse possession. Mostly (2). I am on the lookout for Ways With Dried Beans in order to use up the offending legumes with good taste and variety. Sadly, not only did this recipe use a scant 3/4 cup of the beans, but as pictured above, it made my younger son distinctly unhappy. His review of the meal was this: "It made me yack a little bit into my mouth." He is now sequestered in another room until he sees fit to finish his dinner.

I'm of mixed feelings about this. Some of my least-happy childhood memories involve being forced to sit at the table in front of a plate of something I found unpalatable, the dish growing colder and less-appetizing by the minute. One of my father's favorite topics of dinner-table conversation was the poor quality of his own mother's cooking, the details of which any of my sisters can recall by heart, and how good we children had it, relatively speaking. It's hard to argue with his logic. My mom was and is a great cook, given the limitations and food-vogues of the day as well as her straitened budget and large-ish family. She used to "put up" heroic quantities of pickles and jams every year, made her own yogurt, etc. BUT she also liked to make fried rice, which I still won't eat unless somebody's willing to pay me cash money to do it.

Adults are entitled to their food dislikes, and usually deal with them by crafting balanced, healthy diets that omit their most-loathed ingredients. I avoid: mayonnaise. That's pretty much it. And I was brought up right insofar as I will eat ANYTHING that is placed in front of me at a restaurant or somebody else's house, bar NOTHING. So in theory, I object to forcing children to eat things they genuinely hate. But one presents a united front to the kids, parenting-wise, so I'm sitting this one out.

On Snooping and Cleaning Kids' Rooms

2009-01-27T08:57:00.000-08:00

I'm currently reading a book called "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You." I had been hoping it would be pleasantly snarky and full of judgmental conclusions I can draw after scrutinizing people's bookshelves and CD collections. Unfortch, it reads like someone's Ph.D dissertation re-tooled as a pop psych book. Yawn. However, it dovetails nicely with my primary activity of the past day: super-cleaning the boys' rooms. At this point in their childhood, Oscar and Ike are one hundred percent dependent on their parents for food, clothing, lodging, transportation, etc. so it's always surprising to swamp out their rooms and find things I didn't expect to be there. The fruits of their black-market barterings with classmates, hoarded food (Ike), girls' phone numbers (Oscar. Age 7). Once, I was reading Oscar's journal (still OK, right? He's 7?) and discovered a page that said nothing but the words "I hate Mom!" More heartbreaking: a single sheet of folded 8.5x11 paper, labeled on the ourside, "Oscar's Laptop." Inside, hand-drawn screen and keyboard.

The poorly-lit photo you see above is a snap of Oscar's room, less than 16 hours after it was CLEANED. So clean that not a single Lego remained on the floor. His participation in the project was coerced by my agreement to move his bed into the position you see it here, jutting six inches into the doorway of his room and probably violating the fire code. Entropy has clearly taken hold. Picking up and organizing his many building kits simply kindles his passion to scatter the parts of those kits all over the now-empty pallette of his floor and engage in ever-more-Quixotic projects. (Note: Pallette: what an artist uses. Pallet: what they use at Costco to move around bales of paper towels. Palate: your sense of taste. None of my three readers may ever use these words incorrectly ever again.)

Random Post

2009-01-26T16:12:00.000-08:00

These puffy fleece pants make me look like Mr. Tumnus.

That is all.

You Are Getting Sleepy . . .

2009-01-25T12:29:00.000-08:00

. . . as you stare into the mesmerizing swirl of spicy paste that makes an otherwise-ordinary pork roast into a hypnotic point of ocular fixation. This represents one of those rare occasions when I went off-recipe in a substantial way. I'm usually a recipe-follower, one who takes pleasure in perfectly re-creating a dish that looks exactly like the photo in Bon Appetit. I like the scientific precision of the recipes in Cook's Illustrated and the feeling that as long as I do everything just as I've been told, the result will be at minimum palatable. The result of a poorly-received meal is a great deal of personal self-flagellation (metaphorical) that I'd rather not risk.

Whilst on vacation, Caleb read a book entitled "Anti-Cancer", a sort of instruction manual for eating and living your life in the least cancer-encouraging way possible. He loves this stuff. Whereas I view food almost exclusively from the p.o.v. of "what tastes good," Caleb seems to approach food as a tool for the constant betterment of one's physical plant. Food can make you healthier, stronger, less prone to illness, more prone to have washboard abs. This is admirable. His typical breakfast is a bowl of homemade oatmeal sprinkled with flax seeds and blueberries. I like a good fried-egg sandwich.

One thing we both agree on, at least for the moment, is turmeric. We are both Pro. Caleb, because it combats cancer, me because it's in delicious Indian food. So I was trying to find a preparation for pork that would incorporate the Spice Of The Moment. I found an Indonesian recipe called babi gulang, which is typically a whole roast suckling pig, spiced and cooked on a spit over an open flame. The version I found called for making a curry-like spice paste out of shallots, lemongrass, lime juice, garlic, turmeric (natch), jalapenos and a number of other goodies, rubbing it all over some dead pig and roasting it on your grill. Wisconsin Januaries not being amenable to outdoor grilling, I decided to make this paste and, after carving my roast into a blanket of raw pork, spread said blanket with the spices, rolled it up cinnamon-bun-style, and tied it with kitchen twine. I was then able to cook it in the usual way in my oven, and the result is something I am calling "Ho-Ho Of Meat." It tasted great, and the cancer-fighting spice paste has definitely not made its last appearance in my kitch.

Now. Stare DEEP INTO THE MEAT. Relax. Count backwards from ten. When you wake up, you will not remember anything about this blog post.

First Dinner Back, Or, The Comfort (Foods) of Home

2009-01-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

For our first meal back from vacation, I cooked the above-pictured pasta dish. The recipe is officially titled "Slow-Cooked Meat Ragu" but we just call it "The Sauce" chez nous. It's from my doughty copy of the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, which is foolproof and, in my house, splattered with enough different types of foodstuffs that its pages would provide you sustenance throughout a Gobi desert crossing. This recipe is one of my all-time favorites. It's simple and every one of its (few) ingredients are nonperishable pantry-type items. Here's how you make it:

Ingredients:
1.5 pounds beef short ribs
Olive oil
One minced/chopped onion
1/2 cup red wine
One 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes.

You brown the short ribs in the olive oil for ten minutes, then remove them from the pan. You saute the onions in that same pan for five minutes. Add the wine and reduce to a glaze (2-4 minutes). Dump in the can of tomatoes and return the meat and accumulated juices. Bring to bubbling, cover, and let simmer for about 2 hours. Shred the meat and remove the bones. Serve over pasta - I use rigatoni but any "short" pasta works well (penne, farfalle, etc.). Top with grated parmesan.

So simple! So easy! You can vary the fat content of the sauce by removing as much of the remaining beef juice from the pan as you like before adding the onions. The quality of the short ribs makes a big difference in this recipe. I've tried meat from every grocery store in town and find that the Whole Foods short ribs trounce every other ribs in this recipe, but since the amount of meat is relatively small, the dish is still not a budget-buster. I keep this meat in the freezer at all times so I can bust out The Sauce on pretty short notice. A green salad and nice baguette would make this a swell dinner-party dish, and it makes the whole house smell delish. Sometimes I get crazazy and use canned fire-roasted tomatoes. A little bit of red pepper flakes might give it a pleasant little kick.

The longer you cook this sauce, the more tender and falling-apart the meat will be. Two hours usually makes it shreddable into soft cat-whiskers. It tastes just as good leftover. Can a recipe save the world? If so, this might be the one. Unless you are vegetarian, in which case I got nothin'.

Back from Vacay

2009-01-22T08:44:00.000-08:00

The huz and I have just returned from a much-needed tropical vacation, one highlight of which you can see above. That is us, and behind us, that is a totally kick-ass waterfall. Best! Swim! Ever! The occasion for this getaway was our upcoming ten-year anniversary, which has now been well and truly celebrated. Culinary highlights are forthcoming. While the food on the cruise ship was good and abundant, I didn't geek out and take pictures of anything. However, the best discovery was the "Asian Corner" of the buffet, where yours truly could get samosas and spring rolls in unlimited quantities. Score! However, the real food spelunking took place in San Juan, PR, where we spent some time on either end of our cruise and where I ate one of the most delicious lunches I've had in recent memory and also had to tragically pass up what would have been a mind-blowing dinner because I was still digesting my mind-blowing lunch. Also there were a few places in the West Indies we had to skip because (a) they most emphatically took only cash payment, and (b) they were too sketchy for bacteriaphobe husband (although in this case he might have been on the right side of this argument).

At any rate, over a week away from the kitchen has re-invigorated my energy for cooking and the resulting meals - with recipes! - will be coming soon, including an old favorite that has the shortest and simplests recipe imaginable - only five ingredients, and one of them is a tablespoon of olive oil, which doesn't really count. Also including a recipe I kind of created myself and am calling a "Ho-Ho of Meat." Stay tuned, trio of faithful blog readers!!!

Au Revoir, Les Enfants

2009-01-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

We are on vacation without the kids. Yesterday, my mother met us at the airport in Chicago and we handed Oscar and Ike over to her for what will undoubtedly be a week of such extreme fun for the dudes that they may never want to return to Wisconsin. Right now, Caleb and I are at a HoJos in San Juan, Puerto Rico, enjoying the free wireless and the balmy breeze blowing in the window of our seventh-floor room. We've been travelling all day, beginning at six o'clock this morning when Caleb's sister Naomi drove us to O'Hare in an extremely ominous snowstorm. After a de-icing procedure that involved an extremely macabre-looking red fluid being sprayed onto the airplane windows, our flight took of on time. And we were behind Law & Order star Dennis Farina in the security line! His carry-on luggage looked very expensive and I felt a bit embarrassed when the plastic tub containing my Radio-Shack-model laptop collided with his briefcase, which looked as if it were made from the tanned hide of a unicorn.

From a gustatory standpoint, the trip has been a disaster. After an encouraging start (deluxe cocktails at The Violet Hour with Naomi and a "small plates" dinner), I have had nothing but cheeseburgers all day, as well as one extremely doughy and bland in-flight bagel sandwich. The strip our hotel is on contains no real dining options other than a full complement of American fast food. My dream of dining in Puerto Rico involved a little shack on the beach where a pig was being roasted in some authentic Boricuan style on a spit, and adventurous gringos are welcomed with raised glasses of mojitos and fed delicious pork dishes garnished with sofrito. No dice. However, the ocean is clearly visible from our hotel-room window, our view bisected neatly by the tower of the fancier and more-expensive hotel across the steet. Nonetheless - can't complain.

Mom, Do I Get My Dessert Now?

2009-01-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

Still getting the hang of posting photos - these appear in reverse chronological order. We just got back from a rare meal out, courtesy of my in-laws at Madison's Nepalese institution, Himal Chuli. The place has been operating for as long as I've lived here, which is going on twenty-plus years, and it has a sort of careworn authenticity about it. I've historically ordered the same thing every time I go there, operating on the "if it ain't broke" principle, because what I order - momochas - are the thing most people kvell about when they talk about Himal Chuli. The sweet waitress very earnestly tried to take six-year-old Ike's order first, and he credibly and seriously began ordering for himself a dish from the menu he had selected - i.e., not the kid-friendly dish Caleb and I had pre-chosen for his meal. He had ordered chicken sikar, which I then decided to have so that we could share it, and it's pictured above in its before and after states. This dish was so very tasty - it was listed as "popular chicken sikar" on the menu, and I can see why. Nothing novel, just general curry-like tastiness with lots of flavor but no real heat, the perfect thing to eat on a cold day like today.

Right now, Madison is covered in a thick, glossy sheet of ice and the cold has that peculiar quality that can only be described as "bitter." We wouldn't have left the house at all if not for the in-laws' visit. The experience was something like a sauna - plunging ourselves into the freezing outdoors to go consume Himal Chuli's food, which is the alimentary equivalent of antifreeze: steaming bowls of dal, steaming cups of tea, steaming everything. Except the lassis, which the boys are pictured draining in the above photo. In the kid-adventuring department, the meal was a resounding success. Ike polished off his half of the sikar and Oscar demolished two samosas, which he had never tried before. The dudes did us proud, although Osk may be suffering from culinary whiplash after consuming two pepperoni-pizza Hot Pockets for lunch before dining on authentic vegetarian Nepali cuisine for dinner.

A Bad Day, Fixed by Curry, Or: "I'm Warning You, There's Tofu in This!"

2009-01-03T16:01:00.000-08:00

So I've been on a bit of a losing streak. My car needed new terminal clamps, and it died in the middle of traffic yesterday; I had to have my seven-year-old sit in the driver's seat and turn the key in the ignition while I held the battery cable in place so we could start it and drive it to the nearest auto parts store, where I had to replace the clamps in the parking lot. This morning I was at a big-box store and accidentally left one of my bags at the checkout, not realizing my mistake until I was all the way home, causing an aggravating re-schlep. Let me not even describe the demoralizing shopping experience prompted by my fear that none of my kicky cotton sundresses will be sufficiently Krystle Carrington-esque for the fancy dinners on the cruise I'll soon be departing for. I fear the biddies on the ship will receive my down-home attire like Nellie Oleson responded to the Ingalls girls' outgrown calico dresses and bare feet in "On The Banks of Plum Creek:" - "Country girls!" [sniff!]

This curry recipe RAWKS. Easy, convenient, delicious, vegetarian. The kids both liked it, despite the fact that Ike was determined not to eat the tofu. The red curry paste I worried would be magma-hot based on its lava-red appearance was actually mild, flavorful and sweet(ish). It would not be possible to improve on this by the addition of bacon. I felt good about myself while cooking it and good about myself after eating it. You could even serve it to freaks who don't think they like spicy or "foreign" food. Ahhh. Curry happiness.

And yes, Oscar is wearing pants to the dinner table. They are out of frame.

Tofu and Sweet Potato Curry: Before

2009-01-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

I take a demented pleasure in creating these little pre-dinner tableaux. Assembling ingredients, especially for a colorful dish like this one, makes me understand the appeal of raw-foodism a bit more. There's also an orderly appeal in doing a super-thorough mise en place, which is a cooking lesson it took me FAR too long to learn: that "two cups chopped onion" means that you, the cook, need to actually chop two cups of onion before you even begin step one of the recipe in order to avoid manic and dangerous mid-recipe chopping and potential disruption of the entire enterprise. My cooking is now discretely divided into chopping mode and cooking mode, and when it comes to a Thai dish like this one, the former is orders of magnitude lengthier than the latter, the prime example being pad thai, which takes about an hour to chop and prep and five minutes to cook. Ike has already informed me that he is "allergic" to two of the ingredients in this dish - red peppers and tofu - so I'm pessimistic about its success and considering changing the name of this blog to "Cooking Despite Two Dudes." My kitchen looks much gloomier in this picture than it actually is, but for those of you who dislike the heartless objectification of food you can clearly see my knife, cutting board and cookbook in the background of this slightly ominous still life.

What Do You Do With a Head of Red Cabbage?

2009-01-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

If it were left entirely up to me, my family's diet would be far less healthy. Lots of butter, lots of coconut milk, unlimited quantities of cheese - if I were a single girl, my cuisine might have ultimately devolved into me, sitting on the couch in my sweats with a whole stick of butter in my hand and chomping on it like a peeled banana. Caleb is a healthful influence, but sometimes he'll bring a so-called Superfood into the house without any overall design as to how it's going to fit into our shambles of a family meal plan. Recently, an entire head of red cabbage appeared in our fridge, and there it has sat, waiting for me to transmogrify it into a Dish. Hence the salad you see in its pre-assembled components: vinaigrette and Braeburn apples, shredded red cabbage with some very un-appetizing-looking dried cherries, and the spiced candied pecans I MADE MYSELF while buzzing from a big Starbucks latte, which is the unbilled ingredient in nearly every meal I make. The pecans were absurdly easy to make and smelled up the kitchen in a good way - brown sugar, cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce which sadly makes this a not-strictly-vegetarian recipe. The salad is meant to contain equal parts red and Napa cabbage but the overall raison d'etre here is to lay waste to an entire head of the red stuff, so the Napa has been benched. The kids will hate this recipe, I have little doubt, but it will probably add a good week or so to the lives of those of us who eat it.

Lamb Rogan Josh: After

2008-12-30T16:15:00.000-08:00

While the adults in the house enjoyed the lamb rogan josh, the under-ten set gives it a mixed review. This is the way Oscar and Ike evaluate everything - with the "Gladiator"-style thumbs-up, -down, or the milquetoast non-review, thumbs-sideways. Here, Oscar is trying not to piss me off by giving my Indian curry a fully negative review, but the fact that he barely ate two bites of it is what I consider a thumbs way down. Ike thought that "the meat warms [his] throat up," and later augmented his review to "too spicy." You can see that I served it over basmati rice and garnished the whole shebang with cilantro. This kind of dish tends to be better the second day. More interesting posts will surely follow, not all limited to the subject of food. In unrelated news, I sang "Okie From Muskogee" to my co-workers today and discovered that despite the fact that I spent hour upon hour painting my toenails with Malia Gagliano in high school listening to the "Platoon" soundtrack on cassette on her back deck, I could not remember that many of the lyrics. How perplexing is memory.

Lamb Rogan Josh: Before

2008-12-30T14:33:00.000-08:00

Long time no post. I have just gotten my hands on my very own digital camera, so as soon as I grok how to use it there will be pictures galore and more posts. Tonight I'm making lamb rogan josh. What's not to like about Indian food? Seriously. Naan is delicious. Tikka masala is delicious. A tandoori is capable of alchemically transmogrifying even the most uninspiring raw materials into pure red-tinted deliciousness. I was originally planning on making this dish on Christmas day. I had all of my ingredients assembled ahead of time, or so I thought. On the day, I realized that I had NO fresh ginger (an ingredient I usually have around), thus triggering an hours-long trek all over Madison looking for a grocery store that was both open and stocked with fresh ginger. No such thing. So we all ended up going to Taste of India for dinner. My understanding that Chinese restaurants were the customary destination for a Christmas meal out was incorrect; Indian restaurants, at least in Madison, are the go-to destination. The rogan josh dish was pushed up to tonight and is currently simmering away on the stove. I could eat lamb for every meal. Not only is it delicious, but there is something delightfully perverse in consuming an animal that is so cute and fuzzy while it is living and doesn't have a euphemistic name once it's transformed into meat, like "veal" or "squab". If I can figure out this newfangled photo-graph machine, I will post a picture of the finished product and you can all wish you were in my cozy turmeric-scented kitchen this evening, listening to me whinge endlessly about rude library patrons.

Candlelight Makes It Special

2008-09-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

My husband has been out of town for several days, and it always surprises me how quickly the kids and I descend into "Lord of the Flies" territory unless we are vigilant in keeping up appearances. It's hard to get motivated to cook a decent meal for one full appetite (mine) and two very small and occasionally nonexistent ones (the boys). Yet we are told that sitting down for a family dinner together is the cornerstone of functional nuclear blah blah blah, so I've been trying to maintain some semblance of an evening meal even though the food itself is uninspiring. Hot dogs, mac and cheese from a box, etc. Since I'm somewhat deficient in the strong-armed discipline department (that's dad's bailiwick) I've had to be creative in getting them all to assume their dinnertime positions. That's where the candles enter the picture. The kids are willing to sit, eat and chat about the day much more willingly when the lighting is moody and romantic. Messed up, no? There is an inverse relationship between the formality of the setting and the hauteur of the meal. This evening's repast will most likely be Taco Bell by candlelight. Ole!

The Uncanny Valley

2008-09-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

I've heard this term - the Uncanny Valley - most commonly used to refer to the CGI humans you see in movies that are intended to, but fail to, resemble real people. That is to say, the creators have tried to create a close facsimile of a human but fallen just short enough to make you feel creepy all over. As opposed to cartoonish humans that are clearly not intended to be realistic (like the infantilized ones I saw with my kids in WALL*E this summer). Obviously, this is an intensely useful term with lots of other applications. I had cause to think of this recently when describing to my mother a movie I saw in the early '90s called "Stanno Tutti Bene" by Giuseppe Tornatore, the filmmaker who did "Cinema Paradiso." The Uncanny Valley experience was engendered by the appearance of the aging Marcello Mastroianni in character, pictured above in his characteristic suit and glasses. The uncanny part is that, to me at least, this character looked remarkably like what I imagined my father, who died twenty years ago, would look like if he had lived longer than forty-seven years. My dad wore exactly this style of spectacles and had the same brushy mustache, and dressed in a suit and tie for his very square job at IBM. It was very odd to watch an entire feature film in which this character went through his paces speaking Italian and engaging in heartwarming and -breaking interactions with his adult children. I don't know if this effect would hold up if I watched the movie today but at the time it was fairly startling. I'm not going to watch this movie again, probably because re-watching it might cause the comparison to break down. If I preserve that 1992-ish experience, it's almost like uncanny Mastroianni-dad still exists on an alternative cinematic plane, preserved on a digital recording in a foreign language.

Peaches.

2008-08-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

No, not that kind of Peaches. The kind that you eat. There is a store - Brennan's - here in Madison that posts a sign every summer advertising "Chin Drippin Peaches." Despite their failure to use the appropriate folksy apostrophe after the second "n" in this phrase, I usually buy a case every year. A case = lots and lots of peaches. I like to make them into pies, which I then freeze for baking later in the fall and winter, when it's a pretty neat trick to produce for one's dinner guests a delicious peach pie that tastes like it's August. The project started auspiciously, with the case of peaches being on sale for $5 less than usual. Then I got myself a Corporate Iced Latte, which gave me enough hyper energy to make lattice-top pies while listening to one of the best compilation albums in my collection - "Rockabilly Riot!". Do not - I repeat, DO NOT, omit that exclamation point. Punctuation, then, is the theme for this post. When my husband came home from work, I am sure he thought I was having some sort of psychotic break, listening to Fifties music ("Baby, Let's Play House" is on the disc) and baking! Baking! Baking! In my cheery red apron. It was a "Mad Men" moment, if you will. Three pies later, only half of the case of peaches has been scalded, skinned and chopped up. Wait, isn't that how they used to punish treason in the original thirteen colonies? The one peach pie I baked fresh came out perfectly, due to nothing but dumb luck. How can you know in advance how much thickener-of-choice (I use potato starch) to add in order to avoid soupy pie? And how to fend off the rapacious family that wants to eat the pie before it has had time to cool and set? It's really just a blind guess for me, but this time the cards fell in my favor and the pie consistency was spot on. I've come down from the caffeine high and am wondering what to do with the rest of the freakin' peaches.

Book blogging. Re: Doctor Books

2008-08-31T06:16:00.001-07:00

Stuff is very much going on in my kitchen nowadays, but without photos, it seems a bit pointless. So here's my subject: I am obsessed with books about medicine. Clearly, I'm not alone, since I see a seemingly endless parade of them come through my hands working at the library. The appeal is not hard to figure out. We all have bodies, we all (might) get sick, and few of us have the brain power or persistence to actually become M.D.s. In addition, we're inundated with pop-cultural doctors on television (E.R., House, etc.). I'd also like to pitch in what I consider the "freakshow" factor. I love reading about weird, rare diseases. Well, who doesn't? I have a total lit-crush on Atul Gawande (New Yorker medical writer). My kids and I routinely watch Nova videos about strange medical cases. Boy in the Bubble? Check. Family That Walks On All Fours? Yes, please!

So recently I read two books in a row that were, in different ways, about medicine and the human body. "Why You Shouldn't Eat Your Bookers and Other Useless Information About Your Body" was something I picked up thinking it might have kid-interest (didn't) and it turned out to be a collection of ho-hum, read-it-before factoids (why men have nipples, etc.). It didn't even take a strong stand on the bookers issue, coming down, it seemed, more on the pro-booger-eating side more than anything else, based on keeping your nasal passages clear and boosting your immune system by ingesting bacteria. So dull, and also misleadingly-titled. Simultaneously, I read "Intern: A Doctor's Intitiation", Sandeep Jauhar's account of his completely miserable year of internship. Dude was depressed. I realized what it is that Atul Gawande does so well, which is to focus on patients and illness rather than his personal struggle, and to take fascinating individual case studies and weave them into a larger narrative about some big medical issue that would never occur to a layperson to ponder. Jauhar occasionally does this, but larded with too much Eeyore for me.

BUT the big realization here is that I read doctor-books for much the same reasons that I gravitate towards yet another micro-niche: books by restaurant waitstaff (like Phoebe Damrosch's "Service Included." Because I am a hard-core people-pleaser, it's like research on how to be the BEST. CUSTOMER. EVER. Whether eating a meal or putting my legs into a set of stirrups (not the horsey kind), I just want to be liked. Is that so wrong?

...Still waiting for pictures

2008-08-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

If I were a more independent and self-actualized woman, I would learn how to upload my own digital photos onto the laptop my own damn self. If I had actually been listening to the lyrics of Destiny's Child's "Independent Woman Pt. 1" or Christina Aguilera's "Fighter" or any of the Ani DiFranco CDs I bought in college, I would take the initiative to master what is most assuredly a fairly uncomplicated piece of technology that would save me from becoming one of those grannies who relies on the teenage grandkids to program whatever the 2040 analog to the TiVo might end up being. But no. This isn't a technophobe thing. It's more one of those marital-bailiwick things. The digital camera is my husband's turf in much the same way that, say, home plumbing is mine. See, I'm not a total dunce, Gloria Steinem! But what this means for my two faithful blog readers (hi, mom) is that the breathtaking shots of my cherry clafoutis are not yet available for public consumption even though the dessert itself was made available for private consumption some weeks ago. Option the first is to abandon the notion that this is a cooking blog and just use it as a forum to grouse about library patrons. Option the second is to move on. Thoughts? Opinions?

Stay Tuned . ..

2008-08-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

Cherry clafoutis has actually been made. This involved the purchase of ramekins and vanilla beans, and the subsequent assembly of what looked like an effortlessly thrown-together Frenchy bistro type meal but was in fact the coldly calculated result of weeks (two, but still weeks PLURAL) of planning and scheming so that I could be all nonchalant with my whisk like, "I don't know why I don't make my own vinaigrette all the time. It's so easy!!!" There is actual photographic documentation of the clafoutis that has yet to be uploaded to my computer, HAL 9001. So stay tuned for awe-inspiring clafoutis snaps and enjoy this vintage test pattern while you long nostalgically for a time when the television broadcast day had a beginning and an end and was capable of approximating something resembling a narrative arc rather than serving as a metaphor for the neverending Sisyphean struggle of humanity in its relentless barrage of meaninglessness. That is all.

How Compulsive Moms Have a Lemonade Stand

2008-07-28T06:08:00.000-07:00

This morning, my boys decided to have a lemonade stand. The impetus for the idea was a plan they found in a library book that provided schematics for a lemonade cart. It used, among other things, a bicycle wheel and a great deal of lumber and hardware, for the price of which I could have taken my kids down to the chi-chi Sundance Cinema Cafe and treated them to an entire meal capped off with glasses of frosty fresh-squeezed lemonade while Robert Redford himself fanned us with palm fronds. I had a very hard time letting go of my paradigm of the lemonade stand as a profit-making venture. If we had used generic concentrate we might have broken even, but I would be embarrassed to serve it to my neighbors (some of whom I am related to). I am surely delusional in thinking that I have a rep to protect. But we made a simple syrup on the stovetop and went to buy some lemons to juice. They cost 79 cents per (why don't computer keyboards provide you with the "cents" symbol? so wrong) and we had to buy ten. Round up the price to account for sugar and ice, and conservatively this was an eight dollar pitcher of lemonade. The kids wanted to charge a dollar a glass, which would have actually been reasonable, but one always assumes one is surrounded by culinary philistines who DON"T UNDERSTAND what goes into a fine product such as ours. Deciding to take a loss, the price was set at two bits a glass (notice my end-run around the lack of "cents" symbol by retreating even further into antiquity) and our inventory snapped up by neighbors, our stand hastily dissassembled before we were shut down for health code violations.

One Pie To Rule Them All

2008-07-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

I'm cooking again. Yesterday this blueberry pie was produced from our kitchen. I had been discussing the topic of blueberry pie earlier in the week with the husband, because I had never made one. My apprehension about blueberry came from both my perception of it as sickeningly sweet, even unctuous, and as a sort of Pu-235 of pies, radiating a deep blue tincture, staining everything that comes within its orbit a permanent, regal purple, including but not limited to teeth. Caleb's principle objection was the cost of blueberries, overcome when his uncle presented us gratis with a large box of said berries. So - pie.

Two of my nieces came over for the pie-making, and while Eileen and Helen cheerfully participated in the rolling of the crust and the gentle folding of the lemon zest into the berries, my own kids industriously watched a Power Rangers video (Ike) and replaced the batteries in the toy light saber (Oscar). The girls were splendid. They embodied all of my early-motherhood fantasies in which my kids would calmly but enthusiastically help with every cooking project, adding an ingredient here and there and listening with rapt attention while I pedantically share my knowledge of cooking factoids both obscure (use vodka to moisten your pie crust!) and painfully obvious (the more you handle the dough, the dirtier it will get!). We even rolled out the extra crust dough and made cinnamon-sugar cookies. And then I smacked them all around a bit and lit up a Vantage Light.

Photo credit: fabulous husband Caleb.

The Hold Steady!

2008-07-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

Last night, I got to see The Hold Steady live. There was a ten-year-lull in my once-active concertgoing after getting married and having kids, but recently I've started going to live shows again (thanks, JLK!). I had forgotten how invigorating it is to see live music, and how the chemistry in the air can change in an instant when a group of musicians all of a sudden meshes together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The communal experience of a live show fills me with what can only be described as joy. My ears are still ringing, though. The venue had an upper balcony with comfy seating and tables, perfect for an oldster like me for whom the mosh pit is no longer a viable or dignified option, but as it turned out the acoustics were radically different upstairs - muddy sound, vocals much lower in the mix. I dragged my recalcitrant husband down to the floor for the encore and discovered that the sound downstairs was MUCH better. Good to know for future shows at this particular venue. I don't have a whole lot of profundity on the subject of the show except that the unlikely frontman gave an EXTREMELY animated performance dressed in what looked like Dockers and a polo shirt. He looked less like the lead singer of a hipster band than the IT guy who has arrived to stop your computer from freezing up.

My Imaginary French Dinner

2008-07-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Heat and several nights of work in a row have temporarily derailed the grandiose summer cooking plans, but what's really hanging me up is this: the next two recipes in a row provide the framework for a lovely, delicious, intimate French dinner party with fresh seasonal ingredients, and there is no configuration of guests in my life to whom this meal can be served. The recipes I want to cook are: a warm goat-cheese salad with fresh greens; and a cherry clafoutis. I have a great Provencal tomato tart recipe that would serve as the main dish for this hypothetical menu, which remains, alas, solely in my imagination. It would be a great meal to serve to four adults without kids. Who might these adults be? One possibility would be to cook this food for myself, husband and two kids, with the result being two plates of uneaten salad (the kids') and my ending the dinner feeling (1) like I had just busted my arse for very little gratification and no good reason, and (2) intensely depressed. The special brand of depression I reserve for recipes that flop or are insufficiently appreciated. Another scenario involves inviting a childless couple over to consume this meal after the kids go to bed. But we don't know any of these. Having kids has this affect on one's social life: your friends are entire families, not individuals or couples. The last possibility is to invite a family and serve the "nice" food to the grownups and make macaroni for the kids to eat. I can't put my finger on precisely why this seems not-fun to me. The public and official abandonment of my childrens' potential to eat adventurous food? The specter of a pot of Kraft mac bubbling on the stove while my tart bakes beneath it in the oven only a foot away? The macaroni silently making a mockery of my fancy cooking? Feh. Stay tuned for the solution to this dire and globally-significant dilemma.

My House is Mobbed With Children

2008-07-16T12:17:00.000-07:00

I am currently in charge of three of my sister's four children in addition to my own two. The grand total, in case you didn't major in math, is five. Five kids + ninety-degree heat= ok, I can't do this any more. They are installed in front of a Harry Potter movie, all thoroughly wilted. The culinary angle on this - there always is one - is the snack I have been preparing them for the past hour straight. Apple slices, trimmed of seeds and any evidence of core, spread with peanut butter and sprinked with miniature chocolate chips. Plate after plate of apple slices. I feel like I'm catering hors-d'oeuvres for a wedding reception attended exclusively by kindergarteners. Because I am compulsive, the slices are arranged in a nifty pinwheel on the plate, but my design lasts for less than fifteen seconds. Every time I think they can't possibly consume another apple, the plate comes back to the kitchen empty. My kids are as culpable in this mass consumption as their cousins are, if not more so - the addition of chocolate chips to an otherwise-healthy snack is a real novelty to them. I'm sure there is some way to add chocolate chips to, say, cauliflower, that they would love. Maybe Jessica Seinfeld plagiarized something like that in her annoying cookbook.

Having many kids around the house is not that unusual. Some configuration of the four cousins is over here from time to time as payback for all of the times my sister and brother-in-law have provided child care for my own maniacal and often-destructive kids. I would feel less guilty, in fact, if the cousins were over here more. BUT while I was spelunking the interweb for an amusing picture of a large group of children, I stumbled across the most car-wreck-fascinating blog I have ever encountered in my entire life. It is called "Lady of Virtue" and is illustrated by the picture above with the gal cheerfully feeding the horse with its head in her kitchen. When I first saw this picture, I thought, HA! Somebody else has a super-dry and sarcastic sense of humor and is blogging about their family. But no. This is a dead-earnest blog by a woman who is homeschooling her FOURTEEN children. Now I feel like a real whiner. I think I'll go cut up another apple.

Mother (F&*%ing) Sauces

2008-07-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

This demented-looking chappy is Careme, famous dead French chef and codifier of the four sauces upon which frog cuisine is based: Allemande, Bechamel, Espagnole, and Veloute. (There are accents sprinkled throughout these sauce names, but after spending the last 45 minutes wrangling with sauce no.2, I can't be bothered.) These are called the Mother Sauces, and I've made a mini-career writing-wise of avoiding writing a heavily-metaphorical essay combining the subjects of cooking and motherhood and speculating as to whether success in the kitchen is necessary for nourishing, maternal parenting, blah blah blah. The point being that in my own decades-long kitchen career, I've only had occasion to make Bechamel (many times) and it NEVER goes quite the way it's supposed to. It would be easy to blame this on my stove, which has gas burners labeled "Maximum Output" but seem in reality to have only two settings - half-dead Zippo Lighter and SCORCH. According to the make-and-freeze lasagna primavera recipe I'm making, the white sauce that serves as its base should thicken up after only 2 or 3 minutes of simmering. Like fun it will. I've had the same experience making custard (lemon curd, specifically) but those recipes at least provide a temperature to shoot for, allowing me to hover obsessively over the pan with my digital instant-read thermometer reassuring myself that breaking, curdling, burning, or any other of the horrors that can befall a sauce will not happen to mine.

There is something very wrong with the fact that I can make my own snowflake-shaped marshmallows to float in my hot cocoa and yet am so bedeviled by this simple sauce. I will not be present when this particular lasagna is served - I'm working through four dinners in a row this week, so while guilt is not listed in the recipe, it is definitely among the ingredients. I will have to hear second-hand whether the lasagna is creamy and cheesy and holds together as it ought, or whether the removal of the first piece causes the entire rest of the thing to slump despondently into the hole.

The Deal-Breaker.

2008-07-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

In the same way that I will cook, order or consume almost anything that contains peanut butter, there is conversely a deal-breaker: an ingredient that will put me off an otherwise-appetizing dish for no good reason. Or at least, reasons that only seem reasonable to me. That would be DRIED FRUIT in any savory application except for salads. (In a salad, I am perfectly thrilled to encounter a dried cherry or cranberry or blueberry, but oddly, not a raisin. Blergh.) If there are sultanas or currants in, say, a delicious curry, I will leave them out. It's mostly a texture thing. Fruit that has been dried and then reconstituted in a liquid or sauce skeeves me out. The skin is sort of baggy and the fruit is flaccid, like the miniature internal organ of some wee disgusting creature. The sac bursts disconcertingly in one's mouth, releasing a frisson of discordantly sweet glop amid an otherwise perfectly-enjoyable meat dish. Plus, there is the whole logic breakdown involved in drying out a piece of fruit only to re-moisten it later on. I could understand this if refrigeration were not widely available. And intellectually, I suppose I get the idea of dessicating the fruit and then REPLACING its fluids with whatever liqueur or what have you that you've decided to macerate it in.

This is also one of those realms in which the sweet-savory boundaries are more strict for me. When I was dating my now-husband and trying to impress him with my mad cooking skillz, I made him a dinner of pork tenderloin with an accompanying compote-type sauce made of Italian plums despite my sister Catherine's dire warning: "Guys don't understand fruit with meat." She thought that my presenting my man with pork and plums together, I would make his head explode with the incongruity of it all, he would be unable to wrap his head around the illogic of my creation, and then he would dump me, none of which happened. However, I still won't eat creepy little raisins. You can't make me.

Peanut Butter Closes the Deal.

2008-07-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

I think everyone who cooks - or eats, for that matter - has at least one particular ingredient that he or she can't resist in any form. Whether it pops up in a recipe or on a menu, something that gives you the gustatory equivalent of tunnel vision, like in the movie of "West Side Story" when Tony and Maria spot each other across the dance floor and everybody else becomes all blurry and they start playing that song "Maria." For me, I am embarrassed to report, peanut butter falls into that category. Surely this is to some extent because of repetitive childhood brainwashing - "here, have a peanut-butter sandwich" - but I've been an adult making independent menu choices for some time (or so I like to tell myself) and still I keep coming back to peanut butter. Obviously, it represents comfort and familiarity, but I think it's also incredibly versatile, and as I've gotten older, its savory applications have revealed themselves - particularly in Asian cuisine. One of my darkest times food-wise was my college semester abroad in a country (Italy) where peanut butter could not be found in any grocery store. I finally located a jar of the all-natural variety that requires stirring, which was a poor substitute for my beloved Jif or Skippy. I finally located a jar of American-style PB in a Swiss grocery store and sat in a park in Lausanne eating it straight with a plastic spoon. Yum.

My latest recipe was a batch of triple-chocolate peanut butter sandwich cookies. The cookies themselves were flavored with Dutch-process cocoa powder and a bar of Ghirardelli 100% cacao chocolate, with wee chunks of milk chocolate mixed in, and a peanut-butter filling was squished between them. Sort of like the artisanal analog to a Reese's peanut-butter cup. My kids did not participate because I permitted a Power Rangers DVD to darken our doorstep yesterday, and they could not be torn away from the television to participate in the cookie project. The cookies themselves were a smashing success. The addition of confectioner's sugar gave the peanut butter that dryish, amost doughy consistency that the filling of Reese's has. After the Biryani Fiasco, I was ready for a good, solid, hit-it-out-of-the-park recipe, which this was.

In Which Steph Falls Off A Skateboard.

2008-07-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

So my kids are into skateboarding right now, for which I am to blame, having provided them with a trilogy of Tony Hawk's Trick Tips DVDs from the library and then hooking them up with a freecycled skateboard. Said skateboard is very much a children's model, decorated with the Cat in the Hat and featuring a deck and hardware much smaller than standard. I used to skateboard circa 1987-88 and was frankly not very good. My big trick was Going Down The Sidewalk, with the occasional Turning The Corner thrown in when I was feeling flashy. But my boys kept veering off of the sidewalk and onto the grass and I finally grew frustrated enough watching that I decided to show them my (limited) skating chops and demonstrate the way you can steer the board from side to side.

A thirty-five-year-old woman who gets onto a skateboard has no right to complain when she gets what's coming to her, namely road rash and possible sprains of wrist, elbow and shoulder. Particularly when that woman, setting a HORRIBLE example for her kids, was not wearing any protective gear. The last twenty-four hours have revealed to me that (1) my body is not as resilient as it once was when it comes to recovering from calamities, and (2) even at my relatively advanced age, there are still unplumbed depths and dimensions of my own idiocy to be explored.

In a totaly unrelated moment of pop-cultural endorsement, I am recommending the DVD of Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis biopic "Control", which is all about the lead singer of Joy Division, shot in stunning B&W and completely required viewing for anybody who has ever admired either the music of the band or the album photography of Corbijn, who is probably best known for shooting the cover of U2's "The Joshua Tree" and a great many videos for that band, for Depeche Mode and numerous others. Everybody go put "Control" on your Netflix queue. Except for my mom, who reads this blog and would absolutely hate every single second of it including the font used for the credits.

Boys: "Biryani - blechh!"

2008-07-10T06:26:00.001-07:00

Above you see the first actual picture of a dish I cooked for my kids, who absented themselves from this project as soon as they grokked the amount of vegetables involved. You can see the saffron and cashews and, on the right side, all of the tasty herbs and spices - garlic, ginger, cumin seeds, coriander, ground cloves and cinnamon sticks. The frozen peas didn't make it into the glamour shot because they just weren't photogenic.

Here is a verbatim transcript of the conversation that took place in my kitchen while I was sauteeing the vegetables and spices:

OSCAR: (suspiciously) Something smells odd down here.

IKE: (impassioned) Let's get out of the room!

OSCAR: (more suspiciously) Is that the biryani?

IKE: Cough! Cough! (Imagine the kind of stagy, exaggerated cough a vehement non-smoker might emit if somebody sat down on the other end of a park bench and fired up a Parliament)

Exeunt boys.

So despite the fact that the final result of the project was a healthy dish comprised of layers of saffron-infused rice and gently, aromatically spiced vegetables topped with a tangle of caramelized onions, the kids were having none of it. While my fabulous husband enthusiastically scarfed down about half of the recipe, the boys were willing to forego dessert in order to avoid eating my vegetable biryani. I liked it - cooking with saffron is always a revelation. A tiny half-teaspoon turned the entire dish canary-yellow and perfumed our entire house with its aroma. It is as much a scent as a flavor, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the boys failed to appreciate a dish that featured saffron as its primary spice. So I won't be cooking biryani again, because I have a primal aversion to sitting at the dinner table and watching my children reject my cooking. Bah! Humbug!

Doing Things In An Orderly Fashion

2008-07-08T12:48:00.001-07:00

The higher-than-usual intensity of the cooking at my house this summer springs from my determination to work my way through a stack of recipes I've photocopied or torn from various foodie sources over the past five years or so. And by "work my way through" I mean ACTUALLY COOK. Some misfiring synapse in my brain will not let me actually throw away any of these recipes until they have been attempted - a synapse which is probably nestled right in between the one that forces me to leave a single bite of food on every plate, and the one that won't let me wear brown shoes, ever, and somewhere in the neighborhood of the bit of DNA helix that makes me think that the cover of "Macarthur Park" by The Negro Problem is a work of genius.

So I have a compulsivity problem that manifests itself in certain things needing to be done a certain way, in a particular order, and that causes me a deep satisfaction when things are done to completion, preferably while following a set of numbered instructions. Like following recipes, or knitting sweaters, or engaging in the other great project of the summer: listening to every one of the currently 6,000+ (and growing!) songs on my iPod in alphabetical order, carefully curating and editing as I go along. This started about four days ago and we just listened to "All The Young Dudes" by Mott The Hoople, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this Project. I feel like the guy who is carving the Crazyhorse statue must feel.

This is not the first time I've done something like this. As a kid, I used to listen to all of my cassettes in alphabetical order all the time, usually over the course of a rainy weekend, beginning with ABC and working my way through Huey Lewis and the News' "Sports" album and the Duran Duran oeuvre all the way to Weird Al Yankovic, who is to twelve-year-olds what Robert Benchley is to subscribers of the New Yorker. I don't know what compels me to do things like this, but they are enjoyable in an itch-scratching way that only fellow possessors of this urge can understand. It should come as no surprise, then, that my professional destination is the public library, where things are shelved according to a beautiful and time-honored system that, even though it was invented long before the advent of many of its subjects (computer science, skateboarding, hip-hop, string theory) is flexible and capacious enough to include them all and more every year. The library is a splendidly orderly place. The flip side of this is that if an item gets misplaced, it as much as winks out of existence entirely. Whoever said that matter can neither be created nor destroyed had obviously never encounterd a mis-shelved library book, which disappears as thoroughly as if it had dropped through a wormhole into another dimension. And that's all I have to say about that.

The Missing Picture.

2008-07-07T10:37:00.001-07:00

Here it is, the cake which most wonderfully combines The Grotesque with The Buttercream.

Birthday.

2008-07-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

It is my freaking, J.C.-on-a-popsicle-stick, tapdancing birthday. I am 35 today, a number that feels at a total disconnect to my age. On the one hand, one feels as if one has been alive FOREVER, and on the other, 35 is too old by far to still be worrying about (1) acne (2) what people I went to high school with think about how I look and (3) making perfectly-curated mix tapes for people upon whom I want to force my taste in music (The Handsome Family! Bill Monroe! "Teenage Kicks" by the Undertones overandoverandover!). No cooking for me tonight - I am working through the dinner hour in a passive-aggressive maneuver that prevents my birthday from being underwhelming before it even starts. BUT because I am pathetic, I told the lifeguards at our swimming pool to give me the Tootsie Pops that the three other birthday-celebrants were getting, even though all three of them were in the single-digits, age-wise.

Additionally, my husband has come across something called The Compact - a group of people organized through the Interweb and swearing to spend money on nothing for a year besides food and medicines. Well, "food" constitutes a fairly continent-sized carve-out in my book, encompassing everything from Taco Bell on up to things like 6-year-aged Manchego cheese and, you know - crab legs. Keeping the grocery bill down in These Hard Times is a massive issue in my house nowadays. I managed to spend $300 more on groceries last month than the month before, with nary a truffle or a cave-aged cheese to show for it. The only way I imagine this could have happened is if the budgeting software has accidentally categorized Anthropologie as a grocery store.

And no, it is not Ronald Reagan's birthday. I just think this is a hilarious cake, and I want it. I actually share my birthday with Ringo Starr, a.k.a. The Worst Beatle - the one who didn't write any of the songs and plays state fairs.

Hey, Baby, It's The Fourth of July

2008-07-05T06:15:00.000-07:00

Independence Day is my hands-down favorite holiday of all time. Here's why: to start with, it's nicely inclusive. If you are within the borders of the U.S.A. you can celebrate it regardless of things like, say, religion (I'm looking at YOU, Christmas). It's nice to have a day when I can feel patriotic without nasty partisanship inflecting it. It's in summer. It centers around delicious food - coolers full of ice and drinks in glass bottles, barbecue, pie, whatever your variation on Flag Cake might be. It's sort of a second-tier holiday that your in-laws probably won't get too het up about your choosing to spend it with friends. And it has superb music. In addition to all of the stirring patriotic music involving fifes, which get their place in the musical sun precisely one day a year, there is the BEST holiday song ever recorded. I am speaking, of course, of Bruce Springsteen's "Fourth Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." Which just ties it all together like the rug does to The Dude's room in "The Big Lebowski." Good on ya, Bruce.

As if all of this weren't enough, there are fireworks.

And my own local bit of treasured hokum: at the branch library where I work, the neighborhood marching band assembles for their one and only annual practice sesh right on the sidewalk, treating us to lovably amateurish renditions of "You're A Grand Old Flag" and such in preparation for the parade. This year, they added "So Happy Together" to their repertoire. It feels Mayberry-ish in the best possible way. So happy fourth to the three people who read my blog.

Falling on the Sword

2008-07-02T17:14:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow night, I will be working through the dinner hour. Because I'm feeling martyr-ish today, I'm spending my evening cooking and freezing baked stuffed shells for the boys and their dad to dine on in my absence. That is the kind of long-suffering mother I am: I'm going to be cooking them dinner FROM A MILE AWAY.

Baked shells are incredibly putzy. I know my mother made these for us when we are kids, but it's hard to imagine any Seventies mother, even my own incredibly handy and capable one, piping ricotta cheese into pasta shells. The only think I remember her using her pastry bag for was decorating a Wilton R2-D2 cake. I filled mine by putting the cheesy glop (ricotta, eggs, mozz, parm, basil and garlic) into a clear Ziploc with a hole stipped in a corner. A clear plastic bag of cheese filling just looks demented. The temptation to take it to the top of a tall building and drop it on somebody's head just proves how far I am from being a genuine grownup.

One tries to be a good mother. Loving, accepting of the kids' flaws, giving of oneself without expecting anything in return but the joy of parenting. But I suspect myself of the bottomless capacity for setting up crazy guilt trips such as the one I will be laying down tomorrow night as I slave away at my job while my children dine joyously on my homemade baked shells with marinara sauce.

We Make Our Own Pizza

2008-07-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

Tonight's menu is pizza. We make our own. This does not entail pouring sauce from a jar onto a lilypad of premade dough. It's all from scratcheroo. If I sound like I'm both crowing and looking down my nose at you simultaneously, you may be right. As much as I love all of the varied types of commercial pizza out there, from high (wood-fired with prosciutto at a sit-down restaurant) to low (frozen Pizza For One), I can't bring myself to spend money on something that I know how to make myself for a fraction of the cost.

The mystical Pizza Knowledge was bestowed on me at a cooking class I took at Orange Tree Imports
before I had kids. The flour is a special high-gluten stuff from an Italian specialty store that makes the dough marvellously elastic and well-behaved. The sauce is straight 6-in-1 ground tomatoes from a can. I cook the end result on a scary-looking pizza stone that is splotched with the charred remains of Pizzas Past. The pies are always a bit misshapen, or as I call it, "rustic." I get tired of my own pizza sometimes but ordering in would feel like a deep, personal failure. This is probably something appropriately worked through in therapy.

On the horizon: homemade chocolate/peanut butter sandwich cookies; vegetable biryani; mushroom lasagna.