Sara Bir

Ramps: Forever Sexy!

April 30, 2013

Ramps—wild, unspoiled, robust ramps—have become fashionable in certain circles. This isn’t objectionable or perplexing, as ramps are totally awesome. It is, however, worrisome. I fret that my own deep affection for ramps is cheapened by association. The New York Times Magazine included ramps on last week’s Meh List, a compilation of frivolous trends that are not bad, not good, but…just okay.

Ramps are not just okay. They are just the most stupendous allium to be found growing anywhere on this continent. Urbanites are at a marked ramp disadvantage, as these feral mountain leeks proliferate deep in primeval Appalachian woodlands, and to sell them in expensive little bundles at farmer’s markets set up on concrete in the shadows of skyscrapers is to neuter them somewhat. Few Americans have the luxury of foraging in hollers, of course, and I’d snatch up that displaced bundle of big-city ramps in a second.

Ramps are a litmus test: anyone with general ramp awareness is probably someone worth knowing. Anyone who knows a lot about ramps should be your future boyfriend or girlfriend (or, more likely, future honorary grandparent).

I had a boyfriend once who knew a lot about ramps. He was from West Virginia, the epicenter of ramp lore. I grew up right across the river from West Virginia, and I never heard of ramps until we met. Not even all West Virginians are familiar with ramps. West Virginian palates can be a bit timid, and the garlicky pungency of these little buggers can be divisive. There are concerns about bad breath, about post-ramp B.O. (an odiferous badge to flaunt with pride, I say!)

Daniel embraced ramps. He told me of ramp dinners, big fundraisers held in churches and community centers, where volunteers cooked up vast quantities of ramps to serve with potatoes, beans, ham, and cornbread. I had a hard time picturing it, these oddly-named vegetables being the focus of an entire springtime subculture. “How are they cooked?” I asked. “You just cook up a big mess of ramps and eat them with all of the other food,” he replied matter-of-factly.

He even cooked ramps for me in his preferred fashion, frying up potatoes in a skillet and adding blanched, chopped ramps at the end. Cooked down, they look a bit like wilted spinach. I liked them.

We later went on an overnight backpacking trip in the Catskills. I packed a flank steak marinated in chimichurri and a bottle of syrah, and not far from our campsite we happened upon a little patch of ramps. They looked so unassuming, nothing my untrained eye would ever consider eating. Daniel dug about a dozen of them up and we grilled them alongside the flank steak. And so, yes, when your native West Virginian boyfriend cooks freshly dug ramps for you over an open fire, ramps are a million miles away from inclusion on the Meh List.

Quantity also comes into play. Ramps are best deployed in dishes that have no subtlety whatsoever, as I found out recently when I made a ramp risotto using five of the pencil-diameter ramps I dug up in the woods behind my parents' house. Dad, fancying himself a mountaineer, planted some ramps down there about three years ago (I have no idea where he obtained the contraband infant ramps), and he has since refrained from picking any because he wants the patch to mature undisturbed and then hopefully grow exponentially, taking over the hillside. There’s a tinge of something covert in the whole operation, as if he were growing marijuana instead of a redneck delicacy. I talked him into sampling just a few from his rampy little brood, and risotto seemed like a decent way to showcase a small amount. 

It wasn’t. The risotto was fine, but I wanted to be bowled over with bombastic ramp action, and we could barely taste the ramps. I had minced the slender little bulb ends and sautéed them at the beginning of the dish, later adding a chiffonade of ramp fronds once the rice was halfway done. As you can see in the photo, I had to splash the whole works up with some extras, like a half-nibbled sausage and some beet salad. A better approach would have been to prepare a standard risotto and garnish it with a big mess of ramps flash-cooked in hot oil. We’re talking, like, 10 to 15 ramps per serving, minimum. That’s how to make ramp risotto. My maximum willpower is employed in not pillaging the remainder of Dad’s fledgling ramp patch.

I think these jaded city slickers are unimpressed with ramps because they are not getting enough of them. Begin stingy with ramps brings them down to a cameo role when they need to be the star. It’s not practical to feature a big mess of ramps on a fine-dining menu; since an armload cooks down to maybe a pint on a good day, those tiny New York City upscale restaurant kitchens would have to be overrunning with ramps. Look at the heaps and heaps of ramps piled on tables in this sweet little ramp documentary to get an idea of it.

To fully understand the allure of ramps, you can’t wait for ramps to come to you. You have to go to the ramps. Even so, a little taste of ramp heaven is nothing to sneer at. Give those ramps at the farmer’s market a good home in your tummy. I recommend chopping them up, stems and leaves and all, and swishing them around a bit in hot olive oil before scrambling them with eggs. Breakfast of champions. Then, instead of plotting your cruise to Croatia or middle-aged-crisis pilgrimage to Burning Man, dream of next spring’s ramp festivals to come.  

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Stalking Green

April 14, 2013

Note: I found this in an old file on my computer. It's not dusty like a real folder would be, but it has gathered a patina of age in my mind; I wrote this in 2004 or thereabouts. That's about how long it's been since I've made Asparagus Mousseline. We may have to change that. 

We always have a bundle of asparagus in our refrigerator. It’s fake. A friend gave us a bunch of plastic asparagus spears a few years ago as a joke, which—mostly because we didn’t know what else to do with them—we bound together using two wide purple rubber bands. Now our crisper drawer, even in the dankest days of winter, perpetually teases us with an empty promise of spring; more than once have I glanced into the drawer and thought, for a split second, that we really did have asparagus—live asparagus, the kind you can cook about a million ways. The kind that’s meaty and grassy all at once. The kind that sidles up to goat cheese, olives, sesame seeds, or prosciutto with equal dexterity. The kind that makes your pee smell funny. The kind that we love.

Asparagus is one of the first harbingers of spring. During its season, which stretches from March to early June, asparagus becomes one of life’s few affordable luxuries; that’s when it tastes best, and that’s when it’s cheapest. Buy pounds and eat tons.

 Just as an ear of corn still encased in its silken threads will being to lose flavor the second it is severed from its stalk, asparagus benefits from consumption as soon after harvesting as possible. Most of Sonoma County’s loamy soil (the kind growing asparagus prefer) is understandably given over to the cultivation of grapes, but definitely don’t pass up locally grown asparagus if you have the luck of stumbling across any. If not, buy the stuff grown in our state’s Central Valley, which today leads the nation in production. When buying asparagus, look for closed tips and smooth stalks. The cut ends should not be dried out (ideally the market will display the asparagus bundles with their cut ends in a shallow pool of water, which is exactly how you can keep them fresher at home on your refrigerator.)

 Let asparagus inspire you: pair it with other locally-grown seasonal delights, especially if you have a CSA box brimming with goodness that’s short on variety. One of my favorite spring soups is comprised of several bunches of asparagus and nearly every other tender green vegetable I get my hands on. I chop the vegetables, sweat them in butter, simmer them with chicken stock until tender, puree and strain the mixture, then fortify it with cream. This soup can be served warm or cold, and it makes a wonderful supplement to a grilled cheese sandwich.

Asparagus dazzles us with its versatility. Boil it, steam it, grill it, roast it, fry it—virtually no cooking method will do asparagus a disservice. Decades ago, tall and slender cylindrical asparagus pots were the preferred cooking vessel, as they boiled the thicker, tougher ends and steamed the more delicate tips. However, today’s cook need not worry about splurging on specialized cooking equipment to properly cook asparagus. If you have a skillet, a stockpot, a steamer basket, or even a wok, you can cook lovely asparagus.

Some cooks prefer slender stalks that equal a child’s pinkie in diameter, but real asparagus aficionados know that burly spears the size of a farmer’s thumb deliver the best flavor and meatiest texture. These thick spears are the best type to roast; medium-sized spears, meanwhile, are the best option for chopping and tossing into a savory bread pudding or casserole, because when cut into 1 to 2-inch lengths they still appear in proportion with the other ingredients (fat spears look clumsy when cut into sections).

The fibrous lower third or so of an asparagus stock needs to be removed before cooking. To do this, bend the bottom half of the stalk, which will naturally break off right at the woody part. Hang on to those bottoms and use them to buff up the flavor of homemade vegetable stock.

Thicker spears sometimes benefit from paring the tougher skin near the base; this is not a necessity, but it does make the presentation nicer, especially if you are serving whole steamed spears. Peel the spears with a heavy-duty vegetable peeler prior to trimming. There’s no need to peel those pencil-thin asparagus, whose dainty size makes ideal for salads, slaws, and the clichéd but always welcome party crudité platter. Especially fresh and tender specimens can be eaten raw and savored for their sweetness, but in most instances, when serving asparagus cold, you should blanch it first.

Asparagus tastes a lot better cooked to a limp, army-green mess than you’d think (see long-cooked asparagus recipe below). Prepared this way, it becomes rich and meaty, almost stew-like. When cooked briefly to a bright, vibrant green, asparagus’ other attributes—its pleasantly assertive, toothsome grassiness—rise to the forefront. What you don’t want to do is cook it al dente; the stalks’ flavor is fuller when fully cooked. When you can easily insert a knife into the thickest part of the stalk, it's done. My favorite method is pan-steaming, which is somewhat of a lazy shortcut but effective nonetheless: set trimmed asparagus in a skillet and add about a quarter inch of water. Cook over high heat; if most of the water has evaporated, add more as needed. The asparagus should be ready in five to seven minutes.

Don’t forsake asparagus at the breakfast table. Eggs love asparagus: fold a fluffy omelet around three or four cooked spears and a shredding of gruyere; glorify eggs benedict with a few tips nestled in between poached egg and Canadian bacon; liven up a fried egg sandwich with asparagus and crisp bacon. 

Ultimately is appropriate to eat asparagus any time of day; perhaps my favorite way is to pluck leftovers straight from the refrigerator, holding a fat spear between my fingers like Groucho Marx wielded his cigar. It is our duty to pack our days with asparagus when we can, for during the rest of the year there’s nothing but the cruel tease of the fake plastic bundle in our crisper.

Asparagus Mousseline

This charming recipe, which comes from the Junior League of Charleston’s 1950 spiral-bound cookbook Charleston’s Receipts, is very ladylike and delicate. Served with melba toast and baby greens tossed with vinaigrette, it make a wonderful light lunch. For mousseline with a bolder flavor, reduce the cream to ½ cup and whip with 8 ounces chevre.

Serves 8

1 pound asparagus, trimmed with tough ends reserved

1/2 rib celery, roughly chopped

3 scallions, roughly chopped

2 sprigs parsley

2 cups chicken stock

½ cup frozen peas

1 tablespoon unflavored gelatine

¼ cup cold water

1 cup cream

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Break off about half the asparagus tips. Set in a small skillet and fill with about 1 inch of water. Bring to a boil over high heat and cook until asparagus is tender, about 5 minutes. Drain, then plunge asparagus tips into an ice bath to cool. Drain, pat dry with a paper towel. Arrange asparagus tips in the bottoms of up to eight 6- to 8-ounce molds or ramekins; set aside.
2. Gather the tough ends of the asparagus tips into cheesecloth and tie with kitchen string. Place in a medium saucepan with celery, scallions, parsley, chicken stock, and remaining trimmed asparagus. Bring to a boil over high heat; reduce to a simmer and cook until asparagus is very tender, 15 minutes.
3. Remove and discard the cheesecloth bundle. Add frozen peas to saucepan, stir, and let sit 5 minutes. Transfer the cooked asparagus mixture to a blender and puree very well. Pass through a fine wire-mesh strainer, discarding solids (you should have 1-1/2 cups puree). Season with salt and a few grinds of pepper (the mixture should be a little salty). Set puree over an ice bath, stirring frequently.
4. Meanwhile, sprinkle the gelatine over cold water in a small microwaveable bowl. Let sit 5 minutes, then microwave in 15-second bursts on high powder, stirring at each interval, until gelatine is dissolved. Stir into puree.
5. When puree begins to set, whip the cream to soft peaks. Fold 1/4 whipped cream into puree, then fold in remaining puree. Pour mixture into molds; place in refrigerator until set. To unmold, dip molds into hot water for 10 seconds and invert onto serving plate. 

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The Goldberg Variations of Bean Soup

March 20, 2013

Recipes travel around like a culinary game of telephone. We’re not even talking about the internet here. Between recipe cards, photocopied cookbook pages, and word-of-mouth, a dish can wind up having a hundred variations, these little adjustments that individual cooks make in a knee-jerk sort of way without even noticing it. It’s one of my favorite things about cooking, and it’s why there’s no definitive chocolate chip cookie recipe or chicken adobo recipe or matzo ball recipe.

Spanish Bean Soup is a great case study. A little background:

1. My parents visit Tampa, Florida sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s and become fans of a hearty potato and chickpea soup at Ybor City’s Columbia Restaurant. 
2. On a subsequent trip to Florida, Mom and Dad purchase a copy of The Columbia Restaurant Cookbook and bring it home to Ohio. Mom asks me to follow the book's Spanish Bean Soup recipe to make for dinner. We lack the beef bone, salt pork, and dense Spanish chorizo the recipe calls for, so I use a ham hock and greasy, fresh Mexican chorizo instead. I likewise fall in love with this significantly altered Spanish Bean Soup.
3. Years later, in California, I improvise a preparation based on my recollection of the soup I made in Ohio. This time I use smoked Spanish paprika instead of regular paprika, and I eliminate the meat products. It’s fantastic.
4. I develop an official Spanish Bean Soup recipe for a story on smoky vegetarian food that I’m writing for The Oregonian’s FOODday. The recipe goes over very well, especially with the FOODday staff.
5. Fast forward to 2012. My Spanish Bean Soup recipe is included in The Oregonian Cookbook, and I am thrilled because it’s a fantastic book (buy multiple copies to give as gifts!) Eventually I look at the recipe itself and am surprised to see that during the testing process, the test kitchen staff chose to eliminate the saffron and substitute canned chickpeas for the dried ones I called for. How did I fail to notice this?

In my role as a recipe tester for big publications, I tweaked many recipes to streamline the preparation or create workarounds for hard-to-find ingredients; asking the writer for permission just isn’t part of the equation. So I wasn’t upset to see the changes FOODday made to my recipe. People still loved it, and maybe more readers were apt to make it with the convenience of canned beans.

But I’ll always prefer my version. Canned chickpeas are handy, but they have a subtle tinny taste and an inferior, mushier texture. And the saffron that FOODday omitted, to my palate, adds an elegant brightness of flavor that transcends the humble bones of the soup.

I had just heated up a pot of Spanish Bean Soup when my friend Caroline was visiting a few weeks ago. She asked me for the recipe, and of course I wanted to give her mine—saffron and dried chickpeas and all—because it’s the best. Although the originator of the Columbia Restaurant’s Spanish Bean soup might sample mine and guffaw “That’s not even the same soup! Where’s the chorizo? Where’s the beef and ham bones?”

Once Caroline prepares this recipe, it will become her own. She might add something I didn’t, or use regular paprika instead of smoked (though I would not recommend doing so). And you can make this, too, and keep the game of recipe telephone going and going.

Spanish Bean Soup (Potaje de Garbanzos)

Makes 3 quarts

Much of this hearty golden soup’s beguiling flavor comes from smoked Spanish paprika and small but crucial amounts of saffron. The potatoes fall apart and thicken it as it cooks. This version happens to be vegan.

• 1 pound dried chickpeas beans, soaked overnight and drained
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for garnish, if you like
• 4 medium onions (about 2 lbs), chopped
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon smoked Spanish paprika
• 2 small russet potatoes (about 1 lb), peeled and quartered
• generous pinch saffron (more than 1/8 teaspoon but less than 1/4 teaspoon), soaked in 1 teaspoon warm water
• salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. In a heavy-bottomed stockpot or Dutch oven (at least 5 quarts), combine the chickpeas and bay leaf. Add enough water to cover the beans by an inch or so. Bring to a boil over high heat; reduce the heat, cover, and simmer until the beans are not quite fully cooked (about an hour or two, depending on if you have a lazy simmer or a hard simmer). Add water as needed to keep the beans submerged.
2. Meanwhile, now that you have a head start on cooking the chickpeas, cook your sofrito. Place a large skillet over medium heat. Add the olive oil; once it shimmers, add the onion and cook until translucent and lightly browned, about 20 minutes. Don’t rush this part; it’s the flavor base of your soup. Add the garlic and paprika and sauté for another minute.
3. Taste a chickpea. It should still be a little toothy. Add the potatoes and the sofrito and the saffron with its soaking water to the pot and continue cooking until the beans are very tender and the potatoes fall apart (about 30 minutes). Don’t freak out when you see the potatoes falling apart! It’s what makes this soup so rib-stickingly good. Season very generously with salt and a little black pepper to taste. Using a potato masher or the back of a spoon, mash a portion of the beans and potatoes until the soup is especially think and chunky. Float a little extra-virgin olive oil on each bowl of soup at serving time if you’d like to make it extra glimmery and rich. This soup does not freeze especially well, as the potatoes don’t hold up, but it will keep in the refrigerator for about a week.

Here’s the original Columbia Restaurant’s Spanish Bean Soup recipe. And here’s my recipe as it appeared in The Oregonian’s FOODday, with canned chickpeas and without saffron. Now you can compare all three recipes for fun, because I know that’s the kind of person you are, and that’s why I love you.

 

 

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Roasted Strawberries

June 29, 2012

The strawberries in our garden are in full swing now. We’re picking about a pint of ripe ones a day. All year long I wait for these little gems, the pleasure of plucking them right from our own backyard.

“They taste kind of weird,” says Joe, and he’s right. They’re a tad too acidic, or a tad too ripe, or just wan and watery. I blame the late-season rain, because it’s handy to blame things on the rain here. They’re not terrible berries, just not as mind-blowing as I’d like. I can go to the farmer’s market and get a flat of Oregon-grown Hood strawberries that will blow some minds. Our backyard strawberries are convenient and passable.

But they’re ours, and we’re kind of a weird family, so it’s fitting they taste weird. I still think they are miraculous in their way. I planted them three years ago after my brother and I walked past a house in our neighborhood with a bunch of strawberry starts laid out in the front yard next to a FREE sign. I get to ignore them all year long, and then for about a month they give me fruit.

A friend growing strawberries in her Portland yard shared that she feels so blessed in numbers that she spits out any offending berries that aren’t up to flavor spec. A luxury, yes, and one we could adopt here as well, but I love our underwhelming strawberry children, and I can’t bring myself to write them off.

So I’ve been blasting them in the oven a bit to intensify their flavors. Roasting fruit is de rigueur, so I’m not blazing any culinary trails here. I think some people roast strawberres on a parchment-lined sheet pan, but I want some syrup to go with it, so I put them in a small gratin dish that collects their gooey liquid. It’s almost like making jam in the oven, and it’s a jillion times easier, and I don’t have enough ripe backyard strawberries at a time to make jam, anyway. The vanilla bean is really what makes this amazing. It fills in that gap of exquisiteness my berries suffer from.

Roasted Strawberries, a.k.a. Oven-Baked Strawberry Compote

Makes about one cup

• One pound (about a pint) strawberries, washed and hulled
• 2-3 tablespoons turbinado sugar (though you could use any kind of sugar you had on hand; I like the fruitiness of turbinado)
• ¼ vanilla bean

Position a rack in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

If the strawberries are those big honking ones, you may want to cut them in half, but you don’t have to. Put them in a medium-sized shallow baking dish, preferably non-reactive (ceramic, enameled, or Pyrex vessels are good choices). Add the sugar. Split the vanilla bean vertically and scrape out the seeds; add the seeds and the scraped-out vanilla bean hull to the berries. Toss it all together a bit, but don’t worry about it too much. It’ll all even out in the oven.

Place the dish, uncovered, in the oven and bake for 30 to 45 minutes, stirring a little bit midway though if you remember. You want to see the berries collapse and lots of juice rapidly bubbling all around them. The whole mess will thicken and become jammy as it cools. 

Store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to five days. Leave the vanilla bean hull in there so that the flavors both deepen and mellow as it all sits.

Here’s what you should do with this stuff:

-Spoon it over nice, thick plain Greek yogurt (full fat!) 

-After scraping the warm mixture into a container, there will be a bunch of syrup clinging to the spoon. Lick this off because you don’t want to waste it. It’s so sweet and a little wine-y and it might make you feel a bit sick, but it’s worth it. Wipe off your face when you are done; you will have ruby streaks all around your mouth. You can also share this spoon-licking part with your kid.

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Fast Nibbles

January 16, 2012

Baking Cookbook Reviews 5-13

(See reviews 6-10 here, plus others.)

Though I wanted to write thoughtful reviews of all 13 cookbooks I had in my original stack from The Oregonian, I ran out of time. My humbling is your gain. So here's to that which is short and pithy!

Milk & Cookies: 89 Heirloom Recipes from New York's Milk & Cookies Bakery by Tina-Marie Casaceli: This book claims that you can make nearly any cookie using one of three basic doughs. Except not really, because it has more than three cookie dough recipes.

Cake Simple: Recipes for Bundt-Style Cakes from Classic Dark Chocolate to Luscious Lemon-Basil by Christie Matheson: Bundt cakes are best suited to people with huge families or busy social lives. This book has recipes for nothin’ but Bundt. Currently, my social life and family size don’t qualify.

Gobba Gobba Hey: A Gob Cookbook by Steven Gdula: Gobs are another name for whoopie pies. The dude who wrote this book sells gobs from a mobile food cart. For a book named after a Ramones reference by a guy with a really cool last name who also wrote The Warmest Room in the House, I wasn’t very excited about it. Go figure.

Good Housekeeping The Cookie Jar Cookbook: 65 Recipes for Classic, Chunky & Chewy Cookies: You’ve seen variations on this book a trillion times. The last ten pages are actually blank tear-out recipe cards, which is sort of a gyp.

The Cookiepedia by Stacy Adimando: The spiral-bound cookie cookbook to give to trendy cookie-making neophytes who read Wired and Make magazines. Cute and actually not very encyclopedic, but that’s probably okay.

Les Petit Macaroons: Colorful French Confections to Make at Home by Kathryn Gordon and Anne E. McBride: One of my pastry chef instructors in cooking school told us that the crinkly ring around the base of a macaroon is called a “foot.” The foot is desirable and necessary. However, I prefer American-style coconut macaroons to the French ones. They have really awesome ones at Le Chatelaine in Columbus, Ohio.

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Cookies/Christmas/Cookies

December 19, 2011

1. (Cookies Past, sometime in the early 1980s)

Mom and I make Chocolate Crinkles at home. I’m earning a merit badge for Brownie Girl Scouts. It’s the first time I can remember making cookies from start to finish with her, Mom telling me what to do and me doing most of the measuring and mixing and shaping. Maybe she picked out the recipe for me, or maybe I asked her if we could make Chocolate Crinkles specifically, but without a doubt it’s the recipe on page 23 of Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book. There’s a photo, one of hundreds of wonderful cooky photos, of Chocolate Crinkles on the lower right-hand corner of the page; our Chocolate Crinkles come out looking just like the ones in the book. For all the hours I’ve stared at the pages of Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book, this is first time I’ve been able to make something from it become a reality. Something clicks.

2. (Cookies Past, a string of years in the mid-1990s)

Christmas break. Every year we make boatloads of Christmas cookies, some to give away but most to put in tins that we store in the freezer or in the winter-cold garage. My brother and I eat scores of cookies while splayed in teenaged sloth, I on the sofa and he in the recliner, as we take in hours and hours of awful television. As I grow deeper into my teens, the eating of these cookies sometimes becomes frenzied and private, a flawed but unstoppable effort to fill up a chasm of insignificance and unrest churning inside me. Later, I go to the bathroom to vomit up the cookies.

3. (Cookies Past, mid-1998)

Early on into my externship at Martha Stewart Living Magazine, it becomes apparent that, while fairly adept as a cook, I am in no way adept as an intern. The test kitchen is thrumming with the energy of freelancers and editors researching a massive cookie project. They bake and bake, leaving no recipe unturned. I make Sal Johnson’s kolachi recipe and Aunt Priscilla’s skillet date-nut cookies, both of which are warmly received one day by a cheerful Martha who stops by the kitchen to chat and nibble. It turns out this is the most pleasant mood I will ever witness her in. Neither of my cookies recipes make it to the final project, but I do survive my externship.  

 4. (Christmas Present)

We want to bake cookies in warm houses under early-darkening skies, to don cute aprons and sip spicy teas and fill our kitchens with aromas of sweetness and comfort. I want to do all of these things while listening to Christmas records, and then pack tins full of treats to distribute to family and friends who will covet them.

In seconds, I can dash off a list of the cookies without which it is not a Proper Christmas, just as I can tell you my favorite bands or English novelists or the boys I had crushes on up until I was eighteen. Some recipes are from spattered cookbook pages, some are from deeply creased photocopies, some are on recipe cards in my own hand, copied from recipe cards in Mom’s jerky script. 

This Christmas will not be a Proper Christmas. There will be no cutout sugar cookies decorated with sugar sprinkles, no fruit-filled kolachis, no gingerbread men. The time to make the cookies does not exist; the people who are to covet tins of them do not actually covet them. It is only me, just me wanting these things, craving the balm they release to mitigate challenging aspects of the holiday season that inevitably haunt all of us, a specter that changes form and size from year to year but never goes away. The cookies are just for me and I can’t have them.

This is a Christmas without a tree, a pragmatic strategy to prevent Frances from breaking ornaments, or any parts of her own precious self. Our home is too small to safely house both a decorated evergreen and a two-year-old whose climbing talents grow daily. It takes all of my might to make a simple dinner, interrupted as it is with her darting and grabbing and scaling and chucking. Lapses into quiet are not peaceful, but ominous: is she tearing pages from a book? Poking Scooter’s eye with her pointy finger? Squeezed unseen behind a large piece of furniture in search of electrical cords to yank on? Such is the lot of the working parent to a whirlwind of a toddler.

Our streamlined Improper Christmas brings benefits. The tower of cookies we could find no deserving homes for do not call late at night or after lunch, demanding to be gobbled down in fistfuls until I’ve ruined several future meals. No scent of pine perfumes our house, but we’re liberated from the downer of packing away Christmas decorations after the turn of the New Year.

I did manage to bake one batch of cookies. The Chocolate Crinkles of my Girl Scout youth, yearning as I was for a portal to those simpler times. I let Frances play with a blob of chocolatey dough as I shaped and baked them. She called it “Play-Doh” and then pointed at the small brownish log she’d formed and said, “Doggie poop.”

That’s my girl; these are our simpler times. Five years from now it may be easier to crank out batches and batches of Christmas cookies just as I did before arriving messily onto the ruthless scene of middle adulthood, but now, this Christmas, is the only one we will spend with this toddler, the girl who pushes her scraped-up little IKEA chair over to the kitchen counter and then perches herself atop the chair so she can investigate, always curious about what there is to cook and eat. She spies the Chocolate Crinkles I’d intended to hide from her. “Want cookie!” she demands, stomping her foot. And I give her the damn cookie. Because it’s Christmas, and because she’s my girl.

Sneaky Surprise Chocolate Crinkles

This is exactly the same recipe you’ll find on page 23 of Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book, except it’s vegan. My husband and my co-workers happily munched these without noticing any difference. All I did was swap out the eggs for half a block of silken tofu, a small change that, in this recipe, functions just as well. Chocolate Crinkle dough is very similar to brownie batter, so think of these cookies as individual brownies coated in lotsa powdered sugar. The key to success, whether your dough is vegan or not, is taking the cookies out of the oven just after the tops crack but their centers are still wet and soft. Overbaked Chocolate Crinkles are a vastly inferior cookie.

Makes about 4 dozen cookies

4 ounces good-quality unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped (I prefer Scharffen Berger, but Ghirardelli will do in a pinch)

½ cup vegetable oil

2 cups granulated sugar, divided

6 ounces (half an aseptic package) soft silken tofu, at room temperature

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

About one cup powdered sugar

1. Place the chocolate in a large metal bowl. Set over a saucepan halfway filled with of simmering water. Let sit for a minute or two, then stir with a rubber spatula until melted. Remove from heat.
2. Add the oil and 1-1/2 cups sugar to the melted chocolate and stir to combine. Set aside.
3. Place the tofu, vanilla, salt, and remaining ½ cup granulated sugar in a food processor. Puree until very smooth.
4. Stir the pureed tofu mixture into the melted chocolate mixture. Add the flour and baking powder; stir until combined. The dough should be just a bit sticky. Chill the dough for at least 2 hours.
5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. Form the dough into walnut-sized balls and roll in the powdered sugar to coat well. (I like to roll the balls in the powdered sugar twice, just to get the good and coated. The finished cookies look so much better that way.) Place about 2 inches apart (about twelve cookies to a sheet) and bake 10 to 12 minutes, rotating the baking sheets front to back and top to bottom halfway through. When ready, the cookies will have fully cracked tops but centers that are still quite wet. Keep a close eye on them to be sure they don’t overbake.
6. Cool cookies on baking sheets for 5 minutes before removing to wire racks to cool completely. Cookies will keep, tightly covered, for about a week.

[Comments]

Wild Rainbow Sugar Ride

December 02, 2011

Baking Cookbookm Review (4 of 13): CakeSpy Presents Treats for a Sugar-Filled Life by Jessie Oleson

She fries cupcakes speared on sticks, makes instant pudding with melted ice cream, and sandwiches scoops of ice cream between Pop-Tarts. Moderation is not part of Jessie Oleson’s kitchen vocabulary. Even those who shudder at the thought of artificial colors and boxed cake mix will find inspiration in author-illustrator Oleson’s CakeSpy Presents Treats for a Sugar-Filled Life. It’s so cheerfully over-the-top you can’t help but hop on board Oleson’s wild rainbow ride, populated with whimsical spot illustrations of unicorns and smiling cupcakes (full disclosure: her Rainbow Cookies are an adaptation of a recipe from this blog, in turn an adaptation from Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book, which Oleson and I share a ginormous affection for).

I think Oleson, a diminutive woman who’s built like a bird, has a personal food pyramid that’s 90% saturated fat and refined sugar. What sets CakeSpy apart from so many of today’s overabundant pastel-hued dessert cookbooks is Oleson’s infectious enthusiasm. There's no moral here. She just wants to have as much fun as possible, and she wants you to have fun, too.

But Oleson's surreal creativity keeps everything from getting toothachingly twee, adding a teensy twist of subversion to the works. Yeah, she makes a trompe l’oeil salad out of green candy melts and marzipan (um, I’ll pass), but she also whips up a coffee cake that’s 2/3 crumb topping and only 1/3 cake. Because isn’t the crumb topping always the best part? That “why not?” sensibility is exactly why everyone is creaming their pants over The Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook. The difference is a pastry chef outlook versus a little-kid-tripping-on-Pop-Rocks-let-loose-in-the-kitchen outlook (actually, I think both cookbooks call for Pop Rocks in recipes.) 

I started with a S’moreo. It took about a minute from start to finish, and by that I mean “a minute ago this thing was just a marshmallow, an Oreo, and a piece of Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, but then it went into the microwave and now it’s in my tummy.” Its unrelenting sweetness made me feel sick and sent me lurching for my toothbrush, but it you are eight years old or stoned, you will think S’moreos are the greatest innovation of our young century.

The Toaster Pastry Ice Cream Sandwiches were much more my style. We used frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts paired with strawberry Haagen Dazs. I like eating room temperature  Pop-Tarts straight out of their silvery package, but frozen Pop-Tarts bookending ice cream is, indeed, even better.

Cupcake-Stuffed Cupcakes are, conceptually, my favorite thing in CakeSpy. You take a baked, frosted mini cupcake and place it in a full-sized muffin tin partially filled with batter and you bake the whole works. “The mini-cupcakes, sealed by the moisture of the cake batter, don’t dry out, and the baked bit of frosting lightly spreads, browns, and adds a rich crunch, making for a visual contrast that can’t be beat,” Oleson writes.

Here’s how I put mine together: Mini banana-peanut butter cupcakes with peanut butter-cream cheese frosting tucked into half a batch of Black Magic Cake batter, frosted after baking with more peanut butter-cream cheese gloopiness.

Given my general animosity toward cupcakes, I think baking baked cupcakes was cathartic for me. My flavor pairing serendipitously wound up echoing Peanut Butter Buckeyes. Delightful!

I think CakeSpy might be my favorite cookbook of the year. Not for cooking from, but just for looking through. I’m going to hide it from Frances until she gets a little older, because I know she’ll be pestering me to make Candy Salad and Cadbury Creme Eggs Benedict, and I’ll say no, because the thought of my daughter eating that kind of food horrifies me. But then I remember how badly I wanted to leap into the colorful pages of Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book and just live in those cookie-laden tableaux, and part of me hopes she’ll someday nuke her own version of S’moreos when I’m not looking.

[Comments]

Fruitcake is Not a Sponge Cake

November 22, 2011

Baking Cooking Review (3 of 13): Cake Boy

When a lavishly photographed book about home baking places a blurb from Elizabeth Hurley on its cover, what is the average person supposed to think? Elizabeth Hurley may very well be a lovely person—I enjoyed her in Austin Powers—but her opinions on pastries are of zero importance to me. Still, there it is: “Eric Lanlard makes the yummiest cakes on the planet.”

Cake Boy: Home Baking from Master Patissier Eric Lanlard proudly bears Hurley’s badge of approval; meanwhile, the bio on the jacket flap claims that Lanlard “has earned himself an international reputation for superlative cakes with an impressive A-list clientele.”

I don't care if Madonna is a fan of Lanlard’s London patisserie. I just want to enjoy browsing through a cookbook and baking some stuff.

In England, Lalard has hosted two TV series, so it makes sense that photos of his (stubbly, greasy-haired!) self baking and mixing pepper the book’s pages; maybe British readers will respond to them with warmth and recognition. But those pictures came off as smug to me, as if he has something to prove. Images of comely Nigella Lawson and cuddly Ina Garten never bothered me in their cookbooks, and I don’t watch their shows.

Maybe it’s actually Lawson and Garten’s writing that appeals to me, their images only reinforcing that familiarity; I didn’t get that with Lanlard, who has this to say about chocolate chip cookies: “These sweet cookies, and their many variations, always remind me of my first trip to the USA, where they sell them everywhere straight from the oven…” Which USA did Lanlard visit? Can I go there, too?  The USA I skulk around in is more populated with massive displays of Chips Ahoy! packages.

The recipes here do seem pretty solid. I made Lanlard’s madelines twice, and I have only glowing things to say about the results. (Cakey! Moist! Very easy, with no creaming or beating the eggs and sugar to a ribbon!) I also made something like his light fruitcake (light as in color, not in calories), swapping out these dried fruits for those and totally ditching nasty-ass candied cherries. You can see the end product in the photo, but I wrapped it in muslin and put it on a dark shelf to “cure” for a few weeks before Christmas, so I don’t know yet how tasty it is.

Is fruitcake a sponge cake? Um, no, but according to Cake Boy, it is. The “sponge cakes” section contains only two true sponge cakes (cakes leavened totally or in part by eggs beaten to a stiff foam); the rest are just classic cakes that rely on chemical leaveners like baking powder. Is this perhaps one of those discrepancies in British and American terminologies? There’s also an adorably named section for “tray bakes”, what we’d call bar cookies. (I wonder what they call bar cookies in France.)

That Lanlard’s voice is thrice removed from the American baking audience didn’t help much. A French patissier’s sensibility applied to British tastes is one thing, but the soul of the thing just did not come through to me here in Portland, Oregon as it should. Lanlard is obviously a successful businessman, and it’s likely he didn’t achieve that without lots of experience, hard work, and talent. Too bad those qualities aren’t more palpable in Cake Boy, which made me feel like I’m being sold a product, not a passion.

[Comments]

Big Cake, Not Cupcakes: A Manifesto

November 11, 2011

^{Baking Cookbook Review (2 of 13): Intoxicated Cupcakes}

Cupcakes are overrated. But they are here to stay, or at least here to stay as an edible symbol of all things cute and frivolous. For Halloween, my daughter’s daycare playmate was a cupcake princess. She wore one of those instant costumes from the Halloween superstore. It was cute enough, but its existence means some manufacturer decided to combine the two cutest, most flouncy things in the orbit of an American little girl. Cupcakes! Princess! Boom: cupcake princess costume.

My objection to cupcakes stems from culinary preferences, not a hatred of all things cute and miniature (you know those Japanese erasers shaped like animals and food? I love those things.) It’s a question of ratios and surface area.

Cake batter has a different texture when it’s baked in a full-sized pan. The crumb is more consistent all the way through, so the texture is finer and more elegant, with no big, clumsy bubbles like cupcakes have sometimes.

And cupcakes have more surface area, so you get more rubbery outer parts; I like the velvety-light interior of a cake, and a full-size cake offers more of that.

My greatest source of cupcake displeasure is the whacked distribution of frosting. Bakeries and cupcake-mad minions baking at home have latched on to this oversized turban of buttercream, a cruel mess of goo that overpowers the helpless cake underneath. With a two-layer cake, or even a sheet cake that’s only iced on top, the frosting is more spread out, and so each bite has a much better balanced ratio of cake-to-buttercream. They combine their contrasting textures to create a cohesive and pleasing package of fat and sugar. Big cakes are for occasions, like a family birthday party. Cupcakes are for settings, like a bakery or a classroom or an office break room, where ease of serving is a priority.

Intoxicated Cupcakes by Kate Legere is only about the zillionth cupcake cookbook to appear in the past decade, but it’s maybe the first to feature 41 cupcake recipes with booze. So if you mix lots of sticky-sweet cocktails at home and you love to bake and you’ve been wishing for a better way to combine the two, by all means buy this book and use up that pesky, dusty bottle of creme de menthe that's been lurking in the back of your liquor cabinet.

From an entire cookbook of cocktail-inspired cupcake recipes, I picked the only one using beer, Dark Stout Cupcakes (I didn’t know there was a shade of stout other than dark; this is like asking a person to buy an orange orange). They were okay, the cake part rich and somewhat dense but dry. I declined to top the cupcakes with mini marshmallows as the author suggested, because I don't like room-temperature marshmallows, and because I strongly disagree with Legere's feelings that they resemble the creamy head on a pint of stout. The cupcakes I brought into work lingered for a few days, a telling sign.

I wanted to taste more of the stout; the batter contains 6 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, which is a lot. I’d bought a large bottle of Guinness at Winco and was happy to sip away at the remainder throughout the afternoon. It was my favorite aspect of this whole venture. Stout, despite its dark color, is actually light in body and alcohol, so it’s a good afternoon sipping beer.

The frosting, a heavy and simple combination of cream cheese, butter, and melted white chocolate smoothed out with just a little stout, was quite tasty. I appreciated its lack of powdered sugar.

Legere conveys a personable, good-natured sensibility in her writing style, the voice of a gal who's game for cocktails and good times. So despite my ambivalence toward the subject matter, I didn’t once throw the book across the room. The photos are cheerful and attractive, save one where the frosting is broken and looks like congealed blue cheese dressing. (Yes, I know my own photo here is pretty lame, but it was night and I was tired. My husband's sweatshirt as a backdrop is some pretty sweet prop styling, eh?)

This broken-frosting issue is not exclusive to Intoxicated Cupcakes. I notice this stuff. Does anyone else? My cooking school friend once pointed out a hair on a lamb chop in an otherwise lovely photo in a Charlie Trotter cookbook. It's smack-dab on the middle of the lamb chop, short and kinky but presumably not a pube. Even seasoned pros miss things sometimes. 

[Comments]

Kale 'Em All

October 30, 2011

Over and over again, I keep seeing recipes for kale chips, or having kale chips pop up in conversations with friends and strangers. We went to a little girl’s birthday party tonight and I was so thrilled with the kale chips that I passed on the cupcakes (not to self: include kale chips for all and beer for grownups at future birthday parties for Frances). Kale chips are just the thing when you are craving something greasy and salty that’s not a potato chip. They’re also a fun way to “preserve” kale when you have a garden or CSA box overflowing with the stuff.

If you can take a nap, you can make kale chips. They’re that easy. So why do I keep seeing flawed recipe for kale chips? Many of them call for baking the kale at 350 degrees, or even higher. Kale is a hearty green, but it’s not that hearty. These are the important points:

• Bake them low and slow.
• Don’t overcrowd the pans.
• Use a little oil, not a lot.
• Salt is yummy!

Try gentle 250 or 200 degree oven; you just want dehydrate the kale, not char it. It’ll take a few hours before you wind up with kale chips, but it’s mostly hands-off work.

The hands-on part is the best part, anyway, and I do mean hands-on. Start with maybe two bunches of kale. I use a mix of curly and black (a.k.a. dinosaur, Tuscan, or Lacinato) kale from my garden, but if you are buying kale, just get curly, which tends to be cheaper, and I like how it gets so crispy around its frilly edges.

Stem the kale. I like to stem my kale by stripping off the leaves with my fingers. It’s faster, and touching kale feels nice. It transfers life energy into you when you handle it.

Wash the kale and dry it out (a salad spinner is nice for this). Next, lay out a few clean tea towels and thoroughly pat the leaves dry. Paper towels will work, but they are not as absorbent. Be a grownup and just use the tea towels, okay? Your kale deserves to be pampered.

Next, get out two baking sheets. Old, cruddy ones are the best. Don't bother lining them with parchment; in fact, I think the kale's direct contact with the pan is better for crisping up the leaves.

Dump the dry kale in a pile on one of the sheets and then drizzle the pile with about a tablespoon of tasty olive oil. Use your hands to slick up each leaf of kale so it glistens with oil but isn’t dripping. This is the sexy part. Enjoy it. Don’t rush. Lay the slicked-up leaves one by one on the empty baking sheet, making sure they more or less don’t overlap. Keep on going until both baking sheets are full. Pour a little more olive oil right onto one of your palms if the kale starts to seem dry, then continue with the kale slicking-up process.

Sprinkle the kale with the salt of your choice. Last time I made these I used both Maldon sea salt and homemade shichimi togarashi, but just salt alone is fine, or maybe even better.

Bake in a 200 degree oven for an hour. Check on the kale—probably it will be shriveled up and mostly brittle. For good measure, turn off the oven and leave the pans in for another hour or so. No flipping the chips over or aything. This is when you can take a nap, if you are not a parent to young children. Put a Post-It on the oven door saying something like “KALE CHIPS INSIDE DO NOT PREHEAT!” if you are afraid someone will come along and endanger your kale chips. If they are still soft after all this, just turn the oven back to 200 degrees and dry them out for another 15 minutes or so.

Store the cooled kale chips in an airtight container for up to a month. Lately I’ve been thinking of them as condiments, crumbling them over soups or slipping them into sandwiches (just like I know you did with potato chips as a kid). I really enjoy them on top of cheese pizza slices.

Kale chips will give you funny-tasting burps, very vegetal in flavor, but don’t let that discourage you from making, sharing, and eating these crispy treats. I may love hot dogs, but a kale chip burmp beets a hot dog burp any day.

[Comments]

Donuts, Doughnuts, and Me

October 23, 2011

^{Baking Cookbook Review (1 of 13): Memories of donuts provoked by reading Doughnuts: Simple and Delicious Recipes to Make at Home by Laura Ferroni}

One.

There’s a little bell that dings against the door when you walk into Brownie Bakery on Front Street. Inside it smells sweet and dusty, of sugar and flour and old bricks. A coffee pot sits festering over a heating element. Behind glass cases are all sorts of delicious things, and they are not lovely and ethereal and perfect-looking, but real and approachable. Brownies with chocolate icing and a thick coating of powdered sugar on the bottom; large, rectangular raisin cookies that boast nary a particle of oat; cottony pepperoni rolls stuffed with long sticks of pepperoni the width of pencils. You prefer the donuts, especially the cake donuts. They have chocolate, blueberry, and plain cake donuts, resplendent in their lumpen glory. Next to the old-fashioned cash register—the kind you don’t need to plug in or turn on—sits a jumble of plastic bags filled with donut holes. Twelve donut holes to a bag. The only thing better than a Brownie Bakery cake donut is a bag of Brownie Bakery cake donut holes. You can eat the whole bag in one sitting, teeth shattering the thick veneer of glaze and moving into the moist donut inside. Mom buys a bag as she's dragging you along on her errands, and before you leave Brownie's she lets you untwist the twisty tie, and you both enjoy a snack on the spot. For the rest of your life, this is what a bakery will mean to you.

Two.

This early morning gig slinging donuts in Bexley is your first 40-hour-a-week job. You are twenty, and to compensate for the shame of dropping out of college, you got this, as well as a 20-hour job shelving audio-visual materials at the library downtown.  

The bakery opens at six. You arrive at five-thirty, just as the white-trash guy who makes donuts all night long leaves. Before doing anything else, you make three huge vats of coffee, two regular and one decaf, to get ready for the morning rush, and because you need coffee. Then you walk to the back of the bakeshop to put on flimsy disposable plastic food-handling gloves and arrange the freshly-made donuts in trays. You roll, sprinkle, fill, and ice various shapes and flavors of donuts. This part is pretty cool, except you are in a rush and feeling very exhausted from workingso much and from feeling so empty all of the time.

After placing the donut trays in their display racks, you unlock the door. The same couple you see waiting every morning is out there, all bundled up in the cold and dark. She gets two glazed donuts and a decaf; he gets an iced jelly and a regular. You find their morning routine and apparent dedication to each other moving, but also annoying. Who has the desire to freeze outside five days a week waiting for the donut girl to unlock the door?

Donuts, bagels, and cookies are free for you at the bakery. You gobble down an average of three donuts a day—usually a chocolate iced custard, a blueberry cake and a crescent-shaped “stick”—but because of body-image issues and deeply flawed eating habits, you decide to give donuts up for lent, and instead take to eating three cookies a day.

Three.

Michael P., a friend from the summer you worked at Yellowstone National Park, visits you in Santa Rosa. You make a batch of pumpkin-cornmeal donuts from the Martha Stewart Living Cookbook, which seems to yield endless dozens of somewhat leaden, gritty donuts. Michael P. and you rally to eat them, but discover that a breakfast of freshly made donuts is both grossly filling and perplexingly unsatisfying.

*****

Here are some great examples of situations perfect for frying up a batch of homemade donuts: hosting the slumber-party breakfast of a bunch of ten-year-olds you really want to impress; stocking the concession stand at your u-pick apple orchard; one-upping the funnel cake stall at the Sternwheel Festival.

I was happy to leave donut-making to the pros, pros whose kitchens have powerful exhaust hoods. Deep frying is fun, however, and if donut cookbook isn’t immediately follwed in your mind with why?, there are now plenty of donut cookbooks to choose from. Seattle food photographer-writer Lara Ferroni’s slim and colorful Doughnuts should aid you nicely through your maiden journey into donut craft. This is a cookbook for those yearning to make donuts, not for those who want to plunge into global donut history. There is, for instance, no discussion of why both “doughnut” and “donut” are legitimate spellings of this humble fried treat (I prefer that snappy economy of the latter, as you can see; Ferroni goes with the former).

There’s plenty to like about this little book, including gluten-free and vegan recipes, classic and contemporary variations on basic cake and raised donut preparations, and, for those in fear of hot oil, a few baked versions. Ferroni has some inspired ideas, like a crème brûlée donut (a custard-filled donut with a caramelized sugar top), and her photos are bound to ignite a mighty donut craving. Ferroni is a home cook, and it shows in both her palpable enthusiam, as well as a few occasional misfires with flavors and techniques. A maple glaze of powdered sugar and maple syrup, for instance, would probably get much more depth of flavor from a splash of maple extract. And I was hoping for some clever tips on glazing, filling, and frying, but beyond some cheerful introductory yay-donuts banter, the text is fairly lean. Ferroni does include a bacon-maple bar recipe, but, to her credit, does not offer any cereal-topped donuts. Really, once you get the donut itself mastered, the sky’s the limit.

How to Make Old-Fashioned Sour Cream Doughnuts at My House 

1. Decide to use white whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour, even though you know full well your donuts will wind up denser than the author of the cookbook intended.
2. Begin mixing dough in the midst of a minor bickering session with husband. Also, your toddler is standing at your elbow, licking a green blob of Play-Doh, and you want to get it away from her because it is very high in sodium.
3. Encounter a speed bump: author called for butter in recipe, but didn’t specify if it should be chilled or at room temperature or melted or whatever.  Also, she instructs to combine it with the sugar, sour cream, and egg. How, exactly? Opt to work butter into sugar with fingertips.
4. Mistakenly add baking soda to the butter-sugar mixture instead of the dry ingredients because toddler’s abuse of Play-Doh distracts you. Carry on anyway.
5. Decrease author’s called-for teaspoon of cinnamon to that to half a teaspoon; add a little freshly grated nutmeg. You like subtle spicing and want some sour cream flavor to come through.
6. Mix the dough, which is supple and a little sticky and comes together in s snap. Author calls for resting dough for about fifteen minutes before frying the donuts, but you wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it instead so you can fry donuts the following morning very early, surprising your husband.
7.  Following morning: sleep in. It’s Saturday; even the toddler sleeps in, which is  nice. Forget that whole “surprise donuts breakfast” thing. Ask husband if he’d like fresh donuts for breakfast. He objects: the smell! The lack of nutrition! You defer.
8. Husband goes to band practice and toddler takes nap. Frying time! Place skillet full of oil to heat while you prepare dough rounds to fry. Author says to roll the dough out, but it’s soft enough to pat. You do this on a lightly oiled surface (rolling out doughs for deep frying on floured surfaces introduces particles that will burn and cause off-flavors to the oil; thanks to Ivy Manning for that tidbit!) Author does not suggest frying the donut holes, but you do, because a) less work, and b) good for snacks.
9. Donuts go into oil. House smells like a midway.
10. Frying is over quickly. You have eleven regular donuts and that many donut holes. The donut holes look like hush puppies. Author says you can freeze unglazed donuts for later, so you do not glaze any. You eat a few nibbles of plain donut holes; they are dense, subtly spiced, and pleasantly wheaty. They are also screaming out to be dunked in tea or coffee; you have neither handy, but that’s okay.
11. Freeze most of the donuts, but a few you roll in plain granulated sugar, just because it’s there and it’s easy. Toddler wakes from nap. You give her a donut, her first, because odds are she may never eat a homemade donut again. Cool breeze flutters the kitchen curtains, which are made from a gauzy IKEA sheet with a thread count lower than an earthworm’s I.Q. Toddler says, I kid you not, “May I have another donut, please?” She is sucking on her sugared fingers. “I like how you said please!” you chirp. But you do not giver her another donut.

[Comments]

Thirteen Cookbooks

October 19, 2011

Donuts are the new cupcakes; macaroons are the new cupcakes; tiny pies are the new cupcakes; mini Bundts are the new cupcakes; whoopie pies are the new cupcakes; bakesale cookies are the new cupcakes; full-sized cakes are the new cupcakes; cupcake-stuffed cupcakes are the new cupcakes.

Enough, please. My boot up your butt is about to become the new cupcake. Why can’t cupcakes be cupcakes, pie be pie, and good food be good food?  These are scanty times for a person craving substance over artifice.

A quick look at the baker’s dozen sugary new cookbooks I got from my editor at The Oregonian initially didn’t do much to cheer up my curmudgeonly outlook. “There are some crazy ones in this mix,” Katherine had said when she asked if I’d be interested in reviewing any. But of course I told her I was interested. Who says no to free cookbooks?

Do you adore pastel colors? Do you have an entire edible accessorizing wardrobe of silvery dragées and nonpareils in your pantry? Are lunch and dinner bothersome hurdles on your long day’s road to dessert? This is your year for baking books, my friend.  Saccharine frippery blows cotton candy kissed on all of these titles (and, for some, it’s a big, syrupy French kiss).

It was my instinct to dismiss the whole lot of these books, but that’s not very insightful, is it? The more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s a reason for this explosion of gooey, cakey, and cutesy. We experience our modern world crumbling all around us every day. The seemingly carefree act of making your own lemon verbena marshmallows is a very accessible way to temporarily banish our typical alienation from the marvelous act of doing.

I decided to review all thirteen cookbooks here on this blog, one by one. It’s only fair. I’d like to think every cookbook, even a pretty awful one, has at least one redeeming factor. The goal is to try at least one recipe from every book.

This comes at a time when I’m more and more drawn to vegan baking, as well as baking with whole grains, as well as less-sweet sweets. So be it. Perhaps it’s time to reconnect with the familiar and comforting craft of baking with eggs, butter, flour, and sugar.

[Comments]

The Giving (and Giving) Pear Tree

September 29, 2011

When I am feeling generous I describe the house we live in as ramshackle, but usually I consider it a dump. The rent is cheap and the bones are more or less structurally sound; I suppose its innocuous outer appearance might be a blessing, in a way. It’s not the eyesore of the neighborhood, but I would wager serious money that no one has ever passed it and said, “My, what an adorable little place!”

The scrubby backyard especially lacks any sense of serenity or order. Diseased overgrown lilacs and a monstrously top-heavy holly tree lurk at its outer edges, with accents of ivy and Japanese knotweed bordering the patchy fence.

Even so, the happiest hours I’ve spent at this address have been in the backyard, waging a war of manual labor against vines, weeds, and tangled branches. There’s room for a generous garden, and that garden produces food, and that beauty of plenty makes up for the yard’s marked lack of visual beauty.

When we moved in, the man we rent the house from pointed at a misshapen, three-story tree in the back corner of the yard. “That’s a pear tree,” he said. “It used to make pears, but I’m not sure if it does anymore.” I felt badly for the pears that were not to be, squandered by two decades of tenants who felt no need to prune the thing. That first year here, three brick-hard green lumpy fruits manifested on the tree in the summer and made no progress towards ripening come fall. Wanting to welcome some signs of thriving life into our backyard, I bought a bird feeder at Fred Meyer, filled it with thistle seeds, and hung it from the pear tree using the frayed nylon rope entangled around its trunk some 10 feet off the ground. We did not have any wrens visiting.

Then something happened this summer: pears. Dozens and dozens of them appeared, from the tree’s lowest branches all the way up to the top ones, alongside an ensnared, deflated Mylar balloon. Few of the pears were in reach, so we waited until the wind or gravity brought them thudding to the ground (I really could have used one of these things). I lightly pressed a speckled, yellowish fruit with my thumb and felt the flesh under the thick skin indent just slightly. After a tenous bite, I ate it all. Delicious.

Normally I don’t like pears for eating raw; they are either too mealy, or too pulpy, or too messy, or too dry. But our unexpected windfall of backyard pears enthralled me, and I realized the vast gulf dividing a supermarket pear from a very local specimen. Pears just don’t travel well, and they have a scandalously brief window of ideal ripeness.

Well, we suddenly found ourselves with hundreds of pears, and accordingly hundreds of opportunities to strike ripeness-window gold. Most of the pears were bruised beyond use by their harrowing fall, but we were still able to collect enough from the area underneath the tree to fill up our Radio Flyer wagon. Every day, Frances and I would wander out to the tree and begin our process of gathering. With a toddler’s love of sorting objects, Frances wholeheartedly applied herself to padding over to the compost bins over and over again, a pear in each fist, and tossing the damaged fruit in with great finality.

Maybe they’re bartlett pears; I’m not sure, but I am positive they are not d’anjous (too green) or boscs (too soft). Every morning I’d dice up a few pears for Frances and I to eat with our muesli or hot cereal or yogurt—with their many bruises, bug holes, and funky spots, dicing them was often necessary.

I took the least ugly pears to work, where few people ate them but me. Raccoons nightly feasted on the fallen pears, willy-nilly devouring some sections of the fruit while leaving other parts untouched. Our backyard started to smell like a distillery about to be shut down by the Health Department, and swarming colonies of fruit flies flourished in our rapidly filling compost bins. I began to suspect that the burden of managing backyard pears accounted for the previous tenants’ refusal to prune the tree, perhaps in the hopes it would give up the ghost. For a person truly does not own a fruit tree. The fruit tree owns you.  

I made pear butter infused with a little ginger, lime zest and Ceylon cinnamon and spiked with a touch of rum, and with dry hands cramped from hours of peeling pears, I admired the tidy row of little jars my maniac labor yielded. I tinkered with a Joy of Cooking recipe and made vegan pear bread with almonds and lemon zest: an overambitious failure. I then more or less followed the recipe and wound up with vegan pear bread that tasted like banana bread, but with pears. It wasn’t bad. My Cooking Light came in the mail, and I made a riff of Ann Taylor Pittman's pear and proscuitto pizza. I ate huge slabs for dinner and another slab for dessert.

As the daylight shortens, the chore of collecting pears is now taking less and less time. Today, we found just three, but all of them were still intact. Frances and I took turns biting from a particularly tasty one this afternoon, the juice running down my arm as I held the pear out for Frances to sink her sharp little teeth into.

I’m not sure what it was that triggered our tree to fruit this year; I’m not sure if it will be so generous to us next year. I did get out my little saw and hack—I wouldn’t call it pruning—at the dry and spindly branches I was able to easily reach. I thought about getting out the ladder to cut down the nylon rope, but I decided to leave it. Something needs to be there to remind me that this neglected tree in our unsightly yard is capable of grace and bounty.

Arugula, Pear, and Almond Pizza

You can call this pizza, but it's more like cheesy flatbread with salad on top. Use this recipe as a base—that’s more or less what I did. You could even use a Boboli pizza shell or a tube of pizza dough from the refrigerated section at the grocery store.

And I used a vinaigrette I had in the refrigerator, something I’d thrown together to use up the smears of Dijon mustard clinging to the sides of a nearly empty jar.

Take the dough and make it into the pizza shape you like best (I like “blob” shape). Lightly smear some olive oil around the outer parts of the dough so the crust will be pretty and yummy. Press divots into the dough with your fingertips so it won't rise into a big dome when you bake it. Then top it with grated cheese; I used asiago, but gruyere would be splendid as well...something with a little sharpness, to contrast with the pears. Don’t skimp on the cheese, but don’t go crazy, either.

Bake this in a hot oven, like 450 degrees or so, until the cheese starts to brown and is bubbly. You want the pizza to be done—it’s not baked any more after this.

Top it with a salad of arugula leaves (about four cups) and thinly sliced backyard Bartlett-esque pears (maybe two or three) tossed in the aforementioned vinaigrette. Sprinkle this all with roughly chopped toasted almonds or hazelnuts. The nuts are very important, adding the certain something you'd sense would be missing otherwise. Our pizza was too good to take a picture of. We ate it. Sorry.

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What Cliff Did You Fall Off Of?

September 26, 2011

For a blog to be worth reading, it has to be about something; to write a blog worth reading, you must first do things worth writing about.

I’ve been very busy doing things since my last post, which was—oh, geez—six months ago. Gardening, chasing after a toddler, working, and enjoying life. We went to Ohio and the toddling Frances ate sweet corn.

Have you been busy, too? I hope so. Thank you for visiting my comatose website. You know how some bands put out seemingly dozens of albums a decade, while others release them about as frequently as Halley’s comet is visible in our skies? I’m like those bands. It’s just the way we work.

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Zen and the Art of Sharp Knives

March 01, 2011

I talked to chef-instructor, knife sharpener, and all-around nice guy Woody Bailey for my article about knife literacy in this week’s FOODday. Bailey is passionate and analytical about many things, not just knives. So his business, Zen Blades, is aptly named.  I’d happily recommend his services, but please don’t think I’m discounting other knife sharpening services by doing so. In fact, if you take your knives to someone else and are happy and content, I’d love to hear about it.

The original interview with Bailey took place a few years ago. (I know, I know, I’m a slow transcriber.) We talked for over two hours, and there’s a lot we discussed that didn’t make it into the article. I’d like to share it here.

Bailey has a technical  background and came into his culinary career later on. His path to professional sharpening began with a phone call to Seattle-based bladesmith and knife world celebrity Bob Kramer. (The New Yorker did a profile of Kramer’s ongoing quest to craft the ultimate culinary knife, adding to Kramer’s already-long waiting list of custom orders.) I’ve found that knife people are very generous with their time when discussing knives, so it’s not surprising that Bailey and Kramer made a connection. In fact, Bailey’s enjoyment in knives is such that he’s now exploring the art of making knives, too.

Bailey recalls: That first time we talked for almost two hours.  I got my job at Oregon Culinary Institute, and immediately got put on teaching knife sharpening and skills training to students. I thought, ‘I should call Kramer again.’  So I did, and he said, ‘You know, it’s really weird you called, I have got to get out of sharpening and focus on making knives.  The list is two years long and I’ve got no room to take more people. I’m either going to sell the business outright, or I’m going to train a couple people and that’ll be it.’  He called back a week later and says ‘Are you interested?’ and I said sure.

We started off with the science of metal, the geometry of knives and how each knife’s geometry is specific to its function, and the telepathy of understanding the user of that knife: are they careless, throwing it in the drawer or dishwasher, or is it their prized possession? Kramer said, ‘It’s amazing how quickly you learn how to read those things in a knife, and when you have hundreds of knives going by you get a little story each time a knife comes into your hands.’

I opted to take it mobile. I bought my truck, bought the equipment, started putting it together.  Then my engineering heart kicked in, stalled everything and tripled the price. I practiced on 50 – 100 knives from the school that we use for weekend programs.  I’d dull one up and sharpen it up, dull one up and sharpen it up, then I started getting restaurants.

My style of sharpening knives is very much a hand-art form. There’s no jigs. It’s either done right or it’s not.  My process and Kramer’s process, which is referred to in the New Yorker as “Power Sharpening” , requires seven steps, each one done with a very slight but progressive degree of geometry as well as grit level. To the point where you’re up to about 5,000 grit on a water stone scale, which gives a very polished edge.  The key difference is trying to achieve a geometry that the average person can maintain themselves.

Note: When Bailey’s talking about geometry, he’s doing so in the context of a knife’s edge.  Would a cross-section look like a housetop, or is it narrower, like a church steeple? Knives perform different tasks, so no one angle is the best for every task or every cook. And a knife’s geometry can have a wider angle at the bottom of the knife and narrower at the top, depending on its purpose.

Convex has the most muscle of an edge possible because the geometry of rounded shoulders down to that point supports impact better than something just thin the whole length of the blade. A beefy bevel is really good for impact, so you want that at the back of the chef’s knife, and then as you come up toward the tip, thin thin thin.

The average consumer doesn’t need professional sharpening but once a year, maybe with really heavy use twice a year. If you’re taking care of your knives with simple maintenance, then I feel I’ve extended the love of your knives, because you’re connected to them. If you enjoy the preparation of your food, or if you enjoy the results of your preparation, then the time investment of once-a-week knife maintenance for at least one knife makes a lot of sense.

The easiest method is to start with professional sharpening, then maintain the edge with a ceramic hone, then test for sharpness. Three steps.  Sharpen, hone, test.  And then it’s just hone and test, hone and test, hone and test, eventually when it’s dull back to professional sharpening.

 Some people also believe that they can’t possibly sharpen a knife themselves by hand, so what’s the next best thing?  I think I like the EdgePro system.  It’s a pretty easy to set up and you can control the bevel angle.  Which is good because on a chef’s knife, toward the back you want something that’s strong and beefy but thinner up towards the top. And the EdgePro allows you that kind of flexibility. It’s a pendulum kind of a system. You control the movement and angle as you go, but you have controls that are set.

I get a lot of knives with broken tips from customers. It’s funny, we become very attached. My mother to this day has a paring knife that I think she would carve a prime rib with because it’s her favorite knife.

I had one woman bring me a carbon steel knife, and it was completely broken off in the tip.  The question in my mind is does she want a repair work, or maybe like a santoku edge.  Then I thought when you get an aged knife like this, there’s probably some significance.  So I sharpened it and said, ‘My interpretation is that it’s something family has passed to you and that maybe this broken piece means something to you to.’ She sent me a response about how her grandmother had broken this and yet it had been her cherished knife and the breaking of it was a big story. Thank God I didn’t change it.

I’ve got a gentleman up in the west hills who, every two weeks, gives me the same 22 knives, all I’ve done the last four times is realign them.  I’ll even take them across the belt.  And he’s so thrilled.  But he’s insistent, and I tell him you don’t need this, I’m going to show you how, but no it’s of no interest to him.  It’s like in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there are people that want to understand and learn, and there are those that just want it fixed and to work.  Where you are in relation to your knives fits the same way.

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We Don't Need No Stinkin' Mandolines!

February 28, 2011

Last night we had potato-rosemary pizza. They key to pulling off this starchy treat is topping the pizza with thinthinthin slices of raw potato—if the slices are too thick, they’ll still be crunchy and raw by the time the crust is overly scorched.

I used to perform the potato-slicing feat on my trusty French mandoline, but last night I was brazen. My favorite knife was newly extra-sharp thanks to Zen Blades, and I didn’t feel up to braving the cold to dig the mandoline out of its banishment in the shed.

The pizza? A success. The knife? A dream. Sure, the mandoline would have speedily yielded almost perfect slices of potato, but if you factor in the time it takes to retrieve the thing, set it up, use it, rinse it off, dig stuck potato bits out of its blades with a toothpick, dry it off, and put it away, I actually saved time slicing my potatoes freehand. I felt competent and capable and studly. I can’t fix my car or mow the lawn, but I can slice the shit out of a potato.

“It’s always best to do things directly in the professional manner instead of using subterfuges,” Julia Child once said on “The French Chef.” This may be the best nugget in a lifetime of saucy quips. While Julia was into her gadgets and probably had a few mandolines herself, I feel the logical progression should be knife skills first, slicing toys second. And unless you are a raw foodist or make potato chips at home daily, that’s just what a mandoline is. A fun, fancy toy.

You can get a very good knife for under $50. You can take a knife skills class for probably $65. Those two things will make you a lean, mean cutting machine every time you set foot in a kitchen. And then you won’t have to worry about where to keep your mandoline.

Besides, there are a lot of bum mandolines out there. Do you like keeping your fingernails intact? Then don’t buy any model of OXO mandoline. They uniformly suck and should come with a free packet of Band-Aids. The Shun mandoline is a handsome but overdesigned behemoth akin to parking a Cadillac Escalade on your countertop. Those little Japanese Benriner mandolins are the best bang for the money, but I am fond of my own pretty (and much spendier) Bron stainless steel mandoline. It was a graduation present from Mom and Dad. I picked it out at the cutlery store in Rhinebeck, New York, just up the road from where I went to cooking school.

That was eleven years ago. Since then, my knife skills have improved, and my desire to candy carrot ribbons has sharply decreased. Thus the mandoline resides in the shed, but I will always keep it for sentimental reasons and sauerkraut-making projects.

And here’s a bonus tip: most mandolines come with a “food pusher,” the clunky attachment that’s supposed to spare your fingertips but actually ends up mutilating half of your zucchini or potato. In restaurant kitchens, they throw that part away. I advise you do the same thing. Get a pair of nubby-palmed gardening gloves and keep them with your mandoline to wear exclusively when using it. This is the cheap alternative to those hard-to-find nylon chainmail gloves marketed specifically for protecting your hands (though do keep in mind that gloves or no gloves, a mandoline can and will bite a careless user the first opportunity it gets). This gardening glove tip I gleaned from my stint in the test kitchens of Martha Stewart Living magazine…figures, huh? A good thing, yes.

[Comments]

Our Knives, Ourselves

February 24, 2011

These are the knives I use the most. I keep them on a magnet above our kitchen counter, as I find the magnet convenient and safe. I like being able to see them there on the wall. You’ll notice a lot of Shun knives. I used to work at a store that sold quite a bit of Shun products, and I am very fond of them. I also didn’t have to pay for any of my Shun knives. But I have other brands of knives, too. It’s good to have an assortment of styles and brands, a blended family of knives. That way every knife has its own story. These are the stories of my knives, from left to right.

Shun Classic U2

U2 stands for “ultimate utility,” not for that big-head Bono. With its curved tip it is great for making sandwiches (cut your bread and smear it with mustard, all with one knife!), but I truly love this knife for chopping chocolate. The serrations bite down into the chocolate to keep the blade from slipping. It makes awesome chunks and shavings.

Shun Classic 6” Alton’s Angle Utility

The dorky angle of the blade—an innovation of Alton Brown, whose mug actually appears on the knife—keeps your knuckles from hitting the cutting board. I am not a huge fan of utility knives, which have narrower blades than chef’s knives, but this little fellow is pretty handy. We most often use it for cutting cheese, perhaps because with a narrower blade there’s less metal for the cheese to get suck to.

Shun Classic 3.5” Paring Knife

Shun’s Classic line has a D-shaped handle that’s supposedly ergonomic for right-handed folks, nestling right into their grip. I’m a lefty, but the Classic line still feels fine in my hands.

Wusthof Classic 3.5” Paring Knife

The paring knife issued to me in my cooking school knife kit was very similar to this one…until a co-worker at Dean & Deluca in St. Helena, CA knocked it off my cutting board and nicked the tip off. I was able to grind a functional edge back on it with my sharpening stone, but that poor paring knife was never the same again. Years later, my old boss at Sur La Table gave me this Wusthof knife as a thank-you for selling a significant amount of merchandise, and I was able to retire my gimpy paring knife to my gardening tools, where it now works splendidly for edging.

F. Dick 9” Chef’s Knife

In 1997, when I began my studies at the Culinary Institute of America, students were issued a kit of F. Dick knives in a rigid black plastic case that looked like some Mafia hit-man’s briefcase of murder weapons. I went to the knife shop in Hyde Park and had them mark my name on it using a dremel tool so I wouldn’t get is mixed up with any of my classmate’s identical knives. F. Dicks are German, comparable to Wusthof, but without the name recognition. A lot of my C.I.A. classmates disapproved of the F. Dicks (they also make tools for grooming horses), but I didn’t. I still love this chef’s knife, though these days I find it overly long (most chef’s knives are 8 inches) and lacking finesse. I reach for this puppy when I need to split a melon or squash in two, or if I’m breaking down a whole chicken. We got boning knives in those C.I.A. knife kits, too, but I prefer using this chef’s knife for chicken, as the bolster functions nicely as a mini-cleaver of sorts.

Shun Elite 7” Santuko

This is the knife is my baby. I reach for it 4 times out of 5. I love its lightness, the smoothness of its handle, the subtle matte finish of the blade. It feels right and it’s sharp. To my eyes it is handsome as well, and that never hurts. I had to sell a ton of Shun cutlery to earn this puppy, which retails for over two hundred dollars. But if I were the sort of person who spent $200 on a knife, I’d be happy to spend it on this one.   

Cutco Spatula

A spatula has no business on a knife magnet, I suppose, but its place there is my recognition of this particular spatula’s admirable performance. It’s one of my favorite tools in the kitchen. No true chef will praise Cutco knives, unwieldy stainless steel rip-offs as they are, but this lovely, long spatula is both sturdy and flexible. I use it to flip food in sauté pans, remove cookies to cooling racks, and ice cookies and cakes. It also makes a pleasing “ping” when it comes on or off the knife magnet.

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Hitting Up the Bar (Cookies)

January 18, 2011

I remember bars, the kind with beer. They were fun. Someday I’ll go to one again. Maybe both my husband and I will even go to the same bar at the same time together!

I also remember cookies, and baking, and spending a lot of time baking cookies for fun. Now I steam butternut squash in the pressure cooker to make baby food in my spare time. We have an awesome baby who’s eating more or less homemade macrobiotic baby food, so the lack of iced sugar cookie cutouts is something we can roll with for now.

When I do manage to bake tasty treats, they’re low-labor ones, like bar cookies. Butter and sugar and crap baked in a pan and cut it into squares. That’s it. Barely more work than a boxed mix. When I have a sugar attack and we don’t have any cheap, acceptable Trader Joe’s dark chocolate around, I reach for my funky sauté pan and make bar cookies.

The sauté pan is a trick I learned at a Nick Malgieri baking demo that revolutionized brownies—and, by extension, bar cookies—for me. It’s a one-pan method that can be adapted to other bar cookies, not just brownies. You melt the butter in a high-sided skillet, getting it good and hot. You want the butter to just begin sizzling, then you yank it off the heat and drop in finely chopped chocolate. No futzing around with bowls over simmering pots of water, no creaming of fat and sugar, no beating of eggs. All of this means fewer dirty dishes. Cleanup is most of the work of baking, and it’s that part that sucks, so why not eliminate as much as possible?

The following blondie recipe doesn’t seize Malgieri’s brilliant melt-the-chocolate-in-sizzling-butter method, but it does call for the use of one skillet or sauté pan (or even a saucier), plus assorted measuring implements. No bowls! And with ingredients like vanilla extract, nuts, and chocolate chips, I just eyeball it like we annoying experienced chefs do.

I made these blondies in the midst of my latest sugar attack. It’s an easy recipe to remember, based on a ratio of ones (1 stick butter: 1 cup flour: 1 cup brown sugar: 1 egg), so I don’t even need to consult a cookbook. The salt and vanilla I just toss in there, and the nuts and chocolate depend on availability.

What is important is to gently continue cooking the butter after it’s melted so that the milk solids brown; this is what gives the blondies their amazing flavor, which is a caramel-butterscotch-toffee bonanza. Such rewards from such humble ingredients! When the blondies include stir-ins like toasted nuts and chocolate chips, they are like a cross between chocolate chip cookies and very sophisticated candy. 

There’s a recipe sort of like this one in The Essence of Chocolate. That’s because it’s my recipe (I used to work at Scharrfen Berger), but it’s uncredited, and that’s another story, but a pretty boring one that has to do with an innocent fact-checking error. The inspiration for the Essence of Chocolate recipe came from the blondies recipe in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything; the browning the butter was my addition. So what you see below is a big mashup of tips and techniques gleaned from smart bakers and cooks. Years in the making! But you, dear reader, can bake your own blondies at home with maybe ten minutes of active work.

Bar None Blondies

Makes enough to last, like, a day or two

• 1 stick (1/2 cup, or 8 tablespoons) unsalted butter
• 1 cup light or dark brown sugar
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 egg, straight from the refrigerator and cold
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract (I just dump it in there…it could be 1 teaspoon or 1 tablespoon, but you are aiming for 2 teaspoons)
• 1 cup all-purpose flour, or ½ cup A.P. flour and ½ cup some kind of whole wheat flour
• About ½ cup pecan or walnut pieces, preferably toasted
• About ½ cup chocolate chips or chunks

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F and position a rack in the center. Put the butter in a high-sided skillet (about 10 inches wide) and place over medium heat. Swirl the skillet every minute or so. Once the butter is melted, continue cooking it, still swirling from time to time. Keep an eye on it, because butter can go from browned to blackened in seconds. Once the butter makes popping sounds, smells toasty, and has gently browned flecks floating in it (those are the milk solids, now browned), remove the skillet from the heat and immediately add the brown sugar and salt. Stir with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until well blended. Be patient with this whole butter-browning business. Sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it takes about 5 minutes; I think it’s mostly up to the whim of the butter.

Depending on the type of skillet you have, your sugar-butter mixture might be pretty hot. Let it cool for a few minutes while you prep your 8-inch-by-8-inch baking pan. Line the pan with foil or baking parchment, letting two opposite ends hang over at least a few inches to create handles. If using foil, grease the foil. Do not skip this pan-lining step and think you are clever, because once baked, these buggers love to stick to the pan.

Are you done with the pan treatment? Come back and crack the egg into the skillet with the butter-sugar mixture (that’s why the egg is cold! It helps the batter cool down! Thank you Alice Medrich!) Add the vanilla extract and beat until quite smooth and toffee-like. Add the flour to the pan and mix until incorporated—no streaks. Stir in the nuts and chocolate (if the batter is still warm, the chocolate might melt, so you may need to go wash dishes or pay a bill online first).

Spread the batter (it will be quite tacky) in the lined pan. Bake until the top crackles like parchment and a toothpick inserted in the center of the blondies comes out with moist crumbs, but not gluey. This may be anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes. You will have to be a grownup and decide for yourself if they are done the way you want.

Place the pan on a cooling rack (or even in the freezer, which makes the blondies easier to cut and keeps their interior from getting too done). Once cool, lift the giant uncut blondie out of the pan using the parchment or foil handles. Invert onto a cutting board, peel off the foil or parchment, then invert onto another cutting board so the giant blondie is presentation-side-up. Then cut into desired shapes of desired size. In a house with two greedy adults, the blondies will last about 2.5 days. Keep covered when not eating.

 

[Comments]

More Things to Love!

January 03, 2011

For the past few years, the Oregonian's FOODday has had an end-of-the-year feature with a bunch of blurbs about cool food-realted things. I love reading and participating in the "Things We Love" issue because it has few rules, no rankings, and tons of fun. 

Just for kicks, here are my "Things We Love" outtakes. Was there a food thing you loved this year? Share it in a comment! I always enjoy hearing what delights a happy cook or eater.

Cloth kitchen towels. Just buy a whole bunch and use them. Don’t be shy. New, vintage, cotton, linen, whatever. They work better than paper towels for blotting foods dry and are pretty. 

Black Sheep Bakery Trail Mix Bars. I’m not a fan of this bakery’s other offerings (after one too many muffins streaked with clumps of badly incorporated dry ingredients), but their oaty trail mix bars more than make up for it. Cakey, chunky, studded with raisins and chocolate, I’ve yet to eat one on a trail, because I can’t seem to walk five paces without inhaling the damn thing. Try as I might, I just can't replicate Black Sheep's trail mix bars at home, so good thing Peet's and Whole Foods carry them for me to buy in moments of weakness. 

Banh Mi at Best Baguette. Cheap, fast, fresh, exotic. The gateway banh mi. Three words: shredded pork skin.

Fizzy water. Sometimes all you want is fizzy water in a can. And that’s exactly what this is. FOODday’s Linda Faus got me hooked on this, a case of which was always in the test kitchen’s refrigerator. She prefers La Croix in the green can (lime flavor), but at home we often have Big K in the blue can (unflavored; available at QFC and Fred Meyer). Sure, buying water is ridiculous, but as splurges go, it’s ridiculously cheap.

Penzey’s Spices in the Pearl. The merchandise is the same as their location in Clackamas—world-class spices and herbs at generally reasonable prices—but their new spot in the Pearl District is much cozier.

Little cans of coconut milk. It is fairly rare that I need a whole can of coconut milk at once. I know you can use leftover coconut milk in things like quick breads and smoothies, but I just never seem to. Little cans of coconut milk to the rescue! I get these 5.6-ounce cuties at Fubonn, the giant Asian market close to my house, but I suppose smaller Asian markets might have them as well. Cheap, less waste, yay.

Bittersweeties by Ida Rand. Collages made with wallpaper and pages from old cookbooks. Bad color separation and delightfully dated food styling mashed up with storybook illustrated kids who romp and flirt with tasty treats. “My work is an enigma surrounded by a question ground into sausage and then wrapped in a pancake,” says Portland-based artist Ida Rand. Pancake-wrapped sausages? Right on, sister. Santa, please bookmark Ms. Rand’s artwork for Christmas 2011.

Tempeh. It’s the meat analog for haters of meat analogs. Meaty texture, slightly funky/fermenty flavor, filling as all hell.

Attic Journals. As a left-handed person, I don’t write well in spiral-bound books. Which is good news, as otherwise I’d have spent a small fortune on Attic Journals made from reused cookbooks. I’ll just have to make due enjoying the intact vintage cookbooks I already own, but you righties out there can buy away and use those virgin pages to scribe up all the recipe haikus you want.

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Sausagetarian Goes Pretend Vegetarian

January 01, 2011

I decided to stop eating meat in 2011. Then had bacon with my New Year's Day sourdough pancakes. There is no shame.

For a long time I’ve been kicking around the idea of going vegetarian, but I resisted because I like a burger and some cured pork products every now and then. But now that our daughter is 11 months old and I am still in no way inclined to feed her meat, I figured I might as well give it up myself.

Why stop eating meat? It’s gotten boring. It’s cheaper to not eat meat. I don’t have to worry as much about cross-contamination in my kitchen. I won’t get the willies if I think too hard about how most of the fowl and livestock in our industrial food system are raised.

Plus my husband, who eats out every day he works, can have any sort of animal flesh he likes from downtown Portland’s food five million carts, so he still has plenty of meaty choices outside of the home.

There are a few circumstances in which I will eat meat. If a hunter gives me some venison (unlikely), I will hella eat that meat. If I am at someone else’s house for dinner and it would be rude to not eat meat (unlikely, as we live in ultra-P.C. Portland), I will eat meat. If I find myself in the proximity of trail bologna or a West Virginia hot dog, I will eat meat. If I made soup in 2010 with ham and then froze the soup, I will eat the soup in 2011 because the ham will be grandfathered in.

Cooking tasty vegetarian meals is not hard, but cooking new and exciting ones can be. I like challenges, and I like projects, so this will be my current one until I no longer deem it necessary. That might be a few months; it might be a few years. I’m not going to write a book proposal about the year I went vegetarian, and I’m not going to blog about this specific topic after this.

I’m also not going to be eating any sausages for a while. Soyrizo, one of the few meat analogs I can abide, does not count. 

As for my New Year’s Day bacon…well, I bought that before I decided to stop eating meat. We have a few slices yet, and I will cook and eat those, because I don’t want to waste food. The cabbage rolls we had for New Year’s dinner were vegetarian, save the bacon grease I cooked the filling in (once again, no waste, plus I was too lazy to clean out the breakfast pan. Also, I'd like to note how impossible it is to get an appetizing photo of cabbage rolls when it's dark outside and you are impatient and hungry).

I’ll still eat selected seafood (canned tuna, wild salmon, and canned anchovies, mainly), plus eggs, plus assorted chicken stocks that might be in foods I order at restaurants. I will never, ever give up fish sauce. And I will still eat eggs and dairy.

So basically I’m being a fair-weather vegetarian, which is more or less a sausagetarian with less emphasis on the sausage. No hot dogs for a while. I’ll live.

[Comments]

More Buckeyes, Please

December 10, 2010

Take a peanut butter candy center and dip almost all of it in chocolate, leaving a patch of filling the size of a dime exposed. That's a peanut butter buckeye. In Ohio and thereabouts, we make and eat them during football season and Christmastime.

Here in Portland, where I have spotted a few lovely expat buckeye trees, many folks do not have any idea what a buckeye is, in tree or candy form. This is unacceptable. As long as I live away from Ohio, I will continue my Ministry of the Buckeye! They were even part of the truffle class I taught a few times at Sur La Table, and though peanut butter buckeyes are not truffles, they were always the favorite thing of all the students. 

Despite your feelings about or probable unawareness of Ohio, or buckeye trees, or the Ohio State Buckeyes, you should embrace peanut butter buckeyes. Peanut butter. Chocolate. Easy to make. Easy to give. Very easy to eat.  

Buckeye F.A.Q.

Q. Why do people make peanut butter buckeyes at Christmastime if the actual nut of the buckeye tree appears in the fall?

A. Peanut butter and chocolate taste good, hello! When it comes to Christmas traditions and logic (man in red suit, three oriental kings kneeling in a manger bearing expensive perfumes, fir trees with glass balls and candles, caribou that fly) it is best to suspend your disbelief.

Q. Sara, why do make fun of Oregon college sports mascots like the Ducks and the Beavers for being lame when the mascot of the Ohio State University's sports teams is an inedible nut?

A. There is a yummy edible confection version of the buckeye, and Ducks and Beavers have no such thing. I don't even like sports, so what does it matter? 

Q. Didn't you already write about buckeyes on this blog?

A. Yes. Once is not enough.

Q. I want to make peanut butter buckeyes. Where's this recipe already?   

A. It is here. This is from my buckeye article in Saveur issue #77. Thank you Saveur, and Merry Christmas.

Peanut Butter Buckeyes

Makes a few dozen, which is not enough, so double this.

• 2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
• 3/4 cup smooth peanut butter
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 6 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/2 teaspoon vegetable shortening

1. Put sugar, peanut butter, butter, vanilla, and salt into a mixing bowl and beat well with a wooden spoon. Roll peanut butter mixture into 1" balls and transfer to a wax paper–lined cookie sheet in a single layer. Freeze until firm, 15–20 minutes.

2. Melt chocolate and shortening in a small heatproof bowl set over a small pot of simmering water, stirring often. Remove pot and bowl together from heat.

3. Insert a toothpick or wooden skewer into the center of a ball and dip about three-quarters of the ball into the melted chocolate, leaving about a 1-inch circle of peanut butter visible at the top. Twirl toothpick between your finger and thumb to swirl off excess chocolate, then transfer to another wax paper–lined cookie sheet, chocolate side down. Slide out toothpick and repeat dipping process with remaining peanut butter balls and chocolate, reheating chocolate if necessary.

4. Freeze buckeyes until firm. Smooth out toothpick holes left in peanut butter. Buckeyes will keep, well sealed, in cool place for up to 1 week and up to 2 weeks in refrigerator. (Author's note: they will not last that long.) Serve at room temperature or chilled.

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Macaroni Comeback

December 07, 2010

I wrote this post years ago. Seriously. And I only recently unearthed it from dusty-crusty cyberfolders. I will share it with you now, because I feel like it, but something is missing! What it it? Read the post to find out. Email me if you'd like the solution to this mystery.

How many of you regularly buy or prepare macaroni? I’m not talking about macaroni and cheese, but macaroni the pasta product. Elbow macaroni.

My best friend Erin was visiting from Ohio recently, and when she mentioned the Johnny Marzetti casserole her mother makes (I remember eating it at Erin’s house when I stayed for dinner), it kick-started a bizarre craving for macaroni. I realized I hadn’t had made anything with macaroni in ages.

We do enjoy homemade macaroni and cheese from time to time, but I usually make it with penne. Fusilli, farfalle, mini-penne and even more esoteric shapes like orecchiette and radiatore have captured our hearts with their fanciful names and sauce-cradling properties, but back in the day, pasta was spaghetti, fettuccine, or macaroni. End of story. And of those three, one is the obvious choice for baking and for kid appeal.

I’m proposing an elbow macaroni comeback. Let’s admire its cute, chubby stature; its universal availability; its sturdiness in mayonnaise-laden pasta salads of yore. Macaroni is not just for preschool crafts, folks!

Tonight I baked pastitsio, the hearty Greek-American pasta casserole that’s like a kickier, easier lasagna. You make a ragu with ground beef, spice it up with a sneaky kiss of cinnamon, toss it with al dente macaroni, dump it in a casserole, and top the whole works with béchamel sauce. I love how the béchamel melds so velvety with the pasta component, so unlike the stringy mess of cheese-crowned baked pastas.

I was quite young the first time I made pastitsio, maybe 10 or 11. I didn’t even know what béchamel sauce was, but I dutifully followed the directions in the recipe Mom bookmarked in Better Homes & Gardens Heritage Cookbook. The recipe below is based on memories of that successful dish, one that pleased my husband this very evening, many years later.

Sara's Perfectly Incomplete Pastitsio

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 carrot, finely grated (optional)
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes
• 1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
• 12 ounces uncooked macaroni (or cook a whole pound of pasta, but I like my pastitsio somewhat saucy)
• 2-1/3 cups milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 3 tablespoons flour
• ¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• A few dashes hot pepper sauce or a few grinds of white pepper
• 1/3 cup parmesan cheese

 Bake at 375 degrees F for 45 minutes, until the top is nicely browned in spots and bubbling. Let sit at least 5 minutes before serving.

Oftentimes I'll omit typing up the entire method when I'm developing a recipe, assuming I'll remember what I did and finish up later. Usually I do; this time I didn't. The inclusion of eggs in the bechamel is baffling me. At what point are these added? Are they tempered into the hot milk mixture right at the end, before pouring it over the pasta? Was I drunk when I did this? Only old man time knows. 

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