12.21.16

i had my first glühwein of the season on a perfect november day in berlin; we'd just toured a spooky east german amusement park with our friend ed and were taking the long way back to the train along the spree when it began to drizzle. the vacation rule, of course, is that one must hole up with a drink when it starts to rain, and lo, there was a riverside cafe. do germans ever put their holiday mugs away? we took a table and argued about politics for an hour while i pretended i was a one-woman christmas market. i'm still thinking of berlin, and of another friend who lived there for a few months while working on her doctorate. she posted on facebook last night:

Listening to the BBC interviewing someone about the Berlin attacks - yesterday's kick in the chest, for me - and the reporter asks some security pundit if the Germans know everything about the however-many-thousand refugees that they are sheltering. And pundit responds (in paraphrase), "of course not, but we also don't know everything about the however-many-million Germans who live in the country, and nor should we _want_ to." Stay sensible, my shaken city.

i adapted a chowhound recipe, as our local grocery store lacked whole cloves and cardamom pods and making a two-bottle batch of glühwein when you only live with one person is intense, even when you're mostly german.

first-day-of-winter glühwein

- 1 lemon
- 1 orange
- pinch of ground cardamom
- pinch of ground cloves
- 5/8 c granulated sugar
- 5/8 c water
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 bottle red wine (i used castillo de fuente)
- 1/4 cup brandy (i used grappa we smuggled on the train from milan to berlin)

zest and juice the citrus and put the zest and juice in a medium saucepan; add the cloves, cardamom, sugar, and water, then bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar, and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the mixture reduces by a third. add the red wine and brandy, then bring back to a simmer, remove from heat, serve in mugs, and make merry. i leave the zested citrus in there; it reminds me of fallen leaves in the spree.

05.06.13

the cocktail of the summer, in case you were wondering, is the aviation (our version is 2 oz. nolet's silver dry gin, 3/4 oz. lemon juice, 1/2 oz. luxardo maraschino originale, and 1/4 oz. rothman & winter crème de violette; shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe). it is one of those beverages for which you must purchase liqueurs you're sure you'll never use again (any old gin will likely work and who doesn't have that, but the maraschino and the crème de violette cannot be approximated with other things), but an aviation makes you feel as though you're on a zeppelin in a spangled cocktail dress, and if that isn't your idea of an incomparable friday-night situation we probably wouldn't get along. they say it's called an aviation because it looks like the evening sky. joe downloaded a flight-tracking app a few weeks ago, so as we sit on the balcony with our drinks he tells me who's causing each vapour trail in the eastern air.

02.28.13

101 in 1001 {III}: 093 learn to make bagels at home [completed 02.22.13]



a few things one should know about making bagels: the process is in no way arduous (a mere hour of rise time! you could decide to make bagels at nine in the morning and be eating them by like 11!*) and virtually idiot-proof, one can sub flours and toppings in and out at will (the heartbreak of poppy seeds between your teeth need never happen again!), and you can eat more than one when you're done (because they're much smaller than the carb bombs you'd buy from someone else, and also listen, you just made your own bagels and can do whatever you want).

this zenlike-in-its-simplicity recipe got to me by way of my college roommate jen, a brutally talented baker who, for example, rejiggered her famous-in-multiple-metropolitan-areas pie crust recipe with algebra and vodka to eliminate the need for crisco (that post features weight, volume, and ABV charts; it's a thing of beauty). she, in turn, picked it up from jennifer reese's make the bread, buy the butter, a book on when cooking from scratch is and isn't worth your time (her blog is here). ye recipe, with my adaptations and notes:

homemade bagels

- 3 1/2 cups flour (i made my first batch with ye olde white flour, and my second with 2 cups white and a cup and a half of whole wheat; both were great)
- 4 1/2 tsp. instant yeast
- 3 tbsp. cane sugar (i used vegan cane sugar)
- 1 tbsp. kosher salt (i kicked this up to more like 5 tsp, as the dough was a bit sweet)
- 1 1/2 cups warm water
- neutral vegetable oil for greasing (i used a can of pam organic olive oil spray i found at work)
- 2 tbsp. barley malt syrup or dark brown sugar (i had neither and used tupelo honey)
- cornmeal, for sprinkling
- 1 egg

combine the flour, yeast, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. add the water and beat hard for a few minutes. if the dough is too wet, add more flour, but just a bit at a time until you have a stiff dough. knead for 5 minutes. place dough in a lightly greased bowl and cover with a clean, damp towel to rise about one hour and double in size. preheat oven to 400 degrees F and bring a large pot of water to boil. while water is heating, lightly oil one baking sheet and sprinkle another generously with cornmeal. divide dough into 12 pieces.** roll each piece into a ball and stick your thumb through the middle to coax it into a bagel shape. let bagels rest on the greased baking sheet for 10 minutes (or not; i've skipped this step and the bagels don't seem to care). once the water is at a rolling boil, add the brown sugar or barley syrup (or honey). drop the bagels into the water, three at a time. let them simmer for a minute and flip them over to simmer for another minute. remove with a slotted spoon back to the greased baking sheet. repeat with the remaining bagels. move all the boiled bagels to the cornmeal sprinkled baking sheet, flipping them over when putting them down so the drier side sits in the cornmeal. give the top of each bagel a wee egg wash (one beaten egg was enough for the whole dozen), then sprinkle on the toppings of your choice; i used grey sea salt, penzeys dehydrated onions, and five diced garlic cloves.*** bake for about 30 minutes, until golden brown. serve with cream cheese and the satisfaction of fresh bagels acquired without the application of pants.

we split our first batch of carb DIY with our sweet downstairs neighbor who's been stuck at home since foot surgery a month ago. we brought our second batch along for yupster brunch on our train trip to washington last weekend.





yeah, those are faux-bois paper plates and napkins. not pictured: vanilla skyr, my quilting supplies (quilting and homemade bagels on the train: this is how childless cat ladies spend their time), joe biden (though i feel he was there in spirit), the $300 we had to spend on the much-less-genteel ride home on sunday when we missed the 6:20 train by five minutes. but this is not the story of that sadness; this is the story of bagels, and the story of bagels ends happily. go forth.


*if you're baking before nine in the morning, most of this website will not be of use to you.

**the original recipe is for 10 bagels, but i like mine slightly smaller, and, let's be honest, 12 is the best number.

***i am not usually a gadget fan, but my life changed for the better the day i found a garlic chopper at the office. i have and love a microplane, but a chopper is great for dishes which call for bigger chunks and social occasions which don't call for garlicky hands.

06.18.12

101 in 1001 {III}: 006 bake pumpernickel bread from scratch [completed 06.15.12]



summer fridays! they're referenced on twitter, and one hears of them in passing on saturdays and sundays, but never were they mine until last monday, when it was announced that my office would be closed at the end of the week, motherfuckers. with baking time on my hands, i found myself a recipe, hit the whole foods at columbus circle like an eastern army with a continent-sized campaign on its map, and settled down to make some pumpernickel.

the tricky part of bringing this bread into being was, oddly, the shopping (o, how the russians fetishize shopping): deb of smitten kitchen's russian black bread calls for seventeen ingredients, including a fresh shallot, unsweetened chocolate, three kinds of flour, a decommissioned tank, and four severed alliances. the combination of those things resulted in the peculiar cat-food smell that is the signature of good pumpernickel, though, so i figured i was on the right track.



as my go-to bread procedure has always been jim lahey's no-knead recipe, spending quality time with a dough was new and a little frightening. how much abuse did it want? what does springy feel like, anyway? was i supposed to fold and punch, to stretch and wheedle, to fling and exclaim? i spoke a little russian to the gluten as it developed ("i am studying international relations at stanford university, i am not a spy! what time is it? meat salad!").





the bread, to make a long story short, was quite horrorshow; i think i would be a bit more liberal with the caraway seeds, toss in a bit of sauteed onion, and perhaps tinker with the flour ratios a bit next time (for the pumpernickel flavor was just a bit subdued), but on the whole i was exceedingly pleased. my two loaves rose dutifully, and they were right tasty sliced and toasted with scrambled eggs and cracked pepper.

summer fridays are not merely for making bread, o my brothers; i have also been addressing the 101 in 1001 list with new-to-me shakespeare (as you like it in central park on thursday night) and kubrick (full metal jacket as i pumpernickeled). as you like it was one of the better comedies i've seen in recent years; lily rabe's rosalind was sharp and charming, a katharine hepburn for arden, and the bluegrass steve martin composed for the show paired well with the cast's high spirits. i teared up as i do every year; it is so fine, this city of mine with its plush june air and whirling moths and poetry all over the place. full metal jacket, in turn, was...passable? i liked the head-shaving opening sequence very much (can you really shave a head that quickly?), and vincent d'onofrio was as scary as he always is, but the pacing was weird, and joker's final voice-over was disappointing. i have higher hopes for barry lyndon and dr. strangelove.


imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 what would you do with a suddenly-spare friday?
02 are you a baker of bread? have you any kneading secrets?
03 how many of shakespeare's plays have you seen (live)?
04 do you ever cry at plays?
05 am i the only one who didn't know 2 live crew sampled full metal jacket?
06 have you seen prometheus? was that first scene on earth?

08.29.11





we had a lot of cheese at our disposal by the time we battened down the hatches for the storm on friday night. cheese is not the sort of thing one should stockpile for an emergency, what with its tendency to throw fits in the absence of refrigeration; i admit i was cultivating a scenario in which the power went out and our eating large quantities of cheese was the responsible thing to do. judge if you must.


by saturday afternoon our relationship with crackers had become strained, but we could hardly plan to bake in the morning; while it was entirely possible that our oven would be fine and safe to use on sunday, a risen dough that goes unbaked is a dough i can't face. enter the easy little bread recipe from 101 cookbooks: about 15 minutes of prep (including five to ten in which you're just waiting for your yeast to bloom), a 30-minute rise, and 35-40 minutes in the oven. the most exotic ingredient is "runny honey" (we used a rather firm sunflower honey and were just fine). our poor storm-stuffy apartment smelled as if jehovah himself were in the kitchen baking bread. within two hours we had the ultimate ploughman's lunch on our table (is there a jar of branston pickle among your disaster supplies? fix that, as soon as you can) and were watching youtube clips from the freddie mercury tribute concert at wembley, as one does. take this recipe for a spin; you won't be sorry.

01.02.11: the dirty dozen {concocted for the holidays}






01 blood orange sorbet
02 candied blood orange peels
03 rosemary bread, fluffy
04 whole wheat bread, flat
05 chocolate chip / chocolate bar / pecan / almond cookies
06 vanilla ice cream
07 spiced glazed nuts and pretzel mix
08 roasted tomato salsa
09 spinach and artichoke dip
10 boxing day margaritas
11 sugar cookie dough
12 so many hobo names

11.22.10: the dirty dozen, part I {conspicuous consumption}



01 say, have you heard of orphan thanksgiving? it's not actually especially orphan-related, though i'm working on that: it's an "i made this" flickr group in which photos of tasty thanksgiving dishes from around the world rub elbows on the internet. it's a tapestry of calorie-dense magic, if you will. college friends and i started it a few years ago, and it remains surprisingly satisfying to stop by and check out each other's potatoes. come on in!

02 speaking of potatoes, emily gould has intrigued me:

[C]eleriac may look weird, but it is a great addition to mashed potatoes. Make sure you peel off all the hairy parts, then slice it into chunks and boil it with five or six potatoes. When the potatoes and celeriac chunks are all fork-pierceable, mash them with some cream cheese, milk, garlic butter and scallions. People will be amazed by the potatoes and won’t know why.

The farmer’s market shopper seemed skeptical but I think that was because of my evangelical zeal and the fact that she hadn’t initiated an interaction with me. “That was really something to share with the Internet, not a specific human,” I remember thinking as I walked away.

03 i'm not in charge of potatoes this year; i'll be defrosting the cheese pumpkin i squirreled away a few months ago to make throwdown pumpkin pie (i'm already excited about making the bourbon-maple whipped cream, which is the sort of topping which could trick one into eating one's own hand) and summoning either dark salty caramels or homemade twix bars (or both?) from the sugary ether. my relationship with caramel remains problematic, but tomorrow is another day - and even inchoate candy is better than no candy at all.

04 takae mizutani's my egg & soldiers. more breakfast-related castles, please.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 where will you spend this thanksgiving? are you in charge of any of the cooking?

02 have you any experience with this celeriac-in-mashed-potatoes business?

03 do you think national opt-out day will really happen on wednesday? are you concerned about travel?

04 what did you have for breakfast?

08.03.10



101 in 1001 {II}: 038 cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [ongoing]

11: okra. long ago when the earth was flat, a relative of mine made some sort of fried okra with cornmeal. this relative is known for many things, god love her, none of which involve crowd-pleasing cooking (though one does involve grits in a non-culinary way), so the fact that that dish was absolutely delicious has stayed with me for decades. that okra only comes up these days in the context of 1) gumbo or 2) how it is acutely slimy and therefore tricky to prepare doesn't really recommend it, but there it was at the greenmarket, and i apparently had a secret urge to smuggle a bag of okra into my friend's wedding dress fitting/purchase, so: okra! also i sure do enjoy frying things.



i followed paula deen's recipe (minus the garlic salt in the seasoning), and it was tasty as hell; something alchemically fabulous happens when one dredges okra slices in buttermilk, and they complemented the seasoned cornmeal-flour mixture wonderfully. i fried quickly in teeny batches in a small saucepan (so i was only ever working with, say, two cups of hot oil), and the apartment, ventilated aggressively, never stank; bonus! in the absence of a dip suggestion (thanks for nothing, deen), i mixed sour cream and mayo with chopped chives, sriracha, pimenton, salt, and pepper; also tasty as hell. will be preparing more okra as soon as is socially plausible.

06.23.10



101 in 1001 {II}: cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [ongoing]

10: lavender. i've had my little glass jar of penzeys french lavender for months, and while i've been making lavender lemonade like a lavender-lemonade-making machine - for picnics in jersey, for experimental cocktails, for pouring over my head while i make high-end conditioner commercial faces - i hadn't actually cooked with it. of course, these lavender lemonade binges sort of mean that the ingredient is no longer one i haven't used before, but let's not go overboard. in the spirit with which i came up with the item in the first place, i made lavender shortbread cookies, and they're great. they taste like a high-rent version of the royal dansk danish butter cookies that'd materialize at extended family christmases when i was little. i am semi-seriously considering having a tea party.

on confections, i would regale my tea party with excerpts from "only mr. god knows why," my boyfriend anthony lane's new yorker dispatch from the eurovision 2010 song contest. writing a less than entertaining piece about eurovision is like taking a terrible picture of new york at night - you'd really have to work at it - but he makes a point of being droll, incisive, scrupulously dressed. favorite bits:

[W]hen you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony that the competition is clearly designed to rebuff? There is, of course, a middle way, as taken by the Israeli-born Carmela Corren, who sang for Austria in 1966, and changed gear from German to English halfway through "Vielleicht Geschieht ein Wunder" ("Maybe a Miracle Will Happen"). Historians of Eurovision argue that the miracle has been waiting to happen ever since the same country dispatched Bob Martin--again, not the most wistfully Viennese of names--to the competition in 1957, with his bottom-ranking ballad "Wohin, Kleines Pony."

[...]

The final act, from Turkey, tried to rough things up with a dab of hard rock, but they sounded like a school band, and the angry stripping robot at the back, who sawed off her own armor in a shower of sparks, missed her cue. As a pièce de résistance, she was meant to yank off her silver helmet to show her golden tresses, but it fell off early, and she was reduced to holding it up shyly to the cameras, like a little girl showing her parents the cup she just won for Best Handwriting.

[...]

It is a matter of tradition, almost a matter of pride, that Cyprus awards its twelve points to Greece; they would give twelve points to Greece even if the Greek entry consisted of an elderly Cretan slapping an octopus against the side of a wharf. Recent obligations also play a part; Greece itself received twelve points from Germany this year, which was Germany's way of saying sorry for bailing out the Greek economy to the tune of only twenty-eight billion dollars.

i'm so glad we're together, anthony lane.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 any cookie recipes i should know about? this will be a fancy tea party, you see, with a variety of cookies.

02 were/are you a fan of ye olde tinned butter cookies?

03 have you ever watched eurovision?

04 are you with me on this anthony lane thing? i mean, you guys.

05.30.10



i never did get back to talking about our wanderings at lesley's cocktail classic a few weekends ago, and that's a damn shame, as it was an especially good weekend for mezcal. in case i haven't bored you to death with my mezcal speech lately, let me summarize by saying we don't drink the kitschy, face-melty stuff packaged with a worm; i refuse beverages with pickled creatures in them, for one thing, and i'm also not a fan of cheap agave spirits. i'm actually not a fan of most fancy agave spirits (sorry, tequila), but single village mezcal is a thing of beauty: it's smoky, robust, and wonderfully phenolic. gives you a fine spreading chest-warmth, like a good scotch will. it's the ultimate slow beverage (in many villages, both the palenqueros and the horses turning their agave-heart-grinding wheels were born nearby), but it's affable and unpretentious. i feel strongly about it.

our cocktail classic weekend began with a three-thousand-person gala at the public library and ended upstairs at mayahuel in the east village. it was a long afternoon: andy seymour greeted us with glasses as we walked in, and we were served three more cocktails and five wee clay cups of mezcal in the course of the presentation (joe and i were the only civilians present, i think: everyone else was a bartender, importer, or restauranteur of some sort, and i now have a small, impressive collection of acutely festive business cards). far be it from me to go all creepy evangelist on you - i have zero stake in the rest of the world appreciating mezcal, unless it's to lay the groundwork for me to discover it in friends' liquor cabinets at parties in years to come - but internet, seek it on drink menus and shell out for some if you discover it near you (del maguey is unimpeachable, and los danzantes is also good). it's excellent neat, and the four cocktails we had at mayahuel (below) were all good; the very last one, the oaxacan punch, is the best damn cocktail i've had in years. it wins THUNDERTIPPLE hands down.

salsa verde (by andy seymour, aka wine geek)

1-3/4 oz. del maguey vida mezcal
1-1/4 oz. fresh cucumber juice
1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice
1/2 oz. agave nectar
fresh cilantro

put 6 cilantro leaves in a mixing glass; add remaining ingredients and fill with ice. shake hard and strain over crushed ice in a highball glass. garnish with fresh cilantro leaves.


el zachilla (by john lermayer, the florida room at the delano, miami)

1-1/4 oz. el tesoro reposado
3/4 oz. del maguey chichicapa mezcal
3/4 oz. benedictine
4 dashes grapefruit bitters
squeeze of lime juice

combine all ingredients in a mixing glass over ice. stir to chill and strain into a coupe cocktail glass.


division bell (by phil ward, mayahuel)

1 oz. del maguey chichicapa mezcal
3/4 oz. aperol
3/4 oz. luxardo maraschino liqueur
3/4 oz. lime juice

combine all ingredients in a mixing glass; fill with ice and shake. strain into a coupe cocktail glass and garnish with a grapefruit peel.


oaxacan milk punch (by danny valdez, cocktailian nola, new orleans)

1-1/4 oz. del maguey crema de mezcal
1 oz. vsop cognac
2 oz. handmade horchata
fresh grated nutmeg

combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. shake vigorously and strain over crushed ice in a rocks glass. garnish with fresh nutmeg.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 had any fantastically good (or fantastically awful) cocktails lately?

02 what'd you drink over the long weekend, alcoholic or otherwise?

03 if you were to teach the world to drink, what sort of booze would you promote?

05.05.10



101 in 1001 {II}: 038 cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [ongoing]

09: saffron. i eat very little spanish food; i'm vegetarian, i have a blood feud with roasted red peppers, and i'm also secretly turning into akiko, the iron chef judge who thinks everything is too oily. i'm developing a fondness for pimentón, however, and when consulted on my spice-shopping list joe promoted saffron with great gusto. alors: it was time to attempt paella. i'd had the vegetarian version at jaleo on our trip to washington a few months ago; it was decent but a bit olive-heavy and (ahem) oily. mind you, that was the first paella i'd ever had; maybe it's a dish i'm just not meant to love. i considered that for a bit, and then i found mark bittman's paean to a simple version. no nasty meat and fish presented with flourishes and foolishness; just pimentón and saffron, good tomatoes and a handful of chopped parsley (that's not the whole recipe, but it's the elements that matter). lovely.



the recipe called for cored tomatoes in thick wedges, but alas, the summer crop is months away; the bigger vine tomatoes were despondent. these little fellows looked fantastic (that reptilian green!), though, and i thought smaller tomatoes would be more likely to roast to joe's satisfaction (he doesn't deal well with raw tomatoes).



hot damn, folks. i had to extend oven time by about fifteen minutes - our sole ovenproof skillet was way too small, and i ended up pouring the paella-to-be into a big old brownie pan - but i couldn't have been more pleased with the final product. the little halved tomatoes retained their juices and split only when eaten, so every bite was moist. i ignored joe when he told me to add extra oil, and the resultant rice was fluffy rather than slimy. this recipe is fabulous as is (i can't wait to try it with greenmarket tomatoes later this year), and it'd be a great base for any number of paellas. wild mushroom? fresh herb? mysterious urban park-things i'll hunt down with my foraging team? yes.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 whose hand is that?

02 do you hear what i'm saying about oily food?

03 do you like paella?

04 is paella this decade's answer to fondue (trendy, presented with ceremony)? if not, what is?

05 have you made anything especially tasty lately?

03.23.10



101 in 1001 {II}: 038 cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [ongoing]

08: cream of tartar. though i've been baking bread once every week or two for the past six months, i still graze the sides of the oven all the time (which is super-awkward when the burn forms a line on my arm and i then share a pole with someone on the subway. i need a lapel button: NOT A CUTTER.). though i've chopped veggies almost every night since time began, the dark and primitive chili gods still want bits of my fingers. kitchen safety is complicated, is my point, so candymaking terrifies me: why invite all of that volatile molten sugar into your life when good-looking people in brooklyn will sell you the finished product for $20?* ah, yes: the $20 part.

on friday night we saw half of a good eats episode ("the ballad of salty and sweet") in which alton brown scorches a ruby red grapefruit with a miniature torch (need to try that), makes praline bacon (missed that part, and can't say that i mind), and makes dark salty caramels. the ingredient list for the caramels was both manageable and intriguing (soy sauce, you say?), the process looked simple, and preparing the pan involved some exciting work with parchment paper. i bought a cheap candy thermometer and some cream of tartar on saturday afternoon.



truth be told, i'm not entirely sure what happened. i followed the recipe to the letter, or so i thought, and ended up with a pan of tastiness that has less structural integrity than heidi montag. at the length caramel will out, and it poured past my little parchment paper sleeves before i had a chance to talk it into solidifying. after two days in the refrigerator, this is as calm as it gets; i tried to take a picture of it near the living room window to get that lovely color, but just a few moments of sunlight were lethal.** i'll certainly give the recipe another try, as that flavor profile really is amazing; with a bit of practice, i think i'll be able to make something one could eat in mixed company. (we're eating the first batch gracelessly and furtively, you see. it's really tasty.)

*which is not to say nunu's hand dipped salt caramels aren't worth every penny. they are, is the problem.

**vampire caramel? non-stephenie-meyer-vampire caramel, i mean. it doesn't sparkle.

01.19.10



it's been a handful, this handful of days: we auditioned for a kitten, joined a bourbonfest in an old bank, were told the cat might lose his tail, said our goodbyes to the princemas tree, made pudding, visited the gaf, returned to the old bank, collected robot paintings, and took the cat in for surgery (no tail was lost, happily; joe will take him home in an hour or so and begin convincing him to forgive us).

many of those things are complicated, but one (the pudding) is simple, and you must summon it yourself without delay. with no more than sugar, water, corn starch, vanilla, and milk - and a bit of patience - pure, unadulterated joy (in tupperware) can be yours. this was actually my second batch, and i cut the corn starch nearly in half to avoid the first batch's flannish consistency; with that tweak, and with a bit of sea salt cracked over it at the end, it's damn fine. sometimes focusing on damn fine pudding is the thing to do.

12.01.09: the dirty dozen, part I {twelve seasonal things}

what a fortnight it's been, internets: mystery illness (that made me miss the pixies show last monday and is yet ongoing, hooray!), our first overnight guests in the new apartment, new blogging work at the office, thanksgiving, risotto-making injuries, the action just never stops. though i haven't been especially forthcoming, i've missed you.

01 one of the big hits at our t-giv table: crack pie, a butter-and-sugar-and-butter-and-eggs-and-butter-and-oats concoction we discovered at momofuku milk bar with jacob and megan. there are no photos of the two crack pies i prepared, for they never really got plated (we ate right from the pie tins); the sugar tremors they induced would've ruined the shots, anyway. i'll make them again, though i'll cut the butter down a bit and be sure i have a few ectomorphs about to bat cleanup.

02 i was also quite pleased with last thursday's edition of no-knead bread, a recipe i've used five times in the last month. i added a few teaspoons of fresh chopped rosemary before i set it out to rise and cracked some sea salt over the top just before chucking it into the oven, and it was glorious.



it's been reported that joe's pork (for it was a pork thanksgiving) was toothsome as well; as the resident vegetarian with stuffed sinuses, i can't even tell you what it smelled like, but apparently we all had fancy bacon auras for the next few days. oh, ventilation.

03 as we'll be hosting a holiday get-together or two later this month, we've decided to acquire a dining table. a dining table! we've never had one, and are disproportionately excited. it will probably spend most of its life in the kitchen and catch mail and magazines while we eat at the coffee table in the living room, but i feel this is a legitimate grown-up milestone nonetheless. as it happens, we already have dining chairs (a quartet of teak n.o. moller model 84s we stumbled across at a thrift store in chelsea) and we have a fairly good idea of the sort of table we want (something from blu dot's strut line). we're having a bit of an issue with color, though: which, o internets, would you pick (click on the 'strut' link to see the options)? the kitchen-space looks like this, though we'll probably be adding wallpaper at some point and, you know, the rest of the apartment isn't nearly as nude now.

04 speaking of wall-clothing, i spent part of last week's sick day (singular, for i am an idiot) turning toilet paper rolls into a quasi-seasonal wall hanging.



bear in mind that i shot the finished project after an unconscionable amount of chloraseptic.

how was your holiday? which table-shade do you fancy? should i spray paint the toilet paper rolls silver? (metallics say 'holiday' to me. i think it's a publishing industry thing.)

11.23.09

101 in 1001 {II}: 038 cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [ongoing]

07: dahlia tuber. joe and i were nosing around a vegetable stall at the union square greenmarket a few weekends ago when one of the younger farmers turned to us. "those are dahlia tubers," he said, gesturing to a bin of homely potato-ish things at my hip. they're totally edible." i quizzed him: best raw or cooked? (raw.) how much would i need? (not much). what did they taste like? (floral, which...i guess i should have seen coming.) were they expensive? (no.) did they keep well? (sure, you can slice pieces from a single tuber all winter.) sold! i plucked a fist-sized fellow from the bin and brought it home, where it languished in the crisper until last friday. then, in one of my Ill-Advised Late-Night Baking Fits, i made this.



dahlia bread (adapted from plantlady2's gardenweb post)

- 2 eggs
- 1/2 c vegetable oil
- 1 c sugar
- 1 c grated dahlia tuber
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 1/2 c flour
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp cinnamon

preheat oven to 350 degrees. in a medium bowl, beat two eggs until light and foamy, then discard a quarter of egg mixture. add oil, sugar, dahlia, and vanilla, then mix until combined (don't go crazy, but you want a homogeneous mixture). combine and jumble up dry ingredients in a second bowl, then add to first bowl and stir together only until blended. pour batter into a greased loaf pan and bake for approximately one hour, or until surface is golden brown and fairly firm (i started checking at 50 minutes and took my loaf out at around 55, as i recall).

joe had already gone to bed by the time the bread was out of the oven and cool enough to eat, but our friend jacob (in town from iowa and perpetrator, as it happens, of some of my all-time favorite dahlia arrangements at his wedding last october) was brave enough to try a piece - and liked it! i did as well, actually: it was crumbly and fragrant, and the little silvers of dahlia added a mysterious note of spiciness (it was, in fact, quite floral) that paired well with the cinnamon. the original recipe called for baking soda, which we left behind in our hell's kitchen refrigerator and hadn't yet replaced, so i subbed in additional baking powder without cutting down any of the other ingredients; i think the lower pH of the resulting batter was rather nice. pounce on dahlia tubers if you see them, internets! you'll intrigue house guests and feel like a faerie queene at the breakfast table.

11.05.09

101 in 1001 {II}: 038 cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [ongoing]

04: key limes. our friends with relatives in florida fell over laughing when i showed them one of the grape-sized mexican key limes i ended up ignoring the health-care-related whole foods boycott to buy back in august; i'd apparently compromised my ideals for the runtiest limes on the eastern seaboard. i argued that their size wouldn't affect the eventual excellence of a key lime version of giada de laurentiis's unstoppable lemon ricotta cookies with lemon glaze,* and i was right; the awkward process of juicing in miniature did leave me with arthritic little crone-hands, however, and i know just which exotic fruit to curse when i'm unable to play the piano someday. in conclusion: key limes make fine cookies and sublime pie,** but i probably don't need to bake with them again (unless i find myself in florida).

05: sunchokes (aka jerusalem artichokes).



(how 'bout that bubble wrap presentation! there was a lot of that for a few weeks there.)

these rooty little things were pitched to me as tasting like a cross between artichokes and potatoes, which (if blackened and thrown in a taco) would make them the perfect food. in practice they're neither as scary as the alien grubs they resemble nor quite as chompable as advertised, but my impatience as a roaster could be to blame: our oven at the old apartment handled vegetables unevenly, and my little sunchokes (tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, and a few whacked-up shallots and cloves of garlic) were subsequently either velvety and winning or surly and a tiny bit fibrous, depending on where they were in relation to the heating element. everything sorted itself out in the next day's reheat, though, and the apartment smelled fantastic; sunchokes will come home with me this winter. that mysterious hybrid flavor (a bit taterish, a bit chokesque) is worth investigating.

06: mochiko (aka sweet rice flour).



(i also baked while we were moving. i have the attention span of a gnat.)

i feel i deserve double credit for baking with mochiko; i had neither used it nor known of its existence prior to this recipe (i adore the green tea mochi that sometimes materialize at sushi restaurants and japanese grocery stores, but i'd never devoted much thought to what went into them). the food librarian's blueberry mochi cake (via my friend sara) promised exotic, gluten-free chewiness,*** so i scored a box of the good stuff at the soho dean and deluca and got baking. straight out of the oven and warm on a napkin, this cake is dazzling: its texture is unusual without being off-putting, and the flour's whispery sweetness (paired with a bit of tartness from the wild blueberries) is light and sophisticated. a few days in the refrigerator (as we're no longer the destroyers of cake we were in our twenties - most of the time, anyway) weren't especially kind to the leftovers, so i'd recommend this as a decadent breakfast or dessert item for company (that is, people who can eat it right away) - but i'd certainly recommend it.

*george's (excellent) idea.

**that i will continue to purchase from the pros.

***wheat and i are cool, but some of us need an alternative to cupcakes; i hear that.

09.30.09

101 in 1001 {II}: 038 cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [ongoing]

01: jicama. no contemporary record remains of the jicama salad i made a few months ago, which is just as well. i found a tweet in which i hoped i'd be as good at cooking with jicama as i am at eating jicama, but that's it (and, as it happens, i wasn't). i first ate it, sliced into sticks and punched up with lime juice, at a fancy dinner party at our eating club in college; i think i prefer that mandoline-free iteration to the one i prepared a month or two ago, for i was in constant fear of losing knuckles and/or maiming one of the cats with that wicked blade. this slaw was tasty - it just wasn't worth the peril, know what i mean?

02: honewort. it breaks my heart that central park might not yield honewort and wild onions again until next spring; the delicately zingy risotto i made with them back in may still haunts me. i might have to take another foraging tour this fall for more dinner inspiration; fresh mystery greens (especially these, which were light and seasonal and just a bit mysterious - i guess that's the taste of the park) are good stuff.

03: kale. while i sometimes wish i had a few more years to be pre-thirty,* i think i hit the sweet spot, agewise, vis-a-vis the internet: it was pokey enough when i was a high school model UN nerd that we weren't expected to have up-to-the-minute information in security council (blech, we'd never have slept), but the whole online recipe gold rush happened just in time for me to get out of college and start cooking on my own. how did people know what to do with kale in the nineties? me, i saw rachel's post on pasta with kale, lentils & caramelized onions and was set. the lentils and onions give the kale a sweet, deep flavor, and the kale's texture balances out the squoosh of the other ingredients. i've used both flat leaf and dinosaur kale and prefer the flatter stuff, i think, though both are tasty (and how often does the word dinosaur come up in non-chicken-nugget-related food conversations? not often enough, obviously); i recommend a sharp parmesan and a bit of lemon juice at the end, if you've got it.

on tap this evening or tomorrow, from the farmer's market at my office: jerusalem artichokes. i think i've eaten them a grand total of once in my life (at a potluck thanksgiving a few years ago); any pointers or favorite recipes, o internets?

*though i don't want to be a twentysomething again, god. i'm still working on the math, is what i'm saying.

08.05.09: the dirty dozen {twelve useful things}, part II

04 via the sacramento bee (via my mom), a recipe for homemade ginger beer! gaining the ability to turn things in our apartment into ginger beer makes me feel like a modern-day rumpelstiltskin, except for the part where your guessing my name would make me screech "the devil told you that! the devil told you that!" and tear myself in two* (god, the brothers grimm are excellent).

05 via 101 cookbooks (via jen, who knows a thing or two about marathons), marathon cookies. quoth jen,

keeping in mind that they are not actually cookies but rather are healthy, cheaper-than-clif-bars, make-big-batches-and-freeze post-run snacks, they are pretty darn good. i recommend them, and don't be put off by the fact that the recipe calls for beans. seriously. recommended tweaks: double or even triple the amount of dates it calls for, don't be shy with the lemon zest, and don't forget the aniseed like i did.

kooky japanese tea cakes have desensitized me to the sweet bean thing; i am intrigued.

06 via david lebovitz, absinthe cake.** you guys, my contribution to the last jersey barbecue of the season will be epic.

*speaking of tearing one's self in two, joe and i saw about five minutes of U2's rattle and hum on cable the other night - specifically, the five minutes when they perform "bad" and bono's wearing these terrible high-waisted pants with suspenders up around his ears. "i'd had no idea robin williams was in U2," joe said. "i was about to say that," i replied.

**did i ever mention how we smuggled two bottles of absinthe (one french, one czech) back with us after our honeymoon a few years ago? i was very proud of us, though i am a terrible liar and would have spoiled everything if we'd actually been questioned at customs. we were only the second-best smugglers of our wedding party, actually: my mother developed a complicated system of band-switching that enabled her to spirit a bunch of cuban cigars back to california. she actually wrote bogus letters home about how sad she was to have had to leave the real things behind: amazing.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 is it us, or is bono really channeling mork in that rattle and hum clip?

02 would you eat absinthe cake?

03 have you ever smuggled anything? were you successful?

08.04.09: the dirty dozen {twelve useful things}, part I

01 i feel like the last person on earth to get into dr. bronner's products - i mean, esquire pimped the liquid soap a month or two ago, and it was on display at our local american apparel - but in case you haven't tried it, man, hook yourself up with some dr. bronner's. it's cheap, it's eco-friendly (unlike the shockingly-effective-but-probably-evil scrubbing bubbles shower cleaner i still can't quit), it smells fantastic, and it really is multi-use (i've only washed dishes, clothes, and hands with it to date, but i'm almost ready to give it a try on my hair as well).

02 paul newman: a life (shawn levy). write-arounds (that is, pieces generated without a subject's cooperation) can be painful for writers and readers, but levy worked it out; when he learned that he wouldn't get access to newman, he dug up decades of existing interviews and cobbled them into a next-best-thing mega-monologue.* he also researched his ass off as a general proposition, and his work on newman's development with the actors studio, racing career, and philanthropy is meaty (he's a film critic for the oregonian, so his discussion of the films has some heft as well). some of the family scenes were a bit skimpy, but i was so charmed to learn, say, that newman would sneak off to the bathroom at restaurants and wash his salad (so that he could use his own bootleg dressing instead) that i didn't mind the occasional mystery. a fine read, internets.

03 rachel's baked zucchini fries. we don't have a big box of CSA veggies to dispose of each week this summer, since we thought we were going to be out of town for several weeks and i didn't want to waste the subscription. we do, however, have a habit of eating the same vegetable over and over until it becomes deadly boring, and i needed to transition away from brussels sprouts before we started to resent them. i made these for the first time on friday and had plowed through four zucchinis by sunday afternoon: yum. this weekend i'm all over her pasta with kale, lentils & caramelized onions.

and you?

*for his own edification, that is - not for the text. that would be frightening.

07.24.09

for most people, running seven miles several times a week means getting to eat whatever you want, full stop. as i have the metabolism of a ball python (thanks, nature!), i'm not so lucky - but i do let the exercise justify the preparation of ludicrous special occasion food on non-holidays.



ye olde five-months-'til-christmas-eve cheese ball*

- 4 c grated sharp cheddar cheese
- 4-5 oz. cream cheese (let it sit out for a bit)
- 1/4 c mayonnaise
- 1/4 c chopped scallions (or chives, but i like scallions)
- 3 cloves garlic, crushed
- 1 tsp soy sauce
- tabasco to taste
- pimentón (smoked paprika)
- cayenne pepper

combine everything but the pimentón and the cayenne in a large bowl; when the cheese mixture is well blended, form it into a ball (i tend to wear latex gloves if they're handy; this is a fragrant recipe, and the spices will stain your hands). throw the ball in the refrigerator to harden back up a bit, then roll it on a plate that's been dusted with the spices.

WASPy holiday grub in july? reader, i served it.

*also known as the two-weeks-'til-meg's-wedding cheese ball - this recipe first improved my life at her bridal shower this past fall.